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Podcast

Augmenting Offshore Teams with AI for Hyper Scale.

February 25, 2025 · Hosted by Dexter Cousins

Dexter Cousins speaks with Simon Lee, founder of Teamified, about the transformative role of AI and offshore teams in Fintech startups. 

Tune in as they discuss tactics on how to build and rapidly scale a Fintech startup by harnessing an offshore workforce augmented by AI and AI Agents. Using real life examples and clients Simon and Dexter share their expertise on how to launch and scale a Fintech without the need to raise $millions.

What does this mean for venture capital and the evolving landscape of entrepreneurship in Australia?

Simon unveils the Teamified platform and the impact of AI on the hiring process. And they also debate the concept of Fractional Executives and why they may not be the right solution for Fintech startups.

There’s also a breakdown of the jobs most at risk in this rapidly changing digital landscape.

Simon shares his insights on building businesses and Dexter poses the Billion dollar question ‘how he would build a startup in 2025 with just $5000!’

AI and Remote Work discussion points

  • AI is significantly reducing hiring times and costs.
  • Offshoring talent can provide access to specialised skills not available locally.
  • The traditional path to entrepreneurship is changing with technology.
  • AI is not just a tool; it’s a game changer for startups.
  • Health and well-being are crucial for sustained entrepreneurial success.
  • The rise of AI will democratize business opportunities.
  • Every SaaS application needs to be rethought in the age of AI.

Chapters
00:00 The Power of AI in Startups
02:59 Teamified’s Unique Approach to Recruitment
06:03 Offshoring and Remote Work Dynamics
09:04 The Impact of AI on Hiring and Recruitment
11:23 The Evolution of the Job Market
14:06 Democratizing Entrepreneurship with Technology
17:12 AI Agents: The Future of Business?
20:15 Optimizing Outsourcing Functions
23:14 The Future of Recruitment and AI Tools
29:52 The Future of Executive Roles in a Changing Landscape
37:16 The Reality of Work: Expectations vs. Performance
40:15 Prioritizing Health: A Shift in Perspective
43:02 Passion vs. Burnout: The Balancing Act
44:38 The Impact of AI on Business and Employment
46:07 Democratisation of Business: Opportunities for All
48:45 Starting a Business with Limited Resources

Find out more – https://teamified.com.au

Links from this episode.

Simon Lee on Fintech Chatter.

More on building without big raises on Fintech Chatter.

Full transcript.

Lightly edited for readability — filler words removed, wording otherwise unchanged.

Dexter Cousins
Can AI really help build a startup with no capital? Successful fintech founder Simon Lee from Teamified is joining me to share the tactics he would use if he was going to start all over again.

Hello and welcome to Fintech Chatter, the podcast where I chat with fintech leaders about their secrets to success. I’m Dexter Cousins, your host and the founder of Tier One People, the executive search firm dedicated to connecting high growth fintech companies with exceptional leadership talent. With a proven track record in placing top execs, Tier One People is trusted partner for many of the world’s most recognisable fintech brands.

Simon’s joining me today where we’re unpacking the power of AI for scaling your startup. Simon, welcome back mate, it’s been a while.

Simon Lee
It’s been a while mate, but it’s always good to have a chat. As always, always been a bit of a mentor to me in the recruitment space, so every time we catch up I learn a lot from you mate.

Dexter Cousins
I always learn lot from you as well. It’s been awesome to, I guess, see the journey of Teamified over this last, what, five years or so. But I guess for anybody who’s listening who doesn’t know you, doesn’t know Teamified, could you maybe tell us just a little bit about yourself and the journey that you’ve been on?

Simon Lee
Yeah, so before Teamified we had a business called Assembly Payments, now Zai, mx51, and we had to raise significant capital and it took a lot of investment and we got quite heavily diluted along the way. And so when we started our next business, what we wanted to do is we kind of looked at it from how do we help founders get less diluted. In fact now it’s founders and business owners, and it’s not so they don’t have to raise as much money to get profitable. It’s probably turned into a lot now that it’s more how do you get businesses profitable from loss making is point of view as well, now that kind of onshore staffing cost are so expensive.

Big thing that we focus on is how do we hire 50% faster than the industry average, how do we produce high performance teams, and how do we do it 70% cheaper. Those are three main things that we drive in, and AI is actually a big part of that, so it would be good interesting conversation today.

Dexter Cousins
Awesome. So tell us a little bit about kind of Teamified and when you launched.

Simon Lee
Yeah, we kind of started in 2020, and it’ll be coming up five years around September this year. And with our first couple of years it was just kind of heyday time because everybody was going remote, everybody needed people. The last couple years it kind of took a little bit of a slowdown, and then again this year, last year we grew by 80%, and 80% again will grow this year, so hopefully hitting around 20 mil ARR around June, July this year.

Mostly serving fintech, crypto, digital native businesses. It’s quite exciting time for us. In fact, that’s how we started, but it’s about 60% of our, I think we’re hiring 50 people at the moment and I think 60% of our open jobs are actually non-tech, so we, and non-tech businesses, so we’re kind of making that change, which is quite an interesting new direction for us.

Dexter Cousins
Awesome. Now, one of the things that I guess makes Teamified unique is the platform that you’ve built as well. So it’s not like you’re just another recruitment business for offshore talent, but you’ve actually built proprietary tech in the background to support your clients.

Simon Lee
Yeah, that’s been a hard journey, especially bootstrapping it without raising capital. And I think you’ve been one of those ones I’ve always come and tested the idea with, right? I go, yeah, because you’re right, hiring is probably one of the most difficult things you can do. As you said, the JD is useless and the resume are generally useless, and so then when you start from that point you, okay, if you’re using those the foundation to start hiring and shortlisting people, how do you make hiring kind of art versus science?

Dexter Cousins
Almost sometimes, exactly.

Simon Lee
It’s been an interesting problem to solve, and the way we’ve solved it I think is actually quite exciting, as you know, that we’ve, I ran you through it last year, and we’re finally turning that on this month.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah, awesome. Yeah, awesome. So I guess, look, what I wanted to talk about was really, conversation between you and I from kind of these similar kind of space that we’re operating in, but just, I guess, how we’re seeing AI, first of all, kind of impact the kind of traditional path of kind of starting a business and growing a business. And then I guess the other part would being, hey, well what are the impacts going to have actually on the, kind of for people that are listening that are thinking about their careers as well.

So if we start on the kind of founder path, what would you say, if, yeah, putting yourself kind of where you were with Assembly, what, 10 or so years back, and if you were going to start that journey again in 2025, like, what are the things that really kind of strike you as, hey, like this completely changes the game?

Simon Lee
I think one of my ex-business partners, Reg and Papy’s, just launched a, you could call it a fintech, it’s a stablecoin bank. So you could call, he more kind of likes to call it a crypto, but what he’s done is he’s built everything that a banking business, a bank would have, but on stablecoins. He’s done it purely out of, with remote teams out of Sri Lanka, India and the Philippines, and actually we’re just setting up in Brazil and Egypt for him.

He’s onboarding 2,000 customers a day, I know, and he’s growing, he can’t hire fast enough. So he’s hiring huge numbers of people, but purely in outsourcing things, and he’ll be profitable in the next couple of months, less than a year after launching. And it’s really down to, he’s been able to do that because of being able to avoid the regulatory hurdles that you have to go through here, that cost, you need tens of, if not hundreds of millions of dollars to launch and get banking licences.

A stablecoin bank, he can onboard anyone in the world. He’s still getting the on and off ramps, beer and Mastercard for cards and cash and getting money in and out of that environment, but he doesn’t need to then go get banking licences and things. And that, obviously as he grows and scales, he’s massively building transaction monitoring, AML, fraud teams and things like that, but he’s doing that purely, he’s not paying the onshore hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, he’s hiring those people in kind of an outsourced environments at a third of the cost.

Yeah, and just, yeah, it’s just exciting. Like, I’ve never seen a business, nothing I’ve seen or been that close to, just seen someone get that many signups, right? So if I was doing that again, if I was doing a fintech again, I’d be going exactly down that path.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah, just amazing. With that though, I think one of the kind of common pushbacks that you get from people with offshoring is that there isn’t a talent, they don’t understand the nuances of the work, there’s challenges in kind of communication and actually delegating the work as well. Do you want to kind of give us the reality of, because a lot of that stuff might have been true 5, 10, 15 years ago, but isn’t necessarily, we’re not in the same world, right?

Simon Lee
No, it’s completely different now. And in fact I’ve always kind of said if you’ve picked up your best developer, product person and sent them to a different time zone and got them to work remote, and if you’re not set up to work like that, your best guy would become a poor performer. So sometimes it’s how you set up the teams to work remote, and I think what Covid did is it set everybody up to work remotely and it changed the way that they work.

So we had it previously in Assembly days, where one of the guys who was absolutely fantastic went to another time zone and became, and then when he wasn’t in the office and everyone worked in the office, it didn’t work. He became poor performance just because we weren’t set up to work with remote people. Now it is set up like that.

The reality is too that if you look at places like India, especially the fintech experience you can get there is just so hard to find here in Australia. So it’s actually easier to say if I want a payments person that’s got 10 years experience in product and inside payments, and I want to have them experience working on XYZ technologies, you can go to India and you can find that person, where there might be only 10 of those people in Australia that exist.

So it absolutely works. In fact we’ve seen it where we’ve got product managers in India actually managing all the onshore devs here, and it doesn’t really matter where the location is anymore. And especially what we’re kind of seeing now, that because everyone did go remote and everyone set up to work remote, and as long as everybody that sets up a remote team treats it as part as their company and not their outsourcer, but it’s their Indian team or their Philippines team, and they do it right, in fact they become more of a high performing team. And in some cases now we’ve got businesses where they hire engineering teams, and apart from their CTO, as remote, they don’t even have anyone onshore.

Dexter Cousins
Wow. So why do you think then there’s such a kind of premium, an emphasis placed on hiring local talent versus offshore?

Simon Lee
I think sometimes if you don’t set it up right, and there’s probably a certain time if you need to be in a room and work really closely, it may make it easier. It’s almost like, okay, if I can get everyone in the room every day, and this is the same thing, if you had a remote team in the same room every day is going to make it easier. But if you set up with a remote team you’ve got to kind of put some really good principles in place of how you’re going to work, and as long as you’ve got those principles in place it really, really works.

First when you’re first starting out, does having everyone a room on a whiteboard, it’s really easy, right? Which business is getting an engineering talent to come in every day and look at a whiteboard? But it’s down to their own demise, and that reality, right, is they want to work home. And my good mate Swabby kind of talks about it from, like, founder of BL Escapes, is, well, if you want to work from home, you’re putting your job up, because if you want to work for a remote then you can get people for 30% of the cost.

Dexter Cousins
So also, what, I mean, I made this very point on Osiz TV like four years ago. I was like, hey, look, if you want to work remote, like, you’re up against 8 billion people for your job, right? Like, that’s what you’re doing, right, is you’re kind of putting yourself as a commodity, not as an asset. And I think that’s kind of one of the, seems to be that there is a little bit of a kind of shift now in recognition that, hey, kind of why we doing this, this is madness.

Simon Lee
So yeah, so what are you seeing in the changes of the market now that people are kind of getting more accustomed to outsourcing, and the rise of AI just becoming, people are coding with it now, people are using AI agents? What are you seeing in terms of the type of roles that have been hired in Australia versus what was been hired four years ago?

Dexter Cousins
Yeah, look, I mean, I kind of, first of all, I would say in terms of my business I haven’t really seen there be a detrimental impact, the most executive search.

Simon Lee
Yeah, yeah.

Dexter Cousins
And so kind of what we see is we’re always doing the mission critical hires, so I think that has kind of, we’ve been protected a lot from what’s gone on more broadly. But if you look at the last two and a bit years, I mean, product, marketing, sales, customer success have been massively impacted.

Simon Lee
Yeah.

Dexter Cousins
So where you’ve got, if you put an ad up for Chief Marketing Officer or somebody in marketing, you’re going to get thousands of applications, and typically those people are on the market for 6 to 9 months.

Simon Lee
Really hard.

Dexter Cousins
Really tough gig.

Simon Lee
And we’ve seen similar in that space, because what we can get now is you can get an awesome content writer for 1,500 bucks a month outsource, and they can use AI to drive high quality content. And we’ve seen, yeah, it’s kind of impacting also agencies here, right? So I’ve got instances where clients have been able to do 10x cheaper and actually have better outcomes.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah, the work that they were putting out to marketing agencies. So I think absolutely there’s an impact there, and anybody who’s kind of saying AI is going to augment you to do jobs, well, it’s a bit like saying the kind of blacksmith, when the motor vehicle was coming out, was like, oh well, we’ll do rubber hoofs, right, instead of metal ones. It’s kind of, yeah, yeah, it’s like the whole kind of, there’s a kind of quantum shift, right, to what technology can do and is going to replace humans to do. So I think that’s absolutely kind of starting to play out.

Where it is getting really interesting, the capital markets are, if you look at the headline number it’s been pretty positive, but if you then break that down it’s been a few big raises, and interestingly those companies that have raised quite a lot of money haven’t done a lot of hiring, been some mission.

Simon Lee
Are you seeing that as well, that just, what do you think’s going to change in the next 5 years in terms of capital requirements now that you can build things for less? What do you think’s going to, what’s your?

Dexter Cousins
Well, I just think, well, let’s talk about your experience, right? And it’s pretty much the experience of every founder that if you look at the venture capital market here in Australia, it’s operated more like private equity. It’s been really risk averse, and if I look at and consider some of the term sheets that have been gone around the last couple of years, where there’s provisos there that you can pull your money out after three years, there’s been zero investment or kind of appetite for actual innovation. And so we saw this with the neobanks, where, yeah, you’re talking about decades long to build a bank the way that they were talking about doing it, and nobody had the patience.

So I think what we’re seeing is kind of a settling of, well, we’re not the US, we’re not the UK, we’re Australia, right? So this is what we’re about. And I think what it’s then done is we’re actually a nation of entrepreneurs.

Simon Lee
Yeah, 100%.

Dexter Cousins
That’s the reality, right? Like, if you look, we’ve got 2.5 million small, micro businesses, right? That means that’s 2.5 million business owners, right? That’s 10% of the population. Not the working population, the population, right? So what I’m seeing is, I think there’s now this thing of what the, we been doing, like, putting a pitch deck together and then going out and begging people for money, when now actually you go back to, it’s kind of like the old days, right, where you remember having the guys from World Nomads on, the guys from Tyro, right? They were all starting businesses where they were maxing out a credit card that had like a three, four grand limit on it.

Simon Lee
Yeah, and yeah, they had to get servers and all sorts of stuff and they run off that and they would run off, right?

Dexter Cousins
Yeah, exactly, right. So what we’re seeing is kind of a return to those. You want to talk about democratising entrepreneurship, technology is the democratiser. And I think what we’re seeing are those people who, I think you kind of focus first of all on what’s the problem, who’s got the problem, how do we solve it, and how do we do that for money, right, and for profit, and build a business.

Simon Lee
See those businesses thrive, right? Like, yeah.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah, good examples being, yeah, kind of Julian at LoanOptions.

Simon Lee
Yeah, done amazing. Yeah, right. And it was getting too expensive to build, right? So that was the problem. You might have the right problem, you might have the right way to go about solving it, but you just simply couldn’t go and actually build something without raising a huge amount of capital. Now it’s bringing it back to the ability to be a garage builder, build a business in a garage, which is really exciting. It’s great for small business owner.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah, exactly.

Simon Lee
Because they can do things for cheaper, they can get a whole marketing team for six grand a month coupled with AI to enhance the service they’ve done, and they can start living off the profit of their business, not having to beg for money and end up with 10% of their business at the end of the journey and probably a mental health issue.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah, look, I think one of the kind of other differences as well from when you started, or Lan started, is YouTube. I think it’s kind of one of the greatest learning resources, in fact the greatest learning resource I think that humanity’s ever created, right? But also there’s a lot of on there, and I kind of thought that was a nice segue into AI agents, because you go on YouTube, everybody telling create a business where it’s just you and you got all these AI agents.

I’m working my way through how that actually works, and there are some bits that are cool and other bits that are just an absolute nightmare. But what’s your kind of take on AI, and is it going to completely replace everything? Is a guy like me going to build a billion dollar business and just have an army of AI agents, or do you think that’s kind of maybe a bit further down the track?

Simon Lee
I think we’ve had this conversation last year where you talking about there’ll be that single man billion dollar business, right? Definitely that’s probably going to end up happening, especially with some of the very intelligent people out there. But my kind of opinion on where you look at where the industry’s been going is, and especially when you look at things like outsourcing and work, is it was, as you said, it was started get so expensive to build things, and outsourcing kind of sold in that, but it was growing, outsourcing was growing at 99.5% year on year. It’s a $1.6 trillion business that’s going to double again in another five years, and it was coming unsustainable as well, and it was actually getting more expensive for outsourcing.

So if you kind, and if you look at, less than 20% of the world is considered a kind of developed country, right? And as the rest of the 80% of the world comes out of kind of poverty and becomes develop, you just simply, without AI, that simply isn’t going to happen. So when you look at the developing countries coming out and becoming First World countries, there’s going to be all these other services we’re going to have to do, so many more services, because you look at what the developed world consumes. We consume so many services compared to developed countries, right? So when I look at, go, are we going to be all out of work? No, but we’re going to have AI help everyone actually move out of poverty. So I see it a really good thing for the economy, and I also see it a great thing for small businesses to be able to thrive and get more profitable.

The biggest thing I kind of see at the moment is, and where we’re at at the moment, is it’s kind of dumb smart AI, right? Like, you ask it some stuff and it gives you some really brilliant insights, but if you don’t ask it that specific question that you need to, it will give you the wrong answer.

Dexter Cousins
I don’t know about you, right, but I find like the first three or four goes it’s really good and then it just starts to itself, and I can’t help but think that for the first three I’ve actually got a human there going, oh yeah, but that sort this. And then you kind of, they get overwhelmed and it’s like the machine has to kick in, and that’s when it, yeah.

Simon Lee
Well, it’s costra, just more questions you ask, the less resources it throws at the answer or something. But what we kind of seen, I think we touched on this before we started recording, is you see really good senior developers become 30% better at coding, but you see really junior developers just become really coders, because they’re using it to produce the code and they produce garbage and tie garbage together. So you still need the really good senior developers, you still need to develop the junior developers to become good developers to use AI to help them.

But I think it’s really exciting, and we’re both in and roundabout Bay, I’m doing outsourcing, but it’s still, the primary thing is we have to recruit. I’ve seen a massive improvement in the way to use AI to help the recruiters recruit better, and that falls back primarily to something you’ve always talked about, is the job description generally doesn’t really fit the job, and it does. And most of the time, this is your words not mine, and I’ve learned you’re right, 100% right on this, is that sometimes the actual person hiring doesn’t know what they really want, and also the resume doesn’t match them.

So we worked on how do we use AI to solve that problem, and I think it’s absolutely exciting what we’re doing there, and already in testing produced results where on average it takes 45 days to hire a tech person, we’re down to 22.

Dexter Cousins
I mean, Simon, right, like every week I get somebody who reaches out saying we’re going to solve recruitment, right, wanted to run the idea by you, and I have to say that same thing over and over and over again.

Simon Lee
Yeah.

Dexter Cousins
Right. So everybody thinks it’s matching the job description to the resume, and it’s not, right? It’s like the thing that really frustrates me is, like, these are all entrepreneurs and founders, right? First principles, right? Like, yeah, what’s the problem you’re trying to fix? And they can’t see it, right? Let’s say, yeah, look, right, think back to your own experience, right, like what you’ve done. And it’s amazing how people can’t get beyond that thing of what they actually do day in, day out and how they’ve approached the problem, and then apply that to something like recruitment.

Simon Lee
But you have to admit, I come to you probably four or five times thinking I’ve solved it this time, I’ve solved it this time, right? And you like, no.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah, yeah, but it is the thing though, right? Like, because you kind of look and you go, that’s where the dollars are, right? The dollars are just to solve the pain point, right, and the customer thinks that is the pain point.

Simon Lee
Yeah.

Dexter Cousins
I think that’s the problem, right? It’s like, to create a business that you want to be successful where you have to re-educate the whole market, that’s a loss leader, right? Like, you’re just never going to make money where you’ve got to educate the customer.

Simon Lee
Do you know, a good recruiter in-depthly understands the client, right? And the longer they work with them, or the longer, more experienced they are, the better they get at that. And the hardest thing you have to do then, and what everyone in Al bu says, we’ve got the best recruiters and that’s why you should use us, but you can’t replicate amazing recruiters.

But you can, if, what we’ve started to do is transcribe the client interviews when they’re interviewing, listen and record those to the question they ask and the live feedback they give us, and we store that on the client. So every time we hire for them we know the questions they like to ask, what sort of things they like. And if we record 10 to 15 interviews from the client, we really in-depthly know what they want. We use AI to transcribe, listen that shortlist and give our recruiters questions to ask when they’re hiring.

Yeah, that’s going to help. That helps us then hire better, because a bad recruiter then knows what a client wants, because it’s been given the questions to ask based on transcribing and shortlisting those calls, right? The other thing we’ve started to do is, it’s really hard for recruiter to think about when they hire a .NET developer versus a PHP developer and everything, and the old recruitment tools used to give you static questions. Now we can, based on using the JD and the client’s previous interview stuff, real time generate really technical questions for them to ask, have a transcriber listening to the answers and rating those answers and giving them follow-up questions.

So a recruiter become a really good technical recruiter, right, which would generally take you years and years to train that. But all they’re really doing now is listening to the AI and actually asking those questions. The other thing we can do is, at the end of that, we can do quality assurance on our recruiters, making sure they’re doing high quality interviews, but also have a really good senior technical person review the thing was that, were those dummy answers, did the AI rate those answers properly, and do a five minute review and go, yeah, that’s actually a really good candidate, or no, actually AI that up, yeah, let’s move it out, right? So yeah, that’s where we see huge improvements.

Dexter Cousins
What are some of the best AI tools that you’ve seen so far?

Simon Lee
Look, to be honest, I’ve been in Anthropic and ChatGPT, and I’m a massive user of ChatGPT and I just love it. But Copilot for coding for us is giving us a really big improvement. One thing we’re not using, Hugging Face, but Hugging Face, I just really love it and want to figure out how to use it, just because it’s bringing everything together in one place, and all the LLMs and everything. I don’t know if had to look at that, it just looks really, really interesting. It’s almost like a middleware of, you can just, your video, your transcription, your kind of 3D production, your coding and everything there, and I think that looks really cool, and it looks like the growth that they’re having is absolutely phenomenal.

And then the other one I’ve been kind of playing around a little bit, like, so we’re doing a lot of designs and stuff like that and changes to our website at the moment, and I kind of should be leaving this to our CTO, but every weekend he gets a few messages from me, call us, and it’s like, probably need to put me back in my box a little bit, yeah, considering I haven’t been a developer for 20 years. I’m trying to tell him really good ideas and he’s like, no, no, no, stop.

But I was playing around with v0 by Vercel on the weekend and just seeing how it can convert Figma designs into code, Next.js, and optimise it and stuff. And you kind of have to start looking at that and going, oh, I wonder if things like Workable and Bubble and stuff like that, which are kind of no code ways to build your website, whether that’s still going to be needed, or whether you’re just going to talk to AI that’s going to fix everything.

And that’s the biggest fundamental change I see happening, right, is that we’ve come from these things like HubSpot and these really config, and Workable, that just as actually an ATS, and Webflow, that is for your websites and stuff, and you need training on how to use these things. And the rise of AI means, instead of actually getting an integrator for HubSpot to come and set up and build how you want HubSpot to work, soon you’re just going to talk to this thing, it’s going to set up you want it to work, right? And all these expensive consultants that you’re going to need to set up your environment, it’s just not going to exist.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. So a couple of questions that I’ve got for you. The first one is, when it comes to outsourcing or offshoring, like, what would you say are the most optimised functions to do that for, and what are some of the functions that you think AI can make work as well?

Simon Lee
Look, what we’re seeing a massive rise in now, especially now we do non-tech roles, is those roles like you said, the marketing roles, bookkeepers and accountants. There’s a global shortage of accountants now, right? And so we’ve got a company now where the CFO, they used to have five people underneath them and one outsource, now they’ve got the CFO and the whole teams that they outsource to the Philippines. Philippines is a great place for accountants, you wouldn’t go to India for Australia, for example, but you kind of seen that really taking off. Marketing roles, support roles, it’s just a no-brainer to do support, it’s a tenth of the cost.

And then when you look at the type of dev roles you do, and depending on the type of dev roles you do, so for example if it’s things like Golang and Elixir and things like that, you just wouldn’t go to places like the Philippines for, you’d go to India, but you just do get some really experienced people there. But yeah, one of the things we kind of think about is it does make sense. I don’t think, we have six people here in Teamified and out of the Teamified staff we have 39 remote, right, that work directly for us. And so we’re pretty much, if you look at that, that’s almost 10% of our businesses onshore, 90% is offshore, and then we have our remote teams that we set up for clients. We’re probably on the extreme end, I think, but I do think now it should almost be a 40 onshore, 60 offshore split at least, yeah, right, just for the cost benefits.

What about you? Like, if you kind of had your crystal ball on, what do you think, do you think executive roles can be replaced or outsourced, or do you think it’s just going to be more that it’s going to be small executive roles here and AI and Al team? So what do you think?

Dexter Cousins
I was actually going to ask you this as well, right, because I think one of the things that I’ve found is one of the biggest, what’s the word, yeah, kind of marketing fluff things is fractional execs and how that’s pushed out. And I think as a concept it sounds brilliant, but in practice I’ve yet to see it work. I think if I look at who, there’s maybe three people in my network who’ve been able to do it really well, and how they’ve done it has been that they’ve had to really select one client and focus on that client for 6 months, 9 months, 12 months.

This notion that you can have three different clients on the go at once working in this space, and the founder call and say there’s a fire, I need you to put it out, you go, oh, I’m not in until Wednesday next week, we’ll do it then, yeah, it kind of just doesn’t work. So I think for execs, it’s a 24/7 job.

Simon Lee
I actually think you’re right. We actually went out there last year going, how do you really optimise a remote team and still have the right support here, especially non-technical founders or stuff like that, and you’re right, I don’t think the fractional model works. I don’t think it works on a C level. I think it can work on a CMO level, because a CMO level can put in, like, I’ve got a fractional CMO at the moment that works inside Teamified. We don’t have a full-time one, and she has a permanent remote team with us of four people doing the work, but they can set the strategy and actually deliver things.

But it has to be almost, I don’t think it’s they sit across three clients, I think they can set two, yeah. And if they can do two, that’s okay, and it’s probably similar with a CTO too, if they fit across two that’s okay. The only issue is with the CTO is then they want to charge, if they’re sitting across three they want to charge $10 to 122,000 a month themselves, and then if they want to sit across two they want to charge 15 grand, right? And you look at that, that’s not a business, right?

Dexter Cousins
Like, yeah, it’s too expensive. Yeah, exactly. It’s like, hang on a second, right? If you want that, go and get a permanent job. This isn’t, and I think this is where there’s a big disconnect, right, is that people are looking at this as a lifestyle thing, whereas the people that you’re looking to serve are like, they’re in the trenches, right? Like, it’s like they’re not going to pay 15 grand a month for somebody to be on holiday whilst you’re kind of, the village is burning, right?

Simon Lee
Well, if you go to our website right now it talks about fractionals, and in three weeks’ time that’s not going to be there, because just it doesn’t actually work. And unless you get a, and in fact when people are pitching themselves as CTO and want to claim that money, they don’t actually need a CTO at that level anyway. When the startups up, they actually need a really good engineering manager or a product person.

Well, the thing we can do too though is you can get a really good principal lead in India for $8,000 a month, and they would be just as good as an engineering manager and cheaper than a CTO. They actually deliver what you need, so why would you pay that much for a fractional? So we’re gone, we actually got rid of our principal model, bringing it back, and we’re not offering fractionals anymore, yeah, because it’s actually not the best thing for the client, they end up paying more.

Dexter Cousins
All of the noise comes from the supply side. Yeah, the demand side, I have this conversation and I don’t think anybody has ever told me anything differently to what we’ve discussed. And I think I’ve kind of got to look at that and go, okay, this isn’t a new concept, right? Like, I was looking at this as a business model way back when I started this business, and it was, hey, do I kind of pivot and go off and do that, or do I stick with recruitment?

What was really interesting, Simon, was I kind of went and I spoke to a lot of VC and they were all like, yeah, concept’s amazing, but we kept asking this question, right? Like, one, how do you get trust? You got to have trust there, right? So like, how do you get the trust? Well, it’s not going to be like a kind of Trustpilot score, Johnny in Canberra gives Kevin five stars, right? It’s like it comes through your networks and actually previously demonstrating what you’ve done, right, and having that context.

And then I think the other challenge that comes with it is just around, kind of, the deployment perspective, right? Like, the reality is any platform, whether it’s Expert360 or whatever, right, the people that are sitting on there, on in demand, no. If they were, they wouldn’t need to be on the platform.

Simon Lee
Yeah.

Dexter Cousins
If you’re not in demand, right. The reality is that there are people out there that are better, get better results than people that have sat on that platform. And I think it’s kind of one of the myths and the lies that’s come out from Covid of, oh yeah, you can work anywhere. You can, hey look, you can do the job anywhere, but the expectation isn’t that you do the job, it isn’t that you perform the tasks, it’s that you deliver results, and delivering is very, very different to working.

So I think that’s kind of, for me, I don’t really see, essentially, much change. I think what is going to happen is middle management, that layer gets totally rinsed. It always does in any downturn, right? We seen this in 2010 when all of the big corporates in Australia offshore to India, yeah, all middle management gets rinsed, yeah. And then unfortunately graduates in the kind of lower level roles, you just lose that next wave of talent coming through, and the talent pipelines are massively reduced.

Simon Lee
I think on that middle management, it’s always down to value exchange, and as you said, if they ask 250 grand a year and they don’t want to come in the office and they don’t really want to work hard, is what they’ve got to do now is, for the value exchange, is they’ve got to go, right, if I want that…

Dexter Cousins
Think they kind of, they’ve not grasped, right, that it’s not a contract for time anymore. No, it’s a contract for, like, your life, right? Like, it literally is. And I think there’s stress and everything else that you have to deal with, yeah, that’s what the contract is.

Simon Lee
Yes.

Dexter Cousins
I think there’s just been a lot of, yeah, kind of, and we’re seeing this in society, right? I don’t want to get into politics and all that stuff, I think there’s a lot of nonsense going on, but there is a fundamental reality that you have to deal with, right, and that is that it’s called work for a reason and it’s not meant to be easy. It is stressful, it isn’t psychologically safe, right? It’s hard, right? It’s really hard. And I think we’ve got, like, generations now who believe that it should be easy and on their terms. Yes, I don’t get to go to a client and go, yeah, you’re going to work with us and it’s on my terms.

Simon Lee
Yeah, is this guy, the problem is now there’s alternatives, where before there was no alternative, so the employer was held to ransom a little bit and kind of had to offer all these really nice attractive terms to kind of, as you said, hey, I’ll pay you just for your time and then anything else you give me, like it’s a them, right? But it’s now…

Dexter Cousins
And this is the Aon seon, right? If I look at the top performers, they’re not interested in that stuff. They’re interested in building something that means something to them.

Simon Lee
Yeah.

Dexter Cousins
Being around the best people, right, and actually, like, learning and being challenged and taking it to the next level, right? I’m not saying that they’re kind of obsessed with being burnt out, but they’re obsessed with delivering, and the kind of sacrifices that come with that, they’re prepared accept them.

Simon Lee
Yeah, well, that passion for the job and building stuff is the risk of burnout, but you’ve just got to balance it, right, between the passion for the job and also putting your health in your physical, mental state first, family second, and then your passion for the job third, right?

Dexter Cousins
I don’t know if you listen to Alex Hosi podcast, but he says something which I think really resonates with me, and it’s where people kind of challenge him, right, or they’ll question like him, what he’s done, and he’ll say, hey look, it’s kind of like you want my results but on your terms and your way of doing it, and that’s not how it works, right? Like, I’ve got these results because here’s all the things that I’ve had to do, the sacrifices I’ve had to make, the friends I’ve lost, the health, the this, the that, right? Like, the pressure, the stress. You want my outcome but you don’t want any of those things, and you can’t have it, right? And I think society has tricked everybody into thinking that you can have that without all of the downside.

Simon Lee
Do you know the biggest change, I want to go back to fractionals in a sec, but the biggest change I’ve made, it’s only been in the last three months, I think I said I’ve just done 16 weeks no drinking. And also, I always used to go, right, family is always my priority, and then it’s the business, and then it’s my mates. But what would actually happen is quite often your business, it would go, business would be taking priority and family, you’d be trying to balance it, but business would always end up taking priority, you trying to get between the two, and then you try catching your friends, and your fourth one is, I need to be healthy, yeah.

And you’d end up, you probably see me balloon out and kind of become like, and when you get really stressed with everything else you end up too much the wrong foods, and you hit burnout because you’re working too hard and everything. And the biggest change I’ve done that ended up being that I’m actually three times a better dad and three times better at business, and it was actually only thing that he realised, and I was actually listening to some podcasts and stuff and getting some advices, the number one thing needs to be your mental, physical health first. And if you have to really focus on that, you end up being an awesome dad and husband and you’re three times better at your business and you don’t be without, right? And it’s the biggest change I’ve made, because I used to always put myself number four, right? Yeah, and now it’s actually, no, my health is number one, and then I’m so much better at everything else because of it.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. Well, and look, I think it’s interesting to say that, right, because my distinction that I would ask people, that if you ought to think of business like sports, right? When you’re doing startup, right, you’re like Premier League. If you’re working for a big corporate or you’re working just a regular 9 to 5 job, and that’s what you want, right, that’s Sunday League that you play with your mates for a bit of exercise and a bit of fun, right?

Simon Lee
Yeah.

Dexter Cousins
Whereas startup is like the real deal. Peak performance, super competitive, high pressure, everybody’s looking at you, everybody wants you to fail, right? That’s the reality of what being in a startup is like. And I think what a lot of businesses and founders have done is they’ve tried to appeal to the Sunday League player, come and join the Premier League club, rather than just going, look, this is who we are. And I tell you who does this better than anybody else is Revolut. This is who we are, this what we’re about, this is our vision, right? Like, you want to be on board, it’s a rocket ship, get on. Yeah, but we’re not for everybody, right? Like, only for like a small percentage.

Simon Lee
Well, in those Premier Leagues they’re not out there drinking or partying or doing things or seeing their friends, kind of deliver, be quite a just a focus.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah, exactly, exactly, right. So yeah, I think that’s kind of the analogy that I would use for particularly founders, is that when you’re going out, you’re looking for people, you got to recognise that it’s not a skill shortage, it’s not a talent shortage, just, hey look, it’s just mindset, right? Like, you got to find people with this mindset, and there is only like 10% of the workforce who has that mindset.

Simon Lee
But I think of it like a sport too, and in fact, like, I look at Assembly and the exit, it’s like I got a bronze medal there, and it’s not, you’re not chasing an exit or you’re not chasing the kind of, but it’s like an AFL player, they want to win the Grand Final, but it’s not about winning the trophy for them, it’s the fun of the sport. And so that’s kind of, I kind of think of running a startup like that, and probably in startup land, scale up land, the exit is the trophy, right? But you’re not it for the exit, you do it because you love it, and if you’re doing it for the exit you’re never going to get it, right?

Because the AFL player goes, I just want the trophy and I don’t really enjoy the sport, they’re never going to win. But if you love the sport of startups and you love doing it, then you’re going to end up getting that, more likely to get the trophy. But you’re not doing it for the trophy, do it you love it and as much fun, and you’re addicted to it, but you’re right, you’ve got to then run your body like a professional.

Dexter Cousins
Absolutely. Well, and I think this is the other challenge, right, for everybody, is that sooner or later the passion goes, right? Like, I remember catching up with you the end of the Assembly days, mate, you weren’t passionate, right? Like, you weren’t loving it, right? And I think what happens is it go through these waves, right, and it’s kind of your responsibility to find the thing that’s going to give you fire. Like, I’m going through it right now, right? Like, it’s like, nine years of the business, it’s like, okay, what does the next 10 years look like, where I going to find the fire to kind of push on through that next 10 years, right? Because it’s not going to be the stuff that you last 10 years, right? So I think that’s a challenge that faces everybody, right? It’s like, where you going to get that from, right, because the passion has to come from something. And once you get that bit, it’s like, well, how do you get passionate about that, right?

Simon Lee
Like, yeah, exactly, bed with being passionate about that, right? I want about something, right? I’m coming up, I’ll be five years in September in Teamified, and it’s like, reinventing what we’re doing again to make sure we’re staying… So yeah, nine years, congratulations mate on that one.

Dexter Cousins
And then the other thing is, this is one of the things that I keep saying to people, is oftentimes when you’re outsourcing stuff, you’re outsourcing your learning.

Simon Lee
Yeah.

Dexter Cousins
To kind of, I like to learn how to do it, or send it to somebody and then bring it back in house, right, because I want to understand how everything works, right? Because if I don’t…

Simon Lee
Yeah, right, that’s when bus need.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah, yeah, yeah, but it’s, yeah, I mean, one is there’s just the kind of personal enjoyment that comes from development and growth and learning new things and keeping fresh and inquisitive, right? So there’s those benefits, but then the other is like, nobody knows my business better than me, right? Nobody knows my clients better than me. So what I like to do is kind of get that, how do you do this, like, how do you do it, and then tweak things.

Simon Lee
That passion you have, that’s what kind of keeps you passionate about doing what you’re doing, right? I was going to ask you, and I’ve got my thoughts, and like, I think we both believe that the rise of AI is probably just as exciting as the invention of the internet, right? That’s the biggest change that’s happened, other than the internet, in my lifetime. What are you really excited about seeing that’s going to fundamentally change for founders of businesses, and what do you think is going to change in the technology landscape? What are you most excited about?

Dexter Cousins
So the thing I’m most excited about, like, when I was a kid, I was about eight or nine years old, I lived in the north of England and we had 30% unemployment, and we were like a mining town and shipbuilding, and both those industries were destroyed overnight by Thater, right? So you could look at kind of the US, and there’s almost like a similar kind of period that they’re going to be entering that was kind of the ’80s in the UK. The biggest difference now is that back then, like, yeah, you could only get a job if you moved cities, right, or countries, right? Yeah, most of the guys had to go to the Middle East and work on oil rigs and stuff like that.

So I think the thing that I’m most excited about is this true democratisation of being able to start a business. You don’t have to go the path of going to university, getting a degree, getting a job, doing a grad scheme and kind of climbing this ladder, and you get to the top of it, you go, like, I’ve climbed the wrong ladder, right? Like, yeah, I remember the advice I was given when I was younger was, pointless climbing the ladder of success if it’s up against the wrong wall. Yeah, the other one is, yeah, if you win the rat race you’re still a rat.

So I think we really are at a point, right, where, and it amazes me that kind of the world seems to be just itself all the time when we’ve got this opportunity in front of us. And right, this isn’t to be dismissive of kind of issues that are happening around gender and diversity and everything else, but the narratives keep coming about why it’s impossible to launch a business, why women aren’t getting funding, why, right? Like, I think we’re kind of looking in the wrong avenues, right, rather than empowering ourselves and going, wow, this is an opportunity to create whatever I want to create, right? I can do it.

And which kind of comes to my last question for you. We touched on this earlier about the Atlassian guys. Yeah, you got five grand, right, on a credit card, you’ve lost everything, yeah, and your missus is saying you go and get a proper job, but you can’t do it yourself and you got to say, we’ve got five grand, trust me, in the next 30 days we’re going to turn this into a business. What would be the things that you would do?

Simon Lee
Well, what I think’s really exciting about the, like, I’m just going to kind of go on to your last answer before. What I think is really exciting is I think every single SaaS application probably need to be reinvented, and you kind of look at it the moment and that been fundamentally built with an interface where you had to sit there and configure and build everything. And I think it’s really exciting if you’re going to start a business right now. Every single piece of recruitment software needs to be completely rebuilt, every HubSpot and customer relationship management platform needs to be rebuilt, every single kind of theme needs to be rebuilt and thought about being a AI service orientated in the way that you’re going to communicate and set up things. So if you’re starting a business now, it’s really exciting, and the cost to build them now is significantly less, right?

If I had $5,000 though, and I had to go and start a business, I love ideas I call them stupid dumb business models, right, which is something that everybody needs, that can help someone, that you can start with a very low tech base. So you don’t have to, if you had $5,000 for example and you need to start making money in 30 days, you’re going to have to get something up and running really quickly. Now, really quickly, like, what I love about Teamified and outsourcing is it’s so manual. You set up, you set up an outsourcing, and the hiring’s manual and the management people of manual, most, 99% of them don’t even have a platform to manage it and everything, but it’s actually quite easy to set up something like an outsourcing business. Yes, you have to jump on a plane and go to India and set up, so for five grand you probably wouldn’t do that.

But I kind of look at it the moment and go, how many products could you get up and running? So if it was me and I had 5,000 bucks, I would set up a business that you could store your blood work, store your DNA test, store your microbiome test into a single location and sync stuff like your health data into it. So you could build that very simply, and use, for five bucks a month, get all your data stored together and have AI be able to give you health advice. And I’d then turn that into things where you can buy stuff like red light therapy, hydrogen bottles, get a supplement plan based on your blood work, so you could sign up to a $200 a month plan where your supplements get sent out to you once a quarter, you go get your blood work.

I think everyone that’s supplementing are probably supplementing the wrong supplements. They should be getting everything. So I’d go set a business up like that, probably, if you did it really light. The first thing you do is just a simple data storage using ChatGPT to give you some non-medical advice, but how easy would have been to put e-commerce shop on the front of it to start selling supplements, and then do a subscription based supplement plan. And five grand, you get something up and running. I reckon you could create a billion dollar business over time, but just something where you’re selling a product and it’s not high tech to do it, you do it really cheaply. And something that I’ve actually got really passion, more than fintech now, is I’m more passionate about health. But I also think longevity right now and is going to, I don’t think our kids are going to drink alcohol, right? I think it’s going to be a really big thing.

Dexter Cousins
Well, we’re coming to AA. Where can people find out more about Teamified?

Simon Lee
He you, or reach out to me on LinkedIn. Always happy for a chat, love talking to other founders and talking about how to optimise their business. As we said, we started this to help founders not get diluted to 10% like we did in Assembly, and to just scale and get more done. So always, always happy to have a talk.

Dexter Cousins
Awesome. Great to see you again mate.

Simon Lee
You too, you too Dexter, and always great chatting. You always full of great advice and

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