2X eCommerce Podcast

How to Optimize Your eCommerce Team with High-Level Outsourcing → Ian Myers
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Kunle Campbell: [00:00:00] This episode is brought to you by ShipAccel. Cut your shipping cost, gain insights with detailed analytics, and automate your shipping process seamlessly with ShipAccel.

A lot of people have like vaguely heard of Sri Lanka. Some of them don't really know where it is. They're, is it part of India? It just, there was a lot of we don't know about this, which to me was an opportunity because it's like, Oh, if nobody knows about this talent pool, wait till they see it.

Mhm.

We've got a big team in Sri Lanka. We manage everything. We call them divers. It's a lot of nautical puns involved in our business. They get matched out to clients who get basically a full time, long term part of their team even though they work for oceans.

And for, a very like 80 percent less than what it would cost to hire someone in the U S you get an incredibly skilled, well educated, talented, driven individual to work on your operations team, your marketing team, your finance team as a full time [00:01:00] dedicated person.

Mhm.

we've got over 300 clients. I'd say probably almost a hundred of them are e com brands, so we see a lot of the trends. And what's interesting is we are seeing more like founder led content. LinkedIn, of course, on Instagram and all the meta products on TikTok, but LinkedIn especially has been a weird place of growth.

And so a lot of our customers are coming and saying, Hey, help me run my LinkedIn. In terms of the content creation, we're also seeing a lot of people turn to AI. So they're using, there's plenty of companies that are popped up for eCommerce brands where, okay, you don't have to do a photo shoot anymore.

Mhm.

So on this episode of the 2X eCommerce podcast, we break down how tapping into Sri Lanka's skilled workforce can help you outsource high level roles like marketing. Operations and finance, allowing you to scale your eCommerce business efficiently while saving on cost.

This is the 2X [00:02:00] eCommerce Podcast hosted by Kunle Campbell

so welcome to the 2X eCommerce podcast. In today's episode, we're diving into how tapping into Sri Lanka's skilled workforce can transform your eCommerce business. I'm joined by Ian, the founder of Oceans, a platform that helps eCommerce brands outsource high level roles like marketing operations and finance to top talent in Sri Lanka.

Whether you're looking to streamline your operations, improve media buying, or get control over your financial processes, this is the Ian shares invaluable insights on how leveraging global talent can help you scale efficiently while reducing cost. If you're struggling to grow your team or keep up with rising costs, this episode is packed with practical advice.

You don't want to miss. And before we dive in, be sure to follow the podcast on your favorite platform. Your support helps us bring even more top tier guests and content directly to you.

[00:03:00] Ian welcome to the 2X eCommerce podcast. Great to be here. Thank you so much for having me excited to talk about all things, talent, eCommerce growth and everything in between. Incredible. Incredible. I've been hearing a lot about oceans in recent times. I think I've come across your platform half a dozen times of recent.

Do you want to give a backstory of your genesis, your origin? And it could start from your own story as a founder. Yeah I was not a founder always, and I never really wanted to be a founder. I think it's not something that's really in my DNA. I was actually an academic for a long time and was planning to just become a professor my whole life.

I studied international policy. A couple of conversations happened and I decided to take a job instead of becoming a professor. I would, you have to understand that some of the people ahead of me that Graduated were like living in their cars as associate professors. So that [00:04:00] sort of was like a wake up call.

Oh, maybe academia, not the place for me. So I went into finance just because I was doing like international policy, cross border stuff. I somehow convinced this asset manager out of Japan to give me a job investing in venture funds. That's when I got exposed to venture startups.

I knew nothing about it. I spent a couple of years doing that. We invested the money. I moved to work for one of the funds that we knew really well was investing in startups in New York. And I think if anyone's out there and, has been a venture investor, they know that yeah, it's a great job, but you're watching the entrepreneurs and you're like, man, that looks so much fun.

Like I'm just sitting in an office, like researching stuff. They're out there building. Of course that's misguided and fun is like the last thing you have as a founder and it's set to very specific points in the journey. But I decided to try my hand, started my first company that was pretty successful.

Started my second company. And that wasted all the money I got from selling my first [00:05:00] company. And now I'm on my third company and it's doing pretty well. So that's my story of how I got to a founder, but I consider myself to be unemployable at this point. I'm a terrible employee. I can't work for anybody.

So I have to be a founder and that's just my only option. Interesting. Interesting. So why talent? Why global talent? What is the opportunity here in talent? The world has obviously never been more connected. What I was feeling was a pain point. Related to my previous company and what I was seeing was an opportunity and how the world was shifting.

So the pain point was when I was running my first company, I hired a lot of global talent, some for short term projects. Everyone knows Upwork. People use them for a lot of great stuff, but I would also try for more like virtual assistants. People were reading the four hour work week. It was all over Twitter.

I've got a VA, you've got a VA. It's, changed my life. I tried that. I think the problem I ran into was the people I were hiring overseas [00:06:00] just didn't have the education, the experience, exposure to keep up with the demands. I was experiencing as a founder. So they were great. If I gave them a defined task list, they could run through it.

But thinking outside the box, critical thinking, starting from scratch, doing it their own way, wasn't really happening. At the same time, I saw the pandemic changed everything. Companies had to be remote. And so suddenly, companies that may have never been remote, they may have only been remote for their engineering team or something like that.

They had to put in place all the infrastructure to run their company from, their desk at their home. That meant that suddenly domestic talent is the same as global talent, maybe just a different time zone. There's nobody going into the office, and so people are now ready to look at this.

If they've got the same Or if I can hire some of them struggling to hire here, why don't I just look abroad? So those things collided with some time I spent in Sri [00:07:00] Lanka where I found an incredible talent pool that I thought had a higher level of sophistication, education, drive, willingness.

And I just fell in love with the people there, with the talent there. It was a country that didn't exist. Didn't have a lot of strong ties to the U S and so I thought, here's an opportunity. I don't want to do venture again. I want to be bootstrapped. I don't want to reinvent the wheel. I just want to open a new market to something that already works.

And that's when I started Oceans. That's super interesting. What got you to Bangladesh? To Sri Lanka. Sorry. That's okay. That's A company I listen that, that incident right there betrays one of the issues, which these are very small countries and Americans in particular.

A lot of people have like vaguely heard of Sri Lanka. Some of them don't really know where it is. They're, is it part of India? It just, there was a lot of we don't know about this, which to me was an opportunity because it's like, Oh, if nobody knows about this talent pool, wait till they see it. What got me there was a previous company that I worked with [00:08:00] called use base had a big office there.

They were Japanese business run by a very good friend of mine. I really mentored mine and he. Had looked all over for, Hey, where's the best talent for our equity research business, really sophisticated stuff. And he needed English speakers, Japanese, there are not a lot of English speakers in Japan, especially at the professional level.

And he looked to Sri Lanka, found an incredible talent pool there. I was working with him on some stuff. I was interacting with these people and I saw, wow, this is a special place. So just to clarify, is Ocean's exclusive to Sri Lankan talent or are you global now? We have a few small offices elsewhere.

We serve clients all over the world, but the bulk of everything we do is based in Sri Lanka. We have hundreds of people there working with clients all over the world. What's the population of Sri Lanka? It's about 27 million, I think. And what's their literacy rate? It's [00:09:00] 99%. Interesting. It's very high.

Okay. And what's this? Don't quote me on these stats. I know we'll fact check and puts in the show notes. Interesting nonetheless, from a top level standpoint and then what are the most popular term verticals or niches you, you find that talent from Sri Lanka actually fits?

We've. Interestingly enough, there's a reason I'm on this show with you. eCommerce has been like a huge category for us. Now we've just grown in there through referral. That's in terms of the businesses we serve. I can talk a bit more about that in a minute, but the talent we work with is three primary verticals, admin and operations, sales and marketing and finance.

So the way Ocean works is we hire these people, they work for us. We've got a big team in Sri Lanka. We manage everything. But the we call them divers. It's a lot of nautical puns involved in our business. They get matched out to clients who get basically a full time, long [00:10:00] term part of their team even though they work for oceans.

And for, a very like 80 percent less than what it would cost to hire someone in the U S you get an incredibly skilled, well educated, talented, driven individual to work on your operations team, your marketing team, your finance team as a full time dedicated person. And that's super interesting.

And are they exclusive to my brand or do they do they have, do they work for multiple? Yeah. Yeah. No, it's a good question because there's a lot of different models out there and this is a new wave of, I guess what would be traditionally known as outsourcing. So historically there was Oh, a huge function.

We want to shift overseas, mostly call centers. And then we got into this place where it was a lot of work product delivery. So there were a lot of businesses where it's like, Oh, you're Deutsche bank and you want to have an analyst do your models for you. They'll deliver your models and you can talk to them, but they're not part of your team.

Now we're in a new place because of, the pandemic opened [00:11:00] up everybody to remote work where I can be in Sri Lanka and get a birthday cake from you and be at the all hands and have an email address and be on the Slack and really be fully part of your team. So they are dedicated, exclusive, our oldest customer is almost three, three years old now.

We're a very young company. They still have. All their people, they've been with them for three years, helping them build this. It's a podcasting startup, interestingly enough. And that's that's the way we prefer to do things. So we don't do short term or project based or anything like that.

Okay. Okay. And then what about how, so what's the what the sizes of businesses that use your talent pool at Ocean? Sure, we we work mostly with, I would say, in terms of startups, we work mostly with seed series A, series B companies. We also work with a number of services businesses. I'm talking law firms, accounting firms, [00:12:00] things like that.

We work with medical practices, doctor's offices. Design agencies, nonprofits. So our customer base is actually quite large. Um, we're not a fortune 500 vendor we're working with, I would say at most medium sized mid cap businesses, which makes sense. The reason I asked was systemization.

People, processes that we talk about people, processes and systems, and, people is the first piece. And then we, when we began to processes my, what was in my head was like this business, I'm assuming these businesses already have the established processes and then they're plugging these talents, into the processes that they're not necessarily creating processes for you.

Is that the. It depends. It really depends. I would say we as a business serve mostly junior to mid, mid senior roles. Our customers have a range of folks and sometimes they're coming in and setting up a process, especially [00:13:00] for our EA Plus, which is like our Kind of VA built for founders that we specifically created a training program and delivery program around.

They are coming in with the expertise to say, Hey, we have a great Ecom brand is one of our customers called Cheers. They make an after drinking Supplement and their person came in, works with the CEO directly and brought all these processes with them on how to, go to a conference and keep track of everybody that you've met and make sure that the follow ups happen.

Here's the playbook for that. And here's, the playbook for trade shows and the checklist for everything that we need to go through for going to a trade show and making sure that we have everything set up for that. And oh, here. If you're an F& B brand, you're on Kehi, you're on Unify, you're selling into retail as well as e com, there's a lot of complex stuff around that.

So sometimes depending on the role, they'll come with a playbook, they'll set up the systems and they'll do it for you. Other times they might be working with a senior member of the team to support them and they'd be fitting into existing processes. Okay, that makes [00:14:00] sense. Makes sense. Now, speaking on behalf of the audience, I'll just give a typical avatar.

I'm running a 1, 000, 000 a year business. It's 2 years old. We've we're establishing product market fits. 30 percent of our business is retention at this point in time, I've been working with agencies. So I have a meta agency I work with, I have one head of marketing that coordinates between the agencies at this point in time.

But I'm really looking at my contribution margin is shrinking. I'm struggling really with that. And I'm still looking to just bolster my team so that we can. Continue to increase top line. So if I come to yourselves for talent team, marketing talent what's approach would you take?

It's crazy that you just nailed a lot of our customers in terms of their profile. Your audience. Um, that's usually where you fit in. So if you're a venture backed [00:15:00] company, you're using us to, you need to increase revenue, but you've got to keep your costs down.

So you need those hands typically full time to do marketing, to do operations, to do things, to increase revenue to get you to that next fundraising milestone. If you're a bootstrapped company, your life and death is determined by making money. making more money than you spend. And so in that case, you start to work with agencies.

You might, your growth might plateau if ads have been working really well, but suddenly they're not working as well and you can't spend more and more with these guys. We come in as a solution to have somebody in house because I think a frustration a lot of people feel when they don't have enough to hire a full time, like for example, marketing person in the U S so they go with an agency.

For 5, 000 a month, hard to get ahold of them. Are you really a priority client? You want answers to stuff quickly. It can sometimes be a frustrating experience. So we allow people to [00:16:00] hire for, 3, 000 a month. A full time person who has a ton of experience in meta, who can come in, run your ads, be responsive, be part of your team, be bought into your vision, your mission, and hopefully deliver better results for substantially less costs than working with an agency.

Okay. That makes sense. I think one of the challenges for a lot of operators now is content. Where the, we're told that we need content. Essentially to feed our advertising, all our demand generation advertising, whether it's paid meta, whether it's TikTok, but really meta and then what the sources of content that there's UGC, there's IGC the there's branded content, internally founder led content and all of that stuff, I think where a lot of.

eCommerce businesses fall short is the second piece of the equation, which is how do you repurpose that content, efficiently, [00:17:00] regularly into your mentor. Do you have any use cases of just like a content coordinator, someone who's just exclusively responsible for your remit mate is to give us, to deliver 500 pieces of quality content, we can give the agency to constantly test for the next 30 days.

We just anecdotally, one of the interesting things is we've got over 300 clients. We, a lot of, I'd say probably almost a hundred of them are e com brands, so we see a lot of the trends. And what's interesting is we are seeing more like founder led content. LinkedIn, of course, on Instagram and all the meta products on TikTok, but LinkedIn especially has been a weird place of growth.

And so a lot of our customers are coming and saying, Hey, help me run my LinkedIn. In terms of the content creation, we're also seeing a lot of people turn to AI. So they're using, there's plenty of companies that are popped up for eCommerce brands where, okay, you don't have to do a photo shoot anymore.

You don't have [00:18:00] to go and physically put your product in there. You can just use AI to generate product content. And then you can put that up everywhere regularly. And we're also seeing more. Micro influencers, smallest taking instead of giving, I don't know what it costs to work with Rinaldo a million dollars, for a post something like that and hope that some percentage of his audience converts they're spending, 500 on a micro influencer.

That is, if you go that route, it is often. More effective, but incredibly intensive because now you don't have three huge influencers you're working with. You've got 30 micro influencers where you have to get them the product. You have to give them the scope. You have to follow up with them to make sure the content is posted.

You have to make sure that it's delivered on time. You have to make sure it doesn't overlap too much with other content creators. So there's a huge amount of administration operation that goes into that. [00:19:00] That's often where we. Sit, we don't often do a lot of the design work or the creative of the content that is typically done, either by creative teams in the U.

S. or, by the founders themselves or things like that, because it is hard to, capture video from where our people are working from. Yeah, understood, understood, understood. So even if you're like on a, like on an influencer marketing platform where you're sending scope of work or brief for influencers, that coordination can easily be handled by, by, by staff from yourselves.

Yeah. And that's, I think one of the reasons we found a lot of success with eCommerce clients is that is a ton of work. And there's also just a ton of work around, if you have a lot of product lines managing the backend in Shopify, if you're a Shopify brand, if you're on Amazon, there's a huge amount of work that goes into maintaining rankings on Amazon and keyword optimization and making sure that [00:20:00] you're visible above the fold as a top seller.

There's just a lot of manual work involved in eCommerce brands. And we're not even talking yet about. The manufacturing, the supply chain, the shipping, the delivery, the returns, the warehouse, all that kind of logistics work as well. Ecom is just, it's complicated until the product gets to you. And it's complicated getting the product to the customer more so than for instance, retail brands, even because with retail brands, if I'm selling it to retail, Yes, I have to pay a lot of people to do a lot of stuff, but I don't have to do that much.

It goes right from my manufacturer to the warehouse. The warehouse sends it to the distributor, or the distributor picks it up from the warehouse and they distribute it to my retail customer. I'm not involved in a lot of that process except for maybe the invoicing, etc. Ecom, I got to do it all myself.

It's one to one. It's one to one essentially. Yeah. Yeah. I have a question around AI. How is AI. You [00:21:00] mentioned earlier that you have 300 plus customers. That's incredible growth for two, three year old company. Incredible, but what's been the impact of AI, particularly generative AI on just how you source talent on how talent is executing for, on how even people hire talent and their approach.

This is a question I get so regularly. You can see. Look, I'm in the U S there's a strike going on right now. The longshoremen on the East coast. This is going to affect everyone that's an eCommerce customer. There's, if you're an eCommerce brand, you don't want the ship, the shipyards going on strike.

In Q4, yeah. In Q4, exactly. Great timing. And I'm sure that might've been intentional. They're saying. Hey, we want a contract that says no automation ever can't use automation forever. Those are the terms of our contract. My point being people are worried about this. This is top of mind.

What happens to our jobs? What happens to us [00:22:00] as people when AI begins to do the things that we want to do? Generative AI in particular is a little bit ironic because, we were told, I did a LinkedIn post about this a while ago, AI is going to come in, they're going to do the jobs we don't want to do, we'll be freed up to do creative work, pursue our individuality.

And what ends up happening now is I'm still doing my laundry. I'm still shopping for my groceries. I'm still making my own dinner. What AI is doing is writing, making videos, making art, all the creative stuff that I was told I would get to do. AI is doing that. So it's very top of mind. For us, the question is more like, hey, when's my, when's AI going to replace my system?

That's really it. It's seen as a very low level job that is susceptible to replacement. I think, listen, I'm, I come from the venture world. I'm not a technology hype guy. I think anytime that investors in a company [00:23:00] or a sector are screaming about how much it's going to change the world, it should be taken with a grain of salt.

I think the timelines are a lot longer than people think they're going to be. I think there's early adopters to technology and then there's a long lag time before it gets everywhere else. So I'm of the mind that it's going to take much longer. There is going to be a phase of assistance. So even for your executive assistant, even for your marketing team, they're just going to be working with these tools to help them.

It's not going to fully take over their job. Eventually we might get there, but I think we're actually talking about like a 15 to 20 year time horizon. Even if the technology is there, that doesn't mean people are going to adopt it. And it may be that startups adopt it quickly, but small businesses, our doctor offices, clients, I can tell you, they're not going to be like replacing their employees with AI as soon as our like cutting edge e comm brands that are, looking at tools all the time.[00:24:00]

Which brings me to my second question. Has AI increased the productivity of your talent? But how are they utilizing AI to, to be more productive? It's, that is an interesting question because from our vantage point, we see both sides of the equation. There is a push to be more productive and there's a, Hesitancy to accept the use of A.

I. So on the one hand, clients ask us regularly. If I hire a marketing person from you to make content, are they gonna be using a I'd help them deliver more faster? And we say, yeah, of course, as part of our training, they understand how to use these tools. On the other hand, we have clients come and call us and say, Hey, one of your guys just used generative AI and something I asked them to do.

That's not okay. So there's both sides of the coin happening. And I think people are [00:25:00] often confused about, Oh, the productivity versus do I really trust this versus, is this going to come off as authentic? Do I have to read everything? We have developed a framework where there's just transparency around use and results.

So we always have a disclaimer generative AI was used to assist me in this particular task and very clearly outlining that. And I think that's important for everyone in any role that's using that technology, because otherwise you're going to get questions around, did you use it? Did you not use it?

Is this you doing the work? Is this not you doing the work? Imagine you're up for a promotion a year later and your boss is think most of this was just gen AI. Why should I promote you? This is is this even your work? So having clear distinctions around if you're an employee at a company, right?

When are you using Gen AI and for what and specifically for what is important to protect your own career, but it's also important to make people feel comfortable with the sort of augmentation that it provides. Yeah, I think it's a missed opportunity for operators that put in op [00:26:00] resistance to AI.

I think every member of your team. should, so long as it's within the remit of the job description or scope of work should be. Essentially really good, so imagine AI as a horse, it should be essentially really good riders to take them forward as against just being on their feet. I think AI, so I think it personally, I think AI is like the bicycle or, a vehicle.

Do you think there's any if I'm an employee, any fear that Oh man, I'm going to ride this bicycle until they knock me off the bicycle and the bicycle keeps going. As they're like, it's am I training my replacement right now? I sometimes I think that's like a subtle.

Yeah, fear in the back of the mind of these people. So as for my podcast [00:27:00] I use AI and I can tell you that it's tough particularly with the accuracy. And what I'm finding is sometimes for certain projects, I've been better off working with a human. Yeah, just due to the fact check in and the iterations and waiting for it to come over and over again, a human that knows that their job is at stake would have just done a better job without so many iterations.

And I'm also finding that the, it's ability to hold generative AI, particularly to hold information, the memory capabilities are still a bit laggy. So I could be on a prompt if a prompt is really long. So let's say I've put on 40 prompts in one single session. It's very hard for it to contextualize prompt five when it's at prompt 30 with the [00:28:00] results of the output it's giving that's obviously going to change over time, but we're in 2024 now, and that's still happening.

Yeah I guess to turn the question back to you, AI can make video now. How long until you just say, I'd love an interview it's going to be me and the CEO of Oceans. Here's the website link and his LinkedIn just throw that together for me and let's put it out on the feed. Believe you me, people don't, at least for now people don't want to hear from robots per se.

In this scenario, I could use AI to research all the podcasts you've been on and come back to me with questions. No one else has asked you before. And then that's value to my audience. Another thing, another use case in eCommerce, just go through all the customer reviews in for our top seller, look at the [00:29:00] competitors and see the gaps and let's feed that back to product development.

So with those use cases, for humans to process all of that, it just, no, it's not worth AI strategy. It's the only thing that will beat AI. I think the strategy behind your use of AI is where the human intelligence comes in. And I don't know where this universal AI, universal intelligence thing that they're talking about, but where we are now with generative AI, you still need a really good human that can strategize and know what the outputs would be.

And then it requires iteration iteration upon iteration. And. I find value, I apply value, I give value to individuals that know how to use AI like really well, like creatively, like a very talented artist, for instance, just the ability to get the most out of AI. I digress. No, that's, it's a [00:30:00] topic everyone is interested in.

So indeed. What steps would you, what first hires in in, in eCommerce, particularly operators listening to this, would you suggest listeners consider if they're looking for Sri Lankan talent through oceans? I would say right out the gate. Lazy answer, but our EA plus, and what we do with our EA plus, and why it's different is we decided not to hire people that, and any background as VAs.

So I had hired a lot of VAs before. They were career VAs and they were great, as I mentioned, for the basic stuff. I thought if I'm a founder and I have a lot of complex operational work that needs to be done, that's more valuable than just managing my schedule. So we turned this idea of a VA on its head by saying, we're only going to hire people who are operators.

So they've come from a background in marketing. They've gone to a great university. They've worked in finance. They've worked in operations. They've never been a VA before. [00:31:00] Ian, that's counterintuitive. I want someone with VA experience. I get that sometimes that's like regular question, but we've created a great training program.

It's a three week training program. People come in, it's eight hours a day. They learn how to be an awesome assistant. And the end result is someone who can handle a lot of complex operational tasks. A lot of administrative tasks and sit between that assistant and an operator. So for growing companies, let's say you're a million to 5 million, maybe 10 million in revenue.

You're sub 30 employees. You've got a CEO whose kind of business is picking up, but there's a lot to manage. There's a lot of travel. There's a lot of marketing. There's a lot of operations. There's a lot of logistics, invoicing, et cetera. That role. Can unlock the executive's time and can also help with reducing the administrative burden and streamlining things like SOPs, internal wikis to help the company as a whole function better, that seems to be [00:32:00] the most value from their clients.

Typically, Oh, they're very happy with this. Let's hire somebody else through oceans. Then we usually go to marketing. Paid acquisition, media buyers, someone who managed meta. And then sometimes if they're getting big enough, we go to accounting. We do a lot of like bookkeepers, financial controllers, FPNA.

Now we're making money. How do we manage that money? How do we analyze that money? What's our cashflow, which our budget, that kind of work as well. Super, super, super interesting. Really interesting stuff there. What's about HR, like delegate, how do you manage the resource?

What happens, what's the day to day Also with time zones, I think that the day starts much earlier than ours. I think yours is like 12 hours, ours is about six or eight hours. So how do you manage time? We do it differently than a lot of folks. So I'll talk briefly about delegation, but also in terms of time zone, a lot of our competitors, a lot of other people you might hire work the full [00:33:00] overnight shift.

Our philosophy is we want to deliver the best talent to our customers. Think about your own market in the UK. How many of the smartest people in the country do you know that are working the graveyard shift? It's not the most appealing option. So we don't do that. We our folks work a split shift. So in the US, they work 5 hours of live overlap, 3 hours of async.

So our customers get enough face time with them to do what they need to do in the mornings, but then they're also doing some async work so they can go to bed at 1030, 1130 at night and they don't have to, work till 4 o'clock in the morning. In terms of how to manage them, these people are part of your team.

They're working with you day to day. They're in touch with us, they're in the trenches with you. We have a lot of folks in our collective kind of offshoring sphere that make endless playbooks, endless delegation handbooks, how to delegate, how to do that. Our philosophy at Oceans is that puts more [00:34:00] work on the delegator, on the executive, on the manager.

Yeah. Our role should be to prepare our talent and our people to proactively fit themselves into the organization and manage up, hey I'm here's what I can do, here's what I should focus on, what do you think? It's a very different relationship. And that's part of the unique training we give people is not, Hey man, here's how here's a bunch of books on how to delegate to your people.

Great. Go do it. It's wouldn't it be nice if someone came in and was just like, Hey, here's what I'm going to do today. If that's cool with you. That seems easier to me. So that's how we've set up our training and our focus as a business. So with the training you offer them that there still needs to be some sort of immersion into like my entire company, particularly given the fact that this person is remote for them to really sink in, to understand what our challenges are, what makes us tick, how much how do you [00:35:00] get them to be embedded in the company?

So they make. A really relevant suggestion as to how they can add value, because that's what I heard you say in terms of, here's what I can do. Yeah we check with our clients throughout the process. Are you going to take this person, meet with them every day, make all the relevant introductions, onboard them in a way that is like you're onboarding a normal employee?

Because that's what has to happen. If you hire this person from us and keep them walled off over here. They're just like over there. They're not part of the company. It's never going to work. And we check every from the first time you get in touch with us, you're might be evaluating our services, but we're evaluating you.

And the reason for that is because the number of potential customers is way higher than the number of great people. And so we actually are pretty selective about who we work with. We don't want to be dealing with churn. We don't want to be dealing with customers that are unhappy, that aren't a [00:36:00] great fit for our service.

We're looking at, are you going to bring this person in, let them shadow you, spend the time every day for the first month, really invest in that J curve, introduce the rest of the team, and treat them in a professional way like they are fully part of your organization? If yes, we want to work with you.

It makes sense. Makes sense. Makes sense. Makes sense. I could go on and on. But it makes sense. It's worth really worth exploring this option. I'm speaking to the audience now with regards to Sri Lankan talent from a point of view, particularly that these are college educated white collar.

People who have been in ops in the past or even finance in the past they've been trained through, through oceans and they're essentially very proactive. They're not your, from what I gathered that they're not your regular. Outsourced virtual assistants, [00:37:00] that we've come to know from platforms such as Upwork or Fiverr.

These people will add value. Take, you will understand what your challenges are, you know where the opportunities are, and see how they can be part of that progress, that trajectory for growth. Ian for people who want to find out more about Oceans what's the best way to reach out to them?

And do you have any special offers to the eCommerce operators listening to, to, to this episode? Yeah, absolutely. Oceanstalent. com and then there's booking links to talk with our team and at least get an introduction and take a look at some of the people that we have working with us. That's the best way to get in touch.

The sales team. Doesn't let me take sales calls because I'm not supposed to offer discounts and stuff like that. But I would say to people, if you mentioned the podcast, um, I'm just thinking on the spot here. How about a thousand dollars off your first month with us. So it takes the risk down a little bit.

I know I'm going to get yelled at for that. I can see as soon as this goes live, someone's going to have [00:38:00] words with me. But I like helping people. I like helping entrepreneurs like this business is special to me because I get messages all the time from our divers that like, I can't believe I'm getting to work with this brand.

This is incredible. Like we have some leading eCommerce brands that use our. And then I get messages from those brands being like, Oh my gosh, this has helped me so much. Like our team is functioning so much smoother. I was able to hit profitability because I was hiring from you guys. So it makes me feel really good and I like helping people.

Come on, check us out. We'll give you a discount. Answer any questions. And yeah, I'm, I love working with e com brands. Brilliant. By just by any chance, are you nautical in any way? Why oceans? Why divers, waves, it's a good question. I you don't realize until you're in a company like this, how many of our like Parts of our language are nautical in origin.

You keep catching yourself being like, yeah, I'll just dive right into that Ted. Oh God, I did it [00:39:00] again. Like it's just every, it is part of our language. The answer is I don't like the beach. I don't eat fish. I really don't like I think, ocean underwater, that's more of a space guy than an ocean guy.

But when I was thinking about the company and starting the company, I thought, what is, something that connects all of us. That's the ethos of what we do. And to me, the ocean was representative of that. And my favorite color is blue, but those two things together. You got a great brand name. I like the sound of that and it's been a warm pleasure having you on the two XC cameras podcast.

I thoroughly enjoyed this conversation. Thank you. Thanks, my friend. Great to be here. I had a great time.

Mhm.

Thank you for tuning in to this episode of the 2X eCommerce podcast. I hope you found my conversation with Ian from oceans insightful, especially as we explored how outsourcing high level roles like marketing operations and finance to skilled global talent can streamline your eCommerce business and also boost your [00:40:00] profitability.

Ian's strategies for leveraging Sri Lanka's talent are offers a cost effective way to scale your operations without compromising quality. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to the 2X eCommerce podcast on your preferred platform. Your support helps us bring more incredible guests and valuable insights that Directly benefit your business.

Don't forget to leave a review and share this episode with other eCommerce entrepreneurs who could benefit from these strategies. Until next time, keep pushing the boundaries of growth and scaling your eCommerce business. Thank you for listening.