Surviving the Side Hustle

From Tech Innovator to Values-Driven Entrepreneur: Andrew's Journey of Redefining Recruitment and Achieving Impactful Success

• Coach Rob • Season 1 • Episode 78

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Andrew's incredible journey unfolds in our latest episode, where we promise you'll gain insights into navigating life's challenges and opportunities through sheer determination and creativity. From the heart of the San Francisco Bay Area's tech boom to establishing a meaningful life in Idaho, Andrew's story is one of resilience, innovation, and profound learning. His unique path, marked by skipping college and embracing real-world experience, showcases the power of understanding personal strengths and weaknesses. Andrew shares how his entrepreneurial spirit was ignited through firsthand encounters with venture capital and the tech industry's rapid transformations.

In a captivating segment, we explore Andrew's venture, Red Balloon, which challenges the conventional recruitment landscape. Following a pivotal moment where Andrew's refusal to compromise his values led to his dismissal as a CEO, he founded Red Balloon to ensure that personal beliefs and professional life can coexist. By focusing on cultural and skill fit rather than traditional financial incentives, Red Balloon seeks to mend the broken recruitment system, offering businesses and job seekers a platform where values truly matter. The flat fee structure removes bias, ensuring transparent and efficient hiring processes that align with meritocratic ideals.

As we wrap up, Andrew's vision for Red Balloon's future comes into sharp focus. Addressing the pressing issue of labor-based lawsuits, Andrew highlights how Red Balloon's cost-effective solutions help small businesses navigate the legal landscape while finding the right talent. With an ambitious goal of scaling to 1,000 placements per month, the company leverages proprietary software to enhance recruitment efficiency. Andrew's story serves as an encouraging reminder that taking action and embracing the journey often leads to clarity and success, urging listeners to start somewhere and keep pushing forward.

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Speaker 1:

What's going on? Everybody Today on the show we've got Andrew man. How are you doing? How are you feeling?

Speaker 2:

I'm feeling good. It's been fun to watch what's going on in the world and I feel like there's a renewed spirit of let's get out there and get stuff done. I'm feeling good and I'm in beautiful, sunny Idaho, so no complaints at all good and I'm in beautiful, sunny Idaho, so no complaints at all.

Speaker 1:

Nice, nice, yeah, man. So let's dive in. I'm excited to have you here and kind of dive into your story a little bit. Would you mind sharing a little bit about who you are and what it is you do and who do you kind of help, sort of thing?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, for sure I'll kind of jump into it. I grew up in San Francisco Bay Area, did the dot com thing down there, which was really fun. I wasn't an executive so I wasn't making the decisions, but I really had some opportunities to see what $32 million of venture capital money did to a business and kind of their culture. I got the opportunity to do things all over the world for a couple of businesses down there, which was amazing because I never ended up going to college, just because I was working full time when college age came around and my friends were all broke and I was driving a convertible Mustang and so I'm like I think I'm winning and I'm not going to go to college. So that was really fun.

Speaker 2:

And then, you know, ripe old age of 22 dot com bubble hits. I'm kind of burned out because I'm working 80 to 100-hour weeks and so I decided to move up to Idaho, where I live now, and got lucky enough to marry a beautiful woman and have five kids and six dogs, and we live on 60 acres, 10 minutes from the office. It's kind of the Idaho American dream. So that's really cool. And then I've been also blessed to use that experience from the Bay Area up here in Idaho and have started a whole bunch of businesses and sold a bunch of businesses.

Speaker 2:

I've actually had six successful exits over the years and those have ranged from $100,000 to half a billion dollars. So really the whole gamut selling to private equity, selling to strategic buyers, selling to nonprofits, doing a management buyout. So just got to experience a lot of those things, which is amazing. And now I've got a couple of big projects going. I'm doing massive housing development. I've got a bunch of commercial real estate I'm working on and then I am doing Red Balloon, which you can see behind me. So I've got enough to say grace over. Keep them busy. Super fun.

Speaker 1:

Wow, yeah, that's awesome. Pretty powerful stuff there, perfect fit for the show. Let's dive in a little bit more on everything, starting from the beginning there. So you mentioned how you were like, yeah, I'm winning right now, I'm working full time, I've got the cool car, you guys are away at school. What was kind of going through your head there when it was like time to kind of think about colleges and you were diving into working full time Because that's a tough decision to make at any kind of age whether, like, okay, I should stick with this. I'm starting to kind of feel the workflow is this the right fit? There's a lot of like. There's got to be a lot of questions and what was driving you Like, what was the driving factor for your compass at that time?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, good question, and unfortunately you have to go back a little bit further. So I had some significant learning disabilities. I am really dyslexic, so everything's backwards, and so I did not do well in school. I did not enjoy school, and because everything they cared about in school were things that I was bad at, like spelling, doing homework on time and it didn't make sense to me because I wasn't getting paid and I wanted to get paid and not pay money to go to school, so school was never my favorite thing, and so actually when I turned 16, I started working full-time and doing school even less than I probably should have, and in retrospect it would have been helpful to learn the things that I learned that I would have learned if I'd stayed more focused on school. I found math really easy, so I took a bunch of math classes and then I totally bombed everything else. And then I played sports, because I love baseball and soccer and everything that involved the ball. So I was doing all those things. So I was basically working full time by the time I was 16.

Speaker 2:

And by the time I was 18, and should have graduated high school I don't know that I actually got my GED because I was so focused on work and in fact I started taking my first business trips for this company when I was 19 years old and education just wasn't really on my radar. And with my five kids my oldest son he did a year of college because he thought that was going to be a good fit for who he is and then he wanted to get in the working world, whereas I've got a couple other kids that are probably going to get master's degrees because they're really geared for that academia. And I think that's the thing in my mind is you need to focus on where your strengths and your qualities are, and one size doesn't fit all, and for me, education wasn't the thing that I needed. To be successful, I need to really work hard and kind of learn from the school of hard knocks, but that's not right for everybody.

Speaker 1:

So say you're talking to some early entrepreneurs. Some guys are out here. They're trying to figure out what our strengths and their weaknesses are. Aside from just sitting down and doing a SWOT analysis, do you have any tips for somebody to kind of like dive in to really figure out where they're good, if, like, they're like yeah, I want to start something, but I don't really know where to kind of start something.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, absolutely. So I think the first thing is go out and do stuff right. If you're steering a boat and it's sitting at the dock, that steering doesn't do you any good. But if you're going somewhere, if you're accomplishing something, if even if it's not the thing you're going to be doing for the rest of your life that steering actually accomplishes something right, because then you're picking a new direction. And so for all young entrepreneurs and like you know they're like I really think I want to get into tech Okay, well, go get a job in tech, work for someone who's done it before and figure out what you don't know, learn as much as possible.

Speaker 2:

And I mean, I didn't start my first business until I was kind of almost mid 20s and I had had, at that point, a decade of well, not a decade, but I had well, yeah, probably nearly a decade of work working for other people, learning what they knew, learning what I needed to know to be able to have a successful business.

Speaker 2:

So I think it's fun to think starry-eyed man, I'm going to go start a business, and actually I encourage a lot of people you should start a business, but make sure that you are humble enough to go out and just get a job and work for somebody else for a little bit.

Speaker 2:

To go out and just get a job and work for somebody else for a little bit, and that's going to teach you so much about where your strengths and your weaknesses are. Because the reality is, if you think you're good at sales and then you go out and get a sales job and you suck at sales, well then you just found out you probably shouldn't be pursuing that as a career, or you need to get yourself way more education and push yourself hard to get better at that specific skill set. So I think that's where it is is you need to prove to yourself, um, and you need to show a track record of being successful in the area where you want to start a business, and if you do that, then you're uh, have put yourself in a much better position to be successful once you've actually started that business.

Speaker 1:

So, looking back on the cause, you, you've had a couple of success, like quite a few successful exits. You've got a couple of different projects going on now. What so? What is your through line? What was your specific skillset or your area of expertise, aside from just grit?

Speaker 2:

Because it sounds like you were out there busting your ass and like, yeah, grinding you know, I think, in all the businesses, um, if you are, as an entrepreneur, as a business owner, as a manager, as an employee, deeply obsessed with the problems that your customers have, so you are really focused, dead set on. Okay, this is a problem in the marketplace, this is a problem with the people in my life and I want to solve that problem. If you're obsessed with solving problems for customers, I think that is the kind of the driving factor for any successful business. So I had a 3D printing business and we started that because we were talking to someone and they're like man, I had to wait in line for 45 minutes to print my 3D thing at this shop, line for 45 minutes to print my 3d thing at this shop. And I'm like, really, because, like a paper printer, you just send the job and it queues up and as soon as it's your turn, it spits out the paper with it on there. He's like well, yeah, but like the way the 3d printers work is, you have to take your little thumb drive and you go plug it into the darn thing, because it's not very good at queuing up jobs, because these jobs are enormous right, the file sizes are too big and there's not really. I'm like oh well, that sounds like a major problem. Here you have an engineer who is trying to figure out how am I going to go and waste maybe an hour trying to get this thing printed so that I have a prototype to work with? And so we didn't solve anything super novel. We basically took a lot of the technology around queuing and network printing and brought it to the 3D printing world.

Speaker 2:

Well, turns out, it was solving a problem, and it was solving such an important problem for a huge engineering firm called Striker that they called up and they're like okay, can we actually, what would it cost for us to control your dev cycle? Like, we want these features and I know you're going to get to them eventually, but we want to be first in line. And my answer was well, you can buy the business. And they're like okay, what's the price? And it's like a million dollars. And they're like great, well, let's get going on that. I'm like, oh yes, amazing, right, but we were just trying to solve a problem for a customer. And so if you go out there and you find a problem that someone has and you really obsess about it and try and figure out a creative solution. That's going to be a way more successful business than starting with the solution and trying to find a problem for it, if that makes sense.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, definitely.

Speaker 2:

All my businesses were technology businesses because that's kind of how I'm geared. All my businesses were technology businesses because that's kind of how I'm geared, but all of them were focused on how do I solve problems at scale for customers. And if I do that, I'm going to be plenty successful in business. No-transcript. Yeah, so problem that red balloon I started with my own problem.

Speaker 2:

I was a CEO of a pretty good sized tech company. In fact, I'd helped start the business, and this is in 2020, the year the world kind of went a little crazy, and so I had started this business. I'd sold it a number of times, so I didn't have very much ownership left, and my board basically sat me down and said look, you're a conservative Christian and that's just not allowed in today's world. So you need to park all of that on the side and not bring your whole self to work or you're not going to have a job here anymore. And I said I'll take door number B, because I am not going to separate what I believe and who I am from the work that I do, and I don't think anybody should do that as a side note. You don't have to jam your worldview down other people's throat. You don't have to bring up politics and religion every day at work, but you should be able to live your values out loud and be who you are.

Speaker 2:

And so, after a long back and forth, they went ahead and removed me from the position that I started talking to people around the country who were put in a very similar position, and when you're kind of given a choice between your job and your values, everyone thinks, well, I'll stick with my values on that, but when you're staring a mortgage or hungry kids in the face, that's a lot harder decision for most people than they give it credit for.

Speaker 2:

And so, look, I just wanted a place where, if those people had to make that decision and they did make the decision to stick with their values and lose their job that I'd be able to help them find a job where they wouldn't have to make those same decisions, where meritocracy reigned, where free speech reigned and where freedom in the workplace was a key motivator for the businesses and for the job seekers. And so that's really what Red Balloon is. It's a matchmaking service for businesses that believe that a person should be able to live their values out loud, work really hard and focus on bringing value to their business and where job seekers can find businesses that you know. Whether it was vaccine mandates or DEI training, they're going to focus on doing their job and not on the latest political correctness we have a vast majority of our businesses and job seekers are center right, but that's not a prerequisite. Freedom and respecting each other's opinions is the prerequisite, and that just tends to attract people who are center right. Gotcha, gotcha.

Speaker 1:

So I understand that the world of recruiting is broken. Can you dive in a little bit on that and explain a bit about that for me?

Speaker 2:

I use recruiters, I use a lot of different job boards out there, and I would say that the whole world of recruiting is broken, because if you're a job seeker right now and you're looking for a job, you're feeling this acutely. And if you're a business and you're like I'm going to do the post and pray method, where I'm going to post a job out there and pray that someone sees it, you need to remember a job posting is an online advertisement for employment. It's not a guarantee that someone's going to apply, in the same way that if you place an ad on Google, maybe you'll get a customer, but maybe you won't. So what we wanted to do is say look, let's take a step back. How do we solve this kind of deep systemic problem that is in the labor market today, where job seekers hate the job searching process and employers hate the hiring process because finding good people is very, very difficult and that post and pray method is absolutely ridiculous. So we start digging into that and so we were like oh well, there's a reason that employers are willing to pay recruiters sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars to find a new employee because they don't want to deal with that post and pray. Let's just hope the right person sees this. They want to be proactive about that.

Speaker 2:

So they go to an outsourced recruiter and those recruiters generally charge 20 to 40% of the first year's salary or a compensation full compensation package for the employee they place. That sounds great. I don't have to pay until I hire someone. The problem is you just introduced a perverse incentive, meaning that the recruiter is paid based on how much you pay the person that you just hired. So what do they want? They want you to hire the most expensive person possible as quickly as possible. Fit is not the most important thing, it is total compensation so that they get a bigger check. And there are really good people in recruiting. But incentives always win and these incentives are broken and so we're like, okay, there's got to be a better way to actually do recruiting in a way that's going to be a blessing to businesses.

Speaker 2:

So what Red Balloon is doing today and it's working is we charge a flat $4,500 to do a full recruitment process. It's like you have a Red Balloon team member on your team helping write the job description, do compensation, review, post jobs, handle interviews, actually proactively, reach out to people in our database and a LinkedIn recruiter. So we're going to be going after the people who are going to be your next best employee and we're going to be doing that for you. Then we're going to do a first cultural interview to make sure that they are not going to be a waste of your time, and they're going to be a skill fit, a culture fit, and we're going to bring you great people. When you hire one of those people, we charge $4,500 success fee, so it's a flat $9,000.

Speaker 2:

And we are now not motivated to just get you the most expensive person. We need you to get someone who you're happy with and that finder's fee on the back end is not so big that we have commission breath on man. Just hire this person, it doesn't matter. We really wanna try and bless the customer and we can only do it at that price because we're already a job board. So we already have the scale of a job board. We already have 100,000 unique people on our site every single month and that just puts us in a really unique position to deliver a lot of value for a small price. And so again back to this theme of you find a problem that your customers have, you're really obsessed about it and you come up with creative solutions to solve it, and that innovation can sometimes be business model even more than technology. And so that's what we're doing. And, yes, the recruiting world is broken, but we're trying to fix it wherever we can.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that definitely sounds like it. It sounds like you've kind of like taken this whole thing by storm. I'm not too familiar with the recruiting industry so I'm not as diverse into it, but it sounds like you've got it pretty much on rest for the whole process, from start to finish, for people who are out there looking for it.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, well, and the reality is, if you're a small business, you need to know that 75% of businesses in America have had a labor-based lawsuit in the last five years. 75% of small businesses had a labor-based lawsuit in the last five years. Well, that just means that the hiring process is terrifying. It takes a lot of time and energy, and so that's part of the reason they're willing to pay $30,000, $40,000, $50,000 for a recruiter to come in and solve the problem for them. But when employers find out for $9,000, they can also solve the problem, and they know that they're going to have the blessed assurance of knowing that Red Balloon is going to bring them a value aligned person that they don't have to worry about.

Speaker 2:

Well, that's incredible, right, and it's kind of fun, and you know you're on to something when you have customers write you a check for their finders fee with a thank you note just saying this has been such an incredible opportunity to work with you. I'm so excited about this new person that's going to be on the team. I don't have to worry that they're going to sue me. I don't have to worry that they're going to be a bad fit, because another Red Balloon team did their job. So that is really fun and whenever you kind of hit that spot in business where you're deeply blessing customers and it's fun, you know that it's only upward and to the right it almost sounds like it's like too good to be true, though, so like companies who are used to paying these crazy numbers and compensation packages.

Speaker 1:

How did you get that kind of started? How did you get it rolling? Because it almost seems like it's like whoa, like you're undervaluing the service, and everything here Was that like a hard thing to get into the mind of your customers.

Speaker 2:

There it is, and it does sound too good to be true for some of these customers. But we've now done 350 positions so far this year, so we know that it is working, it is successful and we have a ton of return customers because they're like, well, that was so easy. I've got another position I want to hire. I'll just call up the Red Balloon team and they'll take care of it, right, so? But yes, when you're starting something like that, our business model works great because we have 60 positions we're working on at any given time and we have a team and we've built software to make them efficient and effective to be able to deliver that.

Speaker 2:

It is super hard to get it going, though, right, when you get the first position, you're losing money on that. When you get the second position, you're losing money on that. And then, honestly, probably for the first 20 or 30 positions, we were losing money on those. But we were learning very, very rapidly, we were starting to build scale and we were building a reputation in the marketplace of delivering value for a reasonable price. And so now we are at this scale where it is not only profitable but we are blessing people at scale, so a lot harder to get going.

Speaker 2:

If we were just doing the success fee one job at a time where we're getting a $50,000 or $60,000 check, we'd be working on one or two positions at a time. But because we pick that price point, because we want to bless customers, we're like, okay, it will start to pencil for us when we're working on 20 positions at a given time, so we need to get there as fast as possible. But then we have the scaled upside because we know that we could be doing 100 positions at a time or 200 positions at a time, and then the margin on that is significantly larger, because we're now a big business with a lot of happy customers. But it's just like a SaaS kind of problem where you have to invest more upfront to solve the problem. But then you can do things at scale rather than just onesies, twosies, and then that's how you build big, meaningful businesses Awesome problem. But then you can do things at scale rather than just one, onesie, twosies, um, and then that's how you build big, meaningful businesses.

Speaker 1:

Awesome, and that's, that's incredible. So you guys are, you guys are over one job um one project per day. Basically, you're over 350 already. So yeah you're, you're pumping these things out left and right.

Speaker 2:

We are pumping these things out. I think we uh, we placed eight people eight people so far this week in employers, and if you can do that at a reasonable price and profitably, then our goal would be to get to doing a thousand of these a month. And why not If you can scale the team up? You know that there's a million people being hired in America every single year. Well, why can't we be part of that story and make employers' lives easier?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and just for reference, this podcast is being recorded on a Wednesday, so he's currently eight in already on the Wednesday, so we're halfway through the week. But that's awesome and congratulations with that growth and that explosion too. But I'm sure you're not foreign to it because of all the other success you've seen, and you're talking about scaling up and getting to higher and bigger numbers. What specifically are you looking to get into for 2025? Because we're right here at the end of 2024. We've got new things coming up into the new year. So what's Red Balloon and some of the other projects? What are you looking to bring out for the next year?

Speaker 2:

Yeah. So one of the things that we did to keep the prices low is we had to build software for our recruitment team to be efficient and effective in the way that they delivered a great recruiting experience to our customer, right. Well, so we've been working on this software for a year and it is making the team more and more efficient and effective every single day, because we're making hundreds of little tweaks to the software, the user interface, the flow, the data that we can pull in. Well, lo and behold, now that you've put all this time and effort into software that makes your team really happy, well, what if we could bless other people with that software? So we have, like literally this month, launched our applicant tracking system, and why I'm excited about it is because it is a tool that we have built for ourselves, which we know it works.

Speaker 2:

Sometimes you get a software tool out there that was built theoretically with a theoretical customer involved, and then they bring it to market and it's kind of a meh. But now we have a tool that we know that our team has been using it effectively. They've been learning. Our engineering team sits right next to our recruiting team and kind of finds out what their needs are how they need to think about recruiting, and then they're able to go and implement that. So when you have a very short feedback loop and an experimentation loop in business, that's another way that you win.

Speaker 2:

So I'm excited that we're going to have this kind of suite of hiring software that brings hiring efficiency to our customers. So look, if you want us to do the hard work of recruiting, that's fantastic. If you want to use the software that allows us to do that and you want to be able to use it for your team for $500 a month instead of $9,000 a position, no problem. We'd love to get that implemented for you. So that's really. The next step for us is how do we go and implement ATS at thousands of our customers? Once we're at that spot, then I'll figure out what to do next at that spot, then I'll figure out what to do next.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, like that, and that's exciting, that's really cool stuff. Andrew, I mean we're getting kind of close here on the time. I want to just show a little appreciation for you Cool, awesome story. It was great to hear a little bit about what you've gone through, what you're currently doing, and a little bit shining into what's coming up into the future. So, thank you, I appreciate it.

Speaker 1:

A little bit shining into what's coming up into the future. So thank you, I appreciate it. This is a crazy time of year, a lot of stuff going on, so carving out the time means a lot to me. But before I let you roll, I got to ask you if you were to boil it all down. I know you've got a lot of knowledge, a lot of experience and insights, with a lot of different things you've gone through and are currently working on.

Speaker 2:

But if you were to break it all down and just give us that cliche number one piece of advice type of tip, what would that be? Yeah, I think my advice to people, whether you're an entrepreneur or just an employee, or you already have a business is do hard things. A job started as a job half done, it is a lot easier to sit on your couch and think about how impossible it is to try and accomplish something rather than just do it. And once you just start doing it and it doesn't, you don't have to have a perfect plan, and I've seen so many people with this analysis, paralysis, where they're like I have got to figure out the perfect plan. Once I have a perfect plan, then I'm going to go out and do stuff like that boat we talked about in the beginning. Just start doing stuff and you'd be surprised. That's where your clarity comes from. That's where it's like oh well, actually it wasn't as bad as I thought it was.

Speaker 2:

That all comes from activity, and so I would encourage you just go out and start doing stuff. Go volunteer your time to work for a business so that you can learn what they do. Go find yourself a job and get a side hustle. Obviously the point of this podcast. A little bit, go out there and start doing stuff, because that's where you're going to get your best inspiration. And again, a job start is a job half done. So if you get something started, it's a lot easier to have clarity on how to finish it and how to go do something really successful. And look, we need people who are doers, who are out getting stuff done, and if you're listening to this, you're probably one of those people. So get out there and do it.

Speaker 1:

Boom Love it. I appreciate you and thank you for taking that time. That was awesome and very powerful. Andrew man, have a good one. It was great to connect. Thank you again, man.

Speaker 2:

Thanks so much. Thanks for having me.