Full show notes for this episode can be found at https://jakehower.com/leveraging-the-power-of-a-team-to-produce-remarkable-content-with-chris-ducker/

This is episode number 17.

Our guest today is Chris Ducker.

And Chris has utilized his own team and helps other entrepreneurs

utilize a team of outsourcers.

And so today we're going to look at a little bit about how Chris does that

and how his companies can help others do the same with their own content.

It's a cracking episode.

So rather than put it off any longer, let's get stuck

straight into it right now.

How are you, Chris?

I'm very good,

Jake.

Thanks

for having me on.

Oh, no problems.

I'm very excited to have you on today.

When you were in Melbourne about a month or two ago, we were lucky

enough to catch up for a quick coffee.

And what really I found from that quick coffee with you was that you're

certainly much more than the VA guy.

So I wanted to get you on and.

To delve in a little bit deeper than just looking at virtual assistants.

Sure.

I'm looking forward to it.

Let's get as deep as you want.

Oh, absolutely.

And I must also mention to our listeners now that you went into a little bit more

about dealing with staff in an episode on Foolish Adventure with Tim Conley

a couple of weeks ago, and I thought that was a fantastic episode as well.

Yeah, I, that came out, I think of a call or something, right?

I said that I was a bad manager and he he said how the hell have you

got 200 plus people working for you?

Then I said we'll talk about it over a beer sometime.

And he basically twisted mom and got me to do it on a podcast episode instead.

So yeah, it was a, that was a fun conversation.

Tim's a good guy.

Yes, absolutely.

All right.

So just before we kick off, let's give our listeners a little bit of context.

If they aren't familiar with who Chris Ducker is.

Okay.

I'm, I'm fundamentally, I always say I'm fundamentally a sales and

marketing guy as my background.

That's what I've done my entire career.

And to fast forward, I was in, I was involved with the publishing

business back in the UK and worked for a couple of pretty major companies

over there on and off for a while.

And I eventually came out.

To the Philippines in 2000 and do some consultants work and help set up some

call centers and things like that.

Some training, recruiting and all that sort of stuff.

And then eventually in 2004, I went ahead and started my own company.

Which I then sold a few years later to a local businessman.

And then I decided to start another company.

And that's where the whole outsourcing world began for me.

So that was back in 2007.

So at that point it was really even though I'd been involved in the

outsourcing game for a while, I really just, immersed myself in it completely

and that's where the Live2Sell group were born, which is still running very

strongly now with 260 odd full time staff.

And that's fundamentally a call center inbound and outbound call center.

But I also do a lot of virtual assistant work through Virtual Staff

Finder, which is another one of my companies and just recently opened up.

Sabu's first ever co working space as well, location 63.

So it's all good stuff.

And I thoroughly enjoy what I do.

I'm lucky to be in the position that I am.

Yeah, definitely.

So obviously outsourcing company was the first thing that was born.

What brought you then to the online space and building your own personal brand?

Yeah,

it was funny.

I just stumbled into 2009.

I realized I just couldn't keep going at the pace that I had been going for the

last few years in building the company.

And January 2010, I launched my first blog, which was

Virtual Business Lifestyle.

And I just talked on that blog about my goal to become a full time virtual CEO

and remove myself from the business.

And that was a one year goal that I put in place.

I broke it down to monthly goals.

And I just blogged about those monthly goals and what I was doing how I was

removing myself from certain sections in the business slowly, but surely.

Throughout the course of the year, it gained a lot of traction.

I started a podcast off the back of it where I was interviewing other

lifestyle designers and things like that.

And people that were building businesses online.

And before I knew what was happening, it was two years in, I was starting to get.

Very regular speaking requests and the podcast and, it was well into the

forties and ended up actually on a 50th episode before I pulled the plug on it.

And it was, yeah, it was one of those things.

It all just started out of I guess my own personal necessity to let

the world know what I was doing so that I wouldn't back out of it.

Yeah, that's how I got started with it and it was without a doubt.

It was.

It was the best move I ever made from a business standpoint because as a

businessman, I'm very traditional I'm quite old school in the way that I think

And getting involved in the online space a few years back Was without a doubt

the best thing I've ever done for my businesses because it allowed me to open

up that door to a whole new world of marketing and networking and branding

and everything that went along with that.

The problem for me though, came that around about the end of 2011,

after doing that for a couple of years, I started to get quite bored.

Talking about lifestyle design and working remotely and all that stuff

is only so many things you can say, and I went through a rebranding,

which went live around about halfway through last year, 2012 and rebranded

everything on the chrisducker.

com, which is now my online.

Portal started the podcast again and got going with everything.

So yeah, the personal brand element came out of an initial blog and podcast.

But my thought process in regards to business nowadays is more of a P2P

process as I call it, which is people to people rather than a B2B or B2C one.

And I just I just believed because of that people to people.

Philosophy and concept that it was best to go with a personal brand.

Yeah, definitely.

Definitely.

All right.

I think this is all very interesting for our listeners.

What we're going to do today.

We're going to go behind chrisducker.

com and have a look at how Chris goes about creating

content and leveraging his own.

Team to help him with this.

But I think just before we do head into that, I think let's just keep

peeling back the layers of chrisducker.

com.

Now, Chris, we've previously added a brief chat about how you monetize or how you're

looking to monetize Chris Ducker, because on first glance, anybody coming to the

site is going to see a whole heap of great content, but it's not really clear, you

don't have super strong or super imposing.

Call to actions.

And I think you've got a pretty interesting take on why.

Can you, reveal to our listeners a little bit about your thinking behind this?

The main thought process is that I don't need the

blog or the brand to make me money.

Because I don't class myself as a full time blogger or online

marketer, quote unquote, right?

I make my money through my other businesses.

And when I create content for my blog, for my podcast, for my YouTube

channel, and all the rest of it, I do that because I genuinely want to help

people out, not to profit from it.

Yes, there are some affiliate links on the site here and there.

But it's not like you say, there's no real hard core selling or promoting.

And I get emails every single week from one person or another asking me

to pitch their product or their, their ebook or their course or whatever.

And I don't do it.

You just don't bother asking me because it's not going to happen.

There's probably literally a handful of people that I would break that rule

for if and when they were ever to come out with something that was relevant.

To my audience and that's the key word there relevance If there's no relevance

in what i'm producing for my audience, then obviously I can't expect them to

You know appreciate that link or that review of that product or that service

or whatever the case may be so for me the main aspect when it comes to

creating content for the kristaka portal or platform is So just help people to

either solve a problem or to educate or to entertain one of those three things.

And anybody that's checked out any of my stuff will know that

I love doing all three of those things more than anything else.

And if I can amalgamate all three of them together into a video or a podcast

session or a blog post, then I'm as happy as pig and shit, literally.

Okay.

Yeah, definitely.

Now I think this is very important.

Because that's all very good and well saying that, but I think

certainly what we need to let our listeners know is that it actually

is profitable for you, chrisducker.

com.

Yes, it is.

It does make money in an indirect fashion because I do have.

A link there to my virtual Starfinder company and service, which chrisduckee.

com is actually the number one referring website to that.

And we do a lot of marketing for that particular platform for virtualstarfinder.

com.

So for my blog to be the, the number one top referring site is impressive.

Because, the focus that my blog has on working with virtual assistants is there.

I wouldn't necessarily say it's the main focus, but it's definitely

right up there in the top three.

And I think it goes back to that P2P philosophy, Jake, where I talk

about people wanting to do business.

With other people rather than brands and things like that.

And so people get to know me through my blog.

They get to know me through my podcast.

They can see that I reply to every comment.

They can see that I post regularly, that my content is.

Actionable and helps them in some way shape or form and because of that there's

that virtual relationship that's built up And I mean if you spend time on my

Facebook page, you'll see that I take the conversation very much So off the

blog and onto Facebook where they get to see a lot more of me You know, I

post pictures of my family out there.

I talk about the stuff I do on the weekend what books I'm reading

All that sort of type of stuff.

And that's stuff I generally don't share on my blog.

The relationship has built up and because of that, I get the click

throughs across the virtual style finder, which is my, professional

recruiting and matchmaking service for entrepreneurs are looking for VAs.

And looking to build up virtual staff.

So it, it does make money from an indirect Avenue, but nonetheless, it

makes money and that's a key element.

Yeah.

And I think it's a really good model because as you say, you're building a

really deep connection with your listeners or your readers and your viewers.

And as you say, you've been got relevant services.

That you can help people with anyway.

So that link, while you say he's relatively indirect, it's also

relatively tight, which I really

like.

Yeah.

And I, I enjoy the I enjoy the camaraderie.

There's nothing better for me than when I write a blog post and I think this

is, it could be said for most every blogger out that, I publish a post and I

come back a few hours later and there's already a handful of comments on there.

I get to reply to them and then, people reply to each other and I love that stuff.

That's, for me, that's the reason why I produce the content is to help people

to be able to inspire and motivate people, but also to be able to converse

with them on the subject as well.

I did a post a while back on how to start up and run a mastermind group for the

first time because I recently did it.

For myself and I talked about everything I did to prepare for our first mastermind

session, how we selected the people involved, what went on in the session,

how it was run, the format and everything.

I laid it right out in black and white along with a couple of pictures and things

like that as well and people ate it up.

They just ate it up, they were like my god, if only there was

something like this I could have followed years ago, this is perfect.

Had a load of people tell me that they, pinned it or they saved

it into their Evernote notes or whatever the case may be.

Those are the kind of posts that, when I write and I get that kind of feedback

it makes everything worthwhile, all the hard work that goes into it, I love it.

Yeah, that's

great.

All right.

Let's now look at the content a little bit now from an outsider looking in,

I would say that just looking at your content as well, that you actually

enjoy writing and producing blog posts.

And I dare say that that's just the very beginning of how leveraged that content

becomes.

Yeah the writing the funny thing is though and it's funny you point out the

fact that you believe i like writing and i do writing i'm in the middle

of writing my first book right now and i enjoy writing very much so but

the funny thing is believe it or not.

My audience actually prefers video and they prefer the podcasts

rather than the written posts.

Now, I force them down their throats a little bit every now and then.

It's my blog, if I want to write a post, I'm going to write a post.

Do you know what I mean?

But no it's, this was something I discovered as time went by that.

I would get more viral sharing of video clips and I would do,

a 1000 or 1500 word blog post.

Just the on page analytics of people sticking around longer on posts that are

video, three, four, maybe five minutes to watch the entire thing rather than

two and a bit minutes on a blog post.

These are all things that you got to look at when you're producing the content.

To see what's resonating with your audience and what's not.

And it was very clear to me that my, my audience prefers.

I guess to hear me speak or to watch me speak rather than to

read my words, and that's okay.

But every now and then, I feel like a written piece of content is the best

way forward for that particular message.

And so I'll go ahead and craft a, a blog post.

But, like you said, that's just the beginning of it.

Because once that piece of content is created...

It then goes into the funnel with my team, and they get to work to

repurpose that content as much as they possibly can across the board.

Because that way, we're able to just splatter that content out across

a number of different platforms.

Rather than just use it once.

Yeah,

fantastic.

I think I could go so many different directions right now, but let's try

and reveal, let's try and reveal everything in some sort of order.

So looking at all your different forms of content on your site, how

structured or spontaneous is all the content that you're putting up there?

There are

certain parts that are quite structured, I'll perhaps get into

a conversation with people at an event or I'll get a certain amount of feedback

from a specific podcast episode that I've done where people have asked me.

Four or five sort of related questions or something like that.

And at that point I can start planning out, publication

strategies in terms of okay.

On the subject of, podcasting, I can do, for example, three, three posts,

one on the equipment, one on the soft.

Where and one on the actual marketing of the podcast, that sort of type of thing.

So the strategy is there from time to time.

But I would honestly say that my, my publishing of content is probably a little

bit more spontaneous than structured.

However the structured approach to then repurposing that content

and like I said, getting it out there across the entire internet is

definitely very structured indeed.

Because once a piece of content is created, like I

said, it goes into a funnel.

And the team literally takes over from there and I just watch

it all get published across a number of different platforms.

All

right.

Let's go down that funnel then.

What would be the typical steps involved in once your team takes over?

Okay.

This all came out of me when I made the rebrand over to chrisduckley.

com.

It became very apparent to me that, there was a lot of work that went into

creating any single piece of content.

If you wanted the content to be good, you'd have to work hard at it.

It became quite apparent to me, though, that I needed to be across

a number of different platforms to be found and remembered properly.

The perfect example of this is a little bit like this.

You create a 20 minute video clip, which can be a combination of,

visual video of yourself talking.

And then perhaps some event footage or perhaps some kind of screencast footage

where you've got a keynote or PowerPoint presentation that you've put together.

And you can either edit that together yourself with, a simple program such

as ScreenFlow or something like that.

Or you can pass that off to a video editor, VA.

To go ahead and do that for you, which is in my case is exactly what I do.

Even though I can use ScreenFlow and I can edit video quite well together,

my, I feel like as a business owner, my time is better spent doing other things.

So that goes then over to my VA.

He will edit that content and send it back to me for approval.

Once I've approved it.

I then send that video clip to my general VA and she will then go ahead and upload

that to YouTube, put all the description, the title, any keywords required,

links, and everything else, and it fundamentally gets published onto YouTube.

At that point, my VA will then also rip the audio out of that,

and we can use that audio as either a separate podcast issue episode.

Or we can use it, across a number of different platforms, such as a slide

share document or another video that we might want to utilize with different

slides and all this sort of type of stuff.

There's a lot of different, I always say there's a lot of different

ways to skin that particular cat, but the fact of the matter is it's

gone from a video to an audio.

At that point, it gets transcribed and that transcription can then be used as

a blog post or if it's a longer file, it can be used as a series of different blog

posts and then it can also get put into an e book or an opt in magnet of some sort.

Like a cheat sheet or some kind of white paper or something along those lines.

At that point, it can then get turned into a Slideshare document, which can

then go out onto DocStock and Slideshare and all those other, file sharing

sites and things like that out there.

And it can also then, at that point, get turned into an infographic, which

gets put up to Pinterest and any other infographic directories are out there.

There's a lot of them cropping up right now.

We can then also pick.

Some of the hotspots of that infographic and turn them into

tweetable images that we can use and why they're called tweetables.

I don't know because you can't use them on Twitter.

You use them on places like Google plus and Facebook because we all know that

with Facebook, I think something like you've got a 90% more chance of your

status message being shared or clicked on if you've got an image attached to it.

So if you take nothing more from this interview.

For those listening in, that's what you need to do immediately on your

Facebook page is to start using images on almost all of your status updates.

If you go to mine, you'll see very clearly that I do it very regularly.

And it really, truly does work.

You can see what I've done.

It's gone from video, to audio, to blog posts.

To ebook to white paper to slideshare doc to tweetable images to infographic

All off one piece of content and all i've done is produce that original

piece of content That's the only thing you can't outsource yourself.

That's your voice.

That's your brand.

That's your philosophies and your way of getting things across that

stuff should not be outsourced ever, but everything else can be.

Yeah, definitely.

Now, one very important part, which I'd like to point out there,

and often people ask about how you go about finding outsourcers

or where can you get stuff from?

I think a more important question to be asking is how have you set up a system

to allow you to employ these people and.

What's very obvious to me here is that you've got a strong

or a solid system in place.

Is this something that you designed over time?

Or is this something that you've had your staff help you with?

Oh, I've definitely had them help for sure.

Even though I've lived in the Philippines for 13 years now, I'm married to Filipina.

I know the culture very well.

The bottom line is I'm still a visitor.

I'm still a foreigner even though I'm a permanent resident and all the rest of it.

I couldn't be, and I wouldn't be where I am today without.

The help of my filipino staff across all aspects of my businesses and I

am very vocal about that I talk about that on stage whenever I speak here

in the country And it's not just me massaging the locals earlobes.

I'm being very serious when I say that I think the large majority of the

strategy honestly speaking comes from me But in terms of the implementation

and you know getting it out there.

They're very involved With the way that we do things and with virtual starfinder,

when we first started I remember saying to Stephanie who's our senior project manager

who helped me start virtual starfinder almost three years ago I remember saying

that, Steph, wouldn't it be great if we could help 10 entrepreneurs a month Find

really good quality virtual assistants to help them build the business.

Wouldn't that be great?

And she then in reply said yeah, it would also be great because we're

helping 10 Talented Filipinos find work with good quality bosses overseas.

So it was like a double edged sword that we were, we physically

started waving about with this idea.

And in the course of that three year period, we've hired, I think it's

very close to a thousand VAs that have been hired over the course of

the time that we've been in business.

So that's a thousand entrepreneurs have found their VAs.

Through virtual starfinder and the first six months boy, were we

flying by the seat of our pants?

I mean it was you know The old entrepreneurial adage of it's like a

duck going along the you know The top of the water above the water everything

looks very graceful But beneath the water, the legs are paddling like crazy.

And that was exactly what it was like for that first six to eight months

or so with virtual staff finder, because we were still finding our way.

We were still looking at our processes.

And we, we still on a month to month basis, actually meet once a month with

the entire team to talk about processes and the way that we automate certain parts

of our recruiting process and obviously.

The majority of it is very manual because it requires a lot of interviews

and background checks and sorting through resumes and marketing and

everything that goes along with that.

There are certain things that we follow on every single procedure

that we go through but every now and then a curveball is thrown and

you learn something new about it.

But, yeah, across...

Across the board, there is a process that we follow in the

way that we help people find VAs.

But, the other flip side of that coin is that they can always

do that on their own as well.

They can go to the job sites, they can post their job description, they can go

through all of the resumes and attempt to do the background checks and, testing

and all that stuff that we do for them.

But ultimately, if you're a savvy entrepreneur, you realize that's

a complete and utter waste of your time and it's better off to...

To use somebody who is doing it day in, day out for hundreds of people.

Oh,

absolutely.

It makes so much sense to not spend the five plus hours just

to post a good job description and put it up on some job boards.

Yeah,

and the other thing with the job boards is, I always say they're

a great place to start for project based outsourcing, so if you've never done

any kind of outsourcing before, they're a great place to begin for getting a

logo designed, or a landing page put together, or some transcription work

done, or something along those lines where it's just a one off project, because

it allows you to get your feet wet.

in a virtual way of working, which is absolutely required for it to be able to

work, long term over a period of time.

But once you realize what's possible through outsourcing and what you can

achieve by utilizing the power of working with VAs and building a virtual

team, that's when you have to get a little bit more serious about it,

because that's what you want to do.

You want to build.

The team, you don't want to just have a VA here and there, you need

a VA doing this, another one doing that, another one doing this.

And collectively they become almost like a machine the machine I have

with the content repurposing is it runs pretty much on its own now.

And I definitely wouldn't be able to kick out all the content across all the

different platforms that I do without it.

I'd still be able to blog.

I'd still be able to do my podcast.

I'd still be able to do my video, but everything else that I do online to

market, all of that stuff would disappear overnight if my marketing team disappeared

with me.

Yeah, absolutely.

And that's absolutely very interesting because realistically, as you say,

what you can't take out of it is yourself on that high level in

terms of producing the content.

So why not maximize, why not leverage that by utilizing.

Every avenue that you can to get that content

saying, yeah, exactly.

And I always say, and I'm a big believer of this, if you're going to be creating

content, there's two things that you need to keep in mind all the time.

Number one, you want your content to be genuinely consumable.

Meaning people are going to discover it and they will genuinely consume it.

They will either read that podcast, sorry read that blog post.

They will either listen to that podcast episode or devour that entire

video or infographic or whatever.

It must be consumable and not just browsable, if that makes sense.

And the other thing is that once it's consumed, It's got to be shareable.

It's got to be that good that in some way, shape or form, whoever consumed

it decides to go ahead and share it with everybody else that they know.

And that right there is the secret to content marketing.

It's about having stuff that's genuinely consumable and then very easy to share

in terms of what they get out of it.

Yeah.

Great.

All right.

So let's have a look then.

How many do you have on your marketing team?

There

are five full time people on my marketing team.

And are they all filling similar tasks or have you got experts

in a different?

No you have to make sure that you hire for the roles and not for the tasks.

So all five of those people do very different things for me.

One of them is a general VA.

She'll manage my blog.

She'll upload all my content, take care of all that sort of stuff for me.

The second one is a graphic designer, which is self explanatory.

The third one is a video and a podcast editor.

The fourth one works on more SEO and kind of internet marketing type tactics.

And then the fifth one is a project manager that kind of

manages the whole lot and just make sure that everything works real

nice.

Yeah.

Fantastic.

Now, how do you go about building redundancy into that?

What if one part of the system breaks down for whatever reason, potentially

say a brown out or something like

that?

Yeah.

I'm, the fact of the matter is that, redundancy is important

in every level of business.

And I think the marketing should not be discounted.

A lot of people just.

tend to focus on the operational side of businesses in regards to redundancy,

but I think marketing is, probably it's got to be right out there in the top

three in terms of, the important aspects.

And I wish there was like a silver bullet for this one, but there

isn't really, I make sure that.

A couple of my team can very simply edit videos just in case my video editor who

is absolutely fantastic is not around.

I can still get video content out there, the podcasting side of things he

also handles, but but I can also edit my own podcasts if I need to as well.

The good thing about me is that because I've been podcasting for so long now.

Generally speaking, there's not a whole lot of editing involved anyway.

It's a combination of experience and the fact that my podcast episodes

are very conversational anyway.

So there's generally not a lot of editing involved with my podcast, but that's

not a horrible thing to, to have to do myself if I have to the tough one for

me, actually above and beyond everything else there is the graphic designer.

Because really good graphic designers are very hard to find.

And when you do find them, you've got to make sure that you look after

them properly, both financially.

And in terms of, culture and the way that you work with them everything

else, I feel relatively confident that we could handle within the team without

any major issues, but the graphic designer, that's a real art form.

And it's a tough one.

And I wish I could use Photoshop a little better than I can, but I can't,

and neither can anybody else in my team.

So yeah, if my graphic designer was to disappear.

Could I continue to put stuff out?

Yes, of course.

I could go to 99designs or I could find a, a freelance graphic

designer relatively easily.

But in terms of actually replacing them full time on my

team, that would be a tough one.

Maybe you've maybe you've tripped up a chink in my armor there, Jake.

I'll have to look at that one.

That's very interesting because I've got a team very

similar in job roles to you have.

I have a project manager.

He looks after all the general stuff and manages everybody.

I have an illustrator, I have a video editor and I've got a sound engineer and

I'm on call, I then have a content writer for press releases, et cetera, et cetera.

And let's get a little bit actionable for our listeners, because it may

be that they're not necessarily.

Able to just have this automatic team come in and start producing content for them.

So I might explain a little bit about how I went about building my team.

And I'm sure you'll be able to add a lot to this, Chris, and

give us even myself a lot of tips.

So I started off with my content, producing it myself.

Once I was comfortable that the process was relatively strong, I brought in a

project manager who took off most of those tasks, including the video editing.

Once he was sufficient in it, we got ourselves a video editor.

Huh?

Which increased the quality of the video editing, of course, and

freed up the project manager's time to focus on other things.

Once we had that under control, we brought in an illustrator,

and then also the content writer.

So that right now, the redundancy plan for us is really, I can do Most

roles except again for the graphic design and so can my project manager.

So it's quite similar there.

There is a kink in the arm up, but it's, as you say, graphic designer is not easily

replaced.

No, it's not.

And, the fact of the matter is that I don't think, it just goes to show

you, even though I do what I do.

In regards to, finding other people, VAs and all that sort of stuff.

The fact of the matter is that no business is trouble free.

And that is one thing I can definitely attest to.

Just as you think that everything's rolling along nicely, I guarantee you,

something will happen that will put, that will knock you down a little bit.

And that's one of the traits of the entrepreneur.

Or rather the successful entrepreneur, he's been able to handle those knocks

as and when they come along in whatever way is deemed plausible at the time

and to take it up to the next level.

And I always say, one of my biggest phrases, and I use it literally daily,

either whether I'm talking to myself which I do quite regularly maybe

I should see someone about that.

Or whether I'm speaking with a member of my team or whoever the case may be.

One of the biggest phrases I use over and over again is, I'm too busy for bullshit.

And that, for me, sticks out like a sore thumb in the way

that I manage my businesses.

The fact of the matter is, if there's any kind of bullshit that raises its

head in the way that I run my business, I take care of it because i'm too busy

to handle it I take care of it and I do it quickly and I do it efficiently

And then we get over it and we just we carry on until the next piece of

bullshit comes along Because it will do it'll rear its head quite regularly.

But that's you know, that's why I was saying As entrepreneurs, as business

owners, all we are at the end of the day are glorified problem solvers, we have

other people to help us run our business.

We don't run our businesses, we grow our business and we, we

market our businesses and that all comes down to solving problems,

above and beyond everything else.

Yeah, definitely.

All right.

Now let's quickly focus a little bit on standing out.

Cause this is something that you said was very important and it's very true.

One thing that our listeners may be thinking right now is, holy

crap, if I employ all these people, it's going to be so expensive.

The reality is though, that it doesn't necessarily add cost on a per piece

basis, what it does do is it, the cost will stay relatively similar when you've

got these different people on your team.

What will increase significantly is the quality.

Yeah.

And not only the quality, but also the revenue that you get

back from that investment, like you shouldn't look at manpower,

never look at manpower as a cost.

That's crazy.

Why would you do that?

These people that you bring on board as your team, whether they be virtual

or physically there with you, they are an investment in your business.

Then not a cost just because you paid him a monthly salary and it might look like a

cost on a P& L statement It's not a cost.

It's a damn investment and the moment you snap into that mentality of I'm investing

money in these people But I'm also investing mentorship and time and energy

and effort into these people as well And what am I going to get out of return?

I'm gonna get them helping me build my business and I feel like a lot

of people have Their heads turned on the wrong way when it comes

to staff and things like that.

Number one most important thing for me in my business is my people.

That's right at the top of the list.

Number two are my existing clients.

And number three are my prospective clients, or

bringing on board new business.

I think a lot of business owners have that arse backwards.

Where they focus, number one, on bringing on board new business.

Then looking after their clients.

And then taking care of their people.

And these are the type of business owners for me.

That are going to go bankrupt sooner or later because they've got their head

sewed on completely the wrong way around.

If you don't take care of your people and look at them in the right mindset

in terms of their willingness to help you day in day out to build and run your

business, then you know you, you're a little crazy, you're all la right there.

Your people are your business and that's why I.

I tend to try and take care of my people as much as I possibly can.

Yeah, that's so true.

That's so true.

All right, Chris, we've taken quite a lot of time there.

I think we've, unraveled a little bit about how you produce content.

And there's a lot that our listeners can go off and implement right now.

One thing we were talking about, there is a virtual staff finder.

Now, where can our listeners go off and find out a little bit more

about that particular service?

Yeah, if they're interested in hiring either a part time or a

full time VAA to become a member of their team, and that's all we do.

We don't do project based outsourcing or anything like that, but if they

are interested in that, they can just hop on over to virtualstarfinder.

com and we'll take care of them.

I'm sure you'll link up to everything in the show notes, but

yeah, we'll take good care of them.

If they want to reach out to me on my blog, they can also

do that over at chrisdafer.

com as well.

I'm very approachable and I'm always available on Twitter,

that's Twitter's my, my, my kind of main social media stable diet.

After that it's Facebook.

Oh, that's fantastic.

All right, Chris, thanks very much for coming on the show today.

I've certainly really appreciate it and I know our listeners will as well.

So thank

you very much.

Oh, thank you mate for having me on.

I thoroughly enjoyed our little coffee.

I wish it could have been a longer.

Coffee and turned into a proper breakfast or something.

Maybe we'll do that next time I'm in Melbourne.

Yeah,

absolutely.

I'm sure we will.

All right, Chris, thanks very much.

And I'll speak to you very soon.