Yoni Kozminski talks with Jason Barnard about building elite remote teams for startup success.

Yoni Kozminski is a Co-Founder and CEO of MultiplyMii - an expert recruitment for the top 1% of Philippines-based talent and Escala - a boutique process improvement management, specializing in SOPs, organizational strategy, and project management tool integration.

Yoni Kozminski shares proven strategies for hiring and managing top global talent. He shares his expertise, specifically focusing on his experiences with Filipino talent, highlighting the cost benefits, high education levels, and motivation of workers in the Philippines. Yoni also highlights the challenges, such as cultural differences and turnover, and provides practical tips for overcoming them.

Learn how to maintain team motivation even without physical office spaces and find out why clear expectations and preparation are crucial for remote success. This is a compelling conversation for entrepreneurs ready to expand their global workforce.

What you’ll learn from Yoni Kozminski

00:00 Yoni Kozminski and Jason Barnard

01:25 What is Missing When Jason Barnard Searches for Yoni Kozminski’s Name?

01:36 What is a Knowledge Panel?

02:18 What are the Key Benefits of Having a Remote Team? 

02:31 What are the Advantages of Hiring Remote Talent, Particularly From the Philippines?

04:28 What are the Disadvantages of Outsourcing to Countries Like the Philippines?

05:26 What are the Major Cultural Differences Yoni Have Noticed Between the UK and the Philippines?

05:50 How Does Yoni Kozminski Describe How Israelis Deal With Conflict and Emotional Expressiveness?

06:16 How Does Yoni Kozminski Describe How Filipinos Deal With Conflict and Emotional Expressiveness?

07:36 What Software is Used by Kalicube as a Virtual Office?

09:41 How Does Yoni Kozminski Deal With Turnover in a Remote Team?

12:24 Why is it Important to Invest Time in Setting Up a Knowledge-Based and Clear Onboarding Process?

12:31 Where Does Yoni Kozminski Store His Documented Processes for Employees to Access During Onboarding?

13:57 When is Outsourcing to Places Like the Philippines, South Africa, or South America Most Valuable?

16:37 How Does Jason Barnard Measure Trust When He Delegates Tasks as an Entrepreneur?

17:17 How Does Yoni Kozminski Maintain Motivation When Working Remotely?

21:55 What is the Best Way to Hire in the Philippines?

This episode was recorded live on video December 10th 2024

https://youtube.com/live/B4IFKtUZxCI

Links to pieces of content relevant to this topic:Yoni Kozminski

Transcript from Building Elite Remote Teams for Startup Success - Fastlane Founders with Yoni Kozminski

[00:00:00] Narrator: Fastlane Founders and Legacy with Jason Barnard. Each week, Jason sits down with successful entrepreneurs, CEOs and executives and get them to share how they mastered the delicate balance between rapid growth and enduring success in the business world. How can we quickly build a profitable business that stands the test of time and becomes our legacy. A legacy we're proud of. Fastlane Founders and Legacy with Jason.

[00:00:31] Jason Barnard: Hi everybody, and welcome to another episode of Fastlane Founders and Legacy. A quick hello and we're good to go. Welcome to the show, Yoni Kozminski.

[00:00:44] Yoni Kozminski: Yeah, I've been on hundreds of podcasts, never been sung in before. So Jason, I appreciate that and it's an honor to be here.

[00:00:51] Jason Barnard: Brilliant. Absolutely delightful and welcome. We're going to be building elite remote teams for startup success, which is exactly what we've done at Kalicube. And as I was saying before to you, before we started the show, I've done it with one team, you've done it with many teams for many companies, if I understand correctly.

[00:01:09] Yoni Kozminski: Correct. Yes, that's effectively what we look to do and how we look to empower entrepreneurs is to take, what might be your and my trade secrets into the masses.

[00:01:21] Jason Barnard: Brilliant. Then we empower entrepreneurs too. And if we look here, this is what we do. When I search your name, you can see that big blue box on the right hand side. There is something missing when I search your name. And the thing that's missing is this. It's called a Knowledge Panel. On the right hand side is Google's understanding of the facts about you.

And I have to use that really weird URL to actually get that to trigger when I search your name. And that is your Google stamp of approval when somebody searches your name. That's Google saying, I understand who Yoni is and I believe him to be a credible authority in his market. And at Kalicube, we believe every entrepreneur worth their salt should have a Knowledge Panel trigger when you search their name.

[00:02:03] Yoni Kozminski: Sign me up.

[00:02:04] Jason Barnard: Yeah, brilliant. Exactly what you needed to say. I didn't feed him that. Anybody who's watching. So onto remote teams. The first huge question is, what are the key benefits? Why would I want a remote team?

[00:02:18] Yoni Kozminski: So in my mind, I would say the benefits. And I'm a little hyper focused on the Philippines. I've worked with a lot of geographies and each of them have their own unique value proposition, Eastern Europe for, say, development talent. But I would say the benefits that I've seen is that when I talk about remote talent and Filipino talent, the obvious one is that you're looking at 60 to 80% of their effective local costs, so lower salaries. But what's high value when we talk about Filipinos is that you have a pretty educated market. over the last 20 years, it's moved from about 3% of the population being college educated to more like 15% today. That's population, and that's a population of 120 million people, where all education or higher education is in English.

So you're getting, highly educated English speakers who are really motivated. a lot of these people, it's the first of their family to go to college, so a lot of the rest of the family is now dependent on them. So you're getting these educated, motivated, and, I would say, workhorses, if you will, who really want to excel and deliver. And I would say there's that really healthy balance of, I would say, like onshore versus offshore talent. You probably want to be a little bit careful not to think that you can swap every single person that you currently have in your team locally for someone that lives abroad. But I think that you can push a lot further than what you might believe to be the case.

[00:03:50] Jason Barnard: Okay. you focused in on the Philippines, but generally speaking, outsourcing to somewhere like South Africa or South America or the Philippines is beneficial from a cost perspective, but it brings a lot of disadvantages. here we said there's a cost advantage. Education is very high, particularly in the Philippines. South Africa would be very similar. What are the disadvantages? the idea of somebody working on the other side of the world and me not being able to, let's say, oversee them is a huge stress, I think, for a lot. Or a huge blockage, maybe for a lot of entrepreneurs.

[00:04:27] Yoni Kozminski: Yeah. Yeah, as you point out, Jason, there's not that really organic osmosis happening in the office where you walk by and you pull someone into your, into your office or, into the bullpen or however you're operating, so you lose that ability. There's obviously the cultural integrations while, South Africans maybe have the accent that's maybe a little funnier than mine. there's still cultural differences between the UK, the US and, and any remote geography. And so there's that adjustment period that goes into it as well.

[00:05:02] Jason Barnard: there are two points you've already made, and I think we can go on through the ones because I think the advantages are fairly obvious. And we all think, yes, that would be ideal, but I don't really want to go that way. Cultural differences is a huge one is my culture from the UK is obviously very different to the Philippines. There are some similarities and there are some very common grounds. What are the major cultural differences you've seen?

[00:05:26] Yoni Kozminski: So I like to use the example that I found online and it's a graph. And on the X axis it has risk or, sorry, conflict aversion versus conflict readiness. And on the Y axis you have emotionally expressive and emotionally unexpressive. And so when you look at the, and I'm sitting here in Israel, so Israelis sit on the, top left right hand quadrant where you have emotionally expressive and very comfortable with conflict. And they could sit here and shout at one another, about something related to the business and then go out for lunch after and it wouldn't even move them. they're best friends. It's that's how they operate. Filipinos, on the other hand, very emotionally expressive but very conflict averse.

And I think I see this throughout Asia in general. So to have that behavior, if you're someone who's going to shout at your team members and not give them the time or breathing room to build a safe environment, then you're going to lose that team member or you're going to lose a healthy, cohesive relationship pretty quickly. And that would be different to South Africa and that would be different to the Ukraine in Russia and so on. I'd say for the Philippines that would be one key aspect. And I would say one thing to again, when we talk about building culture with Filipino talent, one really important thing is to build that safe space. they're not going to be, they're not going to be culturally someone who's going to be proactive is the wrong term. But going above and beyond from the standpoint of engaging in something that doesn't feel quite right to them.