Hassle-Free Growth: Unleashing the Power of International Talent with Andrew Segal

0:01Light that, Sparkfire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire. Brought to you by the HubSpot. podcast network, the audio destination for business professionals with great shows like Business Made Simple. Today, we'll be breaking down hassle-free growth, unleashing the power of international talent. To drop these value bombs, I brought Andrew Siegel into EO Fire Studios. Andrew is the founder of Boxer Property, 15 million square feet in commercial real estate, and co-founder of Relay Human Cloud, a staff hosting company operating in India, Honduras, and Mexico. And today, Foundation, we'll be talking about work and home culture, its effect on consumer behavior.

0:42We'll talk about trends in the office space, as well as trends in work culture. We'll talk about integrating overseas talent into American businesses and so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Andrew and our sponsors. Business Made Simple, hosted by Donald Miller, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Business Made Simple takes the mystery out of growing your business, join my friend, Donna Miller, each week as he shares value bombs on topics like the secret to making better marketing decisions. Listen to Business Made Simple wherever you get your podcasts.

1:19Ever thought of giving a TEDx talk? It's one of the most powerful ways to share your message with the world and four-time TEDx speaker, Taylor Conroy from Thought Leader can help you get there. Visit thought-leader.com slash fire to join Taylor's free training where he teaches you how to land a TEDx talk and spread your message to millions. Andrew, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. I think that core to success is allocation of focus. So I know that everyone thinks if I could just raise more money or if I could just work harder, I'll be successful.

2:02But to me, it's how you decide what you focus on that's the difference between success and much greater success. Well, Fire Nation, we're talking about hassle-free growth, unleashing the power of international talent, which definitely could lead to greater success for you. And I want to start, Andrew, by talking about the work-from-home culture and its effects on consumer behavior? I think that the one thing that I could say that was positive about work from home is it allowed people to spend time doing anything else besides working from home. So it was very good for the consumer products. And the dogs and the cats probably liked it a lot in the beginning, probably got tired of having people in their house all day.

2:50But I think it's just a toxic, horrible thing that we're doing. And it's like a disease that gets worse and worse because you don't onboard new people. You don't onboard culture in a company. And there's no real way to be as creative as when you're together. Now, I will say, and it's pretty interesting. I'm reading this great book by Walter Isaacson all about Elon Musk. And not only is he so big on working together, he wants everybody at the different parts of the organizations to all be together under the same roof, preferably in the same room, so they can interact and engage with each other.

3:39Because he thinks that's where the real juice, the real fire begins. So with that being said, what are you currently seeing, Andrew, as trends in both the office space and work culture? Let's go over those trends. A couple of things is that we're seeing a return to work. If you have a group that's a really cohesive team and they work from home, the first day, nothing really happens. And the next week, you're still fine, but you find yourself several years in where people have come and gone, and you've just lost the cohesion. So I think that the companies that are going to survive and going to thrive are going to come back together.

4:28Now, what's interesting is I totally disagree with Musk, and I don't think that he really practices everyone literally in the same place. I think that you have to be with a group of people. It could be five people, it could be 10 people, it could be 100 people. So everyone doesn't have to be in exactly the same place, but they have to be around peers. Now, you've seen it done well, Andrew, and you've also seen it done poorly. So let's talk about the best ways to integrate overseas talent, specifically into American businesses. So the first thing that is very important is that the talent is together.

5:10So in other words, overseas doesn't mean that they're working from home or working from a restaurant or doing a gig is that they come into a structured office where there's training, where there's collaboration, where there's mutual support. That has been the magic of working. So everyone doesn't have to be in the same building. They don't have to be in the same time zone. They don't have to be in the same country, but they have to be with a group. And that's led to great success, great success for us. And I'm now seeing the customers of Relay go through this. And this is the global workforce company.

5:56There's about 80 of them now, is that they have really cohesive teams and the teams identify with the company and the culture that they're reporting to. Now, what are you seeing the worst ways people are integrating talent into American businesses? There is nothing worse than having somebody start with a company remote. And it's best, you know, to have them in an office. But their problem is when everyone's not in the office together, you can't find a mentor. You can't find somebody who cares about your career. And that's one of the most important things that anyone can achieve when they're starting out is just find one person who cares about you.

6:45It's so critical. And you're not going to find them on Zoom, as far as I can tell. Fire Nation, hassle-free growth, Unleashing the Power of International Talent. What does that sentence mean to you, Andrew? Why do you think that's a good title for this episode? What it means is thinking more broadly about where work is happening, kind of the idea of moving work through space and through time. So for example, we had a very hard time when I was starting my career in Houston, Texas and Dallas, keeping good people as we would bring people on, we would train them, we would nurture them, we would give them a lot of attention, and they would get hired away and go somewhere else.

7:34So we realized we had to think more broadly and with systems and with kind of dedication to building offices where people could be together overseas. We originally went to India and hired 10 people in the accounting department. That's now grown to 300 people. I would say that it used to be an advantage and now it's a necessity, is that we're not going to be able to be competitive with a wholly domestic workforce in most industries. In Fire Nation, we're going to dive deeper into that concept as soon as we get back from thanking our sponsors. Are you ready to close 2023 out strong by surpassing your revenue targets?

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11:39But I'd like you to share the actual pain points of domestic hiring. First of all, depending on what state you're in, in the United States, and certainly in Canada, is hiring people is a minefield. It's a minefield of litigation. It's a minefield of expectations, and it's a minefield of continuity. So it doesn't mean that you shouldn't have people working in the US, but we need to kind of think about the shape of work. Like what is it that people are doing that has to be done at a certain site? So it could be a security guard can't be a security guard from home or an electrician can't fix your wiring from a vacation spot.

12:30but there are many other things and there are many other aspects of the work that people do that doesn't have to be done in a certain place and normally when i when i talk about the value of a global workforce it starts with saving money and and and that's understandable as we all want to save money we want to be able to do things for less expensively than our than our competition But what happens, which is really interesting, is that you realize I can go to a 24-hour system. I joke that the sun never sets on my accounting department, is that businesses don't shut off at 5 o 'clock. If you're running a hotel or a restaurant or transportation or an airline, everything doesn't grind to a halt at 5 o 'clock.

13:24So you can move things through different time zones. You could move things through different languages and keep a kind of a 24-7 system. You can also work faster. You know, if we think about a typical person who works in a cubicle is in that seat about 22 % of the available hours in a year. So 22%, 22 % of the time they're in that seat, the rest of the time, vast majority of the time, it's vacant. What if when they stood up at 5 o 'clock and went home, someone else sat down in that same seat and started working? And then when that person left, someone else took the seat and kept working. You would do things three times as fast.

14:13And that's basically what we're doing with the global workforce. Now, you talked about some of the pain points of domestic hiring. Are there any pros to domestic hiring? Oh, sure. I love the fact that people are in touch with the customers. They're close to what people are doing. They're very aware of trends. And this is really valuable. But all of the things that they do don't have to be done here. The other thing about having a domestic group who is overseeing a global workforce is that people who normally wouldn't have an opportunity to be a leader, to have people report to them, can do that.

15:08And that's very profound in terms of building leaders in our country. Now, you were just going through this method of the 22 % and what about this idea of when the person stands up at the end of the day, we can have somebody sit down. And this method I think you've termed following the sun and that allows businesses to get more work done on any given day. So again, you did go into that practice, but let's dive a little bit deeper. What exactly is the opportunity that sits with that following the sun methodology? There's a couple of things. One of them is just efficiency, is that you can keep processing things, whether you're reconciling bank accounts or you're responding to customers or you're doing quality control.

15:59you just you could do it all night long in a way that you just can't do it with a domestic workforce so a good example is leasing office space so typically leasing agents work during business hours and if you ask them about the weekends and evenings they'll tell you nobody leases office space on the weekends like that's ridiculous well the reason it turned out that no one leases office space on the weekends is there was no one to lease from. So using a global workforce, we kept our leasing agents on staff and, and, you know, on, on, on the clock, 24 hours a day, seven days a week to lease commercial office space.

16:44And it's been amazing. You cannot believe how many people, you know, are busy during the day. And on the weekends, it could be Sunday morning, whatever, they're searching for office space. And all of a sudden, there's someone to talk to, there's someone who can book an appointment, there's someone who could send them a lease, or someone who could talk about availability and price. It's what we expect in all the other places in our lives. Like we Amazon doesn't close at five o 'clock, it never closes. You know, Spotify, you can download a song anytime you want. Netflix, you know they don't have business hours and and we need to move more of our business into that customer-centric philosophy and that means a 24-hour cycle and and really the only way to do that you're not going to be able to get people to stay up all night waiting for leasing calls uh you know on saturday night is is the global the global workforce now you're the co-founder of Relay Human Cloud, which is a staff hosting company operating in India, Honduras, and Mexico.

17:54Share the details of how Relay International staff hosting actually works. We made it stupid simple. We said, let's look at the model of a cloud server. So in other words, when you want to store your data, whether it's I'm backing up my iPhone or I'm running a business on the cloud. You just go in, sign up, and now all of a sudden you have server potential. You don't build a building, you don't order equipment, you don't request licenses. It's just very easy. You pay one price domestically to Google or Amazon, and that's it. So what we did is we said, wouldn't it be great if human resources were like that, where we could go into these other countries, we hire people, we spend several months with them, this is very important, is training them how to engage in international business, how to use certain software systems, you know, all sorts of great things that we wouldn't have the luxury of doing domestically.

19:05And then they become a bench. And just like if you think about business like a football team is you have a certain amount of people on the field and then you have a certain amount of people standing on the sideline. And every once in a while, the coach turns around and says, you come in. And less than one minute later, they're in the game. Well, we did that with human beings, with people who have long-term interest in working for Western companies. And they're literally one minute away from an assignment at any time. And it's dealt with so that we deal with all of the compliance. We're the employer.

19:52We're dealing with the benefits and the office space and the computer and the network and the cricket team, whatever is appropriate for the country. And the client just pays one amount to Dallas, Texas. It's a domestic bill. It's not an employee. You don't have to go through your HR department. and it's instant. So Andrew, you've given us a lot of information all around the concept of hassle-free growth, unleashing the power of international talent. What is the one key takeaway that you really want to make sure our listeners get from our conversation today? You can scale quickly and efficiently if you can bring on team members the minute that you need them.

20:42and we've gone through COVID, we've learned about remote work. Now let's make it pay. If Fire Nation wanted to connect with you, your company, what is your call to action for us? So we have a website called RelayHumanCloud.com. It's like a relay race. We're handing the baton around the world. And when you go on that website, you can see the bench. You can actually watch video interviews of each person. You can check their resume. You can see how we've defined hundreds of job descriptions in very minute detail. RelayHumanCloud.com makes it very easy. It looks like a shopping site. Fire Nation, you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with.

21:36and you've been hanging out with AS and JLD today, so keep up that heat. And for links to everything we talked about, visit eofire.com. Just type Andrew in the search bar. The show notes page will pop right up. And Andrew, I want to say thank you, brother, for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation. For that, we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side. Thank you very much. Hey, Fire Nation, a huge thank you to our sponsors and Andrew for sponsoring today's episode and Fire Nation. Successful entrepreneurs accomplish big goals. That is why I created the Freedom Journal to guide you in accomplishing your number one goal in 100 days.

22:15And we're talking step by step. Visit thefreedomjournal.com. And I'll catch you there or on the flip side. Business Made Simple, hosted by Donald Miller, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Business Made Simple takes the mystery out of growing your business, join my friend, Donna Miller, each week as he shares value bombs on topics like the secret to making better marketing decisions. Listen to Business Made Simple wherever you get your podcasts. Ever thought of giving a TEDx talk? It's one of the most powerful ways to share your message with the world and four-time TEDx speaker, Taylor Conroy from Thought Leader can help you get there.

22:56Visit thought-leader.com slash fire to join Taylor's free training where he teaches you how to land a TEDx talk and spread your message to millions.