The Dropship Unlocked Podcast

How To Hire Rockstar VAs For Dropshipping w/ Yoni Kozminski (Episode 88)

• Lewis Smith & James Eardley • Season 1 • Episode 88

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📞 Ready to Take the Next Step? https://dropshipunlocked.com/training-watch-apply?el=podcast-88-hiring-vas-with-yoni-kozminski

Hire First Class Talent With Yoni’s Help ➡️ https://www.multiplymii.com/ 

🗣In this episode of the Dropship Unlocked Podcast, hosts Lewis Smith and James Eardley welcome Yoni Kozminski, co-founder of the $50 million eCommerce growth fund and a leader in scaling eCommerce businesses and their teams. 

Yoni shares his extensive knowledge on how to hire and manage top talent to scale your dropshipping business.

👉 Prefer to watch this on Youtube? Check it out here  ➡️ https://youtu.be/_CAbJR0hzJw

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Topics Discussed:

★ Using Freelancers from the Philippines: How to effectively use Filipino freelancers to implement scalable processes in an eCommerce business.

★ Tips for finding and hiring skilled freelancers from the Philippines. Maximising Value from Filipino Employees: Strategies for getting the most productivity and quality work from Filipino virtual assistants (VAs).

★ When to Hire the First VA: Indicators that it’s time to hire your first VA. Steps to ensure a smooth onboarding process and integration into your business operations.

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Links and Resources Mentioned:

Pick up a copy of Lewis’ book: https://htabook.com 

Get Shopify for £1 a month for 3 months: https://www.dropshipunlocked.com/shopify 

Salary Guide - https://hubs.ly/Q02JbYLs0

ClickUp eBook - https://hubs.ly/Q02JbZSD0

Miro Org and Accountability Chart - https://hubs.ly/Q02JbZXC0

Operational Excellence - https://hubs.ly/Q02JbZ_20 

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Key Takeaways:

★ Effective Outsourcing: Leveraging the skills of Filipino freelancers can significantly enhance your business processes and scalability.

★ Timing and Strategy for Hiring: Knowing when to hire your first VA is crucial for maintaining efficiency and focusing on growth.

★ Mindset Shift: Transitioning from doing everything yourself to delegating tasks is key to scaling your business. Adopting a leadership mindset allows for more strategic growth and better management of business operations.

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★★★Dropship Unlocked - Lewis Smith★★★

🌏Watch Our Free Training ➽ https://www.dropshipunlocked.com/training?el=podcast-88-hiring-vas-with-yoni-kozminski

Hi everyone. Today we are joined by Yoni Kozminski, a mastermind in scaling ecommerce businesses and a pivotal figure behind a$50 million ecommerce growth fund. Yonnie's expertise in optimizing business operations and financial strategies is something every ecommerce store owner dreams of tapping into That's right. Lewis, in our chat today, Yoni, will be shedding light on what it takes to not just survive but thrive in the competitive e commerce landscape. We'll dive into the topic of hiring a league virtual assistants for your E commerce business, and how it's crucial that every element of your business is put together so that you can thrive and really have a successful business for the long term. Absolutely. James for our listeners, this isn't just another discussion. This is going to be a real roadmap to potentially skyrocketing your E commerce business's value. So make sure you're ready with this one. Make sure you've got some notes in front of you, and we're going to go deep into the mechanics of business scaling that Johnny has perfected over the years. So get ready, get your notepad out, and let's unlock the secrets to maximizing your E commerce potential. Here we go. Welcome to the dropship unlocked Podcast. I'm Lewis Smith, the founder of dropship unlocked, and with me is our Client Success Coach James Eardley. Now, when we're not recording the podcast episodes, we're running our own e commerce businesses and helping aspiring entrepreneurs launch their own high ticket dropshipping businesses keen to build your own six or even seven bigger business. My book the home turf advantage is your blueprint for launching a profitable online store. Grab your copy@htabooks.com today, and let's get you started now, sit back, relax, and let's unlock your potential with the dropship unlocked podcast today. I'm very excited to introduce to you Yoni Kozminski, who is a co founder of multiple businesses ranging all the way from a $50 million e commerce Growth Fund in South coal all the way through to businesses that specifically focus on hiring talented individuals from the Philippines. So there's gonna be loads to dive into about scaling e commerce businesses, getting the right team in place so we can create a sustainable, consistent income stream that doesn't rely on us to make sure the money keeps coming in consistently. So Yoli, firstly, it'd be great with a little bit of an introduction to yourself and a little bit about your journey to get you to the position that you're into today. Yeah, absolutely. James, firstly, thanks for having me on those listening in. I hope, if nothing else, you get a few nuggets of value and can learn from mistakes that I've made through my sort of 15 plus year journey. To keep it really short, I cut my teeth in digital marketing, creative advertising for a 10 year period working with brands like Sony, MasterCard, Mercedes Benz, Medtronic. It's a British audience. So Mondelez Cabo dairy, milk, Frederick frog boost, cream, egg, the works, companies like that, everything from Facebook media buying. It was the largest Facebook mini buy in Australia for a number of years, there with Mercedes Benz, to web development for the priceless.com, MasterCard, website, content production, TV commercials. When I was in the US and found my way actually into E commerce, initially through drop shipping, I had a brand that I was curating content for guys things that I really liked, and I don't know if it comes up in the episode, but that failed miserably. Hopefully, none of you guys experienced some of the turmoils that I did, but today, as James clearly put out, I'm running three companies at the same time. I have Escala, which is a process improvement consultancy. We help build systemized scale into businesses through operations. We then help staff it with talent from the Philippines in our multiply me recruitment and payroll and HR management company, and South coal is the vehicle where we invest in E commerce businesses looking to exit, where we take them on this two, three year journey with an investment bank and a fund to grow them to exit. So there you go, James, I know it's a mouthful, but just try to give the listeners a reason to actually see that I've made a ton of mistakes, and hopefully, like I said, you guys can take some lessons from them. Yeah, no. Fascinating to hear about your journey. It's you've got a wealth of experience with different areas and different levels up the journey of building an E commerce business from from start to finishing, away with the exit piece at the end. But key to dig into that failure that you mentioned, because with failures becomes loads of lessons, no doubt you took from that failure. So why do you think your initial business failed? And importantly, what were the lessons you think you took away from that initial failure? Yeah, it's a great opening question here. So I'd say, you know, I shared briefly, but that the 10 years that I had in Creative Advertising and digital marketing, it was working in a. Agencies with big companies from the lens of smaller agencies. I was the 10th employee in Australia. We grew to about 30. I was the 15th in Los Angeles. We grew to about 45 and so I'd seen and experienced how to build a digital presence, how to drive traffic via PPC, how to do SEO strategy and content production. I understood all the mechanics around e commerce and how to do things like, you know, leveraging a Facebook pixel and conversion tracking and optimizing the add to cart experience remarketing in the works. You know, I really touched on a lot of these things. And so I'd always felt that, while it was great to work for other brands, to do it myself on things that I was really passionate about was the ultimate excitement, and so I started a website called just for lads.com. I still hold the domain, but unfortunately, I got stung from a mistake that I hope no one else experiences. I can't say you'll be protected, but here's your first nugget, if you're just starting out on the journey. My website was focused on curating really cool content for men, so everything from everyday carry staff and wallets to just the range of these sort of sub $50 products that I was really interested in. This is going back quite a bit of time. This is probably about seven or eight years ago when I was doing this. And so this is before all the Alibaba style slap a bumper sticker on it and do drop shipping. It was still relevant. Then today, it's a very different existence, and it's much harder to build a brand when you don't have that quality control that has sort of shifted over the course of time. But what I'd done was I'd put all these products together. I'd invested in building a beautiful Shopify store. Everything looked great. I had a lot of experience doing this. I had the resources and capabilities, and lo and behold, I hit launch, and things look like they're going great. I'm getting a lot of traffic, sort of specific products, and I think within the first week, all of a sudden, my ads just got paused, and I had no idea what had happened. You know, it can be a bit of a black hole even inside of Facebook when there, because there were no specific ads that they were flagging. But what I learned as I dug deeper was that I had listed, like, a whole bunch of different knives that were just really cool, like butterfly knives and pocket knives and things, again, that would just really align with the brand that I was building. And they flagged me. I went through a whole process. It can be quite hard to get reinstated, and I never managed to reinstate it. And so as a result, that whole website, that whole experience, you know, I even tried, like, some really creative things, I built it 301, redirects to a different website. So I bought media to one website to forward it to the other. But they were smarter than I was, obviously, and so I couldn't, I couldn't solve this problem, and I had to pack down a whole idea through just a foolish mistake that really shouldn't have had an impact. So again, I hope you guys can learn what not to do and to review the Facebook guidelines around media and what you can and can't have on site. Yeah. So great lessons, no doubt, but yeah, the policies are not that clear, but now we know to stay away from the knife niche if you want to run ads on meta or Google. It could be the same there as well. So no doubt, lessons, and I think that the key part was that you had all of these knowledge that you've you've built up from working for other companies, the digital marketing background, and you wanted to put that into your own businesses, and really put that to your own work. And then there's fast forward a little bit now to escala and multiply me, because those those companies fascinate me in the way that you're able to scale e commerce businesses. So firstly, if we could talk about multiply me, which I know is a lot about scaling and hiring people to be able to scale your business. So do you use freelancers specifically from the Philippines? And if so, why do you hire talent from that part of the world? Yeah, again, great questions. That's why you're the host, James. I'll give you a little bit more context here. Just for those listening, I joined an E commerce business that was e commerce, but, you know, large footprint inside of fulfillment by Amazon. And it was a it wasn't drop shipping. It was a private label brand where it was constructed. I was able to, in 12 months, grow that from 2 million to 5 million, and it was acquired. And so through that experience, I understood that I was able to build effectively the working operation needed to scale any e commerce business, bit drop shipping or private label. And so that was what led me into multiply me. And the experience that I had in doing that was I really understood that one from a cultural perspective. It felt like really strong alignment from a Filipino culture perspective. You know, you're talking about people who are really motivated when it comes to delivery. And, you know, job security is really important. English is the tested and. Very much spoken language that exists so they're not learning it necessarily as a pure second language. It's part of the schooling and higher education. Anyone that has a college degree in the Philippines has done that in English and 600,000 graduates every year. So I had some really good experiences. I'd actually found talent from some of the largest some of the largest digital agencies globally, one of them named cognizant. And that just was a bit of a paradigm shift for me, realizing that I didn't need to get these really baseline VAs where I build a task list and they would just do the work. I could give them accountability, and I could say, you are responsible for my paid media. These are the expectations I have around the campaigns. And lo and behold, it was able to really scale and grow and achieve everything that I'd hoped for. So that's really my love or where my love affair started with the Philippines, probably over 10 years ago now, but more specifically, in the last sort of seven or eight. Yeah, interesting. I have a similar love affair, as you put it, with Filipino workers. I've got a team working for me now on the two stores that I'm running. And yeah, I think I've completely agree with the cultural attitude that they bring to work. Is amazing, the sort of cheerfulness that I've experienced. So yeah, I can see why we hire from that part of the world. Something you mentioned is like scaling a business from two to 5 million and having an exit from that. There must have been some things that you learned from building from from two to 5 million, is it is a good size jump. Are there some things that you can see as, like repeatable patterns that that come in place when you build a business from that level? From two to 5 million? Plenty, plenty of repeatable patterns, I would say that it's probably one of the more interesting. And I would say, sort of challenging parts of growing a business. And what I mean by that is it's far more complicated running a 1015, 20,$50, million business, but the the learning, sort of the learning requirements from going, particularly from like zero to one, where you can get your hands around virtually everything you know, you can really touch and feel and handle, everything from like the bookkeeping to you know and the finance function to the marketing to identifying the products, to listing them on your Shopify store to really, sort of getting your hands around everything. When you start to get into that 234, 5, million, you no longer have the ability to touch on every single thing at a personal level, if you're doing it. And I have seen people that have been able to their lives generally are not optimal when it comes to they might be cash rich, but time poor. And you know, I think for from a longevity standpoint, you need to solve for those things, because at some point you're going to burn out. You can't take a holiday, you can't give your partner or your children or wherever you're at in your life stage, or even your fitness or health, everything starts to take a secondary seat. So I'd say some of the key lessons that I have taken are things that are then repeatable. Is one building clear goals, so understanding where you're driving to. So what does 12 months on threes on look like, defining what you want to achieve? So that might be, how many products do I want to have live? What is the category that I'm focused on? What is my net profit margins? Really critical? You know, I think a lot of people tend to look at revenue numbers as a badge of honor. But if you told me you had a million dollar business and you had 50% net profits, I would say you are, you know, you are kicking absolute goals here, and that's a much better business than someone who's got a $8 million business at 5% net profit margins, and you know, he's working super hard not to actually take any of the money home. So, so I'd say that's one two, once you have that clear vision, working backwards and saying, Well, in order for me to succeed in achieving that vision and the lofty goals that we all as entrepreneurs like to set ourselves, who do I need or what do I need to be true from a number of products that I need to identify number of products that I then need to list success of each product, when do I actually say that this is not a product that makes sense to fit in my catalog of products. So, so being critical and defining the criterias of what you're searching for, what good looks like when to pull you know, saying no is probably the hardest thing. So understanding that, and then, and then finally, putting the right people in the right seats at the right time. So that's not I want to be a $5 million business. I'm starting today. It's I want to be a $5 million business. It's going to take me two years, three years, one year, whatever, whatever your goal is, and what are the incremental people that I then need to bring into that business in order for it to be true. I mean, James, I can keep going, but I'll stop and maybe there's questions here. Yeah, 100% no. There's loads to dive into. So I think something that stands out is like you illustrated a person that I know intimately. There are many people like this, where they struggle to give away the tasks, especially when they're fairly early stage and they're really it's their baby, this business that they're building. But I mean, what would you say to those people that are struggling? To be able to release some of that control over their business. So this is where most people get bogged down. I think it's probably the biggest challenge that particularly early stage entrepreneurs face and and what I would say, or the advice I would give that person, if they were to ask me, is that one giving up and relinquishing the executional delivery of parts of the business does not dictate you giving up control of the ultimate decision. And to highlight an example of that, let's say that part of your strategy is to be having an enormous catalog. You want to have 5000 products in your mind, your systematic approaches. I'm going to find all of these locally sourced suppliers. I'm going to, you know, I'm going to pound the pavement, I'm going to leverage tools. I'm going to do it in a way that makes sense to me. I'm just going to see what sticks, you know, I'm going to see where are the good profit margins, who's buying you know, I want to sort of take it on that approach. You do not need to be the person that is finding all of those products. You do not need to be the person who is loading them up on the Shopify store. You do not need to be the person trying to, you know, exert the raw data, trying to understand what actually happens. What you need to be doing is you need to be building the infrastructure and saying, Okay, I have a VA, I have a, you know, a researcher, a product researcher, who's going to find me all the potential deals that I can resell on my platform. And building the criteria, it needs to have a potential profitability of this, there needs to be X number of website traffic, there needs to be low competition, really setting that criteria and then saying, I need you to bring me this in a really clearly defined, you know, whether it's a presentation or a data set or an Excel or however it is you're looking to present it. And each week as an example, you will say, right? These five or 10 or 50 or 100 whatever you're sort of looking to drive toward, these are the products that make sense you've actually had the ability to look and review and say, yep, that's the product I want to have live so you can already augment how you're involved in the business from pretty early on by bringing in, you know, a resource that might cost you five bucks an hour to really buy you time. And I think that the other component of that around relinquishing control is that most early stage entrepreneurs do not value their time enough. They don't understand how valuable it is for you to be able to think and think about growth opportunities, strategic relationships, like, what does it look like to double down and explore how you can increase your your rowers or or anything that relates to actually growth, deploying an SEO strategy, finding other material ways to grow the brand. And you really got to look at it from a holistic picture, and saying, if I am doing this because the great equalizer is time, then what am I missing out on? Yeah, and there's, whenever you say yes to something, you are saying no to something else. So if you're saying yes to doing all of these tasks, that there's a sacrifice somewhere. And a lot of people that are getting started with with these e commerce businesses, I know I was one of these people had a nine to five job at the time, and I started it initially as a side hustle, and it was a mindset shift that I needed to go through, because in the nine to five job, in the nine to five world, I was very much a doer. These are the tasks you have to do. These are time we got to do it. So my mindset was based on, these are my list of tasks. It's up to me to get those done. I'm not in the mindset to delegate, and you have to switch completely to think, okay, instead of, how am I going to get through this list? When you start thinking about who's going to get through this list? For me, you know, who not? How is that? That key term? Yeah, we're very big on building lifestyle businesses with this channel that we can outsource to other people to run so we can get our control of our lives back essentially. But when we look at our list of tasks, Yoni, we've got to decide which tasks to give away. I wonder if there's going to be some that we need to keep control of. What sort of criteria would you put against a to do list to decide? Okay, fairly early stage business owner, you've got everything on your plate. Which task would you be looking to give away first? Yeah, great, great question. And the who, not how? Dan Sullivan, Strategic Coach. You know, it's a great framework for anyone who's looking to really understand how you can bring in the best people to do and achieve the tasks, as opposed to try and take it on yourself. So a big, big believer in that. And I think, to your question, I think there's a few different ways in which you can approach this right the first, and I would say the simplest way to approach this, if this is you who really struggles to say, how, how can I delegate something? How can I actually hand it off? Um, an exercise that I do for myself, and I'm just wired this way. I like to really have every every hour of my day planned out just in terms of what I'm doing and be accountable to what I've committed to, even if it's task oriented, it's about sort of understanding what I'll do is I'll actually map out in my calendar What am I doing. I mean, people suggest doing 15 minute increments. I think that that's pretty tough, and I think that takes a lot of time, so I just. Out my week, and I say, right, these are the objectives that I'm trying to achieve this week based on, for me, the six month strategy that we've set out. And how do I actually get closer to that? But again, earlier stage, you're probably not thinking as far ahead. Just as a as a side note, I have a team of 90 people internally, so I'm running a, you know, a bigger business than than, probably someone who's just starting out. So I'm thinking about it in longer time horizons. I think when it's early stages, doesn't make sense to be trying to think so meticulously. Because you're still a speedboat. You're not, you know, this heavy, you know, slow moving, chug boat that that you really need to guide the directions to move. You know, two degrees, left or right. So coming back to how I would approach it. Look at how you're spending your time. Put it in your Google Calendar. There's a beautiful feature that lets you actually attribute like a coloring and therefore as sort of a naming convention around things like, you know, product research, listing creation inside of my Shopify, store development work, SEO, media bot, all the tasks that you're doing, put them down. And then at the end of the week, you'll see, A, how many hours you're actually working, but B, what are you actually working on? And so how you can then take it to the next step is you say right from five to one, five being something that critically needs to be you. You want to select the products that's really important to you, whereas one is uploading it to Shopify, which is a really simple, you know, process, once you've figured it out the first one or two times, that's a one or a two that can be handed off. So really understanding, sort of, what are the tasks that don't really need to be you from a strategic position, and what are the things that really need to be you, building that list, and then trying to look at what are the like skills, you know, I would say, I would advise people not to fall into the trap of saying, I'm just going to get a VA to do everything. That's one to three. So they're doing Canva, they're doing, you know, bookkeeping. They're doing, you know, like, if you're trying to blend too many of these capabilities, you get a jack of all trade and a master of none. So look at what you can off board. That is, you know, a similar skill set, to give a good example, maybe someone who's looking at your, you know, website performance and your paid media and your keyword research around Google Trends and what is making sense that could be bundled into an individual and because they're going to do the same types of things, they'll need a bit of training to think about how You look at it, but that's one way the alternative, which I think is sort of the people who are maybe a little bit more strategically minded, or have gone through this, is we're not going to be the best at everything, right? And I think you really need to accept and say, while you could spend the time to focus on doing things and becoming the best, because that's how we, all, you know, believe that we have the capabilities saying, I'm going to be the very best at this, one or two things, and bringing in experts, The Who, not how of bringing those experts to actually take you to a level that you couldn't go by yourself. The only challenge with that is that you need to find the right relationships when you don't have a, you know, a significant or a considerable amount of capital to start with, or you're not at those levels where you can afford it. You know that becomes the trade off. You either build from that would be the first example is bottom up. So I'm trying to build capabilities from the bottom up and hand them off versus top down, where higher cost, but you'll pay less operational debt, you won't need to guide them as much interesting. So I've always used the bottom up approach. So my first hire was a customer service VA. And then from that position, I realized that, you know, either I needed a second customer service, virtual assistant, or I needed sort of more particular skill sets in certain areas that was going to be key to growing the business. So I use that bottom up approach. I'm keen to just touch on as well in terms of finances and what position we need to be in when we first hire our initial VA. So I was given some advice when I was deciding when to hire my first VA, was that I needed to have the net profit every month to cover at least two virtual assistants before I was ready to hire my first one, and to put that into figures and expect to pay a first virtual assistant customer service, about 600 $700 a month at most. So I'd be looking at a net profit of $1,400 before being able to hire the first VA. Would you agree with that advice? I think that's sound advice. I think you always you know, coming back to things we were talking a little bit about before we hit record, you really need to be paying attention to your business profitability. And I would say James, I'm definitely someone who has historically built our business from bottom up as well. And what I'm finding now with such a large team is that you have this sort of operational debt. You've got almost too many players and not enough coaches. And so that's something you need to find a healthy balance around is, how do you sort of, at the right stage, bring in coaches to expand your objective, but I would say, like from zero to a million dollars in revenue, I think it's totally safe to say that you're likely going to be building bottom up once you start to go above those types and with a healthy net profit margin. You know, we're not talking about one. Percent, 2% 5% profit margins, you know, with a healthy net profit margin, that's when you can start to explore and say, Okay, I'm going to give up a little, but it's going to create so much more pretty Yeah, so that that stands a lot. I like the player and coach analysis, because obviously, basically majority UK audience that we're speaking to we all understand the football coach and the football player analogy, and initially we've got to bring in the players. So you bring in your Kevin de bruynes, your a star players, and then there's a certain point where you have to replace yourself as coaching all of the players, and to get to that stage. So at what level of business do you start to see people hiring coaches instead of the sort of customer service players, what stage in the business is, that makes sense. So it would come back to, you know, firstly, what is your initial capital outlay? If you're someone who has, you know, capital, and not starting it as the side hustle to get out of the nine to five work, or you're doing that, but you also seem to have saved a considerable amount of of capital. You have sort of the professional business acumen to understand what the business needs to look like from a financial perspective, then you might see that those decisions coming earlier and build from that sort of top down approach. I would say, for most people who are just getting into dropshipping, figuring it out as they go along. I think the reality is, you know, I would probably start to look at coaches, maybe at the earliest stage of that a half a million dollar revenue, looking again at net profit margin as a key indicator here, what you can afford. But I think actually, how you how to frame it, if you take, you know, I think it's a little bit generic, just to throw figures out at you guys listening is, you know, what, what am I actually bringing in and what does that free up for me? And you know, I would say that the first coaches that you likely bring in are the things that are going to drive profitable growth. So it might be someone that sits across your paid media and SEO and email marketing functions from a coaching perspective, because they should be able to become a force multiplier. And saying they understand how to do it, they understand how to manage that team, if this is not in your core skill sets, and all of a sudden you can start to focus on the things that are really going to move the needle, and that's product or category expansion, and looking at the things that you know, I think for a lot of people, you know, you're not just getting in to the Drop Shipping game for the money. There's also an appeal of, you know, picking the right product and building a sustainable business too. So anything that's going to free you up to get to that position quicker would be the first coaches that I would look to bring in, especially if they can manage your existing players or switch out the team from a, you know, from a B league to Premier League style existence. Yeah, fantastic. So I know that multiply me has a particular approach to hiring a style players, because VA is just like football players. There'll be different levels to how, how the skill level or the talent level they have when we hire them. What is multiply me and your approach to hiring a team member from the Philippines, and how do you really get the A players from the start? So, so for us, our approach is one. We're typically working with businesses who are looking to bring in at the stage where they're not looking for these sort of fractional resources that it's like, I'll take 10 hours of this person and three hours of that person, they've sort of graduated and saying, in order for me to build my company and my vision, I want people on my team who are exclusively on my team. So we're finding full time talent. And I share that for a couple of reasons. One, how we're set up is we offer a lot of the sort of fringe benefits, like healthcare, social security, HMO, 13th month, these things that are a little atypical for sort of Remote Setup companies in the Philippines. And so as a result, we're able to attract a higher caliber of talent, a lot of ex corporate talent. So that's sort of already, for, from our perspective, a bit of a differentiator in how far up sort of the food chain of talent and capabilities we can move. But we really pride ourselves on finding great talent, so we'll go and we'll help build the job description with with the person that we're looking to work with. We will then go out and we will do a lot of headhunting. You know, we have all, you know, the bells and whistles that you would expect from sort of a recruitment company that's placing 3040, plus people every month into other businesses. So we have, you know, premium LinkedIn recruiter. We have access to job boards that don't exist for, you know, foreign entities. We have obviously, an enormous database of people that we've vetted over the last five or so years. And so we have all these sort of tools in our arsenal to get access to, you know, to hire caliber talent. But I think for what you can take at home, you know, whether you work with us or not, I would say the things that you can apply, independent of, multiply me, is one being really clear on what you are trying to solve in your business. And building a really strong job description that attracts the right person, building a scorecard or a way in which you're actually interviewing that person and getting clarity on, have they achieved these things before? What are the things that they're really passionate about, and do they align with the role that they're actually going to be playing in your business? You know, you want to get people who are motivated to to have, you know, the the growth mindset in their role and their capabilities. And so if you set up that interview process the right way, if you build the right incentives, right? So if you're saying, you know, I think it's great. I think with Filipinos, particularly, job security is a really important thing. But if it was, for example, you wanted to get a product researcher, that was the first role that you said, I really want to have 5000 products that I can sift through to sift through to pick the top 50 every year. And, you know, building an incentive program that's actually outlined in the job description, saying, you know, we reward people that are able to find the best products. And if you can do it, you know, you'll get whatever bonuses every month or every quarter based on selection and success. So finding ways to make sure that you're aligning that hire with success, and finding ways where it's meaningful for them and it's meaningful for the business, and there's that real clear alignment, align your incentives with what your goals are for their position. So something I've done is give bonuses to virtual assistants that are driving five star trust pilot reviews, because, as a customer service representative, one of the biggest things that we can push for is reviews, and they have a big, big play in how many we get, and that's been very successful in getting a lot more reviews, because they are then incentivized with the extra bonus. Something I wanted to dig in as well is the talent really surprised me, actually, from the Philippines, because it was quite how many people have a graduates over in the Philippines? I mean, that's, there's quite a considerable number. Isn't there people that have actually graduated in the Philippines, a high level hires from the start? Yeah, yeah. I mean, to give you that, the stat around it the US, who I think might project well, you know, let's exclude countries like China, who I just don't, I don't, I don't have the answer to, but the US produce 2 million new college graduates every year, with a population of about 360 odd million people. In the Philippines, it's about a third the size of the US. So it's 120 million people, and right now they're producing a little over 600,000 college graduates, and that number continues to increase year on year on year. So what you're seeing is, you know, the closing of the gap. And this is how it works with emerging world countries. You know, a lot of the a lot of these countries where, you know, once upon a time, even, you know, look at where China was and where China is today. Now a global superpower. It takes time for them to actually achieve the this reality. But, you know, they're closing in relatively fast, and I think that's what's really exciting prospect of of the Philippines. But I think it expands even beyond to a lot of these emerging world countries, I think one of the big things that we're realizing today, and it's the same for for Brits, it's the same for Americans and Australians, just the cost of onshore labor and and what the business needs to be doing from a profit starts to become, you know, in some realities, not not as viable today. So if you can find ways to actually offset that, you're building a much better business. And when we talk about drop shipping, specifically, you know, it is definitely a game of margins. You know, at the end of the day, you have to be, you have to be smart in what you're picking, because if you're picking things that are commoditized, that you're going to make a couple of cents on compared to your your competition, when you when you roll in all the fees and the cost per acquisition and your ability to resell to them, if you're not really building an intelligent, strategic product offering that's aligned with the market, that you can continue to create these repeat sales to the same audience, then you know, you get that margin erosion Pretty quickly you do, and actually the who we hire plays a big role. So my biggest expenses initially is the marketing spend to acquire the sales and the second largest monthly expenditure is actually on the the team that we've got in place, because the software costs of running an E commerce business is so low. So it really does make a big difference. And we're talking five or six times cheaper to hire somebody from the Philippines compared to a UK worker. So it really ends up in terms of the margins, and yet the the skill level is absolutely there, and English as well. I mean, English is, um, oftentimes a second language for a lot of people in the Philippines. And that's always struck me as well as something that's really strong over in the Philippines, yeah, it's, it's literally the tested and spoken language in many parts. I'll actually throw in there for for anyone listening in, we've got some great free resources, and I'll give you the link, and you can drop it in the show notes. But we take the top 100 roles to hire in the Philippines and what they cost as a junior, mid and senior level. A perspective in this ebook, and we even have one that's focused around e commerce businesses. So how to actually structure a small e commerce business versus a larger e commerce business right now, it's a little bit more focused on private label businesses, but we will absolutely come out with one that is for drop shipping. But I would say the the nature of it's the same. You just wouldn't have that product development function, or it would look somewhat different in terms of how you're approaching its product selection versus development. So you can see, like, what would an org structure look like? What would it cost? We even have all the job descriptions that you can click into and and download for free with a Google editable version of it for job description. So we've got a lot of these free resources that I'm happy to share with you, James. And you know, we created it for ourselves first because we want to make sure that we're paying fair market rates. But then we realized that would help a lot of people sort of understand what was possible. 100% Yeah, absolutely. We'll make sure that is in the description in the show notes beneath this episode, because a very, very valuable resource. And we've gone deep into hiring and talking about hiring virtual assistance, because the more and more mature I get with my business is growth, the more I realize a key skill to what really keeps the business growing is my ability to hire, my ability to look after virtual assistants as well. So to close out, Yoni, I mean, we've talked a lot about hiring today, if somebody was looking to hire, and they were, they were keen, potentially, to work with multiply me. Where would you say people should should start? Where would they get in touch with you and learn more about the services that you provide? I mean, I'm always happy to have a conversation with someone, if I can help them, but I would say that honestly, on our website, you can find the booking link to jump on cat. Our Director of Client engagements call and should be very happy to walk you through sort of the process, help you understand even pre built examples of people that we've hired, you know, help guide you through that process. That's sort of what we, at multiply me pride ourselves on, is really helping educate the market first, and if we get to work together, fantastic. But we're definitely here to be, you know, a helpful resource, first and foremost, amazing, fantastic. We'll make sure that's all linked as well in the description. So thank you, Yoni, for joining us today. Really enjoyed today's conversation on the podcast. Really appreciate it. Thanks for having me, James. I've enjoyed it. I hope people got some good value. 100% Absolutely. Thank you very much. Well, Louis, that really was a deep dive with Yoni Kozminski there, and we really went beyond the trip typical growth strategies, and we really talked about Ali virtual assistants. And I just thoroughly enjoyed that conversation. The clarity that he brings to financial optimization and business scaling is really unparalleled. Yes, it was a fantastic conversation, and I think it became clear that it's not just about incremental gains, but really exponential growth. If you can truly understand the value of hiring the right people, it can do wonders for your business. Yeah, it's something that's probably overlooked when you start an E commerce business. How important is to get the right people on board, but it'll be crucial for long term success. I think what's really important about when we listen to these episodes is that we apply what we've learned today, and I know that I've got so much I'm going to take away and implement into my own business, so that we can make informed decisions that align with our long term growth objectives exactly, and to help you implement these strategies, Yoni has generously provided further in depth training available exclusive in our members only premium content as well. Plus, to compliment yoni's tactics, I recommend checking out the systematic approach laid out in my book, the home turf advantage, which you can access at h t a book.com together, if you combine these two, they provide an incredible toolkit for any e commerce entrepreneur who's serious about scaling up efficiently, so head over to htabook.com now to get started and to harness the full potential of your E commerce adventure. Enjoying the podcast, we'd love to hear from you leave a comment or a review, and we might just feature it on an upcoming episode, also for detailed show notes and resources. Head to dropship, unlock.com forward slash podcast. If you found value from any episode of this podcast, please take just 10 seconds to leave us a quick five star review on your podcast. App of choice. It helps us more than you could imagine. And who knows, you might just hear your comments on the show. Thanks for being part of our community. Your support helps us keep delivering a new episode every week. Now it's time to answer a question that we've received from a listener. Remember, if you want your question answered on the podcast, all you need to do is comment beneath the YouTube video version of this episode, and we might just answer it in an upcoming podcast episode. So that's exactly what furhat has done, and he has asked, I am just wondering, would these suppliers sell you products one by one, or would they want you to buy in bulk? Thanks for your question, fur hat. So yeah, I mean, we specifically partner with suppliers who are already familiar with the dropshipping model, because that ensures that. They're already ready to handle orders individually, one by one, as each order is placed by the end customer, it comes through to you. They pay retail price. You can then use the customers funds that have come through to your business bank account to then pay the trade price to the suppliers for an individual item, ensuring that they're happy to ship those items out one by one, avoiding you having to part with 10s of 1000s of pounds of your own money to buy bulk stock that may never even sell. We make sure that from the get go, they are equipped and willing to ship products one at a time. So hopefully, that answers that part of the question. Now, the business model that we use the home turf advantage, allows us to order products on a per order basis. So this means that we only place orders with our supplier Once we've received them already from the customers. It's streamlined. It's a really easy process. It minimizes inventory risk, it minimizes your cash flow problems, because cash comes in before it goes out, and so by working with suppliers who are already set up for dropshipping. We avoid the complexities and the financial burdens associated with bulk buying. So it keeps it really simple on the logistics front, but it also allows you to offer a much wider variety of products, because you don't have to go and buy those products ahead of time. It costs you nothing to put them up on a digital shelf on a digital storefront. Exactly. Thank you for your answer there. Lewis, yeah, great question, and just highlights the benefits of the drop shipping business model. So it's now time to highlight a review that we've had in for the podcast as well. So a big thank you to succeed. Com for the YouTube comment, and they have said, thank you both. It's so useful to hear actual stories of how people have succeeded with this system. There are so many aspects of different people's stories that resonate with those looking at this and James, your story just shows what's possible with hard work and determination. Many thanks. Wow. Thank you so much for your review. Again. Before we go, I have one question that I'd appreciate if you could help me with Have you left us a review yet? If not, please leave our podcast a review wherever you're listening to us today. It should take you about 10 seconds, but it really does wonders for us, and it's a huge part of what drives us to continue with this podcast. So if you like what you've heard and you'd like us to continue creating these episodes and you haven't left us a review yet, please take just a moment now to do so, and hopefully we can read it out for you on an upcoming episode soon. Thanks for joining us on this episode of the dropship unlocked podcast. We hope you're walking away with insights and inspiration to kickstart your ecommerce journey. Grab a copy of my book, the home of turf advantage@htabook.com it's a distilled guide based on real experience to help you build your E commerce venture. Don't forget to hit the subscribe button for more strategies and success stories. And if you like what you heard, a five star review would mean the world to us, and you might just get a shout out on an upcoming episode. And finally, thank you for deciding to spend your time with us today. We can't wait to bring you more insights on the next episode of the dropship unlocked podcast. You.