Navigating the Remote Work Landscape with Kyle Mau, Hire-UA.com

Venture with us into the future of work as visionary CEO Kyle Mau of Hire-UA.com sits down with Gary Pageau of the Dead Pixels Society to recount his transition from a Californian computer systems engineer to an entrepreneur in Eastern Europe. Tap into Mau's story as he navigates from the corporate world to found a remote work company based in Ukraine. His story is a testament to the versatility of remote work, the wisdom of building a stable, dedicated workforce, and its pivotal role in enhancing operations and refining customer service.

As Mau makes the case for remote employment, Ukraine emerges as a focal point, teeming with a young, self-reliant generation. Discover the unique advantages and challenges of managing a business amid political disruption, and the strategic measures taken to ensure remote employee welfare. Mau also discusses the implications of AI and automation—will they supplant human creativity and service, or can a harmonious balance be struck? Mau's involvement in recruitment and the growing reliance on Eastern Europe remote teams underscores a dynamic in the employment sector. 

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Transcript

Erin Manning: 0:02

Welcome to the Dead Pixel Society podcast, the photo imaging industry's leading news source. Here's your host, gary Peugeot. The Dead Pixel Society podcast is brought to you by MediaClip. Advertite Printing and Independent Photo Imagers.

Gary Pageau: 0:18

Hello again and welcome to the Dead Pixel Society podcast. I'm your host, gary Peugeot, and today we're joined by Kyle Mow, the CEO and owner of HireUAcom. Kyle is coming to us from Poland today. Hi, kyle, how are you today?

Kyle Mau: 0:33

Good Thanks for having me on, Gary. I really appreciate it.

Gary Pageau: 0:36

So you do not have a Polish accent.

Kyle Mau: 0:39

I do not.

Gary Pageau: 0:40

Where are you from and how did you get started in the remote work business?

Kyle Mau: 0:46

So I'm originally from California and I was actually a very long time ago. When I was 24 years old, I was an engineer I'm almost 33 now and I decided I did not really like the corporate job, so I quit a six-figure job, saved a few thousand dollars and took a one-way ticket out to Eastern Europe where I ultimately found a new home, and I've been out here pretty much ever since.

Gary Pageau: 1:09

So what were you doing in this former job?

Kyle Mau: 1:11

I was a computer systems engineer, so I was in charge of running data centers with the storage units, and when big companies had problems like this data sets offline they would call me.

Gary Pageau: 1:23

At the middle of the night when you're trying to sleep.

Kyle Mau: 1:26

Sometimes yes. But, then what actually really set me like I have to go be an entrepreneur was I became an admin instead of like an engineer, and I was working for a think tank for the government, and it was one of those situations where if I wanted to make a five-minute change, I had to have five months of meetings. Just sitting at a desk all day. I just I couldn't do it, Just waiting for people to get their paperwork done. So I took a shot and thankfully it worked out.

Gary Pageau: 1:53

So clearly one who works for a government think tank the first thing they do when they go to Eastern Europe is start an olive oil company. I've seen that story over and over again. Tell me how you did it.

Kyle Mau: 2:06

Well, actually I started off as a blogger and just doing travel stuff, a little bit of dating advice, like basically saying like hey people, maybe you want to move abroad. And then one of my readers from that blog his name is Martin. He had a family olive oil orchard in Croatia and needed help with marketing, so I partnered with him. There's a bottle of it behind me here on the shelf, although this is just an audio podcast, so you're not going to see it.

Erin Manning: 2:30

but you can play it. You go ahead, plug it, okay.

Kyle Mau: 2:32

Do the plug. So all of dot com, if you want to check it out Basically. Then a few years later COVID happened. I was living in Ukraine and I ended up hiring someone as a personal assistant in Ukraine and I kind of said, you know, a lot of people have always gone to like India and the Philippines to outsource overseas, why is no one like coming here? Because they're really sharp, they're really smart and that's ultimately kind of how hiring when they got started was me just being on the ground there and seeing there was maybe an opportunity.

Gary Pageau: 3:01

So what kind of companies are looking for remote work I mean, you always hear it for like programming and you know call centers and you know that sort of thing, but it can really be almost anything at this point with technology.

Kyle Mau: 3:17

It really can. Like earlier this year or sorry, last year, I should say we signed like a higher distribution company in Miami and we placed some people there and that to me, was like this is a shop that sells tires locally in Miami, hiring logistics and operations managers eight time zones away, and it's working. So, like you said, technology has really changed the game, that almost any business now, unless it's like a retail storefront, really can become remote, and even some of those I have noticed like there's dentist office, doctor's offices now, where you walk in and there's an iMac and there's someone there who will check you in and that person's overseas and they're just on the cap. So really there's almost no shortage of like almost anyone can become a company these days, like truly obviously those are either technical jobs or customer facing jobs that can be done remotely.

Gary Pageau: 4:10

You're in the way you structure the business. Do you get like a specific person or is it like there's a pool of people who are going to do this function? Because I think a lot of people who are looking at remote work wouldn't like a revolving door type thing, right when it's like whoever comes in that day. You know, I'm thinking like a call center. Can you have a dedicated person to fulfill a function when you're doing a remote position, for example? Let's say, for example, you're doing sales and say at a remote person doing cold calling, could you make sure you get the same person?

Kyle Mau: 4:42

What do you mean? So, yeah, I mean we basically spec people based off of the role that they need. So a business comes to us and says we need someone to manage our customers, so we would go out and find this very specific person.

Gary Pageau: 4:54

Okay, that's what I mean. It's a very specific thing. It's not a you know like most people want to. They most probably think of remote work, especially overseas. They think you know a call saying you're never going to get the same person twice right, yeah, no, no, no.

Kyle Mau: 5:08

These are dedicated people. They've always got the same person coming and they're usually small businesses. So when someone becomes a client success manager, a customer success manager, that person is then dedicated to whoever the clients are for that business. It's definitely not a revolving door and I know exactly what you're talking about. Like every time you call a bank overseas, you call someone, you get someone and then you know you get disconnected and you have to start all over and you'll never, ever, ever have that same person again, which I think is really made customer service very difficult for a lot of people these days. It's very hard to get the help that you need when you call like a big corporation these days.

Gary Pageau: 5:42

Yeah, cause people still like to call and talk to people. I mean, yeah, there's this, the AI, chatbots and all that great stuff, but you know there are a great number of people who just want to talk to a human being who can listen to them and get something done.

Kyle Mau: 5:56

Yeah, yeah, and a lot of the problem too is that if it's ever any sensitive information, you just have to go round and round and round and it's very difficult to get that help you need and, like you said, ai is not necessarily always a good substitute.

Gary Pageau: 6:09

Now you brought something up that's kind of interesting sensitive information, right? Are there any legal or logistical issues with having to manage, like, let's say, you mentioned Dennis, right? So in patient files, right, that information going overseas? You know, is there HIPAA concerns there or anything like that?

Kyle Mau: 6:30

We don't typically do placements like that. So we've done a couple like medical IT companies and they had to set up separate access points for these people. Like there's basically a wall where there are people couldn't get into the other side of it because of HIPAA. So I don't know, because we don't really do positions like that, I don't know what the legality as far as you know, having someone right there, you know that has access to that information. Certainly, if you're a dentist or a doctor looking for an opportunity like that, then you need to, you know, go with someone who actually has those fail safes and, you know, do your research on that.

Kyle Mau: 7:05

But yeah, it certainly can be an issue and the one thing I always tell people is like, at the end of the day, this person is overseas and what are you going to do if they do something you are not going to? For example, start a lawsuit, you know in Ukraine, you're not going to hire a lawyer there, you're not going to be able to get this person to court. You know it's the middle of a war going on there, you're, and then you know how are you going to possibly collect damages? It's just not going to happen. That's just kind of what I tell people. That's your trade off. You know to save a ton of money on hiring them is there is potentially a little bit more risk.

Gary Pageau: 7:39

Right, that is a very balanced way of looking at it, right? Because I mean you brought up the elephant in the room, which is you do this to save money? You do this I mean, I mean, that's why you're doing it. What kind of cost savings can someone see typically? Let's say, for example, you know, let's say a customer service person, entry level here, let's say they're making $18, $19 an hour, you know, plus basic benefits. What kind of savings can we see here, like on a percentage basis?

Kyle Mau: 8:12

Typically, you would see savings of roughly 70 to 80% across the majority of positions. So customer service person, you're probably looking around $6 to $10 an hour, kind of just depends. And the other thing, though, is that it's very expensive to hire, like in the United States now, because of the benefits and the 401k matching and insurance and everything else that has to be on top of that number, whereas when you go abroad you don't have to provide any of that. If you decide to great, it's a nice bonus, but you don't necessarily have to, so it typically comes out quite a bit cheaper, and I think what I've seen over the last few years is so many small business owners are struggling to just get people into jobs.

Gary Pageau: 8:51

Exactly that's what I'm thinking, because I know, like in the industry I work in the photo imaging industry it's very, very difficult to get people to just even plus. We're doing crunch time right Now. Can you do this temporarily, or is it a year long contract? Because then the photo industry we have seasonal work. Yeah, we have heavy seasons then, not so heavy seasons.

Kyle Mau: 9:16

So we typically try to put people into full time roles. There are companies that will do more project based, and we make exceptions. We obviously are business. We have to make money too.

Kyle Mau: 9:24

So if someone comes to us and says, hey, I only need this person for three months and we know the score going in, and then we can go to candidates Like we might find someone who's just looking for part of time work, and we can just tell them like, hey, this is a temporary gig. As long as you know the score, as long as you're good with it and everybody's happy, then we can make this work. But I think what a lot of people now you know in the businesses that you're talking about is it's hard to get people to even show up to interviews in person, like some of the local small businesses that are clients are like half our people don't even show up to in person interviews because all they're doing is checking the box on unemployment of I applied for a job, I didn't go to the interview, I applied though, and that then gets them their next check in the mail and they just do it all over and over again.

Gary Pageau: 10:07

Or they accept the job and still don't show up, which you still hear stories of that too, which floors to the umpteenth degree that someone actually go through the entire hiring process, be offered a position and then not show up.

Kyle Mau: 10:22

It's shocking and I don't know if it's like a millennial thing. I mean, I am a millennial. I know a lot of people my age are just not as interested in like working that I've seen, like with my parents generation, for example. It's something has like fallen off a little bit. I'm not really sure what it is and I don't know if it can necessarily be fixed easily, which is why a lot of people, I think, are starting to look abroad, because they're like I have no other option.

Gary Pageau: 10:44

Right, yeah, I mean, I think the first preps are people would be enough. You're going to be running that Miami Tire store, for example. I think they probably would have preferred to hire local people, right, of course. Yeah, so I mean that's sort of their thing, right, where your local Miami Tire company. So let's talk a little bit, I mean, about the Ukraine itself. So you went there and you kind of saw that what was the deciding factor that made you think, wow, these people are great for remote work. Was it the educational system, or the culture, or the language? Because I mean, I think they, even though they do, there's a Ukraine language. I think they do speak English very well there.

Kyle Mau: 11:29

So it was a lot of different things. The big history is that they were a communist country for a long time, and the generation now has come up in a society that's mostly been improving over time since communism fell in 1991. So English, just generally bright, intelligent people, just self independent thinking, you know, self analytical, able to tackle stuff on their own, and just generally a very bright society of very smart people, a lot of engineers, a lot of scientists. So when you have these opportunities with an American company, like we place them with, they're making double or triple, maybe sometimes quadruple, what they could actually make in Ukraine. So like a young 25 year old person who's studied English their whole life, who maybe went to business school but doesn't want to leave their home in Ukraine or wants to stay in Europe. For them to be able to then work remotely on a flexible schedule and make four times a normal salary, there is like everybody wins. So that's really. What drew me a lot, though, is just general intelligence and self analytical you know, self independent thought, thinking.

Gary Pageau: 12:34

So obviously there's a bit of a kerfuffle happening there. How has that impacted your day-to-day operation? Because I think most of my audience is North America. I do have quite a few Europeans who listen. But I'm just curious, like, from a geography standpoint, there's the eastern part of Ukraine, so typically I don't know geography. How is that impacting? I mean, how many people do you have in your pool, for example?

Kyle Mau: 13:03

Well, when it all kicked off, things were chaos. Obviously, for months it was just nothing but chaos. Since then it's really stabilized. So a lot of people that we've placed, a lot of the candidates we saw, have moved out of Ukraine at this point, so they might be in Poland or the Czech Republic or Germany or in all these other different places.

Kyle Mau: 13:21

So those ones are very simple. They're totally safe and stable. If they're still in Ukraine, which is a lot of more, say, technical positions, like developers, because right now men cannot leave the country. So we have to say like do you have a generator, Do you have a Starling cookup nearby? Like, what are your options for staying online if things go bad? And we actually have had a few people that have not shown up to work and we've never heard from again. We don't know what happened to them. They could be something horrible could have happened, we're not sure. But for the most part we've made sure now that everyone we place is in a stable situation where they're able to still function and do their work at a high level.

Gary Pageau: 14:02

Now let's talk a little about your customer base, right? The people who hire you. You know you've got a couple of hundred clients. You've built this thing pretty fast in a relatively short time. Are they all over the world, or where are they? And how do you market the business other than appearing on very successful podcasts like this one?

Kyle Mau: 14:22

It's a combination of a lot of things.

Kyle Mau: 14:24

So I would say 95% of our customers are American USA, and then the other 5% Canadian, uk and Australia, but primarily American.

Kyle Mau: 14:34

As far as marketing, I was fortunate enough that I've had a very large blog and email list from my personal brand back when I was doing blogging for a long time, so that I was able to kind of catapult into some traction on LinkedIn, some traction on YouTube. So a lot of social media. Basically I'd say it's about 50% of it, whether it's Twitter, youtube, linkedin, and then also via cold email outreach. So basically just downloading lists of business owners, sending out some campaigns and just seeing if they're interested, and then, as the company has grown, huge word of mouth and referral kind of deals where, like once because what people are struggling so much to hire, when they come to us and we find them someone in five days and this person is just absolutely killing it for them, then they tell all their friends who are having the same problem. So like once someone's come in, they've had a good success. If they know other business owners, like everybody just funnels them our way, which makes it really easy. Obviously it's really nice.

Gary Pageau: 15:53

So let's talk a little bit about technology, since you have a technology background. Are you concerned for your business that some of the functions could be replaced by AI, with some of these automated systems that are in place to do some customer service?

Kyle Mau: 16:12

Some things definitely concerned me. Like, for example, I was playing with Mid Journey, which is the illustrating AI making some thumbnails and stuff, and I'm like holy cow, I can sit here and give it one prompt and it spits out just this beautiful piece of work. So some things are absolutely terrifying and I could absolutely see entire roles being shifted away. In the McDonald's here in Poland, for example, there's more of kiosks than employees. Now, like, you walk in, there's 30 kiosks where you can order your food, but there's only like three employees you can talk to. So I think there's always gonna be a need for people to run those machines. But I do think that we're gonna see more and more roles kind of just swallowed up by AI, because it's faster, it's more reliable once.

Gary Pageau: 16:58

It doesn't call in.

Kyle Mau: 17:00

Doesn't call in sick. Yeah, it's all about whether the models can learn properly. I think so you can right now. If you go to chat GPT and you say, like write a blog post, like most people can tell it's not a human that wrote it. The question is, can it be trained to become good enough? And in that case then, yeah, a lot of people are gonna be out of jobs.

Gary Pageau: 17:20

Yeah, I mean, like in the imaging industry, there's a lot. We've been dealing with AI for quite a few years actually, with some technology to automatically create things, but it is now that you've got the generative AI, which is what you're talking about, mid-journey, where you just put in a prompt and it creates something out of a whole cloth. That's completely new and, like you said, it's not quite perfect, but it's getting better every day.

Gary Pageau: 17:42

It's getting better and it's not gonna stop. It's not quite T1000 yet, but it's getting there. So I'm not just curious because I think that is one of the things people talk about here in terms of employment is what's gonna happen with AI replacing some of these functions? I think it will replace certain entry level function, right? Yeah, you know, like if I need somebody to do some basic copywriting, I can just drop it into chat, gpt and yeah, I'm not sure. Yes, I have to edit it and I have to clean it up and whatever, but it's going to get you 80% there and I don't hire somebody to do that. But sounds to me like you're trying to get levels above that, right? You're not. You're not doing entry level people, you're actually doing key employee type functions.

Kyle Mau: 18:27

Yeah, I mean that's what we try to do. Of course we do basic entry level roles as well. We don't turn away those jobs. But yeah, we're trying to put high level people in. Most of the people we put in, you know, are, you know, full on masters degrees. Lots of them have many years of experience in a relevant industry, Like it's. It's high quality people, because it doesn't do us any good to place people who are just going to get fired and churn. You know, we make a lot of our money on the back end of having someone in a business for a long time. So we're incentivized to find the best people possible because that's how we actually make our money.

Gary Pageau: 18:58

Yeah, yeah, it's like the old. You know you want a long term customer, so you make money over time, right? I mean that's exactly exactly how employment agencies actually work is is they, you know over time is where they, it's not just the single placement. So tell me a little bit about how you find people to to be part of your program. I mean, obviously there's some recruiting and word of mouth that happens there and you have to vet people. That sounds like a process.

Kyle Mau: 19:26

Yeah, I mean I'm fortunate enough now I've built out a whole team, so I don't do any of the outsourced, that are, those people remote that you yeah, my whole team is primarily Ukrainian.

Kyle Mau: 19:36

I've got a couple of like sales people in the U? S because we don't really do sales positions, but everyone's Ukrainian. I've actually met the majority of them in person. But we're all kind of spread out over Europe. So we've got some people in the Netherlands, germany, um Slovakia, some people still in Ukraine. So they all work remotely and they handle everything from start to finish.

Kyle Mau: 19:55

So once, like let's say, for example, someone goes to the site, books a call and they decide to sign on with us, from there we write a full job description and it gets passed on to the recruiting and operations team and they go out and they do their thing. So a lot of it is scouring the local boards and local groups. It's a it's a closed off place, like you kind of have to have local connections, local language knowledge to be able to actually get your foot in the door and be able to understand that. Then we set up all the interviews. So the business owner, whoever it is, just has to show up and we take care of everything else. So they just show up, they might do five interviews in a row and then they usually will hire someone and we get everything started from there.

Gary Pageau: 20:34

Cool. So in the imaging industry right, for example, some of the business that we work in you know they've been used to outsourcing. For example, image editing used to be outsourced right To the picture edited. You drop it into a hot folder somewhere and somebody would pick it up and remotely work on it and drop it back, and so that that function has been around for quite some time. So people are kind of used to doing that. I just wonder if, like you know, sales and all those kind of things would be as effective. Sell me on that On. You know I'm, you know I need a sales person. I mean, can you detect an accent? Is you know how does that work?

Kyle Mau: 21:21

We don't do like full sales closers because it is difficult with the accent and we don't think it's a good fit. So we don't actually do it?

Kyle Mau: 21:30

We will do like appointment centers. So, for example, if someone books a call and you want to qualify them, we could place someone who would then like call them and say hey, can you tell me a little bit about your business before you get on the call with so and so? So that's kind of how it works, but certainly some roles are tougher to do than others. I think sales is definitely one of them, but there are a lot of companies, you know, in the marketing spaces and the agency spaces that I mean they're doing everything remote and they're closing big deals with remote sales People. I think people have gotten, you know, pretty used to being on a zoom call to be sold something to.

Kyle Mau: 22:03

But like like no one's going to go, no one's doing you know, $10 million enterprise computer sales on soon, probably, like you're still going to probably go shake that person's hand. They're going to want to dine you. So I think that's. That's never going to be within reach of remote outsourcing.

Gary Pageau: 22:19

Okay, so you still need that Alec Baldwin always be closing guy.

Kyle Mau: 22:25

Yeah you still need someone to go, take them to the bar and get them drunk and write it off on the company dive exactly.

Gary Pageau: 22:32

Cool, cool. Yeah, I was just kind of curious because I you know. I mean, there are people who you know are trying to figure out where this might, something like this might fit in their organization, and you know it's not gonna replace, you know, the more experienced sales people are doing that kind of stuff. So are you interested in finding a pool of talent outside of Ukraine, or is it just something you now you know, love Ukraine, so that's the pool you're gonna work with is? Are you looking at other regions within Europe?

Kyle Mau: 22:58

We've actually started expanding out to a lot of other countries in Europe, like Serbia, macedonia, because we found really good talent there, and I'm actually working on a software platform too, which is gonna be a little bit more global. I think there's talented people like everywhere in the world and then some of the more traditional outsourcing hubs like India and the Philippines. Sometimes the problem is that there's such a high population of people. It's really just like Looking through a needle in a haystack, like if you go to some of those job boards and you post a job, you'll get a thousand applicants. It's just crazy. So I think Europe is a little more condensed, a little lower population levels and you know very, very good talent, very, very good people, which makes it a little bit easier to actually find someone good.

Gary Pageau: 23:40

So what's the most surprising, surprising placement you had, like the one there was, like I don't know if we can find somebody, and then it happened.

Kyle Mau: 23:52

I'd say the most surprising one, like signing clients, was like when the tire company came to us, when an anesthesiology clinic came to us. So those are the some of the surprising ones where I'm like you know, this is not a typical like internet marketing company, that's that's always been remote. Like these are people who are just so desperate for help. This is where they're they're looking to go. So I think that those are the most surprising ones as far as clients. And then when we place it in architect, once we were like we don't know if we're gonna do this or how it's really gonna work. Are they gonna actually like is this gonna work with a London architecture firm and a Ukrainian guy? And it actually did. So that was probably the most surprising overall. On architects worked remotely, I didn't know if we could find that and they did a great job.

Gary Pageau: 24:34

Good, good. Well, that's exciting. So where can people go to get more information about your company and to read your old travel blogs or to buy your olive oil?

Kyle Mau: 24:45

Okay. So if you are a business owner looking for some help, go to higher dash uacom and then I blog almost daily at Kyle mouth calm and Check out the olive oil company. It's sello Se Lo Olive calm, awesome.

Gary Pageau: 25:01

Well, thank you, kyle is great to meet you Best. Likewise is a pleasure. Yeah, best wishes for future success. If I ever make it out to Eastern Europe, I'm gonna definitely check it out, thank you.

Kyle Mau: 25:10

Sounds good, thank you. Thank you for having me appreciate it.

Erin Manning: 25:13

Thank you for listening to the dead pixels society podcast. Read more great stories and sign up for the newsletter at www. The dead pixels society society calm.