Virtual Assistants

Congrats! You’re a real business! You’re bringing on your first employee!

It doesn’t matter whether your revenue is $0 or $100k a month, bringing on your first employee is a big step in your business journey. It’s a transition to “I’m really taking this serious now”.

We all like to overcomplicate everything. This is really just like hiring any other employee that’s fully remote. If you haven’t spent the last few years hiring and training a bunch of people, jumping straight into management is going to be a learning curve for you.

Good.

You have to learn to delegate and build processes. This makes scaling infinitely easier.

Now I’m not an expert in hiring VA’s. This is my experience hiring a few VAs, hiring a dozen+ people over the last few years, and being involved in probably 50+ hiring decisions.

This article is going to focus on hiring a Filipino VA given I have no experience hiring a VA from India or elsewhere. I’ve hired teams/companies from India, but not as VAs so I won’t speak on that.

Differences From Hiring In The US

Other than taxes, there’s a few things you need to think about in terms of hiring outside of the United States and managing remote workers.

Legal Jurisdiction

First, there is essentially no legal repercussions if something bad happens. I don’t mean there isn’t, what I mean is you’re not equipped to deal with it and it’s not worth the headache to hire the law teams.

You’re hiring in a different legal jurisdiction. Their laws apply to their citizens and your laws apply to you. If something bad happens, what are you going to do? Are you going to hire a law firm in another country to track them down and get punitive damages that won’t amount to anything substantial?