The Nearshore Talent Advantage That's Scaling US Agencies Fast, with Brian Samson

It is an honor today to have Brian Samson on the podcast. Brian's the founder of Plug Technologies, a leading nearshore firm connecting Latin American talent with U.S. companies.

Brian spent 10 years focused on nearshoring, including living as an expat in Argentina. As a founder, he's grown three separate companies from nothing to $4 million in annual recurring revenue each. Prior to that, he was a VP of talent for several South San Francisco-based tech companies, including an IPO and an acquisition. He holds an MBA from UCLA, and he and his wife are advocates for foster care, having adopted a baby girl.

And I'm so glad you're here. Thanks for being on the show. I am honored to be here. Thank you so much.

Welcome to Catalytic Leadership, the podcast designed to help leaders intentionally grow and thrive. Here is your host, author, and leadership and executive coach, Dr. William Attaway. Brad, I'd love for you to share some of your story with our listeners, particularly around your journey and your development as a leader.

How did you get started? Yeah, uh, you know, ended up in uh Oahoot, Hawaii, which is where I'm at today. Started off as a Midwest kid, grew up uh just outside of Chicago, four seasons, shoveling snow, raking leaves. You know, if I wanted to make money, there was something to do out, some hard work to do outside.

Yeah. But I think my leadership journey in education starts with fast food. Um uh, you know, I always had a work ethic probably like a day after I turned 16 and was eligible. You know, I was working in in restaurants where listeners who might be a little uh a little more older might recognize uh FUDRuckers.

Yeah. Yeah, that was my very first official job. Um I haven't seen a FUDRS in a long time. I don't even know if they're still around.

I don't either. Yeah, um, and I had a weird job, William. I was what's called like a guest service relations, and that means, you know, for those who've never been to FUDRS, you order your food up at the counter, and you know, you put uh what's your name? William.

All right, gotcha, William. You go sit at your table, they give you a cup, you fill it up the soda machine, you know, just like you do at Burger King, you know, you sit down with your soda, and they call you, you know, 10 minutes later, William, your order's ready. You go up there, and they've got this beautiful buffet of condiments, you know, pickles and cheese sauce, and you know, it goes it goes on and on and on, and it's it's fun. You dress your burger, you go sit down, and then I pop up, you know, like, hey, I'm Brian.

Good evening. How's your how's your food? Can I refill your soda? By the way, we have a bakery.

Can I get you something at the bakery? And take your money, walk up to the counter. And it was really awkward. Uh I think what I uh and people were really sure, like, do I have to tip this guy?

And I was only making five dollars an hour. Gosh, I'm dating myself now. Um, so maybe if I had a great night, I might have three extra dollars in tips. But I think what it it probably taught me is uh, you know, there's uh a lot of like roles that people aren't really sure what their expectations are, like what are they supposed to do?

What is good look like? What does not good look like, um kind of being vulnerable in those situations. So I think that stuck with me early on as am I explaining the roles properly, you know, to people so they're set up for success. Right after that, I ended up at another Midwest uh restaurant that's actually gone nationwide a couple years ago.

They sold out to private equity and then had an IPO. That's a restaurant called Portillos. I don't know if they have those in Virginia. I haven't seen one, but it doesn't mean they're not a Ralph.

Uh so but Chicago style food, you know, Chicago hot dog, Chicago Italian beef sandwiches, and it had a drive-thru that was probably busier than your busiest Chick-fil-A you might see. So my goodness. Chick-fil-A's got those outside team members, right? Hot summer day, they're out there with their headsets and you know, stuff.

We would see drive-throughs with 40 cars in the drive-thru line, you know, at a given time. And basically the whole operation was run outside. So the drive-thru was a big piece. Of course, they had an interior seating, but the drive-thru was where all the action was.

And I remember um, you know, I'm a like teenager, late teenager, 20s, you know, I'm using this to pay for college. What an intro introduction of leadership in that one, too, because I had a lot of fast food managers there. High stress job, by the way. And almost all of them would walk the line and point out what you're doing wrong.

Hey, a you on the grill, did you use the right tons for that tomato? You know, hey, um, did you use the right abbreviation for this when you took that order? Um, hey, your cash store is off by 82 cents. What's wrong with you?

Uh wait, you know, you're you're going out there, but you don't have your you don't have the right hat, you know, so it's always about correction. But there was one manager uh named Ron, he was probably in his mid-30s at the time, you know, like a high energetic guy. And he would do the opposite. He would walk the line and find something you were doing right and point it out.

Brian, you know, love the way you're doing this. And you just like sought that recognition, you sought the positive recognition, especially in a negative recognition environment, and you just didn't want to be noticed. You know, you would kind of tense up when the other managers would walk the line. When Ron did, you felt relaxed, started to be recognized, and he had the same um, that's why, like, as in, you know, that's why you're the you're the guy, that's why you're the star.

And later on, I read that book, um, well done, you know, by the one of the manager series. And I'm like, okay, that's Ron might not have read that book, but that's what Ron was practicing, and it really resonated. So, you know, later on I became an entrepreneur, business owner, ran teams, pretty large teams. But I think it's all really rooted in fast food as a teenager.

Wow. My goodness. The impact of Ron on your life. Oh, that's so good.

Y'all, your team has made, I read, 500 plus placements connecting Latin talent with U.S. companies. You know, near shoring is something that a lot of the people in the in the entrepreneurial world might be familiar with, but many may not.

I I'd love for you to share a little bit about why near shoring is a big deal and maybe even what it is, why do it, and the benefits that you've seen in those 500 plus placements. Yeah, I'd love to. I'm sure a lot of people listening are very smart, very worldly people, and they're probably looking, um, they probably hear the word offshore. I know what that means.

And there's there's been three big countries that have kind of mastered the offshore world over the last couple of decades. If you look at uh things that are made at my house, your house, listener's house, made in China. China's the offshore manufacturing center, right? If you've called a customer service hotline, virtual assistants, back office, probably the Philippines that's been a major offshore hub for that.

And IT, software engineers, integration, QA, India. India probably produces more software graduates than other countries that have people every year. So those have been the big three forever. And um, and they've they've done fine.

Asia's very difficult to compete with on price, and they do a lot of a lot of things very well. They've got the whole machine built, they serve the U.S. market.

What they don't have going for it though is time zone. There's a whole Pacific Ocean in the middle. So if you try to align your schedule as you, maybe you're doing a call late at night. I spoke to somebody last week who said, you know, hey, like I'm I'm a guy that my team is offshore and my company, but my energy is sharpest in the morning.

That's usually when I do my deep work, my deep thinking work. But it's all disrupted because I have to spend my morning with their evening just to collaborate on some of the work. So now I have to move my deep thinking work to the afternoon, but I'm not sharp. It's post-lunch, everything kind of suffers.

So you either have like a what's called a follow-the-sun model, where as soon as you're done with work, maybe there's like a quick call, like, hey, here's what I need you to get done, or a quick email, project plan, and then the work gets sent over, you know, uh to Asia. I think we've all experiences though where maybe the instructions weren't exactly as clear as you thought, or the work output didn't quite match your expectations. And then you got to give the feedback, hope that feedback resonates.

And if that person was in your office, he would have just knocked, you know, knocked on their little cubicle and said, Hey, this is actually what I wanted. No worries, William. I got you. And then, you know, you've all figured that out in the hour.

Might take a whole week to get on the same page, you know, if you're working with Asia and like that. That's true. Yeah. So, you know, there's a lot of uh kind of frustration and you're balancing time zone, but you also get the cost benefits, but the work, you know, so there's a lot of things that are kind of muddled there.

With Latin America, you don't have to worry about that. Same time zone essentially as the US. I may look at the map and like, well, Brian, are you sure Argentina seems to kind of jut out really far in Brazil? Well, I'll tell you, they eat dinner late.

They're eating dinner, you know, 10, 11 o'clock at night, just Tuesday night, normal dinner. So that means their workday is like eight hours of just pure overlap. You got a question, they got a question, hop on WhatsApp, hop on Zoom. So the time zone, it sounds like you know, it's just like one bullet point, but it's a huge bullet point.

A couple other reasons why Latin America has really been um a great place, and then and I'll tell you um the secret reasons that nobody quite computes, but they're like, oh yeah, I see that. Latin America has uh a lot of cultural alignment with the U.S. They're watching the same Netflix shows we are in English, they understand U.

S. culture. If you call a call center in the Philippines, it feels like they speak English, but it's a little bit different from like the English that we're speaking here. In Latin America, they understand U.

S. style English. It's conversational, it's natural, it's normal. When you look at things like white-collar work, it's not just back office, they've got software engineers, they've got QA, marketers, call center, VAs, accounting, finance, anything that could have been remote during COVID can be done from Latin America.

Millions and millions and millions of really talented people. Now, the stuff that gets me excited, Latin America, for better or worse, the facts are it's it's tumultuous there. It's volatile. We hear stuff, headlines in the media.

We had a helicopter raid in Venezuela and capture the leader and crazy uh government policies. There's cartels in Mexico. What the heck is going on in Argentina with this inflation? Can't they get their act together?

Oftentimes we read these headlines and they just associate it with everybody in the population. We write off the population. That's the big mistake, and this is where this amazing arbitrage for people's business can come into play. Because you're penalizing the people, but you should really just penalize the government.

The people have been living under these conditions. That means they are naturally calm under chaos. They're scrappy, flexible, adaptable, able to deal with ambiguity, they deal with problems all day long. So nothing you share is going to scare them.

They just tackle the problem, find something creative, a creative workaround, right? I can't think of a single business owner that wouldn't want these attributes on their team. So that's what has really created Latin America success. And the 500 placements have been success stories because our customers appreciate all those attributes too.

I love that. And I think you're spot on. So, you know, it is so easy to just uh write off a whole group because of what you see, the actions of of those at the top. Yeah.

And how incredibly dangerous that is, you know, to make that kind of an assumption. How did you get into this world of near shoring? Yeah. How did you how did you jump into this these waters, so to speak?

It's kind of a funny story. Um so met my wife, and you know, I grew up in a pretty um low travel Midwest childhood. A lot of great things about my childhood, but we we just weren't weren't traveling. Grew up in Illinois.

No problem. Nice. Didn't actually have a passport until I was 28. Wow.

Uh which is wild because like my kids have been all over the place, Japan, everywhere, you know. And I'm like, you guys don't realize like this, you know, that's not how I grew up. But so I didn't really understand the world. And then I I moved to San Francisco, met my wife, who actually happened to be what's called a third culture kid, so American who was growing up in a different country.

She grew up in Japan and Korea, and uh her dad was an expat. So she was like surrounded by this global world, and for her, the world was small. For me, the world was enormous, and it made me very, very kind of like open to ideas, open to travel, and I wanted to see more of the world. So, fast forward a couple years, you know, we're married, no kids, and I um I really wanted to be an expat in Asia with her and go through that whole experience.

I was just fascinated and awe. Realized it's very difficult to cold call companies from America and say, hey, I'd like to be an expat for your company. Especially this the skill set I had, which was talent acquisition. No need to apply.

And then I called someone that was pretty successful. We had worked at the same company, but never never crossed paths. So we had that in common. And he had a giant company in China.

So he moved to China, was out there. Cold called him, love to be an expat. Do you speak Mandarin? No, no dice, but I like your initiative.

If you have any other ideas, don't be a stranger. So I took him up on that, came up with an idea to build um minimum viable products, which is a um kind of like a prototype for tech startups for the fintech industry. Saw a big need in San Francisco, New York, and put this whole pitch deck, everything together for him. He liked it, agreed to actually invest $2 million.

And we put sales in San Francisco, and I realized like the world is my oyster. Hey, could this be my Asia expat experience? I realized Asia didn't quite make sense for this, but Latin America did because I wanted the same time zone engineers. So told my wife, hey, you know this expat experience we're thinking about.

We can do it, but it's not Asia. It's gonna be Argentina. And uh I think she had to look at the Atlas for a second to remind herself where Argentina was, but she was game, and we uh relocated to Buenos Aires, um, actually got rid of our San Francisco apartment and just threw everything in two big suitcases, uh, moved down there and got an apartment, kind of like immersed ourselves into the culture of the world, set up an office, later grew that to about 80 engineers. And uh yeah, just just had a total blast.

I ended up exiting that company a few years later, but was all in on Latin America, just saw something that I guess the world didn't quite see yet. You know, this amazing land of of eager, enthusiastic, humble talent that was that could really make an impact. So I've had three total companies that have played in this near shore space, and it's just been a fantastic ride. Well, and to take three companies from startup to four million plus in ARR, you know, a lot of people are still trying to do that with one.

You've done it three times. So what what are some of the things you've learned in that journey? Uh a lot of bad decisions leads to wisdom, right? Uh that's good.

Yeah. Uh but I will say um here's a mistake that I think is common that most people um make the same mistake that I did. So maybe I can help some people here. Yeah.

I came up through talent acquisition, um, which meant not a sales guy. Okay. I handled sourcing candidates, negotiating rates, but I wasn't out there hunting logos. And you know, a small subset of our population are natural salespeople.

The rest have their expertise. You know, maybe it's science, maybe it's software engineering and coding, you know, maybe they're technical, maybe it's marketing, maybe it's tax and accounting, maybe it's plumbing, electrician, all these things, but we don't see ourselves as salespeople. So I tried to kind of buy sales, meaning like I hired expensive salespeople, praying that they'll just bring in the money and I'll, you know, and we'll build our businesses. A couple years later, of you know, just a lot of bad spending made me realize like I've got to learn how to do this.

And not only was that a good decision, I also wildly underestimated the grace that prospects and customers give founders of businesses because they know no one cares more, no one knows more about the domain. And sure, you'll say the wrong things. You're not gonna run a proper discovery call start to finish. But they give you a lot of grace.

They also do not give the same grace to the salesperson, right? That salesperson's gotta be perfect. The founder doesn't. And as soon as I figure that out, I became the head of sales slash CEO founder of my businesses.

And, you know, sure, we've you know brought on salespeople later, later on, but um you gotta make the first 20 plus sales for your business and you gotta embrace it. You can't pawn it off. Don't make the same mistake that I did. That's so good.

No, a lot of the people who are listening may be interested in near shoring, and uh they just they haven't known where to start. Like if you're sitting across a table from them, what advice would you give them on how they can get started and maybe some things to keep in mind? Yeah, uh great question. You know, I would I would actually encourage, especially very small business owners, there's no shame in the DIY, do-it-yourself approach, you know, for the first hire or two.

There are plenty of platforms out there. You don't need anybody like me right away. I'll give a use case for us in a second. Upwork, Fiverr.

We all know these platforms are loaded with offshore and nearshore talent. I think there's something important about going through the process yourself, creating your job description, your role related test, what are you looking for in profiles? What kind of questions do they want you want them to answer before you get on the phone with them? What do you want to do in an interview?

What's your budget? Make a mistake, hire the wrong person, go back to the well. We've all done it. I've done it.

And that's okay. You know, that happens. Where we come in is I would say the upworking fiber talent is probably good, not great. But the reason that you might think maybe I'm biased saying that, you know, sure.

But there's also this element of these platforms have made it really favorable for the employers, not the employees. So they're paying high fees as a candidate. That's unusual. But that's just a strategic decision these platforms made.

So that means if you don't need these platforms, you just ignore them. And you work with recruiting companies like mine, like Plug Technologies. And just like you're hiring elite talent in the U.S.

, probably working, you use LinkedIn and other places to source, build relationships, build a candidate pipeline, and try to match that with companies that are scaling, companies that are building teams, or companies that want to pay for that extra gear for the talent that they probably couldn't get on their own. I think the other thing that I'd advise on if you're looking to near shore or offshore for that matter, there's a bias that sometimes we all have, and uh or our teams might have, and you might not even know it, where there can be like an us versus them mentality.

They're not Americans, they're not in my office. And by the way, I think we even have this in the States, you know, like maybe you're from the South and hire somebody from New York City, and you know, there could be, you know, or um, I mean, I remember in my first staffing job, I was in Chicago, and we half the team happened to be in Boston, and the Boston guys all thought we were like low urgency lazy, you know, just because we we talked in our slower Midwestern draw. And I and sometimes I hear myself, you know, talk on a video later.

I'm like, man, I I do speak really slow. But in these Boston guys I'm from Alabama originally, so you know. Yeah, so I think I think we're on the same wavelength, but the Boston guys would have, you know, all right, let's let's go, hurry it up. Right.

But I think there can be an us versus them dynamic or like, yeah, just give it to the low-cost resources in Mexico or India. Remember, these are real people, they've got families, dreams, purpose, they want to make an impact. So treat them accordingly, and you'll be wildly surprised uh what you get out of it. Great advice.

Brad, you know, as you continue to lead, you know, your team, your companies, your clients, they're gonna need you to have a higher level of leadership two, three, five years from now than you do today. How do you stay on top of your game? How do you level up with the new skills that they're gonna need you to have? Yeah, me personally, I've always been a mile-wide, inch deep kind of person, which I think is has helped me a little bit.

I always want to see things from different perspectives. As you shared with my bio, I've got an MBA from UCLA and then also National University of Singapore. So I think that helped kind of give me a broader understanding of marketing and finance and strategy and positioning and things like that. I think with the exposure into Argentina and then Latin America broadly, that's kind of helped me see that the Singapore degree helps me understand Asia.

I have recently launched a uh AI implementation business. For a year and a half, we were using all this internally at Plug, and then I realized there are a lot of small business owners out there that want to use AI, they don't know where to start. Uh by the way, you're not alone. Everyone's kind of hearing about this all day.

It's in their LinkedIn feed all day. Um, we all are thinking we're being left behind. Everybody knows more. A small number of people know a lot.

A large number of people of us are like, what is clogged code? How do I what do people mean by agents? How do I set this up? That's really what this business, it's called Bansall AI, was set up for people like me that wanted to stay stay ahead of it.

So I think that's really my recommendation for others in that same boat is try to continue to go broad because um you want your team to go deep, but you as the head have to be broad, kind of more T-shaped. We all have our superpower, but uh, I think being T-shaped, understanding how the world works, understanding just enough about the functions you can you can lead, you can manage, you can tie them all together from a strategic perspective. That's where I've been trying to spend a lot of my time.

I love that. Is there a book or a podcast that has made a big difference in your journey that you'd recommend? Gosh, I listen to so many podcasts. Um uh one of my favorite pastimes is uh I'll um I've got a nine-year-old Boston Terrier.

So when I'm walking the dog, I'll throw the podcast in. This dog's got a lot of energy. An hour walk is kind of nothing for him. So we'll you know take him around and that gets me through a lot of podcast episodes.

But just for small business owners, you know, one that I I really enjoy is called uh My First Million. Kind of a cheesy title, but it's a lot a lot of things that I think entrepreneurs are curious about. Uh tech, boring businesses, AI, the founder journey, life lessons. Really enjoy that one.

I think it's a great podcast. Love that. And this has been so great, Brian. I've so enjoyed our conversation and getting to know you a little bit.

I I know our listeners feel the same and they want to continue learning from you and more about what you're doing. If they want to engage with you and especially learning more about the Latin talent and near shoring, what's the best way for folks to do that? Well, thank you so much for asking. We have conversations all the time about education around Latin America.

Just like AI, I think there's some curiosity about Latin America. It's in the news more. We hear more about near shoring instead of offshoring. So people just want to have an initial conversation.

Here's my budget, and then we we just give advice. Do you want to hire more people? So maybe we should look at a city versus a country. Do you need to send a specific hardware to them?

Let's make sure we we have a tariff-friendly country instead of a closed tariff country. Um, are you worried about currency and inflation? So, you know, all these things kind of go into our calculus, and we can give advice and have conversations. So, long story short, you can just go to plugpl.

tech, and there's a contact us form, fill that out. Myself or a member from our team will reach out to you and we'll have that educational conversation. I love that. We'll have that link in the show notes.

Thank you. Brian, thanks for your generosity today and sharing so openly and and freely from your journey so far. I can't wait to see where you go next. My pleasure.

Really appreciate the platform.