31: Buying Your Time Back With Outsourcing Guru Chris Ducker

Nathan: Hello and welcome to the Foundr podcast. My name is Nathan Chan and I’m your host, coming to you live from Melbourne, Australia. Hope you’ve all been having a great week. I’ve kinda gone off the ball with this podcast thing since we’ve gone out of the New and Noteworthy, I have kind of taken a step back on the production. I really wanna give you guys our best stuff, and that means I’m going to be giving you one episode a week every Wednesday. That is my promise and commitment to you guys. Now, today’s episode we have Chris Ducker. He’s an outsourcing expert. He’s a master of getting your time back. He’s a master of systems, and he’s got a great story to share. And in this episode, I talk to him about his latest book called “Virtual Freedom”, and he gives you a ton of strategies and guides and tactics all to do with getting your time back. You know, as business owners, as entrepreneurs, we try and do everything, and I learned personally a lot from Chris and his book on how you can bring on virtual staff and utilize virtual staff, and, you know, do the things that you should be doing that move the needle forward, not just like this rubbish administration and repetitive tasks. So that’s it for me, just a short one for me guys. What’s been happening in my world? Been very busy with launching our latest product. This is our second product after the magazine and it’s an Instagram course. I’m really, really excited about it. We’ve had a ton of interest. We’ve got a lot going on. So have an awesome day. Thank you for taking the time to share your earbuds with me. And now, let’s jump into the show.

Today I’m speaking with Chris Ducker. Chris is a serial entrepreneur, outsourcing and small business marketing expert, and he’s the founder and CEO of Virtual Staff Finder and the Live2Sell group of companies. So, Chris, thank you for taking the time, man. Absolute pleasure speaking with you today.

Chris: Yeah, my pleasure to be here. Thanks for the invite, Nathan.

Nathan: Any time, man. So can you tell us, how did you get your job?

Chris: I love that question. How did I get my job? That is literally the best first question I’ve had on the interview for a year easy. I love that. I got my job because I ultimately became unemployable, to be honest with you. The last job that I had, which ran from 2004 through to 2006, was working for a company over in Florida within the infomercial business, and I was making this guy probably an average of around half a million dollars a month in sales internationally through, you know, different infomercial rights and product distribution rights and that sort of type of stuff. And when I sat down and I realized how much money I was making this guy, I just thought to myself, “This is crazy.” Like, you know, I was making good money myself in the position, but I was traveling no ends, and I wasn’t happy. I just wasn’t happy doing what I was doing. And the last time that I spent with him I was actually in Miami which is where he was based. For about a month, we were shooting a couple of infomercial shows and putting together some branding strategies for some retail products he was launching in Europe as well. And, I mean, he was a lovely guy. I mean, to hang around with this guy, you know, he had floor seats at the Miami Heat games. He got, you know, the best tickets of a Hard Rock Cafe for all the concerts in Miami and all that stuff. He was a cool guy to work for and everything, but he was such a pain-in-the-butt boss, just a micromanaging boss. And that last month, well, I spent literally every single day with him, he was just there, and I was flying back home to the Philippines. I was 37000 feet on my way to Hong Kong for my connecting flight back here to the Philippines and I, at that point, wrote my resignation letter right there in the air. When I landed in Hong Kong, I didn’t mess around. I hit the send button on the email and that was that. And from that moment onwards, I was an entrepreneur, like a full-time entrepreneur. I’d been involved in entrepreneurial ventures prior to that for about 10 years or so, both as a partner and as adviser and kind of a marketing head for a lot of companies and partners. I’d never actually had my own business up until that point, and that was when it all began. So, you know, that’s how I got my job. I ultimately fired myself out of being employable.

Nathan: Love it. So how did you come up with your first business idea? And can you tell us about that? Like, is that how you started Virtual Staff Finder and Live2Sell?

Chris: No. That was how I started Live2Sell. So the Live2Sell Group is…you know, it’s a group of companies. So we have Live2Sell which is a outsourced call center. We have Virtual Staff Finder, which is obviously the VA recruiting service, and that’s what most people know me for within, you know, sort of the online world and stuff like that. And then about a year ago we opened a co-working space here in Cebu as well, so it’s three different businesses running under the same banner, and the first out of all those three was the call center. And I got involved with the call center because I’d been involved with other call centers and setting up call centers as a consultant for many, many years here in the Philippines, and, you know, my background was, you know, telemarketing, you know, branding and that sort of type of stuff, so it was a natural fit for me. And after being in the Philippines for so long, I’d created all the contacts I needed to to be able to set up a facility here without any major issues. And I knew that, because of my sales clout, I was gonna be able to bring in the clients regardless. So, yeah, I mean, it was just sort of really going for it. There was a lot of competition over here, but I knew none of them had me at the helm. You know, we focused on company culture right out of the get-go, and building up a great culture internally, and it still serves us very, very well today.

Nathan: Awesome. And how many staff do you have now in Live2Sell?

Chris: We started with 7 and now we’re up to, I think, about 270-odd, so it’s grown quite a bit.

Nathan: Wow, that’s really impressive, man. Now, something I’ve been meaning to ask you, and I think this would excite anyone, is how did you remove yourself? Now, I know this is something that you’ve done, and you’ve essentially removed yourself as the CEO and you’ve got everything running by itself. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Chris: Yeah. I mean, it was late 2009 and I was in a position that a lot of kind of, you know, hardcore business owners are in when they’re growing the business. I was working 16 hours a day, 6 days a week, spending very little time with my family, and ultimately, I burned out. By the end of 2009, I was no good to anybody for anything. And December 26th, 27, and 28, me and my wife had a bit of a staycation. We checked into a resort here in the Philippines which is not too far away from us. You know, we just talked. We talked about what we were gonna do going into 2010 to kind of alleviate some of that stress and that micromanagement that I had sort of slipped into, because it’d become very evident to me at that point that I was no longer running that business, the business was running me, right? And so what we did is we put in place a goal for me to become a virtual CEO, so basically meaning I didn’t need to be in the office to help run and grow the business. And we put that goal in place and we wanted that to be a one-year-long goal because it had to be…you know, I had to be realistic. I wasn’t just gonna go cold turkey and not go into the office anymore. Through the course of that year, I removed myself one kind of position at a time. By the end of the year, we had seven or eight new people on board to help run all the different areas that I was running, so kind of marketing operations, HR, training, recruitment, that sort of type of thing, and I had effectively removed myself from the business. So I went from doing 16 hours a day 6 days a week to now doing 4 days a week. I don’t work Fridays anymore. I have a three-day weekend, and I average around seven to eight hours a day, Monday through to Thursday, so it’s a much more of a productivity-based lifestyle now, and that freedom allows me now to, you know, focus on the stuff that I really enjoy doing, which is, you know, blogging, podcasting, travelling, speaking, writing, and that’s how, you know, everything that I’m known for today came about.

Nathan: Wow, that’s amazing, man. That’s what I call living the dream. So you’ve got your stuff…got pretty much everything on autopilot.

Chris: Well, I mean, I wouldn’t necessarily say autopilot. I mean, I still have to overlook things. You know, it’s very much the case of if the cat’s away for too long, the mice are gonna have a bloody field day, you know what I mean? So I have weekly meetings with my management team, and that is about 15-odd people. It’s two one-hour meetings every week that I have on the same day in the office with two different sets of teams, and, you know, obviously I get weekly reports emailed to me via email on my operations management staff. And it works well. It does, you know… There’s a certain amount of, you know, automation in play in regards to the way things work now. You know, the systems and the processes and the standard operating procedures are now in place so that the business can run effectively and efficiently, but it wasn’t always that case, I can tell you that right now, but yeah. It’s a nice situation that we’ve worked ourself into for sure.

Nathan: Okay. Can we unpack that then and start from…I know it might be quite a cumbersome conversation, so let’s just start from the start. Like, how did you go about working out how you would fulfill this goal?

Chris: Well, I mean, the first thing I did is I sat down and I did an exercise that at the time I was just making some lists, right? Like, I didn’t know that it was gonna develop into an exercise that I’ve now had tens of thousands of people do either online or live in events and things like that, but this is what developed as my 3 Lists to Freedom exercise, which I’m kind of…you know, I kinda share that online and a lot of people talk about that as an exercise now in regards to working out what they wanna outsource and delegate and stuff like that, but that’s…ultimately what I did is I made three lists. And the first list was all the things that I just didn’t like doing. I procrastinated these tasks, you know, until the last minute and then rushed them because I hated them so much. The second list that I made was a list of all the things that I couldn’t do properly but I was still trying to struggle to do just because of my kind of whole…what I call the superhero syndrome of, you know, trying to do everything myself. Entrepreneurs have this…we have this misconception at first that we need to do everything ourself, so, even if we’re not good at it, we’ll still try and do it. Like, if we can save some money, we’ll do it. If we can train ourselves to do it, we’ll do it. And, you know, this is where the word “recharge” only really attributes itself to your cell phone, you know what I mean?

So I created that second list of all the stuff that I really just couldn’t do. And then lastly, I really sat down, and this was the list I really had to think really, really hard about, and that was the list of all the things that I felt I shouldn’t be doing as the business owner. And it was a tough list to put together because, you know, some of the tasks and some of the jobs on that list I enjoyed doing. Some of them I was really good at doing, like training, for example, training our staff. I think, you know, I’m a great trainer of people, but I needed to put together a training manual to get someone else to do it so I wasn’t doing it 20 hours a week, you know what I mean? So, yeah, that 3 Lists to Freedom exercise that I did right at the beginning of 2010 when I launched this one-year-long goal was really, you know…I had everything to attribute to that initial kind of two or three-hour brainstorm session.

Nathan: Awesome. I love it. Now, we’ll actually get that list in and put it in the magazine so we can go into more detail with that. And can we have a look at some of the things that you’ve actually removed now?

Chris: Yeah, I mean, yeah. In fact, actually, you can point people to chrisducker.com/threelists, and it’s all laid out right there. There’s a video version of the exercise and really shows people how to run through it themselves as well properly, so you might wanna kinda link up to that and get you guys to check that out. It’s really a game-changer, Nathan. It totally revolutionized the way that I started running my business.

Nathan: Awesome. And this kind of lays on a really good segue to my next question, and that is how critical, in your opinion, is it for businesses to be outsourcing right now? And what sort of tasks should they be outsourcing?

Chris: Yeah, it’s a great question. I mean, I don’t know whether you would call it critical, right? Like, I mean, some businesses don’t outsource and they do just fine. They have it all in the house and they grow and they survive and they’re profitable and that’s that. But I think, you know, the large majority of, you know, entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, wannapreneurs, you know, very very small business owners that are out there that are juggling lots of different roles, that are wearing lots of hats in what they’re doing as a business owner, that’s were the outsourcing model should be switched on. And, I mean, you know, these simple tasks such as, you know, just filtering through email inquiries from a website or, you know, setting up appointments or doing online research or updating your social media or filtering your email. You know, all these sort of different types of required but maybe not too super high-end tasks, that stuff should be outsourced. As a business owner, you should not be doing those tasks.

I understand at first you might want to or you might have to, but ultimately, you should not be doing those tasks. You can get somebody else out there that’s probably even better than you at doing them to do them for you, and that’s really where you gotta weigh up, what is my time worth, right? what is my hour worth? If I was to sell an hour of my time, what would I charge? Because time is our most valuable commodity as business owners. As entrepreneurs, if we don’t invest our time wisely, we’re done. Like, you can forget about it. So the time that we’re spending right now together talking about this is an investment. It’s an investment for you and your readership and it’s an investment for me and my brands and, hopefully, the sales of my book and everything else that goes along with that. So understanding that time is your most valuable commodity and then really, you know, working out what you should be and should not be doing with that time is absolutely paramount when you begin outsourcing.

Nathan: I just wanted to say there’s an awesome service called RescueTime, are you familiar with that?

Chris: Yes, yes, I’m aware of them, yeah.

Nathan: Yeah, yeah, no. It’s a great service to…it actually, yeah, sits on your…you can run it as a service on your computer and it tracks everything you’re doing. And is that the kind of thing that you would recommend that people use before they start outsourcing? Just seeing where their time goes?

Chris: I mean, yeah. It’s not a bad idea. I don’t think it’s absolutely required. I think, you know, just sitting down with those three lists is probably enough for you to, you know, get a really, really clear picture as to what you’re doing and what you shouldn’t be doing and so forth. But, you know, something like RescueTime, it allows you to look at where your major distractions are, because we spend so much time at the computer running our businesses, a lot of our stuff that we do now is cloud-based, right? Our email, our calendar, social networking, that sort of stuff, and we’re sitting on our computers a lot, and, you know, I found that the less time I spend at my computer, the more productive I am on a day to day basis. So, you know, I try not to sit at my computer for any longer than half an hour at any one time. And when I say sit at my computer, I mean sit there with the internet on with the browser open and all the rest of it. That doesn’t mean that I’m not physically using the computer, so I could be writing a blog post. I could be recording a podcast. I could be shooting, you know, and uploading a video, but what I’m saying is actually sitting there, getting distracted by all this stuff, RescueTime is great for that sort of type of thing, but I don’t think that it would necessarily give you the blueprint that you can follow to start outsourcing as much as the 3 Lists to Freedom exercise.

Nathan: I see. I see. So what sort of other tips would you give for managing your time?

Chris: I mean, I can tell you what I do to sort of cut back on a couple of major time drain tasks nowadays. Let’s look at email and let’s look at social media, right? So social media, for example, you gotta be in it to win it. It’s kind of like a necessary evil. Personally, I hate Facebook. I think it’s one of the biggest waste of spaces on the internet. However, there are a billion plus people on there, and if you wanna find business, Facebook is a pretty darn good place to look for people. I just don’t like all the bells and whistles. I think it’s got well out of control over the last couple of years, but you gotta be in it to win it. The problem with that though is that it does take time to update your status updates, to monitor your messages, to reply to people, you know, and all the rest of it, so utilizing a virtual assistant to do those types of things for you, particularly reply to sort of, you know, simple inquiries that people might have on your business page or on your, you know, your Facebook inbox and that sort of type of stuff. If there’s anything that they can’t handle, then they can leave it and you can get to it when you pop on there next. But, you know, updating your status updates, engaging and posting photos and, you know, like-minded videos that people might want to see and stuff like that, you shouldn’t be doing that, and I don’t do that and I’m pretty active on Facebook, but I probably spend no more, and I’m not exaggerating here, I probably spend no more than an hour and a half a week actually logged into Facebook. My VA handles pretty much all of it for me, and that’s the way that any smart, modern-day entrepreneur should be, you know, kind of focused on social media.

I mean, I’m a big Twitter guy as well, but I automate a lot of the stuff that I do on Twitter in regards to content and links and stuff like that that I think my audience are gonna be interested in and then I’ll hop on, usually twice a day for about 10 to 15 minutes a pop, and reply to everybody that’s commented or said anything or, you know, tweeted me on anything, and that’s the way I handle my social media. I kind of batch update it. But there’s one…you know, we get on to email. Email is the bane of every entrepreneur’s life right now. We’re suckered into being absolutely cornered with that particular medium in terms of communication. We don’t have a choice. And so if there’s anything you can do to really kind of maximize, you know, your ability to handle email in a extremely efficient manner, you should look into doing so. And what I do is I work with my VA in a very, very simple but very effective way to handle my email. I get around 200 to 250 emails a day, all right? And my VA, Marie, is in my inbox at 8:00 in the morning whilst I’m either swimming or practicing yoga and then having breakfast and then spending time with my son, and by the time I turn on my laptop for the first time in the day at 10:00 a.m. and log into my inbox, Marie has cleared out around 70% of that email for me by replying to questions and comments with canned responses that we’ve already put together. She’s spam-blocked certain people. She’s deleted. She’s archived stuff maybe, you know, getting back to it later on, but ultimately, that is a massively good use of a virtual assistant’s time, you know, in relation to me not having to sit in my inbox for probably an average of three, maybe four hours a day, so half of my working day. I’d much rather work with Marie like that, and, you know, automate as much of my email replying as I could instead of being bogged down inside it. So there’s a couple of ideas in terms of how you can work with them to really kind of catapult your productivity.

Nathan: Yeah, no. Look, I definitely feel you there with the email piece, and it’s something that I need to personally explore myself is getting a virtual assistant. Now, a question I’ve been dying to ask you is what’s your opinion on using a service like Fancy Hands versus hiring an assistant yourself, like, using your service, Virtual Staff Finder, that will find you a dedicated virtual assistant?

Chris: Yeah, I mean, you know, any of these kind of virtual conciergal task-based, you know, outsourcing companies that are out there, they all serve a pretty simple process, and that is, ultimately, they will take away certain tasks from you and do them for you, okay? But if you’re looking to truly build a business, you need to build a team, and I’m a big believer in developing teams and developing people on, you know, literally a full-time basis. And, you know, that doesn’t mean that you can’t get involved with outsourcing to begin with. I mean, if you’ve only got the old task, you’ve got a logo you need designed or a landing page put together or some podcasts you want transcribed or, you know, a quick video edited and uploaded, that’s great. You can use stuff like Fancy Hands or oDesk or Elance or Fiverr or anything else like that out there to do that, but that’s task-based outsourcing. That’s project-based outsourcing. If you really wanna inject virtual workers into your business to help run, support, and grow your business, you need to build a team, and that really is very, very apparent in the successes that I’ve seen with entrepreneurs and the way that they work with virtual workers.

Nathan: Interesting. So let’s talk about your new book that’s coming out, “Virtual Freedom”. Can you give us a little bit of a run down what that’s all about?

Chris: Yeah, I mean, you know, I was contacted by a publisher a few years ago to write a book like this and I turned them down because, quite frankly, I was just too busy, but I was also contacted again at the end of last year by another publisher, you know. Yeah, they offered me a decent advance and all the rest of it, but that wasn’t the reason why I took this particular offer this time around, because I’ve seen a lot of crap go up online in the last few years in regards to outsourcing and VAs and working with them and hiring them, cheap labor and all this sort of stuff. And I wrote it for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, I wanted to right all those wrongs that are out there. There’ so much information online. It’s so sporadically spread out, and it has, you know, such a huge difference of opinions in regards to what works and what doesn’t and how to do this or not to do that. I wanted to try and put everything in one volume so that everyone could hear it from hopefully a very genuine source.

And, you know, I’ve been in the Philippines for 13 years. I’ve been in the outsourcing industry pretty much on and off for most of that time, and, you know, over the last four years I’ve built a brand for myself online as the the go-to source for VA information and for building virtual teams and that sort of stuff. And so I figured, well, you know, if anybody is gonna write this book, it’s gonna have to be me, and so I said yes to it. And that was the first reason why I put this together. The second reason why was because so many entrepreneurs have this at their fingertips and they’re unaware of how to do it right and what’s even possible when you do it. If we rewind a few years, “The 4-Hour Workweek” came out and Tim Ferriss wrote an amazing book for our generation’s entrepreneur, and he talked about outsourcing in that book, and he painted a great picture and almost created delusions of grandeur as far as I’m concerned in terms of what’s possible through outsourcing, and he painted that picture of, “This is what’s possible. You can do this. Outsourcing is great. You should give it a try.” But then he left it at that. He didn’t actually tell you how to do it. And so “Virtual Freedom” is the step-by-step guide. It’s the essential field guide for every modern-day entrepreneur doing business today to work out how to find, hire, train, manage, motivate, and really capitalize on building virtual teams, and it really is a step-by-step guide. That’s exactly what it is. From cover to cover, I walk you through it one process at a time.

Nathan: Wow, that sounds amazing, man. Can you give us a little bit of an introduction on how entrepreneurs can go about building a virtual team? Like, what are some struggles that they might find and how can they overcome them?

Chris: Well, there’s two main struggles. The first one is them themselves. I mean, entrepreneurs, like I said, we’re a strange breed, man. Man, we got issues, okay? And, you know, we don’t… The major problem of entrepreneurs is we don’t wanna let go. We’re micromanagers. We believe that we can do everything better than ourselves, and we do…we suffer from what I call in the book from superhero syndrome, and, you know, that really is us believing that no one else can do this better than us. So the first hurdle is getting over yourself and understanding that there are people out there. There’s talent all over the planet that you can hire to help you do amazing things to build and grow your business. So that’s the first hurdle. And the second hurdle, particularly with virtual assistants, is getting over the idea that there’s one particular super VA that is out there that can do everything for you. I mean, if I could go literally a day without getting an email from somebody saying, “I want my VA to do my website design, to do all my website programming, to write my website content, to record my videos, to edit my podcast, to update my social media, to do my online research, to book my travel itinerary, you know, put together business…” I mean, it just goes on and on and on and on and on. These guys are delusional. There’s no super VA out there. When you hire and build a team of virtual workers, you gotta hire for the role, not the task, and that’s where it’s important. You don’t hire a roofer to come in and fix your plumbing. You hire a plumber, and it’s very, very important to understand that that is absolutely the same when it comes to dealing with virtual team members just like it is in real life. So they’re the two major hurdles of getting over yourself and letting go and relinquishing some control day to day, and then obviously understanding that it’s gonna take a team. One person cannot do it all for you.

Nathan: Yeah, no. That’s interesting, and it’s interesting how you mentioned about that the Fancy Hands is based on just tasks, and that’s a really good point you make. So that kinda leads on to how do you go…and I’m sure you talk about this in the book and it’s…I want to know how do you go about finding A-players? Like, how do you go about seeing and sourcing really good talent?

Chris: I mean, this is always a question that I get a lot, and, you know, before you get to that point, you’ve gotta sort of understand a little bit more about the different types of VAs that are out there. So you got your general VA who is your kind of genuine kind of Admin Gal Friday sort of type of role, and, you know, she’ll help you do all your social media and your stuff like that, but then there’s the web developer, there’s the graphic designer, there’s the SEO or the internet marketing sort of type of VA, there’s the writer, there’s the video editor, there’s the audio editor, there’s the app developer, you know, these types of people. Once you understand the type of people that you need, you can then figure out where you’re gonna go and find them. So people like, you know, web developers, app developers, that sort of stuff, you know, sites like freelancer.com, odesk.com, you know, these sites are great, because they’re worldwide, a worldwide network, and you literally have a massive pool of people to pick from in regards to their talent and their experience levels, their salary levels, etc, etc. And then you got sites like 99designs when it comes to web design and graphic design and stuff like that, and that gives you the opportunity to work with so many different people, get so many different ideas and concepts in front of you to be able to kind of pick and choose as to who you wanna work with, but I mean, after that, it really comes down to, you know, interviewing and getting…you know, make sure that you put together a decent job description when you’re posting for these types of roles and then interviewing the guys properly, and making sure that when you do interview them that, you know, you’ve got a very clear picture as to what you need and what you don’t need at the end of the day.

Nathan: Let’s go a little bit deeper with that, like what sort of characteristics do you look for in a hire? Is there certain things? Because skills are quite common, but at the end of the day, how do you know that that person will be a good fit for working with you?

Chris: Yeah, no, great question. I mean, first and foremost, you mentioned skills, right? So, you know, the candidate that you’re looking for should have the necessary skills that you need, right? So you gotta delve into them. You gotta ask questions, the right questions, in regards to the actual skills themselves, right? So, you know, if you’re hiring a web developer, you gotta ask them about HTML and PHP, like dig into that and understand that they truly do have the skills themselves. The other thing that I look for, a couple of other things I look for on a really good hire is, number one, personality, right? Like, I’m really a people person, so in my mind, my potential VAs personalities, they really need to mesh well with me and what I’m all about and my overall vibe as an entrepreneur and as a business owner, and if that happens, they got that much more of an opportunity of getting hired, because other things can be learned but that personality can’t be learned or unlearned for that matter, and it really does absolutely no good at all to have super talented people that you don’t really interact with properly. I’ve learned that over and over and over again. And the other thing is growth potential. You know, I feel like every person that I hire should show evidence right out of the gate that he or she is continually developing their own skill. So, you know, in my book, this will mean that, you know, potential VAs will potentially maybe be able to reference some sort of training that they’ve done in the last twelve months, whether they provided, you know, by an employer, whether they did it on their own, that sort of type of thing. So really it’s the skill set, it’s the growth potential, but most importantly for me is the personality. They gotta mesh well with me and what I’m all about.

Nathan: Love it. Okay, look, we have to work towards wrapping things up and I had a couple of more questions for you, and I wanted to switch gears and understand you as an entrepreneur, and I wanted to know…this is one of my favorite questions that I like to ask people is what did you have to give up to get where you are today? What did you have to sacrifice, man? Because everybody when they look at entrepreneurs that are really successful like yourself, they just see the end product, and I wanna know what went on behind the scenes. Tell us about the things that a lot of people wouldn’t know about the Chris Ducker that we see today.

Chris: Yeah, I mean, that’s a really good question. I understand why you get so excited to ask it. I mean, you’re right. Every entrepreneur is different. We’ve all got different stories to tell, different issues that we have either dealt with or continue to deal with rather. So, I mean, for me, it was my social life, quite frankly, and not so much now, thankfully, but when I was really hardcore into growing the business, and even in 2010 when I was removing myself from the business, I wasn’t out that much. I didn’t invite too many people around for dinner. We didn’t do too many dinner parties. We wouldn’t spend so much time with friends on the weekend because during the week, we were working hard to do everything we needed to do to either grow the business or remove me from the business, right? So the social life definitely did suffer. The other thing was that, you know, I figured that it would be better off for me, my family, my business, the people around me in terms of the people that work for me, it’d be better off for them if I was to invest in myself through reading and through talking with people with like-minded thoughts and desires and aspirations rather than hanging out down the pub having a pint. And, you know, I do socialize more now than I have done in the last few years because I have a little bit more time on my hands. Even at this point, I’m not one of those guys that hangs out, you know, three, four nights a week for a beer after work. That’s not my style. I’d rather go home and spend time with my family. So, yeah, it’s strange but it’s a really good question. I wish I had a slightly sexy answer for you to be honest with you, but yeah, the social life. The social life was definitely affected, definitely.

Nathan: Yeah, no. Look, thank you for sharing that with me, man, because, you know, more times than not, that’s what a lot of people say. They talk about the impact that it had on their life and their family. And, you know, it just shows that you are a human being, and you would’ve had struggles along the way just building this company that you’ve built to 270-odd staff that it’s not just gonna be smooth sailing and there’s gonna be a thing you have to give up, and I always find it curious to see what the person’s answer is. So thank you.

Chris: That’s a great question. I mean, as somebody who has a podcast and asks lots of questions of people, that’s a goodie. I might just steal it from you.

Nathan: All right, man. Be my guest. So, yeah, look. I was going to say you’ve been generous enough to give us three copies of your new book that’s coming out and we’ll be giving that away to listeners and readers of the magazine, so thank you very much for that. Now, if people wanna find out more about you, where can they go and find you?

Chris: The easiest way to be able to get me is on my blog, chrisducker.com, and we have a site for the book set up, virtualfreedombook.com, as well. You know, there’s a podcast out there. There’s videos and a buy-now page and all that sort of stuff if anybody wants to pick it up, and if anybody listening in or reading the magazine wants to win one of those three copies, all they gotta do is send out a tweet with your twitter handle, my twitter handle, which is @chrisducker, along with the hashtag #VFbook and give me the reason, the number one reason, why  they need a copy of “Virtual Freedom” right now, and I’ll pick the three best ones that come out and I’ll make sure my publisher gets it to them no matter where they are in the world. They’re great like that.

Nathan: Awesome. Love it, man. You’re too kind.

Christ: It’s the most I can do. I mean, like, honestly speaking, I truly believe, Nathan, that every entrepreneur on the planet needs a copy of this book. If I have to give out a
Nathan: Hello and welcome to the Foundr podcast. My name is Nathan Chan and I’m your host, coming to you live from Melbourne, Australia. Hope you’ve all been having a great week. I’ve kinda gone off the ball with this podcast thing since we’ve gone out of the New and Noteworthy, I have kind of taken a step back on the production. I really wanna give you guys our best stuff, and that means I’m going to be giving you one episode a week every Wednesday. That is my promise and commitment to you guys. Now, today’s episode we have Chris Ducker. He’s an outsourcing expert. He’s a master of getting your time back. He’s a master of systems, and he’s got a great story to share. And in this episode, I talk to him about his latest book called “Virtual Freedom”, and he gives you a ton of strategies and guides and tactics all to do with getting your time back. You know, as business owners, as entrepreneurs, we try and do everything, and I learned personally a lot from Chris and his book on how you can bring on virtual staff and utilize virtual staff, and, you know, do the things that you should be doing that move the needle forward, not just like this rubbish administration and repetitive tasks. So that’s it for me, just a short one for me guys. What’s been happening in my world? Been very busy with launching our latest product. This is our second product after the magazine and it’s an Instagram course. I’m really, really excited about it. We’ve had a ton of interest. We’ve got a lot going on. So have an awesome day. Thank you for taking the time to share your earbuds with me. And now, let’s jump into the show.

Today I’m speaking with Chris Ducker. Chris is a serial entrepreneur, outsourcing and small business marketing expert, and he’s the founder and CEO of Virtual Staff Finder and the Live2Sell group of companies. So, Chris, thank you for taking the time, man. Absolute pleasure speaking with you today.

Chris: Yeah, my pleasure to be here. Thanks for the invite, Nathan.

Nathan: Any time, man. So can you tell us, how did you get your job?

Chris: I love that question. How did I get my job? That is literally the best first question I’ve had on the interview for a year easy. I love that. I got my job because I ultimately became unemployable, to be honest with you. The last job that I had, which ran from 2004 through to 2006, was working for a company over in Florida within the infomercial business, and I was making this guy probably an average of around half a million dollars a month in sales internationally through, you know, different infomercial rights and product distribution rights and that sort of type of stuff. And when I sat down and I realized how much money I was making this guy, I just thought to myself, “This is crazy.” Like, you know, I was making good money myself in the position, but I was traveling no ends, and I wasn’t happy. I just wasn’t happy doing what I was doing. And the last time that I spent with him I was actually in Miami which is where he was based. For about a month, we were shooting a couple of infomercial shows and putting together some branding strategies for some retail products he was launching in Europe as well. And, I mean, he was a lovely guy. I mean, to hang around with this guy, you know, he had floor seats at the Miami Heat games. He got, you know, the best tickets of a Hard Rock Cafe for all the concerts in Miami and all that stuff. He was a cool guy to work for and everything, but he was such a pain-in-the-butt boss, just a micromanaging boss. And that last month, well, I spent literally every single day with him, he was just there, and I was flying back home to the Philippines. I was 37000 feet on my way to Hong Kong for my connecting flight back here to the Philippines and I, at that point, wrote my resignation letter right there in the air. When I landed in Hong Kong, I didn’t mess around. I hit the send button on the email and that was that. And from that moment onwards, I was an entrepreneur, like a full-time entrepreneur. I’d been involved in entrepreneurial ventures prior to that for about 10 years or so, both as a partner and as adviser and kind of a marketing head for a lot of companies and partners. I’d never actually had my own business up until that point, and that was when it all began. So, you know, that’s how I got my job. I ultimately fired myself out of being employable.

Nathan: Love it. So how did you come up with your first business idea? And can you tell us about that? Like, is that how you started Virtual Staff Finder and Live2Sell?

Chris: No. That was how I started Live2Sell. So the Live2Sell Group is…you know, it’s a group of companies. So we have Live2Sell which is a outsourced call center. We have Virtual Staff Finder, which is obviously the VA recruiting service, and that’s what most people know me for within, you know, sort of the online world and stuff like that. And then about a year ago we opened a co-working space here in Cebu as well, so it’s three different businesses running under the same banner, and the first out of all those three was the call center. And I got involved with the call center because I’d been involved with other call centers and setting up call centers as a consultant for many, many years here in the Philippines, and, you know, my background was, you know, telemarketing, you know, branding and that sort of type of stuff, so it was a natural fit for me. And after being in the Philippines for so long, I’d created all the contacts I needed to to be able to set up a facility here without any major issues. And I knew that, because of my sales clout, I was gonna be able to bring in the clients regardless. So, yeah, I mean, it was just sort of really going for it. There was a lot of competition over here, but I knew none of them had me at the helm. You know, we focused on company culture right out of the get-go, and building up a great culture internally, and it still serves us very, very well today.

Nathan: Awesome. And how many staff do you have now in Live2Sell?

Chris: We started with 7 and now we’re up to, I think, about 270-odd, so it’s grown quite a bit.

Nathan: Wow, that’s really impressive, man. Now, something I’ve been meaning to ask you, and I think this would excite anyone, is how did you remove yourself? Now, I know this is something that you’ve done, and you’ve essentially removed yourself as the CEO and you’ve got everything running by itself. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Chris: Yeah. I mean, it was late 2009 and I was in a position that a lot of kind of, you know, hardcore business owners are in when they’re growing the business. I was working 16 hours a day, 6 days a week, spending very little time with my family, and ultimately, I burned out. By the end of 2009, I was no good to anybody for anything. And December 26th, 27, and 28, me and my wife had a bit of a staycation. We checked into a resort here in the Philippines which is not too far away from us. You know, we just talked. We talked about what we were gonna do going into 2010 to kind of alleviate some of that stress and that micromanagement that I had sort of slipped into, because it’d become very evident to me at that point that I was no longer running that business, the business was running me, right? And so what we did is we put in place a goal for me to become a virtual CEO, so basically meaning I didn’t need to be in the office to help run and grow the business. And we put that goal in place and we wanted that to be a one-year-long goal because it had to be…you know, I had to be realistic. I wasn’t just gonna go cold turkey and not go into the office anymore. Through the course of that year, I removed myself one kind of position at a time. By the end of the year, we had seven or eight new people on board to help run all the different areas that I was running, so kind of marketing operations, HR, training, recruitment, that sort of type of thing, and I had effectively removed myself from the business. So I went from doing 16 hours a day 6 days a week to now doing 4 days a week. I don’t work Fridays anymore. I have a three-day weekend, and I average around seven to eight hours a day, Monday through to Thursday, so it’s a much more of a productivity-based lifestyle now, and that freedom allows me now to, you know, focus on the stuff that I really enjoy doing, which is, you know, blogging, podcasting, travelling, speaking, writing, and that’s how, you know, everything that I’m known for today came about.

Nathan: Wow, that’s amazing, man. That’s what I call living the dream. So you’ve got your stuff…got pretty much everything on autopilot.

Chris: Well, I mean, I wouldn’t necessarily say autopilot. I mean, I still have to overlook things. You know, it’s very much the case of if the cat’s away for too long, the mice are gonna have a bloody field day, you know what I mean? So I have weekly meetings with my management team, and that is about 15-odd people. It’s two one-hour meetings every week that I have on the same day in the office with two different sets of teams, and, you know, obviously I get weekly reports emailed to me via email on my operations management staff. And it works well. It does, you know… There’s a certain amount of, you know, automation in play in regards to the way things work now. You know, the systems and the processes and the standard operating procedures are now in place so that the business can run effectively and efficiently, but it wasn’t always that case, I can tell you that right now, but yeah. It’s a nice situation that we’ve worked ourself into for sure.

Nathan: Okay. Can we unpack that then and start from…I know it might be quite a cumbersome conversation, so let’s just start from the start. Like, how did you go about working out how you would fulfill this goal?

Chris: Well, I mean, the first thing I did is I sat down and I did an exercise that at the time I was just making some lists, right? Like, I didn’t know that it was gonna develop into an exercise that I’ve now had tens of thousands of people do either online or live in events and things like that, but this is what developed as my 3 Lists to Freedom exercise, which I’m kind of…you know, I kinda share that online and a lot of people talk about that as an exercise now in regards to working out what they wanna outsource and delegate and stuff like that, but that’s…ultimately what I did is I made three lists. And the first list was all the things that I just didn’t like doing. I procrastinated these tasks, you know, until the last minute and then rushed them because I hated them so much. The second list that I made was a list of all the things that I couldn’t do properly but I was still trying to struggle to do just because of my kind of whole…what I call the superhero syndrome of, you know, trying to do everything myself. Entrepreneurs have this…we have this misconception at first that we need to do everything ourself, so, even if we’re not good at it, we’ll still try and do it. Like, if we can save some money, we’ll do it. If we can train ourselves to do it, we’ll do it. And, you know, this is where the word “recharge” only really attributes itself to your cell phone, you know what I mean?

So I created that second list of all the stuff that I really just couldn’t do. And then lastly, I really sat down, and this was the list I really had to think really, really hard about, and that was the list of all the things that I felt I shouldn’t be doing as the business owner. And it was a tough list to put together because, you know, some of the tasks and some of the jobs on that list I enjoyed doing. Some of them I was really good at doing, like training, for example, training our staff. I think, you know, I’m a great trainer of people, but I needed to put together a training manual to get someone else to do it so I wasn’t doing it 20 hours a week, you know what I mean? So, yeah, that 3 Lists to Freedom exercise that I did right at the beginning of 2010 when I launched this one-year-long goal was really, you know…I had everything to attribute to that initial kind of two or three-hour brainstorm session.

Nathan: Awesome. I love it. Now, we’ll actually get that list in and put it in the magazine so we can go into more detail with that. And can we have a look at some of the things that you’ve actually removed now?

Chris: Yeah, I mean, yeah. In fact, actually, you can point people to chrisducker.com/threelists, and it’s all laid out right there. There’s a video version of the exercise and really shows people how to run through it themselves as well properly, so you might wanna kinda link up to that and get you guys to check that out. It’s really a game-changer, Nathan. It totally revolutionized the way that I started running my business.

Nathan: Awesome. And this kind of lays on a really good segue to my next question, and that is how critical, in your opinion, is it for businesses to be outsourcing right now? And what sort of tasks should they be outsourcing?

Chris: Yeah, it’s a great question. I mean, I don’t know whether you would call it critical, right? Like, I mean, some businesses don’t outsource and they do just fine. They have it all in the house and they grow and they survive and they’re profitable and that’s that. But I think, you know, the large majority of, you know, entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, wannapreneurs, you know, very very small business owners that are out there that are juggling lots of different roles, that are wearing lots of hats in what they’re doing as a business owner, that’s were the outsourcing model should be switched on. And, I mean, you know, these simple tasks such as, you know, just filtering through email inquiries from a website or, you know, setting up appointments or doing online research or updating your social media or filtering your email. You know, all these sort of different types of required but maybe not too super high-end tasks, that stuff should be outsourced. As a business owner, you should not be doing those tasks.

I understand at first you might want to or you might have to, but ultimately, you should not be doing those tasks. You can get somebody else out there that’s probably even better than you at doing them to do them for you, and that’s really where you gotta weigh up, what is my time worth, right? what is my hour worth? If I was to sell an hour of my time, what would I charge? Because time is our most valuable commodity as business owners. As entrepreneurs, if we don’t invest our time wisely, we’re done. Like, you can forget about it. So the time that we’re spending right now together talking about this is an investment. It’s an investment for you and your readership and it’s an investment for me and my brands and, hopefully, the sales of my book and everything else that goes along with that. So understanding that time is your most valuable commodity and then really, you know, working out what you should be and should not be doing with that time is absolutely paramount when you begin outsourcing.

Nathan: I just wanted to say there’s an awesome service called RescueTime, are you familiar with that?

Chris: Yes, yes, I’m aware of them, yeah.

Nathan: Yeah, yeah, no. It’s a great service to…it actually, yeah, sits on your…you can run it as a service on your computer and it tracks everything you’re doing. And is that the kind of thing that you would recommend that people use before they start outsourcing? Just seeing where their time goes?

Chris: I mean, yeah. It’s not a bad idea. I don’t think it’s absolutely required. I think, you know, just sitting down with those three lists is probably enough for you to, you know, get a really, really clear picture as to what you’re doing and what you shouldn’t be doing and so forth. But, you know, something like RescueTime, it allows you to look at where your major distractions are, because we spend so much time at the computer running our businesses, a lot of our stuff that we do now is cloud-based, right? Our email, our calendar, social networking, that sort of stuff, and we’re sitting on our computers a lot, and, you know, I found that the less time I spend at my computer, the more productive I am on a day to day basis. So, you know, I try not to sit at my computer for any longer than half an hour at any one time. And when I say sit at my computer, I mean sit there with the internet on with the browser open and all the rest of it. That doesn’t mean that I’m not physically using the computer, so I could be writing a blog post. I could be recording a podcast. I could be shooting, you know, and uploading a video, but what I’m saying is actually sitting there, getting distracted by all this stuff, RescueTime is great for that sort of type of thing, but I don’t think that it would necessarily give you the blueprint that you can follow to start outsourcing as much as the 3 Lists to Freedom exercise.

Nathan: I see. I see. So what sort of other tips would you give for managing your time?

Chris: I mean, I can tell you what I do to sort of cut back on a couple of major time drain tasks nowadays. Let’s look at email and let’s look at social media, right? So social media, for example, you gotta be in it to win it. It’s kind of like a necessary evil. Personally, I hate Facebook. I think it’s one of the biggest waste of spaces on the internet. However, there are a billion plus people on there, and if you wanna find business, Facebook is a pretty darn good place to look for people. I just don’t like all the bells and whistles. I think it’s got well out of control over the last couple of years, but you gotta be in it to win it. The problem with that though is that it does take time to update your status updates, to monitor your messages, to reply to people, you know, and all the rest of it, so utilizing a virtual assistant to do those types of things for you, particularly reply to sort of, you know, simple inquiries that people might have on your business page or on your, you know, your Facebook inbox and that sort of type of stuff. If there’s anything that they can’t handle, then they can leave it and you can get to it when you pop on there next. But, you know, updating your status updates, engaging and posting photos and, you know, like-minded videos that people might want to see and stuff like that, you shouldn’t be doing that, and I don’t do that and I’m pretty active on Facebook, but I probably spend no more, and I’m not exaggerating here, I probably spend no more than an hour and a half a week actually logged into Facebook. My VA handles pretty much all of it for me, and that’s the way that any smart, modern-day entrepreneur should be, you know, kind of focused on social media.

I mean, I’m a big Twitter guy as well, but I automate a lot of the stuff that I do on Twitter in regards to content and links and stuff like that that I think my audience are gonna be interested in and then I’ll hop on, usually twice a day for about 10 to 15 minutes a pop, and reply to everybody that’s commented or said anything or, you know, tweeted me on anything, and that’s the way I handle my social media. I kind of batch update it. But there’s one…you know, we get on to email. Email is the bane of every entrepreneur’s life right now. We’re suckered into being absolutely cornered with that particular medium in terms of communication. We don’t have a choice. And so if there’s anything you can do to really kind of maximize, you know, your ability to handle email in a extremely efficient manner, you should look into doing so. And what I do is I work with my VA in a very, very simple but very effective way to handle my email. I get around 200 to 250 emails a day, all right? And my VA, Marie, is in my inbox at 8:00 in the morning whilst I’m either swimming or practicing yoga and then having breakfast and then spending time with my son, and by the time I turn on my laptop for the first time in the day at 10:00 a.m. and log into my inbox, Marie has cleared out around 70% of that email for me by replying to questions and comments with canned responses that we’ve already put together. She’s spam-blocked certain people. She’s deleted. She’s archived stuff maybe, you know, getting back to it later on, but ultimately, that is a massively good use of a virtual assistant’s time, you know, in relation to me not having to sit in my inbox for probably an average of three, maybe four hours a day, so half of my working day. I’d much rather work with Marie like that, and, you know, automate as much of my email replying as I could instead of being bogged down inside it. So there’s a couple of ideas in terms of how you can work with them to really kind of catapult your productivity.

Nathan: Yeah, no. Look, I definitely feel you there with the email piece, and it’s something that I need to personally explore myself is getting a virtual assistant. Now, a question I’ve been dying to ask you is what’s your opinion on using a service like Fancy Hands versus hiring an assistant yourself, like, using your service, Virtual Staff Finder, that will find you a dedicated virtual assistant?

Chris: Yeah, I mean, you know, any of these kind of virtual conciergal task-based, you know, outsourcing companies that are out there, they all serve a pretty simple process, and that is, ultimately, they will take away certain tasks from you and do them for you, okay? But if you’re looking to truly build a business, you need to build a team, and I’m a big believer in developing teams and developing people on, you know, literally a full-time basis. And, you know, that doesn’t mean that you can’t get involved with outsourcing to begin with. I mean, if you’ve only got the old task, you’ve got a logo you need designed or a landing page put together or some podcasts you want transcribed or, you know, a quick video edited and uploaded, that’s great. You can use stuff like Fancy Hands or oDesk or Elance or Fiverr or anything else like that out there to do that, but that’s task-based outsourcing. That’s project-based outsourcing. If you really wanna inject virtual workers into your business to help run, support, and grow your business, you need to build a team, and that really is very, very apparent in the successes that I’ve seen with entrepreneurs and the way that they work with virtual workers.

Nathan: Interesting. So let’s talk about your new book that’s coming out, “Virtual Freedom”. Can you give us a little bit of a run down what that’s all about?

Chris: Yeah, I mean, you know, I was contacted by a publisher a few years ago to write a book like this and I turned them down because, quite frankly, I was just too busy, but I was also contacted again at the end of last year by another publisher, you know. Yeah, they offered me a decent advance and all the rest of it, but that wasn’t the reason why I took this particular offer this time around, because I’ve seen a lot of crap go up online in the last few years in regards to outsourcing and VAs and working with them and hiring them, cheap labor and all this sort of stuff. And I wrote it for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, I wanted to right all those wrongs that are out there. There’ so much information online. It’s so sporadically spread out, and it has, you know, such a huge difference of opinions in regards to what works and what doesn’t and how to do this or not to do that. I wanted to try and put everything in one volume so that everyone could hear it from hopefully a very genuine source.

And, you know, I’ve been in the Philippines for 13 years. I’ve been in the outsourcing industry pretty much on and off for most of that time, and, you know, over the last four years I’ve built a brand for myself online as the the go-to source for VA information and for building virtual teams and that sort of stuff. And so I figured, well, you know, if anybody is gonna write this book, it’s gonna have to be me, and so I said yes to it. And that was the first reason why I put this together. The second reason why was because so many entrepreneurs have this at their fingertips and they’re unaware of how to do it right and what’s even possible when you do it. If we rewind a few years, “The 4-Hour Workweek” came out and Tim Ferriss wrote an amazing book for our generation’s entrepreneur, and he talked about outsourcing in that book, and he painted a great picture and almost created delusions of grandeur as far as I’m concerned in terms of what’s possible through outsourcing, and he painted that picture of, “This is what’s possible. You can do this. Outsourcing is great. You should give it a try.” But then he left it at that. He didn’t actually tell you how to do it. And so “Virtual Freedom” is the step-by-step guide. It’s the essential field guide for every modern-day entrepreneur doing business today to work out how to find, hire, train, manage, motivate, and really capitalize on building virtual teams, and it really is a step-by-step guide. That’s exactly what it is. From cover to cover, I walk you through it one process at a time.

Nathan: Wow, that sounds amazing, man. Can you give us a little bit of an introduction on how entrepreneurs can go about building a virtual team? Like, what are some struggles that they might find and how can they overcome them?

Chris: Well, there’s two main struggles. The first one is them themselves. I mean, entrepreneurs, like I said, we’re a strange breed, man. Man, we got issues, okay? And, you know, we don’t… The major problem of entrepreneurs is we don’t wanna let go. We’re micromanagers. We believe that we can do everything better than ourselves, and we do…we suffer from what I call in the book from superhero syndrome, and, you know, that really is us believing that no one else can do this better than us. So the first hurdle is getting over yourself and understanding that there are people out there. There’s talent all over the planet that you can hire to help you do amazing things to build and grow your business. So that’s the first hurdle. And the second hurdle, particularly with virtual assistants, is getting over the idea that there’s one particular super VA that is out there that can do everything for you. I mean, if I could go literally a day without getting an email from somebody saying, “I want my VA to do my website design, to do all my website programming, to write my website content, to record my videos, to edit my podcast, to update my social media, to do my online research, to book my travel itinerary, you know, put together business…” I mean, it just goes on and on and on and on and on. These guys are delusional. There’s no super VA out there. When you hire and build a team of virtual workers, you gotta hire for the role, not the task, and that’s where it’s important. You don’t hire a roofer to come in and fix your plumbing. You hire a plumber, and it’s very, very important to understand that that is absolutely the same when it comes to dealing with virtual team members just like it is in real life. So they’re the two major hurdles of getting over yourself and letting go and relinquishing some control day to day, and then obviously understanding that it’s gonna take a team. One person cannot do it all for you.

Nathan: Yeah, no. That’s interesting, and it’s interesting how you mentioned about that the Fancy Hands is based on just tasks, and that’s a really good point you make. So that kinda leads on to how do you go…and I’m sure you talk about this in the book and it’s…I want to know how do you go about finding A-players? Like, how do you go about seeing and sourcing really good talent?

Chris: I mean, this is always a question that I get a lot, and, you know, before you get to that point, you’ve gotta sort of understand a little bit more about the different types of VAs that are out there. So you got your general VA who is your kind of genuine kind of Admin Gal Friday sort of type of role, and, you know, she’ll help you do all your social media and your stuff like that, but then there’s the web developer, there’s the graphic designer, there’s the SEO or the internet marketing sort of type of VA, there’s the writer, there’s the video editor, there’s the audio editor, there’s the app developer, you know, these types of people. Once you understand the type of people that you need, you can then figure out where you’re gonna go and find them. So people like, you know, web developers, app developers, that sort of stuff, you know, sites like freelancer.com, odesk.com, you know, these sites are great, because they’re worldwide, a worldwide network, and you literally have a massive pool of people to pick from in regards to their talent and their experience levels, their salary levels, etc, etc. And then you got sites like 99designs when it comes to web design and graphic design and stuff like that, and that gives you the opportunity to work with so many different people, get so many different ideas and concepts in front of you to be able to kind of pick and choose as to who you wanna work with, but I mean, after that, it really comes down to, you know, interviewing and getting…you know, make sure that you put together a decent job description when you’re posting for these types of roles and then interviewing the guys properly, and making sure that when you do interview them that, you know, you’ve got a very clear picture as to what you need and what you don’t need at the end of the day.

Nathan: Let’s go a little bit deeper with that, like what sort of characteristics do you look for in a hire? Is there certain things? Because skills are quite common, but at the end of the day, how do you know that that person will be a good fit for working with you?

Chris: Yeah, no, great question. I mean, first and foremost, you mentioned skills, right? So, you know, the candidate that you’re looking for should have the necessary skills that you need, right? So you gotta delve into them. You gotta ask questions, the right questions, in regards to the actual skills themselves, right? So, you know, if you’re hiring a web developer, you gotta ask them about HTML and PHP, like dig into that and understand that they truly do have the skills themselves. The other thing that I look for, a couple of other things I look for on a really good hire is, number one, personality, right? Like, I’m really a people person, so in my mind, my potential VAs personalities, they really need to mesh well with me and what I’m all about and my overall vibe as an entrepreneur and as a business owner, and if that happens, they got that much more of an opportunity of getting hired, because other things can be learned but that personality can’t be learned or unlearned for that matter, and it really does absolutely no good at all to have super talented people that you don’t really interact with properly. I’ve learned that over and over and over again. And the other thing is growth potential. You know, I feel like every person that I hire should show evidence right out of the gate that he or she is continually developing their own skill. So, you know, in my book, this will mean that, you know, potential VAs will potentially maybe be able to reference some sort of training that they’ve done in the last twelve months, whether they provided, you know, by an employer, whether they did it on their own, that sort of type of thing. So really it’s the skill set, it’s the growth potential, but most importantly for me is the personality. They gotta mesh well with me and what I’m all about.

Nathan: Love it. Okay, look,  we have to work towards wrapping things up and I had a couple of more questions for you, and I wanted to switch gears and understand you as an entrepreneur, and I wanted to know…this is one of my favorite questions that I like to ask people is what did you have to give up to get where you are today? What did you have to sacrifice, man? Because everybody when they look at entrepreneurs that are really successful like yourself, they just see the end product, and I wanna know what went on behind the scenes. Tell us about the things that a lot of people wouldn’t know about the Chris Ducker that we see today.

Chris: Yeah, I mean, that’s a really good question. I understand why you get so excited to ask it. I mean, you’re right. Every entrepreneur is different. We’ve all got different stories to tell, different issues that we have either dealt with or continue to deal with rather. So, I mean, for me, it was my social life, quite frankly, and not so much now, thankfully, but when I was really hardcore into growing the business, and even in 2010 when I was removing myself from the business, I wasn’t out that much. I didn’t invite too many people around for dinner. We didn’t do too many dinner parties. We wouldn’t spend so much time with friends on the weekend because during the week, we were working hard to do everything we needed to do to either grow the business or remove me from the business, right? So the social life definitely did suffer. The other thing was that, you know, I figured that it would be better off for me, my family, my business, the people around me in terms of the people that work for me, it’d be better off for them if I was to invest in myself through reading and through talking with people with like-minded thoughts and desires and aspirations rather than hanging out down the pub having a pint. And, you know, I do socialize more now than I have done in the last few years because I have a little bit more time on my hands. Even at this point, I’m not one of those guys that hangs out, you know, three, four nights a week for a beer after work. That’s not my style. I’d rather go home and spend time with my family. So, yeah, it’s strange but it’s a really good question. I wish I had a slightly sexy answer for you to be honest with you, but yeah, the social life. The social life was definitely affected, definitely.

Nathan: Yeah, no. Look, thank you for sharing that with me, man, because, you know, more times than not, that’s what a lot of people say. They talk about the impact that it had on their life and their family. And, you know, it just shows that you are a human being, and you would’ve had struggles along the way just building this company that you’ve built to 270-odd staff that it’s not just gonna be smooth sailing and there’s gonna be a thing you have to give up, and I always find it curious to see what the person’s answer is. So thank you.

Chris: That’s a great question. I mean, as somebody who has a podcast and asks lots of questions of people, that’s a goodie. I might just steal it from you.

Nathan: All right, man. Be my guest. So, yeah, look. I was going to say you’ve been generous enough to give us three copies of your new book that’s coming out and we’ll be giving that away to listeners and readers of the magazine, so thank you very much for that. Now, if people wanna find out more about you, where can they go and find you?

Chris: The easiest way to be able to get me is on my blog, chrisducker.com, and we have a site for the book set up, virtualfreedombook.com, as well. You know, there’s a podcast out there. There’s videos and a buy-now page and all that sort of stuff if anybody wants to pick it up, and if anybody listening in or reading the magazine wants to win one of those three copies, all they gotta do is send out a tweet with your twitter handle, my twitter handle, which is @chrisducker, along with the hashtag #VFbook and give me the reason, the number one reason, why they need a copy of “Virtual Freedom” right now, and I’ll pick the three best ones that come out and I’ll make sure my publisher gets it to them no matter where they are in the world. They’re great like that.

Nathan: Awesome. Love it, man. You’re too kind.

Christ: It’s the most I can do. I mean, like, honestly speaking, I truly believe, Nathan, that every entrepreneur on the planet needs a copy of this book. If I have to give out a few copies out there to, you know, try and get people to start talking about it, I’m more than happy to do that.

Nathan: You’re a really good guy, Chris. Yeah, look, I just wanted to say thank you for taking the time, and was there any other passing words that you’d like to finish off on?

Chris: No, I mean, other than the fact that, you know, here we are 2014. Man, technology, the world, business, mindset-wise, the way everything has come along in the last couple of years, if you’re stuck, you know, handcuffed to a desk and not utilizing, you know, the right people to help you run and grow your business, you’re not going to survive. It’s just not gonna happen. There are competitors out there that are already working with virtual teams. There’s people already out there focusing on their entrepreneurial productivity, and if you don’t follow suit pretty soon, you’re gonna be left behind in the dust, so just take action. I’m all about getting people to try and take action. That’s what it’s about for me.

Nathan: Awesome. Love it. Well, look, it’s been an absolute pleasure. I’ve had a ton of fun speaking with you, man. Thank you for taking the time.

Chris: No, thanks for the invite again, Nathan. I’m a big fan of the magazine. Love it to bits, and I wish you all the best with it going forward.

Nathan: Thank you. few copies out there to, you know, try and get people to start talking about it, I’m more than happy to do that.

Nathan: You’re a really good guy, Chris. Yeah, look, I just wanted to say thank you for taking the time, and was there any other passing words that you’d like to finish off on?

Chris: No, I mean, other than the fact that, you know, here we are 2014. Man, technology, the world, business, mindset-wise, the way everything has come along in the last couple of years, if you’re stuck, you know, handcuffed to a desk and not utilizing, you know, the right people to help you run and grow your business, you’re not going to survive. It’s just not gonna happen. There are competitors out there that are already working with virtual teams. There’s people already out there focusing on their entrepreneurial productivity, and if you don’t follow suit pretty soon, you’re gonna be left behind in the dust, so just take action. I’m all about getting people to try and take action. That’s what it’s about for me.

Nathan: Awesome. Love it. Well, look, it’s been an absolute pleasure. I’ve had a ton of fun speaking with you, man. Thank you for taking the time.

Chris: No, thanks for the invite again, Nathan. I’m a big fan of the magazine. Love it to bits, and I wish you all the best with it going forward.

Nathan: Thank you.