Perfect your Virtual Assistant processes and get ninja with internet marketing_Interview with Pete Williams

Thanks to our partner Pioneer Transcription Services for making this transcript possible!

David:

Hello, everybody. Here we are once more for another four-hour workweek success story interview. Unfortunately, again this time it’s without any video because this time on my end I had some issues connecting to the Internet, so I’m doing this now through the phone, through Skype, and hopefully the quality will be good. Today I have with me Pete Williams. Pete Williams is probably known to a lot of you guys who have been fans of the four-hour workweek for quite some time, because Pete, I think almost to the day two years ago, published a video on YouTube where he was talking about his four-hour workweek success story, how he deals with outsourcing, et cetera. So I think I could go on and on and on forever introducing Pete as Australia’s Richard Branson, as he is called in the media in Australia, a very interesting guy, author of books such as How To Turn Your Million Dollar Idea into Reality and he’s a 100% entrepreneur, also global runner-up in the JCI Creative Young Entrepreneur Awards for 2009, et cetera. And what I like especially is that Pete is also a passionate runner, obviously a passionate triathlete, because, being myself a passionate mountain runner and marathon runner, I really know what it’s like do to that kind of stuff, although I’m still very far away from doing any triathlon. So, Pete, thank you for your time first of all, and welcome to this interview.

Pete:

Thanks, Dave. Very happy to be here. I got up this morning, I did my hair, got ready for a video. So hopefully my dulcet tones will be enough for those who listen in.

David:

Well, I still haven’t shaved in a month. So, as in my last interview the other day, probably from my point of view it’s better that I’m not visible on video (laughs). So, just for starters, I’m always interested in finding out a little bit what connection my interview partners have with the book The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss, because in the end this is the background and the interest of all the readers and followers of our site. Through a youtube video, I know, of course, that you are a fan of The 4-Hour Workweek, that you have been influenced by it. Can you explain a little bit your connection to the book?

Pete:

Yeah, sure. When it first came out I kind of ignored the book. I’m a huge reader and devour a lot of content, and when I first came across it I thought, there’s probably not going to be a lot in it for me. I’d already run a couple of successful companies, my own book had been released prior to Tim’s. So I kind of was very much in that sort of entrepreneurial space already, and relatively decent with productivity and that sort of stuff. And then a lot of people in my circles suggested to check out the book. And I did, and really, really enjoyed it, particularly the first half of the book, in terms of the core fundamentals and creating the context around a lot of lifestyle design. I really enjoyed that sort of stuff. The second half of the book, where Tim goes into the creation of the muse and stuff like that, for me personally there wasn’t a lot of new stuff in there. I’ve been a member of the faculty of challenge.co, which is simply www.challenge.co, and it’s an online place which sort of teaches exactly the same sort of stuff that Tim talks about in that half of the book. Very much the first half I found fantastic in terms of lifestyle design and that sort of stuff.

David:

So where were you at the moment you read the book, or before you read the book, in terms of your four-hour workweek lifestyle or general lifestyle? Did it extremely change your whole lifestyle to the better towards this so-called four-hour workweek?

Pete:

Not really. I think the way I’ve applied the four-hour workweek to my life in the business is not about actually getting more time to actually do other bits and pieces. It was more about just being more efficient and getting more out of the time I was investing in my projects. So I’ve tried to really apply that generally. So I haven’t really gone and am living the four-hour workweek as such, by pure definition. But I think, as Tim’s said in numerous interviews and conversations since the publication of the book, that the core message really is about getting more out of what you’re doing, so making sure you’re really being efficient and effective, and then not being idle, so taking the time you gain by lifestyle design and then investing that back into either lifestyle or into a business and a project, which is what I’ve continued to do. So I’m still working ridiculously hard and things like that. But that’s purely because I actually enjoy it, not because I have to. So I could easily go back and work a four-hour workweek if I wanted to. But I think two weeks into that, I’d go absolutely nuts, because I would be so bored and things. So it’s more about being able to do more and have more projects on the go and have more sticks in the fire, if you will, for me. I did kind of apply it in its traditional sense in the last 21 weeks, as you sort of alluded to before. I just finished my first Ironman Triathlon two weeks ago. So I was able to sort of give myself a lot more time freedom to invest in the training, because the training, obviously, was pretty intense. It was sort of fifteen to twenty hours a week, depending on the week, my coach set out for me. So that’s obviously a lot of time to invest in just running, swimming, and riding a bike. So the 4hr workweek was able to give me that time freedom. But now that this Ironman’s finished I’m back investing that time back into my business and my projects again now, not sitting on the couch getting fat or anything.

David:

Well, congratulations, of course, on your first Ironman. Ironman Triathlon, that’s fantastic stuff. I really admire that. So when it comes down to the 4 hour workweek, as a last question regarding the book: where do you think most of the people get it wrong, this whole four-hour workweek, when reading the book and saying: “Oh, I want to work four hours”?

Pete:

I think part of it is that they really expect people to only work four hours. And Tim said, as I kind of mentioned before, that he doesn’t work four hours. Think about The 4-Hour Body and The 4-Hour Chef, his new book. He very much spent a lot of time working on those two projects, and it wasn’t about just trying to work four hours. And I also think, unfortunately, with any sort of book that’s being marketed in any sort of way people’s expectations are a little bit off, in that I think you have to build up to it. You can’t sort of just cut the time and go to four hours straightway and have an outsourced virtual assistant take up all your slack and all your additional work in three weeks and they’ll know exactly what to do. I think a lot of the time you have to invest very heavily and very intelligently into building up the systems and the processes around your outsourced virtual team. So I think that what I hear as I talk to a lot of people, the issue they have, is that the outsourcing sort of stuff didn’t work for them. And nine times out of ten, when you really have an honest conversation with them, it actually comes back to them being the cause of the problem with the outsourcer, not that they hired incorrectly or the employee was wrong, but just that their expectations for that person were a little ridiculous and that they didn’t spend the time investing in training and putting the systems in place to support that outsourcer. Because if you really think about it, so many people, when they outsource, they go: “I’m going to outsource my entire business to one person”. And to find one person who’s great at customer service, amazing at graphic design, and technically savvy enough to create a website, you’re not going to find that person by hiring. You’re going to build that person by training, and that takes time. And I think a lot of people expect they can hire someone in the Philippines or in India, as Tim obviously talks a lot about in the book, and expect that person to be able to do all those four or five completely separate tasks straightway within two weeks with no investment of time, training, or learning. And I think that’s where a lot of people really go wrong with the four-hour workweek and the philosophy and trying to implement it. Just false expectations.

David:

You’ve already now mentioned several times the key word that we want to focus around today, the outsourcing, because obviously you’re a specialist when it comes to outsourcing. You are a serial entrepreneur yourself, because next to www.preneurmarketing.com you also have Infiniti Telecommunications, On Hold Advertising, Simply Headsets, and I’m not sure what else you have running. So being a serial entrepreneur like that, of course, logically means that you have to delegate as much as possible. You cannot possibly do everything by yourself and not be a living dead, let’s say. Being a specialist in outsourcing, can you describe a little bit how outsourcing in general is helping you?

Pete:

Yeah, sure, absolutely. To put some of those businesses and products in context, just to give people a bit more of a background—and then I can definitely talk about how outsourcing fits in–I’ve had a telecommunications company here in Australia for about five or six years now, which is sort of, I guess, the biggest business in the portfolio. Such a douche-y word, portfolio, but it’s probably the best word to describe the businesses that I run. And that is a real-world, bricks-and-mortar company with real-world Australian employees that sell and install phone systems in quite a few states around the country. So that’s the core business. And the majority of staff in this business is obviously Australian-based for, obviously, customer service and installation and technical support and all that sales stuff that goes along with that. But as part of this business we’re continually and always growing the outsource team to look after a lot of the administration work. So doing a lot of just the general bookkeeping stuff is now being outsourced to the Philippines. Also, as part of that business group, we’ve got a number of e-commerce sites selling telecommunications-related products and services like office headsets under the Simply Headsets brand. We’ve got a headphone website where we sell to the direct consumer market selling headphones and a whole bunch of other sort of various smaller specific niche-based e-commerce sites. And a lot of the management of those e-commerce sites is driven by our outsource teams. So they’re doing everything from continually doing price checks to make sure we’re competitive on our pricing across the marketplace. They’re doing stuff like product management, so as we get new products from our suppliers we have a very structured system in place that we send that new spreadsheet of new products from our supplier to one of their team. And then, through a series of steps and processes we’ve built up over time, we create videos for all our products that go on YouTube and get syndicated across the web. Obviously the products get pulled apart and put into our e-commerce store, the listings, and things like that. Obviously we have some online marketing principles and processes that get done through our outsourcing team. So that sort of stuff that isn’t really internal employee-required has been built over time through our outsourcing team. So we very much do a lot of that. And then under my preneurmarketing banner, which is sort of, I guess, my personal banner, where I do sort of a little bit of speaking—and obviously my books and stuff are under that and stuff like that—I’ve got a team of online marketers and a couple of virtual assistants, who do a lot of personal support, work in a personal-assistant type manner, everything from customer service to organizing doctor’s appointments, and all the kind of cool, fun stuff that Tim highlights in his book that he can do with an outsource team. So I definitely employed and implemented those sort of fun things through my own team.

David:

You’re based in Australia. Where are your virtual assistants based?

Pete:

Philippines. We tried India quite a bit earlier on, and for whatever reason it just didn’t seem to work for us, whereas with the Philippines—fantastic from a price point. Not to commoditize them on any level, because that’s another big thing I think people make mistakes with is treating their outsourcers as commodities. They are people, and you really have to respect that relationship. But from a price point, they’re very, very competitive. I’ve found their English skills are phenomenal, their loyalty’s amazing, their work ethic is just phenomenal if you treat them right. You know, I’ve found some of their staff sending emails and replying to emails on the weekends, and when asked why, it’s purely: “Oh, I was just checking my email online, so I thought I’d check my work stuff at the same time”. And it’s just their work ethic’s amazing. So I’ve found the Philippines a fantastic resource for building our team.

David:

And how many VAs do you have working for you?

Pete:

Right now—let me count up—I think, in the current instance, full-time, we’ve probably got nine or ten. And then we’ve got a number of what I call freelancers, from graphic designers to article writers. I guess that part of team members would be up to sort of ten or fifteen people that we can call on the fly. So they’re not actually full-time employees as such, they’re just freelancers, and they are from all around the world. We’ve got some technical guys over in Eastern Europe, we’ve got some graphic designers in the U.S., we’ve got some article writers in the U.K., in Canada, and in the U.S. as well who do on-the-fly work for us. And we pay them on a per-project or per-output basis.

David:

That’s amazing, nine VAs full-time. So you still pay them by the hour, but they’re working exclusively for you, right? Or are they really your employees but just based in the Philippines?

Pete:

Yeah, they’re purely our employees, based in the Philippines. So yeah, as I said, a couple of website designers in there as well, who do sort of just the basic HTML work, that work very closely with our internal design and development team for the telco company. So they are very much our employees. They log on every morning and work the same hours as Australian hours, which is possible because the Philippines is relatively close. So they’re working sort of 6 am to 2 pm, 3 pm type hours. So they’re working like in Philippine time, so they can work the same hours we do. I like those people being on Skype and being able to connect with us on a regular basis during the day, so they can ask questions and be efficient and effective in that manner. So yeah, they work just like they would if we had an employee who just worked from home in Australia. There’s no difference.

David:

Since now you have told us how much you use VAs, how much you also kind of rely on them in order to make your businesses thrive and so that you can work on your businesses instead of in your businesses, with all that knowledge that you have: what you do think then is the biggest misconception when it comes to the usual 4-Hour Workweek reader, let’s say, who reads about Tim and outsourcing and gives it a try? What’s the biggest misconception here, or the biggest mistake that people usually make, do you think?

Pete:

Yeah, I think the biggest misconception—and all credit to Tim, because obviously it’s a fantastic book, but like anything, when you read something you get excited about, the initial reaction you have is it’s going to be easy. And obviously Tim paints that to a certain extent in the book, that it’s easy to do. And once it’s up and running, it is absolutely fabulous. But I think the biggest misconception is, as I kind of alluded to earlier, that it takes a lot to get the systems and processes in place. And that’s one thing I think Tim didn’t go into enough in the book, in my personal opinion. And I understand why he didn’t. And if I was in his position I probably wouldn’t have either. Otherwise the book would be, obviously, a lot more extensive. But I think you have to spend a lot of time building systems and processes. There’s a term called outtasking, and outtasking is what Tim refers to quite a bit in the lifestyle design element of the book, where he talks about getting someone to organize a holiday for you or organize flowers for your partner or the one-off sort of tasks that make your life mundane that you outtask and get someone else to coordinate. And the issue is that outtasking’s great, but there’s no real long-term leverage in outtasking, because in outtasking quite often you have to explain the task, because it’s a unique task every single time you pass that to a virtual assistant, whereas to grow a business…. My personal assistants do a lot of outtasking stuff, that’s what a personal assistant generally does. But the majority of our team, who have consciously worked very, very hard in building up systems and processes, can rinse and repeat, because that’s where outsourcing really grows, is that once you actually have a team of people who you can just feed in a particular task, or the elements or ingredients of a task, at the top of the funnel and you have a system in place that automates that, that’s where the true leverage comes. So, as I sort of spoke about before, with our new products we want to add to our website, we have a system in place now that we can just grab that spreadsheet from a supplier, send it to one of our team members, and then from there just go through a sequence of events where that document gets taken and put into a format for our actual content of the site. That document then gets passed on to one of our video guys in the Philippines, who then creates 30- to one-minute videos with overviews of each of our products, where every one of our products can have a video on our YouTube channel. We can also embed those videos on our product page, and then from there it can go to another team member who can start working on online marketing for backlinks and article writing for SEO and that sort of stuff. So you really, I think, have to consciously work very, very hard to build a system that really not only leverages your time but leverages their time and leverages your business, because a lot of the lifestyle design stuff Tim spoke about, yeah, it definitely leverages your time but it doesn’t give your business a whole lot of leverage. And I think that’s where a lot of people really are not aware of how much work it takes to build those systems and processes and really get that in place.

David:

A couple of times you have mentioned systems and processes. How does Pete Williams set up a system or process in order to insure that the cooperation with the VAs is smooth and as effective as possible?

Pete:

Yeah, sure. Well, this will be a very, very big rabbit hole to go down, so I’ll try and be as concise and clear as possible.

David:

Let’s start from the point of view of somebody who is inspired by the book and says: “Okay, I’m now working on my business but I’m spending too many hours and I want to get started with VAs”. Maybe we can take it kind of from the beginning and then see where we end up or if the rabbit hole gets too deep.

Pete:

Sounds good. Well, I think the first thing people really have to do before they hire a virtual assistant is actually almost write out a week in the life of that person, literally sit down and actually write out what stuff would they be doing on a weekly basis and how long would each of those tasks take, because I’ve seen a lot of people hire a virtual assistant because they have 40, 50, 60 hours worth of outtasking type tasks to do, so they hire someone, give them those 60 hours of tasks, and then realize at the end of that 60 hours they don’t really have anything else for that person to do because it’s not anything that’s rinse-and-repeatable, it’s not a system. So they get: “Oh, hang on, I’ve got this person now, what do I do?” and they start giving them tasks and projects that suck up your time to define the project but don’t really give you any benefit. So I think the first thing you need to do before you hire someone is work out what stuff would they do on a weekly basis that is rinse-and-repeatable and regular, so you can justify their wage. And sometimes that just means you hire someone part-time, you just hire someone for 20 hours a week, as opposed to a full 40-hour a week employee. There’s nothing wrong with that. So I guess that’s the first rule I have is that before I hire someone I really want to make sure that they’ve got 40 hours of work a week to do that can be regular.

David:

May I ask, before you go on to the second step: of course I can hear already the questions from readers and followers who say “Well, Pete, but how much is that going to cost me? How am I supposed to afford it as an entrepreneur who just started out?” It’s probably one of the oldest questions when it comes to outsourcing and starting something on the entrepreneur side. What is your take regarding that?

Pete:

That’s a very, very good question, and it’s a very fair question. I think it kind of actually plays into the step-two sort of thing, in that you want to make sure that you have done those projects and those steps yourself first. And that way you know how long it takes to do that particular task on a regular basis. You may have a task of continually putting your product on your e-commerce site, or you’re writing articles to get syndicated across the Internet to give you backlinks to help from a search engine optimization perspective, whatever it might be, and you know that you’re investing 10 hours a week doing that particular task. Now, if you feel and know that you can spend those 10 hours somewhere else and make profit in your business, then it’s a pretty easy equation to make. But so many people, what they do is actually start outsourcing without any revenue. And the concern there is that the 10 hours they free up that they then re-invest in their business are not really revenue-generating hours. So you’re actually just digging a deeper hole, so to speak. So it’s a hard one to really communicate clearly, from my perspective, anyway. But I really think what you want to make sure you’re doing is that you have a bank of cash, maybe five grand or ten grand or $1000 you’re going to invest in the business. And then that way you can say: “I’m going to hire some people to work, and just consider these costs an investment in this test of a new muse or a new project or a new niche business”. And that’s fine. But otherwise you really want to make sure when you are outsourcing, giving them tasks that are otherwise on your to-do list, that you’re re-investing your free time effectively in the business. When Tim Ferriss turned his supplement business around and used outsourcing, the business was already profitable. So he was basically buying back his own sanity and his own time. But he was able to buy that sanity back because there was profit there. He was willing to give up some of that profit in exchange for the salary and free time, which makes sense. But when you’re starting out a brand new business, you don’t really have that luxury of buying freedom, because you don’t have any revenue that you can re-invest and allocate somewhere else. So you really want to make sure that you’ve really got funds available or you are very smart and just start off small and grow your team. You don’t sort of go and invest in five people straightway. You just hire someone part-time that might be 20 hours a week, and you’re paying, hypothetically, five U.S. dollars an hour for that 20 hours. Then obviously that’s $100 a week you’re spending. Now, for a lot of people you can justify that. And you can even justify that if you’re not recouping that straightway with additional $100 in revenue. But that’s a good place to start. And I think you really should say: “As soon as I start making $100 a week in my 4 hour workweek income muse, I invest that straight back into the business to grow the business and not put that in your hip pocket”. And you invest that by having another staff member, which means you can produce more of whatever it is that you produce, whether it’s content, backlinks, products, whatever you normally produce in a 20-hour week, do more of that. And then just get to that tipping point, because there’s always going to be that tipping point, where you actually start generating more revenue than you do time. Does that answer the question at all?

David:

Yeah, definitely. So the first point, you said, was sitting down and defining what this person has to do, what this VA has to do. And you were about to go to the second step.

Pete:

Yeah, well, I think the second step is that you sit down and really do all the tasks yourself first. I think a lot of people will hire an outsource team member and give them a project or a task that you, the entrepreneur, the 4-Hour Workweek reader, haven’t actually done yourself. And I think that’s a bad thing, for a number of reasons. I think you really want to make sure that you know what’s expected of this particular task so you know, a) how long it takes, so that way when a virtual assistant does it, you can know whether they’re sort of ‘yanking your chain’, to use an Australian term, and taking you for a ride and not being serious, or if they’re not being effective; and b) you know what it takes so you can actually write up the procedure yourself, you can be very clear on what it takes to actually do this. And I use a software package that people might find very helpful called ScreenSteps. It’s available for the Mac and Windows, so it’s multi-platform. And it’s basically a software package that allows you to create process documentation really, really easy. So, particularly if you’re doing like computer-based work, you can take a screen shot very, very quickly and easily of the first element of the step, then you can write up what it takes to do that step, then take the picture if you need to, hit another button, and start that process again, take a screen shot of the next step in the process. And I use that a lot. And I’ve now got my team members using that a lot as they develop processes and procedures themselves which have obviously got that stage in their business. But really document everything, document the process, so you can hand the process steps to your team members. And I think you have to make sure that you know what you’re doing, first and foremost, so you can define how you want the process created. But then you also know how long it takes your team members to do that, so you can manage that and have those expectations correct.

David:

It’s also helpful, I suppose, because on the one hand, as you said, if you have done the job yourself you can really judge if this VA is taking too long maybe or is doing a super-incredible job by delivering it twice or triple-time quicker than you could do it; but also with this ScreenSteps, as you say, it’s great to give some visual support to the VA regarding the process step. And if, for whatever reason, your main VA who is doing the process decides he or she doesn’t want to work with you any more, you can easily give this documentation to somebody else, who knows exactly what the process steps are. It’s a great idea.

Pete:

Yeah, exactly. And I actually use another service—I’m probably going to dump a whole bunch of services and tools onto our listeners, I’m obviously a big believer in sort of using tools and systems, I think people have probably understood by now—editme.com. Basically it’s a service that allows you to actually create an online work Wiki, is what we call it in our business. And again, ScreenSteps allows you to easily upload and export the ScreenSteps documentation you’ve created into HTML format. So you can cut and paste that straight into EditMe and make an online-accessible, across-the-world, globally password-protected resource library of all your steps and processes. So as team members change roles or join and leave the team, you can actually have this online resource that everyone can actually access. So it makes it a lot more efficient and effective from that perspective. You can edit stuff online so it’s always up to date. I know people also use Google Docs for that really, really well. So I really believe in having that sort of platform in place your team can access. And we have that now, and it’s phenomenal, because one of my key team members had to go off in hospital to get some operations done for a month or so—miss you, Flo, if you end up listening to this at some point. But obviously I’ve had people step in and fill her big shoes, and have been able to do that because there are just procedures there straightway. So my time hasn’t changed, I still email the new team member, hey, I need you to go and do this particular task, and then she’ll go and find the process in the work Wiki and do the task. Yes, it’s going to take longer than when Flo did that particular task. But from my perspective I can still live that four-hour workweek methodology because I don’t have to re-train that person myself, because there are systems in place.

David:

Sounds very sophisticated. So ScreenSteps and EditMe. And the Wiki, is that something that is only recommended if you have like a whole team of virtual assistants working for you, or is that something you recommend already with the first virtual assistant?

Pete:

Well, I think it’s something you want to do straightway, particularly because, as you train your first team member, when you give them any instructions I believe you should be doing the ScreenStep documentation as part of their initial training. And then it’s five bucks a month, or, using WordPress, it’s fundamentally free if you’ve got a hosting account already, to upload those ScreenStep documentations into that process area. So realistically, it’s not much more work for you up front to have that online resource than it would be later on, because you’re already going to teach that person, so you may as well get those steps in. And what I’ve done numerous times as well is I might actually jump on Skype with a team member, use Call Recorder, which is an app on the Mac to record the video or the audio. And it’s actually what we’re using to record the interview here today. And I’ll walk them through a process or a procedure I need them to do on a regular basis, and they’ll watch as I share my screen on Skype. I’ll record the screen using Call Recorder or ScreenFlow. And so I actually do the process, they watch. And then what I get them to do when they go and do that particular task for the very first time themselves is, as they do that, they create the work Wiki screen step process themselves. So I don’t actually even do the process any more of creating the procedure documentation. I just show them what the task is the very first time, then let them go and actually do the task and create the procedure while they’re doing it, to actually leverage my time even more.

David:

Like I said, it sounds totally sophisticated, and I think it’s definitely something that we all should have in mind, we who are thinking of virtual assistants and using more of this virtual support. Back to my question before from the cost point of view, with Screen Steps, et cetera, where are we when it comes to cost?

Pete:

Good question. I’m going to Google it while we’re talking. I’ll give you some prices. It’s not ridiculously expensive. There’s obviously a free trial … And it’s $39.95.

David:

Per month?

Pete:

That’s the one-off cost for ScreenSteps. There’s also EditMe, www.editme.com, to be precise. And that is a monthly plan, I believe. Again, there’s a free trial, and then $19 a month for the entry level, which gives you 10 users. So for most people you’re not going to have a team more than 10 to start off with, anyway, and that’ll give you everything you need. But obviously WordPress is free, and if you’ve already got a hosting account you can put the documentation on there somewhere as a subdomain or something like that and host that for free. And then there’s plenty of free things for WordPress. It’ll be a Wiki type thing that’ll allow you to do that pretty quickly.

David:

So we have step number one and step number two. Then how would Pete Williams continue the whole process, having in mind that we are just starting out?

Pete:

Well, I don’t know if it’s really a step in the process, but the next step I guess that I really make sure we do is to have what we refer to as end-of-days with our team. So we actually get our team to actually send me an email—and still I do this myself—at the end of every day with, I think, five key things. And this helps me very quickly leverage my communication with the team, manage their actions and reporting, and things like that. And if it’s via email, I can do that on my iPhone or my iPad no matter where I am, which makes it really efficient. And basically there are five questions that I get the team to email me at the end of every single day. So the email starts with the very first point, which is: What was the plan for today, and what was achieved? So they’ll actually email, okay, so these are the five or six things I had to do today. It might be replying to customer service emails, it might be building a website, whatever the tasks are for that particular day that they had on their to-do list. And they’ll actually just write them all down, what they had planned and what they achieved, and then, in brackets, how long each of those particular tasks took, so I actually get an idea of where their time breakdown is. And I can read that answer and that response in ten seconds, so I can quickly see what each of my team members did on a daily basis and how long each of them took. The second thing is: What personal development steps did you take every day? One thing I really encourage for our team to do is actually invest an hour of their time every day at my expense to actually learn and train. So I will give them access to various online courses, things like www.challenge.co, for example, which I mentioned before, that every one of our team members has to go through at the very start. And it’s a whole bunch of free videos with just the basics of online marketing. So I know that Tim modeled a lot of what he put in the second half of The 4-Hour Workweek off the Challenge stuff, which was originally called the Thirty-Day Challenge. It’s now changed and is over at challenge.co. And it’s basically a lot of online video walking you through the four-hour workweek muse process, so to speak. And, depending on their role, is we’ll give them access to different courses. So whether they’re doing video editing or they’re article writing or whatever it might be, we’ll give them access to different online resources and projects and products that they can actually go and devour. So I want to know what they did that day. So, for example, one of my team members here, I’m just looking at their email from yesterday. It’s a new team member. They watched, for whatever reason, only 30 minutes of challenge.co videos yesterday, and they listed which particular videos they actually watched, just so I see their progress and what they’re learning. The third question they need to answer for me is: What wasn’t achieved today, and why? So it’s okay if they don’t achieve all their objectives every day, because things do pop up. But I know what they had planned for that day, what weren’t they able to get to, and why. So maybe it might be: I ran out of time, or: I couldn’t access this particular service because I couldn’t get access to the password, so what I did was then email the support desk to reactivate the account, or whatever it might be. So if it’s something they had to do that day but couldn’t do it, I want to know what it was they didn’t achieve and why they didn’t achieve it, to make sure they’re actually outcome-orientated team members, because the key thing is I really want to make sure they’re actually outcome-orientated. So if they can’t reach a particular outcome, what do they actually do to try and reach that outcome? What sort of problem-solving stuff did they actually do, to make sure they didn’t just go, oh, I couldn’t do that, and forgot about it? So that’s the third element. The fourth thing I get them to email me as part of this daily report is: What do they need from Pete, me, and by when? So if there are certain things they’re waiting on from me, whether it might be access to a particular account or feedback on a particular thing they’ve emailed me or whatever it might be, I get them to put that in that email. So that’s my action steps for the next day. So I know simply I can just look at those particular responses to the question of what they need from me and then I can put them into my OmniFocus task management software that I use, and then they’re my action steps to make sure my team are running efficiently, so that’s what they need from me. And the fifth thing that’s part of the email is: What’s the plan for tomorrow? So I simply get them to actually give me a list of what they think, based on their projects and their tasks and obviously the high-level stuff we’re working on as a team, what are they doing tomorrow, what are their particular tasks they’ve got planned for tomorrow? And fundamentally I can then reply to email overnight really quickly, agree, disagree, change their plan for tomorrow. I can obviously respond to the things they need from me very, very quickly, on the fly. So I can just do that via email every day. And then their plan for tomorrow element becomes the first part the following day. So obviously what they had planned for tomorrow becomes what the plan for today was and what was achieved the following day. So it’s just that very quick email they send to me. It takes them all of five to ten minutes at the end of the day that summarizes their day, that I can actually manage and respond to, no matter where I am, very, very quickly.

David:

That all sounds very logical. In step number four you mentioned task management software, OmniFocus.

Pete:

Yeah, that’s the software that I use personally to manage my time. It’s a software that’s been developed off the foundation that David Allen talks about in his fantastic book Getting Things Done, which a lot of people probably are familiar with. And if you’re not, I recommend that as one of my top five reads, along with The 4-Hour Workweek. I think Getting Things Done is a fantastic book—and procedure, is fundamentally what it is, and process to, funnily enough, get things done. And OmniFocus is a Mac-based software that runs on the iPad, iPhone, and obviously on my MacBook and syncs across Dropbox that is my to-do management software. So I use that to sort of manage my time and my tasks and stuff like that.

David:

That’s also something for free? Or does it come with some cost?

Pete:

Yeah, I think it’s about $30 or $40 for the PC. Off the top of my head, I think it’s roughly about $20 for the iPad and probably $15 for the iPhone. So it’s not a cheap, but it’s a phenomenal app, and something I would be hard put to survive without.

David:

I just want to make sure that this doesn’t go unnoticed. The software you mentioned here might be also very useful for others. It was step number three altogether, right? How would you continue then?

Pete:

Well, that’s pretty much the main three things I do, because off the back of the email on a daily basis, that kind of gives you a lot of understanding about your team members, of who’s efficient, who’s not efficient. And obviously then you just start tailoring stuff fundamentally based off that. They’re probably the three key things that I could think of off the top of my head that really relate to the building of the team.

David:

Sounds very good, definitely. And I’m sure that this already in itself is very, very useful information for many of the listeners and readers out there. What I wanted to ask now is, I saw this video of yours that went online, I think, very recently from the guys over at Noble Samurai, where you talk about something called “The Content Leverage System”. I watched the video. It’s 30 minutes or so, and definitely worth watching, because many of us who get inspired by the book The 4-Hour Workweek end up somehow in the online marketing/niche site marketing area, so what you describe there in the content leverage system video is in my opinion fantastic information. And like I said, I really highly recommend everybody of the readers and followers to watch the video. I hope that people will watch it, but for people who, for whatever reason, don’t get to watch it, how would you connect your wisdom or your knowledge about virtual assistants with that online marketing piece?

Pete:

Wisdom—I don’t know if that’s justified, but I’ll take the compliment. So yeah, for people who are listening and unfortunately can’t get back to your site, Dave, to actually get the link, it’s available at www.noblesamurai.com/blog. And obviously, depending when you’re listening to the interview, the blog piece might be at the top or it might be hidden a little bit. But my friend David Jennings and I did a couple of videos for the boys over at Noble Samurai, who make Market Samurai, which is an awesome product for online research for SEO and a range of other sort of online marketing things that you do. The Market Samurai software is amazing, and I really hope you would check it out. But yeah, we did a couple of videos on outsourcing and our experiences with that. And Dave did an awesome one about hiring team members, which you can find on the blog as well. But my video was all about the content leverage system, which is one of many systems that we have in our business. And basically, from an Internet marketing perspective, as you said, very much a lot of people who read The 4-Hour Workweek and end up making an online-based business for the obvious reasons have to do a lot of content creation to make sure you’re a market leader. And this is something that we speak about quite a bit, market leadership. And you really want to make sure that this day and age it’s not just about ranking number one in the search engines, it’s about becoming a market leader. And that is the person who actually starts the conversation in your marketplace, creates all the content, and that sort of stuff, not necessarily the leader in terms of number-one sales but leader in terms of crafting and controlling, to a certain extent, the conversation in your particular muse and niche. So the content leverage system is basically a system that we’ve brought up over time using our team to make sure we can get that market leadership position without taking a lot of my personal time out, because obviously to create video, audio, articles, PDFs, e-books, all that sort of stuff could take a lot of time. So we developed a system to leverage my time and create that content. So fundamentally, what it’s all about is producing a lot of content by using my team without me having to do a lot. To give a quick overview of the process, basically what I do is, I’ll use a software package called MindNode, which is available on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac. I’m pretty much an Apple convert. And it’s a mind map software. So I’ll go off and create a mind map about a particular topic, whether it is how to do a particular outsourcing task or my opinion or something, whatever I’m going to create content around. And I’ll create a mind map, be it in the car or on the bus, sitting by the beach, whatever it is where I’ll create that mind map—sitting on the couch in front of the Kardassians with my fiance or something like that, I don’t know. And it’s a mind map that I’ll structure in a certain way. And then what I’ll do is, I’ll open that mind map up on my MacBook Pro and use ScreenFlow, which is a software package that allows you to record your screen and your microphone at the same time and create a video. So I’ll then typically create a video of me talking through the mind map, so that a core piece of content would be my voice talking through the mind map in a sequential order, in a very coherent and articulate manner, that can become the foundation of a lot of content. And then from there, what I’ll basically do is take that ScreenFlow file and the mind map, zip them up, and then drop them into a specific Dropbox folder. So we use Dropbox quite heavily on our team because it’s a fantastic service that allows you to sink files and folders very easily across a number of computers and team members, because you can share the folders. So I’ll drop that ScreenFlow file into a particular Dropbox folder. And then one of our team members will monitor that Dropbox folder, so any time something comes into that Dropbox folder they know exactly what process to actually take. So as soon as that goes into that folder, one of our team members will then take the mind map and create a PowerPoint or Keynote presentation, and all the slides for that are based off the mind map. That becomes a PowerPoint presentation. And then that will be the team member who actually sinks my audio from my mind map recording to the PowerPoint slides, with all the transitions and all that sort of stuff, and then export that as a final video. So that becomes a video that my team have produced. I don’t worry about doing the mechanics of the process, I just worry about the content. So that’s the process there. And then from there they’ll actually take the video, and that’ll be syndicated on YouTube and Vimeo and all that sort of various video-sharing platforms for exposure, market leadership, and obviously also for backlinks and SEO benefit. We’ll then take the audio file out of the original recording that I did, and that becomes an MP3 file for podcast or syndication on a blog, whatever it might be. Then we’ll also get one of our team members to transcribe the audio that I produced in my initial mind map recording, and that becomes a transcript which can be syndicated online, re-embedded into the YouTube video. And then that gets syndicated across the web in various ways as well. We then take that transcription into an article that can be syndicated across the web as well on e-zine articles, as guest blog posts, as a blog post of my own, and then potentially, depending on the content, it might become an e-book that we’ll sell on iTunes or on Amazon, through Kindle, and stuff like that. So fundamentally the content leverage system is just a series of processes that we’ve now documented using ScreenSteps and EditMe. But it’s very much a systemization of content creation where I simply focus on the key element of content creation, which is the content itself, and let my team work on the mechanics and the context, because during this process we get a lot of different contexts out around the content, we get video, audio, different written formats, so different modalities of my audience, whether they like video or audio or written, they get all that, with me only doing one core element at the very start of this process and the team doing the rest. So that’s the high-level overview of the process. But as you said, the video we did for the Noble Samurai guys on their blog goes into quite a bit of depth on how that whole system runs out and some little ninja tips for each of the steps and stuff like that.

David:

I watched the video and I was already amazed, but now that you’ve given me the high-level overview I’m even more thrilled because it just blows my mind what is possible, because in the description of the video it says something like how you can create great content leverage system from just 30 minutes of work per day, and I think that’s true. Maybe it takes a little bit more time to come up with a mind map and audio that goes along with the mind map, but in the end, as you said, you just focus on one thing, the key element, which is the content, and then everything else, in an ideal world, will be done then by your team. And the outcome of that is highly valuable and highly SEO-relevant stuff.

Pete:

Absolutely. And it’s not just for SEO. There are obviously huge benefits in that system to generate you backlinks, but it’s also just about getting that conversation out there and being the market leader. And I think you touched on the key point just before, that you want to focus on the core element of any particular task and outsource the mechanics. And I think this is something that hasn’t really been clearly communicated in the four-hour workweek or lifestyle design community, that the key thing you should be trying to do when you’re using a team of outsourcers is that they should be there to help produce and leverage your time by doing the mechanics of a particular task. So you should always control the core element of it. Like in the content leverage system the core element is the content and the message. But all the other stuff that just takes up so much time, which so many people will be doing themselves right now, are really the mechanics elements. Like I personally don’t really care what sort of transition we’re doing on the slides in keynote, whether it’s a flash or a swipe. Those little mechanic things make no difference to me. I want to focus on the core element. So all that sort of stuff is mechanics. And I let my team, who are my mechanics, do that, and I just focus on the main elements of the task, whatever it might be. So that’s the real thing. And I think you really want to encapsulate and internalize that when you actually are creating these systems and building your team. You really want to make sure when you build a system, you work that and just draw out and fundamentally think through: What is the entire process I do to create a website or to create a bunch of articles or to even write a book, to a certain extent, what is the key element that I have to control, and what elements of that process are just mechanics that anybody can really do? When you really define that and can really break down the process between mechanics and core, that’s where you can really get the leverage and start to actually see how a team member or a bunch of team members can actually help you. You really grow your niche business or your muse.

David:

Like I said before, in an ideal world it happens like that, that you focus on the key element, the core element, the content, and then the rest is done by your team. But the ones who are starting out might not have the financial possibilities to have a whole VA team backing them up. So in your opinion, if you put yourself into this position, what is the number-one outsourcing part in this whole process?

Pete:

I think it comes down really to just knowing which part of the mechanics stuff you either don’t want to do or aren’t good at. Like if you sort of take that content leverage system that I just explained as an example, you could easily do that system by outtasking it. So you could potentially do the video, the keynote presentation, and record all that yourself, but then find someone on oDesk or Elance or one of those sort of online outtasking service platforms and actually get them to transcribe the audio and create a series of articles around it. So you don’t actually have to have a full-time team doing this. You could just test this with one particular video that you want to do, and do the first half of it and then outtask the last half. So I think you don’t want to put the cart before the horse and hire a team member to work for you on this content leverage system, for example, before you really know you’re going to be doing this on a regular basis. Start by outtasking this. Yes, it’s going to take a little bit longer and might cost you a little bit more. But just make sure that the actual outcome is giving you the actual outcome you predicted, so you actually get the outcome you wanted. And start by just outtasking that, and then as you grow, start building your team. And as I said at the start of the interview, someone who’s going to create the keynote slides and video for you is not going to be the same person who’s going to do the transcript and the article writing. They’re completely different skill sets. So to try and find one person who’s going to do the entire content leverage system for you…. Yes, someone could possibly do that if you teach them. But it’s not going to really give you the quality you want, because someone who’s good at doing video and rendering is not going to be good at doing transcriptions, is probably not going to be good at actually taking the core message and writing it as a standalone article. They’re three completely different skill sets. So outtask that first.

David:

And of course there’s always the possibility of partnerships. Like on our site we were lucky enough to find a partner, Pioneer Transcription Services, who does the transcriptions of the interviews for free in exchange for linking to their site and for mentioning them. So there are always ways, I think, to somehow avoid the cost factor and still get the benefit of outsourced services. So my question now would be, since we’ve talked now about Internet marketing, and since you are, from what I see, definitely a specialist in this and in the whole SEO aspect, et cetera, if somebody wants to create, let’s say, a four-hour workweek business or a niche site through Internet marketing, would you prefer to try to be a big fish in a small pond or rather a small fish in a big pond, if you know what I mean?

Pete:

Yeah absolutely. Okay, this is probably one of the few times you’ll hear someone say, “Do as I say, not as I do.” When you’re starting out, definitely become a big fish in a small pond. It’s definitely the way to go because it’s easier, less competition, you can test stuff, you can see results quicker, all that sort of stuff. From my perspective—given, obviously, that I’ve had a lot of time playing this game, for want of a better term—we and my team tend to play in medium-sized to larger ponds now because we know we have the systems in place. We can come at it with a Mack truck because we have the systems in place, like the content leverage system. So I think products like headsets and headphones and telephone systems and some other niches that we’re in that aren’t talked about a lot, they’re pretty decent-sized niches, because obviously we can start up a new website and throw $5000 worth of ad words at that as a test. And most people don’t really have that budget to test something, with a $5000 budget or a $2000 budget, whatever it might be. So we have that ability, which obviously has been built up over time. There’s still stuff that I do that I’ll start off in a very small pond with a website, purely trying to target one specific keyword, to see if we can rank that one specific keyword. And if we can, then we grow the business from that. And that’s the sort of stuff that I talk about a lot. But from our perspective, we like to go more like a bull at a gate at a particular niche. But that’s because obviously we’ve got the resources and systems and team behind us to actually be able to do that. So it’s a do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do type message, to that question, anyway.

David:

To round out this subject of the virtual assistants and the Internet marketing, is there anything else you would like to add to that?

Pete:

There’s probably plenty of stuff I could talk about, really. But I think the biggest thing when it comes to Internet marketing and stuff like that—and I think Tim kind of addresses it in The 4-Hour Workweek as well—is that you should really consider all this sort of stuff simply as a test. It’s not a win or a loss, everything is a test, whether it might be a muse, a business idea, a blog post. Anything you do should simply be a test to see if works or not. And that’s one thing that a lot of people struggle to do is get their ego out of the way. There’s so much stuff with our websites that works now that I would have said would not have worked. We have lively discussions—that’s probably a nice way of putting it—internally in our office when it comes to sort of site design or element layout and stuff like that. And I’ll be like, that’s not going to work, that looks crap. Or someone will say, I don’t like that color, whatever it might be. We just test everything. We let the marketplace tell us. And we’re able get our ego out of the way. It’s not what we think or what our friends think or our team think, it’s about what the marketplace not only thinks but responds to with an open wallet. And that’s the real matrix, someone actually opening their wallet and giving you money. That’s the only opinion worth listening to. Get your own out of the way. And test regularly. Use Google Analytics or Website Optimizer and really test on a regular basis everything you can, because you’d be surprised that some of the biggest realizations come from testing stuff and listening to your marketplace.

David:

Sounds like one can definitely hear many times – from Tim Ferriss, from you now, from other people like Pat Flynn from www.smartpassiveincome.com et cetera. So testing logically is of course a very important aspect here. I am really not the best with testing because I find it so boring somehow. It’s way too technical somehow, going through all the analytics, analyzing split tests and whatever. But I have no doubt that if you want to make a big difference you have to go into testing as well.

To completely round out this interview with you would be the following question. You mentioned before that Getting Things Done and The 4-Hour Workweek are within your top five books that people should read. What are the other three?

Pete:

Influence by Robert Cialdini is a fantastic book. He’s a university lecturer, a professor. And it’s a book about the four or five elements that influence people, and it’s a really, really cool book. On that, obviously a lot to say. My books, some are in the top five.

David:

Which would those be?

Pete:

The first book is probably the most relevant to this day’s conversation, which—again, like I’m not a huge fan of the title but the publishing company outwon me on that vote—is called How To Turn Your Million Dollar Idea into a Reality. And it just basically helps you take your idea and make it a reality. So it covers a lot of the sort of stuff that Tim covers in his book, not so much the lifestyle design stuff, more the action steps you can take to take a business to market.

David:

I have a question about your book, because it was through Tim I was made aware of this book by Harvey Reese, How To License Your Million Dollar Idea: Everything You Need To Know To Turn a Simple Idea into a Million Dollar Payday. Is that totally different from your book?

Pete:

Harvey’s book is more about licensing. So basically you still own your idea and let someone else do a lot of the work, whereas my book’s very much geared a lot more towards real-world business. Obviously the principles apply. This is one of my pet peeves. When people say, “I’m an Internet marketer,” that is the biggest load of crap I’ve ever heard. You are simply a marketer who only has one path to your target audience, and that’s through the Internet. So I think people who say they’re an Internet marketer are full of it, to a certain extent. They don’t really treat their business as a real business. And there’s nothing wrong with having a business that only has one path to market, being the Internet. That’s fine, there’s nothing wrong with that at all, but just be aware that that’s the business model you actually have. So that’s something to keep in mind. Other great books…. It’s always hard sort of to reel off books because I’m a huge reader.

David:

Which can be seen on your Amazon suggestion list on your website. Six pages.

Pete:

It’s huge, isn’t it? I’m just trying to pull some stuff that’s relevant to this particular call. As a side note, there’s a really cool service that I’m actually helping promote at the moment and launch for a friend of mine called Steve, probably the best link I’d love people to check out, called justreaditfor.me. And it’s a book summary service, which is really, really cool. So every month or every week they give out a new book summary which is video-based, with very, very visual, graphically designed, beautiful book summaries. There’s also like an action-oriented workbook. It’s just an amazing service for devouring books in summary format in a very engaging form. They’re not sort of the old traditional, black and white, very stale book summaries, they’re really, really cool. So that’s a side note. Rules for Revolutionaries by Guy Kawasaki is an old book, it’s probably ten years old, but it’s an awesome, awesome read. I think The War of Art by Steven Pressfield is a fantastic book worth reading. It’s all about getting over procrastination and beating resistance and actually doing the work required to actually produce something. So I think that’s a fantastic book.

David:

I think you’re also a fan of Think and Grow Rich, right?

Pete:

Yeah, absolutely. Think and Grow Rich is a fantastic book by Napoleon Hill, How To Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie, two of the old books, are awesome. I think something that’s a bit left of field that might sort of throw people a little bit as a book by a mutual friend of Tim and I’s, Neil Strauss, called The Game. Neil’s a writer for Rolling Stone and the New York Times, a real geeky guy, super-cool guy. But quite a few years ago he was given an assignment by the New York Times to actually write an article about this online underground community of pickup artists and he got told to write that article and kind of got involved in the community. And basically The Game is his story of getting that assignment and learning the art of social interaction in the context of pickup. And I use those words very, very particularly because the book is very much about social science, social interaction, which everyone is involved in in their life, whether it’s trying to talk to and communicate with a colleague or an outsource person or a client. It’s very much about social dynamics. And that’s what the book is about, but the context of it is in pickup, male or female, married or single, I really do think it’s a really interesting book if you read it through the right frame, and the frame is social dynamics, not about how to go up and meet women and get their phone number in a bookstore. It’s about how you go up and start a conversation with someone and interact socially with them. So I think it’s a really, really cool book to read. The One Minute Millionaire by Mark Victor Hansen and Robert Allen has a very, very soft spot in my heart because in that book it tells of a story of a guy by the name of Paul Hartunian who actually sold pieces of the Brooklyn Bridge walkway back in the 80s and made quite a bit of money out of it, just by turning pieces of trash into a piece of memorabilia that was sold quite well. And I read that book years ago and actually replicated that exact idea here in Australia by selling bits of the Melbourne Cricket Ground, which is Australia’s version of Yankee Stadium, and got a whole lot of exposure. And it was off the back of that particular project, which was huge, and obviously my other businesses and stuff like that, that got me the tagline that you mentioned at the top of the interview as Australia’s Richard Branson, which seems to stick with me now, and which I’m more than happy to take. And the book’s really cool, the book’s a great book, and it’s always going to have a soft spot in my heart because it was such a pivotal book for me in terms of getting me some exposure with the project and giving me the core idea that I went and actually implemented as well. That’s probably the big few, anyway. You can find further book suggestions on www.preneurmarketing.com. Also www.petewilliams.com that I use is more of my, I guess, personal site. It has some information on there, it tells the MCG story if people are interested, and a few other bits and pieces as well. It links to the podcast that I do on a regular basis as well.

David:

And the podcast you do just for the people who are interested in it. What kind of interviews do you have there?

Pete:

It’s not interviews, it’s basically myself and actually the guy who does all my media production. So the guy who actually does all my videos, who’s based in Spain, Dom Goucher, we just jump on once a week for about 45 minutes and discuss the topic of the day, whether it might be outsourcing, it might be how to do effective note taking—I’m just going through some of the most recent episodes—minimum viable product, zero-based thinking, just a whole bunch of stuff that I think relates to entrepreneurs and making them more efficient and effective. And it’s called Preneurcast. It’s in iTunes. Or the website for people who want to check it out is just preneurmedia.tv. You can subscribe there and check out the back catalog and all that sort of stuff as well.

David:

I definitely recommend everybody to straight away go to the site and make sure to subscribe to those podcasts of Pete, because the information shared was really amazing, in my opinion. And of course the subject is endless. We could go on hours and hours. But I think for the time being, everybody who took the time now to listen really learned a whole lot of good stuff. Of course, like I said, I do recommend watching that video about the content leverage system because it’s totally awesome. Pete, thanks a lot. Very much appreciated that you spent your time here with us, and hope to be in touch with you soon. You also have a Facebook site, right, where people can connect with you?

Pete:

Yeah, just www.facebook.com/preneurmarketing. You can connect me on there, and happy to chat and answer any questions that people might have, or feedback and suggestions. And yeah, if people really loved it, more than happy to jump on a call again with you some stage next year, Dave, and we can do all this again.

Thanks to our partner Pioneer Transcription Services for making this transcript possible!