Latest / Beyond Fulfillment Podcast / Turning Failure into Opportunity. Anne Lackey's Entrepreneurial Journey of Pivoting and Growth

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Turning Failure into Opportunity. Anne Lackey's Entrepreneurial Journey of Pivoting and Growth · Beyond Fulfillment Podcast

• 0:00
  In today's episode, we're joined by four time bestselling author, speaker and entrepreneur, Ann Lackey.
• 0:08
  Ann is the co founder of Hire Smart Virtual Employees, a company that's optimizing remote work by connecting businesses with skilled virtual assistants.
• 0:19
  In the Philippines, her journey began in real estate where she and her husband built a successful property management business.
• 0:27
  Learning valuable lessons along the way.
• 0:29
  In this episode, Ann shares the turning point that led her to start Hire Smart Virtual Employees after a personal staffing issue on a long awaited vacation.
• 0:41
  Discover how her innovative approach to business has helped countless companies adapt to remote work even before the pandemic made it mainstream.
• 0:50
  We'll explore her insights on scaling businesses, the importance of adaptability, and why she believes in investing in mentors and education.
• 1:01
  Plus, Anne discusses the evolving role of AI in her industry and what's next for her business.
• 1:07
  As always, if you found value from this content, please like and subscribe.
• 1:12
  Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the Beyond Fulfillment podcast.
• 1:16
  I'm your host Dave Gulas and this week my guest is the co founder of Hire Smart Virtual Employees, Ann Lackey.
• 1:25
  Welcome Anne, how are you?
• 1:27
  It's good to see you here and good to meet your audience today.
• 1:29
  Thank you for having me.
• 1:30
  Yeah, I'm doing fantastic and thank you so much for taking the time to be here.
• 1:34
  We know how busy you are, so we greatly appreciate it.
• 1:37
  My pleasure.
• 1:38
  Okay, so as I mentioned, Ann, your co founder of Hire Smart and we'll get into what that company does here in a minute, but you've had quite a long and fascinating entrepreneurial journey.
• 1:49
  Can you just talk about your backstory and how you got here?
• 1:53
  Sure.
• 1:53
  Well as you said, it's been long and varied.
• 1:56
  I am kind of started my entrepreneurial journey in real estate.
• 2:01
  That's kind of how I kind of cut my teeth teeth and getting into business.
• 2:04
  And so my husband and I started our property management company for our own rentals back in 2002 I think is the the year.
• 2:13
  And we started buying rental properties because we realized that corporate America wasn't going to really do it for our future.
• 2:20
  And so we worked two jobs.
• 2:22
  I mean basically I worked during the day, you know, for my full time job and then we did our side hustle of acquiring rental properties.
• 2:29
  And in 2005 my one of my friends said you're really good at this property management stuff.
• 2:36
  I see that you're able to collect your rents.
• 2:38
  And she says I need a partner to manage my clients portfolios.
• 2:43
  Would you be willing to.
• 2:44
  And I was like okay, so we started our property management business in 2005 and grew that pretty well.
• 2:53
  I retired from corporate in 2009, so I'm working like all the time during that period of time.
• 3:01
  Retired in 2009, still doing real estate.
• 3:05
  Of course, we went through the 2008 bubble and rebranded and did a bunch of different stuff with that.
• 3:11
  And then basically we started hire smart virtual employees because I had a marketing manager quit via text on my first vacation in seven years.
• 3:23
  And so we started looking for what are some solutions for employers to have good people that can work remotely and save, save money.
• 3:35
  So that's kind of how it all started.
• 3:37
  And then again, as everything my husband and I have ever done, we had friends and I was like, huh, you've solved this problem.
• 3:44
  Can you help me solve it?
• 3:46
  And so we started hire smart virtual employees 10 years ago, helping other companies have the solution that we did for ourselves.
• 3:54
  Fast forward now into 2025, and here we are helping many, many clients across the United States with their staffing problems.
• 4:04
  So that's kind of the.
• 4:04
  The short version of my very long, varied past.
• 4:12
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• 4:36
  Okay.
• 4:36
  All right.
• 4:36
  Yeah.
• 4:37
  And a whole lot to get into there.
• 4:38
  So I appreciate the, Appreciate that overview.
• 4:42
  So let's start way back at the beginning.
• 4:44
  So you're in corporate America.
• 4:46
  You said it's not doing for you, doing it for you.
• 4:49
  And you realize that's not going to secure your future.
• 4:51
  So you decided to get into real estate.
• 4:54
  So how, like, how did you get started in that process?
• 4:58
  Well, that actually is a kind of a story in itself.
• 5:01
  So my husband and I were in commission sales.
• 5:03
  That's what we did.
• 5:04
  We, I worked in IT services.
• 5:06
  My husband worked in relocation services.
• 5:08
  And we had a small networking group that would trade leads back and forth, people that were moving that needed to relocate, that type of stuff.
• 5:15
  And in that group of 12 people that year, two people ended up getting cancer.
• 5:21
  And one of them subsequently died.
• 5:22
  And he was, he was a commission sales rep.
• 5:25
  And so we watched him become financially destitute over the year.
• 5:29
  Unfortunately, he did pass, and he left a wife with two children.
• 5:33
  And there was no, there was nothing there to support his kids.
• 5:38
  And of course, if he wasn't working he wasn't making any money.
• 5:42
  And so that was a light bulb moment for us as commission sales reps.
• 5:48
  We realized we're only as good as what we're able to produce today.
• 5:50
  And we needed to figure out a way to have money coming in without us having to work for each and every dollar.
• 5:57
  Which is why we chose rental real estate.
• 6:00
  It made sense to us.
• 6:01
  My family had always had dabbled in real estate, and so it wasn't unforigned to me, but I had a lot to learn.
• 6:09
  And so we dove head in.
• 6:12
  We bought four properties our first month in the business because that's the way Mark and I roll.
• 6:17
  And we have not looked back.
• 6:18
  We still own those properties today.
• 6:20
  They're still income producing assets for us.
• 6:23
  And we love rental real estate.
• 6:26
  We love the flexibility it gives.
• 6:29
  We call it mailbox money.
• 6:30
  And so we knew that that was a way that we could secure our future that corporate America would never be able to do for us.
• 6:38
  Okay, all right.
• 6:40
  So you get, you have that realization, powerful reminder with a friend.
• 6:45
  And what happened there?
• 6:47
  You get started, like you said, you dive in headfirst, four properties right away.
• 6:51
  Uh, I'm sure there was a learning curve, right, and, and some, some mistakes along the way, but you figured it out and got rolling.
• 6:59
  Well, we paid professionals.
• 7:00
  I think that's one of the things.
• 7:01
  So if, you know, we're talking about entrepreneurial journeys, one of the advice I give to people is pay people that are smarter than you to help you figure it out.
• 7:09
  Like people that have run that road before.
• 7:10
  So we, we invested in our education, we invested in the right partners.
• 7:16
  We really made sure that we had at our disposal people that would come alongside us to help us minimize the mistakes.
• 7:24
  We still made plenty of mistakes, but I feel like we probably made less mistakes because we were willing to, you know, partner with people, invest in them, pay for education, all of the things that we recommend that people
• 7:38
  do.
• 7:38
  You know, having coaches and mentors is really an important piece.
• 7:42
  People that have walked before you to get it done.
• 7:45
  So that's one of the pieces of advice I would give to someone if they're starting their entrepreneurial journey.
• 7:51
  Okay, all right.
• 7:53
  And so as you mentioned, you were doing your own property management and that doing it very well, that a friend realized how good you were doing and they asked for help in their business and thus the next company
• 8:05
  was born.
• 8:06
  That's correct.
• 8:07
  Okay, so going from managing your own rentals for properties then to starting a whole property management company, I mean, what was that process like?
• 8:19
  It Was grueling.
• 8:20
  Right?
• 8:20
  I mean, when you make mistakes on your own properties, the only people that you hurt are yourself versus when you are managing other people.
• 8:26
  You have a different level of responsibility.
• 8:28
  Now again, because my husband and I came from corporate, we were used to policies, procedures, rules, guidelines.
• 8:34
  So we brought that into our property management business when we were working ourselves.
• 8:39
  So it wasn't as much of an adjustment when we went and added other people's, but the accountability factor was there.
• 8:47
  And we, in our first year in the business business, we added 80 properties to our, to our management inventory really.
• 8:57
  And we learned a ton that first year.
• 9:00
  We learned a ton of, you know, what to do, how to screen.
• 9:05
  We're pretty good tenant screeners in, in general.
• 9:08
  But again, there are things that you don't know just because you haven't had the volume of people.
• 9:12
  But that year we had a lot of volume.
• 9:14
  And so we continue to refine our policies and our procedures and our guidelines and every.
• 9:21
  We have.
• 9:22
  And even to this day, anytime we make a not a mistake, but we do think that doesn't work exactly the way we want it to work, we dissect that and we go, okay, where, where would we have stopped
• 9:33
  that?
• 9:33
  Or where would he have started that?
• 9:35
  What would, what was it that we can do to mitigate that going forward?
• 9:41
  So we are constantly like looking basically 360 degrees, like what do we need to know that we didn't know?
• 9:48
  What can we incorporate that to make us better going forward?
• 9:51
  We don't look at mistakes mistakes, we look, we look at them as seminars or educational opportunities.
• 9:58
  We always say that like some of our best learning opportunities were big seminars where we ended up writing checks because we just didn't know what we know.
• 10:06
  But we didn't look at it as a failure.
• 10:07
  We just looked at it as, okay, well I learned that not going to do it again.
• 10:12
  Okay.
• 10:12
  And that's, that's such a powerful mindset for entrepreneurs because you know, so often.
• 10:18
  Right.
• 10:18
  Like in the school system were taught to not make mistakes.
• 10:22
  Right.
• 10:22
  And that can be very challenging type of programming to overcome if you're going into entrepreneurship.
• 10:28
  So how did you develop that mindset to where you really.
• 10:32
  I've never heard it put like that.
• 10:33
  You view a mistakes as a seminar where you write a check and you get a valuable lesson.
• 10:38
  But like how did you develop that type of mindset towards mistakes?
• 10:43
  And I'm not really sure I remember how we did that.
• 10:46
  I just knew that that was kind of what we attributed it to.
• 10:50
  Again, we paid for ment we paid for education, so we were used to writing texts to help, for people to help us.
• 10:56
  And so I think, like, I can remember one, one really bad, you know, rental mistake that we made when we were buying a property and selling a property and we looked at each other and we went, well, it's
• 11:09
  the cost of a seminar.
• 11:10
  And we never made that mistake again.
• 11:12
  So I really don't know if, if it was a conscious like thing, but that's just kind of what we attributed it to.
• 11:20
  And again, it's.
• 11:21
  It's usually the things, again, it's things that you don know, that you don't know is most of the time what gets you.
• 11:27
  And this was something that we had never encountered, we had never thought of.
• 11:31
  And so when it happened, we just kind of looked at each other and went, that's not good.
• 11:35
  But here's what we learned.
• 11:37
  And again, now not only do have we learned it, but we now teach other people, like, hey, this is an issue.
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  You need to be aware of it.
• 11:43
  Make sure you don't make the same mistakes that we make.
• 11:45
  So we try to pay it forward to people as well.
• 11:48
  Okay, all right.
• 11:49
  So you have the property management company, like you said, adding 80 properties in your first year.
• 11:54
  So you start scaling and you continue to grow that.
• 11:58
  And, and then what happened next?
• 12:00
  What happened is 2007 and 2008, you know, that was the big real estate bust, right?
• 12:05
  It was kind of like musical chairs.
• 12:07
  Everything kind of came to a halt.
• 12:09
  And so the investors that we were serving were no longer buying because they could no longer get.
• 12:14
  Get loans.
• 12:14
  And so we had to shift, we had to rebrand, we had to figure out what are we going to do to make up the gaps in the income.
• 12:23
  Now we still had the portfolio of ourselves, plus we had managed, we were managing for other people, but at that point, some of our investors weren't able to keep up with a mortgage.
• 12:32
  And so we had to deal with how do we, how do we unravel some of this?
• 12:37
  So it was a very difficult learning curve for us.
• 12:41
  And if, you know, me and Mark, we really love people and we love to do the right thing.
• 12:48
  And so, you know, when some of these investors weren't paying their mortgages, and yet I have tenants that I have that are counting on me for a place to live and they go into foreclosure.
• 12:56
  I mean, that was a really difficult time in our business because they counted on us, right?
• 13:04
  And I, I can't, you know, so having to navigate that and doing it in a way that was respectful.
• 13:10
  Do you know, to the best of my ability.
• 13:13
  Really did kind of help me realize, okay, we're not always in control.
• 13:19
  But what can I control?
• 13:21
  What can I do to help this person?
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  What can I do to.
• 13:24
  To make sure that they're okay and treat them with.
• 13:27
  With dignity as they deserve?
• 13:29
  So a total shift of mind in that era.
• 13:33
  And we then also started thinking, okay, well, we're no longer selling homes to investors.
• 13:40
  Where else can we sell homes?
• 13:41
  So we actually started working with more traditional buyers and sellers, and so we ran a real estate team to help with that.
• 13:49
  We did that till about 2013.
• 13:52
  And Mark and I realized in 2013, we didn't really like working with traditional buyers and sellers.
• 13:58
  That just really wasn't our thing.
• 13:59
  We much preferred the investor buyer.
• 14:01
  And so we did some other shifts along that as well.
• 14:05
  So the lesson in all of this is don't be afraid to change tax if things happen.
• 14:11
  Like, don't get so set in one particular phase of your business that this is what you're going to do.
• 14:17
  Be able to be fluid and morph and change and then change again.
• 14:21
  I mean, if we had to talk about how many times my husband and I have rebranded ourselves, it's probably been close to 20 times.
• 14:27
  I mean, just different things that we do.
• 14:31
  So hopefully that kind of answers your question.
• 14:34
  Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
• 14:36
  And, you know, like you said, not getting set in your ways, being able to pivot when the situation calls for it, I mean, that's.
• 14:43
  That's powerful.
• 14:44
  But the core theme too, it seems, is that regardless if it was investor buyers, you know, traditional residential buyers, you still had this expertise in real estate.
• 14:55
  So it sounds like the experience, you're able to stack those skills and that experience that even when you did need to pivot within the real estate industry, you still had a.
• 15:04
  A high level of expertise.
• 15:06
  So I would assume it made the pivot that much easier.
• 15:09
  It did, actually.
• 15:10
  We got small business of the year in 2010, believe it or not, and we were recognized in 2011 in our county.
• 15:18
  And that's out of all businesses.
• 15:20
  That's not just real estate.
• 15:21
  I mean, that just shows you the power of what you can do when you don't just hide your hide in a hole when things are bad.
• 15:28
  But you think about, what do I need to do to lift myself up and how do I.
• 15:32
  How do I work?
• 15:33
  We were still selling homes, and we did it with no.
• 15:35
  No REOs and no foreclosures.
• 15:38
  So again, that's the power of mindset.
• 15:40
  And being able to say, okay, the world has changed.
• 15:44
  How can I change with it?
• 15:45
  And what can I do?
• 15:46
  What advantages can I adapt?
• 15:48
  And you're absolutely right.
• 15:50
  My ability and my husband's ability to analyze deals and talk to a buyer about why this was a good opportunity for them, or a seller saying, here's what, here's your net ROI that you're going to get when you
• 16:04
  sell was instrumental in us being successful in that area of time.
• 16:10
  Okay.
• 16:11
  And another question too, something I've noticed as you're telling this whole story.
• 16:15
  So, you know, so often we see things that, that hold people.
• 16:19
  A theme that holds people back is inability to take action.
• 16:23
  And entrepreneurs, successful ones in particular, are known to have a bias for action.
• 16:28
  And that certainly seems a central theme is even when things were bad, even when you encounter setback, you're will just go and take the action.
• 16:35
  So, I mean, where does that come from?
• 16:39
  And how, how important do you think that's been to your, your success?
• 16:42
  I think it's extremely important.
• 16:43
  And, you know, we, we tend to, if everybody's going left or, or right, we're going in the opposite direction.
• 16:51
  So we typically go against the grain of whatever is happening, and we're not afraid to fail.
• 16:58
  As we talk about it, it's not failure if you're not failing in business in some form or fashion, you' or you're not taking enough risks.
• 17:07
  And so there is an acceptable level of risk in any business that you need to be able to take in order to have the big wins.
• 17:15
  Because here's the thing, if everybody's doing everything the way everybody else is, there's no differentiating factor.
• 17:22
  If you're willing to take risks when people aren't, that's where you have an opportunity to shine.
• 17:28
  And that's been the way it's been for my whole life.
• 17:32
  What makes me that way?
• 17:33
  I think I was born that way, quite honestly.
• 17:35
  I mean, if you look at kind of even before college, I mean, I graduated college in three and a half years with no summer school because I'm just that kind of a person.
• 17:42
  Like, I see what I want and I go for it.
• 17:45
  And I don't really worry about the consequences of it.
• 17:49
  I just go.
• 17:51
  And so I think part of that is just part of just who is in my DNA.
• 17:57
  For people that are listening, that don't know if that's part of their DNA, what I would say is it gets easier the more risk you take and you realize you're not going to like, totally lose everything all the
• 18:09
  time, then you get better at being able to assess those risks and being able to figure out what's your.
• 18:16
  What's your threshold.
• 18:19
  And my threshold for risk is pretty high, and I've been rewarded because of that, but it's not in everybody's DNA.
• 18:27
  Okay.
• 18:29
  All right, so fast forward to 2015 and you start another business.
• 18:35
  And so often there's a story or a crisis or just, you know, just something that's a catalyst to why a new idea and new business is formed.
• 18:46
  And so you alluded to it earlier when you took your first vacation in seven years and your marketing manager quit, and that was the impetus for this next business.
• 18:57
  So can you just talk more about that?
• 18:59
  Yeah.
• 18:59
  So, as I said, we ran a property management, and my marketing manager was responsible for posting our listings, taking the phone calls, setting up the showings, doing all of that, running the applications, all of that front office type
• 19:16
  work.
• 19:16
  And we drive six hours to Orange beach, which is.
• 19:21
  My husband is my.
• 19:22
  One of our favorite beaches.
• 19:23
  And we get there on a Thursday night.
• 19:26
  We wake up on a Friday morning, just a little bit later because we figured we could sleep in.
• 19:31
  We head to our favorite breakfast place called Duck's Diner.
• 19:35
  Hopefully it's still around.
• 19:36
  It's been a while since we've been there.
• 19:38
  And we literally pull into the, the, the parking lot, and my text starts blowing up.
• 19:45
  And she says, I'm, I'm leaving.
• 19:47
  My keys are on, on the desk, and the remotes are on the desk, and I'll see you later.
• 19:55
  And I was like, what's, why, what's happening?
• 19:58
  Could you not have done this yesterday before I left for six hours, like, what's happening?
• 20:03
  And comes to find out she had a lot of personal challenges and things like that.
• 20:06
  And bless her heart, I, I now no longer am upset with it, but at the time, I was really, really angry.
• 20:14
  And then my operations manager is calling me saying, why are the phones not getting answered?
• 20:18
  Like, what's happening?
• 20:19
  I'm like, she didn't tell you she left?
• 20:21
  She's like, no.
• 20:23
  So anyway, we.
• 20:25
  We make it through the weekend.
• 20:27
  We were supposed to be there a week.
• 20:28
  We ended up coming back on Sunday morning so that we could kind of go back to figuring out what do we do in this.
• 20:35
  This situation.
• 20:37
  And what that made me realize is that we were really vulnerable.
• 20:40
  You know, to have one person in the office that had that much power that literally made me come back from a week's vacation.
• 20:47
  We didn't own a business, we owned a job.
• 20:49
  And I was like, we need to fix this.
• 20:52
  And so my husband and I had been to a mastermind in the Bahamas and kind of got introduced to this concept of full time dedicated virtual staff from the Philippines.
• 21:01
  And we were very curious about that and trying to figure out, okay, how could we make this work?
• 21:09
  And so again, my husband and I are very good at policies, procedures, and figuring things out.
• 21:14
  And so we said, okay, we're going to, we're going to do this the right way.
• 21:19
  We have a staffing partner in the Philippines that we are exclusive to them and to us.
• 21:23
  So we're doing business correctly in the Philippines, which is really important to us, and yet we service our clients here in the US but at that point, I just needed somebody to, to help me with my phones and
• 21:35
  all of that.
• 21:35
  So what the way we started Hire Smart Virtual Employees was again, we were having a, a conversation with a CEO and she's literally was 15, 20 minutes into the conversation and she said, I timeout.
• 21:49
  Like, you're not complaining about all the staff problems.
• 21:53
  And I've never gotten through a lunch without us having this conversation.
• 21:57
  So what, what has changed?
• 21:59
  And I said, well, I've hired a Teresa from the Philippines and she's amazing.
• 22:04
  She's like, I don't believe you.
• 22:06
  I said, what do you mean you don't believe me?
• 22:08
  She said, do you want to talk to her?
• 22:10
  She's like, yes, I want to talk to her.
• 22:11
  I don't believe you.
• 22:12
  So literally, I, I got Teresa on the phone and I said, hi, Teresa, would you please talk to my friend Michelle?
• 22:19
  And so they had a conversation.
• 22:21
  Michelle hangs up the phone and she says, I need like 5 teresas.
• 22:26
  Can you do that for me?
• 22:27
  And I said, sure.
• 22:31
  And I had not, I had to create it.
• 22:33
  She's like, and I want you to train them and I want you to, to tell them everything that you need to know.
• 22:38
  And I was like, okay.
• 22:39
  So we created our certification program, which we still, we've updated a lot, but we still have the certification piece to what we do here, which really has been the secret sauce to Secret Sauces for Hire Smart.
• 22:53
  And we were able to deliver.
• 22:55
  I think we ended up delivering like nine virtual employees because she had a friend that she says she needs some too.
• 23:00
  So we're going to just have you do all of them together.
• 23:02
  So I, I created a certification program.
• 23:05
  I did the interviewing, I did the assessments and all the things that I normally would do as an HR professional.
• 23:12
  And I got that her people.
• 23:13
  Interesting fun fact.
• 23:15
  Teresa still works for my company today.
• 23:17
  She doesn't work for me personally anymore, but she still works for, for us 10 years later.
• 23:23
  I think that speaks a lot to who we are as a company and the type of people that we attract.
• 23:29
  Okay, wow.
• 23:30
  All right.
• 23:30
  So you have this horrible vacation experience where you realize you don't own a business, you own a job.
• 23:36
  So you set out to fix that and you find a fantastic solution and virtual employee from the Philippines that can really step in and manage aspects of the business.
• 23:48
  And then a friend sees that and wants the same thing.
• 23:53
  And basically that demand turned that turn your solution into a business.
• 24:01
  And again, similar to the property management where you weren't plan, planning this but that, you're, you know, your, your, your ability got noticed and thus the demand created a business.
• 24:12
  So what was it like this time in terms of not planning?
• 24:16
  And then it seems a little more complicated too, being that you're dealing with labor from other countries and, and all the other aspects of that.
• 24:24
  So what was it like growing that business?
• 24:27
  It's been phenomenal.
• 24:28
  It's been a wild ride.
• 24:29
  I, I love working and doing this business.
• 24:34
  It's, I mean, I had in corporate, I did a lot of HR and management and, and so I was, I'm able to bring that into this business.
• 24:42
  This is a much more fun business than my property management business was.
• 24:46
  We've since sold the property management business.
• 24:48
  We still have the assets, but we have somebody else manage the day to day.
• 24:52
  I think, you know, again, for me it's about being open to the possibilities.
• 24:57
  And I think again, in your entrepreneurial journey, what you need to look at is what's an area of the market that's not being served.
• 25:05
  Remember, this is way before COVID right?
• 25:07
  This is way before people ever even thought about working remotely.
• 25:10
  This was, I mean, this was a decade ago.
• 25:14
  And so trying to convince people that this was a thing in the early days was hard.
• 25:20
  It was hard.
• 25:22
  But once they saw the quality of people that we had, once they saw the fact that we were really able to help them.
• 25:29
  When Covid did hit, my clients were rocking and rolling.
• 25:33
  It's kept going.
• 25:34
  There was no, no pause in the service they were able to offer because they were already set up to work remotely.
• 25:41
  They were already had the skills to manage remotely.
• 25:44
  They already, they were so well poised to take advantage for their entrepreneurial journey into post Covid world.
• 25:52
  Right now that we're post Covid, I no longer have the, the, the problem of, well, that can't be done remotely.
• 25:59
  Before COVID it was like, no, I need somebody in the office we really, we, you can't do this remote thing.
• 26:05
  So Covid was really, really good to us and we were poised very, you know, prominently to take advantage of that.
• 26:12
  But really the people who won were my clients.
• 26:15
  They were, they were set, they didn't have a lot of these, these the same issues that a lot of my non clients at the time had.
• 26:23
  Okay, all right.
• 26:24
  And so let's talk a little bit more about Hire Smart.
• 26:26
  Are there certain industries that you, you specialize in or certain employee classes?
• 26:34
  Yes, we service all kinds.
• 26:37
  Everything from breweries to janitorial services to catering companies.
• 26:42
  It doesn't really matter.
• 26:43
  But I only do support positions.
• 26:46
  So what's a support position?
• 26:47
  Right, so administrative work, customer service tasks, accounting support, things to do with sales support, marketing support.
• 26:59
  So there's support roles, so there's really entry level type roles where typically us people have a lot of churn because you can't find, if you can find somebody to fill it, they're not going to stay there more than
• 27:09
  six months because they're going to use that job to hop to something else.
• 27:13
  Whereas my people stick around for a very long time.
• 27:16
  We pay them very well.
• 27:17
  We have full time benefits, we have dental benefits.
• 27:20
  We're rolling out a retirement plan this year that they can, the clients can opt into for less than $22 a pie pay period per person.
• 27:28
  And yet it has a huge impact on their, the stickiness and being able to have people that again, really invested in our clients mission.
• 27:38
  So all of that I think, you know, really kind of makes the difference if that makes sense to you.
• 27:46
  Okay.
• 27:47
  All right.
• 27:47
  And so as you mentioned, we're here in 2025, right.
• 27:50
  And you've got exciting plans, you know, like you said, with the growth of Hire Smart and then so what, what's next for that business?
• 27:59
  Well, I think, you know, really where what's next is.
• 28:03
  Obviously we have a lot of conversations around AI and people think AI is going to take out all my business.
• 28:08
  It's, it's not.
• 28:09
  People still like to deal with humans, but we're looking at AI and how do we incorporate AI into our certification class?
• 28:17
  How do we make sure that we've got people that understand AI and use it appropriately?
• 28:23
  We're looking at what roles are more AI proof than others.
• 28:29
  So I think, you know, I think the first kind of bite out of our business is going to be accounting because I think accounting lends itself to AI fairly easily.
• 28:38
  But some of the other things like that we offer, like receptionist people don't want to Talk to a bot.
• 28:44
  People want to talk to a person.
• 28:46
  I think customer service, I think will change up the level of customer service.
• 28:51
  So, so AI will deal with kind of the routine, kind of run of the mil FAQ questions and then my people will step in when it gets kicked up above that.
• 29:00
  I think, you know, what we offer for executive admin, that's not going to be replaced by AI because people want to have a relationship with their executive admin because it's an extension of the CEO.
• 29:10
  And I think that's going to be something that we focus a lot of our attention and training and certification on.
• 29:17
  I think, again, sales support is another one.
• 29:20
  People like to talk to people when they're buying us or selling a service.
• 29:24
  And so those are, those are some of the things that I think we're going to continue to mature, use AI as a tool, and yet really be able to take it to the next level for, for our clients.
• 29:35
  Okay.
• 29:36
  All right.
• 29:37
  And if people want to get in touch and learn more about Hire Smart and how, how they can potentially work with you, what's the best way that people can reach out to you?
• 29:45
  Well, if people want to schedule a call with me, the easiest way is meet with an dot com.
• 29:50
  That's the way to get on my schedule.
• 29:52
  If you're curious about the services that we provide, it's hire smart virtualemployees.com and they can check us out.
• 29:59
  We have lots of resources, lots of good educational tools in our resource page to encourage people to do that.
• 30:05
  And of course, we're on social media as well.
• 30:08
  Okay, excellent.
• 30:09
  And we'll link all that in the show notes for everyone.
• 30:12
  Well, and thank you so much for taking the time to be here, sharing all this valuable wisdom from your journey and all these insights for the audience.
• 30:19
  We greatly appreciate, appreciate it.
• 30:20
  It's been my pleasure, Dave.
• 30:21
  Thank you for having me.
• 30:22
  And again, I hope to help anybody that's listening in any way that I possibly can.
• 30:27
  All right, and that is all the time we have for now.
• 30:30
  We will see you next time.