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:
- EO San Francisco
- EO Accelerator
- Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO)
- John Corcoran on LinkedIn
- Rise25
- Devin Koch on LinkedIn
- Teamswell
- Oasis Broadband
- Ubiquiti
- Isaac Ocampo on LinkedIn
- John Grover on LinkedIn
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…
At Rise25, we’re committed to helping you connect with your Dream 100 referral partners, clients, and strategic partners through our done-for-you podcast solution.
We’re a professional podcast production agency that makes creating a podcast effortless. Since 2009, our proven system has helped thousands of B2B businesses build strong relationships with referral partners, clients, and audiences without doing the hard work.
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We’ll distribute each episode across more than 11 unique channels, including iTunes, Spotify, and Google Podcasts. We’ll also create copy for each episode and promote your show across social media.
Co-founders Dr. Jeremy Weisz and John Corcoran credit podcasting as being the best thing they have ever done for their businesses. Podcasting connected them with the founders/CEOs of P90x, Atari, Einstein Bagels, Mattel, Rx Bars, YPO, EO, Lending Tree, Freshdesk, and many more.
The relationships you form through podcasting run deep. Jeremy and John became business partners through podcasting. They have even gone on family vacations and attended weddings of guests who have been on the podcast.
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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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