How is your website converting potential customers or franchise buyers for your business? When is the Have you thought about hiring help internationally in the past, but didn’t know how to do it? Or maybe you tried working through an international virtual staffing company and found it did not work out as you had hoped? Our guest today is Jon Matzner, and he shares how he helps business leaders hire top talent globally.
TODAY’S WIN-WIN:
The Bruce Matzner Ratio: dollars earn, to days in flip flops.
LINKS FROM THE EPISODE:
- Schedule your free franchise consultation with Big Sky Franchise Team: https://bigskyfranchiseteam.com/.
- You can visit our guest’s website at:
- Attend our Franchise Sales Training Workshop:
- https://bigskyfranchiseteam.com/franchisesalestraining/
- Connect with our guest on social:
- @matznerjon
ABOUT OUR GUEST:
Former American Diplomat, entrepreneur, and cofounder of Sagan – that has helped hundreds of business directly hire thousands of people from around the world, since its founding 15 months ago.
ABOUT BIG SKY FRANCHISE TEAM:
This episode is powered by Big Sky Franchise Team. If you are ready to talk about franchising your business you can schedule your free, no-obligation, franchise consultation online at: https://bigskyfranchiseteam.com/.
The information provided in this podcast is for informational and educational purposes only and should not be considered financial, legal, or professional advice. Always consult with a qualified professional before making any business decisions. The views and opinions expressed by guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the host, Big Sky Franchise Team, or our affiliates. Additionally, this podcast may feature sponsors or advertisers, but any mention of products or services does not constitute an endorsement. Please do your own research before making any purchasing or business decisions.
TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:01] Tom DuFore: Welcome to the Multiply Your Success podcast, where each week, we help growth-minded entrepreneurs and franchise leaders take the next step in their expansion journey. I’m your host, Tom DuFore, CEO of Big Sky Franchise Team. As we open today, I’m wondering if you have thought about hiring help internationally, but maybe didn’t know where to start, or maybe you’ve tried working through an international staffing company or agency and found it didn’t work out as you had hoped.
Well, our guest today is Jon Matzner, and he shares how he helps business leaders hire top talent globally. Now, Jon is a former American diplomat. He’s an entrepreneur and co-founder of Sagan. That’s the company that has helped hundreds of businesses directly hire thousands of people from around the world since its founding just 15 months ago. You’re going to love this interview, so let’s go ahead and jump right into it.
[00:00:57] Jon Matzner: My name is Jon Matzner, the company is called Sagan, and my title is co-founder.
[00:01:03] Tom: A great place for us to start here is really getting into the heart and core of your business and what you guys are doing. I really like this question we talked pre-show, and just talking about what’s wrong with normal outsourcing and virtual assistant model, and this whole idea of attracting outsourced talent.
[00:01:22] Jon: For the last 30 or 40 years, people have been hiring globally. AT&T in 1988 moved their customer service to the Philippines, or to India, or whatever. The reason why only big companies did it was because it was expensive. If you remember, you had to get like a T1 line or a T3 line, and you had to FedEx hard drives if you had to send something big. For a long time, the model was a big office tower in Mumbai or Manila where you had people doing revenue cycle management or whatever it happened to be.
Because of the proliferation of things like Zoom or Slack or Microsoft Teams, or even Gmail, you no longer have to operate within that model, and what that means is that companies can directly hire individuals from around the world rather than having to go through one of these what I think of as relatively archaic business models.
Now, that doesn’t really matter, except for one big thing, which is the quality of people that you get, and the cost at which you can hire those people when you’re doing it directly is a fraction of what it is if you’re doing it via this kind of outsourcing or staffing model that is very popular, and so young, ambitious people do not want to go into a call center with a headphone on and make 187 calls a day and their mouse movements are tracked. They want to have a career. They want to have a relationship with their employer. They want you to come visit them. They’re just normal people who happen to live in other countries.
Historically, this was not possible. The technology was not there. In the last several years, particularly after COVID, you can just work with Beth from South Africa, and over time, you forget whether she’s in Fort Lauderdale or South Africa. That is an incredibly powerful thing for small business owners, for franchisors, for franchisees.
[00:03:24] Tom: You started mentioning a little bit about this outsourced staffing agency or these virtual staffing type models. Someone might tune in, and maybe they’ve tried it or worked with it. For someone who hasn’t, talk a little bit about that model in particular.
[00:03:37] Jon: Sure. We call that the staffing markup model. What that model is, I say, “Tom, I can get you people in the Philippines for $9 an hour.” Tom goes, “$9 an hour? My goodness, that is a great rate.” What Tom doesn’t know is that the person that has billed out to him is making $3 of that $9. That person’s business model is to make it seem really complicated and really hard. “Oh, Tom, you have to worry about all this stuff. Just pay me $9.” What happens is, as soon as Tom has that person that’s now embedded in your company, that person who is working for Tom 40 hours a week, and that company that facilitated that is doing very, very little.
They try to make it seem like they do a lot. Trust me, they don’t do a lot. They are making $6 of the $9 that Tom is paying every hour. We call that the staffing markup model. The reason why that matters is, there’s nothing wrong with capitalism. Look, if Tom’s okay with $9, God bless America. I’m a capitalist, right? The issue is that the quality of the talent who will work for $3 or $4 is very different and is usually relegated to admin-y type roles, weak English, maybe they’re just like banging the phones or whatever.
What we think about and talk about is we just hired a controller from Buenos Aires, Argentina, who’s working directly with a lower middle market private equity shop, who previously worked at JP Morgan in Buenos Aires, and this person underwrites their inorganic growth pipeline. Do you think that person is going to be okay with being billed out and making $0.30 on the dollar, or do you think they want to have a career with Tom and say, “Tom, I’m a member of the Big Sky Team, and I’m going to fly up and come see you, and you’re going to come down to Buenos Aires.” They want to have a career, just like Americans do.
That’s why it matters for listeners, is that absolutely a virtual assistant or all this little kind of low-level stuff. We call it a starter drug. It’s a great way to get started. It’s simple, but as soon as you hear somebody like me talking, you’re like, “Yes, I want to keep going. This is awesome.” That model really restricts what keep going looks like.
[00:05:44] Tom: I resonate with what you just described there, because I’ve tried, and someone who listens to this may have been in a similar situation. You try working with one of these groups. They pitch this idea, get this workforce at a lower price, and say, “Huh, that’s interesting. It sounds great.” However, I experienced exactly what you said: either low quality, it ended up being high turnover, and it just wasn’t worth the headaches that was going on. It was, I will say, a very short-lived attempt. I said, “Well, I’m not doing that anymore, and I will source or find candidates domestically, or I just won’t do it. I’ll figure something else out.”
[00:06:21] Jon: I’m sure you’ve talked about this on the pod before, when we think about who our ICP is or our avatar, who is our customer? Almost 100% of them have tried to hire globally before and failed, or have hired from maybe only the Philippines, and they have a couple of virtual assistants or something like that. There are people who have dipped a toe in, and we kind of open up our overcoat and show them there’s so much more to this than Philippines or India. There’s Ireland, there’s South Africa, there’s Argentina, there’s Canada, for God’s sakes. There’s 8 billion people outside the US.
Just because some poopy person in your DMs tried to bait and switch you on the quality of the video they showed you and who [unintelligible 00:07:04], that is like saying I went to one bad country and now I don’t travel anymore. There’s millions of places in the world. Please don’t give up on travel. It’s the same thing with building a global workforce, I’d say.
[00:07:18] Tom: Very, very well said. Well, I didn’t realize I fit your avatar perfectly, but how do you solve that problem? You mentioned that CFO or high-end financial analyst that you’re able to set someone up with. How does this whole thing work? How do you help create that trust with someone that, really, that trust has been broken in these international markets?
[00:07:38] Jon: What we’ve seen, generally speaking, is the candidate speaks for themselves. Generally speaking, I can talk like crazy, and you go, “Okay, whatever. That guy’s just chirping.” When Tom puts in a request and says, “I’m looking for somebody who can help me do takeoffs at my home improvement business, who I can send iPhone pictures to, and they come back to me with draft plans to show my customer,” and then I send you somebody who says, “Hi, my name is Maria Gonzalez. I’m from Guatemala City. I have 11 years of architecture experience. I have a master’s degree in architecture. My dream salary is $1,700 a month full-time, and I’d love to help you grow your home improvement company.” Tom goes, “Okay.”
I believe that me talking is not going to do anything. Actually, looking at people is going to be how you break through to the next level. It informs my story a little bit, which was went to school on the East Coast, and then I went into the government. I worked in the greater national security world and lived in the Middle East and North Africa for the first part of my career. When I came back to the States and started building and buying businesses, one of the core insights I took from spending the better part of a decade abroad was, there are brilliant people who happen to live in other countries and talent is equally distributed, but opportunity isn’t.
There is somebody who is brilliant in Oman right now, who is so smart, and they’re so articulate, and all they want to do is help you grow Big Sky. Because of the power of the internet, that person is a few clicks away. That, to me, was the seed of what eventually became Sagan was there are brilliant people, they just live in these other countries, and so facilitating that relationship is something I dedicated my life to in the government and then now as a private sector entrepreneur.
[00:09:30] Tom: Connecting with these brilliant people, then, that becomes a challenge and seems like you’re the conduit to that. How do you find these people and connect them with your customers? How does all of that work?
[00:09:42] Jon: We’ve got a team of maybe 75 or 80 spread– I think Sagan’s internal team is in 19 or 20 different countries, I think. The joke that we use is, we drink our own champagne, meaning most of our executive team is global as well. I mean, we’re spread. There are two things I would say, and this is not secret, saucy or anything, because it’s a lot of work. The first thing I would say is you got to kiss a lot of frogs to find a prince. The business we’re really in is when we put up an ad, we get 200 applicants, and the business we’re really in is evaluating, testing, grading, screening, interviewing, profiling people to then get those three princes among the army of frogs, to put a point on it.
The second thing I would say is, and you will appreciate this, I think, given your background, is recruiting in every country for every role is like a sales funnel, meaning the way you recruit a graphic designer in Argentina is night and day different than the way you interview a B2B cold caller in South Africa. In South Africa, it’s all about Facebook groups, and so we buy Facebook groups and publish jobs there. In Belize, it’s about churches. In Argentina, it’s about the local version of Indeed. In Philippines, it’s all about LinkedIn or whatever it happens to be.
Every one of these roles and markets is like a different sales funnel. What we maintain an expertise in is, you come to us and you say, “I need a graphic designer,” and we take that and we go, “All right, what’s the kind of sourcing, screening, recruiting strategy that is unique to this role? Because it’s very different than a controller, than a graphic designer, than a data entry person who you’re just trying to save money on.” I think we launched Sagan publicly about 14 or 15 months ago, and we don’t know the exact number, but we think we’ve done close to 1,500 hires.
[00:11:32] Tom: I like how you said 8 billion people outside of the US market, and there’s lots of talent. I think that’s very, very well said, and you’re able to secure and find them. One of the things that I found really interesting is our connection happened through a franchise connection and how we ended up getting connected to each other. I’d love for you to talk about how this applies not only to help that growth-minded entrepreneur or business leader that’s looking for some kind of additional staff or talent replacement, but also for that franchise company and that franchisor that might need that additional support to be helping their franchisees.
[00:12:10] Jon: What I would say is we work with a ton of franchisors. We also work with some folks who sit above that at the brand owner level, who own a dozen brands and those kinds of things. The first thing I would say is I’ve learned, and I think, Tom, you’ll laugh when I say this, which is, if every other sentence out of my mouth isn’t sell more units or drive royalties, franchisors tune out. When I’m talking to multi-unit operators, private equity-owned folks who own 25 Burger Kings, I’m talking about profitability, I’m talking about EBITDA, I’m talking about reducing OpEx.
When I’m talking to a Zor or a brand owner, if I don’t say this sells units and this drives royalties, they’re just like, “Yes, it’s okay. Maybe you can try with one of our Zs or something.” That’s the first thing I would say up front. In our experience, that’s just what we’ve seen. What I would say is, franchisors, both from a selling units perspective and driving royalties– well, I’ll start with selling units. You’re in the business of helping people build better businesses. That’s the business you’re in. Best practice accumulation of a variety, whether that’s negotiating your lease, or how to hire local swim coaches, or how to price. That’s really what business you’re in.
Global talent as an advantage is something that is extremely appealing. Again, pardon my ignorance. What’s it called, demo day at franchises?
[00:13:29] Tom: Yes, the discovery day.
[00:13:30] Jon: Discovery, not demo day.
[00:13:31] Tom: That’s probably what you’re referring to.
[00:13:32] Jon: Yes, thank you. Discovery day. When you sit there and somebody’s looking at four different brands and one of the brands says, “Look, in your first year or two, you’re going to be on the truck and you’re going to do everything.” Then the second brand says, “You need a huge pile of capital, and you might be able to stop doing this within a year or two if you buy three different Zor.” The third brand, the one that has really integrated global talent, says, “From day one, we have a relationship with a company called Sagan.”
What that’s going do is, as a part of– We have people who’ve put us in their FDDs, and they say, “You’re going have a back office coordinator from day one.” What that means is this person’s going help you recruit crew, they’re going help you do your schedule, they’re going help you deal with customer service issues so you can go out and grow the business, so that, when you’re starting from zero, you can go out and do the one thing you can do, which is be that growth engine to go line up B2B referrals or go get a channel partnership or go freaking drop flyers off at little–
All the things that only that owner operator can do in the beginning and not sitting there going, “Oh, their credit card got canceled. I got to go change it in QuickBooks and do all the things you got to do when you’re small. For a very wallet-friendly price of, say, $1,500 a month US, you now can have that Z focused like a laser on driving revenue, which drives royalties, and also, during that discovery day, go, “Yes, man, I hate doing back office stuff. This brand is going to support me in back office from day one,” and I’m going to go out and try to drive revenue instead of, “Oh, the crew called in sick and I got to–” The things that you got to do when you’re small.
That’s what I’d say is you can get support earlier, and I think smart Zors, who are looking to differentiate themselves in sometimes a crowded marketplace, see this as a way to take that corporate employee who’s transitioning out of a W-2 who goes, “Man, I want some support from day one. With this global talent offer, I got it.” That’s what I see smart Zors doing these days.
[00:15:26] Tom: In franchising, not everyone is as you described, a smart Zor. Let’s say a franchisee listens to this or someone comes along and says, “Well, my Zor does not fall into that bucket, but I’m interested.” Maybe there’s a group of franchisees that are interested. How do you work with franchisees directly?
[00:15:45] Jon: Often, we’ve seen that going at the Zors is hard and slow because they walk down the street, and they get pitched three times by a vendor. It’s hard. Now, we do work with a lot of Zors, but most often, the way that we get started with Zors is via a large Z. If you’re familiar with the FastSigns brand, the largest Z in the network, his name’s Wes Kauffman, and they do, I don’t know, I think he shares this publicly, upwards of $50 million in revenue as FastSigns, and we’ve done between 40 and 50 hires for him.
He is the one who’s brought up to the network, not the Zor, because he’s like, “Guys, I was able to grow faster, support growth, let my local staff focus on local things, let my global staff focus on global things.” Very often, we went over a Z who’s trying to reduce their OpEx or support growth or whatever it happens to be. Then all of a sudden, people start looking over me, like, “Dude, what are you doing? How’d you solve your graphic design problem in Lancaster, Pennsylvania?” He’s like, “Oh, we don’t graphic design in Lancaster, we just sell and manufacture. When it comes to designing the signage, we kick it to some of these other places, and Sagan helps us get those folks.”
The way we work with folks at that level is we have two different offerings. One is a contingency search model, which you pay us a one-time success fee if we find you somebody great. That’s a little bit more expensive if you don’t want to become a member, which is essentially an annual plan where you get a certain number of hires, and then we have a lot of other resources and support, things like continuing education and a community and best practices, and all those kinds of things, discounts on payroll.
Usually, people who are just getting started will do that kind of one-off hire. Then, as soon as they’re like, “Oh my goodness, I think I need to hire a bunch of people over the next year or so,” then they switch over to membership. 95% of our customers are members.
[00:17:43] Tom: You mentioned briefly about that one-off franchisee, maybe that single unit that’s getting started, where maybe the franchisor introduces them to your services. How have you found working with maybe that smaller franchisee that maybe has one, two, or three franchises that they own, and now they’re saying, “I want that extra help,” or “I’m six months in and I need some clerical or office support”? How do you work in that regard?
[00:18:11] Jon: That would be really simple. The way we work is you’d pay a deposit, it’s $500, and you just have a dream session, and we’ll coach you on this. Tom, very oftentimes, I say it’s a dream session because it’s an exercise in fantasy. I want somebody who can cold call, who also knows soccer, who can do QuickBooks. You’re like, “All right, my brother, let’s come back to reality for this amount of money.” You’re like, “What’s the priority here?” “Oh, well, if we get our QuickBooks sorted, that would make everything better.” “Okay, so a little bit more QuickBooks-oriented.”
Very often with small companies, we call it Superman syndrome, which is because you’re so used to having to jam 11 job responsibilities into that front desk person to make their payroll worth it, to make the numbers work. We’re like, “This person is going to be, say, $1,500 a month is our average hire, full-time, working your hours, you don’t need to overload them to justify it.” They hop on with us $500. We start our search. We’re getting faster and faster, but for most roles a week or two, and we would then present our three finalists that meet your requirements. You do the final interview.
If you like them, you’d say, “I think Bob is great.” You pay us a one-time fee for facilitating that transaction. Then Bob works for you, and you pay him directly $1,500 a month forever. With that, we have a replacement guarantee of 90 days if, for some reason, it doesn’t work out, or a placement at no cost. If you’re a member, we replace all of our hires forever at no additional cost. Pretty low risk associated with that.
What we’ve seen is just get on the phone with some of these people. You will think of your business life as before global talent and after global talent because you’ll be like, “Yo, I thought this was like a low-quality save money thing. She has a master’s, and she’s smarter than I am.” You’re like, “Yes, man.” It’s like AD and BC. It’s like before global talent and after global talent.
What I would suggest is click around our website, read some stuff. We’ve got a salary guide where you can see, actually, for different roles in different countries, how much people make. It’s at salary.saganpassport.com. It’s free, just download that. What I’d say is just talk to a few people, and if your hair is not blown back, then don’t do this. If you’re just like, “There could be something here,” I’d say take the red pill from the matrix.
[00:20:38] Tom: We’re engaged in doing some work together, and I’m in the midst of reviewing candidates myself. I will say I’ve been very impressed. I was out of town and unable to dig deep into it, but just started to. The candidates that have come across are fantastic, and I’m certain someone in that mix is going to be the right fit for us.
[00:20:57] Jon: Where I started with this, Tom, was one of the business I bought was a home improvement company based in Southern California. I’m a proud American. I did my government service and had a lot of fun doing that. It was a daily struggle for me to get people I could afford that were sober and competent in my home improvement company. It was a daily struggle.
Again, I love my country. Getting somebody to show up at 8:00 AM without many liquor bottles in the desk, and who could competently execute on the operations and administration in answering the phone and doing crew schedules, was a boil on my butt, let’s say. I said, “Enough, enough.” I went on this journey of supporting my local business with a global workforce, and I got people who said, “Jon, this is a dream role. I just want to thank you for the opportunity. In four or five years, I’d love if I could maybe become an operations manager instead of just an operations coordinator, but I know I got a lot of work to do between now and then.”
I’m like, “I thought people like this didn’t exist,” because I’d been so beat down by somebody who was just saying yes to the job, and they were playing on YouTube all day. I was exhausted by it in Southern California, and I couldn’t afford it. It was my own pain that led me on this journey to then rebuild the way that I built companies by combining a local workforce with a global one.
[00:22:35] Tom: What’s the best way for someone to get in touch with you or the company or learn more about what you’re doing?
[00:22:40] Jon: If you’re on Twitter, I write a lot on Twitter, @MatznerJon, my last name, M-A-T-Z-N-E-R-J-O-N. I’m pretty active on Twitter in particular. Our company, if you just go to getsagan.com, G-E-T-S-A-G-A-N, like Carl Sagan, find us there. We write a lot. I have a newsletter and a podcast, both called Lazy Leverage. That’s another place if you want to learn more or hear my awesome voice.
[00:23:03] Tom: Perfect. We’ll make sure we include all that in the show notes, too, so someone can click on that and get to your resources quickly there. Well, this is a great time in the show, Jon. We ask every guest the same four questions before they go. The first question we ask is, have you had a miss or two on your journey, and something you learned from it?
[00:23:19] Jon: Miss or two on my journey would be– I’ve had multiple. I’ve had three misses this morning. I left college. It was probably the most impactful miss of my life. I left college. I thought I was about to get a job and start my career in the government, and I moved to Washington, DC, signed a lease. The day I showed up, I found out I got rejected, just at the very end of this process that I thought I was a lock for. I was sat down by a mentor.
There’s this old Abraham Lincoln quote that became thematically important for me, which was, “I will prepare, and one day my day will come.” Rather than basically having a pity party, it was, “I’m going to use this time to sharpen my sword.” I think there’s probably people here listening who are maybe in a W-2 that they’re not thrilled with, or maybe they’re in a franchise network that they’re stuck in, and they just can’t get it through.
Rather than take that as a disempowering idea, I think the idea of saying, “Well, what can I do right now to get ready when my day does come? Okay, I need to learn Spanish because I want to be in the home improvement space. Okay, I want to go take a bookkeeping and accounting course at night so that I can know my numbers cold when I do finally get into a system and a growing business model.” That was very impactful on me to basically have an internal locus of control, rather than feel sorry for myself because I got a freaking rejection or whatever.
[00:24:45] Tom: Thank you for sharing that. Let’s talk about a make, a win, or a highlight.
[00:24:49] Jon: Make, a win, or a highlight would be, we created a business model from scratch, and it’s exploded. Historically, this idea, we call it Costco for global talent, which is this membership thing, was invented by me in a jacuzzi when I was talking to my dad, because I was like, “I don’t want to sit between people and their talent and mark up the labor forever, but I want to have a way to provide enduring value and make it all work.” It was just a complete exercise in pure business thing, and the market has responded to it. We have customers that are $8 billion private equity funds and pre-revenue franchisees and everything in between, and it was completely invented by me.
[00:25:30] Tom: Well, the name of the show is Multiply Your Success, and we always ask every guest, have you used a multiplier to grow yourself, personally or professionally, or any organizations you’ve been a part of?
[00:25:41] Jon: One of the single biggest multipliers that I can’t emphasize enough is the book Getting Things Done by David Allen. I read it maybe 15 years ago. I was the kid in high school who used to write his homework on his hand. I read that book and I said, “If I’m going to live up to my potential, I cannot be disorganized, I cannot have 87 unread emails, I cannot forget meetings, I cannot not know how to take notes.”
That book, 15 or 20 years ago, set me on a path of being very well organized as somebody who is not naturally like that. I would say it has been a core contributor to my professional trajectory. It sounds boring, but it is so stick and important to be that guy who doesn’t miss anything, who doesn’t forget things, who knows what to work on at any given time, and so I can’t recommend David Allen, Getting Things Done, that kind of philosophy enough.
[00:26:36] Tom: The final question we ask every guest, Jon, is what does success mean to you?
[00:26:40] Jon: Success to me looks like– My dad’s name is Bruce, so I’m Jon Matzner. My dad’s Bruce. Was a career entrepreneur, went to Harvard Business School, and became an entrepreneur before it was cool, is what he says, in the early ’80s. Right now, 90% of the people who go to HBS are entrepreneurs, but back then, that wasn’t the case. He always said, “My goal is to–” I call it the Bruce Matzner ratio, which is dollars earned to days in flip-flops.
Success looks like, to me, being able to have, be professionally ambitious, to be the leader of an organization I believe in, or a contributor to an organization I believe in, but also balancing it with a great life and not deferring life in the name of whatever that professional trajectory is. To me, it’s this healthy interplay between professional ambition and being a good dad, being a good husband, contributing to my community, and doing everything I can to balance those. That’s what success looks like to me, my dad.
[00:27:38] Tom: Jon, as we bring this to a close, is there anything you’re hoping to share or get across that you haven’t had a chance to yet?
[00:27:44] Jon: I would say what I’m hoping people take away, and it’s why my podcast and newsletter is called Lazy Leverage, which is the business that you currently own is a choice. It’s a choice, and there are people like you who, through learning from engaging with people like Tom, through reading and education, have found a way to break free of what you think is a set of fixed constraints. You are making a choice every day, kind of like what you tolerate is what becomes your reality. If you say, “You know what, I know that I’m on the truck right now.”
There is a guy out there, or a girl, or a book, or a method, or a vendor, or whatever that can work with you step by step to get off the truck, so to speak, or to get that second unit, or to improve your gross margins. What I’d say is, even if you’ve tried a few times and failed, listen to my podcast, read books, talk to Tom, go in forums, whatever, I’d say, don’t give up, because you answering customer service emails at 4:00 PM on a Saturday does not have to be. Maybe it’s a short season of life, but there is a clear path to exit that.
I just want to give people hope that there are people out there, through a variety of ways, who have broken out of that, and who aren’t scammers trying to sell you some baloney course or something. There are proper professionals who can take you by the hand and say, “Come on, let’s get you out of the day-to-day.”
[music]
[00:29:18] Tom: Jon, thank you so much for a fantastic interview. Let’s go ahead and jump into today’s three key takeaways. Takeaway number one that I really found interesting is when Jon said that companies have been outsourcing internationally since the 1980s. I thought, “That seems like a long time. I had no idea it’d been going on that long.” That companies can now hire directly individuals from all around the world, and that it’s easier than it’s ever been and especially for that small and mid-sized business community.
Takeaway number two is when he talked about the staffing markup model that organizations will use when you hire temporary or potentially permanent staff from around the world when you’re working with these various agencies. I know that I tried working through some of these types of groups, very short-lived. For me personally, it just did not go as well, or as I thought it was going to.
Takeaway number three is when Jon talked about Sagan and that they’ve done over 1,500 hires in 15 months or so. That seems like a lot of people in a short amount of time, and that he’s really designed to help support franchisors, multi-unit franchisees, and even single-unit franchisees, and I find it interesting that he’s really focused on this franchise community and our franchise world. Now it’s time for Today’s Win-Win.
Today’s Win-Win comes from the end of the episode, when he talked about the Bruce Matzner ratio, and I love that. It’s something his dad developed, and Jon has named it the Bruce Matzner ratio, which is dollars earned to days in flip-flops, dollars earned to days in flip-flops. I thought that that was a perfect way to summarize the interview, because really, what Jon is trying to do, not only for himself but for his customers and the clients he serves, is to help them improve that ratio of dollars earned to days in flip-flops.
I really thought that was a great way to close, because Jon is helping his customers find a way to spend maybe a few more days in flip-flops by hiring some great talent and great people to help support the businesses they work with. This Bruce Matzner ratio, as he said, is dollars earned days in flip-flops to help you balance and remember it’s not just about income, it’s also about time spent with your family and in your community, but also not to forget about you’ve got to generate some income as well. It’s kind of this motion of all of this working together. I just love that. I thought that was a great win-win to summarize the episode today.
That’s the episode today, folks. Please make sure you subscribe to the podcast and give us a review. Remember, if you or anyone you know might be ready to franchise their business or take their franchise company to the next level, please connect with us at bigskyfranchiseteam.com, where you can schedule your free, no-obligation consultation. Thanks for tuning in, and we look forward to having you back next week.
