Brad Starnes’ itch to lean into a newly realized pain point at the end of 2024 led to the acquisition of his Screamin Cow Marketing Group and the launch of another passion project, the former UMKC Student Entrepreneur of the Year shared.
With the move — which sees Screamin Cow transitioned to Builders of Authority — Starnes now has switched his focus from website building and branding for home service companies to the hiring of overseas talent for digital marketing agencies through TalentFuze.
“What I’m passionate about is doing marketing with the agencies and hiring offshore talent,” he explained of the new venture. “Every time that I would talk with somebody — whether it was on the (Builders of Authority) mastermind group or a networking event or something — I always tend to talk about the people that I was hiring and the opportunity we were giving them, not necessarily the marketing side of things or the results side of things.”
When his son was born in November 2024, he took six weeks off, giving him time to reflect on the strength of his hiring skills and where his passions really aligned, noted Starnes, co-founder of the now-defunct startup Splitsy, which helped earn his UMKC student honors.
“It was the end of the year, so it was a little bit slow,” he explained. “But I had some key players in my agency that I hired that basically were able to run it without me. I had a few agency owners I was talking to, and they’re like, ‘I could never do that. People are always dependent on me. They’re reaching out for questions, or I have clients that are always communicating with me.’”
“So I had this itch at the end of last year to do something different,” he added.
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Brad Starnes, TalentFuze; courtesy photo
This time of self discovery led him to launch TalentFuze — with the goal of hiring offshore talent for agencies — in early 2025, he said. Initially he planned to continue to run Screamin Cow while building up TalentFuze until his core team member — who ran everything while he was on paternity leave — put in his notice.
“It was like, OK, I have an opportunity to either bring somebody in to replace him and get back into doing things myself and doing the fulfillment aspect myself, which contradicts and goes against everything I talk about in TalentFuze with hiring to delegate and everything like that,” Starnes said. “Or I look for a partner to do an acquisition with.’”
While performing customer discovery for TalentFuze with more than 30 agency owners about the good, the bad, and the ugly of hiring overseas talent, many of them told Starnes that they would be interested in acquiring his marketing agency if he was ever ready to sell it, he continued. Ultimately, Starnes said, he had a dozen offers come through, eventually landing on selling to his mentor, Adam McChesney, founder of Builders of Authority and who also works with home service companies.
“I want the acquisition to be worth it for me but also want it to be worth it for my clients, too,” he noted. “I want them to feel like they’re getting better service, better quality, more deliverables, all of that stuff.”
“(McChesney) grew his first agency from nothing to a little over a million a year in recurring revenue in 18 months,” he added. “He parted ways with that, and then in October of last year, he relaunched with a new agency, and was able to hit that same milestone in about five months, again, all from personal branding content.”
Much of Starnes’ success with TalentFuze is a result of what McChesney taught him as he was growing Screamin Cow, he said.
“So that’s one big reason I was looking at him as an acquisition partner,” Starnes continued. “TalentFuze is five months old and we’re already doing more revenue and have more clients than my agency was doing before Adam and I entered that acquisition agreement. Almost all of my business, except for one client on the TalentFuze side of things, has come from my personal brand and the content that I learned from Adam.”
What sets TalentFuze apart, Starnes noted, is the company provides training and support for both the talent and the agencies on top of just recruiting.
“A lot of these agencies, they’ve never worked with offshore talent,” he explained. “So they have no clue about the ins and outs, the cultural differences, the time zone differences, all that stuff. So we’re providing support there, and then we’re also providing support for the talent on the latest industry trends and everything like that. So we’re constantly doing weekly calls and training support there. We have a VA (virtual assistant) mentor that we just hired that is assigned to each VA we hire to help give them support.”
While he is focusing on growth this year, at some point next year, Starnes hopes to add a portal where clients can see what virtual assistants are tied to them, weekly check-ins, performance reviews, plus a payment portal and skill tests for the virtual assistants.
“They’ll be able to see their ROI and savings of hiring offshore through us in comparison to your traditional VA model,” he explained, “but then also in comparison to hiring somebody here in the U.S.”
