The Angel Of Sacramento

The Interview

Back in 2008, my brother Jason was a real estate agent living from closing to closing —often telling himself, “Hey, if this one doesn’t happen we pay the mortgage on the credit card.”

Jason knew he needed help, but with two employees already on the books, he couldn’t afford another staff member. Someone suggested that he look into hiring an overseas virtual assistant, so with a bit of trepidation but feeling motivated by his massive workload, he started looking online.

That’s when it happened: he met Lily, advertising her services as a virtual assistant on an outsourcing website. She was friendly, experienced, and educated — so he hired her & hoped for the best. He was in luck: their personalities & work styles meshed. Even better, Lily worked hard — and she had career experience doing bookmark and managing staff.

It didn’t take Jason long to realize that, despite living overseas & working remotely, Lily outperformed the two actual employees in his office. They were always complaining about paperwork and taking extended lunches at their leisure. He’d settled for them after a string of bad-luck local hires — folks who’d usually last for around a year before moving to a higher paying job or becoming a REALTOR® themselves. He’d resigned himself to thinking “that’s just the way it is”, but hiring Lily got him thinking — maybe it doesn’t have to be that way.

An Unexpected Find

Jason: “So Lily, tell me about your last job anything from your experiences there that will help you here?”

Lily: “I think so, Jason. I pretty much ran my bosses business for him.”

Jason: “Why did you quit?”

Lily: “I got tired, he had 200 employees I was directly responsible for them, there was just too much work and I never saw myself being more than his employee.”

My brother was surprised, to say the least — after years of working with local talent that had trouble even showing up to work, finding offshore talent with this kind of skill was exciting. His first thought? “I need more people like Lily!”

As Jason would soon find out, you can find amazing talent overseas willing to work for less than local hires in the USA, but it’s a hit-or-miss proposition — and if you don’t know what you’re doing, you’ll end up kissing a lot of frogs before you find a prince.

Jason was incredibly lucky to have found Lily. When he tried to find another virtual assistant just like her, he failed — 4 times! The candidates were either not qualified, not reliable or wanted to do only contract work.

Worst yet, when he tried calling the outsourcing company he hired them through — NO ANSWER. So he followed up with email. STILL NO ANSWER. The outsourcing company showed up promptly on payday, but getting in touch with them if you had a problem? Yeah, right.

He told Lily about his frustrations, and she responded, “Jason, let me place an ad and visit some companies to do some head hunting for you.” He asked her to go ahead & even agreed to pay her a bonus if she could find him someone good within 1 week….but she didn’t need a week.

Within 3 days she had him scheduled for 10 interviews — all trained, experienced & educated virtual assistants, and all looking to work hard to achieve success.

Jason was overjoyed, and also sensed there was a bigger mission here than simply staffing his real estate company. That’s when he called me, partly to tell him about his remarkable story, and partly to help find me some help for the full-time real estate brokerage I was building.

“Daniel,” he said, “Just make sure to keep this hush-hush. If the other brokers in our area find out, we’ll lose our edge.”

“It’s too big,” I responded, “We’ve both got friends all over the country killing themselves just trying to survive like we are. They all need help, and this kind of experience & cost-effectiveness is exactly what they’ve been looking for, just like us. What if we told everybody?” Thus, MyOutDesk was born…

The Start Of Something Great

Maybe my brother Jason and I sound like a couple of hard-luck cases, but you have to remember the real estate market back at the time. This was 2008 — banks were collapsing, car companies were going bankrupt, and squatters were literally stripping the pipes out of abandoned new construction housing developments in Bakersfield to sell them for scrap. It was a tough market, and catching a break on labor costs was a real blessing. Finding Lily was even better.

She had been doing a little virtual assistant work for me as well for a short while when I mentioned in passing that I was spearheading a rebranding of the business and had paid a designer $1000 to do a logo and some business cards for me. In that recovery phase of my business, $1000 seemed like a lot of money — yet another expense in a list of many — and I hadn’t even liked what they had produced for me so far. I was down about it. Lily told me she would try to do a better logo for me for free. Why? Because she wanted to show me the level of work she was capable of. She wasn’t convinced that I understood just how talented she was, and she was right. I was very happy with the result. We ended up using her logo instead of the designer’s.

Lily saw an opportunity working for a U.S. business virtually. At the time she began working for my brother, she had two small children, one of them an infant, and she was working at a call center. To make the long commutes to her job, she had been surviving on just four hours of sleep on workdays and didn’t feel like she had enough time or energy for her family.

Since the quality of her work was so outstanding, I asked her if she could find more people like her who could do quality work like her. We would employ them through an entirely new company called MyOutDesk. Without strategically planning it, she became the de facto leader of what would become the MOD movement in the Philippines. Lily became a star recruiter for MyOutDesk. Working virtually had been a boon for her and her family, and she wanted others in her area to have the same freedom and prosperity.

Back then, few people were working with virtual assistants as yet, but our business took off quickly. Our first client went from 5 to 17 virtual professionals with a completely revamped organizational model in short order, and he told me, “Daniel, our virtual professionals have shaved $250,000 off our monthly overhead.” He was able to reinvest that money in the business and see supercharged growth. Around the same time, we had our first MODCon convention in the Philippines, and that was when I truly came to understand what Lily already knew: There was an enormous talent base in the Philippines, and I had tapped into something quite powerful. That visit was a profound experience because I think as an American; I had not fully grasped the quality of global talent until I saw it with my own eyes.

With teams on both sides of the ocean, we were able to help more and more clients scale their businesses and scale MyOutDesk exponentially at the same time. We thought we had reached a huge milestone in 2012 with 100 virtual professionals, but little did we know that today we would have 10 times that number. Lily has said, “I think when you came to visit that first time, you saw that these people you had employed were not just names. They were people with families that you have a big impact on. Looking back, what makes me filled with joy is knowing that there are thousands of families here in the Philippines that are living well because we have MyOutDesk.

Lily is a great at explaining to clients exactly what makes our blended work model a success. She tells new clients, “We’re here to make your life easy. Things that you can’t do while you’re out of the office, we’re here to do for you. This is going to give you more time to focus on what drives your revenue rather than being tied up doing tasks.”

Lily’s path in life has not always been easy, and she enjoys that we have an opportunity to pay it forward in the Philippines. Always one to see the value in philanthropy, she is one of the team’s most enthusiastic supporters of our charitable organization: MOD Movement. One of the organizations we have been able to help there is Boys’ Town, an orphanage near the resort where we have our conferences. She visited Boys’ Town and immediately felt we could help. Since then, the MyOutDesk team has gone back time and again, because as Lily pointed out, “Those children are never without a need. These are abandoned kids; hungry kids. We have donated food and clothing, and have even done repairs to their Foundling House, which houses infants and toddlers. These babies were living in a tough spot, and our virtual professionals were happy to take the time to completely rehab their home and do anything else they could that was needed. Because we feel we are blessed in so many ways,” she quickly added.

In Lily’s Words

• “I have small kids.”
• “I need more time with my family.”
• “Travelling expenses and taxes are too high.”
• “Traffic is terrible, I want to save time.”

“Like most of our MyOutDesk virtual professionals (MOD VPs), I decided to pursue a work-from-home career because of those reasons.

Ten years after I made the decision to try this new virtual professional model, an industry relatively unknown in the turn the 21st century, I’ve discovered a lot about myself professionally. In 2006, I took a risk by becoming the original employee of what one day would be a company that has employed more than 5,000 virtual professionals, I am so blessed. Like all of the MOD virtual professionals, I started my career at MyOutDesk with zero knowledge of how to work with companies in another country virtually. I was very fortunate that I worked with Jason Ramsey, one of the cofounders of MyOutDesk, who invested his time helping me to get up to speed in my role and his business. Because of the trust placed in me and the company’s core value of treating our employees, vendors, and virtual professionals like family, I thrived. Every day, I logged in virtually ready with a plan of attack so that my day was super productive. I was learning on the job, since another one of our core values is healthy soil (is to be constantly developing). Whenever I saw a need, I acted, and our company increased its revenue by more than 74% each year for five years in a row. One of those years had an 126% increase over the previous year.

I’m personally proud of the great leadership team at MyOutDesk. They have always believed in me and supported me along the way. As you can imagine, after 10 years in a leadership position, I have gained a good number of friends who are like family to me. I have become known as Mother Lily…and I love it! I appreciate that the VPs have bestowed their trust in me and are able to come to me to share their personal triumphs and challenges. I have always taken my role of serving our virtual professionals as a chance to represent MOD, embody our core value of having a servant’s heart, and find win/win solutions for our people.

The entire MyOutDesk virtual professional team owes our livelihoods and our success to Daniel Ramsey, who carried us from just one MOD VP to over 5,000. That large number equates to whole families, and even to extended families, being provided for by MyOutDesk. This fact, in itself, is already a good reason to run a business. MOD helps drive our economy and has added more than 30 million dollars in payroll to families in the Philippines.

It has been 10 years, and this book serves as another milestone for MyOutDesk to conquer new grounds, help more clients scale while lowering their overhead, and help improve the lives and well being of more Filipino families, one virtual professional at a time.

To my better half, Don, thank you for the love and support all these years. You have proven time and again that you will be with me through thick and thin, and through sickness and in health. You are my dream come true and my answered prayer. To my kids, Jamie and Donita, thank you for taking care of your mommy! You are my very reason why I have this career. The thought of leaving you for a few hours to work elsewhere was just unbearable. To my mother, Veronica, my stepfather Lennart, and to my siblings, Holly and Warvi, thank you for the love! God has given me a family that nurtured me and continues to care for me and support me to this day. To my in-laws, thank you for taking me into your family and making me one of your own. To my church family, thank you very much for all your encouragement, loving assistance and prayers. To Jason and Daniel, thank you for your kindness and trust. I could not have done it without your confidence in me. To Jeff McCaffrey, thanks for the leadership and for sharing your wisdom with us. To Megan, thank you for picking up the pieces and for taking good care of me!

To all my friends in MOD, you give me joy and I thank you for the time we have spent together.”