Track 2: Crossing borders: Best practices for working with an outsourced team

"In this presentation, I share my experience of building and working with teams in India and Mexico and all the mistakes I made along the way! Decide if you are ready for outsourcing and How to find the team that works best with your firm."

Transcription:

Kristen Keats (00:11):

I forgot to badge into the last session I was in, so I guess if we want CPE, where do we badge in back there? We use our skin, our things. Yeah. Okay. Hi everybody, I'm Kristen. I'm here. My topic is Crossing Borders, it's best practices for working with an offshore team. There's our little branded slide. So I love how the other speakers today have just teed all of this up beautifully for me. It's been great being a part of these other sessions, but it's really just validating what I have learned as a practitioner in the last few years that really if we're going to survive and thrive and bring joy to our world, which that's my mission in life by the way, is to bring joy to accounting. And the only way that we can do that is if we're not killing ourselves. And I see having a remote team or using an outsource team as one tool in the toolbox for accomplishing this. So a little bit about me. I've been a CPA for over 25 years. I stopped counting because that's long enough for me to keep counting. I have been in tax my entire career and mostly working with small business clients. Although I started off in the big firms for most of my career. I've worked with small businesses, individuals, I've worked with really the clients that are on QuickBooks Online and Zero and that are really owner managed businesses. I got interested in working with international teams in about 2018 was my first interaction with working with an international team. And it was at a time when I had been a practitioner for a long time and we were starting to feel the staffing crunch around that time.

(02:07)

And I was looking at starting my own firm. And one of the problems that I was trying to solve for is finding staff because I knew that I wasn't going to be, have the capacity to do all the work. And so once I started working with, at the time, I was at a firm that had a team in India and that was just life changing for me because that really would've solved all my problems. So since that time, I've become a co-founder of a company called Cadencia. We have an staffing firm that is out of Guadalajara, Mexico and we work for accounting firms, other firms too, but primarily accounting firms. And like I said earlier, my life mission is to bring joy to accounting. So everything that I do is for that one mission and goal. So my topic today is on building bridges. And so I want to cover how do you find the right team? You want to think about location hours, the skillset. I'm going to go into all of that. I'm going to go into another big topic which Heather touched in on her last session, which is about, we're always worried about security, we're always worried about following the rules. How do we do this the right way? So I'll tell you how we go about doing that. And that's really about people. It's about access, it's about monitoring and prevention. And then I'll give you some of the best practices for process team building our core values. And I'll tell you some of the mistakes that I've made. So you can avoid making those same mistakes. So everything, it's always a learning curve.

(03:40)

So first I want to talk about the benefits of having a remote team. Like I said, the other speakers have teed this up really well for me today, so I appreciate that. But I'll tell you what I've gleaned from this. First of all, it creates scale in your firm to leverage tasks off the plate of you and your US-based team. Cause what we found is where the strength of having our US-based team is those client relationships. So let's use our US-based staff to have those client relationships. Let's take our clients out to coffee and let's utilize our remote team to do those tasks that are taking up all of our time. And the other benefit is that we have been hearing about this problem with staffing in the US and the pipeline problem and fewer people are going out and getting their CPA. There's less of a problem with that in some of the other countries and markets that are out there. So it's really just giving us access to more staff globally. And of course there's a lower cost. And what I found too is I found a lack of ego and a willingness to work that I don't always see in the US frankly. I found that sometimes if you talk to an accounting grad in the US and you maybe give them a bookkeeping task or ask them to reconcile a bank account, they might think that that's beneath them. They're like, well, got a four year degree. It's like, yeah, this still needs to get done. Where I don't find that with my remote team and they're just very eager to work. And then this is probably a benefit that I didn't necessarily expect, but just by having a remote team in another comp country, another culture has really expanded me just as a human being. Just being able to explore other cultures and get to know people in other parts of the world has really been an amazing benefit to me and about learning to know how other cultures work and what their values are, getting to know their families and their culture when I go visit.

(05:58)

Okay, so the first step is finding the right team. So you guys probably, if you've paid attention at all, that there's tons of opportunities to find an outsourced team. And I don't know about you. I constantly am getting LinkedIn a connection request by folks telling me that they can help me find an outsourced team. So how do you go about finding the team that will be right for you? So first thing you need to think about and I tell anyone who's considering this to really map out and be as specific as you possibly can about what the skill sets are that you need. So not just saying I need a bookkeeper. No, say I need a bookkeeper who knows my specific industry or knows this specific software. Be as really granular as you can to be able to try to locate the right team. What hours do you need your team to work?

(06:49)

Do you need someone who's working US-based hours or would it be okay with you if they were, let's say if they're in India or the Philippines, their clock might be completely opposite of ours. And is that okay? Is it something that you can really work asynchronously with or do you need them to be on US hours and will that time difference be an issue? So I know for me personally, I really like interacting in real time as much as possible. I actually have a standup meeting with my team every single day just so we can touch base on the work that we're doing. Some people that's not so important. You can do a lot of things during via loom videos and things like that to be getting feedback to your team. The language and culture barriers, some are more than others. Having worked with an India team, their language, they speak English, it's awesome, their English is different than our English, which it actually kind of makes it fun because sometimes when my birthday rolls around I'll get a text that says happy returns. And I don't know what that means, but I think it has to do with my birthday. So it's just funny things like that. Little cultural differences. And then this one is really important to me and to for I like firm owners to think about if you're willing to be able to travel to visit your team or to have your team travel to the US to visit you. For me personally, I love having the ability to have an in-person touch at least once or twice a year. I know that the team always appreciates it when I've been able to go and visit them, but it was something that you're going to want to think through as you're looking at the team that you want to build. And the last thing, which might be the most important is to make sure that whatever company or team that you are utilizing shares your core values. And for some of us that might be really reflecting on what are our core values, what are things that are important to us and what do we therefore want to see in the team that we're hiring? And so this again, was why it was really important for me to be able to visit because I want to make sure that the working conditions align with how I would want my team to work, that people still get to have a life outside of work. I don't want to create a great work-life balance for my team in the US just so that I can have somebody else not have a work-life balance in the outsourced team that I use that really wouldn't accomplish my overall goals. So those are things to think through. And then of course, what's the specific skill set that you need? So whether you need bookkeeping help, tax help, again, be as granular as possible. I know a lot of us with smaller firms, we might have staff that do bookkeeping and tax all throughout the year. And so is that something that you need or can you get someone more specific to the actual skills that you're looking for?

(09:56)

Okay, I love this quote. This is from my pal Matthew Mays at Acuity. Don't be afraid of offshore. It's just people. I actually got into a little bit of a Twitter spat the other day with someone happens from time to time. But because I feel like a lot of times folks will kind of use this blanket term for offshore or outsourcing, and I really always like to bring back to these are human beings and they just live in a different part of the world, so let's make sure that we're treating them as human beings. So the first objection that we get in that vein is usually around security concerns. And I think that's where this Twitter thread maybe was going is that there's almost this immediate assumption that if you are outsourcing that there's some kind of security risk there. And what I've found, I actually in the last six months have got done a really deep dive on our own firm security and which is eye-opening and terrifying. I don't know if any of you guys have been through this process, but really having an IT audit on your own security. And really what I found is there's not necessarily any greater risk mean now that we're all in the cloud, now that all of our information is out there, there's not necessarily a greater risk to having things outsourced versus the risk that of your own firm. And so what we've done is no matter where folks are located, we're still doing referencing and background checks, we're still having constant communication about the risks and creating awareness around the risks.

(11:43)

So in other words, how many of you do phishing email tests and things like that with your firms? So yeah, we're doing that. We do that with the US folks, we do it with the folks in Guadalajara, the same thing. So it's really important for wherever folks are located. You're doing that regular training. We're doing the internal campaign campaigns, blogs about security trends. I know we get an email every week about whatever the latest breaches are that we need to be at risk of. And so we just make sure that our entire team is included in all of that. And then of course there's access control. So we've got the two factor authentication, whoops, that's really important. We use a Google authenticator or we use a text just the same as we do in the us. This creates a lot of challenges sometimes though with folks on the offshore team because I know sometimes they don't, they're not able to set up with a non-US based phone number. So that's a little challenge we've had to work around with. We use an app called RingCentral that we can set up a text number. I know Google has some ways around that, but you know, have to find sometimes creative ways in order to get those controls in place. But it's important that we keep those up and that single sign on is another one because so by a single sign on, what we mean is, in other words, using Google to sign in with instead of a password. A lot of us are using Practice Protect is another one that does this where can, if there was any kind of a breach or a security risk, the access then can be kind of shut down in one spot for everything. And then we have our files and access levels so we can have just certain permissions given to certain folks on the team depending on what access they need in order to do their work.

(13:58)

And then probably the highest level is to do a VPN, which we are currently implementing in our firm to do it. And all of these things though, what's been interesting for me is that we had a certain way that we operate with our US team. So it's then how do we integrate with our outsource team? So our outsource team has their own IT department, their own IT person that handles a lot of things. So I've had to kind of put my US person in touch with the outsource team person. They speak the same language and they can coordinate those efforts as they go.

(14:40)

And then we set up these kind of certain rules around, again, these aren't really different for our outsource team, but we say we provide a computer to our team. We say this is only for business. You're not to use it for gaming, Netflix, all those kind of things. We make sure everybody's on the latest updates. We always have a remote control ability on that laptop computer. So again, unfortunately if we've had to terminate somebody or anything like that, we can shut down access right away. And we can assure our clients that their data is always secure and we're always monitoring the network usage as well so that we can, if there is any kind of improper use of the computer, we get notified of that right away. But thankfully we haven't had to deal with that. So I can move on to what I've learned as our best practices. One of the things that I have learned about is with our onboarding. So whenever we get a new team member, it's always important to remember this is a very big day for them when they started a new company. So as much as possible, I really try to welcome them, do a big intro with the rest of the team and make them part of our team as much as possible. And a lot of what that includes is training and getting them off to speed With our team, we usually give them a week to, for example, they do the QuickBooks advisor training, they're getting up to speed with all of that. We set them up with our training on our tax software, whatever it is for their specific job. We make sure that we give them access to all the training materials and give them a week or so to get up to speed with that. And then are also building in time in their schedule to keep up to date. With the trainings as we go, the processes are going to be key. And this is the thing that really any gaps in your processes are going to be highlighted by having a remote team. That's where you're going to see where any problems are. And it still happens to me on a regular basis. We have a practice management software where we have all of our steps mapped out and it's really easy once you bring a new team member on when they miss something, you'll be like, oh, that's another step in our process that we we're continually fine tuning that. And like I said earlier, I really make it an effort to visit whenever possible. I think as much as possible, you never want your person to feel like, you know, would never hire a staff person and just put them in a room by themselves and then never speak to them again.

(17:24)

You really would want to interact with them. If they were in your office, you would take them out to lunch, you would take them out to coffee. Those, you know, just have to be more intentional about that when you have a remote staff and you have to have that awareness also of their local culture, their customs, and the more you work and visit with them throughout your time together, that's more time to be able to learn that. And my team luckily has been so gracious with me as I go and visit them. And so patient and I've been really working on my Spanish and they've been really great and patient with me as I learned Spanish and also with the India team as well. And really we recognize their holidays, we try to learn about their culture and have that cultural exchange. So it's not really just this one way of how we work in the US as how this is going to go. We've learned a lot from our Mexico team as well because they have a different way of working than we do and frankly we probably could learn a lot from them. We're a little more laid back than we are. So I've learned a lot from them about chilling out and relaxing and enjoying life a little bit more. The other thing that I encourage folks to do is to have a team champion in the us especially if you're a larger firm, you really need to have that one person who can be a point of contact for your remote team and be their champion. I know I think it was Alan was mentioning today of a lot of firms will say like, oh yeah, we tried offshoring, we tried outsourcing and it didn't work. We sent a few returns and it didn't work. And that's so common because there's always going to be. It's always going to be the first time of trying something that's going to be hard. So you have to work through that and if it's important to have a person in your firm that can really be that advocate for that team and really work with them, and it is a time commitment, it is a commitment for someone that maybe they are like a senior or manager level in your firm, but it's so important for your team to have that mentor and have someone help them, show them the ropes of your specific firm that to it, it's so critical to the success of the remote team, especially if you only have one or two team members, you know, never want them to just feel like they're off on an island somewhere. You really want them to feel a part of the team. And having a buddy in the US to help them navigate that is critical in my opinion. And then ideally also to have a team liaison in the remote country as well. So for example, for our team at Cadencia, we have a client success person who can help us if we need to give feedback to a team member. If someone is struggling and we're not sure why we have someone there who's speaks their native language, who can help them as well, mentor them on that side as well. And it's really important to have their roles and expectations clearly defined. I feel like everything I'm saying here is, and that goes for us staff as well. It is, I feel like I always need these reminders of, it's just the same managing someone in the us it's just a titch harder because they're just not down the hall in the office, down the hall. And so it just takes that much more intention, intentionality to execute that. And then the continuous feedback is super important as well. We are either doing, one of the tools that I've implemented is I have office hours, which the team loves, so that just gives them a chance where I open up, I get on the Zoom and I open it up for whatever questions or problems that they're dealing with and everyone's invited to come so they can also see what other questions the other team members have. And it's a huge learning opportunity because sometimes they don't even know they would have a question until someone else asks it. And so just to open that opportunity up, it has really helped us a lot in the communication. And then we are also using within our practice management, the ability to have our good old review points for tax returns. Like everything that you saw and made changes on, I really try to make a point to not just change it and get it out. I know in the thick of tax season sometimes it's really hard to just not resist that temptation of just getting it done and out, but always providing that feedback to the team member about what they could do differently because otherwise none of our lives are going to get better if we can't delegate down and train our team, it's not going to get any better. So the takeaway from this, again, your remote team is your team, and so I think it's real important that if we are using remote staffing, that we don't think of it as a separate and entity or a separate identity that they really become a part of our team. So how many of y'all are using remote staffing right now? Like offshore? Yeah. Okay. About half. Okay, cool. A little more than half. That's good. I feel like even a year ago it was a lot less than that. So I think all of us are drinking the Kool-Aid now that we know that we need to embrace it. The time has come and then it's a matter of what's going to work for our firms the best.

(23:06)

Okay. Sorry, I went backwards instead of forward. There we go. Oh, here's a quote for my partner, Martin Mull. Having a remote team will only highlight weaknesses you already have in your processes. This is what I was saying earlier, it's really good to continually refine those processes and know where your weak spots are. Okay, this is another common question I get a lot. How many tax folks are in the room? Okay, yeah. This is probably one of the biggest questions I get is about communicating with the clients and getting the disclosure that we need in order to send tax work. So I'll give you the background you at the beginning that I'm a tax person and so you kind of get to this decision point when you're going to start using an outsourced team about like, okay, how do I disclose to my clients? How do I get my clients to agree to the disclosure and what's the communication around that? So the IRS has this code section 7216 that's multifaceted. So one part of it is just about in general disclosing tax information, which I know that for the tax folks in the room, you already know if someone says, Hey, my mortgage broker needs a copy of my tax return, well under code section 7216, we need to get a expressed permission for that. There's a very specific format that it goes in to get permission for that. There's an extra layer when it comes to sending tax information outside the US, which I think is really interesting now that so much is in the cloud and we don't really know where things are if it's outside the US, but we're going to use the broadest definition possible just to be conservative because we're accountants and we want to be safe. And so we are required to get our client's permission when we disclose their tax information and especially social security numbers outside the us. So that's what 7216 is.

(24:59)

So I already said that. And so one thing that I think is interesting that I think a lot of folks forget about is this is also required for just disclosing. So for example, if I go on a vacation to Paris and I decide that I'm going to work for my hotel room, this disclosure is required for me to work on client information anywhere outside the US. So I think that that's even eye-opening for a lot of tax preparers that it's, it's not just a matter of if you work with an offshore team or not, it's really accessing their information anywhere outside the US and the AICPA has some great forms and it's in the IRS required format that you can use to get the consent from your clients. So then the question is how do we communicate this to our clients? And I say honesty and transparency. When the day I am very clear with my clients about who my team is, where they are located, all of their faces are on our website. I invite them to my client meetings. I'm very clear and transparent about all of it. I humanize my team as much as possible. Everyone knows their names, they know with their faces and we have them talk about their pets just as much as possible to really make it not scary because I understand for a lot of clients, they're not in our world. We've been coming to this conferences, we've been hearing about outsourcing for years, but our clients haven't been hearing about this for years. So we really need to give them a little breadcrumb trail to make it as comfortable as possible for them. And this is what, so probably for the last two and a half years is when I've been having these conversations with my clients.

(26:50)

Actually more than that, it probably has been since 2018 because while at the firm I was at previously, we allowed our clients to have a choice about whether they would sign that disclosure or not at the firm I own. Currently we do not. We are requiring all of our clients because it's the only way that we can work. It's too difficult to have different systems and processes for clients who agree to the disclosure versus those who don't. So I'm like, I'm not even going to bother with that. We've got enough clients, we don't need to do this. So if you don't feel comfortable with it, sorry, you can go to the next firm down the road.

(27:33)

Including them I client meetings a positive firm-wide messaging. And so this is really important too, that as much as possible, every single person on your US-based team needs to be on board with the whole outsourcing initiative because if there's any negativity or dissent, the clients are going to sense it and it's not going to be a positive vibe for the team in general. And even when it's not required. So for example, for bookkeeping work, you're not required to get a 7216 disclosure. However, I always am making it clear to clients because I never want to have that conversation of, well, you didn't tell me that my information was going out of the country, so I never wanted to do that. So I'm just very transparent about it from the beginning. Have you guys, if the tax people, are you guys outsourcing your communicating with your clients? Does anyone have any thoughts or ideas about that? Are you not sending tax work outsourced? No. It's probably the last hurdle, I think to a lot of the outsourcing work. I think the bookkeeping is probably the easiest lift. And so a lot of times we'll start with that and then we've been able to grow our bookkeepers into tax people, but we're really looking at it in a long-term view because it's the only way that we really see as being able to manage the firm profitably, honestly, going forward.

(29:18)

So I wanted to make sure, I usually get a lot of questions, so I wanted to make sure I had plenty of time. I've got my contact information up here, but I would love to hear others' experiences too about what you've done and also any questions that you have. Yeah.

Audience member 1 (29:41):

How long does it typically take, decide you're going to off actually having people really understanding the engagement and being on a regular basis?

Kristen Keats (29:52):

That's a really good question, and this was probably one of the things that I had to learn about too. So Heather's question was, how long does it take between the time you're like, okay, I'm making the decision, I'm going to hire someone till they're fully on board and able to really go? Obviously it depends on the person because they're human, but I would say usually it's about 30 days to be able to do the search and interviewing. On the probably best case scenario, it's probably 30 days to be able to get someone hired and then they give notice start. I would say probably from beginning to end, it's maybe six months because, so we're interviewing them, getting them onboarded, we're getting them trained. So in Mexico, for example, what I love about accounting, it's a universal language. So they already know accounting, they've done some work, but they don't usually know QuickBooks, so it's usually a month or something for them to get to know QuickBooks.

(30:47)

I know other teams in the Philippines and India, they're already on board with QuickBooks, so that part of it, they're really up to speed. So then the trick for us is getting them to know the individual clients, which again, kind of the same in the us it's probably another, I think three months before someone can really go through that cycle enough. And I guess when I'm saying this, I'm thinking about our bookkeeping clients. So for tax clients, it's probably going to be the whole, it's probably going to be most of the tax season before they get in the rhythm. I mean, I've been really lucky. So one of my folks that I hired, I hired her actually as an admin. And then the, okay, I love telling the story actually because I hired her as an admin, but she had a finance degree, and so she was in the running, there was two of them kind of in the running for this admin position. But we ended up hiring both of them because I wanted to hire Elizabeth because in her interview she was talking, I said, what was the challenge that you've made it through? Or whatever my interview question was. And she said, well, when I was in my last semester of school, we had to work with an actual company and get their financial statements produced. She goes, and I just kept having to call them and ask them for their bank statements and ask them for their information. And I had to keep calling them. I'm like, you're my girl, you already know the struggle. So I actually hired her as an admin just to be that person, to chase the bank statements and to chase the information that we need. And then I trained her in payroll, and then I trained her in bookkeeping. And now this has been her first tax season actually preparing business returns. So that's in two years I've got gotten her from an admin to being a level one. I call her tax preparer. So I consider that a success because she has the growth mindset, she wants to get to the next level. And so I'm like, she's a win. And honestly, so I think she's in her late twenties, I'm hoping in a few years she can really be a trainer and a team leader for the next ones to come up. Yes, sir. So

Audience Member 2 (32:55):

How many team member do you have?

Kristen Keats (32:58):

So on my team, for my tax firm, I have four for our Cadencia team as a whole, we've got 30 plus. I know we're hiring people all the time, so it's hard to keep track. But yes, for my firm I have four.

Audience Member 2 (33:14):

So how much do they cost? How do you feel about it?

(33:17)

So it starts, I would say it's around 3000 a month for an experience purpose. And that's all in, so that's with their benefits and their holidays and everything, I don't have to worry about any everything. And then how do I fill them? How do I fill them up, fill up their time? So for me, it was pretty easy. So what I did in my firm is previously for our US team, I think I said everyone was doing everything. So my first order of business is I wanted a dedicated bookkeeping team. So now I have that. So two of my team members are dedicated bookkeepers. That's all they do. Sherwood Tax had always been behind on getting the bookkeeping, and now we're caught up and every month, usually by the 15th or the 20th of the month, depending on getting all those bank statements and client information that we need caught up for all of the clients. So that for me was a huge win. The other positions that I have, so I have a project manager, so she's really in charge. She's more of the admin now and really in charge of making sure. So she got certified in Ignition and she got certified in Carbon, so that she's just the kind of got the bird's eye view on all of our projects. And then I have Liz, who I was just talking about that kind of does the work, but my next person that I probably want to hire is more of a technical person that I can train for tax.

Audience Member 2 (34:41):

You do background checks?

Kristen Keats (34:44):

So it's really interesting. So we use a company in Mexico to do the background checks and they're quite thorough. They're more thorough than we have in the us And I don't know if we realized how thorough they were until we got some more details and my staff came to me and they were like, oh, they came to my house and they make sure that I lived there. And they talked to my neighbors and was like, oh, and they do a medical background check, which I'm like, I don't even think that's allowed here, but so they do a pretty extensive background check on the folks there.

Audience Member 3 (35:23):

I had a question. So with the staff that you have offshore, do you guys trust them enough to contact your clientele basis for a single basic returns? We do offshore, but we haven't there. And I don't know how we can transition to that because people are already, and then, oh, you're having somebody contact me from where? How do you get to that transition and how do you trust that? And if you have, what was the process for that.

Kristen Keats (35:52):

So yes, I do. And it's because, I mean, here's what you have to understand. We were really at a breaking point with how crazy busy we're, right? So you get to this point when, so I'm just like, you know what? You got to let go. It's not going to be perfect. And like I said, I talked to my clients about who my team is, so they know they're, they're not expecting the queen's English when they call them. And usually it's via email. I give my team access to Grammarly and I ask them to please run all of your email communications through Grammarly before you send it off to the client. And now chat GPT, I'm like, run it through chat, GPT, make sure it's right for tone. And it's, again, it's not always perfect, but it gets the job done. And sometimes it gives, they always copy me on the emails. So it also gives me an opportunity for feedback at that time too, that I can say, Hey, great job. I wouldn't have quite said it like that, or I might have used these different words. And so we're always giving feedback in that way too. But it's get me wrong. It's hard. It's hard as a controlling person to just let go, but you have to do it.

(37:09)

It's mostly email, although there have been phone calls because sometimes just like with us, the emails go back and forth and they're like, can we just jump on a call? And my team, their English is good enough. We have one team member who's English isn't as strong. She's one of the bookkeepers, but kind of my lead bookkeeper will be the one to have the communication with the clients. Yeah. Yes.

Audience Member 4 (37:35):

Thank you for this time. Very helpful. I want to ask about separate entity that moved down to Mexico for the, if you're doing I guess a separate entity, get one them?

Kristen Keats (38:02):

Right. So yes, this, no, it's okay. This was another one of our learning curves. So yes. So the question was do we have a separate entity in Mexico? We do. We have a US based entity, and we have a Mexico based entity. So on my 72 disclosure, 7216 disclosure, I put just the name of the entity in there saying, your information will be disclosed outside the United States too. And I just put the entity name and then yeah, have him sign that

Kristen Keats (38:37):

Right? Yeah, no, I don't list the individual names. I just put the entity and because they are employed by this other entity. Yes.

Audience Member 5 (39:00):

So what did that (Inaudible)

Kristen Keats (39:02):

Yeah, so on the Cadencia side, we actually have a recruiter that we work with. And then that person will go, and honestly, they're using LinkedIn, they're using job boards, they're using all those things that we would use here in the US to find those folks. And so generally we'll get from the recruiter, they'll vet through them, we'll get three or four candidates that we can then interview, and then we can interview for culture, we can interview more specifically for what we're looking for and have how they interact with our team. And now that I have four people there, whenever I'm bringing on a new team member, I ask them to all go to coffee together. And I ask them, I want to make sure that they get along as a team too, because they do their own team building. We make sure that they also interact with each other because again, I just never want people to feel like they're on an island by themself. And so I want to make sure that they are cohesive as a team as well.

(40:29)

So we worked with a recruiter there at a staffing agency there when we were very first getting started. And by the way, this was in the very middle of the pandemic. This was pre-vaccine at the beginning of 2021 is when we started hiring in Guadalajara. So everything was remote. So we were working with a recruiter at that time, and he would give us resumes. And so we knew at that time we were looking for leaders. So we were looking for that additional quality of that. We wanted them to be team leaders. It was not successful from the beginning. I'll be the first one to tell you, I've hired, I hired I think three people that didn't make it for more than a couple months because once they had got in there and actually started working, so I got more and more specific about the skills I was looking for, how I wanted them to respond to the questions, the experience that I was wanting to hear that they had. And so, yeah, it was rough the first few months.

(41:33)

So we have a 90 day window where we, before we bring them on as permanent employees, we say there's a 90 day trial period. Because honestly, I mean almost like with any other recruiter, you need that 90 days to really test them to know that they're going to show up and get the work done that you need to get done. So yes, thank you. That's a really good point. We have that 90 day period, which is really critical, and we make a big deal when they do sign after the 90 days, we kind of celebrate that. Yeah, you're a permanent part of the team. Yeah, it's like it's a really big deal when they sign on after the 90 days. Yes.

Audience Member 6 (42:12):

So when you hire the recruiter for you, are you looking in a specific area like you told, I'm only looking for hire or in the Philippines, or you kind of opening it up for all remote?

Kristen Keats (42:27):

So for us specifically, we wanted people that were in Guadalajara or could at least. So for my team, they're remote. Some clients require their people to be in an office. We actually have an office now. And so some folks just want to make sure that people are coming to an office. Mine are all remote, but I do require that they're able to be in Guadalajara when I'm there. I, yeah, we couldn't hire somebody in Mexico City, for example, because that's just too hard to get there for meetings and things like that. So we made that requirement for Cadencia. I know not all the other firms are like that in other places, but I mean pre pandemic. I know that folks in India and the Philippines, I mean they were in office required. No one really did remote offshore staffing before the pandemic because it wouldn't even a thing. But yeah.

(43:38)

So I have our website here, Cadencia.io. There is a form that you can fill out if you are interested in working with folks in Mexico. I mean, I am biased toward working with Mexico because what I found with, while I love working with my team in India, and we still do, by the way, we still have a team in India that we work with. I just found, especially in the tax world, it was so nice being in virtually the same time zone, being able to travel there really easily, having really good English speakers who were, their culture was very much like the US. I just found it a lot easier than working with an India team. That's just my personal experience, someone else. Yes.

Audience Member 7 (44:52):

How do you keep the talent from giving and as get all the level of (Inaudible)

Kristen Keats (44:58):

Yep, I hear you. I got you. Because right, it's the same thing. You kind of cast a wider net and the quality might be not be up to what we've experienced up to this point. So our long-term plan is for that, at least for Cadencia, we're actually working with the local universities to create a pipeline and we are creating curriculum there that will ultimately feed Cadencia. So curriculum ideally to include us tax US gap, our tools that we use here in the US to be able to keep feeding that pipeline. And so far so good. We're two and a half years in, but the universities are really excited about what we're creating and the opportunity that we're creating for folks in Guadalajara.

Audience Member 7 (45:46):

Does this wok for canadian entity?

Kristen Keats (45:48):

I mean, why not? You mean for Canadian firms? Yes. I don't see why not. Yeah, I'm looking at martin, that's my partner, Martin here. I'm like, right, why not? I mean, I don't know what the Canadian laws are and all those kind of things, but yeah, I don't see why it would be any different. Yes.

(46:25)

I mean, I don't know that anyone has a CMA currently, but one of the things that's on my radar is, well, for my tax team is like to get an EA to get the enrolled agent, because that would be really cool for me once they get that level of experience to be able to sign tax returns. Because frankly, I'm the bottleneck in my firm because I'm one of two signers in my firm. So for me to have to touch every single tax return is terrible. But yeah, it would be, I mean, at this point, it would be one of those things that we would create a path for if that was important for me to have a CMA as a goal. And then just, again, I do with my staff in the US create a plan. So I've got a tax preparer in the US that's working on Haier and working on getting an accounting certificate. So we just have a plan in place for her to be able to do that. And so that's what I would do for that team as well. But I don't think we have anyone that would currently, it probably is not on their radar to have a CMA certificate.

Audience Member 8 (47:23):

Are you client account. (Inaudible)

Kristen Keats (47:33):

Yep. It's actually most, if we look at the 30 staff that are there, it's probably mostly client accounting services and the fewer tax people. Yes, sir.

Audience Member 9 (47:44):

Do you see your basic level?

Kristen Keats (47:48):

My intention is to have everyone grow. I don't want permanent staff people anywhere. So yeah, my intention is for them to grow and ultimately, I mean, again, going back to Elizabeth's, like she's a perfect example. She, she's kind of a unicorn because she was actually born in the US. She and she moved back to Mexico with her family in fifth grade. So she's a US citizen. So if she actually continued to learn and grow, but this would really be the same for anyone if she ultimately got to the place where she could manage client engagements and review, why not? Right? Because it's all about, I love the quote from earlier today that maybe a few years ago it was really about an economic play, but now it's a survival play. That's what Ellen said, and I'm like, I wrote that down because I'm like, it's a hundred percent. It's not even so much of like, oh, it's a cheaper cost. It's like, no, I need a different pipeline just to get qualified people that I can train.

Audience Member 10 (48:45):

Do you guys wrok from office or work from home?

Kristen Keats (48:48):

So for mine, again, so because we started in the pandemic, we allowed them to be work from home. We do have some clients who require their folks to be in an office. So we have an office and office space available, and I think it's at, obviously we have to charge for, if you require your folks to be in an office for my team, I offer that to them because we're actually in a WeWork, so they can kind of come in if they wanted to go in the office for some reason, they can go in and do that. But for the most part, I don't require, however, I do, I have been, one of the pitfalls is they have to have good home internet and we have to be able to have it. So that's the nice thing about having an IT person on the ground in Guadalajara is that one of my team members having trouble with that, he can troubleshoot it and kind of figure out how to get the internet better there. Because that's critical, obviously for doing everything cloud based. They have to have a good remote connection. Okay. Yes. Yep. Same. Yep. So I have for the bookkeeping team, so I've got Claudia who's like my team lead. And then again, if I'm honest though, I'm the bottleneck. So I'm not necessarily checking it every month. It might be every couple months or when the client has a question and then I can kind of spot check and do things. Yeah.

(50:29)

Okay. Cool. 18 seconds ago, I think we did pretty well. Okay. Well, I'm hanging out. I guess we're doing a panel discussion also on staffing for the next hour. So would love it if you guys can stay for that. But thank you.