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Scaling a business often means building a team that can help take things to the next level. So what do you do when hiring locally is cost-prohibitive? This is often the case especially for smaller companies that are just getting started. One solution gaining traction among business owners is hiring global talent, particularly from regions like Latin America and the Philippines. However, misconceptions about hiring overseas have led many entrepreneurs to shy away from this opportunity. If you’re curious as to whether it could work for you, then it’s important to understand the myths, onboarding processes, and cultural considerations that come into play.
Today, we’re highlighting the insight of Brian O’Connor, founder of TalentHQ and a seasoned expert in growth strategy and talent placement. Having transitioned from a successful career in corporate consulting to entrepreneurship, he has a unique perspective on leveraging global talent to drive business growth. As a digital nomad, Brian has built relationships and networks in Latin America and beyond, gaining hands-on experience in sourcing first-class overseas support. His strategies have helped countless businesses build cost-effective teams, enabling them to scale faster without compromising on quality. Let’s dive in!
The Benefits of Employing Global Talent
“If you have a $100K role, you have to wait until you have enough budget to hit $100K… versus if you hire offshore, you can hire now.”
One of the biggest advantages of hiring globally is the cost-efficiency it provides. Businesses can afford to hire more people or bring on roles earlier than if they only sourced locally. This means that your business can build a more robust team for the same budget or even less.
By hiring internationally and leveraging talent at a fraction of the cost, business owners unlock a key secondary benefit. The increased productivity allows them to scale faster and ultimately generate more revenue sooner.
The Myths About Hiring Overseas Talent
“They may have a bad experience with either a bad hiring process and then blame the country… or they may go to a country with a different culture than they expect and then blame all offshore.”
When it comes to hiring overseas, one common misconception is that the quality of talent is inferior. Many business owners believe that the only roles suitable for overseas workers are back-office tasks that don’t touch the customer. However, this mindset is often based on faulty comparisons and misunderstandings.
If business owners approach hiring overseas talent with a limited or misinformed mindset, they may end up blaming the talent pool instead of addressing the real issue — a poorly defined hiring and onboarding process.
The Importance of a Strong Onboarding Process
“Onboarding is making sure that the idea of success in your head is clearly articulated into the head of the person you've just brought into the business.”
One of the most critical elements in employing overseas talent is a well-structured onboarding process. Onboarding isn’t just about handing over a set of instructions but instilling a deep understanding of your company’s culture, values, and mission.
This clarity allows new hires to understand what good communication looks like, what successful execution involves, and the standards they’re expected to meet. Many business owners underestimate the importance of onboarding, leading to miscommunication and failure to meet expectations.
Latin American vs. Filipino Culture in the Workplace
“Some cultures are best at what I'll call coloring within the lines… but for certain types of tasks, cultures that are better at coming up with their own answers to questions and problem-solving type things are better.”
When exploring overseas talent, cultural differences can play a significant role in how effectively your team operates. For example, Filipino culture often excels in following structured instructions and maintaining loyalty to employers. On the other hand, Latin American culture emphasizes creativity, initiative, and building strong relationships.
Understanding these nuances can help business owners align roles with the strengths of each cultural background, leading to better outcomes and more harmonious working relationships.
The Power of Leveraging Global Talent
“I do think that not hiring overseas just really holds you back from the leverage and compounding that you can create and getting that started sooner.”
Hiring globally is more than just a cost-cutting measure; it’s a way to enhance your business operations by accessing new talent pools and skill sets. However, success in global hiring requires debunking myths, investing in a solid onboarding process, and understanding cultural dynamics.
For entrepreneurs who want to scale faster and more affordably, embracing overseas talent could be the strategic move that sets their business apart.
…Class Dismissed!
If you think you’re ready to hire internationally, take the time to set up proper onboarding and find the right people who align with your company’s vision. Remember, the world is full of talented individuals ready to help you build and grow.
Want to hear the full interview with Brian? Click here!
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Transcript
Brian: [00:00:00] I think those time trackers, the screen recorders, we're trying to record remote talent screen. I think it's a crutch for lazy management. If you only care about the output and the outcome and you have the systems in place for them succeed, then you don't have to worry about whether they log in at 9am.
Brien: Welcome to the millionaire university podcast. I'm your host, Brian Geeran with you today. And on this edition of the MU pod, I'm joined by Brian O'Connor. He's the owner of talent HQ and oversees talent. Placement company. And also he is a digital nomad. He's been to or through nearly 20 countries to date, and he's currently residing in Columbia.
So Brian, welcome to the show, my man.
Brian: Thank you. Excited to be here.
Brien: Yeah, this is going to be great. We're going to tackle a topic that is, it's usually on my mind and I think it's on the mind of a lot of business owners, but especially digital business owners. You can correct me if I'm [00:01:00] wrong there. I'm sure there's.
Overseas talent is highly utilized, but I also think kind of totally underutilized to date. We're going to talk about that in depth. We're going to talk about some of the myths or some of the pitfalls or some of the beliefs about hiring overseas that might otherwise inhibit a business owner from actually taking the step in the leap.
And doing what could really be a huge positive move for their business. So Brian, we're going to chat about that, but first I want to get a little bit of an Oregon story. I want to hear a little bit about, you know, how did you end up doing what you're doing? Where did you start and how'd you end up in Columbia?
Brian: I'm excited. I'm excited. Cool. So I have the corporate to entrepreneur path, right? I did six years in management consulting, right? Picture like, I don't know. Ford rooms, the fancy suitcase, fancy suits, low suitcase, that thing, right? And I started kind of talking about my experience on the internet. And the way that I did that was I had a friend who was not a consultant, like [00:02:00] didn't have time to talk to advise a friend of his sent him to me.
And he was having some basic problems with his business that we were solving day to day with the corporates with like basic frameworks. And he was really frustrated. And so when I gave him our frameworks, he was so relieved. Like I kid you not, he kind of cried on the phone, which is a fascinating story for me because on the corporate side, people like it's more of a, it's less, it's less personal, right?
When you're helping small businesses, like it's about their passion, their life, you're helping them have a better life. And so I realized that what we were doing on the consulting side with the big businesses was so useful to the small businesses. I started typing it on Twitter, LinkedIn. And it took off.
I got 85, 000 followers, 14, 000 email readers. And kind of switched to doing that full time, helping small business owners, and then been doing it since I could do on the internet, kind of traveling around.
Brien: Yeah. Wow. Okay. So when you're, when you say small business owners, so these like main street mom and [00:03:00] pop type of gigs, or are they kind of, you know, five to 10 million plus type of companies or in a certain niche, or is it all over?
Brian: So my sweet spot tends to be five to 10 million, right? Well, we'll do some 20, et cetera. The reason that 5 million is the target for that Is because sub call it, I don't know, 3 million. It's much more tactical, right? You're zero to one. You're finding product market fit one to three. You're kind of scaling product market fit a little bit, but it doesn't between three and five, the wheels start to come off.
You don't have systems. If you don't have strategy, if you don't have the type of things that we were doing with the, with the big businesses. And so I get mostly get consulting calls when the 5 million. If you don't have. Systems in place and culture thought out and management and all those kinds of things.
And so that's where I focus.
Brien: Okay. So you were, you found your way from corporate into consulting and basically helping these businesses systematize and keep the wheels on, if you will, reel them back in and put the [00:04:00] lug nuts back on for them. How did that start transitioning into talent HQ and being part of finding solutions with overseas talent?
so much.
Brian: Yeah. So the biggest thing, so my focus in consulting or back when I was at Deloitte, I did growth strategy, marketing strategy, growth strategy, those types of things. And so helping the small businesses were more on the marketing side. And so I'd make a marketing strategy, a marketing plan, and they would say, great, but who's going to run that, those like that strategy, right?
Who's going to execute that plan. Right. And so, We needed a team. And so what I would do is go find marketers to put in and run the action and get, I don't know, build a team of marketers so that they can make the plan a reality. The challenge is at that size, if you need five marketers, it's hard to afford that in the U S right.
And so we started looking for talent overseas to get the same quality level quality. But to be able to afford the whole team that we needed, not just part of the team, [00:05:00] and we don't have to wait until the business grows enough to afford each individual role, we can get them all at once. And so when I did that for one business, I started doing it for a few others.
And that part of the business I ended up taking off because it's a big need that a lot of people have. So those became two kind of independent businesses where I'm advising small businesses on their marketing strategy and plan, but then also putting people into those businesses to actually make that marketing reality.
Brien: And so then talent HQ, you are on the ground, you're in Columbia, you're in Latin America, you are actually in these places where this over where the overseas talent resides. So tell us a little bit more about talent HQ. So are you, you're meeting with talent or is it all about your network down there where you can be like, Hey, we have a company who has X, Y, Z needs.
And through your network, you know, five or six people who can apply for this type of job. How does that work for you?
Brian: I'd say it's a combination of two things. One is like the, to your point, meeting people in person that can fill the [00:06:00] role. Cause we do a lot of our talent in Columbia, but the other one is building out distribution channels.
And so what I mean by that is we've been able to create relationships with Latin Americans, say marketing influencers, people who have like Latin American communities. That teach marketing or have marketing communities that we can do while we're on the ground here meeting those people in person who lead those communities and then can distribute our roles to those people.
And so that helps our distribution wildly. I mean, I'd say the average role. We get, call it three to 400 applicants per role. I think we had a record, we actually had a record last week. We had a project manager role go for 1, 040 applicants in 24 hours. And so the distribution we were able to get here is insane.
So I'm, I'm. Yeah, exactly.
Brien: So let's talk a little bit more about Latin American talent versus like, I guess the probably when most business owners, especially if they're hearing about it for the first time when they hear overseas talent, perhaps they think I'm going to Upwork and I'm [00:07:00] finding someone from the Philippines or Pakistan or, you know, that area of the globe.
But I feel like Latin American, Latin American talent is kind of a newer, I don't know if phenomenon is the right word, but kind of the hotter thing right now. What's the difference? Why Latin American talent versus any other?
Brian: So there's a few differences. I'd say the biggest one that I'm most fan of is the cultural difference, right?
And so there's some cultures that are best at what I'll call coloring within the lines. If you have a task to be done where you have a set of five instructions and they never have to hear from those instructions Then there's, there's cultures that are great at following those, those instructions, right?
That recipe. So take like Filipino culture, for example. With Filipino culture, they are very loyal. They definitely admire US folks, foreigners, et cetera. And so when you tell them what to do, they're, they're awesome at following it. Sometimes because of that, that this is the downside of the upside, [00:08:00] because of that, when the guidance or what they have to do falls outside or the color outside lines a little bit, things can break.
Not always, there's plenty of great talent there too, but for certain types of tasks, cultures that are better at coming up with their own answers to questions and problem solving type things are better versus when there's tasks where you have to follow kind of step by step, those cultures may be better.
And so I'm a fan of LATAM for more critical thinking, kind of free form type things where you don't want to write out the instructions and recipe for every step.
Brien: So I'm coming at this as a, a marketing company owner, and I think there's a million examples running through my head where we'll do things that my people need to have some creative ability to be able to produce on their own and not have to call me and say, Hey, what do you want here?
It's more of me saying. Use your creativity and put something together here that I know that, you know, will work or that is, you know, creative, right? I had examples of this with one of my email [00:09:00] copywriters today. We have three new launches that were going out this morning. And there were a few areas of feedback that I provided that said, Hey, rather than just this line or just this kind of a, this feels a little bland.
Let's put a little pep in the step. Let's spice up the copywriting a little bit. Right. Where I can imagine where if someone from a culture where it's, this is steps one through seven to get this launched, boom, boom, boom, boom. But I guess you're saying if there's room to need some sort of creativity and kind of take that initiative, perhaps different cultures might not do that.
Brian: Right, right, right. So your example, right? You're like, Hey, I need more pep in the step. I need more spice. Can you give that to me? Right. That's a pretty vague instruction. Right. Exactly. Right. But some people can run with that. Right. There's some people who can run with that and some people who can't. Is it to say that all folks from one culture can't?
No, absolutely not. You can find people in every country who, who are able to do that. Right. But a broad brush as a whole, that if in those more creative fields, when I've tried with [00:10:00] say Filipino talent or, or others, I needed to give very, very literal examples. Like the exact chat dbt prompt you need to use to get this outcome, right?
And if you have to change the prompt a little bit, it's not going, it's going to break versus that example you gave, which is just like, Hey, can you put some more pep in a step? Can you add some more spice? That is going to be better in cultures that aren't as call it rule following for lack of better terms, you know, where they've got a little more creativity.
Brien: It's like, I can't sit here and explain exactly what I want here, but I'll know it when I see it. And I know you can do it type of thing. Right. But if that's not part of the mindset, it's not going to happen.
Brian: Exactly. Exactly. So if that's your thinking where you go, Hey, for this type of work, I can't explain exactly what I need.
Then that's going to be better in say Latin America versus if you say, Hey, I can explain exactly what I need and I can't think of situations where we go outside, outside this explanation, then that would be better in say Philippines. Right. And sometimes [00:11:00] that's part of the role design. So I worked with a client last week who they need two roles, right?
One was more rule following the other wasn't. And so one of the benefits of Philippines. Is it is cheaper than Latin America? So what we ended up doing was we took the more rule following one Lowered the price brought it to philippines and we took that price difference and moved it to latam So we could get the best of both worlds because we've just taken the arbitrage on the prices of cost of living
Brien: Okay, I love it.
So let's talk about some of the myths involved with hiring overseas talent. I think there's a whole lot of them we could probably wrap on, but what are some of the top myths that you see that you could help us dispel today?
Brian: So I think one of the big ones, okay this is a bunch, I'll start with one. Around quality, right?
Some people say, Hey, look, the stuff that hides in my back office and doesn't touch the customer that I can offer. I can't do anything that, that touches the customer, right? I need the highest quality, et cetera. And I think the reason that [00:12:00] that mentality happens, right. Is because to your point, they may have a bad experience with either a bad hiring process and then blame the country, right?
Or they may go to a country with a different culture than they expect. And then blame all offshore. And so I think there's great client facing talent, especially in Latin America. So that's what I know best. And if you get the hiring process, right. And you get the onboarding process, right. You'll find great talent.
If you don't, you may actually blame, you may have a bad hiring process. You may have a, may have a bad onboarding process and then blame the talent. And I don't think that's a fair comparison.
Brien: Okay. So you mentioned the onboarding process. I think this is something that a lot of, especially the smaller, maybe that's too broad a statement.
Cause I'm sure there's a lot of larger size businesses who might still not have their, their ish put together, right? Those SOPs, those standard operating procedures. What do you recommend to business owners when it comes to having that type of stuff ready to hire? I know we're, I'm [00:13:00] sidetracking here going down a rabbit hole, but I'm curious because this is something that it took me a while to build out for my company.
But I think a lot of people have questions around that. And I'd love to hear your take on it.
Brian: Sure. So how do you onboard? So just to clarify how to onboard, how, like how to build SOPs, like just to narrow down the question.
Brien: Yeah. Like, let's say you're working with a client and it's time to onboard, you know, they hired someone from your agency, they're about to onboard.
What do you tell them? Do they need a bunch of videos that show them exactly how their job's going to work? Do they need to spend three weeks, four weeks with the new hire and sit down and I mean virtually, but sit down with them and walk them through exactly how it is? I think a lot of business owners are probably worried about the time commitment because they have so much going on a day to day basis.
They're like, how could I possibly have time to onboard somebody?
Brian: Yes. So I think the first thing to dispel is the time commitment thing. And the reason I say that is because I do believe that people are one of the biggest leverage things you can have in the business. Let's say one person onboards correctly, the other [00:14:00] person onboards incorrectly, right?
And you do that for a team. Let's say you have five people. That means that five people, if you onboard incorrectly, will do something wrong that you have to fix every single day for three, five, whatever years. That's like anti leverage, right? That eats your time more than you know. I'm sure you've heard that famous thing where it's like, Oh, this will take me more time to fix and do it myself.
I might as well do it myself. And then boom, what you're, the problem you're back to is you have no time. And I think that you have no time probably because you didn't like adequately empower others to do things for you. So my challenge there is to say, yes, you may not have time now, but if you don't do this, imagine how much less time you have in the future.
So that's the caveat. The other side of it is it does take time to set up the first time, which I do have templates, by the way, I've made templates. If that's helpful to you guys, I can share. But once you build it once, it's much easier to build it the next time, right? Cause the kind of things that you have to do during onboarding are like, for example, setting [00:15:00] values, right?
It sounds fluffy, but there's a big, there's a big synergy using fluffy consulting words between your SOPs and your values. What I mean by that is you can't SOP everything. I think what people tend to make, build a thousand SOPs, but who's going to read a thousand SOPs? And so I think there's this balance where you take the most mission critical parts of the business, turn those into SOPs because you can't mess those up.
And then the parts that aren't covered by the SOP are covered by the values of your business. Why do I say that? Well, because it's your job to every person that comes into your business or imagine the captain of the boat and every person that comes in, you have to make sure they all roll the same way, right?
You have to make sure that they know what success looks like. And that's what onboarding is. Onboarding is making sure that every person, that the idea of success in your head is clearly articulated into the head of the person you've just brought into the business. And so that for me means taking the values of your business and putting them in front of the person, given the resources they need to answer their own [00:16:00] questions as a piece.
Knowing what, like what performance looks like, like you, then, you know, you'll have performance on X amount of time. If you don't hit these metrics, you're out those kinds of things. And so all of that clarity comes during the onboarding process.
Brien: Yeah. It's all through the proper onboard and I can see how it's, I'm sure it's happened before where a lack of a proper onboard.
Meant that a person who probably would have done really well at that job may not be there any longer because there was no proper onboard.
Brian: Yeah, just to give you a simple example, think about, are you familiar with Paul Graham's essay, Maker vs. Manager?
Brien: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah,
Brian: so someone who builds the maker has a different communication style and communication needs.
And someone who manages the manager, right? Now, if you're listening to this, you may be in a manager role. And so you have manager expectations for communication. The person you hired may be a maker. So they have maker type community expectations for communication that inherently is a conflict, [00:17:00] right? And so without saying it and clearly defining what good communication means to you, you're already set up for a clash.
And so part of it, like we have, I have whole sections and we're going to mess the piece now. On just on what does good communication look like versus what does bad communication look like? Because if I never tell my talent that they should have maker style communication expect me to have manager style communication Here's how the two married together then I expect failure.
So I need to tell them right if someone's not doing what I expect It's either because they didn't know they had to my fault. That's communication. They didn't know how to also my fault. That's training Well, I didn't want to. Also, my fault is motivation. All of that to me is initially the, the initial seeds there are during onboarding.
Brien: Wow. Okay. So can you give us some examples of what you were just explaining in terms of how, you know, because I'm coming at this from the business owner perspective, I'm thinking to myself, what does this look like? What does it look like when we're [00:18:00] properly onboarding somebody? And are these communications, are they things that are like, Are we talking about stand up meetings or is it one to ones within the first three weeks that are intense, that are going over everything, or is it more of a, you know, here's what we do, here's how we flow, let's just get to know each other and, you know, walk before we run?
Mm hmm.
Brian: Yeah. So one kind of reminder caveat is we're, that my business is fully remote, right? And so that means a few things. One is like, we have to design a workplace for remote first type thing. Mm hmm. And the other thing is that for in person, a lot of people are amazing communicators in person, but the second they go to remote, right, they don't email as well, they don't slack as well.
They're not as clear, that kind of thing. And so I think, I don't think you can have a flexible work environment and poor communication. I think you have to pick one. Right. So you have to have, if you're going to be fully remote, you need stellar communication. Why do I say that? Because that means that you have to take the time and communicate how important this is, important this is if you're onboarding [00:19:00] remote talent.
So what I do, at least it depends on the role, but for let's say account manager, what I'll do is I'll have a kickoff call to get people like welcome to the business and overview the basics. Right. So that's things like, what's our mission. I want everybody like one, the thing with remote talent is remote talent may like may not get all the information.
Right. That an in person talent person would and so you have to make them feel like they're also building the business with you that they're part of it that everyone's kind of going on the same mission. Okay. I think there's a famous quote. I want to say JFK, right? He went to go visit. Oh yeah, it was JFK.
So JFK wants to go visit NASA and he bumps into a janitor, right? And he's like, what are you doing? And the janitor is like, I'm helping put a man in the moon. Everybody needs to know what you're about. That's important. So anyway, I take time to say, okay, look, You need to deeply understand what we're about.
You need to understand our mission. You need to understand our values. And I actually beat a dead horse. Like, when we sit there, we have four values. And we sit there and we [00:20:00] say, Okay, what are examples of poor versions of this? What are examples of good versions of this? What does success look like? Right?
With each of our values. Then, what's our culture and what's our ways of working? So, ways of working are just like, think of ways that you use a tool. Not like, let's use, so we used for task manager, we used Asana, for example. When I say ways of working, you can Google how to use Asana, right? This isn't like hit con, hit tab Q, and then it creates a task.
I'm not talking about that. What I'm talking about is if I wanna assign you, so say, Brian, I wanna assign you a task. Do you have to accept it offline? How do we manage like the due deck? How do you decline a task? What kinds of things do we have a conversation about in Asana versus in Slack, right? This are just examples on the top of my head, but they're just.
Ways that your company works, like what kinds of things go into which tool what's best practice in terms of like, how do you accept tasks or postpone tasks or ask questions about tasks, those kinds of things, where if you don't clarify what that means. [00:21:00] Then it's kind of a mess because you'll ask your questions.
Like some people will put documents in Google drive, whereas others put them in Asana and others put them into Slack. So, yeah, so we try to clarify how do we, I don't know, work together. What kinds of timing do we expect on responses to things? How do we talk to clients? All those kinds of things we, we try to clear up in that initial onboarding base.
Brien: Yeah. Do you encounter business owners that, I guess, maybe a better question. Do you have to turn businesses away that might not have these things ready to go when it's time to hire, even though their business is at a stage of needing to hire, but you've identified they don't have their SOPs or they don't have the vision.
They don't have their mission and things that are ready to be shared.
Brian: I don't, and the reason I don't is because we off as part of our, our deal, we offer advising on these things because I assume, so this is something I did a lot at Deloitte was just basically like we went into businesses like I've, for example, like there was this hedge fund that just blew up, like got really big, really quickly.
And they're still in Excel. And so some processes that used to [00:22:00] take them two hours now took them to literally two weeks. And so we went in, created systems and figured out like, how do we optimize the business to actually function? And so because of that, like I have a ton of resources on just like, literally, how do you onboard people, right?
How do you set them up for success? The reason I do that is because what I'm most incentivized. to make sure that the talent excels. If I place, if I find the best talent in the world for you, I placed your business and you don't have your system set up, they're going to fail. Even though they're amazing talent.
But, and that when they fail, you go, that was horrible talent. I'm never talking to Brian again. But if I sit with you while we're searching for people and I like check through your stuff and say, okay, actually, Here's the updates. Here's these new systems, just copy, paste, put them in here. Then I put someone they're much more likely to succeed three months from now.
You call me and go, wow, that was amazing. Like my talent is doing great. The business is doing great. I actually want two people now. And so I see this as a long term relationship, not just like a transactional thing, [00:23:00] and I fully believe because of that, I mean, for me. I'm really proud of the stat. 70 percent of our clients come back for more, right?
Most people, 70 percent of people who come and ask us for talent, come back and ask us for another. And I think that's part of it, right? Cause they have a good experience on making sure that the talent can actually succeed.
Brien: Yeah, because there's so much of that in my business experience where before we even get to the tactical things, we have got to figure out a few of your infrastructure issues and then talk strategy and then enter the tactics as part of that strategy.
And I think in your line of work, there's a lot of that, that doesn't get done where it's more so about, Oh, Hey, here's the, 10 people for you to go interview. And where's our, you know, our cut by the way, when really the business owner is not in a position to do this correctly and it serves nobody. So I think that's huge for you having that consulting background to be able to go in and actually, Help these businesses do this before, even in, before even hiring.
Brian: Yeah. I like it a lot because part of [00:24:00] it is I'm also just here to help people, right? So to give you an example, remember that maker manager distinction I gave you a moment ago, that's a real example. So we had a client like a month ago, I want to say two months ago, who onboarded really quickly, didn't like, didn't take the onboarding processes seriously.
And they had that maker manager issue, right? Communication. And so the emails I got were basically explaining the issue and then asking, should I record this person's screen and like document their time and all these things that are just, in my opinion, this is a controversial take I have. I think those time trackers, the screen recorders, we're trying to record remote talent screen.
I think it's a crutch for lazy management. If you only care about the output and the outcome, and you have the systems in place for them to succeed, they know where to go when they have questions, they know what success looks like, then you don't have to worry about whether they log in at 9 a. m. Unless, of course, it's like a customer service role where they need to, that's a different animal.
Brien: I'm familiar with that too, because [00:25:00] with my team, I don't care when you do the work. All I care is that it's done by the time it needs to be done, and it's done exceedingly well. So yeah, that's, that's one of those things where, with remote talent, if you can have that attitude of, You know, you don't have to, it's not like you're their big brother.
You're not their Lord. Right. It's a matter of, is the work getting done? Is it getting done the way you need it done? And do you like working with them as well? Right.
Brian: And to your point, if it doesn't matter what time you log in and log out, you can have that, but you need a stellar communication. People need to let you know if they're going to log out early, right.
They need to know they want, they need to let you know that they won't be available to catch the ball. If you're going to pass to them, they need to let you know what's, what's left. Right. And what's going to be done tomorrow. All those kinds of things versus the other side of the fence. If you're like, Hey, you're logging in at nine, I'm recording your screen.
I know exactly what's going on. Then that level of communication isn't as, as necessary. Right. That's why, that's why I think it's a crutch because you can choose to either improve the communication of [00:26:00] your business. Or, I don't want to say improve, but enhance the handcuffs that go into it, right? Make it more of a controlling environment.
I prefer, I think, I do think it's harder to get, to nail the communication side, but it's much more valuable if you can free that up.
Brien: Okay. So, one of my questions is around cultural differences. So, you know, obviously every culture has its differences, right? There's things that we don't understand about other cultures in the same way that other cultures don't understand about ours.
What are some things that you notice between. A business in the States and talent that's placed from Latin America that might be attributable to cultural differences.
Brian: So clash between Latin culture and like a U. S. business culture, basically.
Brien: Yeah, like, is there something that we wouldn't know about Latin American culture that That is very true down there, but it could affect the relationship between the business owner and the talent.
Brian: Yeah. The two things that jumped out to me and [00:27:00] for context, I should mention this convenient, I actually grew up in Ecuador.
Brien: Oh, wow. Okay. You're very familiar.
Brian: I'm actually half Latino. My, my mom's from Ecuador. So I grew up in Latin culture, which is part of the, I can, you know, Part of the reason we have a distribution manager, I can run ads in Spanish and all that kind of stuff.
Brien: Yeah, the Irish last name really throws you through a loop though.
Brian: I know, I know, Brian O'Connor, look at me too, right? Yes, yes, it's in, it's hidden in there. But anyway, so I think the two that jump out to me are, one is the way we view time. Meetings in time. And then the other is the importance of relationship versus transaction.
So I'll start with the first one in terms of time. So you and I, I think we had the start at the top of the hour, right? And if I joined top of the hour, I'm late. I joined a minute early. Right. That's just, that's the U S culture. That's what we're used to. Latin culture by default runs a little behind that, like start time.
That heart palpitation that I get, if I joined a minute late, doesn't exist in Latin. [00:28:00] Now, that's easily fixable if you're working with them because they know they're working in the U. S. culture, right? And so they're trying to adapt to U. S. culture. So one of the things that's actually one of my ways of working is join 30 seconds to a minute early, joining on time is joining late.
And so that's a performance point. People join late. Like we talk about during performance. The other thing, and as I think out loud, this may be more of a management thing and a persuasion thing than a actually no, this will apply. So in Latin culture, everything's relationship based and sure. There's an argument that in the U S things we were on the conversation because we know mutual person and all those kinds of things.
But the weight of that is much more in Latin culture than it is in U. S. culture. We can be a lot more transactional and do things just because it's beneficial to our business. In Latin America, it's more about strength of relationships, and we'll do things because of strength of relationships more often than what's best for business.
And so [00:29:00] does that mean that you have to, if you're running a team of Latin Americans, you have to focus on building strong relationships with them? Not necessarily because they do a great job kind of adapting to the U S culture because like they know they're working in their culture versus if you were working in their culture.
So I'd say, even though those are cultural differences in terms of how they work, I don't think it impacts the business as much as if you were going to go work with and do a deal with a Latin American company, let's say.
Brien: Okay. Interesting. And what types of, cause I could imagine there's some listeners out there who are probably wondering is overseas talent.
Good for me. Or do i run a business where it wouldn't be so beneficial or maybe the people i need have to be customer facing and they have to meet xyz criteria is latin american talent does it span the board from those who are easily customer facing. Versus just maybe in a fulfillment role or, you know, something that's more [00:30:00] tactical.
What does that look like in terms of Latin American talent?
Brian: So customer facing versus back office.
Brien: Yeah.
Brian: Yeah. So from a customer facing perspective, I think you need two things. And most of our, a lot of our roles are customer facing. We get a ton of like what I'll call like account managers, like sales folks.
We get a lot of those. And so I do think it's a great place for that for two reasons. One is language, right? A lot of people, one of the biggest objections is. Yes, but there's a language barrier. I'd like to put them in front of clients, but the language. And the other one, I'm going to hit the other point before I explain it is charisma.
We talked about the Latin culture a little bit. One thing that I love about Latin culture is it's much more warm, relationship based, charismatic, extroverted, that kind of thing. I call it the Latin flair. And because of that, what I'll call Latin flair, it is a very charismatic culture, which is something that I'd like to put in front of a, of a client.
So if you're comparing different cultures or who can be client facing, I love Latin for that reason. Now on the [00:31:00] language side, I think people conflate and confuse, say, in accent versus bad English. So, there's a difference between someone speaking with great English, but having a non native accent, right?
No one docs you for that. Nobody cares about that. My account manager has an accent and my clients love it. Versus having just bad level English. That is different. That's not acceptable for a client facing role. So what we do and the way we get around that is we get Three, 400 applicants roll. And one of the filters is you need to hit a certain level of me, right?
We have them tell us there's a ranking in LATAM of like, how good are you at English? We only accept the ones over that certain rank. Then we have them submit a video of themselves speaking so we can hear it and make sure that once again, it's not the accent. But it's the ability to understand, the ability to speak, that kind of thing.
So if you have good English and you're charismatic enough to speak to [00:32:00] customers, Latin is a great place to be.
Brien: Okay. So what does it look like from a business owner's investment standpoint? I know different roles will surely carry different salaries or different pay methods. How does that stack up on average when you're hiring out of Latin America?
Brian: Yeah. So I would say if you have, I don't know, a role in the U S let's say 7, 000 a month, 6, 000 a month, right? That same role will probably go for 1, 500 a month in Latin America. Wow. And so the savings are massive, but then here's the other side of the coin, here's where it gets a win win. That 1, 500 in a lot of cases is double what a company in Columbia would do.
Right. So a good friend of mine, she started out plumbing company, 800 bucks a month. Started contracting with the U. S., 1, 500. To the U. S. company, that's a huge cost of savings. To her, she just doubled her income. [00:33:00] Yeah. It's just, it's cost of living is a lot lower and so they're able to essentially live a lot better on amounts that in the U.
S. would be different.
Brien: Wow. Okay. So that is massive. And then are these full time positions or is there, is it a matter of how much the business owner needs or is it full time only?
Brian: I'm talking full time here. There are part time available, but I think part time is harder to pull off from a culture, values, onboarding, all that kind of stuff we're talking about.
I do think full time is where it's at.
Brien: Okay. And what type of positions does the talent that you recruit typically fall in? Or is that a, an extensive list or do you guys focus more on specific type of positions to hire for?
Brian: So we focused on kind of two buckets of positions. One is marketing roles. I'm a CMO.
My co founder sold Zima marketing agency, right? And so we understand that role pretty well, very well. And so we're able to see, that's where we're able to gauge the talent. We actually run them through tests. What we'll call a pilot project [00:34:00] where they do, where we look at their background, their test results.
And based on that, we can tell how good they are. So think like paid media, email marketing, content creation, graphic design, those types of marketing roles on the other side is more admin roles to think like admin sales type roles. So think like data entry, we have BDR slash SDR, whatever you want to call them.
Typical VA's that kind of
Brien: stuff. Okay. And is the talent like, so maybe I'll try and get granular here. If so you're hiring for a marketing role, do you have talent where they have proven expertise or they've learned expertise in how to run Google ads, you know, search campaigns or how to manage a social media or social media ad campaigns?
Are they very specific tactical skills that they have, or is that, you know, a wide range?
Brian: So it can be, so they can be either highly specialized or kind of more junior general staff. I [00:35:00] think there's two different, let's say in the recruiting world. There's kind of what I'll call inbound recruiting versus outbound recruiting.
So inbound is like what our process. So as I said, we had a role last week. You want a project manager, let's say, right. We account managers and project managers are our sweet spot. We love that. And so we ran that, we got a thousand applications, right. And we have a whole process to find top what 0. 1%, I guess it is of a thousand applications, right.
And then get them in front of you. That's one process. We run that because we're marketers, we understand funnels, we have distribution channels, all that kind of stuff. The more specialized you get, you have to switch from what inbound, which is what we run, to outbound. And so if you want seven years experience in this industry, plus like email marketing, it's harder to run an inbound process for that.
And so what you do is you have to find individual people, reach out to them directly, and likely poach them from other companies. And so that's kind of like a one on one targeted type [00:36:00] thing. We do the more inbound. I think once it hits a certain level of specialization that it needs to switch to an outbound approach.
Brien: Okay. Gotcha. So I know we, we started, I took us down a couple of rabbit holes.
Brian: Yeah,
Brien: I'm known for those. I might as well call me rabbit. All about it. But we were talking about some of the myths. Did we cover most of the myths or is there a few other outliers that, that we haven't talked about that are potentially in the way of business owners who could really benefit from hiring Latin American talent?
Brian: Yeah, I think the big ones are so quality wise, right? So people like, Hey, quality doesn't hit. Right. When we talked about that, the one thing around the quality is that we didn't mention is a lot of people don't make an apples to apples comparison. Right. So here's an example. So I worked with a founder a few months ago who was like, Hey, I want someone to like, I need these skills of like a C suite person, right?
They were like they in their head, they had imagined [00:37:00] that the quality isn't out there for an offshore person because they were comparing say executive level us folks to mid tier offshore folks. You know what I mean? So like a lot of people will say, Hey, I can't find someone with the, like with this level of critical thinking that I have.
But if they went for that for a more junior role, but if they weren't for that same role in the U S they would also not find that level of critical thinking. And so a lot of times it's non apples to apples comparison, I would say really broad brush strokes. There's like, if you're going to pay for, I don't know, a 80, 000 a year role.
That's comparable to say 30 K in Latin, right? 30 to 40 K I'm doing public math, but roughly you can't compare a six figure role to a 30, 000 role. Those are just apples to apples. Those aren't apples to apples. And I think a lot of people do that when they're trying to think through. Like, what's the [00:38:00] level of quality of talent?
Brien: Yeah, yeah. Okay. Cause I could see how it'd be easy to just be kind of blind to it because you're used to hiring practices locally or nationally, right? As opposed to understanding, especially that monetary difference, but also the talent difference based on what you're trying to hire for or who you're trying to hire.
Brian: Yeah. And the talent, the quality is great. I think if you can go through the hire process correctly, right, you either hired the right or wrong person. There's great people in each country. And there's different hubs by the way, like Columbia is amazing. Argentina is amazing. That kind of stuff. And there's countries that are less open to remote work than others.
So that's different rabbit hole. But anyway, so if you get bad talent, I wouldn't say it's, it's the whole country it's off, right? It kind of feels naive to say that us has always the only country in the world that was great talent. That's a wild statement. So if you didn't have a good experience, it must be either because it was a poor hiring process.
You chose the wrong person, or you didn't onboard and train them properly. Yeah. Or manage them [00:39:00] properly once they're after onboarding.
Brien: Right. Interesting. And I think we're, and we're going to be wrapping up here shortly. I want to make sure I honor your time, but time wise. So if you're hiring from overseas on the other side of the world, I know in the Philippines, a lot of people will agree to work US based hours, but a lot of them, you know, you kind of have to make yourself available for when your people are working.
That's not a problem if you're hiring in Latin America, right? We're kind of, we're all in roughly the same. Time zones, right?
Brian: Correct. Correct. So in Philippines, to your point, they will, they'll work, they'll work overnight so that they work U. S. hours. For me, one of the, like, many reasons I do LATAM, but one of them is I do know that there's this subculture in the Philippines of just a ton of people who work overnight and so they're used to it.
I had Filipino workers ask me to work the overnight shift and I would like, I think probably three to four times I asked them if they, like, it wasn't time sensitive, like, do you want to work normal hours? And so it still didn't sit well with me that they're working from [00:40:00] 8 p. m. to 6 a. m. or whatever. I made a public math error, but like, that they worked overnight.
Versus LATAM, it's the same time zone, right? So I'm in Columbia now, it's one hour behind Boston, my hometown. And to the other extreme is Argentina, it's one hour ahead of Boston, right? So like the, the time zone. Yeah,
Brien: that's perfect. It's just as if you're doing business with someone on the East coast and you're based on the West coast, it's a max three hour difference.
So that's a big advantage.
Brian: Exactly.
Brien: Awesome, man. Well, this has been a ton of fun. Is there one thing about hiring overseas? If we can leave our audience with one thought. Maybe one piece of either advice or inspiration to possibly take that step to explore hiring from Latin America. What would that be?
Brian: I think people is the highest leverage thing you can do, right?
I mean, there's, if there's an evolve, there's, there's like code and other things as well. But one of the biggest things you can do to increase leverage in your business is people and when you don't hire, uh, overseas, You can't use as [00:41:00] much leverage, right? What I mean by that is if you have a, just to do simple math, you have a hundred K roll, right?
You have to wait until you have enough budget to hit a hundred K versus if you hire it off shore, you can hire now, right? So you can hire earlier, but if you still have the same a hundred K budget, you can hire three people. And so not only are you able to hire sooner and start the compounding effects, you can also hire more roles and get compounding in different parts of your business.
And so I do think that not hiring overseas just really holds you back from the leverage and compounding that you can create. And getting that started sooner.
Brien: I love it. It's really about shortening that timeframe to building your business. And this is one of those almost a cheat code that you can implement in your company and get to where you want to get a lot faster.
So,
Brian: yeah, it really is. I mean, when I was working with the corporates, they use it all the time. I, we used it, right? Like I would do this strategy during the day and then pass off the deliverable to my team in India at night. [00:42:00] And then wake up the next day and have it done in the morning. So you're handing the client, right?
And so like the speed that we can work at when this being worked at during their normal hours, but our night, it was incredible. But then from a Latin perspective, we're able to build out a full team. Whereas before we can only have one person. So the leverage is incredible.
Brien: All right. Awesome. Awesome. I love it.
Well, man, this has been a ton of information. I think our audience and myself included, we have a lot to go off of in terms of thinking about possibility and maybe taking action on hiring a talent out of Latin America to take our businesses to the next level. I want to make sure everybody out there can get ahold of you if they want to reach out, say hi, maybe ask some questions or check out Talent HQ.
What are the best ways to reach out? To get ahold of you, Mr. Brian O'Connor.
Brian: Absolutely. So two ways. One is the Talon HQ website, talonhq. co. And the other one is, I have a weekly newsletter. Every week, I just put pretty detailed [00:43:00] nerdy guides on, like, on these different parts, right? Onboarding, getting the management part right, growing the business marketing channels, everything you need to grow and run your business at my newsletter, which is outliergrowth.
com.
Brien: Awesome. All right, guys, we'll make sure you check out and get out on that, that newsletter, outlier growth. com and talent HQ. co that's. co Brian, man, this has been awesome. Thank you so much for joining us. It's been a pleasure. All right, my friends, if you liked this episode, please share it with a friend.
Just hit the simple share button in your pod player, grab that link and text it to your friend, family, colleague, coworker, whoever you think might enjoy it. And while you're at it, why don't you go ahead and hit up millionaireuniversity. com to sign up for our free mini course and get a list of 300 business ideas that you can use to grow your six or seven figure business.
Guys, it's been a pleasure. I cannot wait to see you on the next episode of the Millionaire University podcast. Go out there and crush it today, [00:44:00] guys.
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