We are delighted to bring back one of our favourite guests to the Recruiter Startup Podcast: Joe Mullings.
The Mullings Group is MedTech’s Global Leader in Talent Acquisition and Branding with offices across the US, Canada, and the UK. Their clients are multi-billion-dollar companies, as well as emerging startup companies that are bringing to market technologies like surgical robotics, telerobotics, AI.
Joe predicted that we’d have the best 18 months in the world of staffing & recruitment in the darkest depths of the pandemic. He was right. Now, we are seeing shifts in the market - but how will they affect your journey?
He shared valuable insights and his predictions for 2023. Listen or read our conversation below
Enjoy!
Dualta: All right. Welcome back to the Recruiter Startup Podcast. We have one of our favorite guests today. In times of crisis, we bring on people for emergency meetings, and it is an emergency out there. People are losing their jobs. The market's crashing. Cryptos evaporating. Elon Musk is taking over Twitter. He slashed most of the people.
Dualta: He's trying to prove that you can do more with less. It's fact and everything. Money's too expensive. We're trying to reshape the economy in terms of the inflation rate, it is, it's a time of flux. How are you feeling about it all, Joe?
Joe: I'm along the lines of the best businesses are built when there's blood in the streets. So I'm excited about it because it requires thought. It requires patience. It requires courage, and it requires basic business fundamentals.
Dualta: It sure does. So let's take a step back for anybody who's wondering who Joe is, who hasn't caught up with any of our previous shows, give us a snapshot into the businesses that you run, Joe, where you're based.
Joe: We are down headquarters is Delray Beach, Florida. We've got an office over, well you're in Gibraltar now, you've upscaled. But we've got an office over in the Uk. We've got an office in Canada. We've got an office in Cleveland. We primarily focus in the medical device life sciences space. We have about 12 recruiters who will do over 12 million dollars.
Joe: So our pda, our per desk average is a million a desk. We have Dragon Fly stories in one 60 studios, which I sit in today. We're the only search firm in the world that has its own production company, and that, we can touch on the importance of that, on how you get your message to the market and not just trying to reach the market with phone calls, because that's at most 60 or 70 a day.
Joe: What if I could show you how to get in front of a hundred thousand people a day in your specialty? And I recently resigned from Chief Vision Officer of Management Recruiters International. But I ran that for a little over two years and pulled them out of the doldrums and pushed them forward into the 21st century with branding, technology and office strategies.
Dualta: There's snapshot. Okay. Look, I've jumped into the Dragon Fly stuff and the branding before, and I want to just focus on some of the other stuff today. The MRI's really interesting cause we've built RecWired over the last couple of years. And, I know a lot of what it takes to get communities up and running and I love what you did with the branding there.
Dualta: What did you come into and why did you leave it?
Joe: So manager recruiters, great organization. I started my career there in December of 1989 as a head hunter. And then spent two years and then became an owner and opened up down in Miami, coral Gables, and then left after a couple years Burt Miller bought the organization.
Joe: I came back in March of 2020, actually, the first week. The first official week of Covid and it was a tired brand. It had been beaten up by private equity who had sold it a couple times and great owners. I felt in love with the organization cuz the recruiters in the organization truly loved the business, but the leadership had absolutely disrespected the franchise category as well as, didn't give them modern tools, didn't give 'em new strategies.
Joe: Basically was still pushing. Take a phone duct, tape it to your head and drool into the phone for four hours a day and hopefully make some placements. And so with leadership there, I was part of reinvigorating the brand, bringing digital into it, business analytics, business intelligence into it, brought it into the 21st century.
Joe: You should cater to the individual, meaning the candidate, not to the companies. And then you should explain why a search firm should be a partner in your business relationship versus just being a service provider. And then we did a great job of that and I think you're gonna see some interesting headlines over the next couple weeks.
Dualta: Awesome. Okay. Crisis hits all the easy stuff. The gravy, it's gone. Can't just do it with LinkedIn recruiter and one relationship with an internal HR person, cuz they've been there now they're looking for their own job, right? Correct. What, you're running a search firm, what does your Monday board meeting look like?
Dualta: The market's changed. What do we do?
Joe: Yeah, so look, it's still a fantastic. For search. It's just that and we had this conversation a few months ago in my firm. Like I saw this coming for the last nine, 10 months and we had all hands on deck a few months ago in my firm, and I said, it's really this simple.
Joe: It's not doom and gloom, it's just that the fish have stopped jumping in the boat. There's tons of fish in the ocean, but all of you people who got lazy or entered the business because the fish were jumping in the boat, contextually, this is still a great time to be in search if you're not counting on the call in jails or the easy placements.
Joe: So what do you do? Good question. Look, let's look at the playing field first. You got a couple, you got a couple players here, and in fact, due. I'll give you a peek inside the My Mad Mind in preparation for this session today, so if my control board can pop up that graphic, I sat down about an hour ago and I just had to get outta my brain all of the things that I thought we'd explore for your audience today.
Joe: Leah, can you
Dualta: get that up? You knew I was going
Joe: down this road, didn't you? I didn't know, but I was in preparation cuz I respect our time. Very good. Really is our graphic up? Yeah. Okay. All right. So if you look at that graphic, you got a couple players here. You got your supply side, which is crazier than batshit crazy.
Joe: The candidates, right? Right now they're expecting big salaries. They're expecting sign-ons, they're expecting Wfx lifestyle choices. They've got multiple offers and they're getting counter offer. So that's a dynamic right now that's really hard to get your arms around. So I like to think about the recruiting market as two loose ropes swinging around in the wind and you're trying to grab the two loose ropes and put 'em together to make a deal.
Joe: So your supply side, which are your candidates, your individuals as crazy as heck. So let's just put that on the side for a second. Then your playing field, you brought it up earlier, you've got the geopolitical issues going on, you've got election cycles going on, you've got inflation supply chain.
Joe: Interest rates. So what's happening right now is public markets do not like uncertainty, and so they start to respond to that kind of stuff. Governments don't like that. They start to respond. So that's the playing field companies are trying
to play in right now. And then you've got the fuel for the rocket and the fuel is money.
Joe: So you got venture money, you got private equity money, right? And then you got public markets, and then you've got the banking. And then you got the tech sector. So the tech sector right now is causing everybody to at least pause because we're finally gonna have some sobriety to the tech sector.
Joe: Because in the past if you were raising money and hiring lots of people, your stock price went up, which is insane because it inferred. We got out of the mindset of building a business for revenue. So you got meta right now who is indicative of what goes on in the Bay Area. My Bay Area friends are gonna get pissed at me for this, but it's the truth and you've got two things happening.
Joe: You got Elon coming in and calling out all of those vest wearing. Young to middle-aged software engineers who at best were working 15 hours a week and getting paid a quarter million to half a million dollars a year as quote unquote techies. And are they smart? Yeah. But I spent years in Silicon Valley and there's no such thing as hard work out there.
Joe: There's people showing up to a clubhouse. So you got that. There's a reckoning there. Meta look, ar, vr, it's a hundred years away, be before it's mainstream. You've got Amazon that's still hungover from everybody buying their toilet paper and everything else coming out of the Covid crisis cuz nobody wanted to go into stores.
Joe: So you have all this over-hiring of these tech people, software people, and The internet marketplace is finally settling in and it's not as frothy as everybody was hiring for. So what's that doing is it's scaring the heck outta the rest of the market. It's fine though, because if you look at the markets in general, profits are great.
Joe: They're relatively stable, everything's highly predictable. And with the US the Fed has told you what they're gonna do. There's gonna be no surprises. So now you got the playing field, you got the supply side. Which of the can. And then you got the fuel. And the fuel right now is hesitating. Could
Dualta: I add a couple of things to the supply site?
Dualta: There go the, you, the generation of people who are retiring, that's, and there's a gen there's enough wealth passing between the boomers onwards that
people don't have to work. Then there's the gig economy of people that have become freelancers. So there's still a lack of people. To do the job.
Dualta: Surely the fundamentals don't change in terms of highly skilled people for highly skilled jobs and the availability of
Joe: that.
Joe: Look, the dynamics occurring right now in the marketplace is corporations typically, their playbook moves very slowly relative to where the markets are because unfortunately, executives and HR aren't very good at building talent on their teams. They've never strategically had to do that. And now that you're getting in an environment, and this is why it's a very promising time for head hunters, and I'm gonna give you.
Joe: I'm gonna tell you what the symptoms are and what the challenges are, and then I'm gonna offer up what I believe are going to be the solutions. And it's easy to point at the problems, but let's also talk about the solutions. So right now, the contract, the contracting world, if you're in the headhunting business, you ought to be exploring that as a addition to your full-time search, because as you pointed out to.
Joe: Organizations wanna off balance sheet, certain expenses. They don't wanna bring on salaries. They still have to get the work done, and those people who thought they were retire or took an early retirement are gonna get a little bored and gonna wanna wrap back in and have a lot to offer to the marketplace.
Joe: Those who thought they can go live, From a wfx or a, it's none of your business where I work still pay me. They're gonna have a throat punch coming very soon. They're gonna have to get back into the classic marketplace, but there's still gonna be a part of that population, maybe two to 5% of the market that is going to be able to solve problems, but it's not going to be as.
Joe: Generous to them as they expect. So I would be getting into to compliment my business into the contract side of the business. And it's also nice because it's a monthly check coming in into the headhunting company that you own versus just the single pops of the transactional pops on the full-time search site.
Joe: I agree with you on the top end, the people who are retiring and on the bottom end, the people who went to contractors people who are going to contractors are gonna miss the tribal experience, are gonna miss showing up in
the office every day, are gonna miss the comradery because there's more to the workplace than work.
Joe: No matter what you wanna say, our relationships are formed there. Our fulfillment is formed there. Our side gigs that we do our bowling, our softball teams, our football teams, our dart leagues, whatever it is, there's a lot more to the work environment than work itself. So we can't disrespect that and human nature being what it is.
Joe: So now if you own a head hunting business, what do you do? The first thing you need to do is you need. Make sure that your time to fill on your searches is the number one metric you look at. What we've started doing our organization is we start the clock on the day that we start the outbound activity, not the phone calls, the outbound activities on our searches, and once we hit 60 days, we're in the red.
Joe: Because if you're a headhunter, time kills all deals. And what we were seeing was on average our head hunters would work 15 retainers at a time on their desk. But what was happening is those retainers, cuz they had so many, they couldn't cut deep and hard enough. So their fulfillment time was leaking beyond 90 to a hundred days.
Joe: And we, I mentioned business analytics and business intelligence earlier in the podcast. Every search firm. Better embrace data, business analytics, and how long it takes you on a number of activities in your search. So we track when the intake call was, when it was kicked off. When the first candidate was presented, when the first full slate was presented, how long it took for first interview, second interview, all of those things, cuz you can start to troubleshoot where your workflow is in your organization.
Joe: So we've cut it down to from 15 to 10 searches at a time. 60 days is the red zone and you make more placements that. On a year, and I'll show you how the math works, and you also don't lose out to, this job went away when an internal candidate popped up, which is what kills a lot of searches. So anytime you go beyond 60 days in our business, in our category, you're in the red zone.
Joe: So now what that means is you're probably filling nine outta 10 containers instead of maybe. 11 outta 15, you're giving a better customer experience. You're shortening the times between the search activities from start to finish. Therefore, in an annualized basis, you actually fit in more searches because you're reducing the number of days it is to fulfill that search.
Dualta: Joe, what would you say to the founders out there that have explored with remote working and for the first time, No, they're worried about the productivity.
Joe: I have remote workers. I have two people in Cleveland. I have two people in Newcastle. I have one up in Canada. And you know what it comes to, that
Dualta: was a jump for you.
Dualta: Wasn't a job. What's that? That was
Joe: a cultural job. I, you and I have talked about it three years ago. I said, there's no way I would ever hire somebody who was not in my office. There's no. There's no way. So again, I have so much to learn in this world, and, but having said that, it made us be a lot more diligent in our hiring process.
Joe: And so I think you have no concerns with productivity if you hired the right person. If you hired the person who's a screwball, they weren't as productive in your office as you thought They. Active, but they weren't productive. And that's, that that's the key right there. I find most management issues in a search firm are based upon bad hires.
Joe: And if you're a lot more diligent, your hiring process, you reduce your headaches substantially, and then you reduce the toxicity. Substantially, which is what is the basis for a lot of search firms. Hitting the skids is bad employee toxicity. It reeks their bitches and they end up infecting other people who are impressionable.
Joe: And that is the demise of most search firms, I find.
Dualta: Yeah, the need for data. Running remote teams is super important. On a Monday Charlotte runs through all the data and productivity with the team using a mixture of source and LinkedIn recruiter. So she's able to just pull it all up and then go through what did you actually do?
Dualta: And we find that although it can be an uncomfortable enough experience for people, It's super necessary with remote teams to get the ethos right?
Joe: Yes. And it's all dalt in how you present it. Am I presenting this as an inspection of your activity or are you coming to the table with How can I help?
Joe: So we do that. We have multiple meetings during the. That are, here's the activity. How can I help? We've identified these gaps over the last 60, 90 days. In other words, why is it taking you seven days to get first candidate into the client? Let's sit and examine that. How can we help you? Is it your research work?
Joe: Is it your LinkedIn messaging? Is it your language in your messaging? Is it you're starting your searches on a Friday and then you're losing the weekend and. Days are clicking in. So we start to look at all that. And another functional that your listeners should be very interested in, and I think it's as important as Dragonfly was from a production company branding perspective.
Joe: We created a search operations function in our firm. So our search consultants now outsource in the firm creating. The postings, creating what we call the position briefs, which are the multimedia products that we use. We send to candidates, individuals, as we call them, they handle all the metrics.
Joe: They find out what are you working on? How close are you done with being worked on a, what resources do you need? So my head hunters are only. Focused on points of engagement. You notice I didn't say phone calls, points of engagement with the market. And so we've got three people who are servicing 12 recruiters who are taking care of all of the activities that are not keeping the individual in front of.
Joe: The search consultant in front of the individual or in front of the client. They're also reaching out with clients and setting up appointments managing calendars, all of those things. Now, I go back to what I said before. You have to make sure you're hiring teammates who want to only focus.
Joe: Talking to individuals, talking to clients, and allowing their partners on the search app side to take care of all those other highly valued activities, but aren't required to be the same skillset as a good headhunter. You've made
Dualta: that sound very easy. I've built that thing as well in our own way.
Dualta: There's a tremendous amount of detail. To get that right from the marketing, the systems, the process where those people are, what they do, what they're happy doing, how their communication flows between them and the two 80 head hunters and how that whole thing like it, it is taught, it is it's taken us a while to, to nail that down, but I a hundred percent agree to it.
Dualta: I almost feel like sometimes our guys take that for granted. That it's just going to be done for them. How long did it take you to put that
Joe: together? It's still a work in progress. Yeah. We started it in earnest about 16, 18 months ago and we just now interesting. Dewal about five months ago, about the same time that I had the meeting with the organization here about, listen, the market's gonna.
Joe: Don't be afraid. We're just gonna have to be agile enough. I had used search operations as a retrospective function in the company being, what did you do this week? What did you send out this week? What's going out today? We then expanded it to biz dev and it's made all the difference in the world. So now they're doing biz dev for us, putting together marketing pieces, managing our paid campaigns on LinkedIn, and we can talk about paid campaigns on LinkedIn.
Joe: As we go to conferences, they're reaching out on our. The people at the conference we wanna make appointments with, they're putting together the marketing graphics pieces. So now they're loading the top of the funnel and they're retrospectively
Joe: gaining the data on the back. So why is data important? Couple reasons. One is what happened? Number two, why did it happen? Number three. What's gonna happen? And then the elite side of business intelligence, how can I make it happen? Yeah. And so when you start to ga gather data, you go through those four phases and Val Hala is, how can I make it happen on the data site?
Joe: And once you start to get enough data, you can start to predict what your spend needs to be in order to make something happen. And that spend is either people money or time in a headhunting.
Dualta: So let's take another step back and so you called the branding thing and you called the boom. That would happen on the other end of Covid.
Dualta: We all know we're in shock now for the next four to six weeks, and then we got the Christmas break. We come back in January. The dead wood has been scattered every. What does the market look like for the following 12, 18, 24 months? Do we have to wait for the Fed to give the green light to start making money again?
Dualta: What? What does it all look like? What does that mean for anybody who's listening, who owns
Joe: a search for. So when you said, I called the media, you and I had a session a couple years ago before Covid, and I said, as a search firm, you better start developing your brand because there's something's gonna happen in the near future.
Joe: And companies that have great brands, and I don't care if you sell soda sneakers or cars come out of a crisis faster than anybody else. And sure enough, just a couple months later, COVID came and we saw that happen. The brands came out, they stayed alive, they came out much faster, and they took advantage of the market.
Joe: And we talked about Covid where. There was a scrambling going on and we, you and I called that, that it was gonna be the golden years of recruiting and relative terms. It was, now you called that I was
Dualta: running a outta of money. I wasn't sure what was gonna happen. . That was all you
Joe: We were on, I was fortunate enough to share that on your podcast.
Joe: That was, yeah. Yeah. And then look, where's it going in the future? There's gonna be few things are gonna.
Joe: Headhunting market's gonna continue to get finally professionalized with some of the services that you provide to the marketplace. I love that. I left MRI for a couple reasons. One is I'm gonna be developing a world class training program for headhunters as well as search for owners. Like looking at it like a real consulting business.
Joe: I'm not suggesting they're not run that way right now, but there's a lot of room to improve using technologies, tools, training. Okay. So that you're gonna start to see that you're also gonna start to see search firms. Not buying other search firms, but JVs occurring between other search firms. And as you called it, some people are gonna stop painting over the dead wood and let it burn off because there's a lot of search firms that are painting over dead wood and thinking everything's gonna be okay.
Joe: You've gotta actually burn that dead wood right off, like aggressively burn it off. And then what you're gonna see is people are gonna start, we hired two people in our firm that were each making. Large six figures out of medical device and they looked at their industry and they said, I love my industry medical device.
Joe: I'm making anywhere from 300 to 500,000 a year. I'm a salesperson in that space. And I see that dynamic changing, but I don't want to give up my black book, meaning my book of contacts. I love what I do. I love the people I serve, and I'm moving into my thirties and forties. I don't see promise for me working for the mothership or big corporate, they joined our firm and both of them are killing it.
Joe: And so I think you're gonna start to see a professionalism. I don't care if you work H V A C, mining, construction, med tech, life science, the really good search firms are gonna go out and grab that talent, who I don't have to teach the industry. Who have great contacts, who are subject matter experts who already know how to sell, because most head hunters are shit at sales, and what they're taught is even worse than what they don't know.
Joe: And you're gonna have these people come in who, again, the two hardest things to teach in a head hunting firm, how to be a headhunter, meaning selling. And I'm not talking about cheese ball selling. I'm talking about consultative selling. And then domain experience sometimes takes years because otherwise you get on the phone with a hiring manager, and the hiring manager clearly knows you don't know his domain or her domain, and they hang up on you or don't have trust.
Joe: So I think you're gonna start to see the people in their thirties and forties who realize they don't wanna spend the rest of their life. Continually getting their commissions hacked off. The good search firms are gonna give first year guarantees to those people, bring them up to speed, and those people will be running million dollar desks within 12 to 16 months and everybody will be happy.
Joe: It's gonna elevate the space and it's gonna break away certain search firms and certain categories from everybody else. So I think that's what's happening. And then finally, you're gonna start to. Business intelligence, data analytics, and digital tools that will make the search firms services to the partners, the clients, so seamless and so easy that it's gonna be really hard.
Joe: To not use a good search firm, and you might see repricing too. I don't know about that yet. You start, you may start to see repricing in the search business where you can go into a client and say, let's do a million dollar contract, $80,000 a month, 88, 80 $3,333 a month. It'll guarantee you 2020 hire.
Joe: And I don't care if it's a CEO or I don't care if it's an entry level sales person. That's what it is because then the search firm can go ahead and start to
build an infrastructure around their business and they can offer a much better cost per hire to the client. And how you construct your search business around that is entirely different.
Joe: Then the way classic search firms have been built where they start with one desk, make it the three, make it the five, and it's a whole bunch of disparate desks in the middle of a bullpen and some owner has a chipboard and is inspecting four hours of phone time and it becomes a transactional business.
Joe: So I think you're gonna have that metamorphosis occur over the next 24 to 36 months.
Dualta: The during the, after the pandemic or during it? The big winners were life sciences, healthcare. An FMCG primarily coming outta the gates. Who's gonna be this time?
Joe: Food science. Healthcare will always be, here's the beauty of he.
Joe: Healthcare grows at about six to 8% per annum. But there are micro markets within healthcare that grow at 25 to 35%. And so that's what you wanna look for. You wanna look for markets that are not, that have built in governors to them, because anytime you have a market that doesn't have a governor built into it, it grows too.
Joe: And by design it has to crash just as fast. We've seen that with the internet. We've seen that with housing. We've seen that with a number of things. So you wanna look for something that has a built in governor, but has micro markets within it that are spawned by innovation that require investment dollars.
Joe: We talked about fuel earlier. Where is the venture money going? Where's private equity money going? Where's the public market money going in your desk? Specialty? I would say a majority of. If you spend your weekend and really dig into where is the fuel coming, because when that investment money comes in, the thesis is the investment.
Joe: People want you to grow and grab market share before anybody else gets it. In order to do that, you have to hire best in class, and those firms will pay a head hunting fee. They're used to it, so it doesn't mean you have to punt on your existing. Industry desk. But what you have to do is do meaningful homework and say, public money, private money, venture money.
Joe: Where's the money going into? What's the subset in there that's being invested? I love healthcare. I love life sciences. That's why I picked them 32 years ago. I love food science a lot because we're gonna have to get a lot more efficient and it's through laboratories and brilliant scientists, and you can pick off healthcare and life sciences and pull people into there and vice versa.
Joe: So I like those areas a lot. I would stay away from, super high tech.
Joe: Companies. But the category I would also go after is voice and vision. If I was opening up an office today, I'd be doing food science and voice and vision, and voice and vision for the smart homes of the future, voice and vision in cars. So anything that is in in, in. That is video related, both visible and invisible data.
Joe: And just think about all the things that run in our world. So if you're going after the scientists, the sales people, the project managers, the product development, the quality engineers, you see 'em coming back to creating technology. But voice and vision jumps across a number of industries. So you're not tied into an industry.
Joe: You can move in and out of the functions within consumer products, medical devices. Science health tech, med tech across that. So I would look at those categories, food, science, voice, and vision. And
Dualta: When I look at your business from the outside looking in, you're synonymous with innovation, quality of work, but also doing more with less people.
Dualta: Were there moments. In that boom coming out of Covid where you thought, you know what? I might go to a hundred now. I might go to 200. I might acquire five different businesses. And was there any particular moment that you went, actually, no. We're going to just stay to what got us to the party.
Joe: Good question.
Joe: We still, our goal within three and a half to four years is to be 50. We're still going after that. That'll be organic and inorganic acquisition as well as the other model I told you is going after people who are in life science, med tech, who are used to making half a million a year, who wanna open up their own business and leverage what they did, will help them open up an office, become a partner with us, and then use the media, the market.
Joe: We have our own software development company within our search firm that makes digital products for search consultants to be able to scale their efficiencies and create a better appearance to the client. So it's seamless. So what we did DTA is I knew that the rate of growth going through the pandemic was not a straight line function, nor was it sustainable.
Joe: And With that, I said, okay, let's pause here. How do I make my $400,000 billers, $800,000 billers? How do I make my $800,000 billers, 1.5 million billers and not put a lot at risk? So what do we do? We invested enormous amount of money in We for the very first time, dal. I have not had a CRM in my office for over eight years.
Joe: We went to lock. I'm a big fan of Alexa, so we finally put a CRM in because we got into the data analytics, the backend business intelligence. So we spent money there. Then we continued to spend money on software products that. Sit in between our customer, meaning the individual and the client, and our search firm, and an experience that is world class that people like, holy crap, between media, multimedia, et cetera.
Joe: We expanded dragonflies capabilities without expanding the number of head hunters on our floor. And our revenue went from, I think, 8.8 to 12 million within 18 months on the. And so my exposure, sure. I had some spent and we brought search operations in. I said, how do I increase the efficiency in my players?
Joe: Then we loaded up the funnel with those two hires from the industry who were experts that I didn't have to spend time. And the one fella in his first six months, I think his side of his billing is $380,000 in his first six months. That's a pretty damn good number for somebody who's never done search before.
Joe: And so those are the things that we did. What are those? Those are building blocks. And they're all scalable components. So now as I watch some search firms start to struggle, there's gonna be people who work on those search firms who are gonna go mullings, can I talk to you? In fact, I have another interview tomorrow with a fellow who's coming out of a search firm, can I talk to you about potentially joining?
Joe: And it's opened up our environment. Because I never would have had somebody remote, as you and I, joked about a couple minutes ago. But now we. And I have, I'm having a conversation with a fellow in Buffalo, the same thing. These are business people who have advanced degrees, who have industry
expertise in their domain that they want to take it into helping building companies and careers.
Joe: That's the way I think we're gonna scale over the next five to seven years. Is that a franchise
Dualta: model, Joe?
Joe: No. Right now we have open offices that eventually they'll be a rev share with the people who are leading those offices. Another will be somebody who wants to come in and partner with us and they'll own the office that they're in.
Joe: But I don't like, I came out of a franchise organization manager, recruiters, and it's a damn good company. There's so many things about a franchise organization that. Less than optimal because it's two, it customized things to the same way. It, you know what it is, Dal is you're, the bar you set for entry gets compromised and it could devolve to, can you fog a mirror and write a check to open up a franchise?
Joe: And so I think if you think about a partner model, the bar is so damn. That you are gonna have a lot less, but the quality and intellect, like you can't compromise on cognitive intelligence. You can't compromise on conscientiousness, you can't compromise on curiosity, you can't compromise on work ethic.
Joe: None of those things are compromisable. So in our interview process, we do all of that. My fear with the franchise is every franchise organization in search that I've looked. There's 300 offices, 10 of those offices are responsible for 50% of the revenue, and the other 290 are responsible for the rest of the 50%.
Joe: And they all get together in these meetings or they all go on a Zoom call together and it's clear that the top 10 eventually I don't know why I'm wasting my time here, even though they're generous people who want to give back. So it won't be a franchise, but there will be one of straight up owner.
Joe: and those other owners adding to the capabilities of the firm where a franchisees is waiting to be fed. A partnership model is how do I take these capabilities and add them back to the firm? Okay.
Dualta: All right. I think we've covered quite a lot of, Rachel. Let's have 45 minutes. Look, thank you so much for your.
Dualta: Appreciate it as always. What what's the physical regime right now? You're back doing jujitsu. You you just lift in what's?
Joe: Still exercising, turned 60 this year. So you, I gotta fight father time. But same thing on the physical regime, mental regimes just as pursuing my pilot's license. I think we talked about that.
Joe: I'm really enjoying that. Keeping the brain. Super agile there and just trying to keep up with the youngins here. I gotta always make sure that, old man's strength can overcome the young vigor. I got a couple of the guys in the bullpen with me who are at the gym at 5:00 AM so it's always fun trying to keep up with them as well.
Dualta: Great stuff. Look, thanks for your time as ever. Really appreciate it and very insightful.
Joe: You got it buddy. Be well.
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