94: How to Take the Leap and Scale to a Multi-Million Dollar Business
Behind Their Success: Episode 94
[00:00:00] there's quite a few people that have these ideas and, and they sit on the ideas
forever just because they don't have the confidence to go out and walk away from something
that's good in order to pursue something that is great.
Paden: Hello everybody. Welcome to Behind Their Success Podcast. I'm Paden Squires, the
host, and today we have on Jeremy Jenson. Jeremy is the CEO and founder of Encore Search
Partners, the largest executive search firm in Houston. Jeremy's expertise in connecting top
talent with leading companies has made him a standout figure in the world of entrepreneurship
and leadership.
He also hosts a podcast called Path to Success, where he uncovers the strategies and mindsets
behind high achievers. Jeremy, welcome on Behind Their Success Podcast.
Jeremy: Excellent. Your podcast name is incredible. It sounds familiar. Yeah.
Paden: Yeah, man. Well, um, welcome Jeremy. Just kind of tell us, you know, you guys, Encore
Search Partners. [00:01:00] Just kind of tell us what that is and what you guys kind of specialize.
Jeremy: Yeah, absolutely. So companies retain our services, uh, to poach high performing
professionals away from their competitors. So we work with quite a few wealth management
firms, law firms, public accounting firms, uh, engineering architecture, right. Industries where
people are your most valuable asset. And so, uh, that's what we do. We're professional poach
artists and we help companies grow, by stealing great talent.
Paden: Yeah. I love that. You know, of course, before we hit the record button, we were kind of
talking to this like, okay, this is kind of right up my alley and then the space I'm in, professional
services. Right. and I'm certainly gonna have to, get a little more information for you about your
services, Jeremy kind of, take us back to the beginning, what, got you into, talent recruiting.
Jeremy: Yeah, great question. So my first business that I started way back in 2010 was a
company called Market Share Solutions. And so before that I was kind of like the company
smart kid that did all the [00:02:00] corporate project management. So I implemented a new
CRMI implemented an email marketing program.
Redesigned the website, worked on how to calculate the commissions for the salespeople, and I
learned a lot at 24 and 25. One day I was in the pipe yard in the back at GSKi. It was a $50
million pipe valve and fitting distributor. And one of the sales guys was telling me about a deal
that he just closed, where we drop ship the pipe from a manufacturer in Nebraska to the job site
in Chicago.
And he was like, man, we closed this $3 million deal off of one of your email blasts, Jeremy.
Paden: Yeah.
Jeremy: like, oh yeah, that's cool. Yeah, well, I don't even know what that meant. Right. At 24,
25 years old and he planted the seed and he said, man, you could do this for a lot of companies.
so in, 2010. I actually started my first business and we did email marketing and lead generation,
uh, for a variety of different industries.
That first [00:03:00] company I built up to about 250,000 in revenue, and I'd kind of run out of
hours in the day, right? And so it was difficult for me to scale past that $20,000 a month. MRR.
And then I looked at my client base and I saw that about half of my clients were staffing and
recruiting companies. And, in late 2012, I basically said, I'm in the wrong business, man.
You know, uh, I have this false sense of accomplishment that I'm in my mid to late twenties
making over 200 grand, but. I could make exponentially more money by having a recruiting
company. And so in January of 2013, we hired our very first recruiter, and then it's just been
organic growth ever since. Ever since then.
Paden: so kind of making that shift to, to a recruiting company, how easy was that shift? I'm
sure it wasn't, that easy, but like what, uh.
Jeremy: Yeah, great question.
Paden: Yeah.
Jeremy: Uh, it was easy. Paden, it was a hundred percent easy, right?
Paden: Okay.
Jeremy: I knew [00:04:00] how to generate leads for staffing and recruiting companies because
I was doing that with my lead generation business. I just had to have the guts to tell those
companies I was no longer working for them. I was gonna compete with them.
Right. And so I think, you know, there's quite a few people that have these ideas and, and they
sit on the ideas forever just because they don't have the confidence to go out and walk away
from something that's good in order to pursue something that is great. Right? And so. it was
literally that easy.
Now, the difficult part, you know, 2013 with no brand recognition, no industry experience. I was
getting the, the scraps from my industry, right? We were working lower level jobs, non-degree
roles, entry level type searches. And our average fee that first year was about 13 K. And to put
that into perspective, in 2025, our average fee.
Firm wide is over [00:05:00] $90,000 per placement. Right. And so that's not salary, that's our
transaction fee. Right. And so every single year that we've been in business since 2013, we've,
we've gotten more focused on the data analyzing, you know, what is our unique selling point.
What is our value proposition? What gives us the, the highest probability to close what is the
most profitable business?
And then being intentional about creating our direct integrated marketing efforts focused on
those types of searches. And we've just gotten better and better each and every year over the
last 12 years.
Paden: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And you know what, and I agree there, Jeremy, I think the, the, the
hardest part of that whole decision, right, was like. you had to break something that was kind of
working for you, right? Like you had to break your, you know, your, your business model a little
bit like to refocus, right? You had to run off some customers to refocus and Yeah.
And, and that's scary, right? You're, you're getting rid of what, you know, but with the idea to
pursue something [00:06:00] larger, right?
Jeremy: Absolutely. I mean, you'd mentioned earlier that you're a CPA and A CFP, so I'd be
willing to bet that you had a, probably a decent tax practice before you had a sophisticated
wealth management practice and you had to take a look at the numbers and realize, Hey, you
know, this one is being compressed by margins and offshoring and X, Y, Z, and this one.
Actually has a tremendous amount of higher enterprise value just because of the nature of long-
term asset management, right? The multiple, whenever you, you know, you, you go to transact
on that upon retirement, or if you were to bring in a junior partner that you wanted to sell equity
to, you just started focusing your efforts on something that had higher long-term enterprise
value.
That's what we did as well.
Paden: Yeah. Yeah, a hundred percent. And, you diagnosed my initial move there. Correct.
So, you know, are there any daily habits or routines or anything that you do that, you believe
just kind of sets you up [00:07:00] for success? how do you decide your, you know, your daily
routines?
Jeremy: Yeah, I mean, my daily routine is obviously to work as little as possible and to play as
much pickleball as possible. That's first and foremost. If you wanna be successful, just focus on
pickleball. No, the short answer is, is, Hire competent people. Make sure that they're aligned
with your mission, vision, and company core values.
Give them best in class systems, tools, and resources in order for them to do their job and then
literally get the fuck out of their way. You know, I mean. the end of the day, you know, I think that
companies where they fail is whenever there's not any clarity around, you know, what are we
working towards?
Why are we working towards it? Right? What is our brand identity? who is our target client
profile? What, what is our unique selling point? Why do our customers buy from us? What, what
is our go-to market strategy? I think that if you drill all of that down. You have a mechanism to do
that knowledge [00:08:00] transfer from the executive team to mid-level management, right.
Then I think that you don't really necessarily need to be heavily involved in day-to-day
operations, right? Because there's a system that should be better than the entrepreneur.
Yeah. If you were to say, what are the daily habits? I mean, uh, clarity, transparency,
authenticity. Right. You know, I, think that, one of the things that I do well is, speaking candidly to
my team to make sure that everybody's rowing the boat in the, the right direction.
because I think that without, structure and accountability, uh, I think that people could think that
they're being productive, but they can go in different directions.
Paden: yeah, yeah. I mean, they're working in their own silo there, right?
Speaker 6: Mm-hmm.
Paden: they think you know, most of the time they think they are accomplishing, you know, what
you want them to do or what the company wants them to do, but.
often it's amazing how humans can, uh, miscommunicate and think they're communicating. Um,
you know, can you speak to that as a leader and like just kind of your leadership style around
some of that [00:09:00] communication.
Jeremy: Yeah. So it's two things really. It's, uh, transparency and authenticity I think really are
really aligned with my leadership style. yesterday afternoon at our level 10 meeting, so the all
hands meeting, you've got all 40 employees in the conference room, We run on EOS. Yeah. Uh,
but just speaking to like my fears and anxieties and, and insecurities in business, right? There's
no reason for a leader to conceal those things, right? Because if, if my team knows that I'm
losing sleep, I. fearing a cybersecurity attack. Right. Then they can be hypervigilant in making
sure that they don't contribute to letting in any type of Trojan phishing scam.
Right. You know what I'm saying? And so there's no reason to conceal information whenever.
My core focus should just be for everybody to think like me, right? And so if that's the case, I
think that that's a skill that I learned as a father, right? Is, [00:10:00] you know, I don't need to
just yell at my son if I see that he's.
Uh, walking on top of the monkey bars at the, you know, at the playground. I can say, Hey Luke,
whenever I see you walking on top of that, the only thing that I see is a premonition of you falling
off and breaking your arm because you know why Jackson, right? Uh, miss Jennifer's son fell off
of the monkey bars two years ago.
He broke his elbow and now I'm really, really scared that it's gonna happen to you. So can you
please? Not walk on top of the monkey bars because you're gonna give your dad a heart attack.
And now my son knows why he's not climbing on top of it. Not that he's incapable, but now he
knows the why behind the what.
Paden: Yeah, I had a guy on this podcast here a little while back, and he was like a le, I I can't
even say the word, he studies language. Um, but he, uh.
Speaker 6: a linguist.
Paden: Ling [00:11:00] was why I could not get that word out. Um, he talked about, you know,
it's like, there's that study where, you know, people were like standing in the copier line and if
you went up and gave a reason to why you needed butted the line, people would just let you do
it.
Like, and it, it didn't even matter like how logical the reason was, but if you gave somebody a,
because like, I need to step in front of you because, and it doesn't even matter, dot dot what you
even said, people would say, sure. But if you didn't give them a, because you almost always
gotta know. And it's, it's just a, it, it's using that, closing that loop and giving the people the why
and, and that's all they really want know.
Jeremy: Absolutely, man. I'll tell you that worked on me in the Paris airport. you know, a couple
of weeks ago, whenever we wrapped up our four week euro trip, we were running late on, on a
connection, right? And, you know, I grabbed my fiance's hand and I ran to the front of that line
and I said, Hey, our flight boards in 20 minutes, would you mind if we kindly skipped you in the
line? [00:12:00] And they just said, okay. Right. They didn't need any additional information.
They saw two panicking people that were madly in love. Maybe it was on, we were on our
honeymoon. They don't know, and they didn't wanna have us miss that flight. So, yeah. Thank
you for sharing that. I, I'm gonna get good, I giving the, because, and I don't even need to be a
linguist.
Paden: Quis. Thank you for correcting me on the
word.
Jeremy: Well, you know, you, Paden, you're in the business of numbers, right? If, if, if you
couldn't spell, algorithm, that would probably be a bigger red flag than you not being able to
pronounce linguists. So you're good brother.
Paden: so for entrepreneurs, we got a lot of listeners here that are really trying to scale their
businesses, right? what piece of advice would you give to owners that are trying to scale
businesses like, you know, like you have.
Jeremy: Yeah, great question. So, you know, I remember I started in 2010. We didn't hit the
million dollar in revenue mark in a single year until 2016. So it took me six years on my own, to
even hit that kind of milestone, which was a big [00:13:00] deal 10 years ago. Right. you know,
as a solo operator and having some support staff that if you're doing a million in revenue, a lot of
that goes into your, your pocket, right?
Paden: A cash flow to the.
Jeremy: I had a very profitable business. But I was having difficulty scaling, right? And so I was
in Vistage, which is a peer-to-peer executive advisory group, and I was venting about my staff
and that I couldn't grow, right? And, and there was a guy in my group and he basically said, well
God, Jeremy, you must be losing a lot of money. I was like, what are you talking about, Scott? I
made half a million bucks last year. And he's like, wow, what if you actually put in processes,
systems, and accountability? How much money could you make? And I said, well, man. I'm, I'm
a really good recruiter, but I don't know shit about processes, systems, or accountability. So he
said, you need to have me come in and run your company for you. And so one of the smartest
decisions that I had ever made in business was carving out [00:14:00] 150,000 from that 500 K
net income, hiring a really good operator that can put in the EOS system, the entrepreneurial
operating system, and implement a.
Processes, systems, accountability, right? A mechanism that we could identify, discuss, and
solve complex problems in the business, right? A, a resource that we could make sure that we
had the right people in the right seats on the bus that were aligned with mission, vision, and
values, right? These are all key words that makes sense to EOS people, and they do sound a
little bit cliche, but man, that was the genesis.
To us turning into a real company and not just a smart guy that provided a service to rich people.
Paden: Yeah.
Jeremy: million dollar CPA firms are there out there?
Paden: Um,
Jeremy: of thousands.
Paden: Yeah,
Jeremy: How many $10 million ones are there? Not very many,
Paden: Yeah. Yeah. And even, even the ones that are hitting maybe even a couple million or
because there's several partners in there or whatnot, they still [00:15:00] don't have any
systems or
Speaker 6: Yeah. They operate autonomously.
Paden: Yeah. I mean, like, And you're describing my journey perfectly, right? Like I, you know,
solo operator, man, I worked by myself for years. then I started bringing on a couple employees
and really it was still just Paden doing a song and dance and making money and, and I would,
could always generate more revenue 'cause I would just work more and whatever.
Right. Super profitable. Right. Kind of sucks for me.
Jeremy: It kind of sucks for, you know, your, yeah, your relationship with your kids, your quality
time with your spouse. Man, I've been there, brother. I know the
Paden: Yeah. The business doesn't move without you, you know, in that thing. It's like you are
the business. There is no separation. And like it hasn't until, honestly, to the last probably two
and a half years where I've started to get really serious about that. Right. And, and really serious
about implementing processes and scalability and, and you know, I would say just getting
professional in every aspect of, business.
Jeremy: Absolutely. And so to answer your question, I hired a strong COO. [00:16:00] We
started implementing EOS. We, identified what was our one year, three year, 10 year vision. We
carried that vision to the employees, the people that weren't aligned with it had to get off the
bus. Now we can be very intentional about having one unified message with everybody that we
onboarded, trained, mentored, and developed on the team and really started to just build the
company around.
The system and less around the people is really what's led to our success. And so you fast
forward nine years post EOS implementation. We still operate on it today. we self implement.
We don't have an implementer. Um, we have a full-time integrator. but now this year we're
trending to do about 15 million in revenue.
All gross margin. Baby. We don't have costs of goods
Paden: Yeah.
Jeremy: charge transaction
Paden: Selling services baby instead.
Jeremy: Yeah, and it's awesome and it, and it's awesome to look at our competition who are all
[00:17:00] struggling to even stay relevant in an age of offshoring automation and ai. And we're
sitting here raising our fees. We're going up market because we've got the proven track record
of success that says, Hey, Encore, search Partners is the best.
If you wanna self implement, here's the AI tool, here's the automation tool. Hey, here's TurboTax
baby. If you wanna do it yourself, go for it. But if you want the best, then you're gonna pay for
Paden Squires.
Speaker 6: Right.
Paden: Yeah. and a hundred percent. And, and those are moves that like, followed the same
path, right? I've definitely moved up market and, changed my offering and, how, and who and,
and all those kinds of things. Because as I grow and we systematize everything, it's. Yeah. I
mean we are worthy it 'cause we are better, right?
Like, like you're just gonna flat out get better results with us as opposed to, you know, X, Y, z
and that comes with a little cost, right?
Jeremy: Well, you know what [00:18:00] you talk about ROI, it's so funny. I'm gonna tell you
how my wealth advisor got me. this was way back in 2020. I had lost a couple hundred grand
because I thought I was a day trader whenever we like, went to go work from home back in
March, April, yeah, yeah, it was a good learning experience.
But, uh, the point that I I'm making is, is. He basically said, Hey, look, even the best fund
managers in the world are like, you know, plus or minus 10% from the s and p 500 historically,
over the last 25 years, he said, but. What a real wealth advisor does is they mitigate your
exposure in times of volatility, right?
And so when the market crashed 22%, way back in 2008, he had a proven track record that
says, Hey, our investors lost 8%. Right, and so it really wasn't the ROI, it was the peace of mind
that he was selling me, but he had been around the block long enough to know that [00:19:00]
when you're selling to ultra high net worth individuals, and we're gonna say that, that's the really
sexy companies that we sell to our service.
It's not necessarily. the better, faster, stronger component, because we all know that AI
eventually will be better, faster, and stronger, but it's the peace of mind aspect of that, what
we're selling, right? And then, yeah. So.
Paden: as a guy myself that works in the financial space there, and it's like, I talk to clients all
the time and it's like, yeah, you're talking about, like, I don't really engage with clients in that
space if like their, number one or their only concern is like total return on investment.
we do asset management, great. We do a fantastic job. but I know enough about finance and
markets and whatever it's like. The difference between one manager and another is like so
marginal and like, it doesn't really matter. Like what you're getting in coming with me is, a
relationship.
Like, and honestly, I keep, you know, the emotions out of it, right? Like, you're so close to it. I
stand between you and your money [00:20:00] and say, Hey, do you really want to do that? You
know, and that, and that kind of thing, right? Like you're, it's much more of a, Investment
performance is just part of it, I would say.
You know
Speaker 6: Absolutely.
Paden: that's, that's not even the value prop I even give to my clients.
Are you looking for a new tax experience, looking for an advisor that actually brings you high
level ideas and proactively plan so you aren't overpaying your taxes? Or how about one that
even just responds and communicates in a timely fashion? If any of that resonates with you, you
probably just have a tax preparer and not a tax planner.
Speaker: And it is through the tax planning process where all the value is found. And when Tax
Planning's done right, it has a positive return on investment. I'm Paden Squires, I'm a CPA and
owner of Squires Tax Planning. We work alongside entrepreneurs and high income earners,
helping them pay the least amount of income taxes, both legally and ethically.
We have saved our clients hundreds of thousands of [00:21:00] dollars through specific
strategies, and we guarantee we can find multiple tax strategies that your current tax preparer
hasn't told you about. If that interests you, head over to squire's tax planning.com. There you
can take our free assessment to see how likely it is that you are overpaying on your income
taxes.
From there, you can also book a free tax discovery call with our team to see what it would look
like to have us working for you.
Paden: So, you say given advice, you know, put it in systems, right? Scalability, you've done
that for, longer than I have. I'm behind you in years, but I'm starting to, uh, get those pieces and,
you
Jeremy: You are ahead of me in the gray hair and the beard though,
Paden: Dude, like that is just the, uh, that's, you know, genetics, I guess bad genetics, gray hair.
Um, I'm not even 40 yet. So,
and like, what, what are some common mistakes I guess you'd see when businesses are trying
to scale? what are some common mistakes you see?
Jeremy: Yeah, I mean. where the, owner needs to make all of the decisions. I think that
[00:22:00] if, that's the type of business that you run today, I think that that's gonna seriously
inhibit your growth and success. you're gonna be the bottleneck in the business. Right. And I
think that, you know, I learned a lot just by like seeing my kids get older, right?
Like, if I can explain to them. You know the why behind, you know why dad wants them to be on
a traveling select basketball team, right? Whether they win or lose is irrelevant to me, but are
they developing the right character and skills and comradery and teamwork and grit? Resilience,
discipline, focus, right?
Follow through skills. I can make sure that. What we're trying to accomplish is aligned with the
long-term vision. Then it doesn't matter if the decision is right or wrong, because even if it's
wrong, it can be a learning experience for that individual.
And so what we do is we hire competent people.
[00:23:00] We explain the why behind the what. Inquisitive is actually a, uh, one of our core
values that's on the wall. And so they're incentivized to have a curious mindset, right? You know,
Hey, why are we creating this video? Why are we doing this? Why are we doing this? And so my
day-to-day responsibilities, to be quite honest, is really just to answer a lot of the whys behind
the what?
Because it's kind of like machine learning, right? The more they have my answers. The more
they can think like me, rather than just rely on me telling them the what
Paden: Yeah. Yeah. And you know, we keep going back to AI in these conversations. What kind
of tools will that allow you to, you know, ultimately reproduce yourself and, be able to, you know,
spread that vision inside your company? And that's something, you know, I have a small team,
but we've started to do is using, you know, we use perplexity AI kind of as our internal and uh,
you know, we started creating like a central knowledge hub of our, firm.
And, taking things like our mission [00:24:00] and vision statement, core values, SOPs, you
know, operating procedures and connecting all that into our ai and anybody in our team can just
query AI and say, okay, what's the next step in this process? Like, what do I do after this? What
do I do after this?
You know, and it's just all right there. And it's, to me, it's so mind boggling. How many. People
don't realize, and every day I find new applications for ai, but people don't realize like how far
reaching this stuff is.
Jeremy: Oh, we're using 1% of its capability too. I mean, a, a perfect example of what you are
saying on how I'm perceiving it is, let's say if I'm a new employee and I've been there for four
months, right? And I ask. the database, right. how much PTO do I have? can I even take three
days off in October and still get paid?
Right. Like historically we've had to like email hr, right. Wait for them to look [00:25:00] it up in
our system. Right. But AI will be able to spit out answers right then and there,
Paden: you can. I mean, you can easily upload your employee handbook and it can read it all
and answer the questions for all your employees.
Jeremy: Yep, absolutely. And so it's funny that we're talking about this because I own a
recruiting company and we are having to safeguard ourselves from being exposed to losing
clients. That are, um, investing in AI to where like half of their company is gonna be obsolete,
right? We're looking at already copywriters in and marketing departments are no longer needed
because AI can write it better than you. Right? you know, even video editors now, there's so
many AI automation tools, right?
And so like, marketing is being impacted very, very hard. you know, we know that HR is being
impacted extremely hard, right? We're going to see a digital transformation in the accounting
space, right? Because we've already seen so many companies that are going to offshore
[00:26:00] resources because CPAs are so expensive nowadays, right?
I mean,
Paden: there's supply and demand, man. There's no
Jeremy: Supplying them in. Yeah. Yeah. I got 23-year-old kids. The second they get their CPA,
they want a hundred grand man, and it's like what?
Paden: you know, in a college town, university of Missouri, and I went, I, I was at a accounting
like, uh, just for the accounting school, like a, a career fair, and there were, I think it was like 130
companies and like 75 students. And the students were like, and that was like freshman through
senior or whatever.
Those are twice as many companies as even candidates. There
Jeremy: You know? it's like being a, a single girl at a, at a bar in West Texas. You know, the girl,
the guy raised shows is nine to one. She's got a lot of options.
Paden: got your pick man.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Jeremy: Who's got the biggest truck? That's what she's asking out in Midland, Texas.
Paden: Yeah.
So yeah, I mean it's, interesting, you know, and it's, coming for, you know, all kinds of different
white collar jobs. But, speaking of my industry specifically, like I, tell you what, an industry that
[00:27:00] needs shaken up, that just runs on a broken business model because like.
one has a choice to get their taxes done any other way. you know, it's, it's gonna change a lot of
that. And, I think it changed that, you know, for the better. so Jeremy, if you could go back to
your first year, so go back to, what was this, 2010, 2011.
You can go back to your first year as an entrepreneur, and you can give yourself one piece of
advice.
What would that be?
Jeremy: Hmm. I think that the one piece of advice I would give myself is you don't need to be
the smartest guy in the room. Right. I think that, you know, I don't have a college degree. I was
married to somebody that was far more educated than me. and so not having a degree was like,
made me very, very insecure.
I was intelligent, I was creative, I was hardworking. But I think that insecurity really inhibited my
growth because I always needed to be the smartest guy in the room. Right. For my own
confidence.
Paden: yeah, just an ego thing, right? Yeah.
Jeremy: A hundred percent ego thing. Right. [00:28:00] And then in 2016, I hired Casey Knight,
who's now our division president over our largest practice area.
And he was smarter than me in his individual practice area, which is wealth management. Right.
And. Just because I was an expert in manufacturing energy and industrial didn't mean that I
needed to continue to scale my business in what I was the most technically competent person
in, right? And so investing in people that were better than me in order to diversify our service
lines.
An increase, our scalability factor was definitely the best move that I have ever made. Right?
And so, that's really what it is, was, having the humility to say, I don't need to be the smartest
guy in the room. Let me create a brand and an ecosystem that these people wanna come work
for, and then we can build it together.
Paden: Yeah. once you hit a certain level of, success in a business that, kind of like a plateau.
You have to, you have to cross. It's like, [00:29:00] yeah, you hire your first employee that is
quote, like, better than you in like in their lane. Right. because you know every employee you
had before that, you know, it's, you know, maybe they're 80% as good as you in, in whatever
lane or, or whatever.
Right. Um.
Speaker 6: Yep.
Paden: It is truly, once you do that, you realize, wow, okay, I get Why? You know, maybe some
employee costs a half a million dollars a year because well, he's worth it, right? I can't wait. I get
hire my first million dollar a year employee.
Jeremy: man, I'll tell you, you know, and, and having the confidence. Not even really the
confidence, but the creativity to structure a compensation plan that will attract that person. So
when you look at Casey, you know, last year Casey made over $1.8 million. This year he'll make
over $2 million.
Right?
Paden: amazing.
Jeremy: it's because I put together a creative compensation model way back in 2016 that if he
built what he thought that he could, he should be. Very well financially [00:30:00] rewarded,
right? But so many entrepreneurs, well, when I started I was at a $26,000 base and 10%
commission.
Well, fuck dude. That was when you started, bro. And you quit that job and started your own
fucking company. Do you want some? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's like you have to get
creative whenever you wanna attract high level talent. We all know that.
Paden: Yeah. and, and more importantly, it's not even just like getting creative on the deal or
whatever, but like you said, you gotta create a brand. You gotta be a leader yourself. That is
even attractive to somebody like that. You know, you're not gonna get even a, a slightly high
performer if you yourself are anywhere near, like, you know, their status in performing in a
discipline and holding yourself responsible.
And like that's a huge part of the game. Once you build a, build a business that has a little bit of
systems in place and you just kind of make that switch to. You know, I would say truly like CEO
leader or, you know, founder, whatever you wanna call it. then it just becomes a game of
leadership, right?
And, [00:31:00] pointing the way for the team and, that kind of thing. which is huge responsibility
in of itself.
Jeremy: I saw, I saw a quote on Instagram, I think it was like Jeff Bezos or someone, but it was
like, you know, making that transition from, you know, as a leader, from making a bunch of small
decisions. Right. To making very few decisions, but they're all the big decisions.
Paden: All the big decisions.
Jeremy: that's the pivotal moment whenever you turn from being an operator to a true CEO.
Paden: Yeah. Yeah,
Jeremy: shouldn't have to make all the the small decisions. Right. You know, I'll give you an
example, right? So Jacqueline Va, she's our senior manager of growth and development, right?
She handles business development, marketing, public relations, training, onboarding, talent
acquisition, I don't need to proofread all the content whenever it goes live, right?
But what I will do is provide my opinion after it's live, [00:32:00] you know, and as long as she
understands the why behind the what, then it will organically kind of evolve into something that's
congruent with, with our brand guidelines and things of that nature, right? So not, don't
necessarily tell your people what to do.
But tell them why to do it, and then just live with what they do, you know?
Paden: that's how you really run a dynamic business, you know, and especially in today's day of
the world is like, you know, you need to give the, the clarity of like, okay, here's the goal here
where we're heading. And, and like ultimately you want to create an environment where it's like,
Hey, here's the problems we need to solve.
Like, you are empowered to go solve them.
Speaker 6: Mm-hmm.
Paden: lemme know if you got any problems, right? Like that is, you know, kind of ultimately
where you wanna be at. Right.
Jeremy: And you know, now that, talent have access to, you know, certain AI tools, like, like the
one that you use and, and you know, we are, we're still on chat, you know, GPT, but what I'll say
is, is if you know that the [00:33:00] budget for that job is 55,000 for your entry level, you know,
uh, client service associate that's coming straight out of University of Missouri.
Maybe you go for the fresh green grad that has the creativity, the ambition, right? Uh, the focus
and the discipline, the grit, the resilience, the coachability. When back in the past we needed
someone with
Paden: You needed the experience. Yeah. You needed the,
Jeremy: experience. It's like, no, the characteristics are more valuable than the experience
Paden: A hundred
Jeremy: today's environment.
Paden: Yeah. And especially in professional services, right? Like there's certainly there, there's
certain personality types when it comes to, you know, especially in the financial planning space,
but even some more so in the, in the, the accounting space. Like, you know, all, all the guys that
are smooth talkers going to the financial space and there's like zero smooth talk accounting
space.
So like being able to like an accountant and being able to sell is like a, a, a unicorn combination,
uh, that you [00:34:00] don't find too often.
Speaker 6: absolutely. Absolutely.
Paden: Well, Jeremy, man, like this has been a great conversation so far. Like anything else you
wanna leave the listeners kind of before we go?
Jeremy: you know, what I can say is, is, you know, it took me six years to hit my first million. we
put in processes, systems, and accountability, and, we successfully grew it to, you know, about
12 million last year.
And as we're evaluating how we're gonna grow from 12 million to 25 million, I think that it's going
to require. A very different type of business model. And so I guess my one piece of
encouragement would be never stop evolving. Never, ever, ever get complacent with saying,
Hey, this is the way that we've always done it, and so this is the way that it needs to be done,
right?
That, that we are creatures of habit, but if you want to make sure that you are insulated from
becoming obsolete. You have [00:35:00] to do what, Amazon did, right? And change from an
online bookstore to a $2 trillion fully integrated, supply chain distribution company. Right? You
know, they've got their tech arm, they've got this, right?
If they would've just said, Hey, we're a really good online bookstore. would've blockbuster it up,
dude. They would've sead it up, you know, uh, even Walmart. Walmart went out and pay, you
know, spent like $12 billion for jet.com, and we were all like, what the hell's going on? But they
saw that they needed to become relevant or else Amazon was gonna put 'em out of business.
Paden: Yeah. I love that you talked about, you know, you're at, you know, 15 million or whatever
and you think it, it, it, it takes a totally different business model to get to 25 million. And I think
that is a, a great realization and, thing that people need to understand that like.
you can build a business, say a, a tax firm like mine, you can build it two, $300,000 with a
couple people and, [00:36:00] and just kind of hustling hard or whatever. But like, it, it, it takes,
you can't take that business and make it into a $2 million company. Like, you almost it's like a
totally different business model.
Like you can't, you know. Um, if you ever read the book, 10 X is easier than two X by Dan
Sullivan and, and Ben Hardy, they, they talk a lot about that. It's like two Xing, you know, like that
$300,000 business. Well, it's just like, okay, just do more work a little harder and, you know, I
can kind of, you know, figure out how to two x this business.
But when you start thinking about 10 X in a business, it's like, whoa, we'd have to change
everything. Like we have to come up with a totally different business model. Right. And, and that
is such a great exercise. And in path that I've gone through the last couple years where I've just
kind of just almost tracked my model of, you know, eight, nine years and said, no, we're going
this way.
Um,
Jeremy: We did the exact same thing. That's how we 10 x, right from one to 10 million now, and
I'll share this piece of advice. You and I are [00:37:00] entrepreneurs, and so we have this way
of thinking where it's like we wanna put together an entrepreneurial compensation plan, we gotta
hire hustlers, go-getters that are innovators and creators.
But when you really think about it, if I hired someone that had those capabilities, odds are after
two or three years of success, they're gonna go out and start their own business. And it's like, I
can't even fault them for it,
Paden: Yeah.
Jeremy: that's what I hired.
Paden: Best interest. Yeah.
Jeremy: So what we've done is we've started to hire, people on higher salaries, right.
more benefits. More golden handcuffs, more Fortune 500 enterprise level amenities in order to
get these early career people that become reliant on the guarantee. Right. And then they
become a product of the system. And then, it's the company that is [00:38:00] creating a lot of
the innovation and creativity, right?
And so even if that person leaves the system, a lot of times those client relationships and
candidate relationships don't go with them, right? Because it was built around the system and
not the person.
Paden: Yeah. Not the
Jeremy: So it costs money to make money is what I'm gonna get. Right. by doubling our salary,
you know, this year what we pay our producers versus what we paid in 20 13, 20 14.
it's almost like illogical to think that you can make more money by doubling your sal.
Paden: what a lot of people don't understand too, is like, okay, you know, A players, right? Like,
and of course, you know, I'm speaking to the recruiter guy, but like a, a players are, you know,
they may cost 30% more or whatever, but they produce, seven times what the B player or
whatever produces, like why the cost is higher.
There's way more value in there though.
Jeremy: And what you have to do is you just have to be skilled at squeezing all that potential
out of 'em. You know, I, I've got right here, our media relations person in the office right now
behind the [00:39:00] camera, and you know, the disparity between an A player is the least
financially. Right when they graduate college, and so you know, what we told her is, Lauren,
you're gonna learn so much at Encore Search Partners.
You're gonna be exposed to so many different things that your money is not made on this 50 5K
offer that you're accepting right outta school. It's gonna be made on your one year anniversary
when you've created a completely different job that we didn't even know exists. Today because
of your creativity, your innovation, your skills development, your work ethic, the amount of
influence and and trust and rapport that you've got with your colleagues to where she might very
well come out as a manager after a year, and she's not gonna have that capability going and
working for a digital advertising agency where she's a peon and then gets promoted to senior
peon after two years.
Speaker 6: You
Paden: I know.
Jeremy: but you can create something in an entrepreneurial [00:40:00] environment.
Paden: Yeah. That's great, Jeremy. That's great stuff, man. Well, Jeremy, what's the best way
listeners can connect with you, get to know more about you, your business, and, um, everything
you got going on, man.
Jeremy: Yeah, so the best way is let's connect on LinkedIn, right? So it's just my name Jeremy
Jenson, I've got a little goat emoji in my last name. Uh, and then if you want to follow the
personal life, I have a lot of fun there. You can follow me on Instagram, it's just my name also.
but yeah, if you shoot me a DM on LinkedIn, I'm gonna reply and uh, and I'll look forward to
connecting with your audience there for sure.
Paden: Yeah, absolutely. Jeremy, man, I appreciate you coming on the show. Thank you for
sharing, you know, your journey and knowledge and, uh. listeners, we'll catch you next time.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much for listening to the podcast. If you found it valuable, please rate,
review, and share it. That is the best way to help us build this and reach more people as we're
trying to accomplish our goal of help creating more healthy, wealthy, and wise entrepreneurs.
You can follow us on social media by searching for me Paden Squires.
Or going to padensquires.com [00:41:00] on the website and social media. We're always
sharing tips of personal growth and there we can actually interact. I'm looking forward to it.
Thanks guys.
