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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