No Office. No Drama. Just Results—How Smart COOs Lead Remotely | GrowthAssistant (Podcast 480)

We hire like 0, 2 or 0.3% of applications, something like that. It's just a ton of volume that we go through before picking the right candidates.

Very cool. I love that you, you know the data for that. That makes sense. Today's guest is Gerald Koo. He is the biz ops and strategic finance lead at Growth Assistant and offshore recruiting agency. With a background spanning private equity, strategic finance and operational leadership, Gerald brings a deeply analytical and systems minded approach to scaling remote teams. Prior to Growth Assistant, he held roles at Vyl and Sumeru Equity Partners where he developed a strong foundation in financial strategy and operations. Now he is helping drive growth and efficiency for a company that specializes in placing high quality offshore talent into scaling startups and companies. And in our conversation today we get into the nitty gritty of data. How to think about what to collect, what to measure, how to use it to make better decisions. Gerald also shares a compelling case for why offshore agencies can be a smarter solution than hiring freelancers or building remote teams from scratch on your own. And we explore the keys to maintaining a thriving company culture and seamless communication across remote teams. So if you're thinking about scaling with offshore talent, leveling up your data, or you just want to hear from a sharp operator behind the scenes of a really awesome company, this one is for you. We are here live with Gerald Ku. Welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me. Glad to be here.

Yeah, really looking forward to this conversation. We were chit chatting back and forth a bit. You are based in New York and you are currently working with a company called Growth Assistant. So why don't you give us a little bit of an insight on what do you do at Growth Assistant and who do you serve?

Yeah, absolutely. So Growth Assistant is a global talent agency. We essentially match US based companies with offshore talent. Mostly in the Philippines, mostly in marketing focused roles. I am the finance and biz ops lead at Growth Assistant. So how I would describe my role is split into sort of three main parts. Anything finance and accounting related, all oversea. Anything data related flows through me typically in some shape or form. And that's not always dollar signs. It's often sales data, rev ops, recruiting related data and then another sort of third of my job would be more operational. So special projects. Anytime there's a cross functional initiative that there's not a clear owner of at the department level and then really just being the CEOs right hand with anything that doesn't have the bandwidth for or wants to put some extra focus on in the company. CEO Is who I report to. Her name is Adrian Schwager.

Okay, cool. And Adrian, how did you guys get connected?

Yeah, it's. It was originally through Twitter, honestly. So.

Okay.

Growth Assistant was founded by Adrian and a guy named Jesse Puji. Jesse was a successful entrepreneur. He started and ended up selling at one of the larger performance marketing agencies called Ambush. And then coming out of that, he decided to start a few more companies under this umbrella called Gateway X Growth Assistant being one of them. At the same time, he developed like a bit of a Twitter following. So, like, he has almost 200,000 followers on Twitter. And I had been following him for a little bit. Um, just popped up on my feed enough times that I hit follow and eventually I saw him tweet that they needed this. This person at Growth is this. And I. I thought it sounded really interesting. So I ended up emailing him and ended up connecting with him and Adrian through that.

Okay, beautiful. So he's no longer with the company and it's just you and Adrian.

So he was. He's still very involved with the company, but more so like very active board member versus Adrian runs the day to day of the business.

Great. All right, so how long have you been with the company?

About a year and a half now.

Okay, tell us a little bit about what was the state of the business when you came in in terms of company size, offerings, you know, challenges, things that were going well. What was it like when you first came in?

Yeah, definitely. I would say the business has grown a lot since I joined. Right now we are doing north of one and a half million of monthly revenue. And at the time it was. It was under a million. At the same time, we built out our team a lot around the time when I joined. We hired some people on the sales team, some people on the recruiting team invested more in marketing. So the team has built out quite a bit. When I joined, I would say it. It was sort of. There wasn't like a true semblance of a leadership team. A lot of the people who were on the team were sort of like ICs or doing their functional work versus over time, we've built out the leadership team a little bit more. One other big change is when I first joined, we were pretty reliant on marketing through Twitter, just because Jesse's Twitter famous Adrian has a small following as well. And over time, we've invested more in other marketing channels and built that out as well.

Great. Okay. What does your day to day look like now?

Every day is. Is. Can be pretty different. Which Is, you know, part of the thing I like about it. It's a pretty wide breadth of stuff I get to work on, but I think it sort of matches up on average with what I went over before. Sometimes I'll be focusing on the finance side, so that includes anything like FP and a. Like putting together the monthly reporting pack, strategic finance questions, also overseeing all our financial operations and accounting. So that takes quite a bit of time. Sometimes I would say often the bulk of my day is something data related. So sometimes that looks like, you know, getting certain data requests or certain like hypotheses from the the team that they want to look into. Sometimes that's building out different dashboards or trying to improve the infrastructure and processes with which we track and report on data and then, you know, looking at it, trying to extract insights and actions from it. A lot of times, chunky parts of my day are spent on like special projects and initiatives as well. Like if we're thinking of expanding geographically, for example, or we want to roll out a new process in the sales side or the recruiting side. If I'm involved there, oftentimes that will be a chunk of my, my day as well.

Okay, this is great. I love where this is going because I guess I didn't mention this to you. We were talking a little bit before we started reporting, but the company that I was a big part of growing was a sales recru. We placed hundreds of reps. Yeah, I think like the most we ever placed in a month was like 110 in a month. So over my time there, thousands of sales reps. And man, that's pretty crazy. Data tracking is so important. And it's one of those things that I didn't realize until once we had gotten so kind of far in a year or two where I recognized the data that I needed to make decisions, but I didn't have it because I hadn't started tracking it early enough. And so now it's one of the main things I'm thinking about when I come into actually worked with another. I did a fractional CEO role at a outsourced company that recruits from the Philippines. So I'm really familiar with the. The industry is one of the first things when I came in, what data do you have? And it was not good. It was everywhere. So being able to figure out, okay, what do we actually need, how do we track that? And then making sure that team members are responsible and clear on what they're supposed to be tracking so it's accurate. So I would love to hear it sounds like this is a big part of your role. What is the data that specifically for the industry that you're in? What's the data that's most important for you guys to track accurately?

Yeah, I would say I would split it up into two main buckets. So one thing, like on the sales side, it looks like you're the typical stats that you would track in any kind of B2B sales type. Org. You're looking at funnel metrics, you're looking at conversion all the way from a lead down to conversion in the funnel. What sources those are coming from, et cetera, sales cycles and whatnot. Typical, typical stuff on the sort of demand side, on the supply side, which is recruiting, that's where it's a little bit more specific to our business. A couple key metrics that we focus a lot on are time to hire and time to fill. Those are sort of like from when we launch a role with the client. How long does it take to get a job offer out to a candidate? And then what is the total time from launching the role to actually having the candidate on board with the client? Another thing that we look at super closely is sort of proxies for talent quality. So one thing that we look at a lot is cancels and replacements in the first 90 days. And then we often cut that by sort of a talent quality reason. So that's sort of our indicator if, like, if someone is getting canceled or replaced in the first 90 days and it's like because the town had an issue or we did something wrong, that's sort of what we, what we track. We also, on the flip side, want to like, obviously delight our customers. So we'll track NPS scores, customer feedback pretty closely to see not just like, you know, when stuff is going wrong and minimizing that, but trying to maximize opportunities to really give clients like magical experiences. Love that.

What is the process for tracking that data specifically on the recruiting side, I'm curious, is it all automated based on where the team's putting in their info? Are they responsible for updating Google sheets or what is the kind of streamlined system for making sure that that's tracked accurately from team members?

Yeah, yeah. Today we do it in a couple places. The main place where we track our, our recruiting pipeline and how that is flowing through from a, a launch requisition to an endorsement or a job offer, all the way to an onboarding. The main way we track that is honestly. ClickUp. Not sure if you're familiar, but it's just like a Project management software and we've built out very like custom tasks and, and fields and cloud ClickUp, including like calculations and automations that help us track everything. ClickUp is pretty good about letting you export all the data or connecting to it via API so that we can then look at it in, in Google sheets or however we want to track it. We also have an ATS and we use the ATS to track all the candidates and different conversion rates. However, like the time that someone is taking through our process is typically tracked and ClickUp and that's sort of our product management tool. On the cancel and replacement side, we use HubSpot for our CRM, which is also what we use to track cancel and replacement tickets. So that's sort of the other side of the data equation.

Okay, for someone that's listening and maybe they're thinking, man, I am. I've got data all over. I don't even know where to start. I don't know what I should be tracking. What questions of thought or thinking or principles around this topic would you recommend someone kind of go through to start?

Um, yeah, I think. Well, one thing is it doesn't have to be perfect necessarily. So I think as a, a small company and as, as a startup, you, you kind of bootstrap together what you can on the data side and then it becomes more of a priority over time. So I think like it's okay if you, if you're a small company and you don't have like the most sophisticated like data warehouse, data lake and like a BI tool on top of that, and you're using sort of the, the tools that you, you grew up with as a company. I think the other thing I would say is what I think we've done a good job at is finding like sort of scrappier ways to make these tools more useful and in, in absence of like you know, a whole data warehouse, making sure that the softwares are all talking to each other and we're able to make sense of data and stitch it together from different sources. So one thing that is, is helpful is having shared codes or identifiers that live across the different softwares. So you know, in HubSpot we have the same code that is showing up in, in ClickUp, which is showing up in our ATS, in our payroll software, etc. And even though those may not be directly integrated with each other, we're able to kind of stitch it together on the back end if we ever need to.

Can you give an example of a code?

So you have to Kind of. You have to. It's. It's the. An example of a code is just like letters and numbers that are random, and you have to just decide on what you want to use as a. As a company. For us, one code that was really useful was just the HubSpot record IDs. So we make sure that the HubSpot record ID is linked to the work we do in. In ClickUp, the work we do in our ats. It's also in our sort of payroll and productivity tracking software. So when we need to, we can sort of match it up.

Epic. Okay. I would love to take a little bit of a. A different direction of the conversation and hear a little bit about how your executive team is set up or the structure of the company. How many? Well, I guess first question is, the candidates that you're placing, are they technically your employees and you're covering like insurance and payroll, or is it your client's responsibility to manage those types of things?

Good question. We give our contractors benefits, and our contractors work for us, and they're sort of subcontracted out, you could call it, to our clients. So they're not responsible for any, like, benefits, taxes, et cetera related to hiring them.

Okay, and how many of those team members or contractors do you guys have?

Uh, we have over. Over 500 at this point.

Amazing. That's so awesome. Very cool. And your leadership team internally, what does that look like?

Um, leadership. Currently we have me, Adrian, obviously. Uh, we have a head of sales and sort of head of client in general. His name is Brett. Um, he oversees the entire sales, account management, and customer support side of the business. Um, we have Carolyn, who leads up marketing. Um, and then we have V. Veronica. She is our head of recruiting.

I'm curious with the. This sales position he's doing sales, account management, and customer support. Is that just like, if something goes wrong, his. Like he's trying to save the sale or, like, get a replacement? Or is he actually doing more like client management throughout the month with ongoing things that are coming up during the recruiting process, or is that all? Veronica?

So I'd say Brett is. You can think of it him as leading the team that is typically interfacing with the clients. He'll certainly get involved when he needs to, but he has, you know, sales reps, account managers, customer support people that he sort of oversees and manages. I think how we thought about the role was an owner of revenue, more or less. And when you think about revenue, you have the new business side that's coming in, but you Also have account management where we're trying to expand customers and customer support where we're trying to like provide great service and of course save any customers that are wanting to cancel or shrink. In terms of comms during the recruiting process, the client team and the recruiting team definitely tag team it. So customers will often have like sort of a main point of contact in the, in the, the account management or sales Org and that you can think of as their tour guide. But along the way there's several stops where you might see the customer support people you might get introduced to the recruiting team that's working on placing your roles for you, et cetera.

Mm. Yeah, I like the idea of in some degree sales positions also being responsible for like you said, decline support. Because I think there's a lot of teams where it's like, let's bring in a salesperson who's really great at closing sales and they'll just kind of get anyone in the door and then they, they brush their hands and it's like, you know, good, good luck and that whole other team is responsible for it. And like there is this. You're kind of alluding to this. There's a really beautiful switch when someone offered me this insight, which is think about like all of the work and time and resources and budget it takes to get one new client versus if you've already gained that client. Just keeping the one that you currently have and making sure that they stay on is basically like you're, you're getting that sale every month versus if you keep getting new sales in and then you're, you're losing clients on the back end. So I just, I, I like the idea of having that like, yeah, there's some dual responsibility there.

Yeah. And, and if you, if a customer leaves, you have no chance to expand with them versus, you know, even if they're around and even if they're small, there's still a chance that they're, they'll expand in the future. And that's super important to us because, um, we get about the same amount, if not more growth from existing customers, growing their footprint with us as we do with net new customers.

What is the, do you have like a top client? Like how many, how, how, how many contractors is like your biggest client have?

Our biggest clients have north of, north of 50 contractors with us.

Wow. Amazing. Yeah, I think outsourced work is, it's, it's super slept on. There is some incredible, incredible talent overseas and it's something that, until I went into an outsourced company, and saw there was one person, the owner from the US and then the whole rest of the company is a seven figure company. Every single internal employee was from overseas, was from the Philippines and just recognizing the level of talent and you know, his head of finance, his head of ops, head of client success, all from the Philippines. And it just totally expanded my mind of what's possible. So would love to just kind of open up that container for anyone who might be thinking about would that work for me? What is kind of the typical, you said marketing I think is what you usually fill in. Like what type of quality of talent are you guys able to find?

Yeah, it's a great question. Well, I'm obviously biased but I think we have the, the best talent for the roles that we place. And I think a few things that we, we really pride ourselves on are not only you know, taking the, the, the check marks on the JD and making sure that they have like the hard skills but also the soft skills or what we call durable skills are honestly even more important. So we have, we train our recruiters to test for that. We have actual assessments for that to, to train sort of the intangible qualities that will make someone a really successful employee regardless of sort of whether they've had one or two years of experience with X software. For us, we, we do focus on mainly marketing focused roles. That's I would say like 60 or 70% of what we do. So anything related to ads, search, affiliate and influencer marketing, email marketing, designers, we are, we are very good at that. And we I think can speak the same language as our clients oftentimes and it originally came from sort of Jesse's heritage being in, in growth marketing and having the agency before. We'll also do a number of other types of roles like customer support, data data analysis, finance and accounting roles, et cetera, like you name it. But what we lead with is typically marketing in terms of the level of talent. I think certain, certain agencies kind of have different approaches. We try to be on the, the more premium side of like ic, IC talent. So you know, know these are not necessarily the strategists and the people who will run a whole department for you, but they are very good ICs with a specific experience in that area. So if you have sort of someone to point them in the right direction, right SOPs structure the role a little bit, they can really thrive.

So what is the, maybe outside of the testing up front, what is some additional reasons why someone should use you guys versus just going and trying to like find Someone on their own.

Yeah, I think it's a few things. One, you know, we're experts at the areas in, in which we recruit. We have dedicated recruiters in both overseas and in the US with, with decades of experience recruiting for these roles. As I mentioned, we look for the hard skills, but also the durable skills and the culture fit. The other thing is we, we sort of give a guarantee to clients that if, if something doesn't work, we replace it, no charge. And so if you were to hire on your own and it doesn't work out, then you're kind of back to the drawing board. You'll have a disruption in your business. You have to go out and recruit again. We kind of take that all off your plate after someone is onboarded. Um, there's also a lot that we do. We essentially kind of abstract away the entire backend for them. So all HR administration, payroll, productivity and time tracking, we do all of that. And on top of that, we do constant, like, upskilling learning and development to make sure that our, our contractors can really grow with our clients. And they're not like, you know, the same person you hired a year ago is not the same person that they are now. They have more skills, they're better at their job. That's something we pride ourselves on as well. The last thing I would say is, oh, and on top of that, it's all the benefits and administration stuff like that we take care of. The last thing I would say is there's a lot of sort of headache and hidden costs associated with hiring directly or hiring through an EOR that unless you're, you know, very experienced in doing that as a client, you may not realize, which could add up to, you know, make making something like 30 to 50% more expensive than you originally thought.

Mm. Yeah, we'll just kind of add on to support your case a little bit. It is shocking how much time and effort goes into finding really, really good talent. And it's one of those things where once you've got like a good amount of like, well, you guys probably have decent traffic and branding and outsource workers know your name. It's like you guys have probably a larger volume of people coming in or you're able to bring in top level talents. If you guys are doing outreach that if you're just doing it on your own, the process of trying to get, you know, like someone may go message 3 people or 10 people on Fiverr or they're trying some online sites and if you're picking the best out of 10 people, you're probably going to get someone average or below average. Just in terms of the, the outsourced market.

It's a gamble.

Yeah. And especially with the outsourced market there is a lot of, I mean even in the US market there's just a lot of weeding of applications that you need to do. But overseas I would say in my experience it is at least five to six times you need that many more applications to have the same level of kind of success as bringing in applications in the. I was like you got to find the diamonds in the rough. And so if you're trying to do that on your own, it is going to be a lot of time, a lot of work and a lot of effort. So I think that's another reason why outsource agencies are so awesome is being able to cut the time really quick and get high level quality at the same time.

Totally. Yeah. I think we hire like 0, 2 or 0.3% of applications, something like that. It's just a ton of volume that we go through before picking the right candidates.

Very cool. I love that you, you know the data for that, that sense. One of the things that you mentioned is you've got recruiters in the US and overseas which to me means you guys like we have a remote team and lots of people from overseas are somehow showing up at an office every day in the US So what has been the most challenging part about managing a remote cross functional team?

Yeah, I think remote work is definitely a challenge sometimes. You know, it allows you to hire fast and scale faster. But it has its drawbacks for sure. And our team is pretty distributed, even our US team like across the country. So we're typically not in person at the same time. And then you have another layer there where you're working with people you know, across the, across the globe. I think one thing that is, is can be difficult is like it you turn into having a meeting culture which I'm sure like a lot of people can empathize with where you, you feel like you can't get anything done and unless you like get time on someone's calendar. So I think what we've tried to do is reduce meetings as much as possible or make them very intentional and then also encourage like sort of quicker forms of communication where weekend slack and if you're not getting due to someone, you can call them or you can huddle them. You don't necessarily need to schedule a 30 minute block like several days out to get something done. I think another thing is that you miss out on is kind of the morale aspect. Like you know, people building personal connections with each other. It happens for sure in remote work, but it obviously takes longer and it's a little bit different. So for the US team, we do several like team off sites a year and I think that helps a lot. Just like, you know, we have our, our businessy agenda, but just hanging out and having people get to know each other. Like we went to Epcot as a company in January and that was super fun. We also get the whole like Philippines team together. That works for Growth Assistant, not for clients. We get them all together once a year. They all got together in March with several members from the US team flying out there. Um, and they had, you know, of course like a productive agenda, but also they just had a blast. Like so much fun activities around that, staying at a nice hotel in Manila. And so I think that that helps as well.

That's beautiful. It sounds like you guys really care about your people and having connected culture. Even being remote, are there other things that you guys do culturally through onboarding, through retention practices, around having people feel seen and appreciated? Because I think that's, you know, people. There's so many opportunities that if people aren't loving their role or their company, it's really easy to have high turnover. So curious, like what has been your guys experience in that and what have you done to have higher retention?

Yeah, yeah, definitely. You know, I mean there's a lot of different, there's a lot of different like initiatives and like HR things that we do. But I think a lot of it just boils down to having a culture of open and transparent communication. I think that's something that you know, Adrian is really good at and she has tried to hire for people who can fit into that culture. So I think one thing that's unique about us is we speak very candidly, very openly and we also have like sort of a shared language for talking about our frustrations or anything that's negative. Um, we do a lot of work with, I don't know if you've heard of like CLG or Conscious Leadership group. Um, that's kind of helped us give us a shared language for talking about our, our, our feelings basically. And I think that's, that's super helpful for our client facing talent. We also obviously retention there is incredibly important. We have virtual events where we'll get the, the client facing team or the sort of client deployed contractors together. But we'll also do in person events. Our HR team organizes a bunch of get togethers where contractors that work for different clients can actually go and, and meet up and like go to dinner, go to karaoke or something like that. And I think that's kind of a value add. It's also the case that for every contractor we have like a, a dedicated, we call it ga, a growth Assistant Success manager. And that's sort of their like learning and development coach. So anytime they have a question or anytime they're like unsure on how to approach a certain client situation, they have a buddy slash coach that they can go to and talk to who will give them candid advice, give them candid feedback. And so they're not sort of alone them working with their client. We try to support them as much as possible.

That's really cool. Very, very cool. One of the things I was excited to ask you about was I saw in some of the pre notes that you had sent over was you described your relationship with Adrian as Batman and Robin. So I would love to just. Is there a time that comes to mind where that felt especially true?

Well, it's actually something that she coined somewhere recently, like wanting to feel like we're tag teaming stuff and that we are just so in lockstep that like, we know we. We can tackle stuff really efficiently and together and have fun doing it. I think for me it's like a, it's a couple of things that make that successful. One is like knowing each other's weaknesses and blind spots and when to give kind of like a dissenting opinion and playing devil's advocate. Um, I think like, if the, if I were just agreeing with Adrian all the time, for example, like, I would be less valuable in my role because I wouldn't be offering another perspective. But the, the flip side is also knowing when to just like step on the gas and accelerate what the CEO wants to do or what we want to do as a company. So I think like, knowing when to kind of slow down and give another opinion versus when to just pour gas on it is helpful. And yeah, I mean, tons of ton, tons of examples working together every day where it feels like we're kind of flowing and it feels good.

Are you guys pretty connected through the day? Like, are you guys messaging each other quite a bit on Slack or what is your communication method? Because I've had very different experiences where being in the right hand role, the owner really wants to talk to me quite a bit. It's like, hey, this is coming up. I've got this. Can you do this? What do you think about this scenario that Just happened. And then I've had other cases where they're a little bit more solo, like on island, they're kind of doing their thing and they're just expecting me to just handle the, the things. What is your guys's flow or structure for staying in sync but also giving each other space to do your roles?

Yeah, I think, I think there's a good balance. We're definitely not like slacking and, and calling all day. Like, we're both, we're both busy, like working on our own stuff. She especially has like a ton, ton of calls every day. Um, so I think it's a good, good kind of middle ground where we will, we'll check in several times a day, but it's not like we're talking all day. Um, and then certain days, if there's something a little bit more urgent or something that we are working on kind of in parallel, then we'll be talking more frequently or having more calls about it. Um, and then I think just like a good, simple way that I keep her updated is giving a weekly update on stuff I worked on that week and then kind of a backlog of stuff that I want to get to but have not gotten to that week and sort of like a sense for prioritization.

Yeah, those recaps are super, super helpful because I think it's so easy to get so tunnel vision on what we're doing and maybe we talk about like the problems or things that are coming up, but if you don't actually share with each other what you're working on, it can feel like, what is this person doing? Or are we really aligned? Yeah, I think having those like weekly touch points of. And with all of my teams, every single person doesn't end a day report every single one.

Oh, wow.

Because I want to know what are they working on? What are the challenges and the level of in synchronous that happens when you do that? At first it feels like an extra, like a lot of extra thing. Oh, I'm going to have to read all these reports and my team's going to have to write them out. It is, I would say, like my top tool for keeping things in sync and making sure that your team is working on the highest priority. Because if you don't have visibility on it, it's really hard to know. But yeah. And in terms of the more executive leadership theme, more like weekly recaps, we do a monthly recap. I think it's really important for team members to know what worked last month, what didn't work and what's the initiatives and the focus for the next month outside of just big quarterly meetings or rocks? It's like having month by month, week by week, having the transparent.