June 17, 2026 – Water CEO FluidLogic Sara Blackmer and Hiring Improvement Doug Levy

Intro 1 0:04
Broadcasting from AM and FM stations around the country. Welcome to the Small Business Administration Award-winning School for Startups Radio, where we talk all things small business and entrepreneurship. Now here is your host, the guy that believes anyone can be a successful entrepreneur, because entrepreneurship is not about creativity, risk, or passion. Jim Beach.

Jim Beach 0:26
Hello, everyone. Welcome to another exciting edition of School for Startups Radio. We got a cram-packed show. First up, Sarah Blackmer is going to talk about venture capital in the defense industry, and then Doug Levy will be with us to talk about operational improvement and doing our ops better, so that we make more money. System, system, systems – we got to have those systems anyway. Great show. Thanks for being with us. Let’s go ahead and get started right now. Very excited to introduce my first guest today. Please welcome Sarah Blackmer to the show. She is a Lieutenant Colonel retired from the United States Air Force, and has built an amazing career both in the service, but also afterwards. She is now the senior partner of Solico Capital, which works closely with their portfolio companies to accelerate growth and sharpen operations. One of the portfolio companies is called La Fluid Logic, where she is also the CEO. They are really interesting. They help human hydration systems designed to optimize, optimize physical performance in demanding situations. It sounds like what they wear in that movie, Dune. She has won tons of awards and is on all sorts of boards, it is amazingly impressive, including boards at both Nvidia and other super high-tech companies like that, Intel, as well. Sarah, welcome to the show. How are you doing today?

Sara Blackmer 1:54
Hey, Jim, thank you so much. I really appreciate that introduction. Excited to be here.

Jim Beach 1:58
Fluid Logic is one of your companies. Is that sort of like the Dune recycling thing,

Sara Blackmer 2:06
yeah. It’s funny that you say that. No, we are absolutely not recycling your own fluids and then reusing those like you need in Dune. But what we are doing is optimizing human performance by keeping you hydrated the way that you’re supposed to be. People joke a lot about hydration, where they’re like, oh, Sarah, I know how to drink, you don’t need to help me, you know, remember what to do to drink. I’ve been doing that since I was two, you know, and I always joke back and I say, yes, physically you know how to consume water, but technically how to stay hydrated is a little bit harder than just drinking water when you’re thirsty, so yeah, Fluid Logic has solved this by creating a technology called Intelligent Hydration, and it’s just about using water right. We’re pretty excited about it.

Jim Beach 2:52
Interesting, what do you mean using water right? Does it tell you when to drink, or what is it? Yes,

Sara Blackmer 2:57
so if you wait until your body tells you that you’re thirsty, you’re already dehydrated. That cue comes after dehydration happens physiologically, and so what we’re doing is trying to stay ahead of that. And the science of hydration is not about only how much water are you drinking, but also how are you consuming it over time. And so typically we’ll wait till we’re thirsty, and then we’ll guzzle, like you know, 810, 16 ounces of water in one time, and what happens is our body can absorb only a small amount of that, like maybe half an ounce, maybe an ounce, and the rest of it will eliminate when we go to the bathroom. So, in contrast, to stay hydrated, you should have smaller amounts of water, but dosed more often over time, so imagine drinking like a medicine cup every five to seven minutes, if you will, and then your body has time to absorb that water, so you’ll consume approximately the same amount of water over the course of an hour or two hours, but this method within which you consume it really matters in terms of how your body has a chance to absorb and use it the way that it was physiologically designed to do.

Jim Beach 4:05
Wow, it sounds a lot like a morphine dispenser that only gives you a little bit at a time, and they figure out the cycles and stuff. So sounds very similar to that. Who is the user for this? Is this a military use, or yeah, I already have another use in mind. What’s your use?

Sara Blackmer 4:21
Yeah, so we are in market in three, you know, billion dollar markets. The first of those is consumer sport. So we started in motorsports and power sports. So 30% of all professional race car drivers, you know, are using fluid logic systems and winning while they’re using them, which is really exciting. We love our motorsports athletes, but then also later this year, that’s broadening into more mainstream consumer sports, so think of cycling or hiking or running applications, so that’s going to be a pretty big launch for us later this year, and then we’re also in military, so the idea behind the military is. How do we keep our war fighters mission focused and mission effective while also still allowing them to have the best performance that they can have? So, instead of thinking about how do I take care of my body or how do I take care of myself physically and mentally, they like tools that help do that, so that the war fighter themselves can stay really focused on just mission execution, and so we’re a system that helps that on the human performance and optimization side, and then finally we’re in industrial safety, so the same kinds of productivity and performance that anyone would want is really important on a job site, it helps reduce errors and accidents and injuries, but then also helps improve overall productivity and performance. So, there’s a really great, you know, return on investment, pretty much in less than 30 days across all applications and industrial safety. So, yeah, those are our three target markets right now.

Jim Beach 5:58
Oh, very impressive, very cool. I actually think I have one for you that’s bigger than all three of those.

Sara Blackmer 6:03
Okay, let’s hear it.

Jim Beach 6:05
Kidney stone patients,

Sara Blackmer 6:07
yeah. So I do think that the medical application, in a couple of ways, Jim is probably the biggest market opportunity, and quite frankly, probably has maybe some of the best impact. I will tell you, there’s two ways that we’ve been thinking about medical. First, as medical professionals, you know, so think about your nurses and your med techs and your surgeons and your doctors who do shifts that are 12 plus hours long. They’re on their feet all the time, they’re moving, they need to stay cognitively and physically really engaged in what they’re doing, and they spend most of their time dehydrated, and in some cases intentionally dehydrated, especially if you’re thinking about being, you know, in a surgery where you have four to six to eight hours, you know, where you’re not going to stop and go to the bathroom, and so I think that on the medical professional side, there’s a real opportunity for fluid logic to make a big impact, but on the patient side, you know, the number one thing that’s prescribed, and I use prescribed loosely, but the number one thing that’s prescribed by physicians, no matter what it is that’s wrong with you, is hydration, you know, stay hydrated, drink more water, like those are always the things that are said, and it has a huge range, so kidney stone applications would be good, you know, pediatric recovery, geriatric recovery, and there’s a lot associated with this idea of staying hydrated and people not remembering to drink water for myriad reasons, but we’re a tool I think that can really help for that.

Jim Beach 7:39
Oh, yeah, I have a kidney stone right this second, and water consumption takes up half of my day, and planning, I don’t go to the bathroom all night, and you know it’s, it’s horrible for the kidney stone patients, and I think that that would be a huge market for you, and I want to tell you a story about doctors getting dehydrated, my mother worked for probably the most famous doctor ever in America, a guy named DeBakey, invented the open heart surgery, and was LBJ heart surgeon, and was probably the most famous doctor of last 100 years down in Houston, and my mother was his anesthesis, so my mother would put the patient to sleep for him, and then he would operate right. And during, while the patient was asleep, there wasn’t much for her to do, so he asked my mother to be in charge of providing co-tex for him, because he would tape co-tex to his forehead, because he was sweating so much, and he would go through two or three co-tex per operation, and it was my mother’s job to keep him well. Kotex,

Sara Blackmer 8:44
yeah. Well, that is a good story. I’ve got two back at you. One of those is, you know, this idea of sweating profusely. You know, our motorsports athletes will lose up to seven pounds of sweat in a, you know, two hour event. Seven pounds of sweat, I mean, that’s a huge amount of water that is leaving your body,

Jim Beach 9:04
nasty. It’s so nasty to think

Sara Blackmer 9:06
it is nasty, but it’s, it’s, it’s intense. I mean, you want to think about, like, your craziest workout that you’ve done, like, imagine that, you know, on steroids, because that’s pretty much what’s happening inside this race car. So that’s kind of story one, story two, so a little bit of a, you know, I don’t know, closer to home for me, anyway, is my daughter had heart problems, and when she was 11, had surgery, and you know, her pediatric cardiologist surgeon was talking about, hey, if it’s the easier version of this, which we won’t really know until we go in, if it’s the easy version or the hard version, but the easier version of this is going to be, you know, four to six hours. The harder version of this is going to be more like six to eight hours, and he said so, just to kind of expectation management, that’s about how long we’re going to be in there, and as I’m thinking about this doctor with his hand. Is on my 11 year old daughter’s heart and dehydrating over the course of this time, just for the sheer fact that he is in there, that he is sweating, you know, that he is doing this mental and physically intense activity that he needs to have fine motor control, but he also needs to have really great, you know, brain activity and operations, so that he understands and directs what to do at the time to do it, and here he is getting worse and worse and worse at his job over the duration of this time that his hands are touching my daughter’s heart, and I said, man, if there is a way for me to do something to make that better for any other human going forward, I really want to be involved in this, and quite frankly, it’s one of the things that’s inspiring the most to me about what we do and our mission at Fluid Logic, in terms of really hydrating humanity and making each person the very best version of themselves that they can be with something as simple as water.

Jim Beach 10:57
Well, it’s an amazing story, and I can’t wait to see how it progresses, so what is the relationship between Solico and Fluid Logic? Is it Solico a venture firm? Basically,

Sara Blackmer 11:10
yeah, so we’re a private investment firm headquartered in Michigan, but we’ve got offices all over the United States, and we just opened an office in London last fall. We’ve got about 45 companies in our portfolio, and we invest in companies that are disruptors that are going to fundamentally change the face of whatever business that they’re in, and that could be because of the technology, that could be because of a new manufacturing process, it could be, you know, subject matter expertise, really doesn’t matter to us, as long as they are driving disruption. We also don’t really care what industry vertical that they’re in, as long as they’re driving disruptions. So, we’ve got companies in our portfolio that are AI, business SAS, defense, logistics, consumer electronics, sports technology, food and beverage, agriculture. I mean, we’re really, really broad, and that’s intentional, because we want to have the best opportunities as possible, you know in our portfolio, so Fluid Logic is one of the companies that we’ve invested in. We made our first placement about five years ago in Fluid Logic, five and a half years ago now, and just really excited by what they’re doing again, fundamentally changing the face of what they can do across multiple market segments, really with this human performance, human optimization,

Jim Beach 12:24
and did you start that fund, or did you come on after it was already operational?

Sara Blackmer 12:30
Yeah, so Leica was founded in 2017 and I joined in 2019 We’ve got 10 senior partners, of which I am one, and then there are three of us that lead as the board of managers, so you know, amongst those 10 senior partners, about $50 billion in hands-on transaction experience, and a wide range of leadership experience, which really helps us kind of dive in and work shoulder to shoulder with the founding teams of our portfolio companies to help them monetize faster or achieve growth objectives greater than what they could do on their own, and I represent, I think, the operational talent on the team. So, you know, my job over the course of my career has been to build and lead high-performing teams that are accomplishing some kind of crazy mission, and always with advanced technology in mind, and I’m an engineer by education, but that started with, you know, fighter jets in the Air Force, but then that moved into, you know, alternative energy and robotics and high-performance ground vehicles and advanced compute hardware power, and then kind of now with Clicko, there’s a really broad portfolio of technology, and and my job is to sort of help those companies be as effective as possible operationally,

Jim Beach 13:43
and how many of those are military applications?

Sara Blackmer 13:46
Yeah, in our portfolio now we’ve got two companies that are dual use. No, that’s not true. Three companies that are dual use, so there’s a commercial application as well as a defense application that we’re pursuing. There’s a couple of other companies that could have defense applications, but doing business with the Department of Defense is really challenging, and so you have to be in it for the long haul. It’s not just something that you kind of pivot into and then pivot out again, so you know you really have to make a determined decision to be a part of that community in order to do business there. So, we’ve got about three in our portfolio,

Jim Beach 14:21
okay, and did you go out and raise $100 million fund, billion dollar fund?

Sara Blackmer 14:28
Yeah, so our investment methodology is has typically been through special purpose vehicles into one asset at a time, so investing directly into that one portfolio company, and a couple of years ago, our LPs asked us, “Hey, can you help us, you know, diversify a little bit? You know, out of every 10 companies and venture, traditionally, or statistics will tell you that seven or eight of those are going to fail, one is going to break even, and one is going to do really well. And in our mind, we want to flip the script a little bit, which is why. We’re not a traditional venture capital firm, you know. We want all 10 of our companies to be successful and a handful to be truly exceptional. And so our LP said, “Great, how do we know which ones are going to be truly exceptional? And so we made a little bit of a diversified multi-asset SPV for them, and that was portfolio SPV one. We raised $30 million to do that. They said, “Great, give us more of that, and so we’ve got 13 companies in portfolio SPV two that was $100 million fund, and we’ve just oversubscribed to that, so that fund has closed, and now we’re looking at structuring what will be portfolio SPV three as we move forward, so we expect that to open up, you know, in the next month or so, relatively quickly,

Jim Beach 15:44
all right, very, very interesting. And you said that you’re looking for any company that is in the field of disruption, right? And you said any industry you’re agnostic toward anything except disruption,

Sara Blackmer 15:57
that’s right. So, are you the three basic things that we look for is one, are you a disruptor in some way, and that could be technology, it could be process, it could be subject matter expertise, or something, you know, are you a disruptor? And then two, do you have an exponential growth curve, so you know, we’re really looking for 10x 50x 100x plus returns, we’re not investing in lifestyle businesses, and then three, you know, is there a way for us to dive in and work shoulder to shoulder with that company to help them be better than what they could be on their own? You know, we’re not a turnaround company, we take really good and make it great, really great, make it exceptional. That’s kind of been our mindset and our model from the beginning. So, yeah, market agnostic, asset specific, we invest typically, Jim, in the I would say late stage startup, early stage growth. So we don’t invest in good ideas, we don’t invest in technology that still needs to, you know, prove physics. You know, we’re not investing in this really great widget, but we don’t have any idea what problem it solves or who would actually need it, you know, it’s a very well defined something that has a very clear product market fit and a really clear demand signal. Our companies are typically pre-profitable when we invest in them, but they are in revenue or burgeoning on in revenue, so they’re mature enough that they’ve worked out a whole lot of those early stage startup challenges, and made it through those wickets to get to

Jim Beach 17:26
us very, very, very interesting. What have you seen in robotics? Have you invested? I think you’ve invested there, haven’t you?

Sara Blackmer 17:33
Yeah, we have. In fact, you know, my background is in the robotics space. I was very early on, you know, when we were talking about driverless cars, like in, you know, 2009 2010 that they were going to be ubiquitous on the roads in 2020 which is so funny to think about now, that 10 year life cycle that really still hasn’t happened 16 years later, but you know, driver assist technologies, how you can do autonomous mobile robots or ground vehicle robotics, you know, individually, and that’s been really exciting, you know. One of the companies that’s in our portfolio has done autonomous logistics, so how am I moving gear or stuff, not people, but stuff from point a to point b, usually over uneven or really rough terrain. The commercial application there kind of goes along with, you know, campuses or, you know, manufacturing facilities that, you know, are these broad spaces, because their robots can successfully navigate indoors and outdoors, which is just a little bit different than what you’re seeing in the AMR, the autonomous mobile robot space today. It’s broader than warehouse logistics. Also, really cool technology related to robotic refueling. So, as we think about the vehicles that are going to be electrified, as we think about the vehicles that are going to have, not platooning, truck platooning is an example, and logistics specifically, where you’re going to reduce the amount of drivers, there’s no point in not having a way to re-fuel those vehicles also autonomously, if you have an autonomous vehicle itself, so just some really cool things, also in remote and austere locations, you know, not having to specifically man those stations to be able to do that unmanned is a really interesting and I think necessary innovation. So, yeah, a couple of really cool things going on in robots right now.

Jim Beach 19:38
Way, obviously, Taxi company has selected Atlanta as one of their first markets to go crazy in, and I think it’s really, really backfired on them. I think the acceptance rate was in the 40s, and then there was an article in the paper, and then the TV stations went crazy with it, that all of the Waymo cars go into one neighborhood in the nicest part of town. During the middle of the night, when they’re not needed, and get stuck on one street, and you see this picture, the street’s got 40 Waymo cars all stuck there, not being able to get the hell out because they got too many of them in there, and it’s in the nicest part of town, like a mile from the governor’s mansion, and now the acceptance rates are down in the teens. I have heard it’s gone from 40% to 15% or just favorability ratings, I guess. Because,

Sara Blackmer 20:31
yeah,

Jim Beach 20:31
no one wants a bunch of Waymos in their front yard.

Sara Blackmer 20:34
Nobody wants a bunch of Waymos in the front yard, that’s true. But there’s, there’s a lot of acceptability challenges that go along with with robots in general, broad brush, so not just in the autonomous taxi space, but also in any kind of way that you might interact, and there’s a lot of hype going on with humanoid robots right now, which you know I don’t think that’s going to go anywhere personally, and I think that we underestimate the challenges associated with integrating robots with humans, and what that means, and not just from a technically, how am I safely interacting, but also perception wise, what does this mean to humans, and then I also think the liability challenges, and you know, when something goes wrong, who’s at fault between a robot and anything else you know also becomes a challenge. Is it the manufacturer of the robot? Is it the owner of the robot? You know who really owns liability, and I think until those kinds of things get worked out, you know, we’re really not going to see robotics deployed, you know, at mass the way that we might see those. We talked about this way back in 2010 at the time it was approximately 35,000 americans were dying in a vehicular accident annually 35,000 is a lot of deaths for something that we knew technology could help solve the challenge becomes if you reduce the number of deaths let’s say to 20,000 you’ve just saved 15,000 people’s lives, but what happens in a headline is robot call car kills human, and once you have that headline, nobody wants to be in a robot car, and so you have to be perfection. Everyone will accept 20,000 or 35,000 deaths from a human to a human, but nobody will accept one death by a robot car to a human, and so that perception challenge, that acceptability challenge, I think is a real issue related to the deployment of this kind of technology at mass, for sure.

Jim Beach 22:35
Sarah, have you heard about all of the college commencement speeches that have gone awry this season. Have you heard about this?

Sara Blackmer 22:43
I haven’t heard about this.

Jim Beach 22:44
Every speaker who stands up and mentions the word AI, boo boo boo, and then off the stage they have been 20 that I have seen commencements disrupted because the guy stood up, the woman stood up and said, AI is the future, embrace AI, and the entire audience goes ballistic, hating them and banters them off the stage. And wow, the 22 year olds hate AI. Oh my god, is it getting fierce? What do you think about this? How are we going to solve, or are we even going to try to solve? We have an entire generation that is already screwed, and now they’re going to get double screwed by AI.

Sara Blackmer 23:27
So, I’ll say a couple of things. One, I will caution people to be very upset by the idea of AI taking jobs, because that’s typically what the upsetness is, because every time there’s been a new technology innovation, every single time it has, in fact, created jobs, it has changed those jobs for sure, but it has created more jobs, and so I think that there will be a job disruption, but I don’t think there’s going to be a job loss overall, you know, there will still be jobs, they just might not look the same, and I always liken it to cars versus horses and carriages, you know. When cars came, horses and carriages left, and so the same kinds of blacksmith jobs, or, you know, horse caretaking type jobs, you know, all of those things went away. You didn’t need stables anymore, you didn’t need that kind of infrastructure anymore, but it was replaced with all of these jobs associated with car design, development, manufacturing, and then deployment. A lot more goes into selling individual cars than what we did when we sold horses, just tons and tons more jobs, and so I think that, although that’s a very simple example from 100 plus years ago, I think that that same kind of a thing happens every single time, and history will show that every single time a new innovation comes that people are frightened of it, in fact creates more jobs. So I think AI will be the same. Yeah, but the second thing that I will say is I think that all of our digital life and our youngest generation, especially who has only grown up with a digital life, they’ve all grown up with screens and mostly touch screens. I think that there is going to be this desire for humanity, for in person contact, for more connection, for this ability to to really have real and honest conversations and engagement, and I think that there is a little bit of of issue, and quite frankly, negativity, and I think it’s actually good associated with the fakeness that maybe exists when you only have a digital environment, and I think that the backlash against AI associated with what’s real and what’s fake and what’s genuine and authentic versus not, I think it is powerful, and quite frankly, it’s probably a really good conversation to have, and I think that there will, in fact, be maybe not a rejection, because I think it will ever be rejected, but there will be this pull towards what becomes authentic and genuine, and brings us back to the human interaction and connectivity, because I think that, that I mean, we are a people designed to be with other people, and I think that we will be clamoring for that more human, real, genuine, authentic interaction and connection.

Jim Beach 26:35
I hope so. I hope so. Sarah, amazing information. I’d love to talk to you about the secret government, but we don’t have time for that. Do you think there’s a secret government underneath everything else that came out this week? That in the Trump UFO releases, there was a document that was talking about the underground bases in America, and that there’s 150 underground facilities in the United States, over a million square feet, a million square feet is a 70 story tall skyscraper, and there’s 150 they say, facilities over a million square feet underground in the United States. Do you believe that?

Sara Blackmer 27:14
Well, I will say, Jim, that I don’t typically subscribe to conspiracy theories. I think that in the last

Jim Beach 27:21
federal papers released this week by our government

Sara Blackmer 27:24
in the last 10 years that we have had a whole lot of promoting of conspiracy theories to, you know, the front of our media and engagement in ways that I never expected to be things that people were like that’s ridiculous are now not ridiculous anymore, and I think it makes real news a little hard and challenging to discern and truly understand, you know. Do I think that there are facilities that exist that we don’t know about, or maybe are learning about? You know, absolutely. I think that there are things that have happened all over the course of our time, what our government and military has done, and some of that is for public consumption, and some of it’s not intentionally, and I don’t have the same kind of challenge or problem with that, you know. Am I worried about, is there this underground government, and blah blah, you know? No, I’m not worried about that. I think about my spirituality, I think, about my family connection and unit, and those kinds of things keep me grounded in a way that doesn’t make me worry about these kinds of things that are quite frankly very beyond my control.

Jim Beach 28:30
Your 15th generation military, is that correct?

Sara Blackmer 28:34
That is correct.

Jim Beach 28:34
When does that go back to the Romo Grecian War of third decade BC

Sara Blackmer 28:42
goes back to the militia on the Mayflower.

Jim Beach 28:45
Oh my god,

Sara Blackmer 28:47
yeah. So

Jim Beach 28:48
you can trace it all the way through the generals and colonels and captains through all of those generations.

Sara Blackmer 28:53
Yes, I would say more on the private side than the general side, but yes, every every single generation going back, it was a really fun exercise, actually, that Daddy and I sat down and did. He was a retired Army colonel, and we went generation by generation and talked about what the name of the family, what their job and function was, you know, kind of what they did. A lot of militia, actually, obviously, you can imagine, you know, during the formation of the United States, we spent time, but it was a fascinating exercise. It was something that I was really happy to be able to have shared with my dad to try to do that, to figure out, well, he already knew that, but to share with me, you know, all of the different generations that he had researched as he was researching ancestry in general, and it was a, it was really cool. I’m very, very proud of that. I am sure that there are things that happened by my ancestors that I probably wouldn’t be proud of. I think there’s history through all of the military where there have been things that are very honorable and awesome, and things that are embarrassing and terrible. Shouldn’t have happened, and I’m sure that’s true for us too, but on the whole, I’m very proud of my family’s history of service.

Jim Beach 30:06
How do we find out more? Follow online, buy us some,

Sara Blackmer 30:12
yeah, so check out hydration@fluidlogic.com You can check out Suliko and all of our investment portfolio at Sulico capital.com that’s S O L Y C O, Celico capital.com And anybody’s very welcome to check me out or connect with me on LinkedIn. Have a pretty active LinkedIn profile, and I’d be happy to see you there, Sarah Blackmer. No, H

Jim Beach 30:37
fantastic. Sarah, thank you so much for being with us. Great stuff, and we’d love to have you back. Thanks a lot.

Sara Blackmer 30:41
Thanks, Jim. Take care,

Jim Beach 30:43
and we will be right back. We are back, and again, thank you so very much for being with us. You know, I love to blame the people. It’s always the people’s fault, they are just not smart enough. Ooh, or maybe it’s your systems and operations that are the problem. Ooh, I don’t like that idea. Please welcome Doug Levy to the show. He believes that businesses are usually messed up by the systems, not the people. He hasn’t hired or fired some of the people I’ve hired and fired, Doug has created an incredible career doing this. He is the founder of Lexington Rose Consulting, which does exactly what I said. It’s sort of like a COO for hire, they come in, fix your problems, and then you are more efficient and more operational. He is also the CEO of a company called Logic Wise Ops, which is also very helpful in this space. They help make hiring decisions better and more efficient. Doug, welcome to the show. How you doing?

Doug Levy 31:54
I’m doing great, Jim. Thanks for having me on. I appreciate

Jim Beach 31:57
it. So, why aren’t the people the problem? You don’t know some of the morons I’ve hired,

Doug Levy 32:02
so the people can be the problem, but the reason that those people are there is because of the systems that are in place that brought them in and the systems that they’re operating in while they’re doing their work.

Jim Beach 32:15
Okay, so it’s my fault, I don’t have a good system for hiring,

Doug Levy 32:20
essentially. Yes, and as a shy dog, yeah, I thought we agreed on no crime, but as a founder, it’s our responsibility to take, to really take responsibility and take ownership of these things. So, when these things, I always encourage my clients that when something’s going wrong, the first place that they should look is in the mirror, that’s the best place to figure out where to fix problems.

Jim Beach 32:45
Wow, you are really pushing this accountability stuff, Doug. I don’t know if you know, absolutely. Accountability was outlawed in the big beautiful bill.

Doug Levy 32:54
Oh man, yeah. In that case, I’m gonna have to find it

Jim Beach 32:57
anymore.

Doug Levy 32:58
You’re challenging everything about my approach. We’re gonna have to figure something else out here. Jim,

Jim Beach 33:03
you know us entrepreneurs, I don’t.. I’ve never seen a statistic on this, but I know from personal experience that everyone I’ve talked to says the same thing. Entrepreneurs hire the first person that walks in the door, my marketing guy’s boyfriend,

Doug Levy 33:21
absolutely, and I

Jim Beach 33:22
partied with last night. I offered him a job. That’s how we hire. We hire the lowest hanging fruit that’s available right now, and willing to work for cheap.

Doug Levy 33:31
Yep, we’re hiring on vibes, and there’s a lot more of a process behind it, because vibes change, and vibes don’t represent the work that’s being performed and what good work looks like, so it requires a much, a much deeper dive, and it’s a dive that a lot of people aren’t willing to do. They don’t know how to do it, they don’t have the patience for it, they don’t have the framework for it. So it’s the problem that people have is a very natural problem, because it’s human, it’s very human to want to work with somebody that you like, but there’s so much more to it that gets overlooked when you, when you basically stop there and only hire based on people that you like.

Jim Beach 34:11
All right, so How should my company of five people hire its sixth full-time employee? What should the system look like? And we’re small, we can’t afford software, or you know, multiple interviews. We got to get somebody, of course. Body now,

Doug Levy 34:28
of course. What I would first tell you, Jim, is that what you really can’t afford is to make a mistake when you hire this person, or to hire the wrong person. So that we have to begin with the end in mind. What we want is to hire somebody who’s going to be able to perform the job and who’s going to stick right, so that’s if those are the goals, then we have to hire for those goals, and I think one thing before this process even starts, understanding the states is so important because a high. Hire that fails after six months. I’ve done the math, Jim. A hire that fails after six months can cost you 80 to 200% of that person’s salary in actual hard costs, time costs, and that doesn’t even include the incalculable cultural damage from from doing this over and over again.

Jim Beach 35:24
Hell, I could beat that number. I hired Carolyn, and one day came home from lunch, and Visa had called while I was away for 45 minutes, and figured out that what we were doing was not part of their policy, and they clawed back $600,000 from me. She was making like $8 an hour, you know. This was quite a few years ago. She cost me 400,000% of her salary.

Doug Levy 35:53
Oh, you win, then you win this contest. The first step in the process, Jim, is to understand what the role is and isn’t, and a lot of times people skip that step entirely and say, How do I want to advertise this job to the type of person that I want to hire, without even really thinking about what they need to understand about the job and what the job really is, so if we’re honest with ourselves, not every, not every piece of every job is glamorous. Would you agree?

Jim Beach 36:25
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I’ve done so we have glamorous ones,

Doug Levy 36:29
right? So we have to acknowledge that a job may be repetitive, that a job may not have a lot of autonomy, that a job may not really have have growth opportunities, and that’s okay, because not everybody wants or needs growth opportunities. I’m hiring for one of my clients, we’re hiring for a sales role right now. There’s no growth there. The growth is in your bank account when you become an amazing salesperson and make more money. So we have to be honest with ourselves about, is there growth, is there repetitiveness, is there autonomy? What are some of the less glamorous parts of the job, and what do I need out of a person that’s going to do that work? And then, how can I advertise this job out into the into the public? But that’s only the beginning. You want to hear the rest.

Jim Beach 37:15
Oh yeah, let me ask you this. Let’s detour for just a second. Sure. Are sales people born or created

Doug Levy 37:23
both? I think that there’s a very, I think that there’s a very specific personality profile that lends itself to sales. I don’t believe that everybody can, should, or wants to be a great salesperson, I believe that there are people that are simply not destined to be a great salesperson, and there’s nothing wrong with that. There’s something for everybody, but you take a great salesperson, and that salesperson can either do a bad job, a decent job, or a stellar job, depending on the environment that they’re placed into and the systems that are designed to support that person.

Jim Beach 38:03
You should hire my eldest son as a salesperson. When he was 1012, he was a huge wrestler, and he’s actually a wrestling coach on the side now.

Doug Levy 38:14
Oh, cool.

Jim Beach 38:15
And did collegiate wrestling, won two national championships, little stuff like that, and we would be at the Greensboro Coliseum, which is a donut arena, and we would walk the Outer Edge, and he’d be, oh yeah, I know that kid over there, I wrestled him four years ago, his mom was really nice to me, and oh, that guy over there, I was in preschool with him, he remembers every single person that he’s ever met, their name, you know, he’s got that stick down, that sales stuff down, the personality, you know,

Doug Levy 38:47
absolutely, but he’s still got to go through the process.

Jim Beach 38:50
Well, he’s, he’s, yeah, he, but he’s done well, he’s with worse, and now he’s with Lenovo,

Doug Levy 38:58
that’s fantastic,

Jim Beach 38:59
you know, he’s doing, yeah, and some people, well,

Doug Levy 39:01
and some people have that from a very young age. I actually just worked with a gentleman that I recently hired to help me with some marketing, and I experienced one of the greatest sales processes and sales presentations that I’ve ever experienced in my entire career, bar none. And I asked him, I said, so he just executed perfectly at every step of the process, so he, you know, what the shortest course in sales is, Jim, I’m going to give your audience a free sales lesson, it’s the shortest course in sales, and it’s only four words. Do you know what those four words are?

Jim Beach 39:43
Two,

Doug Levy 39:45
that’s not what that’s not one of them.

Jim Beach 39:48
Feel like I’m playing Family, not Family Feud, a Wheel of Fortune.

Doug Levy 39:52
Yeah, I don’t think about

Jim Beach 39:54
you. You,

Doug Levy 39:55
the four words are, ask quite. Questions and listen.

Jim Beach 40:02
Okay, I do agree with that strategy.

Doug Levy 40:04
That is, that is the if you do that and nothing else, you’re in much better shape, because who do people want to talk about themselves? So this gentleman that I spoke with, number one, he asked me lots and lots of questions, and he fed that information back to me to make sure that I, that I heard it throughout the rest of the process. He asked my permission to proceed at every step, which was getting buy-in from me and getting me saying yes throughout the process. Then he answered my questions perfectly, so I had some very specific questions about how his execution, how he executes his strategy, and he was able to immediately pull up statistics and examples on demand the second that I asked for them. He had them on screen in 1515 seconds, and then at the very end he stayed extremely composed when I presented some objections, because I did say, hey, you know, I have a friend that is that owns a marketing agency, and my gut is telling me that I should reach out to him before committing to you. What do you think about that? And he said, well, let’s pretend that I’m your friend. If I was your friend, what would you say to him, and he just gave me this perfect answer. And then, at the end, he made it extremely easy for me to buy from him. He sent me a very short Docusign contract while we were on the call, that was not really a lot of pressure. And then he sent me a payment link, and got me to, got me to stroke him a $5,000 payment before we even finished the call, so it was perfect. It was, I was, I was extremely impressed. And then I asked him at the end, I said, How did you pull that off just now? How did you, how did you do that, because that was perfect. And he said, I, it doesn’t come naturally to me. I’ve been working with a coach for the past 18 months, so this is somebody who clearly has the skills to execute this type of sale, but needed a coach for 18 months to figure out the actual tools to do it. So it’s a nature and nurture type of thing.

Jim Beach 42:18
I want to zoom in on the yeses that he got you to do with buying into each step that also has your benefit. Not only did he make you practice saying yes to him, but also by you approving each step, when it came to the very last step, you had already, you know, approved 90% of the process, and so it’s not absolutely go back to, oh, I want to go back to that point three minutes ago, or 10 minutes ago, you said this, you can’t, because you’ve already said yes to that portion of the imagination, right, and that’s

Doug Levy 42:54
yes, and that’s huge in sales, that’s something that I teach, because I also, a lot of people, I’m kind of billed as an operations person, like processes and procedures and workflows, but I do a lot more than that with culture building and sales training and sales strategy and stuff like that. So one of the big pieces of sales is to contain every objection. So you’re absolutely right that he got me to agree to each piece of the process to the point that when we got to the very end and it was time to talk about price or whatever it was, we were only talking about price, we weren’t talking about value, we weren’t talking about execution, we weren’t talking about how it works, we were only talking price, and that makes it a lot easier for the for the, the buyer, and for the, for the seller, and the thing that I.. there’s one thing that I would like the audience to know, Jim. I believe that sales is helping people make decisions that are in their best interest. I don’t think it’s getting one over on somebody or anything like that, would you agree?

Jim Beach 44:02
Yes, it should be a lot of times. It’s not, but that’s the way it should be.

Doug Levy 44:06
Yes, the way that I, the way that I teach people to sell is so that they can feel good about it. First of all, I only teach people that I believe in what they’re doing and believe that it is a good thing, and then I tell them you need to own this. You need to not feel like you’re convincing somebody to do something that they don’t want to do. You need to not feel like you’re manipulating them, you’re helping them make a decision that’s good for them, good for their business, whatever it is. And owning that is, I think, an important part of the process as well.

Jim Beach 44:36
Yes, let’s go back to the hiring. I think we’ve stopped it. Sure, too.

Doug Levy 44:40
Yeah, let’s go back. So, step one,

Jim Beach 44:43
something back in there. Step

Doug Levy 44:44
one, sure. Step one, understand the job internally. Step two, advertise the job properly. You’re not trying to sell it to anybody, you’re trying to attract the right people. Step three, when you look at a resume, you need to know what you’re looking for, and you need to do. Side that before the resumes come in, so people tend to make assumptions about what they’re looking for on a resume. I have a client who saw a resume that was pretty poorly formatted and the English wasn’t perfect, and she said, “Oh, well, this is a bad applicant. You want to know what she was hiring for,

Jim Beach 45:23
janitor, I have no something that it’s English skills, I bet

Doug Levy 45:27
somebody to give massages, so I had to, I had to explain to her that while I understand that we’re conditioned to say, oh, a poorly formatted resume with bad English is just a bad applicant, you have to determine that based on what the job is. I said this person will be working with their hands. This person is not even going to touch a pen in your office. What does it matter? A computer, what does it matter? And she’s like, “Oh, you made a good point. You know what, we ended up hiring that person, and she’s a fantastic addition to the team. So you have to, you have to really understand what you’re looking for on a resume, and you have to score it objectively, so you decide what’s important in terms of experience or location or things like that, and then you, you use a scoring rubric for the resume. After you score the resumes, when you get somebody that passes, you call them and do a quick screening call on the phone, this step is important because it gets buy-in for the rest of the process. One of the biggest problems that that applicants have these days is that businesses are trying to put everybody through the ringer before there’s any buy-in. Right, I’ve seen that the hiring practice is exhausting for applicants. Have you seen that on, like, have you seen people complaining about that? Like, I’ve applied for 400 jobs, and everybody wants me to record a video of myself or take an online assessment, stuff like that.

Jim Beach 46:54
Oh, sure, I’ve seen that all the time, and it just infuriates me, because I believe that hiring should be fairly difficult for the employee, you know. You should set up steps to test them along the way. One of my favorites is to say, by Friday, I want you to submit this, and the link that you give them is broken on purpose, and they have to, you, and say the link is broken. Could you send me the correct link? And it’s interesting, who does that on Thursday night at 12 o’clock? You know,

Doug Levy 47:28
that’s so funny

Jim Beach 47:30
already before they’ve done anything, you know. So

Doug Levy 47:33
that’s true. It’s a little bit of a departure from my methodology, because I believe in making it a little easier, and making it, and making it human, because at the end of the day, we want qualified applicants for our job, right? And a lot of people accidentally filter for desperation for desperate individuals, and not qualified individuals. Qualified individuals typically have a job, have a life, and are busy people. They’re not going to spend an hour and a half applying to your job before they’ve ever even heard of you or know who you are or know if they’re even interested in the job, right?

Jim Beach 48:14
It, yeah, it depends. I also try to pay 20% more than everyone else.

Doug Levy 48:20
There you go, there you go. You can do that. They don’t know that yet. They don’t know that yet. So that’s the okay. Well, there you go. So that that helps. So the screening call that I do is very simple. It filters out deal breakers, for example, if I need somebody to be bilingual, if I need somebody that lives within 20 miles of my office. If I need somebody that’s okay with fully onsite work, not hybrid, not remote, whatever it is. So we filter out deal breakers, and then we say to them, we’d love for you to continue with the hiring process. Our next step is for you to do an online assessment. The online assessment will take, say, 40 minutes. It’s long enough to be thorough, but short enough to be respectful of your time. Would you be willing to do that? They typically say yes. Then you have them do an online assessment. The online assessment is kind of the secret weapon, you know. Why?

Jim Beach 49:11
Nope. Why

Doug Levy 49:13
gives you a lot of information that you can’t get from any other step in the process. So, if you’re using a good assessment tool, and there’s a lot of them out there, and they’re not all appropriate across different channels or different job descriptions, but when you use an assessment, these things are designed to really drill a lot deeper than you’re going to be able to get from a resume, a conversation, an interview, and even a work sample, so I believe in using that objective measure to run people through a process. Only after the assessment do they come in for an interview and then have to do a working interview, and their strategies for how to do all of these things because the. Other thing people like to do, Jim, is they like to ask very stupid interview questions.

Jim Beach 50:06
What do you mean? The interviewer likes to ask stupid questions.

Doug Levy 50:10
Yes, they ask questions that only validate what they already think, or that are really easy to answer, because at the end of the day, an interview is a performance. It doesn’t mean a whole lot without a bigger picture, so I’ll give you a perfect example of what I consider a stupid interview question. I was talking to somebody about this the other day, so let’s say I asked you, Jim, I’ll ask you the stupid interview question. So, Jim, I’m hiring you for this job, you work nine to five, it’s like a retail job or whatever, and you’re done with all of your work at 3o’clock You’re done at 3o’clock You have nothing more in your task list to do at 3o’clock but you have to work until five. What are you going to do from three to five? Jim,

Jim Beach 50:53
fold shirts like this. Okay, clean the displays, clean the racks.

Doug Levy 51:00
Okay,

Jim Beach 51:00
go up to customers and see if I can help them.

Doug Levy 51:04
Okay,

Jim Beach 51:04
go give away free samples at the food court.

Doug Levy 51:07
Okay, those are good answers. Those are pretty good answers. You know what the problem is, though? That pretty much any applicant with half a brain is going to say the exact same things that you just said. So, so, so that in that interview question doesn’t actually give me, as an employer, that interview question doesn’t give me any real information that I can use to determine if you’re going to be a good performer if I hire you, it just tells me that you understood the assignment and know how to tell me exactly what I want to hear, so we have to specifically select interview questions that that give us information, so that’s part of the process. Then you have a working interview. This is all scored objectively, everything I’m talking about, you score it when you’re in the process, so you actually have an objective measure, not just a subjective measure, and then at the very end we make an offer, and we, the last piece that people get wrong, Jim, is when they assume that when a, an applicant wants to negotiate or counter offer, they take that personally, and I think that’s a problem as well, because, because typically again, if we’re looking for qualified candidates, why would we not want somebody that’s willing to advocate for themselves or or try to get more money? Your job is not a prize, your job is what this person is going to dedicate their life to, and if they want to try to get a few 1000 bucks extra out of it, and it’s in your budget, they’re within their rights to do that, so I teach people how to have that conversation and remind them don’t get offended when your applicant comes back and advocates for themselves for a little bit more money or a little bit more PTO or whatever it is, so that’s the process in a nutshell, and what it does is it makes it so you have to, you just like the guy who did that sale process with me, every step has its, it’s pass-fail, so you can’t get to the end without making a lot of good decisions on the way there.

Jim Beach 53:12
Doug, 22 minutes sure goes fast on the radio, but we are out of.. I am so afraid. Sorry, we would love to have you back. I feel like we’ve only scratched the surface. How do we find out more? Follow you online, get in touch,

Doug Levy 53:25
www dot Lexington Rose consulting.com And specifically for the things we’ve been talking about today, Jim, which I really appreciate your time, it’s www dot Logic Wise Hiring system.com You can learn more about that, very easy to launch, and very important for small businesses.

Jim Beach 53:43
Fantastic, Doug. Thank you so very much. And we do hope you come back soon. Thanks a lot.

Doug Levy 53:47
Absolutely, thanks, Jen.

Jim Beach 53:49
Well, we are out of time for today, but you know what that means. We’ll be back tomorrow. Be safe, take care, and go make a million dollars. Bye now,