Peter Faist is Founder and CEO of Staffy, Solving Staffing Challenges for Hospitality and Healthcare

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[00:00] SPEAKER_01: Welcome to Canada's Podcast, the number one podcast for entrepreneurs by entrepreneurs.
[00:08] SPEAKER_01: Hi everyone, welcome to Canada's Podcast. Today we're going to meet Peter Feist, who's the founder and CEO of Staffian
[00:16] SPEAKER_01: and maintains, as he said, the reputations are bomb-free bomb. He is a diverse experience and you know,
[00:24] SPEAKER_01: he's now working on some very complex projects in across North America. He was president of NECON
[00:30] SPEAKER_01: and a lead network security company and he's a graduate of NECS Founders, which is a tremendous entrepreneurial group.
[00:41] SPEAKER_01: He studied programming and Sheridan College and completed one year of culinary training at George Brown. So, you know, a pretty mixed background.
[00:50] SPEAKER_01: So Peter, welcome to Canada's Podcast. Let's kick off as a user, you know, just give us a quick overview of who Peter Feist is and what you're doing in the moment.
[01:04] SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so my name's Peter Feist. I am the founder of Staffian currently and for the last five years. Prior to Staffian, I was a senior security architect working in the IT industry.
[01:21] SPEAKER_00: And, you know, I thought, well, I came onto the idea of Staffian accidentally actually, which we can talk about later, but you know, it's been a very, very interesting journey.
[01:33] SPEAKER_00: I have a passion for wine and audio and good food. And, you know, I follow politics a little bit and, you know, I have a lot of hobbies that keep me occupied when I'm not, you know, working for the job.
[01:49] SPEAKER_00: I'm nice in the hours of day on staffings.
[01:53] SPEAKER_01: You know, you said you had a great career. You know, I've got paid a lot, didn't do much. And then you jumped into being an entrepreneur, where, you know, you don't got paid enough of me.
[02:12] SPEAKER_01: You weren't on stop kind of thing.
[02:16] SPEAKER_01: Why, definitely why, why have people, what, why are they going to say?
[02:21] SPEAKER_00: You know, that's a, that's a great question. But I've always kind of been an entrepreneur slash inventor. And I've never really worked for anybody else, but I did have,
[02:33] SPEAKER_00: I've been a great career manager to have a great career in IT. And, you know, I was well compensated and I didn't have to work that much.
[02:42] SPEAKER_00: And, you know, when I stumbled on the idea of Staffian, like I said earlier, but it was such a brilliant idea.
[02:50] SPEAKER_00: And it wasn't a cliche before that I just had to, you know, it got me to my core. And I just had to do everything I can because I thought, this is a once in a lifetime opportunity to really make a difference and to make a change and do accomplish something.
[03:05] SPEAKER_00: And, and I, you know, in IT, I, you know, I've done some pretty cool things. I, I, I, you know, I set up one of the first wireless networks in North America, really, you know, way back when.
[03:18] SPEAKER_00: And I was, you know, we, I basically, my job was to prevent hackers from attacking corporations and, and I, you know, is traveling around quite a bit and I had a really good, good life.
[03:31] SPEAKER_01: And then I decided to give that all to start a company, really. So, so, you know, how did you actually get started? You know, people dream of starting a company that might have ideas.
[03:44] SPEAKER_01: And it's, you know, curious to find out how people actually get started, you know, it's thinking and then doing it. It's a big job.
[03:56] SPEAKER_00: Yeah. So, so I was, I was, I don't know, I was, I was, I was skimming over an article about an entrepreneur in Toronto that had, that I got confused about what he was doing.
[04:14] SPEAKER_00: So, I was skimming over this article and I saw shifts and on demand. And I associated his name with the hospitality industry because his brother works in hospitality. So I conflated the two of them.
[04:26] SPEAKER_00: And I thought, wow, this guy did the Uber for hospitality, which wasn't a cliche at the time. It was before the Uber of X wasn't, you know, wasn't a common phrase heard.
[04:38] SPEAKER_00: But I thought, man, what a brilliant idea is that is and I worked in hospitality, you know, between the ages of 19 and 24. And I worked in Miss Saga as a, you know, bartender and a server and a bar back and had some of the best years of my life, frankly.
[04:54] SPEAKER_00: And, and so, you know, I thought it's ideas like it's such a great idea because absenteeism is such a, is such a big problem in hospitality. And we originally started as a platform that basically solved the absenteeism issue for, for restaurants.
[05:11] SPEAKER_00: And so when I stumbled on this idea, I read the actual article and he hadn't done anything of what I described. He'd done like a module for this application called When I Work and wasn't anything to do with what I imagined he does.
[05:27] SPEAKER_00: So I called on my buddy Victor, who was the proprietor of the best restaurant in Toronto at the time. And I said, you know, hey, Victor, listen, if there was an app and your line could call them sick and you'd get somebody in 90 minutes for a place, then would that be useful to you.
[05:41] SPEAKER_00: And he swore at me and he said, that's the most brilliant idea I've ever heard my entire life. And I was living in Vancouver at the time. And so there was a bunch of very fortuitous meetings shortly thereafter where I knew some, you know,
[05:57] SPEAKER_00: I had in Vancouver, I knew a few people, I knew a few people. And I ended meeting this, this guy that had had wrote the one of the first online gambling apps way, way back when and he's a great mentor.
[06:17] SPEAKER_00: I was a great mentor and I still talked to him today, but you know, I started developing the idea. I wanted to do everything. So I thought, you know, just not line cooks or dishwashers, but what about trades people, health care, education, construction, all those things that depend on somebody being there and not calling and sick.
[06:35] SPEAKER_00: And all the things where there's, you know, there's not, there's generally a middleman taking advantage of everybody. So, you know, the agency model where they charge a lot of money and they pay staff very poorly.
[06:46] SPEAKER_00: And so, you know, for, you know, if you want a plumber and why are we paying $150 for a plumber, you know, pay some company when we could just pay the guy like $40 or $50 and, you know, he's happier and we're happier. So that was the really the genesis of the idea is how to disrupt the that predatory middleman that's, you know, present in many industries.
[07:08] SPEAKER_00: And I was really adamant about doing everything. So I wanted to launch this platform where you could sign up as really anything, health care, education, a teacher, construction worker, and my mentor said, you know, that's, that's impossible.
[07:28] SPEAKER_00: You're going to spend a lot of money trying to do it and you're going to fall flat on your face and I couldn't conceive of why that was true.
[07:36] SPEAKER_00: But luckily, I got the book called Lean Startup and quickly realized how accurate that was, which is a great book and I recommended to anybody in a very early stage.
[07:46] SPEAKER_00: And so, you know, my mentor taught me two things and he said, you know, one is to do one thing and do it really, really well, which actually no longer applies in today's world, today's COVID world.
[07:58] SPEAKER_00: And the other thing you said is to build a business before I built an app because, you know, as I thought of the idea, I had gone out and find out how much would, you know, how much would it cost to create an app?
[08:10] SPEAKER_00: And I was getting anything from $50,000 just for wireframes to a million dollars for a free functioning app. And, you know, we didn't have any money. And so basically we, he, he, he proposed that we used like a, just like a one 800 number basically, and people could call or text.
[08:32] SPEAKER_00: And we also had to solve the chicken and egg problem. So how do we have staff before we have clients and how do we have clients before we have staff.
[08:43] SPEAKER_00: So he then, you know, he then just I go and talk to a bunch of people and because I had been working in IT and because I've been well compensated, you know, I spent, I spent most of my time in restaurants drinking good wine and eating good food.
[08:57] SPEAKER_00: And so I knew all the proprietors in Toronto or many of the proprietors and I had a pretty good reputation. That was a good tipper.
[09:07] SPEAKER_00: And so when I, when, when, when I, when we thought of the idea, I basically went to all of them, you know, it was probably 20 or 30 years. So when I said, what do you think is the idea?
[09:16] SPEAKER_00: And would you be a first customer and almost to a number they said, that's the most brilliant idea I've ever heard. And of course, will be your first, your first company, your first customer.
[09:27] SPEAKER_00: And oh, yeah, what about surge pricing like when I need a dishwasher on a Friday night, you can just charge me $25. I'm not going to care.
[09:35] SPEAKER_00: So that was, you know, so we, I actually launched staffy while I was living in Vancouver in Toronto. So I launched it remotely.
[09:46] SPEAKER_01: We are still working. I mean, did you still?
[09:50] SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I was, I mean, I think everyone so that one of the things that people are, you know, they have an idea, they want to do it.
[09:57] SPEAKER_01: But how, the money side of it, it was a family or this. So, you know, that kind of thing.
[10:04] SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
[10:06] SPEAKER_00: So we, I managed to raise some money from friends and family pretty, pretty quickly.
[10:14] SPEAKER_00: After we had kind of developed the model and then decide how to solve the chicken and egg problems. So we hired like a couple of line cooks to basically sit around and just wait for shifts or wait for calls.
[10:27] SPEAKER_00: And we, you know, we tentatively launched on November 2nd, but we started getting our first request on November 1st as like an on demand solution for absenteeism. Of course, it was a dishwasher that called in, that called in sick that we needed to replace.
[10:40] SPEAKER_00: So, I mean, I didn't, obviously, it wasn't enough business to sustain to, you know, to be able to draw a salary from.
[10:52] SPEAKER_00: So I think it was about two years before I, before I started working on staffy full time. And I very much was, you know, trying to do trying to manage a career and trying to start the startup as well.
[11:09] SPEAKER_00: And, you know, it was very challenging sometimes because I, you know, at one point I was working in an office and I was getting calls from clients and I didn't know what to do.
[11:20] SPEAKER_00: And, you know, we didn't have enough money to be able to hire like staff full time yet.
[11:26] SPEAKER_00: So it was, it was, yeah, it was very, very, very tough for a long while to manage that, you know, my work life plus my startup for sure.
[11:36] SPEAKER_01: So, you've been running for a long time here about five years. So, we watched the best thing about being an entrepreneur versus, you know, having a job kind of thing.
[11:49] SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, I think it's, you know, when you're an entrepreneur and you have something that you love, then you're really, really passionate about what you do. And all of the accomplishments, I mean, as well as the, you know, the not so, not so great things about being an entrepreneur.
[12:06] SPEAKER_00: But, you know, you feel really directly.
[12:11] SPEAKER_00: And when you are, when you're in a career, you're kind of doing things for other people for the most part.
[12:18] SPEAKER_00: Whereas when you're an entrepreneur, you're really doing things and accomplishing things yourself. And it's a lot more rewarding. It's a lot more stressful.
[12:28] SPEAKER_00: And, you know, I think I have a lot more great hairs than I did five years ago, but, you know, it's, I think I have a lot more great hairs than I did five years ago.
[12:36] SPEAKER_00: It's a very, very, very different world.
[12:40] SPEAKER_00: But it's, it's, it's, it's far, far more rewarding because you're directly responsible for everything that happens.
[12:48] SPEAKER_01: What's the greatest challenge you've faced in the last five years?
[12:56] SPEAKER_00: I think, I think, well, I think Canada and my challenge in Canada has been fundraising. That's been the biggest challenge for us.
[13:08] SPEAKER_00: Because we were like a sexy, sass market play or a sass company that had this like, you know, all of these, you know, metrics that they can take and measure.
[13:21] SPEAKER_00: We were a staffing marketplace. So, not as attractive and it more, it's all transactional versus recurring.
[13:30] SPEAKER_00: And, you know, it's less, less popular in Canada and there are very few investors in Canada.
[13:37] SPEAKER_00: And I didn't, I've been a, I was a solo founder. And I think that would, that would really worked out for probably the first two and a half, three years.
[13:46] SPEAKER_00: But, you know, towards the third year, I realized why a co-founder would have been valuable. And I did try to have a co-founder right away.
[13:55] SPEAKER_00: But, you basically one person can run the company and one person can fundraise. And I didn't have that luxury.
[14:02] SPEAKER_00: So, it was kind of like a vicious circle of, I can't raise money because I have to run the company. I can't run the company if I'm trying to raise money.
[14:13] SPEAKER_00: And so, you know, we've been basically bootstrapped the entire time. And we, you know, we've done well.
[14:19] SPEAKER_00: So, I think we'll hit close to close to or an excessive, an excessive 12 million in sales this year.
[14:29] SPEAKER_00: But, yeah. And so we, I mean, we managed to bootstrap it, but it was very, very, that was the hardest part of, of, of our journey and my journey is bootstrapping the company because
[14:43] SPEAKER_00: it just makes things a lot more stressful. Like, you know, I was, man, you like, you, you worry about being able to pay people and, you know, it's just, it's a, it's a very, very tough thing to do.
[14:56] SPEAKER_01: Like, that was sort of one of the things I was going to ask you, you know, we face unexpected challenges on people's nerves.
[15:04] SPEAKER_01: And I, I took you to, to a lot of things I do, you know, interested to know, you know, you obviously hit some during the last five years.
[15:15] SPEAKER_01: Have you kind of found a way to, to manage them when you hit that challenge to the last five years? Is there some kind of method or is it just like,
[15:24] SPEAKER_00: yeah, it's exactly that. Yeah, I mean, it's pretty much it. And then you, you know, you start throwing so I'll see what sticks. But, um, in my previous career, I spent a lot of my previous career being a troubleshooter, actually.
[15:41] SPEAKER_00: So I was figuring out constantly how to solve sometimes very complex challenges, technical challenges.
[15:50] SPEAKER_00: And I really think that benefited me in, in my entrepreneurial journeys because I never relied on anyone to solve my problems. I always, I always took on the challenge myself.
[16:05] SPEAKER_00: And, and so when I, when I encounter issues in, in my business, I always, I always work very hard to solve them and are often, you know, I'm often, you know, able to do that.
[16:20] SPEAKER_00: I'm also very optimistic person in general. So I always think that I can do things, no matter what. So I have a lot of confidence and, you know, most of the time it actually works out.
[16:35] SPEAKER_00: And sometimes I can. And so, and that's when I, you know, I asked other people to help, but, you know, it helps eliminate a lot of the, a lot of, helps us get through a lot of problems by, you know, using my team.
[16:49] SPEAKER_00: And, and, and having myself to solve issues that we encounter.
[16:53] SPEAKER_01: So, if you could go back in time to your 20 something self, what advice would you give yourself back then?
[17:05] SPEAKER_00: My 20 something self or five years ago when I started to come to the, before that, we move into the work, what should we do?
[17:17] SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I don't know if I have a good answer for that. I've had a pretty good life.
[17:22] SPEAKER_00: And I've really, you know, if, if, if everything culminates or has culminated at this point in my life where I'm running this, you know, what I think is an amazing company.
[17:32] SPEAKER_00: We're doing amazing things right now. I'm really proud of the journey and, you know, I wouldn't really, wouldn't really change anything or give my 20 something self and the other advice.
[17:42] SPEAKER_01: I think it's been a good journey. I've had a, I've had it. Yeah.
[17:47] SPEAKER_01: That's a good thing. So, yeah.
[17:49] SPEAKER_01: A good time.
[17:50] SPEAKER_01: You mentioned the, a mentor. And I think that in my life, there's been two or three people that are really kind of given me the lasting impression on me kind of thing.
[18:04] SPEAKER_01: What's the best piece of advice that you've received from a mentor? And do you use on a continual basis?
[18:13] SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
[18:15] SPEAKER_00: So, yeah, I think I mentioned them earlier. One was, you know, in a practical sense, to build a business before you build an app because you have to demonstrate the efficacy of the model that you're planning on executing.
[18:29] SPEAKER_00: And, you know, to, you know, go out and survey the clients was super useful. So, practically, those were really good.
[18:37] SPEAKER_00: You know, that's that was really good advice. And then the stick to one thing and do it really, really well was super important because it took me a while to realize how significant that is and how trying to take on too much is, you know, is a disadvantage and not not an advantage.
[18:55] SPEAKER_00: You know, we were, we were turning down lots of different companies early on because we didn't want to spread ourselves too thin.
[19:04] SPEAKER_00: And even though, you know, I really wanted to chase after this big chunk of business because it was guaranteed income. It was just not what not our core function. It didn't make any sense.
[19:15] SPEAKER_00: But that being said, so we recently pivoted from hospitality into healthcare and general labor.
[19:27] SPEAKER_00: And so I was curious about how we, you know, and I talked to my mentor, I said, you know, when, when we first started chatting, you said to pick one thing and do it really, really well.
[19:41] SPEAKER_00: And now, you know, we're doing all kinds of different things and it's not really that that same motto. And he said, well, the answer is that is that we're, they completely different world than we've ever been in a unique span in all of our lifetimes and the old rules no longer apply, which is, you know, really quite true.
[20:02] SPEAKER_00: And so, you know, we've been able to pivot pretty successfully. And, you know, thankfully, saves the business and actually succeed and do better than we've ever done before.
[20:18] SPEAKER_00: But, you know, those were really the great pieces of advice. And one more recently is to just, I don't know how to put it.
[20:31] SPEAKER_00: But basically, you just have to always, you have to always remain calm.
[20:40] SPEAKER_00: And not show how frustrated or upset or angry might be with something and just always, you know, remain a cool head, have a cool head when, when dealing with people.
[20:52] SPEAKER_00: Now that I'm prone to not having that, but sometimes, you know, things that are not sure to be very frustrating. And, but always remain calm and putting your best foot forward is always, you know, I think is great advice.
[21:07] SPEAKER_00: And, you know, a very valuable lesson.
[21:13] SPEAKER_01: So, if you weren't doing what you were doing, what you're doing now, would you be doing the same job or would you, is this that you were an IT that you were doing before and, or is it something else that you would be doing?
[21:27] SPEAKER_00: I would probably be doing the same job quite honestly, unless I thought of something better.
[21:34] SPEAKER_00: But I'd probably be living on a beach somewhere in the, in the K-White North.
[21:42] SPEAKER_00: You know, I do love it here though, but, you know, I would, I would probably be, I have a lot more leisurely lifestyle, I think, which would be, which would be great, especially now.
[21:52] SPEAKER_01: Do you pivot in cause of cold wind really, I guess, with hospitality?
[21:57] SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
[21:58] SPEAKER_01: You know, everything else.
[22:00] SPEAKER_01: And you've done it successfully. I mean, you know, what can you, I mean, you said it's because rules of the past are no longer rules of the present kind of thing.
[22:18] SPEAKER_01: Is this some other things that you could, you know, to our listeners viewers, many of whom are entrepreneurs who are probably scratching their head and saying, oh, shit, you know, what are we going to do now?
[22:32] SPEAKER_01: Or anything that you could sort of pass on to them in terms of that pivot advice brought on by where we are, the, the really kind of might help them take a similar path.
[22:50] Speaker UNKNOWN: Yeah.
[22:52] Speaker UNKNOWN: Yeah.
[22:56] SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
[22:57] Speaker UNKNOWN: 
[22:57] Speaker UNKNOWN: 
[22:57] Speaker UNKNOWN: 
[22:57] SPEAKER_00: Yeah. That's a good question.
[23:01] SPEAKER_00: I think there's a lot of opportunity right now, because the world is changing so quickly.
[23:07] SPEAKER_00: And, you know, we were able to succeed and get customers that would probably have normally taken a year or two.
[23:18] SPEAKER_00: To find and develop the relationships with and get contract signed, but because everything is changing so quickly, you know, we had contract signed within a week kind of thing.
[23:29] SPEAKER_00: And so I think you have to look for the outliers right now and where the opportunities exist. And we, I mean, thankfully, we kind of stumbled on to ours.
[23:41] SPEAKER_00: And I'll tell you what happened.
[23:44] SPEAKER_00: So right around, so previous to COVID, we had been building our company for about four years.
[23:52] SPEAKER_00: And we'd finally got to the point where we were starting to become pretty successful and get contracts with a lot of larger and larger clients basically.
[24:03] SPEAKER_00: And, and we were even starting to talk about the third vendor agreements with some of them.
[24:10] SPEAKER_00: And then COVID hit and basically destroyed 98% of our business almost literally overnight right around the time.
[24:20] SPEAKER_00: Doug Ford had announced the state of emergency.
[24:25] SPEAKER_00: And we were, you know, so everything stopped.
[24:29] SPEAKER_00: Basically, we were expanding into the US that stopped fully because we were going into airports and, you know, there was like no more flights basically.
[24:38] SPEAKER_00: We, you know, we were, we were dealing with hospitality and events. So all of the events stopped. All the restaurants closed.
[24:47] SPEAKER_00: And, you know, our revenue dropped to, you know, 5% of what it was, or 2 to 5% of what it was, you know, just a few days before.
[24:58] SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it was, it was, it was wild. And I was trying to think of what we were going to do.
[25:07] SPEAKER_00: And at the same time, I was, I'm a frequent user of Instacart.
[25:10] SPEAKER_00: And I noticed that the dates, the delivery dates were getting further and further out.
[25:16] SPEAKER_00: So first it was, you know, 12 hours and it was a day that it was two days and it was five days.
[25:22] SPEAKER_00: Then you couldn't even get an Instacart order.
[25:24] SPEAKER_00: And what it made me realize is that there's going to be a lot of companies that are much busier because of COVID as opposed to having their businesses decimated like in hospitality.
[25:34] SPEAKER_00: So the law laws, the sobies, the cost codes, Canadian tires, the Amazon's, all of those companies, I thought would be much busier because of COVID and I ended up being a luckily, luckily, right.
[25:48] SPEAKER_00: But also healthcare companies as well.
[25:52] SPEAKER_00: So, although I thought it was going to be, I didn't think COVID was going to last this long.
[25:58] SPEAKER_00: And, but I felt we had an obligation to the staff on our platform to try and find them revenue because they had just lost 100% of their income basically.
[26:11] SPEAKER_00: And so I started reaching out to, I was literally, I literally emailed Jeff Bezos at like 2 a.m. the morning because I thought I'd get him like up up and working or something.
[26:21] SPEAKER_00: I emailed all of the CEOs of all the biggest companies I could think of like Canadian tire, Costco, LaBla, sobies.
[26:28] SPEAKER_00: And we started talking to some of them.
[26:30] SPEAKER_00: But the most traction we got was was in healthcare.
[26:34] SPEAKER_00: And basically we were able to repurpose the healthcare, the hospitality staff into healthcare.
[26:39] SPEAKER_00: So dishwasher or line cook might work as a housekeeper or a cleaner server or bartender might work as a dietary aid.
[26:48] SPEAKER_00: And then basically once they became familiar with our model, they started asking us, or I kind of have hazardly offered that we could maybe think about finding the nurses and PSWs and healthcare aids.
[27:06] SPEAKER_00: And man, we had within like a few days, we had 400 requests for all of those positions.
[27:14] SPEAKER_00: And because long term care had been deeply affected by, you know, where they're losing 30% of their other staff basically.
[27:23] SPEAKER_00: So we were able to close a number of contracts very, very quickly because we had breached out so aggressively and Eric, who's my number two guy.
[27:36] SPEAKER_00: We literally did everything we could. We were working like 16 or 18 hour days.
[27:42] SPEAKER_00: And we, you know, the funny thing is we weren't trying to save the company because I thought it would be short lived.
[27:47] SPEAKER_00: But, you know, because COVID has been so, has lasted so long, we actually saved the company itself.
[27:54] SPEAKER_00: Because otherwise we would have probably had to close down if we had impivided.
[27:58] SPEAKER_00: So I really think it's about finding those, you know, opportunities for those opportunities or outliers where people have thought of something before because everything is changing so quickly.
[28:13] SPEAKER_00: So there's so much happening right now. And then there's, you know, unique opportunities that work alongside government and all the red tape has gone away because everybody's just trying to find solutions to problems and they have to do it quickly.
[28:26] SPEAKER_01: Just, just, just getting close to the end couple, couple less, into the question.
[28:32] SPEAKER_01: Are you a morning or a night person?
[28:36] SPEAKER_00: Definitely a night person. I really even nine o'clock is kind of early for me.
[28:41] SPEAKER_00: I generally block out my calendar before the contract is made for you.
[28:47] SPEAKER_00: And I'm usually work till about, you know, 1 a.m. or so.
[28:53] SPEAKER_00: And I go to bed and I do wake up like six and I work for a little bit and then I go back to sleep.
[28:59] SPEAKER_00: And then I just really work up work around nine o'clock and then I do a workout.
[29:04] SPEAKER_00: And I start my day around 10.
[29:07] SPEAKER_00: And, yeah, so definitely not a, definitely not a morning person at all.
[29:12] SPEAKER_01: If you have to pick one word to describe yourself, what would it be and why?
[29:17] SPEAKER_00: To natious.
[29:19] SPEAKER_00: Because I, I never, ever give up.
[29:22] SPEAKER_00: And it really came from the background of, you know, previously when I was a,
[29:28] SPEAKER_00: a troubleshooter is always, I think of it as a, like a challenge, like every, every problem is a challenge to see if I can solve it.
[29:36] SPEAKER_00: And so, a lot of people describe me as having a lot of tenacity.
[29:42] SPEAKER_00: And it's because I, I never stop and I never give up.
[29:44] SPEAKER_00: And I, you know, I always make sure I get things done and I fix things or.
[29:52] SPEAKER_01: What book are you currently reading?
[29:56] SPEAKER_01: What book would you, you know, you already recommended one book, but there's been, what are you reading on?
[30:02] SPEAKER_01: What would you recommend?
[30:04] SPEAKER_01: And you read recently?
[30:06] SPEAKER_00: I honestly have not had any time to read anything in the last, probably year or so since COVID hit.
[30:17] SPEAKER_00: I read the internet.
[30:19] SPEAKER_01: That's about it.
[30:20] SPEAKER_01: I usually read, you know, two a month and I'm done about one quarter a month.
[30:26] SPEAKER_01: It's, it's pretty, I agree.
[30:29] SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, I, we have been, you know, flying by, see their pants with, with our pivot, we've grown easily 10X, since pre COVID and unfortunately, I have, you know, I don't, I haven't had any time to read any books or even think about any books.
[30:48] SPEAKER_00: I have a lot of books I'd like to read.
[30:51] SPEAKER_00: The ones that, the one by Reid Hoffman, I really, I really like to read.
[30:58] SPEAKER_00: I forget what it's called, but it's a thing about, you know, speed scaling or something like that.
[31:04] SPEAKER_00: But yeah, we have a whole library of books that we, you know, back when we were in an office, we had all this whole library of startup friendly or startup centric books.
[31:16] SPEAKER_00: But now we don't have enough.
[31:17] SPEAKER_00: There's nobody around to read them.
[31:21] SPEAKER_00: Okay.
[31:22] SPEAKER_00: Yeah, scaling, that was that.
[31:23] SPEAKER_01: I mean, interesting, some, some great, great, you know, great input on your part of people, you know, how can people get you online?
[31:33] SPEAKER_01: I mean, you know, you get people listening and they get interested and they sometimes want to connect the email, whatever.
[31:40] SPEAKER_01: What's the best way for people to connect with people?
[31:43] SPEAKER_00: Yeah, right now is linked, linked in is probably the best way.
[31:46] SPEAKER_00: My email inbox is inundated every day right now.
[31:51] SPEAKER_00: And linked in is a lot less commerce.
[31:53] SPEAKER_00: So if anybody wants to reach out or, you know, they want to get into the company where it's staffy.com.
[31:59] SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
[32:00] SPEAKER_01: Hope you have a thanks very much for going on.
[32:03] SPEAKER_01: Can the spot guys, it's been, it would be great meeting.
[32:06] SPEAKER_00: Thanks Bill, as a pleasure and thanks so much for having me.
[32:10] SPEAKER_00: It's been great chatting with you.