Adam Pisk lives in Sydney, Australia, and just turned 45. He has 5 year old twins, and at the time of this recording, had just taken them on a trip to explore theme parks. He enjoys good wine, good steak, and good people. And the best place you can get a steak? In his backyard on his pit. Outside of this, as he puts it, he is unfortunately one of those people that really enjoys their work. IE, considers it a hobby.Adam started his outsourcing journey in 2001, specifically in the manufacturing industry. He couldn't get the engineers he needed, and built an offshore engineering team. Once he got that working, he wondered what else he could outsource. Eventually, he offshored operations for a different company, and noticed all metrics improved. He then realized there is something to this.This is the creation story of Bruntwork.SponsorsP0 SecuritySpeakeasyQA WolfLinkshttps://www.bruntwork.co/https://www.linkedin.com/in/adampisk/Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
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In the developing world, you have traffic North Americans couldn't comprehend unless they'd been there. Very few people that we employ have the means to live within a close vicinity of an office. If you are at a $5 to $8 an hour type salary, you're living out a long way away. And your journey to the office is typically two to three hours each way. The commute is a complete waste of time.
And so when you have and you give people the right infrastructure to be able to work from home, it gives them four to six hours a day, or sometimes eight to 10 hours a day, depending on where people were coming from, of their life back. My name is Adam Pisko. I'm one of the co-founders of Bruntwork.co.
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With over 100 five-star reviews on G2 and customer testimonials from SalesLoft, Grotta, and Autotrader, you're in good hands. Join the Wolfpack at QAwolf.com. Adam Pisk lives in Sydney, Australia, and just turned 45. He has five-year-old twins, and at the time of this recording, had just taken them on a trip to explore theme parks.
He enjoys good wine, good steak, and good people, and the best place you can get a steak? In his backyard on his pit. But outside of this, as he puts it, he is unfortunately one of those people that really enjoys their work, i.e. considers it a hobby. Adam started his outsourcing journey in 2001, specifically in the manufacturing industry.
He couldn't get the engineers he needed and built an offshore engineering team. And once he got that working, he wondered what else he could outsource. Eventually, he offshored operations for a different company and noticed all metrics improved. Again, realizing there's something to this. This is the creation story of Brunt Work.
We're an outsourcing company. What that means is that we have staff in six countries around the world, predominantly Colombia and the Philippines, but in other locations as well. North American companies, European companies, Australian companies generally will engage us and we then find the best global talent for them.
And we then engage with that talent, with those staff, and they work directly then for those other companies. In simple terms, what it means is a company from the US goes, I need someone to do this job rather than looking for someone in the surrounding five mile radius who can come to an office every day and you're limited to the depth of talent.
With us, you basically say, I want the best in the world for this price I'm prepared to pay. Really, pretty much any job, we have hundreds of different job titles and thousands of agents from CFOs to admin assistants to bookkeepers to sales to digital marketing and everything in between.
You can get someone who's great at it from somewhere else in the world at a far less cost and often better capability because you've just got a bigger pool of talent to look for. I started my outsourcing journey in actually in 2001. So I've been doing this for a very long time in different ways.
I was in the manufacturing industry and at that time in Australia, I was manufacturing for a global market. I couldn't get the engineering expertise and resources in Australia at the time that I needed in terms of the designing the machines that I was looking to manufacture. And that led me to build an offshore engineering team at that time.
And then from there, I was like, OK, if I can get skilled engineers that don't need to be in the office with me and this is back in 2001 where we didn't have anywhere near the technology that we have now to manage remote staff. What else can I do? And then I started expanding that in that current business.
In 2014, I got out of the manufacturing business and I joined a technology company that was run by my current co-founders. This company still exists, but it was a marketplace business where you're dealing with contractors as your customer base and contractors didn't want to pay for marketing leads, which is what this business provides.
The economics of that business, the metrics just didn't work because of the payroll cost. And so the first thing that I was really involved in was moving that entire operations offshore to lower that cost base. But not only did we lower the cost base, which made that business profitable, almost every metric involved with those particular teams, once we moved them from local to offshore, improved.
The offshore sales teams beat the local sales teams. The offshore developers were able to deliver far more in terms of their sprints, et cetera, productivity base. Our customer support was faster in terms of responding to tickets, got better MPS.
So we then started thinking about it and going, okay, if we can move an entire business offshore and be more profitable and grow more and have more revenue and have more productivity, there's really something to this. When COVID hit, given this business was focused on contractors, that then meant that the business basically halted. We had staff that had been with us a long time.
Obviously, our customer base couldn't be in Australia. There were very big lockdowns. This was an Australian-based business. So this business was going to collapse. There was nothing you really could do. And offshore and government support, et cetera, didn't work because we had an offshore team. So Australian government wasn't going to support us to pay an offshore team.
So we had to think about and go, how can we save the jobs of our staff? They've been with us a long time. What are we going to do? And we knew how to outsource because we've done it ourselves. And so we started looking at other at basically customers or other businesses that we had relationships with that could benefit from our expertise.
And we got a couple of clients pretty quickly that needed services within COVID that they didn't have. So basically businesses that had bricks and mortar stores. So they needed to pivot to a digital model. We had developers, we had customer support, we had salespeople. We basically said, we can jump in very quickly. We've got existing staff, they're trained.
We've just got to understand your product and we can ramp up your operations. And we had one of the largest supermarket chains in the east coast of Australia come to us. They didn't have a digital presence. We set up their digital presence in two weeks and their online delivery. And they started doing $5 million a week in revenue within a quite a big success story and that got around.
Other people then approached us and then Bruntwork was born.
Okay, so this will be interesting where you start. I'm curious about what you would consider, you know, the MVP for Brent work, right? So there is not exactly a like digital product or something here.
Maybe there's some technology involved in places, but the MVP could have been that, you know, when you were outsourcing folks for different companies and improving their operations, or it could have been after wherever you want to take it. But tell me about the MVP, how long did it take to create and bring it to life? And what sort of tools were you using?
You wouldn't think it was technology, but it really is technology in a lot of ways, combined with really good people. There's three and a half thousand companies globally that do the type of thing that we do in outsourcing. Might be more. That was actually an old stat. So you got to look at what is the difference? How can you differentiate?
And the reason why we've had such massive fast growth is the combination of a couple of factors that we do differently. Number one, we came from a business before that had to rely on digital marketing and lead acquisition. So we understand from a marketing digital perspective how to obtain clients globally, but also more importantly, how to get the reach of the best talent and agents globally.
And that's the other big factor that a lot of our competitors just don't know how to do. And so with us, for example, we get now about 18,000 resumes a month of agents that are wanting to work for us.
When you understand the technology and the strategies on how to do that, you then drive a lot of talent to you as opposed to having to just place ads on job boards, etc., which our competitors mainly do and try and attract attention that way. We have a lot of inbound people. wanting to work for us, which gives us the selection of the best.
And then when you get that level of scale, you then have to have the technology in order to filter that effectively. So you can respond to clients fast and more accurately. And that's something that if you've got a manual team, it's not as effective as AI driven engines in order to do that.
We've invested really heavily in AI technology on the recruiting space and the interviewing space that goes all through our business to help us make better decisions and matching the right agent to the right company. That's quite unique in our space. We don't think anyone else has developed that to the extent. You need technology to be able to give you the best result to win those interviews.
those projects. So technology is very good. And then obviously our company culture, we have nearly 600 Glassdoor reviews from staff that work for us, average rating of 4.9 out of 5. So creating that culture in the developing world where people feel part of something, a lot of that comes down to trust and reliability in the developing world.
You have to have the infrastructure and the technology to pay people all around the world and receive money all around the world. So there's a technology element to that too, and a way to do that to make sure that you are never late on paying anyone.
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How do you go about deciding the next most important thing to do, to address, to build with Bruntwork?
In the beginning, a lot of those processes that I mentioned were manual, but it was okay being manual when you were hiring 20 people a month or 30 people a month or 40 people a month. At the moment, when you're hiring five to 600, maybe 700 a month this month, you've just got to scale that you have to have that technology associated with what you do.
So when you're hiring at scale and you're growing that fast, you've got to have the right growth strategies to make sure you bring on the right internal team that has that sort of mindset that is okay to put in the hours to grow, seize the bigger picture, et cetera.
The difference is now when you start, obviously, you've got a very small team and growth rates that are amazing at that time because you're off a very low base. But you want to keep those growth rates going off a higher base now as you're more established. And we're not that established. We're not even four years old. I think we're still fairly new.
It's how what new technology can we do to make it easier for our clients, easier for our staff so we can do things better. And that's really what we do at Bruntwork as the name. It's about us doing the Bruntwork, but we want to use technology to do that even better and more effectively. So your agents and us can work on more important strategic things to deliver a better outcome.
So this will be an interesting question because you're finding the best people, but there's also, there's people that are the folks that are being outsourced to, but there's also your team. So I'm curious about both those things. How did you go about building your team and what did you look for in those people that, you know, indicated that they were the winning horses to join you?
And I think also, interestingly, I'd be curious about how you vet the people that you outsource to. How do you find the best people?
Finding the right people for our companies, as you said, is one thing. And then as you're growing faster, you've got to build your internal team consistently as well.
And the risk when you're doing that, and we're very aware of it and we're trying our best to manage it, is when you need people to manage your growth and you need them quickly, there's the risk you compromise on quality and that then can destabilize everything that you've worked for if you have a couple of bad, toxic people that then enter the business.
We go through a similar process internally that we do with clients because we think that works. And then again, it's finding people that have that right mindset and cultural fit that see a bigger vision and people that can buy into that vision. Our vision is very clear. We want to improve the economic position of the people, of the companies that engage with us and the people that work with us.
We know if we help clients grow and make more money, they'll hire more people.
we know if they hire more people they help our agents and in the developing world there's a multiplier effect with that so unlike in australia or the us canada etc where if you're employing someone you generally might be supporting one family in the developing world it's more than likely you're supporting multiple families with that income You might be supporting a village in some instances.
So there's a real multiplier effect in the employment game in the developing world. So the good you do in helping people really is extended when you get people a good job. We need people that are looking at it from the right perspective, that are happy to work in an environment that we hope doesn't have much ambiguity about it. We're really clear in our vision strategy, but it's fast growing.
So you've got to be able to be adaptable. That's what we look at internally. And externally for our clients, it's really understanding their business and then matching the type of candidates that we think are going to fit in, not only with the skills, but with the culture of that company that we're putting them forward to.
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And this will be super interesting because there's scalability of the technology you're using internally, right, to enable the operation to run and to enable your team to work better. But there's also scalability of people, which is hard. So I'm curious if there have been interesting areas where you've had to fight scalability as you've grown.
As you grow as a company, you need people in different positions. You have people in management positions when you're smaller, right? And they're great for that stage of the business. And then as you grow, the question is, are they still the right people? They might be great people, but are they great now when they're managing a team of 200 or 100 rather than a team of 10?
That's where you have to sometimes make some hard decisions. And we've had to where you have good people that have bought into the vision, but are they the right? They were the right person at a particular stage. Are they the right person beyond that stage? In order to do that, our view is we value loyalty very highly.
So we will do everything to get someone to a stage to take on that additional role. And we do a lot of internal training. We have a whole internal training team to try and train people who don't necessarily have the skills. And we engage with a lot of external training to get our staff to have those capabilities.
So the idea for us is if we've got someone with the right mindset and the right attitude, if we can develop their skills into a new position, we'll do everything possible to do that. Sometimes it's just not possible. And then you've got to place that person in a role that is better suited.
So as you step out on the balcony, you look at all that you've built with Bruntworks specifically, what are you most proud of?
There's two parts of our business that I think make a very big impact to the people that work for us. And now when we have thousands of staff, you can see that at the level of scale. One is we are a work from home business, and that's controversial in some parts of the world and something that we have to explain in context, particularly to U.S.
clients, to Australian clients, where if you're going to the office, you're driving down a highway in an ICE car listening to a podcast to maybe talking on the phone. It's not a difficult part of your life to do that commute. And therefore, when people look at it, they go, It's not a big deal for everyone to go back to the office or in New York, you might be on a subway. Yeah, it's a bit crowded.
It might be 40 minutes, but it's not that bad in the rain. So in the developing world, you have traffic North Americans couldn't comprehend unless they've been there and you have rain and you have vehicles that are old and old.
polluted and the journey to the office very few people that we that we employ have the the means to live within a close vicinity of an office just doesn't work like that in the developing world those are where the diplomats and the big business people live if you are at a five to eight dollar an hour type salary you're living out a long way away
And your journey to the office is typically two to three hours each way. So you're spending four to six hours a day traveling and you're not traveling in a nice car. You're traveling on the back of a jeepney in the rain most of the times. Squashed up and you can't have your phone out or whatever or listen to a podcast because it gets stolen. The commute is a complete waste of time.
in the developing world. And so when you give people the right infrastructure to be able to work from home, it gives them four to six hours a day, sometimes eight to 10 hours a day, depending on where people are coming from, of their life back. And that's just mind blowing what that does when you've got four to eight hours of every day back and you're spending nine hours in an office.
You're sleeping on the jibney is what people were doing or in the office. So sick days go down, work-life balance improves, productivity improves because people sleep and they're happy. If you need people to meet up, okay, they can meet up once a month, once every two weeks. You can organize a boardroom, et cetera, for people to meet up if you actually need that collaboration.
We had offices for years, so we ran a lot of testing. Companies that were in office versus out of the office doing the same thing, remote teams versus in office. In the developing world, it was absolutely conclusive that productivity, efficiency, all better in a work from home environment. And that's been a major thing that I'm very proud of as a business that we've been able to do that.
Let's flip the script then a little bit. Tell me about a mistake you made and how you and your team responded to it.
We're actually new to this industry. We started only three and a bit years ago. We had outsourced ourselves as a company that was doing outsourcing, but we'd never run an outsourcing business. None of the founders had any experience in that. And I think that's had a positive and a negative.
The positive is a lot of people that have been doing something in an industry for many years just continue to do things the same way. And we've been able to look at things differently. So I suppose from that disruptive sort of mindset, say, hey, there's no reason why we should be going down that particular path. The negative of it is you don't know what you're doing.
You're testing and trying a lot of different things as you go. One mistake that we made that I was actually proud how we recovered from it is early on, we took on a client and it was a very large client. It was our largest client by a long way. We could see from fairly early on their operating methods weren't aligned to us.
They had an online store that were lying to their customers about stock levels, inventory levels, delivery times, and that didn't sit well with us. I suppose the mistake we made at the time was not doing our due diligence enough on bringing on a client like that. But then, even though that company was at that stage, about 50% of our revenue, it was early on,
We decided to terminate that client, which was a big move. It was meant 200 staff that were working for us. We had to find other jobs, which was very challenging. And losing half your revenue by terminating your biggest client is a difficult decision. But it ended up being the right decision.
We grew much faster and we weren't distracted by the additional pressure, stress issues that this one client gave to us.
What does the future look like for Bruntwork, for what you offer and for your team?
We're really optimistic. I suppose the long-term future, I'm not sure. And I'll give you the context for that. AI is moving quickly. And we've seen, even in the past month, changes in AI technology that's
What it's meant is that people from the developing world are now on a more equal playing field because they may not have had the Harvard, Stanford education, but AI has really leveled the playing field where you can get someone at $5 an hour to now really as effectively do a lot of the work that you're paying someone $50 an hour locally to do because the AI just enhances their capabilities.
And so at the moment, there's been a real boom in what we do in partnering a person from the developing world who's smart, but understands how to utilize AI to make them even smarter. That's what's really triggered a lot of our ongoing growth in that companies have started to realize that.
And then they get a better experience out of the whole process as well when you match a good person with the right technology. Now, long term, what I'm saying I don't know is obviously for all of us, and I'm talking every single person in every single role, including a podcast host that can have an AI bot ask questions, you know, where does it lead to? I think we all need to be careful of that.
But at the moment, it's meant a lot more productivity and efficiency for our agents to deliver better value for our customers. And therefore, they're hiring more people. So it's been good now. Where it leads to, I'm a little scared.
Curious where it's going to go myself. Let's switch to you, Adam. Who influences the way that you work? Name a person or many persons or something you look up to and why.
I started business myself when I was 19. I'm 45. I've been at it a long time. I've had more failures than successes. That's absolutely true. And in the beginning, I think I had more failures because I didn't have enough people to look up to. I'm very lucky in this business now in that I've got two co-founders that really complement my skill sets.
It's not so much the people that for me, someone that I look up to, but I respect them a lot. And I didn't have that support when I was in businesses before. And it meant the pressure was on me to make all the decisions. I came to realize I'm not good at making all the decisions. Some people are. That's not what I'm very good at. Revenue. I'm very good at sales. I'm very good at customer.
I'm very good at leadership. I'm often in the weeds. I'm not that good at strategic. I'm not that good at even though I did accounting is background on the financial side, etc. It's not a strong point for me. The attention to detail is not a good point.
I've got in a position now where I've got two business partners that are very good at what they do, far better than what I am, creates a good balance to the business. And so it's not so much that looking up, but in terms of learning and listening and then making the right decisions, all of us have a voice and we're all good at what we know. So there's a little respect level in that.
In terms of everything else, I'm constantly podcast reading everything out there on sales, revenue, leadership, management. I'm trying to consume always as much as I can. I'm not sure if I could say there's one person I look at specifically over another, but I try and consume everything I can on that consistently. And I make sure to learn every day.
Okay, Adam, last question. So you're getting on a plane and you're sitting next to a young entrepreneur who's built the next big thing. They're jazzed about it. They can't wait to show it off to the world. And can we show it off to you right there on the plane? What advice to give that person having gone down this road a bit?
I had a couple of times the next best thing and I had waves of success. And then I had waves of failure in terms of what I've done. The main reason why I failed at certain times was because I moved too quickly without the right, without enough resources to do it. And I got too, I suppose I had too much ego in that what I was doing was that good. It wasn't going to end.
And both those things caused me to fail in businesses at different points in my life. So one was expanding. When you've got the next biggest thing, you just know you're on something good. You think everyone is going to want it, but you then start pushing hard and you don't necessarily have the cash and the balance sheet to support that.
And that's happened to me where then one thing happens, a big major company then pays you late or something happens in the world. I was in the mining industry. I was selling machinery to that commodity prices dropped 60% overnight and And all of a sudden, mines that I was selling to stopped paying me. It's about that balanced scalability.
And to me, the days of having growth for growth's sake are over. I don't look at it that way. It now needs to be profitable growth. And to some young entrepreneur who's got the next best thing, who's looking to take over the world and looking at number of followers or adopters of their technology or users. Yeah, that's a great metric.
But bottom line has to always be thought about and how much cash do you have in the bank at the end of each month is probably the biggest thing to look at rather than what's your user adoption and what's your growth rate.
I appreciate that answer. That's fantastic advice. I couldn't agree more. Well, Adam, thank you for being on the show today and thank you for telling the creation story of Bruntwork.
Thank you.
Thanks very much, Noah. I enjoyed it. And this concludes another chapter of CodeStory. Code Story is hosted and produced by Noah Laphart. Be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or the podcasting app of your choice. And when you get a chance, leave us a review. Both things help us out tremendously. And thanks again for listening.