Five Tips for Entrepreneurs To Scale Staffing Businesses || Season 1 Episode 7

How can entrepreneurs quickly grow their businesses to outpace the competition?

In this episode, the team runs through five tips that can drive growth, including the power of AI.

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Transcript

Unknown: 0:00

Music.

Scott Montminy: 0:13

Hello everyone, and thank you for joining us Now Hiring! A podcast about trends in staffing, recruiting and talent, and I'm excited to have Sameer Penakalapati, the founder and CEO of Ceipal, along with Ceipal CMO Andy Weiss, join us for another great discussion to dig into some industry trends, and today, you know, Sameer's business experience can be said to be relevant beyond this industry that we're all in is someone who's created a number of successful startups. He's taken businesses beyond the 100 million dollar revenue barrier more than once, believe it or not, and he has five tips for entrepreneurs in this episode. Andy, you and I have been through a number of these rides from startup through IPOs and and we have a front row seat to this journey as well, and and we may have seen a few others. And so as participants and spectators at some points to some of samir's achievements, is there a tip on samir's list? Because I know you've seen it too, that stands out to you, that you think we should start with,

Andy Weiss: 1:21

you know what? I think, here's, here's the cool thing about them is that they all kind of intersect. And so I'm looking forward to having Sameer kind of walk through that the intersection, and how they all kind of play together. And I want to make, going to be taking a lot of notes along the way, because there's a lot of good stuff baked in here. He's got a lot of lot of wisdom to impart. So then Sameer

Scott Montminy: 1:42

will let you tell us. Where do we start

Sameer Penakalapati: 1:44

look if you are an entrepreneur or a business leader, and these apply for everyone, or even just upcoming leader, or want to be an entrepreneur. And my top in the list of five leverage AI, I think I can't stress enough to do everything that happening in our lives today, right in the business, or if you are running a business, or managing a business, owning a business, look into the aspects of automating it, to using, Utilizing AI. And also, while doing that, you be responsible and be careful. What can you do? Because these llms and AIs are not perfect. I might use, you know, biases and in uninterred consequence and data failures and and errors, omissions, lot of things that you may experience. So you had to have a carefully using it and evaluating it, and then basically adapting those if you do that, you would bring a tremendous productivity to your business and, in fact, your work lives. So

Andy Weiss: 2:54

I think it's interesting that that's the one of these five that you you started with. Yeah, did my gut says, and I've seen, based on your your LinkedIn post, uh, recently that that it's a new entry to your list. But it may have also kind of worked its way from, you know, being a new entry to one of the top because of its AI's ability to, you know, decentralize and kind of make a lot of different things and capabilities, whether it's coding, whether it's content creation, whether it's, you know, even just simple productivity things, it cuts through a lot and kind of takes what used to take, like a large staff and make it much more accessible to a smaller team. Is that

Sameer Penakalapati: 3:37

why? That's kind of, yeah, in fact, that is a famous I don't want to quote, because it's just, you know, I don't have the source to remember today, but I wanted to say it in the recent times, an article that I've read. You could do a lot of things, automate, especially the back office. A lot of the workforce productivity apps out there, if you planning and you would responsibly implement it, you could do lot of things with with the 50% of the staff. I'm not saying all of them, but there are you had to look into it, in that, in that I in that lens of you know, where can we introduce do not assume that this is not possible with AI. Now, we just really don't know the capabilities of AI, so it's always good to have an open AI and going to looking into every aspect of you know, automating, and then bring the value of the humans bring the values right you want, you want to, you want to leverage more the value that humans bring versus the repetitive tasks, and lot of analysis work can be done with the AI. So definitely, I think this is something that I wouldn't be saying it two years ago, but today, that's in the top of my list. So

Andy Weiss: 4:57

what other things are? What are the other four on the list? First

Sameer Penakalapati: 5:00

and you know the other one, second one, especially if you're an entrepreneur. And people used to talk about, and the VC firms talk about, just grow, grow, grow and don't worry about the spend. The mindset of growth at any cost is shifting from No, grow with profitability, grow responsibly. And I think that's should always have been the case, but, you know, it went too far. The industry that grow at any cost, grow growth is all it matters, nothing else. But I think the industry is coming to to a census saying we should grow, but grow responsibly and profitably the business. So,

Andy Weiss: 5:44

yeah, is that true? Whether you've got outside funding or not, like that, you're looking at that as kind of a holistic kind of,

Unknown: 5:52

I think that's a good

Sameer Penakalapati: 5:54

old golden standard that you grow business profitably, as simple as that, right? I mean, this is something that not invented today. This is how it always have been. But I think that's in between something came up that, okay, we grow at any cost. That's not the case. Maybe there is a use case for a company, for for an industry or a sector. It is a reason why he wants to do it. But in general, I think growth and profitability go hand in hand, and that should always be the case. Yeah,

Andy Weiss: 6:24

it's kind of like, you know, it treating it like it's your own own money, whether you've got whether you have outside funding or not. If you're treating it in that fashion, then you're going to think about purchase decisions, expenses, how you're going to market, and you're going to approach that completely differently than if you're playing with, you know, house money, which we, you know, a lot of companies seem to have done over the last several years. So no, I love that one. What's next on the list?

Sameer Penakalapati: 6:51

Being a niche, I think lot of us just get too excited about putting our hands into everywhere. It's hard to to justify who we are like it's like you your DNA, what's what are you known for? And being a generalist is not a good thing. And there is, there is you don't have a very compelling a product or a service that you could go have a name for it. So I think it's important that every business start with something niche that they can name for it and go for it. So I think the staffing industry specifically get tempted to go all in for everything we do, everything you know. So I think that's just a devaluing your own business. And not having a focus is also a devaluing the business. So I think it's important to have, you know, you pick a sector that you have, or people have got an expertise in it, or you you pick a technology that that you truly bring a value to them, to the customer, and then on top of that, you can grow at a different but you still focus on the sector wise. I'm not saying, you know, you you build your entire business with one sector 100% but you could have multiple sectors, but have a very specific expertise in delivering a value to your customers. I think that's a key. And my third one is always be, find your niche and then and create a differentiators and mode in the industry, and then, and then, just to double down on going into that industry, I think that creates a lot more value than just being a journalist. I think I've never seen a staffing business has a huge value creation. Being a journalist than a specialist. Gotta

Scott Montminy: 8:37

be all things. So

Andy Weiss: 8:37

we got, I go ahead.

Scott Montminy: 8:39

I'm sorry. I was going to say the next thing on the list is build teams that align with your vision. And I'm wondering how much of that are we talking about the people that you or the talent you acquire, and how much of that is culture?

Sameer Penakalapati: 8:54

Yeah, look, if you have the right team, and they, they buy your vision, and they, they trust and see what you're trying to do, and then culture really builds around that. Because, like, you know, I assuming that you you've been fair create a fair organization. You've been creating an opportunities for them. You are acutely know that what type of people are bringing into versus what's your vision for the organization. As I get those kind of too broadly aligned, you generally have people with very high caliber on high intent to to work with you. That just creates very winning culture in the organization. I think it's just, you know, you had to set for what values you're bringing in the organization, and then the people you're hiring are also aligning with those values. And if those are aligned generally, you would create a winning culture. And that's what I meant to say.

Andy Weiss: 9:48

Yeah, awesome. So Sameer, this the last one number five is keep innovating. Scott, I think this is a potential kind of future episode, just on kind of and Sameer I'd love to kind of talk deeper on, on the idea of innovation, and how what you think about it, because I think there's a bunch to unpack. But in the context of, you know these five areas, what's, what's the kind of, the crux of of keep innovating, it's anything

Sameer Penakalapati: 10:16

that we do it for an example, like, take a staffing firm, look into what you are known for, it and what else happening through the lens of now the generative AI and how can you create a value for your customers and then craft, customize or bring a value and create something, a service or product, and enhance your services through the taking advantage of the AI and those, that's what I meant to say. You know, keep innovating it. Keep thinking through the lens of what's happening around with the technology, what's happening around the markets, even the industries, right? So if you are aligned. Keep aligning yourself into those opportunities. You could continue to build a great business. If you are not aligned, you have we keep your old ideas and thoughts, but then industry is not in aligned to it. I think it's a lose and lose game. So innovation is, should be the DNA of you. Wants to continue to grow and and build a bigger businesses.

Scott Montminy: 11:24

I like the way you think about that Sameer and sum it up and that it's a little different than it's not just the Clay Christensen disruptive innovation. It's the innovating every day beyond that and refining it and making it better, and not just resting on that one time Big Bang that you created, but creating more bangs after it to follow. Really enjoyed the time. But I know that we wanted to keep this tight. If you haven't already followed Sameer and LinkedIn, I recommend you do a lot of the material that we come up with for this podcast comes from there, including these five areas to focus on, if you're an entrepreneur, and I think they're relevant, whether you're in staffing, recruiting, workforce management, or any industry really, just startup technology in general, these rules do seem to apply to just about any business. And hopefully we're going to bring you a lot of content like that as we continue to work on this conversation until the next time we are Now Hiring!