“I wanted to create win-win scenarios, helping business owners to have better and more affordable talent, but also giving hard-working professionals in LATAM access to stable, long-term jobs paying salaries” – Dan Baker. Founder & CEO Valatam. Co-Founder Elevate Teams.
Dan has 7 years of experience in providing remote talent from Latin America to businesses in the US while making a social impact with top-quality job opportunities.
Q: What inspired you to start your own business?
I was inspired to start my own business when during my travels I saw the disconnect between talented, hard-working, bilingual professionals in Latin America and growing businesses struggling with talent acquisition in the US.
Many business partners in the US and Canada always spoke about their staff issues, how hard it was to find good, hard-working people in the US, and the issues they had outsourcing to Asia. Yet at the same time, I had friends in Latin America who were unemployed or not earning a living wage due to the struggling local economies, and these people were college-educated, spoke 2-3 languages proficiently, and were smarter and harder-working than most of my contemporaries back home!
I wanted to connect these two needs to create win-win scenarios, helping business owners to have better and more affordable talent, but also giving hard-working professionals in LATAM access to stable, long-term jobs paying salaries way above what they could earn in their local job market and in a stable currency.
Q: What do you think is the biggest issue for entrepreneurs and business owners as they are growing their companies? And how can Valatam help solve this challenge?
It’s been our experience that many of the common issues business owners face often boil down to People and Processes. We can mainly help with the People part, but I’ll explain them both here.
If you have the wrong people or even the right people but in the wrong seats, then things just don’t flow. You might find people that are technically qualified but don’t have the soft skills. You might find people that have the right soft skills but don’t have the capacity to do the job. You might even find people with the capacity and the soft skills, but they simply just don’t want it enough.
Most clients don’t have the time or want to spend the time that recruiting requires. Recruiting without help often takes weeks even to start seeing resumes, and if they are not versed in recruitment they often don’t have effective methods for weeding out those applicants that would be a bad fit for their company, so they make bad hires and all that time invested goes to waste.
When clients partner with Valatam, we are only hiring pre-screened talent that we have put through a tried and tested 9-step screening and recruitment process, as well as a 1-month training and evaluation course. All this happens before our recruits are deemed ready for client placement.
By the time a client interviews a candidate the whole screening, recruitment, training, testing, and evaluation has been done, so the entire hiring process can be completed in less than 1 week. Additionally, far fewer ‘bad’ hires are made because of the thoroughness and effectiveness of our screening steps and our 1-month training and evaluation.
The second biggest issue we see is about processes. The clients we see grow the fastest (and who also have the most successful working relationships with our remote team members are those that have their procedures and operations documented in SOPs. On the other hand, those that don’t have processes often have to spend much greater amounts of time training and managing their people.
A great book that explains the importance of processes and systemization is The E-Myth by Michael E. Gerber. He basically promotes the idea of building your business like a franchise like McDonald’s, where every operation is planned and documented so it is easy to follow and repeat at the same time every time.
Many businesses don’t have their processes clearly documented and then get frustrated when people do things wrong. But 9 times out of 10, if something is done wrong it’s because the SOP wasn’t clear or there was a lack of management or accountability.
The great thing is that when clear, well-designed processes are combined with data, this occurs in an environment of healthy accountability:
- There’s no room for excuses.
- You no longer need world-class people in most seats because their tasks are so clearly defined and explained that the job becomes easy.
We don’t recommend getting your Valatam remote team to design your processes or create your SOPs (although on occasion some experienced assistants who come to know their client’s businesses like the back of their hands have done so!). Instead, the best person to do the process design and documentation is usually the Owner, the COO/Ops Manager, or the owner of the task. On some occasions (and if none of the above people are ‘process people’) it can be a good idea to bring in the most organized person in the company and sit down with them in a 2-hr session and put the process down on paper, then go over it again and again until it’s bulletproof.
One thing clients often find a positive side-effect of hiring their remote teams – if they weren’t process-oriented people documenting their SOPs before – is that the process of training their new hire inadvertently gets them to think about their processes in a much clearer way while teaching them (before they were just doing the tasks without thinking about them), and at this time it becomes very easy to clearly put those processes down on paper in the form of SOPs, which can then be used again further down the line for future hires.
Q: What is the most important lesson you’ve learned in your career to date?
To be organized and structured. And if you’re not a naturally organized person, surround yourself with people who are.
We have hit several walls in terms of growth at Valatam, and each time the reasons for hitting the wall usually boiled down to either not having the right process or not having the right people (or enough of the right people) to carry out those processes.
When we hit walls or have issues at Valatam, we sit down to identify and discuss them, and finally solve them, often by defining a new process (which must be documented), and occasionally by making a new hire. This then gets us back on track to a state of constant growth.
It’s also important to mention that something that worked brilliantly before often won’t work brilliantly forever. What worked perfectly for a one-man band or small startup probably won’t work for a 200-person operation, so regardless of how good your processes and people are, there’s no doubt that they will need to be changed or added to at various points through your growth journey.
Valatam stands for “Virtual Assistance Latin America”. We’re a Virtual Assistant Outsourcing Agency that connects talented and bilingual remote talent with US businesses.