Austin Gray: Owners and operators, welcome back to another episode of the OWNR OPS podcast. I'm your host, Austin Gray, and in this episode, I have Baird Kleinsmith joining us. Baird is an owner and investor in self-storage properties in Colorado and New Mexico. In 2021, he bought his first self-storage facility, and in three short years, he has grown this business to $2.6 million in topline revenue and is kicking off almost $900K in cash.

This is really impressive because the business is being operated and managed by a team in Latin America, completely offshore. So, what we're going to get into in this episode is how he bought his first self-storage deal. In the second half of the episode, we're going to talk specifically about how you can leverage offshore talent in Latin America to help grow your operations.

Look, Baird thinks that every business here in the U.S. could benefit from talent offshore, and he's placed a bet on it—so much so that he has co-founded a business called Hire LATAM. I went through their sales process last week, and it is very impressive.

For all of you out there who think you can only hire people in the U.S., it's such a myth. There are plenty of smart, talented people all around the world. And guess what? When you hire someone offshore, you are giving them an opportunity that they would not have otherwise. You are creating something here in the U.S. that can have an incredible impact on people.

For example, doing something really cool for people in Venezuela, he is currently waving the onboarding fee for placing talent from Venezuela with U.S. businesses. As I said, I'm actively going through this process right now, and I will give you guys an update. So far, it has been incredible.

I'm excited for you guys to listen to this full episode because Baird gives some advice for any U.S. business owner. As you guys know, I love local service, and I'm a true believer in the fact that we, as local service business owners, especially if you're starting as an owner-operator, can benefit from someone just to help you with the back office.  

The back office was the first hire I ever made, so I'm excited for you guys to listen to this episode. I hope you enjoy it. Without further ado, let's jump into the episode.

Austin Gray: All right, well Baird, welcome to the show!

Baird Kleinsmith: Thanks, man! Glad to be here.

Austin Gray: I've been following you for a couple of years now. You've got a really interesting story. It looks like, like a lot of other people who listen to this, you get inspiration from podcasts. I read one of your tweets where you were on a mountain bike ride, listening to My First Million, and came across some of Nick Huber's content. You stopped everything and went and sent out 50 letters. At that time, you were leading biz dev teams, correct?

Baird Kleinsmith: Yeah, yep. So, I was in financial technology for, gosh, in the end it ended up being about 15 years. But from a very early point, I realized that I didn't want to work for other people. I realized I had a great skill set in selling and helping other people learn how to sell, and that was great for me; it allowed me to build this career. But I was always looking to the next step.

Actually, the first podcast that set me on this path was Invest Like the Best. One of my friends turned me on to this podcast that was an interview with a couple of Harvard Business School professors who described the search fund strategy—this idea of buying a small business and adding value. It was basically like buying yourself a leadership position—an ownership position—in a business to get away from working for other people.

The math made sense; it totally made sense that you buy this existing business with cash flows to support debt payments. That kind of set me down this track of thinking about what my next step was. I was planning what I was going to do when I got back to the States. I knew I didn't want to continue in the corporate career, so I got to thinking about buying a business, but I never really found anything that was inspiring to me until I heard Nick Huber on the My First Million podcast in, I think it was November of 2020.

That’s when it clicked. It was like, “Okay, this is a business that doesn’t sound too operationally complex.” It certainly required capital, and I had capital to deploy coming out of that career. I didn’t really think about it; I just went for it. I started sending letters and was really lucky to get some responses.

I got to meet Nick in person a couple of weeks ago. Man, that guy changed my life! His willingness to share is really what set me up on this trajectory. Now, I've said it before, I feel like I'm living the life of dreams. So, say what you will about Nick's strategy of building an audience, but his generosity in sharing the details of his journey inspired me, and I know at least a handful of others that have gone down similar paths due to him sharing his experience, and it really has changed my life.

I read one of your tweets the other day with an update. You're, what are you, three years in at this point? You started in 2021—it's 2024 right now—said $2.2 million in topline revenue, $1.6 million in net operating income, and you're kicking off just shy of $900K in cash, right?

Baird Kleinsmith: Yeah. I mean, this year—it's hard for me to keep track of the numbers, but I mean, this last month we just closed the books on July, and across the portfolio, those nine properties did about $252,000 in revenue. So, if we just level off at this point—which I actually think there’s quite a bit of room for growth in some of my properties—we’ll hit, you know, $3 million in topline revenue at about 75% net income margin.

I don’t do public math, but if you subtract my debt service, I have the potential to cash flow seven figures this year. I've never, in my wildest dreams, thought that I could generate this kind of income with the sort of freedom that I have now. So, again, it’s like I pinch myself and think, “Man, I’m so lucky to have found this.”

Austin Gray: So, take us back to the first deal. What did that look like?

Baird Kleinsmith: Well, I read one of your tweets, and it says that one of the guys responded to one of those 50 letters you sent. Yep, yeah, but tactically what did that look like? How much cash did you bring to the table? How much debt did you use? Just like the whole picture of the deal.

This is going to challenge me to think back to three years and a few months ago, but yeah. So, rewind. I listened to Nick on the podcast, and I just thought, “Okay, I see all these crappy self-storage properties around me in Southwest Colorado and Northwest New Mexico.” So, I could have gone down this path of like buying a list or paying somebody else to build a list, but I just thought, “You know what, the quickest way for me to do this is get on Google. Google self-storage properties in these small towns around me.”

And I built a list. I literally just manually went to Durango, Cortez, Bayfield, Pagosa Springs—all these little towns around me—and I Googled self-storage. I built this Google spreadsheet of property name, the address, the phone number, you know, any details that I could get around size. Then manually, again, no automation, I manually went to the County Assessor databases and did property searches to identify the owner of the company, where they get their mail, where they get their tax notices, and I just built this database of owners of self-storage properties.

This was really compressed; this was within a matter of like a day or two. Then I created a form letter. I didn’t even use the tools that I know are available to me now to create those letters. I created a template for this letter and then manually filled in the property name and the owner's name and all that detail.

If there was something special I noticed about the property, I added that. I printed those letters, hand-signed each of them, folded them, put them in envelopes, and hand-addressed each of those envelopes. I think that first mailing was about 50 letters that I sent out and within a week I got my first response.

Actually, I remember the first property I bought—I had to do quite a bit of investigative work to figure out who the owner of this property was because the man who owned it lived in Seattle, Washington. The property was in Northwest New Mexico. It was owned by an LLC that was a Washington State LLC, so I did a bunch of research, tracked him down. I remember thinking in that process, “Man, you’re wasting a ton of time; you got 50 other properties to go after—why are you wasting your time trying to track this one guy down?”

But luckily, I persisted, tracked this guy down, and he called me right back. He had only owned the property for a couple of years; he bought it in 2018, but he wanted to buy some property in Washington and had started thinking about selling this property in New Mexico. It was perfect timing—I think he was going to put it on the market in the spring. I reached out to him in like November or December of 2020.

Man, at that point, I had no idea what I was doing! I had learned a bit from the internet about what questions to ask, you know, get the rent roll, get the profit and loss statement, try to figure out what I could drive in terms of revenue, what kind of costs I would incur in operating the property.

I got that, and he had kind of focused in on a seven-and-a-half percent cap rate. Based on his net income, that valued the property at $1.1 million. We ran the numbers and thought, “Okay, well, I think I can adjust prices; I think I can increase prices.” His prices were really low compared to competitors in the area, and I did my best to create a pro forma P&L. It looked good to me; from what I could tell, it looked good.

But I was still, I knew I didn’t really know. I knew that I didn't know what I was doing, so Nick Huber was offering consulting at the time. I reached out to him; I was on a really tight time frame, and I remember I got on the phone with him at like five in the morning my time, seven in the morning his time because it was like the only time that he had available on his schedule for the next couple of weeks.

So, I was like, “Man, if you’re available at five, I’ll get on the phone with you.” We looked at the deal together, and he confirmed what I was thinking, gave me some additional guidance, and basically gave the thumbs up for the deal.

In terms of the specifics of that deal, it was a $1.1 million purchase price at a seven-and-a-half percent cap rate, so take seven-and-a-half percent times $1.1 million, and so he must have been generating about $75,000 to $80,000 in net income.

Then for debt, I had started talking to a couple of local banks to get an idea of the interest rate, the loan term, that kind of thing, to put that into my model. The numbers seemed to work, and I ended up on that deal.

I did a conventional bank loan; I brought 20% down—so it was about $275,000 that I brought in plus a little bit of closing costs and legal fees—and ended up buying that property.

We’ll go into the operations later. I had some major hiccups with that one—lots of learning occurred in the first few months of that. Fast forward in time, I ended up refinancing that property. I must have refinanced it in late 2022 after owning the property for maybe 18 months.

I refinanced, pulled like $350,000 cash out of it, refinanced into a 10-year term on the interest rate, 20-year amortization, and then I ended up selling that property in December of last year so that I could buy my most recent buy.

I bought this property for $1.1 million in February of 2021 and sold it for $2 million in December of 2023. I ended up getting, I think, about $900,000 in net proceeds out of it and then rolled that via 1031 exchange into a $1 million buy. So, it was kind of like the perfect play of buying something, adding value, stabilizing it, and then rolling the proceeds from it into what I now consider sort of like the gemstone in the Sultan's ground.

Austin Gray: That is awesome. What were the terms on that first loan?

Baird Kleinsmith: Yeah, so, oh man, interest rates were amazing back then. My original loan was 4%, 20-year amortization, and a seven-year adjust. From the beginning, I've always been worried about interest rate risk, so I've tried to get the longest fixed terms on the interest rate possible.

I was in a seven-year term until it would adjust. I think my monthly payment was like somewhere around $5,000. Honestly, that was a great loan. The only reason that I refinanced it was one, to get my cash out of it, and then two, I was buying another property at the time, and another local bank came to me with an amazing proposal to finance this new purchase, but they required that I bring a couple of properties that I had debt with other banks over.

So, I refinanced this one plus another with this new bank in order to get a great loan on this new property that I was buying.

Austin Gray: So, what point last year were interest rates when I refinanced?

Baird Kleinsmith: So, this would have been, I think, late 2022 when I did that refinance, and I was able to refi at the same interest rate—so 4% in a 10-year term on the interest rate, again still 20-year amortization. I did that right before interest rates started to go up.

I have some regrets about selling that property in that I had another nine years left at 4%! It’s really hard to pay off, you know, a million dollars of percentage debt. But it was just the only way that I could buy this property that I knew had a whole lot more upside.

If I had unlimited capital, I would have kept that property and bought this new one, but cash is finite. I had to find it somewhere, and it was in selling this one.

Austin Gray: Okay, I want to hear about this opportunity property because obviously, it sounds like you found a gem there. Outside of that, we can split this question into two. Whenever you bought that first property, you mentioned operationally there were some hiccups, so can you walk us through those hiccups?

What were some of those first ones?

Baird Kleinsmith: So, the first property I bought came with an on-site manager, but she was a remote on-site manager. She had been local to the property and had been working in the office there, but with the pandemic, she had transitioned to working from home and going to the property as needed. She was not great—not super friendly—what you would find with most self-storage managers.

She wasn’t super friendly. She didn’t have a lot of focus on customer service; she sort of seemed bothered to do what I was asking her to do, like be super friendly, be very outgoing, and very proactive with customer service. It seemed like an inconvenience to her.

I figured out pretty quickly that it wasn't going to work; she didn’t really fit with my vision for creating this really friendly, great customer service organization. But I needed her there to help me learn how to run the property.

In retrospect, I would have made a move much quicker, but it took me a couple of months to realize she wasn't going to work out. I explained to her that I was going to change direction and was hoping that she would stay on board for like a month and help me transition to somebody else managing the property remotely.

But when I explained my intentions, she basically threw the keys at me and walked away. So, I was left there with a property that was like an hour drive away from me, with no manager—no one to do anything.

I immediately became the manager of this self-storage property. I was the guy answering the phones. I was troubleshooting gate issues from an hour away. I remember there were a couple of weeks where every day I was driving to the property to try to figure out gate issues.

But it was trial by fire. I was forced to learn, you know, the software, the processes—a lot of it I probably had the benefit of, like, not knowing how things would normally work in a self-storage operation. I was able to sort of design that from my own perspective: “If I were a customer renting a United Self Storage property, what would my experience be?”

I learned a ton there and eventually hired my sister-in-law to take over managing that property, plus a few others that I had accumulated in the following months. She was great, but ultimately, it wasn't a fit for her, and she had the potential to do much more. Frankly, she was very expensive compared to what I heard I could get if I went offshore.

Fast forward today, I've built this amazing remote operations and customer service team that's all based in Latin America. I’ve got two folks in Venezuela, I’ve got one in Peru, and then one in Honduras that manage operations and customer service across nine self-storage properties in Colorado and New Mexico now.

I mean this business is not passive for me by any means—I'm still very actively involved in it—but I've got an amazing operations manager in Venezuela that's really the boss of this business. She acts as sort of the CEO of the business and really only involves me in critical decisions.

Austin Gray: This is incredible. So, can you expand more on how you went about making that first offshore hire?

Baird Kleinsmith: Yeah. And this sort of evolves into the second business, Hire LATAM. So, rewind—I had my sister managing my properties. I knew I needed to augment her with some customer service staff. I originally tried hiring in the Philippines—worked with one of the recruiters that I met on Twitter; they gave me some great candidates. I ended up hiring one, and I was really impressed with the level of quality that I could find in the Philippines.

But then when it actually came time for that person to work, they were clearly challenged by the time zone difference. They were being asked to stay up overnight; they were sleepy on recorded calls that I listened to. They disappeared for hours at a time, probably to take a nap. I don’t blame them, but it just didn’t work out.

I replaced them with another person from the Philippines; had the same issues. So, I thought, “Okay, I like this model of finding offshore talent to help with customer service, but maybe I can find somebody in these time zones.”

That led me to Latin America. I wasn’t aware of any recruiters focused on Latin America like the recruiter that I had found that was focused on the Philippines, so I had to go find people directly.

I found a job board that was focused on matching U.S. businesses with remote talent in Latin America. I posted jobs directly and fielded hundreds of applications. The majority of those applications were very unqualified. It took a ton of work to filter through the good from the bad, but I was lucky and found my first hire—her name's Andrea, and she's in Venezuela.

She joined as a customer service rep, and she’s still with me today as sort of a senior customer service rep on the team. Then I thought, “Why don’t I find a manager, a leader that could build this team from Latin America?”

Using that same job board, I found Desiree, who’s my operations manager, also in Venezuela. I wasn’t trying to find people specifically in Venezuela, but that’s where I happened to find my first two folks, and I hired Desiree as operations manager.

I knew immediately when I saw her video that she submitted as part of her application that she was the person to hire. Again, she’s still with me today—she’s the operations manager of the storage business. The customer service team all reports into her, and she does it all.

From there, I woke up to this opportunity of hiring in Latin America. I found these great people, and I just thought, “Man, I want to get in this game. I see there are so many talented folks in Latin America.”

At the time, there wasn’t a clear leader in the recruiting industry, so I approached the owners of the job board that I had used to see if they’d be willing to sell. They weren’t; they shut me down and were very clear that they had no interest in selling.

In that process of researching that company, I just happened to find a Twitter conversation between that company and Ed Rodriguez, who’s now my partner in Hire LATAM. I reached out to Ed on LinkedIn, found him on Twitter, and we chatted. We decided it was a great fit for us to partner—I could bring some of my expertise in growing a business, and he knew the recruiting industry really well.

So, we joined forces and started Hire LATAM in April of last year, and now that team has grown tremendously. We’ve got like 25 people across at least a dozen countries in Latin America. The majority of that team is recruiters across many different countries in Latin America, and we’re now placing dozens of remote workers in Latin America with great jobs with U.S., Canadian, and even some European businesses.

As someone who has gone through your onboarding process so far, I mean this is incredible. It’s what we need as small business owners. Your fee structure seems very straightforward and fair. For anybody listening to this, a lot of our listeners are in the early stages of starting a local service business.

For all of you listening, this is something I’m actively going through the process of right now. I have to fill out my job description; I've already gone through the first call with the team. Super professional. It’s awesome—the talent that is available just with a Zoom or ME.

I want to talk about how you would coach me to set this hire up. Well, I’ve never done this before. I know a lot of our listeners likely haven’t either. How would you coach us to set the expectations well on that first hire?

Baird Kleinsmith: You could go one of two paths. The first path would be you hire somebody who’s more experienced, more skilled, and ask them to build your processes, your SOPs. You get somebody who has some autonomy that can help you figure out how to structure your team or your operation.

The second would be if you’ve already got those processes very well defined, you hire somebody maybe who’s a little bit more junior that can just fit into the processes that you have while also looking for somebody that’s proactive, intelligent, and driven—who is not just going to take direction but is also going to help you build and look for areas of opportunity.

I think that’s the first decision you have to make: do you want somebody who’s going to really help you build and define, or are you going to hire somebody who’s just going to plug into the operation that you already have today?

Austin Gray: Which one do you think you sort of fit into?

Baird Kleinsmith: I would love to hire someone who can help me build the process. The reason being is because I've started multiple businesses. One thing I've been challenging myself right now is to not go start another business because that’s the easy thing to do.

It’s so easy now; you see opportunities everywhere. It's like I could literally start any sort of service business and get it to somewhere between $500,000 and a million in revenue. Like, that's the easy thing to do.

What I'm challenging myself to do right now is to ask, “Once you generate seven figures, how do you beat the next boss?” Where I personally have the most growth to do is building out the process.

I’m sort of hustling—doing as much as I possibly can, running around like a chicken with my head cut off to just get stuff done. But you can only do that for so long, and you’re literally just running yourself ragged. You’re going to cap the company—the company’s never going to grow beyond you as the leader if that is who the leader is. So, I’m personally really challenging myself right now: let’s hire someone who has experience building the processes and the team.

Baird Kleinsmith: I think one thing that might be helpful for you and others is to think about your ideal future state. Like what’s the work that you want to be doing, and what’s the work that you’re best at doing? Then I would hire for the future.

When I hired Desiree as my ops manager, I think at the time I only had like four properties, but I knew that I wanted to get to the point where I had many more properties—a much bigger portfolio. So, I hired somebody that I thought could not only grow with the business but could also help drive that business growth.

I was responsible for acquisitions—finding the properties to buy—but I needed somebody that could help scale an operation, so I almost over-hired from the beginning and brought somebody in who was probably overly qualified for the job at the time, but I knew that the job would grow over time as I transitioned away from the lower-value activities that I was spending the majority of my time on.

That allowed me to focus on the higher-value activities that I have the skill set for. I know I'm really good at sales; I'm really good at convincing the owner of a storage property to sell their business to me. Then I know I’m also good at optimizing revenue and costs, and that kind of thing.

So, I looked for somebody that could take everything else off my plate that was lower value.

Austin Gray: Can you talk us through what the difference in investment would be for a business owner here based on those two different routes?

Baird Kleinsmith: I think either way, you should expect to invest a good deal of your time upfront. I would say the difference between the two routes is that if you hire a more junior person, you can expect to be their manager. You can expect to be their frontline manager doing daily management activities with them.

So, it’ll be like an ongoing sort of management job that you've created for yourself, versus if you scale up and get somebody who’s a bit more skilled, more experienced, more capable. There’s probably an equal amount of time you’re going to have to invest upfront, but longer term, you’re not going to have to be as involved in the day-to-day operations. You can trust that they take on those daily operational tasks.

I think it’s just a difference of an upfront investment versus an ongoing investment in those two different types of levels that you could hire.

The other thing too that I would encourage is I’ve seen a lot of folks focus in on finding people with very specific experience in the industry they’re in. I know an example of another self-storage operator who really wanted to hire somebody that had real estate property management experience. We found a bunch of great candidates who had proven success in other industries but didn’t have that property management-specific experience.

We thought they should have hired somebody without property management experience who demonstrated success in adjacent industries that would transfer really well to real estate. That client ended up choosing a candidate that we didn't recommend but had property management experience, and that candidate didn't work out.

We have a guarantee where if somebody doesn’t work out within 90 days, we replace them for free or refund. That candidate didn’t work out. The operator came back to us and said, “Okay, I’m going to follow your direction this time,” and they hired somebody who didn’t have property management experience but was really bright and driven. That person has worked out tremendously well for them.

Long story short, I would say focus less on specific industry experience and more on the person and their demonstrated success in doing the kinds of things you would expect them to do, even if it's not in your specific industry.

Austin Gray: Specifically, what is the cost difference?

Baird Kleinsmith: It’s amazing what a couple of hundred dollars a month will do in increasing the level of talent that you can get. I’d say a junior customer service rep who’s really just going to take phone calls, handle customer scheduling and payments, and all of that—you could get somebody who’s less experienced but really good for maybe $1,200 a month.

But if you increase that budget to $1,500 or $1,700 a month, you can get a manager-level person—somebody who’s not just going to answer the phones but is proactive in actually building and managing an operation. Even if that operation is small and maybe it’s just them, they take on more of the things that you do.

It’s incredible—the difference of $200 to $500 a month can really improve the level of quality of candidates that you can find. We typically, every client we work with, we have a consultative call and we go through all of this. More often than not, we end up coming out of that call with a higher-level role than maybe the client initially thought they wanted to hire.

If you think about it, it’s really easy to get an additional $500 a month in value from somebody who’s really good versus somebody who’s solid but kind of good.

Austin Gray: Definitely! One of the videos you posted last night was incredible. I'm sure you have people lining up who want to hire that person!

Baird Kleinsmith: For context for listeners, Venezuela is tough right now. A couple of years ago, I had no awareness or interest in international politics, but I have two people on my storage team in Venezuela, and they’ve given me pretty heartbreaking insights into what’s gone on.

Long story short, they have a communist socialist dictator, and they had elections on Sunday. By all accounts, the opposition—the Democratic opposition candidate—won like 70% of the vote. But this socialist dictator, Maduro, rigged the election and claimed himself the victor. It’s an incredibly oppressive regime, and there’s a huge disparity of wealth in Venezuela.

You have the haves and the have-nots—this elite group of rich people and everybody else in poverty. My team has been sharing with me these heartbreaking stories of what's going on in Venezuela. I thought, what can we do to help? What can I personally do to help Venezuela?

I proposed this idea to Ed, my co-founder in Hire LATAM, of like, “Hey, let’s just get as many Venezuelans good jobs as we can.” The more power we give to the Venezuelan citizens in the form of great jobs and great income, the more likely they are to create change in their local political environment.

With Hire LATAM, we were constantly filling jobs. We try to present at least three qualified candidates for each job, so it ends up with at least two candidates that we've taken through this vetting process—candidates we think could do these jobs, but they just didn’t end up getting hired because someone else was better.

So, we decided to remove the barrier for businesses hiring these folks, and we waved our placement fee for any pre-vetted workers in Venezuela that we can place in jobs. I tweeted yesterday that we're going to completely wave our placement fee, which is normally $2,900 for the first hire, for anybody we’ve got in our pre-vetted candidate database in Venezuela.

Even if a competitive recruiter came to us and said, “Hey, I have this job; it’s been really hard for us to fill. Do you have any candidates in Venezuela?” I would happily pass those candidates to a competitor so they can charge their client for that placement.

I don't care. All I care about is doing our best to find these people great jobs and give them strength to make changes in their local community.

I'd say with Hire LATAM, our mission is a little bit backwards in that it’s candidate-focused. Our mission is to find as many Latin Americans great jobs as we can. We’ve got to create a business that supports that, so we have to charge clients a fair rate to do that, but really our mission is on the candidate side, matching them with great jobs.

We feel that if we do that job well, the money will follow. That business has been profitable from the start, even without a primary focus on revenue and profit.

This is an opportunity for any of our listeners right now. If you're in the early stages of growing a business, I can tell you firsthand, the best decision I ever made—one of our mutual friends, Berg, was talking to me early on. As you may or may not know, his first business was a sewer and water excavation business in Denver.

He was right around the time I was starting this business, and he was able to give me some advice pretty early on that really fast-tracked us. I think it comes back to this concept: hire before you actually think that you need it.

He pushed me early on; he said, “Look, man, you cannot be doing everything. You have to hire someone to help you with the administrative tasks.” So, by making that decision and really investing upfront, it paid dividends over the next 18 to 20 months.

She has since moved on, but it’s because we got to this point of living in an expensive mountain town—like you’re overqualified for the role. She helped us greatly; she did her job very well. But, you know, I’ll keep her information private, but she was overqualified for the go.

This is where I see this being such a great opportunity for small local service business owners like myself and a lot of our listeners. So, where can they find this business?

Baird Kleinsmith: Yeah, so HireLATAM.com, and we've got a couple of buttons on the website for hiring in Latin America or have us hire. That just goes to a basic Typeform where interested parties can submit their information. At the end of the form, there’s a Calendly link to book a call with our sales team.

We’ve got a couple of sales folks—everybody in this business is based in Latin America, with the exception of my partner Ed and me. Ed is originally from Puerto Rico but lives in St. Louis; I'm of course in Colorado.

But every single one of the other folks in this business is in Latin America. You mentioned you’ve gone through this process; you had a sales call. Did you have a call with Anna?

Austin Gray: Yes, I did!

Baird Kleinsmith: Anna’s in Panama, and she's a perfect demonstration of the kind of people that we can hire. That’s one of the things I love about this service: the proof of our product is in our sales process.

You get on the phone call with a salesperson in Latin America who's super well-spoken, understands our business really well, understands the remote talent environment in Latin America really well, and they’re a perfect example of the kinds of people we can find.

So, if any of your listeners want to go to the website, submit your information, and schedule a call with the sales team—which would be Anna or a couple of other folks—it’s no pressure. We’re happy to take those phone calls even as an exploratory step if anybody’s just interested in learning more.

They're experts; they can walk through the different salary ranges for different types of roles. There’s no money involved until we actually make a placement.

We have some clients go through the process; they get candidates from us, and they just decide either they don’t have a need anymore, or maybe the candidates aren’t what they expect. There’s no pressure to hire somebody if you decide not to hire; that’s fine—there's no money out of your pocket. You’ve had the opportunity to see what's available.

But in most cases, people end up hiring one of the candidates we present. And then you mentioned our pricing model; we decided to do a fixed flat rate model. Most recruiters like us charge a percentage of the first comp—usually about 30% to 35% of year one comp.

We decided to do a fixed flat rate of $2,900 because then it doesn’t create an incentive for us to go find the highest cost talent that a client would accept. It’s a more fair model where our interests are aligned with the clients—and finding the best possible person at the right level of compensation rather than the highest level of compensation that a client could stomach.

Austin Gray: I’m going to break this down for listeners here: so at $1,500 a month, you are looking at an $18,000 a year investment in a person who has experience running the operations of a business.

For somebody who can help you take tasks off your plate that you, as a business owner in the early days, need to be doing, I can’t tell you how much this helped us. Just to have someone on the back end, it’s like when I get a request in on my phone, I can literally forward it to her. I can ask her to help out with things that need to be handled on the phone or on the computer.

Especially if you guys are in a similar industry who are listening—it’s like if you’re operating equipment, that's unsafe. So having somebody on the back end is a big-time help. Just to paint some context: if you’re in the U.S. and you're hiring an office manager for your G&A, the minimum you’re looking at is around $50K.

With your pricing structure being so fair, some people are going to think I'm getting paid as a sales rep for this at this point. But the $2,900 placement fee puts you a little just shy of $21,000 a year investment for G&A. You’d be hard-pressed to be able to find that here in the U.S.

This is why I'm excited to continue the process with you guys. I think what you're doing is really cool, and the fact that your mission is to help those people get high-quality jobs is just awesome.

At the time of publishing this, it sounds like this will still be available as an offer for the Venezuelan buyers, correct?

Baird Kleinsmith: Yes, we’ve got dozens of candidates in Venezuela across a bunch of different roles, so we’ll keep this offer going until we exhaust our Venezuelan candidate database. I mean, I think this will create additional candidate demand, and our database of pre-vetted Venezuelan workers will continue to expand.

I don’t see things changing there anytime soon, so I don’t see us ending this offer anytime soon.

But going back to one thing—you were just talking about the benefits of hiring somebody and the challenge of managing the work plus all the admin. From a consumer perspective, I can’t tell you how frustrating it is to chase contractors down to schedule jobs, send me invoices, and get the work done.

In most cases, the individual operator is the guy doing the work—he’s doing the HVAC, the plumbing work, he’s taking the calls, scheduling the jobs. It’s a mess, and from a consumer perspective, it’s not a great experience.

Whereas if that plumber or HVAC contractor hired a back office admin that answered the phones and handled scheduling, it would make their customer service experience so much better and probably create a much more efficient business operation, making that owner more money.

Austin Gray: It would! I can speak to this from experience. The second we invested in this, it paid dividends. The reason is that, and this is not a knock on any other contractors out there, but the bar is set very low in these industries.

A lot of contractors just got into the trade because they know how to do the work and they enjoy doing it. They’re good at it, but most don’t necessarily know how to take it to the next step and actually run a business out of it.

This is one step that you can literally set yourself so far above the competition because when a customer calls in or they fill out a form on your website, you have automations on the back end to get a call immediately from somebody.

“Hey, this is Austin with Bearclaw,” or “Hey, this is Gabrielle with CL Services, right?” That initial touchpoint is huge, and it sets you far above most other contractors in the game.

Baird Kleinsmith: Once again, not to beat a dead horse, but I'm excited about this process. Tactically, we’ve got a few more minutes here before we wrap up, as I know we’re approaching the top of the hour. How are you doing on time?

Baird Kleinsmith: I’m good. I’ve got plenty of time!

Austin Gray: Okay, all right. My daughter gets up here and my wife is out of town for work, so I’ve got a few minutes after the top of the hour. But we’ll finish up here. Tactically, can we riff on just some ideas?

I’d love to hear your perspective on what are some low-hanging fruit tasks, really in any business—whether you’re in self-storage or contracting—what you should just get off your plate as an owner.

Baird Kleinsmith: Just think about the sort of the lowest value tasks that anybody could do. I think one is answering the phones. If you’ve got somebody who’s there specifically to answer phones, take customer calls, and schedule jobs—all of that—I think that’s like the lowest hanging fruit.

Building a super responsive customer service organization— I would say that could just be one person. Then I think things like invoicing—sending invoices out to customers, following up with customers for reviews.

My self-storage properties do really well in Google rankings in part because we’re really proactive in gathering customer reviews. I have a bonus structure where I pay my team for every four or five-star Google review they get.

We’ve got, you know, you look at any of my properties—even the small ones—they have dozens of five-star reviews. We’re way above any of our competitors in the area, and consumers look at reviews.

If you do a Google search for storage in your area, your eyes are going to go to that property that has a 4.7 star rating with 50 reviews. If the next guy has like five reviews and a 3.5 star rating, we’re going to gather so many more clicks and calls from that.

Anything else that’s administrative—managing vendors—this is stepping up a little bit, but my team manages all of our vendors, from gate repairs to major excavation. We’ve got a new retaining wall being built at one of our properties that was completely coordinated by my remote team.

They went and found vendors, got bids, presented those bids to me. I made the final decision on which one to go with, and then they manage—like they’re doing all the project management.

This one project that’s happening now at one of my properties requires shutting down one of the lanes at our property and coordinating all that. They’re just doing all of that to make sure that it runs smoothly.

I think I would just separate your tasks into low-value tasks and high-value tasks. You mentioned it—your highest value tasks are probably getting new customers and making sure the jobs are done properly—building your team of people to do those jobs.

Lower value tasks are probably answering the phones, sending invoices, tracking down payments, sorting receipts—like all those things that don’t require your specific skill set.

Austin Gray: Have you figured out a solution for receipts as far as being 100% hands-off?

Baird Kleinsmith: Not 100% hands-off. Receipts are a challenge; we try to—we handle it pretty easily. Most of our receipts are electronic like we pay our utility bills every month, and we get an email receipt for those. We’re paying contractors and getting invoices and receipts via email.

We’ve set it up so that we can automatically email those receipts to QuickBooks. There’s definitely some manual intervention there. In some cases, you have to print an email receipt as a PDF for it to get into QuickBooks properly, but I think there’s some tool that could make that easier—maybe you can just snap a photo of those receipts and put them in QuickBooks.

Even QuickBooks might have a tool in their mobile app where you just snap a photo of each of the receipts and it automatically drops into QuickBooks. Their system is pretty smart; it can read the receipts and suggest an attachment to a certain transaction.

But that’s where I’d start—look and see if the QuickBooks mobile app has a solution that could make that easier for you.

Austin Gray: Definitely! As far as other things you’ve delegated to people on your team, let’s talk a little higher level—management or operations.

Baird Kleinsmith: A couple of areas: marketing. My team now fully manages our websites. They’re constantly updating new content on our websites, like blog posts. They manage our Google profiles.

Google really likes it when you actively manage your Google profile and you’re consistently posting updates and offers. You're responding to messages, responding to reviews—like my team has taken over all of that, which is pretty beneficial.

In our industry, in self-storage, we have this auction process—this lien process—where if somebody doesn’t pay their bill, we have a lien on the items they have stored. There are specific state laws that dictate the process we have to go through to collect payments and auction units, if we need to.

The team’s taken over defining that process. I’ve given them the resources where they can understand the local Colorado and New Mexico storage lien laws. They’ve configured the software and our processes to make sure we're in compliance with those laws.

Vendor management has been really big—enabling the team to go out and find contractors for specific jobs, get bids, and then ultimately build a database of preferred contractors.

If a gate goes haywire in Pagosa Springs, we’ve got that list of gate vendors in Pagosa Springs in order of priority. We know, you know, you start with contact number one; if they’re not available, you move to contact number two.

I think we covered a good amount here, and I’m sure I’m missing a ton, but today all I really do is a little bit of bookkeeping each month, which I could offload as well, but I just like to clear my bank feeds because I like to look at every transaction that’s happened in the month. I’m a stickler for clean books—I make sure every transaction is categorized properly.

So I do a little bookkeeping each month, and I focus on revenue management. I look at the occupancy of properties and decide to make decisions about existing customer price increases—changing street prices and that kind of thing.

Actually, that's another point: competitive research. I’ve got my team making calls every month to competitive facilities to check prices and occupancy, ensuring we have a comparison of where our prices are versus our competitors. There’s so much that they can do.

Austin Gray: How do you manage your SOPs and communication with your remote team?

Baird Kleinsmith: We use Dialpad as our phone software. Each of our properties has a phone number that routes into Dialpad, which has a mobile app, desktop app, and web browser access. Dialpad has a team chat function, individual and team chat functions, very similar to Slack.

All my communication with my team is through Dialpad. For storing documents, SOPs, any sort of knowledge base stuff, we use Notion and Google Drive as well.

To be honest, I don’t even have much insight into that—I’ve built it a little bit of a black box for me, but I know it works and it runs. Everybody does what they’re supposed to do, so I don’t even know—I wouldn’t even know how to access our Notion page or anything like that.

That’s a highlight for me: I should have a contingency plan for if Desiree were to become unavailable. We need to ensure we know where all that stuff is.

Austin Gray: Could you have her document everything that she creates with a Loom video attached and back it up in Google Drive?

Baird Kleinsmith: We do use Loom a lot. I do need to make sure that all that stuff is backed up. This is a great benefit of this conversation for me. I sometimes think about worst-case scenarios.

I need to have a contingency plan in that worst-case scenario if she were to become unavailable. The last thing I’m going to ask, and then we’ll wrap it up here: what tools are you using?

Baird Kleinsmith: So we use Notion, Melo, Dialpad, Google Drive—any other tools that might be critical there?

Austin Gray: Any ideas for paying your contractors remotely?

Baird Kleinsmith: I pay them—so a few of them have US bank accounts, and I pay them using Melo. I can set up recurring payments. One of them we pay via PayPal, and I’ve actually offloaded that to my ops manager, Desiree.

She now has a business PayPal account linked to the business checking account for the property management business, and she sends those payments via PayPal. I have another person in Venezuela who doesn’t have a US bank account, and I pay them using a local app called Zelle.

It allows me to load value into my wallet—like US dollar value into my wallet—using a credit card, and I can transfer that value to her. It’s a little bit of a hack for me to work around, but in most cases, Wise is really easy to use; we probably use Wise more than any other money transfer service for paying the Hire LATAM team and anyone that we handle payments for—Hire LATAM clients to their workers.

Austin Gray: Does Wise work for Venezuela?

Baird Kleinsmith: Wise does not work for Venezuela. I use Zelle. There are other options that work there, too. I can’t remember—there are others; I just don’t have them on the top of my mind here.

Austin Gray: Well, Baird, this has been so much fun, and I’m glad we finally got to actually talk in person. I know we've engaged back and forth on social media for a couple of years now.

I’m definitely looking forward to hitting the slopes this winter and maybe doing a mountain bike ride at some point. I appreciate you being on!

Baird Kleinsmith: Absolutely! This was long overdue. We’re in different parts of the great state of Colorado, but at some point, we’ll get together on skis or bikes and meet in person. Thanks, Austin. This was cool; I enjoyed it!

Austin Gray: Yeah, definitely! Is there anything else you’d like to share with our listeners before we wrap this episode up?

Baird Kleinsmith: No, you can find me on X, formerly known as Twitter, as my handle is SultanOfStorage. I don’t post as frequently on LinkedIn, but I need to. You can find me on LinkedIn as my real name, Baird Kleinsmith. I can assure you I am the only Baird Kleinsmith on LinkedIn!

Austin Gray: I love it! Well, thanks again for being on, and listeners, thanks again for listening and supporting the show. I reviewed the analytics last week—I was telling Baird before we started the show—and a lot of you people are listening, and I can't tell you how much I appreciate that!

It's just a fun side project that started in the winter during our slow season, and it’s becoming something people are listening to, so I’m very thankful for you guys. If you are getting value out of this, please leave us a five-star review. Just like building a service business—and Baird mentioned it as well—getting five-star reviews on your Google My Business profile is super important, but in podcasting, five-star reviews are really helpful too!

If you don’t mind, take 30 seconds. If you’ve gotten some value out of this, leave a review. Also, if you have anybody who you’d like us to interview on the show, you can leave those in the comments below.

If you’re listening on YouTube, we would sure appreciate a like and subscribe. Thanks again for listening to the OWNR OPS podcast. Don’t forget: work hard, do your best, never settle for less. We’ll see you in the next episode!

I wanted to introduce you to two of my growth partners: Striker Digital specializes in SEO services specifically for local service businesses. Bod and Andy, the two co-founders, have helped me get Bearclaw Land Services to the number one search result on Google for my specific search term. If you want to learn more, visit stryker-digital.com—that's S-T-R-Y-K-E-R-Digital.com.

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