Ian Myers: Founder & CEO of Oceans

Episode 571

In this episode of The Kara Goldin Show, we're joined by Ian Myers, Founder and CEO of Oceans, who shares how his company is transforming the outsourcing industry with ethical practices and significant cost savings. Ian discusses the challenges and innovations of creating Oceans, focusing on improving employee conditions and redefining global talent sourcing. He also explores the impacts of technology on business, including remote work and AI, and offers insights on leading a successful, ethically-driven company.
Tune in for an enlightening discussion on the future of outsourcing and leadership in a rapidly evolving business landscape. This episode is a must-listen for companies interested in outsourcing, ethical business practices and innovative hiring strategies. Now on The Kara Goldin Show.

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Transcript

Kara Goldin 0:00
I am unwilling to give up that I will start over from scratch as many times as it takes to get where I want to be I want to be, you just want to make sure you will get knocked down. But just make sure you don’t get knocked down knocked out. So your only choice should be go focus on what you can control control control. Hi, everyone and welcome to the Kara Goldin show. Join me each week for inspiring conversations with some of the world’s greatest leaders. We’ll talk with founders, entrepreneurs, CEOs, and really some of the most interesting people of our time. Can’t wait to get started. Let’s go. Let’s go. Hello, everyone. And welcome back to the Kara Goldin show today. I’m super, super thrilled to have our next guest. Here we have Ian Meyers, who is the founder and CEO of an incredible brand that I actually hadn’t heard of. And I am so excited to know about this company. Now. It’s very, very cool. It’s called Oceans. And you’re going to absolutely love learning more about it. It’s the perfect opportunity to learn about a company that’s redefining the outsourcing industry. And traditionally, outsourcing has faced criticism for ethical concerns and confusion and Oceans is turning that narrative around by providing highly experienced and motivated talent at savings of up to 80% Compared to some US hires. So with its stellar reputation built on exceptional referrals, Oceans is setting a new standard. And I’m super, super eager to hear more from the founder and CEO Ian Myers about this incredible business that he is building. So without further ado, welcome Ian to the show.

Ian Myers 1:53
Thanks, Kara. Great to be here.

Kara Goldin 1:55
Absolutely. So what inspired you to start Oceans? And did this come from a personal pain point that you had in having this, this experience? Or what was the moment that you really said, you know, this should exist?

Ian Myers 2:14
Well, I’m afraid I have something of a mundane origin story. I don’t think I sort of was walking down the sidewalk, when inspiration struck, it was more that I was involved in something that made sense to me, and I wanted to share it with others. And I think that’s a common trait among a lot of successful entrepreneurs. But, you know, I had been working with a business that had, this was my Oceans, my second company. And my first company used a lot of talent from around the world, sort of a mixed results. I think a lot of people in the entrepreneurial community, the startup community, work with people all over the world for various tasks, short term, long term, etc. But frankly, if you talk to anybody about it, they’ll tell you some of its great some of its not so great, and it was really sort of a mixed bag across the board. And I ended up working with some people, based out of Sri Lanka, I was put in charge of a team of around 30 people there. And that’s for a company called user base, and was just super, super impressed by the sound quality by the people there. And also by everything from the work ethic to I mean, I remember one time, this was like a financial intelligence platform, we were supposed to be talking to a client at 230. In the morning, the analyst time the analyst was in like a friend, let’s step back and say, Wow, they’re like incredible CFAES. And financial analysts literally like that was a shock to me. But an even bigger shock was that they were excited to stay up until 230 In the morning, and talk to clients and share their work and be proud. And frankly, that’s a small anecdote, but something I hadn’t really experienced a lot of here anymore. I feel like people, you know, in the US, at least, there’s an environment of kind of unease and anxiety. And a lot of the workforce, people are sort of less proud of their companies, they’re more sort of focused on what they want to do, which is great. But to see someone who was like, so excited about their work, and what they do that they were like, in a suit and tie at 230 in the morning, more awake than I was, you know, it was incredible. And so that’s sort of set me off on the path of, you know, nobody knows about this, why are people going everywhere else in the world, but here, entrepreneurs can totally use this. I have so many entrepreneurial friends, I talked to them about it. They want to hire people from there. And there were some roadblocks, which we get into, which is why Oceans exist. But it was sort of the discovery of what felt like a secret little island that nobody really knew about that had just incredibly talented people that I wanted to share with the

Kara Goldin 4:53
world. That’s awesome. Where did the name Oceans come from?

Ian Myers 4:57
There’s a few I get asked that a lot. And I feel Like the answer changes every time. So I wish I had some kind of stock stock answer for it. But the truth of the matter is, I like the color blue. It’s great, I wanted the brand to be a color I liked. I also think that it is very malleable. When you’re starting a company, you want to have something that sticks in the mind. And especially something as practical as staffing. You don’t you know, so many companies in our industry have really mundane and boring names, you know, and they’re all some variation of flank staffing or team, you know, something or whatever. I wanted to be a little bit more branded, and felt that it’s a little cheesy, but you know, Oceans is what connects us all. You know, I’m here working and I have someone on my team in Sri Lanka, the thing that is between us that is connecting us is the ocean. And I thought that was really cool theme for the business.

Kara Goldin 5:55
So I read that you focus on ethical outsourcing. And so how, how do you define that?

Ian Myers 6:04
It is a good question. And it’s a really important question. And interestingly, when I started the company, I didn’t think people would care about that. And then maybe that’s stupid of me and insensitive. But I’ve met a lot of entrepreneurs. And I felt like the thing they would care about was cost. That was it. And they wouldn’t ask questions. And they wouldn’t ask, How are my people being treated? And you know, what’s their life? Like? Is it a good life? I was wrong. And people really, really care are the good ones do we have some clients who don’t care, and we don’t love working with them. So, you know, that was a big surprise to me. And a big shock to me. And I, luckily enough, had been keeping that in mind at the forefront of what I was building from day one. Everyone that comes to work for us is a professional, that’s what makes us stand out. The people are highly skilled, many of them have studied abroad, they’ve lived in the US. So we got McGill, graduates, UCLA graduates, we got people that went to University of London University of Australia, we have some people who went to Cornell to Fordham University, you know, they come from all over the world, they study abroad, they’re very sophisticated, they’re very career oriented, they’re very professional. And they need a certain amount of what you would get anywhere else in their lives. If they’re going to go work for a company in the US. They’re gonna go work for a startup, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, they want to have benefits, they want to have 401k, they want to have health insurance, they want to have community, they want to have events, gatherings, get togethers, they want to be alone and isolated, in their, you know, in their living room, they also want to be paid well and above market rate, all of these things were considered when we started the company. And we have a whole lot of people that just work on this. I think this Friday, we rented out an entire movie theater, so the team could go see, Deadpool vs. Wolverine is our most popular event we’ve done so far, we’ve got a book club, we rent hotels out so people can bring their families to the beach to you know, relax. Those are super, super important parts of building a sustainable company that is not just like a transactional exchange of people’s talent, which I don’t think is a great way to do things. So

Kara Goldin 8:20
today, you’re focused just in Sri Lanka, or is there multiple areas that you’re really focused on.

Ian Myers 8:28
We also operate in South Africa, as well. And we have some great talent there. I think, if you’re looking for a common thread between the places that we often try to operate in, got to have a great education system. That’s number one. That’s where it all begins. Got to have a lot of professional exposure, and companies that can train people make sure that, you know, you don’t want someone coming to work for you, if you’re a startup, and a lot of our clients are startups, who has been mostly like using filing cabinets for their career, right? That’s not good. So you want to have people that have other professional opportunities that will scale them up. In addition to the training, they receive it Oceans. So the corporate job landscape in these countries is really important. And then also, obviously, English skills, communication skills, things like that internet strength, all these other things. And for anyone who’s been to South Africa, they know that there’s an incredibly intelligent, amazingly talented workforce there. And we recently just actually opened up there and are sort of expanding into that region.

Kara Goldin 9:36
That’s awesome. So what is the business model? And I guess it’s sort of a two part question. What What would people come to Oceans to gain talent for like, what kind of problems do you think you solve really well?

Ian Myers 9:52
We focus on essentially as I say it, when I used to do sales calls way back in the day when I was the entire sales team. and which I only recently stopped doing is we focus on highly skilled operational offshoring. And this is important because it’s something that wasn’t really possible until the pandemic. You’ve had offshoring in customer service developers for a long time, as well. But those are sort of established ways of doing things where you’ve got communication flows, you’ve got teams and pods, they have ticketing systems, they have everything to sort of make the workflow smoothly. Most companies were not set up to run their operations entirely remote until the pandemic, so that happened. And now suddenly, you can not just have devs anywhere in the world, you can have your marketing team anywhere in the world, you can have your finance team anywhere in the world, you can have your operations team in the world, because everything’s now on Dropbox and on Slack and on Zoom, and you built your company to operate in this environment. Now you can, so we focus on, we call it EA plus, which is kind of our most famous thing, which is like a virtual assistant built for founders. But we also do growth marketers, content marketers, we do operations professionals, we do accountants, financial controllers, FP and a huge variety of roles, but all within operations. And people that are extremely highly skilled, that are very well educated, that are different from everywhere else, and incredibly cost effective for our clients. But you know, they have to care, they have to want these people to be full members of the team. We have folks that I remember in February of this year, I went I drove I live in New York, I drove down to Pennsylvania, we have a long term client there, their entire accounting department is run through Oceans, they have four people in Sri Lanka. They flew them here to participate in the company off site. And these guys had never been in cold weather. And all four of them had these ridiculous puffy jackets on and they all walked out to meet me together in the freezing cold. And it was so out of context, because I had been used to meeting them when it was just extremely warm. But you know, that’s a little bit of an anecdote, but I want to express that the people we work with are looking for great talent, but they also want that great talent as like real parts of the team for long term work. We don’t do project based stuff. We don’t do short term stuff, we do long term, fully engaged additions to people’s teams.

Kara Goldin 12:25
And how do you find the talent in these countries? Obviously, you’re living here, but how do you end up finding great people? Well,

Ian Myers 12:33
I was lucky enough to having worked with folks in that country to have a lot of connections that could help me build a team, even though I wasn’t there. The truth of the matter is, I started this company in March of 2022. And didn’t go to Sri Lanka for the first time until April 2023. So ran the whole company for a year fully remotely, in a testament to I think, the offering that we have, but I had a lot of friends, a lot of people in New there that helped me hire the right people, it was all done remote, we set everything up. And now we have a big team of recruiters, HR professionals, everybody over there, who helped us take people through an incredibly rigorous interview process, four rounds of interviews, skills, assessments, personality assessments, things like that, to make sure they’re gonna be a great fit with our clients.

Kara Goldin 13:26
So are these people employees of yours, then too, who are in the other countries? And are there any, like, I just I don’t know enough about that, that side of the business, but are there like legal or regulatory issues are, like varying by countries, or I

Ian Myers 13:45
would say we’re gonna see some, because this is a really serious thing that is taking the country. You know, it’s growing, like we have grown from, you know, nothing to over $10 million in revenue in two years. And that is a testament to how the country is waking up to the fact that you can find incredibly talented people all over the world, we have 300 clients that trust us to do this, we add anywhere from 15 to 20 new clients a month, it’s gonna get picked up by somebody at some point in time soon, because, you know, it’s it’s, it’s just too much of a force and it’s transforming how we work and how companies are built, I think in a positive way. But as with anything, plenty of people are going to think in a negative way. We, you know, we follow the labor laws of all the countries we hire from. Our important point is we want people to feel secure. So this is a big deal when you’re talking about skilled professionals. They are interested in working with cool companies abroad. We’ve got AI companies, we’ve got NFL players, we’ve got, you know, incredible amounts of DTC companies we’ve got like, tons and tons of clients all across these different categories. And these folks in other geographies who are maybe restricted by the careers in their local area, are super interested in working for these cool cutting edge people and products, but not at the expense of like, oh, I can lose my job at any time, because I’m just a random contractor for some company abroad. They want to have a buffer, they want to have all the benefits we’ve discussed, they want to have community we have like a, we just made an ID card, we have a small office, because most people work from home, a lot of our team is new mothers who you know, are able to put their kids down and then sign on to work with their clients. And so most people were from the home. We made these ID cards. And if you show these ID cards around to various restaurants and stores and things like that all over SriLanka, you get discounts and you get special products, you get things like that. So people are looking for that, in addition to being sure that Oh, my clients a startup, what happens if they shut down? What’s gonna happen to me? Well, nothing’s gonna happen to you, you’ll never stop getting a paycheck, you’re just gonna be rematched to another client. If you just go and contract with someone on Upwork, you don’t have that kind of security and for professionals that are serious that security is important. Yeah,

Kara Goldin 16:16
definitely. So when you think about remote work, overall, I feel like you started this company during the pandemic, it was, you know, 2022. But the idea for a CEO dealing with remote work right now. I mean, why wouldn’t they start to look at outsourcing? Right? And I mean, it seems like it actually works to your company’s benefit, where people are starting to think if I’m gonna have remote workers anyway, why don’t I get the best talent? Anywhere in the world? Yeah,

Ian Myers 16:51
people are definitely reevaluating, there always gonna be roles that need to be here. You know, even for us, we have, you know, we might have 30 Something people in Sri Lanka, working on our internal team, but we still have almost 10 People here as well, you know, there are always going to be roles that you need to keep people around for. I think the the question of remote work is truly a, like, complete conundrum, and entirely based on the culture of the company. If our person is the only person working remotely that is doomed to failure, we actually asked this question, when we onboard new clients, how like, do you work remotely, how many of you work remotely, what percentage of company works remotely, because if it’s not a decently sized percentage, this isn’t the only person. It’s never gonna work. And so we try to check that the companies are like that a lot of CEOs, old school CEOs, even but younger CEOs want collaboration on people in the same room. It’s a lot more work to be on top of people working remotely, being like, and you have to not give into instincts of suspicion and doubt, and all these other things, because you’re sort of like, wait a minute, it’s 230. And you’re not online, like, what are you doing, they could have shut their laptop for five minutes to get a smoothie and then come back, you know, but you’re sort of like, there’s a lot of emotional weight and gravity, if you’re a CEO, if your manager tied to having people work remotely, and getting over that. And being able to exist in that environment is very difficult. And so a lot of people just prefer to have it in person. But a huge number also want to, you know, weigh the cost effectiveness of it, the flexibility of it, employees definitely want it. So there’s a lot of factors involved. I think there’s no stopping the trend that’s continuing and more and more people working remotely, that’s not going to slow down and it’s going to become increasingly more global. How

Kara Goldin 18:48
do you handle like different time zones, and, you know, maybe cultural backgrounds to some extent, you were, you know, there’s certain days that people can’t work or don’t want to work because of, you know, religious or cultural, you know, overall cultural societal feelings, or I’m just curious, like, how you guys have handled that.

Ian Myers 19:11
A lot of our competitors have people work, graveyard shift fully overnight. We getting back the question ethics, we don’t do that. Our people can work up to 2am, but they get compensated better if they stay up that late. The bulk of our people sign off around 10:30pm. So we work with our clients and our clients basically get five hours of live overlap, and then three hours basic, it’s 40 hours a week. Full Yeah, you know, long term, but you get five hours with your person. And then they get three hours of work, sort of while you’re asleep in their daytime. That’s worked really well. Why do we do it? Well, A, you might imagine that like the US, the best, most talented people don’t want to work fully overnight. Right. So yeah, when we started the company We started trying to do that. And we were just like, why are we not getting good resumes? Why are we not getting like, these are all see team players. And the second we dropped that requirement, it was like, Oh, here’s all the good people, here’s all the really well educated, like, they’re super excited, they’re just not going to do that. So we have a great rhythm going with clients where they get five hours overlap three hours of async work. And that seems to that seems to sort of check all the boxes ethically, and also checks all the boxes have enough overlap time for our clients and our people. It’s working great.

Kara Goldin 20:32
So AI, obviously, is such a huge topic. And, and one of confusion, I think, for most, most CEOs, even ones that are sort of technology advanced, like what is it going to do to my company? How much is that going to change your business? Or are you guys actually enabling many companies just by helping them to really input where they can, it’s something that is more automated.

Ian Myers 20:58
This is a conversation I have so so regularly. I, you’re talking to a technology skeptic to a certain extent, I used to be in venture for a long time. And so I understand how that all works. I understand the hype cycles, I understand the mentality of the people there. My belief and my company, so I can do whatever I want is it’s always overhyped. You know, people have been talking about self driving cars for 20 years, right around the corner. And I understand that, you know, it’s it’s AI is different and that it’s advancing faster. And there’s a lot of utility and a lot of WoW, and shock value and stuff like that. But if you step back, the people telling you that this is the future, and that it’s coming right now, and you need to be ready, and you need to use it and it’s going to transform your life are typically the people who stand to make money from it, which are the companies themselves, the investors in the companies, the consultants who want to sell you on transforming your business through AI. When I talk to clients, real clients, they come and they sit with us. It’s not mentioned that often. It’s sort of like, oh, I tried that out. And then that’s it. And we’ll get there. And that’s something that’s got to be on my radar. But it is surprisingly, there is a decade, two decades plus to run of global talent and how that’s going to affect the workforce. My belief before we even get to AI transforming everything. I know, there’s some people that are like into yours. It’s all over lights out, you know, but we’ll see. Yeah,

Kara Goldin 22:50
we’ll see. Exactly. So key advice you would give to entrepreneurs who are thinking about, should I be looking at outsourcing for for my company, when is there a certain size of a company? Is there something where you think, you know, this is definitely would make more sense for for, you know, a certain size company that has X? Yeah,

Ian Myers 23:13
we have gotten to our, our people were the second person they hired at their company all the way through, like Series B, I would say, if you’re past a certain size, call it 100 People or you know, a series B Company, it’s hard to back into outsourcing and like stuffing into your org chart. So starting earlier is a little bit better. Because if you can plan your company around the knowledge that you can access this talent, it’s a whole different trajectory for the business. And so you should you should look at that as early as possible. Now, how you do it, there’s a lot of options. We’re one of them, there’s other businesses doing other things. There’s other ways to go about it. You can do it just having people come in and do ad hoc tasks who live all over the world shorter term stuff, we focus on the long term. Hey, what if you could get a full time employee who is as good as anyone you could hire in New York, but they cost you $3,000 a month? Wouldn’t that be nice? That’s kind of the lane we go in. But there’s a lot of other options. And that might not be right for you right off the bat. It might not be right for you when you’re 100 people. But it’s right for a lot of our clients who are trying to grow trying to achieve metrics, and most importantly, not trying to rely on hugely diluted financing, or they are small businesses focused on cash flow focused on profit. We really seen a huge increase of customers in those segments where they are trying to become profitable, they are profitable, but they want to generate more cash. And so they’re building and shaping their companies around the idea of global talent, which they didn’t really do before.

Kara Goldin 24:52
So you’re a serial entrepreneur, serial founder, and you’ve also you had mentioned this worked on the on the VC The side of thing or side of things. So bootstrapping versus fundraising is always like, you know, the big question, especially for first time founders, sometimes even for second time founders who might not have had the greatest experience. But what’s your take on that sort of knowing what you know, today,

Ian Myers 25:23
only a very small percentage of companies should use venture financing to succeed. And I think you see that in the very small percentage of successful outcomes that are generated in the industry. But if you look back, when I was in grad school, I studied the evolution of venture capital in Silicon Valley, you look back at the 60s 70s, when it came into existence as an asset class. These were companies that were were so risky, they required huge amounts of hardware investment, they were like, nobody else would touch this. And if we don’t invest, this incredible technology won’t get built. That’s a very different thing from what we see today. And what we see today is a culture that has been built around venture and startups that has put so many people on a path that probably isn’t right for them. And we’re seeing a lot of change. Now, a lot of people are trying to build sustainable, profitable businesses. It’s nice to have a ton of money in the bank. But I can tell you, the benefit of that is like oh, I don’t have to worry about running out of money. Well, a you still do have to worry about running out of money be you were at worry about running out of other people’s money and see you have people constantly checking in to see if you’re going to run out of money. Whereas bootstrapping, you can tailor the outcome to whatever you want in life, if you can build a bootstrap company that sustains you, and you just want to have, you know, make $120,000 a year on a small SAS tool that generates that for you. Great, you can do that. If you want to build a business, step by step by step and keep the whole or the majority of the equity for yourself. If you sell a business for $25 million, and you own 100% of it, that’s much better than selling a business for $50 million when you own 20% of it. So you know, you have so much more flexibility. I’m a huge proponent of people stopping and thinking what’s the best financing option for me, typically, is what we did raising a small amount just to get off the ground, I call it peace of mind capital. It’s like $200,000 $300,000. So you can sort of not be constantly worried about your own credit cards getting spent to build something and then just go from there. You don’t have to you don’t have to dilute you can still have secondary transactions. You know, we’ve done rounds, the secondaries was like, okay, the earliest people got out some new people who have a different risk profile and a different investment target have gotten in? You can there’s still so many options. You don’t have to go on that path. It is right for some, but it’s not right. For most, that’s my two cents.

Kara Goldin 28:06
No, I think that’s that’s great advice. So finally, what legacy do you hope Oceans will leave in sort of the broader conversation about outsourcing? I asked founders this all the time, because I think obviously, you’re focusing on your own business and growing it, but there’s certainly changes that maybe 10 years from now that you’re going to be able to say, Yeah, we were doing that at Oceans and or no one was doing this. What do you hope people are taking away from what you’re spending long hours on? And, you know, really, really focusing on every single day? What what do you hope to change in this industry?

Ian Myers 28:49
I, when I hear those questions, and when I think about that, I actually strike back to me, I don’t think about our clients. It’s lovely to hear stuff from our clients, like, oh my gosh, you’ve like transformed my business or this person’s amazing or like, we were able to get profitable because of working with you guys, or whatever it is. But I still get messages regularly from our people in Sri Lanka, are people in South Africa, which are like, hey, my kids can go to a better school because of this. And I never thought I’d get to work on like an electric vehicle battery charging company like that opportunity doesn’t exist here. And oh, I was working with a client in Tokyo. They want to give me a visa so I can move to Japan and work for them. I didn’t think I’d get out of Sri Lanka. Like that kind of stuff, is what I really care about and what motivates me and makes me happy and we’re, you know, launching an Oceans foundation this year to kind of support causes of education and things aligned with our mission. And that is exactly in line with what I want to do. I think Paul Newman is a hero of mine and somebody I really look up to in these days. Not that I’ve ever met Him or know Him personally. But you know, read a lot of stuff a lot of what he’s done. And it was really just a question of building businesses and building mechanisms to help people. Oceans is a rare instance where and I was building apps before this. So I know what is like a waste of time and like kind of just sort of kept pure capitalism. Oceans is a business where everybody seems happy, like everybody seems to win, like our clients are thrilled they get awesome people at, you know, a price point that is making their lives easier and running their business, the people are excited about the opportunity they get to work on. And we as a company still do very well. So I think that is such a rare thing. And I feel so lucky and privileged. And I hope more people try to build companies in that way, and see that it’s possible.

Kara Goldin 30:51
I love it. So well, thank you so much in for joining us today. Ian Meyers, founder and CEO of Oceans, and we will have all of the info in the show notes. But best of luck with everything. And everyone needs to sign on to Oceans and check out what you’re doing and see how Oceans can help solve problems for them. So it’s a it’s really, really cool. So thank you.

Ian Myers 31:15
Thank you so much. It’s been an incredible conversation. Thanks

Kara Goldin 31:19
again for listening to the Kara Goldin show. If you would, please give us a review. And feel free to share this podcast with others who would benefit and of course, feel free to subscribe so you don’t miss a single episode of our podcast. Just a reminder that I can be found on all platforms at Kara Goldin. I would love to hear from you too, so feel free to DM me. And if you want to hear more about my journey, I hope you will have a listen or pick up a copy of my Wall Street Journal, best selling book undaunted, where I share more about my journey including founding and building hint. We are here every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Thanks for listening and good bye for now.

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