Start With A Win - How to Hire Better and Level-Up Your Team with Kurt Wilkin, Co-Founder of HireBetter

Episode Date: September 14, 2022

Kurt Wilkin is a trusted advisor for high-growth, middle-market companies as founder and managing partner of Bee Cave Capital and Co-Founder of HireBetter. With a passion for growth and a hard-earned, proven set of tools in his toolbox, Wilkin works with other entrepreneurs and CEOs to help them escape the start-up mindset and achieve next-level success. His debut book, Who’s Your Mike? A No-Bullshit Guide to the People You’ll Meet on Your Entrepreneurial Journey, Kurt reveals how entrepreneurs can transform their companies by minimizing hiring mistakes, investing in high potentials and making the difficult decisions to drop dead weight from their team.Main TopicsKurt’s professional journey, from becoming a CPA to launching his own firm to buying the company HireBetter (2:13)Why Kurt believes The Great Resignation is a myth and how to find employees who are dedicated to making an impact rather than just a paycheck (5:25)Are employees looking for more money or more fulfillment? (9:07)How to hire people beyond just what you can see on a resume and how to hire “A-players” (11:00)Kurt’s book Who’s Your Mike? and how to know when it’s time to move on from an employee (15:10)Episode LinksLeadership Tactics with Sergeant Major Kyle LambEpisode 203: Part 1Episode 204: Part 2https://whosyourmike.comhttps://whosyourmike.com/quiz/Connect with Kurt:https://www.kurtwilkin.comhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/kurt-wilkin-7345255/https://twitter.com/kurtwilkinConnect with Adam:https://www.startwithawin.com/https://www.facebook.com/AdamContosCEOhttps://twitter.com/AdamContosCEOhttps://www.instagram.com/adamcontosceo/Listen, rate, and subscribe!Apple Podcasts Spotify Google Podcasts

Welcome to Start With A Win, where we give you the tools and lessons you need to create business and personal success. Are you ready? Let's do this. Coming to you from Denver, Colorado at the Brand Viva Studios, it's Adam Kantos with Start With A Win. Sitting here with producer Mark. How you doing, buddy? I was dancing. My seat moved. Whoa, yeah.

One of those bouncy chairs going up and down. Well, you know, it's the lever. My foot hit the lever and I shrunk. All right. Hey, everybody check that out. Yeah. If you're just listening, go to YouTube and watch it there. There you go. So, hey, you know how I really like to talk about high growth companies, personal success, kind of the no BS way of getting there?

Totally. I know that. And so we brought on Kurt Wilkin to the podcast. He is a trusted advisor for high growth middle market companies with a passion for growth and a hard earned proven set of tools in his toolbox. Wilkin works with other entrepreneurs and CEOs to help them escape the startup mindset, which we always need and achieve next level success. His debut book, we've been talking about mics a lot here. Yeah. Who's your mic? Because there's so many good mics, right? Yeah, be like Mike, Mike O'Hearn.

Mike O'Hearn. Who's your mic? A no bullshit guide to the people you'll meet on your entrepreneurial journey. Kurt reveals how entrepreneurs can transform their companies by minimizing hiring mistakes, which we all need, investing in high potentials, and making the difficult decisions to drop dead weight from their team.

Woo! We're going to have some, as we talked about before, spicy conversations on this one. Kurt, welcome to Start With A Win. Welcome. Hey, thanks so much for having me, guys. I love what you guys are doing to inspire people and talk about leadership and entrepreneurship. Awesome. Well, thank you. And I love this topic. You've done a great deal of research. You're an amazing executive coach, CEO coach, guide for business success here. Tell us a little bit about your professional

journey, what you're up to now. So my professional journey, I'm a CPA by trade. And I learned early on that I'm not a very good CPA when I was at Ernst & Young. And so I started realizing my entrepreneurial dreams that my father and brother instilled in me. And after about five or six years as a CPA, I launched my own firm out of necessity because of the dot-com crash. And weirdly enough, it was also a finance and accounting firm, which you say you're a bad CPA, but then you're going to tell me you launched a firm. But I had a really good partners that were much smarter than me.

And I was able to go sell business and talk to clients and they were able to deliver stellar service. And that's really where I got my big break was when I partnered with Brett Lawson and Kathy Schrock, who were very smart. And after we sold that, had a nice run, grew to about $20 million in revenue. And then I bought Hire Better about six years later because I felt like talent is the biggest thing you need to be as a growing company. And it's served by the, how should I say this, by the not very reputable recruiting industry. And so I bought Hire Better and I said, you know what, everyone's going to buy from me because they trust me. We're going

to cut and paste. And it's been a very humbling experience, Adam. I got to tell you that. Awesome. You mentioned something that's really important to me. And I 100% agree with this statement. I want to unpack this briefly. You talked about talent. And when you look at, you know, you've got all these people that create these startup companies, and they want, like, instant success, or like, we're going to IPO in two years, or some, you know, crap like that. And we know it doesn't happen realistically. There may be a unicorn here or there where somebody hits the absolute gold mine. But frankly,

people don't buy your company. They buy the talent that drives the company and the future success that that talent is not guaranteeing, but leading to for the investors. Tell me a little bit about how you, CPA, you see the numbers, you understand numbers and growth trajectory. And, you know, are these people just living a dream right now and burning cash? Or are they actually going to get someplace? And you turn that into actually this business projection mindset of calling, you know, calling BS on people for this. Tell me about that talent process and what we should think about from that perspective. Well, I tell you, no matter what business you're in, everyone's in the people

business. Whether you're a consulting firm selling hourly work for your people or whether you're creating the best technology whiz bang gizmo, right? You're all in the people business. And so if you don't have talent, you're not going to be able to make it. I like to say that you really need capital and talent. If you've got enough money to give you a runway and you've got enough talented people, you can figure stuff out. You can overcome, you know, Obamacare is what I used to say, but now you can overcome the COVID pandemic if you've got enough people that can help you shift your business model and turn the corner. Right on. And I guess this whole talent thing can be correlated to the great resignation, as we've had this term, reset, resignation, whatever you want to call it. I mean, you say

this is a myth. I mean, what's your perspective on this great resignation and everything that's happened during the pandemic? Because people are still kind of on edge going, all right, where do we go? What do we do? We hear things like recession. We hear things like employment or unemployment. We hear interest rates. We hear all this other stuff going on. And it scares the hell out of some. Others are like, opportunity. How should we look at what's going on out there? And how does a great resignation, as you call it, fit into this? Yeah, I think the couple things you said there. First of all, I think any kind of downturn, any kind of challenge, there's opportunity.

So I'll just comment on that. And I know that's a big thing for your audience. The other thing is I think most of the headlines that we see today are generated to draw clicks and to try to get viewers. And I honestly think the great resignation is no different. Surely there's a lot of people out looking for their next job. And a lot of folks aren't taking jobs anymore because they, the same jobs that they used to have because they wanted to do something different. But the numbers would tell you that the growth of the people that are actively looking for jobs

is about the same trajectory as it was three or four years ago before the pandemic. The reason why there's such a big cliff in 2020 was because nobody moved in 2020. So there wasn't much of this migration. So then when 2021 came around, all of a sudden, there was some pent-up demand like a hose, right? And so the numbers are really not that different. The reality is people for the last five or ten years have been looking for something more impactful than just a job. And that's the big theme I want to leave your audience with is your talent is looking for purpose and meaning and mission. I loved your interview earlier with Kyle Lamb serving a mission. Your audience is looking for that,

and it's not always about a paycheck. It's something more than their lives. So let's break that down just a tad bit. And Kyle, I mean, fascinating man, Delta Force operator. He was in, we all know the movie Black Hawk Down. He was one of the guys in that, defending the Black Hawk. So it's fascinating when you take a look at that intrinsic desire within people. And you're right, it's not necessarily a paycheck. I think Jim Collins has said that paycheck is like number five or seven of what people look for. But what are they looking for from your perspective, Kurt? And how can we fulfill that need to help them generate that self-gratification or climb Maslow's hierarchy of needs to find a greater self where the paycheck isn't number one. Because if they're in survival mode, the paycheck is number one, right? Yeah, and you're right.

There are some people that are looking just for money. And for those folks, that's their meaning. That's their purpose. And not that they're bad people because there's a lot of folks that are just looking for money. But for most of the people I want to employ and most people I want to work with, I'm looking for folks who want to make an impact. And that might be saving the world or going to fight in Desert Storm like Kyle. Or it might be just serving a quality product or quality food at a local restaurant because you're a servant mindset. So just looking for something more

than just a paycheck. So it's things like mission. What does your company stand for? Where are you going? What is your vision? What are we trying to accomplish? And it's those things like core values that are, there used to be soft things that we would talk about. And most people would say, I don't give me that soft bullshit. I want to, you know, I'll just pay them more. And the reality is for most of the workers you really want, they want more. It's fascinating because I remember I had almost 1,000 employees during the pandemic. And we went through this phase where it was like, we have to pay them more. We have to pay them more. Everybody else is paying them more. Facebook's

paying them more. Google's paying them more, whatever it is. And you're like, well, wait a second. Why don't we treat them better? Or why don't we create a more fulfilling environment for them? It seems like we peaked in that pay them more piece, and I'm using air quotes here. And now we're looking for that fulfillment. Do you think that pay them more was a short run to placate people? Or do you think that's got a long-term impact on it, especially given the economic environment that we're operating in? Sure. That's a great question. And I hadn't really thought about it in exactly that way. But I think that we did peak about three or four months ago where it was just such a panic. People were losing their employees to their competitors and

they wanted to try to keep them. So they came up with some methods and paying more is definitely a strategy. I think for a lot of folks who left, the number of boomerangs, people that went back is really an interest. I don't have a stat, but it's really interesting to see how many have come back. We had a couple ourselves and candidly, I love them because they know what they left and there's things, sure, our sausage is not made in the most beautiful fashion. But when you go to another company and see what their sausage looks like, maybe I liked that place before. So I really like that concept. And the whole grass isn't greener on the other side, things like that. They were looking for more green, but not more fulfillment, I suppose.

And it's interesting when we start pulling this apart. They were looking for more green, but not more fulfillment, I suppose. And it's interesting when we start pulling this apart. And the majority of our listeners are entrepreneurs, either solopreneurs or entrepreneurs of some sort, or those that are seeking a growth in their leadership capabilities. So we all end up looking at a hire on paper. We're hiring people. Everybody's hiring people right now. It's hard to get somebody. And I mean, what should we be looking for in order to create a good fit instead

of just grabbing the next person that comes by and applies for a job? Do you have any advice on how to hire properly? You know, I do. And there's a couple of these things in the book. The book is the Who's Your Mic book you talked about earlier is not just a hiring book. Trust me, there's a lot about firing and reallocating and all kinds of good stuff in there we can get into, I'm sure. But the resume is important. What they've done on paper is important. But I want to dig deeper. Tell me about these situations and experiences. Most of our clients are entrepreneurs who are scaling their company. So they like, they get really enamored with the background of somebody from a big company, or maybe they have connections to the place I want to go. But I want to make sure that their

work ethic is ready for a startup environment. They're ready for all hands on deck, roll up your sleeves. So those are things that don't really show up on a resume. They might show up through some questioning that you have. But what I found is most entrepreneurs are glasses half full guys and gals. And so for me, in any way, it's hard for me to hire because I'm going to fall for your bullshit when I ask you questions. So I have my team dig deeper and my team really assesses out whether they can really do the job and have some of those skill sets. The other thing I'll mention, I'm sorry, Adam, is real quick is, you know, hire fast, fire slow. I'm sorry, hire slow, fire fast. Because just take your time. If you've got five or 10 employees, you can't risk a really bad one, especially in a key role. So do a lot of backdoor references, talk to some of their former employees,

employers, former colleagues, and just don't fall for the silver bullet resume. I love that you're digging into this because it seems like pre-pandemic, you'd do two or three interviews, you'd look at their resume, you might call one or two of their references, do a background check or credit check or something like that on somebody and then offer them the job. It seems to me now that interpersonal capability, that interpersonal communication, and you're right, how the problem-solving skills or how they can articulate their history and how they've developed as a leader with your open-ended questions. I mean, you made

some pretty strong statements there. And I love the fact that you turn your team loose on them to figure out, OK, do I want them on my A team here? I've heard the term A players hire A players, B players hire C players. And I think we got to, I'll be the first one to say, I'm not a human resources expert. So when somebody drops an interview in front of me, I got to – I'll be the first one to say I'm not a human resources expert. So when somebody drops an interview in front of me, I got to try and find my A game for that. Otherwise, I get a C player. Do you have any recommendations for anything we can – obviously, there's your book, Who's Your Mike? But what experiences or ideas do you have for us to become A players when it comes to picking talent?

So there's a couple things you said in there. I want to get to your question, but let me make two quick comments. Number one is having your team interview. I happen to run a recruiting firm, so my team are recruiters. And so it's slightly different. I want to warn entrepreneurs not to give too much of the leadership of the hiring of your, you know, let's say your COO, for example, your right hand to your team, because they might not hire someone who's going to hold them accountable and change things the way Kurt did it or the way Adam did it. So just be a little careful with that. So, and then the other thing is as you're interviewing and really screening and vetting to make sure they can do the job in today's environment,

especially, we also have to have our sales game on. Make sure that we are selling them something and giving them a good experience because we might turn off the A players if we do what I'm about to describe. And that is, oh gosh, Kurt's coming in for an interview. Where's his resume? Let me pick it up off the printer. And then you go in asking the same bullshit questions that the two guys before you asked, the same candidate. That's a bad employee experience or candidate experience.

Great point. I can't tell you how many times I've seen that happen. Let's dig into your book here. Who's Your Mic? A No Bullshit Guide to the People You'll Meet on Your Entrepreneurial Journey. What's the book about? Give me a couple of the key points in it and where can we find the book? Yeah, the couple of key points is it's written in story form, other people's stories. And I want you as an entrepreneur to be able to learn from other people's mistakes and other people's successes. It's not, you know, like my 10 tips to being a billionaire and living on a beach. It's what kind of things that people screw up and what do they do right so you can see yourself. So each chapter is a different character.

And I'll give you the really quick lowdown on Mike, the title character. Mike is your fraternity brother in college. You guys were best buds and thick as thieves. You trusted him with your life. When you started your business in your garage, Mike was right there with you nights and weekends doing all the back office administrative things that you don't like to do. And frankly, you kind of suck at. So you brought him in. And then when you became a real company, he quit his job, became your accountant. Again, doing all those same things, setting up your LLC, setting up your bank

account, all that crap work, anything that wasn't biz dev or product related. You grow, you reward his hundred hour weeks with the controller title and the CFO title, and he's working his butt off. And then you look up and you're a $10 million company. Mike's trying to negotiate a big line of credit with your bank, maybe a merger agreement with your biggest competitor. And he's hadn't taken a vacation in five years. He doesn't have a team. He didn't know how to build one. He's just swirling. He didn't know, didn't want to tell you because he's loyal to you. The question is, who's your Mike? Every entrepreneur either has had, will have, or has a Mike, whether it's finance and accounting,

sales, marketing, operations, you pick it. So who's your Mike? Wow. For everybody listening, just grasp onto this concept here. And if you list every one of your Mikes out there, your CFO, your attorney, your banker, all of these things, you need to figure out, okay, have I outgrown them? Because honestly, what Kurt is saying here is so true. The team you start with is not the team you end with. and move on to the next one and carry it to the higher level because the different skills necessary to grow a company continue to change as the company grows. And hold up the mirror, folks, because sometimes you may not be the CEO that your company needs

moving forward. You can regress or not regress. I'd say shift over to a board director or an advisor position or something like that and put somebody in there that can really accelerate your growth, not just for your employees who's your Mike. It's, are you the Mike? Think about that. And I'm glad you said that, Adam, because about a year ago, I stepped aside as CEO and brought in a new CEO, Cisco Sacasa, and I'm officially co-founder. There you go. I don't have a board, so I didn't want to be chairman of the board. It's kind of a disingenuous, but look, I'm not the best person to lead this thing. And I'm good co-founder. There you go. I don't have a board, so I didn't want to be chairman of the board. It's kind of disingenuous. But look, I'm not the best person to lead this thing.

And I'm good at a lot of things, but being the CEO is not one of them. Awesome. Hey, where can we find your book? And I mean, any recommendations for action steps with this book? Yeah. So a couple of things. Amazon, Barnes & Noble, anywhere online right now. We have a website, whosyourmic.com, which has links to everywhere. I did an audio version

of myself, which is kind of a, if you can stay in my voice for five hours, it's kind of a fun listen. We also have a fun quiz, whosyourmic.com slash quiz. If you are concerned that you might have a mic or there's other, not every chapter is about a legacy employee. Some are about the silver bullet you tried to hire that was a misfit. And there's also a, skip to the end, there's a keystone character at the end who actually brings it all together and helps you get to the next level. So it's not all bad. That's for sure. Awesome. Make sure you check out Kurt's book, Who's Your Mic on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, wherever you get your books. So Kurt, I have a question I ask every one of our amazing

guests. You're an incredible entrepreneur. You've done so much to grow businesses. How do you grow yourself? So, Kurt, how do you start your day with a win? You know, without fail, every day, 365 days a year, Adam, I swim five miles and bike 32 miles around my neighborhood. I'm just joking. I know you have overachievers on your show. No, I wish I did. Now, here's what I do try to do. I try to fill my bucket. So every day I want to do something that really fuels me. And the more I can do that and the less I do things that detract me, I'm going to be a better leader and a better human being to my kids and my wife. That's for sure. Awesome. Kurt Wilkin, thank you so much for being on the show. Again, make sure you check out Kurt

online and his book, Who's Your Mike? Kurt, thanks for starting your day with a win. Adam, thanks so much for having me. I love what you guys are doing to inspire and encourage. Thank you. Awesome. Hey, and thank you so much for listening to Start With A Win. If you want more great content, if you want to get inspired, head over to adamcontos.com. And there you can get all sorts of access to stuff, as well as a downloadable PDF that will help you become a better leader so that you can grow your business. So remember, until next time, start with a win. Thank you.