Why The Best Online Stores Are Quietly Building Remote Support Teams - Abbas Mohammed | Why Founders Become Bottlenecks, How To Find Business Bottlenecks, What To Delegate First, How Recruiting Scales Businesses, How Hiring Va's Works (#489)

00:00:00:03 - 00:00:19:17 Unknown If you stay in that cycle where you think you should be the one doing everything in the business, it becomes extremely difficult to scale the business. What's your answer? If somebody comes to you and says, nope, I can't outsource this because no one knows it better than I do. 00:00:19:19 - 00:00:38:05 Unknown Hello!

Welcome to another episode of the E-commerce Coffee Break podcast. Most ecommerce founders think they have a traffic problem, but often they have a time problem. They are answering customer emails, handling operations, and putting out fires all day long, and somewhere along the way they become the bottleneck. That's why many e-commerce brands are building remote support teams behind the scenes.

00:00:38:06 - 00:00:58:00 Unknown But what should you delegate first? Who should you hire and how do you make it worse? Working without sacrificing quality. To help us answer that question, today I'm joined by Abbas Mohammed.

He is a three time founder who built his first seven figure business for hiring virtual assistants and is now the founder of Remote Leverage, helping businesses build high performing remote teams around the world. 00:00:58:00 - 00:01:19:02 Unknown So let's get started. Welcome to the show, Klaus. Thank you for having me.

Let's jump right in. Most e-commerce founders start doing by doing everything. When does that become a problem? Yeah, I mean, that's a good question.

I would say every business owner goes through that where they start off, they're basically we're in every single hat in the business marketing, sales, executive assistant and that sort of thing. 00:01:19:02 - 00:01:57:13 Unknown And eventually what I found in my own personal experience, we've worked with literally thousands of business owners, and I've also scaled remote leverage. Now we have about 130, 140 team members at remote leverage. And from my experience, what I noticed is that if you stay in that cycle where you think you should be the one doing everything in the business marketing, sales, EA, work and customer support and all that, it becomes extremely difficult to scale the business because the reality is there are other people out there that you could hire that are better marketers than you, that are better sales managers and sales reps than you better customer support people than you.

00:01:57:15 - 00:02:24:04 Unknown So a lot of times when we're starting, we think, hey, this this part of the business can't be outsourced because I'm the best person at it. But that's only because you haven't seen what else is possible that's out there. And so in my head, that is one of the biggest bottlenecks I, I commonly mentioned that when I started Remote leverage, one of the first key pivotal hires when I started is I hired someone in marketing, and this person was significantly more experience than than our level of business at the time.

00:02:24:04 - 00:02:44:19 Unknown And, and hiring people like that. And I've done that multiple times, right? I've hired sales managers, I've hired customer support manager and other roles that are significantly more experienced. And what that does is it brings the business forward.

Instead of me learning how to do Facebook ads and Google ads and how to be a good sales manager, and that might take ten years in each department. 00:02:44:21 - 00:03:01:23 Unknown By hiring the right people, you're basically buying those skill sets into the business and is significantly cheaper than you spending a decade of your life trying to be the best in all these different areas. I couldn't agree more. I have found it a couple of companies, and that's exactly the point.

You're not working in your business, but not on your business. 00:03:02:01 - 00:03:18:06 Unknown Now from all the experience they have, what do you see usually breaks first when a growing store doesn't have enough help behind the scenes? It depends on the business. I've.

I've seen a lot of different bottlenecks, the way I think about bottlenecks in the business and what role is the right role to hire for, is I always ask myself and I do. 00:03:18:07 - 00:03:35:23 Unknown I did this when we were small business and I do this now consistently. I do this in every department, and that is if I wanted to double the business within the next month, what would be the reason why I couldn't do that? And whatever the answer is to that question is, is exactly the role I should be hiring for for most small businesses.

00:03:35:23 - 00:04:00:00 Unknown I'll tell you, from my experience, most small businesses, it's either they don't have enough leads, they don't have enough traffic and customers. And so for that reason, they should hire a marketer, someone to handle their marketing operations. And that way they can get more traffic, because if they can get more traffic, they can do more sales, they'll have more customers, they'll have more profits, and then they can invest into the next best thing, right, to to invest in when it comes to hiring.

00:04:00:01 - 00:04:19:12 Unknown The next problem that I commonly see is that a lot of small business owners are kind of messy, right? We're out here doing a bunch of different things, and sometimes things aren't as organized as they should be. And so things kind of fall through the cracks. And so in my in my perspective, the next best role usually is like some someone in the operations or the admin or executive assistant type of position.

00:04:19:16 - 00:04:37:11 Unknown These are usually the best early on roles. And then as you continue to scale the business that that kind of shifts over time, right? Eventually it will become you'll need sales reps, you'll need sales managers, you'll need customer reps, customer support management. Right.

And so just again every business is a little different. And you have to ask yourself that question. 00:04:37:12 - 00:05:00:16 Unknown Now I've also seen clients and I've done this myself as well in the past where I feel like, hey, I don't want to do this type of work. And so I'm just going to go higher for that position right now.

But the reality is, if you're a small business, your resources financially are limited. And so you have to be very careful with every position, because if you hire the wrong position, you're taking away resources from another position that might be truly bottlenecks in the business. 00:05:00:16 - 00:05:23:11 Unknown And so sometimes it's like, I completely agree that you do have to work on the business, but depending on the scale of the business, you also have to be working in the business to kind of get through to the next phase.

And then eventually, hopefully all you do is work on the business for the most part. But if you have less than 50 employees, you have to make some sacrifices and what you decide to hire for, depending on what the actual business bottleneck is. 00:05:23:13 - 00:05:42:00 Unknown No. Very true.

You mentioned in the beginning nobody can do the job as I can do. This is something that I have heard a lot, and I'm on the position that I say is like, I agree with you in the beginning. When you start, you have to do every task in your business by yourself just to understand how it works, how the flow is. 00:05:42:00 - 00:06:00:14 Unknown Because you can't manage someone when you have absolutely no idea what's happening now, what's what's your answer?

If somebody comes to you and says, no, I can't outsource this because no one knows it better than I do, which probably is not true. Yeah, yeah. I mean, honestly, the best way to do that is to just show them the type of talent that they could get. 00:06:00:15 - 00:06:25:18 Unknown You know what we specialize in remote leverage is we help people hire or businesses hire Latin American virtual assistants.

We also hire from South Africa, the Philippines, Egypt, Europe. But primarily, I would say, Latin America. And the level of talent that you could get from Latin America is insane. To think about 6 to $10 per hour.

They speak perfect English, and a lot of times they have multiple years or sometimes decades of experience in whatever position you want to hire for. 00:06:25:18 - 00:06:45:19 Unknown So if you're thinking, look, I am currently the best sales rep, I would say, see what you could get for $10 per hour in terms of sales reps from Latin America. And then you can you can decide if that person is a better fit for for the business or not. Same thing with marketing, operations, customer support.

And the reality is you might be the best person at that job. 00:06:45:20 - 00:07:03:11 Unknown However, by you doing that job, you're bottlenecked the business because you can't go do the next best thing. You're doing $10 per hour tasks when you should be doing. Maybe, you know, if you're a small business owner, maybe 200, 300, $400 per hour tasks.

At this stage in my business, it's multiple thousands of dollars per hour task. And so would I rather do that? 00:07:03:11 - 00:07:26:06 Unknown Or would I rather go do sales and be the best sales rep? But if I have a team of 2530 sales reps, they will do significantly more work than I could ever do being the best sales rep.

And I would say even that is debatable whether whether you're truly the best. I think in a lot of cases, I see people think they're the best until they find the right person, and then they realize they just didn't know what good looks like, and that's why they thought they were the best at it. 00:07:26:07 - 00:07:44:21 Unknown Yeah, I couldn't agree more. It's like I say, it's like learn.

Learn how it looks like and then give it to someone who's better than you. And it's normally easier to find there's always someone who is better than you. Now I want to talk a little bit when it comes to outsourcing. One concern might be quality, brand consistency, all of these things.

00:07:44:22 - 00:08:08:17 Unknown Obviously that takes some training, some onboarding. And I want to know from from your experience and how you do it with remote leverage, how do you guarantee that everything is in line with the brand? That's a great question. I would say the best way to do that is to.

So the way we do it at remote leverage is you don't have to hire anyone until you interview multiple candidates, and you find the right person that you want to move forward with. 00:08:08:18 - 00:08:26:23 Unknown Until that point, you don't pay us anything. So it's completely you can get to see multiple types of candidates and then decide if they if they fit within your company culture and the brand and that sort of thing. So that's very important.

The next I would say is that, you know, depending on every business is different. So what I find acceptable in my business, you might not find acceptable. 00:08:26:23 - 00:08:48:00 Unknown And so one of the things I always tell people is have, you know, a clearly out, you know, written company culture and expectations as far as to what you find acceptable in your business. Like for us, for example, you know, we we primarily focus when we're hiring on integrity, speed, you know, things of that nature, pursuit of excellence and other things like that.

00:08:48:00 - 00:09:08:08 Unknown And so maybe speed is a encouraged behavior in my business, but then in another business, maybe they want to go extremely slow and they don't want to rush through things. And that's completely okay as well. And so if people that are coming on to the team understand what the values are, and they see that you actively encourage those values, they'll follow them just as if you are hiring somebody local. 00:09:08:08 - 00:09:26:16 Unknown So I would say, you know, you just have to make sure that you have clear expectations of what you're interested in applying in your business.

And then as you interview people, make sure that they fit within that company culture and the expectations that you have laid out. I'm particularly bad in human resources, in recruitment. That is just me now. 00:09:26:18 - 00:09:50:13 Unknown I'm sure a lot of listeners have never hired before, and now they're coming to it and it's like, how do you even start now?

I think that's where you come in and help with the whole process finding the right person, giving the right candidates through to them. How does this whole process work? So the first step in my head is you have to correctly identify what is the actual bottleneck in the business and what role should you be hiring for. 00:09:50:13 - 00:10:09:17 Unknown So if when the clients book calls on our websites to speak with our consultants, the first step is figuring out what is the right position.

Once that position is figured out, they get passed on to a hiring manager. And our hiring managers have, you know, literally interviewed thousands of people. They've helped thousands of business owners hire. And so they're very experienced.

00:10:09:17 - 00:10:32:13 Unknown What they'll do is they'll help you craft a job description, the job tasks, the responsibilities, the type of qualifications, all on a call right together. And so once they do that, they pass it on to a team of for cruisers that we have. And so then the team of recruiters takes all of that info. They go find you multiple candidates that fit that description, that speak perfect English, that work in the US time zone.

00:10:32:13 - 00:10:46:21 Unknown By the way, this is why I also primarily suggest Latin Americans because they work in the same time zone. They understand the US culture and that sort of thing. And so anyway, so they'll find you people that match their criteria, speak English, work in the same time zone, and then you hop back on a meeting with the hiring manager. 00:10:46:21 - 00:11:09:08 Unknown And the hiring manager could help guide that interview on your behalf.

You could watch and basically judge the candidates as as the interviews go on. Or if you decide to take a more active approach and handle the interview yourself with the hiring manager, you could also do that, but they will help guide that decision for you. Because in a lot of cases, the businesses that we work with usually have between 1 to 10 employees. 00:11:09:10 - 00:11:28:14 Unknown You know, most of them are under 50, but I would say the vast majority are between 1 to 10 employees.

And as you said, that's kind of the first time or they're not as experienced in hiring. And so we help guide them through that process. Another thing that I, I found interesting is that even when we hire internally at remote leverage, sometimes you just make the wrong decision. 00:11:28:14 - 00:11:45:05 Unknown And so the way we handle that is we give out a 12 month replacement guarantee.

So if you come back to us and you're like, hey, I chose a person. They turned out to not be the right fit for the business. For whatever reason. It doesn't really matter to us.

You just tell us and we will go out and will replace them for you multiple times if necessary. 00:11:45:05 - 00:12:13:01 Unknown But we'll help guide you through that, that, that process. Because sometimes you do everything right and you just don't choose the right person for whatever reason, or they change their behavior after the interview. And so we're aware of that.

It happens to everybody. And so we'll kind of make sure that you're taking care of. The point is, we want to have you come back for the next hire and the third and the fourth and the fifth, because in our heads, as you scale the business, recruiting becomes one of the most important parts of the business. 00:12:13:01 - 00:12:31:16 Unknown And so if we can become a reliable partner where every time you want to hire someone, you know, you could come to us and hire the next person to help unlock that bottleneck, then we we would both be in a winning situation.

Now, I can totally relate to that. Obviously, if you're a small team, then the next hire is a big decision for the next step in your business. 00:12:31:16 - 00:12:54:11 Unknown So it's not like you have 100 people and just add one, okay? But if you're a two man, three, five men team and you add someone, massive thing brings me to the question is obviously companies grow organically.

Some DTC and e-commerce brands grow massively in a very, very short time. How do you deal with this? Adding more people, adding more hours? 00:12:54:15 - 00:13:20:04 Unknown We've scaled remote leverage pretty rapidly.

We've gone from zero people to now. We have, like I said, about 130, and we did in less than two years. So we've experienced that, and we've also had a lot of business owners that we've worked with that have gone rapidly in terms of headcount. And so what we do is depending on the business, we will assign you the same set of recruiters and the same set of hiring managers that will understand your business deeply.

00:13:20:04 - 00:13:43:10 Unknown And so if we have repeat customers, you always get the same account managers that understand exactly what you're hiring for, what you're hiring style is what the business cultures. And so hiring more people through us becomes extremely easy, which is why one of the things we offer is we offer discounted rates for bundles, like if you want to hire three or you want to hire ten, or you want to hire five week of discounted rates because it makes the process easier.

00:13:43:11 - 00:14:00:09 Unknown We don't have to onboard a new client and understand their business from scratch. It's the same business owner. They know us, we know them. And so we could work with these business owners a lot more closely if they're hiring many people.

In fact, I could think of multiple businesses where we've hired 50, 60, 70 people on their behalf. 00:14:00:09 - 00:14:21:17 Unknown And it's a it's an ongoing relationship that benefits both parties. So you're basically outsourced in-house recruiter sort of kind of. Yeah, yeah.

And I'll call you. I'll tell you why. Even large businesses are doing that nowadays, because let's say you, you have a large business and you have a lot of employees or whatever, and you want to continue to scale, right? 00:14:21:18 - 00:14:43:10 Unknown As you continue to scale, you continuously need to hire.

Setting up HR and a whole recruiting infrastructure is extremely difficult because not only do you have to hire in-house recruiters and you might need multiple of them, right, but then sourcing candidates becomes extremely expensive. Like right now we're getting about 1000 candidates per day. We're going to up our ad spend very soon. 00:14:43:10 - 00:15:08:14 Unknown Our target is to get to 2000 candidates a day.

And so imagine getting 2000 applications every single day, having to vet through them, having to interview. We literally host right now about 300 to 400 interviews every single day with candidates. And so it's crazy, like these numbers are just massive. But then out of all of these thousands of candidates that we that we interview every single week, we bring you the best people that match your exact description.

00:15:08:14 - 00:15:23:19 Unknown And so if you wanted to go out and advertise your own job, you might get 50 or 100 candidates. And then you have to choose out of those 100, we have literally a database of hundreds of thousands of people we could choose from. So I tell a lot of our clients, if you want to try it yourself. Be my guest.

00:15:23:20 - 00:15:43:14 Unknown Do that while also having us bring you candidates so that you can see the quality difference and what we could bring you versus where you could get on your own. Yeah, I think the main factor there is time. If you have ever worked with, I don't know, opera or freelancer. Com and you post a job there, you will be bombarded with jobs and then you have to shift through that and find out the right person.

00:15:43:15 - 00:16:16:08 Unknown It's a lucky gamble to be honest. 100%. Yeah. Time is a huge factor into this because you have, again, you have to go through all these candidates and a lot of times they're applying with automated applications.

And so you have to filter through a lot of people background checks. And it's just if you think about it from a business owners perspective, you should be handling things that will help you get to the next revenue milestone and not, you know, try to save costs on little things like recruiting and other other duties that you could easily outsource to someone else. 00:16:16:10 - 00:16:36:18 Unknown You spoke already a little bit on a case study on examples. Who's your perfect customer?

Are there specific industries in e-commerce that you work more with than others? Yeah, I mean, we were cross many different industries. We have a pretty good, pretty good range. I mean, our biggest industry is only 10 or 11% of of, you know, our client base.

00:16:36:18 - 00:16:58:02 Unknown And so so we had a lot of ecommerce, by the way, as well. I would say typically our ideal customers are ones that have less than 50 employees. Once you have more than 50 employees or it's a few hundred, sometimes it gets a little too. There's too much red tape in terms of the hiring process and the type of candidates we get are usually in very high demand.

00:16:58:03 - 00:17:19:02 Unknown They're interviewing with multiple multiple clients. They're interviewing with multiple companies. They're very high quality. They speak perfect English and they get a lot of job offers.

And so in larger businesses, when they take too long to make a decision, by the time they decide to hire someone, it's like that person is gone. And so we really typically like small business owners that have less than 50 because they they interview quickly. 00:17:19:02 - 00:17:37:08 Unknown They can make decisions very quickly once they find the right person. And so and so that puts us in perfect alignment.

Plus also a lot of times we can help them understand exactly what to look for in the hiring process. And so that helps really create a big impact. Like we I've seen, if you go on our website, we have like 70 video testimonials just on our website. 00:17:37:08 - 00:17:59:13 Unknown And I think we have like another 100 that we have not edited and posted because there's already too many.

And what's interesting about that is you see the level of impact that these virtual assistants have on on the business. I've heard of many cases where, you know, we've had clients say, if had I not hired a VA for $10 or 11 or whatever, I would have probably had to shut down the business because I was overworked. 00:17:59:14 - 00:18:21:23 Unknown Hiring locally was too expensive. I didn't want to do it anymore.

So it's really interesting to kind of see that feedback and see the level of impact. But also, you know, in terms of like besides revenue and besides cost savings and all that on the business side, seeing the impact that we've had on now, we've placed 2100 virtual assistants and seeing, you know, the stories that we hear is also really phenomenal in my head. 00:18:22:00 - 00:18:41:12 Unknown Yeah, I can vouch for that. I'm using virtual assistants for 15 years somewhere in this ballpark, and I wouldn't be with my business where I'm nowadays without them.

There are such a important part of a business, and they're highly skilled and highly available and so on and so forth. Let's talk a little bit about contracting payment and all this part of it. 00:18:41:12 - 00:19:03:00 Unknown I think our listeners are interested in this. Like, okay, on a contracting side, how does that look like?

Yeah. So we have we have two options, right. One option is you can do that yourself. And basically if you do decide to do it yourself, we'll give you, you know, tips on like contracts.

We'll give you tips on how to handle payments, what platforms to use and things like that, time tracking and all of that. 00:19:03:00 - 00:19:23:07 Unknown Now that's if you decide to do it yourself. We could also do it for you. So we have a service now where essentially we will handle the payments, we'll handle the legal contracts and the compliance.

We will handle time tracking. And, you know, basically onboarding and off boarding and everything else that is required. So that way you don't have to focus on back end HR type of work. 00:19:23:07 - 00:19:39:01 Unknown All you have to do is just choose choose the person you want to work with, assign them tasks and manage their day to day work.

But we'll manage the whole infrastructure on the back end so so we can handle it for you. Or we can teach you how to do it yourself. Completely optional. How about timelines?

How long does it take to find the right candidate? 00:19:39:07 - 00:20:08:02 Unknown That's a great question. It really depends on the role. So if it's if it's a very neutral like sometimes people will come to us and they want, you know, construction estimators in a specific industry that have worked, you know, in a specific type of state or whatever, then those might take a little longer, like three weeks, sometimes four weeks if it's a sales position, if it's executive assistant, customer support, marketing, you know, these type of positions usually you can fill in less than a week.

00:20:08:05 - 00:20:23:17 Unknown In fact, there are many cases where we can do it in three days or four days really, depending on the on how fast the client wants to go. Sometimes clients are like, I'm just not available for another week, so I can't interview anyone. But if they're if they are available, we can usually do it in like 3 or 4 days. 00:20:23:19 - 00:20:47:15 Unknown How does your pricing work?

How do you charge for your services? So I remember when I first started hiring virtual assistants back in 2019. I was a customer of a virtual assistant company, and they did this thing called a staffing model, where essentially I was paying them $3,000 every single month, and I was logged into a contract, and then they were only paying like 5 or $600 to the actual virtual assistant. 00:20:47:15 - 00:21:04:08 Unknown They were pocketing the difference.

And so when I started the remote leverage, I thought that was an unethical model. I didn't like it, and I don't I didn't want to set up a situation where a client has to pay us every single month because they want to use that virtual, like most of the work is done in the recruiting. 00:21:04:09 - 00:21:28:07 Unknown After recruiting, you know, as a business owner, you want to integrate them into your team and you want to manage their day to day. And so the way we built our model is very different than every other virtual assistant agency.

What we do is we call we call it a recruiting model where you hire people directly. So we handle the sourcing, we handle the interview process and help you basically choose the right person for the business. 00:21:28:07 - 00:21:51:02 Unknown And then you pay us a one time fee, depending that that's based on basically their their annual salary. Right.

Once you pay that fee then you don't ever have to pay us again for that position. If you want to hire obviously additional positions. We have discounts for repeat clients. We have bundles and that sort of thing.

But it's a one time payment model where you pay us whatever the fee is, and then you pay the virtual assistant directly afterwards. 00:21:51:02 - 00:22:07:19 Unknown Whatever the agreed upon hourly rate is between you and them. If it's $10 per hour, then that's what you pay them. We take no cuts out of that at all.

Okay, that makes it very easy and straightforward. I like this as well. Very cool. Before our coffee break comes to an end today, is there anything you want to share with our listeners that we haven't covered yet?

00:22:08:00 - 00:22:32:23 Unknown Yeah, I would say one thing I would always encourage people to do is think about again what the bottleneck is. But after you identify that, check out the type of candidates that you could potentially get. A lot of times people are closed off to the idea of hiring virtual assistants because maybe they've had a bad experience in the past, or maybe they've hired people from, say, the Philippines or other regions in Asia or, you know, other regions of the world.

00:22:32:23 - 00:22:51:15 Unknown And I'll tell you that hiring from Latin America is a significantly different experience because, you know, usually, again, there are 6 or $7 per hour. They speak perfect English. We can get you really high quality, skilled people that have a lot of experience. And the way we've set up the remote leverage is that you come to us, you tell us what you're looking for.

00:22:51:16 - 00:23:07:18 Unknown We can we can get you multiple interviews for free. You don't have to pay single dollar for that. And that way you can get to see the type of candidates that you can have before you make a decision on whether hiring virtual assistants is the right is the right decision for you or not. So I highly recommend that you do that completely risk free.

00:23:07:18 - 00:23:27:07 Unknown You might as well try it out, see what type of talent you can get. In a lot of cases, people are very pleasantly surprised by the type of positions we can help them fill in their business. Yeah, makes perfect sense. And as you already know, I'm a big fan of outsourcing and having virtual assistants and is definitely helps growing your business very fast with very skilled people.

00:23:27:09 - 00:23:43:02 Unknown Cool. Where can people go and find out more about you guys? Yeah, the best way to do it is to go on our website remotely. And another ways you can go on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, whatever type in remote leverage you'll see us, but remote lovers.

Com you can see exactly how it works. You can watch a lot of testimonials. 00:23:43:02 - 00:24:02:14 Unknown You can book a call with a consultant. They'll walk you through the process and help guide you.

Basically in choosing choosing what role to hire for and get you interviews. Cool. I will put things in the show notes, as always in just one click away. Thanks so much for your time today.

I think it was a great overview of why you should hire skilled people and grow your business faster, and I hope a lot of people will reach out to you. 00:24:02:14 - 00:24:05:02 Unknown Thanks so much for your time. Appreciate it. Thank you for having me.