JOHN JONAS: That was my goal. Like I want to build a platform where I could recruit someone on my own so that I could recruit a content writer, or someone to be on the phone, or whatever kind of a social media person, which social media wasn't really a thing at the time.

So I hired a programmer and he built Onlinejobs.ph which is a job platform. You post your job. We have over 3 million Filipino resumes now where they're going to apply to your job. You're going to interview them like you would someone locally. The big difference there is you have instant access to any talent that you want and they're going to be affordable that's the point of Onlinejobs.

INTRO: Pilates business owners, welcome to The Pilates Business Podcast, brought to you by the people who own, operate, and instruct in a successful clinical Pilates studio in Australia. 

Our mission is to help you to discover Pilates business assets to build your clinical Pilates business success. And now, here's your host, David Gunther. 

DAVID GUNTHER: Last episode, we opened the door to a world of talent beyond our studio walls, talking with John Jonas about the power of hiring in the Philippines. Today we go deeper exploring why going direct, not through agencies would be probably a great idea for us.

This could be a game changer for your Pilates business.

It could be just the thing you are waiting for to expand the skills within your business.

How do you actually find that perfect person? How do you build trust when there's an ocean between you and what does it take to keep that new employee? They're not employees, they're contractors. That new contractor loyal for years and helping you to grow your business. I'm joined again by John Jonas, founder of Online Jobs, pH.

Who's helped millions of skilled, affordable, and dedicated Filipino professionals connect with business owners like you and me? Let's dive into the practical steps to building your dream remote team.

JOHN: The Philippines government will not allow you to classify them as an employee unless you have a physical presence in the Philippines, which you do not. So what should you expect when hiring someone?

The number one thing is to treat them well. So we've already talked about this.

They're a human, they're not a robot. Treat them well. What you can expect from them is for them to really want this job as long as. And this is the critical piece. So this is like the mistakes and the, what you need to do. This is it. As long as they trust you. So in the Philippines, I know that you go into this thinking, well, I don't know if I can trust this person.

They're on the other side of the world. How can I bring them into my business? In the Philippines, they have that same feeling towards you. Only their feeling is stronger than yours, where they're like. Putting their life in your hands really if you don't pay them they're not gonna eat and there's nothing to fall back on.

There's no recourse here. So they're feeling of distrust towards you towards them doing a bunch of work and not getting paid is really strong towards them doing something wrong and you getting mad at them and firing them right away is really strong They're feeling of distrust towards you causing them to lose face is really strong.

So in all of these situations the thing that you need to do is to gain their trust in you. And you do that in a lot of ways. Communication is one, training is a really big one. Training people. And training does not have to be big and complicated. It's very simple, So communication, training, giving feedback, feedback towards their stuff is really important and positive feedback, even when they did it wrong. Like, Hey, thanks for trying on this. I can see what you did. Here's more of what I have in mind, would be the feedback from me. So those three things are a really big deal. Now, let's talk about expectations towards hours. Can you expect them to work productively for eight hours a day?

I guess that depends on what you have them doing. If you have them as a receptionist, then there's not a lot of option for them. They need to be there at 8 a. m. Your time, right? Which in Australia is, I think is 8am their time, so it's not that big of a deal.

DAVID: So on our side of Australia, we're actually three hours ahead. Pretty close which is really advantageous for Australia Australian businesses working with people in the Philippines but, you do have to acknowledge that there is that if you want them to start at 8am.

Canberra time, that'll be 5 a. m. their time. And, I'd like to touch on this the problems of hiring people through one of these big organizations, call centers, where they have to travel. Two hours in, in cases to get to that place of work where they can then sit in front of a monitor that they, and we don't do this, although we have explored it because there are some advantages there possibly.

But we've decided we want to. the money to go directly to the workers. And we always getting back to your point we make sure we pay and we make sure we pay on time. And in the trust side of things, that's really important.

And we do recognize that. That situation where they are relying on us, not only for them to eat, but their families in many cases, they're supporting multiple family members with the money that you're paying them. So yeah, let's talk a little bit about that difference between hiring through a website like online jobs.

PH, which is your website that you've run now since 2005. So congratulations, 20 years coming up for that. That's fantastic. And I can only imagine the amount of support that you've given to these people, the population of the Philippines in the work that they've been able to do outside of the Philippines remotely for businesses like ours and many much larger businesses.

But yeah, that was one of the things when we discuss in our interviews with potential remote workers what's your motivation for being a contractor and working from home then they can tell us about people that they might support. They can tell us about, they need to be at the house because they've got children, they've got a partner that does either work remotely or goes out to a center a local place but it could be two hours travel, John 

JOHN: Yeah. So yeah. Let's talk about how do you find these people? So we've talked about who they are and what good they can do. How do you find them? So there's three options. You can fly to the Philippines and try and find someone locally. It's not a very good option. The second option is you can hire an agency and this is a common option mostly because agencies are in your face and they're telling you they're going to do this for you.

So here's how this works. You go to an agency. They say, yeah, we can find that person for you and they will provide you a person that person works in their office, which seems really great. Until you realize that, yeah, like what you're saying, there's a two hour commute. Commute times in the Philippines are insane.

And it is, it's not only is it not uncommon, it's common, even, to have a two hour commute to work. Which means four hours a day out of their life. Which is just horrid. But, they go into work, they have a job. Now, just so you know, here's how this works. They go into work, there is a manager there, That manager is cracking the whip on this person.

Often you're paying this company 1, 500 a month for the person that they've hired for you. They're paying that person 500 a month. That person's spending a hundred dollars a month on travel to and from work. It's a hard situation. for them working in an agency. They'll do it because the other option is you don't have a job, right?

And that's a much, much worse option. And this was the first way that I hired someone in 2005. So actually I've, I started online jobs in 2008. So it hasn't been 20 years, but it's, it's been a lot of years. I hired my first person in 2005 through an agency and what I thought was happening, they said, do you want a webmaster or a programmer?

And I was like, well, Kind of want a content writer. They said do you want a webmaster or a programmer? I'll take a webmaster, I guess. So like two days later, they came back to me with a fully trained webmaster. What had actually happened was, and I didn't know this at the time, because I didn't know that agencies Incentive structure isn't what you think.

They had pulled someone off the street and given him like 30 minutes of training on what the internet was and said, here's your webmaster, right? It was a warm body that they'd put in a seat. And I've learned over the years, I didn't know this then, but their incentive isn't to find you the best person.

Their incentive is to test you, the employer, because frankly, most of the time when it doesn't work out, it's the employer's fault, the employer's not willing to. Build trust with that person. They're not willing to think of them as a human. They're only thinking of them as a data entry robot. And you don't care about that person or what they're doing, or you don't care about their markup or their wage or their commute, if you don't care about the person, then yeah, going through an agency is a good way.

for you to go if you don't care. When that person I hired, which this was 2005, he still works for me today, which this is another one of the great things about the Philippines is their loyalty. They are loyal almost to a fault to where when you hire them, as long as you treat them well, they'll never quit working for you.

So he still works for me today. When he found out that I was paying the agency 750 a month and they were paying him 250 a month for full time work. He was pretty upset and I didn't know that they were paying him 250. And I was like, that sucks, but okay. Like for me, it's not the worst thing ever.

For him, it was the worst thing ever. And he said sir, I quit. I was like, no, you know what? You can't quit. He's I can't handle the office politics here anymore. And now that I found out the wage difference, I quit. Sorry. And I was, and I told him, Hey, look, I'll double your pay if you come work for me, but you can't do this for 30 days.

Cause I have a contract. And the next day he responded and said, I just, I told him I quit and I walked out today. So I'm ready to start working whenever I was like, Oh man, so problematic for me. But that was their reaction. And I've seen that reaction over, over and over again. So there, the agency model is an acceptable model.

They provide office space. They provide a computer, they provide internet access, they provide oversight. They also provide. A huge salary markup, and commute time, and a middleman between you and them, and if this works for you, then it works for you, great 

AD: Follow the Show promo

Help the team at the Pilates business podcast, keep improving and delivering this important information. Follow the show on your favorite podcast platform and recommend it to other clinical Pilates business owners.

DAVID: You mentioned caring and caring is one of the essential ingredients, one of the values of Pilates Can, the Pilates Business Podcast, but one of the reasons it's a value is it's a value of our industry. We do care about people.

That's why we're in the industry. That's why we look after, but that's why we don't make as much money as the big franchises in fitness that use the word Pilates and put warm bodies in front of people and call it Pilates. So the agency model does have the advantages and our challenge has been to find. Workers in the Philippines who can replicate the agency conditions, if you like, to an extent the workspace where they've got room, the technology, the internet the power supply and all of those sort of things so that they can do the work and be relied upon by a business who needs them.

We can't really have someone there to do that. today and gone tomorrow. They've got to be there consistently when we need them to be there. and, look, there's always ups and downs. There's always life gets in the way. but we do care about those things.

And so that's why I think this model of actually going out and Finding your person. And there's many of these people in Philippines that are, as you say, highly skilled in all different areas. And in a way, it doesn't really matter what you made your sort of need is and how you're going to build up that person's hours, but with various sorts of tasks or roles.

But if you can find That sort of person that can replicate that and create that trust. As you say that's really important. And the communication and understanding that loss of face, you also mentioned, how that works for them. what is going to be a trigger for that things that you might say as a boss, as a person running the business who has certain goals to achieve that are going to relate to that.

To them have having that loss of face to making decisions that aren't going to be good for them or your business in terms of building up that trust factor and building up the work that they'll be doing for you. Yeah, really think that sort of model of the agency model. doesn't really work for very small businesses because there's so little margin there to give to that commitment for the worker.

The worker needs to have that trust. They need to get good outcomes from this relationship. And if it's going to be long term, then those outcomes need to be significant for both sides. So yeah, thanks. Thanks for that viewpoint, because That's really important.

say it straight, which is really important. In these industry, there's, can be a lot of promotion, a lot of publicity, a lot of advertising strategies as you say they're in your face and saying it'll be this, it'll be that.

And it's going to work. work really well, but then in the actual doing of it's just not the case. Perhaps you've got some real success not just with your business.

Your business is probably a bit bigger than most of our businesses in this audience for this podcast, the Pilates business podcast for smaller businesses that have been successful and why they have been successful, John.

JOHN: Yeah. I think it was the third time that I went back to the agency to hire someone because after I'd done it the first time I realized I replaced myself in a couple different areas with this first person. I went back the third time and they said, do you want a webmaster or a programmer? I was like, I want to recruit someone on my own.

And I think there's a better way to do this. Give me a programmer. they actually gave me a programmer and I used him to build OnlineJobs That was my goal. Like I want to build a platform where I could recruit someone on my own so that I could recruit a content writer, or I could recruit someone to be on the phone, or I could recruit whatever kind of a social media person, which social media wasn't really a thing at the time.

So I went back to them, hired a programmer and he built Onlinejobs.ph which is a job platform. You post your job. We have over 3 million Filipino resumes now where they're going to apply to your job. You're going to interview them like you would someone locally. The big difference there is you have instant access.

To any talent that you want and they're going to be affordable and every time I think about hiring someone locally here, I don't know who I should hire because I don't know if I'm going to get ripped off locally in the Philippines. I might get ripped off, but I'm still getting a bargain.

that's the point of Onlinejobs You're going to hire someone direct. I built what I wanted. I wanted to hire someone direct. They work from home. There's no markup. We don't mark up salaries. We're not involved. We're not a middleman. You hire them and work directly with them. So you asked what about success?

What are small businesses seeing? So on onlinejobs. ph slash real results, which it's at the top of that page, you can click on the real results from onlinejobs. ph. We have hundreds of things that people have said. And what kind of success do people have? Like a, like you said, a client service manager.

I talked to a guy who said he, he has someone in the Philippines who does client relationships. He talks to them on the phone. He manages their accounts. And people are always concerned with, Oh, they're not going to like talking to someone in the Philippines. I need someone in the No, actually, they might like it.

The person in the Philippines is responsive and that's their job. And they're not distracted by other things because you can afford to hire two or three or five. different people to do where you couldn't afford that in Australia or in the U. S. I know a guy who runs a YouTube channel and he has a team of people in the Philippines that help him film.

Like they help him with the ideas for what they're going to film about. They help them with scripts. They do all the editing, they do the producing, they do the publishing, they do the content writing, whatever it is, the transcriptions, the thumbnails, the, they're doing all that stuff, right? And the reality is that I could go through thousands and tens of thousands of businesses that small businesses that are succeeding with this from like realtors and insurance agents to online retail shops to the UPS store.

I don't know. You guys have UPS? You have UPS? I think you have UPS in Australia. Or DHL or Google and Uber and Canva are all using online jobs to find people. But that's not the point because for every big speedo that's using online jobs, we have a thousand solopreneurs who are using it to find an admin assistant.

Someone to help make travel plans for you. Someone to help with your scheduling. And every single day I hear from people saying, I love my people. They don't they never tell me who their people are, which is, I mean, that's at my request. I don't want to know who your people are because. You don't talk about the people that you've hired because that just makes other people try and hire them from you.

You said, Catherine, I was really glad you did not say Catherine's last name, because everybody listening to this, the first thing they would have done is search Catherine and whatever, and they would have tried to hire from you, which one of the great things is they're loyal, like I said, and they're not likely to leave you. 

DAVID: What I'd really like to hear there was the three million people that are in the Philippines that are looking for work. They're not just like with some of these agencies there, they're located in a specific spot which might be, to travel to, but they're really only recruiting from that two hour radius as well.

Now that, that could have 5 million, 10 million people in that two hour radius, sure, but maybe not that many that are looking. Whereas the people that are on Online jobs the Filipino workers that are highly skilled. They've been to we can talk a little bit about, the university education and how the system works there in the Philippines, because many of our audience would not be aware of that.

And just how important education is to the Filipino families over there. Family values are very important, but also education, just very similar to what it would be in Australia or in the USA John, perhaps could tell us a little bit about that.

JOHN: Almost everybody you find is going to have a college degree. And that's that, it's a post high school, three or four year college degree, and that's the reality of the Philippines education system. They are very well educated.

That's all I have to say.

DAVID: that's just good for us to know. The accountability aspect is important and being able to create that trust because, initially you don't trust them, they don't trust you and that's just natural what's going to happen here.

This is a new situation, but What ideally is the accountability side of things? How does that work with smaller businesses in particular, who are perhaps a little bit more concerned about that than they should be. But perhaps not.

Building trust isn't just a hiring tactic. It's the bridge to long-term success, whether your team is across the street or across the sea.

If today's conversation sparked ideas for your Pilates business, don't just let them sit. Put them into action and join me next time. As we uncover even more ways to grow with the right people by your side,

this conversation isn't over. So please make sure you subscribe then. Tune in next week and learn about accountability, security, and why this approach can likely work for you as it has for so many other businesses like ours. Until then, stay awesome. 

OUTRO: You have been listening to the Pilates business podcast with David Gunther. If you are enjoying the show, let us know by subscribing and leaving a review. For more information or if you have any Pilates business questions, visit www.pilatesbusiness.com.au.