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Second in Command: The Chief Behind the Chief with Cameron Herold
Ep. 542 - Vinali Group COO and Co-Founder Ruth Velez - Uncommon Wins: The Proven Way to Lead with Vision Under Fire
00:43:25
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The CEO, my husband and I were just like, this cannot fail. Like, we've poured so much and this is just us. We don't have private investors. This is us pouring our entire lives into building this. And. But we also saw some hope because we had great clients, the clients that did stick around. And we pride ourselves into really having that tight, not being so transactional, but being very relational with our clients. So our clients were really good at helping us along and really being patient with us.
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Welcome to the Second in Command podcast produced by the COO alliance and brought to you by its founder, Cameron Herald. In the second in command podcast, we talk to top COOs who share the insights, strategies and tactics that made them the chief behind the chief. And now here's your co host, former COO of a multi eight figure remote company and alumni member of the COO Alliance, Savannah Brewer.
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C
Today on the Second in Command podcast, I am joined by Ruth Velez, the president and COO of Vinali Group. With a background that spans media, education and executive leadership, Ruth's journey from award winning radio host to global operations leader running a nearshore recruiting company after multiple pivots is really inspiring. In this episode, she shares what it's like to run a business alongside her husband. He's CEO, she's coo. And a little bit about the yin and yang dynamic. And really the takeaways are very translatable to any CEO and COO partnership. We also dive into how she helps steer the company through the brink of collapse during COVID ultimately using grit and pivoting to a new business model that's now thriving. She offers her approach to building client relationships that last even through hard times. Ultimately, this one is packed with wisdom on resilience, relationship building and leading with heart and strategy. Let's dive in. Okay. We are live with Ruth. Welcome to the show.
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A
Thank you so much. Thanks for inviting me.
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C
Absolutely. This is going to be a fun one because I was just sharing with you, we have some overlap. You are currently working with an offshoring company and also your CEO. CEO of the company happens to be your husband.
- [02:30]
A
Yes.
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C
I've never worked with my husband because I haven't been married before, but I was sharing that I've built two recruiting companies as COO and both are with different exes. So I can kind of understand a little bit of the dynamic. So we're going to dive a little bit into that today. A little bit about how many pivots you guys have made through. I know Covid was really challenging for a lot of People, especially the space that you are in. So let's just give us an overview. Tell us a little bit about the finale group. What do you do and who do you serve?
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Sure. Thanks so much. Well, in 2016, my husband and I started the Vinali Staffing, and it was a traditional staffing firm. We went nationwide. We grew really quick. Within a year, we were already in the millions. And so we just exploded. And we were growing into our space. We found some other partners that really helped us to grow and learn a lot of lessons from the operational sense. And so that was really helpful for me. I was a little bit new in the space, in the staffing space. So it was thanks to some partners, third party employers, they kind of taught me how the business runs more efficiently than what we had planned and what we had thought originally. And so that was really great was learning by just partnering and pay the extra fee and watch. And I think that really helped us for the first couple years. And you know, we did really great. 2019 was a record year. And then 2020 hit and Covid. And of course, like I tell people, the first ones to go are the temps, right? Well, when your business is based on temporary workers, it was just bulldozer to our cash flow and everything. And we were still pretty small at the time, and so we were just forking out anything we could to keep our staff on payroll. The PPP loan really helped us out. So I know a lot of people criticize that, but I always raise my hand and say we're the ones that really were saved because we had just those few months that were a little bit of a relief. And then we did end up losing a few because they found other didn't want to work anymore as what happened in Covid. And then the things opened up in Florida and we had an avalanche of work. And so being that a lot of our work is in Florida because we're headquartered in Orlando, we then had the challenge of, I don't have enough recruiters, or I don't have recruiters that I can pay well enough because I already went through all my savings. So my husband is part Colombian. We had some connections over there and we thought, well, there's a bunch of bilingual young people, professionals, and they're stuck at home. They were quarantined for two years. And so we started interviewing them. We thought, we can teach recruitment. That's not something you go to school for. So we said, let's just hire a team. And so we did. So it was the end of 2020 we started with a group of eight, of which now we just have one, but now she's grown to our VP. And that was wave one, we called it. Then we had wave two. A couple months after that, wave three, wave four, and then we developed curriculum. We started training along lines, and it worked really well to the point that we. It was a really good business model. We were helping others. They were very eager to work, super professional. Their English was great, and they were just doing recruiting for us nationwide in the US Just recruitment. Some of my processes as well. And then we decided, let's just take care of these people. Let's put a ring on it. Let's open a formal entity in a foreign country, which was also a really challenging process. To find trusted people, to find an attorney that would understand us, was really challenging. But we did it, and we found. It took us a year, but we established the entity. We got an office space, and we brought everybody in house. It changed the entire ethos of we would do these monthly parties. We made up a name. It's called Piggage Parties. They were competitions with the recruiters, and we had to shift from doing that online, which was a lot of fun, to now doing in person, which was even more fun. So we had this amazing chemistry there, and we figured out the employment piece. And once we figured that out, it just took us like, two months. We're looking around and thinking, wait, if we figured out the employment piece, that's. That's the hardest part. Why don't we start offering nearshore staffing and start saying, okay, we have our recruiters. We'll find people to work in the US but if you need an accountant that, you know, a bookkeeper that's less than what you would pay in the US but equally as qualified. They speak English. And it's not. Not offshore. Offshore is the normal term. We call this nearshore because it's in the same time zone. So. So there was a huge advantage to that. Not as cheap as offshoring to the Philippines or India, which they do a great job. This is near shore, a little bit more expensive, but we're all aligned. And so we started selling that. And that went wildly successful, too. I mean, there were a lot of hurdles to go through, and we can talk in more detail about that. But once we started that, then we started the official pivot out of the traditional staffing space, where eventually we just. We sold off some of the contracts and we said, we're out. Let's just focus only on near shoring. And we're still expanding that. So it has been a wild ride of ups and downs. And it took us two and a half years to get back to where we used to be prior to Covid, but now with a completely different business model.
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C
Very cool. Thanks for sharing that whole story. Yeah, it sounds like such a roller coaster.
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A
Yeah, it was.
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C
There was a lot of different. Oh, shoot. Moments.
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Yeah.
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What are we doing? And so just to clarify, the near shoring, yours are only focused on that which is just placing Colombian recruits.
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Right. Those in Colombia and around Latin America. We're expanding into other countries as well. So each country has its challenges. So. And it takes time to do that, but we're able to recruit anywhere. Like, we can recruit anywhere in the world. And that's the secret sauce. Once you can find the right talent, then it's just, hey, how can I find a client that will partner with me and trust me enough to find the right talent and to properly take care of the employees? Because these are now long term. It's not the staffing cyclical model. It's now a recurring model where we just basically process payroll. But we do a whole lot more than that. We're taking care of them as employees. We're listening to them. It's not just processing payroll. It's having the office space where they can work out of making them feel like a bigger party. Even though I've got, you know, 70 people in a room and there's 20 different clients that they're representing, but we'll have an office party and everybody comes together and they feel like a bigger family, if you will. So it's a lot of fun. It can be quite complex, especially with the labor laws in the different countries. And how do you do your pricing around the labor laws? Who's taking the risk on what aspect? Because they're night and day going to Latin America where they're a little bit more. More employee focused. In America, it's more employer focused, where, you know, if it doesn't work, you cut, you can move on. And it's not quite like that. They put a lot of burden in Latin America on the employers and on business, on entrepreneurs. I mean, the economy is on the backs of the entrepreneurs.
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C
And you guys actually have an office space in Colombia that they're working out of. That's amazing. I mean, for anyone that's listening that's thought about hiring offshore, you know, there's questions of like, do I just do this on my own? Why do I need to hire someone else to find this person for me? And as someone that has done this myself, there is so much value in having a company like you guys handle some of that middle part because, yeah, when you're just hiring someone on your own, you miss out on some of the cultural pieces.
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Mm.
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C
I'm sure you guys have learned that over time, like what holidays are important to them and what is the kind of team culture and having them be involved from a team aspect in an office, it gives them a sense of belonging that sometimes they don't have when you're just hiring them independently. I'm sure there's some other reasons as well that I'll let you share. What are some of the other reasons why someone should look at hiring a company like you guys versus doing this on their own?
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A
Right. Well, for security reasons, for risk, you can have a ton of contractors and that's fine. There's a lot of businesses that do that and we've had a mix of that before as well. Having contractors, it's just risky on both sides. The contractor, even though they are doing great and probably getting paid very well, there's not a security net for them. So psychologically they know that this is not a long term play and that does something to the psyche. And the same thing happens with the employers or the businesses where, okay, it's, well, it's just a contractor. You know, there's like a kind of a stepchild view of, of things. Whereas if you hire a company like us, there's not a whole lot of us. There's employer of records all over the world. So what we're different at is we're the hands on, we're the middleman, we're the ones that you can come for HR issues. We'll handle the HR because we're the employer of record. We do have to be the ones to handle all the issues with the employees and make sure that we're compliant and everything. And the other layer that no one talks about is also the cybersecurity. When you hire contractors, they're all on their personal laptops. Where's your information going? You know, and so with us, they have to be on a company laptop. We're CyberSecurity certified with ISO 27001, which was incredible, the process to go through that, to be certified on that. And so we're proud of that. And we have very tight controls because that's our promise to the clients, is that anyone that's working for you has to follow these, this protocol. And all parties are covered and all parties have to comply.
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C
Love that. And that's such a huge benefit, because one of the things that people sometimes don't think about when hiring offshore is. I mean, this is kind of the case in any remote company, but especially with some of the offshore workers. In my experience, they have learned how to have three or four different jobs, three or four different clients. Now with AI tools. There's, you know, one of the companies that I was at, we actually screen shared, like, everything, so we could go in and, like, see. And it would be so fascinating how even after a really extremely thorough interview process, we would find people cheating and not actually doing their job and just making it look like they were doing their job. And so being able to have some of those protocols and processes, and you guys have already jumped through all the hoops. Huge benefit to using an outsourcing company like yourself. I would love to talk about some of the challenges with the pivots and the hurdles, because the story of Blockbuster comes to mind, right? Like, when Redbox came out, I think there was Redbox. They had tried to, like, buy Blockbuster. Blockbuster. I don't know. I'll have to research this afterwards. But I just know that Blockbuster didn't pivot. And very soon, you know, with Netflix and all of the things, it's gone. What was it for you guys that allowed you to make a change and not just get drowned out like I'm sure some other recruiting companies did during.
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COVID I think the simple answer is grit. The CEO, my husband and I, we're just like, this cannot fail. Like, we've poured so much, and this is just us. We don't have private investors. This is us pouring our entire lives into building this. But we also saw some hope because we had great clients, the clients that did stick around. And we pride ourselves into really having that tight, not being so transactional, but being very relational with our clients. So our clients were really good at helping us along and really being patient with us and the learning curve. We were telling them what we were doing. Like, hey, we hired a whole team in Columbia. You know, what? What is that? And so, hey, we're learning this. They're learning. And we're learning how to teach them better because of the cultural nuances. So they were very patient with us. And then later on, they were quite pleased. And then some new clients that came in, that was all they knew. And so by then, we had learned. It took us about a year or two, I think, to really iron out all the way to te recruitment in the US and all the nuances that come with the different cultures and how they communicate and all that. But, yeah, it was quite challenging, and we made it through. I think grit was that and being creative. So our clients being very relational, very transparent, that's one of our core values, too. I tell the team, if you mess up, you fess up. We're human beings, too, but we also have a very high standard of, like, okay, don't mess it up either on purpose. You know, we're not being relaxed either. And so being very strict about levels of quality and being very creative, sometimes we've had to kind of sell what we think we can do, and then we find out if we can actually do it. And so we had a lot of moments like that where I'm a very literal thinker, CEO, my husband is very visionary. So he'll come up and say, I think we can sell this. Let's. Let's sell it. Let's pitch it. I'm like, are you kidding? We've never done this before, you know, And I'm thinking, I'm not going to stop. Because it's happened now time and time again that every time he has an idea, probably nine out of 10 times, they've worked very well, or sometimes they just take a long time. You know, even just this week, we had something that we started conversations about a year and a half ago about, and now things are exploding. We just had a call yesterday. Oh, my goodness. The potential is amazing. But we were talking about this a year ago, and I couldn't see the potential. So that's where I rely on his vision to see the potential. And he relies on me to also be compliant on things. But it's also the guts to actually do it, not be so scared of failure. I think we've tried a lot of things. Some things have failed, and other ones came out amazing and better than we thought. And then there were also moments where we tried something and almost failed. But we were so transparent about our weak points, we dove into it. I remember one of our first clients in, for example, medical billing. We have a medical billing division. And so we had our first team. They knew how to do medical billing, but not at a certain level. And the client kind of knew we were assembling this team for the first time. And so then there were issues like two, three months in, and it was pretty significant. So my husband hopped on a plane, went over there, we had pizza parties or, you know, we brought in lunch for the whole weekend. We said, whatever it takes, everyone's going to stay here until this. We're going to redo everything that we've done the past two months and we made it fun. We tried to do that and the client saw that we were trying and actually came out really good so their end product came out better. And we learned so much in those couple weeks that we gained the respect of the client and now a very long term partnership that we've had for a couple years now and doing great and still growing with them. So sometimes you have those crisis moments and it's just going all in and not the blame game. It's like how can I fix this right now? And hopping on that plane and doing whatever you got to do to save the client. And we're grateful we did that. So that's one of our success stories.
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Hey, it's Cameron Herald, your high energy leadership guru here to pump you up on the Second Command podcast. If you get frustrated because your managers aren't leading like you want them to be, check out my Game Changing leadership course@investinyourleaders.com that's investinyourleaders.com for just 347 per leader you get 30 years. My proven experience straight from taking 1,800-God junk from 2 million to 106 million as COO and it's packed with 12 easy modules. Learn situational leadership coaching, delegation, conflict management and more all in under 6 hours. @investinyourleaders.com with straight to the point videos, worksheets and real life scenarios, your team will master time management, be able to hire a players and get aligned with your vision. It's all backed by a 30 day money back guarantee and raved about by hundreds of CEOs and thousands of managers already learning from the content. Grab this now and watch your business soar.
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C
It sounds like you guys have the kind of typical CEO COO dynamic which is visionary. He's got the ideas, not really sure how it's going to happen, but he's going to come up with the idea, bring it to Ruth and you're like okay, let's make it happen. And the quote that comes to mind is I think, I believe it's Jordan Peterson who talks about the principle of order coming after chaos. Or maybe he's regurgitating that from someone else. But that's been something that's been really helpful for me is realizing that I don't always need to build the perfect system or have all of the answers before we can sell something. In fact, that's why we grew so fast at Closers was they just I called the Owner of the company, he asked me how many accounts could I max fulfill? And I told him I think the max would be like 15. We bring on another closer, double sales in less than 30 days. And all of a sudden I have 40 accounts, and I have no option but to figure out how do I now fulfill 40 counts? Right. Fast forward a year and a half later. We're fulfilling over 150 at any one time. And so it just. Over and over, I was learning the lesson of building the parachute on the way down. And you just. Yeah, you. You figured out so huge kudos to you for doing that. There's so many questions I have, but one of them would be just to start to clarify, you and your husband, did you guys start this at the beginning together?
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A
Yes. He started it with two other gals that were friends and. And somewhat family. And I came in like two months later, and, you know, it was just brand new. I had another job at the time, too. And so then it was just like, hey, just handle payroll, okay? And so, you know, I mean, I got in there. How do you handle payroll? I've never done this before. I've always. Always on payroll. And so I learned that. And then he's like, hey, handle this. And I have an administrative side to me. So he knew that. But it took about six months for me to fully handle all the things, and I got to relieve the others so that they can work in their strengths as well. And I discovered a lot of strengths that I didn't have or didn't know that I had from before. And I learned on the journey and still learning, you know, I'm not the number one salesperson. I've had to learn a lot of lessons on being on those sales calls. I'm. I'm a literal thinker, and I'm more of the think about the risk. And sometimes that's part of our clashing, too, where I'm negative. Nancy, you know, it's not being so negative. You don't do that on sales calls. Oh, that's right. That's right. So I've had to kind of learn in my mind, not, don't bring up all the risks. That's not what you do during sales, for example. Of course. And any salesperson, it's. It's automatic. But there are people that think that way, and they're different personality types. A risk assessment manager or whatever, that's all they think about. And as a mom, I think that mom and me came out. You're always looking for points of danger, and So I want to point these out, but that's not how you do good business. So those were things I had to learn along the journey, and I've had to learn myself and how I can be a better operator without holding the sales team back and being able to say, this is crazy, but I'll make it work. Fine, Y' all are nuts. But I'll make sure that we're safe, you know? And there. There's been. I mean, that's pretty much our story of me saying, I, I don't get it, but you have a proven record, and I trust you, and so let's. Let's go at it.
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C
There's a lot of COOs who find some conflict with their CEO bringing them a lot of ideas. And when you said the negative Nancy thing, I know for me, one of the situations that I've been in is part of my brain is like, I'm just always thinking, worst case scenario.
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Right.
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It's a gift, and it's also a curse. Yes. It's why I'm able to see problems and fix them ahead of time. And it's also what creates a lot of anxiety sometimes in me and my team when they feel that, oh, yes. How have you guys found the balance of, especially being in a marriage? Navigating, being excited about his ideas, but also picking the right ones and knowing where to focus? Is there any sort of process you go through to figure out which ones you're going to actually move forward with or to make sure he doesn't feel shut down or the negative Nancy doesn't come out?
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Right. Right.
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What's your view or perspective on that?
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Yeah, I don't have a formal process, but I've gotten better at this because it's also marriage. Like, just business is life, too. I mean, we've got a huge family, too, so we've got a lot of stuff going on. It's a circus. But we're good at what we do, and we really, really have fun. So I don't know how many marriage leadership couples are out there, too, but I think if you're having a great time, you're going to build a beautiful company, because we are just fully invested and we're just having a blast with all the challenges. So when he comes with these crazy ideas that seem crazy to him, and some are pretty obvious, but I don't see it quite yet. Just listen, write everything down and. Okay, Okay. I hear you fine. No problem. I've already got 10 things in my head that are like, this is nuts. This isn't going to work. I already see problems with this. I already see that's not the moment to bring it up, bring it down. Let's see if. And sometimes his ideas are just blurting out because he just wants to get them out into the air. And so, fine, we'll table it and it'll come up in a couple days. So however it works out. But usually what I'll do is then I will have my own session and think, okay, what are the positives? What is he thinking? What can work really well? And then let me write down a list. I'm a bullet point person, so let me bullet point all the other risks. Obviously, my list is going to be a lot longer than the positives at the time. But then I have to say, okay, what are realistic? And over the years I've developed of like, well, here he would say this to that point, this is a risk, but I know he's going to negate that. He. So over time, you end up learning how the CEO thinks and you kind of have your discussion while you're almost kind of putting a proposal of how I think this is going to play out and all the risks. So you have this discussion already by yourself. And doing the work on your own helps the relationship too. And then once everything is done, you say, you know, you say, okay, I put some thought into this. Here's my list. Here are the points that I thought, but I know you're going to react this way, but I'm just going to verbalize it because I want you to recognize that I'm thinking about how you think. And I'm not here to fight you. I'm here to make this work. And I'm here to give you the other side of the reality check because we're on the same team. And then I'll give them to these points. So how can we. And instead of like, this is not going to work because of this reason, I have to come at it. These are the challenges I'm finding. How can we make this work? And that really has helped because especially in the past several years, doing this whole nearshore pivoting to that. There's a lot of I didn't know how to do it and a lot of I don't even know who to trust to ask these questions. So that was what I brought to the table. I don't even know who to ask. So, all right, let's think of all the people we know in our context. How can we. Who do we ask about these things? And then that's where we, then we can problem solve together. Instead of me just being all negative, I'm just bringing, I'm just challenging his vision to make it even better and to make it a reality.
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C
I love that. I'm sure that little piece is going to be so helpful for so many people because I know this is a recurring topic. And speaking of like those moments when you just don't know where to ask. I mean that's why the seaweed alliance for me was so helpful because I found myself in a CEO position, had no idea where to turn to for I, I had never hired anyone before. I didn't know what a end of day report looked like being a manager. And so it's like being able to find a community where you can ask questions. I know you've read Cameron's book and this is something I want to ask you about in a second. But you know, if you're someone that's listening and you can really empathize with what Ruth is saying and you're looking for more support and answers that maybe you don't have, that's why checking out the CO alliance could be a really beneficial support for you. And in terms of the yin and yang, I know that you've read Cameron's book the dynamic with your husband and that kind of yin and yang use these things a little bit differently than he does. What have been some of the benefits of that? Because sometimes it's just really annoying. Oh my goodness. Why don't you see it the way I see it? Like this is so clear to me. What have you found to be some of the benefits of that?
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Well, the benefits are because you have different strengths and if you can identify those strengths and really hone into that, you can lean on each other for that. He'll come in sometimes in the office and say, this is what's going on. What do you think? I say, well, if you look at these aspects, we can figure this out. And that's how you do it. Oh, he didn't even think about that. Other times I'll be in a sticky situation and he's, he's just fantastic with relationships and sales and not manipulative. He's just a genuinely great guy and a nice guy and he's just got a softer side to his personality and he has this insight into like humanity, into the human mind that I just can't, I'm just too literal for that. And he is able to see things from other people's perspective much better than I am. So I would come to him. It's like, I really have to communicate this very hard thing to this client. What's the best way of doing it? And that's leaning on him. So really identifying the differences and realizing that, like, really together is better. And it does bring clash. So you have to live with the friction. But also, there's so much benefit in the friction if you can just identify it and not be so threatened by it. That was also a big lesson I had to learn early on. Like, okay, if I'm here going to be defending myself and thinking I'm the smartest person in the room, or I want to put him down, I mean, none of this works out in marriage either. So it's kind of helped. But your pride has to kind of put that to the side a little bit and just be humble with each other and realize, like, okay, you see it that way because that's how you are. I'm seeing it this way because this is how I am. So how do we meet? In the middle. And yes, it comes with annoying each other, but once you can appreciate it, then at least the annoying times you kind of plow through and all right, that's annoying, but I get it. That's how he is. And he'll say the same thing. That's annoying. You're always so negative. I'm the options queen. That's what he calls me to. Even when we want to do something with the family, what do we do tonight? I'm like, well, there's this one, this one one, and then we'll choose one. And then I'm still thinking about options. It's terrible. And so he gets annoyed by it. But I'm like, well, but guess what? The time where we had to go find another vendor who was shopping around and looking and making sure we had the best option, that kind of mind has benefits. So it's just annoying when you have to pick a place for dinner or whatever.
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C
Sure. Always speaking of dinner, and this might be a little bit of a selfish curiosity question for me, because like you said, I don't know how many people are listening that are working with their spouse or even someone that they're dating. But for me, I have. And I'm just curious to hear your answer on this. But one of the things for me that was really challenging was we were just on all the time, and we'd leave work, and it's like 7pm we'd go to dinner, and we're trying to focus on just, like, enjoying each other and work just would Always get brought up. And we really struggled to maintain the boundary. And then it was. We were having conversations of, should we even have a boundary on this? Should we just let work kind of bleed into all of our lives? Which kind of like Layla and Alex Hermosi, if you follow any of their content. But they're a married couple, and she's basically the CEO to all the stuff that Alex does. And they just. Their whole life is business, and that just works for them. For me, I like, need. I need it to feel a little different. What's your guys dynamic on that? When you guys go to dinner, is it businesses off the table or how do you guys keep it still romantic and honor the relationship separate from the business?
- [31:22]
A
Well, I think when you're starting, it's really hard too. I mean, we're almost nine years, but after all the pivots, I feel like we started like three times almost. You know, I can't say that I have the keys to success. There's not really a clear boundary. Our family kind of pokes fun at us as well. Our kids do too. Mom. You're always on the phone or Mom. And so I've just tried to tell people, well, this is the weight we're carrying right now. As we grow, as we can formalize different leaders underneath us, as we can start hiring and scaling, then I can have a little bit more balance. And things are running by themselves. But when you're starting, you're all in. And I don't think that's something to be ashamed about. I mean, being a mom too. There's a lot of mom guilt that comes with, you know, your kids and what are you doing with your kids? And I'm like, yeah, but I'm building. This is part of their legacy too, so don't ignore them, but try to find a place where things are kind of healthy and you know when they are. And so if it's 75% business and 25% personal, it's not 5050 or whatnot, okay. But stuff gets done. And guess what? There's a lot of people that have jobs because of what we did. And guess what? We are paying our bills and we're thriving because of this job. So it's just necessary. And we're really having a lot of fun. And I think when you're even with hard times, we are. We always tell ourselves we wouldn't trade this for the world, even with all the stress and the seemingly mental breakdowns, but they're not. But. But we've gone through some really, really stressful times. And even with that, we wouldn't trade it for the freedom that we have. And also just flexibility. But that does mean that we're constantly talking about clients over dinner, even with the kids. And the kids know it, too. Oh, you guys are always talking about business. I'm like, well, how do you think we're paying for this meal? So stop the guilt and the whole balance of things. I don't think it's a worthy goal in life. You know, just try and try to have your vacations and. And just do your best. As long as you're doing your best and you're not neglecting your family. And they understand. If they understand, that's already half the battle. So the kids have taken a couple years. We've had to take them. Let's see the office. We walk in, see, look at all these people that are working. All these people have jobs because of what we're doing. And when you see mommy on the telephone, this is what we're trying to make work. And all these people can provide for their own families because of that. And so they're now they're getting a little older, and they understand, but that's just par for the course.
- [33:46]
C
You know, I think that's so important to involve your kids. It's actually something that I've gotten really fired up about in the past with other people before, because there's. With some families, this really big divide, like, very big compartmentalization. And for me, as a kid, I grew up with a dad who was an entrepreneur. For 17 of the 18 years that I was growing up, he only had a job for one year, which was in a really, really tough time. And growing up in the house of an entrepreneur, you just experience life differently. Yeah, the conversations that your parents are having, you feel the pressure and the stress. Even when my dad tried so hard to not bring that home, you know, they've got the weight on the. Of the. The world on their shoulders sometimes, and families that they're responsible for. And my dad did a really great job of bringing us to the office. And then when I was 17, he had always wanted to go to a conference with him. And I grew up in a tiny, little small town in Rogersville, Missouri, But I was always very entrepreneurial. Had a business pretty much for as long as I can remember. And he brought me, let me skip a week of school, Took me to traffic and conversion summit with him when I was 17, skipped a whole week of high school. I thought it was awesome. And I was there yeah, it was so fun. And it was the first time that I was like, wow, I am not like the only person that's interested in business. Look at all these other people who are doing cool things. And that's when I started meeting mentors. So many of those first, like one or two events that I went to were the complete foundation for the connections and the jobs that I got, internships that led me to. By the time my friends were graduating college, I was really, really well set up for the rest of my life with skills and resources. So, yeah, just I really believe that involving your kids in some of those pieces, just really, really supportive.
- [35:49]
A
Yeah. I have older step kids as well, and then we have our twin daughters to see, my husband and I, so. And two of the four older ones also work in our business. So it is a double edged sword.
- [36:02]
C
Wow.
- [36:03]
A
I had a whole conversation on this on another podcast, hiring family. And it's a double edged sword for sure. But what an opportunity. Also to. To give your kids the best is to give them opportunities to develop some skills and to have opportunities to grow under your watch, you know, so that's the beautiful side. And the other are just the normal challenges that come with.
- [36:26]
C
Sure.
- [36:27]
A
And nepotism and all the things that you're accused of or whatnot. And so you just navigate them as best as you can.
- [36:36]
C
Could you kind of go back to something earlier that you had mentioned was you have really good clients who actually like stuck with you through some of the pivots? I've worked at companies for the clients, there's like 50% that I liked and then there's 50% that or even like 5% that created 80% of the problems. And there was typically at really fast growing companies where the sales team is just incentivized to just sell, sell, sell. And then you get into these clients that just create a lot of issues. And then I've worked at companies. One of the most recent companies I did some fractional work with, I was just blown away by the clients where I was like, I want to be friends with all of these people. They're just kind and they get it and they respect boundaries and timelines. And it really changed my perspective on the types of companies I want to work at due to the types of clients that they're willing and not willing to work with. I think you learn a lot about even the founders when they say, we're not willing to work with people like this because we're protecting our team. We don't care about the money. We Care about culture and all of these other pieces. Would love to hear your perspective on any things that you're looking for in this kind of early part of the sales process to determine is this someone that we actually want to work with? How do you continue building those relationships? What's. Yeah, just what's your overall kind of view of creating really good relationships with your clients?
- [38:05]
A
Yeah, I think the key is putting the time in for the relationship. We have a hard rule. Everything is on video. We do video calls for everything. We're working in different countries. So in order to keep the relationship, we got to see face to face. So all of our calls are on video. And we try to make all of our calls with our clients on video too. Another thing is now we're. We're at a different stage. So now we're going through kind of the, our next pivot of growing to hopefully 10 million plus now. So now we have too many clients for us to have the personal touch from the top down. Whereas Israel and I, you know, we've known a lot of our clients, we've taken them out to dinner. Israel has done a ton of traveling. We try to, you know, even do some traveling. If he's got to go for one thing to Las Vegas, well, he made sure that he saw a client in Denver, made another appointment with an old friend. That could be something, you know, even just to see an old friend. But always have two or three purposes for every trip and try to make it a point. So we work hard at that, at maximizing our time. But that face to face with clients has been game changing. We will have a client for life if either we can see them face to face and see their facilities, or they come. We've had many clients come to our offices in Bogota and they are not going anywhere because they have seen it. And we invite them over. And there's just so much something about being so personable and getting personal because at the end of the day, everyone's a person, even the big corporations, we're all people. And there's some really nice people out there and not so nice people out there. So in the course of building that relationship, you kind of see what kind of people they are. And we've built some solid client relationships. We've had fun with some of them on a personal level. That's always been great. And then we've had others that we've bent over backwards. We try to build that relationship and then they ghost us and they never talk to us again. So. And it was because Things went bad at their company, and, you know, they just ghosted us. They couldn't pay the bill, and so they cut everything and make us out to be the bad guys, you know, so we've seen it all, and we've been trying to be very good also at picking and choosing our clients. Well, like, once you sell, if they're a little fuzzy in the pocket in the onboarding process, then we already start raising flags, and then we have different processes for those clients. So it is differentiating them and tailoring to their needs. Like you say, sometimes there's the 5% of the clients making 80% of the work, and we definitely have clients like that, too. So you cater a little more to some of them, but then if they're loyal to you, my goodness, you know, stick it out, because that's how relationships are sometimes. Sometimes they're just more complicated. You have friends that are more needy than others, and that's okay. And they're all true.
- [40:51]
C
Totally.
- [40:52]
A
Yeah.
- [40:52]
C
I love what you said to, like, keep it fun and. Yeah. Keep it personal. And sometimes I think we just make business so serious. It's something that I've really, in the last year or two, just worked on integrating more is being silly and joking on podcasts and being myself in work environments and really. Yeah. Just, like, it doesn't have to be so serious all the time.
- [41:13]
A
Yeah.
- [41:14]
C
So speaking of fun, what is something you're really excited about in the next six months? It could be personally, professionally. What are you looking forward to?
- [41:21]
A
We're also in a process of just kind of formalizing a lot of other processes that we've been working on and setting ourselves up for the next level of growth. I'm very excited about that. Obviously, we always need to pivot, so we're trying to pivot a little more into incorporating a lot more AI. Even though we're human resources somewhat business, AI is the way to go. So how do you make that work? I think we're all learning. Like, AI is going to fill a lot of gaps, but not all of them. So how. How do you identify those? Just really grow and scale, but also sort of cementing the growth process. We've done it. We just had a lot of hurdles along the way and a lot of bumps in the road, but I think all those bumps were lessons, and now it's just kind of doing the work to cement the further scaling and being able to sustain the bigger size that we'll be at pretty soon here, so.
- [42:14]
C
Amazing. Well, I'm really excited to see how you guys continue to grow and all the pivots, how those just continue developing. Such an amazing story. Thank you for coming on and sharing. If anyone wants to connect with you or reach out or they are interested in working with you, what's the best place for them to do that?
- [42:31]
A
Yeah, you can go to vinali group.com or vinali outsourcing.com through the website. If you want to email me directly, that's fine too. I'm happy to answer any questions. It's rvalezinalegroup.com awesome.
- [42:44]
C
Well, thank you so much Ruth. Appreciate it.
- [42:46]
A
Thank you Savannah. Take care.
- [42:50]
B
You've been listening to Second in Command, brought to you by COO Alliance Founder Cameron Herold. If you enjoyed this episode, please be sure to like, share and subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and our other podcast streaming platforms. For more about practices from industry leading COOs, visit COOAlliance.com.