Episode 34 | The Honest Truth About Global Outsourcing with Russell Meiselman

Russell Meiselman  00:01

The  biggest  reason  people  go  to  outsourcing  his  financial,  right?  It  always  comes  down  to,  I”  need  more  people  and  I  can’t  afford  to  hire  that  many  more  locally,”  right.  “I  have  a  little  bit  of  a  budget.  How…what  can  I  do  with  this?  Well,  how  can  I  maximize  this  amount  of  money?”  And  that’s  the  reason  why  most  companies  start,  but  it’s  not  why  they  stay.  

Karan Rhodes  00:01

Blended workforces are one of the hottest talent strategies today, where employers are using a mix of traditional employees with external resources like independent contractors, coaches, consultants, vendors, and technology solutions, all in order to enhance competitiveness, ensure cost flexibility, and expedite business goals. But how are the successful companies infusing blended workforces into their business strategy? And what are the critical success factors and pitfalls to avoid during implementation? And on the flip side, what does it really take for suppliers to improve their chances of finding and landing contract opportunities? The devil is in the details, my friends! I’m your host, Karan Ferrell Rhodes, and it’s time to get smarter about Blended Workforces at Work!Hello, my superstars. This is Karan, and welcome to another episode of the blended workforces at work podcast. We are super excited that she joined us today, and we have a tremendous guest on today’s episode that’s going to share a bit more this from his perspective on the VIN supplying external talent from the vendor side of the house. And we’re honored to welcome on today’s show, Mr. Russell Meiselman, and hopefully I didn’t murder his name Michael, who’s the president and co founder of Clark staff. And Clark staff is a remote staffing agency that helps companies gain access to a wide range of global, outsourced talent. And under Russell’s leadership, you know, Clark staff has really expanded their operations across all locations, including recently launching a new 5000 square foot office in the Philippines, and I can’t wait to hear more about that. What’s unique, I mean, there are quite a few outsources out there, but what is really unique is about their approach to global talent. And you know how they partner with companies across the globe, and they are founded in the US, so that they have to tackle, you know, a lot of challenges in other countries where they do locate and use talent. So definitely an interesting perspective, and I can’t wait to learn more. But so welcome to the show. Russell,

Russell Meiselman  02:19

Yeah, thank you. Karan, I really appreciate it. I’m excited to be here today.

Karan Rhodes  02:22

Oh, thank you. We’re so excited to have you. Well, you know, we there’s so many questions. I mean, I can’t wait to delve deep into what you all do in your business and how you all help companies. But before we go there, we always love to learn a little bit about a guest. And so for as much as you feel comfortable, can you give us just a small sneak peek into your life outside of work?

Russell Meiselman  02:47

Yeah, chaotic, no. I just had a newborn baby, little baby Eleanor.

Karan Rhodes  02:53

Awww. Congratulations!

Russell Meiselman  02:54

Yeah, she’s three months old, first baby. So it’s a lot. It’s definitely a shift. We obviously, we have locations and staff in six different countries, and I’m just used to traveling and working, and sort of, my wife has put up with me for the last 10 years in this model, and I just don’t know if the baby will. So we’re gonna, we’re gonna figure that out over the next year and see how that goes. But that’s, that’s the biggest change for me, and it’s right now that’s consuming my life. But outside of the new baby. I like golf. I don’t mean just like the the occasional Sunday round. I mean, I’m a little obsessed, I have to be honest.

Karan Rhodes  03:29

Okay, so you and my husband are brothers from other mothers, because he is as well. He’s even now deep into and I don’t even know what you call it, but it’s on TV now, the the Insight tournaments that Tiger Woods has. TGL, yeah, the TGL. And I’m like, What in the world? But he loves, loves golf. He loves playing it. He loves watching it, anything golf related, he’s there,

Russell Meiselman  03:58

Yeah, I wish I wasn’t. If I have. It’s a really expensive hobby. I’m not very good, and I would wish it wasn’t such a big part of my life, but I guess it is one little tidbit.

Karan Rhodes  04:09

When we go on vacations, I always have to dedicate a day for him to go golfing, because he loves to try different courses around the world and and so I make it my spa day, or I’ll go with him and drive the cart. But

Russell Meiselman  04:24

Yeah, half of our vacations, the locations that we choose are because I want to play at a particular course, or the beautiful mountain views, or wherever we’re going, it’s usually like, oh, that course is amazing. We’re staying in this town doing and, you know, the wife, luckily, she puts up with it. So it’s,

Karan Rhodes  04:48

Well, I love sports in general. That’s, I won’t say I’m a golf fan addict, but I love sports in general, so I’m game. It’s okay. It makes it a great vacation for both of us, because we have other things we do. But anyway, lost. Richard, it’s just funny that you mentioned that. Thanks for sharing, Russell. All right. Well, let’s get down into the nitty gritty. If we can, I’d love for you to start out by sharing with our listeners a little bit more about Clark staff, what it does and how it operates. Yeah, who it helps serves

Russell Meiselman  05:18

So we have a bunch of different services. Outsourcing is actually a really, it’s an it’s a really old industry. It’s not new, obviously, the pandemic and, and I love your podcast, blended workforce, this idea that, you know, companies are starting to sort of realize that remote or freelance gig workers, and, you know, just getting things done outside of the traditional I need to hire a w2 right? But to be fair, in the outsourcing space, in our space, in our industry, it’s been around forever. It’s in the truth is, is most of the users of outsourcing would be those sort of fortune, 1000 large, sort of large corporate organizations, you know, and everybody knows, you know, when they think outsourcing, the first thing that comes to mind is going to be customer service or tech support or whatever it is. Right when you call Amazon, or if you call American Express or your your bank, you’re getting somebody on the phone, and they tend to be overseas and and they’re dealing with that sort of like tier one level customer service that is call center work, in my opinion, it does fit within outsourcing, but what we do is just really different. And so I would say we’re a subset niche of the industry. And the reason we’re called BPOS, which is business process outsourcing, is companies like mine tend to take over entire business processes from various sizes of organizations, so everything from small, sort of startup companies to larger corporations, which we do work with a few, but we tend to stay away from the call center work, just because there’s companies that have been doing it for 25 years or 40 years, and they have that stuff packed down. We really primarily service more in the professional services space, meaning everything from accountants to engineers and architects to nurses, doctors and lawyers, graphic designers, video editors, all of that sort of like other stuff that would be employed by certain organizations, right? And so what we do, particularly is that is we primarily house and employ these sort of professional level workers that get assigned then to particular customers, right? So if you’re we’ll just use a finance company or wealth management company as an example. And you have books. You have, you know, your books, you got to keep a R, A P, you have financial analysts and reports that you need to do most of the sort of wealth management part of these finance companies in terms of decision on investments and moving money around. That’s usually done by the local right or the executive team or upper management, but they are just administrative work that needs to be done, whether that be writing content and blogs for the website, whether that be just managing the books, whether payables for the vendors and service providers and so on. And some of this stuff can be done by local employees, and that’s obviously the more traditional way of doing things. What we’ve basically leverage in the big the biggest value add that we bring to most companies, small or large, is some of these functions really just can’t be justified profitability wise, to do locally, right? Like your tax filings, they’re important. You have to do them, otherwise, IRS is coming in and putting chains on the door, right? But it’s not making you money. It’s a cost of doing business. And you know, to use a third party or something like that. Locally can sometimes get expensive, but you can have a full time accountant, for example, offshore, and it might only cost you, you know, two grand a month, or whatever the number is. And they can do manager reports, they can do your taxes, they can manage your normal books and all of that stuff and and that’s really the value. It’s more of helping these smaller and medium sized businesses leverage more profitability that tend to be reinvested in the organization to grow the sort of partnership that we look for. So that’s our service. That’s what we do. I mean, you can think of any role, any industry, there is very limited or unlimited in terms of options, of what we can do. There’s obviously some roles that we can right. We can’t hire a mail clerk for you, it requires somebody to physically be there. Your receptionist can’t be replaced, like somebody has to greet them at the door. You know, there’s things that can’t be done, but if it doesn’t require them to be physically in any one location, then this outsourcing could be an option. Yeah.

Karan Rhodes  09:34

You know, it’s so interesting. You said that because I do, obviously, I try to be a thought leader in this space, and I do a lot of thought leadership from the HR perspective, and there’s a ton of research studies out there, Deloitte, art nerd. But anyway, long story short, they have said that up to 50 or 60% of the traditional job descriptions tasks on job descriptions could be done by an outsour. First individual that it and it’s time now for companies to kind of re look and rethink, especially from a cost and profitability perspective, of really having a more sound strategy of how work gets done. And it does not necessarily have to be, you know, with one of your FTEs. It could be from an external expert resource as well, and I think that’s where you know Clark staff shines. I’m curious that what when you all pitch companies, or do you pitch I guess I should ask, but when you have a conversations, what are some of their top concerns or pushbacks or questions that they have for you all?

Russell Meiselman  10:39

So yeah, we do, obviously, we take on new business, but we don’t do very much marketing or sales, really. In general, a lot of what we do is referral based, and the reason for that is you can’t really sell what we do, I would say, I mean, you can, you can, but we tend to think it’s better for us to not sell. If somebody needs to fill a role or build out a department, they have to be in the headspace to do it right. It’s not something that I could, you know, hire a couple of cold callers or email marketers to just to generate leads and then sell them on a service, and it’s a 30 day no contract obligation, like, you know what I mean, can you force a deal through? Yes, but what we’re really looking for is more of that partnership, sort of relationship. We work with our customers on both the consultative and the staffing side. So there’s just a lot going on there. It’s tough. You got to be in a space to do it. So that’s to answer that question, yeah, the biggest reason people go to outsourcing is financial, right? It always comes down to, I need more people, and I can’t afford to hire that many more locally, right? I want to have a little bit of a budget. How? What can I do with this? Well, how can I maximize this amount of money? And that’s the reason why most companies start, but it’s not why they stay. It was really surprised myself to learn that’s not why they stay, that’s not why they continue. That’s not why they expand. What it comes down to, for a lot of companies, at least that we work with that they, you know, they’ll start in year one with, let’s say, three or four or five outsource staff, and by the end of 18 months, or 24 months, they have 20 plus people. And the reason that growth happens isn’t because they love the cost savings, and they’re just replacing a bunch of local workers they get to elevate and build out departments the right way. And what I mean by that, I’ll give an example of, you know, a marketing team, a marketing department, in the States, we tend to be able to afford what we call digital marketers or multimedia specialists, where they’re, you know, they wear a lot of hats, right, right? They do the social media, and they do the content, and they do, you know, you list down the list of any particular role type, and they, you know, they do 25 different jobs, and there’s nothing wrong with that, and it’s great that they have the skills and the ability to do that. But if you want somebody that is a professional, and, I mean, really like a certified Google AdWords SEO person, right, can you do you have time or the money to afford somebody that can do that in the States, probably not right for the cost of the doing it in the Philippines. As an example, you could get an SEO, a content writer, a link builder, you know, two or three roles for the price of one. And each of those people are professionals in their space. And so that’s why they do it. They tend to grow, is because they realize, okay, instead of having a blended AR and AP, bookkeeper and accountant, I can actually separate and have the proper controls, right? How they are separated from a from AP, and I can have a controller like I can elevate my current accountant to be the controller within the organization. I have a bookkeeper, I’m going to make them the GNA manager, right?

Karan Rhodes  13:37

Right.

Russell Meiselman  13:37

And so they get to elevate the people that are there. So the way I always look at in the biggest conversation that we have in initial stages is don’t replace don’t go off once you discover outsourcing. Don’t just go fire a bunch of people. That’s not what you want to do. We want to do is take a look at what people are doing in their eight hour day. Find those three four hours in everybody’s job, because everybody has them. Of those tasks that aren’t that don’t require a high level of industry or company knowledge, or, I don’t want to say skill, because that’s not the right word, but you know that doesn’t require that level of person to do. Anyone can do those two or three hours with the task, but the work has to get done. Those are the tasks that you offshore and let your people, if they’re a salesperson. Don’t have them spend three hours a day doing administrative work of raising orders. Have them out there selling, building those relationships and and maintaining your customer base. If your accountant is really somebody that you value in making financial decisions for your business, don’t have them updating your general ledger for three hours a day. That’s not a good use of their time. Have them do reports. Have them get more involved in operation side too, to give the advice that you need as an Executive leader to make those decisions for your organization to actually grow. So at least for me, the most important thing when people get in outsourcing, and the biggest conversations that we have in those initial stages, I

Karan Rhodes  14:57

love that you said, is in the advice. You give is don’t immediately just fire everybody. What I see your service doing is providing air cover for them to continue to fly the plane while they can figure out more efficiencies down the line. It gives them the space to continue to get the work done, because the work has to get done, but then it gives them that air cover to go back, like you said, on the strategic side and allow them to make some major decisions of what they could outsource versus not, and then how to better use their internal expertise if you’re able to take some of these labor intensive tasks away.

Russell Meiselman  15:34

Yeah. So, I mean, you look at it from a team leader side. I was just in Pittsburgh last week, very large organization, obviously, I won’t say the name, and they’re fantastic. They’re they’re great group of people, privately owned, but very, very large business. And you know, when you go into the, let’s call it middle management level, and you interact, and you and you work with these managers, they don’t nearly spend enough time on the strategic side, meaning improving the department. How can we take this process that’s so vital to the organization and improve it, make it more efficient, integrate technologies. Start using AI, start using more automation tools so that way errors can be reduced, or whatever it is, they don’t they’re stuck in the the trenches of getting the work done because, you know, they’re strapped on time. There’s only so many hours in the day and that really, I think even at the lower levels of management, team leader for supervisory sort of levels, they need at least an hour, minimum, really, ideally, two a day, to be able to have the time to stare at the wall and think strategically, right, like take off that tactical sort of helmet and put on that strategic hat. How can I improve? What can I do to make this better, faster, more efficient, more accurate, whatever it is. But in most businesses, that’s not the case, right? You the employee shows up at 9am they’re grinding as hard as they can to five, doing the work that has to be done, and there’s zero improvement. And so you’ll see companies like the one I was at where they’re still doing stuff real manual, like it’s a humongous organization, and I really mean that financially and number of employees, and they have locations across the globe, and their managers are just they don’t have the time to sit and strategically think. And that’s part of it is not the utilization of outsourcing, but also part of it is just that work, sort of allocation, right? Like, how much of it should be on the manager, how much should it be on the rank and file? And that’s really important to from an executive perspective, to take that into consideration. Well, I don’t want my manager staring at a wall for two hours. You really do? You do, I think more than you think you do right? Like they will improve thing, because they are the boots on the ground that are gonna get stuff and move your company forward, on the technology front, on the service level front, on every front, they’re the people to make changes and and improvements like you can

Karan Rhodes  17:55

Are they concerned? Are they ever concerned about, you know, location, especially with this whole, you know, return to the office initiative that’s going on in the US. Sure. Are there ever concerned about them being

Russell Meiselman  18:10

7000 miles away?

Karan Rhodes  18:10

Overseas?

Russell Meiselman  18:11

Yeah, yeah, of course. I mean, that’s, I would say that the biggest barrier for everybody initially, right? It’s like, how do I manage them? What are the right protocols? What are best practices for managing remote employees? Cultural stuff, right? Right? We have, I would like to sit here and pretend that every single engagement that we’ve had with every department head or manager or company that we’ve worked with has been successful, but sometimes it doesn’t work, and a lot of that comes down to the manager themselves, usually not the business owners, but the managers themselves, tend to have a hard time with either culture and or learning how to train, manage and work with people, regardless of whether it’s offshore or onshore. It’s just remote in general. And there’s things to learn there, right? There’s, you know, I don’t think as organizations, we spend, and I say this as a whole, I don’t think we have spent enough time on training and and developing our own people on okay, if they’re not sitting next to you, KPIs and metrics are more important communications, regular, scheduled meetings and touch bases and daily huddles and all of that stuff is exponentially more important, right? Having the appropriate tools and be able to share the knowledge bases and playbooks and SLPs are now, all of a sudden, that much more important and all of those things. I don’t think we have enough conversations around that

Karan Rhodes  19:29

We don’t Russell, and I’ll just share with you that, you know, I’ve had a 20 year career in corporate America with Fortune 100 companies, so I mean the bill, right? Yeah. And I will share with you that 75% of my career, even, obviously, before the pandemic, because I’m older, was remote. I was in global roles that I did travel quite a bit, but I worked at a remote office, and so when the pandemic happened, I’m not gonna lie to you, I didn’t understand what the big deal was. Let’s see people’s. Switching, because I had done it my entire life, and it just shows you my worldview versus others. I led global teams of individuals, and we just traded off, you know, who’s going to have the time zone hit? You know, when we had team meetings?

Russell Meiselman  20:14

Yep, who’s scrificing, who’s waking up at 2 am, that’s it. Yeah, exactly.

Karan Rhodes  20:19

Have alarm clock will, you know, will rise. And we would trade off time zones of who got the short stick, but it was part of team building, laughing. And usually, you know, I gave the person who had the short stick, you know, additional time off to regroup. There are ways to manage through that. Instead, we had a very high performing team, if I do say so myself. So I totally agree with you

Russell Meiselman  20:41

A little bias, but yeah, I’m sure, yeah. I mean, yeah, like, the same, same. When the pandemic it, it was like, this big, big deal. And, you know, it’s like, well, yeah, we’ve been doing that for 15 years. So it’s like, you know, it’s not like, it was not a big deal for us, obviously. And honestly I like, I think, look, if I take myself out of it and unbiased as I possibly can, I think this is good for for the American business and how small business owners run their business. I think it’s important that they learn how to do this. Because there’s a reason why these fortune one hundreds and fortune five hundreds are the size that they are, and a lot of it comes down to this. How do you manage people remote? How do you stay on the same page? How do you rebuild cultures across different offices that you have, maybe across the country, if you’re not global yet, or whatever? How do you service right? Like there’s, there’s a lot to say about the skill of managing and working with people that are not in the office

Karan Rhodes  21:44

Absolutely or not in your from your local culture as well. Yeah, there’s a lot of resources you can do to learn about them, and especially business practices and things like that, so they need to take advantage of it.

Russell Meiselman  21:57

Yeah, yea.

Karan Rhodes  21:57

I’m curious as well. I’m going to switch and put you on the hot seat a little bit because you’re providing a lot of external talent for organizations being in a similar space as you but from on the HR side of the house, there’s always challenges with you know, even if you are a supplier, keeping your talent, keeping them utilized, motivating them, helping them to onboard great with clients. What’s our few examples of things that you have that are top of mind for you, for your own talent that you are placing at organizations?

Russell Meiselman  22:33

Yeah, it’s really, I mean, it’s, it’s funny that you say that because you went right to it. It probably has to do with your experience with doing this in the first place, because most people don’t think about that. My organization, my company, like you know, my job, I guess we’ll start there. My job in the organization is really more of the consultation. I work a lot with customers on their side of the business, because I come from a consulting background, right? I come from working with these large organizations that used to hire me to go fly to India and start their call center for that, right? That’s what my job was for a long time. And so I understand, and I can put my sort of hat from their their side of the table of well, here somebody needs to learn operations first before we can go and outsource it. And so in our business, and the way our service model is set up, which is your employee, right? So you Karan, if you were to hire somebody through us, it would basically be your employee. We would just manage the HR, the payroll, the office infrastructure, the it sort of the legalities of employing this person and so on, but the day to day sort of performance management, the sort of the task allocation that you give them and what you have them work on on a day to day basis, is managed by you. That’s your employee in our office. So the role of our company in this model is really, we’re just HR folks. Our job is to write office management, right, infrastructure management and HR. So our job is to make a really cool work environment. Make sure the IT stuff works, obviously, but most of our focus, my largest department within the company, is HR, and we do a lot and activities. I would say, look, all the fun stuff. I don’t know if you saw pictures on the website or anything, of our offices, right? But like, yeah, yeah. It’s like the old school, you know, Bronx, New York, brick walls in a warehouse converted into an office with tables and pool tables, and we have a swimming pool, so the cool office environment is important. Sure that’s all the fun stuff, the free coffee and the the bread snacks and all that good stuff. So that’s, I would say, the foundation you got to start with. Do people want to be at your location, right? Do they want to come to work? But that it can’t stop there. I think a lot of it will then evolve into like, more complex things, which would be your social responsibility. The groups we have these things called the houses, and everybody joins a house, and these are our core values that are broken into these five. Houses, and everybody joins, and there’s competition and there’s a sense of ownership. We have a leadership team amongst that, like a committee. And you know, these are activities that are during and sometimes outside of work hours, and it allows them to sort of build that relationship and friendship with within the organization. I think one of the best things that an organization can do is allow great managers to really shine. And great managers go beyond a really productive workforce, it comes down to the relationships, the trust, the you know, all of that sort of stuff. So if as an organization from the executive level, is really empowering managers to be great, and that requires more than just daily performance, it requires them to have the power and ability to run the teams that they that the way that they want to, and to fit their personality. And it’s okay if the best SEO guy in the United States doesn’t work with the manager that manages the SEO team, right? Okay? Because if two of them have to jive, they got to get along, they have to have a good personal working relationship for it to work. So, you know, having great talent is important, but the manager is the person that’s running the day to day that that’s an important thing. So for us as an organization, it comes down to building out career development plans. How do we keep people? Why is our retention really good? In terms of industry standard? It’s probably because we spend a lot of time with our customers, saying, hey, a job title change once a year, every couple years, and an annual three to 5% bump isn’t enough, right? We gotta give them a career, yeah. What’s the career path look like? How are we measuring versus, you know, metrics versus, you know, just I like this person, like, Are there real measuring tools? And a lot of small businesses doesn’t have that stuff. So you coming from corporate America, like career tracks, these exist at, you know, the Amazons and AmEx is and Microsoft’s or the world, but they don’t exist in everyday small businesses because they think it’s not important, but it is. People need to know, where am I going to be in five years? Where am I going to be? What targets are available to me? What paths can I take?

Karan Rhodes  27:07

We had whole departments that were focused on career tracks for every job function. So, you know.

Russell Meiselman  27:12

Yes. We have entire department as well, focused on working with customers, specifically on career track, definitely CDP plans and and working with them on what are the pips, and when do we want to trigger them and and how do, what time do we allocate per day or per week for training and cross training and all of these things like, that’s so so so valuable to retain people. And I’m not, I don’t mean offshore. I mean anywhere. You know, that’s something that people should talk more about. And look, I get it. Corporate Governance sucks. I’ll take the first to tell you, Okay, corporate governance and structure and having not being able to as a manager, give a couple $1,000 annual raise when somebody does a good job is I got to go through the compensation and benefits department, but we have an entire benefit department for that. Okay, that sucks, and oh, there’s a career track, and there’s salary ranges, and everything is based off of a metric based incentive. You know, ummm

Karan Rhodes  28:08

it’s hard to navigate that. You want to keep your morale up is crazy.

Russell Meiselman  28:12

It’s hard to navigate that. But there’s equity. There’s equity across there’s clear paths for people to grow. It sort of puts everybody in check. And if you’re a manager that wants to grow people and keep people, yeah, that’s what’s necessary. That’s great. It’s really what’s necessary. If you want people to have 25 year you know, anniversaries with you as an organization, if you don’t provide that, it then either A, there isn’t enough opportunity in your city or town, or you must really love having barbecues at your house, because there’s no other way to maintain people for 25 years unless they have a career plan and you you’re helping them achieve those goals and meet those not only financial sort of goals, but also just responsibility goals, and where they want to be. And if some people don’t want to do to be in management, that’s not a problem, but they need to have a career.

Karan Rhodes  29:05

That’s absolutely true. That is so correct, and that’s why it’s so important to offer this and put the effort around it. But partnering with organizations like yours can really help that out, and I’m so sorry that we’re running short on time, but we can’t let you sneak out of here without asking you our signature question. And for my newer listeners, our firm had done a lot of research on high performing leaders. And we’re all leaders at all levels in our own right, and whatever we’re doing. And we’d love to ask our podcast guests, you know, which of the seven tactics of high potential leaders really resonated with them. All seven are equally as important. You use them at different times, but which of the seven really popped for them? And so Russell was so kind to share that executive presence really resonated with him. And the way we define it is your ability. Executive presence is your ability to you know. Influence and lead others you know, through very convincing oral or written arguments, it’s having that type of grit conversation and data backed influence to convince them to follow your lead. So curious minds would love to know Russell, why does leading with executive present? Why did that really resonate for you?

Karan Rhodes  29:05

Absolutely

Russell Meiselman  29:05

No.

Russell Meiselman  30:21

I read a book called Good to Great. I don’t know I actually did this with the leadership, my entire leadership team, I think, a few months back, and in that book, I don’t necessarily agree with everything that book, but putting the managers and great managers in front of the lines to be able to really drive your business is something that really stuck out as something that we as an organization try to do. We’re not amazing at it, but we do it. We do it when we can. And I think from an executive level, it’s really important that you put things on paper, and you give people goals, and you have strategic plans and and I think it’s important when you look at companies that have come out of nowhere, that are privately owned, and then all of a sudden go public. Yes, I’m sure they took some VC funding, but a lot of it comes down to great leaders putting things on paper and convincing people to take, you know, follow them, down that sort of really dark, kind of scary path, right? And I think, I think it’s important that we remember that really, the company’s success comes down to the executive being able or the executive team being able to communicate that down the down the ranks.

Karan Rhodes  31:26

Absolutely love that. Well, thank you again for sharing that. Russell. We always love to now we’ll have everything, like your bio and everything in the show notes, but we always love to give you a little air time to let people know where they can find you are the company. So would you mind sharing?

Russell Meiselman  31:42

Sure, I’m not big on plugs, but you can find our website, clarkstaff.com Clarkstaff.com we also have a few other brands that we sort of market under, same business model, same everything, but specific to industry. So Nectar BPO, the Branding Bees are just a couple of those other ones that we launched specific for various industries.

Karan Rhodes  32:04

Fantastic. Well, thank you so much, Russell for being a guest on the podcast. I think you saw me feverishly writing down a ton of notes. This has been extremely insightful, and we thank you for the gift of your time.

Russell Meiselman  32:17

Yeah, I appreciate it. Thank you so much

Karan Rhodes  32:19

Awesome. And thank you to listeners for the gift of your time. As you know, we do not take your patronage lightly, because there are literally millions of other podcasts you could be listening to. All we ask is that you like or subscribe to our podcast on your favorite podcast platform of choice and just share a podcast with just one friend, because by doing so, we can all get smarter about blended workforces at work. Thanks a ton, and see you here next week. Well, that’s our show for today. Thank you again for listening to the Blended Workforces at Work podcast. You can check out the show notes, additional episodes, bonus resources, and also submit guest recommendations on our website at blendedworkforces@work.com. You can also follow me on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram or YouTube by searching for the name Karan Rhodes with Karan being spelled K a r a n. And if you like the show, the greatest gift you can give would be to subscribe and leave a rating on your favorite podcast platform of choice. This podcast has been a production of Shockingly Different Leadership, a global consultancy which helps organizations execute their people, talent development, and organizational effectiveness initiatives on an on-demand, contract, fractional, or project basis. Huge thanks to the SDL production and editing team for a job well done. Bye for now.