Jeremy Weisz 14:43
Work places difficult, there’s clients and then there’s talent. And I know you’re Canadian-based. Are the talent sources from all over? Or where talents tends to be?
Sammy Davis 15:01
Very important to us that it was all localized remote. So by that, I mean it’s a funny little term, and I’m always accused of making up my own funny terms, I can’t help myself, I came out of the marketing world, right? The localized remote to us reflects that if somebody in Toronto needs a designer, their first choices are going to be the people in Toronto, there’s nobody in our roster that doesn’t call Canada home, or North America home. We don’t have any overseas, we’re not first and foremost, a kind of commoditization of skills to be able to race to the bottom financially. We actually do the other side of the swing, we defend the we don’t even talk about as living wages, we defend the idea that people can have a very healthy business in doing this kind of work for themselves. So we ensure that they get paid what they should be paid. We educate our roster all the time on here’s what the kind of financial constraints are, here’s what keeps you competitive. So there are people in our roster that are way more expensive than you might be ready to deal with. There’s people on our roster that are way under what you might have expected. And there’s people that are right in that middle, we’ve got the whole thing, but what we do is we leave it all to them. It’s not a I’m going to do this at night, when I’m watching TV, and bang out something for 20 extra dollars. This is their career, their full specialist, it’s a specialist economy that we’ve been kind of wrapping ourselves around since we started in 2014.
Jeremy Weisz 16:49
Sammy, I can see how you can attract talent and vet them, we have potential projects, and you got them? How do you get the other side of the marketplace, the clients coming in for the talent?
Sammy Davis 17:07
It’s a lot of outbound, meaningful, genuine conversations, quite frankly, a lot like you and I are doing right now. The business that we’re in has evolved since our 2014 jump-off. And in 2014, talking to people about remotes, being not in your office necessarily, was a very different conversation than it is now. Right, and COVID was one of those times that did a service for our business, it showed everybody that everything we’ve been preaching up until that point was applicable, and now it had to be auctioned. So, that evolution has changed some of the pieces that we started with us foundation there, so there’s not a single company that we work with right now, or that exists out there right now, that hasn’t at least recognize the impact that professional gig labor can have on their entire human capital strategy, and are looking at where’s the benefits? Where are the risks? And how do I build around that to take advantage of things like budgetary fluidity, ensuring that when I need to scale up or down, I have the ability to do that? Quickly, I’m getting qualified individuals right away. And I’m getting that word-of-mouth referral that saying, hey, you can trust them, because I trust them. And here’s all the reasons why. A lot of what we’re, there’s people, it’s a huge industry. So the professional gig labor force right now in North America is considered the fastest growing labor force in all of North America. And that is sole proprietors going making that transition from I’m no longer an employee, business owner that does contracts and one of these forms. You’re seeing a growth now, I mean, and the growth is being measured by lenders. So you can trust that some of this research is not just, hey, the people like Sammy are asking for the research and then look at benefits their company, isn’t that the way it goes? It’s things like Visa and MasterCard and such are actually out there going. There’s an increase in sole proprietors, they have different lending principles, we have to learn to lend to these people differently. And if that’s where a bunch of our workforce is going, we need to figure some things out. So in some of those statistics, I can tell you that in 2020, it was estimated that 36% of full-time positions were being replaced by contractors in the kind of corporate world. It’s estimated that by 2027, you’re going to see that shift over to 52%, which presents challenges to every aspect of a business. From management principles and values, right, we’re seeing a shift. And the good managers, the good principal companies are no longer going, hey, I value seeing you do your work for 40 hours a week versus I value you giving me the thing you said you were going to give me when you said you were going to give it to me, it’s an output value now. So there’s all these changes that are happening there. And then on the HR side, you’re presented with this idea of like, okay, so everything I’m doing on full-time employment recruitment, now presents me risks when I go after a contractor. And that is a very expensive challenge, because you’re talking about changes in policies and procedures that can also hurt you on the other end when you’re starting to recruit or let people go. So it’s a fascinating market right now. And so these are the kinds of conversations we’re just reaching out, asking people what they’re doing. And if they need help to, as I mentioned before, make sure that they’re not paying their staff to just kind of hunt around for people in hopes that they can get something together. We take care of things like making sure your IP is not in danger, if you’re working with somebody, security is a big piece to what we bring to the table. Also the assurance that if you start bringing in on your own, we just finished our own research study, which again, serves to help us but I look at it and say there’s a reality in there, 90% of the HR managers we talked to express that they had such high failure rates every time they were left up to their own devices to go out and get contractors. Those fail rates meant that, if they started a project, those people were leaving before the project was done, or those people were not seeing their full contract to the end. And a lot of that has to do with the processes, strategies that they’re using that are FTE, to basically try to bring in somebody. I use an example all the time, if you’re putting out on a hiring job board, that you need a contractor and they fire you a resume, you shouldn’t be looking at that as a victory, you should be running away from that person. Because if they have a resume, what they’re really telling you is they’re looking for a full-time job. So if you hire them on a contract basis, you’re risking your exponentially higher risk of them taking off if someone ways a full-time job at them.
Jeremy Weisz 22:50
Does it happen, let’s say someone wants, I was looking at your site, there’s people who do project management. Yep. And you have them come in, and let people are really — they love working with this person. Can they bring them on for longer, longer hours, and even possibly, for more of a full time not necessarily positioning or working through Go To The Well, but if they want a larger amount of hours.
Sammy Davis 23:22
Yeah, happens all the time. We’ve seen what used to be full-time employment engagements do exactly that, they’ll re-audition somebody in to take care of a specific need, and then just start mounting the hours up. We’ve got a few folks I know that kind of do 40 hours a week with one company. And that’s what they’re good with. But the difference is they do 40 hours a week for one company. But there’s an on-and-off switch. So and that’s at the company’s behest, it’s an agreement between both parties. It’s not one or the other. So we see all the time that companies are using it as a means to again gain that budgetary fluidity. So let’s say you have $100,000 a year job in a for a creative director, which is low, but you know, it’s a junior creative director, let’s say $100,000 a year job. When you compare hour to hour and you bring in a contractor, you’re not going to get a 50% savings or like or say hey, they got to match that 100k you’re gonna pay more per hour, but you’re also not paying for their downtime. So you’re only paying them when they’re engaged. And when they’re sitting on their thumbs. There’s nothing to be paid for. What we’re seeing a lot happen now is they go cool. We’re gonna hang on to that person for six months or 40 hours a week, but we know this is our downtime, so we don’t need them for three of those months. Right so you’re no longer looking at 100% full time full-time. You’re looking at full time hours but not a full-time engagement. So that person will leave for three months and will say find them another contract for three months with a different company altogether. With the whole idea that yeah, we’ll return to the other one when they’re ready. And that’s kind of the move that’s happening. There’s a lot of companies that are recognizing without anybody like me telling them, that you’re the idea of outside influence gives you a competitive advantage over people that are not allowing outside influence, especially into marketing practices. And the only ways you get outside influence is if you allow them to leave. And then come back at a contractual level. We have a few folks I can cite right away that they have six clients. And for the last three years, they’ve been revolved around those six clients in kind of three-month brackets, three months here, three months here, three months off three months, kind of in and out with this company, and then back to this one. So it’s the way people are rebuilding their career paths.
Jeremy Weisz 26:02
What is an ideal from the client perspective coming in to look for talent? What is a usually an ideal size? Or how would you describe that ideal client that comes to you?
Sammy Davis 26:17
So going back to one of your questions about what was on the wish list? The answer is in that wish list. When I initially built the company, I built it to answer the question of, and any of my former account managers watching this would say, oh, yeah, he’s right. I drove them crazy. Because I would sit them down and go, I do not understand why someone’s working with us. Because our cost requires that they are this high, always, every time they call us, it’s minimum $100 an hour, like, what’s happening, not small businesses can’t access us. What we’ve done is made that access point based on the individuals within the roster themselves. So we have folks that have a volume play their production designers, let’s say our production writers that just bang out tons of stuff for small businesses. And that’s how they built their business is volume, volume, volume, and quick crickets. The Well was constructed with purpose to say, hey, we’ll up and down the scale based on our roster, so we’ll never send you somebody that is, say, a creative director that requires a $200,000 budget minimum, if you’re a mom and pop pizza shop that needs a flier done. And that was the mismatch that I was seeing happen at my own agencies all the time, like we had what we had. And if you’re a small company, and you came in, and you said I want this, I could try, but I ultimately had to repackage it and send it back to you is something we could do. And we built the roster with purpose to say, hey, the mom-and-pop pizza shop, yeah, we’ll help you. Umbra we’ll help you too, or major manufacturer X we’ll help you to. And it because we broke it down to that individual level.
Jeremy Weisz 28:16
I want to talk about niching. And your thoughts on niching for an agency. And we’ll talk about the conversation about expanding services, right, which is part of niching. Right? So when we’re talking about like, how do you decide that, okay, we’re going to now start offering accounting-related services, right? Because you could stick to what you’re already doing, and just go deep on that, but you’re seeing something. So talk about your thoughts on niching. And then we could talk about expansion of services?
Sammy Davis 28:58
Sure. 100%, then niching is a fundamental pillar to what The Well is and does. In the shift of the way that human capital is working and labor forces are working right now on the professional level, generalists are the ones that are typically rocking out full-time employment specialists are the ones that have picked that niche and, they might be amazing two to three things. That’s, you’re not going to ask them to do the 70 things that you want doing. And therein lies our opportunity. I mean, to jump ahead to why we moved to accounting, there was a natural evolution and it’s because our niche as much as our niche was always looked at as your marketing advertising comms technology, and that’s because of my background and because of my founding partners backgrounds, we all come out of that world. The thing that struck us and part of the research we started doing when we started to dig deeper into kind of the ecosystem that is a corporation, and realizing all of these things at play on management values and HR policies and what have you, we realized that the HR task of accessing these different labor forces presented the conundrum of they don’t know what they don’t know. So before jumping off, we researched the heck out of it went and figured out, is there something at play here where we can be of help, and then realize that one of the, when we talk about the growing labor force, in terms of professional gig labor force, the areas that are growing the fastest, in that labor force are things like marketing, communications, accounting is a close second. So there’s a supply and demand issue there. Because tradition is still telling a lot of businesses, hey, I have to have a certain amount of full-time people there. When in fact, we use something like the CFO, we always have, he’s used the CFO, the CFO was the very first professional service that if it came, kind of commonplace, to have that as a fractional person, not a full-time person. And we use that as a measuring stick on the health of the market for us. So we figured we’re using the measuring stick, we’ve perfected this IP. I mean, when you look at that 90% fail rate that is happening when HR managers are left to their own devices to go and bring in find and work with and sign agreements with contractors, and they’re failing to not have them finish. Our fail rate as a company is 2%. So that showed us that okay, we’ve got something here. And so additional research testing in the market, the result was we were able to take our vetting process and discover that that fundamentally, apart from any technology or vetting process is our IP. And we have 22 standard points that need to be met. And they’re not as simple as question and answer a question and answer they’re not straight lines. And we realized that there’s six fundamentals within our vetting process that can be twisted and changed per industry. So what you’re seeing in the accounting side was initially a test. And then it showed this works, this works, we’re getting the same results, we have something to compare it to with the marketing, we’re getting the same results on the accounting. So let’s go all in. I was talking about this recently with a colleague, actually, earlier this afternoon. On the fact that a lot of the feeders for the growth in the professional gig marketplace, or sports or the professional gig labor force, the primary feeder is any industry that includes within its confines a firm approach. So marketing, obviously, there’s marketing firms there, we’re seeing accounting firms, because ultimately, people learn a ton while working with an accounting firm. And anytime they are downsized or leave on their own, they’re always looking at, I can do this, I can do this without the firm. So it’s a feeder to that first dip. And what our vetting does is go, you’re not going to get any first dippers. So they’re not going to run away on yet.
Jeremy Weisz 33:51
Sammy talk about that company listening and like, yeah, I need a better vetting process when I’m hiring and what are some things that you’d recommend companies to do? A few of the things that you do that they should incorporate into their hiring?
Sammy Davis 34:09
Well, the very first thing I do, and I do engagements with business cohorts. And I usually shocked them with the first thing out of my mouth is to say, I want everyone if there’s nothing else you get out of this, I want everyone to leave here with a mandate to abolish the word hire out of your corporate vocabulary. That’s step one. The reason for that is when you’re sitting around the boardroom table, and people say, oh, we should hire this. It sets into motion, a formula that quite frankly, just isn’t working. I mean, if it was, I wouldn’t exist. I wouldn’t have people coming to me all the time going, I can’t get rid of good candidates. I can’t find a source. I can’t. I can’t, I can’t. So step one, get rid of the word hire. As soon as you do that, you’re opened up to going. All right now I need to start recognizing as segmenting what the different labor forces are that are prevalent out there? And how do I access them and meet them not just on their terms, but on equal terms? Because that’s what the modern worker wants is equal term meeting, right? It’s not, I owe myself to that company for giving me a job anymore. That’s our parents and grandparents. That was one of the values in their world have, you got a job and that company was good to me, so I’ll be good to them. Well, good to me is redefined now, you also got to recognize that you got and this is always up for debate, the number is, but you got at least six different generations in the workforce right now. And their values are completely different from one another. So one size fits all approach to any type of recruitment or human capital strategy is a terrible approach. You’re setting yourself up for a fail. If you are going down the FTE side, that segmentation helps a ton there. So if you are looking for a full-time employment engagement, or you’re looking for a full-time employee, for this role that you have as a company, you got to realize who you’re talking to, and who you’re working with. Just imposing your hiring practice and making it crazy long and full of what you used to consider risk assessments are actually just telling people I don’t want you or I’m not doing my research on who you are, I haven’t figured out anything about you. I want you to tell me, and then I’m going to take forever to get back to you. And then ask you for three more interviews and a PowerPoint presentation only to tell you someone else was better. People are tired of that they’re just not doing it. Which is why you see people jumping into the gig labor force go on, it’s on my terms now, I’m going to tell people what I want to do and what I don’t. Your bottom three bad terminology. But your youngest three generations that are in the workforce is a fundamental recognition, whether you’re wanting to as a company go through the segmentation exercise or not recognize that the younger the person is that you’re talking to you, the more likely is they’re no longer asking that question we used to ask when we’re growing up, what do I want to be when I grow up? They’re asking, why do I want to do any of it when I grow up? The question of work as a value and as a thing that we must do, is legitimately being questioned by them. You’ve got so much research that’s saying that the younger generations have already before they even got into the workforce, have resigned themselves to the fact that they’ll probably never own anything. They won’t own a house, they won’t own a car. And why would I want to? That’s a boat anchor, right?
Jeremy Weisz 37:54
Uber and Airbnb, they’ll just…
Sammy Davis 37:56
Well, I mean, a lot of HR managers, especially in Canada are shocked when I show them like, you know what, you know what’s valuable to them is experience. They spent all their money on experiences. It’s not spending money on flashy things. Now, there’s differences between the American culture in that and the Canadian culture in that and then state to state province to province is different too, but it’s definitely skewed this direction of you’re talking to somebody that values money, and the idea of work totally differently than you did in your own generation. So, as an HR manager looking to bring in somebody stop just over-preparing on this idea that they’re going to negotiate with you on salary and benefit packages, because half of the young kids aren’t even doing that. They’re just going on Glassdoor and going, this is what you owe me. So make it that. That’s the end of the conversation. Now, what I do want to talk to you about is how often do you need to be in the office? And could I work three months in Costa Rica? And do I need to check in with you when I want to take vacations? Or is it something that I can kind of be open to? And what kind of influence am I going to have are not influence, so much as impact? Am I going to be of actual value? They used to be just a thing you would see pop up in strategic planning, but now there’s legitimate values and measurements tied to it by the worker themselves. Am I giving you value? Because if I’m not that’s when they start looking that whole quiet quitting trend that people are writing about is fundamentally where a lot of that started.
Jeremy Weisz 39:31
It’s such an interesting perspectives, Sammy, I really appreciate you sharing it. I have a few I want to hear. You mentioned tech stack. You’ve probably seen a lot of software’s and tools and things. I’m wondering what you’re seeing and what you use. And then I want to talk about mentors too in industry. You’ve been in this agency space for a long time. But start with tech stack.
Sammy Davis 39:56
The tech stocks that I like are the ones that are actually supportive and not dictating to me what I need to do next. I don’t know if that makes sense. But we’re breaking out our philosophies and our approaches on things. So, we minimize the use of automation platforms. I will say that, and I know that flies in the face of what everybody talks about right now. And we do it, because we need to maintain that genuine connection, or human-centered technology supported, not technology centered human supported, it might be looked at as an old school thing, but the results speak for themselves, right, our relationships with our clients and with our roster members is completely the opposite of transactional, is not transactional it is alliance with each other and trust is forged and built that way. So a lot of the automation tools that are out there, things like your HubSpot, your Pardot, things like that we will make use of in different ways will bend them to the way that we want to work with and will never just set something automatic pilot. I’ll share with you something funny that I haven’t been sharing with too many people. But right now, my own personal kind of consulting interest is always on that revenue officer. I’m always building revenue with clients and showing new ways to do that. If you go on LinkedIn right now, the thing is just drowning with CRO and sales gurus that are just firing playbooks at you like you wouldn’t believe. And the advent of the leaning on AI as now a massive, is turned into a massive noisemaker to be quite honest. I mean, I don’t know if you’ve noticed how many LinkedIn messages you get, they’re just pitches right off. And the whole thing is transactional. It’s a ratio game at this point, how many people aren’t going to hook how many and we’re not. We actually, my team was saying the other day, they were like, we love that we get the opportunity to be very custom and show people that we actually know, or try to figure out who they were before we sat down for our first conversation. And right now I do a thing called I call it, spam roulette. Where every Friday, I pick one of those playbook automation emails that are so obvious, because they all they don’t see each other. So they don’t know they’re all the same. And I respond to one, and just kind of give them pointers on how they should change the way that their current kind of approaching all that stuff. We don’t use AI for our content. And what we will use AI to help us with things like there’s a couple of neat tools that are out there. And some that are kind of in their very early stages on just kind of rating best areas for content ceding rather than providing the content, they’ll provide us avenues of here’s the best spots to put that. Again, we’ll use AI for ideas around what we should be saying. But we won’t ever just lift it and use it. And in fact, we use our own roster to help us build out what to say, based on some of the ideas that we’ve been able to put together that way. And that’s kind of a very high use of AI that we figured out is it’s a great blue sky person to listen to your yammer on about whatever, and spill you back things that probably aren’t the idea but there’s a trigger in there. So those are our tech stacks. We’ve made sure that, we do use chat bots, but our chatbots are actually built to interrupt that they interrupt us as the employees to tell us someone’s in there. So we jump in as soon as possible. We don’t let the chatbot do anything recommendation-wise. None of that kind of stuff. So it truly is, we’re very true to our claim and our brand of, we’re human-centered tech supported and not the other way around.
Jeremy Weisz 44:39
You mentioned CRM and like not from like automation, but just like more organization perspective, what do you like or what have you seen people use for like a CRM or project management tools?
Sammy Davis 44:53
I mean, I find that every CRM requires There’s a matching to the sales process and what the sales value is. Are you a relationship builder? Are you a strict outbound chaser? Are you all built on new business or what have you, and that’ll determine a lot of that. Personally, I love some of the HubSpot tools in doing the relationship build. I like some of the Salesforce tools better on the new business hunt. I really don’t like a lot of the Salesforce relationship tool, I find it’s not built for that. And then you’ve got your other pieces, I will say I kind of, rightly or wrongly, kind of like, give the big red X to I don’t even know what it’s called. But there’s a CRM that Microsoft’s put out there that they tout is completely customizable. I’m like, yeah, but you’re selling it to people that haven’t even determined what their funnel or their deal stages are. So customizable, means nothing. It’s just a glorified address book. That’s kind of what I do, I’ll look at it and say, okay, your CRM is based on what’s your entire kind of revenue, goals, how you’re going about it, what your cultural makeup is, but also, like, what you need to accomplish within each of those steps will really determine, I mean, a lot of CRMs, I find that are free, you get what you pay for. It’s just a glorified address book, right? Don’t even bother. A CRM should not be just a place that you keep information that you hope you should go after some time. You’re building out understanding and everything from project planning, what a future might look like, with that customer, to what are they’re hearing now issues. And it’s not just documentation for someone else to pick up or to remind you later, it’s so that you can start to use other tools to feed in. What am I going to build here? I’m building this with this person. It’s not just they’re my customer, and I’m selling them stuff.
Jeremy Weisz 47:25
Thanks for sharing that Sammy, last question as mentors through your agency journey, and also just your business journey, who are some of the mentors that influenced you? And it doesn’t have to be personal mentors. It could be like a book or another resource that has been a distant mentor to you.
Sammy Davis 47:50
Sure.There’s a book called Switch that always stuck with me.
Jeremy Weisz 47:59
Is that a Chip and Dan Heath book? I can’t remember. Yes. Yeah. I love their stuff. Yeah, they have several books that are phenomenal. Stick was one Switch was one Yeah.
Sammy Davis 48:12
Switch really stuck with me, like Made to Stick it was kind of, I love the kind of the, you know, the upheaval on the brand pieces and what have you. But the Switch stuck with me because I found it was one of those business books that didn’t rely entirely on someone’s current success or a bunch of recency bias to say that the philosophy was true. And it stuck with me because it may change something to celebrate, as opposed to fear. And anyone that I’ve run into that is obviously, I bring them a whole bunch of stuff they haven’t thought about before, or maybe they have thought about, but they’re like, whoa, that’s all scary. I usually leave them with if you got the time read that thing. It makes it so approachable and easy to look at. I mean, mentors throughout the years on personal level. I’ve got a weird way about this. And I know it’s because I’m like the business artist, and not the business scientist. But most of my mentors are not people that you would look at and say, oh, they’re rank and file above him. I actually look at people that are either on we’re equal in our experience, or they’re, they have less experience than I do. That’s where I pull a lot of my motivation and a lot of my understanding and influence on what’s next. What can we get excited about? I’ve got I’ve got things that have stuck with me like everybody else has. I was coaching someone today and heard myself saying, although it was so long ago, I couldn’t attribute to who it came from, but I know it came from likely one of my strategists at the agency level, who basically said, as long as you’re working on things, the one thing you will never run out of his opportunity. So stop grieving the one you think you missed. And those are, yeah, those are just things that that have stuck with me. And I think if you were to talk to my staff or anybody that I’ve coached through the years, they’ll tell you that I’m the guy have little anecdotal stories that will capture your attention for a second. And maybe they’re using some of my phrases out there living off them too.
Jeremy Weisz 50:39
I love it. Well, Sammy, I want to be the first one to thank you. Everyone, check out gotothewell.ca to learn more, and check out more episodes of the podcast and Sammy, thanks so much.
Sammy Davis 50:51
I really appreciate it. It’s a lot of fun.
