Hire Proactive Global Talent For Your Team To Go From Zero To 10 Million with Ian Myers

Here's a question nobody seems to be asking: Why are the leaders still so focused on keeping talent local? The companies at the cutting edge know that global teams are the future— diverse skills, around-the-clock productivity, and resilience that a single location just can't provide. And let's get real about hiring for adaptability over experience. If you're still hiring based on resumes alone, you are setting yourself up to lose momentum. High-growth companies need thinkers who can pivot, adapt, and innovate fast. And then there is AI. Everyone talks about it as if it's a risk, but what about the opportunity to unlock potential across the entire team? And let's not forget remote work. If you still think productivity can only happen in an office, you're clinging to an outdated model. Welcome back to Mastering Tech Growth, where we interview industry leaders to bring you actionable insights and inspiring stories. I'm your host, Mike, and today we are joined by Ian Myers, CEO of Oceans, who's an expert in building high-growth companies through global talent strategies, delegation, and innovative workforce transformation. Ian, thank you for joining us today.

Thanks, Mike. Really glad to be here.

We're glad to have you. It's a very interesting topic. I love the title. You know, how do you go from zero to $10 million? That's a good one. So as a warm-up, Ian, we have this question which we ask every single guest. When I say mastering tech growth, what comes to mind?

For a lot of people, I think it must be mastering either the technology that exists to help enhance your own business growth or to just grow. I've ever— obviously every entrepreneur wants to grow. To me, when I hear it, I hear how do you utilize the different tools that are available to grow? I'm not actually thinking about my company growing in terms of dollar revenue. So that's what was interesting to me about this is not really There's so many podcasts that are sort of like, how do you just grow as a business? And most of them really boil down to work harder. But, you know, precisely what are the options you as an entrepreneur have, you as a business leader have to grow? And, you know, we're not talking really about tech today. We will, I'm sure, touch on it a little bit. But what are the tools in your toolbox? That's a really interesting topic for me.

Yep. That's a— that's a very nice pick. What tools AI in your toolbox to actually grow, which leads me to follow up on this one. So if you would choose one tool, you know, that, that one main thing, and you can only choose one, what would that be?

I don't think it's a controversial answer to say talented people. I mean, it's at the end of the day, I know there's a lot of talk about AI, but it's not going to, um, Let me take a step back and say, as, as an entrepreneur for almost a decade, I look at a lot of growth charts for companies. I've been an investor too, and more time— more often than not, if you're looking at a growth curve of a business, you'll see points where it just kind of ticks up at a steeper angle, or it's been flat for a while and then something changes. That is almost always tied to hiring a person. You know you've made the right hire if you can point at the growth chart where that person was hired and then like a month later things start humming. And I really love seeing that. And so for me, it's always going to be about the talent. It's always going to be about the people because that's the most kind of 10x impact. Technology you use, incremental change, improvement to business processes, that's all great. But who's really going to transform your business from $1 million to $10 million to $100 million? Is the people.

I love that. We actually had a couple of guests choosing the people as well. If I would dig into that, Ian, are we talking about any people or are we talking maybe at exec level or leadership level or is it just, it doesn't matter, it's just the talent. It doesn't matter the seat it comes in. If a person is talented, aka a high performer, the influence they can do for any businesses is basically what you mentioned. You just see that on a graph.

Yeah, I mean, the lazy answer is, of course, every person matters. And if you have A players across the board, your business is going to do very well. For me, it's less about the executive stuff. I think executive hiring is the trickiest hiring. It's the most amorphous hiring. Timing-wise, people almost always get it wrong. When do you hire new executives? That's like the biggest mistake you consistently see. It's either too early or too late. For me, I've always focused on uncovering talent from sources that are not usually looked at by peers or companies. I think there's a lot, if we're talking tech, if we're talking startups, there's sort of the known talent pools that people choose from, bigger tech companies, other startups, McKinsey, Goldman, wherever the sort of smartest people are going, business school, et cetera. My hiring methodology to get real incredible people at the earliest stages of the company is to look to adjacent skill sets. So I'll give you a great example of this. I hired an individual to be an account executive. They've now since become my chief of staff, integral to the entire operation of the business. But originally they were an account executive.

Mm-hmm.

And what— that never worked in a startup before. Hadn't done it. Um, what they had done was run children's camps for a large, uh, organization on the East Coast. Um, and for me, what I was looking for was I want someone who can talk to customers really well, who understands the nuances of communication, who can handle high-pressure situations, and who can sort of unpack strategies to either escalate or de-escalate situations. And I thought, man, if you can handle dealing with like screaming children all day, and then you can also deal with the parents who are super upset at you, and you can sort of make everybody happy, you're actually going to be a great person to take calls. And that was correct. And so, and they've become an amazing part of the team. So that's just one example of, you don't have to look in the right places, look for overlapping skill sets where you think someone might be able to make the jump successfully, because oftentimes they're going to cost you a lot less and do a lot more. More.

Okay. I love that actually. And I can resonate with that so, so deeply, which leads me to a follow-up question, which is, do you have a method of how you screen people for particular soft skills you're looking for? Is it just more like a gut base? Like, I'm having a conversation with you, we're just going to talk about life, about other things. Maybe I'll put in some, you know, hard skill questions in there and I just look how I feel towards you.

For our company, I mean, we at Oceans hire anywhere from 30 to 45 people a month. So we have to work with our clients. So we have a very, you know, serious methodology that we have like honed over the past 3 years that includes interviews, it includes tests, it includes personality quizzes, it includes sort of like example work product. So that's very specific to our business. Me personally, I'm just like terrible at that. I just, I want to interact with the person and I want to try to understand them as an individual and what motivates them and are they going to be a good fit for the company. And I would say about 50% of the time I get it wrong and they're not going to be a good fit for the company. But the secret to that is you then got to move quickly. So if you follow the methodology of trying to uncover talent where it's not normally found and you get people in the door who are skilled and excited and eager, even if you only get it right 50% of the time, you then got to move on. You got to let that person go. You can't sort of keep them around for months. You've got to make the decision. Trust your instinct. If it's week 3 and you know they're not going to make it, do something about it right then and go back to drawing board because maybe next time you'll get the right person. So even if you're not able to get someone in the door really, you know, 80% of the time, 90% of the time who's the right fit, it's about what you do about that quickly that matters most.

Yeah, I love that. I love that. Okay, so you do have methods of how you hire as Ocean, but then if you look at, you know, hiring for, you know, for the business, you do it a little bit different. Would you be able to share how you hire, you know, as Ocean, like what's your framework? You mentioned, interviews, some tests, like, you know. Yeah. Is there any, um, where you feel works very well?

I mean, we have, so we now have over 400 people working for us in Sri Lanka who work with our clients all over the world. And we have, it starts, um, with where you're, where the talent comes from. So in a smaller country than say the US, or the UK or, you know, Japan or whatever, it is easier to identify these are the top employers, these are the companies that the good people work at. So it starts by understanding the landscape of the existing businesses and, oh, if someone comes from there, they're probably going to be good. You know, if they've spent 10 years at this place, we probably don't really want to work with them because it's a slow atmosphere and they're not going to cut it. So you sort of understand that, that's the top of the funnel. And then from there, we have to understand, um, more about them, their work history, et cetera. So they go through a series of 2 initial interviews, um, with varying team members who each have a different approach, uh, in terms of asking about their background, their situation, you know, pretty standard interview questions. But then we go into a skills assessment which is, it takes about an hour and a half to do and encompasses depending on what role they're doing for the clients. If it's for our EA Plus, which is like our virtual assistant, but for founders, that's a real specialty program that we created. So there's a specialty assessment for that, that kind of tests people's aptitude to complete this and do well in the role. From there, we go to another set of interviews, questionnaires about them and why they want to apply for the job. And then they go through a lengthy training program where they're evaluated as part of that as well before they're finally able to be matched with a client.

All right, so that's a quite strong filtering funnel you have here. So you're looking at the geographics, then the skills, then more skills, then tests, then questionnaires, then training.

And then you got to really want to be here.

Yeah.

And we have built our entire reputation around quality, so it's, you know, we are not trying We're not trying to grow as fast as humanly possible. We're trying to grow and maintain a certain level of quality, which is really difficult because it of course deteriorates over time.

Okay. So, so the quality of the service you provide when it comes to that talent or workforce offering is something you dearly protect. And that's the sort of like a business unique sales proposition is.

Exactly. Okay.

So let's talk about that, you know, global talent in general. So leveraging global talent is a crucial strategy for companies aiming for growth. We have Forbes, you know, reporting that companies embracing global talent strategies can reduce costs by 50% while maintaining the quality. Beyond the cost saving, global talent offers diverse skills, you know, allows around-the-clock productivity, diversity transformation, all of these aspects. So from your perspective, Ian, what is the biggest growth benefit you have seen for businesses accessing the global talent pools?

For me, it's always been about helping people cross the chasm to the next level with limited resources. Now that answer depends very much on who the customer base is. So we have a number of different customer types. We have startups, that's a big technology startups, that's one big customer segment. We have, we call services businesses. So that's law firms, accounting firms, creative agencies, a variety of different services businesses. And then we have more traditional businesses, which can be anything from manufacturers to medical practices, to dentists, doctors' offices, to hospitals, nonprofits, more traditional stuff as well. And people come to us for various reasons. If you're a startup, you are often on a fundraising treadmill. And especially at seed and Series A, you're being judged on pretty clear metrics. You got to have this much revenue, you got to be growing at this rate, and then now you can go out and raise your next round of funding. The problem is, how do you stay alive long enough to achieve those metrics, and how do you afford all the people required? And a lot of startups get stuck in sort of a doom loop where they don't have enough money to make, you know, a couple six-figure hires to get them to where they need to go. But without getting where they need to go, they can't get the money to make the six-figure hires. And so it's a very difficult situation. We have found a lot of success bridging that gap. We work with a lot of startups who hire marketers from us, accountants from us, executive assistants from us. And because our cost is really low, relative to the US salary, it's a full-time person for around $3,000 a month, but the skill is just as high as someone you might hire in New York, they're able to build a team to get them to, you know, spend 2 years getting to their Series A from seed or 2 years to get from Series A to Series B. So building in the most resource-efficient way possible is why people come to us on the startup side. Interestingly, on the traditional business side, it's often more because they just can't find people. They just, they can't hire. If you're an accounting firm in, you know, outside of Philadelphia, in Pennsylvania, you're going to really struggle to find anyone to help you with marketing. Nobody wants to do that job. And so a lot of times they come to us because it's not really an option. Even money is not the problem. They, you know, these businesses aren't like startups. They're cash flowing. They're profitable. It's that they literally can't find people to do the work reliably. Okay.

So we have costs. So we have just much better value for your dollar effectively.

Yes.

And then we have a talent shortage effectively. I just can't find people. Do you charge, just trying to compare London market. So if I'm startup and I want to hire someone, I will need to invest my time to find that person. If I'm going to go to hiring agencies, I'm going to pay a hefty fee. You know, we're talking like £10,000 to £20,000 for that hire. If it's a 6-digit hire. So I would just rather take that £10,000 or £20,000 and spend it on actually getting value, right? So my question was, do you charge some type of like onboarding fees, which, you know, can—

No, just the monthly cost. Just the monthly cost. Okay. You know, usually around, again, around $3,000 to $4,000 a month, depending on the seniority, whether it's a growth marketer or like a financial controller, they're going to have slightly different costs. But there's no fees or anything outside of the monthly cost. And there's a much quicker turnaround than doing it yourself. There's also a much better quality guarantee. If you don't have the expertise to hire overseas, it can be a minefield of problems and situations and liabilities that you can avoid by working with people like us. There are some very sophisticated entrepreneurs who have been doing this for years. They've built teams offshore, like obviously cut out the middleman, go do it yourself and do that. But most people are not, don't have that experience and are not ready or willing or want to do it themselves.

Okay, I love that. So effectively, if I'm a startup in UK and, um, maybe I'm bootstrapped, you know, maybe I have like rich parents or maybe I took a loan, effectively what you're saying that instead of paying that 10 to 20, uh, hiring fee, I could actually get like 5 months of an actual, you know, employment and value production just by— Yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah, it's clearly the, the economical module of that approach is just so much more beneficial to kickstart. So if I'm new to this, I'm listening and I'm new to this, what should be the very first step in setting up a global talent strategy? I could just go to Oceans, of course, but let's imagine I'm not and I'm just listening and I'm like, okay, clearly valuable. What do I do now?

Well, the first thing to do is evaluate whether it's the right time. So do you have the ability to work with someone overseas? I mean, we've worked, for instance, with companies who, like, this was going to be their only remote employee. That's been a disaster. So how does your company function? Can you incorporate people from overseas? You know, the way we do it is they're full-time members of your team. They're at the all-hands. A lot of times they fly to the UK to do an offsite with the company. It's a very serious relationship. This is not like going on Upwork and hiring someone. So are you able to work with people in that way and create an environment that is going to allow you to build a successful team in a different country? That's sort of number one. Number two, evaluate what your need set is. Do you need someone to come in and help for a month to get a project over the line? There's a whole, there's a lot of providers that do that. Upwork, Fiverr, you know, like short-term freelance work. Very different situation. Do you need high volume but low skill? So are you looking to set up a customer service center or something like that where the cost needs to be low but the skill set isn't that big and you need 20 or 30 people to do it? There's a whole set of companies that can help you focus on that. Or are you really saying, hey, I need a growth marketing manager, I need an accountant, I need a specific role that is going to work with me in the company for a long time. That's also a different type of hiring. That's the type of hiring that we specialize in, but it's gonna be a very different journey from the others.

Okay.

So understand, can your business do this? And if not, what do you need to do? Understand what type of role and time commitment are you looking for? And then from there, if you've never done this before, find the right provider to help you get off the ground. In these, in the area that you're focused on.

So what potential challenges I'm looking for, let's say I just went on Google and I'm thinking that I want to do this, maybe it's not a freelance work, so I'm not going to like Upwork or, you know, freelance areas and I'm like, I need someone for long term and I realize that there's a couple of countries, you know, some in the West, maybe some in the East, I don't really understand the laws within those countries, I don't know what the labor laws, you know, what it means to hire like I see that being a challenge. Is there any other sort of like gotchas people should be aware if they're thinking about like global talent strategy?

Yeah, I mean, if you're hiring one person as a contractor from the US or something like that, you know, it's unlikely that you're going to run into any labor law issues. I don't want to say you will, but people really don't— a lot of these countries don't really start taking notice until you've got a lot of people there. But it's definitely something to be very careful of. Another is how do you even evaluate the talent? You don't know the universities, you don't know the companies there, you don't know who's good and who's not. And obviously people make their resumes look impressive. Fraud is another huge issue. People will say, you know, I'm working 40 hours a week for you, and they'll be saying that to 4 different people, you know, collecting 4 different paychecks. That's pretty common in some of these places. If you're just hiring contractors. And other issues, you know, confidentiality. You have no— there's, you know, often no recourse. If you're sitting in the US, you don't have an entity overseas and someone does something wrong, steals something from you, takes something from you. Even if that country has a judicial system that is functioning, what are you going to do about it? Do you have any idea how expensive it is to go after someone overseas? It's like, like lengthy, expensive. It's crazy. So the way we've set it up is we, you know, we have our business there, we hire the people, we, you know, have our legal team, we have everybody on the ground, HR team, everything like that, so that our clients don't have to worry about any of those problems and can just contract directly with us as opposed to the individual. And the last kind of gotcha is really just that a lot of times the people who don't want to work for a company and are not looking to advance their career, but are just open to being a contractor doing whatever you want them to do. They're not the best and most talented people in the country. Okay, that's a good shout.

There's some truth to that, isn't it? Okay, so there's like at least a handful of gotchas.

Uh, I, I, we could spend 6 or 7 hours running through the horror stories that I've encountered as people have told me about things they've done while hiring overseas. So yeah, it's, it's getting better, it's getting easier certainly than it was. You know, we're kind of in the fourth wave of global talent or offshoring, but still can be a very dangerous practice if it's not done well.

Okay. Yeah. I would say the same thing, especially for more like 20, 40 people startup. If they're looking to add a huge amount of headcounts, maybe they just raised the money and they're looking, you know, to go fully remote and just go fully distributed and look at the global talent. You know, if you want to add a significant amount of people fast, partnering up will be a much better idea until you understand the frameworks and potentially can do it yourself. 100%. So I want to touch on this innovative hiring strategy. So in UK, at least, they're very old schoolish. And when I say old schoolish, it's just the same everywhere. You get an interview, you pick up phone, you get a test. You know, these tests are sort of very blunt, you know, like right now solvable with ChatGPT, to be honest, like Copilot, you know, you can fake that you coded them.

That's a huge problem, by the way, that we're running into. It's very hard to evaluate.

Yeah, exactly. And, you know, you go in interviews, you know, I myself worked with some, some of the tools where you have a real-time ChatGPT support where, you know, we could be talking right now and I could be looking at ChatGPT output and, you know, coming up with like questions, you know, not myself, but ChatGPT. So there's real advance in that. Element, which these tests, you know, almost become like a moot point. And then you go to interviews and, you know, there's no flair in those interviews. It's very like, oh, well, what is your biggest weakness? You know, and then things like that. So you go through this process and you start questioning if you even want to work for this company, you know, because, you know, advertisement, potential marketing of a company is very cool. You know, it's very maybe hip, up to date, and you're like, oh, I really would want to be part of that culture. Then you go through the hiring process and you're like, hmm, that's not the same. Which leads to that, you know, that question I felt it myself. And I heard that a lot from, you know, from people around me. It's, it's like, how do you as a company, you know, build your talent pool and how do you make sure that, you know, your hiring strategies is, is like people go through that and go like, oh, that's going to be awesome company to work for.

That is an excellent question that I think every company wants the answer to. For me, it comes down to really, are you making good on the promises of the culture you're promoting? And so many companies don't do that.

Amen.

There's one of our friends and, you know, runs a company, Eliz, in Las Vegas, and he was telling me that he's never really had any issues with employees. He's never had any problems. Most people stay forever. And one of the One of the reasons, you know, it's a decently large company, but not huge. One of the reasons is he personally meets every candidate that's gonna work for the company, flies them to Las Vegas, takes them out to dinner with his wife, meets the family, gets connected, and builds a real working relationship. That's crazy. I don't do that.

That's a huge investment.

But the results have been incredible for him. And so he was telling me about this and I thought, oh, maybe I should be flying people. Flying people to New York to meet before we hire them. Um, not possible when you're hiring 30 or 40 Sri Lankans a month. But, um, so that's one example of the branding that he's putting out there is a great place to work and a founder who cares is really matching the culture. I think for a lot of people, there's a huge disconnect between the recruitment department and, you know, who's just trying to get top-of-the-funnel CVs in and the culture of the business beyond the values and how those values are translated. Because there's a couple of issues, right? So if you— company can have values, but are they applied? Do people follow them? Do they care about them? A lot of times, no. And so it's interesting to see how companies present themselves from a marketing front, you know, the picture of all the team having fun at a big event on the careers page or whatever it is. And then you get into an interview and it's kind of like your hiring manager doesn't even like the company. And they're like, I mean, I literally interviewed for a job once when the hiring manager told me that they didn't like the company. They're trying to leave within 6 months since they wanted to hire someone to replace them. And I was like, that's not a good way to get someone interested in this role. Yep. And so I think that's one option. Another option is just to be really creative in the hiring process. Like, don't just let— don't just do the same tired kind of hiring panel of the same people. Bring some different perspectives in. Let someone from like accounting join a hiring panel for a marketing person, you know, let people be people and observing other people, not just kind of the category experts that are often involved in these specific hires. You know, do stuff for your new hires. You know, during the pandemic, there was a lot of like employee engagement stuff that sort of fizzled out because none of it was real. But there are companies that really make an effort to, once someone is there, send them gift boxes and get them involved in culture and set them up with buddies and make sure they have someone guiding them for 30, 60, 90 days. So just getting to the line of hiring is not enough. You also have to get them through their first 90 days culturally. There's a lot of research showing that the first 90 days are the most important. And if people have a really solid 90 days with the company where they feel supported, their longevity with the company will be substantially more, i.e., they will stay and retain much longer than if their first 90 days they feel isolated, they don't feel they have the proper guidance, and they don't feel they're connecting with the company.

Okay. So some tips over there. One thing I picked up when you were talking about this, Ian, is you said, I couldn't be able to fly every single employee when I'm hiring, you know, 40 people a year.

A month, 40 people a month.

Okay, so that's a lot more than 40 people a month. Uh, yeah, that's true. Which leads to that question or realization is that once you start hiring at scale, you want it or not, you're probably going to lose some of that flair, isn't it? Because you're becoming a lot more processy, right?

So it's true, it's very hard. It's— that is one of the tricks. And you look at other players in our industry that have 1,000 people or 2,000 people, and suddenly it becomes a volume game, and that is unfortunate, and we're doing our best to prevent that. It's interesting in the way it's sort of reflective of how you grow customers if you're a startup. So in the early days of customer acquisition, you, you know, use your network, you talk to everybody, you're referred by people, you're sort of, you know, your conversion rate is super high because you're networked into all of your early customers. But once you get beyond that, then it starts to get mathematical. Okay, we need 500 leads a quarter to convert 100 people to paying customers. You know, or because our conversion rate is X, we just need, you know, our leads to be Y, and we just spread a huge net to get people in. I think that's also similar in the hiring world as well. You reach— and we're not quite there yet, but you definitely reach a point where it goes from this conversion rate, quality referral hire to we just need to have a large enough people coming in, except that a huge number of them are not going to work out, but that a smaller percentage will meet our requirements. To get us to the numbers we need.

Okay. Is that like a strategy by default? Or you did some like A/B testing? And where I'm coming with this from, I'm just thinking of sales. So there's two different camps of salespeople. So you have, you know, what is called sales at scale, where you, you know, just cast a huge net, outbound, maybe cold outreach, cold emails. You know, same with LinkedIn. You're sort of trying to fake that you really know the person by using some personalization elements, but ultimately it's at scale because you're just blasting everyone. And then you have another camp of people where they actually go like, look, show me that you know me, right? So just spend 10 minutes at least on my profile, pick something from my feed, which I know definitely is not going to be automated. You know, write me that message, you know, like spend like 20 minutes per profile, you're going to reach out to a much smaller amount of profiles. But when you look at that ultimate close, which happens at the end of the funnel, that camp is basically saying that you're going to have better numbers than doing sales at scale. So that sort of puts that question forward. It's like, if you're doing hiring at scale, did you do like A/B testing comparing, you know, hiring at scale and doing something like more personalized when it comes to hiring and looking what an actual result is? Because you did mention like a lot of people will drop off and you just accepted that it's just not going to work out.

Yeah, well, we, you know, as of now still rely heavily on referrals as a source of great hires. So we've created a great culture. People want to work at Oceans. And so people that are at Oceans refer their trusted friends and colleagues. That's still our biggest pool of talent. And that is somewhat scalable, i.e., if one person you hire will refer 3 to 5 people in a year, then the people they hire, the same thing, right? So you are able to continuously take advantage of referrals. And that's sort of our quality strategy. I would say that meets about half of our targets. So we really have a blended hiring strategy where we rely on, you know, we heavily invest in our referral program for hiring for about half the hires we need to make. And the other half is more large volume LinkedIn outreach, advertisements, things like that to get people interested in working with us.

Okay, that makes perfect sense. And I would imagine then people somehow are incentivized to, to, to make the referral. Bring a friend, get X, right? Okay.

Yeah, I mean, we do that across the board with our clients too, who bring us new clients, because I'm a firm believer that if you're helping our business make money, you should be rewarded for that.

Oh yeah, 100%. I mean, the referrals are— affiliates referrals are highly overlooked by many businesses. I mean, it's one of many tools how you can grow. The people-knowing-people element which you suggested here, and you said, you know, during the interview process, maybe involve people from other departments, you know, just allow people to talk with people rather than having some automated techy processes, which I really like that. I mean, I never really, as a hire, as a person being hired, or as a person hiring, I never really enjoyed anything which is non-personalized. Human-related, like, you know, here's a test, go home, spend 2 days, give me a result, I'll look at the result, I'll tell you how good you are. Like, I never understood that. I always wanted to have a chat, ask the questions, you know, take the questions deeper to understand the knowledge and things like that. So I always was a lot more social skills leaning, and I never really cared about hard skills that much. It doesn't matter what role I'm hiring. Let's say I'm hiring maybe, you know, like a backend developer. I would ask questions, understand that they have a general concept understanding, and that would be it for me. Because hard skills are teachable. Like, I know that if I bring them in a team who has a good coder, they will pick that up in like 3 months. So it never was a risk for me, but I always seen a risk about like, you know, understanding how to be a team player, you know, helping others, you know, just being a really good addition to the team and making sure the team gels. So I always wanted to have chats. In your processes, when you hire people, what is the, you know, weight on the hard skills you put on? Like soft skills, hard skills, you know, like what's the ratio?

Well, for us, it's really about soft skills because, for instance, for our EA+ program, the people we hire have never been EAs before. For. That's kind of our special method. We take folks that have a background in operations, marketing, sales, finance, and train them how to be the right hand to a founder or a business owner.

Okay.

And the training is on us. So what we're really looking for is adaptability, intelligence, communication, understanding, comprehension, attention to detail. These are the kind of things that matter most. And I think that is increasingly true across hiring for any role because these upskilling cycles have gotten so short. I mean, you think about 50 years ago, you would hire someone who, you know, they might know how to work a specific fax machine or something like that, or use a specific piece of hardware, and that's what they've been trained on because the technology cycles were much longer. And so if you had a skill set, you could rely on that skill set to get you halfway through your career before you had to learn something new. Today, if you're not learning something new, like every 6 months, you're falling behind on the latest technologies. And so in that environment, knowing how to use specific tools, having specific skills is so much less relevant and important than your innate intelligence, your adaptability, and your understanding of how to pick up new things, because that's what's going to matter the most.

Oh my God, I love that so much. I don't know, I don't have words to express it, but that's— he just took words from my head and put it out there. And that's exactly what I'm thinking. And my question would be, how do you think AI will have an impact on that? And where I'm coming from, this is because I feel like if it's a hard skill like coding, And if AI can code for you, it just becomes a lot less relevant. But can you make AI, can you use AI to become better at communication? You know, can you use AI to become better at adaptability of innovation, which is still probably not, right? Again, just my opinion, but so, so sorry, I'm just anchoring potentially your opinions. The question is, how do you think AI will have impact on the hard skills and on the soft skills?

That, my opinion is that that will be up to us as human beings, as consumers, as people to decide. We've all seen the potential of AI, what it can do. I'm personally somewhat skeptical about the length of some of these hype cycles. It's always like the change the world technology is going to arrive in 6 months. You know, Waymo is like doing really well right now. And there's a lot of press around how it's making money and it's going super well, driverless taxi, it's amazing. It was like 10 years ago that they said that technology had arrived and was ready to change the world. So these cycles are a lot longer than people think. That being said, the rate at which AI is advancing, there is going to be a point in time at which we as a world, as nations, as people have to say, we want human beings to continue doing these things and we want technology to help us here. And we're going to put limitations or restrictions in place on like what people can do, because there is what AI can do, because there's going to come a point where it's basically everything. I mean, Google just announced that they're launching an agent that can just like operate a computer like a human being could. Um, and so that's like, that's huge. I think we are gonna come up with the specific use cases as a society where we want to deploy this technology. Otherwise, we're going to face a crisis of, you know, nobody being able to do anything, which is sad. I mean, right now, look at what we're doing. AI can generate pictures of both of us, and those two AI can have a conversation, and it'll probably be pretty similar.

Yeah, maybe that's AI talking right now.

No one knows. I could have a French accent in this other version. You know, you can do whatever you want. There's a lot of functionality. So, you know, the answer is I think longer hype cycle than people realize, slower adoption than people realize, and I suspect more than people really think parts of this technology are going to be rejected in the same way that Apple just shut down its, um, just shut down its Apple Glasses or whatever they were called, the headset production because nobody was buying it, because nobody wanted it. It's an incredible piece of technology, but there's some things that are so, I think, repugnant to how we exist biologically and emotionally as human beings that we will just reject that technology even if it's incredible. And so I think that, that is likely going to have some effect on the development of AI. In the same way that it's shut down a lot of VR because it makes us nauseous, shut down the Apple Glasses because I don't want to walk around like that.

Some people potentially do, but yeah, if you don't have a network effect, then just doesn't stick at that scale. Okay, okay, yep, that's good.

I like that.

So we're not sure how it's going to change it, but some things will change. Let's talk a little bit about delegation in. So how you do it and how Ocean does for, say, founders. So, to give you a little bit of context, so delegation, ultimately, we're looking to save time, drive maybe operational efficiency. According to Harvard Business School, we get about one-third of increased focus if we have ability to delegate well. Ability to delegate well is actually a skill by itself, being able to delegate. And then, you know, another aspect is actually having people to delegate to, which can, you know, perform the tasks with delegating. So from your perspective as a CEO, how do you do delegation? And then a sidekick sort of question, if from your clients, which Ocean has, if I'm like a founder, CEO, What people do they usually hire from Oceans and what type of, you know, delegation they actually perform?

Well, it's interesting that you ask that question because the answer to me is I'm a terrible delegator and that has shaped my philosophy in building Oceans. Um, I get, I can do it and I get the job done, but I'm not one of these guys that goes on a podcast and is like a master of delegation. I struggle with it in the same way that I think like 99% of the population struggles with it, especially if you're a CEO, an entrepreneur, and you're growing a business. And that really inspired how we approach our staffing, because if you look at a lot of our competitors, other people in the industry, it's plastered everywhere. Delegation guides, delegation handbooks, how to delegate. Here's your resource library on delegation. Read these books for delegation. And the problem with that is, one, it's hard. People don't talk about how hard it is to become a really good delegator. It takes decades and so many different varied excuses, uh, experiences, and so many failures in order to get there. And so what I wanted to do when I built Oceans was there's another side of this, which is instead of you delegating, someone else can be proactive. The people you hire can go through your day-to-day with you and proactively put themselves in a situation to take stuff off your plate. I have found in my own personal hiring of our Ocean's team that works the best for me. I hire proactive people who I don't have to really focus on delegating to because they jump up and get it themselves. That's also informed our philosophy in how we work with clients at Ocean. So we don't have a huge resource library around how to delegate. I don't get on podcasts and talk about delegation all the time. We have— when we hire, we have all these criteria that is meant to understand who's going to be a proactive person, which is something we hear all the time from clients. I've hired overseas and the problem is they just sit back and wait. And if I don't tell them to do something, they don't do anything. That's a huge problem.

Yeah, yeah, I felt so—

we've built a system where we identify the people that are gonna be proactive, and then we teach them how to be, you know, there's, there's such thing as eager beaver syndrome, where you're too proactive, that can be damaging. So how do you find the right level of productivity? And a good example of this is we placed an EA+ with a very well-known internet personality, expert on e-commerce, had gone through a couple of offshore assistants and just found that they were lacking that proactivity. Well, week 2, the guy spent a week kind of shadowing, coming up to speed. This is his EA+. His EA+ on week 2 put together a whole presentation, said, I've looked at your whole week, I looked at what you do every day. Here's my skill set. And here's a presentation on literally what I think I can take off your plate right now and where I think I can fit in in the next 3 to 6 months. If you haven't experienced that, that's incredible. Someone coming to you and saying that is so much easier for a CEO than sitting and drawing and trying to feel, okay, you know, Ted's going to do this and I think Sarah can take that and then maybe I'll put some, you know, like Having someone come to you and say, I got this, I know my skills, I know what you're doing, here's where I fit in. Incredible. So that's how we try to differentiate ourselves in terms of our EA+ and how they work with founders. In terms of what people come to us for, it's, you know, we focus on operational roles. So admin and operations, which is mostly our EA+, sales and marketing and finance. Some people have one person from us and some people have 15 people from us. It really depends on what stage they're at in the business, what they're looking to hire. I would say mostly EA+ and marketing is our, our biggest categories. We also have started to do a lot of accounting and finance roles because there's sort of an accounting accountant shortage in the US. So those are the categories we work best in, but it does, you know, there's a lot of variety between just who's hired and how many people. Across our client base.

Okay. That's a very nice flip, you know, be more, you know, don't get yourself into delegating mode, you know, look for people, sort of proactive people. If you don't have that in your team, does that mean, you know, does that sort of imply that you're hiring poorly? Like you should just change your hiring strategy and, you know, just look for proactive people?

A lot of times people need permission to be proactive. And that's one of the biggest problems is especially if you're young or you're junior, of course, like when you make an executive hire, the person is going to come in and I— we're doing it this way and we're doing it this way and I'm setting this up and we're canceling that and we're doing this. That's because they have confidence and they've been given a mandate. You make an executive hire, you're hiring someone who knows much better than you in a category you don't want to deal with. So they come in and make changes. At the junior and mid-level, I've seen that people are much more reticent to just come in and start doing stuff or even make suggestions. And so we at Ocean's give our people permission to be proactive by telling them they need to be. So it doesn't necessarily mean you're making a bad hire. It just means maybe culturally you need to emphasize proactivity more than you need to emphasize waiting for instructions. Instruction, because the default is waiting for instruction. That's almost everyone's default in the workforce. You learn it as a junior person and you don't get over it until you're a senior person. If you want your junior and mid-level people to be more proactive, you need to emphasize that in your onboarding, in your culture, in your values, and how they interact with their managers on a daily basis.

I love that, and you're absolutely right. I mean, when you're talking now, I'm just thinking about some of the roles I did Yes, people do tend to just wait. You need to give them a green light to just sort of, you know, be more proactive. I've worked with one of the founders who had this saying, do things and say sorry later. And that was sort of his go-to. So he just expected people to just take on with things, go ahead and do, and, you know, if they mess up, basically go like, sorry, I messed up. And, you know, and that was that bias towards action and productivity was actually what he was looking more than that risk and fear of doing something wrong because you aren't sure and thus waiting for some green lights from other execs. Okay, that makes perfect sense. Why do you think delegation is so hard yet? Like why some people are good at it and some just not?

Well, again, I think a lot of it comes with experience because the act of delegation is an act of letting go. And especially at the CEO level or at the founder level, you're not doing it because you don't like to be in control. I'm a founder because I hate working for other people. I can't do it. I'm a terrible employee. And so hidden in that coding is I don't like giving up control. And I think most founders feel like it's my company, I know best, etc. So So part of it is a mental game of getting over yourself. And that takes repetition. You have to— and this is what I'm saying about the fact that it takes a lot of experiences and a lot of positives and a lot of negatives, but you have to do it a little bit at a time and see the results. Oh, I'm letting someone else do this. And it's working. Now I feel good about that. And you have to teach yourself to feel good about giving stuff away to other people. Is part one. Part two is the, well, now what do I do problem. It's often hard as a CEO or as a leader to give things up to other people, if you aren't ready to sort of move to what you should be doing elsewhere. So shifting from I'm building everything, it's me and a co-founder and one other person to I've got a team of 40. How do I even spend my time? It's hard to even conceptualize what I'm not doing the day to day. What do I do next? And so by not delegating, by holding on to specific minute tasks that you're not letting anyone else do, you don't have to face that question, which is, I built the team, I built the company, I built the product, it's growing. What am I here for now? And that's a scary question for a lot of entrepreneurs and a lot of CEOs. And so there's all these things inside of you that make it so that delegation doesn't feel good or doesn't feel right until it does, until you've fully done it and you've experienced it and you've sort of let yourself realize that it's okay, then you can do it.

Okay. So it's effectively you want to pass the ownership of some of your tasks to someone else and you want to leave them alone, give the accountability of these tasks and just wave goodbye and accept whatever outcome is coming and just forget about it and, you know, add value to the business somehow else.

If I'm— I mean, I think the last thing I would say about delegation, because it's an important and interesting topic, is the other problem is delegation is not a one-way street. And in a lot of like books and resources and guides, it is portrayed as a unidirectional activity, which is to say, I'm delegating. And the reality is delegation is a two-way street, and everyone is different. So each employee that you have that you're going to delegate to, their motivations— what's going to get them to accept the delegation? What's going to get them to do it well? What's going to get them to You know, talk to you at the appropriate cadence at the appropriate time, make them feel comfortable, make them do more, do less. One of the core reasons why delegation is so hard is it actually, it does require understanding the person at the other end and every person is different. So it takes a lot of work to get like, to do it really effectively and really well. You also have to have excellent communication and connection skills with the people you're delegating to. And that's oftentimes exhausting and really hard.

And it's venturing into that leadership area, isn't it? It's, you know, you mentioned knowing people, being able to communicate. That's all, you know, transformative leadership, even transactional leadership type of skills to be able to do that. And by default, it's not going to be as simple as any guide would make you to believe. I think that's the conclusion we're making. Let's say I still want to do that. Let's say I'm a founder, CEO, small startup, scaling fast, I'm drowning. So I'm like, okay, I need more of these proactive people. Mike Kenyon is talking about I need to delegate more. Like, I know that I need to do that. I'm just not sure how I go ahead and do that. So let's say I go back to business. How do I Do I send an email? Do I call everybody together and go like, hey, one of the cultural things right now is going to be ownership and accountability. You all are free to do things. Go surprise me. Be proactive. Is that a good step one? Or would you be more prescriptive of how people can sort of start that journey today?

I would say, of course, it starts by communicating that. But then there are two really important things. One is for you to do that. So leadership always sets the tone. If you want people to do something, you have to do it yourself first. That's really important. Number two, whenever I'm trying to create change inside an organization, I always have people that I know I can rely on. These are people that are well respected. They're not me. They're well liked, and they are sort of cultural standard bearers for the company, and there's always a few of these types of people inside of any organization. I want to get on the phone with them and say, hey, I'm really trying to change this and I want you to jumpstart this process for me because obviously I'm the CEO and it needs somebody else to show people that I'm being serious. Because you can go in and say, hey, you guys have permission to do whatever you want, move fast, break things, whatever. Nobody's going to be the first person to take that risk. It's like You know, going to a dinner party and being the first person to start eating. It's like nobody wants to be that person. So you have to, you have to sort of manually jumpstart that by working with the few people inside your organization who you know you can trust, who you know are visible, and who you know understand, and get them to start doing that stuff to give everyone else permission to do it themselves. They see that it's okay, they see that we're serious, and now they're going to start doing it as Yeah, I love that.

Lead by example, role model the change you expect the business, you know, to go to. And by the way, I'm going to share a secret here. I think I'm the person who starts eating first at the dinner parties.

Good for you, man. I mean, that's the most important person. Everyone's waiting for that person. They want that person to go ahead and the people with the courage to do it. I have my friend, my oldest friend in the world. He's known for that. Being the first guy to start eating. And, you know, we love those guys. They're really important.

You said that, and I just remember at least a couple of parties where I was just so hungry and I just, I just said, now, you got—

someone's got to do it.

I love that. Someone's got to do it. So we talked a little bit about AI, and what I was trying to discover from, from your point of view is, you know, how— what effect it might have on the hiring strategies and how we look at the hard and soft skills. But I want to sort of read this quote from PwC. So effectively, they released a report and they're projecting that, uh, AI will add $15.7 trillion to the global economy by 2030. So for scaling companies, AI automates routine tasks, freeing teams to focus on high-value activities and strategic initiatives. Making a powerful tool for sustainable growth. So from your point of view, how AI will transform the workforce dynamics, especially in companies who are rapidly growing?

I, you know, I'll be honest with you, I don't think I have anything different to say on this that hasn't already been said. I mean, my opinion is the first stop on that train is augmentation. This is true. I think it will, in a positive note, be a forcing function for people to specialize in the things that they feel good about, confident about, and can succeed in. And that's actually, I think, a net, net, net positive. For instance, if you're someone who has a lot of different tasks, you're an operations manager or something, which is sort of like, especially at startups and fast-growing companies, everybody does everything. Well, if you have an AI agent that you can start offloading stuff to, you're going to naturally start offloading the stuff that you don't really like to do. And then you're going to sort of be able to spend time figuring out what you as a person really like working on and want to keep doing, and hopefully will pursue that. So at a minimum, I think it's going to allow people to not hide behind a lot of different work that they're doing all the time, but really stand out as someone that's an expert in a certain area. And then it will allow companies to just hire those experts. You don't need to hire like all-rounders anymore. You can just hire specific people because, you know, a ton of the all-around tasks can be handled by AI.

Okay. I love that. It's a good summary. Okay, so let's move on. So effectively, we think in automation, we're removing the busy for the sake of being busy tasks. And we think in maybe more long-term, more strategic approaches, more creative approaches, effectively things where domain experts, people, humans can only do. And that's what we're looking at as a future outcome of AI coming into workforces is that Is that like a good assessment?

Yeah, I think that's right.

Okay. So, one of the challenges I had with remote teams, and I actually have a fairly broad history with remote teams, I think about 8, 9 years or so ago, before it was a thing, I spent, so I was a co-founder with a startup, and I spent about 6 months convincing the board to give one Friday as a remote. Right. It was not a thing at that point in time, but I was working with a lot of hiring companies and because we were scaling, I was looking, you know, what people actually want and what they're asking for so I can build a good offer to the market to attract a good talent. And what was really growing rapidly was an ask for flexible hours and remote work. So, so I tried to make the package and I spent like 6 months battling that to actually get like a Friday as a remote. And, you know, we went and started doing Friday Fridays and then it, you know, it grew and it just became a culture, right? And one of the main things which I had issues was actually, you know, managing, just being a transactional manager for, you know, for people at home because I felt like they don't really know how to manage themselves in the first place. Like that was my real issue where people if they're not in office, you know, you can sort of come to them and have a chat, you know, they would just get lost. And, you know, it's almost like what you said about people would sit and just wait until someone tells them what to do. Like that was like my number one issue, you know, with the remote. Because you have all your workforce remote, like what comes out as a real challenge for businesses hiring, you know, remote and distributed workforce as like a number one or maybe, you know, top three?

I would say communication, visibility, and cohesion are the top 3 things that come to mind. I mean, communication, Slack, Microsoft Teams, how we interact over those mediums. Some people are better than others. I know people who, like, whenever I Slack them, they sound like jerks and I think they're angry at me, but that's just how they type and how they communicate. So if you take away the facial expressions, you take away how you interact with people in the office, you can begin to misjudge people because text-based communication is not very effective in terms of conveying emotion. And so that's one big issue. The second issue, visibility. How do you ensure that people, you know, are not just— it's not just the most vocal person on the call, the most vocal person on Slack that gets attention and time. And it's very easy in those environments. If you have someone who's more talkative than everyone else, to take up all the oxygen and get all the visibility, take up all the oxygen and get all the visibility. What do you do? You know, how do you make sure that your entire team has opportunity for those things? And so to me, this all comes down to intentionality. It is much harder to run a remote organization. There's so many positives, but the mistake people make is just thinking that everyone's going to take care of themselves. The culture is going to take care of themselves. We'll get on a call once in a while. We've gone through this at Ocean's, it's hard. You have to be so much more precise in what you set up and make people adhere to in terms of like not just happy hours, but how you communicate response times that are acceptable, time off policies, out of office policies. All those things are really important and you just have to be very intentional about how you set up those guidelines.

Okay. So we do want to have guidelines then. Maybe we want to copy, I think GitLab has like a, how do we do remote handbook or something like that? Like, but we do want to set some type of how we work as a remote business and have some guidelines and sort of make that as an onboarding process in a way, or just like a cultural, like this is how we do it. This is how we do it. You know, go read if you forgot. And just sort of be very intentional in making sure people adhere to these guidelines.

Yeah, absolutely.

Okay. I actually love what you said about style of communication. I get sometimes messages as well because you can't see a person. You go like, what do you mean? Like, are you mad right now?

Why are you so upset at me? And then you get on the phone and they're just like happy and super nice. So, you know, that's a problem.

Yeah. Yeah, that's definitely one out there. Alignment was the second one for me. And, and I see that even like today, like when you have big businesses, you know, lots of people working on big, big projects which involves, you know, cross-teams, cross-departments, cross-disciplines, and all of them are distributed. Alignment is a big issue. So especially as well, if you have a 24/7 rotation or you have different time zone overlaps, So some part of the teams wake up, they do things, they go to sleep and, you know, other teams come up and they need to sort of pick up the same thing and continue. And there's a lot of sort of like repetition, you know, saying the same thing in different meetings or different areas. And then, you know, looking at some people in like focus group and they don't have that information because they didn't attend like a meeting or something like that. How do you like, are there any like actionable, you know, tips? How you guys do that in Notion, like, which, you know, makes it—

Yeah, I, the single most impactful change that I have made, Ben, and it's always a struggle and it's an ongoing struggle, is to make people use channels instead of DMs. So if you're working remotely, everything is on Slack or Teams. I'm not familiar with Teams, so I'll just use Slack as an example. But like, that's where 99% of the communication happens, right?

Yep.

People in remote environments naturally tend to DM each other.

True.

That creates a total lack of alignment and visibility because nobody knows who said what when. I tell people, unless it is confidential or personal, put it in a channel, tag the person you want to ask the question to and put in the channel so everyone has visibility. You never know who might see it, have a different idea, remind them of something that happened, have a different perspective, want to weigh in on it, have an idea. Using channels to communicate instead of DMs is a huge unlock for visibility alignment across remote teams.

So we're making this presumption that if someone will basically go through the channel information because it will come up as unread in their threads. So they will look at it in a way you will look at emails. You would go like, oh, I don't know what conversation was over here. So I'm going to read through that. And just get up to speed, right?

Okay.

Yeah. Yeah. What if people don't just read that?

Well, I mean, I think if you're in that channel, you're in there for a reason, you know, and so you've liked, and also Slack is designed like an iPhone or anything to grab your attention. So like the whole product is designed to make you read stuff and stay in Slack.

So yeah, I mean, it's good. I have, you know, and I know people who don't like Slack. I use Slack and Teams and and Skype, but that's still a thing. I think Slack does it best when it comes to distributed teams. It has a good product for that. What about engagement? You know, like a lot of companies, and it sort of, you know, connects with the remote one because I feel like remote has that challenge. Big companies have engagement surveys. They usually call it engagement surveys, but, you know, ultimately it's a set of questions to gauge people and employees' happiness. And it's, you know, it's done in different ways. We have probably like a couple of leading companies who actually offer that service. And then, you know, you get answers and you look, you know, at a couple of things which are very important for employees to be happy, like recognition, you know, team developments, learning, career paths, and things like that. How does that differ for you guys? Because you sort of providing operational service, as I see it, you know, like, you know, the employee works for Ocean's, so the career development probably is owned by Ocean's, but they provide, you know, the skill and service to whoever is hiring, right? So it's sort of like a separation of concerns in a way.

Like, so in this, in this instance, we have, you know, the, the company that are people are embedded with, they have their own culture. And, you know, they participate in that, they participate in that online, obviously. So we focus on offline experiences for what we do at Ocean. So we have orientations, we have events, 2 or 3 events a month, we have book clubs, get-togethers, we have parties every quarter, we have trips people go on. So we really focus on bonding at Ocean over in-person events, because most of the people we hire are within a single city. And so that is where we put our focus and, you know, let the companies run the sort of online culture that they want our clients to run that our, you know, our people participate in. Okay.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. So you guys make sure that teams are connected.

Do they?

So when they get hired by other companies, those companies say they bring their own team. So it becomes like a mashup, right? So they have their own employees. Companies, plus they're hiring a huge branch or a trunk from Oceans and that just becomes like two mashups which needs to sort of come together. Do you guys encourage some type of like cross—

Well, it's usually slow. So they'll start with 1 to 2 people and then they'll hire a third or a fourth over time. So it's usually actually just integrating like at most 3 people at a time into a company. So we're not like a customer service organization where people hire 25 people at a time from us. It's usually 1 to 3 to start, sometimes more. 1 to 3 to start and then adding over time is how our typical engagement works, which means you're never in that place where there's sort of like a huge cultural mashup that has to happen. It's just how do you integrate 1 person or 2 people into your team.

Okay. I understand that. All right. Well, you have a lot of experience with building various teams, you know, Ian. So, so What a company could do who have a low engagement, like what would be your go-to to make sure people are more happier?

Usually if you're a bigger company or remote team, it's because people just don't feel connected with the organizations. They don't want to participate in some random thing. For me, what I've seen work really well is just micro-engagements. So You know, if you've got 2 or 3 people in a city, sponsor them to go out to dinner together and just get to know each other. If you've got a group that's really— I mean, our book club is a great example. If you've got a group that's really interested in reading, empower them to get together. So don't just kind of like force culture and engagement down from the top, but identify people who care about engagement and want people to participate and empower them. Give them budget, give them opportunity, give them time, give them a platform. To create smaller groups within an organization that ultimately will lead to more engagement and more cohesion, even if it's not with the company, it's with the people at the company. And that's just as important.

Okay. So just empower people who actually are natural people persons and just allow—

Yeah, there's always people that just are more interested in that type of stuff than others.

Yeah, I do agree. Okay. Well, that was incredibly insightful conversation, Ian. And for the listeners who want to know more about Oceans or about you, how they would connect with you?

Well, you can go to our website, oceanstalent.com, or you can find me on LinkedIn, Ian Myers, Ocean's Talent. I'm always happy to talk to people if they have questions. And if you're interested in working with us, there's like 15 different CTAs that all point to booking a call. But if you have questions about anything we've discussed or want to know more about global talent, you can just DM me on LinkedIn or email me, iam@oceanstalent.com, and I'm happy to answer any questions.

Excellent. And for the people watching or listening, scroll down, check the show notes. You'll have the links as well for your convenience. As Ian showed us today, strategies like leveraging global talent, hiring for adaptability, smart delegation, even if you know it, how to do it or not, still works. AI integration and all these other things are very important to make sure you guys grow efficiently and healthy. If you find the value in the show, please subscribe, share it with your network, leave us a comment. We would like, we would love to have a conversation with you. And as always, until the next time, stay safe. And see you online.