Building a Global Workforce - Trevor Turnbull - Fractional C-Suite Retreat - Episode #31

Growing a business is hard, but it does not have to be.

Once a week, we take a break from the hustle and bustle in business to talk about innovations and what's new in the C-suite. This is the Fractional C-Suite Retreat, and I'm Joseph Frost. Pull up a seat at the fire, grab a drink, smoke a cigar, and just join me as we relax, learn, and get inspired. This retreat is sponsored by Your CMO, helping organizations grow with better marketing strategy.

Welcome. Today's guest has a diverse experience in marketing, sales, operations, and product development. He serves awesome leaders and helps them drive up scalable growth. He helps others to realize their full potential. He is co-founder, fractional CGO, conscious creator, connector at Singbull Ventures. Welcome, Trevor Turnbull. How are you today, Trevor?

Doing great. So glad to be having this chat with you and, uh, oh yeah.

Yes. Me too. And, uh, first, the G in CGO stands for what?

Ha! And that stands for growth. And I know when I first started Googling, does this exist? It doesn't really. There's not a whole lot of titles you see out there like that. So naturally I always have to kind of explain what it means.

Yes, I know. I found it very interesting and intriguing. As a marketer, it's good to stand out that way. So, well, good. Let's jump right into it. The question I enjoy starting with the most is what's something that you see in the C-suite today, an opportunity that maybe other C-suite execs should know about or think about?

Well, the first thing that comes to mind, and it kind of ties into what other pieces that we'll probably talk about here, is just that In the last 2 years, this world opened up massively and we either recognize it and leverage it or we ignore it and we slowly disappear. I don't think there's any 2 ways about it. And what I mean by that is naturally we all know that like this technology, Zoom opened up the opportunity to have meetings remotely. So you didn't have to be driving around. You could meet people from across the country. But what it also did was connect us closer with talent all over the world that people were using. People are outsourcing developments and design and all kinds of stuff, strategy even overseas. But man, oh man, there's just never been a greater time where you can actually build a diverse global workforce if you can build the structure of the way your company is set up to support it. So that's a huge one. And I know people are aware of it, but I don't know if they truly understand the magnitude of what's possible. Wow.

Everything.

Yeah.

And do you separate in your mind a difference between the C-suite fractional world and then the general workforce from a global standpoint, or is it really one and the same opportunity?

You know, I think there's still a lot to be said for having your C-suite team be a little closer to home. If I'm understanding the question correctly, like, can you find C-level talent overseas? I think the answer is yes, but naturally we're still dealing with time zone challenges, right? That's always probably one of the biggest ones as it relates to really truly leaning into building a global workforce. And when you have leaders that are responsible for meeting with people and leveling up people, you need to, you need face time, right? So, it's definitely more challenging to kind of dip into the C-level side of things if you're looking to grow your team.

Yeah, you say that even though you're gonna become a global C-level person soon, right? So, yes, I, in general, the opportunity's more on the, the workforce side and tapping into this global, this global group of people that are very strong in different areas of expertise and easily accessible over Zoom, but has nuances with time zones and cultural norms and things like that. Yeah.

Well, and you're alluding to it, but yes, we're moving our family down to Costa Rica and without a doubt, part of the decision-making process of going there versus say Southeast Asia somewhere was time zone because we do business with all of our clients in North America. So it just made sense on that level. And then the other thing I would say too is, you know, as far as the extended workforce, you think about, you know, how I operate my business with a small team behind me and then an agency side that I can tap into as well. But the small team of, you know, data processors, like people that are just doing data entry to video editors and copywriters and all that kind of stuff. Most of them I've never ever even seen on a video call before. We just operate within a project management system. So it's just a different dynamic, right? You don't have to be on meetings with those people, whereas my partners, my clients, I do. So time zone's important. I didn't want to be working at 3 in the morning.

Yeah, it's, um, it's unique. We have a global workforce as well that supports our teams and some of our clients and half of them are in Mexico and half of them are in the Philippines. And there's not a right or wrong answer, but when the team in the Philippines is in working during our time zone, it's their night and you can see it and feel it sometimes like, oh my gosh, it's 3 in the morning over there. I can't believe you're still up, but you're working with us. They get used to it, but still, it's 3:00 AM in the morning and they're working. It's a different dynamic.

Yeah. And it would be challenging. I know that's something that we're constantly tossing around. Do we want to try and find virtual assistants, for example, that will be willing to work in our hours? But then this is an important piece, I think, for us to say out loud for anybody else that's in this fractional space too and looking to expand their team is these people are people. We still have to always remember that, that, you know, they can't be nocturnal and up at night and sleeping during the day forever. So there has to be a balance there. And that's actually an important piece of why I've chosen the Philippines in many cases too, because there is an overlap in time zones and not even time zones, but just, you know, at the end of their day is like the start of our day. So they can actually work a handful of hours that are not too extreme, whereas I find in India, we're literally 12 hours difference. So it's a really tough kind of overlap there. You almost have to have somebody working in the middle of the night if you want them working on North American time zones. So it's a bit more challenging.

Yeah, it is. So we've done, done this for a while. We've experimented with different ways to address the time zone issue. One way is find work they can do completely in their own time zone. That's, that's the simplest, right? If you can figure out what's the work they can do, they don't have to be 8 to 5 US or North America.

Yeah.

The other is the hybrid. So figure out, I need you 4 hours a day, 8 to 5 or whatever, then the other 4 hours, flex it. The third way, we just, not really the third way, just what we did recently was we took our team, it was too hard to go completely hybrid, but we gave them Friday afternoons off and stretched the rest of the day 9 hours the rest of the week. And what it did was we, so I went over and visited my team in the Philippines, which was amazing. And I went over on a weekend and I met them on a Saturday morning. I met some of them on Friday and the other on a Saturday morning, their time. And when I was there Friday, I was, I met them at like 7 or 8 o'clock. For a quick check-in and they were about to go to work. I'm like, is this Friday night and you're about to start your Friday day? Yeah. And I felt, I felt very guilty. I'm like, this is, yeah, this is not good. So you, you mean you work till 4 in the morning on Saturdays? You really don't get a Friday. You don't, you know, you have Sunday, but that's, you know, that's different. So when I came back, I said, or when I was there, I said, what, what would you guys think if we gave you that Friday off so you could be done at least by midnight? And just make it up the rest of the week. Like, oh, we'd love that. So I got back home and talked about the team. No one had a problem with it. It's Friday afternoon. Who works on a Friday afternoon anywhere here, you know? So one way, and to your point, they're human beings, you know, they got families, they got events they're trying to do, and God bless them, they're good, you know, they're loyal, they want to work, they enjoy the work. And I don't think they mind the overnight. Night shift. My, my wife, my, um, daughter's a nurse. She loves the night shift, right? So, yeah, altogether night shift's not a bad thing, but just little tweaks to try to make it better for them.

Yep. No, I'm glad you brought that up though, because I think sometimes we can just straight up forget the fact that people are doing that because they're committed to doing their work to make the money that they want to be able to buy the stuff that they want and getting connected to the human beings, I think, is a critical component to all of this. And I just bring that up because that, if you were to ask me the same question you did at the start, as another thing, it would be just the connection of the people and the understanding of like, how can you help your people truly live their best life? And that be a focal point. And that actually speaks to why I think you and I are both aligned on the fact that the fractional model is so amazing too. It not only serves the companies that don't need or can't afford to hire the full-time role of somebody with, you know, a C-level experience, but it just allows that person to live however they want to live and from wherever and, and leverage these tools. And to me, that's critical. You know, I'm not, I'm not doing my work just to make money. Like I want to be inspired every day. And part of that is where I choose to live and what I choose to put in my schedule every single day, which will be more surfing in the future and less shoveling snow, just to be clear.

Yeah. I'm excited to hear about your, your adventures when you get there. Surfing versus shoveling snow does sound very appealing. That is for sure. That is for sure. So this global workforce, let's continue that conversation. How have you seen clients or yourself or others tap into it? I know there's different ways to go about it from hopping on Freelancer or Upwork and trying to find somebody direct that way, which is a exhausting nightmare most of the time. Or you can work through third parties that have different models. They can kind of lease an employee through somebody or go more of a kind of PEO route where you're paying them direct, but they're handling— someone's handling the payroll and taxes. What have you seen? What's worked? What hasn't worked in your experience?

Yeah, well, you think you— I think you brought up all of the examples. And then the other only other one I would maybe say is just hiring people full-time. So not through these third-party management services or through the Upwork freelancer dot-coms of the world, that type of thing. The benefits to that obviously is that if you can hire somebody full-time, you have their full attention to focus on whatever it is you want them to do, and you can grow with them and you can provide them opportunities to level up. In their role, in their rates, all that kind of stuff. The challenges is, is that you gotta start hiring staff, right? You need to then manage those people and you need to have good procedures and workflows and project management systems to make it work. And quite frankly, we do a bit of a hybrid still, and we've evolved from, I think, using the Upworks and the freelancer platforms of the world and hitting those roadblocks, like you say, 'cause it's, It's always a little mad. You just never know how it's going to go. You find somebody and you're like, wow, perfect. And the rate is amazing. And then it just doesn't work out. But that middle ground of the, um, companies that say have a team of freelancers that work underneath them. So they have almost a management layer and a project management layer. That's a great solution for many people and companies, but of course it comes at a little bit extra cost because they got to layer on that extra bit of margin for them to make sense to even run that business. So for me, we've evolved to not using those services as much, but that was kind of the progression was just go find some people and cross your fingers and hope that it works out, hit a wall and go, somebody's got to manage this. I know for us, we even tried hiring full-time, but our systems and procedures just were not up to par. So we had to go to that kind of hybrid model. Well, we started to build that stuff ourselves and now, like for, for us, we actually have a team that works with us full-time and it's not a huge team, you know, it's like 4 or 5 people with some individual skill sets, a little bit of overlap between them as well, but it just works brilliantly once you get those procedures and workflows down. That's the key. Yeah. Communication is the key.

Yeah, it is the key in most things in life, right? Not just work and overseas work, but no doubt relationships, communication makes all the difference. We did the same and I've, gosh, I've been in marketing for not as long as you, but I've been doing marketing agency-level work for the last 15 years. And when you grow up in that space, you're trying everything. How do you find a freelancer from your next-door neighbor to your Upwork and somebody in Karachi, Pakistan, and all over. And it is like throwing a dart and just hoping you find the right number because sometimes it's terrific, but most of the time it's a miss. The next layer is finding that like the hybrid you talked about, and there's, I've found that Even that's somewhat of a— it's really hard to get consistent part-time work. So we evolved straight to we need full-time people. And that took a long time to evolve there. But that is— so I tell everybody, don't even bother hiring part-time overseas, find— or onshore, doesn't matter, offshore, it's full-time. Because even if you only need 20 hours of the work, it's going to be a much better 20 hours. You can always find something for them to do, or they can twiddle their thumbs, but they'll stay there. And it'll be more consistent and you'll be more happy.

Yep.

But we went to full-time and then we went through these agencies that help you place full-time people and you pay a little bit of a layer of recruiting fees and management fees and taxes. And here's what I found overseas in two different companies, one in Mexico and one in the Philippines, not my own, but two different companies, is they all pay their people differently. So when you're working through a third party, you don't really think about, well, are you paying their taxes in full? Are you paying their benefits? Are you giving them time off? Are you retaining them? Is this a good culture? We have lost people in our organization that we otherwise would love to have kept because the third party didn't have a good culture or a fair compensation. So we're paying them and expecting the outcome. And then the employee on the other end is like, I can go find a better gig. I'm sorry, Joe, we really like working for you, but I can double my income by going over here. And oh, by the way, when I went over to that company and said, hey, how much are you paying? How much are you charging me to pay them double their income? The same. So the company I was working with is making a bigger margin, right? So that opened my eyes up to the idea that you really need to know. I don't know if you need to know the complete, like, transparent numbers, but you need to know there's at the other end some sort of commitment to retention and development and growth of that individual, or have a way to keep them if that's not there. And we had one company we worked with where we had a 1-year non-compete, essentially. Even though she wanted to stay and work for me, I'd have to pay $18,000 for her to do that. And I just had to tell her, I'm sorry, you're going to have to quit and go find a whole other job. And she did. Because she could make twice as much money working for somebody else, but she didn't want to.

Yeah.

There's, there's, those are dangers out there when you're looking.

Well, and I think, I think I understand the audience that's listening to your, your podcast and interviews and whatnot too. But what you're saying is so relatable in the corporate world now too, because you're hearing stories of companies now that are trying to fill positions because they've lost people, right? People either quit or whatever the case might be. Maybe the company went under hardship. During the whole pandemic stuff and all of that. But as they hire these new people, the market's so competitive, they're having to actually pay higher rates for the same role that they would've 2 years ago. And they already have people in those seats. So naturally, so you gotta pay the money to get the, the new talent and then to do the right thing, you should be leveling up your existing people to that same rate. Otherwise, right. It's that exact same story you're talking about, just at a You know, add two zeros to the end of the salary. So this is the challenge that executives in the corporate world are facing. It's very relevant, you know, it's very similar to what we talk about in the international outsourcing side of things too.

Yeah. And then the hybrid work. So it may not be apparent, but with the company that we work with in the Philippines, they allow for It's our preferred company. They allow for remote work. So the Philippine employees are working from home. There are other companies in the Philippines that because of COVID allowed people to work from home, but now are saying, no, you got to come back. And the people in the Philippines don't want to come back. I mean, people in the US and North America, Canada, they don't want to come back. Like people don't want to come back to work wherever you live.

Yeah.

We're thinking remote and hybrid, even at that micro level. They want to stay remote from their home and serve us remotely from there. It's just a totally changing world.

It sure is. Yep. And then like, I don't even know what to expect when we go to Costa Rica, but people have told me that yes, of course there's fiber optic internets in the places, areas that we'll be living and whatnot, but it's going to go down every once in a while and it is what it is. Like you either surrender to it. Or you don't move there, right? And that's the thing that I've experienced even too over the years is, you know, like the Philippines will get these typhoons and then all the power lines will be wiped out. And at first when you hear that, when you start outsourcing, you think, really? Did that really just happen? I don't know. And then you're Googling and you're like, oh damn, I get, yeah, there was a typhoon there. And then the next thing, and this is again, something that I had to kind of learn because I wasn't thinking from the perspective of like hiring a salaried employee in North America, but I had to think like, I wonder if that person's okay. What if there's anything I can do? And like one of my team members that I've had for like 6 years, their house basically got demolished in one of these. And, you know, we couldn't be there physically to help, but we stepped up and provided some money to help them rebuild. But I think a lot of times maybe people forget about that, you know, like there's a human element behind this where if we take care of these people beyond just the salaries and the hourly rates we're paying them, but to make sure that they're okay and living a good life, that's when you can really thrive in this space.

Yeah. When I was in the Philippines a few weeks back, months, a couple months back, I guess, twice the power went down in the whole province. Once we were on a beach and all of a sudden we had no power and they thought that it's going to take 12 to 18 hours. And so we left, we went inland and got into a place that had power again.. And then the other time we're just walking around the city and power went out in a pretty large area for 2 or 3 hours. And it was like nothing happened because we were eating dinner when it, when it, when the power went off and the rest, all the owners in the area, there's a bunch of restaurants around there, just casually walked outside, flipped on the generators, power came back on and kept serving food. It's like, that's just the way it is over there. Sometimes things go down.

Yep, exactly. Prepare for the worst, right? Then you're ready.

So talk to me a little bit about your decision to move to Costa Rica and how logistically you made that work as a fractional family.

Yeah.

You and your wife.

Yeah. My wife is also fractional in what she does and she does similar type of work. I would say that she's also in a CTO type of role, which is the growth side of things. Not just when I say that, it's not just marketing, it's also sales, and then it's also just people development too, you know, leveling up the people, knowing that that helps level the business up and improves the marketing and sales and everything else. But the vision for going to Costa Rica was never Costa Rica. It was just, it started with the weather, quite frankly, you know, like We made a choice to live in at least the nicest area of Canada from a weather perspective out on the West Coast, but it still gets cold here and you still get snow and there's a lot to enjoy with that. But every time I've went down to Mexico or anywhere down south, I always leave thinking, why am I leaving? Like, what? Why don't I just stay here? And I remember that thought in like 2003 thinking, Man, I gotta figure out how to get down here. And there's been a lot of pieces along the journey, but you know, I read a book by, uh, actually it's this one right here. I'll just show you called Unlikely Destinations: The Lonely Planet Story. So it's, uh, it's an autobiography type book about the people that created the Lonely Planet travel guides, those little, you know, before the internet kind of thing. Mm-hmm. And they went from the UK through Afghanistan and down, you know, when you could travel through there in the '70s and. Through Southeast Asia and Australia, and they just documented the process and the people that they met along the way, the food that they ate and built a business around it, had a family, brought the kids with them, climbed Mount Everest with their kids. And I remember thinking, that's the life that I want to live. And while it was possible, I think over the last 10 to 12 years, like you could do it. People were living in Mexico and working remotely. It wasn't until this pandemic hit that it became really obvious that we can do this from anywhere. One, because people were open to doing communications like this, because we forget, like, in February of 2020, there was a lot of people that wouldn't hop on a video call. They just thought it was crazy. And then it's just, yeah, then it's just flipped all of a sudden because people are thinking, well, I either do this or I don't have a business. That's it. You're just forced into it. And then the other piece, and we kind of alluded to it already with regards to just, you know, the fact that we're digital in everything that we do, we need internet. We need internet to run these businesses. And you can't always rely on the local internet or power, but Elon Musk is throwing satellites up in the air that will allow you to sit in the middle of a jungle as long as you've got a direct line of sight to that satellite. So all the barriers have been removed and, and then naturally, of course, I had to start to just put that out into the world to say, this is what I'm intending on doing and see what the feedback loop was like, both from my agency partners as well as my clients. And there was very little resistance to it, especially because of the time zone thing. Cause we were lit, you know, we're maybe 2 hours difference from where we are right now. So it's, it was so smooth. Like nothing's going to change. The only difference is that when I get up at 5 in the morning there, I'm going to be surfing instead of whatever, you know, trying to find some way to keep warm.

Yes. Yeah. So your wife, as I understand it, recently became a C diffractional and you, but you've been doing it for a couple of years.

Yeah.

What has been your experience? And maybe you've kind of revisited the experience again. With your wife of transitioning from a full-time role to fractional? What's similar and what's different?

Yeah, well, one, in a role, because I haven't really had a job per se for many, many years, but I did sell a company and then became one of the executives on the team with the company that I sold to. So essentially I was in a, like a role, you know, like in a, in a job, I guess you would say. And with that, there was a lot of internal meetings. There was a lot of, uh, planning that was happening. We were using Scaling Up as a framework and going through that and creating our rocks and, and our, all of our KPIs and defining all of those things. And, um, and then I sat in a very specific role that in my case was sales focused. It was just about generating revenue. And while I enjoyed it because I just liked new challenges, I remember hitting a point where I thought, No, I think I want to be more on the strategic side and a little bit leaning more on the marketing side, uh, because it's just kind of what I enjoy. Um, but as a fractional, what I had to really figure out, I think one of the biggest first pieces was how do I manage my time? How many clients can I actually handle at once? What can I give to my clients so that they're getting value, but that I'm not putting in 16 hours a week because quite frankly, they don't need it. And a lot of the things that I, that I could do myself, I could outsource for $10, $15 an hour. So it was, it was really a matter of me getting really organized on how do I structure the way that I operate with my clients and the way that I present an offer to them. And then also, how can I build a team behind me that allows me to get out of the way of some of the things. It's kind of like the $10 task versus the $10,000 task. I want to spend 98% of my time in the $10,000 tasks and then either support my clients and their team on the execution side, or be able to fill the gaps with my team, whether it's an agency type service or just a one-off freelancer that's needed for a project or, or an ongoing recurring task. But yeah, that's what it's been for me.

And when you strip away all the tactical execution stuff and are truly able to focus on the $10,000 tasks, there's not that much time you actually have to spend usually in a company when you're just focusing on those tasks. And that's why I think the fractional world works so well for the C-suite is, you know, strategy is not generally a full-time job. In a, in a C-level role, we just fill up the rest of our time when we're full-time with tactical work that could be better off paid to somebody lower level.

Yeah. And I think the other benefit of it too, and just having the experience of going through the Scaling Up model, for example, and just seeing how detailed it is where you're building out your big, hairy, audacious goals and you're putting together your quarterly plans and your monthly plans and you're tracking certain metrics. I think maybe C-level executives or CEOs, even just as a general statement, might think if you go fractional, you lose a little bit of that, like in-house, I really care about this thing and I'm accountable to it. But I found that that's just not true. If you have somebody that understands the fractional CMO model or CGO or whatever you want to call it, they know that they need to plug into the systems. That that company is running on. Otherwise, they're floating on a cloud doing their own thing and they can't prove their value and then they won't stick around for long. Yeah. So that I think is a huge opportunity for the fractional space to better define on how to best do that. And it's also a challenge too, because companies can maybe sometimes get really stuck in certain frameworks, I guess, of scaling. Where if they trusted the expertise of their fractional CMO, they might actually be able to grow faster. That's been my experience anyway.

Yeah, I will— it is, it is. And I will tell you, we've spent— at Your CMO, we spent 6 years building our framework of how to deliver fractional CMO services efficiently, productively, with some continuity and outcomes and We've put a lot of energy and thought into the how, how do you do this? And similar to your experience with scaling up, we've had a great deal of experience with EOS and, and the fundamentals that are tried and true in both those systems. I'm familiar with them both. Quarterly plans, scorecards, KPIs, rocks, action items, to-dos, weekly meetings, all of that. If you build that into your framework of how, it's really hard not to be accountable. If the fractional CMO has a system or they've figured out how to develop their system or processes, certainly there's outcomes every quarter, there's to-dos every week, there's clear metrics with goals and red, yellow, green, like, and if you've done it right, in many ways, I think they're more accountable more productive than some full-time people that can kind of, I wouldn't say hide, but can kind of get lost in the noise of a full-time role.

Yep. Yep. Yeah. And my wife in her capacity of how she works with her company, she's actually transitioning into more of a fractional where she was full-time salary before. And she was in the kind of hybrid marketing department between there and IT and some other things, because she was there as like a digital transformation specialist, kind of somebody to integrate all of these departments that don't usually talk well together.

Yeah.

So she, she saw the, the, I don't want to even say dysfunction, but just the reality of having somebody say in a senior marketing role that because they're salaried, they're having to get into the trenches on certain activities that they just quite frankly shouldn't be doing. And then, right. Because of their level of expertise, there's sometimes a tendency to not want to give up certain things because they feel a responsibility to get it done. So the delegation starts to be really challenging for senior-level people. And that's where when you go fractional, you don't have that emotional attachment to like, well, I got to be doing something, so I better fill up the gaps here of my full-time salary. It just is such a smoother way to to work, especially when you have people that have exceptional talent in more than one area, because that's the thing that my wife and I really have is we're not just marketers. We're also salespeople. We're also very highly technical when it comes to understanding integration of software systems and tech stacks and stuff. And quite frankly, we're expensive as a salaried employee, like We really are. And, but the market's starting to reflect it though, too, like a CMO role. I think you and I were talking about this. What's the average rate? It's like $150,000 to $300,000 a year for a CMO role within a company, depending on the size and all of that industry. So, you know, you can hire a fractional for a fraction of that cost and still get the meat of what you're looking for from that highly talented person. Then you just gotta build the team around them or outsource to their agency or freelancers or whatever it might be. It's just a smart model.

It makes sense.

Yeah.

I haven't had too much experience with someone who's left the corporate world and became a fractional and then sold their time back to their previous company. I'm curious, what did that look like from negotiation standpoint? Because you can't just chop your salary in, you know, a certain percentage and say that's good because that's probably not simple as that. How did you determine yourself? Maybe you've done it recently again with your wife.

Yeah.

The right way to navigate that.

Yeah. I'll speak about my wife maybe because I think the example here will be relevant to the question you're asking. So because she was involved in multiple departments before, and she was kind of a glue piece between them, a bridge. She was able to see pieces of all aspects of the business, including some of the visionary pieces that the CEO had in mind that never really fully got, uh, executed on because the business was just busy. You know, like they did a complete revamp of 4 websites and there was 2 acquisitions in the last couple of years, so they had to integrate those and all the technology, but the CEO has some ideas that are like game-changing. They just need some focused attention by somebody that can take an idea and make it become reality where there's no playbook, like it doesn't exist. You either have the talent to piece it together or you don't. So that's how she introduced her as a fractional was to say that she would jump in at that level, the CEO level, and say, you know, all those little side projects that you think could actually 10x this business, Why don't we go and execute on that stuff? And let me be the person to take your vision and go make it happen. Because that's really her skill set. And yeah, it just made sense. It's quite honestly in negotiation right now. So I, assuming by the time you've published this, it would probably either have gone forward or we'd be moving on to something else.

But that's the best example I'd have is, um, how much time is she thinking she's going to need to give back? Uh, roughly like half her time, a third of her time, 10% of her time.

More? Yeah, I'm thinking a quarter of her time. Like we've, we've both built our model so that we can take on 4 to 5 clients comfortably at a certain amount of hours of meeting time and prep time and follow-up time and all of that. And it basically works out to, if I remember correctly, like 30 hours a month type thing per client. And that's not all meeting time. It's only about a third of that is meeting time. But, um, and then what we've done is we've layered on pieces, um, that in some cases, some people say, no, no, no, that's extra. But like, I have an assistant, for example, that takes every meeting that we do and all the recordings and downloads it and extracts all the key learnings and insights, and then puts all the action items into the project management system and flows them to the client, flows them to me. So there's a cost there, but I always roll that into my fees on a monthly basis. And then even some of the simple digital marketing stuff, like I just think of some clients where, you know, I'll just use an example of their LinkedIn profile. So we're going through it one day and we're like, you know, we really probably should do that, redo that background photo. I don't want to give them a quote or send them a bill for $12. So I'm just, so we'll just say like, yeah, we'll take care of that. It's, we got it. It's done. And it's those things I think that make the fractional model, uh, more tolerable, even though your rate compared to your salary might be double. There's just so many extra benefits of where it makes everything else easier because you can bring some of those things to the table. Yeah. And that's, uh, I'll just maybe say that too. Anybody that is in a fractional role, I think you have to build a small team around you, even if you have agency partners that can deliver on everything you might need, like websites and app developments and whatever, you still need that executive assistant and you still need that designer and that video person and a copywriter just so you can pull in and do those kind of things. 'Cause there's so much massive value for such low cost that it makes it so that your clients feel like they're getting exceptional value.

Yeah. Well, that's exactly what we did from day one when we built our model for CMOs. Because I was one of them, like, I need to— there's just no way I'm going to get all the administrative, tactical project management stuff done and be a strategist. All of our CMOs get access to a marketing coordinator for every client, and the coordinator is on every call with the CMOs. They're doing the transcribing, they're helping with managing the projects, and they're doing a little light creative design when necessary. Um, we, we stay very much away from agency type work, but you know, we'll jump in a WordPress, back out, you know, fix a couple things real quick if necessary. But for you, exactly what you said, it's, you can't stay strategic if you're in the weeds. And we recognize that. And I mean, the clients, I don't see it as much. I mean, they, they know it's nice to have someone else there. And, but yeah, the CMOs like you feel it. If you're not, if that person goes away and you're doing all that stuff again, oh my God, you notice it. You notice it fast. Oh yeah. Yes.

Yeah. Yeah. Because the to-do lists just start piling up and you're like, what, who, who usually does this work?

Well, it's so smart of you because I've talked to a lot of other fractional professionals that are, you know, on their own doing the same thing we're, we're both doing. We've built an infrastructure. You've built a small team and they haven't. And, and they are doing that work. And I, and I tell, and I, you know, I want to wring their necks and say, no, you need an assistant. Because if you don't have an assistant, you are an assistant and can't serve your clients well that way. It's just a difficult— well, for two reasons, I think. There's an investment piece of it. Like, I don't know if I want to spend $2,000 a month for a full-time assistant overseas, or, you know, maybe a little less, maybe a little more, but because that's money right out of your pocket and you're not passing that along to your client. Maybe you can take an extra client or two, but it takes a while. The other reason is they're just bad habits. It's, they've done it forever. Why would I need an assistant? I've been consulting for 10 years doing it this way. I don't want to train an assistant how to do this. I don't want to oversee. It's, it's just bad habits. And that's the hard part. Yeah.

Well, and the market is forcing people to level up on that though, because the bad habits now, when somebody else comes in with the same level of skill sets and years of experience and the client is saying, do I work with this person or do I work with that person? The one that's willing to evolve and actually go outside their comfort zone and build that team around them, they're gonna win. They just will. That's the reality of this world that we live in now. So And I realized too, and I, I'm sure this is why your business and what you're doing, and even this podcast exists, is that you want to help people win. And part of that is to just give them the like, hey, wake up. This, you either evolve with this because you can't go on your credentials of, well, I've got 20 years experience of working in the corporate world. Now I'm an executive coach. It's like, yeah, you and 26,000 other people with the exact same credentials are executive coaches. Right? Why, why you? Why are they going to choose you? And I, I do a lot. I've created a lot of trainings and done programs and stuff. And, uh, that's the one of the main things that I always speak about is like, how do you make you, uh, a no-brainer hire, fractional hire? And it's those little details and it's uncomfortable. It's yeah, it's because you got to shift kind of the way that you operate and you work and You got to trust people. You got to build procedures, all of that fun stuff.

All that fun stuff. I'm curious. One of the things I'm interested in and kind of studying, if you will, is leadership at all levels. And when I say that, I mean, we think about fractional leadership and there's a real nuance in how you build it so it works and it's effective. But if you take the next layer, that global worker, if you will, How do we develop tools or frameworks for them to also be leaders in, in their areas of influence, whatever that might be? And as you've worked with several freelancers and assistants and people, have you found some ideas or tools that work well for creating leadership at those levels? Have you seen natural leadership at that level that stands out to you? What, what thoughts do you have?

Yeah, I think the thing that comes to mind is defining leadership. That's one thing that I've really leaned into a lot in the last, I want to say, 7 years, because, you know, in 2014, I had somebody enroll me into a leadership program. And at the time, I was thinking, hell yeah, I'll go into a leadership program. I'm ready to step up and make more money and rise within whatever, you know, I want to be doing at that time. And to me, leadership was that it was kind of like corporate leadership and how you can lead other people. And, and I actually found that leadership of self and inner work and self-reflection and self-care and mindfulness and slowing down to speed up, these actually became key components to the leadership conversation that we're talking about here. In fact, I just did, this is my third podcast interview today. I interviewed two people and now you and I are talking.

Okay. You're, you're draining.

Yeah. It's one of those, one of those kinds of Fridays, but one of the leaders that I spoke to today was a CEO of a, uh, mush functional mushroom company. And he committed to coming to a retreat that I had planned last weekend. So there was 8 guys. It was a men's retreat. It was me and my partner that hosted it. And I asked him the question, how do you lead your people in a way that inspires them? And he said, it's by going to things like what he did with us, going to the retreat, because when he comes back and he has a different energy and they go, whoa, You seem different. It actually rubs off on those people. And then it also gives him inspiration to go, you know how I can actually get more performance out of these people is to actually care more about them and to make sure that they're taking the time to slow down, to speed up. And that to me is, I know incorporated in the corp, in the leadership training space, because it's an important piece. It's, it's well known right across the board, but I think it's critical. You know, you have to want the people that you're working with to level up their being and truly aspire to live their best life. And one of my staff, one of our outsourced VAs actually the other day said that because a lot of the content that we create and put out that she works on, because she transcribes a lot of things and chops up videos and whatnot. She said she feels like she's getting life coaching as she's doing her job. And I was—

Oh, because she's listening to the videos of the— Yeah, that's awesome.

Yeah. Like the interviews and stuff. And I actually forgot about that, but when she said it, I was like, man, that means a lot. Like that, that to me means, means that I'm making a difference in these people's lives. And all I got to do is just show up and be the example. So if the leaders can be the example. You'll find that other people will be inspired to actually level up themselves too.

Yeah, I really like that. And it's very much in alignment with my thinking as well. The idea that a lot of entrepreneurs I know want to have lifestyle businesses or, you know, some do, some don't, but I take it, you know, a little bit further. What if your employees could have lifestyle jobs? It the same mentality that you're putting in as an owner into building a lifestyle business that gives you time away, flexibility, excitement when you're at work and you're doing all the things you love to do. What if that was at every level of your organization and how much happier would everybody be? And by default, I, you know, the premise is how much better would the company also be? How much more excited would the clients and customers want to work with employees and team members that are all in a lifestyle role of some sort.

Yeah.

It's scary though. You know, you have those conversations, everybody's like, oh great, everybody's gonna work 20 hours a week and sleep in and not get anything done. And like, well, yeah, that's how it— that's, that's a different issue.

Yeah. It just, you just reminded me of something though too, which is a lot of times I think in the corporate world, if we can't can't measure it, like very specifically measure it, we feel like it's not worth investing in. And you think about sales, right? So sales is all what you could measure is how many touches, who's in the pipeline, what's the average or what's the potential deal value. Then we can determine, like make budgeting predictions. But what if we measured how, how much time a person actually takes to ground themselves before a call? As opposed to just dialing all day, you know, what if you build in that 10-minute buffer for them to do a quick little bit of research and for them to actually close their eyes, do some breathing and visualize how that call will, will end up in a sale because they will enroll that person into what it is they're trying to create. You can't measure that. So therefore corporate maybe kind of throws it out, but, and it's just so obvious. If you take care of the people, the people will take care of the business.

Oh, 100%.

100%.

Yeah.

Yeah. Just wanted to say that out loud.

No, it's good. It's, it's, it's, um, I'm glad you're, you're, you're thinking it the same way I am. And, and I feel that fractional is a step for corporate to start thinking the same. If they can make the leap from, I don't need a full-time head of marketing or head of sales or head of HR or head of IT or finance. I can learn to trust a fractional head of the same. If they can build trust at the leadership level, then the next level, they should have some additional opportunity to build trust. I haven't seen any great frameworks out there yet for it to work well and to educate people on how to do that well, but that's where I'm spending my time and energy is trying to figure it out.

Yeah. And that's what I expressed to you the first time we talked is that I appreciate the fact that you're doing that too, because that's, it's a committed effort just to support the fractional CMOs of the world out there that are trying to build that framework, you know, and, and like I say, there's, there's scattered pieces of it and some models work well in certain environments and others work in others. Like I just think about the, the very, um, you know, Fortune 500 companies and how they decide to hire executive coaches. It's completely different than the entrepreneur running a $100 million company, right? It's completely different. And there is certifications required to even get on the shortlist with the Fortune 500 companies, whereas the executive— they're the entrepreneurial type leader running a 9-figure company, just makes a decision based on gut. So how do you manage both of those? There's definitely parallels and overlaps between the two of them, but Yeah, that's why it's great what you're doing. I think it's very much needed.

All right, well, let's wrap up with some fun talk.

What do you, what do you like to do for fun? Honest answer, the first thing that came to mind is I like to jump in cold water. You wouldn't have heard me say that 6 months ago, but I started cold plunging back in December. And I think I've done it about 120 times in the last, like, 160 days now. And we, we jump in a river here locally, about a 12-minute walk from my house every Wednesday and record it and put it up on a YouTube channel too. So that's fun to me. I'm leaning into the pain. Yeah.

Is there cold water in Costa Rica?

I gotta find an ice guy. Yeah. 'Cause there's definitely no natural cold springs out there.

That's for sure. Yeah. You're going to struggle jumping into bath warm water. Sounds awful.

Exactly. I got to make buddies with the local restaurants and see if I could just get some bags every morning delivered to my door or something. I'll make it work.

I'm sure there's a way to figure out how to take a cold shower too, but maybe not. Maybe the groundwater is also warm.

Who knows? I'll let you know.

Yeah, for sure. Well, thanks a lot for being on the show. I really appreciate it. It's been a lot of fun. I'm really excited for your trip to Costa Rica and following up and seeing more about it. So thank you for being here.

Yeah, my pleasure. And stay in touch. I know you got some trips planned down there too, so I'm interested in kind of swapping stories about different regions and whatnot. And yeah, just staying a part of a connected community. We've got some similar interests and mindset, and I enjoyed the chat.

Yeah, that'd be great. And if someone would like to get ahold of you, what's the best way? I just do show notes, but what would be your preferred way?

Sure.

Yeah.

Just Google my name, Trevor Turnbull, T-U-R-N-B-U-L-L. You'll find my website. LinkedIn also pops up pretty high. YouTube channel. Those are all the best places to get in touch.

All right. So for our viewers, if you're looking for a cold plunge or a tour guide in Costa Rica, Just Google Trevor Turnbull.

Thanks so much.

Have a great day. Thanks for joining.

And that's a wrap. There's another successful episode of the Fractional C-Suite Retreat. See our show notes and more episodes at fractionalcsuitretreat.com. This podcast is sponsored by YorCmo, helping organizations grow, save time and money with better marketing strategy and fractional execution. Visit them at YorCmo.com. YorCmo.com. Spelled wrong on purpose.