FAQs

Our team members are capable of executing many tasks in your back-office. Long story short, if there’s a process, your VA can do it! We’ve listed some of the common tasks your 5 ELK team member could be trained to complete in our Brochure and ’21 Tasks’ resource.

Unlike other firms, we won’t rush a team member into your business. We take the time upfront to understand your business and needs so we can onboard the perfect VA. Our thorough onboarding process includes:

• Outlining the tasks that can be outsourced to your new team member
• Creating your job description
• Interviewing and hiring your team member

To find out more about our process, take a look at our brochure here.

By developing and nurturing a relationship with a team member over time, you won’t have to keep repeating the same information over and over to multiple people. You’ll be able to train your VA in your way of doing things and generate an ever-increasing return on the time you invest in them.

Other than a competitive salary, there are a number of other reasons why people love working here. We provide our team with extra benefits such as free private health insurance for themself and a dependent, a personal trainer and an in-house nutritionist. A happy, healthy and comfortable team member performs at their best and stays around for longer.

We won’t be ‘sailing into the sunset’ once your team member starts in your business. Outside of the ongoing management and upskilling of your team member, we’ll be regularly checking in with you. This will help us to address training gaps and solve problems, ensuring your team member is constantly adding value to your business.

Our headquarters is located in Cebu, Philippines, with some senior teammates based in Australia. Our management team has extensive experience owning and leading Australian financial advice businesses.

The advantages of outsourcing to the Philippines include:

• a strong customer-service orientation
• excellent fluency in both written and verbal English language
• relatively low labour cost
• a favourable timezone for Australia (only 2 hours behind EST); and
• a large number of highly talented and educated people, with 450,000 annual college graduates in the Philippines

We understand that client data privacy and security is critical for any advice business. The risk of sensitive information being compromised is real and as such, we have taken a number of steps to ensure the security of your data. These include:

• The use of a world-class Amazon Web Server
• Completing due diligence and background checks upon recruitment
• Compulsory comprehensive cyber-security training for all staff
• Supervising all staff in a dedicated work area that requires security access
• Using specialist password protection software so that we never require your external log-in details
• No printers or USB ports are connected to our PC terminals, and use of portable devices such as smartphones or iPads are prohibited from the designated workspaces, restricting downloads
• Surveillance software that can be used to track activities and emails
• Onsite IT, meaning that any ‘system downtime’ is minimised.

Typically this takes about 3 months but as with anything in life, you get out of the process what you put in. The more consistent and constructive you are with your feedback and communication, the more rapidly your team member will settle in and start adding value to your business. 

If recent history has taught us anything, it’s that physical separation is no longer a barrier to effective communication. While your new team member will have an email address for your business, we have found the most effective way to avoid having your inbox clogged up is to communicate via an instant chat function, such as Microsoft Teams or Slack and through regular video meetings catch-ups. If you prefer the phone, the good news is that your team member will also have their own outbound phone line, so they can call you any time, as needed. 

Ongoing personal and professional development is crucially important to us and many say our ‘Growth Academy’ is our point of difference. Other than rigorous training for your role during their onboarding phase, your team member will have access to an array of 5 ELK-run upskilling opportunities every month that are chosen by you. These standard and custom sessions cover a range of technical and soft skills in the areas of CRM, financial products, industry legislation, time management and business communication skills, just to name a few. We set an annual ‘Continuing Education’ (CE) target for your team member, which becomes one of their KPIs and impacts their annual review.

There are over 26 public holidays in the Philippines, so we don’t follow the Philippines

public holiday schedule. To ensure consistency in security and support across our business, we have decided to follow the Victorian public holiday schedule across the board. 

If your team member is unwell, you will be notified prior to the commencement of the working day, as soon as we possibly can. With regards to annual leave, we enforce a ten business day lead for team members to request annual leave and all requests need to be signed off by you. Your team member is entitled to 20 days of combined annual and sick leave each calendar year.

Like most Financial Advice businesses in Australia, we shut down over the Christmas to New Year period. As you would know, the exact dates of this period vary from year to year. This is a wonderful time for our team members to travel back to their provinces and visit their families.

Yes, we do. Our business is well-equipped should a disaster occur, as evidenced by how we navigated living through an entire country lockdown in 2020 and the devastation of Cyclone Odette in 2021.

One of the key ways we achieve this is through our ‘multiple office’ approach, which means if one office needs to close down, we have multiple alternate work locations for our team members to continue doing the great work that they do.