Reshaping Recruitment & Empowering Latin American Professionals

Tom Finn (00:01.645)

Welcome, welcome my friends. Today we are learning from Jaime Nacach. Jaime, welcome to the show.

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Jaime (00:08.054)

Thank you so much. Happy to be here Tom.

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Tom Finn (00:10.701)

Well, we are happy to have you. Can't wait to get into your story. If you don't know Jaime, he is the founder and CEO of Virtual Latinos, a virtual assistant recruitment agency that has empowered more than a thousand companies to elevate their levels of freedom, success, and growth. More than that, he's a dynamic entrepreneur, an energetic leader, a marketer, a tech enthusiast. He's got a background in business administration and an MBA from Tel Aviv University with 20 years of expertise and experience and strategy, digital marketing, and certainly automation as well. Thrilled to have your big, beautiful brain on the show today. Let's start with something a little more personal than just jumping into business. Interested in this academic journey to Tel Aviv University for an MBA. Did you do that in person? Is that something that's important to you?

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Jaime (01:01.206)

Yeah, very important. Yes, it was in person. And when I was choosing my MBA schools, I applied to my personal choices of top schools in the US, which included MIT and Northwestern because of the marketing background that I had. And then I applied to a few places abroad. And that was between Spain, Hong Kong and Israel, but I lived myself in Israel a few times and I thought it was a great opportunity to go back and live there while being a little more adult in my life. So yeah, it was great. I was there for a year.

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But then within that, when I was in Israel, they came and told us, well, you know, as students from Tel Aviv University, you have the choice to also go abroad on an exchange program, and here's a bunch of options of schools you can go to. And I was basically taken to Singapore, and I spent about six months in Singapore. So that's where I technically finished my MBA.

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Tom Finn (01:51.169)

Oh, that's fantastic. I love it. The double abroad program from, from San Diego to Israel, from Israel to Singapore, uh, for, for an MBA. It sounds actually pretty magical, uh, to be.

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Jaime (01:54.984)

Yes. You know, the funniest thing about that was like when I was in Singapore with all these other students that were on exchange, they were like, oh yeah, I am from like, I don't know, Slovenia, but I'm actually studying in the UK. And so I'm an exchange also from the UK. So like everybody was doing double of brats, like 80% of the students in Singapore were like double abroad from wherever they were studying. So it was really interesting.

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Tom Finn (02:23.165)

Well, I guess it takes a certain type of person that's willing and able and really wants to travel and live somewhere else, right? It's in your soul. It's in your blood. Uh, you're just kind of ready to follow your heart and, uh, and to check out new cities, which I think is great. What did you, what did you take away from that experience that was meaningful for your business?

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Jaime (02:31.359)

Yeah. You know, while I was in Israel, some people might have heard the term that people sometimes call Israel the startup nation because of how many startups there are. And so while I was in Israel, I attended a lot of meetup groups in person. And I was quite amazed to begin with just to sign up how quickly things filled up. I mean, compared to San Diego here in the States, when there was like meetups, you know, you could take days to sign up before they would get full in Israel. 

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I quickly realized so many people want to be in the know of what's going on. And there were usually meetups related to technology or startups and business in general. But if you didn't sign up within one or two hours, they would get filled up. And these were events for hundreds of people. So you would see people just checking your app to make sure that if there's something new, you would sign up ASAP. And then once I started going all these things, even though I was a student practically everybody was either a founder slash business person or a developer, which is what Israel is known for a lot in terms of lots of tech. And so everybody's like, you know, hi, nice to meet you. Are you a founder or a developer? And I'm like, wow, this is pretty straightforward. I know that's how Israelis are, but I'm like, I'm not any of them. I'm just studying right now in the university, but being in that environment of a bunch of entrepreneurs coming from a background of entrepreneurs in my family and have thought about becoming an entrepreneur myself at some point kind of really inspired me to do that when I came back, which is when I started my company. And then it was quite different in how it works in Singapore. So in Singapore, I continued, let's say the MBA stuff. I also went to a bunch of meetups there, also entrepreneur-related, but both the way that people in a way approached other members they were meeting, as well as how the whole entrepreneurship model of work in Singapore was very different. I got to know people in the University of… it was called National University of Singapore and US started going to the programs of the people who ran like the entrepreneurship stuff at those universities. And you know, the insiders basically told me, look, in Singapore, there's a lot of money. So the universities and the government want to invest a lot so that Singapore is known like for entrepreneurship. There's like between you and me.

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Of course, people are being creative and coming up with like different business models, but it's like, doesn't compare anything compared to Israel. And the reason I knew this is because this program also had sent a bunch of the students from Singapore to Israel to learn from the Israelis. So it was just interesting, because like they basically, it was funny because the directors there, some of them were actually Latin American in Singapore running these programs. And so we spoke in Spanish and they would tell me, yeah, you know, the truth is we spend a lot of money to try to help a lot of the Singapore entrepreneurs, but like a lot of them fail and not many of them are successful when it comes to the big international market. So it was just interesting to hear both sides.

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Tom Finn (05:27.845)

Yeah, what a wonderful and rich experience. Uh, so how many languages do you speak? I mean.

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Jaime (05:33.342)

I'd say like two and a half, totally fluent in English and in Spanish, because Spanish is my native language. And I learned conversational Hebrew. So yeah, I can defend myself speak. I can speak with Israelis for 10, 15 minutes enough, just about, you know, top level things to get to know them. But when it comes to business, I can't talk business in Hebrew.

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Tom Finn (05:54.005)

You can order lunch and check in on the weather that day. Which is great. Sometimes that's all you need. Okay, so you do this great experience. You're immersed in lots of different cultures. You've got the US culture kind of in the back of your brain. You've got the Israeli startup culture. We've got sort of the Singaporean culture and that kind of landmark.

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Jaime (05:55.714)

Yeah. Exactly. Yeah, some basic stuff, but yeah.

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Tom Finn (06:23.229)

How did you think through the next phase of your life? What were you actually thinking through? I wanna do this, I wanna do that. What would that look like?

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Jaime (06:31.714)

Sure. Well, I guess I'll start by saying for those listening that I'm a digital marketer. I had been doing digital marketing for a long time, but really just as a both full-time job. And then on the side, I was doing web design and graphic design, which is kind of how I really started my whole career. The quick background is I got to learn about HTML, which is the language of the websites, at least the original one, back in high school from a friend who was gonna post our homework on his website. And I'm like, come on, this is 2002. Like, what do you mean you're gonna put our project on your website? Like, this is before Facebook existed, right? You couldn't just do that. So long story short, he taught me how he learned HTML. Then I was really into learning how to do websites. I was doing this for fun, but I made myself the project that I wanna actually learn to do this well. And I decided I needed to practice. So I decided to just recreate my entire high school's website just for fun.

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But eventually I did a pretty good job. I pitched it to the principal in my high school and they replaced the entire high school website with the one I'd made. And then they maintained it for a year in my senior year. So that was super cool. But then that led me for people to know that I build websites now. And then eventually somebody contacted me and then I was kind of doing freelance web design. And then those people needed graphic design. And then I was actually doing full-time marketing work. So all that led me to do a bunch of freelance work for many years while I was working full-time at a business and then I realized, well, you know, this is great, but what if I could actually now build a company, in this case, a marketing agency, where I'm able to serve a lot more people if I actually have a team as opposed to just doing it myself. And so when I got back from Israel, this was 2012. So I started, you know, trying to look for at least initially some work before I figured out what I was going to do with my life. And I was very lucky that people very fast hired me full-time, but for short-term projects, two, three months here, two, three months there. And so eventually after about a year, I decided, you know, this is all great, but I'm obviously working for other people. Maybe it's time that I actually, you know, come up with something to do in terms of a new business. So that's when in 2013, I decided to create my marketing agency. And I said, you know, I'm just gonna actually start working under a company name, and I'm gonna start eventually hiring people and be able to offer my services to, you know, a lot more people. And that's how that… Eventually became virtual Latinas because my marketing agency became virtual Latinas. That's the short story.

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Tom Finn (09:05.765)

So that's a nice evolution and I'm glad you went through all of that detail because for people that haven't started companies before, that's actually what happens. It starts with some sort of consulting project, some relationship. You make a decision, right? You make a decision that you're going to go down this path. And then you come up with your brand name and you come up with your target. And all of a sudden you're a marketing company and then something else happened. And you switched into, the business that is virtual Latinos today. So that, by the way, my friends, that is another decision that wasn't an accident, you know, Jaime was looking at the model, looking at marketing and saying, maybe I haven't heard the story yet, but maybe I can use my marketing skills to help develop a bigger, richer, deeper, more meaningful impact in the world if I just pivot a little bit, so tell us about going from marketing to virtual Latinos.

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Jaime (09:42.978)

Yes. Sure. So even though I started using the name of the company in 2013, it was really until 2014 that I said I'm going to make it a legal entity and then eventually it got approved and you know, within a few times. So officially January 2015, I have a company and so now I can operate as a company and then I actually joined a co-working space and I really mean a real co-working space, not a WeWork. WeWork wasn't around but it was actually like an old building, two floors in an area of San Diego called University Heights. And it was actually really a co-working space. In fact, there was no private offices. It was like a regular house with like a big dining area and a bunch of sofas. And so people would literally come in and you would sit down in a 12-person table and we were all kind of freelancers, let's say, and people would sit down with their laptops and everybody that had their own little businesses would sit together and just work. And then through there.

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I started learning and chatting with everybody there. And then I met a graphic designer and then I met a social media person and I'm like, great, I can hire all these people. So I started hiring them all and they all became kind of part of my team. You know, even though I didn't hire them as employees and eventually, you know, I started, you know, growing in terms of the business by getting more clients. And then these people would do the work and I would hire project managers. Um, but everybody was in the US and eventually. After I started to learn more about, let's say the marketing industry, I started going to a lot of events related to marketing, including the ones in San Diego that are where some of them happened. And then I kind of bumped into the knowledge that a bunch of marketing agencies are saving money and making more money by using virtual assistants in the Philippines. And I'm like, ah, clever. I don't know why I didn't think about that. Right. But you know, I was learning like everybody, but then I realized, wow, this market is not even new.

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It's been 20, 30 years that people have been using offshore talent. Of course, the internet took a while to make it much easier, right? When it came to actually using the internet as opposed to just the phone for call center support. But yeah, basically met the guy who writes a book called Virtual Freedom, Chris Ducker. And I'm like, wow, this is great. This guy is in the Philippines. He's Australian, I believe, and he basically is pitching, you know, goes to the Philippines, writes a book, has a whole business, like an agency to sell you, you know, the virtual assistant from the Philippines. But long story short, I'm like, you know, this is probably a good thing that I might consider because I personally was very much struggling with my personal finances at the time. It was now 20, well, when I started exploring this was like 2017, you know, two years after I started my company and I, and then I, then I got engaged that year and I was going to get married in 2018 and I did.

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And I basically called my friend and I'm like, Hey man, how much money do I need to live in San Diego? Because whatever I'm making is not going to be enough to make a family. Literally that was the reason I started to consider a different business model. Cause I'm like, I need to make more money and I can either increase my pricing, which that's a longer story that I knew I could based on a lot of feedback from external people who were not my clients said, dude, you're doing an amazing professional job your branding is great. You can certainly just charge more money, do the same work, have less clients, but better clients and just make more money and then you'll be good. But I didn't necessarily want to go down that path because I knew that I was going to stop working and helping the people that I knew more desperately needed it, which were the super small businesses, mom and pops, one to three-person companies. Now, yeah, those were the ones without money and they weren't the ones that needed the most help, but I really enjoyed helping them because it was making a difference maybe it was obviously a stupid decision, but the point is I decided I didn't want to increase my pricing too much. I did, but not crazy. I thought that maybe I'll just decrease my costs and maybe that way I can make more money. So that's what led me to go to the Philippines. And so I did, I hired five different people in about a time span of about a year. But the long story short about that is that made me realize through my process, which unfortunately for me, or I guess, fortunately, because it made me build a business was very bad. I had the people that were scamming me and they were actually not really doing the work and they were sub hiring other Filipinos. And then I found out that the Filipinos were getting scammed themselves to the same person that was scamming the American clients. Other people would leave me for 50 cents to work with another company. Other people had internet issues in the Philippines. But the biggest problem for me was the time zone. And the fact that I spent so much time hiring these people myself. I chose to be a- I guess maybe typical entrepreneurs starting out, I'm like, I'm not gonna go through an agency and pay more. I'm gonna pay direct. So I'm gonna go higher than on my own. And I did, but it was painful and hard and long. But that made me realize, you know, I don't wanna go down that route. So I'm gonna now do it on my own, but maybe in Latin America, let me go find somebody in Latin America. I live in San Diego, it's border with Mexico. I'm Mexican. I'm sure I'm gonna be able to find some Mexicans that can do the same digital marketing work but in Mexico.

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And then ideally in Tijuana, Mexico, which is the border town next to San Diego, and then they can just cross the border if they have a visa and come to my office when I need them to. And I couldn't really find those people because in Tijuana, there's not really digital marketers much. The locals told me, but eventually I did find someone and she was a graphic designer, not a marketer. I told her, hey, I'll teach you everything you need to know about American digital marketing. I'll train you and you'll become my first Latin American virtual assistant for my marketing agency. And that worked for a year. And then she also left me for some big company that was gonna pay her more. And that's when I said, okay, that's it. I can't keep relying in Tijuana. And the other option was Upwork, which was still expensive at the time. And then I searched and searched and searched on Google and I couldn't find almost any options except a single one, but it didn't really offer VAs from all of Latin America, just one country. And then that's when I kind of saw an opportunity. Man, that's great. I mean, it's bad because I don't really want to start a company, but it's great because it's an opportunity to try it and see if it works and then I'll be the first company to do it. And that's how it got started.

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Tom Finn (16:14.965)

Oh, that's awesome. There's so much to unpack there, uh, around that story. So the one thing that I've heard when people are dealing with virtual assistance in the Philippines, as you said, is the time zone issue, right? We're all going to run into certain issues, uh, in terms of, uh, people being honest or leaving for 50 cents more an hour that those types of things. I think we, as human beings and business owners are, are we, we keep an eye out for that kind of stuff. But- But the time zone thing, you can't change. I mean, that's one thing you can't change. And so now there are some great virtual assistants in the Philippines that do a great job and they work in the middle of the night and they sleep during the day because they work on US hours. That's kind of how they do it if you're not familiar. But there is something to be said for, you know, putting your ruler on California, putting your ruler on New York and going south, right? Just creating that channel and just looking at Canada, North America, Central America, South America, you're all in the same time zones, my friends, right? And it makes things a little bit easier if you just go North-South versus East-West when you're thinking about offshoring talent, for sure. So I'm with you. I think all that makes sense. So you had your experience, you start thinking about folks in Latin America, and...

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Jaime (17:21.326)

Exactly.

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Tom Finn (17:42.085)

What was the first step that you took? How did you actually move on from the young lady in graphic design in Tijuana to, okay, who do you call next? Where do you even start?

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Jaime (17:52.918)

Yeah, that's a great question. The first thing that came to my mind, I'm like, am I stupid? Like, why am I gonna do this? I mean, there's probably a reason nobody else before me did it. Like, maybe it's a really bad idea. Maybe people don't speak English well enough. There's gotta be a reason why nobody's done it before. It doesn't make any sense. Like, honestly, there's hundreds of thousands of businesses and a lot of them work with the Filipinos. How come nobody thought about working with latinos? So I'm like, maybe it's really not a very good idea. Maybe I'm gonna just spend all this time and money and not make it work. So I was generally thinking it would be a bad idea because I just truly couldn't understand how in 2018, this hadn't happened yet, right? So I was really kind of skeptical, but I'm like, well, unless I try it, I'm not gonna find out, right? So there's nobody gonna tell me the answer. Now.

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Being myself from Mexico City, knowing that generally speaking the percentage of population in Mexico at least that speaks English, it's very small compared to what people in Asia speak English. Percentage-wise, I've traveled myself to all of Southeast Asia at this point, except the Philippines for some really weird reason, but I haven't made it there, but I've been to every other place. And a lot of people, you know, let's say the commoner, many people do speak English. Of course not everybody, right?

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But in Latin America, it's much more known that a lot of people do not speak English. It's like not typical that you're going to take a taxi and the guy's going to understand it. Right. So that was the biggest concern. But eventually I said, you know, I'm going to just try it and see. I'm sure I'm going to still find someone. So I basically built a landing page. So I basically started to use all my marketing skills and my background that I know how to do everything. Landing pages, ads, websites, Google ads.

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I can just make it all and fake it till you make it. So there was no business model in very deep detail. There was no website, no portal. I'm just gonna pull up a landing page and I'm gonna start attracting through advertising people in Latin America to an opportunity to work with American companies and see if people sign up. And that's what I did. I started spending a bunch of money first on ads and people were signing up and people were super interested.

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And I was overwhelmed by how many people applied. And then I had the same problem as when I started with the Philippines. I got hundreds of people now applying to something that doesn't exist yet, looking for a job. And I'm like, then I'm worried, oh my God, now what am I gonna do? I don't have any clients. I don't have anybody to give these people jobs. But I'm like, okay, at least people are interested. That's the good first step. Now I'm gonna go back and...

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Tom Finn (20:27.461)

Yeah, first step, you were figuring out the supply side. So for those of you that are thinking about your MBA or have been through it, or just remember your high school economics class, as supply side, we are trying to match supply and demand in equal proportion where they cross on the X and Y axis. So in this particular case, Jaime is speaking in general terms, but what he's saying is, I had to build the supply first and actually that's a really important point to be made. 

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Jaime (20:32.107)

Yeah. Exactly. That's right.

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Tom Finn (20:57.481)

When you're building supply and demand models, you got to build supply first. Then you have to go generate the demand, um, in a structured way. Of course you could flip it on his head and say, I'm going to go get the demand first. I want a client. Then you're scrambling to meet the expectation of that client and you likely won't and you'll likely lose that client and burn your brand. So this is the safer way to do it. Uh, build supply first. All right. Hi mate, back to you.

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Jaime (21:26.326)

That's great. Thanks for that. That makes that's very good. I'm glad that you put it in those words. So yeah, I started to see that there was supply and then I said, okay, for me, the biggest thing I struggled with in the Philippines was quality, vetting quality. Nobody was vetting it for me because I chose to do it on my own through a website that basically only has a bunch of VAs from the Philippines. And I was basically scrambling to figure out, okay, who do I even see in terms of the resume? Who do I interview? Who do I figure out who's worth my time to interview?

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But because I had done it, I kind of came up with a little process that I had. So then I had all these people apply, but I only wanted to get the best into my eventual website slash business. So I started vetting people and then only the best ones I started to accept. And then I would invite them to create a profile on a website that I built on WordPress with some plugins, which was kind of like a job board. And then I said to myself, when I have at least a hundred people who've completed their profile correctly, based on a bunch of instructions that I told them, then I would say, okay, I have enough supply that I can go tell some random potential client, hey, go check out my site, there's at least 100 people for you to choose from. And then that would be the time that I could start looking for clients. And that's exactly what I did. As soon as I hit 100 people, that would be 10 pages because each page of the browsing would give you 10 people. So that's 10 pages to browse. That looked legit enough to me.

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So then I started going to a bunch of San Diego-based events where a bunch of entrepreneurs or people that wanted to hear what other people were up to would do. And I would just start talking about it and I would start telling people, Hey, you know, all I would like for you, if you're interested in what I'm telling you is I'll give you free access, go, go basically post a job and hire someone please, because then, you know, there's a limited time of how many, how many months or weeks people are going to wait to see if what I told them was truth or it's BS.

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So I really was hoping that people would hire them so that then people would be like, oh, this thing actually works. Now I have someone that is actually hiring me. And so that is what happened. I gave a bunch of people free access, a bunch of people hired them. They were super happy. And then I started to charge money and then there's the rest of the story. But that's how it got started. As an actual portal only where people could post a job and then they would be able to choose people from community. And then the whole business model change completely to what it is today, which is purely just an agency model where we do all the work for our clients. And then I can talk more if you'd like.

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Tom Finn (23:52.317)

Of course, no, this is fun because what we're doing is going through the evolution of how you build a business. You didn't, you didn't start where you are today. You started somewhere else and you had to keep moving, pivoting, shaking, changing things up a little bit, getting, you know, you, sometimes you just have to get through the gate. You have to get through gate one. And once you're through gate one, you now have the skills and the tools to get through gate two, where you build skills and tools and understanding, and now you get through the third gate and you're sort of going through this process as an entrepreneur building your business. And if you, if you look at the great entrepreneurs in the world, that's how they did it. They didn't have all the answers on day one. I think that's the most important part. You don't have to have all the answers on day one. So, so let's go back to this story. So I'm just literally on the edge of my seat here. I love that. So, so we've, we built the supply side. We determined that we can create some level of demand, which by the way, for those of you that are thinking this way, that means Jaime is the salesperson. He is selling on the phone, emailing, digital marketing, companies in the US saying, use my talented, exceptional, wonderful human beings that just happen to be located in Latin America. Um, okay. So cool. So we're there. We've got this model. We got some people on a website. We got some people in the US. We're buying a couple hours here and there or a week of services, whatever it might be. Now what happens?

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Jaime (25:18.314)

Yeah, so the first thing that I realized is like the money issue. I'm not gonna I'm not making money. I'm not making much money here because I was charging 50 bucks one time to post a job. For some very now bad reason, I thought I'm going to go copy what I did in the Philippines and go build a website like the Filipino website where people can just browse a bunch of people. But that made me very quickly realized I was going to spend more time helping people figure out how to post jobs, write job descriptions, figure out who to hire, who to interview, how to make a contract, how to write a contract, how to sign a contract, how to pay a person. And I'm like, okay, this is exactly all the stuff I'm struggling with. And everybody else is too. Very few people didn't contact me for help. So then I was making very little money, spending too much time bending the people, trying to still get clients and still not really

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I was not going to be able to generate the money that I was in the end trying to look for. So then I said, okay, maybe I'm going to just offer what I didn't want to do, which is I'm going to do it all for them. Right. But that's going to be time-consuming for sure because I'm literally not going to have to do all this for every single client. Right. Which is crazy. So I, you know, the first person that I hired for our company was for the marketing agency. So I did hire naturally some of those people myself, because that's what I was looking for. That was really the main goal.

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So I hired a graphic, sorry, a marketing lady from Guatemala. She became our first virtual Latinos, let's say, you know, team member, but she was really working for Bluminati, the marketing agency. But I told her, hey, we don't have virtual, it doesn't really exist yet. It's just something I'm still trying to build, but would you like to help me? And she said, yes, right? So she was helping with my marketing agency stuff. And then eventually she started helping me with the virtual Latinos, which were just me and her at this point trying to build that. And so she learned how I was doing the recruitment of the people. So I told her, hey, pretty much, why don't you help me continuing to vet all the people while I'll continue to focus on getting the demand of more clients to come into the sites. And then, you know, we grew that and started hiring more people. But what really changed within the years, I did offer now the service of do it all for you, which is the agency model, right? Where I would now tell people, listen we still have the option of the directory where you can hire on your own, or I'm gonna charge you basically a little more per hour, but you don't have to worry about anything, right? And that started to grow, but it still took over two years for us, and I guess for me to eventually realize that the directory was not gonna be something good to keep around, and we got rid of it. Mostly because one, it was not good for business-wise. Second, it was not good in terms of how we were spending our time either.

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And the worst part is every time we spoke to clients, I'm a guy who believes in being completely transparent as much as I can within, you know, some parameters. But every time I had a client on the phone, a potential client, I would always tell them, listen, Virtual Latinos has two options. You can hire on your own and pay one time, and then you gotta do everything on your own, or you can go through our agency and I'm gonna do it all for you. You're gonna spend a little more through the agency, but you're gonna do a lot less work. And I'm gonna give you some type of guarantee, right? But then I had to then spend so much time trying to not convinced but explain to people the two options. Then eventually making on, I'm just gonna, yeah.

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Tom Finn (28:37.413)

Yeah, what are the two differences Jaime, right? Like help me understand how much work, what type of work, how would I post it? So you're basically in option one, you're basically giving them the laundry list of work in option one, and then having them decide if they want you to do that, or if they feel comfortable doing it. And then you know the next question, well Jaime, what if I only wanna do part of that? What if there's, you know, I'm cool with like posting and some interviews, but I'm gonna need you to do the contract and you to take the billing and you to...

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Jaime (28:43.635)

Yeah. Exactly.

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Tom Finn (29:07.417)

Right? It just creates too much ambiguity for the buyer. Okay. So we've got option one. Here's, here's the directory you pick. You do it. Give me 50 bucks or option two. I'm a full scale agency model where I, you know, you know, we pay $8 an hour and we charge you 10 and we take the two bucks in the middle.

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Jaime (29:27.298)

No, in this case, what we show on our website, which is still eight bucks an hour, that's what we charge the client. We keep a small percentage, but we pay most of it to them, to the VAs. And that's also a big difference of how I chose to build the company. I didn't want to be like most companies I learned about later in terms of most recruitment agencies that work with like offshore talent, they keep 50 to 70% of what they charge and only pay people 30 to 50% at the most. We do the opposite. We actually pay between 69 to 91% of what people pay us. So the big chunk of money gets paid to them.

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Tom Finn (30:01.529)

Yeah, that's important. And if you're a buyer in the United States or anywhere in the world and you're thinking about who should I partner with in terms of an offshoring agency model company, ask that question. How much do you pay the actual person doing the work? The last thing you want to do is pay $10 an hour. And the person you're working with is getting $3.

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Jaime (30:24.894)

Yeah, which happens in the Philippines a lot. I'll tell you that though. We've had clients coming from the Philippines that when eventually they found out how much their people were actually getting paid, even though they were not supposed to find out, they were not happy. Naturally.

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Tom Finn (30:35.993)

Yeah, no, nobody look you want to pay and you want the person that you're working with to make that money or the majority of that money. I think everybody understands that there's an agency fee of a buck here, two bucks there, three bucks, whatever, as you go up price for higher level talent. But what you don't want is that is the feeling as somebody who has used virtual assistants for some time, you don't want the feeling that person that you're working with day in and day out isn't being treated well by the virtual assistant company. That's the last thing you want.

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Jaime (31:08.95)

Yeah. So then basically a little side note, I increased the pricing of the directory many times and people were still paying it. So that's why I'm like, okay, it's clearly still very valuable, which is great. But I went from 50 bucks to a hundred bucks to 150 bucks one time, eventually then I'm like, I'm gonna still do it, but in the recurring model, 50 bucks a month. So even if you hire them and pay them and work with them independently, you still owe me 50 bucks a month and that worked for a while. Then a hundred bucks a month, then 150 bucks a month then 150 bucks a month prepaid three months in advance and people still would pay it. So I'm like, okay, clearly the people are great and the value is there, which is good. But now I'm just gonna just get rid of the directory because otherwise I'm not gonna be able to grow.

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Tom Finn (31:52.941)

Okay. So that's cool. I mean, the money started rolling in where we're charging people more and people are willing to pay it. That means that you're creating immense value for them. And let's be honest. If somebody comes to us and says, look, you're going to be able to recruit as many people as you want for 150 bucks a month on my delightful platform, and then you're going to be able to hire them directly and all you got to do is pay me 150 bucks. Most companies are like, yeah, that sounds, that sounds good. Thanks.

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Jaime (32:19.562)

Yeah, exactly.

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Tom Finn (32:20.569)

So then though you realize that's non-scalable, let's pivot this model a little bit. So what did you move into?

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Jaime (32:24.042)

Yeah. So I mean, because we were already offering at that time, the agency, but we wanted to stop offering both options to stop confusing people. We just said, that's it. We're going to just stop offering it. And I think this was already now two years ago that we said, that's it. January 1st of whatever the next year is, that's gone. We could just remove the whole thing from the website. So people, the new people that would look at it, didn't even know it existed at that point.

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Now some people that were already clients are like, hey man, I still want to hire more people but I'm like, sorry man, you have like six more months and we're taking it out. That's it. You can't be on this model anymore. And so we just kind of cut ties with the people that we had. I mean, some people didn't hire more people but they kept paying me for a long time because they still owed it to me even though they because they already hired them but they still work with them. I still charge them every month. Right now they couldn't come back and hire more people so that, you know, some people were not so happy. But the ones who already had them kept them and kept paying me until eventually people just stopped paying me because either they stopped working with them or they just said, why should I keep paying him because he doesn't even know if I'm working with them or not. So they stopped paying. And I didn't want to deal with the, Hey, you still owe me this money. Like it didn't matter at that point because we were just focused on growing the agency model, which is what we're doing today.

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Tom Finn (33:36.669)

So the agency model, and I think I heard you say it earlier, charges a client, mainly I would imagine in the US, a particular fixed price per hour of work. And then your organization, Virtual Latinos, is paying between 69% and 91% of that dollar to the person doing the great work there for you.

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Jaime (34:01.858)

Yes. Now that number is constantly changing. I don't know when I got the last time that I did that math just to be clear because that constantly changes. I will say that number might be actually a little now more because we don't really publicize exactly the dollar amount but we pay ourselves a flat dollar amount regardless of whether the person's eight bucks or 15 bucks or 20 bucks. But the whole market as a whole has just increased on average. We are naturally both paying more and charging more to clients, still making the same amount of dollar profit per hour because just the market has just become more expensive due to lots of things in the world, right? But yeah. So yeah, that percentage might be changing a bit, but the point is, yeah, we're still paying people well, people are happy. We also did a study of how much more people are actually making in their local countries to see how happy, at least money-wise, they would be, right?

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Tom Finn (34:43.429)

Nice, nice.

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Jaime (34:58.962)

So I had a person within our team dig a lot of information about what was the average pay of somebody with, I think we said like an average of three or four years of experience with a degree in like four or five different let's call verticals in terms of industries, what they would get paid in their local economies, right? And then we basically figured out what we were paying. And then we realized how much more X's are we paying, right? And it went down from at least two X all the way to five, almost six X in terms of how much more we were paying them. So of course, when you're making double to six times more, it's significantly more money for the work that you're doing and you don't have to drive anywhere, right? So the value just money-wise for the people that we hire is just huge.

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Tom Finn (35:41.977)

Yeah, that's a point to be underlined and exclamation pointed because I think that's something that gets lost in the shuffle of these business conversations is there are local communities that you're impacting all over in Latin America, and those people are earning more than they could if they were working locally in their own city or town. And that's a really big deal. You know, if we can if we can start to build up globally, the economic footprint of all of the cities and towns and countries, a rising tide lifts all boats. So you don't have to be in the U S to be successful. You can be anywhere on the globe, have a computer and internet service and be a virtual assistant that can deliver value to organizations. And ultimately you can make more money perhaps in your, in your hometown than you would without those types of services.

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Jaime (36:37.354)

Yeah, for sure. I mean, now we know if somebody that actually lives in a remote part of Argentina or Chile in the southern tip of South America, where there's not really an internet service, but with Starlink, they get internet, you know, through Elon Musk's internet, and they can work from like the middle of the forest. It's cool.

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Tom Finn (36:55.961)

Yeah, I love it, man. I love it. So what's next for your organization? Is it scale, scale? Is it scale and sell? Is it, I just want to be an entrepreneur and ride this thing out and raise a family and be a good husband? Like what's the, you know, go surfing in San Diego, catch a Padres game. What's the thing that is next for you?

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Jaime (37:09.89)

Yeah. I'd say that at least for the next three to five years, it's definitely to scale it. Right now we're kind of internally thinking about building, let's call it version 2.0 of our company, which is basically about how to be able to deliver more value in less time, in a more streamlined process through the use of a better process and better technology to be able to actually do more recruitments per week, right? So we have a cap of how much we can do with the amount of people that we have internally doing all the work behind the scenes, as well as the limitations of what our technology can do in terms of saving us time. Like you introduced me, I'm a lot about automations, and if people are interested in what I do, I talk about that separately a lot. I used not only my marketing knowledge, but all of my technology automation stuff for doing a lot of boring stuff that's repetitive, automated so that even my human team doesn't have to waste their time on. And that's really a huge piece of why I was able to build a company. Yes, I had the marketing knowledge and I had in this case, a tech background without being a developer or know how to build all these automations that helped me save so much time which meant I had to hire less people or the people that I already had would just be able to focus on the most important stuff and not waste time doing repetitive stuff. So now we hit the limitations of all that I built with my limited knowledge in tech and the tools that we have that we put together with a bunch of connections.

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Now we're trying to move to the next phase of making a better process so that we can do a lot more recruitment processes to grow. So the next phase would be to keep growing and growing. Eventually yes, we may potentially sell the company, get investments, who knows, right? But for the next three to five years, our goal is to hire at least 10,000 people and be able to continue to positively affect the businesses we work with to help them grow as well as empower the lifestyle of all these Latinos that are going to stay in Latin America with their families being happy. And, you know, that will be less crazy stories of immigration of people coming here. Now, of course, the stories of immigration of people crossing the border is usually people who don't speak English are not educated for the most part. Right. But still, the more that the economies localese are better, the less likely that people are going to want to move.

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Tom Finn (39:34.333)

That's right. Well said. And we can, we can leave it right there at a high maze immigration proposal, uh, the for the U S government. Uh, and, uh, really appreciate you being on the show. My man, this, this is really fun to hear about your journey. And, and I want people to take away not, Oh, this is a guy talking about his company. This is an entrepreneur who's teaching us how to go through different pivots and how to look at markets and models and how to think differently about business. And a marketer that turned into a virtual workforce company really is what he's doing and he's changing himself, evolving, growing, building the company the right way. So congratulations, brother. This is, this is great work and kudos to you and your family that supports you and the friends you have around you that they keep you going.

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Jaime (40:22.146)

Thank you, I appreciate it. Happy to chat with you. I definitely have to say that this was very awesome to speak with you because you really asked great questions. You really made a difference in terms of how you said the story, it was great. So just wanted to thank you for that.

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Tom Finn (40:36.045)

Well, I appreciate that Jaime and where can people track you down if they want to, if they want to hunch it down, uh, find you at, uh, I know we got virtual latinos.com, uh, that they can track you down there, but where else can they find you?

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Jaime (40:48.854)

You can definitely find me on LinkedIn with my name. I'm the only guy with my name right now, so that's easy to find me. And if you send a connection request, that's not a paid email, I likely see it because my LinkedIn's full of paid messages. So if yours will not, I'll be able to find you. So otherwise, of course, just, you know, you could fill out our website form and I'll get in touch.

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Tom Finn (41:09.829)

Yeah, well, I'm going to test that theory, Jaime, because I sent you a LinkedIn request and you have not responded to it yet. So we're going to see if you actually respond to that one. And by the way, this is a PSPS after the podcast is over here. I get so many in-mail requests. I'm so inundated with LinkedIn marketing. At this point, if you are still using that model, nobody reads them. We just put them in the other column. Nobody reads them.

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Jaime (41:35.116)

Nobody reads them.

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Tom Finn (41:38.769)

We're all business owners here. We don't read them. All right.

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Jaime (41:41.262)

Well, let me tell you to that point just to answer. So I'm actually now, I mean, I've been trying to do it for a while, but I have my executive assistant now logging into my LinkedIn. I'm like, you know, we got to really clean this up. And people who are genuinely trying to connect with me, I want you to help me because I just know most of it is spam and trash, which is why I'm not logging in to do it. That's the reason I probably haven't accepted your request because now I need my team to, you know, go through the BS of not real requests.

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Tom Finn (42:07.737)

Yeah, exactly right. All right. Keep your LinkedIn inbox clean. My friends, if you don't know how to do it, call Jaime, he will get his team to help you, uh, from his virtual assistant organization called virtual Latinos. Jaime, thanks for joining the show, brother. Great to be with you.

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Jaime (42:22.926)

Thank you, Tommy, you've been great.