S4 - Ep21 - Mastering Startup Recruitment: Building the Perfect Team with Rick Gerard

Speaker 2: 0:11

Welcome to Side Hustle City and thanks for joining us. Our goal is to help you connect to real people who found success turning their side hustle into a main hustle, and we hope you can too. I'm Adam Kaler. I'm joined by Kyle Stevie, my co-host. Let's get started, all right. Welcome back everybody to the Side Hustle City podcast. Kyle Stevie joining remote from his iPhone. Kyle, say what's up.

Speaker 3: 0:40

What's up.

Speaker 2: 0:41

I'm here, he is here. So, rick Gerard, you are joining us today, and thanks for being on the show all the way from sunny California, yeah.

Speaker 4: 0:52

Thanks for having me. I don't know how it's Well, yeah, it's sunny and warm finally, for, like the first you know, we've been having Midwest weather here for God knows how long. it's been a crazy winter.

Speaker 2: 1:03

Oh, wow, and you're paying them prices. You need any better weather.

Speaker 4: 1:07

Tell me about it. I didn't move out here to live in London, that's for sure.

Speaker 2: 1:11

Where did you move out there from?

Speaker 4: 1:15

Well, i was born and raised here and then I lived in Hawaii for about 10 years and then I moved back to California. Once I got married, we had a kid and you know, the grandparents were kind of pressuring us to get back to back to family, closer to family, and you know, i think it was just time to move back to civilization.

Speaker 2: 1:35

Yeah, so to speak. Oh, that makes a lot of sense, yeah, where everything is and milk's not seven or eight dollars a gallon or whatever it is in Hawaii.

Speaker 4: 1:42

Oh no, it's here, It's.

Speaker 2: 1:44

It's not expensive here too, Oh my God you need to come where they make the milk. This is what we have here. It's not very far, a couple hours away.

Speaker 4: 1:51

Well, you know, I figured there's a hack to that. I just don't drink milk.

Speaker 2: 1:55

Oh they.

Speaker 4: 1:55

Well, there you go There, you go.

Speaker 2: 1:57

You could do that too. So, yeah, so I love lattes too much, so I have to. That's where I get my milk. Fix that. But yeah, let's talk a little bit about what you got going on. I mean you so you were in, you were in Hawaii for a while, you're back in California, you're in Newport Beach, that whole area right there. You're doing a lot of executive recruiting for years and years for startups, helping them make sure that they make the right moves when they hire. I mean, these are expensive hires, these are not cheap people, and a lot of the folks that listen to our podcast they're kind of all across the board, some of them you know, here in Cincinnati and they've got people that I know that got startups with hundreds of employees. They could be somebody who's just out here thinking, hey, i want to start a company someday. But I always tell people you could have A B idea, but you need an A team.

Speaker 4: 2:49

Oh yeah, 100%. Yeah, you know it's so it's. it's kind of funny. You know, i was fortunate enough to do a lot of work in the Silicon Valley for a lot of years And one of the things that I realized was, you know, people get funded and then you know startup founders and actually people that have been doing it for a long time, like they really just don't even know how to interview, and so what ends up happening is people kind of conduct these really, i mean kind of like industry, like you know, best practice interviews that probably work really good for the large companies that can afford to make bad hires, but for startups you can't know.

Speaker 4: 3:32

And so I kind of set on this mission. you know, some time ago that, like I wanted to fix that. I wanted to make sure that, like, like startup companies, it's so critical that every hire matter and they get the right person on the bus that that you know. the way in which I can fix that is get people really really good at interviewing, and when they're really good at interviewing they can. they can ensure that the person who joins is is is really going to be the person's can be most impactful to the organization. And to me that ties to two things. One, you need people who align with the core values of the company, that are positioned properly for your size organization. They really want what it is that you want And you know, for startups, you need people who are builders, you know, and that's that's kind of a unique, kind of DNA.

Speaker 4: 4:27

People who are builders tend to like want to go in and build stuff from scratch. They don't want to make things better or kind of just, you know, work on a widget, right, they want to. they want to do something impactful. And then, secondarily, you know it is important that people bring to the table transferable skills, that that that can can get them moving through and get them successful in the company. So what I found that most people do is they just focus on the skills and they ignore the other pieces, and so that's where we get into trouble.

Speaker 2: 5:08

Oh man, kyle, This is leading my favorite subject, mbti. This is starting to kind of head into the. So I'm an ENTP, rick and Kyle's an ENFP, and we work.

Speaker 2: 5:22

We work really well together, especially on this podcast. So ENFPs and ENTPs work right. How do you get? I'm telling you, we've been bringing this up on every one of these, I bring it up on every one of these, But do you? does that play into anything? I mean Enneagrams, MBTI, any of that stuff. I mean, do you look at that? So, of course, skills, Skills are what they are. You could give somebody a, have them sit down and do a test to see if they're a decent job of developer. But what, what do you? what do you look for? What are these other things that you're looking for? and do some of those tests kind of play into it?

Speaker 4: 5:52

No, not at all Like. so I think those tests and assessments in general are really helpful in how you're going to lead and communicate with people. But to make a determination on whether or not you hire somebody because there are in the NTF or like whatever their classification, is that. it's not accurate. You know there's no data out there to show that that's going to be an accurate criteria. The best that I've ever seen from from like predictive index and a bunch of these assessment companies is they can tell you who got hired, but beyond that they don't know if it was successful hire at all.

Speaker 2: 6:31

Are they just not collecting data on it, Or I mean, do they? I don't know. Is there no feedback loop there?

Speaker 4: 6:39

I don't believe so, because when, when, a, when a person is hired using that criteria like they're not feeding it back that we fired the person six months later, there's nobody capturing that data. Interesting So there's a software company right there, don't tell anybody, don't tell anybody.

Speaker 2: 7:01

Start hiring for it.

Speaker 4: 7:02

Okay, that's what we're doing, yeah, so yeah, that's, it can get dangerous. I mean, definitely it can work. It's better than nothing. But I think what what we try to drill down on is whether or not somebody operates under the same core values that your company operates under. That's independent of, like, somebody's personality profile. I feel like personality profiles are a little high, like too high level to make an accurate decision based on that. I prefer to to be able to gather evidence to support whether or not somebody operates the way in which we need them to operate within the organization, and that helps you get past the assumptions, bias and personal motives that most people make decisions based on.

Speaker 2: 7:50

You know well I tell people that I was detail oriented just because back in the day, when I used to actually like apply for jobs and stuff, i'd say detail oriented just because every resume I used to work at Like my first job out of college was at Kinko's downtown since I work a second shift and I worked in the computer services, so I would do resumes all day for people, right, it was like the worst. Yeah, all the fun work was taken up by the day people. So here I go with wedding invitations and resumes, right. So I'm reading on every resume is detail oriented.

Speaker 2: 8:20

You know, there's like certain things that everybody says And later on I realized I'm not that damn detail oriented. And then when I did my MBTI it's like, yeah, you're like the least detail oriented personality type. You're all over the place And I'm like that's me. I should stop telling people that, right, that I'm this detail oriented type. No, i need detail oriented people around me and to support me and to remind me when I have something to do, because I will literally go off track and do something else, like I am right now.

Speaker 4: 8:50

So do you 100%. I am not detail oriented at all either. I'm the same way. I'm a. I'm an entrepreneur, right Like we're. You know, we're like wild stallions that got to keep in a corral because otherwise we're just going to go chase shit.

Speaker 2: 9:05

Exactly. Yeah, we're like telling our boss better Oh, you know what you guys should do. It's like, no, we've got this plan and we're going down this path and this is what we're doing And the board agreed to do this. And you're like no, no, no, but it's the wrong direction. We need to adjust. And you, they don't want to hear that, like we're just not meant to work in those companies or we have we have that different roles in those companies And I fear that a lot of people do what I did and they just go and they put on their resume what they think somebody wants to hear. They go into the interview, tell somebody what they want to hear and they don't really even know themselves. Honestly, do you, do you deal with that? Like you said, where I'm going with this.

Speaker 4: 9:45

Yeah, yeah, i 100% like. I see it all the time and that's that that you know. If you think about what an interview is, the purpose of an interview is to get to the truth of who that human is. That's, that's, that's you're talking to, right, and the truth is that most, most people, if you you know most interviews, the way they're conducted is they're you're feeding them answers and you're giving them the answers and all they're doing is just kind of marketing them back to you. You know, just parroting them back to you. You know. So, like, like your example, you saying you're detail oriented because that's what they wanted to hear. Anybody who's astute will do that in an interview, right. And then what's interesting is the interviewer will come out and say, oh man, that person was great because you know they're detail oriented and you know they told me all the things that I wanted to hear.

Speaker 4: 10:36

That's exactly it, but they never dig underneath the hood to figure out whether or not it's real.

Speaker 2: 10:39

That's right, and you don't know until you hire them and it's kind of scary And the next thing you know the person's not not very detail oriented.

Speaker 4: 10:47

That, by the way, is terrifying. Finding me like to hire them because, oh, you know what I like them, let's just give them a shot, Like that's, that's such a dangerous attitude, right It's? it's kind of like, well, you meet somebody, an hour later you go, let's get married, and just give it a shot. What do you think You know, and hope that it works out. There's TV shows like that Hope there's not a good hiring strategy at all.

Speaker 2: 11:09

No, they. They filmed TV shows out in LA doing that same exact thing, where let's just get married. We just met each other. You're hot, i'm hot, let's go Like that's, that's pretty much it right. So Kyle works in a very demanding industry. It's sales, So sales, sales, sales. Fast pace, things have to get done really quickly And Kyle, one of his jobs is training new salespeople. So, Kyle, are you feeling what he's saying right now, Kyle?

Speaker 3: 11:38

Yes, because I'm the one that gets to you can get the fruit of the interview labor. So I get the old guys that if they don't if they interview well, but they you don't really get in depth in certain answers I'm the one to get to expose all their bullshit. And then it's like okay, now I'm stuck with this guy for six months or whatever it is trying to make my account on while I'm babysitting some knucklehead who can't show up on time or who can't follow directions very well. So, yes, but or on the other, on the other side, you know we've got, so we've actually got really good interviewers here, so I don't really have to. I don't have any complaints on my end. We'll get guys that I'll look at the perfor the first time and think this dude is a chump, There's no way he's going to make it. And within three weeks I'm like holy shit, this guy's amazing. How do they find?

Speaker 2: 12:30

So you get surprised on a good way sometimes.

Speaker 3: 12:35

Oh yeah, completely, and it like he was saying about core values. I mean you can get. you know the rubber meets the road really fast here, so it's not like you can get lost in a project for two weeks Where our stuff has to get done in 10 minutes. We've got, we've got an hour to get a carrier from the west side of Atlanta to the pickup. you know we've got to go. So I get to see right away if these guys can hold up to what you know, the expectations that have been created with TQL. where you got to go, you got to go you got to go.

Speaker 3: 13:10

There's no pussy foot around anything. There's no timidity. You got to be ready for rock.

Speaker 2: 13:16

And that seems a lot different than what Rick probably deals with on a regular basis because Rick's in the. You know the software world And I'm interested too, rick, like just the type of niche that you're in, like first of all, like you like working with entrepreneurs, you're you focused on the startup world and mainly really softwares, where it sounds like you kind of dug in. And now you've got this hiring OS which, like OS operating system kind of thing It's kind of it all plays together.

Speaker 4: 13:46

Yeah, yeah. So you know, what's interesting is um, so I, i don't do as much search work um now as I was, so we developed a product that's called inter. True, it's like a true interview, right, and the idea behind that is that, um, kind of one of the things that happened as as as I was kind of doing a lot of executive search work is I and and with the realization that people don't know how to interview, is I started building into my searches a, a interviewing process, saying, okay, look at we'll, we'll work together, but we need to run this interview process that I'm going to plug in. Here's how I build it. You guys are going to train and teach you how to do it, and then, um, you're going to successfully hire this person, and so, um, it took me a while to get it right, but, like, it actually started to work.

Speaker 4: 14:39

And then we started seeing, like these really incredible results where we were getting, you know, um, we, we had a couple of companies that were they hired their executive, and then they said you know, can you teach the rest of our staff to use this? So we have one company that was actually they do um, caregivers and nurses, and they, you know, they were at like maybe 40 people and we, we found them an executive and then, um, i think now they're, they're over 400 people, pretty close to 500 people, and they, they hire all of the caregivers and nurses. Um, the same way, it's all based on core values first, skills, second, and, um, you know they're, they're.

Speaker 4: 15:21

I talked to the CEO maybe about, uh, i think it was back in November, december timeframe. He's like we have not made a bad hire in six years, wow, and and we and we've got people that are coming through like we're getting referrals. We don't have to do really any recruiting, we don't post jobs, we don't do any of that, and so it's it's kind of it's pretty incredible how we were able to kind of turn that around. Yeah, um, kyle, doing sales. Actually, you know, i, i I used to have a big challenge with salespeople because, you know, as you know, kyle, they're mostly full of shit, right, I would tell you this this is a bad story but it's a funny story.

Speaker 3: 16:01

Actually, got came from California. The best sales guy I ever trained was a method. He was like he was. He was actually on heroin really bad And he was so fucking good on the phone. But I just could tell you could he could sell anything to anyone, cause he spent his whole life lying about who he was and what he was doing behind the scenes. So he was such, he was such a good con artist that it was like I was just. I just remember I was mad at him That he got. When he got fired I was so pissed off by the, not because he was an addict, but because of the fact that he had so much skill that he was just wasting by by not getting by, not even trying to get better. So, yeah, i the the. When the best person you've ever come across was a heroin addict, i would say a lot of. There is some. There's a lot of a bullshit involved with what we do.

Speaker 4: 16:56

Yeah, Yeah, But I you know, so I guess that are you looking for more methods to hire.

Speaker 3: 17:05

No, i don't, I would. I would much. I'm much more interested in how much rather have the guys that I know are going to do what they're supposed to do when they're supposed to do. It Is that you lose some of that natural salesmanship ability But at the same time, you can, you can. You can teach a competent sales. You can't teach characters.

Speaker 4: 17:28

You know, it's interesting as one of the best recruiters I ever trained was a fairly quiet person who was very like just a really great listener But asked really good questions And that person used to crush it for me. She she was. She was just very calm, would would ask really good directive questions, wouldn't talk very much And like just hit the cover off the ball, like month after month, like you know, so it's, it's, it's kind of interesting that um and then that does not at all fit the typical mode of a sales person, right.

Speaker 3: 18:43

No, no, no. I my cousin's really good sales And like he's a, he's a pretty big, he's pretty high up with Dell and BM two not BM two, but whatever the other PMC, amc two And he is the kind of guy that when you go to the tar film everything's kind of like over the top, happy to see you, Like, like you're somebody who's important, you know and say, hey, how are you doing?

Speaker 3: 19:10

And I was like, oh, that, i must say, point where it's uncomfortable. And I'm the other, i'm on the opposite side of sales, i'm more of a you know, i, i I try to stick through to who I am inside. So I'm more direct, i'm less touchy, feely. I mean I think that, um, my, takes me longer to build relationships with customers because it's harder for them to like want to talk to me, because I talk really slow and I can come up, come up, come across kind of serious too much. But the relationships that we forge are are much more durable because we, they know they can trust me and they know where I'm coming from.

Speaker 2: 19:47

Yeah, definitely. Well, rick, is any of this stuff? I mean the fact that you've done this for so long. One of the things I like about what you're talking about with your software is that you've got all this experience. You're listening to Kyle, you're probably I mean you're you're probably understanding everything he's saying, like you're getting it. You've probably dealt with people like this. You're able to take this knowledge, this, this stuff. I mean even even you kind of said I'm BTI, i don't know about that. I've got my own system based on all this experience that I have, and you could turn that into a piece of software that the next person can build on. Right, like it's not. It's not like these people like when your career is over, all that's gone, all that's gone. It's gone forever. Oh yeah, totally, but you've built something to keep it going.

Speaker 4: 20:39

Yeah, you know, i think it took me a long time to do it, but one of those things, it's like I don't. I just realized a long time ago I don't scale right, so That's right. Well, how do I figure out a way in which I can scale? And, um, yeah, and you know for a long time, um, you know a lot of what we built out. There's some AI and machine learning components that haven't really been, you know, viable. And, thank God, you know GPT, for, yay, I use it all the time. Yeah, right, um, you know, now, with a lot of the generative AI, like a lot of the things that we want to do are available, then they make it a viable product.

Speaker 2: 21:20

So, yeah, Well, now that it's a thing and there's a model for it, it makes it a lot easier to spin up new products like this that you've had in your head. You haven't really been able to like get out there or take a lot of time and you'd kind of have to reinvent the wheel. But not anymore. I mean, there's so much opportunity now with AI and you know these large language models, and now they're saying you don't even need a large language model. You can have a, um, a smaller language model that's more defined for a particular thing, potentially like for your industry, and take this stuff out of your head, put it into something. Put it into Essentially an AI, like can we build another Rick inside of this software? That's kind of the idea.

Speaker 4: 22:05

I love, i love to be able. I mean I am a handsome man. So what can I say? Look at you. I mean you agree, you're doing MMA.

Speaker 2: 22:11

You're staying in shape. You're living in Newport Beach. You got a software company. I mean, come on, i'm hydrodynamic.

Speaker 2: 22:18

You know, there you go, I mean you got your Hawaii and LA combination, Like, look at this, You're taking the best of both worlds and putting it into one brand. You're taking the best of both worlds and putting it into one person, Yeah, Yeah. So I mean, you've got all this experience and it's like now you're like let's, let's create this software. Let's focus on and you're not even necessarily focused right now on on tech companies. This is, it can be for anybody, Like you just mentioned travel or nursing company, whatever hospitals.

Speaker 4: 22:49

Actually, you know what Our first customer like. We're not building it for. You know we've got one tech client. We just launched the product in November. We've got one company that's a tech company, but almost every other company You know we were working with a lot of are you guys familiar with EOS at all?

Speaker 2: 23:08

No.

Speaker 4: 23:10

Traction Gino Wickman.

Speaker 2: 23:12

So traction, yeah, of course.

Speaker 4: 23:14

Yeah, so you know we're actually working with a lot of EOS companies right now that are all over the board, because you know they. They they're core values based And it's a very easy transition to be able to help them build their interview questions around their core values and then get them operational. And you know they're already used to systems. You know companies, who, who run an operating system. You know if you can. You know what we're doing is we're systematizing interviewing for them so that essentially, anybody can plug in at any given stage, run the interview and be able to provide or produce accurate results.

Speaker 2: 23:53

Interesting. So it takes it out of their personal bias. In a way, it takes that out of it and puts it into the system, puts it into this I mean partially sounds like partial AI type of setup And it runs them through a process that, yeah, it takes some of the bias out of it. That's, that's great.

Speaker 4: 24:15

It takes a lot of the bias out of it. As a matter of fact, we we don't even provide resumes to the interviewers because resumes bring bias. Because people go in, they look at a resume and they go oh well, i don't like that school that this person went to, or I don't like that. So they've already made a decision, based off the resume, as to what kind of interview is going to happen. And I just noticed that there's, you know, people go into an interview thinking I'm going to really like this person, or they think, oh, i'll talk to this person, but I'm probably going to screen him out.

Speaker 4: 24:45

And so most people have two different types of interviews that happen Interest, which is completely unfair, and it's actually not healthy for the company, because the company needs the best person to join, not the person you like the most, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2: 25:01

Well, i mean, if the University of Pittsburgh was on a resume, i know that Kyle Stevie would probably eliminate them immediately, or, yeah, anything to do with Pittsburgh. Steeler fan interest. Steeler fan gone Out of the interview process?

Speaker 3: 25:16

Yeah, if there was if there was anything. If they're great grandmothers within 200 miles of Pittsburgh, i'm not hired, even even even if it was at the crackhead. I mean, i'm sorry the, the meth guy who made you.

Speaker 4: 25:27

He probably came from, yeah, 100% came from Pittsburgh. That guy He was, he was, he was a, he was Cal.

Speaker 3: 25:38

He. He was a. He was a loan beach. He was a loan beach. He was a loan beach. He was a loan beach. He was a loan beach. He was a loan beach. He was a loan beach. He was a California guy.

Speaker 4: 25:47

Okay.

Speaker 3: 25:48

He settled in Indiana, which is the weirdest place on earth The federal Long Beach, Lawrenceburg, Indiana. It's just, it's just strange.

Speaker 2: 25:57

Yeah, that's a pretty different thing. Yeah, no, we love our Pittsburgh listeners. We don't hate, we don't hate you guys. We just we just want to beat you a football every weekend. So there's that, and but anyway, yeah. So, getting getting back to the bias thing, So it's taken out the bias It's doing, it's it's actually making your it. Actually it might take some of the liability out of interviewing as well, cause I mean you could potentially have some complaints there from people that say, hey, this guy didn't treat me fairly in the interview. This person, you know, obviously didn't like me for whatever reason. Going into this thing, i wonder why? was it cause my first name is this, or is it because I went to this school? or is it because, whatever, there was bias there and now I'm going to, i'm going to say something and I'm going to get an attorney and screw you guys.

Speaker 4: 26:51

Yeah, that happens all the time, right Like, so it does help to look at. It Doesn't happen for smaller companies very often. You know usually the people that they target the big companies with the big pockets, right Like that's. But you know somebody feels like they were discriminated against. And you know we also record and transcribe all the content. We use it for training purposes. Oh, and also you know our AI is is providing kind of recommendations back based on the actual evidence. So it's it's saying Hey, this person said this, dig deeper here on this question. So all the questions are predetermined and and basically there's sub questions below that that help us get to the truth. But it's really easy to be able to defend that No, you weren't. You weren't discriminated against at all. I mean, we, we evaluated you for this core value and you, you even said this is not you Right. So it makes it very, very easy and you're making decisions that are based on fundamental principles, as opposed to you know the color of somebody's skin or you know sex or whatever else.

Speaker 2: 27:58

Yeah, anything else that you can.

Speaker 3: 28:00

I was thinking about this because Pint, the vice president, went to Hanover and I was like if I put on my power to go job searching, not put on my resume that I went to Hanover depending on who you're talking to they're like Oh well, i know that's where Mike Pence went. Mike Pence is an asshole, So I don't want any part of this. And he must be. He must be from one of these liberal arts. The liberal arts school is very religious and conservative.

Speaker 4: 28:25

Yeah, assumptions, people make assumptions but based on that stuff all the time.

Speaker 2: 28:31

All the time, all the time, yeah, and now you've just it's not just about the software. I mean, you've got this startup company, you've built this awesome thing that I think the more I hear about it now, the more I'm interested in it. Because you know, you mentioned the one company who hasn't made a bad higher in eight years. How much money has that saved you? Like, if you were going to quantify all this stuff we're talking about, hey, potential discrimination thing, hey, that's going to take time away from my team. It's going to have to pay lawyers. I'm going to have to do all this. Also, a bad hire cost you I can't remember. There's some company out there that quantified it at one point. You may have it off the top of your head, but I'm thinking about like, hey, what's the you know the cost of your software versus all these headaches.

Speaker 4: 29:20

Yeah, I mean, look at the cost that nobody really knows. There's a bunch of formulas on the cost of a bad hire, right. But you know what happens if you lose one of your best people because of it? right, There's all different kind of productivity, right. Because you bring in a bad hire, Everybody else's productivity goes down because they see that that person's not performing. And you know, basically what you're doing is demonstrating that, hey, our bar is lower now, so you guys don't have to work as hard. That's right. There's so many repercussions to a bad hire. I do kind of believe that. you know, if you look at each hire, each person you bring into the company, especially in sales role, right, They're worth a million dollars to the company. Each salesperson should be bringing in a million dollars a year, right? So if you bring in the wrong person, it's costing you a million dollars, Real good point.

Speaker 4: 30:11

And if you think of it that way, why would you want to bring in like, why would you take that risk?

Speaker 2: 30:16

Oh, you wouldn't take that risk. Yeah, i mean that's, that's wild. And I hope that when people are listening to what you're saying right now, if they're thinking about doing a startup or maybe they even have a startup, what you're hitting on are pain points. These are major pain points. You're swinging I mean you're swinging for the fences here, because this industry I mean what you're talking about, what we've talked about so far up to this point these, every company deals with this stuff. It's expensive. These are your team, is everything, like we said before in the podcast.

Speaker 2: 30:49

So, guys, if you're listening to this, listening to Rick right now, he's come up with a solution that goes after a big prop. big problems, not just small little problems that you know you're going through your day and you're like, oh, i should do a startup that does this. These are big problems that, if he hits on these and companies start realizing, hey, we're not, we haven't made a bad hire in eight years. Hey, we haven't had anybody say that. you know, they were discriminated against in an interview. This is the type of stuff that people talk about And at some point, when people are using your software, you don't have to do sales anymore because your customers are going to become your salespeople.

Speaker 4: 31:29

Yeah, that's the idea. That's the idea. I mean, like you know, if we can, we can down, hire sales and just have customer success.

Speaker 2: 31:37

That would be great right, yeah, that would be 100%. And then these people leave. I mean, you know, if I leave a hospital, i'm going to go to another hospital, i'm probably going to have a similar position. And if I was using your software to hire, if I'm in HR or whatever, i'm going to be like, hey, why aren't we using this other software here that I was using at this other hospital? Oh, what is that all about? Wow, man, they were killing it with this software, let's use this. And then they start talking about it. So I mean, this is you know.

Speaker 4: 32:04

Well, here's the interesting thing We built it. We built it for SMBs, we didn't build it for enterprises, and my mission personally is to help entrepreneurs and small business leaders be able to win, because in hiring right And the thing is that You know, look, we lose a lot of times to bigger offers. Yes, and the reason why we lose to bigger offers is because you don't have, you think that you don't, you can't offer somebody you know a huge salary. But there's like the mindset has shifted in humans, especially like the younger generations, where they're more about what value am I getting out of the company, as opposed to like how much you're gonna pay me, and so, as, as people come up through the ranks, if you can demonstrate to them that, hey, look at, we can, we can help you grow your career, we can help you get to where you want to go by joining this company, and here's all the value we provide, then you don't have to pay somebody a whole bunch of money to, to, to join the company.

Speaker 4: 33:07

And that's been, that's been a side benefit that we've seen with a lot of our customers, because large companies aren't saying, hey, look at, here's how we're gonna groom you And here's what we're gonna do for you And you know, we realize you have this problem right now, but if, if you join us, you'll be working on this, that and the other thing, which is exactly what you told us you wanted to do. Um, you know, if you go to Google, it's like hey, get to work at Google, good luck, we'll pay you a lot of money. Hopefully, get in a good group.

Speaker 2: 33:35

Yeah, Yeah. Well, you would know about that. You've probably placed people there or new know people that have been in that company plenty of times.

Speaker 4: 33:43

I know a lot of people have worked at Google. Yeah, i've never placed anybody there. I've, i've come to, i've battled Google quite a few times for candidates and I am a terrible loser. So I just, you know, i'm one of these people where, like, if, if, um, if I'm up against another recruiter, i'm going to do everything I can to destroy them.

Speaker 2: 34:05

That sounds like a you're you'd be great at MMA, then, which is, you know, one of your, one of your side hobbies or whatever where Kyle just he falls over and just gets beat up. This is what it's. My impression of Kyle in a match is just, is he just? he just like, all right, he does a little something and then he gives up about halfway through it. This is my impression of what the way you explain your matches Kyle. This is what it sounds like to me.

Speaker 3: 34:29

No, this is what it is. It's a I'll do like eight weeks of really hard preparation. I will work with the guy who the coach at the gym will come up with a great game plan. Um, i got into a lot. I got enough connections that generally I don't know who I'm going up against, and then I will get on the mat and I will forget everything and I will pull guard and I will hold on tight for until the referee breaks it up because I'm stalling, and then I'll get my guard past and I'll lose three to nothing. It's pretty much every freaking fight. I get it, i'm, I'm, i get an adrenal dump. I'm just working with this.

Speaker 2: 35:09

Rick, i don't, i don't get the impression you're. You've got that problem with all this competitive talk.

Speaker 4: 35:14

Well, i'm not. I'm a guard puller too, cause that's kind of my school right. I, i train at AOJ. Um, they pull guard, but like the, the, the, what kind of what they teach you to do is pull guard and then sweep real quickly. So you know, so you're, you're going in kind of safe and and and and but. But uh, like I, like I told you guys earlier, like you know, there's a bunch of killers there and I'm probably the worst. You know. No, i'm not the worst person my age, but I'm probably the one of the worst black belts there, but you know, hey.

Speaker 2: 35:48

Hey, you're a black belt. You got there, you, your competitiveness got you to that level, so you're you're there.

Speaker 4: 35:53

I told everybody I got promoted. I was a diversity promotion.

Speaker 1: 35:56

There you go. I got to promote. What'd you say, Kyle?

Speaker 3: 36:06

One of the few Americans there. I would assume that was a black belt right now.

Speaker 4: 36:12

There's, actually there's a lot of them. They produced a lot of black belts, yeah, but, but there's definitely more Brazilians and you know definitely more people from that. They have a big recruiting program and they go to Brazil a couple of times a year and recruit people from Brazil and bring them over and make them world champions, right? So jeez Yeah.

Speaker 2: 36:31

Well, that's an easy it's not tough flight. So also, why don't you tell us a little bit about this book that you've got this healing career wounds? How did that come about? I mean, you got the software company. You're doing all this stuff, you're fighting people. Now you got this. You decided to write a book on top of all this.

Speaker 4: 36:48

Yeah, i did this during co, like I got bored during COVID, so I'm like I'll just write a book.

Speaker 2: 36:54

Yeah, a little bored. No, nobody to fight during COVID, so let me just write something.

Speaker 4: 36:58

Well, it went off the premise of I don't scale right, so why don't I make it really easy for companies to plug in and actually build an interview process. So that's what higher OS is is like the methodology that I built out right. So essentially, the book is a, like, i wanted to be an easy read. I can't I'm not a huge reader and I can't start. I can't start reading books that have a million stories about companies that have, like you know, good grade is great book, but like I don't care about Coca Cola and how they went from 100 million to a billion dollars, because I'm a startup, yeah, i want to know how they got to a million, right.

Speaker 4: 37:37

So the idea behind the book is I wanted to create something you could read on a flight, that is, a playbook that you can plug into your business, and so I've got scripts in it. I have the whole process kind of laid out and how you run an effective interview practice And yeah, so, like that that was. You know, i did it during COVID And we released it in what? 2021 or 2021? Yeah, i think 2021. Oh, and yeah, it's been, it's been doing pretty well.

Speaker 2: 38:11

So Nice, you got through that pretty quick. Yeah, kyle just finished his book. How long that take you, kyle. That took you like a full year, didn't it?

Speaker 3: 38:19

For fucking ever. No, it took me, yeah, took me about 20 months, but I was taking I was taking nerd talk and trying to translate it to Hillbilly And it was way more difficult than I thought it was going to be. I'm not the greatest transcriber of things, i guess.

Speaker 2: 38:35

Kyle wrote a book on tokenization of assets, mostly real estate assets.

Speaker 4: 38:41

Nice.

Speaker 2: 38:42

So that's Kyle.

Speaker 4: 38:43

And I I just, you know, I just focused. I committed to like three months where I'd wake up at like 430 in the morning, open my laptop, read the last paragraph that I wrote and then just start writing, And so I just did like verbal vomit for about a net. I mean, you're written vomit for an hour and a half to two hours every morning, and then the best thing I ever did was I hired a developmental editor and she helped me get everything together and structuralize it and make it.

Speaker 3: 39:15

I did. I did none of that. I put a my. We went to a yoga retreat in Bali and we loved the music down there. My wife got a playlist Nice So I put that on and I drove in the work or office because I could. I would get more work done there than I will at the house, but I was the same way. About five o'clock in the morning I would go in, put my earphones in and then try to type up as much as I could. It was I think I could. There were I couldn't do word vomit. It was just. it was just I had to. I had to do more like legal writing. It was the when we were learning legal writing in law school. It was just like you got to take these big words and try to get them as close to one pillable as you can. And it was just, it was like a puzzle.

Speaker 4: 39:57

Yeah, yeah, i get that. I couldn't turn on the lights or anything. I just had to keep it all, like you know, cause I get purple squirrel mode, you know something? So like, if you're an ENTP, if too much is happening around me, i'm all over the place.

Speaker 2: 40:14

What's your? what's your MBTI? I'm curious.

Speaker 4: 40:18

My MBTI. What is MBTI?

Speaker 2: 40:20

Are you an ENTP or are you, or what's your Enneagram? Did you take any of those tests? I did disk. Oh, did you do disk Okay?

Speaker 4: 40:26

What's your? yeah, I've done disk. I'm a high DI, Okay.

Speaker 2: 40:29

Okay, yeah, you're same as me. Yeah, we got problems.

Speaker 4: 40:36

I'm more either AMD, i'm a ID, and then you know my SC are pretty low. but you know, i don't, i don't know, i don't really pay much attention to it.

Speaker 2: 40:47

I'm more or less a promoter Like I'm a. I'm the person who like hypes it up and puts things out there and gets things going, and not necessarily the guy who can, like take it over the finish line. You know, that's just not my thing.

Speaker 4: 40:59

Yeah, yeah, yeah, i'm the same way. So you're a high AI then on disk.

Speaker 2: 41:03

Yeah, yeah, we got a. I just, i just like the. I like to mess with ideas and theories and things like that, as opposed to, you know, sit there, i can't, i can't do that. I can't get up in the morning and just crank away for a certain amount of time, like I want to get up and do something else, like immediately, like I'll do it for 10 minutes and then I'll just I got to get up and do something.

Speaker 2: 41:21

It's tough, it's a struggle, yeah, and there's a lot of people out there like that. I mean, if you're got an entrepreneurial personality type, if you're listening and you've got an entrepreneurial personality, just know that a lot of us are like that. A lot of us are very like you said. I'm squirrel, squirrel, like, and you're like oh where, where you know and you're, there's always something else that you want to be doing And you think you can multitask and do several things at one time, but it's, it can be a struggle, especially if you're trying to write a book 100%. So, yeah, guys, well, this is awesome man. So, rick, you know you want to leave us with something. Some way for people to like reach out to you, understand a little bit more about what you're doing. Maybe get the book.

Speaker 4: 42:02

Yeah, absolutely So. The book's on Amazon, It's on, you know, Kindle and everything else. It's called Healing Career Wounds And you know the. The title is a little, you know, you think it's for, you know, a career seeker, but it's actually the title is the punchline. If you really want to attract really strong people as a startup, if you can demonstrate that you can help heal a person's career wounds, you're going to attract really solid talent to your company because nobody else is doing it And that's the competitive advantage that you have as a, as a smaller organization. So if you can figure out what they want and what you offer, satiates that, then it puts you in a point where, like nothing can stop you from landing that person. I also have a podcast too. It's called Higher Power Radio. It's not a religious show, It's H-I-R-E.

Speaker 4: 42:54

Okay, there you go And and and then, of course, our, our software platform is Intertruits. I-n-t-e-r-t-r-u dot a-i We just launched in November. We've got we've got a small bunch of companies. We're actually still working through our MVP and onboarding customers, but we've got a waitlist that we're building out. If you're a small and medium sized business and you know values are important to you and hiring the right people is important to you, then reach out to us. We'd love to talk to you about, you know, when we're, when we're fully launched getting you on the platform.

Speaker 2: 43:29

Love it. Rick, this has been awesome man, i really appreciate it And, uh, i hope you get out there on the water sometime, if you, if you're into that. You're in Newport Beach, so you're right there.

Speaker 4: 43:40

Yeah, you know it's funny, i, i like I actually traded in my surfboard for a mat and I'm starting to itch to get back in the water because I'm spending too much time on the mat. So I don't have too much time, and startup life is not, you know, not really conducive to free time right now.

Speaker 2: 43:59

Well, we don't get that at all, so we're even further away from being able to surf or get out on the water. So you get out.

Speaker 4: 44:05

Might as well be where you are.

Speaker 2: 44:07

You might be more productive here. Honestly, like it's, it's a good place to do stuff, so, but cool man, i really appreciate it. Rick man, thanks for being on the show, sir, yeah, Thank you so much for having me, guys.

Speaker 4: 44:17

It was great to meet you guys.

Speaker 2: 44:19

You too, yeah, you too. Thanks for joining us on this week's episode of Side Hustle City. Well, you've heard from our guests, now let's hear from you. Join our community on Facebook, side Hustle City. It's a group where people share ideas, share their inspirational stories and motivate each other to be successful and turn their side hustle into their main hustle. We'll see you there and we'll see you next week on the show. Thank you.