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In this episode of Owned and Operated, John and Jack are joined by Sagan’s Jon Matzner to talk about the use of global talent and hiring overseas to enhance business operations, beyond just saving costs. What is the importance of systemization and automation in building a high-leverage business model?
Jon also goes through the evolution of the Sagan system, which starts with global talent as an entry point and extends to include automation and decentralized leadership. What are the dynamics of remote hiring, the role of AI in augmenting job roles, and the changing landscape of talent acquisition? You’ll never know unless you listen to the newest episode of Owned and Operated.
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John Wilson: @WilsonCompanies on X
Jack Carr: @TheHVACJack on X
Episode Guest:
Jon Matzner: @MatznerJon on X
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Owned and Operated #147 Transcript
Jon Matzner: I hired Global Talent to increase my customer service, not save money.
Jon Matzner: Global Talent is just the entry point into building leverage in your business. This is how you build an empowered frontline management team. And that's not, I get you cheap people from South America, but then you use Global Talent and automation as like brother and sister to actually create a great lead gen.
John Wilson: Recently, we've been buying off some. com and we've been able to get plumbing HVAC and electrical stuff off there. And my biggest concern was timeliness. Hey, if I need this thing pretty quick, can I get it? And you for sure can. So that was awesome. So deliveries are fast. They ship coast to coast and you can call them and you can get expert support with real people, which is awesome.
John Wilson: So check out supply house. com for buying the stuff you need. Welcome back
Jack Carr: to owned and operated. We have John Matzner here today. What's going on, John? And John Wilson, too.
Jon Matzner: Living the dream, just speaking at a lot of conferences, oh,
John Wilson: that's good. That's good. I love to start every podcast with a humble brag.
Jon Matzner: John was giving me a little Talking a little He was chirping a little bit, as you'd say, about humble bragging. So I wanted to make sure that we let off with that, Just to create the right environment for this
John Wilson: conversation, I'm good. I feel ready. I feel ready.
Jon Matzner: Started it. Cause I said, you did the Fonz pose.
John Wilson: Yeah, I'm still not happy about that photo. If anybody listening wants to see my least favorite photo that my team wants to put everywhere owned and operated. com. It is now being used in Wilson's advertisements. I hate it.
Jack Carr: Yeah. The ironic part is there's other photos, John, that are at your office itself that tend to go around that have not showed up on any social media that I do wish they would post.
Jack Carr: I don't like John in front of a horse on the horse. Excuse me. It's like a small children's horses that are out in front of John
Jon Matzner: Wilson sized horse is what they call them around the office, right?
John Wilson: That is exactly what you call it. Yeah. That's what you call it. You own Sagan. I'm a. A proud client of we just wrapped up I think two hires or three hires.
John Wilson: First one's really great. Second one starts on Monday, but yeah you own Sagan. So walk us through it.
Jon Matzner: So my background, I was in the foreign service, so I was a diplomat. So I lived and worked abroad, got a lot of experience working internationally, then decided to buy and build a home improvement company, which has its challenges.
Jon Matzner: And one of the biggest ones was just high quality talent that I could afford, because I'm not like a venture backed company or something like that. And so out of desperation and necessity, like any good business owner, was able to just build the muscle to yeah, just pure desperation, to be clear.
Jon Matzner: Like crawling out of a prison with like my fingernails, had to rely more and more on a global talent pool. Beyond just the Philippines in particular to make payroll and then to grow from that, realize that maybe some of my approaches were a little bit different about how I did it, all sorts of different stuff around that, which we can talk about and saw an opportunity within the market to build an offer that I thought was compelling and worked for me and works for our customers.
Jon Matzner: And so here we are.
Jack Carr: And John, when you say talent, I think a lot of people view You know, they know about VAs. They know about this background talent. What areas do they specialize in? I know it's a big question for me. Is it just, data entry or does it expand beyond that?
Jon Matzner: It's basically anything that can be done remotely.
Jon Matzner: And so I tell people if it can be done remotely, it can be done globally. Because there's eight and a half billion people in the world that don't live in the U. S. In the last 30 days, we've helped hire everything from a guy who builds LBO models for a private equity company, to a video editor, to a cold caller, to an operations coordinator, to a purchasing manager, meaning an architect who does takeoffs for a home renovation company.
Jon Matzner: Dude, there's eight billion people in the world. This isn't some niche thing. It's like literally there's eight billion people in the world. It's more rare that it can't be done than it can be done.
John Wilson: The last time we had you on, it was like three years ago. And we talked about the, it was the home improvement.
John Wilson: It was garage Excel. That was the, that's the name of that project.
Jon Matzner: That was the original one, which we sold. And then we've, we sold about 35 of those so far. I talked to you when we hadn't done one.
John Wilson: Yeah. If anyone's interested in like following the journey, one of my favorite things is having guests on I think it's fun.
John Wilson: We've had rich on a few times. Obviously you're now on for a second time. It's always interesting to hey, what were we talking about in 2021? And what are we talking about in 2024? It's just totally different. So last time it was like, Hey, here's what we're doing with garages. Here's how we think we can do this episode 45 for the listener.
John Wilson: If you want to listen to it, it's really interesting. And the idea was this like anti franchise thing. And now you've taken a portion of that, the staffing specifically for it. And you're like, Hey, I'm going to turn this into its own thing. Where's the garage.
Jon Matzner: Yeah it's rocking and rolling.
Jon Matzner: Yeah, it's rumbling along. It's a pretty low brain damage business model. I think you guys have had this in your careers if you haven't, but my professional trajectory has largely been around earning the right to hire leverage. I started in garages because that was the only place, that was the first toehold I could get.
Jon Matzner: I could make an acquisition and use that. to like Tarzan swinging behind vines, go to a, like a slightly higher leverage business model. And then I use that vine to swing into my next business model. And so it wasn't like on day one, I had earned the right to be like an allocator. I had to claw my way into, I don't want to say better business models, but higher leverage business models is what I would say.
Jon Matzner: Part of the reason why Sagan has done so was because I started there. Because when I talked to business owners, I just open up a vein and bleed. So Jack, how many times have you drawn front desk people to AA meetings? I have. Let's talk about why that person needs to sit in Southern California.
Jon Matzner: How about you put that money in the hand of your tax and stop editing your videos in Southern California. I speak from a place of authority because I'm not like an internet guy. I'm like, dude, I built this, like I solved my own problems here. At the time I didn't see the whole picture. But looking back, it's very obvious.
Jon Matzner: Sagan wouldn't be doing as well as it did if I couldn't speak with like authority. How many
Jack Carr: people have you placed so far?
Jon Matzner: You guys have been open, what, six months now? Yeah, we're a little past six months, probably well over a thousand. Wow. That's incredible. Yeah. Cause, cause we've done some interesting things with the model.
Jon Matzner: Just again, because I came up in an operationally intensive business, a lot of people do staffing because it's operationally non intensive. And because I came up in an operationally intensive business, like home improvement, where, you know, Hey man, your guy cut our power line. It's 11 at night. And the truck broke down and somebody's drunk.
Jon Matzner: Going to an internet business operationally lets us move really quickly because we've got good skills. You guys building a media company compared to HVAC. You're like, wait, so they just send me money.
John Wilson: It feels unfair.
Jon Matzner: It feels unfair. That's what leverage feels like. I think. Cause you're like, wait, what?
Jon Matzner: Where's the Cox? No overtime. You're like, sir, you sold a newsletter ad. There's no, you don't have to issue a W 2. You
John Wilson: know, when you started sharing information on the internet, the goal was selling this like anti franchise from doing that. You built an audience and from the audience you launch Sagan. Is that sort of the right way to think about this?
John Wilson: When
Jon Matzner: I first started writing on the twits, all I was writing about was systemization, building systems, SOPs, and I found out that nobody cared. Nobody paid attention. And so then I started writing about what you get as a result. But what I found out was, you sell the destined, you sell the beach, not the plane ride.
Jon Matzner: And one of the benefits of systemization is that you can hire globally, build a better company. And so that's how I just naturally, I saw people paid attention when I'm like, our crew manager is in Columbia, they would pay attention to that. And then as soon as they started paying attention, I'm like system systems.
Jon Matzner: But if I led with systems, They would fall out of their chair half asleep. And so it was me just trying to find what people engaged with. And they're like I've tried to hire an EA before it doesn't work. And I'm like, Hey systems, let's talk about writing stuff down. And so it was really a way to backdoor my way into giving them what they needed by just wrapping it in candy.
Jon Matzner: And that candy was called hiring globally.
Jack Carr: Yeah. It was perfect timing too. Cause I feel like all of this came to a head just right at, there was a lot going on Twitter. A lot of this came out. There was another competitor of yours, I think that launched. A similar timeframe.
Jack Carr: Do you feel like that timing was an important part in this? If this were to launch in 2019, do you think that it would have the same kind of traction it has today?
Jon Matzner: I think Twitter or Twits, as you guys call it, are early adopter business owners. And post COVID, the inciting event was COVID, where John was like, Dude, I have to have my crew manager working remotely because it's essential employees only or whatever it is.
Jon Matzner: And that planted the seed for early adopter business owners, realizing that they don't need seven people sitting in their office. And the minute something has gone remote, it can go global. And so I think COVID was really like. The beginning of the story that we're still very early in, but it let John finally set up his deal account so that he could pay globally.
Jon Matzner: And he was only doing Philippines. And then he sees something on Twitter and realizes he can go beyond just the Philippines or Upwork. Maybe he started on Upwork during COVID and then did onlinejobs. ph and then realized Philippines isn't the answer for everything. And now he's ready to be a Sagan member.
Jon Matzner: I think COVID was actually, so 2019 marginally. You could have done it. But COVID was really particularly for the offline businesses, like not SEO, not web guys who've been doing it forever. But we have a crane and rigging company in Alabama. He's like giving us testimonials and referrals and he runs a freaking crane and rigging company in Alabama.
Jack Carr: And so what was the sparking moment that really went, was there a moment or you just, people were asking you for, advice and information and you're like, okay I'll create something.
Jon Matzner: I studied international relations in college, I lived and worked abroad, like my passion is international.
Jon Matzner: My venture into garage upgrades was like a small recess. I was writing online to find the business model and to find the opportunity. I was writing to clarify my own thinking, like, why don't more people hire globally? Oh, it's because of system. Oh, why don't they do this? Because they think that global talent is just Philippines.
Jon Matzner: And basically through writing online, if you look back, you can see my thinking kind of being created. And I'm like, yeah, dude. I'm not going to pay you three grand for someone I know you pay 800. It started pushing me towards a business model and saying, okay what would it look like to I don't want to do just head hunting because these people do need support, but I don't want to do staffing markup.
Jon Matzner: And you could, over the course of writing online and talking to people and coaching and stuff like that, I was able to say, okay, that's a problem. That's not a problem. That price point's compelling. That business model is silly and exploitative. I was able to like. Show my math and see how people you know, I did something silly.
Jon Matzner: It sounds you'll appreciate this because you guys are both nuts I tried something a year ago that was called text for talent where I just texted out a candidate who was ready to be hired Off immediately. It was one time sealed bid. Like I was like, I can't do that, but I was running experiment Hey, is this the way John wants to buy global talent?
Jon Matzner: Cuz it shouldn't take three weeks. It should be instant I tried like 15 things to see what people really identified with. But yeah, text for talent. I text out a candidate and be like, Jack, text me your one time sealed bid for the finders fee. I made actually some decent money. I just didn't want to keep doing it.
John Wilson: But it still feels like the actual business is the content that gave you the leverage to do it.
Jon Matzner: There's four types of leverage, labor leverage, capital leverage, code leverage, and media leverage. My audience and content, to your point, whether it's Twitter, my newsletter, Videos is a form of media leverage, which means I shoot one video and it gets 10, 000 views.
Jon Matzner: I get huge leverage off that. And so to your point, the place where I built a business was among other things, off the back of media leverage.
John Wilson: Sagan has been very successful. For one, it's a need, but there's obviously, it's a high competition area. And I think the thing that sets you guys apart is the captive labor force, the payment model.
John Wilson: That's totally that is inarguably better people wanting to charge 30 percent finders fee to me is just what doesn't really compete with me. So you thinking about experimenting into other things beyond Sagan or is this like where the focus is for the time?
Jon Matzner: Yeah. So what we're seeing, and I wrote this post.
Jon Matzner: And we've talked about it a lot within our group, which is we call it the Sagan system. If you look at Donaher business system, or even like EOS is like a version of this. We really believe is that global talent is just the entry point into building leverage in your business. And the Sagan system where we think we're going within Sagan, and we do it already, which is a lot of stuff about automation, a lot of stuff, even about building content creation into your stinking plumbing business.
Jon Matzner: It's really about building leverage in a small business, global talent. Is just a great like gateway drug and once you've experimented one of my drugs. I want to show you Decentralized leadership looks like so christian ruff helicopter pilot special forces comes in and goes This is how you build an empowered frontline management team and that's not I get you cheap people from south america That's the way I hooked them That was the shiny bait and once they're in we're about building better businesses like modern high leverage businesses The definition of sagan is more expansive than just like me get you global talent at a better pricing model That's the gateway drug
John Wilson: Talk on the internet, sell garage business in a box, continue to grow the audience, launch Sagan.
John Wilson: Sagan becomes the thing and the media is now just reinforcing that thing and it's almost switched what the main thing is.
Jon Matzner: When people ask me about like writing content or creating content or whatever, I'm always just I write for myself and if other people want to watch, that's fine. I write it to distill what I think.
Jon Matzner: Jack say dude, I disagree with this. Josh Schultz will swoop in and say something like way smarter than me.
Jack Carr: Is there going to be a focus in Sagan in the future on some of those other two leverage points, like capital leverage or anything like that?
Jon Matzner: We already do a lot in terms of automation and AI leverage code leverage.
Jon Matzner: We already do a lot and we'll continue to do more from a capital leverage perspective. Absolute. Do you guys know Justin ish beer? I do not. He's a private equity dude. Comes from some money, but I think he's deployed like billion in capital with an average check size of 12 million. He stayed in the lower middle market.
Jon Matzner: Dude, look, Google right now, Justin Ishbia and just look at his stats and you hear him talk and your brain like expands. His whole thing is like, why didn't he move up market to deploy more capital like everybody else? Oh
Jack Carr: yeah, I've seen him before.
Jon Matzner: Where I think from a capital leverage perspective, Jack, to your point, is I think where we're already getting dragged into is we see opportunities to deploy the Sagan system against acquisition targets and basically say instead of being a vendor to John, I'm going to find John, but for accounting, I don't want to be a vendor.
Jon Matzner: I want to just buy your company and bring my horsepower. Basically it's like a thesis. Hey, this industry needs global talent, automation, and AI. They're slow adopters. I'm going to come bring in all this operational leverage. So I suspect over time, it won't be for a little while. We'll start taking direct positions into acquisitions targets with the idea that we bring the SWAT team in terms of dude, why is your call center in Southern California?
Jon Matzner: What are you doing? So that's where I think we'll go from a capital leverage perspective.
Jack Carr: I've spoken with a lot of these PE firms that are doing rollups just because I enjoy the conversations. What it seems like that they bring is they bring in an HR function, which a lot of that's talent. They bring in some capital and then they're bringing in some marketing on the backend.
Jack Carr: So if you're going through and doing all those things from your system, I think it's a great fit. How are you looking at the automation aspect? Can you give some examples for us? When we hired overseas talent or global talent, the key to the hiring them is how many SOPs, how good is the system behind that?
Jack Carr: Because without a good system, then you can't rely on that talent just because they're very good at following those systems.
Jon Matzner: Have you seen my Matzner's hierarchy of leverage at the top? It says owners, then one level down, it says high expense talent, then below that it says low expense talent. At the bottom it says AI and automation.
Jon Matzner: There's an arrow next to it. That says systems that pushes down. And your goal is to push things down the pyramid by using systems to preserve quality. And so you can't just take something that was done by the owner and automate it. You have to basically push it down through systemization. So like how to answer your phone.
Jon Matzner: John doesn't need a system to do that. And then his. 35 an hour in office person needs a light system. You need a little bit of a better system to get it to Columbia. And then to actually build an AI tool that has IVR and branch functions and spill over to humans, you need a better system. But what you've just done is you've created an enterprise value, scalability, better earnings of the hierarchy is how you create.
Jon Matzner: Value. And I believe it's what our job is as business owners is to build leverage instead of just being the one man plumber. If John says, look, I have a very thin top of my pyramid, everything else is done by low cost talent or AI and automations. That's a wonderful company instead of, oh I don't have anybody who makes less than 180 grand a year.
Jon Matzner: That's called a consulting company. No EV. I think a lot about building leverage. To use a specific example, Jack, about systems. We have a, we spun out a little cold calling thing for actually home improvement leads. It's been doing pretty well. And Zach, the guy running it, hammering the phones, right? High volume global talent.
Jon Matzner: But then what he did was he built an air table that as soon as somebody says, yes, it takes a transcript of the cold call grades, the cold call also plugs into Zillow's API. As well as Google Maps API and in Airtable shows you the house of the lead. So when it gets sent to the salesperson, you can see it's a nice house.
Jon Matzner: And so that's an example of where I think the system is for cold calling and what the script is. But then you use global talent and automation as like brother and sister to actually create a great leech engine.
John Wilson: A few months ago, we got our call center on Avoka. And Avoka is a AI call center solution for home service companies just like me and probably just like you they have a couple different products but the one that we like the most is their coach product which listens to every single phone call and runs it through a rubric to help our call takers improve and this is a really big deal because we take hundreds sometimes thousands of phone calls every single day and it's just too much for our trainers and managers and leads to keep up with and effectively train so let's just do ride alongs on almost every single call Click on the link below to go to Avoca, and make sure you use the promo code OWNED for a special discount.
Jack Carr: This is one of the problems we have, is there's so much on this high The top of your pyramid that's on my back or on my GM's back or on a service manager's back How do we get that off and move that down and that's across the board. It's in finances bookkeeping. It's in sales It's in service. Like how do we move some of that down to get rid of it?
Jack Carr: Because
Jon Matzner: I work with a lot of franchisors And they say, look, I need more HVAC techs. How does global talent help? Or, hey, can global talent be a veterinarian? And you say, right now, you have Gordon Ramsey as your chef. And Gordon Ramsey shows up at four in the morning and peels the potatoes. He grills the hamburger.
Jon Matzner: And then he goes out and does VIP stuff, and that is your HVAC tech. It's not hard to build a restaurant with Gordon Ramsey's, but you have to pay 180 k and there's not that many of them. The magic of a restaurant is that Gordon Ramsey sets the recipe and then you have a minimum wage guy come in, he peels the potatoes.
Jon Matzner: Then you have a line cook who follows the recipe, and Gordon Ramsey's still there, but he just does VIP stuff and recipe development. And so your HVAC tech should be all tooth and no tail. And what you do, the way you afford that is that. You don't have to have 180G guys across your company. You have a variety of wage levels for your French fry cook and you take some of those savings and you give it to the tech.
Jon Matzner: You pay your HVAC techs 20 percent above market, you solve your recruiting problem. You steal from your competitors. How do you do that without raising your prices? Don't have your Instagram person make 78, 000 a year. So I've run that playbook with a ton of private equity and a ton of franchisors, which is I just need more HVAC techs.
Jon Matzner: You're like, awesome. Let's clean up your labor efficiency ratio. Stop doing that stuff with 48 an hour people and let's take a bunch of that savings and give it to your frontline techs because those are the hard people to recruit, not the inbound CSR. That playbook has been exceptionally effective because it's just a more efficiency labor, a more efficient labor model.
John Wilson: But I have a lot of friends in the industry that are. 15 to 40, and we're one of the only companies that uses remote talent the way that we use it. So I've got I've got this group chat that Jack's in with me. Dude, half
Jon Matzner: of them are SEGA members.
John Wilson: I know. All of those guys use Global Chat. They tend to be smaller companies.
John Wilson: I have this other group chat. No one uses Global Talent. Everyone's north of 20 million. One guy's north of 70. No one's touching Global Talent. So some days we'll sit there and I don't know the answer to this. For what I'm about to say people unintentionally, sometimes intentionally, but often not like you have a choice for talent.
John Wilson: You can either go cheap, but good, which is remote. Like you have to build more systems. You have to do other stuff, but like you are sacrificing something or you can just go expensive, but great. It's really interesting to watch people make this decision. Sometimes they don't even know that they're making the decision.
John Wilson: Like I talked to a company, he's going to be on the show in the next couple of weeks. He doesn't have any remote talent, 20 some million dollars. Not a single remote person, their call center has way less people than ours. Every one of them is way better than any of our individual call takers. Vastly outperforms, also vastly outpays, and that's a choice.
John Wilson: And remote's the other choice. What I just think is interesting is, for so many of my No one is actually doing it. They all just pay their way less call takers that are just a lot higher quality. Are you running into that? When do you feel like is a good application?
Jon Matzner: We have members who are everything from pre launch franchisees to we do a ton of hiring for a three and a half billion dollar company.
Jon Matzner: Mid market private equity company. So what we see as our like ICP, as who our customers are, is people who are like on the front edge of trying to do new and interesting things. It's not people who feel like they're already there unless they're desperate. Who were the people who adopted the internet in 1998?
Jon Matzner: It wasn't Blockbuster. It was Netflix. And so if you look at Clayton Christensen and disruptive innovation, it's John Wilson, the up and comer, the hard charger. It's what's his name, Hoffman, Chris Hoffman. It's guys who are not like the stab. Oh, we have a way of doing things around here and that's how innovation happens is that it's done by the new hungry.
Jon Matzner: It's Peter Lohman, not the hundred thousand door slow moving battleship of a property manager. And then eventually the internet or global talent eats the industry over time. And so it's like any kind of innovation, like who are the first guys to use CRM? It's any technological innovation. It was probably the same group.
Jon Matzner: Oh, we our techs use blue copy, red copy, yellow copy. And then eventually it becomes table stakes after a long enough time, which is, yeah, man, we have to use CRM or else customers expect text message confirmation from tax. I think it's the path of any technological innovation, where one of the big things that we're trying to change, John, is that this idea of high quality.
Jon Matzner: is not commensurate with global talent. Historically, global talent, business process, outsourcing, stick it in the Philippines or India, private equity company, trying to juice earnings before they resell it. That was what it was. And if you look at the way I believe in using global talent, these are people who increase the quality of your service, who are wonderful representatives of your brand.
Jon Matzner: It's not something you're embarrassed to say at your mastermind. Hey guys, I'm hiring globally. Like it's not, it's dude, That's Beth. She's awesome. We flew her up. She's a great member of our team. She's awesome. She happens to be less expensive, but dude, she's a boss. That's, it's not this like dirty secret I use people in the Philippines, which is historically how it's been done.
Jon Matzner: And I just don't. I don't, I believe that we can change the perception of that. People in Canada are global talent. They're 30 percent less expensive than Americans. Would you call the queen? I used to make fun of people on Twitter about this. Would you call the queen a virtual assistant if you hired her?
Jon Matzner: Because everybody just calls everybody a VA. But my point would be is like, you think global talent is like Philippines, broken English. I'm saving money. I would like to challenge that. Let's have a conversation. So that's, I think, part of it too is, That's just not the case anymore.
John Wilson: I'm involved in a project that has, it's 40 or 50 percent of their team is in the UK and really talented 30 percent less.
Jon Matzner: That's global talent. It's not BPO. Everybody's in a white collar sweatshop with headsets on and sweats drip dripping off their forehead. It's not that anymore. A lot of reasons why that's going away. The biggest one actually is the proliferation of high speed internet because you used to only be able to get good internet in Manila or New Delhi or Mumbai.
Jon Matzner: And now because internet is in the country, you can just hire people directly. You don't need to have them come to the central hub anymore. So you don't need this intermediation model.
John Wilson: When we try to pick a direction for like, where do we take our talent in the call center? Do we do? And yes, they can be good.
John Wilson: And I'm not saying they can't like a lot of our best call takers are in the Philippines, which is, that's our reality. But you can just have more and you can do it lower budget.
Jon Matzner: I think it's going to play out. And then I want to pitch you guys on something where I think the industry is going. I'm going to pinch you jointly on something.
Jon Matzner: I think where the industry is going is similar. To us manufacturing, there will be some people who will pay a premium to know that my t shirt was made in California, 119. And there's going to be one of similar quality that was made in Tunisia. There will absolutely be organizations that called every person you talk to sits right here in Canton, Ohio.
Jon Matzner: Awesome. I ain't cleaning your drain for 69. So you either go 69 and have a global workforce or you're able to price that in. And they're just like American manufacturing. Hey, buy an American, that's fine. As long as it's priced in because right next door, if you're going to have an incredible product, that's 40 percent less expensive.
Jon Matzner: It's going to be the same with bookkeeping. Think of that, but with bookkeeping and it's going to be, we do our books right here in Orange County, California. Awesome. 1, 000 of return.
Jack Carr: It's interesting that you put it that way, though, because, one of the reasons, so our, almost our entire call center team is from the Philippines or South America.
Jack Carr: One of the main reasons we hired these individuals, because they almost had no accent, so I don't think that the general public actually even realizes that most of our team. Is even from out of the country, we hired them for two reasons. One, because of the stigma to mostly because we found global talent without of accent has been global talent for a long time.
Jack Carr: They've been able to practice, they understand the U S culture in the U S way. Do you think that a, you either run into you more of your thesis or B, do you see global talent that is almost undistinguishable from American talent in terms of. Via the phone
Jon Matzner: both and phone is just one part of the global talent Ecosystem enough 50 percent of California is Hispanic if the person's from Mexico and they have a Mexican accent, right?
Jon Matzner: So I point would be you know, I would tell people that all the time you just most people have a very specific Image of what global talent is and it's just 20 years old a british guy Someone from mexico who lived and grew up in the u. s There's 8 billion people that whatever you think you can't generalize about it I tell people all the time I hired global talent to increase my customer service not save money Because I wasn't answering the phones.
Jon Matzner: I could not afford somebody And so I did it to increase my customer experience or my, whatever.
Jack Carr: Are you guys worried about artificial intelligence moving forward and or are you viewing that as a kind of a coach? Because they're in the space we've had them on in the last few months. Avoka and there's a bunch of other different ones that that are claiming to eventually be the new call center does seem like the direction that they're moving.
Jack Carr: And I would imagine not just call center, but bookkeeping and all these other things.
Jon Matzner: One of the historic, you guys can think of a plumbing analogy here, but is there a tool? That it used to take a guy who had 20 years of experience to do, and now, Oh, I watch plumbing videos on YouTube. Instead of the thing where they like burn it and do the pipe, there's now just like a gun that they squeeze and it like seals it,
Jack Carr: right?
Jack Carr: Propess for solder, yeah.
Jon Matzner: Okay, yeah, that's what I meant. And would you say that puts plumbers out of business, or does it let you onboard somebody to actually be doing re pipes faster because they don't have to spend a year apprenticing on how to solder lead pipes? Instead of replacing Philippines people, it makes them act like high skilled people.
Jon Matzner: I was just hiring somebody for a lawyer, and he's must have really good written English. And I'm like, we have an AI for global talent course that teaches them to use Claude, and now they write perfect American English. The person who's in trouble Is the 60, 000 a year copywriter, 15, 000 a year of global talent plus my AI course makes them look like a 60, 000 a year copywriter.
Jon Matzner: You can't tell the difference. Just like the guy who's in trouble is the soldering guy who's 100 an hour and then you have this new ceiling thing and an apprentice. Can seal a pipe. So what technology does is it turns low skill people into high skill people. So the people who are in trouble are the expensive low skill people in the U.
Jon Matzner: S. because now my Philippines people can write pretty decent marketing copy with AI. So we use it to boost our global talent folks. We teach them how to use it.
John Wilson: We use AI everywhere, basically. At this point, it is a tool to gain leverage. For lower skill. So like our remote talent is the biggest user of our AI, like much more than American.
Jon Matzner: It turns them into high skill. I have a repository of every SOP that is accessible via text message. Now I don't need to have a guy apprentice for three years. Think about what leverage that does. That. It just creates all sorts of leverage within your skilled workforce. So we consider them brother and sister.
Jon Matzner: There will obviously Jack be some things that are completely eliminated, like creating pie charts. You just stick that in AI and it spits out. That job goes away, but then everybody moves up on skill level. The people who are in trouble are the sub 100, 000 white collar people.
John Wilson: I think it gets more and more fragmented, like what we're seeing.
John Wilson: And I know we've talked about this slightly on here, but the speed is crazy. Of AI, we're like, it seems every 30 days, the next thing is coming out that's better, faster, cheaper. That's the speed that we see it happen. We're much more hesitant to sign contracts for anything touching AI, because in three months, It will be outdated.
Jon Matzner: I think you're gonna feel the same way about signing anything for SaaS, because you're gonna go look man with a no-code tool. And why am I gonna get locked into your ecosystem of sa? I think vertical SaaS is gonna come under serious pressure. Serious pressure, because you're like, I'm not gonna pay you $300 a seat forever.
Jon Matzner: What are you nuts? I can go develop an in house tool. Like that thing I was telling you about cold calling. We grade and score our calls just using a couple APIs in Airtable. Grade and scored. And if it's a low grade, it gets pushed to Slack. If it's a high grade, it goes, that is 10 years ago.
Jon Matzner: That's A 4 million SaaS product that you roll out to every home service company. And now we did it in three days with Airtable.
John Wilson: AI seems to just be a greater tool, even a bigger reason to send more, like more jobs remote. They just gain so much more leverage.
Jon Matzner: But what it's going to do, John, though is just like economics demands are unlimited, meaning the market is going to get pushed up.
Jon Matzner: Meaning I don't believe people are going to lose jobs, but they're going to expect that they have a consultant. Who's based in the U. S. to talk to them about their home improvement project. There's going to be more people. The market is going to move up. Everyone will do better because of this.
Jon Matzner: People have unlimited wants. They will just, productivity will go up. GDP will go up. Manufacturing lifted the quality of life. Jobs shifted, yes. But ultimately, I think it's a wonderful thing.
Jack Carr: There's also potentially a premium for if you wanted to talk to somebody in house in the United States versus talking to a computer.
Jack Carr: We've mentioned that historically too.
John Wilson: What I think will be fun is when it starts to take over like more BPO style roles. And I think that's, which I don't think is far away. I've already started to see it a little bit. It's just, it's not there yet. I saw something yesterday. They added an AI. component.
John Wilson: Like their reporting is notoriously bad. So that's why most people switch over to Service Titan. Like you need good reporting to run a bigger business. And so you just are not able to do it on these smaller softwares. And the way that they fixed that was they just added AI. So it's Hey, what was this guy's average ticket?
John Wilson: performance and closing rate. And it just, it answers you.
Jon Matzner: Let me give you an example. That's also like that, John, that just shows the relationship between global talent and AI for these BPO type roles. We got brought on by this private equity company. Who's rolling up HVAC in your neck. You probably know them.
Jon Matzner: I'm not going to say them out loud. I'll tell you after the, they have like tens of thousands of contracts and they need to know this, the maintenance schedule and the terms for every contract. Every piece of equipment of all these like 800 companies they've bought and everyone's different. This is twice a year and it's for coolant only.
Jon Matzner: They started with was just a bunch of Philippines lowish and they're putting it all on a spreadsheet and just air conditioner unit fall and spring. 800 parts not included because from, because every single company does it differently, whatever, but very quickly we are moving them into building an AI tool that you just upload the document and it pulls out the data and we just eliminated this kind of like BPO type job.
Jon Matzner: It's just gone. You just upload it into the tool and it parses out the data. And it now gives you the, and you have a human being monitoring it, keeping an eye on it. If it doesn't understand something, it'll jump in there. But that grunt level 2 an hour, it's just going away. So that's an example.
Jon Matzner: They had to like index every piece of equipment and all these roll up platforms. That's a very specific example. Like today, like this week, someone is I don't know the maintenance schedules for these companies we're buying. And it's like a bunch of scanned PDFs in a Google drive. What am I supposed to do with these?
Jon Matzner: That the guy had like a file cabinet.
John Wilson: We started using it to project budgets. We threw it in last week Hey, give us rough budgets based on three year historicals and it was correct enough to use.
Jon Matzner: And you're like, I'm trying to make payroll, but I know I should be using this stuff.
Jon Matzner: Jack, can I pay you to help me get a couple people in a call center, get QC set up and get AI analytics? And you're like, yes. Yes, you can. I did it in my business. So that's why I think there's a lot of value to be created. Obviously, once you've cracked it for one for that product, I service it's plug and play to everybody else.
Jon Matzner: That's what's powerful about it. It's a product not a service.
John Wilson: We covered the backdrop. We covered Sagan. I'll give my quick input for the listener. We just used them to place two accounting hires, which I did not. We feel very comfortable hiring like call center, but like anything beyond call center, we feel a lot less comfortable hiring remote.
John Wilson: Again, we feel really comfortable self hiring call center. It's the on call center role. So we're like, okay, like this is a little out of my wheelhouse. So no, you guys were great. If people want to connect with you and hear more about what you're up to, where can they find you?
Jon Matzner: I would have them text you, John.
Jon Matzner: And then, you just
John Wilson: say, 5309.
Jon Matzner: You can look me up on Twitter. I'm Matt's Nerd John. You'll find me making fun of overpriced headhunters a lot.
John Wilson: This was this was great, man. We'll have to bring it up to our workshop. Last time was just like, we spent a lot of time on like org chart and people were just like, how are you doing it?
John Wilson: And it is we've been using Upwork forever and it is just
Jon Matzner: yeah,
John Wilson: if you don't want to sift through 300 resumes
Jon Matzner: or you want to hire outside the Philippines,
John Wilson: Yeah. Yeah. For all the listeners, if you like what you heard, make sure you check out ownedandoperated. com for more of basically everything.
John Wilson: Just more. Leave us five stars. Leave us five stars wherever you listen. We could use that. Yeah. We're desperate. We'll do anything for it. Jack will text you pictures. Yes. Yep. Thanks.
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