How ACT Can Grow Your Business || Season 1 Episode 3

In this episode, Andy and Scott explore Sameer's three-letter acronym to building your staffing business. 

Spoiler alert: The need to automate and comply is as certain as death and taxes. 

If you like the Now Hiring! podcast, we think you'll enjoy our newsletter, also called Now Hiring! You can sign up for the newsletter here. 

Transcript

Scott Montminy: 0:13

Welcome to Now Hiring! A podcast about staffing, recruiting and talent. I'm Scott Montminy, and with me, as always are Andy Weiss and Sameer Penakalapati, our host, who happens to be the CEO of Ceipal and Andy the chief marketing officer there. But we are delving into and diving into topics that go much deeper than our work lives together. We want to talk about the topics that matter to those in the staffing and recruiting industry and workforce management and tackle some of those issues. And in one of our episodes, we discussed the idea of building a high value staffing company, and we have this big bear barrier of$100 million that Sameer has advice to get us across. But before we even get there, we touched on the idea of specialties being a help, making sure that you're going into a niche that needs to be serviced, and that you're able to service and we just barely touched on the idea of automation when we got to the end of that episode. And I think that is one of the topics. Andy, if I'm wrong, yeah, it feels like, Sameer,

Andy Weiss: 1:22

you're taking us on this journey we started. You know, origin, we, you know, you talk to us about, like there being low barriers, but, but focusing in, you shared a little bit of your story, in your journey, but now, you know, we've got some traction. So what's, what's kind of the, the key to making some of this stuff happened to get us closer to that 100 million? Yeah, no, I

Sameer Penakalapati: 1:43

think what I come up with the name the AC T act, that's really I meant was that you had to make, put your act together to grow and create a value, high value business, the ACT AC T for automation, compliance and taxes. And

Andy Weiss: 2:00

to be clear, we are, this is not standardized testing. This is not college Test Prep. This is, this is something completely different, right?

Scott Montminy: 2:08

Yeah, that's the SATs we'll be talking about in the next episode, and the AC

Sameer Penakalapati: 2:13

T's and the SAT test for creating a high value business like, Okay, remember that, there you go as creating. So again, you know, we're talking about a value creation, right? When you talking about a value creation and building a customers, building a niche skill set, growing the revenue is one thing. That's just a piece of it. The second bigger, larger piece of the business is your automation, compliance and taxes, right? And I have you know my experience working with large scale number of m&a firms over times, and the biggest worry of the new acquirer or somebody a VC firm is putting money into your business or helping you to grow being a partner. One of the things that they want to see is, how do you run your back office operations? How efficiently are you running the business, right? And what are the things that you're actually automating the business? And then second, compliance, compliance, guys, I it has gone like many multiples of complexity in running the business. Today, I'm talking about compliance related to the state compliance, your labor law compliances, your immigration compliance, then you are, you know, like 401, K compliance, or your payroll compliance. And we're talk, you're talking about you can name after the name, after the name compliance, like if you do not have a team or the plan in really making sure that you are maintaining a compliant business and or if you don't have a proper structure in place, that's going to devalue your business. And you, you take my word compliance is as important as bringing a new client to the business. So,

Andy Weiss: 4:06

so Sameer, before we get into the taxation one, you know, we talked a little bit about, or you shared a little bit about, kind of the automation one first. So the difference between, or the challenge between, kind of, do I hire somebody, or do I automate something in my back office? Like, what's, what's the trade off? Where do you decide, you know, let this makes more sense to automate versus hiring somebody on the back and in the back office to complete that function?

Sameer Penakalapati: 4:38

No, I think, you know, look into the back office, right? You were onboarding an employer consultant. There's no reason to have, you know, a set of people doing an onboarding. The now onboarding, you can completely do paperless onboarding. So you do have a Do you have a full Baker back office system that can onboard a. Without having an in person, you can do completely paperless onboarding. And then your I 90 verify this is completely automated to it right? And then your background check is to be automated through integrating to your, you know, your back office ATS platforms. And then your compliance too, really, you know your compliance related to integrating your back office system to your payroll agency. And then you are all other things, like benefits automation, your you know your like you know healthcare automation, your health insurance like your so a lot of things that you have to find a way to automate so that you can run more efficiently. So I'm saying not only become very efficient in automating your business running through these systems, but you're also be more compliant just because you are. They

Andy Weiss: 5:56

work hand in hand, yeah. So then the final letter in Act is T so death and taxes. So tell us about taxation. Yeah, the taxes is the

Sameer Penakalapati: 6:08

one thing right, like another that I keep hearing from the investors community, that if you you know one thing is you obviously file taxes every year having a proper returns in place, but at least if you have a review returns are audited financials for your business. It's just much more third party audited reviews and third party audited financials will give you a lot more weightage to your numbers. And those are kind of things. And then then you make sure you compliant with the state taxes filing timely. You make sure your federal taxes file compliant. You You make sure when it when you close the books annually. You make sure that you have no use in taxes. You're compliant with it, your proper documentation, you you're retained and then showcase to it. So because taxes can go all the way back to seven years of your business, even even longer if there is an issue with it. But you know, it's as important as that every single one of them automation is if you don't automate, you will not be a profitable business. There is no value for it complying. If you don't comply, even though you have a great business, that could kill the business, not being compliant taxes. We don't do it. They can shut down the business if you're not complete. So AC T is as important as anything else is probably even the most important. But if you make sure you have back office systems in place, your payroll systems in place, your compliance in place, automated, right? And you run this business like a well oiled machine through automation, and that's my takeaway from this. So,

Andy Weiss: 7:47

so Scott, we've got, we've started. We got traction now. We've got the ACT framework. Feels like we're getting close to to our 100 million threshold. What?

Scott Montminy: 7:58

What do you think we're going to take the next step on the journey in another episode. I don't think we have enough time to do it right now, but we are going to get to it. So be sure to look for that getting over the big 100 million dollar barrier. And I love that acronym act, because it you have to act. And there's an important process for each letter and automation which starts it kind of goes through all of them, I think too. And so when we meet again, we're going to talk, keep talking about it, but we're going to dovetail it into as Andy says, getting over that 100 million dollar barrier. So be sure to stream that one, download it on your favorite platform, like, share, subscribe, get the notifications and all that good stuff. We hope that you found this as interesting and as useful as as we do, and we'll see you there until next time. We are Now Hiring!