Nate Shutes: Hello and welcome to the Bootstrapper's Guide to
Logistics, the podcast highlighting founders doing it
the way that doesn't get a lot of attention.
We're here to change that by sharing their stories and
inspiring others to take the leap.
Hisham Khaki: It's a roller coaster ride that you might
ultimately fail.
Nate Shutes: That's when I kind of knew I was on to something.
Hisham Khaki: It was very hard.
Nate Shutes: It truly is building a legacy.
Hisham Khaki: The more life you live, the more wisdom you have.
Nate Shutes: Because we are where we're supposed to be kind
of answering the call.
Don't shoulder entrepreneurship on your own.
I'm your host, nate Shoots.
Let's build something together from the ground up.
Hello everybody, and welcome back to the show.
We are getting started with Season 3 of the Bootstrapper's
Guide to Logistics.
Somebody asked me what's going to be different about Season 3?
And I said absolutely nothing.
We're doing the same thing we've always done, and trying to
shine a light on people building good businesses, and
doing it in a way that is ancient, almost as a simplistic
way of saying it, but bootstrapping is not a new
phenomenon.
It's the way everything used to be started before fundraising
and venture capital and private equity.
Before any of those things were things.
Bootstrapping was a thing, and so I am always excited to get to
share another story, and this week we have my friend, hisham
Khaki, who is the founder and CEO of ShiftSwap in Atlanta.
Hisham, good morning, how are you today?
Hisham Khaki: Good morning, nate , I am doing great.
Thank you so much for having me on the show.
I've loved following your podcast and I know our
relationship goes even before you started the podcast, so I
just feel honored to be on this today.
Nate Shutes: Well, I am grateful to get the chance to unpack
your journey a little bit and maybe we jump right in with.
One of my first questions is you began Happy Gig before Shift
Swap, so this is your second iteration, so why don't we start
with the beginnings of your entrepreneurial journey, when
Happy Gig was the first thing that you were building?
What was it and what was the impetus for starting it in the
first place?
Hisham Khaki: Good question.
So Happy Gig was the first company I think going before
that, just kind of talking about my purpose of helping improve
the lives of warehouse workers, which kind of leads into Happy
Gig.
I think that story is good.
So I began my career working for a large 3PL and actually
started in engineering 3PL and I actually started in engineering
and one of the big things we were doing was rolling out lean
within our distribution centers.
I don't know, did you ever have experience with lean in
warehousing?
Nate Shutes: I do.
I have a black belt myself.
Oh okay, and I'm a process engineer at heart and did some
industrial engineering too, so I think we're cut from the same
cloth.
Did some industrial engineering too.
Hisham Khaki: So I think we're cut from the same cloth.
Exactly so.
We were rolling out lean and, as you all know that understand
lean.
The big piece of lean is employee engagement.
And one of the big things we were doing was rolling out
Kaizen events.
And Kaizen events just to summarize real quick you get
employees that are actually working on the direct processes,
so floor associates.
You take them away from the operation anywhere from one full
day all the way to a week, and they're actually working on
continuous improvement.
So they're not doing any of their day-to-day jobs.
They're literally in a conference room out on the floor
crunching numbers with other engineers and other continuous
improvement people and they're the ones figuring out how to
make their processes better, which obviously makes sense.
And when we'd finish up a Kaizen event, we'd have this kind of
ceremony where we would give the associates that participated
these certificates.
And they were so nice.
There are these framed certificates.
They were signed by executive leadership and we'd hand them
out one by one.
And I'll never forget I was doing a Kaizen event in
McDonough, georgia, actually and I'll never forget the
employee's name.
His name was Dennis Gilpin, and when we handed him his
certificate, I looked over after he grabbed it and he literally
had a tear, like I'm not, it wasn't not being like figurative
, he literally had a tear dropping down.
And I went up to him and I was like Dennis, are you all right?
And he just looked at me and he was a bit choked up and he said
, man, I've been working in warehousing for 25 years and my
wife is going to be so proud of me when I go home with this
certificate.
And man, like, at that moment it just clicked, like it did
something to me where it was like okay, this is my purpose.
My purpose is to find ways to help improve the lives of the
hourly workforce.
And you know, with the 3PL, I eventually went into operations,
because operations you can impact more people's lives.
And then eventually, at some point, I found I could impact
even more people's lives.
And then eventually, at some point, I found I could impact
even more people's lives by starting up Happy Gig, which, in
essence, that company was one of the pioneers of gig labor
within the warehousing industry.
So the premise is you've got great warehouse workers that are
already working, that may be looking for extra hours, and
you've got employers who need flex labor to help deal with
variability, and there was really nothing out there back at
that time that made that connection so founded Happy Gig.
It had a tremendous amount of success with that.
We began in.
2018 is when we began recognizing revenue and then, of
course, through COVID and all that, we saw a lot of success
and then eventually that kind of morphed into ShiftSwap, which I
know we'll get into a little bit more, but that's kind of the
story of Happy Gig and how that started.
Nate Shutes: Well, right off the bat, we're just leaning into
the people side of things, and I love that because I have a deep
fondness for warehousing.
I've been in it for, I'd say, the last eight years.
I've been responsible for at least one site usually many and
it is not a place where cameras typically go.
There's not a lot of podcasts being done inside of a warehouse
and that workforce is generally not getting a lot of
recognition.
And yet they are the ones that do the work and without them,
anything that's on the store shelf at Target or that shows up
to your front doorstep would not be there.
And I think there is a lack of awareness, maybe more than a
lack of appreciation.
I think if folks had a chance to spend time in more warehouses
and see what it actually takes to do that kind of work I work
in furniture, so you know I get to see folks lifting sofas 20
feet up in the air on a cherry picker, and it's a different
stress.
You know there's a physical component to it that most people
assume is all automated.
Nowadays they get an idea of a conveyor type system in an
Amazon facility and they think that that's what warehousing is.
It's not.
That's some of it, of course, but for the most part it is
hardworking men and women getting up at really early hours
4 am, you know, 3.30 am to get to a shift in the dark and
working a very demanding job for long hours on their feet all
day long.
And so when I come across someone like you that has that
same not just awareness but a deep appreciation for the people
that do the work man, like right off the bat, it reminds me
of why we hit it off when we first met.
So I love the heart that you bring to it, and that is the
heart of Lean.
Also is it's about the people, and those folks generally.
Again, don't get asked, hey, what can we do to make your work
easier, more efficient or safer ?
Hisham Khaki: no-transcript.
My first job was actually in cement manufacturing and I was a
process engineer at a large uh cement uh factory and it was a
union.
You know union operation's all I really knew.
I did that for a little less than two years before I went to
the 3pl world and during my interview, um, I was walking
through the warehouse and it's really the first real warehouse
I've been in and I'm interviewing for a logistics
engineer job where my job, my, my role was to make things more
efficient.
And the VP of ops, one of my mentors, he's walking around
with me, interviewing me, and my eyes are huge because I'm
seeing all these people on these clamp trucks and they're
driving backwards and they're moving, like you know, at a very
high speed, they're honking, I mean it's, it's crazy in the
warehouse.
And he looks at me, the VP of ops, uh, and he, his name was
Ralph Price and he goes yeah, sham, and he had a really raspy
voice, shammy.
Tons of opportunity over here, right, you can probably see it
everywhere.
And in the back of my mind I'm like, oh my God, like where's
the opportunity?
These people are all working.
I came from an environment where, unless the factory was in
shutdown, meltdown mode, you know, operators would have their
feet kicked up, just waiting for something wrong to happen.
Nate Shutes: Totally the opposite environment.
Hisham Khaki: Completely, and you're right, like people don't.
Most people have never really been inside of a warehouse other
than a Costco, but a true warehouse.
They've never seen how efficient it really is and how
hard people are working in there and how much weight they're
lifting and the motions they're going through.
It's a lot going through.
Nate Shutes: It's a lot.
It's a wonderful ecosystem is sort of the way I picture the
four walls of a warehouse.
Every warehouse is different.
It could be the identical product, racking, equipment and
everything, but you just add different people and it becomes
a different organism altogether and it evolves and changes over
time and that you can't understand it unless you
experience it.
And observing will get you some insight.
Participating will get you more.
Doing the work will get you the most, and that means being there
for the 6 am stand-up meeting, not just flying in in the
afternoon, and after all, the work is mostly done and
everybody's on their way out.
And again, not a lot of folks have that level of appreciation
for it, and so maybe part of this episode really is going to
just be about highlighting the people, because I know that's a
big reason why you do what you do now is it's obviously you're
in a company to make a profit, but you're also adding elements
to that of I want to do it in a way that's going to have an
impact and be good for others.
So you, beforehand, I asked you a handful of questions and you
shared with me some of your values that you run your
business by and we'll at some point we'll get into what Shift
Swap does too, but this is such fertile ground.
The two that really stood out to me right off the bat were
simplicity and effectiveness, and I'm curious how you landed
on those as two of the values that guide your decision making
that guide your decision making.
Hisham Khaki: Yeah, so simplicity is something I've
always been extremely fond of, because I I've always felt to
actually create something simple is extremely complicated and
you know, no matter what you're looking at in life, whether it's
a person training to be an athlete or someone in the
warehouse trying to pick orders and get it onto a truck, for
whatever reason, lots of people overcomplicate processes and I
still don't understand why a lot of the times, and I just see it
.
Once you start seeing it, you can't stop seeing it in so many
things.
So I've always been kind of obsessed with what's the
simplest way to accomplish the goal at hand, and whether that
goal is creating a software that's actually effective or
creating a process that is efficient.
If you have kind of that goal of simplicity, a lot of, and it
takes a lot of work.
By the way, like that, when you say, create something simple,
it takes a lot of work to get there, but once you do, the
impact usually is very clear and it's tangible, so that I don't
know.
That's always just been something that's been near and
dear to my heart.
Nate Shutes: You seem to have design instincts at your core,
then is what that is telling me?
From engineering processes to visualizing flow, you are a
process designer seeking the shortest path between a and b,
or the most efficient or the most effective.
Is that something that you discovered about yourself as an
adult, or were you?
When you were younger, you shared?
You know that you're a bit of a troublemaker.
Were you always looking for a creative solution to a problem
that maybe didn't fit within the academic world, or has that
always been a part of your DNA?
Hisham Khaki: Yeah, that's an interesting question.
I almost think it started more when I was younger, just
sometimes feeling dumb, to be honest, right when you hear
complex things being thrown at you and you're not grasping it,
you feel a bit dumb, but I always want to figure it out or
find the truth.
So my mind would always go to okay, this is what I'm being
told.
How can I simplify this to where I understand it and then I
can communicate it to other people and my mind will just
break down complexity and figure it out the simplest way
possible.
And maybe I didn't really understand that.
That's how I operated until my professional career, but looking
back as a child, I think that's what it was.
I almost had a fear of looking dumb, so it made me really peel
the layers back in whatever I was trying to understand or look
at and then be able to explain it in a very simple way.
Nate Shutes: Yeah, I hear curiosity in that then as well,
Not accepting something at face value, but wanting to peel it
back and understand it more.
Once you tap into that, you had a bunch of success in your
career.
You had a bunch of success in your career.
You rise to the executive level of a very large and successful
organization and gained a lot of experience, I'm sure on the
people side as well leadership, strategy, management.
And then one day you decide, okay, I'm going to go out on my
own and give up the golden handcuffs, the seeming security
and structure of a large organization, and try to build
something from scratch.
So you must have had aside from wanting to have an impact, you
must have had a very high level of conviction that there was a
need and that you were the right person to solve it.
There was a need and that you were the right person to solve
it.
Then, as happy, gig started to morph into shift swap, you know
and some learning happened in between there that caused you to
choose a slightly different direction.
Can you help me understand what that learning process was of?
Okay, we're going to go this direction slightly different now
and I see a new opportunity that I have equal conviction in,
yeah, and maybe you can explain what shift swap is too.
We're 20 minutes in and I haven't even asked you that.
My bad.
Hisham Khaki: So and I'll get into it a little bit more.
But happy gig is external labor .
So imagine you've got a warehouse, you need some flex
labor and you're basically going to the outside to bring labor
in.
Shift swap creates almost that gig economy or flexibility
within your own operation.
So and we'll we'll get more into exactly what that means.
But you know how it morphed from HappyGig Flex and HappyGig
Flex is still around, by the way but how that really morphed
more into ShiftSwap is.
Iteration is the key to any startup, any business.
I believe the key is always iteration.
Things change so quickly, needs change very quickly.
You've got to be able to iterate in a very smooth,
controlled way.
Um, in a very smooth, controlled way.
So what we started finding was that a lot of like after COVID.
After COVID, after things started stabilizing a little bit
, a lot of our customers started saying this is great, we love
being able to tap into your workforce, but honestly, we need
something for our own workforce .
We're struggling with retaining our workforce and we're
starting to believe that the key really is to figure out how to
retain them, and we're hearing from them that they need a
little bit more flexibility.
So I started listening to that and hearing more and more
customers say that.
And then what happened was one of my largest customers came to
me and said hey, we love Happy Gig, but we have a corporate
initiative.
This is a billion-dollar company.
We have a corporate initiative to create flexibility within our
workforce and we want to explore the opportunity of you
actually building it, your team building it for us, because
everyone loves the user experience of of happy gig.
So we said yes to that and we built it.
And, uh, we built like an MVP rather quickly within a couple
of months, started rolling it out to pilot sites, started
taking feedback and then we just started seeing it work.
Site after site was loving it.
They were immediately seeing improvements in their metrics
and then it just started taking off from there.
And my North Star has always been how can I impact the most
lives?
So whenever I'm thinking about where to pivot to next whether
it was engineering into operations, operations to Happy
Gig, happy Gig to ChefSwap it's always how can I impact more
people's lives?
And I quickly realized ChefSwap can, has the potential to
impact the lives of many more people than Happy Gig Flex, and
that's why it's become our number one focus right now.
Nate Shutes: And can you explain what the primary use of it is?
Hisham Khaki: focus right now and can you explain what the
primary use of it is?
Absolutely so.
It actually it'll work for any hourly workforce and there are
really three, three big values to it.
The first one is um, let's say I'm an associate somewhere and
let's say I don't have childcare this coming Monday morning.
Typically what would happen is I'd wait until Monday morning
and I'd call out sick, like that's.
That's the way it works, especially in warehousing, and
I'll take you know the hits I'll take from an HR perspective.
I'll get you know another point and I get one step closer to
being terminated.
But it's the way I get a little bit of flexibility for myself
and what ends up happening is I'll eventually get terminated.
That's what happens in warehousing.
With shift swap, I would actually be able to post that
portion of my shift and then someone else from another shift
if I have a multi-shift operation can grab that shift
and cover it for me and that feature you've seen a tremendous
amount of reduction in turnover .
The second big value is all of your dynamic shifts.
So any kind of overtime, any kind of voluntary time off, time
off If you have part-time workers.
Traditionally the way we do in warehousing is an ops manager or
a supervisor walks the floor, collects volunteers, or they'll
put a break room sign up sheet or they'll just call mandatory
overtime or mandatory cut to hours, and none of that is good.
That creates problems, lots of problems With ShiftSwap.
All that becomes automated.
I'm an operations manager, I need six people to stay a couple
hours longer, I post that I need six people and it all
happens in a seamless way where everyone gets the notification,
they can grab the shift.
It goes back to leadership for approval.
Good to go.
And the third big value is just messaging.
Messaging so a way to keep in communication with your
workforce, whether it's departments, skill sets,
individuals, the entire team, you know, just a simple way to
communicate with your workforce what's interesting is the
difference between white collar work and blue collar work in the
white collar world generally speaking.
Nate Shutes: Hey, I've got a, my kid has an event at their
school.
I'm going to be a couple of hours late and it's sort of uh,
as long as you get the work done , totally cool.
You have the flexibility.
You know we're not clock watchers, yeah.
And yet the blue collar workforce that's paid hourly
doesn't receive that same flexibility.
And you hit the nail on the head as soon as an hourly
associate gets on the point radar hey, you were 20 minutes
late or something happened.
The relationship changes to one .
It almost feels punitive.
Where they just had something in life happen, it wasn't.
I live in Minnesota.
We have blizzards, you know.
Some people can have a snowblower, some people don't.
That might mean you're shoveling for an extra hour and
of course you'll make acts of God type exceptions for
attendance issues.
But that kind of impact is felt much more severely by hourly
workers and they generally unless it's a unionized
workforce they don't have as much of a voice typically to
stay off of that radar or build processes and policies that are
more accommodating.
So if your goal is so, this is me riffing and just learning as
we're talking here, because this is helpful for me.
I still run a facility today and this is good reminders for
me.
If your goal, oh, go ahead.
Hisham Khaki: No, I mean it, just it.
The white collar workforce had the flexibility even before
COVID to a certain degree.
But after COVID, I mean white collar workforce went through
revolution where the amount of flexibility now is unbelievable.
Right, like most, you know, most companies allow a lot of
flexibility for the white collar workforce and still zero for
the hourly workforce.
I remember being in operations where there were train tracks,
you know, right next to the facility, and if you got caught
behind a train and you were 10 minutes late, you still got.
The points Didn't matter.
So imagine like you're going into your job, nate, and you
have to worry about not getting stuck behind a train to
potentially lose your job.
Like how are you able to focus on anything else other than that
?
Nate Shutes: And then how do you not feel that that's somehow
unfair and again punitive?
I recall in the beginnings of COVID the very, very early days
where all of a sudden everything started shutting down and we
have hindsight now to know kind of the severity of what COVID
turned out to be.
But in the moment nobody knew, everybody was afraid and a bunch
of folks generally were like I'm not going into the office,
I'm staying home, I don't have a choice, you can't do
warehousing remotely, and so there was a big disparity in how
risk was absorbed in the population.
And again, I'm going specifically to that period
where none of us knew what was happening.
And I recall being in a facility at the end of the day
and we had bleach and all of these cleaning supplies and we
had not full gear on but we were like disinfecting the soda pop
machine and wiping down sinks and all the pack stations and
the mouses at the ship station and we didn't know if we were
gonna, you know, get really, really sick and have to go to
the hospital.
Meanwhile a whole other group of people was just tucked away
safely at home.
And it really does highlight the differences of why one rule
can't apply effectively to everybody, and then how you do
need to adapt to, in this case, who your customers are and who
the people are that you're trying to impact their lives.
How do you measure how much impact you're having?
Hisham Khaki: Yeah, great question.
So the beauty of ShiftSwap is that it's literally improving
the lives of the workers that are registered with ShiftSwap
and are using it and at the same time, it's helping the
employer's bottom line.
It's like it's a win-win.
So, you know, if you pitch something to a traditional
warehousing company and it's just pitched as hey, this is
going to make your employees' lives better, their first
question is going to be well, what's?
You know, is this going to cost me more?
You know, is it going to inflate the cost per unit?
What's going to happen?
So when you find something that really helps employees and, at
the same time, helps the company's bottom line, that's
when you've really got something .
And the way, the way we measure our impact for employers is
simple it's reduction in turnover, reduction in
absenteeism and reduction in cost per unit.
So those three things are used from the employer's perspective
to justify it.
And then the associate's perspective.
I mean, of course, for me it's number of users.
Our goal in the next few years is to literally impact the lives
of a million hourly associates.
That's where we want to get to.
So that's, that's our high level number metric of how many
lives we're impacting.
But then from there, you just see how many, how many hours
people are able to take off without getting pointed, how
many times people are able to give up a portion of their shift
to take care of something at home.
How many times am I able to grab overtime or a little bit of
extra money to support my family?
So there's many, many different things.
Nate Shutes: When you think of a million people.
It's too big of a number to actually comprehend A million
people in one place at one time.
There are a handful of concerts .
I think Garth Brooks in New York in the 90s.
They said that he had a million people at his concert, or
something like that.
And so we like those really big numbers, but even smaller
numbers.
If you make a post on LinkedIn, for example, and it gets 500
impressions, somebody would be like, oh, it's only 500.
It's not that big of a deal.
You know how many people 500 people is.
It would fill up your local high school gym that you go to a
basketball game.
Every single seat would be completely full, packed to the
gills.
And that's 500 people.
And it's hard to imagine large numbers.
So when you say something like hey, if you've got 1000 users,
or you've got five or 10,000 users and you putivities or
something, and every single one of them was a user of yours, do
you ever just imagine?
Because it's just a number on a screen sometimes, but it's not,
that's an actual person.
Hisham Khaki: Yeah, I always think that way actually, and
it's funny you refer to that, because I was reading something
last night and I can't remember where I was reading or what it
was, but it and I don't even know if it's true, so it may not
be true to ever play since 18, whatever, they won't even fill
up one stadium.
And I again, I don't know if that's true, but uh, it was.
You know, it was giving all the numbers.
It said something like if you took every player since 1887 or
whenever major league baseball started, it would account.
It would be like, you know, 40,000 people that wouldn't even
fit in one stadium.
That's generally packed.
So, yeah, whenever I think about any numbers and you know
impressions or users, you always start thinking of, like, you
know, I'm, I'm in this room right now and it feels packed
and there's only 300 people in here.
So imagine what 3 000 people in here feel like.
Nate Shutes: So if you work your way towards a million I mean,
that is such a theoretical number how do you, as an
entrepreneur, stay focused on what you can do today to make
the number bigger, while having this really ambitious goal way
off in the future?
That's going to take a thousand , while having this really
ambitious goal way off in the future, that's going to take a
thousand small decisions over and over and over.
How do you stay motivated in the long-term nature of what it
is that you're building?
Hisham Khaki: Yeah, I think what always keeps me motivated is
the crazy big goal.
To be motivated is the crazy big goal, and then you have to
have that, just so you know what you're working towards and that
you really can make a gigantic impact.
But then if you don't, if you're a founder or you're
leading a big business and you're not able to break that
down into realistic short-term goals, then you're you're never.
I mean you're just going to burn yourself out and feel like
you're never doing enough.
So you've got to set realistic goals, whether they're, you know
, monthly or quarterly.
You know you at least need quarterly.
I think that's the minimum.
Um, you've got to have quarterly goals that are that you can
truly believe in right, that you can actually see it and you can
create a plan to get there.
You know, if I said, hey, we're going to get to a million users
by the end of this year, that's there's.
No, I don't believe that.
I don't believe it yet, but I do believe we can get to our
current goal that we're aimed at at, and just that belief will
get me there and then that'll unlock more belief and I think
that's that's kind of like the process.
You've got to truly believe it.
You get there and you have to understand that once you get
somewhere, it'll unlock further beliefs.
Nate Shutes: I dig that.
What are you most excited about right now?
What are you most?
Hisham Khaki: excited about right now.
Um, I just I love, I love the simplicity of shift swap.
I love, I'm super excited that we were able to kind of pivot
towards it.
We've literally had zero attrition from customers
starting it to leaving it Like it just doesn't happen.
So the impact is there, people love it.
The experience is great.
So it's just really exciting to see something that works and is
truly having an impact.
With Happy Gig Flex, that was tough, that was trying to
implement a different thought process for a lot of employers
out there and what we'd see a lot is that we were losing
almost as many clients as we were gaining every year, and
it's demoralizing.
It wasn't for lack of performance on our end, it was
just companies were using us as a band-aid because they had a
shortage of labor and once they were able to get staffed up, you
know they would stop using us.
So whenever year you're looking back, you're like oh, you know,
we got 25 new customers this past year but we lost 20
demoralizing, right.
But having a platform that really is sticky and is
constantly improving value, learning curve, change curve is
low.
I think that's what I'm most excited about.
Nate Shutes: I'm also imagining the warehouse manager that has
the experience of.
They have to go around and ask for volunteers for a Saturday
shift and they've got to do the attendance write-up and all of
that and that's just kind of part of their normal.
And then you have somebody who's on your platform and that low
level friction is all gone and they're spending their time on
more strategy or more kaizen events or people development,
etc.
So I I don't I'm not surprised at all to hear you say you have
zero percent attrition, because the, the people that are stuck
in the old way can't imagine that there's a solution for the
new way.
And then, once they get there that they are probably saying to
themselves man, why didn't we do this years ago?
I didn't know that there could be a solution to this.
And, going back to this idea of simplicity and lean, you have
redesigned an entire process and removed all the waste from it.
That waste used to be walking and talking and documentation on
attendance, and now it is streamlined, it's efficient.
Do you find joy in that Of knowing you've applied all of
your engineering thinking and your care for people into
something that, if it's going, really really well, nobody even
notices.
Hisham Khaki: It makes me so happy.
It makes me so happy.
I had a customer tell me, um, this is probably about a year
ago, and this was a three PL customer, and they were telling
me that they were on a phone call with their customer, which
their customer huge, you know, fortune, probably 100 company
and this Fortune 100 company is on a call with all of their
three PLs managing all their distribution centers across the
country and they were having some sort of an emergency.
And they were having some sort of an emergency and they're
telling all their three pls hey, you know, you've, you have got
to get so-and-so product out the door, you know, by tomorrow
evening or whatever it was.
And we strongly recommend you get an extra 20 people to work
overtime.
I'm making up numbers, but it's something like that.
You know, you get an extra number of people, um, to work
overtime.
I'm making up numbers, but it was something like that.
You know, you get an extra number of people to work in
order to make this happen.
And our customer, of course, the general manager, right away he
gets on shift swap and he posts the shifts and within minutes,
if they're all filled, and he speaks up.
Right, I can't remember what happened, but on this call with
this huge company, it gets out that, hey, we've already filled
all the shifts.
And they were like, what, how did you do that?
Did you already send your supervisors to walk the floor?
You already put a break room sign up sheet?
What did you do?
And he's like, oh, we've got the system that does it
automatically.
And he's like, oh, we've got the system that does it
automatically.
And it was like, when I heard that story, it's just like the
values of mine you were talking about earlier.
That makes me so happy.
Nate Shutes: Just being effective and efficient at
physical work.
Yeah, it is simple stuff, but you hit the nail on the head so
well that we overcomplicate it.
That is our nature is to overcomplicate it, and so this
struggle towards a simpler solution that is both cost
effective and good for the bottom line and good for the
people, no wonder you're having fun.
No wonder you're having fun, no wonder you're having success.
Um, I can keep talking to you about this for hours.
Now I just want to do my own.
Let's.
Let's blueprint out some workflows, and I need to get
back in and redo some racking in a facility now, because that's
I love that part of fulfillment myself, and so it's always good
to be able to talk shop with somebody who is clearly a pro at
it and has that same level of love for the subject matter.
Hisham Khaki: Yeah, I love it, but what makes it really work is
our developers, our development team.
I have no clue how to code anything.
I don't know anything about computer science.
I struggled in college with the couple classes I took and that
was actually one of my biggest fears starting up a technology
company.
It was like what?
Nate Shutes: Understandable.
Hisham Khaki: I don't know how I'm going to do this, but I've
got the idea.
But our development team, they're incredible and you just
give them the vision and they create the most streamlined
experience ever since the Happy Gig Flex days and they've just
gotten better and better and stronger in making that vision a
reality.
So I love it and I love how I get to watch these incredible
computer science engineers develop this stuff and be
experts in their subject matter.
Yeah, yeah, they love seeing how many people they're
impacting.
It's fun all around.
Nate Shutes: Well, I dig it.
I shared this with you before.
But I never know where we're going to go in a conversation,
because I am fascinated by everyone's journeys and the
turns that they take and the things that motivate them and
the deep why behind what they're building.
And it's been seven and a half-ish years for you on this
run.
I can't wait to see what the next stretch of the road looks
like for you.
I have no doubt you're going to continue to grow and be
successful.
We have to stay in touch.
I want to hear an update from you in a year on the latest
goings on with ShiftSwap and in the meantime, just know that
we're all rooting for you, thank you, Nate.
Hisham Khaki: Yeah, you've been a huge supporter ever since we
met.
You've been a huge supporter ever since we met.
When was?
I think we met three, four years ago, probably.
Yeah, I love, I've loved watching your journey as well.
Just, I mean, you do so much from you know, even last time we
were talking, you noticed that the furniture in my office came
from your facility, right.
So you make all that happen and you do this really, really cool
thing where you're getting the stories of founders out there
for other people to hear, because it's daunting, like
being a founder, especially bootstrap, I mean, everything is
challenging, right, even if you raise a bunch of money, that
has its own problems, but you focused on bootstrappers.
Uh, it's really cool that you're getting people's story
out there and I applaud you for doing it.
Nate Shutes: Thank you, I appreciate that and I receive it
in the spirit in which you shared it.
So thank you again for sharing your story today and we will
catch up soon, my friend.
Hisham Khaki: All right, buddy.
Thank you so much Nate.
Nate Shutes: Thanks for listening to another episode of
the Bootstrappers Guide to Logistics, and a special thank
you to our sponsors and the team behind the scenes who make it
all possible.
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