Armir Harris, CEO and Founder of Shofur, has been building his business without any outside investors, or even a loan, since 2013. By moving fast and learning quickly from mistakes, he’s led his company to #21 on the Inc. 5000 list of fastest growing companies in America. Find out what has brought him success (hint: it’s his team) on this episode of The Best Team Wins Podcast.

 

 

Follow Shofur on Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, Instagram, Linkedin, Pinterest, and Youtube.

Connect with Armir on Twitter and Linkedin.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Transcripts:

Adam Robinson:	Welcome to the Best Team Wins Podcast, where we feature entrepreneurs and business leaders 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 show, Armir Harris is the founder and CEO of Shofur. Shofur, founded in 2013 is bootstrapped and currently has 35 employees. Shofur was listed at number 21, wow, on the Inc 500 list of fastest growing private companies. My friend, you are looking good on the cover of this year’s Inc 500. Pretty awesome. Welcome to the show. I’m really excited to dig in.
Armir Harris:	Perfect, thank you so much. Thank you for having me.
Adam Robinson:	All right. I got to ask you, what was it like being on the cover of a big magazine? For me, that would be the biggest bucket list item of all time.
Armir Harris:	Yeah, I actually didn’t know I was on the cover. I flew out to LA for a business meeting and I scheduled a photo shoot with Inc, and the photo shoot was taking a very long time and I was getting a little frustrated because they wanted a perfect shot, and it was taking about two hours, right?
Adam Robinson:	Oh my gosh.
Armir Harris:	Yeah, so then, finally, at the end, I said, “What is this even for? I don’t even know what this is for. Why am I getting my photos taken for two hours,” and they said, “Oh, this is for the cover of Inc.” Then, I just had a big smile on my face and I actually think, right after that, they got the perfect shot.
Adam Robinson:	Yeah, you bet they did. It’s so funny how your perspective changes when you realize what you’re actually spending your time doing.
Armir Harris:	Exactly.
Adam Robinson:	Very cool. Congratulations. What an awesome experience. Listen, we’re excited to hear about your experiences on the people side of your business, and so, this is a podcast listened to by entrepreneurs and other founders, and so we’re excited to learn from your experiences there. Before we dive in, give us 30 seconds on Shofur and what you guys are up to.
Armir Harris:	Yeah, certainly. Shofur is a bus aggregation platform. What we do is we aggregate bus companies across the United States. We have over a thousand bus companies on our platform right now, and unfortunately this is an industry where it’s pretty archaic and antiquated. There isn’t a standardized software that everyone uses, so it’s difficult to get transparent information. There’s a lot of information asymmetry. Most people don’t shop for buses on a regular basis so they don’t understand the market that well. They don’t really know what type of bus they’re getting or what type of driver they’re getting, so we help aggregate all of that data and we match a buyer to a bus company. That’s essentially what we do.
Adam Robinson:	Excellent. If listeners want to learn more about the business, what’s the best way for them to do that?
Armir Harris:	The best way is for them to go to shofur.com. That’s S H O F U R .com. There’s live chat on there, or they can call us 24/7. There’s a 1-800 number, and we have a call center that’s staffed 24/7, as well.
Adam Robinson:	That’s great. Christen, our producer, who helps us organize some things internally here at Hireology. We have an annual offsite where we bus people from downtown Chicago out to suburban Chicago to a campus at a former college where we do our annual kick off in January. We always struggle mightily trying to figure out bus transportation, so, Sir, we’re going to give you a shot. I think they’re digging into it, we’re going to give you guys some business here. I look forward to experiencing that.
Armir Harris:	Awesome, yeah. Please do.
Adam Robinson:	Yeah. All right, so, let’s talk about the people side of your business. Take us back to 2013, and in the founding of the company, not necessarily from a business model perspective but from a people perspective, what was step one for you when you were putting the team together?
Armir Harris:	Yeah, so, I actually started the business by myself. I never really started a company before, and it was difficult. There were a lot of mistakes that I made and I just learned along the way from those mistakes. The first person I hired was actually a young lady named Nicole, and she’s still with us today. She was our first employee. After that, the business grew a lot. We had exponential growth, almost, and we had the need to hire more and staff up, but along the way, I didn’t make the best hiring decisions, nor did I make the best training decisions.
	I didn’t really have a training process in place. I didn’t have anything that was formal, so I just hired people on an as needed basis. Someone would come to apply and they would say, “I need to put in a two week notice,” and that didn’t work with me. I said, “No, I need you to start tomorrow. Can you do that?” It was very informal, and I kind of polished it along the way, learned from my mistakes, learned what worked and what didn’t work, and now we have a pretty smooth recruiting process in house.
Adam Robinson:	Let’s talk about some of those early mistakes. You mentioned training and you mentioned hiring. Tell us about some of, thematically, what were some of the hiring mistakes that you’ve made?
Armir Harris:	Yeah. One mistake that I made is that I hired strictly based on experience in the beginning. That’s not necessarily the best thing to do, especially at a startup. I would hire someone that had worked at a Fortune 500 company and they were in charge of business development at a Fortune 500 company. Business development at a Fortune 500 and business development at a startup with two employees is a completely different thing. You don’t have a lot of structure at a startup with two employees. You need to take initiative. You need to find your own path.
	After about the second employee that I hired based on experience, I realized, this is probably not the best decision moving forward. After that, I basically decided not to put a title on anyone, so everyone that I hired, I said, “Listen, I’m not going to have a job description for you. I’m going to have a generic title, and what you need to do is you need to do everything necessary to help grow my business. You need to wear any hat necessary on any given day.”
	This way, we were a small team, we were an agile team, and we were also flexible, and no one really felt entitled, nor were they constrained to any specific role or job responsibility.  I think that was probably the best thing that I did. I kind of still apply that to this day, whenever we’re launching a new product and we need to build a new team. I don’t necessarily give employees a job description. On the contract, for formal reasons, I do, but when I present the position to them in person, I tell them, “Listen, you have to wear any hat necessary to be able to grow this division or grow this department.”
	That’s probably the best mistake that I made and what I learned from it.
Adam Robinson:	You mentioned some training mistakes, as well. For me, I know in our businesses, as we started to scale, you  realize pretty quickly that giving someone a phone and a desk is not a great way to on board them. We’ve made all those mistakes. What were some of the mistakes that you’ve made?
Armir Harris:	Yeah, that’s certainly what I did. I would hire someone and then I would put them on the phones right away or in sales or customer service right away, and that certainly wasn’t the best thing to do. We have a process in house now, so whenever someone comes in, let’s say, on the sales team, they’ll probably shadow a sales manager for about a month or two, and then we would give them a test. This is a formal test. It’s probably a three page exam, and if they pass that test, then we would take them live on the phone with clients and they would be customer facing.
	Even after they’re customer facing, they’re still shadowing a sales manager. After that, once they reach their KPIs or certain benchmarks, they’re off on their own. The whole process takes about four to five months, and this is a lot better than just sending someone into the weeds and they have to figure out on their own.
Adam Robinson:	All right. What has the result been of that?
Armir Harris:	The result has been great. For the customer service side, on the customer end, it’s been a lot better. They’re not dealing with someone that is inexperienced or doesn’t understand the product or the industry that well. This also allows us to filter applicants and early hires a lot better. If they’re not excelling early, if they’re not picking up on things very early, we tell them, “Listen, this is probably not the best position for you.” If they have a great attitude and they have a good work ethic, we’ll find another position for them in the company.
	Overall, it has helped our sales and conversions a lot, just being able to have a more formal and lengthier onboarding process and, lack of better words, filtration system.
Adam Robinson:	Reading between the lines of what you just said, it sounds like people that are a core values match for Shofur, have an opportunity to switch jobs if what they’re doing isn’t the right fit, but people that are, perhaps, technically able but aren’t a culture fit really don’t have a place anywhere in your business. Is that an accurate way to paraphrase what you just said?
Armir Harris:	That’s 100 percent correct. Someone that’s hungry and motivated and has a good work ethic, they can pick up the technical skills relatively quickly, and then even if they can’t pick it up, we still give them a chance. The core values are very important. It’s really important to have a team that has cohesive core values. This way, they’re working cohesively towards one common goal.
Adam Robinson:	Let’s talk about Shofur’s core values, if we could. Would you be willing to share with us the values that you’ve framed the culture of the business on?
Armir Harris:	Yeah, just given the nature of the company, we were ranked 21st fastest growing private company in the US, so we’ve had rapid growth, and this rapid growth has come without any sort of funding. We haven’t had any venture capital, any private equity money, nor have we taken out any loans. This has all been organic bootstrapped growth. We’ve just been reinvesting our cash flow.
Adam Robinson:	Pretty impressive, by the way. That is a rarity, at that growth rate, to have no funding outside.
Armir Harris:	Yeah, thank you so much. With that, we have limited resources. I think that the most limited resource is our time, but for us it wasn’t just our time. It was also money, so we had to be very agile. We didn’t have the funds to launch a product and test it out, do A B testing for several months, and see if it would work out. We just had to figure it out relatively quickly, otherwise we were going to be insolvent and run out of money.
	One of the core values is learning to be agile, in my opinion. Another core value is just being overall prudent. That’s very important to us, as well as having a good work ethic. Most employees that worked at our company, or still work, no one really works less than, I would say, 60 hours a week. I know our sales team comes in at nine o’clock in the morning and they might leave the office at 6:30 or 7:00 PM, and then when they go back at home at night time, they’re still returning emails.
	The work/life balance is not great, and that’s why it’s very important that they love what they do and they also have a great team around them.
Adam Robinson:	When someone isn’t a core values fit, how do you know that?
Armir Harris:	That’s not a very tangible thing to know. It takes a little bit. Sometimes people might be shy. They might not open up right away. They might not feel comfortable in your company right away. It make take a month to know. Sometimes, it might takes three months to know, but the main thing is that they’re a team player. If they’re contributing, or doing their best, and they have the right attitude and they’re putting in as much effort as possible, we know that they’re a team player. When, let’s say, they take a two hour lunch break or they’re just sitting in the corner by themselves, and we tried our best to warm them up, but they’re just sort of indifferent or apathetic towards the company or the employees and their staff members, then we usually have a talk with them, give them a warning, say, “Listen, this is what we’re noticing and this is a warning.”
	It’s also extremely important to be transparent right from the start and set the right precedent, so whenever we see a warning sign, it’s important to stay in front of that and be as transparent as possible with that person and the rest of the team, as well.
Adam Robinson:	Let’s take this up a level. With the benefit of what’s now four plus years of experience in building and leading the organization, philosophically, how would you sum up your approach to the people side of your business, as you look to the next phase of growth?
Armir Harris:	Yeah. I think, the people are my business. I don’t think my business is necessarily the product or the website. It’s the people behind the business that are making everything possible. With the right team, in my opinion, everything is possible. I don’t know if this is very philosophical, but when I came in, I thought that product was everything. I thought that having the right product and having the right service was probably 90 percent of my business, but then I realized that having the right people was probably 90 percent of my business.
Adam Robinson:	How has that realization impacted your approach?
Armir Harris:	I’m a lot more careful on who we hire now. We have a more thorough interview process. We have a lengthier interview process. No one gets a job offer, probably, with two or three interviews. They usually have four interviews and they have to meet every single person that they’ll be working with and everyone has to like them, so we’re a lot more careful on who we hire.
Adam Robinson:	All right. Let’s look at your rewards and recognition approach. When people are doing well or they’re performing above expectation, what’s your approach to rewards and recognition? How do you single out people for a job well done?
Armir Harris:	Yeah. Positive reinforcement is very important, but there’s several ways to reinforce positive behavior. Of course, there is monetary compensation, but when someone’s spending 10 hours a day or 12 hours a day in the office, it’s not just about the money. It can’t be, otherwise they’d be miserable, so it’s very important to just congratulate someone when they do a great job, to tell them that they’ve done a great job and to tell the rest of the team what a great job they’ve done, and lead by example. On the other hand, when they make a mistake, it’s important not to be too harsh and just analyze why they made the mistake and make sure that that mistake never happens again.
Adam Robinson:	Flip side of that coin, when someone, just, perhaps chronically underperforming or just not getting it done, and they’re someone you want to save, take us through the company’s approach to working through tough situations with folks who may have a slow start or may be struggling in a new role.
Armir Harris:	Yeah, you have to figure out why are they struggling. We have a conversation within everyone on the team. Again, transparency is very important at our company, so whoever is having the problem, we would bring them in. We’d probably bring their manager in, and maybe another colleague or two and just have an open conversation. Maybe there’s things that someone is looking at, at a different angle that other employees aren’t looking at it, so, you kind of analyze the situation, and if this is a chronic behavior, we ask the employee, “Can you fix this? How can you fix this? What do you think you’re doing wrong?”
	It’s also important to be introspective and inward looking and to have some sort of self-awareness, in my opinion, for that employee, but as a boss and as a manager, it’s also important to have sympathy and empathy, as well. It depends. If it’s a technical issue and they just can’t fix this technical issue, and we’ve given them the chance to incubate, and they just can’t perform, then we have a serious conversation to them. It might result in letting them go, but if there is something else lacking, or if there is team chemistry lacking or there’s bad management lacking, then we might have to address their manager or the team leader, as well.
Adam Robinson:	Let’s talk for a second about you and the role you’re in, and how you’re thinking about scaling the leadership team of Shofur.
Armir Harris:	Yeah.
Adam Robinson:	Of course, when you started, it’s just you, you’re doing it all. At this point, you can’t possibly be doing it all. Talk about that transition. Who’s around the leadership table now, and what does that look like, potentially, three to five years from now?
Armir Harris:	Yeah, of course. In the beginning, I was doing everything myself. I was doing the sales myself, accounting, marketing, everything, operations. Now, I’ve decided to delegate as much as possible. As a leader, you need to have trust in your employees, so I think delegating without trust is almost impossible . Also, if your employees feel like you’re not trusting them, they’re not going to perform as well, nor are they going to feel fulfilled. As a leader, my role has changed. My role is to provide as much trust as possible.
	For example, I’ll tell them, “Listen. I need to focus on building this product. I’m going to work with the technology team for the next month. I will leave this operation up to you. Please don’t CC me on anything, and if there’s an emergency, it’s important that you deal with this on your own. I have trust and faith in you,” so I’ve delegated everything now. Right now, we have a head of operations, we have a head of marketing, we have a head of sales, we have a head of technology.
	It’s important that they fully understand the process and the business around them, so they can now delegate tasks to the staff that’s underneath them as well, or working next to them as well.
Adam Robinson:	Now that you’ve given away your job, I say this tongue in cheek, what are you doing every day and are you having fun?
Armir Harris:	Yeah. No, I’m in the office every day. I still come here every single day. I work about, on average, 10 to 12 hours a day, still. The main thing that I focus on is overall strategy and coming up with new products, and just innovating and staying ahead of the curve, just building as many barriers to entry in this very competitive environment. That might require working with the technology team closely and building new products, or that might require me doing a lot of market research and working with our marketing or our operations team or my financial team.
Adam Robinson:	As we close out here in the final couple of minutes, I want to get a glimpse into what you’re doing in your role. What book are you reading right now and would you recommend it to our audience?
Armir Harris:	Yeah. Right now I’m reading a book from Ray Dalio. It’s called Principles, and it’s a great book. It talks about his economic outlook, but it’s a lot more than that. It talks about his overall business approach, so if you guys don’t know who Ray Dalio is, he’s basically a hedge fund manager, one of the most successful hedge fund managers in the world, and I really take on his approach and have basically put the same approach into our company, and that’s basically an approach of transparency. It’s very important to have complete transparency in our company. That’s, in my opinion, the best way to be productive and move on from mistakes and build routine.
	That’s what I’m currently reading right now. I don’t have too much time to read, honestly.
Adam Robinson:	I’m sure. Yeah. Ray Dalio … This is the same hedge fund manager that is famously trying to automate the role of the manager in his company, is that right?
Armir Harris:	Somewhat, somewhat. I think it’s a little bit more complicated than I can probably get into it for a bit 30 minutes or so.
Adam Robinson:	Okay, well, we’ll just leave it at that. Check it out. It’s an interesting read, for sure. All right. Closing question, here. If you were to come back on this show a year from now, and report to us on whether or not you successfully tackled the biggest opportunity that you have in front of you, what will you be telling us happened?
Armir Harris:	What will I be telling you happened? I think, the biggest opportunity for us is just improving the way that buses are rented. We probably have one per cent of market share. For us, my goal is to get market dominance, and market dominance is 10 per cent of the market, or more. I’d love to get more than 10 per cent of the market. The only way possible to do that is by providing the best product and service out there. As we move on and as we aggregate more and more data and we figure out how to improve this industry, I would love to come back in a year and I would love to tell you that we have, essentially, captured market dominance by improving our products.
Adam Robinson:	That’s the final word. Ladies and gentlemen, you’ve been learning from Armir Harris, CEO and founder of Shofur. Armir, thank you so much for being with us on the program today.
Armir Harris:	Awesome. Thank you so much for having me.
Adam Robinson:	That’s a 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, which you can find online at www.thebestteamwins.com. Thanks for tuning in, and we will see you next week.

Adam Robinson:	Welcome to the Best Team Wins Podcast, where we feature entrepreneurs and business leaders 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 show, Armir Harris is the founder and CEO of Shofur. Shofur, founded in 2013 is bootstrapped and currently has 35 employees. Shofur was listed at number 21, wow, on the Inc 500 list of fastest growing private companies. My friend, you are looking good on the cover of this year’s Inc 500. Pretty awesome. Welcome to the show. I’m really excited to dig in.
Armir Harris:	Perfect, thank you so much. Thank you for having me.
Adam Robinson:	All right. I got to ask you, what was it like being on the cover of a big magazine? For me, that would be the biggest bucket list item of all time.
Armir Harris:	Yeah, I actually didn’t know I was on the cover. I flew out to LA for a business meeting and I scheduled a photo shoot with Inc, and the photo shoot was taking a very long time and I was getting a little frustrated because they wanted a perfect shot, and it was taking about two hours, right?
Adam Robinson:	Oh my gosh.
Armir Harris:	Yeah, so then, finally, at the end, I said, “What is this even for? I don’t even know what this is for. Why am I getting my photos taken for two hours,” and they said, “Oh, this is for the cover of Inc.” Then, I just had a big smile on my face and I actually think, right after that, they got the perfect shot.
Adam Robinson:	Yeah, you bet they did. It’s so funny how your perspective changes when you realize what you’re actually spending your time doing.
Armir Harris:	Exactly.
Adam Robinson:	Very cool. Congratulations. What an awesome experience. Listen, we’re excited to hear about your experiences on the people side of your business, and so, this is a podcast listened to by entrepreneurs and other founders, and so we’re excited to learn from your experiences there. Before we dive in, give us 30 seconds on Shofur and what you guys are up to.
Armir Harris:	Yeah, certainly. Shofur is a bus aggregation platform. What we do is we aggregate bus companies across the United States. We have over a thousand bus companies on our platform right now, and unfortunately this is an industry where it’s pretty archaic and antiquated. There isn’t a standardized software that everyone uses, so it’s difficult to get transparent information. There’s a lot of information asymmetry. Most people don’t shop for buses on a regular basis so they don’t understand the market that well. They don’t really know what type of bus they’re getting or what type of driver they’re getting, so we help aggregate all of that data and we match a buyer to a bus company. That’s essentially what we do.
Adam Robinson:	Excellent. If listeners want to learn more about the business, what’s the best way for them to do that?
Armir Harris:	The best way is for them to go to shofur.com. That’s S H O F U R .com. There’s live chat on there, or they can call us 24/7. There’s a 1-800 number, and we have a call center that’s staffed 24/7, as well.
Adam Robinson:	That’s great. Christen, our producer, who helps us organize some things internally here at Hireology. We have an annual offsite where we bus people from downtown Chicago out to suburban Chicago to a campus at a former college where we do our annual kick off in January. We always struggle mightily trying to figure out bus transportation, so, Sir, we’re going to give you a shot. I think they’re digging into it, we’re going to give you guys some business here. I look forward to experiencing that.
Armir Harris:	Awesome, yeah. Please do.
Adam Robinson:	Yeah. All right, so, let’s talk about the people side of your business. Take us back to 2013, and in the founding of the company, not necessarily from a business model perspective but from a people perspective, what was step one for you when you were putting the team together?
Armir Harris:	Yeah, so, I actually started the business by myself. I never really started a company before, and it was difficult. There were a lot of mistakes that I made and I just learned along the way from those mistakes. The first person I hired was actually a young lady named Nicole, and she’s still with us today. She was our first employee. After that, the business grew a lot. We had exponential growth, almost, and we had the need to hire more and staff up, but along the way, I didn’t make the best hiring decisions, nor did I make the best training decisions.
	I didn’t really have a training process in place. I didn’t have anything that was formal, so I just hired people on an as needed basis. Someone would come to apply and they would say, “I need to put in a two week notice,” and that didn’t work with me. I said, “No, I need you to start tomorrow. Can you do that?” It was very informal, and I kind of polished it along the way, learned from my mistakes, learned what worked and what didn’t work, and now we have a pretty smooth recruiting process in house.
Adam Robinson:	Let’s talk about some of those early mistakes. You mentioned training and you mentioned hiring. Tell us about some of, thematically, what were some of the hiring mistakes that you’ve made?
Armir Harris:	Yeah. One mistake that I made is that I hired strictly based on experience in the beginning. That’s not necessarily the best thing to do, especially at a startup. I would hire someone that had worked at a Fortune 500 company and they were in charge of business development at a Fortune 500 company. Business development at a Fortune 500 and business development at a startup with two employees is a completely different thing. You don’t have a lot of structure at a startup with two employees. You need to take initiative. You need to find your own path.
	After about the second employee that I hired based on experience, I realized, this is probably not the best decision moving forward. After that, I basically decided not to put a title on anyone, so everyone that I hired, I said, “Listen, I’m not going to have a job description for you. I’m going to have a generic title, and what you need to do is you need to do everything necessary to help grow my business. You need to wear any hat necessary on any given day.”
	This way, we were a small team, we were an agile team, and we were also flexible, and no one really felt entitled, nor were they constrained to any specific role or job responsibility.  I think that was probably the best thing that I did. I kind of still apply that to this day, whenever we’re launching a new product and we need to build a new team. I don’t necessarily give employees a job description. On the contract, for formal reasons, I do, but when I present the position to them in person, I tell them, “Listen, you have to wear any hat necessary to be able to grow this division or grow this department.”
	That’s probably the best mistake that I made and what I learned from it.
Adam Robinson:	You mentioned some training mistakes, as well. For me, I know in our businesses, as we started to scale, you  realize pretty quickly that giving someone a phone and a desk is not a great way to on board them. We’ve made all those mistakes. What were some of the mistakes that you’ve made?
Armir Harris:	Yeah, that’s certainly what I did. I would hire someone and then I would put them on the phones right away or in sales or customer service right away, and that certainly wasn’t the best thing to do. We have a process in house now, so whenever someone comes in, let’s say, on the sales team, they’ll probably shadow a sales manager for about a month or two, and then we would give them a test. This is a formal test. It’s probably a three page exam, and if they pass that test, then we would take them live on the phone with clients and they would be customer facing.
	Even after they’re customer facing, they’re still shadowing a sales manager. After that, once they reach their KPIs or certain benchmarks, they’re off on their own. The whole process takes about four to five months, and this is a lot better than just sending someone into the weeds and they have to figure out on their own.
Adam Robinson:	All right. What has the result been of that?
Armir Harris:	The result has been great. For the customer service side, on the customer end, it’s been a lot better. They’re not dealing with someone that is inexperienced or doesn’t understand the product or the industry that well. This also allows us to filter applicants and early hires a lot better. If they’re not excelling early, if they’re not picking up on things very early, we tell them, “Listen, this is probably not the best position for you.” If they have a great attitude and they have a good work ethic, we’ll find another position for them in the company.
	Overall, it has helped our sales and conversions a lot, just being able to have a more formal and lengthier onboarding process and, lack of better words, filtration system.
Adam Robinson:	Reading between the lines of what you just said, it sounds like people that are a core values match for Shofur, have an opportunity to switch jobs if what they’re doing isn’t the right fit, but people that are, perhaps, technically able but aren’t a culture fit really don’t have a place anywhere in your business. Is that an accurate way to paraphrase what you just said?
Armir Harris:	That’s 100 percent correct. Someone that’s hungry and motivated and has a good work ethic, they can pick up the technical skills relatively quickly, and then even if they can’t pick it up, we still give them a chance. The core values are very important. It’s really important to have a team that has cohesive core values. This way, they’re working cohesively towards one common goal.
Adam Robinson:	Let’s talk about Shofur’s core values, if we could. Would you be willing to share with us the values that you’ve framed the culture of the business on?
Armir Harris:	Yeah, just given the nature of the company, we were ranked 21st fastest growing private company in the US, so we’ve had rapid growth, and this rapid growth has come without any sort of funding. We haven’t had any venture capital, any private equity money, nor have we taken out any loans. This has all been organic bootstrapped growth. We’ve just been reinvesting our cash flow.
Adam Robinson:	Pretty impressive, by the way. That is a rarity, at that growth rate, to have no funding outside.
Armir Harris:	Yeah, thank you so much. With that, we have limited resources. I think that the most limited resource is our time, but for us it wasn’t just our time. It was also money, so we had to be very agile. We didn’t have the funds to launch a product and test it out, do A B testing for several months, and see if it would work out. We just had to figure it out relatively quickly, otherwise we were going to be insolvent and run out of money.
	One of the core values is learning to be agile, in my opinion. Another core value is just being overall prudent. That’s very important to us, as well as having a good work ethic. Most employees that worked at our company, or still work, no one really works less than, I would say, 60 hours a week. I know our sales team comes in at nine o’clock in the morning and they might leave the office at 6:30 or 7:00 PM, and then when they go back at home at night time, they’re still returning emails.
	The work/life balance is not great, and that’s why it’s very important that they love what they do and they also have a great team around them.
Adam Robinson:	When someone isn’t a core values fit, how do you know that?
Armir Harris:	That’s not a very tangible thing to know. It takes a little bit. Sometimes people might be shy. They might not open up right away. They might not feel comfortable in your company right away. It make take a month to know. Sometimes, it might takes three months to know, but the main thing is that they’re a team player. If they’re contributing, or doing their best, and they have the right attitude and they’re putting in as much effort as possible, we know that they’re a team player. When, let’s say, they take a two hour lunch break or they’re just sitting in the corner by themselves, and we tried our best to warm them up, but they’re just sort of indifferent or apathetic towards the company or the employees and their staff members, then we usually have a talk with them, give them a warning, say, “Listen, this is what we’re noticing and this is a warning.”
	It’s also extremely important to be transparent right from the start and set the right precedent, so whenever we see a warning sign, it’s important to stay in front of that and be as transparent as possible with that person and the rest of the team, as well.
Adam Robinson:	Let’s take this up a level. With the benefit of what’s now four plus years of experience in building and leading the organization, philosophically, how would you sum up your approach to the people side of your business, as you look to the next phase of growth?
Armir Harris:	Yeah. I think, the people are my business. I don’t think my business is necessarily the product or the website. It’s the people behind the business that are making everything possible. With the right team, in my opinion, everything is possible. I don’t know if this is very philosophical, but when I came in, I thought that product was everything. I thought that having the right product and having the right service was probably 90 percent of my business, but then I realized that having the right people was probably 90 percent of my business.
Adam Robinson:	How has that realization impacted your approach?
Armir Harris:	I’m a lot more careful on who we hire now. We have a more thorough interview process. We have a lengthier interview process. No one gets a job offer, probably, with two or three interviews. They usually have four interviews and they have to meet every single person that they’ll be working with and everyone has to like them, so we’re a lot more careful on who we hire.
Adam Robinson:	All right. Let’s look at your rewards and recognition approach. When people are doing well or they’re performing above expectation, what’s your approach to rewards and recognition? How do you single out people for a job well done?
Armir Harris:	Yeah. Positive reinforcement is very important, but there’s several ways to reinforce positive behavior. Of course, there is monetary compensation, but when someone’s spending 10 hours a day or 12 hours a day in the office, it’s not just about the money. It can’t be, otherwise they’d be miserable, so it’s very important to just congratulate someone when they do a great job, to tell them that they’ve done a great job and to tell the rest of the team what a great job they’ve done, and lead by example. On the other hand, when they make a mistake, it’s important not to be too harsh and just analyze why they made the mistake and make sure that that mistake never happens again.
Adam Robinson:	Flip side of that coin, when someone, just, perhaps chronically underperforming or just not getting it done, and they’re someone you want to save, take us through the company’s approach to working through tough situations with folks who may have a slow start or may be struggling in a new role.
Armir Harris:	Yeah, you have to figure out why are they struggling. We have a conversation within everyone on the team. Again, transparency is very important at our company, so whoever is having the problem, we would bring them in. We’d probably bring their manager in, and maybe another colleague or two and just have an open conversation. Maybe there’s things that someone is looking at, at a different angle that other employees aren’t looking at it, so, you kind of analyze the situation, and if this is a chronic behavior, we ask the employee, “Can you fix this? How can you fix this? What do you think you’re doing wrong?”
	It’s also important to be introspective and inward looking and to have some sort of self-awareness, in my opinion, for that employee, but as a boss and as a manager, it’s also important to have sympathy and empathy, as well. It depends. If it’s a technical issue and they just can’t fix this technical issue, and we’ve given them the chance to incubate, and they just can’t perform, then we have a serious conversation to them. It might result in letting them go, but if there is something else lacking, or if there is team chemistry lacking or there’s bad management lacking, then we might have to address their manager or the team leader, as well.
Adam Robinson:	Let’s talk for a second about you and the role you’re in, and how you’re thinking about scaling the leadership team of Shofur.
Armir Harris:	Yeah.
Adam Robinson:	Of course, when you started, it’s just you, you’re doing it all. At this point, you can’t possibly be doing it all. Talk about that transition. Who’s around the leadership table now, and what does that look like, potentially, three to five years from now?
Armir Harris:	Yeah, of course. In the beginning, I was doing everything myself. I was doing the sales myself, accounting, marketing, everything, operations. Now, I’ve decided to delegate as much as possible. As a leader, you need to have trust in your employees, so I think delegating without trust is almost impossible . Also, if your employees feel like you’re not trusting them, they’re not going to perform as well, nor are they going to feel fulfilled. As a leader, my role has changed. My role is to provide as much trust as possible.
	For example, I’ll tell them, “Listen. I need to focus on building this product. I’m going to work with the technology team for the next month. I will leave this operation up to you. Please don’t CC me on anything, and if there’s an emergency, it’s important that you deal with this on your own. I have trust and faith in you,” so I’ve delegated everything now. Right now, we have a head of operations, we have a head of marketing, we have a head of sales, we have a head of technology.
	It’s important that they fully understand the process and the business around them, so they can now delegate tasks to the staff that’s underneath them as well, or working next to them as well.
Adam Robinson:	Now that you’ve given away your job, I say this tongue in cheek, what are you doing every day and are you having fun?
Armir Harris:	Yeah. No, I’m in the office every day. I still come here every single day. I work about, on average, 10 to 12 hours a day, still. The main thing that I focus on is overall strategy and coming up with new products, and just innovating and staying ahead of the curve, just building as many barriers to entry in this very competitive environment. That might require working with the technology team closely and building new products, or that might require me doing a lot of market research and working with our marketing or our operations team or my financial team.
Adam Robinson:	As we close out here in the final couple of minutes, I want to get a glimpse into what you’re doing in your role. What book are you reading right now and would you recommend it to our audience?
Armir Harris:	Yeah. Right now I’m reading a book from Ray Dalio. It’s called Principles, and it’s a great book. It talks about his economic outlook, but it’s a lot more than that. It talks about his overall business approach, so if you guys don’t know who Ray Dalio is, he’s basically a hedge fund manager, one of the most successful hedge fund managers in the world, and I really take on his approach and have basically put the same approach into our company, and that’s basically an approach of transparency. It’s very important to have complete transparency in our company. That’s, in my opinion, the best way to be productive and move on from mistakes and build routine.
	That’s what I’m currently reading right now. I don’t have too much time to read, honestly.
Adam Robinson:	I’m sure. Yeah. Ray Dalio … This is the same hedge fund manager that is famously trying to automate the role of the manager in his company, is that right?
Armir Harris:	Somewhat, somewhat. I think it’s a little bit more complicated than I can probably get into it for a bit 30 minutes or so.
Adam Robinson:	Okay, well, we’ll just leave it at that. Check it out. It’s an interesting read, for sure. All right. Closing question, here. If you were to come back on this show a year from now, and report to us on whether or not you successfully tackled the biggest opportunity that you have in front of you, what will you be telling us happened?
Armir Harris:	What will I be telling you happened? I think, the biggest opportunity for us is just improving the way that buses are rented. We probably have one per cent of market share. For us, my goal is to get market dominance, and market dominance is 10 per cent of the market, or more. I’d love to get more than 10 per cent of the market. The only way possible to do that is by providing the best product and service out there. As we move on and as we aggregate more and more data and we figure out how to improve this industry, I would love to come back in a year and I would love to tell you that we have, essentially, captured market dominance by improving our products.
Adam Robinson:	That’s the final word. Ladies and gentlemen, you’ve been learning from Armir Harris, CEO and founder of Shofur. Armir, thank you so much for being with us on the program today.
Armir Harris:	Awesome. Thank you so much for having me.
Adam Robinson:	That’s a 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, which you can find online at www.thebestteamwins.com. Thanks for tuning in, and we will see you next week.

Adam Robinson:	Welcome to the Best Team Wins Podcast, where we feature entrepreneurs and business leaders 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 show, Armir Harris is the founder and CEO of Shofur. Shofur, founded in 2013 is bootstrapped and currently has 35 employees. Shofur was listed at number 21, wow, on the Inc 500 list of fastest growing private companies. My friend, you are looking good on the cover of this year’s Inc 500. Pretty awesome. Welcome to the show. I’m really excited to dig in.
Armir Harris:	Perfect, thank you so much. Thank you for having me.
Adam Robinson:	All right. I got to ask you, what was it like being on the cover of a big magazine? For me, that would be the biggest bucket list item of all time.
Armir Harris:	Yeah, I actually didn’t know I was on the cover. I flew out to LA for a business meeting and I scheduled a photo shoot with Inc, and the photo shoot was taking a very long time and I was getting a little frustrated because they wanted a perfect shot, and it was taking about two hours, right?
Adam Robinson:	Oh my gosh.
Armir Harris:	Yeah, so then, finally, at the end, I said, “What is this even for? I don’t even know what this is for. Why am I getting my photos taken for two hours,” and they said, “Oh, this is for the cover of Inc.” Then, I just had a big smile on my face and I actually think, right after that, they got the perfect shot.
Adam Robinson:	Yeah, you bet they did. It’s so funny how your perspective changes when you realize what you’re actually spending your time doing.
Armir Harris:	Exactly.
Adam Robinson:	Very cool. Congratulations. What an awesome experience. Listen, we’re excited to hear about your experiences on the people side of your business, and so, this is a podcast listened to by entrepreneurs and other founders, and so we’re excited to learn from your experiences there. Before we dive in, give us 30 seconds on Shofur and what you guys are up to.
Armir Harris:	Yeah, certainly. Shofur is a bus aggregation platform. What we do is we aggregate bus companies across the United States. We have over a thousand bus companies on our platform right now, and unfortunately this is an industry where it’s pretty archaic and antiquated. There isn’t a standardized software that everyone uses, so it’s difficult to get transparent information. There’s a lot of information asymmetry. Most people don’t shop for buses on a regular basis so they don’t understand the market that well. They don’t really know what type of bus they’re getting or what type of driver they’re getting, so we help aggregate all of that data and we match a buyer to a bus company. That’s essentially what we do.
Adam Robinson:	Excellent. If listeners want to learn more about the business, what’s the best way for them to do that?
Armir Harris:	The best way is for them to go to shofur.com. That’s S H O F U R .com. There’s live chat on there, or they can call us 24/7. There’s a 1-800 number, and we have a call center that’s staffed 24/7, as well.
Adam Robinson:	That’s great. Christen, our producer, who helps us organize some things internally here at Hireology. We have an annual offsite where we bus people from downtown Chicago out to suburban Chicago to a campus at a former college where we do our annual kick off in January. We always struggle mightily trying to figure out bus transportation, so, Sir, we’re going to give you a shot. I think they’re digging into it, we’re going to give you guys some business here. I look forward to experiencing that.
Armir Harris:	Awesome, yeah. Please do.
Adam Robinson:	Yeah. All right, so, let’s talk about the people side of your business. Take us back to 2013, and in the founding of the company, not necessarily from a business model perspective but from a people perspective, what was step one for you when you were putting the team together?
Armir Harris:	Yeah, so, I actually started the business by myself. I never really started a company before, and it was difficult. There were a lot of mistakes that I made and I just learned along the way from those mistakes. The first person I hired was actually a young lady named Nicole, and she’s still with us today. She was our first employee. After that, the business grew a lot. We had exponential growth, almost, and we had the need to hire more and staff up, but along the way, I didn’t make the best hiring decisions, nor did I make the best training decisions.
	I didn’t really have a training process in place. I didn’t have anything that was formal, so I just hired people on an as needed basis. Someone would come to apply and they would say, “I need to put in a two week notice,” and that didn’t work with me. I said, “No, I need you to start tomorrow. Can you do that?” It was very informal, and I kind of polished it along the way, learned from my mistakes, learned what worked and what didn’t work, and now we have a pretty smooth recruiting process in house.
Adam Robinson:	Let’s talk about some of those early mistakes. You mentioned training and you mentioned hiring. Tell us about some of, thematically, what were some of the hiring mistakes that you’ve made?
Armir Harris:	Yeah. One mistake that I made is that I hired strictly based on experience in the beginning. That’s not necessarily the best thing to do, especially at a startup. I would hire someone that had worked at a Fortune 500 company and they were in charge of business development at a Fortune 500 company. Business development at a Fortune 500 and business development at a startup with two employees is a completely different thing. You don’t have a lot of structure at a startup with two employees. You need to take initiative. You need to find your own path.
	After about the second employee that I hired based on experience, I realized, this is probably not the best decision moving forward. After that, I basically decided not to put a title on anyone, so everyone that I hired, I said, “Listen, I’m not going to have a job description for you. I’m going to have a generic title, and what you need to do is you need to do everything necessary to help grow my business. You need to wear any hat necessary on any given day.”
	This way, we were a small team, we were an agile team, and we were also flexible, and no one really felt entitled, nor were they constrained to any specific role or job responsibility.  I think that was probably the best thing that I did. I kind of still apply that to this day, whenever we’re launching a new product and we need to build a new team. I don’t necessarily give employees a job description. On the contract, for formal reasons, I do, but when I present the position to them in person, I tell them, “Listen, you have to wear any hat necessary to be able to grow this division or grow this department.”
	That’s probably the best mistake that I made and what I learned from it.
Adam Robinson:	You mentioned some training mistakes, as well. For me, I know in our businesses, as we started to scale, you  realize pretty quickly that giving someone a phone and a desk is not a great way to on board them. We’ve made all those mistakes. What were some of the mistakes that you’ve made?
Armir Harris:	Yeah, that’s certainly what I did. I would hire someone and then I would put them on the phones right away or in sales or customer service right away, and that certainly wasn’t the best thing to do. We have a process in house now, so whenever someone comes in, let’s say, on the sales team, they’ll probably shadow a sales manager for about a month or two, and then we would give them a test. This is a formal test. It’s probably a three page exam, and if they pass that test, then we would take them live on the phone with clients and they would be customer facing.
	Even after they’re customer facing, they’re still shadowing a sales manager. After that, once they reach their KPIs or certain benchmarks, they’re off on their own. The whole process takes about four to five months, and this is a lot better than just sending someone into the weeds and they have to figure out on their own.
Adam Robinson:	All right. What has the result been of that?
Armir Harris:	The result has been great. For the customer service side, on the customer end, it’s been a lot better. They’re not dealing with someone that is inexperienced or doesn’t understand the product or the industry that well. This also allows us to filter applicants and early hires a lot better. If they’re not excelling early, if they’re not picking up on things very early, we tell them, “Listen, this is probably not the best position for you.” If they have a great attitude and they have a good work ethic, we’ll find another position for them in the company.
	Overall, it has helped our sales and conversions a lot, just being able to have a more formal and lengthier onboarding process and, lack of better words, filtration system.
Adam Robinson:	Reading between the lines of what you just said, it sounds like people that are a core values match for Shofur, have an opportunity to switch jobs if what they’re doing isn’t the right fit, but people that are, perhaps, technically able but aren’t a culture fit really don’t have a place anywhere in your business. Is that an accurate way to paraphrase what you just said?
Armir Harris:	That’s 100 percent correct. Someone that’s hungry and motivated and has a good work ethic, they can pick up the technical skills relatively quickly, and then even if they can’t pick it up, we still give them a chance. The core values are very important. It’s really important to have a team that has cohesive core values. This way, they’re working cohesively towards one common goal.
Adam Robinson:	Let’s talk about Shofur’s core values, if we could. Would you be willing to share with us the values that you’ve framed the culture of the business on?
Armir Harris:	Yeah, just given the nature of the company, we were ranked 21st fastest growing private company in the US, so we’ve had rapid growth, and this rapid growth has come without any sort of funding. We haven’t had any venture capital, any private equity money, nor have we taken out any loans. This has all been organic bootstrapped growth. We’ve just been reinvesting our cash flow.
Adam Robinson:	Pretty impressive, by the way. That is a rarity, at that growth rate, to have no funding outside.
Armir Harris:	Yeah, thank you so much. With that, we have limited resources. I think that the most limited resource is our time, but for us it wasn’t just our time. It was also money, so we had to be very agile. We didn’t have the funds to launch a product and test it out, do A B testing for several months, and see if it would work out. We just had to figure it out relatively quickly, otherwise we were going to be insolvent and run out of money.
	One of the core values is learning to be agile, in my opinion. Another core value is just being overall prudent. That’s very important to us, as well as having a good work ethic. Most employees that worked at our company, or still work, no one really works less than, I would say, 60 hours a week. I know our sales team comes in at nine o’clock in the morning and they might leave the office at 6:30 or 7:00 PM, and then when they go back at home at night time, they’re still returning emails.
	The work/life balance is not great, and that’s why it’s very important that they love what they do and they also have a great team around them.
Adam Robinson:	When someone isn’t a core values fit, how do you know that?
Armir Harris:	That’s not a very tangible thing to know. It takes a little bit. Sometimes people might be shy. They might not open up right away. They might not feel comfortable in your company right away. It make take a month to know. Sometimes, it might takes three months to know, but the main thing is that they’re a team player. If they’re contributing, or doing their best, and they have the right attitude and they’re putting in as much effort as possible, we know that they’re a team player. When, let’s say, they take a two hour lunch break or they’re just sitting in the corner by themselves, and we tried our best to warm them up, but they’re just sort of indifferent or apathetic towards the company or the employees and their staff members, then we usually have a talk with them, give them a warning, say, “Listen, this is what we’re noticing and this is a warning.”
	It’s also extremely important to be transparent right from the start and set the right precedent, so whenever we see a warning sign, it’s important to stay in front of that and be as transparent as possible with that person and the rest of the team, as well.
Adam Robinson:	Let’s take this up a level. With the benefit of what’s now four plus years of experience in building and leading the organization, philosophically, how would you sum up your approach to the people side of your business, as you look to the next phase of growth?
Armir Harris:	Yeah. I think, the people are my business. I don’t think my business is necessarily the product or the website. It’s the people behind the business that are making everything possible. With the right team, in my opinion, everything is possible. I don’t know if this is very philosophical, but when I came in, I thought that product was everything. I thought that having the right product and having the right service was probably 90 percent of my business, but then I realized that having the right people was probably 90 percent of my business.
Adam Robinson:	How has that realization impacted your approach?
Armir Harris:	I’m a lot more careful on who we hire now. We have a more thorough interview process. We have a lengthier interview process. No one gets a job offer, probably, with two or three interviews. They usually have four interviews and they have to meet every single person that they’ll be working with and everyone has to like them, so we’re a lot more careful on who we hire.
Adam Robinson:	All right. Let’s look at your rewards and recognition approach. When people are doing well or they’re performing above expectation, what’s your approach to rewards and recognition? How do you single out people for a job well done?
Armir Harris:	Yeah. Positive reinforcement is very important, but there’s several ways to reinforce positive behavior. Of course, there is monetary compensation, but when someone’s spending 10 hours a day or 12 hours a day in the office, it’s not just about the money. It can’t be, otherwise they’d be miserable, so it’s very important to just congratulate someone when they do a great job, to tell them that they’ve done a great job and to tell the rest of the team what a great job they’ve done, and lead by example. On the other hand, when they make a mistake, it’s important not to be too harsh and just analyze why they made the mistake and make sure that that mistake never happens again.
Adam Robinson:	Flip side of that coin, when someone, just, perhaps chronically underperforming or just not getting it done, and they’re someone you want to save, take us through the company’s approach to working through tough situations with folks who may have a slow start or may be struggling in a new role.
Armir Harris:	Yeah, you have to figure out why are they struggling. We have a conversation within everyone on the team. Again, transparency is very important at our company, so whoever is having the problem, we would bring them in. We’d probably bring their manager in, and maybe another colleague or two and just have an open conversation. Maybe there’s things that someone is looking at, at a different angle that other employees aren’t looking at it, so, you kind of analyze the situation, and if this is a chronic behavior, we ask the employee, “Can you fix this? How can you fix this? What do you think you’re doing wrong?”
	It’s also important to be introspective and inward looking and to have some sort of self-awareness, in my opinion, for that employee, but as a boss and as a manager, it’s also important to have sympathy and empathy, as well. It depends. If it’s a technical issue and they just can’t fix this technical issue, and we’ve given them the chance to incubate, and they just can’t perform, then we have a serious conversation to them. It might result in letting them go, but if there is something else lacking, or if there is team chemistry lacking or there’s bad management lacking, then we might have to address their manager or the team leader, as well.
Adam Robinson:	Let’s talk for a second about you and the role you’re in, and how you’re thinking about scaling the leadership team of Shofur.
Armir Harris:	Yeah.
Adam Robinson:	Of course, when you started, it’s just you, you’re doing it all. At this point, you can’t possibly be doing it all. Talk about that transition. Who’s around the leadership table now, and what does that look like, potentially, three to five years from now?
Armir Harris:	Yeah, of course. In the beginning, I was doing everything myself. I was doing the sales myself, accounting, marketing, everything, operations. Now, I’ve decided to delegate as much as possible. As a leader, you need to have trust in your employees, so I think delegating without trust is almost impossible . Also, if your employees feel like you’re not trusting them, they’re not going to perform as well, nor are they going to feel fulfilled. As a leader, my role has changed. My role is to provide as much trust as possible.
	For example, I’ll tell them, “Listen. I need to focus on building this product. I’m going to work with the technology team for the next month. I will leave this operation up to you. Please don’t CC me on anything, and if there’s an emergency, it’s important that you deal with this on your own. I have trust and faith in you,” so I’ve delegated everything now. Right now, we have a head of operations, we have a head of marketing, we have a head of sales, we have a head of technology.
	It’s important that they fully understand the process and the business around them, so they can now delegate tasks to the staff that’s underneath them as well, or working next to them as well.
Adam Robinson:	Now that you’ve given away your job, I say this tongue in cheek, what are you doing every day and are you having fun?
Armir Harris:	Yeah. No, I’m in the office every day. I still come here every single day. I work about, on average, 10 to 12 hours a day, still. The main thing that I focus on is overall strategy and coming up with new products, and just innovating and staying ahead of the curve, just building as many barriers to entry in this very competitive environment. That might require working with the technology team closely and building new products, or that might require me doing a lot of market research and working with our marketing or our operations team or my financial team.
Adam Robinson:	As we close out here in the final couple of minutes, I want to get a glimpse into what you’re doing in your role. What book are you reading right now and would you recommend it to our audience?
Armir Harris:	Yeah. Right now I’m reading a book from Ray Dalio. It’s called Principles, and it’s a great book. It talks about his economic outlook, but it’s a lot more than that. It talks about his overall business approach, so if you guys don’t know who Ray Dalio is, he’s basically a hedge fund manager, one of the most successful hedge fund managers in the world, and I really take on his approach and have basically put the same approach into our company, and that’s basically an approach of transparency. It’s very important to have complete transparency in our company. That’s, in my opinion, the best way to be productive and move on from mistakes and build routine.
	That’s what I’m currently reading right now. I don’t have too much time to read, honestly.
Adam Robinson:	I’m sure. Yeah. Ray Dalio … This is the same hedge fund manager that is famously trying to automate the role of the manager in his company, is that right?
Armir Harris:	Somewhat, somewhat. I think it’s a little bit more complicated than I can probably get into it for a bit 30 minutes or so.
Adam Robinson:	Okay, well, we’ll just leave it at that. Check it out. It’s an interesting read, for sure. All right. Closing question, here. If you were to come back on this show a year from now, and report to us on whether or not you successfully tackled the biggest opportunity that you have in front of you, what will you be telling us happened?
Armir Harris:	What will I be telling you happened? I think, the biggest opportunity for us is just improving the way that buses are rented. We probably have one per cent of market share. For us, my goal is to get market dominance, and market dominance is 10 per cent of the market, or more. I’d love to get more than 10 per cent of the market. The only way possible to do that is by providing the best product and service out there. As we move on and as we aggregate more and more data and we figure out how to improve this industry, I would love to come back in a year and I would love to tell you that we have, essentially, captured market dominance by improving our products.
Adam Robinson:	That’s the final word. Ladies and gentlemen, you’ve been learning from Armir Harris, CEO and founder of Shofur. Armir, thank you so much for being with us on the program today.
Armir Harris:	Awesome. Thank you so much for having me.
Adam Robinson:	That’s a 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, which you can find online at www.thebestteamwins.com. Thanks for tuning in, and we will see you next week.

Adam Robinson:	Welcome to the Best Team Wins Podcast, where we feature entrepreneurs and business leaders 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 show, Armir Harris is the founder and CEO of Shofur. Shofur, founded in 2013 is bootstrapped and currently has 35 employees. Shofur was listed at number 21, wow, on the Inc 500 list of fastest growing private companies. My friend, you are looking good on the cover of this year’s Inc 500. Pretty awesome. Welcome to the show. I’m really excited to dig in.
Armir Harris:	Perfect, thank you so much. Thank you for having me.
Adam Robinson:	All right. I got to ask you, what was it like being on the cover of a big magazine? For me, that would be the biggest bucket list item of all time.
Armir Harris:	Yeah, I actually didn’t know I was on the cover. I flew out to LA for a business meeting and I scheduled a photo shoot with Inc, and the photo shoot was taking a very long time and I was getting a little frustrated because they wanted a perfect shot, and it was taking about two hours, right?
Adam Robinson:	Oh my gosh.
Armir Harris:	Yeah, so then, finally, at the end, I said, “What is this even for? I don’t even know what this is for. Why am I getting my photos taken for two hours,” and they said, “Oh, this is for the cover of Inc.” Then, I just had a big smile on my face and I actually think, right after that, they got the perfect shot.
Adam Robinson:	Yeah, you bet they did. It’s so funny how your perspective changes when you realize what you’re actually spending your time doing.
Armir Harris:	Exactly.
Adam Robinson:	Very cool. Congratulations. What an awesome experience. Listen, we’re excited to hear about your experiences on the people side of your business, and so, this is a podcast listened to by entrepreneurs and other founders, and so we’re excited to learn from your experiences there. Before we dive in, give us 30 seconds on Shofur and what you guys are up to.
Armir Harris:	Yeah, certainly. Shofur is a bus aggregation platform. What we do is we aggregate bus companies across the United States. We have over a thousand bus companies on our platform right now, and unfortunately this is an industry where it’s pretty archaic and antiquated. There isn’t a standardized software that everyone uses, so it’s difficult to get transparent information. There’s a lot of information asymmetry. Most people don’t shop for buses on a regular basis so they don’t understand the market that well. They don’t really know what type of bus they’re getting or what type of driver they’re getting, so we help aggregate all of that data and we match a buyer to a bus company. That’s essentially what we do.
Adam Robinson:	Excellent. If listeners want to learn more about the business, what’s the best way for them to do that?
Armir Harris:	The best way is for them to go to shofur.com. That’s S H O F U R .com. There’s live chat on there, or they can call us 24/7. There’s a 1-800 number, and we have a call center that’s staffed 24/7, as well.
Adam Robinson:	That’s great. Christen, our producer, who helps us organize some things internally here at Hireology. We have an annual offsite where we bus people from downtown Chicago out to suburban Chicago to a campus at a former college where we do our annual kick off in January. We always struggle mightily trying to figure out bus transportation, so, Sir, we’re going to give you a shot. I think they’re digging into it, we’re going to give you guys some business here. I look forward to experiencing that.
Armir Harris:	Awesome, yeah. Please do.
Adam Robinson:	Yeah. All right, so, let’s talk about the people side of your business. Take us back to 2013, and in the founding of the company, not necessarily from a business model perspective but from a people perspective, what was step one for you when you were putting the team together?
Armir Harris:	Yeah, so, I actually started the business by myself. I never really started a company before, and it was difficult. There were a lot of mistakes that I made and I just learned along the way from those mistakes. The first person I hired was actually a young lady named Nicole, and she’s still with us today. She was our first employee. After that, the business grew a lot. We had exponential growth, almost, and we had the need to hire more and staff up, but along the way, I didn’t make the best hiring decisions, nor did I make the best training decisions.
	I didn’t really have a training process in place. I didn’t have anything that was formal, so I just hired people on an as needed basis. Someone would come to apply and they would say, “I need to put in a two week notice,” and that didn’t work with me. I said, “No, I need you to start tomorrow. Can you do that?” It was very informal, and I kind of polished it along the way, learned from my mistakes, learned what worked and what didn’t work, and now we have a pretty smooth recruiting process in house.
Adam Robinson:	Let’s talk about some of those early mistakes. You mentioned training and you mentioned hiring. Tell us about some of, thematically, what were some of the hiring mistakes that you’ve made?
Armir Harris:	Yeah. One mistake that I made is that I hired strictly based on experience in the beginning. That’s not necessarily the best thing to do, especially at a startup. I would hire someone that had worked at a Fortune 500 company and they were in charge of business development at a Fortune 500 company. Business development at a Fortune 500 and business development at a startup with two employees is a completely different thing. You don’t have a lot of structure at a startup with two employees. You need to take initiative. You need to find your own path.
	After about the second employee that I hired based on experience, I realized, this is probably not the best decision moving forward. After that, I basically decided not to put a title on anyone, so everyone that I hired, I said, “Listen, I’m not going to have a job description for you. I’m going to have a generic title, and what you need to do is you need to do everything necessary to help grow my business. You need to wear any hat necessary on any given day.”
	This way, we were a small team, we were an agile team, and we were also flexible, and no one really felt entitled, nor were they constrained to any specific role or job responsibility.  I think that was probably the best thing that I did. I kind of still apply that to this day, whenever we’re launching a new product and we need to build a new team. I don’t necessarily give employees a job description. On the contract, for formal reasons, I do, but when I present the position to them in person, I tell them, “Listen, you have to wear any hat necessary to be able to grow this division or grow this department.”
	That’s probably the best mistake that I made and what I learned from it.
Adam Robinson:	You mentioned some training mistakes, as well. For me, I know in our businesses, as we started to scale, you  realize pretty quickly that giving someone a phone and a desk is not a great way to on board them. We’ve made all those mistakes. What were some of the mistakes that you’ve made?
Armir Harris:	Yeah, that’s certainly what I did. I would hire someone and then I would put them on the phones right away or in sales or customer service right away, and that certainly wasn’t the best thing to do. We have a process in house now, so whenever someone comes in, let’s say, on the sales team, they’ll probably shadow a sales manager for about a month or two, and then we would give them a test. This is a formal test. It’s probably a three page exam, and if they pass that test, then we would take them live on the phone with clients and they would be customer facing.
	Even after they’re customer facing, they’re still shadowing a sales manager. After that, once they reach their KPIs or certain benchmarks, they’re off on their own. The whole process takes about four to five months, and this is a lot better than just sending someone into the weeds and they have to figure out on their own.
Adam Robinson:	All right. What has the result been of that?
Armir Harris:	The result has been great. For the customer service side, on the customer end, it’s been a lot better. They’re not dealing with someone that is inexperienced or doesn’t understand the product or the industry that well. This also allows us to filter applicants and early hires a lot better. If they’re not excelling early, if they’re not picking up on things very early, we tell them, “Listen, this is probably not the best position for you.” If they have a great attitude and they have a good work ethic, we’ll find another position for them in the company.
	Overall, it has helped our sales and conversions a lot, just being able to have a more formal and lengthier onboarding process and, lack of better words, filtration system.
Adam Robinson:	Reading between the lines of what you just said, it sounds like people that are a core values match for Shofur, have an opportunity to switch jobs if what they’re doing isn’t the right fit, but people that are, perhaps, technically able but aren’t a culture fit really don’t have a place anywhere in your business. Is that an accurate way to paraphrase what you just said?
Armir Harris:	That’s 100 percent correct. Someone that’s hungry and motivated and has a good work ethic, they can pick up the technical skills relatively quickly, and then even if they can’t pick it up, we still give them a chance. The core values are very important. It’s really important to have a team that has cohesive core values. This way, they’re working cohesively towards one common goal.
Adam Robinson:	Let’s talk about Shofur’s core values, if we could. Would you be willing to share with us the values that you’ve framed the culture of the business on?
Armir Harris:	Yeah, just given the nature of the company, we were ranked 21st fastest growing private company in the US, so we’ve had rapid growth, and this rapid growth has come without any sort of funding. We haven’t had any venture capital, any private equity money, nor have we taken out any loans. This has all been organic bootstrapped growth. We’ve just been reinvesting our cash flow.
Adam Robinson:	Pretty impressive, by the way. That is a rarity, at that growth rate, to have no funding outside.
Armir Harris:	Yeah, thank you so much. With that, we have limited resources. I think that the most limited resource is our time, but for us it wasn’t just our time. It was also money, so we had to be very agile. We didn’t have the funds to launch a product and test it out, do A B testing for several months, and see if it would work out. We just had to figure it out relatively quickly, otherwise we were going to be insolvent and run out of money.
	One of the core values is learning to be agile, in my opinion. Another core value is just being overall prudent. That’s very important to us, as well as having a good work ethic. Most employees that worked at our company, or still work, no one really works less than, I would say, 60 hours a week. I know our sales team comes in at nine o’clock in the morning and they might leave the office at 6:30 or 7:00 PM, and then when they go back at home at night time, they’re still returning emails.
	The work/life balance is not great, and that’s why it’s very important that they love what they do and they also have a great team around them.
Adam Robinson:	When someone isn’t a core values fit, how do you know that?
Armir Harris:	That’s not a very tangible thing to know. It takes a little bit. Sometimes people might be shy. They might not open up right away. They might not feel comfortable in your company right away. It make take a month to know. Sometimes, it might takes three months to know, but the main thing is that they’re a team player. If they’re contributing, or doing their best, and they have the right attitude and they’re putting in as much effort as possible, we know that they’re a team player. When, let’s say, they take a two hour lunch break or they’re just sitting in the corner by themselves, and we tried our best to warm them up, but they’re just sort of indifferent or apathetic towards the company or the employees and their staff members, then we usually have a talk with them, give them a warning, say, “Listen, this is what we’re noticing and this is a warning.”
	It’s also extremely important to be transparent right from the start and set the right precedent, so whenever we see a warning sign, it’s important to stay in front of that and be as transparent as possible with that person and the rest of the team, as well.
Adam Robinson:	Let’s take this up a level. With the benefit of what’s now four plus years of experience in building and leading the organization, philosophically, how would you sum up your approach to the people side of your business, as you look to the next phase of growth?
Armir Harris:	Yeah. I think, the people are my business. I don’t think my business is necessarily the product or the website. It’s the people behind the business that are making everything possible. With the right team, in my opinion, everything is possible. I don’t know if this is very philosophical, but when I came in, I thought that product was everything. I thought that having the right product and having the right service was probably 90 percent of my business, but then I realized that having the right people was probably 90 percent of my business.
Adam Robinson:	How has that realization impacted your approach?
Armir Harris:	I’m a lot more careful on who we hire now. We have a more thorough interview process. We have a lengthier interview process. No one gets a job offer, probably, with two or three interviews. They usually have four interviews and they have to meet every single person that they’ll be working with and everyone has to like them, so we’re a lot more careful on who we hire.
Adam Robinson:	All right. Let’s look at your rewards and recognition approach. When people are doing well or they’re performing above expectation, what’s your approach to rewards and recognition? How do you single out people for a job well done?
Armir Harris:	Yeah. Positive reinforcement is very important, but there’s several ways to reinforce positive behavior. Of course, there is monetary compensation, but when someone’s spending 10 hours a day or 12 hours a day in the office, it’s not just about the money. It can’t be, otherwise they’d be miserable, so it’s very important to just congratulate someone when they do a great job, to tell them that they’ve done a great job and to tell the rest of the team what a great job they’ve done, and lead by example. On the other hand, when they make a mistake, it’s important not to be too harsh and just analyze why they made the mistake and make sure that that mistake never happens again.
Adam Robinson:	Flip side of that coin, when someone, just, perhaps chronically underperforming or just not getting it done, and they’re someone you want to save, take us through the company’s approach to working through tough situations with folks who may have a slow start or may be struggling in a new role.
Armir Harris:	Yeah, you have to figure out why are they struggling. We have a conversation within everyone on the team. Again, transparency is very important at our company, so whoever is having the problem, we would bring them in. We’d probably bring their manager in, and maybe another colleague or two and just have an open conversation. Maybe there’s things that someone is looking at, at a different angle that other employees aren’t looking at it, so, you kind of analyze the situation, and if this is a chronic behavior, we ask the employee, “Can you fix this? How can you fix this? What do you think you’re doing wrong?”
	It’s also important to be introspective and inward looking and to have some sort of self-awareness, in my opinion, for that employee, but as a boss and as a manager, it’s also important to have sympathy and empathy, as well. It depends. If it’s a technical issue and they just can’t fix this technical issue, and we’ve given them the chance to incubate, and they just can’t perform, then we have a serious conversation to them. It might result in letting them go, but if there is something else lacking, or if there is team chemistry lacking or there’s bad management lacking, then we might have to address their manager or the team leader, as well.
Adam Robinson:	Let’s talk for a second about you and the role you’re in, and how you’re thinking about scaling the leadership team of Shofur.
Armir Harris:	Yeah.
Adam Robinson:	Of course, when you started, it’s just you, you’re doing it all. At this point, you can’t possibly be doing it all. Talk about that transition. Who’s around the leadership table now, and what does that look like, potentially, three to five years from now?
Armir Harris:	Yeah, of course. In the beginning, I was doing everything myself. I was doing the sales myself, accounting, marketing, everything, operations. Now, I’ve decided to delegate as much as possible. As a leader, you need to have trust in your employees, so I think delegating without trust is almost impossible . Also, if your employees feel like you’re not trusting them, they’re not going to perform as well, nor are they going to feel fulfilled. As a leader, my role has changed. My role is to provide as much trust as possible.
	For example, I’ll tell them, “Listen. I need to focus on building this product. I’m going to work with the technology team for the next month. I will leave this operation up to you. Please don’t CC me on anything, and if there’s an emergency, it’s important that you deal with this on your own. I have trust and faith in you,” so I’ve delegated everything now. Right now, we have a head of operations, we have a head of marketing, we have a head of sales, we have a head of technology.
	It’s important that they fully understand the process and the business around them, so they can now delegate tasks to the staff that’s underneath them as well, or working next to them as well.
Adam Robinson:	Now that you’ve given away your job, I say this tongue in cheek, what are you doing every day and are you having fun?
Armir Harris:	Yeah. No, I’m in the office every day. I still come here every single day. I work about, on average, 10 to 12 hours a day, still. The main thing that I focus on is overall strategy and coming up with new products, and just innovating and staying ahead of the curve, just building as many barriers to entry in this very competitive environment. That might require working with the technology team closely and building new products, or that might require me doing a lot of market research and working with our marketing or our operations team or my financial team.
Adam Robinson:	As we close out here in the final couple of minutes, I want to get a glimpse into what you’re doing in your role. What book are you reading right now and would you recommend it to our audience?
Armir Harris:	Yeah. Right now I’m reading a book from Ray Dalio. It’s called Principles, and it’s a great book. It talks about his economic outlook, but it’s a lot more than that. It talks about his overall business approach, so if you guys don’t know who Ray Dalio is, he’s basically a hedge fund manager, one of the most successful hedge fund managers in the world, and I really take on his approach and have basically put the same approach into our company, and that’s basically an approach of transparency. It’s very important to have complete transparency in our company. That’s, in my opinion, the best way to be productive and move on from mistakes and build routine.
	That’s what I’m currently reading right now. I don’t have too much time to read, honestly.
Adam Robinson:	I’m sure. Yeah. Ray Dalio … This is the same hedge fund manager that is famously trying to automate the role of the manager in his company, is that right?
Armir Harris:	Somewhat, somewhat. I think it’s a little bit more complicated than I can probably get into it for a bit 30 minutes or so.
Adam Robinson:	Okay, well, we’ll just leave it at that. Check it out. It’s an interesting read, for sure. All right. Closing question, here. If you were to come back on this show a year from now, and report to us on whether or not you successfully tackled the biggest opportunity that you have in front of you, what will you be telling us happened?
Armir Harris:	What will I be telling you happened? I think, the biggest opportunity for us is just improving the way that buses are rented. We probably have one per cent of market share. For us, my goal is to get market dominance, and market dominance is 10 per cent of the market, or more. I’d love to get more than 10 per cent of the market. The only way possible to do that is by providing the best product and service out there. As we move on and as we aggregate more and more data and we figure out how to improve this industry, I would love to come back in a year and I would love to tell you that we have, essentially, captured market dominance by improving our products.
Adam Robinson:	That’s the final word. Ladies and gentlemen, you’ve been learning from Armir Harris, CEO and founder of Shofur. Armir, thank you so much for being with us on the program today.
Armir Harris:	Awesome. Thank you so much for having me.
Adam Robinson:	That’s a 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, which you can find online at www.thebestteamwins.com. Thanks for tuning in, and we will see you next week.

Adam Robinson:	Welcome to the Best Team Wins Podcast, where we feature entrepreneurs and business leaders 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 show, Armir Harris is the founder and CEO of Shofur. Shofur, founded in 2013 is bootstrapped and currently has 35 employees. Shofur was listed at number 21, wow, on the Inc 500 list of fastest growing private companies. My friend, you are looking good on the cover of this year’s Inc 500. Pretty awesome. Welcome to the show. I’m really excited to dig in.
Armir Harris:	Perfect, thank you so much. Thank you for having me.
Adam Robinson:	All right. I got to ask you, what was it like being on the cover of a big magazine? For me, that would be the biggest bucket list item of all time.
Armir Harris:	Yeah, I actually didn’t know I was on the cover. I flew out to LA for a business meeting and I scheduled a photo shoot with Inc, and the photo shoot was taking a very long time and I was getting a little frustrated because they wanted a perfect shot, and it was taking about two hours, right?
Adam Robinson:	Oh my gosh.
Armir Harris:	Yeah, so then, finally, at the end, I said, “What is this even for? I don’t even know what this is for. Why am I getting my photos taken for two hours,” and they said, “Oh, this is for the cover of Inc.” Then, I just had a big smile on my face and I actually think, right after that, they got the perfect shot.
Adam Robinson:	Yeah, you bet they did. It’s so funny how your perspective changes when you realize what you’re actually spending your time doing.
Armir Harris:	Exactly.
Adam Robinson:	Very cool. Congratulations. What an awesome experience. Listen, we’re excited to hear about your experiences on the people side of your business, and so, this is a podcast listened to by entrepreneurs and other founders, and so we’re excited to learn from your experiences there. Before we dive in, give us 30 seconds on Shofur and what you guys are up to.
Armir Harris:	Yeah, certainly. Shofur is a bus aggregation platform. What we do is we aggregate bus companies across the United States. We have over a thousand bus companies on our platform right now, and unfortunately this is an industry where it’s pretty archaic and antiquated. There isn’t a standardized software that everyone uses, so it’s difficult to get transparent information. There’s a lot of information asymmetry. Most people don’t shop for buses on a regular basis so they don’t understand the market that well. They don’t really know what type of bus they’re getting or what type of driver they’re getting, so we help aggregate all of that data and we match a buyer to a bus company. That’s essentially what we do.
Adam Robinson:	Excellent. If listeners want to learn more about the business, what’s the best way for them to do that?
Armir Harris:	The best way is for them to go to shofur.com. That’s S H O F U R .com. There’s live chat on there, or they can call us 24/7. There’s a 1-800 number, and we have a call center that’s staffed 24/7, as well.
Adam Robinson:	That’s great. Christen, our producer, who helps us organize some things internally here at Hireology. We have an annual offsite where we bus people from downtown Chicago out to suburban Chicago to a campus at a former college where we do our annual kick off in January. We always struggle mightily trying to figure out bus transportation, so, Sir, we’re going to give you a shot. I think they’re digging into it, we’re going to give you guys some business here. I look forward to experiencing that.
Armir Harris:	Awesome, yeah. Please do.
Adam Robinson:	Yeah. All right, so, let’s talk about the people side of your business. Take us back to 2013, and in the founding of the company, not necessarily from a business model perspective but from a people perspective, what was step one for you when you were putting the team together?
Armir Harris:	Yeah, so, I actually started the business by myself. I never really started a company before, and it was difficult. There were a lot of mistakes that I made and I just learned along the way from those mistakes. The first person I hired was actually a young lady named Nicole, and she’s still with us today. She was our first employee. After that, the business grew a lot. We had exponential growth, almost, and we had the need to hire more and staff up, but along the way, I didn’t make the best hiring decisions, nor did I make the best training decisions.
	I didn’t really have a training process in place. I didn’t have anything that was formal, so I just hired people on an as needed basis. Someone would come to apply and they would say, “I need to put in a two week notice,” and that didn’t work with me. I said, “No, I need you to start tomorrow. Can you do that?” It was very informal, and I kind of polished it along the way, learned from my mistakes, learned what worked and what didn’t work, and now we have a pretty smooth recruiting process in house.
Adam Robinson:	Let’s talk about some of those early mistakes. You mentioned training and you mentioned hiring. Tell us about some of, thematically, what were some of the hiring mistakes that you’ve made?
Armir Harris:	Yeah. One mistake that I made is that I hired strictly based on experience in the beginning. That’s not necessarily the best thing to do, especially at a startup. I would hire someone that had worked at a Fortune 500 company and they were in charge of business development at a Fortune 500 company. Business development at a Fortune 500 and business development at a startup with two employees is a completely different thing. You don’t have a lot of structure at a startup with two employees. You need to take initiative. You need to find your own path.
	After about the second employee that I hired based on experience, I realized, this is probably not the best decision moving forward. After that, I basically decided not to put a title on anyone, so everyone that I hired, I said, “Listen, I’m not going to have a job description for you. I’m going to have a generic title, and what you need to do is you need to do everything necessary to help grow my business. You need to wear any hat necessary on any given day.”
	This way, we were a small team, we were an agile team, and we were also flexible, and no one really felt entitled, nor were they constrained to any specific role or job responsibility.  I think that was probably the best thing that I did. I kind of still apply that to this day, whenever we’re launching a new product and we need to build a new team. I don’t necessarily give employees a job description. On the contract, for formal reasons, I do, but when I present the position to them in person, I tell them, “Listen, you have to wear any hat necessary to be able to grow this division or grow this department.”
	That’s probably the best mistake that I made and what I learned from it.
Adam Robinson:	You mentioned some training mistakes, as well. For me, I know in our businesses, as we started to scale, you  realize pretty quickly that giving someone a phone and a desk is not a great way to on board them. We’ve made all those mistakes. What were some of the mistakes that you’ve made?
Armir Harris:	Yeah, that’s certainly what I did. I would hire someone and then I would put them on the phones right away or in sales or customer service right away, and that certainly wasn’t the best thing to do. We have a process in house now, so whenever someone comes in, let’s say, on the sales team, they’ll probably shadow a sales manager for about a month or two, and then we would give them a test. This is a formal test. It’s probably a three page exam, and if they pass that test, then we would take them live on the phone with clients and they would be customer facing.
	Even after they’re customer facing, they’re still shadowing a sales manager. After that, once they reach their KPIs or certain benchmarks, they’re off on their own. The whole process takes about four to five months, and this is a lot better than just sending someone into the weeds and they have to figure out on their own.
Adam Robinson:	All right. What has the result been of that?
Armir Harris:	The result has been great. For the customer service side, on the customer end, it’s been a lot better. They’re not dealing with someone that is inexperienced or doesn’t understand the product or the industry that well. This also allows us to filter applicants and early hires a lot better. If they’re not excelling early, if they’re not picking up on things very early, we tell them, “Listen, this is probably not the best position for you.” If they have a great attitude and they have a good work ethic, we’ll find another position for them in the company.
	Overall, it has helped our sales and conversions a lot, just being able to have a more formal and lengthier onboarding process and, lack of better words, filtration system.
Adam Robinson:	Reading between the lines of what you just said, it sounds like people that are a core values match for Shofur, have an opportunity to switch jobs if what they’re doing isn’t the right fit, but people that are, perhaps, technically able but aren’t a culture fit really don’t have a place anywhere in your business. Is that an accurate way to paraphrase what you just said?
Armir Harris:	That’s 100 percent correct. Someone that’s hungry and motivated and has a good work ethic, they can pick up the technical skills relatively quickly, and then even if they can’t pick it up, we still give them a chance. The core values are very important. It’s really important to have a team that has cohesive core values. This way, they’re working cohesively towards one common goal.
Adam Robinson:	Let’s talk about Shofur’s core values, if we could. Would you be willing to share with us the values that you’ve framed the culture of the business on?
Armir Harris:	Yeah, just given the nature of the company, we were ranked 21st fastest growing private company in the US, so we’ve had rapid growth, and this rapid growth has come without any sort of funding. We haven’t had any venture capital, any private equity money, nor have we taken out any loans. This has all been organic bootstrapped growth. We’ve just been reinvesting our cash flow.
Adam Robinson:	Pretty impressive, by the way. That is a rarity, at that growth rate, to have no funding outside.
Armir Harris:	Yeah, thank you so much. With that, we have limited resources. I think that the most limited resource is our time, but for us it wasn’t just our time. It was also money, so we had to be very agile. We didn’t have the funds to launch a product and test it out, do A B testing for several months, and see if it would work out. We just had to figure it out relatively quickly, otherwise we were going to be insolvent and run out of money.
	One of the core values is learning to be agile, in my opinion. Another core value is just being overall prudent. That’s very important to us, as well as having a good work ethic. Most employees that worked at our company, or still work, no one really works less than, I would say, 60 hours a week. I know our sales team comes in at nine o’clock in the morning and they might leave the office at 6:30 or 7:00 PM, and then when they go back at home at night time, they’re still returning emails.
	The work/life balance is not great, and that’s why it’s very important that they love what they do and they also have a great team around them.
Adam Robinson:	When someone isn’t a core values fit, how do you know that?
Armir Harris:	That’s not a very tangible thing to know. It takes a little bit. Sometimes people might be shy. They might not open up right away. They might not feel comfortable in your company right away. It make take a month to know. Sometimes, it might takes three months to know, but the main thing is that they’re a team player. If they’re contributing, or doing their best, and they have the right attitude and they’re putting in as much effort as possible, we know that they’re a team player. When, let’s say, they take a two hour lunch break or they’re just sitting in the corner by themselves, and we tried our best to warm them up, but they’re just sort of indifferent or apathetic towards the company or the employees and their staff members, then we usually have a talk with them, give them a warning, say, “Listen, this is what we’re noticing and this is a warning.”
	It’s also extremely important to be transparent right from the start and set the right precedent, so whenever we see a warning sign, it’s important to stay in front of that and be as transparent as possible with that person and the rest of the team, as well.
Adam Robinson:	Let’s take this up a level. With the benefit of what’s now four plus years of experience in building and leading the organization, philosophically, how would you sum up your approach to the people side of your business, as you look to the next phase of growth?
Armir Harris:	Yeah. I think, the people are my business. I don’t think my business is necessarily the product or the website. It’s the people behind the business that are making everything possible. With the right team, in my opinion, everything is possible. I don’t know if this is very philosophical, but when I came in, I thought that product was everything. I thought that having the right product and having the right service was probably 90 percent of my business, but then I realized that having the right people was probably 90 percent of my business.
Adam Robinson:	How has that realization impacted your approach?
Armir Harris:	I’m a lot more careful on who we hire now. We have a more thorough interview process. We have a lengthier interview process. No one gets a job offer, probably, with two or three interviews. They usually have four interviews and they have to meet every single person that they’ll be working with and everyone has to like them, so we’re a lot more careful on who we hire.
Adam Robinson:	All right. Let’s look at your rewards and recognition approach. When people are doing well or they’re performing above expectation, what’s your approach to rewards and recognition? How do you single out people for a job well done?
Armir Harris:	Yeah. Positive reinforcement is very important, but there’s several ways to reinforce positive behavior. Of course, there is monetary compensation, but when someone’s spending 10 hours a day or 12 hours a day in the office, it’s not just about the money. It can’t be, otherwise they’d be miserable, so it’s very important to just congratulate someone when they do a great job, to tell them that they’ve done a great job and to tell the rest of the team what a great job they’ve done, and lead by example. On the other hand, when they make a mistake, it’s important not to be too harsh and just analyze why they made the mistake and make sure that that mistake never happens again.
Adam Robinson:	Flip side of that coin, when someone, just, perhaps chronically underperforming or just not getting it done, and they’re someone you want to save, take us through the company’s approach to working through tough situations with folks who may have a slow start or may be struggling in a new role.
Armir Harris:	Yeah, you have to figure out why are they struggling. We have a conversation within everyone on the team. Again, transparency is very important at our company, so whoever is having the problem, we would bring them in. We’d probably bring their manager in, and maybe another colleague or two and just have an open conversation. Maybe there’s things that someone is looking at, at a different angle that other employees aren’t looking at it, so, you kind of analyze the situation, and if this is a chronic behavior, we ask the employee, “Can you fix this? How can you fix this? What do you think you’re doing wrong?”
	It’s also important to be introspective and inward looking and to have some sort of self-awareness, in my opinion, for that employee, but as a boss and as a manager, it’s also important to have sympathy and empathy, as well. It depends. If it’s a technical issue and they just can’t fix this technical issue, and we’ve given them the chance to incubate, and they just can’t perform, then we have a serious conversation to them. It might result in letting them go, but if there is something else lacking, or if there is team chemistry lacking or there’s bad management lacking, then we might have to address their manager or the team leader, as well.
Adam Robinson:	Let’s talk for a second about you and the role you’re in, and how you’re thinking about scaling the leadership team of Shofur.
Armir Harris:	Yeah.
Adam Robinson:	Of course, when you started, it’s just you, you’re doing it all. At this point, you can’t possibly be doing it all. Talk about that transition. Who’s around the leadership table now, and what does that look like, potentially, three to five years from now?
Armir Harris:	Yeah, of course. In the beginning, I was doing everything myself. I was doing the sales myself, accounting, marketing, everything, operations. Now, I’ve decided to delegate as much as possible. As a leader, you need to have trust in your employees, so I think delegating without trust is almost impossible . Also, if your employees feel like you’re not trusting them, they’re not going to perform as well, nor are they going to feel fulfilled. As a leader, my role has changed. My role is to provide as much trust as possible.
	For example, I’ll tell them, “Listen. I need to focus on building this product. I’m going to work with the technology team for the next month. I will leave this operation up to you. Please don’t CC me on anything, and if there’s an emergency, it’s important that you deal with this on your own. I have trust and faith in you,” so I’ve delegated everything now. Right now, we have a head of operations, we have a head of marketing, we have a head of sales, we have a head of technology.
	It’s important that they fully understand the process and the business around them, so they can now delegate tasks to the staff that’s underneath them as well, or working next to them as well.
Adam Robinson:	Now that you’ve given away your job, I say this tongue in cheek, what are you doing every day and are you having fun?
Armir Harris:	Yeah. No, I’m in the office every day. I still come here every single day. I work about, on average, 10 to 12 hours a day, still. The main thing that I focus on is overall strategy and coming up with new products, and just innovating and staying ahead of the curve, just building as many barriers to entry in this very competitive environment. That might require working with the technology team closely and building new products, or that might require me doing a lot of market research and working with our marketing or our operations team or my financial team.
Adam Robinson:	As we close out here in the final couple of minutes, I want to get a glimpse into what you’re doing in your role. What book are you reading right now and would you recommend it to our audience?
Armir Harris:	Yeah. Right now I’m reading a book from Ray Dalio. It’s called Principles, and it’s a great book. It talks about his economic outlook, but it’s a lot more than that. It talks about his overall business approach, so if you guys don’t know who Ray Dalio is, he’s basically a hedge fund manager, one of the most successful hedge fund managers in the world, and I really take on his approach and have basically put the same approach into our company, and that’s basically an approach of transparency. It’s very important to have complete transparency in our company. That’s, in my opinion, the best way to be productive and move on from mistakes and build routine.
	That’s what I’m currently reading right now. I don’t have too much time to read, honestly.
Adam Robinson:	I’m sure. Yeah. Ray Dalio … This is the same hedge fund manager that is famously trying to automate the role of the manager in his company, is that right?
Armir Harris:	Somewhat, somewhat. I think it’s a little bit more complicated than I can probably get into it for a bit 30 minutes or so.
Adam Robinson:	Okay, well, we’ll just leave it at that. Check it out. It’s an interesting read, for sure. All right. Closing question, here. If you were to come back on this show a year from now, and report to us on whether or not you successfully tackled the biggest opportunity that you have in front of you, what will you be telling us happened?
Armir Harris:	What will I be telling you happened? I think, the biggest opportunity for us is just improving the way that buses are rented. We probably have one per cent of market share. For us, my goal is to get market dominance, and market dominance is 10 per cent of the market, or more. I’d love to get more than 10 per cent of the market. The only way possible to do that is by providing the best product and service out there. As we move on and as we aggregate more and more data and we figure out how to improve this industry, I would love to come back in a year and I would love to tell you that we have, essentially, captured market dominance by improving our products.
Adam Robinson:	That’s the final word. Ladies and gentlemen, you’ve been learning from Armir Harris, CEO and founder of Shofur. Armir, thank you so much for being with us on the program today.
Armir Harris:	Awesome. Thank you so much for having me.
Adam Robinson:	That’s a 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, which you can find online at www.thebestteamwins.com. Thanks for tuning in, and we will see you next week.