Hey team,

Big week at Handoff!

Three new teammates just joined the crew, we're rolling out a content agent that's already earning its keep, and AG has thoughts on the one quality that makes or breaks a LATAM hire.

But first, the team is getting bigger, and we want to make sure you know who just came on board.

Welcome to the team: Jorge, Esteban, and Andrés

Meet Jorge Gomez, joining as our Senior Accountant from Medellín, and Esteban Valbuena, joining as our Automation Specialist from Cajicá. One owns the numbers. The other builds the systems. Together, they represent exactly the kind of operational backbone Handoff needs as we scale.

Jorge is a bilingual, full-cycle accountant who has run the entire financial operation for multi-entity U.S. companies — solo, remotely, and to a high standard. AP/AR, payroll, month-end close, GAAP-compliant financial statements, U.S. tax filings, he has done it all. He lives in QuickBooks but speaks fluent SAP, Ramp, Bill.com, ADP, and Gusto, too. He owns the books, fully.

Esteban is an AI Engineer who doesn't just connect tools, he builds entire products. Full web apps from scratch, AI agentic workflows, Voice AI agents, and custom integrations across Zapier, Make, n8n, Go High Level, and more. His background started with deploying smart systems for luxury hotels and casinos like the Intercontinental Hayman Island Resort and the Waldorf by Hilton Las Vegas. High stakes and zero margin for error… sounds about right.

And rounding out the trio: Andrés Jimenez, our new recruiter and talent strategist. Andrés started in psychology and HR, which means he actually understands how people work before he tries to hire them.

His career evolved into technical recruiting for fast-growing startups, with deep experience in full-cycle recruitment, workforce planning, and building the kind of pipelines that don't dry up. At Handoff, he's here to strengthen how we source, attract, and scale the right talent — bilingual, analytical, and built for fast-moving environments.

Two sharp operators and one strategic recruiter, all joining the same week. This is what intentional growth looks like

Now, inside the rest of this issue:

• AG's Take on the mindset that actually gets LATAM talent hired and why "initiative potential" is the real X factor

• AG's Agents, featuring the Friday morning content brief that turns a full week of Slack, calls, and notes into usable thought leadership

• Post of the Week: What AG keeps hearing on every operator call,and why the answer is always the same

• Talent Spotlight: Meet Jose Vielma — an accounting specialist with EY and Disney on his resume, available through Handoff now

Let's get into it.

AG's Take: The X Factor That Actually Gets LATAM Talent Hired

(You may have noticed the rebrand from "Tony's Take." Tony is great. AG just wanted his name on things. We support it.)

It took a while to even put a name to it.

Initiative potential.

That's the question every client comes back to — sometimes without realizing it: will this person figure it out, or wait to be told?

At Handoff, there's a saying shared with a lot of the talent before they go into placements: better to ask forgiveness than permission.

That's not a license to go rogue. That's autonomy and accountability living inside the same person, at the same time. The distinction matters.

Building Handoff made this really fast.

When you're building something, things will break. That's not a risk, that's the guarantee.

The only variable is what your team does when they do: do they move, or do they wait for someone to tell them what the next step is?

The shift from "what should I do" to "what can I build" is everything. Clients feel it immediately. It's the difference between a hire that needs a roadmap at every turn and one that makes the whole team sharper just by being in the room.

That instinct, the one that says "let's try" before "I'm not sure", is what the best hires have in common. It's what Handoff looks for. And increasingly, it's what the best clients are asking for too, even when they don't have the words for it yet.

That's the hire. Every time.

AG's Agents: The One That Catches the Content You're Already Creating

(Previously "Tony's Tools." Still the same great tools. Now with 100% more AG branding.)

Every Friday at 5 a.m., a report lands in the folder.

Not a metrics dashboard or a generic week-in-review.

A content brief built entirely from what actually happened inside the business that week. The conversations, the decisions, the challenges, the patterns. The stuff that usually gets buried under the pace of the work.

The agent reads through emails, Slack messages, Fireflies transcripts, and Notion notes, then surfaces the moments worth sharing publicly.

From there, it creates a structured brief for the content team: themes, post ideas, suggested formats, pull quotes, and a two-week content calendar.

This past week, it flagged things that wouldn't have made it into any traditional content plan: an ATS migration with 200+ active candidates living across two platforms, a client call that hit a Latin American labor law question nobody had fielded before, and the fact that Handoff hired a Webflow developer through its own nearshore process.

None of that was planned as marketing. Yet all of it is useful, specific, and worth sharing. It shows how the business is growing, where clients are getting stuck, and what the team is learning in real time.

The agent doesn't replace perspective.

It helps surface it before the best ideas disappear into Friday afternoon.

We run this on Claude using Cowork mode.

Reply to this email if you want the exact setup.

Post of the Week: The Work Is Eating Them Alive

This week's post from AG hits on something every furnished rental operator knows, but not enough of them say out loud.

The short and mid-term rental space is scaling fast: more units, more markets, more moving parts.

But what AG keeps hearing on every call is that the work is consuming the people running it. Guest comms, reservations, follow-ups, admin — the stuff that keeps the lights on but doesn't actually grow the business. And somehow, the founder is still doing it themselves.

That's the gap Handoff fixes.

AG is heading to MTR Summit in San Diego next month as a sponsor, and the timing feels right. Operators who are scaling smart aren't grinding harder, they're delegating better.

If you're going to be at MTR Summit, swing by the booth or book a chat ahead of time.

Talent spotlight

This week, meet Jose Daniel Vielma — an Accounting and Financial Operations specialist available through Handoff, built for fast-paced businesses that need precision, structure, and serious international accounting experience.

Jose brings nearly six years of experience supporting global clients across accounting, external audit, reconciliations, invoicing, and financial reporting. He has worked with EY and The Walt Disney Company — handling high-volume financial processes, multi-currency reconciliations, vendor invoices, accruals, and monthly reporting cycles across multiple jurisdictions.

His work has included complex financial workflows tied to U.S. energy operations, cost estimates and actuals, payables reconciliation, regulatory reporting, and multi-currency royalty accounting for international licensing agreements across Europe and the Middle East.

What makes Jose stand out is the combination of strong fundamentals and operational range. He's experienced with PeopleSoft, OneStream, SQL-based reporting systems, advanced Excel workflows, and is comfortable collaborating across global teams under tight deadlines.

If you need someone who can manage accounting operations with accuracy, support multi-entity financial processes, and bring structure to fast-moving environments, Jose is a reliable, detail-oriented operator who can add value immediately.

Scale Smarter with Handoff

Whether you’re filling a key role or building an entire team, Handoff connects you with vetted, global-first talent, fast.

Cheers,
The Handoff Team

Coming up next edition: the Handoff Tour Recap. The team has been out at a lot of events lately — five in California alone. We'll catch you up on everything.