Sara Sheehan’s guest in this episode is Chris Brown, Partner and CTO of Wow Remote Teams, a connection service for companies in need of virtual professional employees. Chris explains the benefits of staffing from Latin America and discusses his company’s vetting and recruitment processes with Sara. Chris believes in the positive impact nearshore staffing creates for businesses and explores how it impacts the local economy for the better.
Chris breaks down Wow Remote Teams’ sourcing process for Sara. He details the questions asked of the employers, such as what skill level and type of person they’re looking for, as well as what budget they have. While the company maintains a huge database of talent, it also turns to an outbound model and works in larger hiring networks, like LinkedIn. The process is thorough and considers many factors vital to company success.
Sara and Chris discuss creating a team culture despite every team being remote, the truly borderless global talent economy, how the prevalence of internet connections benefits everyone, and how AI and AI positions drive the market. Chris highlights how communication with remote employees differs from those in the office, but stresses how an open company culture combats the differences and facilitates flow. Chris sheds a light on how nearshore and remote services are very much the future for a lot of staffing needs.
About Chris Brown:
With 20 years of software development, business automation, and digital marketing expertise, Chris Brown proudly serves as the Partner & CTO of Wow Remote Teams. He has helped cultivate a rich technology roadmap that powers the Wow Remote recruitment processes to streamline and optimize staffing operations, guaranteeing efficiency and precision in candidate selection.
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Resources mentioned in this episode:
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Contact Sara Sheehan | Sara Sheehan Consulting:
Contact Chris Brown:
- Website: WowRemoteTeams.com
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Transcript
Sara Sheehan: [00:00:03] Hi there, I’m Sara Sheehan and welcome to my podcast Transformational Thinkers with Sara Sheehan. Today I’m joined by Chris Brown. He is the CTO and partner at Wow Remote Teams. They help US companies build high performing teams by tapping into Latin America’s exceptional talent pool, driving growth while fostering cross-cultural collaboration. What began as a solution to the talent crunch has evolved into a movement, reshaping how businesses approach team building in a globalized world. Welcome to the show, Chris.
Chris Brown: [00:00:43] Thank you, and thank you for having me on, Sara. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Sara Sheehan: [00:00:47] It is a pleasure to have some time with you. This is an extremely important topic. All businesses need access to talent, and some of us, namely myself, I’m extremely comfortable working with global teams. I’m extremely comfortable having an extension of my team being in another country, if not halfway around the world, just because I’ve done it so frequently. I’m super excited to have you here and to learn more about how you’re serving clients, and especially the fact that you’re working with clients of such varied sizes. You’re making something accessible to a non-Fortune 100 business, which is wonderful. So talk with me a little bit about your business first, Wow Remote Teams, and what you’re doing in the marketplace.
Chris Brown: [00:01:57] We’ve been operating for almost five years now, and we do talent sourcing, staffing and recruiting primarily from Latin America. The difference that we bring to the table is that we do, what we call, bespoke recruiting. We do individual niche finding recruiting. We go through, we find exactly what your needs are, and we find talent that is very well skilled and very well qualified to match those needs for any given position. Basically anything that can be done remotely, we can find amazing talent for. The reason we do Latin America is that I have had many teams throughout the world. I’ve been in technology for 20 years now. I’ve run teams in the Philippines and in India and Eastern Europe, and I’ve done all the things with all the developers all over the place. Time zones and culture are always problematic. When you’re working in the Philippines, somebody is working at two in the morning. It’s either you or them. No matter which side it’s on, that’s never a pleasant experience, or it never was for me anyways. It obviously works, a lot of people do it. I’ve found that having Latin American talent brings a different kind of environment to remote work and to the nearshoring or offshoring situation.
Chris Brown: [00:03:17] They’re working the same hours as you, they’re very culturally close to us, their English levels are very high because they’re all watching American TV and taking in American movies and entertainment and everything. They’re very skilled, of course, the universities in Latin America are incredibly good. There’s universities throughout Mexico and Colombia and all the countries in between, and everywhere south of there as well, that are very well rated and have incredible graduates coming out. Graduates that are excelling at all sorts of different positions. Myself, I do a lot in technology. I look for highly technical people and skilled people in those realms. We’re able to find candidates that are just amazing, not compared to anything, but just amazing in general. You don’t necessarily think of nearshoring candidates when you’re looking for a C level position, but they’re out there and they’re fantastic. We’ve found there’s a wide range of available talent and the market isn’t as saturated as one would think it would be. Especially coming from a position of having worked for many years with offshore teams.
Chris Brown: [00:04:29] When you think of offshore teams, what I did as a technologist, it was always Philippines and Indian and those are the main sales points. You go to the larger consulting firms and you’re always getting talent from there, and there’s always a project manager that’s in the middle of it, and you’re never quite sure who’s doing the work or who’s doing the testing. There’s layers upon layers of problems that I’ve experienced that I see my clients experiencing. I’ve found a difference in the candidates that we get from Latin America. Part of that, of course, is our sourcing team. Part of that is our process and our recruiting and the way we go through things. We pre-vet and pre-interview everybody that we see before a client would see them. We only bring people to clients that we ourselves, and myself, would like to hire. They have to pass our internal screening before we would bring them to somebody, so that of course makes a difference. There’s a big touch point there of making sure that the people that you’re bringing to your clients are truly exceptional for the position that you need.
Sara Sheehan: [00:05:32] That is a wonderful introduction to your business and what you’re up to. When you think about the Latin America workforce, I am very attracted to that because of the time zone opportunity. It’s within the realm of my day, rather than, for instance, starting at night. I definitely see value in having a team that might work when I’m sleeping, but when it comes to roles that I’m working really closely with, the most important and most meaningful roles, having them in Latin America would be extremely competitive. I think you’re at the absolute best time to be bringing this idea into the business world. And you’re definitely going to create a significant revolution in the talent game. Not only because you’re bringing people that are effective, smart, intelligent, but it also might be an intelligent decision for the business owner. Can you talk a little bit about how some of your current engagements are shaking up the talent game and creating this quiet revolution?
Chris Brown: [00:07:11] I see a difference in that a lot of clients come in and they already have offshore talent, and that’s primarily Philippines or Eastern Europe depending on the position. They come with a similar problem set which is, time zones are a problem. Being halfway around the world from somebody causes a huge disconnect in your ability to work with them. As you said, there’s a lot of things that can be done that we would like to have done while we’re sleeping and then wake up and everything’s done, and that’s great. But that’s not the kind of tasking that we’re looking to fill positions for. If you’re looking for your lead of marketing, or you’re looking for someone that’s doing really in-depth social posting, or you need somebody who’s working with you collaboratively on the app that you’re building and it’s a very technical thing, you don’t want to wake up in the morning and come into work and find a whole list of emails about questions that they had that they’re not going to work on until 2 a.m. your time the next day.
Chris Brown: [00:08:07] If you really need to be engaged with the people that you’re hiring, which many times you do, in my experience, you need someone who’s going to be working alongside you and working at the same time as you and available when you’re available. Manifesting that same dedication that you are in the same time frame that you are. That does happen with offshore talents on the other side of the world, the problem is that one of you is working at two in the morning. Is it going to be you or is it going to be them? How often is that going to match? People are messy. I’m messy, we’re all messy. Life gets in our way, things happen. Your daughter needs to go to the hospital, you’re not going to be working at two in the morning if you’ve been at the hospital until ten at night. It just works out so much better for you to be aligned in the time zones. Then, of course, there’s the cultural similarities. Latin America is very entrepreneurial. The thing that clients come talking to me about is they don’t like seeing ‘yes men’ so often. I find in Latin America that people are willing to tell you no. Not tell you ‘no, I’m not doing that’, but ‘no, this isn’t going to work’, or ‘here’s a different avenue’ or ‘here’s why I think differently about that’. Again, I’ve had a lot of experience offshoring, and it’s very task based when you get to a lot of offshore companies that are moving to the other side of the planet. Again, that is not to say that you can’t find amazing people, you absolutely can. But what I found in Latin America, especially with our model of finding people who are a great fit for your position and not necessarily just doing large scale outsourced task work, is that we can find people who are really engaged and really involved and really understand our sort of business model. Because the US business model dominates the Americas.
Chris Brown: [00:09:59] We call ourselves American, but North and South America are in the same time zone. It’s the same north and south. Our culture imposes across all of that, and our business model, and our economic model across all of that. They’re all influenced by the way we operate, and they all understand the American business mindset. When you bring someone in who is well trained and well versed and well skilled, and they understand how American business works and they have that hungry, go getting, pro getting attitude, it really brings a difference. Any position, even the lower level positions. If you’re talking about virtual assistants or executive assistants, you still need somebody who’s going to go out there and be like, by the way, I’m doing your social posting. I’m going out there and doing this every day. But here’s what I see that your competitor is doing, because Instagram’s showing it to me now. And by the way, what about all these things? You’re like, I didn’t even know that existed, let’s go try that. It’s all about the value add. Employees are an investment in your business, and getting that value back is important.
Sara Sheehan: [00:11:08] It’s very important. Chris, can you talk with me about how your sourcing process works? Let’s say a client presents a need for a resource or more than one. What happens after you are made aware of that?
Chris Brown: [00:11:27] First we make sure that we know all of the needs, that we’re clear on what it is we’re looking for. If we’re not clear we’ll go back and ask questions. What is your time frame? What is your overall need? How many hours do you think this is going to be? What kind of depth are you looking for? What skill level are you looking for? What budget are you looking for? Then of course, there’s always the soft skills. What kind of personality are you looking for? What kind of person do you like to work with? It’s always a very important question, and it somehow gets missed a lot when people are talking about sourcing. They’re looking for a resume and the resume is important, but the person behind it is as important. I don’t know if it’s more important, but it’s as important. Because you’re going to work with this person and you’re going to rely on this person and you’re going to trust this person, so they need to be someone that you would trust anyways.
Chris Brown: [00:12:17] From there, we would take that profile and that overall skill matrix and that personality type, and then we’ll go look through our database of talent. Of course, we have a huge database of talent at this point. We have a lot of people that we’ve talked to, we’ve prescreened, we’ve pre-interviewed. We go see who we think matches that set, and if we have people already, then we go contact them. Ask them their availability is, ask them what they’re looking for work. If it’s part time or project based, then we ask them if they have available hours or if they have available time coming up in the next however long it takes to get in. Then from there, there’s always the outbound model which is, now you’re looking outside of your own internal network. Let’s say that we only found two candidates that fit inside our network. Generally, we try to send three so we’ll go out to the outside network. We’ll start at the larger places, LinkedIn is a good example of a huge hiring network, so you would go there and you’d start posting your job and then looking through profiles.
Chris Brown: [00:13:16] All of our recruiters are using the LinkedIn paid tools. We have LinkedIn recruiting and LinkedIn sales professional and all that stuff, so we get a little bit easier outreach than your general individual is going to get without all those tools, but it’s still the same basic process. You’re going to go out, you’re going to look for profiles that match the thing that you’re looking for in the regions that you’re looking to match. LinkedIn, and all the additional platforms like those, will have the availability of filtering and looking and finding skills and finding regions and finding things. Then you either have them already in your network, which of course we have a team of recruiters who do this all the time, their networks in those platforms are already giant. It’s easy for them to contact that talent and say, by the way, we have a new opening, would you be interested? If not, then you reach out to third level connections or what have you and ask the same sort of thing.
Chris Brown: [00:14:10] We have this new opening here, are you interested in work? What does that look like for you? Would you like to come take an interview with us and see how we fit for you and how you fit for us? Then it gets into the nitty gritty normal recruiting, hiring, HR process. Which is, find the people that match, do the prescreening interviews, do your initial round of assessments, whatever those tests may be, whatever those things you need to accomplish are. Make sure that they fit and then get that profile over to, in our case, it would be our recruiting team lead who would then review the interviews, review the profiles, make sure that they’re a fit for what the client wanted, and then get them over to the client from there. Generally, we can do that in about three days, depending on the position and depending on how many people we have in our own database. We like to say 3 to 5 days just to give ourselves a little bit of leeway, of course.
Sara Sheehan: [00:15:05] Always a good idea.
Chris Brown: [00:15:07] Our internal metric is generally three days. Almost always hit it, but sometimes you don’t. It’s this continual motion that we have ongoing that makes it a little bit easier for us than it would be for, if I were doing this by myself, it would take me longer and it would be more difficult. Just because I have a team of recruiters who do this every single day. I have a database of people who’ve already talked to us, who expect communication from us. They know what we do, they trust that we’re doing something. So that when they get an email from us saying “there’s a new position, would you be interested over the next couple of weeks of getting on board?”, they’re kind of excited about that because we’ve talked to them, they know what our setup is like. They know that we’re going to pay them a reasonable salary, we’re going to pay them more than they’re going to make in their home country. They trust that we’re going to be good at that, because they probably know people who already work for us. But doing it yourself, it’s not impossible. Of course, you can go out and reach out to people and say “I’m a US company. I’m looking for X, Y, and Z talent. You kind of match that profile, would you like to interview with me?”
Chris Brown: [00:16:17] That’s going to get you a lot of potential leads, especially if you’re doing job postings and things like that. I’ve already mentioned LinkedIn, because LinkedIn is huge and everybody that’s watching this is going to know LinkedIn, but you can search for job boards. A job board in the country that you’re potentially looking for, let’s say Mexico in this case. Then a skill set, Java developers or something like that. You’re going to get 2 or 3 different job boards that are set up in different regions of Mexico. You can go into those and you can start searching around and find additional talent that way, and then do the same process. The headache that I always saw personally, and that I see my clients having, is that when you post a job post and then you start that recruitment process, you’re going to get hundreds of resumes. Then out of those hundreds of resumes, you’re going to get dozens of interviews. Now those dozens of interviews, you’re going to have maybe a handful of people that you think are actually qualified. Then how do you make that decision? How often are you interviewing people to have a good idea of, does their personality fit what you’re looking for? I find that front end filter really makes a difference for our clients. When we’re working with them to be able to say, here are three people, my recruiting team has talked to them. My recruiting team has reviewed all of this. I would trust that this would be a good person for the position. When I’m hiring somebody, there’s no difference in what we do. I put the profile into the system the same way I put a client profile, I just put my own company at the top of it. It’s the same exact process that I do for myself. That makes a big difference, but it’s also not impossible. If you have the time and the wherewithal, please do.
Sara Sheehan: [00:17:58] There is a tremendous amount of value to me in being able to call someone like you and get help on sourcing pre-vetted candidates. There’s tremendous value in that, that someone’s taken the time to do that already. I don’t have the time, I’ll be totally honest, to go do it myself. Bless the people that do, but I am one of many people that you’ll find that will say, I’ll be glad to give Chris a call to get some help on finding the right talent for these roles that I’m having trouble filling. There’s a lot of value in that, you can’t replace that. Chris, tell me a little bit about the skills that you are filling most often.
Chris Brown: [00:19:00] What we fill most often and what we get requests for, it’s always a bit of a changing thing. We do a lot of marketing positions, we do a lot of executive assistant positions, things that can be done remotely, a lot of creative type positions, designers and things like that, we get a lot of those types of positions. Software engineering, software is a bit of a harder market currently, but you still get a lot of people looking in that direction. Of course, the prices in Latin America are significantly better than US prices for software developers, engineers, things like that. It’s worthwhile to go look because the difference is massive. You’re paying contract rates out of Latin America instead of US employee rates, which includes huge benefits packages and everything else, especially when you get those higher positions. What’s really hot in the current market is all the AI type positions. AI everything, people love to put that word on basically everything at this point.
Chris Brown: [00:19:59] You get a lot of machine learning engineers, you get a lot of the front end react developers who are developing the chatbot front ends or the integrations in order for people’s websites to do these things. There’s a thing called prompt engineering, which we’ve seen quite a few of, people who are really good at prompting the large language models, building the prompts themselves that allow you to automate the system that uses the large language model to continue an automation and build something bigger from there. Then things like designers and things that have experience with all the AI tools and even the AI tools in general, we see so much coming in that is using those kinds of tools. You’ll have, let’s say, an executive assistant position, but they’ll say “I need somebody who really understands how these new AI tools work so that they can implement them for me, because I don’t know what’s going on with this right now.” You have the gray area where people aren’t exactly sure what it is that they need to be doing with it, but everybody knows that they need to be doing something in that general direction. Again, marketing positions are a big one for us, and developers and things like that are always in high demand.
Sara Sheehan: [00:21:14] Are you able to provide a glimpse of the difference in a US software engineer pay scale versus a contract Latin American resource that’s a software engineer?
Chris Brown: [00:21:33] Generally, our mark is that we try to say we’ll save you 30% so we’re going to be about 70% of US costs total, all in, your whole package. That gives you a pretty decent idea of where you’re going to land. There’s such a wide range of available positions that it’s really hard to say, here’s a mid-level Python developer in the US you’re going to be paying $70 an hour. In Latin America, you’re going to be paying $55 an hour or something of that sort. You can get to that kind of thing, but it really is easier to talk in percentages and say, you’re probably going to save 30%. Depending on the position, we’ll be able to save you more, it just depends on what you’re doing and what you’re looking for and the skill set that you need. The more expert that you get, the closer the prices get and the rarer that you get, I would say, the closer the prices get. When you get into really distinct skill sets, people know their value. But when you have something that’s a little bit more common, the price gap increases.
Sara Sheehan: [00:22:36] Interesting. 70% of what you’re paying in the US, that is real savings.
Chris Brown: [00:22:44] It’s significant, especially when you’re talking about multi six figure positions. It can be huge.
Sara Sheehan: [00:22:51] Exactly, that’s impressive. Can you talk with me a little bit about some practical strategies for business leaders to think about how they could structure a remote team to actually get their business performance to improve?
Chris Brown: [00:23:12] Working remotely is always a little bit difficult. You don’t have the human connection, you don’t have that in person, you’re not looking someone in the face. There’s a learning curve to the communication style, but I think most people, most business leaders at this point, have been through that learning curve. We all survived Covid, and we all went through that learning curve of, everybody’s remote now, how do we deal with this? What are these tools like? How do you expect people to communicate on a daily basis? It’s about managing expectations, managing communication and managing outcomes. Expectations, you need to be clear on what it is that you’re looking to achieve, because someone’s not sitting there at a desk next to you. You can’t just lean back and say, did you get this done today? You have to ping them and message them and hope that they’re reading their messages right now. Because they could be in deep work mode and have all their stuff silenced. Now you think they’re not responding, but they’re 400 lines deep into this code that you need written and it’s better not to bother them, but you don’t know that because you’re not sitting there watching them do it. Managing expectations, when are they really going to be available? And then what is the expectation for the work getting done on whatever basis that is. That might be a daily basis for you, that might be a weekly basis, that might be a project basis. Being clear about what that is and how that works is pivotal in remote work.
Chris Brown: [00:24:46] I think it’s pivotal in business in general, but I think remote work just leverages a bit more on it. Because you can’t just walk over to their office and see that their screen is full of code and then leave them alone and walk away. You don’t know that. Communication is life, essentially, for humans. Communication with my wife is just as important as running a remote team. Being clear, being open, being honest, knowing what you need to say, when you need to say it, and when it’s appropriate to say. Again, when are they going to be available for the kind of communication that you need? Routine meetings, you have this scrum idea of standups, that kind of thing. Those are very useful, they’re very powerful. Having regular intervals when you say, this is the time we meet, this is what we need to go over, and this is where you define your expectations. Are you on course? Are you not on course? You can go through the whole agile methodology and get an idea of, how do you implement that and how do you make that work for you? I think communication is not just how we communicate, but how we understand what’s being communicated to us. Having the patience and the empathy to understand that everybody else is also struggling to communicate the way that they would wish to. I rarely am able to communicate the things that I want to and the way I want to, even though I try my best. They are not received the way I thought they were going to be, because what’s in my head and what comes out aren’t always necessarily the same. I think that’s true for everybody. Understanding that, we need to come at that with-especially in things like your texting. You’re writing back and forth, you’re writing emails. Emails are difficult because we assume certain things in the email. We go, they know this and this and this, and then we write the email and they have no idea where point three came from because they didn’t know about that point. There’s always a gap of information, and being mindful of that gap really can be difficult. But I think it’s very important when you’re talking about communications for remote work. You might be talking to this person in a video call or on a chat once a day or something, and having a good structure for what it looks like to have that chat and to make sure that everybody’s on page and on track. I think that takes additional work, but I think it’s worthwhile and I think it’s effective. In person as well. We have to assume the same things, it’s just easier in person because you have that presential body language that tells you, they don’t know what I’m talking about, I better go back. You just see a smile and you don’t necessarily know that it went over their head.
Sara Sheehan: [00:27:36] And if it is someone that you’re going to be working with full time, maybe the business owner or business leader travels to meet the team they’re hiring.
Chris Brown: [00:27:48] A lot of our people that we hire are fully remote. We don’t actually have an office anywhere, so we’re not putting people in an office and having them come in every day. But having company meetups, having everybody go together, those are always super effective things. They can be hard to do at times, especially when you have a really dispersed company. You can have problems flying everybody together and figuring out how visas work and everything. With Latin America, it’s pretty simple because everybody has a visa to go basically everywhere. So it’s really easy for everybody to meet in Mexico, let’s say, or Colombia. You can always pick a cool destination that everybody would like to go to and then do a company retreat now and then. What we see a lot of clients doing is virtual retreats. Everybody gets together, they have a pizza party or they have a holiday party and everybody’s together. Then what they’ll do is they’ll call us and have us order whatever it is the candidate or the employee or the contractor needs for that party. If it’s a pizza thing they’ll say, can you get a pizza delivered on March 17th at 2 p.m.? Then my team will go out, we’ll look, we’ll find a pizza place that’s nearby. We’ll call them, we’ll figure out how to order from them so that everything gets delivered and paid for and the whole thing. That’s always kind of cool. There’s always little pieces like birthdays and things like that that you can do as well. Send them gifts for their birthday, have them sent flowers or chocolates or fruits or whatever else like that. People generally appreciate that, especially in smaller towns in Latin America. Because, again, everybody’s working remotely and everybody has the internet at this point, which means that you can hire people that are outside of a city. If this person’s working in a small town somewhere in the countryside of Mexico, they really don’t expect to have something delivered to them, so you can make a pretty impactful overture.
Sara Sheehan: [00:29:51] And there’s always Goldbelly, where you can send something really special to them. I love the idea of the personal touch, I really do. Based on your role as CTO, can you share a little insight into what technologies that you’re using that may be interesting or forward thinking in your business?
Chris Brown: [00:30:20] Of course there’s the whole new world of AI that is absolutely everywhere, but it’s been really effective, and we find that it speeds up the process if you’re using the correct kind of thing. AI in general, people want it to be more than it is, but when you get down into it, it can do a lot of semi creative work, it can do a lot of routine tasking, it can do a lot of improving job descriptions or making better candidate assessments. A thing that we like to use it for is interview questions. I can’t expect my recruiting team to be super knowledgeable about Scala developers. There’s a couple hundred people that would actually be super knowledgeable about that. There’s more than that, but you know what I’m saying. We can go to one of the AIs, you can go to Google, or you can go to OpenAI or ChatGPT or whichever, and you can ask it, give me a list of really pertinent questions for somebody coming into a Java developer role using the spring framework with five years of experience, and here’s an overview of their resume, what would you ask this person? It can give you really insightful tips about, here’s a good idea of what are some pertinent questions that would be on a higher level interview.
Chris Brown: [00:31:35] Then you can move through those and say, that might be too high level because my recruiting team’s not going to understand the answer, potentially because they don’t understand that system. Or if they do, maybe they can ask those questions. You get into systems like that and then you start to automate those kinds of systems. You can either do it yourself using LangChain or a server based kind of application, or you can use a prebuilt builder like N8N or Make.com or whichever one you like. You can really start to automate workflows based on that. You can say, here’s the new job post that came in, let’s do these seven steps that we know we have to do every time. We have to make sure that the job description matches the thing. We have to make sure that there’s a list of initial candidate assessment questions. We have to make sure that the recruiter knows the questions that are asked. We have to make sure that the interviewer knows the questions to ask that are correct. Now that’s happened, let’s review the video. Now the video can come over into the automation. Read through the interview, make a transcript, summarize that transcript. Does that transcript look like somebody who is a good candidate for X position? Give me a value on that. Now you have all this additional information. You don’t necessarily want to use all of that and just say, here’s my entire process, it’s all run by AI. Maybe, but for your recruiting lead it’s really impactful to say, here’s a summarization of the transcript of the meeting and here’s Gemini’s idea on how good they are as a Java developer. Does that fit the thing that we’re looking for, yes or no? If yes, now let’s go review. Let’s look deeper, let’s make sure that they’re a good candidate. Let’s put the human touch back into it. Do they have that feel of personality that we’re looking for? It’s less about, we can automate everything and it’s going to be an amazing AI journey, in which we can automate a lot of things, but adding that personal touch back in is super important. It gets away from the tech stack at the end of the day.
Sara Sheehan: [00:33:34] When we talk about having resources in other countries and we talk about finding ways to be smart about the resourcing that we’re doing, it really does mean that we’re in a global talent economy, truly borderless. Have you seen that this is transforming some clients’ businesses?
Chris Brown: [00:34:11] Absolutely. There’s always the discussion of price point. If you’re paying 70% for people in a different place, or less if you’re going even further offshore, you can get talent that you couldn’t get in the US. That makes, potentially, a huge impact on your business, depending on what your business is and what that looks like. A lot of times, someone like a chief marketing officer for a medium sized business, that might be too expensive of a role in the US. It might be one of those things that you’re just like, I have this need, I know I need it, but it’s just outside so we have to keep doing it ourselves. You can keep hiring the people that are just below that role, and training them and sending them to conferences and pushing them towards that role, but you’ll find that people like to move laterally. As they get the ability to be a CMO, they’re going to move up to another company that will pay them more to be a CMO. Moving to Latin America allows you to get that kind of position where you can really bring in resources that would be a little bit too high level for you in the US, and you can get on to people that are extremely skilled and extremely valuable for what they’re going to bring to your business. I think a lot of it for people is crossing that cultural barrier, that first attempt at it, that idea of, I’m hiring nearshore, so I’m looking for task based people. I get a lot of initial clients who might have a large operation, they might have a lot going on, but they come in looking for a very specific role. “I need a designer who makes all the images for my social media for this potential thing.”
Chris Brown: [00:35:53] There’s tons of social media platforms, there’s all different image sizes, there’s all this stuff we need to make, let’s do that. So we bring them that person. We bring them somebody generally pretty good, hopefully very good. They place that position and they work with them for a little while. Then a few weeks or a few months later they come to me and say, by the way, I have this other position for the next level up from that. I need the person who’s producing all of my videos or writing the scripts, or, I need the person who’s managing this particular area of my business. Do you guys think you could do something like that? Then we get to open their doors a little bit and say, here’s all the available talent that could really do an amazing job at that, and here’s their price point. Then the conversation flows from there where they go, I didn’t realize that was the level of thing that was available. As we move into this borderless economy, as we move into this globalized workforce world, we’re going to see more and more that people learn that great people are everywhere. It’s a matter of how you do the correct recruiting and how do you reach out to people that might not have generally known that they could work for bigger US companies for whatever reason. And bigger US companies didn’t generally know that they were available, but they are now. Everybody has the internet. There’s things like Starlink. I went to the Amazon two summers ago, and I went to the Amazon many years ago. My wife is from Colombia and I’ve lived there for a few years. I love to go down to the Amazon because it’s a beautiful place and it’s incredibly lush. The first time I went was almost a decade ago, and there was no connection. There was no internet, there was no service, it was just a completely different world. You took a little plane, there was no way to get down there by car or anything. You land and you’re completely disconnected, you’re isolated. Two summers ago, I went back. I was like, this is going to be awesome. I’m going to have a complete disconnect. I’m going to live in this beautiful jungle world again. I get down there and my cell phone works, and every place I stayed at had a Starlink on the roof and everywhere had perfect internet, and I never got to not work because everybody could contact me the entire time.
Sara Sheehan: [00:38:09] That’s a dramatic change!
Chris Brown: [00:38:12] That’s to say that that’s the extent to which we have connected this world. Which means that you now have the availability of talent that was in little towns. They may have gone to the best university in the country and gone back to their little town because they want to be with their family and they love where they live and it’s beautiful. Now they have complete 24/7 amazing internet connection. You’re talking about very skilled, highly adept people who just lived too far away, five years ago, in order to do this. But now everybody’s connected, everybody’s available.
Sara Sheehan: [00:38:45] The door is open.
Chris Brown: [00:38:46] The door is completely open, and that’s not really fully tapped yet. It’s barely tapped at all, to be honest. Not a lot of people are sourcing. I still get a lot of client calls that say, do you have an office in Mexico City? I go, why would I have an office in Mexico City? Yes, I have a lot of people who are from Mexico City, but they don’t want to drive to an office in the middle of Mexico City. They don’t want to deal with that traffic. I have tons of people who are not anywhere near Mexico City. I’m not going to make them relocate. They’re amazing talents, and I would lose them if I made them go to an office. I have a lot of clients that are still in that perspective, a lot of people don’t understand just how dispersed the internet is at this point. It’s a different world now than it was.
Sara Sheehan: [00:39:33] Your example of how Starlink was everywhere that you went is extremely telling. It’s going to be really interesting to see what the next ten years brings to our talent economy.
Chris Brown: [00:39:48] It’s going to be a different world for employers and employees, contractors and everything in between. Any type of work that can be done remotely, as long as you don’t have to operate a machine. But I don’t think that’s even true. I don’t have anybody that’s operating machines remotely, all of our stuff is knowledge work. But there’s always the remote driverless cars and things, the Waymos. I don’t know, but I would imagine that there’s somebody there that’s able to pilot them, I’m pretty sure that’s a thing. I’m not saying that they’re being piloted, I think they are fully automated, I don’t know anything about them. But there’s jobs for that. There’s somebody who’s working that machinery, there’s people who are remotely working large industry machinery. I don’t know how that works very well because I’m not in that world, but that thing is just as connected as the rest of the type of work that we do. And as we get further into this, it’s going to get more and more into that kind of thing.
Sara Sheehan: [00:40:51] That’s right, there’s got to be someone that’s there in the final mile. Once it gets close to the destination, there has to be human intervention. Chris, are there any big goals or aspirations that you’re currently working on accomplishing right now?
Chris Brown: [00:41:11] As always, I’m always trying to be as flexible and free in my life and my location as I can be. I’m in Phoenix, Arizona currently. I spend a lot of time here every winter. I’ve become what people in Phoenix call a ‘snowbird’, but I’m a bit different from that. I try to escape the summers, essentially. Every year we try to find a different place to go. Part of building this particular business, and the businesses previous, has been this idea of location independence. That’s a big reason why we do completely remote work for everybody that works with us. I don’t want to be tied to an office, I don’t want to be tied to a location. I love to go explore, I love to travel. This year we have our RV and our truck and we’re going north. We’re going to go to Glacier National Park and then up through Canada and then see where we go. It’s been this dream to do an RV trip. I think after the RV trip, the dream is to do a sailboat trip. Get a sailboat, get our captain’s license, go down to the Caribbean. I’m trying to get there. It can get rocky at times just because I’m running a company and there’s a lot of people that depend on us now, so it gets a little bit harder. We haven’t spent a summer in Phoenix in the last ten years. I don’t remember the last time I was in Phoenix for the summer, so far we’ve been successful.
Sara Sheehan: [00:42:35] That’s phenomenal, and you’re doing things that are absolutely stretching you, I’m sure. You’re putting yourself out there and doing something really different, which is very exciting and courageous.
Chris Brown: [00:42:49] It’s been really fun. Yeah, it can be stressful though, it can be hard. Making sure you have the kind of internet connection that you need when you’re fully mobile, and that sort of situation, has been a learning experience. My RV has three different internet connections currently, and I’m hoping that’s sufficient.
Sara Sheehan: [00:43:09] That’s wonderful. You’ll certainly learn on this next trip what it needs to be. If you haven’t got it where it needs to be, you’ll be able to tweak it.
Chris Brown: [00:43:24] Aside from that, that’s a bit of the personal ongoing goal. But the business goal is, growth is always a thing for people. Everybody’s looking to grow, everybody’s looking to get bigger. But I think the bigger thing that we’re looking to do is to touch more lives. Because what we do is really impactful for the people that we contract with. It’s impactful for our clients, of course, and that’s primarily what we talk about here. And what I talk about with clients, of course, is how it impacts their business and how they grow and how they manage their remote teams better and how they find better talent. The most important part of this is that the people that are working with us are, like I said, they’re in little towns, they finally have the internet, they finally can do these things. These places have never been touched by this kind of work. We’re bringing incredible economic value to people that didn’t have it previously and had no way of getting it before. You look at the amount of people that want to come to the United States in order to work in the United States, because our economy is huge. The ability to be here is massively impactful to anybody’s life. But now we’re getting to the point where we can take that out to them. You can go to people and say, I can pay you in US dollars, and I can pay you significantly more than you’re making in your local economy to do work that you want to do, because it’s the thing you studied, and it’s the thing that you’re looking to do. It’s hugely impactful and it’s going to continue to be hugely impactful. The win-win there is so important to us.
Sara Sheehan: [00:45:00] Absolutely, you’re transforming the lives not only of the employees that you’re placing with businesses in the US that need support, but you’re also transforming those businesses as well and creating a bond that will not end, that will live on. It’s a wonderful thing. Chris, how do our listeners find you?
Chris Brown: [00:45:26] You can find us on our website wowremoteteams.com. You can also find me on LinkedIn, you can look for ‘Chris Brown Wow Remote Teams’. ‘Chris Brown’ is going to get you a lot of results, so ‘Chris Brown Wow Remote Teams’ will help. Those are the primary ways if you look for us there. There’s always a bunch of other social media, but I don’t actually use social media very much, so if you want to get in contact with me, go on our website.
Sara Sheehan: [00:45:51] Excellent. Thanks so much for your time today, Chris.
Chris Brown: [00:45:55] Thank you for having me, it was fantastic talking with you today.
Sara Sheehan: [00:45:58] Absolutely.
Sara Sheehan: [00:46:00] This episode dives deep into the smart move of outsourcing and how it can transform your business landscape. Here are the key takeaways. Seamless cross-cultural collaboration. Outsourcing to Latin America offers not only a time zone advantage, but also cultural synergy. This means high quality interactions during regular business hours and culturally aligned solutions to business challenges. A cost efficient strategy. By hiring from Latin America, companies can save around 30% on costs compared to US based hiring. This financial advantage opens doors to securing top talent that might otherwise be out of reach. Remote work balance. Effective communication and clear expectation setting are pivotal when working with remote teams. The emphasis is on managing communication styles, setting precise deliverables and ensuring meaningful engagement with your workforce. Thanks so much for listening today, and as always, subscribe and never miss an episode.
