Lawn Care Blueprint w/John Jonas: How to Hire and Keep a Lawn Care Virtual Assistant

Ezra McCarthy

Hey guys, this is part two of the series we’re having with John Jonas. He’s going to share how to hire, train and retain some killer great virtual assistants for your business, plus communication, pay, trust and even tools to help your lawn and landscaping business buy back your time. So let’s get to the episode.

John Jonas

Here’s probably the number one issue that people will run into culturally. Filipinos are shy. This is what they call it. They call themselves shy. And really what it is, they’re non-confrontational. If there’s a problem they don’t want to confront you about it, that’s scary to them. And this problem could be that they don’t know how to do what you’re asking them to do, that they don’t like doing what you’re asking them to do, that they’re scared that you’re going to yell at them, they really do not like to lose face. 

It could be that they are not making enough money to support their family and they need to make more, but they don’t want to talk to you about it because they’re scared that you’re going to be super mad at them. So in all of these situations it’s all the same thing. They’re shy about it. And rather than saying something to you, they would rather walk away.

And so if the person that you hire disappears, like they don’t talk to you for a couple of days, that is a really good indicator that there is something wrong. It’s not a good indicator that they don’t want this job or they’re lazy or anything like that. If they get a job, I mean it’s hard to find a job in the Philippines. They get a job working online like this is a dream job for most people. They want to keep that job. 

If they disappear, it’s because something is wrong and you need to then approach them and say, hey, I haven’t heard from you in a couple of days. I have a feeling that something is wrong. What have I done or what is stopping you from working or what is causing a problem for you? What can I do to help?

And if you approach it like that, this is the number one problem you’ll run into. If you approach it like this, your success rate is so high here. And that’s the cultural, there’s just not a lot. They’re super westernized.

Ezra McCarthy

So you talked about having long-term success, what do you say is the best way to keep them? I know in the US, I was just talking to someone the other day and you hear it all the time, can’t find people, can’t find people. And even, who was it, oh yeah, I was talking to someone and they were talking about their office staff and they’re like, yeah, someone called in and asked, do you do this service, which they did. And they’re like, oh no, we don’t. And I’m just like, wait, what? You paid for that lead to get it there.

And this has happened more than one time. Like how don’t you understand this? So retention so that they understand the nuances of our business, even in office staff is really important. So how do you help and teach people, okay, how can we have a great long-term working relationship?

John Jonas

So, one of the keys here is to go to the Philippines. And I had no idea when I started hiring people, and had no clue about this. Filipinos are loyal almost to a fault. Like that first person I ever hired still works for me today. I guarantee he gets job offers making two or three times what I pay him. Guaranteed. But they’re loyal. They’re super loyal. And you have to treat them well. You have to be a good boss. You can’t be a jerk and expect them to stick around.

But if you’re a good boss and you care about this person and you show them that you care, keeping them is just not, it’s a paradigm shift. Like that’s the wrong question. Here’s the right question. So how do I know if I can trust this person? I’m going to bring them into my business and they’re going to see all my leads and they’re going to have all my customer information. How do I know if I can trust them? That’s the wrong question.

The real issue here is you have this fear that you don’t trust this person. How can I trust them? They have that same fear, but their fear is stronger than your fear. And there’s a good reason for it because if they take this job from this foreign employer who they can’t see, who has no legal obligation to anything with them, what if they work for you for a month and you don’t pay them? Then their children don’t eat. They starve. There is no recourse in the Philippines. There’s no soup kitchen. There’s nothing. They end up on the streets.

They’re scared of you. They don’t trust you. So when you go into this thinking, don’t know if I can trust this person, that’s fine, but recognize they have that same feeling, but it’s stronger. And if you want to find a really amazing person, you have to gain their trust in you. And this is what solves all these problems.

If you’ll approach this as, how do I gain this person’s trust in me? You’ll start to think like, oh, I should be nice when they make a mistake rather than screaming at them like, you’re such an idiot, why didn’t you? And you’d be nice like, hey, I actually think you tried here and there’s a disconnect and maybe my instructions weren’t correct. What did I do wrong when you’re asking them? And then they’ll be like, oh, he actually cares about my success.

And this is when they start to open up, when they get over their shyness, this is when they start to trust you and you’ll be like, oh my gosh, this person’s being super honest with me. They’re not going to steal something from me. So this is how, like this is another cultural thing that I didn’t talk about, but they’re scared. They’re scared of you. And if you’ll overcome that fear, almost all of the problems will just disappear. Did that make sense? Did I answer the question?

Ezra McCarthy

That was good. And I think one thing I would ask for your opinion, something I’ve done, is pay weekly. Because I understood, and actually I remember hearing your podcast talking about obviously we’re nervous because we’re like, they have the keys to the business proverbially, but then obviously they’re nervous as well. So do you recommend that weekly pay? That way they’re not, and obviously they’ll learn trust over time, but I had one of my team members, I think their previous employer was literally a couple months behind, just never paid them.

So do you recommend that weekly pay so that they realize, okay, if something did happen, it’s not like, which I’m not going to be dishonest and I don’t think people listening are, but that way it kind of allays their fear that this person’s not going to run away with two months of my hard-earned work.

John Jonas

I recommend that you pay people weekly for the first couple months. Because otherwise they have no guarantees. For me, I’ve been doing this for 20 years and when I bring someone in, I can say, hey, we pay monthly. And they have 50 other people on my team they can talk to and recognize, yeah, this guy’s going to pay me. For you, they have no such thing. So pay weekly for the first couple months. Then you can pay bi-weekly or monthly or whatever.

Ezra McCarthy

So quality control, how do you ensure that things are getting done right and then accountability? Are there some kind of tool sets that you recommend, communication cadences?

John Jonas

So your question is about quality control. Regardless of if they do the work, pay them. Yes, I know. I just saw your face reaction. Pay them anyway. It is exceedingly unlikely that you found someone trying to scam you. If they’re not doing the work, there’s something wrong. It’s because they don’t understand your instructions. It’s because they can’t do it. It’s because something’s going wrong and it’s your job to figure out what’s going wrong.

So you’re going to ask them like, what’s going on? Why is this not, how is this, how can I help you? If you go two weeks and you get nothing done, pay them, pay them anyway. If you don’t pay them, their children don’t eat. And that’s part of the learning process of doing this. I’ve been through this, I don’t know, a dozen times. I have like 55 people who work for me full time today in the Philippines. When stuff doesn’t work out, still pay them. And that’s part of the long-term gaining of trust.

And this is how, so people always want to know how do I hire a rock star. You don’t. You create a rock star by gaining their trust. And yeah, you can hire a rock star. So yep, I’ve done it a dozen times. Okay, so let’s go back to the quality control then.

I get an email from an employer that says, this person sucks. I gave him all these instructions and it was so well done and they never did anything. And I’m not paying them and blah, blah, blah. And they sent me the instructions and I looked at it and I was like, dude, I have no clue at all. Not a single idea of what you’re asking to be done here. I can’t even tell you how unclear this is. And yet he thought it was perfectly clear. And he sent it to me. I looked at it and was like, oh yeah, this is not even close.

And over the years I’ve come to realize that usually when something goes wrong, so quality control, they are trying their best because they want to keep the job. It’s your fault. Your instructions aren’t as good as you think, or there’s a block in the path. You have assumed something that’s obvious and it’s not obvious to them. But you’ve been doing this for 20 years, so it’s obvious, but it’s not obvious to them.

So the other side of quality control is just participating in it with them. You’re going to look at it and you’re going to give feedback. One of the things I learned early on was that providing video feedback is so incredibly helpful. And there are tools today that make this like a dream. I use Snagit every day. It sits open on my desktop. You drag it out and it will record your computer, your voice, your mouse. It records your screen and you can just make a video and you click upload and it uploads it to a cloud. And they get to watch exactly what you’re asking them to do rather than you trying to type it out in an email or do it on the phone and trying to describe it. They get to see exactly what it is and you can annotate the video. You can annotate the images that you take, the screenshots, whatever. Super, super effective towards helping improve the quality. 

So one of the things that I did in my business was, and this is interesting, you think you’re hiring a virtual assistant. Well, a virtual assistant doesn’t really describe a lead qualifier. They’re not virtual assistants. They’re a lead qualifying specialist. Give them a title. And this has a surprising effect. If a Filipino isn’t responsible for the task, then they’re not responsible for the outcome. In their culture, they’re not responsible for the quality of the outcome. That’s their superior’s responsibility. So then it’s your responsibility.

But if you give them a title, then all of a sudden they have responsibility over that thing. And now they feel responsible. And if you let them know, hey, look, I don’t want to be the one figuring out if this is correct or not. That’s your job. When I see it, I want it to be perfect. And I want you to have done your best. And if you have concerns, you’re going to explain those concerns to me so that I know what your thought process was. And then if it’s wrong, I at least know what your thought process was and I can go back and fix it.

So those couple of things, the title makes a big deal, giving them authority and responsibility over that thing as, no, you are in charge, not me. And then asking their thought process, trying to pull that out of them. They have to trust you in order to make this work. But if you’ll get that, quality control is, I mean, you just find it so easy.

Ezra McCarthy

So what would you recommend for communication cadence as far as how often to communicate? And obviously it’s going to vary depending on their job, but I’m sure there’s like a minimum.

John Jonas

No, every day. I’ve always talked about a daily report. You get a daily report from them, however you get it. I get it in Basecamp, our project management system. You could get it in an email. I don’t ever do meetings with them. In fact, I could count on one hand the number of times I have ever spoken to my people on the phone in 20 years.

But other people talk to their people every single day on the phone. So to me, it’s just important that you have some sort of interaction every day. And often for me, that’s just a thumbs-up emoji. For some people on my team, the more important people that I’m interacting with, we have conversations every day.

It’s not synchronous, it’s asynchronous. I don’t ever do any live chat with people, but we’re both posting in our project management system, we’re sending emails back and forth and I’m having multiple communications and I’m giving feedback and they’re giving me feedback and we’re discussing ideas and that’s happening every day.

Ezra McCarthy

So what’s the best way that you recommend? I know we talked a little bit about mistakes or failures, but how do you recommend, especially for some of these people that you’re training, to deal with mistakes? They’re going to be there and perhaps even failures. How best to communicate and maybe what not to do when you’re trying to teach and correct a team member?

John Jonas

Yeah, so don’t yell at them. That’s the first thing. Yelling at them immediately loses their trust. They stop trusting you because they don’t trust that you won’t yell at them and yelling at them loses face.

Number two, assume it’s your fault first. If you assume I have failed somewhere in this and ask them like, hey, this isn’t right. And I think it’s my fault. Can you tell me what I did wrong or what was lacking in my instructions or what didn’t you understand?

This will go such a long way towards having a successful relationship with them. That’ll solve 95% of it.

Ezra McCarthy

So I know AI is really like a buzzword and people talk a lot about it. What do you think the future of remote work is? Do you think that online jobs are going to be obsolete anytime soon? And I know a lot of business owners hear a lot about it, but what’s your perspective there? And do you think it’s still effective outsourcing?

John Jonas

Yeah, I had this conversation yesterday. So number one, I have never been very good at seeing the future. I’m just not. Number two, online jobs has just over 20,000 active employers this month. And that number is slightly more than last month. And it’s slightly more than the month before that.

When did AI come out? Sometime in, yeah, it came out in 2022 or something, it started hitting in 23. Well, last month was our biggest month ever. More employers than ever before.

And we aren’t double what we were in 23, but we’re a lot higher than we were in 23. So that tells you a little bit of how employers feel about hiring still. My team uses AI every day. My people in the Philippines use it to be better. They’re just better at their jobs because of it.

It’s possible that we haven’t hired an additional person somewhere along the way because my people are so much more efficient now that we didn’t need to hire someone else. We just used AI to fill that void, but I’m not doing that work. That’s someone in the Philippines doing the work. And over the last year we’ve hired like 10 people.

And again, AI is amazing. It is incredible. And in fact, we’re using it right now on online jobs to help you find people better. We just built an AI matching algorithm that, you post your job, get 100, you said 20 or 30 applicants and I laughed because 20 or 30 applicants is if you’re lucky. We cap it at 200 applicants because job posts were getting 3,000 applicants.

So we created this AI matching algorithm that will analyze every single applicant of yours and prevent you from having to do any of it. And it will rate them according to their experience, their skills, their age, their availability, their wage, their following of instructions, how well they followed your job post.

We have like 10 criteria. It will rate them and tell you, here are the people you should interview. Here are the people you should completely ignore. Don’t even look at these applications. And then you’re narrowed down. You’ve got 100 applicants, here are four of them. Interview these four people.

And it’s so dang good. It’s so good at telling you the right people. It looks at their personality. Here’s your role. Here’s the appropriate personality type for this role. Here’s the personality type of this person and their skills and their experience and their availability and their wage and all of this stuff. It does it all within a couple of minutes.

Ezra McCarthy

What do you recommend? I know when I talked to someone who was hired, that’s kind of where I got my playbook on how I hire. We have a process on how when we’re hiring people. But what do you recommend as best practices? Maybe someone’s like, wow, this sounds great. I know there’s a wrong way to do it because I’ve done it. But what do you recommend is the best practice to find the right person there? Because there are a lot of applicants. You mentioned around four million.

John Jonas

So I’ll start this with saying I’ve done this like 75 times over the past 20 years. Fifty-five of those 75 people still work for me. I’ve had very little turnover and I have a really high success rate at finding a good person the first time. So I laid out my entire process at onevaaway.com in detail. Here’s what to do. I’ll cover it right now in five minutes.

My first thing is I’m going to put some qualifiers in the job post. I want you to make the subject of your application this: my role name dash your name. I just want some qualifier so I can weed out anybody who didn’t read the whole job post and didn’t follow my instructions. Instantly, I’m not going to look at you.

Number two, years ago we developed Apply Points that turned out better than we hoped. It limits the number of jobs someone can apply to each day and allows them to tell you how interested they are in your job based on their finite quantity of points. So I will usually say, when you apply, use eight apply points, or six, or fourteen.

Anybody who doesn’t use that number, I’m not really going to look at them. Those are two immediate qualifiers that tell me: did you read and follow instructions? And, are you really interested because they’re only given 10 apply points a day. And if I asked for 14, that means they can’t apply to any other jobs today. They have to wait till tomorrow to accumulate 14 in order to apply to my job. So someone who applies. Yeah, they’re serious, right? 

The next step for me is I’m going to use AI matching. It’s such a no-brainer. I’m going to get 30, 50 applicants. I’m going to click the AI matching button. It’ll analyze them all. I’ll end up with two, five, ten who are worth talking to.

From there, I’m going to start my interview process, which is not a video interview. That’s the mistake. Trying to schedule a video interview right off the bat is the wrong way to do this. I’m going to send questions via email. I’m going to send two, three, four questions. I’m going to do it five, six, ten times. And the reason is I want to see their attention to detail because this is going to be a virtual relationship.

If I were going to interact with them through a video call every day, I would do a video interview. But I’m not. I’m never going to do that.

If I ask them four questions in an email and they answer three of them, then I know after I hire them the chances of me giving them four tasks and them doing only three is high. If I ask four questions and it takes them three days to respond, that’s how long they’re going to take when I hire them, and that doesn’t work for me.

So I’m eliminating all these potential problems by interviewing this way. And what I find is I’m going to drop people out of the process. Some people are going to drop themselves out. I will never ever end up with a scammer if I go through this process because they just are not willing to go down the process, which you’re super unlikely to find a scammer in the first place because we are so active at online jobs at eliminating bad apples. So you’re just super unlikely, but anybody who’s looking for an easy buck, they’re just not gonna go through this process with me. I’ve never had that come out of this. 

Then I’m going to ask for trial work, like a test job, and I’m going to pay for it. If it’s going to take longer than 30 minutes, I’m going to pay them. Ten bucks, twenty bucks, whatever. I’ll pay three or four people. The goal isn’t to get work done. The goal is to see who I work with best.

What happens when I give you instructions and you do something for me? What happens there? Do I hate the process with you? And that’s another part of these emails. Am I looking forward to getting an email from you or am I cringing when I get a response back from you? Because I’ve had that.

Then at this point you have a really good idea of who you want to hire. Now you can negotiate. They’re asking for a thousand a month, you want to pay six hundred. So you say hey, your wage is too high. I’m offering seven hundred. Sometimes they’ll say they can’t. Sometimes they’ll say yes.

You negotiate paid time off or any other benefits. I do not recommend underpaying people. Don’t take advantage. It’s already affordable enough.

So that’s my process. There’s more to it, but if you follow this process, your chances of finding someone good are really high. And AI matching eliminates so much.

Ezra McCarthy

This has been great, John. And for people interested and say, hey, this is something I’m interested in, I know you mentioned onevaaway.com. I know there’s a website there. Do you mind telling the audience where’s the best place if they’re interested to find out more about you, OnlineJobs and even the One VA Away?

John Jonas

Yeah. So there’s two things to do. Number one, onevaaway.com is great. Before you do that though, start at ofsguide.com. OFS is what I call virtual assistants. I hate the word virtual assistant. I don’t hire virtual assistants. I hire specialists. I call them Online Filipino Specialists, OFS.

ofsguide.com will answer the questions you have before you’re ready to hire. Taxes, time zones, stuff like that. It’s super fast, like a four-minute read.

Then if you want more, the best thing is my newsletter. I send a newsletter a couple times a week. They are not marketing. They’re informational and people love it. I have 170,000 people subscribed. If you go to onlinejobs.ph and create a free account, you’ll start to get my newsletter. You can also get it at johnjonas.com.

I don’t do phone calls. I will not take a phone call ever for any reason other than my wife or kids. But I will make myself available through email. If you have a question, you can email me at john@onlinejobs.ph.

Ezra McCarthy

It’s been great. This has been a great masterclass in hiring a VA. So if you’re interested, feel free to check out those resources. Thanks to John for coming in today. Thank you to each one for tuning into this episode of the Lawn Care Blueprint. Be sure you’re subscribed and if you found this interesting, be sure to leave a rating and review and we’ll catch you on the next one.