I read a post this week that I just had to comment on. Its entitled “Embracing Introversion and Being Boring” By Vincent over at Self Stairway.

The reason I feel the need to comment on this one is because it really resonated with me. Most people who know me, know I am an introvert and I have definitely struggled at times with the common thoughts of “whats wrong with me?”

In todays day and age, it come be a little disheartening being a introvert … with all the “connecting” we apparently have to do to be successful. I am supposed to be tweeting constantly, blogging daily, and the rest of the time I am supposed to be podcasting. Put simply I would pass out and die if I had to these 3 things all the time.

As Vincent puts it so well …

Some introverts are outgoing, but they’re like batteries that are drained when they’re around others and charge while alone.

I fall in this category for sure. I can feel exhausted after a long lunch with someone.

The point I wanted to make on top of all this was that, too often if you look online you will see examples of entrepreneurs who are extroverts. These guys are everywhere doing interviews and talking to people. Naturally we compare ourselves to them and for us introverts we tend to feel like there is something wrong with us or we have to do business like they do.

The good news is you don’t have to. If my business relied on me connecting with people I would fail, no doubt. I am simply not the kind of guy who thrives on meeting new people. Don’t get me wrong I occasionally love meeting new people, it energises me like it would anyone, but only so often and I am only capable of maintaining a small amount of close relationships.

I have met enough people “offline” now that are quite simply invisible online, but for me are perfect examples of the entrepreneur I want to be.

It’s important to do it your way and take your own path, everyone is different … the only way you will succeed is by being yourself. (Don’t confuse this with “the resistance”) … as they say, there is more than one way to skin a cat.

I have found the most important aspect for me was selecting a business that suits me, not the other way around.

In ecommerce I can geek out, look at the numbers, game google, improve product design, etc. Thankfully I have my partner for the customer facing side of things

The post You Can Succeed In Business & Be An Introvert appeared first on Kaizenify.

In the process of doing this I realised, how important some of the metrics are and how its plays such a large role in marketing. Take for example the Cost Per Visit metric.

I determined on one of my sites that the the metric was as follows …

As you can see every person time a person hits my site that is worth $1.51 to me in revenue. Then it just a case of taking your margins to get your per visit profit.

This tells me a few things …

First is that I have been wanting to play around with Google Adwords and diversify my traffic. By looking at the Organic Per Visit Value I can get a pretty good idea of what kind of return I will get on average per visitor. Which of course in turn will affect my maximum CPC. (I don’t want to spend more per visitor than what I am going to get in return)

Second is that just by looking at the two metrics I have given, it is obvious that something is making a bigger return than organic traffic as the Total Per Visit Value is $1.98. I dug in and saw that in actual fact it was Referral Per Visit Value which was sitting nicely at just over $5 per visit. That came as a surprise to me. Actually I have done very, very little in regards to social media so far. The only initiative I have taken so far is to ask customers upon checkout if they could share the site with friends in order to save 5 bucks.

Now that I have had this site up a few months and gathered some solid data, I am now a lot more confident about the giving Adwords a crack. It doesn’t guarantee success, but knowing your numbers certainly helps. (mistake I made for years)

Oh and please note, that if you sell to one country, like I do, be sure to segment data by customers from that country, any visits from other countries are only going to make your numbers look worse than they actually are.

How To Find Per Visit Value In Analytics

First way is to go to Acquisition > All Traffic and then hit the ecommerce link at the top, which looks like this …

This of course assumes you have ecommerce tracking already setup (highly recommended) on your site.

The post Per Visit Value – An Important eCommerce Metric appeared first on Kaizenify.

eCommerce Uncovered | Nathan & Tessa Hartnett

Nathan and Tess over at Talk N Business  just simply rock! I love their undeniably Aussie laid, no hype, no BS approach to their blog. They have a quality book out which goes through their business in a step by step process. Follow it and you have a huge advantage over most … learn in a day what took them 7 years to master. Anyway enough selling of their book … seriously just check out the blog, it has helped me and Im sure it could help others.

Smart Marketer | Ezra Firestone

Discovered Ezra, on a podcast a while back and since them have been following him. He is clearly knowledgeable and experienced in all areas of eCommerce. One of my top resources, with high quality videos.

eCommerce Fuel | Andrew Youderian

I cannot remember how I discovered Andrews site, was either via a Shopify Guide on Dropshipping that he wrote or through a business mastermind group called Dynamite Circle in which I think he is part of? But anyway, this is the reason I started this site, so I could meet people like him, smart, ambitious and travelling the world and so I can be one of those guys! Andrews another one of those guys who learns by doing and documents it on his site.

Build My Online Store | Andrew Lin

I was considering not listing this one, because it leans more towards a podcast than a blog (getting technical), but the content on their is amazing and their is the occasional blog post thrown in for good measure. Like this quality post. Andrew really has become the “Andrew Warner” of the ecommerce space, having spoke to so many successful online business owners.

Shopify | Mark Hayes

Mark seems like a super switched on guy, combine that with access to huge amounts of data on the ecommerce space and that makes a recipe for a blog you must be reading.

BigCommerce | Mitchell Harper

I have watched a few of the videos over at the Big Commerce blog and got to say that are really impressive. Again like shopify above these guys are a leader in the space with a lot of data to look through, so its worth taking note.

Get Elastic | Linda Bustos

Im new to this site, but it seems to be packed with content, everything from infographics to tool comparisons. Will be a site I keep an eye on in the future.

Practical eCommerce | Multiple Authors

A multi author blog with some great content on there. Frequently updated with many different perspectives.

Grab Apple | Dave Huckabay

One I have not read until I learnt about the site recently through a blog post by Andrew, titled 9 eCommerce Experts You Should Be Following (thanks Andrew). Anyway, Dave seems to have been in the space a long time, and if Andrew recommends him I for one will be taking note.

My Wife Quit Her Job | Steve Chou

Another I have just discovered through Andrew, but really love their story. Looks to be a highly informative site, with practical information.

Mashable eCommerce | Multiple Authors

It’s hard to talk about any sort of business blog without mentioning Mashable. I love their content, always quality, frequent and timely. The ecommerce section is no exception.

Tropical MBA | Dave Andrews & Ian Schoen

Ah, my first true blog love … where it all began for me really. I started reading everything Dan dished out years back now and its impressive to see how far their business has come. Dan & Ian run a few eCommerce sites, they may be pivoting slightly into software if I am not mistaken, but still offer a plethora of information for anyone in the eCommerce space.

Magento | Multiple Authors

Whilst a little disappointed with the frequency of a quality post coming out, the guys over at Magento still deserve a mention. Perhaps talk about themselves to much, but when they do give advice on the industry its normally a “corker” as they say (not sure who?)

Volusion | Matt Winn

Great content put out by the fellas over at Volusion. Graphically appealing blog, but more importantly the content is super useful. Love the “success stories” they occasionally publish, as well as the 2 Minute Tuesday videos

The Whine Seller | Hillary DePiano

Shop | Fiona Swerdlow

With a domain name like shop.org, you would like to think the content lives up to domain name … thankfully in this case it does.

Shopatron | ??

Rockin’ name, rockin’ website.

Pro Stores | Lily Tung

A part of the ebay companies.

Exciting Commerce | Jason Soo

This site has excellent content with experts of the industry, a must read.

Channel Advisor | Scot Wingo

These guys have some pretty cool data to look at which makes their content fascinating to read. They sell software that allows customers to post to ebay, amazon and others with just one hub to manage them.

eCommerce Partners | Marcus

Frequent, well written content.

eBay | Multiple Authors

Can’t make an ecommerce list without mentioning the big dogs in the space, eBay has a blog that mainly talks about themselves (obviously), but does occasionally have useful information with industry news or tips.

Ecommerce Boy | Armando Emanuel Roggio

Started out as a twitter account and evolved into a top notch website.

Marketing Tech Blog | Douglas Karr

Whilst strictly not only a ecommerce blog, the Marketing Tech guys seem to have a great curation team and are always pulling in the latest awesome ecommerce content from around the web.

Simon Lilly

Simon currently works for a costmetics company so is right in the middle of it and understands the industry very well, even providing current trends and gaps in the market.

Sell It On The Web | Bill Hazelton

Groove Commerce | Ethan Giffin

These guys seem to deal a lot with Magento. If that’s your platform definitely check them out.

Schawel + Coles | Michael Schawel

An agency specialising in ecommerce, specifically, magento, volusion, and bigcommerce by the looks. Some great content particularly for the previously mentioned platforms.

Fortune 3 | Dan

Uni eCommerce

What Do You Read?

Have I missed a big one? Would love to know what others are reading

The post Must Read Blogs For Every eCommerce Entrepreneur appeared first on Kaizenify.

So before I get into this, I just want to suggest you read a little bit about the history of the internet, search engines and Google. It can be helpful to learn what has been done in the past so that you get a better understanding of what is happening now and what may happen in the future.

So to begin.

What makes one website motivated to link to another website? That’s what I will be discussing in this post. I want to get you familiar with how humans operate, too many people make the mistake of “de-humanising” any marketing efforts they undertake online, for one reason or another many people forget this simple factor.

Rand Fishkin calls it Relationship Building but I prefer to think of it as Reference Building, as Aleyda Solis put it. It just sits better with me as “relationship building” or “networking” have never been something I am fond with or even care for.

The fundamental aspect of the internet is to allow websites / documents, to link to one another, this is how it was first created by “Mr Internet”, Tim Berners Lee, who wanted to interlink many documents to each other from all over the world.

The link has been the core to the internets design and use and will continue to be, long into the future, regardless of the new technologies that come up, a link is fundamentally the building blocks of which the system is built upon. Think about it, what is a tweet? Or a banner ad? Or Google Adwords? Every form of marketing online is just a form of one website linking to another in order to gain eye balls.

The most basic and universal of concepts that of content and usefulness. The more relevant and useful your content is the more likely it will be linked to. This of course applies to all forms of content. The less useful your blog post is the less links you will receive. The less useful your facebook post is the less links (likes / shares) it will receive.

If you think about the word “useful”, the most useful of sites are those that provide quality content on a specific subject on which the writer is an expert / authority on. Lets take on of my favourite examples, BodyBuilding.com is a huge resource of people (particularly men) looking to get in shape by increasing muscle mass. At the core of it, they are just an ecommerce site selling health products, but the reason behind the success of this website is not in the products they sell, as they are pretty commonly found branded products, but rather in the content they provide for their primary market. The site is the ultimate example of providing useful content through their own writers, providing useful content through expert in the industry (in their case actually body builders), and even providing tools for people to use in order to help them with their fitness goals.

From humble beginnings this website has been able to oust larger competitors such as Mens Fitness, because their content is simply so appealing to the market.

A great example of how to use content as your “front” to attract links & traffic

A great example of how to use content as your “front” to attract links & traffic

But …

The reality is, that most of us don’t have the time, resources and in some cases the expertise to ever produce the type of quality content these guys do, especially at the scale they do. Heck, many people reading this may be in an industry that simply finds it which simply finds it difficult to get anybody excited about.

I used to work for a large safety equipment company, in Sydney Australia, and link building was not even on the radar, mainly due to the sheer fact that virtually nobody blogs about “safety in the warehouse” or the latest in “australian safety standards”. In fact while I am on that point, please be aware of your industry and primary market, because in the case of the safety industry, a very small percentage of customers even use the internet as a means of finding a product. At the company I worked for it was about 15% of all sales, however new customer acquisitions through the internet were a small percentage of that number.

In the case of the company I worked for SEO was not a large focus in mainly due to the fact that the site was easily the largest in the industry and outranked most without even trying, I believe mainly due to the huge number of searches for the company name. If, however this company was not so large and realied more on SEO I would have been trying to create useful content for specific market segments, for example schools or the mining industry. The content created does not always have to be exactly about what you sell, but it does have to appeal to your target market.

So bear in mind, when reading this how your typical customer behaves, but don’t worry I will go into keyword research later, so you can determine just how many people are searching for your products each month.

So basically you have 2 options with any ecommerce site:

1. Make your content “linkable” – This is just like I have discussed about, creating content that would interest people in your space.

2. Pay for links – If you can’t accept the fact that your site needs quality content in which would garner attention, then perhaps this book is not for you, because most of your marketing efforts would require payment in return for exposure, which is obviously not SEO.

There is technically one exception to this rule. Create quality products. On the odd occasion sites don’t need a lot of content in order to be link worthy because the products themselves garner links for them. These sites are few and far between. An outlier. I imagine my content will appeal most to eCommerce owners like myself, who perhaps import from China, and do not create unique products. So if you do want to go down this track I suggest you start learning about the manufacturing process and have one heck of a great product idea backing it up.

Let me get something clear to you first, link building and SEO in general is a long term strategy, it will take a while, but the upside to sticking with it and being consistent is that it will be very difficult for you competitors to easily replicate your success. I have a friend, that constantly refers to SEO rankings as “real estate” and the fact that one day we will all be talking about the “new gold rush” that was the early years of the internet.

No is the time to get ahead of the competition, before they get to far ahead of you.

So you are still interest in link building and creating “linkable” content? Great lets solidify this concept with an example. Lets say you import Football jerseys and sell them online. These are high priced items and very common, you have many competitors online. If your content was nothing more than an online store, with a few lines of content for each product, then you may have a hard time getting links to your site. You may get the odd link from a directory, but then what? You could offer an affiliate program and start attracting links that way, however you are still essentially paying for these links.

So this is where its time to get dirty and roll up your sleeves.

You could begin to create an online database of every football players bio, or a history or each club, or regular curation in which you pull in the top news about particular football clubs, or what about training videos to improve your game. Sorry if you are not a sports person, but you get my point, get creative with it and aim to create the best content on the internet for your industry.

A website designed just to sell a product is very different from a content rich, reference site with hundreds and hundreds of pages of information.

I once was told a great analogy on this topic …

A website with a goal to sell products of some kind is like a library. A library is firstly, about content, that is how they get people through the door. In saying that, they do sell things, such as office space, or computer time, printing pages, maps, etc.

Why should you be doing this? Because content gets links, not products.

Table of Contents

Next Chapter | Chapter 2 – Planning Your Link Building

​

The post What Makes A eCommerce Site “Linkable” appeared first on Kaizenify.

Helpful? I have a hard time with posts like this as it seems so dead simple, but the fact of the matter is that there are a lot of people starting out in eCommerce that have no idea. I have recently come across a lot of people that are new to the online business world. So this post is really for them. Or perhaps you knew about tracking your rankings and just hadn't come across this gem … check it out and let me know if you got a better piece of software at the same price (free). Cheers, John

The post Track Your eCommerce Website Search Engine Rankings appeared first on Kaizenify.

It’s been quite the journey. A lot has changed in the last year.

• Parted ways with my business partner and went it solo
• Closed down the Philippines Corporation
• Moved to a new country
• Started an eCommerce site
• Met my now long term GF

It’s been different to the previous two years but I am have really enjoyed it. It has been a great learning experience for me and one I don’t regret.

Here comes the cliche …

Focus Is The Key

For the first time in my life I have really been able to focus and not let any external distractions pull me away from what I am trying to achieve. I have a real clarity now of what I want out of life.

I am starting to see the benefits of focus. I made more personal profit in my second month of going it alone, then I ever have before. I have had a setback since (and learnt a lot from it), but I am almost back to the point I was before. This is down to knowing what I wanted and not doing anything that did not get me closer to that outcome.

Which brings me to my next point …

I will only be writing on this blog with a set plan in place (which is what I have). I have a very clear outline of what this blog can do for me and how it can improve my business and more importantly make me money. A mistake in the past I have made is blogging for blogging sake. 

I really do hate writing. I don’t think I am good at it and I dont enjoy it, but I can see how it will help me reach my goals and give me  the security I need. So here I am. Back in the blogosphere. No idea whether or not I will stick to it, but it does come down to one thing. Having a channel in which I can connect and share my thoughts, will be the main factor as to whether of not my business will be around in 10 years time.

I almost started this blog on eCommerceTeacher.com but I wanted a site in which would encompass every part of me and I didnt want a domain that limited my topic. I also didnt want to use JohnPaulGrant.com, not really even sure why, I just have a thing against personal blogs. Feels a bit too diary based, self centered or something.

 Why eCommerce?

• Higher barrier to entry then other online business models. This is especially true in Australia, where it is virtually impossible to find a reliable dropshipper, it means you are practically forced into purchasing stock wholesale, or you manage to find a niche in which the competition has slow shipping timeframes and you can setup a system for dropshipping your products (like me). This for me means, a lot less competition. The older I get the more concerned I am about security and stability. eCommerce lends itself to this.
• Little to no convincing required. Customers are looking for the product and already have the desire to purchase, its simply a question of from where. As I have experienced, this makes sales a lot easier than having to convince clients to signup for your services, like I was doing in the past.
• I have little patience for people. I’m not going to lie. I get bored easily and struggle to keep concentration in a conversation that bores me (ADD perhaps?) Therefore I am really bad at customer service, talking to clients regularly and teaching people anything (in real time). Of course customer service plays a big role in ecommerce, however thankfully I have an amazing girlfriend who has taken to customer service like a fat boy takes to a new fast food chain.
• Potential growth in Australia in the future. Australia is so far behind the US in terms of quality and quantity. Of course our market is 1/15 the size, but I can really see a lot of room for improvement.
• Money to be made. Australians are big on consuming, they love it! And I love that they love it. Australians have some of the highest salaries in the world and a lot of personal income. I didn’t want to make the mistake of creating an entire business around customers that have little money … I’ve already made that mistake in the past. (Work from home, Virtual Assistants anyone?).

So here I am. I can’t really believe I am back writing on a blog after my woeful efforts in the past. (see past blog posts), but yet here I am, about to give it another go for one reason … it makes business sense and I know exactly what I want to get out it.

Cheers,
John.

The post The Rebirth … Kaizenify 2.0 appeared first on Kaizenify.

What Is A Shit Blog Post?

Of course this is very subjective, but to me a shit blog post is any blog post which is generic in nature, does not give any personal experiences, theories, or data to back something up.

It is a blog post anyone could research and write the same exact thing. Now there is definitely a place for these researched posts, particularly ones pulling together a lot of data that saves a reader a lot of time. Eg, “50 Amazing  free wordpress themes”, the lame ones are those that are not so much timesavers, but very basic / generic content … Eg, “10 great tips for outsourcing” … it’s the kind of information you could go to About.com and find. That shit bores me! And I see to much of it! I want to know how you personally came to this conclusion, give me something that sets you apart!

I was talking to 2 buddies of mine over a beer, and they went through knowledge / experience in a level concept. Let me explain, to go from knowing nothing to knowing a little is going from level 0 to level 1 for example. Well lets just say I am at a level 2 … I understand the basics and it bores me half to death reading about the basics or even writing blog posts about the basics.

I want to be writing either Level 2 blog posts (posts I have learnt about recently) or Level 3 blog posts. Posts that I have learnt by doing the research / gathering the data for the post.

Examples of Great Bloggers

Adsense Flippers – Justin does a rockin job at taking data that they collect, analysing it, coming to a conclusion and laying it out in a well written post. (I mention these guys too often … I swear they are not paying me though)

Seomoz – Want to see the best damn graphs collected in regards to all aspects of SEO, these are your guys.

Hubspot – Gathers a lot of data, again directly from users, giving them insights into trends in the marketing space.

Mr Dan Norris (who has been killing it all the over the place recently) wrote a guest post entitled … “Case Study: 13 Pre-Launch Traffic Strategies for Startups” where he talks about how guest posting is more effective if you talk about your own experiences, he saw a greater click through / conversion I believe because of doing so. (On a side note, I am planning to start a petition for him to grow back the beard. See here for bogan. US translation … redneck?).

What do you think? Agree? Completely disagree? Im happy to be wrong … if it happens often enough you get used to it.

My gripe is this … I know way too many smart people (way smarter than me), that write blog posts for beginners. Why!? Leave that to the less knowledgable / experienced! The internet needs less shit and more gold, Im just saying.

PS I have written a arse load of bad blog posts, and I will write a arse load more. Do as I say, not as I do.

PPS Sorry if the language offends you

The post How To Write Shit Blog Posts appeared first on Kaizenify.

1. Increased Productivity – We thought by us looking over their shoulder, we would be improving the amount of work getting done. Wrong! Firstly its pretty simple to install remote monitoring software (we currently use TimeDoctor.com), which I would argue works better then physically looking over their shoulder. Secondly, if you are hiring these sort of employees then you might want to look at your hiring techniques.
2. Lower Staff Turnover Rate – We thought having people working in the same area, they would develop relationships together and therefore prefer to stick around. This generally wasn’t the case, as we had multiple staff leave as soon as they were offered a position working from home.
3. Improved Line of Communication – Having the ability to walk up to somebody’s desk and train them / talk to them is definitely and advantage, however we found that 95% both us and the team would talk to each other via skype anyways! So why not just meet up once a month and talk through everything?

I honestly remember thinking that opening an office would change everything, like some sort of magic bullet that would bring the money / clients flowing through the door.

In fact opening an office perhaps was the worst decision we have made since moving to the Philippines. I know there are plenty of cases of foreigners moving to the Philippines and opening offices and being huge successes, but I am strongly of the opinion that most people do not need to open an office here in order to be successful. Particularly for people who are not inclined to management, like myself and Matt. I do not want to spend my day micro-managing staff, its just not my style.

I worked for an Australian guy here in Manila, helping him manage his staff for a few months and I am still not really sure where the benefits to the office he had were. What I noticed was that all the staff would still communicate via skype, even if they sat next to each other! They would all still sneak a look at facebook, or have a little nap or sit on their phones messaging their girlfriends. So what was the purpose of this office? Why not send them all home? I could see their being a real productivity drop and I could see the entire team being a lot happier with their working situation.

Infact, I spoke to most of the staff working for them and the minimal travel time for these guys was an hour each way! Minimal! Imagine how much happier the team would be saving themselves 2 hours a day!

Examples of Businesses Succeeding Without An Office

Adsense Flippers – Joe and Justin are buddies of ours and we have seen first hand how they have built an adsense empire from the Philippines with staff that work from home. They currently run a team of around 10 I believe.

James Schramko – This guy always comes to mind when I think of someone who has built a remote staff empire! Don’t quote me on this but I believe he has a team of over 50 working for him mostly here in the Philippines! Great example of someone killing it with the work from home model. Not to mention his a fellow Aussie

Kissmetrics – A big player in the online analytics space, their entire team work from remote locations and it does not seem to have affected them in any way.

TropicalMBA – The number 1 advocate of remote location / location independent business setup. Dan & Ian have managed to start a million dollar ecommerce empire along with some other great projects.

Eben Pagan – Another guy running a multi-million dollar empire, with over 50 staff all working for home.

When Is An Office Worth It?

It depends on the amount of revenue you are generating.

If you are churning out a million dollars in revenue, then an office is a much more justifiable option. The cost of an office would be a lot smaller percentage of your revenue. When you are a small startup, then the cost associated with starting an office is a lot more of your overall revenues for something that in today’s day and age I would argue plays a very little role in helping create value for your target market.

Anyone else out there that may running successful remote teams?

PS Our Filipino job site is starting to help quite a number of entrepreneurs find and set up remote teams for themselves

The post Does Owning An Office Give Your Business A Better Chance At Success? appeared first on Kaizenify.

“You being a technical guy and myself not being one, how would you suggest I go about hiring a technical lead for my next project?”

What he said next was both simple and in-genius that I thought I should share it on the blog as I am sure I will not be the only person to not think of this.

He said something along the lines of …

You can hire most Filipinos for a much smaller amount whilst on ‘probationary period’. Put them on lets say 3 months for this period at 10,000 php ($220 USD) as opposed to 30,000 or 40,000 ($880 USD) they would usually be on. This is common practice here and most Filipinos will not mind.

The added benefit of course is that gives extra incentive for them to impress!

Of course if they are a good employee during that time, then be sure not to screw them around and bump them up to what they deserve. Always treat your staff well

However, if they have not met your expectations then you can let them go before the probation period is up, without being a huge burden / risk on your business. You were very clear from the start and set out expectations so at least you were fair.

The guys went on to tell me about a person they knew here who was willing to take a third of the “usual” salary for a 12 month period! Now I think that is too long and a little cruel to be honest, but it does demonstrate the desire for work here and what Filipinos will do.

I also know a few nurses here and I have heard on multiple occasions that a lot of nurses work an entire year for free, to both get the experience and in hope of locking down a permanent job (which I assume are hard to come by).

This is something you could do whether you were living here in the Philippines or you were hiring them as virtual assistants / remote staff.

So keep that in mind during the hiring process and it could save you big time.

Ragde and Christian run a number of cool startups located here in Manila, check em out. The startup scene is definitely growing here in Manila and these guys are leading the way.

Some of their work …

PS We have had a number years experience with hiring / managing in the Philippines, so we created a service that helps small businesses Hire / Recruit Filipino Remote Staff through our service RemoteStaffRecruit.com.

PPS Fun fact … an eye infection can stop you boarding a flight! … I am stuck in Davao because I was not allowed to board a plane until my eye infection clears up.

PPPS Philippines immigration will not send documentation to its Manila branch hence the reason I had to fly to Davao myself! Only in the Philippines

The post Tip When Hiring Filipinos – Direct From A Philippines Startup appeared first on Kaizenify.

Now I have to be blunt, this is not a “starter article” on outsourcing. If you haven’t outsourced anything before you should probably start somwehere else.

So I assume that you have some kind of outsourcing experience.

In this article I will give you three advanced strategies for managing your outsourcing process. You can also yink of this as a basic outsourcing management framework.

When you start out with outsoucing you typically have some kind of project management system to track your projects or tasks. Perhaps you have also just used email for commicating with your staff. While email is a great tool for communication it can quickly become very hard to manage projects and tasks over time.

So a first quick tip could be to setup some kind of project management tool. Whether that is something like Basecamp that is hosted and is super simple to use, or something you install on your hosting account like PHPProjekt that can be installed with a one click installer on most hosting accounts doesn’t really matter too much.

The main idea here is that the projects and tasks is out of your email inbox and inside a system where you can see the history and match tasks with people who can do them.

But before we dive into the advanced outsourcing strategies we need to discuss why we’re outsourcing in the first place. Bare with me here, there will be a point later.

Objectives

Why is it that a small business would want to utilize outsourcing? Well depending on the size of the business that can be long list, but remember that we’re only talking about either start-ups or small businesses.

I’ve defined three main categories

• Save Time – You want to be able to use your own internal time for something more constructive.
• Save Money – You want to have something done in a country where it can be performed cheaper than in your own country.
• External Expertise – You want to buy some expertise that you don’t currently have in your own business.

The last one can be tricky since it’s notoriously hard to outsource tasks you do not know how to do yourself. As an example how would you instruct someone to do a task you did not know how to do yourself? And if that succeeded how would you be able to check the delivered quality if you did not know about the process?

But the first two, save money and save time are fairly self-explanatory.

Now the reason why I wanted to mention these objectives for outsourcing is that this is often where things go wrong.

Instead of doing a certain tasks yourself, you end up spending the same amount of time describing the tasks and managing the person/team that you’ve outsourced to. And then what have you saved? I’ve heard a lot of frustrated business owners saying that it would have been quicker to simply do the taks themselves.

You can also fall into the trap where the project or task will actually take more time to do for someone on the other side of the planet than for a person in your own country. This will therefore equal out the difference in price.

Specially in the IT business where I’ve spend a lot of time there is some kind of management belief in that you can just replace a developer in your own country with one from India and cut 70% of the cost. Problem is that the people making these decisions are management people with calculators and spreadsheets, not developers themselves and they very often fall into the trap of “not knowing what they’re outsourcing”. Sorry… just a quick rant, but in my experience, 4 out of 5 IT projects outsourcing ends up being a really bad experience.

So what are some of the comon pitfalls that you can experience as a small business owner wanting to utilize outsourcing successfully.

Pitfalls

• Micromanagement – You end up sending mails all day long and being on endless Skype calls even with just a couple of people. This results in you not having any time to focus on what you really should be focusing on, developing your business.
• Error Rate – Everything seems to come back incomplete or simply half done. You spend all your time doing quality assurance checks and emailing back and forward everytime to find yet another thing missing from the delivery.
• Scaling – You can have found a great setup where everything seem to work. This is typically something that has been built over a longer period after a lot of trial and error. But now you are having trouble scaling this business because it involves you to train new people and let them know about your business.

Well I’m glad that you made it this far, because these issues are the ones that my strategies in this article are addressing.

So let’s take a look at the first advanced strategy.

Process Automation

The most important take away from process automation is to start thinking in processes instead of tasks and projects. There are of course always one-off tasks but if you have people hire part time or full time and not just for a single project, then you should start thinking in processes.

Defining a process has the benefits that it’s

• Visible to everybody
• Optimizes quality in the delivered work as it is done the same way each time
• Easy to get new employees up to speed
• Can be tweaked and optimized over time as you get feedback from the use

So how can you create a work processes? Well there are a number of ways. Below are some of the different examples that I have used in the past.

• Checklists are probably the most simple thing to create. As someone does a task they have to follow this list. This most likely be done in a single page of text (formatted as a list)
• Step by step process is a bit more elaborate than a simple checklist. Here you typically describe each step of the process in details. This could span several pages and include images such as screenshots where appropriate.
• Screencast where you record your own screen while you are performing the given task. I use Screenflow because I’m on a mac but if you are on a pc you might want to look into Camtasia (although a little on the expensive side). Screencasts are also really great if you want to show a specific thing outside the process such as an error or similar. I use it all the time.
• Weekly schedules is another great thing you can do. I had one guy doing some search engine optimization working for me and he basically had some tasks that should be done each week. So I created a weekly schedule for him with entries each pointing to a step by step process description. One example was that in the beginning of each week he had to send this week’s keywords to an article writer, so there were process descriptions on how he got the keywords and how/who/when he should send them to the writer.

But where should all these documents/videos be stored? There are different places. The easist thing I’ve found is simply to store them in a Dropbox account where you create a “Business Processes” folder and share it with your employees.

I have experimented with creating a real intranet for my company and putting all the processes here, but the problem is that then I need to maintain an intranet and while it might look snappy and sound awesome to have an intranet, it’s mostly just a hazzle.

Most of the time I just upload videos to Youtube and mark the video as unlisted. It’s really easy to do directly from my screencasting application so I don’t need to go to Youtube and upload myself.

Decision Automation

This kind of automation is all about letting your employees think for themself. Yes I know they should be doing this already, but fact is most of the time they are simply doing what you are asking them.

But here we are talking about you empowering them to make their own decisions that might even cost you money. Now hold your horses, I’m not asking you to give them your credit card or anything. But one decision could be one that would take some time implementing for the employee and that would then cost you the time he or she spent doing it.

So there are two kinds of decision types that you can empower your employees with:

1. Money
2. Time

The whole idea about decision automation is that you set up some rules or limits that your employees can act within. We can describe the two different types of limits like this:

• Money limits – I did tell you not to give them your credit card, right? One example however could be the one that Tim Ferriss mentions in The 4-Hour Workweek where he says that his support team can make decision costing him up to $100 (later raised). So when a customer calls the support team and says that he hasn’t received a package, they can just send him a new one without involving Tim. I’m not in the physical product business, so I haven’t had to give these kinds of instructions, but you might need to.
• Time limits – If your employee experiences trouble, how long time can they spend on solving the problem before they need to notify or alert you? This could be setting a timespan on a given tasks like “you can spend 10-30 hours on this but alert me after 20 hours if you can see that you will need more than 30 hours” or simply tell your employee that they can spend up to X hours fixing problems or unforseen issues in regard to their job before alerting you. But if you do so, make sure that you can trust your employees, this is not a rule I would start out with without knowing my people really well.

Improvement Automation

So now you have your outsourced team running on tracks, but how do you improve and evolve your business?

I guess that you are mostly the person doing any business development in your company, right? But why not have a formal way of getting input from your outsourced team as well?

There are two main categories that I want to mention

1. Process Improvements, and
2. Business Ideas

The most obvious candidate for improvement is of course the processes that you’ve created. They are using them everyday so if something is unclear or difficult to follow, or if something could be done much easier, your guys (and gals :)) are the ones who can provide you input on it.

The second candidate for improvement is your business itself. It could be that a person on your team had an idea on how you could easily improve a product or perhaps bring it to a new market. So why not listen and better yet, have a formal strategy for how your team can contribute their own ides.

This last strategy can be quite hard to implment in practice. In some cultures employees are not used to saying or doing anything that lies outside the directions they have been given from their employer/boss. So I do not recommend doing this with a new team.

You need to create an atmosphere where you welcome new ideas and actively tell them that you do. Also if you create a “process” for contributing ideas or process improvements, you are also actively telling your team that it is expected of them.

Besides creating a process for improvements you should also always appriciate every idea you get. Even if you don’t end up implementing it or even liking it. If someone gets laughed or ridiculed at for bringing an idea to the table, they most likely won’t contribute with another idea. And it would be a damn shame if it was idea number two that would have doubled your business, right?

Summary and Stuff

So there you have it. If you are already doing some outsourcing and want to take the next step then you should consider implementing these strategies.

It’s not always easy, but once you get them running you will see that you will have much less management, higher quality and a happier team.

About the Author

Rasmus Lindgren is currently running a couple of lifestyle businesses that enable him work only a few months of the year. He spends the rest of the time with his family, writing a book, following crazy ass ideas and focusing on self-development.
You can find him over at his blog http://RetireMyAss.com

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