The Power of Outsourcing: Transforming Small Businesses with Brian Hunt

Freddy D: 00:01:58

Hey Freddy D. Here in this episode 90, we're joined by Brian Hunt, CEO of Core RPO and Core BPO.

A dynamic leader with a passion for building high performance team and driving strategic growth through smart outsourcing.

sses from startups to Fortune: 1000

Through Core RPO and Core bpo, he delivers customized solutions that streamline recruitment and the business operations across hr, customer service, sales, marketing and more. Brian's global leadership background and holistic approach makes him a powerful ally for any organization looking to scale with purpose.

Welcome Brian.

Brian Hunt: 00:02:54

Thanks Freddie. Happy to be here.

Freddy D: 00:02:56

So tell us a little bit about the backstory of how Core RPO come all about.

Brian Hunt: 00:03:02

I've been working in some form of outsourcing capacity my entire career.

I started with big consulting companies like Deloitte and Accenture and ran all kinds of big projects and large programs, primarily in software development. I had design teams in Argentina and Venezuela and software development teams in Costa Rica.

I've always for some reason been gravitating towards large, complex problems that need a large complex solution and so outsourcing became part of that. I had a number of different ventures during my late 20s and early 30s.

In my mid-30s I ended up taking over a staffing and recruiting company in Southern California and moved my family to beautiful Laguna Beach. Had some challenges in the beginning, growing staffing and recruiting company didn't have much experience with that.

Partnered with the original founder who had sold the business to us and quickly realized there's an opportunity here to build a team of recruiters offshore to support my team onshore.

Over the years that grew and became such a successful piece of our business, you ended up spinning it out in its own entity and providing not only recruiting services but all kinds of other services today. So we do marketing, outbound calling, virtual assistant services from accounting and finance work.

It's really just to become a talented group of individuals who are happy to help my clients. That's where the inception began.

Freddy D: 00:04:39

How important is it to bring on good team members? Whether it's an employee or a contractor.

Brian Hunt: 00:04:49

It'S absolutely critical and I think one of the most important things that companies do is hiring and the hiring process. My director in India is the most thorough in screening for both skills and culture fit.

I've really grown to appreciate his process and how thorough he is at screening and bringing in new employees and as a result it's kept this amazing culture of hardworking and great people One of the things that's unique about India is there's just such a massive employment population. I read a statistic that there's a million people coming into the workforce every month in India.

If you think about how many jobs need to be created to absorb that large of a workforce, we do job fairs internally, and a hundred people will show up to a small company job fair.

It's pretty amazing, but it allows us to also screen and get some of the best people who are excited about working for Core RPO and excited about working with our team.

Freddy D: 00:06:04

Before we started recording, we talked a little bit about the importance of culture.

You get a bad apple in there, and that can really decimate a culture in a company because it spreads negativity and issues, poisoning the whole culture pretty quickly.

Brian Hunt: 00:06:22

Absolutely. Yeah. And I think we were speaking earlier about the idea that you need to create superfans internally.

If your employees don't love working for your organization, then it's time to look in the mirror. One, maybe there's something that you can do better, or two, maybe you just have the wrong person in the wrong role.

I've always been very careful about making sure to put people in a position where they can be successful. Not everybody is cut out for every job. I think that's one of the things that I appreciate more later in my career.

There's such a wide range of people in this world, and there are so many different people who would love the job that you had. Right. And other people who may not care for it.

It's really important to put people into roles and have them working not only on things they work on, but with people they work with. It's absolutely critical.

Freddy D: 00:07:14

Yeah.

And it also comes into the point of Maslow's theory that sometimes we do a bad job of promoting somebody to their level of incompetence because they can't handle the new position they're in.

And they may have been a rock star one step below, but this whole new level, they don't have the skill set to handle that position, and that starts creating a problem.

So even though they've been a rock star, you know, I've seen it over my years in a SaaS world where people got promoted and they were horrible in that position. And just like you mentioned, that wasn't for them.

Brian Hunt: 00:07:54

Yeah. Earlier in my career, I think I had a harder time letting people go.

It's never easy letting people go, and I'm certainly never cold or heartless about it, but I do feel like sometimes you're freeing that person up to find something they can be passionate about, something they can love. If ultimately they're not doing very well at a role, then it's probably not the right fit for them.

Freddy D: 00:08:22

Sounds like we've both seen that in our careers.

Brian Hunt: 00:08:25

Yeah.

Freddy D: 00:08:25

We talked earlier about the multicultural aspect of leveraging technology and individuals from different parts of the world. I used to run sales on a global scale and set up 60 different resellers in different countries.

It was amazing the things that I learned dealing with different cultures. I look at things completely differently today than before I got into that role. Some of those people were my greatest assets in sales.

Growing, getting ideas and marketing strategies and everything else. In my case, I was working with independent distributors. So these guys were software resellers, basically what we called value added resellers.

They had 5, 6, 7, 12 different software products. So I've got to get mind share for them to market my product thousands of miles away.

It was really all about the relationship at all aspects of their company. Not just the owners of the company, but the sales team, the support team and everything else.

Brian Hunt: 00:09:31

Absolutely. Absolutely. Cultures have fascinated me. I was fortunate enough to live abroad when I was young.

I was 18 years old and took a year off between college in high school. I lived in Spain for a while. Being in a different country, it doesn't really matter what country it is.

But if you're assimilating to a new culture, potentially a new language, it's such a humbling experience.

You learn so much about the different nuances of you versus the people you're surrounding yourself with in this new country, you know, and they're so different. I've been fortunate enough to work with people all over the world.

Philippines, Argentina, Costa Rica, various Central American countries, Caribbean countries, European countries as well. It's such a unique world that we live in.

It's fun to watch it blend in a lot of ways and see the differences between the cultures that you bring together.

In fact, I have a customer in the Netherlands and when they started working with my team in India, there's a very kind of straight to the point kind of directness to the Dutch culture.

Freddy D: 00:10:41

Right.

Brian Hunt: 00:10:42

And it's not the same in India.

It's funny because I've done my best to instill a bit of my culture into my team in India to be a little bit more direct in how they're communicating with our clients and making sure that everyone is on the same page.

Different cultures have different ways of doing things and communicating A lot can get lost in translation and it has nothing to do with the actual language. It's for the tone and culture of it.

Freddy D: 00:11:13

Oh sure. I was actually born in France, but at two months old we came to the United States.

When I was young, I would go back and spend my summers between school seasons. That's where I learned a travel bug when I was trying to sell years ago into Japan.

They loved the technology, they loved the business plan, but they would never sign the contract to be a mass distributor. I couldn't figure out why. And I was in Australia, talking to my distributor there and he says, what are you talking about?

Says talk about the business opportunity, the coolness of the software, the contractor intelligence. He goes, shut the heck up about that stuff. Start talking about them or learn about them. And really it completely changed my whole approach.

A couple months later when I went there and asked them show me around a little bit. When they came to Scottsdale, Arizona, we had a two hour meeting and I took them around to show them the area.

Month later I had a $200,000 contract come in, you know, because we changed the focus of the conversation. So let's go into some of the things that you guys do at core rpo.

Brian Hunt: 00:12:22

Yeah. So like I said, it started off as in recruiting and we have an amazing group of recruiters.

We have a number of different clients from all different industries.

We've got recruiters in the Netherlands on life sciences opportunities, recruiters in the UK working on financial services, clients t and technology recruiters working across the us. We've done everything from nursing, oil and gas, accounting, finance, marketing, you name it. It's fun.

I really enjoy helping clients build their recruiting teams, the processes and how to make it work. We've got really great people and recruiting is really just another form of sales.

So our offerings have evolved into all kinds of different social media marketing, email marketing and search engine optimization. We're doing a lot of outbound calling and appointment setting and all kinds of different initiatives for our clients.

It's really evolved into providing a lot of different services for our customers.

Freddy D: 00:13:23

And so how important is it to go through the process of identifying the right individual?

And what can a small to mid sized business do that they're probably not doing and should be doing to vet whether it's an employee or a contractor or whether they're going to be working with a supplier, distributor, et cetera?

Brian Hunt: 00:13:48

Yeah, I mean like we talked about, hiring is key. I think every small business struggles with a number of different things. How to attract and retain really good people.

Small business certainly has budgetary constraints. It may have Constraints on its ability to grow. Because of that, I really enjoy working with small business owners. I love the theme of your podcast.

Building super fans within your organization and outside of your organization can really be champions for you.

The idea of working with small businesses to help them do whatever they're doing a little bit better, maybe a little bit more of it, and it's never one size fits all. Businesses are all so unique and different. There's certainly some commonalities.

You gotta do some marketing, you gotta do some sales, you gotta do some accounting and finance work. You got some operational aspects. There's some commonalities for sure.

The appropriate blend of those things, how things are going to work efficiently, how to work with the team that they have and make them more successful. That's probably the thing I like most about my job, is working with small business owners to help them make their people better, more efficient.

Help them.

It's gratifying when you have someone in an organization that might be overworked or underpaid and overworked, and to be able to help them be more successful in what they're doing is one of my favorite parts of we do. Yeah.

Freddy D: 00:15:18

Because one of my quotes in my book is people will crawl through broken glass for appreciation and recognition. And you know, somebody that's overworked and maybe underpaid, you can come in and say, hey, you need to rectify this because this is your ace player.

Do you? And they need to be compensated and appreciated and recognized.

It's one thing to recognize somebody individually saying, hey, Brian, thanks a lot, really appreciate the extra effort.

And it's another thing to say, hey, everybody, I want to take a moment to recognize Brian for really knocking it out of the ballpark on this particular project. For us, that whole energy changes and it not only empowers the individual, but it empowers your team.

Because now all of a sudden your team go, wow, they really appreciate what we're doing. I want to do more. I want to be that guy or that gal that got recognized in front of everybody.

And so one of the things I always talk about is, you know, the little things are really the big things.

Brian Hunt: 00:16:21

Absolutely. The little things are definitely the big things. It's the little appreciations you can give here and there. It doesn't have to be monumental.

We used to do big presidents, clubs, trips where we would take the top performing people beautiful places around the world, and it was always fun and a big ticket item. But even the little things go such a long way. People really want to be appreciated for what they're doing on a daily basis.

I think the same thing goes for relationships and marriages. It's just a little bit of appreciation that goes a long way. And, you know, I'm just a big fan of. Every small business has that hero in there.

You call them super fans, but someone who really kind of carries the team. Thinking of a buddy of mine who I talked to earlier today, and without Patty, he would be done.

Freddy D: 00:17:08

Right.

Brian Hunt: 00:17:08

It's one of those things where I love being able to say, how can we help Patty? It's going to help your business, it's going to help you as an owner, but how can we help your people?

Because that's really going to make a difference across the board.

Freddy D: 00:17:22

Oh, absolutely. And another thing is, yeah, people have a tendency, and I'm sure you've seen it, that's my employee, that's a contractor.

And that mindset to me is absolutely ridiculous because that contractor brings just as much value as the employee in a lot of cases, more. Because their skill set to specialize. That's why you brought them in.

Brian Hunt: 00:17:50

Absolutely. Absolutely. And it's funny, that's probably one of the things that is a big hurdle for us.

Most of our staff are typically 10,000 miles away from our clients. In many ways, they can be kind of an afterthought. One of the requirements that I have is all of my staff works at the same time zone as my clients.

UK EU shift. I have an Asia shift and a North America shift. So whatever time zone my clients are in, that's when they're going to be working with their team.

And every day, it's not only online meetings like this with their teams, but it could be daily prioritization meetings. There's daily chat sessions that happen on a regular basis.

We really enforce the importance of our people are going to be a part of your organization. They may be 10,000 miles away, but they're going to feel like they're right next door because they'll be there for you when you need them.

They're going to be reliable and good at what they do. Every client that we have has a team lead as well.

So if you're working with one of my staff members, they'll have a team lead who's helping to bridge communication and make sure that everyone is on the same page and working together, successful.

Freddy D: 00:19:06

And that's really the important part is making sure that they're all working together as a team. It's not, this is my employees and these are the contractors. There's businesses that that's their mindset.

I've seen them and you know, that's their mindset. Well, they're just contractors. Disposable. It's like, well, no, step back and look what would happen if all your contractors going.

I share that because I work with an interpreting and translation company a couple years ago and all the interpreters were contractors. They had the mindset where they should be grateful we're giving them work.

I was like, wait a minute, they're going to the hospital interpreting in their language. So they're really the front line to the customer, not you. The customer is not seeing you coming in to do the interpreting.

It's the contractor, it's the specialist that speaks that language. Whether it's American Sign Language, Spanish, Polish or Swahili. You need to be taking care of those like gold.

Because no contractors, you're out of business.

Brian Hunt: 00:20:19

Yep, absolutely. Absolutely. It's interesting too. Like I said, every client is unique in how they operate.

But I find that if a company has a culture of being super competitive where it's a bit of a dog eat dog world, it can be a great production environment. You have high achieving, competitive people who are competing against each other and ultimately make the whole team better off.

But it needs a little bit of a softer undertone, so to speak. It can't be completely Shark Tank, right? You have to have an element of we're all working together on the same team here.

And so that's one of the things that we come across frequently because there's a number of those types of organizations in the sales and recruiting space. Whenever we're working with them, we want to make sure we're on the same page as to the success and failure of the whole group.

For example, we have one client where we're doing essentially appointment setting for them. And the client had one or two folks that were just both doing setting and closing, if that makes sense.

They were kind of making the calls and closing the deals.

And then we had one closer that we were supporting and we had a team of four making calls to set appointments for him and he was closing deal after deal after deal and it became this bit of a machine. Right. Then you have these other two kind of independents thinking, I want a team of four people sending appointments for me as well.

So it's fun to watch these organizations evolve too, because sometimes we come in as saviors and they're excited to have us help. Other times it's some form of competition. And I always laugh at those scenarios because we're not really out to compete with any of our clients.

We're always just out to help them.

Freddy D: 00:22:11

You bring me back a memory years ago when I was selling, me and this one guy in the company were always battling for top sales. Guy. I have a couple of plaques on the wall. Either I had the top sales and he came in second, or the next year he came in first and I came in second.

We were first in the categories. So it was kind of clever because we never were first or second. I had the most volume, he had the most deals.

We're still friends 30 years later because it was a fun competition. It can be very healthy and the company benefits. Everybody benefits. But it's gotta be done in the right way. Neither one of us were losers.

It wasn't first and second because second is first loser for competitive people. But the way it was structured, we both won in different categories.

Brian Hunt: 00:23:00

Yeah, that's great. It's a good way to set it up.

Freddy D: 00:23:03

So share a story of how you guys came in and really turned around a company that was having issues in their outsourcing and onboarding.

Brian Hunt: 00:23:15

Yeah. It really starts with the owner's mentality. Right. It really has to start from the top and they have to really embrace it.

Outsourcing been around forever. It's not a new concept. But still think people have a difficult time wrapping their heads around it, getting comfortable with it.

It can be threatening to some folks. Ultimately, the way the owner presents it, the way the owner approaches it, is a big portion of being successful.

That's why I always say reward your best people, give your best people more help and they will do more for you. Right. And it's kind of the approach that we take. If that's really the starting point, who in your organization could benefit from more help? Right.

And how does that look? You know, and that can be kind of virtual assistant type work, you know, email management, that kind of thing.

There's a whole bunch of different scenarios that come across in terms of help. Right. And the company that really embrace it, I think do an amazing job.

And what I've learned too is your best people are going to be the ones that are the best at helping our staff become better at what they're doing. Right.

If you have staff that may or may not be your top performing or best employees, they quickly won't be able to manage or support, develop or train. Our team helped them. And I've seen that over and over again. And it's interesting.

We had one client who dipped the toe in the water, hired one or two people, and quickly Realized, oh, your team is really good. And I can see how this person's working really well with them and then this other person's not really working well with them.

But it became kind of an organizational shift and they brought in more of our people to work with their top person who was helping them the best. And it ended up increasing and eventually doubling their production and overall revenue and results.

So I think if organizations really take a hard look at themselves in the mirror and think about people who are truly adding value, people who are the super fans, people who are making super fans, your customers, those are the ones that you want to provide the most support.

Freddy D: 00:25:40

Absolutely.

Brian Hunt: 00:25:41

For. That's your salesforce. Right. And sometimes it can be what's going to make your life a little better.

And you know, we've had our virtual assistants who are kind of doing more personal assistant type work for a number of our clients because frankly, that little bit of effort to take things off their plate is going to make that top performing employee that much more engaged and excited and better at what they do.

Freddy D: 00:26:06

And you just said a magic thing right there is going above and beyond doing the unexpected. I call it in my book, the unexpected extra. And that goes back to the little things are the big things.

Because doing that little unexpected extra going above and beyond changes dynamics and all of a sudden things start to work better.

There's more appreciation, gratitude steps into the equation and it creates a bond where both individuals are working more harmoniously because now they've learned to appreciate what each one other brings to the table.

Brian Hunt: 00:26:49

Absolutely. Absolutely. And like anything, it can take some time and some adoption. There's a bit of change, behaviors change.

But what I found is good people have good habits and it usually comes natural to them. It's a genuine authenticity. They're top performers because of how they were raised or trained earlier in their career.

There's something that makes them special. They're already great. And the more you can do to help them, they're just going to do more.

You free up their time to do more things and they're probably going to do more great things. And that's what I've found with a lot of my best clients is they get that.

Freddy D: 00:27:31

Yeah. And that's transformative for their business because their business all of a sudden goes from here right up to there.

It wasn't really a lot of extra effort or a ton of money that got spent. It just all of a sudden everybody started working together. One of those racing boats.

When I lived in Chicago and Lincoln park, there's A little river, and you see everybody lined up in a row on their little rowboat. And if you think about it, how can they race that thing? Everybody's got to be in synchronization, going in the same direction, same mindset.

Otherwise you're not going too far too fast.

Brian Hunt: 00:28:07

Oh, yeah. Yep. Absolutely. That's a great analogy. It's a great sport. I love all the analogies that go along with rowing because it's 100% true.

The synchronization, all in the same direction.

Freddy D: 00:28:18

It's critical. It's timing. I mean, it's on top of its timing. You can't be two seconds behind.

Brian Hunt: 00:28:24

No.

Freddy D: 00:28:25

Because that is. You gotta be a machine running that thing. So it's a lot of fun. It's a lot of fun watching it.

I use that as an example for businesses, because at the end of the day, if someone's off, that affects everything 100%.

Brian Hunt: 00:28:40

100%. Yeah. And it's interesting, too. I think in business, you know, there are also times when we expect a lot from people. Right.

Or, you know, when they take on a lot, we tend to add more onto their plates. I'm even thinking about my director in India, who I'm constantly throwing curve balls and new projects at, and I think he really does enjoy it.

But I do. I asked a lot of him, and it seems like every new challenge, he embraces it. But I'm also mindful of, hey, what is he not good at? What is he.

What is he not going to want to do? Let's be honest about that as well. You can have some amazing superstar players, and they're not good at. Insert something they're not good at.

And how do you help them? By finding somebody who can help them with that. Right?

Freddy D: 00:29:32

Yeah. Really? That's it. Instead of chastising them that they're not good at it, acknowledge the fact that it's just not their thing.

You don't want to demotivate and create negativity.

Their whole mindset's gonna shift, and what they're really good at, they're not gonna be as good at anymore because they're stuck grumbling about stuff they don't care to do. A simple tweak of bringing someone else to help handle that and take it off their plate continues the momentum.

Brian Hunt: 00:30:02

Absolutely. Yeah. It's actually really fun going into new organizations, especially when they're not quite sure about outsourcing. How does this work?

They've never worked with somebody in India, so they're like, huh, Wait, how's This gonna work? How are we gonna work together?

There's a little bit of a learning curve, but it's fun to watch those people that get it and then they're like, oh, okay. So I can give them this, this, and this, and I can free up my time to go that. Cause I like doing that. And I'm good at that.

That feels good, but I'm not good at this. So let me give more of this to them and then I can go do more of this, which is going to help everybody.

Freddy D: 00:30:42

Because the other person might be. That might be their jam. That he's also.

Brian Hunt: 00:30:46

Exactly. And that's the other part of it is we always want to pair people that are good at working together. And sometimes it doesn't work out.

And we are very consistent about making sure that we are getting happy, productive relationships with our clients. And if we don't, we make a change. And most of the time, we're not necessarily letting the person go.

We've had amazing people that work really well with one client and that same amazing person. You move them to another client and it doesn't work. It's like the perfectly good heart that's being transplanted into a body and the body rejects it.

Those things happen. We always have to be mindful of those things.

But when it, when it does work, we have clients who have been working with their teams for eight plus years, their family, most all of them never met face to face. But I've been back and forth to India and brought gifts to them and sent gifts back to the, you know, the, their contacts in the U.S.

it's a fun thing to create because it's. It's almost like you're creating an extended family.

Freddy D: 00:31:49

Oh, absolutely.

Brian Hunt: 00:31:50

Yeah.

Freddy D: 00:31:51

Well, Brian, as we get close to wrapping up here, it's been a great conversation. And you and I could probably talk on this stuff for hours.

Brian Hunt: 00:31:59

Sure, we could.

Freddy D: 00:32:00

Great insight for our listeners and small business owners on leveraging outsourcing as a means to help them get to where they want to get to. So how can people connect up with you, Brian?

Brian Hunt: 00:32:15

Yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn. It's Brian Hunt and Core RPO is the name of the business. You can email me@brianorepo.com and it's core with a K. So it's K O, R, E, R, P O.

Freddy D: 00:32:28

We'll definitely have that in the show. Notes, do you have anything for our listeners?

Brian Hunt: 00:32:33

Yeah, I'd love to offer a free consultation. I really think outsourcing is about your business and it's something everybody can benefit from.

I think it's scary for some people because it's, it's, it can be new and unique and there's a lot of uncertainty about it.

I always say if you want just one off skilled person to do a project, there are plenty of amazing gig economy sites available to do all kinds of skilled tasks.

But if you really want to build something within your organization to be a part of your business, you should really partner with a company like mine to get the right people to do the right things and make sure that there's oversight, all kinds of things that go.

Freddy D: 00:33:16

They'Ve become an extension of the business.

Brian Hunt: 00:33:18

Absolutely.

Freddy D: 00:33:20

Brian, it's been a pleasure having you on the Business Superfan podcast. Great conversation and we look forward to perhaps having you on the show again down the road.

Brian Hunt: 00:33:29

That'd be great. All right. Thanks, Freddie. Appreciate it.

Freddy D: 00:33:32

Yep. Hey, superfan superstar Freddie D. Here.

Before we wrap, here's your three A playbook power move to attract ideal clients, turn them into advocates, and accelerate your business. Here's the top insight from this Best people are already top performers. Double their impact by surrounding them with support, not red tape.

Here's your business growth action Step pinpoint to your top three internal superfans, then assign them virtual assistant or contractor support that frees them to create bigger wins for your business.

If today's conversation sparked an idea for you, or you know of a fellow business leader who could benefit, share it with them and grab the full breakdown in the show notes. Let's accelerate and start creating business superfans who champion your brand.