Jordan Buckner (00:00)
One of the biggest bottlenecks I see for CPG founders isn't demand, it's capacity. There's always way more to do than to time, budget, or headcount allows. So the day's to guess is figure out an alternative path early on. Luke Anthony's scale Morning Made by working with offshore VA style talent to grow his business. Morning Made is a line of matcha, chai, and other beverages designed to start your morning. He first came about them when you launched your like brand redesign and expansion.

and just love the packaging and everything that you do. So today I really wanna talk

hired out first, what worked, what doesn't when you're using offshore talent, really share those real world lessons. Luke, welcome to the show.

Luke Anthony (00:41)
Thanks Jordan, thanks for having me on.

Jordan Buckner (00:43)
So I'm super excited. Through this, you've turned your lessons into Plus Forty as well, which is a company that helps to source talent and offshore talent for other CPG brands from your experience. So I really wanted to talk through what lessons you learned in the Morning Made days so that you can, and you're still running that company as well, so that you can understand how you're helping other companies as well. So take me back a little bit to Morning Made early days, what problems we're starting to stack up that made you realize you couldn't

do everything yourself anymore.

Luke Anthony (01:14)
Yeah,

I think it's an interesting place taking it back to those early days. And I think it's probably consistent now that there's lots of problems at all times. And that doesn't change. The problems just sort of evolve into newer problems, which is a sign you're on the right track if you're getting the opportunity to solve new problems. But I think early days, and it still is sort of similar now in terms of was very scrappy. It was very much founder and a couple of people owning pretty much every part of the business.

Jordan Buckner (01:22)
He

Luke Anthony (01:41)
wearing multiple hats, which again is still happening now, but there were definitely times where things started to break as we started to expand. I think we realised that there were definitely lots of sort of lower leverage tasks, very monotonous tasks, tasks that were very repeatable, that we were doing on a daily basis, which...

gave opportunity to sort of assess whether that was something that could be outsourced, delegated or automated and then put us through the process of figuring out what works best there.

Jordan Buckner (02:07)
Now, when you started Morning Made were you the only founder? Do you have a co-founder or a group of co-founders or a team?

Luke Anthony (02:13)
Yeah, so Brad Matthews actually is the founder of MorningMade. And I guess I met Brad in New Zealand when I was working for another company. And then I went out and started my own agency called Tag Projects, which was essentially taking Australia and New Zealand brands into the US, into retail in particular. So we started working with Brad very, very closely and built a great relationship. And we were able to launch a small sort of Kiwi brand that had some traction into Walmart, Target.

sprouts, railings, a whole range ⁓ of big retailers in the US that really kickstarted that journey and did the same across Australia and New Zealand with the major supermarkets and mass retailers here too. About a year ago, which was two years into that consulting arrangement, ⁓ I came on full-time to help run the business. That's been the journey with MorningMade. I've been very fortunate. It's a unique scenario where I've been there from very, very early on, but only in a full-time capacity from the last

sort of year.

Jordan Buckner (03:08)
That's always really cool because I bet from his perspective as well, right? Like obviously you need help in growing a business But you have to try to figure out do I hire someone like a co-founder level? Do I hire an employee? Like usually in the early days, you don't have a ton of money to just like pay high salaries for people So I see a lot of people who are like I need basically like very cheap labor So at the earliest ages my equity feels relatively inexpensive and so like let me bring out the co-founder But then you can't just fire a co-founder

Luke Anthony (03:33)
Yeah.

Jordan Buckner (03:37)
because they're not just an employee, they have ownership in the company, so it creates all these weird dynamics. And that financial and growth pressure is really tough for a lot of companies. So I think it's one really great that you got a chance to work with him together early on before you kind of came on as that full-time role, which is really cool. So even when you came on then...

At what point did you realize that the team needed more help to do things? And what were some of those first tasks that you hired out for a virtual assistant or offshore talent?

Luke Anthony (04:10)
And yeah, so definitely. I think in terms of that, those early days, the, even when I was consulting, and talking back to sort of providing that value, I guess, to provide that opportunity for what came next was I was doing a lot of the work actually just for free because I built a good relationship with Brad and then also saw the opportunity, I guess, in terms of what the brand and the product and sort of the white space was. So I was very fortunate that I came into a space where I was helping with retail, but definitely solving a lot of operational challenges.

as well which allowed me to sort of come...

probably more onto the business from an agency perspective than any other agency would in terms of actually making sort of key operational decisions like hiring. So the first sort of, I guess, area that we identified was customer service, which we outsourced to the Philippines to a lovely gentleman named Ivan, who came on to run our customer service arm. And I think the customer service is quite interesting. I think it's a common one to start with in terms of in terms of offshoring, because usually it's something that

a founder does as sort of a last minute type thing. You know, I speak to a lot of founders, especially in the earlier days when the amount of sort of tickets or inquiries is quite low. It's something that, you know, they're doing on the couch after dinner at end of night, getting out the 10, 15, 20 different inquiries that are there. But I think as the business grows, that starts to snowball and becomes a big impact on sort of their time and...

where they should be spending their own resource. So that was something that we identified early and brought in someone that was offshore and worked really, really well.

Jordan Buckner (05:39)
How did you go about finding Ivan and actually starting to work with him?

Luke Anthony (05:44)
So we, at the time, were with a third party logistics company and they recommended an agency similar to Plus Forty that essentially placed offshore talent. So we got a good relationship with this guy and we went through the process of, or their recruitment process, which we learnt a lot about in terms of what works and what doesn't. But essentially this person set up interviews with a couple of different candidates that we then had very, very quick interviews. And back then, I mean, we didn't have a lot of structure in terms

of our recruiting process, we didn't really know what good looked like. So we had a couple of really loose conversations and pretty much just said yes to the one that felt right.

Jordan Buckner (06:23)
you

And then from that, what did you learn in terms of what worked well and what worked poorly from that process? Because I hear from a lot of founders who say like, how do I know they're going to represent like me and my brand well and communicate with customers so it doesn't feel like I am just putting off this to customer service to someone else outside of, you know, that's offshore where you sometimes you'll call a large national company and feel like, they're just like, I'll serve.

You know sending my information out to someone else who can't really solve my problems I feel like there's definitely a bias there that people have so how do you help to overcome that?

Luke Anthony (06:59)
Yeah, and I think customer service is a really unique one where the tone of voice is really, really crucial in terms of how that person is responding to customers and it changes on platform as well. how that person may respond on email might be slightly different for the brand in terms of how they maybe respond through to Instagram DMs or even comments as well. in terms of that particular example, I think the onboarding is a really, really important.

process of upskilling this person in how does the brand look feel how does it you know how does it sound how

How should we respond? we, know, is there brands that are more sort of cheeky in terms of the way that they respond and fun? And then there's other brands that are, you know, more clinical and scientific. So it's much more important to be more polished. So I think having sort of some kind of brand guidelines that sort of dictate how this person should respond, whether they're offshore, onshore, in your team, remote. I think having those brand guidelines for a customer service type role or a customer facing roles is really, really important.

Jordan Buckner (07:59)
Now after working with the agency and that person worked out well, what other roles did you start hiring for using Offshore Talent?

Luke Anthony (08:09)
So we took the same lens really and we thought what else is, because that worked well, it's okay, what else in the business is are we spending time on on a daily basis that is taking away

our energy and time from things that truly shift the needle. So the next thing that was sort of logical was a sort of sales operations role. you know, entering orders, working with the 3PL on tracking shipments, you handling retail and B2B customer inquiries, those types of things. So we brought on a sales and operations role, which essentially now does a lot of data entry, does a lot of follow ups, does a lot of tracking orders, creating orders.

working between our sales operations and finance team and that's given a lot of leverage to then say our sales person. So instead of keying in orders or following up tracking, shipping tracking, he can actually spend time actually speaking with customers and getting the value out of those conversations versus doing the sort of monotonous day-to-day tasks.

Jordan Buckner (09:03)
And for someone like that, right? Did you find someone that had food and beverage experience or that you have to teach them about the industry, how it worked, the language to use?

Luke Anthony (09:14)
Yeah, it's a really good question. we didn't, the agency we went through probably didn't provide the best sort of overview in terms of the experiences person had had, but at the time, be honest, and very, and which is probably similar with a lot of early on sort of startups. I mean, you realize sort of there's a fire and you just try and put it out. And I think in hiring that's, know, we need someone, let's put someone in the seat. And I think that's where sort of, mentioned before, we've learned a lot about hiring, whether offshore or onshore in the last 18 months around sort of things

further ahead in the future of how does this employee truly impact and contribute to where we want to go and what does even the growth pathway for this employee look like and how does this work in a cohesive way with our onshore team, with our remote employees, with our offshore team. And we've definitely learnt a lot there but I mean if I speak honestly and transparently about say that particular hire, it was very much get someone in the seat and we'll provide the learning and the upskilling to where they are today but even there's a lot of learnings around that.

you know, we didn't have onboarding docs, was no SOPs written out, there was no, you know, ways of working. So there was a lot of information where, and to the credit of this person has had to pick up on the fly and extract information, which is very common within startups. A lot of information lives within people's heads. So spending time, you know, on calls with people following, you know, what they do. But I think there's a lot of really cool tools these days, like Loom as an example, where you can really interact with

with remote teams where you can just explain your process and thinking and allow someone to follow that at a later date which is really really helpful.

Jordan Buckner (10:44)
I actually love Loom as a tool because then it allows that person to go back at their own speed as well to rewatch it again, but then a week, two weeks, three weeks later, they can actually go back to that video so they don't have to ask you over and over again. You just have to share that once.

Luke Anthony (10:59)
We use Loom a lot in our business, even for our team that sit next to each other every day. think Loom can replace a lot of meetings and a lot of conversations that impact other people's time. And like you said, allows someone to come back to it at a later date and watch it at two, three, four times speed, which is very, very helpful.

Jordan Buckner (11:18)
approximate number of offshore talent that Morning Made is working with at any given time?

Luke Anthony (11:24)
So we're working with five, five full-time employees offshore at the moment. And we've got 12 full-time employees that are based across Australia and New Zealand. roughly a third of our business at the moment is offshore and will continue to grow. think where we found a lot of value is there's different sort of needs, dates and reasons for having people onshore or offshore or remote. There's a lot of value to having an in-person team in terms of speed and the agility that you can get from being able to communicate.

on the fly and I think we've learned that offshore employees, whether remote or based in places like the Philippines, can really supercharge and power our key sort of team, if that makes sense. So having the sales manager that sits next to me every day in terms of the speed that we can get from communicating, but then having someone offshore that can supercharge what he does and allow him to really buy back his time so he can focus on what matters and again, really truly shifts the needle.

Jordan Buckner (12:20)
Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. Have you found any tasks or functions that surprise you that work better with offshore teams?

Luke Anthony (12:28)
Yeah, definitely. And I think it's been a bit of a journey in terms of unraveling what this offshore sort of market even looks like and understanding, you know, what really is the capabilities of say, you know, people that are based in the Philippines as an example. So, yeah, it's been an interesting journey. And I think what I've learned is like any other market all around the world, there is a whole scale to skill sets and experience. And, you know, I think sometimes

is very much branded as low-level monotonous tasks like data entry is an example that or customer service that there should be offshored but as an example with Plus Forty we've hired a senior supply chain manager that's come into a FMCG brand just recently who's coming in and actually creating the systems and the processes behind their supply chain which is something that and they've had you know 10 to 15 years experience across a whole range of CPG brands so it's a different level of insight into what they can bring and how

they can sort of act within a brand which I think is really really cool and really unique and I think it's worth exploring for a lot of brands and that's where Plus Forty as a service is really really cool because you can go down the path of you know you've got a thought of a role or a person and you can get you know some interviews with some people you can even get some trial projects back and you can get to the point where you haven't paid a cent but really evaluate what this could look like for your business which is which is really really cool but we're saying a whole range of roles whether it's video editors

marketing managers, influencer outreach specialists, operations, supply chain, logistics, there's a whole range of roles that can be outsourced.

Jordan Buckner (14:02)
Yeah, I think that's the bias,

though.

working the overcome as well because I've worked with and work with talent that lives around the world and my team as well and to say that just like any market there's people who are entry-level who have know relatively little experience there's people who have experience in other industries but maybe not yours and then there's subject matter experts who have actually worked in food beverage industry and have worked with other companies and have more specialized skills they just happen to live in other parts around the world because those industries also exist in other parts of the world as well which is really exciting

I'm kind of curious, how did this model as you started working with this kind of move and evolve around the work that you were doing at MorningMade and grow into Plus Forty?

Luke Anthony (14:41)
Yeah, so I guess Plus Forty was really born out of the understanding that no one was building a company around offshoring for CPG. I think so offshoring and these types of agencies that place talent from markets like the Philippines is definitely not new. And we talked to that, you know, quite often. And I think it's a good thing it's not new because that means there's a lot of, you know, experienced people that have worked with global brands for the last 10 years, which is amazing. And which is, you know,

talent pool that we try to attract and then place within amazing CPG businesses. But where we found the interesting point of view from a front end is that there's no agencies actually talking to CPG specifically. And I think CPG as an industry is very sort of nuanced in terms of the talent that it requires to grow and scale. And an example of that is, know, we replaced a sales ops type role recently that has great understanding of UNFI and Kehi. Whereas, you know, a typical ⁓ sort of

VA, as you would say, from another agency might have worked with software companies for the last 10 years. what we're trying to do is build a very robust talent pool around roles that really truly impact CPG brands and help them scale. And then where we can add value as Plus Forty is how do we provide training and sort of structure and processes for these talent pools to thrive within a growing CPG business. that's where sort of our unique positioning is. ⁓ There's no one else on the market

that's doing that currently. it's something we're very excited about. And I think Connor and I who started Plus Forty are very much deeply sort of rooted in CPG in terms of our experience, but also just our love for this game and seeing cool CPG brands come to life and then being able to succeed on the global stage is something that we're very passionate about. So being able to unlock some talent for them is very, very, very cool. ⁓

Jordan Buckner (16:31)
Yeah, I think

that's so exciting, being able to use your own.

CPG experience and Rick Connor working in the food industry as well of being able to help educate and train people and identify those who with experience and like what it actually takes and being able to tell if they know what they're talking about, right? To evaluate and filter them to help brands You know, I think that's so cool. You've been able to do a Plus Forty and being able to help connect people with talent How does it work usually in terms of bringing on talent? they working as employees independent contractors when they're

with you or they just like hire Plus Forty then you handle all the logistics of working with them how does that process work?

Luke Anthony (17:08)
Yeah, no, it's a good question. So we handle essentially all of the challenging parts with with offshoring. This is sort of how we position it. And we really try to from every part, whether it's the hiring recruitment onboarding, our whole aim is how do we simplify this process to make it as easy as possible for a brand and how that looks now currently is these employees, sorry, these people are independent contractors to Plus Forty And then we charge out an amount per month for from Plus Forty. So you just deal directly

with Plus Forty in terms of the the payment side and we handle all the the messy payroll contracts and everything that happens from a back end with each of those individuals.

Jordan Buckner (17:48)
And then are people usually working hourly or is there a commitment to working with an individual?

Luke Anthony (17:54)
So there's currently a 20 hour minimum commitment per week for any individual. And that whole, I guess, reason for being there is to allow one individual to work solely on one brand. So when we first started, we didn't have an hourly commitment, which meant someone could bring on, say, a customer service person for five hours a week. But what we found is that potential candidate, five hours a week is obviously not enough for them to sustain a living. So they ended up working on 10 different brands, working 50 hours.

a week and then we found that you know it gets very mixed in terms of priorities, goals and sort of context switching between each of those brands so we want you know this person to come fully ingrained into the business and 20 hours as a minimum allows that to happen so like an onshore offshore employee you want your employer to be committed and fully sort of in the business so that commitment is there to sort of allow that to happen.

Jordan Buckner (18:44)
that. And then I know the pricing per hour per person varies. Do you have an approximate range of how much you're paying or someone will pay for working with this talent?

Luke Anthony (18:55)
Yeah, it really does scale. And the reason it scales is exactly the same with any employees is it's based off skill set and experience essentially. for an example, mean, in terms of average, a lot of our roles fit within sort of a 12 to $14 an hour bucket. But as an example, we've brought on say that supply chain manager who's had 10 to 15 years experience within CPG, that could be closer to $16 to $18 an hour, just purely based on the experience.

in this skill set that that person's coming in and providing.

Jordan Buckner (19:26)
Awesome, love that.

Well Luke, thanks so much for being on and talking about this. For anyone who is considering or interested in learning more about working with offshore and talent for your business, definitely talk with Luke and he's happy to tell you more, like if it'll be a good fit or not, or what roles and tasks that you want to, particularly offshore. But just like any employee, what I always recommend, especially for small brands, is write down all the things that you're doing as a founder or business owner right now, and then figure out where your time is spent best, and then figure out the best

source to offshore or to use that do those other tasks and delegate whether that's someone who's local, whether that is a remote employee, someone who's offshore or an agency so that you can focus on what's going to grow your business. Luke, thanks so much for being on.

Luke Anthony (20:09)
Awesome, thanks Jordan, I really appreciate your time.