# Scaling Success: How to Outsource and Automate Your Startup - Podcast: BYU Tech Transfer Podcast - Host: Dave Brown - Guest: Tyler Leber, Co-founder of Coconut - Published: 2024-09-09 - Length: 28 min - Page: https://podcast.coconutva.com/scaling-success-byu-tech-transfer ## About this episode Dave Brown talks with BYU alum Tyler Leber about meeting Eric Espinosa, selling Venture Validator, and testing business models for Coconut with its wow factor survey. They cover what VAs cost, when founders should outsource, how to choose between automation and people, and the mistakes that make outsourcing fail. ## Key moments - 0:00 From BYU to entrepreneurship - 2:16 Meeting Eric Espinosa - 7:30 Coconut and the Philippines - 10:31 Validating the business model - 13:19 When to start outsourcing - 20:15 Automation or people - 22:48 Outsourcing mistakes and what is next ## Transcript **Dave Brown [0:05]** Welcome to the Tech Transfer Podcast. I'm Dave Brown. I'm here today with Tyler Leber, who succeeded with his own startup company and also is focused on outsourcing because that's what his company does. So we'll talk about that a bit. And Tyler, can you explain to us kind of your experience at BYU and how you got into entrepreneurship? **Tyler Leber [0:19]** So it's been a few years since I've graduated. I graduated in economics, had a minor in business management. And yeah, like I said, it's been a few years now, but we started a company while we were still at BYU, kind of junior, senior year. We ended up selling that company and started Coconut about three years ago. **Dave Brown [0:41]** Were you always planning? Did you study econ knowing you would be an entrepreneur? **Tyler Leber [0:44]** Yeah. So for me, I really just didn't know exactly what I wanted to do post graduation. And so economics, it felt like a good starting point for a lot of different careers that interested me, at least. I've always been in, I don't know, more, not creative at all, you know, not graphic design, nothing like that. And I like finance. I like, you know, business management, all of that. And I felt like economics was a good, good, like in between a good, you know, foundation to go off of for a bunch of different career paths. And so, no, I didn't, I didn't start knowing that I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I more sought that out. I really did like junior, senior year. **Dave Brown [1:25]** And what would plan A be like if you had gone kind of a more traditional, get a job route, what, what might you have done? **Tyler Leber [1:31]** Yeah. So for me, I, I, you know, I was doing a lot of testing and so, you know, I did a bunch of different internships, but then I also worked at, or I was also interviewing at startups around that, you know, kind of junior, senior timeframe. And so, yeah, for me, like plan A was to get a job. I was going to start out as a financial advisor at Vanguard and I had an offer and everything. But then I had been working for, for this, startup Venture Validator for a little while. And I actually decided to go with that full-time. I figured if it, you know, there was a time to take a risk and see, you know, how entrepreneurship worked for me, that was the time to do it before, you know, having kids or, you know, having a lot of expenses. **Dave Brown [2:14]** Yeah, absolutely. Least risky time. Right. Right. And you, I, I've heard you talk on another podcast about finding the right business partner. So you interviewed and went to work for Venture Validator, I think. Did you know your partner there beforehand or was that how you met? No, yeah, that was how we met. **Tyler Leber [2:29]** So yeah, I'd done a few interviews with a few, you know, BYU founders. They were going to college or just graduated and they had their own, you know, startup getting, trying to get funding or had just gotten funding. And there was the one guy, his name's Eric Espinosa. He's also a BYU alum, interviewed with him and we clicked very, very quickly. We complimented each other in a lot of ways. He's, it's more of a visionary mindset where he's got a lot of big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, ideas. And then I'm more of the steady, you know, behind the scenes, just doing things in the background. And so we, we really hit it off and started working right away and worked really well together. And so for me, it was, it was a very easy decision. **Dave Brown [3:12]** Okay. And for the kind of steady behind the scenes work, what is that? Like what types of things do you focus on? **Tyler Leber [3:19]** Yeah. So mainly like systems operations, but then also a little bit of, of the finance. I'm not, you know, I'm not a finance major, you know, or, or do it, I guess. But for the basic budgeting and forecasting of the company, I've always taken that on, but yeah, mainly systems, which means, you know, automation, delegation, and also just managing our software stack. So I don't even, I should count it sometime, but we probably have, you know, 40 or 50 different softwares that we use for a huge variety of purposes. Right. I mean, right now, obviously we're a bigger company than we used to be a Venture Validator, but we, we manage a huge amount of softwares and all of those have to integrate together. And a lot of those require automations. **Dave Brown [4:01]** And so managing that is definitely a full-time job. Okay. And so you said Eric kind of compliments that he's more visionary type or you see him that way. So what is that type of work? Like, like what, what does he do? **Tyler Leber [4:13]** Yeah, definitely. So especially in the early Venture Validator days, and then also the early coconut days it was a lot of like customer discovery, I would say, and also just trying to, to, feel out the direction of the company. So Venture Validator, for example, we were doing a lot of market research reports, but then also coconut, you know, we do a lot of staffing, so long-term staffing. Right. But at the very beginning days, we didn't know that that was the direction that we wanted to go. We had, you know, had all of these different options available to us. And we were trying to figure out which one would be the most profitable and which one would also make customers the happiest. So his job was definitely to, you know, do customer service, talk to people, deliver, you know, reports back in Venture Validator or, you know, deliver a placement in coconut and then figure out like, Hey, is this kind of what you were looking for? You know, what else could we do to be a better company? And so he really kind of set the foundation in each company of, you know, this is our pricing. You know, this is the direction that we want to go as a company. This is the offering that we want to give a lot of those like foundational elements that we then kind of take off and systematize and automate. **Dave Brown [5:27]** So in Venture Validator, so I can see how that's complimentary Venture Validator. Did you sell off or what happened to the first company? Yeah. Yep. Yep. **Tyler Leber [5:35]** So we, we ended up selling, we built that for about two or three years. And then we ended up selling that neither of us are sales or marketing guys. So luckily now in coconut, we actually have a co-founder that is much more of a marketing mind. But in Venture Validator, it was tricky because we, we were doing market research reports for very small companies and we would tell them like, this is a good idea or this is a bad idea. And a lot of the companies, like they had a bad idea or, you know, just didn't have enough traction. So we would tell them like, Hey, you should not continue. So we were kind of killing off our own business in a way, right? Like we would be pitching, you know, we'll validate your vision, but a lot of times we'd say, yeah, no, it's, it's, we want to invalidate this. It's not a good idea. And so then obviously they're not going to ever come back to us and, uh, you know, re-up with us, right. Start a new project with us. Uh, and so that was really tricky to find a lot of business that was not recurring whatsoever. And then coconut ad pretty much the polar opposite, uh, business model, which very much excited us. **Dave Brown [6:36]** Yeah. So the two of you co-found, well, three of you, I guess, co-found coconut. And so you went from intern with company one to being co-founder of company two, did kind of the whole team go, or did you two just take off and do it? Yeah. Uh, so Venture Validator. **Tyler Leber [6:49]** Yeah. I started as an unpaid intern. Um, and then I actually did work my way up basically to co-founder in Venture Validator as well. So I had, uh, you know, a minor stake in the company, minor, you know, equity holding in the company. And then, so, you know, I was part of that sale and then we started, uh, coconut together. Eric and I are the original co-founders of, of coconut as well. And so, yes, we did actually bring over a few of our virtual assistants, uh, from, from Venture Validator, but there weren't any other us, um, people, uh, you know, with the company at the time. And then, uh, George, uh, he's the new January. Okay. And coconut is super interesting. **Dave Brown [7:30]** Do you want to explain for us what it does and why, why it's the Philippines? **Tyler Leber [7:34]** Yeah, definitely. So we, uh, maybe like all best startups, we kind of fell into it and, you know, we're solving our own problems. So we used virtual assistants pretty heavily at Venture Validator. Um, and we kind of stumbled into the Philippines. We just did our online research, found that they have really excellent English proficiency. They have a fairly similar, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, um, I guess culture to us, like they have their own culture, but they're also very familiar with ours. You know, they watch a lot of the same Netflix shows and, uh, you know, they know all the slang that we use, all of those different little quirks. Uh, and so it was really easy to, to start working with, with them. And then, um, yeah, when we got into coconut, we just already, again, kind of had our foot in the door and we're able to build a community, uh, from there. Um, so yeah, that's, that's kind of how we, we got kicked off with coconut. **Dave Brown [8:26]** Okay. So, and we're virtual assistants. If someone hasn't used them, you have someone instead of hiring an American, which could be expensive, you have to provide benefits, maybe all these things. Yeah. Instead, maybe you can pay someone kind of geo arbitrage, pay someone in another country to do things at a much lower rate. Right. Correct. Yeah. **Tyler Leber [8:41]** And so we are different than like a Fiverr, right? A Fiverr is more just very much project-based. What we do is long-term staffing. So we'll find somebody at an hourly rate and we'll, we'll staff them at your company, uh, for a long-term position. And then we'll just handle, like you said, kind of everything on the backend. We'll handle payroll, tax compliance, legal, you know, every, and even like HR solving conflicts, uh, anything like that. Um, we, we provide that ongoing support there. **Dave Brown [9:07]** Yeah. And personally I've tried and I have outsourced things to the Philippines. I've tried doing it personally, like one-on-one versus going through an agency, vastly different experiences. What, why would people want to go through a company instead of just connecting with an individual? **Tyler Leber [9:20]** Yeah, definitely. I mean, yeah, I won't lie. It can definitely be cheaper to go by yourself, you know, AirDirect, but you know, obviously the value prop is that we have, for example, even for us at Coconut, we have a community of over a hundred thousand people now, um, that we can post a job to, and we'll get, you know, three to 500 applications the first day. And a lot of people that we have a reputation now, you know, in the Philippines and we provide benefits actually on, on our end, uh, to the VA. So that's not coming from the clients, but we just kind of set the standard of what benefits we want to give to every single person that we provide. And so, yeah, we have a reputation. We have a lot of, uh, basically pipeline. And so that's the benefit is you could say, Hey, I want an executive assistant. And then in five to 10 days, we will have, you know, the best three candidates, you know, just out there that we can send to your inbox. You can interview them and then start working with that person. So it's really like speed. And it, of course, it's just taking a lot of work off of your plate to figure out, okay, how do I outsource? How do I actually find somebody that's good? How do I vet them? And then if they don't, then I'm like, Oh, I don't know. I don't know. If they don't work out in the first month or two, now you have to start that whole process over again, or we could just find that replacement for you. **Dave Brown [10:34]** Yeah. Okay. And so before launching coconut, I know you had done market validation. Your prior company was a validation company, but what did that look like? How, how was this, how did you know it was a good opportunity? Yeah, definitely. So like I said, you know, it's called Venture Validator. **Tyler Leber [10:47]** So we would really work, uh, with the wow factor score. So on a scale of one to 10, what's the wow factor for, for this product or this, you know, business. And so, yeah, like you say, we, we tested, we did a lot of market research of our own and did that exact same survey structure for coconut. And so we went out there and tried to figure out, Hey, what could we change? What could we alter to this, you know, staffing agency model to get that score as high as we possibly can. And so, yeah, we, we kept tweaking it. Obviously we could do it cheaper because it was just at cost for us. And we were able to use our own internal systems on internal team. So we iterated, you know, probably five, five major different changes to our business model, uh, before we landed on one that really scored highly. And we, you know, we tested with at least a hundred entrepreneurs every single time, um, with pretty in-depth surveys. And then we would even do follow-up questions and, you know, customer discovery surveys like live on zoom. Uh, and, and yeah, like you say, we, we finally got to a business model that really scored high. I think it was a 7.8, maybe an event eight out of 10, uh, which was incredibly high for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, all of the companies that we had previously surveyed or, um, **Dave Brown [11:59]** before. Okay. Super interesting. So a couple of weeks ago, I talked to June Bay, who's the CEO of hollow AI started that and same deal. He went through five business models, said the exact same thing. Oh, there you go with the, with your early model. So there's a lesson there, but with your early models, what's something that you, you investigated that didn't work, that didn't make sense. **Tyler Leber [12:18]** Yeah. I mean, one thing that actually it does work, we've seen other companies do this. Uh, but we just did not like the idea of the, of the one-time placement fee. So it was, you know, a big upfront chunk of money for somebody to, that we were just, you know, find somebody for you and then be completely hands-off because a lot of people that we interviewed with, uh, you know, it could just be a different, different subsection of the market, but the people that we talked to is like, they, they don't want to do a lot of that ongoing support. Um, and, and so that was one of the key differentiators that we wanted to, to really focus on is like, Hey, we, we find somebody long term and we will stay there long-term. With you. Um, of course, yeah, it's a little bit more expensive, you know, month over month compared to just hiring direct, but there is value being given every month. And, and also that security of if this VA leaves, or if I need to find a different VA, it'll be incredibly easy just to use you guys instead of having to start that whole process over again. Uh, so yeah, that was one big business model change that we tested. **Dave Brown [13:19]** Okay, great. And so if you're explaining to an entrepreneur, lots of students are intimidated by launching companies because they feel like, Oh, suddenly I'm going to be a boss. I'm going to be leading this organization with all these people. And it is simpler if you could outsource things like what, um, what's the selling point? Like how simple would it be for someone launching something new to, to use VAs to scale up? **Tyler Leber [13:37]** Yeah, honestly, I mean, for quite a while, it was just Eric and myself, um, you know, building Venture Validator, doing a lot of those, uh, market research reports purely, you know, manually by ourselves for quite a while. And so that's what I would recommend is make sure that you actually have something good. Uh, that people will pay for and that you can fulfill, um, before ever hiring somebody or outsourcing. Um, and then, yeah, I mean, for us, it took a while, like I said, before we hired our first hire and now we even have, I think 12 or 13 people on our internal team, but you know, that's after building now two companies and this one actually reaching a, I think we're at $3 million of ARR. So, you know, annual recurring revenue. And so it takes a while to actually get to that point where you're going to be a boss of, of quite a few people. Um, and then, yeah, like you said, like, when do you start outsourcing, you know, there, like I mentioned Fiverr earlier, I think Fiverr is honestly a great place to start. If you're a young scrappy entrepreneur and you do want to start delegating, but you don't have the budget or the runway, um, or if it just is stable business model, those project-based outsourcing options are going to be fantastic for you because yeah, sometimes we, we can't wear all the hats. If you need a video editor, for example, to help with social media and you just, that's not your skillset. It would be easier to pay somebody on Fiverr 40 bucks, uh, and save your time for, for client facing time. Right. So there are definitely ways that you can delegate without hiring somebody full-time or even part-time. **Dave Brown [15:08]** And you mentioned $3 million of ARR. So that's the recurring subscription revenue, right? So it's not, you're not having to get new sales every year. So that's, that's super meaningful. The, um, okay. So what type of, say someone tries out Fiverr a little bit and then the business is growing and now they're thinking, maybe I do need to be a, uh, a virtual assistant. What types of tasks are best to outsource? What makes the most sense? **Tyler Leber [15:30]** Yeah. Um, it's really a dependent on your skillset, right? Because for, for Eric, especially like he, like I said, he's kind of that visionary mindset. So he needs somebody that is very detail oriented and very, uh, conscientious and more admin related. So, you know, if it comes tax season, like Eric hates that, like that is just his worst nightmare. **Dave Brown [15:53]** But for me, like, it's a fun time, you know, like I enjoy looking back at all this financial data. **Tyler Leber [15:58]** Right. And so the, the skillsets that you need are definitely dependent on your own skillset. And like I mentioned, the video editor, I hate doing that work. And so, yeah, if I'm starting to look for somebody to help me, what I'll do is I'll just go back, review my task list or my to-do list and say, Hey, here's all of the tasks that are repeatable. I've been doing these for six months now, every single day takes an hour of my day, but it's not something that I need to do. And so that's something that's the first place I would start is like, okay, is there enough work there that I can delegate and keep somebody busy? And of course, do you have the budget now to keep that person, uh, employed? **Dave Brown [16:35]** Yeah. And some, some entrepreneurs will say, well, just think of what an hour of your time is worth. And if someone's going to cost more than that to pay someone else to do pay them to do it. Right. Yep. Exactly. Yeah. Yep. Exactly. If you have a, a dedicated virtual assistant paying per hourly, whether it's through coconut or someone else, like what's a, what's a typical rate, what are you paying someone like that? Yeah. Great question. **Tyler Leber [16:56]** Um, I mean, yeah, it, it totally depends on the role. Um, but I would say for, you know, a really amazing executive assistant, for example, you could pay anywhere from 10 to $15 an hour. Um, and that'll, that'll get you an amazing executive assistant from the Philippines. And then also there's, uh, countries in South America, even Mexico, uh, you could find somebody, you know, that's very qualified, that has a lot of experience, uh, at that hourly rate. Um, you could find somebody. **Dave Brown [17:24]** Okay. Great. And so you're working on both sides. You're, you're providing the service to the customer, but you're also providing benefits, whatever else for workers in the Philippines. What is the experience like for them? Is this a good job or is this kind of what's it like? **Tyler Leber [17:36]** Yeah, no, I love that. And that's, that's another huge area that we focused on in the beginning is like I said, we had a few VAs at Venture Validator. And so we did a lot of focus groups with them. And we also invited a lot of their, uh, virtual assistant friends to these focus groups. And we would basically ask like, okay, what do you hate about all the agencies you've worked for? Right. Cause cause some agencies have a terrible reputation and there's a lot of BPO companies that don't have the most glamorous jobs. They don't have great benefits. So we identified all of these things, uh, that the VAs really cared about. So very common in the Philippines is 13th month pay. You basically pay an extra month of salary at the end of the year. And it's a common practice in the Philippines, but a lot of us employers, especially if they're just hiring direct, they don't know that it feels weird to them. Like it's, it's just a, it's a quirk, you know, in the Philippines that we're not used to. And so we knew that we had to, we had to do that. So even right now we save up every single month so we can pay out that 13th month pay to all of our VAs. So we don't have our clients pay that. We just pay that out of our own pockets. Um, so that's one little example of like, okay, we know that this is going to set us apart as a U S based agency, trying to employ people in the, in the Philippines. And, and yeah, we've gotten amazing feedback. We, we do a quarterly NPS survey among our VAs and we actually just hit our highest score, which is a 9.8 out of 10. Um, but even from the beginning, it was 9.6, 9.7. And, and yeah, a lot of people say it's, it's the best job that they've ever had. Uh, they have great employers, you know, great clients. Cause we do a lot of our own vetting and making sure that we have good people, uh, get a good employers, good clients. Um, and then we also make sure that they they're paid above average. So we do a lot of our own vetting and they have a full range of benefits. **Dave Brown [19:23]** That's great. So, um, do you, do you need to have people on the ground there or is it the virtual assistants are over there? The company's over here? **Tyler Leber [19:31]** Yeah, no, it's been totally remote. Um, so even within the first, I think two years of coconut, neither Eric or I had ever been to the Philippines. Uh, and then even now we will both been, I've been once he's been twice, uh, and George has been once as well. And so, yeah, for a lot of our U S clients, most that's a 98%. Of them have never been to the Philippines. Uh, yeah, you definitely don't need boots in the ground there. Uh, it's independent contractor relationships. You don't have to have an office there or out of space or anything like that. **Dave Brown [20:01]** I was sure I was going to find out that either you or Eric had served a mission in the Philippines, **Tyler Leber [20:05]** right? That's pretty much anybody from Utah, any of our clients there, they always ask us that. **Dave Brown [20:10]** Yeah. Yeah. There are some Tagalog speakers locally, but the, um, well, great. So another question for automation, say you're running a startup company. Uh, there's this issue of, do I outsource something? Or could maybe AI do it at this point? Can I automate it some way? How do you, how do you decide what's good for software and what's good for people? **Tyler Leber [20:27]** Yeah. I mean, there's a, obviously a lot of use cases you could dive into. I'd say like a good general rule of thumb is, is this a client facing action or just an internal backend operation? If it's something that's backend, uh, it's, you know, notifying an internal team member or, uh, you know, launching any kind of automation, like project management, for example. A lot of those. Yeah. You could definitely try to automate those. If it's client facing, you know, we try not to do a ton of like automated or templatized emails. We want those, we want those touch points. Uh, so many people are diving into AI and automation. And so if you can, if you can maintain a lot of that client facing interaction where it still feels very personal and still feels very human, I think that's going to be a huge way to stick out, uh, you know, even now. Uh, so that's my general rule of thumb. **Dave Brown [21:20]** Yeah. That makes sense. You can definitely tell when text is coming from chat GPT anytime on LinkedIn, when someone's referring to esteemed colleagues or something like that. Yes. AI again. Yes. We're good. So you guys, how long has coconut been around? Uh, three years, three years. Okay. So you're into it. You have significant revenue. So how have you scaled up? What's that process been like? **Tyler Leber [21:41]** Yeah. Uh, for, for us, it's definitely been a mix of content marketing. So Eric and I, and now George, we've all been posting on LinkedIn. Uh, very, very consistently over the past, probably two years. Um, but yeah, even from the beginning referrals is a huge, huge source of business for us. It's about 50% of all new business that may be a little bit lower now that we're, you know, seeking other ways of outreach and, you know, throwing more events, uh, doing more partnerships, but yeah, for sure at the early days, it was a lot of even our Venture Validator clients, right? Like, Hey, we helped you with this market research report. We noticed you're doing great. Is there any way we could help you where you've now opened coconut? We have a staffing company. We could find a great executive assistant for you or customer service rapper or whatever it might be. And then, you know, making sure that you treat that client extremely well. And then that may turn into one or two referrals, which obviously is just going to exponentially grow your business. **Dave Brown [22:37]** Yeah. And for what it's worth, I know I learned about you guys on LinkedIn from seeing your posts on there. So there you go. And you have a presence on YouTube as well. So you're, you're out there on, on social media platforms. That's good in terms of your own outsourcing, uh, either venture. What, what are some mistakes? What are some things you've seen go wrong in outsourcing and how do you avoid those problems? Yeah. Two big things come to mind. **Tyler Leber [23:00]** One is that, um, there are, there are people that think of outsourcing and they think of saving money, which is very, very accurate, but unfortunately people take another step and say, okay, I'm going to go to the very bottom of the barrel and say, I'm going to save you most amount of money. And it's like, yeah, you can hire somebody for $4 an hour, but you still get what you pay for. And so you're not going to find the best talent. So that's, that's one of the, just thing that really hurts my soul is when people, when people do that, like, yo, I'm going to outsource. And I had a terrible experience. It's okay. Well, you hired somebody for $4 an hour. Like, what did you expect to find? And like, you know, you're, you're expecting them to do X, Y, Z, some high level project. And that's just unrealistic. So that's one of the biggest issues I see with, with people outsourcing. Um, but also more on like the internal side of it. I would say the other thing that I would say is that, you know, is just making sure that you stay on top of it. Um, stay on top of delegation, I would say. So even for me, like I will, I'll start a new, or I'll find a new software, for example, or I'll find a new way to do something and I'll start doing it. I'll kind of pave the way of just like a lot of founders do, like they're going to do something the first time, uh, and, and figure out how that all works. But then you need to make sure that you, you separate yourself as soon as that is repeatable and that it can be handed off because I've had that many times where I just go by, you know, three or four months without thinking about it. And now I'm working, you know, 50, 60 hours a week on all of these admin tasks that I don't need to be working on, but it was just me that figured out how to do it. And so I kind of like, Oh, well, I'm the only one that can do it. I'll just keep doing it. Uh, so you kind of got to get rid of that ego and say like, no, I am not the best person at that. Like, yeah, maybe I stumbled upon that, but now I can hand it off to somebody else. **Dave Brown [24:46]** Yeah. It does seem to me that business leadership is largely about nailing what works, you know, trying stuff, getting it to work. And then like you say, handing it off, but you've described yourself as kind of a detailed guy, kind of an executor. So how do you make yourself step back and look at what you're doing and say, Oh, that needs to go to someone else. **Tyler Leber [25:03]** Yeah. Um, like I said, I think for me, it's just too many things get onto my plate. And so, yeah, maybe I am really good at X, Y, Z process, but if I now have 10 things that I'm doing, you know, every single day, then I'm my effective effectiveness, and just the quality of work is going to start to go start to decrease. And so I think that's a really key indicator of, okay, I need to start delegating this because somebody else on the team, maybe they could get it to, you know, 85% or 90% completion. Like, yeah, I can get it 95 tonight to a hundred percent, but it would be so much more effective kind of going back to those hourly rates that we talked about earlier, um, for somebody else to, to get it up to 85, 90%. Uh, and then maybe I could spend a few minutes to, to touch things out. To refine something, even LinkedIn recently. So I've been posting on my own LinkedIn for over two years now, and I just barely hired somebody to help me, uh, write LinkedIn posts. So I will say, Hey, here's an idea for a post. And then they'll do the grunt work of, of drafting it up. And then I'll come back in and say, okay, that doesn't sound like me. Like, you know, this is what I would actually add here. And so it's kind of cutting out that the grunt work in the middle, um, and, and still maintaining that high quality of work. Okay. Great. Well, because of the two businesses you've done, you're very well equipped to, to kind of automate and outsource things. **Dave Brown [26:24]** You could go the Tim Ferriss route and do less and less of the business's work. Right. So what, what is actually the future for you in coconut? What do you have planned? Yeah. And I, I kind of tried that out. **Tyler Leber [26:34]** I started heading that direction of, you know, yeah, like I, I have an amazing team. I know how to delegate, like let's start offloading all of these different things. **Dave Brown [26:42]** Um, but for me, I mean, this time of my life, I still have a lot of energy, **Tyler Leber [26:46]** a lot of ambition. Like I just, I'm not ready for that. Like I could do that, but I, like we, like we've talked about, there is still a lot of value, like in, in the founder role of exploring new ways to do things, new processes, uh, new markets, new ways to reach out to people. And so I really just get a lot of satisfaction from, from doing all of that, uh, that novel work, you know, kind of walking the path that nobody's walked yet. And then showing somebody else how to do that. I think that's still very fulfilling for me. And so, yeah, for the, for the first season, I think I'm going to I won't be doing the four hour work week. Okay. Well, sounds good. **Dave Brown [27:21]** Okay. Well, Tyler, we're just about out of time, but if someone wants to follow coconut or connect with you, where should they go? Yeah. I mean, Coconut VA.com. **Tyler Leber [27:29]** And then also, you know, Tyler Leber on LinkedIn, I've got a little coconut next to my name. That's how you can know it's me. Uh, and so yeah, follow me on LinkedIn, DM me on LinkedIn. Happy to talk. Happy to chat anytime. Okay. And the company has a YouTube channel too, I think, right? **Dave Brown [27:44]** Yeah, we do. I think it's, it's more VA facing. A lot of, you know, how to, how to apply to Coconut VA So that might not be as applicable, but yeah. Okay. But if you've been on the Philippines watching and interested, there you go. Okay. Well, so great. Thanks for sharing your time with us, Tyler. And this is a great insight on outsourcing. Really appreciate it. Thank you. Appreciate it. All right. Take care.