Catalytic Leadership

The Hiring Shift: Why Agency Remote Teams Beat In-House Bottlenecks

Dr. William Attaway Season 4 Episode 6

Send us a text

Scaling past seven figures brings incredible opportunities — but it also exposes new bottlenecks. If you’ve ever felt like your in-house team can’t keep up, or you’ve struggled with communication gaps and rising costs, this episode will give you a proven alternative.

I’m joined by Chris Brown, Partner and CTO at Wow Remote Teams, a staffing and recruiting firm that sources top-tier talent from Latin America for U.S. companies. With nearly two decades of technology and entrepreneurial experience, Chris has built and scaled businesses using agency remote teams that drive efficiency, cut costs, and eliminate the handoff headaches that slow growth.

We explore how to build agency remote teams that align on culture, time zones, and performance expectations, while avoiding the burnout and bottlenecks that come from traditional hiring. You’ll walk away with practical strategies to structure your talent pipeline, level up your leadership, and scale your agency with confidence.



Books Mentioned

  • Poor Charlie’s Almanac by Charles T. Munger
  • Atomic Habits by James Clear


You can learn more about Chris Brown and his work at wowremoteteams.com. You’ll also find him on LinkedIn.


Join Dr. William Attaway on the Catalytic Leadership podcast as he shares transformative insights to help high-performance entrepreneurs and agency owners achieve Clear-Minded Focus, Calm Control, and Confidence.

Connect with Dr. William Attaway:

Dr. William Attaway:

I'm excited today to have Chris Brown on the podcast. Chris is partner and CTO at Wow Remote Teams, a staffing and recruiting firm focused on sourcing amazing talent from Latin America for US companies. Chris brings nearly two decades of technology experience to the space, helping to increase efficiency and reduce costs. Chris, I'm so glad you're here, man. Thanks for being on the show.

Chris Brown:

Of course. Thanks for having me, William. It's great to be here.

Intro:

Welcome to Catalytic Leadership, the podcast designed to help leaders intentionally grow and thrive. Here is your host author and leadership and executive coach, dr William Attaway is your host author and leadership and executive coach, dr.

Dr. William Attaway:

William Attaway. Yeah, I'd love to start with you sharing some of your story with our listeners, Chris, particularly around your journey and your development as a leader. How did you get started?

Chris Brown:

How did I get started? I mean, that goes way back, of course. I've been an entrepreneur for forever. Essentially I've been. When I was a teenager, I was selling things on the internet and building things and I actually got really into entrepreneurship my whole family's entrepreneurs. They own businesses and run things and own a lot of real estate and do the whole thing like build our own world. Essentially, I really got started selling pieces, pieces out of video games. So I would play you know I'd play online video games, mmos like uh, back you know I'm getting old now. So back when I was a teenager, it was like everquest and the world of warcraft. Um, you know I'd play those and sell pieces out of those games and sell gold and sell all those things and that funded some international travel that I wanted to do.

Chris Brown:

I went to Australia when I was like 17 that I had paid for by selling stuff on video games, yeah, so you know it all started way back then of you know how do you do this? Like you know, I had jobs. I was. You know I always had a job. I always had to work. You have to do the normal thing, but there's a whole other side path in life of how do you achieve your goals and how do you get to where you're trying to go. And part of that for me has always been like this idea of freedom, but more than just like freedom, but, like you know, location independence, financial independence, the ability to live life on my terms, which is a bit of a cliche kind of thing to say but it's really been a focus of how I've lived my life and how I've developed these businesses and systems and operating the operating system of life right, the operating system of how do I do this? Like I said when we were chatting before, you know, we're in Montana currently. We're from Phoenix. It's August 4th today, so Phoenix is very hot. It's probably 110 or something there right now, you know. So I need to not be in Phoenix. Why would I be in Phoenix? It's 110 degrees. So part of this entire journey has been you know, how do I do that, how do I live that life, how do I do the things I want to do?

Chris Brown:

For a long time there was a lot of travel focus there and I say that as if it's not still right. I'm talking about I'm in Montana today, like I still travel a lot. It's a major part of life. But there was a lot of international travel. You know I live, I went through all over, all over Southeast Asia and Europe and, you know, all through Central and South America. I lived in Colombia for five years, which is part of how we got into this conversation today, and all of those travels. Generally it's always been long-term stuff.

Chris Brown:

I'm not like a vacation kind of guy, like it's always been. I want to go somewhere, I want to stay there, I want to live there, I want to see what life is like in a different place and really get an understanding of what's the difference and what's great and what's beautiful and what's the food like. I'm a big foodie. You know it's always just how good is the food? Where's the best food? And the answer is Mexico. It's always Mexico. My wife likes to fight with me and say it's Peru, but it's Mexico, yeah, um, yeah.

Chris Brown:

So you know, in that, in that realm, in that, in that kind of direction, you end up with a lot of like how do you do this better? Essentially, like, how do you? You know, coming back to leadership, like to build these things requires other people. I, I wish I could do it all myself. I maybe I don't wish I could do it all myself. Why would I want't wish I could do it all myself? Why would I want to do that?

Chris Brown:

It requires other people. You need a team, you need other people that are on board with you, that are working towards the same goal, that are excited for the thing you're doing and working on it with you not just for you, but with you. And to get there, you have to learn how to manage other people and not just manage like did you get your work done? Are you hitting your KPIs? Are the expectations being met? But manage them. What makes them excited? What brings them to the table? Why are they here? Why are they going to stay here? Why are they going to work on this thing with me? You know, are they aligned? Are they in the same mindset? Do they want the same things? If so, this works out a lot better, right? If we're all kind of going the same place, then we all get to go there together.

Chris Brown:

So there's all these pieces and I don't know if I'm just off on a tangent at this point, but there's all these pieces that have to come together and you know, my experience of doing this has been to learn to do. That was never a thing. I was taught. You know, I went to university, I have degrees, I have, you know, I have this whole other technical side that was part of this journey of how do you do these things and where can I go and make a lot of money, essentially, but these things weren't a part of that.

Chris Brown:

How do you really integrate a team? How do you be an effective leader? Not just you know, here's a textbook about leadership and you need to make sure people have the right. You know this, that and the other, but more like, how do you actually figure out what someone needs? How do you understand them at a personal level in order to find that and I'm not saying like I understand this a hundred percent this is a journey, right, this is part of the process. Like I am in this today, I'm trying to figure this out and figuring it out. I mean, I have 20 years of business experience plus. I'm 40 now and I've been doing this since I was a teenager. I have a lot of experience and a lot of time in market trying to help other people achieve their goals while achieving my goal. So, yeah, I'm not sure I feel like I'm just ranting at this point, but it's somewhere in there. There's an answer in there.

Dr. William Attaway:

Well, no, I love that. I love what you said about the distinction between the education that you got, the degrees, all the things that you've learned, and learning how to lead other people, because that is a distinction that I think is important. Leadership is something that is executed and learned as you are executing. You can read hundreds of books on leadership, I have right, but you learn how to lead by doing it, and I think that's where there's been no wasted experience in your life. Everything that you have described there, and so much more, has contributed to make you into the leader and the person that you are now.

Chris Brown:

Yeah, yeah, I completely agree. I think that's true about just about everything in life. That's why we I mean education is very important and it gives you a solid basis and foundation and you know, you can spread wide and have more ideas and a better understanding of this kind of multimodal sort of you know, polymath sort of understanding of the world. But if you don't go and do it like I think failure is one of the world, but if you don't go and do it like I think failure is one of the most useful processes that there is, and I think speaking about failure and talking about failures is, I don't know. People are afraid of it, people are worried about it, people think it's like a negative mark, you know. But it's not. It's how you learn, it's where you, it's where the rubber meets the road. Essentially, you got to put it into practice and when you put it into practice it's not going to work and that's when you learn how it actually works.

Dr. William Attaway:

Well, I think failure is part of the journey to success. I don't know anybody who has been successful at anything without experiencing failure at certain points. But the key there is not over-identifying with it and saying, well then, I'm a failure because I felt, no, no, no, no. Failure is an event, it's not a person, right, yeah? And I think that's important.

Chris Brown:

Right, exactly, unless you make it unless you decide it is.

Dr. William Attaway:

If you choose, if you choose, okay. But, you get to choose.

Chris Brown:

Yeah, yeah, you get to choose and you also get to. You get to choose how you react to it, as with everything, right, that is kind of the stoic idea of how do we, how do we manage ourselves? Right, like, you get to choose what your reaction to that event is. If you decide to lean in and take it personally, as if you you know. Yeah, that whole conversation it is a learning experience. It is a thing to aim for in the math in the process of getting to success. In fact, I don't know if we know what success is without failure. You know, it's like you don't know that you have good luck unless you have bad luck. If all you have is good luck, you have no idea that you have good luck. It's the same with success.

Dr. William Attaway:

If you're immediately successful.

Chris Brown:

You have no idea. I mean within reason. If you're a billionaire at first chance, you probably know you're successful, if that's your measure of success.

Dr. William Attaway:

Right yeah, and that's the other piece. You get to choose what your measure of success is. You know, for some, maybe it is dollars in the bank, For some, it's the freedom that you described. You know the location freedom or the time freedom. You know the location freedom or the time freedom, you know. I think we have to understand that there's not one definition of success that rules them all, that one size fits all. You know you get to decide. What does success look like? What will success look like? Where am I aiming, when am I, when do I want to be and how do I get from here to there? I think this is what we get to do as leaders. We get to not just chart that path for ourselves, but we get to help other people and encourage them and empower them and equip them.

Chris Brown:

And also give them some perspective that it's possible sometimes.

Dr. William Attaway:

You can do this.

Chris Brown:

You can be this way, you can live like this. You just have to A you have to know it's possible, and B you have to know how to go get it and do the work. Do the work. Yeah, you always got to do the work, that's right. That's step zero. You got to do the work.

Dr. William Attaway:

And yet shocking how many times people think they don't have to. They can avoid that, you know.

Chris Brown:

Yeah, but I mean that's another failure. Step right A hundred percent.

Dr. William Attaway:

So I would love for you to share a little bit about WoW remote teams. You know a lot of the folks who are listening lead teams, many of whom members are remote, but some have not yet taken that step and there's a struggle in this idea like well, man, you know what does it look like and why should I consider? You know, latam when I'm thinking about remote teams members.

Chris Brown:

You know what makes that different from, you know, any other part of the world. Yeah, absolutely, I mean for us, because our clients are US companies. Right, we're a US company. I'm an American, obviously from my accent. For us, you know, it's a really good talent pool. They're very culturally aligned, you know, and they're also very time zone aligned, so that makes a big difference. We get a lot of people calling us who have talent in other places in the world and you know they're having problems with the time zone thing where you know the person that they have is working at two o'clock in the morning. Maybe that's great. I like to say I'm very biased, right, I'm getting the calls of the people that are unhappy with that situation. So that situation works. It works all day. There's a lot of very large companies and a lot of people doing, you know, remote work from from wherever from the other side of the planet, but that time zone alignment is really impactful and really important.

Chris Brown:

Everybody on my team is from Latin America and it's. You know, everybody works the same shift. Everybody's on during the day. We all get up. You know we have our morning meetings at 8.06 AM and for you know, it's gotta be, it's gotta be a weird time. It helps people get online. I don't know what it is about it, but if it's eight, people don't show up. It's 8.06. Everybody's there. It's a great thing. Wow, yeah, it works. Good tip.

Dr. William Attaway:

That's good.

Chris Brown:

But you know, everybody's online at 8 AM. Some people had started an hour earlier, some people start an hour later. It just depends on their job and what the overlap looks like. You know, and everybody's online throughout the rest of the day. Basically, everybody on my team is full time, so you get complete overlap, right. I'm here, I'm working, I'm ready to go, my partner is here, she's working, she's ready to go, and all of our team is online at the same time. Anything happens, everything we need to know about. There's no disconnect. There's no strange oddities, there's no.

Chris Brown:

This email came in and then it went out wrong and then there's a 12-hour gap and now we're replying to a client Like I don't like that. You know, I don't like those gaps. That doesn't mean that everybody has to be. You know. That way you can work differently, but for me that's important and for me it works really well and for my clients it seems to be important and works really well. Right, we're online, we're working, we're top of mind right now. I don't want to think about this at 4 am. I don't want to wake up at 7 and have client issues from yesterday that didn't get replied to till 4 am, that are still, um. So you know that.

Chris Brown:

The other thing is just talent pool. There's a huge talent pool in Latin America and there's a really strong talent pool, very well educated, they're very well experienced. They have a lot of roots with US and American companies, right? Like you know, all of these Latin American companies, a major basis of their economies is the US economy. You know, the US economy is the driver of the economy in this hemisphere, essentially Not the planet really, but in this hemisphere we are the dominant factor. Everything that happens around us is connected to us and Latin America. A lot of them come from, you know, deep roots of culture that have been influenced by US methodology. Our business methodology is somewhat unique. It's why we're so dominant, it's why we're good at what we do, right, we dominate every market on this planet, essentially. Maybe not you know industrial exports so much anymore, but we did for a time and then we moved on, which is to say that, you know, the Latin American systems are built basically the same way, the education systems are built basically the same way. Everything is very correlated and just you know, there, for you, it all works really well together.

Chris Brown:

And then you have this other piece, which is language and language. Right. All of Latin America speaks Spanish, except for Brazil. They speak Portuguese, but English is really strong throughout. That doesn't mean everybody speaks English Now, you can find a lot of people that don't but English is very strong throughout. English is a highly regarded thing throughout them. And that also comes back to America's the dominant force. They know that America is the dominant economy. If you want to succeed, if you really want to grow, if you want to come up, you're going to go, try to learn English and it's going to be part of your curriculum, right?

Chris Brown:

My wife and my partner is from Bogota, colombia. I met her while I was living in Colombia and she speaks perfect English, speaks great English. Right, she learned English her entire life. She had it in school, she had it in media, she had it in everything. Right, she learned English her entire life. She had it in school, she had it in media, she had it in everything. And then you add another layer to that, which is technology. Right, we have the internet, we have this. Like me and you, where are you right now? Where are you located?

Dr. William Attaway:

I'm outside of Washington DC.

Chris Brown:

Okay, yeah, you're 2000 miles away from me, right, and we can have an in-person, immediate, well, in-person, digital, digital, in-person, immediate, face-to-face conversation. That's true about every reaction in the world right now. Right, all of these people in Latin America. They're consuming US content. Of course, we're the biggest content creator on the planet. They're consuming content in English. They're consuming all of our stuff all the time. There's radio, there's music, there's TV, there's movies. All of this is just being streamed and given, right, then there's no longer a differentiation. You don't have to go to the movie theater and watch a movie and you know, you can watch the same episode of Friends 7,500 times until you know every word that they've said. And, yeah, like they're learning, they're just vicariously, just absorbing English because it's just, we're such a massive cultural powerhouse, so they know our culture. Their basis is partly our culture. They have their own cultures, right, they're all different. They all work their own way.

Chris Brown:

This is not to say that America dominates everything, but it's to say that we're aligned and that alignment really brings a lot of power to US businesses, because you get to go to a talent pool that's much larger than you were previously experiencing and you get to find people that are very well educated, very adept at what they do, probably very well experienced. There's huge corporations of every kind that you could imagine all throughout Latin America. There's every industry. There's every type of just every type of market, every type of economy, everything you can imagine. There's somewhere in Latin America that has that kind of economy, has that kind of industry, has that kind of production modality and you can tap into those resources. And especially, coming at it as an American company, you're going to offer them higher rates and a better compensation package. Then they're going to get offered in their home country. So now you have this dual win situation where you're coming at people that are very experienced, very talented, very adept, and you're coming with a compensation package that they couldn't get in their home country. Like that's win-win, because that compensation package is going to be less than you're going to pay Americans. Like it's almost always there's there's exceptions at the top end. Of course you can, you can get into it, but yeah, you're, you're saving money, right, you're going into. It's an arbitrage play at that point on the on the finance side of it. And yeah, you get amazing people, amazing talent, amazing alignment, better prices and it's just, it's a huge win. It's a huge win in every direction essentially and you know, I'm I'm the guy with the company like there's a bit of a sales pitch in there but just like I used this service before I came into this company my old company I was I had an ecommerce company selling medical and dental supplies and we had a CSR team.

Chris Brown:

We replaced them with Latin American staff. We had our development team. We replaced them with Latin American staff and it was fantastic. We saved money. The KPIs got better. You know like we, we upscaled our operation for less money doing it through Latin America. Part of that was having a good resource. You know, I I was I was using my partner as the resource to start finding those people. She's very good, she's very adept. She was an executive in an education company in Columbia before moving to the U S, so she's very well rooted and has very good connections and network and, of course, very smart Um. But using that, using that network, bringing that in, using that talent pool, just completely changed the base operation of that company. By the time I left that company, the only people left in the US were the people that were needed to be there, like the forklift operator and the office manager. Wow, everybody else, everybody that could be remote, was from Latin America.

Chris Brown:

And again, that was also you know again, going back to the way I've structured my life and my businesses that one was also structured to be as remote as possible. Now there was a warehouse, there was physical inventory. It was a large operation but the majority of the positions were built in a way that nobody had to go to that office. They have the optionality. If you really wanted to go to Mesa, arizona, and go to a warehouse, have fun. There's a desk, you can use it. I don't know why you're going to, but have fun, you know.

Chris Brown:

But once we saw the Latin American option, it just took over. You know the hiring process of the organization because it was just better. I mean, my, my partner and her recruiting team were far better at finding good people than we were in the in our own company, because we didn't have a dedicated recruiting team. Why would we? We're an e-commerce with a warehouse. You know we need we need 15 people at any given time. So I'm not, I don't want to hire a recruiter as well. So you're kind of doing it yourself, right? You have your operations officer kind of acting as recruiter and that works well. They know what you need. They're probably good at finding stuff, but they're never as good as a dedicated recruiting team right, they're not as good as somebody whose job it is to interview people and who enjoys interviewing people. You know it makes a difference. It makes a huge difference.

Dr. William Attaway:

It really does. Yeah, you know a couple of things you keyed into there that I want to follow up on. One was the cost thing Most people think about. You know sourcing talent offshore as a cost being the primary reason you would do that. One of the things you talked about was how it's not just a matter of a benefit for the businesses in the US to think offshore talent. It's not just for a cost benefit for you, it's also for them. You know you're actually giving them an opportunity at a wage and a benefit package that they could not achieve without that. I think that's important.

Dr. William Attaway:

One of the key themes that I talk about frequently when it comes to leadership is seeing the people that you lead not just as cogs in a machine, but as actual 3D human beings, right, and people that have hopes and dreams of their own. It sounds like and feel free to correct me if I'm off, but it sounds like that is how you view this entire thing, as you're trying to find a winning situation for everybody involved the employer and the employee. You know the team lead and the team member, so that everybody wins. Is that accurate?

Chris Brown:

Oh, that's 100%. The underlying model, that's what underpins this business working, is that the people you hire have to be happy. Essentially, they have to be fulfilled, they have to be well compensated, they have to be getting what they want out of life and out of your position in order to be a long-term, stable asset to your company. And yeah, the only way you get there is for them to be well compensated, be well maintained, be well cared for. And in order for that to happen, you have to pay a good salary, pay a good wage, have good benefits. You know you have to take care of them, make sure that they know what their time off is and are able to take it and aren't over pressured and aren't overworked. And yeah, I mean that's part of part of it is client, client intake really, because you know finding candidates, finding good people, making sure they're well-compensated. It's very important. Again, it's an underpinning of our business. It's part of the point of the operation is, you know, bringing better opportunities to people in Latin America. That's kind of part of how this started. It also started, as you know, we can find it for Americans and there's a business model.

Chris Brown:

But clients, you know checking clients, intaking clients, seeing if a client is a good fit is part of that motion, and that is that question of like. You know, what is your, what is your business's policy, what is your outlook on how this works? Are you treating this person as a disposable contractor? If so, I'm not the right guy for you. I don't really want your business. I mean, there's a lot of them. You know there's plenty of business out there for you. You can go find those people, but I don't want to be involved in that situation.

Chris Brown:

So part of it is, you know, assessing the clients that are coming in and making sure that you know, is your budget for this position reasonable? And I get a lot of client calls that it's not a reasonable budget for the position, and that's might just be my positioning in the market. Right, we're a little bit more mid level at this point, not at the, you know, not entry or bottom level. So a little bit of that is positioning, but also a little bit of that is just that expectation that you're kind of alluding to, which is you know we're coming at this to save money, yeah, okay, well, you know you can try to hire somebody at $7 an hour from the Philippines or something, but at the end of the day, you're going to get what you pay for. You're going to save money by going to Latin America.

Chris Brown:

You're going to save money by going to the Philippines, that doesn't mean it's going to be the cheapest thing you've ever seen. Right, you get what you pay for, that's well said.

Dr. William Attaway:

Let's talk about you for a minute. In your journey, as you described, kind of where you've been, what you've been through, what you've led, you know what you have to do today, for WOW requires more of you than it did five years ago, and five years from now, wow is going to require even more. How do you stay on top of your game? How do you level up with the new leadership skills that your business, your clients, your teams are going to need you to have in the days ahead?

Chris Brown:

I mean, the answer is a little bit cliche, which is this like lifelong learning thing which you know, I think everybody kind of leans into and I think everybody does, but really it's, it's the fundamental basis of how do you continue, how do you grow? You know, growing as as a leader, growing as the business leader, growing, as you know, the operational head, is just another piece of everything else we have to grow at in life. Every day is is new, every day is a new challenge. Every day there's another little piece that you have to learn and figure out and I think that's just this. You know, it's this continued curiosity for me, which is just always looking for something interesting, something interesting that helps along the way. You know, it's not necessarily just blind, shotgun approach to interesting things, which is basically like reels at this point, you know. But more, more kind of focused interest is, if you're, for me. I don't know if this is always true, but for me, when something, when a topic is top of mind, when something's kind of bothering me, when something's out there like I just this, this is eating at me, it could be better, right, something in this universe kind of brings the right information my way and that's not just like I sit there and it comes at me, but I'm out there searching, I'm looking, I'm reading different things and then you know, when you have something top of mind that's an issue, something that's not necessarily connected, will click and they'll be like, oh, but this topic's out there. I didn't realize that topic was out there. And then you go look at it and think about it and then you read more on it and then you realize, oh, that really does correlate, just not in the way I expected it to right.

Chris Brown:

There's this kind of tangential correlation to basically everything that you can go find new avenues in. And as you find those new avenues, those new methodologies, those new, just interesting topics, they come back and they wrap around. It's like this thing I forget the name of it there's this thing where, like, if you learn a new word, that word's going to pop up in the world around you, right, like you didn't realize you were hearing it all the time and now you know what it means and suddenly you see the word everywhere. You know there's that, but it kind of permeates everything around us, like for me anyways, maybe that's not true for you know, but in my experience, when I see a new topic, or when I see a new avenue or something, suddenly that kind of thing, it just starts clicking into place with everything else.

Chris Brown:

And a lot of times you know the way our mind works, or like my mind works is that that clicking will really help with that problem solving of the thing you're working on. It's not going to solve the problem, right, but it's going to give you that next little piece, and that next little piece is going to give you that next step, and that next step is going to lead to that action point. And that action point is either going to lead to failure, and you're going to learn from it, or it's going to lead to success. And now you have the toolkit and then you can continue and then it's just, you know, it's the the ooda loop kind of situation, right, you're continually looking, you're continually orienting, you're continually deciding and then you're acting, and then then you learn, because then you go back to the first step to see if that action worked.

Chris Brown:

If it didn't work, which result? Was it right? This continual, ongoing cycle of am I doing the right thing? Is this on? Am I? There's this idea from the, the Charles Munger almanac book, which is avoiding stupidity, right, which is like, is this thing stupid? Is is what is the bad consequence of this? Like how can I avoid stupidity? In these motions, you know, and those things all kind of work together. They coalesce into a working operational reality around you.

Dr. William Attaway:

I love that You've mentioned at least one already. I'm curious is there a book that you would recommend to the leaders who are listening? That's made a really big difference in your journey.

Chris Brown:

Well, that one, of course, I mean Portia Early's Almanac is probably one of my favorite books. You know, it's just it's a little bit different, right, like there's always these answers of you know, atomic Habits is an amazing book and Atomic Habits he has a newsletter on Thursdays the email newsletter I love it. I love it. It's the only newsletter that's allowed past my unsubscribe filter. It's the only one I don't let no other newsletter gets passed, that one I'll read every Thursday.

Chris Brown:

It's fantastic, I love it, it's so valuable. But Poor Charlie's Almanac is just, it's a different thing. It's this idea of multimodal thinking right, it's this lattice work of thought processing and it comes back to that thing I was talking about a moment ago, which is like ideas click when you find them in different places. But it has to be this network of ideas, it has to be this entire mesh of things that we understand and this mental model that we have of the world, based on that mesh of ideas and this information. So you bring all these things together from all these different places and suddenly they connect in ways you didn't understand and it's like this uh, you know, his whole point is this, this basal understanding of kind of just multiple, multiple places.

Chris Brown:

So, like you have decent understanding of biology and physics and you know psychology and business and and as you go moving through the world, each of those things will kind of give you interaction or give you, you know, input and it's you know, especially the leading teams. Like you could lead all in on psychology, but then you have too much psychology. Or you lead all in on you know just business, but then you just have business. You need. You need a well-rounded approach to all these things in order to see the path ahead and get a better idea of what the problem actually is and and define the problem so that you can attack it. Hmm.

Dr. William Attaway:

Solid. Last question, and I ask this one to everybody If I could, if I had the ability to snap my fingers right now and solve one problem in your business, what would you want that problem to be? Oh, one.

Chris Brown:

Um, I think communication is always this sort of transient problem that we have. It's not necessarily like yeah, if you could solve communication in a way that's not just how do we communicate, because there's a billion ways to communicate, but are you doing it effectively?

Chris Brown:

Are you doing it correctly? Is the recipient understanding what the sender I'm not sure what the other word there is is saying, right, is it being? Is it being? Is it coming across in the way that it needs to come across? Because it, it goes sideways all the time, especially as you get, as you get further away from in-person spoken conversation, it gets harder and harder, right? So you go, you know in spoken conversation, you still have disagreements, you still have misunderstandings.

Chris Brown:

I constantly, me and my wife, will have I'll say something and she'll take it a different way, or she'll say something and I'll take it a different way. And then you have to iterate on this process to find what was the correct understanding there, what, what did you mean to say? How did you say it and what was I meant to think from that? You know, and that's in person. So you get to, you know, video chats on a call here, or you get to just voice chat and then you get down to email and then you get down to text messages and then you get down to you know, etc. Etc. Etc.

Chris Brown:

You get further and further away from a good, effective, empathetic approach to good communication, effective communication. And you know, I don't, I don't have an answer to that. We're always working on that. I'm always personally working on that. You know, how do I? How do I get this across? How do I make sure that, when I get this across, the other person gets what I'm trying to say? And how do I figure out how to, you know, manage what I'm saying so that it comes across as clearly, as effectively and as as impactfully, but as empathetically as possible? And so, yeah, I think somewhere in that world would be awesome. There's a million other problems to solve, but I think that would be if you could snap your fingers and solve it.

Dr. William Attaway:

That would be amazing, right, I wish I could. That would be amazing. You know, I ask that question because I think it's so easy to look at somebody like you from the outside and say, oh man, chris, chris's journey is just up into the right. He's never struggled with anything. He never really has any real problems.

Dr. William Attaway:

you know, like I have, you know and I think it's good for everyone listening to this episode to understand that, no matter where you are on the entrepreneurial journey, no matter what level of success you've achieved, there are always things you would love to solve. There are always problems that are still staring at you. That you're trying to wrestle to the ground, and I think that's very helpful and encouraging.

Chris Brown:

Yeah, yeah, absolutely, I agree, you know, I would. Just I would add that it's never always up, and to the right, it's always rocky. I agree, that was just the right, it's always rocky. I agree. That was just one example. There's endless examples.

Dr. William Attaway:

Chris, this has been such a great conversation and I'm so grateful for your transparency and your generosity in sharing so freely from your journey and what you've learned so far. I know our listeners are going to want to stay connected to you and continue to learn from you and more about what you're doing at WoW. What's the best way for them to do that?

Chris Brown:

Generally the website wowremoteteamscom, Google us or just ask ChatGPT for good Latin American staffing companies. It would generally pop up. The other way, of course, is LinkedIn, but my name is Chris Brown, so kind of good luck. But Chris Brown. Wow is LinkedIn, but my name is Chris Brown, so kind of good luck. But Chris Brown, wow, wow, teams, something like that. You'll find me and yeah, those are really the best routes.

Dr. William Attaway:

We will have those links in the show notes, including to your actual LinkedIn profile.

Chris Brown:

Yeah, please do.

Dr. William Attaway:

Chris, thank you so much for your time today.

Chris Brown:

Yeah, thank you for having me, william, it's been a pleasure.

People on this episode

Podcasts we love

Check out these other fine podcasts recommended by us, not an algorithm.

The Look & Sound of Leadership Artwork

The Look & Sound of Leadership

Essential Communications - Tom Henschel
The Lead Every Day Show Artwork

The Lead Every Day Show

Randy Gravitt and Mark Miller
The Global Leadership Podcast Artwork

The Global Leadership Podcast

Global Leadership Network
The Carey Nieuwhof Leadership Podcast Artwork

The Carey Nieuwhof Leadership Podcast

Art of Leadership Network
Seven Figure Agency Podcast with Josh Nelson Artwork

Seven Figure Agency Podcast with Josh Nelson

Josh Nelson - Seven Figure Agency
Agency Forward Artwork

Agency Forward

Chris DuBois