The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Karla Singson Chief Executive Officer at Scalewind

Episode Date: August 28, 2022

Karla Singson Chief Executive Officer at Scalewind Scalewind.com

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, this is Voss here from thechrissvossshow.com. Excuse me, thechrissvossshow.com. Wow, okay, that's going to be the improv beginning that we do.

The voice cracked. The voice cracked. The voice cracked. It's Friday. And I was eating some mustard pretzels, honey mustard pretzels. Those are really good. Don't buy them. Trust me. You'll eat the whole bag.

So clearly I don't have my voice today, but welcome to the show. We certainly appreciate you guys being here. As always, refer the show to your family, friends, and relatives. Tell them it's the family that loves you but doesn't judge you, at least not as harshly as your current one does. And we all know how that goes, right? Oh, am I kidding? Anyway, guys, go to goodreads.com, Fortuna's Chris Voss.

Go to youtube.com, Fortuna's Chris Voss. Go to all the groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, all those crazy places, the big LinkedIn newsletter, and the big LinkedIn 128,000 group. Also pick up my book, Beacon's Leadership over on Amazon. Do us one. You can enjoy that as well. Today, we have an amazing CEO on the show, and I think you're going to really be interested in this because those of you who are a lot of entrepreneurs and people out there or are looking to hire people because it's gotten kind of weird

to hire people these days. Sometimes it's hard to find talent, especially locally. We're going to be talking to her about her amazing company. Carla Singson is on the show with us today. She's the CEO of ScaleWin.com, and she is an award-winning writer, speaker, and entrepreneur who started and built physical and online businesses since she was 17. Over the years, she used her expertise in marketing, revenue generation, and leadership management to scale her businesses and live a life of fun and freedom. Currently, she leads ScaleWin, a managed outsourcing company, and bought it from

zero to seven figures in one year without spending anything on ads. That's pretty darn awesome. ScaleWin helps online businesses scale fast and easy with turnkey virtual assistant, tech, creative, and customer support teams. She resides in Playa del Carmen, Mexico, where she spends her free time enjoying overwater sports, cooking Filipino food, and watching comedy shows in Spanish for the first time. That's got to be interesting. I actually love watching Telemundo.

Welcome to the show, Carla. How are you? I'm good. Thank you so much, Chris, and I'm excited to be here. And we're excited to have you. Thank you for coming. Give us your.com. I already spilled it a little bit.

Good. Plug it again for us. So I lead SkillWin.com. You can find us super easy, skillwind.com. And we do manage outsourcing for companies who want to scale fast and easy using Outsource Team. Awesome sauce. Awesome sauce. So you can go to the website and give us a little bit more in depth of what would you want to start this company if you would? Right. So my partner, Perry Belcher, who is one of the founders of Digital Marketer,

you know, Traffic and Conversion and War Room, is we started it over the pandemic. We saw that, you know, there might be a need for a lot of these services to be outsourced because in, you know, in Canada, America, UK, in some of the more developed countries, there was a lot of movement in the labor force. There was layoffs, transfers, people moving to the suburbs, people moving remote. So there's a lot of movement. And we just thought, you know what, without the movement happening, it would be pretty good to get a slice of that. Maybe for the first time, a lot of companies will finally consider outsourcing. So that's how we enter this market. It is already a very dense market.

Obviously, I learned SEO in 2009, and at that time, virtual assistants were already around. Yeah. I mean, I've had friends that with, especially with technology or building apps or games or different things, they've, they've had people working on doing code around, around the world. Uh, and they were virtual for a long time before COVID, but yeah, with COVID. And then of course there's the big squeeze on, you know, being able to hire local people, uh, you know, and being able to find people you need, you know, the grant, the great transition, if you will.

And a lot of people who, when they're getting the claw back where the boss is like, you got to start coming back in the office. A lot of people are like, nah, I think we're going to go just find something we can stay at home. So it sounds like that gives a lot of opportunities. So I guess there's two different sides to it. There's the if you want to hire side and there's the if you want to get hired side.

Okay. And so, you know, if you're a company, you come to you, you go to ScaleWind. I noticed there's some different things in your website. You've got a list of companies, careers, and a calculator. Tell us a little bit more about how the website works and how people can find what they want on either side. Yeah. So if you are, if you own a company, whether you're a small business or, you know, eight figure business, and you're used to hiring people traditionally, you can go to our calculator. It's a, it's a pretty neat tool to see how much you're, you know you know on average you're going

to pay for hiring certain positions say a graphic designer so for example you need a design and a tech team so you put there like graphic designer wordpress developer and maybe a copywriter and then um our tool lets you uh see what you're supposed to pay based on average on Glassdoor, basically what companies pay. And then it gives you a comparison on how much you can save if you hire our team. And all of our team is turnkey and it's also month to month on a monthly contract basis. So not only do companies actually get to have a turnkey team, you know, start right away, super fast and easy, they are not committed to long-term contracts. And I know this little thing is also a concern in a lot of businesses in the States, the legal exposure

of, you know, of hiring more people is just, you know, the HR filing, the legal exposure, you know, working with an outsourced company and working with a contract that's a simple service makes it super easy for the businesses. Yeah. And I like the thing that you can do month to month. So when I go to your companies tab, I can see all the different agencies. There's a creative agency, a support agency. One's real estate assistant. That's kind of interesting. So you can help people serve VAs that will serve realtors, brokers, mortgage brokers. There's a whole lot of different support prospects. And I like how it's not long-term

contracts. So maybe if you just got a project, you want to test it out, you want to give it a run and stuff. I'm not a big long-term contract, which is probably why I'm still single. They way ahead of those long-term contracts. The cancellation fees are hella here. But not at your company. Let's see. So there's another tab for careers where you guys are looking if people want to. You've got a list of people you're looking for and hiring there.

So people can do that as well. It looks like quite a few different jobs that you guys have available. And so when people come to work, they're not freelance. They're working for you technically. Is that correct? Yeah. So another advantage is that when you work with us the we don't hire freelancers all of our team members are with us you know we provide all the

you know they're all based in the philippines you have over 200 people in the philippines and they work on um different time zones because you have clients all over the world so we just kind of distribute them where they're properly matched. And yeah, we mostly hire people from the Philippines. And so obviously there's a little bit of advantage in terms of cost, you know, hiring from countries like ours. And I grew up in the Philippines. I'm Filipina.

And so I know what it's like to, you know to take care of my people and and what matters to them awesome sauce that definitely gives you an edge because you can talk the language and you know the culture and stuff and and the philippines are like like really great like i had like uh you spent some time there did you, I haven't been to the Philippines, no. A friend of mine was like, hey, I have a great VA. You should try him. And I was like, what are you paying him? And I was like, and I was taking it back.

And then he goes, yeah, it's an American. And I'm like, why are you not in the Philippines? Everybody knows if you want a VA, you go to the Philippines. So it's a good place for it. Yeah. So it's funny because not a lot of people are really, this is a good opportunity for me to also kind of educate the market. So in the Philippines, everyone grows of our bigger states, we speak a dialect called Bisaya or Cebuano. And then all of us speak Filipino, which is Tagalog, our national language.

But our medium of instruction is English. And so if you go to the Philippines, even your housekeeper will be speaking English, can speak um it's very obviously it's very simple english but they can speak they can understand and um you know in college it's very common for a lot of filipino kids or filipino students to if they take a gap year or some of their first jobs would be for a contact center or for a BPO. So my sister, for example, worked for 1-800-Flowers. And I think Western Union, she was a call center agent. And a lot of kids have this work experience. And that's how we develop the American accent. And so there's really a lot of opportunity for Filipinos.

It's just part of, you know, U.S. companies investing over there for us to have the language, kind of understand the culture and get used to like speaking to a worldwide audience, basically. Yeah, it's definitely the place to hire. So what else do we need to know about your company and how you do things? Right. I would say another advantage really of doing managed outsourcing because, you know, outsourcing in general, you can do it yourself. So here's another important nuance. Outsourcing is not consulting. So outsourcing is having processes that are ready, you know, templates that you have perfected over the years, SOPs, if then processes, and then passing it off to someone

else. So a VA is not a Hail Mary. A VA will not, quote unquote, save your company if it's about to go under. If they could, that's a miracle, you know, like kudos to you. But if you're looking for consulting, that's not what we do. You need a strategist. But if you need someone to kind of do the, you know, do the work on the background and just keep your head down and do the work that's the business we're in and and we love to do the work for you so um on an hourly basis you know if we average it out it only costs 12 about 12 bucks an hour and you don't only get the service you get the support of management as well, which means that if you have some tech issues,

you're moving to, say, a different platform, a different CRM, or basically if you need a little bit of advice, you know, should I be on TikTok? Should I be on Instagram based on my audience? You have someone to talk to. You can get a little bit of advice, but what you're really paying for

is the service for the job getting done. That's definitely great. I mean, I like how you have the drop-in team and they probably already have gelled, right? So they work together well. You don't have to like try and get everybody to gel up and know what they're doing. Probably really helps. I can see that coming because, you know, that makes all the difference. So, I mean, this works pretty good and uh uh you guys have been doing it for how long now so scaling this a little bit over like two years old uh i can you know we're super proud of of what

we we've achieved we've come from like zero to a seven figure company in a year without spending anything on ads and this is just purely word of mouth and, and our clients, you know, referring us to others or clients turning into really passionate, like affiliates. And, um, so we're really like proud of the word of the work that we do. And we plan to like go bigger, uh, you know, as, um, as we go. On your guys' website, it says reduce labor by 70% and get more done. Is that because you're saving a lot of different costs like health insurance and being able to turn people over without dealing with human resources and all that sort of thing? Yeah. So I think it's the,

first of all, the savings in salaries and wages is really a big thing. The other interesting thing is the legal exposure or the labor stuff that a lot of small businesses honestly don't want to deal with. And also it could be a cause of them even going under or something. And I'm going to tiptoe a little bit on this because I'm a woman. In the workplace, you know, the relationships of men and women have kind of been pretty tricky, you know, with the Me Too movement and everything. And unfortunately, I personally, I feel like it has even tightened opportunities for women. And it hurts me when I was in the States, when I was living in the States,

it hurts me to hear managers saying, you know, let's hire for this position, but let's try not to hire a woman because every new woman in the office is legal exposure, a risk for legal exposure because of the Me Too movement or something like that. A hug right now can be considered like sexual harassment oh yeah you're able to argue it you know like if you chris say like a kind of a raunchy joke to me right now like i can oh sexual harassment you know like yeah so i had a i had a i i are they really doing that though i mean i thought that was kind of discriminatory but i mean they won't say it on their job description, but you hear it in the pantry or something. Seriously?

Wow. Wow. That's crazy. The, yeah, I mean, a friend, it was a sexual harassment. A friend of mine was at this big company in Silicon Valley. He walked into a room and he just said, hey, guys. And now he's in training for, you know, some micro fucking aggressions or something, which I think are complete stupidity. But, you know, I mean, there's no bottom to where you can go with microaggressions, but that's another topic. But, you know, I suppose there is some sort of blowback. I've heard that companies have discouraged, you know, evening events or going to bars, you know, for events for works because there's the commingling and people are drinking and they do stupid stuff when they're drinking.

I've seen that movie. I might have done one or two stupid things. But, you know, when I had my companies, we wrote up our fair share of sexual harassment complaints. And, yeah, it doesn't take much. And, you know, it's just kind of become one of those things. I know. Kind of sad. Yeah.

Our first sexual harassment complaint was actually a gay guy and another guy. And one guy felt the gay guy was hitting on him or oh my god i was like seriously the first one we're having is two guys but i mean welcome today's world you know but yeah you can avoid a lot of stuff and i to me that's one of the benefits of of having um you know outsourcing and people working from home they're not they're not doing stuff on my copier which has been found you know awesome yeah it's it's uh you know i don't i don't i'm not like what did this security camera pick up on the desk last night oh great well and they're both married that's lovely um i should call her i should call their spouses um uh i think we had one secretary run off with

another guy they were both married they just did a runoff to like another state oh gosh so it was it's really it's really affecting yeah you're just like you're having wives and spouses call you what what i don't know what i spell i don't dude just this isn't my like i'm just here to make what do you see the future of this business? Let's talk a little bit about the future of COVID, going back to the office, clawbacking. I call it clawbacking when they're like, hey, come back to the office. What do you see as the future of that from your experience in what you've been doing?

You know, I look at it from the point of view of the business owner, right? I've started a couple of businesses and I've bootstrapped most of them. I've started like Zero Capital. And the headspace of an entrepreneur is a very important thing to protect. So I would say, number one, having a managed outsourcing company really helps you just have lesser worries and still get the job done.

So with how this is contributing to the conversation of people making these decisions, first of all, business owners making these decisions, should I have to require my people to go back to the office or not? Or these employees thinking, should I go back to work or not? What if I don't want to go to work? What if my boss will require me? But at the back of their heads, a lot of these people are also thinking,

what if I start my own business so you know outsourcing also um offers offers a very affordable opportunity for people to be able to maybe start their own business um you know i've had people tell me carla do you feel guilty you're taking jobs away you know in the states and i'm like guys outsourcing has been around forever and it's kind of hating on immigration, right? Like, it's like Louis C.K. Like, he had a joke which was like, if you're mad at someone who doesn't speak your language and no contacts in this country taking your job, you probably don't deserve that job or something like that. He had that joke. And so for me, you know, outsourcing, first of all, offers opportunities for people, for business owners to, you know, not go under and still get to grow like their dream, you know, support their families.

And even maybe, you know, scale up their business pretty fast and easy. Number two, it is an option for people who are thinking of going back to their jobs who may not ever find this opportunity to start their own business, to fulfill their dreams. Now they can trial and error, pay someone up an hour to trial and error in your behalf while you start on this side hustle, while you're trying to figure a way out of this company. And also another thing is it gives you, while you're trying to figure a way out of this company.

And also, another thing is it gives you, you know, every money, every dollar saved in the company or in a business is always a dollar being put back into the economy, right? Like, you know, Americans, like they get to, you know, which is most of our clients, I think 95 of our clients are in the States. Every dollar they save in their business, they still get to, I don't know, put that in their mortgage or their child's education or savings or investments. So I think it's a win-win still for everyone. Definitely. I mean, anytime you can save money and do stuff.

The big question on everyone's mind is, is, are we ever going to go back to full office space? Do you, do you think we'll ever go back to like, maybe a half C's where you're like, you know, split weeks where two days in three days out? What do you, what do you think we're going to, what's your prediction? Personally, I think more people are going to be deciding what they want for their lives. I've noticed that, you know, every time we hire people because we're based in the Philippines, we always ask them, how are you with working on a night shift? Because, you know, instinctively, it's not healthy for you. Like, we think it's kind of not healthy for you, right? But then when they start to share their lives and they say, oh, I prefer this because I'm homeschooling my kids

or I prefer this because my husband's doing this so I can do this and earn money on the side. And we can hire part-timers as well. Our minimum engagement is 20 hours a week. So we hire a lot of part-timers, but we still provide them with full-on benefits and everything. So we have a lot of like stay-at-home moms, single moms, who get to make more money than if they're working corporate,

and then they still get to enjoy that freedom. I think ultimately, in general, people are going to be deciding based on how they want to live their lives. They're going to be voting on their sovereignty more. I do think a lot of people still love going to their offices. So I think having that option should be good. Personally, I would love to reopen my office in Manila and really host a very chill work environment. And then people can just come if they want because work is also a good break from home.

You know what I mean, right? You've got to get out sometimes, especially if a kid's in a wife. I remember when I first moved in and I had a girlfriend who had two kids, and they were wonderful kids and she was wonderful. But I never used to go into the office on Saturdays, and I'm like, no, I understand why all the men come in on the weekends. That's why men play golf, right? Exactly.

We all have to get away. Mom's got to get away too sometimes. Everyone needs some space and a break sometimes because you know those kids are hard man it's tough raising kids that's why I don't that's why I let everybody else do the work for me on that one I was like

I was like you guys got this kid thing yeah all you guys are doing just fine filling up those landfills with the people that fill landfills. I'll step out on this one because I really like sleep. I think that's the reason I have chills. Same.

I can do a joke. I really like sleep. Yeah. And I heard that you don't get any sleep and they're waking up. Like, I have two beautiful huskies and I've had huskies all my life. It's bad enough when they wake me up and I'm like, seriously? For real? But, you know, at least I can send them to the pound if I decide I don't want them. No, I'm just

kidding. I never do that. I love my dogs. The other thing I love about my dogs is they unconditionally love me. No matter what I do, I'm still a great person. Exactly. Unlike kids and a wife who hates you most of the time. So there's that. So anyway, anything more you want to touch on or tease out before we go? Right. So I would say, you know, if you're thinking of, you know, outsourcing, if it's your first time, the best thing is really to not do it alone, because I've noticed that a lot of entrepreneurs or business owners are very talented salespeople and that's why they start a business. They're

good at selling something and they have great ideas. They're great visionaries. And sometimes some people can be born with that. People are just naturally persuasive. When I was a kid, there were just people who were just naturally persuasive. They don't have to be bullies to get what they want. And then there's kids who are like, you know, like in the debate teams and everything. And they're just like really persuasive speakers. And I was one of those nerds, actually. In college, I was the president of the debate team. So I was the biggest nerd of all.

That's still a great skill to have debate team oh hell yeah if i do decide to have kids like i i feel like how you feel on uh on sleep and everything like you have no idea the sound of an alarm pisses me off like when i have to wake up for a flight like i'm like uh like it's not my body's natural state to be alarmed when i wake up i should wake up inspired, you know, like not alarmed, like, I don't know. And that's how I feel about alarms. So what was I saying? So, okay. So a lot of people are born, you know, persuasive entrepreneurs, good salespeople. But the one thing that people are, no one is really born with is the capacity to hire, train, inspire people.

And managed outsourcing fills in that gap because that's what we've been doing for so many years. And I mean, even before we started this company, I've owned other outsourcing companies and, you know, HR, VA HR company, I own a VA HR company as well. So it's so, if you're starting out, if you don't know what to do, if you need extra help, um, and if you want to scale fast and easy, managed outsourcing is really the way to go. Even if you do not work with my company, if you have another like great option, I would really, really encourage you to do that, uh, instead of, you know, doing it by yourself. There you go. There you go. Well, that's a great wrap for what we were

talking about. It's been wonderful having you on the show. Thank you very much for coming on, Carla. Thank you so much. It's been my pleasure. And if you visit our website, skillwind.com, I also hold office hours, but better. It's like OHBB. So every Wednesday from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. central, you can book a time with me to chat about outsourcing, ask for advice. It is not a sales call. My selfish reason for this is open for everyone. My selfish reason for doing this is I really want to get as many conversations as possible for people who are in my market. So if you need advice, if you're wondering about something, if you need leadership

advice with your team, if you have an outsourced or remote team right now, I'm there to help. There you go. There you go. Well, thank you very much for coming on the show. Really appreciate it. Folks, check it out. Go to scalewind.com. And definitely, we've talked about a lot of the great benefits that are here. Also, go subscribe to our LinkedIn newsletter, our big LinkedIn group, 120,000 people. Go to all of our groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram. Just search for the Chris Voss Show. You'll find just an amazing array of stuff. Also go to goodreads.com, Fortress, Chris Voss,

youtube.com, Fortress, Chris Voss, my book, Beacon's Leadership. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe. And we'll see you guys next time. Thank you.