
This is software (AWS) generated transcription and it is not perfect.
Well, my story is probably a little bit different than most. I mean, I came out of school thinking I was going to be a banker for most of my life, started off in investment banking. But I went to work for a large multinational bank within just a few months after I started the bank experience significant problems in fact, within a year it was close to bankruptcy, so that time was somewhat scary but it's been a great opportunity because head started a role and people needed to make a change that opportunity for those who work hard and try to do a good job so that allowed me to progress very rapidly through the bank and become one of the senior executives over a short period of time, which then led me to be able to move my career to a different direction. I went to work with one of my customers as their CFO. Later, that company became a public company, really set a lot of the stage for what I ended up being in life. If I try to summarize kind of what that all means, I think you just really need to set your priorities like what is it that you want to be and what is it you want to do. There is an old saying, "If you really pick something in life that you like, you really will never have to work a day in your life because it'll really be fun the whole time". It's important, though, throughout my career I noticed to really trying new things to imagine and to take the risk. You're just going to day after day, come and do the same thing and work for someone else, but creative people will notice that creativity and that imagination and it will make a difference in your life now sometimes it will not work out for you. I mean, you don't take risks and don't make mistakes then you won't learn from them. I think it's really key that you try to enjoy the journey, enjoy what you do and try to not focus on results, which is a lot of times what your boss wants you to do but focus on learning, focus on your own personal growth and venture that results in good results, great outcomes that's my background. I don't know how much more detail you'd like me to go into and after that, I worked for a public company. That company, eventually sold to another public company. And today I started my own business and now have nine businesses that we run in various different fields. So it is all based upon the things you learn and the things you strive to do all the time.
Like I mentioned, I've worked for multinational Fortune 50 companies where my decisions affected thousands of our customers. Today I work for a relatively small business. Today, my career changes significantly that now Best Business Services has about 20 employees at all. So going from a company that had three four five thousand employees to a company that only has 30, the breadth of your responsibilities is much different. I don't just handle the strategic decisions as I did as the CEO of the public company, I handle day to day decisions. People will need help if a truck is broken, we may have to go out and fix it ourselves or tow it in so it's a lot different for a small business. At the same time, the company itself is mostly bookkeeping in various administrative functions for other companies. So I'm constantly out talking to people trying to get new business and try to find new clients for us to be able to work with. It's interesting because at different times in my career I've put in over 100 hours a week working and sometimes now as the boss and the owner, I only put in 10 hours in a given week. If you get the right people working for you then there is no real reason for me to go in and get in their way. I need to let them do their job. So work depends upon what you're striving to accomplish and how much you're trying to learn and at this point, I'm of a mentor than the person trying to learn new things. I travel a lot, I travel probably ten days a month. I'm going all over the place, not just in this state, but throughout the country and even internationally, I do a lot of my work traveling because due to modern technology there is no reason to be in the office. So a lot of that work is done while I'm traveling and I do a lot of it at home. I actually only come to the office for about two days a week. All the rest I work I do is there on the road or at home.
We use to have a test so that we give potential employees to just make sure their skill base is there, what they profess to be, they actually are and they've got the necessary skills to be there. After that, I like to interview people myself in person. I'm really looking for long term potential and while ambition can be both a plus and a minus, I'm really looking for people that want to move forward and want to become something more than they are today, want to learn, want to grow of enthusiasm and passion for what their own past experience has been, but also what they feel they can do for our business. I look for people that fit in our company that, understand what our culture is and how we work, that they feel that they fit in and likewise, we feel they fit in because if not they aren't here for very long and that employee hiring costs tend to be one of the difficult things we work with and the response to my questions is there's no right or wrong answer, but just how they think through the question that's kind of what I look for the most. I don't do when they're interviewing me any kind of skill-based questions like I say we test them beforehand, make sure that there it's really just to see how they think and what they're planning to do in the future.