The Breakthrough Hiring Show: Recruiting and Talent Acquisition Conversations
Welcome to The Breakthrough Hiring Show! We are on a mission to help leaders make hiring a competitive advantage.
Join our host, James Mackey, and guests as they discuss various topics, with episodes ranging from high-level thought leadership to the tactical implementation of process and technology.
You will learn how to:
- Shift your team’s culture to a talent-first organization.
- Develop a step-by-step guide to hiring and empowering top talent.
- Leverage data, process, and technology to achieve hiring success.
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The Breakthrough Hiring Show: Recruiting and Talent Acquisition Conversations
EP 139: Mastering high-volume hiring and employee retention with Avi Singer, CEO & Founder at showd.me
Join host James Mackey and Avi Singer, CEO & Founder at showd.me, as they discuss high-volume hiring in healthcare and tech, emphasizing systematic processes and the importance of a clear employee value proposition.
Avi shares insights on online compliance training and adapting learning platforms for the healthcare industry. The episode concludes with cost-effective ways to show appreciation, discussing impactful gestures and personalized perks to enhance employee retention.
0:34 Avi Singer's background
2:02 High-volume hiring challenges
10:56 The importance of retention strategies
16:06 Online training for healthcare employees
19:46 Talent acquisition strategies
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Hello, welcome to the Breakthrough hiring show. I'm your host, james Mackie. Thanks for joining us today. We were joined by Avi Singer. Avi, thank you for joining us.
Speaker 2:Thanks so much, James. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.
Speaker 1:For sure. So before we jump into it, let's go through your background a little bit. Can you tell us about yourself?
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. My career started out in HR, more by coincidence than anything else. I started out working for online technology companies, online advertising companies. My first company was a company called DoubleClick and back in those days I ended up there just because my resume was on Monster or Hot Jobs or one of those, and they called me, but I knew nothing about online advertising. But it was a fantastic experience. So I grew my HR career there at DoubleClick. I went through an acquisition by Google, which also was just an amazing experience for myself. I stayed on at Google for a little while after that and realized that I wanted to move on to something else Interesting this little factoid about me.
Speaker 2:I briefly worked for Blue man Group in the show. That was not one of the boomers. I had to work in HR at Blue man Group. It was only a few months. The economy took a hit then in 2009 and entertainment is one of the first things that goes at that point. I was there for a few months and then was very fortunate to be hired by a company called Undertone and spent another four and a half years at Undertone, another online advertising company, developing my HR career there. That was my early days, my first years in HR and after that I decided to launch my own company called Showed Me, which is an online learning platform. Initially we were focused on peer-to-peer or social learning and then transition into compliance training over the last seven, eight years. So we work with large organizations in home care, skilled nursing those areas, helping them find great talent, onboard great talent and then develop their talent.
Speaker 1:I love that, so I think that's a good place for. Our first topic is to go into tonic position, possibly for larger organizations that are hiring for high volume roles. Maybe you can share us a little bit about some of the challenges and focus points of these employers and what it really takes to hire for high volume roles. We can kind of start wherever you want there, but let's just dive in wherever you want and we'll just start the conversation.
Speaker 2:Sure, yeah, I've had a couple of experiences with that so early in my career it was hiring engineers. So we are working for fast growing venture back-tech company. You're trying to hire dozens, if not hundreds, of engineers and that's a unique challenge and have a culture that you're trying to promote and a certain type of employer trying to hire. At the same time, you're doing it at high volume. It's how do you balance those? So it certainly is a challenge and spent quite some time developing that and we can certainly get into that further. But at the same time, our clients today are large employers in the post-acute healthcare space who have lots of needs in home care, skilled nursing and those areas and again want to hire high quality employees to take care of those patients. But at the same time, they need hundreds and hundreds of employees in order to meet their needs.
Speaker 1:Got it. So most recently, what would you say Like how is that landscape changing right now for companies that are currently working on hiring for let's just get back to focusing on high volume roles what are you advising them currently?
Speaker 2:I think the advice is you need to use the tools that are available to you.
Speaker 2:There are job boards, whether it's Indeed or other, or applicant tracking systems or different ways of getting in front of the candidates that you want. However, you still have to have a way of identifying those employees that you want. Yes, you want that, you want to be that fisherman with the big net, but you're not trying to catch all the fish, you're trying to catch some of the fish. So in that strategy, yes, you can post your jobs out there, you can post your positions out there, you can take out a billboard, you can take out ads on subway cars and things like that, and that's fine. But really early on in the process you've got to figure out so how are we going to identify? If we're going to get hundreds of candidates, how are we going to identify the ones that match the culture that we have, the type of employees that we hire, the qualifications that we need, in a very systematic way? Otherwise, you're chasing lots of dead ends. So you need to have a little balance of both there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, what are the best ways to really do that and filter through everyone? Yeah, no way that I mean. Is it really just as simple as you have to have a massive recruiting team that's not being able to screen all these folks, or you know I? You said leveraging all the tools. I don't know if there's tech you recommend as well, or what do you think?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think the tools are technology right, but I think it's you can't just like. The best I always give is don't just post the generic job out there. You have to have specific questions and criteria and predetermining types of assessment and what's specific to us. So what kind of experience is an absolute must have? What kind of qualifications are absolute must have? And therefore you're really disqualifying many people based on those criteria and what language skills do they need?
Speaker 2:So if you don't have those, if you just post out there, hey, I need a nurse, or I need a nursing assistant, or I need a physician assistant, then you're going to get everyone and the more specific you can get in, I need somebody who's a nurse but has specialties in these areas, is available to work these hours available to these those patients. Wants to work for an organization that values X, y, z. Those are things that yet tools sometimes online tools can filter for that. But also, even if you have a recruiting team, they can assess that very, very quickly. So in the first 10, 50 minutes of conversation, they should be assessing is this person a good fit, and not go through all the qualifications first, only then discover an hour into the interview oh, by the way, they don't have some of the most important things that we need or require in terms of their knowledge, background, education, culture fit those kinds of things.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and also I suppose one option and I often shy away from this is you can, during the application process, require them to fill out questions or more details about their experience. Sometimes I hesitate with that, because what if they get halfway through the application? It's taken too long and they're well, I'm just going to apply to jobs that don't make me do all this stuff. I've seen tools where it's like it'll, as soon as you apply, shares your profile with the hiring team, but then it's like a further application process so you still hold on to that, but that's more of through LinkedIn and maybe tech that is, in this, common for some of these higher body and roles. Like, do you do anything there? Do you recommend adding more criteria to the application process or do you feel like it's better to just capture those resumes versus trying to get them to do too much upfront without them being able to speak to somebody?
Speaker 2:It's a good question. It really depends on the market out there. So if it's a type of role where there are lots of potential qualified candidates, then you want to do it at the outset. You don't want to waste your time. For example, we work with I'll give you a hospitality or restaurant. Anyone in the world I don't know 99% of Americans or anyone is qualified to work in a restaurant. I'm not saying that chef was a waiter, waitress, busboy, whatever the role might be. But if you have a certain culture that you're trying to reflect in your restaurant, you can ask a qualifying question right at the outset.
Speaker 2:First thing first. Do you want to show up to work every day in a suit, or do you want to work and are you available to work from four o'clock in the afternoon to 10 o'clock at night? And right off the bat, you're going to eliminate a lot of the candidates because it's not a good fit for them. You don't want to waste your time. You don't waste their time either.
Speaker 2:So why have that come up at the end of the conversation? Where I've qualified this person? They're great, they're perfect, they're exactly what we're looking for. And then you bring in this thing like oh, by the way, here are our hours or here's our location or, by the way, remote's not an option for this role or those kinds of things Then realize I just wasted four to five minutes an hour of both of our time. So I think it goes both ways. I think you want to be respectful of the candidate and therefore any of those qualifying things, be at the outset, be really upfront about that, and you also want to be respectful of yourself and say I don't want to have to talk to 500 people. I want to talk to the 50 that are most likely to be qualified and want this role.
Speaker 1:Yeah, for sure I mean. So one of the other things we discussed in the prep call was going through the concept of employee value proposition. You don't really see as much in the blue color space. I feel like it's an untapped opportunity. So tell us, tell me, more about that. What do you really think the opportunity is and how can companies get better at this?
Speaker 2:So it's a great question. I think, across the board, everyone has a value proposition, and you might think let's talk about the color for a second or let's talk fast. So what's the difference between working at McDonald's, taco Bell, dunkin' Donuts, starbucks any of those If as a talent acquisition professional or somebody who's developing a tackle on a talent acquisition strategy? If that's your thought process, you're missing a lot. So it may not be as big. Back when I was working in tech and I was like our value proposition with ping pong tables and free lunches and great coffee and things like that. So that may not be the same proposition that you're pitching to an engineer or salesperson or account manager as you're pitching with somebody to work in a restaurant, but there are little things that they would expect. So, for example, what we find is a lot of people at that level. It pays super important to them. They're making close to minimum wage and therefore getting paid on time, getting paid accurately, is important. So those are the little things that can be frustrating where some would say well, I'm working and I felt like I worked 45 hours this week but I didn't quite get paid for what I was supposed to and there's something inaccurate in my pay and therefore I'll just go next door. It's the ease of being able to move requires you to be just a little more so the value proposition even though it sounds a little strange, but the value proposition just might be easy to use tools in terms of our clocking in and clocking out and getting paid.
Speaker 2:Some of the things that a lot of our clients are using are access to wages, so we're so used to payroll. You get paid once a week or twice a month or whatever it is, but you have so many great companies out there are giving earned wage access and that might be your value proposition. We respect the fact that you don't make a lot of money and it's a challenge, and therefore we want to give you access to that money as quickly as possible. So if you work a day tomorrow, you have access to that pay already, right? Yeah, it's not the massive things you use as a value proposition when you're hiring for engineers or something like that, but there still is a value proposition. You need to be aware of it and if you can figure it out, whatever it is, you are going to differentiate yourself from all the other fast food restaurants on that road.
Speaker 1:It's like dialing in almost to employee experience. Exactly, exactly, we're going to make this, remove kind of friction, make your life easier.
Speaker 2:That's what it is. Sometimes it's simple, it's ergonomics. We're just being able to say on an interview process and some may have experienced working from hospitality or industries like that and say we care about your health and welfare and we cooperate or use certain tools or things like that to make your job a little bit easier. That might be the differentiator. It shows that you care. It's something that would be meaningful that an employee may need to be lifting on a daily basis or being very active, and it's not a super high cost and it's a serious differentiator.
Speaker 1:Yeah for sure. So one of the other things we discussed was how retention cuts, or as it ties back into directing to talent acquisition. Given the people and talent leadership roles that you've held, I'd love to get your thoughts on why retention is so important, how it is so closely tied to the hit with a success of talent acquisition.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. I think when you think about talent acquisition it's the stuff we just talked about up until this point it's that marketing strategy, the value proposition, all of that. But if you actually talk to talent acquisition professionals, they'll tell you that a significant portion of their time is being spent on backfilling roles and that's not growing your business. And I think the retention component of talent acquisition is underappreciated, and I think organizations before you can go onto this massive marketing strategy and value proposition and promoting rules and all that.
Speaker 2:If you haven't figured out your retention strategy, you're just gonna burn through a lot of stuff, and I spent a lot of my time and most of my career has been talking about this specifically.
Speaker 2:I've grown organizations where turnover was as high as 20% year over year and that means for every 100 employees, the first 20 hires you make every year is simply going to backfill those that are going to leave this year and therefore companies are now thinking about their 2024 strategy and things like that. If you haven't figured that out, that means that it could be Q2, q3, q4, before you can even start thinking about hiring all those new roles, because I'm spending all of my time on that backfill. So I think, as somebody who's been on both sides on the talent acquisition side as well as the HR side it's a big mistake to not recognize what do we need to do to make sure that our retention improves and then be able to then think about okay, we've got that under control. If we hire people, they're gonna stay. That's good. Now we can focus on how do we make sure we hire more people so we're actually growing our business.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that's like all tied into employee value proposition as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, better experiences you can create for your employees, the more you can start to market that back to people and also, using tools like Glassdoor, we're gonna be able to build that brand out there to the world that you are able to create great experiences for employees.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I feel like retention is definitely a focus which, to me, it's like retention is about experience, creating great experiences, and you know there's a quarter of a million places we can focus, but it's really just staying close to employees and asking good question, I'm figuring out where the biggest pain is, because when you think about retention holistically, there's obviously so many different areas that you could focus on. Yeah, like comp or onboarding, or training managers properly, or capacity planning for managers, or ratio from individual contributor to managers, or professional development opportunities, learning development or promotion paths all these types of things, how performance is being managed and measured, and a million different things. So I think that it's just very telling. You just gotta dial into, okay, what's almost like the ideal customer profile what do your customers care about? In this case, your employees are your customers.
Speaker 1:Yes, really dialing is like what they care about and then optimizing specifically for that, versus trying to attack everything at once, right?
Speaker 2:It's exactly that it's. You know, I always say retention strategy is identifying the gap between why did they join and why did they leave. Yeah, they joined for a certain reason. That reason either was never there Like you're talking about. So much turnover happens in the first 90 days that promise wasn't met or is no longer there, right. So maybe somebody leaves after a year or two, and that's how you have to have that conversation. So, like you're saying, it's like surveying employees and saying why do you join the organization? I joined for this reason and why do you leave while it wasn't there? And if you can fix that, then back to your point, you can use that as your value proposition. Say employees join our organization for X and, by the way, we do X right. So employees join our organization for professional development opportunities, career development opportunities, and they're all here. So then you turn your entire career page into that's the way we have mentoring programs and training and learning. And look at all these employees who started out as interns and then became employees and became managers and directors. And your whole bad proposition becomes around that, because we've identified that gap.
Speaker 2:Not as often as people think around compensation. People always say it's a people leave for compensation and they also don't even think that that other one, that people always say that people leave because of bad managers. Yeah, people do leave because of compensation and bad managers, but those are like somewhat easy to fix. I think the harder one to fix is what we just talked about is really identifying specifically for your organization. Why do people come work here and are we delivering on that promise? And if you are, you're gonna have a really great retention strategy. I have a client actually one of my clients in the healthcare space and they've got literally thousands and thousands of patients and thousands of employees and they have I believe the number is close to 2,000 employees who've been with them for over 10 years.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I'm like you should do a study, except for the fact that they're competing with everyone else. They're not gonna let everyone have all the information. But for me personally, I've talked to them and I understand some of the things that they're doing. And in a space where, again, in healthcare entry-level healthcare, home care, skill nursing the roles are so transitional you can work in one organization, another one with the same certification and not really have to change much to have that kind of retention, is just unbelievable. And it goes back to them really thinking about it, really thinking about why do people join us versus the other healthcare organization and how we're gonna get them to stay up. They've done a great job of it.
Speaker 1:I love it, I love it and I feel like this is also this is a good time to transition into talking about online compliance trainings. I think it'd be really cool for you to share why exactly you started your company and what problem you really saw. What opportunity did you see from the perspective of maybe what was missing? And then I think it's again. It seems like you're primarily partnering with healthcare.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, that's what we saw, the biggest gap. So I mentioned before I started an online learning platform and it was a peer-to-peer learning within organizations, a lot of onboarding orientation. We were approached, interestingly enough, by some healthcare organizations when I say healthcare, I thought mostly post-acute, so elder care, assisted living, independent living, home care, skilled nursing and they said we have all these training requirements that people you know that our employees have to take when they join the organization, as they're staying with the organization and we haven't really found a platform that works for online training. So we do mostly classroom-based. And I started talking to a few of these organizations and I said how many employees do I have? 3,000. I'm like 3,000 employees all go to 12 hours of classroom training on an annual basis and I'm like, absolutely. So. I actually went down to their office and I just literally looked like the DMV, right. Just hundreds of people coming through the door sitting through PowerPoint presentations and hundreds of people leaving the door, and it's constant all day long and I started to look into. So this results in a terrible experience, right? So you just employ experience at a time. I like it. It's an awful experience to not be able to do your job today because I've got to go through 3 hours of death by PowerPoint and, on a yearly basis, same thing over and over, and it turned out that there was a very significant segment of the employee bay in healthcare that we were dealing with.
Speaker 2:The platform wasn't well-designed for that audience right. So it was designed for maybe a little more of a skilled, experienced audience who had gone through online training before. We thought it was a great opportunity for us and we adapted our platform specifically for home care and skilled nursing, which means we made it easily accessible on a mobile device. We made it multilingual, which is a big demand in our space. We made it easy for end users who had never taken all-in training to get support and help they needed to get through training, and it became the business that we do today and we love doing it.
Speaker 2:It sounds boring teaching Oshun, have a train with a bunch of people in multiple languages but we love the fact and it goes back to the same before that it's a good experience. We're constantly asking our user is this a good experience? And I think it then reflects back on the employer. So, employers, if you're still out there pulling people into classrooms to do training that doesn't require a classroom. This could be done on their own. That's a poor employee experience. The employee wants to be on the floor, they want to be helping their patients, so you have to give them this. You have to give them this. So that's what we've been doing. So we go online combined training, we do onboarding, orientation and we love it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so it's also just seems like it'd be a lot more expensive to do this stuff in person.
Speaker 2:Oh, it's way.
Speaker 1:It's way more expensive, but it was always hourly rates or whatever it might be. That's just such a massive Time during it was it was.
Speaker 2:You know, like I said, there was just this impression that a lot of these organizations had, whether it was because they had tried to assist a platform that wasn't designed for their use case, or just maybe they hadn't tried anything and they were thinking, hey, the only way we're gonna get this done that we have to be compliance. The government requires certain things and therefore we can't risk it. So we have to do classroom training, and that was a little bit of a change management piece. We have to go through and get them to somewhat risk, put some risk in there and say, oh, are we gonna get our training done? That's it. But yeah, in hindsight, they love, you know, they love the fact that we have clients who had big training rooms, you know, turn those into office space and other things because they no longer need the training space. So so they're happy to have that.
Speaker 2:You're also providing something for your workforce that's helpful, which is access to knowledge information on the fly as well. So once they learn how to do their training, so now it's also they can access it. We've done with a certain patient or certain situation, or even though personal professional development now log in to a system online and learn about something that maybe they didn't know before. I think across the board it saves money, it provides a better experience and our clients get to focus on other important things like recruiting right there always. You know all of our clients are really in that space. There's a lot of turnover in healthcare for their counselor recruiting and they get to focus on that Versus making sure that everyone does their 12 or 15 or 20 hours that need to do this here.
Speaker 1:I love it. Before we into that, I would love to really just get your thoughts too. If there's any other top of mind advice that you have when it comes to talent acquisition and we can continue to focus more so on high volume, the caller we can get into Really anything else, but just any likeable moments or top takeaways when it comes to hiring throughout your career, that kind of guides how you maybe even hire for your own team these days.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think some of the stuff we've talked about. So it's a know your organization right, know your selling point no, and spend time, like I remember back in tech we spent on an understanding organization. So, again, before you can get divided proposition, what kind of organization do we have? Let's be honest with ourselves. Do we care about people or we share about compensation? Go through that exercise. You might be surprised, and you need to be. You need to work with somebody whose objective and it's going to give you real answers, because I think I know for myself as the CEO, I think our company is great and everything's great and everyone who wouldn't want to work here, but the truth that many people probably don't want to work here. So you have to be honest with that. You have to go through that exercise with your team and, like I said, with some as an outside consultants as well understand. Do we have something and, if not, what can we do to change that? So what do we need to do in order to make sure it isn't an environment people want to come work at and work for, and because Employees will see through that very quickly, whether they're candidates, they'll say I don't think I want to work here. But you can see that pretty quickly. I think we've all been on those interviews. We're kind of say, hey, this probably isn't for me, or they join and they realize after a short amount of time, hey, this probably isn't gonna, it's gonna work for me, and we've all had those experiences. So I think certainly there will always be employers out there who maybe don't care as much, but you want to be that employer.
Speaker 2:If you really want to win the war on talent at any level, you want to be that employer. Control very clearly that you care. And there's. There are little things you can do, for example, and sometimes they cost money, but you know the long run. You run your ROI studies on this stuff. It's nothing. So, for example, giving employees choice of equipment, you know, hey, what kind of charity you want, what kind of computer do you want? We'll just make life easier. I don't have an approval process at our company for things that employees need. I may never employees are a mode work from home. But things that you want to stand up desk, you want to sit down desk, you want to sit on a medicine exercise ball, whatever it is, let's just not make a big deal out of those things, because that's the kind of organization that we want to be.
Speaker 2:I've been giving my clients I'll take something interesting in healthcare. I've been giving my clients a piece of advice that none of them have taken yet. But anyone who's listening in in home care, skilled nursing, take this advice. It'll absolutely change your organization. And I've said many employees In post-acute that we deal with they're taking subways or taking buses or taking a very, they're walking to work, they're taking public transportation.
Speaker 2:I live in New York. It's cold and I told my clients, I said the best possible thing you can do for talent acquisition, retention, even customer acquisition, would be buy every single one of your employees a really great warm. I don't want to throw any brands out there, so we'll leave the brand out of it. Warm winter jacket and you can even put your logo on it. Put your logo on it. It's you know you're giving, but give it to them. Give them something really great and you're gonna put your logo on it.
Speaker 2:And I said and three things don't happen. One is that employee will appreciate it. So you want me. You know I have to take the bus. You can't change that. You're not gonna be in a car, but at least you care about me and you're giving me something that makes it a little bit easier, makes that can be a little bit easier. You're showing others who might see them on that bus or train or subway or walk that you're an employer who cares and you've given your employees something that, again, it's not a ton but it's something that's meaningful to them. You've given them a jacket that might have cost 150 or $200, that they would never have bought themselves.
Speaker 2:Now other employees want to come work for your organization because you care and you also show potential patients that you're the kind of organization that cares. But it's a massive investment. It's a big event. You have, by a thousand employees, a $200 jacket. That's a big investment. But I've told all my clients I said, the one who does that is already gonna be like the ROI on. That is gonna be immeasurable and there are ways you can track it.
Speaker 2:But I think that's. I think the bottom line is that that's the key thing. If you're, you know, answer that question are we an employer who cares? And if we're not, then let's not play games. Let's just do high volume work. We're gonna be fine with that If we are an employer that cares. Let's figure out what that means and how that translates and how we reflect that and everything that we do, and let's hold ourselves to it. So, once those employees start, we've told them that we care about them and we want them to do it and have a great experience, and make sure that we're doing everything we can for them to have that great experience.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's great. It's like an example of something really thoughtful that you can do. It does add up, of course, for larger workforces, but still it's the ROI, as you said. Across comparison to losing people faster than really could, it makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 2:So and even if you lose those employees, they'll probably still wear the jacket and it may work in something else, but it's a really good jacket. So you don't get the benefit even if you don't stick around.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, it's just you're right and I don't think a lot of companies are very thoughtful about that, but honestly, that's a really good example. You can find a way to find that for your business I'm sure every business has something like that or if you really think about it. What is something that's like maybe even just inconvenient or uncomfortable, or what's just a little thoughtful thing that we can do? That's probably not going to be expected. That's just a gift. They don't even have to make an ask Like, hey, let's just do this.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and you don't have to even pretend about the fact that you're not expecting ROI. Like I said, you can be selfish about it. You're giving people something and you don't have to be. You know that. It's not a town acquisition or retention strategy. Yes, it will last to be magnanimous and say like, yeah, we give out jackets because we don't want to be warm, but you don't have to be that way. You can be honest about it as well.
Speaker 2:It's the same thing I remember back in 2000, trying to convince companies to have coffee in the office. And just if you change people's mindset and they're like why should we get free coffee? People get their own coffee, or why should the coffee be good? Companies had coffee but it was usually terrible. It was made in Mr Coffee machines and I was like, oh, karrigah's coming out, we should get those and all the flavors.
Speaker 2:I'm like, why would they do that? I'm like, wait a second, do you realize? The average employee leaves the office three, four times every 20 minutes. That goes down line on Starbucks. That's 45 minutes an hour a day. I'm like, if you change that and have good coffee in the office like, you're getting 45 minutes back. But again, it's the cost that people focus on. They don't focus on that ROI. So I think there's so many areas where employers can think about that and say, yes, it's gonna cost me something up front and I can measure very quickly whether I'm getting anything for it. So if I'm not getting anything, I can always stop it. I don't have to continue doing it. But I would challenge people about their mindset around those things and realize that a lot of those things, if they're meaningful, if they have purpose, if they're things that people actually appreciate, are gonna give you a lot more return than what everything that's gonna cost you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, a lot of those things too. It's not like they're incredibly expensive. There's ways that you can show people that you care. That doesn't call hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars, yeah yeah, I always stop again.
Speaker 2:If you don't like the jacket one, just start with umbrellas, like really good umbrellas, like the ones that people are gonna lose really easily. Like start with umbrellas and see how those are received. And if the umbrellas go well, maybe you move up to get a really warm hoodie and then you can go to that really expensive jacket. But do something. I think again, going back to the town acquisition, like we were talking about, you gotta test stuff. You gotta try stuff. If you're not trying anything, if you're just doing the same thing everyone else is doing, that's yeah, there's no differentiation. So it'll just be spending right. So it gets into your whole SEO strategy and, like you just outspend everyone else and you know who's gonna spend most for the keyword. Do something completely different and it'll cost you money. But let's get. Let's face it, you're spending money already on this stuff.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love it. I love it. Well, this has been a really insightful episode. I really appreciate you coming on board today and sharing your thoughts with everyone. Thank you so much for joining us.
Speaker 2:Thanks so much for having me. James. Really appreciate it.
Speaker 1:Absolutely Everybody tuning in. Thank you so much and we'll see you next time. Take care.
