Robb Hoyle joins Joshua Maddux on this weeks episode of In The Bunker to talk about People, Process, & Performance. Robb talks about how he got consistent as a company and moved away from the roller coaster effect. This was overcome by People, Process, & Performance.

Our episode highlights:

• Keep going! Have some blind faith. Work harder for some time.
• Working on the business vs in the business.
• Your "Not To Do" list.

Bio: Robb is a passionate leader with an intense focus on building strong personal relationships with colleagues, candidates, clients and industry leaders. Over 15 years’ experience in business management, operations, and business development. An uncommon work ethic, fanatical discipline and winning attitude are the guiding principles that have allowed for continued career and life success.

As CEO of GTS responsibilities include the overall recruiting program, business development, marketing, finance and operational functions. In this role, critical focus has been placed on client relations, requirement fulfillment and employee career development. Success in this role has been accomplished by building next level personal relationships, tailoring the overall recruiting strategy and providing the highest quality candidates allowing for clients to achieve dramatic company growth.

Specializing in the recruiting and staffing industry including full life cycle agency and corporate recruiting in both contract and permanent placement recruitment. Expertise in creating and improving recruitment processes, leading and developing high performance recruiting teams. Subject matter expert in the areas of scientific, engineering and technical recruiting for niche industries including: biotech, pharmaceutical, medical device, chemical, engineering, environmental, food & beverage and healthcare. Extensive work partnering with companies varying in size from start-up to fortune 100 companies in the U.S. and Globally.

Why Robb loves what he does:

• Building Deep Personal Relationships
• Team Building, Training & Development
• Connecting, Networking & Helping Others - "Pay it Forward"
• Big Picture Vision & Leadership

Links:

• Website: http://www.gtscareers.com
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/r-hoylegts/
• LinkedIn Company: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gts-scientific/
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCx04lDV_wWVGMCZYvokN10Q
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gts_scientific
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/growthstaffing

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Today we have Rob Hoyle on with us.

Rob has over 16 years of experience in recruiting and staffing.

He's helped countless companies find the right staff member.

Rob was faced with a challenge in his business.

Like many of us are.

Getting consistency and getting consistent as a company and moving

away from the rollercoaster effect.

You all know what I'm talking about, that, fulfill the first client and then find

the next, then fulfill the next and then find the next it's that rollercoaster

effect that we're talking about.

There's so much to learn here and unpack, and I'm super excited to jump

in and learn how he and his company and team have overcame this issue.

Rob, great to have you on the show today.

Thanks for having me here, Josh.

Appreciate it.

So let's get started.

Let's dive in and what is your 90 second background?

Who are you?

How'd you get here?

What do you do?

Sure.

Rob Hoyle, the CEO of GTS.

Founded the company back in 2013.

What we do here today, nine years later is very similar

to what we do when we started.

We are a life science and engineering search firm.

We provide a couple of different service offerings.

One is more of your traditional retained search at the executive C-suite levels.

And then the other is more of your staff and management.

Search work that we do.

We do a lot of work in life sciences even specific niche

areas like cell and gene therapy.

In terms of the final service offering we do offer.

An outsourced recruiting model where companies will come to us

and we will take the place of their internal recruiting team.

If they're a larger company where we will generally do all of the

recruiting, everything from helping the hiring managers create job

descriptions up and through when the right candidate starts with the company.

It's really a niche and challenging work, but it's a lot of fun for sure.

As a company here, we have done work now in over 30 states

Canada, Europe, south America.

So we're global in scope, although we don't necessarily go out to the rest

of the world to find those, this, most of it's here in the U S and we've

worked with companies that are small to mid-size on up to the world's largest

companies in the form of biotechs.

And I imagine over the past, two years with COVID and everything

else just craziness in the medical field.

I imagine that has been a huge, probably growth point in the business

a little bit with the sense of so many companies looking for new

talent, expanding, closing, shifting, just changing gears all the time.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's been really interesting over coming in pre pandemic and thinking

about the way the business world was before that, and threw away all of

your traditional business knowledge that you had and Hey, we're going

to have to do things differently.

So we adapted very quickly but for us, we, we were fortunate that we, over

the last six or seven years here, our focus has been that life science scopes.

We have clients who are making the antiviral drugs, clients who are

making the vaccines or developing new vaccines, and luckily for the industry.

And I think for all of us investment didn't stop during that time.

So companies were still getting funded and still bringing, your

traditional cancer therapies, rare disease, therapies, and cures.

We were very fortunate.

That continued.

And then, some of the things that I was preaching with clients for years

and years about interviewing candidates quickly being able to offer them the job

quickly, that all came to fruition because executives and management team weren't

traveling across the country and we didn't have to fly candidates in for interviews.

So we're able to schedule things more quickly and actually get people

hired a, at a much faster pace.

I will definitely say the number of companies

who've adapted technologies, such as zoom, Skype or others.

Over the past few years is incredible.

I know as we were talking before this.

We were talking about some of the challenges that your business

has faced over the years.

And one of them as I noted in the intro was getting consistent

as a company and moving away from that roller coaster effect.

And as I alluded to that sort of find the first client then fulfilled and find the

second then fulfill and that, that sort of up and down a little bit in the sense of.

Really shifting directions as a business to a sort of fulfillment team and then

a marketing and then film it and then marketing love to dive into that and hear

your perspective a little more on that.

Sure.

Yeah.

And it's funny because we'll be in business nine years here and each stage

of your company, there's going to be different ups and downs and, getting

stable and getting away from that roller coaster effect, it looks like a different.

Each year that you grow.

So back in 2013, 2014, I only had one employee and then two employees.

So it was literally, you bring in some business, you bring in a new

client and you've got, four or five positions to recruit on for them.

And it doesn't make any sense to be out doing more business development because

you need to fill the five that you have.

That's how we, that's how we make money.

Each time you grow, you have to deal with those challenges.

And it's a different thing.

Each level that you get to right now we're doing 30 person projects versus

five person projects, and really what I've found at the end of the day, the

biggest issue inside of that roller coaster effect is people and the process.

We, fast forward to 20 18, 20 19 we were able to bring on a

COO who actually my brother, who was in recruiting for a decade.

And one of the things that Greg has been focused on has been the process,

improving the process that we had internally here to be able to deliver

for our clients and also managing that.

And it's funny because even at each level, we've doubled in size in 2020 this year.

We're probably going to have close to 30% growth on top of that.

So it's awesome.

But the thing is each step of the way, there's a new process that you

have to put in place and make sure everybody's trained properly on that.

And it's funny how many of you now we're getting pretty well-disciplined

that making sure there's a process for everything and nothing gets.

And, the process itself, we're being able to train people correctly.

So it really, those are the two things that, you know, having the right

people on the team has been huge for us and also driving those processes

in the right direction and making sure you're not just doing one thing

where it's a quote unquote, best habit that doesn't become a process.

Once you start, Hey, we've got one recruiter over here doing things this

way, but then there's this recruiter over here doing it totally differently.

That's going to start those inconsistencies and you're going to

be running in that hamster wheel of why isn't this person able to perform.

That's the last piece to, our kind of motto there is performance.

If you don't teach them the right way, they're not going to be able to perform.

If it is the right person in the right seat on our team.

And if they are following the process, the way we've done it and that's our

job as the executive team now, or it's to make sure there's a process behind

everything, make sure that the management team is training people properly on it.

And if they are, they're able to perform.

I'll say, owning my own business.

As you scale that up, there's a difference between hiring someone,

that first employee that you mentioned, you would sit down with

them and walk through some stuff.

They may shadow you.

But now if you want to go hire five new employees or 10 new employees to have

all of those employees shadow you and do the same type of stuff that you did with

the first employee, it's not scalable.

And not only that.

I know with everything over the past few years with, a lot more

people are working from home.

A lot of companies have gone more remote or satellite offices.

And so that type of stuff in addition has created even more of a need, I

think now than ever for, processes.

Our own team has talked about these challenges.

We would all be in the same office and, two people be having a conversation and

a third person would jump in and go no.

Remember we do it this way now.

Oh, yay.

Yeah.

And so it's if that third person isn't a part of a zoom call, then,

two team members may go down a huge rabbit trail and waste, days or

more of work before we ever realize that, oh, we were doing it wrong.

That's one of the things that.

You can easily lose track of that stuff if you're not paying attention.

And that's, our goal where, you know, three years ago we would have lost three

or five days worth of productivity.

Not realizing somebody just didn't know how to do it the right way.

Now we're trying to cut that down.

We put a process in place to make sure that anybody on a research team or a

recruiting team doesn't get to date.

Doing it the wrong way, essentially.

And then they're going to struggle and you're going to struggle because they

didn't know, a piece of the process there.

So that's, that's imperative and that was also one of the

big things that shifted too.

We used to think, Hey, we have to be in the office five days a

week to see the team to make sure everybody's doing their jobs.

Correct.

We very quickly realized that's not the case.

The cool thing for us is, a bunch of our employees wanted to be back in the office.

So we did that as quickly and safely as we could, but there's

no more mandate on office time.

We tell everybody we like to have you in on Tuesday and Wednesdays, if

you can make it, it's not required.

And there's no rhyme or reason to who's coming in those days and who's

not, most of the team comes in.

But there's days where nobody's there on Tuesday or Wednesday.

My whole thing is communicated to me, so I don't come in to see

people and then nobody's there.

That's always fun, we also have a couple employees now that.

Fully remote, one of them Sarah she's up in upstate New York and she comes in

maybe once every six months or something.

But we realized that we can do this as long as we do it the right way.

And again, if you're not doing it the right way and you're remote it, it

does, it gets even trickier to make sure you're training everybody the right way.

So having those processes in places it's huge.

Yeah, absolutely.

I think our team is a, at a similar dynamic.

We were actually pre COVID.

We were in office Tuesdays and Thursdays, and it was flexible the rest of the week.

And now, or pretty much our whole entire team is relocated, whether

it's, I moved during COVID, but it was five miles roughly.

Some of our team has moved further than that.

But it's it's really an interesting shift, I think, to see how, some of this type of

stuff as you scale and dealing with some of that type of stuff works out as you get

into the aspect of remote work as well.

I think there's a huge piece there.

Yeah.

And the art, there's an Arabic DCE being in recruiting.

If you're not offering that flexible work schedule anymore.

Where people can work remote as much as they want.

You're not going to be able to compete in the market for talent.

It's funny in life sciences that, the war for talent has been here for a

very long time, but now it's across the board in every industry and

every company everybody's looking at.

For great talent, let alone any talent just to run their business.

And the other piece to just mention is that, inflation is a real

thing in order to compete as well.

I think the whole $15 an hour minimum wage conversation, just

going to go away because companies won't be able to hire if they're not

offering much more than that now.

So it's been, really interesting to watch for sure how the

nature of business has changed.

Yeah.

And I think it's going to continue to change a little bit as things level

out over the next, few years I know in California, we they signed a basically

allowing for restaurants to continue to have their outdoor, temporary structures

and stuff for another two or three years.

And so they just passed that recently, which is crazy to

think that, these businesses.

They're still in recovery.

I know of a restaurant locally that they're paying two to three

times what they did pre COVID for, chicken and, not having to

just gouge the, the end customer.

These are just massive challenges that all businesses are dealing with.

Yeah, for sure.

At the end of the day, everything's going to go up it.

Just roll up.

Stop.

Yeah.

Yeah, I see.

Good services, everything across the board.

Yeah.

So what are other elements for you guys, getting consistent with inside of the

business that really helps, flatten that sort of roller coaster effect?

The biggest thing outside of the processes is the people.

And I mentioned that earlier, diving into that a little bit

here, it's, having the right team I think, Is the biggest difference of

companies that are going to make it.

And when I say make it right, whoever's version of making it is different, right.

For us now it's to get to 10 years, we've got to three years.

Great.

We're still in business.

I figured out that, I can make a good living for myself that

wasn't that interesting to me.

Could we.

As a team, could I bring other people on board and create opportunities for them

to grow in their careers as I have, right?

And now we get to do it as a company, but, whatever the benchmark is for,

your fan base out there, it's getting to five years, 10 years now, my next

vision is how do we get to 20 years?

And, really turned us into a long lasting company.

In order to do that, I need.

You need a baseline of good people that can do the work, but in order

to really grow and be a dynamic company, you have to have great people.

And in order to have great people, you have to take care of them and you have

to make sure that you are training them properly, showing them how to do things

well, showing them that there is going to be a real opportunity for you to

grow your career to the next level here.

So this all speaks to consistency, right?

Because if I don't have a great team, I can't do that.

And that's everything from, the management team on down to, the junior staff members.

And we've been doing a lot of cool stuff here in terms of not just

showing them opportunity, right?

That's what drives me every morning.

I wake up and I say, Hey, everybody here needs the

opportunity to feed their families.

And we've got some people who've been with us five, six years now.

People are having babies.

People are different stages of life.

And it's really cool to see.

But that's, the responsibility on me is to make sure that everybody has an

opportunity to grow and not just feed their family, but be really successful.

So we've been doing some really cool things, A, what we're calling

a next generation leadership team now where we're having some of our

junior team members who, it's pretty apparent that they want to be leaders.

So this is a great way for them to get involved and talk with us about what's

going on in their world, how things are going, what problems we can solve

for them, cause the biggest thing I can do for my team is making sure that

there's nothing that's getting in there.

Preventing them from gains, being able to be efficient and successful.

So hearing those ideas from the junior team, and then, we

have a senior leadership team that we meet with every week.

And I know you're involved with the, the the tab stuff, but we'd put

basically an EOS meeting in place for all of our senior leadership meets

once a week, if there's any issues.

We resolve them.

And it's funded to do that quarterly meeting where we see how far we've

come with anything that was an issue.

And how far, we're able to go as a team.

But again, having the, the number one thing that comes up is, do we

have the right people on the team?

Are they in the right seats?

Is this a job that they want to be in?

And I think those are elements that.

Oftentimes people forget about and I love the fact that you guys

include both of those, the people and the process, both as elements

and not just look at, the process.

So many people say, they'll talk about, have a process in your business, make

sure you have checklists and to-do lists, but if you don't have the right

people, the processes don't matter.

And if you don't have the right, you can have all the right people, but if they

don't know what the heck they're doing, it's gonna, it's gonna have a problem.

Yeah.

And it's making sure that they're doing the right thing, right?

Like I'm no longer the best person to be managing the

day-to-day recruiting operations.

That process is evolved.

And what we need is somebody who does it more efficiently than I would.

Cause it's not my thing.

It's not my.

My strength is to be doing business development and leading that team

and the general business operations.

So it's just being able to look at who the folks are on your team and what

they're doing and what they want to do.

A lot of companies will just push people into roles because that's

the best thing for the company.

Not necessarily the best thing for the employee.

So what we try and do is say, Hey, I can see this person would be a good

business development person in the future.

But I don't want to push them into that.

I want them to have a conversation with me and let me know what they want

to do as their career and continue to follow that path and then show them

how to get into that versus just trying to push them into something that they

don't want to do and know vice versa.

If they are a really great recruiter and they want to be in recruiting longterm.

Great.

We can take you to just higher levels of doing that.

That's my whole, I have a whole thing about, not trying to push people into

careers that they don't wanna be.

And a lot of what you're talking about and you

alluded to tab a little bit So for those who don't know what tab is

basically a business peer group.

And it really is something it's something that Rob and I are both in different

groups and it meets depending on the group meets typically on a monthly

basis with other business owners.

And it's a board of directors basically for your business,

if you don't have a board.

And so one of the things I know, With a lot of this is

just the aspect of feedback.

What you're talking about with people is you're not saying,

Hey, here's a new job role.

This is what you're starting next Monday, you're sitting down and having

a conversation with these people and saying, Hey, where do you see

yourself in the company in the next.

Two five, no, two years, five years, 10 years.

And how can you grow with the company?

Not necessarily something as much of this is the task that you're going

to be doing for the next 10 years.

And that's it.

In reality, if the company is going to be growing, those people have to

grow with it, or you got to figure out another way to grow the business.

Yeah, for sure.

And it's funny too, being I'm assuming most of your audiences, going to be

small business owners or, folks that work in a small business, that feedback

is not always there right there.

Weren't a whole lot of people for me to go to that were running executive

search firms and get advice from them.

Those folks are usually my competition.

Having that board has been great because it's, you're

getting an outside perspective.

It was also great to be able to bring my brother onto the company back in 2018,

because when you're running a company by yourself your team, your people,

aren't going to necessarily, Rob you say, Rob, you're doing this their own way.

Greg had no problem telling me that there was many things that we needed to

improve, which is really what I needed, even though it was uncomfortable because

for seven years, nobody was telling me, Hey, you're doing this the wrong way.

It was.

A new, old feeling.

I felt like I was back in that entry level seat where you're learning

and getting feedback constantly.

So that's, I would encourage your, your audience to be able to get

some sort of peer group, whether, you're in something organized like

tab or EOS or whatever else, or just really, a good group of advisory peers

that can help guide you and mentor.

And give you some feedback and throw some ideas your way it's extremely important

for small business owners to understand.

I definitely agree.

I'll second that for sure.

I know for me, it's been a huge success for the business and for me

just personally as well, having that sounding board and then also having a

group of people who don't have a problem with saying that's a stupid idea.

Yeah, like having a group of people that are not on your payroll that

have no problem telling you that's dumb and you should not do that.

Or you should really reconsider and poke holes in your idea.

It is nice.

To be able to have that, and also have people who, some of the people in the

group that I'm in have been there for.

We've been in business for 30, 40 years.

And some of them are newer companies as well.

And so it's not necessarily always the person who's been in business 30 years.

That's got all the right, perfect ideas, but it's also nice to have people

who have quote unquote, gone before you a little bit and get it as well,

which is nice.

Yeah.

That was one of the coolest parts about my tab experience.

These were folks that were just generally in different levels of the business.

We had a member that was, growing by whatever revenue percentage.

We had another member that was out there getting acquired by a PE firm.

And then his job was to go out and look for new deals for new

companies, for them to acquire.

These are conversations that you normally wouldn't be exposed to either.

They're just not general business conversations that

I'm getting the inside scoop.

So it's really great to, to have been able to hear from some of these guys who were

know a little more senior than I am as well, or their company has generally been

around five or 10 years more than mine.

But it's also fun now to help, some of the.

Newer companies, the founders or whatever that come in and be able to give back

to them and, say, Hey, I've been there, where you're at with those challenges.

And usually it's about the same exact thing, right?

We're setting up a business process, getting the right people in place.

That happens to be my area of expertise.

So I'm able to add a lot of value to them.

So it's fun to be able to have that given.

Yeah.

Yeah, it definitely is awesome.

I've really enjoyed having you on the show today.

Before we part ways I would love to walk through what is your

advice to someone who is facing one of these challenges right now?

Facing the challenge really of that rollercoaster effect.

You could, two things I would say is, number

one, you have to keep going.

You have to have blind faith in the fact that it's going to happen for you.

If, you believe in your your vision and you believe in what you're

doing you're going to have to work harder for a little while.

But there is, that light at the end of the tunnel, as long

as you can fight through it.

And that was the best part about being.

Getting to different levels of our business.

It's Hey, we've been in business five years now.

It's not we're building a brand and continuing to build that brand.

It's not, Hey, calling somebody with this crazy idea that Rob started a company.

So really it's just keep going.

And it's amazing to see what can happen after you get to, 5, 6, 7, 8

years in business, and people start to know you and you can move forward.

And then the other piece too specifically the roller coaster

effect is you have to be.

You hear people say working on the business versus in the business, if you're

in that day-to-day grind in the bunker, sitting there and you're not able to step

outside of it and take a breath and say, let me look at what the heck is going

on here versus just continuing to grind and completing tasks and doing things.

If you're not able to step outside of that and look at it and say, this isn't

the right way to do it, or this isn't the most efficient way to do that.

Then you're not going to be able, you're going to continually be in the bunker

in the grind, in the day-to-day hamster wheel, if you can't step outside.

But, and say, let me think about doing this a little bit of a different way.

And then coming in and staying true to that and implementing it and

actually following through on it.

I think that's extremely important for business owners to understand

it's that you need to be able to work on the business and not always.

That's really good.

I'll share.

One of the tab members in my group was talking and they were, we were talking

about that exact topic and he mentioned that he has a, not to do list on his desk.

It's all the items that he is a business owner should not be doing.

And he goes, when something pops up and he's oh, I should get that done.

And he goes, Bob can do that.

Bob is totally capable of doing this.

He writes down the name of the task and then he will make that list

and, hand those off to people who, maybe need to learn that task or

learn how to take care of that, X, Y, or Z, whatever that thing is.

Maybe it's also something that.

There's three or four things that add up that may create a new role

that needs to be hired against.

And that's the type of stuff that taking those things that you're working, in

the business and moving those to a task list that you can offload those

to someone else allows you to work on.

And that's really cool.

To that point there, it, as a business owner.

And I am trying hard to get far away from this while you're in it

every day for 5, 6, 7 years, you're pretty much controlling everything.

And whether you're a control freak or not, you've been controlling

the business for however long.

And you've been doing things the way you're doing them

when you've grown the company.

It is uncomfortable at times to be able to delegate things that

you should be delegating, but you need to do it in order to grow.

And if you haven't, my philosophy now is if I need to do it, I'm

not training my team properly.

It means that I'm limiting their opportunity because I'm taking this

cause I want to control it because I know how to do it the right way or whatever.

So my philosophy is very different on that now.

I, if there's somebody on my team, if there's a task that needs to be done

and they don't know how to do it the right way, that's why they're going to

call me and say, Hey Rob, can you take this call and talk with, a candidate

about equity or relocation or whatever.

Let me take this opportunity to talk with them and train them

how to have the conversation, how to do the test the right way.

And then that's how they get to grow.

They get opportunity from that.

And it gives me the opportunity to go focus on the things that I

need to do to grow the company.

Not being a control freak is huge.

Being able to delegate, being comfortable with doing it.

I got to tell you that's been a a huge factor.

Yeah.

And as a business owner, oftentimes you sit there thinking, this is

my business, this is my baby that I've, raised in and where it's at.

And I don't want to let someone else, this is a critical business task,

but you do, you have to step away.

And it's, there's a philosophy out there that some people talk about is

as a business owner, you take a 30 day vacation, no cell phone, no emails.

None of that.

And if you can step away from your business for 30 days, then it's a,

that's a huge success, a huge win.

And oftentimes a lot of business owners won't ever do that.

Yeah.

I got to tell you, I've been able to do that personally.

Not, I didn't take 30 days off for sure, but I, I was able to spend a

summer down the beach with my kids and.

Knowing that you have things at least to some level, but you're never

going to stop as a business owner.

You're always wanting to want to grind and grow things.

But just knowing that I could take two weeks off or be off, pretty much

every Monday or Friday during the summer, because my team's got it.

That's a big thing, that's going to give you the ability to grow in the future.

It means that you're doing things the right way, and you're still able to make.

If you're not in it.

And that's what, that's what people say all the time.

If you're not able to not be there, you don't have a successful business.

That's going to thrive.

True.

Awesome.

It's been super good having you on the show.

In the show notes, we've got links to your website and YouTube,

Instagram, and a bunch of others.

What is the number one spot for people to reach out if

they want to connect with you?

For me it would be my LinkedIn page.

Pretty easy to find, just Robb Hoyle on LinkedIn and I'm right there.

And that link will be in the show notes for

those who do want to connect.

Awesome.

It's been great having you on today.

I hope hope everyone listening got something out of this.

I know I for sure did.

And until next time,

thanks for having me Josh.

Thanks for listening to this episode of, in the bunker.

As always we can be found on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter

at, in the bunker podcast.

Be sure to share this episode and what you're going to apply from it.

And how that can affect your business, make sure to tag us in that post so

we can highlight your journey as well.

But before you go.