192 - The Power of Listening and Growth in the Virtual Assistance Industry with Virtual Latinos's Jaime Nacach

Welcome to Listening with Leaders. I'm Doug Noll, lawyer turned peacemaker. I teach executive leaders how to listen to emotions rather than words so that they can become the leaders everyone wants to follow. And I teach those same leaders how to be authentically present, available, and connected to their families despite being insanely busy. I have learned that we are 98% emotional and and only 2% rational. Learning how to listen to emotions is, in my experience, the foundational skill of life. Stick around to the end of the show and I'll reveal how you can be on our next guest in 15 to 20 minutes. So let's get started.

Jaime Nakash, welcome to Listening with Leaders. You are the founder and CEO of Virtual Latinos, which is a virtual assistant company based out of San Diego, California. Really looking forward to our chat today. Same.

Thank you for having me.

Tell us a little bit about your backstory.

Sure. So I'm originally from Mexico City. I've been in the States for some time and I began my professional, let's say, career initially really actually just doing web design and learning HTML when I was back in high school before graduating high school and then started doing some freelance web design and graphic design. But then I started actually working in marketing. I worked in digital marketing for a long time and then decided to go back to school, got an MBA in Israel and then returned in 2012 and then decided that it was time to think about if I was gonna create a business, maybe it was, you now rather than later. And after having a few full-time but short-term projects that I was working on and hired for a specific purpose, and when I finished those, uh, I thought it was a good time to take my marketing skills and my background doing freelance stuff and build a marketing agency and actually start hiring a team to help me help more customers. And so that's kind of what I started in 20 2013, but I registered the company in 2015. And yeah, then from there I, I became a recruiter without really trying to. So my marketing skills then used, uh, to build a new company, to market it well. And now that's where, where I'm at today. I'm the founder and CEO of Virtual Latinos, which is a recruitment agency, uh, for hiring talent in Latin America.

So, uh, I take it that Virtual Latinos is in the business of matching Latin-based virtual assistants with people who want VAs. And it looks like you're all over Latin America and also in the Philippines. Why did you choose Latin American company, uh, countries?

Yeah, so I chose not to actually go to the Philippines. So we only hire in Latin America. I actually did try, and by simply following the rest of the marketers, which I started to get to know while I was in that space, and realized everybody's doing it, so I will do it too, and went up and hired 5 different Filipinos. But I wasn't so happy for several reasons in my case, which I won't get into the details. And being Mexican myself, living in the border between San Diego and Mexico, uh, I thought, you know, I gotta be able to find some Mexicans that can do digital marketing to American standards, both remotely and then cross the border as needed to come to my office. So yeah, That's kind of what I started in terms of pushed me to start this.

And see, how long has this company— this company been going since 2018?

2018, correct.

And, and, uh, obviously you're still in business, so you've been successful.

Yes.

Are you seeing a, a growing demand for Latin, uh, Latin-based virtual assistants?

Yeah, I think that there's a bigger demand, uh, both because we keep getting clients, which is a great thing, of course, but also because we see a lot of competitors that didn't exist. So, uh, the company I created was the first company to offer virtual assistants and professionals in Latin America working from their homes remotely. Uh, before me, the only other company I could find on Google was offering virtual assistants but through a single location, um, office as opposed to all over Latin America. But now we got a lot of copycats copying our model, so Really, it's a good thing in terms of there's enough demand that people want it, right?

How do you go about— how do you go about recruiting virtual assistants?

Uh, right now, about more than half of them come from referrals from our existing community. Um, we have thousands of people into our community that join, whether they are actually hired or not yet. We pre-vet everybody. Uh, but the other way that we attract them had been initially through advertising. Right. We basically published ads that would attract them to join our company to be able to find a job through, through us.

So you've been doing this now for, let's see, 6 years plus, and you got your other companies. What is it that gets you up in the morning and gets you excited to go to work?

You know, today, the more I hear about the amazing impact that the company is doing to both clients and the professionals in Latin America. And by the way, I'm using virtual professionals now because it really is kind of what we're offering. We're not only offering assistance, we still use that term because it's common, VAs or virtual assistants, but we really offer virtual professionals because they come in all degrees of experience from very low level to very high level with people with master's and PhDs. So, but anyways, go— going back to that, when I hear the stories of how many of the people that we work with internally as part of our company, as well as the ones that work with our clients, that they've been able to make a huge impact, a true impact in their lifestyle, whether that's taking their kids to a private school or being able to afford a car or literally buying homes. It's like big, big impacts. And those stories really are just amazing to hear and really get me excited that everything we're building right now, it's helping, you know, over 1,000 people, but it can help 10,000 people to 50,000 people. There's a huge potential and I think the bigger that the impact is in terms of everyone's individual lives, the better the economies in these countries become and the stronger these companies— I mean, these countries become, the better it is for the region in general, right? All of Latin America as well as, of course, here in the United States. And then when we also hear great stories from our clients who are also being able to grow their business, which help them also grow their families and their goals, it's a win-win-win situation. Everybody wins in this. Equation, which I think is amazing.

Wow, good for you. So I mean, these people are working in all, in all these different Latin American countries. They get a steady paycheck.

Mhm.

For them, probably pretty high pay compared to what they could earn in their own countries.

A lot higher. We did a study— this was a little already maybe old, that was towards the beginning, around 2020— we had somebody from our company basically research what were the average salaries for people that had at least, let's say, 3 to 5 years of work experience, which was like the minimum we'd wanted to compare for a few different types of roles or, you know, industries in terms of what people studied. And then we compared it in each country, what that average was versus what we were paying our assistants and professionals. And yeah, then we realized that, you know, we're paying at the very least usually twice as much all the way to 5x because we pay everybody equally in terms of dollars. But those dollars make a bigger impact in countries like Venezuela or Argentina where the dollar goes a lot further. Wow.

Yeah. So I mean, these people, these, these people that are working as virtual assistants and professionals can support a large family. Yes, on that, on that kind of, on that kind of an income. Um, that's really cool. So I'm curious about what it is about you that makes you unique, or what is it that's unique that you bring to the table that's made this company as successful? It is helping as many people as you do.

Um, I, there's a few things, but one of the key ones I like to think it to be true, and I believe it is true for the most part, is that I'm a very detail-oriented guy, which is all about, for me, doing the best I can in terms of the highest standards of quality. Um, I guess, you know, God, if you believe in God, or whatever created me, just made me like that, and that's just the way I am. I like to always pay a lot of attention to everything, and I would like everything to be as perfect as I can. But of course I have to find out the hard and quick way that I can't make everything perfect, otherwise I wouldn't grow and nothing could get done. So finding that right balance has been hard, but definitely attention to detail and trying to always do everything the best is, has been, is for the most part worked out. The other thing in terms of skills is, uh, I love technology and marketing because I have been doing marketing for so long. So I used my marketing experience and my love for technology doing automations to be able to bake in a lot of technology and automated workflows into my new business to help me save a lot of time because I started this just on my own with no money from anybody.

How many employees do you have now?

I think the last count was about 115. Wow. Yeah.

And how do you, how do you With your desire to pay attention to detail and maintain high quality, how do you, how do you keep from micromanaging?

Yeah, so that's, I mean, let's just say that it's been hard for me. Um, but I just realized, you know, if I wanted to be the bottleneck, I would never continue to grow. And I was the bottleneck for quite a while because everything had to be approved by me from every department before it could go live. Uh, you know, whether it was a marketing campaign, an email to a client, whatever it was, right? It comes down to kind of trust, right? I just gotta trust that my team is doing the right thing. And even though I think I've done a pretty good job in being better at trusting my team, I still sometimes hear that, you know, people think I don't trust them because sometimes I ask for a lot more stuff than they probably want to give me or were expecting that I'd come and require from them. But, you know, I was just talking about this with our COO, Like, yeah, you could say that it is because I'm not trusting fully, maybe what it is they're doing, right? But from the way I see it, it's like, I want to be quality control. I'm not asking you to pass everything through me, uh, before some things go live, but some important projects, I definitely want to be able to continue to make sure that the highest quality, uh, of our products and services are out there to our clients and anybody interacting with our community, because that's the reason it grew. Right? So if I don't maintain that, at least to the level I think that it should be, then things might change. So that's why.

How do you—

that raises a really interesting question in my mind. How do you imbue that desire for quality into your culture and into your organization?

Great question. So now it's getting harder because there's too many people and I don't get to choose who to hire them or onboard them or train them. And not even meet them initially, right? Until later we have ways to meet them. But so we at our company are following a model called EOS, Entrepreneurial Operating System, that's actually based on a book called Traction that I have right here. Um, and we've been using it for about a year. Part of the system is sitting down for a long time to figure out who your company is, what they represent, what are their goals, what are their values? So we spent months and months thinking, you know, what are our company's values? So we came up with 4 of them. And one of them definitely is embedded into the idea that the companies, as well as the professionals that are working with us, are continuing to grow. They have a drive to grow, right? In general, that's about growing. There's another one that we have that is basically related to how you need to constantly try to do your best job in terms of quality. And this is values that we're using actually to measure people in our team. I'm going to put them on the screen as a background so you can, you know, see them in case people are gonna, you know, look at this. But they're right here: passion to help others thrive, right, to grow, and, um, an excellent and compassionate attitude and dedication to the Virtual Latinos family, right? So the drive to grow embedded within that, it's about quality. We had a lot of bullet points for each of these values that we shared with our team, you know, but yeah, it's definitely hard. But as we onboard people, every time we tell them the importance of making the best effort they can.

Now, when you talk about the drive to grow, is that business growth or is that personal growth or is it both?

It's both. So great question, right? So in a way, it's all of it because from the business values that are for all of our community, which includes clients, internal staff, that stuff that works for our clients. So yeah, it's the idea that everybody needs to grow professionally, personally, and is in continuous want to be better. And how—

I'm curious, do you have, you have programs in place to help people grow?

Yes, great question. So internally, we do, as well as I'm going to say it externally. So externally, I mean, for the people that are working for our clients, we launched about 6 months ago something called Virtual Latinos Academy, which is basically a web-based education portal where people can take courses that we are creating, uh, for free so that they can start training themselves either before they get hired or after they are hired. And now we're going to partner with content creators to create a lot of, a lot more courses. Right now we have 5, or I think 6, we just launched the 6th one, um, but we're going to be creating a lot more content. And now internally for our team that works as part of our team, we have 2 different programs. Programs that we call the Milestone Program, that after they take X amount of courses, they automatically get a raise of 50 cents an hour. And they, they can increase that by up to 5 times, so up to $2.50 extra an hour from whatever they get paid, um, as well as other, uh, courses and training that they can take that are part of their work hours so that they continuously improve, you know, who they are.

Wow.

Yeah.

How's it working out for you?

Great. Yeah, people definitely love, uh, in general, the idea of being able to spend some of their time to get better at what they do, to get skills that of course are going to help them personally, whether they stay with their company forever or not, uh, but also gives them a little bump up in the pay, the payment, as well as the fact that we have the Academy that anybody can use, as well as the internal courses to just help them, you know, know that we care about their careers. So that part is very new. We haven't completely polished that, but we're working on it.

Right. The other value I saw, the third value you had up there, had to do with exceptional and compassionate attitude. Tell me about that.

Yeah. So, you know, we want to make sure that people who are part of this company and who interact with our clients or clients who interact with us We wanna make sure that people are treated with respect. People are not just thought of as people that are just the typical thoughts that we've heard from people that think about the outsourcing industry, let's say in India or the Philippines or other places like, oh, they're just the call center or tech support. They're all behind some wall and nobody cares, or they're just cheap labor, right? No. So first of all, everybody should be valued as people as who they are, as well as having the attitude to always try to help others grow. So one of the beautiful things that happens with our community is that as opposed to the regular job market where people are cutthroat to try to get the job and competing against each other, even though internally they're also competing against each other for jobs, the community we built, which is another portal, the people actually get to support each other and kind of cheer to each other, which is kind of been really nice. But they get to say, hey, you know, you can do it, you can continue trying to get a job. And if it's too hard, go this or do that. And they're like, supporting each other, kind of like family, uh, which has been amazing.

Wow.

Yeah.

Well, the name of the show is Listening with Leaders, uh, and that's because in my work as a lawyer turned peacemaker, I teach people how to listen. It's not something that anybody else teaches.

Yeah.

And how important is listening in your business, Nate?

I mean, definitely, I think that the whole process that we have for our clients starts with listening. So I mean, yes, general— generally, if you come to a recruiter, it is obvious that you're going to talk to them and tell them what you want, right? But from our experience working with other companies before I started this one, it's usually, let me give you something quick, and it's usually, okay, let's talk for 15 minutes, you tell me what you need, and in 2 days I'll just send you a bunch of options for you to choose from, right? We take our time, we really listen to our clients, which means Yes, we still have an initial call to figure out if we're a good fit for each other, but then we spent about an hour specifically listening to every exact detail and every exact thing and task that they need the people to do within each of the different categories of things they need them to do. We take a lot of notes and we really make sure that we're listening to exactly what it is they think they need and what they actually then need, because in most cases, uh, we're actually working as consultants which is how we're calling those roles, right? Recruitment consultants. Because many people think they need A when they need B, right?

They don't know what they need.

They don't know what they need, but at least they have an idea. So what ends up happening is we end up recommending to them what we actually think that they need, uh, based on, you know, what their actual issues are.

So how often do you see messiness end up on your desk? Messiness in terms of fights, arguments, disputes, people unhappy, upset? Crazy emotional stuff like that?

Well, that always happens. And it's very small, uh, let's say up to like 15 people. I was also HR, and that meant everything had to go through me when there is— were issues. I personally don't like dealing with those issues, which in many cases are drama in my point of view, right? Uh, which is not a political thing to say, but the truth is now we have an HR department and they deal with any issues that are happening. And only things that are very, very good or very, very bad come to my desk, let's say, to deal with.

Wow. What would be an example of something very, very bad?

Well, very, very bad usually means we're probably going to fire someone who's been here for a long time but is not keeping up with the demand of the job or doesn't have the right attitude or any of the 4 core values that we have at this company, which we've now established. Which we tell everybody, you know, we are going to measure you now every year starting with last year because it was pretty new and making sure that you have a high score in each of these values, because if you don't, you're not the right fit anymore for this company. Right. And yeah, dealing with that situation is never great, especially when I've created bonds with people for years.

Wow. It's got to be difficult. How do you, how do you, how do you— those, those, the 4 values you had up a little earlier are all seem, seem to me to be pretty subjective. How do you, how do you get objective measurement about them? Yeah, there you go. Back, help others thrive, drive to grow, exceptional compassion attitude, dedication to the Virtual Latinos family. How do you measure that?

Yeah, so the truth is we don't have an exact way to measure it. Now, what we did create so that people could be at least as rational as possible was we created a chart where we said, you know, if people are— for each of these values, we created basically something that says if somebody's like this, they are in between the range 1 to 2. Now, this was grading out of 5, right?. And then if they are, like, we would give basically a lot of different examples of what the person would be like or how they would act at work or how their work was in, you know, in terms of describing what it means to be scored 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5, right? So we kind of explained to them what each of the numbers in the scale meant so that they wouldn't just pick a random number, right? They had to read, oh, okay, Number 3 looks like what it is that I think that they are doing right versus 4 or versus 2. Now, it's definitely not perfect. It's very sometimes subjective, but it's the best we can think of for now.

And, and are the employees appreciating the fact that they're getting evaluated on these values?

Some yes, and some no, because some are very much the right fit. And they love it because they're getting scored high. And that affected, you know, bonuses. And that was good. And some of them like, man, now we're getting to corporate, and there's all this stuff that we need to be. But something that else that we have is like, um, happiness pulse survey where every 2 weeks we send it out when people can fill out a survey anonymously to just give us feedback so that it doesn't have to go through managers, and then the leadership team gets to see it direct.

Oh, so, and so you're getting— you're constantly taking the temperature of the team to see how everybody's doing and try to see what— see if there's— are trends that you can— that you can react on?

Right. So that we know that there's no No manager trying to just hide something bad by not telling us.

There you go. So what do you see the future for yourself and the company in the next 5 years?

So in the next 5 years, we're likely to continue to grow as long as all things remain the same in terms of economics, uh, right? But the economies of the world change all the time, and that obviously affects usually every business. When COVID happened, in our case, it was more positive because people had to work remotely, so we definitely grew. As things have changed away from COVID being a thing and more people, uh, going to the office, in a way it also positively impacts us because people don't want to go back to the office, so they'd rather work with us than go back to the office. Um, but right now, you know, the, the goal of the company right now is to continue to invest in ourselves, to modernize our processes, modernize our technology, modernize our structure in terms of the team, to be able to get ready to have enough, let's call it, supply and the ability to serve a lot of customers. Because we know that if we had more capacity and we could turn on the marketing engine of more leads, we would be growing much faster. But we don't do that on purpose when we see that we're just already too busy with work.

So you're kind of at capacity right now, and in order to grow, you're going to have to find more VAs. But if you, and if you found good qualified people to serve as VAs or, or offsite professionals, you could ramp up your marketing and find, find the work for them.

Correct.

But the problem is deciding how big do you want to get? Because expansion and scaling means big.

Scaling is not easy, definitely. So that's why right now we're making sure that we look at the machine to make sure it's gonna work properly for Brian because There's different stages of growth. We've passed a few, but the next one is going to be harder. It just gets harder.

So you're living down in beautiful San Diego. What do you do for fun when you're not working?

Well, definitely spending some time with my wife. Once a week we try to go out. It's on our calendar every Thursday to go out and spend time with my wife, friends' wives. Usually I'm, I'm a guy who loves music festivals, electronic music festivals. So that's one of the things I like to do when possible. Whether locally in San Diego or, you know, close by. And then recently snowboarding. I was snowboarding last week in Big Bear.

Really? I learned how to ski in Big Bear back in the '50s. Ah, yeah?

Oh, wow. Yeah, that's the place I learned too.

Yeah, no, I learned— I'm a level 3 certified ski instructor, among other things. So one of the reasons I live where I live is because I can ski very close to where I live right here. That's cool.

Yeah.

How do you like snowboarding?

How do you like snowboarding? Great. I've been doing it since high school.

Oh, okay. So quite a while.

It's been a while.

Yeah.

But definitely now as I grow older and I don't exercise as much, it's like, man, this time I went for half a day and my legs were killing me.

I understand.

But yeah, I love it. I love the rush of going down the mountain and it's nice.

Good for you. One more question. I'll let you go. Jaime, what is one thing about yourself that we would never know unless you revealed it to us?

I guess some random fact is that, I guess I'll say two. One is that I collect soda cans.

Soda cans?

Been doing that since I'm like 12. Wow. Hundreds of soda cans in lots of boxes. And it all started in Israel when I saw a Coke can written in Hebrew. And then I went to Egypt and saw Pepsi and Coke can written in Arabic. So that was super cool. And then I started collecting cans for a long time. Now I don't do it so much because they take too much space. My wife already wants to throw them to the trash. And that's obviously a different, you know, problem. But yeah, I like to collect things from around the world. But yeah, cans were not a good choice because they take too much space. And yeah, I guess some other random thing is that I took an 8-month backpacking trip after college. And went to Southeast Asia. I now know every country of Southeast Asia except the Philippines, which is kind of weird, but every other one I've been to backpacking in. Yeah.

Wow, good for you. Well, this has been a great conversation. Thank you so much for your time today.

Thank you as well. Pleasure to be here.

Doug Noll here. Thank you so much for listening to Listening with Leaders.. If you are a successful executive leader who would like to be on this program, please visit podcast.dougnull.com/podcast. If you got something out of this interview, would you please share this episode on social media? Just do a quick screenshot with your phone and text it to a friend or post it on the socials. If you know someone that would be a great guest, tag them on the social media to let them know about the show and include the hashtag #ListeningWithLeaders. I love seeing your posts and guest suggestions. We are regularly putting out new episodes and content. To make sure you don't miss any episodes, go ahead and subscribe. Your thumbs up, ratings, and reviews go a long way to help promote the show and mean a lot to me and my team. Want to know more? Go to my website, DougNoll.com, or follow me on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram. That's @DouglasEnoll. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next show.