This January Assured Labor’s founders gathered in at the Managua office for a week and a half to round up and plan for 2010. We spent some QT with customers and even had the pleasure of hosting one of our investors in Nicaragua. Mapping out an entire year takes a lot of foresight, but more than anything, takes a good whiteboard.

Unfortunately, the white board that came with EmpleoListo’s office had been drawn on with a permanent marker before it was acquired by Assured Labor’s Chief Revenue Officer Joseph Bamber. While this was just our backup whiteboard JR (Joseph) made it his mission to make this white board usable by the end of the trip. His perseverance paid off and by the time our Sales, Marketing, Product Development and Operations plans had been hatched so had his sparkling clean white board – ready to be filled with more great plans.

As you’d imagine, after an intense 7 day work week, the air conditioning began to wear on the team and our investor requested a change of scenery before his departure. This led us to San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua’s surfing haven where multiple hump back whales had recently been spotted. So, after conducting a series of surf related team building exercises the team was picked up by a small boat run by two fishermen who are part of a local fishing cooperative.

Shortly after embarking on our quest to spot whales our fishermen guides informed us that it was too windy for the whales to be spotted and suggested we fish instead. As weathered entrepreneurs we appreciated our guides’ knack for turning a negative into a positive and immediately complied. In turn all four of us brought in a fish. Three plumb Tuna’s (5 pounds plus) followed by something resembling an eel. We ate well that night, and made our way back to our respective Assured Labor offices the next day.

Along with white boards, surf boards and tuna I recommend the following tools to keep your distributed team in sync.

• Skype (www.skype.com)
• DropBox (www.dropbox.com)
• 5PMWeb (www.5pmweb.com)
• RememberTheMilk (www.rememberthemilk.com)
• CoMindWork (www.comindwork.com)
• Google Docs
• Google Calendar

Saludos,
Dave and the Assured Labor team

2009 was the year we put our heads down and got to work creating the service Assured Labor was intended to be. The ultimate service for recruiting mid-to-low wage workers in emerging markets using web and mobile technology.

Highlights from the last year include:

• The launch of our Latin American brand – EmpleoListo, to much fanfare in Central America.
  • You can take a look at http://www.empleolisto.com
  • You can see some of our recent Television appearances at http://www.empleolisto.com/media.jsp
• Over 10,000 candidates registered!
• An expanding team, now up to 9 full-time across three continents
• Partnering with Latin America’s largest wireless carrier, Claro, to bring EmpleoListo into the hands of thousands of users.
• New office space in Managua. And new office space in New York and Cambridge at Dogpatch Labs (http://www.dogpatchlabs.com)

As you can tell we’ve been busy. We’re going to have a lot more to announce over the coming months and for 2010 we’re going to do our best to keep you up to date.

Thanks for your continued support!

Best,
Dave and the Assured Labor team