What It's REALLY Like To Be A Filipino Ecom Employee (With Lara Guevara) transcript

foreign [Music] hello and welcome to an awesome bonus episode of the Andrew Ferris podcast you are going to love this episode let me tell you right now if you are operating a business and you have ever wondered about working with overseas talent and bringing that that Talent into your business particularly in the Philippines this episode is for you I loved this conversation so much it is with my sponsor for the month so yes this is a sponsored episode but I I don't want that to give you pause it is an interview with Lara Guevara the CEO of more Staffing but Laura herself is in the Philippines became the CEO of more Staffing which is my sponsor who hires Filipino talent for your us-based e-commerce business amazing company amazing people Lara runs that company after herself being an employee in the Philippines of us-based e-commerce businesses and so we talked about her experience with that but we also talked about sort of what the whole thing is like on the other side of the world where what is it like to be a Filipino employee of a us-based e-commerce business from the filipino's perspective do they feel like they're underpaid how is their English is this good work for them what about the time zone stuff like all of these kinds of questions that I think are major friction points for people considering hiring eCommerce Talent we talked about all of that and more Lara is amazing she is very smart very thoughtful and also talks about how being the employee of a us-bas Ecommerce business helped her get through her cancer it's just insane just incredible story you're going to like this conversation a lot again if you have ever considered working with e-commerce or working with outsourced talent in the Philippines and Yuri's business let's jump in all right Laura welcome thanks so much for taking the time to do this how are you yes I'm good I made sure that I had enough coffee for this uh interview well okay so I'm in La it's uh it's nine o'clock for me in the morning what time is it for you in the Philippines it is 12 13 a.m here in the Philippines so midnight okay also just a little past midnight you feeling awake enough you feeling good to go yes I had enough coffee and I I was just having a conversation with my team that the interview will be at midnight and I was telling them that we have a Filipino joke about English that we don't we stop speaking English or we pause when it's midnight so it I just want to make sure that I will be able to communicate well and answer her questions so yes very excited yeah that's really funny I'm I hope I'm not breaking any rules here in the Philippines by getting you to speak in English past midnight but I mean your English is awesome it's a funny thing like I think one of the things that people are nervous about sometimes when hiring overseas employees is the English I think that's like a friction point that American companies they just kind of are like I'm sure these people are smart but like is there going to be this communication gap and that's sort of I think a reasonable concern to just want to know that when they're communicating with one another and with clients and vendors and all the stuff that the English is good but you were telling me that in the Philippines you know you were learning English from a pretty early age is that right yes from preschool yes okay awesome so English and Tagalog growing up is that right yeah so um before we start preschool it will be Tagalog and then from preschool to elementary high school and college there will be an English language for us yeah awesome and then what about that's what you were growing up with what is it the same for kids growing up now in the Philippines no so now my kids for example my two boys are 100 speaking English and not Tagalog anymore so it changes from generation to generation so my mom they can my parents they can communicate in English but their accents are heavy heavier and stiffer than ours and then my My Generation it would be a little bit softer but we still we still get tired speaking English at 12 minutes but with my kids they will really just speak video English 24 7. so I think the future uh Manpower of the Philippines it will not be an issue anymore and as you said it is really a topic when I discuss the opportunity to staff Filipino us-based company so what we are doing in more staff is we actually have an English um test so it is being recorded it's both are written and spoken English so we read them and we give the score to our client but with those kind of work that is minimal in talking in negotiation discussion clients from the us know that they are going to deal with people who are less less proficient in English but for marketing operations supply chain sales all of those positions we you can expect that there are so many Filipinos who can converse very well yeah you know I've worked with Filipino employees across a number of different companies just you know being around e-commerce and being where I'm at where I'm servicing different companies all the time I've never seen it be a problem like every Filipino employee I've worked with has been very good English and and I'm impressed by that always English I think native English speakers sometimes underestimate how hard of a language it is I think English is very difficult and so I'm teaching my three-year-old to read right now and all that kind of stuff and I'm just like astounded at how many how many times it's like oh no the g is silent in that word buddy sorry you know like it's just like you're telling them all these things and it's so hard so it's so impressive to me when people grow up speaking both languages and and I know for a lot of people in the world you know that's that's normal to be growing up speaking a couple languages but but yeah anyway that's interesting so tell me more of your background in terms of you know right now you run more Staffing and you know the first time I talked to Greg your name came up because he was just like oh I hired Laura and she was the greatest person who ever lived you know his he could not have spoken more glowingly about you but in saying that he um he talked about you being one of his early hires at section 119 in his e-commerce business so is that was that your intro to e-commerce were you working with e-commerce businesses before that like how did you get start start going down this pathway so okay I work with like four or five e-commerce businesses before section 119 and what I've done with Greg's business is actually grow the business that's why I'm I'm very happy that he's he's also very appreciative of my work but also I've had yeah multiple experiences in growing e-commerce businesses before section 180. my profession is Industrial Engineer by trade but I've been in supply chain industry for more than 15 years so I've worked in a corporate setup a supply chain manager here in the Philippines and then my my breakthrough was 2017 when I started working in Singularity University and that's where I met Greg Carey I I stayed in San Jose and my our office is in Mountain View that's when I first met Greg as well in person and and so it's like pandemic happens and then our working Singularity business our Singularity University is a tech event and so when pandemic started that's when I started help helping Greg with his e-commerce business awesome and and had you you had been working with us-based companies before that as well yeah or yeah okay got it yeah okay so you've been around that for a long time is that normal around employees from the Philippines who they're lots and lots and lots of remote overseas work yes and while I was in college I'm also a part-time call center agent so I was calling for Capital One credit cards and I'm selling credit cards to U.S clients and so we are from that experience we were trained with accent with how to speak with our clients so BPO industry here in the Philippines is very huge they Outsource customer services here so it also adds up to our experience speaking English and communicating with U.S clients awesome so you started working with Greg at section 119 what your first job with him was supply chain yes I did the end-to-end supply chain with um section 118 as the first hire yeah and that that's he was your first hire I mean excuse me you were his first hire yes that's right yeah yeah yeah that's awesome and how was that experience working with Greg and kind of coming into the e-commerce World a little bit more so Greg said that he was very new with the e-commerce world as well so it's like him hiring someone who knows how to grow the e-commerce and like he he always say that I will hire someone who knows more than me because I can learn from him or her and that's actually something that I really admire about Grant he's not he doesn't let us feel that he's better he's higher he's the manager he's the owner he always appreciate what the team can do and like he said that I will be the expert in supply chain and I teach him how and then he will hire an expert we hired an expert in different areas as well like customer service and design and then he will learn from them so it's like learning from each other is the culture of section 118. yeah that's really awesome and I think he had talked about having like 16 or something like that Filipino employees at section 119. you were the first of those is that right yes and I hired most of them did you help him build out right okay yeah that's interesting is that the Genesis of of more Staffing like doing that as sectional 19 and going like other businesses could do this as well yes so you actually did this in his company first figured out how to do it really well and then now it's like wait a minute other companies could use this too yes so I recruit then my best friend glaiza in section 118 as the second employee then I recruited some of my supply chain people in in previous companies and then I started recruiting my relatives who are graphic designers and friends who are in customer service so I also was able to provide support to some of Greg's friends so that's actually where the idea came from like I had been recruiting people and sharing the talent here in the Philippines why not make this a business sure yeah yeah it seems like you have enjoyed like just from here and you talk about it a little bit you have enjoyed working with Greg a lot and working with with in the sort of e-commerce world and so yeah it's interesting because the way you the way you're describing that sounds very similar to like me finding a friend of mine and going like hey you would like this work it's good work it's good people those kinds of things just very organic very natural to go and do that you're I assume that friends you've brought in and others you've you've recruited have had similar experiences they've enjoyed working with e-commerce companies in the US the whole deal yes I agree and and not only again so many benefits of working remotely not only the flexibility and the freedom that we get but also the higher pay and the experience and earnings that we get from working with U.S companies or International companies can we talk about the pay issue for a second I'm just curious what pay what U.S pays I know what it feels like for U.S companies which is like it's lower pay than paying somebody in the US obviously that's part of the value proposition in the Philippines it is higher pay better pay yes so we are in the middle so I'm just bringing my calculator just in case I need to convert so I would like to give an example for example of a head of business operations that is for example dollars per hour in the United States and then we can get it for 20 dollars per hour here in the Philippines but if if they are working here in the Philippines they would be getting 10 to 12 dollars per hour if I convert it to dollars so it's like lower than U.S salary but higher than Filipino companies so it's that's interesting does that then create a large demand for those positions in the Philippines that's right yeah that is super interesting so I would assume that the supply and demand Dynamics workout to where you get very high quality employees because if there's if the pay is that much better you're talking about like 100 better potentially yeah but it's that much better that sounds my assumption would be that it's like there's it's a highly competitive for talented people in the Philippines to go get those jobs which probably makes is helpful for your job as a CEO of a staffing agency to go find people who are really good and feel like feel like they're doing a good job yes and um Andrew it has been Customs here in the Philippines um generations to Generations that we that Filipino that needs to earn more go to other countries to work so even my father worked in Saudi Arabia just to just to support the family so being able to not go away from the family and just remote work remotely but earning higher than PHP is something that is really a breakthrough for us it's a huge help moms can work and the parents can work without eating how the house and then they can take take good care of the kids and the family doesn't have to separate because they don't have to work abroad I I also had an experience working abroad for three years in the Middle East so it's very hard and um it's very challenging so this opportunity also the mission of more Staffing is to provide as much work to the Filipino community in Filipino professionals and give them an opportunity to earn more that's really really cool this fits you know for me I know that I would say there's probably a couple there's I think there's at least three concerns that U.S companies have let's say four four concerns with the US companies have with with hiring in the Philippines number one is English we talked about that already not necessarily in order by the way this is one of them I said a second one is quality of employee and sort of like where to start they just don't know what they're going to get they don't know how to you know and when you're dealing with an overseas staffing agency or whatever you just have no idea how good this person's gonna be you don't control the interview process as well and but what you just said actually speaks to that issue in a really interesting way where it's like actually the market is going to work very favorably for you to get really high quality Talent so it's I think people have no trouble believing that they're talented people in the Philippines I don't think that's the issue I think it's like I just don't know how to get to the right ones you know but what you're describing is really interesting especially compared to and I know this is a part of more Staffing in your approach compared to sort of just the VA model where it's like go find someone for five bucks an hour or whatever and and do that like you know Greg has talked about this and I know this is a big part of what you guys do like virtual professional not just virtual assistant go find really high quality really talented people at a great rate for you in the US and a great rate for them in the Philippines and it can work really well and that leads to number three which I think is there's some ethical concerns for some people they're worried about like am I just underpaying people in a way that like feels you know wrong or something like that and and what you're describing is actually the opposite this is like a really great opportunity allowing people to stay home that's really cool and there was a fourth one but I can't remember what it was so oh time zone time zone I was gonna say time zone right yeah I think there's a concern about sort of overnight time zones and all that but you know here you are speaking English past midnight so we got that covered too and actually um there are uh menu for clients who hire from us who actually um actually heard from your podcast they would want an overlap so for hours to be discussing with or having a meeting called with the USD in four hours doing asynchronous work or if they have vendors outside us that's the time that they should be doing it so it's a matter of creating the right process project management tools improving the communication so that you don't have to work same time together so there are seldom that many of our clients are very concerned about Filipino staying like the whole night so they would just say overlap PST overlap in in Manila time overlap ESD and Manila time overlap or Central or on any time overlap so it we haven't experienced any problem on time zone and if they that client will be requiring a full PST for full ESD work hours and we're also open for that we've experienced that I've experienced that as well yeah some folks are just willing to work a graveyard shift to do it basically actually we've talked to some Filipino talents that that likes it more it's because it's more quiet there's no kids buying the door all the time so they can focus on working when it's nighttime and there are people really that are night owls so they prefer working nighttime so it's a win-win situation for the talent and the client yeah that's super interesting it's that's another issue that I actually haven't seen really be an issue with the Filipino talent that I've worked with before as well where you know teams even all the way yeah I just I haven't seen that actually be as much of a problem as people expect it to be but what you said is really interesting which is that like part of the answer to that problem is just process build good process make sure people are working I just did an episode not too long ago my second episode with Pana Yoda hotsis who's uh who helped me build sort of my process infrastructure so that I could add people in my business and then you know Lara you know I have talked about me maybe me adding a designer from your you know going through more Staffing and working with you guys directly but I feel so much better positioned to bring that person on because like now I have like built up actual Sops around you know working in Asana and like where to use Asana where to use slack and where not to use slack and some of that kind of stuff but the thing is that's true for any business that doesn't matter where you're hiring someone from if you're working remote even if you're working in office the as your business grows you simply have to invest in that kind of process orientation otherwise it doesn't matter where the person is it's going to be a problem now it's probably going to be a bigger problem if the person is on a different time zone than you you know having that stuff even better is good but I would actually look at that as a benefit to doing this because what will what that will do for an American company is force that CEO or that person to get good in those areas which will be a massive benefit to their ability to scale their business because if you can't do that it's just you're never going to be able to add Talent as you grow and have them work effectively if if your sort of systems and processes are not set up correctly so yeah I totally agree and it's actually something that business operations experts here in the Philippines or supply chain managers have been doing is building process processes so we don't have to we can work asynchronously like so we started more Staffing all of us having full-time job so imagine and the flexibility that we have all of us four members here in the Philippines um JC Angela blaza and I we have all of us have full-time job so it's just a matter of how can we work asynchronously I have set up click up slack and and everything that we can we can just stop check update and we don't have to always call and get meetings so from ground up we've built the process we've created system that doesn't need a lot of more than two hours a day so we were able to work our own full-times at the time and then set up more and now that JC and I are both full-time for more Staffing we we stopped working in our full-time job already so we focused growing more Staffing since um we saw the potential that we can we can still get yeah and that that's really cool that makes sense yeah that you guys built that out internally yourselves first with click up with slack all that stuff tell me more about more Staffing for a little bit in terms of just from your perspective as a CEO what is like the ideal client for you what is like the the really the right e-commerce business to be working with more Staffing I'm sure you guys can service a lot of different people but like tell me what like the real sweet spot is you know yeah so regardless if it's service based or selling products we can support any business from small medium-sized businesses that would that is growing and the owner usually the founder or the CEO would like to focus on growing the business and would like to let go of the day-to-day operations so again we're promoting hiring more than an assistant level but someone who you can read and Trust to run the business while you you focus on growing the business so anything from support on business operations supply chain Finance we are we can really support the companies to that so again regardless if it's service or product as long as you're willing to delegate let go of the day-to-day take off work from your plate and duplicating yourself with the talent that you're getting that's actually our goal so in more Staffing we have a six-month coaching with the Filipino talents that we staff I am an ICF certified coach we have other ICF certified coaches in our company and so we we grow with them we make sure that we support them hand in hand so that we can we can help them navigate challenges and difficult situations and actually even personal goals and just to make sure that we are supporting the clients as well because the client goal is to have this team member new team member to stay for a very long time because you know training course is very expensive and then I our goal is is also for the talent to stay longer for the company because this will lead to the next value proposition of more which is one year guarantee so of course whatever happens to the talent we are going to replace it either if it doesn't match your expectations we're gonna replace it or if it's a personal reason that he or she resigned on the 11th month or 12th month we're still going to support you with free Replacements that's our promise and are guaranteed but yeah what I've mentioned we we want to make sure that we're going to partner with our client for 12 months or longer and then we are like their first choice of agency when they need more manpower yeah that's really cool that one year guarantee that you guys offer is really interesting because of how much it creates an incentive for you guys it creates a meaningful cost for you if you if it doesn't work out basically you actually have to then go find good talent and somebody who's committed and somebody you really trust to do that which I think does solve some of that gap of like you know people going I would love to hire this Talent from the Philippines but I just want to don't I just want to make sure I end up with somebody good I don't it's I mean hiring is already hard it's really hard for anybody you know and so that I think put some skin in the game for you guys in a way that I think is really good yeah the whole thing the whole thing is super interesting to me I you know part of the reason I was so excited to start working with you guys is I started talking to Greg and I think one of the things I learned from Greg pretty quickly is that and and again like you know if you're listening to this go back and listen to my my interview with Greg it's a really good conversation you get a sense of kind of who he is and where he came from and thinking about some of this too and these two conversations combined I think will be really helpful for people but I realized that he was looking at e-commerce in very similar ways to me and from a sort of broad strategic perspective and then he saw my content as sort of fitting with the way that you know you guys both in his econce business but also in more Staffing could was thinking about things and I think there's this core thing that I think about all the time and I talk about it a lot which is that if I'm designing the p l of an e-commerce business the number one place that I look at and say man there's a real opportunity to scale your business profitably it's in the area of your operating expenses for free Commerce businesses e-commerce businesses scale against their operating expenses very very well so that Opex can be a pretty small percentage of Revenue that's I think one of the great advantages of the category that's already the case even if you're hiring some team members and those sorts of things you can still do well with this what is fascinating to me is the idea that you could make that even better by reducing your costs from a us-based business but do that with employees who are actually getting paid well above Market in their place this is like the this I I actually can't figure out the more that I have talked to to Greg and to you and to more Staffing the more excited I am to have you as a sponsor of the show because I know like I'm to a point where I'm like I actually don't know why U.S companies wouldn't pursue this like I can't think of what the counter argument is anymore we've talked about some of the friction points a little bit but there's that I mean from your perspective Laura I'm curious like what do you see as like like how often do you see this be successful with employees that you place is there anything that gets in the way is there anything that like makes it so this doesn't work very well what's the remaining friction left for us businesses and and like how do you make sure to overcome that to place employees and to not have to rehire them within a year you know because it just seems like such a good value to me and such a good thing that like I was like yes please come on be a sponsor again I am I don't just want your money like I want I want like to be promoting this to my to the people who are listening to me it seems so good so what would get in the way what would break that so far as you can tell from where you set okay so I think based on my experience talking to because I do the sales call myself in Jason and Grand So based on on that experience the only thing that we cannot support is when the position that you're looking for has a mixed of remote and face-to-face so an example of that is there are head of business operations currently in the United States and they will the owner will say I think on the pay is too high for the things that he or she is doing so what we're proposing there is to help you so we can help you with that we need to separate the job description of the person in the US that needs a face-to-face work and then we find someone remotely that can do 100 of the business operation so they can let go or they can shift the operations support in the United States to be a nesser hours or either a lower position and then hire someone from the Philippines that can do the overseeing and the the management of those possessions those are the only challenges that I see that with our clients and let me think of other otherwise it works pretty smoothly you're saying yeah I mean yes obviously I think most people yeah that's awesome and and again like here it sounds like go ahead yeah sorry our advantage is when we talk to our clients Andrew they know that we know what we're talking about e-commerce so there are a lot of great agencies here in the Philippines I can say that they are not directly competitors they may be um Staffing executive assistants but there are lots of great agencies here in the Philippines but our focus is we know your language we know how it works and when I say and and explain this to the client they appreciate how we know the end to end of supply chain or sorry e-commerce in the United States so they would be from that call from that sales call they they're already 100 going because they know they can trust that our team more Staffing are all aware of how e-commerce works in the United States and turn off all of our team members here even working in the Philippines can had an experience working with e-commerce and we know the end to end of it so the trust that we here provide to them or the confidence that we give during our sales call is there and so they can they can trust us that we know what we're talking about we know how to support you they they even sometimes start with a different like they would say I need a supply chain manager and then a foreign conversing about how can we help them we will have um a result that okay I don't think you need you need a supply chain manager right now but just purchasing support and that's a lower rate so we don't just get the higher it because as you the agency fee that we do is annual salary all based on the annual salary of the talent so yeah that's normal for almost any Hiring Agency yeah yes so the higher the agency sorry the higher the fee of the talent the higher we get but our when we work we want to make sure that they are getting uh what is really the right and fair and just rate for the Filipino so if if they say sometimes we encounter they're saying I have a budget for 25 dollars per hour I want 25 per hour and I can do it 25 to 30. and but you're in reality you can get a star Rockstar talent for just 15. and we say that you can just you can hire two positions for your budget but we're just going to give you this read Because this is the fair and the right uh rate for this position yeah I've actually noticed that about you guys too that you just don't you just really seem like you're trying to do what's right with the client and I think it actually it's just one of those things people are worried about when there's like a service-based fee I deal with this all the time because I get like a percentage of AD spend for clients that I'm working with growing stuff and people are always nervous about that kind of idea because it looks like there's a strong incentive for me to spend money badly but it's I actually think the incentive is not that strong to do that from a service provider perspective because actually what will happen is the client will just fire me if I do that and so I won't actually make very much money it's very obvious to me that like if I spend bad dollars and the client is losing a bunch of money and it doesn't go well then they're just gonna fire me and for you like I imagine that your customer base in terms of e-commerce in terms of e-commerce customers are actually I'm assuming the first hire is not where most of the value is for you guys I'm assuming that like you know like I said section 119 Greg's company has 16 or whatever Filipino employees like if you can actually work with an agency work with an e-commerce business in the US long enough to where you're actually Staffing out like not just one position but five positions over time and and maybe even 10 and you know those companies as they grow if I'm if I'm running an e-commerce business at 5 million bucks in revenue and I'm hiring a Filipino employee to add to my team but if I get that business to 20 then like I'm gonna and my field my first hire goes well I'm going to come back to you guys and I'm going to you know keep working with you to hire more so so I it seems to me the incentive is actually not very strong for you guys to like purposefully Place sort of an overqualified overpaid person so you could take a bigger cut of the agency fees because because that would just hurt your LTV if that's the case for your businesses so anyway that's my assumption and I'm the same way like I've done that where I've told businesses like you you need to I just had a conversation a couple days ago with a client was like actually you need to fire me it's time for it's time for us to be done because I'm no longer gonna be able to provide value in excess of my cost you know I'm doing fine your business is doing fine like you're adding full-time employees so so listen we only had a couple minutes left I wanna I wanna get just another sense of what the long-term goals for more Staffing are for you Laura I'd love to hear your experience as a CIA go there just to get to know you a little bit more like what what's your goals for yourself and what's your goals for more Staffing so this is very connected to what I've just mentioned earlier another thing that I remember and I want to share this because I want to answer the usual issue of the clients that we have been talking is the need of full-time versus part-time because before we are just supporting full-time but right now we are continuously expanding our offers and products and service less so we can we can support not just those who are pin afford full-time but those who also are needing part-time Talent so connected to that we're considering ourselves more Staffing in Phase One and we're continuing to offer more services and in phase two which is going to be end of the year so we've started offering part-time offers we're started offering like a um e and eats our services for companies that work with us hiring two or more so we want to make sure that we can support you with the HR if you don't have an HR department yet in your company and which is the usual key is for a small medium-sized um comments then we're going to handle HR Support and then like you've said we've grown with a lot of clients in two years some of our clients are still have hired more than 50 or 12 actually going 15 for some of their positions and then and then we again had a client that's just started three months but hired six already that's how fast they grew because of the support or savings that we were able to provide so as we learn and as we talk to more clients and hear their problems we want to solve it for them so before we don't have part-time offer now that we hear that no I can't afford full-time right now so yes okay we're going to offer part-time for you and then the HR and the coaching and the training and so we want to craft thoughtful packages and services for the clients we want to make sure that it will add value to their businesses and add competencies to their team and not just any type of product we want to make sure that we are supporting Filipinos in the and the US clients at the same time now imagine how fulfilling it is for us in more Staffing because we have two sides we can provide work to our co-filipinos and that's that's priceless and then we can help uh us-based companies to increase confidence or and save more so it's like clients are sharing with us their their feedback I have sent some to you feedback about how great their talent was and then the talent during our coaching will tell us how grateful they are with the opportunity so it's like money will follow our profit will follow if we do continuously do good in our job and that is where more Staffing is going and our goal is just to be the number one go to agency here in the Philippines that can understand e-commerce businesses and as for me my work here as a CEO and and of course also an internal coach of more Staffing is to just hire more the more we hire the more I coach the more I develop my talent and this might be a little bit of a surprise fact-free but I was a Panzer Survivor just this year I just finished that's why the hair I usually have long hair so imagine Andrew that I was able to work well on chemo on radiation on operation so it's like using my time they say when you had a life threatening experience it's using your time to actually value or what your mission is and and that is mine and I would focus here because I was able to help if I don't have that experience I wouldn't be able to cover the expenses of of chemotherapy and all in and the treatments but I was here I am successful I am happy and I can be with my kids and this is the same thing that I would like to share with other Filipinos and like Greg he's the other counterpart that we want to help more Greg we want to help more e-commerce businesses so for me and for more I think the mission Visions very aligned and all of the people working under more Staffing it has the same values and we are all aligned we are very happy for that and as we grow offer more services we hope that we can support more yes-based companies yeah that is amazing and I'm so glad that you came out well on the other end of cancer that's awesome I did not know that and and I was working remotely while on treatment so it's like that's that's the flexibility I went during chemo I would just rest for the first few days and I would be on leave and then I will work normally on the second week and third week until my next session so nobody can do that when you're working face to face or something like that so it's a life-changing for me and sure for sure for the talents that we've staff and so we want just to duplicate that to more more and more Filipinos yeah that's really really cool and and it is symbiotic in that if you guys staff somebody it goes well for the company the company grows they want to come back and staff more as long as and as their Opex stays small as a percentage of their revenue they create profitability in their business high quality Talent profitability they're going to come back to you and so if they are growing their business and they're doing that at a higher margin because they're working with Filipino employees for whom for them it's potentially a job that can get them through cancer and that's like an unbelievable outcome you know and then on the U.S side it's like they can grow their business and then potentially hire more that is really awesome again I think hopefully people can hear why I like after Greg and I first talk jump at the top jump to the possibility of working with more now and why I've like you know when we talked about the idea of doing another sponsored episode I have not offered sponsored episodes to my other sponsors that I've had I have only offered them to more now because I like I don't like sponsored content it sucks normally I'm not interested in it but like for you guys I just like I'm I'm so hot on this idea of like this should be a core part of how people are are growing their business so let's finish off on where people should go if they want to work with you where what do we need to do to to hire more now and to hire great Filipino talent in their businesses all right so the the easiest way is just to go to our website more now that CEO and then on the home page there will be a form for them to fill out and submit and then a calendly um link after that so it would be automatically scheduled so you will talk to me or JC and Grand during that quality handle sales call ourselves so we make sure that we can understand your need or just email us as well our emails are in the website so thank you so much Andrew for believing in our business as well this is where I'm very happy to be here and to share my experience as the talent and as a CEO of more Staffing to your listeners awesome well thanks and uh I'm excited about to make sure that if you go do that go to more now.co and and again of course the links are in the show notes for this if you're watching on YouTube the links are in the description you can go do that tell them that you got there through this conversation I know they would like to hear that they've spent money to advertise on my show and so they want to know they gotta return on that so please tell them that and I want to know that they got a return on that because I actually want to do a good job for them so tell them that they came through my show and yeah okay that's it Laura thank you so much for your time go to bed put your English away and uh and and and enjoy Tagalog for the rest of the night all right thank you so much [Music] foreign [Music] there you have it my conversation with Lara Guevara I just loved that conversation so much again like for me it is continuing to sort of knock down roadblocks in the way of of hiring e-commerce talent in the Philippines I think it's this continues to be a no-brainer to me to grow your team in a way that is friendly to your Opex I've talked about it a lot in the episode but this seems so obvious to me and this conversation only made that feel smoother to me as a value proposition for how to grow your eCommerce business so go work with more Staffing they are fantastic people you will like them that's more now.co tell them I sent you also go back and listen to my episode with Greg Carey the founder of more Staffing you will like that as well get his perspective on kind of how things started if you've been considering moving this way in your business and I don't know why you wouldn't I honestly don't at this point I think this hopefully Those comp those two episodes together will be helpful to you I have a bunch more great stuff coming up just like some episodes I'm incredibly excited about so make sure to hit that subscribe button if you're watching on YouTube or if you're listening on Spotify Apple wherever you're listening to your podcast and of course all the usual things are helpful rate review and tell a friend about it all those things are useful to me and so please do that if you've liked this show it would be a big help back to me you can also always reach out to me at podcast ajfgrowth.com or reset me on Twitter at Andrew J Ferris I would love to hear from you thanks so much for listening for watching okay [Music] foreign