How I grew my agency with a team in the Philippines

The first time I hired offshore, I thought I’d found a shortcut. Cheaper hours, same work. Simple.

It wasn’t simple. I made every mistake on the list. I hired the person who looked perfect on paper and vanished three weeks in. I watched work slip the moment I stopped checking it. I found out one hire was quietly running a second job on my hours.

Every time, I blamed the hire. And every time, I went looking for a better one.

What I kept getting wrong

It took me longer than I’d like to admit to see the pattern. I was finding good people. Then I was leaving them on their own.

Nobody managed them except me. And I was busy running an agency.

Finding a good VA is a recruiting problem. Keeping them good is a management problem. I’d been solving the first one over and over and ignoring the second.

So I got on a plane

I flew to the Philippines and built the team myself. I bought our own office in Cebu, at Oakridge Business Park. I put real systems around our people instead of expecting them to figure it out alone.

That meant someone checking in every day. Clear standards for how fast we respond to clients. Time we could actually see. A plan for when the power or internet went down, because in Cebu it sometimes does.

Honestly, it was a lot. A Canadian agency owner buying office space on the other side of the world is not a normal move. There were weeks I wondered if I’d overdone it.

What changed

Once the team was managed properly, it stopped being a cost and became our advantage.

My senior people did senior work. Delivery got faster. We could say yes to bigger clients because we had the team to deliver.

The agency grew 300% year over year. We hit seven figures in two years. And the people stayed. Our VAs average three to four years with the same client.

Remember the hire running a second job on my hours? With the system in place, that problem mostly went away. The people were about the same. What changed was that the work was visible, expectations were clear, and someone was paying attention.

Then other owners started asking

Other agency owners noticed. The question was always some version of “where do I get people like yours?”

So in November 2022, we started MyHire. It’s the same system that runs my agency, offered to other agencies. We’ve never spent money marketing it. Every client so far has come from one agency owner telling another.

I’m not telling you about an agency I used to run. I still run MyPortal Marketing every day, with the same team and the same systems.

What I still don’t know

People ask me if this model works for every agency. I don’t know yet. It works for agencies that have repeatable work and an owner willing to let go of it. I’ve seen owners who say they want help and then can’t hand anything over. I’m still figuring out how to spot that earlier.

What I do know is that the hire was never the hard part.