Kyle Hegarty, Managing Director at Leadership Nomad (a division of TSL), wrote the book, “The Accidental Business Nomad,” about succeeding in business across cultures.
Listen as he talks to me from Singapore and explains problems he encountered and recommendations for avoiding those mistakes.
He talks about how to understand the deeper levels of language and why a prostitute wouldn’t take the translation job he offered!
To access the “Communication Contracts” and other tools visit - https://www.leadershipnomad.com/businessnomad
To find his book, visit - https://www.amazon.com/Accidental-Business-Nomad-Survival-Shrinking/dp/1529329078
Connect with Wendy - https://www.linkedin.com/in/wendypease/
Connect with Kyle - https://www.linkedin.com/in/slapdragons/
Music: Fiddle-De-Dee by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com
ATTENTION: Below is a machine generated transcription of the podcast. Yes, at Rapport International, we talk a lot about how machine translation is not good quality. Here you see an example of what a machine can do in your own your language. This transcription is provided as a gist and to give time indicators to find a topic of interest.
[00:00:35] Wendy: Oh, I am so excited today. We've got somebody with vast experience and he's calling in from Singapore. So we're welcoming Kyle Heggerty. He is the author of the accidental. Business nomad. You got to get the book it's on Amazon. He's the managing director at TSL marketing and he's got a wealth of [00:01:00] experience.
[00:01:00] So Kyle, welcome to the global marketing show.
[00:01:04] Kyle: Thank you so much. It's great to be here.
[00:01:06] Wendy: So how did you end up in Singapore? Let's start with a little background
[00:01:11] Kyle: there. Oh, it's the standard story. I was basically, I followed the girl. One of those, one of those stories. In, in some ways it was a, it was a bit of an accident.
[00:01:22] My now wife at the time, my girlfriend, we were both based in Boston. She started. Collaboration as a [00:01:30] scientist, she was over at MIT and they were collaborating with a group here in Singapore. That was sort of the seed that got planted into our brains. And without having kids at that point or mortgage know, we could just pick up and go.
[00:01:43] W what what happened on my side was I was basically running a small little marketing company out of Boston TSL, which is a lead generation company. We do end-to-end B2B marketing for mainly for tech companies. I had a nice book of business [00:02:00] in north America, some clients in Europe and. Did would it a young, goofy sales person?
[00:02:07] Does I oversold an idea before I had any idea what to do? So in other words, I, I just started telling clients, oh, by the way, we're doing this in Asia. And so this wouldn't have been 2005, 2006, and the momentum was certainly coming towards Asia, even, even back then. And a majority or not majority, but a [00:02:30] number of clients wrote back right away, said, yes, if you're in Asia, we're, we'll take it.
[00:02:36] And I ended up signing these contracts having no idea what to do. I find myself getting onto the flights and I was just, I was flying back and forth from Boston to Singapore, which is if you're lucky it's a 24 hour round trip sorry, 24 hour trip, one way. You're lucky. One way trip with the 12 hour plus time zone, jet lag and everything.
[00:02:58] And so I was doing, I did that one [00:03:00] year, 12 times. Nice little healthy carbon footprint there for you. And finally it was like, look, I th th th the millennium, the business is in Southeast Asia, for me, that's where the opportunity is. And I just found it that myself, you know, okay. I'm, I'm here. I'm hoping my girlfriend followed through with her plan, which was to move her, her science and, and put a lab over here, which, which she did.
[00:03:23] So we both kind of ended up here. I partially accidentally, but, you know, we were both [00:03:30] following the opportunities. Right. So
[00:03:32] Wendy: how long have you been
[00:03:32] Kyle: there now? 15 years. And in our little, in our little COVID bubble, we've been in stuck in this 20 mile radius little island for the last 16 months. So I haven't, I don't think I've been outside a 15 or 20 mile radius since that's the, so
[00:03:47] Wendy: you two met here in Boston, you started a life over at, you decided to pursue this dream.
[00:03:54] Moved over there, got married and had kids. [00:04:00]
[00:04:00] Kyle: Our timing was good. We left in 2006 and all of my friends were like, you know what, I'm buying a house like, oh, that's a great time to buy a house 2006, 2007. And I'm like, yeah, I'm going to go to Asia instead of a company. And so I think I, I, I won that bet, but, but yeah, so we were, we were, our timing was very fortuitous and lucky, I would say I have two kids later and yeah, two kids later.
[00:04:21] And we we're one of these ex-pats that has a, it's a funny thing over here in a lot of parts where there's a two year. [00:04:30] I've just two more, two years. And then, and then all of a sudden it's like, well, two more years. So I think we're on our eighth, two year plan.
[00:04:40] Wendy: Right. And so are you so settled or you think you'll come back?
[00:04:44] Kyle: Yeah, we'll come back. We'll so my wife's from the UK, so we'll probably our next stop will probably be to the UK. I think that from a times, you know, they, the Brits did it. Well. They, they planted the flags and they got the time zones in their favor.
[00:04:58] The best part of the world would be [00:05:00] Western Europe. I would say, to do a global type of role simply from a time zone standpoint. So I think that that's probably our next.
[00:05:10] Wendy: Okay. And so you had never, you had been over for business to Singapore, but you would never live
[00:05:16] Kyle: there, correct? Yeah. We, I, I was, I had partnered with local agencies and was really just doing what so many companies do, you know, to, to get a foothold into a new region, [00:05:30] which is your, you find local partners and you go that way.
[00:05:32] We just found that the momentum, so many clients were sincerely trying to expand into Asia as well. The timing was great. So it made sense for me. I, I, I can't, I can only deal with so many of those 24 hour commutes,
[00:05:49] you know, there's just a, it's an adventure and it's a great region. I mean, it's, again, our timing has been great from a growth standpoint. I mean, this is, this is [00:06:00] historically probably one of the greatest growth periods that's ever happened in this re in this region. So. We, we, we timed it. Well,
[00:06:09] Wendy: yes, you did.
[00:06:10] Now, you know, everybody has struggles when they become an ex-pat or live internationally. Can you take us back to the beginning and talk about some, you know, particularly in the business side, what were some of the differences?
[00:06:23] Kyle: Yeah, Singapore, Singapore is an easy place compared to a lot of other places it's often called the, the [00:06:30] entry point or Asia light because there's such a Western influence and infrastructure here work, everything works.
[00:06:36] So it's, it's, it's easier than some of the challenges that we've had in other, other regions. I think the thing that hit me very quickly was the cross cultural communication stuff. That's the culture clash that I think people talk about so frequently. And that's what I got into when the book, which was even small conversations where you're thinking one thing something else is happening.
[00:06:58] I think in the first chapter, I use a little bit [00:07:00] of a goofy example of ordering drinks at a bar. And here and across the region, they have these one for one promotions. And to me, English one for one w w one for one, which, which actually means the one for one would be two for the price of one. So that's fine.
[00:07:16] But then if you're ordering these drinks and I kind of walked through the story and at the first chapter, it's like, yeah. Okay. So I'll have a, I'll have a beer, we'll have two beers and they'll bring you four because it's one for one. So [00:07:30] you, so, so, and you go, well, wait a minute. I just want, I just want two beers and the, and the waiter will go.
[00:07:35] Yeah. Yeah. Your here's your two beers and you're staring at four and it's like, well, I'm, I'm, I, I think it's just such a small, but useful example of, of. Can be crystal clear to one person and totally a different, you know, even the basic ideas of numbers can, can vary depending on the situation. You put a couple more zeros at the end of those numbers, [00:08:00] and now we're talking about business mistakes and that's where some massive problems.
[00:08:05] And what I kept seeing over and over. What were companies coming in here using their playbook from the U S from Europe, from Australia, Western companies, and hitting these, these one for one moment w you know, in small ways, all the way up to multi-million dollar mistakes. And I was going through the same thing hiring people, thinking that my communication style, [00:08:30] my working style was going to be clear and effective to find out that actually I'm building a team that's incredibly dysfunctional and unhappy, and, you know, we're, we're all going in different directions.
[00:08:42] And so that's, that's kind of the impetus for writing the book because there were, so everybody goes through that learning curve. My business, what I've done is tried to ask the question, is there a way to shorten that learning. Is there a way to put it into a [00:09:00] bottle and and unfortunately the answer is no, but I do think that you can, through the power of storytelling, I think you can learn a lot of, from other people's mistakes and try to avoid some of these things.
[00:09:12] Wendy: Right. And that's what we try to do with the podcast too, is just get these stories out there so people can pop on and, and, and listen and get those takeaways. Yeah, yeah. That one.
[00:09:24] Kyle: Oh, sorry,
[00:09:25] Wendy: go ahead. I was going to say, I love that one for one story. Cause that's so you could see somebody saying I'll [00:09:30] have a beer and two showing up or you could say, you know, see it I'll have two beers and okay.
[00:09:34] That's, you're one for one. So it's such a subtle thing, but I understand it. Go ahead. You were going to give me another work example.
[00:09:41] Kyle: Another work example. I did this to a degree and another, an Australian guy came to me years later and he explained that he did the same thing where he inherited a team, this case in both of our cases, it was a sales team.
[00:09:53] We kind of had, we walked into a situation where there was a existing sales team and all of a sudden you're the foreign manager now in [00:10:00] charge. And he and I had so we have similar backgrounds, I think in mindsets and working styles. And basically the talk that I gave was, you know, You all, I was managing people from the whole region.
[00:10:16] I was like, you know, you all know your market inside and out. You certainly know it better than I do. I don't, you know, I'm, I'm coming from another part of the world. I'm going to be looking to you for, for guidance and for help. And I need you to [00:10:30] bring ideas and I want us to work together. And really, I want you to think of, you know, me as, as somebody who can support you.
[00:10:39] And he did the exact same thing. And in both cases, what, what we were trying to convey was basically that kind of sense of a flat hierarchy. We're all in this together. Let's be open and, and, you know, leverage off of each other's strengths. What, in both cases was heard from. [00:11:00] Audience in this case, the teams was, I stand up and I basically declare that I have no idea what I'm doing and I have no authority and you're all screwed if you're going to be working in this team.
[00:11:15] And that usually that kind of a pep-talk will that if you survive it, that's a 600. Process to dig yourself out of there, you know, there, there's kind of, you're taking your one for one bar [00:11:30] situation and translating that into what I would say would be a pretty typical work situation that happens all the time.
[00:11:37] Wendy: I have heard that story so many times, and it's such a subtle one. Like you just, you're trained in the us or Australia to come in and, and, and you go, oh good. I've got a leader. Who's going to listen to me. Whereas in Asia, there's more hierarchical. I want somebody who knows is going to give me direction
[00:11:57] Kyle: and yeah.
[00:11:58] Right. Correct. And it [00:12:00] doesn't, it doesn't mean that you have to come in and be a hard-ass and, and you know, a dictator, but, but there's a there there's a. Change in management style that you have to, to work through. I noticed this even in coaching. So what I, what I, when I started going through the process of understanding some of the different cultural nuances, and I think the hierarchy thing is such, always one of the core ones that you, that you mentioned, and that that's part of this example, love
[00:12:27] Wendy: that story that you just told, because I heard about it, but [00:12:30] you've gone through the direct experience.
[00:12:32] So it's
[00:12:33] Kyle: oh yes. Another, another example would be coaching. So coaching methodologies. I, I was I am a big fan of I think his name is Michael steamier. He wrote a book called the coaching habit and it's a, it's, it's a, it's a wonderful book on coaching, but it doesn't work everywhere the same way.
[00:12:55] You've got two. You've got to localize. His approach is create, I think [00:13:00] he's either American or Australian or blend or something, but his approach, I think he creates this methodology based on his surroundings. Has a lower hierarchy and a assumption of equal status in terms of communication styles. And I don't say this in any way to be little his book.
[00:13:21] I think it's a great, in fact, I've, I've reached out to him. He, he, he, he read, he gave me a reference for my book. He gave me an endorsement and we're actually thinking about collaborating on a, on [00:13:30] a project together, down the, down the road, which is really cool. So, because, because of this, and I said, you know, I love your stuff.
[00:13:37] Here's how I've modified it to make it work here because you're going in with the assumptions, just saying, okay, Hey, you know, first year here, Hey intern you know, tell me what, tell me, tell me what, what, what are you thinking? It's not going to work everywhere.
[00:13:54] Wendy: How would you modify that? How would you be successful in Asia if you're coaching or managing.[00:14:00]
[00:14:01] Kyle: So it's still the methodology at a high level still works, which is essentially flipping the script. I think his approach in this case is ask great questions, get the, get the other person talking through the challenge, let them discover potential solutions, let them define a next step. And then offer only offer your support at the end.
[00:14:24] I think the way to adjust that in a more traditional hierarchy [00:14:30] hierarchal environment is to put a little bit more structure to it to offer a little bit of guidance earlier on in the process to make it clear that the decisions that get made you're going to hold them accountable for. So it's, it's like a, it's like a what was the expression?
[00:14:45] I recently heard the the velvet hammer, which, which I think is a way to give feedback. So it's kind of. It's a soft, still nice approach. You want them talking, but at the same time, you're not, you don't want to assume [00:15:00] you're going to get the same level of immediate response and feedback that you might get in other parts of the world.
[00:15:05] And the other piece that I've added to that is storytelling. So give more examples from your side as you go through a coaching experience. So rather than just have them do say 70% of the talking, it might not work that way because some people don't speak up as quickly because of some of the con we'll call it the cultural baggage that we all bring into any [00:15:30] conversation.
[00:15:30] So rather than sit there and just complete awkward silence, tell some stories, give some examples of what has worked give some examples of turnaround stories to soften the conversation and to make people feel more comfortable. So I found that those are two ways. Change the script a little bit to make it work.
[00:15:52] Wendy: That is fantastic advice. I mean, I think you've really put a structure at it because I've heard, I've heard something like the [00:16:00] velvet hammer before. And there's still the authenticity and they're still the kind, they're still the emotional intelligence that goes into it, but you're changing your communication style to make the other person feel more comfortable in what they expect.
[00:16:15] Kyle: That's exactly that that's the big takeaway from all of this. And I think that I looked at a couple of core ideas out of the book and, and this is what I do now. I do a lot more coaching and work with teams who are, [00:16:30] who are working internationally. We do it all virtually now. So there's, we can talk about that.
[00:16:35] We'll talk about that again. Yeah,
[00:16:36] Wendy: yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I want to get into that now. So, you know, tell me more about TSL marketing. Are you still doing the lead generation and the coaching? So tell, tell us what you're doing
[00:16:46] Kyle: now. The TSL marketing in Asia, the original plan based on the client. Excitement and enthusiasm was that we were going to start rolling out global marketing programs.
[00:16:59] So the big [00:17:00] guys, the big tech guys were saying, you've done this stuff in us. We've done bits and pieces of it in Europe. Let's bring it to Asia. And in many ways was an attempt to bring the headquarter playbook and apply it on the other side of the planet. And what we realized fairly quickly was that that was not going to work.
[00:17:22] You can't take an effective marketing campaign, cut it from the U S cut and paste it and put it into Southeast Asia, [00:17:30] Southeast Asia. It's not a market. It is a region with dozens of markets. India is not a market. You know, the, the, the north India is probably one of the most diverse countries I've I've ever worked in.
[00:17:43] And so you really want to think about things in a more localized approach. What we found was the local teams and some of these big companies didn't want a global agency working with them. They didn't like the fact that they were potentially losing [00:18:00] control. They didn't like the fact that it was, we were being sent over from headquarters.
[00:18:04] And so they deliberately, oftentimes they pushed back and pushed back happens, and it gets expressed in different ways here. Oftentimes it's more subtle. So the, an expensive large company would come in and say, okay, you know, Singapore region or whatever, whatever regional marketing team you're going to, we want you to do this.
[00:18:26] And everybody locally says yes. And what they [00:18:30] are going to do is what they want to do, which is not what they just said yes to. And are they lying? Are they being duplicitous? No, it's just the style of communication style is different. And so what we found was we worked, we did, we had a couple of years of, of mega growth.
[00:18:47] We ended up taking on a bunch of projects. We grew the team to about 45 in Southeast Asia. I think we had another, maybe a hundred in India, people. So, I mean, we had some very [00:19:00] significant growth very quickly, but those campaigns oftentimes fizzled out because there was a lot of disagreement as to who's doing what, what they wanted.
[00:19:11] We, we found a lot of infighting amongst the big companies. So I still have a small team that does lead generation across the region. I would say 1980 5% of my time has pivoted towards this type of consulting work. So focusing on sales teams, helping them [00:19:30] expand across the mark, the region, helping some marketing teams, but also just, just executive teams figure out what's their communication approach.
[00:19:38] How are they going to strengthen their virtual teams across the region or globally? What's that going to look like now that people can't travel and how are they going to apply that relationship building internationally to their clients? So the entire business model shifted. Based on my experience, trying to build a [00:20:00] marketing agency that was global in, in, in nature.
[00:20:03] It's kind of an interesting evolution.
[00:20:05] Wendy: Yeah. So I want to go back to the troubles, you know, the, the problems that you ran into the oh, the trouble is you've seen it.
[00:20:17] Kyle: There's a chapter in the book on the,
[00:20:19] Wendy: yeah. So that's what we want to pull out now, because I think that's where the best learning comes through.
[00:20:25] So you started with the, you know, the yes, that could mean [00:20:30] no. And so why don't you start talk about that because that's a very important communication style and how do you work with that? Yeah.
[00:20:40] Kyle: Talk a little bit
[00:20:41] Wendy: more about it and, and what you've seen and experienced. Some, some stories on that.
[00:20:48] Kyle: Is it, is that the two hardest words in the English language or are the most complicated words are yes and no.
[00:20:56] There are just so many countless examples of parts [00:21:00] of the world where co and I'll just, I'll, I'm going to talk in massive generalizations for a minute, cause everybody's different. But parts of the world where really saying no directly is considered rude and you don't want to be rude. You, you know, we're trying to build relationships.
[00:21:17] So the way not to be rude is to make sure that you're not being rude. And I'm not going to just say no, I'll say yes. And then we'll work back channels to figure out a way to solve this problem, because that's how we do things here. [00:21:30] Now put that into a global team where everybody is now working from home.
[00:21:36] There's no moments where you can actually sit down together face to face and say, okay, what the hell just happens here? So I think that it's very important to understand that there's large parts of the. Where you could ask a direct question, get a direct answer, but it might not be that it might not be the answer that you think is going to be.
[00:21:57] I had a large [00:22:00] client in the airline space there, a software aviation software, German, German company, and they would win a deal with say, Thai, Thai airways, or Japan. One of the Jap, Japan airlines, all good. You'd have a local sales rep handle the deal, but then the support goes back to Germany. And so Japanese clients is, oh, well, you know, could we make this alteration?
[00:22:28] And can we use this interface and [00:22:30] the German point of contact who is very German in this example, what he responds back either via email or just directly over a phone is no. Why would you do that? That's not a good enough. No. And the impression that that gets from the other side, that in this case, the Japanese clients thinks, wow, that's the most rude thing I've ever heard.
[00:22:50] Why would we want to work with this company moving forward? We should probably put an RFP to replace this. And sometimes those [00:23:00] interactions can lose multi-million dollar deals as a, you have to be so careful with this stuff, which I, I think it's absolutely. I'm not sure what that answer, that starts answering your question.
[00:23:10] Wendy: Absolutely fascinating. And so you said, so now you've given a good explanation and you were talking about the difficulty of global teams that are now working virtually where you can't sit down and talk about it, but recommendations, are you making to clients to handle that?
[00:23:25] Kyle: Well, the biggest seller this year in terms of the workshops and the [00:23:30] seminars that I'm doing is around this.
[00:23:31] I have this hybrid team building seminars and it's very cust it's very personalized because my argument is the first rule of, of hybrid club is that there's no rules. And so it's up to every single team to. Define their rules. If not rules, let's at least call them norms. What are the norms that we as a group are going to agree to?
[00:23:54] And so the one tool that I can't recommend enough is what I [00:24:00] call a communications contract. And this is, I think you can get it for free on my website. And I'll give you the link for later leadership nomad website. So it's leadership, nomad.com. Oh,
[00:24:13] Wendy: mad.com. And then you that the communication.
[00:24:17] Kyle: I'll have to.
[00:24:18] So, so on the back of the book is one of those like hidden links, right? So if you buy the book, you get the hidden link that gets you all of this free content, but you've got to buy the book. I'll send you the link. I can
[00:24:29] Wendy: send [00:24:30] it to you. Send me the link,
[00:24:33] Kyle: the key, but yeah, I'm happy to give your audience guys the access to this stuff.
[00:24:37] That's absolutely fine. Okay. The book
[00:24:39] Wendy: is just for us to remind our listeners is the accidental business nomad. Okay. So go ahead. The communications contract, which is a helpful tool, go ahead.
[00:24:49] Kyle: Communications contract is in mind, anyway, it's just, it's broken into three different parts and it's designed to be worked through with your [00:25:00] team.
[00:25:00] So you can, you w what I like to do is put it into a shared documents set, assuming everybody's virtual at this time. And everybody has access to be able to fill this thing in and build it. And essentially what you're doing is as a group, you are establishing, what are, what are our norms? What are we going to agree that we're going to allow?
[00:25:21] How do we deal with timing? There are some people that always show up five minutes late. There's some people that don't do. So let's, let's get this stuff out here on the table to [00:25:30] define what's good. What's taboo that we will agree is not acceptable. What communicate, what, what technologies are we going to use?
[00:25:39] Are we going to email when an issue gets heated? Can we agree that email never solves arguments? So what's that look like? Can we agree that we're all getting burnt out on Skype video calls and maybe some of these calls we can jump on on video at the first five minutes and then just turn the damn videos off because [00:26:00] it's exhausting.
[00:26:00] And then maybe we turn them on again. There's there's no rules one way or the other. So my point is it's up to the group to figure out what that's going to look like for them. And so this is simply just, it's just a guide. It's a, it's a, it's a somewhat of a blank camp canvas asking certain questions, pointing them in directions, and then letting them figure this stuff out for themselves.
[00:26:26] The big,
[00:26:28] Wendy: helpful, cause it prod [00:26:30] you as to what are the things that people normally run into trouble on.
[00:26:34] Kyle: But one of the most common ones is time zones. And, and you know, the, the phrase that's popped up, it's been around forever, but now it's now, now everyone's facing it as asynchronous communication.
[00:26:46] So I I had an issue with a, with a business partner he's based in the U S and we chat our, our times to be able to communicate a really 7:00 AM and 7:00 PM. That's just, that's the [00:27:00] closest overlap we get to overlapping business hours. The problem is that it's 7:00 AM. I've got my two little Singaporean kids running around, like crazy trying to get him ready for school or home-based learning or whatever other mess is going on.
[00:27:17] And my chats are going to. I'm going to be on and off my phone because life gets in the way and the exact same thing at 7:00 PM. I'm trying to get them, you know, try and get them cleaned up and gonna [00:27:30] take bandages off and whatever, right. The two boys who beat themselves up every day. So, you know, make sure there's no bleeding and then just get them, get them into bed.
[00:27:39] But the, but, but you can be in the middle of a conversation and then all of a sudden you stop and you go quiet for 30 minutes and people in their own heads can interpret that in whatever. We have no idea what our own, our other people's heads or stories we're telling ourselves. Right. And so part of this in, in this example was just to say, let's [00:28:00] just look, look at I think that the best times to communicate are this time, but at the exact same time, let's, let's acknowledge that if there is these weird.
[00:28:08] Gaps, please do not try and read into anything. I'm just chasing children, right? Like I'm just, I'm just trying to get other stuff done because of the timing. And so once that got established and we, and we both, every once in a while, we reinforced that just to say, look, you know, by the way, I'm going to be offline for the next hour, but let's, I can solve for this problem when you're [00:28:30] over overnight your time.
[00:28:31] Right. And just to be that, that one extra sentence, rather than just having things, just dangle and people not knowing if there's going to be a response right away, that gets really frustrating and people can read into that the wrong ways. So, I mean, that's just one very specific example about handling and agreeing to what asynchronous communication looks like.
[00:28:55] What are the, what are the benefits to it? What are the [00:29:00] potential dangers to it? And let's just get this. Oh,
[00:29:05] Wendy: that makes so much sense. And just see if anybody's listening and they haven't heard of synchronous versus asynchronous conversations. Synchronous means what we're doing now, we're talking live and there's a give and take back and forth conversation.
[00:29:19] Asynchronous means you're still having a conversation, but you're not doing it exactly at the same time. So text, email, chat, you know, any of the slack channels. And so [00:29:30] what you're doing is taking asynchronous communication style and consolidating it in or around a timeframe. So you can get that immediate feedback that you might want.
[00:29:40] So that's a, that's the next step of asynchronous communication. That's very creative to really get, yeah. You know, communication done.
[00:29:49] Kyle: That's exactly right. And, and, and, and different teams handle it in different ways. And, and when you get into the time zone differences, and now even if you're in the same time zone, [00:30:00] people have different life style going on.
[00:30:03] Right. And so there, I, I get very frustrated where companies, and in some cases, countries say you are not allowed to email after 5:00 PM. Like to me, I understand the intent, their intent is good. But don't tell me when I can and can't get my stuff done. Maybe I'm a night. Maybe I, right. I mean, my writing, I only write in certain times of the day, but now, now I'm being, [00:30:30] I'm being legislated again.
[00:30:31] I don't mean to get political, but I mean, it's just like, you know, if I'm sending an email at midnight, it's maybe that's my style. I'm not, I'm not trying to, I'm not subtly suggesting that everybody needs to respond to me at midnight. I think that's what they're trying to avoid. And to me, rather than making weird rules about it across an organization or a, or a country, like why don't we as a smaller team, have this adult, honest adult to adult honest conversation and just [00:31:00] figure it out for ourselves.
[00:31:02] Wendy: Right. That is such a good point because I've heard people really carrying that banner of we only work these hours because I want my team to have work-life balance. But that, that just disregards everybody in a different time
[00:31:15] Kyle: zone. Assuming your work-life balance now is you're going to make everybody's work-life balance yours.
[00:31:21] I did.
[00:31:22] Wendy: Yeah. Yeah. I've never worked that way. You know, I want to, I can sit down. Yeah, rarely at midnight, it's more apt to be [00:31:30] five o'clock in the morning.
[00:31:32] Kyle: Th one of the big rules that came out of the book, but it's, it's, it's sort of the, one of the first things that you figure out along the way of working globally is you have to treat people the way they want to be treated the new golden rule.
[00:31:48] Yes. Yeah. The new gold and the platinum rules. I'm all these, all these gurus are running around trying to claim ownership to it. So I always find it amusing. This, this plant has been around for a long time, but [00:32:00] the golden rule is treat people the way you want to be treated. But you want to, I think the chapter I've got is called throw up, throwing away the golden rule, treating people the way they want to be treated.
[00:32:10] And that goes back to the, the example that I gave earlier, where here's my speech to my inherited sales. I'm not, I treated them the way I want them to be treated. That was a low hierarchy and assumption that everyone's going to be free to speak up and push back and challenge. That's not how they want it to be treated.
[00:32:28] And I needed to [00:32:30] change my behavior. Adjusted a little bit to make it more effective in that given scenario.
[00:32:35] Wendy: Yeah. Yes, yes, absolutely. No. I've heard that before and I've heard it as the new golden rule, but I like it. The platinum rule. That's a, that's a, that that'll, that's a good chapter. I'm glad you point that out.
[00:32:47] Okay. So I'm going to go back to the troubles you've seen. And you were talking about yes. The you know, the yes versus the no. And then you started [00:33:00] talking about that. What came out of that as you had lots of people working in India and around there, and you said campaigns fizzled because there was infighting.
[00:33:08] Can you, can you dig into that a little bit more
[00:33:12] Kyle: there? This is a bigger trend that I, and I'd be curious, your thoughts on this. I noticed in my 15 years of really, really focused on out stuff outside of the U S the localization has sprinkled. Across the world, meaning [00:33:30] it's more important to have a local answer and a local look and feel now than it was 10 or 15 years ago.
[00:33:39] I think you can get away with the, your American headquarters coming in and kind of telling you the way things are gonna work. I think that a lot of these emerging markets quote, unquote have emerged. And I think that there's a new level of self-confidence and awareness in terms of what people want.
[00:33:59] And [00:34:00] so we got caught up in that, that challenge, which was his head cruising charges. What does headquarters a command and control approach going to be? Are they going to tell everybody exactly what to do or are they going to give more autonomy to regions and countries? We tried to build a global agency, tried to do a Twitter.
[00:34:28] We're trying to [00:34:30] force standardized marketing campaigns into countries that were rapidly localizing. And the answer in Singapore was very different than it was in Vietnam. And it's very different than anything that it looked like in the United States. And so I think that one of our failures was to we were, we were trying to build a, a global standard in markets that were going the [00:35:00] opposite direction.
[00:35:03] Interesting. I'd be curious, your thoughts on that. I know you're, you know, I have you being, you know, working in such, such global environment that you do. Do you find that there's more, I don't know if it's localization growing, is it is, is localization the new globalization. I'm going to flip this podcast I'm interviewing you now.
[00:35:24] Wendy: Well, yeah, I have, I think it really depends on the company. As [00:35:30] to what they're doing now, one thing that really supports what you're talking about is I've seen some research from common sense advisory. Who's the industry research think tank who said that when the internet came out and websites were flying up, most of them were going up in English.
[00:35:51] Now it's so prevalent in countries that smaller local countries or companies are putting websites up and they're in their [00:36:00] local language. And all the research for years has shown that if you want to sell, you have to put your website in the local language because people are, you know, 90%. We'll spend more time on it.
[00:36:17] 72% are more apt to buy 56 or more. We'll spend more money on a localized website. So everything says connect with people in their own language. So this, you know, [00:36:30] this research shows that if you're not putting it in on local language, you're going to lose out. And it's the same with podcasts. Podcasts started out, they were predominantly English.
[00:36:40] And I heard about a podcast that, you know, the number of people that spoke the Indian language that he started was very small. So he said, well, I'm going to do it in English because there's more people that will listen. And when he changed to doing it in his local language, his listenership skyrocketed because there was less available and [00:37:00] people were interested.
[00:37:03] Yeah. So how I see it play out in translation with what we do is it really, it depends on the company. It's really hard to manage a different agency in every country. There is really only a handful of languages that you need to translate into to reach a majority of the world. And there was a, there's a podcast with Patrick Nunez about rotary international on [00:37:30] this, if this exact same question and his, his process, we also have a, a LAR it's white paper or ebook it's beyond a blog an a case study, an outlining how they did it to give a vision to companies because.
[00:37:46] They found that each country was doing their own thing. And there was no corded message, coordinated message. And then they have lost the global brand. So they came in with brand guidelines, but then [00:38:00] they have areas where their local country can really adapt to what the market is doing and they modify the global message to make sure that it's culturally appropriate.
[00:38:12] So that's what we're seeing a lot right now is that it's not just translation. It's really thinking through where the translation is going to be used and culturally adapting it. So it connects with that market.
[00:38:27] Kyle: I liked the phrase that jumps out at me is that [00:38:30] you, the rule that you want to or to think about is that you globalize wherever you can and localize wherever you have to.
[00:38:38] Wendy: Absolutely. Absolutely. Right. Cause then that's going to work in with your, your strategy and your budget, but your localization is gonna, you know, it's the play on the field.
[00:38:52] Kyle: Correct. So if you, and if you let it go to local than exactly your point, you lose, you lose a ton of the whole reason. You're doing [00:39:00] this in the first place, which is to grow a global brand, a global solution, right?
[00:39:04] You lose the economies of scale. If you've got every single country doing their own thing, using all of the same, you know, different back office approaches, I'll give you another. Yes, no example. I, this is, this is the longest answer you'll ever get, because I think you asked this question about 20 minutes ago.
[00:39:19] But a, what we found was the, one of the big companies, they were trying to standardize their their vendors. They were trying to get fewer agencies just [00:39:30] as you were saying, but they were also trying to standardize how they pay. Companies. And when you start talking about cross border stuff and POS, oh my God that's for another, that's another discussion, but the, they, they rolled out a global purchase order or payment system.
[00:39:49] And so when we were going through the PO process, they said, look, you know, this is actually streamlined because it's now one system. So you just go in, you do it, [00:40:00] you do not have to invoice every single country and deal with the different currencies. It's all taken care of. This is automation. This is what we're doing.
[00:40:07] This is globalization 20 2009 style. Like we were on this. Right. And so great. Fantastic. So we get, get everything going. Oh, well Singapore signed into it. Nobody else had all countries in this big company said, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And they didn't do it. So they [00:40:30] said yes. And they said yes to headquarters.
[00:40:32] What we found was that we had to, in some cases, mail, and we were, we had this channel marketing program where we were doing work for about 120 companies across seven countries at the same time. And each of those programs was split up in some cases into four different sub-programs. So we were sending out hundreds of invoices almost every month to seven different parts of the world.
[00:40:59] The [00:41:00] total, total nightmare and disaster. It was, it would have required an entire full-time team just to do it correctly. But that was all due to a misunderstanding where each country we said yes, but they really were planning on doing something.
[00:41:16] For my
[00:41:17] Wendy: gray hair comes from. Right. And so you can't, so it's a, it's a, it's a very delicate balance here because it's a culture that is so [00:41:30] opposite on the scale of the United States. If you're, you know, if you're listening to this from the United States where you can't say a direct no, but it's very hierarchal goal.
[00:41:41] So it's so key to build those relationships and ask the questions that's going to solicit the right information on how something's gonna get done.
[00:41:50] Kyle: Correct. I love the name of your company Rapport, right? Which is exactly what is required to do this. Well. You've got to build rapport with teammates around the world [00:42:00] and the fact that, you know, we're, we're not jumping on planes anymore and doing quarterly meetings face to face which often were done poorly, but there was better than nothing.
[00:42:10] Now this is all done. Virtually. And so I think you need to re again, rewrite the rules, rewrite the norms of how you approach this stuff. And I think more time needs to be spent building rapport with your counterparts in these different parts of the world. So you can avoid some of these, some of these.
[00:42:28] Wendy: Right, right. Okay. So [00:42:30] speaking of Rapport, which is a French word, which is localization and globalization, can you talk to me about language and translation and how you have handled that what's worked? What, hasn't a lot of questions in there.
[00:42:43] Kyle: It's interesting. And I get into this discussion frequently, especially with trans people in the translation industry, because they go well.
[00:42:51] Oh, so, you know, like what, what languages do you speak? I think on my LinkedIn profile, it says I'm still, I'm still learning English. I don't speak any of these languages [00:43:00] and it's really tricky when you're working in a global team or a regional team in Southeast Asia where, you know, If you're managing Southeast Asia, what are you going to do?
[00:43:12] You're going to learn Mandarin Korean, Japanese Bahasa the dialects and some of the, you know, Thai maybe, but that's, that's not feasible. So what I'm interested in and my business has been focused on is the communication underneath the language, the invisible stuff. After the [00:43:30] fact, I, I, and I don't mean to say I'm not being literal.
[00:43:32] I'm not trying to minimize the influence and the power of, of local language. It's, it's critical. It's incredibly important, but in many Pease, for many people like myself who are working in, I think I've probably spoken to people in 10 countries today. You need to be able to figure out almost like a how what's our, what's our agreed upon bad English going to be that we're at least all kind of communicating the same way.
[00:43:57] The way we did a [00:44:00] translation too, which is one of your question. The answer was poorly. We did a poorly, I never knew the detail and the intricacies and the complexities of proper translation. We have this situation when we were growing like crazy years ago, this is, this is we, we had a very cowboy approach and it was very much just like we would, companies would come to us, ask us questions.
[00:44:25] Can you do this? We just say yes. And then we'd figure it out afterwards. And [00:44:30] one of our large clients came to us and said, look, our translation agency for Thailand. We've, we've screwed up. We need this. We need these documents. These marketing materials translated for an event in like three days from now.
[00:44:43] Our approved translation agency says that it will be two weeks, but that's way too late. Is there any way you can help us? And so back in this back end, this would have been 12 years ago. We were just raw startup we'll do [00:45:00] anything. And so we just said yes and now. Okay. So, okay. Everybody into the conference room, let's figure out how are we going to translate all of this material into Thai?
[00:45:10] Any ideas were opened and I had a bunch of interns at the time. And so we started throwing out, okay. You call the Thai embassy, see if we can do this. This was before the days of Upwork and online. Where you could just, you know, find somebody to do a one-off project, maybe Craigslist, but there was [00:45:30] very little options online to find this type of talent, especially last minute.
[00:45:34] So going around the room, all these ideas, Timesy not helping who knows in Thai people who have and one of the interns as a joke says, oh, we'll go. We can go to one of those. You know, one of those dive bars where where all the sex workers work, you know, basically let's, let's go to it. You know, w who knows any time let's go, let's go to the prostitutes and kind of, we all laughed about that and moved on.
[00:45:57] And then at the end of the meeting, that was [00:46:00] like the only idea that was even remotely feasible that we could come up with. And so said, all right, this is, this is the strangest internship project you'll probably ever have. Here's some money, like. Talk to some ghost, go talk to some talk prostitutes and see what you can find.
[00:46:15] And I, and I have to be very careful the story cause I don't, I, I don't mean to sound sort of cavalier about it, but, but that's, I guess that's how we were behaving. Anyway, he ends up finding out, talking to this woman and [00:46:30] our, you know, I think our mindset was look, talk to these peoples, find out if they know somebody, maybe they have a brother or sister or somebody, you know, that they could connect us to.
[00:46:40] And he ended up talking to this woman and she used to be an English teacher in Bangkok. And now she's working as a, she's a sex worker now in another country. And We said, well, would you be interested in doing this job? We, and she, she said yes. And she did it and we turned all the stuff around and we sent it to the head of [00:47:00] the Thai you know, the head of marketing, I think for the company in Thailand.
[00:47:04] And he loved it. He had no idea how we did it, but he loved he, this, this stuff. It looks great. And, and you did it so fast. I'm going to, I'll give you the whole, I'll give you the whole book of business. And so over that, that moment, we turned into a translation company accidentally. We were an accident.
[00:47:23] We were accidentally a translation company that day. We had to go find this woman. And I had in my head, I had kind of these [00:47:30] images of like, I'm going to, I'm going to save this woman because I'm going to pull her out from this horrendous life of this industry that is deplorable situation that she's in.
[00:47:39] And we're going to give her the opportunity of a lifetime. It's, you know, Richard Gere and pretty woman moment where we come riding in and save this person. And had a conversation with her. I go look, you know, would you, would you like to do this full time? And she just basically laughed at me and just said outright, no, she said I make way more money doing what I'm [00:48:00] doing.
[00:48:00] And she's like, I don't really, and she didn't say exactly, but she was like, yeah, I don't, I don't really want to get into this corporate BS that you guys do every day. It's just doesn't seem like interesting to me at all. So she, she turns down and then we had a decision to make, it was like, We can't really just kind of hang out outside prostitute bars.
[00:48:19] That's not exactly how we're going to scale this translation business that we've just been had offered to us. So we did go back and we just said, look, this is where we can't, we can't take the business. It was, [00:48:30] it, it would have probably doubled the size of my operation overnight. Had we been able to take it just because he had a huge amount of business for us, but what we, what we learned was that yeah, you, you probably shouldn't.
[00:48:44] Use prostitutes as secondary translators for your biggest clients, marketing the team, maybe that's the takeaway lesson
[00:48:55] Wendy: and that's the takeaway. And it's not because it's not because [00:49:00] she didn't do a good job. She did a great job, but
[00:49:05] Kyle: yeah, she's laughing at me. She's like, yeah, I'm like here, you know, and here's the offer like, oh, this is, you know, here we go.
[00:49:13] Wendy: Yeah. So any time anybody thinks that translation is too expensive, just remember this story.
[00:49:22] Kyle: Don't call me,
[00:49:26] Wendy: call me.
[00:49:29] Kyle: I mean, [00:49:30] that's, that's where I developed my respect for the industry is like, oh, this is, this is work. W. We got away with it. Right. We got lucky. We happened to just, we got away with that one off, but man, that would have, that was not that was not a sustainable way to build business. So that's my pretty much my one and only real translation story.
[00:49:50] Right.
[00:49:51] Wendy: How did you procure, did most of the time, your company, your clients procure translation?
[00:49:57] Kyle: We had partners and, and oftentimes the [00:50:00] companies would take care of that with a separate translation partner. Yeah. And to your point, you know, it's very difficult managing agencies that are different in different parts of the world.
[00:50:09] I really, after that it, it, it was an area that to two points. It was just an area that I didn't really focus on because there were agencies taking care of it and to. We had our own issues with translation from a language standpoint, because we were calling [00:50:30] into all of these parts of the world. We basically had a call center where we were calling.
[00:50:35] We were doing B2B lead gen calling, and we at any given time, we would have people calling in on behalf of, I don't know, six or seven languages an absolute nightmare to try and manage for small business to try and get a single project manager to manage. How, like how would a project manager be able to quality control something that was done in, in different language?
[00:50:59] [00:51:00] So this was another reason why our business pivoted away. It was just too damn hard. We basically turned down business. Now that is languages. That's outside of our, our core competency. I, and, and I get inbound inquiries all the time from people saying, look, I need somebody for, you know, we're doing we're doing a one month campaign and we need to call into Thailand, Vietnam, and China and Japan and Korea.
[00:51:26] And it's like, so if you think about the logistics of [00:51:30] trying to find the talent, to be able to do that, to get the Q and a quality control, right. Do it over a month and then stop it. It's just not, it's just not feasible. It's just not good business. And I know very few companies who have actually figured it out and crack that.
[00:51:51] Wendy: Yeah. There's, there's some interesting ways to do that. You know, leveraging telephone, interpreting, but it is what languages are you [00:52:00] servicing now? And how many of them,
[00:52:01] Kyle: We are right now just doing, we've got, we've got English. We're doing one project in Korea, so we've got to create, but that, you know, so basically what I'm doing when, when companies come and say, can you handle this?
[00:52:13] We were saying, it's gotta be a year. If, if you, if you're given to give me a year of a contract, then we can get the languages across Southeast Asia. But if it's under a year, we, we just have to turn it down. It's not worth it. It's not so, so we can do it. And it, in some ways it's getting easier [00:52:30] because the ecosystems online of finding talents there's, there's a little bit more of a fluid network of of contractors to be able to figure that out, but I try and stay away from that business now.
[00:52:42] Okay.
[00:52:42] Wendy: So that's, that's really interesting, which I think is a good point is you have a strategy and you've picked out what language are you going to do? So this is what I talk to companies all the time about is figure out what your strategy is, just don't Zig and zag and picking languages and popping.
[00:52:58] Step up on your website, [00:53:00] focus on a language and, and make a commitment to.
[00:53:05] Kyle: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Another way to say that is, you know, if you're thinking about expanding into new markets, pick one, don't say if I get people there, oh, we're, we're about to expand into Southeast Asia. It's like, well, what, what does that mean?
[00:53:16] Where the market, the Asian market is where the Ozzy on market has 500 million people in it. The Aussie on market, it's like eight countries and [00:53:30] minimum of 10 different languages, totally different cultures. Like everything is wild at different. So you can't unfortunately think about, we keep talking about Southeast Asia, but you can think about this in other parts of the world, but Southeast Asia is probably more is, is the best example of just absolute yeah.
[00:53:49] The markets you do. Yeah, no, this is true. So the, and we had the same challenges in, in in Europe finding the, finding the language.
[00:53:58] Wendy: And south America would [00:54:00] be the same thing, even though most of it is Spanish-speaking you still have different cultures, but you know what? This is killing me because I love this conversation, but we're getting to the end of our time.
[00:54:10] So I've got to ask my standard questions
[00:54:13] Kyle: bedtime for me anyway.
[00:54:15] Wendy: Awesome. Right, right. I'm just getting going. All right. So. Your favorite foreign word?
[00:54:21] Kyle: The th the, the HASA, I do like some of the words in Bahasa. We were playing around [00:54:30] with the idea of a muck. I was going to use that in part of the business in the book, title, something, you know, business global business run a mock a mock is actually a Malay word.
[00:54:39] I think of just chaos. And I always liked that, but Bahasa is a good one. So even when they say hello, you know, tenor, MECASA some, some I think that their greetings are, there's a, there's a sweetness to it. I like as a, as a goofy, big, goofy westerner. It's always a fun word to say. It's always fun just to greet people with big smiles, [00:55:00] I'm going to butcher it.
[00:55:03] Cause that's I'm as an American. That's what we do. A trim trim Acosta. It depends on, I suppose. Where you where you are if it's Indonesia or Malaysia, but I'm hello? Oh, some of Simon. Thank you.
[00:55:18] Wendy: That's great. Some of Selma's. Thank you. Okay. So how about your favorite vacation?
[00:55:26] Kyle: Ooh we did a a vacation that probably [00:55:30] would be very common for most people.
[00:55:31] We took our one-year-old to Pakistan. For two weeks. And that was an interesting, very common, very common. Yeah.
[00:55:44] Wendy: The first time I've heard of that,
[00:55:47] Kyle: the border patrol in the U S doesn't always have a good sense of humor about that. You know, what were you doing in Pakistan vacation, vacation? We were so my, my wife's sister she's in the foreign [00:56:00] office, she's British.
[00:56:00] So she was stationed in as Lama, but she was, she's sending us emails saying she's six feet tall, blonde woman, you know, as love of us. Fantastic. She loves it. You guys should come up. I'm like, yeah, maybe. And again, it's kind of head trash, right? It's preconceived notions. That certainly I was holding many, many hold, but Yeah, we went up.
[00:56:20] So we went to visit her and we went to a couple of places. We took a train to Lahore. We, we, we went to the border. We went up to the foothills of a bottle bad. So I've [00:56:30] got a photo. This was about a year after they, they got a lot. And so I've got a picture of me holding my one-year-old by beat up sign, you know, welcome to a, bought a bed.
[00:56:39] That was a fantastic holiday. The, the, the danger happened in two. A couple of, couple of weird things happen. We almost got crushed by crowd, just wanting to see us, like people just, we were, so there are so few foreigners and a little, very white baby. It was just incredibly unique. So crowds would form and it became a [00:57:00] little bit dangerous just because of the crowds.
[00:57:02] I mean, it was, it was dangerous because people were so positive and curious, so that was kind of interesting. And then
[00:57:09] Wendy: like that, cause I, I had that experience numerous times in China and Taiwan growing up and visiting you get off to the smaller areas and just a crowd would form around you just out of curiosity, but I never felt in danger.
[00:57:21] It was just,
[00:57:24] Kyle: there were some times where it just, things just seem like there was an energy that was just escalating and just things kind of [00:57:30] just a little bit, all it would take would be one weird thing to kind of go wrong. But and, and of course you're more paranoid for a number of reasons.
[00:57:39] I was chatting with these guys on a train. We had a good company. It's really interesting. I just found that the people were just fat. They're fascinating people, they're smart, they're educated. They read a ton of books, books everywhere. They're just screwed with horrendous lottery of life. Like they're just in a bad place, bad leadership that everything.
[00:57:59] [00:58:00] But then they were very curious as to, as to the perception of their country from outside. Very curious about. And so we had this great conversation at the end of it. He said, oh connect with me on Facebook. And I said, oh, I I'm, I don't, I'm not on Facebook. And that was, he didn't believe me. I w I'm not on Facebook.
[00:58:18] And so he thought I was insulting him. He thought I didn't want to connect with him. And that escalated. He got, he got mad. And so we had to kind of. [00:58:30] I almost got into a fight in Pakistan over my lack of Facebook.
[00:58:38] Sorry. Long winded answer to a very easy question, but it was,
[00:58:41] Wendy: it is another, there's a cultural thing of, if somebody asks how you accommodate, do you want to go out for a drink sometime you say yes. Even if you have no intention, just because you could be being so offensive. So, yes. Okay. So how about, I mean, you've given us a [00:59:00] bunch of crazy and rewarding cross-cultural experiences.
[00:59:03] Is there another one you want to share?
[00:59:05] Kyle: I mean, I have 50, I've been married for, you know, I'm married to a British woman, so we've got, I got, how much time do you have for marital? Examples of cross-cultural no, I won't go there. But
[00:59:17] in fact, actually I was thinking about you a couple of days ago because some of the media companies must use auto translators for a lot of media news and stories. I know AI is starting to kick in and then the [00:59:30] translation issues that pop up, they were there was an article about a a rugby. And the player, his position was that was the hooker.
[00:59:39] That's his position, the translation into the U S translation. The U S story changed hooker to prostitute. And so they referred to this guy as the team's prostitute, big thuggish looking guy, you know,
[00:59:58] there's your translation. [01:00:00]
[01:00:01] Wendy: If you ever get those, send them right over to me. Cause I look at them. They're my, my pleasures in life. That is a
[01:00:10] Kyle: good one. I saw that I was like, I'm talking to Wendy in a couple of days. I'll store that one
[01:00:16] Wendy: away. Oh, just bring them on in. I love them. Oh my gosh, Kyle, this has been so fantastic.
[01:00:23] If people want to reach you, where's the best place to reach you.
[01:00:28] Kyle: So my website is probably the best [01:00:30] starting point that's. So we, what we did is just to kind of tie up the TSL, the marketing company. So because of the challenges that I talked about earlier, I decided to spin off this leadership focused.
[01:00:45] Consulting practice. It's still under TSL, but it's just a different brand. It's the Lipkin field. So it's leadership, nomad.com is the website. That's where, and I'll send you the link, the special, special link to get access to that other material. [01:01:00] You can see the, the team courses that I do for people as well.
[01:01:03] That's the best starting point. The only stuff you can't find me on Facebook say that right now. So I don't want to get into any fights.
[01:01:12] Wendy: Social are you on
[01:01:14] Kyle: LinkedIn? Is, is the, is the, is the one. And actually I'm doing a, I did a LinkedIn learning course. I filmed it a few months ago. So that will go live in a few weeks where the topic is exp.
[01:01:26] It's just, one-on-one expanding your business into [01:01:30] international markets, a different framework to think about all of the questions that you should be asking as you look to expand overseas. And one of the cool ones that we added was how do you do it without. So that's kind of a cool, cool angle.
[01:01:46] Wendy: Yeah.
[01:01:47] That's a nice new angle on that. Okay. So if you want to reach 'em it's leadership, nomad.com definitely go to Amazon and buy the accidental business nomad. I've started reading it and [01:02:00] it's absolutely fantastic. You can tell from all the stories that they have. So thank you, listeners. This has been a fantastic episode.
[01:02:07] I hope you've enjoyed it as much as I have. If you could do me a favor. Past this episode onto somebody that, you know, that's interested in global marketing or expanding international, or just loves anything about global stories and give us a rating of five or above so people can start following us.
[01:02:25] So we will catch you next time. And Kyle, thank
[01:02:28] Kyle: you. Thank you [01:02:30] so much.
