How To Scale 3 Businesses to $4M Each: Nearshoring With Brian Samson

It went from one extreme of everyone in office all the time to this other extreme of everyone working and people took advantage of it. You know, people in New York all of a sudden move to Hawaii or Bali or Vietnam or wherever and tried to take their high salary and live really cheap. Who wouldn't want to just spend two or three minutes watching their future boss with the office in the background explain what the, what the role is all about. You get a feel for their personality, their style, all that stuff. We started to do that. When you don't know people and they're just on the other side of the world, it's easy to refer to them as like, yeah, we've got some low cost resources in Mexico, but when you remember that these are all people with their own lives and motivations and personalities and styles and you treat them like people instead of low cost resources, just that mindset shift and it changes the game.

Welcome to the Business Game, a podcast that moves the needle. Hey guys, before we jump into today's episode, we just wanted to take a really quick moment to thank one of our sponsors, Tala Offshore, for any businesses wanting to maximize their return on new hires. Tala offers seamless access to top tier Filipino talent who are real employees hand selected by the Talla team, slashing your staffing costs by up to 60% with onboarding in under a week. Visit talaoffshore.com to scale smarter. And thanks again to Tala for supporting the Business game. Hi guys. Welcome back to the Business Game. Thanks so much for being here today. Remember to like and hit that subscribe button. And if you have a question while you're watching the episode, leave it in the comments below and I'm sure our guest will be keeping an eye on it. My name is Jasmine.

And my name's Lisa.

And we are joined today by someone all the way from Hawaii. Brian, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for the invitation.

Of course.

Our pleasure.

So we'll hand it right over to you. Brian, can you tell our listeners who you are and what you do?

Sure. Based in Hawaii, I've been an entrepreneur for 10 years and these 10 years have been exclusively focused on something that we call nearshoring, which is time zone dependent. But here I am in the States. So for us, nearshoring is leveraging talent in Latin America. For your audience that might be in Australia, nearshoring could be using labor in Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, folks that are on your time zone.

Right. So I was. That was going to be my first question. Was the plain English explanation But I suppose actually how does it differ from offshoring? I've heard of offshoring before.

Yeah, Yeah, I think that's, that's a common question. Most people have offshore before or they've heard of offshoring. It's a, you know, common thing in business. Even going back to say 1998, 99, 2000, when books started coming out, Thomas Friedman wrote the World is Flat and it fundamentally changed how work was done. You think about companies like Deloitte and kpmg and all of a sudden they started to hire back office accountants and customer service and software developers. And that's been going on for 25, 30 years. So it's a very mature part of business. And generally, if you talk to anybody who's senior in their career, if you ask them if they've offshored, there's a very good probability that they've offshored before. What we started to see was a couple trends in the last couple years. So offshoring has gone on forever. But you think back to the COVID days, those that crazy couple year period of the pandemic where you can remember, you know, we were all wearing masks and in our home and afraid to go outside and sanitize in our groceries, you know, but what also happened was we started to become much more open to people working remotely. But for the most part there was like a, like a boomerang effect. You know, where it went from one extreme of everyone in office all the time to this other extreme of everyone working and people took advantage of it. You know, people in New York all of a sudden moved to Hawaii or Bali or Vietnam or wherever and tried to take their high salary and live really cheap. Right? So that boomerang back was when companies started to see there's benefits to remote work, but there's downsides when people aren't on my time zone.

Right.

Was kind of everything. So in 2021, 2022, the states had a massive hiring boom. Seemed like every company could not hire fast enough. In fact, the number one most sought after role that companies were hiring for was recruiters. They cannot hide recruiters because they had to hire everyone else and you need recruiters for that. So recruiters were like the rock stars, you know, 2021, 2022. But anyway, the whole end result of all that is near shoring had been around for at least a decade, but the awareness of nearshoring just took off in 2021, 2022, because talent was so scarce, because everyone was hiring, talent was so scarce. Time zones really Mattered because companies started to see the downsides of, if I'm offshoring to India, I've got to do another call at midnight or I can't seem to collaborate with this person on my team that moved halfway across the world because we're not on slack at the same time. And I just can't find good people in New York City or California or wherever I am. So is there another market that I could latch into? So this awareness towards Latin America took off, and companies in the States were very happy to have people in their same time zone that they could collaborate with. There is this massive millions of people on this continent that they could connect with for job openings that they couldn't fill stateside. So it totally changed the way work was done. And I think the 2020s are really the decade for Latin America.

Yeah, that's really interesting. So I'm just wondering, before we get into all of the actual actionable insights that you are going to offer us today, how did you end up in this industry?

Yeah, it's kind of funny in. So I met my wife when I lived in San Francisco, and I was always fascinated with her story because she's an American. She was born in Guam, a little island, you know, between Japan and Hawaii. And her dad worked in the hotel industry, so she was an expat. So basically she went to school in Korea and Japan and kind of grew up there as an American.

Wow.

And I thought that was so cool and like, you know, I grew up in a very, like, suburban middle America, you know, didn't have a passport, you know, until my 20s, you know, just kind of sheltered. So I'm like, wow. You know, my wife is so fascinating and interesting. Like, I. I want to have some experiences like that. So I had my eye on Asia. I really wanted to be an expat in Asia, and I was fascinated with Singapore and Shanghai specifically, and ended up getting into this MBA program. So I was living in San Francisco, and the MBA program was kind of a cool thing where you could get a degree from UCLA in Los Angeles and also a degree from National University of Singapore in Singapore. And for those that don't know, no one in the States cares, but NUS National University of Singapore is the number one school in Asia. So I thought that if I got into this school, you know, it'd be like Harvard or something and everyone would know. But it didn't quite work out that way. Oh, no. Yeah. So long story short, I'm like, trying to, you know, Skype my way into a Job, you know, in Asia. And it just wasn't, wasn't happening. And at the same time I reconnected with this person I knew who was a investor in Shanghai. I had first approached him about, hey, could I work for you? Could I move to Shanghai and work for you? And that conversation lasted about a minute because you know, I don't speak Mandarin and that was a self starter, you know, starter. Um, but he, hey, you know, I kind of have an idea. Could you flush this out for me? So I took like a half baked idea which was big time growth in the fintech world. San Francisco, there's fintechs everywhere. New York City or fintechs, you had tech people and then business people. And most fintechs were led by business people that had no problem raising money. Lots of finance connections, good product vision and they could care less about the software behind it and like what they were building. So hey, you know, maybe there's something here. So ended up working on this whole business plan for this investor and it was to build a company that built minimum viable products, MVPs for fintech companies. And the world was, was kind of our oyster. So I ended up raising a couple million dollars US dollars and where would we put our developers? And you know, it could be anywhere. So I'm looking at like Taiwan and could we do India, you know, where, where should it be? And I stumbled upon Argentina where I had been a backpacker a long time ago. And I remember I had a really good experience there and I thought, you know, this could be kind of interesting. So I looked more into it and came home one day, you know, officially raised the money, came home one day and said, you know, to my wife, so you know how we want to be expats, right? Yeah, well, I don't think it's going to be Asia. What do you think about moving to Argentina?

Just a minor pivot.

Yeah, yeah, just a minor pivot. Just a little bit, you know, only the other side of the world and about as different as you could get from a place like Singapore in every measurable category. But we didn't have kids yet at the time. Now we've got a couple, but no kids at the time. And we were game and open to it. So at the end of 2015 we relocated to Buenos Aires and lived there right in the thick of it, you know, had apartments, not hotels, went to the grocery store, dealt with, you know, labor strikes and the metro not working and, but also some really cool things too, and crazy inflation and like the good, the bad you know, it was such a cool experience. So educational. I'm so fortunate that I could do all this firsthand, but that, that was the. The whole story behind me ending up in Argentina building my first nearshore company.

Wow. So just purely circumstance, more or less. And then you went over there, had this incredible experience and amazing. Everything aligned just for you to end up in exactly the right place.

Yeah. It's so funny, you know, you have this like, life plan and you think you're doing all the right steps and you end up doing something totally different. And 10 years later, I am as passionate as I am about near shoring as I was on the first day.

You know, I just think it's love.

Hearing that there's an incredible thing funny how life happens.

Absolutely. There's a. I, I can't remember who said it, so I'm going to paraphrase this, but I remember watching an interview years ago who may have been a motivational speaker, actually perfect for a situation like this, but I. He said something like that. He thought the best way to approach life, the best motto to have, was to stay committed to your end game, but flexible in your approach. And I think about it, I thought it to myself this morning, you know, and it's funny how things work out. That's awesome.

Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. So I've been to Argentina nine times since and, you know, dealt with inflation so crazy that they, they would write the menus of restaurants in chalk so they could erase it, you know, and change it.

And.

A business climate where you can't really get credit. So if you Want to buy 10 laptops for your team, you better have all the cash, like a big wad of cash, know, to buy that instead of credit cards or. And just, you know, some things that were so foreign to me as someone who spent his whole career in the States, but wow, it just opened my eyes. And, you know, these are a lot of kind of like nutty things about it, but something like flipped in my brain about a few months into it. And, you know, some days, you know, I'm like complaining, like, how come they can't just do this the normal way? You know, like, why does everything have to be so hard? But this thing flipped where I started to think about the environment. You know, you've got this country, and I'm talking about Argentina specifically, but I think you can apply this to different places where. And I'm not saying the US Is perfect, the US has plenty of flaws, but you've got this place where decades and decades and Decades of government mismanagement, protectionist policies, sky high inflation, capital controls, it's hard to bring in hardware, and businesses are taxed to death and you know, all these things, right? So it's, it's a tough place to survive. But on the flip side of that, you have a whole population that from the day they were born, they've had to deal with adversity, they've had to learn how to be flexible, they've had to find some super creative ways just to navigate life. And they're gritty, savvy, smart. So I thought about that, like, it flipped for me. And you know, what, what manager, what company wouldn't want someone who was flexible, adaptable, gritty, great at problem solving. And this is like everybody there because they've had to be from day one just to survive. Stuff that would completely stress me out in the States and friends and it would like, ruin our week. It's just like a minor inconvenience to them, you know, and it flipped everything for me. And I think that's a big reason why I've been so bullish on this area.

Love that, I guess. On that note, also speaking about, you know, your journey into this and, and kind of that mindset shift on a personal level, what would you consider the. Some of the highlights of your career so far? You've obviously been doing this for a good long while, operating all these different spaces. What, what does that look like for you? What have been some of your biggest successes?

Yeah, so, you know, I, I had met way back when I was in Chicago starting my career. I had an internship and I worked for a guy, you know, who was like the chief administration officer, oversaw HR and like 50 different things. And I, I was looking at his career kind of, you know, reverse engineering, and he had lived in a lot of different places. And I thought that was really cool, you know, especially for someone like me who had. Didn't travel ever, you know, and, and I wanted to emulate that because I felt like breadth of experience was more important to me than death of experience. So I wanted to try a lot of different things and touch a lot of different stuff. So to your earlier point about like the end and then the journey, you know, so for me, the journey was all about how do I get a lot of different experience in a lot of different places. And I think that has maybe been the catalyst to me having some success is I have decent pattern recognition and I can kind of see gaps and opportunities because I've been so broad and like, I probably know A little bit about everything, but like not no death in anything. But I can, you know, kind of see to see different patterns. So that's all to say, I think some of the things that have been maybe most interesting for me are I came up in the talent world. So I was running talent for a startup company called Lending Club back in 2013, 2014, and Lending Club at the time was having a real difficult time recruiting software developers were in San Francisco competing with everybody from Facebook and Google and Salesforce, Oracle, and like the list is, you know, a thousand companies long. And they all had better recognition and paid better and so forth. So we ended up winning world's top recruiting department in the year 2013 for companies under a thousand people. And I think I attributed that to a couple things that we did that nobody else was doing. It's kind of common today with the rise of video and YouTube, but in 2012, 2013, we were like one of the first companies to do video job descriptions. And, and there was like a light bulb that went off for me where I remember showing my wife an example of a video job description. And we were watching this, you know, and, and it's super authentic. It's not like, there's not like fireworks and it's mass produced. It's like produced by some marketing expert. Super authentic. So there was this startup that we were watching that had a video job description. They were like the only other company I'd seen do this. And it taught me a lot. It was kind of like what you'd expect some early stage San Francisco tech startup to look like. There's like eight guys, no women, they're wearing their hoodie sweatshirts. There's like exposed duck and brick in the office. Oh, yes, Foosball table.

That's almost just a stock photo at this point.

Yeah, yeah. And like some guy like one of the engineers in the background on his skateboard in the office. So, you know, and the, the CEO is trying to explain what his company does. So, you know, I'm like telling my wife, like, you gotta watch this. Like, see, like, isn't this cool? And she's like, oh my God, I would never work there. And this light bulb went off though, for me, because imagine if it was just like a text job description. Maybe she had applied, right? But who wouldn't want to just spend two or three minutes watching their future boss with the office in the background, explain what the company is, what the role is all about. You get a feel for their personality, their style, all that stuff. And we started to do that. You know, with Lending Club, we had video job descriptions. And then I also noticed a trend.

Where.

The engineering there, it actually, it was kind of the opposite of that company I just talked about. Most of the engineers were, you know, in their 40s. They had families and they were senior. So when you get to a certain phase of your life, there are different priorities that you care about. You know, you want to be done with work at 5pm and hop on the train and get home to your family. You don't want to stay, stay there till 9 o' clock having pizza and playing video games and, you know, screwing around. But plenty of companies did want that. Plenty of companies had a culture of, you know, let's whiteboard, you know, 15 different ways to solve this thing and take breaks between playing FIFA on video games, you know, eating a bunch of candy. Lending Club was more mature and serious. And so we, we ended up going to subway stations, like way out in the suburbs, a good hour away from the office where people in their 40s with families probably lived. And we had these, like little flyers all about, you know, work, life, balance, finish up at 5, competitive benefits and, you know, hard problems, but, you know, things that would, like, appeal to that age group. So that was a huge success. You know, like, instead of sitting in front of our computer all day sending LinkedIn messages, you know, we waited at the train station and we had this like giant puzzle that people could like, stop and look at and try to solve. And it created a buzz. So anyway, I think a reason for success that year and for being recognized is we saw gaps and we tried to do things that nobody else was doing. And I'm really proud of that team that we had. And then just from a macro standpoint, as an entrepreneur, all three nearshore companies that I've had, they all still exist. And they all started at zero revenue and grew to over 4 million in revenue. And that's not very common. You know, I think that people can do that. So I owe a lot to other people for doing that. But I think that's something I'm really, really proud of.

Absolutely. And congratulations. It's so cool as well to watch this sort of trajectory of your career, finding these gaps and having these innovative ideas and then going out after them. You know, what if we try this and seeing that it works and then moving on to the next step, it's really inspiring. That's awesome.

Thank you.

Yeah.

Could you walk us through some of the actual, like, hard KPIs that you're using as you're building these companies to hit that sort of 4 million mark.

Yeah. I always tell my team, you've got to be effective before you're efficient. I probably say this like 50 times a day because the instinct is to come up with like percentages, like we grew 200%, or our open rate, you know, is 40% or whatever and. Or like our ratio is X. None of that matters until you've hit some sort of statistically significant raw number. So I don't really care at all about percentages or anything. You know, in the early stages, I only care about like hard raw numbers. What I tend to look at. It's not anything like earth shattering. You know, I look at top line revenue, I look at gross profit, which you can derive gross profit, margin, percentage. I look at ebit, you know, that's a short, shorter version of ebitda. But in a professional services company, you know, you're not really amortizing or depreciating. So it's just, you know, a simple EBIT that really gives me what I need to know. And if you take that, you know, one step lower, you can look at each function, you know, should have different KPIs. So for sales, when you're early going, you know, again, I don't think I'm saying anything profound here, but I think client meetings are really important because it sets the behavior. You know, you want to talk to a lot of prospects. And, you know, I'll, I'll paraphrase what I've heard before is know nobody's ever done something in business that didn't start from a relationship.

Right.

Well, you just have to shake a lot of hands to make, make some deals happen. And I remember, you know, my very first entrepreneurship company I had, you know, even before Lending Club, I just did like a year. You know, it's like 10 o' clock on a Thursday night and I'm like tweaking the website copy and thinking like, if I, what if I put a comma there? You know, all of a sudden I'm gonna get all this, you know, all these people, you know, pounding on the door to do business with me. But then I realized, like, you don't really have a business if you don't have a customer, right? So get out of this. Like, should I do an LLC or, you know, an S Corp or should I use WordPress or Wix for my website? Who cares? You know, get it, get a customer. So that's what I tell our salespeople. You know, you gotta meet some, you Gotta meet people, get out there, relationships. And then the business happens after that. And then on the recruiting side, you know, we're looking at things like. I think the biggest metric for me is on site interviews. So how many candidates can you get to an on site interview stage? And then the on site interview to offer extends. And there's things that can be nuances at the extremes, you know, the outer edges of that, like total number of candidates you're screening or submittals. But if you're getting people to the on site interview, it means your quality is pretty good. If you're getting people to extend offers, that's also a really good metric. And then, you know, offer, extend versus offer accept. I think it, it can tell you something, you know, if you're making strong offers and you're moving fast enough and all that. But that's really the, the KPIs that we would care about.

Yeah, beautiful. And what, what's probably like the biggest difference between Those early stage KPIs and the late stage before you move on.

So back to the effective versus efficient. So once you've reached some sort of level of effectiveness, then you can care about efficiency.

Right.

So, you know, we're probably at a stage right now with plug technologies where we're large enough, we're closing in on 100 people and we care about efficiencies and ratios and percentages. You know, we want to see that. But that meant nothing to me in the early days.

Yeah, well, you've done it three times.

Successfully, so it's amazing.

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And on that note, also the saying, you know, putting in the commas and stressing about the copy and all of that sort of thing at this stage in your career. Obviously you've been able to scale these businesses successfully so many times. Do you still struggle at any point with that imposter syndrome? How do you navigate that, especially in, you know, these high stake conversations with investors or clients?

Yeah, I think I've, I think I've only I've only had imposter syndrome.

Really.

I think that is. That's the human condition, isn't it?

Yeah. You know, so I think. I think back to. There's probably two really clear memories that I have that I'll share. The first is. But I also think that it. It was like a. Maybe a reason what drove me, or maybe three things that I'll share. So the first is I could not have been more average in high school.

Like, right, okay.

Right in the middle of my class rank, I was like an average athlete, an average everything, you know, and then when I moved to San Francisco, I think I was 30 years old. I spent a couple years in Southern California as well, but I was 30 when I moved to San Francisco. And, you know, I went to, like, some. Some state school in the state of Illinois no one had ever heard of. And I get to San Francisco and it's like, everyone went to Stanford, Berkeley, mit, and Caltech. Oh, my gosh. Like, and I felt totally inferior. But I think when I look back, it was really good because I had this chip on my shoulder, this burning hunger to stand out, and I knew it wasn't going to be because of raw intelligence. I certainly didn't have that. And the third time was when I did that MBA program I had mentioned. I remember. So the program was an executive mba. So that meant, like, people are kind of further along in their career for the most part. It was people that were, like, managers or directors trying to make the leap to, like, VP or C suite. So we had a lot of people from, like, major companies like General Electric and WeWork and LinkedIn then, you know, super successful. And I felt like there was 38 people in that class, and I felt like 37 people were smarter than me. You know, I felt like I was. I was like, the dumb one. But again, I think that was important. You know, I. I think you don't really. Like, if I did that MBA program today, I'd feel like I kind of know this stuff and maybe I could show off a little bit because I know I can teach some things, but I don't know if I had any value to offer. 10 years ago with that program, I just felt in awe of, wow, these people are so wise and smart. So maybe, like, the. That was good because it drove me because I felt like I was humbled so much every day, and I. I just had this, like, need to somehow keep pace with.

It.

Just everyone felt so much more impressive than I was.

Yeah, right. I think that's a really Positive thing. Is there something you can point to currently, today that is kind of that same thing for you that keeps you kind of striving for something better?

Yeah, about a year ago I took like a little detour, you know, still very bullish on all the nearshore stuff but I wasn't doing anything here in Hawaii so I wanted to try to do some business here and I since in the last year I've bought stakes in what we call home services. So you think about like cleaning or your plumber or locksmith, you know, people like that. So I bought stakes in two of these small businesses and it's a whole new world for me, you know, like, you know, I don't know anything about this stuff and you know, my value add is, you know, I can bring some capital and some business sense and you know, how to professionalize this world. But I'm also totally out of my element. And Lee, you know, in like the real know how and specificity of that particular domain.

Yeah, awesome. That's something that Jaz talks about a lot actually needing to, wanting to not always to put herself in positions where you're not the smartest person in the room. You know that there is, there is something. I think that's where a lot of the growth happens. It's really cool that you sort of still chase that in different areas of, you know, of your business.

Yeah, I think it's fun too, you know, I think it's fun to learn again, you know, my personality. I'm never going to be the domain expert on anything but, but it's really fun to learn and just have different problem sets, you know, like, oh, our locksmith company needs to get more leads which is wildly different from like B2B sales and you know, trying to sell like five person team of software developers from Argentina. Um, it's a totally different problem set. And then I think that's really fun for me.

Awesome, that's great. So I guess getting into the technical operations of it all. How do you source and vet your talent in Argentina? What's the process?

Yeah, so the first business that I had, it was much more technical. We had our own technical staff, directors, lead software developers, architects, all that. And there's pros and cons around that. But the cons led me to how we do it today. So when you talk to engineering companies that are hiring software developers, they might ask you like, well the same question you just asked me, Jasmine, you know, how do you, how do you vet people? You know, and so we used to do that all the time, you know, at that first company. And I noticed, although we could technically vet people, if you put 10 engineering leaders in a room together from different companies and you ask them to vet an Engineer, you'll get 10 wildly different opinions.

Right.

And no, nobody talks about that. They just think like a good engineer is a good engineer is a good engineer. And it couldn't be further from the truth when you get to the brass tacks of it, because everyone interviews differently. They bring different biases, they, they bring their past, you know, baggage to how they hire or they don't know how to interview very well or whatever. So there's really not a whole lot of value to be derived from our own technical people vetting an engineer for you because we might think completely different. Sure. So I scrapped that when we started Plug and decided to make it, you know, your hiring bar. That's all we care about. We're going to learn your hiring bar. We're going to customize our search entirely for you. And we're not even going to have engineers vet. It's pure recruiters. You know, you tell us exactly what to look for, we'll ask the questions in a way that we can gather useful information. But in the end, you, client need to technically vet them because you're the only one who can vet them the way that you want to technically vet them.

And do you have a predetermined pool of employees or staff that you're offering or what does that look like for you? Are you hiring new every time?

Yeah. So what you're referring to is commonly referred to as having a bench. So that might mean like, let's say we've got 80 people, which is, you know, close to where Plug is, and five people, their projects wrap up in August normal for professional services, would we take those five and try to push them on someone else? And that wasn't, that's. I'm so glad you brought that up because that was another thing that I wanted to move away from because I learned it the hard way from my first company. So the pro of that is like, hey, these are known entity people. You know, we, we know them, we know their org style and if they're good and all that. But the downside of that is you're really looking out for your own interests more than the client's interest, if you think deeply about that, because that person could be an okay fit for the client. And they're kind of like a hot potato for you because they're costing you money that you can't bill out. So you're like, please take my software developer that is just burning a hole through my budget right now and you can cover their cost. I think it's so much better to. Project wraps up, engineer wraps up. We would love to try to find another project for you, but we have to be client first always. So whatever that client wants. Now maybe serendipity happens and we happen to find a new client that perfectly matches with an engineer that just wrapped up. But it's kind of rare. I think it's better to start fresh and bring a custom search and get the client exactly what they want rather than try to. This sounds poor, but peddle somebody else's candidate, right?

So is the loss of roi, I guess, like it seems that you're more profitable just sort of letting them go and the cost of training new recruits or vetting them isn't outweighing that.

Yeah. So there's really not a, you know, different countries have different labor laws, but we're transparent. For the most part we are focused on senior talent. And senior talent in Latin America is different from junior talent. And I don't just mean from seniority. They're different in what they want. Junior level talent tends to want hands on mentorship, lots of training, great benefits and a reasonable salary. Senior level people want challenging projects and money.

Right.

They don't care about the benefits, they don't care about mentorship, they don't care about some of the other things. So as a result they're more often than not opting in for like a contractor relationship than an employee relationship. So they're making a trade, they're trading stability in exchange for higher cash compensation and interesting projects. So when the project wraps up, they know in advance and they know that's, that's the trade that they made. So everybody's on the same side of the expectations, you know, there's no surprises. So the cost of having somebody wind off a project is pretty, pretty negligible. And then the cost of training somebody, again, it's not a huge part of our business because we're mostly hiring senior people instead of, you know, junior to mids.

Sounds like you've cut out a lot of the risk there.

Yeah. I was also going to ask actually just earlier on when we spoke about remote workers, how you sort of manage monitoring that the people who are, who are out of office or in different countries are actually doing what they're meant to. But I guess that's the answer, isn't it? You have, you've already kind of mitigated that risk. You've got people who really want to be there, who are senior level, who know what they're doing and who are committed to the project and getting it done.

Yeah, we might just be the luckiest company in the world, but there's been so few cases of us being burned by bad actors. It just, it's just really, really rare. But I think there's also something about Latin America, you know, where, gosh, you know, this is kind of a silly story and maybe this will hit my point, but right before I was an entrepreneur and nearshoring, I was executive team slash, you know, running, running a bunch of departments at this mid stage startup in San Francisco. And we were going through a little bit of a tough time. You know, we were, you know, in the startup, startup financing world, you know, it's sequential. So series A and then you raise your B round and then your C round. So we were a B stage startup raising our C round and you could kind of tell like we haven't raised money in a while. Do we have enough money in the bank? It kind of seems like, is this business going to last? And we were probably a few months from running out of money so we had to lay off about a dozen staff. And it was really rough, really sad. And you know, in my role I'm the one kind of driving all that. So it was, you know, we got to work, you know, on a Monday morning, it's kind of somber in the office in San Francisco. And then you know, we kind of had some like entitled bratty team members that are like ah, what happened to the hummus? Did you guys in the kombucha? There's no hummus and kombucha in the fridge.

You know, these are important issues.

This is very San Francisco also.

Yeah, guys like we 12 people's jobs were lost so it couldn't be more different in Latin America. You just have like no entitlement, pure gratitude, hard working, thankful. I don't take any of this for granted type of personality and I think that is something we really appreciate.

Amazing.

And what about specific software or tools that you use between clients and stuff to kind of connect everybody? What does that look like for you?

Yeah, I think a lot of the stuff that your audience probably is familiar with, you know, Slack for a lot of the quick communication, Google Drive and Google apps. We like Monday.com quite a bit, you know, for project management and uploading files and you know, kind of tracking stuff like that. So you know, a lot of the basics. Cool.

I'm always just wondering if someone has a golden bullet that I haven't heard of yet, I want to be the first to know about it.

Yeah, tell me. Tell me if you find anything.

Yeah, we'll let you know. You'll have to keep watching the show.

I will, I will.

Okay, so for remote staff doing the work that they're meant to be doing, and you've problem solved that with kind of just the demographic that you're hiring, what sort of metric are your clients coming to you to check in on? Or do you hand over sort of 100%?

Yeah, so we tend to focus, we identify much more as we call staff augmentation than like a whole solution. So companies that kind of own the end, end solution, they're usually owning some sort of deliverable or KPI. Like we will build the software for a quarter million dollars and have it done in three months. Right. We don't own that part. Our job is to find great talent and then the client, you know, manages the team member. And this is where I think Latin America thrives because you've got this really passionate talent base that cares. You know, they ask hard questions, they push back, they take a vested interest. They have personalities and they want to know about the client and their lives and their kids and, you know, vice versa. You know, they'll share personal stuff and they become like part of the team, maybe part of the family. So managing them is a lot easier. You know, it's a lot more simple because it just feels like you're managing somebody in New York or Dallas or wherever. You know, I will say that the thing that we care the most about for our clients is retention. What does attrition look like? Is it. And if we lose people, is it voluntary? Is it involuntary? Is it regrettable? This is somebody that, oh, it's really painful that they left and just back to that loyal, dedicated, committed mindset. I can probably count on one hand the amount of voluntary departures we've had in two years.

Well.

And that is not like San Francisco. You know, you're worried. You're worried people are going to leave every minute. It's not like that in Latin America. The loyalty is amazing.

I think that also is a real testament to what you've created as well. Like, obviously you've identified the right, the right location. You identified Argentina, you figured out where, you know. But I think also a lot of that really speaks to the culture that you've built into your business. And I think that's awesome.

No, I appreciate that. I Think if I could impart any, any wisdom here. It's when you don't know people and they're just in the other side of the world, it's easy to refer to them as like, yeah, we've got some low cost resources in Mexico, you know, but when you remember that these are all people with their own lives and motivations and personalities, styles, and you treat them like people instead of low cost resources, just that, that mindset shift and it changes the game and makes it a real relationship.

Absolutely. So how do you go about finding your clients? Do you find at this stage that they're predominantly coming to you or do you do any outreach?

Oh, I, I wish we had a line out the door, but I think just like every company, you know, it's, it's noisy. There's a lot of, a lot of competition, you know, out there. But yeah, we are lucky. We have some referrals, we have some really nice partners. We'll get some inbound. We have salespeople that are doing outbound. We'll go to meetups, conferences, events. So I guess the short answer is, any possible way we can meet a customer? We're out there.

Yeah, sure. So it's still a very active process. And that, I mean, that's typical. We'd all be a little bit glum if you just were coasting along easily, not having to do anything.

Everybody else feeling very bummed out watching that. I think that was a good answer.

Have you tried, have you tried other types of structures with your other near shoring companies where they have looked different in terms of the demographics you've hired or how you followed the client journey or managed the staff? Have you explored other structures?

The first company that I had was very heavy Argentina. And we invested a lot in things like a really cool office. And if you've ever been to Argentina, you'll know that meat is a big part of the culture now. For me, it is the best steak ever. You know, no disrespect to Australia or anywhere else, but it really is.

Yeah, I think those are fighting words over here.

It's just so good and it's so important that we even had like a barbecue grill right. Just right outside the office. Like you open the sliding door and you could throw a steak on.

Wow, that's amazing.

Yeah. And, you know, we had a bar in the office and video games and, you know, all, all sorts of cool stuff. And you know, so we invested in that, we invested in the culture. But then the, the two subsequent companies that I've had it's been a lot more about meeting the person where they're at. So we had a lot more like wildly different levels. At the first company, junior level, mid level, senior level and management. But in the other two companies, one was like what's called rpo, where you lease recruiters out to growing tech companies. So let's say you raise some money. You need to hire 40 people tomorrow. The first thing you need are recruiters. So we would have like a turnkey, you know, here's some recruiters and then you can go hire your people and then plug. We're trying to meet people more where they're at, you know, instead of like forcing an office and like, hey, come to the office. We have a grill. Come to the office games. If you're senior and you just want to work from home and maximize your cash, that's cool, you know, like, that's all right. I do think it's really important for companies to know who they are and know what they want because that's where when cognitive dissonance happens and you know you're offering something different than what you're delivering. We just want to be super clear, like this is what we, this is what we're trying to optimize for. If you're also optimizing for that, it's a great match. If you're not, let's not try to force it.

It sounds like you've solved a lot of the risk mitigation side of it. But does that translate to the margins? Are you seeing a better return on margins with this current model?

I think there are different margins to look at, you know, to put it a different way. So there are, there's gross profit margin and then there's EBIT margin contribution margin. We're doing better on the even margin and probably a little bit worse on the gross profit margin. So the business itself is more profitable, but the unit economics are a little less profitable because we're also not trying to play the game of like currency arbitrage. And you know, I think we're offering a better product for our customers where in the other company it was a better product for us.

Right.

And we just hoped our customers benefited.

Yeah, probably a bit more long term value in this approach, but it takes a little while to get there. More of a legacy build, I suppose.

Yeah, I mean we wouldn't be where we are if I didn't have all that. You know, you learn a lot of lessons along the way.

I think this is probably like a broad question, but at an industry level, what are like the current dynamics and the culture of near shoring? Like the best and the worst of it? What should C suite leaders who are interested in near shoring, what should they be watching for in 2025 and going forward?

Yeah, I think there's, there's probably a couple trends, you know, that would be on the radar. The, the things to maybe like be mindful of, and I, I had hinted on this earlier is Latin America is not the low cost leader. Right. So if you're, if cost is the most important thing for you, don't go to Latin America. Right, Right. Southeast Asia is still the clear winner in terms of cost. And to the other point I made earlier about low cost resources versus real people, Latin America is making a statement as a place to find talented people that can solve ambiguous problems. So you have to build that into your budget. You're paying for that value. But I think there's an arbitrage opportunity as a pro is you're always trying to balance marginal cost versus marginal benefit. So the marginal cost is higher in Latin America, but the marginal benefit is much higher than compared to Asia. So if I'm the C suite, I'd ask myself, do I care about cost or do I care about value?

Yeah. Okay.

The constant question. Yeah.

Yeah.

What would be a really great green flag for someone picking up with a near shoring company a question they could be asking you?

Yeah. Is that from like maybe a talent perspective, like what a software developer, you know, might be looking for? Yeah. So what's been interesting in many countries in Latin America is it's still like relatively volatile. Right. And you know, the States, we had our couple years of, you know, pandemic inflation and wait, you know, this bread costs this much now, you know, and it's, it gets kind of crazy, but wow, you know, like inflation is just all over the place, you know, in Latin America, you know. Sure. You know, your viewers have probably seen images of like Venezuela where the currency isn't even worth the paper it's printed on, you know, and like they, they burn it, you know, to keep warm. I mean, that's, that exists, but it's also kind of an anomaly. But I think to the point maybe your question is asking is, you know, what should talent in Latin America look for in a near shoring company? And if I were them, I'd first decide like, where am I in my career? You know, do I need mentorship? Do I care about benefits? Do I care about cash? Do I care about a project that's really challenging. And in Latin America, because of the history, there's some distrust towards institutions, there's some distrust towards newer companies. And we were all, we were all brand new companies once in our life. But you know, I've been in this space for a long time. I think this is maybe something that Plug is able to offer to stand out is long track record. You know, I've gone through all the, the craziness, gone through all the chaos. We're a trusted brand. We're a trusted company. We pay on time. We're not going to run out of money. We're not going to, you know, leave you hanging in a lurch. You know, non paid. We work with companies that are great and there's a lot of trust factor there. So I think if you're senior in your career, you're going to look for a company like Plug. And why you might choose Plug is because you're also trying to mitigate risk. You want a trusted company that has a good reputation.

Yeah, right.

Great answer. So we have a little segment that we like to throw on guests at the end here. We're wrapping up now, which is our rapid fire question. So just really quick answers off the top of your head. And Lisa, I was going to say.

In five words or less, but I just, I just made that rule. Is that what did you have to sacrifice to achieve your success?

Yeah, I mean, just to be brutally candid, 2017 was a rough year because we were trying to get our family started and I was traveling all the time. You know, we were living in Hawaii, but it seemed like I was on an airplane more than anything, headed to Argentina, heading to California. And that was really rough on us, my wife and I, and we got through that period. And now I really try to minimize travel, but I think that was a sacrificial year.

What advice would you give your younger self?

What advice? Oh, gosh, this is easy. Don't wait to start your entrepreneurship journey. You know, every day as an entrepreneur, you're, you're building for your own retirement, not someone else's. And all your learning is compounding. You know, what I learned last year, I keep for myself and I keep growing for that. Gosh, I waited way too long to take the first step. I wish I did this right away.

Oh, you don't look a day over 21.

There you go.

You're too kind.

All right, well, we've got also another new segment we'd love for you to pass on a question as one executive to another to our next guest. That we can ask them.

Yeah, let me think. That's an interesting segment. I like your spontaneity here. Let's see which book had the biggest impact on your business outlook?

What book had the biggest impact on your.

Yeah, for me, I really liked Ben Horowitz, who's from Andreessen Horowitz, it's a VC firm in San Francisco. And he wrote a book called the Hard Things about the hard things. So what made that book different is if you pick up a leadership book or a management book, it's almost all rose colored lenses. Like, follow these seven steps to success. And his was just brutally, like, this is a horrible time and this is a terrible day. And like, these are the all the mistakes that I made and it was terrible. But the truth is, like, it really is like that it is hard, you know, it is hard to keep dusting yourself up. So to read somebody who was incredibly successful, just talk about how horribly hard it was. And just the brutal honesty and candor of. Was everything that I needed to read at the time and give me this confidence that like, I can, you know, I can get past these challenges and struggles.

Amazing.

It's not failure, it's just normal.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a lot of aspects of, of especially starting business that I think is literally just. It's something to get through, you know?

Yeah. It made me relate to. So we had our first kid in May of 2019. So he just turned 6. And right before he came, one of my best friends called and he had two kids that were a couple years ahead. And he's calling, he's like, hey, so having a kid is amazing. And everyone's going to tell you that it's only amazing. But I got to tell you, it is really, really hard. Like, it is so hard. Like, it's brutally. You know, he just went on and on for like 10 minutes.

But the man needed to vent.

You know what, this is so funny that you said that though, Brian, because the person that I got that from, who that I have in my head, you know, sometimes before we get to the good part, there is just things to get through. He was actually speaking about the first nine months of being a father for the first time. And he said, it's my advice to all dads. I make sure to tell them, you know, I ring them up and I say, you know, it's going to be incredible. You just got to get through the first nine months.

Yeah. So I, I passed that advice on to new fathers now and. But it was, it was everything that I needed to hear because there are some brutally rough days and nights. And if I only thought that it was bliss, I would have doubted myself and questioned, like, what's wrong with why? Why is this so hard for me and so easy for everybody else? So having that, you know, and it was of course amazing. Like, yeah, the greatest thing ever. But there are some rough days and I'm so glad that I had that perspective, you know, so I didn't have that doubt.

Yeah, I love that. That's beautiful. My book collection is growing rapidly since starting hosting on this show. So thank you for another recommendation. So we are out of time, Brian. It's gone so fast. But thank you so much for joining us today and for our listeners. Could you give us an idea of where to find you and to see what you do?

Yeah, absolutely. Best way to find us is Plug. That's Plug Technologies and the website is Plugg Tech. T E C H. Plug Tech. Gorgeous.

Amazing.

Alrighty. And we will have links for everything down below. Thank you so much. All the way from Hawaii. We'll talk again soon, I'm sure.

Thank you so much for joining us, Brian. Nice to meet you.

My pleasure. Thank you so much.

Thank you.

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