EP12: Putting People First: Revolutionizing Career Development with Bryan Verduzco

Seth Waters (Co-Host): Well, welcome to Purposeful Prosperity Podcast. My name is Seth and I'm here with Jack Smith. And you know Jack, he's a founder, entrepreneur, investor, and world-changer. Excited to be with you today, Jack.

Jack Smith (Host): I'm excited to be here too, my friend.

Seth Waters (Co-Host): We have a great interview today with  Bryan Verduzco.

Jack Smith (Host): We do.

Seth Waters (Co-Host): Yeah, excited about that. And you're going to hear a lot of great information from him. A couple things that he said that were really interesting that I pulled out. One thing he said was that, “We are not just a staffing company.” His company is not just a staffing company, they are a platform that helps talent staffing thrive. And that's not just a “what”, that's a “why”. How important is it, Jack, for purposeful companies to have clarity around not just their “what”, but their “why”?

Jack Smith (Host): Well, I call the “why” our superpower, right? That's the message that brings the team together. Everybody has to make money and have a job, but it's just a job until it's a passion. And that's really when you weave that “why” into your business between purpose and prosperity, that's when people lean in.

Seth Waters (Co-Host): I love that. Another really interesting thing that Bryan shared with us was he said, fail fast and have fun along the way. How important do you think it is, Jack, for purposeful leaders to understand that failure is not the end, but it can be a gateway to the future?

Jack Smith (Host): There's only one way to learn, right? And you have to fail. And so you can either penalize failing and that is going to create a culture of no growth and stagnation because nobody's ever going to do anything that they're not 100% certain that they're going to be successful at. Failure happens when you don't doing something, you're not 100% sure by definition that it's going to be successful. And as an organization, if you can embrace that, celebrate, have fun with that, enjoy the learning process. It's just part of the journey. It's just one step along the way. Everybody stumbles every now and again. It's about getting back up and keeping marching.

Seth Waters (Co-Host): I love that. Well, let's jump right into it. Excited for this interview with Bryan Verduzco.

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Jack Smith (Host): Welcome to the Purposeful Prosperity Podcast. I'm your host, Jack Smith, and I'm so excited today to be joined by my friend and fellow co-founder Bryan Verduzco, the Chief Growth Officer at Clapself. Thanks, Bryan.

Bryan Verduzco (Guest): Oh man, it's so great to be here. Thank you so much for having me on the pod today, Jack.

Jack Smith (Host): Absolutely, man. I'm really excited. Well, I love your journey and I love your heart in particular. And so I really appreciate you coming on Purposeful Prosperity. You and I connected from a business perspective because we have a lot of the same concepts in mind as far as how we feel the consulting and staffing world should run. So maybe you tell our listeners a little bit about your entrepreneurial journey and kind of where you are today here at Clapself. But honestly, the path to get here is very interesting.

Bryan Verduzco (Guest): Yeah, man. I really did enjoy that conversation when a mentor of mine, Dave, introduced us and I think we bonded initially on that concept of people over profits, right. And I think for us being in the staffing and recruiting game, people are everything. I mean, they are our business. And so I come from traditional contract staffing background. I did ten years, started in San Francisco with a Bay Area old national firm, but in San Francisco proper. And then opportunity arise to go to Sacramento. My wife's from here. I grew up in Modesto, so I always knew I'd come back to the Valley and I had launched a division for another national firm and it was great. Got a ton of experience, how to build an office, how to manage a PNL, all those things. But I looked at it like an MBA, how can I learn how to do this but then go do it on my own and with a team around me that we can build something special?

Because I saw lots of success there, but I also saw things that I thought could be improved upon. And really it starts with the candidate and the candidate experience and treating them like they aren't a commodity, but just a person, an employee of ours. And so for those people that might not be too familiar with contract staffing, I mean, in It in particular, it's a 50 plus billion dollar industry. The staffing industry as a whole is over 500. And so it's just massive, right? But when companies need to hire consultants, they'll tap the shoulders of me or Jack and Fortuna to be able to supply them with talented resources in a number of different areas. And so when those companies employ the IT talent, in my case, they typically offer benefits, but it doesn't happen right away. They don't typically offer PTO or really anything beyond an hourly wage. And so I always thought that that was something we can improve upon.

So this journey that I'm on now with Clapself, the two co-founders that I've gone on It with, we really want to put a professional-first approach to how that traditional model is run. And truthfully, we're not building a staffing company, we're building a platform to be able to power technology talent to thrive in this new area of work that I think we're all welcoming with remote and being able to work from anywhere, for anyone. So for me, that's the journey that we're on. And I really want to help those individuals be able to feel like they're a part of a large organization, but the flexibility to work on exciting, engaging projects all over the world. And so that's what we're building at Clapself. I could talk more in depth, but for me, it's all about how do I put people first, how do I put them in the right situation for them. And I always tell my team, if we're putting somebody in a better situation today than they were in yesterday, we won. And let's make sure that's our number one focus and then we'll solve business problems from there.

Jack Smith (Host): So I love the story of Clapself and I love your journey of how you took the learnings and how to care for people and putting people over profits into your company. So can you tell me a little bit about Clapself? It's an interesting name and I think an even more interesting concept.

Bryan Verduzco (Guest): Yeah. So Clapself, it really starts with my two co-founders, Anuj and Ramna. They were building an upskilling platform to help individuals get better at their career or maybe take on a new career. So “clap for yourself in your career” is the premise. And so what they realized as they started to do multiple proof of concept was that it was great. They were helping people get better at their career, but their current employer either wasn't going to take advantage of those new skills, or if they were, they weren't necessarily paying them for it. And so that last mile was getting them a new job. And so that's how we got connected, because what I've done over the last decade is connect people to opportunities.

And so that's what I came in to help with. And how I can best describe it is where the vision is, is what Uber did for ride sharing or what Tinder might have done for dating, is really what we want to do for hiring. And so when you think about how is the next generation of talent going to find their opportunities, we want to be where the puck is going and be able to interact with them in the way that they're accustomed to through the apps that they're living on now. And so what we really want to do throughout that is also improve the candidate experience. Because candidates typically, like I mentioned earlier, they don't get all the perks of being a full-time employee in contract staffing.

Well, we are offering them benefits from the first day that they begin. We're offering them paid time off, which isn't traditional in most contract staffing agencies that you're accustomed to. We're offering them this upskilling platform. So that way when they come to us and they say, Bryan, I'm a Java developer, or I'm a full stack engineer in XYZ. Well, great.

Let's take some assessments. Let's see where you're at today and then let us build curriculum to help you get to where you want to be tomorrow. And oh, by the way, let's show you those outcomes and how that will lead to more compensation for you and provide a higher quality of life for your family based off of the learnings and the growth that you're going on. And so that's our big differentiator. But the last part is being able to help these individuals be able to create other avenues of revenue and income streams, I should say, because traditionally in most positions when you refer a candidate over to a company like mine or maybe it's an internal, you might get a one time fee.

Congratulations. Thank you for bringing us this awesome talent. Well, what we're going to do is in perpetuity while they're an employee of ours, give them reoccurring revenue from the top line that we're taking from that person that we place that they brought our way. They've got 10, 15, 20 friends? They've just created multiple thousands of dollars for them year-in and year-out while they're on our platform, which we think will be game-changing for them and for us. It's the network effect. Talent knows good talent. So we don't have to have those big robust recruiting teams. Our AI platform will pre-vet and assess them. We have a deep learning and matching profile algorithm that we're building and so we can use automation and AI to enable that connection between the talent and the company.

Jack Smith (Host): I love it. I love that you're using AI to create connection. I think that's really transformational and important to recognize that not all technology integrations are community-breaking, right? You're actually weaving community and connection through the technology that's available today. That's pretty spectacular.

Bryan Verduzco (Guest): It's pretty observant. Nobody's phrased it that way yet on the feedback, but I appreciate that.

Jack Smith (Host): No, thank you very much. I love what you're doing. I love that you've just stepped out onto this entrepreneurial journey. So is there anything about this journey that maybe you've learned? We're talking to entrepreneurs. This is what this podcast is all about. So you're what, year one into starting up your business as an entrepreneur? So maybe you can tell us the post doctorate year one lessons learned from the entrepreneurial road.

Bryan Verduzco (Guest): Yeah, it's funny. I've adjusted to what I thought was an MBA prior was really just an associate's degree. I mean, I've learned so much in this last five months of building Clapself with my team and my co-founders. Luckily they're just world-class and they've done this, they've had successful exits before. So it makes the world of difference when you can lean on them and learn from the mistakes that they might have made, the failures that we're going through every day. Because we always say fail fast, you're going to make a mistake. But how much enthusiasm do you go from one mistake to the next I think is super critical and just try to have fun along the way because everything isn't going to happen overnight. I haven't built a software platform before, so I want things done tomorrow or yesterday more predominantly, but it takes some time, right? And so we're trying to recreate how a proven model has worked for years, but be able to alter what it's going to look like in the future.

And that's not going to happen day one. And so I think for me, sometimes I get humbled trying to move too quick. We've been really lucky to have some great customer adoption. And so with that, you want to take on more and more and more. But the learning lessons don't take on more than you can handle. And don't over-promise, because for me, that's the last thing I want to do to anybody that signs up to work with us. So.great promise to have. Hiring is the main focus for us right now. We're able to secure friends and family around to go invest and we've landed some awesome people. So, as you know, the team is everything and we're going to continue to try to grow that. But scalability is something I'm going to need to learn and I'll be able to tap into you a little bit on that as we grow, because what you did from 40 to 800 over the pandemic is something I think about often and something I can continue to learn from.

Jack Smith (Host): I'm always here, happy to be a resource, so I appreciate it. I absolutely love your purpose. I'm excited about your project Clapself. We're going to definitely figure out how to team up and launch that thing together. You do that today, that's your purpose. And you're kind of growing this on your entrepreneurial journey. But you were telling me a little bit before about how you see prosperity and things that you're doing to either create the momentum of prosperity or are already creating prosperity in your communities.

Bryan Verduzco (Guest): Yeah, I think the prosperity of my communities, I've always tried to be involved, but I've done the cliche things of my last organization. I would take my team and once a month we would go do something for the community, right? Whether it was cleanup days, whether it was going to the food bank, whether it was delivering meals to nurses and doctors during the pandemic because obviously things were closed. But I think those were like minor things that people should be able to help with if you've got the resources and time. But how do you make a bigger dent? How do you actually make an impact? Is something that we continue to talk about here at Clapself.

And for me, DEI is a hot topic right now. Right, and it wasn't three, five years ago, but there's people that are putting individuals on their board or in leadership positions because they want to show that they're diverse. And don't get me wrong, I think that's great that those people are getting opportunities, but we really want to tackle that from the ground level and start to empower diverse backgrounds to be able to get educated, especially in technology. So that way they can climb up the ranks and earn those positions in a way that they feel right and be able to get that reach, get those tentacles to more underprivileged, underserved communities. So we're starting here in greater Sacramento.

But my vision, and I don't know if you're a Tom's guy or I think what Bombas did for socks and Tom's did for shoes is when you buy a pair, you give a pair, right?

Jack Smith (Host): I'm wearing Bombas right now.

Bryan Verduzco (Guest): Okay. So I always thought that'd be so cool to be able to do for jobs. And so what we're trying to build right now and what we're talking to partnerships. And by the way, if anybody has any recommendations, feel free to connect with me. But when we give somebody a job, we want them to be able to say, okay, now you're going to sponsor an underprivileged, underserved individual to get a job as well. And Clapself will go find them that job. We'll pay them almost like an internship. And especially if it's in other countries know, whether it's Africa where we're starting to have conversations, whether it's India, whether it's Latin America, then we'll sponsor that individual to go work on a local small business where we'll teach them how to do software development or maybe website development.

We'll pay them for that so that way they can provide for their families, but they can learn in a true life business case that is different or they might not be able to have the opportunity to do. And so as an employee or a consultant of ours, when you see a pop-up screen after welcome to coming to Clapself, who would you like to sponsor on their career and IT journey, and you can see the profiles of these individuals. We're probably going to target younger demographics so we can rise them through the ranks. I think that's going to be a powerful dent that we can truly make on DEI in the future. So that's what we're piloting now. That's what we're trying to build. And I think that's something that hopefully others will replicate as we continue to go on this journey.

Jack Smith (Host): I love it. We call it a “glocal impact” here at Fortuna, we're making a global impact at a local level. And that's exactly how you do it. That is wonderful. Absolutely. Please, I want to make it a movement. So this is for everybody. We are making a global impact. That's what purposeful prosperity is really all about, is how we're making those local impacts and how we can raise the velocity of those impacts and the impact of those impacts. I was trying not to use the word as the definition. Maybe it's impact squared. I like that. So I really, really appreciate that. And that is a great kind of segue into your passion because you bring passion and enthusiasm and energy to everything that you do, even our golf game. And I really appreciate that about you, but you have a podcast that is all about your passion. Can you tell me a little bit more about that?

Bryan Verduzco (Guest): Yeah, absolutely. I think I almost passionately broke a golf club during that round.

Jack Smith (Host): No comment on that!

Bryan Verduzco (Guest): You know, it's funny. I'm a sucker for self-help and development for me. Like, you know, I journal in the morning and in my like, it gives you a motivational quote. And today's I thought was kind of timely, but it was Oprah Winfrey and she was talking about the whole point of being alive is to evolve into the complete person you were intended to be. And that was a quote that really stuck with me because that's my whole purpose of the podcast. What brings me my most passion is my girls. I've got two young daughters, one just turned four, one turns two here in a couple of months, and my wife. And so how do I come to be the hero for my girls every single day and try to live to be the man of my dreams, my wife's dreams, I should say.

Jack Smith (Host): You can be the man of your dreams too.

Bryan Verduzco (Guest): I don't know. That might be anyways, I won't say that on, you know, that's the purpose behind it. And so it's called FITFO, and it stands for Figure it the Father Out. It's a play on an acronym. My football coach used to tell me, he's like, Verduzco, you got to figure it the fuck out, right? FITFO, come on. And so as I was becoming a dad, there was not an acronym that came to mind more often than you just got to figure it out. And so that was the play on words. And so every episode I talk to thought leaders, moms, dads, parents, or individuals that I can learn from to be the better version of myself for my family. And so that's really the mission that I'm on.

That's what I get excited about every single day. That's what I read and research, because that's a journey that never stops, in my opinion. And so it's also not an achievable goal to be the man of my wife's dreams. But if I strive for that every day and I look at my girls in the face and say, dad did something today to try to be a better version of himself for you and truthfully mean it, then I'll be proud of where I end up hopefully 100 years down the road.

Jack Smith (Host): I love that. I love that you said centurion, too. We are all about longevity here on the Purposeful Prosperity Podcast. Life health is just as important as financial health when it comes to prosperity.

Bryan Verduzco (Guest): Oh, man. My health span just as important, if not more than the lifespan. And, yeah, I always joke with my wife like I would love to be the first 100 year anniversary. I don't know if it's happened before, maybe it has, but if we both have that goal to live, the 130, that'd be pretty cool to see.

Jack Smith (Host): I love it. Bets on, we're chasing the same goal, so I dig it. That's awesome.

Bryan Verduzco (Guest): We'll see you at Biohacking another time.

Jack Smith (Host): Absolutely. Well, I appreciate you coming on. Is there anything that you didn't get a chance to share with our listeners that you might want to tell them about yourself or your project?

Bryan Verduzco (Guest): Oh, man. Not anything that I think we missed, but just appreciate the opportunity to come chat with you anytime I can get in a room with you. There's always good things that happen and I appreciate that for me. If you guys want to learn more, feel free to check out the podcast. Whether you're a parent, a mother, a father or not, there's life lessons in there that I think hopefully you can learn from. If you're a candidate looking for work, call Fortuna, and if you don't call Fortuna, call Clapself.

Jack Smith (Host): Call us both. We'll team up and do it together.

Bryan Verduzco (Guest): Exactly. And so other than that, no, I'm just excited to follow along on the journey and just fortunate to know you, man. So grateful and thank you for the opportunity.

Jack Smith (Host): Likewise, my friend. Well, I appreciate you coming on. I appreciate your passion and your enthusiasm. It's always a pleasure.

Thank you guys for listening to Purposeful Prosperity today. Tune in next week when we will introduce you to another amazing, world changing entrepreneur. Until then, please like, follow and share and keep doing good in the world. Thanks for listening.