Ethan Kap and Outsourcing for Insurance and Finance

And they have that. That respect for you. Right. And even if you tell them don't call me sir, they'll still do that.

They'll still call me sir.

They'll still do that. So I have found, once you get there, get their trust. I mean, some of them will go above and beyond to work some crazy hours to get projects done for you.

Hey, guys, welcome. My name is John Jonas. I'm here with Ethan Capp, which I'm super excited about because Ethan has some really good stuff with the Philippines, stuff that people ask me about all the time. So let's off. What is your business? What do you do?

Well, we have two core businesses. The first business is a marketing company or a lead generation company. So we generate leads for financial advisors and they pay us for that. And then our second company is a financial company. And so the agents who actually want to write their financial products with us, we take a bit of the override. So it's almost like a national agency. So we have agents all over the country who write products with us and we get paid a little bit of the override.

Okay, so sweet. And you have built a whole team in the Philippines to help run these things?

Yep. Right.

How many do you have?

22.

22 right now.

Okay.

Did you start with 10 or did you start with 1 or what did you do to start?

Well, we started with one.

You started with one.

I've known you for a while before you had online jobs. So got into your training and I didn't believe you, of course, like somebody from the Philippines, because like many other people that have tried outsourcing, I've tried from other countries and we struggled there, you know, maybe not understanding the language, not getting people who were hard workers and respectful and things of that nature. And so we started. I think our first person we hired was a web developer in the Philippines. In the Philippines. And so Jeremiah was his name, actually. We still have connections with him. And we hired one named Ricky who did all of our web and video work. And. And we still use some of those assets that they created even today. And so that went really well. And so of course, we like anything. We kind of hired a couple that we struggled with. We didn't clearly explain what was going on. And so, like, if you want to, we can get into like, you know, what agreement we have them signed and how we onboard them and all that. But yeah, now we've got a pretty robust process. We use online jobsph. We have a pretty robust interview process. And then once we go through that and make them do a couple of steps and we interview them, then we onboard them with a, you know, a 30 to 90 day onboarding process.

Sweet. Okay, so when you started, you didn't have the robust interview process. You didn't have the contracts and stuff. You just hired someone.

Just hired someone.

Okay, so let's talk about your interview process then. I mean, you've refined it. You're pretty good at it now. Most people you hire now are successful with you.

Yep.

Okay. What do you do to interview people? What's your process?

The ad is important for us. You know, we got started, I don't know, 10 plus years ago, we hired our first Filipino. And so obviously, you know, with inflation and things are going better in their country, and so we pay them more today than we paid them back then, obviously, and we try to pay a little bit more to get a better person. Okay. We have found that if we put. Let's say that the going is $600 a month. So it could be more or less than that. We're just saying right now we try to pay a little bit more than that to try to get better candidates. So we have found that we have them apply, so we have a lot of jobs where they have to be on the phone. And so at first, we didn't think that we could find a lot of Filipinos that had little to no accent. In fact, we've been able to find many that have almost a perfect English accent. And not saying that we need that for every position, but we do have a call center and our phones are answered here now. So for a couple of months, we were trying to hire somebody here in the US to actually answer our phones. And they would come and we would train them, and then they just wouldn't show up again. Like, we couldn't find someone who actually, like, would come here, here. And so we're like, well, maybe we should just test somebody from the Philippines answering our phones. And we were kind of scared to do that. And so we tested it out and we found Kayla. She speaks perfect English and she's been answering our phone probably a year and a half.

We're sitting in your office right now.

Yep.

And I walked in, there was. There's a receptionist desk, and it's empty. And there's. It's empty. There's nobody there.

Yeah. And we'd walk you around, but we're repainting and most of our offices are empty now. Okay. Now we do have key people here that work from home. We've outsourced most People. So there are American people that work here that either have a higher skill set level in terms of like marketing, copywriting that we need that we haven't been able. We haven't figured that piece out yet of how to train Filipinos how to write high level direct response copy. Yeah, right. So. So there are some positions or we have a full time camera person here. Well, we've got to go to locations here. We have agents come here. Obvious some of the Philippines can't do that piece. So we do have some pieces that are here in the US obviously. So we have them go through like a two or three interview process. We have them record.

Are these email interviews? Are these Skype interviews?

They do Skype.

Okay.

So before we get on the phone with them with Skype, we have them do a couple of things, have them jump through a couple hoops. We want to see their syntax in writing. So we have them write why they feel like they would be good for the job. We have them call and record a message and speak why they want to be good for the job.

For that call and record. Just like your voicemail, we have a.

Service that they can. It's a 1, 800 number that they can call in and leave a voicemail. We like that because one for the positions that need a better accent, we can hear that. We also like to hear their syntax when they're talking even to us. Like I want. It's okay if some, in some positions that they have an accent, that's fine, but if they have really poor syntax that doesn't really fit for us.

Communication is never an issue with anybody in the Philippines. But often there is a. There's a little oddity in their English that if you're going to be putting customer facing communication, that oddity comes through.

Right. And I like to talk to the people that work directly with me. My developers don't like to get on the phone. They like for me just to type it all out because they want to read it in word, word for word. And we understand that now and they do a great job. So I have two personal assistants, Lee and Liz. I get on the phone with them. Yeah, it's like I don't Skype with them. Like I'm just like, let's just get on the phone and talk this out. And so for me, for that position, it was important that they understood my syntax, but also I could understand their syntax. So they have a high level of English awareness. And like you say in your training, it's shocking the amount of high level education, you can find someone over there for what you pay them.

Yeah, it's crazy. Okay, so your interview process, they, they have some communication with you, email they have to jump through, they have to record something, they have to write something. Then you get on a, then you get on a Skype interview with them.

Right. So I'm one of our main HR people, interview them. The other thing that the Filipinos like, and it's important if, if you can give them the feeling that you are a stable company because we've, we've found that now we don't have to hire as hard because the referrals come in pretty good. Like our best people bring their best people. And so when we can have a history of like 10 years or even a year of paying them and now we're missing payments and etc. We don't have to hire as hard. Right. We get the referrals. We just go out to say, hey, we're hiring this position and we get five, 10 referrals.

And anybody new now you can say, talk to our other people and you know, because then they know like, okay, you're stable and you're going to pay.

Right. So example, I just hired Liz as a second personal assistant. We got so busy with the idea with a high end private client group that we need more help. So we hired Liz, our HR person, recruited him after they went through the steps, I then recruited him and then I had Lee talk to them who essentially would be one of the main people over them. So we build teams. We like to have a main Filipino and then we advance them and then we put two underneath them when we create pods. Okay. And the other thing that we do that's been helpful is they send daily emails. Learned this from the guy, super fast business out of Australia, Great training on that, that he runs a lot of Filipinos as well. And so he basically has them. And I took that same process, which was I have them send me a daily email and it tells me how busy they are. So green means they weren't that busy, yellow means they're really busy, and red, if they go about two weeks in the red every single day, we have a process where we automatically then go hire someone else. So we know that we need someone else in that position.

Sweet.

Okay.

I love it. Really quickly, I want to touch on the software. What are you doing to have them answer the phones?

So we have our own phone server here. Not that you need that. You could use something like Grasshopper or whatever it's called. Right, okay. You could use an online phone Internet service. We just have found. We like to control it here. So we have a phone server here, and we just give them an extension in the Philippines. So it's almost as if they were here.

And it rings their. Their personal phone.

Right. So if I want to call Lee, who's my personal assistant, which he lives in Manila, right next to the airport, and I always hear the airplanes coming in. Okay. Not that he doesn't really contact our consumers too much. Right. But yeah, I just dial 441. That's an extension he picks up. And they use. They use Bria, which is an online phone.

Okay.

And they just talk to their computer.

Okay. Okay.

So they're.

They're using a soft phone. Bria.

Bria. Okay. We have found that to work well for us.

Awesome. Okay, do you. You have the. You have some of them or all of them work us hours?

Well, yeah, that's. That's one thing that you might struggle with, because some of them want to work their hours. Yeah. What we put that into the ad saying it is a graveyard shift. So they work us hours. Okay. And then we tell them it's, you know, we're mountain time. So we tell them it's nine to five. Mountain. We're very clear with that. We have a lot of them that have worked in the BPO industry, and they're kind of okay with that because they've already worked those hours in call centers. So there's a really good group of people that are already used to that. Okay.

So I don't do any of that because I just found, like, the graveyard just hurts the people that I've hired. So I stopped doing it. We have a couple people that do it, but just to cover customer support.

You have to find the people that are already accustomed to it. And so if you're familiar with the BPO industry, it's a big industry over there. And so we're finding them from that industry. They're working their call centers, and they want to work from home. And so they're already used to those hours. They've accustomed to them.

Everybody on your team in the Philippines works from home. You don't have an office there. You don't have utilities or insurance, or.

We haven't wanted to get an office because the other biggest disadvantage is the weather there. Right. And so we've never. We always have at least one a day that have something like, you know, typhoons happening or, you know, because it is a third world country. Right?

It is.

You're Gonna get some of that. So we've never wanted to be in one physical location because if that went down and that would hurt us. Yeah. Okay.

Sweet. Okay, so let's shift gears for a second. You have a lot of insurance agents who you work with. How can they use this in their businesses? What are the specific things that you're doing that someone else can do at this point? You're big. I mean, you have 22 people. I get 26 people. I'm 14 years in.

Right, sure.

Someone starting off. What are the things that you see that they can do?

Well, to me, it comes back to the law of 80, 20. Right. So I get this question a lot from financial advisors, and many of them try to run the business themselves. Right. And so they're doing everything, and they think that that saves them time. So a lot of that is a cash flow issue. So assuming that you can afford five to seven hundred dollars a month, which is you can find a really good person that can help you out. And so I would say, what are all the $10 an hour tasks that you're doing that you don't want to have them do? Right. So here's what my Filipinos do. They answer. They answer all of my calls coming in to my clients. I don't answer the phone anymore. Right. I don't even have a direct line. Okay. They answer. They have. Now, I forwarded all of my emails to them. So they go through all of my emails and forward me the ones that are important to me. Okay.

So they're filtering your. And you had to teach them to do that?

How to teach them.

Like, you had to go through and say, like, here's. Here's this type of email. Here's what to do. Here's this email. Here's this special case here.

Yeah. So in my company, like, I'm an entrepreneur and I have ADD like everybody else, and I've had to learn, like, I'm 15 years in, like you, that standard operating procedures are actually a good thing. Right. And it's. I always was impatient thinking, like, oh, I got to build a standard operating procedure. And everybody in my company laughs at me now because that's all I talk about. But as we. As we built those and the standard, the company starting to grow, and it's starting to be systematized better. It works. And so, yeah, you've got to train them and you got to set time aside. But in my opinion, what was worse, dealing with all of these clients that I just didn't want to deal with sometimes Right. Because I needed to write copy and I needed to grow the business. Right. And so I needed to find a way to create a client control system. Right. And so the only way I knew how to do that was create that wall and train them. So it gives me now a lot of freedom. Right? Yeah. I have people, but I talk to them only once or twice a week for an hour that we actually go over. They know exactly what they're supposed to be doing. At the end of the day, they send me their report. I respond back to that report with any major questions. And of course, if they have an emergency, we have, like an online communication system, like Slack, that we all communicate. And if they need an emergency, which sometimes they do, then I'm available.

So I love that, the approach that you take, because so many people I see, they come into this and they're like, oh, I just want you to hire someone for me, and I don't want to deal with it. That doesn't get you anywhere here. You have to be willing to deal with it. You have to train them, you have to interact with them. You have to gain their trust. They have to trust you, and I love that you've done that.

Well, they're human like anyone else. Right?

Well, so a lot of people don't think that. They think they're hiring a robot because it's someone on the other side of the world and they're. I don't want to use the word a slave, but, like, that's what a lot of people think this is. Oh, I tell you what to do, and you do it right now. And that's all I do.

Well, I like the word trust because once you actually get their trust, and you talk about this a lot in your training, like, because of their culture. I mean, it's shocking how even after 10 years, some of the people with me still use the word sir. Like, they call me sir, and they're very respectful and they have that respect for you. Right. And even if you tell them, don't call me sir, they'll still do that.

They'll still call you sir.

They'll still do that. So I have found once you get their. Get their trust, I mean, some of them will go above and beyond to work some crazy hours to get projects done for you. Keep that respect and trust active. Right now, we try to treat our people well. When we have hours here that, you know, we have holidays off, we give them holidays off, you know, and some Filipino holidays. We've. We've tried to help them and we do pay the 12th month, 13th month. Yes. So we don't do health insurance. Some of them asset, because it's not really an employee relationship. Right. So you know, we, they don't work for anybody else, but it is a subcontractor relationship. We put that agreement into place. We tell them, hey, we don't work these days, so you don't have to work these days. And it works pretty good.

Awesome. Awesome. So we started off down the road of like specific things that people do for you. We got sidetracked. But they answer your phones, they answer your emails. Keep going through that process. What are the Filipino people capable of? What are they doing for you?

Well, they're definitely, if you find the right people capable of doing web development work at a high level.

All development work.

Not all. We have found. No. We've had some high level C coding where we haven't been able to find Filipinos to do that, like complex. So we've had to build out a portal. When our leads come in, it has to read that and then send it to the advisor that it's at. And we've had to hire some people from the Ukraine and other areas that have that high, high level skill set. But 90% of what we do like web work. Right. So if you need a sales letter put up or a shopping cart or you know, most things that it's pretty simple they can do, even simple software they've been able to do. So yeah, they do that. They do web work. They can write, you know, if you get content, if you. Again, I would check their syntax and just make sure there's people over there. They're excellent teachers. They've taught in English, they've written in English and they can write content for you. All of my emails that I send out are proofread by Filipinos. So I just write in a Google Doc. I send it to them, they proofread it. I take, copy and paste it and put it in. Because I do a daily email to my email subscribers so they can answer phones. Great at project management and really good interfacing with clients if you get the right people. You know, we have found that we had that fear, but the other fear that we used to have is like, what if our high end clients know that somebody from the Philippines has answered our phones and for the longest time we never told them. Then we're like, why should we be afraid of that? So now they know in some positions that may hurt you. But I think overall, so like Lee, most of my. So my high End private clients. They know he's from the Philippines. He speaks really good English. He's always on top of it. He takes care of it. They can get to him if they can't get to me and they're fine.

Sweet.

And they know he's forgetting like he's from the Philippines.

That's super cool. That's. So it's interesting how you and I have had different experiences and different things. Like I have super high level developers. Like anything that can get done for my business, which is a very technical business, is done in the Philippines. And on the other side of that I have not been able to. I have not had really good project management people. So it's interesting that like and maybe it's a different personality thing could be where we're having. But clearly you can get stuff done.

You can. And we have found that they still need software so we use a project management software to help them. But if you can find the ones that are detail oriented enough that they're project management based because they've got to be able to handle multiple things moving at the same time. That's really the project management piece. Once you can find that person then they can do it. Yeah.

And I do have that happening. I just haven't been as good at it as you have.

Well, we haven't, we haven't been able to find high end, high end developers either. So maybe you can share some secrets with me.

This has been awesome. Any last things that you want to add? Anything you want to say to some? You know someone's looking at this, a financial advisor is looking like can I do this? What should I do first? Any last things you want to add?

Well, I think fear is what holds us back. Mostly because like we're talking to someone's in a third world country, right. We like well they're talking to my clients. So there's fear of like what if they find out they're from the Philippines? Right. Or what if that person disappears in a third world country?

Right.

Or what if typhoon comes and I can't get a hold of them?

So there's a lot of what if they steal?

What if they steal? Right. So you know we use infusionsoft now keep almost all of them have access to that they could download the client data and do something. We've never had that happen. I mean could.

But I've been doing this for 14 years. I've seen hundreds of thousands of people go through this and have seen very, very, very few circumstances where something was stolen and almost Every time it's because the employer tried to get the worker to do some work and not pay them for that.

So. Yeah, so. So if you're a financial advisor and you're writing insurance business, or if you're even doing assets that are management, you know, they can. They can do still a lot for you. So if you get the right one, they can do project management for you. They can. They can finalize applications for you. We have our Filipinos call the insurance companies and follow up. I mean, I got a team of people that actually call the insurance companies and talk to underwriters. Right. So things that you think that they couldn't do, you do have to train them. You're bringing them into an industry where it's unique in the verbiage. And so there are Filipinos that actually have done or in financial services over there. So they do have a baseline of kind of how that industry works. Obviously, it's a little different how we work here. And so once you get them trained, though, they can have those conversations. They can update your numbers. Right. They can track things for you. They can run reports for you. We have balance sheets and income statements that are built by Filipinos. Right. And so pretty much anything that you think can be done can be done there. It's just you deciding what you first want to have them do and then go through the process to hire just one person, train them, and then just get going. I mean, that's the biggest thing. There's a lot of fear with it. Yeah. There's some time. You're going to have to learn how to communicate with them and how to talk to them and how to. You know, a lot of them need structure. They need for you to explain it. And that used to be a real big frustration, like, with our web developers. Like, I have to go through, like, say, I want a webpage built. I have to build a word doc out and say, here's where the picture is and here's the copy. If I just say, go build a webpage, they can't think what's in my mind. Well, neither can an American employee. Right. So you can learn that communication style. And once you get comfortable with how they work. Yeah. You have to do a little bit more up on your end to maybe say, here's how it needs to be done, or create a video. Once you send it to them, they get it done, and it's fantastic. Yeah.

So good. It's so good. So I love that this. I mean, exactly what you said in the beginning. So many people can't afford local help, or they're doing it all on their own, or they don't think that they can get good help. And you can. This solves all of those problems. And you have. You've clearly solved all of them, which I love.

So. Yep. Yeah, you can. So I would say give it a test. I don't again, we for some high level coding. We've gone other places, but outside of that, if there's a position in our company now, if, say that person leaves, the first question we ask is, can this person be actually be filled in the Philippines? We now ask ourselves that question. And then we sit down and say, okay, what does that have to look like? What would we need to train them on? How would that need to work? And like, you know, there was fear here. Like, well, what if our clients, because they're older, they're baby boomers? And we thought, well, you know, what if somebody's answering our phone and they're from the Philippines? Well, most agents that call in, our financial advisors even don't even know she's from the Philippines. We don't try to hide the fact, but they love her to death. Like, we come to her events and everyone's like, well, where's Kayla? Like, they have this really strong relationship with her because she answers the phone, she understands all of our business. And so that's the other thing I would say is they're really smart people too. Like, they, they really are smart. They can do projects and they really are loyal. I think that's the thing we've seen. I mean, our web, our current web developers have been with us close to 10 years. Yeah, right. And they don't even think about looking elsewhere. I mean, they're just loyal to you. Yeah.

And that's such a big deal for American businesses where turnover is so high, to find someone who's loyal and well educated and smart and willing to think and then overseas that they're westernized, which the Philippines is very much. There's all kinds of really good that obviously you found in this. So, Ethan, thank you so much. This has been so awesome. I hope you guys have learned something. Thanks for watching. We'll see you later.

See ya.