How to build an A+ team to drive 700% growth

Steve pakras from verblio thank you guys all so much for staying before lunch with me I really appreciate it um I will try to make it worth your while that is not me oh that looks more like me um this presentation was uh this was a much longer saster presentation before um and we streamlined it down so it might run a little fast but I'm going to try to pack it a lot we're here to talk about how to build an A-Plus Talent company with D minus budget

um which is what you do when you're doing with with bootstrap world so I think people think about bootstrapped in a lot of different ways the way I think about it is if you're an investor company you're investing two years in front of where you want to be and if you're a bootstrapped company you're investing what you needed to do two years ago now um and so you need to find the right people in order to do that and getting those people who are going to drive that is your biggest competitive Advantage it's probably the thing that I'm most proud of that we've done as a company

um Let me show um so this is verballo's growth rate I took over the company from the founders in 2000 um at the end of 2016. um so we have been growing at 40 to 50 percent successfully at a bootstrap budget since then we are 100 bootstrapped until a couple months ago when founder path helped us out with some work in capital I have much to say about how amazing this is as a service I was not paid to do so but please talk to

me about it afterwards there was no access to Capital like this for any time before that we're an S corp company so my Founders were going to have to take out liens on their homes for me to get a line of capital before uh and now I have a cheaper rate than here possible and always available within two weeks um this is our story this is what I'm talking about we are a Content creation Marketplace so what we are a combination of SAS and Marketplace we have a network

of 3 000 freelance writers and what they do is create the power to basically how do you explain floor and exploit the new competitive Advantage for the marketing channel of inbound traffic and so we create that content for the web this is our I don't know why it says 2019 but these are our stats through 2000 through year to date we're basically on track for over a hundred thousand pieces of unique content created we are trying to create unique content at scale with high quality and that combination is a very

hard thing to do we call ourselves a master of niches which is in order to compete in SEO it has to get better and better every single year both on the quality side of the writing and also what you need to do to enhance that content to be seen and found we have where we serve over a thousand active customers every month we do that with we have 3 000 writers active in our platform we're actually trying to decrease that to try to find the right balance between talent and scape scalability about a thousand of them are

writing on our platform every month we're on track for 12 to 14 million dollars in Revenue this year and we pay out about a third of that to writers which is a different marketing model than a lot or different business model than a lot of other players in our space the company started in 2010 we were Denver Builder based and then covet hit and now we're not um so this originally started as I was going to talk about one thing I was

going to talk to you about how to scale talent and then Nathan got really excited that I should talk about how to start a Marketplace and also what's a SAS business model for Marketplace businesses I'm going to focus on the middle part and just talk about how we scaled our talent I'm happy to talk about the rest of it later but I don't think we'll be able to cover quite that much we scale this team I took over about 10 people we are actively over 50 now I've interviewed and talked to every single one of the people who came on

board we also recruited a very specific focus on our contractors and who we wanted to bring on as contractors all of our developers our individual contractors are out of Latin America that are maybe a quarter mid to 20 percent of the cost work with our team full time and has give us incredible competitive Advantage but getting them was really quite the um with the tour and so I'm going to have you walk away with two things that I want you to think about that I think really differentiated

us and set us apart with the competitive advantage and the first is that we think about sales and recruitment or recruitment as a sales and marketing process every piece of it is a funnel that should be managed with marketing in mind and in the same way there should be a sales you should Target who you're selling to marketing you should have the right messaging you should have the right segment and then on the product side you're building your company to appeal to them and lastly customer success is you're going to

onboard them because you want to keep them that is how we think of it we don't think it should be run by people Ops in HR we think it should be run by the CEO of the company and the second main takeaway is that if you're a CEO of a company this is your number one job and in order way most people think about strategy is what you should be doing and you can talk about people first strategies all day long but to me a people first strategy starts with what are you not going to be doing and what are you not going to be investing your resources in I'll give you one example

before we jump in um we started off with a um with a actually let me give you one of my favorite references so I read a long time ago that uh Steve Ballmer at the beginning of every year talked to his executive assistant about what percent of his calendar wanted to be allocated to every single one of the functions 25 percent of sales 25 to customers um 25 to people I think of it that same way I want over half of my time to be spent internally and that means we

specifically don't focus on sales and product nearly as much um as is the the current Dogma Force startup success um Nathan really wanted to uh include an org chart um this is kind of amazing to me I think there's a couple things first as any of you want to see them in a higher Growth Company you look at your org chart from a few years ago compared to what it is now and you get blown away about how this happened I interviewed every single one of these people when they came on board there were a bunch of things

that uh that I think really set us apart so one is every member of this leadership team that I've hired over the last six years we have had zero percent turnover that gives an incredible competitive Advantage they are also built for growing a much larger organization than I currently have so we don't spend time on turnover um we don't spend time on having to recruit every year they get to do everything we have we've lost one person on who we didn't want to lose over the last year we at lose an average of two people per

year that retention gives us such scale and such ability to focus on the bigger challenges for our customers and for our product than anything else um every one of these top people who then hired a bunch of other people came from my referral Network and people that I st that I stayed in touch with over the years they were the best of the best that I'd worked with and networking was one of my biggest Keys is staying in touch with people that you like along the way so that they're there and they're available for the moment you that you can actually afford to hire

them or you have room for them and then I think the other thing about looking at a bunch of people in boxes that I find interesting is these all use there you didn't used to be any drop downs so every single one of these people that you're hiring at a certain stage of your client and this is really kind of like a 0 to 10 million type of of org chart every person that you're buying that you're bringing on board is an Explorer they're creating their own job wreck so you created a job wreck that you thought was going to fit them but they never

created that job and so you should think about uh the people you're bringing on that would fit that personality type um bootstrap to eight Talent so the first thing that we look for is a classic Market segmentation what can I be doing differently what it's a innovators dilemma type of situation who can I be looking for that no one else is looking for what characteristics can I bring on at a more affordable cost that I might appeal to might appeal to us and

so the first thing is I don't believe in hiring for experience at a 0 to 10 million type of range there are very few positions that require a large amount of been there before done that those are the most expensive people those are the most the most competitive and those are the hardest priored away from the large investor company or investor funded companies those are also the ones I don't want if they want to be with the large investor funded companies and they want the highest salaries that

are going to go there so what am I going to build for them I need to appeal some do something to appeal to them along the way so I'm looking for traits I am looking for a high passion for motivation deep curiosity I'm looking for energy I'm looking for smarts and curiosity I want people who are going to look and figure out what the problems are that they need to solve because I can't even tell them ahead of time and then flexibility um I want them to be able to to adjust to

whatever pivot that we're going to take because there's a lot of mindset that's going to go into this and so we it's funny so Nathan asked me to put up our scorecard for our recruitment process and I thought this is really actually pretty evident the way that we think about hiring Talent we I firmly believe that scorecards are stupid I think that scorecards make you feel like the choice that you made makes you feel better about the choice you made it only reifies your existing values and your existing choices I realize there's

a lot of Dei concerns and thoughts that go into this process and if you're scaling a larger company it's you know it's important to make sure those checks and balances are in place um but for me it's about hiring for values so we have an extensive recruiting process where we have eight to ten people interview every person that comes on board to me spending that amount of time I think it was it was just uh Todd from Panda who just said 30 minutes with a candidate is not going to tell you if they're a good candidate or not people are getting better at interviewing all

the time you might get a lot better feeling if you got eight to ten but you also are going to know if they like you after eight to ten so those are both really important so we have an extensive we want to know that you're willing to invest in us we're willing to invest a lot in you if we think you're a good candidate and then each one of our interviewers is focused on at least one of the values if not all of them and a very specific question sets is going through we spent a lot of time thinking about our values like I can't remember what speaker we were just talking to but

the values come up when the right time to find your values is after you created them and you try to figure out what you've just created as opposed to the Whiteboard strategy of putting them out there ours are about passion quirkiness and scrappiness inclusiveness and really cheering on bringing energy to the rest of the team the thing that I interview for at the end and why it's so important I thought that Todd's comment was really interesting of like what value does the CEO bring is this just a control freak situation to me I'm going in with a

couple things one is I want to know that you're curious about something like there's something that you just became unexpectedly passionate about and once you did you went obsessively after and wanted to learn it because that's who I wanted my company and the second is the way that I feel I want to feel more energized after I leave the question or after I leave the interview with you than I felt before um and I think if you're adding more energy with every single new person that you bring on you're going to bring a more energized company that's going to attract more energized Talent that's

going to keep coming in um so I think of recruiting like marketing um so we work like a funnel we focus on the talent the second piece of it is we think about the marketing piece is I want my marketing team writing the job Rex and so we'll talk a little more about Job Rex in a second but this is your place where you're attracting your talent so you should be standing out wherever you're going and it um I I

challenge all of you to look at your job Rex and to see if it's the place that you would want to work by looking at it so I have challenged my team that first for the first 20 job wrecks that we created I read and edited every single one of them because this is my messaging I do it for all of marketing why wouldn't I do it for my top people and then I had a mandate that I went three times by the end of every one of them because I want people that are going to be fun to work with and I want them to write me a cover letter that entertains the crap out of me so that me reading

their cover letters is more interesting because I wrote a better job wreck um and then Brandon culture is really the product aspect of this and this is what you need to build you need to build that brand and culture that attracts your top talents this is your product to the outside world and this is a really hard thing to do um I'll take a little pivot for our little tangent for a second and say so much of business school so much of books and thought leadership is all about those pivotal decisions when you took financing we're going to talk about when you took financing all the time

during this conference it's when you made your big pivot and MBA programs I got an MBA we focused on these things all the time and then what I find out is really successful is you set your strategy and you make a thousand micro decisions and micro interactions every day that you make people want them to work more with you and that you want to work more with them it is the CEO who's on the slack Channel studying emojis liking things and setting up a funny emoji afterwards is going to get you so much Credence people are going to work

want to work with you then when people interview with you they're going to be like what's your CEO like and they're like oh my gosh I can't even tell you the comment it's ridiculous and it's embarrassing what he just said but that's the way that you're going to drive these things if you're not part of your own culture and you've off you've delegated that to somebody else your company's not going to have the company or the culture you're looking for mine's clearly a quirkier culture that than most people are comfortable with I lead with a lot of humor yours could be a data culture you could

have data all over your website but make it consistent and make it true as opposed to you're going to check in on the recruiting meeting once a month this is what our careers page looks like it is quirky and it is meant to attract a certain type and has meant to not attract a certain type if you don't think sane were freaking fantastic on a page is funny um you might not think we're funny and might not want to work with us but we take a lot of risks and we let people be

really inventive as far as what they are um um we promote our brand and culture everywhere so um we can't pay competitive salaries everyone of these leaders who came to our company took a pay cut to come to my company to do this because they want to be there so we have to make sure that they want to be there all the time and there's a lot of things that top talent want uh and desire and I think a lot of us learn more and more about that during the pandemic than we ever have before

one is they want agency they want control they want to be able to make a difference so I meet with every member of my company it used to be every month I think Todd was talking about this as well I deeply believe in the one-on-one not just Not Just for information gathering which is the way I think most people think of it but it's also to empower those employees you want people who are going to make a change you want them to see something and want to make a difference as opposed to whatever systems you've built up in place like scar tissue in your company that is going to prevent

them from having that agency um there's benefits that you can think of for being attractive or to attract talents so we have last Friday's off now I know there's a lot of movement towards four-day work work weeks which I'm deeply interested in um there's quirky benefits that cost you absolutely nothing that are so fun you can talk about an interview we offer 200 if you dye your hair one of verballio's three colors it has to be over 50 percent and I have to approve it but um we have a snack budget but you only

get the snack budget if you share what your snack order is on slack and you eating in um this is free like this is free people want this and this makes people super excited to share what they're doing with their lives think about your benefits that way too um so we're going to talk a few seconds about how do you land a players um we're going to talk about Job Rex and so uh I talked about how I want every job rack to make at least make me laugh three times here's just some examples I

love our product descriptions do you even speak Dev bro eats complexity for breakfast and Beauty for dinner has a healthy dose of Whimsy adventurous and rah-rah team spirit your copywriter should be able to do this with like in 30 minutes and you're having your HR people write this like attract the best people this takes so little effort get excited about it read each one of them make see if you would want this job um the second this is kind of a little less obvious which is be really

transparent in your job racks I think most job Recs are kind of vague with the idea of we'll tell them what the job is once they get there top talent doesn't want to know that they want to know what they're getting themselves into if they're a good fit um I think most of us are cautious in that every job wreck is actually impossible there's no one who can fill every single thing on there and you turn off a lot of top talent the more things that you say but I think more people are recognizing that now be honest with them um I would love to Colorado now has a

law we're from Denver and uh that says that you have to be more transparent on your on the comp it's actually been really helpful to let people know just what range we're in uh the last piece can I activate your phone okay am I am I late yet um is to stick the landing um this is really customer success so many sales presentations talk about how sales doesn't end the day the contract gets signed um I think I've seen that presentation a hundred times

um your attend your high your recruitment didn't end the day that you got them on board and that you pass them over to your hiring manager your hiring manager might hire one person every three years that person might have hired their very first person your entire structure and you as the CEO need to be supporting that person and bringing them on board um and so what do we do we have a bunch of things so the first I think is just like normal human like good empathy and and niceness which is when somebody accepts when they're thinking about when

you've made an offer to them have every single person they talk to in the company write them an email and say hey I'm super I'm super excited to meet you come on board I hope you make it not just the recruiting manager not just the head of HR as they're like waiting to get back this is not don't dehumanize your own process because it's so process driven um the second is once they do accept have as many people in the company possibly send out something nice to them as possible send them a swag package make them feel part of the team and then

have an onboarding session so we now once you're big enough so it took us a while to get there but I'm a part of every onboarding session too I want to run the part about culture I want to talk about the culture company history if your executives are making time for new people and they feel like they have a direct connection they are going to be so much more energized to uh to go and you're letting them know that they have that ability to make change themselves um and so I have one last story to end with which is um

is it kind of an example of what uh of what we're doing here of kind of the main point of the story so I took over in 2017 I have another graph that I included in the safter presentation which is um I hired an amazing um so I met this woman Zoe um treason when I was she was an intern at my previous startup and I thought she was a top talent she was a film major and she was going to business school because she thought it would be interesting she'd never manage one human in her life but she was all of the traits that I just talked about flexible

motivated curious passionate Dependable um and so I went out and recruited her before she could finish business school to come over to the new startup that I'd taken over and we had ahead of customer success that just wasn't cutting it um and I gave Zoe head of customer six success role after having managed zero people in her entire life she now runs 20 people which is half of my company uh having never done so before and she grew up through the organization and so the

way that we got there was I had a big decision to make when we first come on board if you're going to build a strategy about hiring top talent that's flexible and passionate but has never done it before you need to give them a lot more resources so I had a budget where I could choose one sales person or an executive coach to support all my new leaders on my first year and I chose an executive coach to coach up that team so they could do all of these things and so that's where strategy gets made and the things that you don't do as

much as the things that you do do and I think that is really one of the major the most important success feature is in growing us 700 over the last couple years and so uh Nathan just came in the room so I'm going to talk about how I didn't talk about the first point and the third point that you added sorry but I did nail the point I I think I talked about him a little bit um so uh this is how we scale the team and I'm happy to talk about contractors

and scaling as well and I would love to talk about Marketplace and business models anytime thank you