Hey it’s Jon! I want to talk today about Cloud-based Systems and how they can help you outsource work.

What I really mean is, have people working for you who aren’t sitting in your office, who aren’t restricted to being in your office nearby. I’m Jon from Small Fish Business Coaching. I run the ‘Tradies Toolbox Coaching Program’ for trades business owners who want to grow, who want to scale, who want to be more profitable and put systems in place.

Now part of growing is growing your team, and I want to talk today about how to grow your admin team in particular, and that there are other ways to do it apart from just hiring someone to sit in your office with you.

Now I’ve talked about outsourcing before, and you can have someone in your office of course, you can have someone overseas (perhaps the Philippines), you can have someone elsewhere in Australia and they can be a normal person or somebody where you buy a service where they come educated with systems and things. And you can also have somebody who maybe works at home, that’s another kind of option.

I don’t want to spend too long on the different types of outsourcing today, I really want to talk about the cloud services and I’m going to do it by using my business as an example.

So we have me in Byron Bay, we’ve got Lindsey in Miami. Lindsey kind of runs the business, I do all this all the sales, I do all the coaching, and I create all this content and make these videos. Lindsey runs the business and runs all the marketing, and does all our marketing and our marketing strategy, and Venus is our admin assistant and digital marketing doer, she does the work. So she’s going to edit this video, she sends you the emails, all that kind of stuff.

And we communicate through the cloud with each other. We also have other associated people. We have an accountant, we have a bookkeeper, we have a web person who helps us with our website. And there is other people, we communicate with them also through the cloud.

So I’m going to show you the suite of products we use to communicate and I’m going to try and explain to you how easy it makes this, how easy it makes communicating with each other even though we’re not in the same room.

So for our accounting, the most boring part of the job, part of the excitement of it, is that you can now have your accounting system in the cloud. We use Xero but MYOB does it and QuickBooks Online do a similar thing. You can have your accounting system in the cloud which means everybody can look at it, everybody can access the same piece of information, and we can all contribute to any different way. So Venus does our invoicing, I think Lindsey does the reconciling, I sometimes look at it and see who’s paid and who I need to complain to it that they haven’t paid me yet, that kind of thing.

We use Zoom video conferencing to talk to each other, we use Google Hangouts occasionally. We use the Google hangout chat functions to send each other instant messages. We use Gmail for our emails and we use the Google Calendar to share our calendars so I can always see whether someone is available to talk to me and Venus can make appointments with you if you want to speak to me and put it in my calendar and know that that time is free. We have a phone that gets answered in the Philippines by Venus, and if you’ve ever tried to call me on that number, you know you’ve spoken to Venus not to me. I have a mobile phone of course. We use our zoom and our email for talking to our clients.

If you can see down here, we use Basecamp for managing projects and we can assign tasks and reminders to each other in Basecamp and we use Google Docs to save all our stuff. We also use Dropbox to upload these videos and things like that to manage bigger files.

And the total spend, including $80 a month for my phone, is $200 a month. We’re not talking big money here, we’re not talking big expenses for me to have a global business, which I know is a bit of a stretch, but we’re in the Philippines, Australia and the USA so I’m going to call it global.

So look, I just wanted to show you that that’s a real a real-life situation for a real life small business smaller than yours probably. It’s easy. These things are freely available, they’re easy to use and there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be doing that as well.

There’s nothing now stopping you from using outsourcing to help you grow your trades business.

So look of course, I’d like to hear what you are doing in terms of outsourcing, if you’ve done any?

I’m going to, in another video, explore some other options for you to look at in terms of outsourcing and in terms of the trade specific cloud-based systems that you can use because there are many. I’m going to try and do some comparing for you but for now, I thought you’d enjoy that and please take away from this, it’s easy, you should be considering it, if you’re not you competitors are.

See you later!