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Gut feelings in hiring decisions are a common but flawed approach. Rick Girard's experience in recruitment revealed that many companies often lean on personal biases when selecting or rejecting candidates. This insight led him to create Intertru, a platform leveraging generative AI to promote more objective hiring practices.
Rick's story demonstrates that while technological expertise isn't a prerequisite for developing a stellar product, assembling an exceptional team is crucial—good thing he's nailed down an interviewing methodology for hiring the best of the best.
For aspiring entrepreneurs, Rick's journey underscores the importance of full commitment to your venture and maintaining an open mind to feedback and diverse viewpoints throughout the process.
***
About Rick
Rick Girard is the Founder & CEO of Intertru, an AI-powered platform designed to help hiring managers with method-driven interviewing analytics & insights. He is also the host of Hire Power Radio Show & Podcast—a weekly series on LinkedIn Live. Rick enjoys helping business leaders hire accurately for core value alignment and transferable skills. Over the past 9 years, he’s developed a proven methodology for interviewing that backs decision-making with data & facts over personal biases & opinions. When he’s not helping other founders and business leaders, you can find Rick competing in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, surfing, snowboarding, rock climbing, and running with scissors (so dangerous!).
About Intertru
Intertru is a method-driven interviewing accuracy platform that uses AI and HireOS® methodology to ensure that your company hires the strongest people, every time. Their mission: eliminate bad hiring from planet Earth!
For aspiring entrepreneurs, Rick's journey underscores the importance of full commitment to your venture and maintaining an open mind to feedback and diverse viewpoints throughout the process.
***
About Rick
Rick Girard is the Founder & CEO of Intertru, an AI-powered platform designed to help hiring managers with method-driven interviewing analytics & insights. He is also the host of Hire Power Radio Show & Podcast—a weekly series on LinkedIn Live. Rick enjoys helping business leaders hire accurately for core value alignment and transferable skills. Over the past 9 years, he’s developed a proven methodology for interviewing that backs decision-making with data & facts over personal biases & opinions. When he’s not helping other founders and business leaders, you can find Rick competing in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, surfing, snowboarding, rock climbing, and running with scissors (so dangerous!).
About Intertru
Intertru is a method-driven interviewing accuracy platform that uses AI and HireOS® methodology to ensure that your company hires the strongest people, every time. Their mission: eliminate bad hiring from planet Earth!
To learn more, visit https://intertru.ai/
***
📧 If you or a founder you know would like to be a guest on In The Thick of It, email us at intro@founderstory.us
Creators & Guests
What is In The Thick of It?
Join Scott Hollrah, founder of Venn Technology, as he takes you "In the Thick of It" with the real stories of founders who are actively navigating the challenges and triumphs of running their businesses. This podcast goes beyond the typical entrepreneurial success stories and delves into the messy, gritty, and sometimes chaotic world of building and growing a company. Get inspired, learn from the experiences of others, and gain insights into what it truly means to be in the thick of the entrepreneurial journey.
Most of the time when interviews happen, I mean,
a good test of this is talk to me about how the interview went.
Oh, it went great.
Okay, so what do you think?
Oh, I really like the person.
Why they all, they seem like they got good energy and da da da da.
And I really like their experience they had over here and what that.
Okay, but why, like, what did they give you that's going
to give you the data for you to be able to say, this person's going
to work in our company because of XYZ just doesn't exist.
Welcome to in the thick of it.
I'm your host, Scott Hollrah.
Have you ever hired someone based on gut feeling?
Rick Girard spent many years as a corporate recruiter
before learning that a lot of businesses often hire or
turn down people based on personal biases or motives.
To address this, Rick started Intertru, a software using generative
AI to help companies make more objective hiring decisions.
Rick's journey shows that you don't need to be an expert in technology
to build a great product, but it does require a great team.
In the process of starting your own company,
it's important to go all in with it and be open to other
people's perspectives and critiques along the way.
I'm excited today to be joined by Rick Girard, founder of Intertru.
Rick, you've got an incredibly interesting background.
You've had a bunch of entrepreneurial ventures over the years.
You've written a book, you host a podcast.
I think you're into like jiu jitsu.
I mean, there's just a lot of layers to Rick Girard,
so I can't wait to get into it.
Thanks for joining us today, dude.
Thanks for having me.
I really appreciate it.
It is funny because I always feel like I'm boring, but when you
hear people bearing back like, oh, you do this, you do that.
I'm like, yeah, I do.
I guess I'm not that boring.
It seems like you don't have a lot of time for sleep.
Amen.
But we'll unpack that.
So we always like to start at the beginning.
Where'd you grow up?
What was growing up like for you?
Yeah.
So I'm kind of an anomaly in California because I actually was born
and raised in California, unlike most people who are here right now.
I grew up in Ventura county.
Normal, kind of.
My dad was a pool man in Beverly Hills when I was growing up
and then transitioned to be a used car salesman.
Tons of funny stories there.
But yeah, I grew up in a kind of normal suburban area.
I went to a catholic private school for a couple of years.
Thankfully, I was told that it would be okay if I didn't come back
the next year, which was great because I wasn't where I wanted to be.
I've always been super inquisitive.
I've always asked why, and if the answers didn't make sense,
I would voice it and I'd say, like, I don't know.
I just, I don't believe it.
And so I think I've always caused friction and I've always been
pretty unconventional in the way I've looked at things from
the perspective of, like, I like to look at what everybody's doing.
And I always like to think that there's, like,
a better way of doing it.
Do you ever see that mood, that episode of Seinfeld
where George Costanza decided to do the opposite of everything
and then all of a sudden his life turns around?
Like, that's kind of been my life story in a way.
I think I missed that one, but that's a very Seinfeld kind of thing.
And so catholic school wasn't for you?
Catholic school wasn't for me.
You said you like to question a lot of things.
How did that show up in your, in your academics?
Were you, like, a solid student?
No, I was not.
Actually.
I was a terrible student until I got into college.
What changed?
I just think naturally I was not the kind
of person who did well being told what to do.
I've never been a follower, and I've never been a rule.
Yeah, I just, I don't like rules.
So that just kind of carried through with
why it was okay that I didn't go back to catholic school.
I kind of grew up.
And I realized in college, I go, well, you know,
I just never applied myself.
And maybe because I was bored or maybe it was because I didn't care.
I was kind of a surfer kid.
So, like, for me, my whole life was, like,
going to the beach and, and hopping in the water.
And that's what I lived for.
Then I decided, actually,
that I was going to be a professional photographer.
I had that inkling.
So I went to school at the community
college level to take photography.
And then I set a goal that I was going to get into Pasadena
art Center for photography and took me quite a few tries.
But I eventually got in and then realized when I was
in photography that that wasn't the thing for me because the poor
starving artist thing just, it wasn't going to buy me my ferrari.
By the time I was 30, which was one of my goals.
Right?
So, fast forward.
I worked for a photographer.
I got really into it.
And then one day, my cousin approached me and said, hey, look,
I think you'd be good at recruiting.
You should come work for me.
And I was like, hey, yeah, I don't know about this, but one thing that
I did know was that he made a lot of money, and he was always happy.
Of course, he was probably faking it,
but that's kind of what I wanted, right?
So we met for lunch one day, and he said, hey, we're going to move up
to sun valley, idaho, and I'd like you to come up and work with me.
And I really had no idea what I was getting myself into.
But what I found out was that essentially,
sun valley, Idaho has a ski resort.
And at the time, I was getting really big into snowboarding.
You'll get the theme that I like boards, right?
So I moved up to really snowboard with my only goal being that
I wanted to be able to buy my season pass.
So I moved up in June, and I wanted to buy the season
pass because I wanted to always do the snowboard 300,
you know, 100 days a year sort of thing.
So I did moved up there.
It was the hardest job I ever did.
I hated it for the first four months, but I got grit,
and I was like, I'm just going to focus in on getting good at this.
It was very, very challenging,
but I committed myself to getting good at it, and I did.
And, you know, I just powered through all the hard stuff.
And then once I got good at it,
and I started making a lot of money, like, my goal was just
to double my income every year or come close to it.
And I was able to do that.
My second year there, I bought my first house,
and the rest is kind of history there.
Then I kind of moved back to California with him.
We started up a brand new company.
I went from zero to 8 million in three years, and I was able
to hit my goal of buying a Ferrari by my 30th birthday,
as I actually went and bought my Ferrari on my 30th birthday.
Wow.
Yeah.
That's amazing.
Which model?
I bought a 355 spider, and I bought it from a basketball player
named Jerome Kersey, who used to play for the Portland.
The basketball team in Portland.
I don't follow basketball.
I'm a short white guy.
That's all, you know?
So backing up a little bit, you didn't like rules.
Surfing was your thing.
Were you into any kind of team sports as a kid?
You know, I played team sports, but.
No.
Yeah.
I just never gravitated toward any of them.
When I did move to Idaho, I started playing hockey at the age of,
like, 22, I think I was when I moved there, because I had
always wanted to play hockey, and that really resonated with me.
I played hockey the whole time I was there, and then I played.
I continued to play for quite a few years until I moved to Hawaii.
That's chapter two.
We'll get there.
So.
All right, I'm thinking about, like, this.
Hey, I don't like rules.
Team sports weren't really your thing.
Is there a relationship to that there?
Like, surfing is kind of an individual type thing?
Yeah.
I think surfing for me is kind of like that zen place for me.
Like water.
I'm really kind of entrenched in water,
and so it's a place I find clarity.
And I probably.
It's like my reset button.
Right.
And throughout my life, like, I actually don't surf that much anymore,
but I always find something to plug that hole.
That's something.
Jujitsu is kind of taking that place now, and something
else will come, like, in probably in the next few months,
because I need to find something else to do.
You don't sit still.
No, I can't.
Not for long, anyway.
I will when I'm dead.
Obviously your cousin who started the recruiting business
and brought you back to California to start a new venture,
clearly there was an entrepreneurial spirit there.
What about immediately, the family you mentioned,
your dad did a couple different things.
Your mom was there, grandparents or others that were entrepreneurial.
No, really not.
I mean, my dad was kind of by force, in a way,
so my dad had his own pool business when I was a young kid.
He actually had a pool route in Beverly Hills,
and it was pretty cool because I used to go,
like, during the summertime with him to work, and then he'd pay me
for cleaning, hosing off filters, and doing stuff like that.
And you're going to all these massive mansions
that are in Bel Air and Beverly Hills.
And it was kind of like, I remember walking into this one place
where you had to walk down this very
long path and they had llamas and all these things.
And I was just like, wow, this is like a place I want to live.
How do we get here, dad?
And he's like, not being a pool man.
Well, apart from cleaning pool filters, what was your first job?
Oh, man, my first official job.
I mean, like, I would always hustle to make money.
Like, I remember I was mowing lawns across street from,
like, I had this really cool neighbor across the street.
He kind of reminded me of a cross between
Burgess Meredith and the guy who played in.
Oh, God, that old guy.
His name was Herb, and he smoked cigars, and he was like,
this old school soul, and, you know, like,
he's like, hey, I need somebody to mow my lawn.
And so he kind of, like, I would mow his lawn and I would do stuff.
So that was kind of my first unofficial kind of job.
My first official job was I worked at Burger King.
And somehow I got fired.
To this day, I don't know how I got fired, but I went in to pick up my
paycheck one Saturday, and then I remember, like, walking out, my dad
came in with me and he goes, oh, yeah, you don't work here anymore.
I was like, oh, okay.
No explanation.
Just.
You don't work here anymore.
Yeah, okay.
I think they wanted me to work
on days that I couldn't work or something like that.
And at that time, I was kind of a nice kid, and I would just passively
vote with my ability to show up as opposed to voicing how I feel.
Okay.
Yeah.
Are you an only child or do you have some siblings?
No, I have a brother.
So my brother, you know, my brother's kind of a unique soul.
It's kind of interesting.
I really admire him, and I always have from a long time.
He knew at a very early age that he wanted to be a firemande.
So I remember driving in the car, like, he knew everything
about every fire truck from, like, the earliest stage,
what kind of trucks they were, what department they were.
And, like, he was on a path from the very
earliest stages to be a fireman, and he did it.
And it's funny because he's been able to.
I think he's a fire captain now, but he did a little stint where,
like, he got a job in Denver,
didn't like living in Denver, so he moved back and he worked
with me for a little while and did recruiting.
And it was funny.
Cause he actually set the record for the most placements made
in a month within our company, which probably still holds true today.
It was crazy.
Yeah.
And then he got a job at the fire department,
and the rest has, you know, been history.
He's worked for Long beach fire department for a very, very long time.
And he's.
He's super passionate and so good at his job, and, you know,
everybody loves him and knows him within the fire department.
I was never that clear path guy.
I remember seeing the Magnum PI Ferrari.
Around the same time he saw the fire truck.
And I said, I don't know what I want to do, but I want one of those.
And for him, it was, I want to drive that big red fire truck.
Totally.
Totally.
It's amazing how some people know
from a very early age what it is they're built to do.
Ive talked about my brother a time or two before on the
podcast, but my brother knew at eight years old that
he wanted to go to the naval academy and he wanted to
fly jets, and he was just stubborn enough that he did
it.
Yeah.
And its incredible to think back to us as little kids and then
to think years later, hes flying a $60 million
jet that hes landing on a boat thats moving in the middle
of the ocean at night with the deck pitching.
Its like, oh, my gosh, it's incredible.
So, yeah, yeah.
Isn't that crazy?
Like, I've always been jealous of that, quite frankly.
Like, because just think of all the agony you went through,
like, when you were growing up where you're like,
I don't know what I want to do.
Like, I mean, you know, when I was a kid, I think I lived a reverse
life because I spent most of my time in activities that I enjoyed.
And I really didn't start thinking about building a business until,
like, I got older.
I I spent a lot of my early career just with this constant angst
about, I don't know what I am made to do, but it's not this.
Yeah.
Finding your purpose, right?
Yeah.
There was something so unsettling and frustrating about that.
And it's really hard when you get up and you go do
this every day and not only do you not want to do it,
but you don't know what it is you want to do.
Amen.
Like, that is so true.
And then even when you're good at something, you still have
these moments of, is this what I'm supposed to be doing?
Is this what my purpose is?
Whereas, like, again, my brother's purpose has always been there.
He knows.
Right.
And I've always had this kind of nagging of,
you know, there's got to be more, right.
And there's got to be a reason why I'm here.
And am I living that?
And that's always been something that I've struggled with.
I don't know if you have as well.
But, I mean, I think at some point, we've all asked ourselves that,
yeah, all right.
You have the realization that this isn't where you want to go,
you get the call from your cousin, you go off to Idaho.
What were those days like?
I mean, I know you talked about how frustrating it was.
You didn't like it.
What was it you didn't like?
Was it just, man, you're cold calling and you're
getting the phone slammed in your ear.
Like, what were those days like?
Well, a lot of cold calling.
I spoke, dude, really well.
So people didn't take me seriously.
Yeah, I mean, it was the grind.
And then the other thing is that I was placing
software engineers and I wasn't technically competent or did I have
an understanding of, really, what I was selling ultimately?
I mean, I was selling people, but I had to figure out how to navigate
a business environment where, like, I didn't have any training.
And it was kind of interesting because my training
from my old mentor in the very beginning was,
here's a list, here's a resume, here's your pitch.
Just call this list and get this person an interview.
Like, that was my training.
And there was a day of, like,
what the technical terms are and stuff, but it was all greek to me.
And so a lot of it was me and another guy named Dave
Stone sitting in an office trying to figure it out.
And turning point for both of us was kind of funny, is, like, our
boss had been out of town, and essentially, like, we decided to
go to lunch, and we went through a couple pictures of margaritas
and then decided during that time when we got back that, hey,
we're going to cold call the rest of this afternoon, and we're
going to have a contest to see how many, like, job orders we
get.
And we, like, absolutely crushed it that day.
I think he beat me, which, I mean, kind of pissed me off,
but we were able to actually kind of hit a turning point.
I mean, we were just saying the most uncanny, like, ridiculous.
I'm like, hey, look it, I just got done with a,
you know, a picture of margaritas.
I got a guy here.
You probably won't even like him,
but you should interview him just because it's me.
I mean, we were saying just stupid stuff and getting results.
So then that kind of kicked off some business
and kind of just got the momentum going.
Liquid courage can go one of two ways,
and it's usually extreme in either direction.
Totally, totally.
But it worked for you.
It did.
I think I ended up turning out from that day of cold calling.
I got two of my first placements from it.
I remember just saying just some obnoxious stuff, like, hey,
you should just work with me, just because
some of them I can't share, but, but, yeah, probably for the best.
Yeah.
So did you continue the margarita tradition from there on?
Was that like the key to ongoing success or was
that just like the catalyst,
the thing that the switch flipped and it was off to the races?
Yeah, I think that was the flip of the switch.
I mean, like, I've never been really a big drinker,
but yeah, that was kicking the pants, I think.
And then I had other things that were
motivating me that things I wanted.
I remember I went to a Tom Hopkins seminar and I wrote down,
what was it?
We had to write down 100 goals before we left on that weekend.
And so I made the commitment that I was
going to check off each one of those.
I actually was able to accomplish 96 of them.
Wow.
Within a three year period.
So that was pretty cool.
Including my ferrari.
There you go.
Wow.
Talking about that moment, and maybe you closed some deals prior to
that day, but in sales,
I think something thats just so important is to get some wins early.
And when you get a couple of wins under your belt,
it boosts that confidence and it gives you
that wind in your sails to just keep going.
And as weve brought new salespeople in at our company,
we want to see them get that first win early.
I mean, certainly we want the business, but I want it for them
to give them that boost so that they can feel really great,
really confident going into that next and the next and the next.
That is so important because I feel like we won in spite
of everything rather than because of everything.
And one of the things that I think that had always stuck with me
is that we weren't really set up for success in any sort of way.
I mean, we got lucky.
We got lucky due to a couple of things, market conditions.
I mean, honestly, all you had to do is be able to spell Java
at one point and, you know, they'd hire one of your people.
So we weren't good.
We were just good at grinding.
Then at some point you realize in your career you're like, all right,
things change.
And I'm not so good at what I think I'm good at.
I've been highly paid for the work that I've been doing and I've
been making a lot of money, but you got to up your game.
Was that like late nineties early two thousands?
Like right around.com burst?
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
So started my career in 93 and I had
a really good run through the.com bubble.
It's funny, we worked with pets.com was one of our clients.
Remember the hand puppet commercials and everything?
And they sponsored the Super bowl.
And then probably two months after they sponsored the Super bowl,
they're out of business.
And I remember a hiring manager there saying, as long as somebody can
spell java and theyre like theyre somewhat competent, ill hire them.
I mean, we made so many placements.
There was crazy.
Made so much money off them and then poof, done.
Yeah, kitty litter over the Internet wasnt so scalable at that point.
I think some of that, though,
was that the consumer just wasnt ready for it.
The idea of putting a credit card into a website,
when we just found out what a website was like yesterday,
there was just something, the average person wasnt ready for that.
And it took some time for things to warm up.
And obviously there was a level of insanity
going on in Silicon Valley at the time.
And if you put.com in the name of your company,
you were worth tens of millions, if not hundreds.
Oh, yeah, for sure.
I feel like were kind of there with AI, but thats a whole other story.
I think its more selective now.
Its definitely more selective in tech right now.
The shift has definitely happened to where, yes,
companies are investing in AI, but its very
strategic and its very much focused in on what the objectives
of the venture capital firm are trying to accomplish.
Yeah, you talked about your cousin got you to move back to California.
What was the impetus for that?
It sounds like things were actually going really well in Sun Valley,
Idaho.
Why leave that and go back to high state income taxes?
I'm a good follower, apparently, on this one.
So, yeah, we had a good maybe three to five year stint there.
And then he decided that he wanted to move back to California,
start up a new company.
We moved back to actually, like the area that I grew up in.
And that was kind of the plan.
So he made me the offer to move back
as kind of the CoO and co founder.
And we started up a company called Cross Creek Systems.
And we started from Xero with myself and four other people.
We got them all trained up, and within a couple years we were up to,
I think we had its peak, maybe 30 people,
and we were generating close to 8 million in revenue a year.
And was cross Creek, was that in the placement kind
of general space or same thing?
It was.
He's very good at duplicating and building,
like small search firms that are boutique.
They focus in on one niche, they get really, really good at it.
And essentially he builds them out in these little
team based units where it's all fully structured
like its commission share and its team oriented.
It was a really unique model.
Yeah, I mean, you know, we were humming
and then, you know, 911 happened.
And so overnight everything changed.
So right before 911 happened, he had wanted me to start
up a biotech group and that wasnt really my passion.
I really didnt have an interest to start
up something again from scratch, something new.
And my view was to build a vertical organization
as opposed to building all these little horizontal businesses.
So we decided, I think around 911
timeframe that I was going to step out.
I sold my interest back to him and I moved to Hawaii just because,
hey, this sounds awesome.
I get to surf.
It's beautiful.
Yeah, it was just time.
Well, I was living back in a place that I grew up in and it
just didn't feel like I was kind of moving forward in my life.
One and two, I could, so it was kind of like I went out to breakfast
with my now ex wife and we were talking.
I'm like, I don't really want to build this new group up.
It's not what I'm passionate about.
And she goes, well, when we moved over here,
you said you were going to either move up or move out.
And so if you're not moving up, then move out.
And we started talking about like at breakfast, hey,
what if you just sold everything and moved to Hawaii?
And I'm like, that's a fantastic idea.
I mean, so, wow.
So how long from that breakfast to the time you got on the plane?
So I let him know probably.
And it was before 911 happened.
So we talked about it before that happened.
We kind of squared away everything.
I was going to move in November December timeframe.
But because we wanted to stabilize the business
and I didnt want to leave them hanging.
We waited until I worked until February or March, and then in March of
that year, I was on the plane and basically I sold my Ferrari, sold
my boat, sold my house, packed up everything and moved to Hawaii.
What was the plan when you got there?
Did you have something already lined up or was it, hey, ive got some
cash and ive got some time and ill figure it out once I get there.
Little bit of that.
But no, I mean, the objective was that I was going to start
up a company in Hawaii and duplicate what he had done in Sun Valley,
Idaho.
He had actually been able to build not one, but like
ten really successful businesses that were all operating in Idaho,
that were all competing against each other.
And so that was my thought.
I was like, im going to go to Hawaii and duplicate it.
Little did I know that that model didnt really work so well in Hawaii,
but thats a whole other story.
Were you focused on placing people in Hawaii or was it just that you
were based in Hawaii and you were placing people all over the place?
Jordan.
Yeah.
The beautiful thing about search is you dont have
to be where you are, like where youre doing business.
So ive always done recruitment in the Silicon Valley
for software engineers, working with the top tech companies.
You can do it from anywhere.
So first Idaho, then SoCal, and then Hawaii.
I started up a little business.
I didn't really take it too seriously because I
was running it more like a lifestyle company.
Sorry everybody who worked for me, but it was, the goal was like,
we were just making placements from Hawaii
in the Silicon Valley and worked really well for about ten years.
Which island?
On Oahu.
Okay.
Yeah, so we had a really great office that was
right on downtown and, you know, we were able
to attract some really good people that thrived.
I wasn't a very good manager or leader because I was more interested
in getting out of there 233 o'clock to go surfing.
My priorities were more about kind of
being in the water than building the business.
What caused you to leave after ten years purpose?
Well, that combined with the fact that I got remarried and
we had a daughter, so when you have a kid, and my family
is primarily here in California and Oregon, and then my
wife's family is actually in the midwest, we got a little
bit of pressure to like, hey, you guys should get closer
to home.
And it was just, it was time, you know, just felt like,
you know, it's time to move back because I didn't
realize it at the time, but I think I, I couldn't
build the type of business that I am meant to build in
Hawaii.
Was there like a moment apart from having the baby,
or was that really the full catalyst, like,
had it been building and that was like the cherry on top.
Good.
You know what?
I don't know.
Like, I don't.
I don't know if there was like.
I mean, maybe it was building.
I mean, I loved being in Hawaii, but I don't necessarily know
if I loved the kind of complacency that kind of set in.
And again, my priorities were not necessarily
in alignment with where my heart was telling me I needed to go.
Let me maybe phrase it slightly different.
Yeah.
When you moved to Hawaii,
did you go there thinking that it was going to be just for a season,
or did you go into it thinking, hey, this is it?
I went into it thinking that I'm moving to Hawaii,
and this is the chapter in my life.
This is where I'm supposed to be.
So not a specified amount of time.
I feel like every place that I lived and everywhere
that I've been has been, like, I've gone there.
When it's time to go, it's time to go.
Like, there's going to be time that I'm going to have
to leave Newport beach and go somewhere else.
Probably bali, but, you know where the next spot is.
I feel like that's kind of what's calling me, I guess.
I don't know.
We'll see.
Okay, so this sounds like just kind of ten years there.
Shortly after 911.
This is early 2010.
Sde yeah.
Sound about right?
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
And you seem to gain clarity on the kind
of company that you were meant to build.
What was that next company?
So then I started up stride search, which is a search business.
I was duplicating what I was doing.
I was duplicating it.
And there was a lot of signs that kept poking up,
like I couldn't duplicate, or maybe I just didn't have
the passion to duplicate what my mentor had done.
And so I hired quite a few people.
None of them really worked out.
I didn't do a great job of training.
I wasn't a great manager.
I didn't really like who I was.
And it kind of came down to the fact that, like, I just didn't
really love business so much or I didn't really love the grind or,
you know, there was a couple things that I just didn't love.
I came in one day.
I first started up in the Westlake village area,
which is where I built cross creek.
And then I decided, hey, look, this isn't working.
So I moved down to Orange county,
and I hired some people and fired some people.
And it really wasn't just.
It wasn't gelling.
So then I had to take a good, hard look at myself, and I just realized
that I needed to kind of pull back, and I just needed to go solo.
So I just came in on a Tuesday, and I, you know, I had,
like, four or five people that were working with me,
and I just said, hey, guys, like, this isn't working.
I'm like, we just gotta end this.
I go, you don't have to go home, but you ain't here anymore.
You know that old saying?
But, yeah, I just.
I kind of shut it down.
I took a couple days off, and then I'm like,
I'm gonna pivot my business completely.
So I'm gonna focus on just doing retain search, and I'm going to
work on solving a problem that nobody's been able to solve.
And that problem is the interview itself.
Like, as a recruiter, my biggest pain point was that
I would send a good candidate into an interview.
Two people go into a room together.
You have no idea what happens.
And then somebody comes out with a decision,
but also the candidate comes out with a decision, too.
So it's your job as a recruiter to try and make sense of it all
and sell both sides, but you have no idea
of what happened when those two people went into the room together.
And most of the time,
what I figured out was there's two interviews that happen.
One is, oh, crap, I really like this person's background.
I got to figure out how to sell them and get them on board.
So that's the sales interview, right.
So you ask a couple questions, and then it's
the hiring manager talking the whole time about what a great
workplace it is and why you should come to work here.
And then you have the second interview, which is,
I'm not really quite sure about this person,
so I'm going to do a really good job of screening them out.
And so what I realized is that all decision making, most decision
making is reliant upon bias, assumptions, and personal motives.
That's it.
So your position is, it's not truly objective?
Not even close.
Yeah, most of the time when interviews happen, I mean,
a good test of this is, talk to me about how the interview went.
Oh, it went great.
Okay, so what do you think?
Oh, I really like the person.
Why?
They all.
They seem like they got good energy and da da da da.
And I really like their experience they had over here and what that.
Okay, but why, like, what did they give you that's going
to give you the data for you to be able to say,
this person's going to work in our company because of XYZ.
It just doesn't exist.
So that's what I've been hunting.
And you believe that you can help people go
from the subjective to objective 100%.
Yeah, it's taken me the past 1012 years to figure that out, but,
yeah, we've gotten it really,
really honed in well with our methodology that we developed.
Was there, like, a particular candidate or
a particular situation that was like the.
Oh, my gosh.
Hit me like lightning.
I got to go change directions.
So my very first retained executive search that I took in, which was
$100,000 fee plus, right, was for a VP of engineering at a company.
So I identified, I did a great job doing diligence.
I identified a bunch of candidates.
Probably the second one that I sent in had a meeting with the CEO,
and I called a follow up with the CEO,
and I said, how did the interview go?
And he goes, great.
Awesome.
We want to hire this person.
And I said, why?
Tell me about the interview.
What happened?
Give me the details.
He goes, man, we had a great conversation
for 45 minutes about the Oakland A's.
I'm like, what?
He goes, yeah, it's his favorite baseball team.
It's my favorite baseball team.
We bonded over it, and I think he's going to be really good.
So basically what he did was he fell in love with his background,
his resume, which my own opinion on resumes.
His resumes, like, the most valuable tool about a resume is,
like, the whitespace and the contact information,
but my own personal opinion.
So he made the decision, they made him an offer.
And I fought it, by the way.
I was like, look, you can't do that.
We have got a couple other candidates.
Let's roll through the process with these two
other people before you make this decision.
Nope, we're going to hire them.
Fast forward.
I fought it.
Six months later, I get a call from that CEO.
Almost to the day.
It was crazy.
And I told him this was going to happen.
I go, this is a bad decision.
If he doesn't work out, this is not on me.
This is on you.
But this could have dire consequences.
He calls me almost six months of the day,
and he says, hey, look, here's what happened.
I need you to replace so and so.
Why?
What happened?
Well, he ran out our two top performers.
So our software engineering team is decimated.
So we had to fire him.
And they had a clause in the contract
where they had to pay him some money.
Our fee was like $100,000.
So he ran out two top performers.
Like, basically he just destroyed their product development team.
And we did the math on it.
We figured it cost them in six months,
about a million dollars, just under a million dollars damage, right.
Like, of what it costs to pay a salary,
running off the other people, everything, right.
And almost put the company out of business.
So that was my aha.
Moment that I really need to make sure that
people get good at interviewing and make decisions based on
objective data as opposed to.
I feel really good about this conversation.
And even to this day, I hear people say, you know, ultimately
I just hired by my gut and God, that makes my stomach curdle.
Because your gut's not always right and your guts often wrong.
Because what we want to do is we want to hire people that are like us,
or we look for reasons, especially entrepreneurs.
We look for reasons to like people rather than
really asking the hard questions and getting to the truth.
And so, like, my mission has become bring truth to interviewing.
Right.
It's really important that we turn the proverbial joke around,
which is, what do you call a conversation between two liars?
An interview.
I've never heard that before.
Oh, yeah.
Somebody told me that a few weeks ago, and I'm like, so true.
Right.
So turn that into, you know, let's bring truth into the conversation.
Let's make sure that people are going to be set up to succeed,
both parties, and then let's kind of flip this rolling,
revolving kind of ick that goes,
that happens in interviewing to something that actually works.
Out of curiosity, and it sounds like you probably had a
disclaimer that protected you, but in your searches, was
there a clawback, maybe the wrong term, but, like, if
somebody didn't work out within a certain amount of time,
did you guys have to place the next person at no cost or
refund the fee or.
Yeah, they wouldn't pay you until after the six month mark.
No, I mean, in retain search,
you get paid at different check in points.
You capture about a third of the fee upfront.
And then.
But there's a success based measure to it.
We kind of restructured ours to really be flexible with our clientele,
and we kind of held a little bit more back on the back end.
But, yeah, there is a guarantee period.
Right.
That we have to ride out and we just have to hope
that the company makes the right decision and that the person makes
it past the 90 days or six months in the guarantee period.
I didn't like having to cross my fingers for months.
And then, you know, on the guarantee date, you're like,
we didn't have to pay that one back.
So what I did was I just looked at it from the opposite standpoint.
Like, sure, we'll give you a long guarantee, but, like, we get a vote.
When you put that VP of engineering in front of that CEO,
did you have reservations going into it, or was it simply
the output of your conversation with the CEO about the interview?
That was the red flag, no.
Yeah, it was the red flag of the interview, for sure.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, and he wasn't even open to discussing
or having a conversation or poking holes in it.
Right.
It was like well, there's an assumption that happens with a lot
of candidates where I always like to call them vanity hires.
Right.
And this was 100% a vanity hire.
The biggest mistake I've seen companies do is they lock in on a
candidate who comes out of a name brand company and think that
this person is going to be successful at their small company
that's under resourced and the person is entirely not
positioned to do well at your company unless it's something
they truly desire.
Like, I spent two years at Google, I hated every moment
of it because I'm a builder and I want to be in a small company
where I can thrive and make the impact, make mistakes and do.
If they're not telling you that, then you should not chase them
as a smaller company because you're setting them up for failure.
And I bring in CEO's of my podcast on all the time and they share
that story and it's almost always a vanity hire that fails.
And then they scratch their head and they're kind of like, well,
the person just couldn't handle the work.
And I'm like, no, the person was set up to fail.
It's interesting, we had somebody that didn't end up working
out and similar, but not exactly the same kind of logic.
My mindset years ago was we want to find people that have worked for
large consulting firms that are burnt out from the long hours and
the travel, and we may not be able to meet the level of comp that
they've had at these other firms, but we can give them a much better
quality of life in our environment, in our culture, and they'll
bring that experience of running these big projects with them and
that'll help.
And I don't know that this would be universally true of anybody
coming out of an environment like that, but I think one of the
reasons that this person ultimately didn't work out for the long
term was in the big company, they had a whole different set of,
and you use the term resources, they had a whole different set of
resources to lean on and it's just not the same in a smaller
organization.
So maybe for slightly different reasons.
Well, I think what it tracks down to at its root is desire.
Does that person really, really deeply desire
to be in a company like yours rather than.
Yeah, we desire to have somebody who looks good on our payroll
for investors or for whatever reason.
But the truth of the matter is, is that if they don't really want it,
you're most likely a stop to their destination.
Not a destination.
Interesting.
Yeah.
So after that what was kind of your next step after the aha,
what was your next step in getting Intertru off the ground?
Yeah, it was actually creating the methodology for Hire OS.
So what is now Hire OS, which is what drives Intertru.
So hire us is our hiring operating system, which again,
through a lot of learnings, a lot of placements, there
was another aha moment that what made stronger hires were
people that actually operate the same way in which all
the members of the team that are fully functioning are
operating.
And that came down to the core values.
So this kind of goes back to actually my first exposure to Eoshdeen,
which is the entrepreneurial operating system,
that there's a core value component and there's a lot of really great
trainers out there who talk about how important core values are.
And CEO's usually tend to shrug it off and their eyes roll back
in the head when you start talking about core values.
But I think the thing that you have to realize is that
every company has core values, whether you own them or not.
So they either own you or you own them.
And if you own them, then you can actually use that or leverage those
core values as a North Star by which people make decisions within
your organization and North Star for hiring to understand, hey, the
type of people that are going to be successful in my unique
environment.
For us, curiosity, huge thing.
We are all naturally curious.
We ask lots of questions,
and curiosity has to be something that people naturally operate.
We can't force people to want to pick up a book
and read it and learn about something totally new or
decide, I'm going to learn how to speak Spanish.
You have to naturally be wired that way.
And so when I learned about that,
I started to see my success rate go through the roof
in the placements I was making because I started really delving into
gauging whether or not somebody was aligned with the organization.
This actually was triggered by an interview that I had with Amazon,
and this was quite a few years back,
but this was you looking at going to work at Amazon,
or this was you preparing to help do placements for Amazon.
So I had a hiring manager, a VP that I've known
for a long time, I've helped support him.
He took a job at Amazon and he called me up one day and he said,
hey, rick, I want you to come and help me build this organization.
Will you come interview here?
And I'm like, I'm not really a big company guy.
It's not my thing.
He goes, it'd be working for me.
And it's specifically, like, building my team.
And he kind of talked me into it.
He sold me on it, and I was like, you know what?
Yeah, fine, I'll do it.
And so he set me up with the interview process,
and I did the phone screen.
They asked a bunch of basic questions,
which I crushed, and then they flew me up for a day.
The way that they weight their hiring decisions is that
something like 75% of the decision is based on whether or
not you align with their leadership principles,
that is, core values, and at the time, their number one one.
And even from the beginning, they started with one,
which was customer obsession, essentially.
I went into this interview thinking, I'm going to,
like, I may be working with Paul.
That would be great, because I had a great relationship with them.
But also, man, I prepped for it.
I kind of, like, really delved into and got into it, and
I realized, and it was funny, like, I think I talked to
the second person who interviewed me, and they said,
well, just so you know, this would not be working with
Paul.
We kind of need some help in these other two areas.
And I was like, dude, that's not why I'm here.
Right.
But I went through the interview process,
and I really learned a ton from it.
And I told them at the end, I go, look, I'm not a fit,
because I'm not going to be a person that you'd bring in just
to hire a bunch of java engineers for the Kindle team.
That's not me.
My whole thing is really hard things.
I'm really good at finding really hard to fill roles.
So we wrapped up, and then I actually sat down,
and I remember just kind of rewriting all the questions.
And I remember thinking, like, they just asked the questions,
and it was my job to fill in the story.
But, like, what if they probed deeper?
And so that's kind of where my methodology kind
of was born and started to evolve, is that they didn't ask me any
probing questions to see if I was even telling the truth.
I could have been lying.
I mean, we all remember the joke, right?
Conversation between two liars is an interview.
Yeah, that was my aha moment
for the whole core values driven interview process.
Because if my behaviors fit really well into an organization,
then, God, you know, what are the chances of success gonna be?
Well, it actually pops you up into the 90th percentile,
I think I've heard Elon and Jeff and all these CEO's say,
look, you can teach skills, but you can't change a person.
And you're hiring a person you're not hiring skills for sure.
If you need to hire skills, hire a contractor.
I love what you said about everyone has
core values and you either own them or they own you.
They are in the DNA of the leadership and how they run
the organization and whether or not they're actually stated,
they are present and it shows up in how you operate.
But also getting back to your idea of taking the subjective
to making it objective, I love that idea of the objectivity
lies in how well somebody lines up with those core values.
That's beautiful.
Yeah.
And if you're running a small business,
it's your responsibility to get the right people in the right seat.
I mean, when you mess up your team notices,
they may not say anything, but when you get the right person in,
what does that do to your productivity and everything else?
We've all had what my friend calls the internal terrorists that have
kind of gotten into the organization.
We've all experienced it.
Right.
Where the person had all the right skills.
Everything, once they got in,
they completely just rubbed everybody the wrong way.
That's that vp of engineering you talked
about ran off to two key people.
Yeah, exactly.
So I havent fully read the innovators dilemma yet.
Ive kind of skimmed a little bit here.
But theres this general premise that its hard for an organization, if
not impossible for an organization to go from this thing where
theyre making money to this other thing where they may not make as
much money, the margins may not be as good, or success is not
guaranteed.
You had this recruiting thing that was working.
I mean, maybe the staffing thing wasn't working, but you'd been
successful with this for what sounds like probably 20 ish years.
Yeah, for sure.
Yeah.
I mean, I could build a half million
dollars a year not even working full time.
Like, it's fairly easy to do.
Yeah.
You could do that in your sleep, right?
Yeah.
Walk me through, like, what was that mental process of going from?
I've got this thing that I know I can have a very good life doing
to I'm going to go place my bet on this entirely different thing.
Spiritual awakening.
That's what I like to call it.
So I'm part of EO and one of my accountability group that I'm part of.
One of my coaches or mentors wanted me to read this book
called the second Mountain, and I've got who wrote it,
but I remember reading it and it talks about purpose, it
talks about your career, how early in our career we
essentially, like, we want to get to the top of the
mountain.
And then we get to the top of the mountain and we're like,
okay, well, there's another mountain over there.
So, you know, then you go through this plateau and then you go
through this finding yourself thing and it's a journey, right?
So on my path to my mount doom, so to speak,
I hit all my goals and, you know, and I was able to kind of
live a very, very, like, fulfilling life.
But then, you know, then you get to this point where like, okay,
this isn't really, am I really providing any value to humanity?
Am I really, like, you start thinking about these concepts of like,
am I really making life any better for anybody else?
And so I think that was the nagging driver for me, that,
hey, you know, like,
I'm here for a purpose and I think that if I don't fulfill it,
then I'm going to have to come back and repeat it in some other way.
I dont know.
So Maslows hierarchy of needs like food, shelter,
clothing, and you move on up.
And I think that the top part,
I think they call it self actualization.
It sounds like thats what you were desiring
at that point youd have the stability.
But there was that self actualization piece that was missing.
Yeah, I think so.
Its like the heroes dilemma, right?
You could stay where you are and I could have stayed
in Hawaii and had a great life and been surfing all day long.
But there's just something nagging in you that
there's something that you have to accomplish.
And so as I was going through, it slowly unveiled itself.
And then the catalyst for it was,
I've been talking to my co founder Mike about,
hey, can we build this methodology into a software platform?
And he's like, well, it requires a ton
of money because AI just isn't there yet.
And then voila, we have generative AI, which made life so much easier.
Right.
So now it becomes possible.
That was the impossible.
Now become impossible real quick.
You used an acronym and just want to make sure for people that don't
know, we talked about EOS, which is entrepreneurs operating system.
Yeah.
Then you referenced EO.
These are not the same thing.
For those that arent familiar with EO,
would you just talk a little bit about that for a second?
Yeah, so EO is the entrepreneurs organization.
So everybodys heard of probably YPO,
which is the young presidents organization.
EO is kind of like the feeder into YpO.
So it sprung out of, I believe it was started by
a guy named Vern Harnish, who is another kind of system like eos.
I think he does.
Scaling up and gazelles, I think, is another book of his.
Yeah, exactly.
So it started by Verne and it kind of took a life
of its own and its an organization thats volunteer run its
entrepreneurs really kind of getting together
with other entrepreneurs and helping solve business problems.
Anybody whos an entrepreneur, you know, man, its a lonely journey.
And it's been transformational for me and being able to kind
of go like, I got a problem, I don't know what to do.
So it's great to be able to kind of understand
how other people have dealt with that problem and what they
did and kind of helps you get to a better decision.
People that have listened to a lot of past episodes will know
where I'm about to go, but I'm gonna keep harping on this.
Everybody needs a mentor, and the next thing you need a mentor coach,
and the next thing you need is a peer group.
Whether it's a formal peer group like an EO or
I'm a part of an organization called Convene.
Whether it's something like that or you've just got a couple
of buddies that you grab coffee with periodically, you need
to have other entrepreneurs that you can share those ups and
downs with and go to for council and something that blows me
away.
I've been a part of convene for, I think, seven years now.
Something like that.
Cool.
And we'll have one of our meetings and six months will go by and all
of a sudden something will pop up in my business and I'll go, oh,
I remember so and so talked about that months ago.
This is what they're talking about.
Oh, I've got a sense of where to go with this now.
And so there's so much learning that happens just
by osmosis of being around other people that are trying
to run an organization in a really, really positive way.
And so find that mentor, find that coach,
and make sure you've got a peer group as well.
Man, I could not agree with you more.
Like, it's talked me off a ledge a couple of times.
Right.
And also, you know, it's been critical for me expanding my
thinking because I think we have a tendency to think big
and then try to water it down to something super small, but
then you're like, well, that's not really, you know, and I
think a lot of people who are not entrepreneurs tend to try
to talk you down a lot of times because they really don't
know.
Why don't you just try this little piece first and test it out.
Whereas entrepreneurs are like, no, burn the boats,
go all in and make it happen.
Right?
And the only way great things happen is when you do that.
Like nobody ever, you know, Jeff Bezos would not
have built Amazon part time without a doubt.
I'm actually reading a biography on him right now,
and it's a, the whole Amazon journey is just fascinating.
One other interesting aspect of that I can think back and I
dont actually remember what the situation was at this point.
This was years ago, but in one of our meetings, it was my turn
to present and one of the guys in the group who weve been together
from the beginning and weve built a great relationship.
We have a ton of mutual respect.
And he calls me out after I get done talking.
Hes like, I think youre making a way bigger
deal out of this thing than it actually is.
Like, that kind of perspective is so valuable.
Oh, totally.
Sometimes I just desire for people to just call me on my shit.
Like, that's bullshit, Rick.
I don't buy it.
It's not them, it's you.
And it's like, all right, you're right.
Yeah, we need that person for sure.
Totally.
All right.
You don't have a technology background, at least I don't think.
I haven't heard anything along the way that says, no, Rick knows how
to spell Java because he's talking to other developers.
But, like, you're not pounding away at the keyboard
and creating applications yourself, right?
No, not at all.
Like, I've never written a lick of code.
It's just I don't have the patience to be able to do it.
Like, it's just not how I'm wired.
But thankfully, the fact that I've actually been in that
world for most of my career and I have a lot of contacts
and I've created a lot of good juju, so to speak, has
enabled me the ability to kind of pick up the phone and
call people.
And I was fortunate enough to be able to find my co founder
Mike, who does write code and build product and, you know, has
had some significant amount of companies that he took from,
like products that he took from zero to 100 million, like
pretty quickly.
So now there's a challenge because he's
never done it with zero resources.
So Mike now is learning a whole lot too.
You're at least our second guest that didn't have a tech
background that started a tech company, Eric Quorum with aim seven,
for people to go back and check that one out.
Who was your first phone call?
Like, what was your first action?
Step to get this thing going.
Well, first action step was actually writing the book
and kind of being able to give people
a really strong playbook as to how our methodology worked.
And then actually, Mike was one of my first calls,
but at the time, he was tied up in something else.
And so me just being the kind of,
I love cold calling, I went weird like that.
I did a lot of warm and cold calling, and I just started talking
to people, hey, here's what I want to build.
I need somebody to build it with me.
Are you my guy or girl or, you know, whatever, right?
So I just started doing, I mean, I just had to manifest a plan, right?
Like, or just make it happen.
So I've had hundreds of conversations.
I created a spreadsheet.
And so, like, the people that I really want or, like,
and by the way, most people don't meet the risk profile
of where I am as a company right now.
So what do I do?
I put them on a list for later,
and I've got a spreadsheet that says so.
And so he's going to fill this type of role
and I'm going to contact them when we're at x.
So, you know, I just started building out my chart, essentially,
and I know when I get to x,
I'm going to make that phone call and they're going to take my call.
I can't think of what.
I don't know if it was a podcast or a book or an article
I read, but somebody in DC told the story about how
pitch after pitch after pitch, the founder is coming,
saying, I need money so that I can go find and hire a co
founder.
And this guy's whole idea around.
That is, if you can't convince somebody else
to come alongside you and take the risk with you.
I'm not writing you a check with my money for sure.
How did you convince your co founder, take the risk and come and join?
I said, pretty, pretty, pretty please, and that was it.
No, you know, it wasn't one phone call.
It was one conversation.
It was over the course of months when Mike said
no the first time I brought him on as an advisor
and kept him up to speed with what we're doing.
My original co founder was a guy named awesome.
Who's awesome?
His actual name is awesome.
Yeah, but it's spelled differently.
But, yeah, it's pronounced awesome.
Right.
So.
So he really helped me get the original product out.
So, like, he was really instrumental in gathering requirements
and doing all the things that I had no idea how to do.
And then we had a team that built the software for us,
the original product.
But when awesome kind of got a job and needed to step aside,
then I recontacted Mike and it just, the timing worked out.
Mike was kind of starting to exit from his current company.
And when we talked further about, like,
what we're doing, he's like, I'm in, let's do it.
Of course, we put all these great plans in place and they've all
fallen by the wayside, most of them, but we just keep getting
back up again and cranking through it and readjusting the plan
and like, I don't know, I'm just a persistent person, so just
keep moving.
Yeah.
How long did it take to get v one ready to ship?
Way too long.
I have this history in my life of doing everything
the most difficult way first,
then figuring out it doesn't work and then getting it right.
So v one, we got up and running in the course of
me and awesome got it up and running in like, oh, wow.
I want to say six, eight weeks, but with the help
of a firm that we still work with today called Vansasoft,
they're great, but we got it up and running.
It was a disaster.
Crash.
They did everything, you know what I mean?
And then with a lot of user feedback, we developed,
I want to call it v two, but it's still not really necessarily
what I would consider to be a most lovable product.
It's a sellable product, but it's not lovable yet.
It's there.
It's close, but yeah.
And then we kind of relaunched that back in April, May,
and then we've had just like any other journey.
You just have the normal growing pans of crashes.
Got to figure out how to fix these bugs and that bug.
And it's a process for somebody who is not technical,
that wants to go take on a technology project.
What advice would you give them?
First and foremost, find somebody else who's passionate about
what you do, who loves to write code, and then have lots
and lots and lots of conversation before you guys start doing.
Meaning, like set expectations.
I created an expectation doc,
so before Mike came on board, I probably talked to 15 to 20 people.
I was like, okay.
They all thought it was a great idea
and they liked where I was going with it.
But then we went through this expectation stock,
and really what they want out of their career, what they're desiring
to do, is completely different than what we are.
And I'm like, well, I'm not going to be able to make you happy?
You need somebody who has what my friend Dean calls the right risk
profile, meaning they've got some money in the bank or maybe even
some money to invest into it, even better, and they're bought in.
But more importantly, you need somebody who's
really willing to go through the mud with you.
And they have to be a builder.
They have to naturally be inclined to want to build something.
And there's lots of people out there who are in, like,
I've been working at Google, and I'm just bored
of building this widget that I've been doing for three years.
I want to build something from scratch.
Like, they got to really deeply desire building something new.
And I think that that is something that could be said regardless
of whether you're getting into the technology space or anything else,
really?
Any business.
Yeah, yeah.
Have you had any of those, like, oh, my gosh, what just happened?
Or oh, my gosh, like, what are we going
to do kind of moments as part of this?
I have one of those every week.
Tell me about one of your favorites.
I don't have any favorites.
They're all painful and they all suck.
But the truth is, we got past them, right?
Like, we powered through them, but, yeah, like,
every founder will attest to the same thing.
It's like it's a constant flow of juggling watermelons and elephants.
I mean, it's like something's gonna break.
Okay, let's just tackle it.
Let's get it done.
Like, it's all about.
You get slammed down a lot.
It's all about just getting back up.
Is there anything you would do differently with Intertru?
Yeah, I mean, here's the thing.
I invested a lot of my own money into it.
I would invested the money differently.
You don't know what you don't know in the beginning.
And then, of course, everything that you learn, you go,
that 50,000 I spent here would have been much better off over here.
And for you, is that like, I wish I had put more money into marketing
and less money into development, or what does that look like for you?
No, it's definitely development related.
I mean, part of building the product too, though,
is you get your v one out and then
you get customer feedback and then you iterate on it.
So really getting the customer feedback quickly
and then learning what's real and what's not real is important
because a lot of customers will give you feedback
that's not necessarily going to move the product ahead.
They'll say, well, it'd be really nice if it had this feature,
feature chasing is somewhat dangerous and what's really healthy is
to be able to differentiate between is this nice to have or is
this going to get somebody to write a check and really keeping
focused in on those things that are going to get somebody to write
a check.
And it's not just because you sold them,
it's write a check because they see value in their business.
Adding to that and we do different things, but there's
similarity in the products and we're building products.
Yeah.
One of the other questions is not just will somebody write a check
but is this something that one person will write a check for
or is this something that lots of people will write a check for?
Yeah.
Is it going to meet this one weird one off need that this person
has or is there broad market appeal that we can leverage across
hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of customers?
Yeah.
And I think that's the mistake I see a lot of founders make,
is that they chase the whales without satisfying the guppies.
Right.
Like they build product for a whale.
And this market, this tech market the past couple
of years has proven to the company that my co founder worked at,
they were totally reliant on FaaNG companies.
That's Facebook, Amazon, Google, and I forgot what the n is.
But they totally were reliant on all their
income came from those big organizations.
Well when they tighten their belts and they started cutting budgets,
guess what happened to their income?
Gone.
Now they're scrapping around trying to figure out how they can sell
to mid market and companies that are actually growing.
And will they recover it?
I don't know, but you got to be able to cover both bases.
And I feel like when you build for small and then land and expand
your chances of success are much greater.
I agree with that.
And Salesforce, we've been in the Salesforce ecosystem for a long,
long time and I've been to Dreamforce, their big conference which is,
it's quite the experience been I dont know, probably ten times.
And theyre very quick to bring the CIO of Coca Cola or the CMO for
insert big brand up on stage for the keynotes and yeah thats cool.
But you know what, the needs that they have are so different
than the needs that a small or mid sized company has.
And guess what, there are a whole lot more of those small mid
sized organizations than there are these massive enterprises.
And when you think about the effort that it takes to land, going back
to your example, the effort that it takes to land that whale,
the years and years and years that you could invest in that.
That may still not come to fruition.
Man, you get enough guppies and you've got a whale,
and those guppies are a lot easier to get than the whale.
And so I think it's really important not to ignore
the mid market and the smaller organizations.
Yeah, you know what you brought up, like one of my pet peeves in life,
too, was like, you go to a conference
and it's like they bring in some big name person out of a summit.
But here's the thing that drives me nuts.
They can talk about how they took it from 100 million to a billion.
Great.
They're not a builder.
Like, I want to know how you went from zero to one, right?
Or zero to ten or zero to 100.
That person is way more valuable to us people who are building
small businesses than somebody who's in a fluff position right now.
Right.
I hate the book.
Good, great.
Because of that.
Because they talk about how Coca Cola went
from 100 million to a billion.
I don't care.
I personally got a lot out of good to great, but my frustration
with it is like, circuit city is one of the stories in good to great.
They're not around anymore.
And so I think that there's an important takeaway.
You can go through these massive resets.
There's Kodak.
Wasn't Kodak in that good grade too, or something like that?
Probably.
But just because you did the turnaround
doesn't mean that you have the sustainability, right.
You've got to keep retooling and keep
figuring things out and the market changes.
And so just because you fixed it once doesnt mean its fixed forever
for true.
Yeah, so true.
Well, what are some of the books?
Weve talked a little bit about books.
What are some of the books that have been really
influential in your entrepreneurial journey?
And then id like to hear a little bit more about your book.
Okay, cool.
Yeah, its funny.
I try to pick up and read a lot of books, but I have the purple scroll
attention span, so I start books, and if it doesnt capture me in
the first chapter, I put it to the side and I don't pick it up again.
So, like, I've started hundreds of books that I haven't finished,
but the ones that resonate with me, like, actually, I'm going back
through think and grow rich at the order of my manifestation coach.
And I remember reading it when I was young, when I was 18,
and I was like, this is the dumbest book ever.
I don't get it.
I wasn't in a place where I could absorb what the lessons were.
Now that Im reading it again, im like, this book is brilliant
because theyre giving you the secret on how to be successful
without giving you the secret on how to be successful.
Right.
And its kind of entertaining to go back to 1930s language
and be able to read like hes talking about Andrew Carnegie.
And these stories are like, you couldn't really release some
of them today, but they're way more relevant
to getting you in the right mindset and to
really help you to start manifesting where you need to go.
And what I've kind of relearning is that
your energy creates your success.
And so what are you putting out there?
And you really need to be mindful of what you're
putting out there on a daily basis because it's so easy
to get sucked into negative think and self doubt.
And I probably dealt with imposter syndrome for a very
long time and all those things that like,
thank you, catholic school and my grandma had put into my brain.
But it's fears that you kind of innately have
that you just need to brush past.
So that's been a book that's been very, I digested it over
the weekend and now I'm like going back through and I'm like
actually doing the lessons and studying it, that sort of thing.
And what brought you to write a book yourself?
So it was funny, a lot of things I do
in my life, it wasn't intentional.
It was kind of like it was necessary.
So it was me sitting down going, okay, I've got a process that works.
I need to be able to convey this process to other organizations
so they can plug it into their business and they can
essentially be able to like have a higher, like a really
successful interviewing and hiring campaign because nobody
likes making bad hires.
So unlike a lot of the popular methods that are out there,
like, they're all kind of theory based or
based out of like data that comes out of college.
Mine's practical.
Like, I pulled mine from Amazon and I adjusted it
to what works for smaller businesses because again,
it's so costly to an entrepreneur to make a bad hirever.
We can make or break or kill a company.
So that was the motivation behind it.
Just prior, you were talking about self doubt, imposter syndrome,
putting out a, I'm going to call it a creative work.
Was that difficult to put that out into the world?
Yeah, I struggled with it internally.
I just knew it had to be done.
So I had to biohack my brain and actually,
when can I actually write a book?
What I had to do is trick myself.
I had to start waking myself up at 430 in the morning.
And what I did was I made the commitment, 430 in the morning.
I don't do anything.
I walk straight out to my computer, I lift up the laptop,
turn it on, read the last paragraph, and then start writing.
Wow.
And so I was able to churn out probably in about a month,
month and a half, maybe a big jumbled piece of work
that when I went through it, I was like, you know what?
The one smart thing that I did do is I hired a developmental editor
to kind of help me piece it all together.
So basically I just downloaded my whole process
that I do with each client onto a piece of paper
and the reasoning why and how it works and why it works.
And I even put my scripts in there so that
essentially you could do it yourself and hired the editor
who came in and actually put it into a book.
And you know what?
I just, I didn't think about it much from the perspective of like,
oh, God, should I be putting this out there?
It was just something I had to do.
So you built multiple companies,
you published a book, you've got a podcast, you got a family.
What's next?
I mean, right now, my waking hours committed to
and building that and with the mission of, like,
we're trying to bring truth to interviewing.
Right.
I want to eliminate that joke, right.
For the betterment of both parties, because
candidates don't want to fail any more than you want them to fail.
But we set them up to fail, and they do.
And then you've got these really interesting stories.
But the truth is, like, the story is your fault as
the entrepreneur because you ultimately sold somebody
to come to your company and they weren't going to match like,
it was destined to fail from the beginning.
So, yeah, like, right now it's building Intertru and making it,
like, solving the world's problems.
I mean, we want to eliminate bad hiring from planet Earth.
So once I hit that, then I'll let you know what's next.
That'll be the third mountain.
Yeah.
The next venture is really like getting to a point where I can
help other entrepreneurs on their journey in building companies.
I love to get back.
I support organizations, and so I have
people who call me all the time asking for help.
And, like, I'm happy to help coach somebody through
an interview process who's trying to get a job at a company.
It's just I love seeing that success of other people.
I've always elevated myself
by raising those people around me, or at least trying to.
Amen to that.
All right, I got to ask, what color was the Ferrari?
Black.
Black on black?
Yeah.
Nice.
Yeah.
I have a picture of it on my laptop still.
Well, Rick, thanks so much for coming on and sharing your story.
Yeah, thanks for having me, man.
It's been a I probably shared way too much,
but hopefully your audience is getting some value out of it.
Absolutely.
Thanks a lot, man.
Thank you.
That was Rick Girard, founder of Intertru.
To learn more, visit intertru.ai
That's I n t e r t r u . a i
If you or a founder you know, would like to be a guest
on in the thick of it, email us at intro@founderstory.us