00:00 Introduction

So Daniel, welcome to the show. Fantastic to have you on here. You and I have known each other for some time, and I think we’ve been talking about getting you on here for ages, and then just like our lunch dates it never seems to happen. But here, maybe this will lead to a lunch date, who knows. So for everyone who’s watching, tell me all about ASW, or ASY, and whichever you’re calling it these days, and sort of how you came into that business to give everyone some context.

00:37 What AS White Global does

Thanks for having me. So A.S. White, now referred to as ASW, we are a premium offshore staffing provider, which I think a lot of people kind of get confused with. What does that mean? I often get asked, is that when you sort of sponsor visas to come out here and work? It’s not that. It’s kind of like outsourcing but different. What we basically do is we build teams, dedicated teams for Australian businesses, that happen to be located within our offices overseas. So we have a network of offices through Southeast Asia, and ultimately what we do is we find and manage HR, facilities management, payroll, IT for our clients.

01:35 The difference between outsourcing and offshoring

So in essence, if you compare the two, and this is where I remember when we first met at the pub whatever it was four or five years ago, I was confused about the difference because remote working I really hadn’t gotten involved with from a recruitment perspective back then. There was outsourced teams and then there’s your teams. So an outsourced team is essentially another company that has their own staff that you can pay for either day on day, hour an hour, whatever it is. Whereas what you provide is you have staff that you recruit that sit on your premises with your computers and your payroll, but they are employed by the end client, so they are their employee and you’re managing them.

Kind of. They’re legally employed by our business, but the terminology is they’re directly seconded into the client as a dedicated staff member. They don’t work for two different companies. They’re that company’s resource permanently. And they fit into their culture and they report into them from a day-to-day basis.

04:00 How the client relationship works in practice

I guess the way in which we describe the relationship is that we’re managing the person. So the things like HR and payroll and obviously the facilities management and the IT and all those things that are associated with that, we’re taking care of that and providing governance across those areas of the business. And ultimately the client’s relationship is the delegation and management of the tasks, and obviously introducing and embedding that team member into their own Australian work office culture. So it really is a partnership approach.

Probably the easier way to describe it would be, if you think of outsourcing, it really is you’re engaging with a third-party business to, on an SLA arrangement typically, for their anonymous team to deliver work on an ad hoc or ongoing basis. Typically the client doesn’t know who that team is or who that person, that end specialist is. And they wouldn’t deal with the individual. They deal with literally a team leader or something. And it might be usually worked out on a project basis, an hourly rate or what have you with an outsource arrangement.

Ultimately with an offshore staffing arrangement, you’re, as the client, as the onshore Australian business, you’re part of the hiring process. So from interview through to offer, the client’s actually hand-selecting the team members to join their business, the same way they would if they were hiring them here in Sydney or in Australia. And they decide the salaries and so forth.

05:30 The benefits of offshore staffing for scaling

And it would save me, say if I’m going to set up in Vietnam, if I want to employ people myself, literally do it all myself, I’m going to have to incorporate a company, I’m going to have to engage, I’m going to do all those things and actually create a business to be able to legally pay people. This is a way of doing that without having to go through all that rigmarole. I literally go and find the people with you and then you manage them for me but they report to me and I control their tasks, and so it’s really getting the best of both.

Yeah, absolutely. So what are the benefits? One of them really is it gives the business the ability to scale their resources and their team without necessarily having to invest in more onshore. So they can basically leverage our facilities, our HR, our payroll, our talent, all of those services without necessarily having to add that here. They ultimately get the baby without the pregnancy, I guess, is the ultimate way of trying to describe that.

07:20 Why talent shortages are driving demand

It helps businesses be able to scale quickly from that sense because you can actually get talent that perhaps you might be able to attract locally, but at the same time I think it gives businesses the ability to not necessarily worry about the running of their business so much but more so the delegation and performance management. Working in their business, not on it.

So are they permanent employees of you? Yes, correct. So from my perspective if I had five people who I had hired through this method, what does that look like? Are they on a notice period, like for example if you think about a player here they’ll have a four-week notice period? Is it a similar sort of thing? You have a notice but it’s exactly the same. So really you’re just trying to make it as simple and as replicable as it is here but at a fraction of the cost.

But the cost benefits obviously are going to be a given when you’re looking at outsourcing and offshoring. I think saving dollars is going to be a given. I think ultimately now, it’s funny, I think a lot of the interest we’re getting now isn’t about so much cost saving, which is pleasing. It’s actually about solving a problem, whether it’s attrition locally where those high-churn roles here that just don’t seem to stick, whether it’s about just actually finding the talent.

09:00 The quality stigma from early 2000s outsourcing

There’s always a quality worry, right? And I’m sorry, I think that probably comes from not your model but the outsourcing model. You all remember from, I don’t know what was it, the early 2000s when everybody outsourced everything? It was a total disaster. It was, yeah, for sure. And I think that there was, and I think that probably is a good point to my own initial concern. Initially I thought the exact same thing. Outsourcing, you know, you’re going to lose control, have no ability to do quality assessments, understand how things are working. Basically giving things over to someone else and literally set fire to it.

I think that this gives businesses still the control they need and the ability to build out the process that they want within their business, and that visibility, you know, and understand who it is at the end that’s actually performing the work.

But you’re right, yeah, there’s a huge amount of factors at the moment that’s driving the offshore discussion. I think that now that we’ve got technology really servicing its purpose, Zoom, Teams, all these different project management tools, I’ve got to be honest, I don’t know how they did it 30 years ago. But now I think it’s become quite seamless.

10:50 Daniel’s journey: AFL draft with the Melbourne Demons

Cool, all right, well let’s talk about, let’s get back to you a little bit. So how did you, you’ve been with the business five years, the business 10 years old, and you’ve been in the business five years. Talk to me about maybe your journey a little bit and how you ended up where you are today.

So professional career, I’ll start with that. I was fortunate, I was drafted out of high school into the AFL, which was amazing. You’re the first guest who’s been taller than me, actually. So it was obviously incredible, I was 17 at the time, and to know that you’ve got work, the next three years or four years sorted, was a huge relief. But to also be drafted into the dream job that every kid wants to do is play their professional sport of choice, was incredible.

Unfortunately I had a couple of knee reconstructions over a short period of time, that dream came tumbling down quite quickly. And kind of left that industry probably realising a few things, and one is obviously things are never forever. And I had a bit of a chip on my shoulder as well at the time. It would have been an incredibly difficult time. It was heartbreaking.

13:00 From real estate to starting a menswear business at 23

I then, with no job and no real career plan after sports, that was going to be my 10-year career, I got into property and into real estate, which was awesome. I loved it. It taught me a lot about prospecting, negotiations, marketing. Hard industry to break into, tough industry. And as a 21-year-old kid with a chip on his shoulder thinking, how high could it be? It was a real learning curve. And I really enjoyed it and was quite lucky that we did quite well, was in a good office, had a good team sort of training and supporting me.

And then as you do at 23, you start your own business. Of course, because you already know everything. And what better thing to do than start your own retail business, of course, because you’ve been working in retail your whole life. So I had no idea about retail, I hadn’t run a business before on my own, and I joined up and started a business in retail.

15:00 Scaling to 30 staff across three states

It’s interesting that you did that. I mean, you’ve had a massive crushing blow, you’ve gone into an incredibly difficult industry, and then you’ve gone, you know what, I think the next logical step is to start a business in something I’ve got no idea about. I mean, just the mindset and the thinking. Yeah, well that’s when I started getting grey hair when I was about 26. So that’s when I started shaving it.

I think ignorance is a real asset at that age. Going in with blind faith, I think, is one of the real advantages of being young. That’s why I love the startup space. Blind faith. And looking purely from the point of, this is going to win, and not even considering the fact that it might not.

So I started in menswear. It was a bit different, it was a niche model where we travelled into offices and fitted guys up, semi-tailored. So we did made-to-measure and we did off-the-peg. And we were really fortunate, it was awesome. One of the things that we were good at was prospecting and closing deals. And we scaled to about 30 staff, three states, multi-million dollar revenue, which was great in turnover. But after about 10 years I’d had enough. I was definitely burning the candle at both ends, and the partnership was probably starting to go a bit south as well, so we decided to part ways.

16:00 Visiting the ASW offices overseas for the first time

And from there I started another business in equipment, as you do, another logical step. Why not? And that was really fun. So with some childhood friends we built that up. I sold out as a build-up and sell-off sort of project. I sold that before my wife killed me because we had a baby on the way and probably a few too many fingers in too many pies.

And it was at that point where my brother-in-law invited me to come over, which is leading into the ASW conversation. He said, why don’t you come overseas and check out what we’ve set up with these offices and how we’re supporting Australian businesses back? And I must admit at the time I thought that he was just focusing purely in the insurance space. I didn’t really understand that he was broadening the service offering.

So I was sceptical. Like a lot of businesses, a lot of people about outsourcing. Still, my stigma was it was outsourcing. I’m not sure how this is going to work and how I could help him, because he was trying to grow the front end of the business. So I went overseas and saw the offices in Ho Chi Minh, and we had an office in Vietnam, Malaysia and the Philippines.

And after seeing the facilities for one, but then to look at the quality of the talent that was working there, my perception was this is going to be the lowest manual tasks, very poor level of quality. And instead I walked in where qualified accounting, senior developers, level three service desk type guys, really accomplished, degree-qualified staff, working for a whole range of quality businesses. And I was blown away.

18:00 Joining AS White Global after five years

But at the same time I was kicking myself thinking of the 10 years of the late nights doing IT, finance, marketing, all those things trying to wear many hats. I’d realised that I’d missed a big opportunity and perhaps my perception wasn’t necessarily accurate. I hadn’t researched it the way I probably should have.

I think that in the industry that we work in, you’ve got like a lot of industries, there’s so many different variables. You’ve got the outsourcing versus offshoring, you’ve got freelancers, you’ve got contract workers, you’ve got part-time, you’ve got recruitment guys that just hire people and they work from home. There’s so many different solutions out there and some of them are the right fit for the right client and sometimes it’s not the right fit for that client.

So fast forward, now five years in ASW, I came back, we had a beer and discussed the opportunity, and I immediately said, yeah, I think this is something that businesses will be really interested in, knowing that they can be part of building their own dedicated team, knowing that there’s full transparency, knowing that there’s governance and security. So here we are. It’s been awesome, it’s been a great ride.

20:00 Daniel’s belief: risk is where success lies

That’s a hell of a story, all the way through. Just out of interest, is the chip gone? It’s smaller. I think anyone who knows me thinks that I like to think that anyone could do anything. So I think you’re a good model of that. Yeah, well whether it’s done well or not is probably the other question. But I come from a background where, you know, a single mother, two young boys, myself and my brother. And I think that both of us, the boys have really taken an approach that, you want to change something, change something. So we’ve now been quite lucky that we’re enjoying what we do and having a good time while we do it.

So we ask everyone this and the variance of answer is amazing. And that’s probably why it’s still my favourite question. Is there some sort of belief that you’ve had at some point in your life, a belief that is such a fundamental core thing, that has changed through this insane journey you’ve been through? And what was it that made it change?

From a belief system point of view, given that we grew up on basically the poverty line as kids, I think that looking at successful people, at some point in time my belief was that they’d taken a risk somewhere in their journey. And I think that’s fair. And some of those risks are enormous and some of those risks perhaps aren’t, they’re quite calculated. But I think ultimately they’ve taken a risk in order to create their business or their empire, whatever it is that they’ve done.

23:00 Hard work, smart work and learning from mistakes

So I’m a big believer that if you want to do something that’s extraordinary, you have to do something that’s not necessarily the ordinary, whatever else is doing. As far as changing my beliefs along the journey, I’m probably a little bit old-fashioned that hard work still is the ultimate. I’ve had really young entrepreneurs come in here knowing that that’s the route they’ve got to go. I think that’s great because I think often when you put something on social about how you work smarter and we do it this way, I still ultimately think that you need to do both. Hard and smart. And I think that ultimately the smarter side of things doesn’t come until later when you figure out all the mistakes, and I’ve certainly made every mistake over the time.

My belief system probably changed on the back of having run my own small business and probably being influenced by other people’s feedback about, for example, outsourcing, without necessarily throwing myself into it further. But most definitely the biggest thing I think is that if you want to do something really, really exceptional, then take the risk. For sure.

24:00 Book and podcast recommendations

So the question that everybody that listens to the show always wants is podcast or book. It can be either, it doesn’t have to be one you’re listening to now, it can be something that you just found was amazing that you read 10 years ago, or it could be something you’ve just discovered, and it doesn’t have to be business related either.

Book, I’m in Limitless at the moment, which is Jim Kwik. I think the reason I threw myself into that, I’ve never been a really good reader, and they’ve taken me a long time to get through. So his whole thing is obviously about speed reading and cheat sheets to learning and what have you. And the way he describes it, it’s a bit like the genie granting, you know, when you have three wishes, your unlimited wishes. So that’s been a really good book for me of late. And there’s a few others there from Tim Ferriss and what have you that I’ve thrown myself into. Tools of Titans, that’s a great book because, and I’m not particularly, as you know, I’m dyslexic, so I don’t like to read it extensively. It’s just lots of little short stories. Just tidbits of, give me the practical stuff.

Podcast wise, I listen to a whole bunch of different stuff. Scaling Up, I obviously really enjoy this and other business fast-growth businesses. I’ll give a mate of mine a plug, Nick Bell, he’s got a podcast called LisNik. I listened to a bit of his stuff every now and again. He’s getting some really good guests coming on. But ultimately anything that’s not the radio. In the car, I just podcast goes on. So I’m listening to a heap of different stuff.

25:30 Why businesses should talk to ASW

OK, last question and we’ll split it into two. So I don’t know whether you’re hiring yourselves at the moment or not, but let’s talk about, firstly, if I’m a business that’s considering offshore, whether I’m looking at outsourcing or your model and whether I know the difference or not, why should I come and talk to you?

I think for one, one of the important factors, if someone is considering looking at offshore staff, it’s important for them to understand the differences in the models for one. And I think we’ve become pretty efficient at describing what we do versus others. And I think that then gives business partnerships a very clear understanding of what to expect when expecting.

While they reach out to us I think they can walk away with a pretty clear understanding as to what the offering is, with assurance that they’re going to, one of the negatives with outsourcing is often retention and attrition. So often they find themselves rehiring, retraining. Thankfully we’ve got a 96% retention rate. The industry average is 40%. When you do things like providing international company trips and all these things that we provide all of our staff, we’ve realised that you’ve got to invest in the people, in the employees.

27:00 Culture at ASW: 1,200 jobs guaranteed during the pandemic

You use the word transparency a lot earlier, so that’s something you feel you’re very good at being, because there is a sort of mystique around it, right? I think so. I think that on the back of Joe, who is the co-founder of the business, that’s always been his approach. He’s put people first and be really transparent. And when you go into that relationship with that approach in business there’s never any surprises. You can always be completely honest all the time in conversation.

It’s held us in good stead for 10 years. Our client retention rate is as equally as high as our staff retention. For example we had a lunch this week with a nine-year client. For nine years. And what are you doing for 10? We’ve got a 10-year anniversary coming up.

I’ve obviously been watching a few of your shows. I think culture is something that a lot of people talk about, but very, everyone talks about it. And I feel that one of the things, particularly in the industry that we work in, it’s something that we’ve really tried to champion. And I’ll give an example on this. When the pandemic hit in March last year, the initial concern for a lot of businesses was, how do we cost-cut in order to get us through this difficult time? The instruction from Joe and the board was, well, we’re going to guarantee everyone their job. All 1,200 staff. No one’s losing their job.

When we talk about culture and putting people first, for a very unknown period of time, that’s a big statement. It was huge. And the resounding feedback from staff was enormous. Especially when in those countries, you knew it was going to be worse. And I think we’ve, onshore, being part of a steering team of executives, where we are growing, being part of that culture I think is awesome. We’re diversifying by way of providing new solutions, so that’s exciting. We’ve created a digital agency, we’ve created a talent search, executive search overseas. It’s evolving. It’s an exciting place to be.

28:20 Why you should work at AS White Global

What a pleasure it has been having you on. And I learned some stuff about you. I’ve known you all these years, which is awesome. Thank you so much for coming on. And look, if anyone wants to get in contact, you, shooting LinkedIn or the ASW or AS White website, one of those ways is the best way. Easy to find. And look, I know we’ve got some things planned together with our two businesses which is exciting. So you can keep an eye out for that as well. Definitely. I look forward to seeing what happens. Thanks, Dan. Thank you.