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If you are seeking new ways to increase your ROI on marketing with your commerce platform, or you may be an entrepreneur who wants to grow your team and be more efficient with your online business.
Talk Commerce with Brent W. Peterson draws stories from merchants, marketers, and entrepreneurs who share their experiences in the trenches to help you learn what works and what may not in your business.
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Brent Peterson (00:00.876)
Welcome to this special Hawaii episode of Talk Commerce. Today I have Taylor Goucher. is the Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Connext Global. Taylor, go ahead, do a much better introduction for yourself. Tell us your day to day role and one of your passions in life.
Taylor Goucher (00:16.081)
Taylor Goucher, I'm Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Connext. As Brent says, one of my passions in life is exercising and teaching folks how to do that and live a healthy life.
Brent Peterson (00:27.68)
Awesome, good, yeah. So I've done the Honolulu Marathon a bunch of times. I've got the Hilo Bird Sanctuary Marathon coming up in December and then the Maui Oceanfront. is your anything around exercise involved running or do you have other disciplines that you jump into?
Taylor Goucher (00:44.583)
My favorite discipline is Strongman, but I come from a military background, so I've been running for a long time and I enjoy that occasionally as well. And swimming, obviously. There's nothing beats an open water swim.
Brent Peterson (00:54.638)
Yeah, yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, and we discussed, I'm in Kona, so I do get onto the pier to swim quite a bit. Anyways, yeah, and there's a great swim series if you're in Hawaii, if you live on the big island, there's a great swim. I'm sure it's way better in Honolulu, but anyways, we won't get sidetracked. Taylor, before we...
Before we start talking about actual business subjects and stop talking about exercise, do this thing called the Free Joke Project. I'm gonna tell you a joke and you just give me a rating eight through 13. So here we go. At my last colostomy, I had the doctor write a note to my wife stating that my head is not up there.
Taylor Goucher (01:43.239)
I'll give you a 10.
Brent Peterson (01:44.302)
Oh, thank you. Perfect. All right. All right. So give us the, you had me, you gave us the 10,000 foot view or view of a context in the pre-show, but tell the audience what you do and maybe a little bit how you're different from some of the other agencies that are out there.
Taylor Goucher (02:07.079)
Awesome, yeah, so Connext helps companies build high performing global teams. And so in the sort of offshoring outsourcing space, there's a number of different models. You have traditional outsourcing, which many think of as like big call centers and Amazon call centers and stuff like that. And then you have virtual assistant freelancers, those sort of things. And we kind of fit in the middle. So we help customers build
Custom teams, they're 100 % dedicated to the end client. And so these people work directly for their clients. We hired a spec. And so we collect job descriptions from the clients. Hey, what roles are you having troubles with? We hire them for them. The people are employed by us. And we sort of enable what many would consider offshore captive. know, JP Morgan Optum have 10,000 people in the Philippines. We enable that at whatever scale our clients want. And so one person, two people.
50 people, that's kind of how we build these teams of folks.
Brent Peterson (03:07.534)
You know, my previous company was a development company, so this was very common to source talent, especially as your projects are growing and contracting. Are we kind of talking about the same thing where you're hiring? Are you finding the talent and then placing them? Is that the model?
Taylor Goucher (03:34.373)
We start as obviously the headhunter. So yes, we go and hire them. We recruit to spec. We have a pretty large recruiting team that goes in and sort of finds these people. And then we have the local entities in these places, Philippines, Colombia, Mexico, and India. And so those entities then hire the people or the employer of record, deal with the benefits administration, HR, things like that. We have in-country IT support.
helps deliver computers, make sure people's headsets are working, troubleshoots any issues. We also have facilities in these places. Some of our clients want their teams to work in an office. And then we also provide what we call co-management, but essentially it's like a fractional country manager that sits in one of these places that helps make these teams successful. And so the recruiting is the first part, and then all of those additional services are sort of ongoing to help make the teams as successful as possible.
Brent Peterson (04:31.458)
Yeah, I know from experience how hard that is. And we were set up in Bolivia, don't ask, Mexico and India. And I can say that if you're trying to do that on your own, that's extremely consuming, especially for Bolivia, don't ask. But maybe some of the benefits and I understand the benefits, especially having that country manager to help maybe with some.
Taylor Goucher (04:37.605)
Okay.
Brent Peterson (04:58.766)
cultural things and everything, but give us some of the benefits on why an employer would go with, instead of trying to set up your own entity, why somebody would want to go with somebody like you rather than doing it all on their own.
Taylor Goucher (05:12.923)
So I think the main, the number one reason is setting up your own entity, as you probably know, in any of these places is really complex and time consuming. And the return doesn't really make sense unless you have a certain amount of scale. We usually say that if you have 250 or more people that you want to hire in a specific country, then it makes sense for you to like put the effort in and go in, deal with the lawyers and the accountants and setting up your own entity and all that stuff.
If you want to hire one, two, five, 10, 20 people, it just doesn't make sense. And again, I think the sort of time commitment, the amount of administrative things you're going to have to do, you're going have to fly to one of these places every month or every week and sort of work on building culture there and getting a recruiting team stood up, it's just really, really complex and takes a lot of time. And so I think folks outsource that to us and that's where they find the benefit.
Brent Peterson (06:11.468)
Yeah, do you have specific industries that work that are more prone to doing this type of outsourcing or does it really apply to anybody?
Taylor Goucher (06:22.575)
It really applies to anyone. I usually tell folks if you have a role or a function that can be done remotely in the US, it can likely be done remotely in one of these places. And so we have some roles that are really common, accounting and finance, IT and developers, customer service, back office tasks like revenue cycle management and healthcare or procurement. Those sort of things are really common and we see a lot.
But it really can be done in any industry. have a whole, we have 300 clients now in the US and the industry range is quite wide.
Brent Peterson (07:01.134)
I know one of the things that we always struggled with was language communication and we were big in Slack and so people could translate in almost in real time using Slack. How do you help your clients communicate with their teams? And if you're in the US, going to Mexico or somewhere in South America makes a lot of sense because you're in the same time zone. But India is a different beast because either they work at night or they work
off hours and they pick up tasks as they're going along. How do you help with that communication?
Taylor Goucher (07:36.151)
again, I think a big role of the country manager or the manager from our, our point of, our, side, there's a lot of what we like to call English to English translation. meaning we say or think something in the U S and then it needs to be, even though these countries speak English and the people speak English, it sort of needs to be. Translated in a way that makes sense to them. And that's a big role of sort of the manager and making sure that people understand things and that they're.
crystal clear on how things should be done. And so that's a huge role of that intermediary that helps clients navigate that. And usually what happens is over time clients figure out and are sort of taught, okay, this is how I talk and manage and sort of speak to my Philippines team and the Columbia team may be a little bit different and the team even different more, right? And they kind of understand that. From a time zone perspective, we have people working 24 seven.
So that's one of the things we let the client dictate is the working schedule of the people. We tend to think that people are more productive in daytime hours, but we do have a good portion of our workforce that works their local night shift, which is a US daytime shift. And so we have that available. And then again, the manager sort of works that same schedule. So they're available to help with any communication issues that may come up.
Brent Peterson (08:57.526)
And do you encourage your clients to do team building exercises even if you're the owner, encourage them to visit the country and try to connect directly with the team when they can?
Taylor Goucher (09:11.087)
Yes, we do highly. We tend to find that the highest performing teams are the ones that are most engaged with, the ones that are sort of treated as if they're an extension of your local operations. think we don't use, people tend to use the term resource when they're talking about a people or a person that's working for them. And we try to avoid that term because it sort of makes them not almost like not human. And so we highly encourage engagement with these folks. We have clients that
We'll send gifts, we'll do coordinated activities, virtual team building sessions. And then, yeah, we have a ton of clients that come and visit. We do a couple of parties every year and we encourage clients to come and they usually will come and visit our teams and have a great time. the most engaged teams perform at the highest level.
Brent Peterson (10:00.782)
How about coming back to visiting your team in Hawaii? That must be a big benefit as well, especially for the country managers.
Taylor Goucher (10:10.819)
Yes, we had a couple of them here last week for our sales and marketing summits. We had a couple of our managers fly in from the Philippines and Columbia and there's first time in Hawaii, first time in the US. And so yeah, they had a great time.
Brent Peterson (10:24.716)
I know that one of the challenges we had was just some cultural things. especially if you outs, like we would implant developers onsite and having somebody come from Bolivia to Mexico, you'd think it would be fairly straightforward. But those cultural differences in those two countries was so different that people really stopped wanting to go to Mexico to work. There's a different work ethic in different countries and different, I won't go into details, but.
Is there just ways to help on that cultural transitions and then understanding which cultures work best and which other cultures?
Taylor Goucher (11:04.345)
Yes, there's nuance. So culture is huge. Each of the geographies we operate in have different talent advantages and different cultures. And so part of our process in sort of working with clients is determining based on the roles that they're looking to hire for their company culture, their business, where they're going to have the highest chance of success. And that be the Philippines, that may be a combination of
the Philippines and Colombia, it may be India. And so part of our process is advising them on that.
Brent Peterson (11:41.634)
What do you advise or what is your kind of thought about how you would introduce a client to outsourcing? I can say that, you know, there's a lot of stops and starts and sometimes business owners are reluctant, but sometimes they have to do it. Is there a sort of a prescribed winning mechanism to get people introduced and then getting some success happening?
Taylor Goucher (12:08.027)
Yes, so it's always best to start small. Start with a small scope of work. Start with something that's well-defined in your business now. If you're going to try to outsource something that you don't already understand how to do, it's going to be really hard. And so we almost always advise to start small, simple, and with something that you know how to do now.
Brent Peterson (12:32.94)
Yeah. How about video and things like that to help train? know, you know, personally, I've, I've hired VAs out of Philippines and it was, you know, very effective to come up with every single thing I wanted to do via video so they could go back and, know, if they did it on Loom, you can go see how many times they've watched it. Is there different things just to help them guide them along?
Taylor Goucher (12:55.579)
Yeah, videos are fantastic. like to help, like we'll do, when the training occurs, our teams will build training manuals and sort of the process of them building that training manual is helpful for knowledge retention. And then it gets verified by the client and sort of, you know, that tends to go well.
Brent Peterson (13:16.086)
How about if you were to, if you're going into a new area or your company's starting, do you help in some of that maybe knowledge building and the local, maybe you're not as well documented and you're going to hire an interim or in-between team to help get that documentation process locally? Is that something that would come up?
Taylor Goucher (13:44.037)
Yes, yeah. And again, that's sort of another role of the country manager. That sort of function is to help with the knowledge transfer and building the local knowledge. And they have some subject matter expertise already. Oftentimes we align the manager with a team that they're used to managing, accountants or customer service reps or something like that. And so that they can help with the knowledge transfer.
Brent Peterson (14:06.296)
That's awesome. If you were to predict what's going to happen this next couple of quarters, what are your predictions for where we're going and where people should start hiring and when?
Taylor Goucher (14:22.791)
That's a great question. I think we're going to see, obviously the emergence of AI is going to be very interesting and people are going to start to build tools and use them in their business. Our experience is that there's always going to be a human touch with AI. And so as we think about hiring over the next few quarters, we're thinking about how can we best enable the staff to support and augment AI.
And so I think that's a big place where folks should sort of focus is like how AI is gonna be embedded in my business and what people I'm gonna need to sort of help with that. You may not need 10 people doing data entry work anymore. You may need one or two better individuals doing QA, for example.
Brent Peterson (15:13.676)
Yeah, I that's such a, mean, we got this far, we got almost 15 minutes without talking about AI. And of course that's just a big topic about downsizing and resizing. Is there some trends you see happening? And I can definitely see in the development space where a developer who is good and proficient in working with say, cloud code or something like that, that they can then do the work of two developers.
Taylor Goucher (15:43.397)
Yeah, I think two things. we support companies that are using AI. We also work with AI companies themselves who are building these tools. The first is kind of what you alluded to, which is generally the people that know AI and know how to use it well can be more effective and more efficient in their work. so equipping folks to be able to do that is super important. And then the second thing is we tend to find that AI
can only automate 70 to 90 % of a process. And so there's always gonna be, at least for now, the near future, there's gonna be some human intervention needed. And we're even seeing that with our AI clients who have these AI tools and they need highly proficient people in the Philippines to be able to QA the outputs of the AI before it goes to the customer.
Brent Peterson (16:33.87)
Yeah, I can, I can speak from experience where cloud code always tells me I'm complete where everything is done. It's checked off and wait, no, somebody should actually look at it and test it first to see if it actually works. Taylor, we have a few minutes left as we close up the podcast to give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug about anything they'd like. What would you like to plug today?
Taylor Goucher (16:57.831)
My plug is, if you're not using or thinking about offshore staff in your business, it may be worth a look in some capacity, whether that's with us or with Upwork or whatever, there's a bunch of different mechanisms to do so. The people in these places are truly fantastic. And I think a lot of people tend to think outsourced out of mind or that the people that work in these places are bad individuals. It couldn't be more opposite.
They're truly fantastic, fantastic workers, fantastic people. And so if you're not thinking about it, it may be worth a thought in 2026.
Brent Peterson (17:36.878)
That's great. And how do they get a hold of you?
Taylor Goucher (17:39.283)
You can find us on our website www.connextglobal.com or you can email me directly, taylor@connextglobal.com and I will get you in the right hands.
Brent Peterson (17:48.751)
And that's C-O-N-N-E-X-T. All right, Taylor Goucher, the Vice President of Marketing and Sales for Connext Global. Thank you so much for being here today.
Taylor Goucher (17:58.767)
Awesome. Thanks, Brent.