253. How to Grow a CPG Brand Using VAs and Global Talent with Morning Made

0:01unknown host:Welcome to Startup to Scale, a podcast by FoodBevy. I'm your host, Jordan Buckner. Join me as I talk to aspiring entrepreneurs, seasoned industry experts, and everyone in between as we unlock the keys to growing from startup to scale.

0:18unknown host:One of the biggest bottlenecks I see for CPG founders isn't demand, it's capacity. There's always way more to do than to time, budget, or headcount allows. So the day's guests figure out an alternative path early on. Luke Anthony's scale Morning Made by working with offshore VA-style talent to grow his business. Morning Made is a line of matcha, chai, and other beverages designed to start your morning. She first came about them when you launched your brand redesign and expansion and just love the packaging and everything that you do. So, you know, today I really want to talk through hiring, what he hired out first, what worked, what doesn't when you're using offshore talent, really share those real world lessons.

0:59unknown host:Luke, welcome to the show. Thanks, Jordan. Thanks for having me on. So I'm super excited. Through this, you turn your lessons into Plus 40 as well, which is a company that helps to source talent and offshore talent for other CPD brands from your experience. So I really want to talk through what lessons you learn in the Morning May days so that you can, and you're still running that company as well, so that you can understand how you're helping other companies as well. Take me back a little bit to Morning May's early days. What problems were starting to stack up that made you realize you couldn't do everything yourself anymore?

1:33Luke Anthony:Yeah, I think it's an interesting place taking it back to those early days. And I think it's probably consistent now that there's lots of problems at all times. And that doesn't change. The problems just sort of evolve into newer problems, which is a sign you're on the right track if you're getting the opportunity to solve new problems. But I think early days still is sort of similar now in terms of it was very scrappy. It was very much founder and a couple of people owning pretty much every part of the business and wearing multiple hats, which again is still happening now. But there were definitely times where things started to break as we started to expand.

2:06Luke Anthony:I think we realized that there were definitely lots of sort of lower leverage tasks, very monotonous tasks, tasks that were very repeatable that we were doing on a daily basis, which gave opportunity to sort of assess whether that was something that could be outsourced, delegated or automated and then put us through the process of figuring out what works best there.

2:26unknown host:Now, when you started MorningMate, were you the only founder? Do you have a co-founder or a group of kind of co-founders or team?

2:32Luke Anthony:Yeah. Yeah, so Brad Matthews actually is the founder of Morning Mate. And I guess I met Brad in New Zealand when I was working for another company. And then I went out and started my own agency called Tag Projects, which is essentially taking Australia and New Zealand brands into the US, into retail in particular. So we started working with Brad very, very closely and built a great relationship and we were able to launch a small sort of Kiwi brand that had some traction into Walmart, Target, Sprouts, Raley's, a whole range of sort of big retailers in the US that really sort of kickstarted that journey and did the same across Australia and New Zealand with sort of the major supermarkets and mass retailers here too.

3:10Luke Anthony:So about a year ago, which was two years into sort of that consulting arrangement, I came on full time to help run the business. So that's sort of been the journey with Morning Maid. So I've been very fortunate. It's a unique scenario where I've been there from very, very early on, but only in a full-time sort of capacity from the last sort of year.

3:27unknown host:And that's always really cool because I bet from his perspective as well, right? Like, obviously, you need help in growing a business, but you have to try to figure out, do I hire someone like a co-founder level? Do I hire an employee? Like, usually in the early days, you don't have a ton of money to just, like, pay high salaries for people. So I see a lot of people who are like, I need basically like very cheap labor. So at the earliest stages, my equity feels relatively inexpensive. And so like, let me bring on the co-founder. But then you can't just fire a co-founder because they're not just an employee.

3:58unknown host:They have ownership in the company. So it creates all these weird dynamics. And that financial and growth pressure is really tough for a lot of companies. So I think it's one really great that you got a chance to work with him together early on before you kind of came on as that full time role, which is really cool. So even when you came on, then at what point did you realize that the team needed like more help to do things? And what were some of those first tasks that you hired out for a virtual assistant or offshore talent?

4:28Luke Anthony:And yeah, so definitely. So I think in terms of that, those early days, even when I was consulting and talking back to sort of providing that value, I guess, to provide that opportunity for what came next was I was doing a lot of the work actually just for free because I built a good relationship with Brad and then also saw the opportunity, I guess, in terms of what the brand and the product and sort of the white space was. So I was very fortunate that I came into a space where I was helping with retail, but definitely solving a lot of operational challenges as well, which allowed me to sort of come probably more onto the business from an agency perspective than any other agency would in terms of actually making sort of key operational decisions like hiring.

5:07Luke Anthony:So the first sort of, I guess, area that we identified was customer service, which we outsourced to the Philippines to a lovely gentleman named Ivan, who came on to run our customer service arm. And I think the customer service is quite interesting. I think it's a common one to start with in terms of offshoring because usually it's something that a founder does as sort of a last minute type thing. You know, I speak to a lot of founders, especially in the earlier days when the amount of sort of tickets or inquiries is quite low. So it's something that, you know, they're doing on the couch after dinner at end of night, getting out the 10, 15, 20 different inquiries that are there.

5:44Luke Anthony:But I think as the business grows, that starts to snowball and becomes a big impact on sort of their time and where they should be spending, you know, their own resource. So that was something that we identified early and brought in someone that was offshore and worked really, really well.

5:58unknown host:How did you go about finding Ivan and actually starting to work with him?

6:03Luke Anthony:So we at the time were with a third-party logistics company and they recommended an agency similar to Plus 40 that essentially placed offshore talent. So we built a good relationship with this guy and we went through the process of or their recruitment process, which we learned a lot about in terms of what works and what doesn't. But essentially this person set up interviews with a couple of different candidates that we then had very, very quick interviews. And back then, I mean, we didn't have a lot of structure in terms of our recruiting process. we didn't really know what good looked like. So we had a couple of really loose conversations and pretty much just said yes to the one that felt right.

6:42unknown host:And then from that, what did you learn in terms of what worked well and what worked poorly from that process? Because I hear from a lot of founders who say, how do I know they're going to represent me and my brand well and communicate with customers so it doesn't feel like I am just putting off this to customer service to someone else outside of, you know, that's offshore where you sometimes you'll call a large national company. You feel like, oh, they're just like, you know, sending my information out to someone else. You can't really solve my problems. I feel like there's definitely a bias there that people have.

7:16unknown host:So how do you help to overcome that?

7:18Luke Anthony:Yeah. And I think customer service is a really unique one where the tone of voice is really, really crucial in terms of how that person is responding to customers. and it changes on platform as well. So how that person may respond on email might be slightly different for the brand in terms of how they maybe respond through to, you know, Instagram DMs or even comments as well. So in terms of that particular example, I think the onboarding is a really, really crucial process of upskilling this person in how does the brand look, feel, how does it, you know, how does it sound? How should we respond?

7:53Luke Anthony:Are we, you know, is there brands that are more sort of cheeky in terms of the way that they respond and fun. And then there's other brands that are more clinical and scientific. So it's much more important to be more polished. So I think having sort of some kind of brand guidelines that sort of dictate how this person should respond, whether they're offshore, onshore, in your team, remote, I think having those brand guidelines for a customer service type role or a customer facing roles is really, really important.

8:18unknown host:Now, after working with that agency and like that person and we're sort of working out well. What other roles did you start hiring for using Offshore Talent?

8:28Luke Anthony:So we took the same lens, really, and we thought, what else is, because that worked well, it's okay, what else in the business is, are we spending time on on a daily basis that is taking away our energy and time from things that truly shift the needle? So the next thing that was sort of logical was a sort of sales operations role. So, you know, entering orders, working with a 3PL on tracking shipments, handling retail and B2B customer inquiries, those types of things. So we brought on a sales and operations role, which essentially now does a lot of data entry, does a lot of follow-ups, does a lot of tracking orders, creating orders, working with in between our sales, operations, and finance team.

9:06Luke Anthony:And that's given a lot of leverage to then say our salesperson. So instead of keying in orders or following up tracking, shipping tracking, he can actually spend time actually speaking with customers and getting the value out of those conversations versus, you know, doing the sort of monotonous day-to-day tasks.

9:22unknown host:And then for someone like that, right, did you find someone that had food and beverage experience or that you have to teach them about the industry, how it worked, the language to use?

9:33Luke Anthony:Yeah, it's a really good question. And we didn't, the agency we went through probably didn't provide the best sort of overview in terms of the experience this person had had. But at the time, to be honest, and which is probably similar with a lot of early on sort of startups. I mean, you realize sort of there's a fire and you just try and put it out. And I think in hiring, that's, you know, we need someone, let's put someone in the seat. And I think that's where sort of I mentioned before, we've learned a lot about hiring, whether offshore or onshore, in the last 18 months around sort of think further ahead in the future of how does this employee truly impact and contribute to where we want to go?

10:06Luke Anthony:And what does even the growth pathway for this employee look like and how does this work in a cohesive way with our onshore team, with our remote employees, with our offshore team. And we've definitely learned a lot there. But I mean, if I speak honestly and transparently about say that particular hire, it was very much get someone in the seat and we'll provide the learning and the upskilling to where they are today. But even there's a lot of learnings around that. We didn't have onboarding docs. There was no SOPs written out. There was no ways of working. So there was a lot of information where, and to the credit of of this person has had to pick up on the fly and extract information, which is very common within startups.

10:42Luke Anthony:A lot of information lives within people's heads. So spending time, you know, on calls with people following, you know, what they do. But I think there's a lot of really cool tools these days, like Loom as an example, where you can really interact well with remote teams, where you can just explain your process and thinking and allow someone to follow that at a later date, which is really, really helpful.

11:02unknown host:I actually love Loom as a tool because then it allows that person to go back at their own speed as well to rewatch it again. But then, you know, a week, two weeks, three weeks later, they can actually go back to that video. So they don't have to ask you over and over again. You just have to ensure that once.

11:18Luke Anthony:Yeah, we use Loom a lot in our business, even for, you know, our team that sit next to each other every day. I think Loom can replace a lot of meetings and a lot of sort of conversations that impact other people's times. And like you said, allows someone to come back to it at a later date and watch it at two, three, four times speed, which is very, very helpful.

11:37unknown host:The approximate number of offshore talent that MorningMate is working with at any given time?

11:42Luke Anthony:So we're working with five, five full-time employees offshore at the moment. And we've got 12 full-time employees that are based across Australia and New Zealand. Roughly a third of our business at the moment is offshore and it'll continue to grow. I think where we found a lot of value is there's different sort of need states and reasons for having people onshore or offshore or remote. There's a lot of value to having an in-person team in terms of speed and the agility that you can get from being able to communicate on the fly. And I think we've learned that offshore employees, the remote or, you know, based in places like the Philippines can really supercharge and power our key sort of team, if that makes sense.

12:24Luke Anthony:Having, you know, the sales manager that sits next to me every day in terms of the speed that we can get from communicating, but then having someone offshore that can supercharge what he does that allow him to really buy back his time so he can focus on what matters and again, what really, you know, truly shifts the needle.

12:39unknown host:Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. Have you found any tasks or functions that surprise you that work better with offshore teams?

12:47Luke Anthony:Yeah, definitely. And I think it's been a bit of a journey in terms of unraveling what this offshore sort of market even looks like and understanding, you know, what really is the capabilities of say, you know, people that are based in the Philippines as an example. So yeah, it's been an interesting journey. I think what I've learned is like any other market all around the world, there is a whole scale to skill sets and experience. And I think sometimes offshore is very much branded as low level monotonous tasks like data entry is an example that or customer service that should be offshore. But as an example, with Plus40, we've hired a senior supply chain manager that's come into a FMCG brand just recently who's coming in and actually creating the systems and the processes behind their supply chain, which is something that, and they've had, you know, 10 to 15 years experience across a whole range of CPG brands.

13:39Luke Anthony:So it's a different level of insight into what they can bring and how they can sort of act within a brand, which I think is really, really cool and really unique. And I think it's worth exploring for a lot of brands. And that's where Plus40 as a service is really, really cool because you can go down the path of, you know, you've got a thought of a role or a person and you can get, you know, some interviews with some people. You can even get some trial projects back and you can get to the point where you haven't paid a cent, but really evaluate what this could look like for your business, which is, which is really, really cool.

14:07Luke Anthony:But we're seeing a whole range of roles, whether it's video editors, marketing managers, influencer outreach specialists, you know, operations, supply chain, logistics, there's, there's a whole range of, of roles that can be, can be outsourced. Yeah.

14:21unknown host:I think that's the bias that I'm working to overcome as well, because I've worked with, and work with talent that lives around the world on my team as well. And I say that just like any market, there's people who are entry level who have, you know, relatively little experience. There's people who have experience in other industries, but maybe not yours. And then there's subject matter experts who have actually worked in food and beverage industry and have worked with other companies and have more specialized skills. They just happen to live in other parts around the world because those industries also exist in other parts of the world as well, which is really exciting.

14:51unknown host:I'm kind of curious, like how did this model as you've started working with this, kind of move and evolve around the work that you were doing at Morning Made and grow into Plus 40?

15:00Luke Anthony:Yeah, so I guess Plus 40 was really born out of the understanding that no one was building a company around offshoring for CPG. I think so offshoring and these types of agencies that place talent from markets like the Philippines is definitely not new. And we talk to that quite often. And I think it's a good thing it's not new because that means there's a lot of experienced people that have worked with global brands for the last 10 years, which is amazing and which is the talent pool that we try to attract and then place within amazing CPG businesses. But where we found the interesting point of view from a front end is that there's no agencies actually talking to CPG specifically.

15:41Luke Anthony:And I think CPG as an industry is very sort of nuanced in terms of the talent that it requires to grow and scale. And an example of that is, we've placed a sales ops type role recently that has great understanding of UNFI and KE, whereas a typical sort of VA, as you would say, from another agency might have worked with software companies for the last 10 years. So what we're trying to do is build a very robust talent pool around roles that really, truly impact CPG brands and help them scale. And then where we can add value as Plus 40 is how do we provide training and sort of structure and processes for these talent pools to thrive within a growing CPG business.

16:22Luke Anthony:So that's where sort of our unique positioning is. There's no one else on the market that's doing that currently. So it's something we're very excited about. And I think Connor and I who started Plus 40 are very much deeply sort of rooted in CPG in terms of our experience, but also just our love for this game and seeing, you know, the global stage is something that we're very passionate about so being able to unlock some talent for them is very very very cool.