Happy Sunday!

If you’re reading this, I hope you’re sitting back, relaxing on a couch, have your feet up, and you’re ready to talk all about hiring, specifically hiring offshore talent for help. It’s getting cold now, at least in New York City, so maybe grab a blanket too.

Before we get into today’s newsletter, I’ve got some updates to share:

  • A new episode of Limited Supply is out — we talk all about maximizing your credit card rewards, Klaviyo vs Sendlane, and the tax implications of cash back.
  • Sharma Brands is hiring a Director of Retention. If that’s you, apply here!
  • Long Wknd launched WKND PAY with Tandym, basically a Long Wknd-branded credit card. Check it out here!
  • If you’ll be in Austin for MarketingLand, holler at me!
  • And lastly, if you enjoy today’s email, reply, and I’ll put together a guide.

Okay, let’s get into the email… this is 8 pages long.

Today, I want to talk in as much depth as I have, and also tactically, about something that has truly changed the way that I hire — offshore talent. Personally, I hate referring to these people as offshore talent because once you find a fit, they’re just remote employees like other remote employees.

Also, quick note, unlike many of the big Twitter bros, I have no affiliation with any offshore recruiting or PEO companies, and nor do I get any commission. I’m just truly appreciative of my employees outside of the US, and truly use any of the companies listed below to help me do that. And if you’re unfamiliar with what a PEO is, it’s similar to JustWorks or TriNet… they handle your payroll, generally for the benefit that health insurance and benefits are cheaper due to JustWorks technically having millions of employees under them. Here’s a Wikipedia article on it.

The other disclaimer is that the hires I’ll talk about here are mostly involved with side projects of mine. At Sharma Brands, our entire team, except 2 people, is based in the US and Canada. With the caliber of brands we work with, we can’t afford to test outsourced talent on our clients unless they’re truly battle-tested. So far, only 2 have been able to do that.

Okay, let’s dive in…

Growing up in San Diego, my neighbor was Jesse Pujji. When I was in 8th grade, I would see him working on launching Ampush, which has now been sold to Tinuiti. One thing I remember was that as he scaled his team, he had a number of employees based in the Philippines and India who would help with putting together reports, crunching numbers, running QA checks, and more. He later took this same framework and launched Growth Assistant, which re-peaked my interest in hiring outside the US.

On Twitter, there was growing support for more and more companies that promised the capability of running more and more parts of your business in Argentina, the Philippines, India, Mexico, Brazil, and more. So I tried three services to recruit offshore talent.

The first was actually because of Jesse, I saw he had a remote assistant who scheduled all his meetings. She’s been with Jesse for 10+ years at this point and has now taken a bigger role. So I went to the same company, YourRemoteAssistant, and hired my VA, Cherish. She’s been amazing and has been with me now for 4 years. Then I tried 2 more services.

I hired two developers from Support Shepherd and one project manager from Growth Assistant. Each lasted about 8 months with me, and then I felt like they had little output or didn’t have much to do. So I let go of all 3. I later realized it didn’t work out because it was my fault — I didn’t have a proper employee onboarding for them as I would have for an employee who was working for me in my New York office.

When someone joins Sharma Brands, I spend a full day onboarding them, they meet with the rest of our team, we set target results for them to achieve, and they get integrated into the company from a culture, team, benefits, technology, and informational standpoint. For no reason other than I didn’t do enough research, talking to others about it, and believing too much in the Twitter hype, I didn’t properly onboard any of these team members in the Philippines. As a result, just like an employee in the NYC office would also have nothing to do or have low output, these employees didn’t have a sense of what they should/could be doing, what they were working toward, and how they could get there. But it was all my fault, and I take full responsibility for that.

It didn’t hit me until I was working out with Austin Rief, and he asked me, “Do you use any offshore talent for your businesses?” I immediately told him about how I have tried multiple services, hired for different roles, and had no success. That’s when he said, “You’re thinking about this in the wrong way. They’re not going to join and know what to do… you need to think of them as employees that you’d go about hiring in your office and onboard them in a similar way.” Austin also had just invested and bought a portion of Oceans, another outsourcing company, and told me I should try hiring someone from Oceans. If I didn’t like it, he said he would cover the costs.

I was down. But this time, I thought about it in a much different way than before. Instead of just thinking, “This person will help me by being a project manager,” I fully wrote out all of the tasks that I need done. I recorded Loom videos with written instructions on how to complete the tasks, and targets that needed to be met per quarter, and a thorough list of all the things this person needs to have from a personality standpoint. For me, my main requirements were:

  • Someone who understands digital marketing and CPG brands
  • Someone who has an iPhone (I’m a big iMessage guy)
  • Someone who is an aspiring entrepreneur and wants to get scrappy
  • Someone who is ok with the occasional late night of work
  • Someone who is able to write well
  • Someone who is able to make calls within the US, as needed
  • Someone who can show up, figure out what needs to be done, and gets sh*t done

Along with this, I built out a full to-do list that spanned:

  • Travel
  • Research (for Limited Supply)
  • Website updates
  • Sales outreach for HOOX
  • Inbox management
  • Coordination between departments at Sharma Brands

I then interviewed a candidate who went to college in Colorado, moved back to Sri Lanka, became the Head of Shopper Marketing at Ogilvy, and he was the top candidate who I ended up hiring from Oceans. When he started working for me, almost immediately, my trust in an outsourced team was full again. I started looking for more ways to get more outsourced teammates to help my businesses, especially for DTC brands. So that’s what today’s email will be about — where are easy places to leverage more talent from around the world, which saves you money, and allows you to do more. And before you come after me, or try to cancel me, let me start by saying that the average surgeon, like an operating surgeon at a hospital, makes about ⅓ the salary that I am paying my team around the world. It’s a win for everyone involved.

Here are the places I think it makes sense to immediately outsource tasks, whether you’re a bootstrapped business or you’re doing $100M a year. This list is a combination of things I’ve done myself, along with other founders who are doing $100k/month up to $8M/month in revenue.

Reporting

The first is reporting. It’s amazing how something as simple as getting daily/weekly reports on all of the metrics that matter most to you in your business can make you more efficient as an operator and also give you the proper visibility into what could be going wrong. 

When you’ve given access to an offshore assistant, you can request any number you need, and you’ll generally have it in your Slack within minutes. I’ve also set up daily reports that I get in Slack every morning with the numbers I want to see.

If you are running a brand, I recommend that you ask for a single consolidated report that shares the prior days:

  • Revenue 
  • Orders (new vs returning)
  • Number of items sold (not the same as orders) 
  • AOV
  • Sessions, Add to Carts, and Reached Checkout
  • Website CVR
  • LP CVR
  • Top 5 visited URLs
  • Top 2 ad creatives

Logistics

Beyond Sharma Brands, HOOX, and Character, I actively run two DTC brands, and both now have offshore team members running logistics. Other founders I spoke with also have a similar setup — talent in India, Brazil, or Sri Lanka to help them with all logistics, warehouse comms, PO placement, routing of samples, paying out vendors, and more.

The rule of thumb I kept hearing was as long as it's possible by a remote employee, even when tied to logistics of physical products, it’s doable offshore.

Some of your favorite brands have their entire logistics team based outside of the US.

Customer Service

Customer service is a touchy subject when it comes to offshoring this function, and for good reason. You wouldn’t just hire agents, so why would you just hire CS agents in the Philippines with no one to manage them? Instead, here’s how I’ve observed the most optimal customer service team setup:

1 senior-level manager or director based in the US. This person’s results are to:

  • Own an NPS score target for the customer service team.
  • Manage the rest of the offshore team function and ensure they are adhering to high-quality standards, closing tickets, and increasing revenue from customers.
  • Make sure the CS team has everything they need for all upcoming product launches, promotions, product or site issues, and anything that could increase CS ticket volume.

Then you can either have someone build out the team manually, or you can hire a firm like Aventus (who we recommend to Sharma Brands clients). The advantage is their team scales up with yours, with no headache to you. They have a centralized training curriculum for all their agents, and they also source candidates that align with your brand. For example, with Hexclad, Aventus has agents who love to cook, which makes the entire customer experience better.

Sales & Marketing

When it comes to sales and marketing, you could have offshore talent to help you with creative, media buying, email marketing campaigns, cold outreach, outbound B2B marketing, community management, and more. 

Founders have found exceptionally talented video editors, sales ops engineers, and media buyers so far, and they plan to hire more. These people aren’t just EAs and VAs. They can be incredibly talented domain experts in their field. I’m even looking at a performance marketer for Long Wknd, and his resume includes spending $1M per month at Leo Burnett and then GroupM. It doesn’t get better than that.

A founder of a $5M/month business uses his offshore team to design landing pages, create static ads, design internal and external decks and presentations, and handle email marketing. So long as their eye for design or their standards of what is good is the same as yours, you can’t go wrong.

I have someone who helps me do HOOX’s outbound cold email marketing. He manages the sales pipeline, focuses on hitting KPIs for driving leads, works with the sales team to make sure they have all the information they need, and also puts together a 20-page deck we review with the sales team every Tuesday and Thursday. 

Quality Assurance Checks

Quality Assurance (also called QA) is what you do before a website or landing page goes live. The goal with these QA checks for a DTC brand is to:

  • Iron out onsite bugs
  • Double check links
  • Click all buttons and confirm their destination
  • Make sure the right products/quantities are added to cart
  • Check for spelling or grammar errors on the page
  • Check for responsiveness across desktop, tablet and mobile
  • Confirm the email pop-ups are properly routing emails into the intended list

Beyond websites, we also do QA work for ads or videos, checking to make sure that the captions are correct and that any overlays, images, or logos are done the way that we want them and are on brand. It’s a huge help.

Personal Life

On the personal side, you can get help with travel and scheduling. For example, this coming week, I’ll be traveling to Austin for MarketingLand, and I will get a Notion doc that is prefilled with:

  • My flight information, including the recommended time to leave for the airport 
  • Hotel booking information with relevant phone numbers if I get stuck
  • Nearby fresh juice or smoothie spots to get fresh celery juice and orange juice
  • Workout classes nearby like Soulcycle, Barrys, or Rumble
  • Nearest locations to take meetings
  • The address and distance of Soho House to my hotel
  • Car rental information with the cheapest gas station from my hotel to the airport (if renting a car)
  • Nearby restaurants to host clients, friends or meetings
  • Finding a healthy salad option (ie Sweetgreen, Just Salad, Chopt, Mixt Greens, etc) near my hotel for lunch
  • A list of people that I should meet with (potential clients, current clients, creator friends, vendors, manufacturers, etc) with a 1 sentence summary of who they are

A step further — when it was my mom’s birthday and we went to Mexico for vacation, as we walked in the room, Rameez (my Sri Lankan homie) had Happy Birthday spelled out in flower petals on the floor, with non-alcoholic champagne (my mom doesn’t drink, he knows that), and a gluten-free dessert (my mom is also gluten-free). Rameez has single-handedly changed my life.

Personal Inbox Management

On the inbox side, I receive about 300-500 emails per day that need to be filtered and prioritized. 

I now have Rameez, and he:

  • Unsubscribes from irrelevant promotional emails.
  • Compile a list of anyone who asks me for a meeting, share the list with me by EOD, and I’ll stack rank which I should meet with first by Tier 1 (ASAP), Tier 2 (within 2 weeks), or Tier 3 (let me just correspond via email).
  • Then actually schedule meetings as requested based on my list.

Rameez knows my schedule, what is top priority, and what can be delegated to someone else on my team, so when he handles my inbox, I can open it and just see the important emails to respond to (clients, employees, etc.).

I’m still exploring all of the things that can be done with offshore talent, but these are some of the areas that I’m experimenting with now. I still have a large US team, and we happily employ 60+ folks in the US, many of whom are in NYC. 

The hardest part of offshore is probably the timezone differences for important real-time work. If that’s important to you, then make that something you address as you hire for these roles. I told Oceans that I needed someone who could be on until at least 4 p.m. EST with me.

If this is helpful, reply and let me know. Maybe I’ll put together a guide on how to hire the best possible offshore talent and which hiring agencies to use.

Okay, onto some fun stuff…

Vendor of the Week:

DiscoFeed — An easy CPA-based customer acquisition channel that drives an incremental 5% of revenue for your brand.

Have you ever made a purchase on a brand you love (Dr. Squatch, Milk Bar, Banza, Glamnetic, etc) and then been recommended more products to purchase? Those recommendations are powered by DiscoFeed’s data of over 80M shoppers across their network, and they make recommendations to customers that make sense.

So let me paint this picture… you’re making $10M a year with your eCommerce business on Shopify. You’re already spending money to place ads on Meta, Google, TikTok, and maybe content recommendation networks like Taboola or Outbrain. You’re probably also spending on affiliates, where you only pay when you generate a sale. Well, DiscoFeed is a combination of the two — it’s like Taboola meets Affiliate marketing.

You install the app, DiscoFeed automatically pulls in your product feed, you set your target CPA, and within minutes, you’re pushing your product in front of DiscoFee’s 80M shoppers, at a time where the purchase intent is high, and so is the AOV. 

Brands like Caraway, Sol De Janeiro, BYLT, Girlfriend Collective, Corkcicle, and others have all been using DiscoFeed for years. I remember personally onboarding some of these brands in 2020 when they used to be named Co-op Commerce (thankfully, they changed their name).

The punchline of DiscoFeed is that if you want to get more eyeballs and acquire more customers on a CPA basis, you need to set up a demo with DiscoFeed. On that 30-minute call, they’ll explain the product, get you set up, and have your ads live. They’ll even give you some free credits if you tell them you came from me.

Set up a call with DiscoFeed today!

LP of the Week:

This week’s LP of the week might be one of my favorite pages we’ve ever created when it comes to copywriting. Our team absolutely crushed it.

CLICK HERE TO SEE THE LANDING PAGE!

Not only does the landing page play toward humor that their audience of men would understand, but it’s also such a clever way to showcase everything that guys need to see in order to make a purchase. We address the common problems or issues guys have when purchasing clothing, especially dress clothes, and tackle it head-on in a fun way.

Today is the LAST day to book a call and still take advantage of our Black Friday offer for HOOX. Don’t let another year go by where you wish at the end of November that you just put that extra $5k into a page to generate another $100k. Jack from Purdy and Figg tweeted about his experience, and well, it was a great 20x ROI for him!

Book your call with a landing page expert from HOOX on this link!

That's all for this week

I hope today’s newsletter was fun to read. It was definitely fun to write and reflect on my own learnings as I hire talent outside of the US.

Obviously, there is a lot going on in the world right now. Make sure you take some time to educate yourself on the issues at hand, to check in with friends and see how they’re doing, and to take time for yourself to unplug.

I hope you get a full 9 hours of sleep tonight, you stay hydrated, and you get a nice workout in this week. Don’t forget to check in with friends and family and make sure everyone is doing okay, too.

I’ll see you next week, same time, same place!