 Hey guys, J.R. Fisher here. Welcome to Monday morning. It is, what is it today, the 25th of April 2022. I want to welcome everybody here and I want to thank you for showing up. If you're gonna be watching this and it's not live, I want to thank you for watching the replay. Don't forget to subscribe either way, right? Hit that subscribe button, turn it from red to gray. Don't forget to turn on all bell notifications. Ring the bell so you're notified each and every time I go live or upload a video. Hey, today's gonna be cool. Today is gonna be a day where I'm gonna talk to you about hiring people. Probably if you're like in the Americas or UK or Australia or can't any of those places, probably for about half the price that you're paying for an employee to come in your office. I'm gonna walk you through the steps, talk to you about how to go about it, talk to you about how to keep those people and talk to you about how to manage those people. So we're gonna have fun today. At the end of the session today, you'll know all this stuff and it'll be easy for you. It won't be difficult. I also have a session scheduled for this coming Wednesday. So this Wednesday, I'll also be live and it's a really cool one. It's about being creative. I think you're really gonna like it. I've got your comments pulled up here to the side so I can talk to you guys. So make sure you use that comment section, chat section. Even if it's not live, guys, you can comment below this video and you know, I can talk to you and I will talk to you. As a matter of fact, I'll get in there today. I know some of you have some comments on some of my videos. I'm gonna answer all of those today so we can talk a little bit more. But I will have that there. And I want to talk about how to hire people, how to hire these quality freelancers. You know, I have been using freelancers and I'm trying to think when I first did it. I think it was 2010. Wow, that's a long time. This is 2022 now. So it's been a long time. You know, the future of free freelancers has really changed in that amount of time. It's gotten different. You know, there's a lot of people in the US that are freelancers now and it used to be like, you know, India or Pakistan or something like that. But it's all around the world now. Let me turn this volume down on this iPad because it's in my ear. Sorry about that guys. I didn't interfere with you. So the first thing I'm going to tell you is before you go out and hire anybody, I mean, anybody, understand what you want. I mean, what do you want? What are you trying to do here? You know, to successfully work with freelancers, you got to be clear with them, you know, and that's the big problem I see is I see a lot of people hire people and say, Well, this person's not doing what I want. But they never really, you know, told them what they expected. They didn't give them the exact pay or they didn't give them the exact, you know, workload or what they were supposed to do. It's really important to understand that and you know, what do you want? Do you want to hire somebody that's going to work for you 40 hours a week and you're going to pay them every week? Do you want somebody that you're going to pay on a job? Do you want somebody that you're going to pay hourly to do something and you know how many hours it takes? All these things are really, really important. And the next thing I would tell you is, because the sheer number of freelancers out there, the quality and professionalism can vary wildly. Okay, some of these people are great. I mean, they're amazing. They deserve probably more money than what they're getting paid. And some of them are awful, awful. I hired a company to do some SEO for me a couple months ago, and they were the worst, I think I've ever seen, they talked a great game. And you got to be careful about this, because a lot of them will talk a great game. But then they just don't follow through. So you want to look for consistency, both on what they have to say and what third party sources have to say, look at, you know, other other companies that have used these people, look at other employers that have used these people, you know, you could make some huge mistakes by taking not enough time to check these people out. I mean, it can really hurt your business. And I've been through this, I've hired some terrible people and I've hired some great people. So that that is really, really important that you understand that, that you get that, that everything is working well for you in that respect. And you want to ask the right questions. Okay, what kind of questions are you asking these people? Are you asking them the questions that are going to make sense to them and to you? You know, the key to freelance is the concept of freedom. So you know, if you have somebody that is a freelancer that's working on various jobs for you, you are not going to control all their time or when they work probably. With that in mind is no surprise that freelancers at every experience level can take vastly different approaches to the work. And you got to figure out, you know, what does this person want to do if you say, Hey, I want to have let's say a website built. Do you really care when they build that website? I mean, does it matter if they work during your hours or they're an hour is probably not. I mean, I know you need to communicate with them and all that good stuff. But the point is, if you are trying to control them like they are an employee, but they are actually a freelancer, you're going to have a hard time because the whole reason that they became a freelancer was so that they didn't have to listen to other people. They didn't have to do what other people told them to do. So you want to make sure when you're doing that, I think a comment just popped up here, finding good freelancers are definitely time savers. You're so right about setting expectations and be clear on price. Yeah, Paul, I've seen, you know, I've been guilty of that too. Fortunately, I've managed people throughout my lifetime as an adult. And I always knew that if somebody's not doing what you want, there's a few reasons for that. And in many cases, it was the manager's fault. I used to manage new car franchises, and I was a general manager. So I had, you know, sales managers, and I had finance managers, I had used car managers and new car managers at service departments and all these different things that worked for me. And oftentimes, one of these departments would come to me, let's say, a new car manager, and the new car manager would say to me, well, JR, my new car salespeople are just terrible. They're no good. I'm really sorry, sales are down. But my new car man, my new car salespeople just aren't any good. And I would look at them and I would kind of smile and laugh and say, well, listen, you're the one that manages them. Okay, you're the one that hires them. You're the one that sets the expectations. You're the one who's supposed to train them. Why in the world do you have bad salespeople? That doesn't make any sense to me because I hired you to do that job. And it sounds like, it sounds like you're not doing your job. And that's generally the case. And it goes, it goes the same way when you're hired freelancers, guys. If you're not telling them what you expect, if you're not giving them the right expectations, it's probably your fault. It's probably not their fault. Listen, Paul says, the new freelance people I use were recommended, or I saw copies of their work. That's a good idea. Get recommendations, you know, I'm trying to get some yard work done yard work, I guess it's landscape work done with some, you know, pavers and stuff in my yard right now. And I've had three companies come over to look at the job and to estimate it. And I will tell you after two weeks of doing this, not one of them, not one of them has sent me an estimate. I don't understand that, you know, and obviously none of those companies I'm going to want to work with because they can't even follow through and getting an estimate over to me. So, you know, it may not be a bad idea when you're trying to hire one of these new people that you say, hey, you know, I've got this small job for you first. Let's see how you do on that. And then I can decide if I want to use you in the future. Or you may say, hey, this is a questionnaire. Can you fill this out for me and get it back to me tomorrow? And if they don't get it back to you, that tells you something right there. That's, you know, that's a side that they're probably not going to do what you want. So, test out these people a little bit, okay? I know I have people working on projects and sometimes I'll hire somebody else to work on the same project and see which one does better. Taking an effectively interactive approach to dealing with these people is super important. If you're diving into the freelancer pool for the first time or you're feeling unsure about the individual skills, start small. You know, any new addition to your core team can really help it or really hurt it. So don't have a huge job for somebody you've never worked with before. Now, I have a developer that works on our website and he's really good. And, you know, he doesn't do things as fast as I want sometimes, but he's really good at what he does and I've developed a relationship with him. So when I come across a new job that I want to have done, I know that he's going to do a good job for me. I know he's going to get things done. I know it's not going to be an issue. And that's what you've got to know before you put somebody onto a job. Plus, as I found that for work at home, I ask our realtor, they have the best leads. That's interesting stuff. Realtor, huh? Well, I use a lot of people in other countries and unfortunately my realtor wouldn't work for me. But if that works for you and you get what you want, that's awesome. And everybody's going to approach this differently. I use a lot of different sites and I do want to list some of those sites for you. The first one is Upwork. I like Upwork a lot. Upwork is really good, I think, for one-off jobs. Now, I'm not saying you can't hire full-time people there. I'm not saying you can't hire hourly people there. But for one-off jobs, like, you know, I want to have an SEO job done. So I have an SEO company right now working on SEO for me. And they're pretty good at that. They are in India. So we do have some language barriers when they go to write stuff and I have to rewrite most of the stuff they give me. But I don't have time to put together even the basis of it and to get it uploaded. So they're doing all that part for me. So you got to figure out, you know, there's going to be ups and downs in different countries. And I want to hit on that in a second. But I also want to talk about some of the other sites. The next one I use a lot is Fiverr, F-I-V-E-R-R.com. Fiverr is really good for one-off jobs too. I like it for one-off jobs. And the thing about Fiverr I like is you can look at price estimates as to what they would do. So on Fiverr, when you go there, let's say it's design a logo. Okay, let's say that's the job you want to do. You can go in there and they're going to have maybe three different set prices for logos and what you're going to get for those three different set prices. And that's how Fiverr is set up, where they will have a job, they will talk about, you know, not talk about, they really have an ad there for the three prices of three levels they're going to have. And then you can upgrade those levels too. So it really helps you because it gives you a ballpark. I think if you're new to hiring freelancers, Fiverr is a good way to start because you can see the pricing up front on all these jobs before you ever list a job. So you're going to know what somebody's going to charge. And that's super, super helpful. On Upwork, you kind of have to know what people are going to charge for that particular task. They don't, they don't really do a lot of advertising. They may have their hourly rate. In fact, they do have their hourly rate on Upwork, but it's different. And so I talked about Upwork, I've talked about Fiverr, and there's a lot of them out there too, Freelancer.com. There's tons of them, but those are just some of the ones I use. In addition to that, I use onlinejobs.ph. Onlinejobs.ph is a good one. Now onlinejobs.ph, the ph stands for Philippines. Everybody that you're going to hire on onlinejobs.ph is in the Philippines, okay? So those are the employees that you're going to get. So if you're, if you're working in that realm, then of course you're going to want to use the Filipinos. Now, you know, they're good for some things and some things they're not. I found that the English barrier is very difficult for online jobs at ph. So when you're having somebody and you're hiring them there, you could have an English barrier. Now, the other thing I will tell you there is they're good in certain areas, but they also pretty much want full-time work. So if you're not ready to hire somebody 40 hours a week, then you could have an issue there. Now, here's where you really run into an issue. Let's say you have a job and it's 20 hours a week and you want to pay somebody 20 hours a week. So you go to onlinejobs.ph, you say, I want to hire somebody for 20 hours a week. You will have people who will apply to that job. You will have people who will say, yeah, that's great. Yeah, 20 hours a week is great. That's what I want. But you need to dig deeper. And here's why you need to dig deeper. Because if you have a job that's 20 hours a week and you have somebody who says, yeah, I want that job, you need to go look at their profile. Because if their profile says they're looking for full time work, but they want to take your job, which is part time, they're taking your job until they can find a full time job. So they're probably not going to stick with you, or they're going to be working other jobs on the side because that's really not why they're there. So my suggestion is look at the people really closely that apply. Look at the people really closely as far as what they put in their bio about what they want. Okay, you should be matching what you want with what they want. And I know a lot of people, you know, that are on these sites will alter what they want to match your job. But if that's not what they long term want, they're not going to stick with you. You're not going to keep that person. Okay. And I would say on online jobs.ph, these people want full time work. That's what they're looking for. There's a very high rate of unemployment in the Philippines right now. Now, the next thing I'm going to tell you is when you go to do any of these websites, whether it's Upwork, whether it's Fiverr, whether it's online jobs.ph, and I'm just naming a few or Freelancer.com, you don't want to look for the cheapest person. You don't want to do it. You don't want to be the lowest paying employer. You don't want to do that. Now, I'm not saying you need to pay the sky way above what these jobs are worth because jobs are worth what they're worth. But you want to try to pay a little bit more than what the going market is. Now, the reason I say that is you're going to attract the better people. You're going to attract the better people. Now, be careful. You know, if you say I want to pay, you know, I don't know, I'm going to try to think about $4 an hour. Okay, you want to pay $4 an hour. You know, going market for that job is $3 an hour. And you find somebody and their profile says, well, I want to make $3 an hour. Don't go and change your rate down to $3 an hour. If you decided you're going to pay $4 an hour and they wanted less than that, pay them more than what they want to pay them more. Take care of these people. Also, in these countries, you have to be respectful. Okay, and I'm talking about hiring foreign countries now. If you're in the US or Canada or UK or whatever, you pretty much know what the rules are, but when you're hiring in these other countries, they got different rules. And they're not going to adhere to your rules willingly. And why should they? You know, they live in a different country, they have different rules. Now, some of these rules may involve the time of day they work. Okay, so I have some developers in India. And I'm respectful from the fact that I know that they have different hours they want to work. I don't need my development stuff done on USA time. I don't need it done. It just doesn't need to be done. Now, I may need to talk to them at some point on USA time, but I'll try to alter that. Maybe I'll do it early in the morning, or maybe I'll do it late night. So it kind of coincides for their time. Additionally, you know, let's say I'm dealing in the Philippines, they have, you know, pretty much their culture is they get all their holidays off. So I try to give them all their holidays off. They also have a culture where they get paid the 13th month. And obviously we don't have 13 months, right? But what I do is, you know, once a year is I pay them an additional month for a, you know, vacation for whatever they want to do with it, I pay them that additional month. And that's something that you have to adhere to. Also, how you manage people may be differently. In the US you could sit somebody down and you know, just beat them up and say, hey, you shouldn't do this, you shouldn't do that, you screwed this up. You can't do that if you're dealing with somebody in the Philippines, you will hurt their feelings. And I understand that. I respect that. They're very family oriented. They don't want to let you down. They have a different culture. You've got to understand their culture. And you've got to treat them respectfully. And you know, while I'm on this thing about treating people with respect, guys, this goes for any employee anywhere. Respect people. Nobody works for you. Don't think of it that way. Nobody works for you. Nobody was born to work for you. People will work with you. People will work on your team. But don't treat them like they're beneath you because nobody's beneath nobody's beneath anybody. I don't care how much money you have or how smart you are, how good looking you are, what your education is, nobody is beneath you. Okay. And you are not beneath anybody else. And if you treat everybody as equals, and I don't mean equals as far as, you know, you do have to work and I do have to work. What I mean is, if you treat them as equal human beings, if you treat them with respect, if you treat them with kindness, you're going to get better results than if you try to beat people up and scare them. That's not what you should be doing. You should be treating people with a lot of respect. And guys, if you have any questions about this, put it in that chat section, put it in the comment section, any of those areas and that way I'll be happy to answer those for you. So I also think that it's important to maintain a long term relationship. People like consistency. If you want to hire somebody and let's say you want to pay $100 a week, I don't know whatever it is, let's pick a number, $100 a week. And you don't have a budget for that. You're just hoping that, hey, I'm going to hire this person for SEO and I'm going to hope my sales go up and then I'll be able to look forward to keep them. Don't do that, guys. If you don't have enough money to hire somebody full time for six months, minimum six months, then you shouldn't hire somebody full time because it's unfair for you to hire somebody and take away all their opportunities to go work for somebody else. And then in a month fire, because you didn't, your sales didn't go up or whatever it was. You're not in a position to hire somebody if you can't do that. OK, if you can't afford to pay somebody six months before your sales go up, before you see increases or whatever it is, then you shouldn't do it. Now, that doesn't mean that if they aren't doing the job, you should keep them. I'm not saying that at all. I'm just saying that don't hire people if you're not in a position to hire people. You know, finding and hiring professional high quality freelancers is hard enough as it is. OK, once you've convinced or once you're convinced of the quality of their work and you're comfortable with working with them on a full time range of products in your pipeline, hold on to them. Hold on to them, right? You know, keep them happy. Make the extra effort to maintain those relationships. This reduces your management overhead. OK, guys, when you when you hire and hire people, it's starting all over again. You've got to spend time training. You've got to spend time communicating. You maybe have to run an ad on one of these sites. You're going to have to look through resumes. All this stuff is going to take time out of your day. So if you've got somebody decent, keep them. Now, you may say, well, they're not doing a great job. They're maybe 80%, 90%. OK, well, until you have somebody that would be 100%, you better keep them. OK, it's not as easy. You know, I used to have a lot of my managers that say, well, I don't have great salespeople. I need to fire these and hire more. I said, well, until you have a better one that you can hire, do you have a better one that you can replace this person with? If you don't have a better one to replace them with, what in the world are you thinking? What in the world are you thinking? You better work with what you got and train them better and explain to them better and help them along. Finding the right talent for your team doesn't have to be a nightmare. You want to narrow down your search. Do your due diligence and hold on to the freelancers who work well with your existing quality standards and culture. Nobody's going to be perfect. Everybody's going to screw up. Your stable of freelance talent will be familiar with your agency style and processes and eager to work on your new projects if they feel like they're secure, if they feel like they're going to get paid on a weekly basis or a daily basis or however you're paying people. That's another thing. I want to get into pay real quick, too, before we end the session and we still got 10 minutes. Pay is super important, guys. You know, I said a couple of minutes ago, you want to make sure you pay a little bit more than what the going market is. I think that's really important. I really do think that's important. You want to be respectful of all of their societal norms. Okay, what days do they get off? Understand that in different countries, they look at things differently, too. Like, you know, in the Philippines, you're going to have people who are going to take off and they're going to be sick. I know in the U.S., people just don't take off when they're sick. They just continue to work. But that's not going to be true in the Philippines. So if you're dealing in the Philippines, understand you're going to be dealing with that. But also understand that you're not paying the rates of somebody in the U.S., okay? So if you're not paying those rates, you can't expect the same exact thing. It makes no difference, right? Excuse me, it makes no sense to do that, to expect more and pay less. The idea is that you're getting somebody for a discounted rate, but that discounted rate should still be higher than what the normal rate is in that country, okay? Not a normal rate in America, obviously, than you would just hire somebody in America. But I'm not saying that people in America are any better because I've hired people in America that were worse than people I've hired in India and Pakistan and Mexico and the Philippines and Romania. I mean, I've hired people from all around the world and just because somebody is a USA citizen does not make them a better worker, okay? Sometimes it does, but sometimes it doesn't. So I don't hire that much in the U.S. Now, we do have a lot of employees in the U.S. because I have a factory where we manufacture our foods. We have a distribution center in Utah where we ship everything out and those are physical employees that we have to pay, obviously. However, when it is on online tasks, when it is social media, when it's editing, when it's SEO, when it's magento programming, when it's any of these things, I can hire people in other countries and get pretty good results. And let me get back to the pay thing again. We've talked about how you should pay, but when should you pay? That's an important factor too. Now, my full-time employees, I usually pay weekly. Don't delay somebody's pay ever. Don't ever mess with somebody's pay. That's one of the worst things you can do. You wouldn't want your pay messed with, right? If you were supposed to be paid every Friday, you'd want to be paid every Friday. So if one of your employees in another country sends you a pay request, and I use Venmo, and I use Payneer, and I use PayPal, I use a whole bunch of different ones to pay different people, but when I get one of those requests, guess what I do? I pay it immediately. If I get it on a Saturday morning and I see it, I'm gonna go ahead and pay it. Why wait? What's the point in waiting until Monday? And you say, well, I just want to keep my money as long as I can. Really, what are you gonna do with it? Are you gonna earn interest in your bank account? What is it like, a half a percent? Go ahead and pay your people immediately. Never delay paying anybody ever. Don't delay that. That's like the worst thing you can do is to hold up somebody's pay. They depend on you for their pay. So make sure you pay quickly, okay? Make sure you pay quickly. And the last thing I'm gonna hit upon on pay is, give them pay increases. If somebody's doing a good job for you and they've been with you six months or a year or whatever it is, you need to reevaluate. Should you pay this person more money? Right now, there's terrible inflation around the world and certainly in the US, so if there's inflation in the US, I am assuming there's inflation in other countries and these people are gonna need more pay. And if you don't pay them more, you're gonna lose them because other companies will pay them. It's the saying about a spouse. If you don't take good care of them, somebody else will come along and do it for you, okay? So you wanna make sure you're taking care of your employees, you respect your employees. You understand the norms there. All these things are very, very important. All these things will come into play and you keeping your employee and getting good tasks done. Treat them with kindness. If you have somebody that's constantly screwing up and you've told them over and over again, they're screwing up, then you just need to replace them. You don't need to get mad at them. You don't need to yell at them. You don't need to be mean to them. You don't need to be cruel. You don't need to not pay them. You need to hire somebody else. It's really that simple. This is not that complicated if you're doing your part, but understand when you hire somebody, you've also gotta manage them. You gotta go check and whatever you check on a daily basis will get done. If you don't check stuff, it will fall by the wayside. That employee will start to think, well, this must not be important because he hasn't asked me about it in four months. So if he hasn't asked me about it in four months, I think I'm gonna slide in this area. That's just what they're gonna do. That's just what they're gonna do. And this is pretty much the norm for somebody who doesn't run their own business. Somebody who doesn't run their own business is gonna probably try to do as little work as possible for as much pay as they can get. That's just the norm. Somebody who really wants to put forth effort or really wants to see something grow is probably gonna start their own business. So you're not gonna get somebody probably with your intestinal fortitude, your drive to work, all these things that you have your creativity, all these things that you have as a business owner, you're probably not gonna find it an employee because they are in an employee. They are not a business owner. Don't expect them to be you. It's not gonna happen. They're not gonna be you, okay? You're gonna be constantly disappointed if this is what you're trying to do. So I've given you some sites you can go to. I think I've given you some skills that you can use to really manage these people and check these people out. But it is work, guys. I'm not gonna tell you that hiring people, a lot of people say, well, I'm just gonna hire everybody to do everything else and that way I can just sit back and go to the beach. No, you can't, no you can't because whatever job you've hired people for, you've added some additional work for yourself. Yeah, you may have taken that task away from yourself, but now you need to manage somebody doing that task. You need to do it on a regular basis. You need to talk to them on a regular basis. Every now and then you need to have meetings with them, okay? I don't like to have meetings just to have meetings. I don't think that's good. However, I do have meetings and I like to go through what they've been doing because anything I check on seems to get better, okay? When I start checking on something, it seems to get better. That's just the way it is, no matter what. If you are a business owner, you can't hire away your entire business, okay? So if that is your plan, you're gonna fail miserably. You have to manage people. This is required. You have to let them know what is expected and you have to talk to them when they don't do what's expected and then if they continually don't do what's expected, then you gotta hire somebody else and keep in mind. If you can't find somebody that's better than somebody you already have, you may wanna stick with who you have because it's a pain in the butt to hire people. We all know that. But if I do have somebody that's consistently not doing what they're supposed to be doing, yeah, I'm gonna hire somebody else. That's what I gotta do. I hope this was helpful to you today. I hope this sheds some light on what I do and how I do it. I do keep people for years and years. I have a lot of people who have been with me for many years, but I think it has a lot to do with management. I think it has a lot to do with my expectations. They don't get surprises. They know what's expected of them. So this stuff is super, super important. All right, guys, that's all I got for you today. If you have any more questions, you can put it in that chat box there. Also, if you're watching this and it's not live, feel free to put it in that comment section down there. I go back through and answer those. I'm gonna be doing that this morning, right after this slide. I'm gonna be going in there and I'm gonna be answering all your comments. I got some over the weekend and I need to get in there and talk to you guys. I did get an interesting comment and I think this applies in many different areas. I was talking to a relative the other day and we were talking about this relative doing print-on-demand stuff. And she told me, well, I made up some shirts and none of them sold. None of the styles I did sold. So this doesn't really work, making these shirts. And I said, no, what happened was either your marketing or the shirts you did weren't any good. That's what the problem is because obviously with all these print-on-demand companies shirring out tons of merchandise, it works. But what you did didn't work. So what you need to do is do something else. And she says, well, you mean like make more designs? I said, exactly, exactly. She goes, well, how many do I make? I says, as many as it takes to figure out what works. Okay, so you'll just keep doing it and doing it. Thomas Edison said he's never failed. He invented, what, electricity? And he said he never failed. He found 10,000 ways of not doing something though that didn't work. Okay, so you're gonna have these failures. Things are not going to work out. That's just the nature of trying new things. But if you try enough things and you keep changing up things, you're gonna hit on what works. Guaranteed. Guys, thank you so much for being here today. I really appreciate it. I do have a free course down there you can grab and it gives you some insight into marketing. A $97 value, you can get it absolutely free. It's in the description below. Also, check out Cartra. This is my ad for Cartra. If you're doing any type of digital marketing, you wanna look below, click on my link for Cartra. You can get a trial for only one dollar. One dollar, so that's a pretty good deal. Check out Cartra below. If you're doing marketing online, you're gonna want Cartra. Don't forget to subscribe if you haven't done so. If there's a button down there it says subscribe and it's red. That's cause you haven't clicked it. Go ahead and click it. Turn it gray. Don't forget to turn on all notifications. Make sure you turn on all those notifications cause that way I can let you know when I upload a video or if I go live. Just subscribing won't do that guys. You have to do this part here. And those comments, I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for being here today. I'll see you guys on Wednesday. I'm gonna teach you how to be creative Wednesday. Talk to you then.