Okay. Can I build an engine to do what I want to do? Right.

Yeah. So then I use the team to do marketing because I, I found out that, like, that was super easy thing to do is to actually leverage your team, to do what most people can’t, which is, you know, be present all the time.

That’d be really excited about this conversation. So Goboto, the marketing firm that I own, is 100% freelancers. So, so, and I hire everybody from local people here to people in India, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, all over the place. And I love the time difference that that gives me get somebody waking up when you’re going to sleep. Right. You know, you get a 24 hour cycle or probably even more than that. So why don’t we, why don’t we, why don’t we start with, cause some people might not know what a virtual team like w like a whole lot about that. So maybe give us a little background of maybe your definition of it or how you see it, or why, why it’s important to you at anywhere you want to go with it. Yeah.

I mean, a virtual team is literally that at the team that, that works for you virtually remotely, and it’s become a very interesting catchphrase lately since the cold COVID-19 crisis, because businesses that pretty much didn’t have any digital presence and were functioning a hundred percent. In-Person obviously just got delivered a huge blow. I mean, unless you were a Costco and you had a flood of people like zombies coming in to buy toilet paper, your business probably suffered. So it’s, so interestingly enough, I mean, when all this stuff happened, I actually had a huge influx in business because people came to me and said, Hey, Jeff you know, I know that you are obviously great at building virtual teams. How the heck do I do that for my business? And even digital marketer.com had approached me and said, Hey, you know what, a lot of art business owners that do do marketing would love to learn this. So it’s kind of given me a little bit of an opportunity to develop myself as like a thought leader, I guess you could say. So

How would somebody like, okay, let’s just say you’re a small company or whatever. How would you get started hiring your first team or person or wherever? What would, how would you get them going?

There’s lots of, there’s a lot of different places to hire virtual teams nowadays. Like there’s Upwork and Fiverr and you know, a lot of freelance websites like free up and some other things like that. You know, for me personally though you know, I haven’t had a whole lot of luck with the freelancers. And I think it stems with something that I’ve actually called and labeled freelancer rightness. And I’m sure, you know what I’m talking about when I say this,

I have an idea where you’re going,

But it usually stems from, you know, people, once they, you know, a lot of people, they get sold this dream. Cause now there’s this dream on Instagram, there’s a million Instagram influencers, right. And those Instagram influencers, what do they do? They start their Instagram accounts. And they basically get famous by traveling the world and telling people how they worked for themselves and their freelancer, you know, copywriter or a graphic designer or whatever the heck they are, or even virtual assistant. And I mean, so being a freelancer kind of has its own stigma of being free. Yeah. Right. And you can work

For the beach. Right.

The problem that, that generates my man is that a lot of times that also is an absence of accountability completely or

Knowing how to work without a structure. So a lot of, a lot of people come from a corporate world and they’re like, you know what, I’m pretty good at this. Or I’ve done this before. I can do it on my own. Well, it gets really hard when you don’t have somebody breathing down your neck right next to you. Some people really good at it. Some people are not

You’re absolutely right. And that’s that’s that, that right there is, that’s where the cookie crumbles, you know, because at the end of the day, you and I, we both have agencies and probably the people listening here have agencies and they want to serve their clients in the best of their abilities. Right. Reliably and consistently, and with good quality. And when you have to rely on a freelancer who maybe is just going project to project, and isn’t dedicated to you that turns into a challenge.

So how do you F how do you find the good people? Then

I recruit them.

I figured there had to be something that was kind of a layup, the softball cost there for you,

That’s it. I literally, I literally recruit them. And and that’s, that’s one of the things that’s really important that I, that I, I truly believe into is that you have to have you have to find people that already kind of do the job or something similar in a vertical of what you want them to do. And that, that really helps out in, well, a number of ways. But like, for example, if I’m going to hire someone to be a virtual assistant for me, for example, then if somebody is in the call center industry, see it’s already in customer sales and support, it’s easier for me to train someone customer service from a BPO industry than to train a random, you know, person off the street, how to do customer support and VVA. So I’m actually go, and by the way, the one thing that I’m looking for that you can’t train is someone who’s reliable, consistent and has good work ethic. And the only people that have those, my friends are people that already have jobs,

Right? The trifecta

People that, and I’m sorry to cut you off, but this is, this is a key factor that I want everyone to think about. Most of the time when people are looking for a job, there’s a reason why they don’t have a job.

I assume that to be true. And a lot of freelancers to be, to be fair are a freelancer because they’re in between jobs and then they need to make money. Right. So, and there’s could be a reason why

There’s a lot nowadays, a COVID a lot of people just woke up one day and found out that their job wasn’t quote unquote essential. Right.

So when did you start like this whole, so it sounds like a whole kind of different arm of what you do or, or how you do it. Like, because from what I’ve learned about you online is a lot more of the, you know, the marketing side, the social media side. So with virtual teams exists because of COVID being kind of front and center, or is this something that you’ve been doing for a long period of time or

I’ve been, you know, in the corporate world? I mean, I built virtual teams and as a project manager, I was basically leading virtual teams working from my home. And by the way, that’s another discussion for another day. But, you know, I think finally the home-based worker, the remote worker finally has a place at the table at corporations.