The Automation Playbook: How My COO Replaced 45 Employees and Boosted Profitability (Podcast 582)

So many things could have been automated. The recruiting team didn't need to spend too much time collecting information on replica role, right? There's a lot of items like that. And it's just really getting to understand who was doing what. I'm kind of a nerd on the back end of it all. And so I already knew a lot of these tools, workflows, automations. For me, it was just like, okay, here's my bucket of problems. Here's my shelf of solutions. Then it's pull pulling one off and putting them together.

Our guest today is Somewhere's Chief Operating Officer Ben Sermon. Somewhere used to be called the Support Shepherd, and I first learned about them through Sean Perry on My First Million podcast, which is my favorite podcast out there other than The Second Command. Ben is an experienced operations leader. He excels at spearheading strategic initiatives that drive significant revenue growth and align with the core organizational goals. What that really means is this guy can scale a company. They've gone from about $1 million in revenue a couple years ago to around $25 million this year and expect to hit $50 million next year. His expertise lies in launching and optimizing new programs, seamlessly integrating them to enhance operational efficiency and productivity. He basically can automate the heck out of any business and really get incredible growth. At one point they were up to 220 employees. He got them down to 175, getting rid of 55 people because of optimization and automization and processes. Got huge profitability and scale and growth back into the business, and now they're continuing to add people as they continue to grow. You're going to love his insights into global expansion, into hiring people in multiple markets like the Philippines and Latin America, and also in automating any kind of a business to get rapid growth. We'll see you on the inside. You can also watch this episode on our Second in Command Podcast YouTube channel. So Ben, welcome to the Second in Command Podcast. Thank you.

Thanks for having me.

Yeah, looking forward to learning from you today and I'm really looking forward to hearing about some of the kind of rapid growth you're going through. Just before we went live, you gave me a couple of key numbers that I'll get into in a second. But before we dive into the growth and how you've navigated the growth, why don't you just tell us a little bit about the company Somewhere, what you guys focus on, kind of what's your reason for being, and then we'll dive in from there.

We just recently rebranded Somewhere.com. Formerly we were Sport Shepherd. We are a global headhunting agency. Helping companies find great talent somewhere in the world. And that's why we've ended up rebranding as well as somewhere.com.

So the supportshepherd.com, I mean, when I first heard about the brand, I won't exactly say why at this certain point, but I'm going to bring them up in a second. But your founder has a pretty good megaphone and was able to talk about it a lot. Why did they change the name over? Was it because— was it to clarify, or was something confusing about the name Support Shepherd? What was it there?

Mostly to clarify, there's a lot of people who, obviously the domain was supportshepard.com. The branded name was Shepard. It never really stuck. You got legal agreements that said Support Shepard LLC. And of course, just the constant typos of Shepard. I've seen every variation of Shepard. So that was really a big driver. It's just like, let's get single word domain. Let's rebrand to where people can easily remember us, whether they like the name or not. Uh, this definitely stuck and we have seen, uh, because of that, a, a change in our business. But ultimately it was just confusion. Yeah. We had to get that corrected before we continued to keep, to keep growing.

It's interesting 'cause when I first heard about the brand and heard about the business, I love the idea, I love the business model, and I didn't love the name and I wasn't sure what I didn't love about the name. And I, I kept throwing that to the side saying it doesn't really matter, they'll be successful on their own. It's kind of like, you know, what's a Volvo or what's, you know, why Apple? You know, like Ford was a guy's name. Like it doesn't really matter. But I like that you have done the rebrand. So you got involved in the organization a year ago. You came in originally, you were a contractor. What were you doing at the time? And then how have you migrated so quickly into the COO role?

I actually, I started back in November 2021 as a contract just with Marshall to help him streamline processes. At the time, everything was running out of a Google Sheet, Airtable. It was very rough, if you will. So I helped come in and like, well, let's just uncover this mess that you have and start building out some processes, start implementing tools, so on and so forth. Uh, that led into just more of a growth role. Uh, and then later on, I was basically at the point of like, hey, I think I've done everything I can do for you as a contract. I'm going to move on. Marshall came back, said, hey, how about you become our COO and run this thing full time and just take the reins and do what you need to do to, you know, continue to grow this thing as any CEO would probably do. Have less day-to-day, just tell me what's good, what's bad. And that's what I did. So I came on as COO and just continued to grow the business.

You joined the organization kind of doing that consulting work around projects and SOPs, and that was right in the middle of COVID or towards, I guess, the tail end of COVID Or no, I guess right in the middle of COVID really. So I'm sure it was a remote role at the time.

Right. Yeah. And the whole, the whole business is remote.

Okay. It's still remote to this day.

Yep.

Was it because you were able to kind of in a meritocracy style way, you know, prove your value from the work that you were doing that got you noticed? Or how were you able to get noticed when, or did you even worry about getting noticed when you were just doing contract work?

Yeah, I really wasn't concerned about being noticed. Uh, also I have a government business, uh, contracts, a few other investments here and there. But it was more so just a, Marshall's actually lives 10 minutes from me. So while we're remote, we're not, the two of us are not remote. It was friends through DM type of situation. One thing led to another. I was most definitely never concerned with full-time role or moving on. But to your point, it was very much just seeing what was happening to the company, all because of the changes that I was making, conversations that I was having, tools I was putting in place. Point where it's like, hey, this guy doesn't know what he's doing, just let him run with it.

Do you think there was some value though to being able to spend that time in person, the fact that you were 10 minutes away? And based on your answer, do you look for to try to hire some people where you can have more FaceTime than we're able to do just via Zoom?

I do think there's value in belly to belly, if you will. I don't think there— that it's necessary on a day-to-day basis. I would say that when I— whenever I did meet with him, As any CEO is busy, we got a lot done in a short period of time, just in person within a 2-hour window. Uh, like, here's, here's all, all metrics that are happening. Here's what we need to do. Here's where we're going. Uh, we would iron it out there, right? In terms of people that we are hiring now, that is not a criteria by any means that you need to be here. The majority of our leadership, if all, have no problem jumping on a plane to go anywhere in this world to meet with someone. Majority of our teams are in Philippines and LATAM. Now we are continuing to, to grow into other regions. Um, and also hiring here in the States. Uh, we have hired account managers stateside just to be able to have boots on the ground because again, coming back to this village belly, uh, clients do want to meet with somebody there. Those clients still do exist and they're very valuable clients. So for us to have somebody locally to fly or you can even drive over to our clients, uh, is meaningful.

I'm going to ask you a little bit about Latin America and some of the kind of the ups and downs that you've had along the way, but I'm curious around some of the funding and how you've gotten to where you are. I heard about Support Shepherd through Sean Perry, who I guess is one of your investors or minority partner, one of the founders of the My First Million podcast with Sam Parr. And he didn't stop talking about you guys for the better part of a year. Was he part of the initial funding or have you done a couple of funding rounds and was he part of the growth because of the mega or was there more strategic than just one guy talking a lot on a podcast?

So the points there, uh, first is the whole company was bootstrapped by Marshall. Uh, there was no investment. I can't really talk about the details of, you know, any of our partners' investment structures. The real capital came in obviously recently with Nick's acquisition. That, that obviously has the investor money. Um, but until that point, we were fully bootstrapped. And in terms of the growth, you Yes, Sean and Nick both attributed to a lot of the business that we could work with. The processes and tools that we put in place is what really made all those leads shine. Nick was actually a referral partner, just kind of ad hoc with Marshall prior to me joining as a contractor. And he was sending a good amount of business and a lot of that business simply wasn't getting quotes. And this was, let's go back again. Working out of spreadsheets and having teams just not really on the same page with the process. Once we course corrected that, we saw immediate uptick in the amount of business that was being closed, the customer satisfaction rate improving, uh, and of course driving down metrics one after another. Uh, things that I think most people wouldn't have even thought to be a metric in a recruiting business definitely became part of overall success. And then having, of course, these two mega bombs, well, three mega bombs. Being able to just immediately pipe in leads was definitely tremendous to growth and still is today.

Do you know roughly how many referral partners you have? Is that still a part of your core growth strategy? And how did you manage your referral partners?

They were, I would say, the two prime referral partners at the time. As the business grew, we added a few more. They never really stuck. We never really had a program in place. Here recently, we have brought on a CRO. And with that, we've built out an actual referral program. We now have about 4,000 referral partners who are sending us various amounts of business. And that's anywhere from, you know, a couple of leads a month all the way up to a couple hundred. They're all, I would say, more of that like micro-influencer. They have their own newsletters, their own little podcasts, so on and so forth. But they still add a tremendous amount of value. We also have referral partners who have no platform. They just have a very big personal network. And you see that a lot with the real estate business, construction business, finance. They just have a huge network and they're all sharing good ideas with each other. And one of them is you can hire somebody in Philippines, LATAM, South Africa, wherever to do a lot of the roles that you're needing to fill. And those people send us, you know, they obviously want to get paid or credit towards their future hires. And so they send us the referral that way.

What percentage do you pay your referral partners?

We have a tiered platform, but generally it starts off at, you know, when you first get started, about $250 cash payment. Then we do work that up to 15% of the business and then for, of the deal closed once it's completed. And in some various cases, up to 25%.

So there's a good little revenue stream there for the micro-influencers, the business people, coaches.

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Where do you find them? Do you guys have like a formal affiliate manager who's out there looking to bring these people on? Are you driving it through ClickBank? Without giving away like everything, that'll be the last question I ask around affiliates.

It is purely organic. People ask us if they can join. We haven't reached out in a mass way to bring on partners. Some of the larger commission structures obviously come through Nick and Sean's network. Where they see alignment. But other than that, there is no actual, we don't use ClickBank for any of that, any of those tools to drive those signups.

I wanted to ask you a little bit about Latin America. I mean, the trend 15 years ago to the last, maybe 5 years ago was everything was Philippines, Philippines, India, India, Philippines, Philippines. And then all of a sudden it was Eastern Europe and Latin America. Um, people now talking a little bit about South Africa. What was the switch like to starting to hire people in Latin America? Clearly, I mean, there's great time zones. For that. Have you noticed any, any other benefits other than the time zones?

Yes, there is. Not only the time zone, we have a lot of companies that need bilingual Spanish speakers or even Portuguese, uh, so going into these regions is key for them. Uh, logistics business has a lot of a huge need for Spanish speaking, so going even into like Mexico City, it's great business for us. And there's also just, I would say, a strong talent bank of finance and engineering roles that we could find throughout Latin America.

So finance and engineering in Latin America too. It's interesting. It seems like the skill base has started to catch up with the demand and we're switching now.

Why?

But why are we switching off the Philippines then? Is it, did we absorb all the best labor over there? Was, was the cost of talent starting to grow, to go up, or was it just the time zones?

I think they're part of it is time zones. A lot of there's a lot more strategy going into, at least from what we're doing, there's more strategy going into placing talent. If you have a 24-hour operation, we can actually, we can strategically place LatAm talent, Philippine talent to get you a 24-hour operation going. If you're needing something that's more SOP-based, obviously the Philippines is still great. If you're needing more of that critical thinking, I think a lot of that starts to fall into Latin America. And then there is one other little bit. Uh, if you have a visa in Latin America, you can come to America. And this kind of goes back to what we talked about earlier, the value of being in person. There are companies who say, hey, we want to still be able to fly people in for a quarterly retreat, quarterly meeting, whatever. Uh, it's much easier, cheaper to fly somebody from Latin America into California or Florida, wherever, uh, to meet with your stateside team, uh, versus somebody in the Philippines or even, you know, Eastern Europe. South Africa.

You mentioned that, you know, some of the funding happened with the acquisition. I mean, when the company was sold, was it a full sale or was it a substantial part of the company that was sold?

Substantial part.

How did that change the culture, or should I say, what changed culturally after that acquisition? Was there like, did the infusion of cash or the new owner change? How did things change and how did the team need to adapt?

For us, nothing really changed. And the reason why is because Nick was already so much part of business prior to acquiring a large stake. The team was already used to working with him, knew his work standards. He worked very well with Marshall at the time on collaborating on a lot of our projects and solutions. So nothing truly changed in terms of, you know, morale or anything else of that nature.

So the growth from the million dollars in revenue to about $50 million, I think is what you said currently, that's over what period? Over 3 years?

Yeah. So we're on track for picking the future. I think this year will be about close to $25 million all said and done. But that is since, yeah, 3 years.

That's pretty substantial growth. How many employees roughly were involved in the company when you got there 3 years ago?

When I started, there was close to 220. Obviously we, we, at the time, a lot of bodies were used instead of processes. So we've trimmed down the headcount, got the processes working, automation working, brought that down closer to 100. And then we've been scaling back up with proper talent, different regions. A lot of, a lot of our businesses change. We were hyper-focused on eAble in the Philippines before. So everybody was in the Philippines. Now we are global, uh, and we are bringing on recruiting talent that has experience hiring anywhere in the world, uh, regardless of where they're based. And so that, that changes our business a lot in terms of the operations, but also what we can offer to clients. Uh, if you come on and say, hey, I want to hire in America, I want to hire in Latin America, I want to hire in South Africa, we have multiple, uh, recruiters on deck ready to go who can place, who can start screening and place talent anywhere in this world.

We, at our last COO Alliance event that we had at MIT, we had a group of about 55 COOs from all over the world meet at MIT for 2.5 days and another event coming up in September. But our last meeting, we talked a lot about automations and processes and optimization of work. And for you to take a company from 220 people down to 100 and then kind of growing it back up, even if these were 120 people offshore at $30,000 a year, that's $3 million in savings. Like that's, that's a lot of money that is saved that drops to the bottom line. A lot of gross margin that is saved. What were some of the systems and automations that allowed you to do that? Can you walk us through maybe the top 2 or 3 that come to mind?

I'd say most, most of it had fallen into the sales side of moving deals through. There were no automations in terms of communication, monitoring activity of deals. It was all just kind of at the time relying on the front, frontline to make contact when needed. Uh, so one of the big ones was just putting processes in place that said, hey, every 2 days there's no communication, uh, reach out with the client. Very, very simple stuff that was not in place. Uh, but then also taking out elements of, for example, the billing process, the signature process, tying that all in. Uh, we do have 2 sides of this pipeline, right? We have the client side, we have the candidate side, both our clients, and we have to sell to both. Uh, so one of our big processes was merging our signature system in with our billing system, in with our ATS, in with our CRM, which is HubSpot. Uh, and so we've, whereas the deal moved to go to the signature, all that was automated. Once the signature happened, the deposit happened, also automated and moved the deal to a recruiting ticket. A lot of the parts there were automated in terms of, uh, getting the necessary information. for the job itself and then automating that into creating the job posts. And then at that point, that's when the recruiter would be hands-on, uh, to source a lot of the candidates. Uh, obviously a lot of automation in place as well for the talent pool based off of what we have on the job to automatically start sourcing people faster and better than, uh, multiple, having multiple people rotate through different jobs, uh, to get there. At that point, like the whole, the whole business, like there is a point in, most people have asked like, why haven't you just automated the whole business? Right? End of the day, people still want to talk to somebody. They still want that like white glove approach, if you will. And they also want to know that you're in good hands of somebody who's talented rather than just a bunch of automations.

Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, there was so much that you saved on that automation. I'm impressed so much of it came from the sales side of the business too. It almost speaks to the point that any company today that is not leveraging this kind of automated workflow is out of business. Like they can't compete. And it's funny that you mentioned HubSpot. I was going to ask you if HubSpot was a CRM when you mentioned the, you know, if we haven't talked to the client in 2 days to kind of ping them and get back in touch. So was any of the software that you used more of a pain than it was worth? And how do you identify which software tools to use versus the, which ones to stay the heck away from?

I think for us on that part was more on the ATS side. Since we are in the recruiting business, a lot of the ATS systems are really intended more for the internal recruiting teams of a company, right? So your Greenhouse, Lever, you know, Workable, so on and so forth. Those really aren't catered to us. So we use them and there's a lot of hiccups. We had to unfortunately build back up from a lot of them. But now as this business is changing, as the world is changing and more people are hiring remote, obviously there's a lot of recruiting agencies in our space now. There are CRMs and ATSs that are popping up. We do utilize Recruit CRM, which is entirely built for our business. We have very custom rules. Fields, data points, processes built into that system. And it's married in with HubSpot. So we were fortunate to be able to have boiled it down to two systems. Unfortunately, we did have to go through, I think, three or four different ATSs before we found our crown jewel.

What does an ATS stand for?

Applicant tracking system. Where the job goes out, the candidates come in. We source in We constantly source to have our own talent pool, which also gives us a little bit more of a unique edge.

Like, it's not a new idea. This is an idea that's been around for a long time. And there were even some really strong brands that were already in this space. What the hell were you thinking? Nobody wakes up in the morning and says, let me go into this mature space that already has a couple of major brand leaders in place. Like, why did they pick this category? Was it, was there so much mismanagement or so much opportunity or?

I think it was so much opportunity. Um, this is really a better question for Marshall, but him and his original co-founder Jomer, um, it was Jomer's idea. And he, he at the time was working out of a, uh, BPO. Um, the majority of people obviously in Manila have a BPO job, uh, they're traveling 2 hours into work. He addressed like, hey, here's all the issues of trying to work in Manila and here's how everything can change with remote work. And The reason why Marshall or how Marshall met Jomer was because of one of the businesses of e-commerce that he was running at the time. And Jomer was assigned to, you know, he found him through the internet. And he was helping him out on a lot of his bookkeeping, customer service, things of that nature, fully remote across the world. He really made a case to his point of like, look how well I helped you grow your e-commerce business here in Manila. Imagine what we can do for other people with other companies fully remote. And then you layer on just at the right time, COVID, the right bad time, COVID happens and all of a sudden now everybody has to be remote. And that really opened the door for changing a lot of this and bringing on the idea of like, hey, let's just go find people for maybe smaller companies. Maybe they're just a founder and you see what sticks. And like I said, the business has changed dramatically since they first started. Marshall did a great job of kind of being a salesperson. Along with Jomar, right when they first got started, of his own network. Hey, I've hired Jomar, look what he's done for my e-commerce businesses. We can find you similar people to do the same for your e-commerce businesses or your, you know, holding company, your family office, whatever. And they were all just EA roles and they started making it work and it was, you know, getting more progressive bookkeeping. I think there's a lot of room in this space for competition and everybody kind of has, you know, their unique little differences here and there on how they, how they provide that service.

It doesn't sound like the original idea was to create a $50 or $100 million company though, either, was it? It was more—

it definitely was not.

It seemed like it was more that there was an opportunity and, you know, we can capitalize this opportunity and probably have a good lifestyle business and replace our 2-hour commutes. Is that kind of the case? How did you as a company identify the systems to start automating? Who was kind of the lead on this?

That was me. That was just me getting into the weeds, having conversations with everybody at the time who was working with the company, understanding what they were doing, and really just very rudimentary stuff. Like, what are you doing? What does your day-to-day look like? And just start pulling all these pieces out and start automating accordingly from there. You know, you need a full team to, you know, handle the billing aspect. You didn't need to have Slow down the sales team with signatures. So many things could have been automated. The recruiting team didn't need to spend too much time collecting information on Replica role, right? There's a lot of, a lot of items like that. And it's just really getting to understand who was doing what. I'm kind of a nerd on the back end of it all. So I already knew a lot of these tools, workflows, automations. For me, it was just like, okay, here's my bucket of problems. Here's my shelf of solutions. Then it's pulling one off and putting them together.

Is there a process that you go through when you look for, you know, things to automate? Like, are you going through like a value stream mapping? Are you putting it through, you know, the workout process from GE? What are you doing that allows you to see this stuff?

Or is it just for— For this business, it was really just going through the knowns and unknowns, right? And I think what really made us grow the most is uncovering what we didn't know that we didn't know. and that was all operational based. You know, there's a lot that nobody knew that they were working harder. Uh, it was really that simple. And that's, you know, to your point as well, like this isn't a very unique business, right? This is all just finding problems and creating solutions. And the majority of that just comes like uncovering what we don't know that we don't know. Um, and solving from there.

It's interesting. It's almost like a fly trying to get out the window where it's just going to keep banging its head on the window until it gets out the window and it ends up dead on the windowsill. Like we're going to keep trying harder. We're going to keep trying harder. We're going to like, and then you just came and looked and went, well, there's a door over here. Let's just go out the door. I'm frustrated for a lot of companies that their management team doesn't have the skills to manage leaders. I started a course called Invest in Your Leaders just to give people the, the core skills they need to actually grow and lead people. And one of those skills is around hiring. But it feels like every early stage manager's solution to every problem is hire more people. And that's, that's really never the solution, right? The solution is often saying no, stopping what we're doing and then kind of automating and optimizing the workflows. Do you lean in that direction naturally? Like, do you, do you lean against hiring more people and lean towards automations?

Yeah. When I first came along, that was the first thing out of my mouth. I'll stop hiring people. And the immediate answer back was, no, we need to just keep hiring people. Or fortunately, I was able to persuade them in to stop hiring. And then also reducing, uh, as I started to see like, oh, this stuff works, right? Uh, and once you put the right processes and automation in place, then you can resume hiring, making sure you're putting the right people, um, in the seats to operate whichever process, uh, needs to be operated on.

And I don't remember if you said this before we went live or prior to going live, but you mentioned you got about 175 people currently. And I think you said the goal is to get to around 500. I don't imagine that it's a goal to have 500 employees. Is that more of the forecast of where you expect that you're going to get to because of growth? Right.

It's the forecast based on the business that we are bringing in and the opportunities, which I can't dive into those too much, that expand our business offering.

Now, would your, would your kind of like private goal to have less people than more? Like, do you?

Oh, absolutely.

Yeah.

Okay. Okay. For sure.

I like, I like humans, but you know, the pain in the ass factor of people is just a lot higher than processes. It feels like at times too.

Yeah, absolutely. That's, that's where the CEO comes in. Um, I think he's very, he's very forward on empathy. Uh, so we can do more people, get more people in and make more people happy and have people doing enough, but not too much. Um, I'm probably, I can probably end up being too aggressive and like more, more, more, more, you know, to the point of like, okay. When are you going to burn out?

Michael Gerber wrote a book called The E-Myth or The E-Myth Revisited. And in the book, he talked about that people don't fail, systems fail. When you notice that someone did something wrong or someone dropped a ball, is that usually a flag for you that we can automate that system or automate a process? Do you look at it that way?

The other part of that is like how many people had to get in to resolve this situation? That's probably the biggest red flag, right? That's a red flag and, you know, smoke show. We got to fix something here because why, why have multiple people, even across multiple orgs, uh, stop doing what they're doing to find a solution here?

Yeah, I was at an event, uh, 10 years ago and Ryan Holiday, who's now become a very prolific author. At the time he'd only written Trust Me, I'm Lying, but he was standing talking in a small group we were in and he said, you know, there's only 4 reasons why a company even has customer service people. It's because the product sucks, service sucks, we overset expectations. Or the FAQs on our website suck, but you can actually put a goal in place to reduce customer service people down to almost zero if you fix the actual root problems and root causes. Does somewhere.com have that kind of a mindset as well, is that customer service is kind of a bandaid for broken systems?

The best part of me try to instill into everybody, and this comes from my dad, I'm sure you got from somebody, but treat everybody's treat all your business as if it's your very own company, right? And so our teams, they are hiring people for these companies. And so treat, treat everybody as if you were going to be the employee inside of this company with the person that you were finding to hire. And that changes mindset a lot. Um, it does, you know, drive that empathy mark, uh, of understanding what needs to be done and finding the best talent and not just saying, hey, cool, you want us to go find you somebody? Here's a bunch of people, which one do you want to hire? It's truly having conversations with candidates, making sure the candidate is having a great experience because it's almost a blind date in some cases for the candidate. They have really no idea for a good portion of the time who it is that they're applying for. And so it is our job to make sure that the candidates are very excited about what they're applying for, selling the company to the candidate. And then of course, selling the candidate to the client. And the less selling that we have to do, which is Honestly, it's monitored by how many contacts we've made at certain points of the stage shows that like, hey, we did a good job of presenting very top talent to the client because the client didn't really have to go back and forth too much to determine who was going to be the next candidate. An even better metric for us is when we see a client say, hey, you presented me 3, I wanted 1, but I want to hire all 3. We did a real good job at that time, right? And that's, we started to see more and more of that again once we got into this mindset of like every client's business is our business. We work for the client, we are the client. Pretend you're the owner of the company. Who do you want to come in to help you grow this business? And again, not just focus on this is my job to go find candidates for people and place them for a customer.

It's interesting, like a lot of what you're saying is the exact proper perspective to have for a company that you truly want to scale, but, and you're doing it in the right way, you're balancing it with actually getting shit done. I think so often people will sit and pontificate on all these questions, but they don't actually get it done. You tend to, I think it feels like you view the business from this perspective and you drop in and kind of get it done. What's the urgency that's within you on this stuff? Is it just because the growth is predicating or like is making urgency happen? Or do you have some feeling like, you know, we need to get this done. That's just naturally a part of you.

I think it's just naturally a part of me. I think it started to naturally become a part of everybody else in the company, which is a good thing. Now there's, there's less communication and more of just getting it and getting what needs to be done, done and doing the best that we could possibly do. Obviously, balls are dropped so we can look back on situations, but we have a client guarantee and we've seen that dramatically go down. Because that's went down, I extended the client guarantee from a 90-day window to a 6-month window because we're that confident that we're going to place the right talent for you and that you won't have to change anything that you've done. So that's, you know, I think it just boils down right back to treat everybody as if it's your own company.

All right. How about yourself day to day? What do you focus on in terms of your day to day as a leader? And then how do you stay on the same page when the company is growing and iterating so quickly. How do you stay on the same page with the CEO or the vision of the organization?

New CEO in place, new CRO, new head of marketing. We have a lot of people new in. I was carrying a lot of weight on my shoulder for the longest time. So we are still going through some learning curves of how often do we need to talk? What do we need to talk about? What do we need to move on first? Ultimately for me, it's the morning start off of checking all the automated messages that have come through on the business that's closing forecasts. Of what's going to close here soon, and then touching base with all of our GMs in multiple regions. How are the teams doing? What projects are lagging? Why are they lagging? And find those solutions as needed. And then of course, regular meets with CRO, CEO of where we are aligned in terms of our KPIs, headcount, the business coming in, the business going out, where are we converting.

When a company is growing this quickly and you're the COO, you can tend to get sucked into every single aspect of the business, every decision, every meeting. How do you orbit that giant hairball? How do you stay away from the, the, you know, all the minutia and all the stuff that should be somebody else's job? How do you decide what to say yes to with your time?

That, that all boils back down to our general managers, uh, for each region. Uh, they keep me out of a lot of meetings. Um, our chief of staff as well, she does a phenomenal job, who's based in the Philippines. Um, she knows when to step in, when to, when to step out. And so decision-making is off often made by people who've just learned through myself, who are in these GM seats. And even also, even our recruiting managers know what decisions to make based off of what's happening on a certain account, certain client, candidate, whatever. They've all done a great job. All right.

I want you to go back to the, uh, the 22-year-old Ben Sherman and give yourself some advice. What advice would you give the younger you that you know to be true today, but you wish you'd known when you were only 22?

Be more resilient, uh, and don't be afraid of ambiguity. Sometimes that's— there is no answer. You have to go find the answer, right? Don't be afraid, just go find the answer.

Yeah, I love it. Ben Sermon, the COO for somewhere.com, formerly Support Shepherd. Thanks so much for sharing with us on the Second Command podcast. Super appreciative of your time today.