He Scaled His Growth Team in an Untraditional Way. It Led to a Big Exit. (Philip Ruffini)

Speaker A: Every week I get to chat with 10 or 15 different high level growth leaders and most of them are feeling stuck right now. The goals that they have are the most aggressive they've ever been, but their budgets, some of the tightest, their headcounts frozen and scaling right now feels almost impossible for these folks. But my former client, Philip Raffini figured out a different playbook when he was at Rupa Health. He inherited a $7 million growth budget and he ended up scaling a team with 25 overseas contractors doing a ton of legwork behind the scene. The team helped him scale the business to an acquisition. And Philip has become probably the most resourceful growth leader I've ever had the chance of knowing. In this conversation, he walks us through how he did it, where he found the contractors, how he onboarded them, where the leverage is, and how you can run the exact same playbook to grow your team without a massive budget or a ton of overhead. It's enough for me. Let's hear from Philip.

Speaker B: I used to work at a series a startup called Rupa Health where I originally was head of media, head of content, ran all the content properties, and then, uh, head of growth left. So I ended up taking over as the head of growth and I inherited roughly a $7 million a year budget. Seven or nine. We were doing low eight figures in revenue and an 11 person team and I didn't really know what I was doing, especially because I was actually the youngest person on that team. So it was really difficult to actually inherit a lot of those managerial problems. Yeah, that's when I ended up meeting Andrew who ended up coaching me through firing lots of people, managing people, and then also just thinking about how to manage a larger scale growth team.

Speaker A: And had you managed people before that point? I can't remember.

Speaker B: I had managed lots of overseas contractors, but I had only managed two Americans. My original team, before I inherited the entire team was two people and then I ended up taking over the entire team.

Speaker A: And what was the size and scale of the business that you were in around that time?

Speaker B: Yeah, so it was really interesting revenue wise, not crazy big. Lab testing is a terrible business. GMV wise was very big. You know, we had 5,000 customers and we are considered one of the two largest companies in functional medicine. Functional medicine being the, uh, holistic naturopathic type medicine. The largest company being FullScript, which is the one that bought Rupa. So the scale was really big. We spent $3 million a year in conferences, we spent $50,000 a month on SEO. We had a podcast that got 50,000 downloads per month. We did $2 million a year in online course sales hosting live cohort based courses for doctors that was run by doctors. We did Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn. We had 50,000 to 200,000 followers across all those platforms. And then we also had a sales team. So there was a lot of things going on.

Speaker A: It was a super impressive business. I remember thinking that when you and I first met, it was like, this isn't a small business. This is like a big operation with big ambitions and big goals and a pretty badass team. That was my interpretation of what was going on.

Speaker B: The goal is to take over the entire functional medicine industry and by be the biggest brand. The original plan was like lab testing. Again, terrible. Business like function health does not make nearly as much money as anyone thinks it does. They actually probably lose money on every customer. But the whole goal was to basically capture market share of the doctors and then sell them a more like profitable product long term.

Speaker A: And so take me to like a week, uh, in the life of Philip at that moment. So there's a lot going on in the business. The head of growth leaves. You're asked to take over the function in addition to all the other stuff you got going on. What's a loose week look like for you?

Speaker B: Around that time, one was like learning, so learning what everyone did and auditing all of our agencies. So auditing our paid ads agency, any type of external contractor we worked with, meeting with all of our like the ICs on my team, cutting growth spend just because it was super, super unprofitable on a lot of the things we were doing. The head of growth before me, Kobe, fantastic marketer, best marketer I've ever met. But we were spending way too much money on things that just didn't have any type of calculable ROI and not even like peripheral in the sense that, you know, they see the podcast, then they click on the ad. There's just tons of stuff that wasn't being focused on and we hadn't doubled down on what was working. So honestly it was a lot of digging through the data and then also being an actual manager because a uh, lot of we had people on our team who weren't doing a great job and no one had ever either pipped them or talked to them or gave them feedback or tried to coach them or showed them what excellent looked like. So that uh, ended up being a large part of my time.

Speaker A: And for you as the head of growth, what did you have ownership and accountability for? Because in every business, it's different and every company scopes it a little bit different. What did that look like for you?

Speaker B: Yeah, so it's probably more close to a head of marketing than head of growth in the sense that I didn't have product ownership within the product, so I owned everything top of funnel outside of the product. So working with you, actually one of the things you helped me narrow down on was my job is not gmv because I actually can't control that. My job is signups, because signups is the actual only metric that I can influence copy on the website. Like how people hear about you and how people get to the website and how people sign up is what I owned. And it was like impressions to signups was actually the only thing I could own because I didn't own the signup flow that was owned by the product team.

Speaker A: And what did you think was the thing for you as the person leading this capability that you needed to work on most to be successful? Like, part of that is probably stuff we worked on, and then part of that is stuff outside of what we worked on. But what did you need most help with, do you think?

Speaker B: Well, what I needed most help with, with you was definitely managing people just because, like, I had never pipped someone. That was a terrible experience. Like, my face started twitching when I had to do that. So that, that, that was a big experience in terms of like actual work, which I also think you helped with was like narrowing down what was actually working, like collecting all the numbers, collecting the data and being like, hey, this is the channel and segment that is working really well. Like, we should do more of this where that just had not happened. And a very large part of the strategy pre me was not science focused. It was more art focused in the sense of like, let's just paint the wall and do everything. Which worked like, really well. Sponsoring the WI fi at a conference is like very, very underrated tactic when you're trying to go for impressions and build like credibility. But it doesn't end up like driving attributable signup super well, nor does anyone actually learn what you do.

Speaker A: I can remember you had what a lot of people have. Like, you had a ton of great ideas and the challenge was which are the most amazing ones that you should prioritize and really triple down on and which are good ideas that you shouldn't invest in as deeply as some others. And I think that was part of the journey that I can remember as well, is just trying to hone down the list a little bit. Just because you couldn't do everything. You had a big team, but it wasn't. There's limited resources. Even with a large team, you just can't do everything, you know?

Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, so we ended up like we had 25 oversea contractors that helped us literally do everything. So happy to dive deeper into that.

Speaker A: But yeah. When did that first show up for you? So obviously your journey has included a lot of overseas folks, but when did that first get on your radar?

Speaker B: Pre Rupa Health, I ran my own content marketing agency and essentially what we did is we made TikToks and short form videos for basically like post series A type companies. And that went pretty well but wasn't really scalable. But I had hired 13 people in the Philippines to help me edit all of those videos. So I ended up working at Rupa Health. Part of my thing was I want to bring my best five contractors with me. So I brought the best five video editors I had and they were the ones who worked on our social media content and all of our YouTube content at Rupa Health. And then essentially Kobe, my original boss was like Philip, can you help hire someone to do X? And then we just kept doing that and then it turned into like me giving a presentation to the company once and being like, yeah, so we have 20 people in the Slack channel that helps us do everything. Most of the people at the company didn't know this. Part of the funny story was Tara, the CEO wouldn't let us hire full time employees. If you wanted to hire a full time employee, it was like three interviews. Her interview super hard, but she didn't ask any questions. When we hired a 2-3k a month overseas contractor. So just became to the point where like hey man, like we don't really want to deal with Tara. Let's just hire an overseas contractor to do this. And then we ended up hiring people to do customer service, video editing, podcast management, SEO, webflow design and then graphic designers as well. And Then also just VAs and EAs to help across the whole team and then also within the marketing function. Doesn't make sense to pay a full time American to upload webflow articles or create custom graphics for articles.

Speaker A: About a year ago I had the opportunity to coach this amazing guy named Philip. He was the head of growth for a pretty large subscription business. They were series A on their way to series B when he and I worked together and he was in an incredible guy but relatively new to the head of growth role and relatively new people manager. And so a lot of what he and I worked on together was creating a team of a players, hiring them, putting the right team structure in place to support his growth goals and what it looked like day to day, week to week to manage that team. And he had a big team. He had 12 US based team members and another 25 overseas contractors on his team doing all of this different specialized execution work. They ended up being a huge lever for him. Fast forward to today. Philip co founded a business called Hire Overseas, helping other teams find, hire, train and manage exceptional overseas talent based on the experience that he had in his previous role. Which is pretty cool. So if you're looking to bring on some amazing talent 2026, check out hire Overseas. It's built by a member of our tribe. Former Head of Growth Co founder also comes from the startup marketing world and they can help you find amazing folks to join your growth or marketing team. You can hire growth marketers, paid ad folks, SEO designers, content creators, dozens of other roles. Check them out for yourself@hireoverseas.com value it's higher overseas.com value this episode is presented by Novatic. If you've been following me or you're a fan of this show, you know how bullish I am on um, the interactive demo space and how much I love the Nevada team. Done a ton of stuff with them over the years and they just dropped a bunch of new features that are really exciting. First they've got a new template library you can choose from. A bunch of pre made templates that have the most common demo use cases and all of the best practices built in help you go 0 to 1 in a few seconds if you're not sure what to build. They also have a new AI storyboard generator. It's exactly how it sounds. You drop in a website URL or some copy or a landing page, whatever you've got, it reads the information, pulls out the key sections and then builds a working product demo for you in a couple minutes. And after you've built your demo you'll probably want to use your data as part of your go to market approach. They've got a bunch of plug and play demo playbooks where you can send that interaction data to your CRM. You can use it to trigger alerts. All kinds of good stuff. It's actually a bunch of the things that my team built manually took us forever when I was in house, so I love this. And after you've built your demo, if you need to make any adjustments, if you're displaying numbers or data as part of that they have a new table AI feature which helps you to clean up that data in a more conversational way and at scale in just a few seconds. They have made it so stinking easy to use your product as your marketing tool without needing an engineer or heavy design work. You can get started with all this in their free plan. Check it out@novatic.com value to get started. That's nevadic.com value. And if we could go back even to that first gig where you said we had this overseas team, they were helping us with video editing and TikTok stuff and all that, how did that idea even pop into your head? Like, did someone else share the game with you or did you just stumble into this yourself?

Speaker B: Oh, yeah, yeah. Really funny story. I stayed at my grandmother's beach house for three months to start by myself to learn how to go viral on TikTok, because I thought that was a very important skill to learn in 2022.

Speaker A: I mean, it kind of is.

Speaker B: Yeah. No. Are you kidding me? My career advice to people is that somehow I ended up being like, the only person who knew how to go viral on TikTok and work with B2B health care companies, which becomes an extremely valuable skill set. And then you get offered the head of marketing job at a $3 billion company. Wild. Because those two skill sets just don't really like. It's very difficult to find someone that knows those two things where it almost becomes then more easily to teach people how to manage a budget and manage a team. But yeah, so I was staying at my grandmother's beach house, learning how to go viral on TikTok. And I post on my Instagram story being like, hey, does anyone want to come stay with me? And my friend Helen, who ran her own startup in Canada, came and stayed with me for four days. And she's like, oh, yeah, I have a EA in the Philippines. And she's like, this is how I hired them. And she just taught me how to hire people in the Philippines while she was staying with me. And then that is how I hired the first person in the Philippines. But that also came from me getting banned from Life on Upwork because I got banned from Life on Upwork because I did something dumb in the past trying to hack like a review system. And upwork's like, no, you can't do this. And they banned me for life. So then I had to learn how to use job boards. The other funny story, you can decide if you want to keep this at once. One, I've gotten three Upwork accounts banned. At one point I was going to CVS and buying rechargeable gift cards to spend on upwork because they banned all my credit cards. So I'd go to CVS every week and I would spend $4,000 buying gift cards to spend on video editors on upwork. And the people at CVS and Ocean City, New Jersey literally thought I was insane. One because I was the only 25 year old coming into the store, uh, which is like, it's kind of like a retirement community. I end up buying $4,000 in credit cards and then coming back every two weeks.

Speaker A: They definitely thought you were scamming somebody.

Speaker B: Um, yeah. Crazy to do that. I can't imagine another scenario.

Speaker A: And so was there any apprehension or pushback or misconceptions internally at RUPA Health as you started to scale the team of external folks? And I asked this not because there should be, but more. Just there's an existing playbook, and the playbook is you hire people and you hire them locally or you hire them remotely, but you hire people that are in your same country because it's easier for taxes and insurance reasons and, um, HR reasons and all that kind of stuff. And maybe you have one person who's external, but it's sort of an edge case. And so was there any misconceptions or pushback or any of that for the first few hires?

Speaker B: Oh, 100%. I, uh, mean, yes and no. It was really easy because our advantage was at a brief moment in time, we had the best healthcare videos on the Internet. Nobody made as detailed level animations for healthcare videos than we did. So when you have that as your case study or product, like your positioning to your internal team becomes significantly easier to just get everybody else on board. It's like, hey, like, we found the video editor. So yeah.

Speaker A: And initially you were finding all these folks yourself on upwork. Was that sort of like the flow when you were doing it before the process you've got in place now?

Speaker B: Yeah. So before working at rupa, I did, I like used upwork. And then I quickly realized that if you want to talk about overseas hiring, like, there's tons of dynamics with all the platforms, Fiverr, upwork, job boards, different job boards, countries, like you can get really specific. But I just found that the video editors and upwork were not reliable, did not show up on time, like had other clients and were not the best either. Which was most important to me. I wanted to find the best animators in the world to work on our videos. So gave up on upwork and then we moved over to job boards and then at RUPA Health I was just doing everything. So online Jobs PH is the popular job board everyone uses for hiring in the Philippines. Literally just started with that. Now we at uh, my own business hire overseas. We're like significantly more sophisticated which is like marginally but way more like larger network pull from internal network. Way more different job boards, social media, plus like internal community of people. So now it's way more robust.

Speaker A: And how are you onboarding people so that they could actually ramp up and add value and do all those things even though they were across the globe?

Speaker B: It depends what the role is. The honest answer is, hey, here's a raw video file, here's the brand kit, here's an example video. Go nuts. And because honestly my strategy when vetting contractors is just like super high volume. Hire someone 48 hours, you kind of know if they're really good or not. You don't need to do so. The onboarding process actually matters less. Different roles matter more. Obviously getting context on the business and industry actually is probably the most important. But generally ramp up is not. You don't have to do very handholding because I've now broken it down into like the overseer. Contractors are not necessarily full time team members. In some businesses they are in some levels they vary but, but for most of the Rupa Health business everything was very output driven. So it was like I need a graphic, I need a video. You don't actually need a lot of context. You don't have to work well with other people. You do not have to communicate well. I have a web designer who built the entire Rupa University website. He still works at FullScript. He has done work for me part time. I've worked with him for three years. I've never video called him ever. Never. Even when I hired him, he did an example homework assignment. He absolutely crushed it. And I was like all, uh, right, you start now and then. Yeah, Dave's been phenomenal and we've never video chatted ever.

Speaker A: And is that like one of the misconceptions is that it would require a lot of like management overhead and leadership overhead and all that kind of stuff?

Speaker B: I think so like you know the sales call I had today, someone was like, have they ever worked with a US business? I'm like they have only worked with US businesses. So I think people even now still misconceptualize that work is now global. If you sit behind your computer, it does not matter if you sit in Philadelphia, New York, Hong Kong, like Manila, M like Lagos, like everyone is doing the same thing.

Speaker A: Hey, I hope you're enjoying this episode of the show. If you are, please don't forget to hit that subscribe button or whatever platform you're listening. On the data show, something like 40% of the people who listen to the show are actually subscribed. It is the best way for you to support the show and it helps the algorithm find other listeners who are just like you. If you're feeling generous, a quick rating or review makes a huge difference as well. Thank you so much for listening and for your support. Now let's get back to this episode and so tell me about your team. At its peak at rupa, what did that look like? How many total people? What was the mix between the US and the overseas folks? Help us to understand what it looks like at scale to do this.

Speaker B: Well, yeah, so at uh, Rupa at our peak we had 11 US hires who did events management, content, running the online university where we sold cohort based courses doing ads, marketing. You, uh, know, if you include the sales team, it was 15 people. And then at the peak at Rupa, we probably had, I want to say somewhere between 18 and 25. It depends how you want to include people. If you include customer service, it's actually way more. Those people did not report directly to me within the marketing team we had at its feek around 18.

Speaker A: And so what changed about your job as the leader of the capability once a good chunk of the team was overseas.

Speaker B: Can you clarify what you mean by that?

Speaker A: Well, I asked it kind of open ended on purpose, but I'm thinking from like a management perspective. So you're managing people who are managing some of these contractors. Maybe you're the direct report, you know, the direct contact for some of these contractors, depending what the project is. Oftentimes internally you've got some folks who are doing some of the execution work, who are doing some sharing and collaboration, things like that. So I'm just, I'm just curious for you as a leader, if that changed when such a good chunk of your team was overseas or if that created any new skills that you needed to pick up or unlearn, um, along the way.

Speaker B: I think it was, uh, most of the new skills for me came from managing the US based employees. Everyone who works with me knows I do not like meetings. I do not necessarily like, I enjoy being an ic, I don't really like being a manager. So I'm very good at structuring my ICs workaround. Not having to meet with them. So in terms of, like, once I took over the entire team, the, uh, new skills came from learning how to like, be a leader and run a team and motivate people and inspire people and actually show up to work. You know, like, all hand weekly presentations do matter and they do help morale. And some people do enjoy those. If you do them well, you talk about things that are important. You don't just review metrics that everyone. There are plenty of weekly meetings that I feel like are complete waste of time. But I actually do think they can be really productive for team building and motivating people. Because I think that's why a lot of people I used to work with liked me. Just because I'm quite good at building PowerPoints and presenting them with energy that excites people. But that, that was a lot of the new skills I learned. Whereas the older stuff was like, you know, managing the contractors. Even once they took over the entire team, a lot of their work was, I don't want to say automated, but it was very process oriented. It was like, hey, every week I want you to send a message confirming that you did all of these things in the Slack Channel. And all the people we hired, we never really had problems with. Now we oversee about 200 contractors across about 80 to 100 clients, and we run into problems all the time. But that initial RUPA Health team, we really didn't have any issues with people having tech jobs, people not doing their work, not being reliable or consistent. So it was very easy to be hands off. People enjoyed joining our Slack Channel. And our Slack Channel was where all the overseas contractors would be like, hey, like, this is what I did this week, or hey, this is now done. And they're very all good at working together.

Speaker A: So there's a point where you kind of turn this, where you decide to turn this chapter into its own business. Can you take us through that moment where you realized, hey, I think that there's a playbook here that might be helpful to others?

Speaker B: Oh, I mean, yeah, this was super easy. So essentially what happened is RUPA Health got acquired in October 2024. That was really funny because I just emailed Andrew. I was like, hey, man, I don't need you anymore. Look, all the problems we talked about last week solved. But it got a card in October 2024, and that was like the biggest health care acquisition for that week or like 48 hours. And at one point it like took over Twitter for solid 24, 48 hours. Like tech Twitter. So I just tweeted. Our SEO graph being like, hey, if anybody wants to learn how Ruble Health got acquired and grew our marketing and did our growth, this is our SEO graph. Here are all the things that I had come up with that I didn't share with anyone. Like, for example, we were using Nigerian doctors to help do content, which that's a five minute discussion. But nobody was using overseas doctors in ChatGPT to write content at that point. In 2023, when we started doing that, I posted about that and that tweet got. Went viral and I think got like 200 viral for tech. Twitter went. Got like 250,000 views. And I ended up setting up 60 calls with people. And I literally just did 60 calls where I was like, hey, this was our revenue, this was our cost. Like, this is everything we did. This is what worked, this is what didn't. Oh, and this entire thing was powered by 25 overseas contractors. If you want help hiring overseas contractors, please let me know. And we ended up signing like 15 to 25 clients. For me doing that, that was still the best thing I've done for this business in terms of getting clients.

Speaker A: What's like the common pattern that you see when either you have calls like that or folks that reach out to you looking for help that are in marketing, in growth, kind of in this

Speaker B: world that we come from, People hate their agencies. Yeah. Number one is people don't like their agencies. Paid marketing, SEO, creative, literally anything agency. Because I did the agency game. And the way working with an agency typically works is for them to optimize a profit, they need to max out clients. So let's say one person can handle five clients. They make money at five. But the thing is, they know people are going to churn in two to four months.

Speaker A: So.

Speaker B: So then they have to take on six to seven to basically optimize that future and like offset, you know, future churn. So what then it ends up happening is they stretch everyone's bandwidth very thin to make money, and then they need to balance how much effort they give you. If you get two good months, you're not getting a third good month because it's like, all right, this client's in good shape. They're not going to churn after one bad month. Let me give focus to these other people who have a higher risk of churn. And it just becomes this balancing game long term. And then you get frustrated as a client because you're like, all right, they're not bad enough for me to want to start over. They're not good enough that I'm happy and want to work with them. And that is literally so many of the people I end up talking to. And then what ends up happening is a lot of these agencies just hire people overseas to do the work anyway. So we work as a business model because our margin is less, we are hands off, so we're able to serve more. And then we just give you a contractor directly who then does the work. We have hired SEO contractors that have worked for SEO firms, like agencies that are responsible for 10 to 20 clients per month. And then we just take them out of that position and they give them the one, and then everybody is happier except the agency who's doing a bad job and now has lost their person.

Speaker A: Preaching to the choir. I hated working with agencies because usually you work with the person who sells you is somebody incredible, somebody you'd be lucky to get to collaborate with on a monthly basis. That's who you say yes to. And then you get handed off to somebody who you've never met, who's super junior, who's in the seat for, like, the first time, for the most part, right? There are some out there who don't fit this, but by and large, I've seen this more often than not seen it. And then you're sort of stuck where you've kind of got this junior person who you're not happy with, but you're not able to work with the other person. And to your point, you're never really that happy. And I like hiring directs. You know, with my assistant, I did what you're talking about. I didn't want to go through an agency. I, uh, posted my own job. You know, I work with somebody who's local, but it's to solve that exact same challenge, which makes a ton of sense, candidly.

Speaker B: What? Our business started doing worse as me and my co founder became more hands off and handed it over to our team. Because people just care less. That's just ultimately what it comes down to. So incentives are usually better aligned. If a contractor is directly on your team versus hiring with an agency, incentives are just more in line because if the contractor does a bad job, they lose their job. Right? Whereas if the agency client turns, the contractor doesn't lose their job, especially if more clients come in. So incentives are just more properly aligned. And then we're incentivized for that contractor to succeed. Where, you know, today someone was like, hey, what are, uh, the contractors doing for AEO? And one of our clients asked that, and within 30 minutes, I had Messaged our contractor and I was like, I need you to put together an entire plan on what you're doing for AEO and send it to your client. Send it to me first. I'm going to review the whole thing. Here is all the information we're doing. And you are also going to meet with our internal SEO person today to make sure you guys are aligned on what you should be doing as well.

Speaker A: It seems like that's been a big part of the success of this both when you were in house and then also as you've been scaling this business. It's like sops. It's a huge part of this. It seems like where you're working with folks you're not sitting next to shoulder to shoulder. Let me define what good looks like or they can define what good looks like, but I want to have a checkpoint there and then let's talk about what process looks good and then we'll have a checkpoint there and then we're just aligned on what good is and then we can just go execute.

Speaker B: The number one thing to success is aligning on what excellent looks like and then just being like very clear with expectations. Example, a lot of overseas people, one have never been treated like a real person. Two just have never worked in a formalized setting. They are very used to the results and outcome like approach of like hey just write an article, hey just write a graphic without like any actual coaching or care. So you know what we do is we have everyone create a 30, 60, 90 day plan outlining like hey, this is what I'm gonna do. This is what success looks like and this is what exceptional looks like within my role. And then that way it is very clear to hold them accountable. Lots of people don't know what is exceptional or what is realistic and to wait. Uh, I mean this applies to everyone too. Not just oversee contractors, but lots of people don't actually know what exceptional looks like and know what's possible and have had people that have been like, hey, like this is your standard.

Speaker A: What's been the biggest change for you going from operator to founder? What stuff have you had to pick up or put down?

Speaker B: One is owning, owning everything. Like financial stress is obviously not super fun. We bootstrapped our business. So it's like, you know, that is difficult. That's 1, 2. Taxes and admin is not my thing. My co founder does a lot of that and then I'd say three is definitely just the most important and probably the best answer is just growing a team from scratch of like there are very, very few people that can be your first employee and then also succeed as like number 25, 50 and 100. And people that are really good ICs don't necessarily make good managers. People who are good managers aren't necessarily good at building systems, if that makes sense. They can hold people accountable, but you ask them to do something new and it was very, very hard to find, like to build a team and a structure as well, because things start to organically build and then at the same time you want to try and force it. So for example, our team is broken up into a, uh, client management, operations and recruiting and then like growth and marketing. I have no idea if that's the best structure. I go back and forth on this every day. Do you want to build a team around one person you hired or is that actually a bad structure and you need to let that person go because despite them being good, like, you can't really structure your business around like them as the piece, if that makes sense.

Speaker A: Hey, if you're enjoying the stories on this show and feeling like you're ready to tackle some of your own hurdles, I'm here to help. If you didn't know already, I offer one to one coaching specifically for people who work on or around growth teams who want to have a bigger influence and impact in their roles. Maybe you're navigating some tough moments, whether it's managing your team or handling feedback. Maybe you just want to step into a bigger leadership role. Or maybe you're at a unicorn company today and you want to make sure that the company doesn't outgrow your skill set. Either way, I can help. If you're interested in learning a little bit more, head to delivering value co coaching to learn a little bit more and set up a call with me to see if we jive. All right, enough from me. Back to the episode. And if folks are listening to this, marketing leaders, growth leaders, kind of nodding along to our conversations. We're talking about contractors, we're talking about gaining leverage as we're talking about agencies. Certainly they're having challenges right now hiring full time us based or domestic based staff. People are listening to this and thinking, I should probably do some flavor of this playbook. What's like the first step? Obviously they can reach out to you and your team, but just in general, if they're interested in leveraging overseas talent to grow their team and to get more done, how do they get started?

Speaker B: It, uh, depends what you want to do. Obviously, if you want to dip your foot in I think upwork is just like by far the easiest. You know, you just throw a job post up, you hear a bunch of people, you can work part time, you can work hourly. That works like very well. If you need a graphic once a week that ah, upwork works really, really well. If you want someone full time, you know, they can work through Hireoverseas.com if not like, it's actually very simple. You just hire through job boards, typically in reset geographic locations. Success definitely is like. And I still, I don't think, I don't think like overseas advice isn't applicable to humans, but it's very outcome driven and we have every single person we hire do a homework assignment just because proof of work is by far the biggest indicator of success.

Speaker A: And so what's next for you in this business? Like how far do you take this, how far do you evangelize this playbook that you've got here? How do you think about success in this next chapter?

Speaker B: Yeah, so success for me is actually getting to $10 million a month. That is like business growth is success for me. The hiring overseas market is extremely commodified. There are tons of businesses that do the exact same thing. And similar people usually work with us because they want to work with me and my co founder. You know, we know exactly what we're doing, we know we've hired all the people ourselves. It's very easy to work with us. We respond to all of our messages instantly. Whereas like, and also like candidly, AI can do a lot of the low level roles. We do not hire basic VAs for people anymore. We'll hire high level admins that are really good at cloud cowork. But we used to get requests of like, hey, I need someone to sit on my computer and press this key at this time and write this sentence. Those are gone like people. You don't need those roles anymore. What we actually do a lot more of and which is more exciting is so we've built an entire custom CRM and outbound system in our business. We built an entire revenue dashboard and we just use cloud code for everything, tracks all of our customers, all of our contractors, all of our recruiting plugs in with all of our tools. We built that all of ourself and then we hired my co founder, did the first version and then we're like, all right, none of this is secure. We have no idea what a, uh, you know, environment file is for API keys. Like this is so bad. So then we hired an actual engineer and now Abdul based in Nigeria manages our entire internal systems and his only job is to work with a different team every week to build custom tools for their workflow. So we're just going all in on that role because it doesn't make sense to hire a US engineer. And there's this really interesting arbitrage that exists right now that if you have a African or Southeast Asian developer who wants to learn cloud code, it costs 200amonth for Claude Code max. They most likely make anywhere from 1500 to $3000. So that Cloud Code Max subscription makes up 10% of their entire monthly take home. So if we are willing to subsidize that for people to learn, then you like now have access to a talent pool that doesn't exist where people keep coming to us and they're like, hey, we want cloud code engineers. And um, I'm like, dude, dude. Like they can't afford to learn. It's really hard to find all these people. So in terms of our business, we are going all in on, um, training overseas people on AI tools and subsidizing the cost where one of the best things we did was in fall 2025, like around August. I loved AI video editing tools and I spent hours playing with Google VO3 and it was my favorite thing I used all of last year. So then I ended up building a cohort of 10 video editors from Nigeria. And I paid, I gave them all a thousand dollars a month in Google credits to just literally learn AI video editing. And that was their only job. And I paid them all $500 stipend on top of that. And then, yeah, just subsidized all their learning costs. And then that role has had one of the highest retentions among our clients because they hired a bunch of AI video editors that you couldn't define otherwise. So I really think a lot of, uh, of the future of working model is finding very good overseas people who are really good at using AI tools to QA feedback and point those tools in the right directions, either being building internal tools, being an engineer on your team, or being like a very, very good marketer indeed.

Speaker A: If there are people listening to this that are nodding along, they either want to get in touch with you to learn more about the business, see if they could be a fit, or just follow along in your founder and entrepreneurial journey. Where should we send them?

Speaker B: Hireoverseas.com or my LinkedIn, which is Philip Raffini.

Speaker A: Dude, we'll put links to all that stuff in the show notes. I appreciate you coming on, man. It's been cool to see the evolution of you and your roles. And I think there's nothing more noble than learning something in your job and then taking it and then building a different life for yourself around the skills that you gained. Because I think so many people view the relationship with their employer as like, really one sided. I'm going to learn stuff and it will help me get the next thing from them. It'll help me get the next promotion or the next raise or the next equity bundle or whatever it is. But more people should think like this. What, what can I learn that I can take with me and how can I make that the thing that unlocks all kinds of greatness in my life? And you've done that, man. It's really cool.

Speaker B: Oh, thank you. Yeah. My suggestion is just do the things that are fun and keep chasing ruthless efficiency and cost optimization. That's just how you ended up getting there. I got to the place I did being like, all right, I want to make the best videos on the Internet. How do I do that? All right, this is way too expensive. How do we make this more sustainable? And you just keep iterating those loops.

Speaker A: I was listening to my first million. Do you ever listen to that podcast?

Speaker B: Uh, occasionally, yeah.

Speaker A: So I was listening to it, which for the listeners, in case you haven't listened to it, is not about how to make your first million dollars. It's really about like cool business ideas with other people that are into the tech world. And in it they were talking about how do you find your thing for people that have the entrepreneurial itch but don't know what their life's work could be or like, what business might be fun to build. And the recommendation was go back to the stuff that you were interested in when you were like 12 to 16 years old. The stuff that you would just like roll up your sleeves and get lost in that you could do like all day every day, but you couldn't cause. Cause like your parents thought you had to go to bed or you had to be well rounded in school or whatever. And that kind of leads you to this type of outcome.

Speaker B: Right?

Speaker A: That's the stuff you were doing on your own at, you know, ah, at your grandma's house. It's like, you know, you're doing that anyways and then all of a sudden you get a chance to do it for work and you get to layer on some other skills and then it leads you here, which is really badass. Man. You're a cool example of that.

Speaker B: No, uh, thank you very much, Andrew.

Speaker A: Dude, appreciate you coming on, sharing the game with us, man.

Speaker B: I hope this was helpful.