Remote Work Revolution: Drive Sustainable Growth with Virtual Teams

0:07Hello and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantz and my guest today is Scott Cox. He brings a wealth of experience in the ever-evolving world of sales and marketing with a career spanning over a decade. Scott's best known for founding Social Reach in 2017, which is a marketing agency that caters to small business owners in varying industries. Today, he provides business coaching where he helps business owners grow and scale their businesses from six to seven figures by implementing the right systems and processes as well as incorporating virtual assistance.

0:43So Scott, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me, John. Really appreciate the time and happy to bring as much value as I can to you and your audience. So let's start first. I work with a lot of agency owners and there are challenges with that business model. There are challenges in every business and every industry. What made you decide that I'm going to get out of the agency world and become a coach? Oh, that's a great question. I don't get asked a lot. For me, it was as an agency provider, you're busy providing services. You're busy managing a team. And especially if you have multiple clients and if you're across different industries, it's just like marketing and agencies are a chaotic world.

1:24There's just so much going on. And to really do it right. And so I had typically been working with small business owners. So this is maybe mid to high six figures to low seven figures. And my niche was helping those mid to high six figure business owners get to seven figures and the low seven figures get to multiple sevens and scale through those processes and all the challenges that come at that level, which are many. And during working with that audience, there was a lot of need for my clients to solve challenges in their business that were coming from growth that were not directly related to the marketing.

2:07Like they were challenges caused because the marketing was working and bringing in new leads, new customers, new business. But then my customers, hey, great, but what do I like? I don't have systems. I don't have processes. I don't like I need to hire people. And so there was so many bottlenecks that these clients of mine, these small business owners had. And so I really just saw it as a massive opportunity to bring value in a different way. And honestly, I was just burned out from the agency life after doing it for a long period of time. And I just felt a more natural calling to saying, hey, I can help business owners build these teams within their own businesses, solve these problems as they grow, focus more on just that and actually help them reach more success.

2:54And not just, hey, hire an agency and get some marketing success, but then hit some other hurdles and have to stop because they aren't doing what they need to do in their business. I guess this is the point where I should say that marketing is everything. That's how I view it. I've been doing this about 30 years and obviously it's marketing's evolved. There's new platforms, new technologies. How do you help? I will say that's probably the biggest complaint I hear from business owners is like, how do I keep up with all of it? How do you keep up with the changes in marketing? And then how do you bring those to your customers to help them stay ahead?

3:29Yeah, I think it's really important to stay focused on the basics, right? There's fundamentals of marketing that will work regardless of the platform you're on, regardless of the medium that you have and everything like that. And so I think making sure that you're focused on the fundamentals first, doing the core marketing tasks and objectives that need to be done to create a good, effective message, get it in front of the right people, and then give them an opportunity to convert. And then it comes down to just your personal style and brand. And if we're specifically talking about small business owners, you as a small business owner are pretty much going to be the driver of content in your business for a good long time.

4:12So if you like recording videos, maybe you have a YouTube channel. If you like writing copy, maybe you're on LinkedIn. If you like making funny gifts, maybe you're on Instagram. Obviously, your audience is the big dictator of what platform medium you use. But I think you should also be looking at your own personal skill sets and what kind of fits into your workflow. Look at how many businesses, small businesses specifically, are on TikTok just recording what they're doing in their business. They're making stuff and they're just recording it and they're having a ton of success. An agency can't just sit here and record their process.

4:47So you have to look at those core things like what is your business? What kind of content does it lean towards? Where is your audience? What kind of medium and content do they want to absorb? And then what specifically fits to you and your style, your skill set, and how you communicate best. So when I go out and speak, I'll give people like the seven ways to do blah, blah, blah. And then inevitably somebody comes up and says, okay, that's great. But what's the one thing I need to do? Because everybody wants like the simple magic pill. But have you found that there are, I don't know, a handful of tactics that every, when it comes to sales and marketing, pretty much every business needs to understand and do?

5:27Yeah. Every business needs to get as much exposure as they affordably can. They need to stay in front of that exposed audience as consistently as possible. And they need to craft a really good message. And look, we have the Alex Formosies of the world who's absolutely brilliant in marketing and explaining terminologies and how these different concepts work. But if you have a business where you can create an irresistible offer, obviously that's going to make a massive difference. But even just having a message that is effective and effective means connects with your audience, leaves them with a good impression of how their life is going to be different after they've interacted with your business.

6:08that is the core things you need to do. Exposure, stay in front of that exposure, and then have a really good message that leaves an impact with people. I mentioned in your bio that you help place and figure out systems for working with virtual assistants. My organization's been, like a lot of companies, I think has been virtual probably for 15 years. Many of my team's been distributed. I can't tell you the last time I sat in a client's office, it's been at least 15 years. Ago. The pandemic certainly accelerated that for a lot of folks that hadn't even considered it as now the norm. Talk a little bit about how somebody might, and I know we're recording this, it's morning for you or it's morning for me.

6:55It's later in the day for you because you're in Thailand. So talk a little bit about how you see the world of virtual assistants connecting with small business and how we can go into some other words. Let's just talk about how you see that kind of connecting right now. Yeah, there's all kinds of small businesses out there. There's virtual businesses like ours, and then there's brick and mortar, there's local businesses. And look, I think at a fundamental general level across the board, utilizing remote workers, virtual assistants gives you a much larger talent pool to choose from when you're looking to hire and source talent for business.

7:32It gives you a much more affordable resource to find that talent. And look, I'll tell you a big part of success for small businesses is if they can understand that there's multiple ways to grow your business. And there's definitely an avenue and a medium where you need to have, you should have an agency come in and help your business grow. But there's also a way where you can hire your own core team to do some of your core functions and affordably scale to the point where you actually can utilize, really truly utilize what an agency can do for you, but have this core team in place and have the consistency in your business and in your marketing to, I talk a lot about this in my videos, one of the biggest challenges that small business go through, especially when they're going from six to seven figures is the cyclical effect, right?

8:33It's just the ups and downs of business, the high seasons and the low seasons. And what most business owners do is when they're busy, they tend to spend money on marketing and they market. But then when things get slow, they tend to stop spending money on marketing and stop marketing. And really that what you need to do is you need to just be consistent throughout. So that does, that means don't overload the marketing when you're busy. And that means don't cut off the marketing when you're slower, pick a strategy and a budget that will allow you to market consistently. And remote workers are a massive part of that, because if you can lower your overhead, as far as human resources, then that's just going to allow you to do so much more for so much longer.

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9:50And to top it off, each dedicated and full-time Work Better Now professional is$23.50 per month, and there are no contracts. To schedule a 15-minute consultation with a Work Better Now rep and see how they'll support your business growth goals, visit workbetternow.com. Mention the referral code DTM podcast, and you're going to get$150 off for your first three months. That's workbetternow.com. And don't forget that DTM podcast code. Yeah. I talked to a lot of business owners that you're not the first person to talk about remote workers, right? That's been something people have been talking about for 10 years.

10:31Offshore, they used to call it. I don't think they call it that so much anymore. But the idea of there are actually places you can get remote workers for much less than, say, a U.S. wage would be for various reasons. But what are some, I've also talked to a lot of people said, yeah, I tried that and I couldn't make it work. What are some of the mistakes or the hurdles that people have to overcome in order to effectively engage remote workers? So a lot of mistakes just come from employee management in general. And so I think a lot of us as small business owners, we're not trained on marketing. We're not trained on sales.

11:05We're not trained on business operations and much less are we trained on employee and people management. And so I think you just have a lot of general mistakes from lack of systems and processes. So having a way to organize your projects, your tasks, your notes, all of those communications, lack of training method process resources and then i think honestly a big part of it is just expectations i think as people we have a lot of expectations of oh i'm going to go hire this person they say they can do this thing i just trust that or expect that they can do what they say they're going to do and then we give them tasks and they fail at it for one reason or another and so then we go oh that didn't work i'm never going to do that again and so there's a lot of things that come into play and a lot of reasons why these failed, but those are some of the big things that's really honestly just lack of understanding of how to manage people.

12:00And when it comes to remote workers, specifically in VAs, these systems become so much more important and crucial because you're not in with that person. So you're not, they can't just, there's a difference when you're working with someone through the computer versus if they're in your office, There's a comfortability there where they can come talk to you. They can see your facial expressions, your body expressions, all that. And honestly, we have video chat now. So a lot of that stuff is not a moot point in my opinion, but it's just different. And so even more so with remote workers, you have to really have these systems in place because you're the, ideally you're not going to be sitting with them eight hours a day, right?

12:42Like you're a business owner, you have stuff to do. having these systems in place to manage them effectively, giving them resources to be able to reach out, get support, SOPs, standard operating procedures. How long have employees been around when businesses still don't use standard operating procedures? They don't even know what they are. It's a lot of these, again, it's just fundamentals, but we're not taught and trained small business owners on these things. And so we don't know, we don't implement them. And then we hear about, oh, you can go hire a cheap$3 an hour copywriter and just expect to be able to write copy.

13:16And it's, it can work. It does work. Just doesn't work the way the marketing people who are trying to, I don't know, sell your freelancer or something are saying it. So I don't know. I love the market. It's beautiful, but it's also still like one of the last wild west of the world. Anything almost goes in marketing. Yeah. Yeah. That's due in a large part to a lot of the fact that a lot of business owners don't really understand marketing. A lot of marketers don't really understand marketing. And you get a lot of this, oh, I just have to take what they say. Talk to a little bit. Do you actually place, do you like screen and place and train virtual assistants for your clients or do you just show them how to do it?

13:58Yeah. So I do both. I've got programs from where I can build out. So I have an audit that I do. That's the first interaction. One of the first interactions with me besides the one-on-one consultation. I do an audit where I'll come work with business owners and we go through a checklist and highlight all of their, Hey, these are where all your gaps, missed opportunities are. Here's what you can do to fix it. And then, yeah, one of my services, again, besides one-on-one consulting or doing like a preset program of, Hey, let's take you, you need to hire a salesperson. Let's take you through that process?

14:28Where are the SOPs, the job description, all that. But yeah, like I actually am able to work with my clients on saying, Hey, I need a marketing team. I need a sales team. Great. I can actually come in. I can help you source, vet, interview, and then train and get your own internal team set up for that. Let's talk a little bit about technology and automation is great. I think a lot of people lean on it maybe too much. You've seen some of these AI chat bots now that are more frustrating than helpful. So how do you balance the fact that there is a lot of automation that can create some efficiencies, but then you lose the human touch, which is, I think probably people are craving more than ever.

15:09How do you create that balance? The rule of automate everything you can that isn't human interaction. And then when you have human interaction, make that human to human as much as possible. Obviously, we're going to automate things that are like emails or maybe text messages or marketing campaigns. But if you're going to have a chat system, if you have the volume, if it makes sense for your business, having a live person respond to that, it's not convenient, but it makes a difference. And I think something, especially in a country like the US or in a lot of other Western countries, I think what small business owners have lost sight of is the fact that as small business owners, the way we can compete with large corporations is by offering that really amazing personalized service.

16:00And that's really the only way we can't compete on costs. We can't compete on fulfillment. We can't compete on refunds and warranties and exchanges and all of that. The big corporations are always going to beat us out on that. Those things that where small business owners can win is that human to human. Look, we have systems and processes, but we're not a large corporation where like you have a unique situation and look, we just have a system and a process. So that's it. You just have to, we are small business owners. We can make exceptions. We can really work with people and give that really specific touch.

16:36And that's been my model when it comes to what should you automate and what should you leave human to human? And I just say on a note of tech and AI, I think one of the most undervalued or underutilized pairings right now is using AI with remote workers. So a lot of people talk about remote workers, a lot of people talking about AI, but maybe where three years ago, I had to pay a remote worker copywriter 10 to$15 an hour to get a decent English speaking or English writing copywriter. Now maybe I can hire a three to five. They're not as proficient, but they can use something like ChatGPT, Grammarly, Hemingway, and they can actually produce really quality copy.

17:19And again, I'm lowering my overhead and using the software to, even if you have a really quality remote worker, and let's say you're paying them a little bit more than the average, you're going to enhance the quality of work they do, the speed of the work that they can do and the creative output. And when it comes to tech, a big focus of mine too is saying, hey, let's pair the AI and these enhancing tools, which I think is a really cool perspective to think about them with your team and just make your team more productive, more creative. Awesome. Scott, where, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast.

17:55Where would you want people to connect with you or find out more about your work? Yeah, you can find me on pretty much any of the social media channels, mainly Instagram, Facebook. I have my YouTube channel, Nomad Talk and Zero Mad Talk and my website, ST Co. You can go there and find out about my consulting and my programs for VA sales and marketing. And you can send me an email or shoot me a friend request on Facebook or Instagram and we can chat. Awesome. Again, I appreciate you stopping by. Hopefully we'll run into you one of these days out there on the road. We'll be right back.