Pablo Fuentes is the CEO and Founder of Proven, a hiring tool for small businesses, and the host of Small Business War Stories, a podcast featuring stories from small business owners across the United States. We’re excited to learn from Pablo on this episode of The Best Team Wins Podcast and discuss topics such as how to define your values as a business, how to manage remote staff, and how small businesses hire and manage their employees.
Follow Proven on Twitter and Facebook.
Connect with Pablo on Linkedin and Twitter.
Transcripts:
| Adam Robinson: | Welcome to The Best Team Wins Podcast where we feature entrepreneurs whose exceptional approach to the people side of their business has led to incredible results. My name is Adam Robinson, and for the next 25 minutes I’ll be your host as we explore how to build your business through better hiring. Today on the program, Pablo Fuentes is the CEO and founder of Proven, a 20-person business headquartered in Austin, Texas. Proven was founded in 2009, and is a venture backed company with a who’s who list of investors included Andreesen Horowitz, Greylock, Founder Collective, Kapor Capital, and 500 Startups. Pablo is also the host of The Podcast Small Business War Stories. He’s a keynote speaker, and in his spare time designs and builds custom guitars. Pablo, we are so glad to have you on the program today.
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| Pablo Fuentes: | Thanks for having me, Adam. Appreciate it.
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| Adam Robinson: | So we’re here today to focus on the people side of your business, but before we dive in, let’s set the stage. Give us 30 seconds on Proven.
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| Pablo Fuentes: | Yeah. Proven’s a small business hiring tool, so we work with thousands of small businesses nationwide to help them distribute their [inaudible 00:01:18] distribute, and organize their job. So if you are a small business, you can post to over 100 job boards using Proven, and then you go collect all the applicants on a tool that works seamlessly from mobile to desktop, and you can collaborate with your team. Yeah. It’s been great. We are specifically designed for small businesses, so we have exactly what you need and nothing to confuse you and distract you from actually getting back to what you want you to do.
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| Adam Robinson: | Excellent. Well, I’m excited to learn from you experience serving small business on the people side of their business. It is the topic of the day. So both from what you’ve seen and what you’ve experienced in growing your own business, let’s dive right in.
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| Pablo Fuentes: | Yes, sir.
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| Adam Robinson: | So when you started Proven in 2009, there came a point where you needed to staff. So tell us that moment, that first hire that’s so salient for small businesses out there. They’re ready to scale beyond themselves. Talk to us about how you made that choice.
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| Pablo Fuentes: | Yeah. At that point it had to do with customer support. The business has changed quite a bit. We iterated the model quite a few times, but that’s beyond the scope of what we talk about right now. But the first hire was somebody that came in recommended by one of our advisors at the time. It was somebody who had experience working at his [inaudible 00:02:38] business that related to employment. One of the things from early on that we’ve always done at Proven is do kind of incremental buy in to people to the relationship, meaning we always set up trial projects. So even my … I had an original co-founder who’s no longer with the business, but my current business partner, Shawn, came in about a year in. With him we started out with him being a contract developer.
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| Adam Robinson: | So that’s your first employee, came through an advisor referral, which is pretty common. And the business grows, and you need to add to the team. So talk us through the early days in building that core team. I can imagine as a software tool that helps you do exactly that for the kind of business that you were at the time, talk to us about the use of the product to do that and your experience in building that first early core team.
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| Pablo Fuentes: | Yeah. Those two things for us were a little bit disconnected, because early on the business did something else. The business was more focused on staffing for blue collar businesses. And the business didn’t become what it is today until years later. So we currently, today, use the tool to hire ourselves, but back then it was mostly a lot of word of mouth, a lot of networking, especially in the early days of building out the core team. The first handful of employees mostly came in through referrals, people who we knew. Again, we did the same thing as we did for the early employees, for most of our first 10 employees, which was give them projects and things that they can work on on a trial basis before hiring them on full-time.
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| Adam Robinson: | I see. So is your goal around the country for your podcast and talk to small business owners about the people side of their business, what are some of the things you hear most often that they struggle with when it comes to team-building? And what are some things from their experience you have found best helps them turn that corner?
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| Pablo Fuentes: | Yeah, so I’ve covered 8,000 miles in the last year interviewing roughly 70 businesses all over the country. And one thing that is a big common thread is that people feel like they can teach people skills, but they cannot teach people values. So one of the things that I’ve gotten from people is you always want to find people who share your core values and share your beliefs as a business and your reason for being. And then the specific skills about whatever it is that you do can generally be taught. In the people that I’ve hired for values tend to be much happier longer term with their hiring.
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| Adam Robinson: | So when you talk with small business owners looking to build a value-based people strategy, what’s step one in determining core values from your perspective?
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| Pablo Fuentes: | Yeah. I think it’s having an honest conversation with yourself and any other stakeholders in the business. So business partners, early customers, and things like that and figuring what are the things that actually matter to you. Because there are things that you think may matter to you that don’t. Don’t maybe sit down and write down some of your core values and then socialize that with other people who know you and who know your business, maybe your top employees or business partner and be like, “Hey, does this resonate? Is this really what we’re about? Or is it not?” I don’t know, a good example of that may be if you’re a design agency, and you’re like, “Hey, a core value for us is, I don’t know, hard work,” right? Hard work could be defined as two different things.
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| It could be like, “Hey show up early every single day and be there at 8 o’clock at the office and we’re all there.” Or it could be, “Hey, everybody’s flexible and can do whatever they want, it’s just we have a high output of product, but if you want to work at three in the morning at your house, you can do that. I guess the core value there is flexibility. Is flexibility or structure more important to you? And then having an honest conversation about yourself, about what your life is actually like, not what you wish it was like.
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| Adam Robinson: | So for most small business owners there’s an idea of where they want to be going. And then there’s the reality of where they are. And in a values-driven business it’s fun and exciting to talk about what the business stands for, but the reality often is that many things are broken or not working, and that’s always the case on a small or high growth business. How would you suggest or in your experience [inaudible 00:07:20]
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| Pablo Fuentes: | Yeah. I think being very self-aware and honest with that is important. So I think it’s easy to get caught in what you wish were the truths. But those things are not mutually exclusive. You can say, you can be very honest about, “Hey, here’s our vision,” and you can be also very honest about, “Here’s what we are now.” And actually the more you’re able to bridge those two things and have this concrete specific plan like, “Hey, here’s where we are today. Here’s where we want to be, and here are the things we need to do in order to get there. And here’s how you fit in to those things.” So that is actually a tremendously effective recruiting tool. If you know yourself well enough, and you know your business well enough to understand that and to be able to give those answers and paint a very clear picture as to how the new person fits into that plan, well, I mean, there’s no better, more exciting way to come into a company than to know that you are valued and that you are going to be part of bringing that vision to fruition.
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| Adam Robinson: | Absolutely. We had a guest on the podcast a few episodes back that made the case, it was actually the counter case, which I thought was fascinating which is, “We don’t all have to get along, we just all have to do our job.” There’s no wrong answers when it comes to team-building, it’s just what’s right for you. Based on your tour, do you see more of the values-first philosophy out there? Or are you observing more of the performance-based meritocracy, “Let’s not worry about getting along. Let’s worry about getting the job done,” type of culture?
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| Pablo Fuentes: | Well, I don’t think those two things have to mutually exclusive. I think you can run a values-based organization that’s very goal-driven, too. I do see people that maybe have everything is about the goal. Those organizations, in my experience, [inaudible 00:09:22] higher turnover, because while in the short term things might get done, it’s extraordinarily stressful, because people are people and you’re dealing with human beings, so people burn out. So that’s okay. I mean, there are businesses that are predicated upon that philosophy. And if that, as a founder, that is a way that you see the world, then, yeah, you should find other people who see the world that way as well. And maybe you’re that successful and that compelling that you can drive people to redline people, and that’ll be fine, and you’ll be successful.
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| In my personal experience, the way I run my business is more, “It’s a marathon, not a sprint,” and we are very conscious of output and of cadence, but we also want to make sure that our values are straight, and that we don’t burn people out. And a lot of the organizations that I’ve seen that have higher retention, really take a more holistic approach to seeing people as human beings. And, by the way, I do think, just to be clear, that there is … I don’t think businesses are a family. I do cringe a little bit when I hear people talking about family. Families are dysfunctional. Families are messed up, and they love each other, and they hate each other, and there’s all kinds of things like that.
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| I think it’s more a sports team. There is a performance-based aspect to it, and you have to really care about people’s output, but that doesn’t exclude also having a values-based organization where the way that the core values of the people you hire are very similar to yours.
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| Adam Robinson: | Are you a values-driven organization at Proven?
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| Pablo Fuentes: | Yeah. We are a values-driven organization. We are also very much … I think we strike a balance. We’re fully remote. So we have people all over the world, and a lot of trust has to be in place for that. A lot of independence and drive. I’m not there to see if our employees are playing video games all day. At the same time we have accountabilities and trust are big values for us. And for us those things lead us to have weekly meetings. We just had one earlier today where we basically share with everybody our progress and what we’ve done versus what we said we were going to do and what’s coming in the next week. And I think that helps keep everybody on the same page. So we do strike a balance on those things. But, yeah, independence, respect, and accountability are all big for us.
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| Adam Robinson: | Were those values that you started with, or are those values that you pulled together after the founding of the business?
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| Pablo Fuentes: | That’s a good question. I think it’s evolved. We were not remote originally. We had our own office in San Francisco, so a lot of those values were things that have come into the business later on. I think from a product perspective the values of treating people, our customers the way that want to be treated, we use our own product, and then also making sure that our product is creating a net social good. It matters to us. It’s not just about making money. It’s we want to help people get jobs. We want to help people hire, and we prioritize that over the immediate short-term making of money. I think that’s something that’s been with us from day one and having that, we want to be a positive influence on society. That’s been there from day one. There have been additional values and things that we’ve added along the way as the specific working structure of our company has changed.
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| Adam Robinson: | I’ve talked in recent episodes a lot about the notion of remote workforce, and we’ve had guests on here that are both pro and con. It sounds like you’re firmly in the pro category, and it’s working well for you. What things in terms of tools or technology, you mentioned trust, but tools or technology, make that work for an organization that’s spread around the world?
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| Pablo Fuentes: | Yeah. We use a lot of Slack. We use Slack, Google Docs. We have centralized platforms for customer support. We have specific processes that we’ve internally created for accountability and to make sure that everybody knows and can, in short order, know something that they need to know about another area of the business. Yeah, and it’s been a learning process. I do think the notion of … A lot of people think, “Oh, well, how am I gonna know if people are being productive?” Well, the reality is that you don’t actually know if people are being productive when you’re at an office. Just because you walk by and somebody’s sitting in front of a computer, that doesn’t mean anything about the work they’re doing, right? And it’s actually, when you’re in an office setting it’s somewhat awkward to go up to somebody as their supervisor and be like, “Hey, what are you working on?” And just kind of go up behind them and say, “Hey, what’s going on?” Then you somewhat Michael Scott in The Office, right? So that is a very natural question to ask somebody in a remote setting, because you’re not in front of them every day. [inaudible 00:14:52]
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| … Deliver their results. Well, great. I think it’s much more for us about that productivity and the deliverables than it is about the specific, “Oh my god. Jack was here until 5:00 and Jane was here until 7:00. Jane must be a more productive worker,” or vice versa. I think those are industrial age notions of widgets in a assembly line which don’t necessarily apply to a lot of the work that happens today on the more creative and virtual front.
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| Adam Robinson: | In an organization that’s remote that requires such a high degree of trust, how are you screening for trust in your hiring process?
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| Pablo Fuentes: | Yeah. I think it goes back to the first thing I said, which is we give people trial projects and assignments, and we do [inaudible 00:16:05] … Immediately nip that up the bud, and don’t let that affect the business or affect the relationship. So, yeah. It’s like they speak softly and carry a big stick kind of thing. In the past we’ve had to use that stick. It’s fortunately not been very often. But you can only be nice if you have a real backbone, and there are real consequences to breaching those values and breaching those outcomes. I shouldn’t say “outcomes.” Breaching those deliverables and that trust.
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| Adam Robinson: | So what happens in the organization, what processes or touch points have you put in place with managers to address outcomes that aren’t meeting standard, particularly in the trial period? When is it time to coach versus time to counsel out?
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| Pablo Fuentes: | I would say it becomes pretty quickly evident whether people are self-driven, right? For us, the core question that we ask ourselves is, “Is this person looking for reasons this will not work or ways in which they can make it work?” And for us we see it’s kind of binary. There are very few people who are a mixture of both, right? So you either have the attitude of, “Okay, I’m gonna figure out how I can do this or, “Oh, this is not gonna work,” and be a naysayer and things like that. I think it’s good to be skeptical. One of the sayings we rely on is, “In God, we trust. Everybody else, bring data.” So we try to make data-based decisions. But at the same time there is a certain attitude about, “Am I going to be resourceful and find out a way to do this?” And, “Am I going to be a proactive creative find things to do attitude”, as opposed to, “Ah, man. This sucks.”
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| Which is unfortunately something that does happen out there. That we can’t teach you. People can teach that to themselves. I do believe in self improvement and transformation, but I can’t teach you that. What I can teach you is specifics of the things that need to happen for this business, but that drive has to be inside of you.
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| Adam Robinson: | Interesting. What you’re saying is you find that attitude is perhaps the most influential predictor or accurate predictor of future success in your organization. Is that correct?
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| Pablo Fuentes: | Yeah. And I would say for a lot of the businesses that I’ve interviewed nationwide that’s also been the case. Just like an attitude of getting things done and being proactive, being imaginative, being optimistic. That doesn’t mean, I mean, you are gonna deal with setbacks. One of the standard questions, I have two main questions that I ask my guests. One is the number one lesson they’ve learned that they want to share with other people starting a company. And the other one is, “Tell me about a time when things went really wrong.” I want to hear about your crisis and how did you handle them and how did you get out of them. The reality is that things will go wrong. It’s not about things not going wrong. It’s about sometimes things happen that are outside of your control. How are you going to make us better as an organization by the way you handle that?
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| Adam Robinson: | So when things are going wrong, when things are going wrong can you give us a couple of examples of when the team says, “I’m gonna make this work versus when they look for ways that it’s not gonna work?” I just love that description of how it works. People look for ways to make it work or people look for reasons why it’s not gonna work. That’s excellent. What are some salient examples from the road you can share?
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| Pablo Fuentes: | I’m trying to think. I don’t know if that’s come up necessarily on the road. It’s definitely come up within our company. We currently do 100% of our sales through content marketing. So we basically don’t have sales people. But, yeah. I can remember many times when we had a sales force, and we would say, “Okay, here’s the new script, something we’re gonna try.” For us, sales proved to not to be an economically viable model, because our product is too inexpensive to be sold. So we have to rely on organic traffic, and that’s why we’ve invested a great chunk of our time in the last two years ramping that up significantly going from 50 to 50,000 monthly readers to our blog in two years. And that is a change that we had to make for the business to survive.
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| But when we had a sales team I remember many times we were like, “Okay. Here’s a change to the sales script, and we’re gonna try this out. And instead of trying it out and seeing how it works, “Oh, that’s not gonna work. Oh, that’s not gonna work.” We’ve had people in the past that were maybe less, I guess, willing to see, “Okay, how can this work? Or maybe let’s give it a try for a week, and then if it doesn’t work we’ll find a way to make it better.” I suppose to kind of losing the battle before you even step on the field.
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| Adam Robinson: | Based on your travels, what’s the one thing you would say most business owners could do tomorrow to be dramatically better at the talent side of their business?
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| Pablo Fuentes: | Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s that’s simple. I mean, there’s no silver bullet to any of this, right? I think the first step is, again, that transparency and that honesty with yourself about who you are and what you’re actually looking for what’s gonna make you successful. I would say the one thing that people who have been successful is hire for things that they don’t have. A common theme that I’ve found is people that have a particular skillset and instead of hiring somebody just like them, they hired somebody who shares values but that has a different skillset. And so a perfect example of that is my business partner and I. My business partner’s a PhD in computer science. He is significantly smarter than I am, very process-oriented, and I am a little bit more in the creative front. We work very well together. We both respect each other. We both respect each other’s ideas.
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| But we’re really very different people. I think hiring … Making sure that you don’t hire somebody who, oh, it’s like, “This person feels good,” and then examining why is it that they feel good? Is it because they are exactly like you? And that might not be the best answer for your business. Figure out what the needs of the business are and then hire for people who will fill those gaps who share the same values as you, if that makes any sense.
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| Adam Robinson: | Absolutely.
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| Pablo Fuentes: | That’s not a silver bullet, right? I can’t tell you a silver bullet of something that … I mean, there are some specific tactics like make sure you cast a wide net. And, again, I think the biggest thing I can share with you is hiring for values and teaching skills. I interviewed in Santa Fe, New Mexico just recently, a knife-making company. They’ve been very successful, and there’s beautiful inlaid handles for their knives. The guy that runs their shop now originally came through as a high school, or I forget. He was very young as an intern. Basically on the first day they gave him the hardest job in the factory and be like, “Hey, are you sure you want to do this?” And he’s become their shop foreman, shop leader over the last, I think, eight, ten years. And he’s somebody that knew nothing about any of the stuff they did. He just was somebody who had the right values and was willing to learn.
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| Adam Robinson: | If you were to sum up philosophically based on your experience and observation, your approach to the people side of business, including yours, what would that philosophy be?
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| Pablo Fuentes: | Yeah. I think it comes back to values. Know yourself. Be transparent with yourself about what your business and your life is actually like, and then identify the values that drive that. And for us trust is a big one. So I can’t say what other people’s values should be and maybe the remote setup doesn’t work for everybody. But know who you are, and then find people who share those values and train them on the right skills. And also a big one is also invest in people. So LinkedIn has, sometimes people put pithy business sayings on there, but one of them is, “What if I trained somebody, and they leave. The counter answer to that, “Well, what if you don’t and they stay?” So, yeah. I have very frank-
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| Adam Robinson: | That’s great.
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| Pablo Fuentes: | Yeah, very frank conversations with my employees about, “Hey, you’re not gonna be here forever. Where do you want to be in five years? Let’s help get you those skills, help this company along the way. And then if your next step in a few years is to go do something else, I’ll help you do that. The last person that left the business I spent a significant amount of time calling my network and getting that person interviews. And if you’re able to have those conversations openly with people, they won’t be looking for jobs behind your back, because they know that they can have that conversation with you. I bring that up in the one on ones that I have with my direct reports, “Okay, let’s talk about your midterm, short-term, and long-term goals and how are we tracking for those?
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| Do you feel like you’re still learning?” And then at some point it’ll come the time when I’m gonna help them transition to something else. That is way more effective for us as a business and for us as people than pretending like they’re gonna be here for 20 years while they’re spending half their time or a quarter of their time looking at job postings, because they can’t stand what they’re doing here.
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| Adam Robinson: | Final couple of questions here focused a little bit more on you individually. What book are you reading right now, and would you recommend it to our audience?
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| Pablo Fuentes: | Ah, god. I’m reading Guy Clark’s biography. He’s a very famous Texas songwriter. If you’re interested in lyricism and poetry and music, absolutely. On the business front I just ordered a book called Friction about building a brand in kind of like the era that we’re in today. I saw the guy, the author, speak at a, they have INBOUND Conference in Boston that [inaudible 00:26:46] does. I liked his ideas, but I haven’t read it yet. But, yeah. I try to always keep one fiction and one non-fiction book on deck, and I’ve been reading a lot about singers and … I also listened to during my latest road trip Bruce Springsteen’s autobiography read by himself. That’s a beautiful, beautiful book. It’s got a lot of really good life lessons on top of the interesting sort of music part. So the Bruce Springsteen one is the one I would 100% recommend to anybody whether or not … I wasn’t a particular huge fan of his music before, but his life philosophies are really, really good.
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| Adam Robinson: | Well, I’m sold. That’s my next pickup there. Thank you [crosstalk 00:27:28].
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| Pablo Fuentes: | Yeah, and you gotta listen to the audiobook, because he narrates it himself, and he’s a very lyrical guy in the way he writes, because he wrote it and didn’t ghost write it, you can actually hear, it’s almost like a song about his life written in [inaudible 00:27:44] with real actionable lessons about things. It’s really good.
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| Adam Robinson: | I love it. I’m in on that. All right, closing question here, Pablo. If you were to come back on this show a year from now and report to the audience on whether or not you’ve successfully tackled the single biggest people-related opportunity or issue facing the business or the endeavors you’re involved in, what would you be telling us happened?
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| Pablo Fuentes: | I would say that the … I mean, I’m not currently actively hiring, so I would say it wouldn’t be along those lines. It’d be along developing people like we talked about before. I would be telling you about how the people whom we have in the organization today have learned new skills and contribute to the business, and we’ve had, again, frank conversations. I’m a firm believer in … I think it was Reid Hoffman in his book that talked about tours of duty where people at LinkedIn, they cycle them in and out into different functions. So I feel like if people at my company are still working on exactly the same things a year from now as they are today, I’ve failed, because we have, A, not continued to grow and develop and earn new challenges.
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| I think as a business and in life, you are never out of problems. All you do is you earn new problems. So I will have been successful if, A, we’ve earned new problems and, B, my team has developed the company and their skills through tackling those new earned problems.
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| Adam Robinson: | That’s the final word. Ladies and gentlemen, you’ve been learning from Pablo Fuentes, CEO and founder of Proven. Pablo, thank you for being with us on the program today.
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| Pablo Fuentes: | I appreciate it. Thanks, Adam.
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| Adam Robinson: | That’s wrap for this week’s episode of The Best Team Wins Podcast where we’re featuring entrepreneurs whose exceptional approach to the people side of their business has led to incredible results. My name is Adam Robinson, author of the book The Best Team Wins that you can find online at www.TheBestTeamWins.com or on Amazon. Thanks so much for being with us, and we will see you next week.
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| Adam Robinson: | Welcome to The Best Team Wins Podcast where we feature entrepreneurs whose exceptional approach to the people side of their business has led to incredible results. My name is Adam Robinson, and for the next 25 minutes I’ll be your host as we explore how to build your business through better hiring. Today on the program, Pablo Fuentes is the CEO and founder of Proven, a 20-person business headquartered in Austin, Texas. Proven was founded in 2009, and is a venture backed company with a who’s who list of investors included Andreesen Horowitz, Greylock, Founder Collective, Kapor Capital, and 500 Startups. Pablo is also the host of The Podcast Small Business War Stories. He’s a keynote speaker, and in his spare time designs and builds custom guitars. Pablo, we are so glad to have you on the program today.
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| Pablo Fuentes: | Thanks for having me, Adam. Appreciate it.
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| Adam Robinson: | So we’re here today to focus on the people side of your business, but before we dive in, let’s set the stage. Give us 30 seconds on Proven.
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| Pablo Fuentes: | Yeah. Proven’s a small business hiring tool, so we work with thousands of small businesses nationwide to help them distribute their [inaudible 00:01:18] distribute, and organize their job. So if you are a small business, you can post to over 100 job boards using Proven, and then you go collect all the applicants on a tool that works seamlessly from mobile to desktop, and you can collaborate with your team. Yeah. It’s been great. We are specifically designed for small businesses, so we have exactly what you need and nothing to confuse you and distract you from actually getting back to what you want you to do.
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| Adam Robinson: | Excellent. Well, I’m excited to learn from you experience serving small business on the people side of their business. It is the topic of the day. So both from what you’ve seen and what you’ve experienced in growing your own business, let’s dive right in.
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| Pablo Fuentes: | Yes, sir.
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| Adam Robinson: | So when you started Proven in 2009, there came a point where you needed to staff. So tell us that moment, that first hire that’s so salient for small businesses out there. They’re ready to scale beyond themselves. Talk to us about how you made that choice.
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| Pablo Fuentes: | Yeah. At that point it had to do with customer support. The business has changed quite a bit. We iterated the model quite a few times, but that’s beyond the scope of what we talk about right now. But the first hire was somebody that came in recommended by one of our advisors at the time. It was somebody who had experience working at his [inaudible 00:02:38] business that related to employment. One of the things from early on that we’ve always done at Proven is do kind of incremental buy in to people to the relationship, meaning we always set up trial projects. So even my … I had an original co-founder who’s no longer with the business, but my current business partner, Shawn, came in about a year in. With him we started out with him being a contract developer.
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| Adam Robinson: | So that’s your first employee, came through an advisor referral, which is pretty common. And the business grows, and you need to add to the team. So talk us through the early days in building that core team. I can imagine as a software tool that helps you do exactly that for the kind of business that you were at the time, talk to us about the use of the product to do that and your experience in building that first early core team.
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| Pablo Fuentes: | Yeah. Those two things for us were a little bit disconnected, because early on the business did something else. The business was more focused on staffing for blue collar businesses. And the business didn’t become what it is today until years later. So we currently, today, use the tool to hire ourselves, but back then it was mostly a lot of word of mouth, a lot of networking, especially in the early days of building out the core team. The first handful of employees mostly came in through referrals, people who we knew. Again, we did the same thing as we did for the early employees, for most of our first 10 employees, which was give them projects and things that they can work on on a trial basis before hiring them on full-time.
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| Adam Robinson: | I see. So is your goal around the country for your podcast and talk to small business owners about the people side of their business, what are some of the things you hear most often that they struggle with when it comes to team-building? And what are some things from their experience you have found best helps them turn that corner?
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| Pablo Fuentes: | Yeah, so I’ve covered 8,000 miles in the last year interviewing roughly 70 businesses all over the country. And one thing that is a big common thread is that people feel like they can teach people skills, but they cannot teach people values. So one of the things that I’ve gotten from people is you always want to find people who share your core values and share your beliefs as a business and your reason for being. And then the specific skills about whatever it is that you do can generally be taught. In the people that I’ve hired for values tend to be much happier longer term with their hiring.
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| Adam Robinson: | So when you talk with small business owners looking to build a value-based people strategy, what’s step one in determining core values from your perspective?
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| Pablo Fuentes: | Yeah. I think it’s having an honest conversation with yourself and any other stakeholders in the business. So business partners, early customers, and things like that and figuring what are the things that actually matter to you. Because there are things that you think may matter to you that don’t. Don’t maybe sit down and write down some of your core values and then socialize that with other people who know you and who know your business, maybe your top employees or business partner and be like, “Hey, does this resonate? Is this really what we’re about? Or is it not?” I don’t know, a good example of that may be if you’re a design agency, and you’re like, “Hey, a core value for us is, I don’t know, hard work,” right? Hard work could be defined as two different things.
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| It could be like, “Hey show up early every single day and be there at 8 o’clock at the office and we’re all there.” Or it could be, “Hey, everybody’s flexible and can do whatever they want, it’s just we have a high output of product, but if you want to work at three in the morning at your house, you can do that. I guess the core value there is flexibility. Is flexibility or structure more important to you? And then having an honest conversation about yourself, about what your life is actually like, not what you wish it was like.
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| Adam Robinson: | So for most small business owners there’s an idea of where they want to be going. And then there’s the reality of where they are. And in a values-driven business it’s fun and exciting to talk about what the business stands for, but the reality often is that many things are broken or not working, and that’s always the case on a small or high growth business. How would you suggest or in your experience [inaudible 00:07:20]
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| Pablo Fuentes: | Yeah. I think being very self-aware and honest with that is important. So I think it’s easy to get caught in what you wish were the truths. But those things are not mutually exclusive. You can say, you can be very honest about, “Hey, here’s our vision,” and you can be also very honest about, “Here’s what we are now.” And actually the more you’re able to bridge those two things and have this concrete specific plan like, “Hey, here’s where we are today. Here’s where we want to be, and here are the things we need to do in order to get there. And here’s how you fit in to those things.” So that is actually a tremendously effective recruiting tool. If you know yourself well enough, and you know your business well enough to understand that and to be able to give those answers and paint a very clear picture as to how the new person fits into that plan, well, I mean, there’s no better, more exciting way to come into a company than to know that you are valued and that you are going to be part of bringing that vision to fruition.
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| Adam Robinson: | Absolutely. We had a guest on the podcast a few episodes back that made the case, it was actually the counter case, which I thought was fascinating which is, “We don’t all have to get along, we just all have to do our job.” There’s no wrong answers when it comes to team-building, it’s just what’s right for you. Based on your tour, do you see more of the values-first philosophy out there? Or are you observing more of the performance-based meritocracy, “Let’s not worry about getting along. Let’s worry about getting the job done,” type of culture?
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| Pablo Fuentes: | Well, I don’t think those two things have to mutually exclusive. I think you can run a values-based organization that’s very goal-driven, too. I do see people that maybe have everything is about the goal. Those organizations, in my experience, [inaudible 00:09:22] higher turnover, because while in the short term things might get done, it’s extraordinarily stressful, because people are people and you’re dealing with human beings, so people burn out. So that’s okay. I mean, there are businesses that are predicated upon that philosophy. And if that, as a founder, that is a way that you see the world, then, yeah, you should find other people who see the world that way as well. And maybe you’re that successful and that compelling that you can drive people to redline people, and that’ll be fine, and you’ll be successful.
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| In my personal experience, the way I run my business is more, “It’s a marathon, not a sprint,” and we are very conscious of output and of cadence, but we also want to make sure that our values are straight, and that we don’t burn people out. And a lot of the organizations that I’ve seen that have higher retention, really take a more holistic approach to seeing people as human beings. And, by the way, I do think, just to be clear, that there is … I don’t think businesses are a family. I do cringe a little bit when I hear people talking about family. Families are dysfunctional. Families are messed up, and they love each other, and they hate each other, and there’s all kinds of things like that.
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| I think it’s more a sports team. There is a performance-based aspect to it, and you have to really care about people’s output, but that doesn’t exclude also having a values-based organization where the way that the core values of the people you hire are very similar to yours.
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| Adam Robinson: | Are you a values-driven organization at Proven?
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| Pablo Fuentes: | Yeah. We are a values-driven organization. We are also very much … I think we strike a balance. We’re fully remote. So we have people all over the world, and a lot of trust has to be in place for that. A lot of independence and drive. I’m not there to see if our employees are playing video games all day. At the same time we have accountabilities and trust are big values for us. And for us those things lead us to have weekly meetings. We just had one earlier today where we basically share with everybody our progress and what we’ve done versus what we said we were going to do and what’s coming in the next week. And I think that helps keep everybody on the same page. So we do strike a balance on those things. But, yeah, independence, respect, and accountability are all big for us.
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| Adam Robinson: | Were those values that you started with, or are those values that you pulled together after the founding of the business?
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| Pablo Fuentes: | That’s a good question. I think it’s evolved. We were not remote originally. We had our own office in San Francisco, so a lot of those values were things that have come into the business later on. I think from a product perspective the values of treating people, our customers the way that want to be treated, we use our own product, and then also making sure that our product is creating a net social good. It matters to us. It’s not just about making money. It’s we want to help people get jobs. We want to help people hire, and we prioritize that over the immediate short-term making of money. I think that’s something that’s been with us from day one and having that, we want to be a positive influence on society. That’s been there from day one. There have been additional values and things that we’ve added along the way as the specific working structure of our company has changed.
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| Adam Robinson: | I’ve talked in recent episodes a lot about the notion of remote workforce, and we’ve had guests on here that are both pro and con. It sounds like you’re firmly in the pro category, and it’s working well for you. What things in terms of tools or technology, you mentioned trust, but tools or technology, make that work for an organization that’s spread around the world?
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| Pablo Fuentes: | Yeah. We use a lot of Slack. We use Slack, Google Docs. We have centralized platforms for customer support. We have specific processes that we’ve internally created for accountability and to make sure that everybody knows and can, in short order, know something that they need to know about another area of the business. Yeah, and it’s been a learning process. I do think the notion of … A lot of people think, “Oh, well, how am I gonna know if people are being productive?” Well, the reality is that you don’t actually know if people are being productive when you’re at an office. Just because you walk by and somebody’s sitting in front of a computer, that doesn’t mean anything about the work they’re doing, right? And it’s actually, when you’re in an office setting it’s somewhat awkward to go up to somebody as their supervisor and be like, “Hey, what are you working on?” And just kind of go up behind them and say, “Hey, what’s going on?” Then you somewhat Michael Scott in The Office, right? So that is a very natural question to ask somebody in a remote setting, because you’re not in front of them every day. [inaudible 00:14:52]
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| … Deliver their results. Well, great. I think it’s much more for us about that productivity and the deliverables than it is about the specific, “Oh my god. Jack was here until 5:00 and Jane was here until 7:00. Jane must be a more productive worker,” or vice versa. I think those are industrial age notions of widgets in a assembly line which don’t necessarily apply to a lot of the work that happens today on the more creative and virtual front.
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| Adam Robinson: | In an organization that’s remote that requires such a high degree of trust, how are you screening for trust in your hiring process?
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| Pablo Fuentes: | Yeah. I think it goes back to the first thing I said, which is we give people trial projects and assignments, and we do [inaudible 00:16:05] … Immediately nip that up the bud, and don’t let that affect the business or affect the relationship. So, yeah. It’s like they speak softly and carry a big stick kind of thing. In the past we’ve had to use that stick. It’s fortunately not been very often. But you can only be nice if you have a real backbone, and there are real consequences to breaching those values and breaching those outcomes. I shouldn’t say “outcomes.” Breaching those deliverables and that trust.
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| Adam Robinson: | So what happens in the organization, what processes or touch points have you put in place with managers to address outcomes that aren’t meeting standard, particularly in the trial period? When is it time to coach versus time to counsel out?
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| Pablo Fuentes: | I would say it becomes pretty quickly evident whether people are self-driven, right? For us, the core question that we ask ourselves is, “Is this person looking for reasons this will not work or ways in which they can make it work?” And for us we see it’s kind of binary. There are very few people who are a mixture of both, right? So you either have the attitude of, “Okay, I’m gonna figure out how I can do this or, “Oh, this is not gonna work,” and be a naysayer and things like that. I think it’s good to be skeptical. One of the sayings we rely on is, “In God, we trust. Everybody else, bring data.” So we try to make data-based decisions. But at the same time there is a certain attitude about, “Am I going to be resourceful and find out a way to do this?” And, “Am I going to be a proactive creative find things to do attitude”, as opposed to, “Ah, man. This sucks.”
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| Which is unfortunately something that does happen out there. That we can’t teach you. People can teach that to themselves. I do believe in self improvement and transformation, but I can’t teach you that. What I can teach you is specifics of the things that need to happen for this business, but that drive has to be inside of you.
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| Adam Robinson: | Interesting. What you’re saying is you find that attitude is perhaps the most influential predictor or accurate predictor of future success in your organization. Is that correct?
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| Pablo Fuentes: | Yeah. And I would say for a lot of the businesses that I’ve interviewed nationwide that’s also been the case. Just like an attitude of getting things done and being proactive, being imaginative, being optimistic. That doesn’t mean, I mean, you are gonna deal with setbacks. One of the standard questions, I have two main questions that I ask my guests. One is the number one lesson they’ve learned that they want to share with other people starting a company. And the other one is, “Tell me about a time when things went really wrong.” I want to hear about your crisis and how did you handle them and how did you get out of them. The reality is that things will go wrong. It’s not about things not going wrong. It’s about sometimes things happen that are outside of your control. How are you going to make us better as an organization by the way you handle that?
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| Adam Robinson: | So when things are going wrong, when things are going wrong can you give us a couple of examples of when the team says, “I’m gonna make this work versus when they look for ways that it’s not gonna work?” I just love that description of how it works. People look for ways to make it work or people look for reasons why it’s not gonna work. That’s excellent. What are some salient examples from the road you can share?
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| Pablo Fuentes: | I’m trying to think. I don’t know if that’s come up necessarily on the road. It’s definitely come up within our company. We currently do 100% of our sales through content marketing. So we basically don’t have sales people. But, yeah. I can remember many times when we had a sales force, and we would say, “Okay, here’s the new script, something we’re gonna try.” For us, sales proved to not to be an economically viable model, because our product is too inexpensive to be sold. So we have to rely on organic traffic, and that’s why we’ve invested a great chunk of our time in the last two years ramping that up significantly going from 50 to 50,000 monthly readers to our blog in two years. And that is a change that we had to make for the business to survive.
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| But when we had a sales team I remember many times we were like, “Okay. Here’s a change to the sales script, and we’re gonna try this out. And instead of trying it out and seeing how it works, “Oh, that’s not gonna work. Oh, that’s not gonna work.” We’ve had people in the past that were maybe less, I guess, willing to see, “Okay, how can this work? Or maybe let’s give it a try for a week, and then if it doesn’t work we’ll find a way to make it better.” I suppose to kind of losing the battle before you even step on the field.
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| Adam Robinson: | Based on your travels, what’s the one thing you would say most business owners could do tomorrow to be dramatically better at the talent side of their business?
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| Pablo Fuentes: | Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s that’s simple. I mean, there’s no silver bullet to any of this, right? I think the first step is, again, that transparency and that honesty with yourself about who you are and what you’re actually looking for what’s gonna make you successful. I would say the one thing that people who have been successful is hire for things that they don’t have. A common theme that I’ve found is people that have a particular skillset and instead of hiring somebody just like them, they hired somebody who shares values but that has a different skillset. And so a perfect example of that is my business partner and I. My business partner’s a PhD in computer science. He is significantly smarter than I am, very process-oriented, and I am a little bit more in the creative front. We work very well together. We both respect each other. We both respect each other’s ideas.
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| But we’re really very different people. I think hiring … Making sure that you don’t hire somebody who, oh, it’s like, “This person feels good,” and then examining why is it that they feel good? Is it because they are exactly like you? And that might not be the best answer for your business. Figure out what the needs of the business are and then hire for people who will fill those gaps who share the same values as you, if that makes any sense.
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| Adam Robinson: | Absolutely.
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| Pablo Fuentes: | That’s not a silver bullet, right? I can’t tell you a silver bullet of something that … I mean, there are some specific tactics like make sure you cast a wide net. And, again, I think the biggest thing I can share with you is hiring for values and teaching skills. I interviewed in Santa Fe, New Mexico just recently, a knife-making company. They’ve been very successful, and there’s beautiful inlaid handles for their knives. The guy that runs their shop now originally came through as a high school, or I forget. He was very young as an intern. Basically on the first day they gave him the hardest job in the factory and be like, “Hey, are you sure you want to do this?” And he’s become their shop foreman, shop leader over the last, I think, eight, ten years. And he’s somebody that knew nothing about any of the stuff they did. He just was somebody who had the right values and was willing to learn.
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| Adam Robinson: | If you were to sum up philosophically based on your experience and observation, your approach to the people side of business, including yours, what would that philosophy be?
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| Pablo Fuentes: | Yeah. I think it comes back to values. Know yourself. Be transparent with yourself about what your business and your life is actually like, and then identify the values that drive that. And for us trust is a big one. So I can’t say what other people’s values should be and maybe the remote setup doesn’t work for everybody. But know who you are, and then find people who share those values and train them on the right skills. And also a big one is also invest in people. So LinkedIn has, sometimes people put pithy business sayings on there, but one of them is, “What if I trained somebody, and they leave. The counter answer to that, “Well, what if you don’t and they stay?” So, yeah. I have very frank-
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| Adam Robinson: | That’s great.
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| Pablo Fuentes: | Yeah, very frank conversations with my employees about, “Hey, you’re not gonna be here forever. Where do you want to be in five years? Let’s help get you those skills, help this company along the way. And then if your next step in a few years is to go do something else, I’ll help you do that. The last person that left the business I spent a significant amount of time calling my network and getting that person interviews. And if you’re able to have those conversations openly with people, they won’t be looking for jobs behind your back, because they know that they can have that conversation with you. I bring that up in the one on ones that I have with my direct reports, “Okay, let’s talk about your midterm, short-term, and long-term goals and how are we tracking for those?
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| Do you feel like you’re still learning?” And then at some point it’ll come the time when I’m gonna help them transition to something else. That is way more effective for us as a business and for us as people than pretending like they’re gonna be here for 20 years while they’re spending half their time or a quarter of their time looking at job postings, because they can’t stand what they’re doing here.
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| Adam Robinson: | Final couple of questions here focused a little bit more on you individually. What book are you reading right now, and would you recommend it to our audience?
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| Pablo Fuentes: | Ah, god. I’m reading Guy Clark’s biography. He’s a very famous Texas songwriter. If you’re interested in lyricism and poetry and music, absolutely. On the business front I just ordered a book called Friction about building a brand in kind of like the era that we’re in today. I saw the guy, the author, speak at a, they have INBOUND Conference in Boston that [inaudible 00:26:46] does. I liked his ideas, but I haven’t read it yet. But, yeah. I try to always keep one fiction and one non-fiction book on deck, and I’ve been reading a lot about singers and … I also listened to during my latest road trip Bruce Springsteen’s autobiography read by himself. That’s a beautiful, beautiful book. It’s got a lot of really good life lessons on top of the interesting sort of music part. So the Bruce Springsteen one is the one I would 100% recommend to anybody whether or not … I wasn’t a particular huge fan of his music before, but his life philosophies are really, really good.
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| Adam Robinson: | Well, I’m sold. That’s my next pickup there. Thank you [crosstalk 00:27:28].
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| Pablo Fuentes: | Yeah, and you gotta listen to the audiobook, because he narrates it himself, and he’s a very lyrical guy in the way he writes, because he wrote it and didn’t ghost write it, you can actually hear, it’s almost like a song about his life written in [inaudible 00:27:44] with real actionable lessons about things. It’s really good.
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| Adam Robinson: | I love it. I’m in on that. All right, closing question here, Pablo. If you were to come back on this show a year from now and report to the audience on whether or not you’ve successfully tackled the single biggest people-related opportunity or issue facing the business or the endeavors you’re involved in, what would you be telling us happened?
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| Pablo Fuentes: | I would say that the … I mean, I’m not currently actively hiring, so I would say it wouldn’t be along those lines. It’d be along developing people like we talked about before. I would be telling you about how the people whom we have in the organization today have learned new skills and contribute to the business, and we’ve had, again, frank conversations. I’m a firm believer in … I think it was Reid Hoffman in his book that talked about tours of duty where people at LinkedIn, they cycle them in and out into different functions. So I feel like if people at my company are still working on exactly the same things a year from now as they are today, I’ve failed, because we have, A, not continued to grow and develop and earn new challenges.
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| I think as a business and in life, you are never out of problems. All you do is you earn new problems. So I will have been successful if, A, we’ve earned new problems and, B, my team has developed the company and their skills through tackling those new earned problems.
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| Adam Robinson: | That’s the final word. Ladies and gentlemen, you’ve been learning from Pablo Fuentes, CEO and founder of Proven. Pablo, thank you for being with us on the program today.
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| Pablo Fuentes: | I appreciate it. Thanks, Adam.
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| Adam Robinson: | That’s wrap for this week’s episode of The Best Team Wins Podcast where we’re featuring entrepreneurs whose exceptional approach to the people side of their business has led to incredible results. My name is Adam Robinson, author of the book The Best Team Wins that you can find online at www.TheBestTeamWins.com or on Amazon. Thanks so much for being with us, and we will see you next week.
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