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Welcome to Last 2 First, the podcast dedicated to exploring the final mile in logistics and the unique challenges faced by business owners in this vital industry. Each episode features insightful conversations with industry experts, entrepreneurs, and thought leaders who share their experiences, strategies, and innovations shaping the future of final mile delivery.
Join us as we dive into topics like optimizing delivery routes, enhancing customer satisfaction, navigating regulatory hurdles, and leveraging technology for efficiency. Whether you're a seasoned logistics professional or a business owner looking to improve your operations, Last 2 First offers valuable insights and actionable advice to help you lead your business to success.
Tune in and discover how to turn the last mile into your first priority!
Last2First family, welcome back to another episode. Actually, it's not really an episode, we're gonna do a three part series on something that you all need to be paying attention to, labor. You know it, I know it, it's one of the biggest costs we have in this business, and we're joined in studio with two guests, It might be a third might pop in. It's a three part thing we're gonna do with Remotely Plus, who has just built a Nearshore Staffing company that is designed specifically for this industry. It's gonna help you understand how to source talent, how to do it at a fraction of the cost, and then why it's different than what's out there in the marketplace today.
Speaker 1:So I'm excited to be joined by Steve and Matt, welcome to the podcast, guys.
Speaker 2:So much, Jason.
Speaker 1:You guys doing, Jason?
Speaker 2:Really good.
Speaker 1:Good? Yeah, great,
Speaker 3:thanks for having us.
Speaker 1:I'm excited to have you guys in. So I'll talk a little off camera a little bit, You guys have very unique backgrounds, so I kinda wanna start with just painting a picture for the audience of kinda how you got to Remotely Plus, and kinda why this idea has come to fruition and now out in the marketplace. So Matt, your background, you spent twenty eight years or so in the promotional product space, and I think you use a lot of kinda outsourced talent, remote professionals, etcetera. What was it about that experience you had over, you know, a couple decades that, you know, either rubbed you the wrong way, or maybe said, hey, this may be a better way to kinda do this thing?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. Great, great question. So I would say about ten years ago, 02/2017, we were looking at ways that we could cut cost in the company. And I knew someone else in my industry who had a call center down in South America.
Speaker 3:And he said, you know, you gotta use my labor. You gotta use some people down here. They're great. And all I could think about when he would say that to me was the awful experiences that I was having when I would call my cable company, and they'd pick up halfway around the world over in Asia. And they would be reading a script, and they really weren't listening to me and answering my questions.
Speaker 3:So he kept he kept on me, kept calling me, and I finally said, alright. Let's let's try someone. So we brought someone in from from customer service, and I was I was shocked. It was nothing like the experience that I had calling to a Southeast Asian call center. The people that we had hired were they were smart, they were loyal, they were dedicated, they showed up on time, which sounds kind of silly, but in these days, just getting someone to come to work on time is, as you know, in this industry is a challenge.
Speaker 3:So anyway, long story short, we just kept adding. We had such a good experience with people that we added a couple more in customer service, We added a couple in marketing. I think at one point, we had about eight to 10 people. We weren't a very large company. We ended up selling that company in 2025, and I was looking for sort of the next chapter of my life.
Speaker 3:And I said, you know, had such a great experience with the nearshoring talent that, you know, maybe I should look into starting our own staffing agency. And I got together with Steve and another partner, Mike Frankel, and we ended up starting Remotely Plus because one of the things I felt was we weren't really being marketed to as sort of a smaller company. We had about twenty, twenty five people in our company, and no one was really marketing. The people that did the nearshore staffing weren't targeting us.
Speaker 1:And I thought,
Speaker 3:if we could start a company and target those smaller companies that that need to cut margin, we could do a lot of business. So here we are today.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So so it was a good experience you had that kind of said, hey, I might wanna do this and double down and give you this myself. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly.
Speaker 1:Steve, your your background's a little different. You actually have run two pretty large HR firms.
Speaker 2:Right? Yes. I have.
Speaker 1:Tell me about your kind of experience there first, and then I wanna get into the question.
Speaker 2:So before we get to the remote side of that, which came at a at a later date, we were, more of an HR company doing global staffing, we would call it, around the country, even even parts of Canada and and Mexico, a lot of warehouse manufacturing work. And we were in the four walls of our clients, and we we had a great deal of success scaling that that industry. We had sold that to a private equity firm in 2018, and we had a second smaller vessel, I guess you would call it satellite of staffing, which was more in the property management space. So these apartment complexes, placing plea people like leasing agents and property managers and maintenance clerks and things like that. And we were able to scale that one, around the country as well.
Speaker 2:So we we had a lot of luck in being able to scale these businesses. When when we sold the first one in private equity, I didn't even really have awareness of it because it wasn't my bag, so to speak. I was more working on the business and not in the business and more of the business development kind of person.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:And Matt came to me with this idea of remote staffing that he and and Michael had been doing, having so much success. I said, I really know very little about that side of it. I know the HR side of of staffing, of course. And I started to dive into our private equity company, and they've been using it in their platform for fifteen years. It's what private equity companies do.
Speaker 2:Right? They figure out ways to cut cost. Yes. So when I started to look at both of the companies, the one I I currently own and this original one, they're both using a significant amount of nearshore labor. And at as Matt had touched upon, you know, that Asian, India, Philippines, that grouping is tough to work with sometimes because of their proficiency in English, their education level.
Speaker 2:And you're also working with the time zone alignment that we have in in in the nearshore side. You don't really have that on on the, on the Asian labor side. So you're getting a lot of night shifters. Mhmm. What we would call a graveyard shift.
Speaker 2:Right? If you talk about the warehouse business, right, and logistics. And that's the grouping that you're able to get if you want them working on the same time zone as you are. So that's where I started to really see that these guys might be onto something of having a service to sell.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So so you were traditional staffing. You were placing labor on-site, in the office. What what what type of, like, industries were you were you
Speaker 2:working Logistics, food manufacturing, printing, you know, some machine shopping, and things like that. But anything that we would call warehouse or manufacturing.
Speaker 1:You got keep going. You so he he'll if we I'm 10 now, but if I grab these notes
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:He'll cut he'll stay on you. I'll I'll get ready for next question. So don't don't don't stop because I'm doing Okay. Doing this over here.
Speaker 2:That was the end of that one.
Speaker 1:Yep. Alright. We'll start back up here.
Speaker 2:How are
Speaker 1:we doing, Mike? Doing good so far? Yeah. We're on them.
Speaker 2:Oh, There's only one one mic that matters here. Yeah. The guy with the camera. Oh, and
Speaker 3:there's this mic too. Oh, did it
Speaker 2:What rim shot. I got it. I should not do this. Can you spell it this way? Okay.
Speaker 2:Alright. Okay.
Speaker 1:So yeah. You were so warehouse logistics industries that are really relative to kind of a lot of our audience is obviously in the transportation space.
Speaker 2:For sure. For sure. Yeah. But what we started to notice is that within our own companies, and again, some of this was private equity driven, there are tasks, and I'll I'll call it tasks, that could be outsourced. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:It may not be complete positions at first, but it morphs into that. So it's things like bookkeeping tasks. It's things like, I guess, resume searches and things like that that could be done more efficiently elsewhere. It doesn't have to be within the four walls of that staffing HR company office
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So to speak.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Another thing you mentioned too was, and this comes up a lot, the time zone element, right? Because, you know, in this business, if you're talking to someone in the audience, they probably run a 20 fourseven operation. And timing is everything, speed is everything in our world. So having the ability to staff in different parts of the country to kind of fit your operation Yes.
Speaker 1:Is a huge asset, right? Yes. So the talent is sourced from, I'm assuming, different parts of map. For
Speaker 2:sure. And we're covering countries like Panama and Honduras and Colombia and Bolivia and Argentina, just just to name a few. Yeah. And we have recruitment outreaches in all those different countries as well.
Speaker 1:Got it. Got it. Now, Matt, so you actually had the experience of working with the with with Remote Talent. Right? You mentioned that you kind of kinda drugged into it a little bit, but then it obviously turned out to be well.
Speaker 1:What what was your what was the thing that kind of maybe surprised you the most? You kinda mentioned that they were I'm asking this from someone, I actually use Remotely Talent myself, so similar to you, I was a little surprised at how engaged, how eager they were to get the work done, certainly showing up on time, but it was just, it was almost like much more enjoyable experience in working with, you know, someone that was, hate to say it, but it wasn't someone out in my backyard. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 3:I mean, for me, what was interesting, before COVID, and maybe this actually sold me on it even more, before COVID, we had a customer service department, and we made the decision to set them up at home to work remotely a few days a week. And our reasoning was, look, you know, they're not going to have to commute in. It's a benefit that's really not going to cost us a lot of money, right? It's going to cost us, you know, we're going to give them a computer and you're give them a VoIP phone, and we'd say, like, two days a week, you can pick to work from home. So we had already, in the customer service side of things, gotten, you know, set up like that.
Speaker 3:So when we started to bring in the remote the Nearshore remote talent from South America, and our talent was mostly from Columbia back then, what surprised me the most was there were days that I totally forgot that they were thousands of miles away from me. Right? I'd I'd be talking to someone in customer service, and they would be very engaging. Yeah. It would be no different than me talking to someone that was around the corner from our warehouse or where our call center was.
Speaker 3:So Yeah. That, you know, I think the misconception in this industry is I'm hiring someone, I'm hiring a service that they're just going to do a function, and they're going to be very robotic about it, and they're going to do bookkeeping, or they're going do customer service, they're going to read from a script. No. That's not what we sell. We sell people that are going to be engaged with your teams, become part of your teams.
Speaker 3:And as a result, I think this is why once people, you know, cross that threshold into this, they love it. They realize not only am I saving money, but I've got these people that are arguably better than some of my own people in the company. So Yeah. So that that was, like, a pleasant surprise that I had.
Speaker 1:You're 100 right. So, I think COVID, like, ripped the band aid off of this, because I'm thinking about my dad, who is, I love your dad, be a dinosaur, right? And the idea of someone not being physically in his presence, where he can, like, see them show up, see what they're doing, see this, we talked about this when I had my business, like, hey, we should look at some things like this, and it was just a hard no. And then now I see him now, now he works from home, he works remote, etcetera. But it took COVID to kind of change the environment for all of us to say, you know what?
Speaker 1:It's really no different. Like, if if if someone can be home on the VoIP phone system, I don't know if they're home, or if they're in Panama, or if they're wherever. Right.
Speaker 2:So when that you said be the bullpen of cubicles, cubicles. Right, Right? People You would have people doing doing these these tasks.
Speaker 1:Uh-huh.
Speaker 2:Now does it really matter whether the person's sitting in Boston or in Bogota or Colombia? It really just doesn't matter anymore. But COVID did kind of open the doors to that, and and companies have learned to manage differently. They've learned to manage remote workers even here in The US and having someone in Dallas and having someone in Kansas City. So now what does it matter where they are?
Speaker 2:And if there's this time zone alignment, which we just discussed, and there's a significant savings Mhmm. Which is, like you had said, too big to ignore, why not take a look at that?
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's a it's a good question that I'm thinking about, because you've been on both sides, right? You've actually managed the talent that's, like, right in front of you. I have. And now there's a bunch of talent that's not in front of you.
Speaker 1:Yes. From that standpoint, like, what is there a big difference in how you motivate, engage, orientate?
Speaker 2:I I think that that's a great question. So I I do think the cultural part of what I used to come from, deciding, is that building the culture in the business within the four walls.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:You know, we would take a manager from our headquarters that was here in New Jersey, and we would put them in, like I said, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Yeah. A huge warehouse for Caterpillar, whoever it was. Right? And we would put them there.
Speaker 2:Now our manager is managing three temporary workers out of the thousand workers that were in that warehouse. But the culture of the four walls wasn't ours anymore. Our manager was now getting soaked up by the culture of, in this case, Caterpillar in this example.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And it was hard for us to manage that person because was he or she on our side, or were they on the client side? Right? They they were eating pizza and and the break room more with client than they were with us. Yeah. And we would fly out there and engage them and bring them into corporate meetings and things like that.
Speaker 2:But it was hard to engage our own worker, the manager, or or team of managers, let alone the workforce of a 185 temporary workers.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:It was hard to do that within the culture of someone else's building. Now, Matt, and you had mentioned that COVID kind of shook that whole thing up. Yeah. And everyone is, in some regard, able to manage differently than they did seven years ago, right? And that's what I'm starting to see.
Speaker 2:So building that culture is different now.
Speaker 3:And I just wanted to add on to what Steve said. Other thing I think that's changed in the business environment now, everything is so application driven on the computer, right? Or on your iPhone or mobile phone, right? So everything that workers are doing in a company, they're either in a specific application in the logistics industry or they're on something like Slack or Teams or whatever. And when you need to train that person, it's a lot easier to train someone who's remote because of all the screen sharing applications.
Speaker 3:And even those, the stuff you can do on those now these days is incredible with all the different functions that they make available. So doing that with a remote worker, and this actually serves this is true whether that remote worker's in The US or in our case in Colombia. It's just easier. Because to go into an office and lean over someone's shoulder and point to stuff on a screen is really difficult. It's a lot easier when I can annotate a screen, I can point things out on a screenshot, and it can be recorded.
Speaker 3:So if they want to watch it, especially if I'm training someone in customer service, I can say, Hey, go back and rewatch what we just spoke about. And it's just a much more effective experience.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think the go ahead.
Speaker 2:I would say in the example you had brought up with your dad being a dinosaur, no offense. Oh, did. Oh, he knows. We all have him. He's proud of it too.
Speaker 2:We all have him. You know, a lot of people back then, even way pre COVID, fifteen years ago, twenty eight years ago, whatever it was, they didn't trust having a remote worker. They didn't trust not having that. It would just factor. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Four walls, walking by and bumping into them at the water cooler or having them go out to a smoke break. There was those interactions, those collisions, we would call that. In the remote environment, that really doesn't happen. You have to call or email or text someone something that you need them to do. So that collision is gone, and a lot of managers and owners and entrepreneurs didn't really trust it
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Up to a certain point.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And I was just gonna say was I was just thinking about as you were as you were talking about that even within even if you have people in your own office, and Jason, you're two offices down from me here. Everyone's lazy. I'm not gonna get up to go talk. What am I gonna do?
Speaker 3:I'm gonna grab my phone or or talk or call you. Right? So it's it really at the end of the day, it's it's it's it's no different.
Speaker 2:But it started out where at first they didn't trust. Mhmm. Then once they did, they still weren't built to manage it. They didn't have the stomach for it. You know what mean?
Speaker 2:That was the other part that I've noticed. And now, you know, whether it's post COVID or, you know, with the popularity of first, was Zoom calls, then it was Teams calls, then it's Google Meet, whatever. It's just gotten so much easier to do that I think everyone has the the, you know, the stomach for it now. Yeah. Agreed.
Speaker 1:Yes. It's kinda like the best analogy I can think about right now is if you are venturing to using buying, like, electric vehicle, an EV.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Right? Once you drive a EV, it's hard to go back. You know, if guys drive driven EVs
Speaker 2:Yes, both, yes.
Speaker 1:Because it's just a different experience, and and you're a little it's a little bit of fear factor at first, like, don't really know what this is, but you get behind it for a few days, like, oh, man, this is nice, and I don't have to go to a gas station either, right? Yeah.
Speaker 3:And I just want to add one more thing, which it's interesting you said that because we are, as human beings, we hate change. Right? So, you know, I remember when the gentleman I was talking to at my old company came to me who had the call center in Columbia and said, Why don't you hire someone? Was like, No, no. Wait a minute.
Speaker 3:I don't know. Not us. You know, we have our own call center. So that's a challenge, right, to get someone, in your case, into that EV. But you know once they're in that EV, they're not going back.
Speaker 3:And it's the same that was the same experience for me. It's the same experience for our other partner, Mike Frankel, who has a logistics company who who has a lot of nearshore talent working for him. You just realize it's it's it's a great it's a great product, great service, and that's that's that's the way forward. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What's a and and a segue for for Mike, because, obviously, Mike is a past guest of the podcast. He he's done a lot of views on the podcast. I think he I think he even joke about he had most the most views on the podcast, but my beyond that
Speaker 3:-DAVID: We're not sure that's
Speaker 1:true yet, right? Haven't validated it The numbers are still being incalculated.
Speaker 2:He does bring it up quite a bit.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah. But the one thing Mike has, he's credible, he and his family have been in this industry for many, many years. And so, guess I want to ask you, Matt, you mentioned you guys kinda got together initially with this concept, and Mike will join us in, I think, the third part of our series here. But why was it important to have someone like Mike as a part of the kind of founding team?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, when I went into it, one of the things that I said was I really wanted to do this with another partner, maybe multiple partners, and it ended up being the three of us. Mike had a very similar experience to Nearshore Talent that I had in my previous company. And we would talk about it often. We live in the same geographic area.
Speaker 3:When we were together, we'd always mention, Oh, you know, we just hired someone from Colombia or Honduras or Bolivia or Argentina. And at the time, I was talking to him about maybe selling my company. And I said, You know, maybe we should do this together. And so, had all this experience on logistics side, hiring all different roles, dispatchers, customer service, marketing people. And I had the experience, we said, Let's put it together.
Speaker 3:And so, we just felt like together we'd be a lot stronger. We'd have a a much bigger reach out to our networks, and here we are today. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Now you had mentioned costs before, so I know costs can come in a couple of different ways. Sure. It's it's the the price of the wage of the worker. Right?
Speaker 2:And then I I when I hired my own talent, you know, within our four walls, you would have the wage, you would have the workers' comp and other insurances you had to hand on top, the tax match so that the part you're matching for what the worker is being deducted from their tax side of it. Then there's the cost of the turnover, and which we in staffing, we're not supposed to call it that. That's an evil term. You have to call it retention. Retention.
Speaker 2:So the retention rate, that's positive term. Consultant thought of that. That's right. Some consultant probably thought of that. So the retention rate in typical staffing is very low.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:The turnover rates are very high. Mhmm. What we're seeing in in South And Central America is that the turnover rates or the retention rates are much, much higher. These workers are way more invested. They're way more engaged than a lot of the workers that we see here, both on the clerical side and these tasks that we talked about.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So they're once they're in it, they're in it. Yep. So coming from the other side, that constant revolving door, where where is that being calculated in a line item on somebody's, you know, Excel sheet. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 2:Where is that on the P and L? So that's what we're seeing. Companies are they have the savings obviously of maybe even up to 70%, which we talked about, the labor costing less in South And Central America than it does here. Mhmm. But it's that cost of the turnover, where is that being calculated?
Speaker 1:Well, it's a great segue for part two of our episode, because I wanna get into the economics of this, because I've mentioned, I've been a client of Sure. And I've had good and bad experience. Know you guys have had some experiences, but I'm sure the folks in the audience, probably one of the first things to think about when they kinda get with that fear and to get that trust is, how much does this cost us, how much do we save? So 70% savings, he's 70 up to 70 up to.
Speaker 2:Up to to,
Speaker 1:70% savings. We're gonna cover that on part two of our episode, we're gonna get into the economics of how Remotely Plus is designing solutions that's gonna help you put money back in your pocket, but also gain a better employee, a better outcome, a better customer service for So your this is part one, I hope you guys enjoyed it. Next week we're gonna drop part two of our episode, look at the economics of it. So Steve, Matt, thanks for part one, we'll see you in part two.
Speaker 2:Thank you, Thank you, Chase.
Speaker 1:See you in a sec.