How to make an offshore hire stick: what agency owners learned after the offer

Brad Ferris co-owns Clinic Grower, a marketing agency for medical clinics, and runs Propel Leadership, a program that trains agency leaders. His most-used line on coaching calls is "tasks before titles." When an owner says they need an operations manager, he asks what that person will do every day, week, month and quarter, and who will report to them. The title matters less than the body of work.

He says hiring tends to go wrong in one of two ways, and sometimes both: you overestimate the person across the table, or you fail to support them once they start. The fix is preparation. Write down the standards you expect, with examples, and a minimum scorecard showing how performance will be measured and reported. Then show it to your chosen candidate before you make the offer.

In his agencies, some candidates change their minds at that point, because they realize they'll be accountable. That's the point. As he puts it, owners race to the hire instead of preparing for the person.

Will Hanke's first three hires were in the Philippines: a web developer, an operations manager and a paid ads specialist. Eight years later, all three are still with him. His team is now 28 people around the world, mostly in the Philippines.

Asked how he built a culture across countries and time zones, Will listed three things. Treat people well and pay them well. Give them a path to grow, so they can see where they fit as the agency gets bigger instead of feeling stuck doing grunt work. And put a foundation under the culture: his agency runs on EOS, uses its people analyzer to check right person, right seat, and has five core values. The last one is fun.

He also leans on his team to learn their side of things, asking his operations manager about local holidays and customs. The week the episode was recorded, the whole Philippines team was flying in from the north and south for a four-day get-together in a big Airbnb, so they'd see each other as real people and not another Slack account.

Nick Hoard started out hiring locally to give back to his community. He found his loyalty wasn't matched: when someone was offered a $10,000 raise elsewhere, culture only carried him so far. The more turnover he had, the more open he became to anyone who could deliver the work, wherever they lived.

When he started bringing people on through staffing companies, he made a point of treating them as part of the team, not as contractors, and says they feel it. He has seen much less turnover, and says a dollar means more to them than to someone down the road, so he's making a bigger difference in their lives.

His advice for making remote work actually work is trust, and trust needs guardrails. For his agency, the guardrails are its core values. Keep a pulse on them and trust can be built. Ignore them and it breaks.

Austin Benoit, who runs the white-label agency Search Prestige, says his biggest lesson in building a team wasn't one bad hire. It was realizing his bar was off. He thought his B players were A players and his C players were B players, until he worked with a real A player and saw the difference.

Underperformers didn't just miss in their own roles, he found. They wore down the A players, who stopped wanting to go the extra mile. Over the past year he made some hard decisions and restructured around a core of strong people.