https://youtu.be/mucIb1Ahq6c
Karla Singson is the CEO of Scalewind, a company that provides creative, tech, customer & admin support to companies that want to grow and scale without the hassles of HR, legal, and manpower management. We talk about the Distributing Growth framework, the scary part of growing a business, and factors to consider before outsourcing tasks.
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Ignite Distributed Growth with Karla Singson
Our guest is Karla Singson, the CEO of ScaleWind, a company that provides turnkey teams, creative tech, customer support and admin support for companies who want to grow and scale without the hassles of HR, legal, and manpower management. Wow, that's the holy grail. Back up to the show, Karla.
Hey, Steve, and I'm super excited to be here. I'm grateful to be invited to your podcast, and I am super thrilled to be talking about outsourcing, team management, and growth today.
Absolutely, that's why you're here. We're going to talk about all these topics, but before we go there, I'm very curious about your journey and what led you to launching this company and you're here in the U.S., which is also pretty unique for these kind of outsourcing companies to be run from here. And you also do automation. So please tell us a little bit about your journey and how did you hone in on this niche that you are serving?
Right. So I've owned service-based businesses since, you know, I say I would, you know, still I was 17 and I used to own a flower shop, an events company. And in 2019, I moved to Las Vegas from the Philippines to start an events company. And when the pandemic happened, we had to close that company and my investor and I were brainstorming on what a good business would be. So I was an SEO writer, you know, in 2009, and I've always kind of used the internet and writing and my knowledge in digital marketing to start businesses in outsourcing also, you know, on the side, and I just thought that it would be a great time to go all in on this specific industry.
And so I sold my ownership and the other companies anyway to my sister, and then I focused on Skill Win. So during the pandemic, we started Skill Win. We initially served companies who needed virtual assistance, creative work, and tech work, and basically helped them grow. Because with the trend of people being laid off, people being transferred, people moving to the suburbs, and, you know, we, you know, a lot of people did movement, you know, decisions over the pandemic. They moved to a different country, moved back to, you know, with their families and all that.
So the job market was in a weird place, you know, in a very peculiar place in the U.S. And, but it doesn't mean that these services are not needed. So even if they laid off, say, someone, it doesn't mean that they don't need that service in a company. So we hope to be able to bridge that gap, and that's why we started managed outsourcing company. So from 2020, when we started this business till now, I probably say, you know, we were able to grow from zero to a seven-figure company without spending anything on ads. And we're just really excited to further this growth and help more companies scale.
Yeah, that's a very remarkable, I mean, many companies were retrenching during the pandemic and you were actually expanding. They say that in a recession, sometimes the best time to launch a business, because if it's sticky during a recession, you've got to take off afterwards. So I'm very curious. This was not a question I was thinking about, but now that you mentioned, you know, virtual assistant, creative and tech being your three legs of the stool. I wonder why did you pick these three? And if you had two more slots, what would they have been?
Right. That's a very good question. So right now we actually have seven brands already. We expanded to customer support. So we have a call center doing customer support. And then we also recently expanded to copywriting. So we provide copywriters and content writers and our team is also trained in AI-empowered copywriting. So it's, as the technology continues to advance, like we have AI art now too, which, you know, like you can just type certain items that you want drawn into like an animation and the computer will just generate, you know, original images. It's really pretty crazy.
I tried it last week and, you know, so technology is always advancing, but we're also always like improving, you know, our team skills to catch up with that. So the reason why we chose virtual assistants, creative and tech is I would say with my tenure in the digital marketing industry in the online business world, these are the top three things that people always need. So if you have a business and you have a website, the mere insurance that your website does not go down or if you're launching something new, you would need a new page. So there's, it's kind of, there's always work for designers and tech people. And of course, virtual assistants, because as businesses grow and as more people, you know, try to dive into business also for the first time, affordable help is always, you know, welcomed.
Affordable help is very welcome. So, you know, this podcast is all about blueprints and frameworks. And when we had our earlier conversation, we were talking about what kind of framework would be the most appropriate that you could share with our listeners. And we are well into the 110 plus episodes. So, we have seen a lot of frameworks. But you talked about distributing growth. And I was really thinking about this whole idea of distributing growth, what does it mean and how does it empower entrepreneurs to distribute growth?
So I'm really excited to share this because I actually don't talk about this part in detail because it's not a secret strategy, but I think it's a good way to always remember, especially for people who are starting their business and growing their business and really investing in their business, you know, for the first time. So, as I've mentioned before, we have achieved, you know, incredible growth in like on our first year, we were able to achieve six figures in monthly recurring revenue just after one year. And I think that the main reason why we were able to do that is because of this framework. And so what we did is that the distributing growth framework is distributing accountability and the desire to grow amongst your teammates.
Distributing growth means distributing accountability and the desire to grow amongst your teammates.Share on X
And with that also distributing the rewards. So what we did is that we built two teams. So we have an acquisition team and a retention team. And then we obviously told the people like which team they belong to, and then we let them just focus on the tasks that are involved in that process. So team acquisition is just focused on showing, say, my brand or SkillWin's brand to as many people as possible, and then getting as many appointments as possible, and getting as many introductions as possible. And right now we're also investing in getting me, you know, booked on more and more podcasts, more and more, you know, stages to speak. So that's part of their task. And then the retention team is just focused on retention and making sure clients are happy, expectations are met.
And so even small things such as, you know, forms, onboarding forms, support cards, everything that makes a client happy, delighted, and makes us want – makes them want to tell other people about us, that's their job. And then the next step is we were able to identify the needle movers and the speed bumps of every process along the way. And so, for example, there are certain items that would stop or prevent from someone to be acquired as a new client. So for example, how do we improve show up rate in appointments? So the way we do that is maybe this is our strategy. Maybe we send them a text reminder and an email reminder and maybe we'll call them too, or maybe we'll tell them, you know, if you show up, we're gonna give you a coupon code or something like that.
So we actually always differ the promos that we give or the rewards that we give. But then when we saw that speed bump, then there might be other items that we have to solve or say invoicing. So there's also speed bumps along invoicing. Like there are times when a client would say yes to the call on the call, like, oh yeah, I'm ready to, I'm ready to sign up, you know, send me the invoice. But then there would be time when, you know, between that call and the invoice is paid. And sometimes the client just forgets about it. So we identify what these speed bumps are and then we solve them. And then we also reward every person that gets to solve it.
So I'll give you an example. So we reward our acquisition team for booking appointments. We reward the salesperson for closing the deal. We reward the person who was able to get an invoice paid through a follow-up. And then on the retention side, we reward the customer success managers so it gets to retain every client every month. We reward them per client per month. And also we reward them for being able to cross-sell a client to other services. So as you can see, we have distributed our growth by distributing the rewards and distributing accountability and identifying where our real opportunities lie for growth.
So a little caveat here, we are a subscription-based service and we really lean on having monthly recurring revenue. So you have to include all of these rewards in your cost of acquisition and you have to probably accept the fact that you probably be profitable on the second or third month of the subscription. So it's kind of a, the cost of acquisition might be higher, but 100% it's more, it's definitely worth it. And in my experience, it's really more effective for long-term growth.
You know getting to cover the cost of acquisition within two or three months is actually a very good number. For big companies,
