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Smooth Sailing with Offshore Staffing with Brian Hunt · Budget Your Business

• 0:00
  Brian Hunt: At the end of the day, what you're doing is you're taking work off your plate and you're giving it to someone else.
• 0:05
  Brian Hunt: It's not, it's not rocket science, but there is a lot of things that you can do, right and wrong, and then exercise, and a lot of it has to do with you know, really, really being thorough in how you're doing this.
• 0:19
  Brian Hunt: I always, I always, handle it, handle it in the form of a mutual accountability exercise.
• 0:28
  Scott Geller: The podcast for small business owners who want to budget or want to financially plan and budget for every aspect of their business.
• 0:36
  Scott Geller: I'm your host, Scott Geller.
• 0:38
  Scott Geller: Today, I have with me Brian Hunt of Core RPO and we're going to specifically talk about offshoring different business resources.
• 0:48
  Scott Geller: Hello, Brian, Welcome.
• 0:50
  Brian Hunt: Hey Scott, Thanks for having me.
• 0:51
  Scott Geller: So for folks who don't know a lot about you, Brian, can you share with them kind of who you are and what you do?
• 0:58
  Brian Hunt: Yeah, absolutely so.
• 0:59
  Brian Hunt: My background really started in technology.
• 1:02
  Brian Hunt: You know, right out of university I went to work for Deloitte Consulting, did a lot of technology implementation projects of all kinds, didn't really have a specialty or a niche.
• 1:13
  Brian Hunt: I kind of bounced to different types of projects, which was great.
• 1:16
  Brian Hunt: At a young age I got exposure to a lot of kind of different types of businesses, different types of technology.
• 1:21
  Brian Hunt: For some reason I had been engaged with a lot of offshore resources and teams over the years.
• 1:27
  Brian Hunt: So I worked with teams in South America and Central America, a number of teams in India and the Philippines.
• 1:32
  Brian Hunt: So just got exposure to a lot of different cultures, a lot of different business types delivering mostly technology projects offshore.
• 1:40
  Brian Hunt: But a lot of design reviews and a lot of user experience, design work and things like that.
• 1:45
  Brian Hunt: So, yeah, it was a great early on exposure to kind of working with teams offshore and then ran a number of businesses through the early thousands and then really started building a staffing company in 2010 timeframe, worked with a lot of talented people, didn't really have a lot of experience in the industry that I ended up kind of landing in and so relied pretty heavily on the staff that I was working with.
• 2:11
  Brian Hunt: You know, a lot of great people, but we were having challenges growing, you know, just given the climate, hiring people, developing them, training them, making sure they have a similar work ethic as the team that I had, you know, was a challenge.
• 2:24
  Brian Hunt: We were based in Southern California and so, tapping into my knowledge and background with you know, with developing teams offshore, I worked with my existing team and said, hey, let's, you know, let's build a support infrastructure for the overall organization with a team in India.
• 2:41
  Brian Hunt: So that's what we did.
• 2:43
  Scott Geller: So I had did so.
• 2:44
  Scott Geller: I listened to a lot of podcasts myself and I was actually listening to one today, and they had someone on there that was in the staffing space, and during the call he made a comment that he felt that we're at an inflection point where small and medium-sized businesses are hiring offshore, and hiring offshore and near-shore talent is really no longer the exception, it's now becoming more of a norm, and I think he was really focusing more on that small and medium-sized businesses.
• 3:14
  Scott Geller: I'd really love to hear what your opinion is and what's your scene.
• 3:19
  Brian Hunt: Yeah, you know, that's a great point, scott.
• 3:22
  Brian Hunt: It's interesting when I first started developing my team in India, you know I would be reading headlines in the India Times News about the massive investment that major corporations were making into India, hiring 15,000 people over three years.
• 3:38
  Brian Hunt: You know, and if you think about the infrastructure that requires to build that kind of a team, think about the infrastructure that requires to build that kind of a team.
• 3:47
  Brian Hunt: You know they were, you know, lighting up 10,000 square feet of office space every month and filling that every single month just to keep up with the hiring demand.
• 3:56
  Brian Hunt: So the scale that we're talking about was at another level.
• 3:59
  Brian Hunt: Even the company that I was partnering with that I founded, you know we got acquired by Accenture and post acquisition, the team there were a little bit discouraged because they used to have kind of small, you know, kind of special forces size type teams where they would go in and implement projects.
• 4:15
  Brian Hunt: And he said he said now that we're part of Accenture, you know everything that we do it requires an offshore component to it and the minimum ticket price is $5 million.
• 4:26
  Brian Hunt: So just selling their projects into these different organizations at that scale was just a lot more challenging, you know so fast forward and you have all kinds of technology advancements that have come a long way, you know, certainly you know communication across 10,000 miles is no longer an issue.
• 4:44
  Brian Hunt: You know the proliferation of just work from home.
• 4:53
  Brian Hunt: You know online collaboration tools tools like the one we're talking on now became more and more commonplace.
• 4:56
  Brian Hunt: The backbone, the communication backbone, became, you know, more and more solid and reliable in terms of, you know, in terms of internet communications.
• 5:06
  Brian Hunt: The early days that was not the case.
• 5:08
  Brian Hunt: No, it wasn't, no, no.
• 5:10
  Brian Hunt: And even in certain parts of the world, you know you can count on power and communication to going out at least some points, you know, during the rainy seasons or the tsunami seasons or whatever the case may be.
• 5:23
  Brian Hunt: But nowadays, I think people have just become used to it.
• 5:27
  Brian Hunt: And I think there's two differences, just in the way that I've seen things.
• 5:31
  Brian Hunt: When you do things at scale, meaning when the Accentures and the Deloittes and the big project people, the people that are built to deliver on large, complex technical challenges, meaning they've dialed in the processes, they've dialed in the requirements gathering, they know exactly how things are going to work.
• 5:52
  Brian Hunt: I think it's become.
• 5:54
  Brian Hunt: You know what I've learned in those kind of circumstances and those environments.
• 5:59
  Brian Hunt: They still apply to the small business.
• 6:02
  Brian Hunt: There's really no difference whether you have a team of one or a team of one thousand.
• 6:09
  Brian Hunt: You have to be pretty clear about who's doing what.
• 6:12
  Brian Hunt: What's doing what, what are the expectations?
• 6:14
  Brian Hunt: One person's out, you know.
• 6:16
  Brian Hunt: One person's input is another person's output, you know, and you have to make sure that you have a good kind of understanding of how everything flows.
• 6:23
  Brian Hunt: You have to make sure that you have a good kind of understanding of how everything flows, and so you know.
• 6:27
  Brian Hunt: Certainly you can save a lot of money by working with teams offshore.
• 6:31
  Brian Hunt: But more than anything else, I think it's a great exercise for small business owners to really think about what they do, how they do it, and really think through what's the best way to do this.
• 6:43
  Brian Hunt: You know what's the most efficient way to do this.
• 6:46
  Brian Hunt: It's almost like an exercise in an efficiency and an exercise in what's the highest and best use of my time, what's the highest and best use of my team's time, and how can I, how can I create something where my team is going to benefit more from the help of another organization or other team members doing different things?
• 7:09
  Scott Geller: Yeah, brian, I think that's a great point, because most small business owners a lot of them grew from nothing right, so they did everything and they can have a very difficult time of giving things up.
• 7:23
  Scott Geller: One Think about what they should be doing versus what they are doing and, on top of that, just thinking through processes, and it sounds like, if I'm kind of restating what you're saying is all that's kind of needed up front in order for you to succeed in this kind of situation.
• 7:44
  Brian Hunt: Absolutely Sometimes.
• 7:45
  Brian Hunt: It's a real self-reflecting exercise.
• 7:47
  Brian Hunt: It's a real, it's a real almost analytical exercise of what you're doing as a business.
• 7:55
  Brian Hunt: Okay, if you were to take up all the human capital hours that you as a business, a business owner, business manager, whatever the case may be, if you take up all the human capital hours that you're using, how are you using your time?
• 8:09
  Brian Hunt: What is going into the activities that you're doing?
• 8:14
  Brian Hunt: How much interaction are you having with your client base?
• 8:18
  Brian Hunt: What are you producing?
• 8:20
  Brian Hunt: And, more than anything else, what different things can you do to really improve your overall business?
• 8:26
  Brian Hunt: What can you grow and scale?
• 8:28
  Brian Hunt: What parts of this business need to be, you know, scaled so that you can be a more successful, you know, platform or business owner and if you can really, you know, analyze and self-reflect on that.
• 8:42
  Brian Hunt: And it's interesting too, I think people have natural and self-reflect on that, and it's interesting too.
• 8:45
  Brian Hunt: I think people have natural, you know strengths and weaknesses.
• 8:52
  Brian Hunt: You know.
• 8:52
  Brian Hunt: I think certain people, you know, have the gift of connecting with people and their highest and best use of time should be in front of people all day, every day.
• 8:58
  Brian Hunt: I think people other people have, you know, a propensity to.
• 9:01
  Brian Hunt: You know Other people have, you know, a propensity to.
• 9:03
  Brian Hunt: You know communicate regularly, you know through email and responsiveness, and they're on top of whatever the communication may be, some form of communication and fulfillment, and so you have a natural tendency to lean towards the things that you do really, really well.
• 9:21
  Brian Hunt: I can think of a partner who you know, if you send him an email, an hour is not going to go by before he responds to that email.
• 9:28
  Brian Hunt: Right, and he's become, it's become his brand, it's become how his clients come to expect it.
• 9:34
  Brian Hunt: There's responsiveness.
• 9:37
  Scott Geller: There's a basis there, right.
• 9:39
  Brian Hunt: It's an unwritten service level agreement right, that he knows his team knows that if they send him a message, you know an hour is not going to go by without a response and that's part of his brand, you know, and I have another partner over the years who's been his ability to connect with you in person and to gain your confidence and trust and then couple that with an amazing team behind him who can deliver, and that's an amazing team behind him who can deliver and that's an effective you know, but getting that guy to sit down and respond to his emails all that he gets within one hour may or may not be the easiest task for him to do.
• 10:17
  Brian Hunt: So you've got to look at yourself, You've got to look at your own strengths, weaknesses and you've got to understand what you do well and what you need to help with.
• 10:26
  Brian Hunt: And that's an important distinction.
• 10:29
  Scott Geller: You've thrown out a couple of kind of high-level examples of how it can work.
• 10:34
  Scott Geller: So let's say, I'm going through this process and I'm thinking about you know, what do I want to do, what do I not want to do?
• 10:40
  Scott Geller: Where are my strengths, where are my strengths, where are my weaknesses?
• 10:43
  Scott Geller: As I'm going through this, can you maybe walk us through some more specific examples of what can I offshore, what can I outsource my business?
• 10:52
  Brian Hunt: Yeah, I mean you know anything that is not 100% in person, you know customer facing, you know probably has some form of regulatory compliance can be outsourced.
• 11:03
  Brian Hunt: So there's not a lot that cannot be outsourced.
• 11:06
  Brian Hunt: And it's funny too, because when you look at things you have to determine whether or not it should be outsourced.
• 11:12
  Brian Hunt: So it's interesting like take technology I think technology has become some of the easiest to outsource for many organizations, due in large part, I think, because the executive team has traditionally had almost the lowest level of knowledge of that.
• 11:34
  Brian Hunt: You know what I mean.
• 11:35
  Brian Hunt: If you were to take the last, you know 40 years of executives in the C-suite, not many of them started off their career as software developers right.
• 11:44
  Brian Hunt: So to take something that's completely outside of your comfort zone, you know, outside of your core skill sets, and outsource that it's an easy thing to do.
• 11:56
  Brian Hunt: Taking something that's a little bit closer to what you do as a business or it's more core to your business, can be a little bit more do as a business or it's more core to your business can be a little bit more um, a little trickier and a little bit perhaps scarier, right?
• 12:09
  Brian Hunt: So, for example, you know, when we took a large portion of our business and this was in a staffing and recruiting space.
• 12:16
  Brian Hunt: You know, when we outsource the recruiting, at first it's like we are a staffing and recruiting business.
• 12:21
  Brian Hunt: What are we doing?
• 12:22
  Brian Hunt: Outsourcing the, the staffing and recruiting but when?
• 12:25
  Brian Hunt: But when we doing outsourcing the staffing and recruiting, but when you actually look at the business activities or the processes behind it, we didn't really do much outsourcing at all, because here's the way we set it up.
• 12:34
  Brian Hunt: You know, we said, okay, there's kind of high value and low, medium, high, medium, low value tasks right in the recruiting space, and this is true of any business.
• 12:45
  Brian Hunt: So if you look at your business and you kind of break it down into what you do, there's always going to be some high value things and some lower value things.
• 12:52
  Brian Hunt: The high value things in the recruiting space is really connecting with your clients, understanding what they need, understanding the jobs that they have, the team that they have, how this job interacts with that team, the importance of this role within the overall kind of team structure.
• 13:07
  Brian Hunt: Those are high value activities connecting with a candidate, connecting with them to understand their career goals or career objectives, understanding what they're really really good at, where their skills are bad, where their skills are going, some of those things become really, really important activities and I call them the high value activities.
• 13:23
  Brian Hunt: But at the time, if you take a full desk recruiter and really this is recruitment in general 70% of the work is still spent on outbound and reaching out to candidates, picking up the phone, calling them Like guess what?
• 13:39
  Brian Hunt: Even today, it's still a big thing Calling on candidates, emailing candidates, texting candidates, and I consider that a pretty low value activity because you're spending 70 percent of your time reaching out to people that may or may not want to even talk to you.
• 13:54
  Brian Hunt: So it's not a real value add, right, it's, it's a necessary component, and so, in this particular case, what we did was we took one of our, our top recruiting people and and we said, we're going to give you a team of offshore folks and if you are, you know, 20% of that team and they're 80% of that team.
• 14:13
  Brian Hunt: We're going to give you a team of four people and all they're going to do all day long, every day, is find candidates for you to have meaningful conversations with and have good conversations with, and ultimately, he went from you know able to you know talk to five to 10 candidates, submit about five to 10 candidates a week about.
• 14:34
  Brian Hunt: You know 20 to 40 a month and eventually he was increasing his numbers to really connecting with you know sometimes 20 to 40 candidates a week and you know and sending out you know 80 to 160 candidates a month and you know, as a result, he's spending more of his time doing those high value activities and produce, producing more revenue and and and producing more results, and so you know those.
• 15:00
  Brian Hunt: That's the kind of rewarding side of this is when you you start to look at it and you you formulate a plan and then you bring it to fruition and you see the results that come like to you know.
• 15:15
  Brian Hunt: For someone's own production to go from, you know know $500,000 of of you know GP production to you know upwards of $2 million.
• 15:25
  Brian Hunt: That's a.
• 15:25
  Brian Hunt: That's a that's fun for all right.
• 15:28
  Scott Geller: It's great for the company as well.
• 15:29
  Scott Geller: Right, I mean that's great for the company Getting more out of one person well, one person a team but you're you're getting them to deliver even more.
• 15:37
  Brian Hunt: Absolutely, absolutely, and so that's really the beauty of the model.
• 15:42
  Brian Hunt: It's not just in recruiting.
• 15:44
  Brian Hunt: We have a lot of clients that need outbound, inbound management with appointment setting to couple with their closers.
• 15:52
  Brian Hunt: So if you look at your organization, you say I have this guy, he's an amazing closer and he's a great army of one, and we can't seem to bring any other salespeople along to be as good as him.
• 16:03
  Brian Hunt: Well, maybe that guy doesn't need other salespeople.
• 16:05
  Brian Hunt: Maybe that guy needs three or four setters that are just making setting appointments for that guy all day, every day.
• 16:11
  Brian Hunt: He needs to be doing 100% of your revenue instead of 30% of your revenue.
• 16:18
  Scott Geller: Yeah, that's an excellent example of how it can work.
• 16:21
  Scott Geller: And in the multiples, multiple returns on it, what are some of the concerns or possibly even use the word fears that you see of people where they're like, oh no, I can't outsource it.
• 16:34
  Brian Hunt: I think it starts first and foremost with some kind of cultural you know some kind of cultural aspect of it.
• 16:40
  Brian Hunt: I think there's a a bit of a fear of the unknown.
• 16:44
  Brian Hunt: You know it's funny.
• 16:45
  Brian Hunt: There's been a large amount of effort put into, um, uh, the different geographies.
• 16:52
  Brian Hunt: You know the philippines their accents tend to be a little bit, you know, easier to understand, understand Central and South America that's quote-unquote, nearshoring.
• 17:01
  Brian Hunt: That's been a big thing, why I never understood that nearshoring is.
• 17:07
  Brian Hunt: It's nice you're in the same time zone, but it's funny, most of the other areas of the world are perfectly fine.
• 17:16
  Brian Hunt: Working different shifts, in fact, in India we have three shifts.
• 17:19
  Brian Hunt: We have a UK shift, uk-eu shift, we have an Asia shift and a North America shift, and so I think that's the biggest, one of the biggest fears.
• 17:29
  Brian Hunt: It's a kind of a fear of the unknown.
• 17:30
  Brian Hunt: There's some cultural gaps too, like when you start working with someone who's 10,000 miles away, and you know there's different.
• 17:38
  Brian Hunt: You know cultural biases there's different.
• 17:41
  Brian Hunt: You know tendencies, priorities may be different.
• 17:45
  Brian Hunt: We have a number of.
• 17:46
  Brian Hunt: You know I've employed thousands of people in India and you know they're extremely family focused and their faith is important to them, and you know they frequently go on pilgrimages, for, you know, week, two weeks, you know, still on silent retreats, and so it's a big priority for them.
• 18:03
  Brian Hunt: So for them, you know, it's part of their life.
• 18:06
  Brian Hunt: They're going to take time away to do some of this, you know, for themselves and for their family, and so that can be a little bit, you know, foreign at times for someone who doesn't quite.
• 18:14
  Brian Hunt: You know, there's not many people in the United States who are taking two weeks off from work to do a pilgrimage to a temple in Omaha.
• 18:23
  Brian Hunt: Nebraska, but yeah you're right, yeah, frankly, yeah, exactly, taking two weeks out to readjust your priorities and think about life.
• 18:33
  Brian Hunt: So I think some of that I think is natural, is natural, and then I think, once you get past some of that, it's interesting.
• 18:39
  Brian Hunt: Over the years I've built these teams where there's such an intimate knowledge between this person 10,000 miles away that they've never met who they're working with almost every day.
• 18:54
  Brian Hunt: And I've gone back and forth and brought gifts to the team in India and the team in India has brought gifts to the United States.
• 19:04
  Brian Hunt: And it rarely makes sense to, to, to make the journey.
• 19:05
  Brian Hunt: You know it is.
• 19:06
  Brian Hunt: It is two days coming and two days going.
• 19:09
  Brian Hunt: It's a quick flip of the time zone and it is a.
• 19:13
  Brian Hunt: It is not an easy trip, no matter how you skin it, break it up.
• 19:17
  Brian Hunt: So it's not for the faint of heart.
• 19:20
  Brian Hunt: So there's rarely a time where it makes sense to, to kind of get everyone together.
• 19:24
  Brian Hunt: But, um, still, they work together every day.
• 19:26
  Brian Hunt: And you know, once you work through a lot of the early, the early kind of, you know, storming norming, performing typical group dynamics, um, you know, kind of, once you get through those, then it becomes an easier thing to just kind of you know they naturally bond over the, you know the common aspects and just kind of you know getting things done now, brian, thank you for that.
• 19:47
  Scott Geller: Now we've you and I've had a couple conversations and we both sit a little or work a little heavier in staffing.
• 19:52
  Scott Geller: So I'd like to maybe you can share with us why does this specific, why is this specifically beneficial with staffing agencies?
• 20:02
  Brian Hunt: Yeah, I think for a couple of reasons.
• 20:04
  Brian Hunt: It's interesting In the early days of outsourcing specifically around technology, we were outsourcing upwards of a million jobs per year in terms of technology, infrastructure and support, both application and hardware kind of support, building large teams and large systems.
• 20:28
  Brian Hunt: So I think in the early days there was a scale aspect to it, there was a known quantification to it, there was a known quantification to it and I think India in particular became the breeding ground, the kind of ground zero, of supporting technology and infrastructure.
• 20:52
  Brian Hunt: That's why today it's easy to think, oh, just outsource software development to India or outsource, you know, your IT support to India, or if you have an application that you know you need to support from an ongoing perspective, you'll most likely look to India to do that.
• 21:11
  Brian Hunt: So I think there's been some kind of common trends that have led to some natural opportunities.
• 21:17
  Brian Hunt: But that's not the only thing that happens and since then it's become, for example, philippines became a really, really big hotbed for call centers.
• 21:28
  Brian Hunt: There's specific reasons for that English speaking in the Philippines, there's a natural kind of language comfortness to it.
• 21:39
  Brian Hunt: Um, even within india, just, you know people always, you know people always talk about india and they speak hindi.
• 21:46
  Brian Hunt: I don't really.
• 21:47
  Brian Hunt: I don't really speak hindi.
• 21:48
  Brian Hunt: To be honest.
• 21:48
  Brian Hunt: Most of them actually speak their native language.
• 21:50
  Brian Hunt: That that is in common in their, in their region or area, whether they're in kerala or andhra pradesh or you know delhi, or whether whether they speak Punjab or Telugu, or there's like 213 languages in India and even within India there's certain regions where the accent is really really thick and they may speak in a tonality that's faster and it's harder to understand.
• 22:17
  Brian Hunt: So but that's kind of evened out over the years too, and we always have amazing English speakers in India.
• 22:26
  Brian Hunt: But Philippines became kind of like a call center platform and that was a common thing.
• 22:33
  Brian Hunt: Latin America and South America became popular for the nearshore aspect of it.
• 22:38
  Brian Hunt: So if you had to blend the teams or if you hadn't kind of played the teams or you wanted to have teams working to their day.
• 22:43
  Brian Hunt: So you know, I think there's been some natural trends.
• 22:46
  Brian Hunt: You know, people always kind of think that you know something was created in the last you know year or two, but the reality is it's been being created over the last 50 years and there's usually a lot of history behind, kind of why things are the way they are today.
• 23:03
  Brian Hunt: But then again things always change and the world kind of levels out.
• 23:07
  Brian Hunt: Now I'm working with a team in the Philippines to do a lot of finance and accounting work.
• 23:13
  Brian Hunt: I'm working with a team in India to do a lot of outbound calling.
• 23:18
  Brian Hunt: So they're becoming kind of more of the you know the calling call center folks.
• 23:22
  Brian Hunt: And you know, and then you know Latin America tends to lend itself to a lot of the.
• 23:28
  Brian Hunt: You know, if you have a large, you know, spanish speaking audience, you know there may be a reason to you know kind of lean towards you know, that region.
• 23:38
  Brian Hunt: A lot of the British folks are leaning on South Africa as an area where they work with.
• 23:44
  Brian Hunt: It's a similar time zone, you know.
• 23:47
  Brian Hunt: And so there's Eastern Europe became kind of a hotbed for I kind of what I would say advanced technology work.
• 23:56
  Brian Hunt: So if you needed to build a business system, you know, in India would be a great.
• 24:01
  Brian Hunt: But if you needed to engineer a commute computer system, that was kind of a bit, you know, outside of the realm of norm.
• 24:07
  Brian Hunt: A lot of Eastern European engineers were known for being, you know, kind of amazing, you know, through true software more lately as well.
• 24:16
  Brian Hunt: Yeah, yeah.
• 24:17
  Brian Hunt: So so those things never, never, really, you know you.
• 24:20
  Brian Hunt: And then you, like, you dig into why, and then you start looking at geopolitics and you realize well, harkiv that you know, which is a town right in ukraine on the border of russia, was a part of russia, you know, prior to.
• 24:33
  Brian Hunt: You know the, the ussr, and, and that was where all of their top universities were.
• 24:37
  Brian Hunt: So harkiv was like the.
• 24:39
  Brian Hunt: You know where you would have it have.
• 24:41
  Brian Hunt: It was like the Boston of Russia and that's where all the best universities were.
• 24:47
  Brian Hunt: And so there's, you know there's a natural tendency to have tons of amazing engineers in Kharkiv, ukraine.
• 24:54
  Brian Hunt: So there's, you know, and again, kharkiv is an area where, you know, half the people will speak Russian and a lot of them will still speak Ukrainian, you know.
• 25:03
  Brian Hunt: So you know, you look at the history of what and this is an area that I actually almost invested in a software development team in, you know opted to not really go in that direction just because of the geopolitical uncertainty, which was still even pretty obvious that you know everyone talked.
• 25:32
  Scott Geller: Hindsight turned out pretty well on that one.
• 25:34
  Brian Hunt: then yeah, yeah, unfortunately it's uh, you know, and hopefully we can all come to a resolution so one more you've talked about.
• 25:44
  Scott Geller: you're giving some great direction as far as how do I get started, some areas that you to consider, offshoring, and if I'm going through this, I'm going through a planning session or strategic planning session for the business and thinking about, okay, I want to go down the path of offshoring, nearshoring, whatever you want to call it what kind of timeframe should you be thinking about?
• 26:04
  Scott Geller: Like you know, could I put this in place?
• 26:06
  Scott Geller: I'm sure this depends, but could I put this in place in a month, three months, six months?
• 26:11
  Scott Geller: What's maybe some guidelines to think about for timing if you want to go down that path?
• 26:17
  Brian Hunt: You know it can definitely be done in months.
• 26:21
  Brian Hunt: You know 30 to 90 days.
• 26:24
  Brian Hunt: If you haven't seen some success in 30 to 90 days, then you know you're probably not moving in the right direction.
• 26:31
  Brian Hunt: You know it's interesting when you look at the overall kind of work.
• 26:38
  Brian Hunt: A lot of it starts with kind of traditional business consulting type of things.
• 26:43
  Brian Hunt: You know, like look at what your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats are.
• 26:48
  Brian Hunt: You know, look at your overall business process, define what you want it to be, design how it's going to be, build it, test it, deploy it.
• 26:57
  Brian Hunt: Build it, test it, deploy it, like some of these kind of you know projects, like based methods of we are here today and we want to get to there tomorrow.
• 27:07
  Brian Hunt: You know, and if you kind of do the work to look at your organization and kind of where you are as an organization, you can really start to map out okay, this is where we're going, this is how we're going to approach this.
• 27:24
  Brian Hunt: You know, and there's usually some low hanging fruit.
• 27:25
  Brian Hunt: You know there's some areas of the business that maybe are really really weak.
• 27:27
  Brian Hunt: Maybe there's certain areas of the business that if you look at it today, you know this is we're not doing this very, very well.
• 27:31
  Brian Hunt: Maybe we need a partner to come in and help us with X, y and Z, you know, or maybe we need to do a lot in order for us to scale, or not, in order for us to grow.
• 27:40
  Brian Hunt: We have to do this, you know, we have to do more of this and although we can't afford more of this today, how can we do more of this in a more affordable fashion?
• 27:49
  Brian Hunt: You know, that's the, that's the exercise.
• 27:52
  Brian Hunt: That I think is, you know, is important and it shouldn't take, you know, it shouldn't take long, you know.
• 27:59
  Scott Geller: I think some people overthink it, you know at the end of the day, it's like it's harder than it really is.
• 28:04
  Scott Geller: It's going to take longer, but it sounds like it's you could get something in place relatively quickly.
• 28:10
  Brian Hunt: Yeah, at the end of the day, what you're doing is you're taking work off your plate and you're giving it to someone else.
• 28:16
  Brian Hunt: It's not, it's not rocket science, but there is a lot of things that you can do right and wrong in that exercise, and a lot of it has to do with you know, kind of you know, really, really being thorough in how you're doing this.
• 28:32
  Brian Hunt: I always handle it in the form of a mutual accountability exercise.
• 28:40
  Brian Hunt: So, for example, if this is a business process and we have to do something for you, right, you wouldn't have hired us to do something.
• 28:49
  Brian Hunt: We're going to do something for you, and then you have to take that and then ultimately do something with it.
• 28:55
  Brian Hunt: In a lot of cases, there's never a business process that just ends, right.
• 28:59
  Brian Hunt: It's a cyclical thing.
• 29:00
  Brian Hunt: Even at the end of the day, at the end of the quarter, right, when you have produced financials in your world and the quarter is done, you get, then you got to close the quarter and then you start planning the next quarter, right.
• 29:12
  Brian Hunt: So there's a.
• 29:12
  Brian Hunt: You know there's a.
• 29:13
  Brian Hunt: There's a cyclical nature to all of it, and so I always look at it in terms of what are we accountable for?
• 29:19
  Brian Hunt: What are you expecting from us?
• 29:21
  Brian Hunt: We're going to meet either monthly, biweekly or weekly to make sure we're on track, and then what are you doing with that?
• 29:29
  Brian Hunt: We can't.
• 29:30
  Brian Hunt: Whatever we do is not going to be worth anything unless it is benefiting your business and you're doing something with it.
• 29:37
  Brian Hunt: And that's an important kind of aspect to understand.
• 29:40
  Brian Hunt: Is we help our clients with that by really kind of saying what are you doing here?
• 29:46
  Brian Hunt: And if we're going to do X, y, z more, what are you going to do with that?
• 29:50
  Scott Geller: Yeah, and Brian, I think we could spend another half hour talking about the do's and don'ts, but I want to respect your time and then we're kind of running up on our time here, Sure.
• 30:05
  Scott Geller: So I like to wrap up all my shows with one to three immediate takeaways that our listeners can literally put into place as they turn off the podcast.
• 30:08
  Scott Geller: So it could be something you already mentioned.
• 30:10
  Scott Geller: It could be.
• 30:10
  Scott Geller: You know, you sound like you've been engaged and work with a lot of businesses over time.
• 30:16
  Scott Geller: It could be about that, or even you know part of the offshoring.
• 30:20
  Scott Geller: But what can you share with us today?
• 30:24
  Brian Hunt: Yeah, one of the things that I've always been a big proponent of, whether I was consulting or running businesses myself, was understanding benchmarks.
• 30:34
  Brian Hunt: Everybody loves to think that their business is different, but it's really not.
• 30:38
  Brian Hunt: When you boil down every business, whether you're selling a product or you're selling a service, there's some form of revenue, there's some kind of cost to sales that creates profit.
• 30:49
  Brian Hunt: The profit has some sort of a benchmark margin that should be good, right.
• 30:54
  Brian Hunt: So in the staffing world it's a 30% gross margin and that produces a gross profit, which then you got to use that gross profit to do operational things like accounting and marketing and sales and your management team.
• 31:12
  Brian Hunt: And so what are those benchmarks?
• 31:16
  Brian Hunt: Is marketing two to three percent of your revenue?
• 31:20
  Brian Hunt: Is your accounting team?
• 31:21
  Brian Hunt: You know, two percent of your your revenue?
• 31:25
  Brian Hunt: Are the, you know?
• 31:26
  Brian Hunt: Is your sales team?
• 31:27
  Brian Hunt: You know four to five percent.
• 31:29
  Brian Hunt: Is your executive team no less than you know?
• 31:32
  Brian Hunt: you know 10 percent of your your, you know, are you producing a net profit or an EBITDA of about 10%?
• 31:39
  Brian Hunt: Is that good for your industry?
• 31:41
  Brian Hunt: Should your EBITDA as a percentage of revenue be 20%?
• 31:45
  Brian Hunt: And once you know your benchmarks, that's when you, if you know your benchmark, it gets your peers.
• 31:50
  Brian Hunt: And there's all kinds of different industry associations, things like that, and you can kind of go and look at and there's certainly all kinds of consultants that can help you know with that.
• 31:58
  Brian Hunt: But at a high level, if you know your general benchmarks, then you can start seeing where you're red, green and yellow.
• 32:05
  Brian Hunt: If you're really out of whack on something, you need to fix it, you need to adjust it, you need to adjust how you're doing it, what you're doing it with, and and work on that.
• 32:16
  Brian Hunt: So I'm a huge fan of that it.
• 32:22
  Brian Hunt: It tends to lend itself to getting the business into a healthy you know healthy state of mind.
• 32:24
  Brian Hunt: I've run so many of my own businesses and with partners and you know we, you know we've we've made aggressive decisions, we've made conservative decisions, We've made decisions that have hurt us and decisions that have helped us.
• 32:39
  Brian Hunt: And so sometimes getting back to those benchmarks is, you know, is a.
• 32:44
  Brian Hunt: Numbers really don't lie.
• 32:46
  Brian Hunt: And although you think this is an amazing opportunity and you want to get aggressive, you know, if it takes your benchmarks out of line, then you know.
• 32:54
  Brian Hunt: So that's, I think, that, the number one aspect.
• 32:57
  Brian Hunt: And then once you really start to understand your you know, your, the benchmarks of your different areas, then you can really dig in and kind of help improve those areas.
• 33:05
  Brian Hunt: And that's where outsourcing can be a tool for that, because if you're, you know, your accounting team today is kind of all on shore if it's not scaling, for example, might be a great you know source of you know opportunity to kind of bring in a team to augment that.
• 33:19
  Brian Hunt: It doesn't have to be a full team.
• 33:20
  Brian Hunt: It's like I need somebody to handle all my AP and AR, you know, and so we're going to hire a couple people to do that.
• 33:25
  Brian Hunt: Or, you know, some people too think they have to do this all you know encompassing thing.
• 33:30
  Brian Hunt: It's just like no, who has who's the biggest bottleneck in the company and how can we help them?
• 33:40
  Scott Geller: You know, that's another way to look at it.
• 33:41
  Scott Geller: That's great perspective and I love that.
• 33:43
  Scott Geller: Thank you, Brian.
• 33:43
  Scott Geller: The other ask we always have is a favorite podcast or book or something you'd recommend.
• 33:48
  Brian Hunt: Yeah, you know, I think you know and I'm impressed we've gotten through the whole 30 minutes without talking about AI.
• 33:55
  Brian Hunt: But you know, I am actually a big believer, big proponent and a big supporter of incorporating AI.
• 34:03
  Brian Hunt: I think AI is going to be a massive game changer for the entire world and it's certainly a game changer even for our team.
• 34:10
  Brian Hunt: My team uses it all the time and I think it's an ultimate leveling of the playing field.
• 34:16
  Brian Hunt: So, but along those kind of similar lines, there's a book that I like to recommend.
• 34:22
  Brian Hunt: It's called why the Right Brain People Will Rule the World and it's talking about the creativity needed to synthesize all the things that are at our disposal right now.
• 34:33
  Brian Hunt: So it talks about there's an abundance of resources, there's a proliferation of automation and things that you can do automatically through AI and all that.
• 34:42
  Brian Hunt: And then there's a huge workforce in Asia, a growing workforce, and certainly in certain countries, maybe not in all countries.
• 34:51
  Brian Hunt: So it talks about the three A's abundance, automation and Asia.
• 34:57
  Brian Hunt: You know, automation and Asia and the right brain people are able to synthesize those three things into something that is more efficient and more effective.
• 35:07
  Brian Hunt: And the days of the logical kind of like programmatic type of work.
• 35:12
  Brian Hunt: Mind necessarily isn't as, necessarily as important as the creativity of kind of synthesizing all these things Take this and do this, pull this over here and pull that together.
• 35:21
  Brian Hunt: So anyway, I thought it was an interesting book because it just talks about how, the perspective of how and why the world is changing, from a business perspective.
• 35:30
  Scott Geller: Well, thanks, brian.
• 35:31
  Scott Geller: And no, we didn't get to AI and we can, but we'll have an episode coming up as the first episode targeted to AI, so feel free to hop on and take a listen to that.
• 35:40
  Brian Hunt: Perfect.
• 35:41
  Scott Geller: Well, this has been really insightful.
• 35:43
  Scott Geller: Where can people learn more about you online?
• 35:47
  Brian Hunt: Yeah, LinkedIn I'm Brian Hunt on LinkedIn.
• 35:50
  Brian Hunt: Corerpocom CoreBPOcom is another one.
• 35:54
  Brian Hunt: I think we're probably going to be consolidating our brands into support BPO, because we're doing all kinds of business functions for our customers, not just recruiting.
• 36:03
  Brian Hunt: We kind of started off as recruiting, which is a great basis because we have a constant need to find and bring in more talent.
• 36:11
  Brian Hunt: We're good at it.
• 36:13
  Scott Geller: Perfect.
• 36:13
  Scott Geller: Well, thanks a lot for joining me today.
• 36:16
  Brian Hunt: Excellent Thanks, scott, really appreciate it.
• 36:19
  Scott Geller: All right, folks, that's it for today.
• 36:20
  Scott Geller: If you liked the show or found something useful, then shoot a message to a friend or another business owner so they can benefit from the insight and great recommendations from the guests.
• 36:33
  Scott Geller: I'm Scott Keller and I hope you join me next time for Budget your Business.