Hiring Is a Business Skill | Chris Brown

PROFITABLE TALKS...

In this episode of The Profitable Creative, host Christian Brim interviews Chris Brown, founder of Wow Remote Teams, discussing his entrepreneurial journey, the staffing and recruiting landscape, and the challenges small businesses face in hiring. Chris shares insights on the consultative sales approach, the importance of clear communication, and the opportunities available in the global talent market, particularly in Latin America.

PROFITABLE TAKEAWAYS...

• Chris Brown has been an entrepreneur for over 20 years.
• Wow Remote Teams specializes in staffing for US companies with talent from Latin America.
• The business model focuses on contract staffing and direct placement.
• Small businesses often struggle with hiring due to infrequent needs.
• Clear communication is essential in the recruitment process.
• Onboarding and offboarding processes are critical for employee retention.
• Consultative sales is an effective approach to understanding client needs.
• The global talent market offers opportunities for businesses to find skilled workers.
• Latin America has a wealth of talent available for remote work.
• Processes in recruitment can be complex but are necessary for success.

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Chapters

• 36:37 [Ad] Make your podcast work for your business - Listen to Podcasting Amplified
• 37:21 (Cont.) Hiring Is a Business Skill | Chris Brown

Transcript

Christian Brim (00:01.436)
Welcome to another episode of The Profitable Creative, the only place on the interwebs where you will learn how to turn your passion into profit. I am your host, Christian Brim. Special shout out to our one listener in Temple, Texas. I will now sing George Strait. All my exes live in Texas. There's a line about Temple, Texas in there. never mind. Sorry. Thank you for listening.

Joining me today, Chris Brown of Wow Remote Teams. Welcome to the show, Chris.

Chris Brown (00:33.816)
Hey, Christian, thanks for having me on.

Christian Brim (00:36.132)
Absolutely. Now you have to follow that that singing with a song of your own choice. Ready go.

Chris Brown (00:43.872)
Ooh, I don't know if I can do that. I'm not much of a singer. Nothing comes to mind for Texas.

Christian Brim (00:47.288)
And well, clearly neither am I. Yeah, now that have you heard the George Strait song? All my exes live in Texas. OK, yes.

Chris Brown (00:55.7)
Yes, yeah. That's the extent of the song that I know, What comes after that? That's why I live in Tennessee, something like that? Yeah.

Christian Brim (01:00.958)
I can't. Well, that is correct. And the line I don't remember somebody in temples got the law looking for me, but I don't remember the girl's name. Anyway, I'm going to stop while I'm ahead or while I'm behind. So Chris, give us your brief CV, your experience. I'm in one of those moods today. know, CV.

Chris Brown (01:15.63)
Thanks

Christian Brim (01:30.94)
I remember the first time I had an attorney ask me for my CV back when I was playing and I mean playing isn't pretending to be a professional witness and I'm like, yeah, sure. I'll get that to you. And I'm like, I don't know what the hell a CV is. I'd never heard that term anyway. So shoot Chris.

Chris Brown (01:46.21)
You

Chris Brown (01:51.979)
Yeah, so I started in tech. I've been doing software for 20 something years now and been an entrepreneur for most of that time. I've had a couple of software jobs being a code monkey as it were, but it never really worked out for me. I didn't like the vibe, I guess is what they would call it now.

Christian Brim (02:05.029)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (02:15.218)
Yes.

Chris Brown (02:15.854)
Yeah, so ended up in entrepreneurship, started a lot of different businesses. I've been in real estate and continue in real estate, of course, because it just becomes part of life. Started a bunch of e-commerce companies, digital agencies doing marketing, different kind of aspects there. And then found my way into what is now staffing and recruiting. So it's a fully remote agency, fully digital. We staff people from Latin America.

Christian Brim (02:37.865)
Mmm.

Chris Brown (02:43.864)
for US companies. So we look for highly skilled, talented individuals who...

can work fully remote because everything we do is completely remote. We don't have an office space. We don't have a physical location. You know, we don't, this is just a completely just mobile kind of nomadic model of business in life that I've worked towards over the last 20 some odd years. And yeah, I think it's worked out. It's worked out pretty well. We travel quite a bit. We travel, I'm in Phoenix, so it's beautiful here right now. And then it's absolutely awful for four months out of the year.

we leave and go anywhere else. Sometimes that works out nicely. Sometimes it doesn't work out so great. But you know, we can work from the road. we travel, we spent this last summer, we went from here up to Bozeman, Montana in our RV, know, boondocking, camping the whole way up. And then we found a place to stay on somebody's ranch on a month to month kind of setup and, you know, just constant the nomadic sort of just freedom of movement, freedom of, you know.

Christian Brim (03:19.57)
Yes.

Christian Brim (03:33.406)
Mmm.

Chris Brown (03:48.026)
freedom, essentially. And yeah, so that's all to say that this is a this is a journey of entrepreneurship. And it's a journey of, you know, trying to find the way of how do you how do you manage something like how do you be successful in finding the way to your goals when they're a little bit outside of the norm?

Christian Brim (03:49.906)
Yes.

Christian Brim (04:09.884)
Yeah, I think like what I take from what you said, I really resonate with that. You have created a business to serve your non-business goals. know, your, your obviously financial freedom, that's everybody's, but then the ability to, to, travel and be wherever you want. I, I, I think.

Too many entrepreneurs, creative or otherwise, don't have much intentionality around building the business. It just kind of becomes the tail that wags the dog and then all of a sudden you're beholden to the business rather than the business being beholden to you. Okay, so on WoW Remote Teams, is there a...

type of staffing that you specialize in.

Chris Brown (05:14.36)
I mean, again, it's anything that can be done remote. So the core of the business is a recruiting team. So really a bespoke recruiting firm at the core of the business and the revenue model has been built around contract staffing and direct placement as well because it works.

But in that model, it's become really just anything that needs a particular recruitment model. So there's a lot of agencies that do like virtual assistance and they have like a queue of people that they train in Excel and Monday or HubSpot or whatever.

And then they place those people directly with you. And it's sort of a pipeline sort of setup. And we went a different direction, somewhat out of necessity and just kind of fell into our lap as these things happen of being able to really be diverse in what we're looking for. So we have a lot of tech positions that are highly skilled and we have a recruitment team that works just in that. And then we have a lot of marketing positions and they're very technical and very specific. And we have a recruitment team that works just in that, right? And we kind of have that across the board.

or some teams are blended just because there's not as much availability there. But it's not so much of a specialty exact niche on a type of position. It's more the availability of, we have a really big candidate database. There's a ton of talent in Latin America where we source from. We know all the Latin American systems because my entire team is from Latin America. The founder of this company is from Bogota, Colombia.

Christian Brim (06:28.338)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Brown (06:45.0)
you know, so it's just this network effect of we can find basically anybody in any skillset, as long as we have a really good idea of what it is that we're looking for. And then if we don't have the internal tools to assess their skills, then we can go out and find external tools or we can find somebody else in our network to help us, you know, assess that and really just become a, again, bespoke recruiting firm, which just means that we can, we can recruit basically any position.

Christian Brim (07:10.802)
So who is your ideal client? Who do you recruit for?

Chris Brown (07:16.428)
Mostly, well, US businesses primarily, some Canadian, some European, but primarily US businesses, generally small to medium enterprise. you know, people with five to 10 initial employees are pretty good starting place up to 200 to 500 is about the upper limit. Once you get above that, you get into larger organizations that we can service, but we're built more for the small and medium kind of customer segment, more of a personal touch.

setup.

Christian Brim (07:48.071)
Yeah, I know from my own experience that that I I was in my first year I bought a franchise and you know the the franchise model was when you reach this certain level of clients You need to hire a bookkeeper And the the idea was to keep the owner from getting sucked into being you know bookkeeping and not doing what is most valuable And so I hired my first

Employee when I'm 27, I'd never hired a person ever and Even though I had some franchise support as far as like job description, of course, this is pre-internet So, you know how to source candidates? I was awful at it and I made so many hiring mistakes I'd like to say the first year was the end of it. But no I I

continued and I find that most business owners are in similar boats, right? Like we don't have a lot of hiring experience. And if we do hire, it's usually not that frequently. Like, you you might hire one employee a year or every other year. And so like you don't ever develop any expertise in it. don't develop any systems or processes around it.

And one of the best books that I've read and I recommend to every entrepreneur, whether they use a recruiting service or not is irrelevant, is Who by Jeff Smart. He and his dad wrote Strength Finders, I think. I don't know if you're familiar with the book, but it really is a process-driven book for, you know,

Entrepreneurs on like okay. This is how you hire people And I think it stood the test of time Are you familiar with the book have you have you read it?

Chris Brown (09:56.174)
haven't heard of it, I haven't read it. Should read it.

Christian Brim (09:56.991)
Okay, all right. Well, you don't need to. You're already an expert. okay, so then, okay, now I'm gonna come at you completely out of left field here and broadside you. I don't remember where I heard this, but, and this may not be the paradigm now, but I had heard that

Chris Brown (10:01.134)
I don't know that.

Christian Brim (10:25.8)
Placement agencies have this business model where they actually work for the employee, not the employer. That's how the industry works. It's like you get a stable of good employees and then you place them and then when they're ready to move, you just go find a different business for them to move their career. So you're really acting as like player agents.

rather than agents for the team, that insight was brought to me. I don't know if that's true or not true. What are your thoughts?

Chris Brown (11:09.55)
say that's not really true about the way we work. I'm sure that is... I think it's blended. I think there's a lot of that, especially if you have... if you're working in the upper levels of talent, like if you're doing high-end tech recruiting or if you're recruiting, you know, specialty surgeons or something like that, then I think it flips over to that kind of model where...

Christian Brim (11:13.822)
Well, what about the industry as a whole? mean,

Chris Brown (11:32.354)
you have such a small talent base and you have such a specific needs set that once you have them sort of on board with you, you're servicing their needs because they're in such demand and there's so little availability for them and the jobs that are looking for them are willing to do what it takes to get them. So it becomes a different sort of setup there. It really depends where you're at and what you're looking for because at...

Christian Brim (11:58.175)
Well, that makes sense.

Chris Brown (11:59.498)
Yeah, so at those upper levels, yeah, I could definitely see it going that way. At the levels that we're generally at, our company, right, we're filling mostly specialty positions of marketers and tech people and things like that, but we're not generally doing executive headhunting kind of stuff or anything like that. And at that point, you have a more even playing field of the amount of businesses out there, the amount of demand out there, and the amount of talent. So

Really, we're not looking to replace people very often. We're not looking to move someone to another company. We're looking to figure out how do we serve that client so that the people they have on stay as long as possible and grow with them as much as possible, right? Because turnover is a headache for everybody, not just the agency, but the client as well.

Christian Brim (12:50.166)
Yeah, I mean we've worked with some placement agencies in the past for accounting professionals and You know, there's there's firms that specialize in just that The problem I had with it is It's kind of like real estate in that, know, your real estate agents don't get paid until the deal closes and so the the agencies I don't know about yours, but

but the ones I work with, like they didn't get paid until we hired somebody, right? And I just felt there was like a pressure to make something, to get the deal done, like to get a fit. You know, there was one specific instance where the expectations and the compensation expectations that we had clearly communicated to the agency were not clearly communicated to.

the employee to the extent that they were telling them something different than we and and like you know, the thing falls apart and I I was I was thinking like, know, I would pay as an employer for for qualified candidates like, you know, a You know five hundred dollars or a thousand dollars per candidate and like okay. I I pick like

You you're you're going to get paid whether I hire them or not. Do you see that model out there? What are your thoughts on that?

Chris Brown (14:25.044)
Yeah, so there's a couple approaches there. There's like retainers, upfront payments, things like that. mean, kind of a little bit what you're talking about sounds to me like a perverse incentive, which is the real estate thing, which is why NAR got sued into oblivion and they had to give a bunch of money back to tons of people. Yeah, I can see that. just, yes. So yeah, there are both sides of that. There's models where you pay, you know,

Christian Brim (14:40.541)
Right.

Chris Brown (14:51.526)
an upfront fee and then you get so many rounds of candidates and then you have a lesser fee once you hire somebody. We do both, we do contract staffing and placement and then we do a hybrid model which is kind of an in-between where you come in contract staffing and then if the person works out then you can take them over on a placement and that percentage is less because you've been doing contract staffing for however long. And that kind of assages part of that issue where you know

I mean, we're still only getting paid on the placement because I generally don't charge an upfront fee because I gotta prove myself to you. By proving myself to you means I gotta show you that I can recruit great talent, that I can bring people in, that my processes are solid, that my client experience is worthwhile, right? That this is better than doing it yourself. But I totally see where you're coming from where it's like, I'm getting paid if I place somebody, so I'm gonna try to push you to place somebody. But.

You know, part of my business model and my ethos is to not do that because I've again, I've been an entrepreneur for so long that I've been in the position where you're getting invoices that you didn't think were coming or you're getting billed things that you didn't know you were going to get or the understanding was clear on your end, but unclear on the other end. Or like you said about that employee where their expectations were different, right? Clear communication with all parties is so integral to what it is that we're doing that if you miss step there.

You forever lose a client, of course. That person's never coming back if you are unable to clearly explain expectations to everybody involved. You're never going to take their phone call. Yeah, of course not. So I think, know.

Christian Brim (16:20.956)
Yeah, they keep calling me and I just ignore them. No, no. Well, to me, it did and this is, I'm curious your thoughts on this is, you know, it broke it down to, mean, hiring is, well, I mean, probably three stages. It's the sourcing of candidates, right? It's the interview.

to make sure the interview process to make sure that they're a good fit. And then there's the onboarding to make sure that they get what they need to do their job quickly. And like making those discrete services. So like if somebody needs all three, great. But like from my standpoint, I was like,

I really feel like we know how to interview and onboard, but like we're having trouble finding people. You know, just just peeling that that piece off and selling that as opposed to but I'm curious your thoughts on on the like how you perceive what you do.

Chris Brown (17:37.986)
Well, I think that's very solid feedback because I've been, I'm constantly in this motion of how do you...

How do you diversify your offering set without overwhelming your team and overwhelming your internal processes? So we have this, we have contract staffing and recruiting that I've already gone over and you're constantly looking, okay, well, they have their problem points, problem points that we've discussed here. There's problem points on the internal basis, Like there's always HR headaches and there's contract management headaches and placements have guarantee periods and placements only work because you're working on both sides of the equation.

Christian Brim (17:47.9)
Hmm.

Christian Brim (18:00.222)
Mmm.

Chris Brown (18:15.048)
you have this thing where it's like, how do you find additional service lines and how do you present them to clients in a way that's effectual, value additive and not overwhelming? So if you called me today and you're like, hey Chris, I'm looking for an SEO expert, need to set up my SEO game. What do you got?

Well, I would come to you and be like, well, I can do contract staffing, can do placement. Tell me about your budget. Tell me about your needs. What is your current setup, right? What kind of character fits well with you, what kind of person? All those general recruiting kind of questions.

But it'd be so much more value additive to be like, by the way, if you just need the selection process, if you need help with interviews, if you need help. But that conversation becomes really complex on a sales side, as far as I've seen, right? Because people come in with kind of an expectation. They have a problem and they need that problem solved. They don't need 12 other problems to think about, of now how do I manage this setup? How do I manage this new person? I don't want to be a headache in the middle of the process. So.

Christian Brim (18:59.752)
Sure.

Christian Brim (19:03.804)
Yeah.

Christian Brim (19:13.32)
Sure. Yeah.

Chris Brown (19:15.83)
Like I, I'm constantly in search of like, do I, how do I add that thing that you're talking about right here of just, I need candidate selection. Okay. can, I have a team of recruiters. can do candidate selection for you and give you three at a time. So you're not overwhelmed and that would be amazing, but it's hard to know that a client would like to have that when they perhaps don't know that the option exists and they don't have your experience set to know that it would be great to have, you know,

Christian Brim (19:39.133)
Well, right. yeah, I, right. I came to that conclusion with, with years of, of battle scars. and, and, know, the onboarding is, is also a very key thing because again, if you don't hire very often, you don't have an onboarding process. And like, it's, it's like, okay, the new employee shows up. What do you do? Well, go.

Here's the software go like right. like actually fleshing that out of what the process is of getting them up to speed, getting them productive and a feedback loop to them of like evaluation of like, okay, you're doing the right things. Here are the things that you may need to work on more. Like it kind of speaks to a bigger problem most small businesses have is that they don't really have a talent evaluation.

process for any employee, much less new ones. But, you know, yeah, onboarding an employee is super critical, especially if you're a smaller business and that like, that's a lot of money, that's a lot of money you're paying to the agency. And if they don't produce, you're in trouble, right? Like I've got this pain point of like, I've got too much work and I've got to get this person up to speed so that they can...

take this off my plate or help us make more money.

Chris Brown (21:12.034)
Yeah. And especially when you're talking about, I mean, you're talking about small business when you're talking about, you know, the first.

five employees or something. It's really hard to understand how that process works, what that looks like. Knowledge transfer is hard. It's really easy to assume that everybody else knows what we know. I think we just do it naturally. And it's a really tough wall to climb to be like, I have to show everybody that needs to touch this, all of the information that touches this, where to get it, how it works, and figure out a way that that...

Christian Brim (21:24.219)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Brown (21:42.828)
becomes systematized in a way that is accessible to them and anybody else that comes in. And then offboarding is a whole other process side of that where how do you extract the knowledge that this person has that might not be in your systems in a way that is effective, in a way that is useful into the future?

Christian Brim (21:55.496)
Mmm.

Chris Brown (22:02.206)
and do it in a way that you can successfully off-board somebody because off-boarding can be a nebulous kind of ugly thing depending on the situation that you're getting into. So how do you get that information out of that person, right?

Christian Brim (22:11.482)
Yeah, yeah you Well, hopefully before you make the decision to fire them Exactly, but that that that speaks to another I think whole that I see in a lot of businesses Creative businesses specifically tend to be a versed processes. They don't they don't like processes You know it cramps the creative flow but

Chris Brown (22:18.284)
Yeah, or hopefully before they quit.

Christian Brim (22:40.624)
You know, the idea of having processes in general, I think is, is very important for a variety of reasons. One of which is like, you you don't want to be in a situation where you have to keep a bad employee because no one else knows how to do their job. That's, that's the worst, right?

Chris Brown (23:06.798)
Yes. Yeah, that's awful. That's a terrible spot to be in. And also you don't want to be in this spot where, you know, I mean, keeping the terrible employee because they know everything, but, know, having it be, you're the sole source of knowledge as well is just, you know, either way you're, you're in a stuck kind of spot and getting to that process and processes are hard, you know, like, and we're not all great at it sometimes. good partners are really effective, right? Because you find people that have

Christian Brim (23:21.776)
Yeah.

Chris Brown (23:36.778)
a skill set that you don't, that's part of what they're able to do. They're really good at process optimization. They're really good at knowledge transfer. They're really good at understanding systems in a way that maybe you don't. It can be incredibly effective and impactful. Or if you have an employee who's able to do that kind of thing.

You know, part of our off-boarding process internally is that kind of understanding of knowledge transfer. know, how many things do you touch? We kind of try to do it on an ongoing regular basis. What are the things you touch? Is the documentation for those things up to date? We're also not a super creative agency, right? I mean, I have a marketing division. I have a creative section of people that are working on those things. But most of our business is very process oriented because I'm talking about recruiting organization.

You know, they're hard problems.

Christian Brim (24:29.778)
Well, as one aged entrepreneur told me many years ago, he said, no business, no problem. More business, more problems. I'm like, OK, that tracks. I'm curious how you got from CodeMonkey, self-described. I am not calling you that. I do not want to be derisive.

Chris Brown (24:55.854)
You

Christian Brim (24:59.175)
So code monkey to marketing agency to recruiting agency. Explain to me the common thread there.

Chris Brown (25:08.61)
The common thread is just technology, really. So CodeMonkey became internet business, which is just different types of code, trying to start SaaS's, launching e-commerce companies, kind of doing our own marketing, just learning how marketing software works. Again, doing real estate that was all on the tech side and the marketing side. And then building systems for that, building software pieces for that.

And then as you go doing that, you know, I have a partner in those old businesses who was very, very charismatic, very communicative, very friendly. And he was able to talk to, you know, a lot of people, tell them what we're doing, talk about what we're doing, get people interested. He's always looking for new lines of business.

And that kind of coalesced into agency work, which was both software and marketing agency work, because we're kind of good at both. You know, I mean, I'm able to write code, I'm able to build systems, I'm able to connect all the things that need to connect in order for things to work well. And marketing is the creative side. I'm not a super creative guy. not like, you know, I can, you know, I'm not super creative on the design and that kind of aspect, but.

On the technical side, modern marketing is very technical. It is extremely about connecting systems, managing data, how that data flows, how you're managing to your lead flow. What does your funnel look like? How do you implement all these different pieces? How do you automate where leads are going? Just everything. The entire thing is a tech stack these days. So you end up in this situation where most of the things that you want to touch are really tech.

intensive and I was pretty good at those things. And then in that, so we had an e-commerce company, we were doing medical and dental supplies. I was the tech side of that e-commerce company running the developers and everything else and keeping the thing running as much as possible. It was medical and dental supplies during COVID, so it was absolutely insane. It was the most craziest thing. We had a warehouse full of medical supplies. It went absolutely nuts. It was wild.

Christian Brim (26:50.494)
Hmm.

Christian Brim (27:11.431)
Mmm.

Chris Brown (27:18.846)
in that we had a full CSR team. The CSR team was based out of the U S and then, I met my current founder and she's, you the founder of this company that I'm for while remote teams. I'm a partner here, by the way, not just working for it, but, so I met her and I was talking to her about, you know, what does it look like to have this? Because she was primarily doing tech recruiting at that point. So she had a bunch of software positions placed and she was doing.

this same sort of model, but more on the tech side. And I had talked to her about our technical needs, which is a lot of website developers, a lot of data management, and some marketing kind of stuff. And I was like, well, what does it look like for the CSR side? Is it possible to replace our US CSR people? They're expensive, and they weren't doing the greatest job, to be honest. They were kind of slacking. And she goes, you know.

Christian Brim (27:50.908)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (28:10.588)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Brown (28:14.156)
I can try, can see what happens. can go find some people and see what's there. We ended up replacing our entire CSR team with people from Latin America. We replaced our entire technical team with people from Latin America. We replaced everybody who wasn't physically needed in the US with people from Latin America. And then as COVID wound down, that business ended up kind of imploding on itself because

the debt load that became from managing that much inventory was unsustainable after COVID died down and those contracts were no longer available. It was a mess. It got too big for itself and I wasn't fully prepared to manage something of that size. So it kind of crashed in on itself, which is sad, but these things do happen. And then she's, know, I came out of that and there wasn't much going on and she said, hey, why don't you come over here and, know.

Christian Brim (28:44.509)
Yeah.

Chris Brown (29:07.18)
help me build these systems and help me work through these processes. And now there's a whole other world of things that I know I can do because I've placed a bunch of random people with you. you know, there's this whole other open world of how we can place all these positions. So I came over here, I partnered with her and I started, you know, putting together the internal systems and starting to help her build this thing out and started to build up the marketing and, you know, start up to build up the teams that build everything internally.

And then, you know, it just became a, at one point it became a need to talk to clients because again, everybody's in Latin America and it was a small recruiting agency focused on tech. And they're like, well, you you're, you're the only gringo in the company at this point. So why don't you jump on with a couple of clients and help the sales process and let's manage this and see if we can get it. And that became a whole other thing. I'm not a sale again. I'm a tech guy. I was never the sales guy and somehow I became the sales guy and like it.

Christian Brim (29:51.837)
Right, right.

Chris Brown (30:06.894)
It just became this entire different path in business and life that I hadn't been a part of, that I hadn't been involved in. And it opened a ton of, I mean, I'm talking to you today because of that, right? I never would have been on a podcast with you discussing business because I would have been off in the tech world, you know, hidden from, from everybody. And it's really just changed perspective and changed the way that I, that I work and that the way we do business and the way I, the way I live my life, right? The way I interact with people because.

Yeah, I fell now I'm just kind of rambling. Sorry, but I fell into this consultative sales model and I didn't even know that was a thing. I'm not a sales guy. So I ended up talking to people on the calls, taking sales calls. I still take sales calls basically every day. You know, there's other sales people, of course, at this point, but I still get on the phone because it's useful. So I ended up talking to people and I learned that if you just listen to people and listen to what their problem sets are, you can identify

Christian Brim (30:55.291)
Right.

Chris Brown (31:06.794)
If your solution is a match, quickly. And if it is, you can show them how your solution is a match. And if it's not, you can tell them that you're not, and they're very happy that you told them it's not instead of selling them something they don't need. Turns out that's called consultative sales. I found that out after I figured out how this works. It's incredibly effective. Yeah, it's incredibly effective. It's amazing. And it's a very simple process. Just listen to people, understand their needs set.

Christian Brim (31:25.403)
that's what I've been doing.

Chris Brown (31:36.322)
figure out if their needs set matches what you're offering is. And if your marketing is doing a good job, if your sales funnel is doing a good job, then their problem set is probably within your solution set. If it's not, you if it's not that you have misses, but if you're missing more than 20 or 30 % of your leads, then your upfront messaging is probably wrong, right? So at this point, almost everybody that comes in needs the services that we're talking about. So I let them explain that to me.

And then I let them, you know, I tell them that I have a solution for that, maybe not the solution for that, and then explain what our solution sets are. And it works, it works very well. And so it's become this back and forth process where now I get to learn what the customer needs on a face-to-face individual basis. And then I get to take that back to the other side and apply it in the backend. And it's incredibly effective.

Christian Brim (32:32.622)
Yes, I think sales is another one of those skills that a lot of entrepreneurs come to the table not having experience. They'll figure it out quickly though, because if you can't sell, then you don't have a business very quickly. But it is learnable, to your point. People have this idea of selling

that is, I think, so outdated in that it has something, to me, it's something around like compelling somebody to do something they don't necessarily want to do. that's that, I mean, I guess that is a way to sell. But it is not, I think, the most effective way to sell. I think your consultative approach makes much more sense because here's the

the dirty little secret that all sales is emotional. We make emotional buying decisions and we come over top with rational explanations to justify our emotional desire. And the consultative approach is ideal for that because you're asking questions and listening and you can't get really emotions. You can't get the emotions to the surface.

Unless you start asking questions, like you got to, you got to dig in there and find out what their problem is, what the consequences of that problem are. like, how is that affecting your business? What's what, what's that look like? That's what drives the emotion. And that's what makes it so powerful. Uh, as a, as a methodology is because you're, you're in that emotion automatically. I, I, I find it ironic because usually technical people, and I don't mean technicalism like

code monkeys, like accountants too, like you generally don't want to have them on the sales call because what they do is they go straight to fixing the problem and they stop listening. It's like, well, I can fix that. Here's how you do that. And it's like, no, shut up. you're, talking past the sale. got it. You got to let them buy first before you start delivering what you. Yeah. So I find it ironic that, that, you're, you're a self-professed technical person, but you're, you've, you've embraced sales.

Chris Brown (35:01.42)
I I think that folly was definitely there earlier on. And it probably still happens. I'm a very solutions-oriented kind of person. a lot of my conversation with you so far has been letting them explain their problem sets so that I can present our solutions. So it's still very solution-centric sort of mindset. It's very much like, how do I get to the root of the problem? And how do I figure out if I can solve that or not?

Christian Brim (35:20.955)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Brown (35:27.938)
But yeah, it's absolutely, and something like this, it's such a, somebody knows what their need set is here. It's very rare to get on the phone with somebody as a salesperson for a recruiting company or for a staffing company and them not have a clear idea of what it is that they're talking to me about today.

You know, I'm not going door to door. I'm not going to you. Outbound is honestly, if there's a failure point in my sales process currently, it's outbound because I've never figured out a good way to do outbound. And you know, my sales team tries and there's some success there and there's always motion and you're always trying, but outbound is really hard because you're looking for the person that has the need set that understands the needs that that has gotten to that emotional position where they've made a decision in a rational

their needs around that. And something like my business, I'm doing Latin American talent specifically. It's called mere shoring, but it's outsourcing. You're moving outside of the US. That's a hard sell for a lot of people who aren't in the mindset of knowing that that's potential, having come to the idea set.

Christian Brim (36:25.757)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Brown (36:39.758)
on their own in some sense, call it planting the seed, but whatever that looks like for that person, having the idea in mind that this is a workable solution makes a big difference. So if I come to you today and all you've ever worked with is US talent in your, whichever agency you have, if you have four designers on staff and they're all from the US and I come in and go, why don't you hire somebody from Mexico? If you don't have a passport, there's zero chance that that message is going to have any effect on you whatsoever, right?

Christian Brim (37:07.782)
Right. Right.

Chris Brown (37:09.935)
a lot of it comes down to...

Again, that sales funnel, that technical aspect of, you know, are you, are the people that you're talking to today actually prepared for the conversation about the solution that you have to offer? And is there a problem set within your solution set? So if you're, if their problem set is within the solution set, but they are not mentally willing, if they haven't crossed that bridge yet of becoming aware that Latin American talent is a solution, that remote work is a solution, that

this could all be done very effectively for less money if you just moved outside of your borders. It's a dead conversation, essentially. I mean, I can have that conversation, but it's not going to be a sale that day.

Christian Brim (37:52.572)
Yeah.

Yeah, and I understand there are people that are still in that mindset, the, know, frankly, for a time I was in that mindset, but the reality is it is even if you are only delivering your service in a certain geographic area. And of course, you know, there are certain industries, like if you're a plumber, you got to have a physical body. So it doesn't work to outsource, but so much more of the economy and especially the creator economy.

is global and its workforce is global and you know you you Rather than stop trying to fight that uh wave, uh, you know, you need to write it um, I I know we You know accountants have been outsourcing uh work for At least a decade. I mean they're they're they're mature in that

You know, all of your global organizations, larger firms have, you know, some of them just have, they actually have offices, physical presences in, you know, usually it's India and Singapore for our talent because that just, they tend to have better accountants.

But I was opened up to that idea just last year about like, what about Latin America? because you know, the, the, the, of the biggest problems in our industry of outsourcing stuff to Asia is, is the, the language barrier. Yes. But the time barrier, and you know, Latin America, for the most part, you're in the same time zone. So it does, it does get over that hump.

Christian Brim (39:50.135)
And you know, you're you're and this is the big reason why business owners need to be looking at this is because their competitors are looking at it is that it's you know, 30 cents on the dollar. So you know, you you it's hard to compete with cheap labor. I mean, that's I mean, that's just the reality.

Chris Brown (40:11.82)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You know, it's significantly cheaper. Direct hire, of course, is cheaper outside of the staffing fee. Contract staffing is a bit less cheaper because everything's built into the hourly rate that you're paying, but you don't have to deal with the person's contract or EOR or their country rules or payment across international borders if your bank decides to be a pain about that for some reason, which isn't so much of a thing these days.

Christian Brim (40:25.192)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (40:30.248)
Right.

Christian Brim (40:37.424)
right, right.

Chris Brown (40:40.206)
But yeah, mean lots of yeah, yeah just Pay them in dogecoin or something, right? but yeah lots of large companies I mean, you know, I've spent quite a bit of time in Colombia. My wife is from Bogota as well And my entire team is basically in Colombia. We we do all over Latin America, but my team is primarily in Colombia so I've spent a lot of time down there and there's

Christian Brim (40:40.594)
Just payment. Just payment Bitcoin.

Yes, yes.

Chris Brown (41:07.498)
massive amount of huge international corporations with giant buildings all over the main cities of Latin America because they've seen the same thing. A good friend of ours works for Merck and she's been working there for 15 years now. And yeah, they have a huge office building in downtown Bogota full of a couple thousand people because why would you do all of this data entry work in the US when you can do it anywhere else, essentially?

Christian Brim (41:12.254)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (41:34.226)
Right, right.

Chris Brown (41:36.172)
So this thing isn't new. think it's just, you know, it's becoming more mainstream of that you can do this remote, that you can do this. Again, I don't have a physical office. I'm not running an office space in Bogota or Mexico City or Panama City or wherever, right? Because my model has been away from that. I don't want to get stuck at an office in Bogota when the manager quits. I don't want to do that. So my model has always been fully remote. But there's lots of my competitors that are running a building in Bogota.

And that works better for some things, right? I mean, we place, you know, like if you have healthcare positions, for example, and you're working with HIPAA data and HBI or whatever that kind of thing is, it can be better to have a centralized location. Or if you're doing a call center kind of things, you know, that's generally gonna be a little bit better if you have a centralized location because you need a manager who's working all these people and make sure that they're staffed and that you have the correct turnover and all those kinds of things.

Christian Brim (42:21.565)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Brown (42:31.822)
You know, so we just don't do a lot in that kind of situation. yeah, like to your point, accountants, things like that, it's going to be cheaper in Asia. It's going to be cheaper in the Philippines. It's going to be cheaper in India. So if you're just looking for bottom cost, Latin America is not going to be the place that you land. You're going to land somewhere in Asia. But if you're looking for people that have cultural alignment, you know, that have time zone alignment, they're on the same time as you, you know, they have, you know, Latin America has a lot of US influence.

And part of what we're, part of this whole thing is, you know, we're bringing opportunity to all these people in Latin America because they get to work with us businesses. They get to see why are us businesses so effective? Why is the way that we do things so dominant compared to the way everybody else does things, not everybody, but you know what I mean? you know, and bringing that to a whole subset of people, we're really just upskilling a ton of people all at once essentially. And yeah.

Christian Brim (43:01.459)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Brown (43:29.218)
That skill set is there, that talent pool is there. People that have worked for massive multinational corporations, people that are very well educated. There's very good schools all throughout Latin America, Monterey and Tech Monterey and Los Andes and Bogota. Just amazing schools putting out incredibly skilled, talented people. And thanks to it being 2026 now, they are completely available to work for you.

assuming you don't need them to run a machine in your warehouse.

Christian Brim (44:00.592)
Right. Yes, exactly. I mean, I think that digital versus non digital divide is going to become one of the very much more pronounced like, you know, the digital is going to completely one direction and the people that are, you know, physically having to deliver their service in person hospitality, you know, HVAC, those things is there.

it's just going to go a different path because yeah. Chris, I really appreciate your time. How do people find out more about you and Wow Remote?

Chris Brown (44:42.05)
Yeah, you can visit our website, whileremoteteams.com. You can find me on LinkedIn. My name is Chris Brown. So that can be difficult sometimes, but if you look up Chris Brown, while remote teams, probably going to find me. That's the primary way we're on all this social media stuff, but I don't actually go on social media. So you're never going to get to me there.

Christian Brim (45:01.15)
Perfect. Well, thank you for your time. Listeners will have those links in the show notes. If you liked what you heard, please rate the podcast, share the podcast, subscribe to the podcast. If you don't like what you've heard, shoot us a message, tell us what you want to hear and we'll get rid of Chris. Until then, ta-ta for now.

Chris Brown (45:17.346)
You