In this exclusive interview with CanadianSME Small Business Magazine, Jamie Shanks, a three-time founder and leader in sales and marketing productivity, shares insights from his entrepreneurial journey scaling agencies like Get Levrg, Pipeline Signals, and Sales for Life. With a track record of building seven-figure businesses and pioneering new approaches to social selling and sales enablement, Jamie now focuses on helping small and medium-sized businesses amplify growth through offshoring and operational efficiency. Through Get Levrg, he empowers founders to reclaim their most valuable resource time by delegating low-value tasks, thus enabling SMBs to achieve sustainable profitability and focus on high-impact innovation.
Jamie is a three-time agency founder in the sales and marketing productivity space. He built Get Levrg, helping clients reclaim time for high-value work, Pipeline Signals, an account-based sales enablement platform, and Sales for Life, a global leader in social selling certifications. Each agency grew to seven-figure revenues, demonstrating his ability to scale businesses and drive meaningful results.
What inspired you to focus Get Levrg on empowering small and medium-sized businesses through offshoring, and how does your own entrepreneurial journey shape the solutions you offer?
In 2012, I launched my first agency – Sales for Life. We were very fortunate to have pioneered a sales methodology called “Social Selling”, which became a global phenomenon in the sales ecosystem. We skyrocketed in growth, winning 600 global customers. Unfortunately, we had the financial acumen of a grade schooler. We allowed ourselves to accept greater and greater risk via accounts receivables terms and payments. The law of big numbers collided with us, and after 6 years of double-digit growth, I woke up one day +$1,000,000 in debt. This crippled my spirits.
During the chaos, I sought mentorship, to which their council recommended I take a hard look at my largest operational expense – human capital. After some soul searching and legacy biases I had to overcome, I began to hire talent from the Philippines and Bangladesh to improve margins / profit. Within 2 years, we had corrected the business. With that success, I was constantly asked “how are you offshoring” by many fellow founders and CEO’s. I wanted to give these skills and capabilities back to the entrepreneur community.
By 2020, I had written the initial business plan for Get Levrg, but paused during Covid. We launched the agency in early 2023. We knew from Day 1 that we wanted to focus on the “SMB Customer” – B2B and B2C companies under 500 employees who are Time, Money and Resource starved. We aim to help customers just like ourselves.
Can you describe the biggest bottlenecks or challenges SMBs face that your offshore services are built to address, and what measurable impact have you seen?
The biggest bottlenecks / challenges that SMB companies face when offshoring is getting out of their own way. Legacy Bias and having the right mindset to change is the first huddle to overcome.
There are three (3) legacy bias’ we often encounter:
“We don’t have time” – time to change, train, coach, evolve. This is where founders / CEO’s think they are a snowflake and are somehow unique. They don’t realize that the opportunity cost of spending time on $5/hr tasks are taking away time from focusing on $500/hr value creation. When a proper system with documented processes are in place (such as Standard Operating Procedures) than anyone can execute the task or project effectively. Taking one moment to slow down and document a SOP, will allow your business to accelerate 3-5 steps forward.
“Communication issues” – language and time zones are big concerns. Both are very easy to overcome. First, screen talent using video and written testing upfront. Second, create systems to ensure that internal and customer communication meets your exact needs. From Slack channels to live call attendance, you set the rules to the road. As an example, our team in Bangladesh works with customers Monday-Friday, EST hours. They use Slack and Monday.com all day with our customers to share project updates. They send daily reports for progress updates.
“Quality of work” – best advice I ever got as a founder “80% done by others is 100% better than being done by yourself”. There are millions and millions of people everyday that execute the exact same tasks, projects and initiatives as your internal team. Again, your work is not a snowflake.
Once a founder / CEO has the right mindset, the economic impact to their business is so dramatic. Typically, the immediate impact is 3-5x increased profit per employee. If a 20% profit company saves $100,000 in salaries, that’s both $100,000 of financial optionality they’ve just acquired AND $500,000 of headwind they’ve just removed from their sales and marketing efforts to achieve the exact same profitability.
How does Get Levrg ensure that quality, culture fit, and operational consistency are maintained when integrating offshore talent with Canadian and North American teams?
The first decision we had to make was what type of business were we building? Was it going to be a bespoke agency, or an agency built for scale. We will be helping 100’s of SMB companies at the same time, with 100’s of employees, so we had to design systems to accommodate this.
First, at a macro level, we took on an investment partner 2X and private equity sponsors Recognize and Insight Partners. This provided us the resources to build a company to help 100’s of SMB’s simultaneously. This provided us systems to scale to (as of this writing 80 employees) rapidly.
Second, none of this is possible without an incredible HR / Talent Acquisition team working with incredible people. Quality work comes from inspired people working within well designed systems. We have a dedicated team who is attracting, hiring, onboarding and developing the best sales & marketing executional talent in Bangladesh. This requests designing a system of Account Managers, Customer Success Managers and Project Managers to work on 100’s of customers. Our assets are people. Everyone is full-time dedicated employees of Get Levrg that we “lease out” to our customers. We invest wildly into our people. Every teammate has a dedicated workstation, training, benefits , just like North American employees. We have an internal learning university to enable our team every week. Each week we meet as a collective team to review our “Rocks” for the quarter. We’re all rowing in the same direction.
Finally, our systems. We have a service delivery system that ingests customers requests using Monday.com, each task is processed and communicated in real-time, and delivered (outputted) to the customer with a high quality Q&A checklist. If you have people who are passionate about being great, and you’ve designed systems to mitigate human error, your work output becomes “North American standard”.
What key strategies or tools do you recommend for SMBs looking to scale their marketing and sales functions efficiently without expanding in-house teams?
At a high level, the first step is to do a Time Audit. Segment your time, and/or your teams time spent on specific tasks and projects by two categories:
$5/hr tasks
$500/hr value creation
What becomes apparent is how much time each week is being spent on repeatable tasks. These are the tasks that you want to offshore. The concept here is:
STOP doing $5/hr tasks, so that you can focus on $500/hr value creation.
Next, create Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) for each of these $5/hr tasks. To create a SOP, make a video of the task being completed, pull the transcript from the recording, and make a documented summary using video, screenshots and text-based instructions.
Finally, leverage key platforms for offshore communication and knowledge transfer:
Communication = Slack
SOP Creation = Google Gemini or ChatGPT
SOP Library = NotionProject Management = Monday.com
Do you have any final advice for Canadian SMB founders who want to achieve greater profitability and sustainable growth through offshoring?
Read two great books by other fellow Canadian entrepreneurs:
- Who Not How – Dan Sullivan. You will realize that growth is through others. Spend your time sourcing WHO will help you, and spend less time fretting about HOW tasks, projects and initiatives will get done. The WHO will solve that for you.
- Buy Back Your Time – Dan Martell. His principles on the Replacement Ladder and “80% done by others is 100% better than done by yourself” will help you reframe talent in your business.
