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Hello and welcome to The Virtual Frontier, the podcast about virtual teams created by a virtual team. I'm Chris and I'm part of the team here at Flash Up on today's episode, we have Derek Gallimore. Derek is the founder and CEO of the outsource accelerator. Derek and Manuel talked about offshore staffing and the future of a globalized workforce. So here is Episode 19 of The Virtual Frontier featuring our guest, Derek Gallimore. Hello and welcome to our podcast, which will frontier today we have the episode, Offshore Staffing and the Future of a Globalized Workforce.

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We have directly more in our episode. And Derek is the founder and CEO of the outsource accelerator. Derek, your business is described as the world's leading independent source of information and advisory for staff outsourcing to the Philippines. So let us start let us start to get the basics right. Let us tell us something about you and specifically about what is outsourcing. Yeah, absolutely, first of all, thank you so much for having me on your show. And as always, I'm certainly excited to to speak about this topic.

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So, yeah.

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Do you define sort of outsourcing as as as I see it?

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Yeah, because basically people think about outsourcing, OK, I have some amount of work. I hand it over to somebody, they do it and hand it over to me. And I don't care about this outsourcing company or people. And they usually think it's very yeah, it is not the way we work. It is intransparent people we don't know. So but what does it mean to you? Yeah, absolutely, and I think outsourcing, for better or worse, is a is a big, broad umbrella term and it covers a huge array of different options, different types of working and different structures.

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And I say, for better or worse, because I think that outsourcing the term itself has a lot of negative connotation with it. And I think obviously you share the same industry as me. I think we have a lot of work ahead of us to to sort of really open people's minds and hearts to the potential of outsourcing or offshoring.

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So I suppose the point of outsourcing that I focus on is really more staff augmentation, and it is about offshoring those staff. So for all intents and purposes, these are still your staff and your team. They're a part of your company and buy into your values and your processes. And generally you as the business owner or the manager, manage the people, manage their operations and manage their outputs. The only really significant difference is that instead of them sitting beside you in your office, they are aggregated in an office in the Philippines and the outsourcing supplier or ourselves provides the facilities and great facilities, also employs them so that they are legally employed.

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They have all the government contributions, all of the health care. But for all intents and purposes, and they are your staff working towards your mission?

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I think that's a huge difference from what I described, because what you said is that you you build a system where you can access people that live in the Philippines, but make them part of your company. You can manage them by yourself. They will be part of your culture instead of having like an account manager that has people behind and then have some intransparent things happen without you being able to control them so that you can't really influence the result, then you just have to trust this single person with a single point of failure.

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Instead, what you do is give people access to yet another part of the world. In your case, it's the Philippines where you have really great talent and then make these people an integrated part of your organization. Right. Yeah, absolutely, and we represent the entire outsourcing industry in the Philippines, and it's been going 25 years and of course, there's a lot of different business models within the industry. The original outsourcing was that full service BPO. And so I think that you've alluded to.

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But now that is the enterprise business is big. International conglomerates are still using those full service options. But generally for the small and medium sized businesses in the world, they are leaning more towards the staff augmentation staff leasing model that we generally promote as well, because this also supports the agile transformation that almost every business is heading to.

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Right. If you don't have access to your people and you can't work directly with them, then you can't use agile methods to like, improve your business continuously with those smart people. Yeah, absolutely, and I don't want to be you know, I'm relatively agnostic, I believe that this form of offshore staffing works well, but also it's like a toolkit. If you need some project work done, that at work might be a really good option. And, of course, you know, most small and medium sized businesses, they will typically go to an accountant, go to a law firm that is all different types of project based work and of course, it getting websites built.

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All of this is just a part of the the different optionality for hiring people in different sort of senses and getting work done ultimately. Mm hmm.

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OK, and let me know, how did all this start? I mean, how or what was the moment when you first thought about building an organization that helps others to outsource? Yeah, so my my previous business was I've always been entrepreneurial and my previous business was in hotels and hospitality. We had a service department company in central London and because of hospitality, there was a need for 24/7 customer support because of course, I found in your hotel 24/7 and I realized that wasn't financially viable in central London.

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So someone suggested that I went to the Philippines in 2011. I got my first employee in the Philippines and I very quickly found that they were incredibly effective at a great price and then built their office up to about 70 staff. We started with customer service, but then very quickly we went up the value add a ladder and we were having the entire organization effectively built and managed from the Philippines. So once I moved on from that business, I.

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I had then spent a considerable amount of time in the Philippines. I was very aware of the outsourcing industry and saw the value, the incredible value of this offshore staffing model can bring to businesses in the West. Now, there's a lot of outsourcing suppliers in the world, but there is no aggregator platform and there's no market place that helps small and medium sized businesses navigate this industry. So I created outsource accelerator, which is that marketplace, you know, with list about 700 outsourcing suppliers.

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We have about five thousand articles on the website and it is all about educating people about what offshore staffing is, how they do it, the pricing structures, and then also how they find and match up with suitable suppliers in in the past.

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I mean, I'm in the I.T. business. I started there since 2006, basically, and even before that, I studied computer science. And during this time I always heard about offshoring, offshoring, outsourcing, and there were movements towards outsourcing. Then there were movements back to insourcing. Why do you think there is always a cycle in this? Like it is like a trend, you know, that people start doing that. Then they have some experience. They stop and think insourcing is better than they have.

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This huge loss of talent don't find people locally, they outsource again. Do you think it is just a trend or how will the future of work look like? In terms of a sort of macro view, I believe everything like a pendulum swings, you know, you have centralisation of services and you have decentralization of services. You in America, you go Republican and then you go Democratic. And I think that generally sort of something catches on. And then over a decade it swings to the extreme and then it goes back the other way.

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I think there are pros and cons to everything. There is the sort of strictly defined outsourcing, which is effectively I think when you get someone else to manage that business, that aspect of your business for you, there are pros and cons to that that I think is being debated for decades or centuries now in that you can get a specialist to do it. They might be specialized at it, but then you don't have the skills internal and you're reliant then on an external pattern which carries its risks.

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So I see the the pros and cons of that. What I do see, though, is a general trend to what globalization now, 50 years ago, there was no globalization, certainly at the level that we have now, because quite simply, there wasn't the the Internet, the communications, the low cost of all of the Internet and communications and the sort of technological interfaces that now allow that. So, you know, there is always this movement between the outsourcing and insourcing, but something that is progressive is this globalization.

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And what that brings is the opportunity. You know, previously we were isolated to the geographic location that we were based, whether it was us or our business or our clients. And you might be in a city of one million people. Now you have a marketplace of about seven or eight billion people in the world. And my sort of message and thesis is that the global communication community should be sourcing from the globe and that eight billion people that can potentially do the job better than the options that you have locally.

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So it's super exciting opportunity and that just leads to more opportunities as the technology and communications improves.

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While you were describing this, I had a huge smile on my face because that is exactly the vision that I follow and that is what I experienced when I had my local workforce like two and a half years ago. And we had always too many projects or too many people, and we couldn't source new projects to earn enough money. But then one project crashed and I had the chance to either let it crash or save it. And I started with a virtual team where I got twenty three people, twenty three people in a single day that saved my projects over four days.

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So that was the moment for me when I experienced. While there are more than enough people all over the world that have the time and the skills to help me with my with my situation right now, I just need to understand how I can access them, how I can find them, and then most importantly, how to manage them properly, how to delegate properly, which tools. And I need so that outsourcing is not happening by accident, but follows a structure and a system.

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So which advice would you give to organizations that are new to outsourcing if they want to start in the right way and avoid the most common problems? Yeah, I mean, it's very broad, it really depends on their requirements, it depends on their firm.

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But generally what I would suggest is just be open minded to to what opportunities and resources are out there that aren't necessarily local to you and just sort of be open minded that people don't necessarily have to sit in the same office as you to be highly competent, capable and to contribute to your business as anyone just sitting locally would do. And I think once you realize that, then you go, holy hell, you know, I've been hiring from a pool of only one million people, one hundred thousand people.

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And there are seven billion, eight billion people out there. And there's a lot of opportunities out there.

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Now, whether you choose to go down a sort of agency route or an up work gig economy kind of route, some sort of project work or offshore staffing, staff augmentation, there's so many different options and we can certainly help you navigate those. But really, it's just opening up the sort of the opportunity to explore those, uh, yabbie be open minded.

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I mean, that sounds easier as it is, but if there is such a big opportunity and the pressure increases every year, I mean, to really find local talent. So what holds people back from just giving it a try?

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Yeah, I think the culture moves slowly and certainly people if if they're not used to working with remote teams, then, you know, there's a sort of cultural shift needed you instead of just sort of leaning over and telling someone how to do something, you actually have to maybe have a few more systems. You have to rely on software. You have to rely on sort of technical technological interfaces a little bit more. So I think these are the kind of hurdles.

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And then also when you talk about offshore staffing, typically you're going to an emerging market, something like the Philippines. So on top of that, there's all the concerns about this. And this is slightly different people. This this is an emerging economy. Is is it safe? Is the trust there? And then how do we work with different timezones? So I think this just sort of, you know, grey areas, there's uncertainty. There's maybe a lack of clarity as to how to proceed.

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And it's just really believing that it is all doable. It's achievable. And people have been doing this now for twenty five years. You'd be surprised who is doing it. And it's really a lot easier than you think.

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Um, yeah. Basically, it comes to comes to the way that organizations are used to work from the past because most organizations I used to work with their stuff in the local office and then what happens? They value they value these kitchen talks and they value the personal conversations that you can have on a daily basis when you meet in the office almost accidentally. They value this more than clarity, structure and the systematic approach to get work done. And from my experience, that's why they think work has to be like this and work can be different.

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And if you tell them, OK, you can outsource your work to like the Philippines or to a virtual team spread all over the globe, then they think, OK, this can't work because here in our company we work like this and this, that and this is the only way it can work. So changing these habits, changing this belief sets and changing this culture is most likely the biggest thing. But on the other side, companies understood they need to change.

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They have to change. And if there was a company that really wants to change, what do you think is the first step to get a positive experience with outsourcing? Yeah, look, you're absolutely right, and I think companies are compelled to stay competitive and companies cannot stay static, they have to keep up with the competitors and they have to keep up with global and technological trends. And I think just offshore staffing is one of those things. If you want to dip your toe in it, it's easier than you think.

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It's really it can depending on the size of your firm. But just identify one role in your business that is not necessarily mission critical to your business. It is not necessarily too technical. And also potentially it is not necessarily to client facing. OK, so choose something that basically cannot fail is what I'm suggesting to something that you are commonly doing and you have an established process for it. Now, once you've identified that that functional role, very commonly, it could be a little bit of bookkeeping, it could be basic business administration, potentially customer service.

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But I would tend not to focus on that too much because that's customer facing. Once you've identified that role, then you can just dip your time by employing someone and giving that a go. You can actually even start on atwork or something so that it's a part time project. But effectively, it's just familiarize yourself with identifying the role or the function, then mapping out the process required to complete that, then finding the resources, conveying the information to the resources, getting them to do it.

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And then there is an iterative process of assessing what they've done, critiquing it and just sort of generally improving the process from there. It's super simple, I think, where people sometimes fall down or they they they basically expect too much at the beginning. Very commonly when you talk about outsourcing, people choose when you say choose the role to outsource, people will think of the role that they hate doing the very difficult roles and the roles that they have never managed to do before.

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And then they go, OK, we'll do this for me because I can't do it and I really don't like doing it myself. And those roles are commonly destined to fail because outsourcing isn't about solving your problems. It is not about outsourcing the problems. It's actually about getting well-established processes done more efficiently. So, you know, it's just sort of choose something easy to something that can't fail, get experience with that. And then you can move up the family ladder and complexity matter of different roles and processes.

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And that's a very valuable advice, really, to focus on those things that can't fail and the things that you are really familiar with, like established processes, that is a good start to get a positive experience and then grow further and further with more positive experience. I'm wondering now if you if you say technology is a driver of outsourcing, because 50 years ago there was simply not such an opportunity to collaborate with people from all over the world. Which tools?

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I mean, not a specific tool, but types of tools do organizations need to implement? So that seamless cooperation and collaboration between the one local office and the outsourcing staff in the Philippines can work successfully. Yeah, look, I'm I'm fairly agnostic, I would suggest going as simple as you can, especially if you're not already using a lot of different software and tools, then don't introduce too many, because that is just going to add another layer of complexity and confusion and stress for you or the boss or whoever it is used the most simple tools.

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You know, we've got Skype, most everyone has Skype, you've got Google documents that people can just right out of process. And that's it, you know, maybe have a to do list and just start with that. The the the the key aspect is to just get the information out of out of your head into some sort of process, some sort of mapped process which can then be transferred into the head of the other person. And tools are great, but just sort of try and minimize them at the start and then you can layer on more and more tools as you go sort of project management tools and different communication tools.

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And of course, you've got slack and things like that. Now, that is not to say that this technology, sort of a kind of ramp up that we've had over the last 50 years is incredible. You know, it's only sort of 20 years ago that the international calls were prohibitively expensive and then came along Skype.

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And so it's just really taking advantage of these incredible things. And it's really about reducing the friction of working alongside someone like that is all it is. It's reducing the friction. If it's if it's a pain to work with someone, if it's a pain to do something, then it won't work. So it's just about how do you reduce that friction, establish the roles and processes, as well as establish a bit of rapport with, you know, the people working together.

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And then that's all you need. You're away. Oh, yeah. That's absolutely a reasonable. Hey, everyone, Chris here again, we'll get back to our conversation with Derek Gilmore in just a minute. I wanted to give a quick thank you and shout out to Kate plans for the review of our show on our podcast. They said, if you work in or with a remote team or are interested in using virtual teams, this podcast is a must hear smiley face emoji.

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So thanks again for that review, Capons. We really, really appreciate it. Reviews like that really help people find our show. So if you like what you're hearing, please head over to your favorite podcast app and leave us a review. You just might be featured right here in this spot on a future episode. Now back to our conversation with Derek Almog. From your explanations and from your experience. How can organizations avoid the following scenario that has definitely nothing to do with a right or wrong tools, but when I started with, like opening our organization to distributed stuff all around the globe, basically we use freelancers from everywhere.

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We experience that our local people saw while there are other people that can help me immediately whenever I need a level engineer or software developer, whatever, I have this person like in a week instead of six months. Then they started working with these people. But what they lack is a clear understanding of which skill this person has and which kind of work we can really delegate to this person. What happened then is that, let's say a software developer, somebody hired a software developer to extend their capacity in the team and then they saw while the software developer is really good, and then they started handing over other kind of work.

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And today we call this roll pollution because the person was hired as a software developer. Then it was supposed to also manage its own work. Then he needs to understand, like user interface a little bit and he needs to do the quality assurance of his own work instead of having a separate Kuai person. So his role and his skills got colluded. And this led to poor results because this person is an expert in software development, but not in management.

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And we had to shift this around and really got clear about the roles, the skills and our own expectations of the work that we want to get done and this together. And then this led to a real clear picture of which kind of people we need to get, which kind of work done. How can organizations avoid this mistake? Yeah, I mean, and I think that's a common example, and it's one that we see too often, but sort of taking out the offshoring aspect to this, I think that is a fundamental management question that people have been sort of experiencing for decades, if not hundreds of years.

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You know, some like part of the issue there is that that when people are effective, they get more jobs given to them. So, you know, if you do a really good job, then we'll give you two jobs tomorrow. And if you do those really well, then we'll give you four jobs tomorrow. So it's just really putting in management processes and operational processes in place so that that doesn't happen too much. And again, I think the you call it sort of roll pollution, but I think that very commonly distributed workforces or remote or offshore teams can often be can often what can often fail.

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And they're wrongly sort of accused of failing because they're offshore or they're remote. And actually it's potentially just the management structure in place that is causing those to fail. And that is as much the case as the business is. A tough running, a smooth operation is tough. Managing people is tough. And then when you add another layer that those people are in a different location, it's a little bit tougher again. So there's a lot of factors in creating a very complex environment.

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And then when something goes wrong, then people can just naturally jump to conclusions saying, well, you know, this is a remote team. So that must be the problem. I think fundamentally, if you have good processes in place, good systems in place, then the the fact that they're remote or distributed doesn't really change that much. But I yeah, I agree with you. I absolutely see it so commonly that I call it role creep. You know, as soon as someone gets good at something, they're given five more tasks.

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And it's something that needs to be sort of managed within the operation that requires a huge amount of self reflection of the person that delegates work, because whenever they start something new and then things fail, they are used to blame the new system or what they simply tried and what was new instead of reflecting on themselves and understand, OK, I, I had an excellent person, but I delegated either in the wrong way or I delegated the wrong type of work to this person.

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And if they do this then they can improve. Otherwise they would have thought to outsourcing and never be able to access this opportunity again.

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So when we look at typical organisations, I'm not just referring to Germany, but to Europe or even across the world. How many organisations do you think are really ready to outsource properly and how to identify? If my organization is really ready to outsource. Yeah, good question, great question. Look, I I generally say that 99 percent of businesses can and should outsource, even if you have a business that is very physically located, like a plumber, for example, or an electrician, you know, there are still a huge amount of activities within that business that can and should be done remotely, whether it's marketing or accounting, invoicing, bookkeeping, administration, client, follow ups, any, anything.

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All of that stuff can be done remotely and it is more efficient to do that remotely. Now, there is one aspect with you being in Germany, and this is the big elephant in the room. There is a language barrier there. And, you know, and I don't know to what degree, but this is a point of friction. And and I commonly come back to the point of friction. If the friction is too high, then regardless of how much you save or the other benefits, then it is not worth it.

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So people just have to sort of assess the alignment in terms of the sort of the language. But beyond that, pretty much every business should look at what they can outsource, what they can offshore, and that that is regardless of the sector, but also regardless of the the the stage of the lifecycle that they're in. So should you start offshoring when you're a startup or a 50 year old company with a thousand people? And my answer to that is just do it now, because if you're if you're hiring your first person, then it's a great start to hire that person remotely and set the foundations.

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If you have a thousand staff and then start with two or three staff doing one function offshore, and then that can maybe spread to other parts of the organization. So it's a very flexible application and model. I absolutely see in the same way, if you start to build your organization based on a culture that fosters flexibility and leverages outsourcing already, and it's easy to scale that with the same system, with outsourcing and virtual teams and a distributed workforce, if you grow a company to like 40, 50, 100, even 1000 people, and then you need to change this culture to accept outsourcing or make even outsourcing your DNA, that is a heavy machine that they have a mission for.

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For sure.

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It is hard and it's difficult to you know, even if you have a thousand people, it's really difficult to implement different software system or an ERP or a, you know, a sort of Kocan system for the staff. Everything gets very difficult to to sort of change in big businesses. And this is potentially the downfall of big businesses. But certainly there's some of the upsides that it's hard to refute. Yeah.

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So changing change is always hard to change in systems or tools is hard, but changing the culture I think is the hardest thing. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

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Let's let's dive into a discussion of, um, the local workforce. I mean, you also you connect to local workforces, right? You have a local organization and then you have the team in the Philippines and somehow they are connected while we have. A completely virtual organization distributed all over the globe. We we even want to get rid of our office so there is no physical limitation or restriction of office or just virtually globally digital. Where do you see the differences?

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Yeah, look, I know it's horses for courses, I think there's different options. I think there are pros and cons to every model out there. There is, of course, automatic, which is Matt Mullenweg, company that runs WordPress. That is sort of, I think, most famously the probably the most prominent distributed company with about 1000 staff. I believe they have never had an office know and it works for them. And of course, they're building a very successful company.

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So I think the assumption is that people that have, you know, multi international offices, they're generally a huge conglomerate. And then people sort of say, well, we don't have the sophistication to work with people in different locations, but you only need to look at a small coffee shop, you know, and if if they have two branches of coffee shops, then they are fundamentally working as a distributed team and they have two coffee shops in the same town, but different parts of the town.

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They then have to figure out processes, procedures for aligning the culture of those two staff teams. And this is all that you have to do within a business. How do we keep people aligned? How do we tell them what they need to do? How do they feel a part of one culture, one business? And how do we how do we sort of execute this efficiently and effectively? So it is not as complicated as people sort of tend to lean towards.

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OK, yeah, that sounds really that sounds to me like or let me rephrase it. If you have a local team, is it required to have this local team because it needs to better results, or is it just a social benefit for people that like to work when other people are around? Yeah, a little bit of everything is. I mean, look, personally, I think that there is a sudden higher level of efficiency if people connect together know.

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And that is why we sort of suggest to have the model of you have your local team and then you have another team sitting in the Philippines and they all go to the office. They all turn up at the same time. They have the huddles and the meetings and things like that. And I see an advantage to that. But equally, I see the arguments for fully distributed teams, fully independent location, independent teams. So, yeah, this is a lot of different options here.

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And I don't think any one of them is right. Any one of them is wrong.

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But certainly the sort of optionality is extending to your clients, usually their offshore staff. Personally, I mean, yeah, I mean, you know, it depends on some of them might just have one or two people and know they might visit two or three years later, but some of them are pretty proactive. They might even come before they build a team and some of them come every six months, every three months. You know, it depends on how engaged they are.

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But generally, it adds incredible sort of fidelity to the experience. When you're talking to people over Skype, I assume, and you sort of get to know them, you chat with them, you're texting them and blah, blah, blah, you're emailing them. You get to know people. But it's not until you actually visit the site, see them all hanging together, see them doing the work, see them going for their lunch break, see them chatting to each other, see them turn up, see them and see them happy, that it really sort of gives you the full picture in high fidelity.

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And then you realize that these aren't just an offshore team. This isn't just outsourced people, but they're actually people. And, you know, they've all got their own families. They've got their own career aspirations. They're excited, they're sad and sort of adds extra level of depth to the business relationship. And then people are like, wow, this is this is incredible. And generally, once people have visited it, it's it's a completely different beast.

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It's it's it's a different experience. And generally, once people have visited, you know, they might have to staff five staff, 10 staff. They want to 10x by the time that they leave because they're so convinced by the model.

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Absolutely agree. This is exactly my experience and what I realized. It's not it's not that you have to sit in the same office to get work done, but you have to meet in person so that you really see and connect on a human level, on an emotional level. And this connection lasts over even. Yeah. Two, three, six, eight, 12 months. So we repeat our team meetings where we invite our virtual staff to one local physical point, wherever it is in the world, so that we can connect on a on a on an emotional basis, on a human basis and simply share some experience with each other.

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So from from my perspective, it's not required to sit in an office to get the work done. But it is required to keep people connected to the mission, to the vision, to the values of the company to connect physically at least once a year. So this is how how we do it. And from my understanding, this is what you described, right?

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Yeah, I absolutely agree. Yeah.

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Now, if you if your business continues to grow over the next, let's say, five years, which vision do you follow and how will this impact the economy or businesses that do not to outsource in today's. Yes, so, look, we have written a white paper on this. We did some research and there's about 50 million small and medium sized businesses in the in the high cost English speaking world. And if you look at the the big international conglomerates, the enterprise, the Fortune 500, 95 percent of those businesses outsource.

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If you compare it to the 50 million small and medium sized businesses in the world, around about zero point five percent of those businesses outsource. OK, so you've got this this skewed distribution where basically every big business outsources and no small businesses outsource. And the reason for that is 20 years ago, it was available to big business. It was not available to small business because of the cost of the technology, the communications, the scale that you needed to do it to make it cost efficient.

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Now, it is cost efficient, but people aren't quite aware of it. They're not quite comfortable with it. But I believe over the next 10 to 20 years, it will become ubiquitous. Everyone will offshore or have a remote team in some respect. So I suggest that over the next 10 to 20 years, there will be another 15 million jobs at least that will be offshore or outsourced. It is a huge shift that's about to happen and it's moving more towards a globalized, single, globalized marketplace, whether it's in terms of consumption or whether it's in terms of production.

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And it's it's it's a good thing for the world. There's a lot of fear about this, that it might take jobs, but basically it's moving further towards one completely globalized, networked marketplace. And that means more prosperity, more opportunities for all of the people within that globalized marketplace.

[00:42:43]

I really love this vision of a globalized marketplace where you can hire people wherever they are, whenever you need them, you can scale on demand. That is that is also the reason I am working and living for every day. I think there is a long way to go, especially when I see how companies think work and especially think about offshoring, outsourcing, virtual teams, etc., because they always fear that they lose control, then I think it is a far away.

[00:43:18]

But as pressure is increasing. Every month to find really talented local people and the war of talent is increasing dramatically, especially if you want to hire locally. Then there's simply no other way. Then open your borders and being open minded and try to access this knowledge that you can access that is available all around the clock. So now we come already to the end of this show, is there some some three points that you want to give to our audience so that they can start outsourcing and benefit from that by today?

[00:44:01]

Yeah, absolutely, look, point one, just open your mind to this opportunity and explore it, you owe it to your company to stay competitive and cost efficient. So just basically explore outsourcing or offshoring. Number two would be just. Find a low risk, low cost way of dipping your toe in and trying this for your company, you've got to commit to it. Otherwise, if you're not committed, then just nothing will happen. But just try a small project, try one role and and explore it, because what you learn through doing is significantly greater than than sort of listening to a podcast or reading a book.

[00:44:52]

And then the third one is don't expect too much too quickly, really. Just treat it like employment. And for the first month it will be a little bit rocky. For the second month, things will start to get on track, but there will be disappointments. But then the third month things will start to settle down, just like any normal employment sort of relationship or environment. And once you harness offshoring or global sourcing, then it is an incredible opportunity and competitive advantage for your company.

[00:45:31]

And I think it is worth always keeping in mind if you offshore, if you outsource, if you leverage freelancers for virtual teams. Always keep in mind these are also human beings, not machines. They are not God. They make mistakes and they heavily depend on what you deliver to them. So I think this is also one important thing, at least from my learnings, and which aligns with what you said, don't expect too much too fast. You are still hiring people.

[00:46:04]

Yeah, yeah, and thanks a lot for being on the show and for all your valuable insights, where can people reach out to you? Yeah, thank you so much. Just go to the website, which is outsource accelerator dot com. There's a huge amount of information there. We have toolkits that you can download or reach out to me direct, which is Derik at outsourced accelerated dotcom. OK, thank you very much. Then I wish you a happy scaling and thanks for being on our show.

[00:46:37]

Thank you so much.

[00:46:42]

I'd like to thank our guests, Derek Gallimore, for joining us today. You can find out more about Derek and the outsource accelerator and outsource accelerator dotcom. If you subscribe to the virtual frontier on Apple podcast, Google Play, SICHER or anywhere else podcast found. And while you're there, please leave us a review. Reviews help people find our podcast. And don't forget your review could be featured on a future episode, just like Capons was earlier. If you want to learn more about virtual teams as the service is a flash of Arborio on behalf of the team here at floorshow.

[00:47:16]

I'd like to thank you for listening. So until next episode, keep exploring new frontiers.