197 - The Power of Effective Listening in the Future of Business with Katuva's Tobe Brockner

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 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.

Toby Rockner, welcome to Listening with Leaders. You are the founder and CEO of Katuva, a virtual assistant company which can be found at katuva.com. So let's get started. Real simple question. Tell us about your backstory.

Yeah, it's a, that's a long windy road. Like most entrepreneurs, it's never a straight line as much as we— but yeah, I, so I grew up in Louisiana and got out as, as fast as I could. The area that I lived in wasn't great for raising a family or anything like that. So I actually moved to Idaho. I live where I live now with my wife and 2 kids. I have been an entrepreneur my entire life. I think I had a 2.5-week stint at McDonald's and that's the extent of my employment opportunities. My wife says I'm functionally unemployable, so I had no choice but to start my own company. In fact, when I was in high school, a buddy of mine, we were sitting on the back of his pickup truck and We had just graduated high school and he said, because my dad owned his own business, my grandfather, my uncles, everybody. And he said, are you going to go work, you know, with your dad now that you've graduated? And I said, oh, I might, we'll see. And he goes, are you going to call it Brockner and Son? And I said, no, we're going to call it Brockner and Father.

You like—

I always knew that was what I was going to do. I was going to own my own company.

You like being the boss and having the freedom and independence to be able to do what you want to do and not be told what to do.

I'd like to be in control of my own destiny, probably a lot like most business owners and entrepreneurs. They like to be able to, to call their own shots. And if the thing succeeds, it succeeds with them. And if it fails, it's because of them. And that's exactly how I want it.

So the company you've got now, Katuva, is a virtual assistant company, but you've had other companies before this, right?

Yeah. My background's actually in marketing. I came up through the direct response marketing world. Was doing direct response copywriting early in my career and doing mailers and kind of old school direct mail stuff. And I, it was in the financial services industry where I actually started my career. I wanted to, my, my original goal was to be Warren Buffett, the, the next Warren Buffett until I realized I wasn't nearly as smart as he was. And but I got really good at finding new clients. I just didn't like doing the work. But I was really good at finding them. And so I started a marketing agency and this was, I think, summer of 2003, maybe. I started a marketing firm with a, with a partner, a couple partners. And we ran that business until I actually ended up leaving in around 2000. We had some philosophical differences between where we wanted to go with the business. This was like, again, it was the old school direct marketing stuff. I saw the writing on the wall with the digital, with People forget in 2014, Facebook ads were very new. Instagram was super new. Even Google ads weren't nearly as robust as they are now. So this was frontier, uh, at the time even. And so I saw that writing on the wall and decided to, to go out and do my own thing and started a digital ad agency from there and ran that for about 5 years. That was from about 2014 to 2019. The marketing company that I had before, we had about 150 employees. It, it was an absolute nightmare. It was just a giant daycare. So I knew I didn't wanna grow, you know, I didn't wanna grow a company that big again. So I wanted to keep the, the digital ad agency that I started boutique and small, and we topped out at about 12 employees or so. But somewhere down the line, I'm, for better or for worse, I'm pretty laid back. I don't, I'm not a micromanager by any means. I try to give people their space. I hire people to do a job and I stay out of their way. Uh, but that can sometimes, when the pendulum swings too far, they, they get it in their head that they can make autonomous decisions and, and undermine your, your initiatives. And some of my employees got it into their heads that we were running a democracy over there and we were not. We were running a benevolent dictatorship at best. So I, I got sick of that and just shut the whole thing down and was like, okay, I'm just gonna go and do freelance. I'm just gonna do my own thing. And I took it down to zero, but I still had clients that needed servicing and needed help and work that needed to be done, deliverables that I didn't know how to do. I don't build websites. I don't, I didn't, I couldn't do video editing or graphic design or any of that kind of stuff. I'm good at the strategy, but the tactical stuff, not so much. I went back and this is where a lot of people. Who most, you know, people who have this idealistic lifestyle of working on their own and being their own boss and all the, most likely have run across Tim Ferriss's 4-Hour Workweek. And that I, I revisited that book and went back and I was like, oh, virtual assistants. He's talking about virtual assistants. I forgot about that part. And so I had dabbled in virtual hiring virtual assistants before with very limited success, made every mistake you could possibly make. But I figured I need to pick this back up because I've got client deliverables that I can't do. And so I, born outta necessity, I started hiring my own little crew of virtual assistants. And like I said, I failed over and over again trying to figure this out cuz there were a lot of mistakes to be made when you're hiring remotely like that, particularly in that time. Uh, again, we forget that Zoom wasn't nearly as robust as it is now. There were the very limited ways to communicate and it wasn't as stable and, and it wasn't as normalized. Actually, the pandemic sort of helped my business in that sense. It. Normalize working remotely. And so what I did was I developed a process for hiring, training, and managing these virtual assistants. And I started having, and it was really just for my own benefit of, so I'd quit screwing it up every time. I needed something consistent, systemized. And I started having business owner friends of mine come to me and say, hey Toby, I need you to help me find a virtual assistant. That sounds interesting. And I just laid off someone or somebody quit or whatever, and I'd like to I want to dip my toe in this. Can you help me? And so I started doing that and that's where Katuva was born, was out of that, that necessity of helping other people and being asked over and over again. And I thought, hey, maybe I'm onto something here where I can create a company around this and build it. And so that's what I did.

Where are your VAs located?

Again, that sort of came from trial and error. I've talked to people who hire VAs from all over the world with relative levels of success. My sweet spot that I found is the Philippines. That's where we stay. I know. I know that country and those people very well now, and I've hired all over the world. I've hired in South America and Peru and Bolivia and Argentina. I've hired in Eastern Europe. I've hired in Ireland and Spain and all the, just anywhere you could possibly imagine. Southeast Asia as well. Vietnam and Bangladesh and Malaysia and Vietnam, China, whatever. I just never had the success that I've had with the Philippines. And it's just those folks over there are built. Differently.

Uh, my VA will appreciate that when she is looking at this video. How do you go about recruiting VAs in the Philippines?

Yeah, we, so we use various job boards, obviously. And so a client will come to us, typically the process is they'll come to us and say, I need somebody that has these types of skills and that can do these types of tasks. One thing that we also require all of our clients, because we require VAs as well, we have them submit a DISC assessment. And we try to match them based on not just tasks and skills, but also DISC profile compatibility. Again, this is something I learned the hard way. I'm high D. I hired a virtual assistant who was also a high D, and all we ended up doing was butting heads. I went and I found someone who was a high C that could take my ideas and turn them into reality, and that, that tended to work out much better. So we take that information And we go to the various job boards and we post our job ads. Um, the crazy thing about it is I was actually doing this over the last several weeks as I've been driving around town. I was, I thought of a piece of content that would be good for us was I started taking pictures of all the help wanted signs all over town and they're just everywhere and you can't hardly find anybody to help you. When we run an ad on one of these job boards, the last one that I looked at, we had 191 applications for it. Wow. So, you know, finding people who are anxious and eager to work is not the problem. It's sorting through all of the ones who did apply that, and most of them are very well qualified and they're great, but you can't hire everybody. But that's really our bread and butter is sorting through all of those. That's really the difficult part.

So when did you start Katuva?

I started Katuva in April of last year. Oh, so we're coming up on our first year anniversary and, and next month. I, I had been doing this, like I said, since dabbling since 2017-ish or so, getting more serious about it in late 2018, early 2019, and then had done some form of this or another since early 2019. Was relatively new just because I was like, okay, let's formalize this. Let's make it an actual company and do it. And so we started Katuva. Katsuba, incidentally, the name, in case you're interested, Doug, is it— there's a Filipino word, Tagalog, called katuwang, and katuwang means partner. And so I took katu and I just hooked VA onto the end of it because that's really what we're trying to build. We're trying to build a partnership with our clients and place VAs in their business who have a vested interest in the sense that not necessarily equity or anything like that, but a vested interest in their success and the VA success. That and the domain was available.

Well, there you go.

You know how hard that is.

Uh, yeah. What is it that gets you up in the morning and gets you excited to get going at work?

Yeah, I, I, I'm going back to Warren Buffett. One of my favorite quotes of his is, I tap dance to work every day. I really feel the same way. I get up every day excited about helping small business owners offload all of the mundane or the overwhelming tasks that are on their plate. Because I've experienced that feeling of relief of I've got this backlog of different things that I've got to do. And it just feels like it's a never-ending source of to-dos. I've always said when I die, they're going to staple my unfinished to-do list to my lapel, my suit jacket in the coffin there. You're never going to run out of things to do. And so being able to teach people how to offload that stuff and then have the, in a lot of cases, have the courage to be able to do that, because it does take a level of courage to let go and give that to somebody else, but also creating, teaching them how to create systems so that it's done the same way every time. That brings me a, a, a huge amount of joy.

Where do most of your clients come from?

All over the United States. Really? Yeah. We're, we're finding people all over the United States. Obviously we started here, just my personal network reaching out and doing different things and word of mouth spread very quickly. Most of our clients are high-performing businesses, they're in masterminds, they're in groups, you know, networking groups, and they recommend us to their friends and colleagues or other mastermind group members who may be across the country. So we have clients from California to Florida.

Wow. So what do you think it is that's unique about you that's made Katuba successful in such a short period of time?

Yeah, I think the biggest thing is our approach. We're obviously, we're not the only VA placement agency out there. There we have dozens of competitors, which I, I think is great. I, I'm always wary when starting a new business if you go into it and there are no competitors, uh, that's a red flag. So the fact that we have a robust competitive market is awesome for me. I, I really like that. It just proves that there's demand for what we do. Um, but one of the things that I noticed, and this was born out of my own experience, was you, you look at other VA placement agencies and they say, hey, we're going to bring a qualified highly trained, low-cost VA to put in your business. And I'm like, well, of course you are. That's— those are the table stakes. That's the bare minimum that you should be bringing to the table. But what about the client who maybe has never hired a VA before, or who has maybe hired one in the past but had a bad experience, or didn't make it, didn't work out? Maybe they've been wanting to hire a VA and they just didn't know even where to start. And so I think The thing that sets us apart from most companies is, is that, that program that I was talking about, we call it Empower Plus, and it's that training program for our clients. We actually do a lot of handholding all the way through the hiring, training, and managing portion of the process. And then we stay engaged at the, on the backend. So when a client comes out the backend of the Empower Plus, they have not only a highly qualified, trained VA working for them, but they also know how to train them on building systems. They know how to communicate effectively with them. They know how to manage them. And then we stay engaged with the VAs, with our clients too, but mostly with the VAs and providing them a place to continually get training and support. So we have private groups for them to go that we don't let clients in because if we let clients in, the VAs would never say anything because they don't want to lose face or don't want to talk freely. So we keep clients out and we, we continue to train these VAs in various aspects of marketing, operations, systems, et cetera. So I think that's probably the biggest differentiator between—

who does the training?

Me. I do the trainings. I also have other VAs who have expertise in various things. Just a couple of, we do 2 live trainings in there every month. We're actually doing one tonight and tonight it'll be on SEO basics. Again, my background is in marketing, so I, I have an understanding of a lot of these different things, but a couple of trainings ago we had one on graphic design basics, which I'm not a graphic designer, but one of my VAs, Ivan, he is a graphic designer and he taught that training to all the other VAs.

Wow.

And then we have another, other trainings that, like I have a Facebook and Google Ads specialist. And she taught a class on that. So there's, I bring in help when I need it that way, but it's mostly me.

So the, it sounds to me, do you have any other employees other than yourself?

I do. Yeah. I've got, so my partner here, he, Spencer, he's in charge of, well, client fulfillment. So he runs the Empower Plus program. I'm in charge of growing the company and strategy and those sorts of things. Sales. And then Spencer is local and he's here and he does client fulfillment. But we also have 5 VAs that operate the kind of behind the scenes in our business. One full-time and the other 4 are actually part-time, but they run the entire, pretty much the entire company other than the sales and the client point of contact from client fulfillment standpoint.

So you're living what you're selling.

Eat my own medicine, Doug. I have to.

And how are you enjoying it?

I love it. Yeah, like I said, I get up every morning just excited to go to work. And, um, it's been an interesting experience because I've been involved in multiple companies before with varying degrees of success, including that first marketing company that I had. We took to— we were doing over 8 figures a year in revenue, and it just— the stress and the staying up at night. Our payroll was $350,000 a month. And so when you're laying in bed at night staring at the ceiling and you've got a $350,000 payroll coming up on Friday and it's Wednesday and you're wondering, what in the heck, can I keep this going? I would much rather have this type of lifestyle. This is— so that was really important to me is to, to when I started down this journey of, okay, I have a chance here, I have a blank canvas and I can paint whatever I want and I can make my life, I can design my life however I want it to be. And I can do that because of the leverage that I have with using these virtual assistants, but creating systems and all these things. And so I very intentionally designed my life to be a way that I enjoy. I scuba dive regularly. I go to jiu-jitsu 3 times a week and generally with my son, he's 20 now and we go and roll together. If there's anything that will humble you, Doug, is rolling with a 20-year-old kid that just whips your butt every time.

I'm a secondary black belt. I know exactly what you're talking about.

He's a tough nut to crack. Yeah, but spending time with my wife and my daughter and, and doing all these, the things that I want to do, being able to do them with whom I want to do them is important.

How long do you think you'll keep at this?

Uh, I would like to do it for as long as we, until AI takes over everybody.

What do you see coming down the road?

Yeah, it's interesting and it's gonna be, I think we're on the precipice here. I graduated high school in 1995, so I'm, I was on that sort of that bridge between the analog world and the digital world. We're just coming outta high school and my entire childhood was all analog. And then after that it was all digital. My son Beau, like I said, he's 20. I told him, I said, you're in the exact same spot I was. Except for you grew up in a digital world and now your future is going to be this AI world. And I don't know that any of us really can appreciate the magnitude of what is coming with this. And it's, it's going to be very interesting to see. I mean, I remember just not too long ago reading an article about something and they said something that kind of caught my attention and said, we only know today, we only know 10% of what we're going to know in 50 years, which is mind-blowingly—

mind-blowing.

I know. It's just, it's gonna be a, it's gonna be a weird world we live in 15, 20 years from now.

Yeah. It's, it is shocking to look at the progress. I learned how to code in 1969 on a mainframe when I was a freshman in college.

Yeah.

And it was great training. I never wanted to be a coder, but it set me up for the digital revolution that I lived through.

Absolutely.

But when I first started, just to show you how far we've come, I started practicing law in 1978, worked for a year out of law school and then went to work for a law firm. We didn't have all of my secretary used a manual typewriter.

Mm-hmm.

And with carbon copy, real carbon paper. And heaven help me if I made a mistake in dictating or wanted her to retype or revise something.

Right.

And then a few years later, the copy machine came into play and that, that began to revolutionize the law. And then I'll never forget in 1981 or '82, the fax machine.

Yeah.

Actually Federal Express, which was formed in '78, '79, somewhere in there. They made a big deal out of we can deliver any document anywhere in the world in 24 hours because they have this fax machine technology and they spent tens of millions, hundreds of tens of millions of dollars in those days. And then 3 years later, everybody had a fax machine, almost put FedEx out of business.

Yeah.

And today we didn't have computer. Yeah. We didn't even have computer. We didn't even begin to have network computers until the mid-'80s, and even then PCs weren't around yet. So yeah, it was crazy time.

I just taught my wife how to use her tap pay on her phone.

Oh, okay.

What is this? Like, she had no idea. I was like, you need to get used to this because in about 10 years you're going to have a little chip implanted in your, in your finger that you're just going to scan your fingerprint and it's going to be linked to your bank account. Like, it's going to be crazy.

Absolutely.

So this show is called Listening with Leaders because I know you've done a little— you read a little bit and maybe watched the videos that I create for my guests and learn more about my work as a lawyer turned peacemaker. So how important has listening been in your career?

I think probably you, you have to look at listening and being able to understand and, and comprehend what people are trying to communicate as a foundational piece of your career. Without effective listening, you, there, there's no, just no way. I don't think you can have any level of real success if you're not a good listener on some level. And so it's, and, and I haven't always been a great listener. I'm a Type A personality and very direct and to the point, just gimme the meat and potatoes and have sometimes struggled with that. One thing that actually did help me quite a bit was understanding the, the Enneagram personality assessment. Having taken that, and my wife took that, she actually turned me on to it and showed me what it was all about. And understanding why people behave the way they behave, and then understanding with that kind of understanding, then being able to say, okay, they tend to, because they're this number on the Enneagram, they tend to behave this certain way. So I'm gonna, when they're acting a certain way or trying to communicate a certain thing, I need to step back and understand that and, and be able to listen on a level that takes that into account. And that's been immensely helpful. We have— we've actually integrated that Enneagram assessment into our Empower Plus program with clients and, and VAs. It's amazing too, Doug, when you look at— you have somebody here in the United States, totally different culture, all the way across in the Philippines, and you have them both take that Enneagram and then and it matches up with their behavior, even with the cultural differences and even with the— they're 8,500 miles away or whatever it is. It's funny describing to them what their number means and them chuckling and nodding along and yeah, that sounds like me, even in the Philippines. And so having those sort of base foundational pieces in place can't be underestimated, I don't believe.

Do you have to spend time teaching either your clients and/or your VAs, uh, deeper listening skills?

Particularly with the VAs, we talk to them a lot about listening. We talk to the clients more about effectively communicating and being clear in their communication because there's that— there's a tendency to misunderstand. There's language barrier, obviously. There's cultural differences, things like that. I remember doing early on, I did a, I was trying to do a postcard design for a client and I sent it over to my VA with the instructions. I said, I need you to put this information on one side and then this information on the other side. And he sent it back and it had the information. So he had split the postcard down the middle and he had information on the left side and the information on the right side. And I was like, no, what I need is I need this on one side and this on the other side. And he sent it back to me and they were just swapped. So he had the information that was on the right now on the left. And I was like, okay, I'm saying the other side. He's hearing the same side, but just one side of the— so I said, I need you to, I need you to put this information on the front and then flip it over and put this information on the back. And then he was like, oh, okay, I get it. And so a lot of that just had to do with me not communicating very clearly what I needed. And it didn't really have anything to do with him not listening. He was hearing me and thought he understood what I was saying. It, it, but it was just, those are these weird examples of how things can get lost in the translation, so to speak.

How do you make sure that, for example, in, in situations like that, how do you make sure that what you are communicating is being understood the way that you want it to be understood by the listener?

Yeah. So one of the things we teach our VAs to do is to repeat back what they're hearing, just to clarify, am I hearing this right? Am I understanding this right? And we generally try to have them do that via written communication. So they'll email back and say, am I understanding this correctly? Uh, so that there's no real room for misinterpretation. If they're just saying it back, then the client who may be distracted or maybe thinking of something else, yeah, that's what I meant. And then it's really not what they meant. And so. We, we teach them to do that, kind of reflect it back.

And then how, how, how do you teach the clients to be able to make sure that what they've said to the VA is being properly reflected back as opposed to where they get very busy and just blow it off and don't pay attention to it?

Yeah. So one of, one of the things we, we try to do is encourage clients to use certain tools, like instead of particularly with more complex ideas, writing more complex ideas, like sending it in an email or putting it in a project management software. We use ClickUp, but like Asana or Trello or something, and, and kind of explaining it that way. My VA didn't actually get what I meant until I did a Loom video and I held up a postcard and I said, look, this is what I'm saying. I need it on this side. And then I flip it over and I need you to do it on this side. And then he was like, oh, okay, I see now. And so we, we try to encourage our clients to use these tools that are at their disposal to make sure that those communications are more clear. Otherwise, there's always gonna be room for misinterpretation. So the more inputs you can give, meaning if I can hear what you're saying and I can see what you're saying, like an example of what you're saying, I'm more likely to understand.

Yeah. And I think that's exactly correct. There's another example of how the technology allows us to have more clarity using Loom or Crane or any of the other many platforms that are out there, or even Zoom, to be able to teach and train and explain so that people can watch.

And even on when I do quote unquote sales calls, I'm not, I generally don't do calls. I always try to do Zoom if possible because I want to see, we, you, you want to get that feedback, the nonverbal. That's as much as listening as anything is, is being able to interpret that nonverbal feedback.

Exactly correct. Yeah. Another thing I do is I teach people how to listen to emotions, which is really powerful when you've got somebody who's upset or angry or just needs to be heard very deeply. When you learn how to listen to emotions rather than to words, you create a very tight connection between people. Very powerful skill. Well, one more question and I'll let you go. What's one, one thing about yourself that we would never know about unless you revealed it to us? We know you're from Louisiana, but what else is out there?

I, yeah, this one's a funny one. I have been in an actual cage fight.

Really?

As a competitor?

Competitor. Yeah. I got this weird, I had this weird midlife crisis situation when I was in my early 30s and put a fight in a cage fight on my bucket list.

Oh my God. You're a brave man.

Training and doing MMA and all the different things. And yeah, went and fought in an actual cage fight.

How'd it turn out? You're still alive.

I did. I won by knockout in the second round, so it was great.

Good for you.

Good for me.

What got you into jiu-jitsu?

I have a wrestling background.

Okay.

I wrestled growing up and during my MMA stint, always enjoyed jiu-jitsu and my son Bo, like I said, he also, I had, I put him in wrestling when he was 4 years old all the way up through high school. And I just thought, hey, this is something that'll be good for us to do that we can bond over and, and do. Yeah, I've been into it for, for a while and really enjoy it.

Good for you.

Well, thank you so much for your time today. Great conversation.

Thank you, Doug. Appreciate you having me.

Absolutely.

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 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. Wanna 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.