With the arrival of the internet and people being able to connect instantaneously from all over the world, working remotely is a growing tendency in many places. For small business owners that means great opportunities to find team members from different backgrounds who can offer all types of services. Instead of only having access to a small group of candidates close by, now you can source help from anywhere in the world! The question is, why should you hire people from other countries?
Countries outside of North America are leading the way
Around the world, home-based work is already part of the workforce set up; particularly in countries like China (85%), India (77%), France (72%), the United Kingdom (71%) and Brazil (61%). That means you can easily find experienced people in all sorts of areas to be part of your team. Most of these professionals are used to working for people in other countries and know how to make it effective. Each day you can find freelancers and VAs specialized in various areas that could bring a lot into your company.
Philippines and India have been the consensus top 2 destinations for global outsourcing. The Philippines’ outsourcing industry has been growing at roughly the same pace as the global outsourcing market. India, on the other hand, continues to be a favourite destination for IT and back-office work. One of the main reasons for it is the cost-efficiency rates. These countries can provide great professionals at very low rates, which makes it a great option for outsourcing on a tight budget.
English has become an accepted “universal language” that is spoken by over 1.5 billion people. It is by far the most commonly studied foreign language in the world, followed by French at a distant second. As so, many countries value the language their children are taught English in school. Because of that, literacy rates are higher than you may expect and chances are you can find team members with great English skills even if that’s not their first language.
Increase your number of potential candidates
Your local market may not have enough choices. If you restrict the area from where you can source team members that means you have fewer options. You might be losing the chance to get more qualified, innovative or even more affordable workers. You might even end up hiring someone that just kinda fits your needs, but wasn’t exactly what you needed. On top of that, you lose the power to bargain for better deals since there’s much less competition.
With a broader set of candidates, you can find specialized VAs that might not be available to you in your local area. As I said before, having a larger pool of people to pick from, opens up the possibility of finding workers with all sorts of qualifications, experience, and background. When you are willing to hire people from anywhere in the world the chances of finding someone that perfectly addresses your needs highly increases.
You may not be able to find VAs locally that want to handle the smaller, low paying tasks that you need to outsource. Depending on where you are located, VAs near you might not be willing to work at lower rates, smaller amounts of time or take on simpler tasks. It is possible that they can find better opportunities with higher pay from bigger companies. Sourcing from other countries, on the other hand, will allow you to find many people willing to do these small tasks at lower rates.
Your business tasks could be getting done even when you are sleeping.
Hiring people in different time zones can be useful for 24 hours of customer service. If you need your business running 24/7, hiring people in different time zones is the way to go. You can have team members working at different hours, that would allow there to always have someone available. For customer service that is a huge plus since as an online business you may have clients from all over the world that need assistance across multiple time zones.
Depending on where your VA lives, they could be working on projects while you are sleeping. That gives you an awesome sense of productivity and effectiveness. There’s nothing better than waking up and starting the day with work done. That also means team members in different time zones can do complementary work without having to constantly be waiting on one another.
Assign work during the day and while you sleep it gets done. This makes you more productive during your working hours. You can have your tasks of the day pre-set for you, wake up with your emails sorted or anything else you need to start a good day of work. That will increase your workflow quality and likely increase your lifestyle as you feel more productive.
Every task in your business has a cost associated with it
At some point in the development of your business, you start to get very busy. There’s a lot to be done and you might get so overwhelmed with busy work that you don’t have time to create value for your company anymore. That is usually when you want to outsource some of the daily tasks you have and free up some time.
You might start thinking “but is it worth the investment? I don’t want to be spending money”. Well, you need to know how much YOUR time is worth. When you pay someone to free up your time so you can do meaningful work and it pays itself fast. You’ll be earning much more by doing the work no one else can do and prevent your business from getting stuck because you can’t do it all by yourself.
List all of the things you need to do and associate a dollar value to it. There are tasks that only you can do, and those are much more valuable than answering emails, scheduling and all those daily tasks that are needed to keep your business running. Associating a value to everything that goes into making your company work will help you get a good picture of where to invest.
Begin your outsourcing list with the items above that you gave a lower dollar value to. Your time is worth more than that and outsourcing will only benefit you since you can now dedicate more hours to those higher-paying tasks and get more productive. It will pay for itself! You are working for more money than you are paying to outsource those tasks.
Businesses with tighter budgets
When you have a small business, investing in growing your team might be a struggle and a scary decision. Hiring people from other countries can be an affordable alternative to hiring regular employees. You’ll have a larger pool of options and can find great deals. It also gives you much more flexibility since many of those people work for multiple employers and will be willing to do work that requires just a couple hours a week. You might find it hard to find regular employees to work less than 4 or 6 hours a day.
VAs from other countries have a lower labour cost. If you think about it the Dollar is one of the leading currencies in the world. That means for people living in other countries your money might be worth 5, 6 maybe 10 times more in their local currency. That’s why sometimes you find people willing to work for even 3 Dollars an hour, which will never happen if you are only hiring from Canada or the USA.
There are also no additional expenses since you’ll be hiring on a freelance basis. That lifts many of the taxes and benefits you would need to pay for a regular employee. So, on top of paying lower hourly rates, you also cut off all those other expenses. All that makes hiring freelancers or VAs from different countries very affordable while still getting effective and quality work.
Need help managing your online business? Maybe I can help, let’s chat!
