Scaling With People
Tired of spinning your startup wheels but never gaining traction? Buckle up, founders and CEOs, because this podcast is your rocket fuel to profitability! Every week, we ignite explosive conversations with bold-faced founders, brainy experts, and even a few out-of-this-world vendors. Get ready to crack the code on growth, master employee engagement, and blast through your scaling goals. We’re talking real-world strategies, actionable tips, and perspectives that’ll make your business do a cosmic dance. So, strap in and prepare for lift-off!
Scaling With People
Brains Over Buttons with Jason Bryll
What if you stopped selling features and started winning on outcomes? We sit down with founder Jason Bryll to unpack the plays that turned a one-person consultancy into a high-performance services engine built on trust, speed, and rock-solid systems. From healthcare data trenches to global team leadership, Jason shares the unvarnished moves that drive compounding growth without the chaos.
We start with the founder shift: hire earlier than feels comfortable, build around ownership, and accept the short-term income flatline to unlock long-term scale. Jason explains how tight salary bands, margin-aware pricing, and disciplined ops saved his company from cash whiplash. Then comes the big pivot—ditching heavy implementation fees for a lower entry point and a higher, predictable monthly retainer. That single change reduced friction, boosted forecasting, and delivered what clients actually want: rapid iteration without the upsell dance.
The heart of the playbook is focus and quality. Jason narrowed services to data warehousing, BI reporting, and analytics, then codified delivery with SOPs, Asana-driven workflows, and video training. This made speed a true differentiator—faster time to value with consistent standards. Layer in a US–India model with monthly culture touchpoints and you get three wins at once: 24-hour progress, approachable pricing, and meaningful wages for a growing global team. The kicker? Zero churn among clients on the recurring model, thanks to steady partnership and fewer barriers to making progress.
If you’re building a services firm—or stuck chasing product market fit with no payoff—this conversation is a blueprint. You’ll hear how to hire for trust over resumes, define the customer outcome that matters most, and transform expertise into repeatable assets that scale. Subscribe for more bold, unfiltered strategies, share this with a founder who needs it, and drop your biggest bottleneck—we’ll tackle it in a future show.
Welcome to Skilling with People, your weekly playbook for turning chaos into compounding growth. Each week we go under the hood with battle test experts in all areas of business, from marketing to sales, operating finance, and people, plus product and leadership, to unpack the plays, numbers, and systems that turn chaos into compounding growth. Learn straight from founders and experts who've done it and continue to do it successfully. There's zero fluff, just moves that you can still immediately. This podcast is brought to you by Guide to HR, human expertise, AI-powered impact. Welcome everyone to today's Scaling with People podcast. I'm Guinevere Cruy, your host and founder and CEO to Guide to HR. So, what happens when you ditch the software pitch and build a business that competes on your brains, not buttons? On this episode of Scaling with People, we're talking to Jason Brill, who is a powerhouse founder who scaled a global services team by betting big on the outcomes and not features. Jason breaks down how his company fused US-based client leads with global analysts to create a high performance engine and why hiring for trust and ownership beats hiring for resumes every time. If you're building a services firm or just tired of chasing product market fit with no payout, this one's a masterclass in scaling with purpose. Welcome, Jason. So excited to have you on today's podcast. And I can't wait to dive in. Before we do, tell the audience a little bit about yourself.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, absolutely. Uh and I'm it's a pleasure to be on it. I mean, I'm a big reason why I wanted to talk today is to help founders who don't always have that advisory support, especially somebody who's been through the ranks. So my background, I am a career healthcare consultant, primarily on the business side of healthcare, helping process insurance claims, um, patient schedules, practice optimization and workflows, um, so the non-clinical features and functions. Um, I founded Parable Associates after you know two decades of consulting in uh 2018. And uh what we focus on is really building the data and analytics solutions so that way the the employees of the practice, the in the finance department and the practice operations department, uh the way that I view it is we can help them be the best selves that they can be professionally. So kind of like how Batman's better with the utility belt, right? James Bond with his fancy watches and cars with missiles, right? So like we're trying to give them the tools they need to be successful in their roles.
SPEAKER_01:I love that analogy. That's awesome. And so as a founder yourself, I'm gonna put you on the hot seat for a minute here. Could you share a moment uh our time, a lesson learned with our audience, maybe that they can learn from and if they get into a similar situation, they can remember your words and be like, I'm gonna go the left way, not the right way, and fall in that hole or that trap.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, there's there's um there's a few different points along the way that I could cite. And from the highest level, what I would say is um as a founder, you you have to be able to take the leap and take the risk, especially early on if you start having clients. Um, what I did for me and what helped me grow my practice is rather than pad my own pocket, I started hiring employees. Um, and so that was a major lesson learned for me was you can't do it all. And you, you know, if you're starting out, you really uh in order to grow, you have to bring people in to help do it. You can't do it alone. Um, and and one of the things that I found from that experience, and it's a massive risk, by the way, hiring a person, figuring out how to hide a hire a person, how to process payroll and do taxes and everything, especially out of the gate when you're not funded or backed by a larger entity, it's really hard. But figuring it out is important because what I found was the individuals I was bringing in were ultimately smarter than me at pieces of this business. And not only was I able to, you know, exit that part of the work um comfortably and it was in safe hands, but it it went off like a rocket. And so, from a technology standpoint, um, we're significantly better off um than if I was doing all the tech myself and uh and other facets of the business as well, very process-oriented director of operations. So um, you know, you have to get a team built behind you. You have to take the risk, have to take the lead. And ultimately, that that net income stream for you might be flat until it starts to go. And then as a team, it's just, you know, you can build a business on top of it.
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely. You're basically taking a lifestyle, you're the only person, you only have so much time in a day. You can't I haven't found anyone that's learned how to make more hours than 24 in a day. So if you want to scale and become an actual business, especially in the services side of the house, you have to have people and bring it on with you. And you know, if you ever need help with that payroll or benefits or anything like that, that's exactly what I do, right? But this isn't about that. Uh, so I appreciate that. But I agree, like as a founder, sometimes we do get stuck in we got to do it all, we have to, or I want to, or this is how it has to be because I'm the owner or I'm the founder of the business. But having that like aha moment that you can't do it all, you shouldn't do it all, really, is like it's not that you can't. I mean, maybe you could, but you shouldn't, right? And and I remember earlier on in my career of of my business realizing that like I was getting caught in doing something I thought was fun, but then kind of realizing this isn't really moving the needle. And so constantly asking myself, am I as the founder or the CEO, the builder of this business, working on the right thing to go to that next level, to hit the goals I've created for myself. Um so constantly thinking that, you know, you could get stuck in something that's your comfort zone or that you enjoy doing because it's creative and you've never done it before and you want to learn more about it. But is that where you should be spending your time?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Yeah. No, it's it's and there's so like here's another thing too, one that is more of a painful lesson learned, which was um as I started to hire people, I had some some big wins and we had some great hires and it was working out really, really well. And then I started to get a little loose in the financial part of it, and I was probably finding resources that were too expensive for me at the time, thinking, hey, this will pay off. Um, and that was a bit of a lesson learned because it it created a spiral where we weren't really able to get ahead. We were just trying to keep um ends met. Um and so what I would say is do your due diligence on what the market's like for certain salaries and positions, be very realistic and operate within your means. Do the financial analysis of what you can afford because these individuals who are interviewing to work with you, um, they are this is their life, this is their career, this is how they you know pay their bills and for their kids' you know, soccer program and things like that. And so it's something that I take very seriously. And as a founder, you are going to be the last one paid. That's just how it should be and how it is if you're taking on that risk. So I wasn't as tight on that. And now we've built into our pricing model um some expected margin-based um contracts. And so, like we we kind of know what we pay people and what our salary bans are, and we stick to those salary bans. That was too loose years ago. Um, and we remedied all that, and it's been uh a significant change there.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and and knowing what you can afford, right? And then finding the skill sets that fit within that and being open to where that skill set might be. Um, so many founders I talk to are like, oh, I need it to be in this, in like in my city or in this state or um in the time zone. And if you could kind of open that up, loosen that up a little bit, there is amazing talent around the world. And obviously, dealing with working with someone who might be like, you know, 12 hours ahead of you or behind you is a little bit challenging, but uh, you know, focusing on where you can find the talent that fits your skill set, uh it's out there for sure.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Good point about the global side of it. That's that's a that's in as of 2023, that's how we started expanding our team. So again, from 18 to 23, it was all US-based staffing. Um, but then we started um a relationship with uh hiring three employees at first based out of India that some of my team members already knew and had worked with at prior employers. And we had such great success with it that we've expanded that team. Um, I was just on a call once a month for culture reasons and so on. I'll do a call once a month early in the morning, and we call it our coffee tea happy hour. And I we talk about traditions in India, we talk about things we're doing in the States. Um, and so I was on that call and I was you know a little taken aback because there were 16 people on the call, not everybody joins. And so we went from three people to um what will soon be probably 25 or 30 FTEs in India. Wow, yeah, and it's it's congratulations. Yeah, it's a it's a major shift, but on the economic side, it's really a win-win because we're able to one, uh it's a win-win-win, actually, if you include our clients in the mix, because we can have 24-hour support, we can have approachable um prices to our customers, and we pay a healthy wage for for those that live in India. Um, and and that was a real catalyst point for our business being on a technical implementation um side. The talent there is fantastic.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:One quick point, too, for people who may not know this. Uh, I learned this on the call today. Um, at schools in India, the students are learning two to three languages as well as two to three different alphabets. So we were looking at like, you know, they you learn the English, like how we write our own names, and then they have their own symbols for their own alphabet in Hindi. And yeah, it's like these people are unbelievably smart and sharp and talented. Um, and absolutely, if you have a virtual business or a virtual service business like I do, you you have to consider um expanding into a global talent.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And and and speaking of like, you know, how you make it a win-win-win for your customers, like that's one of the things that I learned really quickly on was as I started to grow my business. Again, I there's only so many hours. I started getting a bunch of clients, and I'm like, okay, I can't. I had one client that wanted me to work 40 hours. I was like, I I can't, I already have three other clients, but here's what I can do. I can give you 40 hours, just not 100% of my time. I'll bring in a director level. And by the way, that director level is cheaper. So here's what we're gonna do. And so he was the CEO, was like floored and super excited about it because I actually was below his budget of what he wanted to spend, still giving him the 40 hours. He gets the expertise of me, but he gets a little bit cheaper of the implementation of the activities, right? And um, so and that actually expanded. He uh there was so much that needed to be done. We actually I brought in two more generalists, I brought in a couple of recruiters, I brought in a coordinators to get the whole team kind of up and running, and then we started phasing everybody out. But you know, it's uh if you're a services business, you have to figure out what that model looks like that's gonna be a win for you where you're getting a little bit of margin, right? You're still uh paying your people at a great rate and they're happy, and you're making your clients happy because you're coming in probably at a cheaper rate than someone who might be just themselves offering, you know, I always say, don't hire me the at the executive level to write a handbook for you. Like that's ridiculous. That is a waste of money. Let me get my journalist to do it, and then I'll validate and make sure strategy-wise, it fits your company culture and everything like that. So um, yeah, I I just love that you were also calling it out.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it's and and here's one thing to not do in that process is to purely make it about uh margin and cost. Um, you have to also make it about quality. So as you do that, that hiring um, that you're you're ultimately thinking about the the end consumer. They're not gonna care if you're the cheapest, you know, um service provider out there if you aren't providing the quality that they demand or exceeding the quality uh expectations. And so for us, like that was uh it's not even a lesson learned. We kind of came in knowing that. And so we had a lot of processes built already. Um, things we use a project management tool called Asana. And so we have a lot of things that we've basically built the standard deployment structures and project structures and ticketing systems, and we layered that in to uh to that type of a you know, to a global talent um pool. So we already had those things in place of quality was never a question or a concern. Um, so don't make global expansion based on cost alone. And if you're listening, like I could save all this money, you have to still do your extreme due diligence on your hiring process and have processes for those team members because you may be in different time zones. Have processes documented and established already. Video tutorials, we do a lot of video tutorials too. Um, but have do the due diligence.
SPEAKER_01:It's easy to do with AI now, right? There's so many tools out there that will take your written document, make it a video for you as well.
SPEAKER_00:Yep, we do it all the time.
SPEAKER_01:And that's so smart because also another thing is you're building a business, you don't want to lose your brand, your voice, right? And what your your business is all about. And so you need to make sure that you have that content, that structure, those processes in place, so that when you have three people going out to different clients, they're those three, those clients are all getting the same feeling of your brand and your voice because they're trained and running the same.
SPEAKER_00:Absolutely.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, that's awesome. So, okay, I probably could dive in a little bit more to that, but I want to jump in and talk about um, you know, scaling the professional services. We did start talking about the global team, but building that high performance, blended team with US-based clients, global talent. Um, you know, we started talking a little bit about that. What other things could you share with the audience that you are doing or that you think are uh, you know, you should really be thinking about this as you're building your business?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. So we are a service business, and I know a lot of people out there um are starting services businesses are probably like I if I was to categorize what's the easiest thing to start its service business, because if you're really good at something, well, just sell your time for it. Um, so another thing to think about if you're in the early stages is you probably are selling, you know, hours for money and time for money. Um, but a transition that I went through was going through the process of documentation. Like I said, we now have processes, we have implementation books, we have handbooks, um, things that really are like an asset to the business of Parable and make us, you know, stronger in terms of the quality of the output, um having BI tools that are up and running, reporting and analytics, data warehousing, um, to the point that we could, you know, for especially for systems we use all the time, we could slap a guarantee on there, like, hey, we're gonna get this up and running. Um, and the speed. Speed is critical.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Speed is like the number one reason I think why people uh contract with parable is because the speed to implementation is is bar none.
SPEAKER_01:Um so that'd be a differentiator, is what I'm hearing, right?
SPEAKER_00:Absolutely. Yeah. So if you think about alternatives, right? So like compare if you're in a service business and you're thinking about like, well, how do I apply this to my own, you know, figure out what the the consumer, maybe it's speed, maybe it's quality. Um, you know, if you're in like landscaping or something, like so quality and artistic design and so on may be all part of it. Maybe it's a holistic solution, we do everything. Um, for us, it was putting the blinders on and saying this is what we do the best at. And so for us, it was very much I narrowed it down and said, um, all we're doing is data warehousing and BI reporting and analytics. Um, we played with the idea of having um a direct-to-consumer training platform to help develop new analysts. We've essentially uh used that internally now for training our own staff. And then we also played with the idea of like automation. We hear about RPA and AI automations. We did some of that, but really we're we're using it only as it pertains to getting data into the warehouse. Um, so we still we've taken the pieces of those, but we've said now we're actually supporting the core business with it. Um so with that being said, as a service, we had to narrow our focus down and become really hyper-focused on that and then uh be the best and the fastest at it. That's what our consumer base is asking for with speed. And so now we have you know implementation timelines that ultimately we're selling into. Um and one of the other lessons that I learned is we used to charge a lot for implementation and then have a ramp down for maintenance. Um, and we've gone away from that model because what happened was we created a new friction point. So we had this implementation fee, and now every time they wanted custom development or some time and attention, we had this upsell, you know, back and forth, negotiate a small project. And what we've done is we've said, look, as a business, you are always changing and always complex. And so in a B2B environment, we want to make sure we're there for you. We want you to send in a question, a ticket, a new idea, and we want to iterate on it right away without the friction of this piece. So what we've done is we've actually lowered our entry point. So there isn't this implementation fee that's a higher dollar item, and we've just increased our our flat fee for every month for our data team and our data team size that we work with these in these practices. And that's been transformational.
SPEAKER_01:Um that is so smart because that gives you consistent reoccurring revenue, not this like roller coaster of implementation spees, our revenue's up this month. Oh, we don't have an implementation this month. We're you know, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:We lived it.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:We lived it. Yeah. We've been through some painful times with it. We actually had to uh at one point, um, we did have to go through a riff um a couple years ago. And um, because of that, because we had a very front-loaded, very intense um deployment, you know, multiple going on at once, and then that revenue started dropping down too quickly, and we thought we'd have more implementations. Um, and we were in the middle of you know, creating a dozen different proposals for projects, not having that steady, forecastable stream of income. So that's why we made the switch. We've been through the pain point. I guarantee you, if you do that model, you will not have the perfect way to time out those implementations to flatten your revenue.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. That is super smart. Because I know I've I've worked with some founders that that's the struggle bus, right? Is that that roller coaster ride. And especially if you're getting into a point where you are like already uh seed at your series A or B, you know, you you understand the struggle in regards to the investors too, like talking through why your revenue is up and down and how are you going to make it more consistent and more reoccurring that the investor, if you're you're creating a business that is more investable, right? Like that even a word, I don't even know, but you're your higher likelihood of getting more money when you go out to invest because people see you as a brand that's going to be like, okay, this is going somewhere. I'm likely, if all it spells, get my money back, but likely, you know, hopefully two times, 10 times, whatever it might be.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. So yeah, that's the concept of ARR annual recurring revenue that then you can take you can take what's traditionally a SaaS metric, software as a service metric, in terms of how many users and what's the monthly licensing, and then we annualize it so we can see how big the business is at any point in time. We can do the same thing here at my company, Parable, because we have our contracts that are renewing contracts, they are these fixed monthly rates, they're, you know, we have that model now instead of project to project that's not predictable. And investors love predictability. But the other thing, too, is for those that are listening and saying, like, yeah, that's great for you and it's great for potential investors, but what about the consumer? We've we've had 0% churn on any of the customers that are in this recurring model. And the reason is because in the process of building this relationship, they know they have this support and coverage and service and this partnership with somebody. They don't have that point of friction anymore where they're constantly selling and reselling and reselling. Um, and we're there for them. And so it's it's actually been from a service level fantastic for them as well. These are all practices that are typically trying to grow and scale, add providers, new locations, and so on. And uh it's been beneficial for them as well. We can read and react to their business. Um, so no, I I wouldn't say like, hey, you know, what about this sounds like a bad deal for for one person involved with the consumer, but it's not. Like they're they're still our clients.
SPEAKER_01:I think you hit it too. As a services provider, the key is having that mindset of diving in and really understanding what the pain points are, getting to that root cause to then be able to say, here's how we can help you, here's how we can solve this for you. Because if you're just trying to solve that like surface level uh situation, you're not really gonna be able to support the business and the your client the way that they really need to. But if you can dive in and see that and be problem solvers, that's that's where I think you can have your differentiator as a business too.
SPEAKER_00:Yep, absolutely.
SPEAKER_01:Well, Jason, I I could probably talk about this with you all day long because I'm also a service provider, so I feel the pain. I know the growth opportunities, and so I I love it. But as we wrap up today, is there any last final thoughts or tips or tricks or lessons learned you'd like to share with the audience?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I I I think the the biggest thing to share with those that are early stage founders is um you have to be patient and you have to be persistent. And that may mean sleepless nights, it may mean working on weekends, but in order to be a successful founder, um, these are the things that are absolutely required. It took me five years before we actually hit a monumental moment that started taking the business up. So it took many years of patience um to kind of start ramping into that 20, 30, 40, 50 FTEs that we're uh expected to move into right now.
SPEAKER_01:Well, awesome. Thank you so much, Jason. I really appreciate your time and sharing all of your wisdom of what you've been your pain points of growing your business. And for those that have joined us today, I hope you took some great notes, uh, great, learned a lot of great things. If you like the podcast, like it, add comments. We would love to interact with you, share it with your network, and be sure to follow us. And uh, we'll get all Jason's information in the information below as well if you want to connect with him and join us on our next podcast. Thanks so much, everyone.
SPEAKER_00:Thanks for your time.
SPEAKER_01:That's a wrap for today's episode of Scaling with People. If you got value from this conversation, do me a favor, share it with someone building something big. And hey, I'd love to hear your take. Drop a comment, shoot me a message, or start a conversation. And don't forget to subscribe so you never miss the bold, unfiltered strategies we drop every week. I'm Gwynberg Crury, founder and CEO of Guide2HR, where we help high growth companies scale smart with people for strategies and AI powered systems that don't just keep up, they lead. If you're building fast and want your HR to move faster, head to guide2hr.com and let's talk. And remember, scale isn't just about speed, it's about people. Until next time, have a great one.
