Andrew:	This course will teach you how to outsource effectively so you can scale your company inexpensively. It's led by Liam Martin, he's the co-founder of Time Doctor, what you see up on your screen. It helps you track your time, monitor your distractions and get more done.

I'll help facilitate. I'm Andrew Warner, founder of Mixergy.com We're proven founders, like Liam, where they teach.

Liam, can you describe the problem, where were you before you learned what you are about to teach our audience?

Liam:	Well, I was right out of grad school. I was teaching some courses at McGill University. I had started an online tutoring company with a couple of my buddies. After a year it had grown up to about a 100 tutors. I was working, at minimum, 12 hours a day. On a bad day I was working 18 hours a day.

I remember literally being up at 3:00 a.m. thinking to myself, "What am I doing to myself? I've got to be up at 8:00 the next morning to get back to work again. Literally getting four to five hours sleep at night minimum, no social life, no relationships, anything like that, just work.

I had a chip that I had gotten at the back of my tooth. I chipped one of my teeth from the stress. I went to the dentist, and I remember telling the dentist, "I got this chip in the back of my tooth. I need you to fill it up or solve the problem because I can't drink water. It's just killing my tooth." 

The dentist goes and takes a look and says, "Which one are you referring to? Because you chipped all your teeth." I was literally grinding my teeth apart. So that's pretty much where I was before I implemented the changes that hopefully you'll also be able to implement today.

Andrew:	Sometimes it takes some big problem like that to let us know that this isn't the way to live life. I used to be in this office, the very one that you see right here, till maybe 9:00 or 10:00 at night. People would leave around 6:00 and I would think, "Those guys are 'wusses'. They're not working hard enough. I'm going to clobber them."

Then what I discovered was I was kidding myself. Because people who were leaving earlier were actually going home and spending some time thinking. I saw their business progressing. Of course, I had done interviews of people who progressed way further by spending less time than I did. Then I started to ask them, "What were you doing differently?"

I learned, they're just learning how to pass their work on to others, they're learning how to organize their projects so that they can hand them off to others. That's partially, that is what you're going to be teaching us today. What happened to you after you learned what you're about to teach our audience?

Liam:	Well, I went from 12 to 18-hour days to now 20-hour weeks. I set up a 20-hour workweek and I can track that down to the minute through the software that we're working on. But 20-hour work weeks are a complete 360-spin from what I was doing before, where I was probably doing a 60-hour work week. 

I remember, actually, about a year or two ago, after I had started to get all of these processes in place and I had started to delegate what I was doing to the other employees within the company, I took a short, little vacation out to Montreal. 

I remember, literally, over the weekend checking my merchant accounts and seeing that I was making about $4,000 to $5,000 over that entire weekend. It was just literally checking in five minutes, "Oh, I made a lot of money today. Cool." The next day, check in, "Oh, cool. I made some more money. Thanks a lot."

Usually, when you make a sale, particularly in the tutoring industry, and you've got to find the tutor, you've got to interview the student, you've got to setup all of their tax information, you've got to be able set up all of the transactional information, all that kind of stuff. It was all handled automatically for me. That felt incredibly powerful.

Andrew:	Liam, that's the part I'm especially excited about. If this was just about how to outsource so you can have more time to sit on the beach, how to outsource so that you can go and have better lunches and dinners it wouldn't be for me. But if we're talking about how to outsource so that the business runs more efficiently and it grows while we're taking some time away. And that it gives us time to think about were we're going with this, why did we launch this company in the first place then you've got me. Now I'm excited. 

I know that it's worked that way for you and that's why I asked you and I think I was more persistent with you then I was with most other people who came to lead courses here because I said I see a little bit of how much this helps. Liam, come here and teach me so I can get even more and of course let my audience do the same. 

All right. You've got me excited as you can see, I'm talking a little bit faster because I am getting excited. Take me to the first tactic. I don't want to just be empty excitement here, I want to actually be useful and I want people to see results at the end of this course, so let's get to specifics. What's the first tactic? 

Liam:	So the first tactic is going to be doing an audit of your company. Doing an audit of the top time wasters. What is dominating your time the most? It's going to be different for every particular person that engages in whatever they're doing. For me I would say email is a big one, search engine optimization used to be big one and then customer service used to be a big one, so those were my personal three that I started with. At this point I've actually gone a lot further into the business, but I personally suggest that people concentrate on the top three things. I remember I was running this tutoring company. 

The biggest problem that I had was customer service, I absolutely hated customer service. I think anyone that runs a business right now could possibly agree with me on that one. Dealing with angry customers is never a happy situation. I remember we used to work a lot with pre-med students and pre-med students are very demanding, but they pay you a lot of money. It's very easy to have a pre-med student pay you 3, 4, 5 thousand dollars a month in tutoring to be able to manage them through all their prerequisites, which they have to get A's on. 

I had one pre-med student send me an email or jump on Skype with me and said, well my tutor has said he spent 12 hours with me this week and we spent 6 hours if it was a minute more. What you have to do is then go back to the tutor and you have to ask the tutor, did this actually happen, and the tutor says, no of course not, this kid is just being an asshole. You have to go back to the original student and say, you know what, I'm just going to give you an extra 6 hours or I'm going to refund you for those 6 hours and then I also had to pay my original tutor because I wanted to keep my employee happy. 

So I was losing on both ends. I remember for me, I just sat there and I had one of those moments of, what the hell am I doing with this? I just lost money. I worked for 4 hours and I have less money now than I had 4 hours ago. So I was thinking to myself, OK, what can I do to really change this? I started to look into outsourcing and I started to audit my time and be able to say to myself, OK, what are my biggest time sucks and how can I then start to delegate those time sucks away from me so I can stop working from within the business and start working on the business so that I can start to build it up instead of working from within it and literally losing money with shitty students. 

Andrew:	All right. Let's take a look at that. Do you want to show us how you did that? The document that you were going to show us, is that related to this? 

Liam:	Yeah, so here's an example of one of the process guides that I put together right at the beginning. I grabbed this one so I wanted to show you how it started at the very beginning and I think this a great sort of a minimum viably productive type of work to do whenever you want to sit down and say to yourself, OK, how can I process out a particular task? What I always do is I write out a list. I say step one, step two, step three, step four and just go along and then I have these extra notes at the bottom.

Andrew:	I'm sorry, just one second. I just want to make sure that I'm following up until this point. So what you're saying is, the first step is to write down the top three things that take the most time. Be selfish, don't feel that you have to hold back. If email is taking too much time, write email. If it's customer service as it was for you, write down customer service. Search engine optimization, write that down. All those things that you think you're superman and only you can handle, write them down and then the next step is to start organizing the steps that you take to handle them so that later on you can hand them over to someone else, right? 

Liam:	Correct. Yes. So, you want to be . . . 

Andrew:	OK. So any one that our audience, I'm sorry, go ahead?

Liam:	Yeah, you want to be able to write those things out and then you want to be able to start to figure out what you do on those particular tasks. 

Andrew:	OK.

Liam:	Now I mean, if you just write down customer service that could turn into 65 text guides very easily. You're going to have to get into specifics later and I will get into specifics later but if you're just saying lets say writing a blog post as an example. That could be put together in two or three very short text guides, the steps that you take, and then you could have that as a system that you could then give to someone else so that can could do it. 

Andrew:	I see. 

Liam:	The difference between remote work or remote workers and people in your own office. I only have one person that works with me personally, everyone else is remote. It is a significant challenge to overcome and if someone has never done remote work or has a brick and mortar business right now where they already have employees that they talk to on a daily basis. It is hard to get over that psychological jump and the biggest one is if you have Jimmy that is right next to you and Jimmy isn't doing the right job. You can go right over to Jimmy and say, oh here is how you do it and you can show him right away. 

With a remote worker, Jimmy is ten thousand miles away. Jimmy is not in the office. So you have to be able to create that same process of going over to Jimmy and saying oh yeah I can show you exactly how to do this. You have to be able to create that in a digital living organic document that you can give to virtual Jimmy so that he can do it.

Andrew:	OK. All right, so take me through this document that you created, I'll follow along. 

Liam:	I will just give you a quick run down of the philosophy behind it and then we can get into more specifics down the road. This is a basic text document that I put together. I have a link to a drop box link of an actual video that the employee can download. Which is me going through this entire text guide. So not only do I have a text guide but I also have a video of myself with some screen flow so the employee can see step by step exactly what I am doing. You say a picture is worth a thousand words. I think the video is worth 10 million literally. 

So you say step 1, step 2, step 3. So, I say important please read the entire task and watch the attached tutorial before beginning the task. I give a little rundown of why this is important. What they will be doing on this particular task, today you will be printing products from one's shopping cart. Then we go onto the actual steps. 

One important thing that you can see right here, which I don't see pretty much anybody doing, and it is so simple is your seeing this extra text. You're seeing one in English and then another version in Tagalog. The reason we have put it in Tagalog as well is because the people that were doing this particular task were from the Philippines and their first language is Tagalog. Why would I not offer them another version in their own language because they will be able to understand that process much faster if ...

Andrew:	Who does that for you?

Liam:	This cost me probably a buck.

Andrew:	The translation?

Liam:	Yeah, so I have one of my employees from the Philippines, I just give them all these text guides and I say, there is a new one to translate once we have complete the process. I don't have any quantitative data but based off my qualitative data looking at the English versions versus the Tagalog versions. I would say this improves process by around 20 to 25 percent. It is a huge jump in productivity because even though people from the Philippines have excellent English, their first language is Tagalog if they are anywhere but Cebu which they speak a different language in that city. The entire country speaks this one language and their doing business with another language, but if you give them their home language they are able to understand that information much clearer than if you are communicating in...

Andrew:	And you're right, I have never seen anyone else do that, I haven't even thought to do that. 

Liam:	And it's so cheap. If I can translate something for a dollar and it increases productivity by 20 percent on that particular task then I am going to do that for everything. I try to keep everything to one page. As you can see here it is literally a one page step by step guide and then at the bottom I have notes. I will fill in these notes later. One shopping cart login I removed all this information. Login with the admin password, putting in the password, the product name is, the SKU number, the price, all of that information you just want to be able put into your process guide with individual information at the bottom so that you can very quickly jump into those notes and change them around if you need to, but the core process, i.e., the five steps should be something that just, you figure it out once and it works every single time.

Andrew:	Got it. All right, that makes a lot of sense. I imagine, in fact I know I've seen it myself, when I even create these step-by-step guides I start to find steps that I thought were essential, but are really useless. I'd cut them out or I'd find ways to shorten up steps because I find that, boy, it's going to be really tough to explain this. No, there's a way to do this that maybe will get me 90% of the result that I'm looking for but with only 10% of the effort. Screw that. I'll simplify it and get rid of that perfect way of doing things just so I can pass it to someone else. Have you found that too? 

Liam:	Absolutely. I think that when you actually set one of these guides up it's an amazing experiences for yourself because you've never really done something like this before. If you've done this task 500 times, the first time you did it, it maybe took you six hours, but the 500th time it's taken you ten minutes, but you forget all of the little niceties, all the details in that particular task. 

When you have to put it down on paper like this, and later I'm going to show you, test it with your employees, there's some huge ah-ha moments that pop up, to be able to say, oh my God, I can't believe I was doing it this way. I could've done it so more efficiently if I literally just changed one or two things.

Andrew:	All right. What's next for us? Now you've got me really psyched. 

Liam:	So, the next one is you want to build a set of instructions. This is a basic philosophy of those set of instructions, but the set of the instructions that I have, they follow four basic . . . 

Andrew:	Liam, we lost your connection there for a moment. You were saying the instructions that you have, have what? 

Liam:	So you set up these instructions and they're based off a philosophy that I have called the four Ds. 

Andrew:	OK.

Liam:	So that's discover, design, deploy and debug. So the first one, discover, you want to be able to understand the process and figure out the people who built that process. So whether that's you as an individual, as the entrepreneur, or whether you have a few people in your shop and you want to be able to figure out what their process is, sit down with them and find out what they're doing. Figure out why they decided to do this or that. You want to be able to discover the process.

I call it discover the history of the process. You have a particular process that has been [??] something like that, you'll see a lot of businesses just sort of do things a certain way, but if you look at the history of the process you'll find that a certain thing was done a certain way because the first guy that came up with the idea decided to do it that way. It's incredibly inefficient, but that's just the way they're always done it, so that's the way that they're doing it. 

By understanding the history of the process you're able to go in there and say OK, do I really need all of these things? What is the crucial deliverable that I'm trying to pull out of this? Is what they have in place right now producing that crucial deliverable? The second one is design, which is literally just build the process and really do it based off of what you've learned. I use, and we'll be getting into this a little bit later, but you want to be able to go over it three times. 

You want to be able to use what I call the rule of three, which is literally the first time you do something you shouldn't do it for the purposes of process design, the second time that you should do it you should think about processing it and then the third time you should definitely process it. The reason why I talk about that is if you've done something 50 times you forget the little details that work into it, but if you've done something the third time you still have the details from the first time that you've done it, but it's not the 50th time, so you'll produce a process guide that's really, really good, that everyone will understand and you'll be able to give that to your team. They'll be able to understand it very easily. 

So, I mean, the fourth step is deploy, and that's where you take your process, and you give it to your people, and you literally tell your people, "OK. Check out this process guide, and tell me what's wrong with it." I usually ask for their top three things that they don't understand. And {??} because no one builds a perfect process the first time. That does not happen. So, I want to get that input from the employees that are actually going to be using this process, and I want them to give me that {??} back. 

And then the third one is debug, which in essence just means just repeat steps one to three. So, the discover, design, deploy process. So once you've gotten that input back, rebuild your process again, and do it until you no longer need the debug stage, until the employees are saying, "Yes, this is good. There's nothing else that's really all that wrong with it." 

Andrew:	I got it. OK. So I've been writing down notes on this. Discover how it's done right now. Design the how-to guide for it. Deploy, which means ask people for three things that they don't understand about it. And then debug, meaning go back and discover how it's done again using the new system, redesign it, redeploy it so you can get more feedback and keep improving it. That's the process.

Liam:	Yep. And the most that I've gone through those four D's has been three times. Usually a second run through these steps is usually all you'll need to be able to produce something that will stick in your company forever, for years.

Andrew:	OK.

Liam:	So one example of that, which is really interesting for me is one of the biggest time-sucks for people is email. And Google Apps has come up, and I'm sure a lot of your customers use Google Apps. I know that when we've surveyed our users, a majority of them use Google Apps. So the way that I solve that problem is there's a great little application to set up mail delegation. I don't know if you've seen this before. Maybe this is new to you as well, Andrew. 

Andrew:	I haven't. Let's see it.

Liam:	This has saved me literally, I would say, it's cut about a third off of my email time, and it's free which is great. So setting up email delegation in Google Apps, if you have an assistant that's your virtual assistant or your personal assistant, they can actually access your email account through your email account. And they can respond to messages, but the signature is different. So if you were my assistant, the signature would be, "Liam Martin response by Andrew Warner." So you automatically have that filtering process, and the second thing which is really interesting is your personal assistant has access to everything that you do. You don't have to give them any passwords to be able to give them access. . .

Andrew:	Can you show us on your screen how you do this? Do you have a visual for that?

Liam:	Literally, if you just Google, "set up mail delegation through Google" you'll be able to get access to it. I was trying to get in touch with my personal assistant this morning to crack it open, because I don't have her access codes. But she is very easily able to jump [??], and the video shows you from beginning to end how the entire process worked. I just show up in the morning [??] that's gone through my inbox. So she's kind of acting as a second brain, which is beautiful when I get sick, or I get, heavens forbid, hit by a bus or something like that, and I'm in the hospital. She can completely take over instantaneously. She can respond to emails saying, "Liam is sick. I can solve this problem for you here, or I can solve that problem for you there."

Andrew:	OK.

Liam:	So it's a beautiful system. I know for me, I've been doing this for a few years. I remember I had one particular example. I mean there will be problems that happen through process design, and I'm sure that you have a couple other examples in your course. I know that I've looked through your courses, and you have other examples of people that do excellent process. But for people that are going to start this particular process of building up your company this way, things will go wrong. I have a personal example of something that just. . . I remember having a nervous breakdown about this. 

Andrew:	Can you keep up that Google web page up on the screen? I want people to see the URL, and maybe Andrea can copy and paste it into the program notes so that people can go directly to it.

Liam:	OK.

Andrew:	I mean the web browser window, the support.google.com/ et cetera.

Liam:	Yeah. I'm on there right now. 

Andrew:	OK. Sorry. So, you're starting to tell us a painful story before I interrupted you with that.

Liam:	Yeah. So, what I'm going to tell people is things will go wrong, and you have to accept that things will go wrong. I kind of tell people when I consult for them on outsourcing, explosions will happen. One large explosion for me is I had given access where I decided to start outsourcing the most crucial piece of my business which are my bank accounts and my refunds and my merchant account. 

So, that is a big, big step because I literally gave the keys to the castle to my main assistant, and she had access to all the merchant accounts, the bank accounts, the PayPal accounts, all that kind of stuff. I built up a process for how to refund a particular student, and I had one student that was with me for eight months. She was a great student, perfect customer, and then on the ninth month it was the summer, so she actually dropped. It was the summer, she was no longer needing the tutoring, and she was still charged because she didn't put her account on pause.

She e-mailed me and she said, I was charged for this. Can you refund me a thousand bucks? I said, no problem. I'll go in there, pause your account, and you can restart in September. So, there were two buttons on my merchant account. There's refunds, and there's refunds for a certain dollar amount. I didn't put the video together. As I told you before, a video is worth a million words. I didn't put the video together, so I gave this task to my assistant, and my assistant clicked on the refund button and refunded her $9,000 instead of the $1,000.

That was a nervous breakdown day for me because I had already paid the tutor. Everything was squared away. The money was in my pocket, and then all of a sudden I have to go back to this student and say, "Oh, so I refunded you nine grand. Can you possibly give me eight of that back?"

When I say explosions will happen, explosions will happen, and you have to be able to accept them and roll with them. I would test small. That was a stupid example. I should have actually had her refund much smaller amounts or deal with much smaller students before moving up to the larger ones. I remember that day I was as close to hyperventilating as you possibly could because that was at the beginning of my business, and we'd only done about 150 grand in sales. When you lose nine grand of 150 grand in sales, that's a huge chunk of your bottom line. 

Andrew:	I'm glad you talk about the mistakes that happen along the way because I don't want people who go through this process have an issue come up - leave that dialogue box up on the screen, I want to ask you about that in a moment. It's gone. But when issues come up, I don't want people to think, you see, this is why you should never hand off work to someone else. You see, this is why nothing gets done unless the boss does it himself. 

No, the thing we should be saying to ourselves is you see, this is part of the process. It happened to Liam. You don't freak out. You'll figure out a way. Liam, did you get your money back? Did you get the $8,000.

Liam:	I certainly did, actually. 

Andrew:	You did.

Liam:	And not only that, she continued on with us for an entire time of the year. So, she did another eight months with us. 

Andrew:	All right. And frankly, even if she didn't, I believe people are good. I believe that she saw that you treated her well, and, of course, she was going to treat you well. But it's a possibility that she wouldn't have given you your money back. It still doesn't mean you have to give up on the whole process. Mistakes are going to happen. Issues are going to come up. You have to just keep sticking with it. 

All right. I'm going to ask you about that dialogue box later on because one of the things that I like about you is how committed you are to time management. I even like that you have these alerts go up on your screen to make sure that you stay productive. 

Liam:	Right.

Andrew:	I want to ask you about that. Let's keep on going here to make sure that we go through all of these tactics for the audience. What's next?

Liam:	Next step is that you're going to give these instructions, i.e. the document you've created, and you're going to give it to your staff. This is really the testing process. As I said before, that's the deploy process where you're going to give that out to your staff, and then you're going to ask your staff what's wrong with it. Tell me what's wrong, please. Tell me why I'm a failure in process design. And they will tell you very quickly. If you don't have other employees at this stage, if you're just a lone entrepreneur, go to your friends. I'm sure you have business associates, people in your business network. You can literally give them these process guides and you can say, hey, I'm trying to perfect this particular process, can you quickly take a look at this and tell me what's wrong? 

And I still do that, actually, I send it out to a few business buddies of mine and I'll get hilarious multi-paragraph responses saying, you look like an idiot on this video. You should have some cool music in the back ground. All these type of things. So, just send it out, get input. The more input you have, the more information you have the better process you'll be able to create at the end of the day. 

So, the way that I actually do it is I use this particular system and I have what's called The Virtual Process Training website that we use, or we used with my last company. We don't quite use it now, but it's a little membership site and it has all the process guides that have happened in the company. So, Paint Leaves Generation, the V-8 introductory training, website development, leaf generation, customer service, search engine optimization, paper click management. All those types of things. They're all in there and then they can literally just click on a particular video. 

So, here's one as an example, on Google Apps calendar integration and they can play the video directly on the membership site and then they can download the text guide. So, that's the way that we put the company together. It's really important to be able to get this input back from the people when you start this process. So, as an example, I was consulting for a buddy of mine, Sammy, and Sam is, he runs a company of I'd say about, I think he has a dozen people right now that are all remote and when he was starting off this process he went off to, I was telling him about process stuff and how he should be putting this out there and giving it to his employees to be able to get input back. And he wasn't really doing the input stage. So, he was building these process guides and he thought that he was a genius, you know, and you will think that you're a genius when you're putting this together. 

You'll be like, oh yeah, this is exactly the way that I want to be able to do it. It's perfect and it's going to be fantastic when I give this to the staff. So, he was getting almost nothing back from his people. He was getting a lot of confused looks, a product that he didn't want, sort of a deliverable that he didn't want. So, then I started asking him, you know, have you gotten input back? No, I haven't really done that yet, or you know, he was really kind of stand-offish about the issue. So then I went to go and speak to his employees and one of these text guides that he was putting together, these process guides, was on installing WordPress onto a server and getting a domain and all that kind of stuff. And I literally, you know, I was talking to these employees and the response that I got from one of them was, well I don't know exactly what WordPress is.

Andrew:	Oh, I see.

Liam:	So, you see, everything that you take for granted.

Andrew:	Right, right, we assume that people understand the software that we're using. We assume that they understand the end result of what they're going to be creating. But often they don't even know the programs. They don't understand the end result. Can you tell me a little bit about what we're looking at on the screen? Is this a virtual process training website that's exclusive to your outsourcers? This is where they come to see how to do the things that you need them to do?

Liam:	Yes, so this is just a domain that I picked up and I put all of my process guides in one spot and then I'm able to give them a login so that they can get access to it whenever they need it.

Andrew:	What platform do you use to be able to create this?

Liam:	Well, there are multiple ways of doing it. I personally use Kajobi and the reason why I use that is because it's so simple to use and I can very quickly put these sites up. I believe it's around $200-$300 a month for a large package. There are much cheaper ways of doing it and I'll be able to show you a few of the cheaper ways of doing it if you're not ready for this particular step, but for me it was just a very easy way of, in an hour being able to throw up everything that I needed to be able to throw up and have it done.

Andrew:	Can you walk us through this just so we understand the elements of this procedure manual that we're creating for people?

Liam:	Yeah, so when you're going to, I like to break stuff into categories. So, as an example... I'm just looking at my notes here. Here's a particular process. This is the Google apps calendar process. They have the video here that I produced for them. They can just click play and it loads directly.

Andrew:	Let's give it a moment to come up on the screen, actually.

Liam:	OK.

Andrew:	There it is. So this is you showing them how to set up a Google calendar.

Liam:	Correct. I'm showing them how to set-up a Google calendar so they are going to manage their own time and I'm able to assign them tasks through my Google calendar. If we have a particular project, say I'm working for a particular client and we need deliverables produced for that client, I can add that into the calendar very easily.

Andrew:	I see. So essentially what you have for each process that you assign to them, you have video showing yourself doing it. You have a downloads area where they can download the text that you showed us an example of earlier. Do you also have comments underneath it?

Liam:	Yes. I just put this one together for you guys but this was one that we put together recently and then, right in the comments section, I just added this in. You can add in a comment and the employees that are working on that process guide or reading that process guide can say, "Oh, this is wrong" or " This is right". 

Mostly it's what's wrong. They can very easily comment on that process. We also do it through stuff like Basecamp, as an example. When we are putting together the initial process guide, I usually [??] them on Basecamp first or even through Google apps so they can say, "OK, what do I like about this, what do I not like about this". 

Once it's ready, we'll put it up on the actual membership [??].

Andrew:	Can you scroll to the top of the screen while I ask you this next question? I actually haven't seen comments before in a procedures manual, it seems really useful. One of the issues I have in my manual is that if there is an issue with the way that I describe it, people have to send me an email and then I have to, somehow, attach it to the document. It takes too long.

What kind of feedback do you get? And then, do you redo the process based on that feedback or do you just leave it up there so that people can see the issues and your responses to those issues?

Liam:	It depends on the instance but when in doubt, I usually reprocess. That does take a significant amount of your time but it's worth it. Because what you're trying to build here is... I'll go back to WordPress. 

If you have a solid guide on how to install WordPress, that is not going to change. WordPress is going to be with us probably for the next three or four years, at least. So it is worth it to get right from the beginning. 

If you don't put together the perfect process at the very first try, you know what, reprocess it. It will be much faster this time because you've figured out what you've done wrong and you need to something. You will be able to make those changes quickly and effectively. Your staff will be able to get that information so much faster.

Andrew:	OK. Makes sense. The top there, what you have is the different categories of work you want them to do for you. Lead generation work, looks like there's a lot in there. So there's a dropdown menu; customer service, search engine optimization. 

If they need to go and look for a way of doing something, they go to the tab and they see the different guides you created for them and they get to work.

Liam:	Yes.

Andrew:	We don't have to show all the alternatives but can you describe some of them? What are some of the cheaper, easier to use alt- Actually, this is really super easy to use, Kajobi.

Liam:	Yes. Kajobi is super easy to use but if you're not willing to spend $200 to $300 a month, one of the easiest ways to do it is Dropbox. Put all of your text guides into a public Dropbox folder. Put all of your videos into a public Dropbox folder. 

Actually, I have an example here I can show you right now. Here's Biz 3.0 blog post-marketing procedures. Here's all of the different little text guides that I have and I've sort of put them together in a mind manager program. I can't remember what the names of these things are. A little [??].

Andrew:	Mind-map program.

Liam:	Mind-map program, thank you. 

Andrew:	Right.

Liam:	On page optimization, I have the general writing principles. I have the writing process, all of the different steps. Then I have a link to the actual YouTube video which I created and then I have a link to the text guide that explains that process.

Andrew:	And all of these numbered items on the right are link that go to where? To Dropbox or to Kajobi?

Liam:	No. What I've done is given them a very short guide. So this is a very short version of the text guide, and then if they want more information, they can click on the text guide. I tell them they have to read the text guide first. They have read the text guide the first time. Definitely. But after that, if they just want a short refresher, like, "Am I supposed to have an H2 tag containing an LSI keyword? Oh, OK. Yes, I am, and I don't have to read through a three page text guide to figure that out.

Andrew:	I see, right.

Liam:	So, it's a faster way of getting to the information.

Andrew:	I'm sorry to interrupt, but this I've never seen before. And it's really helpful because one of the problems that I've seen in doing these guides is the guide is really long, and people appreciate that length and depth of it when you first hand it to them because they are confused and they want to be walked through step by step to get it done right the first time. But afterwards, after they feel like they've mastered it, they don't want to go back to that long document. They feel like they're beyond it. They feel almost patronized by that early document that they loved so much. 

And then because they don't go back to it, they miss steps. And you're saying this is the way that I keep them organized. I show them in a glance all the steps that they have to take. If they want to, they can go back and look at the video. If they want to, they have the how-to guide. But for the most part, after they've advanced past the how-to guide, they have this overview that they can use, and it will remind them of every step that you want them to take.

Liam:	You've got it.

Andrew:	[??]

Liam:	I always say three layers of complexity. The most complex is the video and the text guide. Then you've got the simple guide here, and then the easiest layer of complexity is they don't even have to look at it anymore. They've already done that task 50 times, so they don't have to come back here.

Andrew:	OK. Alright, this is wonderful. What's next? You said Kajobi, by the way, for doing this. You can use Dropbox. You can use any mind-mapping program to create this particular document that you have up on your screen. Past Mixergy course leaders have talked about Google Sites. I've seen other people who have taken Mixergy courses use Google Docs, and in Google Docs they'll create folders and subfolders for each of their big categories. What else? And I, of course, always talk about using Evernote, which is quicker, I think, but also less flexible than the solutions you talked about. The tool doesn't matter. The idea is to just get it down for people, and you've shown us how you do it as an example of how to do it.

Liam:	Exactly. Yep, that's it.

Andrew:	OK. All right, so next big tactic?

Liam:	The next big tactic is . . . The next one is, pretty much at this point you've figured out your process. So you've got that process locked down, or you've got some type of a version of it. The next step that you want to be able to implement is to go in and find those people. So to actually go in and hire somebody. That's an issue in itself. Most people don't really understand how to hire, promote workers. And I'm going to give you a basic breakdown of exactly how to be able to do that.

Andrew:	OK.

Liam:	So for me, I know that when I started this process, or when I started business, I remember the first website that I ever went to to be able to outsource work is Elance. I'm sure you're aware of Elance. It's an outsourcing site where you can crowd source a lot of bids on any particular thing, and I went out there and I got a website design done. So I had a guy put together my website. And I remember, the initial cost I think was [??] for the site. And then there were these little changes I wanted made.

Andrew:	How much was it for the site?

Liam:	Sorry?

Andrew:	How much was it for the site?

Liam:	It was $500 for the site to put it together.

Andrew:	OK.

Liam:	So this was my first website. I was right out of grad school. I was doing the tutoring on my own, and I thought to myself, "Oh, I should put this online." So that was the next step. And so I spent $500 on putting this site together on Elance, and the guy that I was working with wasn't the best guy in the world. After he had completed the website, the first draft, he in essence said, "I'm done", and I gave him the milestone of $500 and he kind of walked away, and I was left with this really crappy website. And then I went back to him and said I don't want this here and I don't want that there and I want some changes made. He was like, Oh, no problem, it's just going to cost you another $200 or $300 or all this kind of stuff. 

And by the end of the day, or by the end of the month I would be up to almost a thousand dollars. So I had paid him $250 for edits first. He completed those edits; he didn't really get them the way that I wanted them. I wanted them and then I was paying him another $250 for further edits. And this time I got smart. I didn't pay him the milestone up front, so I withheld the money until he actually completed what I wanted completed and it was a problem on both our ends because I was so nitpicky about what I wanted, he actually walked away. So, you know two weeks into this editing process he walked away and he walked away from $250. 

So, the site cost about $750 and I wasn't very happy with it. Now if I actually just, instead of doing contract work, if I had gone out and hired and employee as a web designer from the get go, I probably could have gotten myself a top tier website designer for a thousand dollars.

Andrew:	Really?

Liam:	That would have worked the entire month. Absolutely. I would say right now you can get yourself a pretty nice web designer for about a thousand dollars in the Philippines that is able to produce something that is of equal quality to anybody that you'll find in your local city.

Andrew:	All right. I want to know how to do that. A thousand dollars for a web designer who will work for a month. 

Liam:	Yeah.

Andrew:	All right, how do we that? Now I'm, now you got my attention. How do we do it?

Liam:	OK. So, I mean if you're going to hire somebody out, I would say it depends on what you're looking for. So, are you looking for contract work or are you looking to hire an employee? In my opinion, if you're interested in building your business with outsourcing at its core from where you're going to source your employees, don't hire contract workers. 

Hire long-term employees. So, don't hire somebody that's just going to set up your SCO for you and then walk away. Don't hire someone that's going to set up your pay per click campaign and then just walk away. Number one, that's not going to happen, you are going to fail, I can guarantee you if someone says, oh yeah, I can set up your pay per click campaign and everything will be fine, you don't need to edit anything, you don't need to optimize any of these campaigns, the guy's lying to you. You will be burnt and you will lose a lot of money that way. 

So, what I do instead is I go and I hire long-term people. So, at minimum it has to be a multi-month relationship with the employee. And usually you can get that employee at a much lower price. So going back to the web designer example, I had another buddy of mine who was getting a website put together on a contract basis and the contract would be, I believe $500 and to get this person for the entire month would $1000. So, why would I hire someone to do a contract job that's probably only going to take him three days anyway when I can hire them for an entire month of committed time and get that, get the website...

Andrew:	All right, so show us how to do that if you don't mind. I'm curious and I'd love to see the visuals that you have for it so that we can walk through the process that you walk through and get the same results.

Liam:	So, I'm going to show you two different ways of doing it. The first one is Full Disclosure, this is a company that I've worked with but I, the reason why I'm showing it to you is that I truly do think that it's the best choice is My Staff.

Andrew:	Can you show us that website?

Liam:	They do stuff, so yeah, it's popping up now, hopefully pretty soon.

Andrew:	Chomping at the bit, my friend.

Liam:	Yeah, so My Staff is a site where they source employees primarily from the Philippines and from India, and these are people that want long-term positions. And then the employers, the difference between a site like My Staff and a site like E-lance or O-Desk is Elance and Odesk concentrates on contract work. Whereas My Staff has no contract work whatsoever. So if you just want to be able to build, if you just want it deliverable, it'd be much better to go to Elance or Odesk, but if you want someone on a multi-month or multi-year relationship then you would go to My Staff and you'll be able to watch videos of the employees. 

They have audios, little two minute audio bits of what they're about so you can really sort of understand who this person is inside and out. And I think that that's also really important because you have to be able to get along with this person. You're going to be working with them for, hopefully, years so you want to make sure that they're good people. And you know, that's the My Staff option. Now, if you want the super ghetto ...

Andrew:	Actually, sorry. Before you go to the next one. I apologize, Liam, before you go to the next one, it's kind of confusing because we still on your screen have the Biz 3.0 blog post marketing procedures. I want to see some of what you're describing. Are you able to show it on your screen or is our connection so slow that it's not coming up?

Liam:	I think it might be just a slow connection. 

Andrew:	There we go. Now I see My Staff. You're saying mystaff.com, it is not launched yet, but this is the site where you would go. Well, actually, you're connected with it so of course you would go. But you are still suggesting if anyone in the audience wants to hire someone long-term, they should go to mystaff.com and they should look for that long-term person. 

Liam:	If they're going through the application process, because the employers have to apply to this process as well. The reason why is because there are not 10,000 employees ready to go on this. They are a select group because it is a very refined process. 

We are not just letting in absolutely anybody. If you mention me in the Mixergy interview, I'll make sure that they know that you are supposed to be taken care of properly.

Andrew:	I see. Take care of them ahead of everyone else. I like that. That's at mystaff.com. Then, you were about to say there's a super something and I interrupted you. Super what?

Liam:	Yes. The super ghetto version. 

Andrew:	OK. [chuckles]

Liam:	This is the version if you have no money, right? If you're working on minimum, if you only have $1,000 to spend, I would go to... Almost everyone has been here before but no one's really figured it out and I don't understand why Manila Craigslist. 

Is that popping up on your screen right now? 

Andrew:	Yes. I see that you're clicking, right now, on the English version. I didn't even know there was an English version. That big sound that people heard was my wedding ring banging up on the table as you were talking. [chuckles] 

This wedding ring, it should have been plastic.

Liam:	I don't know if your wife would be all that happy about that.

Andrew:	Hey, a rubber band or something because I keep banging against the table when I have conversations like this. All right, so there. I see the Eng--

Liam:	Actually, I have one, too and when I tap it on the laptop [??] Anyways. The thing that really sort of sends people running is when you go to Craigslist in Manila, it's in Tagalog. This language is, I mean, I don't know how to speak Tagalog. I don't if you do.

Andrew:	No.

Liam:	Almost nobody does. Just click on the little English tab right there. Boom. You've got English translations. OK? The two major cities that you want to be able to target... I was doing this years ago and I've actually experimented with it again. 

It's not anywhere near as effective because people are starting to figure this out. But the two main cities you want to target are Cebu and Manila. Manila is the largest city in the Philippines. That will give you access to pretty much everyone that you would want to have access to. 

Cebu on the other hand, is where a whole bunch of large SEO companies do their work. There are a lot of SEO employees that are available. If you go to Cebu, put up an SEO job request and literally go into the jobs board, put up an ad and boom! You're off to the races.

You will probably get 10 to 12 resumes coming in through that process. You're going to get pretty much everybody that is coming through this process. But if you have no money whatsoever. Basically, you have a $1,000 bucks, this would be the place that I would send you. 

Now, off of that, the actual job application that you put up, you have to understand there are serious cultural differences between job searchers in the U.S. and the West and job searchers in the Philippines. The biggest problem which no one really understands is that people in the Philippines are really, really honest. 

They are just very good people, as opposed to in the U.S., where every second resume is probably pushing the boundaries of what they are doing in those particular resumes. I'll give you a perfect example. 

When I was first putting up jobs on this website, I was putting up 10 different requirements and it was, "Must know JavaScript, must have three years experience in JavaScript. Must understand the Django network. Must be able to have understanding of Ruby on Rails and Linux Admin experience of four years."

So, very specific stuff, and I was putting up these 10 different requirements, and I'd get nothing, but that was exactly what I wanted. Later on what I did is I put up three actionable requirements. So, if you're looking for a Ruby on Rails developer, "Must have experience in Ruby on Rails, preferably two years plus. Must have a portfolio with different pieces of software that they had (?)."

Andrew:	I see. So, you split up the role into three roles instead of requiring one person to have all three knowledge sets. 

Liam:	Yes.

Andrew:	Then you were specific.

Liam:	Instead of getting incredibly specific and just creating a job request that only three or four people would really be able to apply for, I created a job request that 300 people could apply for on Craigslist. 

Later on, when I was interviewing these employees, because that worked much better for me, I would get 10 to 20 requests at that point. I said, "Well, you know, there was this other job board that I put up during these interviews." They'd say, "Oh, yeah, I saw that." I said, "Yeah, well why didn't you apply for it? You're perfect for it." They said, "Well, I met nine of your requirements, but I don't know the Django Network, so I didn't apply." 

Andrew:	Oh, wow. 

Liam:	I wanted to shake the hell out of this guy because he was perfect for the position, but just because he didn't know one of those nine requirements, he said, "That's not the job for me. I won't be able to do a good job for this guy, so I'm not going to apply for it."

So, make sure that they're overall general, maximum of three things that you want to put down. Have specific actionable things. I don't want to see anything in there like, "Must work well with people." That's bullshit. Don't have any of that kind of junk in there, or, "Must be able to have a fun disposition," or "Must be able to be passionate about what you're doing." No, actionable requirements. What do you really want? Get down to the brass tacks. Put down three things and then send that job request out and you should get about 10 people that come back from that process. 

Andrew:	OK. So, list three requirements, make them actionable. With that you should get 10 responses back. All right. Now, we get 10 responses back. What do we do with them? I'm looking to the right because that's where my notes are. 

Liam:	Next tactic that you want to be able to do. I've got my notes right here, too. I'm going along with you. 

Next thing that you want to be able to do is you want to be able to test them. The first test that I actually do, and it's on the job board request, the first test that I do, it's called the Apple Test. What the Apple Test is in your actual job request that you post, somewhere in that text, write down, "Please respond with Apple in your title." OK? 

This will get rid of 90% of people that are going to waste you're time because if they haven't taken the time to actually read through the entire job board request, then they're not people that you want to work with. Then what I do is on Gmail I create a filter for Apple. All of the junk resumes aren't in that filter, and all the good(?) resumes are. From that process I usually shave down 50% of my candidates right there. So, the Apple Test is bold. 

Andrew:	OK. 

Liam:	Usually, if you're going on to websites like Craigslist, as an example, you'll get a lot of people that will apply and they'll say, "My name is Andrew Warner and I'm an SCO Manager and I'm great," but they're actually not Andrew Warner, they're a company that's going to then take your business and impersonate Andrew Warner. So, you don't want that either. Usually those people will just automatically apply.

Andrew:	Oh, I see, so...

Liam:	And they won't...go ahead.

Andrew:	So what you're saying is that SCO mods is really big in the SCO space. You do a post saying, I'm looking for an SCO person who will work with me full-time, etc., etc. They will respond and say, I work for SCO mods, I can do this work for you, meanwhile they have no connection to SCO mods, they're just looking for a job and they're using SCO mods name.

Liam:	Yeah. I mean, they'll be a lot of services that are actually, even services like companies that what they do is they take, they have a whole bunch of employees in their office and then they impersonate [??] a magical workplace assistant and they'll say this guys Andrew Warner, but it's not really Andrew Warner it's seven people.

Andrew:	I see.

Liam:	Right, but they'll, but they're actually charging the employees at the end of the day, they're a pretty small percentage so maybe you're paying Andrew Warner the magical SCO guru $2000 a month to do that work, but at the end of the day it's seven guys that are each paid $50. So you don't want that either, you want to be able to give the money directly to the people who are doing that work.

Andrew:	How can you screen out that? How do we know that if someone says that their one person that their one person and not just a company pretending to be an individual.

Liam:	I'll actually be getting to that later.

Andrew:	OK, alright, then I'll leave it alone.

Liam:	But, and I have a perfect way of being able to get by that but the apple test usually gets rid of most of those people. 

Andrew:	OK.

Liam:	Right from the get go because they just, they literally have, you know, they have key words searching algorithms that find SCO, like oh, SCO post on Craigslist and then they just automatically apply for it. So you don't want that, it's just spam. OK. So, next step is you want to be able to test them and for instance, you know what, you want to be able to just make sure that you're giving them a test that's not too complex but then is also something that's going to be able to show what they can do. 

I actually don't really care what the context of the test is. It's more the actual application of that particular test. So how did they go about producing that content and bringing it back to you? I'm going to give you a perfect example of that. I had, the first tests that I used to put out, I thought that I was a genius at this. I thought to myself, OK, I'm going to just put together this really complex test and everyone's going to do a really good job on it and I'm going to get all these amazing people and I'm going to filter out all of the crappy people and it just ended up as a complete disaster. 

So, what I did is I set-up a PayPal account with about $200 in it and I gave, I think it was ten employees access to this account for $200 and I said what I want you to do is you're going to install WordPress and you're going to do create a blog for a particular keyword. So step one, I want you to go find a domain, so if it was Andrew Warner I want a rank for Andrew Warner so find a keyword that connects to Andrew Warner and I want you to buy the domain name for that and then I want you to go and go and get access to my GoDaddy server. Here's the access to my GoDaddy server, install WordPress on that domain, make all these alterations, blah, blah, blah. This is like a four step process and they just, I mean, I can tell, I can probably tell what they were thinking. They were thinking to themselves, this guy's a nut job, you know, fuck that noise, I am not going through a week of work just to be able to get this one job. 

So I changed it around and I just gave them a very simple test but I gave them a test that would test them, it didn't require a large amount of work for them but I was able to really get access to their work ethic. And I think that's the primary thing that we want to be able to touch one when you're really looking for people.

Andrew:	The work ethic. Not necessarily each, not necessarily watch them do each step of the job that you're hiring them to do. You just want to check their work ethic. Can you show us how to do that? And it looks like we have only about half an hour left, so I want to pack as much into that last half hour as possible.

Liam:	So, as an example, here's one of the tests that we give our developers. OK, so, hopefully this comes up for you but we have a simple four step process for creating a very simple application that we want the employee to put together. This is a pretty simple test. So we'll give that to the employee and we say, OK, we're going to have this test sent to you, you have 24 hours to complete it from the date in which it was sent. Then we'll find out what we did bad. 

We will actually hire people that maybe aren't the best people. Maybe they didn't produce the best version of this particular piece of software, but they got back to us right away, they asked questions when they didn't understand something, they were interactive in the process. They were really interested in doing it and you can't teach that. I can always make a developer better at what they do. I can give them a Ruby on Rails course. I can't teach them actionable, on-the-ball, type of thinking that you can only really get from, you can't get it, you can't learn it, it's just with you. For some reason, I can't hear you.

Andrew:	Sorry. Let me do it a little bit louder. I just raised my volume. I saw that you were raising your volume. Sorry guys about that audio issue. If I'm understanding you right, what you're doing is giving them a three hour test, because you want to make sure that they're committed to getting this job. You're also asking them go and duplicate a Kiss Metrics' web page so that you can check their skills, and I guess you also like the design of the Kiss Metrics' webpage. What else are you having them do beyond duplicate that Kiss Metrics design?

Liam:	After this test, if they have completed it, we give them one more, which is a little bit more complex than this one. This first test isn't paid and then the second test is paid.

Andrew:	OK.

Liam:	At that point we are really sort of looking at their skills. Trying to figure out who we need. I think we've interview a few hundred developers and we only have, I believe, a dozen on the team completely. Get a large swath of people, test them, and I think the biggest thing is work ethic. Having them come back and say, I don't understand this. Very few people will come back, particularly in a job interview and say, I don't really understand this component, can you help me with it? That's what we really need, because we don't want people just blindly doing tasks, even when they don't know what WordPress is. We want to be able to make sure that they ask those questions. That's really what I'm looking for when I'm hiring somebody. I think that's what you should be looking for, too.

Andrew:	For some reason my mic keeps going down. Thanks. Liam, before you go onto the next step, can we have a copy of this test that you give people so that we can see how you're structuring your test and create ours in a similar way.

Liam:	Sure. Yeah. I can send those off to you.

Andrew:	All right. Would you be upset if somebody actually copied and pasted this test and sent that to people they were trying to hire?

Liam:	No. I don't think so. [??] over with the business partner, but to be honest with you, I don't think it's that big of an issue. We've got a lot of different tests. There are a lot of great sites out there that have a lot of excellent test content. Treehouse is one that does a lot of coding stuff, which I really like. I've been checking out their stuff recently, and that's a beautiful sort of game metrics way of testing people as well. There's a lot of [??] out there, but I'll send this off to you guys.

Andrew:	OK.

Liam:	Next step, because I want to start running through these quickly, because the best stuff is at the end.

Andrew:	Yeah. Let's hear it.

Liam:	The next step is the face-to-face interview. This is where you're going to find out whether Andrew Warner is really Andrew Warner or whether Andrew Warner is Philippians Incorporated and it's 20 guys in some kind of a big huge boiler room, or something like that. I demand face-to-face interviews from each employee before we hire them. That's on Skype, right. 

As a perfect example of that, I had a guy that I wanted to hire. He was a great employee. Everything was working out properly. He had a great portfolio. He passed the tests perfectly. Then we jumped on Skype and I said, well, I'd like to interview you. I'd like to do a Skype call. He said, well, I don't really have a video camera, or a webcam. I said, no problem. I'll send you $50 through PayPal. Go buy one. We'll figure it out. 

He said, I can just do it through audio, but I don't think I really feel comfortable doing that right now. I said, I'm not interested in chatting with you back and forth for the next four hours. I need an actual call. I need to talk to you. And so, he said, OK, fine. So, he calls me up or we call up, and in the entire half hour interview he's whispering like this. Whispering, yes, I can do that, sir. That's really great. Yes, I can do that, all this kind of stuff. 

I'm thinking to myself, what the hell is up with this guy? I figured out later he's actually working at his day job. So, he's trying to hustle two jobs at the same time. You do not want that problem. 

I had another instance where I was interviewing someone, and I heard, it was like downtown New York on her end. Well, she was working out of a web cam, and you don't want that problem either. What you want is someone who has a committed space to do their work. So, whether that's their own office, whether that's even their bedroom, their living room, whether it is, it needs to be focused. You need to be able to put in a good six to eight hours every day of what that particular employee is doing. 

For us, that's crucial. Make sure that you're interviewing this person, preferably on a web cam, face-to-face, and you can sort of look at what's going on, and it will do wonders in terms of just getting that extra context in the interview process. 

Andrew:	That's a great idea. I would never have thought to do it.

Liam:	Yeah. 

Andrew:	You want video, Skype based one-on-one conversation before you hire them full-time.

Liam:	Right. 

Andrew:	Then when you hire them, what do you do?

Liam:	The next one is usually you're going to narrow this down to two or three people. So, your two or three top people. If you like them all, my personal take on this is I always hire, at least two people part-time for the first month, and the reason why I do that is because you never know whether someone is actually going to work out in the long-term. They may look great on paper. They may look great in the interview, but then they may not get back to you at all, so on an extended period of time. 

The other reason why I do this is I inform both employees that this is what's going on, so you're automatically going to get their A game. You're not going to get, "Oh, I already got the job" if they're the only hire. But if you're hiring two people and you're testing them, they're automatically giving you their A game, and then you know what to expect from them for the next few years. That's the actual amount of productivity you should be expecting from them for the next few years. 

So, for us we hire two people part-time, see what they're about. If they're really both great and we can afford it, hire both of them. I was just recently down in the Valley, and I was hanging out with his startup. And this graphic designer that was hired on by this startup was paid $150,000 a year to do all the graphics work on the site.

Well, I know for me our graphics people are paid a quarter of that, under a quarter of that. I don't know the exact details, and I don't want you to please don't quote me, but I'm sure they're getting paid $2,000 a month for something like that.

Andrew:	Can we take a look at your home page just to get a sense of what your design looks like?

Liam:	Sure. Yeah. So, I mean, that's the site right there. Beautiful graphics put together and even the dashboards are done by our graphics person, and this quality is done . . . I would say this is pretty darn close or equal to the quality of I was seeing on this other startup.

Andrew:	Let's give it a moment to come up on the screen. You really peaked our interest. 

Liam:	Sure. Yeah.

Andrew:	All right. 

Liam:	Hopefully, it'll pop up pretty soon. 

Andrew:	GoToMeeting is still very slow for some reason. 

Liam:	Yeah. I don't know why. Maybe, it's because I'm up in Canada.

Andrew:	[laughs] I was wondering where you were. It'll come up in a moment. 

Liam:	Yeah. 

Andrew:	You hire two people. You say, look, this is a test. I'm going to hire you just for one month.

Liam:	Yeah.

Andrew:	At the end of the month you may not make it. Maybe, it's the other person who will make it. Maybe, you'll both be rock stars and I'll hire you both, but you let them know this is only a month commitment, you're not committing to any more time with them. 

Liam:	Correct. Yeah. And that's really going to show. From that point on, if they pass that one month period, they're full-time with us. They're working every single day, and I would say this hiring process, for me, has produced probably around an 85% success rate in the sense that I still have 80% of the employees that I hired initially. So, I've only to had to gotten rid of 20% of the [xx]. And usually due to that, I mean I know as an example one story that I can bring up directly is I had two employees. Both of them were just as good one paper, both of them had excellent interviews, one of them was, I believe, $2000 and the other one was $1000 a month. 

And I thought to myself, "Well, this is perfect. I'm definitely going to go with the $1000 person, but just to make sure let's actually do the one month trial". The $2000 employee was back to me one time. Everything was happening like clock work; top tier employee. 

The $1000 one, it was excuse after excuse after excuse, and crazy ones. Like, "There was a typhoon, and that was why the internet was down for the last two days. A week later, "My uncle's sister died, and I had to go to the funeral. I'm sorry I wasn't able to tell you." You know a few days later, "The neighbor's house burnt down, and that's why the internet has been down. There's been a brownout because the neighbor's house burnt down." 

Maybe these were true, and maybe she's just had a really bad month, but I can't deal with that. So that was why you really have to test them out and compare them. Actually with our software you can directly compare employees, but most people will be able to know. Most employers will be able to know, based off their gut, who they want to be able to work with.

Andrew:	Next is you train them using the Kajobi page that you showed us earlier into the process, right? 

Liam:	Yeah. So, I mean, I know for me, and this is more of an advanced tactic, so at this point you've got your employee. You want to throw them into those training modules you created, and have them work from that point. You know, if you've got a larger team, try to be able to have a senior person that's in the organization nurture them and work with them. I find that that's really good for overall productivity, and this is coming from a guy that's not a manager by any means. You know get a senior person to be able to make sure they're doing what they need to do.

But from that point forward just literally have them fill out the process guides and get things moving. I know for me one of the big things that we did, and I think you've probably heard of the Mocha Update. If not I'll explain it really quickly for everybody. The Mocha Update happened recently, and I hope I'm pronouncing that right, on Google. Where they changed their algorithm of how they rank web pages. There were some significant changes that were implemented that required significant changes to our process guides connecting to SEO. 

So what I did was instead of me redoing all these process guides myself, and I'm not SEO ninja by any means. I know a little bit, but not that much anymore. I went to the SEO team that are the experts on this. They're reading about this. They're doing meetings about this. You know, they live and breathe SEO. 

I said, "Guys, anybody who can produce better process guides automatically gets 100 bucks. And we're all going to vote. So what are the process guides that we need to do?" And I think we came up with 6 process guides that we needed to change.

And then I said, "Anybody who want to create a process guide go ahead and produce it. And then we'll all vote on that particular process guide. Whoever ends up the winner gets 100 bucks." And 100 bucks in the Philippines, as an example, is quite a bit of money so they loved it. It kind of turned into to a cool little game. And we even learned more about the Mocha Update through that process. 

So what I've created in essence is an organically evolving process model so that whenever a process becomes out of date simply throw $100 at the problem and solve it. 

Andrew:	I love that. 

Liam:	Yeah. So I mean that's pretty much nitty gritty of it. Once you're off into that point you're literally going to have your people. You're going to send them out into your process guides, and they'll learn the process guides. I would usually pay extra special attention to them for the first three months. Past that point they'll usually just be off to the races. And you'll have a central part of your team and more stuff off of your desk.

Andrew:	And what we're seeing on your screen right now is Base Camp. This is what you're using to keep in touch with all the people who you're working with, and ...

Liam:	Yeah, so we use two things. We use Gero, for our developers and if you're not into development, then that's not a big issue. We use Basecamp for a lot of our face-to-face communications. This really connects to my next tip, really integrating the outsourcer with a team. 

There are some significant drawbacks with regards to outsourcing. It's not a magic bullet, it definitely isn't and I'm not suggesting that it is. Some other people do. There are problems associated with this type of work. Primarily, you can't really create the company culture you can in a brick-and-mortar business.
 
I can't go out for beers with everybody after work. I can't hang out with people and say, "Oh, you know, Andrew, I hear that you're having problems with you're son. How can I solve this problem for you?" All of those things you can't really do remotely in the same way that you can do online.

What we have tried to implement is creating a sense of online company culture. One of the biggest tools that we use for that is Basecamp. As an example, we just had MaryJo, who had her birthday on December the 2nd and we sent out a Happy Birthday message to Mary. 

This is a picture of Mary and then we have all the employees saying, "Happy Birthday, Jo". It's creating those virtual spaces that people can interact. So that you can actually just see all the employees and start to interact with and hopefully, be able to talk with them and develop that brick-and-mortar that businesses really have in spades that online businesses lack.

Andrew:	Yes. That goes a long way to creating a sense of camaraderie and letting people know that they could come to when there are issues and letting them know they can come to you when they have suggestions. All right.

Liam:	A couple of things that we have done which are crucial which I think, if you're getting to the point where you are hiring multiple people, is play the employees $100.00 bucks. Say, "Here's a $100.00 bucks. Go out to the bar, get all of you're employees at that same bar and say, "You guys all have some drinks."

That is one of the best ways to build company culture. Because they are all in their own little offices. Maybe they're in the same city. Get them all in the same bar and get them drinking. That's usually one of the fastest ways.

Andrew:	That's a great idea. Even if you can't make it, you're drink's can make it there and connect them all. 

Liam:	Exactly.

Andrew:	All right. The first step to all of this though is to create, is to figure out the top three things that are sucking up your time and then, to go and create a how-to guide for outsourcing those things. Even if you don't hire anyone, you want that so that you organize your business. Then, you showed us how we can have someone else evaluate the process guide we created, the how-to guide.

Showed us how to hire people that are going to take it on and you showed us how to have them improve the whole guide for us. The one thing I didn't get to ask and I wrote a note to come back and ask you about is that dialogue box that kept popping up saying, it doesn't look like you're doing anything. What is that?

Liam:	I don't know if everyone can see it but right down here, at the bottom of my screen. I have Mixergy interview. It looks like we've spent 1 hours and 42 minutes on this particular interview. 

Andrew:	Including set-up, absolutely.

Liam:	There's quite a lot of [??] actually. That's in essence our software. What our software does is, it's like Google Analytics but for your employees. What we do is give you a platform. So you can see what your employee is doing. How productive they are. What kind of tasks they're doing. 

There are a lot of little pop-ups that will happen. If someone's not supposed to be doing social media work, Facebook work, Twitter work and they're on Facebook. Let's say they're doing a Mixergy interview, in 30 seconds you get a little pop-up that would say, "Aren't you supposed to be working on the Mixergy interview?" You know, to get them back on task. 

We have found with our surveyed users, we are seeing huge jumps in productivity. I know for myself, I've had conservatively a 50% to 60% jump in productivity. We have other clients that have around 20%. It varies dependent upon organization.

To be able to get access to all of your data, not only yourself but your employees and allow you to create a more productive team down the road. Also to, a lot of companies do this but they don't actually give their employees access to that data. We don't really agree with that. We think it's a little bit too big brother for us. 

What we do is we give the employees access to their own data because at the end of the day their own productivity is what we're focused on. If they have access to their own data, they can become more productive. 

Andrew:	I see. If they see that they're getting too carried away with one project and spending too much time, they might recognize that it's a waste of time and start shifting their attention to something else. 

Liam:	Exactly.

Andrew:	And if they see that they're making gains, it might motivate them to keep making gains. 

Liam:	I don't know if you can see this, but beforehand . . .

Andrew:	I see actually where you spend a large amount of time. Is that appropriate for me to see that you spend a lot of time on Uncrunched, Michael Arrington's new site?

Liam:	Oh yeah. 

Andrew:	I do, too. It's a good site. 

Liam:	Yeah, it's a great site. But, for me, I've been looking at cutting down my e-mail time. I think I said at the beginning of this interview e-mail was the biggest time sap, and I literally was spending about 30% of my time, 40% of my time on e-mail. I now spend 
8.7% as of this last week. That's really the core of what you want to be able to do. You want to be able to get those small tasks off your desk so you can start doing the larger scale things. Stop working in the business, and start working on it so that you can grow it instead of just managing the process. 

Andrew:	Is the product out of beta? Can people who are listening to us right now go up and sign for it?

Liam:	Absolutely. You can go to timedoctor.com and pick up a copy. There's a 30 day free trial as well for people that just want to try it out.

Andrew:	All right. So, go check out timedoctor.com, and also, if they want to hire a virtual assistant and don't want to go through the process that you described for Craigslist, it's mystaff.com. If it's not up and running fully or if it's not open to the public when this course goes up, you will find a way to get our listeners in there if they want to, right?

Liam:	Absolutely.

Andrew:	They just go to mystaff.com, and they can ask about it, and they'll get priority if they let whoever it is who responds know that they're part of Mixergy. 

Liam:	Yeah. Just mention Mixergy and/or me and we'll make sure that we can find kind of solution.

Andrew:	All right. Cool. Thank you for doing this session with us. Thank you for teaching us, Liam. Thank you all for watching. As always, come back and let us know what you've done with it. Even if you've struggled, come back and let us know but especially if you've gotten some progress. We're always encouraged by your progress. I love hearing it, and I know that the many people who take these courses don't feel comfortable sharing it with the audience and say, "Andrew, don't talk about it publicly. I will keep your secret".

But I’m still curious to know. It's not about me using you as a testimonial. It's about me connecting with the audience and what the issues are and celebrating those wins with you. Even if all you want to show me is that you've identified the top three things that are taking up most of your time, and you've outlined the process for getting them done the way that Liam talked about and you haven't outsourced them yet, I want to see it because I'd be really proud to see the kind of work that you're doing. And also, if there are any issues, I want to be there to help out.

Thank you, Liam, for doing this. Of course, the website is timedoctor.com. Thank you