Jamison West is a serial entrepreneur who has founded, and scaled multiple technology, services, and software as a service companies, including Arterian, SmileBack, TimeZest, ConnectStrat and now, in partnership with Doxa, MSP Talent.
Jamison, unlike many founders in the MSP space, started his entrepreneur career with a business education, not a technical education.
We start today's podcast with our mutual appreciation of peer groups, specifically The Entrepreneurs Organization and HTG Evolve.
Moving on, they discuss the ways in which the pandemic enabled remote work and the success and growth of business process outsourcing services.
Carrie and Jamison reminisce about their experience with EOS. (Jamison was Carrie's EOS facilitator from 2018-2020)
Jamison shares a big opportunity: remote offshore business process augmentation. While traditionally technology companies have outsourced help desk or NOC requirements overseas, very few companies have cracked the code on supporting other areas effectively. Jamison sees this changing quickly now that small businesses can access the same caliber of offshore employee traditionally only available to enterprise level companies.
Carrie and Jamison talk about hiring in multiple states and countries, and the legal and tax risks that can involve. Jamison shares on how hiring a professional PEO firm can mitigate both the risk and the HR headaches that come with making remote hires outside of your own state/country.
If you're considering what tasks and roles can be successfully offshored, this is a podcast you'll want to tune in for. Learn how to take advantage of the same opportunities Jamison has in order to lower your payroll, your cost of talent acquisition and your HR overhead.
Hosted by Carrie Richardson, Partner at Richardson & Richardson Consulting.
Let's get in it to WIN it, with Jamison West!
Carrie Richardson and Ian Richardson host the WIN Podcast - What's Important Now?
Carrie helps businesses improve their sales and marketing teams.
Ian is certified in Eagle Center For Leadership Making A Difference, Paterson StratOp, and LifePlan.
Learn more at www.foxcrowgroup.com
Book time with them here: https://randr.consulting/connect
Be a guest on WIN! We host successful entrepreneurs who share advice with other entrepreneurs on how to build, grow or sell a business using examples from their own experience.
Jamison West is a serial entrepreneur who has founded, and scaled multiple technology, services, and software as a service companies, including Arterian, SmileBack, TimeZest, ConnectStrat and now, in partnership with Doxa, MSP Talent.
Jamison, unlike many founders in the MSP space, started his entrepreneur career with a business education, not a technical education.
We start today's podcast with our mutual appreciation of peer groups, specifically The Entrepreneurs Organization and HTG Evolve.
Moving on, they discuss the ways in which the pandemic enabled remote work and the success and growth of business process outsourcing services.
Carrie and Jamison reminisce about their experience with EOS. (Jamison was Carrie's EOS facilitator from 2018-2020)
Jamison shares a big opportunity: remote offshore business process augmentation. While traditionally technology companies have outsourced help desk or NOC requirements overseas, very few companies have cracked the code on supporting other areas effectively. Jamison sees this changing quickly now that small businesses can access the same caliber of offshore employee traditionally only available to enterprise level companies.
Carrie and Jamison talk about hiring in multiple states and countries, and the legal and tax risks that can involve. Jamison shares on how hiring a professional PEO firm can mitigate both the risk and the HR headaches that come with making remote hires outside of your own state/country.
If you're considering what tasks and roles can be successfully offshored, this is a podcast you'll want to tune in for. Learn how to take advantage of the same opportunities Jamison has in order to lower your payroll, your cost of talent acquisition and your HR overhead.
Hosted by Carrie Richardson, Partner at Richardson & Richardson Consulting.
Let's get in it to WIN it, with Jamison West!
Carrie Richardson and Ian Richardson host the WIN Podcast - What's Important Now?
Carrie helps businesses improve their sales and marketing teams.
Ian is certified in Eagle Center For Leadership Making A Difference, Paterson StratOp, and LifePlan.
Learn more at www.foxcrowgroup.com
Book time with them here: https://randr.consulting/connect
Be a guest on WIN! We host successful entrepreneurs who share advice with other entrepreneurs on how to build, grow or sell a business using examples from their own experience.
[00:00:00] Carrie Richardson: Good afternoon everybody, and thank you for joining me today on WIN. My name is Carrie Richardson. I am one half of the consulting firm, Richardson and Richardson, and today with me is Jamison West, who is a strategic coach for Connect Strat. Jameson has a special place in my heart.
[00:00:15] Carrie Richardson: Jamison and ConnectStrat were our strategic facilitators at Managed Sales Pros. We were one of his first clients, and I like to think one of his best success stories. Thank you for joining us today, Jamison. How are you doing?
[00:00:27] Jamison West: Good. Thanks for having me.
[00:00:28] Carrie Richardson: Oh, it's always a pleasure to catch up. In the green room, we got to talk about a couple of things that we had in common.
[00:00:36] Carrie Richardson: Let's start with our relationship with eo because you mentioned that you've got a new opportunity on your plate now because of a relationship that you had in eeo. We were in EO together in Las Vegas. Tell me a little bit about the new things that you're pursuing and your relationship with your peer group.
[00:00:53] Jamison West: Absolutely. I joined eo, it's been about 10 years ago in Seattle. I loved it because when I moved to Las [00:01:00] Vegas, it was created a soft landing cause I was a kinda a new bunch of people in my tribe which was great. And then it's interesting because my time in. The formerly H T G now evolved peer groups was one type of peer group, but EO is a very, different type of peer group without a vertical focus, not in the IT services industry, but they started to merge when My current peer group, there's a bunch of us across the whole west coast that are connected and had one of my closest friends and created a company called Doxa and does a, lot of outsourcing from the Philippines, but really does it in a much different and better way than anything I've seen and I've been very involved with.
[00:01:43] Jamison West: Outsourcing from India and Philippines for myself and clients for years. And happened to be in the Philippines last fall and flew back sitting next to each other and had a great conversation around how valuable this would be to the IT services [00:02:00] community. And since then launched M S P talent into the, in the IT services community.
[00:02:07] Jamison West: And it's been really fun and successful. And so that's, kinda been our latest. Endeavor at trying to help folks out.
[00:02:16] Jamison West: So tell us a little bit about your business Connect Strat. Obviously I, know a little bit of the backstory, but tell everyone how you ended up becoming a strategic facilitator.
[00:02:28] Jamison West: Absolutely. So I'm an IT services company for an MSP in Seattle for about 21 years. Exited it in 2016 and then that's when I relocated to Las Vegas. Since then, just really been heads down trying to help figure out what my next, the second half of my career would look like. Post MSP owner, like several of us have been there maybe familiar with Smile Back, helped co-found that, sold that to ConnectWise.
[00:02:56] Jamison West: Currently one of the three co-founders of, [00:03:00] Times Zest, which is going really well. So started a couple software companies and that's been a lot of fun. I'm a serial entrepreneur, but I've always found that my genius is coaching. I love working with people and, I've. I'm, not your e-myth entrepreneur.
[00:03:16] Jamison West: I was never an engineer. I've went to business school, university of Washington. I started as an entrepreneur, not as a tech who had to figure it out. So I've got a, an advantage in some ways, but it's different, right? I just have a different perspective and I've loved being able to kinda leverage that perspective to help.
[00:03:33] Jamison West: Helpful. So that working with you right off the bat? About five years ago, that's right after I sold and moved to Vegas and some other close friends that I still work with part, we all started with the e o s framework, but then when they franchised , we decided to break off and and really focus on creating our own system. It's more holistic, so we talk about impact, vision, strategy, and execution. E o s is just [00:04:00] execution. We wanted to offer a more holistic framework and, so that's what we've been delivering for years. I've got two co-founders and, several other coaches.
[00:04:08] Jamison West: And just doing a lot of, and we're really focused on the top of the pyramid the owner and executive second in command. As opposed to digging really deep into like operational consulting or sales consulting. We're, very much focused on vision and people and, the top of the pyramid.
[00:04:25] Carrie Richardson: I know that our business benefited a great deal working with Jameson and I love to tell this story, but when, Jameson offered to consult with us, I had been of the mindset of. If you were that good at running a business, you'd probably be running one. What are you doing over here?
[00:04:43] Carrie Richardson: Telling me how to run mine? Like those who can do, but I knew that Jameson had successfully exited from his business and he was working in the industry where our core customers were. He was never a customer of ours, but the company that bought him was a customer of ours.
[00:04:58] Carrie Richardson: So we eventually got to work with Jameson anyway. [00:05:00] Yeah. But. It was really important to me that I work with someone where there was a demonstrated track record of I know how to do this, I know how to get there. I know what you want. And for me that was enough. And all of my peers in EO had been talking about eos.
[00:05:17] Carrie Richardson: And how it would benefit businesses. My company president wanted to do e o s and I'd been resistant to the amount of work that it seemed like, but our first year I think we set some very, unrealistic goals. And Jameson was very patient with us while we did that. And we spent that year Floundering a little bit.
[00:05:35] Carrie Richardson: And then by year two we were able to set realistic goals. And that year we actually grew our business by 60% After Flatlining for three years straight, all I ever wanted was to be on the Inc 500 list, and I hit like 1.8. 1.8 and a bit more 1.9, and I was like, f this, we're gonna try something new. Unfortunately the pandemic took my inc year from [00:06:00] me, but the most exciting part of traction for me was the 600% increase in my bottom line.
[00:06:07] Carrie Richardson: So now I'm now own a consulting agency with my partner. I do most of the business development for the agency. He does most of the consulting, but I definitely have a deep, seated love for e o s and the things that it did for me, and obviously for Jameson as a coach as well. I'm married to one.
[00:06:25] Carrie Richardson: I don't know. You roll the dice, pick your
[00:06:28] Jamison West: favorite.
[00:06:29] Carrie Richardson: So we talked a little bit about the opportunity that you're seeing in the market. Tell me a little bit about why the talent market is so challenging for the M S P space right now. I
[00:06:40] Jamison West: It's interesting. It's not a new problem and we've been trying to tackle it for a lot of years, and in my M S P I was leveraging talent out of India because I was struggling.
[00:06:49] Jamison West: If you're in the right Metropolitan Market, you may have exasperated costs associated with getting the right talent pool. There's a lot of competition. [00:07:00] With being from Seattle, I wasn't just competing with other MSPs, I was competing with Microsoft and Amazon. You'd, get an engineer that kind of became worth their salt and they'd come up in your MSP and it was great to see them go move on in their career.
[00:07:14] Jamison West: But it was also a hard loss when you were paying somebody back then. 80,000 a year and they got a $200,000 a year in offer from Amazon. I couldn't exactly compete in my market, but what we've seen now is I, and I think the pandemic has really changed the game, is like this acceptance of I don't need somebody sitting physically next to me when we're look, what we're doing right now.
[00:07:38] Jamison West: You're not interviewing me over. So we're, doing it over technology and, that's become so much more acceptable, not just for the technology market, but for their clients that all of a sudden folks are wrapping their head around the fact that this is a. To, to some extent a global economy.
[00:07:56] Jamison West: My talent doesn't need to be right here. We have extremely strong people [00:08:00] around the world, and so being able to leverage that has been, it's been pretty exciting. That's a, problem that I've seen across my entire client base, and it's fun to be part of the solution. So
[00:08:14] Carrie Richardson: from a.
[00:08:16] Carrie Richardson: From a societal shift standpoint, everybody's leaning towards not returning to the office. There's been a lot of aggressive discussion online. Do you have a preference one way or the other? If you got to pick, would you work in the office or would you work at home? I'd work
[00:08:33] Jamison West: at home. I'm, I think I'm more effective.
[00:08:36] Jamison West: I can spend more attention. I don't lose time in a commute. I'm doing. And there's a time and place to be connected with people, right? So times Zest is I'll, give you an example. So at times Zest, we have, and I spent about a third of my time in the business at Times Zest right now, and we we're a very global company [00:09:00] Vietnam, Poland, Berlin, Mexico, United States.
[00:09:03] Jamison West: It's all over the world. And So we got together for two days in person a few months ago and really brought the team together and that, that keeps us connected from a cultural perspective. And I think that's important. There's a time and a place to connect, but we're extremely effective and efficient.
[00:09:22] Jamison West: And give a lot of, you get a lot of work life balance and it's just it, can be very, positive to let people be in their own environment. Now, some people don't do it well and abuse, but I think people are figuring this out culturally. It's just a shift in, you can see who sinks or swims.
[00:09:36] Jamison West: And I also love the concept of, I've never enjoyed I'm paying you to work from a nine to five. Yes, you need coverage for certain things in certain places, but it's really. I can have somebody staying in office from nine to five doing nothing. I can have somebody kind of doing work here and there all day long and be 10 times more effective from wherever they're at.
[00:09:56] Jamison West: So time and place is less, to [00:10:00] do with output, and quality. So helping people figure out what, do we look at that output? What do we need from folks? What are we compensating them for? You're not paying them just for time. You're paying them to do something and, they don't, do they need to be physically here to do it?
[00:10:16] Jamison West: Depends on the job. I guess
[00:10:19] Carrie Richardson: I'm interested in seeing how things change as far as, so for example, we attempted to hire people in different states and the nightmare that ensued from different tax authorities, different, like different unemployment. Claims processes. I personally would never do that again. I, don't ever wanna run a remote business again.
[00:10:42] Carrie Richardson: If I'm the only employee, I'm okay with it. But
[00:10:45] Jamison West: that was, I think that this is why I, think and, I couldn't agree more. This is why the advent private employer organizations, PS I used a PEO building my, I got to the point where I was like, I can't do this anymore. The second I [00:11:00] had somebody in another state, especially, California or what, whatever, especially some states, but any other state now times us.
[00:11:07] Jamison West: It's like there's a reason why we look at PEOs and do those types of things. So that's really important. And then that's why we're using something like MSP talent, which we're bringing in into the community, which principally out of the Philippines, same kind of thing where they're. Actually full.
[00:11:24] Jamison West: It's like a p e o, an international p e o where they're full-time employees. All of that stuff is handled, so it mitigates the cost, the risk, the taxes, the paperwork. It's simple like just keep it simple and, have folks do the work. Cuz I, I agree. I There's a whole not only is it administrative, nightmare, financial nightmare but the risk is just a pain.
[00:11:50] Jamison West: It's, I never enjoyed that. Yeah.
[00:11:52] Carrie Richardson: No, I haven't had an employee in Ohio for quarters now, and I am still getting [00:12:00] paperwork from the Ohio government stop at Ohio. So how does it, what happens during a turnover event in something like that is, is the company that you partner with responsible for replacing the employee?
[00:12:16] Carrie Richardson: Absolutely. Or would the company have to get involved and interview and go through that whole training process
[00:12:20] Jamison West: again? Yes and yes. Absolutely Doxa would, will find the replacement, but it's not an automatic assignment because we do wanna make sure they're people, this isn't we're not gonna find somebody who's exactly the same, skillset set, and they're gonna likely need training.
[00:12:42] Jamison West: They're gonna likely need some work to get familiarized with the organization, but we're gonna find. It's not just skills work that we're looking for, it's personality fit. There's a culture. We use Culture Index. There's a lot of pieces that come into it to make sure that we get the right person who's gonna do the right job.
[00:12:59] Jamison West: But it's not that [00:13:00] we just assign a resource either. We absolutely have a process where it's finding the absolute best candidates. But then we want the client to talk to those last few candidates and, make a decision, right? And, make sure that they're comfortable and excited about who they're gonna be working with.
[00:13:16] Jamison West: So it'd just be a repeat of that process going back to that individual and going back to that role and saying, all right, here, we need to find a replacement. Here's a couple strong candidates. And, we still have a quick interview process and go through
[00:13:29] Carrie Richardson: that. Sounds a lot simpler than self hiring and a lot less expensive than using a recruiter.
[00:13:37] Jamison West: Yeah, no, yeah, absolutely. The recruiters can be quite expensive. The ongoing cost, usually it's 50 to 70% lower than what you'd pay locally, depending on where you're at. And it's the other thing that's nice about MSP talent is we're not just bringing technical resources, it's resources across the board.
[00:13:59] Jamison West: I get excited [00:14:00] about I multiple clients. Project coordinators. I can't tell you how many MSPs haven't figured out their project management function and a low cost project coordinator, instead of using a high end engineer to do that work, phenomenal return. They become a profit center almost the day they start because you build out project management.
[00:14:18] Jamison West: So that's a really obvious one. But dispatchers, anybody on the finance team, sales development there's all kinds of. All kinds of roles outside the obvious tier one, tier two help desk and NOC type roles that need to be filled. And we do a good job in the MSP community of saying, oh, we know what that pyramid, that tier should look like for support.
[00:14:40] Jamison West: We have five tier one types, three tier two, and one tier three, whatever. But we don't do a good job of doing that in our sales organization. We don't do a good job of doing that in our accounting organization. We have the most, or project. People, right? So we use our most expensive resources to do all the detail work, and we need to start doing that highest and best use pyramid work [00:15:00] in other departments.
[00:15:02] Carrie Richardson: It's gonna be an interesting shift in the market when people finally figure all that out.
[00:15:06] Jamison West: Yeah. They're more ebitda, right? And with the growth that's happening it's, easier in a larger organization, but now at these costs, you can start putting resources in and slightly smaller organization.
[00:15:19] Jamison West: They can and they can begin to work on this earlier.
[00:15:22] Carrie Richardson: So if somebody was considering using A B P O or a, I'm not sure how we're gonna refer to the moving forward, but you've got a multidisciplinary B P O at this point, is how I would describe it. That's right. What questions should a potential customer be asking their B p O organization ?
[00:15:40] Carrie Richardson: Like what would be your red flags if you were interviewing a potential company and you heard this, you'd be like, I don't think this is gonna work out.
[00:15:49] Jamison West: I would wanna I would want to understand with extreme clarity, how they're set up as an organization in their country of origin. Are they, how [00:16:00] are they paying taxes?
[00:16:01] Jamison West: Are they paying their people well? What's their internal culture like? I just, so one thing that was very important, the reason I got excited about Doxsa and this partnership to launch MSP Talent is that over 500 employees at Doxa already. It's very much a strong legal entity doing the right thing by the Philippine government taxes, doing things that are culturally aligned with the Philippine people, 13th month pay.
[00:16:27] Jamison West: There's all these things, but they amortize all that to make it as simple. So you know, you talk about tax risk, compliance, all of that is completely handled. We see a lot of people who are doing outsourcing who don't have the. Have not done that correctly. And then referring to people, and then I'd start looking at the contract and say, how are they referring to people?
[00:16:46] Jamison West: Are they correctly saying our employee or, you have, there's a compliance and risk mitigation piece that just needs to be absolutely handled. And then the other thing I look for is, are the people being [00:17:00] compensated fairly? Like there, there organizations doing this sort of taking advantage of, who they're outsourcing and that's gonna turn into.
[00:17:09] Jamison West: Low morale and I don't wanna be part of it. Low morale, high turnover. There's all kinds of problems that come with that, and I'm just not contributing to what I'm trying to build if I'm doing that incorrectly.
[00:17:21] Carrie Richardson: I think that's excellent advice. So we talked a little bit about the opportunity in the market.
[00:17:27] Carrie Richardson: What are some of the challenges you have conveying this new message to the market?
[00:17:32] Jamison West: It's just like anything, how do you where's the megaphone? Like, we, it's a, we've had this scalable solution, super excited about it. Always a little bit of a challenge to find always the right person, the right seat immediately.
[00:17:46] Jamison West: It's, we're still humans, right? We aren't making a widget. They're people. But the wealth of talent that's available there is, exceedingly easier than, here. I think the challenge is just [00:18:00] getting the word out, having there's a there are a couple of organizations who are doing, I believe a good job of this in our vertical. There's a lot of people outside of our vertical who do this, but when you can focus on the IT services community, I think there's just one or two. And so how do you get out there and really get clarity? I think that like you'll, we do this all the time. I know you do this as well, but how do you go to an MSP who has.
[00:18:26] Jamison West: 60 MSPs around 'em in the same metro market and make their voice sound different than everybody else's. So I think that's just an obvious challenge for us as well.
[00:18:36] Carrie Richardson: The short answer to that is you don't, yeah. There's a lot of a lot of weight put on we need to sound unique, but in reality, you just need to have really good timing.
[00:18:47] Carrie Richardson: Yeah. You gotta be there at the exact right place and the exact right time when the message is gonna resonate with the person who's hearing it. And if you're. Proactively managing your pipeline and nurturing things properly, you know [00:19:00] when that time is most likely going to be because you've bothered to ask the important discovery questions about when they're going to think about something new.
[00:19:07] Carrie Richardson: How do they choose vendors? When's the contract expiry date how do they evaluate new employees? I'm not sure what the questions will be for, your organization, but what are the triggers? Initially there's gonna be a turnover event, and that will be the exact right time to have that conversation.
[00:19:23] Jamison West: That's exactly right. That's exactly
[00:19:25] Carrie Richardson: right. Most of it's, most of it's luck, unfortunately. But you get a lot luckier when you're working a lot
[00:19:32] Jamison West: harder. That's, true. It's a whenever somebody puts out, a need for somebody on Indeed, but what are the triggers that we can look for to say okay, now's the time that maybe we could come and help.
[00:19:43] Jamison West: And for us, when we're coaching and consulting and building out the accountability charts, sometimes they don't know they have a need. What they have is they have four people they're paying a lot of money to doing. All of 'em are spending half their time doing this tactical work where I'm like, wait a minute, you can get outta that part.
[00:19:56] Jamison West: Hire somebody to do that part. A highest and best use [00:20:00] conversation. So sometimes it comes
[00:20:00] Carrie Richardson: through that as well. It sounds like it's it's time for the market to start embracing it. I know that I, personally have been railing against work from home since the minute we started, but I also worked in a very different industry with a very different group of people who couldn't necessarily work from home effectively.
[00:20:19] Carrie Richardson: So yeah, I wasn't a big fan of the idea that we could work from anywhere, but now I'm older and wiser and less inclined to commute myself. So I'm
[00:20:28] Jamison West: I'm exactly excited to see what happens. I did not like it when it all started, and now I'm, now I get it and it's different. And personally I, don't want to go into the office, right?
[00:20:40] Jamison West: I, enjoy working, for my home office and it, gives me balance that I enjoy in my life. So
[00:20:45] Carrie Richardson: think about the, so I'm thinking about starting another business right now and my first consideration is okay, this has to be a business that can be managed from my house. Yeah.
[00:20:56] Carrie Richardson: I'm not going to pay for another office ever. I'm not [00:21:00] gonna buy a building. I'm not gonna lease a building. But then, I like, okay, moving forward in the future, it's like, all right, how do you manage security then? How do you manage there's so many considerations, but my first consideration is what suits me and the lifestyle that I've become accustomed to since 2020.
[00:21:19] Carrie Richardson: Absolutely. Maybe I'm gonna put on shoes today. Maybe
[00:21:25] Jamison West: I'm not wearing shoes right now. That's, I
[00:21:27] Carrie Richardson: am wearing shoes, so that's only cuz my dog is looking at me and she knows it's time. But speaking of time, I think we're about at it. You've got a hard stop to deal with. And in the show notes today for everybody who's watching or listening, there will be some information about how you can reach Jameson.
[00:21:47] Carrie Richardson: Jameson, it's always a pleasure to catch up, glad to hear things are going so well, and I will look forward to hear more a year from now.
[00:21:56] Carrie Richardson: See, perfect. How you're winning.
[00:21:57] Jamison West: All right, thank you.
[00:21:59] Carrie Richardson: All right, thanks. [00:22:00] Bye-bye.