EP 46 Retention, Troy Blanchard's Connections, and Ken Miles Got Jacked

Steve and Tony talk international remote workers and retention methods with Troy Blanchard from ZConnect.  Steve talks about implementing COVID early and often.  Tony talks about Ford Verses Ferrari and how the bureaucracy so prominent in that movie was real... and was probably the fault of the CEO.  And finally, Tony introduces everybody to the "Slug Line" in DC. 


Learn more about Troy Blanchard: https://www.linkedin.com/in/trblanchard/
Learn more about Zconnect at: https://www.linkedin.com/company/zconnect-global-outsourcing/posts/?feedView=all or https://zconnect.biz/
Learn more about the Shingo Model at: https://shingo.org/shingo-model/ or at: https://huntsman.usu.edu/mba/shingo-online-mba
Learn more about Fantastic Tony Benjamin at: https://www.thegrangellc.com/
Learn more about Steven "Big Deal" Smith at: https://thehiringtreebook.com/
Learn more about the Books mentioned on the podcast at: https://thehiringtreebook.com/hr-life-podcast
Learn more about MegastarHR at: https://www.megastarhr.com/
Learn more about Pucks for Autism at: https://www.pucksforautism.com/ 


Troy is the co-owner of ZConnect, a company that helps U.S. businesses scale by connecting them with highly qualified remote professionals across Latin America and other parts of the world.  With decades of experience in operations, leadership development, outsourcing, business development, sales, and strategic growth, Troy is passionate about helping companies solve complex business challenges, improve efficiency, and build strong cross-border teams. He enjoys bringing people together in a way that creates value for both the client and the professionals supporting them.  Through ZConnect, Troy helps companies grow more profitably by developing and integrating remote teams that support key business functions while allowing leaders to stay focused on growth, service, and long-term success.

Creators and Guests

Host

Fantastic Tony Benjamin

I am a unique HR leader with more than 20 years’ experience working for some of Utah’s oldest, fastest growing, and most well-known companies. My experience includes Superior Drilling Products, Air Medical Resource Group, Control4, Ovivo USA and Deseret Book. I am a regionally recognized authority on building successful cultures and am an alumni speaker at DisruptHR SLC and DisruptHR St. George. I have earned an MBA from the University of Phoenix, a Bachelor’s degree from Utah State University, and am a certified Professional of Human Resources (PHR). I'm married to a woman out of my league, have three brilliant kids I doesn’t deserve and, although I travel a lot, live in Vernal, Utah.

Host

Steven "Big Deal" Smith

Steve will be the first to tell you that recruiting is marketing. He earned his Bachelor of Science in Finance at Brigham Young University and started his career in recruiting in Feb 2005. In 2008, he took a risk during a recession to help start a new company with Ryan Kohler, called ApplicantPro, a full suite HR platform for small to mid-sized businesses. In March 2025, ApplicantPro became iSolved Talent Acquisition, now serving 177,000 clients and close to 9800 employees. Before the merger, ApplicantPro made the Inc 5000 list 12 years in a row, Top Places to work in Utah 3 years in a row, and Steve was named the Small Business Utah HR Achievement Award winner in May 2024. iSolved was also named an Indeed Platinum Partner in 2023, 2024, and 2025 and is one of only ten ATS platforms in the country to obtain that designation. SHRM-CP & PHR certified, Steve currently volunteers on the Utah SHRM State Council as the immediate past State Executive Director. His book, The Hiring Tree: Laws of Applicant Attraction, was released in early 2023, and has helped thousands of organizations across the country rethink their approach to hiring. If you need help understanding the principles and role of SEO, marketing, and AI when it comes to attracting job seekers, Steve provides a solid framework for hiring effectively.

What is The HR Life Podcast?

The HR Life Podcast is a show about the work-life experience of those of us in Human Resources and business leadership. This long-form podcast is a conversation, casual, and not always the corporate line. Hosts and guests touch on everything from serious or even controversial topics to the absurdity of modern American business practices. Your hosts are Tony Benjamin, owner and founder of The Grange Strategic HR Consulting, and Steven J. Smith, Author of The Hiring Tree: Laws of Applicant Attraction and all-around important guy. Guests include the best minds in the HR world. Join the show weekly.

Tony Benjamin (00:14.9)
Welcome to the HR life podcast, a podcast about the work life experience of those of us in human resources and business leadership. Your hosts are fantastic. Tony Benjamin, owner and founder of the Grange strategic HR consulting and Stephen big deals Smith, who is so innovative that when COVID came out, he was one of the first people to implement it and decided to keep it way longer than anybody else. Hey, Steve.

Steve-o (00:42.247)
haha

Troy Blanchard (00:43.223)
Steve-o (00:45.272)
Did you know I got it like four times? This is so sad. So you have to understand something. My wife is a nurse and unfortunately during that time we were pretty much forced to get the shots and all the things and she got it multiple times because she was completely exposed all the time. But what's strange about this is I'm the one that actually got it first and shared it with my entire family.

Tony Benjamin (00:48.586)
I didn't know that.

Tony Benjamin (01:06.738)
Right, helping people.

Steve-o (01:13.236)
And the reason I got it is because I went on a fishing trip every year. had a family reunion. I go deep sea fishing outside of Mexico and the Cornell Islands and all that stuff. And I got it from somebody on the boat, brought it home with me and our family got it. Poor Cornell, Cornell Islands is like in Mexico. Sorry, I am bilingual, so it is what it is. But but yeah, I. There you go.

Tony Benjamin (01:26.014)
Wait, where did you go fishing again? Say that again.

in Mexico.

Tony Benjamin (01:35.944)
Right, right, right. That's okay. It will forever be Bucharest to me too, I get it.

Troy Blanchard (01:41.537)
Hahaha.

Steve-o (01:42.296)
Yeah, but I lost my sense of smell and it never came back. And what's interesting about that is, I went through a study at the University of Utah for almost nine months and they finally just came to me and said, look, we're going to have to end the study because you can't, you can't create a, like a medical device that can help you get your smell back. And so there was no money in it. So they were very frank, like there's no money in this. So nobody's willing to invest in it. Therefore.

Tony Benjamin (01:46.996)
Yeah.

Troy Blanchard (02:04.365)
Hahaha

Steve-o (02:10.478)
It is what it is. Now, only like 0.02 % of the population have this issue where it never came back. And one of the reasons it never came back for me is because in my family, we have frontal lobe issues. Because it turns out it is the frontal lobe that actually controls your sense of smell. And my...

Tony Benjamin (02:28.732)
I think that goes a long way to explaining a lot right there.

Troy Blanchard (02:32.009)
Yeah

Steve-o (02:32.046)
Right there from follow. Well, isn't it the frontal lobe that needs to like form but for somebody to become mature finally? That's why I'm not mature. That's what it is.

Tony Benjamin (02:34.673)
Ever

Tony Benjamin (02:39.602)
Yes, that's exactly what I was thinking. Everybody there in the background joining us is Troy Blanchard. He's with us today.

Steve-o (02:46.626)
Yay, Troy!

Troy Blanchard (02:49.593)
Thanks for having me, appreciate it.

Tony Benjamin (02:51.4)
The crowd goes wild for Troy. They just can't get enough. Steve's got to hold them back a little bit. We got to get the bouncers out here. It's been a while since we've had a guest and they're all just super eager for this. Whoa, whoa, whoa. OK, Steve, Steve. here he goes. He's going to hold up his sign here in just a second. And it's. OK, well, I'll just tell him to shut up in there. there they go.

Steve-o (03:10.254)
My marker is dead. I can't even write on it anymore.

Steve-o (03:16.814)
That's so sad. My marker died. Cheap, cheap marker. You know, I had something written on here and you know what it said? It said Steve sign. No, it said Steve sign.

Tony Benjamin (03:22.142)
Welcome to the podcast everybody.

Tony Benjamin (03:26.952)
It said Tony's cool.

Tony Benjamin (03:31.216)
that's funny.

Steve-o (03:32.684)
And I erased it because I was like, need to rewrite it, but now my marker won't work. I'm so sad. well.

Tony Benjamin (03:38.29)
Yeah, well, Troy, welcome to the podcast. We're very, very, very happy to hear you and have you on with us today.

Troy Blanchard (03:45.561)
Well, thank you. Thanks for having me. I could sit back and listen to you guys and have been, since you mentioned this, in my car and my travels and my exercise. I've had you both in each year for a little while now, so.

Steve-o (03:54.66)
man.

Tony Benjamin (03:58.707)
Yeah. Well, you know, what's funny about that is I'll be listening to the podcast because unlike Steve, I end up listening to it like six or seven times either before and after it gets released. And so I'll be listening to it and Steve will call me and he'll say something like, hey, we haven't talked in a while. I'm like, I don't know what you're talking about. I just listen. I was just having a conversation with you. So that's. Right. Good.

Troy Blanchard (04:08.879)
Yeah

Troy Blanchard (04:16.289)
I feel like I've been hanging out with you guys all afternoon. So it's been great. It's been great.

Tony Benjamin (04:26.068)
Good. So what we'll do, guess, Troy, we're going to let you introduce yourself. Do you what is your title? You're the CEO or you the founder of Seekonet?

Troy Blanchard (04:32.024)
Okay.

Troy Blanchard (04:38.167)
Yeah, I always like to say the co-founder, Bright of Zconnect, my wife and I launched it together and that's what I do. That's who I am.

Tony Benjamin (04:42.728)
Okay.

Tony Benjamin (04:50.042)
Excellent. Excellent. Well, let's.

Steve-o (04:50.734)
So she's the CEO.

Troy Blanchard (04:53.071)
absolutely both in personal life and in business, so we're

Tony Benjamin (04:58.258)
Right. That's you got your priorities straight there. That's for sure. I think it took me about three weeks after I got married to find out who was really in charge. And that was not me. And I've never pretended it's been me ever since then. Rachel, I was slow. But when I was we when Rachel and I were.

Steve-o (04:58.412)
Nice. Nice.

Steve-o (05:15.564)
I just can't believe it took you three weeks.

Troy Blanchard (05:17.953)
Yeah.

Steve-o (05:20.322)
Man.

Slow or stubborn?

Tony Benjamin (05:26.538)
When Rachel and I were dating, she told me that she liked football. And so every week in the fall, we'd go to the Utah State football games up there in Logan, because my apartment was pretty much right across the street from the stadium. So we'd go get a Subway sandwich, and then we'd go over to the game. We'd hang out at the game and all that. It wasn't until after we were married a couple of months that she told me she didn't like football. And she wasn't a big fan of Subway either.

Troy Blanchard (05:52.437)
It's a double strike right there.

Steve-o (05:54.094)
can't blame. Do you know my wife's first date, we went to Sonic and all she ordered was a drink and she didn't even drink any of it because she didn't want to eat in front of me.

Tony Benjamin (05:56.02)
That's right.

Steve-o (06:06.83)
So fun.

Tony Benjamin (06:08.114)
Yeah, it's like that. So, okay, Troy, take it away. Tell us about you, your background, where you come from, how you got to be this hugely influential person that runs Z Connect.

Troy Blanchard (06:21.003)
Well, I always hesitate to how far you go back but I was thinking as I was listening to your guys's podcast like when I go back to right after college I come back speak Spanish I was down in South America for a couple years in Ecuador specific and I came to get a job and it was very useful to speak both languages and started working in a Mexican restaurant and you know after I was hired I quickly

Found myself like I think in a lot of small businesses, you know, the owner comes up and says you're in charge of hiring everybody now And here I'm like 22, right and you know fast forward a couple years a couple years later I I left that but it was very it was a very informative experience for me because the next company I went to go work for it did the same thing and I found myself in two categories as I went from college out to my professional career

Tony Benjamin (06:57.993)
Right.

Troy Blanchard (07:17.271)
I found myself doing international business, so mostly out of the country, everything that I was doing. And then the second thing was somehow my Spanish was always incorporated in what I did. And I loved it. I loved those two aspects. And so that's kind of a little bit brief. I don't know how brief you want me to be about how far back I go, but that is.

Tony Benjamin (07:40.764)
No, that's really good. I was just thinking to myself that, my Romanian really came in handy too. Everywhere I go, I'm sure.

Troy Blanchard (07:48.06)
Well, I don't know about that. I don't think so, you don't probably incorporate that your job too often

Steve-o (07:48.089)
Ha ha ha

Tony Benjamin (07:54.427)
No, not usually. Although, although it comes in handy sometimes when you want to swear at people and you don't want anyone to know what you're saying. So, yeah, that that's.

Steve-o (07:56.611)
Yeah.

Troy Blanchard (08:02.964)
Yeah, awesome.

Steve-o (08:03.534)
Yeah, he's used it like tens and tens of times that I'm aware of in his life.

Tony Benjamin (08:09.576)
I've said tens and tens of words with it. My most random time using Romanian is I was going to see my sister in South Dakota. We were driving through Wyoming. We stopped at a McDonald's to get some food with my kids.

Steve-o (08:12.046)
the

Troy Blanchard (08:12.751)
You

Tony Benjamin (08:25.212)
And there were two people speaking Romanian. They're working at McDonald's and they were just, you know, going across the country and working a little bit and then moving on and working and moving on. And there they were speaking Romanian and I about fell over when I heard it. And of course I went up and started talking to them and then they almost fell over because they, they were shocked. So anyways, yeah, that's, that's my weirdest time, but it's always random and you never know when.

Troy Blanchard (08:39.131)
yeah.

Troy Blanchard (08:52.013)
Yeah, that's the opposite, think, Steve, right? mean, the opposite for us is it's anywhere you go, right? It's like, it's never random. It's frequent.

Steve-o (08:52.558)
That's cool though. Spanish is all the time. Yeah.

Yeah, and the thing is, is I like to speak it whenever I am given the opportunity because I like to continue to practice and make sure that I don't lose the gift, if you will. And so I constantly find reasons to speak it when I can. So, yeah.

Tony Benjamin (09:01.684)
Yeah.

Tony Benjamin (09:21.0)
Well, there you go. OK, so you learn Spanish and you come back and it's been useful to you. So let's talk about Z Connect and that and how you got into that then. Yeah, right, right. Yeah, start out what it is and then kind of give us this what got you there.

Steve-o (09:29.442)
Yeah, like what prompted it, like what led to it? That's the story I want to hear.

Troy Blanchard (09:38.476)
Okay, so ZConnect is where we connect global talent to US companies. And so our company is, it provides a veil of protection to a degree. It helps companies when they want to scale and grow, or if they want to save money. There's multiple reasons why they come to us.

But there's a basic function for us is and on our focus as a company, which I'm super passionate about I'll give it a little explanation of why later but I love to focus in on the retention side of the piece. I think a lot of our competitors, I don't like to use BPO but everybody uses BPO in our industry of this outsourcing process. But how it started was it's really interesting because if you go back to

You know, my first, I was working for a company called Pro Look Sports, loved it there, unbelievable experience. I was there 13 years and we did everything out of the Philippines. So manufacture high team sports apparel, right? High quality, fantastic experience. And then also for a small time, I opened up a factory in Mexico to do team sports apparel. So I was always working kind of out of the country and then kind of transitioned into...

Tony Benjamin (10:40.105)
Okay.

Troy Blanchard (10:54.765)
to corporate America, ended up going to work for Cannon Safe, Gunvall, Stackon now, Long Gun safes. It was a fantastic experience as well, seven years. that was, I was across, so I live in San Diego and I crossed the border into Tijuana, Mexico and I'd work there daily. And it's kind of hard for us to.

When I tell people that, they're like, wait, how does that happen? Because I'm going out of the country and through my immigration more than a thousand times, maybe 2,000 times. No, I didn't have to swim. had a floaty. That experience also was all out of the country. That company specifically had it in China and in Mexico.

Steve-o (11:26.604)
So you didn't swim.

Nice, nice. You got dragged.

Tony Benjamin (11:34.25)
That's perfect.

Troy Blanchard (11:48.558)
And so a lot of my experience was that outsourcing. So when I crossed the border, I'd walk into a building and there would be the accounting department and the marketing department. And you just keep going down, right? Finances, know, design, you know, everything, everything you can imagine. And then the manufacturing floor and down there, they're called Makila is where you work. Right. And so there are shelters that do all the HR function, right? It's where a U S company can hire.

a shelter and the shelter is you know the age and a record right they're the ones hiring the employees and they're going through like payroll importation compliance government facing responsibilities.

Steve-o (12:26.424)
So describe an agent of record for our listeners who are not very familiar with what that even means.

Troy Blanchard (12:33.047)
Yeah, good question. And if I I mis-explain it, then let me know. But when you go out of the country, it's Steve's. Yeah, we know that. You know, there's somebody who's primary, right? Who's somebody who's who's who is the it could be an agent or an entity on record that is running a Makila. So if you're under Makila, you're usually programs are under

Tony Benjamin (12:39.142)
It's Steve. If you mess it up, it's Steve's fault. It's okay.

Steve-o (12:42.7)
It's always my fault.

Troy Blanchard (12:58.379)
IMEX under manufacturing side. then you've got everybody that person is ultimately responsible for all labor compliance. So benefits, religious payroll, recruiting, supporting, retention, you know, all that whole function. And that all goes to a shelter. So if I'm a U.S. company and I'm like, hey, I want to use what used to be NAFTA.

but now it's USMCA, unless you're a candidate, you're CAMUS, right? They switched the first two letters, whichever country is talking about it. But you're gonna take care of where you buy all your raw materials in the United States, right? And then you cross the border and then it's assembled or manufactured and then it brings it back across the border to the US. And that program...

Tony Benjamin (13:26.058)
Right? Yeah, a little nationality. Right.

Steve-o (13:26.412)
Nice, nice.

Troy Blanchard (13:44.492)
itself is I was in one of those maquilas or several, Juarez and Tijuana. I was in those maquilas working there. And so when you say what kind of brought me to here is while I was there working, when I first got there, the owner said, hey, we'd really like you to tackle, you know, our attrition rate is horrible, right? It's like 8 to 12%.

We'd love it to be under five. At the time, I'm thinking yearly. Then I'm realizing this is monthly. How do you turn over your entire staff? I thought it was unique. Obviously, the company said this isn't unique. is Macuilas on the border. People will leave for five to 10 cents across the border. That was a two and a half, three-year.

Tony Benjamin (14:16.904)
Right, yeah, of course you would.

Troy Blanchard (14:38.719)
journey of trying to figure just that piece out. I involved multiple universities. I thought it was really cool. I'd call the university and say, who's your expert in HR? Who's your expert in culture? Who's your business director? And then I would just share the problem and say, what would you say I should do? And then I would try to implement it. And it would just kind of evolve. Like, how can we get this down to like an 8 % yearly instead of an 8 % monthly?

And as I did that journey, you really learned the power of outsourcing. Our entire company was back of offices. Sure, was a building in.

Las Vegas and there was quite a few, maybe 40 or 50, but nothing compared to like high season. There's a thousand people that are working in these factories right across the border. And so when you are examining that process of retention, I just had a blast. And we kind of came up with about 10 things that made the difference. And pretty soon, after trying trial and error, trial and error, trial and error, trial and error, did get it down to that 8 % yearly. And it took a long time, but it was

Tony Benjamin (15:24.138)
Alright.

Tony Benjamin (15:45.418)
Wow.

Troy Blanchard (15:46.455)
beautiful experience. And so I know you're asking how does that even end up as Zconnect, but do have a question before I get there?

Steve-o (15:52.448)
Hahaha

Tony Benjamin (15:53.151)
No, no, no, that's, that's, I was going to say knowing what I know about your story and that that leads perfectly into Z Connect, but I'm going to interrupt us first. Running a business is hard. HR shouldn't be. Megastar HR is here to save you from bad HR with expert support and everything from hiring to handbooks, compliance to culture, need payroll help or recruiting power. We do that too.

Fractionally and flexibly no overhead just results visit megastarhr.com and let's grow your business together. Shout out to Becca. Thank you for sponsoring us. We really appreciate it. All right, go ahead Troy. Now tell us that like I said that that leads us directly to where I think you're going with Z connect. So talk to me about that.

Steve-o (16:30.456)
Yay, Becca.

Troy Blanchard (16:41.646)
Yeah.

So after that, you know, during that experience, who'd shut up to, you know, Canon and Aaron Baker and Steve and all those that like were part of my journey and supporting that and funding that and helping me learn those, you know, culture. And you guys have talked, I was actually looking through some of the topics, right? You know, culture is always the center of it, right? And people aren't going to leave for 10 cents more an hour, you know, in Mexico they do, but they stop doing that if they have a clear line of sight of where they're going and what they're

Tony Benjamin (17:01.258)
Right. Yes.

Steve-o (17:02.914)
Mm-hmm.

Troy Blanchard (17:12.463)
pathway is. And what I learned in that maquila is when people feel empowered for their own career advancement and they can see a pathway in that advancement with stage gates, almost milestones that would help them qualify themselves to a higher earning job, you get rid of that retention rate just skyrockets. And so there's a series of steps that we did. And so as I'm working abroad,

crossing the border every day. I knew that I was going to eventually be leaving the country to go to South America with my family. We had at one point as our family had lived in Costa Rica before I took the job at Cannon Safe and we knew that we're gonna go live abroad again. so...

I started consulting and I loved consulting. I love operations. My background is operations, right? And I just love raw materials to finish goods. If it's manufacturing, I love back of house operations. I love studying, you know, abroad and repay trading your money, you know, how to protect shelter. I just love all that. And I started working with a company in West Valley and

they needed some help. So for me, where's my network, right? My network is abroad. It's in Mexico. I'm used to hiring people abroad. So they needed some help in production. And so I'm like, here's a person that I think would do fantastic to consult in production. And so I would build the entity that I'm consulting for, and I would go find the talent or the consultants to plug into this company.

And then pretty soon they needed additional resources, right? And that grew and pretty soon it was customer service. it was, so I'm placing these different people at this time, everybody's just remote. They're doing it at nights or weekends, know, plugging in during their lunch hour. They're just helping remote the other companies. And then it, and then it came into.

Tony Benjamin (18:46.276)
wow, right.

Troy Blanchard (19:05.761)
it came to physically relocating. I could go on, my wife did her masters with a hyper, international relations in hyper focus in Latin America, in Latin America, economic development. so like.

Do people wanna immigrate? No, unless there's no jobs or they're in fear, right? And so the thought process was, the people that I'm checking to see if they wanna relocate to the US, it's not as easy as you think. You think everybody wants to come here to the US, but when you take someone with the top talent and say, hey, you wanna leave your grandma and your grandpa and all your family and you're making plenty of money and you have a house and a car down there, but let's come to the United States so you can be marginally better, right? We quickly found after placing several people, yeah.

Steve-o (19:44.974)
Not good enough, right? Yeah.

Tony Benjamin (19:47.432)
Yeah, yeah.

Troy Blanchard (19:48.368)
And after placing several people, which they love it, right? And I'm so grateful to be part of that process, but it was also, you know, the company's paying 10, 20, 30,000 and just getting their visa. And then I started thinking, we really need to just let people stay where they live and try to tap them in. And it didn't really click until Daphne and I had left. I would say I left corporate America and went to South America. And Daphne and I and my two oldest kids relocated.

to Ecuador, to Quito specifically. And we were living in Quito about a year and a half, was flying back and forth from Quito and I was consulting. And while I was consulting and I was in a location, they said, we can't retain our people. Like it's really hard in customer service. And so at the time we were like exporting flowers and chocolate and nothing was really making decent money. There's small margins, it's commoditized, right? And so I called my wife, I'm like, babe, drop everything.

Tony Benjamin (20:40.904)
Right, right, right.

Troy Blanchard (20:45.687)
Like find two people we got to hire them in four. This is friday by monday they need to start and she's like i've never hired anybody i'm like you'll do great, right and that's the that was the birth of Yes It's the birth of like the real establishment although we'd already been placing people through the consulting and then placed a few people We didn't realize we had started a business, right? It was just something we were doing along with the other 10 things we were doing, right? And then we still didn't hyper focus on it

Tony Benjamin (20:53.61)
That's the standard line right there.

Steve-o (21:03.566)
Yeah.

Tony Benjamin (21:03.646)
Right.

Troy Blanchard (21:14.691)
We were working with some franchises in the US that play some people and pretty soon we got to 16 or 17 people and then we realized, 90 % of our focus is on.

5 % of our income, right? And our income is really over here. And so we started to say, okay, well, what could we do to change? And it really came in alignment with Daphne, right? Daphne is economic development in Latin America. And mine is my whole career. mean, you're talking 20 years. All I've done is work with teens out of the country. And so I wanted to kind of make a hybrid of like, let me consult.

Tony Benjamin (21:49.119)
Right.

Troy Blanchard (21:53.87)
Let me help your company grow. I'm not going to charge you to help you consult as long as you hire one of our team members. And so that's, that's, hope that answered your question, at least your first question. was a long answer.

Tony Benjamin (22:05.436)
No, no, that that takes us to Z connect and I yeah, right, right. And I understand that. And that's how you guys get started. And I actually really admire that because you're taking both your expertise and you're kind of gluing those things together. And it makes it so that you have the right expertise for the right moment. And that's the perfect place for business to start.

Steve-o (22:07.502)
And that's Zconnect, yeah.

Tony Benjamin (22:28.138)
Okay, so you do that and then you're starting to place people. talk now I know there's a specific angle of the type of people you're placing now. So let's kind of talk about that. Tell me more about that.

Troy Blanchard (22:40.291)
Well, I think at the beginning when you're scrapping and there's too many podcasts out there about, my gosh, I'm totally successful and I'm at this point and I'm not, I'm in the grind and there's less talk about the grind.

Tony Benjamin (22:48.681)
Right.

Troy Blanchard (22:52.399)
And the complexities of all of a sudden somebody calls and says, hey, how are you in California compliant? And can we talk a little bit about labor laws? And can we talk about HR functions? And I would like to hire through Zconnect. And how do we do that? And then you have somebody that's super simple, which is really easy when you think of subcontractors. just like, they can work whenever they want. And there's a variety of ranges of where people need help.

Tony Benjamin (23:14.249)
Right.

Troy Blanchard (23:18.543)
We're in 15 industries. We have over 30 companies right now. We're probably closer to 35 companies that currently source through us. specifically, I would say we focus in Latin America on the recruiting side. So for talking about the subcontractor side, we focus in Latin America. Sure, we definitely have people placed from India. We have people placed from the Philippines, because I love the Philippines too, because I spend a lot of time there.

Steve-o (23:34.702)
Mm-hmm.

Troy Blanchard (23:44.814)
But our passion and we've been living over four years in Quito, Ecuador. We just recently moved back to the United States. So that's where the recruitment has been focused. On the customers, when you think of that niche, let me back up just one second. When you're talking about our focus, our focus, there's really the educated. And I gotta tell you, people that have worked.

really hard to get an undergrad. Some of them have an undergrad and certificates, or they have an undergrad and a master's. And it's very common in Latin America to go find somebody that's got a US undergrad, a US master's, and they're driving an Uber, or they're underemployed, or they have one customer that's giving them five hours a week. And so when we saw that, the first several, you know,

Tony Benjamin (24:26.57)
Right.

Troy Blanchard (24:35.403)
Uber drivers were all engineers and they're all 40 years old and they all have at least 15 years experience that were picking me up to take me from the airport to our house. And then you have people relocating out of the neighborhoods that have real high education. The one that really affected me was somebody that in a church setting I was in specifically, and that was a leader that had to be relocated.

I mean, he was leading the area and he explained he had an undergrad in finance with a master's in accounting, both US, if I'm not mistaken, at least the master's is from the US and he couldn't make $400 a month and he's fluent in English. So at that point, I'm like, what? Right? Watching these four kids and moving back in with mom and dad. I mean, this is ridiculous. And so at that time,

Tony Benjamin (25:15.05)
Wow, right.

Steve-o (25:16.162)
That is crazy. Yeah.

Tony Benjamin (25:22.537)
Right.

Troy Blanchard (25:24.077)
That's really what our focus became. Let's find people that are centered in that area. There's lots of programs. You've got University of Arizona that's got OODLA. I think it is down throughout Latin America. It's getting great degrees. You have Pathway through Inzyne and BYU. You've got some UC schools that are connected. There's a University of San Francisco that's, I think, not affiliated, but nonetheless down in Ecuador.

And then when you go from Mexico to the tip of South America, right, you've got universities everywhere that are excellent quality universities. And so they're getting great education, but they don't have great opportunities always.

Tony Benjamin (26:05.49)
No place for them to go and use all that information.

Steve-o (26:07.63)
I was gonna say, why is it they don't have opportunities? Is there just nothing in their area or region or where they live and so therefore the only option is Uber or what have you? Do they just not know? Yeah, I'm just curious about this.

Troy Blanchard (26:19.853)
Yeah, I love that question. I love that question because it's

Yeah, yeah, it's I love that question because it's specific specific to the country. So when you're looking at like Nicaragua, right, Nicaragua is somewhere we can still transfer money, whereas as opposed to like Venezuela, right, this mass exodus. Now you got Venezuelans that are sitting in Ecuador, highly educated, can't get their work, their work visas, right? You've got it depends on what country that you're in, whereas Argentina, they don't really need a lot of our help, right? Like there's we have some talent.

Steve-o (26:47.746)
Yeah, what's happening?

Mm hmm. Imagine that.

Troy Blanchard (26:53.379)
from, yeah, it just depends on what country we're specifically talking. And so, but for us, when it goes back to that story that you're asking me about is, you when we moved there is that the, you know, as COVID was over in the United States, basically, it was still kind of lingering there. And those first two years, it just crippled the economy, right? And the economy down there is destroyed.

right, as it is in most countries, right, that don't have any, and small businesses are gone because there is no, there's no funding, no grants, no programs. And so a lot of those companies all shut down. And so all their like executives, upper leadership and directors are now unemployed. And so it kind of, you know, that's how it started in that region.

Tony Benjamin (27:23.54)
Right.

Steve-o (27:37.976)
Wow. So do you feel like COVID really propelled this?

Troy Blanchard (27:44.688)
you know for for me, I don't think I think If I were to look back I love when you're listening, you know to to some podcasts and you're hearing these people that like just like the world's like aligned right and suddenly just magic and they're just like, you know, let me tell you about my rolls royce or you know, whatever it might be right in in this

Steve-o (27:50.872)
Mm-hmm.

Tony Benjamin (28:00.485)
Hahaha.

Tony Benjamin (28:05.172)
Right, the munchkins come out and point you to the golden path, right. I got it, yeah.

Troy Blanchard (28:09.035)
Yes, there's always in those stories, if you dig enough, they went through 10 years to get qualified to even understand what they're doing. And so I feel like I was in a training ground and I feel like I had just incredible employers that just really hyper focused in on the development of me and Daphne as well. And it really we were searching. It was like throwing spaghetti on the wall. We had started like five different companies right while we're down in Ecuador.

Steve-o (28:10.23)
Wow.

Steve-o (28:16.312)
Yeah.

Tony Benjamin (28:16.414)
Right.

Troy Blanchard (28:36.279)
And this was not the main one, right? And as we're growing these other ones, this one kind of emerged. so it, and then pretty soon it became super moving. I think where we had just decided to go full time and just sell off or close down some of these other things that we were doing, we got these letters and the first two letters we got were just tearjerker.

I mean, it was like I couldn't get married. I haven't been able to for four years. If I hadn't had this job, we wouldn't have been married. Now we're pregnant with twins. I can't thank you enough for connecting me. And then the next letter, and these letters started coming in and there's times where we will call grown adults in their 40s. And when you tell them they're connected and they got a job, they literally, they don't even respond. They just weep. What is more rewarding than like giving somebody who's worked so hard?

to get the talent and education to perfect their English, connected with their dream job to work with somebody in the United States is just, and that's where I would say it, because of the environment, there was a shortage of jobs. It propelled Daphne and I to laser focus in on let's provide jobs. And that's our focus is how can we provide jobs throughout Latin America?

Steve-o (29:36.387)
Yeah.

Tony Benjamin (29:54.347)
I think that's really cool. I mean, you tell me if I've got this wrong, but it's an awesome thing that you're helping these people. You're literally giving them a lifeline or I don't know if that's right phrase, but a line to pull themselves along, right? To do better and better. They get a salary or an income that for them and their area is really high. But for the U.S. company that's hiring them, it's cheap.

Troy Blanchard (30:11.246)
Yes.

Tony Benjamin (30:20.874)
Like they're getting a much more economical move that direction than they would if they were to hire that person in the US. And they get someone who maybe, I guess, depending upon who you find for them does or doesn't have the same amount of experience, but they get someone really good for a much lower price than they would do now.

Troy Blanchard (30:21.359)
Yep.

Steve-o (30:42.338)
Yeah, price tags. So are you an employer of record at that point or?

Troy Blanchard (30:42.649)
Sure, sure. go ahead. That's great. That's great. Great question. There's different offerings within our organization, but yes, I specifically subcontract or hire them as an employer record.

So on the EOR aspect of it, which if you really think of EOR, that's where it's like, you got to be there at eight. If you're there at eight, one, you know, here's your 55 things. Here's your secure computer. Here's, here's your phone. You've got to do this and this. So that might be anything from, could be healthcare. It could be payroll. could be, but then when I'm like on the drafters, designers, architects, you're building a building that has literally 700,000 parts that are going to go into this building. They can work whenever they want.

Steve-o (31:01.038)
Mm-hmm.

Troy Blanchard (31:26.583)
that doesn't need to be an employer record, that's just subcontracted out. And so there's the idea of, you know, anybody can come to us and get somebody as an employer record with insurance and insurance policies everywhere from cybersecurity to any insurance that they need for that person. And we become the employer record for them, but they report to that entity or we can come and do subcontract. And so great question. We do both.

Steve-o (31:29.976)
Yep. Yep.

Tony Benjamin (31:30.474)
Right, right.

Steve-o (31:54.382)
Yeah, that's why I ask. It's just intriguing the whole concept. So, cause I know a lot of companies that do employer records and yeah, anyway.

Tony Benjamin (31:54.857)
that's awesome.

Tony Benjamin (32:03.646)
Well, know, when we when I was working for Superior and we were operating in Dubai, we were starting to approach this very thing because we were hoping to ramp up and have a whole bunch of employees. the process for being bringing people on and off and all that over there.

It's tremendous. it's, it's a lot, and it comes with a lot of risk, right? Because you have to give them a gratuity when they leave and, and there's no real way to enforce them, not stealing your IP when they go. And I mean, there's just a whole lot of different pieces that in addition to all the government regulation that goes with it. But you know, if you've got a company over there that says, Hey, I got 350 people that will come work in your shop tomorrow.

Troy Blanchard (32:23.875)
Mm-hmm.

Steve-o (32:26.99)
Mm-hmm.

Troy Blanchard (32:27.406)
See you then.

Tony Benjamin (32:49.06)
And, and they're ready. We just want to make sure that we know how to train them for what you want and we'll employ them. Right. It will be the, we'll be the agent for you or whatever, and they'll be our employees will just come in and do your thing. And it's awesome. We, we were, we were just getting to that point when our company sold, but that was, that was the direction we were looking at. And again, what you're doing, I think is even cooler than that because you're finding those people in that, in that specific area that, really need that.

and you're providing, again, better pay for them than they ever get and cheaper for the US employer. I think that's really cool.

Troy Blanchard (33:24.333)
Yeah, you know Tony one thing to put in there and there are You know people in your audience that are avid travelers and there's some that aren't I mean in the local town I'm at right now It's you know, I feel like six or seven out of ten is i've loved left the country, right? Yeah, vernal vernal utah. Yeah. Okay cool. I I you know

Tony Benjamin (33:38.858)
You can say it, you're in Vernal, right? You're in Vernal. So you can say it, that's right.

Troy Blanchard (33:47.056)
leaving Ecuador, you I've always lived in a big, you know, big, highly populated city and coming here, I just absolutely love the people. I've loved the experience so far. A lot of people are like, when they say, wait, you travel back and forth to Ecuador monthly, like, why would you do that? Right? But I want to explain, I want to explain going back to your, yeah, I will tell, but to go back to your comment, I want to, I want to bring up just for the perception that when people say,

Tony Benjamin (34:04.65)
You

Steve-o (34:06.178)
Yeah, why?

Troy Blanchard (34:14.927)
we can pay them less. you go, depends on the city, if you want to be in the capital of Quito, in the most secure neighborhood, and you want an entire wall window with a view, and you want a three bedroom apartment to raise your family, right? You can find that easily for $700 or less.

If you go to Nicaragua, you're going to find it for $500 or less. So when you think of the comparison, go recruit talent right now until they're going to be in a three-bedroom apartment with a view in Miami, guess what? It's going to be maybe 10X that, right? And so to be able to tap into global talent, they can live a beautiful life and earn, and the company can excel with paying them less, right? And so I just, I think sometimes when I talk to some people, the perception is, you

Tony Benjamin (34:46.907)
yeah, at least.

Troy Blanchard (35:02.307)
that it's not what it is. The standard of living is we have an index that we follow within our company that we want to make sure that one provider can have a job, raise multiple kids if they choose that lifestyle, be married and their partner, one of the partner, they don't have to work.

If we can give them that salary, then that's the dream, right? You can get a house, you can get a vehicle, one can stay home and raise children. That's great. And if they don't want to do any of that, that's fine too. But that's where we have an index standard. And that's what we strive is the personal and professional development of every subcontractor that's out there working for a US company within our organization.

Steve-o (35:23.523)
Yeah.

Steve-o (35:41.432)
How do you deal with the naysayers that are saying, well, you're taking away US jobs and people that want to work and all this?

Troy Blanchard (35:46.146)
you know what? I thought I would get that every day here at Bertil. I thought I would and I don't. You know, I don't and I'm surprised and I would say, you know, the chamber is awesome here. It's a super active chamber of commerce here. It is super fun. Better than anywhere else I've seen and I've been to a couple of them.

Steve-o (35:50.926)
You don't? Wow, okay.

Troy Blanchard (36:04.015)
But the people are really intrigued more than anything and they they love to ask questions and they're like, how does it fit? And so you've got an organization that decides to hire a designer because they personally are doing all the work and now they hire a designer and they're like, whoa, I can go get more customers. They hire another designer through us. They can go get more customers. And that's an example of Get Social. They're, yes, they're amazing. I love working with them. They're local here.

Steve-o (36:26.606)
It's a win-win.

Troy Blanchard (36:33.969)
incredibly talented and open-minded about this idea and now the company, it was growing before us, but it can grow even faster now, right? And so I think when I get the opera. Yes, I'm telling you.

Steve-o (36:41.228)
Yeah, yeah, Tony, did you see how Troy jumped out of his seat and stood up as he's talking now? Like he is so excited to talk about this like he he no longer is sitting down.

Tony Benjamin (36:47.504)
I did that's because this is his passion man you can see it

Troy Blanchard (36:55.695)
Yes, and I'm turning off my heater just turned off. But yeah, I do get excited about this topic. I love it. I love it because I love the back of house operations. I love the impact of it. And I have found we're at a 93 % retention rate, which is incredibly hard to keep. It's so hard to keep. There's so many steps behind the scenes that we do when a client hires us. For an executive assistant, I'll wait a drafter and designer or whatever the...

Steve-o (37:02.264)
That's awesome.

Troy Blanchard (37:23.907)
whatever the job description is, we are there every part of the way to make sure that both are happy through the process.

Tony Benjamin (37:30.41)
That's perfect. And again, you're not just operating in Vernal. Most of your clients are where? Along the Wasatch Front and throughout Utah, right? Or you got other places too?

Troy Blanchard (37:40.4)
Yeah, we got California. The concentration is kind of the Wasatch, Denver, Colorado, and California. And it's really because that's the footprint of where I was traveling and people that I know within. And so yeah, that's the Vernal just moving here in the U.N.A. basin. I mean, it's just starting. We have one client. I mean, it's growing, right? It's growing. So.

Tony Benjamin (37:48.606)
Okay.

Steve-o (37:52.654)
Yeah, makes sense.

Tony Benjamin (38:02.899)
You

No, no, I it's it's kind of funny people. It's it's funny. People come here, my friends, after I moved here and they would come here and they're like.

Wow, this is incredible. I didn't know. And we'll sit with him on our back porch and, know, U Hill is behind us and Steve's been at my house. He knows how peaceful it is out there. There's nothing behind us except maybe a few cows and a mountain. Right. And it's it's it's gorgeous back there. And I love it. And you don't hear you don't even hear a car most of the time. So all my friends will come up and then they really, really like that. And then I'll tell some of my friends here in Vernal like, hey, my friend came here. They really liked it. And they're they're wondering.

Steve-o (38:22.978)
Yep, I have,

Troy Blanchard (38:28.729)
Beautiful.

Troy Blanchard (38:38.863)
Yeah.

Tony Benjamin (38:43.868)
if they should move here sometime. And then the answer I always get from the locals is don't tell everybody about our spot. What are you thinking? We don't want everybody moving here. So it's it's but it's it's no, it's a great place now. OK, I want to shift gear and we're going to come back to this stuff a little bit. I want I want to talk to you about the state of H.R.

Troy Blanchard (38:50.9)
you

Tony Benjamin (39:05.406)
Look, you interact with companies and you interact with them hiring, and I'm guessing you interact with a lot of HR people and executives in those roles. And you've got a really unique view on this. And this is something that we ask everybody. You can see everything from, man, I'm trying to get God to exercise you all for my life to, you know, to, you're the greatest thing since cookies. I don't know, whatever it is, but tell us your thought about what is the current state of HR right now?

Troy Blanchard (39:05.615)
Mmm.

Steve-o (39:18.67)
Yeah.

Troy Blanchard (39:35.812)
You know, when I look back at how I was thrown into HR and multiple companies, I don't think there's a company that I haven't either worked side by side or they reported to me and, or I was it, right? The HR aspect of it. And it'll, it'll date, but I think it'll correlate. Like it'll date me in the sense that when, you know, HR used to just be, you know, here's your benefits, sign here.

Steve-o (39:47.544)
Yeah.

Troy Blanchard (39:58.8)
and move forward. And now it's more strategic, right? It's like, so I've got my drink. So it's definitely this aspect of the state of HR now is like, when I go into a company and working, it's different. Before it used to be the executive team, right? It could be the VP or the C-suite or whatever it might be that might be managing, maybe it's the managers, the directors.

Tony Benjamin (40:02.738)
Right, glad we got that, I was thirsty.

Troy Blanchard (40:24.783)
But now, know, in most of the meetings you go to is an HR person, if not the director or the manager, and they're coming in strategically because if you want to affect the bottom line, you need HR, right? You want to affect EBITDA, which you guys just talked about in the previous, or a couple episodes ago, right? We know that EBITDA is affected by every move that HR makes. And you can watch companies' margins shrink because of the lack of oversight and paying attention to the HR functions.

And so today you're, which I don't want to go too much into AI cause you guys have done that. But today, when you think of like the integration of compliance with cybersecurity, you think of the AI aspect of it. You think of the, you know, the, especially if you're in a company that's trying to grow to exit or a company that's just hyper-focused on EBITDA and shares, like you guys talked about in a previous podcast where, you know, I think it was just you, Steve, they were talking about.

every week, like educating you on ebony. All of that is HR. So it's now more strategically aligned into the company's goals where before they're like, oops, should we call somebody from HR? And the HR departments used to never know what was going on strategically. They didn't know the roadmap, the business roadmap, if they had a strategic plan. And now they're intricately involved in them, at least the ones that I go, the ones that I've worked with.

Steve-o (41:19.341)
Yeah.

Steve-o (41:42.386)
And that's way it should be, right? And it's good that you're seeing that in your world because that's something that Tony and I, I don't know, some of the companies I've worked with in the past, they're so far from it. HR has, like you said, they have no clue. And it's probably among smaller companies where I see this more often.

simply because the owner is just so focused, hyper-focused on growing the business that they just see HR is okay, I just need to get some stuff done. So let me just throw that into HR and let you go ahead and take care of that. But I'm telling you, if you truly, like anybody who is listening to this episode, if you truly want to grow your organization, you need to think about HR in that strategic way as a partner with the C-suite to manage your human capital.

Tony Benjamin (42:36.468)
No, that's, and I'm happy to see that you're seeing that. That's good. That's a real indicator to me. And I know you've done lots of HR work, but my point is that right now you're on the outside of that and you're seeing it over and over and over. it's, that anecdotal story of that is really cool in my mind because you're, I think I see that, right? I think HR is more and more involved and people take it more seriously.

Steve-o (42:40.908)
Yeah, that's cool.

Troy Blanchard (42:51.62)
Yeah.

Tony Benjamin (43:06.474)
But I'm in it, right? So maybe I'm just inundated. And to hear you on the outside say that is really good. You know, one of our previous guests said, if you don't act like Michael Scott, I won't act like Toby. And I really like that phrase. It's a perfect thing. what you're talking about here gets right to that point.

Troy Blanchard (43:07.961)
Right.

Steve-o (43:20.312)
This is Shana. I love her.

Tony Benjamin (43:31.466)
And I think that's good. That's good. See there. I'm normally the jaded person on the on the podcast, but there you brought a little ray of sunshine. Yeah. Cynical, cynical, all that. Right. That's that's exactly me. But OK, I want to know. And is there anything else you want to say about that or any other comments you want to make about the state of HR before we move on?

Steve-o (43:39.214)
Totally jaded. I have sunshine.

Troy Blanchard (43:53.236)
Well, I think also, you I love hearing that you're seeing it as well because I think that a company that's going to say, let's hire some remote talent and let's bring in Z Connect to help facilitate that and them to be our partner in it. I think they're open minded. They're strategic in their alignment. They're figuring out how to scale. I love it when companies, know, they're, which is, I love it. They call to save money, but there's also some that call. They're like, I don't care about the money.

I care about the turnover. Cause when I hire somebody from Latin America, they see it as a career, right? Instead of seeing it's a stepping stone. Let me get into customer service so I can get into compliance. Let me get into compliance so can become the assistant HR. Let me, so it's a step where that's not the case usually in most people that we hire. They got a degree to get a job that doesn't go away, right? And so the amount of, you'd be blown away to know how many data entry is before customer service. We have data entry.

with four-year degrees that have been there for four and five years and are just singing praises, and they could care less if they're promoted. They're just so grateful to have consistent work. And so I think that's the second thing with the loyalty. So if you have a company that's actually looking for that, I find that they're already open-minded to exploring outside, and so they probably strategically align all departments. So, but if it, go ahead, yeah.

Tony Benjamin (45:12.309)
No, no, that's it. That's an excellent point. That is an excellent point because you're right, lots of companies, and Steve is talking about this too, right? Lots of companies are just HR keep me out of court. You're a drain on my resources, so don't get in my way too much. Yeah, let's all talk the phrase of employees are important, but the moment one of them gets in my way, I just want to fire them, right? And that sort of stuff.

Steve-o (45:26.254)
Yeah.

Tony Benjamin (45:40.531)
And then there are other companies like what you're talking about, that they're looking for advanced or outside solutions. And they just, they just want to, they want to do better in any way that they can do better. They will. And, and I think there's lots of people out there that associate that sort of thing with they'll just cut corner on any costs they can to reduce costs. And they just want to make slaves of everyone. No, no, no. Good companies don't do that. Good companies that Excel, they're always, of course, looking for ways to cut expenses.

Troy Blanchard (46:05.679)
Yeah.

Tony Benjamin (46:10.506)
but they're not out just to do it at the expense of anyone in their way. And Steve and I were talking about this too. We've both run into companies in the last couple of years that it's dog eat dog and they'll hose you. They'll hose you and dare you to sue them. And then they'll say like, well, that's just business. You should have protected yourself more. I mean, that's like saying, that's like saying, you knew that I was going to come rob your house. You should have armed yourself, right?

Steve-o (46:22.434)
Yep.

Troy Blanchard (46:38.093)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Tony Benjamin (46:39.018)
And it's just, it's a ridiculous thing. And I don't know, it just bugs me. Those aren't the companies in my mind. They may look, we were, my wife and I last night, we were, oh, that was actually what I was going to talk about in the HR life. Nevermind. I'm going to come back to that in just a minute. I'm going come back to that thought in just a minute. Ta-da. Right, right, right. Okay. But, okay. Now with that in mind, let's talk about this.

Steve-o (46:56.428)
Yeah, because we've got a sound bar for that.

Troy Blanchard (46:56.769)
Okay, okay.

Yeah.

Steve-o (47:04.365)
You better write it down, Tony, so you don't forget, because five minutes from now, you're going to forget.

Tony Benjamin (47:07.306)
Just tell me it remind just remind say the word Ferrari and then I'm in so Ferrari that's right. Okay so anyways that no Ferrari it's Enzo Ferrari. Anyways let's I want to go over this because earlier you were talking about retention and how you reduce turnover and I want to talk about this I want to know what it was that worked for you so now to back up and go there you're talking about

Steve-o (47:10.702)
the

Ferrari? Okay. I can't say Jetta or something. Ferrari.

Troy Blanchard (47:15.383)
Alright, we'll do it.

Steve-o (47:29.965)
Yes.

Tony Benjamin (47:37.127)
in Mexico in these makelas and these people are here and they're working just for a paycheck to get by and they will move or do anything for the tiniest increase back and forth and that's their culture right right right but yeah but but but anyways they're working those makelas and they're and that is expected like i would assume

Steve-o (47:47.693)
Now is it 10 cents or 10 pesos?

Troy Blanchard (47:48.151)
Yeah, 10 cents. I know probably. Yeah. Well, 10 pesos a lot more than 10 cents. So yeah, they'll do that for 10 pesos an hour.

Steve-o (47:54.242)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Tony Benjamin (48:05.256)
that a lot of those companies that are there, they just expect that they expect the high. It's like, look, if I open a call center here in Utah, I know I'm going to turn through people. Right. It's just that's how it goes in a call center. So I'm assuming that they're all in that same thing. Now you're fighting uphill against that. That's crazy to me. Like it just so tell us how you did it. Because to me, that's remarkable. You're talking about going from turning over everyone in a year to now.

Troy Blanchard (48:15.567)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Tony Benjamin (48:35.178)
your total turnover for the year is 8%. That's incredible.

Troy Blanchard (48:40.685)
Yeah, and it, you know, you're first going to say, of course, that's how you started, but it's, it's always sharing the problem. went to all the directors, all the managers, we have 52 leaders to run a thousand people. So you go to all of them and say, what are your ideas? And we went down the line and got everybody's ideas. Then we, everybody that was leaving best practice, we all know exit interviews. We started gathering all the exit interviews. And so this was a process over years. And so we're identifying those exit interviews. Who are the supervisors that, you know,

A lot of the supervisor is the manager, the director, it's their buddy is the one that's actually causing all the problems. So anybody who complains, you never hear about it because the exit interviews are with the wrong person. The exit interviews is not with the manager that's leading or the supervisor, that person, right? So we started having exit interviews from a different person. you've...

Tony Benjamin (49:17.608)
Right. Yeah. Yeah.

Tony Benjamin (49:24.404)
Ta-da!

Wait, wait, wait, wait. I just want to say this. Like you couldn't know that. That's awesome. Though just what you said, only 20 % of employers get. But it just seems so common sense. Go ahead, Troy.

Steve-o (49:29.262)
So that's step number one. That's right.

Troy Blanchard (49:44.536)
It does, right? And so once we started doing that, right away, you're just going by two or 3%. We're identifying and removing. It's so expensive to keep the rotten apple, right? We all know that. And so we're removing the people that are not behind it. But then there's also this piece of, to do a cultural change in a company, it takes years. And it was literally the support of the owner, the support of the other executives that were doing it with me.

and the support of the managers of coming through and saying, okay, let's culturally align ourselves into what we call clear line of sight. was John Bigum is his name. I think it was at Cal Poly when he wrote that article called Clear Line of Sight. And it was really, it was very, you know.

It was one of my defining moment articles that I read. think he's, or became later the director of BYU MBA. But basically it's, it's giving a clear line of sight to your employees so that they can see what the roadmap is, where are they going? And if you can see that, that roadmap, then they're going to stay. So you're thinking of somebody in Mexico, they're on a line at this time, they're running a press break. They're basically bending steel.

Right. It's a low skill job in the fact that you can teach somebody how to bend skill You teach somebody a press break. They're doing the same thing for eight hours a day, right? And so the idea is is well that guy's been in steel and after he's done it, know 25 000 times he's thinking man. I really like that job over there And i'd really like to make 10 cents more But if when you hire them at that level if you're saying here are three so in every job description We created three steps three categories

And in those job descriptions, you say you started this pay and when you hit the second level, you're at this pay and the third level is this pay. And this is what you have to do. Get your certification, have zero accidents, make sure you're, you know, whatever that description is. So now when we hired him, we said, here's your wage. When you get a category two, here's your wage. When you get the category three, here's your wage. And when you want to move out of that press break and you want to go across there and do the welding that actually makes 30 % more, we're going to educate you to get there.

Troy Blanchard (51:51.544)
and this is how you can do it. So you pass, you pass their ability, you empower them to be able to grow within the organization. And I think a lot of times people won't publish what your next raise is, or they won't tell you what your next benefit increase is because they're worried about pricing themselves out of the market, right? And their margin decreasing, but it's just the opposite. You start losing people, you still have that same problem. It costs you how much to rehire somebody.

Tony Benjamin (52:16.436)
Yep.

Troy Blanchard (52:18.935)
And so that was the second, now there's 13 steps. I'll go through like maybe the top five that I did because I don't know that we have that much time, but that's the second step. The second major step that we did is real. And that's hard when you have, you know, 50 leaders. mean, think of how many positions we job descriptions we had out there that took us a while to curate that. Right. And then once we got it, we had to go sit down with the HR department and we said, okay, this is this many pesos at level one, level two, level three of a welder. Now, when you're inside, like a graphic designer,

Steve-o (52:35.437)
Yeah.

Tony Benjamin (52:37.028)
yeah. yeah.

Troy Blanchard (52:48.793)
that's the same thing. You say, you're gonna get paid more once you achieve this. When you go to get your certification, when you go to an AI training, when you go into incorporating AI into your Illustrator, like once they pass the certifications, they qualify themselves, which is a beautiful thing, because you have a person that's gonna ask for a raise that never deserves it, and then you've got the person that will never ask for it, and they'll never get it. But if you see that they're doing the certifications, the steps within their job description,

Then as they go through those steps, they don't have to come and ask you for a raise. You're going to see it as a manager. Say, wow, they've done five extra certifications. They've qualified themselves in these six areas. This guy deserves a raise. Right? And so that's what we did. That was the second thing that we accomplished.

Tony Benjamin (53:32.779)
That's a really cool. Those ladders, what I use to career ladders, those are very difficult to make happen. They're really difficult to monitor. But once you do, to your point, everyone sees where they've got to go, and they start wanting to move up in that. And if you have clear defining aspects of it, now the catch is, right, and I know there's some people out there rolling their eyes at this point, and they're like, yeah, yeah, you make them jump through a hoop, and then they just do it, but they don't perform any better.

Well, that's that's part of it because like when I was when I was an intern in DC, there was a lady who was supposed to. By the way, she picked me up. She was a bureaucrat, worked for the Treasury Department. She picked me up in a Rolls Royce. And we were driving in and, know, they have the slug line, which is is the the HOV lane. If you want to ride in the HOV lane in DC, you have to have three people, not two.

Steve-o (54:14.478)
you

Tony Benjamin (54:27.922)
And so we, anybody who needed to ride into the city, we would go and stand at this. It was a, it was a, it was a fish place. We would go stand there and they called the slug line and you'd get in a car with somebody so that they could, they were going near the same area where you were and they could go in the HOV lane if they had you. So they'd pick you up and take you. my like second time I did this, there were these two ladies and one of them, one of them was telling the other one how mad she was because

She had increased her typing speed from like 75 words a minute to like something like 82 or something like that. And that was the last thing that she needed to curate her next big raise. And it was worth like 15 grand for her, right? It wasn't a small amount. And she had finally gotten it and all that. And she was mad because they hadn't processed it on the same day. They're going to make her wait until like the next pay period. And I just thought to myself, that's useless. It's just kind of useless. But.

Troy Blanchard (55:11.737)
Yeah.

Tony Benjamin (55:26.14)
My, so when people say that to me, that's what you get when you do those sorts of things. My answer to that is then you've just picked the wrong things. You've just picked the wrong things for them to move up in their category in that, in that ladder. If it's useless and it's boring and it's just a jump through the hoop, then you have picked the wrong thing.

Steve-o (55:43.435)
Well, especially if their production has not become better. You know what I'm thinking about here, Troy, and I have another question for you as we talk about this. I feel like if you're going to select specific certifications or levels or whatever they're doing that's going to get them to that next level. Internally, as an organization, you have to make sure that the behavior that you want to see from them is aligned with

Tony Benjamin (55:47.71)
Yeah, exactly.

Troy Blanchard (55:48.569)
Yeah.

Steve-o (56:12.492)
those particular certifications and what have you, right? And because I've seen this too, especially in sales and customer service and some of the call centers I've been in, people want raises all the time in those types of environments. But if there's no clear path to get there, I can see the huge value of that. But how do you ensure that one, the behavior is what you want and two, the actual steps that you end up selecting

Troy Blanchard (56:16.942)
Right.

Steve-o (56:41.696)
are impactful to the business. Does that make sense? I'm assuming you did this when you sat down with these companies, which is why it took years instead of just a day, right? And so I want to remind our listeners, this is not something Troy did in a day. He didn't build Rome in a day, right? And so anyway, so just curious your thoughts on that, especially the behavior, because we want to make sure the behavior is showing improved results, you things like that.

Troy Blanchard (56:44.675)
Yeah.

Troy Blanchard (56:51.864)
Yeah.

Troy Blanchard (57:00.333)
Yeah, well.

Troy Blanchard (57:08.087)
I think to start off right off that, would say most systems are designed to create a specific business result with no regard to the behavior that this system drives. So if you can get managers to realign management, like improvement and work, to extract an ideal behavior. So like, I'll give you an example, an ideal behavior is you want somebody in the mindset of continuous improvement. Like if you think of, and it doesn't have to necessarily be continuous improvement, because sometimes that's a...

That's a key phrase that that brubs people wrong from from a decade ago. So it's just relentless quest to improve. Right. And so if you can create a culture that has like behavioral enablers, if you can create a culture that has like systems and tools that drive results, which is all kind of the Shingo model, which is where I went to USU to get to focus in the Shingo model, which is really this cultural enablers.

That's how you can get like organizational excellence. So when I think of an ideal behavior is I want somebody that when they're coming into work, they're thinking, you know, they're excited to come up to their supervisor and say, my gosh, when I was showering and washing my hair, I thought this, or when I was driving, I thought this. When they were doing some mundane task, their mind was going into how they can improve a process system. And that is an ideal behavior we want to extract from our employees, right?

And so at that point in time, if the culture has systems that are built around that, which means they come with an idea, great, it's a Kaizen, let's say, right? And it could continuous improvement card, right? So they come in with a Kaizen and they give that Kaizen and then the leaders are reviewing those Kaizens every single money of how they can improve a specific process that you've just created a that is an enabler to continuous improvement behavior.

Steve-o (58:37.986)
Mm-hmm.

Troy Blanchard (58:56.109)
And so you have to focus on the systems and the processes. You can't focus on the results that have nothing to do with the systems and the culture and the processes. I mean, the behaviors. So I don't know if that answered your question. Yeah. Okay.

Steve-o (59:02.946)
Yep. And that's exactly what I was getting at. Excellent. Excellent.

Tony Benjamin (59:07.464)
Yeah. No, no. And this is that's fantastic. That drives into whatever we've to do a podcast sometime on performance reviews. And you just led perfectly into how I do those. That's that's awesome. that's right. That's right. We are. We're going to have Albert on soon. So.

Steve-o (59:17.922)
We are next week. We've got Albert on tap for that. We're yeah. We're going to have that so we're going to yeah, stay tuned.

Troy Blanchard (59:21.654)
Awesome.

Tony Benjamin (59:25.32)
You may not want to promise next week. Albert's a busy guy. So you never know. He might move us around a little bit. Not that he doesn't want to. But anyways, OK, go ahead, Troy. And I apologize. Now I've derailed this a little bit. We start going down rabbit hole. We'll climb out of that. Go ahead and give us the rest of the at least the top few that you were going to tell us about.

Troy Blanchard (59:43.342)
Well, Steve already knew, right? You teed it up for me. was really trying to figure out first, enterprise alignment. How do we get continuous improvement and what are their cultural enablers? And that's really leading with humility. If you can identify and get your people lead with humility, then they're vulnerable. If they're vulnerable, they're teachable, right? And then you create learning events and then you create their input matters. And we really focused on the cultural aspect utilizing the Shingo model, which you guys can go look it up.

free information all over on the website. Yes. Just go to shingo.org. If you go there, it's through Utah State University. There's actually a master's program in that, and I would encourage anybody in operations that wants to really work on culture. It's such a great program to get, and it's done remote as well. I did it in person and remote. anyway, going back to that aspect,

Steve-o (01:00:14.232)
Can you spell that for people in case they try to Google it?

Steve-o (01:00:23.384)
There you go.

Tony Benjamin (01:00:23.85)
B-B-B-B-

Troy Blanchard (01:00:43.183)
of it's the creation of constant consistency of purpose, right? It's creating. So when you're thinking of the overall next piece, we really focused on culture. And when we focused on culture, we focused on what's the ideal behaviors. And when we focused on ideal behaviors, we created systems and process that would encourage that ideal behavior. And it sounds simple. And like you said, this took years, which impacts culture. And so it's a circle that feeds itself, right?

Steve-o (01:00:55.064)
Mm-hmm.

Steve-o (01:01:05.163)
Which would impact culture. Yeah. Yeah, no, see that. And think about this. I mean, for those of you listening right now, Troy has really tapped into a concept here that not only has made a huge difference in the organizations that he has worked with and impacted, but again, a reminder this doesn't happen overnight. This is something that really takes the leadership and the people involved.

Troy Blanchard (01:01:28.622)
Yeah.

Steve-o (01:01:33.976)
to sit down and really think through this and come up with a game plan that's going to have the impact that you seek. So I love this. I love this story as well as just this whole concept.

Troy Blanchard (01:01:42.828)
Absolutely.

Tony Benjamin (01:01:43.027)
it

Tony Benjamin (01:01:49.384)
Hey, and I agree with anybody who agrees with me. So that's all I can say. Culture first, culture first, always and foremost. Yeah.

Troy Blanchard (01:01:52.591)
Okay.

Steve-o (01:01:53.175)
Wow.

Yeah, culture is huge. We've we've had episodes. We've talked about culture before and I I love how this just ties it back in and I I didn't mean to steal your thunder with the whole behavioral piece, Troy, but yeah, it's because I was already thinking about it. Yeah. Yeah, well, in my in my mind, I've always related processes and things like that to the behavior, which is then part of the culture. Because, you know, in sales, I've been in sales for most of my life and in sales you have these KPIs, right?

Troy Blanchard (01:01:58.626)
Yeah.

Troy Blanchard (01:02:06.199)
I love it. I'm glad you introduced it. It's like a T ball. what drives it, right?

Tony Benjamin (01:02:11.122)
Yeah,

Steve-o (01:02:25.652)
And the only way you can accomplish the KPIs is you have to reward the behavior. There are way too many organizations that do not reward the behavior that actually drives improvement. And they miss this all the time. And again, I see this in sales quite a bit. And when I ask them and I dig a little bit and I say, well, wait a minute, why are you rewarding them for that? That has nothing to do with the behavior you're wanting. It has nothing to do with the culture or...

or the, I mean, in fact, if you look at it, it's actually driving the issues that you have with your culture because you're rewarding the wrong behavior. So I've always, I've just always been intrigued by that kind of concept where we really have to sit down and think what are we actually driving? In fact, when I was at ApplicantPro, I helped develop this Excel spreadsheet that tracked our sales activities and things like that. And the reason I ended up doing it is because I knew that if there were certain behaviors

Troy Blanchard (01:03:03.246)
Yes.

Steve-o (01:03:22.978)
that were actually happening and we could record those happening when you break it down into those smaller pieces, it would lead to the big picture and higher revenue. And I remember working with Randy Jensen. In fact, we may want to have Randy on this podcast as well, because he's phenomenal with stuff like this. But he took that model and really drove it in to here's the KPIs and here's why we want to measure these things, because then it led to the results we were looking for. So, yeah, I love this concept.

Troy Blanchard (01:03:27.47)
Yes.

Steve-o (01:03:52.546)
just everything that you said here.

Troy Blanchard (01:03:52.912)
You know going on like intentional Systems that you're creating and processes within that system to to extract a behavior of continuous mindset of improvement and improving the company It's so simple. I think a lot of companies shy away because I think it's so expensive But it's the constant educational piece within the organization. You can't ask people to improve something if you're not helping

Steve-o (01:04:15.95)
Mm-hmm. Yep.

Troy Blanchard (01:04:20.719)
to educate them. And so there's online courses, there's all sorts of things that you can do instead of just sitting into a convention for four days. And those are wonderful as well if you can afford that, right? But if you can't, there's all these these and so that's what happened with us. We created within an organization which was a group of people came together including Daphne was part of that and just a whole bunch of other incredible talented people that came together and created in 13 weeks what we call Cannon University. We offered

it's personal and professional development. So it has elementary school, middle school, and high school because a lot of manufacturing floor don't have those degrees, especially where I was at. And then we had undergrad and master's degrees. And then we had the real courses that I would say that was the focus on that were like business, which was what I mean by real is what I mean paid for courses during work you could go to.

which was another 12 courses that had everything to do from crucial conversations and leadership, leadership skills. Like if somebody wants to start to be trained to the next position to make more money. So pretty soon we're having hundreds of students a week that are going through these courses. And then after hours and weekends, they're doing the personal development courses.

And so they're learning accounting. They're learning whatever they're missing. So that's very applicable for the audiences listening to that has 1,000 plus employees. And they want to really create systems that drive that behavior.

You know, how does that apply to a lot of the companies that I work with that are like six, eight, 10, or four, five, 10, 15, up to 50, right? Which, and we kind of have it on both ends that hire us, but it's the same thing. You can do it on a micro level. You can do it by rewarding like we do. If you were to hire somebody today through us, that person behind you has a whole educational piece that you don't even know about that we are driving to make sure it extracts the ideal behavior.

Steve-o (01:05:56.909)
Mm-hmm.

Steve-o (01:06:13.87)
Well, and I think this is why in in some systems that I've seen the LMS fails the company and the reason the LMS fails is because the videos and such and trainings are so generic that they're not specific to the organization. If you're going to use a true LMS, I get that like harassment training that needs to be universal. I get that. But when you start getting into very specific things right and very specific.

Tony Benjamin (01:06:14.078)
That's perfect.

Troy Blanchard (01:06:19.895)
Yeah, LMS does fail. Sure it does.

Tony Benjamin (01:06:22.164)
Ding, ding.

Troy Blanchard (01:06:36.591)
Sure, cybersecurity.

Steve-o (01:06:42.51)
processes or what have you, educational pieces that actually impact the organization. To me, the best LMS is the one that you can create yourself and that you can put together in such a way that it is specific to your organization. And too many LMSs, well, we have 15,000 LinkedIn learning things in here, modules and what have you. But at the end of the day, that doesn't matter. What matters is that here's the modules that we know are going to impact

this department and that department and this one over there. And that to me is a true LMS that is actually impacting the organization and making a difference.

Tony Benjamin (01:07:22.698)
Exactly. Yeah, yeah, no, I absolutely agree. Okay, well, Troy, we got two more questions for you, but before we get there, we're gonna do it, the HR in life.

Troy Blanchard (01:07:30.319)
Okay, you got it.

Tony Benjamin (01:07:50.141)
All right, all right. So I, a few weeks ago, I listened to a podcast, if no one else has listened to it, this is a great podcast, it's called Acquired. And Acquired, they're long format podcasts, they're several hours long, and they do the history of a company or of an industry or something like that. Some of the ones they've done in the past are Coca-Cola, they've done the NFL.

Rolex, Costco, like they've done some really cool ones. But the last two they've done is Formula One and Ferrari. And those two things overlap so incredibly much. It's just been incredible to watch it. So.

My wife and I were talking about some of the things I learned about Enzo Ferrari and how he developed his cars and everything he did. And that guy, man, all he wanted to do was race cars. He sold cars so that he could race cars. That's just he just wanted to sell cars so could race cars. And anyways, so got us to watching last night. My wife and I watched Ford versus Ferrari. Great movie. I'm assuming, Troy, you've seen it.

Troy Blanchard (01:09:03.607)
Yeah, yeah, fantastic.

Tony Benjamin (01:09:04.712)
Yes, Steve, have you seen it? geez. OK. OK. Alicia, when Alicia Steve's wife, when you when you hear this at double speed, which she listens to the podcast at, let's set up a time. We're going to have to do a weekend of movies and we're going to have to educate Steve on good movies anyway. So yeah, yeah. That's right.

Steve-o (01:09:06.35)
I have not. I just don't watch enough movies to be able to ever say that I've seen it.

Steve-o (01:09:19.502)
That's what she does.

Steve-o (01:09:25.26)
Yeah, and you're gonna have to really pin me down for several hours. So that's my problem. It's hard to pin me down.

Tony Benjamin (01:09:31.43)
And got to get him to watch Predator versus bad Predator, Badlands and a few things like that. Anyways, so in this movie, for Ford versus Ferrari, one of the cool things, there's some real business stuff that goes on in this. But one of the one of the guys, so Ford hires BB or I'm sorry, Ford hires Shelby to come in and create this car for them. And they're going to race against Ferrari and Le Mans and they're going to make it work. All that.

Troy Blanchard (01:09:45.469)
yeah.

Tony Benjamin (01:09:57.631)
The villain of the show, the antagonist of the show is BB. And I can't remember Jonathan BB or something like that is his first name. But anyways, BB comes from this and he's just a jerk. He's just every chance he gets, he's trying to undermine Shelby and he's trying to get rid of Ken Miles, who's the driver that they have for the car. And he's just doing whatever he can. So we got done. My wife was so angry about how Ken Miles had been treated.

and that he should have got the title at LeMans and had the triple crown of racing and all that sort of stuff. And he got jacked. And she was so angry about it that we decided we'd look into it. And I, so here's the short of this. It turns out that Bibi really was that kind of a jerk. Now he's had some friends posthumously publish some stuff about him, say he was a good guy. He was just really tough. That's the phrase people use.

But anyways, and other people are like, no, the guy was a jerk. But the more we looked into it, the more the movie at least got the attitude right. But I read this one article that I thought was really brilliant. And this is what I wanted to mention HR in life. that is that what I'm, BB was a student of Bob McNamara. And if everybody doesn't know who Bob McNamara was, Bob McNamara was the guy who ran

that he was the secretary of defense during the Vietnam War. And he had this idea that if you create a system, computers could predict what would happen in the war. it ended up, he ended up running a war of attrition in the Vietnam War, which was a very bad methodology for doing that. Anyways, but one of his disciples at Ford was Bibi. And Bibi believed if you just put the right processes in place and you had enough levels of review,

process and procedure, you always got the exact same reliable output every single time, which if you think about it is very accurate. That is true. The flip side is when they hired Shelby to come develop the car, they didn't have that kind of luxury of time. They just had to hurry and develop the car and they had this clash of cultures. And the more I dug into it, the more I realized BB was just doing what he thought was best for the company.

Tony Benjamin (01:12:22.972)
And Shelby was out just spending money willy-nilly and doing his thing, rapid development, startup mentality. I'm going to get there. We're going to do this thing all right. And right, right, right. Yeah, yeah. We'll just keep iterating and iterating and iterating and come out with this car that will kick butt. And the two fought and fought and fought. And anyways, what I took out of this was just they were doomed.

Steve-o (01:12:32.01)
It doesn't matter how many mistakes or falls we take on the way. We're just going to do this. Yeah.

Tony Benjamin (01:12:49.62)
to butt heads in it for it to be a conflict and for it to produce results like Ken Miles having to tie for Lamans and not getting that win because of a technicality. And it was just, anyways, I really think it's a cultural piece that made it. Now, matter of fact, if you want to look at anybody I think that is to blame for all that was the CEO, Henry Ford II. And he allowed that sort of stuff to go on.

He did not create a clear organizational reporting structure with parameters around it. He'd give Shelby leeway and then he'd back it off and give BB control. And then he'd give Shelby more leeway and then BB make him control it. And he'd be wishy washy. So I think that's a real villain. Anyways, there you go. That's my HR in life. Troy, your thoughts? Because I saw you nodding on a couple of these things, right?

Troy Blanchard (01:13:38.576)
yeah, I just feel like that show is just littered with just amazing business like bureaucracy, how it just kills innovation, right? Like you watch it and how talent, we always think is polished. Talent is not polished. Ken Miles was not polished. He's difficult, blunt, intense, but he's also brilliant.

Steve-o (01:13:49.634)
Mm-hmm.

Tony Benjamin (01:13:50.088)
Right, yeah.

Troy Blanchard (01:13:59.12)
Right? And then leadership is just like, like you and you watch in there is like protecting and without trusting the team. And it just goes on and on in that movie of such, such beautiful, like business applications. And then it's always easy for us to look back and say, you know, quarterback it right. It's all the things, then would you look at it? You're like, yep, I've done that before in my career. Yep. I've done that before. Cause it's really just guessing what's going to work. Right. So, it was a great movie.

Tony Benjamin (01:13:59.4)
Right.

Tony Benjamin (01:14:20.842)
Been there.

Steve-o (01:14:21.752)
Haha.

Tony Benjamin (01:14:25.16)
Yeah, yeah.

Steve-o (01:14:27.726)
Well, I look at when we started applicant pro. I mean, Ryan was of the mindset where we just he was a lot like Shelby. Let's just try any iteration that we can or whatever we can. And if we fall on our face, that's OK. We'll just move on to the next thing and keep going. And honestly, I kind of preferred that method because we fell on our face a lot. We really did. But let me tell you, we learned a ton. We learned a ton. And that, think, was much more valuable.

We learned ways of not to do it. And then when we had people come into the organization and would question us, well, why don't you do it this way? well, guess what? We can actually tell you with certainty that that doesn't work. And here's why. And I think one of the things that I liked about what we did at Applicant Pro is we would explain the why. Here's why we don't do it this way, because here's what happened when we tried that before. And I found myself talking with a lot of people from time to time.

where they would question it. And I think if, and that's a cultural thing, right? Sometimes we just, well, that doesn't work. And we just move on without actually sitting down for a moment and helping the individual understand, well, here's why that doesn't work. So that we could let them, because you never know, they might take that information and say, okay, well, but you didn't try this. Or there was one more thing that could be done. And then all of sudden it creates a new idea that says, hey, let's go try that again. If we fall on our face, then we'll know another way not to do it.

Troy Blanchard (01:15:53.049)
Yeah.

Steve-o (01:15:54.702)
And Ryan was just of that mindset that he was not afraid to fall flat. He just wasn't. And I love that about his leadership style. And yeah, he came across as brazen sometimes with certain people, but he was just genius in that sense. And he wasn't afraid to fail. So I love that. So anyway.

Tony Benjamin (01:16:17.076)
You were gonna say something about that Troy.

Troy Blanchard (01:16:19.331)
Well, just like, you know, the GT 40, right? If you think about it, it's like, can have speed, but as long as you have control as a checks and balance, like levers, then it works. But like in this one, they had all the speed, but they had to refine like braking and handling and aerodynamics or, know, all these things that they had to do with this car. And so when I hear about what Ryan did, it's awesome because you have both of them, right? That is that lever of like, go speed, but let's put in some control, right? You just...

And so it's just a powerful combination of both of you. Because if you're both just speed, you're not going to have control, right?

Steve-o (01:16:55.534)
And I think that's why we work so well together, right? Because he knew that I had a background in recruiting in HR, and so I understood some of the principles and processes and why companies wanted what they wanted. But I loved it because he would push back and say, well, why do they want that? What is the core reason why they're asking for that? So we could go back and forth with a client and say, and you know what it would lead to? We would go back to the client and ask the deeper questions. And suddenly it was like, that's not what you need at all. You actually need this.

And it led to further development of the software that actually not only handled their problem, but ended up handling dozens of problems with other companies. And it became a much more valuable tool that way, as opposed to that one little incident, you know, where somebody was complaining simply because they didn't understand how the system worked or they didn't even understand their own process. And it wasn't as dramatic as they were making it out to be. So, yeah, anyway.

Tony Benjamin (01:17:52.031)
That's good. All right. There you go. That's the that's the H.R. in life segment. There you go. And anybody who has any other movies that they want Steve to watch, send them to the H.R. Life podcast at Gmail dot com. Right. And if you. Yeah.

Steve-o (01:17:55.694)
That's all right. Yeah.

Steve-o (01:18:03.31)
Right? Because obviously I'm just very poor at this. I had a friend of mine the other day wants me to watch Elemental, so I'm going to have to go watch that one.

Troy Blanchard (01:18:04.035)
Hahaha

Tony Benjamin (01:18:15.466)
Okay, well, I'm just telling you, we're going to do something with Alicia where we chain you to a couch or something and you're going to the only time you can leave is go to the bathroom. Otherwise you're watching movies. We got to catch up on the right movies. That is kind of like her, right?

Steve-o (01:18:25.398)
Wow, you know what my wife will say? She'll get one of those little porta potties and just say, you can just go right there. We did that to our daughters when we would travel on trips. We had a little porta potty and they would just go in the potty. We would never stop.

Troy Blanchard (01:18:31.341)
Yeah.

Tony Benjamin (01:18:41.598)
Wow. Wow. That's pretty good actually. Okay, Troy. got two. I got two more questions for you, Troy. I got two more questions for you. What are you, what are you up to next? And is there anything that you would like to promote on the podcast or tell us about?

Steve-o (01:18:45.23)
It was genius. Like she was good at that. Anyway.

Troy Blanchard (01:18:59.087)
Oh, yeah. You know, I think when you when I think of next, it's the scale of obviously immediately our company of Z Connect. like there's there's that function of of do you go deeper in one channel or two channels or do you keep it kind of broad in spectrum? And I look back and I think right now we've gone into dental offices and we've never done that before. We found somebody incredibly talented, Rebecca, who

who is just fantastic and a coach and it's just taken off, right? And it was something that was out of my purview and somebody else that's an engineer just like took off with designers and drafters. And I think really what's next is, one thing that I've learned is I started out and grinded my wife and I and we're the sales people, we're the sales people. And now we're finding, find people that are passionate, you like in that movie, it's like you walk away and you're like, legacy is built by people that deeply care. And if I can find deeply,

Tony Benjamin (01:19:54.164)
Right.

Troy Blanchard (01:19:55.434)
people that deeply care in their channels, then the next thing we're going after is those channels, right? Maybe that's HR function, right? Like maybe that's that deep channel of people that want to impact, that want to save money or retain talent for years to come that are deeply passionate and want to come through Zconnect. And obviously, just love to talk to anybody in the audience that's listening, love to see how I can help their companies.

I definitely defer to Tony as I did today with my own my own niece right like Deferring the HR coaching on the US side right over to Tony, right? Here you go. Pass it on That's true good point

Tony Benjamin (01:20:31.882)
Of of course.

Steve-o (01:20:32.472)
But see, that's the beauty of a network, right? I've always been of the mindset that, you know what, you have a skill that I don't have and that's okay. It's the abundant thinking mindset where all of us are sitting at the table and the buffet is before us and guess what? We can all eat just fine. We're gonna get what we want at the buffet and we're gonna be just fine, right? So yeah, it was actually one of our core values at Appian Pro, so.

Tony Benjamin (01:20:34.954)
All right.

Troy Blanchard (01:20:51.265)
Yes, I love that.

Troy Blanchard (01:21:00.447)
Love that. The abundant mindset was your core value. Was it called like abundance? Abundant thinking. I love that.

Steve-o (01:21:03.778)
It was called abundant thinking, but it was of that mindset. As an example in sales, sometimes we're so desperate for leads or we want to grab the leads and it's like, no, there's plenty of leads. Just focus on the client and let's close the deal and help them get to the next level where they're successful. yeah, abundant thinking was a big deal for us.

Troy Blanchard (01:21:26.351)
I love it. I love it. So you just shy away from, and I think, yeah. I was just gonna say it just gets your team to not think of that scarcity, right? The scarcity mindset if you're thinking abundance is the opposite, right? So yeah, totally. Yeah.

Steve-o (01:21:28.302)
So to, go ahead.

Steve-o (01:21:36.18)
Exactly. Yeah, it's the complete opposite. It's the complete opposite. Yeah. So, Troy, to echo what Tony said, second thing, is there anything else you'd like to promote before we end our episode?

Tony Benjamin (01:21:41.832)
Yeah.

Troy Blanchard (01:21:47.76)
That's interesting now. Why did New Yorker ask this question? Because I just love it. And if you go along with the mindset of abundant mind thinking is you've got big deal Steve here, right? That any convention he should be your speaker at, right? You got Tony over here. That should be, he is the solution to your HR problems, right? And together they can tackle it. know, I think of, when you think of the abundant mindset, I love promoting like Get Social who does marketing, right? Because they hire our people and how could we,

Steve-o (01:21:59.074)
Ha

Tony Benjamin (01:22:01.63)
Right, right.

Steve-o (01:22:01.845)
haha

Troy Blanchard (01:22:17.507)
drive that mindset that you're talking about the abundant mind thinking that there's enough for the day around for us the table we should be all sharing and networking and and I actually like love it and I love this about chamber connect is you're really in there to help other people and you know anybody I know from what I know of you two anybody that's listening this podcast that wants help on anything where all three of us are like let's do it even if there's not a personal benefit right and so I love that I love that aspect and now what do I

Steve-o (01:22:20.536)
Mm-hmm.

Tony Benjamin (01:22:40.808)
Yeah. Yes.

Steve-o (01:22:44.696)
Yep, and that's exactly right, yeah. I've always been in the mindset, educate first, and if that leads to business, fantastic. Let's do it.

Troy Blanchard (01:22:48.205)
And that's all I promote.

Troy Blanchard (01:22:52.479)
Yeah.

Tony Benjamin (01:22:53.866)
Yep, yep. that's, Troy's referring to a program that we have here in Vernal called Chamber Connect. It's a networking group and it's been going, I don't about three and a half, four months now is all. And I think we're up to about $30,000 in revenue that's been generated for the members of it. It's a really good deal. Yeah, it's really good. It's really good. That's right. Okay, well we.

Steve-o (01:23:14.008)
That is awesome. Shout out to Chamber Connect. Every chamber across the state should follow.

Tony Benjamin (01:23:22.484)
That's right. We want to tell Troy, thank you for being here. This has been cool. Woohoo. It's been awesome. Right. All right. Get the bouncer's now. Everybody wants his autograph after he's talked. So we got to kind of watch out for that. You got to watch out when you go out the back door to Troy. That's he did. Look at that. That's right. That's right. OK. OK. Pucks for autism proves that when we that way.

Steve-o (01:23:24.995)
Yes.

Troy Blanchard (01:23:25.741)
You bet. Thank you. Thank you guys.

Steve-o (01:23:37.507)
look, he signed somebody's head, Tony.

Troy Blanchard (01:23:38.703)
Yeah, apparently.

Tony Benjamin (01:23:50.981)
Let me start that again. Pucks for autism proves that when communities rally families win their hockey tournaments raise local funds that support autism programming inclusion and connection for kids and adults everywhere. Join the team that plays with purpose visit pucks for autism.com that's pucks for autism.com and get involved today. And shout out to Claire. Yeah. They're in the playoffs.

Steve-o (01:23:52.206)
That was awesome.

Steve-o (01:24:15.022)
Shout out to the Utah Mammoth and local in there in the central division, I think. Yeah, and playoffs right now. I think they're leading two to one right now. So we'll see where that goes. I think it's best to set.

Tony Benjamin (01:24:21.074)
Yeah, yeah.

So yeah, congratulations to the Mammoth. Good luck for them. We want to say thanks to Claire. I'm sure she listens to this episode because everybody listens to everybody.

Steve-o (01:24:32.386)
I was talking to my Zumba instructor this morning too, and she's a huge hockey fan and, and, she, she was so excited about the mammoth and all that stuff. She did not trade her Jersey cause they had a Jersey trading, this weekend or she did not trade her Jersey cause she loves, she loved, there was a certain individual she loved. can't remember the name, but, she's really excited. So a lot of people here in Utah excited about the mammoth right now. It's only their second year. So not too shabby.

Tony Benjamin (01:24:44.931)
yeah, yeah, for the old to the new.

Tony Benjamin (01:24:57.598)
That's right, that's right, watch out. Okay, sorry, that totally derailed where I was going. Anyways, Troy, thanks for coming on. We're really happy you've been here. This has been fantastic. We really enjoy it. And we'll make sure that the information for everybody, the stuff that we've talked to is in the show notes. We'll get Troy to send us his website and contact information if you wanna reach out.

Troy Blanchard (01:25:12.557)
Thanks.

Steve-o (01:25:18.51)
Mm-hmm.

Tony Benjamin (01:25:23.926)
There's a lot of good Troy's doing in the world today and really providing some opportunities for people and for businesses, especially small business to get up and going. So thank you, Troy, again. We've loved having you on here. It's been great.

Troy Blanchard (01:25:37.379)
Thanks, thanks for having me. Really appreciate it.

Tony Benjamin (01:25:39.178)
You bet. All right. And I guess we're going out the same way we came in. Thank you for listening to today's podcast. Don't forget to subscribe and leave a five star review on your favorite podcast app. Comments or questions for us? Email the podcast at the HR life podcast at gmail.com. We'll talk again soon.