In this interview, Matt Paulson explains MarketBeat's hiring strategy, which centers on creating a strong employer brand through extensive community involvement in Sioux Falls—such as sponsoring local sports, music festivals, and tennis tournaments—so that top talent is attracted before any job posting. He recounts the company's first hire in 2013, Stevie Shea, who started as a part‑time customer support specialist handling early email inquiries. Paulson advises hiring when you can keep a new employee busy for at least half a day (around 20 hours per week), noting that the cost is justified if the hire frees the founder to focus on higher‑value tasks that generate revenue, ultimately paying for the employee and more.
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What is your approach when it comes to hiring? What was the first Markweet hire that you've ever made? And kind of with that, really quick, do you feel like you need the money to hire someone first, or do you assume that that added employee is going to kind of make back the money that you need to pay them?
My approach to hiring is to build a company brand so good that the best people want to work there. You see this if you live in Sioux Falls, you know all about it. We do tons of stuff in the community. We have the MarketBeat Open Tennis Tournament. We've got the Loud and Cooler Music Festival. We're big sponsors of Augustana Hockey. You could name 10 things just like that that we do in Sioux Falls. So people know about MarketBeat long before we ever have a job posting. It costs us quite a bit of money to do that, but we do it and it brings us great people like you. The first hire MarketBeat ever made was in 2013. There's a gal named Stevie Shea, and she was our customer support specialist. So when people emailed MarketBeat before it was even MarketBeat, she would be the person that replied to the emails. She worked maybe 20 hours a week. It was really like during COVID post-COVID, when we started to scale up the team. Like, we only had 5 people before COVID Now we're up to 21. In terms of money, I think if you have like, you know, you're going to hire a full-time employee and you feel like you've got about 20 hours a week, to fill up their time, like half their time, you're going to find ways to fill up the rest of their time. So if you feel like you can keep somebody busy for half the day, it's probably worth making that hire. Then with hiring, typically it doesn't free up your time a whole lot, but what it enables you to do is go do more. So if I can hand off some of my low-value tasks to an employee, And that frees me up to work on higher-value things that typically pays for an employee and then some.
