Turning Constant Turnover Into a Strength with Sean Phelps of College Works

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:00:00) Our whole proposition to a student is you come to work here so that you can gain really awesome experience. The companies that do the best with where people go after that role have a much easier time attracting talented people to the roles. It can be frustrating when somebody leaves that you've trained, but the alternative is they would have just stayed and done poorly in the job. We still are very picky about who we hire, and it takes about 100 applicants for us to hire one person.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:34) So I'd say... I will tell you, because I'm just a curious person, I've got lots of questions. But one of the things that I was interested in discussing and trying to figure out how to pull value out, because we're mostly technology leaders and things like that. But one of the things that caught my attention was that you have a business where, you know, 80% of the people operating inside of the business actually rotate out every year.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:59) And so I'm hoping that there might be some principles that we would be able to adapt. I'm a big fan of, like, if you're doing something, learning from a completely different space, seeing if there's principles you can pull over. So I'm hoping that would be a good angle. What do you think?

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:01:12) Yeah, I love it. I've got a little bit of fintech experience. So I worked in the tech world for a couple years, but been... Spent a lot more years training college students.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:22) Okay. So you were in fintech doing that. What were you doing over there?

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:01:27) We had a startup called Bloom with three O's. It was a robo-advisor. So back in 2015, 2016, we grew to about $5 billion in assets under management, and then that company later got acquired by Morgan Stanley.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:43) Very cool. Okay. So you have experience there, and you went from the tech world. And now tell me about what you're doing.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:01:48) Yeah. So CollegeWorks, I actually started off as an intern with the company my freshman year of college and basically got a chance to run a painting business over the summer in my hometown and worked my way up from there and helped train other students as a district manager for several years and then a vice president for several years. And now the president of the company. So I helped train about a thousand college students every summer and how to run their own business.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:12) Explain to me exactly what CollegeWorks does.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:02:16) Yeah. So CollegeWorks is an internship program where we teach a college student how to run a house painting business for the spring and summer. So we do a lot of recruiting and hiring in the fall and winter. In the spring, they start working part-time. And then in the summer, they're operating.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:02:31) So they're managing crews of employees and painting houses over the summer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:37) And it's all under your brand. They're not operating different brands independently. Okay.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:02:41) Correct. Yeah. They're all W-2 employees and getting paid a base plus commission and performance-based type roles, but they're all on our company insurance and using our brand.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:55) Now when you see... You've gotten to see both sides of the fintech startup world and this world where you're training college students. When it came to... When it comes to the topic of, like, rotating employees and then now, obviously, the general vibes at the startups are you... You're so precious. Your key people can't leave. It's so important. But then in this other world that you're in now, it's almost designed to have this fluctuation. What have you learned from seeing both of those worlds?

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:03:24) Yeah. I think... So our... Sort of the CollegeWorks side. So our whole proposition to a student is you come to work here so that you can gain really awesome experience, and you can become very marketable when you graduate college.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:03:37) And so they're... We're preparing them to leave, essentially, the whole time they're here. Now we hope that they stay, and we have roles in district manager positions and vice president positions where they help run our company. So a certain percentage of them are going to stick around, but not very many. And if we train 300 new people in a summer, we might have 30 or 40 of those that stick around for another season.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:04:00) So 80%, 90%, like you said, are going to be moving on. But we want to prepare them as fast as possible to do as well as possible as they can in the future, and that attracts new talent. And I saw that still in the tech world where a lot of people are attracted to a startup because they can get more experience than they would get at just a giant company, and they hope that, you know, maybe if they go to work at a Google that that'll lead them to... A lot of those people go on to start other businesses. Right?

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:04:30) They're there to learn how a business operates, how it works at scale, but they also have ideas and passion projects that they might want to start on their own too. I think the companies that do the best with where people go after that role have a much easier time attracting talented people to the roles initially.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:51) And how long have you...

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:04:52) been at this company? 23 years.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:56) Wow. So you've been out there a while?

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:04:58) A long time. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:00) Doesn't get old.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:05:01) My life.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:01) Does it get old watching these kids come in and learn business skills? And...

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:05:06) No. Because of the fact that it's there... It's new to them. Right? So I think of my job like a college sports coach, and I'm preparing them for the pros.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:05:15) And, you know, at some point, if you're going to graduate, they're going to be a first-round draft pick and go off and play the pros of whatever industry they're in. But I've got to get ready to train the next batch and the next group. So, I mean, it's like teaching, coaching. I'm sure people in education can understand that. Like, there's always... There's a new semester. There's a new cohort, so you're never done, you know, training.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:41) Yeah. There's that really popular meme of the CFO asking, "What if we train them and they leave?" And then I think the flip side to that meme is, "What if we don't and they stay?" or something like that. Is that correct?

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:05:55) Yeah. Exactly. I love that cartoon, and I show that at trainings of, um, you know, and that is part of the process. Even when we're training painters, some of our students are like, "Well, I don't know if my painters are going to stick around all summer, so I don't want to put too much time into them." Like, no. You do. You want to put a lot of time into them because what if they stay? And what if they're doing a bad job painting houses for you? And it can be frustrating when somebody leaves that you've trained, but the alternative is they would have just stayed and done poorly in the job. So I see no reason to not put a lot of time and effort into training people to be successful.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:34) And so you have your core team that doesn't change. How... What is the percentage of that? You said it's, like, 10, 20% stay. They're always core?

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:06:44) Yeah. Even there's still rotations and, you know, turnover in those roles too. I think everybody's wanting to, you know, move up or get another better opportunity. And so I feel like the longest I've worked with somebody is probably nine or ten years. For the most part, you know, if we're doing our job, training them well, they're going to eventually get opportunities.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:08) Yeah. And so, like, for parents that... There's a lot of parents that listen to the show, and a lot of them will ask me about, you know, what technology should they be learning and things of that nature for their kids as they get ready for college. But I never even knew anything like what you do existed. What do you recommend for parents who are at... Are you getting this? Are they asking you this?

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:07:33) Yeah. I mean, I'm a big AI adopter. I mean, I'm an early adopter. I use Claude and ChatGPT all the time and other tools. So I think it's very powerful stuff. I do think, you know, if we want to go down that path, I think it'll make people more productive and that there's still going to be a lot of people in the workforce, maybe doing the job of what two or three people used to do in one person's role because they're able to use technology to, you know, get more done. But I don't think it's going to replace everyone. Automated, repetitive tasks, maybe, but somebody's got to manage those tasks, and somebody's got to manage the AIs running those processes. So I think that's still super valuable.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:08:25) Right? If you can be... And young... Younger people naturally are more tech-native and use it in their own life. I think schools can do a great job, a better job even of using AI instead of discouraging it, figure out how to make the project they're working on better rather than, you know, not just replacing the work that it takes to do it.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:08:51) My other parents' advice is just employment. The kids need to have jobs. That's a... That's the trend I'm seeing across the board that parents, you know, focus a lot more on extracurriculars and sports. And I've got kids. I know how hard it is to fit that into their schedule, but I think just basic employment is really critical for a lot of skills.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:13) Yeah. What ages are your kids?

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:09:16) My oldest is in eighth grade, so he's 13. So he's just coming up on that, and we're talking about what kind of job are you going to get.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:23) Yeah. Yeah. And what's your youngest?

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:09:26) Youngest is seven. So I got an eighth grader, sixth grader, and second grader.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:31) All right. I've got eight, seven, and four.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:09:34) Okay. Those are fun ages.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:37) They feel like they're double their age, to be honest with you, their attitudes, but we're working on it. I look... Yeah. They have jobs. They have jobs that they can do. Actually, we have two types of chores at the house. We've got the chores that are non-negotiable that you have to do being part of the family, and then we've got the chores that, like, you can choose to do to earn money. And my daughter, she's eight, and she stopped doing her earn-money chores. And my wife was like... She was telling me this. I was like, "Why?" And she goes, "Well, she figured out she'd get her brother to do the work and buy her things." I was like, "Oh my goodness."

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:10:16) The entrepreneur in the family.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:18) Well, that's what my wife said. She goes, "Honey, she's an entrepreneur. She's just like you." I looked right at my wife, and I said, "Baby, she figured out how to get a man to go do the work and buy her stuff. She's just like you. She's brilliant. Brilliant." My wife loved it. She's... Aria is so smart, that little one.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:38) But she's been asking me too about college and school and, you know, I'd... The conversation of is college worth it in the age of AI? I have a lot of mixed feelings. So part of me says, in its current context, no. I... And from what my experience is of the current college system, I'd say no. But then there's the opportunity to take that infrastructure and improve it. And then the answer could be yes. Like, for example, if they change their classes and their... And what they're teaching and the content and the material and all of that to actually help people accelerate with the most advanced tools that we have, then sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:18) But if they're saying, "Oh, no, you're taking this writing class and you don't get to use any AI." It's like, "Well, then no," because it's like saying I can't take a calculator to math class. Like, "What are you doing?" This is the new vector we're competing on, and we need to be able to use this technology. So I have real mixed feelings.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:36) But every time that conversation comes up with my kids, I go back to experience. You need to have some sort of craft. You need to have some thing that you dedicate yourself to, that you develop discipline with, that you do even when you don't want to do it, and you stick with it. And then you develop mastery of a craft. And from that, you can feed yourself forever.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:11:56) Absolutely. I think the college environment, you know, being able to go live independently, become an adult, figure out your own schedule for your meals, your, you know, responsibilities. Like, that can be really valuable. And then the networking is, you know, pretty essential at that age to be able to meet people that you didn't necessarily grow up around but have different skills and interests and build friendships and relationships with future co-founders, coworkers, partners, you know, all that stuff. So I think it's still something people probably should do, but it's... There's so many opportunities to learn outside the classroom now, and there have been for a while.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:12:37) You know? Ten years ago when the... Or maybe it was 20 years ago now where MOOCs became a thing, you know, the massive open online courses.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:45) Okay. Yeah.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:12:47) So you could just take, you know, on Coursera or Udemy, Stanford professor's class for free. You know? You didn't get credit. You didn't get a degree awarded, but you could learn the information. I think anyone that did those things and really basically laid out their own college curriculum, did all the work to learn the information, and went to an employer and said, "Hey. I don't have a piece of paper, but I did all the other things required." They probably did great in the job market. Yeah. Really, college is to be able to put some guardrails on it and say, "Hey. You have to do it. Like, you can't procrastinate this." So I think in general, it's probably good for most people to still just get the degree, but there's still... There's plenty of ways to learn outside of that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:32) Yeah. I did one of those courses, actually. So I had a question. So I've been a software engineer for all these years. And so I had a question of, like, one day I was just sitting there and I was wondering how does the light emit out of the screen and hit my retinas? Like, that was just this weird question because I've been staring at a screen for 20-plus years writing code, and I never asked myself, how is this actually happening? And I said, I'm going to trace this back. And so I traced the electron all the way back to the power generation station and how it stepped down through the transformers and how it goes from being generated at a power generation station to all the way down to the light coming out of my screen. And I traced the entire path back. And through the process, a couple of those sections were actually answered by, I think it was an engineering course on MIT's open... What did you call it? A MOOC platform or whatever? The massive... Yeah. MOOC platforms. And so I had to dig through that and get my answers. And for me, that was beautiful. I was so happy that that type of content was available.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:14:41) Yeah. It's pretty amazing what you can do. I took one, I think it was Georgia Tech. That was how to start your own hedge fund. And I didn't actually start my own hedge fund, but I had to learn how to use Python to pull in, you know, APIs of data. And I had to... I remember having to partition my hard drive so I could run Ubuntu, and I'm not a tech guy like you. So I knew none of this stuff, but I learned so much from it. And I learned how to utilize data and manipulate Excel. And then that's something I used in my day job of the Excel uses and how to understand, you know, data analysis a little bit better.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:19) So you've compared a college degree to a driver's license. Can you explain that comparison?

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:15:24) Well, I think it's the prerequisite of, like, you need it to go participate in the job market. And just like you get your driver's license, they don't hand you the keys to a Ferrari and go, "Hey, congrats. You're now a driver, so here's your car." And in this analogy, the car is like the job, right, or the career.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:15:42) You still have to figure out how to go find that career, how to fund it, how to keep it running, how to maintain it. But you need the driver's license to be able to drive the car. You know, at some point, you get stopped along the way and somebody says, "Hey, do you have this credential?"

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:15:58) It can be helpful just to whip it out and say, "Yeah, I do have the credential." Now do you use it all the time? No. When I got my master's degree, I had no need for it.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:16:09) I didn't even really want it, but I was at an age where I had time to do it, and I decided I'll just get this done. That way, if at any point in my future career it becomes a requirement, I already have it, and I've got that license to be able to do those things. My mom went to nursing school when I was born and got a community college degree and became a nurse, and she's been a nurse for years and years. She actually had a foray into tech and worked for a Silicon Valley medical startup for a while.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:16:40) And at one point, when she went back to hospital nursing, they had said all of our nurses now need to have a bachelor's degree. So for rehire, you have to have a bachelor's. You can stay in your current role with your current degree, but you won't be eligible for rehire if you decide to leave. And that was something she did a lot in nursing. She would go from home health to oncology to outpatient, and did all these different nursing careers.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:17:11) And each time, she'd have to interview and be hired, even if it was for the same hospital group. So she found herself, I think, in her fifties, doing some classes because the hospital said, "We'll pay for the classes, but you do have to finish your bachelor's degree." And she took about two or three weeks and then dropped out and was like, "Yeah, I'm not doing that."

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:17:31) So in my head, I was like, I'm going to just go ahead and do it. That way, when I'm young, it's out of the way. And I don't have anything beyond a master's degree, so hopefully I never cross paths with something that requires a PhD. But I think for most people, just get the driver's license, have it knocked out of the way.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:17:51) That way, it doesn't stop you later.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:53) Yeah. A big asterisk there, and I think you are absolutely right. You said to participate in the job market.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:18:04) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:05) Yes. For the average person to participate in the job market, it is massively useful, but why participate in a job market when you can just build a business?

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:18:17) Exactly. If you don't have to...

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:19) You don't have to. You just go build a business. You file your forms for $125 at the state. You get your license, open a bank account, and then go find a customer, offer something of value, and have them in exchange give you something of value, and you have a business. And so that's what's so interesting to me with you is, like, you're college, but you're also teaching the kids like, "Hey..."

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:18:38) You don't need this.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:39) You don't need this. Here's your skill if you don't want to do this anymore. But also, if you get into business, I think what you're doing is very valuable because for the... Not every... I don't encourage...

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:51) I actually discourage people to be an entrepreneur because it's very difficult. It's fine. For the people who are... Your program is often, for a lot of these people... Correct me if I'm wrong.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:04) I'll make an assumptive statement. But it's like the closest they're going to get to entrepreneurship before they enter a real job. And so, like, from their experience that they can pull from when they're operating at a high level or the executive level at a job, they can go back to the starting point of the entrepreneur experience they had with you without all the risk.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:19:25) 100%. Yeah. And because we talk about how the stakeholders...

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:19:30) You need to understand all the stakeholders, not shareholders, stakeholders—your client, your community, your employee—how everything kind of works together, because every little decision impacts more than just you. So maybe it's, I want to offer a lower price. Well, that's going to help me get more customers. What's that going to do when I then go do the work?

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:19:53) Maybe I can't pay my employees as well, or maybe I can't fund my operations and I can't pay myself. And so the idea of, like, "Well, that'll help my customer." Great. But how's it going to impact the other stakeholders? For those other stakeholders, you may want to raise the price to make them happier and to make it more sustainable.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:20:13) So I think when you've had the experience and that perspective of... We're not fully letting them be an entrepreneur. There's still kind of that intrapreneurial—they're within an organization, but being very entrepreneurial. You see how all the pieces work together. So later on... You know, and that's something I saw in my tech background is I worked with a lot of the programmers and CTO at our tech firm, and we asked them for very specific things. You know?

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:20:40) "Hey, can you change this on the website, or can you change this on our data dashboards, or can we add this feature?" And the better they understand all the stakeholders of the business, the better questions they're going to ask back of, "Oh, wait a minute. Why do we want to make that change? What if we did this instead?"

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:21:01) And what are you really trying to... You know, what goal do we really have here? And sometimes if you're just in your own silo, you don't see how you impact all these other aspects of the business.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:16) When... If you were to go back now to... You've been there for twenty-three years. When did you do the startup?

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:21:23) I was, like, probably about ten years in. So I was like, I need to go do something else. I need to get out of here. I need to see if there's new things I haven't learned. Turns out everything's the same.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:21:35) The wrapper is different. You know? The business is different, but the same principles, I think, are pretty universal.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:45) Did you shape the hiring process there at all after ten years of CollegeWorks and watching everyone rotate out?

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:21:52) Yeah. I tried to, and I didn't have the most influence there. There were three original cofounders. We had some VCs involved, but I had a lot of input.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:22:03) And so, you know, I looked at, like, who can be productive in doing certain things. Like, we hired a chief marketing officer, and there were some people that were really well pedigreed for the role, but maybe didn't have the skills at that time for what was big in that period's marketing. And we had somebody apply that really was an awesome marketer, but didn't have the pedigree. Right?

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:22:31) They hadn't worked at some giant financial technology company, but they knew how... They were a master at Google Analytics and Facebook marketing and the things that we were doing at the time, affiliate marketing. They were awesome at all that stuff. And so we wound up hiring that person because, you know, we needed somebody that could do the job really well, not just someone who had done it ten years before when the technology was different.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:54) Yeah. What's the biggest hiring mistake that you see other entrepreneurs make?

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:23:03) There's a few. So even at CollegeWorks, where we're dealing with people without a lot of experience and we're then giving them skills and experience and training them, we still are very picky about who we hire. And it takes about a hundred applicants for us to hire one person. Now this is also...

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:23:24) Keep in mind, we need to hire people. Like, if we don't hire enough people to fill up the business, then the business will shrink. So we know in the back of our mind, like, I need to hire 20 people in Kansas this year to fill up our Kansas territories. We can't fill those seats by making exceptions to the quality of the people we're looking for.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:23:47) So I think that's one area I see some entrepreneurs is they, you know, maybe feel a need to hire, and so they just have to hire. It's like you really don't. You have to hire the right person and put more emphasis maybe on casting a wider net. Get more applicants at the top of the funnel in order to then find the candidates that you want. So we have pretty strict criteria, and that's changed.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:24:12) Like, when I first started interviewing, I was interviewing candidates probably fifteen years ago, and it was more based on feel. Did we like them and did we feel good? We did a little data analysis for a few years and found that there are certain predictors of success. Anyone who had at least three years of work experience... Again, some of these are 18-year-old freshmen.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:24:35) That means that they got their first job when they were 15. They had to have worked over thirty hours a week before, which is hard to do in high school because they're busy. They had to have played a varsity sport. They'd have above a 3.0 GPA, and there's a few others. We got all these objective criteria and said, "Hey."

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:24:55) These are the people that do the best, because something that's really critical for our job is ability to work hard, manage your time well with school. That's going to be a different set of experience for other entrepreneurs or for other roles that you're hiring for. But once we identified our objective criteria and started hiring based off of that, we wound up having higher retention rates, better performance rates, a more diverse candidate pool. It really improved everything about the business, instead of just hiring based off of who we thought did well in the interviews.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:34) Yeah. You're hiring astronauts who have been to space versus people who want to be astronauts.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:25:40) Yeah. Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:41) Right? They've already worked thirty hours a week. They've had three years of experience, and they've maintained their GPA at school while doing that difficult load. They can already do it. Yeah.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:25:52) Exactly. And the difference is, you know, most jobs, you probably hire somebody who's done that job too. Right? They've done programming before. You hire them to be a programmer, so you know they can do the work.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:26:05) Here, it's more of knowing that you hire somebody that has worked hard before because you know they can work hard, not just because they communicated really well in the interview process or really wanted the job.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:18) Yeah. There's... You can't ask them the questions you want either. Like, can't be like, "How's your relationship with your wife and kids?" Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:26) I know people can work hard and then destroy their personal lives too. You know? You could put in the hours and run it. But...

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:26:33) Some really good questions I've liked is, I don't know what book I got this from, but I got it from somebody is, you know, you ask all the positive, like, "What are your traits? Tell me about yourself." But asking the opposite, like, "What are you not? Like, what would your coworkers, classmates, friends say you're not?" That was really interesting, and I've done that with, you know, "How are you different than your coworkers?"

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:26:58) So I usually start with how are you similar, you know, when you worked at the pizza place. What were some things that you and all your coworkers had in common? And then what were you... How are you different? And oftentimes, you get a clearer picture from finding out how they're different than others.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:16) Yeah. And then even how they can answer that question is an indicator of their own self-awareness.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:27:23) Absolutely. Yeah. Can they give you clear reasons? For some reason, it's so much harder to embellish or lie about what you're not than what you are.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:33) Right? This is good. What's the shadow every two weeks rule at your company?

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:27:39) So we have all these new people. And so we noticed that as the more and more we implemented more training activities, the better people did, which that makes sense. And then we took it a step further and said, "Well, what if we train them every two weeks even when they're good at the job, even if they've been doing it for one, two, three, five years?" And we noticed a whole lot of things continue to improve, which is interesting because, like, I might watch an interviewer conduct an interview that's done it 500 times before, and they've been doing it for three years. And so every two weeks, they're going to get shadowed.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:28:22) Whatever their main task of their job is in that season or for that whole role, somebody is going to watch them do it once every two weeks. If they're in sales, watch or listen to a sales appointment or watch them do one. If they're managing painters, you're going to watch them for an hour every two weeks managing their crew. And it just helped the entire organization get better.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:28:47) So we noticed more retention. I think one thing that happened a lot, because I know it happened to me, is somebody would watch me, and I'd put on a show for them. You know, I would perform the best I had all week for that. You know? My coworker, who's maybe even at my same job title, they're just in a different area.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:29:08) And they're going to watch me do what I do and give me some feedback. I do the best I possibly can. And then right after that, I think, "If I just basically did this all the time, like somebody's watching, I would be so much better, and I'd get such better results." So you actually keep people from regressing.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:29:27) They don't just get worse. You could develop new ideas. You see something that one area of the organization's doing. You learn from it really quickly and get it to the rest of the organization. So there's been all these ancillary benefits.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:29:40) It actually kind of happened through COVID where we had so much time on our hands. Our normal business got disrupted a little bit. And we went, "Well, we teach everybody to work really hard. We need to keep working hard through this, but what are we going to do? There's not that much to do." At least for about a month or two, there wasn't a lot to do.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:29:59) Let's just watch everybody. And then we started to see all these ancillary benefits. So I think it's part of the training and the continual maintenance of everybody doing things well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:11) So you still do this even if you're the president and you have someone shadow you every two weeks?

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:30:16) Yeah. I do. And today, I mean, I spent three hours this morning watching recruiters conduct information sessions at different campuses on Zoom and just continue to... Take notes, talk to them afterwards, maybe brief them a little bit beforehand of "Here's what I'm looking for," or "Here's something I want to see you do. I wrote down in our notes from last time."

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:30:38) Afterwards, we'll debrief after. How do you think it went? Here's what I noticed. And so, I mean, I'd spend probably half of my week or more in those kind of settings.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:30:50) Interesting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:51) But you have someone come shadow you.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:30:54) Yep, that too. Yeah. Every two weeks, somebody's gonna watch me. I've got the CEO to do that or somebody that I manage.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:31:02) You know, I've got six vice presidents I manage. I might have one of them shadow me. They're learning from watching, but also I'm performing. Anything I'm missing.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:31:12) And I'm performing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:13) That's wild. I've never heard this before. I've never thought about this before.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:19) Because, like, even if you take something as simple as unloading the dishwasher, if I do it and I'm unobserved, I'm gonna do it. But if my kids are coming over and they're like, alright, show me how to... I wanna see this, then I'm gonna put on an entirely different experience for them that I would never have done if I was just like, oh, I gotta do the dishwasher.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:31:40) Yeah. I mean, you're training and being trained and seeing where the level of performance is. You know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:47) And so you've been doing it 22. So how long is the... I want... Here's... I'll ask the question I actually wanna ask versus beating around the bush.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:56) Does it get old? Does it lose the specialness on number... On shadow session 52? Is it like, I don't really care about this as much anymore?

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:32:06) Of course. Yeah. I mean, I think that the tolerance for monotony is a really valuable skill set. I got a chance to meet James Lawrence. He's known as the Iron Cowboy.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:32:19) He did 50 Ironmans in 50 states in 50 days, and then he went on to do 100 Ironmans in 100 days in his home state of Utah. And I got that quote from him that a high tolerance for monotony is a decidedly underrated superpower. I'll never forget that. You know?

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:32:37) I think at times it can. I get refreshed by the newness of the team. Right? Like, I am training new people, and I'll spend a few months... We also have a seasonal business, so I'm in recruiting season for about three or four months.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:32:52) We're doing a ton of interviews, career fairs, information sessions, like, all that onboarding and new employee stuff. And then for four months, we completely shift gears to sales season, and we're training those employees how to go out and get clients. And we're focused on sales metrics and leads and marketing and all that stuff. And then there's about four months where we're focused on production. So I get to wear three different hats throughout the year.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:33:19) That's one nice thing about our business model is as soon as the season gets old, I'm like, man, I'm so sick of sales. Well, now it's time to do the production. And so I get to wear a suit for about four months. I get to wear, you know, polo and business casual for about four months. And then for about four months, I'm in, like, jeans and a T-shirt and a hard hat. So that's kind of a nice piece. It's new people and seasonality that keeps it a little bit more fresh.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:44) From a business perspective, so you don't offer painting services 365? Like, they can't...

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:33:50) We do not.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:50) Use your company. Oh, okay. Got it.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:33:53) Some of that's the seasonality of the market too. Like, you know, if you live in Wisconsin or Michigan or Minnesota, like, you're not painting your house from...

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:00) In the winter. Yeah.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:34:02) October to April. Not a generally good time to do it. Even if there's a couple nice days in a row, it's still not nice and... It still gets below freezing at night and there's some, you know, limitations. You probably shouldn't paint your house then.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:34:15) So if we get somebody that wants it done in April, we're like, hey, we're gonna be starting in just a few weeks. So can you wait a couple weeks? Most of the time, customers can wait till our next season's open.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:27) Is this a nonprofit? How is it... What's the base funding for it?

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:34:31) Well, there's four general partners that founded the business, and they've been really generous in keeping it open. But there's been years where it wasn't super profitable. It is a for-profit business. Through that, they've grown other entities. So they've got a home improvement business that does $500 million a year in revenue, another commercial construction company that does a couple hundred million dollars a year in revenue.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:34:54) So fortunately for us, you know, being attached as, like, a family of businesses with shared ownership. In the off season, I mean, we're cash flow negative for nine months. And probably month 10, we recoup, you know, what we had spent in that nine months a little bit, and by month 11 and 12, we finally, you know, finished recouping and break profit. So I don't think most business models... Businesses would work like that, but we have other businesses that are making money year-round that help support it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:28) Well, in your pipeline. Right? I'm assuming some people go from CollegeWorks to those other businesses.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:35:33) Yes. Yeah. They do. Not a massive volume, but I'd say, you know, the initial people that started those businesses were all from CollegeWorks. And then they grew a life of their own, and they're non-college based, so they have plenty of employees that are, you know, year-round full-time adult employees.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:35:51) Oh...

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:52) Wait. The people that started those other businesses started at CollegeWorks?

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:35:56) Yeah. Oh, okay. Yep. So those are the ones that said, I am sick of working with college students. I wanna go do something else.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:36:04) And they're like, alright. Well, let's do it together. Let's start another thing together. So, yeah, those kind of spawned out of CollegeWorks.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:36:11) And I think that's something we'll probably continue to do. We've had... We've also had a little bit of a venture capital thing within our business. We invested in a few of our students that started businesses, and there were a couple successful exits. One of them started a real estate tech platform that eventually sold to realtor.com, and we had another start a T-shirt business.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:36:34) Sounds like T-shirts would be a pretty limited business, but it ended up being massive and very successful. So we've done a little bit of venture capital investing with our employees, but also they've started other companies too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:47) That is so cool. What a great experience. You just... You don't even need college. Just go to CollegeWorks.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:36:53) I mean...

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:53) I'm kidding. You have to be in college.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:36:55) I agree, but the amount of... That's so funny because I just got back from a trip this weekend, and, like, there are multiple people. There's probably 150 people on the trip. They're all our top performers, and I had probably four or five that came up to me at some point and said, hey, can I talk to you?

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:37:08) Like, yeah. What about? And it sounded kinda serious. I'm like, I don't know if I wanna stay in school. Yeah.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:37:13) And I'm the one that, like, convinces them every time to, like, just get it done. Like, I know you don't want to and you don't think you need to. Like, your parents are gonna kill me if I don't tell you to stay, so just get the degree. Just take steps...

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:28) Or not. The truth, Sean. That's the truth. The parents are gonna destroy you if you're like, no. Obviously, you see how business transacts, go out into the marketplace, and crush it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:37) You can't, but you can't do that. You might want to, but you can't.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:37:41) Yeah. Yep. And I mean, I did, I followed my own advice. I finished. I went to my adviser, and I said, hey.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:37:48) I don't think I wanna be an accounting major anymore because I'm not gonna go work for the Big Four, but I wanna get a degree. So just what can I change my degree to that gets me out of here as fast as possible? And then I went and took, you know, six credit hours over the summer at a community college. I took a couple night classes while I was working full-time, and I just got those last, like, 30 credits eventually knocked out so I could get the diploma.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:38:13) But, um, and I'm all for that. I, you know, I think it's probably fine. There are a...

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:20) It's probably fine.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:38:22) To just get it done. You know? It's not gonna hold you back that much. There's a few I've had that really truly are like, I'm done. You know, I'm dropping out.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:38:29) There's nothing you can say to convince me otherwise, and they've done really, really well. I think it's the type of person who will fight back against the advice. You know? The person who, like, you can't talk me out of it. I'm not gonna finish school.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:38:43) They're gonna be fine. Yeah. Because they're so convicted. You're exactly right. So determined.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:38:48) Yep. 100%. I'm worried about my second grader this summer. He's... Every week of the summer, he would just be in the backyard playing or something and stare off into space.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:38:57) And I'm like, yeah. What are you thinking about, Ezra? He's like, how many weeks this summer, Dad? And then we have these long dramatic pauses. I'm like, well, you got about eight more weeks this summer.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:39:06) He's like, and then how many weeks is school? Like, there's about 40 weeks. And he would just shake his head and be like, I can't do that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:18) Do you home... You don't homeschool or do you homeschool or no?

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:39:21) I don't. He goes, how many years is that? And I was like, well, if you stay through high school, you know, which you're probably gonna wanna do, you're gonna be 18. And he's seven. He's like, Dad, that's twice my life plus four years.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:39:37) There's no way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:39) Ezra's gonna be fine. He's gonna do very well.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:39:42) He is gonna do great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:43) Yeah. That is great. That is very insightful. We homeschool our kids, and we let them go to school. They asked us to go to school last year, and so we said, okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:54) But the deal is if we enroll you, you have to go for the complete year. And they were so excited. They're like, by month two, they were like, pull us out, please. Don't make us complete. They don't let us do what we wanna do all day.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:05) They don't let us learn what we wanna learn. And I'm like, I know. This is why. But you have to let them go. Otherwise, they're not gonna...

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:13) But then we moved them back. They completed the year, reluctantly, a lot of difficult mornings. But then this year, they're back at homeschool, and they're just so happy. And so, yeah, I love getting to spend time with them.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:40:27) We are big on, uh, travel, you know, and learning through experience. And so they've been to probably 35 states and probably 30 national parks. And it's great when they get to those sections in school. So, you know, sixth grader come home and like, what did you learn about today? He's like, oh, nothing.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:40:45) They're trying to talk about whales in science class. And I was explaining to him that, you know, an orca whale has an extra part of their brain that communicates emotions and, you know, nobody knew anything about it. They didn't even know that there was a difference between southern resident orcas and Bigg's orcas, Dad. And it's like he learned all that, you know, watching documentaries and going to Seattle and checking out whales. Yeah.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:41:10) So the... I have a dream of pulling them out for one year and doing a road trip, you know, year... A year around the country. So, hopefully, we get to do that because I think it'll be much more valuable experience than just sitting in school.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:23) Dude, we did that. You did? Yeah. We bought an RV. We sold the house, and we traveled the country for a year, went to all the parks, all the big things, and homeschooled them the entire time.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:41:33) Wow. Alright. I'm gonna have to get some notes after the show because that's... Yeah. So I...

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:41:37) While I do it, I wanna do, you know, I saw James Lawrence. I mentioned him earlier on the show. I wanna start 50 businesses in 50 states in 50 weeks, and just each week in a new state, start a business. And I think there's a lot of entrepreneurship content in the world, but a lot of it is existing businesses. You know, Shark Tank is investing in an existing business, and The Profit with Marcus Lemonis or those restaurant impossible bar rescue type shows.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:42:05) There's nothing that's like starting a business. So I wanna, you know, basically produce content and show people how easy it is to start a business.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:13) Yeah. You know who should back that? Grant Cardone.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:42:17) Be great. Yeah. I'll take anyone to back it. QuickBooks wants to be a sponsor. You know, whoever's out there listening wants to sponsor my journey.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:27) 50 businesses, 50 weeks, 50 states.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:42:30) Yeah. And each one has to be a new business, and they have to, you know, actually exist. Like, we'll do... You know, how do you start a kayak rental business in Florida? How do you start a barber shop in Georgia?

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:43) So you're gonna, like, go on Craigslist, buy a kayak, post the kayak rental. You're just gonna create these small businesses.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:42:51) I saw my dad start a business when I was in middle school, and I think it was about two years of, while he was still employed somewhere working on his business. And some of the things that, you know, were really serious to him at the time were, like, you know, what's my logo gonna look like, and what am I gonna call it? And you eventually figure out that, like, those aren't really that big of a deal. Right? Those are so unimportant.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:43:14) You just need customers, and you need an employee, and you need to figure it out as you go. You're not gonna design the perfect marketing copy, you know, before you launch the business. You're gonna launch the business and then go try a bunch of marketing copy and see what works. And so to kinda get over that, like, all that fear of the unknown and fear of starting, I want it to be like, hey, Monday, we have the LLC, the EIN, the bank account, the insurance, like, the domain, like, we're going.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:43:44) And Tuesday, you know, we've hired the kayak rental entrepreneur... The, you know, manager that's gonna manage this area. And then second thing on top of that, you know, I think there's so many different resources in every ecosystem, and I'm really familiar with Kansas City. I know where all the investment opportunities are and the different entrepreneurship events that take place throughout each week and month and, you know, what the ecosystem looks like here.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:44:11) But I don't know what it looks like in Idaho or, you know, New Hampshire. And so I think just putting that all in one place, showing people, and being very transparent with what's the actual, like, financials of this. I think it could be really, really cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:29) Well, just go talk to the... You got your people through CollegeWorks? Yeah. They got money. Pitch it.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:44:37) Yeah. I need to fully commit and pitch and start.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:40) I think it's good. I think it's interesting. Even if you scaled it back to 12 businesses, 12 states, 12 months or something. But...

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:44:48) Oh, no. We gotta do the whole thing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:49) You gotta do the whole thing. But... Yeah.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:44:51) You don't...

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:51) Yeah. I think that's interesting. And yeah, let me... I would follow that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:56) I would watch some... Yeah. That could be a little miniseries on reels or something. People would watch that. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:06) I'm tired of hearing people talk about it. I wanna see people do it. Everyone's like, oh, I talk about it. We walk up to the guy in the Ferrari. How'd you do it?

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:14) Give me the three bullet points in 90 seconds. It's like, yeah. Yeah. Okay. It's all the same.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:18) I wanna see someone do it. I wanna see someone in the weeds. I wanna see someone go up against, like, have, you know, zero, a blank slate. That's what I wanna see.

(Sean (President of CollegeWorks) at 00:45:28) We'll get it going.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:31) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email: [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.