Building a Nearshore Salesforce Team in El Salvador from Hawaii with Paul Karaffa | The Nearshore Cafe

**Brian:** Welcome everyone to another episode of the Nearshore Cafe podcast. I’m Brian Samson, your host. If you’re interested in Central America, particularly El Salvador, and building a remote team out there, this is going to be a great episode for you. I’ve got Paul Karfa, CEO of a couple companies that have really built some amazing overseas talent. Before I do that, let me thank our sponsor, Plug Technologies, plug.tech. A great way to connect talent from all over Latin America to growing US companies. Paul, it’s great to have you on the show.

**Paul:** Thanks for having me, Brian. So happy to be here.

**Brian:** So, for our audience, it’s kind of fun as we talk about nearshoring. Both Paul and I are in Hawaii, and when you think about nearshoring, Hawaii is the… I think it’s the population center, the largest population center that’s not close to anything in the world.

**Paul:** Yeah, most isolated. Yeah, yeah.

**Brian:** So, maybe let’s start there. As you were building Cloud Pacific—and we’ll get into that and what it did in a second—what was going through your head as you started to need to grow your team a little bit? Because in Hawaii, there’s no natural option, which means you’ve got a lot of options. So, just walk us through how you thought about that.

**Paul:** So, it was originally just me, and it happened because I was laid off from my previous job. We had gone through a merger. I had originally been employee number 10. I was with that company, it was a startup company, doing work in the energy storage space. And I was with them for almost five years, up to 250 people. We merged with Sean. Obviously, with stuff like that, some people get laid off. So, I was one of those people, unfortunately, but it gave me an opportunity to spend some months sort of thinking about what I wanted to do next.

So, I refocused my attention on building out an IT consulting firm. Obviously, it started with just myself. I had a contract for about nine months, and at the end of the nine months, I was like, “Well, this is coming to an end.” They let me know they weren’t going to be renewing it; they didn’t need to, everything was built. And I was like, I was just out there hunting for more contracts, and just so happened, I got two at the same time.

There was something inside me that was like, “I could do two. I could do two at the same time.” But there was also a piece of me that was like, “Yeah, I probably needed to go get some help at this point.” And so that’s when I made my first hire. Slowly started to grow it, and I grew to about… it was like five or six people. No, no, no, it was probably closer to around eight or nine people. And that was in 2020, and I was stressed out of my mind. I remember thinking that I wanted to burn the whole thing down. I was trying to go through this process of scaling it in a reasonable way. There are just a bunch of different scaling steps that you sort of have to go through. I was going through some painful ones.

I ended up meeting up with a number of different executives that were running similar companies to me. Some for advice, and some where I just wanted to see what they would do. Would they buy my company? Would they sell? Did they think I had a reasonable ability to sell this company? We were doing a lot of business, but it was sort of all over the place. None of them said that they would have ever bought the company, so I thought that was super interesting. I was like, “Okay, great. Thanks for letting me know.” It just wasn’t set up in a way to operationally grow, and it wasn’t sellable, even though we had valuable contracts and clients.

So, I decided that I was going to come up with a strategy to then grind through forming a company while scaling it that would be operationally smooth, that would be able to scale in a reasonable way, and that ultimately I’d be able to sell. And that led me to making a decision that I needed to outsource a significant amount of the load in order to grow it as fast as I needed to grow it.

Hawaii is amazing. Unfortunately, there’s a lack of IT talent here. We literally grew to be the largest Salesforce consulting firm in the state. And we were snapping up basically anybody that needed a job that was in the Salesforce space. We were hiring. So, there were other companies, banks and stuff, that were hiring people too, but a lot of people were very cozy and cushy in those jobs. But if they were looking for new work, they were talking to us. And most people, we were picking up.

**Brian:** So, the first eight or nine people were all local in Oahu for the most part?

**Paul:** We had a few people on the mainland. We had a couple people that were former clients of ours, and they ended up leaving and going to different companies. They were just extremely capable, so some of them we brought on part-time; some of them we poached.

**Brian:** What were the first couple hires you made outside of the US, and how did you even start?

**Paul:** So, I didn’t really know what I was doing, but I knew that I wanted a company or I wanted people that would align with the continental United States, because obviously, being in Hawaii, where the time zone is not very great… somebody, they would align well there. And then, people that were really good at English, trustworthy, and reasonable rates. That was really my criteria.

So, I literally got on LinkedIn and started looking at anybody that really had a Salesforce architect or Salesforce developer title that lived anywhere in Central America or South America. And I just started setting up calls and talking to people, and I was going after anyone and everyone that had a senior title. The thing is, there just weren’t that many people. I mean, that was kind of shocking to me. I thought there’d be a lot more people. As an example, I had interviews with a few people in Costa Rica, and the lack of people in Costa Rica with those sorts of titles and expertise just blew my mind.

So, when I was talking to these people, most of them were extremely good, but they were also charging basically US rates. So, it was a little bit of a damper on things, like, “Okay, I mean, they’re very big fish in a very small pond here, and it could be difficult.” And some other countries were a little bit easier to meet people and sort of get more reasonable rates, those countries being like Peru, Argentina was one, Brazil. Ones that were not great were Costa Rica. Jamaica was the worst, you know.

We were talking to people in the Caribbean as well. And what ended up happening is, I found that there seemed to be a pretty good treasure trove of people in El Salvador. And I was like, “This is interesting. A small country. Let’s grind into this a little bit.” And I ended up finding this really great lady, and we had a conversation, and I ended up making her an offer. And it was like the next day or the day after, I got an email from this guy named Gino. Gino was the owner of the company that she worked for, and he was like, “Hey, you are trying to poach my top people.” But he was super cool about it. He was like, “Hey, you’re trying to poach my top people.” And I think he also knew I would eventually be able to poach somebody. But he was like, “Hey, instead of us working against each other, how about we talk and see if we’ve got some synergies and if there are some ways we can work together?”

So, I was like, “Okay, let’s go,” because my whole plan was that I wanted to find somebody not really just to be a developer there; I wanted to find somebody to lead and build a team. So, I met with him, and he owned two different companies. One was a consulting branch that did exclusively Salesforce in El Salvador, and the second was a training company where they took people in El Salvador who essentially didn’t know anything and trained them to know a lot of things. And they also gave them crash courses in English. So, I was very intrigued, and the rates were reasonable. So, I ended up partnering with him, and we built a completely separate company in El Salvador where he would train people up in his normal company. I would essentially interview them once they were done, and then we would export them to the joint venture that we had. And then those people would work for Cloud Pacific exclusively in Hawaii. So, that was sort of the structure. A lot of funny stories along the way, of course, but that was inevitably how we did it. And because we set it up that way, it was so scalable. He already had an operation of bringing in people that were very good. They were hungry, they were ready to go, they were hard workers. They had to put themselves through this training program. I got to interview them, and so we were just stacking people so quickly to be able to service the demands that we have here in the United States.

**Brian:** So interesting. I’d be remiss if I didn’t talk a little about the climate there. So, not long before you started to hire in El Salvador, Bukele came in as the president and really transformed the country. Did that impact your business at all? What did that mean for you guys and your talent?

**Paul:** So, we signed our partnership agreement, I think it was just a handful of months after Bukele came in. And so there weren’t any tangible effects that I saw from that. The biggest thing is that we had considered, because of payment methods sometimes being more expensive with wiring, doing business in Bitcoin, because Cloud Pacific had a Bitcoin reserve. So, we held it as a company because we had a lot of cash flow at the time. We had talked about doing payments in Bitcoin, but they weren’t structurally ready to handle it at that point. And I sold the company a year and a half later, so that didn’t come to fruition.

**Brian:** Did you ever visit El Salvador?

**Paul:** Yeah, so El Salvador and Hawaii are very similar in that we have very similar climates. And they are still very paper-friendly, I should say. A lot of stuff had to be done on paper to be official. So, I had to go through my corporate legal team here in Hawaii to hire a team in El Salvador to represent me and put together all the paperwork, because we weren’t just doing a normal partnership. I owned a company there, right? So, we had to go out there to sign all the paperwork to officially become a joint venture out there. And yeah, I wanted to meet these people, right?

So, it’s actually an interesting story. It wasn’t that long ago that San Salvador, the capital, was the homicide capital of the world. And so, I had some reservations about flying out there. At one point, I was like, “Should I get a security detail?” I was talking to a few companies, getting quotes on hiring one when I was out there, just in case. But ultimately, I decided to just take a risk because I was like, “If I show up and I’ve got a security detail with me, they’re going to immediately think I don’t trust them.” I just thought the whole thing was sus, and I was like, “No, no, no, no, no. I need to show that I trust them, right? We’re going into business together. This wasn’t a small business.”

And so, yeah, I just flew out. It’s a very, extremely small country. The International Airport there is, I mean, it’s probably about as big as the airport over on Big Island, like in Kona. It’s tiny. And he picked me up from the airport, and him and his business partner, Rax, they both spoke really good English, so we were able to get on pretty well. But yeah, I had this one moment, I always tell the story, where I was like, because I’m an adventurer, I travel a lot, I’ve been to like 30-some countries, and I like just kind of getting lost. At one point, I was like, “You know what? I’m just going to go out there.” I left the hotel I was staying at, and I was like, “I’m just going to go for a walk down the streets.” I went up to the end of the block, and you could see a number of the different roads. And on the end of every single road was a police officer with an enormous gun—I think it was an automatic—with his finger right there, ready to go, on every corner. I was like, “Ah, I know. I’m just going to go back.”

But thankfully, the country’s come so far in such a short period of time. And they were unbelievable. We had amazing, good partner meetings, but they also took me around the country a little bit. We went up just to the border of Guatemala, saw some of their more touristy towns, and had some amazing restaurants. They were just great people, and everybody that worked for my company, I just had nothing but positive things to say about them. They were all just really great people to have as part of the team.

**Brian:** That’s amazing. Tell us a little more about the team. How would you compare the level of the Salesforce team in El Salvador versus those you had in Hawaii, those you had on the mainland? Seniority level, problem solving, what were some of the trade-offs that you had to consider?

**Paul:** Yeah, I mean, in terms of effort, it was pretty comparable, in terms of how they worked, their level of knowledge. I would say they’re definitely hungrier than some of the people I had hired here in the United States. And actually, when I look back, a lot of the people I ended up hiring and keeping the most in the United States were either immigrants or first-generation people in the United States, so I always found that super interesting.

One was always English, I think, was probably the bigger thing. We, I would hire people, and it’s not that the English was necessarily bad, but it needed to be exceptional in order for us to keep the pace of work that we did and for things not to fall through the cracks. I had worked with offshore teams not in Latin America prior to this, and I had not had a very good experience, and it always boiled down to the language barrier, and not necessarily their ability to deliver. And with language barriers, you just end up doing a lot of back and forth, and so that was the biggest trade-off. There were a couple people here and there that were borderline at the very beginning when we started working with El Salvador, where the language barrier was a little bit too bad, and we had to move on from them, which is unfortunate. But it was very apparent to us going forward that this is the level, and this is how we’re going to test for it and make sure that we’re getting somebody that’s truly proficient in language and culturally.

**Brian:** In El Salvador, do they have a technical university that was producing this talent, or were they more self-taught, and GitHub type learning?

**Paul:** A bunch of people had a little bit of self-teaching, but they don’t have… I mean, they’ve got a university there, but the big one was that there was a company set up to produce them. It was basically a factory to produce talent. And I don’t know if he’s expanded outside… well, he’s expanded a little bit outside of Salesforce, but there was just such a demand for so many years for talent that it just made sense to do so. And one of the things that I forgot to mention is I made it a priority of my company to actually go for more junior level people, so it really fit well. And I did the same thing here in the United States. I mean, one, yes, there was less cost, but if you knew how to effectively interview them—and I had a very effective interview process—you could find someone that was more junior that had less experience but was exceptionally capable. And so that was sort of the direction that I took it.

**Brian:** And just back to the language and maybe the tools, was this were you guys doing more written Slack and Jira type stuff, or were there a lot of Zoom calls? And how did you guys think about managing across countries and oceans?

**Paul:** Yeah, we worked pretty much exclusively on Slack. So, each of our… we were running six different development teams by the time I left. Each of them had their own Slack channels, and then each of the companies, each of our clients, had their own Slack channels as well where we could communicate directly with them. So, yeah, a lot of communication over Slack. That was how we did pretty much everything. We had Zoom calls every day, though, as well. We had standups every single day with all of our dev teams, with the leads, and if the devs needed to be involved in client calls, then obviously they were included. So, yeah, it was a little bit of each, but for the most part, it was Slack-based.

**Brian:** If you’re, just like when you started your company, you asked others for advice, if people came to you asking for advice on how to build a team in Latin America, what are some things that you’d advise them on, counsel them on?

**Paul:** Yeah, I mean, I think the best way to probably do it is have a strategic partner in the country. I mean, somebody that has experience building teams out there, that’s exceptionally reliable, that is fluent in the language, and that you can partner with. If I had to do it all over again, that’s exactly how I would do it. It just makes everything so much more easily managed. And he was able to manage things that are just sort of more expected. Like, “Hey, Paul, there’s a Salvadoran holiday coming up!” And I’m like, “Oh, I didn’t know about this holiday, right?” He’s like, “Hey, it’s next month. We should probably let those people go for the day and be with their family.” I’m like, “Okay, I wouldn’t have known that, right?” Those are good examples of things where you need somebody, I think, potential boots on the ground, maybe not to get immediately started, but if you’re going to grow to anything of a team of five, you really need somebody out there that can manage and manage the camaraderie. Like, he used to do a couple parties every year. You bring everybody out there. It was good for the company. The entire time that we worked with them, we didn’t lose a single person, so people were very happy and felt appreciated.

**Brian:** And we haven’t talked about the elephant in the room: this is all during COVID too. So, was everybody on-site in an office, or how did that come about?

**Paul:** So, I never had an office space. We had… there’s a co-working space called Treehouse here in Hawaii. For like the first year and a half, I had an office there, and then two offices, or two desks in a big office. And I was trying to grow that as our space, and eventually, like, “Why am I spending all this money on it? It makes zero sense to me.” So, we went fully remote after that, and then we would just do pau hanas.

**Brian:** I’m sorry, what was the other part of your question? You were asking about where we were… Oh, COVID. Yeah, I mean, running. Did you guys have an office then in San Salvador because you’re right in the middle of COVID while you’re running that?

**Paul:** Yeah, so they had an office, but it wasn’t required that anybody come in. Some days they might ask people to come in, but it was fairly rare. I think they needed to have an office to operate, and at one point, they were in person, so they still had all this office space. But for the most part, it was all remote, and that’s the way I preferred it, honestly. So, we were already a remote company before COVID hit, so it was not a big transition for us at all. And I didn’t start this process of looking for people in a different country, like a nearshore team, until late 2020. So, we were already in COVID. And I think at that point, some places were… I can’t remember, it’s all fuzzy, but I believe some places were starting to open up again, and things were easing.

**Brian:** What did the time zone feel like for you, and a lot of people that work in tech, they’re often more night people. Did you have much crossover and overlap, like you personally with the team?

**Paul:** Yeah, so I mean, as the owner, I would start my day at 4:15 every day. So, for them, I… yeah, I don’t… I think that must have been like eight or nine o’clock for them. I can’t remember. And so, yeah, we overlapped. I started before they started, and I ended my day after they ended their day. So, it was always pretty good. The team leads, they had to manage that a little bit closer, but they would have at least four hours of overlap depending on where the lead was.

And I was also extremely liberal with how we managed the company. I did not want to micromanage everybody’s time. So, my take on it, and I remember telling them, especially devs, because I’ve been a dev, I know how it is. I remember telling them, “Look, if your ideal is starting work at 2:00 a.m. after playing video games and pounding Hot Pockets, I don’t care. I truly don’t care whatever makes you happy, man. What I care about is that if there’s a meeting that we care about, like our stand-ups mainly, you’ve got to be there. And other than that, you hit your deadlines. That’s it.” And as long as you’re hitting your deadlines and the volume of work we expect of you, I don’t care when you do it. And everybody was super appreciative of that, and we also had a lot of really good self-starters, and they were able to manage their time pretty well.

**Brian:** Back to your trips there, any particular food or anything that you’d want to comment on, share that you really enjoyed or maybe didn’t?

**Paul:** No, everything I had there, I loved. They… from what I understand, El Salvador is known for pupusas. I believe pupusas are where, or El Salvador is where pupusas came from. Somebody’s going to yell at me, but this is what I was told in El Salvador. So, if it’s wrong, the people in El Salvador believe it, okay? And it’s basically like, it’s almost like a tamale, right? So, it’s made of sort of the same… is it masa? I think the corn masa, except instead of having it in almost like a burrito sort of thing and wrapped in the corn husk, it’s flattened in almost like a pancake. So, it’s like a pancake with filling.

And it’s so funny. Literally last weekend, I was at Costco here with my fiance, and we see pupusas. And I was like, I literally told her, “This is exactly the same as what they’re known for in El Salvador.” I was like, “Let’s get it!” We got them, and they’re amazing. So yes, pupusas! You can get them on the streets, or you go to a really nice restaurant, they’ll have gourmet pupusas that you can order. He took me to this place on top of one of the mountains, or the crater there, the mountain, I can’t remember, that kind of overlooked San Salvador. Beautiful, beautiful view. And yeah, we just, we ordered a ton of the business.

**Brian:** Tell us more about what you’re working on today, Paul.

**Paul:** One of the problems that I saw in the last 12 years being in the Salesforce industry, and certainly when I owned Cloud Pacific, was that the customer service experience that platforms have—and this is not just Salesforce, but other ones, AWS, Azure, so on and so forth—they’re just not really that great. I mean, once a monopoly platform sort of locks you in, their want to invest money that’s dropping down the drain to service your concerns or answer your questions is not something they just don’t put a lot of money into it. And so they all kind of suck.

And so, I came into it sort of saying, “Let’s create something different.” So, I founded a new company this year called AdminNow. And it’s a digital marketplace that helps companies that are using complex systems like Salesforce or AWS get real-time video IT support. So, you could imagine you’re a Salesforce administrator, you’re a Salesforce guru, you’re the team, like an SMB that you’re working at. And very often, you have issues that come up that you just don’t have answers to. You don’t know how to fix it. These could be critical issues, wild fire drills that need to be taken care of. And so, there’s just not a lot of support out there in order to get these things resolved. Really, your options are to go to Salesforce and fill out their very, very long form, and two days later, they’ll get you in touch with a junior agent that barely knows what they’re talking about, or you can go on a forum and beg. I mean, neither of these options are great.

So, with our site, all you do is you go to our site, you put in your issue, you submit it, and you get instantly connected to an expert via video. You can screen share to resolve your issues. Most problems are resolved in 20 minutes or less. We’re building out a 24/7 global network so that you have access whenever you need it. There are no contracts, it’s pay-as-you-go. For our B2C offering—we have a B2B offering coming out—but for B2C, just pay-as-you-go, use it when you want. And the people that have used it so far have really loved it.

**Brian:** That’s awesome. If anybody’s listening that’s interested in that, where would they find you?

**Paul:** Yeah, you can go to adminnow.io. You can also follow us on Instagram, that’s @adminnow.io. And we are on LinkedIn. You can pick us up at AdminNow, all one word and two Ns.

**Brian:** Are you also recruiting Salesforce developers, and if so, any particular parts of the world?

**Paul:** So, we are pulling in people globally because we are trying to create a 24/7 global network. So, anybody that is interested, that speaks fluent English, that has exceptional Salesforce skills, we’re looking for you. This is basically the Uber of IT support; that’s what we’re building. So, we do not hire anybody direct, but you can go and join our waitlist to join as a contractor to start providing services. And yeah, we’re working our way through our waitlist now, bringing people on to service our customers. So, yes, and hopefully through this next quarter, we’ll be through our contractor list, if we can get through it. It’s pretty extensive, so we’d love some more people and more interest.

**Brian:** Awesome, love it. Well, Paul, this has been really great hearing about your experience. Like I said, first person ever in Hawaii to be on the podcast, I think that’s awesome. And wow, what a journey in El Salvador, that’s super interesting. Everyone, this is the Nearshore Cafe podcast, and sponsored by Plug Technologies, plug.tech, a great way to connect talent from all over Latin America, including El Salvador, with US companies. Thanks again for listening. Thanks, Paul, for being a guest.

**Paul:** Thanks for having me. Aloha.