Episode Transcript

Please note this transcript was generated by AI and contains errors including missing and misspelled words.

Meryl: Hey, Isaac, welcome to the podcast.

Isaac: Hey, thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here.

Meryl: It's a little bit of a, I think of a funny story, how we're connected. We actually run competing businesses. We both have businesses in the e-commerce, bookkeeping and accounting space.

Isaac: Oh yes, and we are gonna take you down. That is for sure.

Meryl: But I, I think it's a nice representation where we're part of the dc which is an online community for entrepreneurs. And even though where competitors are in the same accounting niche I, I think that's a testament to the collaborative spirit there that would become friends even though, particularly where we might be competing for some of the same clients.

Isaac: Yeah. I love that. I love. Communities where you can really be open with people and you really learn that you'll both win, right? There's enough opportunity out there for everybody, and if we help each other out, we all win. So that's always my attitude. If I can get around the right people.

Meryl: Yeah, and I think there's a saying something like a rising tide lifts all boats, and I have a similar philosophy. It might be why we're part of this same community that has a philosophy like that. But anyway we're not here today to talk about e-commerce accounting. We're actually gonna be talking about building teams in the Philippines, and specifically why hiring a manager.

Is the most important first hire. But before we go into that, could you give a little bit of backstory about who you are how you have arrived at where you are now?

Isaac: Oh my gosh. How much time do we have? Um, it's, It's quite, people are often surprised at the weird turns in my journey, so I'll keep it brief, but I used to be, long, long time ago, an architect, practicing architect, but I hated it. And everyone's always surprised that, oh, I, I heard arch, I thought architecture was.

No, it sucks. Um, And so eventually I went off to find my own way. I really just found that I didn't like working for other people. That was probably a really big part of it. And I learned about e-commerce and so I started e-commerce businesses had some ups and downs there and eventually sold a business.

Knowing my numbers was a really big breakthrough when I finally did after years, and it made such a big impact on my stress level, my understanding of the business, my confidence. And I was going through some pretty rough times before.

And so when I sold the business, I thought I know that I'm not the only one here. I want to help other people who are in a similar situation. So I started a bookkeeping business. Long story short, I didn't know enough about bookkeeping to do it on my own. So eventually I found a partner.

My partner, Jason Snyder. He's a pretty awesome dude. And we've built summit e-commerce advisors over the last three and a half years together. And so now we've built a team in the Philipp. They're amazing and other accountants keep asking me about it, asking us about it.

Hey, how are you not swamped with work? Or, Hey, what's the deal with your team that you keep talking about? How did you do that? And so eventually more and more people kept asking and suddenly we find our. Doing recruiting for other accountants. And so it's quite a strange and twisting journey, I think.

But I've enjoyed it. And yeah, here we are.

Meryl: Fantastic. And I'd love to hear about the, the way that you built your team in the Philippines and, and specifically I think you've written about this in the past about a breakthrough you had when you hired your manager, Daisy and I wonder if you could talk through that story. A and there's probably some lessons in here for other accountants, but particularly those who are thinking about getting started.

 An offshore team or hiring the Philippines and who first hire should be.

Isaac: Yeah, absolutely. And. It was quite intentional. So I guess I'll give just a little bit of context. So we've always done our own recruiting and that's just something that I've learned along the way. In my previous businesses, I found that I wasn't really good at a lot of the things that were required of me in e-commerce, but the thing that I was really good at was hiring great people and building the team and , I really like that part of business and so I brought that with me to.

Bookkeeping business and I always just hired people in the Philippines. I've actually worked with people all over the world, but never local. I don't know what it would take to start an office to hire people in local office. So if that's just normal to me, which is I know opposite of what's normal to many accountants.

And so when Jason and I started the bookkeeping, We knew that we did not wanna be involved in the delivery, like in the day-to-day, clicking the clicks and reconciling transactions and all of that stuff. For me, I don't, I don't even know how to do that. That's not my background or training. So it fell to him.

And our one untrained bookkeeper. He brought with us what brought with him to the business. And so we had a decision to make when we started taking on more work is what do we do? The easy, obvious answer that I think most people would take would be to, just hire a bookkeeper. Train the one that we have and hire another one.

But we're ambitious. Entrepreneurial minded, and we didn't want to get stuck in all of that. And in my background, in my e-commerce days, I had gotten stuck there doing the customer service and the order fulfillment and all of that. And so I know, I know what that's like. And that's not a good place for a business owner to be.

And because you end up spending so much time. Doing the work that you don't have time to grow the business, do your marketing or any of those things. And so we decided early on that we would hire somebody who could who could manage the work and the small yet growing team so that we could then focus our time less on

the technical work and delivering real value to our clients, having talks with them, helping them, giving some advice or whatever that may be. That's a, place that our, our value is with our clients as well as spending time out in the world, in the communities where our customers, our ideal clients are.

So that was the decision we made to hire a manager first.

Meryl: And I can relate to the accountants and bookkeepers that didn't do that. when we first started Bingers, the first couple of years we had a team of bookkeepers mostly in Australia, and they were all contractors working all of their own hours. And I can remember managing, I think I managed directly about 10 of them.

And so that was me.

Isaac: Hmm.

Meryl: Manager directly trying to keep a handle on workflow. Who's working when does payroll need to be done for a portfolio of clients? As well as trying to sit in that business manager, the business owner seat and worry about sales and marketing and processes and systems. And that was a very stressful period and so I really missed not having, A strong manager in that seat to manage the team.

So if we go back to your story, you decided early on, rather than hiring bookkeepers that you were gonna hire a manager. And so could you talk more about what that was like and what the results were like from that?

Isaac: Yeah. And I'm glad you brought that point up because I have been in the, that spot where if you don't have a manager, you are the manager. And I

had in previous businesses, really drastically underestimated the amount of work it takes to just manage things. When you have people asking you questions.

Little questions here and there all day. You can't get anything done. That's somebody's job. So if you don't wanna be in that situation, then you need to have a manager. So, yeah we, we focused on getting a manager and our current manager, you mentioned Daisy.

Hi Daisy. I know she's gonna listen to this. She's fantastic. I don't know how much detailed to get into. We actually had, um, We actually had a very sad, tragic event with the first manager that we hired. Died in a car crash, actually.

Meryl: I'm sorry to

hear that.

Isaac: yeah. No, that was brutal. And that could be a whole episode on its own.

Just how do you deal with that as a team? Anyway, that was awful. And so around that time, we had actually hired a couple more bookkeeper. After we had hired our first manager, and so then eventually, yeah, of course. What can you do? You have to move on. And so we had to hire another manager.

And so we found, Daisy and What were we looking for? We were looking for somebody who had a lot of experience, who was ambitious and driven and assertive, and who really was a, would be able to do the quality assurance, train the team as they need to be. So somebody who's had quite a bit of experience and.

My goodness, the difference it made from before we had our manager, even though Jason and I were not doing the delivery of the bookkeeping work. Jason still had to oversee it, right? Do the quality assurance, and he's busy, right? Things slip through the cracks, and you end up getting lots of questions from your clients.

What is this? I don't think this should be classified here, blah, blah, blah. And what happens in that situation is you spend a lot of your client time doing low value things, answering questions changing things. a And actually getting, some people are a little bit, frustrated with that, right?

The clients, and that's not what we want. So when we hired Daisy she came in and within a few months, my goodness, all of those questions went straight to zero. Like, Actually zero and then, it's almost miraculous. Then the time that we get to spend with the clients is not about what is this? It can be a lot more strategic, Hey, this is what we're seeing.

Hey, we work with a lot of e-commerce companies. We're seeing these trends. Have you thought about this? And so the difference to our clients, it was huge.

Meryl: Yeah, that sounds fantastic. Not only freeing you up, both you and Jason so that you can focus on other things, but actually resulting in a better client experience as well. And I can relate to that. When we eventually found our manager in the Philippines, so for us it was a bit more of a winding journey where we had a lot of contract bookkeepers in Australia.

We actually tried. team in India first that was also in the very early days of be ninjas. And back then our systems and processes weren't strong enough. So I actually traveled over to India, three different cities, met some fantastic accountants over there, but I think our issue then was we didn't have the right systems and processes.

To work with an offshore team and also that set up, they were quite entrepreneurial, so they didn't really wanna be part of our team. They wanted to run their own outsourcing company and that wasn't what we wanted because we really care about team culture and we wanted to build our team culture, not just have a third party doing work for us.

So that we tested it, that wasn't the right fit for us, and then we, just got lucky. Our manager is called Rose and we just hired a really strong Yeah, you're smiling. Uh, Because we've connected our, our Rose is probably listening as well, and we've connected Rose and Daisy who are both our leaders in the Philippines to share ideas and collaborate.

 But we got lucky. We happened to hire a fantastic accountant who also had some of those traits that you mentioned who was assertive, who can command the respect of our team, but also nurture and build culture within our team. And so we just got lucky that we hired someone like that and then it was night and day.

So she's really involved in helping to onboard new team members and. Review their work, train them and build that culture. And that really took a load off the other senior members of our. But it was quite a few years into the business until we saw the benefits of having a manager in the Philippines.

And in hindsight it would've been fantastic if that had been one of our early hires in the first couple of years. But I think as business owners you have to sometimes make mistakes and feel the pain of things along the way before you learn these lessons. But that is definitely a, a tip that I would have for someone.

In the early stages of growing their team, hire that manager first. And don't start with a bookkeeper or an accountant.

Isaac: Yeah, I'll tell you one thing. So as someone who came, through a different entrepreneurial twists and turns and always bootstrapping everything I, I don't know that I would say I previously had a scarcity mindset, but I was always looking for the cheaper option cuz I, had to cash flow everything that I did.

And so I do remember. somebody who I'd consider a mentor told me once he advised me, when you're building your team, build it from the top and do that first before you fill in the bottom. And I'd always gone about it the opposite way. Hiring the, the lowest level that I could and then growing them up.

But yeah, that was some really sage advice. Yes, I can I, I can agree with.

Meryl: I've actually written about that on the internal operations side of Be Ninjas, where eventually when, again, I think we got lucky with just having a senior team member who wanted to work remotely back pre covid before it was a thing, and ha having someone that could take charge and then hire people and build their own team.

It just takes so much pressure off the business owner. So if we move into recruiting and if we were thinking about an accounting or bookkeeping firm owner who wanted to get started and hire a daisy or arose a manager in the Philippines, do you have some tips of how to go about it or even some common mistakes that you see people making?

Isaac: Oh, plenty. Yeah. So maybe start with common mistakes. One thing is I think people underestimate the amount of time and effort or energy that it takes to properly do recruiting. That's something. I know, I know everything that it sounds like. I know I'm talking about, I learned through horrible mistakes in the past nine years or so.

I got it wrong so many times, and utter painful, terrible failures taught me to take these things very seriously. And so I think there are two really main lessons that I've learned, and so one. It's not by accident that greatness happens. And so if you want a really good result, you actually have to put in the time and effort to do it.

And I think a lot of people will post a job somewhere and the job description will be, like all the other job descriptions out there. And that was what I first did is what do I put in a job description? So I Google something or I look at other similar jobs on the same job boards, and I go, oh, okay.

That's what it should look like. And then I figure out how to fill mine in. But there's nothing worse. You couldn't do anything worse than that. That's just atrocious, right? But that's what most people do. And so that means that you're not setting yourself apart from anybody else. Just the normal, regular, average Joes who are gonna apply to this, not very inspiring job description are just, they're not gonna be the best of the best.

It's just simple as that. And the other thing is not really taking the time and energy. Really go through as many people as you need to. So I think most people will probably get 10 to 20 applicants or respondents to this normal looking job description and go, okay, that's great. That's quite a lot.

And they might email them and then they might hop on a call with five or 10 of them and just hire the one that seems the best. That's just, it's not enough. You gotta start to think of your recruiting, more like marketing. And so I learned a really important lesson.

After I had just screwed up so many times, I was really kind of feeling dejected and down on myself and wondering what am I doing wrong? And I happened to be listening to an audio book by Grant Cardone. Do you know Grant Cardone?

Meryl: I do. Yeah.

Isaac: I don't, he, for those listening, he's a, he's like this influencer guy real estate guy.

And I don't really particularly like everything that he says, but he says some pretty good stuff some of the time. And in this book he talked about, he said, I'm always selling, even when I'm buying, I'm selling. And that line has just stuck with me. That was years ago now that, but it's just stuck with me so tight.

And his example is, If he's buying an apartment building, he doesn't just put his bid in with the seller. He sends a letter to the seller explaining why he's the best person to sell to. If you're gonna sell to me, I'm gonna be easy to work with. I'm gonna be fast. I've got the money. You don't have to go through my board of directors.

And so that really clicked with me like, oh wow. So I made that connection to. Recent failure. I'm not just buying somebody's time, I'm actually selling them an opportunity.

Meryl: That really resonates.

Isaac: Yeah.

Meryl: I remember I, I had a moment where that clicked for me too, of realizing, oh, actually the best people have options. So it's, you are actually se selling them on the opportunity of coming to work with your business and that's why you have a brand and marketing to attract clients.

But I act actually think that it's important to do something along those lines to attract team members. Two, if you're trying to attract the best people, because they've got their goals, they've got the things they're looking for, and if you've got a mediocre job description that looks the same as everything else, why would a top person want that?

Be attracted to that opportunity?

Isaac: Yeah.

Meryl: the, So the job ad and not selling yourself or the business is, is one of the common mistakes. not inviting enough or not having enough candidates? R Roughly how many people do you think you'd wanna vet for a, for each role?

Isaac: So what I try to do, so starting with that idea of I'm really selling this opportunity. You get make that mindset shift. , first of all, this needs to be an opportunity. That's something to think through. Then you go like, oh, geez. Well, what, , what do I have to offer? I'm not anybody special.

But we can talk through that if you want to, but I want to get to your question. So once you make that decision, you put it out. I try to get we don't know how many people email us because we have the sort of automated but we have a full application process.

We use Google Forms. It's a great way to take people's information and so we try to get between 50 and 75 completed applications. And of course, a lot of people who apply don't take the time to act. They go, oh geez, this is a lot. I'll just go find another opportunity somewhere else.

That's easier, right? So in order to get that number you can't just. Sit and wait for it. So we actually go out and we browse through the profiles of candidates. Most of these job sites, job boards, they have the jobs that you can list, but they also have profiles. And so you can scroll through them and find people that you think would be good and invite them.

And so that takes manual effort. But the other thing that that does is if you think about, like you said, the best people are not looking for your average job listing. They're also probably not looking for work, cuz the best people are working usually. And If you can land in their email inbox with a personal invitation, you might be able to catch their attention.

And so that's a really big part of our process is finding people who are, they may have once, had a profile, but they're not necessarily looking through every day.

Meryl: And then, so you've had a whole lot of candidates. They've filled out the application, you've selected the best ones, and starting to do more of that interviewing and vetting process when you are looking for, so I assume with accountants, there's a, and bookkeepers, there's some technical skills that we need to understand.

But when you are looking for a manager in the Philippines, you've mentioned a few things around assertiveness and being driven. How do you assess for, those kind of trait?

Isaac: I think it might be different for everybody, but , here's what we do. We have a pretty extensive application process. In that application. We have a little bookkeeping test. Basically to determine whether or not they actually know debits and credits and things like that.

When we're looking for a manager, we might have a more extensive test. But in addition to those things, we are looking for character traits. That's actually my favorite thing, and it's what I put the. Energy on is finding the right character traits. So before we do any of this work, we have to define a couple of things.

And this is another pitfall that people fall into is not defining two things. One is who is that ideal person? What are their character traits? What's the personality like? And second. How do you define success? How will you and this new hire know two weeks, in four weeks in whether or not what they're doing is successful? And so when we're looking for a manager and even. A bookkeeper or an accountant. We're spending a lot of time on the personality part of it. So we have them do a quick disc, d I s c test, personality test. That's just one data point. We don't put too much on it. But we also ask them lots of questions about what drives them?

What are they interested in outside of work? Where would they like to be if they were working with us four years from now, what position would they like to be in and how would they earn it? What would we need to provide for support? Things like that. And if you just get one sentence answers to those things, this is not the right person.

 we're looking for attitude. We're looking for interest in learning and growth. Of course we're looking for experience. That's part of it. And then I'm an intuitive kind of person, so it, when I have my interview I'm just seeing if I can see what this person's like really.

And for me that's pretty easy. I know for some people, maybe not so easy, but I think having the combination of I guess objective or. The intuitive and the defined and objective that's really good. If you can get all of that in there and then it's just picking the best one.

Meryl: Yeah.

Isaac: I hope that made sense.

Meryl: Yeah, absolutely. And as you were talking, I was also thinking about, all right, , what are some of the things that, that I think about when hiring, and I am a bit out of practice. I haven't hired someone recently outside of contractors, but in the early days of vintages, I've probably done. Over a hundred interviews with different accountants along the way.

And so one thing that I used to do to look for drive and growth, which was one of the traits that you mentioned, was to see how quickly they'd get promoted in different roles. So that's definitely something I'd quickly scan, a resume, and then I'd like to see fast promotions. But if someone's. Not been promoted for five years.

It's only an indicator. It's not a red flag or rule out, but similar to you talking about data points, that's a data point that I looked at. And then my technique was a bit similar about trying to understand what's driving somebody and where would they like to be. And that all helps in the sales.

I think it's a sales process if they're a top candidate, so understanding where do they wanna be, what do they want their life to look like, and seeing if there actually is a match, but, If there is then they're gonna pick your business. Obviously I'm not running a recruiting business these days, so you've got a, I think a lot more insights than me.

But back in the day, it being in design used to do a bit of recruiting, so trying to share a another perspective.

Isaac: Yeah, totally. That makes sense. It's interesting. I rely a lot on intuition and some people try to get specific answers out of that, and it's hard for me. Sometimes it, it just felt right, you know? but I will tell you one thing here is something that you can look for in the interview.

So Daisy who is wonderful, we hired her as our bookkeeping manager. And we've since promoted her to operations manager, and I'm sure she'll go much further. What really told us a lot in the interview is, She started asking us questions, Jason and I, and we were looking for, like I said, that is assertive person.

And in the interview at one point she interrupted what I was saying, which I was like, oh, interesting here. This is not typical. And she said, hang on just a second. So you're telling me that we, that you had a manager, you don't have a manager? Clients', accounts, books are falling behind.

How are we gonna get them caught up to speed? So she, I don't remember exactly what she said, what her questions were , but it was like, okay if I'm coming in here to fix things up, what am I gonna have to do to get back on top? So that was like, that's exactly that. I could have ended everything right there and said, you're hired on the spot.

In fact, I made that mental. That was my decision. And then course we had a little more process left to go. But yeah, you're looking for that attitude and that drive.

Meryl: And what would you expect to pay for an experienced accountant or bookkeeper who can go into that manager role?

Isaac: It's a dynamic market and it's changing quite a lot, quite rapidly. These days we're looking for US dollars roughly 1200 to 1800. Now that is quite a range. But I think yeah, you'll find all sorts of people in that range. I'll tell you a couple of factors. For outsourced accountants their demand is very high right now because people in the US and other countries are having trouble finding people locally. At the same time, there's a new wave of people in the Philippines who have recently discovered online work because they weren't sent home for the pandemic.

And then like a year and a half later asked to come back, and some of them were like, I don't really wanna go back. What else is out there for me? And that's actually Daisy's story. So it's quite a frothy market at the moment and some people are seeing like just how much can I ask?

So where is it all gonna shake out? I'm not sure. In addition to that, the US dollar strength, it was very strong last year and it's getting weaker this year. You add all of that in it. It's a little hard to predict, but I would say roughly in that range, you'll find somebody great.

Meryl: And are you seeing a trend that a lot of these candidates do want that flexibility to work from home rather than needing to travel into an office? What? What are you seeing in that space?

Isaac: Oh yeah. People now know that this is an opportunity for them to work at home and they are really going after it. There are, and I know that we might chat a little bit about. BPOs in a minute. But, some of these outsource accounting agencies the BPOs of the world, they have an office that they have people go to where they'll be doing the work for accountants worldwide. People wanna be at home. They really do. And especially in the Philippines, a lot of the cities say if they're in Manila, that can be a three hour commute, one. And so they can save anywhere from four to six hours every day by just working at home, and they get to be with their families. And it's just the, now that they know it's possible, they're really hungry for it.

Meryl: I think that's a nice segue actually, into the different ways to structure teams in the Philippines. So we've talked a little bit about BPOs, but let's dive into that. There's the BPO O option. There's using an employer of record. There's hiring direct. So do you wanna explain what each of those options are, how they work, and some pros and cons.

Isaac: Sure. So yeah, let's go from one end of the spectrum to the other. So let's start with hiring direct as a contractor. So if you are going on these job sites, like online jobs.ph, if you're not familiar, those listening, that's probably the biggest one in the Philippines. It's great. There's another one, Upwork, which I think most people have heard of, and there's actually a ton of these.

And so when you hire people from these different platforms, most likely you're going direct, and this is a freelancer you have a contractual relationship with. And that's pretty much it. You have to find a way to pay them, but you're not responsible for. Income tax liability or any of the benefits, it's just, Hey, I'm gonna pay you this much.

You're gonna do this for me. That's fine. It's great. It works for some people. Let's go to the other side of the spectrum. Some people they want to know that their team members are employed legally. In the Philippines or whatever country they wanna know that all of the compliance is being done.

Sometimes they want to know that they have a secured building that they're going to work in. And so they would work with A B P O and that stands for Business Process Outsourcing. And there's lots of big names in this space. And so what they do there is those companies will hire a bunch of accountants and they'll put them on the payroll.

 They'll do all of the benefits and everything, and they'll mark up the salary. I think industry standard is about 30%, probably more. And then you have, if you hire through them, you have dedicated team members. Sometimes they're not dedicated, depends on the company who are working with you.

And they get all of the benefits of working for a company in the Philipp. And also the drawbacks too. That works for some people. Other people, they don't like that. Some of the drawbacks there are you have to continue to pay their fees, which can be quite high. And there is a layer of management between you and the employee.

I think there are certain things that you're allowed to talk about with them and not allowed to talk about with, and then they have. Long contracts of, different clauses and the one that often bites people is an exit clause. There's usually no exit clause. And so these people who you think are on your team for a few years and you're getting tired of paying their marked up wages and the team wants to work from home. You go, oh, why don't we just go direct? I'll just pay you directly. You find out that's actually not possible. And depending on the company, it it can become unfriendly. We'll say that nicely. So in the middle, is there anything in the middle between those? The pros and cons of each.

There is also another option called an employer of record. And so if you, if you want your team to be employed legally and all of the, the tax and the benefits and the health through the government be paid and all of that, but you don't want any of that management or the added fee, you can use an employer of record who will handle all of that, but they don't get in the way of all of those other things.

And so the fees should be less because you're paying for less. And hopefully you can find one that doesn't have the lock in. So those are the three options. And you might find, slight differences anywhere along that spectrum.

Meryl: And so that's where your recruitment business team up can play into either of the employer of record or the direct contractor relationship. So you'll take care of hiring accountants for a fixed fee. Thank you for the accountant you're recently placed with us. Uh, Very, we're very happy.

 And then each accounting firm, OR bookkeeping firm will have that choice of are they gonna structure this and make sure they meet the requirements of the contractor, in which case they can do that directly. Or if they'd like to have their team member employed on payroll and set up as an employee in the Philippines and the employer of record is a good option for that.

Isaac: Yeah, I have actually learned in the last year a lot more about these different options. We've always gone direct with our team and I didn't even know about the BPOs and the various challenges there, but we just started out helping other accountants. They asked us to do some recruiting for them.

We said, yeah, sure, why not? And so, yeah, we've just been doing fixed fee recruiting and people have been asking us for an employer of record option, they don't want that full on overhead of the B P O, but they do want them to be, paying their Phil Health and their social security and those other things.

And so we have an option for the employer of record as well.

Meryl: All right. Now it's time for some rapid fire questions. So I'm gonna hit you with them and see how we go. So first one is Have you noticed any cultural differences between Filipino staff and US or Australian staff, and do you have any examples?

Isaac: Oh, of course we could do a whole episode on this. Yeah. Interestingly, so the Philippines, a lot of people say why do you hire in the Philippines? And one of the reasons is because for a country in Asia, they are. Probably the most similar to our culture. I'm from the US , but it's not the same.

There are differences and so they're just, Generally speaking, we are a lot more individualistic than they are. And they're very much more family focused, and team and community focused. And so you will see that in your work with them most likely. There's also a bit of How would you say hierarchy?

They have a respect for authority that, that we, Americans don't, and so you'll see that play out is they really do respect the boss in a different way than we would. And so they're differential sometimes. And another way that plays out is a lot of times some people don't want to tell you things.

They don't want to give you bad news when there are problems. And if you're asking them to do something, that isn't a good idea. Cuz you know we do that sometimes, right? We're people too they have a hard time pushing back on your authority. And so there are some things that you can do as a team leader to help all of us work better together, communicate cross-culturally. You said this is rapid fire. I'm not being very quick in answering this, but this is actually, I was talking with somebody just the other day about this who he wanted to hire some people and I asked him about his business and he has a couple people over there and he is having these types of challenges and so I talked with him about these things and I think he might not have thought, oh, this is more than just the two people working for me. This is actually a cultural thing. So yeah, you first and foremost, we can choose the people we hire. We try to work with people who have maybe some more experience working with Western businesses but also we can.

Create a culture of openness and that just takes time for people to feel comfortable telling you things that maybe they don't feel like they should. So that, I would say that's probably the, the biggest one.

Meryl: Yeah. And that ties into my next question, which is thinking about empowering the team, particularly if you are hiring leaders or managers versus managing them. How, How do you think about empowering them?

Isaac: Yeah, the worst thing you can do is tell them they are responsible for leading the team. Managing the work, and then you get in there and start telling people what to do that just totally cuts them off at the knees and they will learn that they will have to check with you on every little thing.

So yeah, it's really important that you walk the walk when you talk the talk. What that means. They might do things that you don't agree with but you've gotta let them do it. And even if that means making some mistakes, you can put some guardrails in. As accountants, you don't wanna send things out to the clients with errors in them.

So you might add a layer of review on top of things maybe especially at the beginning. But you really do wanna give them. Autonomy to do what you're asking them to do. And so that might mean that you just have more frequent in-depth conversations about the philosophy of why you're doing certain things a certain way and ask them, okay, so how would you handle a certain situation and why?

Those types of conversations are gonna be really, I.

Meryl: Yep. And then last one, what are your thoughts on data security? And do you ever have accountants come to you and say, oh, I'm not comfortable with these team members working from home. I'm worried about security, and what would you say?

Isaac: Yeah, everybody is, yeah, that's a question everybody has. So yeah, Right now, a lot of people, especially after the pandemic there's a lot more work from home If you have, let's say you have a practice in the us but you have people scattered around your city or your state or around the country.

They're working online, and so they will have the same data security. Vulnerabilities as someone in the Philippines, it's really no different. So you wanna use best practices, we can get into those or you can just Google 'em. And yeah I mean, it, it's just an uncomfortable thing to think about.

And they think oh gosh, these people are on the other side of the world. I don't know what they're doing. I don't see them. And so I think a lot of it is just trusting that this is a real legit model. Lots of people do this it works well, and yes, you should take data security seriously. And there are best practices.

 If you hire trustworthy, awesome, amazing people who you take care. They're not gonna do anything unethical with your data. So we could talk more about that, but I think it's just a lot of it is just fear.

Meryl: Yeah. Yeah, I think that's another topic. We could do a whole episode just on that one. Isaac, before we wrap up did you have any parting comments or anything else that you wanted to add about hiring the Philippines or hiring that first manager to get started?

Isaac: I think for a lot of people, this is the first time they're thinking about it, or at least first time they're thinking about the manager. I will say one other thing that I'm meant to bring up and I forgot, which is when you have a team over there, It's really great to have somebody who's a leader over there that they can look to, they can look up to, who can set the tone, set the culture, who is available.

And when there's a typhoon, people are able to get in touch with, the, through their local phone networks cuz you're gonna be disconnected. So it is really good to have that everybody can look up. Who is of that culture and when there are miscommunications or when you say something that upsets the whole team, it will happen.

I promise that they will have somebody who they can go to and say, Hey, can you bring this up? Cuz that, that's also another thing that they do. That they don't wanna, like I said, they don't want to tell you bad news or like that they're upset about something, so they'll designate one person to bring this to you very gently.

And so yeah, having that person is just really important. And I know a lot of people have a lot of questions and we can't possibly answer all of them I love to help. I love this topic. I love building teams and I love giving people great opportunity and connecting people who have that opportunity.

So yeah, if you have any questions, I'm happy to help. Feel free to reach out.

Meryl: And what would be the best way for someone to get in touch with you?

Isaac: I'll give you a few options. You could go to the website. It's hire teamup.com. And there's a way to get in touch there. You can send me an email directly. It's Isaac [at] hireteamup.com. Or you can find me on LinkedIn. Search my name, I'm sure I'll.

Meryl: Yeah, we'll add all of those links in the show notes too. Isaac, thank you so much. It's been awesome chatting with you. Fantastic topic. Really enjoyed it.

Isaac: Yeah. Thank you so much. This is a lot of fun.