Hiring Process Made Hassle-Free With John Jonas of Onlinejobs PH

Atiba de Souza: Hey, everybody! Welcome to another episode of the Build Your Team show. I am your host, Atiba. And listen, today I've got somebody who — it's not hyperbole to say — helped to change my life and they helped to change my business life. Because of what this man has done, I've been able to hire globally, specifically in the Philippines, 20 people who are on my team.

And as always, Build Your Team is brought to you by Client Attraction Pros. Hey, it's time that you become the thought leader of your industry, and we're gonna help you do that and make it fast, easy, and fun.

Atiba de Souza: I wanna introduce you to him, John Jonas. Dude, welcome. It is so great to have you.

John Jonas: Thanks for having me, man. Yeah, I'm excited. 

Atiba de Souza: It's funny because when we started this show, part of it was helping people understand that you can hire globally, that you can hire from the Philippines and some of the process and that was some of the stuff I learned from you that we were sharing here.

So man, I want to kind of start there. How did this whole thing happen of OnlineJobs.ph?

John Jonas: I'm a terrible employee and that's the beginning of the story. The only job I've ever had out of college was eight months, and I just realized like, I hate this. I do not like working for someone else. It doesn't sit well with me.

And so during that job, like whenever I didn't have something to do, I would work on my own stuff. After about eight months, I had something going online that was making me a tiny bit of money. And I had some consulting work going on, and I just saw this opportunity to quit and I was 26 and I knew the older you get in life, the harder it becomes, right? And I went home to my wife and was like, "Hey, look, I think it's time. I'm gonna quit." And she was like, "You have six months to make money." And I was like, "Okay, I'll take it." And so I quit my job. I quit my nine to five job and started working 24/7, right? Because that's — that's how it is.

We just don't have any idea that when you go into business for yourself, you're gonna work all the time.

I And I thought, "Oh, I know I'm gonna build a business online and so everything's automated and I'll work very little." That's just not how it works.

So I started hiring people. I started hiring people locally and it doesn't work out cuz they were like, "Oh, you're making money online." And this is like, 2005 and in 2005, like nobody was making money online. And so people I was hiring were like, "Oh, you're making money. Oh, I can do this on my own." I tried it four times and they all quit.

Atiba de Souza: Oh, wow.

John Jonas: And then I hired some people in India, cuz that's what you did. You hire people in India cuz you've gotta be able to find someone great there cuz there's a billion people. That was a disaster. It's not that you can't find good people there. You can. But there's so much going on in the cultural divide.

It's just really difficult. So then I tried Upwork. Today it's Upwork. I tried Elance which then merged into Upwork later on.

Atiba de Souza: Yep.

John Jonas: And I thought, "Oh, this is it. I figured it out. I figured out outsourcing. I can like get some stuff off of my plate." I hired this guy to write a bunch of articles for me.

He writes 50 articles. I read the first couple of 'em. I check 'em. They're not plagiarized. It looks good. I pay him. And then this massive burden falls on me and I realize, "Oh —", like at Upwork, the whole business is based around turnover, like their whole model. That person has to get a job, complete that job, get a review so that other employers say you're good and so that you can get another higher paying job.

And that's how Upwork makes money because they then charge a 20% markup on what you pay them. And the more they charge, the more markup they get. And the burden that fell on me was like, "Oh, his job was to write these articles." And it turned out that like half of them were plagiarized, but I already paid him.

And then I had to go out and write the resource boxes and the headers and the links and submit 'em. And it was like, "Oh, I hated this crap." Right? So I had given up and I get this tip from a really, really high level business owner that I was talking to, and he said, "You know, when you're ready to start outsourcing some of this stuff, make sure you go to the Philippines with it."

And I was like, "Really? Like, huh?" And he said, "Yeah, you know", and he gave me some tips and he told me where I could hire someone and I didn't do it because it was just so questionable. I'd already had all these experiences. Now outsourcing sucks. It's a babysitting job. And he gave me someone I could hire, like I could just hire someone full-time.

And I didn't think I could keep someone busy full-time. I didn't want someone full-time. I didn't know if they could actually do good work. There was all kind of stuff. I didn't know if I could afford it. I wasn't making that much. And after a couple months I was finally like, "Dude, it doesn't matter. I have to do this. I have to try this because I can't keep doing what I'm doing. I can't keep working 60 hours a week. This sucks." So I hired this guy through this agency. It was the most liberating experience of my life.

Atiba de Souza: Wow.

John Jonas: His full-time jobs to do anything I asked him to do. He wasn't like talented at all.

He didn't really know anything. He just spoke English. But that process of the articles that I talked about, he was able to take that entire thing and do the entire process for me. And the next week he still worked for me. That's like such a big deal, especially for small business owners where turnover is like the worst thing possible.

So I hired this guy and then I realized after a couple months, like, "Oh, wow! He's like fully full-time busy." And I hire someone else. And so I hired someone else and my business starts growing and after a couple months, like I am on this mastermind group and people are started talking about this. They're like, "What are you doing? Like, how is this working so well for you? Why is this so good?" We met once a week and I found myself talking about it every single week. And I was like, "Guys, dude, I've explained this to you like 10 times now." And finally, I just decided, "I need to record this." I'm gonna record a big, long audio and just tell everything I knew, which everything I knew at that point was like 45 minutes long, right?

Now, I could go for like days about this. And I put that audio, I put it out there on my blog and it went crazy. Thousands of people were listening to it and I was like, "Well, I guess I better find something to sell." So I started selling something and started teaching it, and people had me on their webinars and then finally I was like, "Recruiting people sucks. Like finding someone in the Philippines sucks." This is 2008. It's been a couple years now and I think I had six people working for me in the Philippines full-time all through this agency. I could tell you a couple stories about agencies in general, but, and I was like, "I just wanna recruit someone on my own." They won't do it for me. They won't do a good job. I've had enough experiences now to know that an agency's incentive isn't to do a good job of recruiting for you. So I was like, "I think I could build this job board and get a couple hundred profiles into it so I could recruit someone myself."

And that was the thing. I was like solving my own problem, right? And so I went back to the agency and was like, "Hey, I wanna programmer." And had that programmer build online jobs, and it took us like six or eight months and I put it out there and we had a couple hundred profiles in the first month.

Atiba de Souza: Wow.

John Jonas: Which was like so sweet. I could now recruit whoever I wanted, right? I mean, I had a couple hundred people to recruit from which is a big deal.

Atiba de Souza: Right, right.

John Jonas: Today, it's over 2 million people and we've had half a million employer. We'll pass half a million employers this year using it.

Atiba de Souza: Amazing.

John Jonas: And it just exploded, and I had no idea, I was just solving my own problem. There's the big long story of online jobs and like my entrepreneurial journey for it.

Atiba de Souza: Well, that's absolutely beautiful because that's how so many of us who are business owners how it started, right? We had a problem and what was offered in the marketplace was not a good enough solution, and we figured, we could find a way to make this work better, or we found a way, and then other people said, "I want that too." And therein became our business.

And now over 2 million people that you have in your database, half a million employers. Absolutely amazing! Now you touched on a bunch of stuff in there that we want to go back to and kind of really dive into some more. And I'm actually gonna start at the end and work backwards if that's okay.

So you talked about the agency that you hired, and you said you've got a bunch of agency stories, but the key phrase that you made — and I may paraphrase it a little bit — is agencies don't care about doing a good job for you and finding someone great for you. And maybe I'm paraphrasing that just a little bit there, but tell me why? Why do you believe that is that caused you to create online jobs and then how does online jobs then start to help you solve that problem?

John Jonas: So people listening to this aren't gonna like what I'm about to say. But the problem is the employer is the problem.

So usually the worker is awesome. It doesn't matter who they find, they're good. And this is why we go to the Philippines, like your chances of finding someone is just so much higher than other places.

Atiba de Souza: Yeah.

John Jonas: The problem isn't the worker. When it doesn't work out, it's the employer. And we see this, and I know this because I see both sides. And so as an agency, well, when you go out to recruit someone, you have a new client, a new employer, you go find someone. Well, it doesn't really matter who you find. You just need to find out if this employer good or not?

Atiba de Souza: Yeah.

John Jonas: That was the problem. So like, this agency came to me and I went to the agency and they said, "Do you want a webmaster or a programmer?" I was like, "I want a content writer." They're like, "Do you want a webmaster or a programmer?" Because they found the most success with employers who wanted a webmaster or a programmer.

That was it, right? So that's all they did. That's part of the issue with agency is that the employer is actually the problem. And so like when something doesn't work out, employers, when you didn't do the recruiting, you're really quick to say, "Oh, this person sucks." Right?

But when you did the recruiting, you know this person doesn't suck. And like, "I did a really good job of recruiting", or, you know, "I did a crappy job of recruiting."

Atiba de Souza: Exactly.

John Jonas: And so maybe they do suck, but that's my fault because I didn't do a very good job of recruiting. Right? That's what online jobs does. Number one, it puts the honors on you, the business owner to do to the recruiting, because we figured out stuff works out way better when you recruit yourself. And I didn't know this when I started it, but you're not hiring a skill, which is what so many people think. You're just hiring a skill, right? You're not hiring a skill. You're hiring a person.

Atiba de Souza: Yes.

John Jonas: And just to illustrate that, the first person I hired from that agency still works for me today. That was 2005. He still works for me today, right? And I have people from 2006 and 2007 and 2009, and 2011 and 2012, they all still work for me, right? And that's part of the culture of the Philippines, which makes this so amazing.

They're super duper loyal. And so as an employer, you're hiring a person with a personality, not just a skill. And so if you have someone else doing that recruiting for you, well, they're just hiring a skill.

Atiba de Souza: Yeah, exactly.

John Jonas: And they don't care, and not only do they not care, they're just trying to figure out if you're a good employer.

Atiba de Souza: Right.

John Jonas: So when you do the recruiting yourself, you're much more likely to find someone compatible with you. You're much more likely to find someone that's gonna stick around long term. You're likely to find good skills and personality which really matters.

Atiba de Souza: Yeah. You know, one of the things, John, that we talk about here a lot on this channel. It's amazing how often it comes up is hire for fit first. Right? Which gets into the personality because if their personality and your personality don't fit with your culture, it's not gonna work out. No. And even if they are skilled, right? Because you're just not gonna like them and it's just gonna create a bad situation. Would you agree with that? Have you seen that?

John Jonas: I've done it myself a couple times where like, "Oh, this is the right person. I see other skills. This is so good." And I just hired them. Like one of the first people I found. And then every email I get for them for a couple years just makes me cringe. That's so terrible. It just puts this burden on me that I don't need and I don't want.

And then in the end they're also feeling the same thing. It just doesn't work out. And then it's like, "Oh, that sucked for two years." And I gotta go find someone else. If I would've just done a good job in the first place, it would've been fine. So, yeah, you're hiring a person.

Atiba de Souza: Yeah. So at this juncture, because of the success that we've had with OnlineJobs.ph. I've sent at least 20 other entrepreneurs to OnlineJobs.ph who had never heard of OnlineJobs.ph. Okay? And bar none, they come back with, "Okay, this is great, but where do I start? So I'm going to do this recruiting on my own. I'm not using an agency. But where do I start?" What do you say to them?

John Jonas: I'm gonna give a couple things that people can start with, like if you're short on time or whatever. So OFSGuide.com, I will answer the top nine questions. I'm gonna cover some of those just not in as much detail. So start to finish like how I find someone great.

I recorded all of that at OneVAAway.com. It's like my step-by-step process for you to find someone amazing. That's OneVAAway.com. That one, I guarantee you find someone greater, I'll give you your money back. OFSGuide.com is free. There's nothing there. OneVAAway.com is a paid thing, and I guarantee you find someone great.

Okay, so let me tell you where to start now. I'm gonna actually tell you. So for me, here are the first steps. First, you're going to hire someone that to do something you know how to do. And that's the beginning. That's the first piece. Like the worst advice I ever hear, which I hear it all the time is, stick with what you're good at and outsource the rest.

Like, dude, that's such terrible advice. Like you're really good at social media marketing. That's the dumbest thing you could be doing is social media marketing. Like what? I'm a good programmer. Should I just stick with programming and like outsource the CEO? No, dude, that doesn't work, right? Someone else can do your social media marketing.

 You have to be the CEO. You wanna run a business, you gotta be a CEO. So you're gonna hire someone to do something you know how to do so you get some time back. Because every entrepreneur I know, or small business owner I know is strapped.

Atiba de Souza: Yep.

John Jonas: Okay, so once you decide on that thing that you're gonna hire for, now, the rest of the process becomes really easy.

You know what skills you're looking for. You know how to interview someone. You know what the first task looks like. You know how to give instructions for it. You know how to give feedback. You know what results look like. You know? Right? Okay, so here's what I do. Go to OnlineJobs.ph and search for the skill, the role that you're looking for.

Search some skills, and just look at 10 or 20 or 30 profiles. It's really, really eye-opening. The first time when you do this, you're gonna see like, "Oh my gosh, this person not only has social media skills, but they also have some design skills. Oh, that's really cool. Oh, I didn't realize that there's 2 million people here. Every one of 'em speaks English." English is a primary language and not everyone's English is perfect, but wow, this guy's English is really perfect, flawless. So, go look at some profiles. You're also gonna see how much they're looking to make. So then you have a really good idea for your skill that you're looking for of what you should be paying.

You're gonna get a range, and you're gonna find people that are asking for $400 a month. You're gonna find people that are asking for a thousand dollars a month. And you have like low end and you have high end, and you have part-time and you have full-time. Well, as you look at these, you're gonna get a really, really good idea.

The next step is post a job. And that's super simple. Job title which is your role. Job description, write a few things about it. Don't go overly detailed into it, you don't need to. Salary amount, your email, skills you're looking for. Like super, super simple. Post your job. You're gonna start getting applicants like probably within a couple hours, maybe within a couple minutes, depending on when you post it.

If you post it at six o'clock at night, it's gonna be within a couple minutes, you're gonna have applicants.

Our typical job post gets 54 applications, which is too much. It's too many to handle. We cap it at 200 because we've had people get like 3,000 applications in two days, so —

Atiba de Souza: And I appreciate the cap, by the way.

John Jonas: Yeah. Yeah. It's overwhelming for a lot of people.

Atiba de Souza: Yes.

John Jonas: Okay, so let me give you some advice then. I'm telling you where to start, right? So when you post this job, one of the things you should do is include a task in it, like something to tell you that they read your job post thoroughly and they're following instructions.

So that task for me, every single time is make the subject of your application something, something, something.

Atiba de Souza: Yes.

John Jonas: I'm recruiting a React JavaScript developer right now. So I said, "Make the title of your application, React-Your Name." And so any application that I get that doesn't say, "React-Their Name" in it, I just delete it instantly, right? Which is like half of the applications cuz people didn't read it. And they're just being dumb, right? So that just instantly tells you, "Okay, I should or shouldn't open this application." It just saves you a lot of time. So from there you can start interviewing people. Everybody wants to jump to a Skype interview or a Zoom interview.

I think that's a terrible idea. I interview people through email. I ask lots and lots of questions. This is a virtual relationship. I'm never gonna talk to my people on the phone after I hire them. In fact, the number of times I've talked to my people on the phone, I could count on both hands since 2005.

Atiba de Souza: Wow.

John Jonas: Yeah, I don't wanna do it. And that's partly my personality. I just don't wanna do it. So I'm gonna ask lots of questions over email. You're gonna get a really, really good sense of who this person is and how your working relationship is actually gonna work. Unless you insist on talking to them on the phone every day in which you have to work your schedule around their schedule, because they're on the other side of the world.

And that's hard. From there you get to negotiate salary. Like what their profile says isn't necessarily what you have to pay them. You could pay them less. You could pay them more. I've done both. I've paid less and I've paid more. And you negotiate working hours and you negotiate like paid time off and you negotiate holidays or you just ask them what they want for all of this stuff and you find like, "Oh wow, they're super reasonable and super affordable and I'm really excited to just get you started."

And you say, "Hey, when can you start?" And they'll be like, "Oh, I can start tomorrow, sir." You're like, "Holy crap, this was super easy. What?"

Atiba de Souza: Let's go.

John Jonas: Alright, yeah. Right? So that's like how do you get started. There you go.

Atiba de Souza: That's awesome. Very clear, very concise, and I appreciate that. There are a few things I appreciate in there too. I'm sure that you've read the book "The E-Myth Revisited." At some point in your illustrious career. One of the things that he talks about in that book is exactly where you started is that most of us as business owners — and we talk about it on this channel a lot too.

Most of us as business owners, we naturally want to hire for the things we don't want to do or we don't know how to do and that's the wrong first hire. Right? And so I love that you started there. I couldn't agree with you more on that. 

John Jonas: Okay, wait. Let me clarify. Let me clarify. Hire to do something that you know how to do. If you don't like doing it, that's even better, right?

Atiba de Souza: There you go.

John Jonas: So if you can get something off of your plate that you hate doing, man, that's like win, win, win, win. Right? Okay. Go on.

Atiba de Souza: Great clarification. So absolutely love that. We use animals. So for every single job that we have, we have responding the title with this animal. And so then we can code and we can see easily, "Okay, here are all the applicants for this job by animals." Love that too. And it does — you're so right. It saves so much time because before we started doing that, we spent an entire year going through every single applicant to realize, "You suck. You suck. Oh, you're good. You suck." Right?

John Jonas: We got something coming out that may be released. Actually, I know it's been released already before you release this podcast. It's been released on the worker side that is going to completely change this. It's gonna make this whole thing way easier for you and much better from their side.

Like, it should make this finding someone good. Knowing who to interview, way, way easier. So, anyway, it's coming very, very soon.

Atiba de Souza: Oh, y'all got that? We got a little nugget of a tease there. Right? All right, thank you for that. And lastly and this is something that I share with people all the time too. I have a six email policy. So if you apply and we like you, we're gonna go back and forth and you have to respond to us six times before you get a Zoom interview.

John Jonas: I love it.

Atiba de Souza: Okay? Because that way, like you said, we get to see how our interaction is, and we also get to see how good your English is too, because usually by the fourth email we can tell how you really communicate.

John Jonas: You know why? It's like super reasonable to have your friend help you edit your Online Jobs profile. And then when you get that first email from an employer, you're like so excited and you have your friend help you respond, right? And the second time you asking that friend again and the third time, well, now it's questionable.

And the fourth time, well, you gotta deal with it on your own and five and six and seven and eight, it all comes out, right? That's a big deal.

Atiba de Souza: Yes, absolutely. I couldn't agree with you more and I wasn't planning on going here, but since you brought that up, friends have changed. And where I'm going with this is we started seeing friends changed in the way of ChatGPT has become some people's friends.

John Jonas: Oh, boy.

Atiba de Souza: And we're starting to get responses that are so perfect that you're just like, "That's too perfect."

John Jonas: You're getting ChatGPT responses?

Atiba de Souza: Yes. And so what it has done for us is, it's caused us to change the questions that we're asking in the way that we're asking, because the thing that ChatGPT can't do is mimic expertise and experience, right? It can give you a little bit of expertise, but it really can't do both of 'em together. And so we've started asking questions that make you prove expertise and experience.

John Jonas: Tell me like what?

Atiba de Souza: So, for example, we may get someone who replies and we need someone to do great Excel, right? And they need to be able to pivot tables and if their response would be, "Oh my gosh, yeah. You know, all this stuff and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." Okay, great. But tell me about the problem that you solve at a particular client in the past and how you solved it and what exactly you did. Because ChatGPT can't do that.

John Jonas: Yeah. That's good. That's good stuff, man. I like it.

Atiba de Souza: Okay. It hasn't been prolific, but we've definitely seen a few of those. We were just like, "This is too good to be true." And then they don't respond. And you're like, "Yeah, it was too good to be true."

John Jonas: This is my process. I'll send 10, 12, 14 emails back and forth. No problem, right? It comes out.

Atiba de Souza: Yeah. The truth comes out. That's the key. We do have a mutual friend in Dennis Yu and Dennis said something when he was on my show the last time that I absolutely love. He said, "The deal here is you're not hiring anyone. What OnlineJobs.ph allows you to do is hire what really becomes the top 2% of the population for what it is that you want to do."

John Jonas: Yeah.

Atiba de Souza: Right?

John Jonas: We got 2 million profiles. Over 2 million profiles, which is 8% of the workforce in the Philippines. So there's a hundred million people in the Philippines, right? But of like 21 to 55, we're at like 8% of that workforce. And yeah, it really does. It lets you hire in the top percent by eliminating the rest of 'em. And the interview process really does that. This interview process, does that really, really well.

Atiba de Souza: Yeah. So that's awesome. So guys, if you're listening, you just heard from the man himself, the process. Now, you didn't just hear that, but he also sent you to two websites and I wanted to make sure that you got, OFSGuide.com which has lots of questions and answers for you. And then if you really want help walking through the process, John has created that in OneVAAway.com as well. 

John Jonas: Let me explain something. A lot of employers feel like this is a virtual assistant, it's a secretary. A lot of people, that's what they associate virtual assistant with. It's a secretary and they assume that someone oversees is just robotic. They can only follow basic instructions.

They can only do data entry tasks and that's not who I hire, and that's not who people hope to hire. So a few years ago I stopped using the word VA even though I had OneVAAway.com already. And I started calling them OFS, Online Filipino Specialists because that's who I hire. I have a really good team of programmers.

These guys are not virtual assistants. They're programmers. They're specialists. I have a really good user interface designer. He's not very good at graphic design, right? He's not good at logo design. I've tried to have him do both logo and graphic design. He sucks at it, but user interface design, he's really, really good at it.

 I have a couple girls who write my social media, like they're just good at social media.

Atiba de Souza: Yeah.

John Jonas: They're specialists, and so I call 'em OFS. And that's why OFSGuide.com and OFSTasks.com and in most of my communication, I'll call them OFS.

Atiba de Souza: Perfect. That's wonderful. And so that leads me to an interesting question as well. Because I know when you started, you hired someone from the agency and you had 'em do everything for you and you was doing all sorts of stuff. My experience has been I hire specialists.

So that's why I love OFS as well, right? Because I hire specialists and people say, "Why do you have a team that's so big?" Because everybody has their specialty. And if you are a video editor, I don't ask you to do graphic design unless that's what you do as well. And I don't ask you to write content because that's not what you do.

Right? Taking what you just said about taking the word assistant out of the equation and looking at specialists. Would you agree with that? If I'm going to hire and looking to post a job and bring in someone, am I looking for someone who can do a specific task or do I want someone who's just general?

John Jonas: Okay, so there are two situations here.

Atiba de Souza: Okay.

John Jonas: The first person I hired, he was a VA.

That guy knew nothing. He knew nothing. And he told me that later on. Like, "Man, when you hired me I was so scared I didn't know anything. And then you started teaching me stuff and it got better and better and better." Today he runs OnlineJobs.ph, right?

Atiba de Souza: Right.

John Jonas: So if this is your first hire, I don't care which of those two you hire. If you just need someone to take some stuff off of your plate that you can show them how to do, and they're simple things, hire a VA. It doesn't really matter. You don't have to have someone who's really specialized at logo design. Right?

Atiba de Souza: Right.

John Jonas: Or if that first task that you have that you're doing is transaction processing because you're in the mortgage industry or the real estate industry and you need someone to do transaction processing, then yeah, you probably want someone that already has some experience with it. Someone that knows what they're doing.

And there's lots of people like that on online jobs. It kind of depends on where you are. And I know a lot of people that they just have a bunch of stuff that needs to get done. And so it doesn't matter if that person already knows how, cuz you're gonna have to teach 'em your process in your business.

Atiba de Souza: Exactly. 

John Jonas: Just this morning I sent an email. So my son is in the Philippines, which is an odd situation, but he's been there for four months and he came to me last week for the first time and said, "Hey dad, I have someone who needs a job and this person's amazing." He meets people every day. All day long, he's meeting and talking to people and people all the time are like, "I need a job. I need a job." He's like, "Yeah, go apply on OnlineJobs.ph. But this guy, he was like, "No dad, this guy needs a job and he's legit." He didn't have any skills, and t his is the first time I've ever done this.

I sent an email to my email list, which is a hundred thousand people, and like 25% open the email. So this email get opened by like 25,000 people.

And I think I have like a hundred emails in my inbox saying I wanna hire him. I haven't really gotten to it yet today. So there's a lot of people that are hiring a general VA who doesn't know anything and then teaching them stuff about their business.

Atiba de Souza: Right.

John Jonas: And I'm not at that point right now. I don't need more general VAs. Right? I need specialists. And you're the same way. You need specialists. I'm sure you have a couple people that are like general like, "Oh, I need something done. I can ask you to do it." So there's both situations out there.

Atiba de Souza: Fantastic. All right. So as we bring this home, cuz we can go on, like, you and I could probably talk about this for another two days and not get bored. Okay. But as we bring this home, I've got really two questions for you and one, you've already answered this. I do want you just to repeat the answer.

And the first one is, what's the future of online work and virtual work? And then the next one, which you've answered already, is what's the best way for someone to get in touch with you and to start working with OFS?

John Jonas: I'm not super visionary. I never have been. I just solved a problem for myself. I didn't know this would explode. And so the future of online work, the reality is the world outsourcing has moved to the Philippines. When you get a call center now, you do not get India anymore, which was common 10 years ago.

You do not get it anymore. You always get the Philippines. You may not know that, but you're always getting the Philippines. That's part of the future is the Philippines, because they're just so westernized and the experience there is just better. Aside from that, COVID taught everybody that working from home was perfectly acceptable. And in the Philippines, that's even more so now than ever. Like, their internet is really, really good. In fact, one of my workers just wrote me a big, long email about internet options in the Philippines, and they told me that their internet at home is 400 megabits per second. Up until a couple months ago, mine was 400 megabits per second.

So at their house, they have that. And then she has a MacBook Pro and her husband has a MacBook Air. The future is like —

Atiba de Souza: Yeah.

John Jonas: Well, they're really talented and they speak perfect English and they are one fifth the cost. It's just really hard to say that more work is not going to go to the Philippines.

Okay, so how do you get in touch with me? So I don't do social media. I hate social media. If you look me up on social media, you can find me on all the platforms I think. I don't really know, but it's one of the people in the Philippines doing it for me.

And in fact, there's a quick story in and of itself. So like OnlineJobs.ph years ago, we found a page on Facebook, an OnlineJobs.ph page. That was like, "What the heck?" I've always said no to this from people who ask me because I don't wanna deal with it. And so I asked my team, "Hey, do you guys know?" This page has like a couple thousand followers or something.

Like, "Hey, who created this page on Facebook? Did any of you create this?" One of 'em was like, "Yeah, I did. I just thought online jobs should have a presence and I've been making posts." I guess there's a couple thousand people following it already and I didn't have anything to do with it. So Cool. And that's just like kind of —

Atiba de Souza: How it is.

John Jonas: — experience you'll often have in the Philippines is they want to go above and beyond what you're asking 'em to do. So if you go to social media and you ask for me, you're gonna get me. It won't be through me, but they will send it to me. They know to send it to me.

I'm available through email. Any of the sites that you've heard today, you're gonna get me at OnlineJobs.ph or at OneVAAway.com. If you use Contact Us, you're gonna get me right johnjonas.com. It'll come to me and I'll respond to you personally through email.

If you wanna get started, OneVAAway.com, it's so good. I get feedback every day from people saying, "Wow, this really changed. Thank you so much. I was able to hire someone amazing because of this, it worked so well." I've had people that have said, like, "I've been hiring for 12 years, and it was always kind of a struggle and after seeing this, this totally fixed it. Now, it's super, super easy." And I'm not saying my way's the best way or the only way, but —

Atiba de Souza: It's proven.

John Jonas: It's proven that it works. It works really, really well. So there you go.

Atiba de Souza: Fantastic. Well, John, I'm gonna end us today where I started with a thank you. And thank you for having an issue that you wanted to solve for yourself, and then turning around and helping so many of us solve it. I can tell you this through my story and the reincarnation of our business over the last couple of years. We wouldn't be where we are today accomplishing the things that we're accomplishing today without OnlineJobs.ph. And it's given us such a sense of fulfillment for how much we've been able to do. We helped the family who didn't have a stove buy a stove. That's a real felt need. We helped another, person in our team.

Her brother — they couldn't afford to send the brother to college. He's gone to college now. He's graduating. And we just have story after story after story. And none of those stories would've been possible if you hadn't done what you did all those years ago. So thank you, sir. And not just you, but your family because your wife gave you six months and honestly, if she hadn't given you that six months, none of this may have happened because we all know compressed time forces action, right?

And maybe it wouldn't have happened. Maybe it would've. But I want to thank you, your family, your children, for what you guys have done in the lives that you have changed. Thank you.

John Jonas: Thank you. Yeah, it's emotional for me. Every time I hear, "You're changing lives and it's so cool." And yeah, it's cool.

Atiba de Souza: Well, we're gonna end right there, John, and say thank you. That's it. Just thank you, man.