Building Elite Remote Teams for Startup Success - Fastlane Founders with Yoni Kozminski - Fastlane Founders and Legacy with Jason Barnard

Yoni Kozminski talks with Jason Barnard about building elite remote teams for startup success.

Yoni Kozminski is a Co-Founder and CEO of MultiplyMii – an expert recruitment for the top 1% of Philippines-based talent and Escala – a boutique process improvement management, specializing in SOPs, organizational strategy, and project management tool integration.

Yoni Kozminski shares proven strategies for hiring and managing top global talent. He shares his expertise, specifically focusing on his experiences with Filipino talent, highlighting the cost benefits, high education levels, and motivation of workers in the Philippines. Yoni also highlights the challenges, such as cultural differences and turnover, and provides practical tips for overcoming them.

Learn how to maintain team motivation even without physical office spaces and find out why clear expectations and preparation are crucial for remote success. This is a compelling conversation for entrepreneurs ready to expand their global workforce.

What you’ll learn from Yoni Kozminski

00:00 Yoni Kozminski and Jason Barnard
01:25 What is Missing When Jason Barnard Searches for Yoni Kozminski’s Name?
01:36 What is a Knowledge Panel?
02:18 What are the Key Benefits of Having a Remote Team?
02:31 What are the Advantages of Hiring Remote Talent, Particularly From the Philippines?
04:28 What are the Disadvantages of Outsourcing to Countries Like the Philippines?
05:26 What are the Major Cultural Differences Yoni Have Noticed Between the UK and the Philippines?
05:50 How Does Yoni Kozminski Describe How Israelis Deal With Conflict and Emotional Expressiveness?
06:16 How Does Yoni Kozminski Describe How Filipinos Deal With Conflict and Emotional Expressiveness?
07:36 What Software is Used by Kalicube as a Virtual Office?
09:41 How Does Yoni Kozminski Deal With Turnover in a Remote Team?
12:24 Why is it Important to Invest Time in Setting Up a Knowledge-Based and Clear Onboarding Process?
12:31 Where Does Yoni Kozminski Store His Documented Processes for Employees to Access During Onboarding?
13:57 When is Outsourcing to Places Like the Philippines, South Africa, or South America Most Valuable?
16:37 How Does Jason Barnard Measure Trust When He Delegates Tasks as an Entrepreneur?
17:17 How Does Yoni Kozminski Maintain Motivation When Working Remotely?
21:55 What is the Best Way to Hire in the Philippines?

This episode was recorded live on video December 10th 2024

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Yoni Kozminski

Transcript from Building Elite Remote Teams for Startup Success – Fastlane Founders with Yoni Kozminski

[00:00:00] Narrator: Fastlane Founders and Legacy with Jason Barnard. Each week, Jason sits down with successful entrepreneurs, CEOs and executives and get them to share how they mastered the delicate balance between rapid growth and enduring success in the business world. How can we quickly build a profitable business that stands the test of time and becomes our legacy. A legacy we’re proud of. Fastlane Founders and Legacy with Jason.

[00:00:31] Jason Barnard: Hi everybody, and welcome to another episode of Fastlane Founders and Legacy. A quick hello and we’re good to go. Welcome to the show, Yoni Kozminski.

[00:00:44] Yoni Kozminski: Yeah, I’ve been on hundreds of podcasts, never been sung in before. So Jason, I appreciate that and it’s an honor to be here.

[00:00:51] Jason Barnard: Brilliant. Absolutely delightful and welcome. We’re going to be building elite remote teams for startup success, which is exactly what we’ve done at Kalicube. And as I was saying before to you, before we started the show, I’ve done it with one team, you’ve done it with many teams for many companies, if I understand correctly.

[00:01:09] Yoni Kozminski: Correct. Yes, that’s effectively what we look to do and how we look to empower entrepreneurs is to take, what might be your and my trade secrets into the masses.

[00:01:21] Jason Barnard: Brilliant. Then we empower entrepreneurs too. And if we look here, this is what we do. When I search your name, you can see that big blue box on the right hand side. There is something missing when I search your name. And the thing that’s missing is this. It’s called a Knowledge Panel. On the right hand side is Google’s understanding of the facts about you.

And I have to use that really weird URL to actually get that to trigger when I search your name. And that is your Google stamp of approval when somebody searches your name. That’s Google saying, I understand who Yoni is and I believe him to be a credible authority in his market. And at Kalicube, we believe every entrepreneur worth their salt should have a Knowledge Panel trigger when you search their name.

[00:02:03] Yoni Kozminski: Sign me up.

[00:02:04] Jason Barnard: Yeah, brilliant. Exactly what you needed to say. I didn’t feed him that. Anybody who’s watching. So onto remote teams. The first huge question is, what are the key benefits? Why would I want a remote team?

[00:02:18] Yoni Kozminski: So in my mind, I would say the benefits. And I’m a little hyper focused on the Philippines. I’ve worked with a lot of geographies and each of them have their own unique value proposition, Eastern Europe for, say, development talent. But I would say the benefits that I’ve seen is that when I talk about remote talent and Filipino talent, the obvious one is that you’re looking at 60 to 80% of their effective local costs, so lower salaries. But what’s high value when we talk about Filipinos is that you have a pretty educated market. over the last 20 years, it’s moved from about 3% of the population being college educated to more like 15% today. That’s population, and that’s a population of 120 million people, where all education or higher education is in English.

So you’re getting, highly educated English speakers who are really motivated. a lot of these people, it’s the first of their family to go to college, so a lot of the rest of the family is now dependent on them. So you’re getting these educated, motivated, and, I would say, workhorses, if you will, who really want to excel and deliver. And I would say there’s that really healthy balance of, I would say, like onshore versus offshore talent. You probably want to be a little bit careful not to think that you can swap every single person that you currently have in your team locally for someone that lives abroad. But I think that you can push a lot further than what you might believe to be the case.

[00:03:50] Jason Barnard: Okay. you focused in on the Philippines, but generally speaking, outsourcing to somewhere like South Africa or South America or the Philippines is beneficial from a cost perspective, but it brings a lot of disadvantages. here we said there’s a cost advantage. Education is very high, particularly in the Philippines. South Africa would be very similar. What are the disadvantages? the idea of somebody working on the other side of the world and me not being able to, let’s say, oversee them is a huge stress, I think, for a lot. Or a huge blockage, maybe for a lot of entrepreneurs.

[00:04:27] Yoni Kozminski: Yeah. Yeah, as you point out, Jason, there’s not that really organic osmosis happening in the office where you walk by and you pull someone into your, into your office or, into the bullpen or however you’re operating, so you lose that ability. There’s obviously the cultural integrations while, South Africans maybe have the accent that’s maybe a little funnier than mine. there’s still cultural differences between the UK, the US and, and any remote geography. And so there’s that adjustment period that goes into it as well.

[00:05:02] Jason Barnard: there are two points you’ve already made, and I think we can go on through the ones because I think the advantages are fairly obvious. And we all think, yes, that would be ideal, but I don’t really want to go that way. Cultural differences is a huge one is my culture from the UK is obviously very different to the Philippines. There are some similarities and there are some very common grounds. What are the major cultural differences you’ve seen?

[00:05:26] Yoni Kozminski: So I like to use the example that I found online and it’s a graph. And on the X axis it has risk or, sorry, conflict aversion versus conflict readiness. And on the Y axis you have emotionally expressive and emotionally unexpressive. And so when you look at the, and I’m sitting here in Israel, so Israelis sit on the, top left right hand quadrant where you have emotionally expressive and very comfortable with conflict. And they could sit here and shout at one another, about something related to the business and then go out for lunch after and it wouldn’t even move them. they’re best friends. It’s that’s how they operate. Filipinos, on the other hand, very emotionally expressive but very conflict averse.

And I think I see this throughout Asia in general. So to have that behavior, if you’re someone who’s going to shout at your team members and not give them the time or breathing room to build a safe environment, then you’re going to lose that team member or you’re going to lose a healthy, cohesive relationship pretty quickly. And that would be different to South Africa and that would be different to the Ukraine in Russia and so on. I’d say for the Philippines that would be one key aspect. And I would say one thing to again, when we talk about building culture with Filipino talent, one really important thing is to build that safe space. they’re not going to be, they’re not going to be culturally someone who’s going to be proactive is the wrong term. But going above and beyond from the standpoint of engaging in something that doesn’t feel quite right to them. So until you can build a really healthy circular environment whereby they feel confident that what you are doing is trying to improve their position in the business and that this is a cohesive relationship, they’re not going to necessarily come to you with problems because that culturally is, no, they’re going to try and figure it out.

[00:07:37] Jason Barnard: Absolutely. Makes total sense. And the next one that I would look at was the not being able to knock on people’s doors. And it was a huge problem for us at Kalicube. And we found a software called Roam Ro.am, and it’s a virtual office. So we have a virtual office.

Everyone has their individual office, and you can just knock on somebody’s door. And what was really interesting is they used the number eight, is that the average video call will last 15 minutes. The average audio when you knock on somebody’s door is eight minutes. And what we found is that having an office each and seeing everybody in the office and coming into office at the office hours, being able to knock on each other’s doors, bump into people in the corridors, has been hugely beneficial.

[00:08:24] Yoni Kozminski: Wow, that’s super. I know it’s your podcast here, but I’d love to grill you on Roam because I have explored it and another similar style platform. And we definitely saw utility. Like you build your actual office spaces and your locations, but candidly, we probably didn’t commit to it to the level that we maybe should have. Hearing your experience, it sounds great.

[00:08:50] Jason Barnard: what I actually did was presented it to everybody and said, let’s give it a go for a month. It’s free for a month. We’ll try it, and if we like it, we keep it. And my worry is that people would think that I was spying on them, overseeing them, looking over their shoulder the whole time. And that hasn’t been the case. And I think there is a danger of that. And we managed to avoid it. So it has been hugely successful.

I think if the team don’t embrace it, it will never work.

[00:09:17] Yoni Kozminski: That’s great, listeners. That’s some great intel for you.

[00:09:22] Jason Barnard: Moving on to other problems and questions is turnover. The thing about somebody being remote, especially if it’s difficult to create that kind of team environment and that team feeling is that people will jump ship and go and get another job or move on to something potentially. And we had a lot of turnover at the beginning. How do you deal with that?

[00:09:41] Yoni Kozminski: So I think even addressing some of the problems that we were talking about a second ago, the difference of working in a remote environment versus having, local. A local presence, I think that the big mental shift needs to be all about preparation. So how much time are you actually investing into seeing the success and the planning around the talent that you’re trying to bring in? So to me, that breaks down into, let’s say two or three incremental stages. I think one is having clear expectation, understanding is who is the person that I’m trying or what problem is the person solving in the business that I am trying to actually inject into the company. So how is that going to move me closer to my stated company goal and objective? And even if these are simple things like I want to hit $1 million in revenue and 20% net profit margins, let’s say how is this person moving me closer to that stated objective? What are they fulfilling? And then are we setting them up for success? So do I have a very clear onboarding plan in place and am I giving them the time and attention and a way in which they can actually come back to the knowledge base and the repository to actually achieve that success independently without stating, hey, just, just follow me on, Roam around the office and at the end of a couple of weeks you’ll understand what to do and Bob’s your uncle and off you go. I think that’s especially for early stage entrepreneurs or first time or early stage hiring. I think that’s where you can often go arise.

Not setting people up for success and stating 90 days in, this is where we’re going to sit. We’re going to have clear performance metrics and KPIs. We understand that we’ve done our first 360 performance review. We have clarity, we’re getting the right feedback loops into that equation. And I would say just in general, one of the keys to success with remote talent is being more intentional about structure.

[00:11:44] Jason Barnard: I mean you talk about knowledge bases and actually people being able to find information, that’s a huge investment to set that up so that all the processes, all the design elements, the graphic bible that you need for your company, all of that’s easily accessible. And it’s a mistake we made at the beginning is that it was difficult to find things within the company that people would need and then people get frustrated. And the other was the onboarding process was never very clear. It was, as you said, turn up, follow me around the office and we’ll figure it out. And that really doesn’t work. So the investment in time in terms of HR is huge.

[00:12:20] Yoni Kozminski: Yeah, I mean it’s considerable. I should share. I mean I’m not sitting and promoting the other company that I have, but I do have a process improvement management consultancy. And so it’s been a little bit of a cheat sheet for me to have that caliber of talent that actually comes in and we document all of the processes that exist in our business and we put it into a platform called Train your where you know, as people are actually on boarded, they can go through. it’s not automated but they go through this process of actually, how to do everything in their business before they’re actually set loose. So in terms of that time investment, it’s considerable. you’re talking about capturing all the information at a business level as to how our functions interacting and then how are individual tasks being delivered. What I would say though, to avoid people from freaking out here who are listening in, you don’t need to document every single process in the business right away.

You shouldn’t be documenting processes if it’s a new function or something that you’ve just started to understand and it’s only once you see actual value and that this is something that is going to become repeatable. And especially I would say like the big trigger is I want to get this off my plate and now is the time that I want to delegate this out. This is where the more intrinsic value will come from, those SOPs and the knowledge base. So you know, I would say capture the overarching business then move into understanding the gaps and start with those processes that you intend to hand off.

[00:13:58] Jason Barnard: so would it be fair to say that the outsourcing to for example the Philippines or South Africa or South America is most valuable when you have process based tasks that you can ship out to external sources?

[00:14:15] Yoni Kozminski: I would say that the reality is that you don’t necessarily need to wait and I’ll give you an example here. So you know, I am looking to get into paid media and I’d like to handle it in-house versus going to an agency as an example and I can hire someone who has 10 years of Google Ads experience out of the Philippines and it’s probably going to cost me, two and a half thousand dollars a month for all in to bring that person on. Now if I know, my background is digital marketing, I know enough to be dangerous to be asking the right questions and I would feel a degree of comfort in bringing that person in without building out those SOPs. If however, I don’t have the knowledge, I don’t have the understanding, I can’t actually see if this person is good or bad. I would avoid trying to offshore that role straight away and it would be building in these types of structures. So I think for most people just a couple of distinctions here. One is you’re not in my mind, you’re not building standard operating procedures to effectively build a task list so that yes boss, I’ve finished and you’re the end of the task list. It’s really important that you give clear accountability and responsibility to the person that you’re hiring and that they have KPIs, performance metrics and a steady objective aligned with the business.

So I don’t want to conflate the two points in saying you need SOPs and they need to follow the step by step guidance to actually derive success. But as you were talking earlier about challenges around turnover. If you’re able to capture that information and turnover is something of concern or you’re incrementally scaling the business and so at a point that person will step up and become the manager of paid media. That is when processes, I would say in general, like a simple way to look at it is having SOPs across the business is your insurance policy as a business owner. at the end of the day, if you rely too heavily on critical talent in your business, the minute they’re poached, they leave. it all falls back into your court and that’s the last thing that any one of us want to deal with. So that’s the, that would be a stated value proposition of having robust SOPs.

[00:16:37] Jason Barnard: Yeah, it’s a huge value as an entrepreneur to be able to take something, pass it off completely and just forget about it. And I’m realizing more and more that when I truly trust somebody, the way for me to measure that is do I ever think about what they’re doing until they actually sit in front of me and tell me and if I can do that, if I can completely get it out of my mind, they talk to me about something I say, I’ve completely forgotten about that. That’s a really good sign.

[00:17:03] Yoni Kozminski: Amen.

[00:17:05] Jason Barnard: Thank you very much, jolly good. so my other question is actually to do with remote work as opposed to outsourcing to other countries, it’s how do you keep people motivated when they’re not actually in the office?

[00:17:17] Yoni Kozminski: We internally have, a series of things that we actually do to maintain motivation. I think the first is coming back to the objective. So I am not one and I, yeah, I am anti the idea. it sounds like you are too Jason, wherein it’s not about counting hours. I don’t care if you’re in the office for six hours a day or, in your front of your screen for six hours a day or 20 hours a day. If we’re really clear on what success looks like in your role, then all I care about is are you achieving it? And if you’re not achieving it or you’re having issues, are you proactively coming to me and saying, hey, I’m not quite getting there? Can we realign? Can we get through that process? So I would say that’s a critical step inside of that aspect of sort of the looking over your shoulder or making sure that they’re on task. But that also, I think comes down to the satisfaction. everyone who comes into a business, they want to succeed, they’re not applying for this role to just twiddle their fingers.

So there’s that aspect. If you have clarity on their personal performance, that’s key. The next is that emotional connection. we lose touch. I’ve got a lot of team members that I love on my team, but you don’t always have those moments in between to stop and chat and have the water cooler conversations. And so a few things. One, we build that into our weekly practice. So before I start any of my leadership meetings each week or any of the teams that I manage, we always talk about our weekend, we always talk about what we’re doing in our personal life and we talk about our personal wins.

That’s one, one element. And then also on one on ones, we always make sure that we’re having those conversations and that there is an actual relationship being built. We have a layer that we do that we call Culture Club, where every month there’s cultural activities that everyone jumps in and we actually have a team that’s responsible for bringing these to market. And the last thing we do, plenty more. But just, another meaningful thing that can be broken down into a few aspects is if you have, a handful of team members that live in a remote geography, getting them together I think is going to be beneficial both for their working nature. So our team members are all, mostly friends now and they’ll hang out as friends, but will also, support and pay for the ability for them to fly into locations together. I’m actually flying to the Philippines next week. We’ve got our senior leadership first half of the year planning with about 15 of the team and then about 85 of the team will come to Manila for a two day Christmas party that we’re doing.

So if you get the opportunity to actually get over to hanging out with your team, and this will be the second time that we’ve been there this year, I think that’s another. Yeah. Added bonus.

[00:20:12] Jason Barnard: Yeah. I found that to be a huge differentiator. Is I go once a year. We have a team conference. And what I noticed is the people who were at the team conference of the people who are still here, and it really works for us. But we only go once a year. You’re saying twice a year.

[00:20:32] Yoni Kozminski: I’ve been fortunate to go twice this year, but candidly before that, we started this business just before Corona hit. And so we’re talking about five years now, which is crazy to think that everything kicked off. So for years while we were building this business, we actually never had the opportunity to get over to the Philippines. So I’m making it a priority. I think that one of the things we’ve found is that when we do our, like our, we plan our year into, in first half of the year, second half of the year, and getting your leadership team together in a room and having those conversations, we just find it really conducive. So that’s, a big reason why we like to do that. But I think, realistically, it’s getting expensive flying that many people in.

So at least once a year is nice.

[00:21:21] Jason Barnard: Yeah, with 85 people, I can see the numbers adding up pretty quickly to a substantial sum of money. And it, you really have to look at it as an investment. You need to make sure that the amount of money that’s being spent is actually an investment and it returns more than you’re giving out, at which point it doesn’t. You don’t look at it as a cost, which is something that a lot of business owners fail perhaps to do properly is to say, it’s not a cost, it’s an investment. And it’s up to me to make it an investment and not a cost. Last question then is hiring. What’s the best way to hire in the Philippines?

[00:21:55] Yoni Kozminski: Yeah, the easy one. You save the easy one for the end, huh? Yeah, the best way to hire in the Philippines. So I would say that, it’s a broad topic and a lot of it comes down to your, everything from your sourcing component to the recruitment, the interview stage, the assessment stage, the, candidate review.

[00:22:19] Jason Barnard: At the top of the funnel. If we look at it as a marketing funnel, the top of the funnel, bringing people into the middle of funnel, and then actually getting into the process, bottom of funnel, into the interview process. Where do you create the top of the funnel and how do you do it?

[00:22:32] Yoni Kozminski: So top of the funnel, for us, there’s I would say probably five different distinct areas that we attack. So one is we have paid premium LinkedIn and 20 of our full time recruiters will actually be, for every role that is created that we’re searching for, they’re using that feature and that’s great. Outside of that, I would say cultivating a really strong database. we have hundreds of thousands of candidates over the years and so maintaining that database is really important. I think one of the things that a lot of people miss out on is that you’ll have a great conversation with someone at a point in time and you won’t actually capture that. And you’re, for us we’ve got an applicant tracking system. But however you’re capturing that, I think that’s really strong. There’s obviously plenty of job boards that exist out there.

There are some that are exclusively for Filipino entities. So I don’t know how much value that will give to people on this call here. I know that a lot like my, I’d call it like the gateway drag for me to the Philippines was Onlinejobs.Ph. And I think you can find candidates there to a certain level. I might, it would be safe to say that I’m not finding, my best candidates there. But, I would say part of your recruitment process is you should leave no stern stone unturned and you should definitely explore, just be ready to read through a lot of applications if you go down that path. And then honestly, I would say the very best and the bigger your network is, the, the better this becomes.

But referrals. There is no better way to attract talent than by talent that is so happy and is already working with you. I think we have, something like 80 or 90 reviews on Glassdoor, for. And we have a really high rating. And just people having a look at that and saying, people are really happy with everything from the culture to the salary to the experiences around working with us. I think that’s, coming back to exactly what Kalicube does. that is a big part of our presence online is how we are rated as an employer. And so that is where a lot of candidates are going to go to vet and say, hey, this is what people say about you versus this is what you try and tell us that you’re like.

[00:24:58] Jason Barnard: Yeah. And I think it’s important to remember as a company looking for the best possible talent, you’re out there selling yourself. You need to look attractive. And one of the things that Jonathan Cronstedt shared on one of the previous episodes is once you become successful, top talent comes looking for you. Until you are successful, you’re out looking for top talent and you’re trying to attract them. So I think from that perspective, at the moment, now at Kalicube, we’re in a position where top talent is going to start coming to us. And I’m really looking forward to that happening. Thank you so much, Yoni. That was absolutely delightful.

Super helpful. Thank you everyone for watching. And you get the outro song, a quick goodbye to end the show. Thank you, Yoni.

[00:25:45] Narrator: Your corporate and personal brands are what Google and AI say they are. We can give you back control. Kalicube.