“How should I track the time spent on a project by my outsourcer?”

This is another often-asked question by people who are just getting started doing outsourcing. I know I asked the question myself in the beginning, but now I don’t ask it anymore.

Here’s why: If you turn the tables and imagine that you had a boss, how would you want your hours tracked? Would you want to punch a clock and feel like a robot, or would you want your boss to notice your results and care about these results rather than the punch clock?

Exactly. Thought so.

Full time employees vs freelancers hired for specific tasks:

If the employee is a full time person working for me such as somebody I hired at OnlineJobs.ph then I get daily reports of their results and I have a general “feel” for how long the work takes them to complete. If I think it’s below par I tell them. If I think it’s great volume I pay them a bonus and thank them. I have only ever had one situation where a person’s work output was too low for too long and I ended up letting her go.

If the person is a freelancer doing work for me such as graphics, usually I’ll agree to a per-project fee rather than an hourly rate. This sidesteps the problem that we’re discussing altogether. Good solution.

I do have one graphics guy that I work with almost every week (seems like every day these days) and I get him to bill me by the hour. I never question his hours because it seems like he works in fast forward. He will deliver me a nice little header for a website and tell me it took 15 minutes. He will format an entire ebook for me in Adobe Acrobat and it looks like a work of art yet he bills me a few hours.

If you are not getting a feeling of fairness in your outsourcing activities then you either need to change the way you bill, or find new workers.

I do not believe it is a good idea to ask them to install screenshot software that sends you by-the-minute reports on what they were doing. If they want to use Facebook for 2 hours I could care less – so long as they actually deliver quality results and MAKE ME MONEY.

So that brings us to the simplistic answer that I learned from John Jonas. Whenever someone asks him the question we discussed here, he will answer by saying “Does the employee make you money?” If yes, good. Keep them. If no, then you know what you need to do.

I read a lot of threads about outsourcing on forums, and a lot of blog posts on the topic. Whenever anyone talks about how effective it is for their business, it is virtually a sure thing that someone will come in and reply with a comment like this:

“Well, I don’t really know about this. I tried outsourcing overseas before and it really didn’t work out. The guy couldn’t do anything that he said he could, and I kept giving him chances. Eventually I had to fire him. I don’t think outsourcing works.”

Let me ask you a few questions:

• When you were a kid and you missed the bus, did you say that “Well, I just can’t use the public transport system. it’s impossible”?
• When you had a date with a girl/guy, and it didn’t go well, did you say, “This dating thing just doesn’t work. I don’t think I can do it”?
• When you bought some toy and got it home, only to find yourself disappointed by its quality did you say, “That’s it .. I’m not buying any more toys”?
• When you take the milk out of your fridge and find it sour, do you say, “I’ll never buy milk at THAT grocery story again”?

Of COURSE you don’t!

So why is it that when someone has a bad experience outsourcing, they just want to give up? Probably because it is NOT a complete cakewalk, and it is a bit scary to become a “manager”. So if you are reading this and you fall into that camp of “not being sure” about outsourcing, just ask your self this:

Would you rather stop, and simply cease to move towards your goal?
Would you rather do EVERYTHING yourself? (This is impossible)?
…or would you rather figure out what you did wrong and get back up!

Maybe you hired the wrong person
Maybe you were a crappy manager
Maybe you provided no training or direction
Maybe you did not define tasks clearly
Maybe your expectations were wildly unrealistic

There are SO many possible reasons why you didn’t achieve what you expected when you first “tried” to outsource. You can either conclude that “all those offshore workers are no good”, or you can get smart and realize that you probably have more to learn.

There’s my rant for today. I hope you learned something from it. Seriously.

(Oh, BTW, this kind of stuff is exactly why you need to learn from what John Jonas teaches about outsourcing)

From a marketing perspective, I often like to see what people are putting on YouTube. Sometimes it gives me good ideas. Anyway, I found this video review of ReplaceMyself.com on YouTube. It’s short, and seems fairly well balanced (not just all good stuff).

My thoughts: He says that the training provided inside of ReplaceMyself is “weak”. I disagree with this. I think the training is actually very solid. Maybe he thinks it is weak because it is broken down into many steps. For example, on the training in sales copywriting, John basically provides about a dozen or more things that he wants your workers to go through. They could be PDF documents, audio lessons, or videos. Keep in mind this fits into the 80 / 20 rule. He is not creating novels or DVD courses to train your workers. He is giving them the knowledge that will allow them to get 80% of the job done, and enough knowledge to go out and LEARN the rest.

The free audio: Obviously the free audio mentioned in the video is the one that John offers when you opt-in to his mailing list. It’s a great audio, and worth getting.

The training is a big time saver, in my opinion. I only wish he gave people more of the advanced hiring techniques that I’ve come to learn. But that’s why I created a bonus package as an affiliate

I tend to follow a lot of discussion forums where people ask about outsourcing, When it comes to hiring your own VA I’m a believer that you should hire your own dedicated employees. Ideally, you should cross-train your workers so that if one was to leave, another can pick up the important work.

Anyway, I often see people asking about how much it costs, and if it is really reasonable to get a full time worker for the kind of salaries that are mentioned in people’s advertisements. For example, John Jonas talks about how you can get someone for $250, or $350 per month. John Reese, in his Outsource Force videos, talked about getting someone for about $3 per hour. Is this realistic?

The short answer is yes.

If you look for employees over at OnlineJobs.ph you’ll see that people put their salary expectations in their profile. These are in Philippine Pesos, on a monthly basis. So if someone asks for 15,000P per month, and there are 46 Pesos per US dollar, then they are asking for $326 US per month. This is very typical.

Here’s what I have noticed:

• Young workers will often work for less, just as you’d expect. I’ve seen young people asking for only $100 per month full time. Not often, but it does happen. If you snag someone at that level you should look to raise them quickly so they are happy. You can’t live well on $100 per month even in the Philippines.
• $300 is very typical for people with some online experience, but maybe 1-2 years. You should be able to find people at that level who are trainable, dependable, and write good English. You can actually find very solid English writing for that price. But again, as you teach them more skills, you should give them raises.
• If you need a part time employee to do graphics, web work, or other skills that do not involve precisely written English, you can get that easily. You should pro-rate the salary accordingly so if you need 20 hours per week, you can typically arrange for $150 per month.

John Jonas’ “Replace Myself” system gets you free access to OnlineJobs.ph, which is where I hire most of my workers. I actually prefer it to BestJobs.ph right now.

Before you get a membership, make sure you read my review, and also check out the bonus package that I’m offering.