212: Outsource, Automate & Accelerate with Jaime Nacach

05
Jun

Jaime Nacach, the Founder and CEO of Virtual Latinos, the first platform focused on connecting entrepreneurs, teams and agencies from the US, Canada, and the world with virtual assistants and virtual marketers from Latin America. We discuss outsourcing, automation, and business growth with Jaime, who sheds light on tapping into Latin American talent and leveraging automation tools like Zapier. He highlights the potential for small businesses to enhance competitiveness and foster growth in the evolving global workforce landscape.

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Outsource, Automate & Accelerate with Jaime Nacach

Good day, dear listeners, Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast. And my guest today is Jaime Nacach, the Founder and CEO of Virtual Latinos, the first platform focused on connecting entrepreneurs, teams and agencies from the US, Canada, and the world with virtual assistants and virtual marketers from Latin America. Welcome to the show, Jaime.

Thank you so much, Steve. Happy to be here. Pleasure talking to you again.

Well, you’ve got a really interesting business and I can’t wait to dive in. A lot of people are peddling services with intermediating Filipino VAs, but you are in the Latino VA business. So how did you come up with the idea to start a VA agency in the first place? And then why Latinos?

Sure. So, I guess I’ll start by saying I am Mexican, born and raised in Mexico City. So I am Latino by birth and speak Spanish. And I live in San Diego, California, which borders Mexico. So, I’ve been very much, of course, involved in not only the Spanish part and the Mexican part, but just generally speaking in San Diego, there’s a lot of Latin culture. And I am a digital marketer myself in terms of I’ve been doing digital marketing for a long time, and a web designer. And so, I had a marketing agency that I started in 2013, but as a legal entity in 2015. And then as time passed by, I was basically trying to figure out, basically be able to grow the business, make more money at the time. And since the beginning, I only had a San Diego-based team, everybody in the United States. And as I went to lots of marketing conferences, I kind of learned what other companies were doing, which were to basically lower their costs. In this case, by hiring people in the Philippines. So, I did that myself, spent a long time doing it on my own without an agency and hired a total of five people. And none of them ended up, unfortunately, working out for various reasons. But for me personally, having such a big difference with time zone was a big problem because people wanted to work, ideally, at least the good ones during their day, which was my night. Definitely some people would work during my day, which was their night, which wasn’t good for them. And yeah, long story short, I’m like, you know, honestly, why have people been working with the Philippines for like 20, 30 years? I’m like, it doesn’t make any sense to me because I know that Latin America has great talent, but at the time, there really wasn’t any companies offering the same services as virtual assistants in Latin America. What did exist was VPOs and call centers that have been going on for a while, but not people working directly from their house and hired as an agency. So I thought, you know, why don’t I just do that myself and see if it works? Just do you originally only hire people that were going to be marketers for my marketing agency. And so I said, you know, I’m going to just try it and see what happens. And I did, and people were interested, but they didn’t want just marketers. They also wanted salespeople, customer support, and a bunch of other roles. And that’s kind of how it started. I just saw that there was an opportunity to do something nobody had done yet.

Okay. So you did it. And how is it working out? I mean, what are the differences between Latinos and Filipinos?

Sure. So, it’s working out great. So great that we now have a lot of competition. Lots of people now offering the same services in terms of only people from Latin America, I guess everybody caught on that it was a good thing that we could offer. So the main difference is definitely when it comes to comparing to the Filipinos, other than the price being the same in terms of more affordable compared to the United States, is the time zone, right? Because everybody in Latin America is in the same, practically, you know, three to four time zones in the United States. In fact, about 70% of our people are either in the Eastern time zone or within one time zone of that. So it’s really convenient because people naturally want to wake up and go to sleep in the same time as you. And then everybody’s, let’s say, fresh in the morning, just like you, as opposed to some weird type of feeling in terms of having to work at night. The second most important is really the cultural fits. I mean, of course, American culture is all around the world, but because of the closeness of being to Latin America, you know, there’s a lot of things that are closer to the American culture in Latin America because of so much of the cultural connection between the, you know, North and South America. And that’s actually, even though that may not seem as important to maybe some people, it actually has been one of the things that most people tell us is very important and it has made a difference in their companies.

Because when our people are hired by our client in the United States and our people can work with their customers and really kind of understand and feel like they understand the clients, it makes them better workers in a way. Share on X

So yeah, those are like a few of the main important differences.

That’s interesting. So how does this fit into this global rearranging of the workforce? You know, you’ve got a lot of people who are hiring people in Africa, especially in Nigeria. Apparently, they are very good writers down there. And then people are in the Middle East. India is obviously a big market. Then you have Eastern Europe. You’ve got a lot of programmers in the Ukraine, in Romania, Hungary. So how do you see the global workforce? How is it unfolding?

Yeah, I mean, the truth is, I think we’re all at a very good and important part in history when it comes to the global workforce, generally speaking, and the industry of outsourcing becoming more and more accepted. We specifically don’t offer actually any roles in technology-related roles like web design, web developers, software developers, and other IT-related roles. Specifically in Latin America, there’s already a few companies actually only offering that, you know, IT and talent in Latin America. And I actually know a few other people, friends, let’s say maybe competitors that are actually working with people in Eastern Europe and are working with people in the Philippines. I think that as a whole, it is a very positive thing that everybody, at least in the United States, let’s say as clients, are accepting and are being more open-minded to the fact that they can work with people wherever they are in terms of wherever the best talent can be found and not just locally in the US. You know, of course, us being in the US, it is a little bit of a problem in terms of naturally, you know, some jobs are not being given, let’s say to people in the US because they’re being outsourced. But the truth is like most of our clients that have obviously businesses, because all of our clients are business owners. They all say, you know, like the people in America, they’re working harder, they’re trying harder. And of course we’re saving money, but it’s like, we’re paying much less and people are working much harder. So for the business owners, it looks like a very positive thing.

Yeah, what I’m hoping is that this cultural amalgamation as a result is going to have positive implications. I think already when I moved here 10 years ago, I was really impressed with the US being this cultural melting pot and all different people from different religions, from different races, different nationalities, we can all work together and we don’t really care where anyone comes from. What’s important is what they bring to the table. And I think the outsourcing that is becoming even more diverse and even more accepted, and I hope that this will increase the understanding of people with each other and it will reduce tensions, but call me an idealist here.

I’ll tell you something else, that what’s actually in a way for the long term, let’s say between the United States and Latin America, lately in the news there’s been a lot of issues of how many immigrants are coming right into the United States because they’re looking for better opportunities. Now, those people may probably not speak English, and of course, the ones we hire have to speak English to work with our clients.  But the truth is, in a way right now, what we are doing and other companies like us are doing by being able to give better opportunities to people to stay home, to be in their country that they want to stay in, to be with their families, it’s actually good for everybody too, including the people here.

Yeah, and the way I look at it, and some people say, oh, we are outsourcing jobs. No, the way I look at it is we actually are enrolling people all over the world to support the U.S. economy. They are all working for the U.S. economy, and that just makes the U.S. economy bigger. And I don’t see unemployment skyrocketing here anytime soon. In fact, it’s at all time low. So I don’t see the problem. The robots couldn’t take the jobs and now the outsource workers are not taking the jobs. There are plenty of jobs to go around. So I’m glad we’re on the same page here. Let’s talk a little bit about automation because you’re not just using outsourced people for Latinos, but you also help automate businesses. So this is kind of a double bonus for businesses to work for you, double efficiency, tools, levers. What is your framework for automating certain processes in a business?

Sure. I guess first I’ll give a little input to those who may not know what that means a bit, and then I’ll tell you about the framework. So yeah, I am a marketer, like I mentioned earlier, and one of the things I love is technology. So I’ve explored and learned about automating both general business things, but specifically marketing automation to make the process of what I do in my business basically more efficient, which means to not do so many repetitive tasks with my human time.

And so, since I built Virtual Latinos from the beginning, almost every process that I thought that I could automate anything, I did. And so, that's been a powerful thing for growing the business. Share on X

Even though now we’re a big team of over 100 people. If we didn’t have all the automations in place, maybe I would have needed 150 people because we have a lot of stuff that’s working in the background. Now, I guess to explain, you know, what I would call sort of in four phases, how this automation framework would look like, you know, the first step is to identify repetitive and time-consuming tasks. The second would be to assess, you know, what can be and what cannot be potentially automated because there’s some tasks that still require, you know, human supervision and cannot be fully automated. And then if it can be automated, can it be automated without hiring a programmer, right? And that’s kind of the key thing these days, because automation has existed for a long time, but it’s been a much bigger buzzword today, not only because of AI, which helps you do a lot of stuff, not necessarily fully automated, but tools like Zapier and many others like it that basically help you automate processes without having to be a programmer, which is what I did, right? And I, even though I know how to do some coding, I studied business with information systems. This tool really made it easy to help me move data from one place to the other. And then, so, you know, once you figure out if you can do that with what’s called either no coding or, you know, a little bit of coding tools, but it’s usually called no-code tools. Then the fourth and last step is to actually execute the automation, which means you build it, you go to the tool that lets you automate it, and then you just turn it on and say, okay, now, whenever this trigger happens, this action should be taken.

I mean, it sounds so simple. I think about Novak Djokovic, when he plays tennis, he makes it look so simple and so easy. This is what you’re doing with automation, and most of us cannot wrap our mind around, for example, there is Zapier, which supposedly interfaces 5,000 plus applications. How does it even do that? So can you kind of give us a short course, like a five minute or three minute experience how to use Zapier to actually automate tasks and to link together different tasks and what kind of tasks can be automated together? Or how do you even think about this whole problem?

Sure, I’ll try to do it in the best way to explain it. So first of all, Zapier, at the time that I started, only integrated with around 300 apps, which I already thought was a lot. Today, it’s a little over 5,000. And by apps, I always mean web-based apps, because this is the only first important thing you should know. If you have like a legacy system, let’s say like QuickBooks installed on a server on your business that’s not going to work. Zapier only works if you have web-based tools. So that’s step one. If you have things like QuickBooks Online, if you have a website like WordPress, if you have a different project management system like Aplica or Asana, whatever it is that you’re using, most software these days, at least for let’s say modern businesses, they’re all web-based, right? So, usually the way that I think about it is, usually step number one is I go to Zapier and there’s a section that’s called apps, which you can literally type in the name of the app that you’re thinking about trying to automate something with and it’ll say whether it’s part of the 5,000 apps or not. And in fact, for me, it was like a requirement. If a new tool I was gonna use did not already have an integration with Zapier, I would simply not use it or buy it because I just wouldn’t want to do anything without the ability to automate parts of it. Now, some tools already have what’s called built-in automations, which means you don’t actually need potentially Zapier at all. That means, let’s say, for example, a website or a tool like MailChimp or email marketing might already have what are called internal integrations that can integrate with a bunch of other stuff without the need of a third party, let’s say, duct tape, which is how my CTO calls it. But Zapier, in the essence, let’s say step number two, assuming that you have both apps that you’re going to check, it’s usually moving or doing something from one app to the other app. So that’s kind of the main basic idea. If something happens-

Can you give an example?

Sure, I know. If something happens in app A, something else is going to happen in app B. So, as long as both of those two apps are supported by Zapier, then you can do that basic thing. So for example, one of the things that we do that are very common in many variations is when somebody fills out a form, an online form, we use a software currently called JotForm. JotForm.com is amazing. So if somebody fills out a questionnaire or they fill out a very quick form just as a lead, we want to do something with it, right? We do lots of different things, but I’m going to keep it simple. One of the most common things we do is we want to save that information into our CRM. Right now, we’re using Zoho, so if somebody, let’s say, fills that form through a marketing campaign or on our website, and we got lots of forms, we got like 65, I don’t have any forms, but if they fill it out, as the very basic, we want to capture that information and put it into a CRM. And what do I mean by putting it? I mean by creating a contact inside my CRM so I don’t have to manually do anything. The moment people click submit, Zapier is gonna check every five minutes if there’s new people that have submitted it. And if there are, they’ll basically copy, you know, the first name into the first name into the CRM, the last name into the last name field, the email into the email field. And basically within five minutes of anybody filling out your form, you can go to your CRM and type in whatever person’s name and it should show it up, or if you’re just looking at the list of your last contacts, it should show up at the top, right? So that’s one example. Another really cool example that I found really useful is actually automating things with Google Sheets. It’s crazy useful because there’s one specific – so there’s two steps at the very least, something called a trigger, which is what will trigger something to happen, and that’s the app A. And then something that happens on app B is called the action. So, for example, when we want to do a lot of automation related to data, we can create a Google Sheet with whatever columns of data we want to transfer to some other app. And then there’s a trigger code. If there’s a new row in Google Sheets, then basically import that data somewhere else. So similarly to JotForm, where somebody fills out a form. In this case, if you add a new row on Google Sheets with data, it’ll trigger it to do something else. In this case, it could save it also to a CRM, or it can send, let’s say, an email if you connect it to MailChimp, and so on and so on, right? The cool thing about Zapier is that when I started it, you could only do as simple as it, from A to B.

212: Outsource, Automate & Accelerate with Jaime Nacach Share on X

I have very complex Zaps, which is what these Zapier automations are called with 35 steps. It’s crazy.

That’s amazing. So, essentially, that helps you to create these workflows and then the workflows cut down on repetitive tasks, so your people are not focusing on routine tasks, which drains their energy, but they can focus on more creative tasks. So, what are the kind of tasks that you typically see your VAs are needed for when you remove all this repetitive automated stuff? What kind of things do they do?

Great question. First, I’ll say that, you know, the good thing about working with somebody in Latin America is that you get double the benefit if you also use automation. You’re already paying less because they’re more affordable, but then if you’re also having them not spend their time doing repetitive work by automating stuff, then they’re even more useful to you, which means they’re even more affordable, right? So, the types of tasks that are usually are done by our assistants, generally speaking, definitely include admin tasks, because there’s always going to be some admin tasks that are going to be the need for somebody to do it. For example, such as taking calls, being a receptionist, being an executive assistant, right? But they all usually need the interaction with other humans, in this case, our clients’ clients. Now, many of those roles are also in sales, because that also requires talking to people or answering a question on the chat. And all those things are continuing to evolve, right, as we have ChatGPT and people are creating chatbots for answering sales-related questions. But many of our clients are in the smaller business sites, so even if these tools exist, most of them haven’t necessarily figured out a complex chatbot for their company to answer questions, right? So, we all need human support, including ourselves. The other one that’s very creative, of course, is marketing and design. So, we get a lot of people that do graphic design, a lot of different roles within marketing, because there’s email marketing, there’s SEO, there’s content marketing. Marketing is a huge thing. And then there’s the general, what we call customer support, which is talking to people once they’ve been clients. And there’s other versions of that, like tech support, as well as admin related to the billing or finance or accounting part. But we have also many, many other roles working with legal assistants. I mean, as legal assistants, as doctor assistants, as project managers, as procurement managers, all set of roles.

Yeah. So especially when there are human interaction, where you have to bring some emotional intelligence, emotional qualities as well, you have to energize people. That’s when you deploy real humans who can then make a huge difference. They can focus on the real stuff, not on the repetitive draining stuff. That is awesome. Now, one of the things that I have heard some of my guests talked about when it came to Filipino VAs was that they are often not ideal for, I mean, there are some exceptions as well, but they are great for customer service, but often not for sales, for sales closing. Do you find that to be the case for Latino VAs, or you find some really good closers as well amongst them?

First, let me say that we have a lot of clients that are very happy with the Filipinos VAs that they work with, and I have nothing personally against working with people in the Philippines. I myself had to find something better for myself. We have clients today that work with both people that they already have in the Philippines, but then they also want to work with people in Los Angeles so they come to us. Some of them want to replace them because usually the agencies in the Philippines that they work with, they don’t pay them too much, but we do pay our people very fairly. When it comes to your specific questions of sales, yes. Look, Latinos, from what I’ve heard other clients, because I’m definitely biased as a Latino myself, they have told me that Latinos, based on their experience, seem to be a little bit more willing to be more creative and going off script, usually as a positive thing in terms of thinking outside the box and not only following the specific either script or standard operating procedure that they’re given, because the culture is obviously different than in the Philippines. I’ve heard that in the Philippines, people’s experiences are like, I guess, definitely not like India, where it’s a lot more like you got to tell me exactly what to do. The Philippines are different. And I work with them too. They definitely can be creative. They can definitely think outside the box. I’m not saying that they can’t, but the culture in Latin America with the workers here in the United States, I mean, the businesses, they tend to be great salespeople. We have a lot of clients who hire our people to do sales. It is our second or third most common role. Like people come, they’re like, you know, I need a sales rep, I need somebody to book appointments, I need somebody to do follow-ups. It is very common.

Interesting. Very interesting. Okay. Well, that’s great. So you can branch out. I’m talking to the listeners now. So we can all branch out to different geographies for people with different skills. Perhaps in Latin America, you can get some sales VAs as well as customer service. Then you can get good writers in Africa, great customer service, and great other skills all over different geographies, coding in Ukraine. That’s awesome. Then the automation is another layer. I’m really starting to worry about the fortune companies that they don’t have access to all these things because of the culture is being more rigid and more press-oriented. They actually are losing out on some of these things, right? Automation, everything is a five-year project with big IT and they can’t just pull a Zapier on things. The same with outsourcing, it could be that this is an advantage for small businesses.

I want to share with you that we have several of our clients that when we’ve reached out to them for a testimonial or being able to quote them. They’re like, listen, we love you guys and we would love to continue working with you forever, but we are not going to openly talk about you because you are our secret weapon. Not a lot of people sometimes want to talk about us because they see us as a great advantage against a competitor, especially in specific industries where it’s not typically seen as a positive thing to outsource some of the tasks that the businesses do. But I can definitely tell you that just like any tool and technology that comes into the world’s history, let’s say, those who take advantage of it and use it properly usually tend to thrive, and those who don’t tend to want to accept them and use them usually get left behind.

Yeah, yeah. So that leads to my next and last question, which is, what is it that you’re working on that most excites you?

Sure, so, you know, we internally are working on a lot of different projects, but I can tell you that we see our company as a company that’s making a big impact in everybody’s lives who are part of our community, both including the people in Latin America as well as our clients in the United States, which is why our 10-year vision is to empower the lives of a million people. That includes empowering both the people in Latin America to have better, you know, jobs and lifestyles, as well as the clients in North America to have better ability to access help at a great, more affordable rate with great professionalism and skills. So the combination of both.

So I say that because we want to continue to encourage more and more people to work remotely with Latin Americans, of course, that we're offering. Share on X

So we’re creating Academy. We already launched it about six months ago but that was just the beginning where we’re creating basically a lot of different courses to start helping train and give the skills that we know are lacking in Latin America because in Latin America, naturally, there’s not as many opportunities to work with American businesses. So many of the software that we use here in the United States is not even possible to use in, let’s say, Mexico. For example, one of them being QuickBooks Online. QuickBooks Online for accounting only works, to my knowledge, maybe in the US and potentially maybe in Canada, but it doesn’t work in Mexico and it doesn’t work in other countries now. We definitely have people that are, for example, have an accounting background or, you know, are CPAs, so they know how to do bookkeeping and other tax, let’s say, stuff, but may not necessarily have the access to use QuickBooks, right? And like this, there’s many other examples. So we’re really excited about continuing to invest in building an amazing Virtual Latinos Academy as an educational platform to continue to invest in our people, which we’re giving to them for total, full free access for them to basically come and learn and to make sure that they see a lot of value in us, not just as a place to find a job, but as a place to grow their careers and their knowledge. And that’s one of them. And generally speaking, other than that, which very much excites me a lot, not a specific project, but in general, excited is the fact that as we continue to integrate AI, technology in general, automation, and amazing people together, it’s just like a beautiful combination. Like we just had our meeting in our team. We meet our entire team every two weeks. We just had it before this conversation with you. And we were speaking a lot about technology and all the tools we’re going to be using and building. And people were like genuinely excited, which is not necessarily as common sometimes, geeking out about a bunch of things we’re going to do with technology. But yeah, I think it’s just great because it will help everybody do better with their jobs and make, in a way, their life easier.

Yeah. I mean, you know, the definition of fun is something I’m going to paraphrase it, but it’s something like being able to improve, not in an overwhelming way, but gradually improve on a continual basis. And then you give people the opportunity to find that improvement and to essentially to have their curiosity satisfied all the time. It gives tremendous energy to people. People feel like they’re evolving, they are doing this or that thing, they’re helping others. I think that’s an awesome thing and you have a really great purpose helping a million people.

A million and ten years is a big goal. That's what we have. Share on X

That’s pretty ambitious.

Families or businesses and the people around them, it’s a big number.

Yeah, it is a big number. So good luck. Good luck with that. I’m sure it’s going to happen. And if people would like to learn more about how to outsource to Latino VAs, maybe find some sales closers down there, or they would like to connect with you and learn a little bit more about your story or how you use Zapier for automation and other tools, where can they go?

Definitely. We invite all of you to please check us out on our website, which is virtuallatinos.com and all the social media, different networks that are out there. We’re at @virtuallatinos. And of course, if you want to reach out to me, you can definitely come to our website and contact me through there, or you can find me on LinkedIn. My name is Jaime Nacach. I’m sure you’ll be able to find out how it’s spelled. So yeah, happy to connect with anybody that’s interested in learning more about the beautiful opportunities of working with people around the globe, but of course, in our specific case, in Latin America.

Awesome. So, thank you, Jaime Nacach, Founder and CEO of Virtual Latinos. Thanks for opening your Pandora’s box and sharing your secrets about the Latino VAs, as well as the automation, how to simplify it in our own minds. And those of you listening, stay tuned because exciting entrepreneurs keep coming to the show and sharing great frameworks for you that you can implement in your business. So, thank you for coming.

JAIME NACACH: Thank you as well. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

 

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