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I respect your job, but do you?

Often in my talks, people bring up that I seem to think that their jobs aren’t good enough. I like to clear that up straight away. I do respect you and your job. My talks on Personal Development and High Achievement is normally based on the concept that the majority of people do not like their jobs.

I had my first money making ventures when I was about 10. My first business enterprise is about 13 washing cars. My first “real job” is at the age of 14  and 9 months old which was the minimum legal age to start employment in my state of Australia. I didn’t like the jobs I did after school, however I liked the pay. Now I work very little for money and work for passion.

One thing that gets me down is when I hear my friends saying that they would love to pursue their dreams. They would love to live abroad or work for passion rather than money. They really want to provide their children and family security built around their regular pay packet. They have complete dependence on their employer for their family’s security so they have no choice but to work day in and day out.  At times, they have been rewarded with bonus and promotions. However, in line with every increases in pay, their lifestyle cost has also risen. Some of them live in nice homes, some barely survive, yet only a fraction is doing financially well.

 

I believe the core failure is the basis of our society and education system. Our society is developed so that we rely on government, Government Systems (primarily Education and Health Care) and corporations to support us. The Education System is one of the biggest problems. 

Our educational system says there is one way of doing things. This system is about reducing thought, reducing questioning, there is one right answer and only one— convergent thinking. Not just convergent thinking, but Industrial Age worker thinking that IS THE RIGHT ANSWER.

 

Divergent Thinking

Our children are told to go to school and get a good job. Many children don’t know what they really want to do. Perhaps more creativity and focusing on passions would bring about a good answer. Often young adults are told or ‘recommended’ what to study on the basis of further education ensuring they get good jobs. I have met people who’s job  is to go to high schools and sell young adults on college or university places. Universities and industries are fighting and often paying schools for each student they receive from them. Schools are being paid directly or indirectly because of their students going to the university.

Now university is important; however harvesting lost students from high school may not be such a good answer. Sure there are lots of respected doctors, teachers, engineers that may disagree with me; however there are so many drop outs and lost people in this world that you have to question if it is good to encourage young adults to spend years studying if they haven’t firstly discovered what they want to do in life.

Then comes the jobs or careers themselves. This is a bit too deep for some however this is worth sharing. Robert Kiyosaki talks about the Cash Flow Quadrant.

Cashflow Quadrant

Our education system brings up people to stay in the E or S Quadrant. The E and S Quadrant relies on trading your time for money. The I Quadrant is  really simple and easy. I started doing it when I was 18, studying and working part time. The I Quadrant is simple. We are just not taught how to do it.

 

Now as our young university graduates grow older, they begin to repay their student loans. In some countries like Australia, these loans are enormous, and in the United States of America, lower educated adults often join the defense force to pay off their debts.

After students loans, or perhaps before there even paid off comes the car loans, credit card / personal loans, next thing you know it’s a house loan. As they work more, they borrow more and more. As you see with the university, the debt cycle may even begin years before they even start working in their career.

What about the passion? What about their dreams? Youth is gone and I haven’t even mention the added pressure of supporting families.

The school system does not help us people discover their true passions and desires. It teaches following and working for the very few that have established the big businesses.

Most of our society is based around this concept of E and S Quadrant (Employed, Self-Employed). Working hard, earning and spending all of it. The Chinese are good savers. They save. This savings though is generally either given to their parents or spent on a house. They still work very hard, all of their life. Society struggles to believe that there are other alternatives, look around, everybody is working hard right? Well I have to say everybody isn’t working hard, and there are alternatives. The B and I Quadrant is within reach even for the under educated.

 

Since turning I am 28, I have worked a total of around 7 months doing work I chose to do and loved. I spend my time focusing on:

  • My Personal Development. I study everyday.
  • Becoming or leaning how to coach and positively influence others.
  • Daily Meditation, exercise, healthy lifestyle, doing what I enjoy, with whom I enjoy.

“The Four Hour Work Week” by Tim Ferris is a best seller. His work is invaluable and I’ve learned a lot from him. We have a lot in common. Only he is much much more successful in most areas. I’m happy to work far less than him at the time of writing. When he wrote that book, he reports he WORKED 4 hours per week. As I write this I WORK 30 minutes a week thanks to passive income. This 30 minutes, if you are interested involves checking bank balances or occasionally doing a Share or Option Trade on the Australian Share Market (we call it Share Market, North Americans Stock Market). Nothing complicated. Something I learned to do while working in fast food after high school or serving in the Army. I studied Business Management, I just found it easier to have a job and invest like mad. It worked for me from 1999 – 2012.

This morning I did a trade in my bed.

If you love your job, great. That’s great. If you prefer to work 4 hours per week to have more time with your family, I strongly urge you to begin your journey of self development and self fulfillment here. My Blog, talks and material are full of advice centered around Personal Development and getting more out of life. I currently take opening minds to the possibility of much more as a challenge and look forward to being a successful coach down the road.

Please remember, if you love your job that is great. You can use your job to fund your investments I did! But don’t sell your self short. If you don’t love your job or love your life maybe it’s time to take serious action.

 

 

 

Go to the Free Resources page where you can find free resources showing you specifically how to measure you net wealth, cashflow and also, assess your current Wealth Mindest!

Click Here for Free Resources

 

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The Benefits of Outsourcing and its Disadvantages

Outsourcing Around the World

When we talk about Outsourcing, we are referring to a business in a country which hire people from another country to work for them. Although Outsourcing often takes place in the same country or even town, we will now talk about International Outsourcing, predominantly in the IT world.

A lot of businesses outsource to save time and money as well as to get the same quality of service by paying less. This kind of outsourcing gives many new small ventures and everyday people the opportunity to be employ an IT team; turning their passions, ideas, and hobbies into a possible cash flow generating career.

When I started outsourcing, it was a big help to me. I wanted to start a blog; however I was always too busy. Then I looked into it and realized I didn’t have the skills or time to learn how to properly do it. After reading the book ‘The 4 Hour Work Week’, I was inspired to start hiring and making it work for me.

Despite the fact that I have been doing a 30 minute work week for the last 4 years, I am still driven to make a good blog site and share the information I have learned and continually learning on a regular basis.

Without Outsourcing, it would never happen.

Imagine how much more you could achieve with one or two virtual staff  helping you?

 

The following are the benefits of outsourcing:

Advantages of Outsourcing

  • Access to Skilled People – You can easily find very high quality specialists. There are specialists in Quicken, Video Editing, Copy writing, Accounting, Social Media Management, you name it!
  • Cost Savings – When you outsource services like data entry, reception duties, cold calling, etc. to a low-cost country like Philippines, you are getting access to services that are available at a much lower cost (You can save 40-80% of western salaries).
  • Reduced Overhead – You don’t have to lease or build an office space for your staff. You don’t have to be obligated for holiday or sick pay, mandatory insurances, training costs, and much more. Plus you can simply hire people per task. With your current hiring methods, can you easily hire someone to work for you for just 10 hours? With Outsourcing you can!
  • Labour Flexibility – Outsourcing allows you to access extra staff resources whenever you require them. Then you can free them when the tasks are completed.
  • Process and System Standardization. I recommend a systematic approach. It’s really easy to have all of your staff spend a little time creating ‘how to’, ‘roles and responsibilities’ documents so that their duties become standardized systems for the future staff.
  • Level the Playing Field – Most small businesses can’t afford to match the in-house support services that bigger companies maintain. Outsourcing can help small companies act “big” by giving them access to technology and skills that large companies benefit from. 24/7 phone or online chat support is a perfect example.
  • Receptionist at a fraction of the price – Basically you can have a full time receptionist that will answer calls via Skype, receive and send faxes, make orders and process data entry for as low as $120USD for a 40 hour week. But it’s not just about how much you can save. Of course, we still want good and reliable staff.

 

There can be disadvantages:

  • Renewing contracts. Staff can leave for higher paid jobs. This is very common if the staff do not receive enough regular or rewarding work. 
  • Confusion with contract, roles and responsibilities. Out sourcing allows you to be the manager. If you haven’t had managerial experience or staff  before, there could be challenges here. However, wouldn’t you rather have challenges with a team of staff costing you on average $3-8USD p/h than a team of staff costing you $15-40USD p/h? Not to mention legal liability is greatly reduced with Outsourcing. Australia and America has unfair dismissal work and contracts protecting employees. I think I would rather develop managerial skills and define roles and responsibilities of staff with an Outsourced work team any day.
  • English levels vary. English level greatly vary around the world. Native English speakers are often unaware of their own accents. Most Filipino and Indian staff can understand clear English very well, you must speak clearly with them. Your staff may have strong or weak accents too (actually accent training is very common in Philippines). Some new staff may lack the confidence in speaking English with you, but you can help and encourage them.
  • Changes in communication. Talking face to face is very rare so you need to be really clear with instructions and ask for regular updates. Most online staff can talk to you over Skype. I strongly encourage this. All of my staff log into Skype when they are online, even if their not working.
  • Poor quality and tardy services among others. Poor quality is common when ever a staff works without supervision or desired levels of skills. This happens regardless of where a staff is working. Sometimes, staff may misrepresent their skills or enhance their resumes. You may need new systems for quality control or simply hire a online project manager.

 

online services

 

By having good strategies and knowledge, these disadvantages can be avoided. It will take some time to develop and get a good hold of everything; however the results are well worth the initial effort.

If your organization is genuinely interested in outsourcing, don’t let these few disadvantages stop you. You will have some problems but they are opportunities to grow! Sort them out and learn from them. Create strategies and procedures or better yet, have your Outsourced staff write these up themselves as their starting task. 

 

 

There is more in the Outsourcing Game you need to know. I strongly suggest:

  • Read all of our articles on Outsourcing.
  • Use our VA (Virtual Assistant) guide to start with your first online staff member.
  • Outline very clear tasks and responsibilities to your VA.
  • Build up tasks and responsibilities one at a time.
  • Have your VA re-write their roles and responsibilities to ensure there had a complete understanding. Also if your VA leave, or get promoted, a new VA can easily take over their roles.
  • Re-read our articles and don’t be afraid to ask for help.
  • GIVE IT A TRY!!! Sign up to ODESK and give it a go today.

 

Have a great, happy and productive day!

 

Adrian and Yves (VA)

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blog writing

Interested in outsourcing your blog or small business?

Building a booming blog takes a lot of work. Growing your blog into a money-making venture  can take you months or even years of full-time work. You may not have the time you need to invest to make your blog successful, or you may naturally want more success. Outsourcing some of your blog tasks may be the easy smart answer.Blog Writing

 

If you want to Start Outsourcing, we are here to help you. In 2013, we provide help for free. Later we may take our material offline or for members only.

Since reading ‘The 4 Hour Work Week’ in 2011, I have put on over 30 staff. I have fired or no longer use 25 of them. Many of them were simply using Facebook while logged on, or unable to fulfill roles adequately. I have learned a lot and share this information in my Outsourcing blogs.

 

Currently I have my staff doing about 80 hours per week. If not for me, for my they also work for my friends websites. My Outsourcing team have helped a lot of my friends create their personal and business web pages, manage their social media and sort their business email accounts. If you want to hire my team and we are good friends, it’s really possible. If you’re not a close friend, then perhaps my staff can help you with your needs; however you will have to pay them or provide donation for the time used.

 

Before you even begin to look for Outsourcing Staff we recommend the following procedure:

 

  • Make a list of all the tasks you have to do through out the week.

If the task is the kind of work you truly hate doing, or something really simple but time consuming, then it’s a possible  good candidate for outsourcing.

  • Look at tasks that are easy to outsource first.

The easiest are regular familiar tasks such as adding friends on social media, and sending birthday wishes. Most Virtual Staff have Facebook so its very easy for them to manage this task. Then you can go into compiling contact lists, and building new contacts. You can also outsource other simple tasks such as researching an item, creating accounts, becoming active in specific groups and the like.

  • Make some decisions.

Manage your list of tasks to outsource into urgent, short term and longer term categories. Once you’ve made a list of what you’d like to outsource, you’ll be able to tell just what you need like it was in the office set-up. Perhaps one Virtual Assistant would be enough but one VA and one Content Writer would be more appropriate.

  • Start your Search.

We have already shared information on individual roles and even included example job advertisements, it doesn’t get much simpler. You would probably start with a VA first, however sometimes it would also be easy exploring other options.

  • An even easier way.

You can even make it even easier by asking my staff to do the sorting for you. For a small commission they can take care of your recruitment for you. Philippines, India and China are covered by my dedicated staff.

We are also  in regular contact with a very experienced company which can take care of all your sourcing, interviewing in Philippines for a fee of $395 USD. Complete with guarantee.

WIth my Assistants we have a much better option, much cheaper of course. It will be guaranteed by my name and pride, which is just as good if not better. We currently are looking at ways of effectively finding, processing and training staff to work for clients at a high standard. We may soon be able to offer a complete service we’re you can easily hire Virtual Staff through us so we can guarantee the work and staff, for a much lower fee or rate than anything currently available on the market. We already havye a Lawyer, Accountant, Bank Account, and multiple staff working in Philippines and I will be there for the month of July 2013. 🙂

 

 

Outsourcing is a great way to save yourself time and to get results for your blog more quickly.

Do you Outsource tasks for your blog? Tell us what you outsource and how it helps you?

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