Small business owners, entrepreneurs, medium startups, and VCs. This one's for you. Welcome to beyond the bottom line, balancing evolution with execution. Hosted by Elevate Talent Solutions, founder and CEO. Ron Miller grew Ron's own hard won wisdom, as well as that of an array of luminaries across the entrepreneurial ecosystem, he'll glean priceless wisdom that will help you see past the day to day grind and into the future, where you can check off today's to do lists and achieve innovation and elevation to ensure your business is future proofed. It's time for Beyond the Bottom Line, Balancing Evolution with Execution. Take it away, Ron. Hey everybody, it's Ron Miller, CEO and founder of Elevate Talent Solutions and host of this podcast, Beyond the Bottom Line, Balancing Execution with Evolution. And for those of you that have been listening to the podcast so far, you know that we continue to not only offer insights for myself and my experience, I truly embrace the power of community and other thought leaders who offer valuable insights to help small and medium sized businesses grow. And today's guest is someone that I was actually recently introduced to by mutual connection and All of you know that I am all about the power of community and connections. And after meeting with her and having some really great in depth discussions on topics and seeing how our backgrounds really aligned and how our forward vision really aligned out there for how we approach businesses and owners and people and help them grow. It was very quickly evident to me why the connection was made. Without further ado, I'd like to introduce you. To Naomi Teitelman and Naomi, I would like to kick it over to you to do your introduction to the audience. Sure. Hi everyone. And the fact that you said community matters so much is music to my ears. Naomi Teitelman. I am founder of a boutique advisory company called Collaborativity. So I do advisory work with all different size companies on Talis strategies related to the future. I'm co founder of a company called future forward with an HR in the middle of it. And that is a community for forward thinking HR professionals. So we do that through our weekly newsletter, our weekly podcast and our community for CHROs. My background is both in consulting and in HR. I spent many years in big. Corporate, both on the consulting side and in the HR space. Eight years ago, I went out to start my own business because I saw the need to really help and drive impact around the future of work in our organizations, primarily through the HR function so it's a pleasure to be here today and I'm really excited for our conversation. Oh, I am too. And thank you for giving us a little bit of your background. You left out one important piece though, that I found out recently on LinkedIn. Is that you are a very avid Peloton peddler. You're inspiring me long distance here to dust my bike back up. And I'd like to also get to the after set. We could schedule a whole other podcast about Peloton. I am not made by Peloton, but if you let me, I can go on for hours about Peloton. And it is my source for mental health and physical well being almost every single day if I can. We, we all need those outlets. Lord knows I need them. But it's just one of those other things. I mean, even though we discovered that weeks after we met, like just sitting and talking with you initially, we had so much alignment on. How businesses are set up and what's important right from the HR component and recruiting right through the tools and technology and really the evolution of it and what is going on with businesses, where they start to stumble. And one of the key things, and you really pointed this out and made so much sense when you said it is the value proposition that businesses have. what they stand for, who they are, and that's really what today's show is. I really want to peel back for our listeners, going back to the beginning of If you do these things early and stick to them, there is so much value in it and value prop is one of those key things. And I'd love for you to share your experience and background and the thoughts that we were discussing on this. Sure. So I'll take it even one step before. We're talking about employee value proposition, which should be aligned with your customer value proposition as well. But even before that, and this is something you can do in very early days. Really the exercise and conversation around who are you? Why do you exist besides making money? What are your values? And then that becomes an easier starting point to figure out what is your customer value proposition and what is your employee value proposition. And to put it very simply, your employee value proposition is why people want to join your company and why they want to. So really being very solid in your mission or purpose, whatever you want to call that piece, the broader vision of the organization, and then the values that you need in order to bring that mission. A life is really important to get aligned with the founders of the company, the leadership team, as you build out your leadership team, being very deliberate around what those things are, because they become very important parts of your employee value proposition. And the more you can align those things, the easier it becomes as you scale and as you grow, and as you start to implement some more structure around performance management and stuff like that, having that foundation in place right from the get go is really important. Yeah, absolutely. One thing that I always notice in some of the businesses I work with is, is going right back to this. I have a very large customer down South that I've been working with for almost the last year who, As a very strong value prop, they know who they are, what they stand for, where they're going and in working with them to really revitalize their operationals segments, looking at their career path and really taking that to the next level as they grow has made this exercise so much easier and deeper. Some other organizations that I work with, their value prop is very basic. And without that identity, you're not just peeling an onion as you'd work with them as to what stunning growth or why they're not getting talent or why they're not, moving forward to the community. It is almost like trying to rebuild the house. Like you're trying to lift it off and tear the foundation out and rebuild it and set it back down. And it's a delicate process. And that's why I think it's important to know who you are and who you are not, and therefore what the offering is for your employees and what it is not, right? So I always give the example, hybrid working is a big topic nowadays, and we can again have a whole other podcast on hybrid working. But that's a very critical piece of the employee value proposition. So if you're not the top payer, You need to, and even if you are the top pair, frankly, you need to figure out the other elements of your employee value proposition, which will attract the talent you need. and encourage them to stay. So you mentioned, for example, career pathing, which is not always possible in a small company. If you're a small company of even like 40 people, there's very few promotional opportunities. So what is your value proposition? Why would someone want to join your company at a more junior level in their career when they don't see the upward mobility? What types of development are you offering? What types of transparent conversations do you have with them that says, okay, when you reach this point, we're going to help you. Transition out of this business because it may not be the right fit for you anymore. So really being very clear on who you are and who you aren't and what that means for your employee value proposition can really make or break to your point how you grow, how you attract talent operationally, how people are motivated to do their jobs with excellence. It's really critical things to not just think through, but make sure that you're incorporating mechanisms to really think about them all the time in everything that you do, incentives are aligned in the right way, et cetera. Yeah, they shouldn't be. I was hoping you, you really couldn't hear that. Yeah. Okay. I don't know if you heard my dog rolling around the ground before, but he was doing that. A funny segue on that, Naomi, on hybrid work. Fractional business owners and consultants like you and I, we're a hundred percent remote. We work from home. We have our own offices and we have pets. We have kids running around. I don't anymore. My daughter's off in college and gone on their own. If you hear some rumbling in my background today, it's because I do have some workmen outside. Finishing up, my house had to get resided. I had a internet truck back in May, decided to pull a K turn in a tight space. City. I had a bucket truck into my house and shattered buttons hiding. So we hear the finalization of that saga today. And that could be a podcast on its own later on for insurance claims. But if you hear any of that noise, it's just everyday life happening around us. But yeah, so going through exactly what you're saying, even in small organizations that they don't have a wide variety of promotional opportunities. We know that your value proposition as an organization may change or tweak as you grow, your core values normally should stay the same. Where would you suggest, and I'm going to throw this one out there because we haven't even discussed this topic yet. But organizations just getting going and you're starting to grow, like, what do you think are those key things for them to clearly understand in establishing what those value propositions are? Where should they be looking? So, I think, again, back to mission, vision, values. A lot of organizations wait to do those types of exercises and that type of critical thinking, and I think it's really important to do right away, right at the start of the business, because that kind of gives you, the foundation for who you are as you grow, right? And as you said, things may tweak around the margins, how values translate into the business may change over time, but getting really grounded in those things right from the get go is very important. So then you go to, okay, we have to make our first hire being very design thinking, very user centric in terms of, okay, this talented person who is employed at another company, why would they want to join us and what's going to make them not only consider us and join us. but not jump ship in three months when a better opportunity comes their way. So what are the levers that we can pull that are unique to our business? So if you're a not for profit, there's a huge kind of world impact angle to it, which doesn't cost money. You just have to articulate it in a certain way. And make sure that there's some sort of give back opportunity that you're offering your employees throughout the year to be consistent with your values of giving back to the community. Thinking through those values and how they translate to why I want to join your company and why I would want to stay. and why I would want to grow are really important factors to consider. Everyone immediately goes to comp and benefits, which are obviously table stakes and obviously really important, but people will take a pay cut in order to have more flexibility, for example, or people will take a pay cut in order to have an opportunity to give back to the world in certain ways. So really being very clear and honest with yourself about who you are as an organization and what you can offer your employees is really important to articulate even before hire number one. And I think it's very interesting too, as you really look at what you offer as an organization. To establish an identity, if you think through the different needs of the different generations, Gen X is dominated for quite a while with baby boomers. And those are two very distinct generation. Gen X is, I'm going to type this horrible email and I'm going to sit on it. And then they'd be like, meh, I don't really feel like sending it. That's just who we are. We roll with it. We're adaptable. And what we were looking at from organizations while it may have evolved over the course of time was. Hey, we want a good competitive pay. We want really good benefits. We want stability and opportunity to grow. I think millennials started to change what they were looking for out of companies. But to your point now, as you get into Gen Z coming in and taking over and being the future of the workplace, their needs and the impact they're looking for really change what they really want out of organizations while pay and benefits will always be a main driver. I think as you see some of those younger generations coming in now, it's more about what is your impact on the environment? Where do you stand on these issues? What is your true work life balance? And if you're good at establishing your vision early, you're able to adapt and really set yourself apart. And how your organization is not just structured, but how you continue to scale and grow and extract that top talent that you become the employer of choice. Yeah, I think it's a really good point in terms of being flexible. So back to your point about. The values and the values don't really change, but how they manifest may feel different for different generations, different personas in general. We actually just did a podcast episode about the four generations in the workplace. I heard an interesting, an interesting factoid in that, podcast conversation that around recognition, right? And how different generations want either public or private recognition and formal or informal recognition. So it's interesting how you have your values and they translate a bit differently depending on who you're interacting with but not over stereotyping and over generalizing because people are so unique and so individual that I think over generalizing and over stereotyping may lead to to backlash a little bit or negative consequences if you're not holding true to your core values. I think if you try to go Too much what you think a certain generation needs without staying true to your values. I think there's some danger that you become inauthentic. And I've seen that myself through the years in large organizations where you have such a wide variety of people and the values stay the same. But as they evolve, When you start to get really large, if you don't have anything established, you're not offering anything, and then it becomes generalized and very inauthentic. And that recognition and that growth is not aligning with what your employee base is. And it gets harder to attract. It really does. People see through the BS very quickly in this day and age. So again, knowing not only who you are, but who you are not is really important. I mentioned performance management. That's one mechanism that you really need to keep very tightly aligned with your values This is how we manage performance around it. This is the metrics we assign to it, right? That literal just keeps things very much aligned so that you're not, as you have more leaders and more people who are interpreting the values. There are structures in place that enable that to scale in a consistent way because otherwise you have a bunch of different leaders interpreting things differently, and then the employee experience feels very disjointed. For our listeners out there, if you've never experienced that, drop us a line for our mailbag and we'd be happy to talk through the nirvana that you have found. Because we'd like to share that with everybody else that listens. But so, so peeling back because it's such a large topic to kind of unpack. I think for me on a recruiting side too and working with organizations, not just on their operations growth, but From a recruiting side of really looking at it, talent attraction is a concept of recruiting. And it shouldn't for me, I always preach for lack of a better word, maybe I should start the church of Ron and Ron 316, but yeah, that's another topic from that recruiting perspective. Attraction should be a natural recruiting funnel because people do know who your organization is, what it stands for and the things that you're involved with. And no, it's just not words on a wall. That come up at convenient times, when it's that month to recognize this group of people, or it's the holiday season and look what we're doing, let's let you live and breathe a day. And that should be a natural funnel for very top analysts. But I think it also is a change from a proactive recruiting perspective of going out to market and identifying talent early on well before you need it. And getting to know them, what they're looking for, how you mesh together today and in the future and picking that right time as to when it may be. As what I've been building teams in the past, two of my key players, an organization I was with, I actually courted for just over a year before I had the right opportunity and realigned in order to do it. And something you had said in our earlier conversation along this topic is in the fractional world and in those growing and scaling businesses, you had said something that really stuck with me. It helps you identify when you need an A player versus a role player. And when you like want to engage fractional pros and cons of that. And that really stuck with me because that speaks to really scaling your business the right way and making those right decisions. Thanks. So what are some of those key things that you've seen in your experience that you could share of when you identify that A player versus a role player or when you should think about doing something different with fractional support? Yeah, so that's a multi pronged question. So firstly, when you need an A player versus a role player, it's really important to identify who are the, what are the key roles to drive your business, to mitigate risk, all those kind of first. important steps to be in business and then to keep yourself in business. You may pay more for a certain sales role or a certain risk role or whatever the case is. It's important to identify what those roles are because with a finite pool of money, You're not going to be able to go after your A players in every single role you bring into the organization. It's really important to know what is your employee value proposition? How are you going to be able to attract that A player? Have you been pipelining, which is much more important now than ever before? The process that you talked about courting people and pipelining before you even have an open role, because then you're dating for a while until you need to make a commitment. The fractional space is really interesting. It's been evolving over the past 10 years or so, where there's more and more people like myself who choose to work in this way, so back in the day, it was mostly people who were in between jobs who wanted to work in a fractional capacity for a little while to earn some money before they got their next permanent gig. But that's not the case anymore. So you can get some really great talent. A perfect example is if you have a finite project. Or you have a finite piece of work that you need really deep expertise, but it's not really core to your business. It's not something that you're going to need forevermore. It's a great kind of trigger to bring in someone in a fractional capacity, either for a project or for a retainer, a certain period of time. Do you need advisory? Those are the types of things that you can engage kind of fractional talent as well as even in the recruitment space. If you need to quickly. You don't want to hire kind of 20 permanent recruiters in your permanent payroll. So that's a great opportunity to leverage either gig workers or an outsourced provider in order to help you do that. The worker ecosystem has just become a lot more flexible and a lot broader than just hiring a bunch of full time permanent employees. I will caution as an HR professional at all. I have seen small companies, startups hire their first HR professional as a recruiter, and then pile on all the other HR stuff and wonder why it's not working. And I would say that's akin to hiring an amazing salesperson and then piling on all the kind of customer success and operations stuff on them and wondering why it's not working. So HR roles are Vastly diverse, just like any area of the business. So I would caution that not all recruiters are skilled at or motivated by the rest of the HR stuff that needs to happen. So it is a great opportunity to bring in fractionals ballot to build up some of those HR processes early so that you have some structure in place to build on. I could not agree more with that statement. And I will tell you like some organizations I have seen just not only throughout my career, but companies that I've worked with in my staffing background and some of the companies that I've been consulting with now to that point, like. They do one of two things either to your point, they hire a recruiter with an HR degree or an HR background, and they start them off finding talent and then they pile on. And I've also seen the opposite where they bring in an HR generalist, they pile on duties that are way out of scope from an HR perspective with no infrastructure, and then also expect them. To highly recruit and yeah, it, once you start to muddy that water, something suffers and you get a lot of misalignment there. So again, do you need a whole HR department when you're just starting out and only have 20 people or less in your organization? No. But there's a lot of great opportunity to bring in fractional help or gig workers in order to build your bench in a way that is not a full time permanent commitment. I think that's one of the reasons I got into this and made that decision a year ago to really pivot and take the leap as I sat as an individual in the same case. I'm at this juncture. I went through the very first layoff in my career. It was painful. What am I passionate about? And I know that I was always passionate about recruiting and people, but it really resonated with me about growing business. And how do I bring that experience to one company anymore? It falls right into what is that new fractional community is. You want the experience, you want the background, you want the guidance, but you're not at that level to afford it yet. And there are opportunities to work with professionals like yourself and your organizations and what you do, Naomi, and what I do that really feeds in that middle part to really where you take over in the beginning and establishing and then growing that management side. There's so many topics I want to talk to you about with what you do and what you bring that I really hope you want to come back on again, because there's so much value in your background, truly looking at it and listening to the things you've done here. I aspire to be. Where you are today in a few years with your credentials and what you've done. But bringing that together from a fractional capacity, businesses is becoming more popular to engage because it's short term, it's cost effective. And you get that professional knowledge and guidance. at a lower cost and it helps you build where you're going in the future. If you bring on a fractional person as a full time permanent, right, if you engage them so much that they become a full time permanent, I wouldn't say the cost is necessarily the benefit, but it's the flexibility of bringing in different skills as needed, as opposed to hiring an HR professional and then loading all sorts of different things onto their plate so that they can't actually, Get their core job done. Apply that principle to any function and any business unit in your organization. Thinking through who do you need as A players? Who do you need as role players or subject matter experts at what levels you need these people to perform? So don't hire a very junior person just because you can afford them. And then expect that they're going to self manage and know exactly what to do to meet your business goals. Thinking about what are those key leadership roles you need right from the get go that are core to your business and core to making it function and not going out of business. The nice thing about fractional also is it, it tests the waters, not necessarily with that person, sometimes with that person. So sometimes employee is open to full time permanent. So it's a way to test the fit before you. Actually make the commitment, but it's also a way to test whether you need this type of role longer term. So I think it's a great way to sometimes it should be cost effective. They also often don't get benefits and stuff like that. So there is some cost effectiveness there, and there's also risk mitigation there. I still hear people say, Oh, I don't want to hire someone who's fractional or a gig worker because they're less loyal and they can just jump ship, but I actually. Challenge that assumption because your permanent employees can jump ship at any time and all they need to give you is two weeks notice. You're contractually bound a lot of the time with your contract workers. I keep on using all different terminology for them, but it's a great way to get work done in a short period of time in ways that are more flexible, I would say. Yeah, I agree. An up and coming new industry that's out there, fractional contract workers. And we're very different from gig workers. When people say gig, they always think about, well, you're taking side jobs as an Uber driver or Uber eats or Instacart and deliveries. And yes, that exists. And that's, that was a huge industry and it still is, especially coming through COVID and the pandemic and coming up the other side, we're in a much more virtual world and capacity now. And for some folks, I think that scares them in that transition, but think about in a positive manner, what that really opens up your organization to of any size, when you are just getting started and you don't have a lot of money to invest, you now have access to a world of professional talent from across the globe and their experience that they bring, what really fits right to help you grow your organization from day one. Yeah, absolutely. Fractional gig workers, they exist at all different levels. So also don't hire someone who is leadership strategic and then expect them to do the arms and legs work. So really be, there is some strategy around who you bring in as a gig worker, where you source them, platforms like Upwork or TopTal or platforms like that, and then other ways to engage a more, a part time CHRO for 18 months or that type of thing. So I want to be cognizant of time too, because I could talk to you all afternoon and pick your brain on a variety of topics, but what would be one thing from your experience that you would say really where they should, where companies and owners starting out in business should really look first in establishing that value properly? What has been a key thing from your experience? for them to start in step one. Yeah, I think I mentioned a couple of times, but really who you are, why you're in business besides making money and really putting yourself in the passive candidate's shoes of why they would want to join your company. That's the number one thing. Like that is the number one question because you don't want to bring in a bunch of people who are then going to leave or who are suboptimal. So the worst thing is offering a bag of goods that is totally different than what's on the inside. You mentioned talent attraction. The talent attraction piece should be very honest and very authentic and reflective of what's going to go on the inside. And No company is perfect. So really having that down in terms of who you are and who you're not and what the true employee value proposition is key, because it's very expensive to hire a bunch of people only to discover they're not the right people or. They leave because you offered them something that you're actually not delivering on. So I guess the main thing is being true to yourself, knowing who that self is, and how you're translating that to an employee value proposition, and knowing why you're not offering other components of an employee value proposition. Putting yourself on the other side of that desk, thinking from that incoming candidate perspective and asking yourself, would I want to join my own organization? Yeah, I think that's key. It's a great place to start, right? And it starts to answer all the questions about who you are and who you want to be. Yeah, and it requires humility. We all think that our businesses are the best. So, of course, all I have to do is look at my website and you're going to want to work for me. But It's not the case, especially with passive candidates. Oh, and it requires a ton of humility, right? Because you can easily think that your business is the best. All they have to do is go look at our website. They'll get it. They'll want to join us right away. It'll be obvious, but especially for passive candidates, that's definitely not the case. So having that humility and knowing who you are and who you aren't is really important. Something I've been trying to teach for over three years now is When you're speaking to candidates, you're after that passive pool because there's four times as many passive candidates out there as there are active, active candidates are, you're seeing people looking in a snapshot, right? So you're only getting the top talent in a short period of time as they pass by in their orbit. And if you're after those candidates, you need to speak to them. And what they're looking for is not you opening up with, they're looking at what you offer as an organization first. It doesn't matter the name, they're looking at your value and what you offer them to get them interested to get to that second date. For sure. Now, so Naomi, I really appreciate you coming on and sharing your background and insights and knowledge. And I want to give you an opportunity to, outside of LinkedIn, where can everybody find you? If you want to share your website, we'll share all your links. Where can people get ahold of you and find you? Great. Thank you for asking. You can find us at futureforward. com. That's probably the best place. You can learn more about our newsletter podcast community. It's futureforward, F U T U R E F O H R W A R D. com. And it's been a pleasure speaking to you today, Ron. It's been great speaking to you too, Naomi. And hey, give you a preview. What's your next podcast topic that you're talking about for the audience in case they want to tune in? So this week's podcast is about the power of community, I will definitely be turning into that one. We thank you for coming on again. I really appreciate your time. I hope that you come back and visit us again, and we can share some more of the knowledge that you have out there and really kind of crack into your background. And for all of you listening, thank you so much again for tuning in. We hope that the information that today as you start your business, or you're looking to grow or scale or change really helps guide you on that path. Make sure you hit the follow button there at the bottom. So you don't miss another episode. We have some great ones coming up to tie our stories together of growing that business, and you can always find us online www. elevate salad solutions. com. We'll drop our URL in there too. Where you can see what we're about in podcasts as well. And we hope that you tune in again. And any questions for Naomi, please drop them in. We'd love to have her back on for a mailbag and help her share her knowledge if she's open to it. Thank you all very much and have a great day. We'll see you next time. Thanks, Ron. Thanks for listening to this episode of Beyond the Bottom Line, Balancing Evolution with Execution. Hosted by Ron Miller, CEO of Elevate Talent Solutions. You can learn more about him at ElevateTalentSolutions. net and by following him on LinkedIn. This podcast was developed, edited, and produced in partnership with Courtney Reimer of Sounds Great Creative Podcast Strategy. If you want to make a podcast, or make your existing podcast even better, Courtney is here to help find her on LinkedIn. That's Courtney with A-C-R-E-I-M-E-R or@soundsgreatstrategy.com. Special thanks to Adrian thar for keeping us all in line. Adrian is also the CEO of boutique marketing firm, a CR Ventures. Check her out@acrventures.com. Be sure to hit that follow button. Send us love letters and episode ideas@elevatetalentsolutions.net and tune in next week.