How to Scale a Team Rapidly in the Philippines - With Kody Thompson

[00:00:00] So in today’s podcast we’re talking to Kody Thompson from wrkpod. That’s W R K P O D. wrkpod are an outsourcing agency that help you find Filipino workers and what’s interesting about this is the skill set of these Filipino workers can be anything from VAs to bookkeepers to customer support to IT support and the list goes on and on.

So you’re going to find this podcast really interesting because the cost of what you can hire these Filipino workers for in the U. S. UK and Australia is such an advantage and we’re also going to talk about some of the challenges that you might face when you start hiring abroad. So have a listen to this and hopefully it gets your mind thinking.

Can you scale your team quickly and for a much more cost effective way than what you might be doing on shore? . Let’s see what tips you can pick up.

Greg: Kody Thompson, welcome to the podcast, great to have you here mate.

Kody: Thanks, Greg. Pleasure to be here.

Greg: Awesome to have you here. And it’s really interesting, this podcast, isn’t it? I’m here in Sydney, [00:01:00] listeners in the UK and Australia and some in the US. And where are you, Kody?

Kody: Northern New South Wales. I live on a farm out in the middle of nowhere.

Greg: Awesome great to have you on, mate. So, Kody, tell us a little bit about yourself. Kody, what do you do? Give us a little bit of a background into what company you’ve got at the moment.

Kody: Yeah, so I run a company called wrkpod, we help companies to build teams overseas in the Philippines and we’ve placed around 800 staff for our clients over the last two years.

And I got into outsourcing and building teams in the Philippines through my first company, which was a web development company, which I sold last year. So that’s kind of how I cut my teeth on building teams. And then people start to

ask me how I did it. And I launched wrkpod and for the last two years, we’ve been growing wrkpod.

Greg: Fantastic. Let’s just dive into you building your own business, first of all, and how that got you into building teams. So what sort of challenges were you facing with your first company [00:02:00] that you had and why did you have to go and outsource and build a team?

Kody: I mean, I started hiring people overseas fairly early on.

So I started as a freelance graphic designer. My, originally I called myself DesignFox and it was really, I never intended for it to turn into a business. I was actually just, Basically freelancing. I thought I would do it for 12 months. I’d just taken on a volunteer position as a youth pastor in a church.

And so they had no money to pay me initially. I thought I would do this for 12 months until they could. Afford to pay me for the programs that I was running. And then it just started to take off to a point where I was just like afraid every time the phone rang that it would be a customer asking to get something from me.

And so fairly early on, I started. I’m hiring staff overseas. It started out with like administration assistants, people that could just do like invoicing, quoting filtering my email inbox, managing my calendar. Basically my idea was that if I, I charge an hourly rate for design. [00:03:00] So the more time I could spend designing the more money that I can make.

So I started out like that. And then as I got busier, I. Got up to about a team of five or six working full time for me, but working remotely. And then I realized that if I was going to be, you know, build something serious, I needed to start hiring everybody in the same location and to make it easier for me to manage them and things like that.

And also realize I needed to change my business model from being a freelance graphic designer to having a more of a productized offering where I could get more recurring revenue and have a simpler business model rather than offering a whole suite of products. I just try to cut my products down into one major product so that I can scale the business.

And so that was about five years ago. And then I scaled lightning sites up to around 3 million in revenue a year, just a little bit over. And then last year exited that business to focus on work pod.

Greg: Fantastic. [00:04:00] So I think anyone listening to this, they’re trying to grow a successful construction business somewhere between say one and 10 million.

And I don’t think there’s any need for us to talk about why they need a team. I think everyone knows why they need a team to, to relieve them of some of the stresses they’ve got. But I think anyone listening to this now will think. Where do I want to build that team? Do I want to be building this onshore in the UK or in Australia?

Or do I want to go overseas and build this team out? So let’s just talk through some of the reasons why you feel building a team overseas, or particularly what, you know, why WorkPop was set up, what some of the benefits are on that. So I guess the first thing is going to be the cost efficiency, is it? , is that the main reason why someone might outsource?

Kody: Yeah, for sure. I mean, just to clarify too, I think we should be building both teams out. Like you want to have it’s not sort of something that I’d recommend, you know, shifting every role off overseas to the Philippines, but it’s about getting the, The tasks that are, you know, repeatable [00:05:00] process driven tasks, if you can get them done for 5 an hour, instead of paying, you know, 30, 40, 50 an hour, then you’re putting money in your pocket that you can use to elevate more local talent.

So you can get them doing more high value tasks for the business. So I guess that’s you know that cost effectiveness is , usually the first driver. Yeah.

Greg: Yeah, and I think, and if we’ve got UK listeners here, what we’re talking about here is potentially three, four pounds an hour for, some people.

Is that right for some of those tasks?

Kody: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Greg: So huge, difference in, what potentially minimum wages in, in the UK and in Australia. So , that’s interesting. What about thinking about cost efficiency with overheads and, and those sort of expenditures with buildings in broad?

Kody: Yeah, well, I mean I’m not familiar with all of the I guess on costs in places like the UK, but for example, here in Australia, you’ve got all of the additional costs of, you know, [00:06:00] superannuation, obviously If you’re housing them in a local office, you’ve got rent and electricity and all of these

additional costs that, you know, even potentially things like uniforms or vehicles or phones and other costs that will add to your operating expenses.

Whereas, you know, if you work with someone like us at wrkpod, we can find the talent for you. We can set up the contracts in such a way that, You’re paying the staff directly, so you’re getting the best possible price for the talent and there’s no additional costs for, you know retirement benefits and payroll tax and other things that you would pay.

At least here in Australia, I’m not, I can’t speak specifically to the UK, but certainly yeah, in Australia, you save a lot of those costs.

Greg: Yeah, it’s exactly the same in the UK if you’re hiring employees. So I think it’d probably be good just to let people know what wrkpod actually is and explain what that concept is.

Because it’s not just about finding a VA or, [00:07:00] you know, finding a team member. wrkpod offers so much more, doesn’t it? So do you want to just tell us what the benefits of wrkpod is?

Kody: I guess it started from what I wish I had when I was building my team. So when I started, I talked a little bit earlier about when I got up to the team of six five or six, and then I realized I needed to hire everyone in the same place.

I ended up just going to the Philippines and I visited a whole bunch of agencies over there. They call them BPOs, which is business. Outsourcing agency over there. And I visited a whole bunch but I just didn’t like their models. Basically the models that were available at the time was basically that they hire the staff on your behalf and then , they rent them to you or lease them to you.

And I really didn’t like that model because it just seemed border, like I had some moral issues firstly with the model because they would tend to pay the staff like 500 Australian a month. And then they would charge the client like two grand a month. And so like, what’s the value that you’re getting for the, [00:08:00] like four times markup.

And oftentimes the Filipinos are not paid well, they’re not treated well. So I didn’t like that model. And so I ended up having to create my own company rent my own building and just hire the staff directly. So what wrkpod does is basically what I wish I had, which is we help people find the talent.

And then once we find the talent for our clients, we then arrange the contracts between the Filipino and our clients. So we don’t hire them on, on their behalf.

We don’t on sell them. We don’t add any margins on the salary. So the Filipinos get paid directly from their employer, which means the Filipinos get paid more.

But our clients pay less. And then also it’s transparent. They pay us then a fee to have the staff member work from our facilities. So everybody knows. Who’s getting paid. What the Filipino gets paid properly. Our clients pay the smallest amount possible for the talent. And then we just provide all of the infrastructure that they [00:09:00] need to be able to build their team in one place without having to have, Business licenses in the Philippines without having to pay for building fit outs and IT infrastructure and backup power generators and all that type of stuff.

So that’s essentially what we provide. Then there’s a whole bunch of supplementary services like that’s included in our packages. Like we have. An online training center to train the VAs. We have HR payroll support. We have legal support to help with contracts, and we run social events for the staff in the Philippines every month.

So basically we, we provide all of the support that our clients need to actually effectively. Manage and build a team in the Philippines. So that’s essentially what we do at Wearpod.

Greg: That’s great. I think it’s a really well thought out model. And this is what I wanted to get you on because I’ve experienced outsourcing to the Philippines and I’ve, and other countries.

And one of the problems that you often find is you can, first of all, it’s trying to find the right candidate. So that’s, the biggest challenge. So you might go on certain [00:10:00] websites and try and do your interview. So the problem number one is. How do you screen all these candidates? How do you know who you’re getting?

You know, have they got the right experience, but you take care of all of that, don’t you? You’re the first thing you’re going to do is you’re going to help advertise potentially and find the candidate. And we’re not just talking VAs, are we?

Kody: No, we’ve placed all kinds of different staff. Like we just placed recently architects for a Sydney architect firm.

So they do a lot of like rendering, like creating 3d renders and doing floor plans and electrical layouts and things like that. So yeah, We’ve placed specialist stuff

like that. We recently built a team of town planners for a town planning firm here in Australia. So we hired a bunch of lawyers in the Philippines.

They got trained on up new South Wales, which is one of the States in Australia property law. So they’re helping them with stuff like that. We’ve hired video editors for editing agencies and things like that. So we can find specialized tasks as well. Anything basically that can [00:11:00] be done remotely.

Okay. You can find the talent for it in the Philippines as well.

Greg: Love that. Yeah. So there’s a huge skillset. So I think people need to get out of that mindset of, Oh, it’s only going to be a VA or, you know, an executive assistant, something like that. There’s so much more of, of a skillset that is there in the Philippines.

But just coming back to some of the other benefits of wrkpod then. So first of all, it’s finding the candidate just talk us through that process. So. You know, how many candidates you generally find him for a job? Are you helping with the interview process? How does all of that side of it work?

Kody: Yeah. So depending on the role will depend on how many applicants we get, because we do place ads for every client. So it’s not like we get a recruitment order from a client and then we just give them people that have already previously applied with wrkpod. We advertise specifically for every one of our clients to make sure that we get the best.

A possible talent. So that’s the first step. Sometimes we’ll get 50 applicants for roles. Sometimes if it’s a [00:12:00] very like a customer service role, we might get hundreds of applicants. Then what we do is we do phone interviews. So we interview all of the candidates. Then we call their references.

If they pass their phone interview, then we get them to come into our office and film video interviews. So basically similar to what we’re doing here on the podcast, we interview them. We record the videos. And then what we do is we send the top three candidates to our client to review. And so that allows them, like you mentioned before, to save a whole heap of time.

You know, if you can imagine if you were phoning, you know, all of those candidates, it takes quite a lot of time to go through and check their references and all that type of stuff. So our clients can then watch those videos and whoever they like, they let us know. And then we hook up like in person zoom interviews.

And then once we know who they want to hire, we hook up the contracts and go from there.

Greg: Love that. So I think that screening process is so important because thinking about the companies that are listening to this, they’re not huge companies. They haven’t got HR [00:13:00] departments to pass that off to someone else to do all the screening and to read all the CVs.

So what ends up happening is the business owner ends up doing it all and there’s just more on their plate. So actually if you’ve got someone that’s specialist in being able to screen this, to know what to look for, And I’m only sending you the top three candidates or whatever that is. I think that’s, that’s really useful.

So that, that would be a huge time saver. So I can see the benefits in that. And then once you’ve got the candidate, let’s say the interview goes well, and the candidate’s a good fit. The next stage that you help with is the, the contracts, is it? So the, the legal side of it in securing them.

Kody: Correct. Yeah.

And a big part of that’s negotiating the salary. And in, in many cases, we probably save all of our fees on the negotiation, because if, if someone from the UK, for example, was to if they’ve never outsourced before they would probably overpay just because. They wouldn’t understand the market and the roles that are being hired for.

So a lot [00:14:00] of the times that’s one of the big mistakes. I know that was one of the big mistakes that I made. I remember hiring one of my first graphic designers and I paid them 40, 000 pesos a month. This is like 10 years ago. And he was only a junior designer. And it was only later that I realized the junior designer would only be making about 20, 000 in another company.

And so I was paying double the rate and he wasn’t very good. And so we basically make sure our clients don’t make those mistakes. We’re able to kind of negotiate on their behalf to make sure the Filipino is being paid well and competitively, but we don’t want to be overpaying them of course as well, because that can cause other problems in the future, particularly as people grow their teams.

If you make that mistake early on and you overpay for all your roles, then every time you bring new team members on it, there’s a compounding effect. Okay. And I had made many mistakes along the way as I was growing out our team of

80 staff for the web development company. It’s very hard to dial back those rates if you’ve made a mistake early on.[00:15:00]

Greg: Yeah, I think that’s really, really valuable. I’ve made exactly the same mistake and overpaid because it seemed like a bargain in the UK for what I was paying for someone. And then actually I was told by someone that you were actually paying double what you should be for that role. And you think, well, that’s it, but you don’t realize until, you know, you get a Yes, I only made that mistake.

And then once the person secured, you’ve that you then offer something else, which is the infrastructure side, which I think is really interesting, because one of the other problems I’ve had, and I still have now with some overseas workers is that, especially in the Philippines, It’s prone to things like cyclones and, you know, power shortages and cutouts and things like that.

And all of a sudden you’ve got someone offline for a day or two. You’re not sure if it’s legitimate or not, or whether they’re just taking a day off. And you get these frustrations, you know, working alongside these things. Oh, you know, are they working or not? So how do you overcome that with, wrkpod?

What’s, what’s the benefits of being in one of your offices?

Kody: [00:16:00] Yeah, I mean, that’s a big one is just that the internet infrastructure is really strong. Like we spend over 25, 000 a month on internet across our force facilities. And it’s like our, apart from staffing internet costs is our largest. That along with rent or our largest, like line items on our P and L.

So we spend a lot of money on the internet connection that allows us to do like some really important things. Like for example, some of our clients have like very important security requirements around how. Data is kept and things like that. If we control our own internet connections, it allows us to, to kind of manage those types of security requirements which other facilities that don’t spend a lot of money on the internet infrastructures wouldn’t be able to do.

But yeah, internet’s terrible over there. Like I remember last time I was on a trip one of the internet companies was promoting 85 percent uptime. And I was like, Matt, can you imagine an internet company in the UK or Australia [00:17:00] promoting that they’re only up 80 percent of the time? And so our facility, obviously we have multiple redundancies.

We make sure that our internet’s up like 99. 9 percent of the time. We have backup power generators. Just not having them work from home is massive.

Like when I was running lightning sites before COVID, We were delivering about 30 websites a month. And as soon as COVID hit with the exact same team, just working from home, our productivity dropped to 22 websites a month.

So we nearly lost, you know, 30 percent of our productivity, just having the exact same team move remotely. So I don’t care what anybody says you know, about remote workforce, there’s no way it’s as productive as having people rubbing shoulder to shoulder and getting the job done. And that’s what we can do at wrkpod.

Greg: Yeah, I completely agree with that. Without a doubt, productivity drops and I think sometimes there’s a frustration as well as a business owner when you might be on a call with someone who’s working from home and you can hear maybe the kids in the [00:18:00] background or there’s other people in the background, you know, doing things and you think, actually, if they got my undivided attention here or is, are there other home distractions going on, which, which is inevitable.

I work from home and I’m distracted and I’m not as productive as what I’d be if I shut myself in an office for a day. So, you know, Completely understand that. So that’s a massive plus 0. 2. But then you’ve also got another added benefit of thinking about the long term vision for your team. So once you start hiring overseas and you start building the team, obviously businesses are growing.

And when you start seeing the benefits of it, you think actually I need to add IT support. Now I need to add customer service, admin support. I needed another VA. All of a sudden you need a quite a large team. So how does wrkpod benefit you in that if you’re trying to bring up an entire team together?

Kody: I think our expertise for recruitment is one that’s probably understated because we know how to recruit.

We know how to recruit people that fit [00:19:00] well together culturally And then also if you like, I made this mistake early on where I was doing all of the recruitment internally and what tends to happen is they hire their cousin or their best friend or their, you know, their batch mate from university.

And you can end up with this culture where. It’s like an inbred staff culture. And what can happen. We saw this happen with a client recently, actually, they were doing their own recruitment, not utilizing our team to help with recruitment. And then a staff member was refused to pay rise and they resigned and took like four or five other staff members with them.

So that kind of thing can happen if you don’t sort of like, if you’re not careful about how you build the team. So that’s one thing that we do that I think people don’t realize the benefit of just cause they haven’t made the mistake yet. Like I have. And then probably the other one that everyone would sort of know building teams at work pod is just that our facilities are built in such a way that you can scale your team inside our facilities.

So we have specific rooms, [00:20:00] you know, rooms of six rooms of 12 rooms of 20, even rooms of 50. And so our clients are able to basically build their own team culture inside our facility. So their staff come to work in their uniforms, their offices are branded with their colors and their logos. So that essentially using us as a springboard to basically be able to build their team within our infrastructure avoiding obviously the large setup fees that set up costs of fitting out a facility.

Cause I think when we fit out our facilities, it’s about 3000. AUD per desk. So if you’re building a facility for, you know, a hundred staff, then you’re up for a 300, 000 construction cost. And then you’ve got an IT setup cost to set up the internet. So the, the gateway to kind of create your own infrastructure is pretty expensive.

So we allow people to avoid that and, and utilize our facilities to kind of expand their teams.

Greg: That’s a huge plus point. And two, thinking about teams, when you’re running remote teams and [00:21:00] you’ve got people all over the world and in different places, sometimes that cohesion and team, the team working together can be really difficult.

But I guess when you’ve got everyone in a room together, it’s just going to be more productive, isn’t it? If you’ve got six or twelve people all in a room working on a task.

Kody: It’s just funner as well for the, it’s a better experience for the staff. So you keep your staff longer, the staff are happier for longer.

Yeah. It sounds strange, but you even pay the staff less. Because like I found, for example, in my business, when during COVID we’d very rarely had any resignations or any, you know, salary, conflicts with staff and things like that. But as soon as you shift everybody to work from home and they’re all in their bedrooms by themselves, they’re really just comparing that job to any other job they can do online.

And so suddenly they start to like compare. Working with you with working with anybody online. And of course they can get casual jobs. Online and earn a lot more. Whereas when you’ve got [00:22:00] everyone working together, they love going to work every day. There’s a great vibe, great culture. They love going to work with their friends.

And so it’s, it’s much easier to keep your staff longer and not have them comparing, you know, asking you for a salary increase every six months. Cause they got offered a freelance job online or something like that.

Greg: Yeah, that’s a really good point. So, Obviously when we first started this podcast, you were saying that you encourage people to build two sets of teams, one overseas, one onshore.

So if someone’s now in the UK or Australia and they want an overseas team, but they’re also building their UK team. How do you get that alignment? You know, how do you get your existing onshore workers, your UK or Aus workers, to support the offshore hires? Because there must be a little bit of a challenge there.

Kody: Yeah, I try to get people involved in the in the planning of what the role could look like. I mean, as a business owner, if I was talking to a general manager, for example, they’d be like, I’d be, I’d [00:23:00] be talking to them about like the future of their role and, and basically be talking to them about, Hey, I, you know, I want to design this role around you and your skillset and your strengths.

And I want to build a career for you. That’s long term. And I want you to be doing things that you enjoy. And then I’d be like, okay, what are some of the things that are on your plate right now that you feel a low value tasks? Like what things can I take off your plate to help you elevate in our company?

That’d be the type of language and conversation that I’d have with, with people in the organization. And then I would be figuring out how can I buy back the time of my, My general manager or my, you know, my foreman or my, you know, whatever you know, management roles you have, anyone who’s doing administration or, or planning projects or dealing with customer emails or social media, any of those types of tasks in a construction business, how can we, how can we buy back the time of our most important employees to make them more effective?

So I would involve [00:24:00] them in that process and then design the roles around Those key people, if you’ve got an A grade, you know team member in

the UK or in Australia, and you, you pair them with an A grade Filipino team member to assist them, then you can not just sometimes you could double, triple or more their, their output just by taking the low, the, I guess, I don’t want to say low value because there’s not always low value tasks, but I guess the repeatable process driven tasks, getting them off their plate so they can focus on strategic thinking and.

And those things that are, I guess, more valuable to the business.

Greg: Yeah. Such an important point that you’ve highlighted here, because I always sort of teach this too, that you often focus on how do I buy back my own time? And then you’re looking at, you know, what team members do I need to give me more time, but actually before you go out and hide, maybe you’ve got.

in construction, a project manager and the project manager is really busy. And you think, right, I’ve got to get another project manager on board, but really you just need to look at that role and think, [00:25:00] actually, do I need another project manager or is it just the project manager needs some support so that he can focus on some of the high level stuff and get some of that mundane or the admin tasks taken away from him that he or she shouldn’t be doing.

So that’s where to start, isn’t it? Like buyback employees time. I think that’s such a valuable point that you’ve put across there.

Kody: Yeah, the, basically my process when I’m working with my team is firstly, like, what can I, what can we stop doing? Like what things are we doing right now that we should stop doing that are the not producing results and we should just kill it and not do it anymore.

And then, okay, what are the things that we’re doing that we could automate? You know, that we could use technology to, to speed up or automate the process. And then whatever we can’t automate, what can we offshore and get done for a cheaper price? And then of course, then you move on to the, you know, the, the local staff.

So if you take it through that, like, what can we stop? What can we automate? What can we offshore? And then what, what has to be done here in the, you know, in our local team, then I [00:26:00] think that’s a pretty good process to look at the tasks for any of the major roles in our organization.

Greg: Yeah, completely agree with that.

Greg: So let’s just talk about some other issues that might have to be overcome. One of them being the cultural compatibility. Now, I actually think that the UK and Australia are very, very similar culturally. It just, it just seems to be very similar to me, but there is a completely different culture in the Philippines.

So, How do, what sort of things do you have to navigate that you need to be aware of if you’ve never [00:27:00] hired a, you know, Filipino worker? What things do you need to be aware of that is different with the culture?

Kody: Yeah, the Philippines is an interesting place because it’s, it’s got like a Spanish background but it’s also got a lot of American influence through the American military’s involvement in the Philippines over over the years.

So yeah, it’s an interesting melting pot of cultures there. It’s like, it’s like a mix of of that, you know Asian and Western cultures kind of. Mixed together. What I would say about, and now this is a general statement about Filipinos, but, they tend to be quite empathetic people. They tend to be non confrontational.

So that changes the way that I would manage a Filipino staff member. So let me give you a specific example. Like if. If I was teaching a Filipino how to do a task, what a lot of people would make the mistake of doing is they would say something like, okay, I want you to do this, this, this, this, and this, do [00:28:00] you understand?

And they would say every single time a Filipino will say yes, even if they don’t understand because they don’t want to lose face. That’s like very important there is that they don’t want to come across as looking stupid. So they’ll say yes, even if they don’t understand it. And then they’ll go away and Google it, or like ask a colleague or try to figure out how to do it themselves.

So, if I was teaching a Filipino to do something, I would flip the conversation. I would say, I want you to do A, B, C and D. And instead of saying, do you understand? I’d say, have I explained myself well? So I would put the onus on me like that it’s my, if it’s not explained well, it’s my mistake.

So I’m allowing them to save face and say, actually, I didn’t understand. I didn’t understand how, what you meant by that. So that’s just one example but they’ll tend to be non confrontational. So you have to really work hard to develop a culture where they feel comfortable to tell you what they think.

It’s not their default. You know, they’re not, it’s not their default. Whereas I think Australians and, people from the UK [00:29:00] tend to tell you what they think a little bit more a little bit more readily.

Greg: Yeah. A hundred percent. I think it’s really valuable to get that, gain that insight because.

As a business owner and as a leader, you need to know how to manage people. And even in the UK or Australia, you’re going to have different personalities that you need to navigate, and you’re going to deal with some people completely differently to the way you deal with others. So you need to expect your Filipino workers to be exactly the same.

They’re going to have different personalities and different culture fits. So I think that’s really valuable what you said there, Kody. Let’s just move on to talk about The time zone difference now in Australia, it’s not too bad, but the UK, it’s quite a bit different. I don’t know how many hours it is actually in the UK.

Maybe you know what that is to hand. How do we get over that? Those time zone differences that, you know, obviously in Australia, it’s just a couple of hours sometimes. So that’s reasonably easy to navigate. But what about in the UK? Will it, will it still work for the UK?

Kody: Yeah. So a lot of our clients in the UK have their staff coming at work, coming to work in the Philippines at like [00:30:00] 3 or 4 p.

m. Which is in the morning in the UK. And so there’s a, Majority of a crossover of, of work days , if it’s done that way and that’s still, easy enough to find talent that want to work an afternoon shift. So they’ll, they’ll come into work at like three and work till 11, for example. You want to avoid like some of the challenges with us customers, for example, we do have a number of us customers, you know, the night shift is harder to find talent just because, and it’s harder to keep talent long term because it’s just not good for their health.

to be, you know, working from, you know, 11 PM at night till eight in the morning or something like that. So the UK is fine. It’s just an afternoon shift. Otherwise there is some some of our clients that prefer to have only a partial overlap. So they’ll have their Say Filipino team member come in at lunchtime in the Philippines.

And then so they’ll be at work before the, before they start work and then they’ll cross over for like half the day. So there’s different ways that it can be structured

and we just work with our clients to figure out what’s going to be the best [00:31:00] solution for their, you know, for their particular business.

Greg: Yeah, perfect. So that’s, that sounds like that’s something that can be navigated. So let’s imagine now we’ve been convinced that we want to bring on an employee, we hire someone, there’s going to be challenges with any new hire. What are some common challenges that may come up with hiring someone overseas?

Doesn’t necessarily need to be Philippines, it could be anyone, can’t it? Thinking about, I don’t know, things like time management or quality control, that sort of thing. How do you navigate those sort of problems when you’re first hiring someone?

Kody: Yeah, it’s a great question. I mean, for the ones you mentioned like obvious ones, time management, like managing the output of their work, that just comes down to having clear job descriptions for like what their responsibilities are, making sure you’ve got clear processes and systems so that they know, you know, how to do what you’re asking them to do.

And then we, we give all of our clients access to a software called Time Doctor which allows people to track their time against certain tasks. And everyone in our organization has to use that, including [00:32:00] me so that we can figure out like where we’re spending our time. But I would say probably the biggest mistake I see people make is just generally the onboarding.

Like for example, when somebody gets hired usually there’s like a two week period between when they’re offered and when they’re starting. And most of our, most of our clients who work with would not normally contact them during those two weeks. To me, that’s, you know, already you’re missing out on an opportunity to build Build rapport with the person who’s about to start working with you between when, they’ve accepted and when they start.

So for me, when someone accepts an offer, I consider them employed already. Obviously I don’t send them tasks to complete, but I start, you know start engaging with them immediately so that they, they can. They don’t regret the decision that they’ve made because it’s a big decision to choose to work for somebody.

And if you, if there’s kind of like crickets and they’re not hearing anything, they could second guess their decision to take the role or whatever. So, that initial period and then the onboarding, like the first day, first week, first month. I think

[00:33:00] most organizations don’t have a proper documented process for how they take people through onboarding.

So we give a whole bunch of templates out. We never used to and that was one of the things we just started to see people were making so many mistakes. So now we give people, you know, some templated systems on how they can, you know, best navigate onboarding new staff, because that’s definitely an area I think people tend to not do well.

A

Greg: hundred percent, yeah. Onboarding is absolutely crucial, isn’t it, for the success of the partnership going forward. So, you’ve probably seen a lot of companies that have come through wrkpod and you’ve probably seen some companies scale. Now, we heard about your success story, Kody, but have you got any other success stories?

You don’t necessarily have to mention names of companies, of businesses that have come in and maybe started with just one employee and then managed to scale up. Anything you can tell us?

Kody: Yeah, I mean, one of, so I’m a part owner of this company as well. We have another business called GP hero, which is a client of work pod.

And they hire staff through work pod for medical clinics. And we place [00:34:00] those predominantly is like receptionist or like assistance for doctors. And we have about a hundred. Staff in GP hero now. And we have about 80 clinics in Australia that have staff with GP hero. So that’s one example.

That’s gone from, you know, in about just over two years, we’ve, we’ve scaled that over a hundred staff that’s doing really well. There’s another great company from Melbourne. It’s a logistics company that, does shipping. And that’s a really cool business. They basically take containers off massive ships and then they warehouse them and they do you know, spraying out the containers and all that type of stuff.

And so the team that’s with us is about 20 staff there. They basically manage all of the logistics. So, basically where the containers are coming in, where they’ve got to go, where they’ve got to be warehoused, all that gets managed. In the Philippines so that the, the truck drivers and staff in Australia just open the apps on their phone and it tells them what to do every day.

And so so that’s a pretty cool business. Probably one of the other more unusual ones. We have a [00:35:00] 24 hour car park in Melbourne, and if you ever lose your ticket to get out of the gate and you press the button, that you’ve lost your ticket, all of the boom gates and the people at the end of the buzzers that talk to people, all that’s managed.

So they have a team of six or seven staff. You know, with work pod. So that’s pretty, that’s a pretty cool business as well. So there’s a couple of examples, but I mean, we’ve got, we’ve placed 800 staff for our clients over the last two years. So we’ve got, you know, real estate agents that have scaled over 10.

We’ve got town planning firms that have scaled over 10. So we’ve got some pretty exciting businesses that are operating out of work pod.

Greg: Yeah, I think it’s a really exciting concept and opportunity for people to really think about this because construction business owners, there’s so many different team members that you’re going to need as you start scaling from social media specialists, IT support, administration, customer support, and then we’ve got other more skilled roles like bookkeepers and you spoke about, architects and, you know, drafts people and [00:36:00] things like that.

So building companies are going to need all these sorts of things. So I think it’s really useful to think, actually, you could probably hire a number of these roles, probably for the same cost as what you’d bring someone on board in the UK or Australia. So it’s quite exciting to think about how you can scale your team like that.

But anyone listening to this might be thinking now. What is this, all this going to cost? So I don’t normally talk about costs on podcasts because people are going to listen to this in a year or two’s time and it might have completely changed. But I think in this instance, it’s really important because when you listen to this and the value that wrkpod offers, I think people might be thinking, well, this is going to be really, really good.

pricey and expensive. So can you give us a little bit of a guide on what would it take? What are the costs and the ongoing costs to bring on, say, one employee?

Kody: Obviously depends on the role. Cause for example, that we’ve, like I said, we’ve placed lawyers recently. They would be on a higher price than an executive assistant, but just generally speaking, if I give sort of like a mid range rate for say, Someone with [00:37:00] a, you know, a degree, maybe a couple of years of experience, they might be doing a marketing role or or, or a

bookkeeper, that type of level person, in Australian dollars, you’d be paying around 17, 000 Australian dollars a year.

And that’s including the staff members costs and the costs for them to be housed at work pods. So that’s our fees. Plus the staff salary and all of the salary, all of the staff’s benefits. So 17, 000 AUD, that works out to be about 9, 000 pounds a year. So in, in terms of hourly rate, that’s like a 5 Australian out, you know, 5 or 6 an hour or something like that that people would be earning.

Greg: That’s, that’s huge. So just to break that down even further for people in the UK, if you were paying 750 a month for a bookkeeper, that, and that also includes work pods fees or in Australia, we can maybe double that, you know, 1400 to 1500. Dollars a month. That’s what we’re talking about here, Kody, aren’t we?

For a bookkeeper. That’s, that’s incredible. And that includes work pods fees [00:38:00] too, to have all the infrastructure and the internet facilities and everything else.

Kody: That’s right. So you can basically, it’s like between a fourth and a six of the price, basically of like, what you would expect to pay in Australia, depending on the roles you can basically get six for the price of one.

So to your point earlier, it allows you to scale so much faster. You can hire ahead of, of the need, because even if you’re like, maybe don’t need someone full time right now, it allows you to be more aggressive in your growth. Whereas if you’re hiring Aussies, I know at least for me, it’s always a bit of a leap of faith, you know, that you’re like, man, I got to get this person up to up to producing output quickly because it’s costing me so much.

But when you’re hiring overseas, you can be much more aggressive. In your hiring, because the, the cost of holding the staff is not that high. So it’s really, it’s a really exciting way to grow the business.

Greg: Yeah, I love it, Kody. I think the model that you offer here is fantastic. And that’s why I wanted to get you on because there’s so much value in outsourcing.

It’s going to help people scale their [00:39:00] construction businesses. And I think if someone partnered with you at wrkpod to be able to do that, I think they’re onto a winner there. So I really appreciate your time in coming on today. If someone wanted to know a little bit more about if it’s going to work for them

and wanted to talk to your business, how would they get in contact with you, Kody, or your team?

Kody: Yeah, they can just check out wrkpod. com, which is W R K P O D. com. Otherwise my name’s Kody K O D Y. You can just email me Kodyatwrkpod. com. I’ve got some resources that I’ll share with you as well. Greg, we have like a checklist that has like 160 things you can outsource. So that might be a great thing for, you know, your listeners.

I’ll just, I’ll send that to you so you can potentially share that in the, in the show notes as well. So that’s a little resource that they can use to just see what areas of the business they could potentially outsource some tasks we’ve got 150 or 160 things that you can outsource to VA. So I’m going to give you that PDF.

That’d be great for any of the business owners listening to this call. If they want to kind of [00:40:00] do an audit and see what tasks they could potentially offshore that checklist will be really useful.

Greg: That really well. So we’ll put all of that in the show notes along with work pods details. So if anyone’s interested, they can find out a little bit more.

Kody, thanks so much for your time on the podcast today. There’s certainly been a lot of value in that and all the best with growing work pod and the team that you’ve got there.

Kody: Thanks, buddy. Appreciate it.