Building Resilient Teams and Businesses With Devin Koch

Intro: 00:02

Welcome back to the Response Drivers podcast, where we feature top marketing minds and dig in to their inspiring stories. Learn how these leaders think and find big ideas to push your results and sales to the next level. Now let’s get started.

Rick Rappe: 00:19

Hey, I’m Rick Rappe, host of the Response Drivers podcast. Here I dive deep with marketing experts and business innovators to learn how they approach business marketing and use data driven strategies to acquire and retain customers. We’ll talk about what’s working, what’s changing, and how we can stay ahead in an evolving marketing landscape. 

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Our goal is to fully optimize your marketing performance to drive more sales and exceed growth expectations. RPM delivers smarter, more profitable direct mail solutions, so you can turn your direct mail programs into a predictable, efficient sales channel. Check out rpmdm.com to learn more.

Well, my guest today is Devin Koch. 

He’s a seasoned entrepreneur and a tech leader with over two decades of experience building and scaling businesses. He’s the founder and chairman of Teamswell, and he’s at the forefront of the modern workforce, specializing in nearshoring talent solutions that help companies scale efficiently with high performing international teams.

Simultaneously, he serves as the CEO of Oasis Broadband, where he leads the mission to bridge the digital divide by providing high speed wireless internet to rural and underserved communities. Devin’s approach to leadership is deeply rooted in his family’s entrepreneurial legacy, dating back to the Great Depression, which informs his commitment to building resilient, customer centric operations. And he’s also an active member of entrepreneurs organization EO San Francisco, and he’s a dedicated advocate for mentorship and innovation within the global business community. 

Devin, thanks so much for joining me today.

Devin Koch: 02:09

Thank you for inviting me, Rick. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Rick Rappe: 02:13

Well, I want to go back to your entrepreneurial roots, back to your family’s business during the Great Depression. Can you tell us a little bit more about that and how that shaped your career path and your mindset about risk and business opportunities?

Devin Koch: 02:26

Yeah, I think that the upbringing that I had in Southern Illinois was a lesson in entrepreneurship from both sides of my family. One side being farmers, which is the ultimate and entrepreneurial experiences where they are doing so many different things besides managing finances and fixing tractors and deciding on when to plant. It’s just, it’s ultimate in, in an environment for an entrepreneur. And then on the other side, I had a great grandfather who was a blacksmith and a grandfather who was during the Great Depression, started several businesses that failed and eventually one stock. So I grew up in the era of my grandfather having a relatively successful business, small but successful, and my father actually joining him to make that our family’s business.

So it was sort of an identity for our family, which I think was probably the underlying impetus for me to want to be an entrepreneur.

Rick Rappe: 03:18

Interesting. What was the business? Can you share that with us?

Devin Koch: 03:21

Sure. Yeah, it was very simple. I’m from a small town in Illinois, and one of the businesses that my grandfather had was a transportation business. They took people back and forth between my little town and Saint Louis, and they started bringing things back from Saint Louis, things that they thought they could sell in my town that maybe weren’t as widely available. And it turned out that Candy was the thing that sold.

So he ended up bringing back lots of candy. They found vendors for specialty candies, and even eventually got to be vendors for bigger companies like Hershey and M&Ms. And then they added things like restaurant supplies, cigarettes, tobacco, all kinds of things that restaurants need. So we ended up with a wholesale distribution business candy, tobacco and restaurant supply.

Rick Rappe: 04:02

Awesome. Wow.

Devin Koch: 04:05

We were the Costco. Before there was a Costco. We had the big warehouse with all the things and a lot of people would actually come in. They didn’t go off the shelves themselves, but they’d come in and they’d tell us what we want. We’d go get it in the back and bring it out, and they’d take it away in their car.

Rick Rappe: 04:19

Yeah. So you were Amazon before Amazon. I mean, come on. That’s right. That’s amazing.

Tell us a little bit more about your background and how that started to affect your mindset and your, your business. Point of view moving forward.

Devin Koch: 04:37

Sure. As a high schooler, I worked in my, my parents and my grandfather’s company for a while, but the $2.10 per hour that I earned, I think was enough to like, get me out and start to do something else for a while. Since I was not getting cut any breaks by my family. So I decided to, to study computer science, I was a. He asked kids in high school what they remember about me.

It was that I usually had a camera around my neck or. I was sitting at a keyboard helping figure out how to. How to make the computers that our school got that year, how they work. So computer science is what I. My interests stayed with me, and through college I was more and more into technology. 

And by the time I left, I had a job with Accenture. So I started doing it consulting right out of college and then eventually moved into management consulting for a company that’s now called strategy. And we helped large companies Standard and Poor’s, Deutsche Telekom, big insurance companies, Prudential figure out how to spend their IT budget and deliver on large projects. So I, I can, I think I started with that entrepreneurial view I bring, I think somewhat of my own. I’m not sure where it comes from, but I’m kind of a risk taker. 

And I do enjoy the aspect of trying things for the first time or trying new things, and then the refinement that I got through eight years of working in a very structured environment, like consulting, where it’s all about forms and teams and naming standards and test plans and figuring out how to write decks. And I remember one of my bosses at strategy and it was then called Booz Allen. He gave me a lesson in punctuation. He’s like, you, you, you’re not this, this report. There’s no way this is going to fly. 

You’ve got to learn how to use a comma. Here’s how we use periods. And it was like things that I already had learned, but I just wasn’t paying attention to. But I learned that level of detail, which has turned out to be very helpful. Now I can draw on that, although it’s not my natural tendency, it’s something that I can draw on when I need to that level, getting into detail and making sure things are organized and ordered.

Rick Rappe: 06:38

Yeah, yeah. That’s important for all young people to learn as they start their career. I mean, we all had a boss that sort of said, okay, now you gotta like ratchet it up to a professional level, and I had a boss like that as well. So that’s, that’s probably a really common, I would think.

Devin Koch: 06:56

Yeah, I kind of turned into that boss. I think I actually get resumes from, from a lot of people now. I see a lot of resumes in one of the businesses and almost none of them are error free. And it drives me crazy. And I always the thing that I say back to the person writing you this cover letter, I’m saying there are three things in your life that are really important.

You’re going to get that job, you’re going to get that wife. And you know, maybe they’re going to have some kids. But the job is right up there. And one of the most important things you’re going to do in your life, and you’re starting off the process of getting a job with a piece of paper that represents you, that has errors on it. And usually I get a pretty good response to that. 

You’re right. Oh yeah. And then I get back a perfectly formatted AI checked version of the resume. So that’s how I’m paying back that old manager that I had for that lesson.

Rick Rappe: 07:42

Yeah. These days there’s a lot of tools we have that we can use to like really help to like proofread and polish our, stuff. So we shouldn’t be people shouldn’t be making mistakes like that anymore. But then I guess people get lazy and, and, and do things and don’t check it. Maybe don’t check the AI work enough.

And anyway, well, it’s, it’s a different time than when we started, I think back in the day.

Devin Koch: 08:08

Indeed.

Rick Rappe: 08:10

Tell us a little bit about the origin story then of Oasis Broadband, I think. When did you start that company and, and I believe you started it working from your house. Can you can you tell us the origin story there?

Devin Koch: 08:23

Sure. Yeah. During the .com boom period, I worked for a lot of different companies, a lot of very dynamic, to use the phrase loosely dynamic business models, a lot of things that didn’t make it. And I never found any company during that period of time that I felt really confident about. And I saw a lot of them go out of business, you know, I don’t know what the number was, but it was probably 80% of the.com companies eventually got a, you know, went out of business or got acquired for the people.

So at the end of that, I decided to take some time off and think about what I was going to do. But it was a period where I was thinking, I want something that’s a little bit more conservative. I don’t. I don’t want to just take a high flier or find some VC money and come out with the latest idea and see if we can make it fly. I want to do something that’s kind of like a conservative company that will survive upturns and downturns. Maybe it’ll grow a little slower, but it doesn’t need as much. 

It doesn’t need as much capital in the business model, doesn’t necessarily have to be novel. So I looked around for a while, and where I happen to live at the time was in Lake Tahoe and a little town, and as a technologist, I was very disappointed that the fastest internet connection I could get was what I called double dial up. At the time it was called ISDN, which meant that it was a little bit better than dial up, but not much. And so I thought that maybe that was a problem that needed to be solved. I started looking around Lake Tahoe to see who else might be thinking about that, and I did run into another company that had started to think about how they could solve that problem. 

I worked with them for a while and eventually bought their company out, took their some of the ideas and the partnerships and built my own team, raised my own money, and started the company out of my home in Lake Tahoe to bring internet to the people that lived around me that at that time worked for people companies like Hewlett Packard or IBM. They were consultants or professionals who wanted to spend more time in their Tahoe home, but they couldn’t. Even back then. And, you know, almost 20 over 20 years ago. So that’s how it started is I bought what, what in the day was called a T1 line, which was a super fast internet connection that today wouldn’t be enough to draw a web page. 

And we used wireless technology to, to beam that up to my neighbor’s house up on the top of a hill. And then we used a cellular like technology to broadcast radio waves out over the top of my community. And anybody who wanted to get service could put an antenna on their home. We would mount the antenna and then they could get fast internet, which at the time was 300kbps. So it was a scorching fast five times the available connection at that time. 

But that was fast enough.

Rick Rappe: 10:59

Interesting. Wow.

Devin Koch: 11:01

Yeah.

Rick Rappe: 11:03

And then how did you grow that company? What were what were some of the things that you did in marketing at to continue to expand and grow the business?

Devin Koch: 11:12

Yeah. The interesting thing about marketing in this business is that the very first thing we tried is still the thing that works the best. It’s a door hanger. We put a simple piece of paper on somebody’s door and let them know what’s available, and that it sometimes is the case where all the online tools in the world can’t get to the people that we want. You know, if we had our perfect marketing tool online, it would be to draw a circle on a map and say, everybody under this circle is who we want to reach.

But then even when you can do that, the tools that are available can’t reach those people. They’re using Facebook or they’re using Google, and those people aren’t necessarily using those tools. So there’s really no super effective way to reach people online. So we did, we did try some direct mail as well. And direct mail didn’t work as well because a lot of those people don’t have post office. 

They don’t have postal service at their homes. They’re more rural, which means they had post office boxes. So if you send direct mail to the address, it just gets returned. So the best thing for us to do was simply just hang a piece of paper, which in today’s version, we have one of our team members who rides a scooter around in these communities, putting door hangers on people’s doors. He can do quite a few an hour that way, so that’s still the best, best way. 

But we do a lot of community outreach. We work with community leaders. We find people who are very interested in getting better broadband for their community and maybe represent a group of 20, 30, or 40 people and we work with them to get the service rolled out. Of course, we do some Google ads, we do some Facebook ads. We do do that circle on a map thing. 

There is a company that allows us to do that and do our best to reach them through Facebook. And we use a couple specialized service providers for ISPs who kind of figured out the magic on how ISPs can reach people with what wording, and which ads on which tools. So a couple specialized. So we’ve, we’ve. And word of mouth is the best. 

You know, as with most businesses, we have a lot of campaigns that go out to our existing customers offering them something to, to help us spread the word. So the word of mouth is, is by far our best, best technique.

Rick Rappe: 13:21

Yeah. In those rural and underserved areas that you’re, that you’re serving or bringing service into. I mean, I it’s nice that there’s not a lot of competition that that probably makes it a lot easier for you to get traction with, with the homeowners in that area.

Devin Koch: 13:38

Absolutely. Yeah. You know, the 5G didn’t do too much. The latest cellular service because it didn’t really expand the service areas of those providers it just made where they can serve faster. So 5G is not a huge threat.

And Starlink doesn’t really work very well when you have a lot of trees in your yard. Fortunately, Lake Tahoe are surrounded by 120 foot pine trees and fir trees, so getting Starlink can be a real challenge where we live.

Rick Rappe: 14:03

Interesting. Okay. Very interesting. We do a lot of work with other internet and cable companies in bigger markets, mostly. So, but I think it’s interesting to think about the small markets.

And, you know, a lot of the, a lot of businesses are start small and then grow and grow and grow. And pretty soon they’re serving bigger, you know, major areas and have a significant client list. So yeah, our.

Devin Koch: 14:30

Service area goes from Sacramento up to Reno. If you’re for those that are familiar with the geography of California, but it’s about a 90 mile stretch that we serve the the mountains and the hills and the plains and the fields on, on, on that sort of stretch of highway. That’s really the more heavily populated of the less populated parts of California. So it’s a limited area, but we’ve grown a lot and we’ve had a lot of great partnership with the counties that we work in. They’ve recognized the need.

And so Nevada County and Placer County have both been sympathetic and helped us identify ways to roll out to to brought us together with people who need service and actually given us money in the forms of grant giving it to us. But they’ve made us apply for a grant and we’ve won those grants. So we do have the counties actually cooperating with us as well.

Rick Rappe: 15:17

That’s great. Well, and then you also founded another company called Teamswell, and that is more about Nearshoring. And I wanted to see if you could tell us how that business got started. And what was the moment that led to you starting another business like that?

Devin Koch: 15:35

Yeah, I, I had a similar experience. There was a personal need that I just couldn’t seem to fulfill another way in that company. And the need was to hire people quickly that I could afford. So during Covid, when a lot of people moved to rural California, there was a very significant increase in demand for our service. So we were spending a lot of money on improving facilities, putting out new equipment, building new sites.

But we also wanted to hire new people to handle the the flow. So we were trying to figure out how we could hire more people at a lower cost. And we discovered through another entrepreneurs organization number that that there’s a lot of people doing that. And we were very intrigued and immediately hired a first person to help us find people for our customer service team to start with. In Central America, we had been using a outsource provider with low quality and poor results. 

We’d been using lots of outsourced services for managing our technology, our network. We were so small that, you know, we just couldn’t afford a lot of people to do a lot of those roles. So we were using services for marketing services for technology management and services for customer service. But over the course of three years, we brought all of that in-house with our own team members from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua, and did so with an incredibly large increase in quality. The level that we now can offer our customers and promise and provide is under our direct control. 

So with our own Sop’s and our own team members and team managers, we can do a much better job of managing that work and making sure that what’s decided in a meeting gets done in a meeting, as opposed to have it go through an agency where there’s a filter at the agency, who’s your your client manager, and then their team members, you know, there’s a a translation error a lot or just a loss of control. So being able to bring all those people in-house was huge. And so we went from a team of five American employees to now 23 Central American employees and four American employees. So we’ve got everybody that does anything that does not involve climbing, running cables, putting up ladders, mounting things. Everybody’s in Central America, and we have a team of people that if you talk to them, most of them, you’d never know they’re not in America. 

So the English skills have been fantastic. I go down there, it’s a three hour flight from Houston or LA, so it’s easy to get down to meet with my team, which I do multiple times per year. So it’s, it’s sort of like just having a remote workforce in the United States, except they’re one third the cost rather than a little cheaper, maybe in some other state rather than California. So that’s, that’s how we got that started. Was it just worked once. 

Our customer service function became highly functional and running really smoothly. And we just started expanding to the point where now our controller, our director of marketing, our business development team. All of them are in Central America.

Rick Rappe: 18:33

Really. Even senior level positions, it sounds like are near assured.

Devin Koch: 18:39

Yeah. We have our director of customer services there. Our controller is there, marketing manager is there, there. I’m literally the only employee in America that doesn’t go out and drive something or hit something with a hammer or install. So every, every knowledge worker, every customer focused employee is in Central America.

Rick Rappe: 19:01

That’s interesting. So you took that experience from your own company, and then you started helping other companies find and build their, their teams in these same places.

Devin Koch: 19:12

Exactly. When we saw how powerful it was and the fact that it actually increased our quality, where we did a better job of operating our company and allowed me to get rid of a lot of my hats. You know, in an entrepreneur’s organization, as you evolve and as your company evolves, the whole idea is to wear fewer hats. Right at the beginning, I was the COO, the CTO, the CFO, the CEO. I had all the things right?

Yeah, and although I don’t.

Rick Rappe: 19:37

Have a lawyer, that sounds a little bit familiar sometimes.

Devin Koch: 19:42

Yes. Just for all of us, you know, so that it varies too, by who you hire and how much help they need. And, you know, I’ve worked on one little area at a time, but I’ve now got a team of people who largely manage all of the operations. And I get to think about strategy, finance, expansion. And the one thing that my team I’ve not been able to find somebody to do yet in the US is to to find new sites.

Like we have things like cell sites that we put our equipment up on, but we can’t use the ones that are existing. We have to find our own and we have to rent them. And so I spend a lot of time wandering around the rural parts of Truckee and Nevada County with my head looking at the tops of the trees to see where we could probably put some equipment and then knock on doors to see who’d be willing to work with us. So that’s one job I’ve kept but can’t. You can’t outsource walking around backyards in California to Central America.

Rick Rappe: 20:32

Are you sure? What if. What if they got these LiDAR images of your area and started reviewing the lidar images? Looking for the right points? I don’t know.

Devin Koch: 20:45

That’s the way we actually start. Google earth has an amazing set of tools. Now that there’s a button on Google Earth called 3D trees. And when you click that button, you actually see the actual tree. Now, it’s not always 100% accurate.

And we need accuracy down to the down to the foot level. So it’s a great that’s how I decide which yards to walk in. So we we do do that work online first to figure out where the most likely places for those homes and businesses are. But then we got to walk the backyard.

Rick Rappe: 21:13

Interesting. Yeah. Wow. Well, what trends do you see coming up in, in talent acquisition and workforce strategy that you think are going to be really important to businesses in the next 3 to 5 years?

Devin Koch: 21:29

Well, most business owners that have time to think about it eventually come up upon outsourcing and nearshoring using people outside the country to do certain amounts of work that they can at the beginning, feel confident that the output of that work will be high and that if it’s not good, it’s not going to make too big of an impact on their business. So, for example, you may have a virtual assistant, and if you have a virtual assistant, that’s an easy entry point into remote work. And that means that the person that does a lot of the things that are at the beginning, relatively simple is working directly with you. So you build up a rapport with that person, a trust of that person’s capability, and you start to see, wow, you know what? I wasn’t sure whether working with somebody in Honduras was going to work, but it sure seems to work really well.

So that’s kind of an easy entry point. And as more companies hit that entry point and they see how well it can work when you have the right candidate, then you start to do what I did, which is think, well, if this is going to work well for my assistant, maybe it’ll work well for my customer service team. And there’s plenty of ammunition around from the biggest companies on the planet that using international call centers works. Now, does it work well? I think most of us would agree that it does not. 

When you get somebody on the phone who has that international call center accent, that is hard to understand, you just hear your shoulders slump and you droop and you’re like, oh, can I just talk to somebody who you just have that feeling, right? But the difference, you’ve probably had that feeling yourself.

Rick Rappe: 23:04

I’m familiar with it. Yeah. Yeah. I know I’ve, I’ve, I’ve called into that call center once or twice.

Devin Koch: 23:09

Yeah, exactly. So we build the kind of call centers that are the opposite of that. They’re still offshore, but they actually have people who sound American or they have a mild Hispanic accent, which is what a lot of us in America are used to hearing anyway. If we called somebody who lives in California, we might get somebody with a Hispanic accent. So the accents are of a type and quality that people are happy to talk to them, and we make sure that the quality is high.

We pay extra for the best people that have the all the capabilities that are well trained, they’re intelligent, they’re empowered to make the experience something that the customer will remember for being great, not for being just horrible, right? But like one of the worst stories is one of my competitors in Lake Tahoe. It’s a big cable company and there are so many chats online about our, our competitors, clients calling to try to cancel their service. And it’s taking multiple calls and multiple hours just to cancel the service. So horror stories like that are what we want to get rid of. 

So when you find these people work now, well at the CR at your customer service level, you can continue that process. And like, like I did, you hire people that work in bookkeeping, you hire people that work in marketing, and all of a sudden you’re, you’re surrounded by incredibly talented people who are far cheaper than what you would have paid for an American, but they do an amazing job. Their quality level is on par with Americans. So when you do that three, four, or five times, you do what I did, which is you put 23 people down there and you keep hiring down there so that the the the value multiplies. Now, I have so much more ability in Oasis Broadband to do things that I never could have done before in marketing and business development, my outbound sales team, my customer retention team, teams I couldn’t even imagine having before. 

I now have a team of people to do it. So that’s the trend is people will recognize that the capability, quality and cost of international team members is highly valuable, especially as the world starts to change and I’m not sure if you. I not everybody agrees with this, but I see that globalization is coming to an end. I think that the world is. Instead of being global, where everything flows four times across an ocean and before it lands on your door and maybe 15 times. 

Right. Fruit processing. It’s like I get I companies buy their bananas in Malaysia, and then they ship them to Canada to get cut up and packaged, and they ship them to China to put labels on them, and then they ship them back to America to customers. It’s crazy. The amount of shipping and the process that what globalization and cheap shipping has allowed us to do. 

But I think with the world order changing that, countries like the United States are going to start to become regional hubs as opposed to global hubs. And I think that the perspective of business owners and strategies strategists, the consultants, is going to be, hey, it’s probably worth sticking a little closer to home. We don’t know how how long it’s going to be till all of a sudden countries in Southeast Asia are no longer friendly to us. We’ve seen this with China, right? One minute they were the reason that the iPhone became an affordable product. 

And that synergistic relationship that Americans have had with the Chinese allowed Chinese to evolve into middle class and Americans to get what they wanted. Well, it’s breaking up. It’s not you know, it’s not going to be there that much longer. So how do you how do you recreate that without dealing with something that’s so far and so foreign? It’s NAFTA. 

I think the next presidential administrations after this one will probably go back to figuring out how to make really close friends of our nearby neighbors. And that includes Mexico. That includes Nicaragua and Central American countries that have historically been close to us. And that’s where the labor trends will lead us, is to those countries that are nearby. You can reach them with a quick flight. 

You know that the people there are a little bit more American like with their culture, with their they have family who live here. They know where Baltimore is and they don’t confuse it with Boston. So it’s going to be a globalization, but it’s going to be a regional. Globalization is the is the trend that I see with in good times and bad. Like Oasis Broadband, when we grew, we were growing through expansion and we needed to hire more people faster. 

But if companies are contracting, they’re affected negatively by the economy. It’s also a way to keep the the number of employees that you have with at a lower price point, right? So then all of a sudden, your five employees don’t cost you five US salaries. They cost you four Central American salaries and one US salary or whatever. The formula works out best. 

So even in times that are troublesome, companies that are downsizing or shrinking are in trouble, can use nearshore strategies to allow them to continue to operate with the same team force, but at a much lower price point.

Rick Rappe: 28:06

Interesting. How do you think AI is going to play into this in the in the near future. I mean, obviously I can act as another way to replace staff almost and reduce your employment costs. How do you see that playing out?

Devin Koch: 28:26

Yeah, I, I mean, if I could tell you exactly how it was going to work, I probably wouldn’t be here. I’d be on my island in the Caribbean. But I’ll give you my best perspective. That I believe that there’s just been a, a significant development in the world of AI, that the LMS were useful and they’ve increased everybody’s productivity. Coding is, of course, the place where we probably have had the most value out of LMS and like coding assistance and so forth.

But with the creation of this latest phenomena, open claw that there is now a path for how to create what we would have called an agent some time ago, that now maybe we call a persona or some type of a a synthetic employee and the open floor framework that that that and its all of its partners in crime. There’s a bunch of other environments that give you what Open Claw does, which is a way to recreate an employee job by job, by through some programming and using training, using LMS to actually train the open claw agent. And with that, we are seeing how the employees or agents can be personas can be created and do the job of humans. And little by little, we’re seeing where that’s going to start is probably in sales development representatives, SDRs, bdrs, virtual personal assistants, people that do a lot of the admin work for their, their bosses or their, their teams. And that some mostly it’s going to be recurring tasks to begin with. 

So automating things. Review my email each day and Remove the things that are very likely to be spam. Highlight anything you’re not sure about. Draw. Create replies to all of the emails in the inbox that you know. 

You can put it in my drafts folder and then highlight read anything you think I need to see immediately, right? So an agent could actually execute that set of instructions for you, which would save you a lot of time. It’ll help you understand what’s important in your inbox. It’ll give you a set of drafts to review rather than have to have you draft them yourself. And it makes your inbox tame, tames your inbox, so to speak. 

So that’s just one example of a task that’s recurring every day, maybe multiple times per day that an agent could very easily handle. And every day we’re learning more and more about what else we could put into that agent’s task jar so that at the. Yeah. And then so that, I think, is the biggest development in artificial intelligence that we’ve seen. And I believe that that will provide a lot of value. 

And that’s where we are going to extend our team’s well portfolio of offerings, as well as helping clients create those agents. The technical part is not so hard. I mean, it’s hard if you’re not technical, but you can pay lots of people to do it. The harder part is figuring out what in your daily life, what what in your job should that agent be doing for you and how should they do it? And a lot of people, as you can imagine, don’t even know how to start that conversation, much less have the take want to take the time to go through and figure out how to write rules, to manage an inbox through an agent that feels like you’re writing code that is very foreign to somebody who’s in the fruit business.

Rick Rappe: 31:53

So yeah.

Devin Koch: 31:54

It’s it’s a very difficult process for a lot of people to imagine. And eventually there’ll be tools that make it easier. But that’s what we believe right now is of a real opportunity to add value to entrepreneurs and small business owners is helping them ramp up these open claw or the whatever the flavor of the day is going to be tomorrow. These agents help them do work. So it’s creating virtual employees in a way.

Rick Rappe: 32:18

Yeah. Well, it’s really helpful when as an entrepreneur to see examples of how other people are using these types of tools and what they’re what they’re doing with them. And then it kind of opens your mind to, oh, okay, I get, I get it now what what an agent can do. Very interesting stuff for sure.

Devin Koch: 32:38

It is. Yeah. And it’s mostly comes down to a matter of time, as you have obviously done. You’ve done some research on TikTok or YouTube or wherever it was, and you see videos of other people and how they use them and how they ramped up. But, you know, some people don’t want to spend the time, don’t have the interest, they just want it to work.

Now give me a person, you know, give me the agent that can do this stuff. And so we minimize the amount of time that somebody has to invest to get that agent up and running and help them through the process.

Rick Rappe: 33:07

So yeah, I’ve, I’ve gone, I’ve done a lot of like, you know, training sessions and webinars and things about AI. And it’s always like, you just need to get started with these tools and jump in and play with them and learn what they can do. And it’s like, I don’t have time for that in my business. I’m sorry, but you know, why don’t you guys figure out what it’s going to do, get it all refined and then talk to me when it’s ready? You know, I when something when it does something, I think you could find a lot of applications for this agent, an agent in marketing, for example, in what we do.

There’s all kinds of different ways you could apply an agent, but, you know, really create a lot of personalized 1 to 1 marketing using an agent.

Devin Koch: 33:52

Absolutely. Yeah. Doing the research on a human being, like one of your customers, you know, or the company, the company itself, the research, pulling back the research, identifying them based on the research, what the marketing plan should be creating the outreach, creating the direct mail. Absolutely. Yeah.

So then you then you start to become the one. I can tell already you’re one of the people that already sees where these agents and the open claw type employees are going to be able to reach in and start taking jobs away. And that’s helpful. It’s helpful to see that early on so that, you know, hey, how to use it, but B, how to protect the people that you know and talk to and that work in your agency and say, hey, let’s retrain you, let’s get you some new skills. Because I think in a couple of months, this position, you know, is going to be something you’re going to do a lot less of. 

So we’ve got to get you moved into something. You’re a great employee. We want to keep you, but we want to figure out what you can do. Now that will be a bigger value added.

Rick Rappe: 34:41

Yeah, that’s my biggest fear when I hear when I hear you talking about nearshoring and, and AI and things like that, I think about, well, what are all of the workers here going to do?

Devin Koch: 34:53

Sure. Well, fortunately, the numbers are really small. The number of, you know, nearshore employees and offshore employees relative to US employees is still a very, very small fraction. So it’s not affecting the unemployment rate yet, so to speak. But I always think I’m more of a globalist maybe. And, you know, there’s lots of ways to look at things, but I actually think that what’s one of the biggest budgetary expenditures that the current government has had, it’s protecting the border and keeping people out and getting people out.

Well, why don’t we just actually create an economy in their own country that allows them to to stay? They want to stay. They don’t want to come here except for financial gain. They come here for good jobs.

Rick Rappe: 35:34

Right?

Devin Koch: 35:35

So let’s help them create an economy in Nicaragua that allows really smart people to use those skills at home. Then they don’t need to leave. They see that there’s a way for them to stay. So what you’re actually doing is solving the problem before it’s a problem by creating jobs in Honduras and Guatemala and El Salvador. And that trickles down just when people start making real salaries.

And they have real professional employment at home. They start buying cars. This is what my employees. I see this all the time, and it thrills me that I now have team members who have the ability to go buy a car, or to have some type of a vacation that they could never have afforded before because they were job hopping. Taking low employment positions in a call center at $600 a month, which is not an atypical wage there. 

And, you know, we have we have changed people’s lives. So it is super rewarding for me to see the Central Americans benefit, because I feel like they do not have the set of advantages that Americans do with education, with an amazing economy, with, you know, lots of jobs right now that need to be filled very, very low unemployment rate historically. And in Central America, that’s not the case. They don’t have any of those things. They have poor, poorly trained company managers. 

In a lot of cases, they are poorly paid. They don’t have job stability. So this is a way for for us as Americans to help actually solve one of the problems that the government is spending a lot of money to try to solve one way. So let’s just solve it another way and create an economy locally down in Central America and help those people become real standard of living. That puts them at the level as a middle class citizen of the world. 

So that’s.

Rick Rappe: 37:20

Yeah. It makes sense to me. It makes sense to me. What’s one question that you wish people ask you more often but almost never do? Does anything ever? Does anything come to mind?

It’s a little bit out of left field, isn’t it?

Devin Koch: 37:41

Yeah. One thing well, that’s a that’s, you know, I have a one context for that. And that’s actually in the I’ll use the context first of near-shore. So in the nearshoring business, we spend a lot of time with our clients, helping them figure out how to start the process. We teach people we’re like the first company that they usually work with, and so we’re helping them, we’re educating them. We’re helping them understand how risky it is, how easy it is, how expensive it is.

And we give all of our employees benefits. So we are not the cheapest provider. We’re the provider that works to make sure that both the client and the employee are at really, really good places, right? The employee loves this job because we pay the higher end of the scale for that job. And the client, the client still gets an amazing deal. 

It’s still one third or one half of what they would pay for us person. But the one question that people don’t ask, and I think would be one of the most important questions to ask if I were going through this process, is, how am I going to be able to keep this employee? How do I know I, I don’t know much about Honduras, and I don’t know whether there are lots of opportunities flying around and they may just take my job. And then two months later they disappear and they go work for somewhere somebody else. You know, I don’t have any. 

I feel like I’m out of control with respect to an employee in Honduras. And so that’s one of the things we try to do, is to make sure that those employees have zero interest in ever leaving the company, that we place them at, that the company understands that this is not just a static human being doing assistant work. This is a real employee with real capabilities that’s going to get promoted and wants to be promoted and needs training and should be given the opportunities of any employee anywhere. And when you combine that with a top of the top of the scale salary, health care, we pay for their internet. You know, that’s why they stay with us forever. 

So the question we don’t get asked is, how am I going to keep these guys? How are they not just going to get. If they’re the best ones that we can find, aren’t they vulnerable to being hired away by somebody else? Because once you go through all the effort to hire this person, you want them to stay. You know, turnover is a giant problem in growing companies. 

And so we make sure that those employees want to stay with the layer that we add in there. We actually spend time with our team members as well. I go down there, I take them on adventure activities, we’ve done ziplining and take them to dinner and things like that. So we get to know them. We talk to them directly. 

So you have the Teamswell layer of interaction with the team members, and they get to hang out with the other local teams as well. Employees. They know who their Teamswell colleagues are, as well as their US client colleagues. And when you get that deep into a person and you sort of give them local friends and a network and they have a prestigious, you know, US employer, some, you know, entrepreneur organization, company. And I always think of entrepreneur organization member led companies as the top of the heap, right? 

They’re usually very conscious on making sure that the team is taken care of, and they’re focused on the mission, and they’ve done a good job of defining their values. And they’re. It’s easy to see what they represent. And when that’s the case, employees see that as well. And they, they, they want to stay. 

They want to be there forever. So that that that’s the question I don’t get asked that. I wish and I think that people care, but it’s just not at the top of mind when we start the process.

Rick Rappe: 41:23

That’s great. Great advice. Thank you.

Devin Koch: 41:25

Yeah.

Rick Rappe: 41:26

Well, Devin, if people want to get ahold of you and have questions for you about Oasis Broadband or Teamswell, how should they reach out and where should they get ahold of you?

Devin Koch: 41:36

Oh, the best is probably email. And the easiest one to remember is probably devin@teamswell.co. That’s devin@teamswell.co. Well right here. And like, like we talked about earlier, I don’t mind whether people call it Teamswell or Teams Well, we left it that way intentionally.

So whether you’re thinking about how well your team is going to cooperate or how much your team is going to swell once you start using offshore team members, they both work for us.

Rick Rappe: 42:08

Well that’s great. Well, thanks so much. This has been a really great conversation and I really appreciate you joining me today.

Devin Koch: 42:16

Thank you. Great questions. I appreciate the offer and I wish you the best of luck.

Rick Rappe: 42:19

All right. Talk again soon. Bye bye.

Devin Koch: 42:23

Bye.

Outro: 42:24

That’s a wrap for this episode of Response Drivers. Thanks for tuning in. If you found today’s insights valuable, make sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. And if you’re enjoying the show, we’d love it if you left a review. Got a question or a topic you’d like us to cover? Just drop us a message at responsedrivers@rpmdm.com. Until next time, keep driving response and making your marketing work smarter.