Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 21:10
Like do some people like in their hotel paperwork have some kind of stipulation like you give us access to communicate with you, you know, or something like that.
Ephraim Ebstein: 21:21
Yeah, absolutely. When you’re booking the room, like you’re going to expect, you know, that you can be communicated with via cell. That’s exactly it. So same thing with like a class action lawsuit. Now, if you have existing clients, that’s where it starts to get a little bit. I would say a gray area because if they didn’t.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 21:40
You have to like ask for their approval somehow, I imagine.
Ephraim Ebstein: 21:43
Yeah. But if they know who you are. Yes. So the answer, the correct answer is yes. That’s what you need to do. But do we set it up successfully? Without it, the company has to take the risk. It’s their hgp number. We will configure it and set it up. But we have a lot of customers that will, you know, start.
You know, you might have had this list of customers way before the ATP requirements were in place. And you say, well, I’m not going to go to 10,000 people and ask the permission. I’m just going to if I hired an employee, they could just go through the phone number and text them, and they know who we are when we text, like, so we’re going to we’re going to proceed.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 22:25
Yep. I do want to talk about, you know, we’re talking about all this, which is scaling and growth, which is kind of, you know, what you’ve done for a number of years with the IT company. Now with the AI company, I’m wondering what are some thoughts when you think of the IT company that’s helped you to to grow. Right. And maybe some of the the snags you hit along the way because I’m not sure. I’m sure it’s not all up and to the right as far as growth goes in any company. Yeah. Well, some of the things you kind of got over some of those snags to get to the next level.
Ephraim Ebstein: 23:02
Man, I think it’s really important to to be humble and adaptable. Right. And when I say humble, people don’t really use that word a lot, but it means being able to admit when you’re wrong and learning from your mistakes. And it’s the opposite of arrogance, right? And so you have to learn. And the more you can learn from others versus your own mistakes, the better. And I kind of learned that lesson several years in. I started realizing, like as we as we were scaling, I was more and more out of my head. Right? I had never been a leader of a an organization of the size it was then or the size it is now. Every, every year. I’ve never been in that position. Right. So it’s always new. And I’ve I’ve worked really hard now at looking for mentors. Huge mentor of mine is Brandon Dawson.
Grant Cardone is another mentor of mine. I would say Alex Hormozi. So I look at these, I look at these mentors and I pay money to to get myself educated by them. And I want the goal is to make my success easy. So I look at like how a business is run, how it’s scaled. And I will I will then copy those aspects and adapt them if necessary. But the more I can adapt and do what someone that’s had way more success than me has done, the easier I make it for myself. So that’s really what I’ve been, you know, doing and recommending and you know, so reading, learning, spending, investing in yourself, whether that’s a book, you know, an education, a boot camp, an event, those are all things that I do regularly, and I find a lot of value in them. And they’ve they’ve helped me. They’ve helped me greatly.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 25:04
Talk about maybe some of your favorite books.
Ephraim Ebstein: 25:08
Oh, man, I love some of Jim Collins books. Good to Great. I like John Maxwell’s books like 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership. I love Grant Cardone book, the The 10X Rule. Natalie Dawson has One of my favorite books, which is TeamWork. It’s very simple book and easy book, but I kind of started with the book and we implemented a lot of that. I want to say around like 070809, something like that. And then. Like the way that her book is, we’ve refined a lot of that. And just the way we recruit for people, the way that we manage.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 25:59
Looking at that now, Teamwork: How to Build a High-Performance Team. Natalie and I’ll have to check that out.
Ephraim Ebstein: 26:04
Yeah. It’s awesome. I can’t recommend it enough.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 26:09
Talk about recruiting. I know you spent a lot of time in hiring and recruiting process. You enjoy that. What are some of the things you’ve done that worked? Maybe some of the things that have not worked in the hiring recruiting process?
Ephraim Ebstein: 26:22
So I’ll talk about one of the things that I am, I kind of think I should have maybe been a recruiter at some point in my life, because I got so hungry for the right talent. As we scaled, I’ve started to become a like I am, like, I can smell, I can smell good talent. If I hear a whisper of good talent, if you’re like, oh, this guy. Yeah, like I’ll be on a sales call. I’ve done this multiple times, I’ll be on a sales call and they’re like, oh yeah, another I.T company.
They’re terrible. But there’s this one guy, he’s good. And and then I just like, oh yeah, tell me about that. And my ears, I’m more focused on getting the name of that guy that they just mentioned was good and trying to get them to give me that name so I can hunt that guy down and try and recruit him.
And I am on the actual close of the sale. Sometimes I want the sale, but if I can get the guy, I’m going to guarantee the sale. So And I have now a good guy that can do so I will. I’ve gotten sales guys that way. Crazy stuff. I’ll go to my power base all the time. We’re like, hey, you know Dr. Weisz, do you know anybody in accounting that I, you know, if you know anybody or you ask anybody and I will beat down that bush, I constantly ask and re-ask our employees. Hey, anyone you ever worked with that was good. I want to know about them, so I will if I even hear a whisper about someone that was good at something I am. I’m like a blood trail hound on them now. It’s a little harder with scale. Like, how do you teach that to your recruiting team? But I do. We also kind of like created tiers of like referral types, like a type one, type two, type three and type four.
And type one is like, hey, this is someone the executive leadership personally worked with in the past and personally vouches for. It’s an audit if they’re at the top of the list on the higher list, right, versus like a type four, which is just I met him at an event. I don’t know them from Adam. Just give them the information to apply. So we have that. But I think some of the most impactful thing where we’ve been able to. When we if you look at one of our listings for employees that we’re hiring, hiring, when we talk about the about FIT Solutions, a lot of people just give generic facts about their company. If you look how it’s written, we’ve worked in all of our core values into the description. Now, the person reading it doesn’t know that, but they’ve started. Yeah, you might maybe have to Google like FIT Solutions. See one of our job. Oh yeah. Maybe. I don’t know if we have a job posting right on there. They’re usually oh yeah, we’ll give you any.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 29:20
It’s probably very specific.
Ephraim Ebstein: 29:21
Oh yeah. There’s some services. Just click on one of those. Okay. General purpose.
This might be a little different. This is bamboo. Go up a little bit. And now I’m a little embarrassed. But it’s usually if you look at maybe Glassdoor or something like that, I would imagine you would see it.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 29:51
Well, I’m kind of just looking at your careers page, you know what I mean? And like on the careers page, I mean, I find a lot of companies don’t have a careers page in the first place, but like in the careers page here, you do have kind of.
Ephraim Ebstein: 30:02
It might not be there because it’s like directly from our website, but usually when it’s posted on like a Indeed or Glassdoor or Indeed primarily it like has about fit and we work in their core values. So that’s the first indication when they start reading that it’s kind of like they might not recognize that those are the core values as they’re reading it, but they’re starting. It’s starting to speak a language that people are either going to be attracted to or not. So there’s our core values elite raving fan culture, constructive communication, humble and adaptable, teach and promote alignment, results driven and integrity. So we work those in and then and then the other thing that we do this is a really big one. So because most customer companies, you know, some are better at interviewing than others.
And of course we have like that intro call where you’re just trying to see if this is like, should they go to an advanced interview usually. So you have kind of that cultural interview if they’re technical or project manager or something like that, you’re having more an operational interview. And that’s kind of what most companies do. And through those 1 to 2 interviews, they’re determining if this person is a good fit and alignment for their culture. So what we learn is actually in that book, teamwork is that we do a third and last step, which is a core values presentation. Now we don’t do that with all the candidates. We only do it with the candidates that we actually want to hire. So if if we were to, you know, you were to go through the interview process what this would sound like. And you would know it early on on the initial that, hey, this is our interview process. So, you know, and then at the end of the, the, the last interview, I’d be like, Jeremy, you know, this is we’re really excited about this opportunity.
And we think this this could be. Could be a great fit for both of us. What we would like to do is we would like to move you on to a core values presentation. I’m sure you know, our HR team told you a little bit about that. But just to remind you what it is, is it’s, you know, a 5 to 10 minute presentation, and we’ll give you whatever time you need to put that together. And what we would like in that is that you’re presenting not the definitions of our core values, because we know what the definitions are. What we’re really looking for is where you’ve personally used those core values in a past position to be successful or, and or how you would use those core values if you got hired to be successful at FIT Solutions. You know, when can we get that started? And we’ll email you a, you know, a one pager with the core values and the definitions.
So you have it. Make it easy. The presentation that you build is completely of your discretion, how complex or simple you want to make it. Some people just present don’t even make a slide deck. Others go very fancy. Make like a Canva type deal or a PowerPoint. But the real thing about it is it’s I do, I do when they present that core values to us. What I’m I, I do take a look at the presentation itself and say, hey, did they put effort or not? You know, but what we find is this is a filter. So a lot of people, they’ll opt out. They don’t want to go further. We’re good with that. So that’s a great filter. The people that do it some phone phone it in kind of feel it’s stupid, but they’re doing it because they’re going through the motions. You can kind of sense that through through the process. Other people take it very seriously.
And some people are like, man, these guys are so serious about their core values and I align so good with these core values. I have to work at this company and those are the ones that we want. And when they do the presentation, it also I’m looking at it through the lens of like how would the customer view and react to this person, and then will they be successful with this? Because they could be a good person, but they are not going to be successful at our company with our culture. So all ask. Let’s say they tell a story about how they how they help teach to promote somebody. I will, after the presentation be like, hey, you know, Dr. Weisz, you Dr. Weisz, you told me about that time you helped Sally get a promotion, and you did this and this and this.
Let me ask you a question. How much time did that take? And, like, what were the exact things you did to help her with that? Like, what were her biggest weaknesses and what what did you do. Right. And so what’s funny is when you start to ask those questions, they are un prepared a little bit, whereas in interview they’re very prepared and they can put on a good front When you start digging into the things they’ve told you, the stories they’ve told you, you can start to determine, you know, someone says, oh, I helped the company grow to $50 million. Man, that’s so awesome. You helped them grow up. What did you do to contribute to the 50 million and how big were they when you, you know, oh, I was there for a year. They were 45 million. I helped them go to 50. Right. And you’re like, oh 49.9. Yeah, exactly.
It’s like you start to dig in and you start to figure out or they’re like, oh, this is exactly what we did. We restructured our sales team. We did this, we did that. And like, it’s you start to determine the real ones and you start to really attract and you start to filter out and you can anyway, I would say statistically when we look at our numbers, our misfire rate has dramatically dropped. So I would say it was probably like at best a 50 over 50 before we were doing core value presentations. Honestly, it was probably like a 70% misfire rate, and you probably had a 30% chance that you scored a winner within a year. You know, if you look at a year’s time. And with this, we’ve probably turned that on the head. We probably have about a 30% misfire rate and probably 70% success ratio on retention in the first year.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 36:46
That’s amazing. No, I really appreciate you sharing that process because listen, like if someone can help someone hire one more great team member, that can be game changing for a business and that process. And thanks for sharing. TeamWork. By the way, anyone who wants to buy an audible, it’s only $6.36. I mean.
Ephraim Ebstein: 37:05
You can’t.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 37:06
Go. It’s a no brainer. I just bought it as you were talking about Ephraim. So. And there’s they have another. Natalie has another book it looks like, as well.
Ephraim Ebstein: 37:15
Yeah, she’s got another.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 37:16
Start The Work. I’m not sure that one, but the the TeamWork one. I mean, it’s a no brainer. So thanks for sharing that. That’s great. And I mean some of the the founders I’ve talked to, you know, they have high performing companies. It could be software or IT or agencies like I remember one founder was saying they felt like their full time job was recruiting as they were growing. Their full time job was hiring, recruiting. The better they got at it, the more successful their company was. So it was just a skill set that they learned. Wow, I didn’t I didn’t start this company to be a recruiter, but to grow the company, they needed more great people.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 37:59
What about on the leadership on the leadership front? Right. You said each year you’re kind of as you’re growing, you’re out of your comfort zone. This is your in uncharted territory for you. What are some things you’ve learned on on the leadership front? Maybe some mistakes you made that you’re like, okay, I you live and you learn and you iterate, or maybe you learn from someone else’s mistake and you didn’t do it.
Ephraim Ebstein: 38:28
Yeah. So a big mistake I think I made. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs make this the same mistake. And it’s, it’s I guess it’s okay if you want to stay small, but if you want to stay scale, it just does not work. And one of the big reasons I started my company actually, was I wanted to be working with people I really liked, and I wanted us. I wanted that group of people to be successful with me, so I wanted people to rise. Now I still 100% feel that same way. But with that early mindset, as I brought team members in, We acted like a family, right? Like friends and family.
And it’s really, you know. You put up with a lot of lack of accountability, inadequacy. There’s a lot that that just does, you know, it’s it was the wrong way. And I changed my mindset. Now I run my company like a professional sports team. So the same way a professional sports team operates is the way I operate. And I use that analogy and that to help people understand the mindset and why I’m asking certain things. And, you know, the nice thing about a great sports team, it’s fantastic to win together. And guess what? They do feel like family when you’re winning, but you also, if you’re not cutting it, you get traded, you get cut, you get benched.
You don’t have an option not to train with the staff or with the with the team members, right? So one big thing like I require is regular training. I pay for it. I let them do it on the clock, but in exchange, I require as a requirement of the job that you complete that, that that training and the curriculum that I put together, which is going to be a mix of things, including things like sales, which an engineer might not understand or like because they’re like, well, I’m in a technical field, I should just do technical training only. Why am I doing sales training? And they don’t, you know, if they’re not expected to do sales role.
But I understand certain things, having been in that role as an engineer on how those principles help you grow. And so I put that training together. I require also daily role play where we role play scenarios, it’s uncomfortable. It’s a lot of people don’t like it. So those are two things. But guess what? That’s how sports teams operate. You go to practice. No one goes into the pro games figuring out the plays, doing the catch the first time. They have drilled those plays together hundreds of times, and if you’re on the team, you could be Tom Brady himself if you don’t show up to practice. How many times can you do that before you’re not on the team? It’s just the way it is.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 41:39
What’s the I love that. What’s an example of a daily role play that someone would do?
Ephraim Ebstein: 41:44
It depends on the job role. But I’ll give you an example. Like we could use a sales person for, for one example I will I’ll role play different aspects of the fact finding conversation or I want to role play. I’ll break it down into pieces. One slide I want to have you present?
My pain point that I presented on the slide. And you can do that a hundred different ways because different people have different pain points. And I want you to tie in my pain point on how you’re going to solve it when you present this slide. So that’s one example on an engineer.
If you’re an engineer and you work for my company and you just got hired, I’m going to role play the new client introduction and be like, well, why would I need to be role playing? How to introduce myself to a client. I’m I’m an adult professional. I’ve been in the field. I know customer service. I can introduce myself. I’m an adult. You’re not going to introduce. But see, that’s that’s the thing. We’re going to do it the way that I know I’m going to solve for a problem in the business, which the problem they don’t understand that I understand is that the one of the biggest complaints in it is turnover because there’s an interruption in service for the customer and the customer. As soon as they meet a new person, you know what they’re thinking in their head. Great.
Another new guy. And now I gotta train him again. And it’s going to be slow. And I would rather just work with Dave because Dave knows how to deal with it. And if Dave leaves now, I’m like questioning if I should even work with your company. See how that’s how they think. And you, being the new guy don’t understand that in customer service. So what the average person would do on an introduction, they’d be like, hey Dr. Weisz, my name is Ephraim. Really? You know, really nice to meet you. You know, tell me a little bit about your company or what can I get started with or that’s the average introduction. That’s. And you’re thinking the whole time everything I said.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 43:59
They don’t know what they’re. Yeah, I had to read. I have to explain everything over to this new person.
Ephraim Ebstein: 44:04
Yeah, exactly. He’s like, great. I don’t have time for this. So what we do. Not only do they have to do research about the company before they do an introduction, but the way that our introduction goes is a framework where you express excitement. Do the introduction, you say out loud the objection in their head. This is a sales technique. You say what they’re thinking, how you’re going to solve it, and then you ask what I call the magic question, which is and I’ll give you an example. So I say, hey, Dr. Weisz, my name is Ephraim. I’m I am. I’ve heard so much about the Inspired Insider and Rise25, and I’m really excited to get an opportunity to work with you, and I’m glad to be here at Fit. It’s really nice to meet you. I say, you know, Dr. Weisz, I know that a lot of times working with the new guy can be really tough.
And I’m the new guy and I don’t want there to be a big interruption of service. And I don’t want you to have to feel like you’re training me. So what I’m going to be doing, I’m going to be working with Dave to really go through your documentation, and I’m really going to kind of fall on him with my questions as I get to know you guys. But let me ask you a question, Dr. Weisz. If there was one thing I could do to be really successful here, what would it be? Now you’re like, this guy understands me. One, he’s excited to work here. He understands me because he understands that he’s the new guy. I hate dealing with new guys. And there’s interruption of service. He’s got a plan on how to deal with it.
And now I’m actually. He’s asking me how to. One thing he could do to be successful. I’m going to tell him and I’m a little bit invested in him being successful. So that is has been a game changer. But if I want that execution across the board with every new employee, I have to script it out. I got to actually help them role play it with me. I have to hear it from their ears and stop, redo. Do it again. You missed a part. Redo it again. Do it again, just like you would in a football. Hey, I told you to run diagonally, not straight. Do it again. Do it again. Oh! You missed. You slipped the ball. Drop. Do it again. Do it again. Do it again. Do it again until you sound as good as me.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 46:21
I’m curious logistically, is this a kind of a group meeting once a week? Like, what’s the frequency? And is it a group setting? How do you do it?
Ephraim Ebstein: 46:31
So what we do, they train kind of. They have to fit in their training. They have to do it every day. We we we monitor there’s KPI, we watch it. We do an all hands training, all hands meeting every day. So we have a very specific framework. It’s 15 minute meeting starts on the dot, ends on the dot. So the first ten minutes we go over mission vision. Every department announces their KPIs. Top performers wins everything positive. No negativity on that particular meeting because every other meeting is allowed to have problems. Not that one. So that is the cultural alignment meeting.
And then the last five minutes we go into breakout rooms because our staffs all remote. So everybody has to be on the meeting. And then you get broken up into breakout rooms. And that’s where the roleplay happens. That’s where we can help get more people role playing at a at a bigger rate. So if you’re on a team of engineers and there’s, let’s say 5 or 6 guys, you’re going to roleplay at least once a week and you’re going to hear everybody else role play at least every day.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 47:38
I’m curious, what are some elements in the curriculum? Is this books? Is this online platforms? Do you have your own kind of documents? What is the curriculum that you said curriculum?
Ephraim Ebstein: 47:49
Yeah, so so we have basically the curriculum we put together. It is dependent on on the role that how we roll it out, and it is dependent somewhat on the manager to assign what their weakness is. So if you’re really great with people and customer service, once you get past the basics, I might, but you’re weaker on like let’s say firewalls. I’m going to put you on firewall curriculum or some advanced technology if you’re really good in technology. But you know what? You’re not getting a lot of good reviews from customers. Customers are asking to work with someone else.
You’re going to be doing sales and customer service training. Or if I want you to be on a pre-sales meeting with you, you have to do sales training. So those are all things. If you’re a leader, you have to do leadership training. And then in addition to that, so we have these outside sources that we feel are good training content. So they’re mostly videos. You’re doing that. So you have sales customer service, negotiation. Even some of Chris Voss content is in our curriculum. You’re doing technical, you’re doing training on our processes and content that we’ve created and recorded and leadership. And that’s a I think I covered all of them, but that’s that’s about it.
And so you will get assigned you’ll when you start in the company, you have a curriculum that you go through, through the onboarding. And then once that is done through your onboarding, then you kind of move on to the regular training, the ongoing training. And that is 15 minutes a day or 1.25 hours a week. If you’re in a technical course, sometimes it’s better just to sit down for an hour and do your training than it is to do 15 minutes broken up. If you’re doing sales training, I’d much rather do 15 minutes a day than sit there for, you know, an hour and 15 minutes.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 49:49
I love it from. First of all, I have a couple last questions, but I want to just point people to FitSolutions.biz if you want to learn more. Also Fit-AI.ai is the AI integrators piece you know we grow because of. Also like you mentioned with the hiring recruiting key team members. And I feel like there’s an interesting journey with Natasha. Yeah, talk about that.
Ephraim Ebstein: 50:16
Oh man. Natasha I love Natasha. She is a dear close friend of mine. We met in Driver’s Ed when we were 15, so that’s where we met. And through our teenage years we were in the same circle of friends. We hung out all the time as we became adults into our 20s. I would say we were always still friends, but we went different. You know, I got married, she got married. You know, you just kind of like, you know, people space apart. But we were always friends. But I knew she was a professional. She was always very career driven, like her brother. Her brother’s a good friend of mine, too.
And she worked at Nordstrom. She kind of worked up to like, a regional manager and kind of went through that. And then the travel was really heavy with Nordstrom and being like that regional manager role. And when she had her little girl, you know, she wanted to be home more with her husband and and then so I needed somebody good in account management. So I, I recruited her I got her to come over and she kind of has really risen through the ranks. And she’s a good example of somebody that has adapted through a lot of change, because most people couldn’t adapt through the changes as we scaled. And she 100% did. And not only that, she championed the changes and she’s goal driven. ribbon. She has goals. So that’s a big reason. When your goals are big, you don’t care about how things get done or the little processes.
They don’t rock your world. You just like, hey, is this getting me closer to the goal or further away? Anyway, she she’s now our COO in our company and she’s also moved into a business partner of mine. So we decided we wanted to go after a government contracts. And conveniently she is she’s a minority and she’s a woman. And so I was like, hey, why don’t we partner and spin up another company? Because then we can get that the benefits of minority, all the set asides they have. So we we spun up federal cyber systems and she, she’s kind of transitioning into CEO of that company. And it’s basically cybersecurity. It all the same things we do, but on a federal municipal level. And so we’ve been going after and getting clients on that front too. So she’s definitely evolved. And she’s yeah, she’s remarkable.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 53:03
From I just want to I mean this has been really instructive, I think for any business from the hey, we cover a lot of ground here, from sales to leadership to hiring and recruiting AI. So thank you for sharing your expertise and knowledge. People can check out FitSolutions.biz and Fit-AI.ai and to learn more. And Ephraim, thanks so much.
Ephraim Ebstein: 53:26
Thank you so much.
