Create More Time to Scale Your Business – Miles Beckler on Hiring Filipino VAs

“My number one goal is to teach all of the tactics that the fake gurus try to sell you, for free…I’m tired of the overpriced info products sold through overhyped webinars.”

– MilesBeckler.com

After 10 years of failed internet businesses, Miles Beckler had a seriously bad taste in his mouth.

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The excessive hype, fake marketing “gurus,” and exclusive empty guarantees were everywhere.

They promised results. They produced nothing.

But in 2009, Miles turned a corner. He and his wife created a website based around their passion: meditation and spirituality…and it took off. Their website had over 8 million visits in 2018, and it continues to provide a wealth of income and knowledge for both Miles and his wife.

So a few years ago, he launched MilesBeckler.com, where he syndicates his internet marketing knowledge. Miles creates content that teaches business owners to add value to their businesses and nurture relationships with their client-base using internet marketing. On MilesBeckler.com, entrepreneurs can source wisdom on everything from email marketing and facebook ads to SEO and sales funnels…for free.

According to Miles, “What I teach…on my blog is based on the experiences ​and skills I’ve gained from growing that business with my wife from a $95.40 investment in hosting and a domain to a multi-million dollar business with hundreds of thousands of leads, tens of thousands of customers and millions of visitors per year.”

“Now, I’m addicted to sharing the most valuable, actionable and helpful content I can, three times per week on YouTube.”

And Miles’s free (but significantly valuable) tip this past week?
Hire a virtual assistant from the Philippines.

How does someone who runs two very successful websites find time to give away free information?

They create time by delegating; they outsource.

In fact, thousands of business owners have created success by hiring VAs. That’s exactly how Miles does it. And it’s the reason he used his valuable time to share this tip on his YouTube Channel.

Miles’s Tip #1: Find the Repetitive Tasks in Your Business and Give Them to a Filipino VA

“Stay focused on the the highest valuable tasks in your business – which means you have to get good at delegating the repetitive tasks that others can do.”

List things you can pass off to a Filipino worker like customer service, inventory, general admin, basic bookkeeping…and then hire someone to do it! Then use your incredibly valuable time to focus on the things that are most important in their business – like adding value to your products and nurturing relationships with clients and partners.

What can you outsource?

Miles recommends to start by asking yourself these questions:

• What am I doing? (is it the most valuable way to spend my time?)
• What can I hand off off?
• What can I turn into a process/procedure, make a instructional video, and send to my VAs?

What does Miles Outsource to His VAs?

• Customer support – most of his site’s support is done from the Philippines
• Social media audits – gauging posts that have performed well in the past so he knows what to duplicate on other platforms
• Ad comment management on FB
• Community moderation in forums – keeping threads and posts organized
• Pinterest marketing
• Email audits – analyzing open rates against subject lines to find the best subject lines/formats
• Youtube audits – finding youtube videos he doesn’t have content for on his website
• Youtube to podcast transfers – Miles records his videos and then hands them off to his VAs to be created into podcasts and blog posts
• Outreach research – youtube vs blog
• Travel research
• Chargeback management
• Event research
• …The potential is limitless.

Mini tip: Miles recommends hiring workers full-time – it forces you to continually look for repetitive tasks that will keep your workers busy. Then build up a que of work to send to them at night (their working day is during our night time). You’ll give yourself a “massive boost” in productivity.

That time Miles’s VAs bailed him out of something nearly “catastrophic…”

Like we mentioned earlier, Miles and his wife run a website that guides their members through meditations. Their main membership has access to 300+ mp3 files, created by Miles’s wife.

At one point, a plugin update erased all of their audio files in an instant…and their membership immediately lost access to hundreds of files that they had paid for!

So what did Miles do? He made a video for his VAs showing them how to restore the audio files, one by one. By the next morning, not only had his VAs restored the content, they had responded to and resolved all of the customer service tickets that came in during the ordeal.

Miles’s Tip #2: Outsource to the Philippines

Miles has hired 50-60 VAs since 2012, which has taught him a lot.
In the past, he’s hired virtual assistants from:

• Africa
• Eastern Europe
• USA
• Canada
• Mexico
• Caribbean
• Indonesia
• India
• South America

But now he always hires from one country: the Philippines.

Hiring out of the Philippines is affordable.
“I love the ability to pay them well.”

Miles says that not only do Filipino workers produce better quality work than many US workers, they’re more affordable. That means he can afford to pay them well, especially compared to the average salary in the Philippines. Miles also mentions that the currency conversion is great, so there’s a value there, “but it goes way beyond the [financial] value.”

He says Filipino workers are trustworthy and loyal. He also explains that between the proficient English, the skilled talent, and the affinity for hard work, “it ‘clicks’ most with teammates in the Philippines.”

Filipino workers are generally talented and hard-working.

Once, while he was hiring, Miles decided to test some Filipino job candidates against a handful of North American job candidates. As an application requirement, he asked them each to accomplish an identical task using Excel. Then he asked all of the workers to send him their final product.

Almost every applicant from the Philippines nailed the task and some went above and beyond – they blew him away with their thoroughness.

In fact, the results he got back from the Philippines were so much better than what he got from his North American candidates, it made him a little “worried” for North American workers’ futures!

Many Filipino VAs speak clear, westernized English

English is learned and used at a very young age in the Philippines (both English and Tagalog are classified as dual official national languages of the Philippines). It’s also used widely in the schools, so the Filipino people have great command of Westernized English.

Many have corporate-level training

Miles explains: if you call a corporate customer service line, you may notice that you’re redirected to a call center in the Philippines. TONS of corporations (like Convergys, Hewlett Packard, J.P. Morgan/Chase…) outsource their call centers and other BPO to the Philippines.

That means that thousands of Filipino workers have been corporately trained by western corporations. Those corporations require a high standard of customer support, service and business culture understanding from their workers. That kind of training adds major value to potential virtual employees, at no cost to you.

Filipino workers are self-starters and problem solvers, especially if you create a trusting relationship.

Filipino VAs will follow your instructions to a T, but if you invite their feedback, they may help you find a better solution or way to do things. Remember: “It’s all about your relationship building.” If they trust you, they work hard to meet and exceed your expectations

Side Note: Miles pays his workers monthly, on salary, whether they have 40 hours or not. He wants to pay his people well and take care of them – and never wants to give them an excuse to go looking for other jobs.

Miles’s Tip #3: The Best Platform for Hiring Great VAs

In his video, Miles covers a few places to hire Filipino workers, but there’s definitely a front-runner.

Why he doesn’t use Fiverr

Miles says he’s had a few good, but mostly bad experiences on Fiverr. You often receive poor-quality work, you’re not building a long-term relationship with an employee, and you lose the reliability of having someone who shows up to work everyday.

…Not to mention their fees. Most Fiverr workers now charge $10-$40 dollar per task, juxtaposed against the original $5. You can also expect to pay extra if you ask them to turn over a project within 24 hours. “I don’t Jive with that,” Miles jokes.

His sentiments toward Upwork are similar for a few reasons…

Upwork increased their fees to the point of “exorbitant” in Miles’s opinion. They take 20% of their outsourced workers’ pay, money you could give straight to your deserving worker otherwise. And people are buying fake reviews, so you can’t trust reviews anymore.

Miles trusts OnlineJobs.ph – because he’s had great experiences with it.

Miles discloses that he is an affiliate for OnlineJobs.ph – because it’s the best online job board to find and hire Filipino workers. It’s also the largest – with hundreds of thousands of Filipino resumes available for review in dozens of job categories.

They don’t mark up salaries, and they don’t take a cut of your worker’s pay. And OnlineJobs.ph does NOT get in the way as a middle man. They’re a “direct route that allows you to connect directly with the teammate,” Miles says.

In fact, Miles explains how once you’ve found and hired a VA on OnlineJobs.ph, you can cancel your monthly subscription and that’s it. OnlineJobs.ph’s part is done and they disappear (until you’re ready to hire your next worker!).

Outsourcing has given Miles and thousands of other entrepreneurs freedom to grow their businesses.

For Miles, working with VAs means he “can focus on what’s that next most important thing for [him] to do on [his] business” and his wife can spend her time researching so she can “maintain her finger on the pulse of her industry.” VAs have created freedom for MIles and his wife to exponentially scale their businesses, and share their knowledge with the online entrepreneurial world.

Miles and thousands of entrepreneurs have made outsourcing work for them. It allowed Karen to build a business without going into debt. Nathan realized the business of his dreams and has been living the CEO lifestyle for almost 10 years thanks to Filipino VAs. You too can can transform your business through outsourcing by signing up for an Onlinejobs.ph employer account. If you want to learn more about outsourcing, you can sign up for our training program or subscribe to Miles’ channel to find out more how he does outsourcing.

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You can also read the transcript below:

Hey Miles here, MilesBecker.com. In this video you are going to learn where to hire a great virtual assistant so you can free up more of your time to scale your business. It’s important for you to stay focused on the highest valuable tasks in your business, which means you need to get good at delegating and handing off those repetitive tasks that others can do.

This is where bringing on a full-time virtual assistant can be a massive boost in your productivity and it really truly has for my wife and I.

So in this video we’re gonna cover the types of things I outsource to my VA’s, where in the world I’ve found the best virtual assistants and then where what platform to go to find these individuals.

But before we jump into those three things, I want to know have you already hired your first virtual assistant? If you’ve already done hiring and you’re looking to grow your team farther, put a YES in the comments below. If you’ve never hired a virtual assistant put a NO in the comments below because I want to know where you are.

I want to make more great videos on outsourcing but I need to know where you’re at. So yes you’ve already started hiring, no you haven’t started hiring yet that’ll let me know where you are. Give me a thumb’s up and hit subscribe on your way down there too.

Back to the curriculum here, so the first thing, what kind of tasks do we actually hand off to our virtual assistants? And I think it’s important to hire full-time because what that does is it forces you to go find those kinds of repetitive tasks or identify those repetitive tasks that you’re doing over and over and over, so you could hand them over to your virtual assistant.

So I got a little tiny list here, one of the big thing is customer support. My VA team runs most of the support on pretty much 100% of the support.

Social media audits, looking at social media posts, we put on one platform that perform really well so we can go duplicate that out on another platform.

So scrolling back through the past two.., three..,four.., or five years of our Facebook fan page to pull out those snippets, those memes that we can go turn into Pinterest pins etc…, etc.

Add Comment Management, they manage all of the comments inside of my advertisements that run Facebook.

Community moderation, they help out inside of my forum to move the different threads that are disorganized or in the wrong place. They move those around for us.

Almost 100% of our Pinterest marketing is run by our virtual assistants.

Email audits, pulling our open rates from the different subject lines into a spreadsheet so we can quit see how good our…, our emails are doing. So we can go look back through our history to find those subject lines that got great open rates.

YouTube audits, what YouTube videos do I not have content on my website for YouTube to podcast 100% of the process of this video that you’re watching unless you’re on the podcast and you’re listening the whole process. Once I upload this that’s it, I don’t touch it but it still makes it on to my podcast feed with every talking head video that’s 100%…,100% managed by them.

Outreach research, a YouTube verses blog I mentioned that one.

Chargeback management, travel research, event research, the list goes on and on.

And a lot of times I find myself in a situation where we had something nearly catastrophic happen. Our main membership that has over 350 audio files for the members around my wife’s content. We had an update that eliminated all of the mp3 files, so they’re paying for access to 300 different mp3s and they just disappeared based on update of a plugin.

So I made a video showing here’s how to fix the problem. I sent it over my virtual assistants and by the time I woke up the next morning everything was back working, it was in tip-top shape and they stayed on top of the tickets till everybody know who was like “hey…, I can’t find the stuff that…” hey you have now have access to it again.

So this is massive because what it allows me and my wife to do is to say focus on things like this…, this video I can only bring you this video, right? Like I’m Miles Beckler, this is the Miles Beckler brand that’s obvious. My wife’s audio files are the big thing but then the studying my wife has free time to read the books and to study and to really kind of maintain her…, her kind of finger on the pulse of…, of her industry if you will, so that’s one of the big keys.

So those are a variety of tasks and I’m always looking at what am i doing? What can I hand off to a teammate? What can I turn into a process or a procedure? And then make a quick video I just record my screen as I’m doing something and I send it over and say here go do this and then every single day they just go do the work. And now it gets done and I can focus on what’s that next most important thing for me to do on my business.

So let’s talk about where in the world next. At this point in my career I started hiring back and I think 2011…, 2012. I hired my first people and I have hired people from Africa, from Eastern, Europe, from the United States of America, from Canada, from Mexico, from the Caribbean islands. All over Asia as well, so we got the Philippines, Indonesia, India, proper…., I think I had South American there somewhere like literally the amount of people I’ve hired has been probably about 50 or 60 people at this point in time. And for me I have found that it clicks most from on many levels with teammates in the Philippines.

I have found that there’s obviously a kind of currency conversion that is beneficial and the cost of living in the Philippines compared to here in North America is also much lower. So…, so there’s a value there but it goes way beyond the value.

One of my last jobs that I actually hired out, I did post the job for North American candidates and also Filipino candidates and I requested a simple tasks to be done using Excel. And the actual work product I got from the individuals in the Philippines was astounding like it was so much better than what was going on in North America. It actually made me feel a little worried for North American workers because the every single applicant, almost every single applicant in the Philippines just nailed it with graphs and they actually someone went farther beyond what I even requested, which blew me away to see that kind of thoroughness inside of this…, this first task.

So other reasons I really the Philippines is English is learned and used widely right? Tagalog is the native language but English is learned at a very young age. And it’s also used widely in the school system so and their English is a very Western style of English.

You also have the BPO industry which is the business processes outsourcing industry that has been booming for well over a decade. And what this is if you’ve ever noticed you call your bank, you call PayPal, you call up major airline corporation like American Airlines and all sudden you’re speaking with someone in the Philippines, right? So all these call centers move from North America and many Western countries moved over to the Philippines specifically, which means that they have been teaching and learning about kind of what I would call the standard of customer support, customer service and a lot of the different types of business practices.

So culturally there’s just so many Filipinos who work within this industry of customer support and in kind of virtual assistant world. And a lot of them have had training at a corporate level which is really…, really quite valuable.

Trustworthiness is very big. Loyalty is also very big and these are cultural things, right? There are some cultural challenges a lot of times your team in the Philippines might not step up, and mention that they see a problem or mention that they see a better way to do things. They will follow your word, your video you send them almost to the tea. But this is where building relationship and keeping communications open is the key and I’ve really worked with my teammates to invite them like to invite their feedback because I want that feedback when they’re hands-on on a task day in and day out.

You know if you notice some better way to do this let me know. Keep that communication open and really it’s all about relationship building. I love the ability to be able to pay my teammates again who outperformed their North American counterparts in some of these tasks, that I used to kind of test if they were going to be my teammates or not. So not only did they outperform but they’re a better value which allows me to pay them very, very well, right? I pay them monthly on a salary whether they have 40 hours a week or not and I pay them well so they’ll be there each and every month. I don’t want them ever looking for other help because now they’re part of the team, right? My business needs their help and I’m always trying to think of new things to pass off to them to keep working from there. So that’s why I chose the Philippines.

The final component in this video is the third part which is what platform is best to hire. Now I really think it’s important for you to get yourself and your business to a point where you can actually outsource full time. When you have somebody there forty hours a week, a hundred and 60 hours per month, it forces you to find more ways to leverage their help. Syndication is big, right? So I put up this video and then I’m done with it. This video goes out and gets worked on and turned into the podcast and goes out to my podcast feed etc…, etc.

There’s a lot of different ways you can leverage it and when you’re paying somebody you know full time even if it’s $250 a month or $300 per month for a hundred and sixty hours of work. It forces you to start to think like okay what’s that next thing I’m going to hand over to them. Build up a queue of work in the evening before you’re done that’s works for us in North American hours and then send it over and by the time you wake up that work product gets done, it’s really extremely powerful.

So Fiverr is one place that a lot of people think about. So Fiverr has changed a ton over the years for a while it was five bucks plus a dollar fee and then you’ll get back something relative quickly. Fiverr is now a lot of 10 20 30 40 dollar tasks available. If you ever want something turned around in 24 or 48 hours that’s gonna cost you an extra 10 20 dollars right there because nothing’s done quickly on Fiverr anymore. And they have increased their fee on Fiverr for the platform by over by a hundred percent at this point in time. So I don’t jive with that website, I’ve found very poor work product and it’s never building a relationship with someone who I can rely on long term.

I’ve had a few good experiences but I’ve had a lot of bad experiences on there and I’d prefer to have someone on my team who I can really rely on being there knowing they’re there each and every day.

Upwork is another one that a lot of people use and talk about regularly. So upwork about a year and a half maybe two years ago increased their fee. They completely doubled it again a hundred percent increase in their fee up to 20 percent. So upwork takes 20% of the outsourcers pay just to be the platform which i find to be an exorbitant fee, but you also have a couple other challenges on upwork.

Number one, people are actually buying fake reviews and buying fake star ratings and this means that you don’t actually know you can’t really trust the reviews. You got to spend a lot of time reading through those reviews etc…, etc that’s more on the how to hire stuff but that’s just one of the challenges.

Also there’s inflation going on upwork the prices that outsourcers even in the Philippines are charging is significantly inflated versus working directly with the individuals themselves. So that’s why, I prefer OnlineJobs.ph.

Now I am an affiliate, so if you go to MilesBeckler.com/va you’ll go to their website and if you do sign up to use the platform it’s a monthly thing. I do get a kickback that’s not why I’m making this video. It just gives you an opportunity to help support the channel in these types of teachings.

So OnlineJobs. ph is the largest job board in the Philippines where people from Western countries, Australia, Europe, nicest America, Canada etc are able to go work and find Filipino and Filipina outsourcers and teammates through a variety of different tasks, right? You find designers, developers, coders, virtual assistants, customer support, content creation, individuals all kinds of different jobs.

So that is a platform that I personally prefer, and they have two levels of membership. So for $67 a month you get access to the whole job board. You sign up for a month, you turn it on, you go post up your job listings, you go email and do you’re hiring and then you can turn it off when you’re done. And that’s it you can pay your individuals yourself through like Payoneer or through zoom and that pretty much is the game, right? So you can use it on demand.

They have a higher priced option that’s $97 per month and on this option you actually get access to a full course and the full course is: how to find, How to hire, How to train your virtual assistants, which is a really powerful course and so that’s $97. MilesBecker.com/outsourcing is a URL that’ll take you to that course.

And when you sign up for that course you actually get access to the full platform for a month as well. So that’s really the best value because you get that training as well.

So I’ve had by far the best success I’ve got multiple teammates who I’ve had with me for several years now that came from that job board. And they’re like an extension of our family in a major way, right?

Like we one of our teammates just had a baby and we hired a backup for her because she’s got a baby now and we want to make sure she had the ability to you know have sick days as needed and care for the baby days etc. My designer, my developer we use an audio guy who does all of our audio work he’s in the Philippines, so really truly that’s kind of the it, right?

I really think that OnlineJobs.ph is that direct route that allows you to connect directly with the teammate. Directly with the individual who’s going to do the work, so they don’t really take a fee from you for like the other ones do.

So on Fiverr every time you do a job there’s a fee for the platform. On upwork every time you pay there’s a fee from the platform. On OnlineJobs.ph you pay to get access to the job board, you’re able to do your hiring then you turn it off. And six months later if you want to hire another teammate you just go sign up for another month turn it on and so on and so forth, you don’t have to pay.

So I’ve now been paying some my teammates you know tens of thousands of dollars over the course of several years and they’re not taking a percent off of all of that, right? They’re not taking twenty percent of that which is absolutely ridiculous in the long term, so that’s why I prefer it.

If you have other questions, right? If you have something, if there’s some aspect about outsourcing that you’re just stuck on you really need to know the answer to, give me those questions in the comments so I know what kind of videos to make for you.

If you enjoyed this video, give me a thumb’s up. All of the links will be down below in the description. I do appreciate any support but whether you use my affiliate link or not but OnlineJobs.ph is what I use, right? So that’s why I’m sharing it with you it is because it’s the platform that I use but if you go to MilesBecker.com4/va I do obviously appreciate it.

Be sure to subscribe I got three videos a week coming out. Any questions getting me in the comments. Thumbs up, share it, like it, grab the URL spread it out all around the internet, do what you do. I appreciate you and I look forward to connecting with you on the next video until we meet again. Be well!

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About Julia Jasmine M. Sta Romana

Julia has been working for OnlineJobs.ph since 2012, first as a writer and now as its social media manager and content development specialist. She also founded the Davao Virtual Assistants Association, the biggest VA association in Davao City.

She’s a full-time wife and mom and volunteers her time as an internet rights advocate.

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