Shontavia Johnson (00:00):
What’s up, y’all. Welcome to The Shontavia Show, where my goal is to help you start a business based on your life’s vision. This ain’t gonna be your daddy’s business advice. I’m laser focused on entrepreneurship in the 21st century, vision and breaking the traditional mold. If you can get with that, you can get with me, be sure to visit shontavia.com for more episodes, blog posts, and other content. Thank you for listening. The show starts now.
Shontavia Johnson (00:27):
What’s up everybody? I’m Shontavia Johnson and this is another episode of the Shontavia Show where I want to inspire you to build a brand, business and life that you love and I’m excited to have with me again Harold Hughes. Thank you so much for being here.
Harold Hughes (00:42):
Thank you. Glad to be here.
New Speaker (00:43):
So Harold and I were talking in a previous episode, which I’ll drop a link in the show notes so you can check out. And as he was talking, it made me think that he’s got this awesome experience with hiring employees, which is a common question for people who are new entrepreneurs. So he was gracious enough to stick around for another episode so we could talk about hiring. And I should have thought about this before because I follow Harold on Twitter and he was recently adding a new person to his team and created a thread that got a ton of interest around hiring as a startup founder and all of the ins and outs and ups and downs of what that looks like. So I’m going to tell you a little bit about Harold and we’ll talk about hiring practices when you are at startup, a relatively new company. Well you’re not relatively new, but…
Harold Hughes (01:29):
Yeah, but still tips and tricks that tips that we should use as startups…
Shontavia Johnson (01:34):
….As Entrepreneurs, startups out here trying to make it. So Harold is the founder and CEO of Bandwagon Fanclub incorporated. Before starting Bandwagon, Harold had a depth of experience for about a decade in corporate America. Harold is highly successful as an entrepreneur. He’s been through some of the most prestigious institutes and accelerators in the country, including the IBM Blockchain Accelerator, the Founder Institute and the Capital Factory accelerator. Harold is committed to helping other people, mentor women, people of color who are founding Companies. Harold is also a husband and father. His son has his face, as I have learned watching him on Twitter for a while, and we’re going to talk about hiring.
Harold Hughes (02:21):
Let’s talk about it.
New Speaker (02:22):
Awesome. So tell folks about your company and the size of it and how many employees you currently have.
Harold Hughes (02:27):
Yeah, so Bandwagon was started in 2014. Right as I finished my MBA and I actually went full time in 2016. So January of 2016 I started full time and that was just me and we started to add more team members. At high level we help event organizers, whether that’s sports team or a festival know which fans are in the venue on the day of the event. Why is that important? Well, there’s, there’s two main reasons. Number one is that if they don’t know that you’re there, the marketing, the sponsorships, all that is generic. And so you ended up having a miss, which affects their bottom line and their ability provide products and services that are of your interests. But number two, if they don’t know you’re there, at least the ticket fraud. One of the things that we’ve seen is that you won’t be able to get into a venue sometimes because the tickets have been sold multiple times.
Harold Hughes (03:11):
And that’s because surprisingly most people, none of these ticket companies really talk to each other. And so what we’ve been able to do is build a solution that allows the ticket companies to communicate with each other, with each other in a way that protects their information while also helping the event organizer know which fans are there. So our big goal is to help create better community in these live events, creating these once in a lifetime experiences to get people out of their homes, out of their homogenous circles and into really a group that’ll allow them to meet some people that share similar interests, and I think that makes the entire community better.
Shontavia Johnson (03:43):
Awesome. So if you did not hear the previous episode about Harold’s company, about his experience with bandwagon, you have to go listen. It is inspiring. It is transformational. If you’re a person who’s working a full time job or recently fired from a job and looking for that light at the end of the tunnel, you must go listen because Harold has done some amazing things and now has how many employees?
Harold Hughes (04:07):
So now there are four of us full time and we’re actually hiring two more part time team members. We’ll actually– they’ll probably already be hired by the time you hear this we’ll be a team of six.
Shontavia Johnson (04:16):
Awesome. Awesome. So what team members do you have and who did you start with?
Harold Hughes (04:20):
Yeah, so in the beginning, I think it’s really interesting if you’re an early stage entrepreneur, one of the biggest challenges that you deal with is funding, because you need money to hire people. And so the flip side is to, well, what if you could get the people before you got the money? And so when we started, that was the first thing we did. So our earliest team members was a, was a, was a general player, essentially our COO Samotria Holmes. And then we hired a general counsel but also moreso VP of Brands. So like marketing with La-Vaughnda Taylor. And for me it was important to do two things. Number one, I needed an extra set of hands. So Sammy was doing everything I was doing, just, you know, helping double, you know, getting the output done with La-Vaughnda, I was just not really great at marketing and branding.
Harold Hughes (05:03):
And so she was able to fill in a hole, which is important I think as an entrepreneur to understand where your weaknesses are. I was able to say this is something I’m not strong at. La-Vaughnda is, we should bring La-Vaughnda in. And so those were two of our earliest team members in the business. And in the beginning there was no tech involved. So as I told you today, Bandwagon is a fan identity company. We sell B2B business to business. So we would go to a sports team or festival and we’d work with them. In the beginning in 2014 bandwagon was actually a ticket marketplace, like StubHub or Vivid Seats. You go to our website, you could search for events, you could put in your credit card information and buy a ticket or you could sell a ticket to a game for that you weren’t going to be able to make it to.
Harold Hughes (05:42):
But in the beginning there was no tech. So I built the first version, the very first version of the company I built. It was basically like a Craigslist. You were able to say, this is the game that I’m interested in tickets for, and or, this is a game that I have tickets for that I’m willing to sell. I would then message back and forth with this person, buy the ticket from them, communicate to the buyer who actually wants it, how much they’re willing to pay, and pick it up from the seller, drive it all across country or across the country, across the state or city. Deliver it. And that person would pay me in cash. That was in the beginning. So like it was really important for me to be able to do that for a couple of reasons. Number one, I had to wonder if people actually cared about the product or service.
Harold Hughes (06:20):
In the beginning, we created that ticket marketplace to help fans protect home field advantage. So it was StubHub or Vivid Seats with a little button that said sell to a fan of my own team. So these are fans who could have easily listed it on StubHub if they wanted, but they were willing to meet with a stranger, go back and forth in communication to make sure that the fan was going to be of their same team. And so we realized that if you’re willing to do all that, that there must be a market for this. So that’s step one. But step two was by doing all that stuff manually, I was able to figure out what parts of the process needed to be automated first. And so once we realized like, Oh, we need to have this to be digitally listed and all this other stuff, that’s when we had to go out and find our first technologist.
Harold Hughes (06:57):
And so we ended up bringing on a software developer and I said, Hey, listen, how long would this take and how much do you think that would cost? And so he gave us a number and I said, okay, well based on that number, I can’t afford it. Any number over $10. I couldn’t afford it, but I knew I couldn’t afford it. And so I said, well listen, here’s the deal. I want to give you a deferred compensation package and here’s how I’d like to structure it. I want to award you half of a percent of your, you know, half of your equity. Once you build us a beta and I’ll give you the other half, once you get the full product, the product to market and once you build that product, I’m going to go take that and I’m going to shop it and I’m going to go raise money.
Harold Hughes (07:37):
And once I raise money, I’m going to give you $10,000. If the, if I raised $250,000, but if I raised half a million dollars, I’ll give you $20,000 cash, which was great for him because he’s able to say, okay, if I think it’s going to take this long and I could get 10,000 and $20,000 it’s just dividing out hours by money. This is a good deal. Plus you get the stock in the company. And so that’s what I did. And so our early team is really just the four of us. And you know, as we grew, things changed and we said, okay, we need to add in a marketing person or La-Vaughnda is going to work more on sponsorships and we’re gonna bring in a financial person to help us as we do fundraising. So it was really just thinking through like the stages of the company and what we needed at the time to bring them on.
Shontavia Johnson (08:16):
So these full time employees, are they independent contractors…?
Harold Hughes (08:19):
Well, so I think that, so the challenge with startups for me is that I think that the phrase full time and part time are tough because at the time, you know, from 2014, the beginning of 2016, I was working 50 and 60 hours on the company, but I had a day job. So most people would say that, that I wasn’t full time, but the hours that my team and I were putting in were in the high number. And so ultimately we were all unpaid during that time. And it was evenings and nights and whether, whether we put the hours in. So I think that, you know, as you work through the distinction of full time and part time, I think that matters more when people are getting paid. At the end, when they’re not getting paid and it’s just sweat equity. You’re just trying to make sure that the jobs are getting done, tasks are getting accomplished and that they’re working really hard.
Shontavia Johnson (09:02):
So how’d you convince the other two people to work for free? So you mentioned Sammy and La-Vaughnda and your engineer who you gave deferred compensation. How’d you convince the other two?
Harold Hughes (09:12):
Yeah, so Sammy and La-Vaughnda, they, theirs was different. They were both in financial positions that allowed them to have some flexibility. They were passionate about the mission of it. And it’s one of those things where as a software developer, I think you see more of this now where there’s so many people learning coding. There’s such a, like such a wide market of people willing to pay you to build the same, build something. Whereas if you’re talking about a first time COO like Sammy was, or a VP of brand strategy, like, like La-Vaughnda was, those weren’t things that they could just go instead of working at Bandwagon and just go and work at this other startup. And so they were looking at it — using us essentially as a platform to launch themselves as well as, you know, really back a product and a company they believed in. And so for them it was a bit of a trade off. We say, look, you’re going to have equity in the company. When we have the opportunity to pay you, we will give you some money. But for now we think that this could be a great two way street and ultimately they probably did it moreso the fact that we were good friends than anything. I’m sure there’s some random person had the exact same idea. They may not have done all that they did. So I appreciate that they were willing to take that sacrifice.
Shontavia Johnson (10:14):
And they were people you already knew and had relationships with? They were, friends…
Harold Hughes (10:17):
Well, and that’s the thing, when you think about startups, you know, and these companies getting started most people, their first employees or first team members are former coworkers or friends and family. And so Sammy and I had went to Clemson together, worked at ScanSource together, La-Vaughnda and I went to Clemson together. And so it was really that opportunity for us.
Shontavia Johnson (10:37):
So you’ve got a team of four now. At what point do you start paying them? How does that work?
Harold Hughes (10:43):
So they were the first folks paid. I recently came on payroll, but for me, I knew that as the company scaled, so you know we talked about in the beginning in 2014 through 20– early 2016 we had deferred compensation person and then unpaid people. But once we got into, I would say late 2017, it was me saying, you all, I want your full attention. I need you to know that you’re going to get paid and that your work has been rewarded. And so that was where you go and raise money and say, okay, the salary is going to be your 50,000 or 60,000 and 80,000 whatever the numbers were to make sure you’ve got talented people who can help us build it. And so that was really important to me. It was that we got people who cared about what we were doing, but also understood that their work was going to be rewarded monetarily in the short term, but also they had stock options to be able to reap the rewards as the company, you know, sells in the future.
Harold Hughes (11:33):
Right. So you mentioned in the previous episode we did, you ultimately have raised about two and a half million dollars or so. So you had the, you have the resources to pay people now and how many people did you say you have?
Harold Hughes (11:45):
Yeah, so right now we have four full time and there’s two part time.
Shontavia Johnson (11:48):
Okay. How do you find good people? So when you’re at the point where you’re hiring people who are full time quote unquote, how do you find good people?
Harold Hughes (11:57):
The the biggest thing is trying to decipher between when you’re meeting a representative of that person, and this is something that happens on a first date or a job interview. You’re getting the best version of that person and it’s really hard to decipher this person is like this all the time. Or if they’re their interview version. And that’s not a bad thing. That’s not to say that we all aren’t, you know, putting our best foot forward in interviews. But it’s important to try and figure out like what the delta is between the interview person and the person you’d actually hire. And I think that some of the biggest hiring mistakes that we’ve made or anyone that we’ve talked to about has been, you didn’t notice how big the delta was between the person that you were interviewing and the person that actually showed up on the day for the work.
Harold Hughes (12:39):
And so for us, we’ve been able to say let’s find really talented people and eventually get them to work with us. I believe in constantly courting people. One of the folks that’s working with us now she used to work at StubHub. And I met her three years ago and she didn’t know who I was, but I was just like, Oh, that’d be really dope, you know, for this black woman who worked at StubHub, who’s got her JD and has worked at Facebook, like that would be awesome for her to work with us. But at the time I knew that we weren’t in the right position for her to be interested. So I stayed on her Twitter. I kept up with her and randomly she reached out to me after seeing a thread that I wrote about hiring and said, Hey, we should talk.
Harold Hughes (13:17):
I’d love to learn a little bit more about what you’re doing. And so I think that finding great people is, is part deciphering between, you know, the people’s representatives on social media or in interviews, but also being able to constantly court people that you seem to find is exceptional. And so I leverage my network a lot to say, okay, this person is doing really great. I wonder if they’d want to come and work with me. Early stage, um whether it’s an investor or a team member, they’re betting on the founder. They’ve got to be interested in working with you and for you because companies go out of business or companies run out of money. And so it’s just like, well, why would a person take that type of instability? And it’s because they are crazy enough to believe, you know, the founder. And that’s, that’s the story that you need to make sure you were putting yourself out there in that way that they feel excited to work with you.
Shontavia Johnson (14:02):
Cool. Cool. So you followed this person on Twitter and you kept up with her, that kind of thing. So one day when you have the money, do you just reach out to her and say, Hey, now here’s the opportunity. She reached out to you.
Harold Hughes (14:17):
I think it’s important to say, look, I know that and you kind of feel it out throughout the way. There’s another person who we’re really excited about at some point working with and she’s in a really great position at a really awesome company. And so we stay in touch and you kind of figure out like what are the things they would want and compensation, flexibility, remote work as often is obviously a big thing these days. And so being able to say, okay, like I’m going to earmark this person as my top candidate. If I could get them, I would hire them. And you’re able to see them. And because it’s not an official job interview process, you’re able to see them when they lash out on Twitter. You’re able to ask them how, ask people, how they interact with them in real, real life.
Harold Hughes (14:55):
And this is a person that you can do a lot of, gather, a lot of data points on before you even get to that point. And so I think that that’s the best way is that you go and seek out the people. I mean, I was at some type of event and I think the founder of TrueCar, I think it’s Scott Page,usaid as a CEO or as a founder, your most important job is finding the five to six most important people in your company. And in Peter, not Peter in Ben Horowitz’s new book, he talks about how important your culture is. If you mess up these fire, at least hires, it’s going to change the success rate of your business. And so that’s something that we’ve been really mindful of, of like, how do we get those people that we really, really want?
Shontavia Johnson (15:36):
That’s really smart. So do you ever do the alternative? So like the traditional interview process where you put up a job posting. So how do you manage it then when you don’t know those folks?
Harold Hughes (15:48):
Yeah, and so that’s what we had for these last two. So to give you the shape of the team it’s 2019 now or you know, whenever we started this process, it was down to myself and our CTO. So we promoted our blockchain specialist, Dr. Hampton Smith to being CTO, and I was running all sales and investor relations and so the two of us were there and we said, okay, we need more engineers. So we’re going to put out two hiring recs. In our first round we got around 42 applicants. We’re headquartered in Greenville, South Carolina. It’s an entry level software engineering position. And so we were just like, we don’t know what we’re going to get but we’re going to put it out there. And we tried to come up with like qualifications and we tried to come up with like expectations, but it’s a startup.
Harold Hughes (16:28):
And so you never know, like part of it is like take out the trash every now and then. And so it was really interesting to start to think through like what, what it was that we were looking for. And so it was incredible candidate pool and we were able to go through that. And the top candidate that we had in that round was a self-taught developer. Literally she had went to school for design actually has her own business on the side where she does jewelry design, like handwriting. She can turn handwriting into jewelry. Yeah. And so she is super cool. Like all of her gifts are probably just amazing. And so she’s able to go teach yourself to code and went through Hampton’s rigorous testing where we had people, we had a person who flat out five minutes into an interview said, I’m sorry I can’t do this because of how challenging some of the activities were and the, you know, coding challenges or this and that.
Harold Hughes (17:22):
And so it was just really interesting to see that Brittany was able to say like, Oh I’m going to, she equipped herself and she was fantastic. And so, you know, one of my favorite interview questions and it threw Hampton off when I asked it the first time. But I’ll ask people and say, would you rather if you had a choice, would you rather be King or rich? And it has nothing to do with your being a software engineer. But it helped me break up the monotony of how interview questions normally go. And it helped me understand how you thought. And so when the person says, I would rather be King, it’s like, Oh why would you rather be King? Because you could easily say, Oh, you’d rather be King because you want to set the rules, but you have some people say I’d rather be King, because I think that when you’re King, you’re royalty or whatever, or politician, your job is to serve your community and it is your job to protect them and to provide resources for them.
Harold Hughes (18:06):
And so that, you know, and that helps you get insight into how they operate. Or when someone says, I’d rather be rich. Well naturally it’s like, alright, well I’m not going to be able to afford them. And you ask them why and they say, well, I find that, you know, you could have a lot of, you know, if you’re the King you could make a lot of rules, but if you don’t have the resources to provide the access or the opportunities for your people, you couldn’t really go far. So if I’m rich, I think I could help more people. And so it leans into some of that. And so asking some of those different questions helped me kind of learn a little bit more about that person. I think that also when you think about the application process, we made sure to be extremely transparent.
Harold Hughes (18:42):
We said, Hey, we’re hiring one person in this round and we want to pay them in between this number and that number. And we also said, we’re going to take this in a two or three weeks, but we’re going to move fast because we don’t want to be holding you up from other offers opportunities. And we don’t want to have a bunch of candidates on the hook trying to figure out if they’re going to get the job. And so we were really clear about first, first application you submitted. We reviewed half and said, okay, we’ll talk to the first half on phone. Did, those for 30 minutes, next half, cut that and said, now we’re going to talk to you on a video, cut in half again and said, we’re gonna do an onsite, made an offer two days later and we’re able to get started.
Harold Hughes (19:20):
And so that was really important for me to, cause I thought it was important, respect their time. You know, we’ve all been on the other side of the application pool. And so that’s really what our journey has been like. Like when you don’t know them, you’ve got to find ways to make them a little uncomfortable in the interview process to where they can’t be so scripted. So you don’t always have that representative. You’re able to kind of go through that a little bit. And so I asked a bunch of different random questions like in the second interview second batch of interviews we just hired Joe. The interview question that Brittany expected was the King of Rich on, which I did ask, but I threw in another one. I said, Hey Joe, where do you keep your ketchup? Do you keep it in your fridge? Or do you keep it in the cabinet and why do you keep it there? And this whole thing. And so which is super interesting because no one on my team likes ketchup. So more for me I guess, but it’s just a little interesting when you think through like how do you find a way to, again, how do you get from the representative is in the, in the candidate seat to the actual employee and figuring out a way to minimize that delta I think will, you know, make your hiring process much, much, much better.
Shontavia Johnson (20:22):
So you mentioned, you know, you know, really fast timeline, two, three weeks at most and you were respectful of that. What happens? And so this is kind of getting to your Twitter thread. What happens when you extend the offer to somebody and they accept it and then they change their minds. How do you deal with all the ups and downs that go with humans?
Harold Hughes (20:43):
Yeah, the tough part about that’s the tough part about humans and being a human is that first thought is just like, man, this person just screwed me because I just told these other candidates that they didn’t get the job. And so you’re in a tough position but you understand, you know, the candidate is and should do what’s best for them. You know, I encourage everyone out here who’s listening. Number one, if you get a job offer, negotiate it or do your best to, some companies don’t, you know, respond to that, but ask for more. Cause that changes the trajectory of how much you’ll make over your lifetime. But also it really just put us in a position where we were just like, man, that really sucks. Like how do we fix this? And as we looked through, like, you know, we had one person who turned us down and took a job at Salesforce.
Harold Hughes (21:23):
Well if Bandwagon and Salesforce were looking at the same candidates like and we’re at that point I was like, we’re probably doing the right things. But on top of that, I think the next thing is, is really just demonstrating grace throughout the process. Because of the way that we did our application process, we interviewed for competency in the skill sets early on. That was like one of the first things that we decided through. And then as we got to know that person, we, we interviewed for culture fit. And so being able to think through how this person would fit in our culture. You know, if our culture is button ups in full suits and this person shows up with shaggy hair and jeans and torn t-shirt, it’s like, okay, well they probably don’t fit. At the same time. If you’re interviewing for a startup, I think the first thing you should do is look at our team page.
Harold Hughes (22:11):
And so then when you’re sitting in your interview, it’s going to be kind of weird when you come in with a full suit at our startup that’s headquartered in a warehouse. And we’re in jeans and a tee shirt. So it’s things like that where we want to try and figure out ways to, you know, connect with that person and really get to know them. But like for example, in the situation you outlined, we had a candidate, we thought that he was the best candidate. We gave them the offer, top of the band that we were willing to pay. I think it’s really important to set the number that you’re willing to pay for a role, but as it makes sure that you stay in line with your budget and allows you not to have to reach too much for a candidate especially entry level.
Harold Hughes (22:47):
And so our junior level and so, gave him the offer and they initially asked for more time. We gave five days, which I thought was a lot in the beginning and I talked to people and I said, yeah, three days is normally pretty good. So we gave five, initially I was like, I’m being generous. And the person said, well, can I have two more weeks? And at that point I was like, man, this seems like a red flag. But if they’re your top candidate, maybe you try and budge a little and we said, well we can’t give you two weeks, out of respect for the other candidates. We’ll give you two extra days. So they had total of a week. And of course we had other finalists candidates we had notified yet and we said, we let you know, we’re trying to finish the last six interviews and finally the person accepts the job.
Harold Hughes (23:26):
So once they accept the job, I can say, okay, great, excited to have you, we’re going to tell all the other candidates they didn’t get the job. Great. You do that. And then four days later that person says, Hey, I know I accepted the job and signed the paperwork and looked at apartments. I’m not going to come. And so that does two things. Number one, it makes you reevaluate the process. Like what did you miss? The thing that we missed was obviously when the person asked for two weeks that, that probably meant that they were waiting on another offer, which is what they were. But then the next, it just allowed us to go back and say, could we go back to someone that we told didn’t have the job and would they want to work with us? And that was probably like my coolest moment of like 2019 was like being able to go back and our guy’s name is Joe.
Harold Hughes (24:08):
And you know, the way the timeline went was, the candidate we had offered accepted the job on a Thursday. So I told Joe on Friday, he didn’t get the job via email and didn’t hear from him. On Monday Joe sends his email saying, Hey, sorry for the delay. I really wanted to take time in my response so that I didn’t come off as passive aggressive, which I thought was really thoughtful. He shared that and he didn’t have to, but he made sure to say, I really wish you all well. I was really excited to work with the company. He even told us during the interview that he made his first cover letter and his resume built to fit for our company. But he said, you know, unfortunately, I told him, I said, in the rejection, it’s like, Hey, if we could have found a way to hire both of you, we would have like, you were awesome.
Harold Hughes (24:50):
And in his replying email said, you know, unfortunately there’s no consolation prizes in job hunting. Like you get the job or you don’t, and I can respect that. And he said, I hope things go great for you all. You know, really wishing you in the new hire great, or I hope that things go terrible and you get to hire me before I get another job. And I was just like, that’s pretty cheeky. I liked that response. Sure enough, that next morning, Tuesday morning, the candidate that had accepted said, Hey, we’re not going to accept the job. I took another job here and I was like, well, talk to my CTO. I said, well, what do we do? And I said, we could go back to Joe and see if he would take the job. And you know, went back and he said, yeah, absolutely.
Harold Hughes (25:28):
So we go back to Joe, offer him top of the band, you know, great, great offer and call him and said, Hey Joe, what are you up to? And he says, well, I’m working on some cover letters and all this other stuff. I said, you know I understand man a lot. I want to take too much of your time. I really appreciate you spending time with us to our process. And also your note back. And he said, Oh, I’m so glad. I wasn’t sure if it was going to be, you know, the wrong kind of wording. I was like, no, it was great. I thought it was fantastic. And I was like, but I want you to know, I think you really screwed us. And he’s like, what? And I was like, yeah, cause you sent that email on Monday and Tuesday I candidate withdrew and he’s just like, you’re kidding me.
Harold Hughes (26:04):
And I’m like, Nope. So we’re in a bit of a bind. And so I told him, I said, listen, the only reason you didn’t get the job as I told you in the initial rejection letter was that this person edged you out on experience and with startup, experience and being able to move quickly is a value. And so that person was going to help us go a little faster, but from a culture fit, you were a slam dunk. And if that means that we’ve got to spend a little bit more time getting you the proper mentoring and any other resources, we think that that would be a perfect investment for us to make sure you’re on our team. So if you’d have us, we’d love to offer you this position. I’ll send you the formal paperwork and all throughout that he’s just shouting Yahoo and interrupting, which was fantastic.
Harold Hughes (26:43):
And so now he started he got all of his swag as a startup and has that, having a blast with us. Our CTO had set aside a week worth of stuff for him to do and he’s already taken care of it in the first two days. And so we were able to see not only that the person did have the skillset and probably more than we even initially evaluated, but number two, we’ve got a person who is bought in. This is a company that called him back when we said we would call him back if something changed and did it quickly and respected of his time and you know, paid him a reasonable offer. And so I think that that’s like how we’ve been able to handle this process so far in hiring.
Shontavia Johnson (27:16):
No, that’s awesome. So I was at your office earlier with you and he was there and the rest of your team. And could you, if you feel comfortable, talk a little about what his startup was or what you do for your new hires. Because I was impressed actually to see how you as the CEO, as the responsible party for all these employees bring new people on so that they are, like you mentioned, bought in and excited and you probably have, you know, a really amazing employee for however long he’s with you because of this. So how do you treat your new hires?
Harold Hughes (27:51):
Well, yeah, I think it’s really important to surprise and delight. That’s definitely super important. But you know, through the hiring process, it was really interesting because one of the candidates asked me what is our culture? How do we define our company culture? Which is the first time we were asked that and we don’t have it like up on a wall somewhere. And so my first thought was, well, I can answer this, but you should probably hear from the other people who work on the team too. But I think that there’s two things. Number one, we want to be I show grace and I think it’s important to demonstrate grace at every turn and also to lean into the sense of community. Knowing that we get farther together and building together makes us a better product. And so we, when we’re welcoming people onto the team, we want to make sure that they feel like they are part of the team.
Harold Hughes (28:37):
So it was, we’re an interesting position where Joe was starting, right? You know, end of the year. And I was trying to think of stuff to get for Hampton and Brittany who’d been here a little longer. I was like, well, I got to get Joe the same stuff. Like that would be really weird if I gave them their gifts a week ago before he started. Right. And so we made sure to have him with a nice like backpack. It’s embroidered with the company logo. He has his company t-shirt and a company coffee mug or tea if you’re like me and Brittany, me and Brittany are the tea drinkers on the team. And then because it was the holidays and the team did so well, I mean we ended up doing, you know, 287% of our revenue in 2018 for this year. And so I wanted to reward them.
Harold Hughes (29:14):
And so I got them these really nice Ember coffee mugs that keep their coffee hot. They love coffee and they drink all the time. And so it’s like, okay, you set the temperature and it’s that temperature the entire time. And then because of the travel that we’re doing, not only with me being remote in Austin and coming back and forth a little, but we’ve got customers in California or different parts of the United States or in Estonia, I was like, you guys need to travel make sure you have your stuff. So we got them these nice Away bags that a good friend of mine, Amber recommended. And so she’s a huge advocate. And so Joe’s first day is like yesterday and he gets a brand new Mac and a monitor. And then on day two I fly in and I give them their holiday and their Christmas gifts and they get a t-shirt and we’re going out to a nice local restaurant for dinner at Rick Erwin’s.
Harold Hughes (29:58):
And so for me, I think it’s really important for them to know, like unequivocally without a doubt how much I appreciate them. And as a CEO, my job is super easy in that my only job is to make sure I remove barriers and obstacles out of their way. And so if one of those obstacles is the type of monitor you’re using or your computer, like that’s easy, but then the harder part is making sure you show them how much you value them. And so even through the application process Hampton was really explicit. You know, he’s the CTO, these are two software engineers. He’s like, look, in two years I don’t want you to be junior engineers anymore and if in two years you decide you all want to go be, you know, a senior level developer somewhere else, like I want to make sure you have the skillset to do that.
Harold Hughes (30:41):
And so we want to, we want to invest in you in that way. And it’s great that he and I have that same like philosophy on evaluating of people. There’s always this thing that goes around on LinkedIn where, you know, one person, the company says, what if we invest in our employees and they leave? And then the other person says, well what if we don’t invest in them and they stay? And so it’s like, I think about that as like how do you pour into your team to where they know, man, I’ve, if I wasn’t here tomorrow, they would really care that I wasn’t here. And so, you know, when we talked with Joe about where he left from, it’s like I left this company that I was previously at because I wasn’t sure if I was ever really needed. And now he knows that like every line of code he writes is the person, he’s the person that wrote it.
Harold Hughes (31:22):
And that really helps us, I think build true evangelists. We actually had a couple of people, you know, obviously you can’t hire everyone. We had a couple of people who appreciated the process so much, two of them have asked me to review their resume and their cover letters for other jobs that they’ve applied for and one of them has gotten the job and I gave a referral to them. I was like look, I really liked the person. They didn’t fit at the time where we were at, but I think that’d be great. And they got a job. And so I think that that’s the kind of thing where it’s just like, and who knows, maybe that person comes back and they’re our CTO in five years or 10 years. You just never know. And so that’s why the grace piece is so extremely important to me.
Shontavia Johnson (31:57):
So important. Thank you so much for sticking around and doing another–
Harold Hughes (31:59):
Yeah, absolutely. Oh, for sure. For sure.
Shontavia Johnson (32:03):
—Session With me about hiring. This has been amazing.
Harold Hughes (32:06):
I think that, you know, as a black founder, I, I’ve said it you know, more recently now that I’ve been sharing these stories more, is that the transformative power of transparent storytelling is incredibly important, not only in startups overall, but specifically for underrepresented people. We often see these success stories where it’s just like, how did they get there? And the story is, Oh, if you work really hard, if you show up every day and often, and it’s, sometimes it’s a lot of luck. Sometimes it’s a person taking a flyer on you and all that. But if you don’t ever get that story, you think, man, I’ve been showing up every day. I’ve been working really hard and it hasn’t paid off.
Shontavia Johnson (32:45):
What’s happening? And so it’s really trying to figure out how do we do a better job? We being the people who have had these experiences do a better job of sharing them so that people can say, wow, that was a pretty tough time Harold you to sell your townhouse to fund your company a couple of years ago? Yeah it did. Or so and so you to max out your credit cards and you had, you know, a good friend of mine said they had a couple thousand dollars in the bank before they got hundreds of thousands of dollars in investment. Like those are the stories I think are really important. And so when you have these types of stories being shared, I think that really allows not only your team members that you’re recruiting from a hiring standpoint, but investors who are trying to figure out founders to back. And then entrepreneurs who were building great companies that really, you know, empowers the entire ecosystem. So…
Shontavia Johnson (33:29):
Thank you so much my friend. I hope you all enjoyed this as much as I did. I will drop some links in the show notes including to your Twitter post about all of this because I thought, gosh this is so incredible that you were transparent even on Twitter about the highs and lows the whole time too, I think.
Shontavia Johnson (33:49):
Yeah, so be sure to check out the show notes below. For more information about Harold, the hiring process and Bandwagon Fanclub incorporated be sure also to visit shontavia.com for more information about all of the questions you might have about building a brand business and life that you love. Thanks so much.
Shontavia Johnson (34:08):
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of The Shontavia Show. If you enjoyed this episode, please be sure to like, subscribe and leave a comment wherever you’re listening. You can find me on social media everywhere, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and wherever else @ShontaviaJEsq. You can also visit me at shontavia.com to find a transcript of this episode along with other show notes. While you’re there, please be sure to subscribe to my email newsletter.
New Speaker (34:39):
The information shared in this podcast and through my other platforms is designed to educate you about business and entrepreneurship and I love to do this work. While I am a lawyer, though, the information I provide is not legal advice and does not create or constitute an attorney client relationship.
New Speaker (34:57):
The Shontavia Show is a LVRG Incorporated original. The show is recorded on site in South Carolina and produced at Sit N Spin Studio in Greenville, South Carolina. Original music and sound design is by Matt Morgan and Daniel Gregory. Mixing and mastering is by Daniel Gregory and the video is by GVL Media.