Most contractors think offshoring is about saving money. It's actually about creating leverage.
John Wilson and Jack Carr break down how offshore teams helped them scale faster, build better systems, and free up key leaders to focus on growth. They share exactly which roles to offshore, what to keep in-house, and the leadership lessons they've learned after managing dozens of remote team members across recruiting, dispatch, accounting, marketing, and customer service.
What you'll learn:
→ Which roles should be offshored first (and which shouldn't)
→ The judgment vs. process framework for hiring decisions
→ How offshore teams force better systems and accountability
→ Why SOPs matter more than geography
→ How to structure dispatch, CSR, recruiting, and accounting teams
————————————————
🔗 CONNECT
————————————————
John Wilson → https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnbwilson1/
Jack Carr → https://www.linkedin.com/in/jack-carr-81675995/
————————————————
💰 SPONSORS
————————————————
💸Sponsored by CFO Made Easy
Built a strong trades business? Let’s take it to $10M and beyond. CFO Made Easy offers part-time CFO services for home and trade service businesses—helping you boost cash flow, maximize profit per tech, and make clear growth decisions.
📈 Free Offer: Book a 45-min Financial Insight Session to uncover growth blockers.
Shout Out to FieldPulse 🚀
FieldPulse is an incredible Field Service Management platform that helps you save hours each week while keeping your operations running smoothly. If you're looking to streamline your processes, stay competitive, and focus on what truly matters, FieldPulse is a game-changer!📅 Book your demo
💼Shoutout to Avoca AI!
Looking to train your call center and improve technician performance? Avoca AI helps teams identify issues, improve call quality, and drive results from start to finish.🔗 Schedule a demo
More Ways To Connect with O&O
John Wilson, CEO of Wilson Companies
Jack Carr, CEO of Rapid HVAC
📌 Disclaimer: Some links may include UTM parameters or affiliate relationships, meaning we may earn a commission if you make a purchase. Episodes may feature sponsors, but all opinions expressed are our own.
When we went offshore, we ran a better business because we had to run a better business. We had to figure out KPIs and lead people to them because the team needed it for us to continue to run.
We've talked about AI, we've talked about offshore, and like you need some kind of leverage to grow and to continue to fight in this market.
What to keep in office is like critical thought and team leadership, we tend to keep in office.
The influencing factor is the fact that you're gonna make $10 an hour US, like yeah, top five percent of your country. That's extremely motivating.
Hey, do you think offshore can scale?
I think that the focus at the end of the day is I'm John.
Thanks for joining. My co-host here is Jack Carr. Hey guys. We work together, so we we both work in uh a plumbing HVAC business in Ohio. If you're new to our audience, um Jack's down in Nashville, and Jack also runs a business called Quickstaffers where he uh places offshore talent. Let's dive in. All right, cool beans. Sweet, sweet. Um, so yeah, a couple years ago, uh, well, first off, we've been offshore. I actually had this conversation with somebody uh with uh they they were like they're running a private equity platform. And the question was, hey, do you think offshore can scale? Um, because it was the first time they'd seen like our amount of offshore inside a business. And uh it was kind of funny because I I haven't really thought much about that question. Uh and as as I was sort of explaining, I think a few things came to light. So, one, we're offshore native, which I think you are too. I think most of the folks that are like on X, learning about their business, growing it, uh, are offshore native. So they've got team members that are actively over there. But we had to figure out offshore back in 2020. And over the years, uh, we've used it to like fill in talent gaps, which I think you have too, um, just because we found it to be faster, like way faster. It's almost outrageously faster.
Yeah. I mean, we we started because uh um, I mean, I was doing it prior in another business. Because to answer your question, can it scale? I mean, I think you look at the market. You look at the market of who has done it successfully, and there's hundreds of the Fortune 500 companies who are doing this actively, including Amazon, Google, Royal Caribbean, Ford, like all the big names have some functionality.
Every accounting firm, every consulting firm, everyone, every IT firm, yes.
Yeah, yeah. And so you most of these big companies are already using it. And so it's it's interesting when uh we have to deal with smaller operators who are not, they're trying to get their feet under that. Or bigger.
Or or bigger. It um like we we see it from I see it from both sides. Uh, I think it's kind of funny if you're if you're on X and you're like used to this conversation, it's totally normal. If you're anywhere, if you're not on X, then like it's a total shock to you that this even exists.
Yeah, my my favorites when I'm talking with like um my my lawyers or my legal team, and they're and they're blown away by this conversation just because they've never had it before. And you can bring them up case studies of actual entire legal companies that their entire paralegal system is all overseas, which is wild to me that there's a group of people overseas that understand our legal system better than most Americans.
Uh so yeah, so we so we started moving into it uh to basically solve like a pain point. We it was COVID sort of world shut down, we couldn't hire a call center, so we got on, I think like upwork or something, and we found a few folks um to like answer the phone for those first couple years now, six years ago now. And then uh after that, we used headhunting agencies and like we used a lot of different services to find it. Um, but it was like out of pain. Like we needed staff, we needed staff now, and we had to be able to ramp call center and dispatch really quickly. Uh to be and to be honest, that's still like half the reason it's so useful to us is like quality is good, but speed is really, really fast. So if that's helpful to
anybody.
All right, simple way to think about it. Do we want to start by going into in-house versus like the rules and then the framework behind in-house? So I generally like to come up with kind of a two by two grid matrix when I'm thinking about this problem to begin with.
Like what to offshore versus whatnot.
Yeah. And so a lot of it comes down to um judgment and process, right? And so in that matrix, it's high judgment, low judgment, high process, low process environment. And so when starting off um for almost all companies, the first place to start uh with the obvious ones are high or low judgment, high process. Um, do you have any disagreements with that, John?
No, totally agree. I think um I I was actually, I was we're actively hiring a CFO right now. And um, one of the questions we're asking them is like, have you ever worked with offshore? Because our accounting team has a fair amount of offshore on it. And that was verbatim, his answer. And he's working for uh, they do like 900 million. It's like a light manufacturing business. Uh and as in they make lights, and it was exactly that. He's like, Look, if it's like a repeatable process and doesn't require like a ton of critical energy, then yeah, you have to. Like you just absolutely have to. So yeah, I agree.
Yeah, so that's where I like to start. And and to give an example of uh some really easy ones that are high judgment, low process, you're looking at general managers, service managers, comfort advisors, high-level salespeople, um, you know, pretty much any manager. And that's because there's no real SOP for the day-to-day life of most of the managers. It's a lot of decision making from a high level of process, which requires real-time judgment, ownership of the outcomes, requires some level of local context. And so, like, that's the area where I always say, let's stay away from that, just because those I have seen those work. Like we have buddies who have really manager-level overseas hires. We have a manager level overseas hire. Uh, that being said, when you start, that's not the place you want to start. Uh, the first place that I think that you want to start is the opposite end of the spectrum, which is the low judgment high process. And so when looking at low judgment, high process, we're looking at things like, again, like you said, things that you can take from a very high level, you can condense it down into uh SOPs that are really repeatable processes. And so you're looking at like inbound CSR, outbound calling, estimate follow-up, maintenance plan scheduling, um some admin tasks like customer reactivation, reviews, warranties, data entry, um AR, AP, uh CRM work, uh marketing admin, uh all like really good places to start, just because again, you can take a very uh in-depth SOP and hand it to them with some level of training and onboarding, and then they're ready to go within a couple weeks. Again, that speed is crazy, right? Versus like if you posted that on indeed, that would take you two weeks just to get the person in the door.
When I first started growing Wilson, I was obsessed with the numbers, books, podcasts, and checking the bank account pretty much nonstop. But as the business grew, I had less and less time to obsess and I lost clarity. That's exactly what CFO Made Easy solves. Tyler works directly with home service owners, doing a few million a year and helps you understand your numbers in a way that actually drives decisions. Things like pricing, hiring, equipment purchases, all of it. I know what you're thinking, this is just another consultant, but Tyler is different. He built and exited a $25 million home service business himself. So you know that this isn't just fluff. His clients routinely improve profit by five to ten percent just by tightening up their pricing, labor, and overhead and finally getting that oh so juicy control over cash flow. If you've got a bookkeeper and a CPA, but no real financial partner, this is what you're missing. Go book a free 20-minute strategy call at cfomadeasy.com slash owned and get the financial clarity that you've been craving all along. And do me a favor, let Tyler know that OAO sent you. Yeah.
Yeah, we when we moved to um when we moved to our current office in 23, uh, we like all the we had five locations and it was a 20-minute drive for each of them. So a lot of people like the technicians didn't care because like they don't work inside the office, but a lot of the like uh CSRs did not come with the transition just because it was too far of a drive for them. So sort of out of nowhere, we had to spin up an entire call center. And I remember like sitting at my kitchen table, and I just did it at night in two days. I like we hired 10 people and trained them. It was outrageous. Uh, because you can just like run a hey, get a here's the job, here's the script, record a video of you reading that script, record a video of these variations of that script, like that'll filter out like so many people. And it what one of the other sort of funny things about this that we found, and part of this is uh like with speed. I I know we're not I know we're on like what do you off what do you send off and uh what do you keep in house, but um the amount of candidates is truly staggering. Like it for a uh like American side jobs, one of the big pain points is how do you get enough candidates? It's a totally different game when you go offshore. You have to figure out the exact opposite. You have to figure out, hey, I'm going to get 500 applications for this job in the first two days. How what am I gonna use to filter?
Yeah, totally different. How do I condense this down? Exactly.
So you have to add way more filtering and way more like tests, and um because it it's a it's the opposite game that you're used to playing. It's can't it's candid and overflow.
Yeah, a hundred percent. I ironically enough. Um, and and I think you you hit some good points there. Like we do in Quick Staffers, we have uh, I think two major tests that we require them uh to do right out of the gate, just to try and condense that down from like again, a hundred applicants down to a solid 15. Um and and a big one is the the voice. Um, like you said, hey, read this script, tell me about yourself, some level of I call it unique, a a unique question. So what we try to avoid, right, is um any kind of if they're able to pull a script, what we find is that you can train yourself to read a script in a in a certain accent or voice. Yeah. Like I can always do the accent, like a British accent of like certain words that I've practiced and known. And so we try to give them unique words and unique um phrases that we would need them to come up with on the fly. And what that does is it it generates or it it circumvents like that script reading ability, yeah. Um so that they actually have to either sit there and practice a ton to get these words right, or like, hey, they're just native speakers. And we find that that's a great way to condense the list down quite a bit.
Uh so we actually did a we uh last year, one of our goals was inside the sort of like operating procedure side of the business, so call center dispatch, install coordination, accounting, purchasing, marketing, HR, we were gonna do no more in-office hires. Uh because we were optimizing EBITDA, we were trying to optimize cash flow so we could go acquire businesses, which is what we've done. Um, so we had to free up that cash flow to be able to invest more and go grow. Um so that was like a mandate that we had for our team is hey, as I think about what do you not offshore, last year the mandate was we're not hiring anymore. Um, and here's here's why we have to free up cash, we have to go buy these other businesses. Um so I think for most lower level team members, um you can like there's no issue at all with uh like call center dispatch, sort of like frontline, you can do it. Uh, we've also done purchasing, marketing coordinators, APAR, staff accounting, assistant controller, marketing coordinators. We've done like basically everyone. The big thing, and maybe like what to keep in office, is like critical thought and team leadership. We tend to keep in office. So as you think about that inside your own team, like what to send, what to not send. Um we really prefer uh team leads to be uh here in office.
So I'm gonna throw you a curveball here that's not we haven't talked about in a while. Is I think that there's a difference too when you're looking at this from hey, we're just starting to get into offshoring, what should we offshore? When should we offshore? Um I think that there's an interesting junction at some point on revenue size and what you should first look at hiring. Yeah. And so how I know how I do, but how do you think about say a sub-2, sub-three million dollar company, a five to eight million dollar company, and a 10 million plus company? Like, how should each one of those start looking at where should we start offshoring?
Awesome, like you'd probably have more perspective on that than me. Um, because you did it way earlier than we did. Like when we started, we were already four or five million bucks. So, like you, but you started like a million. So, like, how about you walk through your experience?
Yeah.
So we started at 1.2, and the experience I think is relevant to a lot of people. And I think this is where the key is for really small companies to get started, is this role is more about hey, I need to buy my time back as the owner. It was, hey, I don't have the ability to answer the phone at 8 p.m., 9 p.m., two in the afternoon while I'm running calls or doing sales or trying to build the website. And so in the beginning, the best place to start, in my opinion, is call center. It is your call center inbound, outbound. Um, just because inbound initially, uh, maybe some after hours work, uh, but it is the best place to start for a sub $2 million company just because like that is the highest leverage that you can get is hey, I don't have to answer the phones anymore. I maybe have to listen to a few calls a day, which is 20 minutes versus me physically answering and trying to do speed to lead while trying to manage a team, build and grow a company. So I think that's that's the first place to start at that sub 2 million level. It is, hey, we just need to get some time, turn me into a specialist from a generalist, and then hire another specialist into the call center.
Yeah, I mean that's where we started too. I also think like it's the easiest. It's the easiest place to start because like there's scripts. Um, yeah. Now I will say the like normally the next question that we get is but John, there's an accent and our insert locality is uh racist. Um, and like it is kind of funny because anyone I talk to, I mean, I mean, and every single person is like, I don't think that would land here. And it's like everyone's in a totally different city. Like, it's kind of funny. It it reminds me a lot of like in the mid uh 2010s, every you know, flat rate was like new, and everyone was like, that won't work here, that won't work in my market, and um it's like I think it will. Uh, but yeah, I I think like you're gonna be fine. Um, you can optimize specifically around accent. Uh like for us, it is a big part of the hiring process. Like, is someone um like are they uh uh fluent? Are they fluent in English? And like are they clear sounding? Um, but you can really optimize around that a lot. So for us, uh honestly, you wouldn't even notice. Um we have three recruiters that are full-time, Abby, Diane, and Krissa, and uh they're amazing and they're all offshore. And when technicians come in, they ask for to see Abby or Krissa or Diane because they think that they're in office. So you really can't tell at all. And that's in the recruitment side, but we do the same in call center. Um, hey, I talked to so and so. So you could optimize around accent, and it's really not it's really not a big deal. So I I think call centers, yeah, easy, you're right, because there's scripting and you can optimize around accent.
Yeah, I definitely agree. So I think that's the first place, and I think that there's a few hires in there. Um, because that's the first one. And and a lot of times what we get we get the question we get is as well, um, hey, we don't have enough inbound calls to keep this person busy. Yes. And don't get me wrong, I'm not saying, hey, turn this person into a generalist and have them do everything because um obviously doesn't work, but in the real world, yeah, um, like there if there is additional time, uh, we we initially had our CSRs doing warranty in in entry. We had them doing some light admin tasks. Uh, we had them starting do outbounding, like the start of our outbounding campaign came from them. It was, hey, like we can call out and try and book these classes. Alex is a beast. Yeah, Alex is awesome. Um, so yeah, Alex is my uh CSR. She's been with us for three years. Uh started off, and she she's bought like a bunch of laundromats and Airbnbs, and she's she's a baller, she's a baller. Um still and and she like she's part of the family. Like, we're we're gonna try to fly her out this year to the US ignorance. Oh, yeah. So yeah, that'd be fun. Um so all that being said, like great place to start for the sub 2 million, but then you start getting into like the next range, which is that that two to five million range, where you you might have some intro CSR people, you might have some people doing outbounding. Uh, and I think this range is where you start looking at, hey, we can actually afford, right? Because it's affordability to split up our CSR dispatch team.
Yeah.
And I think this is huge because a lot of times, right, in the even even kind of even earlier than two to five, like you could really start closer to two, where normally you couldn't afford that. Now you have the ability to have somebody focused on purely um like dispatching for revenue purposes and and driving the boat. And and so what we found is that if if you can get somebody solid into the dispatching around that two million mark who's growing with the company, help building those systems and that dispatch muscle, it is extremely valuable to split that position up early for you know 600 bucks a week. Like that's crazy. Yeah, like can that's one as one call moved into the right spot, pays the ROI on that entire person for that entire week.
I agree. Um, so I'm just gonna give like a succinct list for everyone of all the roles that we've done. If anyone has questions on this, feel free to throw them inside chat. But um it's uh call center, like CSRs, inbound and out, dispatch, install coordination. And install coordination is like scheduling permits, handling deposit, sort of helping financing move along if you don't have that role yet. Uh purchasing, like someone places an order, our purchasers go source it. Um trying to think if that's it on that side of the house. A few folks in marketing, like our daily call board managers, like they're reporting on it, they're turning off and on LSA or Angie or whatever.
Uh those are offshore uh I think it's important there though to make sure to distinguish that they're usually coordinators, they're not the ones doing the marketing. Like somebody else is in charge of marketing. If you hire someone to do your Facebook marketing for you, it we've never seen success. I I people have, I mean, more power to you. I have tried and I can't get it.
Well, I think you need to know what you're hiring. So I I'll I'll get into that. I'll get into that after because I think that's actually a really good point.
But I think the safe bet the safe bet is a coordinator. So having somebody manage um managing your marketing department while this person is focused more on turning on and off systems, tracking KPIs for marketing, so that you know that you're actually getting value out of your marketing. And that's a huge step.
Yeah, that is. Uh inside uh inside HR, we have three recruiters, and then I think I named the accounting team. I think your call out uh is a good point. Um so the way what offshoring forced us to do uh was we had to get better as a as a business, uh, which I think is good. Where um, you know, this might resonate with some folks. I know this is what it felt like for us, but uh we used to just sort of like hire because of a pain point, like, hey, it's busy season and we're super um, we're super like slammed, and we're just concerned about that. And so we would just go hire someone and we didn't have the right process inside call center or dispatch or marketing or accounting to like train them properly. So it the whole idea of how we well, how we used to train before we really like took offshore to the next level was we'd hire someone and they would do like a res a desk side ride along for like two weeks. Like, hey, here's my new dispatcher. You're gonna sit next to this dispatcher for two weeks. And learn the job. And that's not a training program. That's not a process. That's not scripting. That's not like standard operating procedures. That's a desk side ride-along. So when we went off shore, that was our biggest pain point is we didn't have, we didn't, we hadn't yet put the work in on standard operating procedures or like the guide to booking a call. And like when we first wrote it, it was like 80 pages, which is kind of funny. I think it's down to like 20. We made it like way simpler, just like control F, find your way through it. Um, but we hadn't yet put in that work of like, hey, here's how you book a service Titan call. Here's a video on it, here's the written description, here's the standard operating procedure, here's the job types, here's what fits inside those job types. So it takes a lot of work um to like hold that person accountable, which actually I think David just asked this, but David asked, how do you come up with the correct processes in-house in order to set up your offshore talent success? The way I would think about this, and the way that we did think about it, is we actually built these systems not with offshore. So if just ignore the word offshore for a second, imagine remote. You're working with somebody two states away from wherever you are. They can't sit desk side with your CSR, right? Like remove the language and the non-US and just remove all the other friction from this sort of thought process. If someone is two states away, how are you going to train them on your call booking process? And so that's the that's the experiment that we had to go through. Is the first time we tried with offshore, that's totally where we flopped. Is our processes weren't locked in on call taking, our job types were really bad, and we just hadn't yet put in that work. So we actually had to let them go. And then we had to bring on US remote because um, I don't know if you remember this, but back it was like April 2020. So like in Ohio, we weren't allowed to go to the office. Uh so it had to be remote, if anyone's like wondering. Uh, we didn't have a choice. So we got someone in Minnesota and we got someone in Pennsylvania, I think. So it they had to be remote, and we had no other option but to figure out how to build a remote call taking process. Um, so David, that's sort of the how is we really didn't have any other choice and just sort of ignore the offshore component. If they're in a different state, what would you do?
To help you guys um understand this as well, I think that there's two sides to the actual SOP. So John hit the nail on the head on one of them. There's the there's the technical, right? It's like, how do you enter this into this? How do you book a call through an estimate? How do you do X, Y, and Z? And that's really straightforward. Uh, it becomes really straightforward, especially to as you start turning them into specialists. Like your only job is to take these calls in and book them. So that makes sure, right, that there's like 10 things they have to do. If you try to spread that out too much, that's where a lot of people get overwhelmed is like, hey, they have to do this, this, this, this, and that. You have like a hundred. You need to condense that down to like what is your actual job and what are you doing? That's the technical side. The next part, which I think is the other difficult part, which took us a decent amount of time to figure out, was that uh what I call like the guardrails of the position. So if you try to take and do an SOP for every single situation that's ever going to come up in a in a call center situation, you're you're never gonna be able to do it. It just like a 90-page document. It would be a 90-page document.
So we actually, it was kind of funny. We we went so overboard. At one point, we had 75 job types, which had the opposite effect. Like it used to take us 12 minutes to book a call. And when you start like tracking like time to book, like 12 minutes is a long time. For me, if I'm gonna be on the phone with someone for 12 minutes, you better be my best friend or my wife, not my plumber, right? So, like, yeah, so 12 minutes is a long time. So we had to, we actually went from like 12 minutes, I think we're down to like three and a half, but we went from 90 job types to 12 or nine or something.
So that's part of it, simplifying the process. The other side to it, which I found extremely, extremely useful, is that there's a generalization behind or like a thesis for your company behind every situation. So who are you culturally to allow to empower your team to make good decisions? And so what we found is very effective, um, Amanda and David, is like specifically we give them situations in our training guide, like in this situation, you do this, in this situation you do this. And what you'll start to notice, and what they start to notice, is themes and patterns, right? Yeah. We are going to always book for value. So, like in three different situations, yeah, there's an after hours uh service call. What do you do? It's a P1. What do you do? So we are going to book for value. We will most likely book that call today, even though it's after hours because it's worth $60,000. And so that situation gets stuck in their head. And now they understand, okay, in most situations where we're focusing on value, I'm going to optimize for value. And so you start to put these guardrails in place from like a case study perspective.
Like in this situation, we do this, in this situation, we do this. And so after about 20 or 30 of those, most people can gather what you're trying to do as a company. And they will naturally make decisions based on those principles that you put in pay place from the situational case studies. And so that's what I would focus on is not try to give every single situation, but try to get situations and training and um items in there that are focused around like what you you want them to do and how you want them to come up with the answer. So it's uh, Amanda, so like for the dispatcher, same thing, like making sure that, hey, you have a situation where this call and this call, this one's closer, but this one's more valuable. We will do this, and this is why. And then as you start to build that, hopefully the understanding uh that they gain is that, hey, we're we're we're dispatching for dollars, not for efficiency. Um, but if we can get both, we'll take that instead. So that's what we found to be very effective is is a lot of situational um case studies and training uh with a smaller SOP around like this is actually exactly how you have to do the technical.
Have you ever bought enterprise level software and realized that managing it really just became a full-time job? Well, that's pretty much exactly why my restoration business switched over to Field Pulse. We were tired of software that promised efficiency, but came with endless training sessions, onboarding, and frustrated text. And using it began to feel like it was a job all on its own. Field Pulse was built for owner operators who don't want more dashboards. They need scheduling, invoicing, and job tracking, and they need it all to live in one place without the chaos or the learning curve. Field Pulse is simple to roll out, it's easy for your team to actually use, and it was 75% cheaper than the other Titans of software we were using. Right now, if you book a demo with Field Pulse, you'll get an exclusive partner offer. It's 20% off an eligible annual subscription and 50% off premium support for your first year. If your software upgrade has turned into a time suck, it might be time to make the move. Book a demo with Field Pulse and see if it's a better fit.
When you go to write a SOP uh standard operating procedure, um I find the easiest way to do it, uh, which I'm all about the easiest way, is you get on Loom or you zoom and screen record. You just come up with some way to screen record. Uh so you get on your computer, you screen record for whatever period of time. It can be, I mean, I've I've we have recorded some screens for the whole day. Like you do have to notify, there's laws about this, so like fair warning. Um, you do have to notify the the team if you like, hey, we're monitoring this computer, but you you can record the screen as they're performing tasks, and then you can just take the video and upload it into Claude or Chat GPT, and it will actually just here's a standard operating procedure. Like, here's the task that they performed. Um, so that's what we've started doing in the last year or so. And Loom, I think, does it automatically? Like you can just go, it's lo-o-m.com. You just screen record, you can talk through, like, hey, now you go do this, now you go do this, and then that turns into a checklist or a standard operating procedure or whatever. Um, I used to find those were very, very time consuming and very hard for me to make. So I looked for the easiest way, which was screen recording and then feeding it to Chat GPT. Hey, chat, what did I do?
Watch this video for me and write out the SOP.
Tell me what I did.
Yeah.
Uh, but yeah, I found that that's very helpful. We used to have to really like intellectually walk through like what we were doing, but now you can just screen record it and ship it off to chat. Or Claude. Okay.
Um, so for the most part, uh the way we see things now, I think the way you see things now too is like unless you're a thought leader for your department, um, if you're like if if you're following a checklist, like install coordination, like purchasing, if you're if it's a checklist, we are we are aiming at uh optimizing offshore first. So today we think of ourselves as like offshore first, offshore offshore native. Okay. Um so as you think about it, some some ways that other people have used it, and then we can sort of open it up for some live QA. We have some live examples too. Some ways uh some other folks have used it. Like we have friends that have a controller offshore. Personally, I would not do that. Um, but like some people have. Um I know, like if I think the general idea is like, are you a remote first company or are you not a remote first company? Uh can you pull that off? Can you not? Do you need thought leadership in office? Personally, like my controller, I rely on for thought leadership, so that'd be a real challenge. And for the most part, you can most of the day-to-day activities you can bring on, and it does relieve a ton of bandwidth from your talented team members. So that's been the big win for most of our teams is like, hey, HR, she's a lot going on. We can support her with we can afford to support her with three people, whereas we could not afford that uh otherwise. Um, so she gets really supportive, she keeps to get get gets to keep doing great work, um, which is awesome. What live examples do you have?
I think that's across the board too. That's from marketing. Your marketing person has support, your HR person has support, your jobs coordination people, your warehouse have support. And so, like, that's that's the key at the end of the day is that you're able to drive additional support functions that you wouldn't normally be able to do. Um that's why it's so valuable for um all companies, but in my opinion, specifically smaller companies, because you can when you're looking for leverage against the big guys, like that's how you get the leverage, that's how you get the resources.
Yeah.
Uh and and you know, to be honest with you, John, I think that the focus um at the end of the day is hey, we've talked about AI, we've talked about offshore and like you need some kind of leverage, whatever that leverage is, um, to to grow and to continue to fight in this um in this market. And so, like that, whatever it is, I don't care if the answers, I want everybody to win. But like that's how you should be looking at it is hey, can I automate this out? If the answer is no or it's not that great, hey, can we offshore this out? That's how we look at it. And I run an offshoring company, like I'm more than happy to say that. Um, so focusing on like, hey, how do we make this process the best process possible? And a lot of times that's gonna be offshore.
Um, all right. Anyone, if you have any questions, we hit we'll like sort of enter some QA here. Otherwise, we'll give some tactical examples on uh roles that we brought on and like when.
So I think this is a great one. Michael wrote, how do you prevent people from working multiple jobs? That's always a concern. And you know, admittedly, we've hired people who've worked multiple jobs and had to let them go because of that. It's it's definitely an issue with the overseas hiring team. And what ends up happening is that if if they're able to work multiple jobs, that's a function of the ownership team or the management team not creating and managing KPIs for that person. Right. So if you have, for example, uh a CSR uh that you want to make sure it's not working two jobs, like the answer is hey, they need to be doing uh a hundred calls a day or 80 calls a day. Um, and you need to be able to manage and track that because at 80 calls a day, in or out, um, taking just upped that.
It was we ours was 80 calls a day for like two years, and then two months ago we upped it to 100. And it's been good. It was kind of funny. Uh a metric that we track is average time on the phone per day per CSR. And uh I think we aim at 360 minutes. I want to say that that's right. Um and we just we just uh went up to 100 calls, and like last week it came up in our L10 because time on phone has been very consistent. It's been like 330 to 350 minutes for like a year and a half. Uh, but like it's a key metric for us because it's an activity metric. Like number of calls is helpful, but like number of minutes is helpful. And anyways, it just went up to 420. And I was like, what the hell happened, Lori? And she's like, oh, we went from 80 calls expectation to 100. Boom, here we are. Um, yeah, uh Dan or Amanda, I guess, to answer your question, yeah, 100 inbound plus outbound. Yeah. When you activate outbound, the ability to outbound, there's never an excuse to not hit call numbers because if you only get 10 inbound, no one in the world can stop you from doing 90 outbound. So here's the list. Go call.
We do the same thing. Here's the list, go call, take a look at the board, what's empty in what service, how far out, three-day call board. If this is empty, your job is to fill the three-day call board with maintenance. Here's the script, here's the list, go.
I agree with Jack. Um like, are we tracking KPIs? Because if we are tracking minutes on phone or number of calls, it probably is harder to do. But that's for like call center for accounting. It is a little bit more nuanced. I am generally open to two-way zooms, I don't really mind that at all. Uh honestly, I think it might help. Um, but uh so I think two-way zooms are fine. But I do think like generally, activity metric should get you there. A staff accountant is the one that's probably the hardest one because it's like measured by uh like completion. Like how are daily is your is your cash racks done? And yeah.
Yeah, and at that point, you know, uh to be honest, there's some leeway, I think, with working two jobs in that. Like if you can actively get your work done, I know this is probably not a uh a uh thing that people enjoy hearing from me, but like we we care a lot less about that position um just because like hey, if if we are have our purpose.
Yeah, Charlene's awesome though. Yeah, she does have a great accountant.
I'm not worried about uh her at all because she's got a full workload. Um but honestly, yeah, like that's that's huge, is is activity-based. And then, you know, the other part though, for like for positions like um uh like job coordination, there's actually additional benefit too. Like there's a lot of conversations that happen between your salespeople and your warehouse that there's actually a benefit to having somebody being able to overhear those calls, like they were in the bullpen with them. So like there is a benefit to that outside of just like, hey, I want to make sure they're not working two different jobs.
Yeah. Ross, uh, Ross has a great question. Uh from a culture perspective, are there any specific um are there any specific tactics you deploy to retain top offshore talent and or best practices on training domestic employees on how to interact with offshore staff? So two different items there. Um I'll hit the first one and then Jack, maybe you can hit the second one. But first one, um for the most part, when you're walking with offshore, when you're working with offshore, it's kind of like working with like if you ignore the offshore component and just imagine remote, two states away, remote, they are likely working in their home. So what typically uh the best way to do is like frequent communication, daily check-ins, like you cannot communicate enough with them. If you think about how many, how many at bats I get a day to communicate with someone, if they're in the same building as me, I can probably say hey to the same person like 15 times in a day. That's totally normal. Whereas when you're not in the same room as them, it is much more complicated. So I think from specific tactics, the teams that have the highest performing. So we have like uh eight teams with offshore, and two or three of them struggle, and the other ones just do awesome. And the ones that do awesome, they have daily huddles, they have daily measurements that they're holding their team to, uh, daily check-ins, weekly one-on-ones. They just run a really good team. They're very effective leaders of that team. Um, and the the teams that struggle don't do that. Like they're inconsistent with their their daily huddles, they don't have tight metrics that they hold their teams to, and we're coaching them on that. But uh really it's like it's specific leadership from that leader, is uh what I find to to work the best.
Yeah, I mean, we we say three times a day. It's like check in in the morning, check in before they leave, and check in sometime midday. So even if it's just like they're isolated team members. Yeah, they're isolated team members. Um, but like you'll find that if they're doing like if you build the culture around and do and we're all doing our job, um, it's very easy. It it's like, hey, what what's the on what's on the schedule for today during the the morning check-in? Sweet, it's this yeah, at the end of the day, hey, what's on the schedule for tomorrow? Like it doesn't have to be crazy, you're not doing anything wild. It's just, hey, what's going on today? What's going on tomorrow? And then hey, in the middle of the day, do you need anything? How's it going? We see it seems like we're behind, seems like we're on task, whatever that may be.
So for marketing, they touch base three times a day. They go over the call board, they go over spend, they go over activities that we're performing. So, like, hey, okay, I'm gonna turn off Angie, I'm gonna turn on Angie. I'm talking to call center about outbounding, I'm messing around with LSA. Uh, our call board looks great. But yeah, they check in three times a day, and it's very like metric driven, but it's also like it's a chance to check in. Um, but I think in general, to retain top offshore, very frequent check-ins, a lot of one-on-ones in a tight selection of KPIs. Like, are you really managing that team to KPIs? And this is back to my point maybe 20 minutes ago. When we went offshore, we ran a better business because we had to run a better business. We had to figure out KPIs and lead people to them. We had to run better one-on-ones, we had to run better daily huddles because the team needed it for us to continue to run.
Yeah, we also generally don't have an issue with um retain retention of overseas talent just because like the the opposite problem, the benefit into the US uh dollars so so strong. Um, like I said, Alex has been able to buy multiple Airbnbs and uh a laundromat uh with the funds that Rabbit has paid her. So it's it's awesome, mutually, mutually beneficial um to a very high level. Um and but the question you answer asked a really good question, Ross, is how do you get your team to buy in as well? And this is extremely difficult, in my opinion. And I've had this conversation a few times now with with people. We are fiercely um, we fiercely defend our overseas team because in in the environments at which we find ourselves, high stress environments, um, they're making decisions based on things that I've given them, directives that I've done, um, themes and motives that I've put in place. And so if somebody has an issue with somebody's overseas, it's generally based on my SOP or my problem. So I will go to that at any given time for my overseas team. Uh and there is a cultural shift that has to take place because uh how am I I'm trying to put this in the way since this is recorded to uh to be nice, but people tend to like to complain and they are very easy to blame. Yes, they're easy to blame because they're not local. They don't have to face them at the water cooler tomorrow, they don't have to see them. So they're a very easy team to blame. So we do some really big deep dives on if the actual issue is them or if this is just another complaint point. Um, but over time you'll find that uh with proper communication, utilizing them to communicate directly to technicians, that uh, and then the explanation on the back end is like, hey, we can actually raise technician pay because we are reducing costs overhead in the office. And so after a couple, it took a couple months, but after a couple months, and and a few bag bad eggs were released from the company, not on the overseas side, on the technician side, um, we had extreme buy-in. Like all of our team loves our overshore team. They they're on call for our meetings, they're on calls for our you know company-wide stuff. So that we don't seem to have any issues now. There was an issue at one point with that, and we um not only me now, but the entire team is fiercely def uh fiercely defends our overseas staff.
Yeah, I think for us it was similar.
Um Well, everyone's mad at a dispatcher, right? Because you have to oh, it's six PM and you're sending me an hour away. It's like, yeah, we're gonna be mad whether it's a lot of people.
I had the same conversation, and our dispatcher is like The Swedish lady. Yeah.
And someone was mad at me yesterday. And I was like, why are we mad about her? And she sits in an office like 40 feet away. So yeah. Yeah. But yeah, you can manage through it. I would say in general, like, are we doing a good job? Are we setting our technicians up for success? It'll be a bigger problem if we do a bad job and we don't set techs up for success. So Jack's saying he fiercely defends them, but it sounds like it's because they're doing a good job. You do have to listen to the team when they're not doing a good job and you have to manage it tightly to KPIs. There was a period of time early on in the process when we weren't as tight on our processes, our scripting, and our job types, where um we were not setting our team up for success. So you just have to really like be fluid as you work through it and make sure you're continuing to improve um your processes as you drive this.
Yeah, but I mean that's that's a function of your SOPs. They're not either they're not following your SOPs, which is a completely different issue, or your SOPs are having issues. And so that's a function, like that's management's fault, not overseas fault. So I think that's a really key distinction to make is like when you do this deep dive into the issue. Is it is it your fault personally take the responsibility, or is it like, hey, they missed they they missed this vastly because of a cultural difference?
Yeah. Uh Jared asked, How do you calibrate pay levels base versus uh base versus comp? Um yeah, how do we do that? Uh so we have pay scales that we put in place a while ago. I want to say I mean, well, you do this more than I do.
Yeah, I mean, so there there's uh it it depends on position. Um, but what what we found in general, not the calibrating of pay levels, but base versus comp just to start the easy conversation, is everybody does better on a commission structure, of course, right? Like it helps. That being said, like it isn't always necessary with overseas. It does, you know, influence behavior. That being said, like the influencing factor is the fact that you're gonna make ten dollars an hour US in a uh region where like that puts you in the top five percent of your country. Um, like that's extremely motivating to hold and keep that job. Uh plus there's no entitlement. Uh we don't have there, there's not like the same kind of US um attitude issues you find. Um, so like that's the first part. Though that being said, like you know, commission structure is always helpful um just because it encourages people to do certain incentives. And then in terms of like how do you calibrate pay levels? I mean, it's generally position-based and country-based. Yeah. Um, but you know, a good rule of thumb is you can find somebody for call center uh six to ten globally. Pretty pretty straightforward. Um, if you go above 10, like you're talking about if somebody's asking for that, they better be very good, like fully understand your service type in CRM, and then they should be going way above and beyond to be able to build those. So um, for example, Alex, who's one of our been with us for three years, our absolute killer. She's actually the manager in the department. I think she makes 13.
I think most of our call centers, we're like 10 to 12, like commission all in.
Yeah, there's probably I mean base level, but there's probably some commission on top of that for sold memberships and stuff like that.
Yeah. And then most of our other roles, I would say like 10, 10's a good 10 to 12 is a good number to pace for. When we budget for it, Jared, uh, if this is helpful, we think anywhere from like depending on like the complexity of the role, 16, 1700 to our highest is like 2700. So you call it 22. Um but like the simpler the role, the lower the comp. So like marketing coordinator tends to be simple. CSR, uh, we do commissions, so they do tend to make a bit more. Uh people in our accounting team making the mid-2s. Um recruitment's probably around there too. Uh, but as we think about budgeting, uh call it call it two.
Yeah, I mean, recruitment has a has a unique set point as well, but just because they need to have really good English to that, there's no right, there's no discrepancy.
So, like that's basically the better the language, the higher the comp. Like that's an easy way to think about it because they've spent a lot of time working on that. Um, but yeah, the the better they're the more clear their English, the higher compensation they command. And then obviously, like education too. So as you go, if you as you step into purchasing or accounting or marketing, like if like we have accountants. Um, so like how you think about that, uh like compensation is higher. Yeah, call center, I yeah, I mean call it like sixteen hundred to two thousand. We have a base, we do have a commission, so our call takers, uh US are on commission where it's um small base and then ten bucks a book call. And I think that our offshore is like half. So if US gets 10 bucks a book call, offshore gets five, I want to say. Um, and then they have a base come base compensation.
So pretty meaningful part of their compensation. Yeah, it actually is. Yeah, pretty meaningful part of their compensation is booked call.
It's pretty it's very significant.
Ours is eight to ten, and then they get spiffed based on sold memberships. Um that's good. Which is which is generally pushes our membership program pretty hard. So and that because that's a 28.
10 bucks is meaningful.
Yeah, they they get twenty twenty-eight dollars per membership. So, like oh yeah, they're gonna move. Yeah, so they move memberships. It's like yeah, three or four hours worth of uh labor per membership they sell.
I talk to a ton of home service owners, and if you're anything like the one to five million dollar shops that I know, you're probably getting hammered with AI pitches right now. Most of them sound great until they hit the real world and just completely fall apart. The one that we keep coming back to is Voka. What stands out is they actually understand how contractor businesses operate. This isn't just another AI answering service. Avoca handles inbound calls, outbound follow-ups, texts, web leads, even dispatching, all in one system built specifically for service companies. If you're on Service Titan, then this is a big deal. Their integration is deep, so you're not duct taping together five different tools and hoping that nothing breaks during your busy season. I also respect that they're realistic about AI. When a call needs a human, they've got a 24-7 live transfer built in, so nothing slips through the cracks, and your customers don't get stuck in a bad experience or like an AI loop. Owners using Avoka are seeing hold times basically disappear and booking rates jump, some by 30% or more. If you want an AI partner that actually helps you book more jobs without creating more chaos, this is worth checking out. Book a demo at the link below. Uh yeah, if you need if you need any help, like I'm a resource, Jack's a resource. Jack does run a staffing agency for offshore, it's called Quick Staffers. I think it's quickstaffers.com.
Yep.
Thanks for the shout out. You're welcome. Dude, what if I didn't? Uh, but no, yeah, and if if you need help, um info don't operated, like we can help ping you too. Like we've we're happy to openly share our standard operating procedures. Um, I do think for the most part, if you just like screen record what your team tell your team, talk to them about it. But if you if you screen record uh like booking a job, you will be able to process it. And then once you drill that muscle into your business, the rest of this is pretty straightforward. Thanks, everybody.
Thanks, guys.
