Business and Lifestyle

When you hire people online of the issue that you should pay them small amounts of money regularly. Normally you don’t agree on monthly salary, but instead agree on payments for each part of the project and sometimes it is getting hard to calculate to total you need to pay.

For instance, you might pay to your technical support specialist x$ for each answered ticket, y$ for each bug reported, z$ for each sale that he generated.

These calculations might be time consuming unless your employee will do them himself. The only thing he will do is reporting to you in a certain format and calculation the total.

For instance, your employee might sent you a list of tickets where he participated, list of bugs reported, etc. and finally he will calculate the total himself.

The only thing you will need to do is to check this report and pay the total.

Inside:

•    Why we do business and why move to remote business model
•    Lifestyle we want to have
•    Choosing communication tools
•    Silver bullet thing: manuals and algorithms
•    Move your toolkit online!
•    How to hire remote employee
•    How to prepare job ads text
•    How to pay remote contractor
•    Social component and remote business
•    Think that you should not outsource

In the previous versions I was saying that it is not a good idea to hire for remote job your accountant, legal and financial specialists.

• But it appeared that I’m visiting my accountant in person less and less time. Normally we exchange emails and I send all the documents by email.
• My legal adviser now switched to no-office style of doing business, meaning we stay in contact by phone and email, we still can meet in person if needed, but there is actually no need for this. Once some project is done I receive detailed report about time spent together with necessary documents.

It looks like people like the idea of working remotely now and it is your choice to find people who are willing to do business in person or these who are willing to do business remotely.

If your business is based on outsourcing then you probably don’t have an office or have a home office. You don’t need to wake up early in the morning to drive to your office. You don’t spend time on things you don’t want to, but you is also limited in some way as there is no social component that is necessary for anyone.

Solutions:

• Find some community of local entrepreneurs, normally there are some especially in big cities;
• Travel to conference. Conferences are a great place to meet new people;
• By running business online you have managed to save some time, invest it in the things you like: traveling, sports, hobbies.  You will also find some social component there;

When working with remote employees it is really important to pay attention to financial side of the project. Here are some recommendations to manage this question in a right way.

Divide payments

The most important: If you need to pay 1000$ for a project, don’t do this in a one single payment. Instead, divide the job task into smaller parts, where you can control the readiness of each part pay money as long as you see real results.

When to pay

Pay only when you see result. It might be some small result, but it must be there. Sometimes service providers want prepayment and you might do it if you can check the reputation of the person you are dealing with.

For instance, if you found someone in online forum and you see that this person has big number of posts and good reputation level, then doing some prepayment is not a problem. In a case you’ll face some problems you will be able to communicate with person to solve it, otherwise his reputation in this community might be affected.

If you found someone with no reputation or trusted portfolio – don’t agree on prepayment. To minimize risks from both sides divide the job and the payment into smaller parts.

Payment Methods

When choosing payment method pay attention to its easiness, cost and buyer/seller protection.

• Wire transfer – if you paying to the same country is it fast enough, but normally some significant transfer fees apply. So choose this method when you don’t have alternatives or sums that you are paying are significant.
• PayPal – fast and easy, but it is not available in all the countries. In some countries people can only send paypal and do this using credit card (not actually sending paypal credit) as for receiving paypal it might be limited in certain geographical zone.
• WebMoney – this thing is really popular in Russia. The problem with this payment method is that you will not receive any reasonable documentation for accounting purposes.

Buyer/seller protection

Practice shows that the payment methods don’t protect buyer, the person who is paying for the service. For instance with PayPal you cannot win the claim concerning money that you spend on service without physical delivery.

Escrow

This is a great idea, which is implemented in simple way by such services as eLance. Your money will be deposited until the agreed job is done. Sounds good, but you still need to organize the project process in a right way, otherwise you’ll see that employee don’t follow deadlines properly, don’t deliver right results in a right way, but still requiring you to release funds from escrow. These discussions might be time consuming, so it is necessary to apply all the same principles as we discussed in other parts.

How can you hire for a big project person that you don’t know, that you cannot control that work for your remotely? Then answer is obvious – get to know the person before you are getting into really big project.

I suggest dividing the “testing” or “evaluation” stage into tree steps:

Initial testing

Ask the candidate to do something small for free as a test. This is especially necessary when the candidate don’t have any works that he can show to you. If you hire software developer ask him to solve some small task for free. In this way you will learn if person is willing to take the project or he is more focused on money. Also, you will learn some basic ideas about how the person do the job.

On this stage: pay attention to his timing, communication style. For example, if you asked to deliver some sketch in png format in 1 day, but the person has delivered it in .jpg in 2 days… well, this is not a good sign for you.

Short-term task testing

No, if the person passed the first stage you can start investing money in this relationship. You have not actually testing the candidate yet. The project from his portfolio might be created by someone else, the free test task that you suggested initially might be to small to show his real style of doing job.

Agree on some short-term task now that candidate can do in a 2-3 days. Pay attention to the same issues – timing, format of delivered results, communication style, willingness to correct problems.

Ready for long run?

If candidate passed to the stage 3, most likely you will work with him for a long time. At least you will be sure that you can trust this person with small projects, so that step-by-step you can involve the person in even biggest businesses.

It is NOT as simple as it sounds. You cannot just write in the description of the job that you are looking for marketing specialist to promote your product in social media…

• When writing job ad text and discussing details be as specific as possible in all aspects. Remember about Murphy’s law: “If something can go wrong it will”

Here are some rules that will help:

• Always discuss time and money questions BEFORE you approve the candidate and job
• Always discuss “WHAT IF” cases… what if the job will not be done on time?

Some requirements taken from real-life:

• If you are looking for copywriter always agree on number of words you will have (not pages)
• If you are looking for designer always agree on the format of resulted job (if you need it to be vector – tell so!)
• Ask people to provide you with unique results  – not copied from somewhere else. It sounds obvious for you that if you pay for something you should get something unique, but sometimes people tend to ignore this idea and just steal some copyrighted job from Internet and then sell it to you.
• Be specific… compare “you need some articles to be posted on some sites with some links to your web-site” or “you need 10 articles to be posted on 5 web-sites with this very link to your web-site with this very anchor texts”
• Agree on the format and on the way of delivered result. If you ask copywriter to write some text should he deliver result in plain text file or Word, should he use formatting or not, should he post it to your web-site or just send by email.

Finance

• Don’t agree on hour rate
• Agree on fixed price for the project
• If it is hard to estimate project price – divide it into smaller parts
• If your employee cannot estimate smaller parts – find another employee

Timeline

• Don’t agree on 1 month project – it is too long to control it
• Divide 1 month project into smaller parts
• If your employee cannot divide the project into smaller parts … yes, find new employee!

The first question “Why?” is actually easy to answer.

• You can find specialist that you can pay less
• You can find specialist with certain knowledge
• You don’t need office space and other expenses to hire this specialist

The “How?” question is more interesting…

Imagine that it is you who is looking for the remote job. How would you be finding job online? What would you do?

• Search in google for “remote job offers” or something similar
• Ask your friends who already to remote job

That is what you should probably do in the first place. I’ll mention some web-sites below, but the best idea to start looking for place to hire remote employees is to answer the question: where people from my niche will be looking for (remote) job.

The answer is not necessary some freelance web-site. Most likely there communities online where people from you niche are talking discussing something. Communities like this have a “Job” section where you can post your job ads.

For example, on of our products BSC Designer deals with Balanced Scorecard concept, which is something that people with MBA degree know about. So the best way for us to find specialists on this topic are Balanced Scorecard groups on LinkedIn, not posting job on freelance sites.

Freelance websites

If you are looking for something more common like design, copy writing, data mining, then one of the best places to put your job ad is eLance.

Also, if English is not the only language you know, try to search in other languages as well. For instance, finding software developers on Russian freelance web-sites is sometimes easier and for sure you’ll find better offers there.

Don’t pay to much

We will talk about finance aspect later, but right now I’d like to warn you that today if one told you he can do the job for 50$, other will do the same job for $5. Don’t believe me? Check Fiverr for $5 ideas that sometimes worth more!

In the beginning we were talking about major benefits of running business remotely, without office – possibility to travel a lot. When you travel your laptop is not always with you… sometimes you use internet-cafe, your phone or your iPad.

The general idea nowadays is to bring all your your business tools online.

Customer database

The first and the most important is to move your customer database on the web-server so that you and your employees could access it remotely. For sure, pay attention to security aspects.

If you have some maillist to keep your customers informed, make sure it is easy accessible online.

• Move customer database online

If you still process your orders manually – forget about this. Today most ecommerce providers will do fraud-check for you as well and send necessary data to your internal e scripts to update your database.

Communication

Today it is obvious to have your email in online client (like GMail), not in offline clients like Outlook or The Bat. GMail is also useful as it can read several email boxes at once, so you can access all your email boxes from a single point.

Recently Google introduced ENUM authorization to its Gmail accounts. That is really great feature, as you don’t have to worry that someone will log your password when you are working from internet-cafe.

• Get GMail account

Web-site editing

Make sure you have an web access to the content of your web-site. Using just htm pages that you edit locally and then upload online is not a good idea these days. Instead, run new projects using some content management system. The great choice in this case is for sure WordPress.

• Choose WordPress for new project

Files and documents

For sure one wish to have an access to all his documents from any point in the world. One way is to upload some documents to Google Docs so that you can access them from your GMail mailbox.

If you want to have easy access to any of your documents from any device try DropBox service, which is really popular and as a result there are DropBox clients from most popular platforms, including Windows, Mac, iPad and Android.

• Use DropBox

I think that is one of the most important lessons you can learn here. So please, pay attention to this simple, but really useful idea: describe your business and your business processes step-by-step!

The format can be various – step-by-step instruction on how to do somethings, detailed algorithm, video guide. The key idea here is to give any person (not just you) who will work in your business the instruction on how to do this!

Example

If you have a typical support question write down step by step what your support manager should do to resolve this vary task. For instance, if user has lost a key to the program what exactly should your support manager do? Check database, generate key, send email to user. What email? Should it be just a plain text email with just registration key and nothing else inside? Or should it be email with registration key and instruction on how to enter this key? Or should it be the detailed instruction on entering the key + some relevant cross/up-sale information?

Turning your support manager into sales… sounds interesting? This can work only if you have a detailed step-by-step algorithms for this!

Choose media

Sometimes you need to record a video showing where to click and what to do. In some cases it worth doing, when you are lazy to write something down… Video is visual and interacting, but if you need to do some changes (and sure, you will need to do them), it’s harder to update it; Also, in most cases you will provide additional links to other instructions, and it will be so easy to add a live link in your video instruction.

For now the best idea is to use some web tool. Why not install WordPress blog for this task? There is a WordPress plugin called “User Access Manager”, you can use it to limit access to your blog to employees only. More over, using this plugin you can setup certain groups of employees with right to access certain pages.

And it is quite flexible when you need to add some new data, add cross links, insert email replay templates.