[Tenured Member Series] The Evolution of Nearshoring Talent Solutions With Devin Koch

Devin Koch is the Founder and Chairman of Teamswell, a company specializing in nearshoring talent solutions to help businesses scale by hiring skilled professionals in nearby time zones. He is also the CEO of Oasis Broadband, a provider of wireless internet services for rural and underserved communities. With decades of experience in entrepreneurship, Devin has built and managed technology, consulting, and telecommunications businesses, focusing on innovative solutions and customer-centric operations.

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

[02:01] How a Great Depression-era family business inspired Devin Koch’s entrepreneurial journey
[13:00] Lessons Devin learned from launching Oasis Broadband
[15:42] Balancing economic stability with innovation
[18:02] The inspiration behind founding Teamswell and the challenges of its early days
[20:21] Risks and rewards of running “unsexy” but dependable businesses
[22:02] What nearshoring is and how it’s transforming global talent solutions
[31:03] How being part of EO shaped Devin’s leadership abilities and business growth
[35:12] The importance of creating an employee-centric culture to enhance customer satisfaction

In this episode…

Remote and nearshore talent solutions are becoming a lifeline for companies looking to scale. Businesses must navigate the complexities of hiring, onboarding, and managing a global team, so how do you transform the outsourcing model into a seamless extension of your company?

According to Devin Koch, an entrepreneur with decades of experience building businesses from scratch, the key lies in prioritizing both talent and infrastructure. He highlights that successful nearshoring depends on identifying skilled professionals who align with your company culture and providing them with the tools, training, and incentives to thrive. By focusing on employee satisfaction and creating a supportive environment, businesses can overcome common pitfalls, such as high turnover and inconsistent performance, while reaping the benefits of cost savings and operational efficiency.

In this episode of the Rising Entrepreneurs Podcast, John Corcoran speaks with Devin Koch, Founder and Chairman of Teamswell, to discuss how nearshoring talent solutions have transformed modern businesses. Devin shares lessons learned from his entrepreneurial journey, strategies he used to build a scalable and effective nearshore team, and the impact of creating meaningful employee experiences.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Quotable Moments

“My grandfather was a product of necessity, while I love the thrill and risk of entrepreneurship.”
“Starting Oasis Broadband, we realized the key was focusing on remote areas with limited internet options.”
“In the heyday of consulting, we traveled the world and lived prosperously, which fueled my entrepreneurial spirit.”
“During tough times, you just have to figure out what needs to be done next and dive in.”
“We built a company that really cared about its employees, making hiring offshore as easy as hiring locally.”

Action Steps

Embrace risk and flexibility: By stepping outside of your comfort zone and embracing new opportunities, you can discover innovative solutions and sustain growth even during challenging times.
Focus on customer-centric service: Prioritizing customer satisfaction through reliable service and responsive support helps cultivate customer loyalty and can drive word-of-mouth referrals.
Leverage technology for operational efficiency: Employing tools that facilitate remote work and improve communication can help businesses optimize their workforce and maintain productivity regardless of geographical constraints.
Adapt to market demands: Regularly assess market trends and consumer needs to pivot your offerings effectively and capture niche segments.
Invest in continuous learning and networking: Engaging with entrepreneurial communities and seeking mentorship can provide new insights, support personal development, and open doors to strategic partnerships.

Sponsor for this episode…

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Episode Transcript

Intro 00:03

Welcome to the Rising Entrepreneurs Podcast, where we feature top founders and entrepreneurs and their journey. Now let’s get started with the show.

John Corcoran 00:13

All right. Welcome everyone. John Corcoran here. I’m one of the hosts of this show. And you know, if you’ve listened before that we’ve got all kinds of great interviews in the archives. So check out the archives. Lots of great past episodes there. And this episode brought to you by EO San Francisco. EO San Francisco is the local San Francisco Bay area chapter of Entrepreneurs Organization, which is a global peer to peer network of more than 16 18,000 influential business owners, about 200 chapters, 60 or so countries. So if you were the founder, co founder, owner or controlling shareholder of a company that generates over $1 million a year in revenues and want to connect with other like minded successful entrepreneurs? EO is for you. And you can learn more about the EO San Francisco chapter by going to EO Network, San Francisco. My name is John Corcoran. I’m the Co-founder of Rise25, which is a company that helps B2B businesses to get clients referrals and strategic partnerships with done-for-you podcast and content marketing. It’s been the thrill of my life to be involved in podcasts and get to talk to smart people like our guest here today and also a member of EO San Francisco since about 2021. My guests are today is Devin Koch. And Devin you have been involved in San Francisco for about 20 years now, 18 years now. I believe it is. And I’m looking forward to getting into the background. How you got involved in this and your story as an entrepreneur. Your companies, of course, are Oasis Broadband and Teamswell, which is a nearshoring company, and we’re going to get into those stories. But first you have the on. You were born into an entrepreneurial family, actually had a family business that was started by your grandfather during the Great Depression. That’s really interesting. I’d love to know what that business was like and how you started getting involved in it as a kid.

Devin Koch 02:01

Yeah, it was kind of all around us at the time. We had a small we were lived in a small town in southern Illinois, and my this was, I guess the best way to compare the business to today is we were the predecessor of Walmart or Costco. We had a big warehouse and we would buy from manufacturers like Hershey, or we had lots of products like Coca-Cola products. And most embarrassingly, we had a lot of cigarettes. We sold a lot of cigarettes at the time. That’s what our clients wanted. Our clients were like VFW halls and quick stop gas stations and restaurants, and there were a lot of cigarettes that went through that business back in the day. So I was telling somebody the other day that how I got my start, and I was saying that I went out with my dad on the weekends when we’d go fix vending machines, because we also had a lot of vending machines as a part of the business, and the vending machines dispense cigarettes. So I was great with screwdrivers and a can of WD 40, and I think we had of course, all the coinbox had to be emptied. Yeah. So that’s one of the things I remember most was besides stocking shelves and working around the warehouse, sweeping and stamping cigarettes with the tax stamp from Illinois. But yeah, I got I got to spend a lot of time working with my dad and in my family’s business that my grandpa started and he started during the depression, and they turned it in from a couple of boxes of Hershey bars out of the back of his car, to his garage, to a building, to a warehouse, and then another warehouse. So he was probably the, the, the lineage that that came from or my interest in entrepreneurship came from.

John Corcoran 03:29

Sometimes I wonder when you’re born into an entrepreneurial family, you know where that comes from. If it’s nature versus nurture, you know, sometimes there’s a black sheep in the family who doesn’t isn’t interested in that at all and maybe doesn’t like entrepreneurship. Reflect a little bit on that for me, you know, was your, you know, did you do you feel that it was something that you learned or do you think it think it kind of came naturally? Maybe the same genes that made your grandfather entrepreneurial kind of naturally were passed down to you?

Devin Koch 04:00

Yeah. The interesting thing about it is neither my grandfather nor my dad were risk takers. My grandfather, this was during the depression when he started the business. So back then they were just doing anything they could. There were no jobs, so everybody was doing whatever they could. And somehow they managed to start a bus line and they managed to, you know, then they were doing a bus line. So they put candy or tobacco or whatever on the bus. And when they brought it home, they would then sell that as a second business. But the transportation part didn’t go, but people wanted to buy the candy. So I think that my grandfather was a product of necessity. And my dad, you know, he sort of fell into the business. He worked in it from the time he was little. And then you get me and I’m a risk taker, and I love the thrill. And I think that it was a combination for me of having all that being of being comfortable with the idea of running your own business and then wanting to just push it as far as I as I could to try things that, that that was probably a combination of my in my case.

John Corcoran 04:55

Yeah. Yeah. I think there are probably a lot of people in that Great Depression era that were forced into entrepreneurship because there weren’t any jobs. I heard stories of my great grandfather, who was born in 1919. So he was right in the midst of the Great Depression when he was, you know, kind of young, I think, teenage years, you know, selling donuts on the street with his mother, you know, in New York City. And then he went from that and craved stability and actually went into the Air Force and then spent his entire career in the US military. And I think really, you know, craving that kind of stability. But so, interestingly, you end up in the Bay area and you actually spend a big chunk of your career working for like, a lot of different startups or working with a lot of different startups, first in a larger consulting company, consulting with them and then on your in your own. Talk a little bit about what that era was like that that pre meltdown era in San Francisco back in the heyday.

Devin Koch 05:58

Well the the heyday came out of a period of pretty strong growth for a lot of different companies. There was a lot of optimism. And when I worked at the big consulting companies there, that was also the heyday of consulting companies. If you talk to people who were consultants in the in the 90s, it was we traveled the world and we ate well, and we stayed in nice places and had big parties. And it was a it was really a prosperous time for the whole, you know, economy. And I think that’s sort of what led into it, that, that that economic prosperity led to wealth being available for.com companies. There was a lot of growth in various types of banking. Venture capital was getting a real boost at that time. And the the transition that I made was from one of eight years in, you could call it stiff consulting companies. So that’s where I started. My career, was learning the trade from people at Accenture and Booz Allen. Hamilton eventually moved into operational consulting with a management firm, management consulting firm. But then I got then the internet era started. And so in the in the the late 90s, I was enticed away to go work at a small digital marketing agency that I had dreams of turning into a big, sorry, not a digital marketing agency. That’s exactly what they were not. They were a marketing agency and wanted to become a digital marketing agency. And of course.

John Corcoran 07:18

More traditional, like, you know, physical stuff probably, or ads and newspapers, things like that.

Devin Koch 07:25

Exactly. Ads on TV or it was product labeling. We did a lot of product labels. We worked for Perrier Waters. We had some big clients, but we didn’t have any way to offer things that at the time would have been more like CD-ROM. CD-ROMs were the first thing that we did. Yeah, right. Like product brochure. So we doing that. We started in websites and that was really my first experience sort experience sort of running, I was made a partner in the company and we expanded to the West Coast, and that’s how I got to California. Back to California. I started here earlier, but when I started that company in San Francisco, I really got wrapped up in San Francisco at the time and sort of experienced all the rest of it going on around me as a, you know, a product marketing company. We were seeing lots of products, and it was a really exciting time to be involved in any kind of a startup business.

John Corcoran 08:12

It’s funny now because there’s so many things like cloud based businesses and, you know, selling products online is such it’s so accepted wisdom these days. But back then, yeah, everything was revolutionary. All these ideas were revolutionary. You worked for product companies. Box.com you advised the Greek government at one point. Talk about some of these different clients you work with.

Devin Koch 08:35

Yeah. Like you said, there was a startup for every industry back then. And so I worked with the kind of companies that you would expect. It was an online. It was called Pet Planet and it was a pet product company. All online products that there were probably like a dozen of them at the time, and I don’t know if there’s any left today.

John Corcoran 08:53

Dot com was a famous, you know, failure.

Devin Koch 08:56

Exactly. So yeah, I worked for a couple of those, and there were some of the similar business models that we still have around today. Barely, but a predecessor to Box.com, V-drive, iDrive, there were a bunch of those. There were media companies, things that turned into they got rolled up into into Yahoo. But yeah, there was every business model under the sun was being tested at that point, and some succeeded and most didn’t. During during the bust. But it was a dynamic time. I had I got to the point where after the the heyday was over, that I wanted to take some time up in Truckee and Tahoe, where I had had a place, and I spent some time up here on my own, and I was like, wow, I’d really like to do something here, but I don’t have a very good internet connection. So I started looking around for options, and back in the day, what you could get was double dial up called ISDN. And that was where I realized that there was a big need, because trying to operate anything on the internet at double dial up speeds wasn’t really happening. So that’s the that was what led to me starting. The company was called O wire at the beginning, based in Lake Tahoe. Started out of my house, bought a big fat internet connection called a T1 at the time, radioed it up to a neighbors, and then shot it out over the neighborhood. So that was the beginning of that company. And as I. Got more to do, physical wires.

John Corcoran 10:07

Then you didn’t have to wire stuff up. Oh, okay. So people had what, put, like, an antenna or something on their roof?

Devin Koch 10:16

Exactly. Yeah. We had the antennas on everybody’s roofs. And that was the beginning of the wireless broadband. There weren’t even really product companies there. I think there might have been a couple wireless even now. Like, nobody knows the name of the industry that we’re in. It’s called fixed wireless. And there are a lot of companies that make fixed wireless. Most famously, Ubiquiti was got its start before it was really a product, consumer product company. It was a was a fixed wireless ISP company. So we started making them ourselves from old computers with coaxial cables and slot and, you know, little cards that we would slide into the computer slots to make it radio enabled, give it an early Wi-Fi card, and then put an antenna in the window, literally like a fix an antenna in the window and shoot it out the window. So that was how we started. But people were dying for it, and they didn’t care that it didn’t work well, and they didn’t care that it only got 300kbps, which was, you know, five times ISDN at the time. So people were thrilled and it took off and we started opening other locations around th. Tahoe Truckee area and and then eventually bought a company down in Colfax, bought another company and absorbed them into our footprint. And that was one of the most interesting lessons I think we learned along the way. After building the wireless company, was that we were destined with this wireless technology to do a really good job in small markets, but in the bigger markets, we were going to lose out eventually to the big competitors. So we went into this Auburn business park that had really no connections. People were really struggling. They had to pay a fortune for something. What was the predecessor of fiber? Or you could get us and we sold everybody in the business park. But a couple of years later, we lost everybody in the business park, and that’s when we kind of changed the mission of the company to be only go to the most remote parts, or we can make money because there we would be very unlikely to be disturbed by another provider, which has turned out to be true, as people who live in those parts today know little places around here in Nevada City. Blue Tent, there’s a lot of communities that have really bad options. Downieville is another one. That’s where we tend to go, where we’re going still today, where they have bad, bad choices. And that was sort of set the pace for a little more consistency in the company’s performance, because before that it was boom and bust. We’d roll out the town of Colfax and then we’d lose the town of Colfax when the cable company came in the Auburn business. So and I got frustrated with that after a while.

John Corcoran 12:39

So did you. Did did you have like develop like a formula for figuring out like a density or figuring out like degree of ruralness of a, of a community to figure out whether, you know, you’re kind of like trying to read the mind of the cable company and whether the cable company is going to one time, at some point put in the investment, put in the money to move into that community.

Devin Koch 13:00

Yeah. Well, at the time, it was pretty easy to figure out where cable was and wasn’t because you only had the other option was just DSL. So you could see where there was no cable, you would very easily figure it out. And there were lots of places and lots of populated areas right along freeways that didn’t have cable yet. So when we started rolling out, after we had that period of time where we would roll out a neighborhood and lose it, we went to really remote parts that still today don’t have cable. There’s parts of Truckee that lots of parts that don’t have that don’t have cable. So it wasn’t very hard to locate those We didn’t need social media posts and Google advertising to figure it out.

John Corcoran 13:37

Yeah. And then. And then I think the way that your company operates is you have to find a base, a location where you can put the the I don’t know what you call it, but the transponder or something like that. And so, like, how do you go and find these locations? Are they commercial locations or are they residential? Do you just knock on doors and say, hey, I’ll pay you some amount of dollars to put this pole in your yard?

Devin Koch 14:04

Most of the time I knock on doors and I say, we will pay you. That’s exactly how we do it, because I can find them on a computer model. I can find the places where I want to be. There’s almost never anything there except people’s land. So I go to those places, find the nearest buildings, figure out who owns them, and you can figure out who owns them now online as well. So we kind of already know who we’re trying to find and what their names are. And any enough to, like, know when they come to the door. Hey, Mr. Smith. You know, it’s really nice to meet you. I’ve read a lot about you and, like. Oh, really? So you just kind of fake it until you make it. And it works incredibly well because most of those people are also struggling for internet, right? Most of those people don’t have good options. And so when we go into a neighborhood that needs internet and we find that high point on the top of a mountain, they’re excited to help out there. You know, everything is going to be better if they help for themselves, for their neighborhood, and they make a little money. So yeah, it’s actually not the hardest part or the most. It’s the most enjoyable part. Two people get really excited about it.

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John Corcoran 15:03

Yeah, it’s kind of amazing because usually when someone finds a business that’s countercyclical or that isn’t affected by the economic downturns, usually it seems like the trade off for that is that the business is slow growth, or that it takes a long time to build it up. But you kind of found this sweet spot between something that has economic stability isn’t going to be affected by the boom and bust that you that you witnessed working for all these different dotcoms during the.com era. And yet at the same time, you’re selling, you know, water in a desert where people were desperate for the solution that you provided.

Devin Koch 15:42

Right. Well, it is it is slow growth when you start where I did, which is with zero, and it’s all almost all self-funded. We had an early event, an early friends and family round, but it’s capital intensive because we’re doing the equivalent of building cell sites. So every time we put out a new neighborhood, we’re buying a fiber connection from an established provider. Wherever we can get it nearby, we get that up to the top of a tower or a house or whatever, and relay it to where we need it using wireless equipment. And that can be expensive wireless equipment to get a lot of bandwidth moved reliably from point A to point B in the kind of weather that we have in Tahoe. So you have to you spend a lot of money to build out a site. And that’s why it’s it is slow growth. But after 20 years, you you know, like I said, in the middle two, we had ups and downs where we build out networks, and then for a while we had another period where we declined. When DSL came out and DSL seemed like they were on our tail every time we’d roll out a new network with really at that point, slow speeds, because we were trying to go through trees and our equipment didn’t go through trees very well back then. We would have DSL come out right on our heels. A lot of the neighborhoods around Tahoe got DSL then, so it was slow growth, and we chose poorly at the beginning about where to roll out. But after we hit our stride, things started to happen, both for us about which markets we chose and for the equipment that we used. And now we can drop a gigabit per second, which is, you know, that’s what your cable companies packages are. So we can we can compete with cable on speeds, prices and what we really now compete on is reliability and a customer service team of all types of customer service, whether it’s our field team that goes into your home or the people that you talk to over the phone, we want to be the company that you love to interact with and you want to find when you move, whether or not we’re available or not, because we’re so.

John Corcoran 17:32

And I want to talk about how that led into your current company Teamswell. But before we get there, I understand in the early days, in the early years of the company, when there weren’t many of you around, you know, here you are, you’ve gone from this high flying lifestyle of flying around the globe, staying in nice places, nice meals as you’re consulting all over the globe to doing customer support over holiday weekends yourself for your business, which is in Tahoe while you’re back home visiting your family in Illinois.

Devin Koch 18:02

Yeah, yeah. It was. I mean, you do what you got to do when you own your own business. I mean, you know as well as I sometimes it gets tough and you just have to figure out what needs to be done next. And at the beginning, there were only three of us that operated the company. So when they wanted to be on holiday, which was usually on a holiday, I would pitch in, you know, it was fair. So I would be at home in where my family’s from in Illinois and in a bedroom doing customer calls because we would have some fierce storm up in Lake Tahoe that was knocking things around or causing a problem. And I couldn’t do anything about that. But I could at least take the calls and talk to people and spent more than one evening back taking calls on the customer service line when we had outages during the holidays. Yeah, my family will remember that story. Yeah, that was that was real. It was real. But yeah, fortunately we didn’t we didn’t live there too long. We we didn’t live in that state too long. We were able to add team members to do that a little more often. And I didn’t have to back it up, but I was the one that was handing out. I would put door hangers on people’s doors in my neighborhood, and we still do a lot of door hangers today, and I really like doing that too. I love putting it out there and like people say, oh, you know, what are you doing on my property? Oh, I’m just letting you know about a new option for broadband. Like what? Oh. Come inside. Do you want coffee? So, you know, it’s really kind of fun. It’s fun to do those things. Getting in getting in touch with your customers and being in my position, they don’t know who I am. They think I’m the advertising guy or the customer service guy, but it’s fun to go and be the undercover CEO and do those things today and then talk to customers. So I really, I really I didn’t even then, I didn’t I didn’t dread it. I just it wasn’t taken away from my Christmas time.

John Corcoran 19:38

You described yourself earlier as a risk taker. How did you rectify that tendency in your personality to also building this business that was you know, it’s not it’s it’s not subject to the downturns, but it’s also not doesn’t have the big upside potential of, you know, a.com or something like that. It’s it’s kind of an unsexy business. Right. Like was there ever, ever a part of you that’s kind of like, oh, man, you know, I wish I had the sexier business. Or were you like, after having gone through seeing these, you know, big failures in the .com era that you every day woke up grateful that you built a business that was unsexy, that was dependable. That was reliable.

Devin Koch 20:21

Yeah, there were other factors too. And one of them is the fact that I was able to be in control of things. I think that was really one of the things that kept me in it, because we like as I mentioned, we had a couple of cycles and they weren’t always upswings. There were some downswings, but I just knew that I felt like I could take I could manage it, I could save it, and I could bring it back, or I could, you know, I had control. And I think that’s another thing that is, is something that drives me, is being in a position of being able to make a difference. So just knowing that was another was another reason to stay in it. And I did get bored. I mean, I went during the time that I built Oasis, I worked with a friend for three years helping him build his company, which made aerodynamic wings for tractor trailers. So I was the international business development guy. I struck deals in Mexico and Australia and all over Europe to put big wings on the back of semi trailers to save fuel. I also worked with, like you said, the a Greek group of entrepreneurs who, interestingly, eventually got put in jail and I worked with some Vietnamese guys that were closely connected to the Vietnamese government to try to bring wireless technology to those areas. And you can imagine in the mid to late 20 tens era, there are still a lot of need in places like Greece and Vietnam for broadband. So it was I kind of got a kick that way. I did some independent consulting along the way and was able to get my thrills and my international travel and stuff, doing side things where I thought I had a really good chance to be able to contribute and make something bigger happen along the way.

John Corcoran 21:55

Yeah. Now tell me how you discovered Nearshoring, and also explain, for those who are listening, what that means.

Devin Koch 22:02

Yeah. Nearshoring is we wish I debate all the time about whether to go into the process of trying to create a new word. You know, there’s this this idea that we could develop a new word that represents our industry because Nearshoring has been co-opted by people that put production facilities on the same. Continent as they need to consume them. So our nearshoring is using. Team members who don’t live in your own country, but ones that are close by. Who are on your same time zone. So it’s comparable to outsourcing or offshoring. Business process outsourcing is one key phrase, but all of our team members work. Within a couple time zones of the United States, they work in the United States. Time zones. And depending on which one you’re in, they may be 1 or 2 off. But they’re close, which changes a lot of the the reasons that people become unhappy. With working offshore for for companies that are very distant. So we got involved because. During Covid, everybody wanted to be working from their second home or working from a place that was remote. And the companies that provide broadband in these areas besides us were not prepared for that. So there were a lot of companies who got stuck being unable to provide sufficient broadband capability to remote parts that already were doing it, but they just hadn’t scaled to the point where they could turn up the capacity easily. So we grew a lot during Covid, trying to provide more bandwidth to everyone, expand to areas that were desperate, and that’s a lot of.

John Corcoran 23:35

People were moving out of city areas and moving into more remote, more rural areas because and also because companies were allowing them to work more remotely during that period.

Devin Koch 23:46

Right. Exactly. Yeah. So people were just trying to work from as remote a place as they could get. Some of them were scared. Some of them were taken advantage of the opportunity. But Tahoe and you, I don’t know if you’ve spent a lot of time in Truckee prior to the Covid era, but it used to be there were some busy weekends up here on holidays and, you know, summertime, but it’s busy all the time. It sort of changed the nature of Lake Tahoe. There were a lot of stories back then about trash heaps being left and people not being truly careful about treating the lake as a beautiful natural resource. It really got ugly for a while. It’s calmed down a little bit, but it really changed the nature of Lake Tahoe, which gave us another boost. So when that boost came, we didn’t have the ability to hire all the people we needed as quickly as we wanted, especially given our mission of trying to maintain a really high quality of customer service. So I was talking to one of my buddies, Nathan Witherington, and he said, yeah, you know, my business is not doing as well as yours, and I’m going to have to lay off the person that I had down there who was doing order taking. If you want that person, why don’t you use them like great. All right. You know, seem like a shortcut right into what we needed, which was low priced people that are used to working in call centers. And we struggled with it. We struggled with him, the first employee, because he was really just an order taker. He was not a he was not the person who could help us build a team down there. He didn’t know what we needed. We didn’t know what know what we needed. So we struggled with it for a while. Eventually, we hired the first round. We hired four people and fired three. We hired four more. We fired two. We. We struggled until another friend of mine came into the business here and helped us create a training program and a hiring program so that we knew what we were doing. And eventually we got some really good people. One of them was I. At some point I got really frustrated and I’m like, guys, just hire somebody who’s way overqualified to run this. There are there’s tons of qualified people, aren’t there? And they said, well, I don’t know. We’ll just we’ll just offer a lot more money. I’m like, great, let’s go. So we did and we got a guy and he said, well, what you’re offering is I’ll take it because I need a job right now. But it’s not enough to keep me interested in the long run. Like, wow, okay, great. Made me realize there was a whole group of people in Central America that I hadn’t really thought about, who were heavily skilled, who were worth a lot more money. And he eventually became my partner when we created teams well as a spin out of Oasis Broadband. So by that point we had 12 or 15 people probably working for Oasis under him, and we decided to create teams. Well, we promoted internally to to for a woman to take over his role managing the customer operations team. And he and I decided that we would try to do for companies of, you know, small to medium, you know, an EO term, small to medium that were not able to do this on their own because we had struggled through it. We knew how hard it was to create this. That actually works. Anybody can hire somebody from the Philippines. It’s there’s marketplaces all over the place. You can hire them from Central America. And we realized how hard it was to find really good people and to know what to pay them, to know how to incent them to stay. Because leaving is one of the big problems that you have with employees when you hire them. If you talk to people who have a VA, a lot of them have had amazing experiences with Vas from anywhere in the world. But some of them have said, I’m on my fifth. you know? I’ve, like, just had a revolving door. And so we knew what problems to try to solve because we’d had them all. And with teams. Well, we did that. We built a company that really cared about its employees. We pay at the top of the market. We provide them with all the benefits. We literally give them healthcare in their home country. We provide compensation for their internet connection. We give them a computer. So we take care of all the details that make using people offshore difficult. So that it becomes almost as easy, if not easier, than hiring somebody locally. Because when you hire somebody locally, you have to interview them. You have to give them a computer. You have to take on board them onto your benefits package. You have to do all that. And we take care of all of that. So with us, it’s give us the job description. We will give you back super talented candidates. So we’ve taken all of the hassle out of finding, hiring, onboarding and made it even simpler than hiring an American employee. but you save 6,070% over what you would pay in the US for the person who is usually incredibly and to a lot of people, surprisingly talented, some people that are new to the topic.

John Corcoran 28:14

How do you with the clients that you work with, how do you work with them to make sure that they’re utilizing the, the the resource, the the hire effectively? Is there a way that you can kind of check with, check in with them, or make sure that they’re, you know, supervising that person in the right way? Or is that too difficult for you to kind of oversee that and to, to ingrained in the individual business?

Devin Koch 28:40

Right. But using them effectively is really up to the client. It’s up to them to know that they’re getting what they want. But we do have tool sets. For example, there is a product that we use called Hubstaff that allows clients to understand what their team members are doing on a granular, as granular as you want it to be level. So we do help them understand what the team members are doing, because at the beginning, on the part of an employer, there can be a lot of mistrust. But the interesting thing is that when you’re only paying 30 or 40% of what you would pay for an employee in the US, you have a lot more tolerance. You people tend to have the idea that, all right, I may not get 100% of what I get out of an American, but if I even get 80%, this is a great deal. And so when you go into a situation with that mindset, you tend to be a little more tolerant, I think. And that’s where I think that the surprise occurs and people realize I don’t have to be tolerant. These team members are as capable of any that I’ve ever worked with. So they once they get the experience and they do get a great person because not every person we hire, of course is great, but we have a really high percentage of of success of hiring great people. So that’s it really is helpful. It’s helpful for us to know that we’re starting at such a low baseline. But there are tools. And, you know, the biggest problem we have is actually having clients who are not great bosses. So some some of our clients have lost multiple people, but it isn’t always because of the people. And so we’ve had to cancel some of our clients on their behavior. And it’s not a function of whether the person is onshore or offshore. It’s a function of the way that that client handles its team members. And we do. I my business partner Isaac, is extremely good at those kinds of conversations. So he works with a lot of our clients to ensure that when we have something that looks like it’s about to be a challenge, that we know what’s going on, we talk to both sides. We do sit in the middle, and we make sure that the outcome is the best that it can be for both parties.

John Corcoran 30:46

Yeah. Let’s talk a little bit about EO. You’ve been in EO for about 18 years now. You’ve served as president. You’ve served on on the board. I’ve been on the board with you. What has the what has what role has EO played for you in, in, in your business and in your growth?

Devin Koch 31:03

Yeah, I think that at the beginning I was in it just for, you know, the way that everybody joins like, oh, it’s cool. I’m going to be around entrepreneurs. I didn’t really have a big desire for form. I didn’t really know what the learning events were. I just thought, wow, it’d be great to have a group of people around who are similar. And that’s where it started. I don’t know that I even took that much to heart. Back when I started, I didn’t know that I learned that many valuable lessons. I think it took me a while, maybe because I wasn’t in form, that I didn’t get some of those messages, that, hey, there’s some things you could do to change your own management style, which I now have definitely done. It really started when I joined the board that that journey was like most people who joined the board, I was voluntold that I was going to be a board member and I, I stepped up on TJ’s board. I started with a small role, but then I quickly went to be the learning chair, and at that point I was voluntold that I was going to become president. So I it was back when it was a little less competitive than it is today for the president role. So I learned a lot very quickly because I was used to being a chief with a lot of Indians, and now I had a chief with a bunch of chiefs. So I really I didn’t really I don’t think I would say anybody would say I messed up, but I think that I tested some sensitivities in that role. And I learned a lot about management and those those things changed me a lot. Those those lessons about how to work with people. And I did it because I had to. But when I realized I could treat my employees the same way I treated other CEOs, I think I was a much better boss myself. And I learned a lot about getting people to be dedicated and excited about their work, and it really did change me. I’ve been on the board ever since, and now I do mentoring and I really have enjoyed my experience. A lot of my friends friend groups are through EO, and it’s become kind of a core string through my through my life.

John Corcoran 32:54

It really is amazing how different it is to lead a group of other entrepreneurs who are they’re volunteering their time versus to lead people that you’re paying their paycheck. You know, we had another president recently who runs a very large company, tens of millions of dollars, who told me after one of the board meetings that they ran, that that they were more nervous for that than anything else they do in their company. And it was just kind of floored me. You know, but it was it was because of this idea of like, you know, leading other entrepreneurs that kind of have can have a very short attention span or kind of high levels of expectations. And it’s kind of like, you know, doing batting practice with those heavy weights on the bat. You know, you, you know, you practice like that so that when you swing just the bat without the heavy weights, it’s a lot easier. Maybe that’s a metaphor that works, I don’t know.

Devin Koch 33:46

Yeah. No, I think it is like that. It was. And the lesson I didn’t I mean, I don’t know. I’m not that intuitive with people. It isn’t something that came naturally to me. On how people will feel when I say or do a certain thing. And with that was the lesson I had to learn is if I say this to this person, are they going to react well? I had to really, really think hard. And before I never felt that obligation because they’re my they’re my employees, right. They have to react well. So I think that was the big thing that I worked on to make sure that people really did feel good. And and then it became contagious, where I developed a culture in both companies that was really oriented around the employee and growth and kindness and making sure that everybody, everybody had to feel like they loved working here in order to do what I wanted to do, which was make customers feel like they were loved. And you can’t do that to customers if your employees don’t feel it themselves, right? So I think that’s where things really changed.

John Corcoran 34:43

And I’m almost out of time. But now you’re involved in helping other tenured members because, you know, as an organization, I think it’s fair to say hasn’t always done all that it can for longer term members who’ve been a member for seven, ten years, 15 years, kind of like this is like a new initiative to really nurture and deliver value to the longer term members. Talk a little bit about that.

Devin Koch 35:12

Yeah. So John Grover, who is the chair of the committee, you know, I’m actually a board member. I’m a adjunct board member or a co-chair. John had a vision, and we applied for some funds from the regional group to be able to extend the group that we, you know, our integration. And I’m still stuck on some of the old names, our, our, our board roll into parts of the chapter that haven’t really felt it. So we have a mission now to create I would say it’s an it’s a, it’s a program for tenured members that isn’t going to be like, hey, you’re gonna you’re the biggest and the longest lasting and the wealthiest members. Let’s do some top of the hotel, you know, ballroom. Super significant. Hey, you’re part of the club now events. What we want to do is give them even more of what EO-ers get normally, which is opportunities to interact with other areas that are similar. And maybe that’s the goal is to give them the chance to to share stories and to do things for other, other parts of the EO organization where they might not come in contact with them readily or easily. You know, they they I think that when you get to a certain point in your company, a certain point in your career, you do like mentoring early stage members, and you do like talking to anybody about their business, especially with yours. But there’s also a need to get some feedback and to, to interact with with members who are more like you, that are more that are the that have had some success, that have gone through a lot of the challenges that you may have gone through. And so what we want to do with the program is allow those members to interact with each other a little bit more. It may accelerate the growth that they feel at this point in their career and in their EO experience, as well as make sure that they’re aware of the opportunities that they do have to give back. Not everybody is a mentor. Not everybody is an accelerator coach, even though they’ve been a member for quite a while. Not everybody’s been on the board. So it’ll be a way for us to identify them as having been here for a while, having accomplished a lot in their business and in their career. Make sure they’re aware of what the next steps might be on their on their role, on their path, in EO. And of course, give them some ways to interact in a somewhat exclusive environment, having some pre-event cocktail parties or maybe even a dinner a couple times a year for just the tenured members. So it’s not meant to be sort of like an exclusive club as much as it is a continuation of what I would call the spirit for for the for the people who’ve been around for a while.

John Corcoran 37:51

Well, Devin, I know we’re out of time. This has been great. Where can people go to learn more about you? Learn more about Teamswell and Oasis if they are in the Oasis Broadband area?

Devin Koch 38:01

Yeah. To find out whether you’re in an Oasis Broadband area, you can go to oasisbroadband.net and Team well is under teamswell.co. You can look me up on LinkedIn and I can it’ll you’ll get the links for both of those. And my name is not that easy to spell Devin Koch is how I spell it. So if you if you want to try to track me down, that’s how you do it.

John Corcoran 38:23

Awesome Devin, thanks so much.

Devin Koch 38:25

Thanks. Appreciate your time.

Outro 38:27

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