Riches in Niches — How Valoroo Built a Premium BPO by Saying No

Milan Batinich 0:00
The whole purpose of the benchmarks is that way yeah, it all funnels down to the revenue goals.

Nick Schrock 0:04
And if you're not hitting the ultimate goal, then who cares that you hit those S Yeah, and I think it comes down to I think we're all a lot less sophisticated than we want to be, right? We think we are. It's like, oh, we've got all these metrics to do there. It's like, are you profitable in growing? If those two things aren't yes, then you need to take some hard looks at kind of what your business is doing and the trajectory. And if you're ever talking about global economic trends, you're probably lost, right? Unless you're an Amazon or some massive, massive company. It's like you should be able to thrive regardless of conditions in the market.

Amanda Quinn 0:37
Hi, and welcome to the Build a Better BPO podcast. Today we are so excited that we have a guest with us who's going to talk about specialization. Nick Schrock is the CEO of Valoroo. And hi, Nick, welcome.

Nick Schrock 0:53
Yeah, thanks for having me. Pleasure to be here.

Amanda Quinn 0:55
Absolutely. We're so excited to have you here. Nick, I know we're going to be peppering you with lots of questions, but before we start, could you just give our audience a little bit of an overview on yourself in Valoroo and what you guys do?

Nick Schrock 1:07
Yeah. Yeah. So my name is Nick Schrock, founder CEO of Valoroo. Uh we started in 2019 and um we're a BPO that specializes very much in supply chain logistics, over-the-road freight, things like that. Uh and yeah, that's that's who we are.

Amanda Quinn 1:26
Awesome. Um, what how did you get into this?

Nick Schrock 1:30
How did you get into specializing in logistics and I think it it's a it's a fun story because I think it also gives a lot of context in who we are because we're so we're so different from other BPOs. Like when I talk to other BPO owners and kind of how we operate and what software we use and everything, it really comes because I have no background in BPO at all. I come from logistics. I was working at a third-party logistics company routing less than truckload partials and full truckload freight across the across the US. And I was working for a startup in San Diego and I was running our customer acquisition team. And we're a startup, so you have to max year over year. And we really couldn't afford to do that in San Diego just with salaries. So we looked to other countries, primarily the Philippines. And so I built a pretty successful lead generation team over there. I was like, oh, this is great. I wonder if we could do it for quoting admins and track and trace and all these different things. And so after a few years, we built a pretty substantial team in the Philippines and uh learned a lot of the hard lessons kind of going through it. Hindsight, I would have hired a BPO to do it all for us, but by doing it myself, I kind of learned how to do this. After a few years, got a new boss. We didn't quite agree on how to solve problems. So it was time for me to move on and knew I wanted to start my own company. So just started doing the same thing for other logistics companies. So built a team in the Philippines, started doing it. Now we're in a few different countries. But yeah, we're very specialized in this space.

Amanda Quinn 3:05
Were you one of those people that started a BPO without realizing that it was called the BPO?

Nick Schrock 3:10
100%. Yeah, I didn't know what BPOs were. We tried to hire some BPOs for some other tasks in Mexico, but um, yeah, it was probably it's like BPO, what does that mean? What is the what are those what does what does that acronym stand for? But yeah, very much.

Amanda Quinn 3:24
When the early days, how did you describe your business?

Nick Schrock 3:27
Uh I don't remember. I I more told the story of the problems I solved at my previous company. And it was the I got pretty lucky. And I wish I would even start a few years, but once the pandemic hit, everybody was forced to work from home and everybody was getting checks for not working, and logistics was exploding because everybody's buying stuff. So shipping was going crazy. Everyone needed labor. So whether they believed in it or not, it's like I had people to support their business and their people and they were drowning in work. So it actually kind of gave us a nice kickstart to go. I wish we would have started earlier just so I could have taken advantage of it more than we did. Because we were we were figuring out how to run a company, how to do payroll, how to do all this other stuff. Going from an employee to a business owner is quite the leap, and you make lots of mistakes. I wish I didn't do that in like the best opportunity my business will ever see.

Amanda Quinn 4:20
Yeah, yeah. It sees it's I understand that.

Amanda Quinn 4:24
But it's all worked out. Yeah, it definitely worked out. And there are there's so many BPOs I feel like that were started during that time period because it was such a huge there's such a need for people to be helping.

Nick Schrock 4:37
Yeah, that's a good point.

Amanda Quinn 4:38
A lot of the other BPOs I talked to are like that came up during that period, have they had had exponential growth during the COVID years, and then now growth has started to slow and they're having to like relearn what life is like or how to build a company when you don't have that demand and the market conditions. Are you facing something similar with your business?

Nick Schrock 5:04
Uh, great question. So ours was actually um a freight has been in a its worst recession ever for the past two, two and a half years. Because um, some context, yeah. Because everybody was shipping so much, people were demanding um to the 3x the cost to move something. Which naturally, like um if you're a capitalist, it's like, hey, somebody's making a lot of money. A lot of people opened businesses in that space. So people opened trucking companies, everybody was buying trucks up, and a bunch of people flooded the space. Well, that surplus buying didn't last forever. So buying cycles went back to normal, if anything lower, because all the warehouses are filled. And so now there's an oversaturation of trucks. Now everybody's losing money. People have been going, a lot of freight companies have been going out of business over the past two years. So we've definitely seen the overall market demand shrink overall, but we've had record years, year over year. So we double almost every single year, and we're on pace to do that. I know we're only in February, but we're having a killer Q1. And um, and yeah, there's a lot of reasons for it, which I'm sure we'll get into, but we've seen it in the market, the demand's slow, but we've maintained a pretty strong growth rate for sure.

Milan Batinich 6:26
Nick, why don't you uh tell us more about that? How you've been able to adapt and sustain that during a logistics recession.

Nick Schrock 6:33
Yeah, number one is just our product is phenomenal, right? And if uh if you're ever churning customers and you say anything other than your product is the reason, you're kidding yourself, right? Everything comes down to executing and kind of going into specialization. It's like we only do a few things, right? We're only working for logistics companies, but even inside of that, we only do a few things. We turn business down inside of logistics companies because we're not a hundred percent confident we can execute in it. So by only saying yes to things, you're ecstatic, it's like you just get more and more opportunities. Like, oh, you're doing this for me. What else do you do? Well, we do these other few things. They'll we'll end up hiring you for everything you do because they know you're very, very good. So even within our customers, our year-over-year growth is phenomenal. Even if we acquired no new customers, we would probably grow by 30 or 40% this year just within our current customer base, because they're gonna hire us for other things we do. And then on top of that, it's like, uh, my background is sales, which helps. My sales reps even tell us this. He's like, I love that we only I love that we I get such good feedback from our customers. They never hear about it or have to deal with the complaints. So they have a ton of conviction when they're selling because they know it's good, they know it's gonna work. They they can just promise things that they're gonna do really, really well. And that compounds and they make more call calls, they do more activity. And it's just, yeah, it's a it's kind of a flywheel by being successful for people to sell more versus if you guys have ever sold something that sucks, like excuse my language, it's disheartening. You feel like you're lying to people. It's like, oh, is it gonna work? And then it doesn't work out, and you have to convince them to keep trying it, and it like slowly kills your soul. It does. Like I'm a I'm a lifelong salesperson. I've sold some bad things, and I I refuse to. It's just so hard. It really is.

Milan Batinich 8:32
Right. And your customers can also see that when what you're selling is sucking the soul right out of you. Yeah, like they recognize that.

Nick Schrock 8:39
And I I truly I don't have any metrics around this because it's it's pretty uh tiny to track, but I bet our close rates go up when we tell clients no. There's nothing, I think it's interesting. It's nothing will give you more credibility than turning down business. Right. A great example, like in a logistics, someone will ask for me to do to do cold calling to shippers to help them close more business. We turn that business away, right? And it's sales. It's like this, I can do this. There's so many things I can't control. I can't control their pricing, I can't control how good their product is, whether I'm not to get a good salesperson, like all these different things makes it, you know, maybe it's 60% successful. But by me turning down that business, it gives me so much credibility when I'm trying to sell an operational role. Same thing with software developers or other industries, you name it.

Amanda Quinn 9:32
There's so many things I want to unpack in what you just said that was so helpful and provided so much context. Um let's let's go back to the sales people having confidence. Um Milan, having been a salesperson for a BPO before, can you imagine having that level of confidence in what you were selling and like what that would have done for you?

Milan Batinich 9:53
Yeah, it would be amazing from a salesperson's perspective because otherwise, when you're just selling everything as a generalist, it's hard to get motivated. It's hard to stay motivated when it's hard to, it's difficult to close deals when you're not really an expert in anything, right? You can say you're an expert in BPO, but really you're you're not. You're not an expert in your client-specific line of business. You probably don't even know the vernacular, the right jargon, the right like even if you Well, Amanda, yeah, Amanda, you and I have had this conversation where uh I was at one BPO and uh uh prospect set used a uh acronym and I had to like Google it and pull up a YouTube video because I had no clue what they were talking about.

Nick Schrock 10:33
And meanwhile, like Nick would fire a salesperson if they had to do that same thing because they're clearly not qualified to be it also makes hiring easier because we don't hire BPO sales, we hire freight people to be our salespeople. And so they understand the industry and we have to teach them what we have to teach them the staffing arm, which is like we live and breathe it every day. You could kind of just have them shadow around, which like good luck teaching somebody freight that hasn't lived and briefed that industry. It's not rocket science, but at the same time, it's like you're gonna be lost. Like there's just so much to know. It's like not really complicated, but there's there is a lot. There is a lot.

Milan Batinich 11:13
Yeah, it's a lot of people.

Nick Schrock 11:15
Oh, go ahead.

Milan Batinich 11:15
Oh, I was gonna say it's much simpler teaching a salesperson what BPO work is that already has the freight and logistics experience versus the other way around. Taking somebody that has BPO sales experience and teaching them the specifics of logistics and freight is much, much more difficult.

Nick Schrock 11:31
And they understand the work we're doing for the logistics companies. So when we say it's like, hey, we have to do this invoice audit for this LTL load to make sure the weights are blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, like, oh, I get it. I know what type of work they're doing. I can sell the work. And then uh sure you have to teach them the I how we solve the IT questions and insurance and remote and all these different things. But it's like those, those are more tactical things and they are easier to much easier to teach, in my opinion, than teaching. Yeah, I couldn't even imagine of like trying to like, let's say we went into healthcare, trying to teach my whole sales team like healthcare and how we're solving problems in healthcare when yeah, the only experience they have is going to the doctor.

Nick Schrock 12:19
Yeah.

Amanda Quinn 12:20
Now let's go back to the the line you said, which I love it, um, that you know, if you're churning out clients, it's because your product isn't exceptional.

Amanda Quinn 12:31
So I don't think I've ever heard anyone in outsourcing talk about their services as product like that. Um, but I think they should and they should be viewing it that way. Um, what do you how do you define what is your product? Ways you think about it.

Nick Schrock 12:49
Oh man, it's pretty broad. Like I think of it as like the whole customer experience. So everything from how we're selling them and kind of how they read our contract to whether or not we have employee agent churn, right? And so, like if they're if we have a bad culture and we're churning agents, that's a the product's worse if that happens, right? And so all of it kind of goes into a customer experience. Like I just had a conversation today, somebody responded like in 10 minutes to a client versus like responding really quickly, hey, I'm working on this. And so it's it's just lots of little things that go into making a really good customer experience. And if you're a service-based company, the service is your product. It it just is. Yeah.

Amanda Quinn 13:37
And I would I wanted to I wanted to hear you say that, and I agree with you very much because I think uh BPOs typically operate in the CX space and they know all of these things, they know end-to-end customer journeys, they they sell it, they put it in their decks of this is how we help you brand with your clients, but I don't think they think about their own services that way and what it's how how they need to be showing up at every touch point to make sure that they're delivering on the promises that they're making and what the um the summation of all of those touch points means in terms of client value.

Nick Schrock 14:17
Yeah, I mean, if you're if you treat yourself like a commodity where you can kind of disassociate with the value prop, it's like the BPO is BPO. I'm providing this, it's the same as everybody else. Well, then you're gonna be traded like a commodity. It's like if you're not really driving anything above and beyond, it's like I think we talked about it's a race to the bottom. It's like if you're gonna buy gold, you're gonna buy gold for the cheapest you can. If you're overpaying, you're gonna sell it and go like you're gonna get it somewhere else. So if if you're a me too, like a me too product, man, that's tough. That's a tough business that I want no part of.

Amanda Quinn 14:52
Mm-hmm. Um and they it's like they Milan, we know this. Like we know they see that they're facing pricing pressures, they're feeling the squeeze, they're feeling the competitive, um, the increasing competition, the need to drop prices or open locations and new centers where they can offer lower prices. And yet I feel like there's a cognitive dissonance between like, I know this is happening, but I'm not really willing to do anything about it. I'm not really willing to change my business to escape this commodification, escape this me, stop being a mead too. So I love that you just said that, Nick. I think that um is great advice. And that's what they that's what's going on with for them.

Nick Schrock 15:34
And and it's tough, like, especially if you've already going down that because but one, your product actually has to be better. Like you can't just sell it as being better and it fixes all your problems. It ha because if they come and say, hey, I've got this other BPO that'll do it for X, well, yeah, try them. Go ahead. Like, bring them on, give them a test, let's see how it goes. Like, because we're sell I'm selling a different product. It's like I'm not gonna match, like I can't. I can't. My cost is my cost is higher than them, which it's like, yeah, I'm charging more, right? It's like we're charging, you know, 30 to 50 percent more than other BPOs. But to provide that level of service, like my value, I have to deliver double the value. And we do, if not, if not multiples above that. So that way when we do bake offs, it's like clients are smart enough to realize like these reps are double twice as productive. We don't have churn. I don't have to retrain people all the time. Valoroo just gets it done. I don't even have to think about it now that I hire them. People are happy to pay this, right? It's like um, sure, there's some clients that always want the cheapest, regardless of headaches. They're not for us. They're not for us. That's okay. Right. Yeah, we're the we're the no headache like problem gets solved above and beyond your expectations. That's who we are and that's what we sell.

Amanda Quinn 16:53
Yeah. Do you find that um clients come to you bec and like want to do that champion challenger where they're like, let me and you and you say, like, okay, go test it, test a slice of it with with somebody else and let's see. Do you find like if somebody does that, are you guys winning most of those um head-to-heads?

Nick Schrock 17:11
Rarely do we get customers that are trying to try someone else when it has happened. Like, I'm saying maybe three or four times over six years, like we never lose substantial stakes of the business. Maybe they keep one or two agents with them. I'd say that's how we win a lot of business. It's like, I'll say, give me one agent. Give me one agent, like one agent on any team you want, and then we can just let me prove it to you. It's so much easier. It's like, hey, I can tell you how great I am all day, but once my guys are working alongside your guys, you're gonna see very, very quickly. And then that's how we come, that's how we compound. And I say it's like we'll grow 30 to 40 percent with current clients. It's because that's how we start. It's like I'm willing to start with nothing at I'll work for free if you'll let me, right? Just because I know I'm gonna be able to build a relationship uh and go from there.

Amanda Quinn 18:01
And you're able to charge 30 to 50 percent higher than your competitors, which I think would like records. I need to like add the the audio record scratch um sound effect there because I can that yeah, and then it's a flywheel because then I can hire like BPOs are have ceilings on their best talent.

Nick Schrock 18:19
They can only pay people so much. Well, some people are killers, some people are so good. Like, we all have those people on our team. I can hire all of them when you can't afford them anymore. I can take them onto my team and give them to my clients. And it's like now we just have eight plus plus players that are killing it, they're doing a really good job.

Amanda Quinn 18:38
And are your team, um, your agents actually having like a logistics background, or do you train them all?

Nick Schrock 18:45
No, they all have a logistics background before coming in. Yeah. Or if it's an accounting role, they might have five years of accounting experience. Our eight agents, I think, have eight to ten years of experience, and everyone has worked in supply chain before. Give or take. I'm sure there's some, if not, if it's not 90, I'll say to be accurate, well over 90% of our agents have freight experience.

Amanda Quinn 19:08
And Milan, what's that what's the average BPO? Is that uh how does that compare what you've seen?

Milan Batinich 19:14
Yeah, no, nowhere near that. Uh a fraction of that number, Nick.

Nick Schrock 19:18
Yeah. Yeah.

Milan Batinich 19:20
I would say not even a tenth of that number.

Nick Schrock 19:23
And it's tough. My recruiting team yells at me all the time. They hate it. But it's like what our product is, so we have to do it.

Amanda Quinn 19:30
And do you find that you keep agents longer as a result of this?

Nick Schrock 19:35
Well, it's also um it's it's not only that, like being able to. I mean, I'd be we all want to beat our chest on culture, and I think we do a really good job. We say people first more than any other two words on the planet, but we pay more. That's a huge retention. Just being able to pay people what they're worth. We have consistent raise structures that's more than five, 10 cents, right? It's actual raises on six months annually. Like 90, 99% of our agents get their full raise when they're scheduled to. It's like they're they're ex they're more retention bonuses, almost things like that. Um, and then yeah, just treating treating people the right way, setting them, giving someone their expectation. Like, hey, telling someone that they have to double what the current provider's doing, that's a lot of hard work. But it's like, hey, this is the expectation. This is how you get there. Here's your support system. Just giving people expectations for success. We only promote from within. We do not hire managers outside the company. Like all these things kind of that go into heavy employee retention, which we have to have to provide high levels of service.

Amanda Quinn 20:44
I love that. I mean, I'm sure you do too, Milan. This is like your area.

Milan Batinich 20:49
Amazing. So, Nick, how do you I understand, you know, telling the employees or giving the employees information on how they need to perform? How do you keep the employees motivated, knowing that, hey, in order for us to keep these clients and keep these clients happy and provide this a spectacular service, you know, you need to produce twice as much.

Nick Schrock 21:07
Honestly, it's not because the industry's so bad, it's like not hard. It's like okay, you just have to be a being a good company. It's like you're a shining star. Like, you don't have to be a Google, like with uh slides and ball ball pits kind of going around. But it's like, yeah, treat everybody, don't nickel and dime everything. Like, I mean, I wish I had a magic wand. It's like, yeah, we put ping pong to it's like, no, it's like just show people how to be successful, talk to them about their career goals, help them achieve those career goals. Like I tell our, it's like, yeah, we do management, we just do management 101. We actually do it, is the difference. It's like we actually execute on all these different things, and that'll that has turned into high employer retention. And remove, and then we do a good job of removing bad eggs too. If someone's not a good culture fit, if someone's underperforming, it's like high performers want to be around other high performers. Performers. And so we just kind of do all the I wish I had a fancy answer for you. We do all the small things right. Is really what we do.

Milan Batinich 22:07
That's that's a perfect answer right there. Doing all the small things right. I love it.

Amanda Quinn 22:12
It's refreshing because it sounds like it's that these are just like corporate best practices. And unfortunately, it's like this industry, we're trying to right a lot of the wrongs that I think are um ignored in this industry. And it sounds like you're um kind of set on building a really kind of like almost like like humanitarian like organization where you're viewing them as people that you work with and not just cogs in a machine that you're just endlessly churning and cranking.

Nick Schrock 22:44
Yeah. And our clients are on board with this too. Our clients treat our agents as employees, even though they're clearly contractually got, right? Like for sure, there's no legal association. To them, it's like they're the same as the US team. And because they drive so much value, it's like they work hand in hand together and it's kind of it all works really, really well. And then our people feel more valued because they're driving so much value for a client. Um, and that's really when I think of it, it's like, what do I want in a job? It's like now it's different because I own it. But before it's like, yeah, I just want to drive a lot of, I want to be valued. I want to have an impact on the organization I'm doing. So if you give people that opportunity and you can actually see it come to fruition, it's great. Yeah, it's awesome.

Amanda Quinn 23:27
Do you have any tips that you could share about how you um help your clients really um have their clients have your your employees kind of be viewed as part of their team? Like, do you do anything to foster that relationship or that connection?

Nick Schrock 23:44
Yeah, we talk about it um from the first sales call. We mention that. It's like this works best if you treat them as if they're just in another city, right? Maybe they're in Chicago. It's like treat treat them like they're in Tennessee. They're just working remotely. You can chat them on Slack, you can ask them to do things. Sure, you have us as management layer to help you and do write-ups and all these different things, but you don't have to go through us to do little things. Um, we'll give our clients tips on depending if they're in Mexico or Colombia or Philippines, it's like, hey, these are the do's and don'ts of this culture, right? So that way they're not burning the bridge and so that they they can all be involved. But yeah, just kind of and it it's also our managers are very good at it. Like they're working hand in hand with our clients to do these different types of things. It's just kind of how we're set up so it it works out.

Amanda Quinn 24:34
Yeah, I love that. Um, and I think that's so smart to to give your clients, set your clients up for success by helping them know what what they should be doing. Because I'm sure for especially if it's their first-time outsourcer, I feel like there's a lot of um unknown and fear and like, what should I be doing? And maybe they draw the wrong conclusions. And so um I'm sure for both parties, probably really um appreciate you giving that guidance.

Nick Schrock 25:02
Yeah, and some more direct feedback is like when we do come in and we'll replace like a traditional BPO, like BPOs get really caught up in it's like what are they called? C service level agreements. Like we agree to do this at this metric, right? And and usually the BPO sets those or they work together to set them. But now the success is very this very linear thing. And a lot of times clients like, yeah, yeah, I know you're hitting this, but all these things aren't working. It's like, well, I'm hitting my service level agreement. I'm hitting my SLA, I'm hitting it. And so when they come to us and they're like, hey, our SLA is whatever your is, it's like, is it your on-time delivery? And one, we speak the language. Is it your on-time delivery percentage? Is it your on tracking percentage? Like, whatever you're tracking, we're tracking. And if nothing's not so we're very much corporately aligned with them, we understand their goals are, and they get no pushback from us if we're not doing a good job. Like we're very much an extreme ownership org. If you say we're doing something wrong, whether or not we are, the perception's there. We need to fix something, whether it's how we communicate, how we execute. And so we definitely see our competitors making that mistake. They're head down into this service level agreement and the customers having a bad experience. And then when they lose the client, they're going, We hit our SLA for three years. How'd we lose them? It's like, yeah, well, you weren't actually listening, you know, and it's very common for sure.

Amanda Quinn 26:30
Yeah, we talk about that a lot about like they missed the forest for the trees by focusing so much on these operational KPIs and missing the fact that, like, oh, but our revenue was going down because you weren't asking the right questions to customers or actually solving their needs. And so, yes, yeah, you hit the benchmarks, but the benchmarks were there to try to make sure that you hit the revenue goals.

Milan Batinich 26:53
Right, right. The the whole purpose of the benchmarks is that way, yeah, it all funnels down to the revenue goals. And if you're not hitting the ultimate goal, then who cares that you hit those S.

Nick Schrock 27:02
Yeah, and I think it comes down to I think we're all a lot less sophisticated than we want to be, right? We think we are. It's like, oh, we've got all these metrics to do there. It's like it's like, are you profitable in growing? If it's like if those two things aren't yes, then you need to take some hard looks at kind of what your business is doing and the trajectory. And and if you're ever talking about global economic trends, you're probably lost, right? Unless you're an Amazon or some massive, massive company. It's like you should be able to thrive regardless of conditions in the market.

Amanda Quinn 27:35
Yeah. Yeah. And um, I mean, I think the fact that your margins, your like per unit margins, my guess are probably higher than average BPO.

Nick Schrock 27:45
They're typically about probably triple or four X with the market. It's yeah. Wow. Okay. Awesome. Who knows what they're doing? Like I I don't pay attention to the market very much. I just know for commodities, you're talking most 10%, right? And so it's tough, right? So it's like, yeah, they might be running 5% margins, 4%. It's like good luck taking care of your employees with those margins. It's really, really tough.

Amanda Quinn 28:08
Or investing in your business, which I know is something that you're you're working on right now. And a lot of BPOs and firms in general need to be thinking about what technologies are we layering in and what advances do we want to make. And it's it's hard to do that when you're on single-digit margins.

Nick Schrock 28:22
Yeah. And I don't think, at least me as a customer, when I'm buying software, it's like, I know they're making 60, 70% margins on the software basis. None of us care because it's the value that it drives. If someone, if your customer's really concerned about the margins, you're having the wrong conversations. It's how much value are you driving for that business? You could probably charge more. Like you probably could. You know, if you're driving tons and tons of, I think margins are a direct relation to the value you're driving for your client and not for how greedy you are, right? Yeah. Um, it's just there's a direct correlation there for sure.

Amanda Quinn 28:56
And how are you thinking about your your business and how you kind of um structure your engagements? So are you on a like a per hour basis that you're charging, or are you doing something more outcomes-oriented since you know the space so well or a hybrid?

Nick Schrock 29:13
We we have a little bit of both. It depends on the client and what they're looking for. And we're happy to kind of develop it. I would say the bulk of it is on a uh per employee full-time, like we have a certain cost we charge per month per FTE. That breaks down into hourly. It's just a different way of wording it. So yeah, hourly per employee. And then we only we don't do any part-time work. It's all fully dedicated. Okay.

Amanda Quinn 29:39
Okay. And um, so your margins go on that. So your margins are higher. Your um, my guess is that given that you're so focused, you're probably um your sales uh pipeline is probably much more robust, much more higher throughput, probably a shorter sales cycle would be much more than.

Nick Schrock 29:59
I don't I don't know what other be like how many how many new customers do BPOs generate uh a year? Like what's normal? You guys would know that more than me.

Milan Batinich 30:08
Pretty standard uh for the generalist BPOs per salesperson, maybe one to two a year. New clients per year. Per year, yeah.

Nick Schrock 30:14
And are those so are those like enterprise deals? Like what are no? Like what's a mid-mark? How many agents, I guess, is my question. Like what's a mid-market?

Amanda Quinn 30:25
Uh mid-market's probably like 20, 20 or so. Yeah, I say anywhere 20 to 40. 20 to 20 to 50, something like that.

Nick Schrock 30:33
Yeah, yeah, our sales reps do multiple customers a month for sure. Okay. Multiple customers per month per salesperson at their closing. That they're closing.

Amanda Quinn 30:43
Yeah, that that doesn't happen. I think most BPOs are relying on the code.

Nick Schrock 30:47
Some of those might be one agent. So I don't want to oversell it like we're onboarding 600 people a month and just like oversell it. But uh yeah, it is a if somebody close they wouldn't be with us if they closed two customers a year. That's for sure.

Milan Batinich 31:02
Got it. Yeah, a lot of the uh generalist BPOs, their their metrics for their salespeople are based on number of seats. So it's like, hey, you need to bring in a hundred, say a hundred seats this year, whether it's one client that's a hundred seats, or twenty clients that are five seats each, that's more so the the way they look at it. And then ties to revenue.

Nick Schrock 31:22
And I totally get it. And so I guess the way I view our salespeople is they don't control how much those agents grow with us, right? That's more on operations and client success to grow that. Just give me, get, get my foot in the door. Give me one agent, give me two agents, because I know they're gonna grow to 20, 50, whatever, 100 from there, depending on size. But it's not uh, we're we're definitely more of per logos, like bring on logos and um we'll work with them to make sure they're not only bringing on like like VAs for SBs, like those are tough, but uh they're attacking the whole market, is really what we're hoping to get.

Amanda Quinn 32:04
Yeah, that I mean that that makes tons of sense. And then I my guess is that they're also because you have such conviction that once you get in the door and you have you can um in that you will expand it, you're willing to take on these smaller deals that most BPOs are like, no, the setup cost is too high, I'm not gonna do it, because they lack that. They don't trust the product, as you say.

Nick Schrock 32:25
Right. Yeah, and I'm curious, like, um, so there is a lot of setup cost, but like I said, it's like if if you know you're never gonna lose a customer, you can do a lot of things that other people won't. Right? If I know, if I can bake in my setup cost across three to five years, because I know I'm gonna do a good job, that cost kind of gets evaporated in them, the whole thing. So yeah, our setup costs are tens of thousands of dollars per customer, but who cares? It's like we'll have them for 10 years, right? It's none of that stuff matters anymore. Yeah, it all comes back to the um a lot of people think they have like a VP of sales problem. It's like, no, you have a product problem. If you're not if you're not selling consistently, that tells me you have a product problem. Your salespeople aren't bad, your product's bad or needs some type of improvement. Preach.

Milan Batinich 33:15
Man, Amanda, I think we just found our clip. Yeah. Nick, what you just said was like it's so true. Oh my gosh. Yeah.

Nick Schrock 33:22
Yeah. I a lot of I've talked to a lot of other businesses, and they have they're always like, Yeah, I need a VP of sales. Like, we're not hitting our revenue numbers, and like we have a leaky bucket, and it's like, yeah, like the everybody dreams of the Wolf of Wall Street guy coming in and rescuing their business. That guy doesn't exist. He doesn't exist. A great product fixes all cure, all wounds, cures all wounds, for sure. For sure.

Amanda Quinn 33:46
But it's it's almost higher up, you have to go higher upstream though, because you can't have a great product unless you know who the product is for.

Nick Schrock 33:52
Sure.

Amanda Quinn 33:52
And so they need to first figure out who they're going after and then build something that is truly value creating and defensible and is something that the clients are going to want to stick around because they're not finding alternatives elsewhere.

Nick Schrock 34:08
Yeah, and like there's definitely riches and niches, like that is a real thing for sure. It's uh I totally get the grasp to go after everything because that um TAM is just huge, right? But it's not like supply chain's a small industry, right? Healthcare is not a small real estate's not a small industry. Like you can have a hundred million dollar company focusing on that, if not bigger, right? You can have a massive, massive revenue company and um yeah, yeah, yeah, totally.

Amanda Quinn 34:41
I mean, do something you know doing that for government yeah, yeah, you can lean in and be really and and develop really innovative solutions. Like that's the like the cookie cutter. We just do CX, we do tier one, like that is so replaceable. It's like how can you customize it, make it and I know Nick, when you and I spoke, like you're already starting to think about like how am I leveraging technology? What are we gonna be doing to like make human plus tech to make my product even better, more sticky, more resilient? Maybe, maybe just give a like a little bit of an overview of like kind of what you're thinking about there, because I know that's top of mind for everybody right now.

Nick Schrock 35:19
Yeah. And so when I go to these like every conference on the planet, like when I go to our all of our supply chain conferences, they've turned into AI conferences. And it's like, we can do this, we can do this, and it's all changing. And half of our companies that might not be here in six months because they're startups running out of money. And so we're not trying to compete with people that are driving a lot of value there, but there is some things where they're um, we're doing things that a bot should do, right? And because our people are skilled, there's so much more work to be done that not only are we not doing it, our clients are not doing it. And if we can automate this piece, we can get it to them so they can drive more value for their customers. So whether it's building a load that came over through a PDF on an email and a bot scrapes it, gets it, puts it into three different systems that we used to do manually, that frees us up time to do drive more value. It's like, yeah, what can we automate? How can we drive more value? Um and and go from there. Yeah.

Amanda Quinn 36:19
And are you um unafraid or are you embracing the like revenue, potential revenue cannibalization from that? Or are you viewing this as like it's still gonna be like um leaning into automation isn't gonna hurt revenue because you're gonna continue to drive more value and you'll still have the human just doing more things?

Nick Schrock 36:37
Yeah, I I almost am not even thinking of it right now. My assumption is if I can drive more value to my customers, that will end up being good for my company. Uh again, like my team is kind of frustrated. Like, what is this gonna cost? I go, tell them we'll build it for free. We'll try it. And if it drives value, we can have a pricing conversation. That's literally the words I say. We're not, there's no implementation cost. The trial is free. After two months, we'll have a conversation. And depending on the value, again, pricing is not, it's not like a cost plus. If that thing drives 10x value, it's like I can put a big price tag on it. If it's okay, if you barely notice it, maybe I have to give it to you for free just to help our relationship. It's that is how I kind of view revenue models. And so if I can make it work, it'll be really good for revenue. If I can't, it won't. And so, yeah, I it's just how I view it.

Amanda Quinn 37:28
I think that's really smart. I think that that is a really great strategy. And I wish everybody took that approach because it doesn't need to be, I think there's a lot of fear with technology right now on service providers' part where they're viewing it as a competition, but there's a lot of work to be done. And I think it's the I view it as an opportunity. Like if you can figure out how to leverage tech or build tech to like make yourself a wedge into your clients and stickier and get into more departments or whatever that is, um, this is a huge moment, and you could be the first one to get there.

Nick Schrock 38:02
Yeah, yeah. And yeah, I'm optimistic and terrified at the same time. So it'll be we'll see. Either none of us are gonna have jobs in five years and AI is gonna run the world, but that's not something I can do anything about. It's like, or we're we're just way better at our jobs because of all this, and we'll we'll jump on that bandwagon for sure.

Nick Schrock 38:31
I'll think you said the same thing about the internet, right? It's like we'll just uh just work less. And it's like, yeah.

Amanda Quinn 38:40
Yeah. Milan, any other questions for Nick before we wrap up?

Milan Batinich 38:45
No, I think this has been great, Nick. Appreciate you being on.

Amanda Quinn 38:48
Yeah, super fun. Super fun. Yeah, this has been wonderful, Nick. Um, if there's any um kind of parting advice you would give to a generalist BPO that's like afraid to lean in um and afraid to kind of uh say start saying no to some things, um, what advice would you give them?

Nick Schrock 39:10
Yeah, I mean it's I know it's hard, and even today it's always so difficult to turn down revenue, especially when you're in need of it and someone's offering it to you. Um, like, but if I was consulting for another BPO, I would look at their best three customers in like an industry, and I would go, um, I would just start to duplicate that. I would change our website, I would change our sales approach, and I would only target that. If you want to get crazy, go fire the rest of your customers, like actually dive in, right? It's like just actually be focused and actually dive in, like own the message and go for it. It is, yeah, business is so much easier when the product's really good, right? It's just so much easier, right? I can't tell you my it's so much better, it's so much more fun than trying to compete or go read Blue Ocean Strategy. Are you guys familiar with that? It's the same idea, just in book form, very, very good. Right. Um, yeah, because you guys are specialists as well, right? You guys only tailor to BPO client services, stuff like that.

Amanda Quinn 40:09
Yep. I help BPOs with their position.

Nick Schrock 40:12
How does it, because this isn't just for BPOs, I think this is every industry. Is it reflect the same way? Like you're gonna be able to just have better conversations, more topical, understand them. Like, do you get offered consulting from other industries ever?

Amanda Quinn 40:26
I have been approached by technology companies. So still in the CX space, but yeah, I I 100% believe in the power of niching down and the fact that all I do is talk to BPOs and talk about BPOs and consult BPOs. All I'd get, like my leads are all inbound from that. Like I don't do any sales, I don't do any marketing. Um, we're gonna start doing some sales, so that might change and might start getting some stuff from us. But no, I I very much view you can be non-salesy and use education to drive um demand for your business and do it in a really light go-to-market way by being a specialist.

Nick Schrock 41:05
Yeah. And I I think you can even be really salesy and direct in this if you're super targeted. Like if you're to me, it's like, hey Nick, I only work with BPOs. This is the problem I solve. It's like I'm much more likely to respond to you and have a conversation with than it's like we do sales support for businesses, okay. Right? So broad. So broad, it's like, oh, I'm really good at sales. It's like, sure. It's like that sounds great. It's like we used an accounting firm because they have experience with other BPOs. And it's like that's they do this is what this one guy does because he's used to the international accounting and all these different things. And so I kind of think of all the services I use, it's because they're really niche, not because they're the Walmarts of the world.

Amanda Quinn 41:51
Yeah, you you trust them because you're like, they see clients like me all the time. They know this, they've developed a process for handling situations like this. They you overcome the trust barrier, which is the number one objection in a B2B sale, right? Yeah. Why should I trust you? Why should I choose you over anybody else?

Nick Schrock 42:08
Right.

Amanda Quinn 42:08
And being a specialist helps get you over that hump faster and quicker.

Nick Schrock 42:12
Makes sense.

Amanda Quinn 42:13
Nick, thank you so much for being on. Truly was a pleasure. So glad you could share in your insights with our audience. If anyone has any questions and wants to reach out to you, um, where can they find you?

Nick Schrock 42:24
Yeah, feel free to reach out to me directly. At my email is nick at valoroo.com, V-A-L-O-R-O-O.com. Or our website. Feel free to shoot, reach out to through our contact us. But if you want to reach me directly, the email is best or LinkedIn.

Amanda Quinn 42:40
Well, thank you so much for being here. Thank you, everyone, for listening, and we'll see you next time.

Nick Schrock 42:45
Thanks. Appreciate it.