Hiring Is a Business Skill | Chris Brown

You have such a small talent base and you have such a specific need set that once you have them sort of on board with you, you're servicing their needs because they're in such demand and there's so little, you know, availability for them. And the jobs that are looking for them are willing to do what it takes to get them.

Welcome to another episode of The Profitable Creative, the only place on the interwebs where you will learn how to turn your passion Into Profit. I am your host, Christian Brim. Special shout out to our one listener in Temple, Texas. I will now sing George Strait. All my exes live in Texas. There's a line about Temple, Texas in there. Anyway, never mind. Sorry.

Thank you for listening.

Joining me today, Chris Brown of Wow Remote Teams. Welcome to the show, Chris.

Hey, Christian. Thanks for having me on.

Absolutely. Now you have to follow that, uh, that singing with a song of your own choice. Ready?

I don't know if I can do that. Not much of a singer. Clearly neither of mine.

For Texas. Yeah. Uh, now the, the— have you heard the George Strait song "All My Exes Live in Texas"?

Yes.

Yeah. Okay.

Um, that's the extent of the song that I know though.

Ah, okay.

What comes after that?

Well, in Tennessee, that is correct. And the line, I don't remember. Somebody in temples got the law looking for me, but I don't remember the girl's name. Anyway, I'm going to stop while I'm ahead or while I'm behind. So, Chris, give us your brief CV, your experience. I'm in one of those moods today. You know, CV, I remember the first time I had an attorney ask me for my CV back when I was playing, and I mean playing as in pretending to be a professional witness. And I'm like, yeah, sure, I'll get that to you. And I'm like, I don't know what the hell a CV is. Uh, I'd never heard that term anyway. Uh, so shoot, Chris.

Yeah, so, um, I started in, in tech. I've been doing software for 20-something years now, and, you know, been a, been an entrepreneur for most of that time. You know, I've had a couple software jobs being a, being a code monkey, as it were, but it never really worked out for me. I didn't like the, I don't know, the vibe, I guess, is what they would call it now. But yeah, so ended up in entrepreneurship, started a lot of different businesses. I've been in real estate and continue in real estate, of course, because it just becomes part of life. Started a bunch of e-commerce companies, you know, digital agencies doing marketing and different kind of aspects there, and then found my way into what is now Staffing and Recruiting. So it's a fully remote agency, fully digital. We staff people from Latin America for U.S. companies. So we look for, you know, highly skilled, talented individuals who can work fully remote because everything we do is completely remote. We don't have an office space, we don't have a physical location, you know, we don't— this is just a completely just mobile kind of nomadic model of, of business and life that, that I've worked towards over the last 20-some-odd years. And yeah, I think it's, I think it's worked out. It's worked out pretty well. We travel quite a bit. We travel— I'm in Phoenix, so it's beautiful here right now, and then it's absolutely awful for 4 months out of the year, so we leave and go anywhere else. Sometimes that works out nicely, sometimes it doesn't work out so great. Um, but you know, we can work from the road. Like, uh, we traveled— we spent this last summer, we went from here up to Bozeman, Montana in our RV, you know, boondocking, camping the whole way up. And then we found a place to stay on somebody's ranch on a month-to-month kind of setup. And you know, just constant nomadic sort of just freedom of movement, freedom of yeah, freedom essentially. Yeah. And yeah, so that's all to say that this is a, this is a journey of entrepreneurship and it's a journey of, you know, trying to find the way of how do you, how do you manage something like, how do you be successful in, in finding the way to your goals when they're a little bit outside of the norm?

Yeah, I think, uh, like what I, I take from what you said, I really resonate with that you have created a business to serve your non-business goals. You know, you're obviously financial freedom, that's everybody's, but then the ability to travel and be wherever you want. I think too many entrepreneurs, creative or otherwise, don't have much intentionality around building the business. It just kind of becomes the tail that wags the dog, and then all of a sudden you're beholden to the business rather than the business being beholden to you. Okay, so on Wow Remote Teams, is there a um, type of staffing that you specialize in?

I mean, again, it's anything that can be done remote. So the core of the business is a recruiting team, so really a bespoke recruiting firm at the, at the core of the business. And the revenue model has been built around contract staffing and direct placement as well, because, you know, it works. Um, but in that model, it's become really just anything that needs a particular recruitment model. So there's a lot of agencies that do like virtual assistants and they have like a queue of people that they train in Excel and Monday or, you know, HubSpot or whatever. And then they place those people directly with you and it's sort of a pipeline sort of setup. And we went a different direction, somewhat out of necessity and just kind of fell into our lap as these things happen, um, of being able to really be diverse in what we're looking for. So we have a lot of tech positions that are highly skilled, and we have a recruitment team that works just in that. And then we have a lot of marketing positions, and they're very technical and very specific, and we have a recruitment team that works just in that, right? And we kind of have that across the board. You know, some teams are blended just because there's not as much availability there, but you know, it's, it's not so much of a specialty exact niche on a type of position. It's more The availability of, we have a really big candidate database. There's a ton of talent in Latin America where we source from. You know, we know all the Latin American systems because my entire team is from Latin America. The founder of this company is from Bogotá, Colombia. You know, so it's just this network effect of we can find basically anybody in any skill set as long as we have a really good idea of what it is that we're looking for. And then if we don't have the internal tools to assess their skills, and we can go out and find external tools or we can find somebody else in our network to help us, you know, assess that and really just become a, again, bespoke recruiting firm, which just means that we can recruit basically any position.

So who is your ideal client? Who do you recruit for?

Mostly, well, US businesses primarily, some Canadian, some European, but primarily US businesses, generally small to medium-sized businesses. Medium enterprise. So, you know, people with 5 to 10 initial employees are a pretty good starting place, up to 200 to 500 is about the upper limit. Once you get above that, you get into larger organizations that we can service, but we're built more for the small and the medium kind of customer segment, more of a personal touch sort of setup.

Yeah, I know from my own experience that I was In my first year, I bought a franchise and the franchise model was when you reach this certain level of clients, you need to hire a bookkeeper. And the idea was to keep the owner from getting sucked into being bookkeeping and not doing what is most valuable. And so I hired my first employee when I'm 27. I'd never hired a person ever. And even though I had some franchise support as far as like job description, of course, this is pre-internet, so, you know, how to source candidates. I was awful at it. And I made so many hiring mistakes. I'd like to say the first year was the end of it. But no, I continued. And I find that most business owners are in similar boats, right? Like, we don't have a lot of hiring experience, and if we do hire, it's usually not that frequently. Like, you might hire one employee a year or every other year. And so you don't ever develop any expertise in it. You don't develop any systems or processes around it. And one of the best books that I've read, and I recommend to every entrepreneur, whether they use a recruiting service or not is irrelevant, is Who by Jeff Smart. He and his dad wrote Strength Finders, I think. I don't know if you're familiar with the book, but it really is a process-driven book for entrepreneurs on like, okay, this is how you hire people. And I think it stood the test of time. Are you familiar with the book? Have you read it?

I've heard of it. I haven't read it. Okay. Should read it.

Well, you don't need to. You're already an expert. But okay. So then, okay. Now I'm going to come at you completely out of left field here and broadside you. I don't remember where I heard this, but— and this may not be the paradigm now, but I had heard that placement agencies have this business model where they actually work for the employee, not the employer. That's how they— the industry works is like you get a stable of good employees and then you place them, and then when they're ready to move, you just go find a different business for them to move their career. Like, so you're really acting as like player agents rather than agents for the team. That insight was brought to me. I don't know if that's true or not true. What are your thoughts?

I would say that's not really true about the way we work.

I'm sure that is— What about the industry as a whole?

I mean— I think it's blended. I think there's a lot of that, especially if you have, if you're working in the upper levels of talent, like if you're doing high-end tech recruiting or if you're recruiting specialty surgeons or something like that, then I think it flips over to that kind of model, where you have such a small talent base and you have such a specific need set that once you have them sort of on board with you, you're servicing their needs because they're in such demand and there's so little, you know, availability for them. And the jobs that are looking for them are willing to do what it takes to get them. So it's, it becomes a different sort of setup there. It really depends where you're at and what you're looking for. Because at—

well, that makes sense.

Yeah, so if at those upper levels, yeah, I could definitely see it going that way. At the levels that we're generally at, uh, our company, right, we're filling mostly, you know, specialty positions of, you know, marketers and tech people and things like that, but we're not generally doing executive headhunting kind of stuff or anything like that. And at that point, you have a more even playing field of the amount of businesses out there, the amount of demand out there and the amount of talent. So really, we're not looking to replace people very often. Like, we're not, we're not looking to move someone to another company. We're looking to figure out how do we serve that client so that the people they have on stay as long as possible and grow with them as much as possible, right? Because, you know, turnover is a headache for everybody, not just the agency, but the client as well.

Yeah, I mean, we have worked with some placement agencies in the past for accounting professionals, and, you know, there's firms that specialize in just that. The problem I had with it is it's kind of like real estate in that, you know, your real estate agents don't get paid until the deal closes. And so the, the agencies— I don't know about yours, but, but the ones I worked with, like, they didn't get paid until we hired somebody, right? And, uh, I, I just felt there was like a pressure to make something, to get the deal done, like, to get, get a fit. You know, there was one specific instance where, um, the expectations and the compensation expectations that we had clearly communicated to the agency were not clearly communicated to the employee, to the extent that they were telling them something different than we. And, and like, you know, the thing falls apart. And I, I was, I was thinking like, you know, I would pay as an employer for, for qualified candidates, like, you know, a you know, $500 or $1,000 per candidate, and like, okay, I, I pick, like, you, you, you're, you're going to get paid whether I hire them or not. Um, do you see that model out there? What are your thoughts on that?

Yeah, so there's, there's a couple approaches there. There's like retainers, upfront payments, things like that. I mean, kind of a little bit what you're talking about sounds to me like perverse incentive, which which is, you know, the real estate thing, which is why NAR got sued into oblivion and they had to give a bunch of money back to tons of people. Yeah, I can see that. It just, yes. So yeah, there are both sides of that. There's models where you pay, you know, an upfront fee and then you get so many rounds of candidates and then you have a lesser fee once you hire somebody. We do both, we do contract staffing and placement., and then we do a hybrid model, which is kind of an in-between where you come in contract staffing and then the person works out, then you can take them over on a placement and that percentage is less because you've been doing contract staffing for however long. Um, and that kind of assuages part of that issue where, you know, I mean, we're still only getting paid on the placement because I generally don't charge an upfront fee because I, you know, I gotta prove myself to you by proving myself to you means I gotta show you that I can recruit great talent, that I can bring people in, that my processes are solid, that my client experiences worthwhile, right? That this is better than doing it yourself. Um, but I totally see where you're coming from, where it's like, you know, I'm, I'm getting paid if I place somebody, so I'm going to try to push you to place somebody, right? But, you know, part of my business model and my ethos is to not do that, because I've— again, I've been an entrepreneur for so long that I've been in the position where you're getting invoices that you didn't think were coming, or you're getting billed things that you didn't know you were going to get. Or the understanding was clear on your end but unclear on the other end. Or like you said about that employee where their expectations were different, right? Clear communication with all parties is so integral to what it is that we're doing that if you misstep there, you forever lose a client. Of course, that person's never coming back if you were unable to clearly, you know, explain expectations to everyone.

Yeah, they keep calling me and I just ignore them.

Yeah, you're never going to take their phone call. You're never— yeah. Of course not.

Well, to me, what it did, and I'm curious your thoughts on this, is it broke it down to— I mean, hiring is, well, I mean, probably 3 stages. It's the sourcing of candidates, right? It's the interview process to make sure that they're a good fit. And then there's the onboarding to make sure that they, they get what they need, uh, to do their job quickly. Um, and, and like making those discrete services, like, so, so like if somebody needs all three, great. But like from my standpoint, I was like, I, I really feel like we know how to interview and onboard, but like we're having trouble finding people, you know, just peeling that piece off and selling that as opposed to— but I'm curious your thoughts on the, like, how you perceive what you do. Hey listeners, are you ready to turn your passion into profit? Then grab a copy of Profit First for Creatives. Click the link in the show notes to purchase a copy. And if you're not ready to make that full commitment, you can download a free copy of the first chapter. Check it out right now.

Well, I think that's very solid feedback because I've been— I'm constantly in this motion of how do you diversify your offering set? Without overwhelming your team and overwhelming your internal processes. So, you know, we have this— we have contract staffing, recruiting that I've already gone over, and you're constantly looking, okay, well, they have their problem points, problem points that we've discussed here. There's problem points on the internal basis, right? Like, you know, there's, there's always HR headaches and there's contract management headaches, and there— and placements have guarantee periods, and placements only work because you're working on both sides of the equation. And you know, you have this thing where it's like, how do you find additional service lines and how do you present them to clients in a way that's effectual, value-additive, and not overwhelming? So if you called me today and you're like, hey Chris, I'm looking for an SEO expert, I need to, you know, set up my SEO game, what do you got? Well, I would come to you and be like, well, I can do contract staffing, I can do placement, tell me about your budget, tell me about your needs, What is your current setup, right? What kind of character fits well with you? What kind of person? All those general recruiting kind of questions. But it'd be so much more value-additive to be like, by the way, if you just need the selection process, if you need help with interviews, if you need help— but that conversation becomes really complex on a sales side, as far as I've seen, right? Because people come in with kind of an expectation, you know, they have a problem and they need that problem solved. They don't need 12 other problems to think about of now how do I manage this setup, how do I manage this new person that like, I don't want to be a headache in the middle of the process. So like, I, I, I'm constantly in search of like, how do I, how do I add that thing that you're talking about right here of just, I need candidate selection. Okay, I can, I have a team of recruiters, we can do candidate selection for you and give you, you know, 3 at a time so you're not overwhelmed, and that would be amazing. But it's hard to know that a client would like to have that when they perhaps don't know that the option exists. Well, right. They don't have your experience.

Yeah, right. I came to that conclusion, uh, with, with years of, of battle scars. Um, and, and, you know, the onboarding is, is also a very key thing because again, if you don't hire very often, you don't have an onboarding process. And like, it's, it's like, okay, the new employee shows up, what do you do? Well, go, here's the software, go, like, right? And like actually fleshing that out of what the process is of getting them up to speed, getting them productive, and a feedback loop to them of like evaluation of like, okay, you're doing the right things. Here are the things that you may need to work on more. Like it kind of speaks to the, bigger problem most small businesses have is that they don't really have a talent evaluation process for any employee, much less new ones. Um, but, you know, yeah, onboarding an employee is, is super critical, especially if you're a smaller business. And that, like, that's a lot of money. That's a lot of money you're paying to the agency. And if, if they don't produce you're in trouble, right? Like, I've got this pain point of like, I've got too much work and I've got to get this person up to speed so that they can take this off my plate or, or, you know, help us make more money.

Yeah. And especially when you're talking about— I mean, you're talking about small business, when you're talking about, you know, the first 5 employees or something, it's really hard to understand how that process works, what that looks like. Knowledge transfer is hard, you know. It's really easy to assume that everybody else knows what we know. I think we just do it naturally. And it's, it's a really tough wall to climb to be like, I have to show everybody that needs to touch this, all of the information that touches this, where to get it, how it works, and figure out a way that that becomes systematized in a way that, you know, is accessible to them and anybody else that comes in. And then offboarding is a whole other process side of that, where how do you extract the knowledge that this person has that might not be in your systems in a way that is effective, in a way that is useful into the future, and do it in a way that, you know, you can successfully offboard somebody. Because offboarding can be a nebulous kind of ugly thing depending on the situation that you're getting into. Yeah. How do you get that information out of that person?

Well, hopefully before you make the decision to fire them.

Um, yeah, or hopefully before they quit. Exactly.

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That speaks to another, I think, hole that I see in a lot of businesses. Creative businesses specifically tend to be averse to processes. They don't like processes. It cramps the creative flow. But the idea of having processes in general I, I think is, is very important for a variety of reasons, one of which is like, you know, you don't want to be in a situation where you have to keep a bad employee because no one else knows how to do their job. That's, that's the worst, right?

Yes. Yeah, that's awful. That's a terrible spot to be in. And also, you don't want to be in this spot where You know, I mean, keeping the terrible employee because they know everything, but, you know, having it be you're the sole source of knowledge as well. Yeah, just, you know, either way you're in a stuck kind of spot and getting to that process and processes are hard, you know, like, and we're not all great at it sometimes. So good partners are really effective, right? Because if you find people that have a skill set that you don't, that's part of what they're able to do. They're really good at process optimization. They're really good at knowledge transfer. They're really good at understanding systems in a way that maybe you don't, you know, it can be incredibly effective and impactful. Or if you have an employee who's able to do that kind of thing, you know, part of our offboarding process internally is that kind of understanding of knowledge transfer. You know, how many things do you touch? We kind of try to do it on an ongoing, regular basis. What are the things you touch? Is the documentation for those things up to date? We're also not a super creative agency, right? I mean, I have a marketing division, I have a creative section of people that are working on those things, but most of our business is very process-oriented because you're talking about recruiting organization, you know. Um, but yeah, it's— they're hard problems.

Well, as, as one, uh, aged entrepreneur told me many years ago, he said, uh, No business, no problem. More business, more problems. I'm like, oh, okay, you know, that, that tracks. Um, what, what— I'm curious how you got from code monkey, self-described— I am not calling you that, um, I do not want to be derisive— uh, so code monkey to marketing agency to recruiting agency. Explain to me the common thread there.

The common thread is just technology, really. Um, so CodeMonkey became internet business, which is just different types of code, trying to start SaaSes, launching e-commerce companies, kind of doing our own marketing, just, you know, learning how marketing software works. Um, you know, again, doing real estate, that was all on the tech side, and then marketing side. And then, you know, building systems for that, building software pieces for that. And then as you go doing that, you know, I have a partner in those old businesses who was very, very charismatic, very communicative, very friendly. And he was able to talk to, you know, a lot of people, tell them what we're doing, talk about what we're doing, get people interested. He's always looking for new lines of business. And that kind of coalesced into agency work, which was both software and marketing agency work, because we're kind of good at both, you know, where, I mean, I'm able to write code, I'm able to build systems, I'm able to connect all the things that need to connect in order for things to work well. And marketing is the creative side. I'm not a super creative guy, not like, you know, I, I can, you know, I'm not, I'm not super creative on the design and that kind of aspect. But on the technical side, modern marketing is very technical, is it is extremely about connecting systems, managing data, how that data flows, how you're managing to, you know, those, your lead flow, what does your funnel look like? How do you implement all these different pieces? How do you automate where leads are going? How there's just everything. The entire thing is a tech stack these days, right? So you end up in this situation where most of the things that you want to touch are really tech intensive. And I was pretty good at those things. Um, and then in that, so we had an e-commerce company, we were doing medical and dental supplies. I was the tech side of that e-commerce company running, you know, the developers and everything else and keeping the thing running as much as possible. It was medical and dental supplies during COVID So it was absolutely insane. It was the most craziest thing. We had a warehouse full of medical supplies. It went absolutely nuts. It was wild. In that, we had a full CSR team. The CSR team was based out of the US. And then I met my current founder. And she's, you know, the founder of this company that I'm working for, Wow Remote Teams. I'm a partner here, by the way, not just working for it. But so I met her and I was talking to her about, you know, what does it look like to have this because she was primarily doing tech recruiting. At that point. So she had a bunch of software positions placed, and she was doing this same sort of model, but more on the tech side. And, you know, I had talked to her about our technical needs, which is, you know, a lot of website developers, a lot of data management, and some, some marketing kind of stuff. And, and I was like, well, what does it look like for the CSR side? Like, is it, is it possible to replace our US CSR people? They're expensive, and they weren't doing the greatest job, to be honest. They were kind of slacking. And she goes, you know, I can try, I can see what happens. We can, we can go find some people and see what's there. We ended up replacing our entire CSR team with people from Latin America. We replaced our entire technical team with people from Latin America. We replaced everybody who wasn't physically needed in the US with people from Latin America. And then as COVID wound down, that business ended up kind of imploding on itself because the debt load that became from managing that much inventory was unsustainable after COVID died down and those contracts were no longer available. It was a mess. It got too big for itself, and I wasn't fully prepared to manage something of, of that size. Um, so it kind of, kind of crashed in on itself, which is sad, but these things do happen. Um, and then she was, you know, she— I came out of that and there wasn't much going on, and she said, hey, why don't you come over here and, you know, help me build these systems and help me work through these processes. And now there's a whole other world of things that I know I can do because I've placed a bunch of random people with you. And, you know, there's this whole other open world of how we can place all these positions. So I came over here, I partnered with her, and I started, you know, putting together the, the internal systems and starting to help her build this thing out. And, um, started to build up the marketing and, you know, start up to build up the teams that build everything internally. And then, you know, it just became a— at one point it became a need to talk to clients because again, everybody's in Latin America and it was a small recruiting agency focused on tech. And they're like, well, you know, you're, you're the only gringo in the company at this point, so why don't you jump on with a couple clients and help the sales process and let's manage this and see if we can get it. And that became a whole other thing. I'm not a sale— again, I'm a tech guy. I was never the sales guy, and somehow I became the sales guy. And like, it, it just became this entire different path in business and life that I hadn't been a part of, that I hadn't been involved in. And it opened a ton of— I mean, I'm talking to you today because of that, right? I never would have been on a podcast with you discussing business because I would have been off in the tech world, you know, hidden from, from everybody. And it's really just changed perspective and changed the way that I that I work and that the way we do business and the way I— the way I live my life, right? The way I interact with people. Because it— yeah, I fell— now I'm just kind of rambling, sorry. But I fell into this consultative sales model, and I didn't even know that was a thing, right? I'm not a sales guy. So I end up talking to people on the calls, taking sales calls. I still take sales calls basically every day. You know, there's other salespeople, of course, at this point, right? You know, I still get on the phone because it's useful. So I ended up talking to people and I learned that if you just listen to people and listen to what their problem sets are, you can identify if your solution is a match quickly. And if it is, you can show them how your solution is a match. And if it's not, you can tell them that you're not, and they're very happy that you told them it's not instead of selling them something they don't need. Turns out that's called consultative sales. I found that out after I figured out how this works.

Well, that's what I do. It's incredibly effective.

Yeah, it's incredibly effective. It's amazing. And, you know, it's a very simple process. Just listen to people, understand their need set, figure out if their need set matches what you're offering is. And if your marketing is doing a good job, if your sales funnel is doing a good job, then their problem set is probably within your solution set. If it's not, then, you know, if it's not, then you have misses. But if you're missing more than 20 or 30% of your leads, then your upfront messaging is probably wrong, right? So at this point, almost everybody that comes in needs the services that we're talking about. So I let them explain that to me. And then I let them, you know, I tell them that I have a solution for that, maybe not the solution for that, and then explain what our solution sets are. And it works, it works very well. And so it's become this back and forth process where Now I get to learn what the customer needs on a face-to-face individual basis, and then I get to take that back to the other side and apply it in the backend. And it's incredibly effective.

Yes, I think sales is another one of those skills that a lot of entrepreneurs come to the table not having experience. Um, they'll figure it out quickly though, because if you can't sell, then you don't have a business very quickly. And, but it is learnable to your point. Like it's not, people have this idea of selling that is, I think, so outdated in that it has something, to me, it's something around like compelling somebody to do something they don't necessarily want to do. And that's, I mean, I guess that is a way to sell. But it is not, I think, the most effective way to sell. I think your consultative approach makes much more sense because here's the dirty little secret that all sales is emotional. We make emotional buying decisions and we come over top with rational explanations to justify our emotional desire. And the consultative approach is ideal for that because you're asking questions and listening, and you can't get really emotions. You can't get the emotions to the surface unless you start asking questions. You got to dig in there and find out what their problem is, what the consequences of that problem are. So how is that affecting your business? What's that look like? That's what drives the emotion, and that's what makes it so powerful as a methodology, is because you're in that emotion automatically. I find it ironic because usually technical people, and I don't mean technical as in like code monkeys, but like accountants too, like you generally don't want to have them on the sales call because what they do is they go straight to fixing problem, and they stop listening. It's like, well, I can fix that, here's how you do that. And it's like, no, shut up, you're talking past the sale. You gotta let them buy first before you start delivering what you—

yeah.

So I find it ironic that you're a self-professed technical person, but you've embraced sales.

I mean, I think that folly was definitely there earlier on, and it probably still happens. I'm a very solutions-oriented kind of person. And, you know, a lot of our conversation or my conversation with you so far has been, you know, letting them explain their problem set so that I can present our solutions, right? So it's still very solution-centric sort of mindset. It's very much like, how do I get to the root of the problem? And how do I figure out if I can solve that or not? But yeah, it's absolutely, you know, and something like this, It's such a— somebody knows what their need set is here. It's very rare to get on the phone with somebody as a salesperson for a recruiting company or for a staffing company and them not have a clear idea of what it is that they're talking to me about today. You know, I'm not going door to door. I'm not going to you. Outbound is honestly, if there's a failure point in my sales process currently, it's outbound because I've never figured out a good way to do outbound. And, you know, my sales team tries and there's some success there and there's always motion and you're always trying. But outbound's really hard because you're looking for the person that has the need set, that understands the need set, that has gotten to that emotional position where they've made a decision and are rationalizing their needs around that. And something like my business, you know, I'm doing Latin American talent specifically. Like it's called nearshoring, but it's outsourcing. You know, you're moving outside of the US. That's a hard sell for a lot of people who aren't in the mindset of knowing that that's potential, having come to the idea set on their own in some sense. I call it planting the seed, but whatever that looks like for that person, you know, having, having the idea in mind that this is a workable solution makes a big difference. So if I come to you today and all you've ever worked with is US talent in your whichever agency you have, you know, if you have 4 designers on staff and they're all from the US and I come and go, why don't you hire somebody from Mexico? If you don't have a passport, there's zero chance that that message is going to have any effect on you whatsoever. Right? Right. So, you know, a lot of, a lot of it comes down to, again, that sales funnel, that the technical aspect of, you know, are you Sí, are the people that you're talking to today actually prepared for the conversation about the solution that you have to offer? And is their problem set within your solution set? So if you're— if their problem set is within the solution set, but they are not mentally willing, if they haven't crossed that bridge yet of becoming aware that Latin American talent is a solution, that remote work is a solution, that this could all be done very effectively for less money if you just moved outside of your borders, it's a dead conversation, essentially. I mean, I can have that conversation, but it's not gonna be a sale that day.

Yeah, and I understand there are people that are still in that mindset, but frankly, for a time I was in that mindset, but the reality is it is, even if you are only delivering your service in a certain geographic area, And of course, there are certain industries, like if you're a plumber, you gotta have a physical body, so it doesn't work to outsource. But so much more of the economy, and especially the creator economy, is global, and its workforce is global. And rather than trying to fight that wave, you need to ride it. Um, I, I know we, you know, accountants have been outsourcing, uh, work for at least a decade. I mean, they're, they're mature in that. Um, you know, all of your, your global organizations, uh, larger firms have, uh, you know, some of them just have They actually have offices, physical presences in, you know, usually it's India and Singapore for our talent because they tend to have better accountants. But I was opened up to that idea just last year about like, well, what about Latin America? Because, you know, One of the biggest problems in our industry of outsourcing stuff to Asia is the language barrier, yes, but the time barrier. And, you know, Latin America, for the most part, you're in the same time zone. So it does get over that hump. And, you know, you're— and this is the big reason why business owners need to be looking at this is because their competitors are looking at it. Is that it's, you know, 30 cents on the dollar. So, you know, you, you, it's hard to compete with cheap labor. I mean, that's, I mean, that's just the reality.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You know, it's, it's significantly cheaper. Um, direct hire, of course, is cheaper outside of the, you know, staffing fee. Uh, contract staffing is a bit less cheaper because everything's built into the hourly rate that you're paying, but you don't have to deal with the person's, you know, contract or ER, right, their country rules or payment across international borders if you're— if your bank decides to be a pain about that person, right? Right. Which isn't so much of a thing these days. Um, yeah, I mean, lots of—

yeah, just payment in Bitcoin. That's—

yeah, payment in Dogecoin or something, right? Yes. Yeah. But yeah, lots of large companies. I mean, you know, I've spent quite a bit of time in Colombia. My wife is from Bogotá as well, um, and my entire team is basically in Colombia. We, we do all over Latin America, but my team is primarily Colombia. So I've spent a lot of time down there, and there's a massive amount of huge international corporations with giant buildings all over the main cities of Latin America because they've seen the same thing. You know, a good friend of ours works for Merck, and she's been working there for 15 years now. And yeah, they have a huge office building in downtown Bogotá full of a couple thousand people, because why would you do all this data entry work in the US when you can do it anywhere else, essentially, right? You know, so this thing isn't new. I think it's just, you know, it's becoming more, more mainstream of that you can do this remote, that you can do this. Again, I don't have a physical office. I'm not running an office space in Bogotá. Mexico City or Panama City or wherever, right? Because my model has been away from that. I don't want to get stuck at an office in Bogotá when the manager quits. I don't want to do that. So my model has always been fully remote, but there's lots of my competitors that are running a building in Bogotá, and that works better for some things, right? I mean, we, we place, you know, like if you have healthcare positions, for example, and you're working, you're working, you're working with HIPAA data and HPI or whatever that kind of thing is, it can be better to have a centralized location. Or if you're doing, uh, call center kind of things, you know, that's generally going to be a little bit better if you have a centralized location because you need a manager who's working all these people and make sure that they're staffed and that you have all the correct turnover and all those kind of things. Um, you know, so we just don't do a lot in that kind of situation. But yeah, like to your point, accountants, things like that, um, it's going to be cheaper in Asia, it's going to be cheaper in the Philippines, it's going to be cheaper in India. So if you're just looking for bottom cost Latin America is not going to be the place that you land. You're going to land somewhere, you know, in Asia. Um, but if you're looking for people that have cultural alignment, you know, that have time zone alignment, they're on the same time as you, you know, they have, you know, Latin America has a lot of U.S. influence. And part of what we're— part of this whole thing is, you know, we're bringing opportunity to all these people in Latin America because they get to work with U.S. businesses. They get to see why are U.S. businesses so effective, why is the way that we do things so dominant compared to the way everybody else does things. Not everybody else, but you know what I mean. Um, you know, and bringing that to a whole subset of people, really just upskilling a ton of people all at once, essentially. And yeah, that skill set is there, that talent pool is there, you know, people that have worked for massive multinational corporations, people that are very well educated. There's very good schools all throughout Latin America, you know, Monterey and Tech Monterey and, you know, Los Andes and Bogotá. And it's like just amazing schools putting out incredibly skilled, talented people. And thanks to it being 2026 now, they are completely available to work for you, assuming you don't need them to run a machine in your warehouse, right?

Yes, exactly. I mean, I think that digital versus non- digital divide is going to become one of the very much more pronounced, like, you know, they're the, the digital is going to drift completely one direction and the people that are, you know, physically having to deliver their service in person, hospitality, uh, you know, HVAC, those things, it's, it, they're, it's just going to go a different path. Because, yeah, um, Chris, I really appreciate your time. How do people find out more about you and Wow Remote?

Uh, yeah, you can visit our website wowremoteteams.com. You can find me on LinkedIn. My name is Chris Brown, so that can be difficult sometimes, but if you look up Chris Brown Wow Remote Teams, probably gonna find me. Um, that's the primary way. We're on all this social media stuff, but I don't actually go on social media, so you're never going to get to me there.

Perfect. Well, thank you for your time. Listeners will have those links in the show notes. If you liked what you heard, please rate the podcast, share the podcast, subscribe to the podcast. If you don't like what you've heard, shoot us a message, tell us what you want to hear, and we'll get rid of Chris. Until then, ta-ta for now.