Scott Trevethan is the Founder and Managing Director of Go Global Bookkeeping, an Offshore Bookkeeping and Accountant Leasing business based in the Philippines. In this episode, Scott tells us everything there is to know about developing and managing your remote team: opportunities, risks, tips, and tricks. During this new normal, businesses are in full crisis mode, and managing remote teams requires a different skill set than managing direct reports in an office setting.
Together with our host Joanna Oakey, Scott shares some tips and tactics for supervising remote employees. We also take a closer look at the idea of offshoring and creating a solid team environment.
Episode Highlights:
- Why are we talking about this
- Protectionism in Australia
- Offshoring
- Tips, tricks and traps in managing and engaging remote teams
- Developing and investing in your remote team
- Creating a great team environment
- The legal perspective
- Pros and cons of freelance contractors
Connect with Scott
- Go Global Bookkeeping website
- Go Global on Facebook
- Scott Trevethan on Linkedin
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Transcript below!
Note: This has been automatically transcribed so will be full of errors! We are not providing it to you as a word-perfect version of the podcast but just as an easy way to provide you with a different way to be able to see or scan what kind of information that might be relevant to you if you are the kind of person that likes a transcript.
Joanna: Hi, it’s Joanna Oakey here and welcome back to Talking Law, a podcast proudly brought to you by our commercial legal practice, Aspect Legal. Now today, we have a very interesting episode. Well, aren’t they always, of course, I would say that, wouldn’t I? But it is interesting. I’m telling you the absolute truth because today we are talking about engaging and managing remote teams. We’re talking about the opportunities, the risks and tips and traps along the way. And in order to talk about this topic we have on board Scott Trevethan, Founder and Managing Director of Go Global Bookkeeping. Go Global is an offshore bookkeeping and account leasing business based in Cebu in the Philippines. And with over 70 team members who are all fully qualified accountants Scott is in the perfect position to be talking about this topic today and Go Global Bookkeeping are also a client of Aspect Legal as well. So it makes it an extra special discussion. So if you have a business or an accounting practice, and you have been considering whether to engage with remote teams, or perhaps you even have a remote team yourself, but wondering how it is that you can approach engagement and management and some of the general and also legal risks and tips and tricks for dealing with remote and offshore teams, then buckle in because, in the next 30 minutes, we’re going to give you a lot of information that you might find very useful. So here we go with our discussion with Scott.
Joanna: Hello, Scott, welcome aboard the deal room podcast. I’m so excited to have you on board.
Scott: Thrilled to be here.
Joanna: Fabulous, you know, Scott, I love your energy. So I think this is going to be such an energetic discussion we’re going to have today.
Scott: I’ll do my best.
Why are we talking about this
Joanna: Now, of course, we’re talking today all about the opportunities, risks, tips and tricks in engaging and managing remote teams. And of course, this is a topic very close to your heart and indeed, it’s close to mine as well. But maybe Scott, why don’t we kick it off by you giving us a little bit of the background of why you’re here talking about this topic of today?
Scott: Absolutely. Um, I was fortunate enough to run an accounting firm in Melbourne for around about 16 years. And as part of that, we wanted to try and get access to the low-cost labor market in any jurisdiction. So I went over to the Philippines to discover a bit about it for myself and found out that the accountants over there, were very skilled, very willing, and very affordable. So from a business perspective, it certainly made a lot of sense, and equally as productive as someone that you would employ locally as well. So as a small accounting firm, it definitely made sense for us. So I developed that team nurtured that team over a few years and then built this capability of managing the team and someone suggested to me, why don’t we do this for other accounting firms, and for Australian businesses in general, and therefore Go Global Bookkeeping was born. So as a side project really is a passion project to start with. I sold my accounting firm 18 months ago, and now I’m full time on Go Global and just loving building that team. And now we’re up to about 70 accounts that work on a range of different businesses from accounting firms, bookkeepers, and Australian businesses, both small and big as well. So it’s quite exciting. We’ve even got New Zealand businesses in there as well.
Joanna: Interesting. That is fabulous. I mean, that’s quite the team you’ve got yourself now that some that’s quite a few people to manage.
Scott: Yeah. And, you know, I think one of the things that we tend to underestimate in the West or in the first world if you like, is the skills and talents that are available that are coming through the university systems in the third world countries like Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia to an extent and in India as well. But there are some really skilled people that are good at management so you can get some really good managers, they without having to be there all the time yourself, which is what I’ve been able to do. So I’ve traveled backward and forwards. Obviously, during COVID, I don’t travel at all but I am very confident that the team is being very well managed, and you know, by themselves, because we’ve set those processes up.
Joanna: Fabulous and I guess, you know, just to give some background in order to be clear, at Aspect Legal we also have some of our admin team who are remote in the Philippines. And we just, I just love the interaction of different cultures. I just think it’s a fabulous thing. There’s lots of things that I want to talk about, firstly, however, I want to start with, you know, some objections that I hear and let’s talk about those because there are some classic things that I hear his objections quite often. Firstly, I think there’s this thing about stay local, you know, keep jobs local, which, personally, I find interesting, because my viewpoint on it is why just because someone’s born in Australia, does that mean that they have a better right to a job than someone who’s born somewhere else? So that’s my general, you know, feeling on it, but it’s certainly something that comes up quite a bit. Do you have any thoughts on that? Scott?
Protectionism in Australia
Scott: Yeah, quite a few actually. A few things on it is that the sort of protectionism has never really served Australia well. So what we ended up with were vehicles that cost a lot more than any other country. I remember studying in university, the protectionism around the footwear industry, and how boots was so much more expensive. And yes, we were fostering manufacturing here in this country, were finding jobs for people, but at rates that were much much higher than any other country. And at the same time, we were building in a cost of living in Australia that I don’t think has served us all that well over the years.
Just my view. And that’s really what we’re talking about protectionism, of Australian jobs versus anyone else overseas that might be able to do just as good a job. Now, with the advent of cloud accounting of the internet, in general, it’s really opened up the ability for low cost labor markets to come in to first world countries which they do make no mistake, the large companies that a lot of SMEs that make this sort of objection, are using offshore labor which manufacturers’ go predominantly offshore, if not solely offshore. We’ve certainly seen the large accounting firms and the large law firms. Absolutely sourcing accountants and lawyers from offshore, they’re reducing their costs and increasing their returns for their shareholders, and making it just harder and harder and harder for small and medium sized businesses in Australia to compete. The SME markets always been a market that has been the largest employer of Australians. In general, in our economy, I think that role is always taken for granted by governments. And it’s taken for granted by small and medium sized businesses as well, who really sacrifice profits in order to make sure that there are people that are employed with them. And I say, look, you know, what, it’s time for small and medium sized business owners to get rewarded for all the risks and all of the hard effort that they put in to building and sustaining our economy not getting the returns that the shareholders or big companies get, yeah, I do that by accessing globalization.
So nothing is from a, you know, we just have to accept this as more artificial intelligence comes in, we just have to accept that, as people who are located in Australia, our jobs either have to get, you know, you just can’t afford to sit down and do the sort of crunching sort of jobs that the generation before we’re doing. So certainly me when I started off as an accountant, adding up manually, you know, writing trial balances. Obviously, automation is taken over that, we get to the more exciting thing. So it opens up opportunities for first world people like peoples living in Australia to do more exciting jobs. And those other jobs can get relegated to the low cost labor markets where they can start doing it but make no mistake, those low cost labor markets are catching up in terms of their experience in education and everyone needs to compete on a global stage now.
Joanna: Absolutely. I completely agree. And what are the general objections or issues that you hear being raid?
Offshoring
Scott: Often they’re dependent upon a situation that someone’s offshored before and haven’t had experience?
Joanna: Yes, yes. And there’s so many of those, aren’t they? Because I think this whole offshoring thing is something that, you know, most SMEs, almost all SMEs have heard of, and it’s so prolific that everyone’s got an example of that, if they haven’t themselves, they’ve got an example of a friend that’s tried, but the problem is many businesses approach this by a dabbling process. And I personally think that this concept that someone that they offshore to, will be able to do a million different tasks. Well, rather than being really clear about what they’re looking, it’s more it’s more about the process.
Scott: Absolutely. The unicorn virtual assistant, someone that doesn’t actually exist, but it’s the business owner wants them to do their social media, their website marketing, their accounting, and bookkeeping, their, you know, whatever travel bookings. And that, yeah, it is that unrealistic expectation, but I think that was borne by, you know, businesses start off with, or business owners start off with fiver and upwork trying project by project, what can I do, to get someone to do it, and of course those people can be located anywhere in the world, that bidding for work, you know, they’ll disappear for weeks at a time, or they, you know, they might do your job, and then they’re not there to do the next job. And they will get frustrated at their experiences, or they, you know, they try it for a little bit, they don’t go really, they don’t really invest in it as if they were taking on a person in their own organization. Exactly.
Joanna: That’s the point, you know, I for some bizarre reason that I really don’t understand. It’s this viewpoint, it’s failing to view employing an offshore person as a team member, rather than just as a random add on that you can throw all of your, you know, random task to.
Scott: But there are I mean, to a certain extent, that’s the fault of the providers as well. So there are certainly models, there’s lots of different models out there, in terms of how you can interact with the low cost labor markets. And so as so there’s models were for So from an accounting perspective, where you can send a job over and a group of people will work on that job and finish it and get it ready for review. And then you will send it back to you. So you’re not dealing one on one, it’s really a process or it’s, you know, you’re buying a result, and they can be hit or miss in terms of how that’s done. Because you’re not dealing with an actual team member that’s dedicated to you. And often, when I talk to accountants about that they get, it starts off really well. And then it starts, the value starts to decline, because more and more mistakes creeping in. And they realize that that’s not the same people working on the jobs, and they’d be losing time and efficiency. And they’re making the same mistakes. And it gets frustrating for accountants, who realize that they probably should have invested in a team member of their own from a dedicated resource, but there are lots of different models that that add to some of those frustrations around productivity and skills and mistakes and things like that.
Just the sameI think the answer to a lot of that productivity issues and errors that creep in, is when you think about when you hire a graduate or an intermediate accountant, in your accounting firm, it does take six to 12 months to really get that person to be productive the way that you want them to be productive. Though, I’ll match my guys, my accountants with a graduate or an intermediate accountant locally in terms of productivity and efficiency any day because the you know, accountants are accountants no matter where they are, it’s just that you know, that the expectation has to be Yeah, I’m going to get this person up and firing, you know, within three to six months and then in two years, there’ll be my senior account, they’ll be doing wonderful things. And that’s what we did in our accounting firm and and really pays dividends that’s an engine room now that just keeps producing the accountants and so that the accountants here in Australia can just add value to clients and give advice and take meetings so which is one of the work that they really want to do in the first place.
Tips, tricks and traps in managing and engaging remote teams
Joanna: Let’s talk about some of those tips and tricks then I guess maybe also traps in managing and engaging your remote teams in order to avoid some of these issues that we’ve seen play out that contribute to the this comment that you know somebody down the road tried to and worked out crap. What are our tips and tricks here?
Scott: I think it’s a mindset one is the first and foremost which yeah to say, I am hiring someone for my business. And this is going to be an I really recommend the model that you have a discrete person, a person, this is Joe, Joe was going to work for your business dedicated as a full time employee, yeah, nearly seven and a half hours or 38 hours a week, they are yours. and treat them like that. Make sure even though they’re not physically located in your office, we’re all used to this remote working strict them as if they’re part of your team, which means actively managed what they’re doing actively have a training program for them as well have a development program for them, invest in them in their time. And the returns to you will be tenfold the things like you know, from a practical perspective, daily huddles involve your team member in a in a huddle, if that’s what you have, or a weekly workflow meeting, involve them in that meeting, because the end…
Joanna: I just have to throw in here. Daily huddle. So we use daily daily huddles here at Aspect Legal. And it’s something that I’d heard about for years. And I thought it was one of these things that really suited tech firms or, you know, not the traditional law firm accounting firm. And it wasn’t until someone that I really highly respected who runs a large accounting firm said, “you know, what we run huddles” and I was like, “you run huddles? Oh, my gosh, if you can do it, my team could do it” you know, and we’ve implemented it and we’ve been running daily huddles for maybe 2 years now. And it’s the communication flow between an organization ours are a maximum of nine minute huddle each morning. So super quick, fast communication flow, but also helps the team I think, when there is a remote element, and, you know, most businesses have at least some component that’s remote now because of COVID, even if you’re all in Australia, right?
Developing and investing in your remote team
Scott: Absolutely. So if we’ve got the technology for remote workers to be part of the session, then it absolutely pays dividends. I know, the guys that bought, the two guys came in and bought my accounting firm. And they were they first viewed the whole huddle thing with great suspicion thing, you know, you’re not gonna keep this practice. But here they are 18 months, 2 years down the track, and they wouldn’t dream of doing anything different. And I think that’s typical of people who experienced the huddle as a means of bringing the team together very quickly. And it just, it just helps you for the rest of the day, doesn’t it? but because of technology, it means that we don’t always have to be in the same room to do those hurdles we can do partly remote, partly physical, but it really helps bring the whole team on the same page. And that’s the biggest management thing. I think from an offshoring perspective. Make sure that your team member feels part of your team.
Joanna: I’m so with you and I think that is just such an important element. Once again, it’s a comment that is applicable to a business that just has people based in Australia as well but absolutely applicable to people who have remote offshore teams, the importance of pulling everyone together, you know, and having that team culture I think is just really underrated in many instances and definitely, for people with remote teams, that’s something that we really try hard to focus on. So let’s talk about that. What does that mean to you? How do you create a team environment within your team so you’ve got 70 who are offshore so how is it What does team mean for you? how do you do that?
Scott: Yeah, and it comes right to you know, where we call them team members, not employees because when I established Go Global I was fought when I bought into an accounting firm I had 40 years of of tradition and history and clients that meant that it was really difficult to form a culture and so with Go Global Bookkeeping, I had a chance to start with a blank page. So I wanted something to be fine, vibrant, young and I wanted to make it a family type of environment that we all cared about each other so I had the ability to do that right from the word go and you know, we’re very focused heavily on the core values of Go Global. You know, we call our tribe members called Global’s and I really love that sort of interaction and then there’s a lot of you know, they have only happened as well within our own teams but also we have weekly meetings and then monthly, everyone gets together for a few reward awards, you know, accountant of the month and we support that with both financial incentives as well as other types of, you know, plaques and certificates and things like that, which really just recognition, it’s the sort of stuff that we should be doing in Australia as well.
Let’s just record, especially with the millennials, in terms of not just the millennials, I’m not picking on them. I’m just like, everyone likes to be recognized for their efforts. And we certainly do a lot in regards to that. And everyone knows that they’re there. They’re part of a team, we make sure we do things like annual conferences, which is had to be this, this year’s annual conferences had to be put on hold, because of the kind of issues but prior to that every year and take the time away, and we do some sort of team building activities. We make sure we have Christmas parties and, and other get togethers that when new team members come on board, I take them out for a new team member lunch. And you know, we just get to know each other. So there’s a personal connection between me and the team members as well.
Joanna: One of the things that I have done for the past, I don’t know, like four or five years is..well obviously, I can’t do it this year, just saying is to go over to the Philippines, and to see my team, which, you know, I love travel. So I love that anyway, Philippines has some, you know, amazing stuff to do so so you know, it’s certainly no impost to do that. But just the, the fact of making an effort to meet the people face to face that you work with every day, I just think is, is such a useful activity. And I’ve got to say snorkeling and diving is just outrageously good in the Philippines. But I’m interested to understand I’m sure you yourself, head over to the Philippines, but do your client who sort of staff through you ever go and make their teams and what is their feedback on that?
Creating a great team environment
Scott: They do and they give tremendous feedback and exactly that. So and we always encourage our clients to come over and visit. We don’t, we don’t say it’s necessary, you don’t have to come over that’s part of the full service offering that we do is to make sure that they don’t need to go over and drain their team members or see them more involve them in their time because we’re making sure that they’re well taken care of within the Go Global family. However, they really do increase their productivity. And just the caring of the team member if they can see their client, they know that their client made an effort to come over. And it is a bit of an effort, it is a bit of a journey to get to Cebu City. It’s you know, depending on the time of day, it could be an hour from the airport in very heavy traffic. And it’s not the most tropical of settings. You know, I love the whole thought of, you know, a beautiful island with palm trees and sandy beaches. Unfortunately, they’re about two and a half, three hours away from where we’re based. So to see that too much, even diving and snorkeling is a bit of an effort. But certainly we’ve had clients come over and base themselves in the Shangri La.
Joanna: Yes, yes.
Scott: Some of the beautiful resorts that are in Mactan. And then they’ll come over and they’ll spend a few days with a team and then they’ll go over and they’ll do some diving and spend some time with their spouses and have a bit of a holiday at the same time. So it’s, you know, it certainly can be combined, but the rewards are immense. I would highly recommend it.
Joanna: Yeah. And I just think that, you know, I’ve certainly experienced that. But the other component for me is also understanding culture a little bit more and and not just me understanding culture, I think my team understanding our culture as well, because there there are cultural differences. there absolutely are and I think it helps to understand that.
Scott: We are an Aussie business, so when I say that, they’ve always just been dealing used to dealing with Australians and Australian clients. And you know, we’re very Australian centric. So we spent a lot of time for them understanding the Australian culture, there’s certainly no strangers to it right from day one. But that’s right that you that nothing they love more than introducing the Filipino and especially the Cebuano culture, which is slightly different from the Manila and Clark areas. The Cebuanos, you know, the South areas of the Visayan type of areas, has a slightly different culture, you know, that beautiful foods that they have, which I never really understood, but they know they love showing you the foods they love, demonstrating their culture as well and giving their clients and understanding of what they’re all about and it really helps just bring everyone together at the end of the day. What that does is it just improves their commitment to you and massively increases they productivity because they’re just so much more motivated to work out and please you.
Joanna: Hmm, absolutely. And let’s not forget videoke.
Scott: I’m a massive fan, a massive massive fan of videoke.
The legal perspective
Joanna: Okay, all right, let’s think about the legal side here. What is it that you think businesses who are outsourcing really should be thinking about from a legal perspective? And maybe where you sort of step in and assists, you know, to create that buffer for your clients? Because there are a few considerations, you know, and I guess, before we do that, let’s just step back and make it really clean what the different ways of sourcing offshore that businesses use. So I guess there’s the there’s the obvious simple model of just sourcing someone yourself and doing it yourself. What else have you done?
Scott: So great points, I mean, this really the contractual relationship that you can have with a person, and I can only really talk about the Philippines, it’s the only place that I’ve got experience with dealing law in relation to labor. So it’s okay to have one or two contractors that you hire, once you get beyond that. And it doesn’t matter whether they together in the same office or their apart, the Department of Labor and Employment, which is called DOLE and everyone, when when you hear the term de la, everyone who has a business in the Philippines gets a little bit of a cold shiver, because they are, they can literally go in and shut you down.
Overnight, they are very powerful organization and they’re there to protect the employment rights of Filipinos. So against especially as robber barons from other countries, not the robber barons. But that’s the view seems to be. So there’s that contractor relationship where you can certainly have but once you get you know more than a few contractors on your team and dole, I would consider it that they need to have a proper employment status. Now, and a foreign company can employ Filipinos you need to have a local company or at least a recognized foreign branch. So you need to have a local entity the same as we would have in Australia, so that there’s requirements for for you to have a Filipino company that employs people, and then the employment rights that the Filipinos have.
I think greater than the employment rights that they might have in Australia, so that the thought that you can go in and hire people and then just get rid of them whenever you want without cause is really a fallacy, you need to make sure that that you go through all of the hoops that you need, you certainly need to jump through and Australian jurisdictions as well, if you are hiring them the proper way. And then, of course, there’s all things like their equivalent to superannuation. And they’ve also got public housing element to their withholdings, and they’ve got health care benefits, but a lot more akin to the US system. So you don’t have to give they don’t have Medicare, they don’t have a general health benefit. But you can have private health cover that you pay for those people as well. So once again, if you want to employ someone properly in there, there’s a lot of complexities that are involved in doing that. They give a lot of protection for team members and give them a lot of safety and security as well. But from a contractor level, anyone can go and hire anyone from the internet nowadays, and I can work from home. And there’s some risks and rewards for doing that as well.
Joanna: And then what’s the benefit of a model of using something like your organization, as opposed to you know, a lot of people for many years have use stuff like Elance, or hatever, which I think is Upwork now and you know, those sort of freelance contracting sites?
Pros and cons of freelance contractors
Scott: There’s lots of there’s also job boards and all sorts of things that people can do to a price, I don’t ever need to pay the fees for Upwork anymore. They can they can go directly to, you know, to post jobs for and people working from home, we’ll gladly do that. The risks with in relation to that are really around security of information. So certainly if you’re dealing in an environment where you have to be concerned about the privacy of the document of your own clients or customers, and your you’ve got that information unique under our privacy laws, you need to make sure that you are aware of the the situation that information is being dealt with, if it’s in an offshore jurisdiction. So if someone’s work from home, there’s no way that you can attest to the fact that those documents are being properly cared for and that information is being safeguarded. There’s also the element of security of power and internet.
So typically a home base worker would be in areas that wouldn’t have a consistent consistent internet connection and consistent power as well. So often third world countries, especially the Philippines are plagued by earthquakes and typhoons. Other natural disasters that come through It has big effects on people who are working from home. Oh, the other. The other thing is productivity. So often we’ve heard some horror stories around, if you’re not actively managing what people who are working from home are doing, then it’s quite often that they will just just they’re enterprising nature, they might have two or three full time clients. And they might even employ brothers and sisters to you know, act as themselves to do work, you just never know who it is that’s actually doing the work that’s representing themselves to be the person that you thought you were employing.
So when you’re dealing with organizations, such as ourselves, we, you know, we do everything by the book in terms of making sure that we recruit correctly, we comply with all of the local laws, we pay taxes in the Philippines, and we’re trying to be good corporate citizens there we have our own offices, which means that we can safeguard the security of people’s information, we can make sure that only people who are supposed to be working on our computers are working on our computers, we use biometrics for people to enter the office. So there’s all those sort of making sure that they’re being productive, that they are doing the work that they’re supposed to be doing at any point in time. So there’s a lot more safeguards, of course, that comes at a cost. But there’s a lot more safeguards in using a firm that does that a labor higher labor source company that’s gone through all the trouble of employing people correctly, and making sure that those safeguards are in place compared to a do it yourself model, where you just sort of throwing your fight to the winds, really.
Joanna: What are other things? You know, I guess we headed soon to a wrap up here. But are there any sort of last areas that you think it’s worth mentioning for businesses? And of course, you primarily deal with accounting firms, accounting practices, who are looking to offshore. Are there any other considerations for them in making this decision and making the decision of how they do it? If that’s what they’re looking to do?
Scott: Yeah, I think one of the last things that I would consider is in relation to what to do if something goes wrong. So what sort of protections have you got in place, if the party that you’re contracting with doesn’t do the right thing, or that the staff member that you’re using, takes your information and uses it illegally, when things go horribly wrong, we don’t like to think that will happen but we like to think that our own systems are such that, you know, we wouldn’t be exposed to that kind of risk for either our businesses or our clients. However, those sort of things do occur from time to time. So I think it’s worth considering whether you deal with an Australian company like Go Global is an Australian based company. So we hold indemnity insurance here, you can sue us in an Australian jurisdiction.
Joanna: We’re not inviting people to do that. Scott, let’s be clear. Hahaha
Scott: Well, if you need to. If you’re if you’re contracting with a Philippines based business, you really are relying on the Philippines jurisdiction court, it’s going to be very difficult to get a satisfactory resolution. Even so it’s kind of like they’ll all care but no responsibility. I think if you’re dealing with an Australian based business, then you’ve got all care and all responsibility. And you can make sure that they’ve got the appropriate indemnity insurance to back up any risks that they might have, as well.
Joanna: I think that’s a really good point that that is such an because jurisdiction can make taking any sort of action to enforce, you know, contract a lot of the rights extraordinarily difficult. But, but of course, that comes back to the way, you know, you have agreement set up as well. And I and I guess ultimately, you need to make sure that you have with your own staff, you know, agreements that are dealing with confidentiality and, you know, compliance with legislation, like the Privacy Act and all of those sorts of things. But one of the things I just want to throw in is I’ve had this discussion with many businesses over time about having cross border contracts or or contracts at all, in jurisdictions where sometimes it can be enforceability can be a little bit more difficult. My general point just to throw in my two cents here, from a legal perspective, is that I think, generally, people want to do the right thing. And you know, this is a fairly general motherhood statement, but I think one of the most important things that an agreement or a contract can do is to clearly set out the relationship and the expectations of both parties.
And this comes back to and I think maybe it also comes back to management as well that the tone that you use in agreements, and the time that you use in management, many other documents that are used must be appropriate to the culture and the understanding of the people who are receiving them. Otherwise, the document itself will be of no use. I guess what I’m saying is, it’s a call out for some simpler agreements, and more easy to read agreements in situations like these because, you know, ultimately, I think the point is, you want to, you want to ensure that there is compliance because everyone understands the rules of engagement that you’ve set up between yourselves. And that applies just as well to contracts, I guess, as to just the way that you onboard and manage and deal with and engage with your remote team workers.
Scott: Absolutely. Simple is good. Of course, we’re going to make sure we’ve got you to make sure that our terms and conditions, you know, in legal speak, but I’ve always been big on saying you know, simple is good because otherwise, people don’t understand.
Joanna: 100%.
Scott: I totally agree.
Joanna: Absolutely. Well, that’s it any lasting thoughts there? Actually, I can’t help but, but ask for I love stories, and I just love to hear, you know, stories of great successes Can Can you think back to what, you know, might be an example of, you know, a practice that you’ve dealt with that perhaps wasn’t sure or whatever came to you and has just had a rip-roaring success out of offshoring?
Scott: Absolutely, unfortunately, it’s the majority that will do will have that sort of experience. So I’ve got a guy actually met him at a CrossFit gym of all places. And he decided to go out on his own, he was a big partnership with someone else. And he decided to go out on his own. And he took, he took one team member from the combined business that he was in, but really needed some production muscle. So he’s been with us for just over 12 months now, this will be his second tax season coming through. And he’s just been able to delegate all of the tax work to his accountant that works through Go Global, really freeing up his time to do what he likes to do, which is schmooze the clients and go out to lunch and really enjoy himself that he’s taken on a second account now to make sure as he grows, because he’s been able to do that bring in more business. And he’s just going to build his team up overseas. And he’s really seized the opportunity to do that. He’s been devoted to that very, very profitably.
So his fee base didn’t need to be as high for him to get to that stage where he could really reduce the number of hours that he was working in his business. So he’s got a bit of a lifestyle business, but is able to build at the same time, because of the cost that he’s put into his accounting firm, there’s a lot less. And the great news is this morning, he rang me up and said, the partner that he split with, is now so keen about what he’s doing that he’s going to come to Go Global and get an accountant as well. So we’ll hopefully see another success story along those but really, that is a typical experience. It’s, you know, a couple of months of bumpiness, then often running and then within three to six months. It’s just why did we do this sooner is the sort of question that most of our accounting clients would say.
Joanna: I love it, Scott. Well, it’s a good news story all around, isn’t it? Look, this was a really fascinating discussion. And, you know, I think we’ve, we’ve ticked off a lot of, you know, discussion points that come up on around this topic. So I’ve enjoyed it. I hope you’ve enjoyed your time here.
Scott: I did. Thank you so much.
Joanna: Wonderful. Now, if any of our listeners are keen to find out how they might be able to do some work with you, Scott and Go Global, how did they find you?
Scott: Well, I’m everywhere. So you can find me on LinkedIn or go to my websites, probably the easiest place, it’s just www.goglobal bookkeeping.com. All my contact details are on there. Love to have a chat if anyone wants to have a chat. And I’m always very free with my time. So no obligation if you just want to chat you’re not quite sure which direction to go. Love to have a chat to.
Joanna: And I have to say just an all-round lovely guy too.
Scott: Aww thank you.
Joanna: Wonderful look. I’ve loved it. Great discussion today. Scott, thank you so much for coming on to Talking Law.
Scott: It’s been my pleasure.
Joanna: Well, that’s it for this episode of Talking Law. And of course in this episode, we’re talking all about the concept of remote and offshore staffing and teams, the opportunities, the risks, the tips and the traps of course. Now look if you’d like more information about the Next topic then all you need to do is head over to our website at talkinglaw.com.au and over that website, we will provide you the opportunity to get a free download of the transcript of this episode if you’re the kind of person who just loves to read your podcasts in more detail. Now through that website, you’ll also be able to find the contact details of Scott and Go Global bookkeeping, and of course on that episode, you will also be able to find out how to contact our lawyers at Aspect Legal if you would like help with any of the items we covered today. Well, that’s it thanks again for listening in. You’ve been listening to Joanna Oakey and Talking Law a podcast proudly brought to you by our commercial legal practice Aspect Legal. See you next time.
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