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 174: How to streamline operations and drive sustainable growth with Rachael Becker, Founder & CEO of RB Builds
Rachael Becker, Founder & CEO of RB Builds, joins host James Mackey to discuss business efficiency, tech transformation, and creating standout user experiences.
With a unique blend of expertise across operations and technology, Rachael shares actionable insights on how organizations can streamline processes, improve internal alignment, and scale sustainably.
Thank you to our sponsor, SecureVision, for making this show possible!
Our host James Mackey
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Welcome to the Breakthrough Hiring Show. I'm your host, james Mackey. We got Rachel Becker here with us today. Rachel is the founder and CEO of RBBuilds. She's a good friend of mine and she's an advisor to June, my AI startup. She's given me a ton of great advice and I know she's gonna be able to provide you with a lot of insight too, rachel welcome. Thanks for joining us today.
Speaker 2:Hey, james, thanks for having I'm excited to be here and talk about my favorite subject, which is tech in the workforce. Grateful that I found you guys With RBBuilds. One of the unique things that I think that we can bring to companies is the experience of me and some of my experts throughout our career. We started in ops, hr and then came into tech and efficiencies, and with RBBuilds we have the consultancy for the businesses as well as the consultancy for the go-to-market startups. So that unique understanding of both what's actually happening in the workforce right now, which changes so fast, and how tech is being built, which changed so fast, creates a unique, I think, niche that is beneficial that we're seeing in the market today.
Speaker 1:Yeah, for sure. And you handle, I think, a fair amount of different types of projects for your customers, right, I know a lot of it. It comes down to optimization, technology, transformation, but you work in different industries and, I think, different scopes of work depending on what your customers need. So I'd love to I think everybody would love to learn a little bit more about the different types of projects you take on for your customers need. So I'd love to I think everybody would love to learn a little bit more about the different types of projects you take on for customers.
Speaker 2:Absolutely so. Efficiency is our driving force and within efficiency, that's optimizing skills, your processes, upskilling tech, efficiencies within the user, your workforce, and so a lot of times we're getting calls to either do like an AI prompting workshop, we'll get called to do fractional positions as far as like COO coming in and creating new processes with the teams. Through that process, we've also built and birthed temp agencies after hours answering services to meet these needs as these companies grow and evolve in the crisis that they're in. But it is industry agnostic, even though I have a special place in my heart for deskless workers. I think that's a very complicated industry. It's where I cut my teeth, and so that's our main focus is those deskless industries.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely, and you're doing that and you're doing a lot of work with me at June too, which is really exciting in the SaaS space. So one of the topics we discussed really dialing into today is user experience.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And I think when we've discussed it, like before, we hit record, you use that term broadly as well. We have, of course, ux for tech and product, but I think for you it goes beyond that and you're looking at it, at possibly every interaction within a company.
Speaker 2:it sounds like whether it absolutely yeah employees and yeah, it's a business philosophy of ours that that end user, that experience, goes beyond the tech that they're using. It's their, it's their experience working with you or buying from you. So it's not just the tech, it is their life cycle throughout your company or their life cycle as your client and paying attention to and building back from the way that they receive it. So in 2007, I entered the construction industry. It was a very chaotic year. I think everyone in the world can understand that and I learned really quickly that if I needed a field worker to do something for me in the construction industry, I had to think like them and build backwards. To me it was a very simple concept, but it's amazing how that is just now turning what 10, 15 years later, to where we're focused on how they're going to adopt it instead of shoving it down their throat. Basically and with June I've seen that.
Speaker 2:So when I used June to, I was looking for superintendents in New York City, which is complicated. It's very high volume and then there was a skills gap that we were trying to solve for before we got to the interview phase and the construction workers. These superintendents loved June. They loved the fact that they could elaborate. During the process, they all authenticated. I think 17 and 18 have authenticated. They enjoyed the ability to talk back and explain things and by the time they got to the interview, they stated that they felt more ownership over the role, that they were heard and seen and they were walking in with more confidence than prior before, and to me that that's a win. That's what I mean when, when focusing on that UX and how they're adopting the product.
Speaker 1:Yeah for sure, and so everybody tuning in, just so you know too. You've probably listened to the podcast and you've probably heard me talk about June a fair amount, but essentially, june does. It's like an AI interviewing agent, right? So when candidates apply to a job, june automatically reaches out and conducts a pre-screening interview, and yeah, in this case, I think it does provide. There's like this.
Speaker 1:I think here, like my whole philosophy and this was it actually started running a services company was that great experiences produce great results. So it's like really dialing in on experience, like at every little moment in the business, and maybe, honestly, I think I did it almost to a fault. I think I sometimes did it to a sacrifice of scale. For the first several years in business, I think I was almost overly obsessive on every little thing being perfect, and what that led to, though, is we have a 4.8 out of five star customer review rating at SecureVision. We lead the category for embedded recruiting and RPO. We're not the biggest firm yet From a quality perspective. We got that down, and I always did believe it's. If you take care of your customers, that workflow and your employees and you create great experiences on both sides, you can have an incredible business when we were scaling and we went from. I mean, we had a 12, 18 month period where we went from like one to four and a half million in revenue at SecureVision and like a huge part of my focus was just getting employee experience right, like just really dialing in.
Speaker 1:I consider all that like UX. I just to me, you're right Like I didn't really segment in all these different buckets buckets, it's like I want to create an efficient system in which people have the resources they need, to feel confident in their ability to produce great results for the customers. Like, yeah, and that's basically what we did, because I always saw the business as like any business. To me it's two essentially big, like demand gen, like funnels, if you will, will like two life cycles. It's like you have your customers and your employees. If you take care of those employee experiences, they're going to create incredible customer experiences is how I always saw it and it's interesting how that lens is impacting how I think about building a product company. Now it's just a slightly different perspective, similar to yours, right, like where I think about the term more broadly in terms of let's look at okay, company wide, right Every interaction we have with our customer, not just within a product or every interaction we have with employees, like how is that going to impact it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think it's the adoption over consumption, and so it's something that they're going to hold on to and keep for a long period of time. It's not fleeting, it doesn't solve just one issue. It's taking into consideration the experience instead of the transaction and I think, with whether it's your employee, you know, or it's the user of the tech that you're using, I think that philosophy is what's winning right now and it gets people to believe in you. I think you I just saw the other day that you have an employee that you've worked with, or a recruiter you've worked with and she's coming back, or you're working together again. You know. That, to me, is a huge testament of that end user or user experience built into your own company.
Speaker 2:I have the same thing and it means everything and we're successful, and we take that same philosophy into the companies that we go in, because it's scary. I walk in and people are scared. I joke that the highest paid employee should be nervous, the lowest paid employee should be excited, but it's still really scary. It's scary because of tech, it's scary because of uncertainty, and so we come in and we try to understand where that specific company is experiencing pain points and not just generalizations on tech and fear and shoving it down their throats. We create a custom path for them to get from point A to point B, and it's critical. Every single company in this country could benefit from a little efficiency rethink.
Speaker 1:Yeah, like when you typically go into a customer environment, like what are the highest leverage areas that you see or where's usually, where do you see? Okay, this is the area that we can really dial in on and make the biggest impact.
Speaker 2:Feedback loops, Feedback loops and I learned that in my first year in startup world just how critical that feedback loop is, not just between the user and the product team, the investors, the sales, everybody needs to be on the same page. Missed information, searching for information, actually building a tool, organizational transparency and oversight that becomes connective tissue for that to solve. But that is the first thing we do is get the lanes of communication and expectations aligned and then we build from there.
Speaker 1:Okay, nice, nice. And I'm curious, just since we're working together a lot on June just to dial in from a UX perspective, like you've given us a lot of good feedback on what you think customer expectations are going to be with the features and functionality, when you're specifically looking at early stage SaaS products, like you are with June, it'd be cool to have a conversation about what's most important for you or, from your perspective, what should early stage companies really be dialing in on?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, what are you solving? Make sure you understand that. I think you guys have a clear understanding of that. The humility as you're building it, I think is very important. I've seen really strong confidence in your North Star and then the ability to adapt to the changing ecosystem that revolves around the tech that you're building. So those are two huge things. I think that's important is understanding what you're solving, for it's the same advice I actually give to businesses is you've got to have that North Star, you've got to have that goal, because everything becomes really confusing when you're granular and you're pulled in like a thousand different ways, and so you guys are disciplined with that. I think that's truly important.
Speaker 2:And again, the feedback loop. My favorite question to ask tech, even when I'm doing a demo, is how do you weight your feedback? What's important to you and how are you making decisions based off of what's important to you instead of based off chasing that dollar really fast because this changed or something like that? What do you think about the feedback loop and weighted feedback? I know we've talked about it a couple times.
Speaker 1:Yeah, like in terms of customer feedback.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so user feedback on like the product.
Speaker 1:So whether you own or another tech, it's really, it's been a really interesting experience for me just coming from the services side of the house where, like we always, we had to in a disciplined company like you always have to be very careful about prioritizing feedback, absorbing it like, dialing, like really understanding it well, trying to prioritize it and then making a decision on what should actually be actionable and what, like, shouldn't be a priority. We've done that in our services company, but it's different in that if we onboard a new company and a services company, they could say, oh, we have this one little ask and when you're like as a services company, yeah, sure, okay.
Speaker 2:We can do that. Yeah, that's fine.
Speaker 1:We'll go over here and do this other thing for you. That's not part of our standard whatever. But it's like with a product company. It's like we have these deals in our pipeline and it's, yeah, this is good, but we just want this one little thing. And then it's you find out, okay, at a product company, building that one little thing isn't like one little thing, because that one little thing impacts like 100 other things and it's also a diversion from our product roadmap. And Tony, my co founder he I try not to upset him too much by promising too much it's.
Speaker 1:That is really like that feedback loop.
Speaker 1:And I think the most interesting part to me has been like finding that balance of listening to user feedback, trying to go like through, really dialing in on signal versus noise and then leveraging our own insights and experience to try to determine, okay, where do we really need to build.
Speaker 1:And it's also very interesting now because it's like at an early stage. We're essentially going wide initially with a lot of these discovery conversations, but then also we want to hopefully dial in on an ideal customer profile sooner rather than later, because we don't want to be building product in 10 directions but we don't also want to overcommit, Right. So it's just like this constant like in terms of feedback, like I don't think we've discussed it a lot. You've given us a lot of good feedback. Right now it's like still in this very much so exploratory stage where we're just we're having a lot of conversations, we're trying not to build too much product in too many different directions and we're trying to figure out, OK, what features are safe to build now that we know will drive immediate value, and when does it make sense to turn down a potential customer or just say no.
Speaker 2:That's how I'm thinking about feedback and you touched on two really important pieces as you were talking about it, and the first is how you like consume the feedback, because a lot of times you'll hear that's not the feature we need to do, because the user really doesn't know what they need. They just know their pain point and instead of saying hey, this is my pain point, they're gonna say hey, maybe this, maybe that, and so again, that's that psychology of working backwards, instead of being like, no, okay, we're gonna take that, we're gonna analyze it, we're gonna bucketize it with these other features and you'll start to birth really great features from their like suggestions, which a lot of product people I've seen just brush off because it's not a feature they were intending to build.
Speaker 1:But if you focus on the problem, yeah, like, just as you said, work backward, like they say okay, what about this? It's? Why are you saying that? What are you trying to?
Speaker 2:What are you trying to? What were you doing? I don't know if you guys saw the Google sheet I set when we first started with my feedback is what were you doing at the time? What were you trying to accomplish at the time? And then what's your suggestion? And so they still get the chance to say, oh, I wish it did this, because that's what this thing does and this is what I'm used to looking at. And then you've got the piece. You weight that weight that. You have your systematic process, you tie it to arr all that. And then, on the other side, is you get? How do you say no? How do you keep them enticed and obsessed with your product but tell them, no, we're not building that yeah, yeah you had to say that.
Speaker 1:Yet I don't think you said it, so I think what we've done thus far is I'm trying to onboard customers and like cohorts if you will, and really being thoughtful about what customers can get value out of where the product is today and being aggressive with revenue strategy, but not being a totally blunt instrument, like trying to be a strategic salesperson in this one of my several jobs, right and not just push, push, push, push, just to churn, and so it's like I'm trying to be very aggressive with growing revenue, but I also don't want to onboard a customer.
Speaker 1:It's this could be a great customer six months from now, to some extent, like I think there's that you've got to be careful. The perfectionist side right, where you're just like and of course, as like we're not perfection, we push it out, like we're trying, we're moving fast. But there are some customers where, for instance, I know like we have one deal in the pipeline now and it's one of those things where it's like we're like three, six months too early, because I don't know if they're like a friendly, so to speak. We can sell and they'll pay like full price or close to it, but are we ready for that kind of premium? We want the revenue. We want like that premium pricing, the logo. Yeah, all of that is awesome, but we don't want to onboard new and then to ultimately share, and so I don't think I'm saying no as much right now, because we're still learning, right, we're still having conversations. And hey, if 10 companies say if you had this thing, if we did this, then we would sign, I was like okay, wait, like we've heard this from 10 companies now, let's okay.
Speaker 1:But what I am trying to be very thoughtful about is saying trying to put them in buckets of cohorts, and it's just like we have this one one sas company and we're gonna be, we're gonna at least we're like saying, hey, we're in the like, they need the ability to do international screening and so it's one of those things. It's like we could do now, but there's just more that we need to work on. So it's like we're just telling them like, look like, opposed to getting started now, over the next six weeks, we're going to be building out more here, so let's continue, like in the future. So I'm more so like just pushing folks out at this point If I unless I know for sure like we're not going to be able to do it, but if it's like one of those things where it's like I need to have a few more conversations before knowing for sure, then I am starting to just I just try to push them out a little bit further so we don't overcommit anything.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I hear two things there that I validate. One is that you have the motion going right, so it's probably different communications to the ones you're pushing out that strategy there, that's your sales motion. But I think also when you can confidently say not yet, or this is what we're building instead, and this is why we think that we should be building it. We are the experts, you guys. And so there's a story I always tell You've probably heard it a thousand times. I was in swimming lessons with my middle son. My middle son was born medically vulnerable. He's great now, but it was a scary time. And so finally he was two years old and we're in swimming lessons and the practice was to blow in their face, dunk them under the water and bring them back up. And so I did it the first time and his face came up and it was just distraught.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah.
Speaker 2:And she goes OK, do it again. And I blew in his face and his little lip quivered and I just held him to my chest, I didn't dunk him under the water and she screams at me. He needs to trust you, not like you. And I think that psychology works really well. If you can say no, but give them the reason why. If you can say no, but give them the reason why. If you can say not, yet, give them the reason why. That, I think, is going to build actual adoption than trying to give them something that's not going to work or something you don't believe is core to the product.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I definitely agree, and it's weird because the salesperson in me, a sales leader in me from Secure Vision, it's like being super dialed in on your ICP qualifying disqualified deals fast. Don't waste time on deals that you're not going to win. Is your pipeline real or not? Like really having those types of conversations really building out like buyer persona conversations and just being very targeted, right?
Speaker 1:And it's definitely like at this stage it's a little bit different right, like we're trying to be that company, but it's like we're still not at that point yet where we can just you got to gather data and use cases.
Speaker 2:That's why that feedback loop that you're using inside is so important, because you can start to not just bucket feedback. You can start to identify your power users in a way that you wouldn't have if we were guessing. A-b testing. I love, but you are absorbing as fast as you can in this early stage to then put those in those buckets, as opposed to the other way around.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's really critical insight. I mean, I think thinking about optimizing a product or a service toward the lens of not focusing on an end feature request but getting to the core pay point is something that I don't think is done very often frankly, particularly not on the product side, like I could definitely see product people just like not understanding that at all, particularly if it's like an engineering background. They're not even going to.
Speaker 2:I now speak engineer. I hear that took a while. I see construction, enough. I now speak engineer. I hear that took a while. I think construction yeah, yeah, it's not, and I think that's where I just continue that systematic it's wild, information's flying everywhere and it changes and so you taking that information and putting it into a framework I think really helps calm that, calm the chaos, and it helps. I think our systematic engineers understand too what we're trying to tell them by putting it in some type of formatted structure process.
Speaker 1:Yeah, hey, just to switch gears a little bit, I'd really love to learn more about the work you do with deskless employees and companies in those spaces. I would love to. I know you've given us an overview of some of the projects you work on and what you help with like an overview of some of the projects you work on and what you help with, but would you be able to give us more of a recent example of the work you do there, because I'm just really curious to learn more about what you do on that side of the house for your business?
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely so. I was invited into a group of companies recently, which I really enjoyed. It was a huge challenge because you're walking in and you've got multiple companies within Deslis, but still multiple different companies. They were inter-company, so they had feedback loops. The tech was different in each company, the processes were antiquated and by hand. The welcome letter, the new customer letter even, was still by hand, not even copy and paste from a template. The man hours to the collective man hours across the companies were twice, if not three times, the benchmark, and so it was very clear that there was at least an efficiency issue. They called it a payroll issue, but as you get in you're starting to see it's an efficiency issue as well, because the people that are being paid this much aren't accomplishing what you know. Industry benchmarks say that they should. So we came in, we did some.
Speaker 2:I prefer to upskill as opposed to let go, but in some circumstances that's necessary and in some circumstances they don't want to upskill, they don't want to learn tech, they don't want to learn a new process, and so there's a little bit of that kind of shake that happens. We handle anything, any exits that need to happen, gracefully. I have another philosophy is you give a bigger party when they leave than when they came in. And then we got down to nitty gritty and we started with tech stack. We I vetted all the tech stack that they were using, thankful for AI. It's pretty quick, obviously, my connections in the industry, and so we'll vet the tech stack and see if it's worth keeping.
Speaker 2:What integrations and improvements Do they iterate quickly? Are they changing fast with everybody else? If I have a tech partner in the industry, I'm pretty hard on them. So the demos are always the funnest. They typically end up lasting twice as long. But my questions are because I'm putting something into a client's ecosystem for life. I'm going to have to deal with it or hear about it, so I like the control there.
Speaker 2:So we start with the tech stack and then we start to integrate processes, create SOPs. My favorite format is RACI docs so everybody understands who's responsible, accountable and so on and so forth. There's nothing missed. There's nothing missed, and so it's funny because I believe the operations and HR really are becoming way more connected than they ever have. If you take the two roles and their tasks and align them next to each other, they're pretty much the same thing.
Speaker 2:And so we come in with that operations HR blend, because if you're building a process as operations, don't you want to know how that impacts the person pulling off that process? So again, it's back to that end user. So basically what we did was went in there, shifted people around a little bit, took people the right person in the wrong spot looks like the wrong person. So we shifted responsibilities a little bit to where it worked. We integrated new tech, we trained field staff, we trained vendors and external partners to utilize the tech. We really just go in and upskill and create efficient processes and ensure that staff can then carry those processes on after we leave. The goal is to leave. I want to work on bigger and better things with that company, so we get them good and healthy and then we come back on growth projects, expansions, things like that.
Speaker 1:Is that the primary, like the North Star, as to why folks bring you on board to, is it usually like some kind of form of a revenue target, growth target?
Speaker 2:So we start with. We start with bottom line. So they're yeah. What we don't want to do is, like you were saying too you've got all these people, but you don't want to bring them in and not have a good place to land, and so what we don't want to do is increase revenue before we have the proper processes and efficiencies in place, because then your reactionary as opposed to due to proactive. So it's a.
Speaker 2:Within the first 90 days, I have clients on average see 2X increase in customer satisfaction. Revenue increases actually, but that's not intentional. Even with our temp services, which people often think are more expensive and complicated, they're saying 10 to 20% savings in their payroll, and then the tech efficiencies and whatnot. So it's basically about margin to begin with, and then we can go into sales motions, marketing. We have a great marketing arm in RB Builds as well, and so that's the fun part. When that team comes in. That means that we've been successful, we've created a firm foundation and it's time to grow. And it's quick and it's easy. I know these circumstances and consultants sound scary, temps sound scary, but it's quick, painless. We could be turned around in about 24 hours because we know these industries so well. Is.
Speaker 1:I think it's revenue growth is also very hard. Everything about building a company is insanely hard. But I think what is hard about growing revenue is not just that you're growing top line, it's growing with strong unit economics in the business. So your actual margin is not just depleting where it's like you have more revenue and overhead but you're making less money, which is most businesses and to some extent it is inevitable. In some cases, overhead is going to have to grow a little bit if you start to scale a company, but there's no point to grow if the company is not to some extent maintaining profit margins.
Speaker 1:That's the point, and I think that when it comes to protecting margins or increasing margins, I think that there's still a lot of people in executive positions that they're starting to understand the value of AI, the value of tech, the value of even offshoring more roles. But I think that there's this a bit of an oversimplification on okay, I'm going to review a P&L and that's how I'm going to optimize for margin. That's it. It's just through the lens of where's the waste right, where can we cut. But I don't think that a lot of folks actually have the expertise on how do we build a better machine, a better engine, a better process tech, everything to just drive efficiency and actually increase margin. It's deeper than going into a P&L and I think a lot of times that's where the executives that's what they do right. They're going to review quarterly report, they're going to see okay, what can we do? Is there anything efficiency gains? But like what you're doing is, it's really impressive because it's incredibly hard and it takes a lot more expertise than just simply looking at a P&L.
Speaker 2:That's where we start to actually is the P&L. So I sit with the ops guy, the finance guy. Typically the finance guy is giving me a call because he's mad at the ops guy because things are falling apart and we'll sit with the P&L and that's where I start as compared to industry benchmarks. But then we get granular and we unpack the impacts and maybe the worst performing piece isn't where we start, because you want to stop the bleed right away as well as build these efficiencies into place. And it's no fault to anyone that this is happening. It's happening to the entire country, to the entire world.
Speaker 2:So we used to be able to throw money at things and fix it. We used to be able to throw people at things and fix it. That's not working right now. So some of the conversations I even have before we even get started is you're not running a bad business. I know it's not working and I know you're frustrated, but that's. Everybody in the world right now has to really look at their bottom line and get that healthy. Ai is not replacing jobs. I think it's saving jobs because companies would be going under without it. So I think that a reframe, as well as a tool and not a replacement is a positive way to look at tech right now.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's definitely interesting that is a very interesting topic as well to think about AI's impact on the employment market, I do see. Of course, certain jobs are going to probably disappear. They're going to evolve into different jobs. I don't know how much it's really going to hurt the employment market. I think that things are just going to continuously move a lot faster right, even with developers and engineers. We still need developers and engineers.
Speaker 1:Like the code that a chat GPT is going to push out, even if an engineer is asking for help, it's not going to be the highest quality code. There's going to be errors in it, it's going to be too long, there's going to be problems, but it can help an engineer, a senior engineer, go from working on a problem for a week or two weeks to doing it in an afternoon, and that doesn't mean that, like software isn't necessarily going to become a commodity. It means that we're going to be able to build more complicated, better products, superior products, and so the bar is just going to be raised right, like. It's not that we're not going to need people. It's just that people are going to be doing a lot more. We're going to be building more sophisticated products.
Speaker 2:The bar is raised. Yeah, like we're there and it's. You got to get there or you're not going to get there. It's a saw, an electric saw. You just got cooler toys.
Speaker 2:Tech is also connecting, I think, recruiting and recruiters to the workforce. Yes, maybe taking a sorcerer job here and there, but I also think that in that case too, it's still a tool that somebody's using. I had to stop recruiting until I found June, because I didn't have the capacity to handle the volume that's come in. That isn't replacing the high volume is a newer thing as well, and so I'm hitting a blocker that's not replacing anyone. I just can't do it now because so much is coming in June. Came in and said I'll have that first combo with them. I'll can't do it now because so much is coming in June. Came in and said I'll have that first combo with them. I'll get the warm and fuzzies going, I'll qualify them, you can look at it in a scalable, digestible way, make your decision and move forward, and so tech actually allows me to recruit again, if that makes sense.
Speaker 1:Yeah, for sure, for sure, and it's interesting. Building June yeah, for sure, they're sure, and it's interesting. Like building june is interesting too because it's like I obviously I have a recruiting services company too, right, so it's like I build recruiters. Then I have a tool that enables and potentially could even like help companies run with leaner sourcing organizations. Possibly yeah, we don't know yet, but yeah, I think the goal is, even if you have an ai agent, like, for instance, like with june right, it's an ai agent, like, for instance, like with June, right, it's an AI agent, technically it could handle a lot of the screening in some environments, maybe like the entire screening interview, so it goes straight to the hiring manager interview.
Speaker 1:But to me, as a senior recruiter, we have a culture at Secure Vision where it's like everybody works with customers, right, like everybody. So, even like in the late stage of my career, I've had hands-on projects. I've always been engaged with customers. Even when I was building Secure Vision over the past few years, I was always involved and I wanted an agent, I wanted an assistant, I wanted an agent, I wanted a direct report. So to me it's like, still, no, I didn't see it as lacing my role as a recruiter, not as a CEO, but even as, like a hands on recruiter. It's not even that. It's like. The productivity gains I can get of having a direct report that works for me 24 seven is amazing and that person's gonna make me look great. And they're not even gonna ask for credit, they're gonna ask for a promotion, they're gonna ask for a raise it.
Speaker 1:So it's to me it's, even if you're in a position where it's like there's AI coming in, that's like an agent that can actually evaluate and make decisions and push things along in the process, like there's a way to leverage that in order to make your productivity and value to the company a lot more. And I think that's just the folks that I think just are probably gonna have to be concerned with, like the ones that like aren't thinking about how to leverage AI. Like even on the developer side, like there's engineers that they've been doing their thing for 15 years and they just can't wrap their head around building AI data products.
Speaker 2:I had one the other day was like, hey, I used AI to help this code and I'm like today, you didn't. Two weeks ago, six months ago, what's going on? You got to grab a hold and some people that I've worked with I going on. You got to grab a hold and some people that I've worked with I wouldn't expect to go into this new tech revolution easily and I'm dragging them. I'm like you are relevant, you do need to be in this industry, you need to be working, but you've got to leverage these tools because there are 50 to 60% of people sitting at home that want your job and they are learning how to use this.
Speaker 2:I love it for just a thought partner. I'm like, yes, sobriety, test this, sanity, test this, that type of thing and I like to dive in and really unpack ideas and thoughts, and that alone has been a huge game changer, let alone the efficiencies that tech is bringing us, with the ability to really unpack an idea and dig in with someone at the drop of a hat at any time. I think it's really valuable.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's definitely. It's like a super exciting time to be in technology. I love what you do. I love RV builds. I think it's a really cool concept. This is the kind of stuff that I love to like nerd out on, yes, and almost like in my role is like somebody that's responsible for a scale as my primary driver.
Speaker 1:Again, like at SecureVision, there was so many times where I was just like I just want to get in there and optimize, like I just I love that motion and it's, of course, as the CEO, it's like that balancing growth right and having a strong team to help with those help optimize along the way. But we had a customer, a SecureVision customer that an advisor for, and it was a similar, different kind of project but similar in that I was brought on board as an advisor because they needed to increase net retention. That was the goal we need to increase net retention and so it was really cool because for the talent strategy, it's like all right, let's go in there, let's talk with everybody, let's uncover process, let's uncover technology, let's uncover everything about what's working in the environment, everything that's broken, let's uncover who's succeeding and why and who's struggling and why, and starting that recruiting motion and then I ended up genuinely had openings. I did target folks from competitors and we were considering them and I also was like a kid in a candy shop, asking them questions like how do you run your environment, what is your process? What tech do you use? What's your pipeline? Look like Doing that whole motion and like that whole.
Speaker 1:It's incredibly fulfilling work, like helping companies just build a healthier, just business like something that's humming, something that's like a well-oiled machine is something that's. I know how challenging it is. That's why I'm so impressed with everything that you're doing. It's hard work, but I know it's incredibly fulfilling as well.
Speaker 2:Incredibly fulfilling. I'm getting goosebumps talking about it. I remember the first time we ran the numbers, I was nervous. I'm like are we more efficient? Are we healthy? It I was nervous. I like are we more efficient, are we healthy? It felt good. People were happy. They were showing up more so than they did. They were over, going above and beyond to be involved in this process. They trusted that we were making changes as they did it, and so it felt good, like the vibes were good, but we were in the numbers almost cried. I was like we did, we are good, it does work, like we know what we're doing. It was like we did we are good, it does work, like we know what we're doing. It was really strong gains and what I would say saved some companies and so that it's a scary moment and I would click the button and I was like, wow, we did it.
Speaker 1:We did it, like you. It's like such an impact to your businesses, to your customers, if you're just creating like true enterprise value, like You're creating profitability, but that also increases the ability to unlock sustainable growth, like revenue growth that actually scales, that makes sense. One of the simplest business lessons I learned in my early 20s. It's like look, if you can have a company that it's a $2 revenue and you get a $1 profit, do you want that company or a company with revenue and you get a one dollar profit? Do you want that company or a company with ten dollars revenue and a one dollar profit?
Speaker 2:I want the two dollar.
Speaker 1:I want less risk. I don't want to have 10x the expenses to make the same money, it says. I think that's there. Is this over emphasis on this? Like the revenue metric, which is still incredible. You can't have a bottom line without the top line, yeah, yeah. So it's not that it doesn't matter. It's just like when we start to think about scale, that's where everything starts to break down, because we're not looking at our ability to scale profits and I think we have all these types of misconceptions in our business about what's going to hold up at scale and what's going to break down.
Speaker 1:I know this is just a big mistake that I made in early days of Secure Vision is we used to have a lot of like month-to-month contracts and we worked with a lot of startups and growth stage companies providing recruiting services. It was like embedded recruiting. They would pay us, like people would borrow recruiters from us. They'd pay us a subscription for those recruiters and sometimes, like the startups, like they would hire for a few months, they would stop. So we had it was like a high churn motion as a recruiting agency because we fill the roles in the, but we were considering that recurring revenue. Really, they pay us monthly. They pay us monthly.
Speaker 1:It's like it's okay, but yeah, but like your churn is high, it's not really recurring revenue. It's like you don't decide if your business is recurring revenue. Your customers do, and like those types of misconceptions could start to really mess things up at scale. But there's a billion of them right, like when it comes to process, when it comes to tech, when it comes to business model, when it comes to, like your different financial metrics, like things that you think are everything changes, everything changes, and that's why it's so important to catch what, like the stuff you do for your customers. It's so important to do early on, because if you get to the point where you're at a scale organization and there's all these fundamental things that are wrong with how you're operating and your business model, it can kill you.
Speaker 2:It will, and fortunately that's where we're at too. Again, you can't just throw money at something you can't borrow anymore. You can't. You've even got insurance spikes with the inflation logistics. It's just. It's impossible to not be intentional about the framework that your company operates in and that's that's the hardest part. I come in and I'm the scapegoat. My temps that come in, my fractional leaders that come in. We do frontline like love on our frontliners today, because we're scapegoats, we're a threat, we are thought partners and we do really well in those. In that uncomfortable here I can give really good, really bad news. Really gets dirty, it's exhausting and that's some of the tension that we carry so that these companies can wrestle with real issues. Point at me, blame me, okay, but let's talk about what you need to do to save your business. We're really good at that piece too, because there's a lot of change, management and weight that comes with these types of convos.
Speaker 1:That's also similar to the value of a good COO brings to the table. It's to get to implement all the necessary difficult change so the CEO can focus on culture.
Speaker 2:Exactly yes.
Speaker 1:Showing up like all right guys, great work. That's funny. I've definitely had those engagements too as an advisor, where it's like you come in and you're like the-.
Speaker 2:Dirty work. Yeah, I'm the guy.
Speaker 1:Yeah, just more of the hyper-analytical. And of course you do what you can, but when you come in and make changes sometimes you got to make big changes and I think it is also helpful for a CEO to have a partner that's coming in to assist with that, because it's your business and you've been in it for years and sometimes it's hard to see objectively and it's hard to remove yourself enough to make strong enough to even if you do really understand some of the motions that you're doing for them. It's still so much harder sometimes when it's your own business in a way.
Speaker 2:Oh, 100%. That's the first thing I ever found. It was that situation exactly working at a church and a woman came in and had been really upset, like she was sobbing. I never met her before and she said that she's a doctor's wife and she was at school and one of the kids asked for extra pancakes on pancake day. She wasn't going to give it to them, thought they were being like selfish or something. And the teacher says they won't eat tonight. Let them have a pancake. And she just could not.
Speaker 2:She's like I don't know how to fix it. I got to fix it and I was like I do and I just started to build the bones of her pain point and we created a nonprofit. The first year they said that one of the largest food distribution humanitarian organizations in the area said we'd never qualify and after five years she was getting an award for their the highest patron or something with them. Yeah, like she. It's that whole point. She was so overwhelmed with what was in front of her that she couldn't put the bones to it when I did, and the rest is history.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love it, rachel, we're coming up here on time. I've had a lot of fun speaking with you today. I really appreciate that you came on the show.
Speaker 2:Thank you for having me. I look forward to growing June together and talking more.
Speaker 1:Let's do it. And for everybody tuning in, just want to let you know that I do highly recommend Rachel to work with her in any capacity. Again, I've had an amazing experience working with her. At June she came on as an early customer and very quickly turned into a design partner and advisor. High impact, straight to the point, limited amount of hours getting an incredible amount of value. So if you ever have the chance to work with Rachel, I definitely recommend it. Rachel, it's great speaking to you and I'm sure we'll probably talk to you later today or tomorrow, sometime soon. Bye, see ya, all right, bye.
