On this episode of The Staffing Show, David is joined by Brian Hoffmeyer, SVP of Market Strategies at Beeline. Join the conversation as they break down the inner workings of Beeline, discuss three key strategies they use to differentiate themselves from other VMSs, and unpack their MSP partnerships. Brian also shares his insights on the importance of viewing the contingent workforce from a strategic perspective, explores the term “statement of work,” and highlights other trends in this space. Finally, he provides his take on the evolution of VMS and leaves listeners with valuable advice on effective sales strategies. Tune in for all this and more!
[0:01:14] DF: Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us for another episode of The Staffing Show. Today, I’m super excited to be joined by Brian Hoffmeyer, who is the SVP at Beeline. Brian, thanks for being on today. Super excited about our conversation. To kick things off, could you tell us a little bit about your background and how you got into the staffing industry?
[0:01:33] BH: Glad to and really glad to be here, David. Thanks for having me. I’m really looking forward to our conversation. I came into this industry, like I think a lot of people did, kind of by accident. The story I always tell is when I was a little kid, this isn’t what I imagined myself doing for the vast majority of my career, and I think that applies to a lot of us. I actually posted recently on LinkedIn, there’s this origin story like a meme or a hashtag I should say, going around LinkedIn where people post how they got to where they are. When I was a little kid, I actually wanted to be an architect, and the defining feature of my house is, was that they had a waterslide going through them.
[0:02:10] DF: I support that.
[0:02:11] BH: Actually, still a really good idea, especially in the hot Colorado day like we’re having today. I came into the staffing industry, specifically, the VMS industry kind of by accident about 20 years ago. I was looking for my next step. I was a product manager at the time for a software company that managed IRA trusts and saw a job at then IQnavigator as a product manager and applied for that job, and kind of the rest is history, and have been with the IQnavigator, now Beeline organization for 20 years, which again, was not what I was expecting. But it’s come to really define my career and define a lot of who I am as a person. I’ve developed this, what I call, an unlikely passion for the importance of what we broadly do in contingent labor for the importance of helping companies manage this increasingly critical part of the workforce better.
So, doing helps all of the personas that are involved in it. I think that’s one of the really interesting things about contingent labor is you get all these different personas, you get the buyer of contingent labor, the staffing supplier, the worker themselves, and the technology and the services, MSPs, VMSs, that underpin it all and it makes the world really fascinating. And I’ve been very lucky, in my career at Beeline, now we’re approaching 20 years, have done a bunch of different jobs that have increased my experience and helped me on my career path. So, though I’ve been with the same company for 20 years, I feel like I’ve had, I don’t even know I count, 10 or 11 different jobs during that time.
[0:03:39] DF: That’s amazing. Tell us a little bit about who is Beeline? Where are you guys kind – what do you guys do? And then where are you at from like a size and growth perspective as well? If you’re open to sharing that?
[0:03:50] BH: Yes, glad to. Beeline is, what is typically known as a vendor management system or VMS. Frankly, it’s not a term that we love, because it doesn’t fully describe what we do. Yes, we help clients manage their vendors. But one, we get confused with a lot of other VMSs. If you Google VMS, it’s not going to be the first thing that comes up. Virtual machines might be, which is kind of annoying. But it’s the name we’re stuck with. We tried to change what we were called a couple of years ago, and we will tend to call ourselves an extended workforce platform that tends to fit. But we still answer to VMS.
But effectively, we have a variety of tools, we have multiple VMSs we sell now in the market. They are all designed to manage the end-to-end process for all types of non-employee labor, whether it’s contingent workers of all types. Again, ranging from people working in a warehouse packing orders to very high-end IT workers, as well as statement of work, and independent contractors. All of these different terms, the Beeline tool can manage all of those processes. We’re a software-only company. We provide no services. We’re really managing that process. Our typical client has always been the buyer of contingent labor, the company who is engaging with staffing suppliers to find labor, though, that’s something that’s changing as our product strategy shifts, and we’ll be talking about that more today.
[0:05:14] DF: So, are those some examples of your guys’ customer? Are there verticals you specialize in or size of business?
[0:05:21] BH: Just from a size perspective, we’ve got about 400 plus clients. A big portion of our clients are kind of names that you would know, companies in the global 2000, who are spending historically 25 million or more on contingent labor on an annual basis, all the way up into the billions. We do have a new product that’s focused on the middle market, and that’s going to focus on smaller true mid-market companies. But our clients are large organizations. I probably shouldn’t name a lot of them, but –
[0:05:48] DF: Yes, understood.
[0:05:50] BH: Most of them are brand names that the folks on this would recognize. We process about 65 billion in annual labor through Beeline. We really hit on almost every major vertical, from financial services, is actually our largest. But consulting, manufacturing of all types, retail, computer services, pharma, life sciences. Maybe the one thing that we don’t do, because it requires some specialized functionality, is true clinical healthcare, the actual clinicians in hospitals, because there’s unique functionality that’s required for them and their specialty VMSs there. But in general, VMSs are just that generalist. They can serve across a lot of verticals.
[0:06:33] DF: I mean, you just said, you’re a generalist. Now, I’m going to ask the next part. What makes you guys different?
[0:06:38] BH: It’s a great question. I think it’s three key things. One is that our expertise matters. We’ve been doing this for 20 years, and have served – we’re lucky to serve this very diverse group of clients who have substantial and complex requirements. Our system is enterprise-grade for a reason because our clients have pushed us to do that. So, that expertise has given us an opinion. It’s given us the breadth and depth of functionality needed to serve these clients. That’s one.
Second is what we call unwavering focus and we are an independent software-only provider. We are only focused on one thing, which is providing software to manage the non-employee workforce. We’re not trying – we’re not part of it, as some of our competitors are, part of a large consortium of different software products. That’s our one focus and it’s something we are passionate about as a company.
Then last, is this idea of what we call collaborative innovation. The contingent workforce continues to change and our product strategy changes. One of the things our product team says all the time is that we view all feedback as a gift. So, we engage not only with our clients, but all of the stakeholders, staffing suppliers, workers, and MSPs can make our product better. That combined with that expertise and focus is what makes Beeline unique.
[0:07:54] DF: I don’t know how common this is. But I feel like, sometimes I hear the word VMS, and we also have MSP or we’re partnered with an MSP. Is that a common, maybe a silly question at this point?
[0:08:03] BH: No, it’s not. It’s a really good question. We partner with MSPs. MSPs are involved in a significant part of our business. About two-thirds. And that’s a trend that we continue to see. My day job, when I’m not doing podcasts, is I manage all of our partner relationships and partners, in general are very, very strategic at Beeline. Because of two things. One is the complexity of the non-employee workforce. Two, because of our focus on being just a software provider, we need partners to extend and add to what we do. So, doing allows us to serve the needs of our clients, and MSPs are a huge part of that. Again, about two-thirds of our business. We work in a wide range of MSPs across the industry, across the globe, but it’s a partnership, and they’re not part of who we are.
[0:08:50] DF: Yes, that makes sense. I know, you and I had a brief conversation on just how, and I’ve heard this from quite a few people, that MSPs are playing a bigger role than they have in the past, especially, I know in healthcare, I’ve heard that from a handful of people. But what’s your take overall on kind of the –
[0:09:08] BH: I think it’s for healthcare and I think it’s true in all verticals as well. What we’re seeing is a shifting of what the MSP does. I think this is common across a lot of different industries where technology through AI. We probably can’t have a conversation without mentioning AI. Advances in automation and things like that, are replacing activities that humans used to do manually. As a result, I think one of the fascinating things about humans throughout history is when automation happens, humans evolve and do things that they didn’t previously believe that’s going to happen. In this AI revolution, we’re certainly seeing it with our MSP partners where they’re shifting from managing processes to providing strategic advice, consulting on how work should get done on a tactical day-to-day basis, but also on a strategic basis. And getting buzzwords, things like total talent management and when a company is growing and they’ve got these goals that they’re needing to achieve, the MSP is helping guide them.
How does that impact their talent strategy? It’s been one of the things that’s been pretty interesting over the last few years, not just seeing the MSPs evolve, but seeing increased HR and talent acquisition involvement in the contingent workforce. If we’re having this conversation five years ago, not five days, five years, most of our stakeholders were procurement. HR wanted nothing to do with contingent labor. I’m speaking in broad terms. We have the Heisman. Now, what we see as the best practices organizations, combining procurement disciplines around vendor management, contract management, with human capital, HR talent acquisition, and disciplines around talent. As the contingent workforce grows in size and importance, organizations that don’t have it as part of their talent strategy, I think you’re missing out because if it’s 20% of your workforce are not your employees, but they’re not part of your planning, that’s a problem.
[0:11:06] DF: So essentially, you’re seeing the value add is that if they can take the contingent workforce and include that as their strategic HR planning, you’re going to get more out of it.
[0:11:15] BH: And what’s something that I’m generally pretty passionate about is companies need to think about contingent workforce from a strategic perspective. When a company, what are your goals regarding your contingent workforce? You often hear something that is important, but relatively tactical, like, “I want to help achieve savings. I want to improve quality.”
[0:11:33] DF: I’m trying to reduce cost.
[0:11:35] BH: Yes. And that’s not unimportant, but I think it’s more interesting to say, we, as a company are growing into this new market, or we have a whole new product. In order to do so, we need contingent workers, to help us achieve those goals. We encourage our customers to tie their contingent workforce into higher-level corporate goals because you certainly tie your talent, and your full-time talent into your corporate goals, and contingent workforce should be no different.
[0:12:02] DF: So, it sounds like you also mentioned MSPs, are helping play that role strategically. Do you think that’s why there’s more involved? Or what’s kind of the – you mentioned the AI component of it as well. That’s just kind of shifting the MSPs role. But what do you think the reason for the growth in the MSP segment has been?
[0:12:17] BH: Yes. I think it’s kind of a virtuous cycle driven by all of those things. HR is more involved. MSPs see the need to evolve as the world changes in general, but also in terms of what technology does. They’re using technology to enable the things that they’re doing as well. By the way, a lot of what I say extends to staffing suppliers too. We’re seeing them bring automation in to make better decisions and serve their clients better. We’re seeing them try to become strategic advisors to their clients as well. Again, using that virtuous cycle term that I think is really important, all boats rise with that tide.
[0:12:54] DF: We jumped right into it by talking about some of the trends and shifts that are happening in the staffing industry. One of those that you had brought up and something that I’ve seen quite a few of our customers actually talked to have pushed heavier into the statement of work kind of path, and that’s something that you brought up as a trend that you’re seeing as well. Maybe you could talk a little bit about what that means, and what you’re experiencing from your perspective.
[0:13:15] BH: We’re definitely seeing that. We’ve been talking about statement of work for a number of years and I think various people, pundits, if you will, maybe myself included has proclaimed a particular year is the year of statement of work. Not all of those predictions as predictions or want to do have come to be. I think we’re seeing just an increased emphasis on it.
One is that, at most organizations, statement of work spend dwarfs traditional contingent labor spend. At least 2x. But in certain organizations that could be 6x. We’re talking about statement of work across a wide variety of different categories, certainly IT, both development work, and wholesale outsourcing. But marketing and finance, and then, depending on what industry. Like I was talking to a client in the in the energy, public utility industry today, they do big statement of work around things like vegetation management on rights of why the clear vegetation away from power lines. But it’s a statement of work because its services are being performed by people. There’s all these variations in it.
So, what clients realize that they need to get a handle on it for the same reason they do on traditional contingent labor, ultimately, to get visibility, and better decision making based on that visibility, because now they’ve got the data and they can measure it. I think from a staffing supplier perspective, they realize it’s an opportunity to provide services that aren’t as commoditized. If you’re just competing your project manager against somebody else’s project manager, it’s hard to differentiate. But if you can show a company that you can deliver an outsourced service better, faster, cheaper, through a methodology you’ve developed, I think it sets you apart from your competition. So, both sides are pushing at this to cause it to grow.
Then, the other thing we often see is that when a VMS and an MSP, if there’s one involved comes in and puts controls around certain parts of the process, it’s that classic squeezing of the balloon that it’s going to pop out somewhere else. All sudden statement of work spend goes up, well, then you have to really look at it and say, “Are these truly statements of work that are being created? Or is it contingent that’s now hiding?” Our clients look to us to help them get control over all of that.
[0:15:31] DF: So, it sounds it from staffing agency’s perspective, one of the benefits is differentiated services. Obviously, if you’re solving the problem, from a more meaningful perspective, you actually own the outcomes. I always think about that has to be a challenge from going, “Hey, our problem that we’re solving is getting you the person to solve the problem versus we now own the problem.” It feels like a very different approach to work. What are some of the challenges that you hear about from agencies going down that path?
[0:15:57] BH: I think some of it at times, they’re trying just to wrap contingent, where they’re not truly taking on responsibility. In an SOW wrap, we’re still trying to do it on a time and materials basis. To me, if it’s a statement of work, the tradeoff between the buyer and the supplier is the shifting of that risk. It’s an opportunity to make more money, but it’s also, you’ve got to have the right processes, the people in place, the infrastructure. If somebody is outsourcing development to you, you sure as hell better understand what you’re being asked to develop, and what are the resources you need to do that in a way that’s going to tie into what that company is trying to achieve from a business perspective.
[0:16:39] DF: I have not heard that being the year of statement of work. Actually, more people in the finance and accounting segment this year that have had a lot of success shifting into that kind of approach to contingent labor, and also to more of a strategic solution-oriented partnership. What are some of the other trends that from your perspective, where you sit, talking to all of the suppliers that you guys work with, and these were some of the other things you see going on?
[0:17:03] BH: I think, in general, across our client base, and as I mentioned, we’ve got a significant amount of spend running through our system. We’re seeing week-over-week increases in kind of what I call save, restore, spend, when we normalize for growth and new clients and things like that. We’re seeing this gradual increase in spend week over week. We’re still down year over year, as is, I think, everyone. We track for example, pretty closely to the Bullhorn, SIA, Staffing Index.
[0:17:31] DF: That’s what I – I check that every Tuesday now.
[0:17:36] BH: So, we’re not back to where we were in 2023. But the increase seems to be steepening in this trajectory, which is a good thing. When it first started, I would call it imperceptible to the human eye in terms of like, you can now see it, but we still have about half of our clients are spending more, and half of our clients are spending less. But we think we’ll continue to see a recovery, it will be interesting to see the impact of socioeconomic things, the political climate.
I was talking to an MSP partner, and they did an analysis, and over the last 12 years, they’ve seen no impact based on kind of the party that has an office on contingent labor spending. There’s no correlation that they can find, which kind of surprised me, but I thought was interesting. So, I think we’ll still see contingency to go up. One of things you and I were talking about, though, is that there’s this kind of COVID hangover where spending across so many verticals, especially healthcare during COVID, and that reset the baseline, probably artificially high. I think we need to adjust the baseline down to be like, maybe in a lot of ways we should just take ‘20 and 2021 out of history. I mean, the year it happened and like just look at normalized growth from 2019 as the new baseline.
But I also think that’s created some reticence in clients to spend on contingent labor because we hear a lot about unemployment being so low, but I think that’s not accounting for the folks that have just left the workforce. People are like, “Well, why is it contingent?” It’s always been a leading indicator of growth. Why isn’t it growing faster? I think companies are just nervous right now.
[0:19:15] DF: You’re going to kind of just locked up with the interest rates, and I always – everybody says election year. I don’t know. I would love to know if there’s actual correlation with things pausing on election years, but it feels like that’s the common –
[0:19:26] BH: It feels right, anyway.
[0:19:27] DF: It feels right, for sure. Though, I also –
[0:19:30] BH: – things that we saw so many large tech firms have massive layoffs, you know, in technology, and a lot of those permanent people, I think, got jobs very quickly, but they got jobs at smaller firms. I think, especially really small firms tend to use less contract labor. So, I state that because so much of contingent labor has historically been in technology and IT. So, there’s some correction going on in there, I think.
[0:19:57] DF: Yes. It’s definitely been interesting times. I feel like talking to people outside of staffing. The economy’s doing amazing. Things are things are great. Then staffing, there’s the last 18 months have been a little bit challenging for some, with some verticals, outperforming others. One of the other areas that I know you and I talked about briefly was just kind of the critical balance of cost quality and speed. If you could just kind of share a little bit about that as well.
[0:20:20] BH: Yes, I love this topic, because kind of to the point of savings being tactical. I think it isn’t. I’m not, again, discounting the importance of saving money. But if you save $5 an hour on a person, and they’re not good at their job, and they take twice as long to do it, you haven’t really saved money. So, I think it’s smart for everybody in the industry. Staffing suppliers should be talking about this. We have tools that give clients different levers they can pull, where we show that intersection of cost, quality, and speed. If you spend, again, $5 less, quality may go down, or it takes two weeks longer to find the person. Well, okay, that’s fine. Or you can say, “You know what, this is a critical project to my business. I’m going to spend $10 more an hour, and I find the person in five days and they can get working.” So, having that kind of visibility is really important. I think, ultimately, that’s what our clients really care about.
[0:21:17] DF: How are you seeing clients measure that? Are they able to do that through – and this, again, might be a question that others know. But is that something that you can see and track within the VMS? What are ways –
[0:21:29] BH: Not only can we see and track it in terms of analytics looking backwards. What we’re trying to do is use tools to help create a better requisition from the onset, that creates a better outcome for everybody. So, we say to a hiring manager, “Hey, David, it looks like you’re hiring a project manager again. You did this last year. And when you did that, you added these additional job skills to the base requisition, to the base job description, because that’s what you mean by project manager. So, let’s do that again, so you get a better outcome.” Or another example of that would be like you’re in Denver, but if you hired somebody in Des Moines, Iowa, I was used Des Moines for some reason. I have no ties – you could save $10 an hour and find this person quicker. So, maybe you should expand the scope, the geographic scope you’re looking at. It’s trying to provide those tools to create better outcomes from the start, versus just analyzing in a rearview mirror.
[0:22:29] DF: That’s great. Are you guys looking at, and this is something that’s near and dear to me, and it’s something that I’ve been digging into more is looking at, we’re calling a candidate lifetime value. Same concept as customer lifetime value, but looking at from the perspective of a candidate, and then simply just where were they sourced. Was this say, sourced from Indeed? Was it from Vivian? Was it from a referral? We’re seeing fairly significant differences on just where you found the person in terms of how – that’s not going to necessarily mean quality. But time on contract does probably, hopefully, correlate with quality.
[0:23:04] BH: Yes. I’d probably look at that a little differently. But I think it’s the other side of the same coin is things like reusing the same person, right? Somebody’s coming into your business and they spend the first two weeks getting on board and understanding your development environment. Well, why not redeploy that person rather than find somebody all new. So, I think, we again, try to provide tools to help drive redeployment, but I think, MSP should help do more of this. Staffing supplier should be suggesting that, “Hey, David’s coming up on two weeks to go in his assignment. He’s done a great job. Let’s find another job for him.” And that’s beneficial to everyone.
[0:23:45] DF: One of the other areas that I know you and I touched on a little bit is just, you brought this up earlier, is like saying, VMS is not always what you guys would necessarily say, is the ideal word or terminology. But how have things changed? How’s the opinion of VMS changed over the last few years?
[0:24:01] BH: I think it’s become less of a four-letter word, historically. We still see this a little too much. I was at a conference at the end of March and doing a panel where some of these old adages continued to come up, where the VMS is stopping me from talking to the hiring managers. They’re making it, so it’s hard for me to compete, et cetera. First and foremost, the VMS is just a software tool. If that’s happening, it’s because somebody else has put in a process using the VMS, whether it’s an MSP, though more and more MSPs don’t do this, either. Or the client if they’re managing their own program, or even in some cases, the MSP is forced to do something by the client where they limit manager contact. To me, that’s an area where the industry continues to need to evolve based on we shouldn’t be punishing everybody for the bad behavior of a few 20 years ago kind of thing. The perception of VMS is a blocker has changed.
When we talk to suppliers, we’re trying to make their lives easier and this is where our product strategy has shifted. Historically, Beeline, and I think all VMSs are really focused on the end buyer as the customer, as the persona. We looked at ourselves a couple years ago and said it, we need to change this. Now, we’re talking a lot about triangles today. But again, you’ve got the buyer, the staffing supplier, and the worker at three corners of the triangle, and there’s MSP that sort of overlays or underlays, the entire thing, we want all of those users to have great experiences using Beeline.
Specifically, when it comes to staffing suppliers, we’ve heard two things when we talk to them. One is they ask how can you help us win more business? Then, once we win that business, how can you help us operate with more automation and efficiency? We’ve got products and user experiences that are directly designed to do both of those things. Again, we’re a software provider, so we’re not in the business of saying to our clients, “These are the three suppliers that you should use.” But we want to create tools that create that connection. We have those available now. Then, from an automation and efficiency perspective, we’re doing a lot around consolidating data APIs to make the data flow automatically between our system and external systems. The ATS or what have you, the supplier uses so that the supplier then concentrates on filling the requisition with the right person, rather than manual data entry, which is prone to errors and delays.
[0:26:38] DF: With that, I know you kind of touched on this a little bit. One of the things I’d heard, just over the years being in healthcare staffing is VMS came in, in a major way, and I was like, “Well, it’s taken away the human connections, take away my relationship,” in some instances, which to you’re saying, it’s not necessarily true. But it sounds like there’s actually potentially an opportunity for VMS to also help you identify new clients and I know that’s an area where staffing firms as a whole right now, that’s been the number one challenge for managing the most recent SIA pulse report, but they’ve been sitting in the spot, where finding new clients has been harder than finding new candidates for a while. That’s something that – explain how that works, and what are some of the top agencies doing to actually find new hiring managers and new job orders?
[0:27:19] BH: Yes, so for us, we’ve put up a public directory on beeline.com. I’m not trying to make this a Beeline advertisement at all. But effectively, a robust search engine that helps buyers or contingent labor, whether it’s a Beeline find, or somebody that happens on our website that uses another VMS find staffing suppliers. The other side of this trend, like I said, our staffing supplier partners are saying, “How can you help us find new business?” Our clients are coming to us and saying the exact same thing. “How can you help us find new suppliers?” I have this need for project managers in Des Moines, Iowa, and how do I find new sources of supply for that? We’re seeing that from our existing client base, and we’re seeing that from our MSP partners, because we have so much data, and we’re seeing it when we’re talking to new potential clients that are out here. That’s a common RFP question for us now. So, we’ve responded to that with this directory that helps make that connection, and glad to talk to anybody who’s listening, more about that offline.
I think from a staffing supplier perspective, it’s get this is such one-on-one stuff, but it’s showing truly how you’re different. When you are selling your services to a client, really understanding their business at a deep level, what are they trying to achieve in their business, not just with their contingent workforce in their business, and how you are uniquely focused and able to meet that needs? And what are the tools you can use to do that?
[0:28:50] DF: I know you’ve been in sales for years. So obviously, differentiating the service is good advice. I’m wondering, knowing that that’s one of the top challenges, if there’s any other pieces of advice or things that you see working well on the sales front? Or even if it’s just kind of personal advice to be like, “Hey, if I was CEO of a staffing agency, here’s what I would be telling my team that they should be focused on to make sure that went into business.” I’ll put you on the spot.
[0:29:13] BH: It’s a great question. I think it’s really just comes down to like a lot of business basics. You hear the stories of kind of bad behavior of cold foreign emails that are sent. I get probably one a day from somebody like, “Hey, can we provide staffing to the Beeline directly?” They’re so generic and like, they literally just go right in the bin. They’re not catching attention. They come across as an annoyance. So, you’ve got to get above that. You’ve got to show I understand your business. Here’s how I’ve helped a client that looks like you, even if I’ve not worked directly with you, and here’s why I’m confident that I can meet your needs.
The more you know, the better. Use the tools that are available. For example, if there’s an MSP involved that the client you’re selling to, you better know that because you’re trying to get around them is not going to end well. The client is going to immediately send you to them. It’s going to create a demerit on your report card to start with. So, like if there’s an MSP, build the relationship with the MSP to try to get in there. And again, show them how you can not only help them look better, but how you can serve their ultimate end on the line. So, I feel like it’s pretty basic stuff, but it probably just bears repeating, because –
[0:30:29] DF: I think it’s worth repeating. Also, I feel like the part of the COVID hangover is everybody realizing they have to go back to the basics. I feel like, I’ve heard that from so many executives on this podcast, whether it’s on, not just the sales front, but on the recruiting side. I’m like, we need to get back to pick up the phone and call. You got to do the things that got us here before we had the COVID, I guess not bust, but the COVID boom.
[0:30:52] BH: I mean, despite what we’ve talked about a lot about technology – I always say this, when people come into Beeline from outside, from some other industry is like, “Yes, we’re a technology business. But never forget, we’re in the people business. The people connection and relationships is incredibly important.”
[0:31:10] DF: Absolutely. With that, we’re going to go ahead and jump into the speed round of questions. So, I’ve got a couple left for you.
[0:31:16] BH: I love it.
[0:31:17] DF: Advice you wish you were given before entering the staffing industry?
[0:31:20] BH: The advice I would give myself looking back because I kind of was thrust in without having the right context. As I said, I started as a product manager. So, I really started kind of developing product without understanding the larger context of who all the players were. It’s like really understanding this very unique ecosystem and what makes it different than any other market. Every business market is unique unto itself. But really understanding the intricacies of all of the players, all the different ways, the contingent workforce is used, how buyers, staffing, suppliers, workers, and MSPs all work together is incredibly important for somebody that’s trying to enter it. I learned all that stuff over a longer period of time than I should have.
[0:32:06] DF: Jump in and learn quickly, so you don’t have to do a drip campaign over time on it. In the last five years, what new belief, behavior, or habit has most improved your life?
[0:32:14] BH: Oh, boy. My wife is an executive coach and leadership development person. She works in the industry. She’s the most – her innate ability to understand people in conflict and how to – what she’s taught me is this concept of both and, and really, looking at two things can be true. Things that seem diametrically opposed, these dichotomies exist, and trying to look at things from both perspectives is super important. In our relationship, we have this code word where if I’ve had a rough day or whatever, and I just need to complain about something, I need to tell her like, “Hey, I just need to complain for a second. I don’t need you to tell me what I did wrong, or how I should be looking at the other person’s perspective. Just let me vent.” Then I’ll probably come around and say, “Okay. Now, tell me how else I should be thinking about this?” So, I try to like, again, it seems so obvious, but stopping and thinking about that other person’s perspective and being mindful about that is really important to me.
[0:33:10] DF: What book or books have you given most as a gift? Or have been most influential to you?
[0:33:15] BH: I don’t tend to give books as gifts all that much. I love cooking. I have a pig tattooed on my arm. Just related all the industry, but for me work in life is so intertwined, inseparable, that connecting to people through cooking is often how I connect with people at work. So, I love to share things about cooking with those that I work with. I tell a story like often when I’m presenting on stage that ask the question is a taco a sandwich or not? So, it’s not exactly a book, but it drives connection because everybody tends to love food.
[0:33:47] DF: You say you tell a story that there is the taco –
[0:33:51] BH: I believe a taco is a sandwich.
[0:33:54] DF: I was like, “Well, we need to hear the story. You can’t end on” –
[0:33:56] BH: It’s very nerdy. There’s a theory –
[0:33:58] DF: Let’s go.
[0:33:59] BH: There’s something called the Unified Sandwich Theory that nine boxes, ingredient purity, and structural purity across the – obviously, like, no one’s going to argue that a piece of meat, a piece of cheese, between bread is a sandwich. So, that’s the top left. That’s a sandwich. But then the bottom right, is a Poptart a sandwich, right? Because it’s two pieces of starch with something sandwiched in between kind of thing. A taco is just a starch folded around a filling. You could argue that it’s a sandwich and I happen to love tacos, and actually just recently, a judge, in I think Indiana on some obscure zoning thing about a restaurant, ultimately ruled that tacos were in fact sandwiches for the purposes of zoning. So, now there’s legal precedent to state that.
[0:34:47] DF: I was just asking ChatGPT. Is a taco a sandwich? I have not ever thought about that and that’s a great way to finalize things here. Any closing comments for the audience today?
[0:35:00] BH: No. I mean, just thank you for having me. It’s important to me personally, that we all work together to elevate this really important industry. So, feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn. Glad to have conversations. If you’re at an upcoming conference, glad to talk in person, about how we can work together to help each other. Those connections, and managing Beeline’s partnerships are what gets me up every day. So, doing things to drive those forward is important. Glad to have any further conversations with anybody who listens to this.
[0:35:29] DF: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining, Brian. I really enjoyed the conversation and have a great day.
[0:35:34] BH: You as well. Thanks.
