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Owned and Operated - A Plumbing, Electrical, and HVAC Business Growth Podcast
#148 - Using Global Talent to Outpace Competition with Sagan's Jon Matzner
00:35:15
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- [00:00]
John Matzner
I hired Global talent to increase my customer service, not save money. Global talent is just the entry point into building leverage in your business. This is how you build an empowered, frontline management team. And that's not. I get you cheap people from South America, but then you use global talent and automation as like brother and sister to actually, like, create a great lead gen.
- [00:27]
John Wilson
Recently we've been buying off Supply House and we've been able to get plumbing, H VAC and electrical stuff off there. And my biggest concern was timeliness. Like, hey, if I need this thing pretty quick, can I get it? And you for sure can. So that was awesome. So deliveries are fast, they ship coast to coast, and you can call them and you can get expert support with real people, which is awesome. So check out supplyhouse.com for buying the stuff you need.
- [00:56]
Host
Welcome back to Owned and operated. We have John Matzner here today. What's going on, John? And John Wilson, too.
- [01:05]
John Matzner
Living the dream. Just speaking at a lot of conferences, you know.
- [01:08]
John Wilson
Oh, that's good. That's good. You know, I love to start every podcast with a humble brag.
- [01:15]
John Matzner
John was giving me a little. Little talking a little. He was chirping a little bit, as you'd say, about humble bragging. So I wanted to make sure that we let off with that just to. Just to create the right environment for this conversation.
- [01:27]
John Wilson
No, I'm. I'm good. I feel ready. I feel ready.
- [01:29]
John Matzner
You think I started it because I said you did the Fonz pose? Yeah.
- [01:33]
John Wilson
I'm still not happy about that photo. If anybody listening wants to see my least favorite photo that my team wants to put everywhere. Owned and operated.com workshop. It is now being used in Wilson's advertisements. I hate it.
- [01:48]
Host
Yeah. The ironic part is there's other photos, John, that are at your office itself that tend to go around that have not showed up on any social media that I do wish they would post. I don't hate like John in front of a horse. On the horse. Excuse me. It's like a small children's horses that are out in front.
- [02:03]
John Matzner
John Wilson sized horse is what they call them around the office. Right?
- [02:06]
John Wilson
That is exactly what you call it. Yeah, that's what you call it. You own Sagan.
- [02:09]
John Matzner
I am a.
- [02:10]
John Wilson
A proud client of. We just wrapped up, I think two hires or three hires. First one's really great. Second one starts on Monday. But yeah, you. You own Sagan. So walk. Walk us through it.
- [02:20]
John Matzner
So my background, I was in the foreign service, so I was a diplomat. So I lived and worked Abroad, Got a lot of experience working internationally, then decided to buy and build a home improvement company which has its challenges. And one of the biggest ones was just high quality talent that I could afford because I'm not like a venture backed company or something like that. And so out of desperation and necessity, like any good business owner was able to just build the muscle to kind of. Yeah, just pure desperation, to be clear, like crawling out of a prison with like my fingernails. Had to rely more and more on a global talent pool beyond just the Philippines in particular to make payroll and then to grow from that. Realized that maybe some of my approaches were a little bit different about how I did it. All sorts of different stuff around that which we can talk about. And saw an opportunity within the market to build an offer that I thought was compelling and worked for me and works for our customers. And so here we are.
- [03:14]
Host
And John, when you say talent, I mean, I think a lot of people view, you know, they know about VAs, they know about kind of this background talent. What areas do they specialize in? I know it's a big question for me. Is it just, you know, data entry or does it expand beyond that?
- [03:28]
John Matzner
It's basically anything that can be done remotely. And so I tell people if it can be done remotely, it can be done globally because there's eight and a half billion people in the world that don't live in the US in the last 30 days, we've helped hire everything from a guy who builds LBO models for a private equity company to a video editor, to a cold caller, to an operations coordinator, to a purchasing manager, meaning an architect who does takeoffs for a home renovation company. Dude, there's 8 billion people in the world. Like this isn't like some niche thing. It's like literally there's 8 billion people in the world. It's more rare that it can't be done than it can be done.
- [04:03]
John Wilson
The last time we had you on it was like three years ago. And we talked about the. It was the home improvement, it was Garage Excel. That was the. That's the name of that project.
- [04:12]
John Matzner
That was the original one which we sold. And then we've. We sold about 35 of those so far. I talked to you when we hadn't done one.
- [04:20]
John Wilson
Yeah. If anyone's interested in like sort of following the journey, one of my favorite things is having guests on years later. I think it's fun. Yeah, we've had Rich on a few times. Obviously you're now on for a second time. It's always interesting to like, hey, what were we talking about in 2021 and what are we talking about in 2024? It's just totally different. So last time it was like, hey, here's what we're doing with garages. Here's how we think we can do this. Episode 45 for the listener, if you want to listen to it, it's really interesting. And the idea was this, like, anti franchise thing. And now you've sort of taken a portion of that, the staffing specifically for it, and you're like, hey, I'm going to turn this into its own thing. Where's the garage?
- [04:58]
John Matzner
Yeah, it's rocking and rolling. Yeah, it's rumbling along. It's a pretty low brain damage business model. I think you guys have had this in your careers if you haven't. But my professional trajectory has largely been around earning the right to higher leverage. I started in garages because that was the only. That was the first toehold I could get. I could make an acquisition and use that to kind of like Tarzan swinging behind vines. Go to, like, a slightly higher leverage business model, and then I use that vine to swing into my next model. And so it wasn't like on day one, I had earned the right to be like an allocator. I had to, like, claw my way into. I don't want to say better business models, but higher leverage business models is what I would say. Part of the reason why Sagan has done so well was because I started there. Because when I talk to business owners, I just, like, open up a vein and bleed. So, Jack, how many times have you drone front desk people to AA meetings? I have. Let's talk about why that person needs to sit in Southern California. How about you put that money in the hand of your tax and, you know, stop editing your videos in Southern California. Southern California. I speak from a place of authority because I'm not like an Internet guy. Like, I'm like, dude, I built this. Like, I solved my own problems here. At the time, I didn't see the whole picture, but looking back, it's very obvious. Sagan wouldn't be doing as well as it did if I couldn't speak with, like, authority.
- [06:13]
Host
How many people have you placed so far? You guys have been open, what, six months now?
- [06:17]
John Matzner
Yeah, we're a little past six months. Probably well over a thousand.
- [06:21]
Host
Wow, that's incredible.
- [06:22]
John Matzner
Yeah, because. Because we've done some interesting things with the model. Just again, because I came up in an operationally intensive business, a lot of people do, because it's operationally non intensive. And because I came up in an operationally intensive business like home improvement, where you know, hey, man, your guy cut our power line. It's 11 at night and the truck broke down and somebody's drunk. Going to an Internet business operationally lets us move really quickly because we've got good skills. You guys building a media company compared to H Vac, you're like, wait, so they just like, send me money.
- [06:50]
John Wilson
It feels unfair.
- [06:51]
John Matzner
It feels unfair. That's what leverage feels like, I think, because you're like, wait, where's the cogs? No overtime. You're like, sir, you sold a newsletter ad. There's no. You don't have to issue a W2.
- [07:01]
John Wilson
You know, Alex, when you started sharing information on the Internet, the goal was selling this, like, anti franchise. From doing that, you built an audience. And from the audience, you launch Sagan. Is that sort of the right way to think about this?
- [07:16]
John Matzner
When I first started writing on the Twits, all I was writing about was systemization, building systems SOPs, and I found out that nobody cared, nobody paid attention. And so then I started writing about what you get as a result. But what I found out was, you know, you sell the destiny, you sell the beach, not the plane ride. And one of the benefits of systemization is that you can hire globally, build a better company. And so that's how I just naturally, I saw people paid attention. When I'm like, our crew manager is in Columbia, they would pay attention to that. And then as soon as they started paying attention, I'm like, system, system, system, system, systems. But if I led with systems, they would fall out of their chair half asleep. And so it was me just trying to, like, find what people engaged with. And they're like, well, I've tried to hire an EA before. It doesn't work. And I'm like, hey, systems, let's talk about writing stuff down. And so it was really a way to, like, backdoor my way into giving them what they needed by just wrapping it in candy. And that candy was called hiring Global.
- [08:11]
Host
Yeah, it was perfect timing too, because, I mean, I feel like all this came to a head just right at, you know, there was a lot going on on Twitter. A lot of this came out. There was another competitor of yours, I think, that launched kind of a similar time frame. Do you feel like that timing was an important part in this? If this were to launch in 2019, do you think that it would have the same kind of traction it has today?
- [08:32]
John Matzner
I think Twitter or Twits, as you guys Call it are early adopter business owners and post Covid. The inciting event was Covid, where John was like, dude, I have to have my crew manager working remotely because it's essential employees only or whatever it is. And that, like, planted the seed for early adopter business owners realizing that they don't need seven people sitting in their office. Office. And the minute something has gone remote, it can go global. And so I think Covid was really, like, the beginning of the story that we're still very early in, but it let John finally set up his deal account so that he could pay globally. And he was only doing Philippines. And then he sees something on Twitter and realizes he can go beyond just the Philippines or upwork. Maybe he started on Upwork during COVID and then did online jobs. Ph. And then realized Philippines isn't the answer for everything. And now he's ready to be a Sagan member. I think Covid was actually so 2019. Marginally, you could have done it, right? But Covid was really particularly for the offline businesses, like, not SEO, not web web guys who've been doing it forever. But, like, we have a crane and rigging company in Alabama. He's, like, giving us testimonials and referrals, and he runs a freaking crane and rigging company in Alabama.
- [09:41]
Host
And so what was the sparking moment that really went? Was there a moment or you just, you know, people were asking you for, you know, advice and information, and you're like, okay, I'll create something.
- [09:52]
John Matzner
You know, I studied international relations in college. Like, I lived and worked abroad. Like, my passion is international. My venture into garage upgrades was like a small recess. I was kind of writing online to find the business model and to find the opportunity. I was writing to, like, clarify my own thinking. Like, why don't more people hire globally? Oh, it's because of system. Oh, why don't they do this? Because they think that global talent is just Philippines. And basically through writing online. If you look back, you can see my thinking kind of being created. And I'm like, yeah, dude, I'm not gonna pay you three grand. For someone I know you pay 800. It started pushing me to a business model and saying, okay, well, what would it look like? Well, I don't want to do just headhunting because these people do need support, but I don't want to do staffing markup. And you could. Over the course of kind of writing online and talking to people and coaching and stuff like that, I was able to say, okay, that's a Problem. That's not a problem. That price point's compelling. That business model is silly and exploitative. I was able to kind of like show my math and see how people, you know, I did something silly. It sounds, you'll, you'll appreciate this because you guys are both nuts. I tried something a year ago that was called Text for talent where I just texted out a candidate who was ready to be hired off immediately. It was one time sealed bid. Like, I was like, I can't do that. But I was running experiments. Hey, is this the way John wants to buy Global Talent? Because it shouldn't take three weeks, it should be instant. I tried like 15 things to see what people really identified with. But yeah, Text for Talent. I'd text out a candidate and be like, jack, text me your one time sealed bid for the finders fee. I made actually some decent money. I just didn't want to keep doing it.
- [11:24]
John Wilson
But it still feels like the actual business is the content that gave you the leverage to do it.
- [11:28]
John Matzner
There's four types of leverage, labor leverage, capital leverage, code leverage, and media leverage. My audience and content, to your point, whether it's Twitter, my newsletter, videos is a form of media leverage, which means I shoot one video and it gets 10,000 views. I get huge leverage off that. And so to your point, the place where I built a business was, among other things, off the back of media leverage.
- [11:49]
John Wilson
Sagan has been very successful for one. It's a need, but there's obviously it's a high competition area. And I think the thing that sets you guys apart is the captive labor force, the payment model, like that's totally like, that is inarguably better. People wanting to charge like 30% finders fee to me is just like what doesn't really compete with me. So you thinking about experimenting into other things beyond Sagan or like, is this like where the focus is for the time?
- [12:14]
John Matzner
Yeah. So what we're seeing, and I wrote this post and we talk about it a lot within our group, which is we call it the Sagan system. If you look at like donher business system or even like eos is like a version of this we really believe is that Global Talent is just the entry point into building leverage in your business. And the Sagan system, where we think we're going within Sagan and we do it already, which is a lot of stuff about automation, a lot of stuff even about building content creation into your stinking plumbing business. It's really about building leverage in a small business. Global Talent is just a Great, like gateway drug. And once you've experimented one of my drugs, I want to show you decentralized leadership. Looks like. So Christian Ruff, helicopter pilot, special forces comes in and goes, this is how you build an empowered frontline management team. And that's not. I get you cheap people from South America. That's the way I hooked them. That was the shiny bait. And once they're in, we're about building better businesses like modern high leverage businesses. The definition of Sagan is more expansive than just like me. Get you global talent at a better pricing model. That's the gateway drug.
- [13:15]
John Wilson
Talk on the Internet, sell garage, business in a box, continue to grow the audience, launch Sagan. Sagan becomes the thing and the media is now just reinforcing that thing. And it's almost switch what the main.
- [13:27]
John Matzner
Thing is when people ask me about like writing content or creating content or whatever, I'm always just like, I write for myself and if other people want to watch, that's fine. I write it to distill what I think. You know, Jack say like, dude, I disagree with this. You know, Josh Schultz will swoop in and say something like way smarter than me.
- [13:41]
Host
Is there going to be a focus in Sagan in the future on on some of those other two leverage points like capital leverage or anything like that?
- [13:48]
John Matzner
We already do a lot in terms of automation and AI leverage, code leverage. We already do a lot and we'll continue to do more from a capital leverage perspective. Absolutely. Do you guys know Justin ishb?
- [13:58]
Host
I do not.
- [13:59]
John Matzner
He's a private equity dude, comes from some money, but I think he's deployed like a billion in capital with an average check size of $12 million. He stayed in the lower middle market. Dude, look Google right now, Justin Ishbia and just look at his stats and you hear him talk and your brain like expands. His whole thing is like, why didn't he move up market to deploy more capital like everybody else?
- [14:20]
Host
Oh yeah, I have seen him before.
- [14:21]
John Matzner
Where I think from a capital leverage perspective, Jack, to your point is, I think where we're already getting kind of dragged into is we see opportunities to deploy the Sagan system against Acquis targets and basically say instead of being a vendor to John, I'm going to find John. But for accounting, I don't want to be a vendor. I want to just buy your company and bring my horsepower. You know, basically it's like a thesis, hey, this industry needs global talent, automation and AI. They're slow adopters. I'm going to come bring in all this operational leverage. So I suspect over time it won't be for a little while we'll start taking direct positions into acquisitions targets with the idea that we bring the SWAT team. In terms of, dude, why is your call center in Southern California? What are you doing? So that's where I think we'll go from a capital leverage perspective.
- [15:05]
Host
I've spoken with a lot of these PE firms that are doing rollups just because I enjoy the conversations. What it seems like that they bring is they bring in an HR function which a lot of that's talent. They bring in some capital and then they're bringing in some marketing on the back end. So if you're going through and doing all those things from your system, I mean, I think it's a, it's a great fit. How are you looking at the automation aspect? Like, can you give some examples for us? When we hired overseas talent or global talent, the key to the hiring them is how many SOPs, how good is the system behind that? Because without a good system then you can't rely on that talent just because they're very good at following those systems.
- [15:43]
John Matzner
Have you seen my Matzner's hierarchy of leverage? At the top it says owners. Then one level down it says high expense talent. Then below that it says low expense talent. At the bottom it says AI and automation. There's an arrow next to it that says systems that pushes down. And your goal is to push things down the pyramid by using systems to preserve quality. And so you can't just take something that was done by the owner and automate it. You have to basically push it down through systemization, like how to answer your phone. John doesn't need a system to do that. And then his $35 an hour in office person needs a light system. You need a little bit of a better system to get it to Columbia. And then to actually build an AI tool that has IVR and branch function and spill over to humans. You need a better system. But what you've just done is you've created enterprise value scalability. Better earnings of the hierarchy is how you create value. And I believe it's what our job is as business owners is to build leverage instead of just being the one man plumber. If John says, look, I have a very thin top of my pyramid. Everything else is done by low cost talent or AI and automations. That's a wonderful company. Instead of, oh, I, I don't have anybody who makes less than 180 grand a year. That's a, that's called a consulting company. No, EV I think a lot about building leverage. To use a specific example, Jack about systems, we have a we spent a little cold calling thing for actually home improvement leads. It's been doing pretty well. And Zach, the guy running it, hammering the phones, right? High volume global talent. But then what he did was he built an airtable that as soon as somebody says yes, it takes a transcript of the cold call grades. The cold call also plugs into Zillow's API as well as Google Maps API. And in airtable shows you the house of the lead. So when it gets sent to the salesperson, you can see it's a nice house. And so that's an example of where I think the system is for cold calling and what the script is. But then you use global talent and automation as like brother and sister to actually like create a great lead gen channel.
- [17:36]
John Wilson
A few months ago we got our call center on Avoca. And Evoca is a AI call center solution for home service companies just like me and probably just like you. They have a couple different products, but the one that we like the most is their Coach product, which listens to every single phone call and runs it through a rubric to help our call takers improve. And this is a really big deal because we take hundreds, sometimes thousands of phone calls every single day. And it's just too much for our trainers and managers and leads to keep up with and effectively train. So it lets us do ride alongs on almost every single call every day. Click on the link below to go to Avoca and make sure use the promo code owned for a special discount.
- [18:12]
Host
This is one of the problems we have is there's so much on this high, the top of your pyramid that's on my back or on my GMs back or on a service manager's back. How do we get that off and move that down? And that's across the board. It's in finances, bookkeeping, it's in sales, it's in service. Like, how do we move some of that down to get rid of it?
- [18:31]
John Matzner
Because I work with a lot of franchisors and they say, look, I need more H Vac techs. How does global talent help? Or hey, can global talent be a veterinarian? And you say right now you have Gordon Ramsay as your chef. And Gordon Ramsay shows up at four in the morning and peels the potatoes, he grills the hamburger, and then he goes out and does VIP stuff. And that is your H Vac tech. It's not hard to build a restaurant with Gordon Ramsay's, but you have to pay 180k, and there's not that many of them. The magic of a restaurant is that Gordon Ramsay sets the recipe. And then you have a minimum wage guy come in, he peels the potatoes. Then you have a line cook who follows the recipe. And Gordon Ramsay is still there, but he just does VI IP stuff and recipe development. And so your H Vac tech should be all tooth and no tail. And what you do, the way you afford that, is that you don't have to have 180G guys across your company. You have a variety of wage levels for your French fry cook, and you take some of those savings and you give it to the tech. You pay your H Vac techs 20% above market. You solve your recruiting problem. You steal them from your competitors. How do you do that without raising your prices? Don't have your instagram person make $78,000 a year. So I've run that playbook with a ton of private equity and a ton of franchisors, which is why need more H vac tax. You're like, awesome, let's clean up your labor efficiency ratio. Stop doing that stuff with $48 an hour people, and let's take a bunch of that savings and give it to your frontline tax, because those are the hard people to recruit, not the inbound csr. That playbook has been exceptionally effective because it's just a more efficiency labor, a more efficient labor model.
- [20:00]
John Wilson
But I have a lot of friends in the industry that are 15 to 40, and we're one of the only companies that uses remote talent the way that we use it. So I've got like, I've got this group chat that Jackson with me and.
- [20:14]
John Matzner
Like half of them are Sega members.
- [20:16]
John Wilson
I know all of those guys use global chat. They tend to be smaller companies. I have this other group chat. No one uses global talent. Everyone's north of 20 million. One guy's north of 70. No one's touching global talent. So like, some days we'll sit there and I don't know the answer to this. For. For what I'm about to say, people unintentionally, sometimes intentionally, but often not. Like you have a choice for talent. You can either go cheap but good, which is remote. Like you have to more systems, you have to do other stuff, but like you are sacrificing something, or you can just go expensive but great. It's really interesting to like, watch people make this decision. Sometimes they don't they don't even know that they're making the decision. Like I talked to a company, he's going to be on the show in the next couple of weeks. He doesn't have any remote talent. 20 some million dollars, not a single remote person. Their call center has way less people than ours. Every one of them is way better than any of our individual call takers. Vastly outperforms, also vastly outpays and like that's a choice and remote's the other choice. What I just think is interesting is for so many of my peers in the industry, no one is actually doing it. They all just pay their way less call takers that are just a lot higher quality. Like are you running into that? When do you feel like is a good application?
- [21:25]
John Matzner
We have members who are everything from pre launch franchisees to we do a ton of hiring for a three and a half billion dollar mid market private equity company. So what we see as our like icp, as who our customers are, is people who are kind of like on the front edge of trying to do new and interesting things. It's not people who feel like they're already there unless they're desperate. Who are the people who adopted the Internet in 1998? It wasn't blockbuster, it was Netflix. And so if you look at like Clayton Christensen and disruptive innovation, it's John Wilson, the up and comer, the hard charger, it's what's his name? Hoffman, Chris Hoffman. It's guys who are not like the estab. Oh well we have a way of doing things around here and, and that's how innovation happens, is that it's done by the new hungry. It's Peter lohman, not the 100,000 door slow moving battleship of a property manager. And then eventually the Internet or global talent eats the industry over time. And so it's like any kind of innovation. Like who are the first guys to use CRM? It's any technological innovation like well it was probably the same group. Oh we our techs use blue copy, red copy, yellow copy and then eventually it becomes table stakes after a long enough time which is yeah man, we have to use CRM or else customers expect text message confirmation from text. I think it's the path of any technological innovation where one of the big things that we're trying to change John, is that this idea of high quality is not commensurate with global talent historically. Global talent, business process, outsourcing, sticking in the Philippines or India, private equity company trying to juice earnings before they resell it. That was what it was. And if you look at the way I believe in using global talent, these are people who increase the quality of your service, who are wonderful representatives of your brand. It's not something you're embarrassed to say at your mastermind, hey guys, I'm hiring globally. Like, it's not, it's like, dude, that's Beth. She's awesome. We flew her up. She's a great member of our team. She's awesome. She happens to be less expensive, but dude, she's a boss. That's. It's not this like dirty secret. Like I use people in the Philippines, which is historically how it's been done. And I just don't, I don't. I believe that we can change the perception of that. I mean, people in Canada are global talent. They're 30% less expensive than Americans. Would you call the queen? I used to make fun of people on Twitter about this. Would you call the queen a virtual assistant if you hired her? Because everybody just calls everybody a va. But my point would be, is like, you think global talent is like Philippines. Broken English. I'm saving money. I would like to challenge that. Let's have a conversation. So that's, I think part of it too is that's just not the case anymore.
- [23:56]
John Wilson
I'm involved in a project that has, it's like 40 or 50% of their team is in the UK and really talented. 30% less.
- [24:05]
John Matzner
That's global talent. It's not BPO. Everybody's in a white collar sweatshop with headsets on and, you know, sweats dripping off their forehead. It's. It's not that anymore. A lot of reasons why that's going away. The biggest one actually is the proliferation of high speed Internet because you used to only be able to get good Internet in Manila or New Delhi or Mumbai. And now because Internet is in the country, you can just hire people directly. You don't need to have them come to the central hub anymore. So you don't need this intermediation model.
- [24:28]
John Wilson
When we try to pick a direction for like, where do we take our talent in the call center. Do we do and like, yes, they can be good and I'm not saying they can't. Like, a lot of our best call takers are in the Philippines, which is, that's our reality. But like you can just have more and you can do it lower budget.
- [24:42]
John Matzner
I think it's going to play out and then I want to pitch you guys on something where I think the industry is going. I'm going to pinch you jointly on something. I think where the industry is going is similar to US Manufacturing. There will be some people who will pay a premium to know that my T shirt was made in California. $119. And there's going to be one of similar quality that was made in Tunisia. There will absolutely be organizations that called. Every person you talk to sits right here in Canton, Ohio. Awesome. I ain't cleaning your drain for $69. So you either go $69 and have a global workforce or you're able to price that in and they're just like American manufacturing. Hey, buy in America. That's fine as long as it's priced in. Because right next door you're going to have an incredible product that's 40% less expensive. It's going to be the same with bookkeeping. Like, think of that, but with bookkeeping. And it's going to be, we do our books right here in Orange County, California. Awesome. Thousand dollars of return.
- [25:32]
Host
It's interesting they put it that way though, because I mean, one of the reasons. So our almost our entire call center team is from the Philippines or South America. One of the main reasons we hire these individuals because they almost had no accent. So I don't think that the general public actually even realizes that most of our team is even from out of the country. We hired them for two reasons. One, because of the stigma. Two, mostly because we found global talent without an accent has been global talent for a long time. They've been able to practice. They understand the US Culture in the US Way. Do you think that A, you either run into you more of your thesis or B, do you see global talent that is almost indistinguishable from American talent in terms of via the phone?
- [26:17]
John Matzner
Both. And phone is just one part of the global talent ecosystem.
- [26:21]
Host
Fair enough.
- [26:22]
John Matzner
50% of California is Hispanic if the person's from Mexico and they have a Mexican accent. Right. So point would be, you know, I tell people that all the time. You just. Most people have a very specific image of what global talent is. And it's just 20 years old. A British guy, someone from Mexico who lived and grew up in the US there's 8 billion people that whatever you think, you can't generalize about it. I tell people all the time I hired global talent to increase my customer service, not save money because I wasn't answering the phones. I could not afford somebody to answer the phone on the weekend. And so I did it to increase my customer experience or my, you know, whatever.
- [26:58]
Host
Are you guys worried about artificial intelligence moving forward and. Or are you viewing that as a kind of a coach? Because they're in the space we've, we've had them on in the last few months. Avoca and there's a bunch of other different ones that, that are claiming to eventually be the new call center. Does seem like the direction that, that they're moving. And I would imagine not just call center, but bookkeeping and all these other things.
- [27:21]
John Matzner
One of the historic. You guys can think of a plumbing analogy here, but is there a tool that it used to take a guy who had 20 years of experience to do and now. Oh, I watch plumbing videos on YouTube. Like instead of the thing where they like burn it and do the pipe, there's now just like a gun that they squeeze and it like seals it, right?
- [27:40]
Host
Propest for solder. Yeah, okay.
- [27:42]
John Matzner
Yeah, that's what I meant. And so would you say that that puts plumbers out of business or does it let you onboard somebody to actually be doing re pipes faster because they don't have to spend a year apprenticing on how to solder lead pipes Instead of replacing Philippines people, it makes them act like high skilled people. I was just hiring somebody for a lawyer and he's like, must have really good written English. And I'm like, we have an AI for global talent course that teaches them to use Claude and now they write perfect American English. The person who's in Trouble is the $60,000 a year copywriter. $15,000 a year global talent plus my AI course makes them look like a $60,000 a year copyWriter. You can't tell the difference. Just like, like the guy who's in trouble is the soldering guy who's $100 an hour. And then you have this new ceiling thing and an apprentice can seal a pipe. So what technology does is it turns low skill people into high skill people. So the people who are in trouble are the expensive low skill people in the US because now my Philippines people can write pretty decent marketing copy with, with AI. So we use it to boost our global talent folks. We teach them how to use it.
- [28:48]
John Wilson
We use AI everywhere basically at this point. It is a tool to gain leverage for lower skill. So like our remote talent is the biggest user of our AI. Like much more than American.
- [28:59]
John Matzner
It turns them into high skill. I have a repository of every SOP that is accessible via text message. Now I don't need to have a guy apprentice for three years. Think about what leverage that does that. You know, it just creates all sorts of leverage within your skilled workforce. So we, we consider them brother and sister. There will obviously jack be some things that are completely eliminated, like creating pie charts. You know, you just stick that in AI and it spits out that job goes away. But then everybody moves up on skill level. The people who are in trouble are the sub hundred thousand dollar white collar people.
- [29:29]
John Wilson
I think it gets more and more fragmented like what we're seeing. And I know we've talked about this slightly on here, but the speed is crazy of AI. We're like, it seems like every 30 days the next thing is coming out that's better, faster, cheaper. That's the speed that we see it happens happen. We're, we're much more hesitant to sign contracts for anything touching AI because in three months it will be outdated.
- [29:54]
John Matzner
I think you're going to feel the same way about signing anything for SaaS because you're going to go look man, with a no code tool and why am I going to get locked into your ecosystem of I think vertical SaaS is going to come under serious pressure, serious pressure. Because you're like I'm not going to pay you $300 a seat forever. What are you nuts? I can go develop an in house tool. You know like that thing I was talking about cold calling. We grade and score our calls just using a couple APIs in airtable grade and scored. And if it's a low grade it gets pushed to slack. If it's a high grade it goes right. That is 10 years ago. That's like a $4 million SaaS product that you roll out to every home service company. And now we did it in like three days with airtable.
- [30:32]
John Wilson
AI seems to just be a greater tool, even a bigger reason to send more like more jobs remote. They just gain so much more, more leverage.
- [30:40]
John Matzner
But what it's going to do John though is just like economics, demands are unlimited, meaning the market is going to get pushed up. Meaning I don't believe people are going to lose jobs, but they're going to expect that. They have a consultant who's based in the US to talk to them about their home improvement project. Like there's going to be more people, the market is going to move up. Like everyone will do better because of this. People have unlimited wants. They will just, you know, productivity will go up, GDP will go up, manufacturing lifted the quality of life, jobs shifted. Yes, but ultimately I think it's a wonderful thing.
- [31:12]
Host
There's also potentially a premium for if you wanted to talk to somebody in house in the United States versus talking to a computer, we've mentioned that historically.
- [31:20]
John Wilson
Too what I think will be fun is when it starts to take over like more BPO style roles. And I think that's which I don't think is far away. I've already started to see it a little bit. It's just, it's not there yet. I saw something yesterday they added an AI component like their reporting is notoriously bad. So that's why most people switch over to service titan. Like you need good reporting to run a bigger business and so you just are not able to do it on these smaller softwares. And the way that they fixed that was they just added AI. So it's like hey what was this guy's average ticket performance and closing rate? And it just, it answers you.
- [31:52]
John Matzner
Let me give you an example that's also like that John. That just shows the relationship between global talent and AI for these BPO type roles. We got brought on by this private equity company who's rolling up H Vac and your neck. You probably know them. I'm not going to say them out loud. I'll tell you after the they have like tens of thousands of contracts and they need to know the maintenance schedule and the terms for every piece of equipment of all these like 800 companies they've bought. And everyone's different. This is twice a year and it's for coolant only. They started with was just a bunch of Philippines kind of lowish and they're putting it all on a spreadsheet and just like air conditioner unit fall and spring $800 parts not include included. Because from, because every single company does it differently. Whatever. But very quickly we are moving them into building an AI tool that you just upload the document and it pulls out the data and we just eliminated this kind of like BPO type job. It's just gone. You just upload it into the tool and it parses out the data and it now gives you the, you know and you have a human being monitoring it, keeping an eye on it. If it doesn't understand something it'll jump in there. But that grunt level level two dollar an hour it's just going away. So that's an example. They had to like index every piece of equipment in all these roll up platforms. That's a very specific example. Like today like this week someone is like I don't know the maintenance schedules for these companies we're buying and it's like a bunch of scanned PDFs in like a Google Drive like what am I supposed to do with these? You know that the guy had in, like a file cabinet.
- [33:17]
John Wilson
We started using it to project budgets. We threw it in last week. Like, hey, give us rough budgets based on like three year historicals. And it was correct enough to use.
- [33:28]
John Matzner
And you're like, I'm trying to make payroll, but I know I should be using this stuff. Jack, can I pay you to help me get a couple people in a call center, get QC set up and get AI analytics? And you're like, yes, right? Like, yes, you can. I did it in my business. So that's why I think there's a lot of value to be created. Obviously, once you've cracked it for one, for that productized service, it's plug and play to everybody else. That's what's powerful about it. It's a productized service.
- [33:50]
John Wilson
We covered the backdrop. We covered Sagan. I'll give my quick input for the listener. We just use them to place two accounting hires. I did not. We feel very comfortable hiring, like, call center, but like anything beyond call center, we feel a lot less comfortable hiring remote again. We feel really comfortable self hiring call center. It's the on call center roles that were like, okay, like, this is a little out of my wheelhouse. So now. You guys were great. Whole team was great. If people want to connect with you and hear more about what you're up to, where can they find you?
- [34:19]
John Matzner
I would have them text you, John. And then you just.
- [34:23]
John Wilson
I have 309.
- [34:26]
John Matzner
You can look me up on Twitter. I'm Matzner. John. You'll find me making fun of overpriced headhunters a lot.
- [34:34]
John Wilson
This was great, man. We'll have to bring it up to our workshop. Last time was just like, we spent a lot of time on org chart and people were just like, how are you doing it? And it is like we've been using upwork forever. And it is just like, yeah. If you don't want to sift through 300 resumes or you want to hire outside the Philippines. Yeah, yeah, yeah. For all the listeners. If you like what you heard, make sure you check out owned and operated dot com for more of basically everything. Just more.
- [34:57]
Host
Leave us five stars. Leave us five stars wherever you listen. We could use that.
- [35:00]
John Wilson
Yeah, we're desperate. We'll do anything for it. Jack will text you pictures. Yes. Thanks.