The Nearshore Cafe
Hear from Nearshoring veterans about what it's like living and doing business in LATAM. Join our hosts and numerous guests from LATAM & the U.S. with interesting real life experiences. This podcast is full of great stories and useful advice on how to navigate the world's most untapped talent market along with travel tips.
The Nearshore Cafe
Building a Salesforce team in El Salvador
Discover the art of building resilient remote teams as we sit down with Paul Karaffa, the CEO of AdminNow, Hawaii's leading Salesforce consulting firm. Paul takes us through his inspiring journey from being laid off to establishing a formidable remote workforce, navigating the unique challenges of Hawaii's geographical isolation. We promise you'll gain valuable insights into his strategic approach to international hiring and the lessons learned from aligning with the continental U.S. to manage a growing team effectively. This episode shines a light on the untapped talent pools in Central America, particularly El Salvador, and offers a front-row seat to the contrasts and synergies between U.S. and Salvadoran team dynamics.
In addition to team-building strategies, Paul shares his innovative vision with Admin Now, an IT support marketplace that reimagines how technical support is delivered. Imagine a world where IT support is as accessible and immediate as booking a ride with Uber. Through engaging stories, including culinary adventures with pupusas in El Salvador, Paul paints a vivid picture of how flexible work habits and real-time support can revolutionize the customer service experience. Whether you're a leader looking to expand your team globally or a tech enthusiast curious about cutting-edge IT solutions, this episode is packed with practical advice and inspiration.
Tune in and explore the evolving landscape of remote team management and IT support through Paul's expert lens.
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Linkedin: Paul Karaffa | LinkedIn
Company: AdminNow
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We'll see you next time. Welcome everyone to another episode of the Nearshore Cafe podcast. I'm Brian Sampson, your host. I'm Brian Sampson, your host. If you're interested in Central America, particularly El Salvador, and building a remote team out there, this is going to be a great episode for you. I've got Paul Carafa, ceo of a couple companies that have really built some amazing overseas talent. Before I do that, let me thank our sponsor, plug Technologies. Pluggtech Great way to connect talent from all over Latin America to growing US companies. Paul, it's great to have you on the show.
Speaker 2:Thanks for having me, brian, so happy to be here.
Speaker 1:So for our audience it's kind of fun as we talk about nearshoring. Both Paul and I are in Hawaii and when you think about nearshoring you know Hawaii is the. I think it's like the population center, the largest population center. That's like not close to anything in the world.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's most isolated.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so maybe let's start there. World, yeah, it's most isolated. Yeah, so maybe, maybe let's. Let's start there. Um, uh, as you were, you're building a cloud Pacific and we'll we'll get into that and what it did in a second. But, um, just like what was going through your head as you started to to need to grow your team a little bit, cause you Hawaii it's like there's no natural option, which means you've got a lot of options. So, yeah, just walk us through how you thought about that.
Speaker 2:So yeah, it was originally just me and it happened because I was laid off from my previous job. We'd gone through a merger. I originally had been employee number 10. I was with that company, it was a into uh doing the energy storage space and I was with them for almost five years, 250 people. We merged with siemens, um, you know obviously with stuff like that you know, some people get laid off, so I was one of those people unfortunately, but it gave me an opportunity to spend some months sort of thinking about what I wanted to do next, and so I refocused my attention on building out an IT consulting firm.
Speaker 2:Obviously, it started with just myself, and I had a contract for about nine months and at the end of the nine months I was like, well, this is coming to an end. They let me know they weren't going to be renewing it. They didn't need to. Everything was built and I was like I was just out there hunting for more contracts and just so happened, I got two at the same time and there was something inside me. I was like I could do two.
Speaker 1:I could do two at the same time, you know, but there was also a piece of me that was like, yeah, I probably need to go get some help at this point.
Speaker 2:And so that's when I made my first hire and, you know, slowly started to grow it, and you know I grew to about five or six people no, no, no, it's probably closer to around like eight or nine people, and that was at in 2020. And I was stressed out of my mind. I remember thinking that I wanted to burn the whole thing down. You know, I was trying to go through this like process of scaling it in a reasonable way, and you know there's just have a bunch of different scaling steps that you sort of have to go through.
Speaker 2:I was going through some painful ones. I ended up meeting up with a number of different executives that were running similar companies to me. You know, some for advice and some where I just wanted to, you know, see if they, what they, what they would do right, would they buy the company, would they sell? You know, do they think I had a reasonable ability to sell this company? You know, we were doing a lot of business but it was sort of all over the place and none of them said that they would have ever bought the company. So I thought that was like I was like okay, great, thanks for letting me know.
Speaker 2:You know, and you know, you know, it just wasn't set up in a way to sort of operationally grow, and it wasn't. It wasn't sellable, even though we had valuable contracts. And so, you know, I decided that I was going to come up with a strategy to then grind through forming a company while scaling it that would be operationally smooth, that would be able to scale in a reasonable way and that ultimately, I'd be able to sell. And that led me to making a decision that I needed to outsource a significant amount of the load in order to grow it as fast as I needed to grow it. Hawaii is amazing. Unfortunately, there's a lack of IT talent here. So we grew to be the largest Salesforce consulting firm in the state and we were sopping up pretty basically anybody that needed a job that was in the Salesforce space we were hiring.
Speaker 2:So you know, there were other companies, you know banks and stuff that were hiring people too. But you know a lot of people were very cozy and pushy in those jobs. But if they were looking for new work they were talking to us. Um, and you know most, most people we were, we were picking up.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so the first uh like eight, nine people were all local in in Oahu.
Speaker 2:For the most part we had a few people uh on the mainland.
Speaker 1:Um, uh, we had had a couple people that were former clients of ours and they ended up, you know, leaving and going to you know different companies and you know they're just extremely capable. So some of them we brought on part time, some of them we poached. Yeah, what were the first couple hires you made outside of the US? And like, how did you even start hires you?
Speaker 2:made outside of the US and like, how did you even start? Yeah, so I didn't really know what I was doing, but I knew that I wanted a company or I wanted people that would align with the continental United States, because, you know, obviously being in Hawaii it's not very great, so somebody would align well there. And then people that were, you know, really good at English, trustworthy and reasonable rates. And you know, that was really my criteria looking at anybody that really had a Salesforce architect or Salesforce developer title that lived anywhere in Central America or Central America or, sorry, South America or Central America. And I just started setting up calls and talking to people and I was going after anyone and everyone that had a senior title.
Speaker 2:And the thing is is that there just wasn't that many people. I mean, that was kind of shocking to me, you know, I thought there'd be a lot more people. But you know, as an example, like I had interviews with a few people in Costa Rica and the lack of people in Costa Rica, you know, with those sorts of titles and expertise, just blew my mind Right, and so when I was talking to these people, um, most of them were extremely good. Uh, you know.
Speaker 2:But they were also, you know, charging basically us rates. So it was sort of a little bit of a damper on things of like okay, I mean they're very big fish in a very small pond here and it could be difficult.
Speaker 2:Um, and then some other countries were a little bit easier, you know, you know to meet people and sort of get you know a little bit more reasonable rates, those countries being like Peru Argentina was one, brazil, you know. Ones that were not great were Costa Rica. Jamaica was the worst, you know, yeah, so we was talking to people in the Caribbean as well, and what ended up happening is I found that there seemed to be a pretty good treasure trove of people in El Salvador, and I was like this is interesting, a small country, you know, like let's grind into this a little bit. And I uh ended up finding this really great lady and we had a conversation and I ended up making her an offer. And it was like the next day or the day after, I got an email from this guy named Gino.
Speaker 2:Gino was the owner of the company that she worked for, the owner of the company that she worked for, and he was like hey, uh, you are trying to poach my top people and, um, and, but he was super cool about it. It was like, hey, you're trying to poach my top people, maybe. And I think he also knew, like you know I would. I would eventually be able to top poach somebody Right, um. But you know he was like hey, I would eventually be able to top coach somebody Right, but you know he was like hey instead of us like working against each other.
Speaker 2:how about we talk and see if we've got some synergies and there's some ways we can work together? So I was like okay, let's go.
Speaker 2:You know, because my whole plan was like I wanted to find somebody, not really to just be like a developer there, I wanted to find somebody to lead and build a team. And so I met with him and he owned two different companies. One was a consulting branch that did exclusively Salesforce in El Salvador, and the second was a training company where they took people in El Salvador, essentially didn't know anything, and trained them to know a lot of things, and they also gave like crash courses in English. And so, you know, I was very intrigued and the rates were reasonable. So, you know, I ended up partnering with him and we built a company, a completely separate company in El Salvador, where he would train people up in his normal company. I would essentially interview them once they were done and then we would export them to the joint venture that we had and then those people would work for Cloud Pacific exclusively in Hawaii. So that was sort of the structure.
Speaker 2:A lot of funny stories along the way, of course, but yeah, that was inevitably how we did it and because we set it up that way, it was so scalable. He already had an operation of bringing in people that were very good. You know they were hungry, they were ready to go, they were hard workers. You know they had to put themselves through this training program. I got to interview them and so it was just we were just stacking people so quick, you know, to be able to service the demands that we have here in the United States.
Speaker 1:So interesting. I'd be remiss if I didn't talk a little about the climate there. So not. Not long before you started to hire in El Salvador, bukele came in as the president and really transformed the country. Did that impact your business at all? You know how did it. What did it mean for you guys and your talent?
Speaker 2:So I we signed our partnership agreement I think it was just like a handful of months after Bukele came in, and so there wasn't any tangible effects that I saw from that. The biggest thing is that we had considered, because of sort of like payment methods sometimes being more expensive with wiring and doing business in Bitcoin Because we obviously got a Bitcoin reserve. So we held it as a company because we had a lot of cash flow at the time. We had talked about doing payments out of Bitcoin, but they weren't structurally ready to handle it at that point and we sold the company like a year and a half later. So that didn't come to fruition, but it probably did you ever visit el salvador?
Speaker 2:yeah, so so part. So you know, el salvador and hawaii are very similar in that like we have very similar climates and, uh, they are still very paper friendly. I should say like a lot of stuff had to be done on paper to be official. So I had to hire I had to go for my corporate team, legal team here in Hawaii to hire a team in El Salvador to represent me and put together all the paperwork. We weren't just doing normal partnership, I owned a company, right, so you know. So we had to go out there to sort of sign all the paperwork to officially, you know, become a joint venture out there. And, yeah, I wanted to meet these people, right. So it's actually an interesting story, so you know.
Speaker 2:So it wasn't that long ago that San Salvador, the capital, was like the homicide capital of the world, and so, you know, I had some reservations about flying out there and at one point I was like I was talking to a few companies eating quotes on like hiring a security detail out there, just in case you know, and and so you know. But ultimately I decided to sort of just take a risk because I was like if I show up, I've got a security detail with me, they're gonna immediately think like I don't trust them. You know, like you know, I there's still, you know, I just think the whole thing sucks and I was like no, no, no, no, no, I, I need to, I need, I need to give you know, show that I, I trust them, right, and we're going into business together, right? This wasn't a small business and so, yeah, I just flew out. It was a very interesting, extremely small country. The international airport there is, I mean, it's probably about as big as, like you know, the airport over on Big Island, like in Kona. You know it's tiny, yeah, and so he picked me up. The airport over on Big Island, like in Kona, you know, is tiny, yeah, and so, and he picked me up from the airport, and you know him and his business partner, rax, you know they both spoke really good English, so, you know we were able to get on pretty well.
Speaker 2:But, yeah, I had this one moment I always tell the story where I was like, because I'm an adventurer, I travel a lot, I've been to like 30 some countries, you know, and I like just kind of lost, and at one point I was like you know what, I'm just going to go out there. I left the hotel I was staying and I was like we're just going to like go for a walk down the streets, you know, it's all right. And I went up to like the end of the different roads and on the end of every single road was a police officer with an enormous gun I think it was an automatic. You know, just hit finger right there, ready to go on every corner. I was like I'm not, I'm just going to go back, you know.
Speaker 2:But thankfully thankfully, you know it's. You know the country's come so far in such a short period of time. The country's come so far in such a short period of time and they were unbelievable hosts. We had amazing good partner meetings, but they also took me around the country a little bit. We went up just to the border of Guatemala, saw some of their more touristy towns and we had some amazing restaurants and they were just great people and everybody that worked for my company I just had nothing but positive things to say about them. They were all just really great people to have part of the team.
Speaker 1:That's amazing. Tell us a little more about the team. You know. How would you compare the level of the Salesforce team in El Salvador versus those you had in Hawaii, those you had on the mainland seniority level problem solving? What were some of the trade-offs that you had to consider?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I don't think I mean in terms of effort, it was pretty comparable in terms of how they work, their level of knowledge. I know I would say they're definitely hungrier than some of the people I had hired here in the United States. Actually, when I look back, a lot of people I ended up hiring and keeping most in the United States were either immigrants or first-generation people in the United States. So I always found that super interesting. You know, one was always like English, I think, was probably the the bigger thing. You know, we, I would hire people and, um, it's, it's not that the english was necessarily bad, but it needed to be exceptional in order for us to keep the sort of pace of work that we did and for things not to fall through the cracks.
Speaker 2:I had worked with um offshore teams not in Latin America prior to this and I had not had a very good experience, and it always, to me, always boiled down to the language barrier and not necessarily their ability to deliver, and with language barriers you just end up doing a lot of back and forth, and so that was the biggest trade-off. Um, you know, there were a couple people here and there that you know were borderline at the very beginning. Uh, when we started working with El Salvador, where the language barrier was a little bit too bad, and you know we had to, we had to move on from them, um, you know, which is unfortunate, um, but you know, unfortunate, but it was very apparent to us going forward. This is sort of the level of the stuff we're going to test for and make sure that we're getting somebody that's truly proficient in the language.
Speaker 1:Culturally is El Salvador. Do they have a technical university that was producing this talent? Or were they more self-taught and uh, you know, github type type learning?
Speaker 2:a bunch of people had like a little bit of self-teaching, but you know they're, you know they don't have a. I mean, they've got a universe, a university there, um, but the the big one was that there was a company set up to produce them. It was basically a factory to produce talent and you know, I don't know if he's expanded outside. Well, you know he's expanded a little bit outside of Salesforce, but you know, there was just such a demand for so many years for talent that it just made sense to do so.
Speaker 2:And one of the things that I forgot to mention is, like I made it a priority of my company to actually go for more junior level people. So it really fit well and I did that. The same, I did the same thing here in the United States. I mean one. Yes, there is cost, but if you knew how to effectively interview them and I had a very effective interview process, you know you could find someone that was more junior, that had less experience but was exceptionally capable, and you know. So that was sort of the the direction that I I took it.
Speaker 1:And just back to the, the language and maybe the tools. Um, was this a? Were you guys doing more like written Slack and JIRA type stuff, or were there a lot of Zoom calls? And how did you guys think about managing and across countries and oceans?
Speaker 2:Yeah, we worked pretty much exclusively on Slack. So each of our we were running six different development teams by the time I left. Each of them had their own Slack channels, and then each of the companies that we were, each of our clients, had their own Slack channels as well, where we could communicate directly with them. So, yeah, a lot of communication over Slack. That was how we did pretty much everything. You know, we had Zoom calls every day, though as well. We had standups every single day with all of our dev teams, with the leads, and if the devs needed to be involved in client calls, then obviously they were included. So, yeah, it was a little bit of each, but for the uh, it was, you know, a little bit of each, but you know, for the most part it was. It was Slack based.
Speaker 1:If you're, uh, just like uh, when you started your company, you asked others for advice. If people came to you asking for advice on how to build a team in Latin America, uh, what are, what are some things that you'd, uh, you'd advise them on, counsel them on.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I don't think. I think you probably the best way to probably do it is have a, a strategic partner in the country, I mean somebody that has experience in building teams out there, that's exceptionally reliable, that is fluent in the language um and that you can partner with um if I had to do it all over again that's exactly how I would do it.
Speaker 2:Um, it just makes everything so much more easily managed, and he, he was able to manage things that are just sort of more expected. Like hey, paul, there's like a salvadoran holiday coming up and I'm like, oh hey, I didn't know about this holiday, right. And he's like, hey, like you know, it's next month.
Speaker 2:Like we should probably like let those people go for the day and, you know, be with their families. I'm like okay, like I wouldn't have known that right. You know, like those are good examples of things where, like you need somebody, I think culturally, boots on the ground Maybe not to get like immediately started of five. You know you really need somebody out there that um can manage and uh manage the camaraderie Like he used to do like a couple of parties. You know, every year everybody out there and um, you know just it, just it was, it was good for the company. The entire time that we worked with them we didn't lose a single person.
Speaker 1:So you know people were very happy and felt, uh, appreciated, felt, appreciated. And we haven't talked about the elephant in the room. This is all during COVID too. So was everybody on site in an office, or how did that come about?
Speaker 2:So I never had an office space. We had there's a.
Speaker 2:there's a co-working space called Treehouse here in Hawaii, and for like the first year and a half I had a, you know like an office there and then two offices you know in like, or two desks in a big office and we're trying to grow that as like our space and eventually I'm like, why am I spending all this money? It makes zero sense to me. So we went fully remote after that and then we would just do power honours. I'm sorry, what was the other part of your question? You were asking about like where we, where we were.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean yeah running. Did you guys have an office in San Salvador? Because you're right in the middle of COVID while you're running that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so they had an office, but it wasn't required that anybody come in. You know, some days they might ask people to come in, but it was fairly rare you come in. Some days they might ask people to come in, but it was fairly rare, I think. They needed to have an office to operate and at one point they were in person, so they still had all this office space, but for the most part it was all remote and that's why I preferred it, honestly. So we were already a remote company before COVID hit. So it was not a big transition for us at all and you know, I didn't start this process of looking for people in a different country to like a near shore team until 2021. Or is it? No, it's late 2020. So we had, you know, we were already in COVID and I think it's at that point. Some places were I can't remember it's all fuzzy, but I believe some places were starting to open up again and you know things were, you know, easing.
Speaker 1:What did the time zone feel like for you? And you know a lot of people that work in tech. They're often more night people. Um, did you have much crossover and overlap uh, like you personally with the team?
Speaker 2:uh, yeah, so I mean, as the owner, I would start my day at 4 15 every day. So you know, for for them I mean I, yeah, I don't they, I think that must have been like eight or nine o'clock for them, I can't remember, remember. And so, yeah, I mean we overlapped. You know, I started before they started and I ended my day before after they ended their day.
Speaker 2:So it was always pretty good. You know like the team leads. You know they had to. You know, manage that a little bit closer, you know, but they would have at least four hours of overlap, you know, depending on where the lead was. And you know my and I was also extremely liberal with how we manage the company. I did not want to micromanage everybody's time, so my take on it and I would. When I interviewed people, I remember especially devs you know, because I've been a dev, I know how it is.
Speaker 2:I remember like work till four or five o'clock in the morning and just be like so happy. And I remember telling him like look, if, if your, if your ideal is like you know, we're starting work at 2 am, uh, after playing video games and pounding hot pockets, I don't care, you know, I, I truly don't care. Whatever makes you happy, man, like what? What I care about is that if there's a meeting that we care about, like our stand-ups, mainly you got to be there and and other than that you hit your deadlines, that's it, you know, and as long as you're hitting your deadlines and the volume of work we expect of you, I don't care what you do it.
Speaker 2:Um, and everybody was super appreciative of that and we also had a lot of really good self starters right and, uh, you know they were able to manage their time pretty well, uh, back to your, your trips there.
Speaker 1:Um, any particular food or anything that you'd want to comment on, share that that you really enjoyed or or maybe didn't no, everything I had there I love they.
Speaker 2:They, uh, from from what I understand, el salvador is known for pupusas. I believe pupusas are where El Salvador is where pupusas came from. Somebody's going to yell at me, but this is what I was told in El Salvador. So if it's wrong, the people in El Salvador believe it. Okay, and it's basically like it's almost like tamale, right? So it's like it's made of sort of the same. Is it masa? I think the corn masa. Instead of having it in like almost like a burrito sort of thing and wrapped in corn of the, the husk it's, it's flattened in almost like a pancake, so it's like a pancake with filling. Um, and it's so funny, like literally last weekend I met costco here, uh, with my fiance and we see pupusas, and I was like I literally tell her I was like this is exactly the same as like they're known for it in el salvador.
Speaker 2:I was like, let's get it. We got them, they're amazing. So, yes, pupusas, yeah, you can get them on the street or you can go to like a really nice restaurant. They'll have like gourmet pupusas that you can order. He took me to this place like on top of one of the mountains or the crater there or mountain. I can remember that kind of overlooks San Salvador. Beautiful, beautiful view. And yeah, we just we ordered a ton of the boosters.
Speaker 1:Tell us more about what you're working on today, Paul.
Speaker 2:One of the problems that I saw in the last 12 years being in the Salesforce industry, and certainly when I owned Cloud Pacific, was that the customer service experience that platforms have and this is not just Salesforce, but you know other ones AWS, azure, so on and so forth- they're just not really that great.
Speaker 2:I mean, once a you know a monopoly platform sort of locks you in their want to sort of invest money. That's sort of they're just dropping down the drain to service your concerns or answer your questions is not something. They just don't put a lot of money into it and so they all kind of suck. And so, you know, I came into it sort of saying like let's create something different. So I founded a new company this year called Admin Now, and it's a digital marketplace that helps companies that are using complex systems like Salesforce or AWS in real time video IT support. So you can imagine, you're a Salesforce administrator, you're a Salesforce guru, you are the team, like an SMB that you're working at, and very often you have issues that come up that you just don't have answers to. You don't know how to fix it. These could be critical issues, fire drills that need to be taken care of, and so there's just not a lot of support out there in order to get these things resolved.
Speaker 2:Really, your options are to go to Salesforce and fill out a very, very long form and two days later they'll get you in touch with a junior agent that barely knows what they're talking about, or you can go on a forum and beg, and neither of these options are great. So with our site, all you do is you go to our site, you put in your issue, you submit it and you get instantly connected to an expert via video. You can screen share to resolve your issues. Most problems are resolved in 20 minutes or less. We're building out a 24-7 network so that you have access whenever you need it. There's no contracts, it's pay-as-you-go for our B2C offering. We have a B2B offering coming out, but for B2C, just pay-as-you-go. Use it when you want and the people that have used it so far have really loved it, that's awesome.
Speaker 2:If anybody's listening that's interested in that, where would they find you? Yeah, you can go to admin nowio. You can also follow us on Instagram. That's at admin nowio, and we are on LinkedIn because I'm now all in Word and two Ns.
Speaker 1:Are you also recruiting Salesforce developers and, if so, any particular parts of the world?
Speaker 2:So we are pulling in people globally because we are trying to create a 24-7 global network. So anybody that is interested speaks fluent English, that has, you know, exceptional Salesforce skills. We're looking for you. We, you know it's this is, it's basically the Uber of it support. That's what we're building. So you know, we do not hire anybody direct, but you can go and join our waitlist to join as a contractor to start providing services. And, yeah, we're working our way through our waitlist now bringing people on to service our customers. So, yes, and hopefully through this next quarter, we'll be through our contractor list, if we can get through it. It's pretty extensive, so we'd love some more people and more interest.
Speaker 1:Awesome, Love it. Well, Paul, this has been really great hearing about your experience. Like I said, first person ever in Hawaii to be on the podcast, I think that's awesome and wow, what a journey in El Salvador. That's super interesting Everyone. This is the Nearshore Cafe podcast and sponsored by Plug Technologies pluggtech great way to connect talent from all over Latin America, including El Salvador, with US companies. Thanks again for listening. Thanks, Paul, for being a guest. Thanks for having me, Aloha.