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Daniel Ramsey talks with Jason Barnard about the virtual empire.
Virtual Empire! Daniel Ramsey, founder and CEO of MyOutDesk, reveals the I-We-They framework that transformed his company into a 3,000-employee virtual staffing empire. Drawing from his experience scaling multiple businesses and running a global workforce, Daniel shares his proven strategies for building sustainable systems, creating strong company culture, and leveraging international talent without sacrificing quality. Discover why “virtual professionals” outperform traditional assistants, how to implement the sticky challenge for maximum productivity, and the critical importance of audit processes in scaling your business.
In this episode, you’ll discover:
– The I-We-They framework for systematic business scaling
– How to build a blended business model with global talent
– Why culture matters more than cost when hiring internationally
– The sticky challenge method for identifying revenue-generating activities
– How to future-proof your business through proper systems and processes
– Why audit processes are essential for sustainable growth
This conversation provides a blueprint for entrepreneurs ready to scale beyond their personal limitations and build a truly global business empire.
#VirtualEmpire #BusinessScaling #GlobalTalent #VirtualProfessionals #EntrepreneurshipStrategy #BusinessGrowth #SystemsAndProcesses #CompanyCulture #RevenueGeneration #FastlaneFounders #DanielRamsey #MyOutDesk
What you’ll learn from Daniel Ramsey
This episode was recorded live on video July 15th 2025
Links to pieces of content relevant to this topic:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCn7EbaQFalRfbey75hkNztw
Daniel Ramsey
📰 Featured Press Release:
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Read the full press release:
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Transcript from Daniel Ramsey with Jason Barnard on Fastlane Founders And Legacy. Virtual Empire
[00:00:00] Daniel Ramsey: Unless you have a solidly written down plan and a solidly describable culture. Culture usually is vision, value, and mission. And it’s really simple. We exist to provide this value to this group of people so that they can experience this thing in life. That’s either a value proposition or a great mission statement.
[00:00:26] Daniel Ramsey: And if you’re listening right now, you can pause and go back and write this stuff down. Because this is where most people miss when they’re going from the we to the they is they haven’t got a clearly articulated value proposition for the customer, mission, statement, values for your internal employees how we behave. They say a brand and your marketing guy so you like this. A brand is what your customers say, or a brand is what your customers say when you’re not in the room. Culture is what your employees say when you’re not in the room. So these are the ways to measure these things so that you can be really specific and measurable about your culture.
[00:01:08] 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 at test of time and becomes their legacy?
[00:01:31] Narrator: A legacy we’re proud of. Fastlane Founders and Legacy with Jason Barnard.
[00:01:38] Jason Barnard: Hi everybody and welcome to another Fastlane Founders and Legacy. I’m Jason Barnard. And I’m here with a quick hello and we’re good to go. Welcome to the show, Daniel Ramsey.
[00:01:50] Daniel Ramsey: I didn’t know we were gonna get singing. You have a beautiful voice, Jason.
[00:01:53] Jason Barnard: Thank you very much. It was a long career before I became Google expert and AI expert. Speaking of which, AI mode, we’re looking at this today for you. I was super interested because we’ve been working with you on your Knowledge Panel, which has been a bit of a difficult situation because of the other Daniel Ramsey and what we have here is when you look in AI mode, Google goes into cascading fan queries.
[00:02:20] Jason Barnard: Eight different queries, 54 passages from pages to figure this out where you dominate. So AI mode is great news for you because what Google can do is analyze the two different Daniel Ramseys and figure out who is the most relevant and separate the two in a very clear manner. So personally speaking, I’m a big fan of AI mode.
[00:02:45] Jason Barnard: How have you felt about it?
[00:02:48] Daniel Ramsey: If you’d asked me six months ago, I would’ve said, I don’t like it. And a year ago I was blowing people off, all the hype around it, everything that people were talking about it. But today, I don’t know if I’m normal or not normal, but I use AI for almost everything.
[00:03:09] Daniel Ramsey: From running, I just had a query. I was curious about a marketing task and so I threw it into ChatGPT. I was curious. Actually, I am a real estate guy and so I was underwriting an apartment inside AI mode, which is actually really fun because that task could have taken our CFO, a week to complete prior to AI.
[00:03:33] Daniel Ramsey: And of course I work with you, so I obviously value it and think it’s the future, and as a talent. So we do a lot of talent globally and it’s just the combination of great humans and great tech is the future.
[00:03:50] Jason Barnard: Which is an absolutely brilliant point. We’re talking about virtual empire.
[00:03:54] Jason Barnard: And I really like that. Now we’re gonna be talking about the I-We-They framework. Can you explain that really quickly to kick us off?
[00:04:02] Daniel Ramsey: Yeah. So I’m a real estate guy, entrepreneur, and I wanted a way to explain to other entrepreneurs the process of hiring leverage and this concept of a I-We-They was a really simple way of explaining the process that you have to go through as an entrepreneur. When you hire your first person, in the beginning, you’re an I, I’m doing it, I’m building the business, I’m gonna sell the person, I’m gonna service the person, I’m building an empire. And then at some point you become overwhelmed and you realize that you have enough work that you can actually hire somebody to help you.
[00:04:39] Daniel Ramsey: And that’s when you become a We. And at some point in that We process, you build enough systems and processes. Something I call an audit and a process flow, and then you can say, wait a minute, now they can do the work. So it’s a very simple leverage framework of I-We-They.
[00:04:57] Jason Barnard: Right. I believe you talked to me about that about a year ago of saying when you wanna scale up, you need the They, but you have to go through the I and the We first.
[00:05:05] Jason Barnard: Is that correct?
[00:05:06] Daniel Ramsey: That’s all the pain, yeah. The I and the We. So I have a lot of entrepreneurs who want to jump to the They. The challenge with that is you just don’t have enough understanding of the process. You don’t understand your clients. You don’t understand what matters to them. You don’t understand, the overall industry, and so you have to go through the head damage of actually understanding everything about the business.
[00:05:28] Daniel Ramsey: That’s the I. That’s where you’re learning. You’re understanding the value proposition. You’re building the business. You’re building the basics of what you’re offering to clients. And here’s the point of the I, you have to solve a problem for somebody. Jason, the problem that you solved for us was we didn’t understand Google Knowledge Panels.
[00:05:46] Daniel Ramsey: We definitely didn’t understand how AI was driven by that. We hired you to help us with that. That’s the problem that you solved for our business. That’s what I is all about, is figuring out exactly. The problem that you solve for others and whether or not they would value it enough to actually buy your service or product.
[00:06:07] Jason Barnard: And we are still at the We stage in that it’s me and Elisa and her team who are doing it. So we’re stuck in the we stages that we can’t scale, if I understand correctly, until we can outsource it.
[00:06:20] Daniel Ramsey: It’s not only about outsourcing. I do a lot of global talent for customers.
[00:06:26] Daniel Ramsey: We have over 1500 clients. We’ve scaled a huge company. Close to 3000 employees but it’s not only outsourcing in the We-They transition. It’s really about creating leadership. It’s creating systems and processes that scale. It’s having the right technology stack, which is a really big deal. It’s about packaging your product or service so enough people raise their hand and say, I need that. That’s a thing that a lot of people in the we stage miss. The simplest explanation of a value proposition is your clients have to jump across the table and say, I absolutely need this, and I want this service or product, or whatever it is that you’re offering.
[00:07:09] Daniel Ramsey: When you have that kind of a demand from your customers, that’s how you know you’re ready to get to the They.
[00:07:17] Jason Barnard: Virtual professionals versus virtual assistants. I think about virtual assistants because that’s the term I’ve heard so often.
[00:07:25] Daniel Ramsey: Yeah. And it’s an interesting problem. So 20 years ago, I’m an entrepreneur and I needed leverage in my own business and it turns out that we hired somebody in the Philippines and they were fantastic.
[00:07:38] Daniel Ramsey: And since we’ve gone to Africa and we’re about to go to South America. And so we’re just looking around the globe and saying, Hey, who’s a great talent, who’s got a college education, who’s really motivated, who’s ready to work, and we’re just looking for these pools of talent where they actually have value to add to businesses in the US and Canada.
[00:08:02] Daniel Ramsey: And once we find that talent, then we try to match them with other businesses that are scaling and growing. ‘Cause if you’re growing, your biggest challenge as a CEO is finding and keeping talent, like that’s everything inside of a business. So we try to match that demand of, Hey, I need help. I need somebody to help me grow and scale with people who actually want to work.
[00:08:27] Daniel Ramsey: And we match them and then, we go on to impact the world together.
[00:08:32] Jason Barnard: And am I right in thinking that the word assistant is how would you put it? It’s less positive than professional.
[00:08:41] Daniel Ramsey: You know what’s funny is the very first person that I ever hired, her name is Julie, and about 15 years ago, I’m riding in a van in the Philippines, the first country that we ever went to. And I was saying, Hey, what do you think of this term, virtual assistance?
[00:08:55] Daniel Ramsey: Because we actually created this whole market. It was before the four hour work week. It was before Upwork. It was before Onlinejobs. Like every platform that you’ve ever heard of out there. We started in 2007, so we were before the masses. And what we’ve done is I was looking around and saying, Hey, I would like to outsource.
[00:09:15] Daniel Ramsey: I would like to hire people to help my business. I wanna save money, but I also don’t wanna sacrifice on talent. I want the best people and I was looking around at what outsourcing was at the time, and only large companies, if you’re a Fortune 500 or a Global 1000, you could outsource. But I call ’em up and they were like, no, Daniel, you’re too small unless you want a hundred people or 200 people.
[00:09:40] Daniel Ramsey: We’re just not interested. And I thought, what a shame because the small and medium sized businesses couldn’t take advantage of reduced labor cost. And so if you think about it, you know this cup of coffee that I’m drinking right here. In the Philippines, it’s 50 cents, in the US, it’s five bucks.
[00:10:00] Daniel Ramsey: And so there’s just such a labor arbitrage available to these large companies. 20 years ago that same labor arbitrage just wasn’t an option for most businesses. And so I’m literally, I found somebody and she found a friend and then I actually talked to a business owner and said, Hey, would you be interested?
[00:10:22] Daniel Ramsey: And he goes, yeah, can you get me 17 people? So our first client was like, Hey, I want 17 of your virtual professionals. And so that’s what launched our business is this idea that you can hire global talent and take advantage of that reduced cost and still have high quality people.
[00:10:43] Jason Barnard: And the use of the term, virtual professional also distinguishes you from virtual assistants, which are ChatGPT and so on and so forth.
[00:10:53] Daniel Ramsey: And again, back in the car ride, I’m driving with Julie and she goes, she looks at me and she says, Daniel, I’m not an assistant. And I was like, oh, geez, you’re not. You lead a bunch of people and you’ve helped me build this business.
[00:11:06] Daniel Ramsey: And so that’s when we actually coined the word virtual professionals and it stuck and it’s amazing. Now the world thinks virtual assistance and that’s fine. There’s a distinguished and I just had a call from a customer this morning, we are not the cheapest option but the way we work is a business will come in. They’ll share with us their systems, their processes, technology stack, who’s on the team today? Then we will build a strategy around what they’re trying to accomplish inside their business and that strategy and really the understanding of global talent, that’s our unique value proposition. If you’re looking to scale rapidly, if you’re looking for the right talent opportunities inside your business, then we are a good fit for you.
[00:11:55] Daniel Ramsey: If you’re looking just for the lowest cost, I just need a person to input data or something. That’s just simply not what we do anymore.
[00:12:03] Jason Barnard: Yeah. And you’re multilingual and multicultural.
[00:12:07] Daniel Ramsey: Yeah. And it’s been really cool to watch the difference between, so we source in Africa and other parts of the world and culture really does matter.
[00:12:17] Daniel Ramsey: We have certain positions that are very service oriented and those work really well for the Philippines. And then we have other cultures that are very aggressive and sales driven and marketing driven and that works for other parts of the world.
[00:12:30] Jason Barnard: I think culture is phenomenally underrated in terms of just being able to speak a language doesn’t necessarily mean that culturally you’re gonna fit in with the needs of the work you’re doing and the culture of the person you’re speaking to.
[00:12:42] Daniel Ramsey: And that’s in the They do it. So when you’re talking about the I, We, and They, the things that drive each of those stages are very different. So in the I, it’s about learning. In the We, it’s about building systems and process and a value proposition that your customers really need. And then in the They, it’s about your plan and your culture, like who you hire and what the plan is actually really matters.
[00:13:04] Daniel Ramsey: And most entrepreneurs struggle with building culture and it’s something that we do really well.
[00:13:12] Jason Barnard: So is my culture as your client the most important, or would you help me to build it?
[00:13:21] Daniel Ramsey: You have to have a leader who’s very focused and driven to create culture. And here’s some tips.
[00:13:29] Daniel Ramsey: I’m in the process right now with one of our businesses actually helping the leader build culture. And so you have to identify, who is your ideal customer? Who are the employees involved in delivering that value or service to that customer? And then what matters to the overall growth and scale of that particular industry, that particular business. And you have to think through, Hey, if I’m serving customers, think about this. In and Out is a very different customer than McDonald’s. And if the businesses aren’t oriented around their ideal customer, then the culture’s gonna be off. So most people just don’t take the time to think through, Hey, who do we need to be? This is a being question in order to attract the right kind of customer.
[00:14:20] Jason Barnard: Which is a brilliant point. Moving on to the blended business model. You are saying it needs to be both We and They.
[00:14:30] Daniel Ramsey: No, a blended business model or what we like to create for our customers, this is our value proposition.
[00:14:37] Daniel Ramsey: You come in and you say, Hey, here’s our entire team, and I’m going through this exercise with a large lender right now. So who’s the leaders? Who’s on the team? What’s their systems? What’s their process? Most businesses are built on US talent in the US or in Canada. And what we try to help is figure out what exactly are the things that we can do at a really high level, deliver lots of value at a reduced cost for our customers.
[00:15:06] Daniel Ramsey: So a blended model would be in the mortgage experience or in yours, you’re a marketing service provider. So what are the things that only your internal team? What are the things that only an expert? What are the things that require deep industry knowledge? What are those job descriptions?
[00:15:26] Daniel Ramsey: And then what’s everything else? And we’ll help you create the everything else so that you’re taking advantage in what we call a blended model of the reduced cost of labor, while still having a high caliber of product or service to deliver to your customer. And that’s something that’s just what we believe in.
[00:15:45] Daniel Ramsey: I think it’s really important. I think the advent of all technology. We started there was only Skype and now Skype is dead. That was the first way to communicate. Now you’ve got WhatsApp, you’ve got Slack. You’ve got all these, brilliant technology platforms that just make the world flat.
[00:16:03] Daniel Ramsey: And so our job is to help customers take advantage of that blended employment model, which ultimately every dollar that you save drops right to your bottom line, which is basically our outcome that we create for customers. We help them save lots of money, and that money typically goes into your pocket.
[00:16:26] Jason Barnard: Which is lovely. So it brings on to the sticky challenge and revenue focus. I read this earlier on, I was thinking about it when I was walking down the street. Revenue to business is like air to humans.
[00:16:39] Daniel Ramsey: You know what? What makes a house warm is love. What makes a business work is revenue and all the other things inside of a business can be basically given to others. But as the founder, you have to stay focused on revenue and revenue growth.
[00:16:56] Daniel Ramsey: That’s that’s our number one deliverable. It’s the hardest position to basically delegate. It’s the hardest thing to give away inside a business. And so the sticky challenge really is a way to do a self-assessment of yourself and also your team members. Hey, what are you doing throughout your day?
[00:17:15] Daniel Ramsey: Is it revenue generation or is it non-revenue generation? I was working with a relatively famous woman once. And this is like five, six years ago. And I asked her to do the sticky challenge. It’s in the book. and I said, Hey, could you just spend a week or two doing a time and task analysis? That’s basically what the sticky challenge is.
[00:17:38] Daniel Ramsey: What did you do today? And what was it? Was it high value or low value? And, she walked away and she was spending like 30 hours a week in non-revenue generation work on an 80 hour work week. And I was like, okay, let’s get rid of that. Let’s figure out how to stop doing that.
[00:18:00] Daniel Ramsey: And so the sticky challenge is just that you take stickies and you follow yourself around all day long. And you’re doing two things. You’re saying, what function am I working in? Is this sales? Is this marketing? Is this operation? Is this customer service or customer delivery? What am I doing today?
[00:18:20] Daniel Ramsey: And then what’s the value of it? Is it high value work or is it low value? And the way to actually measure that is, am I delivering revenue or delivering services that deliver revenue to my customer? So those are the highest value things you can do as a founder, as a leader, as even an employee. If you’re listening to this right now as an employee and you’re thinking, how do I add more value to the business?
[00:18:44] Daniel Ramsey: You have to ask yourself, what’s the work that I’m doing and how valuable is it? So you do this analysis over a couple of weeks. You throw it up on a whiteboard and you say, gosh, if I were to rate myself, how am I doing? And this is a game changer for most humans because if you ask yourself, how are you doing?
[00:19:04] Daniel Ramsey: You’re gonna say, I’m doing great, but the data is where all the proof is.
[00:19:09] Jason Barnard: Yeah. I suspect that I’m not doing as well as I think I am. So the future proofing your virtual empire? For me at Kalicube®, we’re really at the We phase and we’re gonna move to the They phase relatively quickly in the next few months, probably by the early next year.
[00:19:27] Jason Barnard: How can I future proof that? Because my fear is that once I go to They, I lose control.
[00:19:33] Daniel Ramsey: That’s true. You do lose control unless this is really important. I mentioned it before, unless you have a solidly written down plan and a solidly describable culture. A culture usually is vision, value, and mission.
[00:19:51] Daniel Ramsey: And it’s really simple. We exist to provide this value to this group of people so that they can experience this thing in life. That’s either a value proposition or a great mission statement. And if you’re listening right now, you can pause and go back and write this stuff down because this is where most people miss when they’re going from the We to the They is they haven’t got a clearly articulated value proposition for the customer. Mission, statement, values for your internal employees how we behave. They say a brand and your a marketing guy so you like this. A brand is what your customers say, or a brand is what your customers say when you’re not in the room. Culture is what your employees say when you’re not in the room.
[00:20:37] Daniel Ramsey: So these are the ways to measure these things so that you can be really specific and measurable about your culture. But those are the two things. Your plan, you know where you’re going, why you’re doing it, what you’d like to deliver to your customers, what’s important, everybody’s aligned.
[00:20:55] Daniel Ramsey: And then secondarily, you just need to have a really solid culture so that you can actually step out. Now, I’ll add one more thing as a little bonus that’s most people create systems and processes in the We do it stage. But they fail to have an audit process. So an audit process is we’ve described our value, we’ve described what we’re doing for our customers, and we’ve described exactly the value that we add.
[00:21:27] Daniel Ramsey: Secondarily is we come back after we’ve delivered the service and ask our customer, Hey, did we do what we promised? Are we giving you the value that we said we would? Are my employees doing the work that they say they’re doing? And is somebody else actually scoring them?
[00:21:48] Daniel Ramsey: Now, this is a wild revolutionary idea and it’s uncomfortable for people. I wanna be clear. It’s very uncomfortable for people. You mean you’re gonna, go ahead.
[00:21:59] Jason Barnard: No. I was gonna say exactly that because it’s a really scary question to which I don’t really want to know the answer. So my tendency is to stick my head in the sand.
[00:22:08] Daniel Ramsey: And you know what’s wild is I do a lot of public speaking and a lot of conversations like this. And I remember the first time my coach in the public speaking world was like, Daniel, you need to get your audience to score you. I was like, oh, whoa, what do you mean? And the last one that I went to, I’m speaking, it’s 150 people.
[00:22:30] Daniel Ramsey: They’re all entrepreneurs. They’re exactly our ideal, clients. And before this mindset of just feedback loops and audits and systems and processes, I would’ve, somebody would’ve asked me how did it go? And I was, oh, it’s been great. It was really good. I loved every second of it. The reality is I asked our audience, Hey, I’ve got a card here and I’d like you to score one to ten and I’d like you to tell me, if I’m a ten, why you thought it was a ten and if it I’m a one, why you thought it was a one. And that kind of direct feedback loop is what creates growth and scale in the business.
[00:23:15] Daniel Ramsey: And it’s also very scary as a human and you have to be open to this idea that you have to grow in as a human in order to actually grow your revenue as a company.
[00:23:27] Jason Barnard: Yeah. Which makes total sense. It’s scary, but we need to do it. And my last point on all of that, ’cause that was absolutely brilliant, as you said, your brand is what people say when you’re not in the room. And my culture or my company culture is what my team say when I’m not in the room, which now slightly scares me. And at Kalicube®, we say that your brand is what Google and AI say when you’re not in the room. So that one initial phrase from Jeff Bezos, I think goes in all sorts of dive actions. When you’re not in the room, what are people AI, your team saying about you? That’s what’s key. Thank you so much, Daniel. That was brilliant.
[00:24:05] Daniel Ramsey: Jason, it’s been great to be here.
[00:24:07] Jason Barnard: Thank you so much. You get the outro song as well. A quick goodbye to end the show. Thank you, Daniel.
[00:24:16] Daniel Ramsey: This is a first. I’ve never had anybody sing to me in an intro and an outro.
[00:24:22] Jason Barnard: It’s the same song though.
[00:24:23] Narrator: Your corporate and personal brands are what Google and AI say. We can give you back control. Kalicube®.
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