A Decade Plus in CW: Hard Lessons Learned

All right, guys, welcome to Workforce 3.0, a worksome podcast. I'm your host, Eric Hanobeck. Join us as we dive deep into the modern workforce landscape. Whether you're a talent leader, HR, procurement, or operations professional, you are in the right place, my friends. Tune in for actionable insights, captivating stories, and advice on how to tackle challenges head on from thought leaders spanning various industries. With that, let me introduce our guest for today, Brett Klinger, Director of Kinder Workforce at Cruise. Welcome, Brett. Hey, thanks for having me. I am thrilled about today's podcast because we're twisting the regular format around. Most conference presentations, webinars, case studies, podcasts really focus on success, a program success, or someone's career success. We always speak publicly as they follow my lead, learn what I've done, it's all going wonderfully well. But today, because it's you and me, we're going to share the converse of this after a decade plus of this industry. We want to share what we've learned from doing, and sometimes doing wrong. Our goal is to share a few points of wisdom from the hardships we've survived, and/or created for ourselves. So with that, Brett, we're used to doing this over drinks and appetizers in San Francisco. Do you think we can still have the same amount of fun on this with basic coffee and a microphone? Oh, I'd say more than that. All right. So as we begin, I have known you for years, but let's give a listener a little detail on your background on the roles that you've taken. They can understand the perspective that you're coming into. Sure. So I've been in the industry about 12 years. I started out on the MSP side for the first four or five years of my career, working at companies like Gap Inc. In Uber, and then about halfway through my career, while I was still Uber, we ended up transitioning over to the buyer side, and I've been on the buyer side ever since. So I spent the last two or three years of Uber on the buyer side, and then I was fortunate enough to land the head job here at Cruz. We're a self-driving car company, our parent company is General Motors. And it's been just a phenomenal ride ever since. I use the term ride intentionally. Like our careers are often a lot like road trips that we take. You know, flat tires, bumping into other vehicles sometimes, and also the smooth sailing and the beautiful views started all kind of comes as one package in our world. So that's been a little bit about my career where I've come from and where I'm going. No, that's exactly right. Sometimes you're the passenger, being like, "Oh, I'm just holding on." Sometimes you're the driver. And sometimes snow is driving the car. And you're like, "Okay, I know. I'm going to be like, "Oh, exactly." There's no lessons learned by doing this job. So with that, let's try to hit a big one today. Our listenership is a great mixture of folks who are completely newest industry. Those who maybe have three to five years, and then kind of some of the OGs who are in the 10, 15, 20 years like we are. So you'll likely make the season folks smile because they too have been through what we have. And the goal is, I'm opening for the ones who may just be getting their journey and we can save them. Save them a couple of heartaches along the way of listening to this. Alright, so let's start lesson one. Relationships are currency. What do we mean by that? I feel like this will make the OG folks smile because this is an often hard one lesson in our world. We cannot function in our world without help. We are both internally and externally, right? Internally, we operate so cross-functionally. I just find that a list for a presentation I'm doing for my team here at Crews. And I listed out all the teams that we partner with. And I mean, it was upwards of over 20 teams for a variety of things. Like you just cannot do and function in our world alone. So if you think about that, right, just in terms of the peer partners that you work with, that's one element of it. If you think about how you need to partner with your business stakeholders or drive initiatives, right? You need to be building relationships with your senior leaders outside of just your direct leadership chain. It is so critical to build those relationships outside of your leadership chain. And as high up as you can possibly build within your organization, it will serve you so well. When I talk about relationships externally, I mean, think about how many suppliers we engage with. Think about how many different partners we use, different technologies that we use. You have to have those relationships in order to really be effective in your day-to-day. One interesting story for me, the relationship when I was a gap ink, we were using RONSTOT as one of our suppliers. And I got to know, you know, the account manager shout out to Vinnie Levine on the podcast really, really well over my three years while I was a gap. And I had no idea, you know, that Uber was even looking to do an MSP. And RONSTOT had won the MSP and Vinnie had heard about it. And he knew I was kind of looking for a change. And so he reached out and said, hey, would you, would you be interested in the Uber job? I said, yeah, I love that. So I went in and reunited with getting the job. And so without that external relationship, I never would have taken that next pivot in my career, which ended up being a really critical step and being able to get me to where I'm at today. So I cannot stress this enough, just relationships, relationships, relationships. Even if you think it's somebody you'll never run into again. Take the time, spend 10 minutes with them, make them feel like the most important person in the world. I promise you in our world what comes around goes around. I can't agree more if I think about, I mean, one of LinkedIn's mantras were religious matters. And it was so incredibly true. And the idea of we're all human, right? Let's go back to like the human psychology. If you are not being dictated by your boss, you're kind of doing things as favors to most people. Or you feel like you have to or you feel like you can. You feel like you may need to. Maybe you don't want to or what not. But in general, if you know about that person's day, there has been wife, partner, kids. If you had a personal touch with them, they kind of talk about like building relationships in two ways. Like deeply authentic, you know, those you can actually be real, but not everyone goes there. Okay. There's then there's professionally respectful, right? If you build those two, because everyone wants to be like the deeply personal, right? In general, you build this criteria that people are wanting to willing to help you. Because you are so care and interested in them and wanting to willingness to help them. What goes around comes around for sure. We help our friends first, almost always. We rarely let them down, right? And as I am with you, what I think about the different stakeholders you have. Usually it's like, just between 20 and 30 teams in the immediate of how you've helped work with Bill to the next Y&Z. And if you feel like you're alone, that's a bad sign. If you feel like you're the only one caring about this, that means you haven't built those relationships around that's touching. And influence matters. Who do you know matters? So I think this is such a huge one. You don't have to charge it alone. And go in a cross, like you said, up and out. I remember when I was at eBay, it was on TAT working with procurement. We did a really good cross functional. And when I moved to LinkedIn, I wanted to bring that. And I had just come from Brightfield and seen where programs were very siloed. I was consulting with Fortune 500 companies and saw, oh my gosh, I've seen people do this wrong. I'm going to go to this new company. I'm very excited about. Let me make sure for Curement, Finance, P2P, AP, InfoSec, Physical Security, Compliance, Internal Audit, all this and all this. And then of course, my boss on the HR side will be good. And what I made a mistake on that was that I built these amazing cross functional. Amazing cross functional, incredible things. And yet, I kind of thought I had a different VP come halfway through. I forgot to rebuild that relationship with the VP. I forgot to rebuild internally what we're doing. They became points of contest because I was spending so much. Everyone else was saying what we're doing was amazing. And she only saw this. And so it's like, one of those things like, shit, you got to constantly do this. Constantly, you're up and out. And it takes time. But if you don't, you won't get anything done. Yeah, I find it really interesting in our world. You are brought in to be a subject matter expert in contingent workforce. You are expected to manage the program relatively flawlessly, right? It's one of those thankless jobs. If the business doesn't hear about a problem, you know you're doing a good job. That's right. But I find that we constantly have to evangelize our own value over and over and over again. Because it's so easy in our world. For one, number one, people don't understand what it is that we do. They just they just do not get it. And for those in the industry are probably laughing right now. I'm like, they can't explain it to your husband or your wife what it is that we do. I struggle with that trying to explain it to my wife what we do. It's really, really easy to find yourself in a position of. Just living in your inbox, right? I'm just so busy. I'm in my inbox. I'm just getting tasked on and I'm crushing it, right? You think you're crushing it. But in reality, the rest of the organization is moving at a pace that is leaving you behind. And they don't they're not they're not what you're doing is not front of mind for your business partners. Not even your cross functional partners let alone necessarily even your senior management. So it's on you to go out and make sure that everyone knows what you're doing. How important it is why it matters, right? The risk that can come from not doing it properly. and ensuring that everyone as part of building those relationships really understands the value of what it is that you're doing every day in the value that a contingent workforce program can bring. You know, if you think about it on in a different light, right, you know, let's say your company has a downtime and, you know, we have to make some hard decisions. We know that some people go. I think we've all been around long enough to know certainly the season folks that, you know, when it comes down to it, you know, I'm not saying it's a giant popularity contest, but in a lot of ways it's, who do I know is bringing value, who do I like to work with, you know, who's going to continue to serve this organization the best going forward. And if you haven't spent the time to build those relationships and instill that in folks minds, not again, not just your leadership, because when those decisions are made, they're not just necessarily made in the silo, they're made very much cross functionally across the leadership platform. And if those folks don't know who you are and what you're doing every day, you know, you could find yourself on the wrong end of a situation like that. So, I mean, that's just one, you know, maybe morbid way to think about it. Obviously, we hope nobody, you know, is impacted in ways like that, but it's just, it highlights an example of why it's so critical, you know, to build these relationships. No, I could not agree more, most people think again, like risks are difficult processes, but to your point, if many people know your name and know the value, it's much easier to say, say versus another person where people aren't really sure, just see a job title, not in a salary. Yeah, like humans, I called you worse at that. So that kind of leads us into lesson two, right, lesson two, you need echoes to your voice. So I think we slightly touched on this, but let's go a little bit deeper into what does that mean, having echoes of your voice. Yeah, I mean, this really does tie in a bit to, to the first one, right, and the echoes to your voice comment was, was actually a phrase I can't claim it was by our old leader when I was at Uber, not Java. And we were talking about influence and the ability to influence and move your agenda forward. And he said, you know, you can't go into battle alone, right, nobody ever wins, you know, fighting solo. He's like, you're going to need folks to be with you, right. And so what that means is, if I have an initiative, say, we realize that there's a large compliance issue with our 10 and 99 population, right. Who's going to care about that? Right. Who's going to care about whether or not that even matters. Your boss is going to be like, okay, sure, that's, that's great. I'll just trust you to handle it, right. But what you're going to need to do is because, let's be honest, if you have to go and reclassify a bunch of 10 and 99s because the misclassified, that could have a really serious impact on your business. Those workers may walk your business may be impacted and not have the support that it needs. And so before you go into that conversation with your stakeholders, you've been to make darn sure you've got backup with you. And you're going to want to talk to your legal partners to make sure that they weigh in on the risks, talk to your finance partners so you can have a cost conversation, right. Those are the kinds of echoes you're going to want in any type of a scenario where you're trying to influence your business, right, at the highest level. I found this on my own. Like, if I'm in a room, speaking on my own on a topic, and I think it's really important, but nobody else is jumping on the bandwagon. It falls on deaf ears, right. And you end up just moving past it. And so, as in any time you want to influence, it's going to be really important to sort of get your, get your base set, you know, get your, get your echoes identified and then go and make sure that they're on board and growing in the same direction. And now we'll have a huge impact when you go and talk to the business. I will flip that over and say, if I'm going to my executives and asking them, I'm putting a proposal in front of them and saying, I need your approval to do so. Oftentimes, in my experience, what I will get asked is, what else are we doing in the market, right. What are other competitors doing, right. Those can also be echoes to your voice. And who else internally has signed off on this, who else has, has looked at this. They want to be comfortable than they're not making a decision in a silo and that it's been thoroughly thought through and there's been a lot of evaluation and there's a lot of benchmarking around it so that they can feel comfortable saying, you know what, rubber stamp go ahead and do that thing and I feel comfortable supporting you going forward. So, there's a lot of different ways that this really, really matters when it comes to influencing. Yeah, no, I like full on double click would you just said, but I think what working with any VP, because you're right, we're in a nuanced business. We're generally who we're asking doesn't truly know what's going on, right. So you have a very short period of time to say, here's the problem, here's what I want to do, here's why it matters, here's what's going to take enough much cost, right. I have never gone and worked with another VP or SVP where the first thing they've said is, who was part of your team, who either was part of the red team, who do you work with to create this and if it was less than three people, they would send me back. You're like, wait, this needs to be well-rounded, this can't just be a what not, because to your point, some of it's fear, oh, if I sign off on this, would I fully understand, who could I bring now with me. But a lot of it just wants like, have you double checked your bias, your perspective, have you thought about how it impacts this, do you know what's going on over here. It's kind of like yet checking your, checking your angles to make sure what you are recommending is coming through fully thought through and then to your second point. They're carrying the banner, even the fact that you need echoes to your voice came from someone else is the exact example we want. Like you're carrying the message that he gave and now kind of claiming as your own and moving it, we want that in any time you're trying to influence or build or scale. It means everyone's got to be on brand with what the message is if they can say it articulate what you guys want to accomplish without you in the room, that's the win. Because you can't be everywhere, right? You can't be everywhere. So how do you create an echo chamber, but it's this multiplier where people are speaking on your behalf, helping swarm. The growth becomes an exponential of who understands and then becomes like, of course, why wouldn't we do that? Let's go on your way, but. But I love that sentiment of echoes to your voice because yeah, one person shouted up from a well, nothing is going to get done. Yeah, and I will say that it is sort of time back to our first discussion point about relationships and currency. It is a thousand times easier to influence if you have a relationship already. Right, I think there's an old saying is you never want to meet a neighbor for the first time when your house is on fire. And it's true. Like you, if you have those connections, they know who you are. They've seen your face. If you can meet in person, that's even better. I mean, that's one of the reasons as much as it may drive, I think a lot of us crazy sometimes on the buyer side, the suppliers want to meet so often in person. It's human nature. Once you have that connection, it's much harder to walk away from that when they reach out and need help. And the same goes internally like if that's a lesson I can take from my supplier partners, I'm taking it. I'm going internally, but I want to talk to you on video. I want to let's meet for a coffee like it will serve you for years because they will remember that moment. And so I just again, I can't stress enough that building those relationships will also help you influence tremendously as well as bringing sort of an army with you when the time comes. Because that they're right. All right. Lesson three. And this one's going to be a threefold. So let's start with the high level. Then your mindset, men, your MSP mindset. Let's talk about what that means. Yeah, I want to be clear. This is not a knock on the MSPs for all the MSPs out there listening. But it's more of looking back in my journey and starting out on the MSP side for the first four or a half years in my career, five years in my career there. And then what that transition looked like, you know, when I moved over to the internal side. There is a at least in my experience with the MSPs that I worked in at the time. There is there is a pattern of thinking right that exists with an MSPs you are sort of trains to operate in a certain way to think in a certain way. Based on frameworks that have been built, you know, over several several years. Right. And that's that's great. It's it's a very it's a great way. I mean, I'm so thankful for that time to have cut my teeth. It was a great way to learn what is, you know, sort of you know, I'm a recording here like best practice in a lot of ways in the industry and it gave me a framework to sort of bump up against whenever I ran into a given prop, right. However, that works, I think, well, when you're on the outside looking in right when you're not an employee of the company, when you're not responsible for the success of the mission, you're just responsible for delivering a service, right. Those things function relatively well. And for me, when I flipped over, when I made my switch, I was a Uber, we were externally managed at Ronstad, then we moved internally managed. The change was so stark. The learning curve was so much steeper in terms of how you had to operate. You were no longer I think a lot of times MSPs can get pigeons will not all of them as sort of like the police, right. You're the enforcement. You're the police. It's your job to highlight when somebody's doing something wrong. So when I, when I'm, when we turn along, I mean, that mindset carried over, right? And I was, you know, you know, finding all of these things that were happening. But the approach when your internal has to change significantly. You are, your mindset has to shift of one from I'm here to provide a service and escalate issues to, I'm not part of the mission, right? My job is to figure out how do we get to, to that endpoint, to that mission, to that goal. And it doesn't really matter at that point what best practice is. I have to solve for whatever the problem is in the day, right? And so your mindset really has to completely shift. Also now that you're an employee, it's not exactly like you can walk over to somebody if you see them doing the wrong thing that's left hand. Like it might have been doing, you know, as the MSB. And so I think your approach to your stakeholder management changes. I think it becomes a little bit softer, a little bit more collaborative. Because again, time back to the first point and the second point, you need those relationships. They're going to benefit you in the long run. And so, you know, for me, that was, it was probably one of the biggest changes that I noticed was it's no longer really black and white anymore. That thing becomes great and in any given moment in any given day, you may have to break best practice in order to solve the problem, right? Absolutely. And I think that's a big shift from permanent MSB mindset. No, I love this one because there's some, I think I'm very bullish about. We are a talent's enablement with compliance, not a compliance program with some hiring, right? You have to enable the business. Otherwise you're the most over-engineered police failed program out there. It's not rogue spend. It's not like people are trying to get the business done. Why do we call it rogue spend? And I'm with you. This isn't a bad thing. MSPs are built for centralization, operation, and repeated business, right? So this is not a bad, good, evil thing. But their goal is how much spend, temporary worker spend can I get within the program? Because that's how they're monetized. And so their mantra ends up being go after what's not inside, pull it all into temporary worker stuff. And when you're an MSP, it's a very clear directive, right? It's really easy to train and really easy to, that becomes the very obvious answer in time to speak to them. And then to your point, once you're inside, you realize wrecked a check where time to fail is the smallest part of your day to day. It's all the other operations, ideas, iteration and solutions that you're helping move the business. You protect the business or move the business, right? And so you have to be seen as a partner trying to find a way through it, not just the no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, person, because typically speaking, your directors, your senior actors, almost, anyway, if you work at a great company, you're working with great people who are going to find ways to do things around you, right? If you're the no, no, person, then they're just going to leave you out and that your reputation then becomes, I can only do this with this one person. So, but they're not on my OKRs, they're not putting product out to the street, doesn't affect your overall equity. So I'm going to go around because my goals are sector overall companies or whatnot. And so how do you not, you're not the police, you're the enablement team to write, to write solutions. So I think this is such a great one of, of how, how you mend the mindset of internals, a whole different thing, especially if you actually want to provide impact. If you just want to do a reduced time to sale, you just want to standardize supplier contracts. OK, you get about five months of a job then, but if you really want to do big work for your company, that's the mindset that you have. So I think that's, I think that's really good. What about with the second one? What about that? What about 3B? Staff augmentation is not always the answer. Yeah, I think that was a, that was a big shift for me when I moved from, from MSP to internal right, our primary revenue source is with staff aug. You try to collect as much spend and, and make sure that it's classified properly so you can drive as much revenue as possible. When you flip to the other side, that mindset changes, right? Our job, at the end of the day, is to facilitate the business, not to dictate to the business. And I'm less concerned, I mean, probably not concerned at all anymore about classifying things as, as staff, I don't want to make sure things are properly classified, right? If the business comes to me and says, Hey, we've been operating with a very large staff augmentation model up until now, but we're not getting resources for the management team that needs to oversee these folks. And we have to switch to an outsource model. I'm all for that now. Yep. If the M of the MSP days, I don't know like, oh my god, this guy is falling because, you know, potentially several hundred people are going to move out from staff aug to an outsource program. I'm going to lose all that revenue, right? And so it's just, it's, it's incentives are misaligned, I think a little bit. And I think that leads to some of the challenges you face sitting on, the MSP side versus the internal client side, where internally, again, I'm part of the mission. My job is to facilitate that mission, that business goal, and help them achieve it. I don't care whether it's staff aug, whether it's outsource, whether it's an IC, it matters none to me, right? I want to get them the best solution possible. And obviously, for the best price possible. But that's, it's, it's a big shift in mindset from where you sit, sometimes on that MSP side. And your focus is, I got to drive revenue, I got to expand, I got to capture rogue spend. I hate the term rogue spend. I know you've said this before, on lots of podcasts, I did a, a speaking event at DMSA at Happen Bay, a while back. And we talked about rogue spend as part of our group. And it was like, it has such a negative connotation, right? And I feel like that's a term that it was generated from. And this is going to personal feeling. I don't know if this is the case. I'm just going to say it on the podcast. I feel like that term came from, I think, our, the MSP industry and some of the, the ways that they look at the spend as being outside of their management. And when they're internal, you realize that there's really no such thing as rogue spend, right? And I'm not worrying about that necessarily. It's all about, am I getting the right solution for my business for them to achieve their goals? We obviously want it to be classified properly as best we can, but sometimes that's not always doable for a thousand factors that we all run into every day. But I feel like rogue spend has such a, like a negative connotation, like the business is doing something wrong. And they're not, they're just trying to do whatever they can to achieve their goals. And it's our job to help them along. That's exactly right. And especially now, when you think about 50% of contracting workforce, calling themselves fractional or gig or task or freelance or whatnot, it's not just the kind of the three broad buckets. I think I remember here in Peter Regan talk about it, staff augur, it's outsourced and then it sheds gray. And there's, you know, in this industry, we define or redefine all these classifications. But most of them, we made up guys. It's like employee independent contractor than everything else is an operational or contractual design that we're looking for. But when we think about if it's not staff aug, how do you do with independence versus the groups versus the whatnot and to your point is when someone, there's so much new technology out there, enabling business. And when you start shutting down the new tech or the new ideas of how to do will work, moves around. All right, that's just the staff aug guy, right? Like we talk about your relationships, your ability, influence. We're in a hit reputation in a second, but you just become that in the box thinker person. Oh, this is the only, only folks who do staff aug and they're going to tell me no one on this. And yet, I'm actually excited about this new technology. Or I learned about this new creative group that I really want to work with. And here's how they work with, so can we get go, can we get this going? Right. But if it doesn't fall within the path of create a wreck, get it approved or whatnot, we shut it down versus saying, Hey, actually, that is great. I've heard of six other companies that do this too. Have you thought about them? It's a yes, and it's almost like it's improv. You don't say no to someone, sorry, you say, aha, and this. Have you considered that? And then you're enabling because now the shades of gray is where business gets done, right? And there's so many cool innovative companies, whether they're people based company or technology company out there to enable this remote talent that folks didn't have the ability to work with kind of pre-COVID. That to say no, my program's going to be this only one way. All right, you're going to be left out, and that's ok, but you should, you should be very aware that's your reputation and what you're missing out on when you crawl for the sea of the table. You've tied your own rope kind of on what you're doing. I think you touched on something really, really important. There was two words that you said, and this is the same two words that my old head of HR, Arden Hoffman said, she's now the head of HR for GM, one of the arden, if you're really saying. It's the mindset shift to say yes and, right? We are not here to say no, you can't, right? Because again, we're here to enable. So anytime the business brings a problem to you, the, this is a broad, this is a broad-based approach, every response is always like, sure, and here's what that means, or sure, and here's how you can think about it this way, or here. It's always the yes and because then the business sees you as, you become a momentum builder, right? You become a partner they want to work with right because you're gonna bring positive energy You're gonna bring the solutions oriented mindset. You're not gonna shoot them down Right, you're at least gonna explore all the options at the end of the day You may end up back where you originally thought you were gonna be in the first place Which you might go higher attempt to a stabbing agency, right? Well, you've at least walked the walk with them You've gone through the journey with them as a partner and they're gonna continue there. They'll remember that forever 100% I think so often managers that I've run across in my career who have experienced other programs in their past Other MSP experiences in their past. Don't get that level of collaboration always and When they find it they come back to you time and time and time again as summer do they want to work with? Oh someone I can ideate. I'm excited to meet with this person versus us. It's just on their meeting Yes, now let's be really clear to the compliance people who are listening Clearly, if it is against the law, there's some conversations, but to what Brett was saying Sure and here are the considerations you need to be aware of But you know if you put this worker here, there could be permanent establishment stuff could happen if we move over to Costa Rica in this way However, we did in this way we'd be at a good spot for three months. How does that sound? So there's way to bring in the compliance the law Um, that can help shift the way they think without it being a no Right, so it's not a pretend the law doesn't exist. It's not a pretend internal audit. It's not going to come It's a and how you approach it As like guiding them and how the solution is coming up versus here are the rules and you're doing it wrong So it's your so it's your approach because we do realize well, I want compliance to be with a little C It's a big C, right? So for those of the compliance teams saying oh my gosh, you guys are no, but it's how you approach Ah, that's a great idea. All right. Here are things we you know, we can consider and and moving forward with this Oh, did you were you aware of this? There's a couple things here Um, but here's how I think we can do this Package it all up. There's very easy way. Usually this is a Conversation not an email It becomes where do you actually spend your time? So think about like what we're asking people to do Spend time with people listen to people meet with people Not an email not a slack tone matters and we're when we're busy tone is crazy. Let's be honest. We've all shot off the thing thinking it meant nothing Or yet for the question and the other person received it like a punch in the face No, when you're working with folks who are trying to do things differently Conversations they can see the light in your eyes. They can see the warmth So so much better than an email or go to my wiki page To actually get this done, right? So I think that becomes really really important And then you got like you're seeing as someone who could help with the analysis and make sure they're in a good spot And they're gonna drag you along then They're like, I don't know what about any of the rules in China get over here I didn't do in this meeting and you want to be dragged you want to be dragged along for the idea So I think this is such a great one about around innovation and and breaking out side of the staff log box Because there's so much more out there All right with that. Let's move to the three C Challenge the status quo I think this goes hand in hand with what we just talked about, right? All of what we just talked about if you are coming at if you're approaching your business through a lens Of my job is to facilitate business not to dictate to business This becomes just a natural next step, right Challenge the status quo, right? We have So much collateral out there that tells us what's best in class This is the best in class process so many rubrics so many maturity models so many Ways to measure and cut and slice and dice our programs That's all great and that's that that works right has its place but When you're in it day-to-day You can't think inside the box Right you have to think of ways to do things differently in order to enable your businesses Or if you just see something that doesn't really make sense in general That is maybe historically been a best practice Challenge it and do it differently, right um, you know, even if the MSPs don't necessarily live it like the example that I use um is when I started in the business a gaping We were a very traditional vendor neutral Um, no manager no manager contact program our specialist for reviewing resumes Um, and then they were acting with the managers And I will tell you coming out of that program. I I hated everything about that Like our specialists don't have the skills to be reviewing resumes um, I don't know why the suppliers just can't talk directly to the managers. They're the ones with the expertise They're the ones who are going to give them quite frankly this the the white love service that we're already paying for through our markups Um, and it would just make our job tremendously easier to not have 10 partners bidding on one wreck and having the managers sift through a stack of 10-15 resumes, right? And so I learned from that experience when I went to to Uber and Was fortunate enough to sort of be in charge of running All of the staff augments at least for the United States region and I decided you know what this this just doesn't I don't want to do this anymore. Like this doesn't work for me. I hate it. Let's do this completely differently And so I took a step back and I evaluated it said What are the businesses incentives and what are the suppliers incentives and how do I actually align those in a model That is going to work most efficiently for everybody and where we landed at the time was What does suppliers want suppliers want exclusivity if they can get it They want manager contact if they can get it They want to get people in the door and what's the business one business wants people in the worst fastest possible And I want the best possible talent I can get right Fortunately at Uber we were a you know a fixed markup model So I didn't have to worry about a lot of you know pricing negotiation It was like here your guard rails for price go at it But once we allowed the suppliers to talk directly to the managers And the MSP took a bit of a backseat role. They were still overseeing and were included on all the messaging But their job wasn't to drive it Right it was let the suppliers connect with the managers let the suppliers service the managers per That's what we paid them for right What we saw was the suppliers committed Their better recruiters right our wrecks didn't go into their offshore resume mills Right they went right to the the team that they you know prioritize the most so what we saw was managers now received three resumes tops Oftentimes selecting a candidate right out on the first batch I would say the 75% of the time they were selecting candidates out of the first batch If not the rest of the time was coming out the second batch But it was two iterations right not multiple with gobs of resumes And what we also enabled the suppliers to do was you schedule your interviews directly with the manager on their calendar Right for those who have Google calendar you can share it in a private format So suppliers can see what you're busy and not busy and it took all of that responsibility off of the MSP So not only was I giving my business what they wanted Right better people right out of the gate faster time to fill. I was giving my suppliers what they wanted exclusivity on wrecks because I was only giving it to one supplier at a time They were also Getting direct manager contact and being able to build those relationships and I was winning because my MSP had less cycles That they had to manage they had less button pushing that they had to do and we were able to leverage get much more out of them at the time Well, this was internally managed that um Then we were ever able to do with them managing that process and such a Traditionally structured way as like what invented initial program would have brought Um, doesn't work perfectly every time. No, we're doing the recruits right now. I'm pretty sure my MSP at times wants to you know Throttomy for having to manage things in this way um, you know But when when it's done right it's it's a really beautiful thing and it can work well and that's just kind of like one example where I was like This is how we've always done it and I don't want to do it that way anymore and let's see what happens and it's it's I think Ultimately been really really positive thing No, I love to hear this and have a couple more examples to to give But going back to where to set us quote best practice comes right those are interesting status quo should be not the opposite of best practice But it's not it's not the same right and when I was at bright field like it I loved Jason's body is phenomenal and we used to talk about this because I push a lot from my experience at eBay Why this is not a best practice why and you'd say it'd be interesting We would talk about well best in class is C plus Why are we telling our customers to do best in class when It's bad or it's it's fine, but it's not great, right The second thing we will talk about was who is at best in class four Right and again, this is not good bad evil stuff. It's just this understanding motivation, right? If it's a best in class for an MSP Usually it's about standardization and efficiency for their team And usually driving business to them. Yeah, that's not that's not better evil. It's real right or What can I do methodically at scale? Right if it's best in class for procurement. It's not how do you crunch numbers down How do I get the best price which may not be the most human element and so Just challenging and asking people questions. Oh, this is best in class. When when was this assignment? Who-who help us put together? Is this your team? Is this one of it? Start to peel apart. What they're actually suggesting to you. And why it may be, because they're saying things. Your commonsense tells you. That's not gonna work here. I don't really. That feels a little weird. Like, commonsense kind of will- will start to prickle when you start to say like, "That feels old. That feels like it's not our culture." Most of us don't want to fight. A lot of folks in the CW world are- Because now they're so new. Ah. Am I gonna question someone who has 30s experience or this senior executive and I just started? So, okay. Let me just take that because it's gonna save me time. And yet, I think what I want you guys to hear a lot of clear is Brett and I are saying, "Question it. Why?" Was it put in place 20 years ago? So, same way when I was at LinkedIn, the goal was butts and seats. Right? How do we motivate the suppliers? And best in class or what was standard, right? Was supplier tearing. Was it absolutely not? So, it's high in tearing. It becomes super lazy. Tier one gets everything. Tier two never does. There's no way they works up. This doesn't motivate my suppliers. And MSP, I want you to have depth of knowledge. I want you to know whether Mark Lillig at Cyprus likes mint chocolate chip ice cream as the allergic to grasshoppers and what's going on in his kids' games. I want you to know what they're actually good at. If you put them in a bucket and you push a button and you want not, you don't have that. So, we took it away and we said, "No, no, no. We're a cool list and we're capitalist." Similar to what you were saying is, "I don't want fair for everyone." That's not how we're writing this program. It's best. And I want every supplier to know when they get erect from LinkedIn, they have at least a 25% chance of feeling that wreck. It's going to go to no more than four suppliers, maybe two. But no more. So, when you get something, you have a real good chance of actually making money. And there is supplier contact. And there are all this stuff where you can say, "You guys can make money through relationship, through a smaller group, and for quicker feedback. Let's go." Right? We're going to change wreck strategy. We're not having a tiering. We're going to break them mold. And on the MSP was great at that time. It was just like, "Let's go." One that I think they realized it was not worth fighting with me. Like, "Okay, let's go." Which I was really appreciative. They said, "Let's do this a little bit different." And it was great because they became fairly notorious at that time. They're like, "This is one of the well-best run programs." Because suppliers were thrilled. They showed supplier forms. Everyone's making money. It's really clear. But you kind of have to say, "I don't want to do it," however one says. Or just because the functionality is there, just because you've always done it or worked over here, "I want to do it in my way." Because it really, really managed, especially, for it to change behavior. I think the interesting I'm watching vendor on premise and master vendor come back into popularity. And I love it because if you have one supplier who's killing it, why not? Why not? Give as much as possible. They have the deepest relations or whatnot. So it's, I mean, we're very much in a, what's old is new again. Yeah. Kind of a relationship that's going on in the industry. But I mean, I go back to, "I love your thought." I'm like, "Change what doesn't make sense. Challenge what you don't think is best practice. And don't be afraid to use that voice to say, "I want to do things differently for this reason." And then measure it. Nope, that was wrong. That didn't work at all. Or like, "Hey, this did work. Let's go." Yeah. A good example you brought up in there was supplier tier and its supplier scorecarding. MSPs have a very set way of doing these for all their suppliers. And I understand the logic behind it. It makes sense. But it doesn't, it's a one size fits all, right? And I think a lot of times, it's clients. We don't necessarily feel that we are the one size that fits all. And so I remember, remember an example. This was probably a year or two ago. I went into supplier scorecarding review with our MSP. And they put up the scorers and they put up the ranks. And they said, "These suppliers aren't performing well. And we've put them on notice and they have a year to turn it around, or we're going to remove them from the program." And I think, and I was like, "Is that standard for like, what everybody does?" And they were like, "Yeah." And I said, "I can't handle this." I was like, with the element of, in our program, with the access that we provide, the exclusivity that you're given, there's no reason that you should be this underperforming. And so, in the room, right there, in about 15 minutes, we put all the suppliers up on the board. And I just started asking, "Who's performing? Who's not performing?" And we just started crossing people off the list. And I said, "Okay, these guys are up." I said, "I don't, I shouldn't have to give you, you know, a year to get it together." I mean, suppliers fight tooth and nail to get a contract with you. Hold them to the highest expectations, right? And if they're not performing, then you can remove them. But believe me, if they want to be there, they will, right? It's like, I forget what the old saying is, but like, that's how you know you'll mean something to someone, is if they'll be there, they'll make you a priority. And it shows up in the data when they're not, right? And they're focusing on other things or other deals. So just, you know, part ways is friends and focus on those that are focusing on you. But don't be afraid to break those norms and be like, "I don't need to give you six months to get it together. You're a professional organization. If we pay a lot of money to, if you haven't gotten it together by now, well, then you've had your chance, right? And I think oftentimes we feel bad or, you know, we want to give people second chances. And it's like, there's how many thousands of staffing firms in the United States, 25,000. There's plenty of other folks out there who will give you the service that you require the first time, right? And so that's maybe a more of a hard-line approach on something like that, but it was a way where we were just like, "I don't want to do the normal thing." You know, let's close up. I think there's an understanding, too, is because it's an understanding that not all businesses are a match made in heaven. Yeah. So do you sign a contract or go to logo? Does it mean what you share about the exclusivity? Oh, my God. It sounds pretty damn good. But sometimes it is a mismatch of skillset, time zone, or whatnot. And so I'm with you on the-- you can actually part as professionals. Now, business development folks are always going to be like, "Ah, but I'm paid off of logos and contracts the next way." No. The recruiters are like, "No, but I'm paid off of actually making fills." But it's okay to part professionally. It's okay to say this doesn't actually write match. Like, let's save each other the time and the effort. Because my guess is they weren't focusing on your team. They're doing really well for somebody else's. Right? And they're going to go where the money is. And that's okay. But it's not a terrible thing just to say, "Hey, this isn't the right match." Right? Like, we had a year-long relationship, and this is great. But see you later. So I think that's a great call out of. You don't have to say, "I'm going to give them a year." "Hey, three months." Or they just have a conversation, "What's going on?" But let's be thoughtful. It's not always about operations. It's not always about standard operations across all customers or whatnot. This is your company, your program, your thought. How do you want to do this? Right? A push on what someone is saying takes longer or shorter or whatnot to really get it done. I think that's sage advice. And in that way, of partying as professionals and doing things, we move on to lesson four. Lesson four. Collaborate. Don't crush your partners, which is a nice PC way of saying, "Don't be an asshole. The people you're working with." So, Brett, you and I have had a couple examples of this in our lifetime. We've hopefully tried to make a men's or whatnot, but talk to me a little bit about this. Yeah, I think it does tie into a lot of what we talked about before. So, what we talked about is the relationships or currency. And that absolutely extends to your partners, your supplier partners. I will fully own early in my career. I was extremely hard on our suppliers. Very heavy handed, because I thought that's what we had to do. I thought that's what it meant to be a good, you know, P.M. on an MSP. You want to be the enforcer. That mindset shifted significantly when I moved to an internally managed program. And the mindset shift of their success is 100% tied to your success and your ability to run an efficient, effective program. Really shifted how I viewed them. And when I was able to build some really, really strong partnerships with our suppliers, they were able to help me enable a lot of what we talked about before, which is my job as to facilitate and I dictate what those relationships and those collaborations allowed me to put suppliers in front of the business that I knew were going to succeed, who I knew were going to invest in that opportunity from the top down, and who would have bent over backwards to make that business successful. Which in turn, and then obviously ended up working out for me in that particular moment. But what that benefited was the business that looked at me and my credibility went through the roof. Right, it's all at the end of the day intertwined. And so I would say, you know, for anybody out there who's dealing with tough suppliers and the ones that just drive you crazy because they're working around, you feel like they're working around your program or you feel like they're not, they're trying to avoid you or they're dropping resumes. Like just take a beat. Right, think about it, have a conversation with them. Even if that happens, it's not the end of the day. the world, right? It's really not. I think when you see suppliers doing that and you see managers engaging in that behavior, look inward. Figure out why is my manager wanting to work with them and not with me? What is broken? What is not going on, right? And I think it's not, and it'll change how you view things. It's not that I'm angry at the supplier. They're doing what suppliers do, right? They're doing exactly what you would expect them to do. I think you should look at how do I make it better for my partners, how do I make it better for my managers so that everybody wins, right? Sort of a rising tide raises all ships type of mentality. It's kind of how I I shifted and it's kind of how I think of things today. Yeah, no. I have a similar experience where after I was at Brightfield and I got to work across kind of all the industry and see the different like work on the landscape reports and meet all the different vendors or whatnot. I came out so much cynical and it probably because my eyes were opened a lot of how the business was getting done. What's going on here? When I moved over to LinkedIn, I was was bullish of I'm going to run the best program that I've ever seen and no one's going to get the best of me. I see what these suppliers do on RFPs and reports and the fudging and the whatnot and that's not going to happen on my watch. I want to make sure that they know who they're messing with. And it was a chip on the shoulder. I don't know why. I just can see it now looking back. There was trying to prove something, right? This is not going to happen. I'm going to protect this company that I love and do this in a right way and whatnot and what I'll say this through the VMS implementation that we had. I definitely want to apologize to San Jim because he worked with me greatly and I pushed on him so hard to prove truth. What was being represented was factual. What was going on? And I put him through the ringer. He ended up on the side. He's doing well now, right? But if I could look back and go back and say, you know what? It didn't need to be that hard. They actually were trying to work with us and tried to do that. They're not generally trying to put one past on you. It feels like that for whatever reason. But they're not now that I've moved from LinkedIn and now my second startup and be on the platform, the technology side working with customers, trying to share. I can absolutely tell you and all of our partners. I've yet to have a conversation with anyone that's like, all right, how are we going to fuck over our customer today? It's always how do I how do I create the solution? How can we show up best? In general, and I used to say this at my, when I was at LinkedIn, of create a program where you know 95% of the suppliers and people are doing the right thing. It's only 5% of the suppliers who are not. But don't build a program for those 5% build for the 95% kind of taking me back to that as well as like assume you're working with people who are our trust worthy. You know, trust the verify, right? Make sure you're on top of it. But how do you hold yourself? Really matters. You don't have to be a tick. You don't have to bully. You don't have to all these things because again, coming from the supplier side now is the customers we do the most with and for are the one not the ones that were perfect, but the ones who are willing to evolve and work with us. And there's grace and accountability. The ones who hammer us, we're going to get things done. But the move mountain mentality is not with them. The move mountain mentality of the ones who recognize we're all humans trying to do the best that we can. And that's the group that we're like, we're going to work over the weekend. We're going to fly high to make them succeed because that relationship is there. Not the bully. The bully's never going to get that. The bully's going to get obedience. Not the evolution in the success. So I'm fully on this one where I think in some areas, I've done really well in other areas. I kind of like clenched my teeth and say, oh, I wish I could go back a little bit and just change that. So for those who are new or in trying to figure out how do you establish yourself with respect? How do you make sure people take advantage of you? It comes in a way of respect, accountability, and how you hold yourself. Not the meanest, the folks who are so tedious, the ones who can't wait to point out mistakes, and the ones who distrust from the beginning. I mean, Brett, what do you think? Yeah, I think it's, we have to walk the fine line as as program owners, right? You're ultimately responsible for everything, right? And so there's moments where you have to have that that iron fist and there's moments where where you don't. I think my advice to everybody out there is before you crush someone, right? Before you fire off that sticky email and I'm guilty to fist myself before you get on the phone and yell in a supplier for doing what you think they might have done wrong. Take a breath, go into it with grace, go into it with curiosity, go into it with compassion. At the end of the day, that's going to win you over so much more. And, you know, the end result may end up be the same. You may not work with that person again, you may end up determining that contract, but I think how you leave those relationships and how you make people feel at the end of the day is your legacy. And again, kind of coming full circle, like our world is small, right? These relationships that you build will last a long time, right? I first met you two or three years into my career and here we are 10 years later to podcast, right? And so just don't forget that, right? Everybody that you come and contact on this world will probably still be here in 10 years from now. It's just it's a small place. It's a very specialized place and this is where we live. This is our home, right? And so be humble and be nice as much as you can. Yep. So it leaves it to the last point, less than five. Integrity should be your brand. Integrity is one of the biggest things that you can do internally for yourself, for your brand. It is how I live my life. It is how I live in my program. It is a value that I instill in my direct reports and in my MSP. Everyone knows I don't care if there's a mistake. I don't care if someone has screwed up, right? I don't care if something completely broke, right? No matter what, you will always, always, always take the time to do the right thing. I don't care if it is painful. I don't care if we get in trouble. We will always do the right thing. And when you live that life, when you walk in those shoes, you would be shocked at how how safe an environment that creates for your team because no one's afraid to fail at that point, right? And everyone is approaching problems with the same mindset, right? There is no concerns about we got to cook corners because we got to get it done tomorrow or the business needs this fast. So let's just not do two or three steps. It's, no, guys, like we got to do things the right way so that we never have to wonder or worry that we're putting ourselves at risk or our business partners at risk. I will say, you know, when you operate internally with integrity, it is so transparent to your business partners. People can feel it, right? They can see it. But I will tell you, when you, when you, when you see someone run across someone who doesn't operate with integrity, it is just as transparent. It is, and that, that impression lasts, it can last your whole career potentially. There's, I think there's a saying for every, someone does something negative, right? It takes like five positive acts after that in order for the people to forget or downplay, like, oh, the negative was just an aberration. That's how strongly we associate negative things, right, to, to other people and other, other teams, you know, as humans. So, you know, it's really, really important to make sure that you're showing up, doing the right things, living in the right ways, and building that trust internally. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I think about, we'll get it goes back to the relationship matters, how people, how people feel about working with you and how to fix your brand. If you are known for high integrity, and high integrity doesn't mean always doing things, you're perfect. It means the willingness to show up and do what's right or what you've committed to, and people can believe in you, right? Like, I love what you just said about the opposite is so true. It's so transparent when someone operates in a different way, because it feels like, it's the one that doesn't belong. You can just kind of feel, I mean, LinkedIn had a phenomenal eBay as well, utmost, work some. You can feel the collaboration of spirit with people who are operated by the same social construct. And then just something that is a little weirder when someone isn't. It's just one of these things just don't belong, which can it be. And when you think about how you, like, how you impact influence of the people, you're making others operate in that mindset in the well. And the reputation that your teams have, like you said, there's going to be mistakes made, going to be where people, there's no way platforms fell, there's going to be mistakes made. But the ownership, the accountability and the lack of blame, you did this, you saw it. No, here's how we're going to solve this, right? It is, it is absolutely incredible. And people will walk over fire to work with people like that. [BLANK_AUDIO] versus the opposite. >> I couldn't agree more, I couldn't agree more. I think there's a couple of other things related to integrity. I think that I've noticed along the way. One of them just being, when you live this, right? When you show up every day with integrity, I think it's surprising to me how often it catches people by surprise to a degree, right? So like an example that we had at the company was, we had a new voicing snappy that happened last summer. And I think six something like, you know, several million dollars didn't get invoiced. We were in breach of contract in some cases. It was a problem. The first thing that I instructed the team to do was, we need to let internal audit them right away, that we had a break. We obviously fixed the problem as quickly as we could. Everything was smooth over all was well, like as we, you know, we do every day we solve these problems. But when we reached out to our internal audit team and said, hey, we just want to let you know that like we had a situation. We had a process breakdown. We since fixed it. Here's the documentation of what went wrong. They were blown away, right? Internal audit doesn't find that people self-report a lot on these issues, but it built a rock solid relationship with a team internally that became one of our biggest advocates and biggest allies for all of the processes that we built. We ended up bringing them in and doing a top down review of every process that we had, right? And the reputation builder that that created, I couldn't have paid somebody enough to do that, right? And I think another example of kind of picking back off of that or leapfrogging off of that is everyone at the office. I don't care what company you work at as awesome as you may be. There's just people out there that you're just not going to get along with or who don't like you, right? And we all know, what's that? - The Seinfeld, Newman, right? - Newman, exactly. And we all know how office politics work, right? And people talk, right, back and forth. People are going to talk about you. You're probably going to talk about people. That's just how the game goes. But what I will tell you is if you've built a reputation of integrity, it will carry you in the rooms that you're not in, because when somebody comes in and they want to say something contrary about you or something you may have done, the folks that are in that room are going to know who you are and know what you're all about. And it will defend you when maybe nobody else will. And it's really, really something to think about as you know, and it becomes more impactful, I would say, the higher you get, right? The closer to the sun you fly, the more likely you are to get burned. And so the more senior you get in your career, I think the more meaningful this gets and the more weight that it carries. And so my advice to everybody is just as much as you possibly can, live with integrity and lead with integrity in all that you do. - I think that's so spot on. Brad, we could do this for hours. Let's do this, we've got to take a pause. This is been incredible. And I'm hoping that listeners have really enjoyed and probably have found themselves in similar situations. To wrap up today, if you could give a call to action, right, we've called out several different behaviors and things that we've learned. What's your call to action to a listener today? What do you ask them to do differently or think differently now? - Can I have more than one? - Absolutely. - I think number one, and we'll just kind of go back through the things that we spoke about. Take some time this week, this month, this quarter and reach out and build two new relationships. Just start small. Two new relationships that are either at or above your level in different departments, even if you guys don't even work to get in necessarily. Start to build your relationships. And it's like anything else. If you start small, it'll snowball over time. So if you build two this month and two next month, well, by the time you get to the end of the year, you've got 24 new relationships that you didn't have before. So step number one, call action number one, start building those relationships. I would say the second one for me is challenge the status quo. I can't evangelize this enough. I think so often what's out there gets accepted as best practice, but it truly is up to us as the buyers, as the program owners, to challenge the historical norms. And elevate the industry to the next level. The only way that happens is that we're the ones pushing for it. And we're the ones challenging what's been done and why can't it be done in a different way. Otherwise, we'll all just stay the same. - I love it. Yes, we are the change. We are gonna make this industry better. I'm so glad that you said that. Any closing thoughts? - This has been awesome. I can't thank you enough for the opportunity, Erica. This has been amazing. I know, I hope this is helpful and maybe refreshing to everybody out there, I know. So I like we kicked off. We talk a lot about our successes and a lot about what has gone well, but we don't talk necessarily a lot about our failures or how to really affect change or really what it's like when you're trying to make things work or how you make things work, right? I think a lot of what we talked about today impacts a lot of that. So closing thoughts for me, go out there, have fun, make your own, leave with integrity, build your relationships, and just challenge everything and really just take this CW space that we've got, that we all own and let's just take it to the next level and make it even more awesome than it already is. - Awesome, Brett, thank you so much for your turn in him. This has been cathartic. I feel like it's a bit of phenomenal therapy session. Love to have you back. Another five less hard lessons learned another time, but really appreciate this. Thank you to the listeners for continuing to support us and everyone have a fantastic rest of their day.