At Business Blueprint, we have a dedicated team here in Sydney and one in the Philippines. These dedicated staff members have enabled us to grow our business, help more people and expand our team even further. They are multi-talented, responsive and incredibly reliable. In fact, our founder and CEO Dale Beaumont recently travelled to Dumaguete City in the Philippines to visit our international team.
Below Dale shares with you his top five reasons why you need to build a virtual team. Click the play button to watch the full video now.
Here’s a breakdown of some benefits of hiring a virtual team:
1. Unprecedented Skills Shortages
Australia is experiencing unprecedented skills shortages across all industries and all professions. So if you live in Australia or New Zealand, and you’re running a business, you may be having a tough time finding staff right now. But in the Philippines, there’s an abundance of talent.
The Philippines is a country with over 100 million people and there are literally hundreds of thousands of people graduating from university every year. People that are young, speak great English, are highly skilled, and highly educated. In addition, many of them have degrees or double degrees, and they’re eager to work for Australian and Kiwi businesses.
So if you want to be able to find and hire great staff that can help you in your business right now, then the Philippines is a great place to start.
2. Increased Staff Retention
Are you experiencing a high employee turnover among your staff in Australia or New Zealand? A high employee turnover rate, the rate at which employees leave a business, creates a lot of inconsistency since you’ll need to rehire and retrain new people all the time. This may also affect the bottom line of your business.
To address this issue, you can hire a remote staff from the Philippines. Filipinos are loyal, especially if you’ll look after them and treat them well. At Business Blueprint, we have Filipino team members that have been with us for almost 10 years.
If you understand how to hire, recruit and manage really good virtual team members, that will massively improve your overall retention, and also improve the retention of your local staff. The majority of the reason why so many people leave is that they are forced to do things that they don’t want to do anymore, that are not exciting and interesting. So what you can do is create a system for those tasks and delegate it to your virtual team. This way your local staff can focus on the tasks that they love and what they do best.
3. Speed of Implementation
Having a dedicated team that is available to you all the time means you can get stuff done fast. For instance, if you’re working with a graphic designer that is working with an agency, they’re not normally just sitting around waiting for your instructions so they can do a task for you. But it might be three days or a week or two weeks before that task is going to be done.
On the other hand, if you build your own international team, all your team members are available whenever you need them. So it means you can do business at the speed of thought, which is awesome. Whether you need a graphic designer, website developer, or customer care assistant, you can fill any position in your team from the Philippines.
4. Lower Cost of Staff
Many business owners ask how much does it cost in order to hire a virtual assistant? This will depend greatly on the person’s level of skills and experience and also it will depend on the type of tasks that you’re getting them to do and what professional qualifications may be required. It can be anywhere from, say 8 dollars an hour at a low point to anywhere up to 20 or 30 dollars per hour at the high end, for people that are professionals in their fields.
For example, people that are certified accountants or people that make drafts, or people that are high-end video editors, then you’ll be looking at paying more professional rates. But, it’s still around one-tenth, maybe, one-seventh of what it is for employing a local staff member, most likely in your country.
Now, the average that we’re going to use is around about 6 to 8 dollars an hour. If we just have that number in your head, then you’re going to be pretty safe for a general virtual assistant. If you’re going to be hiring someone full-time to work in your business, that’s around 40 hours a week, 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, then you’re going to be looking at somewhere between about 600 dollars up to 1,000 dollars per month, depending on whether they’re working from home or they’re working from a serviced office.
5. Stop Things From Being Missed
As a business owner, you can only do so many things so when you get busy, a lot of stuff starts falling through the cracks. However, if you have a good virtual team, you can pass all of those tasks on to them. Having that extra capacity that is available to you on demand, just means that you are able to be a lot more productive and get more things done. Delegating these tasks also frees you up to devote yourself to bringing in more business or providing the specialist service which generates money for your business.
It’s also important to remember that once you have recruited your virtual assistant, it is important to provide them with the necessary training. By creating policies, procedures and systems, you will be able to show them once how to do something, share a document with the instructions and then hand over the responsibility.
Social Impact
Filipinos have very close family ties. When you employ someone here in the Philippines, generally they’re supporting anywhere from three to sometimes up to five other family members. And so by you growing your team here, you’re making a really positive impact on a country like the Philippines by providing Filipinos more employment and creating more wealth for themselves and their families.
There you have it! Six reasons why you want to start thinking about building your own international team. One of the best things I ever did was building my international team and now we’ve helped hundreds of other business owners to do the same and we’d love to help you too. We have some amazing training that goes through and shows you how to do this step by step. Simply visit our Training page here.
If you’re the type that prefers attending in-person events, you can come along to our New Rules of Business workshop where I discuss in detail how to find, hire and manage your virtual team. Claim your free tickets here.
