Time to Go South! The Latin Secret to Finding Superstar VAS | The UnNoticed Entrepreneur

Hola, I'm gonna say hola because we are going to talk about things Latin today. Not Latin as in like ancient Greece, but as in like Latin America. My guest today has built a very, very successful business helping entrepreneurs to access the amazing skill sets and knowledge that there is in Latin America. And if you've only thought that you can get a VA from Asia Then today's podcast is really going to open your eyes because Jaime Nakatch has built a company called Virtual Latinos. Jaime, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Jim. Thanks for having me. Happy to be here.

Good. Well, I apologize for my terrible schoolboy Spanish, but I wanted to introduce you probably because you were originally born in Mexico City, but now you're in San Diego where we're talking today. We're going to talk about how you've built Virtual Latinos, but also what this basic workforce can do for entrepreneurs as virtual assistants. And you're going to share with us some of your secrets to building a SaaS portal that has to have customers and suppliers at the same time in equal measure, and how you overcame that challenge, right? So that's wonderful. And you're going to tell us one mistake you've made and one tip you'd give us all when we're building a business. Yep, it's going to be great. So look, tell us, everyone thinks about virtual assistants only coming from Asia, the Philippines specifically. What alternative can you provide entrepreneurs and why?

Yeah, well, first I'll say that, you know, for good or bad, but mostly good, I had the exact same path that many people do, and I went myself to the Philippines too to hire people in the Philippines. For me personally, it didn't work out so good for various reasons I won't mention right now. But being Mexican myself, obviously I speak Spanish. I also physically live in San Diego, which borders Mexico, and the cross-border culture where I live specifically, it's very big and people cross on both sides very often. So Latin America offers a lot of great benefits to the North American market. but doesn't have to be just North America now because of the time zone. Most of our clients and the biggest benefit to them other than price being a great benefit is the fact that we are all in the same time zone for most of the time zones in the United States. So when people get to wake up and go to sleep at around the same time as you, it's a much better relationship work-wise with them, right? It's more natural. Now, it's obviously a thing that people in the Philippines and in India and other places, they can work what they call the graveyard shift so that they can work during your daytime. But naturally the body gets tired, right? So same time zone is a big benefit. The American culture being more similar or more influenced in Latin America, it's another big benefit that helps American companies to work with our Latino professionals in Latin America because they're more, let's say, aligned when it comes to certain values or cultural things. The third would be the English, let's call it accent or fluency. Of course, there's always exceptions. And in Asia, there's also a lot of great people that speak great American, let's say, type of English in terms of their accent. But one of the things I've noticed, and some clients have told me directly, is like, look, we love working with your Latinos because in a way, our clients in the US don't know if those Latinos are in the US or those Latinos might be outside the US, right? You can still hire them outside the US, but then, you know, people are much more, let's say, used to speaking with Latinos in the US, right? So people don't judge them as bad in terms of compared to when somebody calls a call center or a company and then like a Filipino or an Indian person takes up the phone, right? And there's of course more benefits.

Well, and presumably as well, Jaime, you know, America, I think, isn't Spanish now even overtaking English in terms of spoken language? So you've also got a workforce that's speaking in the language of the customer or the partners.

Correct.

In America as well, haven't you?

Yes. You know, to my surprise, that is actually not a reason why our clients come to us. At least more than 90 or 95% of them, you know, it changes, but most of our clients who hire do not hire them looking for an assistant or a professional that speaks Spanish or is bilingual in this case. A small percentage of them do, especially people in healthcare and in lawyers, especially immigration lawyers, that they want them to be bilingual. But for the most part, they want them to be affordable, professional, and speak great English, right? But yes, that is a huge market that we can still tap into because there's lots of Latino-owned businesses, lots of Latino clients. So that on its own is a huge potential growth for us, which we're not even tapping today.

Yeah, interesting that the assumption from a marketing point of view is that a native Spanish speaker would be great to appeal to maybe that audience, and yet it's not. So really a great case of not making an assumption About what the business is going to do. You did touch on cost. I'm going to pick you up on that. For anyone that wants to go to virtuallatinos.com, you can see Jaime's also very transparent about the cost. Tell us a little bit about the price because actually Asia has become more and more expensive. The fees over there, $8 to $10 now. It's obviously still cheaper than Europe. But actually India now and Bangladesh, Pakistan have now become the low-cost areas. Tell us about the sort of pricing points that you've got for Virtual Latinos.

Sure, I'll say that first, this is the same pricing we've offered since we started in 2018 in terms of the ranges. If you'd go to the pricing page, you'll see 3 ranges. It starts at $8 an hour like it says there. So we have kind of 3 ranges, $8 to $10 an hour, which is what we call entry level, which is usually people with 1 to 2 years of work experience. Then we have mid-level, which is usually 3 to 5 years of work experience, and then expert level. Now, when we started the company, because naturally most people that I initially attracted were very small businesses, one-person entrepreneurs, they all wanted to just save money as the main benefit. So they were all usually hiring entry-level people for $8 to $10 an hour. These days, because of many things that are happening in the economy too, and everything getting more expensive in the United States, globally, in Asia, The prices in Latin America have also increased almost twofold, which is crazy. Now, we're still able to maintain this because there's so many people out there and there's lots of different economic situations in different countries that the dollar goes further than in other places. So yeah, starting at $8 an hour is a great starting point and that today is almost the same as in the Philippines. But I would say the average today is in the mid-range in terms of what people are hiring.

Okay, that's, that's great. So in terms of, um, the, the transparency, that's a big part of it. Um, let's just touch on the challenge as an entrepreneur, Jaime, that you've had, because you've touched on the point about having, you know, getting the first customers in. If you build a marketplace as you've done, where you've got to have the customers who want the the virtual assistants, you've got to have the virtual assistants there to meet that demand.

Yeah.

How did you solve this fundamental challenge that faces every marketplace?

Yeah, well, I'll explain it to you in 2 parts, the initial part and the second part. So initially when I just started, it was really just an idea in my head and I had built initially what we call the Virtual Attendants Directory, which was a different business model than we're offering today where people now are only able to hire through what we're calling the Virtual Latinos Agency, where they have to hire through us. But when we started, it was a portal where you could log in on your own, you could pay a one-time job posting fee and then get to browse our pre-vetted talent. That no longer exists. But when I started that, I had to basically attract a lot of people. I was only accepting the very best of the people that started to apply, and I was quite surprised that hundreds to thousands of people started to apply within a very short period of time. But I only wanted the best people with the best English, with the best detail-oriented skills, with a lot of very specific things I needed. So I spent a lot of time vetting that talent. And I said to myself, when I have enough people to be able to say, hey, now let's go attract some clients and tell them, hey, I got something to offer you, it'll be a good time. I decided on the number 100. I said, when I can have 100 completed and vetted profiles on my directory, it'll be a good time to say, hey, now let's go chat with potential clients. I got something to show you that you can browse a few pages, at least 10, because it would show 10 people at a time. So you could go through 10 pages and see 10, 100 different people with all different roles and experience. But it worked and it was enough so that when I had that, but it had to be a really good balance because if I took too long, And then these people were waiting for a job which I promised to them and they weren't getting hired and it took too long, they would start maybe saying bad things about our company. So, it had to be pretty quick. I had to get 100 people, then I had to immediately go and pitch to people. In this case, I did it in San Diego in physical events where I met lots of entrepreneurs and lots of people who usually go to learn about new things going on in business and I offered them all free access to the site and I just told them, please, all I ask is that one, ideally, you like them and you hire them. I'm going to get no money from you. You figure out you can pay them whatever you want. And 2, give me feedback.

Jaime, that's fantastic. And just to be clear, at the end, you're going to give away a very generous offer to people that are listening today. And you're going to, at the very end, give people a code where they can come and actually get a bonus. So do stick around, listen to Jaime Nahach talking about this. So, but you talked about getting the people on the platform. You talked about going to San Diego, but what about those VAs? How did you get those on? How did you get the workforce recruited?

Yeah, so, you know, because I'm a marketer and it's something I haven't mentioned yet on the show, I'm a digital marketer. I've been doing marketing for 20 years. My company was a digital marketing agency and the whole reason I got into this business was to actually try to replace my local San Diego, US-based talent with more affordable, you know, people so that I can actually have a profit margin because it's hard to do business and I was really just focusing on very small clients. So that's the reason. I didn't want to increase my prices. I wanted to continue to help the mom-and-pops and super small businesses, right? So to attract them, I use all my marketing skills, which in this case meant I created a landing page. I didn't even have the directory at this point because I'm like, I'm not going to go invest a bunch of time and money to build this whole thing if maybe nobody wants to sign up. So I just created a landing page that was a single page that I promote the idea, hey, come and get hired by a US-based company. We'll pay you in dollars. and just, you know, go here and fill out an application. So I did that through advertising. You know, I used Facebook ads. Um, we're still doing that today, but, uh, now more than 50% of our traffic of people signing up comes through referrals, right? So advertising is still important, but not necessarily as important as it was before.

Yeah. And presumably you get a momentum, don't you? And you've got people who are earning money by being on your platform and they'll tell Friends, university colleagues, and so on. As you've gone on to grow the Virtual Latinos, what's been the strategy, Jaime, to get more? Because you've got a beast to feed, haven't you? So how have you now been building the brand? Yeah, and getting more, you know, more people because you're competing with, I guess, the Upworks and the Fivers of this world. Plus some of the niche platforms as well. So how are you getting the scale now?

Yeah, so at the time I didn't have any competition and even though I had tons of competition when it came to the general virtual assistant world, specifically in Latin America, there was nobody that offered people all over Latin America like we did in this type of business model. You know, BPOs and call centers existed for a while and those are usually only used by big companies that hire tons of people at a time. Managed in one location. So, yeah, I mean, the main strategy for growth was, again, going back to my marketing knowledge, which was all about inbound marketing, creating a lot of good content, building a great website that offered a lot of great information, real good tips and information for the benefits of hiring people, in this case, in Latin America, which is what we were offering. And so we were posting initially on our blog one post a month, then we went to 2 posts a month. And for the rest of most of our history, it was up to 4 posts a month. But then we upgraded our game and now we have like, I think it's almost 20 to 30 posts a month, almost daily. And it's not just whatever content. Content for me is one of the key drivers of traffic to our site. So the content, if you look at what Google does in terms of ranking, it's got to be good content. You can't just go to ChatGPT and tell it, give me a bunch of content. It's got to be well structured, it's got to be well thought out. And it's going to be useful, right? So even though now it's a lot, it's because we've been able to hire now internally, you know, SEO experts, content writing people who help us do all the work. But yeah, it's still one of the main things that helps us rank online, which is how we get traffic, right?

Okay. Now, for anyone that's interested in going to my YouTube channel, which is Jim A. James, you'll be able to see the screen share that I've been doing of the Virtual Latinos blog. And yeah, it looks Like it's on steroids. It's beautifully designed, but also the content is frequent but very well structured, as you say, and very informative, Jaime, as well, which is fantastic. So plainly that's going to bring you benefits both for the guests, uh, for the clients, sorry, and also for, for the, for the team that come and work for you.

Yes.

You've managed to make this look like a textbook case of seeing a niche, Solving a problem for yourself, then seeing a niche and that first hurdle of getting 100 on and then going around San Diego and in effect sort of being their job seeker for them, which is amazing. Is there something you're not telling us, Jaime, something that hasn't worked out quite as you might have planned?

Yeah, well, so, you know, for good or bad, Even though I was not very happy with my own personal journey of going through the Philippines and hiring on my own, I chose to not hire through an agency in the Philippines. I said, you know, I got to learn how to do this on my own. And so I did. And I spent between 5 to 6 months doing it. I used a portal called onlinejobs.ph, where it's like a place where you post a job. And that is a great website, but there's thousands of people there and anybody can create a profile in the Philippines. So I spent too much time going through lots of applications, figuring out who am I going to even interview, right? And then interviewing them, figure out are they legit, not legit? How do I trust them? How do I not trust them? How do I know how much to pay them? How do I do an agreement? Like so many things that I hadn't done before. And at the end of the day, I realized, okay, I learned how to do it, but I spent so much time. It was in a way, as an entrepreneur, a total waste of my time. Right? Now, in my specific case, it was great because I ended up building a business out of it. But for the common person, spending so much time trying to find and hire the right person was really bad. But somehow I thought, well, that's a great idea. Why don't I copy that idea of building a directory, but instead of Filipinos, I'll offer Latinos? And in this case, instead of not being vetted, I'm going to vet every single one of them and I'm only going to put the best ones in the portal, right? So I did that. And that was going and being offered for our company around for a long time. But then I kind of quickly realized, hey, we're doing so much work and we're getting amazingly vetted talent, which our clients really like, but we're not charging enough for it. So business-wise, it's not going to be sustainable. So I had to change the business model. But no matter how much I increase the price, and I will share this here, we started charging $50 one time to post a job. Then $100, then $150 one time, and people still paid it. Then I changed it to $50 a month that you didn't just pay for hiring, you had to pay as long as you work with them, even if you hired them directly. But then it was a problem because I couldn't control that relationship. And then I increased that to $100 a month, $150 a month, and then I started charging it in advance 3 months at a time. People would pay me no matter how much I increased the price because the quality was good. And then I said, okay, at that point I was already starting to offer the agency where I did all the whole work for them, where we are able to keep a commission out of what we're doing so it's more sustainable. And that's what we decided, okay, this is what we're going to have to focus on for 2 reasons. Business-wise, it made sense, but clients were happier because we were doing all the work for them. We were only bringing the best 3 candidates, which we still do, 3 to 4 of the best candidates to them so they can spend the least amount of time with the best potential people in front of them and do, in a way, quick, better hires without having to do all the work themselves.

Jaime, that's great. And just a reminder, Jaime's going to give us an offer for listeners at the end of the show, so do stick around. We've not got a lot longer with Jaime. I've got to try and pronounce your surname correctly. Nakatch.

Nakatch, yes.

Nakatch, there you go. He did tell me how to say it. We English, we're just hopeless at our foreign languages. But as the CEO and founder of Virtual Latinos, that's great. So you then sort of morph the business model across, and presumably you've got to deal with the relationships with all of those VAs. How are you managing the communication with the VAs? Because presumably you want to keep them within the portal, they're not breaking away and trying to save the commission themselves. How are you handling that side of things? Because that's sometimes a A bleed.

Yeah, the first thing I'll tell you is that there's no 100% any way to completely know what can happen, let's say, in the background. But my focus was all about building a great community. So we're not just building a portal where people just get a job and that's it. So how that community looks like today is different before of how it looks today. But we basically— the statistics, generally speaking, right now are about the same. We only accept 5% of applicants. to begin with, and only the top 5% become part of our community. And then we only get to hire from that community, right? In most recruitment agencies, the model is different. You come to me and you tell me what you want, and then I'm going to go either like us, have a place that we've already pre-vetted people, but in most cases, then the recruitment agency goes out there and tries to post a job and find people from around the place, right? We only hire from the people we've pre-vetted, and then we pre-vet them specifically for each of the jobs. that people are looking for. So making sure that we offer a lot of value to them is the key to keeping them, let's say, committed to us. Now, sure, some people are not and they don't care for them. It's just a job and they'll go around us and get hired potentially directly, which of course goes against our agreements with our clients, which are all mostly in the US. So our legal agreements are very well structured that basically if we get to catch people breaking the rules in the United States, obviously because we're both in the United States, we can get them to court, then it's a big problem for a business to do that. And for the most part, people in the US are not going to want to mess with us because we're both in the US. People don't want to mess with other people here. Now, sure, people in Latin America can go around it, but to my surprise, positive surprise, at the very beginning, already our clients were like, hey, why don't I pay you on the side and I'll just hire you separately? But people would tell us like, hey, your client wants to hire me on the side and I know that that's not right. And they're trying to save on money and they would tell us that maybe tomorrow they don't want to pay us and what if they ditch me because they're not being honest? So people, well, they're not going to be honest with Virtual Latinos, they might not be honest or proper with me either. So I don't want to have the risk of getting hired directly because who knows what the client's going to do with me? So people would tell us and of course we'd kick out the client and in the end people wanted to have that allegiance to our company because they knew that we were out also to support them. So if they would not have a job with a client, we'll find them another job.

Jaime, that's really, really wonderful. And you're providing that degree of protection for those people. And presumably they're coming from across the whole of Latin America. It's not just Mexico, is it? It's, uh, maybe Brazil and, uh—

Brazil is now included. It wasn't initially because they don't speak Spanish, but now we include Brazil too. So all of Latin America where they speak Spanish or Portuguese, correct? So Argentina, Definitely is included. Yeah, all of it.

Yeah, fantastic.

Except Cuba. Cuba doesn't have internet, so we can't work with the Cubans, unfortunately, even though they're great.

Yeah, yeah. Okay, well, there's political story there, isn't there?

Awesome.

Jaime, if there's a number one tip that you would give as an entrepreneur on getting noticed or otherwise, what would that be?

So I did tell you earlier about what I think about this, but I still think that it's potentially real good advice. But with what I'm about to say, with AI, things have changed a bit. But the tip that I've been really believing in myself and usually giving because it's worked for me for 20 years since I've been in digital marketing, creating good content that provides truly valuable tips to your potential clients in terms of how you do what you do and how you can help them really was a key driver and continues to be a key driver of ranking your website high. Generally speaking, it's known either as inbound marketing, content marketing, SEO, writing content. And today with AI, the challenge is bigger because you can create a lot of average quality content by just going to ChatGPT and asking it to give you an article about X and it'll pop it out in 3 minutes, more like 30 seconds, right? But If you were to say, what should I do? Any website or any business that you have, if you want to attract the type of people you want to attract, sit down and create original content that nobody else has. Now, what do I mean by that specifically? That means don't go to Google and try to research, how do I write an article about X or Y? Literally, it's about what you know how to do that nobody else knows how to do as well as you. And that means sharing your secrets, sharing your knowledge, and writing it down and putting it on a blog. So that it is so unique that Google will basically rank you higher because you're sharing good tips that it doesn't find anywhere else.

Jaime, that's great advice. And I think also to just encourage people to not be afraid, not be shy, right? I work with some clients who say, I don't really have anything to say. And you say, well, you do work with clients, don't you? And they say, yeah. And I say, well, just tell them, you know, write down what you might explain as if you had a client in front of you and use a platform like Grammarly, for example, to help with maybe some of the polishing. It doesn't have to be— you've got to be an artisan to get that content on there. So that's wonderful, wonderful advice. Jaime, over there in San Diego, a book or podcast that you would recommend or that you're diving into at the moment?

Sure. So as a company, we are now implementing a system called EOS, Entrepreneurial Operating System, which is a system that comes out of a book called Traction. Written by Gino Wickman. And it is something that we started a little bit over a year ago or more implementing in terms of how a small business that's growing like us can take advantage of a structure that's not typically huge corporate structure, but it is much more structured than just being a small business that lets you follow a very good system for growth, for looking at data, for figuring out how to hire the right people, and looking at 6 specific things that are very important. So if you want to look into growing and growing your business well, this was a book that was recommended to me now about 10 years ago by a good marketer that I followed, and I completely ignored it. I'm like, okay, that sounds cool, but I'm too busy to read it. But now about 3 years ago, you know, I picked up the book, which I already had here in my house, and I said, okay, it's really worth exploring. And now it's really paying off.

Wonderful. That's Traction then by Gino Wickman. Jaime Nakatch, you did offer something to our listeners if they're interested in trying to work with an assistant based in Latin America. Of course, time zone-wise, if we're in Europe, Latin America is just the same number of hours difference to Asia, but just the other way.

The other side.

Right, the other way. So, um, but of course, any, any of my listeners that are in America, this is wonderful. So Thanks for a generous offer. What would you like to offer people?

Before I do the offer, which I will in just a second, I just want to— for everybody listening, one of the things I forgot to mention, but I think it's very important, is that for ranking and search engine purposes, we definitely still use the term virtual assistants. But I want all of you to know that we are actually not just an assistance company, so we don't offer just admin stuff. Now we're actually co-branding the words with virtual assistant and virtual professionals because a lot of the feedback we got from the Latin American people is like, hey, I'm already, I don't know, an engineer, an architect, or whatever their degrees that they have are. It's like, I don't want to be downgraded to be called an assistant because we have lots of different roles, which we didn't touch on a lot, but it can be lots of different roles. We have very qualified people. Most of them have at least a college degree or master's or higher. Then that's just for everybody to know that we don't just have assistants, we have really professionals that are working remotely. But in terms of the offer, we'd love to offer anybody that mentions the Unnoticed Entrepreneur when they come to our website and fill out the contact form. Basically, there's a section for comments. You can basically mention the Unnoticed Entrepreneur and we will be happy to provide you with a $180 credit to pay for your first assistance.

Jaime, that's wonderful. And I think, so first of all, thank you very much for that offer. And of course, this will be in the show notes as well. But also I think as you really well pointed out, you know, it's Virtual Latinos. Right. And actually, I went through Mexico and, uh, all the way to Costa Rica overland and met very, very many lovely people. In fact, I'm still in touch, uh, with Luis Larro Blanco. Uh, he and I reconnected 20 years later on, uh, on Facebook, which is amazing. And, um, yeah, he actually was in banking and finance and his sister became a teacher. Uh, very fond memories. They took me in when I got I got lost in Ciudad Juárez with my very basic Spanish and a huge backpack. So he and I are still in touch with each other, and I was there in 1989. So I have very fond memories myself. Yes, a very happy memory. So it's a real pleasure to have you on the show.

Thank you.

And that you're bringing such amazing work to people in a place that need it is really great work on many levels. Thank you, Jaime Nahaj, for joining us today.

Thank you, Jim, for your time. Really happy to be here.

I'm going to— can I say mucho gusto? Is that okay?

Mucho gusto. Claro que sí.

Mucho gusto. Igualmente. Okay. Igualmente. Okay. So now I have to say— I was going to say buenas eras, but it's still the morning for Jaime over there.

Yes.

But thank you also for listening to Jaime and myself talking about the opportunity of hiring somebody actually at any level of the business need from Latin America. And Asia, where I spent 25 years, has many wonderful, very capable people, and so does Latin America. And the beautiful point really here is that the internet does make the world flat.

Yes.

And that it really is possible now to hire the best people wherever they live rather than just the best people where you're office is operating. And so this is really liberating for entrepreneurs, isn't it, Jaime?

Yeah, yeah, it's a huge, huge benefit. We couldn't do this before. I mean, I often say to, you know, my family and friends, like, you know, if my great-grandfather was alive and I would, you know, tell him that I run a business, you know, from my house and I never see people in person and I usually wake up in pajamas and work, it's like so crazy.

Yeah, it really is. We can transfer wealth around the world living the lifestyles that suit us and enable us to look after our family and our health and so on. So I was very keen to have Hany on the show to really illustrate what's possible both as an entrepreneur. I love that story about finding 100 people to put in the database and then going out and selling those 100 and getting the momentum in the business and crossing that chasm, which in my own experience as well is the hardest part. And once you get the model right—

Right.

Then you get some scale. So if you've enjoyed this show, do please review it on the player that you are listening to this on and share it with a fellow unnoticed entrepreneur. Don't forget, virtual Latinos, you've got $180 worth of credits there. And until we meet again, I just encourage you to keep on communicating.

Thank you, Jim.

Muchas gracias, Jaime.

Hasta luego.