Success Strategies for a Globally Diverse Team

Jim James: 0:21

And hello and welcome to this episode of the Unnoticed Entrepreneur. Today we are going to Philadelphia to meet Dave Snyder. We're going to talk about how he's managed to build a team in Macedonia, of all places, to run his business. And I'm still here just in Wiltshire Doesn't sound nearly as glamorous as running a business between Philadelphia and Macedonia. But we're going to talk about backlinks. We're going to talk about managing an intercultural team and we're going to talk about things that we can all do better to get our businesses noticed. Dave, welcome to the show.

Dave Schneider: 0:55

Dave, how are you doing?

Jim James: 0:57

Hey, it's my pleasure. Now. You have had your company, , since 2018. And you started it in Philadelphia, but you've got a team in Macedonia. So I'd love for you to first of all tell us about the business, but then also, how can you end up having a team where you are the remote worker and the business is somewhere else?

Dave Schneider: 1:24

Yeah, it's sort of funny to be here as well, because that wasn't exactly what I was expecting when I started. Business or entrepreneurship in and of itself is a we call it a link building agency. We offer a couple of different services related to SEO, inbound marketing, such as link building, content strategy and creation and website design dev, so you can think of it as a mini marketing agency. As you mentioned, the entire team, for the most part, is in Macedonia. There's a person or two also in Serbia and Croatia, but the vast majority of around 20 of us or so are in Macedonia, and we have an office in Skopje where the majority of the team meets daily, with the exception of myself. It's interesting to be working with a company based in Macedonia. In fact, I met a lot of entrepreneurs, but I'm sort of the first one who has picked that location. Historically, going back some years, I was a digital nomad and traveled to a lot of different countries, macedonia being included in one of them, and during that time I got used to working with virtual assistants from the Philippines and Asia and Eastern Europe, and I myself am married to a girl who was born in Russia. I speak Russian, so always very comfortable with Eastern Europe and when I started Shortlist five years ago and was looking to grow it and finally had a little more work that I could handle, I went on I think it was Upwork and put out some requests and an individual named Victor got in touch with me from Macedonia and his pitch was really good and I invited him on to become a member of the team and we worked together for a couple of months and when we had enough work that needed a third and a fourth person, I asked him if he knew anyone, because I had done a company before called Ninja Reach, where I had a remote team and everybody was all different types of geographies, like Mexico and Eastern Europe and Asia, and basically, as much as it was great to have this multicultural team, I always struggled with the logistical aspects of scheduling a call that worked for everybody and everybody had to speak English when it wasn't their native language and they were never able to work in person, obviously because everybody was remote. And I want to try something a little different this time with Shortlist. I wanted to have the company be based in one individual area where everyone could get together, speak their native language and maybe we could go visit them and visit their office and eventually that became Scopi of Macedonia.

Jim James: 4:00

I think on your website, which I'm showing for those who watch the video, we can see Victor, and I think the lady next to him has the same surname. So is that his wife or his sister?

Dave Schneider: 4:10

That's his sister. Yeah, so those are those three that you're showing. There are kind of employee number one, two and three. Essentially, when I was looking to add to the team, I asked Victor who he knew and his sister and his friend were available, so they came on.

Jim James: 4:24

That's a lovely story and Today Link building it's a little bit of a black art and I've had some guests on before talking about link building. But how does a company so, if you use link building, because one of the challenges that we've seen is getting people to link back to our website, so if we have some content, why would they link back to someone else's website? Because they really only want the traffic one way, don't they? Had you get a relationship to be two way?

Dave Schneider: 5:01

There are many different ways to do link building. It's a surprisingly larger industry or marketing strategy than many kind of understand, and even the link building that we do. A short list is a very kind of subset of all the different approaches and techniques to link building. So you know, in some ways that has to be taken into consideration. There are, but I guess, for starters, when you create content on your website, people hopefully it will eventually link to you naturally, just from you creating some content, it being valuable, it being useful, people will come across it on the web and they will link to you. But often the amount of links that you will get or the keywords that the individual will choose are not satisfactory to what you Require or want in terms of growth. And although Google's algorithm for search is, you know, secret in the larger sense, we know that links, backlinks, are A large part of that algorithm and so many companies will say you know we need to go out and proactively acquire some more links to kind of meet the demand that we're looking to to have here. There. The methodology that we use for our link building is primarily guest posting. Guest posting is when you write a piece of content and then you publish it on another individual's website. Because you are providing them with content. They are receiving something of value on top of that. You may also pay an editorial fee. This is a fee for the blogger to review the article and to edit it and post it In the combination of that content in the editorial fee usually results in a backlink that will be placed in the article that was written. So our agency facilitates that. We have relationships with thousands of bloggers and when a client comes to us we can determine who we think are the relevant ones that would be a good fit for them, what type of content we should write in order to feature them best. We know the bloggers, editorial fees and standards for writing guidelines. We can handle that all done for you essentially help them Bridge the gap between you know the amount of links that they want versus what they've been getting kind of naturally.

Jim James: 7:15

Okay, that's interesting and out of interest. And how much does it cost to have someone write an article and then have the article placed? The article placed on a third party website, but linking back to my website, is that right?

Dave Schneider: 7:31

you're right. On average, clients are likely to pay probably between a hundred fifty and two hundred fifty dollars. There are obviously it's a service industry so there are people that will do it for less and there are people that will do it for more, but on average about that amount.

Jim James: 7:45

Okay and they've got to ask you the question impact of you know the a I write is where this chat gbt or Jasper or pepper type. How is that impacting the copywriting and the backlinking industry?

Dave Schneider: 8:03

I think, significantly, we're seeing more and more written content be generated through AI, and even if you are working with a writer a human being, so to speak and you think or feel that your content is being written by a human, there's no one to say that that human being is not using AI as a tool. Even if you, as an agency, maybe, are not sort of sanctioning it directly or it's not part of your tool suite, the individuals, contractors that you work with, may be using it. So it's. You know, one way or another, you really have to kind of confront this trend and find out the best way to incorporate it. We have human editors, so everything that gets written for us, either it's written by a human being or, if there's an AI component to it, it always goes through a human being writer as well. A lot of the AI tools have improved a lot, but there's still aspects of the content that they create that, if you look at it, you can tell that maybe it isn't quite natural or the way that you want, but at the end of the day, certainly this technology is becoming very prevalent in the industry and you know, on the one hand, that might that may result in some lower quality, so that's something that people have to be aware of when they choose who to work with and understand the quality of the finished product. But it may also drive prices down. I mentioned $150 to $150 for a single backlink is quite a lot, I think, for most businesses, but as AI content becomes more prevalent, the cost of the service may be driven down, so that would be a positive.

Jim James: 9:42

But from what I've understood, the AI content as well may be ignored by the search engines because they will see it really as filler content, not authentic, human-generated content.

Dave Schneider: 9:56

Yeah, and that is potentially true, or at least that's sort of what is being said. I will say that I have seen companies like Google and others sort of make these statements, and they make them often as a way to deter people from doing it, but I have not necessarily seen that backed up by actual data to show otherwise. For example, you can go back many, many years, like five years or more, and you'll find articles that say guest posting is dead, that Google came out and said there will be no more guest posting. It's not going to be useful for you. But year after year, people do it and year after year I've worked with many clients. I can see results. So their ability to necessarily determine what content is AI-generated and what is not is maybe not sufficient to back up that claim.

Jim James: 10:52

Okay, very interesting day. Final question about backlinks, because I do want to move on. But how many backlinks should someone aspire to have? I mean, you've mentioned a price per. Should companies have one, two, three a month? Can you give us some idea of metrics?

Dave Schneider: 11:11

I can say that in most cases, clients that work with us are usually looking for between five and ten per month. However, there really is no one size fits all for this type of thing, and that's true for marketing in general. It's very dependent on the company, their level of maturity, what the goals of their campaign are, how competitive the things that they're trying to achieve are, and that's part of the analysis that we do with every client who kind of comes on to meet with us, we'll go through their website and the keywords and the competitors, we'll do a complete analysis and we'll give them a recommendation.

Jim James: 11:44

Dave, that's great. I want to switch gears a little bit now. I want to talk about how you've been getting the business noticed. What have you been doing as an entrepreneur Just to draw your attention to what you've been doing on the environmental side? Because I notice on your website you've got some core values, but you've also got some work that you've been doing, I think, with regards to planting trees and so on. So can you just share with us what you're doing To get the company notice, but also quite interested in this environmental, do good in the world dimension to your business?

Dave Schneider: 12:24

Yeah, let me start with the ladder and then I'll kind of go with the former as an individual surface, an entrepreneur. Obviously there's a top level need of you know, with running the business and earning certain amount to be able to kind of provide the life that you're looking to live. But Beyond that, I like to think that many of us, when we do get an entrepreneurship, we have a greater good mentality that we're looking to kind of, you know, help people or help the world in some way, whatever way that we can. When Shortlist was first started as a really young company that was just trying to get some legs under it, we weren't necessarily in a position to Do volunteering and things like that. However, as the company has sort of grown and matured In reach a little bit of a level of profitability, the questions about what, what else can we really do here, started to come up at first. So first I looked at what some of the things that I thought would be nice, which was the environmental aspect stripe actually has a nice. A strike is a payment processor that we use. They have a nice climate initiative program you can donate. A portion of the revenue that comes in is processed to strike in do some programs that they have picked out that are working on climate, climate change. In addition to that, there was a nice organization called one tree planted, and we came up with a thing that for every link that we build will plant a tree, and so those two things basically became kind of pillars of, you know, the environmental aspect of the business. And then, you know, recently, in the last six or so months, as much as you know, I thought those are really nice initiatives and we were sort of proud of them. I started to realize that, you know, we are a company in Macedonia. Macedonia, for lack of a better word, I think, is classified as third world. I just, based on the economic situation in the country, is not a wealthy country as that, you know, we should. Probably this is something unique about us, about Shortlist, that the majority of the people are in Macedonia. So we should Also try to tailor our efforts to be doing something in Macedonia, and so we found an organization called open the windows, which is basically an organization that helps kids with developmental issues, learning, and so we have been Donating to them every month and also because it's a local business, local to the people that live in Macedonia on the team. Once a month or so we send a couple individuals from the team to go over there and volunteer and I thought that was really cool. I mean, I'm fortunate being in Philadelphia isn't something that I'm able to participate in all the time. I'm hoping to make a trip out the Macedonia soon and to visit them, but Basically I thought it was cool that we could not only provide something for them financially, but also really some hands on work as well and helping them with the marketing.

Jim James: 15:25

Yes, yeah, I was just trying to find in Macedonia, just north of Greece, isn't it so correct? Yeah, it's a beautiful part of the world, actually as well, so that's really wonderful. And, speaking of little legs, if anybody heard any noises in the background, I think you got a young one.

Dave Schneider: 15:43

Yeah, she should be going down for a nap pretty soon, but I just got there now.

Jim James: 15:47

Yes, I know if anyone can hear any noises in the back and my bells are going to the church is ringing, so for anyone listening in, if we can get rid of those noises. David, I decided to carry on like troopers. I hope your daughter gets gets a bit of a rest. Okay, I'm not easy. I'm Dave. In terms of what you've learned as an entrepreneur, and maybe a mistake or something that you think, from a visibility point of view, hasn't gone according to plan while you're building short list, is there anything that you could share? Is it a sort of advice to others? I noticed entrepreneurs.

Dave Schneider: 16:27

Yeah, made plenty of mistakes along the way. I think many of them came from trying to be something we were not. So, for example, two things that we did in earlier years. Number one was I thought that the natural progression for our business was to be a full service marketing agency and to include other services that we don't offer now. To sort of round us out, I sort of saw what bigger companies were doing and what they looked like and thought, oh, I want to be them, so I should basically offer those same services and things like that. In doing so, I felt that we really kind of lost our identity and it became very difficult to manage the business and to kind of unite the team around certain kind of services and principles. We ended up eventually having to kind of cut certain departments and I had to find replacement jobs in other companies for all those individuals to essentially kind of make it, make the team kind of leaner. We had also tried to niche ourselves down too much. I had decided at one point that we were going to work very specifically with health and wellness brands and that was going to be our angle. There are many, many agencies who do link building and SEO services and we were looking for a way to differentiate ourselves. So we decided to come up with this kind of health and wellness sort of angle. But we really didn't have any credibility behind that. We weren't known in that space, we weren't operating, we weren't really promoting those space. A lot of the customers that were originally came on the Short list were people that my partner met and he wasn't necessarily meeting those types of companies and so all of that really just kind of failed. And I think when we looked at it we realized that we were okay being smaller, we were okay being boutique and we were okay servicing everybody and that has worked for us.

Jim James: 18:23

Okay, that very interesting. I noticed on your website we've got quite a few health care, so you had to get the balance between being too broad and too multi-service and too niche as well. And, dave, I did want to just touch on something that we discussed a bit earlier on about a slightly different approach you've got as well with your team because you have to manage them remotely and sort of the cultural issues and around your holiday policy, because as a smaller company it's often hard to engage and retain staff, especially at a distance. Do you want to share with us your rather innovative approach to dealing with the fact you don't have a lot of budget necessarily to hire people in, but you do have something else that you can offer staff or potential employees? What is that, dave, just share about your holiday policy?

Dave Schneider: 19:13

Yeah, sure. So one thing to know, obviously when you work with remote teams from different cultures, is that the way different countries handle their benefits and their expectations for work may be different from what you're used to. In the States, companies do different types of holiday policies, usually two, three, four weeks, but in Macedonia there's sort of a legal law of a minimum number of days I think it's something like 23. And Shortlist has always sort of been kind of a weird. You know, I'm in Philadelphia, it's an American company legally, but the majority of the team is Macedonia. So who's holidays, whose laws do we sort of honor here? But more and more as the team grew in Macedonia, I think the expectations came that we would honor kind of more the way they do business. And so when originally Shortlist, being kind of a one year, one two year startup, didn't really have the like I said, the profitability really to honor 23 days for every single employee, at the time, I did want to make some good on that, as we did eventually mature and now we're in a bit better shape and so we've decided to offer, you know, an unlimited vacation policy, which is a policy that you've seen kind of like in tech companies these days in the States and it's become kind of trendy, but at least in Macedonia and other countries in the world I think is a little bit uncommon. And so people were very intrigued by this idea and to sort of double down on it, not just to sort of have like the policy, but it's important to kind of like embrace it. So we really do encourage people to take trips and then every month we do like a state of the business meeting and part of you know, part of that meeting, aside from talking about the company, is having people who went on a trip that month share photos and share aspects of the trip that they did, so that people can kind of get comfortable with the idea of taking vacation. Otherwise the point of policy would be nullified.

Jim James: 21:06

Yeah, Dave, I love how you've turned some you know something that's often considered as a burden into a reward and a way of attracting and engaging your team. I think that's absolutely inspiring. Now, Dave Snyder, if there's one piece of advice that you'd like to give my fellow unnoticed entrepreneurs about getting noticed as an entrepreneur, with or without link building in there, what would you say to my fellow unnoticed entrepreneurs?

Dave Schneider: 21:38

For sure. So Short list as an agency doing link building, as I mentioned, there are many, many companies that provide a similar service, so much so that you could argue the market is, like, completely saturated. It was the case when I started it five years ago as well. There just many thousands of marketing agencies. Yet has managed to kind of carve its face and basically be successful, at least by my own standards, and I think that there's a testament to the fact that if a market in a need is big enough, there's almost always room for one more, maybe not to be like the biggest fish in the pond, but enough to sort of establish your roots. You do have to find a little bit of a differentiator. It doesn't necessarily have to be with you know who you target. Like I said, the health and wellness thing was a mistake on our part. Or you don't necessarily need to offer all the types of services, but you need to do have a little bit of something. Ours is usually related to the quality of the links that we provide. Nevertheless, I don't think that the fact that Somebody has done something before or that there are many companies doing something should discourage you if it is what you really want to do, you'll find kind of your own path there.

Jim James: 22:47

Dave Snyder joined me from Philadelphia. If you want to find out more about you, where can they do that?

Dave Schneider: 22:52

Emails the best place. I'm not that big on social media, so feel free to shoot me a message at davidshrothlessio. Reply to everything, almost always within 24 hours.

Jim James: 23:05

Dave Snyder, thank you so much for joining me on this episode of the unnoticed entrepreneur. Loved hearing about how you built a blended international team of this brilliant thank you.

Dave Schneider: 23:14

Thanks so much.

Jim James: 23:17

So you've been listening. Dave Snyder and obviously , is doing great work in backlinks and content, but we've got some great insights from Dave on that. But I was also really interested in this into international cultural team management and how he's managed to transcend some of the challenges there by being flexible With his employment policy. If you've enjoyed this as well, do please share it with a fellow unnoticed entrepreneur and if you've got a chance to review it on a player, that would really help out and let me know what you think of the show. And until we meet again, I do encourage you to keep on communicating and thank you for listening.