IAM787- Founder Helps businesses Outsource Manpower Differently

John has helped thousands of entrepreneurs succeed in their businesses by 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.

• CEO Hack: I use Snagit and Jing program
• CEO Nugget: There is always work and a limit to what you can do in a day, delegate your work
• CEO Defined: Being a leader of other people

Website: https://www.onlinejobs.ph

My book “The Outsourcing Lever”: www.outsourcinglever.com

Full Interview:

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Transcription

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[00:00:00.20]- 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.

[00:00:02.29] – Gresham Harkless

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast, and I have a very special guest on the show today. I have John Jonas of onlinejobs.ph. John, it's awesome to have you on the show.

[00:00:10.59] – John Jonas

Hey. Thanks for having me. It's good to be here.

[00:00:12.90] – Gresham Harkless

No problem. Super excited to have you on. And before I jump in, I want 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 businesses by outsourcing differently. He created and runs online jobs dot p h, the largest website for finding Filipino virtual workers with over one million Filipino resumes and over three hundred thousand employers from around the world using it. It. He works about seventeen hours per week, choosing to spend his time with his family rather than working. John, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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[00:00:44.39] – John Jonas

Let's do this.

[00:00:45.29] – Gresham Harkless

Let's do it. So to kick everything off, I wanted to kinda rewind the clock a little bit, and hear a little bit more about what I call your CEO story. We'll let you get started with your business.

[00:00:54.00] – John Jonas

So I was hiring people in the Philippines. I got a really good tip 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 then Elance. Now it's Upwork. Mhmm. And it was all just like, none of it just really worked for me. When I hired this he gave me this reference where I could hire someone full-time in the Philippines, which was scary in and of itself. And it was 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 so I started talking about it, but finding people was terrible. Like, the way the only option at the time was an agency. Like, they have an office in the Philippines. They recruit the workers, bring them into their office, mark up their salaries three times, and then lease them back to you. And they weren't very good at recruiting. And finally, I was like, I just wanna 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 in it so I could recruit someone myself. We got a couple hundred profiles in the first month. Nice. And from there, it just exploded. So

[00:02:16.30] – Gresham Harkless

Nice. I absolutely love and appreciate that. I always say sometimes the best kind of innovations, the best things that come across is just by kinda scratching your own itch, so to speak, and you have a problem, you create that problem, then, as you said, everybody's knocking down your door and say, hey. How are you doing that? And the next thing you know, something even new and sometimes better blossoms from there.

[00:02:33.19] – John Jonas

Yeah. And that's totally that's totally what it was.

[00:02:35.69] – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. Absolutely love that. So I wanted to to hear a little bit more about OnlineJobs. Ph. Could you take us through exactly what we can find there and how it can help us out as entrepreneurs and business owners?

[00:02:45.09] – John Jonas

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 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 online job 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 want or nobody or a bunch of people or whatever. We're not in we're not a middleman. So we don't mark up 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. It's all just a platform where you get to connect directly with workers without a middleman.

[00:03:41.19] – Gresham Harkless

Nice. And I definitely appreciate that, especially, you know, getting the opportunity, as you said, and as you talked about, you know, getting and 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 a phrase. So it's great to hear that you've been able to kinda create that and provide that same opportunity for so many people.

[00:03:59.00] – John Jonas

Yeah. And what I found is for most people, like, a lot of people like the idea of a middleman because they don't wanna recruit someone, and they like the idea of having someone there to, like, kinda 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 commute something something goes wrong in the communication with them. And then that per they're usually, the other company is not that good at recruiting. Like, they're not in fact, we do recruiting for other people, and we're not I mean, we're really good at it. Mhmm. But if people will recruit for themselves, they're always better at recruiting for themselves than we are recruiting for them.

[00:04:43.00] – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. That makes so much sense. And I was actually just gonna ask you that. Do you feel like a lot of that is because, like, a lot of times when you're bringing on some you're bringing on somebody? I mean, obviously, you 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 understand those things. Sometimes, a middle man or a middle person has to be able to kinda 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.

[00:05:12.19] – John Jonas

Well, so as, 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 two thousand five. He still works for me today.

[00:05:23.30] – Gresham Harkless

Nice.

[00:05:23.80] – John Jonas

And this is kind of one of the interesting cultural things in the Philippines is that as long as you treat them well, they won't they'll ever 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 to recruit for you, they don't look at personality. They don't only thing they care about is skill. And if your personalities don't mesh, like, you're not gonna work with someone for fifteen years. You know? Like, it's just not it's not reasonable. Right.

[00:05:53.50] – Gresham Harkless

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. This could be for you personally or for your business, but what do you feel kinda sets you apart and makes you unique?

[00:06:10.80] – John Jonas

So for the business, what makes us different is that we don't take 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 fifteen hundred dollars a month, they're paying the worker five hundred dollars a month. Right. You know? So, like, 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, removing people who 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 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 who 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 garment.

[00:07:29.89] – Gresham Harkless

Environment.

[00:07:30.39] – John Jonas

So we charge workers or we charge employers to post their job, and that just cleans up the whole system.

[00:07:38.60] – Gresham Harkless

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. A lot of times that attracts people who are sometimes serious. From both standpoints, the workers and the people who are submitting the jobs create a 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 you just kinda sometimes see the finish line. You just see that you hired somebody, but you have no idea that you were able to hire that person because we removed a hundred or so of the bad apples that could have made that a lot murkier situation.

[00:08:24.69] – John Jonas

Yeah. And the bad apples are usually the most vocal ones too.

[00:08:28.00] – Gresham Harkless

Yes.

[00:08:28.80] – John Jonas

So we're very aggressive.

[00:08:30.89] – Gresham Harkless

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, a book, or a habit that you have, but what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?

[00:08:44.39] – John Jonas

So I have two things for this. Number one, I found early on this. It used to be Jing. Now I use Snagit, but it is a screen capture screen recording tool that lets me talk through things with people while they can see my screen and 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'd 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 Snagit 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 simple. And that's becoming more common today, but that's been, like, I mean, almost every time I communicate with my VAs or with anybody, even my wife from my computer, I use it. Right? Yeah. It's so good. The second thing that I have that is like, this is my CEO thing, and this is something I had no clue 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. Mhmm. And I didn't know and it took me years to recognize this 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 them 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, if 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 him three days. And he sends me an hour an email four hours later. Like, sir, I finished the task. What do you want me to do now? Woah. 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 the other big thing that people see when they start to do this and they do it right. You hire someone full time, it it transitions you from being a grunt worker in your business to being the CEO of your business.

[00:11:18.20] – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. So now I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO nugget. So this could be like a word of wisdom or a piece of advice. It might be something you would tell a client or if you hacked into a time machine, you might tell your younger business self.

[00:11:30.10] – John Jonas

If I could tell it to myself earlier so I'll just say that I've worked about seventeen hours a week now since two thousand eight. 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 if it's you, you have a job. If you if if all the work if everything comes back to you and depends on you, you've 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 especially as the CEO, like, you got into this business not to build yourself a job, not to build yourself responsibility. You got into it 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.

[00:12:39.29] – Gresham Harkless

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 mean to you?

[00:12:50.50] – John Jonas

I think it means being a leader of other people. So, I mean, you look at, like, Steve Jobs or, you know, like, Tim Cook today. Right? Tim Cook doesn't build iPhones. Yeah. He doesn't he doesn't design iPhones. He doesn't design the website. He doesn'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 you really become a CEO.

[00:13:20.39] – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. And that's extremely powerful. And I love how you said to be, 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, and 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 a hold of you and find out about all the awesome things that you guys are working on.

[00:13:51.60] – John Jonas

Yeah. So over the years, I've found that this isn't like it, 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 won't 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 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 sixty 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 you do that, it takes a leap either way, and you gotta try it and see, does this work for me?

[00:14:42.89] – Gresham Harkless

So Absolutely. And people that wanna get ahold of you, what's the best way for them to do that?

[00:14:48.20] – John Jonas

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 websites, it obviously doesn't come to me, but if you ask for me, it will immediately get forwarded to me. So, if you use the Contact Us link at online jobs dot p h and say, hey. This is for John. It'll immediately come to me, and I will respond to you directly.

[00:15:14.79] – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. And to make it even easier, we'll have the link and information in the show notes just so 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, in 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. It's 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 I hope you have a great rest of the

[00:15:49.29] – Outro 

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.

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