EP 355 – How to Leverage High-Performance Remote Teams for Business Success – Yoni Kozminski – MultiplyMii

Read the best-effort transcript below (This technology is still not as good as they say it is…):

Michael Waitze 0:06
Let’s do this thing. Hi. This is Michael Waitze, and welcome back to the Asia Tech Podcast. We are joined today by Yoni Kozminski, a co-Founder and the CEO of MultiplyMii. Thank you so much for coming on the show today. Before we get into the main part of this conversation, I want to get a little bit of your little bit of your background for some context. Yoni,

Yoni Kozminski 0:25
absolutely. Michael, first absolute pleasure and honor to be here. I’ve had such a great time chatting with you, so I’m really, really excited to dive in. I’ll try not to bore the audience here and try and keep it, keep it as as succinct as possible. You know, you have storied histories, and there’s, there’s lots to sort of unpack. So at the highest possible level, my background consisted the first decade of it was in Creative Advertising and digital marketing strategy, always from the lens of a small agency. So I was the 10th employee. We grew to about 30 in Australia. I moved to Los Angeles. I was the 15th employee. We grew to about 40, and this was doing everything from web development, design, content production, paid media, TV commercials, live activations for companies that you might have heard of, like Sony MasterCard, Mercedes Benz, Medtronic, Mondelez, for those who are outside of the US, like Cadbury, daramilk, freddo, Frog, cherry, rip, boost, the list goes on. So really, that was where I grew up and where I cut my teeth, so to speak. And for the last seven years, I’ve been more heavily involved in, definitely the outsourcing and recruitment space, process improvement consulting, and also, very largely invested in everything that’s connected and around the E commerce space as well. So

Michael Waitze 1:49
E commerce really cool. Okay, so talk to me about this. I want to get into the main bit of this, like really fast you have a really interesting background, particularly because you’ve lived in a bunch of different places, which I think always makes somebody way more interesting and way more well rounded, to be fair, talk to me about why is leveraging high performance remote teams the key to building great, profitable businesses. Why does this matter?

Yoni Kozminski 2:12
It matters tremendously. It matters more today than it ever has, and it’s one the fact that large conglomerates have been doing this for decades. This is really what has allowed, you know, small to medium enterprises to achieve it. And just to give you a personal experience, you know what? I skipped over in the last seven years, probably six to seven years ago, I actually moved to Israel. And when I did, I met a couple of guys who had an E commerce business. This is sort of my foray into more depth when it comes to e commerce. They had a business. They were trying to operate it themselves. They were doing about $2 million in revenue. What I was able to do with my now co founder was grow a company from two to $5 million in 12 months that was acquired by a larger company. And the way in which we did that was by leveraging and building an agency effectively for this business, leveraging exclusively Filipino talent. So what it did for us was it allowed us to build a much more profitable business. You know, we were operating at 20 plus percent net profit margins, so $5 million business, million dollars of profit. You can imagine, multiple start to get a lot more interesting as you start to hit those types of numbers. And so I’d say just that’s the little anecdotal story to talk about why it’s actually really important to talk, to talk a little bit more about why it’s important is that you it’s, it’s, you know, it’s, it’s not a level playing field today, you’re not competing against just other businesses that are leveraging local talent and and off you go. You know, you are competing with other companies, just to name a few of the larger companies, or at least one I’ll give you, like Accenture. Have 70,000 people deployed in the Philippines alone,

Michael Waitze 3:58
seven mostly, 1000 people from Accenture Philippines, exactly

Yoni Kozminski 4:02
70,000 so. And you know, we have to thank the accentures of the world, who have effectively built up the capabilities from very baseline sort of call center style work, where it’s answering phones, to, you know, high level capabilities today. You know, web development, design, content production, project management, accounts payable, receivable. I mean, the list goes on. And there’s verticals that you can really target, but, but coming back to the importance, I would say one, one caveat is that you have to be adept at actually being able to recruit talent or onboard them, or manage talent in general, and build the frameworks around a real business before you look to sort of outsource or bring on remote talent, I would say that you know people who are sort of used to the in work environment and simply say, well, just shadow me for a week and off we go. You’re sort of doomed to fail. So I would say like it is important. And but you have to be ready to step into that pathway. So,

Michael Waitze 5:05
but how do you, how do you do that, right? Like, that’s a key thing. I was talking to the founder of deal. You must be familiar with this company. He’s also, yeah, of course, right? And he’s very involved in that, right? He’ll set up a company, and then he’ll hire people into his company so that they can work at your company and stuff like that. But how do you train people if they’re remote? Because we found this actually, we do the same thing too. We have three kind of main people in our company, and 20 to 25 people distributed all over the world. And finding the right people for us has ended up being really hard. But once we find them, we keep them. And I agree with this idea, like the remote part of this is awesome, really awesome. But go ahead, tell me how you train them.

Yoni Kozminski 5:42
So depending on sort of the model or who you’re working with, or how you approach it, I’d say even before training, I think that it’s about getting clarity on what your business needs are. So what does success look like when you’re bringing a person on before you know, looking at training and upskilling and components like that. So let’s just assume that you’ve been clear. You understand what their accountability is. There’s a mission, there’s clear understandings of what the operational expectations are, and off you go. The next step is to build a really, really clear onboarding plan. Us internally, we have a framework that we call the 7c Onboarding Framework, where what we’re effectively doing is, we’re making sure end to end for the first 90 days, the first six months, the first 12 months, like it’s all it’s all clear where they need to be, what they need to achieve. You know, it’s like giving people the answers to the test so that they can succeed, as opposed to just hoping and seeing where things will land. So I’d say that’s definitely a critical step. So you know, just to throw out a few examples of that, what is your communication style of what platforms? Yep, what platforms are using. So are you having quick communications on a on a messenger tool like Slack? Are we running a project management tool like Monday or Trello, or Asana, or click up exactly any of those things. What does my cadence of check ins look like? Am I meeting once a day, twice a week? Am I sending daily reports, weekly reports? You know, do you start to take the training wheels off as people get more well versed, I would say for more sophisticated businesses and some of the things that we help companies achieve is that let’s build our second half of our h2 goals and our h1 goals and align to that is the effective goal. What are the hit and miss measures attached to that? And let’s build a proper project management plan on who needs to do what and how we achieve it. So how do you actually shift from this mindset for remote talent being these VAs that can do really sort of baseline tasks, to handing off accountability and saying, This is what you need to achieve. Come to me, we’re going to work together, and let’s give you like real accountability, because you know to to be unclear is to be unkind, and to give them that clarity is is everything. When you want to talk about high performing teams,

Michael Waitze 8:03
do you have a set of tools that you like to use that you recommend people do? Like you like we use Asana. We also use Slack. So like, I’m going through this whole process. It’s really cool, and I’ll be honest with you, Yoni at the beginning, I was terrible at this terrible because I’d worked in big companies my whole life, right? So if my boss wanted me to do something, he literally just came over to my desk and said, Get this done, right? There were no tools. Sometimes email work, but it was mostly just some dude coming over and yelling at you. I’m much better at it now, so I’m kind of proud of myself, because I feel like I’ve learned something. But you have tools you recommend to people?

Yoni Kozminski 8:34
Yeah, absolutely. So you know, we haven’t, we haven’t touched on it, but multiply me is definitely our flagship or our sort of main business, but we have a smaller process improvement consultancy called a Scala, and part of that offering is really to come into businesses and understand their operational challenges and complexities and make a whole host of recommendations. So just just to share some of the major recommendations that we will give out when it comes to technology. As an example, we are huge when it comes to so let’s separate a few things. So one is, you need your ongoing, your quick communications. You know, there’s emails never going to die, right? So, so that’s, that’s obvious. That’s obviously a staple. It’s, it’s, how can you be effective in looking at what is something that I need from external communication, what is something that is attached to a project, and what are things that are, let’s say, quick turnaround insights and information. So our structures and parts of the things that we recommend is for project management. For example, if you’re running long term projects tools, we like clickup as a tool. It’s pretty good, relatively inexpensive, but again, Asana Monday notion. You know, a lot of these platforms can do much the same. So that’s one, that’s one aspect. That’s the project side of things. For quick communication, we are definitely partial to slack. It also has a lot of really nice integration. So, you know, our CRM, for example, is on. Spot so you can track deal stages, for example, and get ping to Slack. So there’s a value proposition in Slack as a tool, not just for its intended purpose, but to sort of make your life easier for for quick notifications. The the thing that I think most companies miss on, and the thing that I cannot stress its importance enough, is a company knowledge base, a company wiki. So that is, I would say, fundamentally. So, you know, there’s always people love to get a free SOP, standard operating procedure. You know, they love the idea of, I’ll just take someone else’s SOP. The best companies in the world that are able to scale, have very detailed knowledge bases where anyone who comes in, and this comes back to the onboarding component, anyone that comes in the business, can find and understand any of the critical information. And so the tool that we love, and we actually, we actually have a partnership with them, so we can send you a link, even to put in the show notes, to give people a meaningful discount on on anyone that signs up. It’s called trainual, and they are incredible when it comes to ensuring that you have a really healthy company wiki and knowledge base the way it’s connected. You know, building your orgs org chart, making sure that you’re actually seeing the progress on new hires and where they actually sit in the journey. So you effectively, when you bring someone on, you can see, have they actually delivered or learned the information they need in order to be able to work with a with a new client in a customer success seat. For example, yeah,

Michael Waitze 11:34
I hadn’t thought about actually building a wiki, but this is a great idea. Yeah,

Yoni Kozminski 11:40
it’s, it’s literally, it’s literally our core, like a big part of our core business inside of Escali is not just, you know, on the back of understanding the process maps, and building them out, and helping people get clarity on what’s happening in their business, and making recommendations on how we can create efficiencies, or sort of the the joint offering between escala and multiply means that we come in, we assess the business at a high level, and then we say this function is the one where you can actually yield the highest possible return, because you can find these cut these kinds of talent and this kind of delivery very, very quickly. So we do this hybrid model where we’ll deliver this rapid business assessment, we’ll jump in there, and then on the back of that. The real value is building out all the standard operating procedures so that you have real clarity at the end of the day on what needs to happen in your business. And when you’re bringing people on, you’re not stuck in the weeds of saying, Shadow me, continue to work with me and on and on and on. They have somewhere to go. So can I see this? You

Michael Waitze 12:36
mentioned, you mentioned this e commerce company that you helped go from $2 million a year to $5 million a year. That’s two and a half times like that’s two and a half times. Like, that’s a big number, since we don’t know the name of the company, and I don’t want to know, like, the intimate details, but can you tell me some of the things that you helped them change so I can get a better understanding of why? Like, my presumption here is that their business itself didn’t change that much, but the processes that they put in place to execute that business probably changed dramatically. No,

Yoni Kozminski 13:01
absolutely, absolutely. So Scala has done, you know, close to 150 projects now, and it’s a much more sophisticated version of what we did in that company.

Michael Waitze 13:10
But for sure, to share, tell me something she isn’t, I don’t care. Yeah,

Yoni Kozminski 13:13
I’m just, I’m happy to, I’m just happy to share that that journey, because I think it’s probably very applicable to anyone listening here things that they can likely achieve themselves, even without, you know, engaging a company like a scar. But you’re right. Firstly, you’re spot on. The Business didn’t change drastically, you know, I’ll say that I don’t even know that we added any new products to the company, you know, like I don’t, I don’t even think that that was the case. I think when I reflect on that journey, what the major things that we’re able to do is, you know, I stepped into that business, and very quickly after, brought my co founder, lippy, into the equation. And what we did was, one is we, we looked at how it was operating. We looked at all the key people. They had three people, really, that were operating this, this business. And we said, what are your actual skill sets? What are the things that you can add a tremendous amount of value in and what are the things that are really bugging you down? So pretty quickly, we got clarity on what people’s accountability should look like in the business. And we said, right, the then CEO was spending 80% of his time on customer support tickets. And the reason why, and this is for a lot of E commerce found, is, is that that’s the only interaction that you have with your actual clients, right? So there’s, there’s a baseline argument to be made in saying, Well, this is the only time we get feedback with customers, so we need to answer quickly, and we need to have the right answers. And because I’ve built the product, I know better. I have all the answers exactly so, so that was so that was something that pretty quickly we said, right, how do we get him out of this seat? So we built out the knowledge base all the different types of questions. You know, even though people think that there’s sort of this magic in the way in which they respond, the reality is that. Is 80% the same thing, not to, not to make anyone feel bad about themselves. I also look at myself and I’m like, you know, if I my goal? Yeah, exactly like I look at myself and I’m like, How do I make myself more and more relevant every single day? That’s my, that’s my, like, lifelong goal in in running business, right? How do I just, how do people just not bother me, and I can go and, you know, enjoy the beach, I was

Michael Waitze 15:23
gonna say, but, yeah,

Yoni Kozminski 15:26
exactly. So that was one thing that we did, is we built out this knowledge base, we then integrated a proper tracking and ticketing system. It was called Freshdesk. I’m sure they’re still around, or FreshWorks, I think it might be called now, and that rapidly shifted the ability to both make sure that we brought, we actually brought on a team of five customer support agents, and we built a schedule where we had 24/7 coverage. So we went from, well, you know, instant. We went from, you know, answers that might happen every 12 hours, or, you know, like CEO goes away for a weekend, comes back and, you know, yeah, ends up being in this reactive mode. We we had instant responses. And if there were, like, some tricky questions, which they do come there was a system to then bring them through. We could review everything. So that was one aspect. The other side of it was we went, we did this across the rest of the business. So we said, Right? Why is the co founder who has no experience in design, building all the creative images, they have the right mental, you know, they had the right mental strategy now, using Canva at the time, which is far it’s a much better place today, Canva, but back then, you know, it was, it was really, it was, it was really average work that was being produced. But you know, it was a golden age as well when it came to particularly marketplaces. Amazon was the major marketplace that they were selling on, and so it really came down to keywords and reviews. So the short of it is, we got the key people out of the business operationally very quickly. We then built systems to say, based on what we need to produce. This is the talent that we need. This is the accountabilities, this is the onboarding, this is everything that they need to be successful. And pretty quickly, you know, we went from two to 5 million. And as a result of that growth and the trajectory it was on, obviously the company started to get a lot more noticed, and it was a quiet

Michael Waitze 17:19
I love it. That’s great stuff. Okay, let’s go back to the remote working thing, because I think it’s actually really important. Is the Philippines the best place to build these teams, right? We were talking about a little bit before, but if it is, why? Like, did the government do something? Did the education system do something? Did the infrastructure, like, why is it the best place to

Yoni Kozminski 17:39
do this? So I won’t, I won’t outright say the Philippines is the best place to do this. I’ll say that there are definitely, like, there are geographies that are more partial to different types of skill sets. Just to, like, throw some examples out. Eastern Europe is really, really known for their development capabilities. They have a really strong development you know, you have lat am as well that has their different skill sets and capabilities. South Africa is becoming a hub. If they didn’t have issues with sort of the government and how things are run there, they’d probably be much further along. But coming back to it, why I am so partial to the Philippines, and why it’s really changed my life to give everyone sort of the macro picture and bring it in. You know, the first off, it’s a population of 120 million people, so it’s about the third the size of the US, which is which is considerable. What’s more is that each person that goes and has a college education is taught in English. So it’s the official education language of the country in the Philippines, right? What we’ve seen over the course of the last 30 years has been that No, I got it. Okay, got it. I’ll start. I’m going to start from the Filipino explanation again, which was sort of I was at the start of that. So when it comes to the Philippines, why I have effectively fallen in love with it before I can share my love story, I probably need to take a step back and just share sort of the macro insights of the country. So, you know, might be surprising to some, but the Filipino population is 120 million people, so about about the third the size of the US, for context here. So it’s big country. The really interesting thing that I’ve later found out is that fun fact, there are more English speakers in the Philippines than there are in England. So it’s not I like it. So I found that one I was I was surprised, but just given the sheer size of the population, they really brought up on Western culture. But I think where it gets really interesting when you talk about a talent pool is that the college education system is done in English, so anyone that has a college education does so in English. And you know, over the course of the last 30 years, what we’ve seen as a shift has been that all these massive companies have invested in it, and so too has the. Meant the government puts a huge focus on what they call the BPO business process outsourcing sector. As you know, a meaningful percentage of their GDP, you’ve seen the increase of 3% of the total population having a college education to 13% today over the course of the last two decades. So there was a massive shift in higher education capabilities, you know, it’s still an emerging world. So this doesn’t mean to say that you’re going to replace all of your C suite tomorrow, you know. And Lord knows, I’ve tried, but, but, but the reality is, you have a really highly educated, capable and evolving market. I think, you know, the sort of the love affair for me really stems from the fact that, from a cultural perspective, I just feel very aligned. So there really funny graph, or, I mean, I find it funny, and it’ll make sense to you why I find it funny in a second, but it’s a graph where the x axis will show you effectively, emotionally, emotionally. I don’t know if we can cut this little bit out here. So the x axis will show you emotional, not vulnerability, but rather emotional expression. So how emotionally expressive you are, yes and no, and the other is on the y axis is confrontational, or confrontationally averse. Why it’s funny to me is when I saw this graph for the first time, living in Israel, Israelis sat in, you know, the very high top quadrant of both emotionally expressive and also very confrontational and so and so. What that means, you know, culturally here is you could literally be in a meeting. You could have two people screaming at the top of their lungs at each other, proving their point, walk out of the meeting say, Alright, where are we going for lunch, as if nothing had happened. You know, the Philippines is not that. The Philippines sits on, not entirely the end of the spectrum. So Filipinos are emotionally expressive, where they are very, very different to a culture like Israel is they’re very non confrontational. They sit really in the in the total polar opposite of it. So, you know, I think one of the things from a cultural perspective that that I like is that I can get the emotional expression and understand how people are feeling without them necessarily having to share it. But if you can create a really healthy environment, then you will actually get that, you know, confrontation, or the needed confrontation to make for a healthy relationship. So I would say that’s one, one really interesting thing about the feedback

Michael Waitze 52:50
that you need when you need it, but you don’t get the old excess stuff that you’d get from someone who just wants to yell at you

Yoni Kozminski 52:57
Exactly, exactly, right? And I would, and I would say, like, one thing, obviously, that I haven’t touched on here, but these are the things that are important to me, you know, coming back to, you know, earlier questions about, you know, why is it important to outsource, you know, I would be foolish not to mention that the cost of living is somewhere between, you know, 60 and 80% of that in the US, depending on where you’re actually living. You know, if it’s in Manila, cost of living is a little higher. But as you start to get more out into the provinces, you know, it can be as little as 80% of that of a, you know, of a respective role or respective cost of living.

Michael Waitze 53:32
But this is not just like a salary arbitrage thing, right?

Yoni Kozminski 53:37
It’s not a salary I

Michael Waitze 53:38
just want to be clear about that. I know that are listening, yeah. Sorry. Go ahead. So,

Yoni Kozminski 53:41
so I mean, like there’s a it is geolocation based arbitrage, if you look at the macro level. But when you actually, when you, when you, when you, when you dig deeper, this isn’t I’m gonna pay someone less and get subpar work. This is I’m gonna pay someone a salary. The way we operate is we pay healthcare, social security, HMO, Phil health. 13th month, you mentioned deal. The founder of deal came on the podcast. You know, they’ve built an incredible business. They’re an employer of record platform, EOR, and this is effectively what we do. Just focused on the Philippines. They’ve enabled the world to do it. And I think they were the fastest company to ever reach $100 million in in in revenue, which is, which is really impressive. And so coming back to the point I’m making here is that you’re finding someone who is with great talent, but you’re also paying health care, social security, HMO, field, health, 13th, you’re paying them a better salary than what they would get from a local role, and you’re getting work, I will argue up to certain levels better than what you would find locally, because you have a deep willingness to work and improve. You have, you know, this degree of, you know, I would say, I mean, you, you obviously live in Asia, but I. Almost call it like Asian Pride. There is something in the water and in the region where it’s not just Filipinos, where, you know, I think part of that whole inability to have confrontation, you know, I like to call it like the disappearing Filipino, but I know it would happen in other geographies, is that there’s such a deep sense of pride that they want to deliver on the work that to have an uncomfortable conflict is almost the lesser of two evils than just walking away from a problem. Yeah,

Michael Waitze 55:27
I want to give it a name, if you don’t mind,

Yoni Kozminski 55:31
I’m searching, I’m I’m searching. I’m searching for a good name. Yes,

Michael Waitze 55:37
so in Japan, they call this tatemae, right? Like the way you behave. Honda refers to your real feelings, and Tata mai refers to the behavior that you show people in public. And there’s a certain way to behave, and I’ve been told plenty of times in Thailand, don’t, don’t do that to that person, because they’ll lose face, which is the worst thing that can like. They’d rather get punched and have pain in their arm or in their chest than had than lose face, because once they lose face, getting it back is hard, right? And that’s the key here. And I think you’re right. I think that’s true in the Philippines, and definitely true in Thailand, 100% true in Japan. Like one of the big problems in Japan with suicide is that people will actually commit suicide if they lose face in a way that’s unrecoverable. Feels unrecoverable to them, right? So it’s very important for sure, yeah, for sure. So,

Yoni Kozminski 56:21
so, and I think that, you know, that’s a an important thing to note as well when you’re working with with Asia. But, you know, again, I’m just looking at my sort of more myopic experience with the Philippines, and I’ve worked with, you know, Pakistan, India, you know, a whole lot of other, you know, Eastern Europe, a whole lot of other regions and geographies, but I’ve really sort of doubled down on the Philippines. And I think you know when, when you look at that, there’s a great book called The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, and in it, in this book, it talks about, sort of the different layers of how you can build a really cohesive team. And one of the early stages of this sort of, like five, five tiered pyramid, is having enough comfort in the workspace to have conflict. I think it’s the second tier or the first tier of this sort of baseline. And so, you know, the advice I would give to anyone working with the Philippines or sounds to me, just based on your experience, Michael, other Asian, other Asian countries, is just to make sure that you are building a level of trust and compassion and humility and building this safe environment where people feel comfortable in knowing that you’re not trying to bring them down a peg, or you’re not trying to have them lose face. You are doing this from the purest point of your heart of saying, I want you to improve, and in order for you to improve, I have to give you this feedback. And its feedback is there to help you, not harm you. Yeah,

Michael Waitze 57:50
exactly. And the way Look, I mean, I was taught at a very young age, right? It’s not what you say that matters, it’s how you say it, too. So the way you give that feedback is obviously quite important. Can I ask you this, how has this kind of rise of remote work impacted the whole economy? And because we’re talking about the Philippines, right, how do you think it’s impacted the whole economy? Do you know what I mean?

Yoni Kozminski 58:11
Absolutely, absolutely, I would say, you know, the big shift, you know, is really interesting. So for us, we started our business multiply me as it’s, you know, as an entity just before the pandemic hit, wow, and we’d always built it with the idea of, of, you know, remote first, you know, a big thing as well, like when I talk about Manila, you can commute literally, like, five miles, and it can take you two hours in peak hour traffic. So I, you know, and I, I hated, you know, living in LA commuting from Venice Beach to Hollywood each day, you know, it was less than that. It was probably an hour. And it could get, could get a bit grim, you know, in deadlock traffic. But I, you know, I was like, I’m not getting this time back in my life. And I didn’t want to create that reality. So we started with that mindset of remote first, and then the pandemic here, we literally won our first client in January, and by March, the world was shut down. So it was a really of 2020 we started in 2019 and then launched in in 2020 so back to sort of your question here, and looking at it from the lens of how important is it, I would say that the world pretty quickly had to understand, how do they work with remote talent. And I think it helped us, you know, expedite, not in that first year, but let’s say by year, two people like, Okay, now I’m figuring out how to build better structures. I guarantee you, most people are running better businesses today than they were pre covid as a result of this force function, for sure. And if you look at, you know, let’s, let’s look at E commerce for a second, the rising costs of everything that is attached to supply chain. You know, if you look at everything from the US, like the tariffs that are put on Chinese companies, to supply chain and logistics challenges and the increased demand, the need for it to be same. Day the increases in, you know, Amazon as a platform, for example, and how, for someone who’s selling on the platform, you know, you just have this massive margin compression on all sides. So in order to be profitable as a business and to build a business that, you know, ultimately, I mean, at least for me, I wish I was just running a nonprofit, and everything I was doing was not from monetary gain. I hope I would like to then, you know, have my focus just as, how do I make the world a better place? But the reality is, in order for me to achieve these things and pay healthcare and social security and do good things, even in this short, you know, in this timeframe, you need to build a profitable business. And so I would say, if you are not getting on board remote talent and finding ways to leverage remote talent, you’ll be left behind and you’ll, like I said before, you’re not completing you’re not competing on a level playing field. If I’ve got 80 people sat in the Philippines, and my average salary is circa $1,000 a month for a really capable team member, and yours is five or $6,000 a month, we’re playing the same game, but with very different rules. Yeah, exactly. Yeah,

Michael Waitze 1:01:05
you’re definitely going to win all of the things being equal your cost structure, which means your profit margin is going to be way higher, right? And if your work quality is just as high, the other guy’s going to lose. For sure. Can I ask you this? Why do you think so? I was talking to some guys in India this morning, right? And there’s this, there’s this secular change that’s been taking place in India where, you know, the guys that graduated from the best colleges would then go to the United States, get their MBA, get their master’s degree, go to Silicon Valley, go to New York and work on Wall Street, or, you know, become doctors and lawyers in the US, because they felt like that was a better they had a better chance of, like, living a better life there, but their kids are now graduating from the best universities in India and staying in India because they feel like that’s the better opportunity. And interestingly, these two guys came home because they’re in their 50s, because they also saw that it was a better opportunity to be in India. There has been a whole history of, like, Filipinos being overseas workers, right? But those were generally kind of like, house helpers and stuff like that. Yeah. And I had one, and it happily employed her in Japan for years. But how come these skilled professionals and the college graduates who speak English haven’t made this choice to, like, go to the US, go to the UK, go to Australia, or have they? And I just don’t know it to earn, like, much higher salaries.

Yoni Kozminski 1:02:24
Yeah, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a really interesting question, and I think that it definitely would be like a case by case. So I don’t want to make too many sweeping generalizations, but, but my assumptions backing up my sweeping generalizations, and now saying my assumptions is, you know, we’ve actually had some team members who were US born, moved back to the Philippines. You know, I’m talking about like, you know, first generation Americans moving back to the Philippines. And, you know, when I look at it from, from their lens as an example, you have a a much smaller world. So you know, for example, like people on my team who have that existence, they can get a beautiful salary in the Philippines. It’s not going to be that of the US, but when you look at the unit economics, you know that they’re paid five times likely what someone in a relative position would be paid because of the skill sets. Their cost of living is 60 to 80% lower. And they have house helpers, drivers. Like, you literally can build this incredible lifestyle because the cost of living is so low. And, you know, just for for context as well, like, I mean, for foreigners, very hard to buy land in the Philippines, you’d probably have to find some some degree of like, work around but, like, for a $300,000 investment, you could live in your dream, your dream home. You could probably have a house with a pool on a beach, you know, with everything you know, like, you could retire with maybe a million dollars, you know, in your bank account, something to that effect. So coming back to it, because the world is so small, and because, you know, I would say that most people, at least, I think that the relevant companies look at it from what is the value that someone brings to my company, not what are the tasks that they’re performing, if they can bring value. So let’s say I bring on a salesperson, and they’re generating whatever $5 million worth of new business a year. For us, I’ll pay them a million dollars happily. You know, it’s no question. I don’t care where they live in the world, if that’s the value that they can bring to our business, then off you go. So if you look at it from that lens, you know, this person can work a couple of years and they’re set. They’re set. They could literally become like, you know, they could become the equivalent of, you know, billionaire status in in the Philippines, and they don’t need to leave the country in order to achieve it, if they’re, you know, English is at the level that I would say even Filipinos that never leave the country. Is that in many cases,

Michael Waitze 1:04:54
yeah. I mean, one of the reasons why I live in Bangkok is exactly for that reason, right? If I if. Had to live in Singapore. I love Singapore. I work in Singapore. I think the government in Singapore is amazing. But if I had to live there at the same lifestyle, it would probably be four times more expensive, or five times more expensive. Easily,

Yoni Kozminski 1:05:09
easily. I was just in, I was just in Bangkok in June, and it’s like, you know, the flights over there was like, maybe 1500 bucks, if that. And once you were there, it’s like, you know, comparatively, like, we were there for four or five days, and we literally spent no expense, and it didn’t cost as much, right, as the actual flight over, you know, that’s the, you know, that’s the reality. That was, it was for a bachelor party, and we were saying, if we get once we get there, everything’s like, you know, relatively inexpensive. So I’m saying that’s the appeal. And you live like, you know, we literally lived like kings, yeah,

Michael Waitze 1:05:44
yeah, for this outsourcing and stuff that’s happening into the Philippines, right? Is it mostly Asian companies that are taking advantage of this? Because they know, like, they understand the Philippines, like, I’m pretty sure, if I ask somebody from I don’t know, upstate New York, right? Like in Buffalo or Rensselaer, one of these, like upstate towns, is wealthy, right? They’re not poor. And I was like, Would you do your outsourcing the Philip they’d have no idea, right? So I’m just curious, is it mostly Asian countries, so, like Thailand, whatever that will use them, because we have people in the Philippines that work for us, right? But we’re here, or is it Western countries, or is it just uniquely global

Yoni Kozminski 1:06:22
for us, like in the markets that we serve. And I would say that this is definitely trend, like 80% of our client base comes from or 70% comes from the US, and the rest would be through Europe. So we are really heavily concentrated on a US market. I would say that where it gets really interesting is that it depends on the vertical that you’re in. So, you know, as an example, we got our start, really in the E commerce space. We’d had a bit of experience in it. So it was like a very natural progression. But when I actually look at it, Tim Ferriss wrote a book called The Four Hour Workweek that some of the listeners might be familiar with. Probably, that was probably, you know, I want to say at least 10 years ago that he wrote that book, and so he really helped for sort of that E commerce, entrepreneurial market. He really helped sort of educate people that you could find talent. Back then it was like $1 or $2 an hour to bring on VA is virtual assistants, which I personally hate that term, but that was the term, you know, it was the term that, like, you know, really brought the market forward, or the exposure to the market. So I’d say that, like, for people who are in that generation, reading those books and coming up on that, like, they’re very open to it. They understand, like, for the most part, where to look, what to do. And, you know, while they might not be experts in running businesses, they really understand. So the value proposition, I find, what’s really interesting, and to your point, is, like in upstate New York or in Buffalo, it’s like you have all these, you know, we work with a lot of construction companies and financial services businesses today, like companies that are bringing in site surveyors, quantity surveyors, you know, Junior architects, people that use Revit, you know, roles like accounts payable, receivable, CPA, accountants, roles like that. And they’re often just amazed that, like, wait, I can find talent like this that can do like, all of this heavy legwork lifting, work like, it’s not just this person stuff. So I think that like it, it’s almost like two interesting challenges at either end of the spectrum. You either have people who are really aware of it and will take it on, but aren’t really willing to or they don’t understand the value proposition, because they’re used to saying, Well, I’m paying $4 why would I pay $6 an hour with you guys? Or, you know, like, why would I I can pay someone $600 a month? Why would I want to pay them $800 a month with you, like, just because you’re finding a little bit better talent, would be their mindset, whereas, when you work with these companies who really don’t have the exposure, you have to bring on those training wheels. So coming and building the process documentation and the onboarding, collateral and the SOPs, like, it really helps them build a degree of comfort around it. But they look at and they say, I was paying someone $100,000 I’m paying them $20,000 a year or $30,000 a year today. Like, get me more. So I think that’s like, that’s like, the ends of the spectrum is, like, there’s people that that the industry is right for it, but they don’t have a degree of knowledge base or comfort, or they know, and they’re looking at it from a really sort of narrow vantage point in saying, like, Well, I’m just, you know, it’s going to cost me a couple extra 100 bucks, not it’s going to save me, because I’m getting high quality talent, yeah.

Michael Waitze 1:09:27
How has the government reacted to this? So they must notice, right? The government must notice, because it has to change the tax rolls. They must see people making way more money. They must see the people that are graduating from university, like you said, who can speak English really well? You know, getting better jobs, staying in the country, as opposed to going to the Middle East or going to Japan to get jobs where they’re way overqualified, right? Because we saw a lot of that too. But like, do you speak to people in the government? Do you know anybody in the government? Do you talk to them about this? And like, what

Yoni Kozminski 1:09:57
do they think? So. Yeah, I’ve actually spoken to people in foreign governments about this. So there’s, there’s, for example, I spoke to a lot of people in the New Zealand government who are looking to invest much more heavily in their relationships with the Philippines, almost helping them guide them through that, that journey. But I have a lot of knowledge about what the government’s focus is when it comes to the BPO space and how they help businesses. So there’s a number of different types of accreditations that you can get and ways in which you can structure businesses. As an example, there’s a scheme that they have called PESA in the Philippines, where they’re trying to bring on foreign ownership to a degree, and give certain concessions that enable people to start businesses more quickly and bring more money into the company, into the company, into the country. And so there is a the government is heavily invested. It’s actually like a driving focus for them that’s to to achieve this. Yeah, yeah. It’s an absolute driving focus. Like they see, they see, you know, in 2010 the Philippines was known as the BPO capital of the world, and it was the fastest growing market. I think today, again, it’s the fastest growing market, but it’s, it’s, it’s a combination of factors. I think the government puts a lot of value on it. There was a lot of early work done with these larger corporations and conglomerates sort of built the talent pool, and it’s moved from this. They call it now KPO instead of BPO. So BPO is business process outsourcing. KPO is knowledge process outsourcing. So because the capabilities are now increased, they’re moving to these real knowledge workers and team members. And you know, when I look at our mission as a business our our fundamental goal is to say, how do we how do we create in the most positive, positive way, this codependent relationship where we’re empowering Filipino team members to upskill, get better education and be the best possible, highest value team member, And at the same time, how do we help companies actually understand how to leverage that talent and help them grow too? Because if we can achieve that 10 years from now, you know, we can see a reality where the dreams that I have, where I can switch out and have C suites that are sat, you know, only in the Philippines, and totally creating that unfair advantage is possible. There was one other point I wanted to make on that, around that, that connected tissue, I think, like one of the important things is that, you know, we are talking about, as I said, like emerging world here. So, you know, for us that have grown up in Western societies, you know, we have generations of college education and, you know, it’s sort of embedded in our DNA at this point, and we understand and your our parents and our parents, parents have had these levels of education for a lot of people in the Philippines. You know, this is the first time someone in their in their families had a college education. Generation before were farmers, you know, in the provinces. So when you look at just the sheer speed in which this is actually evolving, you know, 3% at college education to 13% in just 10 years, at a population of 120 million. You know, the reality is that it’s going to happen. You need to invest and create that. You know, to get your you know, to get your heels in now, effectively, because this is the time, and because of all the work that all these massive conglomerates did is now making it accessible for, you know, small to medium enterprise to really leverage it. And companies like deals sort of make that really expansive globally. Or you work with a multiply me, who can do it on a on a Philippines focused scale. I’m going

Michael Waitze 1:13:35
to say this, you answered my last question without me having to ask, and I was going to ask you what the downstream impacts were and how the education system is changing as well. Yoni. Yoni Kozminski, a co-Founder and the CEO of Multiply<ii. First of all, thank you so much for your patience. People will not know what that means, but you do. I really appreciate it and I learned a ton. We have to have you back on. It would be awesome to have you back on and learn more and more about this as it keeps growing. Yeah,

Yoni Kozminski 1:13:57
I would. I would be absolutely honored. It’s just great chatting with you, Michael, and I’ve got to say, just on the back of you and the conversations we’ve had, I am going to restart my podcast, and I’d love you to be one of my first guests. If you’re open to it, I’d love to.