The Relationship-First Approach to Remote Hiring with Chris Brown

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At the end of the day, it's a relationship, you know, clear expectations, good Communication, integrity, honesty, you know, that trust is, the trust is everything. So clear expectations is, is the biggest thing. Understanding what it is that you need from this and clearly outlining that. Where, what do you need today to happen for this to be successful? What do you need 3 months from now, 6 months from now? Where do you hope this goes? Maybe it doesn't, maybe they don't, they're, maybe they don't grow that way. Maybe they're not interested in that kind of growth, but where do you hope this thing leads?

Step into the world of success with your brand amplified. The ultimate podcast designed to unravel the intricacies of thriving businesses. I'm your host, Anika Jackson, and I'm on a mission to uncover the stories, strategies, and secrets that have propelled entrepreneurs and business leaders to success. I am really excited to have Chris Brown on the show today. Chris, you are Wow Remote Teams. And one thing I love that's kind of interesting about anybody who comes on the show who works with remote teams or has an agency with remote workers, has a slightly different slant on how they approach it, why they've chosen maybe the parts of the world that they've, that they choose to work with. And one thing about you is you have a background that wouldn't lead me to think that you would be getting into the work of nearshore talent, right? I mean, you are the co-founder and CTO of Wild Remote Teams, but you've worked in software development, business automation, digital marketing. You're in the US Air Force, right? And then a full-stack developer and then a CTO. And your origin story is pretty interesting for this company. Two of you, you and your co-founder, who saw the same gap from different angles. So, can you talk about how the company came to life? What were the problems that led to this solution and why you felt uniquely positioned to do this kind of work after all of your other business experience and military experience?

Yeah, thanks for having me. Nice to be here, Anika Jackson. I think it's just, as always, it's confluence of events, right? Like these just life kind of leads you down a path and then you just find something new. Oh, hey, there's, there's something cool there. Let's, let's explore that a little bit. So the founding story overall is it's always kind of need-based, right? Like my, my founder's from Bogotá, Colombia, my co-founder from Bogotá, Colombia. She came here, she was in, in Phoenix now, and, you know, people in the Phoenix area and her brother-in-law and other people were looking for talent and she ended up starting just kind of posting in her own network, which was, you know, her Facebook, her friends from back in Colombia and just, you know, she was a professional there. She was a lead in a university there. So she ended up just kind of posting out and finding people and helping people kind of connect. And it a little bit rolled on itself as these things do. You know, when you see, when an opportunity kind of comes along and you happen to jump on it, and it just kind of expands upon itself. And I was actually one of her clients at that point because like I was, you know, I was helping her with connections and a bit of the formation stuff, but it was mostly like, you can do this, here's how this works. Like you go do this thing. And I was in another company at the time. We were doing medical and dental supplies primarily. We were mostly, we were an e-commerce company, a funding company, a development, like we were just, just a kind of umbrella corporation doing lots of other businesses underneath us, but the main business there was medical and dental supplies as an e-commerce, which you can imagine what happened to that during COVID It went absolutely crazy. So we had all of this staffing that needed to happen in just after 2020 because COVID medical supplies. So we had like full CSR staff and full technical staff and web developers and backend support, bookkeepers and all the admin and all the office staff and plus the warehouse staff, 'cause we had a physical warehouse here in Mesa, Arizona. So I went to her and I was like, okay, well, you're, you're primarily doing development positions at the moment and you know, you're doing pretty well with that. But what about these CSR staff? My current CSR staff or then current CSR staff were from mostly Louisiana for some reason, but you know, they were all US-based and they did a good job. They, they did a fine job, their CSR, you know, but what did that look like to do it in Latin America? Was there, Was the cost savings good? Was the accent sufficient? Was the level of service what, you know, my US customers— and US customers meaning medical and dental providers, you know, this is B2B at this point, you know. So we started interviewing, we brought in our first person that worked out spectacularly. We brought in a couple more people, those ended up working out quite well. There's always some hit and miss, of course, it's hiring people, you know, people come, people go, there's turnover. And then that first person we brought in, she ended up becoming the CSR lead. And then we built an entire team under her that was all Latin American talent as the US people left or, you know, offboarded. And then it just, everything, right? And it was, okay, well now my web developers, like I need a junior dev under my senior. Okay, well here's this person. All right, he's fantastic. And then that rolled into now the entire development team is all from Latin America. And then it rolls into, all right, well what about my bookkeeping team? What about my administration team? What about, What about, what about, what about, right? And the only thing left at the end of all of this process was the warehouse staff because they're in a warehouse in Mesa, Arizona. They have to be in Mesa, Arizona. And you just end up with this thing where you're like, this completely transformed the way we staff our business. You know, it wasn't a forced process. It was a completely natural, just, I can do this with a much wider talent pool and I can do it for cheaper essentially by moving to Latin America. And then I came out of that business for various reasons. COVID slowed down and you end up with problems having a large warehouse full of medical supplies in that kind of business. A little bit of not the best management I've ever done, but we learn, you know? And she was like, hey, you've helped me a lot in all these avenues, plus I've staffed a bunch of your people. Why don't we talk about how do we grow this thing? There's a lot of technological needs here. There's all kinds of processes that need to be built. There's systems that need to be built or made better, right? There's a lot of efficiency loss that's happening. There's a lot that we can do to make this entire process better. And I was like, yeah, that sounds interesting. Let me come in and see what we can do. And then it also became, well, hey, the customers that we have coming in, they would love to talk to a US person about this. And you have a lot of experience with actually doing this. My experience isn't just, oh, I want to sell this thing. My experience is I literally built an entire team out of using this service. Like, let me tell you about it. So I end up being the sales guy somehow. So I'm on the phone with clients every day, you know, for months and years at this point. And, you know, I went from just this tech background, everything was very systems process, like building a team focus to literally talking to clients, talking about business needs, figuring out how to solve problems for them, helping them understand how to use the kind of talent that we bring them, how to use remote talent in this way. And it's just such a wildly stark differential from where I've ever been before. You know, I, I never, never thought of myself as being a sales guy, never once in my life, but it worked out, you know, and I think it comes from that place of, I've done this before. I know this works. I know how this works. I know what it's like to be on the receiving end of it. And also I've been involved or have built most of the systems that underlie it. So I know how everything works. So I'm really good at answering questions about it. But yeah, hopefully I didn't go too far off on a tangent there.

No, no, no. I think that's, you know, it's, it is a unique perspective of going from the person who needed to hire and working on that section to being able to be the person to sell that service, but have that background. Because I don't know that everybody who thinks about remote teams and creating remote companies has been the buyer of those services, has been the consumer, has been the customer.

Yeah, I mean, and you know, of course we're our own customer, like we're always using our own recruiting team to do work. My recruiting team is always recruiting for themselves, for recruiters. We're always recruiting recruiters, you know, and then every other position. So it's like this, I call it an unfair edge because I have a constant kind of toe in the stream of talent that's coming along. You know, I always get to see what's out there, who's available, what kind of positions are running through. It's a really interesting place to be. Positioned on the B2B, you know, landscape as it were.

Yeah. What was it about hiring staff from Latin America that made you realize, yes, this is a cost play, but it's also a huge talent play for us?

A lot of it's just that idea of the size of talent pool that's available. Now, I've, I've spent a lot of time in, in Latin America. I lived in Colombia for almost 5 years. Like, I, I've spent a lot of time in Latin culture, so I already knew that the talent was there. Like, I've, I've been to the universities, I've seen the companies that are being built there, like the, the the scale is, is very impressive. But the size of the talent pool, it's, it's such a different jump when you move from like, you know, I'm here in Phoenix and technically in Mesa, which is just a small subset of Phoenix. And you know, you go, okay, I'm going to find a person to do CSR, then they need to come to my office. Okay, well maybe I have 200 people that are available at any time on the outside. You know, maybe 50 of those are actually workable for my solution. Maybe 5 are a real match for what I need. And you go, okay, well, if I did that remote, what would it look like? Well, if I hire in the US, then now you have a few million people, a few tens of thousands that are qualified, maybe 1,000 or so that are a good match. If they're available, cool. And then we would expand again. And it's just that same sort of stepwise process. If you can make it the whole planet, if you have a need set that doesn't require time zone and cultural alignment in the way that Latin America gives you, then that just becomes, you know, an 8 billion person potential kind of thing and it's huge. But in my— the way my companies operate generally, or maybe just our management style, means that it's a lot better if I'm talking to the person during the day. Like, I don't like the black box model of going to the other side of the planet. I mean, it can work really well, but for me it doesn't really fit our style, I guess, which is like, you know, the black box style is kind of the— you just— I go, I have this need set, I'm going to send it off via email and I'm going to wake up tomorrow and it's going to be done. Just the dream of the dream of having things get done correctly is that. But how often does it really work that way? You need correspondence almost always. You need the back and forth of, hey, how do I fix this? How do I do this email correctly? How do I— this process is breaking here. How do we update this SOP so that it works and get that done in real time? And Latin America really gives me, gives us, gives my clients that ability. You know, you're talking to someone who's Awake at the same time you are, they're working the same hours you are, they're online when you should expect people to be online in US business case. And then of course, cultural fit, you know, we're all very similar, we're all very closely aligned between Latin America and the US.

Oh, I, I was gonna ask about that because I've been to Vietnam and met with different businesses and learned a lot about the business culture there and in other parts of Asia, and it is very relationship-based, right? It's very different than maybe the US mindset that's just more process and you decide to do something pretty quickly. Perhaps you don't take the time as much. It's not about as much about family and culture. And when I think about Latin America, I do think of family being really important to the culture. And of course, in some US businesses, but, you know, a lot of times when you're thinking about bigger businesses, you're just thinking about this huge structure. So, it's interesting to hear you say that, yeah, you have the time zones, you have the talent, and that there is a cultural similarity.

Yeah, I think it's, um, again, I, I, I'm very biased. I sell, you know, I sell Latin American talent, Latin American staffing services. I'm very biased. But at the end of the day, I think it's a closer cultural match. We still have part of our onboarding process that happens internally before people go to a client or just before they work with us is giving an understanding of how that American business process works, because it is different. It's much more— I mean, we're not the Dutch, but we're much more to the point than most other cultures around the world. And it's really served us well, right? There's a reason we are dominant in the economic sense in business for the last 100 years or more. It really works well for getting things done in an efficient sense. But you do lose that, like, you know, a lot of that same thing you were talking about. Latin America has a lot of that. The first 5 minutes of a phone call are, how are you doing? How's your family? How's everybody? Like the warming up, getting this kind of really kind of more intimate of a connection than me and you, I would imagine, as US business people are really used to. I'm going to get on a call, I'm going to get to the point because I got more things to do today. You got more things to do today. Like, yeah, we can spend a minute talking about whatever, but it's not the same kind of level. So there's always that kind of understanding and we go through that in our onboarding. But also Latin America is very influenced by America, by the US, which is, you know, a lot of our media. We've been exporting our media for decades at this point. You know, most of the people that I work with have, they've watched all of Friends and all of Seinfeld, and, you know, they're very integrated into this kind of US culture, US mindset of how do we do things, how do we interact, how do we act. A lot of Latin American businesses are you know, built the same sort of way. They're very similar structures. And, you know, they're— we're generally one of their major clients. We being us as a conglomerate of US people and companies, you know, we're their main trading partner. So a lot of the way they work is made, you know, or influenced by how we work and the things we want, because it's just how it goes, right? So you end up with a lot of cultural alignment, and then you have a lot of just the rest of culture, you know. There— these primarily Christian Catholic nations, like, you know, all of that, the same sort of historical arc that brought them to where they are in the modern world brought us to where we are in the modern world. So we all kind of have this shared history of, you know, what has happened to us in the last 200 or 300 years. It's all very similar all the way down. It's the same kind of boats that came across and brought the same kind of people, and we're all looking for the same kind of things. You know, so all of that is a very shared history. So you end up with this alignment across all these cultures that's just, we all understand each other fairly well and we're all connected by time and space.

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Few things are as uplifting as the greatest moments in sports, and nothing brings us together quite like Team USA at the Olympic Winter Games. From NBCUniversal's iconic storytelling to the innovative technology across Xfinity and Peacock, Comcast brings the Olympic Games home to America. Sharing every moment with millions. When Team USA steps onto the world stage, we're not just watching, we're cheering together. This winter, we're all on the same team. Comcast, proud partner of Team USA.

It's tournament time, and this March, Fanatics Sportsbook has 10 times the rewards. Starting round 1, we're giving you 10 profit boosts every single tournament game day. That's over 100 chances to level up your winnings. Plus, you'll earn FanCash on your bets, which you can use on anything at Fanatics. We're talking team gear, tickets, Collectibles and a whole lot more at Fanatics Sportsbook. Must be 21+. Gambling problem, call 1-800-GAMBLER or 1-800-MY-RESET. CT, call 888-789-7777. MA, call 800-327-5050. NY, call 877-8-HOPE-NY. MD, visit mdgamblinghelp.org. Offer not available in all states. Terms apply. See Fanatics Sportsbook app.

I sold my car in Carvana last night.

Well, that's cool.

No, you don't understand. It went perfectly.

Real offer, down to the penny. They're picking it up tomorrow.

Nothing went wrong.

So what's the problem?

That is the problem.

Nothing in my life goes as smoothly. I'm waiting for the catch.

Maybe there's no catch.

That's exactly what a catch would want me to think.

Wow.

You need to relax.

I need to knock on wood. Do we have wood?

Is this table wood?

I think it's laminate.

Okay.

Yeah, that's good. That's close enough.

Car selling without a catch. Sell your car today on Carvana. Pickup fees may apply. Wow. So talk to us about bespoke recruiting, because this isn't just posting on job boards like maybe the early days or going to traditional staffing firms. What does the process look like to bring people in, whether or not you have a client identified for them? I'd love to hear a little bit about that. And do you bring people in, train them up, whether or not you have a client ready, or do you wait until that moment that you have a client and then go out and do the search?

Well, the answer is yes and. So, so, all of the above. So, I mean, bespoke recruiting is all about like finding the best possible fit. It's, it's really just getting an understanding of your needs, whether, yeah, that's skills and experience, that's also character fit, that's what it looks like to do a good job, setting out an understanding of what works best in our experience, which is mostly about expectation and communication, getting all of those things together and finding candidates that are really a good fit for the role and for the company. So instead of just, you know, the shotgun approach of, well, here's 3 people that have the same skills that you're looking for, you tell me if they're a decent fit. A lot of the intake process is, not a lot, but part of the intake process is tell me about the right person for you. Not necessarily— I understand the skills, I understand the experience. You can write out all the bullet points of everything they have to do every day, but if you don't like the person, if you don't get along with them well, working with them is going to be tedious, right? It's, it's a relationship at the end of the day. Everything we do is just relationship-based. So getting an understanding of what the person is looking for really helps us get towards the right kind of candidate. And then from there you have just an ongoing process. So the recruiters themselves, A, they're going to talk to all the candidates, of course, going to have video interviews, do all your pre-vetting. Like you're going to have a real interview with them, all done in English, of course. Get an understanding of their skills, get an understanding of their personality, see if they match both what we look for in a person for our positions and what the client is looking for. Once you get to that, then you go to the client interviews. The recruiter goes to the client interviews, but They don't run the interview. They're not doing the interview. They're letting the client do whatever interview process they want. Please do whatever it takes to know that that's the right person. But my recruiter is sitting there learning, right? They're listening, they're understanding, they're getting a sense of why did you like this person? What did you not like about this person? How did you two come together and where did you two butt heads and why did that happen? That way on the next round of candidates, we're that much closer. That way they go into the next interview with the first pre-vetting interview and they go, okay, well, you have this kind of character trait or quirk or whatever, you're not going to pass their filter. Even if you are a rock star in every other sense, your personality's not going to match. So, it doesn't matter. So, that's really what it is about learning what makes a good candidate from experience of placing a lot of people and then also learning what makes a good candidate for this client. And you really have to be specific to the client because everybody's different. You know, we're all looking for different kind of things.

Absolutely. You work across a lot of business categories, right? Marketing, developers, designers, VAs. Is there a type of role or type of business that you think Latin American talent is particularly a game changer for?

Particularly a game changer. We do a lot of marketing positions, but I think that's just kind of what's hot in the market right now. You know, it's kind of— we're very inbound-based, more than outbound-based. So, it's kind of whatever's hot in the moment is what's flowing towards us. So, there's a lot of marketing stuff currently. There's always a lot of developers. What it makes a big difference for though, I think it's anything that can be done remote really is the overarching answer here of, you know, anything that you can see that would be like, this person doesn't need to be in my office, then you can immediately expand your talent pool just, just by adding Latin America. You can expand it more by including the rest of the world if that works for you. But, you know, you get such a bigger talent pool and there's a lot of cost savings and all that kind of stuff. It's just a matter of, you know, is it the right kind of fit for your business and is that the right kind of thing for you to do in that moment. There's always the bilingual aspect, which adds a lot to, especially along the, the whole southern strip of the country. I'll get a lot of Texas and, and Florida businesses and stuff who call and they're just like, you know, I need this kind of skillset and I need them to be good at what they do, but also I need them to be bilingual. And I'm like, I'm your guy. I got this.

Amazing. I love hearing that. And I personally have team in the Philippines. I have team in the US. I work with a couple of digital nomads from the US who live in South America. Africa and bring their teams in for some of the work we do, but it's, you know, I'm not the direct contact. It hasn't been something for my company specifically that they've worked on necessarily. And I heard you mention cost savings, and I think I saw that there can be up to 60% cost savings over hiring a US-based employee. Can you talk a little bit about that? Because that's a huge advantage, especially considering how many businesses are starting, right? I mean, how many of us are entrepreneurs who've run other businesses, but then now we're onto our next venture and we want to be really smart about scaling.

Yeah, I mean, you know, 30 to 60% savings is just across the board. It's fairly— so it's more expensive than the Philippines in general. The Philippines is the cheaper option, but it's on the other side of the world. So if that works for you, then awesome if you find the right people there. But yes, I mean, 30 to 60%, because part of it is you're paying someone as an international contractor. So that's generally going to save you money. You're not paying taxes in California or New York or wherever you happen to be, which is gets very onerous depending on how you employ them, of course, depending on how the structure and the setup of all that. So there's always some 15 to 20% savings just there, even if you paid them the same nominal rate. But you really have an arbitrage against where this person lives and the cost of living at that place. And usually for South America and Central America, that's a pretty significant arbitrage piece to be tackling. That does change with exchange rates, right? The dollar has been kind of getting hit the last year, so it's made it a little less lucrative sometimes, but it's still better than a US wage just across the board. And you get really high-skilled, talented individuals. I mean, depending on your budget, of course, you're not going to get A players for $4 an hour. It's just not how this world works, right? Not going to get the superstars. But as long as you understand, like if you had a budget for a person in the US and you knew what you wanted to get, You could essentially get the next step up for the same budget, or you could get the same person for a better budget, you know?

Nice. I know a lot of people have had bad experiences as well as good positive experiences with remote workers. I've gone through both sides. You know, the team I have in the Philippines are not people I need to work US hours, 'cause it's, they're editing my podcast and dealing with backend administration. But there are team members I do have in the US, and I'm always looking at, okay, what's the next hire I need to make and where will it make the most sense for me to make that hire? So, you know, how do you make sure that you're building and observing the interactions, not just the people that you're hiring as remote workers, but also with the companies to what, you know, what have you seen work really well? And are there any red flags you've seen that do cause these relationships to sometimes fail?

I mean, at the end of the day, it's a relationship, you know, clear expectations, good communication, integrity, honesty, You know, when, when we feel like someone isn't being honest with us, then immediately everything starts to erode. You know, that trust is— the trust is everything. So clear expectations is the biggest thing. Understanding what it is that you need from this and clearly outlining that. Where— what do you need today to happen for this to be successful? What do you need 3 months from now, 6 months from now? Where do you hope this goes? Maybe it doesn't. Maybe they don't know. Maybe they don't grow that way. Maybe they're not interested in that kind of growth. But where do you hope this thing leads, right? Where, like, if this was a rockstar employee, what would that look like in 2 years from now, right? Would they be leading this division? Would they have a team or would they be somewhere totally else in your business because something else is more important, but you need them here right now? There's all these questions that are good to ask. We don't have to have the answer to it. You don't know. I have no idea where I'm going 2 years from now, but a good understanding of where do I hope this leads 2 years from now. Is a good place to be. But yeah, it's a relationship at the end of the day. Make sure that you're getting people that you enjoy talking to, that you want to be around. Obviously, they have to have the skills and experience to do the thing you need to do. So you have to kind of mesh those two things. Like, what level are you willing to get rid of some skills in order to have the right person? What level are you willing to get the perfect person in order to have the right skills? And it's usually finding that balance. Generally, I find that the personality is more important. At the end of the day. Liking the person you're working with and them being a good fit is usually more important than the skills. Sometimes that can be changed. Like, if it's hard skills and they're an AI engineer and they need to be able to build this system that you have no idea how it actually works, sometimes you gotta get— sometimes you need the guy with the skills, you know. Red flags is, is that kind of stuff. If they're— if you're setting expectations one thing and they're not meeting those expectations, or they're coming to you with Things that don't feel right or excuses that don't seem like they match up with the reason that something's happening, or you feel like they're working another job and they're not getting things done in the hours that you're supposed to work, like immediate red flags, you know, when someone's changing the rules of the game while the game's in progress, it all, it's never going to work out. And it's good to see those things up front. And it does happen, you know, somebody's agreed to a position, they've agreed to a salary, they're ready to come in, signing time comes on and they go, oh, hey, I want, I want 20% more.

Yeah, that's—

yeah, it wasn't— you're past the negotiation point. You had your chance to negotiate at multiple steps in this process. That you chose at the last possible moment when everybody had made this decision just shows bad faith in that moment. Now, maybe you came to a different conclusion. Maybe we need to reopen that conversation again. Communication is important, but how we communicate, when we communicate, is really important. And when we see things happening that set off red flags in us, Again, we're people, right? I'm a mess. We're all messy. We might not even notice that there's like, it's not like a structured, like, this is a red flag. It's more like that didn't feel right. Something about that didn't feel right. Why did that not feel right? And then we have to come back and go, okay, well, now we've seen this kind of thing happen 3 or 4 times and it doesn't feel right every time it happens. What do we do about that? And for us, because we're a staffing agency and we staff a lot of people for ourselves and for others, we see a lot of these things kind of happen, right? So we get an understanding of like, You had 4 opportunities to negotiate salary in this process. Why did you choose when the client has already signed contract and your turn to sign contract? Well, why did you choose now to do so? Because you believed you had a position of power to do so. People don't like that. Now you're leveraging a position of power against them instead of using the, you know, instead of using the points where it was clear and open that for you to do so. So, you know, you see that a few times, you go, okay, that's not good. And then a few of those people make it through because the client goes, They're a rockstar. I don't care. Just give it to 'em. Let's go. You go, okay. And then they don't work out 2 months later because they do the same thing on every single project. And you go, wow, that was a sign. It didn't work. And we get that kind of thing with everything in life. And I don't know, I'm sorry if I'm just tangential with this topic.

No, no, no, no. I think, but you know, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's like anybody, you could be a US employee and do the same exact things that you're talking about. That, and those are all red flags, 100%.

Yeah. No, it doesn't matter where you are or where you're from. We're all just people, you know, we're all kind of messy, we're all kind of, yeah, weird things going on, but it's the same thing at the end of the day. It's establishing a good relationship. And these are working relationships. We're paying this person, you know, as the business owner, this is a capital expenditure. You know, you have to be a good manager of capitalism for, or good manager of capital in capitalism for it to work well. But at the end of the day, like if you're bringing someone into your team, you're bringing someone into your working family, you're going to spend, 6 or 8 hours a day with this person. You're going to talk to them 5 days a week. You're going to be working on projects with them all the time. Like, if you don't have a good feeling about them for some reason, you can either A, hash it out, figure out what it is and work through it, or choose a different person.

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Mom, can you tell me a story?

Sure. Once upon a time, a mom needed a new car.

Was she brave?

She was tired, mostly. But she went to carvana.com and found a great car at a great price. No secret treasure map required. Did you have to fight a dragon? Nope. She bought it 100% online from her bed, actually.

Was it scary?

Honey, it was as unscary as car buying could be. Did the car have a sunroof? It did, actually. Okay, good story. Car buying you'll want to tell stories about. Buy your car today on Carvana. Delivery fees may apply. Yeah. Let's touch— you mentioned AI. You also mentioned hiring remote workers in AI roles. So, talk to us about that. Has AI replaced any need for any of the remote workers, or are you seeing that it's more still human plus AI is the best combination, and that's what people are hiring for?

I mean, again, I'm a little bit biased because I see people hiring, right? So, I mean, I see people firing too on a regular basis, but I see people bringing in new roles, and those new roles, a lot of them Everybody I talk to talks about AI. Every, just everybody, everybody my sales team talks to, every sales intake I read through, every sales intake that I do, 'cause I still talk to clients, all of them are like, okay, here's the needs of the position. And also here's the 2 or 3 AI tools that we're currently using. We would love the depth if they knew how to use those. And also if they brought more to the table, what can we do? How can we better streamline this? How can we add more efficiency? There's also a whole new set of jobs that are now everywhere, which is like AI automation, just automation in general, you know, and it's, it's this thing that's become previously the automation kind of roles were all like a software developer, right? It was like, I need a Python developer because I need to make these 3 pieces of my business scripted. And then I need them to maintain those scripts because they're going to blow up and then I need to hire someone again anyways. And now it's moved into this, like, I need somebody who understands how to use these tools to make automations. And that's no longer just a software developer. It's more like, just, I mean, a lot of people are calling it like an AI automation assistant or automation engineer or, you know, all these kinds of words. Like nobody knows what to call it, I guess is the point here, because I hear just a dozen different titles going out for what is essentially the same thing, which is all these tools exist. I know cloud code is sitting there. How do I make it work to do the thing that I need to do? Or I'm 80% of the way towards the thing that I need to do, and I've built that in 2 weeks. I need somebody to help me. Like now I see, I see that I can do this for everything in my business. So I need somebody who does that for everything in my business. So it becomes, yeah, I mean, it becomes this leverage point of like, we have this new technology, it's available, it's incredibly widespread, very fast. It has affected every business that I talk to. It is deeply integrated in my business. We have a bunch of tools we've built with AI. Like all my team uses ChatGPT and Claude and Gemini every single day, all day to do Basically everything, because why not, right? Why have another person, you know, why not have it review your email? It takes 2 seconds and hey, it caught this, you know, this caught this error. It's great. So that's all to say that I think it's an and kind of situation again where we're employing more people. I mean, we have, we have not slowed down at all in our client flow and everybody wants to implement AI and none of those people that I see implementing AI are doing it to get rid of people. They're doing it to make their business more efficient. They're making, doing it to make their business more money, and they're hiring people to help them with that. And they're making sure that everybody new that they hire for positions that aren't involved in that are also coming in understanding that they're going to need to use that. They're going to need to implement tools and they're going to need to help essentially because AI's here. We got to use it.

Yeah, 100%. So you've built multiple companies, real estate, blockchain, software, staffing. What have you learned about building companies that your earlier self needed to hear?

Choose good people. Choose good partners. Yeah, choose good partners. Make sure you, yeah, again, I just, I always harp on this point. It's a relationship. Like at the end of the day, you have to have good relationships. You have to have good partners. You have to have a partner that brings to the table the things that maybe you're not good at and brings out the things you're good at in you. And if you can find that, it's hard to find. I'm not saying this is easy, but when you find it, it works extremely well.

Amazing. And where do you see the future of work heading? I mean, obviously you're seeing a lot with nearshoring. Do you think that more is going to shift towards nearshoring?

I can't see it not. This is, you know, I, I mean, I guess I could see it not if there's ways that it could go the opposite, I would say. But in general, like technology is moving us into just access to everybody all the time. So I went to the Amazon rainforest years and years ago, like 10 years ago, as just when I was down in Colombia and I was like, this is, I gotta go there. This looks like the most amazing place on earth, right? So I went and it was the most amazing place on earth and everything there wants to eat you. It's incredible. It's, it's the weirdest thing. So I go down there and the first time I went was probably 2014, 2015, something like that. And I went and it is completely just the most like the dream of disconnection, right? There's no roads to get there. You have to fly in. I went to this town called Leticia in Colombia. It's this little tiny piece of Colombia that's right on the Amazon River and it connects to Peru and Brazil and they all come together right there. And you're literally in the Amazon. You're just completely surrounded by rainforest. Like, it's just exactly what you're thinking in your head right now is what it is. So, you get there and you're just completely disconnected. Right? There's no services, there's no road there. You have to fly in. There's no connections of any sort. They have their own power plants, like complete disconnection. And you know, there's one cell tower and it's like running 1G or something. Like, this is just, there's nothing essentially. And I went back like 2, 3 years ago now. Yeah, it must have been 3 years ago. So I went back and I get there and I'm like, all right, I'm going to disconnect. This is going to be amazing. And no, every place I stayed had a Starlink terminal that full, full-on connected satellite internet. You had self-service across the entire place. There's still no roads to get there, but you don't need roads. What do you need a road for? Everybody's fully connected at all times. I was just as connected in the middle of absolutely nowhere as I was here in Phoenix. Like, it's just completely— my team's blowing me up all day and I'm like, well, it isn't working. You know? So that's all to say that we are so connected at this point and so deeply connected that it has to continue to go this way. Like, there's no reason to If I don't need to hire somebody in Phoenix unless the right person is in Phoenix, I'm not going to hire somebody in Phoenix. Now, maybe I just hire somebody in the US. Maybe I have some affinity for keeping my employees in America for whatever reason. Maybe I do, then cool. But again, I don't have to hire in Phoenix. I can hire in the middle of nowhere in Oklahoma, just if that's where I happen to find a good person. And if I don't find a good person there, then I can go look in Central and South America, and I can look in Asia, and I can look in Europe, and I can look absolutely everywhere. And yeah, I see no reason at this point in the level of connectivity and the level of uptime, I guess is the word, of just everybody's connected, everybody's always connected. And the strength of the talent pool is now absolutely everywhere. And I still have a lot of conversations and my sales team has part of it in their script about like, people always ask, how's the power infrastructure? How's the internet? It's like, it's way better than you think because you're still thinking about 10 years ago and it is not that anymore. Everywhere we're hiring from, like, I don't, none of my team's gone because of power outages. When we first started, yeah, that would happen. You'd be, you know, you'd have someone in Nicaragua or something and it would be like, oh, hey, their power went out. They gotta wait 30 minutes while they get to a coffee shop that has power or wait for the power to come back on. And now it's, I don't even remember the last time somebody on my team had their power go out and wasn't available. For some reason. You know, it's just, it's, it's the world's changing so rapidly into that direction that I, yeah, I, I think we just continue to expand that way.

We talked about different job roles that people come to you to hire remote workers for. What about the companies that are doing the hiring? Do they have to be a certain size? Are there specific industries? I mean, you said B2B that you find a kind of your sweet spot, Yeah, generally your medium businesses are kind of our sweet spot.

So anywhere from like 10, 20 to a couple hundred employees is usually the best kind of client overall. We do serve quite a few people that are solopreneurs and bringing on their first hire and, you know, bringing in a part-time virtual assistant and something like that. Like I'm not going to say no, like, hey, here's, I'll go find great people. My team's going to give you the same level of service. But we find that as for us and our best client profile, it's that more medium-level business and mostly just because they already have a lot of infrastructure in place for A, knowing what a good hire looks like, and B, managing a good hire, and C, working with remote people. So for the solopreneur who I'm, again, I'm happy to work with, I was been a solopreneur many times, like I know that life. There's a lot of learning curve there of what are you looking for? What is this role? Right? So a lot of solopreneurs, the first sales call is usually like, I want somebody who can do 6 different things. You know, okay, well, you got to focus in, got to pick 2, you know, so then you get, okay, well, we can help you find somebody to alleviate this level of workload for you for the price range that you're looking at, etc. Now, how does that work? What does your communications look like? How do you talk to this person? How do you manage their time? How do you understand their deliverables and their KPIs? Like, there's a lot of learning curve there. And that's not to say that, you know, we're here to help. I'm happy to help you get there. But there's a lot of potential downfalls at that point because you're really not sure who it is you're hiring yet. Like you don't know what you need just yet. And to get there, you have to go through a few rounds of interviewing people, revising your processes, understanding your job description, deciding if those are the things that are most pressing for you. And I see that medium businesses generally have a much more clear idea of, you know, they've been down this road. 5 or 50 times and they have a good understanding of here's what the job process looks like for this particular role. We need somebody to do that. Here's who fits well with our people generally, you know, here's our understanding of our internal culture and here's how we operate. And then the larger businesses, of course, happy to serve them, but it gets really bureaucratic and corporate at a certain level and it, it's no longer as enjoyable to work directly with the client because Yeah.

Awesome. So, wowremoteteams.com is your website. Any last piece of advice you want to give to any entrepreneur or SMB that's listening right now?

Yeah, I mean, it's all about setting expectations and good communication. You know, as long as you're clear about what you expect for people and from people and what your needs are, then, you know, you can get, you can get a lot further down that road. It just takes some time to find that clarity sometimes.

Fantastic. Chris, do you have a favorite book, quote, poem, mantra, family motto, verse, something that helps inspire you?

I love Poor Charlie's Almanac. Have you ever seen that? It's the— so it's like based on Poor Richard's Almanac, which was written by Benjamin Franklin, but it's Poor Charlie's Almanac. It's all about Charles Munger, so Warren Buffett's partner, and it's his speeches and his thinking and just his ideas and mental models, and it's It's, it's super impactful. It's really great.

I have never heard of it, and that is one I'm going to have to look up right now.

Yeah, go check it out.

Eric, totally. Yeah, thanks for sharing that. Awesome. Well, it's been really fun having you on. I have been thinking about, I have a few strategic hires in mind, so I'm going to have to pick your brain a little bit. Yeah, happy to chat whenever you want. Yeah, but I really appreciate you sharing a little bit more about the opportunity for hiring remote workers in Latin America. We haven't talked about that specifically on the show, and I love the fact that if you've had so many journeys of your own to get to this place where this is the work that you're doing. And it, it really is about people and relationships. Like you said, you're providing new opportunities for people who need, need them and want them, and a big service to business owners who know they need these services, they need these people, but might not be at the place where they wanna spend, you know, all of the full-time budgets and benefits, all the things that come along. With that in the US.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, we love to help. And, you know, a lot of it's the other piece of that. Sorry to jump on, but a lot of that piece is that the bespoke recruiting that we talked about. Yeah, there's, there's such a workload there that just, it doesn't get talked about a lot for some reason. We focus on the people and relationships and the right hire, but that workload of finding the people to start with, that recruiting work. I mean, I'm sure you've been down that road of you post a job and you get 200 applications and you go, I have no idea how to even start sorting this pile. You know, that's, it's, I see it, it's a very impactful workload that people don't notice until they only have 3 profiles to look at and then they go, wow, that's different. Yeah.

Nice. Yeah, 100%. Awesome. Well, thank you again, Chris Brown from WOW Remote Teams, and thank you to everybody who's watching this episode, listening to it. Make sure to leave us a rating and review on your favorite platform. And I know I got a lot out of this conversation. I am sure that you did as well. If you're not ready to hire remote workers or you're not in that game yet, some things to think about, questions to ask yourself, and look into your business for those areas of opportunity. I'll be back again soon. Have a great day until then. Thanks for listening or watching to this episode of Your Brand Amplified. Don't forget to leave us a rating or review on your favorite podcast listening platform, and if you want To learn more, check us out at yourbrandamplified.com.

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