Scott Marlow and his Filipino VAs to make Wordpress Themes

I don't hire personally anywhere else except in the Philippines. That's.

What's up, guys.

John Jonas here from onlinejobs. Ph. And today we have a really great case study for you with Scott Marlowe from ThemeCo. So it's Theme Co, where they create WordPress themes, and they're really good at it. So Scott has a pretty big team in the Philippines and he has a really good, really interesting process for finding them, for finding and hiring. So they're good at bringing people into their process, and then their process is really good at weeding people out. And it's super interesting and I'm excited for you to learn about it. So along with Scott today, I have Chelaine Tuttle, who is the one person in the US who works for me, and she's conducting this interview. So we'll have Chelaine and Scott and let's get into it.

Hey, it's Chelaine with onlinejobs. Ph. Not long ago, I had the pleasure of interviewing Scott Marlowe, a remarkable man of faith and family and business. Scott is one of the co founders of ThemeCo, which is home to some of the Internet's most beautiful and functional WordPress themes available, including the X theme, which continues to be one of the most popular and versatile themes on ThemeForest. One of the qualities that struck me most about Scott was his dedication to creating an intentional and positive life, both at home and at work. He has great tips for life and for managing and hiring outstanding Filipino VAs. Now that we're here, would you tell us a little bit about how. What kind of a role your family has played in. In your backstory and going on this marriage retreat and this life that you've built together? I'd love to hear about that in context.

Well, thank you. It hasn't always been roses. Joanne and I actually tomorrow are celebrating 19 years of marriage. I waited until I was 39 to get married because I just knew that God knew what he was doing when he was keeping me single. And when she came along, it was that love at first sight kind of thing. And I'm like, okay. That's why I was waiting. We kicked off marriage. I was trying to build an Internet business at that time. We got married in 2001, and then we did this crazy thing. We just felt like the Lord was leading us to go to Russia. And we went to Russia for a year, working with street children, working with school children, orphanages, prisons, hospitals, that kind of thing for a whole year, bringing the good news of the gospel. But Also bringing food and clothing and medicine and helping others, other people from around the world, literally to minister to some of the underprivileged in Russia. And that was 03. And then we came back, and that's when I really got serious about building my Internet business. And it wasn't. I mean, it was kind of amazing. I kicked it off in my very first month. I made, I think, $800 profit. And I was, wow, maybe this could work.

And what were you selling? What were you doing?

That was mostly in the affiliate business. I started off easy, just basically learning how to do traffic, learning how to write good ads, and then capturing a lead and then moving people on to what I thought would be a really good fit for what they were looking for. And then very quickly, I discovered that I needed help. So I ended up hiring someone, actually my very first person in the Philippines, and he's moved on. But my second person, which was the first person that. That I hired through onlinejobs, ph is still with me. I think I hired him in. Well, it's been over 10 years. It's been over 10 years that he and I have been working together. From a standpoint of my family, it was awesome because right about the time my business was starting to take off was the time that my son was born. We always wanted to homeschool, and my wife, we wanted to have her home to be able to take care of babies. It's just something that we wanted. It wasn't happening in the beginning because the first. Really sorry. The first two years, my son's life. I'm sorry. I blanked out some things. I was like Mr. Mom while I was building the business. That's right. The first two years of. While first two years of our marriage, I was Mr. Mom and we were building. I was building the business. And then right about the time that my daughter came along two years later, Arianna. And any entrepreneur who has been around for a while knows this. We thought, okay, things are going pretty well. Joanne, let's bring you home so you can take care of both children. And then like the week later, the famous Google slap happened and my business went away, like, overnight, literally. Maybe it went down to about 10%. I had a little bit of organic traffic, but. But we just knew again that God knew what he was doing. So we just waited and pivoted and grew the business again. And then almost like clockwork, the next two years, we had two more children come along. We have four children. Just celebrated my son's birthday this last week, and he's 15. And we're just amazed at what God has done in our children. They are amazing kids, all unique, all different. One brief little story, we discovered four years ago that our fourth child, long story, I'll make it very short, but she had very aggressive kind of brain cancer. And so we went on that journey and we literally found out about the cancer the next day. She was having cranial surgery, and then she lost her ability to speak. And she couldn't move her hands and her legs as a result of the surgery. And then I'm laughing because she's doing very well now. Three weeks later, our whole family, we're a homeschool family and found ourselves moving to Boston where we could get proton radiation therapy. And we stayed in the Ronald McDonald House, who were big Ronald McDonald's fans. And then we went through a year of chemotherapy. And literally, thank God she is doing very well today. So that has been part of our.

Journey, a huge part. So as a homeschool family, do you get to play a part. Do you choose to play a part in your children's education and kind of work with your wife? And how does your work set up, facilitate that?

I have to be honest, about 98.5% of it is my wife. She. And it may be, truthfully, more than that, she's just a rock star. She's a superhero. I think any mom is a superhero. And then some of them step it up to the next level, which is homeschool mom. She's just amazing. But I do some stuff. I was classically educated myself, and we're doing a classical education for our children. So they're learning Latin and rhetoric and logic and the classics, going back to Aristotle and Socrates and learning about how these ideas shaped Western thinking and why we think the way we do and why that's important to understand how we think. And of course, they're still young, but I'm hoping that we're building a foundation for that. I will handle a lot of the reading. I read every night to them almost every night. And I will also handle some of the math, geometry especially. And I guess technically, Joanne is the preacher. The preacher. Joanne is the teacher. And I'm the principal. I think I actually have. We actually have an academy. We're registered with the state of Tennessee as an academy and think. My name is on the documentation as the principal. And sometimes, I guess there is some discipline things, as principals will do. So that's my role. And we have loved it because, listen, we have found ourselves in Disney World in September Or February when nobody else is there. And the lines. There's like no lines. And like, I mean, that. That's reason enough just to go homeschooling, just to be able to go to Disney World in February or September. And. And we take crazy field trips. We actually took one a few years ago to Pompeii. Truthfully, it wasn't that expensive. We. We found some flights that were very inexpensive, and we stayed in a villa that was just not very expensive, less than a hotel and with a view of Mount Vesuvius and the Bay of Naples. And then we just spent our time either learning how to make pizza or going to Pompei about what happened there and how the discovery of Pompeii kicked off the neoclassical movement. That is why our buildings in Washington, D.C. look the way they do. Because of Pompeii. That's right. And we had an awesome trip scheduled for this year. This is for anybody who's watching this in the future. This is the year of the COVID 19 virus. And we had planned to go to, of all places, China in April. And of course, you know what happened there, but we're going to try that again in the future.

That timing couldn't have been any worse.

Truthfully, right about the time that we would have been arriving in China was when they were reopening. So it actually may have been a safer place than here.

Who knows? I'm sure we'll know a lot in about 10 years. Right? We'll understand what's happening now by that point. Well, that just. It sounds like a dream. It sounds like between. Well, it just sounds like you live a very intentional life, guided by your beliefs and your education and your aspirations as a family and as businessman. Because obviously none of this would be possible if you weren't mobile, even if the kids were able to get up and go. So when did you know that you wanted to be your own boss? When did you know you wanted to pursue entrepreneurialism?

Wow, that's a great story. So I didn't. My father, my grandfather was a sharecropper. And when my father went to college, it was crazy. None of his brothers and sisters could understand why you would ever want to go to college. And he was the youngest one, and he went to college and he broke the mold and he ended up getting a job at IBM where he worked for 31 years. And when I graduated from college, I didn't really have any prospects of where I wanted to. To go. I'm still trying to figure out what I want to Major in, even though I've got a couple of degrees now. And I ended up working at IBM as well. And I worked there for eight years. But I tell you what, I never knew that I had this entrepreneurial angst in me. I knew that I wasn't 100% satisfied in what I was doing. Even though I had a fantastic job as a systems engineer, as a psychology major, I got a job as a systems engineer. I don't know how that happened, but I had a great job, but I just wasn't satisfied. And I finally. They put me on a Y2K project. You may be too, too young to remember Y2K.

Oh, I remember. I remember.

And I. That was in, in 98, toward the end of 98 and actually in the beginning of 98, I couldn't think of a better way to waste the next two years of my life than to work on a Y2K project to fix programming errors that were started 30 years before me. And so I took that as a sign that I'm supposed to get out and I got out and I started working on my own. And from that day forward, I mean, there have been tremendous ups and tremendous downs, but it has always been this journey that I just. It feeds my soul. And I told many people that I am. It wasn't too long before I was literally unemployable. Like I don't have skills that anybody would actually want to hire me to do anymore because my brain is coming up with new ideas and ways to execute them. And then I just bring people around me to help me execute them. Which is why we're talking today, as a matter of fact.

Love it, Love it. And we are going to get to that, I promise. But I am going to be a little self indulgent right now because I would love to know, and I am sure that a lot of our viewers would too. I would love to know about your daily schedule and what you do that sets you. I mean, I just get this feeling that you are waking up every morning just ready to carpe diem and what it is that sets you up for success every, every day. Would you share that with us?

Yes, I would love to. One of the things that we realized when we moved to Tennessee, we didn't know this before, but we are on the far eastern edge of the central time zone. And so the sun comes up, especially in the summer. It comes up very early here. And I don't like curtains. I don't think we have any curtains on our house. It's all like open windows. And we're kind of in a private area, so we don't have neighbors walking around or anything, so we don't have to worry about that. But when you don't have curtains, the light just comes in. And so I am awakened at least in the summer, every morning, at least by 5am and I'll get up and my first thing I do is I go work out. We have a basement, and I'll go work out. And I have to confess, it's usually while I'm watching something. So that's kind of like my.

That's multitasking, tasking. You don't have to apologize for that. You're doing two things at once.

Well, it's my motivation, right? If you can sit down and watch a show that you enjoy, but you make the rule where I'm not sit down, I don't sit down. When you make the rule that you can only watch the show when you're on the treadmill or on the elliptical, then it's like a motivation to get, you know, down there and get that done. And so I'll work out for about an hour, and then right after that, I will take anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour and pull open my journal. And I will usually start with something in scripture and read something. And wherever I think the Lord is having me lead, read at that time. And then I will just begin writing. And sometimes it's like me, like, writing to God or to posterity or to my future children. Sometimes it's just random thoughts. But I'll tell you what. Sometimes it feels like it's almost like the Lord is talking back to me. And the thing I love the most is about every two or three weeks I will go back. I mean, sometimes it's just stream of consciousness writing, right? But sometimes I'll go back and I'll open up those pages, and if I can read what I wrote, I'll use what a friend of mine calls the Holy Spirit highlighter. And I just go back and I see the things that are repeated and the things that stand out. And it's at those moments when I go back and almost in that. That sleepy kind of hypnagogic kind of like. Like just writing, you know, And I'm tired, but I'm just writing. I'll go back and see some of the larger ideas that were coming together and some of the things that keep repeating and the things that I can't get out of my mind. And it's those things that I believe that God is actually speaking to me about. And it's those things that I put on my list of things that I'm gonna go take action on. And after that we usually have a team meeting. Start our day around 8 o' clock and then we break and we all go and execute on what we did. That's what my morning looks like.

Tell us about ThemeCo, because in your own words, you're in a very rare field. There are very few people who do what you do. Is that right? We want to know all the details.

Okay. Well, themeco I started with my good friend and one of my best friends and my business partner, Kyle Wakefield. And he and I met many years ago, but we started theme company in 2012 and so we're actually about eight years old now. But first of, first of all, it was kind of an affiliate business where we would help people find the themes that they wanted. WordPress themes is what it was. And then we created, along with the help of Kyle's brother Corey, actually I shouldn't say help, pretty much mostly Corey who did it. We created a new theme called the X theme, which is one of the more popular themes on ThemeForest and really has been ever since. ThemeForest is like a marketplace where you can get WordPress themes. Our X theme has been one of the most popular themes on the marketplace for many years. We have a team of 16 people now, about half in the US and Europe and then the other half in the Philippines and a couple of other places. And I can tell you more about the team if you want to hear about the team.

Of course we want to hear about the team. Yes, absolutely.

Well, so we sell software and when you sell software, you of course have a lot of customers. We have a lot of customers. We sold over 200,000 licenses of the X theme and then a lot more of our pro theme, which is our newest theme that you get on our site directly, not on ThemeForest. And with that comes a lot of customers and of course a lot of questions. We think it's very self explanatory, but we want to be there for our customers and we want to be able to answer the questions that they have as they have them, even if it's the same question we've answered a thousand times. We want to do it with grace and with love and with encouragement. And so, okay. In the early days, Corey, like I said, created our theme and when we put it on ThemeForest, it literally rose to the top like almost overnight. Now, Kyle and I have always been marketers so we had some ideas about how to run traffic to themeforest to get it popular. But once we did that for a couple of weeks, it just took off like wildfire. And so all we had was Kyle and I, two marketers. Now Kyle's probably more technical than I am, especially when it comes to WordPress themes. And then Corey, who was the only person who understood it. And so the guy who created this theme is now the guy that has to answer all the questions. And so literally, I don't think a day or two went by before Corey was on the phone with me. He was like, Scott, how quickly can we get some help in here? And I was trying my best to get the help and it wasn't because of the tools I was using. I was using onlinejobs ph it was because we had set the bar so high to find just the right people. And we want to not just have the right people, we want to be the right company for the right people as well. So it takes us a little while to, to find that right match. But very quickly we found a guy in Iloilo and he is still with us. And then we've just grown from there and have many people from the Philippines and like I said, from other countries who are helping us make our experience for our customers a very. I want to use marketing words like thrilling experience or satisfying experience. Well, I mean sometimes our customers use those words because they love our product. What we want is we want to be available to them. Sometimes we can get back, sometimes we can get back to customers in less than an hour, sometimes two or three hours. So we try to support our customers as well as we can. And it's because of those amazing rockstar people, many of them in the Philippines, that we're able to do that.

Awesome. So you've got developers who also work as customer service specialists. Is that.

Yes. We started with Corey but now once we were able to find some really good support people, Corey was able to start moving back into development. However, we have actually moved several of our people who started in support on up to development and so, and we have, you could truly say we have leaders in, in our dispersed team and in the Philippines we have people who are, are leading and actually doing customer facing things now. So very proud of all of our people.

Yeah, well you must be training very well too because that's integral training and management for such a functional team.

We all come from different cultures and different parts of the world and I think we all from our culture do things differently. We have Found very honestly that it is sometimes our people in Europe, some other like CIS countries and that kind of thing who tend to be able to step into roles where they can begin to lead others more quickly. But we do have leaders and our people in the Philippines. And I don't want to ever be the person that says leadership is always the place you're supposed to go because there are some people who just want to be technical and we love those people who just want to continue to be technical and just to solve technical problems. Right. And I have seen our people in the Philippines grow in both ways, both in leadership and also in their technical proficiency. One thing that I'll say about in general, I hate to generalize any kind of people, but when it's a positive thing and it's deserved, I want to point that out. Well, first of all, we've never had anyone in the Philippines leave us. We try to be, like I said, the place that deserves them. We try to be the place where they can work, that they would love to work with us and then continue to work with us maybe their whole career. And so we've never had anyone leave us. And so that's part, it's a small part of us making what I think we did a lot of hard work to make a great environment and a great place to work. But it's mostly, and just being really honest here. It's mostly because of the typical Filipino mindset. I have found that they're very loyal people, very family oriented people, strong family culture. And literally they're part of our family, our themeco family. And I just. And nobody ever leaves us. We give, you know, I think generous raises almost every year and you know, sometimes when we have to have difficult discussions about, you know, let's do it this way or, you know, don't do it that way anymore. And you know, there's always a slap on the hand kind of thing. But every single person that we have, Philippines and elsewhere, every one of them, when you deliver that kind of information with grace and with love, every one of them are like, you know what, maybe I did mess up. I'm going to step up to what they're asking me to step up to. And anyway, you ask about Filipinos, I am, I don't hire personally anywhere else except in the Philippines. It's just that kind of quality.

What do you do in your business to create that culture where people are excited to come to work and continue to work for you?

Right. Well, we try as much as possible to match the hours that they want to have. It's not always possible because, as you know, they're pretty much 13 hours off from us. So people who first start with us are usually having to work through the night because western buyers are awake during western hours. But we do try to move them to. I mean, there's some people who want to work the weekends, right? And there's some people who do want to work, you know, the early morning hours or late evening hours. And so we try to accommodate that as much as we can. We. We pay a little bit more than what. Definitely more than what this all star could make by getting on a jeepney and then, you know, driving an hour or getting, you know, going an hour or more into the city and then working and then having that same commute on the way home. I've had this chance to go to the Philippines and I love it. I love it in the Philippines. But I would not want to make the average commute that a Filipino worker makes into Manila. But I honor them if they do that.

How do you recruit your workers from the Philippines? You said you use onlinejobs.ph but the more entrepreneurs I talk to, the more they say they are getting so many applicants when they post jobs. So do you go through and look through resumes? You post a job, how do you do that? How do you stand out from other job posts or other employers? What's your procedure there?

I can point to a few people, I guess I've been in marketing for quite a while, and I can point to a few people who have. Who have kind of given me input over the years where I basically. It took me a while to do this, but I basically finally figured out that audition hiring is the most loving and the most effective way of getting the right person into the right job. We do two things. Two things. One is we do have an ad, and then the. And we've set up an automated process that uses Typeform or some other tools actually, where people can come in and take a quick quiz. And it's actually if this is for a technical job at the time quiz, that's that way they can't just go look up the answers on Google. They have to kind of be able to know what they're talking about. And then, you know, we find that, you know, at least half of the people who will start that will not finish it. And that's okay. You know, there's probably another place where they need to be. We are looking for that rock star and then they move on to another one and then they move on to another one. And then eventually they get to one where we talk about chemistry and philosophy and culture and company culture and that kind of thing. And then the last step is actually a personal interview with our hiring manager who works for me. And if somebody gets through that gauntlet, then they're the right person technically, and they're the right person as a culture and chemistry fit for our company. Then we have a personal review with them. And then the next thing we do is we actually never hire anybody. Right. Then we start a minimum of a one month trial period and we give them some very specific tasks to be done during that period. And from day one, they're talking with customers. When I say talking, I mean they're responding on the forum to customers. So it's all types of. And then we will evaluate their performance at two weeks and then again in a month. And then many of them are hired at that point. If what they've done didn't quite cut it, then we have a discussion. You give them another two weeks or another month usually. And then usually people will figure that out because they love working from their home, they love not having to do the commute, and they enjoy us as a company and we obviously enjoy them as a person, as a potential employee. So they're given challenges and almost everybody makes it by that second month and then they come on board. So it's kind of. We call it the gauntlet. So you have to go through the gauntlet to get to the trial and then the trial itself. There's certain measurements that we have in place that they need to meet, you know, how many tickets they answer per shift and that kind of thing. You know, we're looking for things in that point. You know, who are the people who put in the extra and who are the people who, you know, if they didn't get to their quota, they work an extra hour or something like that. Right? Because we don't want people working more than eight hours. And we also don't want anybody working more than one job. That's why we pay a little bit more than the average, so that people will not be exhausted when they come to our work because they've been working somewhere else. And so we just, we want to remove all the barriers that it takes to make sure they're the right person for us and to make sure that we're the right company for them.

So once they've made it through the gauntlet and the trial, what are your favorite methods of management? What kind of software do you use? How do you communicate with them. What kind of rules do you have for them with check in and reporting and whatnot? What kind of training do you do? I just, that was a really big question. So you probably got a lot to share.

We do. Well, we just replaced some of those. So we've had to build a couple of those tools ourselves, but not the major ones. And you know, I have to say a little aside, I, I've always wished that I had a company where people just talked about my products for free with other people because they were so excited about them. So there's two of those products that we use that we pay for that. I'm just going to give them like free reference. Right. Free word of mouth. And the truth is Theme Co is that same way people talk about Theme Co. So I guess I do have that company and they talk about our products, but we use Monday and we have, we have. And actually I don't do this part. We have a manager that does all this, but from what I know he has all of our projects there. And we can see, and we can see when people check in and check out and we can see we've got measurement tools in place and we had to write those. We have measurement tools in place that actually check and see, you know, how many tickets they were able to do and the quality. Of course we, of course that's a little tougher to have an automated tool, but we have that checked by customers reporting back their satisfaction with the answer. And we've, I mean, I tell you what, our folks are 95 plus satisfaction like consistently and we're really excited about that. The other tool that we use is Slack and we kind of live on Slack. So. But with Monday and Slack, that's pretty much everything. We have our own Discourse Forum tool that we use and we support customers, but those two products, really.

I wanted to ask you a little bit about something else that I saw in your story, your Seems Cove story video that's on YouTube. Like I said, you say right before a breakthrough, there's a difficult step. So can you talk to us a little bit about that and how that affected your professional life or even your personal life and how that continues to be a part of your philosophies.

Yeah. You know, one way, and I don't mean anything belittling about this at all. I think one of the most painful things that a human being can go through is childbirth. And I have never experienced that and never will. Many of the people listening have or will. And it is the most amazing, miraculous I think thing that happens, and my wife and my friends who have actually physically done that, talk about how the pain is worse right at the end, and it just builds. It just continues to get harder and harder, and then the baby comes. And I hate to even liken anything that I've ever done to that, but I sometimes feel like when I'm building something or when our team is building something, that the intensity of the pain and the energy that it takes and even the discussions, sometimes that we have internally, you know, sometimes they get heated, and sometimes we misunderstand each other, and sometimes maybe tempers get short. And it's just. We're all under stress and pressure, but very often we know when that starts happening, something great is about to happen. We just went through that just now, just these last three weeks, we've just brought out new products that we've been working on for over two years. And it was a lot of work right toward the end. And so I would say, if any entrepreneurs listening to me, who could be encouraged by that story, that is, for me, every single time there is something new and big and worth it coming out, whether it's a new product, whether it's a new company, whether it's, you know, new business partnerships that are being forged and all the negotiations that are going on, every single time, the pain intensifies just toward the end to where you almost want to say, this is just not worth it, but you don't really realize how close you are to that breakthrough and to that endpoint. And then, so what you do is you just. Maybe you get a little less sleep, maybe a lot less sleep. And you just wake up each morning and you go, okay, these are the things that I've got to do. And I know that I'm a week late on this, and I told the customers it would be last week, but this is what's got to happen. I didn't know that I had to do this. And I bring my team around me, and we work through it. Now, our team, we pray together a lot. And. And when we pray, sometimes we find that our emotions are replaced by the larger goal. And when that happens, we're like, okay, let's forgive ourselves that we're not on time, and let's put our nose to the grindstone and let's get it done. And we just push. And I have to credit Kyle, my business partner. He's also our operations manager. What do we call it? Our development manager. And he is the guy who. Who drives us, the whole team, and he'll bring out the whip toward the end, and it is painful for all of us. But because we push through, because we see that goal in mind and we push through, then eventually it gets to the point even though the pain intensifies, it gets to the point where the breakthrough happens. And that, I mean, every single time, nothing has come easy. Nothing has ever come easy. It's always been. Sometimes the ideas come very easy or easily, and then we start executing, and the first part's easy, but then making everything wire together, making sure the customer need is met by the product that we're producing, and then the marketing is all there, it's just difficult. So I guess I would just say for anybody listening who knows that they're supposed to be doing something, knows that they've built something at the 90% level, be encouraged, because if you stepped out, almost everybody does. And the ones who actually go on to create whatever it is that you're given the vision to create are the ones that push through that last 10%. And it just intensifies as 10, goes to nine, goes to eight, goes to seven, and down at one, it gets harder and harder, but then you break through and then it's done. And you don't. You don't see the breakthrough on the front side of it, but as you go over it, there is celebration.

Thank you for elaborating. I think that is such relevant advice for business and for life and for parenting, and there is so much good that can come from that. Scott, thank you for your time today. This has been a pleasure. We are so excited to hear from you. And, yeah, we just have a lot of gratitude for your time and your insight. It.