Why You Should Hire A-Players from the Philippines with Yoni Kozminski

David 0:00
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Yoni Kozminski 0:46
I had a number of personal experiences probably four or five years ago where I just found people that had such a high caliber of talent and excellence in the specific roles and functions. The applying that I just thought like something doesn’t add up here. Why isn’t everyone doing it? Why it’s also so attractive in terms of the Philippines is you’ve got a population of 120 million people who inside of the business process outsourcing space, the BPO, they are 95%, college educated or above. So you have a highly educated, highly motivated talent pool where I didn’t mention but English is actually the language that everyone studies. If it were me, I think for a lot of these ecommerce businesses, one of the smartest hires and one of the roles that’s like, you know, very often forgotten and not included in is a project manager.

Intro 1:35
Welcome everyone to the firing the man podcast, a show for anyone who wants to be their own boss. If you sit in a cubicle every day and know you were capable of more then join us, this show will help you build a business and grow your passive income streams in just a few short hours per day. And now your hosts, serial entrepreneurs David Schomer and Ken Wilson

David 1:58
Yoni, welcome to the show. First things first, tell us a little bit about yourself and your path in the E commerce world.

Yoni Kozminski 2:06
Well, first things first, Ken, Dave, thanks for having me on the podcast in the first place. It’s exciting to sit down and to sort of walk you through my background. I spent the accent you’re hearing is Australian. So I grew up in Australia. And I spent the first 10 years of my career in digital advertising and creative advertising, digital marketing. So I was sort of growing up in a time where there wasn’t social media for brands. So I launched in Australia, Mercedes Benz Australia, New Zealand’s social presence. So their Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, everything from content strategy to production to photoshoots. To SEO, PPC management, Facebook, I was the largest Facebook media buyer in Australia in the automotive space for at least a year or two with Mercedes Benz. So it used to be really fun when Mercedes and Facebook used to fight, you know, who comes with you to the Grand Prix. So that was pretty cool. But that was my background. And I moved to the states and worked with Sony and MasterCard and Medtronic enterprise clients also from sort of smaller agencies. And so I always saw what it looked like to be corporate from the eyes of a smaller business. And yeah, eventually moved to Israel about four or five years ago. And that was when I got a lot more heavily involved in E commerce. So I was running an agency, I was working exclusively with E commerce businesses. And if I’m honest, I was sick of making idiots rich, when I was only given one very small piece of the puzzle of like, buy my Facebook media or, you know, do my email marketing and you know, certain aspects of it. And as a result, I met a couple of guys that had an Amazon business, they were doing about 2 million a year in revenue. And when I got there, I pretty much built an agency out of the Philippines for them and took that business from two to 5 million in 12 months. And that business got acquired by thrasio and I walked away and built multiply me which is effectively that model of executive search and HR into the Philippines and escala which is a process improvement consulting practice Systemising ecommerce businesses. So that’s, you know, that’s the long and short of it.

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David 4:11
Very nice, very nice. And you are in Tel Aviv, correct?

Yoni Kozminski 4:15
I am in Tel Aviv.

David 4:16
I got to ask is it as awesome as everyone says?

Yoni Kozminski 4:19
It’s honestly the greatest city on planet Earth. I feel very fortunate to live here.

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David 4:24
Yeah, I’ve heard that and its place that I want to, I want to visit like in the next couple of years, so.

Yoni Kozminski 4:30
Mate, I’ll have you any time.

David 4:31
Oh, that’d be awesome. That’d be awesome. Well, good stuff. Ken, what do you got next?

Ken 4:36
Yeah. So Yoni. So your experiences, it’s a lot. So you went through quite a bit. So my assumption is, is when you move from Australia to Israel, then or from the US to Israel, then you fired the man you kind of went off on your own path, and you have a ton of experience with hiring and building a team. So let’s dive into that. So as David and I we’re building out our teams now You know, and a lot of the listeners are solopreneurs. And so can you speak to a little bit of the hiring process and where a solopreneur should start and what not to do?

Yoni Kozminski 5:10
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I’ve been there before I was a solopreneur in the agency. And, yeah, it’s one of those skill sets that you sort of pick up as you go along. And, you know, there’s always different levels, and everyone finds their way into it differently, depending on what their background is. And once they do fire the man, they have to figure it out in whatever sort of frame of reference they had. So I, I would say I went through the traditional, especially when we talk about E commerce entrepreneurs, the traditional route, where I got enticed by the notion, you know, we’re sitting here, I would be surprised if both of you guys hadn’t read The Four Hour Workweek. Tim Ferriss, so, you know, he sort of, I think, quite famously promoted the existence of virtual assistants. And you can get these people to do baseline tasks, data entry, and just like time saving things. So I went through that process, I hired, you know, a bunch of VAs. And I thought, wow, like, I’m really, firstly, I was project managing a lot more, which, you know, became a different skill set that I had to learn for. But I think, at the end of that, it took me to a position where I want to hire experts, not generalists. I want to bring people into the business that are better than me. So when it comes to starting, I’d say like, going back to the Start Here is like, you also have to be aware of where to start. So the thing I like to tell people when they’re not quite sure, like, should I hire someone full time, am I at that level, I always say, look, break down your week. And every task that you deliver on a weekly basis, if you mark specifically tasks that you need to be involved in as a five, and ones that you really don’t need to be involved in, they’re not, they’re very repeatable, let’s say customer support, if you had a whole lot of canned content, might be a one or two, okay, you mark your whole week, and then you can start to actually peel away things that really don’t need to be you as a decision maker as a solopreneur, and a founder of a business, and you can sort of work your way backwards to decide to remove people, that’s to sort of dip your toes in, if you’re really committed to growth, and you know, you really you have a winning product or service, and you can really sort of go all in, then I would say, take on the approach of bringing in key experts into the business around the areas that are going to see you impact either, you know, improve the profitability of the business or, you know, drive that growth, and that EBITDA, which is, you know, obviously the term that everyone has become all too familiar with in the space. So I’d say that’s a starting point, Ken, I mean, I can go into specifics around like, you know, how to approach the interview process, or how to actually build out the job description and things like that, like, help guide me what’s going to be helpful?

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David 7:41
Sure.

Ken 7:42
David, go ahead.

David 7:43
Yeah. You know, I think one thing that for some of the solopreneurs that are listening, they may have heard you mentioned the Philippines. And I know we have a couple employees from the Philippines, and they’re excellent. However, sometimes when I tell people that they are like, how did you meet them? Like, how does that work? And why would you hire someone from the Philippines? And I certainly have an answer to that question. However, I’d be interested in like, understanding some of the key differences between, you know, hiring someone, say out of the states versus out of the Philippines.

Yoni Kozminski 8:16
Yeah, yeah, great question. So let me start off and say like, it’s no coincidence that everyone’s looking into the Philippines and India and Bangladesh and you know, South America and specific areas. The first premise is the geolocation based arbitrage for the simple fact for anyone listening, the cost of living in the Philippines is something like 50 to 80% of what it is in the US, it’s significantly cheaper. So what you as a baseline can do is you pay people less salary, that is a fair wage, and that they are making, you know, good money in their native location. And for your you know, as the cost of business is the line item in your business. It’s not that expensive, and yet you’re not sacrificing on quality. Now, I guess the the next question is why the Philippines. So I had a number of personal experiences probably four or five years ago, where I just found people that had such a high caliber of talent and excellence in the specific roles and functions, that were plain that I just thought like, something doesn’t add up here. Why isn’t everyone doing it? And so, I think the typical journey and you know, I’ll say, I’m gonna watch both your faces and see if I get the nods. But like, if I had to guess, right, you probably found at least talent you’ve worked with historically on onlinejobs.ph. Correct, right? So, so onlinejobs.ph was also what I like to call the gateway drug to the Philippines. It, you know, especially sort of four or five years ago when it wasn’t as flooded. You would find talent, you know, it’d be a bit of work, you’d have to go through a few 100 resumes, but sometimes you’d find talent that was really good. Now, that number is probably blown up tenfold and it’s baseline low level talent, you know. There are a number of other solutions that you can look at there. You can find diamonds in the rough. That’s not to discredit onlinejobs.ph is just, it’s a lot of work, there’s a number of job boards that you have to be a Filipino entity to get access to. So in order to sort of see talent, that’s sort of at a higher caliber, you’re already sort of limited a little bit there. But like, you know, free up, you can look at solutions like Upwork, as well. I mean, there’s ways in which you can find sometimes high level professionals, but why it’s also so attractive in terms of the Philippines is you’ve got a population of 120 million people who, inside of the business process, outsourcing space, the BPO. They are 95%, college educated or above. So you have a highly educated, highly motivated talent pool where I didn’t mention, but English is actually the language that everyone studies in. So it’s now an English speaking population, where it costs you a whole lot less for talent, where you don’t have to compromise on the output. And one of the biggest drivers is loyalty and career progression. So as long as you can build that level of security, and opportunity, the chances are that no one’s going to leave you. So it becomes a very viable solution to find top talent and know that it’s going to stick as well, which is also integral when you talk about building and scaling businesses, you know, having personnel change every other month is really costly. I actually read a really interesting fact or stat, that the base salary of the employee that you hire, if it doesn’t work out, it can cost you 15 times or more of what that base salary is, in terms of impact to the business to its true costs in terms of lost value and time and resource allocation like getting really, I mean, it does really impact your business. Yeah, I can see you, I can see your jaw on the floor there, Ken.

Ken 11:52
Yeah, that’s a lot. So you said 15x. Wow, I haven’t heard that. That’s crazy. But yeah, I totally get it. Now, some of the stats that you you know, in the way you described the Philippines is pretty amazing. I didn’t know that there was that many in the talent pool down there. And, you know, I’ve worked with some really talented people from that area. And some are on our team right now, they’re really talented. So I’d like to take a little bit of a step back. And so let’s say the listener is, you know, they have a full time day job, still, they haven’t fired the man. So they’re working 40 hours at their day job, they’re working 20 hours on their business, and then they’re just overwhelmed. And so, like you mentioned, they wrote down all their tasks that they’re doing that week, and they’re labeling them high level low level one through five. Now, can you take us to the next steps on how they would go about figuring out who to hire, what they need, and how to do the job description, kind of like what you mentioned?

Yoni Kozminski 12:44
Yeah. So I think there’s a few, like, there’s a few stages here. So when you’re looking at that, I think still the most important thing is that you are the one making strategic decisions, especially if it’s your part time job, and you’re only investing 20 hours, and you got a 40 hour full time job, you know, you really have to be calculated in how best to maximize your time because you don’t have a lot of it. So, you know, depending on you know, how committed you are, you would bring in people to really remove some of that Pareto Principle 8020, you get rid of anything that isn’t high level decision making, because you don’t really have time to do it. Now, if it were me, I think for a lot of these ecommerce businesses, one of the smartest hires, and one of the roles that’s like, you know, very often forgot, and not included in is a project manager. So if you can find, you know, let’s call them an agency, like an X agency project manager who understands how to speak to all the different suppliers, knows how to speak to briefing a graphic designer and project manager, you know, the PPC management, make sure that everyone is delivering, like, I would say, that’s a, that’s a smart hire. I mean, you know, take my advice with a grain of salt. This is if I were back in that position, because I, I don’t really look at the world necessarily like that anymore. I mean, I would take a different approach when you’re building your company. And you’re looking at that it’s more so around specialized focus on what does the desired outcome look like in this specific role. So forget the job description. It’s not about like, you should have three years of amazon seller central experience, and you should have two years doing PPC work. It’s what does success look like in this role. And building a scorecard that you can actually write that individual against to make sure that they’re aligned with the possibility of completely you know, if it’s to grow your store, from a million to 2 million over the next 12 months, you know, work backwards and what are the stages that this person needs to deliver on in order for that to look like success?

David 14:44
Very nice. I’m smiling over here because your comment on the project manager is well noted. Actually this week, Ken and I hired two I would say like entry level positions. And all of a sudden we have two more people reporting to us asking us questions. And what we’ve noticed just in a couple days, is that we need to have someone in operations that kind of is between our employees and us. And so I think that that’s gonna probably be our next hire.

Yoni Kozminski 15:14
You won’t regret it.

David 15:15
Yeah, yeah, no kidding. It’s been honestly, a pretty stressful week. So, anyway, my next question relates to I like how you describe, like, rating, all the things that you do, as you know, the one through five, right? And, you know, thinking about this question, just kind of like to make it fun. Let’s think of it like a draft, like the NFL Draft, or football or whatever, whatever draft, you know, we select a quarterback, we select a wide receiver. Starting with a solopreneur, what would be your first draft choice? Second? Third? Like how would you roll that out?

Yoni Kozminski 15:52
I like that. Well, there’s a few questions that I have for you. If I’m building my dream team here. I would say the first question I have is, What are your skill sets? Or what is the thing that they are best at?

David 16:08
Well, I have I’m pretty good at spreadsheets, accounting, and finance. Ken’s a digital marketing wizard. So I’d say we like already, like compliment each other. And so yeah, without going into too much detail, that would be what we’re bringing to the table.

Yoni Kozminski 16:23
Yeah. So I would say I mean, you know, you’ve already found each other, which shows that you’re, you know, you’re building on this and my co founder, Lippy, and I, you know, we have a similar, he’s more into the numbers, and I’m more into the creative side. And, you know, and that works really well, I would say, you know, depending on the size of your operation, right. And I think you guys are making a great decision in hiring an ops manager or someone, you know in that position, because that’s when it becomes complicated. I mean, we grew from, on payroll we grew from four to 130, in about 12 or 13 months. And internally, we have about 55 that report into, you know, effectively reporting to Lippy and I across two businesses, so 55 60, something to that effect. So pretty quickly, you know, the system breaks, it’s built on people process and technology, that’s how we look at the world inside of escala. And so building in those management layers, and those reporting cadences, and the strategy, the high level strategy, so that everyone’s working towards a common trajectory, or a common goal is really critical. So yeah, operations, you can never look past the value of having really high level ops people.

David 17:36
Okay. Okay. So if you were building your dream team, what’s your ratio of like, operations to entry level? Is it like a three to one ratio? Or what do you think?

Yoni Kozminski 17:48
Yeah, really depends again, on the business, you know, like, I’m sitting here trying to put my hat on of like, okay, what was it like, when I was running an Amazon business that was just doing $5 million versus what’s it like to be running a multi million dollar service based business, you know, where one of our you know, it’s an awful thing to say, but like, our product is humans. You know, in one of the businesses like, that’s really if you, if you were really brutal about sort of the economics or the financial reporting of it, we just got off a call with, you know, a company that’s gonna be our fractional CFO, and we’re just sitting there saying, like, it’s awful to say this. And they’re like, yeah, no, I look at the numbers all day. Like, that’s what it is. But yeah, did I answer your question? Or did I go on a complete tangent there?

David 18:29
No, no that does answer, that answers my question. That answers my question. Yeah.

Ken 18:35
Awesome. David, did you have another one or?

David 18:38
No, go for it Ken.

Ken 18:38
Oh, cool. Yeah, so sorry, I was just eager to get into the scaling part. Now, when you talked about four to 120, or, you know, something like that, like, that’s incredible. Like, so to me, I always think like, I always want to, you know, kind of crawl, walk and then run. And then it sounds like to me that you pretty much just ran from four to 120. So can you break that down on how you scaled so rapidly? I mean, did you find the magical elixir or did you do the 80 20? What happened there?

Yoni Kozminski 19:11
Yeah, so I’m going to draw on one of my favorite quotes, and it’s by your boys guy, Abraham Lincoln. And it’s if I had six hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend my first four sharpening my axe. And so that’s like on many of the presentations we send out out of escala, but we spent four months building the infrastructure and the framework for multiply me before we ever won our first client. So much of everything that goes into scanning has to do with planning, scanning. Scaling is planning. So effectively what we do and we’ve built a whole business based on this specific function of how to build for scale. So when you’re looking through it, we’re building out the gearing ratio and the personnel Over the course of the next 24 months we know who are going to hire, what the trigger clause is, what their responsibilities and accountabilities are going to look like, where we’re effectively predicting what our growth trajectory looks like, and also, who we’re going to need and what the team is going to look like, as it grows. I mean, you guys, this is an audio, but I could pull up some, you know, presentations and show you what I’m actually talking about. So, you know, we see a visual of our old strategy sort of balloon out over the course of a few years. So I’d say that’s, that’s key, also understanding, you know, we run our financials to we project out, you know, what does profitability look like? How do we actually create that, and we have a whole team. Like, I mean, again, I, I think we have a bit of an unfair advantage, because we have a consulting practice specializing in process improvement. So like, escala, is currently doing a 20 week project into multiply me where we’ve totally restructured the teams. And, you know, if it wasn’t for escala, multiply me probably wouldn’t be able to get to the next stage of where it’s going.

Ken 21:02
Okay, yeah, that totally makes sense. So, so it’s the synergy between the two is kind of the magic elixir. And so you’re taking the forecasting and projections, the financial and then kind of overlaying the process on top of that, and that makes the perfect recipe, right?

Yoni Kozminski 21:19
Exactly like to sort of put it into perspective, when I think you know, what is three years into the future look like for multiply me and escala? We’re an incubator, we effectively are only rendering services to businesses we take minority equity stake in, and we’re deploying resource intensive building businesses, and staffing for free effectively or in exchange for equity. So not exactly free.

David 21:44
Sure. Very nice. Very nice. Now, you’ve got a podcast called successful scales, which I have recently become a fan of. And so tell us a little bit about that. How’s that going?

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Yoni Kozminski 21:56
Yeah. So when I think back to the start of it, which is not that long, I’ve only been recording these since the start of the year since January, and I’ve recorded probably about 70 episodes now. The initial intent was that, it didn’t matter how many books I was reading, I couldn’t learn fast enough, in terms of, you know, how do you go from having no management to having senior management, middle management, and then there’s like, people running the company that, you know, I don’t even quite frankly, remember them all by name. Like, there’s so many people now. And so, I took the opportunity and said, you know, what, we’ve gone through an experience, like, you know, there is no magical elixir Ken, like, it is hard for everyone, like, you know, I’m not going to sit here and say like, Hey, it all just worked out exactly perfectly, and nothing’s ever broken, you know, like, shit goes wrong, we’re also putting out spot fires. But I thought that if I can have access to people who have done impressive and you know, built businesses much bigger, you know, whatever the different experiences and insights would look like, then hitting record would probably be highly valuable to people who probably haven’t gone through, you know, what’s been a pretty intense 18, you know, 18 24 months, you know, that’s, that’s how long the company’s been in existence, or the companies. So, yeah, so started it and now, you know, I’m really getting to some really high level thinkers. And, you know, it’s definitely pressing me like I had on a couple of weeks ago, John hafta, who’s one of the co founders over at THRASS. And he was talking about what it’s like hiring 1500 People over about three years, you know, which is insane, and what that’s look like, and, you know, around capital raises, and, you know, I mean, the list just goes on as to sort of the topics that have been covered. But it’s been, it’s been an amazing experience. I mean, I’d love to ask you the same question, what it’s also been like for you guys?

David 23:46
Yeah, it’s been a wild ride, for sure. And I would say we’re still from like a building out the team, we’re still working on that. I would say we’re novice, but we’re making steps forward in that hiring process and building out our team, you reach a point in a business where your to do list will never get done. There’s not enough hours in the day, even if you work 24 hours a day, 365 it’s just not going to happen. And so once you reach that point, we got frustrated for a little bit. And then we’re like, let’s, you know, let’s find a solution here. And so, and that has been that been through hiring and I’ll tell you what, man, life is good when you’re working with good people, you know, people that are they do what they say they’re going to do. And I don’t know, it’s been a lot of fun, and we’re looking to continue to grow and scale. One question I have for you on that. You’ve probably, you know heard tons of stories on people’s success and scaling. And one thing that, especially in like the physical product space that people run into, is if they grow by 300%, their inventory needs to grow by 300%. They’re in a cash crunch and asking for a friend. Any suggestions on like, or have you heard any stories of how people have overcome that?

Yoni Kozminski 24:59
Yeah. I mean, the stories that I hear about this is how they found service providers and solutions to help get them over there. So the ones that frequently come up for us in the E commerce space, specifically, are sellers funding, one company with I think similar to eight fig, which is the other one, I would recommend to, that’s how a lot of them are finding that growth capital needed to invest into inventory. Now, I would say when you talk about, you know, that’s a, it’s a band aid solution in ways, you know, depending on the the lines and the terms that you get, you know, at the end of the day, you’re not trying to give away 20%, that it’s eating into your profit margin, right. So what we look to do inside of escala is we’ll work and find ways to reduce operating costs, and create efficiencies, whether it’s automated through technology, or whether it’s leveraging, you know, globally dispersed teams, or you know, that geolocation based arbitrage. And the idea is that there’s many different levers that you can play without compromising on the quality of your product that can be pulled that doesn’t necessarily, like the notion of just revenue is that it’s a vanity metric, in my opinion,

David 26:10
very nice. Very nice. I’ll let my friend know you said so.

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Ken 27:15
Yeah, so Yoni, I would like to pivot a little bit. And so you’re an expert in, you know, scaling, as well as processes too. So we’re kind of you know, David and I are in the process of looking to, you know, build out our SOPs, and kind of match those up with our team and just make everything like a concert like music and play together. But sometimes it sounds really bad as music. So can you offer any advice in terms of like, SOPs? And how to structure those? And who should be writing them? Should we outsource them? Any words of advice there?

Yoni Kozminski 27:50
Yeah. So I would say like taking one step back, like, you know, SOPs, standard operating procedures, it’s effectively like the blueprint to your business. So, you know, when you think about what is the impact of business, it means that if I build effective SOPs and training videos and documentation, and it’s structured in a way that not just me, the potential SOP writer who’s the last person who needs it, which is usually who can find it, if you can document that effectively, then you can either remove yourself from functions of the business, which becomes super valuable for bringing on talent, or it makes it a lot easier to sell your business to, because the potential buyer now sees what’s happening inside of the business, and you’re not held liable or accountable for perpetuity on, you know, what an exit looks like. And I just had this one more, there’s one additional question, you know, 12 months down the line. So I’d say like, as a fundamental, that’s some of the things is a baseline that it unlocks. And when you talk about effective documentation, there’s levels right, like, you know, this is not to plug escala, what we’ve done inside of there is we’ve taken like a team out of Ernst and Young in the Philippines. And we’ve built our own maturity analysis and methodology around the E commerce space, specifically. So we only deal with building e commerce, businesses and agencies. And, you know, we’ve deployed into 50 to 60 brands doing between a million and 100 million in revenue. And so we have a very clearly defined methodology where we have five stages, and in that five stages, and I can actually go into these stages, because I think it’ll, it’ll help illuminate a few things. But I just before I scare anyone, the idea is that really, most people take the wrong approach. So let me give you some like really simple concepts to grasp before I sort of break down what our methodology looks like. When you look at a business. Most people when they’re documenting process, they’ll take a bottom up approach. And what that means is that, let’s say let’s use an example for keyword research. So someone might use the helium 10 tool and they’ll say, jump into helium 10 And, you know, throw your 1000 keywords into black box or whatever, you know, whatever it is they use the magnet tool, whatever tool they’re using, and they’ll document it out in the negotiating stage. And you’ll be like, cool, that’s done. Now, the problem there, let’s start off is that you’ve only done the one process, there’s no way to understand where it fits inside of the actual business itself. And what that process features into. So the way we look at the world, is we look at how systemized the business is based on people, process and technology, those three have to work harmoniously. So what you want to do is you want to take a top down approach where you build out the core functions of the business. So what are the big moving groups that happen? So inventory management for an example, and customer support would be another one and product launch might be another core function and brand management might be the other function. And you could say, maybe inventory, I said, inventory before. So you can say that as a basic Amazon business. So once you build that, then you build in the process groups, which are the things that happen inside of each of those processes. So from a customer support, or let’s say from listing creation, you know, inside of that, it’s like receiving the inputs of the inventory as in like what we’re receiving in, and then it’s transitioning to writing these up into keywords and then putting them on the actual listing themselves. So they might be all under that one core process. But then you sort of keep stepping it down until you get to that final how you got to Helium 10. So that when I look at the document, when I look at what’s happening in the business, I always understand what flow is taking. So for escala, we have our core processes inside of our process groups, then we have our sub processes. And then those are working instructions. Or rather than working instructions, they’re a high level of who’s delivering it, what they’re doing, what technology is used, it’s very hard to explain this stuff without seeing the visuals to be totally, like, I’ve worried that people listening in are not going to pick up what I’m putting down here.

David 31:58
Put it down anyway, we’re I think we’re tracking.

Ken 32:01
Yeah, no worries.

Yoni Kozminski 32:02
So from there, from there you build out the actual SOPs against the individuals. So like some of the key takeaways is like, set up naming conventions, right? Like, don’t just throw things out based on keywords. Have what your process groups look like, name them, name those pillars, name the sub processes, you know, define who’s doing what, and then start to move into the working instructions and the full SOPs, where all these numbers or these naming conventions match up so that anyone who looks at the high level process can understand that this core function in the business relates to this SOP, ultimately. So that’s one of the big mistakes people make is that they don’t unify or create uniformity around that process. And so, Dave, you’re writing a whole bunch of things in one specific way. And Ken’s doing it the other and then someone has to actually work out like what the hell? These are like the same task, but everything looks entirely different, you know?

Ken 32:56
Yeah. No, I appreciate you breaking it down like that. And for anyone listening to this show, just so we don’t go to another topic without leaving this as a blank. Where can you know, the listeners go and find out more about escala and kind of that process you just broke out?

Yoni Kozminski 33:10
Yeah, they can check out www.weareescala.com. And there, it’ll be, there’ll be a bunch of information on what we do. I might even be able to send something to you guys to leave in the shownotes as well like downloading some of our material that will give them some insights and some of the do’s and don’ts depending on when this comes out. Not to commit myself too soon. But yeah, I’d be happy to add some more value here.

David 33:32
Yeah absolutely, we’ll post links to all of that in the show notes.

Ken 33:35
Very cool. David or Yoni anything you guys want to cover before we head into the fire round?

David 33:40
No, I think that’s it. We’ve covered everything on my list. What about you, Yoni?

Yoni Kozminski 33:45
Yeah, I mean, this is your show, this is the one I get to rock up and not have to do the thinking and drive the conversation. So you know, I’m enjoying this. It’s, I mean, what a different skill is it to sit on the interviewer side, like I feel I’m a much better active listener today than I ever have been, because it trains your brain to be trying to think like, through it, and I’m not as organized as you guys when it comes to having some, you know, pre thought out ideas of what we’ll talk about. I just dive into it.

David 34:13
Yeah, no, it’s certainly two totally different things being a guest versus a host for sure. So alright, Ken, let’s get in the fire round.

Ken 34:23
Yeah, absolutely. And likewise too Yoni like definitely wouldn’t you know when we interview someone that has their own podcasts it definitely, you can tell for sure, like the fluidity and everything which is is great, but our other guests are great too. Fire round. All right. What is your favorite book?

Yoni Kozminski 34:41
Who: The A method for hiring. That’s this month.

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Ken 34:44
Awesome. I’m adding that to my list I’ve not read that one. What are your hobbies?

Yoni Kozminski 34:49
Walking the Dog, kickboxing, weightlifting, normal stuff.

Ken 34:53
Nice. Awesome. What is the one thing that you do not miss about working for the man?

Yoni Kozminski 34:59
Ah, jeez, we need a whole segment on this, I would say, not having to try and preemptively think through what someone else’s vision is. So actually having the vision and foresight to not do all the things that didn’t work for me as an employee and trying to create, you know, a win win scenario. Having that, I don’t know if it’s control, I feel like it’s almost having the ability to have true impact and help and support all the lives that we touch both clients and multipliers and people working with the business. I think, for me, that’s probably the thing that’s most fulfilling. And the thing I miss least is just not having that sense of purpose.

Ken 35:39
Nice. Yeah, like that. Okay, last one, what do you think sets apart successful ecommerce entrepreneurs from those who give up, fail or never get started?

Yoni Kozminski 35:47
I would say for never getting started just not taking that risk. You know, I think the one really important thing is to realize, especially if you’ve got a great job today, and you’re thinking about firing the man, your worst possible outcome is that you have to go back and work for someone else in you know, likely a decent job that you’re in today. So taking that step and actually giving it a shot. The worst case is you’re back where you were, or potentially even get a pay raise. So it’s not really that much of a risk. I would say the things that are holding them back though, or stopping them from from succeeding is just giving up really, I mean, just showing up every day and committing to the to the long term and finding the right people to partner with I mean, those are the key areas, some of them to success.

Ken 36:31
Excellent solid advice. David, you want to close out the show?

David 36:34
Yeah. Yoni, how can people get a hold of you?

Yoni Kozminski 36:36
If they’ve listened through the whole show, then they’re welcome to email me directly. Yoni@multiplymii.com spelled MII mii, or Yoni@weareescala.com, either one will get me and I’m pretty active on LinkedIn too. So yeah, check out our websites hit me up on LinkedIn. You deserve it getting this far in.

David 36:57
Awesome. Well, hey, we really appreciate you being a guest on our show. And I look forward to staying in touch.

Yoni Kozminski 37:03
Likewise, thanks for having me guys. It’s been great.

David 37:06
Excellent. Thanks, Yoni. Thank you everyone for tuning in to today’s firing the man podcast. If you like this episode, head on over to www.firingtheman.com And check out our resource library for exclusive firing the man discounts on popular e commerce subscription services that is www.firingtheman.com\resource. You can also find a comprehensive library of over 50 books that Ken and I have read in the last few years that have made a meaningful impact on our business, for that head on over to www.firingtheman.com/library. Lastly, check us out on social media at firing the man, and on YouTube at firing the man for exclusive content. This is David Schomer

Ken 37:48
and Ken Wilson. We’re out

David 38:06
Before you go fun fact for all you Amazon sellers out there when you start selling an international marketplaces, all of your reviews come with you. At the beginning of this year, Ken and I sat down and talked of ways that we could double our businesses in size and landed on international expansion as our number one initiative this year, we partnered up with Kevin Sanderson from maximizing ecommerce and he has made the process an absolute breeze walking us step by step through the process. If you want to grow your revenue and reach new customers head on over to www.maximizingecommerce.com/fire and connect with Kevin Sanderson today. Now back to the show.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai