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Tired of being stuck in the trenches while watching others build empires? Welcome to the 50/50 Accelerator Podcast, where we're flipping the script on the traditional trade business model. I'm your host, Josh Patrick, and like you, I've spent countless nights wondering if there's a better way.
We bring you real conversations with business owners who've transformed their companies from time-sucking struggles into well-oiled machines. They'll share their exact blueprints—from finding reliable teams to creating systems that actually work. There is no theory, just battle-tested strategies that have helped them double their free time and cash flow.
Think of it as your weekly meetup with mentors who've cracked the code.
0:00:02 - Josh Patrick
Since 1974, I've read a book a week searching for what it takes to achieve business success. After thousands of books, hundreds of client success stories and decades of hard-won business wisdom, here's what I know for sure Working yourself to death isn't a badge of honor. It's a failure of strategy. So thanks for joining us today. I'm Josh Patrick, and this is the 50-50 Accelerator, where we explore how real business owners are cutting their hours by 50% while growing their profits by 50%. No consultant BS here, no theoretical frameworks, just proven strategies from people who have actually done it. Because here's the truth If you're still working 65 or more hours a week, putting out fires and missing family dinners, it is what it is, but that's not how it has to stay.
So let's get started.
Hey, how are you today? This is Josh Patrick and you're at the 50-50 Accelerator podcast, and my guest today is Gary Engels. He is the CEO of MyGig. It's a fintech company, from what I understand, but we're going to have Gary tell us what it is and then we're going to jump in and do a little bit of work on how Gary might think about 50-50ing his business and 50-50 stands for, by the way 50% more profits, 50% less time on tactical activities. So let's bring Gary on. Hey Gary, how are you today?
0:01:37 - Gary Engels
Wonderful Josh, Good to see you here today.
0:01:39 - Josh Patrick
Thanks a lot for joining me, so tell me what my gig does.
0:01:42 - Gary Engels
Sure. So, yeah, my gig is focused on business services. You know gig. What is a gig worker? Let's start with there. H
The people that we serve are essentially 1099 workers. In today's economy, 52% of our workforce has a 1099. The world is changing and you know, many of them have W-2s also, but they have a side gig, that 1099 income, right. And when you fall into that world right, when you fall into a side income or a gig worker, a lot of times you don't have access to a lot of the same resources that a large company might have. Right, a large company might offer health benefits. They might offer, you know, know, security systems, it security for your computers and things like this. They might offer a PEO, hr solutions and whatnot.
And as a gig worker, as a 1099 worker, you don't have access to those things. So we help them out. You know we provide a lot of those solutions for them. You know. You know the Gen Z world 72% of Gen Z is a 1099 worker nowadays, right, and it's just growing at an exponential rate and things are changing and so we want to make sure that those, that side of the workforce, is taken care of and has the business solutions that they need. On top of that, my gig is an affiliate platform, and so we offer an opportunity to sign up as a reseller for those services and create a side income for themselves.
0:03:10 - Josh Patrick
So they can sell your services. Is that what you?
Oh, that's cool, cool.
So let's talk a little bit about your business. So I noticed, you know, just for everyone, knows every guest that comes on our show. I have this little assessment I ask them to do because it helps me figure out what we might want to drill in on and talk about, to have a reasonable conversation that will help Gary and help you at the same time. So, Gary, it appears that you are not thrilled with your hirings. Can you talk a little bit about that?
0:03:50 - Gary Engels
Well, you know, when we're just getting started here, we have a solid team in place and we're just having focused on that side. So when you say you're not thrilled about it, it's just not something that we're really tremendously focused on. We are recruiting right now. Right, we're recruiting new certified resellers, enterprise partners and channel partners that we work with. And so you know, as far as like hiring versus recruiting, those are just two different things, and the hiring side of our business we haven't focused a whole lot on.
0:04:21 - Josh Patrick
So do you hire people?
0:04:23 - Gary Engels
Yeah, yeah, we have 25 employees, but you know we yeah employees but we're not rapidly expanding.
right now, we have a solid team in place.
0:04:31 - Josh Patrick
So what's your success rate when you hire?
0:04:35 - Gary Engels
Well, success rate when we hire? Well, we just launched here in June with my gig and so I don't know how to really answer that question.
0:04:43 - Josh Patrick
So you haven't been around long enough to really have much in the way of turnover.
0:04:49 - Gary Engels
Correct.
0:04:49 - Josh Patrick
Yeah, okay. How happy are you with the people you've hired?
0:04:54 - Gary Engels
Yeah, great, like I said, we have a solid team in place. That's why we haven't needed to focus on hiring. We came from a situation where we brought a company, anchor Accounting and 10 years of experience with what they were doing, and we brought a lot of their people over here as well. You know, anchor, the Anchor group, is our parent company and they helped, you know, create the formation of MyGig. So MyGig is new, but it's not new, right? We've been around for 10 years and working with other tax credits and other services, business services for a long time. So we took some of the existing staff and the people that we had with the larger company and we moved them over into my gig and so, like I said, the hiring process hasn't really been a major focus of ours because we already had a team in place to go to step into those roles.
0:05:41 - Josh Patrick
So the anchor folks, what do they do for your customers?
0:05:46 - Gary Engels
into those roles. So the anchor folks, what do they do for your customers? Well, if you think about reselling a service, right, there's kind of a couple different sides to selling right. One is selling, then one is the fulfilling side of it. You don't have to do the fulfilling right my gig as a certified reseller you don't have to fulfill any of the products. That's what Anchor does, that's what our partner companies do when you resell a solution.
0:06:07 - Josh Patrick
So what does Anchor do?
0:06:09 - Gary Engels
Yeah, well, Anchor Accounting is an example. We Anchor Accounting as a FICA tip credit that they offer A lot of restaurants overpaying their FICA taxes, and so Anchor Accounting has a platform where you can bring a restaurant to their service. They will go through all the filing for them, work with them directly as an accounting service and, you know, file the claim and they can get a significant portion of those FICA tip taxes back for them. And so, like I said, as a reseller, you sign up a restaurant, you bring somebody to you know the landing page and kind of help them get into the funnel and the situation. Well, the reseller doesn't have to actually be the accountant, the reseller doesn't have to be the person to fulfill. That's what anchor accounting does.
0:06:53 - Josh Patrick
Okay, so what's the biggest challenge that you're having with MyGig?
0:06:58 - Gary Engels
Biggest challenge, Okay, Well, you know it's, I would say just, you know it's a I would say just a speed to market, right. And so, when you're getting up and running right, we are right now actively recruiting certified resellers, right, and we have a solution that is plug and play, it's ready to go. We're just in a manner of looking for those resellers to be able to step in and start offering those services to other people. And so, you know, biggest challenge right now is just, you know, we're ready to rock, we're ready to expand and you know we're just in the process of recruitment.
0:07:35 - Josh Patrick
So when you're recruiting, you're recruiting people to resell your services, correct?
0:07:42 - Gary Engels
That's correct, yeah.
0:07:43 - Josh Patrick
And how do you go about doing that?
0:07:46 - Gary Engels
Well, we have different incentives there. We have our channel partners are the biggest focus for us right now. Our channel partners are some of these larger organizations that have groups of people that they already work with and they're bringing them in for us. We work with some enterprise partners, like an accounting firm and places like this, that already have staff and already have a group of people that they bring together, and so we're partnering and working with them right now, and so our VP of sales, Alex he is right now just booking meetings every day and just working with some of those enterprise partners to bring them in.
0:08:24 - Josh Patrick
Does he have a challenge getting in front of these folks?
0:08:28 - Gary Engels
Yeah, I think that you know, we could always fill that calendar more and that's where I think that the hiring process and things like that is going to come in even more. But you know, in any businesses, businesses are run by systems, right, and those systems are run by people and the systems right now are in place and we have our VP of sales and our sales team is building those systems out. We just need to plug people into those systems.
0:08:55 - Josh Patrick
You also need to train them.
0:08:57 - Gary Engels
That's right.
0:08:58 - Josh Patrick
So how do you go about doing that?
0:09:00 - Gary Engels
Yep. So my gig has a whole learning management system and we have a whole series of training videos and we call them certified resellers because we don't just we don't just sign somebody up and then just say, you know, go right, we have a whole certified reseller process where you're going to go through, like with this FICA tip credit that I was mentioning right as one product that we offer um, we have a system for training where, where they step in and they watch a series of videos and they become a certified reseller and they get a certificate, you know, showing that they went through that training. But that helps them build the confidence, be able to understand what it is.
0:09:37 - Josh Patrick
You've not been around long enough to probably have any Rogue certified resellers yet, have you?
0:09:43 - Gary Engels
Yeah, no, there's some people that have gone through that process.
0:09:46 - Josh Patrick
I mean Rogue. I mean people who you certify but they end up not doing what you want them to do.
0:09:53 - Gary Engels
Yeah, sure, yeah, too new to even say that yeah.
0:09:55 - Josh Patrick
Yes.
0:09:57 - Gary Engels
And of course, of course that's going to happen. That's where the compliance department comes in. And you know we're going to make sure that we're protecting our opportunity and protecting what we have, so that way people aren't going out and saying something that they shouldn't be saying. Right, you know you can't go out there and start thinking that you're representing the IRS or making guarantees or promises. You know your promise is a restaurant. You're going to get this much money back. You can't do that. And yeah, their compliance. That's part of the training, why that stuff is important.
0:10:24 - Josh Patrick
So is Anchor. How big is Anchor?
0:10:28 - Gary Engels
Well, anchor has processed about a billion dollars in tax credits through ERC and the self-employed tax credit and things like that over the last 10 years as a referral or affiliate platform that side of things I mean. They've paid out in just I don't know the exact number tens of millions of dollars in commissions paid out to their affiliates that have shared those numbers or shared those offers in the past, and they're huge. They just transferred everything over from an older platform that they had into a new platform called MyGig.
0:11:08 - Josh Patrick
Okay, so does Anchor own you guys, or how's the relationship between you and Anchor?
0:11:15 - Gary Engels
Yeah, they're the parent company. Yeah, for sure.
0:11:17 - Josh Patrick
Okay, and can you talk a little bit about how you decided to join with them? What was your decision process with that? Because this is, you know, a lot of companies are going to say, okay, well, if I go with a larger company, I'll have more resources and more scale and more blah, blah, blah blah. But I've found often in the past that sometimes it doesn't work out because it's not a very good partnership.
So how did you?
go about, through the process, deciding anchors who I want to partner with.
0:11:50 - Gary Engels
Well, that's not exactly the relationship there. The anchor group was the founder of my gig, right? We created it together, right? This is something that this is not my idea. I'm not the founder of my gig, right? My gig was created by the anchor group.
0:12:07 - Josh Patrick
You're a hired guy.
0:12:09 - Gary Engels
I was brought in as CEO to help manage and promote and build my gig. Yeah, for sure.
0:12:16 - Josh Patrick
And how did they decide to bring you in? How did you decide that you want to be brought in?
0:12:20 - Gary Engels
Sure, yeah, there's definitely some past relationships and some past things that I've done. You know I built a marketing agency and we were spending millions of dollars a year on Facebook ads and things like that. I've gone down that road. I've been a gig worker, an entrepreneur. I ran a brick-and-mortar business. I ran a martial arts school for 20 years.
So I've been in that world and understood what that takes to run just a brick-and-mortar business, all the different side gig type opportunities and things like that in the past that we've done. And then I was even brought on as a ceo of a, an education company, and we built that company up to be sold and purchased by a larger company that bought us out and kind of worked myself out of a job and so, um, you know, that was that was a great exit and that whole process and that led me into a place where I had some open time and, through some relationships that brought me into it and relationships that trusted and understood what I was capable of, they said that I'd be a great fit for the CEO position to be able to step in.
0:13:26 - Josh Patrick
Cool, so you work for folks at Anchor correct? How are they going to evaluate your success?
0:13:38 - Gary Engels
Yeah, that's a great question. And obviously, on results right, we track our KPIs daily. We track, you know, the success of our certified resellers. Right, those are important measures. Right, you know, if you want to be successful yourself, right, it's completely 100% tied to the success of others around you.
0:14:00 - Josh Patrick
This is one of my trick questions what's more important your staff members or your customers?
0:14:11 - Gary Engels
That is a trick question.
0:14:16 - Josh Patrick
It is
0:14:16 - Gary Engels
Yeah, there's. There's no great way to answer that, right, I always looked at you know, in business and in any, in any opportunity, right, that the your customers are your boss, right. If they're not happy, right, everything falls apart. But how do you keep them happy? Good staff, good training on the staff to keep them happy, and so it's a symbiotic relationship. You can't possibly say that the customers are more important than the staff that helps them be successful.
0:14:47 - Josh Patrick
Yeah, but my experience is, if you don't treat your staff as your very best customer, they will return the favor to your customers. Meaning that if they don't love working for you and love what they do. They're going to make your customers' lives not as friendly as they could.
0:15:06 - Gary Engels
That's right.
0:15:17 - Josh Patrick
And so I've always maintained that the number one job of a company is to have really happy frontline employees, because if your frontline employees are happy, your customers are happy.
0:15:26 - Gary Engels
Yep Couldn't agree more
0:15:26 - Josh Patrick
And I use United Airlines as my favorite example of that. About 15, 20 years ago, united had a CEO from hell. Their flying on United was nothing but terrible every single time you stepped on their planes. I used to fly them a lot. Then, around six, seven, eight years ago, they changed CEOs and all of a sudden, united went from being a terrible experience to being a pretty good experience. It was really simple. The CEO stopped punishing their employees and started treating them with some value.
0:16:04 - Gary Engels
Yeah, took a lot of effect.
0:16:07 - Josh Patrick
And for me that was a pretty big lesson, and for me that was a pretty big lesson. So you guys, you're very system-driven, you're very KPI-driven and I like to take KPIs and make them into dashboards. But that's just my sort of thing.
0:16:23 - Gary Engels
I do the same thing. I agree yeah.
0:16:25 - Josh Patrick
So how did you come across choosing your KPIs? This is a big deal, by the way, for folks who are listening, because too often I go into a business I see I ask them what they're measuring and they give me this laundry list of 32 items. Yeah, so, how many KPIs do you guys focus on everyday?
0:16:48 - Gary Engels
About. 10.
And you know what's. What's interesting about, um, you know, the idea that is something that I actually used to teach in the martial arts world is, uh, the idea of momentum goals and milestone goals, and I think that that kind of helps us understand where we came up with. You know that these, these KPIs that we're going through, the, the idea of a milestone goal, like kind of you know where the top of the mountain, where are you headed? You know ultimate goal that you're looking to accomplish, right, the, you know the BHAG, right, the big, hairy, audacious goal, right, what's that big thing that you're aiming for? And then you start to work backwards. Well, you know, before I can get there, what has to happen. You know, and before I get there, what has to happen, before I get there, what has to happen. And you start to walk your way backwards on that journey. And it's a great exercise to sit down and kind of go through all this and you say you know all right. So right now, into the daily process, right, the daily goal, what is necessary to accomplish. And that's where you know your momentum goals come in, your daily KPIs, right.
There was one time part of a black belt test that I had to accomplish. I had to do 50,000 pushups in a year and it was a part of our process, right? It was just one of those things. Right, it was like and I realized this has nothing to do with the push-up, it has to do with learning how to set and achieve a large, crazy goal. And there was a lot of other pieces to that. But just to simplify and break it down, it was like you know, it was 150 a day and I can't do 150 pushups. I don't know about you but you know.
So how does that break? They got to do 50 in the morning, 50 in the in the afternoon and then 50 before bed. You know, and that was that was something that was achievable, right. And if you couldn't do 50, okay, great, then you break it back down to you know, I'm going to do 10 every hour or whatever it is, but eventually you'll find a place where it's like okay, I can do that, right, that's, that's achievable Right. And you start to, you know, shape your daily process, shape your, your day around. You know, how can I achieve that smallest piece? Right, that? That's that tiny KPI and I think that's. You know the process of it and we're still working on it too. Like I said, still new in the process of understanding these and we're still fine-tuning those.
0:19:05 - Josh Patrick
So I'm going to make a suggestion. I don't know if you're doing this or not.
0:19:09 - Gary Engels
Sure
0:19:24 - Josh Patrick
it sounds like your KPIs are all historical, meaning you're measuring something that's already happened.
Do you have any KPIs that are predictive, that say this KPI, if it moves this direction, is a good thing 90 days from now, it moves in a different direction, it's a bad thing 90 days from now. So I have like three, four or five things I can really focus in on that's going to tell me whether I have a problem in the future or not.
0:19:39 - Gary Engels
Great advice. I'm not tracking that currently no.
0:19:44 - Josh Patrick
In my experience, it's way more important than the goals we set.
0:19:48 - Gary Engels
Sure.
0:19:48 - Josh Patrick
I used to be in the food service and vending business back in the dark ages and I tell this story a lot. You know those restaurants, vending machines that have candies and chips, pastries and all that kind of garbage. Well, our average collection per service was $43. And if I had set a goal of what we accomplished, which was a 400% improvement, nobody would ever have believed it. We never would have gotten there. So we just did better.
So we did these experiments along the way, we went from saying, okay, we're going to get rid of the jujubes and put two rows of Snickers in, because Snickers were always sold out. And then we ended up doing three rows of Snickers and four rows of Snickers and four rows of M&Ms. So eventually we went from having 40 items in the machine down to 15 items in the machine. And you would happen when we did that, because it was the right 15 items Our productivity went from $43 a service to $142 per service.
Now you think about that. Now, I could have never in the world used KPIs to get me there. So it's one of the reasons I say you know, my goal is better, but at the same time, I want to know what's going to happen in the future. The way we used to measure that was we tracked headcounts at our customers. But let's say we had an account that had 575 people and every quarter would ask every customer how many people were working there. If that went from 575 down to 525, $475, down to $425, we knew we had to go back to that client and renegotiate. Sure, if it went from $575 to $675 to $775, we knew we had to sharpen the pencil because our competitors would be in.
So that's an example of a predictive KPI measurement that's going to tell me what I need to be doing in the future.
0:22:04 - Gary Engels
Yeah, that's great. And I can really see this from the Snickers example too. Right, if you had a KPI of, hey, we want to sell 10 Snickers a day out of this machine, right, and you're celebrating like, hey, we hit 10., we hit 10., we hit 10. And then you never realize how much more you could grow we actually couldn't have sold 40 a day. Yeah, exactly, yeah, yeah.
0:22:27 - Josh Patrick
So, so a lot of times when we're doing our measurements, we want to be really, really mindful of what's going to help us move the needle in the future.
0:22:32 - Gary Engels
Yeah.
0:22:33 - Josh Patrick
And having big rocks is always a great thing. No, there's nothing wrong with having a three year goal. Five year goal Exactly. I'm not supposed to be fine with 10-year goals, because I don't think anybody can look 10 years out and say this is what's going to happen. But some people do it, and so I'm not opposed to it. But I'm more excited when somebody tells me here's the measurements that are going to tell me what's going to happen in the next 90 days of my business.
0:22:58 - Gary Engels
Yeah, it's like predicting the weather right the further you go out, the less accurate it is.
0:23:03 - Josh Patrick
Yes, it is. You know like I work a lot with contractors and if you look at a construction company, what's the most important number for them to track? It's backlog. Because if their backlog is going up they know they might need to hire people. If the backlog is going down, they better get their sales force in motion or they're going to have a problem in the future. So it's really pretty simple and I think every business has that sort of stuff. So I would encourage you in your business say gee, what can I do to make predictive measurements that will help us figure out we're going in the right direction or not. But that's just my idea.
0:23:37 - Gary Engels
No, that's great, that's great feedback.
0:23:39 - Josh Patrick
So, Gary, unfortunately we're out of time. So how would folks go about finding you if they wanted to, if they wanted to become an affiliate, and you happen to be a gig worker? How would they do that?
0:23:51 - Gary Engels
Yeah, you go to. joinmygig.com is the easiest place. Joinmygig.com
0:23:57 - Josh Patrick
Okay, and would you be willing to talk to folks who are interested?
0:24:02 - Gary Engels
Yeah, happy to. We have a place on there where you can watch an overview video and you can also book an appointment with us. If you wanted to speak with one of us to be able to discuss questions and whatnot before getting started, that's great.
0:24:18 - Josh Patrick
I've got two things I'd like you to do. The first is please go to wherever you're listening to this podcast. whether it's Spotify or Apple or Amazon or wherever and leave us an honest rating and review. If you love us, you give us five stars. If you found some real value in this conversation, you can give us five stars. You said well, this was a waste of time. You give me one star and I cry and you don't care. But I cry at the end. I usually cry when I get one stars. And the second thing is if you own a business and you're like Gary and you say, gee, this is going to be fun to be on this podcast as a guest, why don't you send me an email? It's really easy. Just say it's jpatrick@stage2 (that's number two) solution.com and solution is singular. So it's jpatrick @stage2solution.com And just say hey, I listen to the podcast, I'd like to be a guest. I'll send you a link, we'll have a conversation and see if it makes sense for you. If it does, then you're on the show. So this is Josh Patrick. We're with Gary Engels. You're at the 50-50 Accelerated Podcast. Thanks a lot for stopping by. I hope to see you back here really soon.
Josh Patrick Outro:
Look, I spent enough mornings thinking and writing about what it takes for business success. Enough mornings thinking and writing about what it takes for business success. Here's an important final thought the old ways work for a reason, but the best legacy isn't just about what you build. It's about building something that outlasts you without burning you out in the process. If you found value in today's podcast, do me a favor Take 30 seconds to rate and review the show and yes, I mean honest reviews. I'd rather have the hard truth than empty praise. Your feedback helps other business owners find these conversations. Hey, I'm Josh Patrick and this has been the 50-50 Accelerator. If you're ready to work less and profit more, make sure you subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and remember you've built something incredible. Now let's make sure you're actually around to enjoy it. See you next time.