The cavnessHR podcast – The 50TH Episode

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iTunes: https://cavnesshr.co/theca912e0
Soundcloud: https://cavnesshr.co/thecaeeea9
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Jason: Hello, and welcome to the cavnessHR Podcast. I’m your host, Jason Cavness. Today’s podcast is brought to you by Audible. Get a free audiobook download and a 30-day free trial at www.audibletrial.com/cavnessHR. Audible has over 180,000 titles to choose from for your iPhone, Android, Kindle and MP3 player.

Now, for today's episode, we’re going to do something a little different. We actually don't have a guest today because today is our 50th episode. So, today, we’re going to cover some things from the podcast in the past, how we built it out, and also how cavnessHR is going.

So, last July, I decided I wanted to do a podcast. I’d been listening to podcasts a lot and I thought it’d be a good way to market cavnessHR. So, one podcast I listened back then, and even today, is Entrepreneur on Fire hosted by John Lee Dumas JLD, and he has a free podcast course that I took along with him and Kate Erickson – a lot of great information on that. And, of course, doing a podcast, you don’t just start one day and start podcasting. It’s a lot of trying to figure out the podcasting platform, the editing stuff. Doing the intro and outro I had to figure out. So I started learning in July and produced the first one in September – September 24th. I posted up one per day for the first 12 days. The advice back then was “post as many as you can to get your numbers up.” But if I had to do it over again, I’d probably do one a day for five days and move on from there.
So, one thing I want to do next is thank all my guests, by name, who’ve been on the podcast. It’s basically the first ten, when I had no listeners and I had no idea what I was doing. If you want to reach out to any of them, just let me know and I’ll connect to you. These are in the order they appeared.

Dr D. Anthony Miles from San Antonio, Texas – he’s a well-published author, startup expert, has won an award for marketing, very first guest and I really appreciate that.
Lee Reeves here in the Seattle area. You want to know something about startups or the VC’s from southern Oregon up to Alaska, Lee is your guy. He's also started Startup253, which is helping to energize the startup community here in Tacoma.

Jackson Calame from San Antonio, Texas. His group Passion Pros helps people get motivated to follow their passions. Great interview.

Jessica Light from Atlanta, Georgia has a great social media company doing great things.

Joshua Lawton, startup founder. His recent startup company recently got acquired. Joshua also graduated from the business school at the University of Texas and John Hopkins – very smart guy. His most recent startup is something where they measure how many people see billboards (if I remember correctly – I might be wrong about that).

Tru, a fellow member of Bunker Labs; and we’ll talk about Bunker Labs later on. Tru has a product where, instead of you having to take your dog outside at 2:30 in the morning, you can use this product in the house, and also in airports.

Mikaela Kiner – she owns UniquelyHR up in Seattle doing great things. I especially want to thank her because, back when I was trying to figure out what I want to do with cavnessHR. She did a talk at one of the networking events here in Tacoma, and I asked her, I told her my ideas because she's like two years ahead of me, and I was like, “are there too many HR people in the market doing what you’re trying to do?” and she said, “No, Jason, we need many more.” So I really went on from there. So I want to thank her for that.

Melissa Washington, out in Sacramento, California – military veteran – and she’s doing a lot of great things for women veterans across the United States.

Paige Whitmire from Dallas, Texas – outstanding coach, I want to thank her.

Anna Hoobler – her and husband own Seattle Benefits Consulting. So if you need any benefits help, reach out to her.

Dennis Brouwer – wrote a great book, great guest.

David Siler from Distinctive HR – another great guest. For those of you getting your SPHR or PHR certification, I highly recommend you go to David. For most people that take these certifications, it's a 50% pass rate. But for David’s program, it’s an 80-90% pass rate, and it’s very good. If you want to know about it, just let me know. I highly recommended his program.

Sandy Fiaschetti – She does HR in Michigan. Thank you.

Cecilia Clark – fellow Army veteran, doing a lot of great things in HR. She currently does HR for Schwan’s. She’s doing a lot of great things.

Zachary Rozga out of Seattle – serial entrepreneur doing a lot of great things, started a lot of great companies.

Kina McAllister has an interesting story; She was either a cancer researcher or HIV researcher. She left that to start StemBox. So what StemBox does is it is focused on girls 7 to 12 but, of course, anyone can get it, and they’ll send you a StemBox once a month with different scientific experiments, and she also gives instructions on her YouTube channel. Just great things.

Greg from aSuggestion out of New York. His company, aSuggestion is an anonymous employee engagement platform where people give feedback on a company or basically anything else on this platform.

Adam Haberer out in Austin, Texas – lawyer. He’s the foster parent for a lot of kids; doing a lot of great things.

Jeff Kramer, VP of HR out of Dallas. Some more background on him – when I first transitioned out of the military, Jeff was one the first people I reached out to and he gave me a lot of advice.

Nick Tran out of Houston, Texas, does a lot of great things for veterans for his company, Schlumberger out in Houston, Texas. Now, Nick has a great story about his journey from Vietnam to our country to serve in the military to what he’s doing now. So definitely look up his story.

Maja Karlsson – another great guest. She's a coach.

Chris Oltyan has a startup out in Denver, Colorado called Rebric.io which is going to use algorithms to help the hiring process, which we all know needs a whole lot of work.

Ben Eubanks, another great HR person. He does a lot of great HR things. He has a lot of podcasts and blogs that are very useful.

Todd Dean – I want to thank him for being on the podcast. He's a semi retired VC who’s currently living out in Idaho and he's always a great help to me.

Dr Tim Baker – an HR leader of Australia. He has several concepts that I believe. One of them is the five performance discussions. So, instead of doing your performance management once a year. You have a discussion once a month that rotates around culture, how they’re doing, weaknesses and other subjects.

William Tincup – great guy, fellow Texan, has a great sense of humor. If you want to know about HR and tech, William Tincup is your guy.

Kevin Goldsmith was gracious to be a guest. He was the VP of Engineering at Spotify and recently, Avvo. Right now, VP of engineering of a new startup called AstrumU, and he's currently looking for developers. If you’re a developer and you’re looking for a job, reach out to Kevin Goldsmith and see if you're the person he's looking for.

Charlie Judy, out of Chicago – another great HR person who helped me out with my resumes when I was finishing up in the army and agreed to be a guest. His company does company culture.

Janice Coe – another coach, another great guest.

Laurie Litwack, out of Seattle Washington, doing a lot of great things for women in tech, helping them get what they deserve.

Paul Maskill out of North Carolina – does a lot of small business coaching and it was a lot of fun to have him on the podcast.

Matt Burns out of Vancouver, Canada – he’s the Chief Human Resources Manager of JYSK and he does a lot of great things in the world of HR and tech, and he’s doing a lot of great things for everyone.

Russ Elliot is a conscious culture expert out in San Francisco, California.

Janelle Rodriguez out of Florida. I want to especially thank her as she’s always supporting me and sharing my items – just giving me a lot of support.

Bruce Bjorklund, another member of Bunker Labs doing a lot of great things. His startup Hyxus is an agriculture compliance platform which he's getting ready to push out pretty soon.

Jazmine Wilkes, better known as HRJazzy, she has been in HR for a couple years and she's just all over it –she has a blog and she’s just doing great things.

Next, Jacqueline Ledgister-Bethell (she prefers to be called Jacky). She's down in the Bahamas and she's doing great things down there, leading a lot of great HR efforts down there.

Leo Novsky here in the Seattle area – he’s a communication expert and a great thing about him is he has a program in one of the prisons in north of Seattle where he helps people get out of prison and become entrepreneurs. As we all know, when people get out of jail, their options are pretty limited.

Steven Matly of SM Diversity. I just had a great talk with him. He's just doing some great things all over the community and he just has it going on. A lot of good thing happening with Steven Matly. I want to give a shout out to him and all his team at SM Diversity and the service partners; I believe they’re going to do some great things together, and I really look forward to working with them more in the future.

Peter Pease from England. Has this test (I can’t remember the name of it right now) but basically it's a test you take and it determines if you're going to be a good entrepreneur or not and it's really an eye-opening test. And one thing about the test is, and what’s surprising is, most people think being resilient is the number one thing an entrepreneur needs. But, according to the test you took, being resilient didn’t make the top 10 things that make you successful as an entrepreneur.

Shout out to Dr Cheryl Ingram – she’s CEO and Founder of Inclusology here in Seattle.

Next is Skylar Bjorn – she's a very interesting young lady. So she just finished her freshman year at Loyola Marymount University LA. Before she even graduated high school, she started 2 startups another business in coding some apps; and now she’s a tech blogger and just doing great things.

I want to thank Wayne Sutton of Tech and Inclusion out in San Francisco ,great talk. We really learned a lot from him.

Next, Sapna Malhotra out in Toronto Canada. She does everything – I have no idea how she even sleeps, she’s doing so much for everyone. And I would like to thank you for introducing me to several guests who will be coming on later on in my podcasts.

Rob Catalano of WorkTango – Who has an employee engagement platform.

Lauren Waldman – a learning coach.

And finally, Malcolm Woods – another fellow Texan who’s a product manager and Android developer. So I just want to thank all those people, especially the first ten.

So when I started off, it was just me and a microphone and it was really raw. I really had no idea what I was doing. So the first few episodes, I tried to be perfect by editing – that was such a pain – trying to get every little thing out of there because everyone says “uh” or “um” or “duh” and that’s the stuff you want to get out. So what I do now, is I do one good editing to the podcast and try to take out everything that I could find, and the second time I listened to it just as a normal listener, if I see anything that pops out, then I take it out. But I’m nowhere near an editing expert. Sometimes I listen to my podcast and I'm kind of embarrassed when I listen to things that are left in there. Another thing I did, after episode 30, I got a banner behind me made to kind of help brand cavnessHR. I also started using Facebook Live, like I'm doing now.

So Facebook Live streams it to my Facebook page, the person I tag, their company and page that I tag, my own company page and my Facebook group) and also livestream it to my Twitter, and my LinkedIn which is a great help to push it out there. And also about adding new, additional revenue streams, right now it’s not paying all that much but hopefully it will in the future. So I have an affiliate relationship with Amazon, Audible, Zoom and Lively. Zoom is what I use to put this out right now. When I first started the podcast, I used a platform call Lybsyn but I’ve since switched to Pippa which I’m very happy with. Also, with the first five episodes, I tried to edit the transcripts myself – that was just a pain. It was just too much. So I finally got someone to work on it from Fiverr and outsourced it.

So the process works, for the podcast, when I get a guest, some people say, “well, how do you get a guest?” So, basically I just ask; if they’re on LinkedIn or Twitter, I ask; if I meet them somewhere, I ask if I think they’ll be an interesting guest. So just in case you don't know about my podcasts, I to talk to small business owners, founders people in tech, startups and HR and try to go from there. I really need to do a better job of reaching out to small business owners. Most of the people I talk to are in tech, startups or founders. So I send those potential guests an email or leave a Twitter message or whatever the case may be.

Sometimes they may say yes, sometimes they say no. I usually follow up 2/3/4/5 times, depending on who it is. If they say they’re interested, I’ll send the details, like a one page of just a lot information about the podcast. Including the questions, and how we’re going to do it. If they say yes, then I’ll send them the link so they can schedule the best date and time for themselves. So seven days before the podcast, I send them the Zoom link and the directions again. Then the day of the podcast, we do it on Zoom and Facebook Live. And, of course, with technology, sometimes the internet goes out. But with me being able to edit that makes it all good.

So the podcast is done and the process next is I upload the podcast from Zoom into Adobe Edition and I do all the editing on Adobe Edition. I do one podcast on a Saturday when I edit it. I also send the Zoom video to Jamila (my Fiverr person) so she can do the transcription. So I edit it on Adobe Edition as best I can. Then I have to upload Adobe Edition to ID3 Editor to make it an MP3 format. Then that MP3 I send it to Pippa to upload it the day of the podcast. Seven days prior to the podcast has been released. I send out another email to the guest and ask them for their social media links and any other links they would like me to have and make sure I have them.

On the day of the podcast, I release it, I send it to the guest – the link to my blog which I put the show notes in (the cavnessHR blog) – then I send them the Word and PDF versions. Then I release it on Apple, Soundcloud, Pocket Casts, Google Play, and also YouTube. Then I share once a day on my social media. I use a platform called SmarterQueue, which is really great. So I use Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Snapchat and Instagram to share and share it once a week. And of course, the guest can share as many times as possible.

So, it’d be great if you can subscribe, rate and review the cavnessHR Podcast on your favorite podcast platform. I’ll really appreciate it. If you’d like to be a guest on the podcast, or know someone who would be a great guest. Let me know that as well. Also, I have a blog at www.cavnessHRblog.com where I put the show notes on Mondays and I also do a weekly update on how the cavnessHR company is going.

Also, I was recently on a podcast myself called the JumbleThink Podcast, it was a great experience. And the funny thing about that, when I did the podcast, I’m like, “man, I didn't say anything, I only talked for about ten minutes.” But the actual podcast is almost forty minutes long. I didn't realize how long I was talking. And also, I’m in a book coming up written by Fiaz Jappie – he's a recent college graduate – called Think Small for Big Results: Navigating Your Way to successful Microbusiness. So I’ll send you the link for that.

Now, for the cavnessHR update. First, some background on how cavnessHR came to be. So when I was getting ready to retire out of the military. I'm doing the LinkedIn thing and that kind of stuff, and I got a LinkedIn message from Mark Monroe. – shout out to Mark Munroe and his wife, Erica – he reached out to me and said, “I have a startup and we want to help veterans and college students get jobs using skills test because their resumes aren’t really that good to transition into different jobs.” He asked me, “well, how did the Army take care of people getting out the military?” And I was like, “well, what the (blank) is a startup?” I had no clue, no concept what a startup was. So we met up, he explained what startup was, I explained how the Army took care of people or in some cases not took care of people. I was like, “you don't talk about HR, why is that?” He said most startups don't really think about HR until further down the line because they’re working on that product-market fit. And I said, “well, how about I setup an HR department for you and learn how to do other things?” And He said that’s an interesting idea, let me think about it.

But what I did, I pretty much hired myself. I started giving HR products, going to meetings and all kind of stuff. So I really learned a lot during my time during my two years there and we had we had a great team from Mark Monroe, Anukul, who was the CTO, Alex Diaz who did marketing, and other great people who we there. But like most startups, we didn’t make it and we failed. But during this time period, I know I did a lot of networking and confirmed how few businesses had HR. So I thought to myself, “maybe this would be a good business idea.” So I did some research and found there 543,000 businesses starting each month and most don’t have HR –and I’ll go into these stats in a little more detail later.

And in this time period, I also reached out to 331 small business owners, tech startups, founders, whatever, across the nation. In the conversations, of course in more detail than this. But many of them answered that I have a business idea that might work and 71% of them said yes. So that’s basically how cavnessHR got started. We did an LLC in the Washington state in September 2016 and we’ve been going since then.

So some things we’ve been doing recently, we’ve recently completed the Bunker Labs online launch accelerator which is a 20-week course that helps startups get into the market. Bunker Labs, in case you don’t know, is a non-profit out of Chicago with their locations across the nation and the mission is to help entrepreneurs, like myself start a successful business to be successful. We also got accepted to the Bunker Labs veterans and residents program which will be from August to January next year. So with the program, we get a free working space in Seattle, and it’s basically set up like an accelerator and incubator. Tech Stars is basically the format so it’s a lot of great stuff for us. And, of course, six months of free work spaces – you can’t beat that.

I also want to take the chance to thank my group partner, Maggie. She’s a great help to me, giving me a lot of great advice, and I want to thank her for her great help and congratulate you on your new baby. I look forward to working with you again.

So what is the vision for cavnessHR? At cavnessHR, our vision is to provide HR to all companies with less than 49 employees by using existing technology. Our vision is, we don't think we have to come to your place of business to answer your HR questions; there’s so much tech out there. Like this platform, Zoom, Intercom, Drift, all these platforms being used to help lower the price. So the way we see cavnessHR working is this – you come to our website. You give us your e-mail address and, of course, this has pivoted many times already, come to our website, you give us your email address. We’re going to send you two pages of HR laws, all the laws you’ve got to follow up on for 1 to 49 employees.

Then, with that, we’re going to send you a message saying thank you for taking this. But we want to give you a free employee handbook, which a lot of HR people charge a lot of money for this. We give them a ten question to answer. For example, we can't tell how many days off to give our people, what holidays to give out to people. Send that back to us, then we give them their employee handbook completed. Also, the important thing to know is HR laws can be different based on your location. so the HR law handbook is based on the personal location. For example, a handbook in Seattle can be different from one in Arlington, Texas, because that’s just the way it is.

So we give you the handbook, and then at the same time, send answers to questions on HR policies, give the answers to them, give them the labor posters based on location. We’re not going to send the labor posters laminated. But the link to the posters, for free, of course, and they’ll have to print it out and laminate it. Then, after all that was discussed, if we give them enough value and they want to continue a relationship. For that we're going to charge based on number of employees. We’ve already gone through 2 or 3 price models, and we'll probably go through several more based on that. We’re still trying to figure that out. After that, we’re going to do jobs descriptions, salary and compensation; for salary and compensation, the goal is, we tell you’re paying someone ten percent of the market, that person is going to probably leave you, or vice versa. You’re paying this person 200% percent of the market, you’re over-paying them.

Another item that we weren’t going to do is orientation and onboarding. When one of our customers asked us to do that for them, and we're doing this orientation and onboarding for them and this might actually be something we’ll do in the future so we want to take a bigger look at that.
So we actually had to turn away two customers. So we had two customers and they had a lot employees and they were going to pay us a lot of money. But they wanted us to do everything hardcopy – printing everything up in hard copies and they wanted us to be in the place of business every day, half a day, every day, which is the exact opposite of what we’re trying to do with cavnessHR.

So some stats for us to go over. Each year, small HR loses $29 billion a year because of risky or bad HR. and that’s coming up to about $1000 per employee. Bad HR can be anything from potential lawsuit, not recruiting correctly, and other items. So that comes up to about around $1000 per person, so if you have a company of 20 people, you’re losing up to $20,000 per year.
Some other stats that we said earlier, according to the Small Business Administration, 540,000 new businesses start each month. For the revenue, 2017, there was $20.7 billion in this market revenue. In 2020, it is estimated to go up to $22.9 billion. In 2020, it’s estimated that the worldwide revenue for HR is going to be $33.9 billion a year, with North America being number one on the market, and the Asian Pacific being number two. I know many people are surprised by the amount of revenue in this market.

We do lots of networking and recruiting. The saying is, “always be closing,” but mine is, “always be recruiting.” For those of you who know, being a non-funded startup, it’s very hard to retain talent. Of course, we can offer people equity, but, for me, that’s the same as telling someone. “Hey, you see that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, that's all yours if you work for cavnessHR.” So I’m very cognizant about that. We're currently in the process of switching from a Washington state LLC to a Corp Delaware to start our fundraising. We currently have two paying customers and 8 users on the cavnessHR platform.

So let's talk about the cavnessHR competitors for a minute, and we have a lot of competitors. So in this market, there’s 7200 competitors from one-person HR consultants, to huge corporations like ADP. So one thing that’s interesting, the top 50 companies account for 70% of the revenue. So those 7150 companies account for the rest of the revenue. So we want to go after those one-person HR consultant companies that charge exorbitant rates to their customers. So we’re going after those.

So, of course, we want all companies with less than 49 employees to use cavnessHR as their HR solution But right now we're focused on our customer acquisition strategy on construction companies and constructing related companies in the Tacoma area. So another thing we’ve got to do pretty soon, and we should have done it a long time ago, IS actually cold-calling and cold-emailing our potential customers. We also need to start a weekly HR blog where we cover HR topics for small business; as I said before. We do the weekly blog that has the show notes for the weekly podcast and the weekly blog on updates about how cavnessHR is going.

So at this time, I’d also like to give a shout out to two of my interns, Noah Thomas and Kate Moley. They’re just doing a great job for me and I'm just very well pleased with them. So some background on them and the program, they’re from the University of Puget Sound in a program called RISE. So basically how the program works is it’s a program for sophomores out of UPS. They take a class on entrepreneurship from January to May and they have to find a company to work for during the Summer time. I just think it’s a great program. I just want to thank them for helping me and working for me especially as a non-funded startup, I can’t pay them anything. What I try to do is I try to teach them as much as I can and take them to the many networking opportunities as I can and have them meet as many people as I can, to the best of my ability.

For those of you who started businesses and are in the process of starting a business, you have to know it's just a lot. Building cavnessHR has been a lot of fun. But it’s just a lot and there's always something different every day. Like when my interns were interviewing me, they asked what we're doing in our daily tasks. I said I can't tell you that, it’s like playing Wack-a-Mole over here. Every day is something different. Fom taxes to everything with all our social media which is just a beast, sales, all the networking, some great, some not so great. Figuring out the pricing modules, qualifying customers, doing the different pitch decks for every situation you need.

Market research, marketing, taking care of all the legal items involved, the branding of cavnessHR, the UX/UI and the design of the website. The products and everything involved with that, sales projections, figuring out, once I get funding or bring in enough customers. How much I can afford to pay employees, the cost for that. Google Analytics, it’s just a beast, and definitely everything for that is information overload. How much to fundraise, what potential VCs to reach out to, putting together all the HR products from scratch and services from scratch. Keeping up with all the changes in HR laws, which as I said before, HR laws are different in each case. For example, in the city of Seattle, the minimum wage law is based on the number of employees. In states like Washington, they have a whole bunch of different laws and additional federal laws, whereas in states like Idaho and Texas, basically their laws pretty much match the federal laws.

Now I want to go over what type of company we want cavnessHR to be. I think it’s important for people to know what type of company you want to build. We want to be a transparent company where everyone works remotely. Meaning we don't have to see you from 9:00 to 5:00 at the office every day to know you’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing. Our philosophy is we don’t care if you do it 2:00 in the morning, 2:00 in the afternoon or whenever or if you’re at your house or in the library or if you’re on the beach somewhere. As long as you’re providing high quality work for cavnessHR. We’re also going to provide unlimited PTO to our employees. I think that's a really good benefit we have provided for our employees. For those of you who don't know what unlimited PTO is, Paid Time Off, reach out to me and I’ll explain it to you.

Now, for unlimited PTO, a lot of people say it’s for the employees. But from my point of view, it’s really for the employer. So, for example, suppose you give your people, say, twenty days of vacation a year, and then after three years, that person quits. But never take any vacation. You have to pay them for the 60 days of vacation – that's a pretty big dent in your budget. Of course, you have to stop this, if you say they can only take twenty days a year and they can’t roll over, that’s one way to take care of it. When you have unlimited PTO, basically if they take time off or go to take their personal time anytime they want to, you’re not tracking it. So when they leave, if they didn’t take any vacations, that’s on them. They should’ve taken the time because you gave them the opportunity to take it. That releases a lot of the burden off you as a company because it can potentially take a big dent in your budget; and it gives people the freedom to take time off whenever they want to. If you have any questions about this, just let me know.

So next I want to go over the culture that we want to have at cavnessHR. Treat all people with dignity and respect, be a valued member of the community, add value and help to solve problems daily, take care of employees and customers – I'm big on this; I know a lot of people tell you, “well, you’ve got to take care of your customer first. I'm a firm believer in you have to care of your employees first and then they will take care of the customer for you. Be empathetic, celebrate wins and learn from losses, have fun, believe in yourself and those around you, be transparent, listen to understand and not to answer. Which I think is a big problem with society today everyone wants to listen to answer. You need to listen to understand, improve yourself and help to improve others daily, always be honest, no sugar coating, be on time, communicate well with others, and make a contribution every day.

Also at cavnessHR, we want to have a diverse company. We also want to hire the best person. I know many people tell you can't be a diverse company and hire the best person. Well, here at cavnessHR, we are a firm believer that we can do both. So pivoting back to the values, one thing we're going to do is, when we interview people. One thing we’re going to ask them is tell us which one of our values speaks to you the most and which one you would take off. Because the way we see it if someone wants to work at cavnessHR, and they can’t even go to our website and see our values or look at our values. That’s probably not someone you want at your company. If they can’t take the time to investigate to see what kind of company and values we have.

Also, another thing that makes me kind of cringe when people say is, “we’re going to hire for culture fit or we’re not going to hire this person because they don’t fit our culture.” I think that’s just like a different language of saying we don't want your kind around here or you're not going to mess with us. So at cavnessHR, we want to hire for shared values, not culture fit. Another note I know probably a lot of people disagree with is we want to hire fast and get rid of people fast. On that, I don't mean to hire someone the first time we see them or the first time someone messes up, let them go or hire somebody. If you have the skills and you want to come with us, we're going to do our best to bring you on. Because we want to see if you’ll work out with us and have a good relationship and just work with us.

You can't do that during interviews. We all know during interviews, both people have to bring their best foot forward, so to speak. You don't really know anyone until you work with them for two weeks or a month. But once we see maybe it’s not the best relationship, we’ll agreed to part ways. The way I see it. And as far as interviewing people go. I think another problem a lot of people do is – and I've been guilty of this myself in the past. You know someone’s not working out for you and you just want to keep them on because no one wants to be the bad guy, no one wants tell the person, “hey, you’re not working out.” So it drags on and drags on with a performance improvement plan and all other kinds of stuff. I think I’ve read somewhere that basically says, if it comes in your mind that you should probably let somebody go. You should’ve probably let them go a long time ago. So that's what we're going to try to do. If we do that or not, it remains to be seen. Like I said, no one wants to be the bad guy.

Also, we want to give everyone background checks. One thing about background checks. It’s important to do those to ensure the safety of everybody in your company. Of course, you meet people and you think they're good, you think they're good people. But you never really know what they've done in the past. Now, for example, depending on what the background check is, like that person got a DUI, I really don't care, they’re not driving. But maybe it’s sexual assault or just assault in the past. You might want to be careful not to bring them on. Also, if they had something in the past where it happened twenty years ago, okay, we can move on with that.

So our pay philosophy. We want to use a platform like Payscale. The plan is to pay based on the percentage of the labor market. Because personally I think one reason for the gender pay gap is not really because of the pay gap itself. I think companies do a good job of paying based on skills. The problem I think is this. Two people get hired, one male one female. They both get offered fifty thousand dollars a year. Stats prove that pretty much every time the guy is going to say, “hey, I need more money because 1, 2, 3,” and the company will give him the raise. Let’s say, from fifty thousand to fifty-five thousand. The females usually say, “thank you” and that's it. So they both do a great job and the next year they’ll get a five percent raise – five percent of fifty-five thousand is way more than fifty thousand. Personally, I think that’s what the problem is. So I think if you base the pay based on the labor market, skills, degrees and all the items. It’ll help that out. That's my philosophy.

Some other items we want to do is, the philosophy is, everyone gets a vote at cavnessHR. But your vote won’t count every time. Meaning by this, while everyone’s input is valued, sometimes decisions have to be made and everything we go with is not completely going to do with what you wanted to do.

Also, a quick story I think of how we want to do things here. So, for those of you who don’t know, I’m a big Cowboys fan and Jimmy Johnson was the coach of the Cowboys back in the 90s. So big fan of Cowboys the coach was Jimmy Johnson back in the glory days. There was a training meeting and this player fell asleep. Jimmy Johnson cut him on the spot. So the next day, at the news conference they asked Jimmy Johnson. Why did you cut this person and the person was a the next to last player on the team. He never really played, he was just the 51st or the 52nd player of the team. The reporter asked the coach Johnson, “well, if that was Troy Aikman what would you have done?” Jimmy Johnson answered immediately, “if Troy fell asleep in a training meeting, I would go get a pillow and make sure he's comfortable.” So my take away from this was, if you have someone that you want to get rid of, do it the first opportunity you have. If you have a superstar, do all you can to take care of them. That's what we want to do at cavnessHR.

Another thing at cavnessHR, all we want is your very best effort. We don’t expect you to be perfect; we're not a safety related company. We want you to make mistakes. We want you to fail so we can learn from them. Of course, you make the same mistakes over and over and over and over and over and over again, that might be a problem.

So that's basically the update on the podcast, the cavnessHR and everything we’re doing with that. I think we have a great team at cavnessHR, from our CTO, Jeff Mccoy who’s doing great things for us, Juan Chaves who’s trying to get his Masters in cybersecurity, and everyone who’s supporting cavnessHR – people at the Bunker Labs. All the people who agreed to be on the podcast. I want to take this time to thank you and I want to thank you for everything.

And one last plug, be sure to subscribe, rate and review the cavnessHR Podcast. And if you know anyone who needs HR, that a company with less than 49 people, just make sure you reach out to me.

And once again, thank you for being with us for our 50th podcast. Thank you very much for your time and remember to be great every day.