Most hosts hire wrong. Here’s how to fix it.

I know what your problem is right now in your business. It's hiring, it's working with people, it's not doing all of the work right. And I reached out to a good buddy of mine, Mr. Matt Metros from CS Outsource. He has worked with over 500 companies right now, placing people all over the world from every single angle, from whether it's customer support, bookkeeping, even go high level marketing, you name it. I've even worked with him in the past and somebody to build us an app. So this is a guy that you definitely want to speak to. Over the three years that I've known him, his company has grown from startup to absolute thriving and he's helping and making an impact in this industry. So I couldn't think of a better topic or better person than Mr. Matt Metros of CS Outsource. Let's listen to this lovely conversation about hiring everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the Boostly podcast. I believe this is episode 803. 803 episodes, which is phenomenal. And today I wanted to talk about a topic that I know you struggle with. I know a topic that everybody struggles with, which is, is hiring. How do you hire, where do you hire? How can you make no mistakes when hiring? And to do this I got my good buddy Matt Metros from CS Outsource to come and join me. We're going to delve into all of the problems that he sees that hosts are making property managers just like you are making on a day to day basis. So Matt, welcome along. For anybody who has never seen your face before, can you just give a quick breakdown, breakdown of you, the business, why you got started and where you are today. Share some numbers if you can as well.

Yeah, absolutely. So I'm the owner of CS Outsource. We help property managers, vacation rental operators, corporate housing, home service companies outsource and build virtual assistant teams. So the way I got started with everything was back in 2020, 2021 when Covid happened started looking into real estate.

You know, I was doing a lot of freelancing on the side, I got a duplex in San Antonio, started doing some co hosting, you know, also needed to get my property up on Airbnb. And then I was outsourcing all the work. And then over time I started meeting other hosts, other property managers, helping them out with the guest communications, managing vendors, the turnover process, setting up their tech stack, bookkeeping and accounting. And then you know, over, over the course of time we, because property managers work with home service operators, we got in contact with them. And now we're working with a little over 500 companies and the team is based in South America, Central America, South Africa, Egypt, Morocco, and then we have an office in, in Asia as well. So we're all over the place.

And it's been an incredible journey. It's a little over 300 of us on the team.

Wow. Yeah. And when I first met you, you were in this many offices and many locations over the world. So it's phenomenal to seeing the growth over the last few years. And you said, did you say over 400 companies now work with you?

What's the 500? 500. I mean, the demand is tremendous. We're probably having about 20 to 30 meetings a week.

Wow. Well, congratulations. So again, we've got a lot of data that we can dig into. So over 500 companies, all ranging from one property owner to like hundreds of properties in their portfolio, is that right?

Yeah, exactly. I would say the, the sweet spot is where people start having this conversation is around 5, they're starting to think about it. I usually see people pull the trigger when they hit about like nine or 10, and it really depends on their, their growth goals.

But my rule of thumb for bringing on an assistant is like, you know, just have enough in the pipeline where, you know, when you bring on this person that like half of their salary will get covered or like you need to have a plan over the next six months where you know that whatever you're going to do is going to cover that, that cost.

Well, this comes into my first question nicely. Nice little transition. So we've got, you know, obviously you work with a lot of people and you know, people come to you at different stages in their career, in their life and in their business in total. And you know, what's the biggest mistake that you see people make? Is it literally to the fact that they a, haven't got any work for their va, so we'll hire a virtual assistant and then they'll just sit on their hands and just go, oh yeah, there's nothing for you. Or is it a case of where they hire somebody and they've got no systems and structures in place, they've got no SOPs? Or is it, you know, a combination of loads of things? What's like that, that these big mistakes that you see people make.

Yeah, wow. It's gonna be a combination.

You know, I, I would say the number one is going to be so focused on price. You get a lot. I, I, I run into a lot of people and they're like Well, I know someone that gets it for $3 an hour, so I'll never pay four. And, and then you'll have another person, you know, five and I won't pay six. And it's just not how it works. I, it's, it's, you know, virtual assistant is, is, you know, I think it's almost like a misnomer. It's literally just a remote worker. A lot of people, they think like, like it's different from a remote worker, but it's, it's fundamentally the same thing. It's just that it came about, you know, in the early 2000s and, and people have this connotation that it's completely different than working, you know, as you and I would work from home. But at the end of the day, like you, you, you know, you, you pay for, you know, you, you get what you pay for, right?

And people, they live in different countries and they have different experience levels and you're going to have different demands for them.

And that's what really gauges price. So you know, the, the price obsession that I would love to see go away from this industry because the four dollar or five dollar per hour virtual assistants.

Yeah, they're out there, but they, there, there's a price tag associated with that. You're, you know, you not being able to trust them to get the task done or they're not having the experience level or the infrastructure.

I was going to say the thing that, to add to this and I've, I've done it in every way you can imagine working with virtual team members. Uh, you know, I've, I've gone to places like Upwork or what, whatever they used to be called, Fiverr, you know, virtual assistant.com, whatever they were onlinejobs, ph, you, you name it, I've tried it and obviously I've worked with, with agencies and your agencies. And I think though the one way that I would describe it is that yes, you can save on money, but what you save on money, you pay in time, right? So if you go and get the, the three or four dollar an hour, the one that you're talking about, yes, you'll save a couple of dollars an hour, but you'll pay back in time. Because the amount of extra time that you have to pay in time, training, talking, communicating, onboarding with just some of the simplest little things that you would just not have to think about, you will definitely have to pay for that. Where if you pay a little bit extra an hour for working with an agency like yourself, somebody that has Already gone through the vetting stage, who has already gone through all the heartache of everything else that you have to. When starting to hire with virtual assistants, then you take care of that. So yes, you pay a little bit extra, but you save it, save that time. And which at the end of the day, as you grow your business, like you said, Property five, Property six is when you start to venture from being a hobbyist host into a professional host. And you know you've got a lot of work to be done when you start to reach out and to hire somebody. You hiring somebody because you want to save time, you know, working in your business to then work on your business. And if you hire and the first thing that you're thinking about is how to save as much money as possible, go for that $3 an hour, $4 an hour virtual assistant, wherever they are in the world, you're gonna actually double your time that you have to work on the business or in the business. Sorry. Because you're having to, to do all the work with the virtual assistant. It may, may come good. But again, the amount of times that I've done this the cheap way, I spend a good month working on a virtual assistant, I've hired myself just for somebody in the Philippines to not turn up the next day is unbelievable. Like, the amount of times that has happened to me because I've done it the wrong way is outstanding. So, so yeah, I'm think totally get, totally get that where you're coming from. So let's talk about the, the attributes of a good client that you work with, a good host, a good property manager. What some of the good skills and traits that you've noticed over these 500 companies from like the personality types of the people that, you know, you work really well with. What, what is like a common trend that you sort of come across with the people that you work with. That is like a good trade to have.

Yeah, it's, it's definitely going to be more on the leadership side of things or just understanding.

You know, staff and employees how to manage them. A good operator is.

Not going to expect perfection. Right. And they're not going to micromanage their minute by minute. I've seen a lot with the inexperienced operators where they'll come in, they're like, what are you working on? What are you working on this minute? I need hourly updates. And it creates this like very toxic environment where they feel like they can't breathe. Another thing is the documentation and SOPs. A good operator, they, they don't necessarily need to write out this whole operating manual ahead of time. But they're really good with LOOM and just creating these like video recordings of them doing the actual work and then they pass it to the virtual assistant and then the virtual assistant actually ends up creating the documentation. And what I found in the past is when we had asked the operator to create the SOPs and documentation, they just either wouldn't do it because they literally don't have time, or they would do it in this like expert lens where they overlooked all these things that like a newbie to the industry would actually need. So for anyone listening to this and you're stuck on the SOPs and documentation part, like you don't need it all. When you get started with them, you can start passing them LOOM videos and then go task by task. And eventually over the course of a week, two weeks, a month, you'll have this huge operating manual. And you know, you didn't have to do all this like pre prep work to get started doing it. I should blow a ton of people down.

I've been doing Booster now for 10 years and it was only up until last year that we had a proper operating manual done because I was rubbish at it. You know, this is before the time of LOOM properly and Loom AI and LOOM transcriptions and all that good stuff. So last year we got, we got it all done and it was, it was a, it was a process. I wish we had started it on day one. But when you've got SOPs and things in place, it, it's helpful. And I think the most important thing that everybody gets bogged down with an SOP is that record it on loom 100% document it. But if it's, if it's something that is available on YouTube, just go grab the YouTube link as well. Because if you try and record a full sop, let's just say on.

Facebook ads, let's just say Facebook ads. Let's say there's a specific way you do Facebook ads. If you were to record a step by step right now, next week, it could be out of date, right? So just have a loom that's like your, your bare minimals and then just include a link to Facebook Facebook like YouTube Facebook ads or whatever like that. Because again, when we first did ours, we did a, a monumental sop. It was huge. It documented everything because I thought that's what you. How to do it. And by, by this time now, Sour day. So, you know, it's crazy, but.

It'S good. So the common trait then is. Is loom. Loom videos. It's amazing to me now because I've used loom pretty much every day for the last year religiously. I. If I've got a big email to type, I'll just loom it. Because I always say that like the written, the written word, words can get lost in translation. But with. When you voice something, if they can hear the context, they can hear the tonality of your voice. And I love it. And a loom video is. So that's interesting. Good, good organization. Loom videos. Is there any other traits that you see that when people who do leaders, for example, that do well?

Yeah, a couple of other things I think.

You know, for the people bringing on people for the first time, they don't understand that an employee does not have the same vested interest as you and will never be as committed as you.

That is why they're an employee. They're not as. Not every single person is going to have the leadership traits and the go getter mentality.

And they don't have to be that way. Right. So when I see, you know, a new operator bring on a VA and they're like, why aren't they working every single second? Or why aren't they as like go getter mentality? It's like, well, this is an employee, like, you know, oftentimes, you know, perfection. If you always shoot for perfection with them, you're going to burn them out. Like, I know it, I've seen it hundreds of times. So you have to get comfortable with, you know, good. Like 85% is awesome.

That is what I have to remind myself. And there will always be problems. And that's just the nature of business. And if you freak out at them when an issue comes in, you're gonna burn through people. They're gonna get scared working with you. They're not going to be comfortable working with you. You're gonna build a culture that, that's very gated and, and you're constantly churning through people. And you just have to understand that like in business you're always going to have problems. It's like a part of it. You're absorbed. Like you created a service absorbing someone else's problems. So by that nature, like, problems are always going to happen and when you have staff, they're going to make mistakes like it's completely normal. So just be prepared, you know, to, to handle mistakes and you know, more mentally rather than emotionally. Because if you handle it emotionally, you're gonna do things that you're gonna Regret and it's going to prevent you from, from growing a business.

So CS outsource. If anybody wants to go and find out more, I will put a link in the description, but simply it's boostly.co.uk forward/hiring. It's a pretty link that I set up that goes to the, to the main page for Southsource. You've got 500 people that obviously you are working with 500 companies, but you'll have, you know, times free of that. Who have people who have spoken to you over, over the years. Yeah, from everybody that you speak to. Like, what's the common misconception of what you do outsourced? So when somebody jumps on the phone with you and you start to list off the services that you do, what's the biggest misconception? When someone jumps onto you and says, hey Matt, tell me about CS outsource. What's that thing you're like, oh my gosh, you didn't realize that we like what, what, what would.

Yeah, yeah, they, A lot of people make the, this assumption that it's just like arbitraging labor in different countries and I'm just giving them a person. Right. There is so much more that goes into this.

When you get started with us, we have a whole entire HR team. We'll meet with you one on one, understand what you're looking for, building out a job description and then we start presenting you candidates and we present you these, you know, you know, buttoned up resumes with these video intros so that you could see the people, their communication skills, their accent. And then, you know, we'll set you up on interviews with the people that you, you know, found interesting in those video intros.

And then in parallel we meet with them and we start creating all the SOPs and documentation for the role. Right. Because what we found in the past is that most operators just never really get to this. And then when they bring on a person, they don't necessarily know how to onboard, they don't know how to do the training, they don't even really know how to set up their tech stack correctly for remote work.

Right.

So then we jump in, we start creating all those systems and processes and documents so that after their interview.

We'Ll jump in and we'll set up everything and we'll be involved in all the training to ramp up, you know, staff. So that's just one part. Like you're not having to go out there, create the jds, you know, screen all these applicants. Right. We're Also professionals in this, we have a whole entire in house team that just does this, knows how to find and cultivate talent so that, that's on like the hiring and onboarding side. Then once the person you know is, is, you know, in your business, we're preparing a backup and then our supervisor is also involved in things in the day to day, getting feedback, doing more training, saying, hey, you know, maybe you need bookkeeping and accounting support, maybe you need digital marketing. Go high level support. And we're increasing the value of the virtual assistant by adding in more tasks that the operator might not even know are things that they can do or they might not have the knowledge on how to train them. But because we have the industry expertise, we're constantly leveling up the, you know, the team, the operations side of your business. So what I try to tell people is like, hey, you come to us and we're going to take over the fulfillment side of your business, the operations. And it doesn't matter if the VA gets sick or disappears. We have backup and we're just responsible for making sure that no matter what happens, there's coverage so you will never have to worry. And if we need to replace somebody, great, well, you know, we can tee you up right away with talent. And that's like another thing. You have you access to talent on demand and you're working with a professional company where if you're not satisfied, you know, like you, you don't pay. Right. It's kind of how it works. And like there's so much value in knowing that, okay, like no, whatever I need, this company's got my back on the fulfillment side so I can focus on sales and marketing. These all these things that grow my business.

Yeah. And that's the thing that I realized as well once I got talking to you is that it wasn't just customer support. It wasn't just here or there. It wasn't just, you know, replying to guests on, on Airbnb. You've got people and skill sets of, on your books or the team can go and find from, from literally everything I think we've, we've had from you sales people, we've had triage people like customer like appointment setters from you. We've had people that have, can design apps, you know, do coding, you know, know people that have used you for bookkeepers and everything. You know, revenue managers go high level. So there's every single type of hyri in your books behind the scenes. So I feel like that would be the, from me speaking from like personal and from knowing other people that have spoken to you I feel like they just, they just go oh, he's just going to help like you say, just going to arbitrage a person. He's just going to help me get someone to deal Customer support answer BME messages so that domain, go check it out boosted out co.ukforward/hiring take you to a landing page and you can book a call. And like I said I feel like those that use your service best who are at the mindset to be ready to work with, with, with a company already to outsource the probably, you know, if we put it to just straight, straight math, five properties, you know there could be like a financial sort of thing around it but five properties in I feel like you're ready to become not just a hospitable host, it's to be a hobbyist host. Sorry, you're going to level up to be a professional host and I feel like that's, that's a good stage to be ready to, to, to chat to you and just again out of interest where do you want people to be from? Do you look after people mostly in the us, the UK or is it now worldwide that people are working with you? Matt?

Yeah, for the, for the most part Europe, UAE has, has grown a lot because of the Dubai market.

Australia, South America, all over us, Canada, we're all over the place at this point. So we have staff, you know, 247 available, taking calls because we had to get to that point and originally it was just the US but yeah we're all over now.

Fantastic. So again if you're watching this or listening to this and if you are, you know, in along your property journey, doesn't matter whether you're doing management or the rent to rent model, some people call it sublease and arbitrage, whatever you want to call it. But rent to rent or even if you're owner based and you know you get into that stage where you feel like you're doing a bit of everything in your business or you just need somebody's help to, to take on a certain thing or if you've tried to hire in house for let's just say email marketing, right and you're just struggling then go ahead, have a chat with Matt and his team and it's amazing how many people that he can put forward for a role and it's again it takes a lot of the hassle and the faff of hiring people. They do it really well. So boostly.co.uk hiring H I R I N G Matt, before we go, any final messages for the audience? Anything that you want to say to say to the people that are listening now?

Yeah, I would say, knowing what I know now, and this is like for all the serious entrepreneurs out there, I would never in my life start a business without an executive assistant. I just would not do it. When you're starting a business, you need to be focused on sales and marketing, sending out cold messages to grow the business. I just see so many new entrepreneurs get so stuck on the fulfillment side. Customer service, the bookkeeping and accounting, managing vendors and scheduling. And yes, that's important and great. But if you're not like in the early days of your business, money is the oxygen and you need to build that forward momentum. And, you know, every single day, no matter what, you should be sending, you know, 50 to 100 cold messages. And if you're not doing that, you're really going to struggle to build the momentum. And if you can't build momentum, you won't be able to, you know, build the business of your dreams because you won't be able to have the income to, to hire, you know, for all those support systems that you want or those features of your business that you dream of. Right. So get an executive assistant to start. It's an investment, but it's someone that will, you know, take over the fulfillment side of your business. And then, you know, it's somebody that you could then repurpose down the line to become like, you know, your COO because they understand all these different aspects of, of the business. So perfect. That's what I would agree.

Could agree more. I would never start a business again without having an ea. Somebody to, to help out behind the scenes. Because you're 100. Right? Right, Matt, Fantastic. If, listen, even if you don't want to go to the, to the landing page that I gave you, please do go and check out more of Matt's writing online. You've social media. Like, where else can people find you?

Yeah, you know, I'm definitely active on Facebook and LinkedIn. Just type in Matt Metros. You can Visit our website csoutsource.com.

And then on any of those, you know, different channels, just drop me a message and I'll get back to you.

Yeah, really good writing. You're writing a lot at the moment, which is, which is awesome. I saw one. What did I see you do yesterday? It was about how to get your first few clients. So you were talking about.

That was the inspiration for what I said.

You're talking. Yeah. Literally ties in. Lovely. If you want to get, like, the writing and the words behind what this Matt just said there and is a final words, then go check out his substack. His social media is LinkedIn. Just go check out Matthew Metro says there's not many Matthew Metric online, is there? So you've got pretty much the monopoly on that.

Name this one.

There you go. All right, fantastic. Thank you very much. Thanks for joining us and we'll be back again very soon.