The Bobby Bones Show - (Sponsored) On the Job -- Never Too Late: One Man’s Journey from Temp Job to CEO

Episode Date: March 21, 2018

Owning one’s own company is a dream for many. Listen to the incredible story of how a temporary position through the Express Employment Professionals in Hickory, North Carolina, set one man on the path toward ownership and the C-suite. We’ll meet this remarkable individual and learn what it takes to rise to the top. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Make every day feel epic in the all-new Hyundai Palisade hybrid. The Palisade hybrid is packed full of features, cutting-edge tech, and up to an EPA estimated 619 miles of range on select trims and class-leading interior space. Seating configurations for 7-8 passengers,

available H-track all-wheel drive, so you can be ready to go anywhere in style. Learn more about the Hyundai Palisade at HyundaiUSA.com. Call 562-314-4.4.4. 4603 for complete details. All right, if you have ever dealt with a traditional home security company, you know the drill. Expensive monthly fees, contracts that lock you in for years, and waiting around for a technician to set everything up. It's a lot.

Well, now they're Simply Safe. They have completely changed the game. Simply Safe has no long-term contracts, no hidden fees, no being trapped. They earn your business by actually keeping you safe, not by locking you in. Setting up is so easy. You customize your system at SimplySafe.com. It ships to your door in a few days. And with the app guided setup, you can have everything installed and armed in under an hour. No technician needed. And it's not just a camera. It's a full ecosystem of sensors, cameras for inside and outside and 24-7 professional monitoring. If there's ever a break-in, a fire, or a flood, SimpleSaf's agents are on it immediately. They were also named America's best customer service by Newsweek, which honestly tracks. Right now, you can get 50% off your new system by visiting simplysafe.com slash bones.

That's half off at simplysafe.com slash bones. There's no safe like SimplySafe. Owning a home comes with a lot of things nobody really prepares you for, including yard care. Sunday is a company trying to make that part easier. They start with a soil test and climate data to build a yard plan tailor to where you live, then ship everything directly to your door. no guesswork, no dragging bags of fertilizer, and instead of harsh chemicals, Sunday uses simple, nutrient dense ingredients like seaweed, molasses, and iron. Everything hooks up to a hose, which honestly sounds like my speed.

If your yard feels more stressful than satisfying, Sunday's approach makes a lot of sense. Go to get sunday.com to get your free custom yard analysis. That's get sunday.com. Service opens doors And at American Military University It can open doors for the whole family If you have a loved one who served in the military You may qualify for reduced tuition AMU offers flexible online programs

Designed to fit your schedule So you can keep moving forward Wherever life takes you Learn more at AMU. APUS.edu.edu slash military Open doors to the future for you and your family with the help of American Military University That's amu.apus.edu.edu slash military.

If you love what you do and you love where you do it, don't let anything stop you from being successful there. Put in the hours, put in the time, put in the work, put in the effort. At 21, Justin Miesimar had just graduated college and was taking a year off from his education, doing on jobs to earn money for law school. Or so he thought. On this edition of On the Job, brought to you by Express Employment Professionals, we'll learn how Justin Misermore worked himself into an opportunity he never could have imagined. If you want to find your next job, or if you're a company hoping to grow your workforce, Express Employment Professionals is for you. Find more information at expressprose.com. Now, independent producer Philip Graitzer tells us the story of Justin Miesimore's unexpected journey.

In an industrial park on the south side of Hickory, North Carolina is the headquarters of Grosha, USA. Hi, how are you? How was your drive up? That's Justin Misimore. He's wearing jeans, a north-faced shirt, and has a tattoo on his right forearm. He looks more like a college student than the CEO and co-owner of this mid-sized manufacturing company. Grosha is one of the few companies in the world that makes steel sawblade blanks that are used in the lumber, aircraft, and oil and gas industries. A sawblade blank is the circular steel part of a sawblade. Manufacturing blanks is an intricate process.

It involves high-tech lasers and a good deal of manual labor. We have three lasers that are constantly running, either the sheet or the round. The factory floor is about half the size of a football. field. And considering that lots of cutting, heating, and hammering is going on, it's incredibly neat. Employees go about their business, driving forklift trucks, loading steel blanks on pallets, operating cutting machines, and hammering the steel blanks. Since the blanks are used for precision cutting, they have to be perfectly flat. Using just a straight edge in a light, a man inspects the blanks. If he finds any irregularities, he puts the blank on anvil and hammers it out by hand.

just like an old-fashioned blacksmith. The first time you saw this, Macymore was impressed. I was like, really, it takes that much to make one of these things that I see on a shell? It really blew my mind, and everyone has that same response whenever we bring them here for the first time. You would never imagine how much work that it takes to make something so simple as a sawblade. Back in 2008, when Miesimore graduated from Appalachian State University, with a degree in business accounting, accounting jobs were hard to find. So he returned home to Taylorville, North Carolina, moved in with his parents, and took several part-time jobs. He was 21,

and he was saving money to go to law school. The goal was to save money, so renting an apartment was out of the question. Moving somewhere on my own was not even an option. So I worked with some friends that my parents knew. I painted some high schools. A friend of mine talked to me to to selling insurance and annuities and things like that. So I did a lot of little things. A family friend suggested that the Hickory North Carolina office of Express Employment Professionals might help him find work. He completed an application and a few days later he was sent to Grosha for an interview.

Grosha was looking for someone with his background. The next day, the company called. He got the job. Misi Moore started the following Monday as an assistant to the accounting manager. The company's general manager, Klaus Jensen really wanted to hire a financial officer. But getting an experienced one would be expensive. And right now, money was tight.

So an accounting assistant would have to do. I thought, okay, let me see if I can get an assistant in first and see how he does and see if he has any potential. If not, he would, if I had to go out and hire an experienced accountant, At least I would have somebody who already knew something. So I called Express that we had worked with for people out in the plant and told them what I needed. And they sent out, I believe, five or six candidates,

and one of them was Justin. Jensen planned for his new employee to handle basic accounting tasks. But the accounting manager had other things in mind. He had stacks of paper, on his desk that were at least six inches to one foot tall. And he knew where everything was. They really wanted someone to just come by and help organize his office. I started out doing that. Knocked that out in a relatively quickly manner. So once that was finished, they asked me to start updating some customer databases. I'm just calling customers, finding out, you know, who's in charge of

ARAP, you have new phone numbers, new email addresses, and things like that. AR and AP are accounts receivable and accounts payable. Money's owed to and owed by the company. Although these tasks weren't preparing Misi Moore to be a lawyer, for now he didn't mind. Yeah, I was a college kid who was taking a gap year. I didn't intend for this to be a career path for me. It was just a paycheck. It really was.

So anything they asked me to do, as long as the payout. paycheck cashed at the end of the week. I was fine with it. In my mind, my career hadn't started, yeah, but in reality, it was my career starting. Perhaps Jensen realized this too, because he asked Misi Moore to look a little more closely at the customer accounts. I was noticing that, you know, they had a lot of customers who were paying within, always paying, you know, 30 days, 30 days, 30 days. And, you know, I was like, I wonder if these guys would be enticed to pay early. if you would offer them a discount, you know, get that money a little bit earlier. And the guys who are constantly paying in, say, like, 45 to 60 days,

I wonder if they would be willing to pay in 30 days if you started charging them a finance charge. And then the customers who are, like, really far past, dude, or is anyone calling these people on a regular basis, finding out, hey, where's our money? Why are you not paying? So there was a lot of small things that I noticed whenever I was going through those things that were, you know, easily addressed. Justin had no practical experience working with accounts receivable.

I'm straight out of college, so all I really know is the theory behind accounting. I've never really seen any real-world practice behind any of it, but in college you learn theories, and theories are supposed to work in real-world practice. Do I know if they're going to work or not? Absolutely not, but why do I have to lose by bringing them up or suggesting them? But he summoned up the courage and presented his ideas to the company executive, I really had nothing to lose by mentioning this to anybody. If they fire me, they fire me. I just go back to doing what I was doing before I got here.

They implemented Misi Moore's plan, and it worked. The company's cash flow improved. Soon, Justin was taking on other tasks. I just took over stuff. It was funny. I took over a lot of the IT stuff. I mean, they had a person not working here, but they had an outside consultant. They were paying him somewhere in the neighborhood of $80,000 a year to manage their IT stuff. And they would call him in. It's like, don't call him, I'll do it. So I would go in there, reboot the server, and save them from having to call this guy in. I looked around. There was a company here in Hickory, contacted them, and they would manage our day-to-day IT services for $800 a month.

Instead of the security monitoring service calling company managers when the alarm went off, Justin told them he'd take the calls. There really wasn't anything I wouldn't do, and it's not even things that I was being asked to do. I just did them. I mean, that's just the way that I've always been. If there was something that needed to be done, I would just take the initiative to do it.

Justin was also doing things way outside his job description. When it would snow, I would make sure that I would come here and open the plant and open the office for everybody. I've got a four-wheel drive vehicle. I've lived in Boone driving in the snow's nothing for me. I'll just come in and do it. About the only thing Justin didn't do was sweep the floors. In the fall of 2008, as his 90-day temporary employment contract was expiring, Misi Moore was offered a permanent job. But he still wasn't sure that working at Grosha was going to be part of his career plan. At that point in time, I still

didn't know where this was going to take me. The goal was still to start saving money. I mean, I didn't know. Maybe the gap year turned into two years. So still, having my eye on the law school end game, stay at home and saves as much money as possible. We're going to take a short break. When we come back, Philip Graitzer will bring Justin Miesimore's story up to date. You're listening to On the Job from Express Employment Professionals. One company is on a mission to put a million people to work each year. Sounds like a big number, doesn't it? Not to Express Employment Professionals, seeking a skilled labor position or administrative work. Maybe you're an executive looking for a career that fits. We take pride in connecting the right people with the right company. Express Employment Professionals is

on a mission to put a million people to work each year. Let us help. We'll open doors for you. Go to expresspros.com to find a location near you. Now back to the story of the accounting assistant who thought he was taking time off from his career path, but found an unexpected way forward instead. Justin Miesimore took on more accounting and administrative duties. Klaus Jensen, the company manager, took note. He was extremely organized. He was time efficient. We always thought we needed at least a person and a half.

He found ways to do it with just him. Soon, Justin had an office all to himself. The two other people in the shared office had been let go. Justin took over their duties. In 2010, Klaus Jensen, and a partner purchased Grosha. The company was not in good financial shape, and I had to trim some personnel,

and Justin by then had shown me enough that I kind of took the chance and said, okay, let's try to do it with Justin on his own. Two years after he started working at Grosha, Misimore was head of the company's accounting unit. They basically told me that they wanted me to be in charge of the company's finances, on a much larger scale. I was like, okay, that's great. But they told me something that started concerning me that they knew a guy that they wanted to bring in on more of a consulting basis. So, I mean, at that first point, I thought I was being promoted all the way

to the top, but I thought I was still being kept underneath somebody. The consultant came in two to three days a week. Then, just every few weeks. And after a few months, the consultant told manager Jensen the company didn't really need his services at all. Miesimor could do the job on his own. With the consultant no longer looking over his shoulder, Justin decided that working for Grosha would be his career. He started working even harder, 11-hour days, six-day work weeks, and no vacations.

I was the first person here, last person to leave. When it snowed, when nobody else was in the office, I was answering the phone. I mean, I would work, do my accounting stuff in the office. front office, I would take orders. I messed up a lot of orders because I didn't know how to take orders at the time. I'm not a sales guy, but somebody needed to be here to take the orders. He'd show management that he really cared. He set his sights to be the company's next CFO, chief financial officer. He was 25 years old. Going that extra mile, doing whatever it takes,

long hours, hard work. You know, it's a balance of hard work and intelligence, but I think that if you have to weigh the two, hard work's going to outweigh intelligence every time. As Justin was gunning for the CFO job, Grosch's owner, Klaus Jensen, had plans of his own. He wanted to retire and he wanted to leave the company in good hands. He set up an exit plan. First, he hired a former colleague Richard Komer to be Grosch's sales manager. Comer would handle the company's external operations while Misi Moore would manage finances. The two got along great.

they were yin and yang. Colmer was the idea man, and Justin was the numbers guy. To Jensen, they looked like perfect candidates to take over the company. Jensen began easing himself out of day-to-day management, leaving Misi Moore and Comer in charge. In three years, they were ready to buy the company,

but they didn't have any money. I had student debt. I just bought a house, so I was, you know, I was in debt. I mean, I had a good income. But being that young, I really hadn't had much time. to save. A bank saw the company as an attractive investment and offered financing to the two

to allow them to buy Grosha. Misi Moore was 28. Comer was 40. In 2016, Misi Moore and Comer purchased Grosha. They were 50-50 partners. Eight years after he started as a temporary employee, Justin Misimore was now the chief executive officer and co-owner of Grosha, USA. When you visit Grosha's factory, the first thing that catches your office, is a huge banner that says everything is important. There's no detail too small. And it's that attention to detail, mixed with intelligence, ambition,

and lots of hard work that got Misi Moore to the top. They saw this young, hot-shot accountant who'd been working with the company, was doing a great job managing the company's finances, was doing things above and beyond what a typical accountant should be doing. Klaus Jensen says Justin deserved the top job. There's always a little bit of luck involved for all of us where we end up. Obviously, he was lucky that I called Express and needed an accountant,

and he got the job. But from then on, he can take credit for maximizing the situation and showing that he was ready and having the ambition and the gods to go for it. At the end of the day, you have to earn it, and he has earned it. Justin Misimore has been CEO for two years. he's ditched his plans to become a lawyer. Still, when he's watching a good lawyer movie, he has daydreams of what it might have been.

I feel like I just sit there and I'm like, I'd have been great at that. I do feel like I'd have been great at that. That's the extent of my regret, but sitting where I am now owning my own company, a living, breathing organism, the freedom that comes along with that, I couldn't be happier. That was independent producer Philip Graitzer, with the story of Justin Miesimor's rise from temporary worker to CEO.

And that's all for this edition of On the Job from Express Employment Professionals. Find out more at ExpressPros.com, and you can listen to every podcast this season on ExpressPros.com slash podcast. This podcast is produced by your host, Steve Mensher for MenchMedia, IHeart Radio, and Red Seat Ventures. You can subscribe on IHeart Radio and. and iTunes, where we hope you'll leave a nice review. That helps other folks find us. And of course, you can listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. See you next time. On the Job. All right. If you have ever dealt with a traditional home security company, you know the drill. Expensive monthly fees, contracts that lock you in for years, and waiting around for a technician

to set everything up. It's a lot. Well, now they're Simply Safe. They have completely changed the game. SimplySafe has no long-term contracts, no hidden fees, no being trapped. They earn your business by actually keeping you safe, not by locking you in. Setting up is so easy. You customize your system at SimplySafe.com. It ships to your door in a few days, and with the app guided setup, you can have everything installed and armed in under an hour. No technician needed.

And it's not just a camera. It's a full ecosystem of sensors, cameras for inside and outside, and 24-7 professional monitors. If there's ever a break-in, a fire, or a flood, SimplySafe's agents are on it immediately. They were also named America's best customer service by Newsweek, which honestly tracks. Right now, you can get 50% off your new system by visiting Simplysafe.com slash bones. That's half off at simplysafe.com slash bones. There's no safe like SimplySafe.

A better help ad. Financial stress affects the majority of Americans, often causing anxiety. society, sleep disruption, and even depression. It's also one of the leading sources of conflict for couples. When money feels uncertain, it can weigh on your thoughts, your relationships, and your sense of stability, and that emotional weight can be hard to carry alone. Finding the right type of support can help. Therapy can give you the space to talk through what financial stress brings up for you,

and help you build tools to manage uncertainty with more confidence. With better help, you can connect with a licensed therapist from the coming. of your home on a schedule that works for you. It's flexible, convenient, and designed to make getting started feel simple. If you've been feeling the impact of financial stress, you don't have to navigate it on your own. See if they're a beast for you. Visit betterhelp.com for 10% off. That's betterhELP.com.

Owning a home comes with a lot of things nobody really prepares you for, including yard care. Sunday is a company trying to make that part easier. They start with a soil test and climate data to build a yard plan tailor to where you live, then ship everything directly to your door. No guesswork, no dragging bags of fertilizer. And instead of harsh chemicals, Sunday uses simple nutrient dense ingredients like seaweed, molasses, and iron. Everything hooks up to a hose, which honestly sounds like my speed. If your yard feels more stressful than satisfying, Sunday's approach makes a lot of sense.

Go to get sunday.com to get your free custom yard analysis. That's get sunday.com. Service opens doors. And at American military university, it can open doors for the whole family. If you have a loved one who served in the military, you may qualify for reduced tuition. AMU offers flexible online programs designed to fit your schedule so you can keep moving forward wherever life takes you. Learn more at AMU. APUS.

Dot APUS.edu slash military. Open doors to the future for you and your family with the help of American Military University. That's AMU. APUS. Dot E-DU slash military.