James Schramko here. I’m going to talk about the two different ways you might go about dealing with in-house team members; one being interns and the other being full-timers, permanent team members. I do see people get pretty excited about interns and that is because they’re cheap. Basically, they cost less. In my own business, I’ve tended to have full-time team members. I do have most of my team members in the Philippines.
Now, I didn’t initially choose that because it’s cheap, but it is a lower cost of labor than if you’re going to hire someone in Australia, or the United Kingdom, or the USA because generally there are all sorts of taxes and labor legislations, etc. that you have to be aware of.
And sometimes, the work ethic is just not quite the same. And believe it or not, I’ve found my team in the Philippines have an amazing work ethic and do really great work; whereas some people in Western culture can tend to be a bit lazy, a bit complacent. The other problems are they tend to sort of switch from job to job and the worst problem and one reason why you want to be careful if you do go down the intern route; if you have cheap labor, in Western society, and, you know, firstly, they’re going to change over and over. They’ll rotate.
So, they’ll be with you one minute they’ll be gone the next. You’ll be looking for the next intern. So, you never get that IP. That intellectual property is never transferred to them and utilized. So, in my business where my team members have been there between five and 10 years, they’re like a working brain of our business. We have a strong culture. We know exactly who our business is, what our business does, who we help, why we’re there to do it, what our mission is.
The other thing is with interns, apart from the fact that they leave is sometimes and more often than it should happen, in Western society, they actually go into competition with you. So, they take your idea and they vertically integrate you, the business owner, and they set up shop. And the extra worst part is often, they’ll try and do it with your own customers.
They’ll actually take your own customers. I had a web developer try and do this once. He was working with me on projects and then when I switched my supply to my own team, because they were being really lazy and sloppy and starting to jack their prices up, he actually reached out and contacted people in our support desk that we had shared for the website development and let them know that he was in business for himself now, and he tried to poach my customers.
This was many, many years ago. It was an outrageously rude thing to do and it shouldn’t happen but it does. So, watch out for Western labor. That can be a big problem. If you go down the intern route, just expect you’re going to have a constant moving team. It’s very rare that you’ll have an intern forever. And there are a couple of companies around out there who hire in Western labor at low rates and they are actually famous for people. You know, everyone used to work at this company.
There’s two that I can think of in the online space but everyone used to work because they come and then they go, they come and then they go, they come and they go.
Whereas if you build a strong, solid in-house team and perhaps you pay a little more, and definitely I would recommend you look at the Philippines then you’re going to build up that intellectual property and have a great team. If you need some help building a Philippines team, if you want a general virtual assistant, I would recommend VisionFind.com. That is a business run by my wife and she’s very good at finding general virtual assistants who you can train into your team and should be long-lasting.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this training. I’m James Schramko. This is SuperFastBusiness.com.
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