Does Firing People Ever Get Easier?

Introduction:

This week, Shawn Busse, Jay Goltz, and William Vanderbloemen discuss whether the old line about hiring slow and firing fast makes sense during a labor shortage. As William puts it, “What if you do have to hire fast? How do you do that? What if you do want to keep people even if you might have wanted to get rid of them before? How do you do that without ruining your culture?” Plus: How do you know it’s really time for someone to go? And what happens when employees share their salaries with each other? Anything good? And as we all binge watch the real life dramas about WeWork and Theranos, the question inevitably arises: Is it still okay to fake it until you make it? And if so, where do you draw the line?

— Loren Feldman

Guests:

William Vanderbloemen is founder and CEO of Vanderbloemen Search Group.

Shawn Busse is co-founder and CEO of Kinesis.

Jay Goltz is founder and CEO of The Goltz Group.

Producer:

Jess Thoubboron is founder of Blank Word Productions.

Full Episode Transcript:

Loren Feldman:
Welcome Shawn, Jay, and William. Great to have you all here. Today we’re going to talk about every entrepreneur’s favorite task, which is firing people. I’m wondering if—given the labor shortage that just goes on and on—are companies reversing the way they normally do things and [are] hiring faster and firing slower? Is that a problem? Is that something you’re seeing William?

William Vanderbloemen:
Well, Loren, I think they’ve always hired fast and fired slow. And that’s part of the reason I have a job, because it doesn’t work very well. I do think there’s an interesting question that this job churn or The Great Resignation has initiated, and that is: What if you do have to hire fast? How do you do that? What if you do want to keep people even if you might have wanted to get rid of them before? How do you do that without ruining your culture?

Loren Feldman:
Do you have any advice for companies in those situations? What are you telling your clients?

William Vanderbloemen:
Retention is the ballgame right now, so if you’ve got good people, figuring out how to reward them. We’ve talked on previous shows about a retention bonus, something that isn’t going to cost you every single year, but gives you a chance to keep people a little bit longer and to build your pipeline a little bit deeper. But the hiring fast thing is just fraught with danger.

Shawn Busse:
I think what you’re seeing is that most organizations didn’t give very serious credence to their hiring process for many, many years. They did a very poor job of articulating the value proposition of their employer brand—why you would want to work there. They gave all the emphasis to sales and marketing for the external customer. And so as a result, it’s really hard to understand what it’s like to work at a business. And so now they’re in panic mode, and so they’re looking for silver bullets to solve this multi-year problem that they’ve had.

And so I’m seeing a lot of Band-Aids out there: “Well, we just need to write better job descriptions.” Or, “We need a careers page,” that kind of stuff. But it’s fundamentally that they need to re-examine it from top to bottom and weed out all the inefficiencies that are in the process.

I have a friend, he did like nine interviews with a company over the course of multiple months, and it’s just insane. And so small businesses, I think they can use things like technology to automate the stupid stuff and then use humanity to accelerate the understanding and insights of the employee. And that’s really what needs to happen. Not these kinds of platitudes of, “Hire fast, fire slowly,” or whatever it is. That’s not the answer. The answer is actually to be strategic about it.

Jay Goltz:
Just so you know, it’s hire slow and fire fast.

Shawn Busse:
Yeah, whatever.

Loren Feldman:
I asked the question, because I think a lot of companies right now feel like they’re in a position where they have to hire faster than they usually do.

Shawn Busse:
And yeah, and then they’re sowing the seeds of misery.

Jay Goltz:
I have to say this: because you’re trying to hire faster, it means get back to them quicker. That doesn’t mean you’re going to necessarily do a bad job with it. But there certainly is something to, “You need to hire faster.” It means: Close the deal quicker. Check the references quicker. Hire them quicker. There’s nothing wrong with that. But you probably should do that, because it’s very competitive out there.

Shawn Busse:
Yeah, that’s true.

Jay Goltz:
I swear, I’ve had 10 people leave out of 130 over the last year, and I replaced them with 10 happy, productive people who are here—mostly Millennials. Maybe I’m attracting them because we’re a nice company. I don’t know why, but it worked. Did I have a hard time finding a truck driver? Absolutely. But we finally did, and he’s solid. That one was tough. That took six weeks. But there are people out there looking for jobs.

Shawn Busse:
Are you doing anything different?

Jay Goltz:
I don’t think so. One of them said, “On my last job, I just got beat up by customers every day, and there was nothing I could do about it. Here, you empower me to take care of the customer.” They’re thrilled to be here. I don’t know what to say. Has it changed the marketplace to where the employees are being more selective now, and they’d rather work in a smaller company and maybe make a little less money than the big company and not sell their soul? Maybe.

Loren Feldman:
Jay, you’ve also had some tough firings—one in particular I’m thinking of, that you’ve told me about. The person who had to be fired reacted very poorly in a kind of a nightmare scenario. Can you tell us about that?

Jay Goltz:
We hired somebody thinking that it wasn’t a great story, how they left their last job. But there were some particulars that we figured, “Okay, it probably wasn’t them.” We hired them. We tried to make it work for nine months. We did everything we could. It wasn’t working.

My HR person sat down with the manager and told them it wasn’t working. They went into the whole this-isn’t-fair routine. You know, “I’m trying hard.” Unfortunately, trying hard doesn’t matter. I’m sorry. I mean, if you can’t get the job done, the customer doesn’t care whether you’re trying hard or not. So we gave it everything we had.

The HR person left and then the employee started to text her, “Thank you. I needed a push. I’m gonna kill myself now, and blood’s on your hands, and blah, blah, blah.” And my HR person was rather freaked out about it, obviously. And she came to me, and I called the emergency contact and explained the situation.

Loren Feldman:
Wait, you called the emergency contact that the employee had listed?

Jay Goltz:
Yeah, because this is one of those situations where there isn’t a hard line of, “Oh, that’s personal.” No, I feel a responsibility. When someone says that, I need to call their emergency contact and tell them what’s going on. And they were thankful that I called them, and they said that there are some issues there. And we had a nice conversation, and they thanked me for calling.

Loren Feldman:
Did you have thoughts about that, Jay?

Jay Goltz:
Zero. Zero.

Loren Feldman:
From a privacy standpoint.

Jay Goltz:
Zero. No hesitation. I am not going to have someone tell them they’re thinking of killing themselves and not call the emergency. There was no hesitation whatsoever. There’s a thin line between being the boss and being a human being, and I absolutely feel the responsibility that you need to tell their emergency contact. And then you’ve done what you’re supposed to do.

William Vanderbloemen:
I totally agree with you, Jay. And in our world, you know a good bit of our search work is for churches. And in a church, if someone indicates that they’re going to harm anyone mortally, you’re usually bound legally to report that to someone. I would say harm yourself is the same as harm to an individual.

Jay Goltz:
I’m also going to tell you something people don’t understand. I called a lawyer—and I’m correct on this—people have a misunderstanding of HIPAA laws. HIPAA laws are for health care providers. As the boss, you’re not bound by HIPAA laws. So even if there was, I would still have done it anyway, but—

Loren Feldman:
You couldn’t call somebody’s contact and say that somebody has a medical condition that they might not have been aware of, could you?

Jay Goltz:
Okay, that would be a bad move, and it would be wrong, but it would not be violating HIPAA laws.

Loren Feldman:
Really?

Jay Goltz:
Because I’m not a hospital. I’m not a doctor. Yeah, fact. I had a situation 30 years ago with someone who was clearly having some serious problems. They were losing weight like crazy. Now at this point, I’m 30-some years old, and I used to always say to myself, “They don’t cover this in business school!” I’m way past that now.

I called her brother, because I was afraid. She was clearly becoming anorexic. I mean, she was just losing weight. Karen Carpenter had just died a few years before, and I said to myself, “Well, gee, isn’t there a line between personal and business?” And I said to myself, “I’m sorry, I’m not gonna go to her funeral and have her brother walk up to me and say, ‘I can’t believe you didn’t call me.’” No, I struggled with it for a few hours. But yeah, I made the call, and I don’t regret it.

Loren Feldman:
That person was still employed when you did that, right?

Jay Goltz:
Yeah, and she was mad about it. And she quit. When I talked to the brother, he said, “Oh my God, that makes perfect sense.” So I don’t regret doing it. Unfortunately, when you’re the boss, and you’re in the middle of something, we have to be the boss. But we’re also supposed to be, I think, responsible human beings. And with that being said, the second that I take care of that, I’m done. I mean, I’m done. I did what I was supposed to do, and I’m sure the emergency contact person is going to take care of it.

Loren Feldman:
Jay, the person that you fired who threatened suicide, did you learn anything from that situation? Would you do anything differently, looking back at it?

Jay Goltz:
That’s always the question. I don’t think so. We were trying to give an opportunity to somebody. There was another issue, which I’m not going to get into, why I think they had a problem with their last job. We tried to give a shot to somebody.

The irony is, the person says, “Oh, this is unfair.” No, I’ll tell you what’s not fair. It’s not fair that I gave this person an opportunity, and now they’re telling me I’m not fair. I’m way over that. If you think when you fire someone, they’re gonna go, “You know what? Thank you for the opportunity. You’re right. I should get fired.” You’re extremely naive.

If I knew what was going to happen, I wouldn’t have hired them. But we took a little bit of a chance, and I will continue to take a little bit of a chance, giving people an opportunity. And sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t.

So did we wait too long? I don’t know. I mean, clearly the fact that it’s hard to hire people had a little bit of a factor into it. But I have no regrets. I think we gave—not think—we gave the person an opportunity. Unfortunately, there are people in the world who think if they try hard, that should do it. And unfortunately, that’s how you go broke—having a bunch of people work for you who try hard but can’t get the job done. That can be disastrous.

Loren Feldman:
Shawn or William, have either of you had a difficult firing like that? Have you learned anything about how to deal with it?

William Vanderbloemen:
Not where someone’s threatening to take their own life. That’s pretty unusual.

Shawn Busse:
Yeah, I haven’t had that. I’d say the thing that this makes me think about is, I met a business owner recently, and she had a really interesting model. And she’s the second person I met in the last few months where she has what’s called a second-chance program. And so she’s actually hiring folks with a criminal record.

And I’m sort of seeing more and more of that kind of conversation. And it’s made me realize that the challenge to employment is so significant, that folks are starting to reexamine their criteria for how they include or exclude people. The mentality that has driven hiring for the longest time was: We want to hire people who have absolutely no issues when they come in the door. They’re like perfect human beings.

And, you know, no human is perfect. And folks who may be in a really good place when you hire them can go through hardships, as Jay is talking about. And I think this is something that’s not really talked about very much, in terms of the small business community, that when you’re a small business employer, when something hard happens to an employee or there are outside forces acting on that employee, boy, do you feel it. And you have to make hard decisions oftentimes.

I had an employee years ago, where I would get these calls from a family member who was trying to find her, and she was like, “Oh, I don’t want to talk to them.” And it was like, clearly, there was some drama there. And how do you manage those kinds of situations? That’s nothing compared to somebody who’s suicidal, but it’s the whole spectrum. And I don’t think there’s a lot of guidance on this kind of stuff.

Jay Goltz:
No. In the beginning, when I was younger, I would think, “I didn’t sign up for this. I’m just a boss.” And I realized, “Yeah, I did sign up for it.” We’ve all signed up for it. If you have enough employees, the reason it hasn’t happened to you is you probably haven’t had a thousand employees. I have. It’s just a matter of odds. And yeah, I did sign up for this. I’m not complaining about it. It is what it is.

Loren Feldman:
Does it get easier?

Jay Goltz:
Absolutely. Absolutely. You’re a doctor, and you’re in the emergency room. I’m sure in the beginning when someone comes in from a crash, and their eyeball is hanging out, you’re going to vomit or something. I’m sure after a while, you kind of get used to everything. I was telling my friend who’s a psychologist that story. She goes, “Oh my God, how do you deal with it?” I said, “I’m used to it.” I don’t know what to say.

Loren Feldman:
Jay, you had one that did make you physically sick, didn’t you?

Jay Goltz:
Yeah, back in the old days, 1990. I had a key person. It was going badly. It was all kinds of stuff going on, and I was so stressed out. I didn’t know it at the time, but I do now. I literally had back pains. I laid down on the floor. I literally could not get up off the floor. My wife calls our neighbor, who’s a doctor. He said, “Call an ambulance.” I literally went to the hospital in an ambulance, because I couldn’t get up. And I look back: That was absolutely all stress-related.

Shawn Busse:
Just somebody quitting on you?

Jay Goltz:
No, not quitting. It was my quote-unquote key guy, and he’d been with me for five years. In 43 years, I’ve had four occasions to have to part with someone who was kind of a key person, and this was my first one. And it was very upsetting. And I was all stressed out about it. And I was all of 34 years old.

I’ve had a couple past then, and I can tell you, it’s nowhere near as upsetting. And I will also tell you that I believe that firing people—it might not sound great—but it’s one of the top five things that one has to do to run a successful business, unfortunately. It is what it is. And knowing when to fire them and taking care of it. Some people just do not fit at the company, and it’s unhealthy for the company. It’s not good for the customers. It’s not good for the other employees. And that’s just one of our jobs.

Loren Feldman:
Jay, somebody hearing that might think you’re saying that one of the key things in running a business is firing a lot of people.

Jay Goltz:
No, not at all.

Loren Feldman:
It’s firing the right people.

Jay Goltz:
It’s knowing when somebody can’t do the job. You’ve given them everything you can, you’ve coached them, you’ve mentored them, and you’ve told them, and it just isn’t working. And it certainly gets easier as you get bigger.

In my case, we don’t fire a lot of people anymore, because we’ve gotten much better at hiring—much better. So it doesn’t happen a lot at all. But I’ve seen companies dragged down because they didn’t have the stomach to do what they needed to do. And I’m sorry, this is one of the jobs of being the boss. And we don’t fire a lot of people anymore, but it is a necessary—I won’t even call it an evil—it’s a necessary part of business.

Loren Feldman:
William, has it gotten any easier for you?

William Vanderbloemen:
No, I think the day it gets easier, you need to do a little self-check and probably go see a counselor. I think …

Loren Feldman:
That’s Jay you’re talking about. [Laughter]

Jay Goltz:
Yeah, I think you meant “easy.” I think you meant, when it gets “easy”—not “easier.” It should get easier because you recognize it. But yeah, I’m not arguing it should ever be easy.

William Vanderbloemen:
Yeah, very well said. I was about to say something similar. I think, Loren, it’s far easier for me to see that it needs to happen now. Like a younger version of me, maybe I had some sort of messiah complex. “I can fix it. I can save it. I can salvage this. I can re-pot them here. I can do this. I can fix it.” And I think as I’m getting older, I’m realizing my limitations and maybe, hopefully, I’ve got a little more discernment to realize, “Yeah, this just is not working.” But the actual, for lack of a better word, execution of it? No, that’s not any easier.

Loren Feldman:
How about you Shawn?

Shawn Busse:
I don’t think emotionally it gets easier. But I do think—to Jay’s point—that there’s something about, when you do something over time, I think you get better at recognizing when it’s just an inevitability. And I think you get maybe a little more forgiving of yourself, because I think that’s what the hesitation is for a lot of owners. They made the decision to hire this person, so if they’re not working out, I think, subconsciously, they don’t want to accept that they made a mistake. And they also want to give that person all the benefit of the doubt.

Jay Goltz:
And sometimes, they’re very nice. A lot of times they’re nice people. They just can’t do the job. Here’s the test. Are you ready? I still use this. This is my magic test. You say to yourself, if this person walked into my office tomorrow and said, “You know what? I’m moving to California, and I’m quitting,” would your visceral reaction be relief? If that’s the case, they shouldn’t be there. And I use it myself all the time. I talk to other managers, I go, “Listen, how would you feel if they quit tomorrow? Would you be relieved? No? Okay, well, then it’s not time yet.” That’s when I know it’s time.

Shawn Busse:
I think the most important thing that I’ve learned is that the way you handle it can be improved upon a lot as you get more experienced, and I’ve gotten better.

William Vanderbloemen:
I completely agree with you, Shawn. I would say on the whole hire-slow-fire-fast thing, I think what I’m learning—and I’m still learning, right—is, yeah, you hire slow. You come to the conclusion that someone needs to be let go quickly. How it gets implemented might take some time to do it correctly—if that makes sense.

Jay Goltz:
Well, one thing one needs to understand is you’re not going to win the fight with them. When they go, “That’s not fair,” don’t think you’re going to convince them, “Oh, no, no, this is fair. Here’s why.” You need to recognize they’re probably not going to agree. And whatever they say, you say, “I’m sorry you feel that way.” But you’re not there to win the fight. You’re there to just let them know that you’ve given it your best shot, and they need to leave. But don’t think you’re going to win.

Shawn Busse:
I found that book Crucial Conversations to be really effective for letting employees go. It’s a framework around coming to shared agreements and having hard conversations. And honestly, I use it to let go of clients. And I’ve used it to let go of employees. And it’s really good because it’s based in empathy.

Loren Feldman:
Give us a hint, Shawn. What have you learned about handling that difficult situation that you do better now than you used to?

Shawn Busse:
Yeah, so first of all, you’ve got to be a lot more stoic about it. And so a lot less of taking it as a personal thing—whether that’s, “I’ve failed as an employer,” or, “They’re a failure as an employee”—and really stick to kind of the core facts. And what you do in that framework—this is a very CliffsNotes version—but essentially, you work with the employee to come to a shared pool of understanding.

So in that pool of understanding are all the things you both agree upon. So that can be everything from, “Hey, Cindy, I noticed that you’ve been coming into work, and you’ve been a little bit downcast. Would you think that’s accurate? Is that a fair description?” So you’re working to come to an agreement on what the situation is. And then you’re exploring, and you’re getting curious, like, “So Cindy, why are you so downcast?”

And eventually, you get to a place where actually Cindy recognizes that she’s not engaged with the job anymore. And that’s the best outcome, where the employee actually kind of comes to that revelation. But fundamentally, if you can use that shared pool of agreement, then you can begin to have the hard conversation, because you’ve come to an agreement on what the situation is.

That’s the process I’ve come to use, and I haven’t had to fire somebody in a long time, but when I do it—whether it’s on the client side or on the employee side—if I fall back onto that framework, which is setting aside my emotional investment, which is being curious, being empathetic, seeking to understand, and seeking to come to agreement as to what’s going on, that has worked wonders for me.

Jay Goltz:
Well, the benefit of that approach is that some people will figure out they need to look for another job and quit.

Shawn Busse:
Yes.

Jay Goltz:
Which is great for everybody. I would say this statement: Usually, not all the time, people shouldn’t be surprised.

Loren Feldman:
It’s your job to make sure they’re not surprised, right?

Jay Goltz:
Yeah, if somebody goes, “I can’t believe you’re doing this,” I can go, “I can’t believe you’re surprised. I told you three weeks ago that if you did this again… What part of this could surprise you?” I don’t know, but whatever.

I believe in righteous firings. You’ve done everything you can to fix it. You’ve given the opportunity to the employee to fix whatever the problem is, and they didn’t. I’m sure there are some occasions where you can’t, and it is a surprise, but it’s best if the employee has fair warning of what the problem is, and they can fix it. And like I said, sometimes they figure out this is the wrong place for them. And hey, good for them. Good for you. Good for everybody.

Shawn Busse:
Well yeah, you know, I think depending on how you treat them, you can turn that into either a really awful situation where they’re getting on Glassdoor, and they’re leaving comments about how terrible of an employer you are. Or you can turn it into a neutral situation where they depart, and you shake hands and walk away. Or you can turn it into a positive situation where—I’ve had this happen—fundamentally, the direction of the business was going in a different way than this employee wanted for his career, and we both had that crucial conversation. He recognized it. I was sad, too, because he was a great long-term employee. And so I was like, “Let me help you find a new job.” And so I worked on that, and I kept him employed. And he found a great new job, and he moved to New Zealand, and he was happy. You know, that’s a great outcome, but it takes work.

Jay Goltz:
There’s also, if they’ve been there a while, the question of severance pay. I’ve paid out lots of severance pay over the years. Some people don’t believe in it. I do. If someone’s been with you for 10 years, and as you’ve just said, things have changed, then yeah, severance pay, letter of recommendation. There’s something you can do, sometimes. And sometimes, obviously not.

William Vanderbloemen:
Any of you guys, or Loren, have you heard of people actually budgeting for severance pay?

Shawn Busse:
Hmm. I have never heard of that. But that’s intriguing.

William Vanderbloemen:
I say that because we have some clients where usually it’s this scenario that I’ve run into: A founder starts—whether it’s a school, or a church, or nonprofit, or business—they make a 30-year run. And some of the people who started with them and have been with them a long time, there’s a need for fresh blood, and new faces, and new voices. And it’s just going to be really painful to let them go.

And so these guys, I think very shrewdly, have said, “Every year, we’re just going to budget some severance pay that allows us to be more generous than we probably ought to be. And if we don’t spend it, we don’t spend it. We’ll give it away to something else or pour it into a new initiative.” It’s kind of an interesting thought.

Shawn Busse:
It is really interesting, because that phenomenon is real—of employees who are great in the beginning, and then they no longer really fit into the company’s needs.

Jay Goltz:
Call that growing pains. The people who were so great when you had five employees frequently do not fit in when you’ve got 40. And it is naive and unfortunate, but you are going to outgrow some people and it’s painful. It’s extremely painful, but it is what it is.

William Vanderbloemen:
Totally agree. I keep a copy of the book What Got You Here Won’t Get You There in my office where I can see it, just so I can see the title. Because it just happens. I just think it’s fascinating to say, “We have a part of our budget set aside for projects we don’t even know are going to happen during the year, but they’re gonna happen.” An opportunity budget. The older our organization gets, I don’t have anybody I’m ready to fire or anything, but I think it’s pretty dang insightful to say, “Why don’t we set aside some money if we really need to be generous to somebody who’s been here a long time, but their run is over?”

Shawn Busse:
Yeah, yeah. That’s a really intriguing idea, William.

Loren Feldman:
We’re running short of time. Let me try something else here. Probably all of us have been binging content lately about entrepreneurs, and a lot of the stories have not been all that positive. I’m thinking WeWork. I’m thinking Theranos. A lot of it is about the concept of faking it until you make it. And I think we all probably agree that Elizabeth Holmes kind of crossed the line, but I’m wondering, where is that line drawn?

And just to start this conversation, I want to recall that, when I was an editor at Inc. magazine, I edited a column by Norm Brodsky, who was the lead columnist and the best read thing in the magazine and the owner of a box storage business. He wrote a column in which he talked about how he got his box storage business off the ground. He identified a problem he had, which is, he would give people tours of the warehouse, and they would see it was completely empty. And they would wonder, “Should I trust Norm with my crucial documents that I need to get access to at some point? Why should I trust somebody who no one else is trusting?”

And here’s what Norm wrote about this. His response was: “I had an idea. We went out and bought 2,000 empty boxes, put barcodes on them, and used them to fill the shelves. We then put mirrors on the back wall. From a distance, it looked as though the warehouse went on forever and was absolutely packed with boxes. When we took visitors on a tour of the facility, we put up a rope to make sure nobody got close enough to the mirrors to see how we’d created the effects. Prospective customers who came in began asking whether we had enough room for their boxes. We assured them that we did.”

What do you guys think?

Jay Goltz:
I’m okay with the empty boxes. I don’t think I would have done the mirror part. I just think in my world—

Loren Feldman:
What’s the difference?

Jay Goltz:
One is deceptive. Well, I just think one is obviously trying to trick people. The other one is just a practical thing of, you know it’s gonna look bad. And it’s about being dishonest. I don’t know, you could argue that it’s the same thing. I just think putting mirrors up, though? There’s something about that that just seems like you’re really trying to deceive people. I’ve got no problem with the box thing.

Loren Feldman:
Anybody else? Shawn? William?

Shawn Busse:
I mean, I can remember moments in my life when I’ve said that expression—the “Fake it ‘til you make it.”

Loren Feldman:
Everybody does it, right? To some extent.

Shawn Busse:
Right. So you’re asking, “Where do you draw the line?”

Jay Goltz:
Here’s my line: lying. That’s my line: lying. If someone brought something for me to frame when I was starting out, and I’d never framed one? I’m not necessarily gonna go, “Geez, this is the first one of these I’ve ever framed.” But if they asked me, I would tell them. There were lots of things I was learning along the way.

Loren Feldman:
By the way, Norm said that in the column. He said, “There are two things you don’t do: You don’t lie, and you don’t do any harm.” And he felt he was okay in this situation.

Shawn Busse:
William, you’re the ethicist among us. Come on, help us out here.

William Vanderbloemen:
My oldest son, he’s 28. We have a family group text, the nine of us. And he just sent this new social media platform around saying, “Have you guys seen this?” And all of his college-aged siblings said, “Oh, of course, we’re already on it.” Maybe you guys have heard. It’s called BeReal. Have you heard of this?

Loren Feldman:
I have not.

William Vanderbloemen:
So it’s basically Snapchat—if I understand it right, I’m an old guy—but you don’t get to pick when you get to post. The app says, “Okay, you have to post right now.” So you don’t have time to set up a filter. You don’t have time to put on makeup. And it’s taken off. They’ve got like 600,000 users already. And it just got going.

And the whole thing is a reaction to the overproduced, over-spun, over-filtered world that we’re seeing on social media. And I think the Gen Z generation is like, “Hey, we know everybody’s faking it. Could somebody please just be real?” So I kind of wonder if the future of marketing isn’t more—and you hear it, people don’t talk about their strengths anymore. They talk about their vulnerability. People don’t talk about their successes anymore. It’s like their failure or they’re working through their mistakes. And I kind of wonder… I’m dodging the question.

Loren Feldman:
I was gonna say!

Jay Goltz:
Yes, you are!

William Vanderbloemen:
I kind of wonder if the fake-it-until-you-make-it is not as in vogue as people think. And I mean, I’ve binge-watched the whole thing with Jared Leto and Anne Hathaway, the WeCrashed. It’s pretty amazing.

Jay Goltz:
Did you cringe? Were you cringing through much of it?

William Vanderbloemen:
Absolutely. I am a marketer/salesperson at heart. I want to present the best possible version of the truth that I can. And as my best friend, who’s an attorney, says, “William, it’s always good when it has the added benefit of being true.”

Loren Feldman:
William, did you fake it until you made it?

William Vanderbloemen:
No, not our current business. Not our current business. Did I sign up for stuff we hadn’t done before? Yeah—and figured out how to do it on the way. We said, “Let’s jump out of the plane and build the parachute on the way down.” But now that we’ve done that a lot, we’ll get a call for a kind of search we’ve never done before, and we say, “Hey, you know what? We’ve never done this before. But we’ve done things that we’ve never done before for a long, long time, and we’ll get it done for you. So I think I’m softening. Maybe I’m just not a very good marketer anymore.

Jay Goltz:
Successful? Maybe you’ve just gotten successful, and you don’t need to do it anymore? Maybe?

William Vanderbloemen:
I don’t know.

Shawn Busse:
I was thinking about: How did I use that expression? And I remember back when we were kind of recovering from the recession, and kind of for the first time, I put the word CEO on my title. And it felt so ridiculous, because we had, like, no employees, because we’d lost everything. And for me, it was aspirational. It was like, “Okay, I’m gonna treat this like a real business now and not a hobby and a lifestyle.” And so that was almost like I was talking myself into a new way of being.

And I think for owners, I think that’s their version of faking it until they make it. I believe I can be this business that I want to be. And I think that’s okay. I think that’s fine. But I think what we’re seeing is the deception piece, right? You’re seeing the act of deception of customers and shareholders. That’s where it has kind of become corrupted.

Loren Feldman:
All right, next topic. William, I believe the last time you were here, we were talking about marketing. And you brought up, or somehow the topic of direct mail came up, and you kind of poo-pooed it. And Jay kind of challenged you to go do it. And you seemed to be taking his challenge seriously. Did you actually try a direct mailing?

William Vanderbloemen:
Not yet, but we’re close.

Jay Goltz:
Okay, just to be clear, I didn’t challenge him to do it. I challenged his conclusion, “Oh, direct mail doesn’t work. People throw it out.” I challenge that, because that’s simply not a true statement. If direct mail didn’t work for anyone, they wouldn’t be doing it anymore. It clearly works for some companies.

William Vanderbloemen:
Well, it totally got my attention, Jay, and particularly, a fair amount of work that we do is succession planning. And within that succession planning, there’s a large subset that is succession planning as your CEO/head of school/senior pastor is preparing for retirement. Well, that’s the list we’re working on segmenting and figuring out what’s working with them, so we could do a direct mail toward a demographic, because I do think that demographic will look at actual physical mail more likely than a Gen Z.

Jay Goltz:
I’m confident that you’re going to have success with that. Because you’re targeting it properly. Clearly, you need to target that kind of stuff to work.

Loren Feldman:
William, you had said that you shied away from the idea of just reaching out to clients and sort of reminding them that you exist and what your mission is and what you do. Have you rethought that at all?

William Vanderbloemen:
A little bit. It’s funny, you ask that. What I shy away from, having been a senior pastor at a very large church, I hated vendors. I really did. And I hated the slick sell. And I could feel it when somebody was trying to sell me, and I just didn’t like it. Yuck! I don’t want to be that guy. I don’t want to be the guy who, when you hang up, you’re like, “I need to take a bath. He was just trying to sell the whole time.”

So I’ve been avoiding that, and we’ve led with content, as you have highlighted several times. And I had a very good mentor say to me one time, when I started our company, he said, “William, you know your No. 1 danger is that you’re going to outsell what you can deliver.” And I’ve tried very hard not to do that, because I could end up selling too many things and not being able to deliver.

But now, after the pandemic, particularly, I’m pretty convinced that our system is able to handle a lot more bandwidth, and that it is very easily scalable. So we’re getting more and more warm to the idea of being aggressive, of working parts of the funnel that are up toward the top, and even cold call or direct mail.

Loren Feldman:
All right, last topic of the day. We only have a couple of minutes left. But I wanted to run this by you. I was recently talking to a 25-year-old working in kind of an entry-level job, somebody who’s been working from home, and recently went back into the office. Not back, actually. For the first time. He was hired while the office was closed, and everybody’s been working remotely. The office recently reopened, people have gone back in. And this 25-year-old told me that literally—literally—within half an hour of being in the office and meeting his colleagues, they had all exchanged their salaries and quickly determined that there was a very wide disparity in what people doing similar things were being paid.

Jay Goltz:
Wow.

Loren Feldman:
It kind of floored me.

Jay Goltz:
Wow.

Loren Feldman:
I’ve never done that. I don’t think anyone my age has done that. I’m curious, are you seeing this phenomenon? Does this surprise you? Thoughts?

William Vanderbloemen:
Seeing it a lot.

Loren Feldman:
Really.

William Vanderbloemen:
One hundred percent. Among definitely Millennials and definitely Gen Z.

Loren Feldman:
And does that change the way you think about things?

William Vanderbloemen:
The No. 1 problem we run into with clients is, “In order to get this guy, I had to give him this deal. In order to get this woman, I had to give this deal.” And everybody’s got different deals. And it’s all a house of cards that falls as soon as people start sharing. As wooden or government-sounding as it is to have a pay grid with, “You fall into this tier or that tier or this tier,” it’s where we’re advising a lot of people. Because Glassdoor is not just a website. It’s what we’re living in.

Jay Goltz:
I don’t know that it’s happening here, but I always have paid people with the idea that, “Let’s assume they talk about it and make sure that we’ve got clean hands.” But this was actually helpful for you to tell me that, because I’m gonna remind my managers of that. I don’t know if it’s happening, but we should assume it’s happening. But we’re pretty careful with that stuff. And like I said, somebody might talk. I’m rather floored that this was a topic of conversation the first time they meet in the office.

Loren Feldman:
Half an hour.

Shawn Busse:
Wow.

Jay Goltz:
Wow.

Loren Feldman:
Shawn, have you seen anything like that?

Shawn Busse:
Well, so Oregon is special in so many ways. We have a pay equity law, so you legally cannot pay people differently if they are doing the same job and have the same level of experience.

Loren Feldman:
How is that enforced?

Shawn Busse:
I imagine through lawsuits. I’m guessing that when somebody finds out they’re paid differently than a co-worker, I’m guessing they have some means of relief. We got way ahead of it. I did, actually, what William is advocating for, years ago. So there’s transparent pay and compensation bands within our company. And then we do salary surveys.

Loren Feldman:
Transparency, meaning everybody knows what everybody makes?

Shawn Busse:
Anybody can find out what any position pays within the company, what the range of compensation is within that.

Jay Goltz:
Wow. That’s fascinating, because—

Shawn Busse:
We don’t post it. We don’t post it for the world, for everybody to see. But if you’re in a role, and you want to go into a different role, and you say, “Hey, what does this role pay?” We have a formula for that.

Jay Goltz:
How many employees do you have?

Shawn Busse:
We’re 14.

Jay Goltz:
Okay, that might work with 14 employees. I can tell you that if you have 130, there are some people who are making a lot of money because they earned it and they’re worth it. And if some of the people at the bottom saw what they were making, they probably would be flabbergasted. And like, I have no interest in sharing that information.

Shawn Busse:
I mean, I know of other companies that are much larger than us that have implemented this.

Jay Goltz:
In Oregon—all in Oregon?

Shawn Busse:
No outside of Oregon. Yeah, I mean, it takes a cultural shift. It takes a ton of financial training and education so that employees understand what’s going on. Like, we have a whole curriculum around this. I mean, well, you can’t just do it.

Jay Goltz:
I think that is a terrible invasion of privacy for the person who’s making $160,000 a year, that they should have to have their salary disclosed so that the person who’s making $43,000 a year… I just think it’s an invasion of privacy. I don’t think it’s any of their business.

Shawn Busse:
Well, your privacy is going to be invaded anyway. I mean, look at the story Loren started with.

Jay Goltz:
Okay, I’m sure that most people sitting around were not making 160 grand. That is my point. That’s a different level.

William Vanderbloemen:
There is no privacy, Jay.

Shawn Busse:
Yeah, give it up, man.

Loren Feldman:
William, do you have any advice for companies that are becoming more transparent, for how to do it in a way that works?

William Vanderbloemen:
Well, I’m only half kidding when I say, “There is no privacy.” So I just don’t think, Jay, that your people are as quiet as you think. I was actually going to Google this, but Loren asked me a question. I was gonna go to Glassdoor and look up your company, Jay, and see how many salaries are listed. Because people do put what they make on the internet, and I can go read it.

Jay Goltz:
Okay, I’m not talking about the $42,000-a-year employee. I’m talking about people who are higher up, who have major responsibilities. I don’t think that they’re out there telling people how much money they make.

Shawn Busse:
Oh, they totally are. In fact, they’re doing it more than the lower-level people.

William Vanderbloemen:
Absolutely. And putting it on Glassdoor. I totally disagree with you, Jay.

Jay Goltz:
So I want to be clear, William. I want you to think of your top person. They’re probably making six figures, correct?

William Vanderbloemen:
Yep.

Jay Goltz:
High six figures, okay. Everybody knows what that person makes?

William Vanderbloemen:
I would like to think they don’t. But I’d be surprised if they don’t.

Shawn Busse:
And here’s the problem: When you survey employees and you ask them what they think owners are making, they radically overstate that number.

Jay Goltz:
Yeah, I’ve heard that.

Shawn Busse:
So the problem is, if you don’t fill the void of information with truth, stories will pop up. And then what’s happening now is the cultural norm has no longer banned that you don’t talk about your salary, as Loren articulated at the beginning. People are talking about it, and they’re putting it online. I really feel like, as owners, you’ve got to get ahead of this stuff, because it’s just a nightmare if the storytelling starts. And then you have one person who’s making dramatically more than another person for the same job.

Jay Goltz:
There’s no no argument there—for the same job, there’s no argument there that that shouldn’t happen. I’m suggesting in a hierarchy, where there are people who have far more responsibilities, and far more talent, and are major drivers in the business, they’re gonna make a lot more money than someone who is at a lower level. And I think that there’s certainly truth to what you’re saying. For sure, they’re talking about it more, but I by no means think that 100 percent transparency is what would be the best idea or what’s appropriate.

William Vanderbloemen:
So Jay, if I told you what the salary range for a sales manager at your company was right now, would that be something you want on the podcast?

Jay Goltz:
Go ahead.

William Vanderbloemen:
$74,450. That’s what Glassdoor is telling me right now.

Jay Goltz:
I have no idea where they got that from. Is that accurate for a salesperson?

William Vanderbloemen:
Your receptionists are reported as $16.43 an hour, and your production workers are reported at $15.65 an hour. And there is no privacy.

Jay Goltz:
Okay, I don’t mind that. It’s probably fairly accurate. It is what it is. Like I said, those aren’t the levels that I have concerns about. It’s the higher levels.

Shawn Busse:
Are you concerned about the higher-level people finding out what other higher-level people make? Or are you concerned with someone making $16-an-hour hearing that so-and-so makes $150,000?

Jay Goltz:
Yeah, that. Yeah, I think that they don’t understand. They don’t understand the contribution that person makes to the company.

Loren Feldman:
Maybe they do, Jay.

Jay Goltz:
I don’t know. It’s just not my… I just have no reason to go ahead and announce it.

William Vanderbloemen:
I wouldn’t go ahead and announce it, Jay. And I’m not at all trying to minimize your very real concern, because you can’t stop human greed. And some people do bring more value to the company than others. I just think, when Loren asked this question, I was like, “What’s the question?” Of course, they’re talking.

Loren Feldman:
And I think we’ll have to leave it there. My thanks to Sean Busse, Jay Goltz, and William Vanderbloemen. As always, thanks for sharing, guys.