Small Business Digest - Bryan DiGiorgio

Thank you, Don, for having me.

Sure, I appreciate that. For me personally from a career standpoint, I spent the first third of my career on the service side of the equation, providing services to other businesses, generally in a call center environment. Then I had the unique opportunity for the next third of my career to move to the client side, running large client-side functional organizations more in customer management for companies like H&R Block, OnStar, Vonage, and Sprint. From there, I moved into the entrepreneurial world, where we have launched three companies, and our latest is 1840 and Company, which we launched a few years back. From a name standpoint, our name 1840 and Company came from looking at the midpoint between the first Industrial Revolution and the second. We pride ourselves on helping young companies pivot from startup to scale.

Yeah, the problems are really that startups are having to take their financial resources and go longer as venture capital is delaying funding through the process now. They have to leverage their capital and make it last a lot longer than they are used to. That combined with local scarcity in resources, where younger companies have a harder time finding skilled resources locally, they have to look outside the city or state they reside in. So they come to us looking for a global solution, which can mean we provide resources both domestically and globally, near shore or offshore, to augment what they are doing. Generally, people come to us when they need to add resource but are having trouble finding local resource or they are looking for independent contractors because they do not want to commit to a long-term employment agreement.

We provide global resources. If someone wants a US developer, we source, contract, and compensate a US developer. If someone wants to hire people remotely who are not domestic, we provide resources from Mexico and Argentina to South Africa and the Philippines. It depends on what skills the entrepreneur is looking for, and we go and source those skills and provide those talents.

Correct. We provide the gamut of skills. We can provide everything from a call center agent to an inbound or outbound business development person, to back office, finance professionals, marketing professionals, to front-end app developers.

Most of our work tends to be full-time and a bit longer term, but it ends up being more flexible in nature. We do not compete with companies like Upwork or Fiverr that do work for two hours. Generally, there is a longer engagement, though still flexible for both parties. We tend to compensate a bit higher for that to the individual, but it provides flexibility to the entrepreneur to pivot and make changes without the commitment of hiring an employee, which is more of a fixed cost and a long-term relationship.

No, I think you are correct. There is high expense when you are located in Silicon Valley. We can provide the same great resources that people have historically seen in Silicon Valley remotely. Remotely does not necessarily mean globally; it can simply mean providing that resource from Kansas or Tennessee versus California. It is a lot cheaper to live in Tennessee than California. And frankly, those individuals can still command a fairly similar rate structure to what they would in California. So what we have seen is compensation for individuals remotely is actually increasing, so there is parity coming between tier one cities and tier two and tier three cities. With remote work, it just does not matter where you are, but you still have a competitive pool for talent. The dollar will go further in Tennessee than in California, absolutely.

The irony with that is, as we were looking to pivot with our company in 2019, I actually interviewed some entrepreneurial friends, and frankly the whole idea of remote work, global work, anything that was not in a facility directly across from them was the wrong decision. It had me rethinking our business. But I looked at everything I had done in my past, whether globalization or working remotely, and we continued down the path of targeting a global remote force for entrepreneurs. Then the pandemic hit, and everyone was forced to reevaluate working conditions. What companies, especially entrepreneurs, started to see was that work can be done remotely. You do not need all that fixed infrastructure, lease the facility, buy computers. You can leverage independent contractors nationwide or globally and have more flexibility and a lower cost structure because you no longer have the facility to bear. One of the largest recent SaaS companies in growth is called Deal. Deal has grown to be worth $12 billion and is a 100 percent remote organization. At Google, they require every employee to be on site at least three days a week.

Yeah, if you are working remote, you have to include other dynamics. Video into the dialogue is important. We have put out an intranet site that helps link everyone globally together. There are additional things you need to do to really create the dynamics and relationship you would otherwise have in an office, but there are significantly more opportunities for a global remote workforce than requiring everyone to be localized to a facility.

Our website is 1840andco.com, and there are contact forms there. Feel free to reach out.

Well, the first is a decision about geography. Where do you want the person located? For us, we are agnostic, indifferent to geography. It is about what you want as a company owner. If you are looking for someone domestically, we can find that. If you are looking for someone globally, we can do that. We have different recommendations for different geographies based on cultures that tend to be better at different activities. Then it is a question about the vetting process. We go through a very strict vetting process: first language perspective, then behavioral interviews, then functional interviews. All that is done before we provide recommended candidates to our clients, who then get the final three, do a final interview, and select the candidate of their choice.

Certainly. There are always checks and balances. With any software, you can limit access. You as a client put in the guardrails to ensure that what someone is accessing they are meant to access. We can also provide additional technology that can view periodically, take snapshots of the page the person is on, or provide enhanced security around bring your own device that will lock down the computer while working. So there are additional security requirements we can offer clients to provide enhanced protection.

Well, you have never met them physically, sure. But what is the difference between needing someone physically in front of you going through an interview versus a video? It is not all that different.

Well, that is me. No, I understand.

Sure. With leveraging our platform, we post jobs similar to others. We are actually developing our own technology to enhance that. But we post on various job boards in various countries to solicit candidates. We generally receive a large number of candidates as we spread things out globally. We target multiple countries typically and or multiple states to identify people. As we post for positions posting remote and in broader geographies, we get a large selection of qualified candidates. We go through to get to the top say five percent of candidates, which we then provide for final interview to our clients.

We get some. I have not necessarily seen a large amount yet. I think some of that tends to be that historically those individuals have locally been able to command a higher rate than when we offer things globally.

We certainly see the trend in remote staffing, and really that is about global remote staffing. In the US, when you reach near full employment, it makes it hard to find individuals and you have to spread the pool out further to find qualified candidates at certain levels. Certainly globalization of a remote workforce. The work-from-home model we see continuing to rise, particularly with some of the people we source in emerging markets. Think about it this way: in emerging markets, those individuals historically had to commute an hour to an hour and a half to work each way. By enabling them to work remotely, we are giving individuals globally two to three hours back a day in their personal lives. We see the need for upskilling resources as new technology comes about with AI and machine learning. Over the next few years, at least 75 percent of the workforce will require upskilling of some nature. And diversity and inclusion continues to be a focus for all companies, making sure they have a complete diversified workforce, which allows them to gain additional insights from different cultures and genders that help promote a better business model.

We have not. We have not seen a reduction in compensation. Frankly, we have just seen increases. And as I mentioned, from a remote workforce what we have seen is the normalization of pay rates in tier two and tier three cities to that of tier one cities.

Our website is 1840andco.com.

Yeah, I think just understanding we have two operating models. We offer a traditional outsourcing model, which is a managed service where we provide not just the people that do the work but the management and oversight of those individuals. Secondly, we provide a vetted freelance model where those are individuals that report and directly work for our clients. We provide one invoice on a monthly basis. We source, contract, and compensate those individuals, removing all of that hassle from our clients.

Thank you, Don. Thanks for having us.