hiring quickly and keeping the soul w/ tommy norman

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Hello, hello. Thanks for listening to Guidance Counselor 2.0. Listen, I want to give you a quick rundown of what this podcast is and what you're about to get into as you listen to these episodes. We had Guidance Counselors in middle school. We had Guidance Counselors in high school, but we didn't really have Guidance Counselors in college and now as professionals, we don't really have anybody to turn to to ask a quick question to learn something about the job search or to navigate your career. And so that is what I want this podcast to be for you. I want it to be a tool for you to navigate the job search and your career.

So that being said, I hope you enjoy this episode. And if you need to reach me, Taylor at vaco.com is how to get in touch with me old fashioned email social media at tdesint. D E S S E Y N. And finally, please rate and review this in the app store because I want this to be discoverable for others so they can navigate their careers. Hope you enjoy the episode. Tommy, let's go ahead and dive in, man. Who are you? What do you do? Hi, well, I'm Tommy Norman. I am the chief agility officer at Aquanaevo. Aquanaevo is here in Nashville. We are a custom software development shop.

We do agile teams and also individual contributors. We have a specialty in Latin America. So a lot of my teams are in Honduras and all around in that little area down there. I've been doing this for a long time. I went to school to be a pilot and found out it was a really bad pilot. Ed wound up in the software industry and have done pretty much every job. I ran cable and good desktop support. I became a developer, became a team lead an architect, project manager, BA, I've been a dev manager, a QA manager. Then I got into Agile pretty early on and became a coach in that.

And I've been a consultant, I've been a product team. And now I've been on an executive team at Aqlin for the past five years. I love it, I love it. So Tommy and I were chatting off air, and again, none of this is scripted. I literally hang out with guests like 15 minutes before we go live, and half that time is Tommy. Kind of tests me just trying to set up and get the show notes right without it deleting. So Tommy and I were chit-chatting. I was like, hey man, like kind of like, what's going on with you? You know, what's kind of your vibe right now?

What do you want to talk about? And the common theme was definitely around hiring, But Tommy brought up kind of an interesting scenario that he's kind of had to deal with the last year. So Tommy, can you dive into that and kind of what's made you open up your eyes and we can go into the first topic which is around hiring pipeline? Sure. Aqlin has been growing like being investors. In fact, over COVID, we actually had some of our best years. We were very well prepared. We were already remote. We're really 100% remote teams. We also have teams that are very supportive of each other.

So when some of is out, There was always additional support coming in. The team kind of operates as a team and rather just, oh, the dev saying, I did my dev stuff. I don't care what else happens. And so we were able to handle that very well. And then also, since everybody was remote workers and doing nearshore and things like that became a lot more popular. So we actually really grew and we have been going through lots of growing pains. And I've been at several companies. I was at LeanKit, a Nashville kind of darling that went from four guys in a garage to exiting and selling the plan view.

And I know I think plan view got sold. Oh, really? Yeah, I think I believe so. And so it is, it is, you know, made its whole life cycle there. And also as a consultant seeing various companies go through this life cycle, these changes. And each time you kind of reach a growth stage, your company changes in lots of different ways. And I've gotten to observe this and I'm starting to kind of really work on some content that I want to share through our blog and speak and stuff like that on. There are patterns you see that are common. Like I'm like, yeah, I saw that there.

I saw that there. And these changes are hard. They're hard as a person as employee. They're hard as a leader. And knowing what those patterns are, recognizing what's going to happen in one of those switchbacks when you kind of become a different company and preparing yourself for it, preparing your team for it, I think is very important as a leader and even when I'm an agile coach, when I'm coaching teams on how to be good teams, they need to know your environment's about to change possibly and we need to be prepared for that. And so that's been somebody that's been very top of mind. I've had to kind of balance a lot of things.

My main job was delivery. I helped to organize our delivery teams and our process around that and I was over that for a long time and then suddenly we needed help in HR. And so I became the HR Director for a year, which was very new to me. And I had to take all this agile and lean process improvement and team building and things like that. I knew for software development and put it on an HR team. And as we said, HR is a lot of different things. We like to say people ops because we don't like to say the R in the HR. But at PeopleOps, there is all of the things, like benefits and things like that.

But as a company who where people are our product, our teams and our individual contributors, the hiring pipeline was a huge part of that department. And so I worked a lot with that as well. So let's break that down, hiring pipeline. People are like, what the heck's a hiring pipeline, Tommy? How would you describe a hiring pipeline? It is exactly that. And it's even more critical right now because it is a seller's market. The workforce is more demand, and so people are getting offers left and right. The salaries are crazy. You have heard some of the things that people are getting and you kind of have to start thinking, how do I compete with that?

How do I track talent? How do I retain that talent? It's just like customer churn. Losing and employing and having a higher new ploy is much more costly than doing whatever you need to do to keep that employee. And so when the world became flat, you know, not a flat earther, I meant when all remote work was remote work. And if I could pay somebody in South America to do the same job as the person who's right down the street because it doesn't matter because they're not coming into the office. And there's an economical advantage, it changed the game. Right. Right. So I think your pipeline for hiring somebody, as soon as a role opens up, whether it's a new role, that never existed before, somebody exits, getting somebody in place there onboarding them, getting from basically opening to that person's in place connected with everybody and providing value.

Yeah. Yeah, how do I do that as fast as possible, but with this good quality to where it's a good experience for that person I'm onboarding? That's what I'm doing. We could probably dive into the nuts and bolts this for 30 minutes, but obviously we do have some good topics I want to cover. But so let me ask you this. Obviously, you've scaled at least been a part of two big organization scaling, right, Lean Kid and Aclan. What's been the biggest issues with hiring pipeline that most people don't do or don't execute on? As far as that, one thing that's big in the change, when you go from one of these growth stages to another, sometimes who you need is different.

The people who were really good contributors as a startup, when you're a scrappy startup, you can wear a lot of hat. You have to kind of sometimes do things quick and easy, because you're trying to prove your idea, trying to get things out there. Then when you kind of prove your idea, and you've got customers, and you've got money coming in, and you now do a switchback, which could either be proving a market, which is finding new market segments, or proving the product, you need something different. And the same people you had before, maybe the right people, and they may not be. And it's a thing, when I was at Linkit, when Linkit went to slim down to get bought by Paynaview, they didn't need agile coaches anymore.

because they already had, you know, one, their partners did it. It wasn't an offering plan do you wanted to do. And so I got laid off. Getting laid off sucks. But when I walked in there and they told me what was going on, I'm like, I get it. I understand that. You know, it makes business sense. And you always want to preach people, but this is a business at the end. And also keeping people in the wrong place or not being able to find the right place for them just to keep them because I think you're a really great guy is not helping them. But it's still hard.

So I think that has something to do with a pipeline, but it also has to do with the existing people you have and the balance between them. Well, and I'm curious too, right? Because I think, and I think this could be a good segue into with the soul of the company. So we talked to Authair about how do you scale a company with the soul of it? Keep the soul of the company. Obviously you bring in new people, bring in old, you know, you keep the old people. What are your thoughts? Like what is somebody advice for some business leaders right now where there's, I mean, most businesses are scaling now, there's a lot of layoffs happening, but there's been a lot of scaling.

What's your kind of tips and tricks to maintain the soul of the company? One, know what it is. Sometimes it's not a thing you could point to. You know, we'll talk about mission and core values and strategic anchors. Yeah, most leadership have been through that. And I would admit that, you know, I've had to be through that several, several times. And I'm like, that's great, but what does that mean today? So if we say, everybody will say integrity, integrity, like nobody says, oh, we do as much as we can. And the screw is a little guy. Nobody says that, we're always integrity. But what does that mean?

And like a specific Galaklin, it means doing the right thing, even though it hurts. And there's several times we did things that I could make a bunch of money. Or I could do the thing that I think is right for my clients or my employees that's gonna cost me some money. I don't have to do it. I'm not legally bound to do it. Nobody would say, oh, you didn't do that and you're bad. But we're like, that's what I wanna do. That's gonna make me feel better and it's gonna make them feel better and it's gonna instill this culture. And there's plenty, my thing is after you outline those core values say, and how do I show that?

Give me examples. When this happens, I do this. And then when new people come in, nobody comes into a company, well, I think maybe some people come in and go, I'm gonna take it apart and sell it, do whatever. Most people don't. Most people come in with good attentions. And it's not that they on purpose do anything, it's just they come in and especially when you do one of these switchbacks where leadership changes. You have proved the idea, proved the market, proved the product, and then you have proved the business. And that's the biggest one. That's when you get out of entrepreneurship and you're kind of really a big boy company.

And that's when you lose a lot of leadership. Because some people are just serial entrepreneurs. They love starting things. And once it gets into the grind, they're like, I don't want to do this. And so they bail. Then you bring people who are good at business. And suddenly, all these things that may have been less defined or a little loosey-goosy before get defined because it's about scaling your business part. And you can do little adjustments like that, and you get a little off center, and you get a little off center, and you get a little off center, and then you wind up over here, and you go, whoa, wait a minute.

This doesn't feel like it did before. So making sure those new people that you're hiring and bringing in, bringing that expertise, but implement it in a way that's still to those core values. So making sure when you're hiring based on your core values, and not just saying, do you have integrity? You know, no, tell me an example. tell me this, here's the thing. And so we've had a bunch of new people come in and of course they're gonna bring in their expertise and they said, okay, in the past I have done this and it's been successful. And we might say, you know what, I think that's great.

But think about this. That hammer worked over here on an AAL, but maybe this is a screw or it's something different. And there's a subtlety to it that's really hard to do. So I think hiring those new people to still be those core values, those people being open to listening and deferring to people there. Even though those people that were there may not have the same experience, is giving them some deference, really getting buy-in. Don't come in and be, this is my way or the highway because I've been successful at all these different places. Well, you're successful until you're not. And it is a thing that it's hard to do.

I've been on both sides of it. As a natural coach, I get brought in to instigate change. And I used to be a new sheriff of town, bullet, bullet, bullet, bang, bang, bang. We're going to do my way. And I found that I started getting less successful with that. And so I started coming in and saying, listen, you got this far. You got so far that you had the money to hire me. Yeah, that's no small feat. that I'm expensive, but just, you know, the idea that you started, you brought people in. Right. Yeah. So some things working, let's talk about those things that are working.

Let's walk through your process and then let's talk about what's not working. If you have a magic wand, what would you change? If you could kill one stupid process, what would you kill? And let's do that. And you know, how do you judge at the end of the day, you did a good job and what makes you feel good? Yeah. And that coming in with that kind of way of getting buy-in on your changes and experimenting and being billing willing to experiment with what they already have a little bit too. There's some things like don't do that. That's financially irresponsible, don't do that anymore. Or hey, you could do things these two ways.

And I have a way I've done a million times and you have a way you've done. I don't wanna automatically think my way is best. Let's talk about it, let's do some experiments. Let's set up some metrics around it and a time box to it. And then at the end, if that's if one way is working better, then why should we change it? Yeah, I love that. I love that. I want to get to a few people who tuned in. Justin, it's great to see you. Chris, Stephanie, Edward, Erica. It's great to see you all this morning. James comes in with a question, a former guest on the show.

How do you handle someone that interviews great but comes in the shows that they aren't a great fit? Maybe they don't follow your core values. Do you give them a chance or part ways quickly? So I have dealt with this. So I'm curious to your thoughts, Tommy. So this is a hard balance because one, I would probably look at my interview process first. How did this person get in here? Or, you know, and it is hard to interview for culture fit, which everybody hates that word. How do you interview coach fit? Do you like- Yeah, I think I posted something last week, Alicia, and around table I did.

He was like, I hate the word culture. And it's, you know, you like doing business with people you like. And I don't, but I don't want to say I have to like you. To make it, it makes it more fun. Sure. And it makes it easier. Sure. We had a very long cycle for hiring people because we tried to bring everybody in for different places and we had several different kind of touch points to see, is this someone that you think matches up to our values and is going to work this way? But you still miss. So one thing is, again, don't go for culture fit because we all know that that falls into a trap of just, hey, we like movie days.

Do you like movies? Oh, great. You're going to fit in great values. Again, you and I don't have to like the same things, but our value is being the same. I am very team oriented. I'm not, a lot of times what happens will hire somebody and they wanna loan Wolfit. That does not work with us. We are team based. So how do you deal with that? You went on ones, check-ins, I mean, what's kind of, I mean, there's no silver bullet by anything. So I'm curious how you handle it. A couple of layers. One is our teams are very much empowered to address this themselves.

They have working agreements, they have the way that things are done. And so I would expect the team to try to self correct first. And they are very much empowered there. We give them coaching on how to do conflict, good conflict, because it is conflict. Right. You know, how do you tell someone, Hey, that's not really how we do things. And if that doesn't work, you know, they have a scrum master. They have what we call an agile delivery manager who is very skilled at leading teams. they might handle it. Each discipline itself, like developers, QA and things like that, we have a guilt master and they may kind of do some coaching as well.

And then there is the hard thing if that coaching doesn't work. Yeah. You know, there's the last line of the PIP, the performance improvement plan. And I've been amazed because you know, you usually kind of think PIP is kind of your last stand and can you really recover? And I've had so many people get a pip and it's how you bring it. It's not like, whoa, you better be in line. Here's your rules of your pip. It's like, listen, I want you, I want to see you succeed. Yeah, we want you here. And I just need to see this. And there's been so many people that the way the pip was brought to them and explained.

But it is kind of explaining, like listen we've been doing this as much as we could kind of nudging you and this is now setting up these guardrails and saying if you don't stay with these rails and we've had so many people that exit it you know it's it's running it really well it's making sure that the person feels supported like it's not like this you know kind of foregone conclusion that you're leaving right and it has happened and that is the thing is that there's there's been plenty of people we loved like you're a great person I love hanging out with you and and you're a great individual contributor, but you're hurting the team.

Yeah. And there are times when we do have to let those people go and it's hard. Because sometimes like we said, so James, you're saying like I interviewed and hired somebody, what if I went through one of these switches and somebody who's been with me for four or five years is now not the right fit anymore? And I either need to move them, and that could be sideways or it could be down. I've experienced that. And or maybe it's out. Maybe, you know, like I said, when I was at Lincoln, they didn't need agile coaches anymore. And I got it. You know, I understand. You know, you took a list of people who did a role, you didn't need anymore.

You sort it by salary and you say, that one. Yeah, exactly. So, and I want to go back, I do want to go back. I feel like we haven't, I'm doing a 180. I want to go back to hiring pipeline real quick. Sure. Because as we're talking, like, man, I just, I have a conviction that we didn't like uncover that as much as I feel like we should. So let's go back to that real quick. When it comes to hiring pipeline, what is your biggest advice for hiring managers right now? Touch. Just, you know, I've been on the other side of that and just not knowing what's going on.

When you have no new information to tell me, let me know you have no information to tell me. Right now, turnaround time is so quick. And if I've got multiple offers coming in and there's a place, I'm like, ooh, I like this place, and I really wanna go there, but I've got these other offers sitting here. There's money on the table, and I don't know what's going on here. And because they are unclear or non-communitous. Expectation setting. I'm just like, all right, well, I'm gonna go with the one I know. And so I would go to my team and say, communicate, communicate, communicate. And if you think you've overcommunicated, communicate it one more time.

Yeah, it's that, you know, get away from it being transactional. As an actual, I have a wreck and they need to fill it. And I go find a person I fill it. No, you have a group of people that you are trying to place, even if you are like a recruiting firm where you're placing people other places or you're placing people internally, you're growing your network and you're finding people like, these are great people and I would want to work with these people or I would want to see these, you know, these are great people who deserve to work at a great place and let me find them in there.

And if you've treated that way, then you're going to want to communicate that person because you're on their side. working for me. It's not just I got to feel a wreck and I've got to, you know, because I make my bone or show whatever it is. Sure, sure. It is finding that person. And so I would say that a lot of times where I've gotten the most complaint to we've lost people is just lack of communication. And you just, I just talked to that person the other day. Yeah, but in the two days that you didn't talk to him, you got three offers. And so crazy.

I've actually talked with my recruiting team about this. You know, I was like, you know, I think I'm sure you've seen me post this like Recruiters need to worry about the 90% of people that we don't place and how do we do that and I've had this conversation My team consistently because my team's fully remote right across the country hiring engineers It's like, you know what we Engineers just want to hear from us. They just want to hear from us They don't they don't even care if it's bad just like hey Hey, I'm checking in with you. Hey, I'm checking in with you And and I think that goes the same way obviously we're talking about that right people just want to know that like yeah Hey, what's going on like that's all people want.

It's it's not overly difficult difficult. I want to ask you this too. How many like did you all have to overhaul your hiring process? Like what were y'all doing? And then what did y'all change up? I'm curious and then and then we'll jump jump into our last topic. Well, I'm a continuous premium guy. So we're always over holding our process. It is And we also had to look at so we added a few years ago, another part, a staff, our part to our teams as well. And you know, the Teams are pretty set. We have the ability to keep those teams together even when they're on their bench, and we try to keep them together.

So there's not a lot of turnover on those, and there wasn't have to be a lot of hiring in there. When we want to expand it, add any team there is. But generally, it's a onesie-toozy there. On the sahog side, you're constantly getting recs and constantly filling there. So when we added that, the team we had in place and the processes we had in place was built to place somebody every now and then. And then when now I have a salesperson bringing in, hey, Cisco wants 10 DevOps people tomorrow. And also on the Aclin side, it was high touch, which is not bad, but it was a quick.

Yeah, we were very deliberate. And because we were getting somebody that's gonna be a permanent employee and there was a lot more at stake of hiring the wrong one as the person asked the question was, I don't want to have to let that person go. I don't have to do as much of that with sapphogg. I do I still want to do it for culture. We still want even though you're not going to be embedded in an Aclin team, we still want you to be the type of person that we would work with because we hire from our own staff log a lot. So when we had to make those changes we had to make it lean.

We had to also we had two different things. There's a lot of the same steps but then there's more steps hiring an Aclin person there necessarily hiring someone from our teams person versus a step on. But one thing was is that there was a lot of back and forth. Somebody would talk to you here and send you a form and then somebody else would talk to you here and send you a form. And I'm like one person. Yeah. And sit down and have a conversation with them and get all that information at once. Yeah. And so we started saying, you know, let that first touch be as soon as possible.

talk to that person. Have a conversation it looks like we're having now. Go through your checklist of things. Can you work in Central Science? Whatever the things I need to, that are easy to get the logistic stuff. And then have a conversation, because we do try to figure out, all right, is this person kind of really jive with us and things like that? So streamlining that became very, very important. And it's hard because I still also have to have a tech interview and that needs to be somebody else because we get lots of different tech, even when I have people who are pretty good at doing technical interviews, maybe Roku comes in.

I don't know Roku. So having that set up to where we can easily do a good tech screening and feel confident in submitting those people. So how many rounds would you say y'all were at, and then what did y'all boil it down to for interviewing rounds? Well, rounds is a liberal term because a round could be- a conversation like how many LinkedIn ping and stuff like you know touch touch points. I don't know. There could be sometimes seven touch points or you know at the beginning because again it was segmented this person is sourcing this person did. You know vetting at some point then there was a vetting here and then there was a person did onboarding streamlining that into like now it's just one person separate onboarding.

But at least that one person will own a candidate all the way through and trying to get that down to what would ultimately great is three touch points. The first initial call, get all that done, a text screening. And then let me hire you. Is this a good client candidate for you? The other thing we had to do was we came up with when we standardized this initial call and the text screen and things like that, we recorded them. We would take their the CV, because I work with people outside the email every time I say resume, and have that formatted and easy to find because you know, some everybody's resume is a little bit different.

We would format that up, have these recordings, things like that. And we basically would give a potential employer a package, is that here, this is the information you can go through that because sometimes like, well, I want to interview them and then this person wants to be around like, listen, we're going to lose that guy. Yeah. Now you're you are making it harder on me because you're wanting to have all these touch points. And when we did that so many clients, because it was so professionally packaged up and it kind of gave you all the information, here's somebody just talking to the guy or woman or whoever, and getting a feel for them.

Here's someone who's doing deep dive into technical, here's all their background, you know, and you know, if you needed to have a background check, we'd have to background check. We'd have all that information packaged together that we could kind of give to you and say, look at that and let's make a decision to move forward so that it's quality but still has to be fast. So in the lean world, we call that flow, which is a good pace without sacrificing quality. I like that. So the last topic here is we wrap up, which is fascinating that you brought this up about competing cultures, right? So you say you've seen this time and time again, How do you deal with competing cultures as you wrap up here?

Well, as we said, culture is part of your core values. You know, it'll reflect that. It's not foosball tables and, you know, and Nerf gun fights. Yeah, those are fun things. Uh, but I've seen lots of that in a place that didn't want to work. So it's really values. Where do you line up in values? There's plenty of companies that I've been at that change. And I said, you know what? You're a great company. You're going to make a lot of money and people are going to do a lot of great things. And I won't work there. It's just not my thing. You know, I don't like you I used to love big companies because I thought there's security in it I liked having somebody who took care of this took care of that and I think I'm done with that Yeah, I'm over 50 now and I like little I like small to mid-size companies right because of The effective change I can have the cultures a little bit hard, you know, cuz you know, you know These larger companies that is really hard to have culture and it kind of gets department like you know There's all these companies we know in town.

We won't mention in your names, but they're like what's it like to work? It's like it depends on what team you're on what department what team you go to exactly So how do you do that as a company? And I think especially when you are bringing in a lot of new people especially in leadership areas it is okay You know when I hire this person How do I look at their values and again? Don't just say well do you have integrity? Yeah? I have integrity. Oh great you're gonna fit our, that's, no. Show me, how does that implement? And let me give you illustrations of how we've done this.

And it's especially at Aclan, because of how we protect our teams. And really, we very much believe that those teams are really well formed, or really were supported and set up for success, they're gonna be great. That means saying no to a lot of stuff. That means saying, I'm not gonna do things that are very common practices in other companies. And again, you might come in and you haven't been here with that history and you come in and say, I've done XYZ a thousand times that other companies been successful. And so you kind of want to lay that ground with. Same thing as an advocate.

I know certain things work and so I want to bring them in. But there's plenty of times I bring it in it. You know what? That didn't work here. And being careful in that, I would be the same where clients will say, we're unique and I'm like, hi, your problems are like everybody else's. Well, maybe they are, but your solution can be different based on the value of your company. So really getting underneath those values, not just saying, are you aligned with that value, but how do you demonstrate it? Let me show you how we've demonstrated it. And I've got a couple in my back pocket that I'll bring out and say, here's a thing where we acted a certain way that may not be a way you've seen before or done before.

And it really illustrates how we implement those values. And if you do that, I think you'll have the right people. And the other thing is making sure those people are kind of come in and they are going to have a good balance of bringing in well proven processes and structure that you may not have had, but also tempering that with changes hard. A lot of change is you stir up the pot, you shake the snow, change is hard. A lot of changes even harder. Absolutely. You know, being respectful, that's like the difference between not to get down the weeds, but different change scrum and lean.

has all this process. Yeah, everybody gets a new title and everybody gets a new meetings. It's like the Oprah. You get a new title. You get everybody gets a new title. But then you come into Lean and Lean is more like the, what is it, Maria Kendo? Look at your process. Pick a part of your process. Does this spark joy? No. Think it and let it go. It is an incremental way of looking at things. And I know, especially when you hire somebody, and when you do these changes, it's a big investment. You hire people that make a lot of money and there's a lot of investment, maybe it's cutting into margin.

So there's a lot of pressure to put something in and make that up and start being revenue positive or show and prove yourself. You know, slow down. You know, let's really, the money is important. I obviously get that. And that's why you're at that switchback. We were coming to Big Boy Business. But I don't want to do it in a way that in a year later, it's not going to be the same company and you might start having an exodus of people who kind of said this didn't fit me anymore. I love that. So all right Tommy that was great. Time flies when you're having fun.

So we are we are out of time. Is there any last bits of feedback or words of encouragement right now to hiring managers Tommy that you want to impart on them? It's hard for everybody. Don't worry. We're all trying to ask. Everybody is struggling and every big company's little companies, remote companies, everything is hard right now. The thing I would concentrate on is yes, you need to offer more money because of everything more money, but we don't pay, you know, there's people that pay this and I'm never going to be able to pay that for several reasons. I'm trying to get close enough to where the money doesn't matter and then our culture and our approach and the way you'll feel when you work for us is like I'd much rather work there.

like the Daniel Pink stuff, you know, pay people enough money to where they don't care about that and then work about autonomy, purpose and mastery. I love that. You know, give them that. I love that. Yeah. And I agree with what Tommy just said, not because he's live right now, but also because I think a lot of higher managers amends me like, well, we can't pay fang rates. I'm like, I'm not asking you to pay fang rates. I'm asking you to, well, you got to get it. What I call it the national average, which I've posted about, but then also like you You can do other things, right?

Like, you know, I caught up with the VP of developer experience last year for Netlify, Jason Langstorf, and Jason was like, listen, like, we've hired a bunch of people who are on FANG levels, but they want to come here because we start off with a ton of PTO days. Like, you know, we allow mental health breaks and, you know, we encourage all that stuff. And so, you know, again, you don't have to throw out money, but you need to offer a lot of other things to be competitive. So I agree with you, man. all right y'all well thanks again for hanging out with us today we appreciate a ton again as always go check out render ATL I'm just gonna be a blast you won't want to miss it very very excited and then y'all have a great one tomorrow I have another guest I don't know this individual she her publicist reached out to me it is a TEDx speaker very very excited to have her on her names Liz So I'm so excited to have that have her on Tuesday and then who do I have on Wednesday Wednesday?

I have oh, I have a block engineer. So the not square but block He's at block now. I'm gonna hang out with him Wednesday Thursday's unicorn finders and then Friday who have Friday Friday Friday Actually Friday. I am yolo in it by myself again. So y'all have a great one Tommy stay on real quick But y'all have a great rest of your Monday Hey, you did it. You listened to an entire episode and I am very grateful because you know why? There's a lot of podcasts out there. There's a lot of episodes and I myself rarely finish an entire episode. So I appreciate you so, so much for listening.

Quick reminder, please rate and review this podcast in the App Store. I want this to be discoverable to others and the only way that happens is if you take the time right now and rate and review it. Please, like, right now. Unless you're driving, then don't do it. So thank you again if you need to reach out to me, Taylor at Vaco.com or at T.S. and on all social media handles and I hope you have a fantastic day.