Nearshoring for founders and entrepreneurs with Brian Samson - Episode - 569

Be aware of who your first 10 to 12 hires are. And if you bring a recruiter on much earlier, you don't have to do a full-time recruiter. They can be expensive, you know, but whether it's a contingency one or someone that is maybe fractional, hourly, it could really open up your total addressable market for candidates and bring different thinking to your organization.

Revenue growth is only part of the story. This conversation explores how building 3 startups to $4 million in annual recurring revenue led to a deeper mission, connecting overlooked talent with opportunity and proving that scale and purpose can coexist. Welcome to Streams to Impact, brought to you by Steve Tucker Capital. I'm your host, Dr. Allen. This show is for high-achieving, high-income professionals who are excellent at what they do. You're not looking for a second job. You're not looking to abandon your calling. You're looking for intelligent ways to put your capital to work so that your money works as hard as you do. Because there comes a point when effort alone no longer creates freedom. Allocation does. If you have ever wondered how to build income streams that expand your influence, Rather than trap your time. If you have asked yourself how wealth can align with meaning, then you are exactly where you need to be. Beyond the Paycheck is a financial clarity compass and instructional masterclass that we created for professionals who want to replace time for money and income with multiple streams of passive income. This private educational experience is our gift to you. You can claim it by going to www.go.steedtalker.com/beyond-paycheck. Now take a deep breath and settle into your seat, and let's get started today. But before we do that, just a brief disclaimer: all information shared on Streams to Impact is for educational purposes only. It is not to be construed as investment, financial, legal, or tax advice. All Investments incur risk. You should not invest if you're not prepared to lose 100% of your investment, and you are always encouraged to consult your legal, accounting, and tax advisors before making an investment. We hope you enjoy today's show, and if you would please, we would appreciate it if you would take a moment to just like, to share, and subscribe. Doing so broadens our Reach and allows others to take advantage of this content as well. What happens when entrepreneurial ambition matures into global impact? In today's conversation with Bryan Sampson, founder of Plug Technologies, we're going to connect exceptional Latin American talent with growing US companies. Over the past decade, he has built 3 startups to $4 million in annual recurring revenue through disciplined nearshoring strategy. With an MBA and a cross-border leadership experience, Brian sees growth as more than revenue. It is about access, dignity, and expanding opportunity. His commitment to foster care reflects his belief that business can be both profitable and deeply human. For high-income professionals, this conversation goes beyond outsourcing. It explores leverage, leadership, and and how scaling intelligently can create both financial strength and meaningful impact. So, Brian, welcome to the show. We are glad you are with us. So, in starting out, how did living in Argentina reshape your view of work and global collaboration?

Yeah, I'll first just say thank you for having me on your show. So when I came to Argentina, this was about 10 years ago, and I had been living in San Francisco for 5 years, from the Midwest originally, but was living in San Francisco. And my recollection of San Francisco was basically living like this, you know, with my phone in front of my face all the time. And I think everyone— Kind of lived like that. And it's a— it was a wild place to be. And I think it's still like that, where everything's about speed and efficiency. And I remember there were— I don't know if they're still around— there were meal replacement tech companies that would— they're called like Soylent was one I remember where they would make these shakes that were like perfectly bioengineered so coders wouldn't have to leave their desk at all during the day. They could just slurp this perfectly perfect blend of protein and fats and carbs. So anyway, you know, 5 years of that and I'm like, wow, you know, this is, this is kind of extreme. You know, sure, I'm learning a lot and my career is going well, but this is, this is kind of nuts. And then I moved to Buenos Aires to get a business off the ground. And it was everything that I needed as an inverse to that San Francisco lifestyle. If you've ever been there, they're eating dinner about 10 o'clock at night and they'll sit down. And the first hour you eat just like normal, you know, your salad and your Well, they don't, they don't do a whole lot of greens there, mostly meat. But, you know, you'll have your big juicy steak and bottle of wine and dessert. You'll finish it in an hour, just, just like we're kind of used to. But then you stick around for another 2 or 3 hours of just conversation, and no one's phone is out on the table as this kind of distraction of Notifications popping up all the time. It's all in their pockets or their purses, and they're present, they're talking, um, they're sharing their stories for the day, their thoughts on current events and politics and, uh, arts, whatever. And, uh, that was just a really good jolt of reality that I needed of Human connection is still infinitely important, and we don't want to forget that and lose it into our apps and our phone and AI and whatever the newest technology trend is. So that really kind of fueled my desire to get more and more immersed into the culture and build businesses around it.

Well, what took you to Argentina?

Yeah, kind of a funny story. So, I was in San Francisco, as I mentioned, and had a desire to be an expat in, of all places, Asia. So, I did a grad school program, got my MBA with UCLA, but also National University of Singapore.

Hmm.

So, it was kind of a dual degree program. You get a little taste of Singapore and China and India, and you're still going to campus at UCLA. And I did that with the intent it might open up some doors and I could have the expat experience in a place like Singapore or Shanghai. I got a cold shower in the sense of it was not nearly as easy as I thought it would be to— Kind of manufacture my own expat experience. But it did connect me with someone who was building a large fintech— that's financial technology— company in China. And he later became an investor in a thesis that I had. The thesis was, after being in San Francisco for a few years, I saw a pattern of A lot of fintech companies were popping up left and right in San Francisco, New York. They all had access to big chunks of capital, no problem raising money, pretty clear product visions, but also kind of apathetic, if not agnostic, to their tech stack and architecture and building their minimum viable product. So, I built a whole pitch deck around creating a company that would build the prototypes, MVPs, and early versions of all these fintech apps and raised $2 million from this person in China and realized pretty quickly that $2 million wouldn't get me very far at all in San Francisco. It felt like it could have been $2 billion from someone like me from the Midwest, but in San Francisco, you realize it doesn't get you very far.

Yeah.

So, um, the, uh, the light bulb for me was, hey, what if we could build this on the same time zone? I had, uh, done a backpacking trip a few years ago in Latin America, remembered that, um, things were just like Wildly inexpensive. The people were friendly, warm, creative, innovative. So I settled on Buenos Aires. You know, it was a mega city, 14 million people in the greater area. It's like New York on steroids. You know, people are just up all night. It's busy, it's bustling, high energy, a lot of talent. And ended up moving there. So kind of had my expat experience just in a much different part of the world. And, you know, it's funny in a way because Singapore, you know, where I was originally thinking, I think everything is black and white. There's no corruption. You can create a business in 4 hours. And Argentina is about as diametrically different. as Singapore. So everything's vague, everything's gray, you know, complex place to do business. But if you can figure all that out, the talent there is unreal. And I ended up growing that first company to about 80 people and doing the whole lifestyle of tree-lined streets and steak dinners. And, um, also recognizing the inflation and terrible government policies and labor strikes and everything else. So, uh, that was, that was a really, uh, fun and interesting experience for me.

Yeah, it does sound really stimulating. So what, uh, what brought you back to the States? Like, you are in the States now, right?

I am, yeah, yeah. Actually, I've lived in Oahu, Hawaii. for the last 8, 9 years, which is a nice place to— we've got 2 young kids, nice place to raise our little family. But—

Expensive.

Yeah.

Yeah. So it seems like every place I live is either, you know, like, you know, you got one thing or the other, right? But life is all about trade-offs. But yeah, moved back to the States because that was a better place to grow our family. And, but still, you know, was at least for a little while still doing, you know, a lot of travel either to see customers in California or long flights to Argentina and, you know, help build the company out there.

Yeah, I spent about 5 years on Guam, so—

Yeah.

I know about those long flights for sure.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, in terms of growing companies, you've grown a couple of companies. What did you learn really about leadership and in particular leadership in scaling? From startup to $4 million?

Yeah, I think probably 3 or 4 different things that I'll say. The first sounds kind of silly and obvious, but I've fallen into the wrong trap and maybe others have too, is you don't really have a business until you have a customer. And I remember my Truly first entrepreneurship experience was a few years prior to this. And I built a company, which is really just me and maybe a couple of freelancers called HR for Startups. And I was in San Francisco and I just remember like 2 o'clock in the morning and I'm editing commas on the website and spending weeks on, should I Do a C corp or S corp or like, who cares? You know, go get a customer. I think the second thing I'll say is I didn't grow up in sales. I'm very comfortable doing it today. But I think what I— the mistakes that I made were 2. It was, the first was I thought I could just kind of hire my way into sales miracles, you know, where you're a young company. And I even had some capital to play around with and I could hire some senior salespeople and they would just magically grow revenue. And that's not, I don't think that's very responsible. I think it's much better to bet on yourself because you as the founder need to know what the sales process looks like and what the objections are and the rebuttals, and you got to carry it yourself. But there's also something kind of special with that in that customers will give you a lot of credibility because you're the founder. So you can say dumb things on the calls, make mistakes, say the wrong thing, and they would never give that sort of grace to your salesperson, but they give it to you and it gets you in the rooms. I'm the founder of this business. We're only a couple people, but playing that founder card, I think, is a really important thing to say. And then the last lesson is maybe more about building the right teams. Unfortunately, I've had to fire my fair share of people, but I've also had some really good hires that have stood the test of time. I worked with them for years and years and years. And I think it goes to a book that I read a long time ago. I believe it's related to that One Minute Manager world, but it's called Well Done. And it's about we spend so much time as managers and leaders correcting, like, don't do it this way, do it this way. Let me give you feedback. And of course, constructive feedback and criticism is valuable. But we don't spend enough time catching people doing something right. And I remember growing up in the Midwest as a teenager, I worked at a restaurant. It was pretty high-volume restaurant, lots of stuff going on, 30, 40 cars in a drive-through at one time. And I had this manager who embodied that. You know, he would, he would walk around looking for, for people doing something right and say, that's why, you know, as in like, that's why you're the star or whatever. And I just remember how much people loved being in that environment and the energy and the positivity. So it just forever stuck with me. You got to be hard on people sometimes too, but don't forget to Recognize when they're doing something great.

Yeah. Well, what misconceptions derail nearshoring efforts and what best practices drive success?

Yeah. So I think there's maybe like a general viewpoint that I think a lot of companies have when they've offshored or nearshored work. Whether it's to India or the Philippines or China or Argentina or Mexico or wherever, they kind of forget for a minute that we're all just people. We have families and goals and purpose and ambitions and so forth. And we all want to try to make an impact. And I think when we shift work elsewhere, There's this immediate kind of us versus them, where we stop thinking about them as people and more like, yeah, these are low-cost resources that are helping us to get some work done. And I think it's just a huge mistake when companies do that. The more you treat people like people and meaningful parts of the team, That's a huge way to kind of flip the card there. You know, the other thing I'll say is we often forget that the same onboarding process that we might do in the States should be applicable, right? So everything from, you know, getting people all the right technologies and tools just like you'd get everybody else. You'd be surprised, you know, sometimes in the US we think pretty myopic that, you know, we're the only ones that have access to these softwares or AI or anything else, but it's global, you know, and they know how to use it too. And it's something we, I think we miss a lot. You know, we don't recognize the— capabilities of people outside of our country?

Yeah, I think there's a lot of egotism in the United States, but yeah, I outsource a lot of things to people outside of the country, and I'm very grateful for the competence that, that they bring to it for much less than what I could get for the same thing in the States, that's for sure.

Yeah.

And I often feel very guilty about it actually. I'm taking advantage of their situations. But I didn't put the system in place here. But anyway, what do high-performing leaders still get wrong about hiring?

Yeah. So I'm fortunate to have a lot of experience with this question because I grew up in the talent world. Started my career in Chicago as a recruiter, ended up growing a pretty large team, then was in San Francisco where I worked for a bunch of tech startups as the head of talent, which means I'm kind of building the talent infrastructure, recruiting the engineers, advising the founders. On compensation, equity, things like that. And what almost every company does is they wait too long to bring a recruiter on. And why is that important? It's because your first 10 to 12 hires really kind of drive the business and they set the culture, they set the tone, they said just about everything. But who are your first 10 or 12 hires? It's almost everybody from your own network or like a friend of a friend, right?

Mm-hmm.

So you get a lot of the same kind of thinking. We talk a lot about diversity today, but it's also diversity of thought, different lived experiences, biases. Bias doesn't have to be a bad word either. We all just Bring our own bias. I think a good example of just bias in hiring is, at least when I was in California, Google and Facebook were kind of wildly different in their approaches to hiring. Facebook would say something like, move fast and break things. So they were looking for hackers, right? They wanted people to just to try it. If it worked, keep tweaking, iterating. And if you dropped out of high school, but you were a great hacker, that was fine for them. On the other side, you've got Google, which was all about the Stanford PhD, right? And academics and people that could think about large-scale models and doing everything really, really well. But those hiring managers had their own kind of— they brought those biases into the organization. And it's not a dirty word. It's just what you care about, what you're prioritizing, what you're looking for, and just being true to yourself that I have biases too. Before UCLA, you know, I went to a state school that nobody had ever heard of. And, you know, I kind of like finding people like that, that have a, you know, little chip on their shoulder and, you know, maybe unknown school, but I'm aware of it, you know, and I still look for it. So anyway, I would say be aware. of who your first 10 to 12 hires are. And if you bring a recruiter on much earlier, you don't have to do a full-time recruiter. They can be expensive, but whether it's a contingency one or someone that is maybe fractional hourly, it could really open up your total addressable market for candidates. And bring different thinking to your organization.

Well, that is a critical part of building any business once you have the customers, that's for sure.

Yeah, that's right.

Yeah. Well, you— how did foster care redefine your understanding of the world and leadership and success?

Yeah, you know, I didn't know anybody who fostered when I grew up. And then it wasn't until, gosh, like 2020 that I was in church here in Oahu with my wife, and they brought somebody in from the local foster organization to give a presentation about what it was, why it was so important. If your audience isn't aware, there's 440,000 children in the US foster care system today.

Wow.

There's about 2,000 or so in Hawaii. And I was fortunate, you know, grew up in a 2-parent household, you know, nice, you know, middle class. And, you know, mom was home, dinner's on the table, never had to worry about any of that, no abuse, nothing like nothing at all. And And I didn't choose it. I was just really lucky, you know. And I think all my peers were pretty similar, too. And then you get exposed to this world where just the worst of the worst, you know, abuse, drugs, you know, physical, sexual, human trafficking, just, it's just— Horrible. And these kids didn't choose any of it. They didn't pick any of it. They're just complete victims in their situations. So, when the speaker was talking about that, I think it just really resonated that we don't always get to choose our environments. Kids don't get to choose their environments. And I don't think I'm very inherently empathetic, but that really shifted my, I think, my perspective, you know? And I think for the most part, adults, you know, can be held to their— adults are a product of their decisions, but kids are not.

Mm-hmm.

So, we looked at each other and said, hey, you know, we have the resources, we have the time, you know, let's do it. And went through all the training, which was a little delayed because of the pandemic, but got licensed. And there was a little bit where every time the phone rang, we thought, you know, this could be it, this could be the placement. And, you know, a couple false alarms, maybe an uncle or aunt stepped in. But anyway, we got this little girl who was just about 6 months old. And fostered her for just under 2 years, is about 750 days or something. And then officially adopted her early 2023. She'll have her 6th birthday coming up in a few months and lights up the room and has just changed our lives. But I think it's helped make me a little bit more empathetic and just recognize when people are in situations that they didn't choose, right? Try to be a little more empathetic towards them.

Well, Brian, share with us how it is that we can connect with you. To continue the conversation?

Yeah, sure. So my company's called Plug Technologies. That's P-L-U-G-G. And the website is plugg.tech, T-E-C-H. My email is brian@plug.tech. And we talk about nearshoring and Latin America All the time. It's one of our favorite topics. I think in this world today, there's much more awareness around talent in Latin America, but not everyone has made that first step. So we do all sorts of conversations with people that are just curious, no strings attached, about what kind of talent they're looking for. Do they plan on scaling? Do they plan on traveling there? Do they plan on having that person use laptops or hardware? And we talk about talent pockets, customs, currency volatility, inflation, all sorts of things are, you know, just par for an intro conversation. And we'll try to steer you in the right way. And if we could personally help you, even better.

Well, thank you, Brian, for being with us and for our Hi, achieving professionals who are tuning in. You've built income. The next question is allocation. So if you're ready to move beyond earning well and begin allocating wisely, you can access our free gift. It's Beyond the Paycheck: The Financial Clarity Compass, and you can find that at www.go.stetucker.com. So thank you for being with us today. If you've enjoyed today's program, please take a moment to like, share, and subscribe. Until next time, scale wisely, lead consciously, and invest intentionally.

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