Leveraging overseas talent to grow your agency (featuring Noel Andrews)

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Chip Griffin: Hello, and welcome to another episode of Chats with Chip. I’m your host Chip Griffin, the founder of SAGA, the Small Agency Growth Alliance. And I am delighted to have with me today, Noel Andrews, the CEO and owner of JobRack. Welcome to the show Noel.

Noel Andrews: Hey, thanks Chip, great to be here.

Chip Griffin: It is great to have you here and before we jump into our conversation, why don’t you just share a little bit about yourself and JobRack.

Noel Andrews: Based here in London, England. It’s not as dreary as people may think, plenty of blue skies and sunshine. I have a particular kind of favorite set of rooftop bars that I like to frequent whenever we do get sunshine. And yeah, JobRack, we help agencies and online business owners to hire really, really great talent from Eastern Europe.

And one of the big things that we do is we take all the hard work of hiring out for people so we really end up helping people get the kind of the talent that they need.

Chip Griffin: Well, and, and that’s a perfect segue into what I want to talk about today, shockingly enough. And that is how agencies can leverage talent from Eastern Europe and perhaps other overseas locations, more broadly to supplement the work that they’re doing, particularly if they’re here in the United States. Look, we know that it’s a very difficult talent market in a lot of places, but particularly here agencies are really struggling to put butts in seats and, and quality butts, preferably.

So how can they, how can agency owners be thinking about expanding their talent pool beyond just their local geography?

Noel Andrews: Yeah. So the last couple of years obviously has shown us that a lot of us have been forced to work remotely, even for the kind of agencies and businesses that weren’t already doing so. So, you know, the heart of it’s done, right?

You’ve proven that you can do it now. It kind of now kind of opens you up instead of trying to hire people that are within that 30, 40 mile kind of commute radius. Now you’ve got the rest of the country, the rest of the continent, the rest of the world. So the first bit is figuring out, right? What are the roles that you need?

Um, are there any particular requirements that mean you might need people in a certain geography in a certain time zone, with certain kind of access, et cetera. Now, most of the agencies that I work with are looking at, you know, there’s sometimes there are some onshore roles, so we often find people get nervous about putting like an account management role, for instance, or customer success, putting that offshore, further afield, they worried about accents. They worry about that kind of relate-ability. And that’s a very, very common thing kind of early on. What we tend to find is that people will often start off with roles, like kind of operation specialists, operations managers, like the technical specialist.

So whether it’s like SEO analysts or SEO specialists or BBC people that are a little bit more kind of back of house, But then very rapidly realize that when you hire really, really good people, then actually where they are, where they’re from, where they are, what they sound like really, really doesn’t matter.

Clients love it. When they’re seeing you’re really, really great quality and committed people and then agency owners actually then been able to leverage and get the benefit of better value because you know, the people in Eastern Europe or in other areas of the world, aren’t having to pay the cost of living that we’re seeing in UK and Canada and North America, et cetera.

That gives kind of a huge opportunity to not compromise on quality. And that’s most important thing for me to say, right? When you look to hire remotely, whether it’s in the same country or further afield, this isn’t about saving money, right? Because if you save money and lose quality, then actually you lose overall.

What it’s about is getting equivalent or better quality for kind of more affordable rates and actually being able to hire the people in the first place where there is actually a, you know, an availability of talent, unlike, you know, much of the U S right now.

Chip Griffin: Well, I think you’ve hit on something really important there, which is that a lot of agency owners tend to think of going off shore for labor, being a way to, to save substantial amounts of money.

And if you’re doing it right, you’re not really going to save a ton of money. You might. I mean, as you say, you may get better value for that money, but if you say, Hey, I can just get some, some cheap help. That’s not really the way to think about this.

Noel Andrews: Yeah, that’s true. And I think the mindset is very much about where can you, first of all, where can you find the people?

Right? Because the biggest constraint to the growth of any agency and the success of any agency is having the right people, right? Having enough people to do a really, really great job for your clients so that they become raving fans, and then come back to you and refer you on. That’s the number one thing.

The second piece, that is one of the big challenges that we all have as agency owners, is that when to hire. Right. You, you know, a lot of people will, you know, we all know that ideally we would hire it maybe 70 to 80% capacity. In reality, most agency owners are hiring about 120% capacity. Everyone’s getting really stressed.

Then they’re like, right, I’ve got enough money, the older books looking good, we’ll hire. One of the benefits of kind of hiring from lower cost regions of the world is that, you know, the people are, the salaries are lower, and often significantly lower. So if we take, you know, Eastern Europe, which is, which is my area of expertise, we’re normally talking, you know, 40 to 50% cheaper than hiring in the US for equivalent or better quality people. So it really, it can make a substantial difference. What we tend to see agency owners doing is that they kind of leverage that to hire sooner and so that they can actually safeguard quality of delivery to their clients, hire sooner, scale out faster, and kind of drive their growth and, and hopefully work less a little bit themselves as a result.

Chip Griffin: And I, and I think that there’s, there’s real benefit to getting that higher skillset that you can buy by stretching your dollars to make them go further or whatever currency you’re using in the business that you’re running, listening to us today. You know, over the course of my agency career, I have used offshore labor in Eastern Europe, central America and Asia.

I mean, obviously you specialize in Eastern Europe. Do you see any fundamental differences between the different regions and perhaps the kinds of roles they fill or is it really, is there really no particular difference? And it’s really more of the specific groups of people that you’re working with.

Noel Andrews: Yeah. So my first caveat before I answer that is that there are great people available in every country in the world, right? That’s the kind of first thing. In some countries for some roles in some regions of the world that takes a lot, it’s a lot harder to find them because there might be some cultural differences that mean, they have tendencies one way or another, for instance. So there are, you know, Eastern Europe kind of, uh, if I kind of refer back to that, so Eastern Europe is renowned for really, really hard work. Incredible, incredible work ethic and a very direct communication. So if you ask them to do something and maybe your instructions aren’t clear, or maybe instructions are wrong, or maybe there’s a better way of doing it.

And the old analogy is, you know, if you ask for a square wheel, then often you’ll get that. Now in Eastern Europe, the cultural tendency is very direct, right? Communication is almost blunt, right. Especially for us soft Westerners. And so, you know, if they think something is wrong or they think you can do it a better way, they will generally tell you.

Big kind of cultural stereotype, but you know, generally very, very true. And why a lot of our kind of clients come back to us again and again. There are other regions of the world that that is not a thing, right? The much more subservient, much more kind of, you know, the boss is this, you know, massive figurehead that they could never possibly contradict or go against.

And that can be challenging, especially when you want people to focus around process improvement, having their eyes and ears open in terms of how to make things better. And especially when you’re getting into management roles or specialist roles, right. Where you don’t want to be managing tasks, you want to be, you know, delegating responsibility and giving them autonomy and letting them run.

So that’s probably the biggest difference we’re seeing. There’s areas of the world that are kind of, that’s more or less of an issue for. It’s one of the key things that keeps people coming back to us, with Eastern Europe. Cause it’s not an issue in that direct communication is just that very kind of blunt and straight communication is wonderful.

Chip Griffin: And you’ve touched on it now a couple of times, but a lot of this comes down to how you’re managing these resources. And so it does take some skill on the part of the team at the home agency, if you will, to manage, you know, geographically far flung resources, whether they’re employees or contractors, no matter which part of the world they’re in.

And so there’s, let’s talk a little bit about how you effectively manage these resources. Because part of it is understanding what cultural differences there may be to make sure that you’re giving the proper level of direction, because I’ve, I’ve certainly worked with some of these groups where, you know, as you say, if you ask for a square wheel, you get a square wheel, it may not turn, but by God you asked for a square wheel and that’s what you’ll get.

And so, you know, you really need to understand that because it changes how you manage things. It changes the processes and instructions that you might give. But I think there are other things to consider too, when it comes to managing.

Noel Andrews: Yeah, definitely. I think, there’s two key things to me. So one is, it doesn’t matter how much someone is working for you, whether it’s five, 10 hours a week, or whether it’s 40 or 50 hours a week, treat them like a team member, right.

Treating like a full-time member of your team as if they were, you know, sat around the table with you day to day. Right. That is most important thing that people get tied up in knots with terminology, like freelancers, like remote workers, like gig workers, all this kind of thing. And to me, you know, employees for instance, and there’s lots of legal reasons why, you know, generally remote workers, especially ones outside of your home country, why they’re not going to be a true legal employee.

Right. So team member is what I use, right. And that is what you are looking to build. You should be looking to build a high-performing team of people that are working together. Right. That’s the biggest, biggest thing for me. So that’s the first bit is kind of in your, is how you frame it in your own mind as a business owner and saying, I am going to have, I’m going to build a team.

I’m going to make them a high-performing and highly functioning team, so what does that take? The number one thing is then communication, right? Putting in really really clear communication channels. And so, and when you’re all remote, this is actually reasonably straightforward. It just takes a little bit of effort.

And it takes effort to have things like team meetings, things like stand ups, whether you use slack or teams or whatever kind of tool you use use. So that sort of thing is actually reasonably straight forward. You just have to put a little bit of time and effort. It’s also really important to do things like the relaxed time, right?

So if you were in an office together, people would be going for coffee. They would be standing around the watercooler is the age old kind of cliche. They’d be going out for lunch together. So it’s important when you’ve got a fully remote team to give opportunities for that kind of like casual kind of chat. So we have at JobRack, we have afternoon tea every Friday afternoon, and we have just a kind of window of time. It’s normally about 30 minutes or so, and it’s kind of optional, but most of the team come along and it’s just kind of free-flowing chat, people just getting to know each other, chat about what’s going on. It’s a way of doing more things like that, just to help kind of foster that team.

But yeah, communication is key. And I think if you’re in a, if you have a hybrid business, so if you’re operating where sometimes people are in the office, but there’s still remote people as well, that’s actually the hardest approach. That’s the hardest thing to manage because when people, you know, Chip, if I come up to your desk and have a conversation about something, but we’ve got Joe that is the other side of the world, or even the other side of the state or the town, and he’s working from home today.

We’ve got to make sure that Joe knows about the conversation that we just had, if it’s relevant to something that we were working on. So it almost becomes harder. It almost becomes like, oh no, don’t kind of talk to me here. Talk to me on slack because the rest of the team has got to know what’s going on.

That’s a little bit tricky, but again, always a big, big fan of, you know, synchronous communication, getting people chatting and kind of conversing and generate ideas, just takes prioritizing it. That’s the most important thing.

Chip Griffin: And this is, this is something that more and more agencies have become familiar with as you noted, because of what’s been going on in the last couple of years.

A lot of us are very comfortable now speaking in these, you know, video conversations where, you know, three or four years ago, it was, you know, like pulling teeth in order to get someone to hop on a video zoom call. And so, you know, that piece of it from a logistical standpoint, I think people are generally more comfortable with, but they’re still learning the ropes for some of the things that you’ve talked about as far as, you know, really having inclusivity and trying to find ways to, to make sure that all of the team is on the same page.

You did mention something earlier that I, that I want to highlight here, because I think it’s a substantial issue that particularly US-based agencies need to consider and that’s time zones. You know, when you’re working with employees who are in other parts of the world, understanding how their working times mesh with yours is an important consideration and something that you need to discuss with any potential overseas resource. So you understand, are they going to be willing to do some time shifting to allow for, for those kinds of synchronous conversations that you mentioned? And it becomes even more important if it’s a role that’s more directly tied to immediate client service versus, you know, long-term work.

So, you know, how do you, I mean, obviously, you know, you’re based in, in England, so, you know, you don’t have a huge time zone difference with Eastern Europe. Here in the U S you know, it could be, you know, a 6, 7, 8, and nine hours time difference, depending upon where you are. And I know that from the work that I’ve done in the past internationally, you know, it is, it can be difficult if not, if both parties are not on the same page about how to hash out some of those things.

So, so talk a little bit about how you advise agencies to handle that.

Noel Andrews: Yeah. So the first thing is to look at the nature of the work. Now, the vast majority of roles that we help agency owners hire, and that agencies in the U S are running with, a lot of the work can be asynchronous, right? It does not need to be done, you know, minute by minute, the same hours that you’re working in, in the U S. And there are a couple of roles that that’s not quite the case for, but there’s often a lot of flexibility.

So, you know, if I take the hardest role, first of all, like a client account manager, right. They’re spending a good chunk of their time on calls communicating with your clients. Let’s again, go to the worst, the hardest scenario, which is someone on the west coast of the U S there’s a nine hour time difference typically with Eastern Europe.

So if you’ve got a very, very regular set of clients that, you know, are having the late afternoon calls, then that’s not ideal because then you’re getting into, it’s like one or two in the morning, Eastern Europe time. And I am very, very against getting people to work basically what is a night shift like permanently.

It’s very, very common in the Philippines, for instance, it’s just, you know, for me, like A players, the really, really good people, they’ve got their kind of choice of jobs. Right. So why would they choose to give up hobbies and evenings and weekends being shattered from work for, you know, for that reason?

What we often look at is we look at say, well, how much of the work needs to be, kind of have overlap. We always aim for at least three or four hours of overlap with your, where most of your people in the agency are. And we tend to find that works really, really well. You then get that kind of benefit of the geo arbitrage.

So you wake up in the morning and they’ve done half a day’s work already, but they’re still online for plenty of the time getting you through to kind of lunchtime or maybe early afternoon. And that’s, if you’re West Coast. It’s very, very common for people in Eastern Europe to work, you know, kind of an evening shift.

So maybe from midday till 8:00 PM, that aligns nicely with kind of west coast time for a good crossover. And you know, flexibility is really common as long as you just talk openly about it. So if someone knows that, Hey, from time to time, they’re gonna need to flex their calendar to do a call with someone in Australia or New Zealand or, you know, west coast of the U S afternoon.

It’s genuinely kind of never, never an issue. So we find that works really, really well. Then when we get into roles, like, you know, SEO specialist, BBC specialists where they’re more not working in isolation, but their work is not actually kind of time bound with, you know, needs, collaborate directly with anyone else so much.

Then, you know, three to four hours works, works absolutely great. And you know, if you’re on the east coast or central time, then you know, you’ve got even more hours to play with.

Chip Griffin: And it, I mean, it’s like any resource, even if you had one that was, you know, just a, you know, down the block, you need to understand, you know, what the expectations are on both sides for working hours and things like that.

And, and frankly, it’s becoming even more common here in the U S for employees to have flexible time arrangements with their agencies in order to accommodate personal needs and things like that. The other thing I will note is that, you know, I know a lot of developers that I’ve worked with who liked to work strange hours, right?

Who are effectively vampires. And if they see the sun, you know, they’re, they’re uncomfortable. So, so I have, I have worked with plenty of developers who basically worked the same schedule that I did. Even though they were on the other side of the world. So, you know, but it’s, it’s really just getting those, those understandings down.

And I love that you used the term geo arbitrage because I think that if you think about the time zone difference as a potential benefit and not just an obstacle, there are opportunities to be potentially had. Now that doesn’t work for every role. But, but if you understand how you can use that to your advantage and you’re adapting your own schedules and timelines with your clients effectively.

You can maybe take advantage of it or at least mitigate it. Right. So, so let’s say that, that it does take longer to get feedback, right? Because if someone’s doing some work overnight, you know, and by the time they get feedback, it’s now added a day. Just work that into your, your timelines with clients. A day isn’t going to make a huge difference in the whole scheme of things.

And you just need to get really good at estimating those things, but look for those opportunities because you may be able to use that geo arbitrage as you call it to help improve the results that you’re producing.

Noel Andrews: Yeah, definitely. Yeah. And when you look at, if I give a couple of kinds of examples, so, you know, if you’re running an SEO agency, for instance, you know, really absolute top end SEO specialists, salary-wise, it’s typically going to run you maybe three, three and a half thousand US dollars a month.

And this is for someone with, you know, 5, 6, 7 years experience that can be client facing. They could be doing strategy. They’re also happy to get, kind of get stuck in and get their hands dirty as well. Like real technical SEO specialists for those kind of rates mean you can probably hire two or sometimes even three for the kind of rates that you might be paying kind of locally.

And so that opens up a lot of opportunity to, you know, offset, like you said, those kinds of, you know, potentially that kind of few hours or a day kind of delay that you bring into it. And lets you either drive up quality, do more, handle more clients, things like that. So when the rates are as they are, and like I said, it’s for equivalent or better quality without that kind of compromise.

And with actual availability of people, it does open up a huge amount.

Chip Griffin: So now, you know, sort of some real nitty gritty logistical issues that some agencies I know have run into issues with when they’ve been hiring overseas talent. How do you pay them? Right. So, you know, what, what is your general advice there? Because I’ve seen all sorts of different approaches to paying overseas labor.

Is there something that for Eastern Europe in particular that you see, you know, works generally pretty well, because I think a lot of Americans don’t recognize that, that the financial systems in different countries are different and not everybody is set up the exact same way, where it’s easy to take a wire transfer into your personal bank account here.

That’s not capable in every part of the world.

Noel Andrews: Some ways it’s tricky yeah. So the two most common ways and what we use here at JobRack is, one is Weiss, formerly TransferWise, super simple. I have not found any Eastern European country that, that it doesn’t work for and it just dropped straight into their bank account.

And the fees are incredibly low. You’re talking like less than about half a percent normally, which is phenomenal, absolutely phenomenal. And then the other one that’s very common as Payoneer, very, very common in Serbia and some of the countries, right. And there, you know, they have an account, they would just simply send you an invoice and a payment link and you can make it on a debit or credit cards.

Typically a 3% fee, which often actually the worker will pay. Cause it’s kind of more convenient for them. But in the scheme of things, it’s, you know, 30, 60, $90, you know, depending on kind of the salary level, if you have, you know, if it’s a, an executive assistant or a marketing assistant, that’s around a thousand, 1200 US.

So it might 30 bucks, in terms of fee, even kind of SEO, PPC specialist level, we may be talking like $90 of a fee. And then the other bonus with that is if you’re into chasing kind of mileage points and credit card bonus points, then, you know, you can put that spend on that, on the company credit card too.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, I think the key here is again, you know, just make sure you’re in communication with the individual that you’re working with so you understand what, you know, what’s gonna work for them and you do need to be willing to be flexible and adapt to, to what’s going to work for them, right? Because ultimately they need to be paid in a timely fashion and it, it, it behooves you to figure out you know what the best approach for that is. But you do need to understand there’s probably going to be a little different than the way you pay your current employees and contractors. But it’s, it’s not a particularly difficult process, once you, once you know how to do it. So, are there other gotchas that you need to be thinking about when you are particularly US-based and, and looking to hire this kind of talent, are there, you had mentioned earlier, for example, you know, language skills.

How much of an issue is that really? I mean, obviously there are some roles, I know in the past where I haven’t had much difficulty at all, again, developer oriented stuff, as long as you can sort of talk about the logic of it, you know, accents don’t matter and, and, you know, spelling doesn’t matter, but some of the roles maybe that does is. And Americans are kind of snobbish shall we say about, the use of the English language. It’s not that you, you Brits aren’t too. But my experience is that that Americans are not as culturally sensitive, shall we say to the fact that not everybody knows it exactly the same way you do. Does that matter? Is that, is that, is that a real challenge?

Noel Andrews: Yeah. So we’re very fortunate in the sense that, you know, all across Eastern Europe, you know, learning English, he starts at a very, very early age. There’s a huge number of people that then, you know, really push with that kind of studies, even as adults. And in that career, it’s going to get better and better. Lots of them go into English teaching. We kind of really took it from there. And so it’s, you know, we, we don’t work with anyone that doesn’t have at least a good grasp of what I would refer to as like business English. I, you never want to have someone that that’s working for you that is painful to communicate with because that just drains you of energy.

Right. The levels vary about, and some of it, you don’t need it to be perfect. Some of it, you need them to be, you know, absolute, absolutely spot on. And so we can kind of flex that very, but the minimum standard is extremely, extremely high and it’s just, you know, someone that you can converse with normally yes, they might have some, a bit of an accent, but then hey, so do most of us.

And so yeah, that, they’re the kind of the main things. It’s that the variety’s there. The breadth is there and it’s about figuring out what is it that you need. And then, you know, we kind of help you kind of find that. But yeah, not really an obstacle at all. I think of other things probably the biggest obstacle is really just, you know, for a busy kind of agency owner business owner.

It’s just making sure you take the time for your team. And actually that’s no different whether they’re in the U S in the same town as you, the same office as you, or, you know, all across the world. It’s just recognizing that as you grow your team, and this has been a kind of recent realization to me, this, like, you know, my number one job as CEO and owner is the team because they’re the ones that are ultimately powering the success of the business.

So the more time we invest in communication, collaboration, you know, kind of team getting to know each other and building out from that, that’s actually what drives the success. But yeah, no, thankfully that the internet, the kind of the world we’re in makes it super, super easy. So, you know, payments over things like Payoneer and transfer wise or wise as they are now.

You know, ease of communication across slack and zoom and the kind of strength of internet connections. Uh, and again, I mean, Eastern Europe doesn’t have any kind of like infrastructure challenges. There’s no extreme weather or anything like that. So that makes for a very kind of stable kind of work environment.

Chip Griffin: So let’s say that at this point, I’m now sold on the idea that I should be tapping into this as a labor resource.

How do I go about finding it? And obviously I know you’re biased. Your suggestion would be I pick up the phone and I say, Hey, Noel, this is what I’m looking for. But, but talk a little bit about the process, not just with JobRack, but generally, how do you go about finding the right talent? Because it is different than, I mean, you don’t just post a job on Indeed typically and find this.

So how do you go about doing this and finding the right people?

Noel Andrews: Yeah. So the first thing, and it doesn’t matter where you are, first thing is, figuring out what you want and what you need. I see a lot of business owners that jump into hiring or they think they need one role. And then actually after we have a conversation, it’s like, oh, that’s not the right role for you to hire right now.

It’s something different. So first the most important step is figuring out, you know, what’s the biggest needs right now. What’s the biggest priority. And then thinking, right? What. What kind of person do you need, what skills and experience they have, what other requirements, because that then dictates where you go to hire and where you kind of might need particular skills and geography, time zones, et cetera.

From that, you know, based on that geography, you know, I would always look for specialists in that area. There are sites that operate completely worldwide, but then, you know, and that can work really, really well. I’m not a big fan personally of just advertising on LinkedIn because LinkedIn, as an example, they make it way too easy for people to apply.

So it’s like a one click, one click application. And you just get whole ton of poor quality. You’re gonna get hundreds of applicants. None of them often will be, will be actually any good.

Chip Griffin: And that’s true, by the way, whether you’re looking for overseas or just in your own neighborhood, I mean, it is, LinkedIn has made it far too simple and it’s really unfortunate.

Noel Andrews: Yeah. So I think ideally what you want to do is have, you know, be having a conversation with someone. So one of the things that I do is I jump on a free consultation calls with people, and it’s very much about figuring out, right, what’s going on for you and your agency right now, what’s going on, what’s coming up.

What role do you think you need? And I, you know, often kind of coach and guide and advise people on, you know, the options and to think about. And if I think they should not hire from Eastern Europe, I’ll be the first to say so and kind of guide people in that way. And so ideally what you want to do is speak to someone, either another agency owner that’s hired from the region of the world you’re thinking of or hired the roles you’re thinking of.

Someone like me, for instance, or kind of peers or, you know, other people that, you know, in a similar space, just have these kinds of conversations and then get recommendations and advice. Um, and then when you come into the actual hiring, you know, you’ve got generally two choices, whether you do it yourself or you get help.

Most busy agency owners should not be trying to become recruitment consultants. I definitely don’t advise that. You’ve got way more important things to do with your time and the cost to get help with hiring is just not that, not significant at all. So yeah, definitely be looking at that, but have conversations with, like I said, with people like me to just understand your options, and then you can make a informed decision.

Chip Griffin: Well, I think people have a lot more information to go with to make that informed decision now that we’ve had this conversation. Hopefully folks have gotten that value out of this discussion. I know that I have. If someone is interested in having a further conversation with you or learning more about JobRack, where should they go?

Noel Andrews: Yeah, simply head on over to jobrack.eu/agency, and there’s a whole bunch of information there and you can click there and book a free call with me any time.

Chip Griffin: Fantastic. Well, Noel, I really appreciate the time that you’ve taken today to explore the options for agencies to expand their talent pool, to other parts of the world.

I think there’s lots of opportunity to be explored there and lots of things to think about. So thank you all for listening. I appreciate your time Noel and I look forward to having you all back again as listeners again, very soon.

Noel Andrews: Thanks, Chip.