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John Jonas has helped thousands of entrepreneurs succeed in their business by doing outsourcing differently. He created and runs OnlineJobs.ph, the largest website for finding Filipino virtual workers, with over 1,000,000 Filipino resumes and over 300,000 employers from around the world using it.

He works about 17 hours per week, choosing to spend his time with his family rather than working.

Most passionate about

• The thing I\\u2019m always working on is helping people to outsource their businesses. I love it; I see so many people succeed with it. I see so much good in it, from both sides, the employer and the virtual assistant.

John\\u2019s career and story

• I\\u2019m a terrible employee. Out of college in 2003, I had a job for eight months, and my only goal was to quit my job. Because I hated it, and it took me eight months to make a little money online, and then I had an opportunity, and I took it, and I\\u2019ve been making money online ever since.
• In 2004 when I was making money, I didn\\u2019t get rich, but I saw how things are working. And I was good with websites; we were ranked on Google, and we were having ads on our websites and were getting money when people clicked the links and so on.
• I realized that there is a business online. Still, the business models of AdWords wouldn\\u2019t work for long, so I started learning other things regarding online - like copywriting, marketing, SEO, and the like.
• I started my online business, and very quickly, I got overwhelmed, I was overworked; there were so many things to do. I thought it\\u2019s going to be easy and obviously I was wrong.
• I tried different outsourcing solutions; I Tried to hire people locally and to hire someone from India, then I tried Elance, which today is UpWork - and all that didn\\u2019t work for me.
• Then I had a conversation with someone very successful in Internet business, and he said to me, \\u2018when you ready to hire outsourcing, make sure to go to the Philippines\\u2019. And he gave me a reference so I can hire someone full time, and I didn\\u2019t do it, but it gave me some hope.
• But after a while, I realized I couldn\\u2019t keep working 60 hours a week without getting enough done. And I hired someone through the agency he gave me, and it was the single most liberating experience of my life!
• This employee was doing whatever I taught him to do, and after like a month, I realized that there is like two of me\\u2026 I replaced myself in my business.
• That guy is still working for me today. Since 2005\\u2026! What I didn\\u2019t know about the Philippines is that they are loyal almost to a fault.
• That changed my life, and since then, I\\u2019ve helped hundreds of thousands of people do that, and it changed their lives as well.
• In 2008 I directly recruited a programmer to build a simple Job Board for direct interaction between companies to job seekers. In the first month, we passed a couple of hundreds of profiles, last month we passed a million profiles.
• The VA sets the terms, and we don\\u2019t take a cut of their salary, so they get all the money you pay them. We get paid $70 by employers for access to the database.

John\\u2019s best advice for entrepreneurs

• I have two pieces of advice. The first one is to make sales! That\\u2019s where entrepreneurs fail. Many of them think that \\u2018if I build this, or if I have just one more feature - than it\\u2019s all going to work. No. It\\u2019s not. You need to make sales.
• The second piece of advice is to make sure you add value; meaningful value to your customers.

Biggest failure with customers

• My biggest failure is entering a market where I don\\u2019t understand the marketing plan. If I don\\u2019t understand what they are looking for and what the offer should be, then I usually fail.
• Six or seven years ago, I paid a realtor for creating training...'