When technology is embraced rather than feared, it can help to strengthen the very thing that we fear it may destroy — meaningful human connection. Rich Smith is the Co-Founder and Chief Marketing Officer of Atlas MedStaff – the largest veteran-owned travel nurse staffing company in the country – and he joins us today to explain how he and his organization are leveraging technology to foster human relationships. We discuss Rich’s background in staffing and how Atlas MedStaff was born before gaining insight into Atlas’ marketing strategy, how it builds brand awareness and loyalty, and how it embraces technology to the fullest. Rich also describes his team’s protocol for generating relatable and honest content, why measuring ROI is more myth than tangible, the advice he’d share with others looking to forge a similar career path, and how he thinks healthcare marketing will evolve in the years to come.
[0:01:14.3] DF: Hello everyone, thank you for joining us for another episode of The Staffing Show. Today, I am super excited to be joined by Rich Smith, who is the Co-Founder and Chief Marketing Officer at Atlas MedStaff. Rich, thanks so much for joining today, super excited to have you on the show.
[0:01:30.7] RS: You know I love doing these things, so I’m happy to be here.
[0:01:32.7] DF: Yeah, I think you probably have more experience than I do. I know you’re out there on the Internet doing it. So, it’s – I love it. So, today’s talk, we’re going to kind of jump into a few different things, we’re going to talk about some technology, where the staffing industry is, where it’s going. I also think Rich, what you’ve done at Atlas and the brand that you built has really honed in on kind of building a human connection and building relationships and you’ve also done some amazing stuff from a marketing perspective.
So, I really want to touch on some of that. To kick things off, could you just tell me a little bit about how did you get into staffing, and then let’s talk about who is Atlas MedStaff?
[0:02:08.8] RS: Absolutely. So, I just celebrated my 20th year in the staffing industry.
[0:02:12.6] DF: Oh, my gosh.
[0:02:13.6] RS: Yeah.
[0:02:14.0] DF: Congrats.
[0:02:14.9] RS: 20 years, it was back in July. Here’s the nutshell story, 20 years ago, I was very happy working at a brokerage firm here locally, that I was doing new accounts and we were selling IRAs and I had tons of friends there, and I thought, “I’m going to be here forever, like, this is something I really want to do.” And, through this weird turn of events, my three-month-old daughter getting influenza A, and taking her to the Children’s Hospital ER. And meeting a travel nurse for the first time, and then, the guy who eventually started Medical Solutions, I worked for, there, at Ameritrade, years ago – you know, a year or two back, called me and said, “Hey, I’m doing this new thing called travel nurse staffing, do you want to come do this? We have this new company called Medical Solutions.” And I said, “Yeah, I just had this amazing interaction with a travel nurse.” And it all lined up.
And I started as a recruiter, then I was a client manager, and then after eight years there, I had the opportunity to start Atlas and now, here we are.
[0:03:14.5] DF: That’s incredible, and what year did you start Atlas?
[0:03:17.9] RS: I started Atlas in 2012.
[0:03:19.0] DF: 2012, all right, and you guys have had quite the growth rate. Can you tell me a little bit about kind of where you guys are at from a size and growth perspective?
[0:03:29.1] RS: Yeah, it was awesome, man, it was awesomely scary all at the same time. I think I’ve said that so many times through our history that –
[0:03:34.4] DF: As entrepreneurship is, yeah.
[0:03:36.5] RS: Right. When you start from absolute zero. Like, I have a picture of the office where we had our original six cubes. Before there was even cubes in there, before we had computers, and like, the day we signed the lease, I thought, “This is insane, what are we doing?” I just came from a very successful company and we had really, really good luck there, building them, you know, that first step of the way that they took, you know, right?
And I left and had the opportunity to do this. Yeah, like, it was interesting but scary, all at the same time, and then you start hitting the phones, and you start making phone calls and I’ve got – I’ve got three recruiters and one – I’m the client manager, I was the very first client manager, you know? And then started growing from there. I think when it really took off is when you find the people that compliment you best.
[0:04:20.6] DF: Yup.
[0:04:21.2] RS: Steve Ryan compliments me very, very well. He is – if there’s a yin and yang, that’s he and I, and I can’t tell you how – and we’ve been close friends for, you know, for 15, 17 years by now. Steve Seitner is the same way. I know you met him, he is our chief operating officer. That guy is excitable in so many ways, we call him the mayor because he knows everyone, and I’m just not that guy.
You could tell me your name and I would forget it five minutes later, not even five minutes, two minutes later. I would absolutely forget it, not because I’m disrespectful, it just doesn’t stick. He remembers everything, and so finding the people that compliment you best I think was one of the first things that we realized we had to do, and then find those recruiters that really had, you know, an understanding of not necessarily the industry but of people because, in the end, it’s just a people job on the recruiting line.
[0:05:13.3] DF: Yeah, that’s incredible, and also getting people that compliment you is so critical, and I think one of the reasons I was excited to talk to you today is just, I feel like, you’re background and the aspect that I imagine you bring as the chief marketing officer is what I’ve seen from the outside looking in is that you’ve really built something special around a brand that people connect with, and I would just kind of love to know a little bit about what that strategy looks like and kind of how you’ve gotten to where you are today with the Atlas brand.
[0:05:42.0] RS: I think I realized early on that brand loyalty is amazingly important but you have to give them a reason to be loyal to your brand in the first place, and so understanding that concept on the front end, and then be able to execute it then on the back end. What makes the traveler? The end user in the hospital that’s going to work every single day, you know, working those 12-hour shifts, what do they really want, besides work?
What do they really want? And we found, it was that human connection. It was that to know that they’re not alone out there. Our industry, pre-pandemic was tracking towards a very Amazon, Uber sort of, “How can I get this done as quickly as possible on my phone?” And you know, that type of thing and just turn over as many placements as we possibly could, and we’ve said, “Wait a minute, there’s a better way to do this.”
We can have those personal connections, we can make those connections, even if it is just on YouTube or through a podcast or through a, you know, a short, or through TikTok, little things like that make those little personal connections. It might make their day that much better and it gives them a reason to stay with us, rather than you know, faceless company that you just book all your shifts on your phone.
[0:06:50.5] DF: I think what is interesting, you’ve leaned in on building the brand, building the human connection but you’ve also leaned on technology where you’re kind of balancing the two in a way that I think a lot of – somebody just seems like they do one or the other. Can we just talk a little bit to that and how you approached it?
[0:07:03.9] RS: I think the first time I ever met you, I told you like, “I know just enough about technology to be dangerous.” And that’s absolutely true. I understand, like, I love this thing. I love this device, and I love that you know, everything that I could possibly want is right here, until I really need something, right? And then, I have a Discover Card for example. If you call 1-800-Discover, a live person actually picks up the phone.
[0:07:26.2] DF: I didn’t know that.
[0:07:27.5] RS: Yeah, that’s my card of choice. Now, it was my wife’s card of choice first and I just kind of became a user but then if I ever got a problem, a live person actually answers it. You’re not going through a phone tree, you’re not hitting one to speak to you know, an IT or whatever you want. So, having that connection when you need it. So, understanding not only where the funnel occurs, right?
As we’re placing travelers in hospitals, but understand, “Okay, I can ask them to do this much off the top,” right? I can, through technology, I can use technology asking to do this much because I’m offering this much more at the bottom, that is that human touch that gives them that connection.
[0:08:07.0] DF: I mean, I think one of the things that also just talking about like, you know, kind of that high level of some of the stuff that you got done from a marketing perspective but you guys really have leaned into marketing and building the brand, and I feel like, I have a background in marketing but I also feel like, that is the future of staffing, is like having relatable, reputable brand that people can actually connect to in a way that they feel good about it, and they’re excited to work with them.
Could you talk a little bit about how you guys have been – I mean, I think you’ve done different versions of kind of showcasing travelers and really focusing on the lifestyle and connecting to that, could you talk about some of the aspects that you’ve done for that?
[0:08:43.1] RS: Yeah, absolutely. So, there’s any number of different pieces of content that we put out that touches their lives in different ways. One of the things I realized early on was, you know, I love what I do. I love the staffing piece of it, I love the, you know, the nuts and bolts of what I do but when I get in my car and I go home, I don’t necessarily want to listen to a podcast about staffing, no offense, right?
I will, but I want to listen to stuff that I’m interested in. So, in baseball, or you know, in technology, those types of things. So, I thought, “Wait a minute, I can marry these two ideas together.” We know our travelers love to go to wineries and breweries. So, we have a podcast and a piece of video content that the piece of video content is called, Wine on Wednesday and the podcast is called, A Beer with Atlas.
And our travelers will send us beers and wines from the road, from wherever they’re at. They’re in Orem Utah or wherever, and they find a winery and they give us a bottle of wine and we bring it here and we drink it and we talk about them, we talk about the winery, we talk about their contract, and what they’d like. So, it’s adjacent to what they’re doing, but it’s within their interest.
[0:09:49.5] DF: Yeah, and I think that’s really great and so it sounds like you’re connecting to them on like, what they actually care about, which –
[0:09:54.3] RS: Right.
[0:09:55.3] DF: To your point, like, I’m not doing the best job of listening to staffing podcasts, I’m saying like one more talk about here. So, I get that, but I got a lot of podcasts I’d listen to. So, you’re connected to them outside of you know, the direct link. Here is what a travel nurse’s life is like and actually connect about things they’re passionate about.
[0:10:10.5] RS: Absolutely. We have two or three different pieces of content right now that deal with just them traveling, like, the pitfalls of taking the actual contract in whatever city. If you travel in an RV, we have pieces of content about traveling in an RV. If you travel with a pet, we have a – we have pieces of content, ongoing pieces of content that we talk with our travelers about, on video, that’s all on our YouTube channel.
[0:10:33.8] DF: Yeah.
[0:10:35.1] RS: Where, if you travel with a pet, here is – if your pet gets sick, this is where you can go, like, these are animal hospitals that are generally nationwide. We’ve done giveaways through Petco and PetSmart and you know, places like that. So, any of those little bits of information that you may not think about on the front end, but then become very important once you get on a contract and you realize, “Oh no, I had this at home, now, I don’t have this wherever I am now.”
[0:10:58.8] DF: And with that, having run a marketing agency previously and also ran, you know, have helped market for a few healthcare staffing firms, how are you measuring ROI or are you measuring ROI? And I, internally, might have a little more leeway as the co-founder but I’m just curious how you approach that part of the effort.
[0:11:17.8] RS: You know as well as I do, you can track engagement, you can track link clicks, you can track, you know, all of that stuff doesn’t really – doesn’t really matter, doesn’t really make a difference, and that’s one of the things that you know, Steve Ryan and I often butt heads about is I can’t necessarily track that. However, we’ve had multiple occasions where in our pieces of content, our travelers will actually bring up the name of another piece of content that we do.
Like, “Oh, I was watching Traveling with Pets, you know, a couple of weeks ago, and I saw, okay, if I’m going to do this, I need to do this, this, and this first.” Like, they’ve actually brought that up before. So, there’s a relevancy of them coming back repeatedly and seeing our name and seeing our face and seeing our logo, that brand that we talked about earlier, that’s important, and I think that you do it multiple times, you have to be consistent with it.
I’ve seen agencies in our space that do it for like, a month or two, and then they’re not – they don’t stick with it. Well, it’s not going to work. Like, that was just – that was a bunch of wasted time.
[0:12:15.4] DF: It’s interesting as I feel like, especially if you have more of like a CFO or finance-driven organization, private equity a lot of times gets into this, where they want to see an ROI and every marketing dollar spent and like in concept, that’s – in theory, that’s good. The reality is from what I’ve seen over the years having done marketing for a handful of software companies and staffing and like, one of the things that I always got caught on was retargeting ads.
People are always like, “Oh, I don’t know, you can’t, like I can’t see an ROI.” And it’s like, brand awareness, there’s a reason that Coca-Cola does the ads at major, you know, at the Superbowl. There’s many reasons that people spend money on this. If people think of you first, there’s value there. This is for the audience listening but I was listening to this attribution marketing podcast area that I get excited about because it’s such a hard thing.
I mean, they were saying that on your forms, leaving that open-ended deal. So, don’t give drop downs but leave it open-ended, “How did you find us?” And you won’t get perfect results but you’ll start to get a much broader variation in terms of where people are coming in from. I think that you’re – as a marketer, completely believe in your approach to it, and getting the brand out. And awareness is so much more valuable than people realize, you know?
[0:13:27.5] RS: I’ve actually started using ROA, right? That’s return on awareness, like, I’ve used that multiple times, that drives him insane by the way, that you know – but I think that is not trackable really necessarily but you can definitely see when it’s working. Like, in the instances that you brought up, you can definitely see when that is working. When you’ve created that awareness and you can draw a line through different pieces of content or travelers that extend or referrals that come through because of that, like, you can start to connect those dots.
[0:13:59.1] DF: Yeah, I think you can start to connect the dots and I also video advertising on social media is one of the areas where I just feel like there’s – even if you don’t have the exact, like, one to one relationship, you can turn it on and off and over that period of time, see the impact that has happened.
[0:14:15.5] RS: Right.
[0:14:15.9] DF: Which can be another way of doing it as well. One of the other areas I want to talk to you about is just you’ve been in staffing for a long time, built an impressive brand, what are some of the lessons that you’ve learned along the way that you could share with our audience? There’s, I think a lot of people that listen to this are newer into the staffing industry, there’s a lot of tenured people as well, but what are things that you wish you knew throughout your journey?
[0:14:37.0] RS: Oh boy. I think, one of the biggest things for me to learn was I can’t fall in love with what we’re doing right now. I have to be okay with understanding that, “Okay, the attention right now is here, and I really enjoy where that’s at right now.” So, if right now, the attention right now, let’s say, six years ago, the attention was Facebook, and we got really, really good at like, free Facebook marketing.
We got really, really good at that. Attention moves, and don’t get romantic, and don’t fall in love with one piece of content or that one idea or whatever that is, you have to be fluid with it. I think we dragged a few pieces of content out a bit too long just because we really enjoyed doing them. Like, internally, we liked doing them but we can see over time, like, they became less and less and less effective. It’s that way with platforms too.
I didn’t necessarily believe in TikTok in the beginning but I forced myself to get on there and actually start, you know, go to the for you page, and go through that and start searching companies and understand, “Okay, there are some companies that are really, really good at this and there are some that are really, really bad at it, and what’s the difference, and how can we utilize that on the staffing side?”
I don’t think we’ve perfected it still but I think we’ve got a pretty decent handle on what the platform looks like, and now that there’s some marketing tools on the backend, being able to really see like, “Okay, we were right about this or we weren’t even close to being right. We need to change things up a little bit.”
[0:16:02.8] DF: Yeah, absolutely. I have learned that lesson as well and I think the fact that attention changes, platforms change, channels change, and then as an entrepreneur, I feel like the role every year, it’s like whatever process you built, you can’t get bought in on that. You got to change that one now too.
[0:16:19.6] RS: Right, we would get very romantic about we really like doing things this way and we thought not only the audiences, right? But we saw our travelers going a completely different way. I thought forever, “Okay, we’re going to do as much as we possibly can without technology.”
[0:16:34.6] DF: Yeah.
[0:16:35.0] RS: And you know, have that one-on-one relationship and understand that that’s just not what they want, and I’ve got to be okay with that. I’ve got to change my perspective and change my opinion about that based on the feedback that I’m getting.
[0:16:47.7] DF: Yeah, and I think we talked earlier as well about some of your ATS lessons learned, maybe share that. I think that’s something that’s probably valuable for everybody listening as well.
[0:16:57.5] RS: I mean, we started off with a very small – our ATS, in the beginning, was very, very small and it worked for us at first but that’s when we started to realize, “Wait a minute, there needed to be more frontend usability for our travelers and so, we switched to a Salesforce model, which Salesforce, if you’ve never used them before, we had a great experience with them but it is like getting a box of Legos, and you’re going to build it however you want.
That is not for us and we tried. We slogged through it and we really, really tried, and then we discovered Bullhorn and Bullhorn has been fantastic for us in particular, you’re a part of it that marketplace, all of those partners out there that are in the marketplace that I can go out to, just a myriad of different products that I could attach and bolt on to Bullhorn and it all works like it should, and usually, it all works together, was exactly what we wanted.
I knew I needed X, Y, and Z, and Bullhorn offered that. So, we made that mistake early on. If you’re more of a tech guy and you really want to build something, I know there are companies out there that are on Salesforce that have built amazing products. Their ATS is fantastic, it’s exactly what they want, it just wasn’t for us.
[0:18:11.1] DF: Yeah, that’s fair, and I think Salesforce is a significant – it has the ability to do everything and also the effort to manage it and get it to do those things takes – I mean, I feel like you probably need a Salesforce developer in-house if you’re at the right size and one thing I think is interesting with the – you brought up the Bullhorn marketplace, I was – when I think about the different ATS, I should say I’m ATS agnostic.
You know, I like them all, throw it, throw all of them, the one thing that I always think about is, bring up the phone again, the marketplace is the apps and like one of the things that on a cellphone, it’s like if you didn’t have the apps, the iPhone wouldn’t be the thing but the marketplace is one of the key elements of it and I think that’s a key aspect of – and Salesforce has the marketplace as well and so does Bullhorn, so.
[0:19:00.0] RS: Yeah.
[0:19:00.3] DF: They have that as well but yeah.
[0:19:02.7] RS: Yeah. I think once you identify what you need out of it and what you’re capable of doing, right? Then there is a world of possibility, be it Salesforce or any other ATS that’s out there but you have to be honest with yourself, and I don’t think we were honest with ourselves in the beginning, and that probably held us back.
[0:19:19.0] DF: Yeah, that makes sense. To shift gears a little bit from like our lesson learned but one of the things we’ve been dealing with this or experiencing this year, especially in healthcare staffing is just some pretty tense market dynamics and changes within the market. Could you talk a little bit about what your experience has been like?
[0:19:37.1] RS: Absolutely. The pandemic was something that we had never experienced before and we always talked about, I lived through the financial crisis of ’08-’09. That obviously had an impact on staffing levels too at hospitals. Hospitals, nonprofit hospitals, in particular, are very tied to endowments, and endowments are very tied to the stock market, and if the stock market went down, there wasn’t as much money for them to spend.
And I understand that there’s a whole lot else that goes into that but at its core, that’s what we saw. So, we saw staffing levels, we saw our staffing levels drop dramatically ’08, ’09, and then start picking up in 2010, and we always said, “Okay, we’re not going to make those same mistakes, we’re going to live through this.” What the pandemic taught us was the highs were so much higher and the lows were so much lower.
And once we came out of it, once we thought, you know, we all took the masks off, and we were ready to go back to football games and stuff like that, we all took a breath and thought, “Well, that’s it. We’re just going back to normal.” That’s not the case at all. Hospitals severely overspent and they are trying to correct for it now. So, that’s where we’re sitting as of 2024. The year started off okay and we had good marginal expectations for this year with three percent growth, five percent growth, that type of thing.
And then, we started to see a decline, bill rates started to go down, and job openings started to go down, and along with that then you saw conversion rates from instead of just one submittal, it was taking you four submittals, and instead of just one interview, you were doing three interviews in order to get that placement and it just progressively got harder and harder and harder and it bottomed out somewhere around the summer-ish, June-July timeframe.
About mid-July into where we are right now, we’ve seen a nice little increase. We’ve seen like we talked about previously off camera was there are indicators that we have on our end using our data to say, “Okay, if you do X, Y, and Z, if you do these three steps, you could generally get a placement out of this.” That was out of whack. It was not happening that way. Unique submittals for example.
It was one of the things that we tracked that we thought, “Okay, unique submittals if you have those unique submittals, the more of those you have, the more placements you’re going to get.” That was absolutely not the case and that was just out the window, and we’re starting to see that come back around now. We’re starting to see hospitals that may have increasing COVID cases again.
I’m sure you know someone who has the new variant, right? That the home tests aren’t picking up. We’ve seen it a lot here in the Midwest too. The flu is starting because school is back in, RFV could pick up like it does. So, if there’s any number of things going into the end of summer, early fall that are trending upwards for us – I’ll be honest with you though, I’m so gun shy. Let’s just keep this nice little steady increase going right now, to be honest.
I could use some – a little bit of normal but let’s just keep it – just inching up just a little bit, how’s that?
[0:22:39.2] DF: Yeah, I think that makes sense and I also – I mean, I think we were talking about this beforehand as well but it feels like we’re kind of regressing to the mean and getting back to the chart that SIA is putting out. The growth rate wiped out COVID and we’re back on, it’s just on that same, yeah.
[0:22:55.4] RS: It’s bizarre, yeah. If you just take those years out and you bump that in 2019 up to 2024, yeah, we got a nice three to five percent increase or whatever. You’ve just – it’s just all that chaos that occurred 2020 to 2023 that we had that we’re dealing with the fallout now.
[0:23:11.9] DF: Yeah, what do you see when nobody can predict the future, but the future of staffing, where do you see things going over the next six months and then longer-term view, where do see healthcare staffing?
[0:23:23.6] RS: I do believe we’re going to see a nice increase through the end of the year, you know, third quarter into the fourth quarter, a nice steady increase. What happens next year, I’m not exactly sure. I guess we have to kind of see where COVID and flu and RSV going, that type of thing. For the industry itself over the next couple of years, here’s – and I’ve said this a lot on different, you know, podcasts I’ve done or if I’ve talked to investors or whatever, is there are facilities out there and systems and facilities both.
It doesn’t matter if they use a VMS, it doesn’t matter if they use an MSP if it’s a direct contract, it doesn’t matter, that before the pandemic said, “I will never use contract staff” for nursing or allied or even locums, whatever, “We’ll never use it, we’re fine on it. We’re fine without it” or whatever. During the pandemic, they had to use it, and I think what they learned was, “Oh my gosh, the flexibility here is fantastic.”
You can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube now, they’re still using contract staff. Now, they’re trying to figure out a way to use it effectively because they never have before but they are figuring that out, and I think we’ve seen that, and we’ve had those conversations with a number of – with systems and hospitals and vendors that are trying to help them, vendors in particular that are trying to help them navigate those waters, and understand that you can certainly hire perm.
You can certainly do your own internal pools and your own travel staff and whatever you want you can try that but I’m going to give you me or the VMS or the, you know, or whatever is going to give you what you need three months at a time and if you don’t need it, you can go away. They can go away. Well, maybe one unit needs them and the other doesn’t, and vice-versa, and as long as you understand and use it effectively, you can actually save your hospital or your system some money by doing that. So, we’re here to stay. We’ve been here to stay anyway.
[0:25:11.6] DF: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s been a growing industry for a long time. I think that volatility, and also a very valuable one when you know it’s – if somebody told you that I recently heard that the staffing industry is the tip of the tail of the dog. It’s the absolute first into the recession and absolute first out. So, what are some of the things that you guys at Atlas are doing to kind of adapt for you know, the three to five-year term?
[0:25:36.8] RS: We have more data available to use right now than we’ve ever, ever had before, and being able to use that data effectively and then communicate it back. We have very strong relationships with our vendor partners and they give us scorecards every quarter. We are developing scorecards on our side for them to understand, look, we’ve seen for the past three years that during this three-month timeframe, you’re using from us 25% more travelers.
If I have a six-month window to build to that, I could be that much more effective for you if I know that those are coming consistently.
[0:26:09.5] DF: That’s great, yeah. So, you’re trying to help forecast and predict and also be more of a partner, a solution provider.
[0:26:18.1] RS: Whereas before, we were just the, “Yep, I’ve got this, you know, staff available.” You come to me because I have the nurses or whatever. I have the nurses and now I have the data too to show you exactly how helpful we can be.
[0:26:29.2] DF: That’s amazing. So, with that, we’re going to jump into the speed round, just two last questions, and then we’ll do closing comments but in the last five years, what new belief, behavior, or habit has most improved your life?
[0:26:40.0] RS: Oh, boy, you know what? New behavior or habit, I still love to read but – and I am not saying this because we’re doing it right now, podcasts.
[0:26:47.9] DF: Yeah.
[0:26:48.3] RS: I absolutely swear by that. I love them and I love any podcast adjacent to what I do that have nothing to do with my job to the point where my kid, my 15-year-old listens to the same podcast that I do. Like, there’s one called This American Life, it’s by Chicago Public Radio and I thought he would never be interested in this kind of stuff. The kid listens to it before I even get to it now.
So, it’s just one of those things once you identify you know, a good handful of podcasts, you’re always finding new ones and find time because they’re what? We’re like 29 minutes right now, we’ll be done at 35 minutes. I can ingest that kind of information in 35 minutes and then go on with my life. That has been probably one of the biggest changes I’ve made.
[0:27:30.3] DF: What other podcast do you listen to?
[0:27:31.7] RS: I love The Journal. So, Wall Street Journal does a podcast every single day. It comes out at 4:00 central time, I listen to that one. I love learning like new little bits of information. There’s another one called, The Economics of Everyday Things, and it really is, it’s everyday things. So, like the one a couple of weeks or a couple of weeks – yeah, a couple of weeks ago was about antivenom, like snake antivenom, and I would never care about that.
[0:27:55.7] DF: Yeah, that sounds amazing.
[0:27:57.3] RS: It was super interesting and it was 25 minutes long and I consumed it and that was it. The last one I listen to and I hope someday I’m on this podcast, I highly doubt it though because this guy – it’s called Founders, and they’ll read books of founders of businesses and stuff. The dude is a genius and I really, really enjoyed listening to him. I can listen to that guy talk for hours and hours and hours and I’ve learned such amazing things on there, other founders, and I take little bits of their information and I bring it back here, and I try to utilize that every day.
[0:28:28.1] DF: That’s a great one. I’ve also listened to that one, it’s really good, and then the last question I’ve got for you, still on the content train, but what books or books have you given most as a gift or have been most influential to you?
[0:28:39.4] RS: The book that I will talk about over and over and over again, Jim Koch, the founder of Sam Adams, wrote a book about the early days of founding the Boston Beer Company and I’ve read it probably three times.
[0:28:51.3] DF: Oh really? Okay.
[0:28:51.9] RS: Yeah, it is fantastic – it’s a short read. It’s a fantastic read though, like if there is one dude I could meet right now, if I could sit down and have a beer with one guy, it would be Jim Koch, and not only did he create an amazing beer, I love Boston Lager, it’s a fantastic beer. There’s similarities between how he started Boston Beer Company and how I started Atlas and wanted Atlas to look and feel and be.
I think that’s the one, I’ve given that book out as a gift multiple, multiple times. The second one I think is anybody should read is called Shoe Dog, it’s the Phil Knight story. So, fantastic book.
[0:29:26.6] DF: Awesome, great insights, and any closing comments for the audience?
[0:29:30.4] RS: Oh boy, if you’re thinking about starting a staffing company, don’t. It will give you the grayest of hair. I’m kidding, I’m kidding. If anything is worth doing right, it’s worth doing right. There’s a whole lot of – our industry is going through some shifting and some changing right now because the fish were jumping in the boat for, you know, for a couple of years there. So, I think do your research, understand who you’re working for.
Why you’re working for them, and then you know, who they are at their core, and you know, see if you really do match with those people, ask good questions, and your travel nursing career will be very successful. That recruiter is super important still too, you can’t call them just like, you know like, you couldn’t just bring up your next job like an Uber. That’s not – your travel nursing career is not like buying diapers on Amazon. It’s so much deeper than that.
And so, trust the ones that understand that there is some technology available but at the same time, that human level, that human interaction is still super important too.
[0:30:30.0] DF: Awesome. Well, Rich, I really enjoyed having you on the show today. Thank you so much for joining.
[0:30:35.0] RS: Thank you, I appreciate it.
