On this episode we will be diving into Virtual Assistants and Amazon! Joining us today we have Virtual Assistant Agency’s Gilad Freimann. As an Amazon Seller, Gilad had a difficult and frustrating personal search for the perfect virtual assistant in the Philippines. From this experience, Virtual Assistant Academy (VAA) was born – the world’s only company specializing in virtual assistant services specifically for Amazon sellers. During this episode, we discuss why it is important for eCommerce and Amazon sellers to find great VA’s. We’ll also look at tips and tricks for finding your perfect assistant, and what to avoid when hiring a VA.
Date: October 5, 2020
Episode: 46
Title: Norman Farrar Introduces Gilad Freiman, Founder and CEO of VAA Philippines.
Subtitle: Finding a good VA and its importance
Final Show Link: https://lunchwithnorm.com/episodes/episode-46-vas-your-key-to-growth-on-amazon-w-gilad-freimann/
In this episode of Lunch With Norm…, Norman Farrar introduces Gilad Freiman, founder and CEO of VAA Philippines.
Gilad Freiman has been selling on Amazon since 2015, and that gave him the idea to find a VA. He discussed the importance of finding and having a great VA for e-commerce and Amazon sellers.
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Norman 0:01
Hey everybody this is Norman Farrar, a.k.a. The Beard Guy here and welcome to another Lunch With Norm, the rise of the micro brands.
Norman 0:20
Alright, we’re broadcasting to you live from Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn and if you’re watching this on a replay just skip ahead and watching on my personal profile page, why don’t you just head over to the official Facebook page Norman Farrar a.k.a. The Beard Guy and you’ll see a lot more content, a ton of video clips and these podcasts and whole. Where are you Kelsey?
Kelsey 0:48
I’m here. Hello. Hi, everyone. First of all, let us know where you’re watching from, throw in the comments we’d love to see and if you haven’t yet, please like and share. We are an official podcast so you can find us on lunchwithnorm.com. It’ll have the Apple link but also you can always search it on Apple and Spotify. We have Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Pinterest, we have it all. You can find it at either Norman Farrar or search Lunch With Norm and we should be able to pop up in front of you and it looks like we have Marina from Toronto. I’m actually in Toronto right now.
Norman 1:31
I’m in Nashville.
Kelsey 1:33
We have Dr. Koz from Los Angeles, cloudy but boring.
Norman 1:37
Dr. Koz .
Kelsey 1:38
It’s a little colder here, I think.
Norman 1:40
Oh yeah, it is freezing outside.
Kelsey 1:42
It’s about eight degrees celsius. I’m not sure what that is in Fahrenheit, but alright and that’s it for me.
Norman 1:48
Okay, so let’s get started. Get out of here. There you go. I shouldn’t be like that with my son, right? But anyways, let him run the behind the scenes production. Alright. So today. Oh, you’re coming back on.
Kelsey 2:03
I was just gonna say, I’ll meet you if you keep it going.
Norman 2:08
Okay. Alright. Oh, yeah. Nice. See what kind of content we put out then. Alright. So today, I do want to mention that we do have another podcast. That’s not an Amazon based podcast called I Know this Guy. We talk to a lot of really interesting people. They could be anywhere, anything from an athlete to Oh, anybody. Anybody who’s got an interesting lifestyle, we talk about their ups, their downs, and everything in between. So check it out, if you want to see something that’s non Amazon. So today, we have a special guest, and he’s going to be joining us from Israel. He runs I think he’s the founder of the Virtual Assistant Academy Gilad Freimann and he has the world’s only company specializing in Virtual Assistance Services specifically for Amazon sellers. So if you have any questions, please feel free to ask them and just throw them over into the comment area. So sit back, relax and grab a cup of coffee and enjoy the show. So Gilad, how are you sir?
Gilad 3:17
Hey, Norm. How are you? Did you say eight degrees?
Norman 3:21
Yeah, no, eight degrees celsius.
Gilad 3:25
Wow. Wow, man. I would go there in a second.
Norman 3:31
You’re in Tel Aviv. Is that correct? Yeah. So it’s probably nice and warm, the beaches.
Gilad 3:38
Exactly. But I miss the eight degrees.
Norman 3:41
I’m so jealous. Okay, Gilad, why don’t you tell everybody just a little bit about your background.
Gilad 3:48
Alright, so, my background as you can see, I’m not Filipino. So we all came, it all started from Amazon and I’ve been selling on Amazon since 2015, a private label and back at a time everything went really good. It was easier to launch new products and it grew fast. The business grew faster, we launched several outdoor products, camping products and went through the rail and once we realized that no, we cannot catch up, we need the help. Then the idea to take a VA came and then it started rolling. I hired my first VA. It was horrible. I had a very bad experience there and I spent hours and hours of finding the right person looking at interviews, looking at CVs doing interviews. t I found the right person and then after that, I taught her everything I knew about Amazon and about a month later she disappeared. She stopped answering my phone and emails and stuff and I knew it was gone and I had to start all over again and I saw that it’s not going easy and that was when it started the whole thing of VAA, and to know how to do it correctly, but I’m an Amazon seller, I live and breathe Amazon, and everything I do is connected with Amazon.
Norman 5:13
Yeah, I’ve always found that a lot of people are talking to me. So let’s say they’ve got a product on their first product and it’s done. Okay, so now they want to go and do number two or number three, and they tried to do everything themselves. Now, nobody is an expert in everything and this is where your product can really collapse, you think you’re going to explode. Instead, you implode and it’s tough to do, I was luckily lucky enough, back in the 90s, to read a book called The E Myth, it’s called the E Myth revisited now and that took me on a whole new journey on how to outsource, how to create SOPs. But the main thing was repeatable tasks, just get off your plate and especially if they’re low hanging tasks, stuff that you do every day, you look at reports, or you look at answering messages or reviews, you’re trying to be exceptional customer service and this was killing people and I also noticed that on the other side that for me, I wasn’t working on my strengths, I would go into work, and I would love working on creative stuff, building brands, doing things that I love doing. But when you start talking to me about accounting, I would just crawl up in a ball and just I would hate it, I like I have to know it as part of the business. But this is where you just delegate the heck out of things. So let’s start with that. Why do e-commerce sellers or Amazon sellers need VAs?
Gilad 6:53
Well, the first form is like you said, I mean, we do it all by ourselves and in the beginning, it’s exciting, you’re launching a new product, so you’re putting all the effort into finding the right product, and you invest a lot of thoughts and creativity into creating the bundle and getting to understand how you’re going to do it differently and so everything is creativity here and then you launched the product and you start to see that Okay, now you have reviews taken care of and now you have another message from a client and and then you have to do PPC and you have to do social media and and suddenly, you’re not doing any any creativity anymore. Suddenly you are just doing whatever it is that you must do today. Because if you don’t, then Amazon will close your store and that is a problem that is something that we have to understand that there is actually no difference between selling on Amazon selling online and selling outside I mean, in the offline and when somebody is launching a store offline, they would never think of doing everything themselves. If you launch, if you open a shoe store, then you would know that you have to hire sellers and that you have to pay for the place and invest money in it before and you would never think that you can handle everything yourself and in here because everything is just in front of us on the computer, then you just spend hours and hours doing the wrong things instead of growing your business. So your question was, why do Amazon sellers need VAs because otherwise they would just be working in their business instead of working on their business, they will just be doing everything themselves instead of thinking how I can look from above and grow my business. That’s my answer to that.
Norman 8:39
Right and it could be very simple tasks, medium tasks, right up to business operations, you can go as hard and heavy as you want with VA. Is that correct?
Gilad 8:54
Yeah, I would say that if I go all the way to the extreme I would the way I do it is for every little test that I have. I think to myself is this something that only me as the founder of VAA or the founder of the Brand on Amazon is it’s only me that can take this decision is it only me that can handle it? If if this is something that needs my attention because it’s something related to where the business is going to be in the year from now in two years from now, how we can grow the business then I will keep that but if it’s something that somebody else and take it as let’s say that you have an army of Superman’s. Okay, so all of them were highly trained, they have what it takes but somebody else with the right training can take it from you then delegate. This is what I do every day I think Okay, can I give this kind of give this and the way I work now is that almost everything is run by my staff of VAs and every little thing that I have now goes immediately with the rock procedures, with the right protocol, but it goes to a virtual system that can handle it and they can handle everything. They can handle little tasks such as checking your listings on a daily basis and telling you if you’re out of stock. Or if you have a negative review on top, and it can go to creating shipment plans, and it can go to doing a great PPC work, and there’s no end, they can do all you need to know and to whom to give what and how to do it.
Norman 10:31
You can go like this is to the extreme, but even with one of our companies, we have outsourced the CFO. So they look over everything, we meet with them quarterly, we have a chief marketing officer, we build brand strategies, and we meet with quarterly basis. We have writers, we have you name it like for our organization and it might be extreme because we’re working with different brands. But we have 39 different people that we’re working with presently, with AMZ club and the way that we do it is we’re appealing these off to experts. So PPC, expert, if it’s going to be rebates, okay. Why if you’re doing rebates, I’ve seen so many disasters when people are working with rebates, because they don’t understand their own keyword research. They don’t understand how to do this, instead of going over and like working, possibly search find buy like with Paul Harvey’s seller chatbot. Oh, it’s going to cost $10 or $15, whatever they charge, or if they go over the Rankbell, or if they go, they try to do everything themselves and usually, they try to cheapen the process and that could be in dollar amount for the VA, or it could be just, oh, I need 50 rebates. I can do it at 23. Because they want to cheapen everything and then they wonder why the process fails and that’s right across the board. That could be from your messages. That could be from your packaging. If you’re a photographer with an iPhone, and you think that you’re a photographer, because the iPhone can take nice pictures. Well, you’re the only one that’s going to like the pictures. So there’s a lot of issues that come up and you can definitely there’s a lot of things that you can do without a VA at the beginning and it’s good for you to take them on like PPC, understand PPC, or social media or there’s lots of different areas. But what are like for you? What do you find some of the problems in finding a good VA?
Gilad 12:45
Well, before I’ve asked for this, I will just say to what you said before, I mean, when you’re taking a VA, one of the reasons is that because if you’re not taking a VA, it’s not that you cannot do everything, it’s just that it’s starting to get tired. You’re starting to get tired from your own business, because instead of doing things that are creative, instead of thinking like big, and what’s the next step, you’re starting to answer negative feedbacks, negative reviews, and then another message comes from another seller saying they’re not happy and instead of looking at this is an opportunity, while I have somebody contacting me saying that the product is not good, this is a great opportunity to understand why it’s not good and connect with the person, send them a gift and get a five star review on that. That’s a great job for a VA but instead of that you’re saying oh, no, another message? Oh, come on. That’s the third today and you’re getting frustrated, and it’s your own business. So I think that that’s one of the reasons that you should know and to take VAs because you cannot do everything like said and it’s getting, eventually you’ll get exhausted from it. So you asked what can an Amazon VA do for me in the business? That was the question?
Norman 14:02
Yes. No, the question was the problem finding a good VA.
Gilad 14:09
Alright, so finding a good VA is a problem because from several options, several reasons. One is that when there are too many Filipinos or too many virtual assistants in general and not necessarily Filipinos. So if you’re going to be posting an ad, expect to have about 200 people applying to you on the same day and they will all say that they have experienced it, they will say that they’re great, they’ve been doing it for years and so on. So it’s not that easy to start talking to them each one and it takes a lot of time and you don’t necessarily have the skills to understand that was my mistake. I thought that they could read through at the VAs and understand who is a good one because of their answers on the interview and it was not the case. I got wrong there, I found the wrong one, I invested a month of training for nothing and so that’s a problem, you need to know how to find VAs. Our recruitment process takes about two months and if we could have done it in a week, and find great ways in a week, we would. But it takes time to really understand who is the person behind it, not just what they write on their CV, not just how they appear on the first interview, you have to really understand how motivated they are. How much they’re looking for a job for the long run, how is their English level, what’s their internet connection? How does their environment at home look like and or they will be answering a customer service phone call with dogs barking and chickens in the background and it’s true, I know and then it’s strange. But you have to really go deep into understanding who you’re dealing with in order to find a good one.
Norman 16:03
Very good for just one sec. I just want to give a couple shout outs here. So welcome back, Simon. Lisa Kinski. You know what? I got to apologize if you see me squinting, these glasses are horrible and the print is about a 16th of an inch. So I might need Kelsey help here and let’s see. Oh, Andy, Andy is a friend of mine, David, welcome. So yeah, if I’m really interested, if you’ve got some questions, just throw them over and we will get to them probably two or three times over the time of this podcast and if they come in afterwards, we’ll definitely answer them in the chat after the podcast. So have you ever heard of the sales or entrepreneur roller coaster? So that’s something that Michael Gerber was talking about in the E myth and for hiring a VA, a lot of the time, the problem is training. So you’ve got this entrepreneur who’s really passionate about their products. So they’ve got this incredible plastic shoes director that’s selling gazillions on Amazon and they’re doing everything themselves and they’re working 25 hours a day and now they try to Oh, I get in coffee here. Perfect, thanks. So they’re working 25 hours a day and all of a sudden, oh, you can pour a little quicker. Thank you. Alright, and then they hire a VA. But what they don’t do is they don’t train people properly and then they get really frustrated with the VA because their sales or their customer communication is falling or collapsing. So they say, Oh, I can only do it myself, they fire them, they go back, sales go back up, they hire another VA, the exact same thing happens. It’s just a roller coaster and it all has to do with training and having a company that’s actually going out there and showing people how to do it. That is a major bonus when it comes to not only vetting because that’s a pain in the butt. But being able to have somebody that’s already trained, but also training, I’m wondering with a company like yours, do you show the entrepreneur or the seller how to train? Or do they still have to go out and find proper training methods, like maybe going to outsource school or something like that, where they show them how to train or communicate with VAs?
Gilad 18:42
Well. I mean, we do both because our objective is, first of all, to connect the sellers with VAs that were already trained and we’re an academy, like VAA stands for Virtual Assistant Academy, which means that we continuously train them, it never stops, even if we connect you with a VA and tomorrow, there’s an update on on PPC, and I can guarantee tomorrow’s an update on PPC, they’re always updates. So our job is to make sure that they’re continuously trained, they will go through and we have a PPC department, we have an Amazon department, we have a social media department. So they continuously go through and learn new stuff and learn what’s new, and what’s that and what will make them better VAs and then we create training for that. So that’s one part to make sure that the VA will be trained and will continue to progress all the time. That’s one point of it and the second thing is to make sure that the seller knows how to work with the VA. Now we do connect for example with when we’re connecting the seller with the VA before that, we connect the seller with the department manager and that’s a VA herself that has been working with us for years and her job is to make sure like that you know how to work with VA, to give you advice, to give you some tips from her experience. What to expect, how to prepare for the first meeting, and the first two weeks or three weeks of working together and which tools are available. So that’s crucial for us because otherwise it would not last for the long run and that’s our objective to make sure that sellers are happy and they’re not frustrated and leave and do exactly like you said before. So we train them and we do work together with them and having said that, yeah, our school is great and you can go deeper into specific things that they teach over there in order to grow your business and grow the efficiency of your VA.
Norman 20:38
Okay, so what about the cultural differences and I’m talking about a service like yours. Do you tell people or can you explain some of the cultural differences that you might find? If you’re a new amazon seller, and you’ve never dealt in the Philippines, what can you expect?
Gilad 20:56
Well, you should expect that you would never find out, most likely you would not find the images of yourself in a Filipino. Most sellers, the first time they are looking for VAs, they think, Okay, I’m going to find somebody who’s really great, they think outside the box, they’re creative, they are looking, and they think like entrepreneurs, they will want to go to the next step, they will advise me how to create a better product, and will always look what’s wrong, and change it and that’s fine. But in reality, that’s most likely not going to happen for sure, and not straight away and because it’s a different culture, and if all Filipinos were thinking like Western entrepreneurs, then they would be entrepreneurs. The fact that they have a different culture means that they’re really good at helping you to advance in your business. So they will be great into understanding little things and doing things repeatedly all over again, that you would never do after five times and be loyal to you, and never look back and keep your secrets and and really hope and do everything for your business to grow. But you should not expect them to be you. Because this is why you are you and there are paid several dollars an hour. That’s the difference and once you understand that, you need an army of people that will help you to move forward, but you still have to manage them and you still have to be the one on the top, making sure that things are working good and you should not expect people to know, to do exactly what you’re doing and then you can go to the beach and I hate this, all these photos that you see of people on hammocks on the beach and with computer, without WiFi doesn’t matter. Sometimes the screen is even off but they’re over there and working. So cold. So that’s not a way it works. You need to work on your business, you need to manage these people and know what to expect from them.
Norman 23:01
Right and while we’re on this topic, one of the things that I hate seeing, you go to a lot of these shows and events. Well, I wish I was going to events. But you’ll see people talking about how proud they are about how cheap, they’re hiring people two bucks an hour and the other side of that is do you really want a loyal person working for you at two bucks an hour, Oh, I got them on Upwork or online jobs.ph for next to nothing and they’re telling you, oh, I can hire somebody for a month for 300 bucks, or whatever it is? Well, the piece that you’re not seeing there is you’ve got a person that has a family that you’re trying to get them to become loyal with you and if you’re going to pay them rock bottom, and if you negotiate so cheap that they can’t live properly, you’re going to find a lot of emergencies that come up, their mother’s going to be sick, their kids going to be sick, they’re at the hospital, all they’re doing is taking jobs that are offering them three or $4 over a period of time. In fact, a lot of the time we’ll try for our first VA to hire them for at least 20 hours even though we might need them for 10. We hire them at a much higher rate than they’re used to because we want to give them comfort, so they don’t have to go out and grab all these other jobs and security, other things that you can do and again, this is not coming from an agency that might already be pre screened. But if you’re going out there, you might want to take a look at what type of phone they have. Can they get a hold of you, what type of internet speed that they have? We’ve talked about this before on the podcast, you might want to see the type of computer that they have and after a period of time one of the incentives that you can give them is or right off the bat. If you really like the person, look at getting them a new computer or a new phone or upgrading their internet and we do that with the internet. I mean, that’s one of the things that we make sure of right away, take a screenshot, let me know what it is, yeah, even after a longer period of time, with the Philippines, they’ve got weather and if the weather keeps going down, we’ve gone as far as buying generators and this isn’t for a one time hire. But when you try to take advantage of people, what you’re going to get is a really a person is going to be really unloyal and the ultimate, what we try not, there’s just people that abuse other people because they can, and they think they’re going to get production out of them and that’s not the way to deal with your VA. So, I don’t know if you have anything to add to that. I’m talking about just hiring outside of an agency, like going to online jobs or something.
Gilad 26:00
No, but I think it’s a lot of times it has to do with the fact that not necessarily bad people I see a lot of time are good people, they just don’t really understand that. When working remotely with somebody from the Philippines, you’re not hiring a robot, you’re hiring somebody with feelings and family and they care about their lives and their family and so this is why when you’re just a lot of a lot of sellers, they just they give them the tasks and then they just get a report once in a week to see that things are done and then, for them it’s like it’s like a chatbot that was doing the work. But for us, it’s really important to make sure that the sellers, they will really understand who is on the other side and they will communicate and have video calls and ask them about their lives and for us as a community, as a company. First of all, we don’t pay them a low rate. We are looking for VAs that will get a higher rate. All our VAs for example, they’ll have a university graduation and degree diploma and we really make them feel at home. So we ask them how they are, we celebrate their birthdays, we make pizza parties, now it’s a pizza party on zoom and all the staff are from the Philippines, they meet up, they hang out and like I said before we continue to train them all the time. That’s not just in order for them to become professional, it’s also to make them feel like this is a place that invests in me. I have somewhere to develop, I feel at home this is where I want to be and when you’re getting somebody to have this feeling, then they will stay with you for years. I have worked for me for years and you have people that are saying okay, I worked with the VA and then she disappeared and you can never trust them and one day they’re here, one day that they have a hurricane, so it doesn’t work like that it’s all up to you. If you know how to work with your VA, if you know how to respect their lives, then you will get awesome results.
Norman 28:14
Right. So why don’t we just take a look so we have beginners, new seller, intermediate and expert. So let’s take a look at a few tasks for each. So as a beginner and you’re trying to look for VAs, what type of task can you give?
Gilad 28:33
I would not necessarily say divide it into the level is more where you’re stuck at. It could mean that a beginner would be stuck because they’re also working in a different job full time job and then they have family and kids and they don’t have enough time so the VA could help them with the very basic work of finding new products, working with the suppliers, finding the right suppliers and sourcing the product and checking the competitors doing the research correctly in order to find what you want to improve in your product and working with your graphic designers in order to really make the first step of launching a new product. That’s usually what you will see from beginners. The next step would be if you have already a higher volume of sales and then customer service goes into a play, somebody to answer your messages and reply to any cases of refunds and then ask for feedbacks and reviews and checking your listings every day to make sure that nobody’s hijacking you and so that’s already like and better level of selling on Amazon and usually we would see from advertisers they’re already looking at that the other two types of VAs that we have, which would be social media VAs and PPC VAs. PPC VAs, obviously you need somebody to really go and do everything once you have more than one product. You need to have several products already and then you will have an extra PPC guy who is checking your campaigns every day making sure that everything is doing well checking the acres, and so on and on social media, it’s really more for launching new products and creating your brand awareness outside of Amazon, working with influencers this kind of stuff, I would save more from advanced sellers.
Norman 30:40
Very good. You caught me in the middle of a drink of coffee. So okay, so Kelsey, are there any questions?
Kelsey 30:47
Yes, we have a couple, actually. One from Simon, how do you prevent the VA you’ve taught everything to and invest the time in from disappearing after a month?
Gilad 31:02
Well, I can relate because this is what happened to me in the beginning, and they left exactly after a month, and she left after a month and but I think I gave the answer before, if you understand how to work with the VAs, if you give them the feeling that this is where their home should be. I mean, this welcome to our company, let me explain to you about our company. Let me explain to you what is my target for the company for next year, what our goal is, how many units we should, make them feel as if they’re a part of it and not just here are the tasks that they want you to do. Good luck, let me know when you’re done and really make them feel like they’re part of the business. They know what their targets where, you’re going to what they should expect on salary, for example, telling them, okay, you’re starting with this amount. But I want to give you a better raise, I want to give you a raise after six months or after a month, and you should expect that and then. So these are things that will make your VA feel like this is the place that they want to stay for the long run as I said, asking how they are, asking about their family, celebrating with them events, it’s important for them, and then you will see that they stay.
Norman 32:17
Right. So even just having like an onboarding process, a welcome letter. Like you said, getting to know them. One of the things that I find is managing expectations. So if you lay it out at the beginning, even though some things might be tough, but you got to tell right up front, you’ve got to realize is this a starting wage and training by Oh, my dog’s right up on the table. Get off the table.
Norman 32:51
Alright. There. That’s weird.
Norman 32:53
Anyways, there’s, I forgot I lost my train of thought, but I’m hopefully Oh, gosh, where was it going with it? Oh, man, anyways, managing expectations. So if you don’t manage these expectations, and you want to talk about what you’re going to pay somebody later on, because you don’t want to bring it up now. It’s just going to cause a very awkward situation later on, the person may not agree that you want to give them a 50 cent raise, they feel like it was $1.50. So upfront, let them know that within the next three months, you’re going to pay this after that, after a performance review, then we’ll talk about this. The other tip that I probably can give after that awkward situation with my dog is that this is just a suggestion, but I would never tell them to train for free. So training is always paid training. Yeah. So I don’t know if you have anything else to add to that during the onboarding process.
Gilad 34:06
Now we have onboarding. Like I said, we have an onboarding process before we connect them to the VAs, we explain to them about how to work with the VA and what to expect and how and after that, when we are connecting the seller with the VA, we work together with them making sure that things are the expectations are met and they know how to work with VAs and not just throw a VA at them and say good luck.
Norman 34:35
Right. Okay. So for the people that are going out and looking through Craigslist or wherever they’re going to look for a VA. How much time do you think is going to be required for them to start, to finish off a hire?
Gilad 34:54
Well, for us, it takes two months.
Norman 34:56
Right but yeah, but I’m talking about the person that’s going in, sourcing this out for themselves.
Gilad 35:02
Yeah. So I would give you some tips to save some time, so it will not be too much for you, because I have a full department of people that this is what they do. But when, when you’re posting an ad on, it could be an online job, it can be somewhere else, Craigslist, and so on, then, okay, you’re gonna think exactly what you want to be able to do and name all the other things over there. But have in mind that most VAs will they ask her, like hundreds of posts like that a day, hoping to catch something. So make sure that they actually read your stuff, add a question over there and that would really show you that this person read it, as like, okay, what’s the color of my website if you go in? What’s the color of my logo on my website? Just ask this simple question, then it will already save you tons of time, or reading CVS of people that just copy pasted there CVs, and that’s it, you want somebody that really thought, Okay, this guy, this seller, this is what I’m looking for, this is a job that I think I would fit in, and then it’s worth for them to read it all to pay the time to go on your website, then on the example I gave and see what the color is your logo and answer the question, and there, you’re already making it shorter, but it will take time. This is why we started the VAA because it takes time, it takes time to get a lot of interviews, and done and then training them from scratch and after that, there is always the risk that you got the wrong one and so you should expect that you should be patient and know that maybe it will not happen the first time and maybe you could go wrong. But eventually, if you want to grow your business, you have to delegate.
Norman 37:01
Right. So it’s not something that might just take a day or two, it might take a few weeks to get the right one.
Gilad 37:08
If you want to get the right one man you can interview three people and choose one out of them and most likely it will not work. Even if the series will look great to you, most likely I would say that’s distinctly and we interview hundreds of VAs every month, and about 2% are accepted. So 19% do not pass the spirit because it could be that they’re very nice, but they don’t have internet connection, stable internet connection, or they have what it takes, but they don’t have a quiet environment to work from and every time you will have a different excuse. So, there are a lot of things to think about and this is why you need to go deep.
Norman 37:55
Alright, so Kelsey, any other questions?
Kelsey 37:58
Yes, we got two. One of the you actually just answered. It’s from David, on average, how many potential candidates do go through before finding a great VA? So he said about 2% of like hundreds?
Gilad 38:13
Yeah, well, it really depends on your time and how much you want to put into looking at them and you can do it in lessons and maybe it will work great and if not, you learn something.
Norman 38:26
But that technique you were talking about Gilad about telling them to look at your logo color, like in the middle of this email, you’re going to the more kind of tests that you put into that email, change the font, make some sentences bold, that’s gonna probably take away 80% of the candidates. Because most of them don’t read emails properly.
Gilad 38:49
It will help make a video call with them. In order for them, first of all, to test their internet connection, make sure that they’re talking to you from home and not from the place that they will be actually working from you and for you. So ask them to make a video call. See how stable the internet connection is, ask to see around how it looks like their environment of working. This will already save you some time. So there’s a lot of these tricks but it still takes time.
Norman 39:16
Right. Okay, Kels. One more.
Kelsey 39:18
Alright. Oh, and we also have Eric Payne joining us. Hey, Eric. Simon says a hired slow, fire fast and his question how to stop these guys from working multiple gigs instructing themselves?
Norman 39:32
Pay them.
Gilad 39:36
Well, if you’re going to be hiring them for two hours a day, for example, then you should expect that they’re working with other sellers, you cannot prevent it unless you’re taking somebody for a full time job, and I’m okay with it. I mean, they could be working with other sellers. As long as you make sure that you can trust them and they’re the right person and you can give them an NDA to sign and that’s great. If you want to chase after them in the Philippines, but it’s really more about understanding their character and see that you have in front of you somebody that will not do both things at the same time and you get when you give them targets, you don’t have to spy on them. I don’t like all these softwares that give you screenshots and check performance via statistics. It’s like virus antivirus every time there is something that the, and they come up with the other thing and so it’s really like, give them targets, give them goals, see how they advance, they report to you every day, you see the things are working, things are advancing, then that’s fine with me.
Norman 40:38
As long as they’re achieving the tasks, doing the tasks and that’s fine. We did have one person where we needed over 20 hours a week. But when we went and we were asking, just on Skype or on Slack, they wouldn’t get back to us right away and so they came back with saying, hey, you’re not paying us to be on, like, on real time with you and so we worked out a deal where we ended up paying them 40 hours a week. So they would stay online with us and when I did mention something or send them over a message they answered immediately. So you can always work something out. Now, I’m not sure what changed, but it sounds like there’s a bit of an echo coming back from your computer.
Gilad 41:29
From my computer.
Norman 41:30
Yeah.
Gilad 41:33
Maybe I’m moving it. Is it better now?
Norman 41:35
Yeah, I think so. Yep. Alright. Perfect. I think, nope. Still coming back. So I’m not sure what just changed. I’m not sure. But anyways, it’s not horrible. Kelsey, any other questions?
Kelsey 41:49
Yep. Doctor Carls just came in with one for every 10 hours of VA work, how much time do you put into manage them? For example, overhead to work ratio?
Gilad 42:02
I think that’s not the right question because it’s not that for every 10 hours of work, you should expect it depends on what you want to give them and depends how much you want to manage them. I give my VAs to work for hours and hours and days and they report to me and I manage them, once they have their SOPS, once they have everything created for them for the environment, then you don’t have to be with them all the time. So you can spend an hour a day, eventually looking at their reports, understanding what they’ve done and creating like meetings with several viewers at a time. So I never measured like, okay, they work 10 hours and I have to put in two hours of work with them. I think it also changes as time goes by. You start with them, you have to understand that you will have to be with them in the beginning and don’t think that you have to write SOPs, they will write this SOPs, but you still want to be with them and show them how to work and and record it and the more times they work, the better they will get at it and then you will see that someday you don’t have to manage them so much. As long as you keep them happy and motivated.
Norman 43:16
We got one of the things you can do. Sorry, I’m getting this reverb back every time I’m saying anything, so I’m just going to Kels, can you just mute Gilad for a second? Okay, so that I think that works out. Unless it’s just me. Anyways, there’s lots of things that you can do to help out with this process. One of the things that you can do is video, so have a Zoom meeting or have a Loom, like if you’re trying to teach them something. Loom is free. They do have a premium program, or just go and do a Zoom meeting, you can record Zoom meetings. On top of that, there’s really very cool software out there. One of them is called Otter O T T E R .ai. Nothing to do with Otter, I use Otter, but what it does is it transcribes videos. So not only will it transcribe a video, you can search it by let’s say somebody wants to learn about rebates, or rebate management or keyword research. They can just type that into the search bar, and it’ll automatically find it in a transcript, and it will move it right over to where the video was shot. So it’s a really cool app that helps VAs just understand the process as well. Sorry, Gilad, would you get back on perfect.
Gilad 44:43
Alright. Yeah, sorry about that. So yeah, I completely agree. There’s also a software called Screencast o Matic. It’s similar to Zoom but it’s not for having conversations. It’s really like recording at your screen and saving it on the cloud with passwords, so you can create for them, you share the screen, you show them what you want them to do and then everything is recorded, so they can watch it after again and again, it’s in the cloud. So even if the VA leaves, you don’t have to save it in your computer or their computer, just change the password or something and it costs like $15 a year, and it’s very effective for beginners and yeah, I recommend it to sellers.
Norman 45:30
Oh, sorry, this reverb again, Oh, my gosh. Okay, so can you share a few tips of things to avoid when hiring a VA?
Gilad 45:42
Yeah, I mean, when you’re working with the VAs, I would say the first thing to avoid is to judge everything by the CV, don’t think that what they say over there, don’t take it for like this is as it is, and that’s it. It’s really pay attention to the interview and pay attention to what they say about themselves, how they talk and like I said, technical stuff as an internet connection environment, and don’t judge, but just by what they say about their experience, usually it will not be that true. Usually, it will be and we’ve all done that. When working as employees, you’re working at McDonald’s, and you’re saying that you will manage the big food corporation. You have to really see the person as they are, give them tasks and create for yourself a tasks that you want them to do, and pay them for that for the time and but like that, you will see how they are actually doing things that you want them to do instead of you can record a task so that you can see how they can understand what needs to be done and how they and how they perform, it will be much better than just looking at their CV.
Norman 47:04
So going back to Dr. for a second, one of the things that you can also do. Again, your question, it really is how long is a piece of string, but what you can do is you can have your staff meetings, and that helps control everything, you can talk about everything during a half hour to one hour meeting with the whole team. If you’ve got more than one, maybe you have project managers, maybe you’ve got five or 10 VAs. But it’s always good to have that weekly meeting with the team and then if you’ve got a bigger organization, you might want a break out where your team leaders or your marketing department has a meeting with you separately. Your PPC department has a meeting with you separately. But as a group, as a team, you kind of get together once a week or once every other week, depending on the size of your company and that’s the glue that kind of holds everything together for you. So not sure if that helps out. So anyways, are there any other questions that you want us to answer? I know time’s running out right now. But if any of our listeners have anything that they want us to talk about VA wise, just shoot it over in the comment box, and we’ll get to it right away. Until that point, I was wondering. So we’re talking about people that are trying to find VA is not going over to a service. Okay, we’ll talk about that in a sec. But if they’re going over to us, if they’re trying to find it themselves, are there any action steps that they can take any tips that they can take about step one, do this step two, do this step three, just quick things that you can think about?
Gilad 48:53
Yeah, I mentioned several things before, I mean, first of all, post an ad, write the things that you want the like how much you’re going to pay, and then how many hours a day they’re going to be working, what they’re expected to be doing for you and that and then get the 200 applicants to write back like I said, implement inside of it some kind of a tricky question. So it will be easier for you to filter them next step I would say before an interview, next step would be to give them a task and in the task, you record something and that will actually show the ability of the VA to do things that they will be doing for you. So give them a little example, teach them something in three minutes of five minutes of video. So they will see the video, see if they really understood it and then ask them in the video to create something for you, to make an output and send it to them. It will already give you the people that are more interested and they will put the time and effort to do your task and it will help you eliminate a lot of other applicants as well and then the next step after will be that’s the way that we do it, it will be a form of a lot of technical stuff like internet connection, show you the speed test, and which type of computer they have, which environment then they have, do they have a backup computer, a generator, like you mentioned, and so on and so that’s a lot of technical stuff, English test, and only after that would come the interview, otherwise, it was spent all day long and just as interviewing one after the other without the ending it. So the interview is very important and usually we make even two or three interviews and when we sometimes make it with groups, they will help each other and we’ll see who’s more dominant and who is more shy and how do they think together, but this would be the steps and and then after that, yeah, create for them a contract mentioned already before, like how much you’re going to pay them, talk about like a raising salary and days off, and when are they going to be available to you during the day, which hours of the day and if it’s flexible or not, it makes sure to put everything on the table and then after comes the training part. So you should be looking for, if you’re hiring by yourself, then look for somebody with experience, it will save you some time, but bear in mind that you will have to go over and make sure for every little thing that and they say that they know you have to make sure that they actually know it. Otherwise you’re in for some problems.
Norman 51:36
Okay, Dr. got another question. It looks like?
Kelsey 51:41
Yes. So there are some heavy hitters like Kevin King that do everything themselves and have no VAs, what do you think about the strategy? Keep playing simple and do everything yourself?
Gilad 51:54
I have no idea if Kevin is using VAs or not? It’s really hard for me to understand how, how you can do everything yourself. So it’s a good question to ask and to Kevin actually, but the way that I work and the way that I’ve been working for the last years, and I think Norm you’ll will agree with me and is that if you’re doing everything yourself, basically, you’re missing tons of things, you only have certain amount of hours per day that you want to put in your business, you want to keep some time for your family, you want to keep some time for your own quiet space and if you’re just going to be doing everything, then you’re missing a lot, your business will probably stay the same or it will not survive. That’s my opinion.
Norman 52:37
Yeah, I think if you want to do this yourself, do it to your threshold. So until you find that you’ve got to work a lot more that you have stress, that you can’t take a vacation comfortably, that everything is dependent on you. That’s when you need to get a VA, if you’re just going to get a VA because it’s the cool thing to do. There’s no need for it, it really does depend on the person. So for us, we have a bunch of different brands. So we need those VAs, if I could do it all myself, I would but I actually I’m going to change that, I really wouldn’t want to because I’d want to be able to go out and take a week off and have somebody take care of my business and I can do that. But nobody’s saying you have to have a VA to be an incredible seller. There’s lots of people out there and I know one company that does $16 million a year and they don’t have a VA. They do have a PPC agency that they work with. They do have another company that they work with for some small tasks, but they’re able to handle most of it themselves. But if you’re building a business and you’re trying to get to that next level, a lot of the time if you want to go and source new products or find new product opportunities, or do PPC or do all this. I find hiring an expert is well worth the money to expand my business. But you know what I’m gonna ask Kevin comes on once a month so I’ll ask him the next time Dr. about him working with the one VA and we’ll get that answer for you.
Gilad 54:24
Oh man, another point that we haven’t talked about in the business set which VAs are crucial is when selling your business I mean, people use it when you build a brand in order to sell it sometime and if the entire business is based on you alone, which means that you know everything, you’re doing everything then how even if the business sells tons of products today, if somebody is going to buy the name, the brand from you, but all the knowledge all the work is done with is done from you then it would be very hard to sell it and the idea of selling a business is that something that will run by itself that needs management, but not needs everything to be done by yourself and that’s also one of the tests to do it is really to take a vacation, how many days can you take a vacation without being on your phone, without opening computer? How can your business run by itself for a month? A lot of times, these are the questions that I asked a lot of times in order to see how if everything runs automatically, and how can I improve?
Norman 55:41
Okay, let’s see, Tony’s got a question. Yes. Hey, welcome back Tony, by the way.
Kelsey 55:47
Tony will be on this Friday, actually to talk about finding your local manufacturer and importers. So Tony’s question. Hi, guys, another great podcast. Why are the majority of VAs located in the Philippines compared to other English speaking countries? I never agree to hire a VA unless they agree to a video zoom interview as part of our SOP.
Norman 56:09
Great policy.
Gilad 56:12
Yeah, I agree with that. I think it’s extremely important to have video calls not just in the interview, but on a regular basis, like you said, once a week at least, and a lot of times, they’re not necessarily there are a lot of VAsnot from the Philippines. But I would say that there is something that really fits in with the Filipinos, their English level is great, if they’re easy to understand. A lot of them were working in some kind of a call center. So they have English that almost seems American a lot of times and for me as an Israeli, it’s crucial, because a lot of times I cannot understand the English of countries in the East like it’s difficult for me. So when working with Filipinos, the English is great and I think their customer service and devotion is really they have this in their tradition, they’re really good at giving a service and working with you and staying with you and in Israel, by the way, you would see a lot of Filipino people supporting the elders and helping them I don’t know how it is, where you live, but it’s from a reason because they’re good in that, they’re good in helping you and making your business succeed. I had a great experience with that.
Norman 57:35
Right. As long as you understand there are some cultural differences. Just like in India, there’s cultural differences. Yeah, I’ve had lots of really great successes out of the Philippines. But, that being said, I work with coders, designers, graphic artists out of the Ukraine, writers out of the UK, writers out of Canada and the US. Some people in Costa Rica, I’ve worked with people in Argentina, it’s all over the map. But the majority seem to be coming out of Manila. I think you’re right, it’s probably because of the call centers, the amount of call centers that are there that get the training, and then they go out and they find other jobs. But let’s see anything else there Kels?
Kelsey 58:30
Yes, we’ve got one more. Dr. being in Israel, which Amazon markets do sell in?
Kelsey 58:40
Oh, sorry, muted you.
Gilad 58:43
Nobody was selling anything, they tried to do Amazon Israel was not it was FBM. It didn’t work so much. So all these rallies, they’re almost all of them are selling in the US, and then usually expand from there you start selling in Europe, democracy, is more difficult to sell and most Israeli sell in the US.
Norman 59:05
Okay, so I think that was the end of the questions. Hey, Gilad. Let’s talk a little bit about why hiring a service now. So let’s, first of all, tell us the same thing: a plan of action when hiring a service. What should we look for?
Gilad 59:23
Well, when having a service like for them to find you a VA, then it’s much easier because they should be doing the vetting, they should be spending the time needed to find the right people. So I mean, you should Yeah, you should be looking for a commendation to see how good they are. How much time do they put into finding the right people after that comes the training part. So I mean, will they give you somebody and that’s it and it’s up to you to train them? Or are they just giving you people that say that they have some kind of experience? The reason that we train them by ourselves is that we found that it’s extremely difficult to count just on their so-called experience, even if you’ve given them a task, they will talk to each other, and then you will have to change the task every week because it will be out there. So if you’re just checking how good they are in showing specific things, it doesn’t work, and I think that the most important thing is to find capable VAs that are here for the long run and are motivated enough to and they can learn fast enough then new things. After that, we do all the training by ourselves, because you want to start from scratch. So you should check if the VAs I mean, where they are trained, and what’s there and knowledge level and if you could change the VA, if you’re not happy. Sometimes it’s not just about their level of expertise. It’s about if there is a connection, if you feel that this is the right person for you or not. So you should check that and also check if there is any kind of long term commitment.
Norman 1:01:03
Yeah, I was while you were saying that I was thinking of one other thing that if you’re looking for a VA yourself, one of the things you want to ask is if they can share any SOPs, or policies and procedures that they’ve had with working with other companies and that is my first if they show me something, I know that they could show some of my product unless they’ve got a reason why they’re showing in other companies SOPs. So that does happen a lot of the times they’ll say, Well, I can’t because it belongs to the other company that I used to work for and then, that’s starting to enable trust. But I know there’s one time I asked for that and I just got all sorts of policies, onboarding policies, this policy, that policy, and that person was taken off the list very quickly. So anyways, that’s just something to keep your eye on. Alright, we’re at the end. Gilad, thank you so much for being on the podcast. How do people get a hold of you?
Gilad 1:02:13
Well, you could go and if you’re an Amazon seller, and you want to and take VA to be helping you with your business and it doesn’t matter if it’s Amazon seller central, PPC, social media, graphic designers, then you can go on our website vaaphilippines.com and there is a contact us option over there. You could read and see about us about our community of VAs and we’ll be happy to schedule a talk and probably most of the time me personally that wants to talk to the to the coming people and ask her the questions and explain how it works and then we choose which type of VA you need and how many hours a day it’s very flexible and we start the ball rod.
Norman 1:03:01
Very good and I can’t tell you how much time it’ll save if you do go to a company like yours and have them vetted and up trained ready to go. It can be a bit of a nightmare doing it yourself. But just like PPC, you might want to give it a try and then if you want to get it somebody that’s vetted. I know that Gilad has a great service. So again, thank you for being on the show and if you do want to go to Gilad’s website, it’s vaaphilippines.com and I believe Kelsey, put it in the chat box. Okay, so that’s it for today’s show. Gilad, thank you for being on.
Gilad 1:03:46
Thank you for having me.
Norman 1:03:48
Alright. Well, you will hopefully get your back on one of these days.
Gilad 1:03:52
We’ll be looking forward to it.
Norman 1:03:53
Perfect. Okay, everybody. Well, thank you for joining us today in today’s podcast. We’ll be posting the whole episode along with shorter clips and other content on our Facebook page Norman Farrar a.k.a. The Beard Guy. It’s also going to be on YouTube if you want to watch this in video. Also tons of repurposed clips. We talked about repurposing with Hani Mourra the other day. So you’ll see a bunch of repurpose clips that Kelsey will be providing for everybody. Let me see. The other thing I should talk about is our newsletter. The newsletter went out today every Monday, and the newsletter does not suck. Please subscribe to it. It talks about everything. Not only Amazon for online sellers. You’ll see Shopify, other types of e-commerce, digital marketing, email marketing, you name it, and there is a there’s no affiliate links. It’s just pure content. So check it out. Let us know what you think about it and I think Kelsey is posting that into the comment section now. But you can go to normanfarrar.com or Lunch With Norm and sign up. So Kelsey, where are you?
Kelsey 1:05:07
Yeah, so I posted it. You can see right here news.normanfarrar.com. Alight and yep, hope you enjoyed the show. If you haven’t yet, please hit that like button, or as Norm says, smash it. Subscribe to us as a podcast too. If you enjoy listening, you can find us on Apple or Spotify. Just search Lunch With Norm and yes, everything that gets filmed here goes directly to YouTube. So if you missed it, if you want to go back and see all the clips that we have, all the content goes out short clips, and we have the full length episodes as well and yeah, follow us on social media, if you are interested in Amazon, e-commerce and if you can think of anyone that is interested in Amazon or e-commerce, branding, marketing, you can always tag them in the comment section. That would do as well and I think that’s it on my end.
Norman 1:06:08
Alright. So next Wednesday. So this coming Wednesday is coming up. You gotta check this out. So one of our favorite ladies Cassandra Craven, from Helium 10 is going to be on. She’s a Social Media Manager over there and she’s going to be talking about tips to boost your Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales on social media. So I’m sure she’s gonna give us a ton of tips. So make sure you tune in and I think that’s it. Please tune in every Monday, Wednesday and Friday noon Eastern Standard Time and we’ll be presenting ongoing information about Amazon and online sales and ways to boost your overall success on e-commerce. Alright. So I think that’s it for today. Enjoy the rest of your day and thank you for joining us.
