Nearshore vs Offshore Talent: What Actually Works w/ Brian Samson

0:00Before we get into this episode, if you're a real estate investor listening to these conversations thinking my follow-up and deal and take is kind of a mess That's literally what I spend my time fixing. I'll mention it again later. Now, let's get into the show We tend to think it in the US that we're the only ones using AI wrong AI is being used all across the world, but especially in Latin America and I'm not just talking about, you know, Chachi BT prompts like There's thousands of new AI tools every day and there are people using it's an automation person jack I'm sure you're using Zapier and doing zaps and things like that and there's a tool called an 8n that is a lot of like AI It's a guy from Nicaragua, you know, who's built all of our NAN workflows and understands our business. What's it all together? So if you get someone under budget who's a multiplier for your business and Producing that, you know, a much greater return. I mean, this is triple bonus labor arbitrage for your business

1:05Brian Samson joins me here today You can learn what his team can help you with by heading over to plug dot tech and you spell plug with 2g So PLU GG dot tech really appreciate your time there Brian Thanks for having me. Appreciate it, Jack. Yeah, this is gonna be an interesting conversation We were chatting a little bit before we hit record and your team specializes in near shore talent I think a lot of people in the real estate world we do use a lot of virtual assistance, but it's more I guess is it offshore? Is that the proper term for it like where we're Yeah, I love to talk about some definitions and you know, maybe talk about some of the differences and nuances If that's all right with you. Yeah, let's start there. Yeah, so the terms offshore and you're sure and onshore They really have to do with where you are in the world and it's relative as well in the states we tend to We tend to think everything's about the state. So it's always in relation to the US

2:08But for us, you know, onshore is pretty obvious. You know, that means it's within the US So say you're in San Francisco. You might onshore to Utah or Kansas City or something You would offshore across an ocean to Asia Philippines India, you know countries like that and then you would near shore to Latin America But it's relative. So if you're in Australia, you would near shore to the Philippines But you would offshore, you know, say to Europe Generally in all these relationships, it's a developing place supporting a developed place So you're getting to get some of the cost arbitrage and the labor arbitrage the in my opinion You're typically looking at Asia If you're from the states if you're looking at Asia for virtual assistance and by the way like a lot of great positives

3:11There's a lot of great qualities, but I think to make that successful You're working with people that are either doing stuff when you're sleeping or They're awake at some crazy odd hour of the night, you know, to accommodate you and I don't know if that's always so healthy Right, you know for long-term sustainability You're generally getting a huge cost savings but the downside of Asia in my opinion and And you know, maybe we'll go beyond a real estate investing just customer service. Let's say You took a flight on United Airlines and lost your bag or something, you know, you need to call lost bag You know pretty pretty common thing and you get connected to the call center and the Philippines They have you know a nine-step process that they follow. Oh, yes, Mr. Jack, you know, give me your tracking number. We'll find it But let's say, you know, you it wasn't a lost bag You wanted to change your direct flight to like a multi-city, you know, and

4:17You wanted to use miles instead and I mean this this kind of gets off script right and this becomes a Kind of a disaster on the phone call and you can Kind of hear that they're having a hard time going off script and you're frustrated What can I talk to somebody in my own country that you know, understands what what I'm trying to do here So that's where I think a lot of frustration happens and companies Maybe underestimate the brand damage that they're doing so they might be saving money on the front end But they're losing money on the other side with customer frustration Because Asia often requires not everyone but it's a there is a stereotype here of very specific processes And you know as a process guy yourself Jack you know that AI is coming. There's agents coming and if you can have a specific process so Critical thinking is like the big differentiator here and if Asia is not critical thinking they're only following a process

5:20You know, it's Do you really need a VA? You should you just have an AI agent, you know, do those tasks Where I tend to like near shore Am I happen to have been an expat in Argentina? I lived in Buenos Aires My business partner was an expat in Monterey, Mexico And why I think a lot of people really are attracted to near-shoring I get near-shoring for the states is Latin America Is their English is so much more aligned to the US? They're watching the same Netflix shows that we are in English They understand colloquialisms. They understand slang. They understand our style. They Love talking about pop culture politics. Not only can they go off script They love going off script and they you know how it just kind of meanders. So if you have a Issue they're not necessarily like follow every step process people They're passionate. They share their own ideas

6:20If they disagree with you then you know, they'll let you know. It's not a hierarchical culture So it maps much more to the states and I think for what the cost is usually a little bit more expensive Not insanely more expensive a little bit more expensive than offshore Having people entirely on your timezone that can do critical thinking That are clever used to problem-solving That's worth its weight and gold and that's what what we're offering And your real estate investors and realtors that are listening in here I think it could be a game changer for your business because you don't have to Map out every single process step by step You can just find good talent and let them cook you know, let them take care of your clients This is a pretty big difference like in fact early on we were using a service And I think it was just a pool of virtual assistance that we're answering our phone calls And this was the and in the end this is the reason we we dropped it was because it was fairly expensive

7:23And we Well, you're not you're they're not learning our business. They're just kind of taking everybody It's like a real estate investor Company that kind of tailored to that But they just absolutely could not speak off script it had to be Through that form So when it's common for somebody, you know, we're trying to market to distressed homeowners. Yeah You're going to get people who want to talk a little bit more or try to understand what's going on it just I we just had this perception of lost opportunity and lost You know, even though it I suppose in in hindsight it was relatively cheap there was a lot of Hidden cost associated with losing opportunities and everything else that that goes along with it Just it just didn't work for us. Yeah, probably frustrating people that called and

8:25And you know, I've you know gone through the home buy and process quite a few times and It's been different every time every single time it's been different and Distressed home buying is a whole other, you know ball of wax and It's never the same thing. You know, there's every deals complicated and unique Um, so it puts a lot of stress if you do use a service like that puts a lot of stress on, you know, the facilitator the realtor whoever to Try to map out 200 different scenarios, you know, if they call and they say a and then they say c and then they say e how to respond It's impossible to do that, you know, you might as well be a software engineer, you know coding You know, a bunch of different Permutations and logic. Yeah, and you're you're absolutely right Everyone it's jack and it's time for a quick pause and fulfill my promise of interrupting this episode

9:25Most investors don't actually have a deal problem. They have an operations problem Leads come in follow-up inconsistent speed to lead slips and deals die quietly That's exactly what real deal crew does We act as a fractional deal operations team We build and run the systems that handle intake follow-up routing and visibility So you can focus on negotiating and closing We're not a CRM not an acquisitions team and not a marketing agency This is fit based and it's not for beginners If this episode sounds like your world, you can book a fit call at realdealcrew.com No pitch just a conversation to see if it makes sense. All right. Let's get back into the episode Where is that company going to be here even within the next year because I'm I'm actually deploying Virtual assistance now that answer phone calls. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This is becoming more and more common Yeah, yeah, I mean with all the the AI tools out there AI answering services avatars that can clone your boys

10:28You know, I I believe in being transparent with AI you know and having it in answer this is John Brian's AI assistant here to answer you know your question So people kind of know right straight away But I think people are are generally okay like this is Kind of cool at least I get to somebody's answering the phone which is often, you know One of the biggest frustrations, you know is is your phone calls being answered But then you're also not doing any significant brand damage You know by by saying the wrong thing you're just gathering information For the principle to get back to you later Yeah You know, one of the things that I you know, I've flirted with some of this through Fiverr and some of those type of services Unfortunately, you know other than the reviews that are there It's it's kind of like It's sometimes hard to trust an individual outside of as entrepreneurs We were convinced that we're the only ones who can do it right right

11:29Could you talk us through like how your team helps with the selection process and just to make sure things are a good match and and yeah Yeah, sure So it's important to remember 25% of Americans have a passport and the ones that do travel Let's say they go to Latin America. Maybe it's cancun or a place like that. So there's a whole world beyond that and A lot of what we do is education, you know, it's education for our customers and trying to align What their goals are what their objectives are and what their budget is because there's certainly not Any similarities between countries, you know in Latin America they each have their own specialties nuances complexities everything from talent pools and pockets to what they specialize in

12:29currency volatility government inflation getting hardware in and out customs there's a lot of different things that go with that so The very if your listeners one of the do a call with us and we do education calls all the time It's one of our favorite things to do in a way where ambassadors, you know for this continent That a lot of people have not traveled to but they're curious about there. What we call a near-shore curious So as you know once we kind of learn the The goals the outcomes, you know, maybe they need somebody to answer phones Maybe they need somebody to do all the operational paperwork Maybe they need somebody to coordinate with All the adjacent vendors, you know, like cleaning companies and locksmith companies and things like that Or you know somebody to facilitate, you know, maybe it's It's loan officers, you know, there's a whole little whirlpool of people in this ecosystem that use Outside people right to help them and augment them

13:32So then we'll advise and let's say for example You know, they're looking for somebody to do customer service, you know very phone-based work I may direct them to Nicaragua Nicaragua is right next to Costa Rica But it's a lot cheaper than Costa Rica and they have great English skills great English fluency They speak our style of English. There's a lot of alignment It's very little accent and you know, they're used to modern technologies, you know, things like that And it's a huge young growing population eager to work with the US But it's also kind of a volatile country, which is why it's less expensive than Costa Rica, which is A long stable safe secure country. I think Costa Rica is the longest democracy, you know in Latin America Sometimes kind of knowing that arbitrage, but if you wanted Costa Rica You just feel that in your price, you know, pay a little bit more

14:34If you wanted software talent, you know, I might direct them towards Brazil and Argentina So there's all sorts of nuances and you know different things or if you wanted to easily visit your team Maybe put them in Mexico, you know proximity. So those are that's kind of where I'd start is providing the advice and recommendations on where we put that person or team And then what our what our team is doing we have recruiters payroll compliance all the infrastructure To operate across all these different countries in Latin America and you know, we're doing all the vetting The cultural alignment So our goal is um and people are certainly welcome to do DIY just like you talked about there's five or there's upwork There's all sorts of of things Those platforms five or In my experience tends to work for I need something done and I needed done now and it's You know like a two-hour project And then upwork has existed forever

15:37But a few years ago they made I think a strategic mistake And they put all the burden on the contractor instead of the employer for fees So good people kind of outgrow upwork And then they just want to work directly with recruiting agencies that don't take from their pocket like upwork does So So anyway, you know, we do all the all the vetting and our goal is to provide a nice shortlist Of you know, say three to four candidates Um, and you know, we've done a lot of work to get there To save you time And then you've got three to four candidates, you know all with um a write-up and pay rate and all these different things And then all you have to do is do a a couple interviews select the right person we get them onboarded Pay them but most importantly we we get out of the way I think the magic happens When that person either they're offshore or near-shore or on-shore Feels like they're really part of the team of the client

16:40I think it's a mistake when there's layers in between Because stuff gets lost in translation, you know, you play a game of telephone Companies tend to do that when they're not as confident in the actual talent so they need to Like buffer it with layers of management that's more polished But if you can just find great polished talent from the get-go You don't need all these layers in the middle You and you want people working with full information feeling like they're part of that team And just to remind everybody if you like what you're hearing I'm going to direct you to Brian's website so go over to plug dot tech For more information there If you found some value in what we're chatting about so far to us a favor share this with one of your investor friends And if you're watching us on youtube Give us a like and subscribe So Brian you you mentioned you you check their budget One of the things that I think I don't know if it's if it's just real estate focused, but entrepreneurs in general where That's that's kind of a hot button

17:42Third rail you're touching there. It's one of those things that when you're talking about here is more of I should probably word it this way Have you found a difficult to get an entrepreneur to see this as an investment Instead of budgeting for it like do you spend any time on the return on this investment Yes, am I making sense? I think this is one of the best questions. I've been asked all year. I really appreciate that Jack so the um I think when If you're only looking at this as cost savings there is always going to be a race to the bottom But that that races in Asia that races played in Asia and it's just You know like neck and neck of who can be cheaper, you know is it Vietnam? Is it Bangladesh? Is it India? Is it the Philippines and you know we can all brag about The person we found for two dollars an hour, right? That's fine. I mean are you happy with them? Are they making?

18:42Are they helping you grow your business early helping you save dollars? So I love the way you frame that I think when companies look at Latin America There's three points of barba charge there, you know, there's the um, you know like the straight cost right which is going to be cheaper certainly cheaper than the states a little more expensive than Asia but cheaper than what you normally pay so you're going to win just on the chucking chuck and off the box like Does it hit my budget? It's probably going to meet your budget But two and three so Asia kind of checks that first box, but I don't know if they check boxes two and three Box two Is are you going to get are they going to be a multiplier are they going to do good for your business not just save you money Are they going to make your clients happy and we've seen this Tenfold from a lot of our customers, you know, they dip their toe

19:44They try one Latin America person before you know what they've got a team of ten wow like this person takes great care of my clients this person Um can think outside the box I can give some ambiguous problem and they I got a boss my gosh how how refreshing is that versus having to all right now I got to think about all the steps in the process for this person to follow You don't have to worry about any of that you just give them a problem right and they fix it So already I think you're at kind of double bonus arbitrage Let's try for triple We tend to think in the US that were the only ones using AI wrong AI is being used all across the world, but especially in Latin America and I'm not just talking about you know chatsy bt prompts like There's thousands of new AI tools every day and there are people using it You know as an automation person jack. I'm sure you're using zappier and doing zaps and things like that

20:47And there's a tool called n8n that you know is a lot of like AI and yeah AI activity and We use that for our own automation and guess who runs that it's a guy from Nicaragua You know who's built all of our n8n workflows and understands our business, you know puts it all together So if you get someone under budget who's a multiplier for your business and producing that you know a much greater return because they're using AI I mean, this is you know triple bonus labor arbitrage for your business Yeah, one of the things that you were talking about a multiplier could you talk about the longevity of you know you add somebody to your team You know you we compared it to upwork and and fiver and stuff like that But I would imagine one of the biggest benefits is somebody that actually is with you a bit longer than a two hour job and Understands your business. How you do things. I mean there has to be some significant lift there too

21:51Yeah, uh, we really appreciate the Loyalty the dedication the commitment that we get from our Latin America workforce I think there's something special that you see there where people are eager to do a good job They're very hungry. They're very humble and They also want stability, you know, they want a lot of the same things we do, you know They want to build a life for their family, you know, they want to save up for a house They want to take care of their kids, you know, send them off school And they know that to do that they have to stay hungry. They have to stay humble and the tenure that we see Is so much higher than the tenure that we see in the states. Um I don't maybe it's it's my generation now, but you know, we we think there's Entitlement and you know, whatever from and I'm sure every generation thought that about the one before them But but it's you know something that I see you know about people in their 20s and They're complaining, you know, how come there's no hummus in the office fridge

22:53You're not going to get these kinds of complaints, you know From from the Latin America talent, you know, they're gonna put their head down And they're gonna be passionate and tell you if they disagree with something or the business to try to help the business But otherwise you're not going to get ridiculous complaints. They're they're going to be thankful grateful and Do their best for you every day. Yeah Well, this has been a really interesting conversation around this um I'm gonna before we dive into a rapid fire questions and close out this episode I do have one more question for you. Could you kind of Paint me a picture of your ideal customer Yeah, sure There's really two that we work with a lot. There's small companies. They could be Venture funded tech startups. They could be small agencies. They could be small real estate or real estate investor firms just small offices That are you know looking for one or two game-changing

23:56type of talent and I've always had the philosophy of there's no client too small no project too small because I've seen a lot of small projects grow to become you know big engagements, you know I'm extremely confident About the impact that Latin America talent can make for for businesses So we're with a lot of small companies. So if you if you're a one or two man show That's okay. We're eager to educate you The other side is the midsize companies mid market companies That are looking more for teams and we also do this exceptionally well Find it a team leader Find in a couple other people, you know around that give you a chance to get like weighted average cost basis, you know across your team But we can we can do that too So if one person's not going to move the needle you need a whole team Whether it's software developers. It's a call center. It's back office

24:59We do this all the time And we'd be delighted to help advise your listeners On the right country and all the different nuances they should consider well This has just been a great conversation Brian. I have a feeling I we could have open up another can of worms and go down a number of rabbit holes I'd be curious even how You built this business and scaled and just the mindset and determination had to take to put this together So maybe we'll have to do that on another episode I'd be happy to One more time you can find more information at plug dot tech And if you need help with implementing your Technology you can always find me at realdealcrue.com But if you're ready Brian will jump into the rapid fire and close out this episode Sounds great What lie do entrepreneurs often tell themselves? Oh, that's a good one. I think when they're By the way, I've been guilty of this one too and when you're up at two in two in the morning

26:05Trying to figure out where to put the comma and the sentence on your website that doesn't make a difference You need to be getting a customer now worried about the grammar on your site Massive imperfect action Yes, if you could go back in time and give your younger self one piece of advice. What would it be? Become an entrepreneur way way earlier than I did I waited till my mid 30s. I wish I was in my mid 20s and Once I realized that entrepreneurship is compounding And you're learning for yourself. You're working for yourself. You're building for yourself Once I once I learned that I mean there's there's no going back for me. I just wish I started earlier Do you have a book recommendation or what are you reading right now? um A book recommendation and then what I'm reading right now book recommendation is Book by Ben Horowitz who was the founder of tech company called loud cloud But today he's the name partner of andreson Horowitz Ben Horowitz

27:05So his book is called the hard things about the hard things And what I like about this is it is a open book the most transparent Entrepreneurship founder book I've ever read Most of them kind of gloss over the hard times and you know They're so excited to tell you about their success and the lessons Then gets right into the guts of The worst parts of his his company his history is founder story and beer is all So I really appreciate that and then um, you know what I'm reading now I've been been on a on a kick of um military leadership. I'm really interested and you know how structure and decisions and things like commanders intent You know flow down And finally what single process or tool have you implemented that has had the biggest time saving impact As we talked about recently n8n. I'm very happy with that so far. Well Brian. This was great one last time It is plug dock dot tech It's plu gg.tech. That's going to be a clickable link in the show notes

28:09But really appreciate your time. This was a great conversation. I hope you'll come come back again sometime Thanks Jack really appreciate it You