In this high-tech episode, Sean Languedoc, Founder and CEO of Outforce.ai – The Global Team Connector, shares how he helps tech ventures propel to their next phase of growth with the right engineering teams at their disposal.
You will discover:
– The three traps most companies fall into when trying to outsource
– The role of culture in outsourcing success
– How a non-tech company should think about outsourcing for their internal technology needs
Episode Transcript
Scott Ritzheimer
Hello Hello and welcome. Welcome once again to the secrets of the high demand coach podcast and I am here with Sean Languedoc who boasts over 25 years of immersion in the tech industry now as the CEO of out force.ai formerly global talent accelerator, Sean’s entrepreneurial journey continues to transform outsourcing from a daunting task to a strategic asset for venture backed companies. The essence of outsourced.ai under Sean’s leadership is to turn the outsourcing maze into a straight path toward accomplishing your mission. It’s about fostering collaborations that hit the ground running, reducing the lead time from onboarding to actual project execution. Beyond his rollout, foresight ay ay, Sean continues to immerse himself in the startup ecosystem as a mentor guiding new entrepreneurs and providing them with the resources and network they need to thrive. Well, Shawn, so excited to have you here. Very, very intrigued by this world of outsourcing I’ve heard you say, and we’ll jump into this here in a moment that everyone’s had a bad outsourcing experience. I’ve had a couple of those myself, but I don’t think it has to be that way. So tell us a little bit about about this world of outsourcing. How did you get into to founding out force.ai?
Sean Languedoc
It was actually the side of a desk while I was building another company, which was Uber meats, trucking. And making sure nobody had an empty backhaul. And I was in the City of Calgary, which is kind of like Houston, it’s an oil town, generally resource based economy. And the oil sector had gone down quite a bit. And they were trying to bring technology into the ecosystem. And I, I saw that there were immigration issues, the United States and Canada had a really good immigration policy for technical workers. So I started to bring us h1 B’s into Canada, and then contracting them back to the United States, just as a side of the desk thing. And because the exchange rate that were favorably for the people in the United States, and it didn’t have to go back to Ukraine, or wherever they’re from, and and then people said, you know, my friends, CEOs in Canada said, hey, you know, Shawn, you bring all these engineers, can you bring in some for me? And then I started a, I said, Well, I probably could. And so I started to build out a real network of sorcerers on the international level to bring people from all over the world, senior engineers only. And and that worked out really well, that was called global talent accelerator. And the accelerator part was really, you had these very high qualified engineers, technically, but there was a cultural gap between North American workstyles. And wherever they came from. And so we were accelerating the soft skills to enable them to work even better. So that worked all great until COVID happened and nobody came into Canada or anywhere, everyone, no one all tribal was suspended. And it made me think back, I mean, I built for tech companies. Every time I build a tech company, I’d hit an inflection point where I had to outsource something. Because I didn’t have enough engineers, I needed a quick fix. And it was the opposite problem of of hiring engineers, there’s just, you know, when you’re hiring engineers, it’s tough to find. They’re all all the good ones are already spoken for. So you got to pull them out. And when you look to outsourcing, it’s easy to find they’re in your inbox 15 times a day, you just hard to filter. So I just figured you know what it’s about time that problem got solved. I mean, there is, you know, on the big enterprise level, there’s all the big usual suspects, IBM, Deloitte, Capgemini. And then down on the very gig worker level, you know, for small, small projects, there’s up work fiber design, 99, whatever you want. But in the middle, where you’re really trying to get a bit of a team assembled, you know, three to five people at the least. There’s nobody to filter all that noise in your inbox. So that’s what I started to do.
Scott Ritzheimer
Wow, wow. So as you mentioned in the intro here, there’s there’s lots of opportunity to find really bad stories for outsourcing. There’s plenty of them out there. I you had your share. I know I’ve had mine. Why, why is that so common and doesn’t have to be this way?
Sean Languedoc
You know, it’s a really good question. And there are many answers to it. But the fundamentals are grouped into three problems. One is nobody really has the time, right? You’re building a company. Your people are solidly, you know, fully booked at what they’re actually doing on their day job. And recruiters are good for hiring but they’re not necessarily good for hiring outsourced engineering firms. So you kind of lean more on your head of engineering, who’s you know, obviously focused on Sprint to sprint and stand ups and their team and and may not be the best suited either at figuring out who’s good. That’s, that’s number one. So you don’t you don’t have time, because you don’t have time. You don’t have a lot of date. If you’re because you’re gonna have time, you’re gonna take some shortcuts, you’re gonna go, Hey, Scott, you know anybody who’s good. And Scott, you may know somebody who’s really good at scaling SAS companies related to coaching, or something like that. And I might be in health tech, and I need something who someone who knows the health industry and the, you know, electronic records management and all the things that come with the health tech or FinTech and banking laws and legislations. So you need somebody who understands your business, not just to understand your technology. And, and those people are, are harder to find. So after hitting you, your friends, you sort of look around on the internet, try and pick a country that usually has good engineers, Brazil, Argentina, Ukraine, whatever. And there, you’re going to find literally 1000s of companies. So again, you don’t know where to choose. So you maybe get ad based, you know, highly profiled companies, or they’re really good at SEO, either way, you end up talking to your this word. The third part is process, right? So you have little time, you have really little data. So you and your process, you don’t have a very good process. So in the process of interviewing engineering companies, he tend to start being the leader, wanting to talk to the leader of the engineering firm. And that’s all they do all day, they answer those kinds of questions. And they sound perfect for what you want to do. And so your expectations go way up. And then you find out the team that you’re they’ve missed, they put us they’ve assigned to you because all their good engineers have been booked out. So they went and found out whoever they could find, are not as good as the as, as advertised. And you had a huge level of disappointment. And that’s where it starts, then it gets worse from there. Sometimes it gets better. But that’s how.
Scott Ritzheimer
What do we do about it? How do you start to turn this around? I mean, it feels like a daunting task. What do you and your team do to help solve that?
Sean Languedoc
Well, we start with lots of data, I forget to forget about us. I’m about to publish a, the definitive guide of outsourcing. So giving away all the secret questions to ask all the processes to do. But it still takes time, right? If you’re going to do it, right. So how we do it is we start with a massive database, we’ve tagged companies, we don’t ask, like, if you talk to somebody, and you said, let’s say you had the health tech company, and and you you go, Hey, we were doing records management for a bunch of hospitals, you guys do Records Management and Health Tech? Oh, yeah, we do that they’re all gonna say yes. And then the problem is you never meet the engineers until the very end when they’re actually in your sprint or on your onboarding process. So we do a reverse, we go from the bottom pop, we we actually look at what engineers are available from the firm that we know is tagged, good that they’re good at Health Tech, and they know they’re good at electronic records. So that’s, that’s part of the process. And, and what we’ve done to sort of fast track that process has introduced a whole bunch of automations to get the information from those agencies about who’s available, what their, what their, what the resumes are, like, done some interviewing on what their communication skills are, like, done some diligence on on what their culture is like, you know, it’s churn rate in the company, got a big turnery. It started off with a great pile engineers, but they can’t keep them what the hell you’re training people every second month. It’s no fun. So those kinds of things.
Scott Ritzheimer
Got it. Good, good, good. So let’s say we’ve we’ve done the work we’ve brought somebody in, when and how should you start assessing whether or not it’s working, right, whether or not you’ve got the right fit, or that they’re going to be able to help you achieve that mission that you’re going after?
Sean Languedoc
Excellent question. I guess I’ll answer that question in a second. But first, you have to go back and figure out whether you’re ready road sourcing, not everybody is ready. You know, you need to have either, and that doesn’t mean you’ve got a project coldly scoped out and you’re ready to go with the details. Because guaranteed the project is going to change scope. It’s really do you have the an enablement to bring them into your company. So some of the best organizations I’ve seen have brought in two or three engineers to join, applaud, and really understand how they work better. And they may have hired three or four more, and they’re in different pods, or they’re going to bring these three once they’re once they’ve experienced the company. And the the rest of the four are gonna join those later. And they’ll create their own pod. But just how to how are you going to onboard? What readiness Do you have? How are you going to manage them? Is there somebody on point in your company where you expect them to just throw ship over the fence and hope it comes back exactly as you told them? So that’s, that’s number one. And then to your point, how do you know whether it’s working or not? Well, we recommend throwing some stuff over the fence that they should know if they’re good and they’re good at what you know. Right? So we recommend throwing on some technical debt for the first couple of Sprint’s, you know, everybody’s got technical debt. And so get them, you know, it’s low risk and could fix something that could be a major problem without risking anything on the future. And that’s a really great way. So you get a couple of Sprint’s of technical debt, and then you know, how these people work and whether they’re going to work out for you?
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, that’s fantastic. As a great, great concept. Everyone has technical debt, I’m still stuck on that. Yes. So I want to jump in here on something that I picked up through the thread of several of your comments. And that is this idea of culture and a different nationalities, culture, different companies culture? What role does comp does culture play an outsourcing? Because I’ve seen several folks who have thought, hey, they don’t have to match our culture. That’s why we outsource what would you say to that?
Sean Languedoc
Oh, my gosh, no, absolutely not. I mean, it has to be aligned. Because that’s where the communications fall apart. Right? Like, if you are a, you know, continuous improvement, because development company, that is just ramping and speed, speed, speed, everything’s happening on a daily basis, you cannot work with a company that is used to waterfall clients. Right? And that is used to project oriented work. They may be experts in domain, they may be deep in the tech stack. But boy, if they don’t fit your work culture, forget about it. So those kinds of things are really, really important. And then you talk about nationalities or different areas of the world. I mean, outsourcing could be outsourcing does not mean people think outsourcing, they think India, all right, personally, I think, oh, low cost labor. And yet well guess what, some of the brightest people are moved 50% of the CTOs of Silicon Valley are from India. So don’t think there aren’t a lot of companies looking to India to pull the best engineers out of their, their IITs, their institutions are, you know, equal to if not better than Stanford, Harvard for Android or MIT for engineering. So, so, big companies sign off $250,000 checks for people from India, it is not therefore low cost, good engineers around the world are, are are are known good engineers, and they will be priced accordingly. But go into the back, India or Southeast Asia generally is a higher culture. So just by the nature of the education system, it’s one where you really don’t challenge that you don’t challenge the teacher, you don’t question authority, the kinds of things blow into their culture of work, where, you know, you’re in a sprint, and you’ve got this, you got some, you got a story that you’re trying to an epic you’re trying to try to play into, you’re trying to build out. And, you know, the person might know more about the product than the rest of the team, but might not say anything from a culture of hierarchy. And, or might not understand what’s really going on and not question not ask, because fear of making mistakes. So that kind of thing can happen in certain cultures. And then the opposite side of the culture, you know, some? I don’t want to, I mean, I’ll just say some Eastern European countries tend to be fairly demonstrative. And you get somebody comes in and says, nobody knew what they’re doing on the odd one, and away we go. And they just crumble everybody. So it kills it. They’re super strong engineers, but they’re acid on your team dynamics, Rice Burroughs, IV. So those kinds of things have to be considered.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah. So one of the thing a number of my clients wouldn’t consider themselves tech companies, but increasingly, they’re relying on technology for their needs. And they might be in you know, doing an internal system for technology needs, or whatever it might be, how should non tech companies think about outsourcing their, their technology needs?
Sean Languedoc
Carefully. Yeah, again, match is really important. And so as an example, like I said, we have 80,000 companies in our database tag based on what they’re really good at. And sometimes there’s, you know, they’re good at four or five things, some things are good at only one. And so some companies are really good at proof of concepts. So if you’ve got an idea, and you’re just starting your first company, you don’t want to give a, you know, 30% of the company to an engineer, buddy, who might not be the right engineer, you know, a few years later when you’re scaling. safe way to do it is to get make sure you have product market fit, and have somebody build the proof of concept. If you’ve got or sort of just integration problems. There are tons of companies that do that. And there’s tons of tons of applications that can do that for you. You know, Zapier, obviously one of the biggest API companies in the world. So there’s technical ways of getting around that, but you need someone who’s a little more architecturally oriented. That might help pull And so fractional use of a CTO might be a really good use of outsourcing.
Scott Ritzheimer
That’s fantastic. So as Christian, I like to ask all my guests and it is this what is the biggest secret you wish wasn’t a secret at all? What’s that one thing that you wish every entrepreneur leader out there listening or watching today knew?
Sean Languedoc
Wow. Wow. That’s that is a phenomenal question. Scott, I love that questions, I would say a. And this is true of everything. That state of mind is the biggest differentiator in everything we do. And if you bring a great state of mind, to work, to relationships, to athleticism, whatever you will perform at a much higher level. And coaching, which is the space that you’re in is one of the best ways to augment state of mind.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, yeah. So. So there’s some folks listening to this, and like you’ve described every problem, and you’ve described how they’ve responded. Right? And they’re just like, how does he know all of this? And they’re thinking, hey, this guy really understands this stuff we need somehow we haven’t had success doing that ourselves, where can they find more out about you and, and Outforce.ai?
Sean Languedoc
Well, thanks for the plug, guy that’s outforce.ai is the place and we we actually have a database an example of our database up on this up on the site as well. So you can play around and see what matches your criteria. It’s redacted until we engage with you but but it’s there. And yeah, like I said, connect through [email protected] And I would or LinkedIn it’s LA and you know if you put my name up on the on the show notes but, Languedoc terribly French name and Sean for Sean’s on LinkedIn either way, connect with me refer to the show and and I’d be happy to send you the that definitive guide which should be ready in about a month and, and help you along in any way you want. I’m I’m always happy to help entrepreneurs in any way I can’t. And, the whole reason I build this company, by the way, Scott, is because I wasted so much time in these outsourcing things. Like sometimes it was a failed, failed relationship sometimes with just slow and not satisfactory, but we push through. And I just don’t want anyone to waste any time talking to companies that are a waste of time.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah. Well, couldn’t end on a better note, Sean, thank you so much. For everything that you share today for the work that you do. It’s really important and it’s very impactful. I highly recommend, if you’re even thinking about thinking about outsourcing, it’s a brilliant resource for you to save an enormous amount of time so go check it out. And for those of you who are watching, listening, you know your time and attention mean the world to us. I hope you got as much out of this conversation as I know I did, and I cannot wait to see you next time. Take care.
Contact Sean Languedoc
Sean Languedoc boasts over 25 years of immersion in the tech industry. As the CEO of Outforce.ai, formerly Global Talent Accelerator, Sean’s entrepreneurial journey continues to transform outsourcing from a daunting task to a strategic asset for venture-backed companies. The essence of Outforce.ai, under Sean’s leadership, is to turn the outsourcing maze into a straight path toward accomplishing the mission. It’s about fostering collaborations that hit the ground running, reducing the lead time from onboarding to actual project execution. Beyond his role at Outforce.ai, Sean continues to immerse himself in the start-up ecosystem as a mentor, guiding new entrepreneurs and providing them with the resources and network to thrive.
Want to learn more about Sean Languedoc’s work at Outforce – The Global Team Connect? Check out his website at https://www.outforce.ai/
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