Unpacked with Ron Harvey
People Always Matter. Join Ron as he unpacks leadership with his guests.
Unpacked with Ron Harvey
Leadership Through Generosity
Steve Perry, founder of The Well Recruiting Solution, shares his journey from commercial fishing in Alaska at 15 to building a recruiting company with over 40 professionals and a mission to place 100,000 people in ideal careers by 2030.
• Starting as a young entrepreneur after realizing boat owners made significantly more than their crew
• Building a company focused on generosity as a core value despite leaving a $900,000/year executive position
• Creating a strategy to maintain lifestyle boundaries regardless of increasing income
• Developing "heavenly net worth" philosophy where earthly success equals charitable giving
• Structuring company roles around individual gifting so team members spend 85%+ time in their areas of strength
• Scaling through strategic delegation and replacing yourself in operational roles
• Leveraging global talent across five countries to build specialized capabilities affordably
• Solving modern recruiting challenges by filtering the overwhelming flood of applications companies receive
• Connecting companies with elite talent more efficiently than traditional internal recruiting methods
Visit HireTheWell.com to download Steve's 10 unique interview questions for ensuring you hire the right talent, or connect with him directly on LinkedIn.
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Disclaimer:
The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers and guests and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any organization or entity. The information provided in this podcast is intended for educational and informational purposes only and should not be considered as professional advice. Listeners should consult with their own professional advisors before implementing any suggestions or recommendations made in this podcast. The speakers and guests are not responsible for any actions taken by listeners based on the information presented in this podcast. The podcast is not intended to be a substitute for professional advice or services. The speakers and guests make no representations or warranties of any kind, express or implied, about the completeness, accuracy, reliability, suitability or availability with respect to the information, products, services, or related graphics contained in this ...
Welcome to Unpacked Podcast with your host leadership consultant, ron Harvey of Global Core Strategies and Consulting. Ron believes that leadership is the fundamental driver towards making a difference. So now to find out more of what it means to unpack leadership, here's your host, ron Harvey.
Speaker 2:Good morning. This is Ron Harvey. I'm your vice president, chief operating officer, global Core Strategies and Consulting, which is a mouthful. We're based in Columbia, south Carolina. Excited to be here with you.
Speaker 2:Our company is really about connecting leaders with the workforce. At the end of the day, you can go to our website and pull a much longer definition or explanation of what we do, but at the end of the day, we want to make sure if you're running an organization where the public, private, nonprofit, education, religious organization how do you make sure you're connected to your people? And there are ways that we help you get that done. We truly believe leaders make or break organizations, so love to talk to you, but today it's about our guests. It's about what they bring to the table and the questions that they need to get to answer and share with us.
Speaker 2:So I don't take much time talking about our company because you can literally go onto our website and get all that information. I want you to get as much as you can get out of our guests than you get from me. So let me pause. I'm going to hand the microphone over to Steve Perry, who's going to dive in, tell you who he is and then we're going to go to work, steve. Thank you for saying yes, man, looking forward to the conversation.
Speaker 3:Oh, Ron, it's an honor to be here. I really appreciate you creating this forum. It's so generous of you. I know it's a lot of work that you put in, and so thank you for having me.
Speaker 2:Yes, yes. So, steve, a little bit about. I know you're running a company, so you're over at the Well, I mean you're doing recruiting and we'll dive into more of your background. But can you share a little bit about your company before we dive into some of the things that'll come up?
Speaker 3:Absolutely yeah. Our company is the Well Recruiting Solution, so we're a team of over 40 recruiting professionals and our job is to help connect you with the top talent that you're looking for your company and take a lot of the work out of that and really just put the best couple few candidates in front of you so you can make the best choice and do what you do the rest of the time.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I love your tagline out there, steve, where you're recruiting the elite talent for top companies and you actually have a goal. You know that. I saw also that I read you guys have a really tremendous goal, which is important. Can you speak to the goal that you have, the vision of what you want to accomplish? You know, I think it's by 2030 that you want to get some stuff done. What is that?
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, absolutely yeah. So by 2030, our goal is to have 100,000 people placed in their ideal career, and really that stems from a lot of research. A lot of people spend a lot of time unhappy in their career and think about it. Right, you're spending 40, 50, 60 hours doing it, let alone thinking about it per week. And if you're not happy, if that is not the ideal spot for you, like, it's super. It's super encouraging for us to be able to place people in a better position, where they're, they're thriving and they're feeling energized by the work that we're doing, and so the only way that happens is if they make a move.
Speaker 3:So that's why we've got that goal of doing that that many placements, a hundred thousand placements by 2030. Wow.
Speaker 2:Love it. I mean for all you that are listening. You know you got to have goals. Let Wow Love it. I mean for all you that are listening you know you got to have goals, let's just be real. So if you don't have this goal, that is big and scary audacious if you wish, you know you are you really selling for less. So I'm glad that you're jumping right out and saying we got a really big goal and we're going to work and get there, but but we got something that we got to work to get towards. You started really young. You know we look at your bio, you started at 15, you paid your way through school. You know and I want to lean into that a little bit because you know that couldn't have been easy and it's never easy to be successful Can you speak to some of that journey of starting young and what got you inspired?
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah. So I was blessed to be raised in an amazing household. My mom and dad have been married for 40 years now and you know me and my younger sister my mom stayed home raising us. My dad was once the newest Naval Academy and, you know, in civilian sector he was was worked in human resources and he never he never really had like big career aspirations. So he was just an amazing contributor and the biggest priority for my parents was to send us to the best private Christian education that we could get and, candidly, that costs about a third of their income. And so if I wanted anything in life, if I want to play on the basketball team and have basketball shoes, I had to work and earn the money to pay for them, If I wanted to go to camp, if I wanted a car, any of those things. And so my first job was commercial salmon fishing out in the ocean in Alaska, where I grew up, and at the end of that season.
Speaker 3:I could do the math. I figured out how much fish we caught, how much the price was, how much all the different things cost, and I'm like man, that owner made a lot of money this summer and I did not. So I think I need to be the owner. And so that was where, the next summer, I was like I'm not going to work for someone else, I'm going to build my own company, and so I was 15 years old at the time, and that started my entrepreneurial journey.
Speaker 2:Wow, I don't even know if I was thinking like that at 15, Steve, Like wow, that's a really really. But it's really exciting to see where you come from and your parents, you know, worked hard and invested a lot into you. But the lessons learned from that? What was the most valuable lesson you think you learned from your parents saying we're not going to give you anything you got to work for?
Speaker 3:Yeah, one of the things that has really been the theme and I feel like is a gifting that God's given me is the theme of generosity. You know my parents despite all of that, you know they regularly tithe to their church and I knew, you know they were supporting different missionaries and organizations around the US and around the world when I knew, like we were driving 15, 20 year old cars that broke down every few months, and so that sacrificial generosity always, always, really stuck with me and also established that habit early on in my life to where you know today. That's really the purpose of why we started the well. One of our core values is generosity to be able to generate a lot of revenue, but not for our own consumption, but to be generous with our employees, but then also with a lot of incredible organizations around the world.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I want to unpack that for a second because when you look at it, you do have the core values and generosity is on there, faith is on there, things that keep you grounded as a human being and at a time where people go into entrepreneurship and they think about wealth, they think about how rich can they get Like you said, you did it when you're 15, you realize how much your owner made. How would you separate not making it about money, Because it's easy to get caught up in that chase the next dollar, get the biggest client you know, and you hear this thing about money.
Speaker 3:But how did you manage to to be more committed and disciplined, to not make it about your personal wealth? Yeah, you know, I look, I look at the Bible and the Bible says to not store up treasures on earth but store up treasures in heaven. And you know, and, and I wrote a couple books. One of the book I talk about is, you know, your heavenly net worth, and so I've tried to live by a model of having my earthly net worth equal my heavenly net worth, ie, you know what does my earthly balance sheet say. And then how much have I given away? And try to correlate the two of those.
Speaker 3:And I've been blessed and fortunate to, you know, work in an executive career prior to starting this company, where God has really blessed us and our family. But what's one of the things that's helped us in starting this business you know I left the $900,000 a year job was we didn't live on $900,000 a year, like we gave a bunch of that money away and and so that gave us margin to be able to move into a business where I haven't I haven't taken a paycheck really in the last year and a half. But that, that generosity, is the antithesis. It's the antidote for greed and if I could just encourage people, the earlier you get started in that and carving off that portion and not allowing your lifestyle to increase every time your income increases, that's, that's a phenomenal way to combat that greedy or money-centered lifestyle.
Speaker 2:Wow. I think that's important for us to unpack a little bit. So were there any practices or things that you did to ensure that, as your salary increased or you get a promotion that allows you to stay very, very comfortable in what you have, so your lifestyle doesn't have to increase because your paycheck increases? Are there any practices that you can share with people that are listening? How do you do it? Because it's not easy and, quite honestly, it's appealing when you're watching people working hard in the car, they drive the clothes they wear, the house they live in and they continue to stack more stuff on Earth. What were some practices that helped you be able to be disciplined and not to get caught up in that?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so a couple of things in that you know. Number one you mentioned goals earlier on, like having goals for, you know, investments, you know your, your business and and and maybe like health, whatever. You can have generosity goals too. So my wife and I have have generosity goals. You know we've started, you know initially with you know tithing, right, but then you know on top of that, what, what additional, and really they were percentage goals, so percentage of income that we want to to give away.
Speaker 3:But the other thing, the other thing we did early on, is is we created kind of this dream lifestyle, like when we were I don't know a couple of few years into marriage, and we dreamed, right, we wrote down this list these are all the most amazing things we could ever imagine having, and we put them on. And then we just put a circle around that and we weren't around. We didn't allow ourselves to grow outside of that, because we could always remember like, well, two years ago, five years ago, 10 years ago, that was the best I ever could have imagined. And so, as lifestyle creep happens, you know your world gets bigger and you see bigger and fancier things. But I know that made me happy and so I'll just share this.
Speaker 3:Like you know, at the peak of my executive career we lived in a $2 million house on the lake which was in that initial box right. I wanted a lake house right where we could host and house people, and we did all of those things. But I can tell you that you know that was crazy, four times as expensive as the house that we lived in before. It didn't make me four times as happy, and so when we sold that to start this company, that's something we remember now as we're living in a rental home right.
Speaker 3:That kind of goes back to where we were, Like we're not 25% as happy as we were and we're probably a little bit happier because it takes less time to maintain, it takes less energy, we have more time as a family, you know. You just think about it, Like how many times my wife and I look at each other. We're like all four of us me and my wife and my two girls are in the same 12 square feet in the kitchen together. Why do we need 5,500 square feet? Some practical things that we did.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. Thank you for sharing it too, because oftentimes you think when you know you get this thing, that's expensive, that looks good, and you can say you've achieved it. But I love that you say it didn't make me happier. It didn't, it didn't make me because I had that and I had to move to a twelve hundred square foot apartment. I'm probably happier and see people more because you know in four thousand square feet, forty five, that the house will be. You know, you see each other like you're in another city sometimes yeah, so you. So you're in another city sometimes. So you're leading. I mean the podcast. We talk about everything on the podcast. What I want to lean into is now you're running an organization and you think about someone that's in a position like you're an entrepreneur. What's the most important thing you think you do for your people as a leader in your organization?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so one of the philosophies that we have in the company is that everybody has a unique gifting, and so it's hard in a startup where you want to be scrappy and you need people wearing all kinds of different hats. But we've tried to be really intentional in creating these narrow tranches of responsibility in the company so that when we bring somebody in, we're able to identify you know we're hiring for this position Does their giftings align with that position?
Speaker 3:And we try to make it so that they do that position 85 plus percent of the time, so that you know they don't need all. They don't need the ping pong table and the snack bar and all the different, you know, treats that some companies use, but instead they're just energized because they get to do what they're gifted in and excel for the majority of their day, the majority of their week, and so that's something that you know as as someone creating this company from you know literally there's one of us in the company 14 months ago to now, I think, has allowed people to to enjoy the majority of the work that they're doing on a regular basis.
Speaker 2:Wow, yeah, Steve, can you speak to? Unpack for us for a second, going from one of you 14 months ago to the staff that you have today, and this is your baby. You've invested in this. This is your livelihood as well. How do you, as a business owner, entrepreneur, can you speak to? How do you begin to trust and let go Because you can't do everything, it's not sustainable. But there's a struggle because it's like, hey, this is everything and it's about my brand and my image. And how do you begin to, as a leader, a business owner, an entrepreneur, let go and trust other people with this thing that you've built?
Speaker 3:Phenomenal question. So that was actually one of the reasons why I knew I had to leave my corporate entrepreneurial executive position is because, like they, the requirement was I did all of these things and I was like, no, this should be delegated to this person, this person's gifted here. But but the expectation was I did it and so when I left that to go start the Well Recruiting Solutions, I had to do everything day one right, but there was nothing that I could do that I could spend my time on personally that could generate enough revenue in a company to make it to the bottom line that it was going to get anywhere close to the opportunity financially that I had left before. So I knew that we had to do it through, initially, a few dozens of people. You know, someday hundreds and thousands of people. We had to do it through them.
Speaker 3:So as soon as I saw myself doing a job, I knew, okay, I got to create a job description for that. And then I have to go find somebody who's gifted there and replace myself and replace myself, and replace myself and replace myself. To to now, you know, we're at the point again, 14 months in, where I've only personally hired just a handful of the people at the company. So we've got people leading that are hiring um that I. I didn't have any decision to whether or not we bring that person in, but we allowed the culture to carry through and bring the right people in Wow, I mean, you're speaking to a lot of stuff I can unpack there.
Speaker 2:You know one of the questions that I get a lot, steve. You know, when I do a lot of entrepreneurship development and I'm working with business owners that are trying to figure it out, I mean, this is a world that you got to work hard. You know one of the things I teach. You know, my wife and I have three kids and one of the things I always teach them if you're going to be an entrepreneur, in the dictionary the first word is work hard. Yeah, that's like, regardless of what order the dictionary is in, if you're going to be really successful in life, there's a first word that we got to learn is called work hard. How do you help entrepreneurs understand? You know the question I get quite often hey, I need to hire, but I don't have the revenue to hire. Which one do I do first? Because people get stuck in this the company can't grow, but they don't have the revenue yet and they can't get out of their way of. Well, I don't want to hire and can't pay them. How do you manage that?
Speaker 3:So I think the most important thing that every entrepreneur has to understand and I think a lot missed this is you're the number one salesperson in your company, and a lot of people are like well, I'm not a sales guy. If you're going to start a business, you have to be the sales guy, and if you can't be, you have to hire or partner, and it's worth giving up a significant portion of the equity of your company because your company will not make it. Now I know we're in this world of venture capital and private equity and so there are some plays that can eliminate that, but we bootstrapped our company and so I knew I had to always be selling, and if I was selling, then that would give me revenue. Answers all the problems.
Speaker 3:That allows me to buy the talent that we need to bring into our organization, or the technology A lot of technology can take place with some of those things at a lower cost.
Speaker 3:And then we got to get scrappy right. Two thirds of our team is not in the United States and so we have relationships in about five different countries where, again, speaking to those narrow tranches, I know that doesn't have to be a 40, 50, 60, 70, $80,000 a year American filling that position. It's perhaps a $5 an hour position. That's in another country where that provides an amazing lifestyle for that family and they're amazingly talented at that piece that I need done in my business. And so those were some of the keys to scaling up quickly but bootstrapping.
Speaker 2:I love it. I love it because you know, as you look at it. You say you know what do I do and you're in a recruiting firm and I know you're helping you bring people on so you can actually live up to what your company's capabilities are. I want to unpack a little bit as we use our time wisely for you, as you think about your organization and what you do. You shared a lot on leadership and some phenomenal information. As you do, recruiting, what is what would you? If I'm a business owner or I'm a major company, what's happening in my organization that says it's time to to really call the well recruiting solutions? What's happening that I need to reach out and start getting external help?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think it used to be in the recruiting game that recruiters possessed access and a Rolodex to people that you didn't have before. That's not been the case for a long time Now. The way that you've connected with them has changed over time. But, frankly, what we find that we do the best at is either in a very specialized position where there's only a certain amount of people, we've identified the best way to find the total addressable market for that and then reach out to all of them, but more so, what we're seeing is just the flood of information, right?
Speaker 3:So, as these apps and AI technologies exist for somebody going out and applying for a job where they can say here's my resume, now I want to apply for any job that looks like this it automatically goes to all the jobs that equal that. It retypes the resume, it automatically does an application and all of a sudden, these companies are getting hundreds of applications that they're paying somebody salary benefits, bonus, vacation, longevity, like $100,000, $150,000 a year to filter through applications. That's where our benefit comes in. Is we're able to do that instantly? With some of the technology and resources that we have, we're able to get down to the best couple few people and then hand it over to the big company that does have an internal recruiting team to pick the best couple people and then they can spend time onboarding and coaching and developing those high talented people into their organization.
Speaker 3:So all that to say our job is to get people to the decision makers as quickly as possible and eliminate the bulk of the time that they're spending trying to find ideal talent. I love it.
Speaker 2:I love it. So, Steve, if someone's interested and want to follow with you, for two things one, to really solicit your services, but two, they want to bring you on because I think you're in the right market at the right time, for recruiting is really really tough and it's a lot of money invested. How do people reach you? What's the best way to contact you and follow up and bring you on another podcast or to use your services?
Speaker 3:Yes, I'm super active on LinkedIn. So Steve Perry, the well recruiting solution so they can find me. But then I've also I wouldn't even send you to our company website, hire the well dot com I've got a fun little 10 10 interview question, 10 unique interview questions to make sure you got the right person coming into your team. So a little giveaway there If you go to HireTheWellcom and you can download that and then obviously reach out to us on there too.
Speaker 2:Awesome, awesome. Thanks a lot, steve. Is there anything you want to share with the audience that you haven't shared? Of course, I do this for business development, but I also do it for education, so is there anything you want to share that you haven't shared yet?
Speaker 3:You know you mentioned. You've got a ton of entrepreneurs listening to this and I just want to. I just want to encourage them, like you were. You were in the right business, you were doing the right thing. I want to encourage you to keep going, because there are like billions of people in the world that do not have the opportunity to start a business like you do here in America, and just like, don't quit, like keep going, keep going, it's worth it. You know, coming from a guy that you know several times did not know how he was going to make payroll on Friday, it's worth it. Just keep going.
Speaker 2:Yes, yeah, it is scary, but it's worth it, steve. Steve thanks a lot. I mean, we come on, we do this really fast and people listen to the entire podcast. If you listen, steve is giving you information. Linkedin is what I use as well, you know. But go to go to the well recruiting dot com and figure out and he gave you information for his LinkedIn how to get to some free stuff, you know, and that global core. We excited to just add value. If you want to find out more about us, go to our website.
Speaker 2:Love for you to reach out to us, but today it's really about giving you stuff that you can really use. Hopefully, you heard something about recruiting or hiring or making tough decisions, and don't give up. Our goal is to inspire you, to motivate you and let you know that it's possible. Just keep doing it and put people around you, because you're not good enough to do it by yourself. Nobody is Haven't met that person yet, so get a team around you, have fun with it and enjoy. And until next time, steve and I will sign off. Until you keep following us on Unpacked with Ron Harvey. You guys have a wonderful day and we look forward to you joining us again.
Speaker 1:Well, we hope you enjoyed this edition of Unpacked podcast with leadership consultant Ron Harvey. Of Unpacked Podcasts with leadership consultant Ron Harvey. Remember to join us every Monday as Ron unpacks sound advice, providing real answers for real leadership challenges. Until next time, remember to add value and make a difference where you are for the people you serve, because people always matter.
