Ira: 0:04

Hello and welcome. I am Ira Gordon and, along with Stacee Santi, the host of The Accidental Entrepreneurs podcast. We each previously founded successful companies Along the way. We became business owners and eventually sold those businesses despite us having no real background in business or ever even planning to become entrepreneurs. In other words, we did this all despite originally having no idea what we were doing or getting ourselves into. In each episode of this podcast, we will share stories and tips from our journey and we'll answer a randomly chosen question about our experience. Let's jump right into the show.

Stacee: 0:41

Good morning Ira. How's it going?

Ira: 0:43

It's going quite well. How are you doing Stacee?

Stacee: 0:46

I'm doing good, doing good

Ira: 0:48

Excellent. What is new with you?

Stacee: 0:51

Well, I have to say, a bit of decision making going on over here. I think I've decided to stop riding horses. Not that I was ever very good at it, but it was one of my goals after I sold the company to learn how to ride the horse better and how to lope and go on a trail ride, and I envisioned myself of being this amazing horsewoman. But fortunately it's just not really working out and I think it's time to pull the plug.

Ira: 1:29

It wasn't meant to be, but did something happen? Is there a near injury or something like this that has prompted this?

Stacee: 1:37

Well, you know, what happened is I was, I have this horse, the Walrus he's called, and he is a great horse. He is so chill and so mellow and nice and really a great horse. He's a total kid's horse and I was riding him and I mean he got spooked about something and he'd rarely get spooked and then he sort of darted across the arena and it's not the first time it's happened. I mean, you're on the back of a giant animal and they have feelings and they're like a normal being. They get nervous and the proper action for the rider is swimming, calm and help the animal calm down, which I can totally do with like a vicious chihuahua or a rottweiler

Stacee: 2:26

But I just freak out and I think I tense up and I hold on for dear life and I and I pull back and I'm like pull back on the reins, like whoa, let's stop and reassess the situation. But that's actually the wrong thing to do with a horse. When they're freaking out, you've got to relax yourself and redirect their energy and move them forward so they don't get more nervous. And after contemplating this quite a bit, I realized like I just don't think I'm capable of that, like I'm not a calm, collected person like that. I'm kind of tense and I guess the horse just senses that about me. He knows me better than myself.

Ira: 3:12

I am keen to follow this story, but I will throw out there that I am going to bet on the fact that you have not ridden your last horse.

Stacee: 3:24

Maybe, but I got to thinking about. I feel the same exact way about diving, Like I used to do a lot of diving and one of the key skills to be a good diver and to be a good horse rider is the ability to remain calm in stressful situations. And I just got to where I don't think I could remain calm if my regulator failed at 60 feet. And once I had that realization, I'm like okay, I've done it, I've seen it, I think I'm done. So anyway, that's what's going on over here. Life contemplations of what bigger meaning this might have about my stress level as an internal person.

Ira: 4:09

Yeah, I do think the whole idea of riding a horse is, in part, supposed to be a relief of stress, as opposed to a creator of it, and so if it's having the opposite effect, maybe it's a good decision.

Stacee: 4:24

Yeah, that's what I told my husband last night. He's a very good horse rider and I'm like you know what everyone, I think things you do in life are supposed to. You're supposed to be very happy while doing them and you're not supposed to be so happy when it's over. There's a lot of things I feel that way about them.

Ira: 4:45

All right let's get into our question for today, which was who was your first hire?

Stacee: 4:52

Okay, that's a good one. I'm going to talk about my first hire and maybe a first batch of hiring I did. How about that?

Ira: 5:02

Sounds good, maybe I'll do the same.

Stacee: 5:04

So my very first hire was easy. It was a girl named Karyn Ekola and I knew her for a very long time because we worked together at the animal hospital and I ran the hospital and she was my right hand there. She was the manager and we worked together for I don't know 10 years, maybe longer, I can't remember. We had a really good working style. We were, you know, like she could ride a horse I bet she's so calm and chill and then when I'm tense and stressed and like go, go, go, she kind of could balance me and vice versa. And we communicated really well.

Stacee: 5:47

So I brought her on just as soon as I could and she helped me with the organization of the business, you know, setting up a CRM, getting our books in order, getting just a lot of structure set up for the business. And it was someone for me to collaborate with and think about things and talk through things. And we had a really great ability to talk through things and kill ideas and promote ideas. So she was a great hire easy. The next few hires were a little harder because I didn't really know who to hire and for what position.

Ira: 6:29

How did you find that first person?

Stacee: 6:31

Well, Karyn was easy because I was leaving the practice and she was like I'm not staying here without you, I don't want to be here. And, like she won, she believed in the vision of that to pet so much as well. She's like I want to be a part of that. In fact, she was so funny. She's like I'm going to give you some of my 401k for this project and I'm like, oh no, I cannot take that, Like I cannot be responsible, this idea is so rolling up the dice right now, but I ended up giving her like fake equity.

Stacee: 7:07

So when I saw the company, I just paid her out at fake equity because I didn't want to risk it for her. She's younger than me and has kids and all that, but I didn't know who to hire next and looking back, I think what I should have done was hire someone to grow the sales side. I waited a long time to do that, I just thought I could. I mean there weren't that many demos coming in so it was easy for Karyn or I to hop on and do a demo. But we definitely could have used someone with a sell mindset, like we didn't know how to sell and close deals and all that stuff. So I think that would have been what I would have done differently. How about you?

Ira: 7:56

We had to make our first hire after, sort of unexpectedly, everybody just started signing up for vet prep after we put it out there and we had like 1700 users in our first six months and that meant emails coming in all the time that me and my partners were responding to, and so I wanted to bring somebody on to answer emails. And it was tough because we wanted to be pretty responsive. But how many emails were we really getting? Like you know, maybe it was five to 10 a day, right, it wasn't like full time work, but we also didn't want somebody that was just going to be working like a few hours of the day, right. And we ended up hiring my brother-in-law Donovan, so my wife's brother.

Ira: 8:39

He was actually a struggling actor at the time I don't think he might be calling him that and so he, you know, he had random things all the time auditions or you know, things he was going to be in. So he had a kind of an inconsistent schedule. That wasn't really a problem for us and he was super technology savvy. He had a lot of experience more in like 3D animation and those areas. But we knew he'd be able to answer some of the technical like why is my browser doing something weird? Right, and, and it was awesome, Like everybody loved Donovan super smart, super funny and he fit great with the team and actually kind of grew my relationship with him, which was sort of not as deep at the time, and he did that for us for a couple of years.

Ira: 9:25

He ended up getting an acting job that required him to literally travel around the world and he probably stopped in probably a dozen different locations and had like a plane ticket that you could just keep going as long as you were going one direction around the world him and the person filming the movie and and so he would just find like an internet cafe because at the time internet was not as ubiquitous, and and he would answer support emails, you know, once at the beginning of the day, once at the end of the day, and kept up with it all while he was doing something like that. And this is, of course, way before remote work was common, and so we all thought it was the coolest thing that Donovan could do his job for us while filming this, this movie project that most normal people wouldn't be able to say us to if they had a new job.

Stacee: 10:14

That is cool and so, like, what's the movie, can we watch it?

Ira: 10:20

Oh my gosh, I need to find it. I'm gonna text him.

Stacee: 10:23

So how did your employee feel about the fact that, of course, they didn't have health insurance and they're working for a pretty iffy situation right? There's certainly no long term job security in this role. How did you navigate that?

Ira: 10:42

It was fine for him at that time. He was already sort of cobbling those things together as a struggling actor and it fortunately didn't end up being too big of an issue. It became a bigger issue when, ultimately, he decided it was time to get a real job and told us he needed to leave us. We were very sad and fortunately he introduced us to his friend that had been seeing him do this job for the last couple of years and was also extremely overqualified to be doing something like this, but thought it would be a good thing to add to her plate, and so we brought on Alana and actually it's now. She's probably been with the company close to 10 years and she now runs all of the software development and product management for the company. She's doing incredible things and is an awesome person, and so that was probably around the time we had to figure out setting up benefits and all those things, which was a lot of fun.

Stacee: 11:46

So that's funny, say, alana is still with the company, Karyn's still sheperding Vet2Pet through the acquisition, like she's still there. She's working for the company that acquired us and she has really developed some crazy skills. You know, she can run a product roadmap, she can build apps, like with the Google and Apple. She knows so many technical things now and it's been amazing to watch her grow. We started working together when she was 19 and she interviewed this is kind of a funny story. She interviewed for a job at the clinic to clean cages and you know, 19,. We hired her and she did that.

Ira: 12:29

We've all done that job.

Stacee: 12:30

We've all done that. And she did that job for about a year and at the time my boss there, the head vet, the owner of the clinic he set her down and he told her we laugh about this story and she set her down and he told her she just wasn't really cutting it as a kennel person, like her cleaning skills were a little subpar and whenever I took over the clinic I found this performance review in her employee file and.

Stacee: 13:03

I showed it to her and we are dying laughing. So she really sucked at cleaning. But in Dr. Parkinson was asking me, you know what do I think? And I'm like well, she sucks at cleaning, but the girls always at a spreadsheet man, she can whip out an excel document for us faster than anyone else. So maybe we move her to the front desk. So we moved her over there, although the natural progression from kennel cleaning was to anesthesia to become a technician and we put her in that role and she, she hated it. It was very similar to my horse experience. So we got her on the front desk and this gal started just ruling it and overhauling everything and automating everything and she found her lane and I think that's such a good story for when you have good people. But maybe they're just not crushing it in the way you saw it, but it might be they're not in the right seat. I found that to be a case with a lot of people as I was growing that to pet.

Ira: 14:07

Yeah, that's always exciting to see people sort of figure out there their niche and grow and really cool that your first early employees you know still there after all these years. I was thinking about one of our very early employees, katie, who we brought in to just kind of help us run those day to day operations and she was fresh out of having getting a business and marketing degree and had joined our company and did a great job. I've also got along, you know, swimmingly with the whole team and she is still there running, you know, several of the test prep assets you know for our current owners and, I think, doing doing a great job and continuing to do awesome things. It's neat to see.

Stacee: 14:57

So that's the pitch right. When you're looking at your first few hires, it's like do you want to get in on the ground floor and be a critical asset to this thing growing? And you could. You could be there for the whole ride. And I think there are so many people out there that like the idea of that, that want to be a part of that that they're. They like it so much they're willing to not have any benefits and not have any job security for a shot at something that might be unique and amazing.

Ira: 15:29

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. You get to be part of part of the whole journey, and those early employees tend to be the leaders of the future.

Stacee: 15:48

So now it's the time of the show. We're going to share our favorite tip, trick, tool, person quote what you got.

Ira: 15:58

So we're just talking about Katie, and she was one of our first hires. Someone shared something that I learned from her that I just never could have even imagined when I was starting a company, which was after she'd been working with us for a year and two. Like she was in charge of doing things like scheduling all our travel and handling a bunch of logistics, and just remember how, how frugal she would be in trying to like do things like find the least expensive hotel and flight and things like that for everybody. And at some point it's sort of dawned on me that like in some ways, like she is taking better care and cares more about aspects of the company than even I did or my partners did, and we just never really dawned on us that you could hire somebody that would care about the business as much as you do. And I remember being completely blown away by that about Katie, and I think I felt that way about numerous other people that I've worked with over the years and it no longer surprises me, but it still really impresses me.

Stacee: 17:07

Yeah, it is crazy you can do that. People want to believe in something and they want to be a part of it.

Ira: 17:16

Yeah.

Stacee: 17:17

Yeah.

Ira: 17:18

How about you? What's your nugget of wisdom for today?

Stacee: 17:22

I'm going to share the importance of having team in person. Get togethers and doing that as early as you possibly can is a really, really good use of money that you don't want to spend Because in the beginning you don't have very much money. Like you're saying, katie was so good at keeping you in line. And the thought of spending thousands of dollars to fly people to a central location to stay in everyone's day in their own hotel room and you have to feed them all and you still have to pay their salaries and you don't really know exactly what you're gonna accomplish in a two-day retreat Like it just seems, like you're just gonna be hanging out in socializing. It's easy to think that you don't want to do that and to not spend your money that way, but I will tell you that is probably one of the most important ways to spend your money because your team can really start to synergize and click and see that each other's real people and you start to get exponential Value of your team that way, yeah.

Ira: 18:42

I love that advice. I have to credit my partner, Mauricio, with really sort of enforcing that aspect of of that prep and wanting us to always try to get our virtual team together for offsite meetings. We would, you know, also include travel for people's spouses or significant others, because we thought it was important for you know us to you know kind of bring everybody together and get to know everybody and and yes, it was invaluable from a just a cultural and having people like working together. But we also always accomplished more in four or five hours of just getting together in a room and talking about things than we would in Weeks and weeks and weeks of doing things, you know, on calls and by email and and everything else. Totally, totally agree with that piece of advice and have to credit my partner for being the one that made that happen at our company.

Stacee: 19:38

Do you have any good location spots for entrepreneurs that need to have a team meeting but don't have a huge budget?

Ira: 19:47

We would try to pick places that everybody could fly to directly, because connecting flights make everything terrible, and so we had more meetings than I care to admit in Las Vegas, I think you know, Salt Lake City, Atlanta, Chicago, also sort of major kind of airport hubs for a variety of airlines, and people can generally get too easily. But yeah, that was, that was how we tried to prioritize that you know.

Stacee: 20:19

I did a meeting with a veterinary group in the Dallas airport and I Wish I would have known about that place, because there is a hotel attached to the Dallas airport and it's so easy to get in and out of there and they have a hotel bar and easy to get to a restaurant and it's that's a pretty good one too. Yeah, I think I think that's right. You got to get centralized and and you don't have to make it doesn't have to be like the Uber meetings where it's like a five-day fancy party thing. It can be just low-key. Everyone realizes you're on a budget. In fact, it probably should be that way, because nobody likes to see the company spending lots of money when you aren't, you know, getting possibly top salary at this point.

Ira: 21:13

One of our best meetings, although potentially with some ill-fated results for a few people, is in New Orleans as well.

Stacee: 21:21

Yeah, that's be careful. Have fun, but be careful don't overdo it. Don't overdo it. All right, here we go. Let's spin the wheel of names and see what we'll be talking about next time.

Ira: 21:42

What have you learned about working with engineers?

Stacee: 21:45

okay, that's a good one.

Ira: 21:49

Couple of tough lessons, but they're pretty cool people overall.

Stacee: 21:54

All right, we'll answer that next week. See you guys soon.