246: Hiring - Building a Better Team with Moses Balian

Hey.

Hey, wonderful listener. You are listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. Thanks for making the show a part of your day today. Before we get into the episode, we just want to acknowledge this interesting, uncertain time that we're living in at the moment. It's really tough navigating the news, the restrictions, and all of the unknowns. And as for what you can expect from us during this time, it's going to be business as usual. We're lucky in that we're used to working remotely. Our team actually spans three different time zones in two different countries, so not much is going to have to change. But we acknowledge that times are tough right now, and we're here to support your blogging and work goals however we can. One of those ways we hope, is with this podcast. And today's episode is perfect for those who are ready to take an important step with their business. Hiring. When you're ready to hire some help, you're bound to have some questions. Should you hire them as a contractor or as an employee? Do you need an employee handbook? What about benefits? Well, that's what Moses is here to talk about today. He'll talk you through those initial decisions using a PEO that's a professional employer organization producing important tax and employee documents and how employee benefits work. It's a really interesting conversation, and if you're at the point where you could use another set of hands to work on your business, we think this will help you navigate your next steps. So without any further ado, Bjork, take it away.

Moses, welcome to the podcast.

Hi, Bjork. Thanks so much for having me.

Yeah, I'm really excited to talk to you about a specific area that we've mentioned a few different times on the podcast. We hear a lot of people bring this up, and there's a lot of confusion around what's involved with the hiring process. And the great news is you deal with that a lot because you work for and you're kind of an evangelist for a company called justworks. Can you explain what justworks is and kind of the basic concept of a peo?

Happy to. So justworks is, as you said, a peo, which means a professional employer organization. So you can think of it like a payroll provider, but oh, so much more because a PEO will also provide companies with access to health insurance benefits, really assist with the compliance aspects of that and running payroll. And even more robust peos like justworks will have an HR consultancy arm where you can talk to a certified HR expert, get help on issues like an employee's decline in performance and you need to put them on a plan or even talk about termination or you're building a parental leave policy, something like this. So it's really like an all in one employment solution to manage your tax and compliance and HR obligations and processes. And so I'm a big fan of the model. Objectively. I came from an in house HR background, as do most of the HR consultants that we have. And so I had never been co employed by a PEO before. But you or a lot of the listeners have probably heard of adp. We're a very, very similar model of that. They also have a PEO product and so we like to talk about ourselves as sort of the ADP for startups.

Got it. Yeah, love. Actually how I heard about justworks, there's some startups that I was tracking along with and they were talking about some of the systems they use and processes and tools and they mentioned justworks. And it was at a perfect time because it was right when we were starting to build a team and I was like, oh, I can do this, I can do paperwork. It doesn't matter if we have two or three people in different states. And then suddenly it was like, oh my gosh, the amount of stuff that I had to read through and process and set up and it was all so much and also different. Especially for us as a remote team. It was all, every state was different. And so it took me like two weeks until I was like, nope, I definitely cannot do this. I need to find a solution. That's how we came across justworks. And you said one of the things you said was kind of interesting and was something that I had to learn about it was this idea of co hiring. What does that mean and why is that co employment? What does that mean and why is that important for people to understand in regards to what a PEO does?

Totally. So one thing that's funky about a peo and we have to explain to the employees of new customers a lot is if you are a customer of justworks, you work for Food Blogger Pro, who is a customer of justworks, your paycheck, your employees paycheck is actually going to come from JustWorks. It's going to say JustWorks Employment Group LLC. And so we are a co employer and that means different things in a lot of scenarios for payroll. It means like we're the ones running your payroll, but completely in line with the decisions and business practice and compensation protocol that you, our customer, has established. So we execute on your behalf in a lot of ways and running payroll is one of those things. The reason that's so beneficial is we have a ton of eggs in the basket or what's rats in the race or whatever it is as far as.

Rats in the race carrying their eggs in a basket as far as making.

Sure everything goes smoothly and is reported correctly and is compliant. We really talk about ourselves as collab with our customers to make sure everything's on the up and up and we're following the rules and making your employees happy and delivering a payroll experience that they are either have no problem with or ideally are even a little delighted by sometimes.

Yes, totally. One of the things that I love about a company or a solution like justworks is it solves a problem in a way that I love to solve problems, which is finding people or solutions or groups that really specialize in an area. And that's kind of all that they do. And in, in our world, there's examples of people who do that in advertising and they really understand advertising. They live and breathe advertising and we want to work with them because they're going to be able to come in and see ways to more effectively have ads on a website or an email expert. And for justworks, that's it's hiring and it's hr. It's people who live and breathe this all day long. So when I have a notice from, you know, the state of Minnesota about our whatever tax rate being adjusted, I can scan it in and say, justworks team, do you need to know this? What do we need to do with this? And it's a familiar thing, so it's been a great tool for us. It's super helpful and it's also great to have you on the podcast because you're able to speak to a lot of the questions that I know listeners and members of Food Blogger Pro have around building a team. Because eventually people get to the point where they realize we can't do it all. And we all have kind of this startup phase where we start as solopreneurs and then we want to start to bring on help. So let's talk about that early stage when you're first thinking about hiring an employee. And maybe that word should be a little bit different because there's employee or there's contractor. Can you talk about the difference between those two things? You bet.

You bet. Bjork. It's a huge question and it's a common question and there's rarely a simple answer. Disclaimer up front. This is probably the most compliance heavy I'm going to get throughout the course of this interview. But the distinctions are really important and awesome and usually more than people want to think about, but oh, so crucial that you do. So the fundamental difference between an employee and a contractor is a shortcut is kind of like an employee derives out of a common sense notion of what an employee is. That's like what the employment law background of it is. Actually the flsa, the Fair Labor Standards act, that establishes like minimum wage on the federal level and overtime and things like that defines an employee as someone who is employed by an employer. And we all learned in elementary school that it's not such good practice to use the word in the definition of the word. And so there's been a lot of like case law and precedents to extract exactly what that means as opposed to a contractor. Now, a shortcut to thinking about it is a contractor is going to look and act and feel more like a vendor. So the word contractor is thrown around a lot and it can mean different things depending on what angle you're coming at it. But basically like say I need the paper products for my copy machine. I'm going to go to Dunder Mifflin and asked them to source my paper. Now, Dunder Mifflin is a contractor for my company. Even though it's a totally established company, they have dozens or hundreds of employees. They're in the business of paper products. They're one of my contractors. That's why the same context when you talk about someone's a federal contractor, has a federal contract, they are contracted by the federal government, they are a contractor for the federal government. So sometimes though, businesses like Justworks or smaller businesses or huge businesses like the PwC or KPMG will engage contractors that are individuals that kind of just so happen to be individuals. And that's where you have to be really careful as far as making the designation. And when you do that, it's fundamentally going to come down to degree of control. Right? Because when I talk to Dunder Mifflin, they have all their own business practices. They source their materials, they have their standards for making the paper products or packaging them, for shipping them. They do all that. I'm just paying for the end result. And a contractor who's an individual is sort of the same thing. So in that way, a contractor is usually going to be provide services that are more ancillary to your, to your business. Their output is going to look a little bit more like a final product or a sort of tangible output as opposed to someone who you expect to be sitting at their desk from 9 to 5 and working on whatever you assign them. So here's an example. Justworks has this beautiful mural in our office of the New York skyline and employees being happy and all that. And so we hired a contractor to paint that mural. We paid him, let's say, 800 bucks. I'm sure it was way more than that, but he billed us for 800 for materials and labor and we wrote him that check. Now obviously he's not an employee, but if justworks were in the business of painting murals and we had mural painters on staff, now all of a sudden we have to think about is this an employee or is this a contractor? So vendor versus somebody who is permanently engaged with you is a good way to start thinking about it.

Yeah, that's interesting. An example for the work that we do, we have a designer who we work with that we consider to be a contractor. And there'll be kind of sprints where we'll work with him quite a bit. We'll have a project that we're doing and there's a deliverable, but then we'll have this gap of, you know, four months and there might be one or two things that we kind of ask him to take a look at and to help out with. And then there's another kind of sprint of projects that we're doing. He, his name is John, lives in a renovated Airstream and travels around with his family and like has his own equipment, has all his own, you know, software. And so in that way he's helping us. He's working for us, but kind of disconnected from what we're doing in terms of the day to day team dynamic versus we have somebody on staff that we just brought on as, as a team member, an employee, and she's helping out with some writing, she's coming into the office once a week or twice a week, has these real specific deliverables. There isn't necessarily an end to that. And so she's an employee. So if people are wondering how do I, you know, they're thinking about making that first hire or maybe they have a team and they want to make sure that they're doing it right. How do you do that? Like is there some type of questionnaire or test or would you say reach out to an HR professional and talk to them about it? Any advice for that?

I would talk to someone who's done these sort of classifications before, for sure. Don't hesitate to reach out. Also don't hesitate to make people employees. I know there's the barrier to entry, which isn't a huge barrier, but you're writing an offer letter, you've got to have them fill out an i9 and they bring in their passport or other acceptable documents to go through that. And then you think of new hires. Okay. There's orientation, whereas a contractor relationship is much more touch and go. It's simple, it's more transactional. And you just have to make sure you fall on the right side of that line. So there are not to get too into the weeds. But there are tests under the, you know, the Department of Labor has a test, the IRS has a test, and you should look at those. But in all fairness, they're pretty hard to figure out for non experts when you're first looking at it. So one helpful thing can be exactly what you described, Bjork, as far as those two individuals sort of the symptoms precipitating out of the relationship. So. Right. A contractor is much more commonly going to use their own equipment. That's right. This is an area where the employer isn't controlling them. They set their own hours. They might work from home, which is not a determining factor, but have a project that could they're completing for you and they do it on their own terms. And maybe they have contractors also more likely to have more customers or more people, more businesses for whom they perform work. And so they're juggling all these things and prioritizing their workflow on their own versus an employee is sort of at your beck and call a little bit. Right. As far as what projects you delegate to them, maybe they're not 100% sure what they're working on, but they're coming in and being assigned something to work on that day. And especially at smaller companies, we're wearing a lot of different hats. So that's another litmus test. A contractor is going to be definitively wearing one or few hats like a designer. I am a designer who does design. That's my product that my output that you're buying from me versus an employee is going might flit around and do all sorts of different things. They might have specialties, but they'll help out where they can because they're sort of tied to you as an employee. So the penalties for this for getting it wrong are pretty steep. A big thing is employees should be offered health insurance benefits. Contractors are not implicated as far as health insurance. So a lot of companies are compelled to make people contractors because it usually is cheaper. But that's not the way the cookie crumbles. As far as employment Law and case law is concerned. So like the other penalties can be steep. Like for example, if you've got a contractor on site a lot, you probably don't have workers comp insurance coverage for them for when they get hurt on the job. And so if they were to and then there's a claim made, you might be liable for the costs associated with their injury and back pay, unlike the insurance that you should have had from the beginning. Also, contractors can't avail themselves of like non discrimination laws. In a lot of places in New York where I'm sitting, only recently have contractors even been protected against sexual harassment from employees. And so these distinctions are super important where basically if something goes wrong and a contractor should have been an employee and should have been entitled to certain benefits or protections and this all comes to light, that's going to get walked back pretty far and you could find yourself in some hot water.

And when you say the penalties, that's speaking to if you are somebody's on your team acting as a contractor when in actuality they should be an employee. It doesn't really work the other way around, right?

Oh totally. So it's always, always safer to make someone an employee. You're never going to be scrutinized for that honestly because so this designer that's you know, say like they work with you so much and you want to offer them health insurance benefits and give them a consistent paycheck, by all means you can bring them on and have them in the office as an employee or work from home as an employee. So it's always safer to err on the side of making someone an employee. For sure. For sure.

Got it. So let's say that you're interested in getting started out. Maybe it seems a little bit intimidating to actually go through some of this stuff. Can you start with somebody as a contractor and switch to an employee status? What does that look like in terms of let's say somebody's looking to make their first hire, should that be an employee? If somebody's coming on in that capacity, that is an employee capacity. Or can you have somebody act as a contractor for a little bit to kind of feel that out and see how it works?

I hear you. We call that temp to hire and that's not going to fly. If somebody's work job duties and the relationship with the business isn't fundamentally changing after that sort of trial or introductory period, then they should have been an employee from the first place. In the first place. So it's no, not appropriate in attempt to Hire or trial period scenario, it doesn't have to do. Permanency is only one of many, many factors to consider when classifying someone as an employee versus a contractor. So yeah, you really should engage them as a W2 from the outset.

And I think that it's reassuring to hear in that it provides some clear guidelines like, hey, if you're going to bring somebody on who you want to stay on as a part of your team to stick around for a while, this is an actual position. It's not just a short term project like a redesign of a website that's going to wrap up after a while or something that would fall clearly in that contractor role, then you want to do it right. You want to go through the process of actually hiring somebody. Which is why a PEO like justworks is great. But there's also some things outside of that that you need to make sure that you're doing. There's offer letters which you mentioned, contracts, agreements. If somebody wants to go through this process of starting to build a team, what are the pieces of the puzzle that they need to have in place along with a PEO like justworks?

Sure, yeah, great question. So the employment relationship is pretty hefty, but less so in the US than a lot of places in the world. And so in 49 states and Washington D.C. the outlier is Montana. Employment is considered to be at will. And so what that means is that in an employment relationship, either the employee or the employer can terminate the relationship at any time, with or without notice, and with or without cause. So unless there's something in your contract that your employer gave you when you got hired that says they need to establish cause and terminate you for only performance or misconduct or something like that, then they can let you go without any warning. And this is sort of the basis for the employment relationship in the US in order to establish that at will employment relationship, you need an offer letter or an employment agreement. And it's not always some hefty duty thing. It can be two pages where you indicate the regular payroll, of course, the compensation, the title, who somebody's reporting to. And some states and localities have a few other requirements that are not too lengthy in nature versus a contractor. For example, you might not even have a written agreement with them. They might send you an invoice and then you write them a check and generate a 1099 at the end of the year. That might be the only paperwork involved. Or you have a really well thought out and baked master service agreement. This might be for, you know, more for a business to business relationship, which again is in effect what you have with a contractor that outlines those sorts of terms. And so where justworks helps with that is, you know, we're keeping tabs on all the multi state employment compliance I mentioned. Some states have offered letter requirements that are more robust. Here I'm sitting in New York, that's one of them, one of the strongest. And so we're going to keep tabs on you and you hire your first New York employee and say, hey, you're used to writing offer letters like this in Minnesota. Well, New York has these extra considerations to keep in mind. And so I can talk about multi state compliance all day and the benefits of a PEO with respect to that. Basically we have employees, co employees in all these places already. And so the fact that we're already established, wherever you want to go, we'll help you. We've been there, we've been there already. And we'll help you wrap things up in a nice little bow and follow the rules.

And it's interesting even, you know, I think of California as an example and we were going through the process of figuring out like, oh yeah, oh, California has some really unique employment laws. And so we have a, when we had a team member in California, we needed to make sure that as a for instance that we had the correct amount of part sick leave offered correlated to the amount of time that the person had worked in a year. And that wasn't, it wasn't an issue for us, but we just didn't know that that existed. And so it was really helpful to know like oh, through justworks they said, this is something you need to be aware of. One of the things that you said that was a learning experience for me early on is this idea of 1099. And when we first started working with people in a contracting relationship and even we had affiliates that we paid through our business where we gave them a commission of sales. Our accountant said, we need to send 1099s to the people that you've paid. And I said, what's a 1099? And little did I know, it's this really important thing. Can you talk about what that is and why it's important for people to understand when you're operating a business that you need to send out these documents at the end of the year for both employees and contractors that you work with?

Yeah, so there's a few different types of 1099s. The ones we're talking about with respect to contractors are called a 1099. Misc. There's others for like, retirement distributions and things like this. But a 1099 misc is what you issue what a business issues to its contractors at the end of the tax year. This goes for individuals and businesses alike. When you've paid them $600 or more throughout the course of the tax year and you send one copy to the irs, you send another copy to the employee, and then they use that to report their income when they file their 1040, their personal income tax return. And so, yeah, this is a requirement. And if you justworks, some people, honestly, some people's favorite feature on justworks is being able to pay contractors and not just employees, and you can schedule all those payments. And as soon as you hit the cross that $600 threshold, we're going to honestly send out your 1099s to those people right away, unless you tell us not to, because that's what's required. People are probably even more familiar with W2s. You know, of course, that's what you get from your employer at the end of the year. That's something any payroll provider is going to do. But yeah, 1099 misc is the W2 of the contractor world.

And it's one of the things that we've really loved. And our process now is anytime that we're paying anybody, whether that be somebody who's on our team or a contractor or vendor that we work with, we're doing all of that through justworks. And like you said, we don't have to worry about that at the end of the year because we know that every payment we've made has gone through that system. And so all of the documents that need to go out will be delivered. And we don't have to comb through our books and say, like, who do we pay? Over $600 this year? Because as the business grows, that becomes more and more people in more, more random places that we're issuing those to, and. And therefore the documents correlated to that. So important concepts. And it goes to point out even further why it's helpful to have somebody who's kind of taking. Keeping an eye on this and managing that process for you. Another thing that's important, as you think about that kind of team building phase that you had mentioned, is this idea of handbooks and policies. For us, this is an area where we're at the point now where for our company, we really need to think about what does it look like to have a solid handbook and how do you do that, what does that look like, and at what point. Should you start to think about that?

You should start to think about a handbook as soon as you've got the bandwidth to do so. Honestly, you know, so fundamentally what a handbook is for is to make sure you are administering your policies and procedures consistently and have consistent treatment of your employees. So it happens all the time that I'll be speaking to a customer on the phone and they've got someone, their first employee who's having a baby, for example, and they say, what do we do? And I say, well, what's your handbook policy like, or what's your handbook? And there's a brief silence there when I say, it's okay. I understand. It's perfectly fine that you don't have a handbook, but this is a great reason to start thinking about it and maybe let's get some of these things down on paper. A parental leave policy is a brilliant and robust example of where, you know, you can't have Jane going out and getting so much leave and so many weeks paid, and then Sally goes out two months later and gets something vastly different. You know, that's gonna get you in trouble, most likely, especially if there's a difference that's not based on a bonafide difference in employment relationship. So again, handbooks are here to establish consistency and just sort of the rule of law at your organization. Think about it as early as you can. Also, it'll head off so many questions that your employees might have for you, like, what's our progressive discipline process? Or even like, you know, where are my health benefits coming from? Why does it say justworks on my paychecks? Coming from Justworks, and then even like, what's our dress code? You know, that's for an HR manager or someone whoever's wearing the HR hat at a small and growing business. Having considering these things in advance will give you something to come back with when you're getting that question and may even preempt the question at all. So while it's a ton of work and getting cracking on a handbook is super intimidating, it's like writing your first paper looking at that blank, blinking cursor on Microsoft Word your freshman year of college, you know, and you're trying to crank out that history paper, that's how it feels and might have some flashbacks. But that's why if you partner with a PEO like Justworks, I can't speak to other PEOs, actually. But we have an amazing partnership with a company called ThinkHR, and they provide us with a lot of tools and collateral and written resources to our employees to our customers. Rather, through them, we offer to our customers something called the Employee Handbook Builder. Where you go in, it's amazing, you enter how you refer to employees, whether they're employees or team members or whatever, the name of your organization, who's in charge, and then what states in which you have employees and the number of state employees in each of those states. And you click next and it generates this beautiful handbook for you that's albeit huge with all of the different policies you might consider including in your handbook. And thankfully they're labeled as far as which ones are absolutely necessary, which is far less than half, mind you, which ones are a really good idea, and then others as applicable to your business. And different employee count thresholds at the company as a whole or in individual states can have huge implications on what employment laws are kicked into place. For example, the Americans with Disabilities act, something I encounter a lot dealing with accommodating disabled employees or those with a serious medical condition on the federal level doesn't actually kick in until you have 15 employees. And so the way the sort of the what your business needs to accommodate and sustain in different scenarios can vary drastically whether you have seven employees versus 100 or even versus 50. So this is the type, this is all to say this feature in the Handbook Builder is amazing. And employee count is crucial as far as determining what policies you need to have in your handbook. And at the end of the day it's going to make your employees, gives them some peace of mind, show that, hey, my employer really knows what they're doing and this is something I can reference when I don't know how a situation will be treated.

Yeah, it's a good reminder for us. We, as we were chatting about before we pressed record here in the interview, we actually went through the process recently in 2020, where we technically used to have two different businesses, Food Blogger Pro and Pinch of VM. They both operate, we're operating as separate businesses and then now we've since rolled up into one. We need to revisit the handbook that we have and make those updates because not only is our team bigger now, but also the name of the company is different. And my guess is from when we last made that, that we've also had tweaks and enhancements and changes that we've made. An example, we have what we are calling an IRL budget, which is as a team, we set aside a budget for each team member where we can travel and spend some time with each other in the remote locations. That wasn't Something that we had, you know, three years ago when we first went through that process of creating a handbook, which it was the exact scenario you described. We had a team member who was expecting their first baby and we said, what is our policy on this? We should probably create a handbook. And as I was thinking about it, I feel like a handbook is kind of like a playbook for, for a team where you technically have to have one, but if you don't, then it's really hard for people to know what the norms are and how you operate and what the language is. So I can see it being a really helpful thing. And we went through that process just like you described, using that tool and then from there kind of combed through it and tweaked and adjusted as needed.

Exactly how much more sophisticated is a football team that rather than saying, hey guys, we're going to run a passing play, we'll say we're going to do that play action thing that we did in practice. And how much more successful is that going to be? Way, way more.

Yes, yes, that's great. So speaking of kind of the idea of understanding the norms within a company, do you have any advice around some, you know, for somebody who's looking to wanting to build a team, what does that look like from a benefits perspective? I think that's one of the things that is kind of scary when you're getting started out is this idea of benefits. And you know, in the early stages, do you need to have health insurance and a 401k, can you add that in after? How does that work and what is your advice for people who are starting to build a team as it relates to benefits? You bet.

The first thing I want to say is for small employers who aren't applicable, large employers under the Affordable Care Act, I'll get to that in a second. But if you have less than 50 employees, you, you for the most part do not need to offer health insurance compliance wise. Realistically, in order to attract the talent that you need in order to get your business off the ground, you're going to want to offer health insurance benefits just to remain competitive amongst the talent pool. So, you know, justworks, any PEO is going to make that so much easier for you because, okay, so one of the ways a PEO works is that I said, you know, your paychecks come from justworks, but also you're under justworks works as group health plan as far as benefits. So, you know, let's say you're a 12 person company, you go and get A health insurance quote for your organization, it's going to be pretty expensive. Especially if you have more employees of particular ages or demographics that are more prone to utilization of the health insurance. Your premium is going to be way higher. Right. Versus the way it works at justworks is you become a customer. We one huge ginormogundo health insurance relationship with Aetna or our other providers of which you become one of many employees and that cost and that risk is just spread out so much more thin that the health insurance premiums are that much more affordable. And so you can be the hip new kid on the block but still offer Microsoft, Google, Netflix level benefits because of really the economies of scale and just works in attracting the types of customers that we want to that we're really excited about. We understand that it's not just about what we call mdv, medical, dental, vision. It's not just about that anymore. It's about benefits that are going to get people excited that they're going to utilize and that are really going to draw them in. So your medical insurance is affordable and, and robust and that's great. I can, I feel like I can go to the doctor. It's like the fundamental level of your Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Right. But, but we go so much so, so so much further up the pyramid and we offer these ancillary benefits that you can buy into. So these are like you can choose to offer these things or not. You can also choose to pay for them or offer them to your employees for them to pay for. And these are things like life insurance which nobody really likes to talk about but we, nobody loves talking about it and we make that as painless as possible. Short term disability, which is something you never think about until you need it and all of a sudden you're unable to work. Provides wage continuance and then other things that we dub as modern benefits which are like access to New York at Citi bike or other bike ride share programs that are popping up in cities throughout the US Sort of an employer cost sharing thing where maybe we'll give your business the opportunity to chip in for half and you can ask employ to pay for the other half. Gym reimbursements and then access to mental health assistance programs. You know we have an EAP for all of our benefits eligible employees of our customers where health advocate where they can call in talk to a counselor 247 every time you call in a licensed counselor answers the phone. You can talk to them about whatever's going on and they are beholden to your privacy concerns. That's not. They're not going to then go to your boss and say, hey, Jimmy's really struggling. Right. It's like totally a safe space and even permits three in person therapy visits where this organization, this eap, will connect you with a therapist even they know what your health Insurance is through JustWorks and will find someone in network. So even speaking from personal experience, establishing a relationship with a mental health professional can be one of the biggest hurdles, especially if you find yourself in a position to feel compelled to or really want to do that. You probably have a lot of other things going on. And so this sort of brokers that relationship and finds you someone in network that's affordable and that you can continue seeing if you want. So I can plug the benefits of an eap, an employee assistance program all day, but you can see these are the things, these are the benefits we allow you to buy into or to provide to your employees at great prices, at great levels of engagement, so far beyond just medical, dental and vision, because people are thinking about benefits. It used to be black and white and now it's a whole rainbow of options.

Yeah. And what I love about this conversation is I think it offers for listeners of the podcast a really good lens into a different way to approach what they're doing from a business perspective. And a lot of times we talk about this idea of the solopreneur and how can you hustle and get things done and be as productive as possible. But inevitably, if you are good at that, there will be a time where you have to start thinking about bringing on additional people to your team and the strategy around that then changes and you have to shift what you are good at and you have to go from being good at like the hustle, productivity, delivering on a certain thing as a solo solopreneur, to what does that then look like to build a team and to create an environment that is positive and in a good place and somewhere that people want to be. So we're kind of going through this series where we're trying to broaden horizons a little bit. And this fits into that perfect. As we talk about kind of leveling up your business, a couple other questions that come up that I know people wonder about and logistical questions around building a team. How about on the insurance side of things? Like, it feels like one of those things where there's probably some type of insurance that needs to exist when you are building a team. Is that something that you need to be aware of and include as you're starting to hire people.

Yeah, sure. The first thing that comes to mind is workers comp and I mentioned that before, for anyone who doesn't know what that is, that's insurance that specifically covers workplace injuries. So it's going to supplement an employee's own health insurance if they have any, as far as injuries that happen on the job. So that's something that you just have to have that is just absolutely fundamental because imagine an employee gets hurt at your office, you have no coverage. That that's going to just be a huge financial liability for you. It's legally required in most, if not all places. So that's really the bedrock as far as insurance that you have as a business have to carry as far as when you bring on start having employees. You know, I loved what you said earlier, Bjork, about transferring or the transition from a solopreneur to a manager of people and of this business. And one reality that I think is important to confront there is that as you grow, maybe your first few employees are also entrepreneurially minded or they're people who sort of share your enthusiasm and ethos and are just going to get it done whatever it takes. And inevitably, as you grow, whether it's once you hit 15 employees or 100, you have people who are coming to work, doing the thing and then going home and probably not thinking about it till the next morning. And that is perfectly okay. We need doers to come in and show up and do the work. And so having people engaged in an employee mindset by offering them these types of benefits, by encouraging a culture of collaboration is so important because frankly, at a certain point, you just can't expect everyone to be as invested in this dream and this idea, in this mission as you are. And so becoming part of the justworks co employment pool, we have all these. We know what that takes. We've seen it literally thousands of times and have these tools at your disposal to offer to your employees and advice to give, whether it's from an HR consultant or from your account manager, as far as building a place where people want to come to work.

Yeah, it's actually something that we've tried to think about, especially as we enter into this phase of tinybit, the name of the parent company that we have is how do we level up in that area? And I know that some people might be at that point that listen to the podcast, some people might be aspirational in getting to that point eventually, but just from an HR perspective. And HR will use a different word to expand that out a little bit. But just like team building or maybe culture perspective, what would your advice be in ways that we can build teams, build a group of people who are working together and support those people. How can we do that? Well, and what are the things that we need to consider as we're thinking about different offerings that we can have or strategies that we can have in that realm? Both personally asking that, but I know that other people would be interested in it as well.

My first piece of advice is seem self evident. Hire well, hire smart and give strong and due consideration to your applicants. You know, I can speak for. Justworks itself as an organization has a very rigorous hiring process. We have special types of sort of character and behavioral interviews that we go through to make sure people are a culture fit. And to that point, in order to hire well, you want to hire against your values. What are your values? Well, give that some good strong thought and try to establish that as early as you can. Now, it doesn't have to be an acronym like at justworks. We have cogis. Camaraderie, openness, Grit, integrity and simplicity. The last one's. Thanks.

You put yourself on the spot quiz.

No doubt about it. I'm sure our HR team is thrilled that I got that right on the first class. I'm not sure how early we developed that. I was employee number 170 or so, but it was around when I got here and I know that they were hiring me against those values and that it meant something to the organization. Maybe you have 15 people and you look around and everyone's just got something. They've got a spark, whether it's a caring streak or whether it's a strong interest in a specialized area or whether it's a wacky hobby. You know, maybe you have people who are really engaged with what they're doing outside of the office. Find something. When you first get get going, find talented people and then look around and see. Try to distill what the common denominators are and what you love about the people that you're looking at and consider writing it down and you don't have to paste it all over the walls. And honestly, you probably shouldn't. When you've got motivational posters on the wall at the office, then that's when you should start thinking about maybe looking somewhere else. I'm not a fan, but at least develop something, something codified against which you can hire and to help your managers. And if you have someone dedicated to recruiting, just have in mind you're not just diving into the massive pool that is LinkedIn. But rather you are identifying particular attributes of individuals, whether that's directly related to their skills of their job, or more like soft skills or personality traits that are going to continue to build a culture that you're happy about. And if you start to stray and start to. I mean, you can visualize it. You hire a lot of employees over here who aren't part of this sort of tree. That's the ethos of what you're trying to grow. It's gonna tip over and wither and sort of get out of your hands. And so just try to. You know, honestly, this image just came to mind of, you know, in a Charlie Brown Christmas, he's like, he finds the, like, really sad little Christmas tree and he rubs his little blanket all around the base of it and put some ornaments on it. That should be your culture. You know, maybe it's gonna be a little, like, ragged at first. It's gonna be gritty, it's gonna be ugly sometimes. But find what you love and nurture it and try to maintain that consistent.

That's awesome. And one of the things that you had mentioned was the. You know what that looks like for justworks, and it's an interesting company in that you work and focus on hiring and therefore you get a lot of exposure to other companies who are doing that and doing that well. And so you're able to fold some of that into what you're doing. Totally. I don't remember where it was or what specific category is in, but it was something along the lines of like, best place to.

To work.

And maybe it was like. Or approval of CEO. I know is another one. What are some of the things that you feel like exist at justworks that makes it a great place to work, that people who are thinking of building a team can emulate in some way?

Well, first of all, we allow dogs in the office. That's going to be a huge plus. It's not foundational, but that's always going to win you a bunch of brownie points. And then I'd say the first thing that comes. Comes to mind. I'll just say it is leadership. The way that leadership communicates with employees. Talking to us like adults, like we know what we're talking about, like we're trustworthy as far as whether it's the very nitty gritty and real financial growth and data about the organization, whether it's new products, new verticals we're looking to build out, but just a leader who talks to you like a person and they don't have to be your buddy, you know, but someone who's going to look at you and hear your questions and answer them candidly and not give you a sort of roundabout answer. I mean, Isaac, I'm such a huge fan. Isaac Oates, our CEO, he's just so matter of fact and like charmingly frank, never sarcastic, but witty. And it's just such a great line to walk. I don't know, he probably has an amazing, amazing coach, if I had to guess. But leaders should really think about that. Honestly, if you're like in a leadership position or you're a co founder and you've never had some sort of professional leadership and presence coaching before, I would strongly, strongly recommend it. No one is as self aware as they hope they are or think they might be. So that can, that can just have huge benefits. But as far as what's working for justworks, you know, we don't have our, we don't have codes plastered on the walls. If you looked around the office, you wouldn't see it written down anywhere except for in like our hiring manual. Right, but literally, but still everyone, maybe not as quickly as I did, but everyone here could, could tell you what it means and what it means to them and experience that they've had here that relates back to those values. So, you know, culture is built by common vocabulary, common responses to certain stimuli or problems or successes. It's common repeated behaviors. You look at it cultures in a certain part of the world within an ethnic group, or you look at cultures within an organization, it's the same sort of ideas, it's common language. What do we call things? How do we refer to things? It's the systems that, it's the tools and systems that you use. And, and that brings me to my point that justworks want customers that are going to be thrilled that they're justworks customers. And if that doesn't quite make sense, it's someone who looks at our product and our platform and say, yes, this makes sense, it's self evident. I can help myself. I feel empowered and all these tools are here at my disposal without being overwhelmed as far as being able to run my business with confidence. And so justworks really infuses its cultural values and its ethos into everything we do. I guess just don't forget, don't think, oh yeah, we talk about our culture when we're having a nice dinner, you know, sitting down to a formal at the dinner table. Right? With like family dinner on Sunday. No, it's like something we live and breathe in like it's real.

That's awesome. And we can feel that as customers of justworks, using the product, interacting with the people, doing a podcast interview, all the different ways that we've been looking lucky enough to have the support of JustWorks along the way. So we, I would have lots of questions and, and know that we could continue to talk about this for a long time. The nice thing is those questions I always can get answered by a simple email or phone call in. Yeah. This afternoon I won't record those following questions that I have. But for, for those who are interested in starting the process of building a team or maybe they have a team and they want to simplify some of the, the ways that they do some of the payroll and just some of the HR stuff. What's the best way to get connected with justworks to kick off that conversation and see if it might be a good fit?

Sure. I mean you can go to our website. One thing you'll probably want to think about first is how much is this going to cost me? Justworks is the only PEO on the the market that has transparent pricing Right. On its website. You can go in and literally whip out your calculator and add it up based on the number of employees you have and the plan you're selecting and figure out how much it's going to cost you on a recurring basis. So go do that. I guarantee you'll be excited by what you see. And then, you know, get in touch with us. Get in touch with our sales team. We'd love to give you a demo. We have. I've never been so thrilled to or privileged to work with the amazing sales team that we have. They're smart people. They have to stay on top of a lot of stuff. This is the most complicated product that I've ever seen sold. And you're having to explain all these complicated concepts to non experts. And it's from the moment you walk in the proverbial door. With our demand generation and sales team, we're working to demystify this whole HR forest and be your spirit guides through and maybe you'll learn along the way. And once you begin speaking this language and learning the ins and outs and intuition of fundamental payroll and HR best practices, you don't have to become an expert. But really quickly it all starts to make sense. We sort of laid out the pathways for you to walk down. Yeah. We sort of manicured the lawn for you. Or that we've trimmed the hedges so that you can walk through the forest of of hr and you'll like what you see and it all makes sense.

Yes. And having been through walked both paths, it's really nice to have that spirit guide because otherwise it's really easy to get lost and be like, I entered into this forest knowing where I was going and now it's all just trees.

Super easy. Right?

And to have somebody helping out with that process is really great. And I know that you've done this that in lots of ways for lots of other businesses and the others that justworks have. So Moses, thanks so much for making the time for talking about this super important area that I know a lot of listeners are interested in. Really appreciate it and we'll catch you around. Thanks for being on the podcast.

Thank you so, so much, Bjork. Thrilled you're a customer and thrilled that you had me on today. Appreciate.

And that's a wrap, my friend. We hope you enjoyed this episode with Moses about hiring. If you're at that step where you're thinking it might make sense to bring another member onto your team, we hope this episode has given you some thoughts and some considerations as you navigate your next steps. Thanks for tuning into the podcast this week. We're thinking of you, our incredible hard working community. We're here for you and we'll continue showing up for you, including in a brand new podcast episode and next week. See you then. Make it a great week.