IAM787- Founder Helps businesses Outsource Manpower Differently

Intro
Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you’ve come to the right place, Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you’re in search of. This is the I am CEO podcast.

Gresham Harkless 0:00
Hello, hello, hello, this is Gresh from the I am CEO podcast and I have a very special guest on the show today have john Jonas of onlinejobs.Ph. JOHN is awesome have you on Show.

John Jonas 0:10
Hey, thanks for having me. It's good to be here.

Gresham Harkless 0:12
No problem. Super excited to have you on. And before I jumped in, I wanted to read a little bit more about john so you can hear about all the awesome things that he's doing. And John has helped thousands of entrepreneurs succeed in their business by doing outsourcing differently. He created and runs OnlineJobs.ph, the largest website for finding Filipino virtual workers, with over 1,000,000 Filipino resumes and over 300,000 employers from around the world using it. He works about 17 hours per week, choosing to spend his time with his family rather than working. JOHN, are you ready to speak to the iamceo community? Let's do this. Let's do it. So to kick everything off, I wanted to kind of rewind the clock a little bit here a little bit more about what I call your CEO story. When did you get started with a business?

John Jonas 0:54
So I was hiring people in the Philippines I got I got a really good tip to from someone saying when you're ready to start outsourcing some of the stuff make sure you go to the Philippines with it because I had tried. And he knew I had tried hiring people locally, I had tried hiring people in India, I had tried hiring people on what was that Elance. Now it's Upwork. And it was all just like none of it just really worked for me. And I heard this, he gave me this reference where I could hire someone full time in the Philippines, which that was scary in and of itself. And it when I finally took the leap, it was the most liberating experience of my life. And then I started having people ask like, how are you doing this? Why are you doing this? Why is this working so well, and, and so I started talking about it, but finding people was terrible, like the way the only option at the time was at an agency, like they have an office in the Philippines, they they recruit the workers, bring them into their office and mark up their salaries by three times, and then lease them back to you. And they weren't very good at recruiting. And finally, I was like, I just want to recruit someone my own. And there wasn't there was no such thing. And so I was like, I think I can build the software and like, try and get a couple hundred profiles. And so I could recruit someone myself. We got a couple hundred profiles in the first month. Right? And from there, I just exploded. So

Gresham Harkless 2:16
nice. Absolutely. I love and appreciate that. I always say sometimes the best kind of innovations, the best things that come across as just by kind of scratching your own itch, so to speak, and you have a problem, you create that problem, then, like you said, everybody's knocking on your door and say, Hey, how are you doing that? And then next thing, you know, something even new and sometimes better blossoms from there.

John Jonas 2:33
Yeah. And that's totally, that's totally what it was.

Gresham Harkless 2:35
Yeah, absolutely. Love that. So I wanted to to hear a little bit more about online jobs, pH, could you take us through exactly what we can find there and how we can help us out as entrepreneurs in business.

John Jonas 2:45
Yeah, so what I created was exactly what I wanted to find, like I wanted to be able to go and like search through resumes, and contact workers and and interview them on my own and hire them and pay them what they wanted to make. Right. So that's what I created. So the only jobs is a job board, where you go on, you can search resumes, you can contact workers individually, you can post a job, and you'll get, you know, depending on what your job post is, you'll get dozens or hundreds of applications to your job post, then you get to interview those people. And you can hire whoever you aren't, or nobody or a bunch of people or whatever we're not in, we're not a middleman. So we don't markup salaries, we don't take a cut, we don't require that you communicate with them through our platform, you can do it through your own email that it's all it's it's just, it's just a platform where you get to connect with directly with workers without a middleman.

Gresham Harkless 3:41
Nice. And I definitely appreciate that especially, you know, get an opportunity, as you said, and as you talked about, you know, getting in wanting to go directly to the person and be able to interact with the person not have all the middleman ish stuff, if that's even a word or phrase. So it's great to hear that you've been able to kind of create that and provide that same opportunity for so many people.

John Jonas 3:59
Yeah, and what I found is for most people, like a lot of people like the idea of a middleman because they don't want to recruit someone. And they like the idea of having someone there to like, kind of look over this person that they're working. And what I found in the end was it that actually is detrimental to most working relationships to have that middleman. You don't get if you don't get direct access to that person, your community something something goes wrong in the communication with them. And then that they're usually the other company is not that good at recruiting like they're not, in fact, when you do recruiting for other people, and we're not I mean, we're really good at it. But if people will recruit for themselves, they're always better at it recruiting for themselves than we are recruiting for them.

Gresham Harkless 4:42
Yeah, that makes so much sense. And I was actually just going to ask you that. Do you feel like a lot of that is because like a lot of times when you bring it on some you're bringing on somebody, I mean, obviously put as much as you can in the job description, but I feel like there's a certain maybe cultural, or a way in which you communicate and understanding those things, something times, a middle man or middle person has to be able to kind of dial into all those things to be able to find that right fit. And a lot of times, if that work isn't done, it sometimes gets the ball dropped along the process.

John Jonas 5:12
Well, so as I'm, like someone else recruiting for you, they're not looking at personality. And so I'll give you an example. Like, the first person I ever hired was in 2005, he still works for me today. Nice. And this is this is kind of one of the interesting cultural things with the Philippines is that as long as you treat them, well, they won't, they'll never quit working for you. And there's a caveat there, you have to treat them well. But that doesn't, when someone else is looking recruiting for you, they don't look at personality they don't. Only thing they care about is skill. And if your personalities don't match, like you're not going to work with someone for 15 years, you know, like, it's just not, it's not reasonable.

Gresham Harkless 5:53
Right? Yeah, absolutely. So that's why it's great, you know, to see that you created something to help, you know, create, to help solve that problem, I should say. And so I wanted to ask you now for what I call your secret sauce, and this could be for you personally, or for your business. But what do you feel kind of sets you apart and makes you unique?

John Jonas 6:10
So for the business, what makes us different is that we don't, we don't take, there's a couple of things, we don't take a cut of salaries, that's a big deal, like everybody else takes a cut of the salary. And typically, like, if you're paying them 1500 dollars a month, they're paying the worker $500 a month. And I was like it, it's a it's a big cut. So that's one thing. Second, we do so much work on the back end that nobody ever sees, towards filtering out bad apples towards removing people that aren't from the Philippines towards finding people who are trying to cheat the system, we do so much work to verify people so that employers come in, they have no idea that we're weeding people out. But they're finding good people almost every time because we do so much work. So that's like our business secret sauce. And then the other side of that is we charge like it's not free. And that was one of the first things we did was we found, if we give it away for free, like if employers don't have to pay to use it, you start getting scam, employers, employers are trying to scam workers into working and then you start getting scammy workers because they know employers are scamming and so it just creates this whole cesspool of garbage environment. So we charge workers, or we charge employers to post their job. And that just cleans up the whole system.

Gresham Harkless 7:38
Yeah, I absolutely love that. And I think so many times we forget that a lot of times, especially from a price standpoint by you know, increasing the price or even having a price as you mentioned, as well to a lot of times that attracts people that are some time series, and on both standpoints, that the workers and the people that are submitting the jobs, it creates that win win situation. And I love what you said, because I think so many times that's so synonymous with success, whether it be you know, trying to hire somebody for a job or just anything with business, a lot of times you don't see all the behind the scenes things that it goes to create that success. You don't just kind of sometimes see the finish line, you just see that you hired somebody, but you have no idea that I you were able to hire that person because we removed 100. So the bad apples that could have made that a lot of a murkier situation. Yeah,

John Jonas 8:25
yeah. And the bad apples are usually the most vocal ones, too. Yes. So so we're very aggressive.

Gresham Harkless 8:30
Nice. I appreciate that. So I wanted to switch gears a little bit. And I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an app of book or a habit that you have. But what's something that makes you more effective and efficient.

John Jonas 8:44
So I have two things for this. Number one, I found early on this, it used to be Jing now you snag it, but it is a screen capture screen recording tool that lets me talk through things with people while they can see my, my screen my mouse, they can hear my voice, they know exactly what's going on on my computer. And so I can record a video and say, Hey, I really like what you're doing here. I want to change this or I really love this or let's mimic this thing or look at this other website, like anything like that. And I can just and the magic of what Jing and snag it do is you click upload and it's in the cloud for you. You don't have to deal with like putting it onto your hosting account or anything like that. There's no rendering of videos or files. It's just so so simple. And that's becoming more common today. But that's been like I mean, almost every time I communicate with my with my VA or with anybody in my wife from my computer, I use it right. It's so good. The The second thing that I have that is like this is my this is my SEO thing. And this is something I had no clue was was gonna be the case but When I started hiring out of the Philippines, I hired this person full time. And they were salaried, because that was the only option that I had. And I didn't know. And it took me a years to recognize this, that, because I made that commitment to hire that person full time. It forced me to step away from my business and work on the business instead of working in the business. Because if I had hired that person, hourly, if that was an option, I would have hired him hourly, because that's so low commitment, and so simple. And then, when that person's not busy, I don't really care. Like if they run out of tasks to do it, I don't, I don't care. It's not on me. Whereas in this case, it is on me to keep their time full. And so as soon as they run out of stuff, like it was amazing, like, I gave him a task, I thought it would take them three days. And he sent me an hour, an email four hours later, like, sir, I finished the task. What do you want me to do now? Whoa, crap, I guess I have to come up with something for you to do, right, which sounds like the first time in my business where I actually worked on the business. And that's, that's the other the big, the big thing that people see when they start to do this, and they do it right. You hire someone full time, it transitions you from being a grunt worker in your business to being the CEO of your business.

Gresham Harkless 11:18
Awesome, awesome. Awesome. So now what it asks you for what I call a CEO nugget. So this could be like a word of wisdom or piece of advice, and might be something you would tell a client or be happen to a time machine, you might tell your younger business self,

John Jonas 11:29
if I could tell it to myself earlier. So I'll just say that I've worked about 17 hours a week now, since 2008. And so if I could, if I could say this to myself earlier, because I was forced into it. There's always work to be done in a business. And there's a limit of hours in a day. And so the big question is, who's going to do the work? Is it you? Or is it someone else? Because it's you, you have a job. If you if all the work, if everything comes back to you and depends on you, you built, you're building yourself a job, it's possible to get other people to do basically everything. You just have to make that choice ahead of time. So and especially as the CEO, like you got into this business, not to build yourself a job not to build yourself a responsibility you get into it to to create yourself freedom, right? I mean, that's basically what everybody does, right? You, especially online, like you're an online entrepreneur, you do it to create freedom, and then you realize pretty quickly you're, you're handcuffed to this thing, because you've built all these processes for yourself. Awesome. So now I wanted to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. And we're hoping to have different, quote unquote, CEOs on this show. So john, what does being a CEO means to you? I think it means being a leader of other people. So I mean, you, you look at like Steve Jobs, or you know, like Tim Cook today, right? Tim Cook doesn't build iPhones. He doesn't, he doesn't design iPhones, he doesn't design the website, he didn't do any of that. Right? He leads people. And the more you can get, the more you can be a leader, the more effective you are. And the more you really become a CEO.

Gresham Harkless 13:20
Yeah, and that's extremely powerful. And I love how you said the lead people, because I think so many times we forget about that people aspect in business, we think about the website, we think about designing the iPhone, and all those aspects. But we often forget, sometimes, which I think is one of the most valuable assets, which is the people that we have working in the organization. So love that perspective. I appreciate it, I appreciate your time, even more, what I wanted to do is pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional, you can let our readers and listeners know and of course, how best they can get hold of you and find out about all the awesome things that you guys are working on.

John Jonas 13:51
Yeah, so over the years, I've found that this is like, it's not for everybody, like some entrepreneurs are never gonna pass stuff off. Right? Like it, like, they'll try passing stuff off, and it just won't work for them because they just require too much control, right? But you will know until you try it. Like you have to you have to take a leap and see like, Can this work for me? Does my personality fit? Can I, you know, like, Can I can I find someone else that can help me. Because if you can, like it'll change everything you ever do in your business. If you can't, okay, now you know, now you can keep working 60 hours a week or whatever right? Or give it another shot and see if you can make it work again another way whatever it is. So however however you do that, it takes a leap either way, and you got to try it and see does this work for me?

Gresham Harkless 14:42
So absolutely. And people that want to get a hold of you what's the best way for them to do that?

John Jonas 14:48
So I don't like social media and I don't use it. I try really hard not to use it. So I'm I'm super available through email. So if you use the Contact Us link at any of my any of my websites It obviously doesn't come to me. But it if you ask for me, it will immediately get forwarded to me. So use the Contact Us link get online jobs.ph and say, Hey, this is for john, it'll immediately come to me and I will respond to you directly.

Gresham Harkless 15:14
Awesome, awesome. Awesome. And to make it even easier, we'll have the link and information in the show notes just that everybody can follow up with you. But I love exactly what you said I'll often say like the the biggest fear or the biggest pain I should say is not and doing something and failing but in not doing something and never knowing if it would work out. So I love what you said at the end is just like you never know if by hiring somebody, you might have the next you know, scalable business at your forefront because you never ever do it. So a lot of times you have to try it out you have to see and I love that you create an opportunity for us to do that. So I appreciate that. Appreciate you my friend and hope you have a great rest of the day.

Outro 15:49
Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at IAMCEO.CO. I am CEO is not just a phrase, it’s a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes, Google Play, and everywhere you listen to podcasts. Subscribe and leave us a five-star rating. Grab CEO gear a www.CEOgear.co This has been the I AM CEO podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.