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Introduction
Hello again everyone. This is Doug and you’re listening to another episode of leadership Powered by Common Sense. Today, I have a young lady who is an entrepreneur. She and her husband are her partners in a very successful business. We’re going to talk about the challenges of managing a business as a couple, and also managing and building a thriving culture in a global situation where the whole company is remote. And so I’d like to introduce you to Jacqueline Basulto. Jacqueline, welcome to the show.
Hi, Doug. So happy to be here. Thank you. It’s an honor.
Yeah. And you’re actually calling in from Barcelona, is that correct?
Yes. I’m in Barcelona, Spain, a beautiful place.
I hear that I’ve not been there, but I definitely hear what a gorgeous place it may be. Tell folks a little bit of your your background and your journey to start the business that you have. And then we’ll talk about the business itself first.
From Google Intern to Entrepreneur
Sure. So I got into the marketing world really, really young. So I had an internship at Google that turned into a full time job offer. And I, being, you know, kind of a naive 22 year old thought, I can do this myself. And started freelancing in New York City. And around that time I met my now husband, Justin, who’s my co-founder, and he was doing something similar.
He was about to start medical school, but had started a tutoring company in New York City, when we met. And we really bonded on entrepreneurship. He also had a background in engineering. And so I started getting more work as Jacqueline, the freelancer, before doing marketing and website support with businesses.
Justin was interested in that topic and we kind of let go of the tutoring business. He said no to medical school. I said no to working at Google long term. Little by little, it’s grown into this business seed and where we are today, we’re about 75 people constantly growing and learning and being challenged. So that’s a little bit about how we’ve come to to now. It’s been about nine years since then.
Oh, my. Great run. Oh, congratulations. You know, here in the US, the Small Business Administration tells us that, you know, the five year anniversary mark is a really critical milestone for small business. If you make it past five, you inevitably are probably going to make it. And a lot of businesses don’t get that far, and it’s that 3 to 5 year range that causes friction and trouble, and staying power to make it through that. So so that’s great. Let me let me start. I’ve got a ton of questions I’m thinking about here. But let me start with the one. How did you decide to start going a little bit more global with your talent acquisition?
Building a Global Team Out of Necessity
Yes. So that’s a great question. And I definitely, before I answer, felt the strain at the 3 to 5 year mark. So I’m happy to be past that and at least know what I’m doing a bit more now.
But yes, I think now people are making the decision to go global and remote consciously, but at the time it really came from my age, my financial background and the need for support. And so when I first started doing this work, it started as with most entrepreneurs, you’re doing every role, right? And then I needed better and better people to help me do things that I’m not that great at.
Like I’m not a web developer. I shouldn’t have been developing people’s websites. And so, the easiest way for me to hire at a young age, a great talent, was to go online. And it was something that was native to to me as well. I’m a millennial, right?
Like almost I’m a little bit older than a Gen Z, a young millennial. And so it just felt normal to me. It was really out of necessity and budget that I initially started hiring online, but then began to see all of the positives of it. Besides the financial upside of it, just finding great talent in places that I couldn’t compete with. You know, Google and Uber to hire engineers in New York City, for example, finding people who are hard working around the world, being influenced by their culture, etc. So yes, at first it was a competitive advantage in that I needed to hire someone and now it’s more of a conscious decision.
The Freelance Platform Advantage
Well, and you mentioned spending some time yourself in that freelance world. And I know there are some great platforms out there like Upwork and Fiverr and I myself have taken advantage of that for spot talent. I call it, if I’ve got a project or a need, you know, finding some really amazing people, and the process is not too different from trying to recruit and hire locally.
Actually, it’s a little bit easier now that I’m saying that. And you’re right, you you can hire some amazing talent that way and take advantage of sort of the cream of the crop. And while I’m thinking about it, I’m going to make a note to entrepreneurs out there who might be listening.
I want you to think about if you’ve got a challenge in your business and you have a particular role, using some of these freelance platforms is a great place to start because for really minimum dollars, you can give your assignment to 2 or 3 people and let them take a shot at delivering results. And then you can, you know, have a little bit of a mini competition to decide who’s the best provider. And I have recommended that to a lot of my business owner clients, and they’ve had great success with it.
And I’m talking hundreds of dollars, not thousands of dollars to trial, test some of these resources and talents. And if you don’t like what they’re doing, you’re done. You don’t have to worry about it. You don’t have a big exit problem. But if you like what they’re doing, then you can get into a discussion about longer term engagement. So it’s a win. It’s a huge win.
I think, especially when you’re first learning to hire for a specific position, as I was, of course, at the beginning of seed, it was really great to be able to go through like hundreds, hundreds of applications, talk to many, many people, get a sense of what’s out there, which is just harder to do through recruiter or through, you know, outreach. And so we use the tool really similarly.
Or we have in the past where we do try out, you know, three people see who’s the best cultural fit, who communicates well, and then we’ll transfer them into being a full time contractor or employee. And now it’s easier. We know what we’re looking for, but these are great tools for sure, for those reasons.
Running a Business with Your Spouse
Yeah. Well, let’s shift gears just a little bit. When we were kind of ramping up in the green room, we were talking about the joys of running a business with your spouse. And as many of my listeners know, I’ve told the story of I and my spouse doing that. But tell me your story. What have you experienced working with your husband in this business?
Well, I would say, we’ve been married for about five years now, but before that, we weren’t because we started the business at such a young age. And so one of our one of the challenges was we really developed our relationship with the business. I always tell people it kind of helped us really solidify our commitment to each other, because we had to be so open about finances, about our goals, about gender roles. Like all of these things super early. So it almost facilitated, I think, helping us stick together and get stronger as as a partnership. And now that we’re, you know, so much further along in this journey, it’s a lot easier.
But those challenges were really strong at the beginning of our relationship because there wasn’t a lot to hide around. Our relationship was romance, but it was also work. And that that’s a difficult but also wonderful thing because we were encouraging each other through this extremely hard process of being Entrepreneurs. But I would say that’s kind of how things have evolved over time. And, it’s definitely easier now when people find out that we’re a couple, they know that we’re married and we’re not, you know, boyfriend and girlfriend, which I think was scary for people. So yes, it’s been an interesting ride.
The Client Confidence Factor
It is interesting you bring that up, you know, because, I know in situations where for your clients that are coming on board in the spirit of doing some due diligence, they want to know who they’re working with. And you’re right. I could see the caution flag there when it’s okay. This boyfriend girlfriend are doing this thing. They haven’t made a commitment yet to each other.
So what’s going to happen to my work if they, you know, sever their relationship and that can get really ugly. So yeah, it, that’s an interesting point of it, but but it is also very healthy. And congratulations, by the way of having that be a lot of the glue that has kind of brought you together. That’s a neat story.
Yeah. Thank you so much. Appreciate it.
The Business Model: Serving Mid-Market Companies
So let’s talk a little bit about the business itself, how you’re helping other businesses or are you predominantly B2B? Is that the bulk of your activity?
So our business is about half B2B and half e-commerce.
Okay.
And we’re mainly working I think the commonality is we’re mainly working in the mid-market. So companies that are experiencing growth, they’ve you know, they have product market fit. They’re experiencing growth. And they need support because they don’t have the internal tools or the internal personnel to fulfill all of their marketing and technical needs. And so people come to us to augment their team, to make sure they’re covering all the bases of marketing, strategy and execution.
And then also with difficult for internal team projects that are difficult for internal teams to do, such as websites, CRM, integrations, data analytics, etc. So we do a lot of things and our kind of, our value proposition is that we can do an overall strategy and execution with the business as the focus. So really understanding not just one channel of marketing, but how does that channel impact the business, the finances, projections, etc. beyond just looking at Facebook marketing, right?
Data-Driven Marketing Strategy
Yeah, I know your website. And by the way, I’m going to say that name again for you. Her company is seed X, and it’s kind of spelled like it sounds. CDX.us is the link. And we’ll have that in the show notes. But fascinating story there on the web, you’ve got some great case studies of work you’ve done with client companies. And one of the things that caught my eye was the whole notion of data driven analytics. And talk a little bit more about that, what that really means to maybe the entrepreneur that hadn’t quite figured that out for their marketing effort yet.
Yeah, sure. So it really goes back to this idea of being channel agnostic. So our team has specialists in different channels of marketing. So SEO, AI, answer engines now websites, CRM, social media platforms, ad platforms. But what we’re really looking at is how do we use these tools for your specific business to drive ROI or to drive whatever our goals are. And so through when we’re doing work on these channels, whatever channel it might be, we’re tying that back to your centralized analytics and your business goals.
So we’re measuring, you know, what is the cost to acquire customer over specific time horizon, over specific channels? We’re looking at how do we move and improve lifetime value over specific time horizons? For retail and e-commerce, we’re looking at how does growth impact inventory? How can you plan your inventory so that you don’t have 500,000 extra of something that’s not selling, and you’re sold out of the thing that acquires your customers? And on the B2B side, we’re looking at which leads actually become deals.
How do we increase spend on campaigns that actually follow through to becoming a deal? So looking not just at the, you know, I have a lead. Great. Is that lead actually making it to the finish line through the sales team. And so those are the kinds of problems we solve and questions we ask as we’re managing those channels.
So really robust and pretty sophisticated opportunity for companies that aren’t quite there yet in terms of growth and scale. You know, it strikes me as you’re describing that clearly a business in sort of the startup phase probably needs all this, but is not ready for all this. They still need to get that product market fit going and get a little bit of momentum for what they’re doing.
And that’s a whole season of time and experience right there in and of itself. But once you get that product market fit and you’re starting to get a little bit of market share, then you can start thinking about maturing your go to market effort and everything you might deploy. Right.
Yeah. Yeah.
Building Culture in a Remote Environment
Well, let’s, for the sake of time, let’s shift gears a little bit. I do want to talk about what you shared with me again in the green room about, you know, managing your remote team and trying to really find ways to solidify your culture as a company. I think that’s a challenge that’s shared by many. And, tell us a little bit of that first. I guess let me ask, as you started adding all these people, when did you realize there was going to be a challenge of maybe making it a cohesive, you know, enterprise?
I think, you know, once we moved from doing we did a lot of project work at the beginning, just kind of getting built in case studies, getting, you know, any opportunity that was available really, and just driving it to the finish line. I think it was when we started to more deeply partner with companies in the way that I’m describing, where we’re working on their growth long term, it became more and more important for our team to be able to communicate really well, to work together cross functionally in the way that I was talking about.
And so that was probably, you know, on the second or third year when it started to become more relevant. And we also started to pay more attention to where we were hiring. So we are a global company, but we hire in specific areas, like we try to have a little bit of a location specific bubble in different areas around the world so that people have coworkers they can meet up with, they can connect with culturally, etc.
Navigating Cultural Differences
And, it’s been interesting. I would say we have to mention a few of the larger cultures on our team. We have a really big Spanish team now. I’m here in Europe, helping to kind of start our Europe expansion. So we have a big team in Spain and a few people in Latin America. So that’s one culture that I would say is pretty cohesive. We have our US team, and then we have a pretty large team in Poland and Ukraine. And each of those cultures communicates really differently.
So it’s really funny actually, to watch the communication cadences and the kind of over exaggeration and emotionality of Hispanic culture versus like Ukrainian culture is very direct. And, things have been lost in translation in terms of feedback and what people actually mean. If you say something is great, but in Ukraine you would never say something was great unless it was perfect. So that’s really confusing for them.
So it’s been interesting to kind of learn each other’s cultures, be able to communicate really effectively, be able to understand our client’s problems from multiple perspectives. But it’s worked out really well. And I think now that our team is more normalized to going through this, and when we onboard, we talk about it, it’s become a benefit because people really like connecting with people from around the world.
The Power of In-Person Meetups
And we do in-person meetups, which is super fun. And I find that people are almost identical to how they are online in real life. So it’s really fun when we work together in real life because it just feels like an extension of our slack chats or our Google meetings.
Yeah.
So if we could drill down on that just a little bit, what are some of the tricks or tips that you’ve found work well to when you are online to try to keep people connected and engaged? Or I’m in the back of my mind, I’m imagining a little bit of a circular loop there, though. You said you try to routinely schedule the in-person meetups, but, you know, not all companies feel like they can do that effectively. So what are some of the other things you try to do oftentimes when people are just truly remote and engage through a screen?
Practical Strategies for Remote Team Success
Time Zone Overlap and Handoffs
Yeah, I would say, first of all, we try to have some overlap in terms of when people work. Most people on our team work Central Standard Time because most of our clients are US based. So, there are at least a few hours of overlap, even if our team isn’t client facing so that they can communicate with the rest of the team. We also encourage everyone to set up one. I think one of the advantages of the time zone overlaps, as well as that we encourage everyone to kind of prepare the next time zone for their work.
So, for example, if I wake up, I might have a message from someone on the Pacific Time coast saying, hey, can you check on this when you wake up? That way, we’re kind of taking advantage almost of all the 24 hours. So that’s interesting as well. And then I think really just over communication is always the best hack in any scenario, probably, but especially in ours, we encourage everyone to overcommunicate on task descriptions when they’re talking to each other. To jump on calls. To try to build relationships with each other. And so, Communication. Everything’s communication.
Communication vs. Connection
Well, and, you know, I’ve talked with a lot of people about the idea from a leadership standpoint, communication is always a skill and an attribute people point to in good leaders. But the real challenge is you might be communicating, but are you connecting? That’s I think that’s the critical nuance there that people miss. They might figure out, particularly in a scenario that’s fairly technical or data driven. It’s easy to get focused on the content and lose the connection.
Absolutely. And that definitely happens I think. I think that having to be in our environment is not easy. Like, I don’t think that everyone thrives in this remote culture where it’s very performance driven still. And so I think there’s kind of like a heightened expectation for communication and the willingness to work through those challenges on your own that we kind of expect of our team. And that’s something that we also communicate a lot before we make a hire during the onboarding process.
And it’s something to think about because if you are a remote culture, you have to have team members that are willing to bring up problems to you because you can’t necessarily see them, or at least not quickly enough. They have to be self-directed because you’re not watching them work. Right. And so I think there’s a really high expectation for their drive and their self, their kind of adherence to their work schedule as well.
Yeah.
Hiring for Behavior Over Skills
And you’re right. And all of that would come under the umbrella of, you know, proper behavioral patterns to fit the culture you’re trying to build. And if you do want to have that culture of being able and willing to overcommunicate, not to pick on them, but it would be hard to bring an extreme introvert into that environment unless they’ve developed a personal awareness of their introverted tendencies, and they’re willing to project a little more and show up a little more engaged, active in the discussion.
They can still be all the introvert they want to be, but if they’ve learned how to manage in that environment, you know, they could be successful. But but it does point. Thinking about everything you said does point to the idea of when an owner founder is trying to hire and build out their team. There’s very much to be said about finding behavioral tendencies, not just skill tendencies. So some have said, you know, skills can be taught, but behaviors can’t.
Absolutely, yes. And I think one of our biggest qualities that we interview for or look for is communication. Like, are you responsive? Are you willing to work through challenge even before we have an interview, let’s say in our email exchange. Right. Because it’s so important to us and because it can really impact a client’s perception if we’re working remotely with a client, if you’re not responsive, it can impact your team members, etc. So I absolutely agree. I think that talented people with the right behavioral qualities can be taught, but it’s really difficult to change someone’s behaviors and personalities, especially in a professional environment.
Yeah.
Looking Ahead: Scaling Business Development
Well, Jacqueline, let me let me ask you this. As a business owner, do you mind sharing what your next big rock may be, what you guys are thinking about for your new year 2026?
Sure. I’m happy to share. I would say we have a really great handle on our operations and our performance with our clients, and we’re expanding into, of course, understanding AI and how that’s impacting our space. Our biggest challenge right now is in my area of the business, which is business development.
So up until now I’ve been the sole salesperson on our team working on all of our new opportunities. And so now I’m looking to scale that and to be able to operationalize that a bit more. So that’s what we’re focused on in terms of challenges that are difficult to overcome. So hopefully through the end of the year and in early 2026, that’s something we start to make some more movement on.
That’s great. Well, tell folks the best way to get ahold of you if they’re interested in knowing more.
Sure. So you can visit our website at CDX.us or connect with me on LinkedIn at Jacqueline Basulto. I’m sure my name will be in the title and in the show notes, and I post content pretty frequently on LinkedIn. I’m also happy to speak with anyone who would like to connect or learn more about Codex.
That’s great.
Closing Thoughts
Well, Jacqueline, thank you for your time and sharing this. And she is right folks. We’ll have all the contact info in the show notes. As always, I do want to remind you listeners that we do have a video version of this over on YouTube channel by the same name, Leadership Powered by Common Sense. Hop over there and check out our archives and looking forward to the new year and all the great things that are happening. But Jacqueline, one last time, thank you so much for sitting in. This has been great.
Thank you Doug, I appreciate it.
All right. Well with that everybody, we’re going to sign off and say goodbye and go out there and make it a great day.
Meet our Guest
Jacqueline Basulto is an award-winning, self- made Latina entrepreneur who serves as the founder, CEO, and Director of New Business at SeedX, Inc. Founded in 2016 with just $200, SeedX has grown into a results-driven data and digital growth agency that has generated over $1 billion in revenue for clients through data- driven online strategies and innovative solutions. With over eight years of industry experience, Jacqueline has built a
reputation for delivering tangible outcomes and creating lasting value for clients across diverse sectors. She balances her role as a business leader with being a mother to a two-year-old daughter and maintains a strong commitment to empowering businesses in the digital age.
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