How A Founder Built A 24/7 Call Center In Latin America

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Welcome everyone to another episode of the Nearshore Cafe Podcast.
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I'm your host, Brian Sampson, and here we talk about all things near shore doing business in Latin America.
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Before we get into our show, I want to thank our sponsor, Plug Technologies, P-L-U-G-G.
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Great way to connect talent from all over Latin America with U.S.
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companies.
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Today we are going to get into call centers, Central America, and how companies go about doing this for the first time, dipping their toe in and building a whole operation.
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So the person we're going to do it with is a dear friend of mine, one of my oldest, closest friends.
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His name is Joe Hulaney.
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He's the founder and CEO of Court Money.
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Joe, so happy we could put this together.
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Good to see you online, Brian.
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It was nice to see you a couple weeks ago when you came into town.
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Really appreciate that, by the way.
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But I watched your podcast, and uh it's been a long time coming to be able to do this with you.
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So I look forward to it.
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Good, good.
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Well, Joe, you've been an entrepreneur really ever since I can remember.
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And this goes back to college days, you know, 20 plus years ago.
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I think it's important to kind of set the scene, you know, of like where you grew up, what it means, you know, to do business in southern Illinois and building businesses from there, the kind of businesses that you built.
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I think that's really going to help set context for the rest of the show.
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Okay.
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Uh, so a little history.
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I'm fourth-generation entrepreneur from what I know of, all the way back to my great-grandfather who came over from Syria, Lebanon in the early 1900s.
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Um, so I grew up in a bus uh privately family-owned business family.
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We were in uh furniture and banking.
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My father started a modular, commercial modular construction company, uh, which I now run.
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And then straight out of college, just kind of assumed that I was also going to own a business.
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Didn't know what it was yet.
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My college background was business management, marketing, and MIS.
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So, right at the beginning of the internet boom is when when I started college.
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So computers were part of my uh my collegiate upbringing.
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Um, but always kind of knew that I was going to own a business and fell into ATMs first, shockingly enough, which led me uh into the um building of an online payment website, as you mentioned, court money.
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Uh we were doing cash bail transactions with credit or debit card in 2004 uh for uh Illinois sheriffs.
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And that has led us down the road to utility billing payments, other government, government-run softwares, and then even buying a municipal software company a couple of years back and now in full software development, not just payments, also.
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Yeah, amazing.
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I I love watching from a distance as you built this really integrated portfolio of a bunch of different companies.
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How have you, you know, maybe we will we'll save the Nicaragua part for a second and just talk about how you looked at staffing, you know, for for most of your business career, you know, and where your talent base was, how you thought about hiring them, managing challenges, plus plus some of the good stuff too.
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You know, that that's a good question because as you mentioned, I'm in southern Illinois.
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Not a lot of high-tech individuals in southern Illinois, very rural area.
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Um, you know, more farming, agriculture, uh, blue-collar work.
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A lot of the white-collar work is medical banking and that kind of thing.
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So staffing was interesting, especially when I got started.
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I got very lucky.
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I did have some friends um in the programming field that were doing um doing programming and websites for Fortune 500 companies, believe it or not, in Southern Illinois.
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And uh as we grew, we realized we needed a 24-hour a day staff for our call center stuff.
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And of course, not a lot of that in southern Illinois.
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And so we started searching uh the internet for call centers, ended up finding one, believe it or not, back in your hometown of Chicago, Illinois.
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And uh I appreciated the ability to do business in my home state.
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The owner and I talked a number of times, really kind of hit it off.
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She was a privately held company also, not large, which I liked, you know, family-owned, easy to easy to talk to the owner.
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And we worked very well with them for a long, long time until unfortunately she passed away and uh her family took over.
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And of course, as typically happens, when a founder is gone, things change.
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And that's literally what happened.
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And I and that's about the time that uh you and I started talking.
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You know, you you became a problem solver for me.
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Yeah.
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Well, I want to um just for fun, take a quick side for this audience because I think I think this is kind of uh interesting with your ATM business, because you, you know, maybe that was your first four into banking, transactions, kind of understanding how how that will worked.
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And I remember you telling me, you know, about all the fees you were making and all the ATMs around.
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But you know, just just like a fun quit for the audience is Joe and I would go to the bars together in Southern Illinois, and um, you know, it would be my turn to buy around and cash poor college student, you know, I'd have to uh hit the ATM.
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Well, who owned the ATM?
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It was Joe.
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So, you know, and it's not like I'm taking hundreds of dollars.
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I have very little in my account.
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So, you know, that I'd with withdraw 20 bucks and and then it would be a three dollar fee.
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So those uh those six dollar beers, three dollars a piece for beers, instead of six dollars, it was nine dollars throwing a tip, ten dollars for the beers for me and Joe, and uh 30, and then Joe also got an extra three dollars out of that.
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I was profiting off the beer and feeds, yeah.
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So I've always always as much as it cringed for me to do that, always admired your uh your entrepreneurship.
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What did you learn just about entrepreneurship way back then?
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You know, from your dad, from your first, you know, I I guess was the ATM business like one of the first that you fully owned and had your name on?
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Yeah.
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Maybe some of those early lessons.
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I'll tell you what I learned uh from my father first was that the buck stops here.
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If there's a problem, you have to solve it.
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If a client wants to talk to you about a problem, then you're the guy.
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Both, you know, you take the good with the bad on that one.
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I watched, got to watch my father solve some problems in interesting ways.
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He taught me that occasionally you have to fire a client.
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That's not something you hear someone say very often, but every so often you do have to fire a client.
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And I've kind of learned that lesson.
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And I can, in my 22 years now of running my payments company, I've literally had to fire, I think, two clients because one, they were they were not profitable, but two, they were impossible to deal with.
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They did not have my best interest at at heart.
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They did not care about my business at all.
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And I think when you're in business, it's a partnership.
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You have to care about each other uh and and come to the table and and discuss things to that need to be resolved.
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So, you know, even in the ATM business, I learned that it's a 24-hour business.
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If your ATM runs out of money at 10 o'clock at night on a Saturday and you're not at the bar, guess what you're gonna do?
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You're gonna get out and you're gonna go to the bar to fill the ATM.
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Um, and and and that's the same thing with even the payments company.
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If a jail needs help with a cash bail transaction at 2 a.m., I'm awake.
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That, you know, that's the way it works.
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The sheriff appreciates that, that knows that his cut his correctional officers who are up at 2 a.m.
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are gonna get great customer service because the owner of the company is gonna help them and get everything done.
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Yeah, yeah, I agree.
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The initial call center team, could you rewind on the clock a little bit?
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When did you first know you needed a call center?
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I think when I realized that transactions needed to have phone support 24 hours a day.
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And I think I was in business maybe three years.
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And and uh while I still handled support calls, my call center would take payments.
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So so when we started getting to into more court-related things and utilities that would need support, not everybody has a PC, not everybody has a laptop.
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And this was back before smartphones had really taken over.
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So people would need to make a utility bill or even a court-related payment at 2 a.m.
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Because while I might be eight to five, you might be eight to five, our time zones don't even interact.
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No, we're we're five hours apart.
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And so my call center would handle those late night calls or early morning calls when I wouldn't be awake.
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And I realized I didn't want to be awake taking those phone calls.
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Yeah, yeah.
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Was there a um was it purely about hours or was there like a like a number of calls, like a threshold that was hit?
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You're like, okay, I think I can afford the style, or it it's worth it to me to have this.
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Yes.
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It was a number of calls, but you know, we also added a call fee to that.
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So we attempted to at least offset a decent amount of that monthly cost in our call fee.
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We've never been able to do it.
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We've never fully offset.
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Typically, we're around 40 to 45% of that monthly cost in our call fees.
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But what we realized more than anything is that we weren't getting payment calls all the time.
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We got a lot of calls asking about maybe a court date or what's my utility bill, or how when is court?
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We ended up getting a lot of phone calls.
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I never anticipated.
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I anticipated we were only gonna get payment-based calls that were going to be revenue generating.
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That's not the case at all.
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We became the information base for things that we knew nothing about.
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Yeah.
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Can you tell us about um that Chicago call center and how you thought about your role?
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Because um, I guess it was technically an outside agency that was running it.
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Your role in training them, your role in evaluating the talent, making sure that they took care of your customers, but you're not on the call those calls.
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How did you think about that?
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So, first off, when we build our systems, we build them to be very intuitive, very easy to figure out.
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So we had created a how-to system, not only for our clients, but then we had to build, we'll call it a call center portal to access only payment forms instead of our administrative side.
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So we had built that, and which was very easy to look up a client to then find the exact payment form for that client to access uh what they needed instead of having to search for it in our administrative side.
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But now the thing that I learned from them was that they also outsourced.
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They didn't have like a typical room, like you hear you would see the cubes of people, right?
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They outsourced all over the all over the country also.
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So they were in bit different time zones.
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So that's where it kind of got me thinking, wait a minute, okay, if we're not in a room full of cubes, we can be remote-based.
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We can be outside of just that, you know, the the old stodgy room of, you know, a call center.
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You can be at a home.
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And that was my first introduction to remote-based employees.
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You know, they had people in California and Florida and Texas and East Coast covering every time zone.
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So it was easy to train, we'll call it train the trainer to then they trained their individual people when they would bring them on.
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Yeah.
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From my experience, the Philippines had really become the world's call center.
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You know, whether it's United Airlines or whoever, you often get routed to staff in the Philippines.
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Was that ever on your radar?
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Did you ever think about that?
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Or were you mostly focused on where can I get the best value in the States?
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I think before you and I had talked, I I was attempting to really try to stay in the United States.
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I was cognizant and sensitive to the fact that a lot of Americans don't want to deal with an an accent outside of the United States.
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What's interesting about that is the amount of Americans who have very thick accents.
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True.
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Who then we'll say, you know, pot calling the kettle black, you get somebody from the south go, I don't want to deal with one of them Yankees.
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I'm like, come on, folks.
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Yeah, yeah.
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Well, I think that's a good segue into so French for transparency, is Joe was telling me about his problem one day, and we talk about all sorts of stuff, baseball, family, everything.
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I was always sensitive to not like I do business with a lot of acquaintances, but I'm careful about mixing it with my closest friends, because sometimes if it goes south, so does the friendship, right?
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And I think you were cognizant of that too.
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So I think I just kind of casually said, Hey, have you ever thought about Latin America?
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And if we could go back in time two years, what do you remember maybe from like that first call or two, just as that idea, you know, resonated?
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I think that when if I remember back then, one of the things that kind of struck me was it's close to home.
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Are the accents going to be what I really want?
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And I'll be honest, I'm just not very knowledgeable at Latin America.
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The closest I've ever been is Cancun off a cruise ship.
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So, you know, even thinking about Mexico had me a little scared.
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You know, I don't know about their culture, I don't know about their education level.
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I really don't know much much about it.
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And so it kind of worried me that we weren't going to get the professionalism or the English speaking that I really needed.
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And you really educated me on that and kind of got me and pushed me along to thinking, hey, you know, this might fit your need.
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This might be what you're looking for.
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Yeah.
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Was time zone a key factor too, having them on your time zone, or was it really more about they could be anywhere as long as they were professional and spoke clean English?
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They can be anywhere, really.
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Yeah.
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As long as they spoke a clean English with very little accent.
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I had spoken to some companies that you know had people all over the world, so time zone really didn't bother me.
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As long as they were willing to be up at the middle of the night.
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Sure.
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Or the middle of the day, their time, you know, whatever it might be.
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That really didn't bother me.
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Sure.
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So I think this is really, really interesting because as other people are listening and a lot of other founders are listening and they're thinking about um there's almost you know two key pieces here of like when I need to, as founder, need to get out of the way so I can I can worry about higher level tasks and not be on support calls all day.
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So I think that's kind of part one that you talked about.
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And then part two is looking at Latin America as a key leverage piece for your business.
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When you so we quickly got me out of the way because I wanted our solution to stand on its own, not be well, you know, Brian's a friend of mine, so I I guess I'll throw him a bone.
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So we were we were very, very adamant about that.
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So you met a few people from our team and they helped to talk through the solution, design the solution.
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Can you talk more about the um the concerns that you had and how you were vetting the solution and maybe even designing the solution collaboratively?
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So when we get moved over to your to your staff, first off, they're they're wonderful.
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Um, they took a lot of time to listen to what I was worried about, what I needed to be educated on.
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They did a really good job of understanding that first off, I needed a payment solution.
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I needed someone to be able to take a credit and debit card payment.
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I needed somebody who could be background checked.
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I need somebody who could be professional.
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They understood that very quickly, that I had very specific needs, and I wasn't going to deviate from those because I know my clients also.
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And while it's interesting that, you know, my operators with you now are a lot of times more educated than some of the clients or my clients and even the credit and debit card clients who uh who they talk to, they're always very professional.
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We have interacted very well with them, and and your staff has always listened to what I need.
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The communication is very good.
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Yeah.
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How about the um the English, the clean English?
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Huge concern for you going in.
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What has that been like for you?
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It's been great.
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It's been great.
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Um, I've always been able to uh speak with one of the employees uh before they hired on.
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We have uh if you ever talk to one of those employees, uh I I will spend 30, 40 minutes uh with them occasionally.
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When I'm driving on the road, I'll call in and I'll get one of them.
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And next thing you know, it's 40 minutes.
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We've been on the phone getting to know each other.
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Uh so it's been great getting to know uh the the people down in Nicaragua.
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They're wonderful souls, wonderful individuals.
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Yeah, you know, something that I I hammer on a lot about, you know, and I think the Philippines is excellent for many, many things.
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But back to my United Airlines example, um, and I think this will resonate with you.
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When I have a very straightforward issue, it's no problem.
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You know, like I need to change the date on a ticket.
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But if I need to change the date on a ticket and reroute through a different city, and I want to use miles for part of it to upgrade a seat, oh my god, you know, like it might as well, you know, be trying to, you know, uh build in build a satellite, you know, it's just way outside of the box, way outside of the scope.
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And you can just kind of feel their panic of what do I do?
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This is outside of my script, outside of my box.
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And the way you're talking, Joe, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but it feels like um you're confident that this Nicaragua team can go off script and and can think creatively and go outside the box if they need to, because business is kind of like 80% of the same stuff, but then there's that 20% that you just don't know what you're gonna get with that situation.
00:18:59.759 --> 00:19:00.720
I I would agree with that.
00:19:00.880 --> 00:19:15.200
You know, one of the things that I've also uh given the staff the leeway of is I don't tolerate somebody calling in and berating or treating one of my staff inappropriately.
00:19:15.359 --> 00:19:22.559
And I told, I told them when they came on, I said, listen, if you have somebody like that, feel free to hang up the phone on them.
00:19:22.720 --> 00:19:24.240
They're calling you for help.
00:19:24.400 --> 00:19:27.759
They're not calling you to get upset and be mad at something.
00:19:28.000 --> 00:19:30.480
At the same time, they've appreciated that.
00:19:30.640 --> 00:19:37.680
If there's something, we'll say it inside that 20% that they need that they've never handled before.
00:19:38.000 --> 00:19:41.839
My administrative staff is available uh to them right away.
00:19:42.000 --> 00:19:44.640
And so we're all on the same phone system.
00:19:44.720 --> 00:19:51.039
It's very easy to put one of them, put a client on hold and say, you know what, I need to get you to an administrative staff member.
00:19:51.200 --> 00:19:53.359
And that handles that happens very quickly.
00:19:53.599 --> 00:19:54.160
That's awesome.
00:19:54.319 --> 00:19:54.720
That's great.
00:19:54.960 --> 00:19:56.000
Yeah, it's really nice.
00:19:56.079 --> 00:20:04.000
Um, and and my clients have have really appreciated that also that while they know they're calling a call center, they can get to somebody else very quickly.
00:20:04.079 --> 00:20:06.400
It's not a five minutes on hold or something.
00:20:06.640 --> 00:20:06.960
Yeah.
00:20:07.119 --> 00:20:16.720
I want to shift gears to some other tech stuff, but is there anything we didn't talk about with this call center um that um that you'd like to share?
00:20:16.960 --> 00:20:18.559
It's been an absolute blessing.
00:20:18.799 --> 00:20:19.680
I'll tell you that.
00:20:19.839 --> 00:20:21.039
It's been really nice.
00:20:21.279 --> 00:20:23.200
As I said, they're all great people.
00:20:23.359 --> 00:20:30.480
They've been very easy to get a hold of, uh, very easy to talk to, get to know better, to learn about their families and their culture.
00:20:30.640 --> 00:20:31.359
It's really nice.
00:20:31.519 --> 00:20:32.319
It's been really nice.
00:20:32.559 --> 00:20:32.960
That's good.
00:20:33.039 --> 00:20:33.920
That's good to hear.
00:20:34.079 --> 00:20:38.000
Well, you've always been one of the more tech forward friends that I have.
00:20:38.240 --> 00:20:47.680
What are you thinking about for your own businesses with AI, automation, all this other stuff that's happening faster than we can we can even react to it?
00:20:48.000 --> 00:20:59.759
It's been interesting because you keep hearing the people that are going to lose their jobs because of AI and that uh as a service is going to be gone.
00:20:59.920 --> 00:21:01.839
Well, shoot, that's my business model.
00:21:02.160 --> 00:21:11.279
Um, you know, you start to read a lot more about bots being able to decide what you need based on your schedule and automatically ordering it for you.
00:21:11.440 --> 00:21:15.759
And so I've started problem solving going, all right, you know, we're in the utility billing.
00:21:15.839 --> 00:21:17.119
How is this going to affect us?
00:21:17.279 --> 00:21:19.279
How are we going to be able to research things?
00:21:19.440 --> 00:21:24.720
And so we we have we're building a new utility billing software now that will be able to handle a lot of things.
00:21:24.799 --> 00:21:30.480
And we are building that in such a way that we able we'll be able to outsource things.
00:21:30.720 --> 00:21:55.519
We may not be able to automate every payment, but we'll be able to do customer support differently, maybe not in an AI sense, but we're building things in such a way that people will not only be able to see what they owed, what they um owe or will they, what they will owe at the beginning of the month, but what they, what their, maybe we'll say their water bill, what their water bill might be as of right now.
00:21:56.000 --> 00:22:04.240
And so it's interesting the the partners that we're that we're working with in the Utility billing space to be able to build that into our systems for later this year.
00:22:04.480 --> 00:22:06.079
Yeah, yeah, that's awesome.
00:22:06.319 --> 00:22:10.000
Well, Joe, this has been everything that I hope for and more.
00:22:10.559 --> 00:22:25.119
I love just the story of as you've evolved your business, really portfolio of businesses, you've thought about staffing, you've thought about operations, taking care of your customers, professionalism, and designing different solutions.
00:22:25.279 --> 00:22:29.599
And Latin America, thankfully, was a uh problem solver for you.
00:22:29.839 --> 00:22:30.400
It is.
00:22:30.559 --> 00:22:37.599
And uh, you know, I don't know if you know this or not, but I'm working with your team right now as at a possible programmer in Latin America.
00:22:37.920 --> 00:22:38.319
Amazing.
00:22:38.400 --> 00:22:40.240
We've got to do it.
00:22:41.039 --> 00:22:46.319
Yeah, you guys have been so good that uh we're working on uh things outside the call center space now.
00:22:46.559 --> 00:22:48.079
Well, we're honored to have your business.
00:22:48.160 --> 00:22:49.039
We appreciate that.
00:22:49.279 --> 00:22:52.640
Well, uh, let's start to uh wind this show down here.
00:22:52.799 --> 00:22:55.119
Plug Technologies is our sponsor.
00:22:55.200 --> 00:22:57.519
That's pl-g-g.tech.
00:22:57.920 --> 00:23:01.039
Great way to connect talent from all over Latin America with U.S.
00:23:01.119 --> 00:23:01.680
companies.
00:23:01.839 --> 00:23:07.359
We're so thankful to have our honored guest, uh Joe Helaney, founder and CEO of Court Money.
00:23:07.519 --> 00:23:12.319
Joe, if anybody were interested in your business or contacting you, what's the best way to do that?
00:23:12.480 --> 00:23:13.519
My email is very simple.
00:23:13.599 --> 00:23:15.279
Joe at courtmoney.com.
00:23:15.440 --> 00:23:15.839
Excellent.
00:23:16.000 --> 00:23:18.240
You're listening to the Nearshore Cafe podcast.
00:23:18.319 --> 00:23:21.920
I'm your host, Brian Sampson, and we will see you next time.