May 29, 2026 – 96% AI No ROI Cheryl Einhorn and Nearshore Business Eric Tabone

Intro 1 0:04
Broadcasting from AM and FM stations around the country. Welcome to the Small Business Administration Award-winning School for Startups Radio, where we talk all things small business and entrepreneurship. Now here is your host, the guy that believes anyone can be a successful entrepreneur, because entrepreneurship is not about creativity, risk, or passion. Jim Beach.

Jim Beach 0:26
Hello, everyone. Welcome to another exciting edition of School for Startups Radio. I have been talking about this show for about a week or so, maybe longer than that, because I am so excited for the guests, and also because there’s a data point in today’s show that I’ve actually been pitching, and I’m excited to get it out there. I’m not going to spoil it now, but it is answering the question, what percent of AI integrations return absolutely no ROI, or have a negative ROI, in other words, they lose money. What percent? And the date of the point will shock you. And it shocked me when I saw it, and that’s why I booked the interview. And I’m excited to welcome the guest back. She hasn’t been on the show in about 10 years, and I love it when that happens. So, anyway, that’s Cheryl Einhorn, our first guest, and will answer that question for us. So, I’m excited to welcome her back to the show. Then, I’m excited to welcome Eric to Bone to the show. He has an offshoring, a virtual assistant, a hire a foreign overseas employee to be one of your regular employees that works from wherever remote workers are, you know, in now, and has bootstrapped the business. I’m so excited to hear the story, and to bring it to you, because it does it the way we like it done, and it’s a great model for everyone to follow. So, I am excited to welcome Eric to the show in a few minutes before we bring out Cheryl and answer that incredible data point question, though I want to make sure that all of you are aware of this. You know, I’m obsessed with China and what’s going to happen there, and again, I’ve been predicting for a long time that I think the current version of China is in peril and does not offer the huge threat that so many people offer, and I’ve also put out the idea that the population of China is not nearly as high as it is purported to be, all of that, those are some of the crazy ideas I’ve had. I also want to have, make sure you understand this idea, and this is not a crazy idea, this is pure fact that the population is not going to keep growing, we are at our will reach peak population very, very, very, very soon, and then it will go down, and the predictions are dire. Things like this by the year 2100 so 70 years from now, ish, the population of Thailand will be 8 million people, and that’s not because of a plague or a tsunami or anything like that. That’s just the natural demographics playing out. Is land still valuable if your population goes from 120 million to 8 million? And that’s not happening just in Thailand, it’s happening everywhere. Yes, even in Africa. So, anyway, think about that as you keep buying land and just everything. Just keep it in your mind. Our population is not going to go up forever,

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Jim Beach 4:14
We are back, and again, thank you so very much for being with us. Very excited to welcome back to the show after 10 years, Cheryl Einhorn, she was a guest with us 10 years ago when she was out promoting, I think, her very first book, but she is back with a new book called The Human Edge: Smarter Decisions in the Age of AI, and this is using her area method, which we will talk about, it’s not the area of a rectangle, it’s something a little bit different, but it uses the same word. She’s just done some startling research on AI. She’s got a couple statistics that are going to blow you away. I’ve been talking about this on the show for a couple of days. The people I’ve been telling the statistic that she’s going to share with us. We’re blown away by it, just blown away, but we’re going to get there. I’m not going to spoil it. She’s the founder and CEO of Decisive, which is a decision science company, and she is an adjunct professor at Cornell and has taught at Columbia and Columbia Graduate School. She is an award-winning investigative journalist at heart and has won a lot of recognition for her reporting on business, international politics, and economic issues. Several books, how many of you written now? Cheryl,

Cheryl Einhorn 5:29
this is my fourth.

Jim Beach 5:31
Fourth, congratulations. And has a very widely viewed TED talk. Cheryl, welcome back to the show. How you doing?

Cheryl Einhorn 5:38
Thank you so much for having me back. I’m very excited to be here with you.

Jim Beach 5:43
So we do the same thing that Saturday Night Live has. Once you’re on the show five times, we give you a green jacket.

Cheryl Einhorn 5:50
Oh, I’d love that.

Jim Beach 5:52
Come

Jim Beach 5:52
back three times fast. Okay,

Cheryl Einhorn 5:54
okay, great.

Jim Beach 5:56
Tell us about the startling research that you did with AI. Do you know the statistic that I was promoting. Do you know which one I was thinking about?

Cheryl Einhorn 6:04
I think that what you’re probably talking about is that while AI investments were over 200 billion last year, 96% of executives report that it’s given no meaningful return on investment, and that 65% of adults are still really barely using AI, if at all, and that’s according to Pew Research.

Jim Beach 6:31
Yes, it was the 96% of executives report that they have gotten no meaningful return, and that it’s over 200 billion, it’s almost 300,000,000,280 9 billion.

Cheryl Einhorn 6:46
Yeah,

Jim Beach 6:46
sorry, 85 285 billion with 96% no ROI. How can that be possible? That’s, you know, 270 billion with no ROI.

Cheryl Einhorn 6:58
Yeah, it’s really unbelievable. I think that everybody has recognized that it’s not just a transformational technology, but it’s actually a cultural change, and so they’re really trying to work with the tools, but they’re really still figuring out what does this work actually look like today, and how do we make sure that we are evaluating it to output properly, so maybe this is really an awful lot of testing, and they’re still making their way forward, and clearly there are some notable examples of companies that have rushed to make the technology take over a workflow, and then have had to pull it back, I think one of the most notable examples was I think it was Air Canada that rolled out an AI system that was helping people with their tickets, and when it came to bereavement tickets, the machine just wasn’t responsive in a way that it all handled these really sensitive types of trips properly, and I had to actually completely shelve it and reinstate having people do the work, so I think you know companies are really still figuring it out.

Jim Beach 8:19
Wow, wow, wow, wow. Okay, and I heard another one. I don’t know if you heard about this, but a small business was asking a business or one of the AI’s to do something with its database, clean or eliminate duplicates or something like that, and the AI figured out that the easiest way to do it was to delete the entire file and the backup, and it was the company’s database. Did you see that story? Yes,

Cheryl Einhorn 8:48
yes, I saw that story too. That being said, this technology is changing so quickly that I bet we are going to start to see some returns, because there are also anecdotal stories on the other side where companies are saying that it’s been very successful for them, so I think we just have to stay tuned on the statistics.

Jim Beach 9:13
Okay, what are some of the biggest failure points, or you know, that 96% is it because they spent too much money and the ROI is too far away, or is the tech broken, or did they design it poorly? How did that number come about? Do you think

Cheryl Einhorn 9:31
I.. I’m honestly not sure, and I’m not sure, you know what, what is still true from that or not, we do know that the spending numbers have really been astronomical, and I think companies are just sort of testing their path forward, and I think also they recognize that when the hammer falls, it falls on humans, right? AI doesn’t care about the content. Consequences, so I do think also that even if they are finding things that are successful, they may not really be implementing it so that it is only AI, and personally I think that human judgment should always be guiding and evaluating the machine, and if that’s what’s happening, that’s actually a good sign for human critical thinking skills, for human oversight and guidance and compliance of the tools.

Jim Beach 10:31
Excellent. What kind of things are people doing? Are there any big buckets you can point to that are maybe some of the projects that were successful.

Cheryl Einhorn 10:42
Well, I was on, actually, on a podcast last week with somebody from Salesforce, who was talking about how, you know, they basically have AI agents that are working alongside all of their teams, and it seems to have been very successful. So, I think that’s one, you know, where they feel like whatever it is that that they’ve actually done, you know, that it’s really improving outcomes for them, because they’ve continued to expand the different workflows that are that are involved for the companies, but I think, you know, when you think about it, the vast majority of companies in the United States are small businesses, and small businesses probably don’t have a lot of resources, right, in terms of experimenting with the tools, upskilling their teams, et cetera, and so I really wonder what’s happening for some of these smaller companies. I certainly think that they could use it in a variety of ways, but I think there’s just so much more to learn here.

Jim Beach 11:46
You have a favorite platform?

Cheryl Einhorn 11:50
I don’t have a favorite platform, but I would say that it’s becoming, it’s becoming clearer that the different AI tools seem to serve different purposes well, so for example, Chat GPT sort of seems like the workhorse, it can do a little bit of everything. I think it also has the highest rate of hallucinations when it gives you a false answer, and it’s been accused of being very sycophantic. It really wants to tell you that you’re smart and you’re beautiful, and my, you look good today. Whereas Claude, I think, has really been coming on fast for people that are interested, interested in using cowork or cope, or or some of its coding, as well as it’s getting a reputation as being good, helping you with your writing perplexity is really becoming like the research tool of the AI bots. It aggregates information from the different AI bots, and it gives you citations much more clearly. So that’s good for research, and then you know Gemini is good for people that use the Google suite, and Copilot is great for people that are on the Microsoft platform. So I think you know, depending on how you’re working, the different tools become more attractive to you.

Jim Beach 13:19
What about Grok?

Cheryl Einhorn 13:20
And that’ll change too.

Jim Beach 13:22
Rock

Cheryl Einhorn 13:24
rock is known as the one that is the least sycophantic, and also I have heard from people that it is good with giving you sort of rules and regulations more accurately than some of these other tools.

Jim Beach 13:44
Okay, so interesting. I used – I’ve been pounding the AI for the last six months. I’ve been using it a lot for my writing, and I uploaded an entire book last night to Chat GPT, and asked it to outline it, and it got horrible results. It would only outline the first six or seven chapters, and then after that it switched to multi chapter reviews and character marks and things like that. And I kept saying, this is not what I want, here’s what I want, and it produced the same trash, no matter how many times I told it I didn’t want it that way, and so I said, ‘Hell with you today. And then I went to Grok, and the book they did it on the first try perfectly. Grok did, and I’ve been hearing that Chat GPT is so sycophantic, and so I wanted you know, and I’m putting my book in there to work on it. So Chat GPT is telling me that it’s going to be the second best seller after the Bible. And then I put it into Grok last night. Grok, for the first time ever, was complimentary last night, and so I think Grok has been altered a little. It to become a little more sycophantic, that’s my happening last night. What do you think of last night, Cheryl?

Cheryl Einhorn 15:07
So, so that’s so interesting. I have a couple of thoughts. First, you know, previously Grok was accused of, you know, really some some things that were considered inappropriate and also considered the cranky AI bot, so that’s interesting. Yeah, maybe, maybe you are really on to something, and you’ve written something very brilliant, that could be one answer, or it could be, you know, as you’re saying that they’re making it a little less cranky in terms of Chat GPT, what I have found is you cannot input that much into the prompt window, so if you have something, let’s just sit, let’s say that your book is 200 pages, right, it can only really hold and process so much information at a time, and so you need to break it up. Here’s the first section, digest this and give me feedback. Here’s the second section, and so on. The other thing is, how much you’re actually paying for the tool also impacts how well the tool works for you in terms of longer and more complicated tasks. So those are a couple of different ways that I think about the experience that you had.

Jim Beach 16:28
Yes, I’m paying for both versions on Chat GPT, I think I’m paying the 29 a month, and on the Gemini or Grok, I think I’m paying, I don’t know, I think 35 a month or something is right, so I’m paying significantly for both of those.

Cheryl Einhorn 16:45
It’s interesting you say significantly. I’m going to interrupt you for one second, because these companies are getting us hooked on these tools. We’re using them for things that are important to us, in addition to small things like maybe how does this outfit match together, but you know, if you think forward to a year, I can’t imagine that you’re going to be paying as little as you’re paying now. And then the question becomes, How valuable is the tool to you, and what you’ve worked on with it, and this history that it’s built up for you. If let’s say they decide to charge $10,000 a month.

Jim Beach 17:23
No, I’m not going to go there,

Cheryl Einhorn 17:25
right?

Jim Beach 17:25
I do think that there’s going to be some significant backlash to the whole thing, and I think it will start. It’s already started with the data centers. I think we’re getting NIMBY data center syndrome, you know, not in my backyard, like almost like putting a nuclear power plant in your backyard. No, you’re not going to do that, you know, because they’re just so destructive with the energy and the water, of course, especially the water. I think you know, with the Colorado River running dry and Hoover Dam is like 30 feet away from closing, because it’s the water is so low, LA gets no power without the Hoover Dam. How are you going to build a data center in the southwest right now, or even in the west if there’s no damn water? So,

Cheryl Einhorn 18:12
yeah, I think there has been a lot of growing resistance over the last couple of weeks getting ready for my book, The Human Edge, to be published. I asked every person I met. It didn’t matter if you were checking me in at the hotel or you were the Uber driver or you were somebody coming to one of my book talks. People are worried that this tool could really make them think less, right? And that’s what my book is really all about. How do you preserve your thinking, and even more so, how do you strengthen it so that you can be using the tools in a way with a human edge and ethically, where you’re leading the machine, and you’re turning this generic tool that knows nothing about you and doesn’t care about you into something that can actually help you solve things that are meaningful to you.

Jim Beach 19:07
Yes, so I want to go into the book in detail next, but before that, I want to tell you one more story. Did you say see what’s happening in Atlanta with the Waymo driverless taxis? Did you see that story?

Cheryl Einhorn 19:21
I’m not sure that I did what happened with Waymo.

Jim Beach 19:23
When the cars are not in use, like at night, when no one’s needing them, they sent them all to just go hang out on one residential street, and then wake up at two in the morning, there’s 40 Waymos on one street, all battling, trying to get in and out with each other, they’re all in one damn street, a cul-de-sac.

Jim Beach 19:43
Wow,

Jim Beach 19:45
that

Cheryl Einhorn 19:46
is, that is hysterical. Yeah,

Jim Beach 19:49
if you lived there, think how just how annoying it would be, how much you would hate it. I mean, you can’t get in and out of your driveway because the entire road’s blocked. Okay. Now I got that out of my system. I feel better. So, tell us a little bit more about the human edge, and I did tease the area method. So, can you start with the area method, please? I know you use area method publication, so it’s important to you. And then start segwaying into more discussion of the book, please.

Cheryl Einhorn 20:18
Sure, so the area method is the method that I introduced in my first book that you and I discussed 10 years ago, which was called Problem Solved, and is about personal and professional high stakes decision making. An area is an acronym for a system that uniquely controls foreign counters, our cognitive biases, those mental mistakes that we all have because we see the world out of our own perspective, and so it really seeks to expand our knowledge while improving our judgment, and the letters of area basically stand for the first day is absolute, up close on the target of your decision, the R in area then puts that target at the center of the decision into its context, because you can come up with a perfectly good solution, but if it doesn’t work for your real world circumstances, it’s going to fail. And then the e in area, I call that the twin engines of creativity, it’s exploration and exploitation, exploration is moving beyond document-based research to identify good prospects and ask some great questions. So, it’s interviewing now that you’ve learned about the subject at the center of your decision. How does that actually work in the real world? What can real-world people with experience tell you and give you the difference between the map and the terrain, and then exploitation is a brand new step in decision making that I’ve inserted, where we really check our assumptions against evidence, so that we don’t move forward with something that sounds good but lacks foundation, and then in the final A of area analysis, we put the pieces back together, and it helps us come to conviction. So, the reason why that connects with the Human Edge book is that what the Human Edge basically says is each of us has a special sauce. We each have a way that we make decisions, and it’s worked for us, right? We make 1000s of decisions every day, but many of us don’t know that much about what we care about in our decisions. So, when we’re working with an AI tool that doesn’t care about us and doesn’t know anything about us, we need to be able to identify for it why are we solving the problem that we’re solving for. So, let me just give you an example. If I come to an AI tool like a Grok, and I say that I’m looking for a new job, tell me what new computer coding jobs are out there. It is not going to know, am I changing jobs because I’m burnt out? Am I changing jobs because I’m looking for an organization that actually will be doing something in the world that better aligns with what I’m passionate about, or some third reason. If I just tell it that I’m looking for those jobs without that, it’s going to give me answers that have nothing to do with why I’m solving the problem, and since area really helps you think about what are the key components of problem solving, when you’re using an AI tool, you also need to be able to understand that good problem solving has your identification of the problem, your why, and the motivation, the contextual factors, what it actually means to conduct research with AI without going into analysis paralysis, because it can give you way too much information, and nobody wants too much that slows them down. They want what’s actually going to help specifically move them forward. So that’s a couple of examples of how area connects with what I talk about in the human edge.

Jim Beach 24:04
Tell us about the cheetah sheets.

Cheryl Einhorn 24:07
Okay, so in all of my books I have the cheetah sheets. The cheetah, she’s the fastest land animal, but her hunting prowess comes from being able to decelerate up to nine miles an hour in a single stride, and the reason why that’s so powerful is that that is where she builds agility, flexibility, and maneuverability, and when we’re solving a problem for ourselves and making a decision, we would love it to be a straight line, but it’s not. It often involves times where we’re gathering new information, and then we need to recognize, okay, does this mean that I can continue to move forward, do I need to move back over a point that I may have glossed over, or do I want to turn in a different direction, so in all of my books I have cheetah sheets, which give you practical tips and techniques to basically. Take right off the page and plug into your own life, and so on. The human edge, it’s how to actually work well to bring forward your human thinking and exercise your human judgment to strengthen your decisions with AI.

Jim Beach 25:15
And tell us about James.

Cheryl Einhorn 25:18
So, James is the main story throughout the book, I have many stories in the book, so that you can see how people are using some of the skills that I’m helping you to develop, but James is an entrepreneur who has a successful coffee shop, he’s thinking about opening a second shop, he has very limited resources, as many small businesses do, and so you can follow his and my work together throughout the book to see how he went through all the different types of steps, if you were solving a problem from soup to nut. The way we use AI is actually at times two different ways, but we think of it as one tool, so I want to just explain that for one moment. For James, he’s using AI like a Lamborghini driver, right? He can use the machine like the high-performance car that it is, but he’s got to be the driver to get to a good destination, and AI can help them get there faster. The other way that we use AI, I call, is as a surgeon, and that’s when you have a specific problem, you’re only missing one thing, you’re going to AI to get that answer, and you’re basically making a single incision at a single point, and you want to be able to fix that one thing, so James is using it more like the Lamborghini driver, but you also see him use it surgically, so you can use one tool in two different ways as well.

Jim Beach 26:58
I love it. We’re about out of time, Cheryl. We need to switch over to the quick 10, so give us our final word on the book.

Cheryl Einhorn 27:05
My final word on the book is, if you want to maintain your critical thinking skills and you want to be the chief decider in your own life, this is a book that can build your confidence and conviction to use AI well and to lead it for your specific purposes,

Jim Beach 27:22
fantastic. Cheryl, I heard that you were willing to play our little game, the quick 10.

Cheryl Einhorn 27:28
I’m willing to play the quick 10.

Jim Beach 27:30
Are you currently sober? I’m required by state law to ask.

Cheryl Einhorn 27:34
Oh, yes, I am currently sober. Thank you for asking.

Jim Beach 27:37
Do you want to accept the standard wager?

Cheryl Einhorn 27:41
What is the standard wager? The

Jim Beach 27:43
bet that everyone else made,

Cheryl Einhorn 27:46
which is

Jim Beach 27:47
the peer pressure everyone else did. It’s

Cheryl Einhorn 27:50
okay. I am willing to accept the peer pressure.

Jim Beach 27:53
Number one, please name your favorite creativity hack.

Cheryl Einhorn 27:58
I love for a run and getting outside when I don’t know what I’m doing, and I need to open up my mind. The big outdoors, that’s what does it for me.

Jim Beach 28:06
Number two, favorite bootstrapping trick.

Cheryl Einhorn 28:09
My favorite bootstrapping trick is I give myself a deadline, and then I actually have to perform against that deadline, and whether it’s the number of words I’m going to write, how long I’m not going to touch my phone, or that I’m not going back into the kitchen for the next snack for a certain amount of time.

Jim Beach 28:28
Number three, name your top passions.

Cheryl Einhorn 28:31
My top passions, I love to spend time with other people, I love to be in the great outdoors, I love to read, I love to bake good cookies, and I love to laugh with my kids.

Jim Beach 28:46
Number four, what are the first three steps to starting a business?

Cheryl Einhorn 28:52
Having a good idea, making a plan, and getting into action.

Jim Beach 28:56
Number five, your first real customer. How do you get your first real customer?

Cheryl Einhorn 29:00
You have to have something that other people really need.

Jim Beach 29:04
Number six, your dreamiest technology.

Cheryl Einhorn 29:08
My dreamiest technology would be something that helps other people feel empowered, that they can move well into their good future.

Jim Beach 29:19
Number seven, What’s your best entrepreneurial advice:

Cheryl Einhorn 29:23
believe in yourself. Most decisions are reversible, even if there is some small confidence. Don’t step into the unknown.

Jim Beach 29:32
Number eight, your worst entrepreneurial mistake:

Cheryl Einhorn 29:36
don’t only listen to yourself.

Jim Beach 29:39
Number nine, favorite entrepreneur, and why?

Cheryl Einhorn 29:42
I guess it would be somebody like a Brene Brown or an Adam Grant who has really brought good ideas to the world and helps people to be able to build their own good future.

Jim Beach 29:56
And number 10, name your favorite superhero.

Cheryl Einhorn 30:00
Wonder Woman, she’s got the best smile.

Jim Beach 30:02
Excellent answers, excellent answers. While we calculate the score and find out the winner of our wager, Cheryl, how do we get in touch with you? Find out more, hire you, or buy your book.

Cheryl Einhorn 30:13
Well, please get in touch with me by connecting with me on LinkedIn, Cheryl Strauss Einhorn, or looking for me on Instagram, Carl Einhorn. My website is area method.com a r e a method.com

Jim Beach 30:30
Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for being with us, Cheryl. I’m just kind of waiting. Oh, I’m so sorry for you. You got a 94 We had a couple of, oh yeah, a couple judges from NYU, and I think they ding do some points, maybe some inner town rivalry or something going on there. You got a 94 it’s an excellent score, but you have to have a 95 to win, and so you owe us a Tesla. We always play for a Tesla, so I’ll look forward to that in my driveway soon. Please,

Cheryl Einhorn 30:55
that’s good. It can go with your Grok usage.

Jim Beach 31:00
Thank you so very much, and we’d love to have you back sooner than 10 years this time, Cheryl.

Cheryl Einhorn 31:07
I would love that. Thank you so much for having me.

Jim Beach 31:11
Thank you, and we will be right back

Intro 2 31:18
on. wonderful, that is a phenomenal question. That’s a great question, and I don’t have a great answer.

Intro 2 31:32
That’s a great question. Oh, that is such a loaded question, and that’s actually a really good question. School for Startups Radio.

Jim Beach 31:41
We are back, and again, thank you so very much for being with us. Very excited to introduce another great guest. This is an idea that I think is really unique. I’m excited to share it with you. Eric Tabone is with us. He is the founder and managing director of Near Shore Business Solutions. It is a recruiting firm that helps us companies get great employees from Latin America. After failing Spanish in school, he moved to Bogota. There’s got to be a woman involved in the story there somewhere. We will ask Bogota, Colombia, and fell in love with the place, and eventually moved there full time. And since then, he has had about 200 successful hires for permanent jobs from incredible people from where was the list, Colombia, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, and Costa Rica, the company again in nearshore business solutions. Eric, welcome to the show. How you doing,

Eric Tabone 32:36
Jim? Hey, thanks so much for having me. Glad to be here, and I got definitely some stories, and yes, there is a girl behind that story

Jim Beach 32:43
as well.

Jim Beach 32:43
To be, dude, you don’t move to Columbia without a girl involved, that’s like the cocaine capital, isn’t it? Is that a dangerous place? I’m worried for you.

Eric Tabone 32:53
Yeah, that was, I mean, that was about 30 or 40 years ago. So, Hollywood really hasn’t done us any favors, but quite a bit has changed since then. But yeah, this was back in 2010 I just came down here originally just to kind of learn Spanish and take it from there. Ended up meeting a girl, started a couple companies, and I’m now on my third company right now. So it’s been a pretty crazy ride.

Jim Beach 33:13
What are the other companies?

Eric Tabone 33:15
So first company was starting 2011 I did an education company where I was doing corporate language training for corporate executives across the continent and region, we were teaching Spanish, English, French, and Portuguese. Second company was a go-to-market consulting firm, and then the third one is this recruiting firm. And what I do now, I pretty much help US companies hire talent across Latin America.

Jim Beach 33:38
Very interesting. Was your language education program? Do you think you ever had any spies as your clients?

Eric Tabone 33:44
You know, I’m not sure about that. I mean, we could have. We had some pretty interesting people. I did have one person, well, from Columbia. I had two very interesting clients, one that was eventually a presidential candidate once, that was really interesting, and then we had somebody else who wasn’t set to run for president, but we saw this probably about eight years ago that he was destined for some greatness, political greatness, and he’s now played a pretty big part within political campaigns, whether he’s going for vice president or the director of the tax agencies down here. So I met quite a few interesting people along the way.

Jim Beach 34:17
Yes, sounds like it, very, very cool. Okay, so how did this business idea come about? How did you see this problem and a solution?

Eric Tabone 34:28
Yeah, so this started a couple years ago. This came more from, you know, I built a couple teams and organizations beforehand, and repeatedly saw over and over again that that America, Colombia, in several different countries along the way, just have some phenomenal talent, but very rarely did they have the opportunities to actually move up in their career. At the other side, the US, Canada, even European companies were struggling to place people within their cost respective budget and hiring, and so I just put the two to. Two together, I had friends who just at first started to ask, How can I hire somebody in Columbia? How can I hire this engineer in Brazil? And from there I just started to take it and roll with it. That was about two years ago. And now my company, I have about 12 people on my internal team. Just this year, we’ve done about 100 placements. Just this year, so last year we did a little over 100 as well, and it’s just growing like wildfire, because people realize that this is solving a problem that a lot of people have.

Jim Beach 35:27
All right, so do people from Columbia work remotely, or do they move to America?

Eric Tabone 35:34
Yeah, the majority of them are going to be working remotely. So, the main rules we tend to work on tend to have to do with engineering, such as developers, client-facing thinking of BDRs, account executives, or business services. So, realistically, any job that can be done on a computer, you could probably hire somebody in that America or Colombia for probably half the cost and have just the same skill level, sometimes even more, as opposed if you’re hired in the United States.

Jim Beach 36:00
So, the placement industry, from what I understand, if you place a person, you get about a third of their salary as your fee. Does that sound about right?

Eric Tabone 36:10
That’s a bit on the higher end for us. So we actually

Jim Beach 36:13
charge

Jim Beach 36:14
not only that, your salaries are lower too, right? Instead of doing a 70,000 job placement, you’re doing 116 pesos placement, right?

Eric Tabone 36:25
Yeah, yeah, exactly. So we’re pretty transparent about our fees, but we charge just right under 17% of annual salary, and realistically, for us clients who are hiring, they’re getting that paid back within six weeks compared to doing a US hire, so it’s a pretty quick payback periods for any entrepreneurs, founders out there listening, they understand what the numbers look like, and at the end of the day, it’s about the financials. How do you make that work?

Jim Beach 36:48
Are most of them permanent workers or virtual assistants?

Eric Tabone 36:54
You know, we’ve

Jim Beach 36:55
done what’s the spectrum of place, you know, individuals.

Eric Tabone 36:59
Yeah, we’ve done everything from there and above, we’ve done placements. Probably one of our highest emplacements was a head of AI delivery, which they pretty much ran a consulting firm of running AI projects for one of the biggest AI chip companies in the world. I can’t say the name, but I’m sure you could take a guess, and that role, I mean, they were probably placed at $140,000 salary.

Eric Tabone 37:21
Yes, yes, that’s exactly it. That’s exactly

Jim Beach 37:25
what you’re talking about.

Eric Tabone 37:26
That’s the exact so, but yeah, AI

Jim Beach 37:28
Perlman.

Speaker 2 37:30
Yeah, so, so we’ve done things that high, but we’ve also done roles such as virtual assistants. We do a lot of business development representatives, so people who just have to call, dial, get people on the phone, and those you know, are looking at 15 $18,000 a year annually. So, we’ve done everything in between there,

Jim Beach 37:47
okay? And you already answered this, but I want to make sure again, the types of industries you said, anything on a computer, healthcare with HIPAA. Do you do that kind of stuff, or give me your top three?

Eric Tabone 38:00
Yeah, so one of our biggest clients actually works within the healthcare industry on the compliance sector. We obviously help them on the more the back end, such as revenue generating, as well as software development, but we also work with SaaS companies, computer technology companies that are growing. We have a massive project out of Mexico, in Guadalajara, Mexico, where we’re doing about 15 to 20 BDRs on a monthly basis for them, and then we also work with just one of the newest things that have been coming in quite a bit is anybody who’s done entrepreneurship through acquisition, so that’s a concept where somebody goes in, acquires a company, and need to optimize. One thing that people could often optimize is looking at using near-shore talent, not American talent for roles that probably weren’t being done or they couldn’t find the person, so those are the main industries we work in, but you know, I’ve been around the brown for such a long time, I’ve seen it and done it all to an extent, if it could be done on a computer, we could probably find the person,

Jim Beach 38:56
yeah, you are old man, exactly, what are you 37

Eric Tabone 39:02
I wish, I wish I just turned 40.

Jim Beach 39:05
Close, though. That’s only 10% wrong. Just listening to you. I am like that mentalist, Oz Perlman.

Eric Tabone 39:13
That’s great. That’s great. Well, how do you, how did, how did you get to 37 What was it you were guessing? What gave it away?

Jim Beach 39:19
You described your children in a way that makes them sound young, as in 456, age, correct?

Eric Tabone 39:29
Yep, yeah, spot on, spot on. You, you are,

Jim Beach 39:32
you know, you 35 have your first kid, 34 a little bit, you know, Colombian woman, you know, spicy, kind of a, you know, attitude, LA, Latin American attitude, going.. I dated one, I couldn’t handle the LA woman, to be honest. I dated one, I was like, “Nope, out, get me back, this woman’s too strong for me. So,

Eric Tabone 39:54
yeah,

Jim Beach 39:54
is that stereotype true?

Eric Tabone 39:56
No, I mean, not really. I mean, once again.. I’m going to kind of go back to like Hollywood, I don’t think has done us any favors, so, but I will have been with my wife for what, 1314, years, and thankfully she’s, we’re still together, and we’re still making it work, so, but yeah, it’s been great, and, but right on with, with the kids, you, I mean, realistically, you’d make a great detective on how you picked up on that so quickly, yeah, I have two kids as well, so

Jim Beach 40:20
you know why, what it is, is I watched a special on Oz Perlman last night. I’m obsessed with it. Do you know who he is? The mentalist,

Eric Tabone 40:27
the mentalist, the mentalist. What’s the biggest thing you learned from him?

Jim Beach 40:30
Well, he, the biggest trick I think he’s ever done was he guessed the press secretary for Donald Trump. She’s pregnant, and she has told no one, not even her mother, the name of the child, and he guessed it out of the thin blue, but the documentary gave away kind of his secrets, and so I’m sort of bummed now, but on the other hand, I’m really super impressed with him,

Jim Beach 40:54
and,

Eric Tabone 40:54
and what is, what is a 10 second summary of one of his secrets that you would remember?

Jim Beach 40:59
Oh, he was on Joe Rogan, and he guessed Joe Rogan’s ATM number.

Eric Tabone 41:04
That’s impressive. And how does he? But, and he doesn’t tell you how he does that. He just has his own techniques.

Jim Beach 41:09
He has his techniques, but I think I, you know, with the documentary that I watched last night, they sort of told us how he did it. He uses, I’ll say, here, here’s the thing that they don’t tell you, and I think it’s kind of scummy, and all of the other magicians are kind of upset about him. Apparently, he interviews the person off air beforehand, and even does stuff like, I want you to think of the number, and when we go out there to make it a better airing and make it better for the audience, I’m going to tell you to pick four numbers, and then I’m going to guess those. Don’t do it now, or go and do it now, but don’t tell me until we’re live, you know. And then he says, now take subtract your ATM number from that on my iPhone, and it’s an iPhone trick that he’s running an app that makes it look like a calculator, which is really sending it to him on his phone, and so he knows your ATM because you type it into the phone during the pre-interview.

Eric Tabone 42:07
Yeah, so he’s cheating. He’s

Jim Beach 42:08
cheating,

Jim Beach 42:09
that’s the whole point. He’s not doing everything on air. It’s just like using a camera cut and showing us different angles of the, you know, the sleight of hand trick or something. You know, I think it’s inherently cheating, and that’s why the magicians are mad at him, and he’s truly cheating.

Eric Tabone 42:25
That is, it’s like when David Copperfield.. I don’t know if you remember, but what this is probably 30 years ago, 34 years ago, and I remember as a kid when I grew up watching this rebate, I think it was like a jet disappeared in front of Niagara Falls, they just.. they just pretty much paused the cameras, and they took it off, so, but that, that’s magicians for you.

Jim Beach 42:45
Yeah, I heard that when he did, made the Statue of Liberty disappear, he moved the entire audience 100 feet.

Eric Tabone 42:53
Yeah, I saw that too. I saw that too. That’s, and they turn off the cameras. Yep,

Jim Beach 42:56
yes,

Eric Tabone 42:57
there we go.

Jim Beach 42:57
Live, I’ve seen him fly live, and it was pretty impressive.

Eric Tabone 43:02
There we go.

Jim Beach 43:03
So, anyway, anyway, so you decided you wanted to start this company. Tell us the first, second, third, fourth, fifth steps that you did to get the company up and running near shore. So, idea, married, go,

Eric Tabone 43:20
yeah. So, this was actually have a slight something else. I kind of jumped in there. I had a quick stint at a multinational where I was running, running revenue. I just had my second kid, and I remember my first call back after paternity leave is they let me go. Now, full transparency, I did deserve it, but it just wasn’t the best timing. So, getting back to this company nearshore,

Jim Beach 43:40
I remember

Jim Beach 43:40
by firing,

Eric Tabone 43:42
by yeah. Well, I’m an entrepreneur. This is my third venture. The first two I did out of choice. The third time it was by firing, but oh my gosh, now I’m so grateful it happened

Jim Beach 43:51
to me. I, my goal in life, Eric was to be the CEO of Coca Cola, and Coca Cola, and saved them a billion dollars, and they fired you. They still escorted me out of the building. Two really, really big guys escorted me out of the building,

Eric Tabone 44:07
but everything happened for a reason.

Jim Beach 44:10
Yes, but yes, I thought of being an entrepreneur until then.

Eric Tabone 44:12
Exactly, so I got the accident one day feeling sorry for myself. And so, first step next day, I was up at 5am and I just got to work. You know, I think that’s one of the biggest things with entrepreneurship. You just got to do it, get up and do the actions, and then things start to come from there. But very quickly, I mean, I just pretty much, it was step by step. First day got to work, started to make calls, started touching my network, see what’s going on, seeing what problems I could solve. Obviously, they’re the simple logistical things you have to do, get a website, get your name, get the LLC set up, all that takes a day, but then at the end of the day, with entrepreneurship, it’s going out there, talking to people, and selling your idea. Does somebody buy it? You’re on to something. If somebody doesn’t buy it, you need to readjust. And you know, I’m sure you know, and all entrepreneurs out there listening, or at least for me, my first six months it was brutal, but. Just hang in there, and I kept reiterating, reiterating, moving forward. And then, about six months later, clients started coming in, and then it since then it just has not stopped. So that’s been about two years where my phone is constantly ringing for help, just because those first six months I put in that foundation.

Jim Beach 45:17
Did you have a website at that point?

Eric Tabone 45:19
I did not, but it took me about a day to put one together, and now this was two years ago. Now, to put a website, it’s even less than a day. People can put up a website in five minutes. Yeah, so

Jim Beach 45:29
it would be hard to sell anything if you don’t have a website to refer people to, wouldn’t it?

Eric Tabone 45:35
You’d be shocked at how many people try to do it, and then they wonder why they aren’t successful. But yeah, the website, it’s one of the first things you got to get up, and thankfully with AI in today’s age, now it takes five minutes to get a website up.

Jim Beach 45:46
Yep. So, and then, like, we were first marketing, true marketing campaign, what was that? What’s your marketing system now?

Eric Tabone 45:54
Yeah, so my marketing system now is based on six main channels: outbound, inbound, SEO, quick parentheses on the SEO, we optimize more for LLMs, so Chat GPT, Gemini. How are we showing up? And that has been very successful. Number four, partnerships. Five, networking, the nasty would buy. Be my founder, that LinkedIn content. So, when I started off, obviously I didn’t have all these six channels going just yet. I was focusing on the website and just outbound, just messaging people on LinkedIn, trying to get those calls, and then you meet one person selling that person introduces you to somebody else, and then somebody else, and so when you say marketing campaign, I’ve never ran a marketing campaign where I had to invest 10 grand to get it going, I started this just from hitting the ground running, making those calls and building those connections, and here we are now. The six champs I have, we run it very differently, but when you’re bootstrapping, it’s not always like that.

Jim Beach 46:47
If you did bootstrap, you own 100% still

Eric Tabone 46:50
100% still. And that’s this is third time I’m going to keep 100% this time around.

Jim Beach 46:56
And what were some of your bootstrapping tricks? How do you do that?

Eric Tabone 47:00
So biggest boots happen to, because I just had to learn how to do it by myself. So, instead of figuring out how to, we’ll go back to something as simple: the website. You don’t have to hire an agency, figure out how to do it. So, it might take you two hours, as opposed to having an agency do it in five minutes, and you actually start to do these things. And if you could get any idea or strategy to at least the 80% mark more often than not, that’s me good enough to at least reiterate and test to see if that’s going to work, and even today, even though I have a team that does a lot of these things, I still get my hands dirty, I still prospect, I still make those calls, I still take those meetings, and with bootstrapping, especially as if you’re in founder-led mode, the more you get your hands dirty, the easier you see the problem, and you could create the solution then that your team could eventually lead.

Jim Beach 47:48
Bill, you said those six months, the first six months were really hard. It made me think of this, my very first company, when I was 23 right after I got kicked out of Coke. They, we had a mailbox, and everything came in through the mailbox. So, this is the 90s, the internet’s internet’s not born yet. When I’m talking about, and so everything was in the mailbox. Our first check came in on the 47th day that we went to the mailbox, 40 times, Eric. The mailbox was completely empty,

Eric Tabone 48:17
but to make it in 47 days, that’s still pretty impressive. It took me probably about four months for my first check to come in, and I know sometimes it takes longer, so 48 foots it’s intense, but, but yeah, that it’s the grind that that’s that’s what we’re, we all do, who are out there building companies, it’s grinding once you get it going, it’s great, but

Jim Beach 48:36
How did get the title of the unofficial Colombian ambassador to the world,

Eric Tabone 48:42
that’s a great title. Why? Just gave it to myself. It just turns out

Jim Beach 48:45
that

Eric Tabone 48:46
I just gave it to myself. Yes, I can. Who’s gonna say no?

Jim Beach 48:49
So, right, but still, you can’t do that.

Eric Tabone 48:52
So, here’s the catch. I talk more about Colombia and talk about how amazing and beautiful this country is, more than anyone else in this world, and it’s true. I’ve been here 16 years. The two things I would tell everybody when I first talk about Colombia is number one, everything you probably know about Colombia is not true. Hollywood has not done us any favors at all. Number two, no country deserves to be this gorgeous. It is absolutely insane on how much there is to see and do here. It’s not fair, but I’m going to take advantage of it. I’m going to see as much of this country as I can. Now, because of that, I’m always talking about Colombia. I do more good for this country than the government does, so I feel like I deserve the title. And I did my own ceremony, had my own little band

Jim Beach 49:36
that you made up yourself. Well, now it is official. Then you have a fake ceremony, then the fake title is true.

Eric Tabone 49:42
Fake ceremony was just me in attendance, and I put on some music on Spotify, and I printed off myself with a certificate. I think that’s good enough, right?

Jim Beach 49:50
It is. It is. I love all of the fake colonels from the South, you know, the guys. Oh yeah, for some reason, like the, you know, the YMCA made the. Colonel, or something, or city, you know,

Jim Beach 50:05
whatever, Mayor for the

Eric Tabone 50:10
day, exactly. Yes, it’s the same, but in all

Jim Beach 50:16
seriousness,

Eric Tabone 50:17
yeah, exactly, but in all seriousness, it is just such an amazing, gorgeous country, and I talked about it so much, and I’m very, very grateful to be living here. Why

Jim Beach 50:25
did O in the Columbia, as opposed to the U? There’s two spellings of Colombia. Why are there two different spellings? Do you ever figure that out?

Eric Tabone 50:34
So, it has to do with the way the Spanish did it. So, Colombia, like the university, was a U, Columbia with an O is after the Spanish spelling, and so Columbus, do l o m b i a, instead of with a u, very important, so never the u, I believe it was going to become from the English side, okay,

Jim Beach 50:52
the Spanish is,

Eric Tabone 50:54
yeah, and then so Colombia comes from Colombo, Christopher Christoph Colombo, the Christopher Columbus, who discovered the American, well, who first European to come to the Americas in 1492 and it came off of his spelling. Don’t quote me on that, but I’m 98% positive that’s true.

Jim Beach 51:11
Then right after that, he tied all of the natives down and killed them all, as I remember,

Eric Tabone 51:15
exactly, exactly. So, but they’re there, so it came after him, but because it was a Spanish, it came from the Spanish spelling of the country.

Jim Beach 51:25
All right, so what do you do during the day now? What’s like your 20% of the day, 30% of the day? How’s your debate day or week divide up as a boss?

Eric Tabone 51:35
Yeah, really, really quick. I mean, I start my days pretty early, most days I’m up trying to be up by 530 at least at my desk, first hour or so. I’m out there, you know, speaking with clients. I work with a lot of people out of India, Asia, Philippines, as well. So, are they wanting to do those calls? 630 start getting the kids ready, take the kids to school, get some, you know, physical, spiritual time up to about nine 9am That’s when the show hits the road, stand up, go, go, go, and I’m either on client calls more often than not. I am pretty involved with my team one to ones, ensuring that execution moving forward. When I am not booked up, I’m trying to think through things, figuring out where our bottlenecks are and figuring out how to solve them. For example, we use a lot of AI to help us be better at our jobs. We don’t use AI to replace people, rather we use AI to make sure we don’t make mistakes. As I’m constantly thinking and visualizing different processes that we could increase or improve upon to make your client experience better. So, during the week, it’s go, go, go. Most Saturdays I do a few hours as well, but then you know, Saturday by 12-ish, I tend to turn off, and then I just focus on my family, and then family, Saturday, Sundays, and obviously during the week as well.

Jim Beach 52:50
Excellent, I love it. Eric, you’ve done a very, very impressive job. I love the bootstrap, we always love that. I love the creativity, take an idea, you know, finding employees, we’ve been doing that for a long time, but then add in the overseas component makes it unique and different. I just absolutely love it. How do we get in touch, find out more, and get a hired employee?

Eric Tabone 53:14
Yeah, thanks, Jim. Appreciate it. Easiest way to get in touch with me, just look at nearshore Business solutions.com You can look us up, Google, Gemini, ChatGPT, you name it, you’ll find it. There’s a contact button if you just mentioned this show. I’ll be sure to jump on this message instead of anybody else from my team. Also, feel free to find me on LinkedIn, Eric Tibone. I’m also known as the unofficial ambassador of Colombia to the world.

Jim Beach 53:38
Eric, thank you so very, very much for being with us. Great stuff, and we’d love to have you back.

Eric Tabone 53:42
Thanks, Jim. Really appreciate it. Look forward to coming back.

Jim Beach 53:44
We are out of time today, but you know what that means. That means we’ll be back tomorrow. Be safe, take care, and go make a million dollars. Bye now.