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.
Nate Shutes: 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.
Nate Shutes: Don't shoulder entrepreneurship on your own.
Nate Shutes: I'm your host, nate Shoots.
Nate Shutes: Let's build something together from the ground up.
Nate Shutes: Hello everybody, and welcome back to the show.
Nate Shutes: We are getting started with Season 3 of the Bootstrapper's Guide to Logistics.
Nate Shutes: Somebody asked me what's going to be different about Season 3?
Nate Shutes: And I said absolutely nothing.
Nate Shutes: 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.
Nate Shutes: It's the way everything used to be started before fundraising and venture capital and private equity.
Nate Shutes: Before any of those things were things.
Nate Shutes: 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.
Nate Shutes: Hisham, good morning, how are you today?
Hisham Khaki: Good morning, nate, I am doing great.
Hisham Khaki: Thank you so much for having me on the show.
Hisham Khaki: 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.
Nate Shutes: 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?
Nate Shutes: What was it and what was the impetus for starting it in the first place?
Hisham Khaki: Good question.
Hisham Khaki: 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.
Hisham Khaki: I think that story is good.
Hisham Khaki: 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.
Hisham Khaki: I don't know, did you ever have experience with lean in warehousing?
Nate Shutes: I do.
Nate Shutes: I have a black belt myself.
Nate Shutes: 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.
Nate Shutes: Did some industrial engineering too.
Hisham Khaki: So I think we're cut from the same cloth.
Hisham Khaki: Exactly so.
Hisham Khaki: We were rolling out lean and, as you all know that understand lean.
Hisham Khaki: The big piece of lean is employee engagement.
Hisham Khaki: And one of the big things we were doing was rolling out Kaizen events.
Hisham Khaki: And Kaizen events just to summarize real quick you get employees that are actually working on the direct processes, so floor associates.
Hisham Khaki: 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.
Hisham Khaki: So they're not doing any of their day-to-day jobs.
Hisham Khaki: 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.
Hisham Khaki: 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.
Hisham Khaki: And they were so nice.
Hisham Khaki: There are these framed certificates.
Hisham Khaki: They were signed by executive leadership and we'd hand them out one by one.
Hisham Khaki: And I'll never forget I was doing a Kaizen event in McDonough, georgia, actually and I'll never forget the employee's name.
Hisham Khaki: 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.
Hisham Khaki: And I went up to him and I was like Dennis, are you all right?
Hisham Khaki: 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.
Hisham Khaki: And man, like, at that moment it just clicked, like it did something to me where it was like okay, this is my purpose.
Hisham Khaki: My purpose is to find ways to help improve the lives of the hourly workforce.
Hisham Khaki: And you know, with the 3PL, I eventually went into operations, because operations you can impact more people's lives.
Hisham Khaki: And then eventually, at some point, I found I could impact even more people's lives.
Hisham Khaki: 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.
Hisham Khaki: 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.
Hisham Khaki: It had a tremendous amount of success with that.
Hisham Khaki: We began in.
Hisham Khaki: 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.
Nate Shutes: I've been in it for, I'd say, the last eight years.
Nate Shutes: I've been responsible for at least one site usually many and it is not a place where cameras typically go.
Nate Shutes: There's not a lot of podcasts being done inside of a warehouse and that workforce is generally not getting a lot of recognition.
Nate Shutes: 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.
Nate Shutes: And I think there is a lack of awareness, maybe more than a lack of appreciation.
Nate Shutes: 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.
Nate Shutes: You know there's a physical component to it that most people assume is all automated.
Nate Shutes: Nowadays they get an idea of a conveyor type system in an Amazon facility and they think that that's what warehousing is.
Nate Shutes: It's not.
Nate Shutes: 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.
Nate Shutes: 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.
Nate Shutes: So I love the heart that you bring to it, and that is the heart of Lean.
Nate Shutes: Also is it's about the people, and those folks generally.
Nate Shutes: Again, don't get asked, hey, what can we do to make your work easier, more efficient or safer?
Hisham Khaki: no-transcript.
Hisham Khaki: 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.
Hisham Khaki: You know union operation's all I really knew.
Hisham Khaki: 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.
Hisham Khaki: 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.
Hisham Khaki: 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.
Hisham Khaki: Tons of opportunity over here, right, you can probably see it everywhere.
Hisham Khaki: And in the back of my mind I'm like, oh my God, like where's the opportunity?
Hisham Khaki: These people are all working.
Hisham Khaki: 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.
Hisham Khaki: Most people have never really been inside of a warehouse other than a Costco, but a true warehouse.
Hisham Khaki: 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.
Hisham Khaki: It's a lot going through.
Nate Shutes: It's a lot.
Nate Shutes: It's a wonderful ecosystem is sort of the way I picture the four walls of a warehouse.
Nate Shutes: Every warehouse is different.
Nate Shutes: 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.
Nate Shutes: And observing will get you some insight.
Nate Shutes: Participating will get you more.
Nate Shutes: 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.
Nate Shutes: 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.
Nate Shutes: 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.
Nate Shutes: 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.
Hisham Khaki: Once you start seeing it, you can't stop seeing it in so many things.
Hisham Khaki: 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.
Hisham Khaki: If you have kind of that goal of simplicity, a lot of, and it takes a lot of work.
Hisham Khaki: 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.
Hisham Khaki: 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?
Nate Shutes: 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.
Nate Shutes: Is that something that you discovered about yourself as an adult, or were you?
Nate Shutes: When you were younger, you shared?
Nate Shutes: You know that you're a bit of a troublemaker.
Nate Shutes: 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.
Hisham Khaki: 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.
Hisham Khaki: So my mind would always go to okay, this is what I'm being told.
Hisham Khaki: 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.
Hisham Khaki: And maybe I didn't really understand that.
Hisham Khaki: That's how I operated until my professional career, but looking back as a child, I think that's what it was.
Hisham Khaki: 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.
Nate Shutes: Once you tap into that, you had a bunch of success in your career.
Nate Shutes: You had a bunch of success in your career.
Nate Shutes: 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.
Nate Shutes: 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.
Nate Shutes: 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.
Nate Shutes: There was a need and that you were the right person to solve it.
Nate Shutes: 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.
Nate Shutes: Can you help me understand what that learning process was of?
Nate Shutes: 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.
Nate Shutes: We're 20 minutes in and I haven't even asked you that.
Nate Shutes: My bad.
Hisham Khaki: So and I'll get into it a little bit more.
Hisham Khaki: But happy gig is external labor.
Hisham Khaki: So imagine you've got a warehouse, you need some flex labor and you're basically going to the outside to bring labor in.
Hisham Khaki: Shift swap creates almost that gig economy or flexibility within your own operation.
Hisham Khaki: So and we'll we'll get more into exactly what that means.
Hisham Khaki: 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.
Hisham Khaki: Iteration is the key to any startup, any business.
Hisham Khaki: I believe the key is always iteration.
Hisham Khaki: Things change so quickly, needs change very quickly.
Hisham Khaki: You've got to be able to iterate in a very smooth, controlled way.
Hisham Khaki: Um, in a very smooth, controlled way.
Hisham Khaki: So what we started finding was that a lot of like after COVID.
Hisham Khaki: 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.
Hisham Khaki: 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.
Hisham Khaki: So I started listening to that and hearing more and more customers say that.
Hisham Khaki: 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.
Hisham Khaki: This is a billion-dollar company.
Hisham Khaki: 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.
Hisham Khaki: So we said yes to that and we built it.
Hisham Khaki: 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.
Hisham Khaki: Site after site was loving it.
Hisham Khaki: They were immediately seeing improvements in their metrics and then it just started taking off from there.
Hisham Khaki: And my North Star has always been how can I impact the most lives?
Hisham Khaki: 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?
Hisham Khaki: 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?
Hisham Khaki: Absolutely so.
Hisham Khaki: It actually it'll work for any hourly workforce and there are really three, three big values to it.
Hisham Khaki: 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.
Hisham Khaki: Typically what would happen is I'd wait until Monday morning and I'd call out sick, like that's.
Hisham Khaki: That's the way it works, especially in warehousing, and I'll take you know the hits I'll take from an HR perspective.
Hisham Khaki: I'll get you know another point and I get one step closer to being terminated.
Hisham Khaki: 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.
Hisham Khaki: That's what happens in warehousing.
Hisham Khaki: 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.
Hisham Khaki: The second big value is all of your dynamic shifts.
Hisham Khaki: So any kind of overtime, any kind of voluntary time off, time off If you have part-time workers.
Hisham Khaki: 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.
Hisham Khaki: That creates problems, lots of problems With ShiftSwap.
Hisham Khaki: All that becomes automated.
Hisham Khaki: 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.
Hisham Khaki: It goes back to leadership for approval.
Hisham Khaki: Good to go.
Hisham Khaki: And the third big value is just messaging.
Hisham Khaki: 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.
Nate Shutes: 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.
Nate Shutes: You have the flexibility.
Nate Shutes: You know we're not clock watchers, yeah.
Nate Shutes: And yet the blue collar workforce that's paid hourly doesn't receive that same flexibility.
Nate Shutes: 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.
Nate Shutes: The relationship changes to one.
Nate Shutes: It almost feels punitive.
Nate Shutes: Where they just had something in life happen, it wasn't.
Nate Shutes: I live in Minnesota.
Nate Shutes: We have blizzards, you know.
Nate Shutes: Some people can have a snowblower, some people don't.
Nate Shutes: That might mean you're shoveling for an extra hour and of course you'll make acts of God type exceptions for attendance issues.
Nate Shutes: 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.
Nate Shutes: So if your goal is so, this is me riffing and just learning as we're talking here, because this is helpful for me.
Nate Shutes: I still run a facility today and this is good reminders for me.
Nate Shutes: If your goal, oh, go ahead.
Hisham Khaki: No, I mean it, just it.
Hisham Khaki: The white collar workforce had the flexibility even before COVID to a certain degree.
Hisham Khaki: But after COVID, I mean white collar workforce went through revolution where the amount of flexibility now is unbelievable.
Hisham Khaki: Right, like most, you know, most companies allow a lot of flexibility for the white collar workforce and still zero for the hourly workforce.
Hisham Khaki: 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.
Hisham Khaki: The points Didn't matter.
Hisham Khaki: 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.
Hisham Khaki: 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?
Nate Shutes: 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.
Nate Shutes: 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.
Nate Shutes: And again, I'm going specifically to that period where none of us knew what was happening.
Nate Shutes: 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.
Nate Shutes: Meanwhile a whole other group of people was just tucked away safely at home.
Nate Shutes: 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.
Nate Shutes: How do you measure how much impact you're having?
Hisham Khaki: Yeah, great question.
Hisham Khaki: 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.
Hisham Khaki: It's like it's a win-win.
Hisham Khaki: 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?
Hisham Khaki: You know, is this going to cost me more?
Hisham Khaki: You know, is it going to inflate the cost per unit?
Hisham Khaki: What's going to happen?
Hisham Khaki: 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.
Hisham Khaki: 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.
Hisham Khaki: So those three things are used from the employer's perspective to justify it.
Hisham Khaki: And then the associate's perspective.
Hisham Khaki: I mean, of course, for me it's number of users.
Hisham Khaki: Our goal in the next few years is to literally impact the lives of a million hourly associates.
Hisham Khaki: That's where we want to get to.
Hisham Khaki: So that's, that's our high level number metric of how many lives we're impacting.
Hisham Khaki: 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.
Hisham Khaki: How many times am I able to grab overtime or a little bit of extra money to support my family?
Hisham Khaki: So there's many, many different things.
Nate Shutes: When you think of a million people.
Nate Shutes: It's too big of a number to actually comprehend A million people in one place at one time.
Nate Shutes: There are a handful of concerts.
Nate Shutes: I think Garth Brooks in New York in the 90s.
Nate Shutes: They said that he had a million people at his concert, or something like that.
Nate Shutes: And so we like those really big numbers, but even smaller numbers.
Nate Shutes: If you make a post on LinkedIn, for example, and it gets 500 impressions, somebody would be like, oh, it's only 500.
Nate Shutes: It's not that big of a deal.
Nate Shutes: You know how many people 500 people is.
Nate Shutes: It would fill up your local high school gym that you go to a basketball game.
Nate Shutes: Every single seat would be completely full, packed to the gills.
Nate Shutes: And that's 500 people.
Nate Shutes: And it's hard to imagine large numbers.
Nate Shutes: 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?
Nate Shutes: 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.
Hisham Khaki: And I again, I don't know if that's true, but uh, it was.
Hisham Khaki: You know, it was giving all the numbers.
Hisham Khaki: It said something like if you took every player since 1887 or whenever major league baseball started, it would account.
Hisham Khaki: It would be like, you know, 40,000 people that wouldn't even fit in one stadium.
Hisham Khaki: That's generally packed.
Hisham Khaki: 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.
Hisham Khaki: 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?
Nate Shutes: 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.
Nate Shutes: 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.
Hisham Khaki: 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.
Hisham Khaki: 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.
Hisham Khaki: I mean you're just going to burn yourself out and feel like you're never doing enough.
Hisham Khaki: So you've got to set realistic goals, whether they're, you know, monthly or quarterly.
Hisham Khaki: You know you at least need quarterly.
Hisham Khaki: I think that's the minimum.
Hisham Khaki: 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.
Hisham Khaki: 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.
Hisham Khaki: No, I don't believe that.
Hisham Khaki: 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.
Hisham Khaki: You've got to truly believe it.
Hisham Khaki: You get there and you have to understand that once you get somewhere, it'll unlock further beliefs.
Nate Shutes: I dig that.
Nate Shutes: What are you most excited about right now?
Nate Shutes: What are you most?
Hisham Khaki: excited about right now.
Hisham Khaki: Um, I just I love, I love the simplicity of shift swap.
Hisham Khaki: I love, I'm super excited that we were able to kind of pivot towards it.
Hisham Khaki: We've literally had zero attrition from customers starting it to leaving it Like it just doesn't happen.
Hisham Khaki: So the impact is there, people love it.
Hisham Khaki: The experience is great.
Hisham Khaki: So it's just really exciting to see something that works and is truly having an impact.
Hisham Khaki: 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.
Hisham Khaki: 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.
Hisham Khaki: 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.
Hisham Khaki: But having a platform that really is sticky and is constantly improving value, learning curve, change curve is low.
Hisham Khaki: I think that's what I'm most excited about.
Nate Shutes: I'm also imagining the warehouse manager that has the experience of.
Nate Shutes: 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.
Nate Shutes: 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.
Nate Shutes: 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.
Nate Shutes: And then, once they get there that they are probably saying to themselves man, why didn't we do this years ago?
Nate Shutes: I didn't know that there could be a solution to this.
Nate Shutes: And, going back to this idea of simplicity and lean, you have redesigned an entire process and removed all the waste from it.
Nate Shutes: That waste used to be walking and talking and documentation on attendance, and now it is streamlined, it's efficient.
Nate Shutes: 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.
Hisham Khaki: 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.
Hisham Khaki: 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.
Hisham Khaki: And we strongly recommend you get an extra 20 people to work overtime.
Hisham Khaki: I'm making up numbers, but it's something like that.
Hisham Khaki: You know, you get an extra number of people, um, to work overtime.
Hisham Khaki: I'm making up numbers, but it was something like that.
Hisham Khaki: You know, you get an extra number of people to work in order to make this happen.
Hisham Khaki: 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.
Hisham Khaki: 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.
Hisham Khaki: And they were like, what, how did you do that?
Hisham Khaki: Did you already send your supervisors to walk the floor?
Hisham Khaki: You already put a break room sign up sheet?
Hisham Khaki: What did you do?
Hisham Khaki: And he's like, oh, we've got the system that does it automatically.
Hisham Khaki: And it was like, when I heard that story, it's just like the values of mine you were talking about earlier.
Hisham Khaki: That makes me so happy.
Nate Shutes: Just being effective and efficient at physical work.
Nate Shutes: Yeah, it is simple stuff, but you hit the nail on the head so well that we overcomplicate it.
Nate Shutes: 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.
Nate Shutes: No wonder you're having fun, no wonder you're having success.
Nate Shutes: Um, I can keep talking to you about this for hours.
Nate Shutes: Now I just want to do my own.
Nate Shutes: Let's.
Nate Shutes: 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.
Hisham Khaki: I have no clue how to code anything.
Hisham Khaki: I don't know anything about computer science.
Hisham Khaki: I struggled in college with the couple classes I took and that was actually one of my biggest fears starting up a technology company.
Hisham Khaki: 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.
Hisham Khaki: 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.
Hisham Khaki: 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.
Hisham Khaki: Yeah, yeah, they love seeing how many people they're impacting.
Hisham Khaki: It's fun all around.
Nate Shutes: Well, I dig it.
Nate Shutes: I shared this with you before.
Nate Shutes: 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.
Nate Shutes: And it's been seven and a half-ish years for you on this run.
Nate Shutes: I can't wait to see what the next stretch of the road looks like for you.
Nate Shutes: I have no doubt you're going to continue to grow and be successful.
Nate Shutes: We have to stay in touch.
Nate Shutes: 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.
Hisham Khaki: You've been a huge supporter ever since we met.
Hisham Khaki: When was?
Hisham Khaki: I think we met three, four years ago, probably.
Hisham Khaki: Yeah, I love, I've loved watching your journey as well.
Hisham Khaki: 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.
Hisham Khaki: 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.
Hisham Khaki: 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.
Nate Shutes: So thank you again for sharing your story today and we will catch up soon, my friend.
Hisham Khaki: All right, buddy.
Hisham Khaki: 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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Nate Shutes: To learn more about the show and connect with the growing community of entrepreneurs, visit logisticsfounderscom.
Nate Shutes: And, of course, thank you to all the founders who trust us to share their stories.