Creating Meaningful Employee Relationships - Mark Ratafia - Fractional C-Suite Retreat - Episode #48

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. I'm really excited about today's guest. He is one of our first guests that is an actual client of Your CMO and a client of mine. He is a wizard when it comes to international matters of tax and accounting. He's the founder and president and CEO of Beacon CPA, which is a boutique international tax and accounting firm. Welcome, Mark Ratafia. Mark, how are you?

Hey, Joe, I'm great and I'm really excited to be here on the show.

Yeah, I'm excited to have you and I did want to lead with full disclosure that you're a client, your first of our series of client interviews that we're doing on the podcast. And the reason I wanted and I'm so excited with starting with you is because not only are you a client of ours, but you also have other fractional members of your leadership team. So you have experience with just not only CMOs, but a CFO, and you're also employing an outsourced workforce from Philippines and I think also Mexico. So you've got a true experience of what it's like working with fractional leaders and outsourced leaders and team members. So It's terrific to have you and your perspective. Thank you for being here.

You're welcome.

So we'll start with the number one question I like to open with. What's an opportunity or what's something that you think C-suite leaders and business owners need to be thinking about today that's really important?

That's a great question. Great introductory question. I think that one of the issues that is, is probably at the forefront of what I'm thinking about. A lot of my clients are thinking about these days is how can we create organizations that attract and retain talent that is really going to be invested for the long term in the growth and the health of our organizations in an environment which seems to be shifting so quickly from the old traditional models of working to something that really nobody knows where it's going to land. And I think that that's, you know, it's a fascinating time to be living in because you're being confronted with issues that you never saw before. And yet the challenge is huge. Yeah.

I like how you phrase that question too, because it's, The way I heard you say it was, how do we create organizations that attract and retain talent? And so many times we think about how do we attract and retain talent? So that little shift into creating the organization that in and of itself would attract and retain good talent, I think is the, is the opportunity. And so what are some of the things that you're thinking about or that you're seeing other clients perhaps do that are specifically designed at changing that organizational structure to attract and retain? Or maybe it's a culture change too. It doesn't necessarily have to be a structural change?

Right. I don't think I really have a great, you know, clear answer to the question about how you do it, but I can certainly share with you some thoughts about what the elements are and what the challenges are. I think that today you've got the shift away from the fully in-office work environment to either a hybrid or totally remote workplace. And that just presents the challenge of, well, if we're not all in the office and we're not seeing each other and interacting personally and sort of coffee discussion, water cooler discussions, so how do we actually create human relationships that are meaningful because I think that that's the real glue that can bind organizations together is where people are working with other people who they relate to, they understand, they like being with, and there's a common goal to be achieved and everybody's pretty much on the bus and comfortable with that. I think it's a lot easier if you're doing that in the in-office environment. It seems that for most firms, even attempting to do that by compelling people to come back is not going to happen. So what does one do when you've got a distributed team and some of the people may not really ever, or with any amount of frequency, come together? And that's, that's one of the great challenges. So, you know, what are possible solutions? Certainly, if the in-person interaction is going to be more sustaining for people's energy and their involvement and their engagement with the organization, then getting people together at least periodically in a location is really important. So, you know, I've seen that even if you're running a completely remote virtual organization, which many of our clients and associates do, that bringing everybody together in a nice location once a year or specific teams where, you know, you get a chance to socialize and relax and have some fun and also plan and strategize what you're going to do for the next quarter or the next year, getting some kind of a commonality of goals and thinking together. I think that could really be very important. Then when everybody goes home, so at least they have that afterglow of the meetings, the lunches, the walks on the board, whatever it is, you know, the volleyball. And that will sort of, I think, sustain people for a while. It's going to fade. And so you're going to have to re-up it. And so that's where you have to find, I think at least, cadence that works for you. And you know, there are economic constraints. You can't fly everybody to, you know, a nice location on a monthly basis. So every organization I think has to figure out for themselves what works for us if you're going to have a distributed team.

Yeah, I think that's becoming a a real, I think it's become a reality for some people that didn't think we'd ever have to go back to in-person. I think that the pandemic suggested that we can be completely remote, completely distributed, and productive, and efficient, and effective, and get culture strong. But then that fills it out because it's no longer necessary to be remote. And so now I think people from a cost standpoint still sounds great. Let's keep everybody remote, distributing the costs down. And that's like maybe for me at least, I see that as a new like bar, like, oh, we want to keep our costs down. We don't need this big overhead. We don't need the big office, but it may be we need to raise the bar enough to cover those in-person visits that you're talking about. So the bar isn't nothing. The bar is nothing plus How are, what's our cadence that is necessary for our team to feel? I think that's gotta be part of the conversation, right?

I think you're completely correct that if a person is running a business and they think that they can save costs by not having office space and it's all gonna run to the bottom line and everything's gonna be fine and dandy, I think that they're dreaming. I have to budget in that we're going to replace some of the costs of rent or facilities with cost of travel and hotels and entertainment and et cetera. I don't know if it's going to actually be a net zero savings to lose the facilities costs, but I think that certainly a realistic, clear-eyed plan includes a line on the, on the P&L for offsite get-togethers, meetings, things like that.

And I think if we get creative, those, that line item and those offsites could be a recruitment tool. Like every quarter we do this, or every year we have a big trip where like, if it's not a constraint from a necessity, like we gotta do this to keep our team healthy and together, right? To Wow, you know, we go to Portugal every year and we surf the waves and we, you know, enjoy the sun. That's our team meeting and it's budgeted and it's something you look forward to as well as you get the glow from afterwards.

Yeah, I think that's a great point you're making. You know, it's a boost for the people that are currently on the team and it's great publicity for the organization. And it's going to attract people.

Yeah. And, you know, it's becoming more and more competitive to find good people. You know that from your experience and I know that. And I think the competition is going to drive companies having to do that in some sense, just to compete with the other options people have. But the other competition, or, you know, the other thing that's emerging that you've tapped into because of the competition to find good people is this idea of, you know, even going further distributed to, in your case, the Philippines or Mexico to find good talent outside the normal radius of search. And, you know, the complexities of making a trip over to see your team in the Philippines or getting them even included in these annual trips. Can be, you know, can be very expensive and I know like with work visas, like it's just really hard to think through all of that. Have you had thoughts around visiting your team as your distributed team in the different parts of the world?

Sure. Of course. So, you know, just a couple of thoughts on that. We have thought of bringing people here to the States and that's got some legal hurdles. It's also got the positive, right? That, you know, that once we have the majority of our team located in the New York, New Jersey area, so we're flying in a smaller number of people to have everybody together, it'd be really impractical for all of us to fly out to the Philippines or Mexico or something like that. But I think that for us, we have, you know, a couple of people here and a couple of people there. We don't have a large enough concentration. We don't have a team of, let's say, 10 or 15 people in any one location at this point in our organization. So I can see though that as we get up there to, to those numbers, a couple of people flying out from New York, if it's on an annual basis or something like that, and just be present with those people, take them out, have, show them a good time, and then do some strategizing. We'll do the same thing that we, I mentioned before in that you want to have a tighter integration than you can achieve solely over the internet. And, you know, look, Zoom and Teams and all the electronic sharing of information that we do on a regular basis is wonderful. But I feel personally that at the end of the day, the communication is always missing a certain intangible dimension that can only be accomplished when you're in, in person. And so, you know, it's a great point. You know, do you fly to your various locations to see your people? Do you bring them in? I think every organization has to sort of find their, their seatbelts on that one.

Yeah, I think that's what we're working through is trying to figure out what that right cadence that you said is, or each company may need its own. I was also thinking, I'll throw this out to you, just curious what your thoughts are that almost, you know, part of it's the human-to-human interaction in general. Like being in your house all day long remotely on Zoom is a lot for any one person to do. So in some regards, just giving opportunities for your remote teams to go interact with other people intentionally. Hey, why don't you just take their next Tuesday, every Tuesday of the week, go to a coffee shop and work from there. Like forcing people out of their homes to get, you know, some sort of interaction might be an interesting way. And forcing's probably too strong a word. It doesn't have to be with our team. It just has to be with other humans perhaps. And maybe it's a collaborative session. Like, hey, why don't you go find 2 of your buddies and go brainstorm this for me, you know, as an example. So working on your stuff, but with other people in a real human-to-human interaction? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Sure.

So I think that, you know, we were experimenting with a distributed workforce before COVID hit. And at that time, people were actually in offices with other people. Now, you as, you know, a particular organization may have only had, let's say, 2 or 3 of those workers, but they were surrounded by maybe 100, 200, even 1,000 other people. So they had that social web that, you know, I think is just so important. Since COVID it hasn't really come back. A lot of the people out there, well, certainly during COVID with the lockdowns and everything, the employees, the people, workers needed to go into their home offices, their kitchen tables, et cetera. You would've thought that they would've come back by now, but it's not the case, at least that from what we're seeing, a lot of the remote workers are still working from home. And gosh, you know, I was at home a couple of days ago and I had back-to-back meetings on Zoom all day long. After 7 hours of it, I mean, I couldn't see straight.

Yeah, I hear you.

You know, and I had to just like go walk around the block because it's just, it's so much. So the, you know, sense of isolation that you can have is not healthy. I think as human beings, we're social people. That's kind of the theme of our discussion, at least up until now. And I think it's a great idea. Like if you have some remote workers and they're sitting isolated in their homes, okay, we'd like you to be working for us, but please get yourself into an environment where there are other people, there's some life going on because ultimately you get worn down, the sort of the alacrity, the sharpness gets dulled. And having a break from a different place to work out of might be a great way to breathe a little bit of life into what could otherwise become a pretty boring, monotonous job in front of a computer screen.

Yeah. I think if you ever had a chance to read Gerber and the E-Myth and some of his writing, I think it was him that, he, that it's a 1960s book. So if you haven't read it, don't worry about it. And I think it was he who said you need to plan like blocks of time out of the office and other people have picked up on that. Right? So people that have an office, he would suggest you go get an office, you rent a physical space somewhere else and you go there once a week for a specific amount of time. And I think maybe we're now at this point where people that are working from home is like, no, you need to go to an office for a specific time and work from there because you need the counterbalance. Right?

Right. Right. Right.

Yeah.

We also just, by the way, on the subject of remote workers, we have some domestic workers as well who are remote because they're moms. They have young children. They want to be able to get those kids breakfast in the morning, get them off to school, put in their 5 hours, their 6 hours, and be there for the kids when they come home. I think that we're not seeing such a difficulty or challenge in that class of worker. And it could be because it's a shorter period of time that they're working typically, and they're really involved in a fulsome way with their families. So, you know, I'm not speaking from experience in that I try to be in the office as much as possible, but I do notice that there is a difference there.

Do you see work evolving from our traditional hours of work being the value of the worker from to more of a measurable outcome, productive units of work being the value of that person?

Yeah, it's a great question. I think that there's an inherent appeal to moving to a measure of productivity that really considers, well, what did you get done as opposed to how long did you work at it? Like from my perspective, if you got your work done in half an hour and you were budgeted an hour for it, I'm happy to pay you for the half an hour provided the work is at standard or above and everything else is going well. I am much more outcome-oriented than time-oriented. So, If that's your question, I think that there is underfoot, at least in my industry, a move towards more of an outcome-based performance review.

Yeah. And I think we all have to go that route with the distributed workforce because you just can't micromanage people's time. And time is so different now. Like someone working from home could be logging it, especially in the Philippines. Like I have a team in the Philippines and I They're logging in at 4:00 AM and at 4:00 PM and anywhere throughout, and they're getting their work done on their time. Right. There's expected time for, they have to, like, there's blocks of time where we need them matching with our time zone, but then much of the work can be done wherever. I'm not going to, I mean, there are computer programs that measure that, but I'm not measuring that. I'm not checking in on that. It's like, but I, I can see clearly the outcomes. I can see every week. If properly, you know, defined. Did they do their work? Did they get the work done that needed to get done that week? At least I think that's where we're going.

I agree with you. And it forces us as managers to be a lot more structured in our time. As you mentioned, you know, you have to have that overlap for coordination and you have to develop a good system of feedback for sort of when, if things are getting done at a pace that you've scheduled out and if they're not, to be able to spot that pretty early in the game. You know, when you have a team that you can actually interact with by going out in the hallway and speaking to them and asking them, you know, What are you up to? What are you up to? Et cetera. And redistributing the work if you, if you need to. So you can get a really good pulse on whether or not things are moving or not. If you have a team that's, that's distributed and you don't really know when they're working and et cetera, then you need some kind of a, of a system that will delineate budgets, you know, deadlines, deliverables and things like that. You need somebody to manage it also.

Yeah. Yeah, we've, it's a, it's, it's really different to manage a distributed team than an in-house team. The old days of managing by wandering around is really expensive. Hopefully you have a team all over the world.

That's a great way to put it.

Yeah. Yeah. I think this idea of this solving this challenge is not only as we started focusing on how do you create an organization that attracts these individuals, but it's also what are the lessons and things we're learning that the individual needs to be doing to keep themselves happy and effective and productive and connected. And so it's 2 sides of the issue. And I really don't focus a lot on that individual, but thinking more and more about encouraging team members to get up, to get out of their house, to collaborate with others. And I do recall before the pandemic, coworking spots were huge. There were tons of freelancers that were going out, working for themselves, remote distributed work, decentralized fractional., but they were in a community of others just like them. Right. And then, and I'll use the Philippines as another example. 30% of the Filipino economy is business process outsourcing. So their whole country is set up to do this and they build giant offices for people to come in, work together for others, but they were together and they were building cultures when these people might individually be working for you or me or other companies, but the culture, the connectivity was in the office. Well, when the pandemic hit, they shut down, pushed everybody home, right? Well, now two things are happening. All of the BPOs are like, all right, come back. We have all this space, fill it up. And the government is saying your tax incentives for building that space requires you to fill it back up. So there's a lot of pressures to bring people back. But the employees are saying, no, we like it at home. We don't want to come back. And I don't know if that's— and I bring that up because that might be the case now, but I'm guessing there's going to be a point in time where some of them are going to say, actually, we do want to go back. We do miss that in-person connectivity while we were serving, you know, out-facing clients. But right now, there's a big push to not come back because they enjoy being at home.

Yeah.

Because they're working moms, because they don't want to travel an hour each way to get there. There's got to be a hybrid coming somewhere in between.

I think so. But the pendulum is swinging, you know? Yeah. And you know, you've seen that major New York banks have, and other organizations as well, I think even Apple might have said, employees, okay, everybody's back in the office September 1st. And then the next day, no, no, no, we didn't mean September 1st, January 1st. So you see that there's a big tension over here. The employees are dugging currently. The employers have concluded, or many of them concluded that we're more productive, we're better off being in person. And you know, how long does that that détente, that stalemate last? Is it that the employees say, you know, I kind of miss being in the office, at least for some of the time? Is it the employers that say, all right, we're able to, you know, to deal with 3 days a week, give us Tuesday to Thursday, and we're not going to really lose a lot of the productivity and the creativity that we're looking for? Nobody really knows. I think you're right. We're heading for some kind of hybrid. Arrangement long-term, you know, but it's a huge challenge and it's a lot of fun actually to be on the vanguard and the cutting edge, all of us, of this new frontier that's opened up through Zoom and Teams and, you know, all the other products that surround that ecosystem.

It's fascinating to be in this moment, you know, running businesses and in both of our cases, serving other businesses that are running businesses. So we kind of see like lots of different variations of people trying to solve the same problem. I can only imagine that the Harvard Business Review case studies that are going to come out in the next few years about who did it right, who did it wrong, what we learned, because it's, we are learning, we're in the midst of almost like an industrial revolution. This is, I don't know what you call it, but it's, It's major. It's changing everything.

It is. I don't think you can underestimate the profound impact that this is going to make on how we work. The comparison to the Industrial Revolution probably holds water.

Yeah. And you're, you know, you and I both are kind of at the forefront, maybe the leading edge, I would probably say, because We're embracing it and not really fighting, and we're able to, we're smaller organizations, a little more nimble. We can, you know, make mistakes and not get, you know, not be Apple. But how is your experience then as a consumer of both fractional leadership and remote work been as a business owner?

I think in general, it's been an excellent experience. Clearly, we are able to tap into some top talent for an affordable, for, you know, for us, an affordable cost, which would be completely out of reach if we needed to hire somebody full-time. And absent the fractional leadership, that emerging segment of the workplace, I'm not aware of any way that we could have done this. Working with external agencies has its inherent limitations. I won't go into all of them right now, but it doesn't give you the, in general, it doesn't give you the person that, the person that, that is, is working with you in an agency is not really going to be as attuned to the needs of your organization, the unique personality, personalities of the executive team. And so they're just not going to be able to deliver a really customized solution for you. And so this is a, this is a great way to tap into top-level leadership for your organization at a cost which is much more affordable.

I don't recall. I know you've used a fractional kind of planner, annual, quarterly strategic planner. You've used a fractional CFO. And you have one of our fractional CMOs on your team. Which one came first? That kind of—

We also have a CTO currently.

Oh, that's right.

You do.

I forgot about that. He's a rock star.

Yes. And he'll be hopefully, you know, part of our team for a long time. So, sorry, could you— Which one came first? Yeah. So, I think that we started with the coaching. Model first, and then we went to what was known in the industry. I don't know if it's still known as this, as a fractional integrator, which is basically a COO on a fractional basis. It's funny because, you know, we're an accounting firm. You'd think that we would be really good at doing our own books, but it's not something that I wanted to put any effort into myself. So we hired then a fractional CFO just to sort of mind the internal accounting and do some projections and other analysis for us. And that's good. We picked up then a chief marketing officer, works for, you know, for your company. And then the other CTO has been sort of the most recent hire to help us with a transformation in technology where we're redoing principally, I don't know, is it 60% or 70% of our tech stack and moving it to a much more integrated cloud-based system that gives us a lot of dashboard type of reporting and just sort of more and more, I guess, information that's relevant to us at hand. So we got a whole set of them.

Yeah. Oh, you do. You get, you get a whole fractional C-suite. If you think about the first time you were dipping your toe in the water of fractional integrator and even the next couple, what was the fears that you had? What was keeping you from, I don't know if this is going to work because of this? What was— Oh, you thought you might uncover that you didn't feel like.

Yeah. So I didn't have any fears per se. I really felt that it was the right thing to do. And 'cause we had a clear job description and we had a clear mandate for that person. And the only question was whether or not they'd be able to live up to it or not and deliver for us what we wanted. To rephrase the question though, a little bit, if you'd like to hear a little bit about what I think the sort of the advantages and the disadvantages of it for Limitations, if you will.

Yeah.

Now that you, now that you have them.

Yeah. I mean, I think that the advantages are that if a person is a quick study and can get your business fairly painlessly, is an intuitive learner and has a background in doing more or less what you do. If it's service, I don't care if it's one type of a service business or another type of a service business. It's just service as opposed to manufacturing, which is a a different animal, then I think that you could sort of bring a person onto the executive team. You can have a small organization with this as well and have a really strong voice and perspective that can complement what's going on. And also somebody from the outside to give a new perspective that, you know, face it, we're all biased and we're all filled with the inability, you know, or we're limited by by being so, I guess, involved in what we do day to day, we can't really see so clearly, you know, what's required. And so that fractional person could come in and say, okay, well, you know, based on my experience and the training that I have, this is what I see going on. And I think that we can make improvements here. And then they can execute on it as well. I think that the disadvantage or the weakness in the model is that the person that you bring in only has a certain amount of time to spend with you. It's sort of by the definition, they're a fractional resource. So if you bring somebody in that's a fractional C-suite type of a person, then they may be able to identify a lot of what needs to be happening in the organization. But they may not have the capacity in and of themselves to actually deliver it. You may need to complement that or to expand their, you know, the scope of their work and the time that they're allowed to do their stuff. No rocket science over there. It's all a matter of what the person's willing to give you in terms of their time and the budget that you have for it. But that, that's what I see as one of the limitations. There's another limitation as well in that it's really important if you're going to consider, I think, Joe, you know, fractional leaders that they listen first and then they make suggestions secondly. I mean, some of the people that we interviewed, they had a, what I thought to be a pretty rigid framework for how they like to work with with clients and it may not work in every instance. And if it's not a good fit for you, well, you're getting somebody who's trying to impose their perspective on your organization. May not work with the players that you have, the other players. So that's one of the limitations, I think.

Yeah. I think that's really interesting. The idea that your limitation is time, get back to the conversation around value for time. And that is by definition what a fractional is. You get a fraction of that person's time and energy on your account. So I think that, well, that made, I wrote down the word lever, right? How do we lever time? As any of us, you know, business executives, we're always strapped for time. So what are the time hacks? What are the ways that we can leverage our time better? And a fractional person is in the position to really show off their ability to lever time. In a strategic role, you should be able to do that. In a tactical role, you know, you're a little more constrained by, you know, your output is based on your time. So yeah, good point. I just think that's an interesting thing for me to noodle on for a while. How do we lever eye more.

Yeah. And I think that you made a great distinction too, uh, between strategic and tactical, right? Uh, for a lot of organizations, um, small organizations. So what they need is both. They need the strategic input, um, because it can breathe, uh, life into an area of the business that is, is otherwise not going to, uh, thrive. But you also need the tactical. And the tactical is the doing. And maybe that's where budgetary constraints come in because ideally what you'd have is, let's say, a fractional marketing person and then you'd have some full-time doers in the organization that would just sort of take their directives from the fractional CMO and then report back, say, hey, you know, we did what you told us to do and these are the results. What's next, you know, type of a thing. So maybe, maybe that's where, where you have to sort of watch out. Those are shoals that you have to watch out for. Yeah, for sure.

How about as a consumer of the, of the remote worker that, and you mentioned you've got people locally that are, are remote as well as across the globe. So globe's just kind of this exponential version of remote, but how has your advantages and disadvantages of working with a remote team been for you?

I think that the advantages are just so numerous. The reach that a business has is unlimited by geography today. You have some time zone issues, that's true. But a business like ours, which is primarily currently located in New York, New Jersey, we really couldn't consider picking up employees in different localities of the country or the world. And there's a lot of talent out there. There's also a very nice price differential between the cost of living in, let's say, Mexico or the Philippines to the New York metro area. And so the wages are a lot lighter. So you can get some great talent that way. We've got workers that are in our local geography as well that are remote. That works very nicely as well. Culturally, there's a closer, you know, they were sharing the same culture, so there's nothing that gets lost in translation. I think that the One of the key issues that you have to smoke out when you're looking to take on a remote worker or a team is whether or not they're a self-starter, they are internally motivated and disciplined, they really want to be industrious and make a contribution to the organization because it's so easy to hide out there. And I mean, you mentioned before that there's software that can monitor productivity and stuff like that. We've experimented a little bit with that. I don't think that that's a great solution for most businesses that have, let's say, mid to higher level needs, right? Maybe for the very low sort of administrative type of a person, call centers and things like that, that technology is important and that level of oversight is important. But if you get up to the higher skill sets, you really need that, the right type of personality because again, you can just hide very easily.

And how do you measure for that personality type? Do you, I mean, can you?

I don't know. I haven't figured it out. You know, we, it's probably like everything else. You experiment a lot with it and you learn primarily from your failures. Yeah. Right.

Yeah.

If you don't get up to bat and strike out, you'll never learn. So I think it's a process of experimentation. I think it's, and that's sort of, it's a different part of the conversation that we could have, but I think that trying to vet people before, you know, to come into the organization as employees is very difficult. It's a vexing job. Sometimes you think you really get a person and everything aligns and the stars align, and then when they come on board, you see, wow, I had that one wrong and it's not such a great fit. So I really don't know.

Yeah. I think someone asked me once, and this has come up repeatedly, like, well, how do I know I'm going to get a good employee remotely overseas or Mexico and for just this reason, it's vexing, right? And I've always answered, how do you think you're going to get a good employee in your backyard? I mean, that challenge of recruiting and making sure it's the right person that got that right personality and they can do the job. I mean, you have to do that either way. And I would argue you're more likely to get a good fit remotely because you have a different kind of person on the other end that, in my experience, they want the job really bad. They value the work quite a bit. They're not in our, you know, we are blessed to grow up in the US. It is different in other parts of the world, and we take a lot of things for granted, including employment and good, well-paying jobs that others don't. And so, Everything else being equal, which education's pretty equal these days. Language is pretty equal these days. It's that desire to work, that want to work that I think is in some cases stronger other parts of the world. But it's still, I've seen all spectrums of personalities, you know, self-starters and not self-starters, people internally motivated versus people that still need external motivation. Like, you still have to screen for that. But yeah.

Yeah. No, I would agree with you with one modification I think is that there are regions of the world that have a higher concentration of the type of people that you're looking for. Like Philippines is a very good example of that. You have a really sort of industrious work, great, great work ethic. The people are really bright. They're easy to work with. They're nice people. It's a great place to have a team. We experimented with other places in the world and it's not uniform. It's just not uniform. And I think the people in Philippines particularly are really happy, as you say, to have the job. It means a lot to them and they want to succeed at it. So I think that sort of regionally you have to know, okay, if I go there, the population is sort of generically like this and an FSMA versus if I go someplace else, maybe it's a little more spotty.

Yeah, I think you're 100% correct. Yeah. It's not ubiquitous. There are certainly areas that are much more prime for finding you a solution than others.

Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. Well, last question and then we can wrap this up. Sure. What do you like to do for fun, Mark?

That's a great question. So for fun these days, I play tennis. Oh, wow. Yeah. I hadn't played tennis since I was a kid. And I have a friend who's local to me and we try to play twice a week. We play outdoors in the warm weather. We go indoors in the cold weather. It's just a lot of fun. We're both, I think I rank somewhere like, I mean, I am ranked in the US somewhere like 1.2 million. So we're both hacks.

Yeah.

Yes. But we have a good time and that's my sort of my weekly fun.

Yeah. And I know that pickleball seems to be picking up quite a bit in our area. Is that something picking up around you?

Oh yeah. Yeah. That's throughout the country. I haven't played yet though.

Oh, like my friends that play a lot of tennis are loving the pickleball game.

Yeah. I think it's kind of like, no, nobody said anything bad about pickleball. Everybody's like, yeah, you know, I kind of like it a lot.

But you know who likes it the most? I think it's the orthopedic surgeons. It's pretty easy to break an ankle at our age playing pickleball.

They like comics pretty well also.

Yeah, I'm sure they do. Absolutely. Yeah. Well, good. Well, I had a great conversation. We talked about so many interesting things. I really appreciate all of our conversations, but specifically today, I really liked drilling deep into some of these areas. So thank you for your time.

Yeah, it's a pleasure. Thanks for having me on.

Yeah. And to our audience, thanks for listening and make sure to subscribe to the podcast if you want to hear more. And if you want to reach out to Mark, we will have his show notes with his detailed contact information. I'm sure he'd enjoy hearing your ranking for your tennis matches as well. But please tune in and contact Mark based on his contact information. That'll be in the show notes. Thank you very much.

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.