E141: Get to Know Abby, EcomCrew’s Filipino VA

EcomCrew has gone through a big transformation ever since the site merged with Dave Bryant's site ChineseImporting.com. In less than a year we've accomplished so much–we've launched new courses, upped the podcast to two episodes per week, and revamped the entire EcomCrew site. Dave and I are tremendously happy with what EcomCrew has become and we are gearing to do even more, but we would not have gone to this point if not for the people helping us behind the scenes.

If you've been listening to the podcast recently or reached out to us at some point, you might have heard of or encountered Abby. Abby is our Filipino VA and one of the people working behind me and Dave to help us get EcomCrew to become so much more. While Dave and I focus (and get distracted) on the course content and speaking at industry events, Abby makes sure everything else run smoothly–from scheduling the podcast episodes to answering emails.

We recently got a chance to get Abby on the podcast (after much persuasion) during our trip to the Philippines. We wanted everybody to meet Abby and get to know her a little, at least virtually. Here's what she and I discussed in this episode:

• How we found her and how she became the EcomCrew VA
• The challenges she encountered early on in the job
• Her day-to-day tasks
• How she learned to produce the podcast
• What's coming for EcomCrew in the future
• Her pro-tip on how to get your VA to stick around

We'd like to thank Abby again for getting on the podcast despite the fact that she was too shy to do it :) If you have someone, or a team of people behind your, never forget to appreciate them and recognize what they're doing to help you get to where you want to be.

Resources mentioned:

Amazon Launch Strategy webinar
E96: Our Philippines Team

Thanks so much for listening! Until the next episode, happy selling.

Full Audio Transcript

Mike: This is Mike, and welcome to episode number 141 of the EcomCrew Podcast. You can go to EcomCrew.com/141 to get to the show notes for this episode. And for this week, I’m calling this Philippine’s week. I just got back from the Philippines. I'm actually recording this intro right now in China, but the podcast itself came from the Philippines. And we were there for a week. Mitchell and I are hanging out with the crew there.

We've got 12 employees now over in the Philippines. It's absolutely amazing. And I wanted to get two podcasts, one with Abby, and one with Mia. And this first one is going to be with Abby. For those of you who don't know who she is, she is our Filipino VA for the EcomCrew Podcast and everything else that we do with EcomCrew. And she has just been an amazing resource for us. Everything that happens at EcomCrew behind the scenes only happens because of her. And I am excited to have her on the podcast and I’m going to get started right after this break.

Mike: Hey Abby, welcome to the EcomCrew Podcast.

Abby: Hi Mike.

Mike: So we were joking about this before recording, Abby is shy; she doesn't want to get on the podcast. But she's been doing all this amazing stuff for us for the past year behind the scenes. So we wanted to get her on the podcast to talk about some of that, get her some recognition for all the awesome things she's done for us. So Abby don't be nervous. It's going to be okay.

We did another episode where Abby guest starred for just a little bit last year, about six months ago. We will put that in the show notes, so we interviewed the whole office. But this time I just want to talk to Abby one on one. So the question we get asked most about all our Filipinos that we have over here is, how do you find these people, how we hired you. So how did we find you?

Abby: Well I saw a post on Online Jobs ph looking for a VA. There's not much detail there except for that the company is simply growing and they need more people to handle more tasks. And I responded and got a reply from Mia.

Mike: Yeah and I think it was funny that the timing was just random. We were looking for someone to help us with the EcomCrew, but also at the same time I think we were looking for a VA just for Terran in general. And the timing just kind of lined up that the next hire we were making at that exact moment was for EcomCrew. It very easily could have been a Terran VA, but you ended up being our EcomCrew VA. So what do you find has been the most like challenging part of this so far for you? You’ve been about nine months now working for us or six months, how long has it been?

Abby: I think it’s ten.

Mike: Ten months okay. So over the last ten months, what has been the most challenging thing for you as you’ve been kind of like getting into this role?

Abby: The most difficult thing for me is learning e-commerce in general. I'm not really — I don't really know a lot about e-commerce even here in the Philippines. It got a lot harder when I had to learn about e-commerce in the US because it's a bit different. And yeah there's a high learning curve, but they do training pretty well, and there's a lot of things to read about e-commerce. Well, the first task I was assigned to was reading all of Dave's blog posts about importing and just e-commerce in general, and that's really good training in itself. That's the hardest part. I think I’m doing fine.

Mike: Yeah. I think you've done an amazing job and we’ll talk about some of the progression that you made. We kind of joke internally, Dave and I do, like there's like nothing that Abby can't do. We were talking about some of the things that you've helped us with because every time there's something new your way, you figure out how to do it which is awesome. I’m not sure I could figure out how to do some of this stuff.

But yeah I guess one of the earliest projects was that was going through — because Dave and I obviously merged his old Chinese Importing blog in with our old EcomCrew blog. And we ended up going with EcomCrew, stuck with that name because it just was a more general e-commerce name. We knew we wanted to do more than just be about importing, so we kind of had to stick with one of the names when we merged things together. But that was like one of the very first projects that you helped us with.

And that was a bear of a project, because anybody that's ever going through merging sites together knows that it's not easy importing the data and getting all the images resized and doing all the 301 redirects. So talk about a little bit like how you kind of helped with that project.

Abby: First the very first thing that was assigned to me was just proof reading. And then I started noticing that there will be dead links, and then that got assigned as well. So basically I was just assigned one task, and then I just go over something and then assigned that and then another. But it's a pretty good read. And after everything I can — I think I say that if I want to, I can start importing from China right now.

Mike: Nice, and it's not that far from here, you're almost in the same time zone. You are in the same time zone actually. So that makes it easier. That's like our biggest challenge is dealing with people in multiple time zones, so that's cool. And I always thought we started having you work on – let’s kind of go through some of the things I can think off the top of my head.

We had you working on a customer service stuff which has become a bigger and bigger part of the job because now that we have paid courses there's a lot more emails coming in, people asking questions. So the thing that's always impressed me the most is that I’d say at least a third to half of the questions, you just answer on your own, like without us having to get involved which is really awesome. So let's talk about that for just a minute. Like how do you go through and what’s your kind of your daily routine on dealing with customer service?

Abby: The very first thing I do when I start my day is look at our support inbox and Facebook, because I want to answer everything before I do anything else. It was a little bit challenging for me. Well I came from customer service but it's not like this. Usually I answer questions like for ColorIt like inventory and shipping. But this time it’s really, one person was really hard for me because people were asking about strategy and of course I didn’t know anything about that.

But after listening to the podcast and reading the blog posts and reading through other e-commerce blogs as well, I kind of like get a feel for what needs to be done. Well I think in my first month I had to keep emailing you guys.

Mike: Yeah, which is fine. We were like I'm always happy to answer and help any questions you have, but it's been a lot less lately. Lately you just kind of take the bull by the horns and do it.

Abby: Because some problems are the same especially for the beginners you know dealing with the same problems, and I already know what you guys are probably going to answer and I tell them that and it works.

Mike: Yeah, like who do you use for your inspection company?

Abby: Yeah.

Mike: Like how do you find out what the duty rates are, we get a lot of the same questions over and over again. And we want to help people even if they aren't paid members or whatever which is fine, but at the same time like one of the things that I have to get more disciplined about is my time, because there's only so many hours a day. And so yeah, it's been a huge help having you kind of run interference there and we only have to deal with the ones that are super advanced questions.

There’s been some really good ones that have come in lately that even are tough for me to figure out an answer. So those are the ones we want to be answering more than the same repetitive stuff. So yeah, definitely awesome help there. So moving on to the next one, we talked about customer service a little bit here. I remember the first time that I — like I knew that you were going to be awesome like pretty much from day one.

But the time that I really knew, I remember we were doing our first course and we had our — we basically Dave Bryant was like you know what, we really need to have like PDF content for everything we do here, not just have a video but we should have a downloadable piece of content. And we tasked you with helping us create PDFs for basically every video. And I was just like when you sent the sample over, I legitimately thought you had like hired someone else to do it because it was so good. But yeah, let's talk about that project or just look like how did you go through and put those PDFs together?

Abby: Well first of all I do have a writing background and I can write short stories. But I do love to write and when I watched those videos, I just like summarized and just took the best points. So for example if you don't have the time to watch the video right now or if you want to review, and you just want to see the most important parts, then you just take that. And I don’t know, I felt like it came natural to me to do that.

Mike: Yeah no it was awesome and for any of you guys that have purchased one of our courses, you know the PDFs we're talking about. They're just super awesome and we talk about this all the time in like everything we do here is kind of a team effort. There's no way that I would have time to put that together. And I don't think that we would have as good of a product if we didn’t have the downloadable content. And it's been like a really good awesome between Abby, myself and Dave and Dave.

We've got to find another name for the Daves because we don't know like which Dave we're talking about sometimes. But obviously Dave Bryant, he's another really good prolific writer, and he does a lot of the blog content and all the blog content really, because if there's anything that I've been doing less than a great job with or falling short of what I promised was writing blog content.

But on the same side Dave is equally as guilty on the podcasting side because he doesn't do a lot of podcasts or any podcasting. Which is fine because I think that we've kind of like fallen into a niche of we're all doing what we're really good at and enjoy doing. For me doing the podcasts is never like laborious and like doesn’t — I don't need to come up with an excuse to put an episode together. It just kind of become naturally something that's easier for me. And writing on the other hand, like I can do it like there’s definitely lots of articles on the site from yesteryears that I put together and wrote, but they take me a really long time.

It probably takes me four to ten times longer to write the same number of words as it would for Abby or Dave Bryant. And then bringing Dave QA into the fold now has been another amazing dynamic because like everything now looks like it's professional and belongs in this decade and not back pre 1999. I always joke that our site looked like it was done in Microsoft run page before. So yeah it's been a great dynamic for that.

So moving on to the next thing that I want to talk to you about which I also I’m just amazed at. When we first got started with the podcast, back when I was doing it with Grant, I was like, look, like really I think we should do a podcast, like here is what I know about myself. Here is the challenge, if I have to prepare a lot for it or be the one editing it or posting it, and it takes — let's say for every 30 minutes of podcasting time, if it takes five hours or ten hours of the work to get an episode up, it'll be something that I do for two or three months, and it'll just kind of peter out.

But we had to figure out a way to make it so for like every 30 minutes of podcast time, that's like 35 minutes worth of work. We've got to get this down to I just turn on the microphone and start doing it. And it was a few things that I knew early on, like I knew that if I had a topic to talk about, I didn’t need to necessarily do a whole lot of pre-prepping for it because this is what I'm doing for my life day in and day out.

I don't need to prep to talk about how to do a follow up email sequence on Klaviyo or how to do it Amazon launch strategy because we're talking about the stuff in the office as a part of our day to day life every day. I mean this is engrained in what I do. And it's become easier and easier as I've done more pod casting because just like anything else that you do, you become better at it. I mean you play the guitar more you become a better guitar player; you write more you become a better writer.

I've recorded 130 something EcomCrew podcasts plus been on a bunch of other industry podcasts, and gone and spoken at a bunch of different events now. So it becomes easier and easier, and the hardest part these days now is just coming up with new ideas all the time. And we always love to hear from the audience. Please just me email if you have any thoughts, you can just email support@ecomcrew.com or comment on this particular episode, because the hardest thing when you're releasing 100 plus podcasts per year is coming up with 100 unique ideas.

And one of them was this podcast here. It was like, oh we're going to be in the Philippines, let's get Abby on the microphone and just start talking about like what we do day to day. But the whole way that this came up was to talk about the podcasts and the editing and like what goes in behind the scenes, because it almost seems unfair because like we have this podcast, it comes out really, really polished. I think it sounds absolutely amazing.

You clearly take a lot of pride in what you do working on audio levels and mixing and editing for the ones that don't come out perfect on the first try. And I spend 30 minutes turning on the mike and recording the podcast, but you spend hours behind the scenes making it sound amazing. And the way that this all came up is even more amazing which was I mentioned this is how we kind of had it from day one, this is what I wanted to do way before we knew Abby.

I knew that it had to be something that was easy. So we hired another company, gave them a plug [inaudible 00:14:44] called podcast motor, they did a great job for us for a year and a half or two years whatever it was when we first got started. And we only switched from them just because we had already hired Abby. And we wanted to bring it all house and be able to more fair to them because we were constantly pushing the deadline for getting all the stuff done, and wanted to just have more control over it in-house. So it was definitely no knock on them.

So if you ever want to start a podcast and want nothing — don't know how to edit or do anything, definitely checked them out. But I told Abby about this. I feel like it was about a month before we came to the Philippines last time and I was just like we want to have you start doing the podcast. You have a month to figure this out. And just like everything else, super amazing out here, she said, okay I got that.

But anyways, so I've been rambling for the last couple of minutes about the podcast, but just talk for a few minutes about how you figured out how to even do this. I mean it's awesome to me that you figured it out because you had no prior podcasting experience. Let’s kind of go through the whole process from the day that you got the email or the Skype message from me, however that went down to how we have now done probably 60 to 100 podcast with you editing.

Abby: Well, you just want to check Google. But what I found out, yeah I goggled how to do all that stuff and then I listened – I’ve been listening to the podcast so I kind of know what goes in what part. And so I just tried it and compared it with what they already have. And actually the toughest or the tougher part for me was not really the editing; it was writing the show notes because I don't have any experience about publishing podcasts before.

And I wanted to kind of like mash the quality of the show notes to the podcast more today. Well it’s really — you got to take some credit for yourself too because it's really easy to edit your podcasts. There's not a lot of pauses, I just have to like little edits here and there. And yeah it's not really that difficult for me. But we do have projects coming up now that's a lot more challenging, but and I think we're going to figure it out.

Mike: Yeah I mean one of the things we joke about in the office is they call me one take Mike, because I for the most part almost every podcast that I've done has been done in one take. And a lot of the videos that we do for the training itself — and again it comes from practice makes perfect. We've done over 100 podcast episodes. A lot of it also is not using filler words. I remember back when we were doing it with Grant, about 30 episodes in, Grant had the idea of doing translations or transcriptions I should say not translations, so transcribing the podcast in verbal and the written.

And we hired another third party I think that's still doing it. I think it's the same person today even doing that. And he's like you got to look at this, I think about three episodes and you got to look at this and do a search for you know on a particular episode. And I honestly had no idea where he was going with this, I mean he had asked me to do that. And it came up with something stupid like 512 you knows.

And I had to replay the podcast back and listen to it. And literally multiple times per sentence I was saying you know. There were so many crunch words you end up using in life and obviously was embarrassing, and I want to do a better job of that. And there's no editor that would've been able to get all of those out. We didn't even ever try at that point. But there was a lot of things I did to practice getting that out of my vocabulary and most of which was going to Toastmasters.

I got in to a Toastmaster, I got to work on my public speaking skills. I have to be more cognizant of what I'm saying when I'm saying it. And they have this awesome thing called the Ocala, and it's this little thing that's about the size of your thumb and they would push the button a little like a click, click. And while you are talking, if you said uh, uh, you know, like such things over again pause too long make things awkward, they would hit the little Ocala thing.

And I remember the very first talk I ever gave there. I mean it was just not — it sounded like hand grenades were going off like nonstop or firecrackers I guess, something like that. It was like nonstop click, click, click, click and you don't even realize it until you hear it. But when you hear the click, you immediately realize you just said it because it's in the exact moment that you did it. And that was probably the most valuable thing that came out.

There's a lot of things that came out of Toastmasters for me that was really valuable. That was probably the most valuable thing, and I've since stopped going to Toastmasters. My time I find is the most valuable thing I have. It's the only commodity that there's a limited amount of that you can't get more of it. And I feel like I just kind of grew as much as I possibly could in that environment.

I would probably still go there if they could amass a Toastmasters of like 500 people, because I felt like the hardest — the thing that I was the most shy over I needed the most help with was just public speaking in general. At the time I had just got an offer to speak for the very first time at Ecommerce Fuel Live, and I was terrified of that. I really didn't want to go do it. So I was more concerned with how do I get up in front of an audience and speak. And the ensuing benefits was the Ocala and some other things that have helped.

But yeah I mean just I know — I want to give myself credit for a lot of things, that's I’m probably my own worst critic, but I also at the same time can look at the quality of the audio files that we produce and I know that they're better. Again it's hard for me to even say that I've gotten better at giving myself credit. I think that it's an entrepreneur trait in general is you don't want to give yourself credit for credit that is due. And I do know now and I’m more accepting of the fact after talking to other people about giving yourself credit for things.

And I’m actually proud of it. I mean it’s been a lot of hard work getting to a point where I don't say you know. I don't think I've been saying you know every other word here. But I don't even think about it anymore. That’s the other thing that's pretty cool. For me it's just like breathing. I don't have to concentrate on don't say you know every other word. The word that I drop more than anything that was like. It's like my other filler word now.

But I don't do it as much as I used to. And I definitely find that I say it more when I'm doing public speaking than I'm doing the podcast. It's just really natural. When you're more nervous, you're going to say that more. The most awkward thing in conversation is a pause, is an awkward silence. There's my favorite scene from a movie about that is full fiction. It's like they are talking about, she's like I don't know what that was when you have an awkward silence.

So that’s just kind of how it is. You're constantly trying to fill that that air time because it feels awkward to have a pause at any time throughout a podcast or a conversation. The more comfortable you are with somebody, the longer you've known someone for, it becomes less awkward. When you meet someone for the first time, it's very awkward to have silence on a podcast. I remember when we first started doing the podcast that it was just like I can't ever take a breath or pause for the stop because that might seem awkward even if it was a subconscious thought.

Thinking back upon it now like it was actually more conscious than subconscious. So anyway it's been it's been a journey and we haven't been able to make it easier for you. But there's definitely other challenges in that we have guests that come on the show that aren't maybe used to be on a podcast which is a spice that requires more editing.

And one of the things that we’re really working on for those of you who know me personally out there that listen to this podcast, and Abby certainly got to know me over the last ten months, I am not the type of person to be complacent and just be happy with what we're doing. One of the things that we really want to do is take this podcast to the next level whether it's once a month or once a quarter even.

We’ll start with a couple episodes that we’re working on that are going to be way different format, something that's going to be in a format and a quality that I would say would be like a national like NPR like radio type show. And that's something I am striving for is to be able to put that kind of content together. So that will be our next challenge of the podcast, definitely looking forward to that. Any last thoughts on the podcast itself?

Abby: Well I just remember one time, one of the episodes where there was a guest and probably the person was not used to that kind of call. And I had to edit like a lot you know like he was saying. And I was done with one file and there was two parts to it, I had to edit another one. And then something went wrong with Mike. I think he told me about that something went wrong with his PC; I had to start all over again.

Mike: It's the worst feeling ever.

Abby: Yeah because I don't want to publish something that I'm not really satisfied about. So I had to do it all over again.

Mike: Yeah I've been there, done that. It feels like — I think from the dawn of when I had my first computer to now, it seems like this is a constant thing where it saved but it didn’t play or you hit save and then your computer crashes or something along those lines happens. It's really frustrating. It does seem like it happens less these days. Computers crash less than they used to and everything is kind of backed up in the cloud now almost immediately.

But there's definitely been times where I've been doing something over the last year and lost that work. And it's so frustrating because you put on this effort on getting it right the first time, and it's weird these types of things feel like almost impossible to reproduce the exact same thing again. It was like one of these things where there is like some nuances. And the next time it isn't quite the same whether you're editing a file or writing a paragraph or whatever it is. Yeah it's definitely that's not really frustrating.

So the last couple of minutes that we have left here with the episode today, I wanted to just talk to you about things that you think are going to happen in the future. What do you think the next big things are for the EcomCrew Podcast, for the blog, for courses, like what are you most excited about over the next six to twelve months?

Abby: Well, I'm [describing [ph] 00:24:48] myself for more emails because I really see the trend. When I got started I was looking over at Laura. She was answering ColorIt emails and I was looking at my inbox, and well there's nothing here. And I’ll go like envious answering those emails, and now I do get these emails a lot. So I’m anticipating that.

And I'm really excited about what's going to come for EcomCrew in the future about the improvements to the podcast, the segments that we're going to do that are really different from what we're doing now, upcoming courses and like in-person masterminds, meet-ups with students. And yeah that's really exciting and I feel like there's a lot in the horizon and I’m really [inaudible 00:25:36] through this all.

Mike: Yeah it's definitely been an interesting journey. You just mentioned the masterminds. We filled up our first mastermind that we have coming up. We're recording this; this will go out in a few weeks. But we're recording it about a week or we can have before we do our first in-person mastermind. I think by the time this gets released the mastermind would have happened. But we threw a number out there like trying to get 20 people in a room in Hong Kong and kind of joked about I hope that we have more than a cricket that shows up.

And the feedback was amazing. This has been an amazing journey for me. It's kind of falling in the niche of — the neat thing about EcomCrew in general is that we can help so many people in so many ways that doesn't affect our e-commerce business. There's no real negative repercussions. I mean every now and then something pops up or it's obvious someone like copied exactly what we did, and they are now a competitor, and yeah that’s frustrating.

But at the same time we just kind of move along past that and think about the greater good. Plus I'm just like a lot more secure in what I'm doing in everything in my life because I'm older now than I was when I started my first companies. And yeah it's so neat like hearing all the success stories. They're pretty infectious. I mean it makes you want to do it more and more. There's a lot of sayings and things about how helping others is better than helping yourself.

And it's definitely been cool because my thing, the thing I think that I'm really good at in life and I love doing is business stuff. So this helps like kind of fill that itch and also be able to help other people at the same time. And now that we have a lot of people taking our paid courses and the feedback we get from that stuff, like some of the initial testimonials have been almost emotional. You're reading you’re just like wow, that's a pretty cool comment to hear from somebody that took the time unprompted to write in and thank us for what we're doing.

I think that our biggest challenge kind of moving forward as we do more courses and get in the EcomCrew podcast and blog etcetera, it continues to just get more popular. You mentioned already just customer support, trying to respond to emails and stuff in a timely fashion between Dave and I, it's tough for me. I mean there's a lot of other things going on. The toughest times are like right now when we're traveling for a long period time.

And trying to respond to really detailed questions and stuff that come in and especially for people that have paid for one of our courses, it's really important to us to be able to do that. And already one time someone actually was like how come it's taking you so long to respond? And I felt bad because we were in the middle of traveling. So we want to try to keep that stuff to a minimum.

But our goal is basically to respond within one business day, like full 24 hour business day for the most part. And we've been able to — for almost all the emails we’ve been able to do that. So that's good and we want to try to keep up with that trend. But I definitely see that being a challenge. I think the other thing that's on the horizon that's cool like you said new podcast segments, new courses. We have our Amazon course that we just finished recording. Now Dave is doing the editing for us and going to get that up, I think that will be cool.

And that will be like our three core courses will be done. That's what our goal was when we started. The middle of last year we kind of mapped things out. We wanted to have three like kind of ever greenish kind of core courses that we would be able to develop. The first one would be on importing from China because that's what Dave’s old blog was all about was importing. We wanted to capture that audience and do a better job with that course.

And then creating a brand which is something that Dave and I, both are really passionate about. It isn't just about selling products. We got that course done and now we have our third core product which will be the Amazon course. And then from there, I think they'll be — these will be courses that we release periodically that will be more specialized things. There's some stuff that's come up like Klaviyo, email marketing or Facebook ads for e-commerce, or things of that nature, things that I talk about a lot in the speaking circuit, ManyChat, things of that nature.

So excited to see where that comes, but definitely excited to have you along for the ride with us Abby through all of that. So thank you for coming on the podcast today. I know that this is something that you weren’t necessarily looking forward to, but you did a great job.

Abby: No, I was surprised, I didn’t really know.

Mike: I knew just like everything else you did, you’d rise to the occasion because you're awesome in everything that you've done for us. So I want to thank you again for everything you've done for EcomCrew. I honestly don't know what the heck we would do without you. It's been awesome getting to know you and have you help with all the stuff behind the scenes. And again everybody out there, any podcast you listen to, almost all the e-mails you interact with us on Facebook Messenger, when you do buy a course or read the written content, it's all Abby. It's all Abby behind the scenes helping with that stuff. So again thank you Abby.

Abby: There's something that I want to say to a lot of these [inaudible 00:30:21] we do get a lot of emails asking how you get us and why we stick around because it's really normal for a lot of people being abused to just leave after a short while. I think my answer to that is that you get to figure out how you can get your VAs to care because when we find an employer that treats us like we are part of the company. So you just got to figure out a way to get your VAs to care and they will not leave you high and dry.

Mike: I don't know why this is so difficult for people. I mean I don't know, just it's a part of my personality. Again I just don't know what it is, but I know that's how it is in general that most people that are in North America that hire Filipinos or people in other parts of the world, they don't treat them like they're a part of the company. They treat them as if they're — I don't even know what they treat people like it's embarrassing.

What ends up happening, I hear a lot of stories about it. But from day one, from when we hired the very first play over here, it was important to us to treat them like a part of the company because they are part of the company. We're asking that if you — you only get out in life out of something what you put into it. So don't ask others what you don't want done to yourself. If you were being treated like a second class citizen or someone that was just there doing cheap menial labor or something, that's what you're going to get back out of it. And you're also not going to have loyalty or things of that nature.

Our goal and our mission is to treat everyone in the Philippines the same way that we would treat someone in our California office. It’s the same attitude, same benefits, same communication. We work hard on this. It's something that we're working hard to like roll out like specifically right now. That's one of the reasons we’re here right now even recording this because it’s the same company that we just had in California we're replicating now here in the Philippines and making sure that everyone feels like they're part of the team.

And in fact I think that we work harder to do that for our Filipino employees than we do even for our California employees because we're in California every day. It's easy for them to feel like they're part of the team because they're interacting with us every day versus trying to make people feel like a part of the team that are 6,000 miles away. That's a bigger challenge.

So we work hard by coming here once or twice a year. It's actually kind of — I think we're just going to call it what it is. We’re going to be here twice a year because it seems like that's the schedule we are on. And even that's not enough. I’d love to be able to do it quarterly if we could, but I appreciate you saying that Abby. I mean it's something that we work hard on and hopefully everyone here knows that they're part of the family. Yeah, any other last thoughts before we sign off for today?

Abby: I think that’s it.

Mike: All right awesome. Well thank you Abby. And I hope you guys enjoyed this episode of the EcomCrew Podcast. We will be back in just a second with the closing.

And that's a wrap. I hope you guys enjoyed this podcast with Abby. Again I want to thank her so much for everything that she's done for us. If it wasn't for her there wouldn't be EcomCrew because Dave and I are just too unorganized and distracted day to day to actually get everything published and done. And I want to thank her for all of her help.

Again you can go to EcomCrew.com/141 to get to the show notes for this episode. Let us know what you think. Leave any comments, we’ll be happy to get back to you. And until the next episode everyone happy selling, and we'll talk to you soon.