How Much Should You Pay Your Employees? A Deep Dive into Compensation Strategies with Cary Sparrow

Discover the power of data in reshaping the labor market with Cary Sparrow, founder and CEO of Wagescape. Our enlightening conversation takes you on Cary's intriguing journey from his early days as a computer geek to his transformational role in the U.S Navy, and ultimately, into the corporate world. Cary divulges the inspiration behind Wagescape's mission to centralize and normalize labor market data, a game-changing approach that is not only propelling business decisions forward but also innovating global HR processes. Witness firsthand how Cary's passion for structured data is revolutionizing the way workforce management is perceived and implemented.

Peel back the curtain on the often cloudy realm of compensation and employee benefits with us. Cary and I tackle the push for greater transparency within the corporate sphere, assessing the ripple effects of this trend on everything from legal compliance to crafting compelling compensation packages that marry employee aspirations with the company's ethos. We shed light on the pivotal role of non-cash benefits and intrinsic rewards in attracting talent, emphasizing the necessity for businesses to stay ahead of the curve in a job market that's perpetually in flux.

The world of work is evolving, and our discussion steers towards the tides of change washing over traditional office models. We analyze the burgeoning topics of wage inflation and unemployment, and dissect the transformative influence of remote work on employee and employer expectations alike. Cary offers invaluable insights from Wagescape's playbook on leveraging flexible work arrangements and global teams. Tune in to unearth strategies that ensure your company remains competitive, adaptive, and forward-thinking in a post-pandemic landscape where office spaces are no longer just physical, but a concept being redefined by innovation and necessity.

How can the guests contact?  website, email, social?

Website: https://wagescape.com/wagescape/

Twitter (X): https://twitter.com/GreenwichHR

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/wagescape-1/

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The Digital Revolution Podcast
Welcome to The Digital Revolution Podcast, where marketing experts share their expertise.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:41

Welcome everyone to the Firing the man podcast, a show for anyone who wants to be their own boss. If you sit in a cubicle every day and know you are capable of more, then join us. This show will help you build a business and grow your passive income streams in just a few short hours per day. And now your host serial entrepreneurs David Shomer and Ken Wilson.

Speaker 2: 1:06

Welcome everyone to the Firing the man podcast. On today's episode, we have the privilege to interview Keri Sparrow. Keri is the founder and CEO of Wagescape, where they provide developers, analysts and consulting firms with access to the world's largest, most up-to-date labor market data collection. This makes the labor market more transparent, opening the doors to tremendous efficiencies in world-changing innovation. The Wagescape team takes a serious and impactful approach to tackling big market issues, providing the best data to drive the best decisions and help businesses succeed in an $80 trillion market. Sparrow is a former US Navy submarine officer, having served on several nuclear submarines. He has combined 35-plus years of engineering, military consulting and operations leadership in achieving organizational growth within HR, it, engineering and technology verticals. As the CEO of Wagescape, serving clients and building outstanding partnerships and meaningful relationships is the best part of the job for Keri. Keri is ready to continue sharing unique insights on current trends in the labor market, including hiring A in compensation for talent. He's excited about helping CXOs, tech leaders as well as HR professionals, create solutions to focus on growth and innovation. Very excited to have Keri on the show today. Welcome, keri. Hey, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me on. Absolutely, to start things off, can you share with our audience a little bit about yourself and path to becoming the founder and CEO of Wagescape?

Speaker 3: 2:42

Yeah, it's a very unusual path. I could have never predicted this career when it was all starting out. I have always been a geek at heart. I fell in love with computers back before the PC actually came out a long time ago and then went to school for computer engineering. Along the way I got involved, I was in the Navy, as you said. I got involved in consulting All kinds of stuff that had nothing to do with computer engineering. When I got a chance to found Wagescape, I was back in my roots and really designing a pretty powerful next generation kind of big data company uses a lot of great technology to do that A lot of pretty advanced data engineering along the way. It was an unusual path. I studied computer engineering in school. The Navy paid for my college. I got into the Navy right out of college. I was in submarines, which involved no building of computers. The PC revolution was in full swing. By the time I got out of the Navy all of my knowledge was practically obsolete. I got into management consulting. That took me further away from anything related to engineering. We did a lot of analysis though, a lot of really innovative and analytic approaches. I got on the corporate side a lot of leadership around building global capabilities, global technology and process and organization capabilities Always had an eye towards. Where is there something that other people aren't seeing? Where is there a business opportunity? Where is there something cool that nobody recognizes yet? How can we connect dots A through F in ways that people haven't really done before? I saw that opportunity with what's going on with data around pay and hiring and so forth, which, believe it or not, it sounds like a really geeky topic. There's so many things in the world that depend on knowing what's going on with jobs and pay that we don't even necessarily even think about it. I got a front row seat to just how bad that data is, where it comes from, all the weaknesses in it and where there were better ways to do things. Finally, it all came together with a view of I think I can make a business out of this, and that was in 2015. Here I am eight and a half years later and Wavescape is a going concern and we're moving up and to the right, the way you should be. I have a friend who calls it a purple squirrel career. It's just that, something you see every day.

Speaker 4: 4:58

Thanks for sharing. That's awesome. I'm excited to dig in and learn more. For starters, can you share what inspired you to found Wavescape and also why would you want to get into compensation management? What fascinated you with that?

Speaker 3: 5:14

I had the opportunity to work with a couple literally a couple hundred different companies in my career in consulting and then, when I was on the corporate side, I worked for a very large corporation that had about 70 different businesses worldwide in about 70 different countries. My task when I got there was to create a global infrastructure for workforce manager All the HR systems and processes, the organization structures support that everything you need basically to create a state of the art global HR capability. I sat on the HR and IT leadership teams to do that and came to the realization pretty quickly that the biggest bottleneck for us was not going to be the technology, because the technology had advanced. This was back when the cloud was relatively new, but HR had moved into the cloud pretty early in that process. It was not going to be processes. The processes were pretty well understood. It wasn't going to be the organization. It was going to be the data Data that was literally an uncountable number of places coming in from an uncountable number of sources. That was not structured in a way that what people call a lawyer actually means totally different things. If you want to understand what the opportunities are to advance people in a law degree or you want to understand your own employee base that have legal related jobs, you can't count on the data that is locally used. In order to tell you that, we had to go through this big, huge process to basically normalize our view of the world, I realized that when you take data that's starting in very disparate places and you provide a common lens to look at it and then you put it all in a common place, that amazing things start to happen. Just using my own company, my prior corporation, as an example, we went from roughly a couple of tiny labor market representing pieces of the organization all over the world to, in a lot of cases, a common labor market around the world, which allows you to see talent opportunities and career opportunities and competitive opportunities in a totally different way, much more powerful way. It allows you to manage things very, very differently. You may have lots of different skills that you didn't even know existed that now you've got visibility to. When you do that, the fundamental principle was bring transparency to a fragmented labor market with really bad information, and amazing things happen. I started talking about this with our consultants and our technology partners saying, hey, the same thing is happening, writ large, for corporations all over the world. You've got systems that are now moving into the cloud with not a tiny number of providers, but a much smaller number of technology providers that had existed previously. The data is all starting to move under a smaller number of groups. We just prove normalizing that data to a common vocabulary is a completely possible thing. I started asking folks with that said what kind of innovations do you guys work? What kinds of things, whatever, are you guys working on that we should be thinking about at this company and building into our plans? And to a person they all looked at me like I had horns grown on a head. They just did not see the opportunity. It's not the way that they were used to innovating. The area of comp in particular was, I thought, very poignant, because the way that pay data is collected and managed and evaluated is really, I think, very much. It has been very out of date, it's very late, it's very difficult to do, it's extremely imprecise, it's not very actionable and there's a lot of science that's built around it that, when you get right down to it, the underlying sources of data don't support. I saw stuff going online. I saw lots of different ways to do things and took the opportunity and did it. I went out and found it. What? What became a wage scape and built a whole approach around understanding what's happening with pay and hiring in the marketplace. That hadn't been done before. Others have gone down that path since then, but not at the scale that we do it. As a result, some of the things I'll just talk a little bit about what we do. Some of the things that we do are we collect a massive amount of data from online sources. I'll use the US as an example. We collect data from about 57 different countries, but in the US every day, take a snapshot of every job that's open for hire. That represents about 85% and sometimes 90%. It's higher market for new jobs in the US. It's a massive sample size that's updated every day. Now it's real time and it's highly precise. It's really well documented so you can identify not just what jobs and who's hiring, but what skills are they looking for and so forth. We're able to get the pay on those right. About 70% of the time Over half of the economy. We're able to figure out to the individual job level what the likely pay is. It's a little bit like measuring sticker price versus actual price, because we're measuring what companies are expecting to pay, not actually what they negotiate ultimately, but it's still an amazingly the real time, highly precise, forward looking indicator of what's going on with pay. That was the proposition. We had a number of clients when we launched in 2016. Our early clients were very much leading edge early adopters big consulting firms, big corporations, investment funds, mortgage funds that do quantitative trading, that we're looking at at hiring as a signal for management's outlook on the business, which is pretty powerful signal. Then, when the pandemic happened, the labor market just went completely out of bounds. You had wage inflation that we'd never seen before and hiring practices that just went crazy. You had remote work, you had the great resignation, you had all the COVID restrictions just a ton of things Everybody. If you think back to 2020, 2021, when people were talking about, I mean, there was all kinds of confusing messages there's no talent out there. Well, actually, there's a lot of talent out there. There's a ton of talent, but they're all lazy. No, actually, there's a lot of people that are not. There's the great resignation, but a ton of people are back at work and unemployment rate is headed really, really well. Again, it was very, very confusing. Everybody that was a supposed expert in the field was making fun of based on their own experience. We were sitting on top of the data of what was actually happening. We reached a really big inflection point in the company where before we had just sold our data as a service, we sold it to people that turned it into products and services that applications are consulting or decision support that they monetized. We realized we were sitting on something that lots more people needed to see. We watched a sass line of applications that's since done really well. The market's pretty favorable to us right now. I got a little bit off topic there, but that's a bit about what we do.

Speaker 4: 11:39

Yeah, no worries. No, that was in depth. One follow-up question on that is I've had several jobs in corporate America bouncing around being an IT and engineering, and so there's at least my experience has been there's been a lot of smoke and mirrors on the comp side and so on the corporate side is that? Do you see that as like they're holding the recipe tied to them? Or I mean, what is the number one reason that you see that where it's not as transparent?

Speaker 3: 12:05

Number one. It goes even beyond kind of corporate versus job seekers and employees Within corporations comp teams. The people who manage compensation policies, who set up compensation processes for handling how much you get as a raise every year and what your bonuses, are the people who own all that process. They're sitting on top of the market's data for what different jobs get paid. They hold that data very closely to the vest. In general the recruiters the ones who have to actually work with hiring managers to define kind of an offer range and inform hiring managers of what's going on in a specific market for a specific job. They need to know that stuff too, but they don't talk with the folks in compensation at a level of detail that allows for that and I'm over generalizing a little bit here, but not much. And so even within corporations there's a lot of lack of transparency, and then the whole kind of paid transparency movement that started a couple of years ago is picking up steam. So I think right now almost half the states either have laws in place or have laws that are going to be in place that require some degree of external transparency and internal transparency around pay ranges for certain jobs, not transparency like you got to share what every single person is making. It's more like what are the ranges that people are actually making for the jobs, and that those in a lot of cases need to be communicated to job seekers too, and so they've never had to deal with this. Corporations have never had to deal with this before, and there's some anecdotes about people kind of trying to do workarounds by presenting really broad ranges, and those are exactly what I said. They're anecdotes, they're actually not not truth. Most companies are trying to be much more responsible at presenting ranges when they're hiring folks. That are reasonable ranges. They're still pretty broad, but they're their reason and a lot of companies are having to adapt to that. But the main reason that they're having to adapt to it is not because the laws are changing. I mean that's providing an impetus. Sure, the job seekers requirements that actually preceded kind of the law changes, and so if you're publishing job ads now and you're not putting a pay range in, then you're at a pretty significant disadvantage for finding the talent that you need, because folks want to know what they're going to be making for a job. And if you put in a range that's too broad and you don't explain what's going to influence where an offer is going to be in that range, then you're also not going to be converting candidates, because in general, people will assume that if they're qualified for the job, they will come in somewhere in the top half of the range, and that's just kind of proven again and again. And so companies are really having to change their whole approach on this and it's not going to get any easier. In fact it's going to get a lot tougher, because now you've got not only pay equity but you've got kind of social equity considerations and so forth, and there's a lot of folks like us who are taking advantage of information that's already outpackaging in a way that's easy to understand and easy to dive into, and a lot of corporations, I think, are not necessarily ready for that quite yet. Like the first thing that any company that talks to us about using our data, the very first thing that they will do, is they'll look up their own data on their own jobs, and in a lot of cases they had no idea that what we're able to find out about them existed. So we can tell you by location, by job, what the ranges are and what the expected pay is in the vast majority of cases, and that's something that's really never been available at that level of detail before. Folks weren't trained to expect it. So there is its attention, but there's definitely a trend towards more transparency, and pay is just one of those areas. When you get into hiring, it's even more jarring, I think, when it's going to be visible what people are doing in terms of gender or ethnicity-based hiring and advancements stuff that nobody wants to share but is actually already out there, if you know where to look. How well did I answer your question, did I?

Speaker 2: 15:53

get it what you were getting at.

Speaker 4: 15:54

Yes.

Speaker 2: 15:55

One thing that Ken and I are faced with every year as we're reviewing our own compensation for our own team and I think probably a lot of entrepreneurs run into is what type of compensation do our employees want? Right, you've got your hourly wage, you've got salaried positions, you have paid time off, you have contributions to a 401k, you have medical insurance in addition to hourly or salaried rate. There's a lot of extras that people need to make a decision on, and so I'm curious what would be your recommendation to an entrepreneur, say, with three to 10 employees on? You know, if their goal is to hire top talent and retain top talent, what do people care about? Is it just cap cash compensation, or where do these other things fall into place in terms of priorities?

Speaker 3: 16:40

So there's lots of different ways that you can structure a deal that's going to get you the kind of talent that you need in order to be successful. So a lot of it is going back to first principles. When you're that, if we're talking about a small startup, then you really want to bring in people that are going to bring who's interests are aligned with yours. In a lot of cases, the opportunities there are. There's a threshold level of compensation that's required, usually on the base side. There's too much volatility in terms of the outlook of the company to really have a strong and reliable incentive plan in place when you're dealing with that number of folks. Some folks do it if they've been around for a while, but they're not growing real fast. But if you're growing, then really the nature of the deal is around. What are the intrinsic benefits for the employees themselves? Are they aligned with your vision? Are they aligned with the opportunity to get in and contribute with something from the ground floor? It's more of the intangibles than the rewards. You have to be aware of what's going on in the market for non-cash benefits, though You've got to know what if you're in the market for developers or marketing people or even administrative staff. What are their other options going to look like, because you're competing with lots of different companies. When the pandemic happens, nobody really paid attention to pushing what their benefits and their non-base incentives were. Literally within about four months after lockdowns happened, we saw the number of job listings that were emphasizing non-base compensation so even health insurance and life insurance and time off and things like that went from about 4% of all job ads before the pandemic to over 20%, and that proportion has continued to go up. So it's absolutely something that if you have a benefits program, you want to lean into it as a source of advantage. But when you're a small scrappy startup that's working to carve your way into an itch or you're working to go from that initial foothold to real strong growth, you got to make sure that you got a team around you that's aligned with the overall vision and that, as long as you're meeting the threshold level of compensation, everything else is secondary to that.

Speaker 2: 18:52

I have a follow-up question that relates to aligning your interests with employees, and that's been something that we've discussed internally. Yes, at the end of the day, as a business owner, we're interested in generating that income, and so if we were to align an employee's compensation with net income, that would be perfectly aligned. However, there are a lot of managerial decisions that are things that are out of their control, that are not in line with net income. Good, that could things that could cause net income to plummet, and so I'm curious have you seen any compensation systems that do this really well, that align interests of the owners of the company with the employees, and how is that structured?

Speaker 3: 19:30

Yeah, so I have. I've seen, you know, a number of organizations that have worked with that. My former consulting firm, I thought, actually did a really good job of this where there was a portion of compensation which was around your direct contribution to the financial performance of the company. So to the extent that you're in a revenue generating or a cost saving or cost management role, there's a component of that. There was a component that related to and agreed upon set of goals and objectives that were developed in a manner that supported the company's strategy. So presumably you know, if you're meeting those, then the strategy execution is going well, and so it was more of an indirect effect there, but it was directly applicable at an individual level. And then there also was a component of compensation which was based on the overall financial performance to the company. And so this multi-dimensional approach that emphasizes that, doesn't leave out company financial performance, but also builds in things that employees have direct responsibility for that are defined in a way that supports the priorities you know leadership priorities, I think works, can work really well as long as leaders are able to kind of effectively manage that way.

Speaker 4: 21:17

So, kerry, you guys are managing a ton of data and so in Wedscape emphasizes transparency and compensation. So how do you navigate the sensitivity and challenges associated with transparency while also respecting privacy and confidentiality?

Speaker 3: 21:31

Yeah, so we're transparent around jobs that companies are hiring for right, and so we never publish anything that's related to an individual, which is where all the privacy concerns are your personal pay, for example. We don't track that. If you put your career profile online like, and without naming names, some of the big places where you can put your career history online that lots of people use, and you give permission for it to be visible publicly, even to people outside of that system, that data is getting picked up, but you've already given permission for it to be exposed and so we have access to that. But there's no pay data there. And all of these things, presumably, are aligned with the interests of the people sharing the information. For individuals that are sharing their career histories, they're making themselves available for people that are looking for hiring or networking with people with similar backgrounds and interests. For the companies themselves, all of the data that we collect starts in the public domain. These are advertisements, and so there's absolutely no right to privacy around those because they've already been released to the public domain. So this was a design decision for the business. When I started it, I was very, very specific that I did not want to get into the business of managing private individual information. I just didn't want to do. It gets into a gray area or has a lots of overhead that goes with that. Interestingly enough, there's two parts where the sensitivity comes in. One is within companies. They may see that they're sharing information on individual jobs, but they don't see how all of that creates an overall picture, a very complete picture, of what's going on, and initially that was a little uncomfortable I think it still is for some but folks are starting to get over it. So that's what. And then the other area is around what is truth and this is true, for anyone who's in the analytics field knows what I'm about to talk about which is when you use data to put together a view of what's happening in the world and to define your choices from a decision standpoint. A lot of times, if that data hasn't been available before, you've been managing by anecdotes and by strength of personality of the leaders that are involved. In some cases, that view, that database view of the world, is very welcome, and in other cases it's very, very uncomfortable. And so there's a real tension there that transparency causes in terms of how do you deal with situations where a version of the truth that's grounded in data that's credibly resourced is different than the notion of truth that exists within companies or within specific leaders heads, and that, frankly, is a skill that anyone in the analytics fields needs to develop in terms of how to navigate that. I bet I could go on with lots of Darnatica. I've seen extraordinarily important studies that looked at things like questions like why do we keep losing women on the way throughout their career to get to the top leadership level? We have strong recruiting programs, but they just are not getting into top leadership levels. I've seen studies that looked at that and evaluated okay, where are they falling out? And that very clearly highlighted where the problems that, with focused attention, could be addressed in a very meaningful way To totally shell those things. Totally shell because they surfaced truths that were just too uncommon for leadership to deal with. You talked about privacy considerations and we're not so much in. We've made a choice not to deal with data that crosses that line, but we still have to deal with very significant considerations related to the applications of transparency and they have more to do with organizational and leadership considerations.

Speaker 4: 25:12

So you're good at tap dancing when you have to.

Speaker 3: 25:15

Yeah, kind of, and there's a number of things. You can't just start with the answer. Anyone who is going to bring a recommendation forward or bring an insight forward can't just start with the answer. Obviously, you have to kind of go back and forth between the answer and then how it was developed and where the data came from, and you have to establish the credibility for the source of the data, the process that you used, then the answer and the conclusion that you get from it. And a lot of folks are just focused on the answers and the vast majority of cases, that doesn't do it.

Speaker 2: 25:43

In your experience, what are some of the most common misconceptions or challenges that organizations face when it comes to managing or communicating employee compensation effectively?

Speaker 3: 25:54

So, most recently, the biggest misconception is what market? I'll use market terms, economics terms, but there's simpler terms to use but what market is an employee in right? So lately you may think of like I'm on the board for my son's school and looking at what teachers get paid which, by the way, is abysmally low when it has been, does not give you the information that you need in order to retain and attract and create a fulfilling career for your teachers, because their options are not to go to a school down the road that pays a little bit more or has a different benefits rank. Their options now are more about changing careers entirely to go to someplace that is also fulfilling, but it's a different career that happens to pay notably more, and so a lot of companies get locked into this view of we have to measure we only measure pay for exactly the jobs that we have, and that's going to tell us what we need to do in order to retain employees. And there was a client of ours that was a recruit firm for medium-sized companies and one of their clients was a owned a number of machine shops in the Midwest and this was back maybe three years ago. They're starting. Pay for spot welders had been $15 an hour and this was that. And then they were starting to see that some places were starting to offer more than that and they wanted to know what to pay. And I'm like, I just drove through a fast food place today and their starting pay for full-time day shift workers was $16.50. Okay, so if you think that you're going to get people to come into a machine shop environment that's a decently skilled environment and pay them what they could get working at the window in a quick service restaurant, that's not who you're competing with, and so your past, you know. Your view of kind of what business you're in as it relates to the topic that you need has largely been turned on its head for lots of different kinds of positions now, because, with low unemployment and with wage inflation that's now started to settle down, but it was really high for the last couple of years and with the ability of folks to go and choose lots of different career options because there's lots more market transparency, you have to fundamentally rethink what market you're in for talent and you've got to have a much broader perspective. You've got to have better information sources around that. Folks that are thinking that they're going to go back to just kind of managing the way that they did back prior to 2020, I think are not going to be very effective with that point of view.

Speaker 2: 28:22

One follow-up question to that what would be your advice to entrepreneurs that are again and I keep framing this as a small startup company and the reason is that it's us and most of our listeners but for good compensation hygiene. How often are they looking at compensation? How often are they comparing things to the market? How often are they communicating compensation things to their employees? What would be good compensation hygiene there?

Speaker 3: 28:48

You know, I'm fortunate enough, I guess you'd say, to work in a company where we do that every day. Right, because that's our business. But I would say that it's more frequent than what you've done in the past. If you're used to working on an annual cycle, that's not going to be good enough. Having conversations about what's going on with wage inflation, what's going on with unemployment, should be part of a leadership discussion, at least on a quarterly basis, if not more frequently. If you've got hourly workers or you've got skilled workers that are what we would call pay sensitive, meaning that relatively small changes in pay they will take job somewhere else then you need to be watching it constantly and having conversations about what that means constantly. And it's not enough to just say originally here's the latest kind of programmers, they're getting paid. Or here's somebody with an omni-channel marketing capability. It's not enough to do that anymore. You have to be able to say here's what it looks like in my specific markets. Or if you're in a market, it's not enough to say here's what if you are based out of Milwaukee, it's not enough to know what's going on in Milwaukee, because your own talent is getting recruited by people all over the country and in fact outside of the US as well, and so you've got to have a broader perspective on that. So the conversations now are more frequent, and the frequency depends on how sensitive your employees are to their pay levels and how much you're growing, because if you set a starting rate a year ago for a certain kind of job that is way out of date, you've got to be evaluating it at least on a quarterly basis. What's going on?

Speaker 1: 30:17

there.

Speaker 3: 30:18

And you've got to be looking beyond the vices that your locator did, because every one of your employees is getting recruited constantly Everyone.

Speaker 4: 30:26

One kind of follow up on that, kerry, you mentioned, for example, a marketing specialist in Milwaukee is getting recruited by companies all over the country and so prior to the pandemic, people who did move make those big moves for big jumps, big promotions. But pandemic kind of just basically level set everything and so now it enabled corporations to go lightning fast with remote work and connections everywhere were ubiquitous. How has that changed now that companies are like there's not really locations? I mean there are, but if a lot of companies allow fully remote work and so how has that really changed the landscape in the last couple of years?

Speaker 3: 31:04

So right after the pandemic because we track which jobs are remote or hybrid and which ones are not right after the pandemic it reached kind of a high watermark about a year in where about two thirds of jobs, across all jobs, were being offered as remote or hybrid. That has since come down to less than about a quarter, so it's come back a little bit. But the notion that employees can be productive while working remote, the notion that employees themselves get a lot more out of a job or there's a lot of costs that they had been bearing previously, either financial or otherwise, by having to go in the office, that they don't necessarily have to put up with anymore if they can work effectively remotely, those are givens now. Those have been proven out, even though it seems like we doesn't go by where there's not another CEO saying I want to bring everybody back in the office. I personally am of the belief that you're never going to get that horse back in that bar. I mean, really, if you were intent on building a business or re-establishing your business that requires employees to build in a commute time, building gas time, building wardrobe time, take away their flexibility around childcare or elder care or anything else that's going on in their lives and you expect to be able to compete with all the other companies that are providing that degree of flexibility to their employees. I don't think that's going to work. I don't see companies just remaining competitive by taking a hard line on that. I don't think it's happening. Plus, in the last four years, there are new businesses forming all the time. There are probably a couple of million businesses that, most of which are small but some of which have grown very fast that have started an entirely virtual environment. Those folks have figured out. They've built entire business models around not having an in-office approach. My company I had the experience of working with global teams before I ever founded Wagescape. I always had the view of first of all, why would I pay rent when that's just money that could be going somewhere else if I don't have to? Secondly, why would I only work for talent here in Minneapolis, which is where I'm based, when I could look around the world? I have developers all over the world. My team is spread in about 14 different cities in about nine different countries. Why would I set up a business with those kinds of constraints? I think more and more people are recognizing that if you can manage that degree of flexibility, then there's a lot of power that comes with it. There's no question, though, that it's come back a little bit. People are putting more in-office requirements on jobs, but I don't think it's ever going to get anywhere close to what it was. In fact, I think it wouldn't surprise me if it doesn't swing back the other way.

Speaker 4: 33:36

Yeah, I would say it'd probably go back once the data's settled in, because the company's also saved a ton of money on lease and rent and everything.

Speaker 3: 33:45

With all of that, I got to tell you, if you go into the C-suite and you say our lease is coming up for tens or hundreds of millions of dollars or we can take advantage of the fact that a lot of our workers are working remotely and rationalize that space and save all that money, which argument you think is going to win? In the majority of cases you just go into any city now because they're all working through it now. Those leases that had been signed right before the pandemic are all now working out and companies are rationalizing their office space and have been for a couple years now. It's a pretty powerful argument.

Speaker 4: 34:17

Kerry, let's chat Wayscape a little bit. Can you share a couple of success stories or examples where platform has significantly benefited both an employer and an employee?

Speaker 3: 34:27

There's a couple. Keep in mind that our data gets used not just for things like hiring and pay, but also gets used for other kinds of decisions too. One of our early clients is one of the biggest retailers in the world. They use our data to understand what their competitors are paying at very local levels for basically four-level retail jobs. They always want to stay super competitive on that. Their whole wage strategy has moved pay up as a result of that, having that degree of visibility, whereas before they had to go based off of the anecdote and the raw judgment of folks at a local level. This one, where maintaining pay and step with to be competitive was absolutely an outcome there that benefited employees. Being able to keep the talent that they need and attract the talent that they need as well, with much shorter cycle times, benefited the company. Overall, they've been one of our best clients. There's another example, though. This is a company that's in the financial services space where they use our data in a product that allows retail investors people like you and me that invest in the stock market we have any money to do that as an indicator of what the business outlook for companies that trade their stocks is, and so this is another one where that product has been out for about four years now and it's been benefited and ordinary investors as well as the company that provides that service. So, okay, there's a variety of those. I would say that, in general, more competitive pay practices benefit everybody.

Speaker 4: 36:03

No, that's excellent. Yeah, I would agree. Well, cool. So, kari, every guest we have on the show, we run them through the ringer. It's called the Fire Round. It's a series of four rapid fire questions. Are you ready? Yep, what is your favorite book?

Speaker 3: 36:16

I have one in the business realm. There's two that are on my mind a lot these days. One is Bob Iger's autobiography. A lot of people know he's the former and now current CEO of Disney. He's had an amazing career and his autobiography is full of lots of wisdom that I just found really valuable. And the other one is an oldie it's been around for at least 30 years, I want to say called Crossing the Chasm a budget for more which is about adoption dynamics of new businesses. I actually think for any new business and any startup founder, understanding adoption dynamics that Crossing the Chasm weighs out is essential, because there's lots of different things that cloud what makes a startup successful. But you've got to understand adoption dynamic in order to be successful. What are your hobbies? So I'm blessed I have a 12-year-old son and he's a pretty intense hobby for me. We like to spend a lot of time together. I like to be active whenever possible. I'm blessed to live in a great area that's got lots of things to do outside. So in the summertime I like biking and I like cross-country skiing. In the wintertime, when I get out west, I like downhill skiing as well, so being outdoors. And then I would say that one thing I've liked all my life that I still do is I play a lot of chess. They'll get better at it for whatever reason, but I still love to play it Nice.

Speaker 4: 37:34

I feel your pain. I have a 17-year-old that beats me all the time. So next one what is the one thing that you do not miss about working for the man?

Speaker 3: 37:42

I have to choose one. Yeah, your favorite. You know I've actually enjoyed all the different facts that I've had. I absolutely do not miss the amount of time it takes to make decisions and all the different things that go into making decisions that have nothing to do with the decision themselves. You know the internal politics of the internal influence and the budget constraints and everything else, and I find myself at least once a week marveling at how fast we can make decisions. The other day one of our developers called up with a problem. An application we had chosen was not going to allow us to do something, and it was a very non-obvious problem and we had to figure out what to do about it. And we all got on the decided to get on the phone and talk it through. So schedule didn't schedule a call, just called everybody up, talked through the issues, talked through the options. 15 minutes later we all aligned on a specific direction, we made the decision and now and it was a done deal, so what would have, in the corporate world, taken probably months and maybe years, because this you know, anytime you talk about technology decisions, if you go back on a prior decision, you could be bounced into an entirely new budget cycle. We got done in about 30 minutes. I really like working at that at that pace.

Speaker 4: 38:50

Nice, yeah, speed of execution, that's. That's crucial. All right, last one what do you think sets apart successful entrepreneurs for those who give up bail or never get started?

Speaker 3: 38:58

There's a fair number of successful entrepreneurs that have, you know, inside to some degree failed. So I think getting started, you know, having the guts to get started is the first thing. Just working in reverse order, not taking failure as failure, is another thing, and perseverance is, you know, everything that you just said. The opposite of it is what, I think, sets apart successful entrepreneurs. I would say you've got to get a little bit lucky, but you've got to make your own luck too. You've got to have a perspective that sees opportunities with every you know, with every change or every every kind of you know new future that comes along.

Speaker 4: 39:31

Yeah, no, that's a. That's a new answer, but I totally get it. So you have to start. You have to not consider failures, you have to consider them, lessons learned, and then never give up or severe it.

Speaker 3: 39:40

You know the whole thing about not considering failures like. One of the things that's so different about working in a in a bigger company is, a lot of times, as a, as a manager or a leader in a in a corporation, you get paid to manage risk out right. Anytime that there's something that happens, that's a surprise. You do a deep dive on what were the root causes and what do you got to do about it. How do you put up controls to make sure that kind of thing never happens again? But but when you're in a startup, those rules just don't apply anymore. The biggest risk of of failure is the risk, the risk of going too slow. You know, a lot of times in a startup because there's a ton of existential threats that you have no control over. So you got to move fast and I very quickly realized that almost everything I think I know about business is wrong In some way or another. In some cases it's wrong in a really big way. In other cases it's more. You know it's more a matter of degrees, but pretty much everything is wrong. And so, having the ability to get in and say, okay, how do I, how do I get in and test things so that I move the ball forward, but I'm resilient to the errors that I'm undoubtedly going to uncover along the way. It is a totally new set of muscles for anyone coming out of the. The corporate side is absolutely essential for any entrepreneur.

Speaker 4: 40:51

I totally agree.

Speaker 2: 40:52

Excellent, absolutely. Thank you for being a guest on the firing command podcast. If people are interested in checking out what Wagescape has to offer or getting in touch with you, what would be?

Speaker 3: 41:02

the best way so you can see us. You know, online at Wagescapecom. I'm on LinkedIn at Carrie Sparrow and I'm also at Carrie at Wagescapecom. Reach out to me directly.

Speaker 2: 41:13

Outstanding, and we'll post links to all of that in the show notes. Carrie, once again, thank you so much for being a guest and looking forward to staying in touch. Yeah, me too. No-transcript.