Remote Revolution: Driving Business Growth With Virtual Teams

September 17, 2024

In this episode of The Same Day Podcast, host Mat Zalk sits down with Gwenn Aspen, Founder and CEO of Anequim, to discuss the power of virtual teams in business growth. They explore integrating remote professionals into company culture, best practices for managing virtual teams, and strategies for scaling while maintaining quality.

Remote Revolution: Driving Business Growth With Virtual Teams

Gwenn Aspen is the Founder and CEO of Anequim, a pioneering company that connects businesses with top-tier, bilingual remote professionals based in Mexico. A celebrated motivational speaker and moderator, Gwenn’s professional history includes co-founding the property management company Wistar Group with her husband Jeremy, which they later sold in 2021. Her passion lies in enhancing the profitability of small and medium-sized enterprises while creating outstanding career opportunities. Gwenn’s expertise propels companies forward by integrating remote workforce strategies into their growth plans.

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Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

  • [4:15] Gwenn Aspen shares the origin story of Anequim
  • [6:14] Best ways to include remote professionals in company culture
  • [8:22] Challenges and benefits of remote professionals in various industries
  • [15:55] The onboarding process at Anequim
  • [24:19] How to mitigate security issues when working with virtual teams
  • [31:00] Gwenn explains the use of performance indicators and the importance of accountability in remote work
  • [42:23] Productivity and growth opportunities for remote professionals

In this episode…

Are you fully tapping into the potential of remote teams to drive your business forward? With the rise of virtual professionals, many companies are rethinking traditional staffing models and finding innovative ways to reduce costs and boost productivity. But how can companies effectively manage remote teams while ensuring growth and maintaining a strong workplace culture?

According to Gwenn Aspen, a leading authority in remote workforce optimization, success starts with treating virtual professionals like full-time, integral team members. She highlights that clear communication, proper onboarding, and consistent performance metrics are crucial to ensure remote employees are productive and fully engaged. This approach eliminates common pitfalls and boosts efficiency, creating a more streamlined and cost-effective workforce.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Special Mentions

Related Episodes

Quotable Moments

  • “Remote professionals are not just assistants; they are core team members pivotal to our success.”
  • “The real success comes from every day working in an environment where you feel appreciated and know what you’re doing.”
  • “Manage people based on their output, not on their seat in the chair.”
  • “Remote work incentivizes the best management behavior and drives your business forward faster.”
  • “You can’t grow here unless you make yourself replaceable.”

Action Steps

  1. Establish clear job descriptions with KPIs for remote professionals: Defining expectations promotes accountability and consistency in remote work, which leads to more robust performance and alignment with company goals.
  2. Immerse remote team members in the company culture from the start: Proper onboarding with mission, vision, and values creates a sense of belonging and increases remote employees’ commitment to your business.
  3. Utilize performance indicators and scorecards to measure productivity: Reliable metrics track remote team member efficiency, driving a results-oriented culture while providing transparency for managers.
  4. Embrace a “camera on” work culture for stronger connections and communication: Visual cues from facial expressions can communicate much more than words, making it a vital practice for clearer and more personable interactions with remote employees.
  5. Encourage and facilitate career advancement by enabling team members to train their replacements: This practice prevents knowledge hoarding, promotes employee growth, and ensures business continuity as team members advance within or move on from the organization.

Sponsor for this episode…

Keyrenter Property Management:

This episode is brought to you by Keyrenter Property Management.

Keyrenter Property Management is a full-service property management company that helps clients buy, renovate, and operate real estate assets.

The team helps clients build wealth while taking the headache out of property management.

That’s why, no matter what rental you have — single-family homes, condos, townhomes, or apartments — they can give you the management solutions you need.

To learn more about their services, go to https://keyrenterpmc.com/ or send them an email at [email protected].

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:05

Welcome to The Same Day Podcast where we discuss driving incremental business growth and other topics related to real estate, property management and entrepreneurship. Now to the show at hand.

Mat Zalk 0:16

Mat Zalk here, I’m the host of The Same Day Podcast where I connect with top business experts and real estate leaders. Past guests of the show have been Mike Basch with Atento Capital, Easton of aerovision, Chip Gaberino, the local entrepreneur doing restaurants, commercial real estate, and of course, the owner of Topeca Coffee, a great local coffee brand that has branched out nationally, exciting for Chip and everyone involved with the Topeka brand. Today’s episode is brought to you by Keyrenter Property Management. At Keyrenter Property Management, we are a full service property management company, helping our clients buy, renovate and operate real estate assets. We help our clients build wealth while taking the headache out of property management, one of the ways we do that is by using remote team members or remote professionals. And we’re going to hear all about that today with our current guest. But it doesn’t matter what rental you have, single family homes, condos, townhomes, apartments. We have the management solutions that you need. You don’t necessarily need to know how the sausage is made, but you’re going to learn a little bit about it today. But go to keyrenterpmc.com for more information or [email protected]. I want to send a huge shout out to the Keyrenter franchise team that’s Nate Tew and many of his associates, because I first met our guest today at a Keyrenter Franchise Summit, and it was a lot of fun. We got to spend a lot of time with Gwenn Aspen and her husband Jeremy, who’s a fellow pilot, so we bonded over all sorts of fun trips that we’ve taken and how we get our family into the planes and where we go. Without further, ado. Gwenn Aspen is the CEO and Founder of Anequim, one of the largest remote professional employers in Mexico. Anequim connects entrepreneurs, property managers and small to mid sized businesses with highly skilled, bilingual, full time virtual assistants who live and work in Mexico. Prior to founding Anequim, Gwenn and Jeremy founded Wistar Group, a property management company that they sold in 2021. Gwenn is a powerhouse. She’s a motivational speaker, a moderator traveling around the country to talk about her passion of making small and medium businesses more profitable and providing amazing career opportunities for Anequim employees. You’re going to hear, Well, I’m excited to talk to Gwenn Aspen right now. Gwenn Aspen, welcome to the show.

Gwenn Aspen 0:16

Oh my god, I’m so excited to be here. Thank you for having me.

Mat Zalk 2:51

This is so fun. I’m really excited we’re going to talk all about remote team members today. But I want to know, like, what are you what’s the industry lingo? It’s got, like, I don’t want to be offensive to anybody. Are we in a is this like an offensive space? Or is this just like what the going trend is? Or are we what we used to call them, VAs, virtual assistants, then they were doing so much more. They’re not just assistants. They’re like core team members. What are we calling remote team members these days?

Gwenn Aspen 3:16

Well, we use, we use the term remote professional, and we use that term because a lot of people just don’t, don’t put them in that same professional category. And really, they are people who don’t live in the United States can do any job someone in the US can do from behind a computer. And this is, like, a really hard concept for people to, like, wrap their heads around, but I swear to God, it’s true, and the results are clear, and people are having amazing teams with amazing culture and saving money at the same time, and everybody is happy, and their clients are happy too.

Mat Zalk 3:54

I love it. I want to, I want to get into like, how, what are best practices for including people that are not physically in your office, into your culture, making them feel like part of the team. But before we go there, I want to ask you, just for our audience, how did you get started with Anequim. What’s the what’s the origin story here?

Gwenn Aspen 4:15

Okay, so the origin story is that my husband lived in Mexico for many years, and then in 2008 we were starting our own property management company. And he got a call from a former employee, and she said, you know, things are bad in us right now. We just had the housing crisis, but things are horrible in Mexico, and I’m literally struggling to feed my child. Is there any way that you could provide some kind of job for me at your new company. I’d heard through the grapevine you started a business. My husband, for better or worse, is one of the most loyal people you’ll ever meet. Doesn’t get it gets up in trouble sometimes, but he, like literally, felt so responsible for this person, and so he looked up different technologies. This is right when the VPN phones, or the voiceover internet, whatever phones came out. So he sent one down. She started answering the calls for our tiny property management company. It was a win, win. So then, as we were growing, we were just hired all her friends, because they wanted jobs too, and we just operated like that as a property management company until 2016 when our friends from Denver were like, this whole thing in Mexico is going great for you. Can you do anything for us? And here we are today. We have over, like almost 1500, employees with over 300 mostly property management companies, but we could do other companies too.

Mat Zalk 5:44

It reminds me of, like, a scenario where someone’s like, This is going really well for you. Can you do this for us? And you’re like, I wish I could. Can well, like, if you just flip the point on the other side.

Gwenn Aspen 5:55

It was supposed to be my side hustle, my mom side hustle. I was like, Oh yeah, you know, I just do part time quality assurance at Wistar. I can do this as a side hustle, and then it became our full time job, and we even sold our property management company. So So yeah, so that’s how it got started.

Mat Zalk 6:11

Love it. We have been using VAs for a long time. In fact, the first when it was just me at our office. And now I think we’re now, I think we’re like 85 people, and half of them, 40 of them, are remote professionals. So we’re, we are fully bought in, fully subscribed. But when it was just me doing everything in the early days, I guess that was like November 2017 it was me and Glorian, and she was a saint. She was the only person that could like work at my pace, and I had to go through a couple of people to find somebody that was willing to accept my expectations, but also my like the speed at which I worked. And Glorian still with us now. Love her. She’s like my work wife. I don’t get to spend as much time directly with her via text and zoom and everything as we did originally, but she’s still like our original gangster, but we’ve grown tremendously since then. People have now have teams under them. So we have a remote professional, we have our core VAs, our executive VAs are all sorts of things, and they have formed teams, and they’ve grown in their leadership. Before they were doing some data input, and they understood the systems, but now they’re they’re building their their kind of team around them. My question to you is, what’s the best way to really inculcate people into the entirety of the culture? Because it’s difficult. We have our all hands meeting every year, and we’ve got 40 people on a screen, and they’re participating, and they get awards, and they do all this stuff, but they’re not physically there with us. And it hurts me. It pain. I mean, these people have been instrumental to our success, and sure, they’re paid, right, but they’re not like there to celebrate with us. What’s the what do we do to to bring them in even deeper and help them feel the appreciation that we have and love that we have for them.

Gwenn Aspen 6:14

Well, I think, I think you bring up a few points. First of all, when you started, you probably weren’t as good at managing this giant remote team as you are now, so it takes a little practice, or you can use the cheat sheet, which is like a company like ours that just holds your hand through it. But the main thing that people forget is they don’t do the onboarding like they would a domestic employee, and that’s like the first step where they get subpar results. Yeah. So it’s really important if you see this person as like a full time worker, like you have to also change your mindset, instead of like a gig worker and treating them like a gig worker, you have to be like, this is like any other domestic employee, and this is a person I invest in long term. So then you start with mission, vision, values, like all those things people forget to do that because people are remote additionally, somehow they forget that these people need, like a great job description with KPIs, and then weekly, you have to hold them accountable. The other thing that gets people in trouble is it is easier to ignore a remote person when they do something wrong and just not address the hard thing that if they’re in your office, and so that that remote people don’t get the feedback that they would if they were in the office, but if you know these things, are the problematic pitfalls that people run into, and you know it on the front end, and you have someone holding your hand and making sure the onboarding goes well and that the expectations are set and a training calendar is set that and You are committed to giving feedback when it’s needed. You can have the experience like you have, where you have a full team, I’m sure you have people in charge of PNLs and really high end managerial tasks, and it’s working great for you. In fact, it’s probably more efficient because you’re not wasting time in between meetings, because you just have your schedule set and you’re like, literally. Than die by your Google Calendar, and you don’t have the drama, and no one’s touching each other in the break room, so you don’t have any HR issues. And so it really ends up being a more effective and efficient community. And guess what? People like their jobs when it lacks drama, when it lacks problems like that, and that’s why they stay and they love these jobs. So is it the same? Can you have the same party at Christmas as you could if they were domestic? No, but at the end of the day, it’s not about the trust fall or, you know, doing beer pong together. It’s really about every day working in an environment where you’re you feel, feel appreciated, and know what you’re doing, and you know you’re contributing to the long term mission and the clients that that the company serves.

Mat Zalk 10:54

So I love this. I love everything you said, why? And I may feel this way, and you don’t feel this way because you’re like in it all the time. Why do I feel like remote professionals have been slow to catch on in other industries? Property Management has been an industry that’s used remote professionals, non domestic workers, for a long time, and yet I don’t feel like any of my friends that own HVAC businesses are plumbing businesses. There’s no nothing in the legal world. I mean, some of it is going to be like HIPAA compliance and regulation that I get, but in other industries that should naturally take advantage of the arbitrage opportunity to hire great people for lower costs, they’re not doing it.

Gwenn Aspen 11:36

The reason that virtual assistants or remote team members, whatever you want to call them has not caught on in other industries is because they have had larger margins. And I know that sounds like really basic, but because Property Management has been a low margin industry, it has been the one to adopt less expensive labor strategies without without compensating with poor labor. Like, that’s the other misconception, is like, oh, it’s going to be less quality. It really doesn’t have to be the case. But that’s why we caught on first, is because we had to, I’ve talked to other other industries, and when they just make so much, you know, and they’re just, like, printing money, it’s hard to want to learn a new skill, and it is true. I think it’s just worth being honest that it is a new skill, managing people remotely. And if you’re not incentivized, or you don’t really care about increasing your margins by doing so, you’re not going to do it. But I think that the margins in many industries are changing, and people are incentivized at this point, where they could see that they could reach their goals sooner if they just adopt the virtual assistant strategy.

Mat Zalk 12:46

Sure, I think to your point, I mean, they’re so about the quality of the people that that you can hire in other areas, we have folks that were, you know, essentially Chartered Accountants for publicly traded companies, and now they’re doing work with our accounting team. These are highly, highly skilled, super sophisticated, very smart people. They just happen to have been, been born somewhere where the GDP per capita is lower, and it’s they just their pay schedule or their pay scale is different. And so the difference between hiring a super motivated, very intelligent, hardworking person from a country that that validates and finds it worthwhile to have hardworking people, versus the US where it’s much more expensive and sometimes people feel entitled, especially in the last couple of years, the quiet, quitting, all this kind of stuff, like the younger generation has a tendency to feel entitled where we’re saying thank you for showing up to work today, and they don’t have the same work ethic. It’s just a totally different ball game.

Gwenn Aspen 13:56

Totally different ball game. And you can not only find people, I mean, we have professors on our team. We have lawyers on our team doing a lot of the work that you know people in property management do, from maintenance coordination to executive assistance, you name it, onboarding specialists, all those kinds of roles. We have people at that caliber, because we’re also able to provide the benefits that a lot of small, medium sized businesses can’t do in the US to attract that kind of labor. I mean, the pay scale is different in addition. So this is like a bomb job, right? If you’re in some of some other countries, and they can also see how they could move up, especially if they’re with a growing firm, and so you’re not sacrificing quality. In fact, I think it’s quite the opposite.

Mat Zalk 14:42

And so what do you say to people that are like, I will I be able to understand these people? Will I will they have, you know, general communication barriers. Can they speak to owners? Can they speak to tenants, especially in property management, and then in other industries, they’ll be speaking to different people.

Gwenn Aspen 14:55

Oh my gosh, the quality of the English is. I mean, the people in Mexico that we work with, they know English is the route to having, you know, a great career. And so they’ve been practicing and watching all of our movies, and they they do all the things American down there.

Mat Zalk 14:56

And so they sound like, they sound like Valley girls.

Gwenn Aspen 14:56

Sometimes it’s, I’ve been told I stuff like a valley girl. They think sometimes their English, their grammar and writing, is even better than mine. And then you put AI with it, and you’re any kind of grammatical errors that maybe we saw a little while ago. It’s nothing that Grammarly can’t fix, and so it’s great.

Mat Zalk 15:42

I mean, okay, so if somebody is exploring a remote professional for the first time, what’s the what would the handholding process look like? The onboarding process through Anequim.

Gwenn Aspen 15:55

So with Anequim, and I’m gonna say this like just broad strokes for anyone looking for any kind of role. I just but the number one thing is being very clear about what the job description is. What does winning look like in the role? Many times we have people who just think of like a job description, or they’re really overwhelmed because, like, they’re bad at email or whatever, which I totally relate to.

Mat Zalk 16:21

But no judgment.

Gwenn Aspen 16:24

No judgment here. But when they say executive assistant, I do have to say it’s the worst performing role, and it’s usually the first one people go to, because they haven’t thought through what that person’s going to do once their email gets organized. So what we’ll do is we’ll coach you on the role, because we’ve seen this. This isn’t our first rodeo. So if your idea of the role is not as good as it could be, we’ll be like, No, we think that this might be better. And almost always, people take our suggestions. But that’s like the number one thing, and then the other thing people don’t consider is the onboarding process, the process of having this person meet people in your company has to be good, or they get the wrong impression about what’s acceptable at your business. And so it’s really important to have like the technology all organized like what their logins are for all the things, what’s their email have that done before they get started? So when you work with us, we make sure that you’re set up for success, because actually, with adequate since we’re a legal entity in Mexico, everyone’s a legal employee. So if it doesn’t work out, we’re actually on the hook for a lot of socialized programs in Mexico. So we need it to work, and you don’t want to spend time with high churn either. So it’s a win win.

Mat Zalk 17:40

Yeah, there are certain things though, that, like our team has remote professionals do that. My philosophy is, you’re a productive person that is here in the United States. I want you to focus on things that can only be done in the United States and in property management, that’s walking properties. That’s, I guess they’re not that many things. That’s walking properties. It’s talking to the actual maintenance vendors when you’re there. And you need to look at this situation to make sure that we’re not being built or duped, or that this is the right decision. We’re going to put we’re going to run new water lines. I’ve got to make sure that this is the right decision. I have to be physically on property. But for our remote professionals, they do so much. But I also say, if it makes your life easier as a person here on a high you’re a high, productive person, I want you to also utilize that person for that. So if you can, if, if a team members, you know, mother goes into surgery in the hospital, we have a remote professional send them flowers. Because I don’t think it’s a good use of Yoni, who’s our head of marketing and sales, time to actually get on flowers.com and do that, but it’s somebody on his team. It’s a very good use of their time to show that our support and appreciation for that person and their mother. So we do that kind of stuff, but it’s not doesn’t fall into a broad, like a real description of somebody’s job. How do you categorize 15% of somebody’s time that’s just going to be on, like, random things? And it kind of goes into that executive assistant role where it’s not purely defined, but a really good executive assistant probably spends six months of their life being pegged to your hip to understand what kind of food you like on a plane and what kind of this you like. You know, what kind of do you want an Uber or a taxi when you get to the airport, whatever it is like. How do you how do you define some of those things that are not quite definable, or is it just a bad role?

Gwenn Aspen 19:20

No, no, it’s not a bad role. And I have an executive assistant that I almost don’t think I could live without, because he does so many things, like forms. If you’re a mother and your kid goes to a camp, I mean, there’s a forum for every thing that they do, forms, the camps, do you know, making sure they get into this or that. My executive assistant does all those things and but they are kind of quantifiable, like forms, flowers, present. I mean, the main thing is to think through that. But here’s the key to an executive assistant role is that I don’t want you to be on a yacht in Croatia, Mat. I know that’s one of your dreams. I know. You’re gonna be on that yacht and wake up at like, three in the morning go, Oh my God, my executive assistant doesn’t have anything to do today. So what we have to think about are recurring tasks that they can do without being told that aren’t those one offs. Yeah. So good examples of that would be like quality assurance. So many people do not use quality assurance. And I’m like, a huge on this, like, small businesses should have somebody doing those tasks, following up on any problem that happens, and going back to the processes and procedures to make sure it doesn’t happen again. And that person really should report to someone at the top. Also, there’s a lot of investigating, like investigate my competition, investigate the software, you know, investigate AI, and how I could utilize it. Investigation should also maybe be part of the role of a remote professional. And then another one would be if marketing tasks a lot of the time, people don’t want to give up marketing, because it’s like the vision of their baby to the world, and they want to have a high degree of ownership. So I’m just saying that when we talk about that role, we want to think about what recurring tasks are also going to go in there, so that you can enjoy a trip to Croatia and not think about your executive assistant.

Mat Zalk 21:19

Yeah, that’s a quality assurance is a really interesting one. And I still, if I define the tasks that I do as the owner, broker of our business, I spend a lot of time poking around and asking questions, and I don’t know how to outsource that. I like, just, I just like, I click on, how do you do that? I just click on links, and I’ll look at stuff. I’ll look at like, the income and the of rents, and I’ll look at one that looks suspicious. Why did somebody pay $372.47 like, that’s not a random that’s not an amount that you normally see. You normally see 1000, 1200 but not that small amount. And I start poking at them. And why is this? Oh, they didn’t pay their late fee, or they depended like, how do you? How do you handle that?

Gwenn Aspen 22:04

So for for property management, the way that we handled quality assurance in the past was we for anyone, everything comes in through email or phones you. If you investigate emails and phone calls from tenants and owners, you will find problems, I mean, almost always, or things that could be tweaked or done a little bit better. And so the role is to spot check things, and then when there are problems, and give people feedback on their emails and their communications, and then go back to the process or procedure, or if there’s a complaint, we use the Kaizen format, which we stole from Toyota, and we do a root cause analysis of why the problem happens. And then we give credit when the problem is fixed. We also quantify the amount of money that we try. Sometimes it’s not exact, but what the fix to that problem? Quantify that so that we can also give people who are in helping with fixing the problem that goes in their file, like, hey, good on you. You fixed this. You came up with the idea the quality assurance person just makes sure that that process continues to happen and happens every day. When we had a property management company, which was a smaller organization that we have now, that was just a half day role, it was like from eight to 11 there they did quality and then they did another job in the afternoon. But we did so much better, because we all know that if you have good referrals, your business is going to grow. If people are just singing your praises right and left and you’re the best customer service experience of their life, you’re going to do great. So this is, to me, the number one role if anyone wants to grow their organization.

Mat Zalk 23:45

Kind of gives me so much pause, like, we need to be doing a better job at that. We need to be doing a better job with that. I do it, but it’s like, I shouldn’t be doing it as a part time hobby. When I, like, come in and don’t have anything to do and just start piddling around, it’s just, and it’s like, upset. To me. It’s like, obsessive. I’m like, where’s the problem, where’s the problem, where’s the problem. And that’s just, that’s.

Gwenn Aspen 24:06

No, it’s not bad, though, because you could have somebody just being your right hand person. And that’s the other executive assistant role. Is like, if you have a big initiative, you have a cultural change you want to make. You have some big initiative, or you don’t like something that happens at your business. This can be the arm of your of your company, that’s checking on things. I’ll give you one more example. We have weekly meetings, and all the scorecard has to be filled out every Tuesday, if someone’s and it’s complicated because they’re a bunch of different teams. So my executive assistant on Monday talks to anyone who doesn’t have their scorecard filled out so that when I go into my leadership meeting on Tuesday afternoon, I have all the data there for me to make sure I’m making good decisions, right? So it’s like another example of just making sure that there’s accountability and people have things done. The other one is, if you kind of go in to meetings, but you’re not in the regular meeting. A lot of times you’ll ask a question, you’ll have it to do, and then no one follows it up on it, because you’re not actually in that meeting every single week. So making sure that this person follows up with that person to make sure that they get their thing done for you is another great task for an executive assistant.

Mat Zalk 25:16

Do you have George doing stuff like, like financial like, paying your credit card bills and like stuff that you don’t want to do. No. Financial stuff is kind of separate.

Gwenn Aspen 25:27

I have that done by our finance department. I mean, he does pay, like, my personal stuff, like, if my kid runs out of lunch money and I have to.

Mat Zalk 25:36

Yeah, have to get that little balance, yeah.

Gwenn Aspen 25:39

Yeah. So he does like those things, but in terms of a corporate you know, that’s done by a different department.

Mat Zalk 25:46

Okay, so you and I agree that we love remote professionals. There are going to be some people watching this that are like, Oh my God. They’re going to have access to everything. Things are going to go wrong. They’re going to steal all my data. They’re going to sell to my compete, to my competition. Like, let’s talk about why some of those fears are unfounded, but let’s also talk about some real stories of like, things that have gone wrong. I’ve got some, and I’m happy to share them. But what have what have you seen? But first and foremost, like, why is it less of a of a big deal than some people might assume it is, or would be okay?

Gwenn Aspen 26:20

So I was so worried about this. When I started the business, I was freaking out about security. Are you a natural worrier passion? I’m always looking for danger, like, where’s the danger coming from? Well, I really care about our customers are. I mean, they’re all our friends. I want. I want happy, sure. So I read this book called The thief in your organization or something. It’s by Tiffany Couch, and she was a forensic financial analyst, and so she looked for stealing, and she said that the number one person who’s going to steal from your organization is someone who gets the mail and puts things in the system, because a lot of the time the they just don’t pay the taxes. That’s like the number one way people steal is they just, they have the tax documents that come in in the mail, and then they they put it in the system, but they take the money for themselves. The other way is, if anyone is able to onboard employees or or vendors and get the mail. That’s the other issue. So you really have to lock down anyone who’s able to onboard employees and have a good like auditing process and vendors. That’s the other really bad place.

Mat Zalk 27:40

What’s the onboarding? What’s the play there on onboarding employees? So then you could add an extra employee and put your.

Gwenn Aspen 27:48

Yeah, you add an extra employee, or you don’t remove an employee, and then you change their bank account number, yeah. And then you take the check, got it, and then if you have a fake vendor, that’s the other one, yeah? So, so the main thing is just to not have the same person doing that, and that’s an in the office problem. The next thing is have a password protection software like Keeper or LastPass, yeah. So many people don’t do that. The only time I’ve had somebody like we’ve had, actually, amazingly, no thievery. But I think it’s because of our onboarding process, and we make sure that they have one of those password protectors. We’ve only had two confirmed cases in the eight years that we’ve been Anequim two, and it wasn’t for significant, I mean, huge amounts of money. But anyway, it’s really hard for somebody who’s far away. Now you have to manage your privileges and your software. This is huge. This is huge for anyone in inside the office or outside the office. People will give privileges because they have a pet project, and then they won’t remove the privileges. And this is like a disaster for every business. So this is where the process for like, at the very least, have on your calendar to remove the privileges at a certain time frame or change your password or whatever it is, right? Right? So those are my keys. I don’t know if that’s helpful.

Mat Zalk 29:21

I mean, we use 1Password. I guess my fear is that we there are softwares that we use across the entire organization, and we maybe change those annually or semi annually, and everybody gets an email in the org that says we’ve changed these passwords. And none of those things have really sensitive data, but it could easily leak into other things. We do use 1Password, though?

Gwenn Aspen 29:41

Well, when you remove somebody, you look at all the passwords, like, if you’re very consistent about using 1Password, and you never given, like, some kind of login in a different way. Then when you are having someone go away, then you have a list of all the softwares that they have, and you change the password. And if people are always when they when they go away, and then if people are always using LastPass, there’s not going to be that runaround of what’s the new password, what’s the new password, because it’s in the system.

Mat Zalk 30:12

Yeah, we had a guy, and he was he had outsourced, or he had subcontracted, some of the work that he was supposed to be doing, and was paying, I guess, a friend to do some of the work, which was an interesting one. So we, I mean, our perspective is, I guess, we let him go. We explained to everybody why we let him go, why that was unacceptable. But I also was like, if he’s paying somebody else less money to do the work that he’s doing. Should we is there a market to pay less for that job? I didn’t quite understand. We also have a problem sometimes, because we have people that are in that are out east. We don’t just go south to Mexico and Latin America. We go out east sometimes, and we’ll find that like Friday afternoon, Friday, you know, morning our time is Friday, evening, their time. And so you call somebody and they’re having, like, a party in the background. You’re like, Dude, you’re supposed to be at work. This is, I know it’s nighttime, your time, but you’re supposed to be at work. And this is Friday, it’s still a business day. And so we’ve had some problems like that, but overall, we’ve also had very few issues. We have not had any that I know of. I mean, because there’s some stuff that could be, you know, we could be outside of my logos of control or whatever, but, like, we haven’t had people steal our data, sell it to anybody else. Do and of get, of course, you have to segment and make sure that people are, you know, have have there’s, you know, lines of control that you want to keep separate so the person that enters keys into our key box form doesn’t also have access to other things related to the property.

Gwenn Aspen 31:00

So, yeah, you have to be strategic about it. I think it’s important to be strategic. And I love the fact that you brought up stealing time. I do feel like stealing time is thievery, and people have had like, two jobs at the same time, but when you brought up the pay part, what a lot of people who just get their own VAs do the pay part wrong. It’s really hard to recover from, and they will overpay people. We are working currently on this banded system that I’m super proud of. It wasn’t my idea, so I can brag about it. Was one of our employees ideas. It’s the most amazing banded pay and accountability system ever. But that’s when working with professionals is very helpful, because you can, and people do all the time, overpay, then they find out what they’re doing. And it’s not like, you know, the 80s, where we never talked about our pay, yeah, it’s like, they’re gonna tell you how much they should and so making sure that you’re doing things the right way with that will prevent you from having drama later down the line and but it is very common that a VA or a remote professional or whatever is paid way too much, and it would make sense for them to pay someone else to do that job and then hold another job.

Mat Zalk 32:58

And would I mean, is your bandit system based on tenure and responsibilities? Like a matrix?

Gwenn Aspen 33:06

It’s based on, I could show it at two after the show, but it’s based on, there are 12 different factors, wow. And there are four bands of progress. And each role you’re not going to get, you’re not going to be perfect, like, if you’re a four at all, things, like, even executives aren’t perfect at all. Four, yeah, but you have to get, like, 40% of that band to be successful in most roles, and then then you quantify where they actually stand and how close they are to the 40% Wow. Again, yeah, it was from the Harvard Business Review. And it’s really cool.

Mat Zalk 33:46

I love it. I mean, but this is why using a professional company to hire remote team members or remote professionals, you guys are thinking about this all the time, in a way that those people that aren’t using you for for hiring their folks are not thinking about what? What about cultural differences. What about stuff like, you know, in the US, a lot of people get bonuses. In Latin America, they may not want bonuses in a traditional way, in a performance based bonuses, and they want to understand what their salary is going to be and not rely on a quarterly bump.

Gwenn Aspen 34:13

Actually, we really think bonuses are a great way to incentivize the right behavior, because you can stay in the bands, and then if someone does something way over the top, then bonusing is definitely a preferred outcome. So we’re very interested in bonusing. But cultural differences are a thing, and one of the cultural differences is just protecting the downside for for any emerging market there is not an abundance mindset. So things can be taken the wrong way a little bit more easily. So the way that we combat this is we are a camera on culture. So if I am sick, if I look like absolute garbage, I’m going to be humble, and I’m going to present myself on screen and x. Expectation, as they do too. The reason is, is because so much is said through the facial expression, right, right? So, and then I have a habit of calling out the facial expression like, Hey, you look really resigned. Tell me more about what you’re you’re thinking right now, because you said yes, but your face said no, yeah. And so that has been very helpful in us having more transparent communication. But the other problem is the covering your but, you know, having a like, I did the bare minimum, you know, I I’m not in trouble. You can’t make me get me in trouble for this. So having the psychological security that nobody gets fired for making a mistake, but you get fired for covering up the mistake. It’s a really important culture to have when you have remote employees.

Mat Zalk 35:52

And so camera on, you’re saying, if, if you’re a remote professional, and I’m, I’m your domestic counterpart, and we’re going to sit down for a meeting, for our feedback, meetings for our one on one on a weekly basis, etc. We’re always going to talk through the camera. We’re not going to we’re not going to hide behind a blank screen on Zoom.

Gwenn Aspen 36:10

Yeah. I mean, there are most there are times when you have to use your phone and it’s not possible, but generally speaking, we’re camera on all the time because of that thing, because I can tell what you’re thinking and feeling.

Mat Zalk 36:21

What are some other tools or philosophies? Does Anequim support promote for employers to encourage productivity and monitor what people are doing? And I should say, when you hire garbage in the United States, you’re going to hire garbage in the United States, when you’re hiring top quality people. You’re going to get top quality performance. So with that caveat in mind, like, what? What are should people be concerned about productivity tools, where the mouse is moving, you know, and all this kind of stuff. Are there other things, or is it trust? Like, how do people, how do people feel confident that they’re getting a full 40 hours out of a person, that they’re paying 40 hours?

Gwenn Aspen 36:58

So it’s interesting, you brought up the mouse thing. So we used to use an activity tracker, but with the advent of these little mouse movers, it’s totally worthless. And so instead of lying to our customers, I mean, like, yeah, your person’s productive, we’re like, let’s be honest, these mouse movers are, you know, $25 on Tiktok. Yeah, that’s what they’re going to use. So it’s really about performance indicators and being able to have metrics for every single role. And a North Star metric, a North Star metric can be as simple as one ring, good, two rings, bad. You know, you want to make it that simple, but everyone needs to have a metric that they’re responsible for, and that goes in the scorecard. And so obviously at our leadership level, you’re not looking at everybody’s metrics, but at the manager and supervisor level, they’re responsible for that team being productive. So I think that being more accountable in the office. You don’t have to be as metrics driven, because you can kind of see if people are working, even though they can hide from that phone swiping right on your time, I guarantee it, but you feel better about it. So I think remote work actually incentivizes the best management behavior, and actually, this is one of the reasons why using remote labor will help you drive your business forward faster than using domestic labor, because you have to use best practices. Yeah, and you have to, you have to manage people based on their output, not on like their seat in the chair. Or, you know, sitting in the chair. It’s not chair time. It’s what did you do for me lately?

Mat Zalk 38:43

Yeah. I mean, we’ve always used the philosophy of of if you can do what I need you to do in 20 hours and spend 20 hours on the beach, I don’t really care. Leverage the tools and the resources at your disposal to get it done on the on the other hand, if somebody can do what they’re doing in 20 hours. Shouldn’t we saddle them with more responsibility, give them more pay, do other stuff? So it’s it’s a it’s a balance, and some people want to stay in their current role. We have property managers that don’t really want to take on more. They don’t want to earn more. They’re kind of happy cruising. They’re great at what they do. And we have other property managers that want to get paid a lot more and be paid more. You have to take on more property. It’s a very simple economic calculus of like, hey, the more you produce, the more you can come to me and say, I want to earn more money. And I’m forced to make a decision, do I want to lose you? And or do I not? I want to lose you? And it’s very it’s a very simple, it’s a very simple mathematical equation. And so I just wonder if we should be, we should be putting many more remote professionals with an individual property manager to just maximize their productivity. Or is there a point at which it stops they just can’t outsource more of the things that they’re doing?

Gwenn Aspen 39:55

I mean, I think it’s a really good strategic exercise to utilize people. Like to really talk about what the job entails and how you could use people most effectively, and especially with all the new tools out. I mean, there has to be some time allocated to figuring out, you know, how you can be most efficient and stay ahead of the curve. So that could be some of the property managers jobs. Well, people behind the scenes are like executing. But I think one of the other things that’s interesting is when you use remote labor and you’re worried that someone’s not productive, sometimes at the price point, it makes sense to hire two instead of one and have them compete. If you’re if you’re measuring things.

Mat Zalk 40:37

Interesting. AB testing. So have you take out my portfolio, you to cap my portfolio, and we see who performs better.

Gwenn Aspen 40:43

You see who’s performing better, and then also they know that there’s that accountability there. And so I think that that’s a great choice. Now I’m not a throw people at problems person, so I want to heavily caveat that I sometimes think that you can have too many people in an organization, and it just becomes Messier. So you want to keep it lean. But there are some roles where it makes sense to, like, have them kind of competing for output, and then as a regular exercise, anytime things get, like, a little messy, going back to the org chart, seems to be one of the most clarifying exercises. Or once a quarter, really reviewing what people’s tasks are that they’re doing, because you should be able to add more things on it if you become an expert at something.

Mat Zalk 41:30

Yeah. Okay, last question, and then I want to, I want to switch subjects. We’ve historically grown, and part of my desire to grow is not for my own sake, but because people in the organization want to make more money, and they need greater opportunity to manage other people and to manage different geographies and everything else, what’s the growth opportunity for a remote professional, as they as they kind of excel at what they’re doing, and as they as they have more tenure within and equipment within a company that and equipment serving. And is there, I don’t know what’s, what is it called, like the Robertson Roberts principle, or whatever, where we we elevate the Peter Principle, where we elevate people to their point of incompetence, or something like, what’s the solution to that? When we want to elevate people, want to pay them more money, take them more responsibility, ultimately, they could fail, and that’s a challenge.

Gwenn Aspen 42:23

So two things on that I totally know where you’re going, where you have to grow so that your people have opportunities, the same with working if you don’t have that natural desire. And I think it’s up to every business owner to know, like, what do you actually want in life? And maybe you don’t want to become the biggest company ever working with a company like Anequim allows your employees to grow maybe past what what you have to offer, and they can feel like they’re learning something in the role that will get them to that next step, because there are more opportunities through the organization as a whole. The other thing is, when we’re talking about them growing part of our role. And with some companies, we manage their labor. So sometimes they have jobs like taking midnight calls maintenance emergency calls, has a high burnout rate. And so some companies tell us, and we kind of manage all their employees for them, but they say, this is our labor cost. You manage that. So we manage people out of the role into another role that they can succeed in to keep the labor costs down for that particular position interesting, so we can make really interesting labor decisions that don’t negatively impact an individual, but support the mission and goals of the business owner in a way that they couldn’t do if they weren’t partnering with a larger organization.

Mat Zalk 43:46

But so that means you, if it’s a, if it’s A a tough job with a low entry salary, you would, you put somebody in there for a little bit. They mature, grow, develop the professional skills so that they can handle something else. So they’re now, they’re now onto something else that’s more favorable to themselves, with a higher, higher salary. And you bring in a new entry level person, train them and do it, and you kind of repeat that cycle. And people, as the business grows, people are accelerating or excelling and moving trajectory.

Gwenn Aspen 44:15

Yes, and it makes sense for us, because we can kind of mold the best behavior and then put them where they need to go. And then also another thing, if you do want to grow in your internal team, make sure that your people are not allowed to get a pay increase or any kind of role name increase until they have the documentation and have trained their backup so that way they don’t hoard information, because that’s a horrible thing that happens at so many organizations. People hoard their hoard information so that they are not replaceable. If you say you can’t grow here unless you make yourself replaceable, that behavior goes away. So the other thing we found is, in Mexico, we really try to keep the we try not to have a big hierarchy. We tried hierarchy, it didn’t work. So we really try to keep the levels very, very small for like, there’s like, entry level, supervisor, manager, that’s it. And we do that because we want to incentivize them to help each other, and you can have, like, a mini role of being a mentor, but that’s not a position change. Yeah, so incentivizing mentorship and helping other people at the business has to be a core value of how the business operates and is organized. I think for it to be most successful.

Mat Zalk 45:41

Awesome. I love that the delegate and elevate from traction or whatever. So we should always be, we should always be attempting to replace ourselves and moving on to moving on to other things, even if that means, yeah, trips in Croatia, Gwenn, I love this stuff. What? What are you reading? What should other people be listening to? Podcasts? You know, what’s on your on your bedside table that helps push you forward as a business owner, as a as an owner of a business of remote professionals, like, Where do people go for more inspiration for the likes of Gwenn Aspen.

Gwenn Aspen 46:18

Oh gosh, I read, you know, I read weird stuff. So I’m reading a jiu jitsu book now, the Breathe book by Gracie. I can’t remember which one the Gracie bros, my other Gracie brothers. So that’s what I’m like currently reading at this moment. I’m loving Diary of a CEO for podcasts right now, but I listen to all those podcasts and Phil Fanta, Tim Ferriss and so I don’t know, I read the paper all the time. I’m always trying to get the Harvard Business Review is a big thing at our organization, but I’m always just trying to take things from other industries and seeing how it fits with us.

Mat Zalk 46:59

Yeah, that’s amazing. Taking stuff that are taking what’s the word I’m looking for, like frameworks from other areas, and applying them to your business.

Gwenn Aspen 47:09

Yeah. Ben Horowitz has a great newsletter. So there are some great newsletters out there that are just about industries that I’m not even part of, that I enjoy.

Mat Zalk 47:20

That’s Ben Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz, right?

Gwenn Aspen 47:23

Yes.

Mat Zalk 47:25

Gwenn Aspen is CEO and Founder of Anequim, one of the largest remote professional employers in Mexico. Anequim connects entrepreneurs, property managers and small to mid sized businesses with highly skilled, bilingual, full time virtual assistants who live and work in Mexico. Prior to founding Anequim, Gwenn, as she talked about today and her husband, Jeremy, founded Wistar Group, a property management company that they sold in 2021 she’s a powerhouse, as you can tell. She’s also a motivational speaker, a moderator traveling around the country to talk about her passion for making small and medium businesses more profitable and providing amazing career opportunities for Anequim’s employees. Gwenn, where do people reach somebody? If they want to go to, I presume they don’t reach out to you directly, but if they want to reach out to you, or they want to reach out to Anequim, where do they go?

Gwenn Aspen 48:09

anequim.net.

Mat Zalk 48:10

Love that. anequim.net. anequim.net. Love it. Gwenn, thanks for being on the show. We appreciate it.

Gwenn Aspen 48:19

Thank you so much for having me.

Mat Zalk 48:22

See ya.

Outro 48:26

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