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EP361 Get Your Time Back by Making the Right Hire at the Right Time · Profit With A Plan

• 0:14
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: What if the reason you cannot get your time back is because you have not made the right hire yet?
• 0:20
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Business owners have a habit of taking on just one more thing. One more client, one more problem, one more responsibility. And before long, the business that you built gives… is no longer giving you the freedom, and it starts taking more of it from you.
• 0:37
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: So how do you know when it's actually time to hire?
• 0:41
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Who should you hire first, and can you build a company that supports the life you want instead of the constant competing with it? That's the conversation we're having today on PROfit with a Plan.
• 0:55
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Hey entrepreneurs, are you working too hard for too little profit? Well, welcome to Profit with a Plan podcast, where we help business owners grow smarter, increase profitability, and build a company that's worth more, whether you plan to keep it or sell it.
• 1:09
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: I'm Marcia Riner, Business Growth Strategist and the Profit Booster behind Infinite Profit. Each week, I bring you practical strategies and expert insights, and real-world steps to help you grow revenue, prove margins, and build a stronger business.
• 1:24
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Today's episode is brought to you by Infinite Profit, where strategy turns into profitable growth. But before we jump in, I have something really special for you.
• 1:33
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: If you feel like your revenue's plateaued, or your marketing's just not producing what the return it should, go get your free Profit Booster Growth Map.
• 1:42
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: In just a couple of minutes, it'll help you identify where to bring in more qualified clients, and where those profit leaks may be costing you more money than you realize.
• 1:52
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Go get it after the show at ProfitBooster.biz. And by the way, there's no sales call required. Now, let's get into today's conversation. My guest is Darren Tompkins, the founder and CEO of Vader Ray Companies, a Texas-based group that helps businesses grow smarter teams
• 2:11
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Through recruiting, engineering talent, and virtual professional support.
• 2:16
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Darren works with companies that need to scale without hiring slower, more expensive, or more complicated than it really, truly needs to be.
• 2:26
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: What I really want to talk to Darren about, though, is the decision behind hiring, and when you know when it's time to bring someone in. Who should come in first, and do you build a company that gives you more of that time back instead of demanding more of it? Darren, welcome to Profit with a Plan Podcast!
• 2:44
  Darren Tompkins: Marcia, I have been looking forward to this one all week, so thank you for having me.
• 2:48
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Oh, me too, I'm glad, I'm so glad. Alright, well, how did you get into hiring and engineering? I mean, there's a story behind all this, right?
• 2:57
  Darren Tompkins: Yeah, you know, come from humble beginnings at a small town in Appalachia. I used the U.S. Army as an enlistment to get out of that situation. 5 years active, and then went into the reserves,
• 3:10
  Darren Tompkins: You know, new college was in my, was in the spotlight for me, and I used the RTC scholarship to get my degree from the University of South Carolina for a technical IT degree.
• 3:20
  Darren Tompkins: came here to Houston to work for oil and gas, and
• 3:24
  Darren Tompkins: that business, whether it's oil and gas or engineering infrastructure, you know, it's all based on what is a barrel of crude selling for today, right? So, when it's $100 a barrel, hey, we're hiring, we're innovating, we're bringing on new technologies. When it's low, people get laid off. So, I rode that wave quite a bit. And,
• 3:41
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: That sounds totally stressful.
• 3:43
  Darren Tompkins: I mean, it is, right? But at the same time, throughout this
• 3:47
  Darren Tompkins: 12-year career, I got hit up by a lot of crappy recruiters, and I know you have too, and I know everybody that's watching this program has, right? It's just… it's a form email, or a text message, or a call, usually it's from New Jersey or Delaware, that's where the call centers are. For jobs you have.
• 4:04
  Darren Tompkins: no experience in for half the pay, working halfway around the world or the country, and I've been to so many
• 4:13
  Darren Tompkins: recruiter interviews where they're like, hey, come to my office and we'll… we'll just talk about this job we have. None of them ever worked out. It was always just trash, right? It stresses you out, it bums you out, it can bum you out for a long time, and so…
• 4:27
  Darren Tompkins: I was… an experience of being, recruiting from
• 4:31
  Darren Tompkins: the candidate side, right? Being recruited.
• 4:34
  Darren Tompkins: once I got into this business, I saw how kind of bloated everything is, as far as the cost and the fluff that goes with everything, and knew we could do it better, faster, stronger, all that good stuff. So I got into it in 2020, right at COVID, with a boutique firm, got poached to go work for an international company, but by then, I had so many friends that were asking for help, former colleagues and all that.
• 4:58
  Darren Tompkins: we kind of bootstrapped. It's like, I think I can form this new business without taking out any VC money, no bank loans, no nothing, right? And, that's exactly what happened. My wife said, give me till September. I said, yes, but you understand, that's it. I'm leaving the W2 world forever. And she agreed. So…
• 5:14
  Darren Tompkins: That was the date. I spent a couple of weeks just kind of looking around, like, I don't know what the hell I'm supposed to be doing with my time right now, you know, as we were building the website and all that stuff. But that's how we got here, and you kind of go with what you know in business, right? So that's why we've stayed with oil and gas, engineering, finance and IT, some legal, everything that makes the infrastructure here work.
• 5:36
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Love it, love it. Well, you know, I… I… it… hiring is such a, chance sport, I wanna… I wanna call it, right?
• 5:44
  Darren Tompkins: Roll that dice, man. Yeah.
• 5:46
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Yeah, you don't know what you're thinking, you don't know what you're hiring, you probably didn't do your job description yet, you're just going, I need help.
• 5:54
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: And I don't know where to look first, and it's just a terrible situation for business owners.
• 6:01
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: So then, let me ask you, kind of, you know, knowing all of that.
• 6:06
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: A lot of business owners wait too long to hire, because they keep telling themselves, hey, I can handle this. What are the signs that actually
• 6:15
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Present themselves to… that it's time the business owner knows it's time to start bringing somebody in.
• 6:20
  Darren Tompkins: It's… it's… I say this, and this will anger some business owners out there, because they are masters of their own domain, right? It's whenever you hit that 41-hour mark in your work…
• 6:33
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: 31 hour?
• 6:34
  Darren Tompkins: 41?
• 6:34
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: I mean, I should drop down to 41 hours.
• 6:36
  Darren Tompkins: I mean, you can, right? It's just… it depends on your situation, right? I have, as we talked about before the call, I have little kids. I'm very involved in the school. I was there… were there today twice, actually. And they're right there, and they're gonna be home here in a little bit, you know?
• 6:51
  Darren Tompkins: as an older dad, as I call it, I realize I have to be involved in their lives as much as possible, so…
• 6:58
  Darren Tompkins: For me, when I was working 60, 70 hours a week on the business, it's like…
• 7:03
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: It's just normal.
• 7:04
  Darren Tompkins: out, and it stresses, and…
• 7:06
  Darren Tompkins: we get mad at each other, my wife and I, because we're… the connection just isn't working, right? So, that's when I was like, okay, I need to pull back, go hire somebody, and you're doing your project planning throughout the year, too, so you can set those gates, right? But for me, it was definitely when I hit that 41-42 hour mark, because it's like.
• 7:24
  Darren Tompkins: my quality of life isn't as good, you know? And… some people can do that, like me. Some people can't, you know? They're demanding themselves working 8 hours a week, right? If it works for you, great. But you have to understand, at some point, you have to make the decision, I've hit my ceiling of knowledge or experience on something, I've got to go find the people who
• 7:44
  Darren Tompkins: can bring that to the table. That's when it kind of clicks over. Whether it's a business need or your personal need, you have to figure that out.
• 7:50
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: I think that's a really smart viewpoint, you know, because we do as business owners, you know, like, we birthed this baby because we knew something, right? Just as in your example as well. You know, we knew something, and we thought, oh, I could make a better quality of life out there for myself and others if I do this thing, but we don't know all the aspects of business, so then we kind of, like.
• 8:14
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Fight our way through everything, and that's when those hours start adding up.
• 8:19
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: One of the biggest fears people have is that, you know, they don't have the money for it.
• 8:23
  Darren Tompkins: Yeah, so that's the flip side, right? So, let's say…
• 8:26
  Darren Tompkins: Marcia, you're gonna start a new business, and I'm a venture capitalist, or a bank, and you take out this million-dollar loan, and you're like, you know what? I'm gonna hire a COO, and a director of marketing, and a baller sales executive, and I'm just gonna direct those people. It's like, sister, that's you! This is a start, right? That's why it's called startup. You have to fill all those shoes. Get to a point where you have the cash revenue.
• 8:50
  Darren Tompkins: Where you're balancing kind of a…
• 8:53
  Darren Tompkins: you're cruising, right? And then you can be like, okay, now I need to hire, because I don't have the time to do the marketing, I don't have the time to do sales all the time, even though you're supposed to be doing that as an owner, but you start piecemealing it out, realizing.
• 9:05
  Darren Tompkins: okay, I could… if I just got 10 hours a week back from this, or 20 hours a week by offloading accounting or something, then you kind of be able to start to sit back a little bit, be like, okay, I got it, you know?
• 9:16
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: I love that, and I always like to think that it's really important that, you know, what is the most valuable thing that you as the owner can do, and only you as the owner can do? And then you don't hire, like, the next C-level suite, you hire the next worker bee, right? That's someone that's going to take that stuff off your plate, like.
• 9:39
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Honestly.
• 9:40
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: people, you should not be doing your own accounting, and you probably shouldn't be doing your own marketing, right? Those are two very specific roles that need experts doing them.
• 9:49
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: But yet we, you know, put it all on our shoulders and say, yeah, that's fun, or yeah, I can do that. And it takes away from the prime role that, you know, your objective is getting customers, right?
• 10:01
  Darren Tompkins: Yeah, as a recruiting company, you know, my first hire was another recruiter. You know, it's like, okay, I've got a… we've got this great
• 10:08
  Darren Tompkins: current bandwidth of clients, but now I gotta go find new ones, because next year could be a disaster, right? I hired a recruiter. She's done a banger job. Thank you so much, Nori. You know, it's like, she's just great, and…
• 10:20
  Darren Tompkins: she gets paid well, she works her… not… doesn't work her own hours, but we're very flexible here. You know, everybody's… remember I told you about cutting the cost, right? Everybody's remote. And we just… very casual, you know, I'm wearing gym shorts on underneath this.
• 10:36
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Me too.
• 10:38
  Darren Tompkins: I'm down to one suit jacket, and I might wear it twice a year, you know? But understand your business, and your job as a business owner, besides getting it launched, is to plant that battle flag, and have your troops rally around you, and go
• 10:52
  Darren Tompkins: make awesome shit happen, and if you can do that, people do anything for you. If you suck at it.
• 10:58
  Darren Tompkins: go hire somebody that can help you out, you know? Or get into something different.
• 11:03
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Alright, so once we know, once the owner, you know, we realize that now we need help, we've gone through this list, we've worked… we're working 42 hours a week, we know that we need to have that balance in life, and we want to come back to getting that, you know, working in the space that we should be inside the company.
• 11:23
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: How do they know, how do they figure out who the first key hire's gonna be, instead of just hiring whatever feels right for their most urgent need?
• 11:31
  Darren Tompkins: Yeah, you need to figure out what's the challenge. Is it revenue? Is it client-based? Is it… I don't get enough followers on social media? Again, does my accounting suck, right?
• 11:43
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: It's…
• 11:43
  Darren Tompkins: It's, it's… you need to… to…
• 11:45
  Darren Tompkins: you know, map it out, and once we got the recruiter in, it's all good. I'm very fortunate that my wife is half owner of this company, and she's an excellent accountant, right? Because if I didn't have her, I would have been bankrupt a long time ago, probably, you know?
• 11:59
  Darren Tompkins: I thought you might have heard that.
• 12:00
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Hurstrings.
• 12:01
  Darren Tompkins: Yeah, she's great. But she has a full-time job. She has a full-time day job in a W-2, because I haven't had insurance in a decade, because of her, you know? And that's something, if you're in a marriage, you know, make sure…
• 12:14
  Darren Tompkins: those bases are covered before you're like, oh, I'm just gonna go quit my job and do this other thing. Keep them informed, because that'll piss people off real fast. But,
• 12:23
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Great business tip!
• 12:25
  Darren Tompkins: Yeah, yeah, keep the wife in the loop.
• 12:28
  Darren Tompkins: you know…
• 12:30
  Darren Tompkins: who that person's gonna be based off the numbers in front of you. That's the bottom line, you know? There's no guesswork when it comes to it. It's like, we need revenue, okay, we need to hire a salesperson. Our views are down, we need to hire a marketing person, you know? I hate doing social media, okay, I'm gonna go hire a marketing or VA company to take care of that, you know?
• 12:49
  Darren Tompkins: it's different for everybody, because it's different for each thing. Are you selling something that's tangible, that you can hold, or are you selling business services? Are you selling yourself, like you do? You know, it's just…
• 12:58
  Darren Tompkins: How many people do you need? And make sure that they're the right people.
• 13:02
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Well, I like that. So you're putting together a plan before you just randomly go out and hire somebody, and don't go hire your friend or your friend's cousin's friend.
• 13:09
  Darren Tompkins: Good Lord, don't.
• 13:10
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Hire somebody who's highly qualified for that role, and then make sure that that's the role you need, right? So, have that plan laid out.
• 13:21
  Darren Tompkins: the mistake people make, and really, this is across the board, is they wait too long to hire. You know, all of a sudden, that project date, kickoff date is in the past, and you don't have a project director or somebody out there pouring steel or something, you know?
• 13:37
  Darren Tompkins: we're looking at the next 3 months, we have zero sales. Now's not the time to be, like, panic buying, because then you just go out there and you hire the first dude that says, yeah, man, I'll make you a million dollars, you know? You've got to be able to plan for this stuff, and backwards plan based on your needs, again, where the numbers are.
• 13:55
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: I like it. Alright, so we're deciding what we're gonna do, we're kind of figuring it out, we're looking at what has the most urgent need, but yet we're not trying to do it at the time that it's past the need, right? When the fire's burning, we're trying to plan a little bit ahead for this.
• 14:13
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: How do we do this? You know, you talk about hiring faster, lower-cost way to recruit. Where is the business owner gonna waste most of their money or time on traditional hiring processes?
• 14:25
  Darren Tompkins: So, on the traditional hiring process, we've discovered this recently. It's happened a couple times over, right?
• 14:32
  Darren Tompkins: A company outsources… brings us in to outsource, right? We give them a recruiter like Nori, and this is a big engineering firm, worldwide. They have a hard time getting the local managers to interview and hire people, because they're so in the trenches of their day-to-day, right?
• 14:48
  Darren Tompkins: they hired us, we loaded them up with amazing candidates, but they're still not… you know, 6 weeks later, they're still not interviewing, so the candidates are bolting. That is the biggest challenge, is you have to be ready
• 14:59
  Darren Tompkins: to bring those people in, otherwise you're wasting a huge amount of time and money, right? So, when we talk to companies, we want to map out making sure that they are 100% ready to go.
• 15:08
  Darren Tompkins: Because if they're not, it's just gonna be frustration from top to bottom. Anything from the pay, to the time to get people through your process, to the cultural fit, which is a huge thing nowadays.
• 15:20
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Yeah.
• 15:20
  Darren Tompkins: You gotta make sure it's right. I, right now, for Vaderie companies, am hiring a sales executive, you know? But it's not a traditional post a job, and somebody will apply to it, because we're not structuring it that way. I'm trying to find people who
• 15:33
  Darren Tompkins: owned other recruiting agencies as, like, a small business owner that, again, I'm tired of working 70, 80 hours a week, so I would just rather go do sales and bring my clients into somewhere else that has a good support system to get the job done, right? And you'll make six figures here, easy, you know? I'm in the middle of that right now, we're going through final
• 15:51
  Darren Tompkins: stages of that hire. That's a big hire for us, because I'd been doing it all myself, because everything up till now has been referrals, you know?
• 15:58
  Darren Tompkins: But it's… it's more…
• 16:01
  Darren Tompkins: there's more of a plan that needs to come together at the very beginning, other than, here's the job descriptions, I need you to post these things, get your recruiters on the case, and let's, let's look at this. It just doesn't work anymore, because that tells us, you haven't done any planning, or… and it's gonna be crunch time.
• 16:19
  Darren Tompkins: Very quickly, and…
• 16:21
  Darren Tompkins: Again, the people tend to like to blame the recruiter because we're an outsourced management system, right? When things don't go wrong, we're a consultant. And because we're Americans, they hate being told that they did something wrong, you know? So, we have to put that way ahead of the problem before it gets there to get everybody through.
• 16:41
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: So, what do you recommend in that kind of planning phase? What are some of the key levers that we should pull, or points that we should cover when we're looking at hiring? What's that plan look like?
• 16:53
  Darren Tompkins: It's very simple. You need to know the person you need for the job that you need done, right? Your job description is your key points of, we have to be able to do these things to drive revenue, to drive projects, whatever the heck that is, right?
• 17:09
  Darren Tompkins: Then you got the people…
• 17:10
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: encryption.
• 17:10
  Darren Tompkins: Yes, then you have the people coming in that have resumes, right? And it's a handshake, right? Do the bullet points line up, you know? And that's the first pass of anybody, you know? I think the old adage is you have, like, 3 to 5 seconds to get a recruiter's attention if you're doing email resume-type stuff, or you're just looking at, or if you're on LinkedIn.
• 17:28
  Darren Tompkins: AI has allowed us to crunch that down into seconds. It's allowed us to make decisions so much faster than before. But we're still doing at least one or two interviews before we send that person to you.
• 17:41
  Darren Tompkins: when I say… when I'm saying we're not giving you 50 or 20 or 10 resumes, we are getting you people who are ready to go now.
• 17:49
  Darren Tompkins: Now, the functional… It fit.
• 17:52
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Align with the job task and everything else. Okay.
• 17:55
  Darren Tompkins: the pay aligns, the expectations, the PTO, all that stuff aligns, right?
• 17:59
  Darren Tompkins: The… what ends up getting us nowadays is a cultural fit, right?
• 18:03
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Mmm.
• 18:04
  Darren Tompkins: of, okay, is this a hybrid role? You know, I do have a special needs kid, I need to take every other Friday off, or, you know, just whatever, whatever it ends up needing to be, right?
• 18:17
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Sure.
• 18:18
  Darren Tompkins: We have,
• 18:19
  Darren Tompkins: We have a client that we had earlier this year where the owner brings two giant-ass dogs to work. A Cane Corso and a, I'm sorry, Doberman Pinscher, king and boss.
• 18:30
  Darren Tompkins: Are you… Marcia, you want this job? Are you afraid of dogs? Are you allergic? You have to ask those questions depending on the.
• 18:36
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: That's specific.
• 18:36
  Darren Tompkins: situations. That is not something we would have asked before COVID. It would have been, alright, Marcia, here's your cubicle and your laptop, don't ask about pay increases or any of that stuff. It's very much an employee's market now, because there are so many people on the market, and so many good jobs that are on the market. But, so what ends up happening is.
• 18:55
  Darren Tompkins: when you outsource to a person like us, we're doing 90% of the work, and so when you finally do a face-to-face like this, you're already there 90%. This could be the person.
• 19:06
  Darren Tompkins: Now let me check these other two folks and see which one I like best, you know?
• 19:10
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Yeah, so then it becomes, I'm sifting through the cream of the crop, and not the Indeed list of thousands of resumes that come my way that is, you know, daunting and overwhelming for a business owner to consider. And you and I both know.
• 19:27
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: that…
• 19:28
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: half the stuff, if not 75% of the stuff on the resume is a bunch of BS, right? And it's formulated and fluffed up, and, you know, it's like, so how do they even… I mean, as a business owner, how do we navigate that and believe what they're saying, right?
• 19:42
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: and get them through. You know, that becomes really scary for a business owner that's trying to keep the business flowing, and hire, and worried about everything else that comes along with hiring somebody on, and then being able to choose somebody based on, well, I like the way they dressed.
• 20:03
  Darren Tompkins: Yeah, it's, so we were talking about this last night at dinner. You know, the AI has been able to help us out a lot, sift through, okay, is this resume AI-generated? It hits a threshold. Our AI agent that we've had for 3 years now is really good at giving a point numbering system to the, the candidates that we pass ahead to make sure that we're in that top 10%.
• 20:22
  Darren Tompkins: there's always gonna be that 1 or 2%, even if I think you're the most perfect candidate, we're gonna offer this job where everything
• 20:28
  Darren Tompkins: takes a dump, where, because you can't figure out, oh, well, Marcia has, 10 kids from 10 baby daddies, and she's got a drug habit, and, you know, all this other stuff. It's just, you know, you can't ask that, you know. I mean, you can do a background and all that if you want, but there's always a psychological, and, you know.
• 20:48
  Darren Tompkins: things that we can't test for, or we can't ask about, or that kind of stuff, so… Yeah.
• 20:52
  Darren Tompkins: it's probably 1 in 20, 1 in 50, when that happens, we have seen it, where it's like, you get them in the door, and they're an asshole to everybody, you know? It's like, what happened, you know? But it could be on many other things, that's a very extreme example. But when we get you there, again, those top 3 are literally in the top 10%.
• 21:10
  Darren Tompkins: Or top 5% or 8%, depending on how many people you've interviewed, you know, and…
• 21:15
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: That's what you want.
• 21:16
  Darren Tompkins: That's what you want in front of you. You don't want the top… top 50, you know?
• 21:20
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: I know, who has time for that? So, let's take a step back. You know, we know that the applicants are… I know, I've heard from applicants that are complaining about, oh, my resume's not even getting seen because it all gets filtered through AI. Why is an AI
• 21:40
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: resume, which… you wanted somebody to write something that looks better for you, but it's still me. Why is that resume getting kicked to the side?
• 21:49
  Darren Tompkins: It depends on how much work you actually put in to make that resume sound like you, right? We… I can pick up an AI resume without even sending it through the agent. I've seen so many of them. It's based on the font and how they structure, and then you just kind of look at the numbers, right, that it'll project.
• 22:07
  Darren Tompkins: we run it through our AI, it'll tell you, oh, this is 80% AI generated, you know, the supposed probability. But here's the thing.
• 22:16
  Darren Tompkins: if you're not showing a vested interest in the job you're applying for, because you're gonna have to get in front of Marcia eventually, you know, it's like, why the hell should I care, you know? I mean, it's…
• 22:27
  Darren Tompkins: a vested interest in yourself and your career. So it's great to use AI to organize your resume and bring it up to modern ATS standards, right? But you're right, a lot of the tracking systems are looking for those markers, you know, and buzzwords. If I see dynamic on a resume, yeah, that's an AI…
• 22:46
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: It's a treasure trove of support.
• 22:49
  Darren Tompkins: Yeah, yeah, if they can't prove… if they're a numbers person where it doesn't add up, you know, and it's just a bunch of fluff, we can… we can pick that out, right? Use AI to organize, but my god, put yourself into it. It's like…
• 23:02
  Darren Tompkins: People use filters on their LinkedIn profiles, you know?
• 23:06
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Right?
• 23:06
  Darren Tompkins: So they… and ageism is a real thing. It's a horrible thing that goes on out there.
• 23:11
  Darren Tompkins: And it's okay if you think you can get through the interview without, you know, showing them who you physically are, but eventually, you and I are gonna have to have a conversation. And if we're a week or two into this, and you're in front of the hiring manager, and they're like.
• 23:24
  Darren Tompkins: They're looking at the…
• 23:26
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Your language
• 23:27
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: and this language skills are two completely different languages, right? You know, that has to flow as well, and I think that that's really important, but you know, it's like…
• 23:37
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: I know so many people want, you know, to use the AI to help, like you said, formulate it, but then once it's formulated, then Marcia comes back in and rewrites it in her own language so it sounds better.
• 23:50
  Darren Tompkins: We're not even, like, completely rewriting, but we want to see your character come out in the resume, so it's not just so black and white, and it looks like 10 others that we just saw, you know? I mean…
• 24:00
  Darren Tompkins: Yeah.
• 24:01
  Darren Tompkins: We want to see your character in it. We want to see your character in it.
• 24:04
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Okay, alright, so… And no videos, and no, no… no…
• 24:11
  Darren Tompkins: Yeah, no need for that stuff.
• 24:12
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Images and all that kind of stuff, right?
• 24:14
  Darren Tompkins: the letter nowadays is not… it's not anything, you know what I mean? We'll kind of breeze through it, but we're going to go straight to the resume, because that's… that's the fast approach that everybody.
• 24:22
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Meat and the potatoes, right?
• 24:23
  Darren Tompkins: You got it, yeah.
• 24:24
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Alright, cool. Well, thanks for sharing that, because I know so many people are like, well, AI can… is just writing everything these days, so why wouldn't it write a better resume? But then it's getting blocked because it's all AI-written, so… Yeah, and all of.
• 24:39
  Darren Tompkins: On that same thing, you know, I know LinkedIn is under fire a lot nowadays. I'm using that because that's where we find most of our professional-level people. You know, there are ghost jobs out there. There's a lot of reasons a company might post a job and never talk to anybody, they forget about it, or remember, LinkedIn is a subscription service on the recruiting side, so the job could be there.
• 24:58
  Darren Tompkins: the hiring manager could have been fired 6 months ago, and nobody's even looked at it, you know? There's all these weird things that can happen. Just…
• 25:06
  Darren Tompkins: Find a way in that's more than just hitting easy apply, if you're out there looking for.
• 25:11
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Right.
• 25:11
  Darren Tompkins: You know? Yeah.
• 25:12
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Right.
• 25:13
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Cool. Alright, so there's, it sounds like, you know, there's a lot bigger issues here than just the staffing, and it's… you brought this up by saying that it's the culture that you want to do.
• 25:25
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: How do you build a company, you know, that you enjoy, and that your employees are gonna enjoy when they come on board, right? That culture kind of feeling.
• 25:35
  Darren Tompkins: So, I don't remember if I talked to you about this before, when I left the W-2 world, when I… and when that date, almost 3 years ago, happened, you know, when I was in W-2 in oil and gas, they give you a work
• 25:48
  Darren Tompkins: uniform requirement, you know? It's cheesy… this is an expensive button-down shirt, but cheesy button-down shirts and khakis and, you know, a dress code, you know, that's what they used to call it.
• 25:59
  Darren Tompkins: when I finished that last day on the job, I piled up all of those clothes, emptied the closet out, piled them up next to my bed, and for the next year and a half, when I got out of the bed, I looked at it, and said, if this shit doesn't work, that's what you're going back to.
• 26:15
  Darren Tompkins: That was my reminder to be like, get your crap together and make this work, you know?
• 26:21
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Yeah, so I think, I think today's… today's lifestyle, too, that you mentioned when, when, you know, you started right after COVID, and the differences in hiring, can you…
• 26:32
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: can you get along with boss and king, right? And can you bring your dog into work? And, you know, what kind of lifestyle do you have in there? So how does one…
• 26:42
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: How does one business kind of create that lifestyle, especially if it's… if it's, if they're just starting to hire? How do they create kind of the culture that they want?
• 26:51
  Darren Tompkins: And I was gonna lead into that, because when I said goodbye to all that stuff, I'm like, I never want to put that crap on again. So why would I make anybody else put that crap on, you know? So when it came to Vader Ray, when I knew
• 27:02
  Darren Tompkins: everybody's gonna be virtual, we're not gonna have a big office with the expensive machines, and the directors of this, and directors of that, and a bunch of admins, because, Marcia, you're gonna look at that when you're at my office, like, man, no wonder this crap is so expensive, you know? So that was my first step, is…
• 27:18
  Darren Tompkins: Create a laid-back culture, cut out all the fluff, because we're gonna pass those savings on to you as a client, right?
• 27:24
  Darren Tompkins: we… you know, we send coffee money, it's just very laid back, because I know when I get on our meetings, our internal meetings, people are gonna be in tank tops and their gym shorts and stuff like that, but hey, I'm wearing the same stuff, and
• 27:36
  Darren Tompkins: I'm a very… hire the right people, let them go do their expert jobs, right? I don't like to be micromanaged myself. I don't micromanage other people.
• 27:46
  Darren Tompkins: I had great managers and mentors throughout my career, but there was something in my head I just hated working for them, you know? And again, it came down to the work dress culture and everything else that came along with that, because I have to drive to another building, and…
• 28:01
  Darren Tompkins: go on it with Zoom at 6.30 in the morning for stuff I don't care, with people I don't care, you know, and
• 28:07
  Darren Tompkins: Yeah, you create the culture out of you. It's what and what type of people do you want to attract, you know? You always want high-speed, fast-moving people that do sales, because they thrive on that, right?
• 28:18
  Darren Tompkins: But, you know, your marketing team has to be creative, and they have to have experience. But even if you hire somebody to do a specific job.
• 28:27
  Darren Tompkins: even if they turn out to be not so good, you really need to understand, and you're going to do this because you're interviewing them yourself, understand what the other skills that they have. Maybe there's something else they could be doing to improve your business, and I'm… again, I've experienced that here at Vader Ray with somebody that we had.
• 28:43
  Darren Tompkins: you… the business is what comes out of you, especially when it's on a video like this. I mean, you see the Batman and the guitars in the background. If you can't figure out what this culture looks like, it's, you know, very pop culture. It's right in the name, Vader Ray, Star Wars, you know? Those are the type of people I like to try, because I have meaningful conversations with them, and then they understand the missions, and then they go perform them.
• 29:06
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Love it, love it. And I think that that's a really good thing that's often missed with businesses, is like.
• 29:12
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: What do you want to, you know… first of all, this is… you're spending more time at work these days than you're spending at home with your family, so make it an environment that feels right, whether you're doing virtual, or… or partial, or even in the… in the… in the branch, or in the… in the company every day. You want to make it, comfortable so that the people are happy and enjoy the
• 29:34
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: coming to work, so then they're more productive, right? I mean, there's so many benefits that come along with that, so I like that. All right, so one more thing I want to cover, kind of before we wrap this up, because this is a really robust conversation about hiring and bringing on the right people and having that company that's desirable.
• 29:53
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: For the owners that are listening who know they need and want some of that time back, right? That lifestyle that we all signed up for when we became, you know, business owners, right? We wanted that freedom and the lifestyle and all that kind of stuff, and we don't have it because we're working the 78 hours.
• 30:12
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: How do we… which one of those roles and responsibilities and decisions should they look at first this week to start making those decisions?
• 30:22
  Darren Tompkins: what do you hate to do? Like, what is the bane of your week? Existence? And then go outsource that, you know? That's real… that sounds funny, and it's… it's a very pointed…
• 30:32
  Darren Tompkins: remark, but that is true. Like, what are you… I suck at accounting. I just hate it. I hate spreadsheets, but guess what? Steffi is awesome at that. I'm very fortunate that I get that outsourced to her, and I don't have to pay her for it, right? But…
• 30:43
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: You pay in some way or form?
• 30:45
  Darren Tompkins: She kicks me in the ass every now and again. But, like, social media, I have… I've had a Facebook account forever and all that, and it's fun to catch up with friends, but when it came to, like.
• 30:55
  Darren Tompkins: doing professional posts, and posting them to LinkedIn, and doing your short videos, and the video editing, oh my god, that was taking up my entire day. So, I outsourced a few hours a week to go do that, and now I have a full marketing team that takes care of it all.
• 31:10
  Darren Tompkins: For some people, it can be, I hate cold calling. Okay, well, let me go find a cold caller to try to get actual sales rather than just the referrals.
• 31:20
  Darren Tompkins: what is it that you don't like to do? Offload that, because guess what? Your attitude's gonna be better immediately, when you're like, oh, shit, I don't have to do this anymore, you know? And Joe here is great at it. There's always a guy, there's always a girl.
• 31:33
  Darren Tompkins: That's out there that can make your life better.
• 31:35
  Darren Tompkins: In business.
• 31:36
  Darren Tompkins: First of all.
• 31:37
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: I love it. And we… we strive so many times to make a real business, and a strong business, and a growth-minded business that's gonna live on for years to come.
• 31:48
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: if you're trying to do everything, listenery, right? You're trying to do wear all the 57 hats and be everything to everybody, you just have a heavy-weighted job and not a business. And I think when you create that business, you're creating an entity that hires people, so you're creating job opportunities. You're able to deliver to your community, which is the
• 32:11
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: The service that you're providing, or the product that you're providing, and then this thing becomes so much more bigger, better, and stronger than you ever imagined, than you trying to do it all yourself.
• 32:23
  Darren Tompkins: Whatever weighs you down in your job, your day job, it's gonna weigh you down more than that at home. That's the way you have to look at it.
• 32:31
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: I love it. And so get that off your shoulders, you know, do the right thing. There's tons of benefits to hiring people and… and…
• 32:40
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: you know, doing that, and I mean, for yourself, for your company, for them, for tax purposes, for, you know, community purposes, we can go on about why hiring really does a lot.
• 32:52
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Where can now listeners go to start finding out more about hiring? You know, we know that you do so many different ways of hiring. You offer a three-way plate of hiring, per se, to say that you can hire us as this, you can hire us as that, or we can help you get VAs, or, you know, whatever. So tell us more about that.
• 33:14
  Darren Tompkins: Yeah, so, again, Vaderay is 3 different companies, kind of rolled into one. It's under VaderayRecruiting.com, but we have case studies, and we do have, we can give you an organizational assessment of what we think, of how it looks, right? Because recruiting isn't just hiring, it's also retention, right? It costs so much more to fire somebody than it is to…
• 33:35
  Darren Tompkins: bring them in, right? You're losing knowledge, you're losing years of experience, and workflow, and process, and all that. We enjoy going in there, doing these types of studies, because guess what? It kind of mitigates all the crap we talked about before of not being ready to hire folks, or maybe you're over budgeted, or any of that kind of stuff.
• 33:52
  Darren Tompkins: There's a lot of, like…
• 33:54
  Darren Tompkins: certification people out there, and consultants and all that, that are in the SHRM and whatnot. You don't… yes, that is great educational benefit, but the experience is what we found really helps, because we have worked with companies that are small, big, mega… megacorps, many different things. And we do have case studies on the website, and we do free consultations for that.
• 34:16
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Love it. And where are they gonna find that again?
• 34:18
  Darren Tompkins: Check us out at VaderRay.com, just like…
• 34:21
  Darren Tompkins: The Star Wars name, Darth Vader and Rey, those are my daughter's middle names, believe it or not. Josie Vader Tompkins, Izzy Ray Tompkins, that was my wife's idea. Love her.
• 34:30
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: I love it.
• 34:31
  Darren Tompkins: Yep.
• 34:32
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: I love it, I love it. So, it's a family… it is a family business, and hopefully we'll do one of the odd things these days, and maybe transfer to the girls in the future, so…
• 34:42
  Darren Tompkins: It's a long future life.
• 34:43
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: It's a long way away.
• 34:44
  Darren Tompkins: Yeah.
• 34:45
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Love it, love it. Alright, thanks for tuning in today. I hope that you're walking away with some practical ideas, that you can put to work right now in your business to make it more profitable and valuable, and of course, more enjoyable, because you're not slaving away beyond those 41 hours a week.
• 35:03
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: And I think that this is, there's so many, again, as I kind of alluded to, there's so many different ways you can hire. You can hire full-time, you can hire part-time, you can hire, you know, for project-based, you can hire for… for assisting, like, VAs, and I mean, just get some help.
• 35:21
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: in your business, so you can create that life that you want, and BetaRay is an amazing company that can help you do that, so…
• 35:29
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Alright, before we go, if you want to have that clearer path to more revenue and a stronger profit, go grab your free Profit Booster Growth Map. It'll quickly show you the top opportunities to grow revenue and stop those profit leaks.
• 35:42
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: that may be holding your business back. Go get it anytime, right after the show, at ProfitBooster.biz.
• 35:49
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: And if this episode, gave you value, be sure to subscribe and share it with other business owners who need to hear it. I'll see you next week with more strategies to help you grow smarter and profit stronger. So until then, make your plans and profit with them. Thanks so much, Darren.
• 36:05
  Darren Tompkins: Thank you.