[00:01:21] John Jonas: Yeah. That’s definitely not what happened.
[00:01:24] A.J. Lawrence: Ok, cool.
[00:01:25] John Jonas: Here’s what I found. I graduated from college in early 2004. I had a job for eight months out of school. That was my only goal during that time was to quit my job. I found out I’m a terrible employee, like the incentive structure, that doesn’t work for me.
[00:01:38] I do really good work, I get paid. I do really bad work, I get paid. It doesn’t matter. Right? And then I just hated like having to be at work every day, and I got 10 days of vacation off per year. Like there was no room to grow, this suck. And my wife was at home with my new baby and she would call me and like, oh, you just missed this cutest thing he did. It’s so cool.
[00:01:59] And I’m sitting at work in this cold office and just. Stupid, right? I didn’t even hate the job. I liked what I was doing. So it took me eight months before I was able to quit that job. I had some things going online. One of them was some of the consulting wor that you mentioned. That was good and it was pretty consistent and that was a good chance to quit. I had something working, making me a little bit of money online, a little bit on my own. And then I had another consulting gig that was gonna last like two months, and I was like, okay, this is it. This is the time.
[00:02:27] And in talking about entrepreneurship, I feel like I should venture away from that a little bit and just tell you my situation at the time, because I think it’s really, really important. I see so many people that just get strapped and they lose their options in running their business or in pivoting because of debt.
[00:02:46] So at the time we had no debt. And well, I mean, we’ve never had any debt since then. We didn’t have a car payment. We owned our car, which is a cheap, crappy 1992 Toyota Tercel. We didn’t have any credit card debt. We had a mortgage, but our mortgage payment was $750 a month. I mean, this is 2004 and we had finished the basement in the house and we’re renting it out for 550. So our monthly liabilities were like $400 a month, something super, super small. So I was free to do whatever I wanted to do.
[00:03:18] A.J. Lawrence: You were doing the fire early.
[00:03:19] John Jonas: Yeah, right. I mean, we kept everything super, super low so there was nothing tying me to not taking a really big risk. Right? And I think that’s important in entrepreneurship. Debt is just so strapping. It just ties you and forces you out of options.
[00:03:39] So I quit my job. I quit the nine to five to work 24/7. Because that’s what we do as entrepreneurs, right? And I had no idea cause I was like, oh, I’m gonna do it differently. I’m not gonna work that much. I’m not an idiot, you know. But things started working for me. Like I was making a little bit of money online, and the other two consulting things had worked, and we had some savings and online stuff was starting to do well for me.
[00:04:05] But I knew I can’t keep this up, so I started hiring people to help me. And I hired local people and it was a disaster because as soon as they realized, oh, you’re making money online? Like this is 2004, like nobody makes money online. Oh, you’re making money online? Well, I can do that too. That suck. And I’ve tried that four times and all four of them quit really quickly.
[00:04:25] And then I hired people in India and I won’t get into it. It was just a mess. And then I hired people at Upwork. Actually, I didn’t even hire Upwork. It wasn’t Upwork at the time, this was Elance.
[00:04:37] A.J. Lawrence: Ok. Elance and oDesk. Yeah, I remember that merged.
[00:04:41] John Jonas: Yeah. This is before. This is like oDesk was just starting.
[00:04:45] A.J. Lawrence: Old school.
[00:04:46] John Jonas: Yeah. But it’s the same concept, right? Like you hire a contract worker, they do some work, you pay them hourly, whatever. So I hired this guy and he writes a bunch of articles for me because I despise writing. And he writes these articles and I was like, oh yes, I figured this out. Now I can get the help that I need. This is so sweet.
[00:05:06] And he sends me these articles and like super excitement. And like 10 minutes later this burden just fell on me. I have to do something with these articles now. His job is to write and that’s it. I paid him, now he’s off getting another job because that’s how Upwork works. That’s how Elance works. That’s how all these folks work.
[00:05:25] Their incentive structure is built so that you get a job, you finish that job, you get a review, you get paid so that you can move on and get a higher paying job and get another review and move on and get another higher paying job. Right? It’s like guaranteed turnover.
[00:05:39] I didn’t know that. I thought, Oh, this is awesome. I figured this out, right? I just get this burden of like, Oh, man, now I have to do something with all these articles and I hate doing this crap. And I just failed again. I was ready to give up with like getting help for my business. It just had to be me, which is like the worst feeling.
[00:05:56] And then a couple months later I had this conversation with someone who’s way farther along than me, and they said, when you’re ready to start outsourcing some of this stuff, make sure you go to the Philippines. Huh? What? Really? He was like, yeah. Because when you hire someone in India and they say yes, that means yes, I heard something come outta your mouth. Not yes, I understood what you said.
[00:06:14] And I was like, really? Like what? And it kind of gave me hope to where maybe something could be different than what I’ve experienced so far. Cuz all I’ve had is failure. And he gave me a reference where I could hire someone and I didn’t because the reference was someone full-time.
[00:06:29] Like I had to hire someone full-time and I didn’t wanna hire someone full-time. I didn’t think I could keep someone busy full-time. I didn’t know if they could actually do good work. I didn’t know if I could afford it. And it just wasn’t super appealing to me. And then one day I was like, this doesn’t matter. I can’t keep doing what I’m doing. I can’t do this forever.
[00:06:45] So I took the leap and I hired this guy out of the Philippines through this agency. I paid them $750 a month, they paid him $250. I didn’t know that at the time. I mean, I just knew I’m paying them 750. They didn’t say anything. It took me probably six months before I realized, Oh, he told me he’s making $250 a month for full-time work.
[00:07:03] But it was the most liberating experience of my life. Hiring this guy whose full-time job was to do anything I asked him to do. And he was willing and competent and he spoke English and we never had a communication problem.
[00:07:16] And he wasn’t particularly talented at anything but anything I taught him to do, he was on it. He was super awesome. So, I hire another person and another person. And finally, I go back to the agency and like, I wanna hire someone. And they’re like, well, do you want a webmaster or a programmer? No. I want a content writer. Well, do you want a webmaster or a programmer?
[00:07:37] A.J. Lawrence: Yeah. That’s all we do.
[00:07:39] John Jonas: Are you serious? I’ll take a webmaster. And they pull someone off the street and like, here’s your webmaster. Like dude, this guy, what? No.
[00:07:50] A.J. Lawrence: Remember it was everywhere? Webmaster. Webmaster. I realized I haven’t heard that in years.
[00:07:56] John Jonas: But it doesn’t make sense!
[00:07:59] A.J. Lawrence: Yeah. I apologize for interrupting. But it was like, wow.
[00:08:01] John Jonas: No, no, you’re right. I mean, the word webmaster doesn’t even make sense. So that was like an inflection point for me where I want to find someone on my own. I want to recruit someone who I want, like I wanna find someone who’s talented and good and competent. Not someone this agency just pulls off the street.
[00:08:20] And I realized later, like their incentive isn’t to go out and find someone competent and good because most of the problems that they have with workers are, it’s the employers that’s the problem, not the worker. So the incentive isn’t find a great worker because then the employer’s the problem and you wasted a bunch of time, right?
[00:08:35] So I was like, I think I could build a job board where I could get maybe a couple hundred profiles into it. I’m not super visionary. I could maybe get a couple hundred profiles into this job board so that I could recruit someone myself. So I went back to the agency was like, I want a programmer. And so they hired me a programmer and we built onlinejobs.ph. I don’t know if later that put the agency out of business. I never followed up with them.
[00:08:57] But we got a couple hundred profiles the first month that we launched it. I never imagined that it would grow. Like today it’s over 2 million profiles, affiliate workers. It grows like crazy and like over half a million employers around the world have used it to hire people in the Philippines. I have no clue.
[00:09:15] A.J. Lawrence: Over the years I’ve seen Onlinejobs.ph listed everything from sort of the four hour work week wannabe discussions to like a McKinsey breakdown. It’s like you’ve created something that spans quite a large swarth of sort of the business world here. That’s pretty impressive. How do you see where you are as an entrepreneur now?
[00:09:40] John Jonas: So I hired my first person in the Philippines in 2005.
[00:09:45] A.J. Lawrence: Mm-hmm.
[00:09:45] John Jonas: So it’s been a long time, which by the way, that person still works for me today. FYI. The Philippines has this like crazy, crazy loyalty thing. So I’ve been through a lot of stages of the business. Like I remember being super, super excited with my wife when I had a website that made me $20 in a day. Like that was so amazing. And then I remember it made $50 in a day. And then I remember dancing around the house when it made $500 in a day.
[00:10:15] I remember dancing. I was young and things were working and it was amazing and it was pretty automated. I mean, obviously there was still a lot of work to do to where now, we just hired a couple different developers last week to join our development team and we hired another designer editor. It’s like our third person. So now we’re past the eight figure revenue mark last year.
[00:10:37] A.J. Lawrence: Congratulations.
[00:10:38] John Jonas: Yeah, it was awesome. It wasn’t really like anything. Like it’s just another day of business. Eight figure year in revenue isn’t like anything. There’s no accomplishment.
[00:10:52] A.J. Lawrence: No, it’s the same stuff.
[00:10:55] John Jonas: Same thing, right? But you know, I have a mature team behind me and I have a good integrator in my business, and that’s my business partner, he’s in the US. He’s the only other US person we have. So as an entrepreneur, I’m pretty far along. Like I quit my job in 2004.
[00:11:14] A.J. Lawrence: The ability to kind of grow something and be able to transition because you were rubbing two sticks together in kind of going through that lovely like, uhh, this doesn’t work, uhh, this doesn’t work. And then all of a sudden something did work for you. But the reality is to go from that job board to now eight figures, the types of capabilities you’ve had to develop. When did you bring on your integrated partner? About how long ago?
[00:11:44] John Jonas: So he was really, really early on. I think late 2004, maybe early 2005 even. We had gone to college together and he had stayed to get a master’s degree. We’ve been together for a really long time and our roles naturally separate. We were so lucky.
[00:11:57] I mean, like as the visionary, he instantly started taking over things for me. Like I would create and he would run. Just so, so great, which I think is so, so important for most entrepreneurs where you see yourself as a visionary but you have to do everything. I had someone that I could hand stuff off to and he was reliable and amazing, and that’s a really big deal.
[00:12:16] A.J. Lawrence: It’s funny, just to go a little aside. That concept of visionary integrator gets so ongoing, ongoing discussion. Everyone wants it integrated. The reality is, I think most people want someone to do the work and then like, oh yeah, I kind of point them towards the direction.
[00:12:35] A really good visionary is that constant in my mind, and I would love to kind of your opinion of this, of like you’re constantly looking at what is possible, what’s going on, what could be done, how to look at it, and then dealing with the unusual problems that always come up. Not the straightforward problem cuz those are 24/7. Well, the integrator is that person who’s just resource allocating. Resource and efficiency and all that. So it’s like there’s those two super heavy types of work. But the visionary can do it anywhere in my mind, but how do you see that?
[00:13:14] John Jonas: Here’s how I have defined this for myself and this is what I see prevents people from succeeding or from growing past that sticking point. You grow your business to a certain point and it just stops or you feel stuck, right?
[00:13:30] So as the visionary, I feel like my job is to think. My job is is not to dream. My job is to find that really, really difficult thing that I don’t wanna deal with and think through the problem. That’s the hardest work we do. In my experience in this life, the hardest work we do is think through a really difficult thing and work through the solution. And come up with a solution and think through putting all of these things together. The things that you don’t wanna think through, that’s your job.
[00:14:05] You have to push on that thing. And if you’re not willing to, well, that’s where the business gets stucked or that’s how you don’t succeed. Because you’re not willing to think. That manifests itself in small daily problems. It manifests itself in where are we getting stuck in the whole business problem. It manifests itself in marketing and sales problems. You have to solve the problem and then someone else should do the work, but it’s on you to solve the problem.
[00:14:30] A.J. Lawrence: Nope. I saw once and it always stuck with me. This founder had moved to sort of the chairman role, he jokingly called it, he was Chief Strange Problem Solver. Everything that was like the deep stuff that everyone else didn’t want to touch, that’s what he focused on. And it just kind of stuck in me. So I like that concept.
[00:14:52] It’s a lot of work because there’s no structure, I think, to it. And I think that’s where a lot of people miss is that we look and we try and, oh yeah, yeah, someone else would take it. It’s like, really?You can’t have someone else do something until you’ve actually defined what it is. You can fill it out. They can fill it out, but you have to define it.
[00:15:13] All right. So as you’ve guys have grown on, what has helped you move more into that ability to improve your entrepreneurial capabilities?
[00:15:22] John Jonas: I will say that finding the workforce was. Knowing that I could always hire a talented person to do the thing that I need don for almost any role, that’s a really, really big step. That’s a big, big deal to say, okay, I need some copywriting done. I know how I can get that done. I need a front end react native developer. Not, I need a webmaster. You know, something silly.
[00:15:49] Because these are the things where people get stuck. Like, oh, I have a friend who knows how to do this thing. Let me see. Oh, he’s too big. Oh, I’m just stuck. Right? So I think having the knowledge of ‘_I can find anybody I want really easily’_ is really freeing towards like, Oh, we wanna do this thing. Okay, I can hire someone to do that. That’s reasonable.
[00:16:07] A.J. Lawrence: Let’s talk about that because that’s that lovely who-not-how type of process where, Oh, you gotta work on them. You seem to have like unlocked that early in your journey. It’s almost like a hack. You kind of hacked into it. But how have you seen your usage of that change from 2005 to now, running an 8-figure? Do you sort of just go, so yeah, let me go think and then pop it in? Or has it evolved? How you start thinking about the type of people, the resources, has it changed for you?
[00:16:40] John Jonas: So it is evolving. It’s still evolving. There’s a couple different things. So this is part of my entrepreneurial journey. One of the things that I look at is there’s this option for this business that we have. If we do this, who has to do this? Like, who do the customers want? Do they want me or do they not care who they get? Because if they want me, I don’t wanna do it. I’m not interested.
[00:17:04] A.J. Lawrence: It’s an agency.
[00:17:05] John Jonas: It’s an agency. I’m not interested. Is there any sort of selling time for money here? I’m not interested. If there’s any time being sold in exchange for your money, I’m not interested. We won’t do it. And so in terms of people, if someone else can do the work and it’s not me at all, completely uninvolved, I might pursue whatever opportunity there is.
[00:17:30] I mean, I get people every day that are like, dude, you have all these resources. You could sell SEO services and AdWord services and social media marketing services. No. No, absolutely not. I will not do that because one, that’s selling time for money. Two, every customer then wants me. They want the one who knows everything, not the worker. Those are two pretty important things in what I’ve done.
[00:17:54] And then I don’t spend that extra time working more, which is different I think than most entrepreneurs. I’ve worked like 17 hours a week for the last 12 years, and I won’t put that time back into the business, the extra time. I won’t do it.
[00:18:07] A.J. Lawrence: That’s a cool thing because the 17 hours, that’s a very specific number, A. B, is it structured? Do you have it or is it just sort of like, all right, I get to 17, I’m done. How does that happen? What does it look like?
[00:18:21] John Jonas: What it looks like is I prioritize time with my wife and my kids, and then work comes second. So I get up in the morning and I do my kids’ lunch. I say my prayers, I read my scriptures, I do yoga. I get my second wave of kids to school with their lunches. My wife makes their breakfast. And then I work some, and I work until I have another commitment, which right now that means skiing. I have a commitment. Monday, Wednesday, Friday at 11 o’clock I have to go ski.
[00:18:58] A.J. Lawrence: You’re in Utah, right?
[00:18:59] John Jonas: I’m in Utah.
[00:19:00] A.J. Lawrence: Salt Lake area? Provo?
[00:19:03] John Jonas: Yep. Yeah.
[00:19:04] A.J. Lawrence: It’s beautiful.
[00:19:06] John Jonas: It’s unbelievable. And then today, so we’re recording this on Tuesday, my oldest daughter’s out of school today and so as soon as this podcast is done, I have to go skiing. So that means Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday and Friday and Saturday, I have to ski this week, right?
[00:19:27] So I fit working in between. So like I’ll work until 11:00 AM today and I worked until 10 30 yesterday. So this week, I won’t get 17 hours. What I found is 17 is probably a pretty good number. Actually, the last couple years it’s been more like 12, 14. That’s what I find, I get in.
[00:19:45] And then, the important part of that is I don’t do any work in that time. I don’t touch WordPress. I don’t do customer support. I don’t edit something. I don’t do any of it. No. The only thing I will do is think and give feedback and create training and make assignments. So my time at the computer is very, very, very efficient.
[00:20:08] There’s no Facebook. There’s no YouTube. I haven’t seen the latest YouTube video. Nope. I haven’t heard about the news, whatever it is. No. I don’t scroll Facebook ever. I don’t have it on my phone. I don’t have Instagram on my phone. And so my time is very, very efficient and focused so that I can spend it doing what I want.
[00:20:26] A.J. Lawrence: Do you plan it out? It sounds like you have blocks of time that you go, Oh, I’m gonna have these blocks of time throughout the week, here are the things I want to do with those blocks. Do you use like Pomodoro or whatever. You just sort of just say, I’m gonna do this with this free time?
[00:20:46] John Jonas: Okay. So I really have like three things that I need to do during the week. One is I need to make sure my people are taken care of. So anybody who is working on stuff that I’m in charge of, I need to make sure they’re taken care of. Two, I need to get through most of my email. I need, I mean, we feel like it’s a need but it’s not, right?
[00:21:07] But The most important thing that I need to do is I need to create content. Cuz what I have found is creating content drives business. And so for me, when I sit down every week, I know I need to write and schedule newsletters. Three per week. I need to record podcasts, which also get recorded as videos. And then if I can create something else, awesome. Right?
[00:21:29] So I will prioritize, okay, well here’s my time. I’m gonna sit down. Okay, I have an hour right now. Sweet. That’s enough time for me to create my three newsletters for the week, and I’m gonna ignore email. I’m gonna ignore it today. And the next time I have, okay, I have four hours toda so let’s get the most important things done. I have to prioritize those things over the easy things cuz the easy things are answering email. It’s like brainless. It takes time, it’s just brainless.
[00:21:54] It’s super easy to fall back on that like, oh, I’m so busy because I have to answer these. That’s not what moves my business forward so why do I focus on that? So I try really hard, and it’s always a struggle to do the most important things first and then come back to the stuff that demands your time but is not urgent.
[00:22:15] A.J. Lawrence: I know this is something I’ve gone back and forth and I’ve followed Eisenhower a gazillion, and to me it doesn’t matter the process, it’s just the consistency of doing so. But the moment you’ve stopped doing it, it’s like doing hot yoga. You do it day in, day out for like a period and you feel amazing. But the one day you skip, you’re like, I’m never doing it again. It sucks. So what do you use to kind of continuously bring to bear what is that most important thing for you and your business?
[00:22:48] John Jonas: I don’t have that. It’s what I do.
[00:22:50] A.J. Lawrence: Okay, cool. I know I have difficulties sometimes. Not so much the email phone, but yeah, sometimes that same thing of like, ah, I felt busy. And then in hindsight I’m like, ah. So yeah, I do try and consistently utilize different resources. You had mentioned traction earlier with the vision, different frameworks, and if I stick to it, it works. But I find sometimes it’s easy to fall off of the process. The process itself, as long as it gets you a little further is all that matters.
[00:23:21] Well, you’ve built this up. For entrepreneurs listening here, a lot of us have gotten to the point where, as I jokingly said, we’re past the stage of rubbing sticks together. When and how should an entrepreneur start looking at bringing on resources from the Philippines or just virtual resources? But we’ll stick with Onlinejobs.ph right here.
[00:23:42] John Jonas: Okay, so I have a super simple answer for that. As soon as you have something in your business that you know how to do that you feel like you could teach someone else to do, hire someone else to do it.
[00:23:52] Get that thing off of your plate. And this’ll be controversial, but the worst advice that I hear given and I hear it repeated over and over on again on the internet and by really big name people, stick with what you’re good at and outsource the rest. Like the worst advice I’ve ever heard.
[00:24:10] I’m a programmer, so I’m like really good at programming. Shall I stick with programming and outsource the rest? No, I can’t run a company as a programmer, you know? Oh, you’re really good at social media? Oh, congratulations. You are now qualified to make $80,000 a year. Period. End of story.
[00:24:25] Don’t stick with social media. You need to be the CEO. So you’re ready to hire someone when you feel like you could teach someone to do something that you know how to do and get something off of your plate. And you can hire someone who’s really, really talented. You could hire a really talented social media marketer, or a really talented programmer, or a really talented content writer, or whatever it is.
[00:24:46] You could hire a really talented person and then give them your way of doing it. Or maybe it’s not even that, maybe it’s some data entry that you’re doing. Super simple and you could obviously teach someone how to do that thing. Get that thing off of your plate. And all of a sudden the world starts to open up to, Oh wow, if I could outsource that thing and it’s costing me $4 an hour, well, I could get rid of this other thing too.
[00:25:11] And what I’ve found for myself and what I’ve seen over and over again is when you get something off of your plate, you get way, way better at the more important things in your business. So you get better at maintaining big relationships with clients, if that’s what you’re doing. Or you get really good at making sales because your brain is allowed to then focus on what actually matters and not have all these little distraction things that are going on in your business that are taking your brain power.
[00:25:37] You don’t realize they’re taking your brain power. You just know they’re taking your time, but they’re taking your brain power away from focusing on the more important, the bigger things. When you get rid of those little things, all of a sudden that focus becomes so clear and it just works.
[00:25:50] A.J. Lawrence: Right, so start thinking of those pieces and jump on to Onlinejobs.ph. Now you’ve passed the eight figure mark. As someone who used to live in Europe and treated the Alps as sort of like my spiritual home, anywhere. Zermatt is my favorite, but pretty much anywhere in the Alps to me. But the Rockies are amazing. Definitely around Salt Lake, you guys have some sweet, sweet, sweet snow.
[00:26:16] You’ve had succes you’ve built up, you’ve come on this great journey, how are you defining success into the future as an entrepreneur? You’ve put your family, you’ve put the things that are close to you most important. But how are you gonna go and expand what success is for you?
[00:26:33] John Jonas: So I have two really simple definitions of success, and one of them comes from a quote which has been a driving force in my life with everything that I’ve done. That quote is, No other success in life compensates for failure in the home. So it doesn’t matter what I do if I’m failing at home. It’s not worth it.
[00:26:50] And so that’s a really big driving force for me. And to me that means time. Like kids just want time. They don’t care about quality time, they just want time. So I give them time. And then the second piece of of success for me is progress. If progress is being made, that’s success. It doesn’t have to be big progress.
[00:27:09] It doesn’t have to be fast progress. It could be slow progress, sometimes it’s big jumps. Usually though, it’s just little incremental things. If there’s progress being made, that’s what breeds happiness and success to me. So I started reading The Gap and The Gain. He defines how most entrepreneurs are unhappy with their lives because they’re always living in the gap.
[00:27:32] A.J. Lawrence: Oh yes.
[00:27:32] John Jonas: Like, Oh, we’ve done this but we could have done this, or we should have gotten here, or we should have made this much money. And instead of looking like, dude, we were here and we got to here. Right?
[00:27:45] A.J. Lawrence: Yep. I am.
[00:27:45] John Jonas: That’s you? Okay.
[00:27:47] A.J. Lawrence: Yeah, I’ve been there a lot. Yep.
[00:27:49] John Jonas: So I’m not. And to me, I don’t know that I live in the gain, but I live with, did I make progress?
[00:27:57] And I find like when I don’t make progress, when I ski too much and then just answer emails and pretend like I’m keeping up, then I realize I’m not making progress and that’s not okay. And I have to make a shift. Like I have to say no. I have to create content because content’s what drives things that makes progress.
[00:28:15] A.J. Lawrence: But it sounds also, the flip is, I’m gonna assume if you don’t ski enough, it’s the same thing. All of a sudden, john’s an unhappy boy. And therefore what you create is not also. What I’ve found in interviewing cool entrepreneurs like yourself is this inherent tension that you constantly have to balance and rebalance and practice that shifting back and forth.
[00:28:41] Sometimes from necessity, gotta do the work. You gotta pay the bills, you gotta do the work. But then as we get past that basic level, it is that constant learning to walk the tight rope of like not too hard, not too soft. Seems you inherently develop that focus early. Without us into too huge of a divergence. Why do you think you had that balance from early on?
[00:29:05] John Jonas: I think it’s because I’m very much driven by freedom, not necessarily by what the world defines as success.
[00:29:16] A.J. Lawrence: Yeah. Not the car or the blah, blah, blah.
[00:29:18] John Jonas: Yeah. I’m very much driven by time freedom, money freedom, responsibility freedom. So I think that forced me to say, Oh yeah, no, I’m gonna spend this time with my kids cuz that’s free. That’s not business slavery, you know?
[00:29:33] A.J. Lawrence: Yeah. You talked earlier you had this one job right out of school that was like typical American. I’m very much an American and very, very proud. But sometimes when you go live abroad, you’re like, wait, how is life? How do you live? That two weeks of vacation, that like the most of the grindstone and you’re just like, where is myself within this? And I got lucky I started the business almost right out of school. And then when I sold it to a company, and they went bankrupt which was great, I had such a series of crappy jobs because I just didn’t understand and I hated working.
[00:30:10] My whole thing after that period was like, I am never gonna work for someone else again. That was like the main driver. It wasn’t entrepreneurship. It was literally like, how the hell can I do this?
[00:30:24] Am I going to be door to door salesman? It didn’t matter. It was just this entrepreneurism. I like that you had that kind of pain, but you seem to have incorporated sort of the value from it pretty early, which I think some of us and myself have taken longer to learn. That, oh wait, there’s more to it than just the avoidance of the work or the bad structure. There is more to it.
[00:30:49] Well, how else can people find out more about you? Learn more about how they can start getting people to help them grow?
[00:30:57] John Jonas: Okay, so I’m gonna give three things here. Number one, ofstasks.com. You can get a white paper that we did that has like hundreds of tasks. I call them O.F.S., Online Filipino Specialists. I don’t call them VAs. I don’t like the word VA because people assume it’s a secretary. This is an untalented person that can only do data entry, and that’s not who I hire, and that’s not who you wanna hire. So at ofstasks.com, you’ll find answers from like 60 different entrepreneurs in any industry saying, here’s what they do for me and my business.
[00:31:27] It’ll give you a really, really interesting perspective of wow, this is what they could do for me. Oh no, my business is different. No, I have like laws and regulation. Sorry dude, your business isn’t different. I know that you have laws and regulations, but there’s a lot of people in your industry that are hiring O.F.S. to work for them. And you’ll find those at ofstasks.com. That’s number one.
[00:31:48] Number two, ofsguide.com will answer the top nine questions that I get asked. And most people, they’re like, oh, I need a phone call with you. I don’t do phone calls. And I send them to ofsguide.com and they don’t come back for a phone call because they realize, oh yeah, I can do this. This is pretty reasonable.
[00:32:04] And the third thing would be onevaaway.com, which is my step-by-step system for hiring a great person out of Onlinejobs.ph super quickly, easily. Onevaaway.com is the seven steps, so good that I guarantee you will hire someone great or I’ll give you your money back. No questions asked. It’s $99.
[00:32:24] So those are the three things. Ofstasks.com is free, ofsguide.com is free, onevaaway.com is $99. It won’t teach you, it’ll just walk you through hiring someone great. It should take you less than two to three hours total. Like watch the videos, do the steps, interview, hire. It should have taken you less than two to three hours total to have someone amazing working for you.
[00:32:45] A.J. Lawrence: All right, I’ll make sure we have those into the show notes, the email, and then social for everyone listening. We’ll have that there for everyone to find and go check out John’s material. I’ve been diving through, and just quickly cuz I know you need to be out skiing soon, I’ve seen definitely in the past year change.
[00:33:04] Besides yourself, there has been for years more than a few different online sort of job posting for international, etc. I’ve actually been in what I think is a complete copy, the jobrack.eu. I know the current owner and he’s changed it a bit, but I think it literally was like, oh, let’s take Onlinejobs.ph and make it for Eastern Europeans. I think that was literally what he had said in some groups mastermind. I heard the story one time.
[00:33:33] But I’ve seen a lot of people use that term VA. Yet now we’ve globalized talent. I hate to say this, the American tax structure of employment, it really does benefit, especially for back office roles and more and more front as we go more digital, kind of as a tax image to go global.
[00:33:51] Because I noticed on your site there is still that hire the VA, hire this. But I do think the conversation, at least for the people who are more advanced into globalizing their talent, it’s changed the discussion of how they look at the roles that are possible.
[00:34:08] John Jonas: Yeah. I mean, it’s fine to hire a VA. But in the end, I mean, we use the word VA to mean anything and, and I think it’s silly.
[00:34:16] You want to hire a really talented backend PHP programmer. You want to hire a really good sales copywriter. Not a VA, not a data entry person. And a data entry person’s great and we see it more and more. I know someone who hired an investment banking analyst out of the Philippines. He said, this guy’s a $250,000 a year person. I’m paying him $1,500 a month.
[00:34:39] Or someone who hired an accounting auditor, and he was like, dude, this guy’s amazing. He’s so dang good at this. And like all along the whole thing. Like, oh, I need a CAD designer. Sweet. I just hired this amazing person. I hired this guy who worked for IBM in this really high role, and now he’s working for me. You know?
[00:34:58] A.J. Lawrence: Yeah.
[00:34:59] John Jonas: Because IBM was in the Philippines and paying Philippine rates, like low rates whatever, and I can pay him $1,500 a month for full-time work and he is working for me.
[00:35:09] A.J. Lawrence: Yep. I’m hearing that more and more out there.
[00:35:11] John Jonas: And more and more people are turning to it and, and I hear more and more people that are like, my company wants to hire people to help our major employees. Right? So like, this is trickling into corporate, we’ve really kind of ignored the corporate world, but then we find like Google and Uber making job posts on Onlinejobs, and it’s really across the board.
[00:35:30] A.J. Lawrence: Well, that means there is more opportunity for you to wear your visionary hat and try and figure out where that next stage is, because I definitely think that’s going to be a larger and larger component of like, talent is always the hardest part of any business – finding the right talent.
[00:35:49] And when you can gain access to talent at a competitive advantage, but more importantly, diversified. it just is amazing to add to any type of business. So what you’re doing and how you’ve grown it, I just can’t wait to see more.
[00:36:05] So John, thank you so much for giving us some time this morning, and I hope you have some great skiing today.
[00:36:11] John Jonas: I’m sure that I will. Thanks so much for having me. It’s been great.
[00:36:16] A.J. Lawrence: Skiing is like surfing. Any day on the slopes, it doesn’t matter how bad, it’s still a day on the slopes. It’s still always great.
[00:36:22] Alright. Thank you John.
[00:36:23] John Jonas: Thanks for having me.
[00:36:30] A.J. Lawrence: This episode of Beyond 8 Figures is over, but your journey as an entrepreneur continues. So if we can help you with anything, please just let us know. And if you liked this episode, please share it with someone who might learn from it. Until next time, keep growing and find the joy in your journey. This is A.J., and I’ll be talking to you soon. Bye-bye.
