EP103: Insider Tips for Successful Outsourcing & Nearshoring for Legal Practices with Jason Melton, Zuly Murphy, and Emily LaRusch

One of the very first best lessons I got about nearshoring was in my very first phone call with my now business partner, when I asked him, Hey, can I get a paralegal Mexico to fill role as a paralegal in in Florida? And he asked me, why would you want a paralegal when you get a lawyer? And I thought that was a crazy way to answer that question. And his point was, listen, you have such an advantage in your currency. Why would you hire like for like when you can hire even better and more qualified people who happen to work and live in a different economic environment when it doesn't really move your needle much economically?

Welcome to the 10 Golden Rules of internet marketing for law firms podcast, featuring the latest strategies and techniques to drive traffic to your website and convert that traffic into clients. Now, here's the founder and CEO of 10 golden rules, Jay Berkowitz.

All right, well, welcome everyone. My name is Jay Berkowitz. My company's called 10 golden rules. And we do one of these live events every month. We have an awesome panel here today. Zuly. And Jason and Emily are with us. And we're going to talk about how to leverage out sourcing and near shoring for a law firm, or frankly, for any firm. I'm going to give you some examples of what we do at our agency. And I'm going to run through a few slides. And then we're going to meet the awesome panel in just one minute. So our outsourcing in nearshoring started with a kid named Rick cash ready, who has become a great friend of mine and the company. And he did his MBA at Lynn University, which is a great little private school right here in Boca Raton, Florida. Now, I'm going back about 10 years to the good old days when we had offices and, and we've met people and interviewed them. And we met Rakesh and we loved him. And he was our second great employee from Lynn University. And he joined our team, and he joined our football pool. And we went for lunch every every week, and we had in house massages. And it was like the good old days when we had an office. And so he joined the 10 Golden Rules team. And then after a year, his his visa was coming up and his family kind of convinced them like they wanted him to come home. So he went back to India. And we were very, very tentative about working remotely. But we were we use Go To Meeting this was even before anyone had heard of zoom. I don't know when zoom first started. But we had go to meetings and we were able to work remotely and Rick was able to give us some services. And it worked really, really well. So then the next evolution my friend Jonathan Bannister, had a great business. He has a digital agency. Now 10 Golden Rules is a digital agency. We only work with law firms. He has a digital agency that works with accounting firms. And so he had a tremendous team in the Philippines. And after a while he started doing like training programs, SEO training programs and PPC training programs. To get great new team members for his team. He was up to 40 people in the Philippines. And after a while we some of his buddies like myself and some of his other buddies started asking like, hey, you've got this great team in the Philippines. Can you get us some great people in the Philippines. So he started doing these training programs every month, getting, you know, great new graduates of the training program. And he could cherry pick the best performers in those courses. And he would make them available to us. So we were very successful getting some of these graduates and some of the folks that had worked for him and we're looking for bigger and better opportunities. And now we have three people working remotely in the Philippines, both with Jonathan's help and without Jonathan's help. So we've become accustomed to using outsourcing and nearshoring. And I want to explain the terminology, just before we get into the panel. So the first term a lot of people use is outsourcing. And to simplify that it's basically any third party contractor that handles a task that would have been handled in house. Like before Rakesh moved to India, we'd never considered, you know, outsourcing some of our our core like he does did a lot of our reporting, and a lot of our digital setups for programs, setting up analytics and things like that. And if it weren't great, like we were able to work with him, but we had the advantage that we'd worked with him in the office for a year. So outsourcing could be down the block could be in another city, state or country. So basically you're going to outsource a task to someone who's not a regular w two employee, who's a contractor and Rakesh has continued to be a contractor pressed. Now offshoring would essentially be the same thing. But by definition, it's in a different country, it's offshore. And historically, the most of us worked with people in India, people in the Philippines were prominent. But, you know, we've had people all over Eastern Europe and whatnot, do technical tasks. So the example is a law firm in Texas, could hire specialists located in India. And then the term that all of us on the call really like is nearshoring. It's a new term, but it's, it's a little bit more precise in that we're hiring third party talent from another country. But one of the advantages of nearshore it just means that typically, you'd have someone in South America or Canada, and it's a more similar timezone. So there's, you know, the folks that we work with overseas are tremendous, like they work, a lot of them work the Eastern US hours, but it's definitely I just find this a little bit of an advantage if you can find someone great. Who has a closer timezone. And, and by definition, therefore, they're in South America or Canada. And how do we make it work? Like, I just wanted to share a few of the things that work really well and making it seamless? You know, first of all, we're all super comfortable on Zoom. So a lot of our team meetings in our different meetings are held on Zoom. Secondly, we use Slack, which is our communication. And if you don't know slack, it's like, I guess Google has a similar tool. Microsoft has a tool, by the way, we share jokes. This one was what did the buffalo say to his son when he left for college? Bison, bison bison, I don't know if that wouldn't make it to that joke of the week this week. And we use a tool project management tool called clickup. And there's a time tracking element. I guess it's a plugin software called Harvest. So we're able to, you know, all of our meetings are, are like this, we're on camera, we can talk to each other. Slack is very interactive, effective. And then clickup is a project management software that basically lays out the work these folks are going to do, we can check their work, we can make sure we're on schedule, we know when a project is completed. And we can do time tracking with that. So we're able to work very seamlessly by using digital assets. The next piece that we find super effective is having a lot of team building activities. And obviously, it's not the same as going for a cocktail, or we used to go for lunch, you know, we're cash would pick the Indian place, and Austin would pick the Jamaican place. But we do virtual cocktails, or if it's someone's birthday, we might just throw together a quick zoom at the end of the day on Friday. And then we've done some organized activities like one of them was a jailbreak and other one was a Lego building thing. Here's my little Lego guy built in the in the Lego building, but it was kind of like a team building thing. Where a guy, someone guides you through these exercises. And we all got to explain like why we were building our Lego and what it was representing in terms of us and, and our team and our mission and things like that. We've done trivia nights, again, there's companies that do these kinds of events. And and then the final one, that turned out to be a lot of fun for everybody except me, I didn't even know this was coming up. I recently had a big birthday, and the team decided to do a roast of me. But it all took place on Zoom. We had you know, everybody had a lot of fun at my expense. And that that was great. Let me tell you.

And then, in terms of making everybody feel like part of the team, everybody's a full time employee, even if they're like paid to accompany they get an app 10 golden rules, email address, they attend team meetings, we use the same HR structure, they report to someone in the company and and have regular one on one meetings. We're on Eos, so everybody participates in our level 10 meetings, etc. And the final thought I just want to share like some of the benefits for us and some of the downside. First of all, we still treat it like all of our managers, all of our department managers, and directors are a US based. And then our enter customer service, like our account managers are all US based. So everybody in the other countries is kind of like a level down in terms of our org chart doesn't mean that, you know tons of my friends in like my lawyer mastermind and tons of law firms are having incredible success with having attorneys and having, you know, SEO managers and directors and account managers overseas. We just haven't done it yet. We find that most of the folks overseas are incredibly enthusiastic, loyal and hardworking. Like they love to be a part of a US company or a North American company. I'm originally Canadian, I always see us now. They get paid in US dollars and typically to reduce asked us. And there's incredible value there, right? Like, if we're paying someone 30 or $40,000, the US dollars go a long, long way, in India in the Philippines. And, you know, it's tremendous, their cost of living is typically less than trying to find a place here in Boca Raton, Florida. And a lot of times, they're very, very happy to do what we might consider repetitive tasks might be less attractive to someone North American based. And there's tremendous English education throughout the world. So a lot of people attended the interlac International Baccalaureate program are British schools, finding sometimes people in in random countries like South Africa or India, Philippines have a British accent because they learned their English through an international network of British schools. But the International Baccalaureate program is where kids can travel throughout the world, and basically have the same curriculum as they travel throughout the world. And typically diplomats and people like that use the International Baccalaureate program. But we've been able to hire some some local folks who went through that schooling system. And so they had this tremendous English based learning. Finally, just a couple risks, you definitely have to keep an eye on some of the junior employees, some of them will try and have two full time jobs. So basically, they'll work for you for eight hours, the word for someone else for eight hours, they'll sleep a little bit. And you know, generally the work product is noticeably worse. And it's definitely something you have to keep an eye on. A lot of folks will take, you know, other side hustles and things like that. So it's definitely something you got to keep an eye on. And you can use time tracking, like I talked about at our expert panel today, we'll definitely have more sophisticated ways of making sure we're getting what we contracted for. So anyways, we're big fans of outsourcing and nearshoring. And we've got some Rockstar companies and experts to today to talk about how you can apply it for your law firm or frankly, for any type of company. So without further ado, I'm going to make my first introduction. And Jason Melton has a law firm called Willa Melton. And he'll tell you the story of how he started some outsourcing in Mexico and had so much success with it, that his friends, other law firms started asking him like, Hey, can you get me some of this great talent from your location in Mexico? And so he created regions remote services. So he's co founder with Melton, personal injury firm based in North. What is it North West Florida?

Yeah,

he's a founder of regions remote services. He's a life member of the million dollar advocates forum and received the AV Preeminent rating by Martindale help. So that just means he's a really, really good lawyer gets amazing results for his clients and is highly esteemed by his peers. He's the president of the National Academy of motorcycle injury lawyers. And so he specializes, as in car accidents, personal injury, and motorcycle. And he's an Instagram Rockstar he actually spoke at our conference tgr live about his amazing Instagram videos and his Instagram channel. So check out Jason's Instagram. But that's not the topic today. Today, Jason is going to talk to us about regents remote. Over to you, sir.

Okay, thank you. Well, if anybody wants to get a hold of me afterwards, that's my direct phone number. Feel free to call me or text me, I'll, I'll help you with whatever you want to help you with. But, you know, Jay, hit it right. I'm a lawyer by trade. It's was never my endeavor to get into this space. I had some needs in my office and explored how to take care of it for my office and then stumbled into the fact that, hey, this is really something that a lot of offices could use. Click that, Hey, you want me to do a j. So to know a little bit about me is to know that I grew up in San Antonio, Texas. It's important in terms of this topic, because San Antonio, much like Buffalo and San Diego and Seattle. You know, we live in sort of borderless business communities, whether we like it or not. It was very common for me to know people whose parents were going back and forth to Mexico. My father and some of his friends were doing heavy machinery business back and forth, through Monterey and whoever they own in Mexico, it's just it's not uncommon in South Texas to do business with Mexico. It doesn't feel like international trade or anything. It's just, you know, there's certain goods and services that are better or better priced, and certainly higher quality on different sides of the border and you just make your business decisions that way. So coming from that framework, it made it easier for me to get to the point where I got to. And also, I'm a huge sports fan. So allowed me to put up a gratuitous photo of, of us winning a championship, click. So I started my legal career as a prosecutor in Miami, and worked my way up in Central Florida, basically, some underserved counties, between like Tampa Bay, and Gainesville. Some people heard of the villages, this is where I do most of my work. But we work throughout the state of Florida. And we had a lot of success early on, mostly because we were working in counties where essentially, firms stopped marketing for their services, because they didn't need to, because there was nobody, no other options, right. So we decided to really hustle and try to encourage folks to hire us. And so we had a lot of success early on. So at a pretty early age, we were I was running a very successful law firm, which has its pluses and minuses, mostly pluses. The minuses is that just like any other business, I too, got comfortable with sort of our status and, and wasn't sort of looking at cutting edge ways to get better. Because we I know we're good lawyers, we've always done a good job. With the practice of law, the issue is always running the business and being more efficient. So we started to see a little bit of a drop, and some of our staff issues towards the end of last decade click. And because of that early success that I had, it became really second nature for me to work away from the office to work remote, if you will, which I think is a challenge for some people, intellectually before the pandemic, could you even produce good quality work without actually walking into an office and having a breakfast sandwich? And you know, saying hello to Sheila, and getting your water at the water fountain? Could you still do your job correctly. And of course, we all know you can. But you know, when I was doing it in 2011, and 2012, you almost just didn't talk about it, because people might think it was weird that I don't put on a suit every day that I might be, you know, doing legal work and my athletic clothes, you know, from my second bedroom, right? So quick. So, as we get towards the end of that decade, we start dealing with Gen Z, and this new crop of, of talent, and you start to develop this idea of a skills crunch. And I think, you know, generally across the country, this happened. In my law firm, I found that there were some jobs sort of at the lower the totem pole, front office jobs, if you will, front of the office jobs. Or I was continually having to train and refill these jobs, and I couldn't figure it out. And I started to notice this sort of lack of an interest in a career changing jobs for small amounts of money or parking spaces, wanting a pat on the back for coming to work every day, this week, this sort of attitude, things that would become second nature for us. But for this generation, who had gone through a total collapse of the economy, you know, parents, or maybe themselves had had gone through 911 and the After Effects, you know, they had just sort of a different way of looking at life. This is sort of the Yolo generation, right? So click this affected the word culture. It was difficult to motivate people to think, hey, if I stay here, I can really ingrain myself into a professional office. This is important for my life, because we worked in areas where we didn't have higher education. So my talent pool was essentially, you know, really older women who had worked in professional offices for many years and wanted to get a in a position of trust in a professional office. They didn't necessarily have higher education in their resume, but they had a lot of industrial or industry knowledge. And so these people were becoming harder and harder to find in our communities, because we didn't have we did an office in Tampa, Orlando, we were in Spring Hill, Florida, for example, or Brooksville, Florida. This is very common to not talk to someone who graduated from a four year university for a week, you could walk around town and never talk to somebody who graduated from college. Nice people, but just higher education wasn't there. Click. So then the pandemic happened and it happened right at the chair at the time when I decided to reach out and make a decision that I thought was kind of crazy. I didn't tell people about which is to find Hey, can I hire someone in Mexico to fill one of my roles? And the one of the very first best lessons I got about nearshoring was in my very first phone call with my now business partner, when I asked him, Hey, can I get a paralegal Mexico to fill role as a paralegal in in Florida? And he asked me, why would you want a paralegal when you get a lawyer? And I thought that was a crazy way to answer that question. And his point was, listen, you have such an advantage in your currency. Why would you hire like for like when you can hire even better and more qualified people who happen to work and live in a different economic environment, when it doesn't really move your needle much economically. And so we started out by hiring lawyers to fill roles as legal assistants, and that really shaped my head about nearshoring. One of the greatest advantages for nearshoring it's not cost it, I mean, cost is important. Of course, that's sort of how the general the the journey always starts, oh, you can get more for less. But that's the more that's more important than the less, it's always going to be cheaper to hire beyond our borders, because of the strength of the dollar. The real issue is you can get people who you could never afford ever in the United States to fill these roles, because of the economy. And by hiring lawyers to do tasks that I normally would fill with people who might go to a six month class and Paralegal Studies allowed me to get work product that was way beyond anything I'd ever had before. And oh, by the way, I was paying a third of what we were paying before. And it's important because a lot of a lot of the space is filled with, you know, flashes of prices. And I just for anyone watching this, your journey should not be price oriented, you are going to say have a major savings, virtually no matter where you go. It's really not about money. It's about quality. And you'll see that as I talk more about this. So the wage issues. So while all this is going on in my head about savings, we had wage issue spike in our country. And so it's like all these forces are coming together, this might be actually a really, really good idea. And so we started expanding into other areas, and other ways to hire people. And essentially, at this point in my office, I have basically backed up every role of my office with someone in Mexico, that makes my office more reliable, more sturdy. But it also allows lots of people to train at different positions. So in my office, we've hired people to do intake. We've hired people to do

legal assistant, work or paralegal work. We've hired people to do SEO work, instead of hiring an SEO agency. That's tremendous savings there, and they work 40 hours a week. But the first most value added position I ever filled, was a video editor. And it allowed me to really crush the Instagram space. I'm going to show you a video that I just published like last week, it took me about 50 seconds, I probably recorded about 50 seconds of video from my cell phone on like the breakfast area at a hotel I was staying at had closed I walked out backwards a table was and I just answered a question. That is it's a pretty obvious question about the most important question, I think when hiring a Pei lawyer, and I filmed it, sent it to my guy in Mexico, and he turned around the same day into a video. So let's just play that video just to give you an idea when selecting your personal injury lawyer, if there's one question you have to add, tell me about your last jury trial. Pretty simply not trying cases, you're gonna find out pretty quick, B they're trying the wrong kinds of cases, you're gonna find out or see if they're guys or gals that try lots of cases they're gonna tell you about it. And then that'll open up questions about the process and other cases they've tried. But it's the single best thing you can ask when you're ever looking to hire a personal injury lawyer never never never hire one who's either never tried a case has tried one very recently doesn't have much to talk about in terms of a trial this similar to the case that you're looking to hire them on. If we can help you call us. We'd love to talk to you about our trials and our successes and then some of the things mistakes we made and things we've learned over the last few decades. So it was called that's a very easy thing for us to do. Now I can I can you know I can produce one of those every day if I want to. And that's because I have we had the ability to hire Very talented people in Mexico, who have understand how to do video editing. And that but that goes with all of our positions. You know, one of the values of hiring in Mexico, as opposed to Manila, is that if you want to meet with your team and have a meeting, you can do it. There's like, I think there's something like 30 Something flights that go into Monterrey a day, that's where our home offices, but we also have an office in Mexico City. These are easy communities to get to, it's just as easy to get there as it is to get to Los Angeles or, you know, Las Vegas or something. Whereas going to Manila, or Bangladesh, I mean, you might have to mortgage half your house to put that trip together. That could be awful. But there's some really, really talented folks in this part of the country. parts of Mexico are also culturally very, very, in tune with the United States, as I'm sure Zuly will tell you as well. You know, Monterey in particular, they watch football on Sundays, and I'm talking about like the Cowboys, they cheeseburgers, they shop and malls, where there's gaps and all sorts of stores that you're familiar with. It's not, you know, Mexico City is certainly, that's a great counterpoint, because Mexico City, although very international, it is very Mexican, there's some things there that you're not going to see in Dallas, right. But in Monterrey, you know, you could if you turn the sound off and just looked around, you might be confused where you are, because it doesn't, doesn't appear to be different country. And so culturally, that's a big deal, especially if they're working on your phones, they're able to pick up on shorthand phrases, and things like that very, very quickly. The little things you kind of take for granted when, when working with other international communities. The English like Jay talked about, this happens very regularly. Many of our people are educated in the States, and they act, then they go back to Mexico, this is not an uncommon fact pattern. They'll do elementary school and middle school, parts of high school, maybe all high school, then go back to Mexico, or they'll do elementary and middle school, the high schools for whatever reason made it difficult for them. So they did High School in Mexico, maybe. And then also the people they take school in Mexico, and based on if it's a British or American School, you'll see that they have a British or American accent when they speak English. So like I have people who answered my phone who went to a British school, and they speak with a little bit of a British accent, even though they are definitely Mexican. And it's, it's kind of interesting, but it's really great. I it's one of the best thing that I've done for my office, but also for myself professionally. But just personally, it's been an awesome process that this is a lovely community. I enjoy it. I think one of the things I've learned from this process is that some things that we were doing before actually were pretty good. I think one of the problems with remote work is people working at home, if you can, you know, like my agency, we have actual offices where people come into work, which allows them to be supervised, that also allows them to be helped. It allows them to create a sense of community and culture within within the the other people that they're working with. So if you can, if you're hiring internationally, or hopefully through Mexico, which I'm partial to work with an agency like regions or others that have actual offices, you know, in an IT department and things like this, so they people can get all those quick services and quick help. But also it helps them build a sense of community and trust me, then being supervised and then coming to work, it does make a difference, we found that probably 85% of the small issues that come up with hiring with our staff, those have been the ones that worked at home, versus the one that came into the office. But other than that, I look forward to the other two presentations. And I'll be here to answer more questions.

Jason, I didn't tell you I'm always gonna sneak in a couple of my own questions. Oh, sure. Because I get to as the host. So you mentioned something interesting. I hadn't. We've talked a lot about this in the past. And I've recommended you to a number of law firms. You said that you backup each employee with an employee in Mexico and we talk in our firm a lot about redundancy. So what's the strategy there and how do you execute it?

So there wasn't the plan. Really, the plan was just to hire people who were really skilled to help the firm but then as I started to do it, I'm like, you know, one of the things that make any organization really good and I unfortunately because I'm a you know, I my head is geared towards sports always has been and any good team. I don't care what sport it is. The really good teams. They are I'll have terrific benches, so that if somebody gets hurt gets in foul trouble, you know, arrives to the game with a stomach flu, they can put somebody in and it's like nothing happened, right. And it's the same thing here. So I still have paralegals in the United States, not crazy. I'm not firing people. But I'm expanding, and I'm growing with a talent in Mexico. And they're learning and one of the great things about hiring people who are highly educated, which I think if I hope, if you've gotten anything from what I've said, that you've taken that from, from what I've said, is that they have learned how to learn, right? It's There's nothing more frustrating as an owner, when you're training people, and you have to retrain them, or go over things again, right? They're trying hard, but they're just not getting it. It's one of the reasons why hiring smart people is really important, because you can teach them things. And then they'll take it to the next level, they'll ask you things you hadn't thought of. Which like in my office, for instance, we haven't drafted a lawsuit that wasn't drafted in Mexico first, in about four years. You know, a lot of the discovery we're doing, we're doing it in Mexico, first, we're not filing things from Mexico. But these people wouldn't give it a challenge. Because they're smart. They took it to the next level and continue to come up with new things that they could do. And if I had just hired people like for like, I wouldn't be there. So back to your question. With when you have that type of talent that's available, I'm going to backup every position because they can learn from the people in front of them. My American workers are not threatened by the talent in Mexico, they look at it as empowering them, I'm empowering them to help them get their work done with this awesome assistant. Right. And so, to me, it was just natural that I would want to backup every position that I could.

I love it. Talk to me a little bit about the facility. So one of the things that we were originally attracted to in the Philippines was, you know, they had a great facility, it was close to a bunch of us based facility. So there was like, you know, if the grid went down, they get the grid backup, air conditioning, internet power, right. And providing computers to these folks.

That was that was the easiest part of starting this business is that my bitten now business partner already had a building that he was working in, for his other companies, a marketing agency. And we've been able to expand within this business, it's class a space, like the corporate entity of POJO. Local there, our downstairs neighbor, like this is a very nice building. And it's in San Pedro, which is one of the nicer neighborhoods, in really all of Latin America, but certainly in Monterey. So people want to work there. And I think that's another thing for, you know, getting talent is paying them well, and having them come to a nice place to work. It's a, it's a big advantage, like I said earlier in terms of supervision, and creating a culture. And I've written some things about this, but there's some things you can do. Because it's hard to work remotely, if you can allow yourself to put yourself in their position. It's, it's a really important part of what we do. But I always say treat humans like humans, these people are not computers, they're not, you know, what are those little things you turn on that vacuum your house, the robot row, it's like a robot vacuum cleaner. Like there, it's not anything like that these are human beings. And just like you would want to have some camaraderie with your office mates, you'd want to be able to know you can raise your hand and ask a question. So treat them like humans give them a place to work that you would want to work and and I can't be any more, you know, positive about it. But our building in Monterey is nicer than my office in Florida. And I have a nice office. But I like I love going over there to work because it's nice. get coffee, and it's wonderful.

Last question, and then we'll get to the next panelist. You all have done some stuff to make those folks feel like part of your team and vice versa. What are some of the things that have worked for you to build team? Well,

I mean, from the region side, I mean, like we provide them health insurance, which I think is very important. That's a can be a problem in some of these parts of the world. But from a widdle Melton side, like we send them swag. We invite them, make them a part of events that we're doing, when we can. Certainly when I go to see them, right, we'll have happy hours together and we'll go to dinner together and hang out. And I just think it just, it's just a core sort of corporate function of just treating people like people treat them just like you'd want to be treated yourself. I think it's the number one problem with hiring internationally as American companies look at this as a plug and play, but you don't have to train them. You don't have to ingrain them in your culture. You can ignore them for weeks. This is That's ridiculous. Like the should be no different than onboarding somebody in your office in September. Right? Should

we say you said you have a video feed? Oh, sure. We will resume

all day, like every day, whenever we're talking to them. But it's just, I just think that you know that it's the biggest failure and it's the easiest thing to fix to write. Just talk to him. It's not a big deal.

Awesome. Well, I love it. And thank you for sharing and being here. And next up, I'm just gonna switch back to the slides to introduce Emily. Emily also participated in teacher live or live event. And we love back office Betty's as some cool things I learned about Emily. She's a volunteer teacher, for inmates all the way to entrepreneurs. It's been a guest lecturer at the University of Texas a&m. And the company that started in 2014, as a Virtual Receptionist company grew to help clients in all kinds of various so they do legal admin support, experience legal assistance intake coordinators, paralegals, admin assistants, and she calls them her heroes who manage everything from paperwork to case prep, so the attorneys can focus on the courtroom. Emily, welcome to this month's live streaming event.

How to y'all I am coming to you from Jason's hometown, just north of San Antonio. I'm right between San Antonio and Austin. And I started the company again in 2014. And I wanted to share a couple of my golden rules of outsourcing and I'm going to focus on fractional outsourcing because that's where we shine and and that's what we specialize in. So we do fractional remote staffing, focusing on the administrative areas for law firms. And that would range again from anything from the legal assistant paralegals to Virtual Receptionist and up next we are adding firm administrators. And one thing that we do a little differently is we are 100% us face. So we'll get a lot of attorneys who need someone we get very specific requests or like I need to be matched with a paralegal who has litigation experience in New York. So all of the team members that we bring on and we vet and we have a very thorough recruiting process for have worked boots on the ground in law firms located in the US and so we can get down to the nitty gritty of I need a workman's comp paralegal, whatever it is that they need. And they want experience in that particular area. So wanted to share some of my golden rules. But first up fractional outsourcing means hiring people who are at the caliber of being a seasoned professional, they're incredible at what they do. And they work for you fractionally only as needed. So you might need someone 20 hours a week, could be less, could be more. And so what we don't want to do is hire one warm body and try and sit them in every seat in the org chart. And that's one of the biggest mistakes that I see law firms making is I you know, I always say like, Let's fill out your org chart, let's look at all the roles that you need to have within the company and who's sitting in the seats. And a lot of times the attorneys sitting in three or four, they hire one person expecting them to take on five, and my stance on it is why not get one or two are are incredible at what they do. And let's figure out what your incredible, what is it that fires you up and as you say, Thank God, it's Monday, I can't wait to get to work. You love creating great results for your clients, you like connecting with the clients. Those are the things that move the needle for the firm, everything else needs to go off the plate. And so that's really what we specialize in is finding people who are amazing at what they're doing. They're gonna be less expensive, they're gonna get it done faster, they're gonna get it done better because they're doing what they love. And so you can focus on doing what you love. So, one of my Golden Rule number one is unspoken expectations or premeditated resentments. I have learned this the hard way that when we are outsourcing, we need to make sure that we're setting expectations up front. So the role needs to be clearly defined. Oftentimes, we know we're overwhelmed, we know we need help, and we're just like get a hot body in a seat. But we really need to take the time upfront to define the role. They need to have KPIs. So we've talked about having to watch and manage team members, our team manager or our team members have been almost 100% in the green across the board, quarter after quarter after quarter. We've done a remote company from day one over 40 employees. And the team is performing well without needing the oversight because they're held accountable to the key performance indicators. And when they're held accountable to those, they have to show up and deliver Ever and so we're getting the results that we need. And they don't require as much oversight. They're also working within what I call their unique genius zone. They're doing work they love. Finally, is, do I have the time right now to train someone? Do I have training materials? Am I going to need to invest time and when I've brought on my own virtual assistants, I've had to say, alright, Emily, buckle up, it's going to be like 30 days, it's going to be rough, because you're going to have to train this person. And you're going to have to invest extra time when I'm already stressed out and already short on time and just know that. So what are the tips I give is if you don't have training, we use train Yule. So if you don't have training already, have your new person come in, have them say, let them know, I need you to create women videos, I need you to document whatever it takes, but you're going to be creating the role and the procedures for your role. So I want you to start writing down everything I'm teaching you on loaded up into something like train Yule, or Google Drive. So now we have the role defined. And if we do have to replace that person, for whatever reason, it's a lot easier. And then finally, is the expectations Am I prepared to invest the time and the money to make this successful, this is just throwing money away when we say I need help, but I'm not willing to invest the time to onboard train and make that an efficient process. To next step, I wanted to share a quick case study. And this is my own case study. So we save 56% of the cost of hiring a C suite. So unless till we're about a $10 million company, there's no way I'm gonna have an entire C suite of full time C level people, and I need a CTO, CFO CMO, all the C's. And so we drink the Kool Aid, we eat our own dog food, we hired a fractional team of C suite. So it's not just limited to your admin team, you can also utilize this with your C suite, doing this has saved over $614,000 in what we would have to pay in salaries for that C suite. And I'm hiring people who have that same seasoned level of experience that I would get, if I were hiring someone off the street with 510 years of experience for those roles. So highly recommend the fractional, I just wanted to share kind of my own case study. And what happened when we did this and hired the C suite. This way, we doubled our revenue in one year. So getting the right people in the right seats to help move the needle make the biggest changes. Golden Rule number two, and Jay touched on this. We also run on EOS. So the weekly same page. Again, teams don't need that oversight. When we're doing the same page meetings, we're reviewing their scoreboard every week we're reviewing the KPIs reviewing the to do list. And now we're not having to have these really weird, awkward performance management conversations a month or three months down the road. Because we're meeting every week and we're communicating expectations. We're following up on the to do's if they weren't done on time, why not? We're talking about it right then in there. Just kind of laying it all out on the table. So just because, you know, to Jason's point, you're offshoring or outsourcing the work doesn't mean it's hands off, they're still part of the team, we still need to manage. And that's what creates the Dream Team.

Golden Rule number three is culture. And this is something that everybody's touched on. I've found a study in Gallup that your revenues are 33% Higher, and companies that have incredible culture. And so I wanted to share a quote and this is from my fractional CMO. She said, I've worked at Fortune 500. Companies with endless resources and massive HR teams. But back office Betty's has been the best company culture I've ever experienced. Even as a fully remote company, they've created an inclusive fun and positive environment that is truly sets the standard for what a great culture should be. And it shows and the performance of the team, the performance of the contractors and the people we outsource with, everyone works together like a tight unit. And so the ways you can implement culture into your business in practical ways, is your core values we call them or Betty isms are a living breathing thing. So we reward by it, we use bonus li It's Bo n u s dot l y and we incent our team members to tattle on each other. So they get buddies bucks to spend by tattling on each other and giving more value shout outs when something good is done. So a team member gives you an assist you give them a shout out and you hashtag it with the core value and you share Betty books and everyone gets a budget every month that can be cashed in for real prizes, and gift cards and things of that nature. During our quarterly meetings, it's all hands remote full time part time doesn't matter. And we reward again we can do an MVP of our core values are Betty isms award winners. We provide growth paths for team members showing them that there's a pathway you know, to navigate through the company, team building exercises We do a dream manager list for all new hires. And so what we do with that is we say, sit down and come up with 50 Dreams they've small doesn't matter. Instead of saying, hey, Zuly did a great job, here's a $10 Starbucks, what we've done is said, Hey, Shawn really wants to go on a pink Jeep Tour in Sedona, I'm gonna cash that in. So we've said, Shawn, you know, take half a day off, we're going to pay, we bought you the tickets, you're going on the pink Jeep Tour in Sedona. And so we're cashing in their dreams and things that tie in with the work that they're doing with their own personal passions, and life dreams. And then we have wellness days, we use a company, it's a shop box moxie.com. And like, this is a gift that I just had made up for a board that I serve on. And you can see it's all customized, it's, you know, to match the board, it's got their core values on it. And inside is a curated gift that I put together, we use that embodies that shot box, Moxie for all of our employee onboarding, we do it for wellness days, they get a little gift once a year, when we have wellness month to promote mental and physical well being and work life balance. So little things like that to just really create a cohesive culture are the tricks that we have put into play. And finally, just avoid that outsourcing. Oopsies things that I've made mistakes on, don't be like me, learn from my mistakes, save yourself the headache, make sure we communicate roles. Clearly, we've got the KPIs in place, we've got a cadence of meeting rhythms, we integrate the culture and we make sure that the team members are good culture fit. And we also make sure we're doing adequate performance management. And the last little tip I wanted to give and it's one that I see a lot is when you're interviewing, and you're going to talk to your candidates. A lot of times what we're looking at is do we vibe with this person. And I've seen it time and time again, when a law firm makes a hire and the person isn't lasting and they're out within three to six months, the performance is bad. And it's because the personality was maybe a little bubbly like mine, but they need a paralegal who can dot every I and cross every T those people are going to be more like your computer programmers. They're a little more reserved, they're quieter, they're not going to show up as well in interviews, and that's one of the biggest mistakes that I see is to make sure that you're matching the traits that you need for the role to the person, rather than looking for a great fit of someone who made you feel warm and fuzzy. That's a wrap.

Awesome, I love it. And the slides are really cool, too. Thank you. So the question I have from your talk was the fractional portion explained. So I mean, I guess it makes sense. Like, if we had, we do have a lot of fractional folks, where are our social media manager, when we first started offering social media was 50%. She was fractional. And that made a ton of sense. And then very quickly, it became a full time job. You said that the fractional you hire the right person for the right seat at the right percentage, I guess is that correct assumption

100%. And it's a scalable model. So most of my fractional C team I've added additional time with and several of our paralegals have been the contract bought out by the law firm they're working with. So they may have started with 40 hours a month, 60 hours a month. And as the law firm scaled and grew, they said I'd like to take this person on full time. The paralegal they're working with loves the firm, and it was a great fit. And so we negotiate that transition for them and help make a smooth handoff. So that's another good way to kind of try before you by doing it that way.

We've run into a couple of instances, like one of our clients, their intake manager quit. And they were down another person and we introduced them to you folks. What are you seeing today, like Where where are the biggest needs and what which calls you getting most frequently from from firms.

From firms, it's typically just being a little overwhelmed. It's we're all busy. And a lot of times we don't they don't know what they need. And so I always say let's start with your org chart. Let's look there, because a lot of times we know we need help, and we're just not quite sure what it's like I need a little this a little of that. So I might let's look at the org chart. Let's look at where you shine. What do you want to focus your time on? What's most important to get off your plate and build it around that way? And then I'll tell you the number one call complaint we get in our call centers is the same as the number one bar complaint. Clients are not being given proper expectations. They're not being communicated. So the one thing I think law firms aren't looking at enough is client services and having a client services rep. Who's touching base letting people know, it could take a month, it could take two weeks, we're gonna follow up and setting real solid expectations. Otherwise, people just keep calling over and over, they feel like they're being ignored. And it ends up being the number one bar complaint. So that's a really easy one to avoid.

Fantastic. All right, well, I'll save a couple of good questions for you at the end. And let me introduce Zuly with a slide. So she did her MBA marketing in Monterey, and has extensive sales and marketing experience before spending the last nine years as a co founder of Profinder. International, it's very active in the community and charitable activities, and with some professional organizations that will probably tell us about. So with that, Zuly, I'm gonna stop sharing. All

right, well, thank you so much for, for this great opportunity of talking about nearshoring. And the great benefits for law firms. It's been a while since our first client started working with us in 2014. At the end of that year, and we just went into this marvelous world of helping companies in the US with great talent from Mexico. You can see my screen just to confirm. Yes. All right. So and we are located in Florida, we are done Mexico is so big greetings from sunny TV. If you haven't been here, I suggest you to consider it for your next vacation. I'd like to talk about the strategies to avoid pitfalls during nearshoring. Implementation. nearshoring is a great resource for law firms and many companies. However, there is there are some issues that we have encountered over the years that we'd like to share with you in caltopo them what strategies we've used and how to make the best out of this strategy. I've seen the pitfall number one is not having clear goals or a very defined expectation of what they want to achieve from a near shore operation. So the strategy is to establish a very, you know, well established with your near shore provider, these expectations what are you trying to achieve with us defining a SMART goals, which is this is a goal that is smart and is specific, like what you want to achieve by doing this new short strategy, you want to grow, you want to reduce costs, do you want to increase the number of cases that you are going to handle? What what is that that you want to do? As well, a goal should be measurable, that you can actually say in a number right convert 20% more leads into clients, perhaps file more demands per month, or file more bankruptcy cases per month and establish number what it is that you want to increase in how much as well to make the goals achievable, something that actually is realistic. Sometimes clients that go into nearshoring, they expect goals to be achieved way faster than what the actually the structure can allow. And it's really important to be very realistic and set milestones. as well. The goals need to be relevant to the actual broader business goals that the law firm is trying to achieve right in aligning them to them. And time bound, which allows you to give you a timeline in which you are expecting these goals to be met and the milestones to be reached. Just to know that you are going in the right direction and to be able to evaluate that the nearshore strategy is exactly serving the purpose that you want it to do achieve. Pitfall number two is a resistance to change. It's obvious that when human beings, we would like to do things in a certain way. And sometimes our staff, and even our own core team can struggle make these, these changes with you, within the law firm on owner have decided to go and try and use your strategy. It's important to owner to open an honest and straightforward communication with staff and with a new show provider as well. Include in the decision to your staff. You know, I'm sure you've seen observations from your staff, saying You know what, I need help. I'm overworked. We have too many cases we need an additional staff member or leverage those observations into this decision as a law firm owner that you're making. So the staff understands where you're taking this decision in order to solve the issues that everybody is seeing right, as well address the concerns and the fears that staff could have and be sure to we'll partner with a nearshore provider very sensitive to this part of the process and can navigate with you, the change with your staff and the staff that you're hiring remotely, to actually work together in a seamless transition, and prevention. Sometimes this could happen, we've seen this happen, avoid any type of small sabotage from a staff that is not comfortable yet with that decision. To prevent these is try to always record sessions between your staff and the near shore operator. So everybody stays transparent in hornist. And as well, as a business owner, you're able to sometimes review what information has been transmitted to the nearshore provider, as part of the processes you need to follow in order to ensure that everything is accurate and applicable to the policies that your company is following. So that would be our advice. With all these years of of going through this. The pitfall number three that we've seen is that undocumented processes, companies grow. And sometimes there's no time to grind and put, like all the documentation up to date of what everybody's doing. From our perspective, in Profinder. International, we really like to start there with documenting the processes that are being transmitted or extended to unusual operation. So we actually understand what everybody's doing and what is expected from them. This as well allows us to actually profile the position and look for the right person to fulfill the job. So this, the strategy is to work with the nearshore provider in documenting this process, keep them updated, as they are evolving, and be able to save those versions, right, like what it was in how it has evolved and what other decisions have been made over time. Here, I would like to share with you a story with one of our clients. It was a situation where they hired opposition for customer service, we started to see the job profiling was good. And this was almost at the beginning of us working with law firms. We profiled the position, we hired the person who had a really good a good resume and had good skills and had actually done a great job with psychometric testing and everything else that we do. And we were finding is this person was not being very stable in producing the result. So after observation, and asking the people around the position like, Hey, why do you think this person is not completing the job? I remember talking with the partners of the firm, several attorneys. And they all said this is a fairly easy job. It's actually simple. We don't understand. I talked with the senior paralegals, they said the same. And basically what we said is, one thing is what everybody perceives to be and one another thing, it's what it is. So we jumped into the position and actually did the job. And we discovered that what was very simple for the most and the highly skilled people in a company was not so easy for somebody in an entry level position, that ended up into developing a whole team that allowed the attorney to serve better their clients. This person in customer service was in charge of actually capturing and answering all the email and mailing that was arriving to the company on a daily basis. So almost about 250 emails daily, with all kinds of level of, you know, complexity from the most simple things to the most complex things. And when we decide to document and to actually give the answers to customer service without interrupting attorneys, and interrupting paralegals, we were able to actually save time increase the customer service satisfaction and stop the grumblings Well, we call though here, when you don't answer the question of a client in a, in a fair timeline, the client would actually convert the same question into three, three additional phone calls, text messages, and emails. And you're gonna create for your own self like basically just a lot of work. But it's not efficient because you're turning one question into three emails or phone calls, when you can just solve it more efficiently. So the training manuals ever seen because we've for us the way to go in every position that we work with, and we adapt to basically, whatever the law firm prefers to do in each aspect of the process. Over time, we're able to do raise our hand in proposed changes that could allow for, you know, efficient processes, but documentation is one of Things of that we've seen brings better results when you when you start there. Pitfall number four is the lack of confidentiality and information security. This strategy is to establish clear policies for both for near your own site, location and for the nearshoring. Office,

keeping keeping private conversations about compensation between your staff back in the US and the staff in the nearshore locations, to make sure that you ensure that those communications are, you know, not him, they are not available between them just to avoid issues. There was one time back in the time was well, we had an issue with a staff member that was working from California that found out that the Mexican staff was receiving as part of the benefits by law that you have to give to employees here, I have a small Christmas bonus, even though the staff in California was making three times more what the Mexican staff was doing, that created a lot of HR issues. So preventing those kinds of interactions, it's important, the same way that communication outside of the professional environment. It's difficult with social media, but at least to not encourage it. It's important, so they are part of the same team. But you don't want them to have discussions of other things that could make it a little problematic, especially in the onboarding system step. After that, then I think everybody grows as a team. And that doesn't matter anymore. But at the beginning is really important. As well, keeping your operations in an on site location, even when you are doing unusual setup. Having people working from an office like JSON, that it's really important, it actually keeps the security of your information of your clients safe as there is a level of management. And it's a level of security protocols on an office. What we do in Profinder, is we create a space just for each Law Firm, where there's no other interaction with staff that he's working with other law firms just to avoid conversations and processes of how everybody does their own thing. We keep it super, super private, and fostering an environment of productivity where the staff arrives to work and they don't have to worry about their computer setup, their licensing to enter any of the software that they need to work with, or the internet connection. And last but not least, the pitfall, number five is a lack of effective management and leadership in the nearshore location. Strategy for these is choose an experienced near shore partner who can offer that layer of management. So you can actually get you the best out of the team in these near shore setup, that can actually supervise that can train can can retain, can actually grow with the staff in the in this in the areas that they can grow. So they can do more, you know, solve more complex things to be able to create career paths and avoid turnover. The idea of opening unusual operation is to avoid the issues that you may have on your on your own location, right like turnover, or people not wanting to to stay there as a career. So you do need a heavy leadership in the near shore operations. And of course, I mean, you know, the benefits of nearshoring outweigh by a lot the negatives that could be. So there's great benefits, we've seen it with our clients, attorneys who were so ingrained in the operation that were unable to take any time off because the operation would stop. And by doing nearshoring they were able to take vacations for the first time in 15 years. So we have become the favorite for the families and the wives of the attorneys and the spouses because now there's time for them to spend with their families and still have an operation that is that is going as normal.

Awesome is that we thank you really cool slides as well. Okay, so I'm going to ask you all a few questions. And I'd encourage attendees to type some questions in the chat or the q&a, either one, and I of course collected a few questions. So I guess this question is for all three of you. But first for Zuly and Emily, because you both talked about how important it is to get started with you know, basically well clear goals. well documented, Emily talked about, you know, training and making sure you have good training documents. So maybe all three of you can take a crack at it. You know How do you ensure that you start things out with a good chance of having success? Yes,

well, one of the first things that we would like to do is to see what law firms have already document meant it, maybe it's not much, maybe it's diagram, maybe it's just small pieces here and there, would like to see that. And then one of our core team members insert into the operation, where the position is going to be taken. So we can actually complete that part of the training other thing, I mean, the training manuals, at the same time that we're producing the work. So these we have used this strategy after working with law firms for so many years and understanding that this is the most effective way of doing so. And that's where we create manuals, we create any type of tools that could help the physician to learn what they need to be doing. And as well, we create diagrams of workflows to see what comes next what comes after. And we make it very process based. So at the end of the day, the conversation with our clients is not all there. But factual is the process was not meant the process was not follow a or we need to improve. You know, it's a three step process. Let's diminish it to a two step process. So that's, that's how we've seen more effective throughout the years.

Great. Emily, you

want to take a crack? Absolutely. So I like to work with the department head who is doing hiring. So doing kind of a just conversation to figure out the scope of the position, what the requirements are, we can define KPIs, if it's never been done before, we can utilize different tools to help create KPIs. If we have someone else in the role, and KPIs have never been created, a great question to ask is, what does success look like for you in your position, and then we can take that information from someone already doing well at the job and building KPIs that way. So that's really important. And then just from a recruiting standpoint, is we like to magnetically attract or magnetically repelled just like you would in marketing when we're sourcing candidates. And so we'll use keywords that might be repelling to one person, but attractive to another to make sure that we're attracting the right type of people for the role.

Yeah, I agree with all everyone. Everything's what has been said. I mean, I wrote actually three eBooks about hiring and onboarding, and, and managing or supervising and the onboarding one, to me is maybe the most important of the three, because you could maybe hire the wrong person. But if you train them, well, you might still have a shot, right? And if you hire the wrong person, and and don't train them, well then manage them, well, won't matter. But you know, for me for training, is I say, you know, give yourself some space, you're not going to get it done in a day or two. I think for certain positions, you can do it maybe three or four days, other positions, you really should try to do like two weeks. And I really believe in going from the ground up. I will let the people know, hey, here's some newspapers, I want you to read that newspaper. Like every day, for the next three weeks, I want you to start to really feel like you live here where our firm is. I give them quizzes about pop culture in our area, like sports teams and politics and everything. And the reason is, this stuff creeps up in depositions, it creeps up in phone calls for intake. You know, what were you doing yesterday, I'm a little hungover because I went to the World Series parade yesterday. Well, if you have no idea that their baseball team and the community is any good, you might sound like someone who's in the Philippines. And I don't want them to sound like they're in the Philippines, I want them to sound like they're local, or at least as close to local as I can get them. So we do a whole thing on culture before we ever even get into the job itself. And then I really want them to understand our organization. I want them to see who everybody is. I want them to understand how to communicate feelings. If they have a problem with an assignment, who are you supposed to talk to? Where do they fit in the organizational chart, right? Because if you walk into an office, a brick and mortar office, you know, if you know your computer's not working, you're not going to walk into CEOs office and say, Hey, fix my hard drive, right. But if you're working remotely, it's just an email address. Every email address is just a couple keystrokes. Right? You still need to give them the sense of order to your office. And I think once you start to really drill down on these cultural issues, the job stuff is easier because then they see where everything fits. They understand here's some templates of previous work that was done. Who did that work? I can even see them in the org chart. Right? Who do I go to? And I think all that stuff when you lay that sort of that lattice work down, the actual work itself becomes much easier to deal with because in their mind, they know where they sit in the structure, and where things need to go where it goes, when I do it, who's going to give me feedback, who I can raise my hand to it all, all gels together. And I think, at least for me, maybe again, because I was just a very visual, I want to see where I fit in an organization. I want to watch the movie. I want to, I want to feel like I'm there, you know, great

answer. And you know, while you're rolling, Jason carrot crane has a question for you. How many employees do you have in your law firm? What percentage of your staff was near short? And what is the average cost of employee versus a full time staff in

Florida? Yeah, I saw the question. I felt like I couldn't answer it and type I have. I think I have 11 virtual assistants right now. And I think in total, we're probably 24 people. So not half, but darn near close, right? Obviously, the cost of the virtual assistant is considerably less than someone who's in the office. But when you look at the overall cost of the virtual assistant even goes lower, right, because I'm not having to go get more office space in Florida. But I can do it through the agency, who already has office space in Mexico, right? The electronics are cheaper. They're just, we provide way more benefits to our American staff than we do to our Mexican staff, just by virtue of the employment contract, right. The although we get health insurance to regions for our staff, it's very helpful, very happy about it was always important, originally, as I'm sure everyone else feels the same way. I don't want anyone ever to even consider words like, you know, sweatshop and these sorts of things. And, you know, like, Monterey, we've talked about Monterey Monterey is really, really industrial town. There's Asian companies, you know, that are running big, big rooms full of people, doing all sorts of things like that stuff does exist, you know, and it exists in Central America. It certainly exists in the Philippines. But there's, for me, there's a right and wrong way to do this stuff. And again, if you're following the pennies, and the dollars, like, you don't have to spend much money to overcome those issues. And so it's all very achievable. You just have to make it sort of one year goals. So I'd have to really get down and figured out the costs, but it's I, you know, I always think in my head, third, you know, about a third of what I'm paying. Yeah,

yeah. Great. Next one maybes. Let's put it to Zuly. First from Tom, thanks for being here, Tom. Realistically, I don't have the time or the patience to give the VA as much training myself. Could I pay extra to have a company do most of the training for me? And I went directly to you first, because it sounds like you developed a lot of the manuals and from existing stuff that the law firm had.

That's right. Yes, there's nearshore providers who actually offered the what I call premium package where you don't do much like it's only at the beginning. It's learning the first processes, documenting everything. And then after that is basically building hiring funnel. So you can just like hire and replace or expand the team, as fast as the company needs it. With time periods of training that could go from three weeks to up to three months, depending on the complexity of the position. If it's a customer service person versus a paralegal like in, in our in our experience with hire and train, for bankruptcy for personal injury, and it's different processes. And we've been able to help in the prepetition postpetition stages for bankruptcies creating plans for chapter 13 that are complex. And that training obviously, is a little longer. And we just base it by milestones of training, like somebody that starts in an entry level will have like a path of actually up to one year to be able to complete all these tasks that are complex, a little different than somebody that is in the intake position, or call centers where we actually deal with leads that arrive immediately with KPIs that answer with of answering within one minute, and conversions of 80%. So those are different trainings. And we can create materials for for each of the positions. And it just really depends of what the company would like, Where would like to start. And my suggestion is to start wherever you have a job vacant at the moment, that's the right place to start.

Great. And Emily, you talked about developing loom videos. And using a training tool or a Google Docs, you want to talk about what role you will provide for the firm or what additional services you can provide.

I think this is a big problem, Jay is a lot of the firms are missing a firm administrator, that I mean, they're really expensive salary, I understand why that's one of the reasons we're rolling out fractional firm administrators for firms to implement the structure, particularly related to like cadence of meetings, management of the team training and onboarding of the new staff. So somebody needs to own that role. And it is too much for an attorney to do when they're also trying to do all the other stuff. So if they don't have a firm administrator, I would recommend again, this is one of those like sea level roles that if you can't bring one in full time, go fractional, and it's going to completely transform the firm being having that role in place.

Great. Another question from Kara crane Zuly. You mentioned the benefits required by law in Mexico, what are they and who pays them our firm or your company? Well,

in our case, it's our company who hires the employee and who gets all the liability and all the benefits that need to be gone, you know, complied with, usually the benefits for law here in Mexico for full time employees have to be with medical insurance to government, the government program, as well for housing in retirement. And my my recommendation is to make sure that then you should provider that you're working with complies with the benefits per law, because in reality, employees are looking for security, and they actually can extend the time that they will stay in the company will diminish turnover. Those are paid. In our case, we calculate everything in we give an hourly rate and monthly rate. However, with the understanding that the number of hours that the employee need to work are the full time they cannot be less than the full time. And if we just make it easier for a client in, in the US that calculates, you know the costs in an hourly way we do it the same way.

I guess this would be a good question for Emily, what common mistakes? Should I avoid hiring globally? Hiring globally? Well, you don't right like Emily,

really don't. I have not had good experiences trying to do it myself. And so I said reverse, I'm not going to go that route. And I'm going to stick to I'd rather go fractional for the biggest one I started with was an accountant and J It cost me like $100,000 and mistakes. And I will never do it again. I don't care that she's a CPA from wherever she's from, like it cost me so much money. And I was so burned that I said, I'd rather go fractional expert, that was someone local, then do that ever again. So I would not be a good one to answer that one. I'll hand that off to Jason.

Yeah, I mean, the biggest mistake, it kind of dovetails to a question you had earlier, but is that you need to be able to invest the time to make this successful. And if you think you're gonna do it, like you're just gonna go to Best Buy and go buy a computer and go back to the golf course, this thing's gonna fail. You need to have the time to properly interview clients, the properly interview the staff to make sure you're gonna get the one that you think is a good fit. And you want to lean on, on sight tests, and you want to lean on, on like, for me, I've all process that I've laid out my ebook, but give them work. Have them do something for you and give it back to you. You don't just have to hire them that they're bubbly. But then when you train them, really train them. And for me, like I always tell my law firm owners, like if you're planning on going to work meeting with clients and sign up new cases, and blah, blah, blah, and you're going to train this person and supervise them, bro, that's gonna be a tough, tough road. I don't know if there's enough time there. So you need to have someone in your office that that person can really lean on can raise their hand, I have a question about this assignment. You know, someone where they can give feedback. And this just goes back to my first points. Just like if you had that job, you want to be treated like a human being, you need to have some way to communicate with people. We talked about clearly defined KPIs, and tasks. That's, that's what all that's about. They have to have a place to communicate. It's all about, like, one of the words I would use is over communication. And with remote staff. There's nothing more important than over communicating things because you have to make up for those watercooler conversations and those lunchroom jokes and those parking lot interactions, none of which occur, because the person is 1000 miles away, sitting in an office in Monterrey, Mexico, they don't get the benefit. Have of hearing those jokes hearing about Betty's issue with John, because they had some issue with the case management system. And the way they fixed it. They didn't get to hear any of that, right? So the way you make up for that as my over communicating everything else, and it's not perfect, but sometimes you end up with even more able employee than you have in your office because they're putting on helmets and they're running through brick walls, because they're not even caught up with the other stuff. Right. So sometimes it's an advantage to, but you got to over communicate.

I'm sorry, I asked Emily, the wrong question. Because we got a bunch of questions coming in from the LinkedIn live as well. How do you avoid potential remote workers working multiple jobs?

That's a good question. For our call center agents, we have a we give them all of their computer equipment and everything. So they know we have monitoring. The other thing is they literally can't walk away from their computer without us knowing because it's the same thing with our bas. When we've got chat setup, it shows you when someone's idle, it shows you when they're not available. We have time tracking, we have a cadence of meetings. If you've ever worked with anyone who was slacking, you know, they're slacking, everyone knows they're slacking, it's no surprise. And what I find is just with the right KPIs in place, it works out well. Has it happened? Yeah, we've caught them. I had one gal who left her mic on, and we could hear her when she was supposed to be doing offline training and getting paid for this. She left her mic on and she's got her buddies over and they're all watching Tic TOCs fired like these things happen. But you can tell in the performance in the way people show up. It's not hard. It's we overthink it way too much. They're either hitting it, they're getting the metrics, they're getting the results, or they're not. It's it will show up.

We had another good question on the chat. And Jason answered it, but nobody else can see it. And obviously we want to get it recorded. Because some of y'all are watching this a year from now on our YouTube channel, the 10 Golden Rules YouTube channel. So give us all a shout out. And please give us a comment. And subscribe on that YouTube channel if you are watching it. So Jason, the question was from Cara, again? Are your nearshore employees handling case loads directly themselves, or assisting us based paralegals. And part two is who's handling the client communication?

Yeah, well, I hate on the second part. First, everybody's communicating with clients, because just to to, you know, backup Emily's point earlier, there's no, there's no easier way to lower your stress level, and to do a good job as a lawyer than to communicate with clients and, and any avenue possible text, email, phone calls, person to person in the office, any opportunity to communicate with your client, you should take advantage of it. If nothing else, also, just to piggyback on something Zulu said earlier, you know, you you answer a question properly. In the beginning, it stems off four or five other phone calls and a bunch of other junk, right? So you get a client used to knowing to trusting that if they ask a question, they get an answer, they're not going to send you 1000 emails over everything else and stress about them because they know that you're going to be available when they actually need you. Right. And it's just like a relationship. Like if you were dating somebody, you know, if they ghost you for three or four days, then you're gonna have an unsettled feeling with them. And if you they talk to you every day, then missing a phone call from them. You know, it's not the end of the world because you know, you're gonna talk to him in six hours anyway. Right. But the first part of question about about what's question, first part?

Are you nearshore employees handling caseload? selves?

Yeah. So I would say like, 90% of our clients, that regions, the staff that they hired through us have their own caseload, right. My office, I don't have it set up that way. I have all my Mexican staff working side by side with my American staff. I wouldn't say in a supportive role, just more of like a side by side, you know, I'll handle this, you handle this. I need help with this. I'm going to handle this, we'll get back together. So, you know, that's just how I run my firm. It's it's not a commentary on capabilities. Clearly. They're very capable. That's that's not an issue. Awesome.

Well, there are more questions, but we're at a time so I want you all to tell everyone where they can find you. and access your tremendous resources. So Zuly Why don't you go first? Yes,

well, if you want to find me on LinkedIn is a great place. I'd like to live Murphy Aviles. Or in our website Profinder international.com.

Perfect. Emily, go ahead.

Backoffice buddies.com also Emily app back office Betty's dot com

and Jason, you can find me on LinkedIn. Certainly Jason Melton you can find me on our website regions Rs for regions remote services.com And feel free to text me if you want 813-505-7855

Awesome. And Jay Berkowitz, I'm I'm Jay Berkowitz. I'm most of the social medias because I beat Dr. Jay Berkowitz and Professor Jay Berkowitz to the new, the new socials and 10. Golden rules.com is spelled out te N Golden rules.com Awesome, everyone. Thank you all so much. This was really, really great. And I think I'm going to be sending dozens and dozens of people to this webinar to learn about how to add this as part of their their mix in their in their company. So I'm sure we'll have 1000s of YouTube views in the future. So thank you all for doing this. Thank you. Bye, everyone.

Thank you for listening to the 10 Golden Rules of internet marketing for law firms podcast. Please send questions and comments to podcast at 10 Golden rules.com That is podcast at t e n Golden rules.com