Why CEOs Die 5 Years Younger Than Everyone Else

Sean Weisbrot: Darwin Shig is the founder and CEO of Shurig Solutions Incorporated, a seven figure executive recruiting firm based in the us. I invited him to be a guest on the show because I loved his passion and his energy for recruiting. We talked about talent and management and hiring and good hires. We made bad hires. We made. Mistakes. We made, good decisions, how much it cost us and what we learned from those experiences. This was a very interesting conversation with him and I know that you'll like it. If you want to know more about Darwin, you can check out his website and other details, which we have in the show notes for you today. So I hope you enjoy the show. Let's get to it now. Talent management is something that. It is very hard to do, and I've tried many times over in actually multiple countries. The first time I was responsible for people was in China, the second time in the us, the third time in China, the fourth time in Singapore. And it doesn't get easier no matter what the industry, no matter how few or how many people you have. I've made tons of mistakes around hiring, and my background is in psychology, so you have to imagine I. You know how hard it is for people who may not have that, that extra skillset that I might have. What's the hardest thing about talent management that you found?

Darwin Shurig: There are so many challenges with it, and then it depends on, um, so, you know, I present on talent management strategies, uh, attraction, efficiency, retention, and the cost of mishires and how you should look at that. I think one of the biggest. Challenges and I'll, I'll, I'll answer your question specifically, but just look at business. Um, you know, 30% of businesses don't make it a year. Of those that are left, uh, 50% don't make it five years. And across all industries, 70% of companies don't make it 10 years. So that's. Pretty fan. That's pretty amazing, right? 30% of, I mean, look at all that wasted revenue time. It's not easy to be in business or to scale, scale a business. Uh, for sure. So when you look at the five main reasons why companies are successful or they fail in the top five reasons, uh, company alignment relevant to leadership, vision, mission, and vision, and then having the wrong talent or the right talent are always in the top five. So. That as our, our benchmark. And then specifically answering your question, I think that companies typ, typ, uh, typically do not have good processes relevant to efficiency. They don't necessarily do a great job of attracting, and I'd say the biggest problem is they don't do a good job of delineating the interview process to evaluate for cultural fit versus the technical skill in any functional area. And. I'll just expound on that. If you're not identifying, first of all what the talent's why is, and matching that to the, the, the mission, then look, 70% of companies don't make it 10 years. Nothing goes perfect, nothing. There's challenges. So if you're, if you hire somebody, um, let's say you want a, a purple squirrel. That can do a certain skill. So you, you, you, you interview the purple squirrel and the purple squirrel has 12 outta 10. They're off the charts technical skill, but they have low emotional intelligence. They're not coachable. Um, they don't get along well with others temperament wise. You shouldn't hire 'em. And then, you know, contrast that if you have somebody that everybody loves. They have high emotional intelligence and you know, they like being around people and everybody invite, invite them to the barbecue, but they don't have anywhere near the skillset that you need in that particular area. You, you shouldn't hire them. So hiring for culture after a minimal technical skillset relevant to what the functional area is, I would say is the number one most important thing that companies fail at.

Sean Weisbrot: I completely agree with that actually. I, I don't really have much to, to. I argue a point on, I tried to deal with this recently. I started, uh, advising a company and they said, okay, we've got this guy. He is gonna be a co-founder. And I'm like, okay, what does he bring to the table? Design? Well, have you seen him do design well, nah. He's in college. He's trying to figure it out. We, we want him to learn. I go, you're trying to build a company. You don't have time to give this guy the opportunity to learn how to be a designer. You need a designer that can design. You need. Someone who can lead the company, right? If he's got a skill set in sales or something else, great. But like, if this guy can't do a thing that you need, that you can't do, you have no business working with him and you don't have the time and the energy to train him and give him the opportunity to thrive. I'm sorry. But the business is, is, you know, uh. I can't remember the word at element, but it's, it's just difficult and you need to have as many opportunities as you can to succeed, and this guy should not be a part of your company. And so they, they agreed to get rid of him, but it took like two weeks for me to convince them to do so.

Darwin Shurig: I think that's really smart. I think that it, it's, first of all, you have to look at what do you, why are you hiring the position for, and oftentimes I think. People or leadership missed the forest for the trees. Hey, we need somebody. You know, the MDR R is a great example right now in, in our world, the medic device, uh, regulations for, for Europe. 'cause they're changing significantly. And, but there's gonna be a lot of people that work on that relevant to compliance, risk management and the technical files to have access to sell in, it's over a billion dollars, excuse me, over a billion people. Access wise from, from from patient standpoint. So you know, the ROI ON it could be significant. However, there's gonna be a lot of people that are working as consultants. Or that are hired for certain positions that if that's the only reason they're hired for two years from now, it's not really relevant anymore. So what do you need the person to do? How is the role potentially gonna change in the next six to 24 months? So that what you're attracting them to, there's no buyer's remorse. There's no, you know, we talked about this before, you know, 25% of employees, uh, volun annually, voluntarily leave across all industries. And it's usually not the people that you want to leave. So what are you hiring them for? What is the minimal skill that you need? And then after you meet that, and there has to be a process to. Capture that data consistently across all candidates to compare and contrast. A lot of most companies don't do that necessarily very well either. And then what are the other skills that they bring to the table that are crossover? Skills that they can grow with the company and that it's not necessarily about just that one position over the next one to two months, assuming that the company has a good value prop and, and is going to grow. Not just

Sean Weisbrot: that, but also what are the things that they wanna work on. I, I had a guy who, as you said, you know, he was fantastic. I, I loved working with him. He was. Uh, incredible. He was such an amazing guy. He was so fun. He was so in, so good at his job. Like there was nothing bad you could say about this person and this employee, and he wanted to have more responsibility in the architectural side. Of the backend. He wanted to become more of an architect and a CTO. Well, we already had a CTO and we Right. We did our best to give him as many opportunities as he could to get into the architecture more, but we couldn't pay him what he wanted to earn, and so he left because he found another company that could, and we, yeah. You know, if I could hire him back today a hundred percent, I would give him whatever he wanted. Because really, it's so hard to find someone like, this guy just couldn't afford it, and I. You know that, that that is what it is. A lot of people, I think, leave because of money. I had another guy who was fantastic. We gave him the opportunity to become a lead developer. He had never really managed anyone before. He managed his team for about a year, and then he ended up finding a job with another company that was paying him more, but they were giving him the opportunity to. Work with multiple teams. He was gonna end up being a manager of managers, which we just didn't have that number of people to do. And he really wanted to move into that. And I was like, well, good luck to you. You know, if you wanna keep working with us, I'm happy to have you work here part-time, but I can't give you what you want. Sorry.

Darwin Shurig: And what you just cited is really, really important and. Smart to understand in terms of, again, like why are you hiring for a position and what are the needs and how's the company going to grow? Uh, I talked to candidates. What's your opportunity for growth? Is it vertical only? Does the hiring manager have to leave? Does the company have to have a, a significant growth spurt so that department grows? Um, or you, you get it promoted into a different segment within your functional area, or is the company opened across, over talent so that you can grow horizontally and then vertically because you have other skill sets. You know, maybe you're in design and development, but you have great program management skills, so you could then move over to be a part of the company's PMO. 'cause it's gonna start a PMO right at the company as an example, but. In terms of what you just talked about, again, 25% of employees leave annually, voluntarily, and so the cost. To a company for that is anywhere from half of the annual salary to four times. That's a significant cost in wasted resources training, and then trying to backfill those positions. Now, you know, there's Leadership iq, career Builder. We look at a lot of different data in terms of what the challenges are around talent management. But um, uh, career Builder had a study showing that 79% of voluntary turnover cited. Lack, employ of employee appreciation as a number one reason, or the immediate hiring manager. So in terms of annual employee appreciation, career ladders, I think that's, that's something to really look at. The other thing is that it showed that 70% of high risk employees are being recruited away. That they stated that they would most likely have to leave their company to, to be able to grow their career in advance. And so understanding what the pathway is and it not just be siloed companies that are more open to talent and understand that people have different skill sets. I always say when somebody's talking to me about an opportunity, look, the money's obviously part of it. It's not, these aren't volunteer positions, uh, compensation, how it benefits your family. Is certainly important. Culture is huge. The why match to the vision, but who are you gonna become by going there? I. What skills are you gonna add? How are you gonna be challenged and how are you going to be able to grow personally and professionally over the next, you know, 12 to 24 months by taking that role? And I think, you know, you just spoke to that quite a bit. Obviously compensation was part of it, but the person wasn't gonna get to do what they wanted to do and what would be exciting for them?

Sean Weisbrot: Yeah, so they were both with us for a year and a half. Maybe two years max. So I always knew that we weren't growing fast enough for a lot of them, and that's okay. You know, I, the way I look at it is we're a stepping stone in their career. So what can I do to give you as much opportunity as you can so you can get the experience you need so that whenever you go on to the next thing you know, you can say you have that experience. And so, for example, some of the people we hired prepared for that opportunity, right? Some of the people we had hired originally, we hired them to be Android developers. And when we pivoted to, um. Doing a web application, we needed to use a different coding language that none of them had any experience with. And we tried to hire a team to do web and we couldn't. So we ended up being forced to basically convert our team from mobile developers to web developers. And we had to upskill them. We could pay them their original salaries, but it took a lot longer to get everything done because they were literally learning how to do what they needed to do. And so that was really frustrating as well, because they also were used to working with, you know, a, a mobile screen versus browsers. Screens, you know, and so the resolutions are different. It's a wide angle or it's a, sorry, landscape versus vertical, you know, so of the ui, the UX is different. Some of the APIs and libraries are different. So there's a lot of things that they needed to learn how to do. And so it just took us a lot more time and took a lot more energy than if we were able to just hire people. Um, we actually able to find two guys that had angular experience. One of them was not a great person, and we ended up firing him. We could talk about employee failures and all that, um, in a little bit here. So we had to fire him. And then the guy that fires, they're fun. Oh yeah. I, I tried so hard not to have to fire people, but at some point it just happens. But I mean, guess we can get into that now since you've brought it up. What's. What is an example of a, a really bad hire you had and, and how, how quickly did you realize that it was a bad hire, but then how long did it take for you to actually fire them?

Darwin Shurig: Well, fortunately or unfortunately, unfortunately, it, it on the face initially. But, you know, we learned more from our mistakes right, than our successes. And so I've made bad hires in, in corporate America and, um, I've made bad hires in my business and so. I think that it is, first of all, it is, goes back to what we talked about earlier in terms of having, having processes to evaluate the functional area that you want, you want to evaluate, for example, and then compare and contrast. Um, I didn't do that very well in corporate America and, and. For initially with my own company, I, I, we did not have processes to do that very well. We learned the hard way and then, you know, the cultural fit. But I would say the biggest problem is that, is, is waiting too long and not making decisions, um, sooner. Because typically if some, if things are not working out, the, the employee already knows it. It's just a matter of how long is it gonna take, how much pain. Are you gonna allow the situation to continue to fester, um, before making the decision that a move needs to be made? But at the point that you know, if you, and if you take a servant leadership. Approach and a, and a a zap empowerment approach. I was, it's making me think about like the first person I had to let go of my corporate career. I almost hyperventilated if the COO wasn't there with me to do it. I, I don't know. They'd probably still be at the company today because I was so anxious about it. Um, and, but, uh, then I had a great leader and mentor, uh, Carrie, who, you know, really taught me empowerment Zap leadership, uh, if you've ever read that book, but. If everybody needs, you know, there's checks and balances for a reason. Hire the right people that fit the culture, that have the skillset that is needed. And then you, you, you support them, empower them to be able to make decisions as a part of the process. Um, and then if people don't perform, you know, they, they, they fire themselves. But if you're giving them all the resources, if you, if you hire the right people and they're excited again, the why, the mission and, and what they're doing is something they want to do. If they feel empowered and that they can make decisions, and it, you know, mistakes happen, they're not gonna get whacked, then it's an environment for growth. And then if they're not doing what they need to be doing, then over a period of time they, they, they essentially let themselves go. And, and there's probably a better place for, there's a place that's much better for them versus where they're at with your company and that situation. And so having that mindset is. I think a lot more productive. So you'd say the, the, the worst one is the first person ever. Um, as far as like the worst hires that I've made no. Or been a part of? Yeah. The one that you had to fire. Well, I didn't hire that person. I just, that was the first person I had to let go. And I, I was, I'm just saying I was so. I, I, I was in my early thirties and I'd never had to let anybody go. And if, if the, if the COO wasn't there, like I said, jokingly, they'd probably still be there. But, um, in terms of, you know, the, one of the worst hires I ever made was somebody that I thought had a certain amount of skill. They sold themselves a certain way. I didn't have a process to evaluate. That I didn't dive deep enough into evaluation of outcomes, and I didn't have a process or an understanding of hiring for culture. And I hired somebody that, um, that was a cancer. You know, they thought they knew everything. They weren't open to other perspectives. They were not coachable. And even though they had. Several of the skills, uh, it was just, was not a good, good fit and it was caused a lot of problems in chemistry and with the team. And when you hire people like that, everybody else is watching how much do you put up with, as, as it, it corrodes your, your culture and it creates lower employee engagement, which therefore almost always leads to more wasted resources. So I. Getting the right skill with the right culture, emotional intelligence, temperament, motivation. Um. And that they're coachable. I think those, those things are critical.

Sean Weisbrot: Hey, just gimme 10 seconds of your time. I really appreciate you listening to the episode so far, and I hope you're loving it. And if you are, I would love to ask you to subscribe to the channel because what we do is a lot of work. And every week we bring you a new guest and a new story, and what we do requires so much love. So that we can bring you something amazing and every week we're trying really hard to get better guests that have better stories and improve our ability to tell their stories. So your subscription lets the algorithm know that what we're doing is fantastic and no commitment. It's free to do. And if you don't like what we're doing later on, you can always unsubscribe. And either way, we would love a, like if you don't feel like subscribing at this time. Thank you very much and we'll take you back to the show now. So one of the first companies I was responsible for the people of was my dad's dental office and some people listening to my go, ah, it's not a business. Yes, it's a business. It's, it was a significant business and there was like 15 full-time employees. So with that outta the way, 'cause that was one of the problems I had. I

Darwin Shurig: was gonna say they, somebody said that wasn't a business. I mean, yeah, absolutely. That's a business. Yeah.

Sean Weisbrot: I was 20. 5 26 and I came in as the HR manager, general manager, and I got a lot of problems from the employees who, some of them had been there for 10 years and they were twice my age and they didn't like that I was coming in and telling them how to use their software. I spent two weeks, I mastered the software. They had no idea about, probably 10 perc. Uh, they, they probably didn't even know 10% of what I knew. In the two weeks, I had sat there in front of the software and I figured out ways to make the business more efficient and ended up saving the business an extra like, uh, six weeks for every time they had to submit a claim for the insurance. So significant. So it went from 60 days to six or seven days. From when you'd submit a claim to when you'd get the money back. That's massive for a business to have that cash flow. They didn't have, didn't understand any of this. Anyways, I got a lot of problems from them because I was the boss's son and I'm like, I might be the boss's son, but I know what I'm doing and if you don't want to listen to what I have to say, sorry, but I gotta fire you. I need people that'll listen. Mm-hmm. So I ended up firing almost his entire team, but not all at once. 'cause I couldn't handle, because every time you fire someone. I had to take over their position until we could replace them. Right. And then you get to work harder, right? So there were a few people working up front there. I mean, obviously there were people like that were technically skilled who were doing, um, you know, actual dental work, hi hygiene, all that. I can't. I, I'm not, I can't do those things, but all the front office stuff, I had to replace people. So we had to figure out how to do it in the right way. And like my, my dad had this woman up front who was very sweet, very kind. She'd been with him for a long time. Everyone knew who she was, but she sucked it telling people how much they owed and collecting money from them.

Darwin Shurig: Right.

Sean Weisbrot: Sorry, which was probably one of her primary responsibilities. That was her main responsibility. Besides dealing with the insurance companies, filing claims, making sure that their insurance was valid, you know, setting up appointments, rescheduling, canceling these, you know, front desk person. Mm-hmm. The most important part of her job. She couldn't even, I had to fire her. Sweet woman had to fire. My dad didn't have a process for like identifying who's culturally valuable. Yeah, he was too busy trying to be the dentist. Sure. And he couldn't be the business owner, and so he had, he tried to leave it to me, but sometimes there were things that like I needed his approval for, which prevented me from making all of the changes that needed to be made. And so his personality prevented us from, from. Improving in a significant way. So eventually I had to fire myself because I was like, look, I, I can't do my job. Like I've done everything I can to help you, but at some point I've done my job. There's nothing more I can do. If anything, you should just sell your business and work for somebody else because as long as you run this business and you don't have a partner that you trust to make all of the hard decisions, you do not deserve to have a business. Sorry, I love you, but No.

Darwin Shurig: Well, and look, many clinicians, physicians. Dentists may be great at what they do, but they're not good at business. Um, they don't understand, you know, certain business principles and, and it's not. And, and it, as we just discussed, it's not easy to be in, in business and having that process to, uh. Identify the right talent is, is not easy either. And, uh, you know, one of the things that we've, we help our, there's three things in industry we do that, uh, as far as I can tell nobody else is, is doing at this point over, over this year. It's three, three years to get to that point in, in process. But one of them is delineating, uh, between cultural fit and that, that, uh, functional area. But if you just look at culture defining it, it's not. Super hard, but you know, it's not easy. And there, there's nuances to it and you gotta invest a little time in it. But you gotta determine what your values are first and foremost. Um, you know, what, what matters to you from a value standpoint. And then you have to create four to six questions relevant to culture that define those values with how people are asked. And then you have to ask the questions in a very. Specific way. And it's crazy because people will tell you, it, it it'll be, it's just unbelievable. I've seen it happen multiple times. Um, and I, we have one, uh, partner that, you know, they've grown by acquisition and they're gonna keep growing. They've gone from 40 million to a hundred million in the last two and a half years, um, in surgical orthopedic products. And it's like, uh, the VP's telling me, I've got people that through the acquisition, and it's like they're not happy because they're having to work a little bit harder and we're gonna grow. Why can't we just stay here? And even in that standpoint, it, you can utilize your process once you get the cultural fit. 'cause it's just a piece of the entire interview process and it's, it's very strategic how you do it and even how you ask the questions. But you can try it out on your existing employees and you'll, you'll clearly see which employees are not gonna make it because of the way they answer the questions. 'cause they'll clearly show low emotional intelligence. Lack of problem solving, poor communication. They're not team players. They don't match the values that you want. And you'll also identify the ones that probably are not, they're not probably, they're not where they need to to be mentally, but maybe they can adjust if the, if, if the message is clear and, and what needs to change. Um, but it's, it's not easy to do. And, uh, there's a lot of. People that have great ideas or innovators, you know, we're gonna be in, I'm leaving Friday for Spain for the LSI, emerging Med Tech conference. Um, there's incredible innovators, incredible businesses starting because of a product that somebody had a great idea and understood, you know, clinically or technical, technically, how that product could bring value. But then it's a whole, it's a whole different. Ball game in terms of how do you get that product to market? How do you get it funded, how do you manufacture it, and how do you bring in the right talent so that you can grow and scale that? Um, 'cause again, as we talked about earlier, the cost of mishires are, Jack Welsh used to say the cost of, uh, you know, the famous CEO from, from uh, GE Healthcare used to say that annual corporate, uh, the cost of mishires cost more than annual corporate taxes. So, you know, it could be anywhere from four to seven times in employees. Annual compensation depending on the opportunity cost.

Sean Weisbrot: Wow. Yeah, it's definitely very expensive. I, I have, uh, a specific experience in mind that was very costly for my startup, where we had hired someone to be a QA manager. Until that point, we didn't really have What's

Darwin Shurig: your, what's your start? What's your startup? What'd that startup do? Sorry,

Sean Weisbrot: it's

Darwin Shurig: just

Sean Weisbrot: my own c curiosity question. We were building a competitor to Slack. Okay, so it was an enterprise communications platform, web-based, and we had gotten to a point where we had, uh, desperation for a QA manager. Okay. We were trying and trying and trying to be able to hire someone, but we didn't have enough of a budget to be able to afford them, but we couldn't launch if we didn't have someone. Go through and build a system that would allow us to understand our coverage of our bugs and our features and all of that stuff You regret, do your regression testing and make sure your traceability is right. Right. We had no coverage whatsoever by this point and Wow. We hired this person who had corporate experience. We thought maybe she's used to handling a lot of people and dealing with large sprawling systems, which our system was becoming. And okay, we thought we're going to switch over from GitLab to Jira. And inside of Jira, there's an ecosystem of applications. One called, one is called X-Ray. We thought we're going to invest in Jira, confluence, x-ray, and you are going to build our system on Jira. You're gonna learn how to do it and you're gonna build it for us. Using your experience. Guess what? Right? That didn't happen.

Darwin Shurig: She didn't happen. She built us.

Sean Weisbrot: She just didn't have the ability to do it. She said she was doing it, but she wasn't. She was instead building out a system based inside of Excel, which was completely not what we asked for. And we talked to her multiple times about not doing that. She ignored us multiple times, and we had hired a qa, a QA tester who happened to be her friend. We put, we had, we did a, a round of hiring her. The QA

Darwin Shurig: tester didn't make you guys aware that she wasn't doing what she was supposed to be doing. She did make

Sean Weisbrot: us aware. She did. Okay. So we, we did a hiring process for a QA tester, for a manual tester and for an automations tester. We hired both of them. The manual tester happened to be a friend of hers. She did go through the process like everyone else. She happened to be the best person that we could find, so we offered her the job, bad decision, because they were friends and. After months, we finally fired this woman because she just wasn't giving us what we wanted. We were spending time and energy trying to convince her to do her job pretty much. And there were a few instances where, so she's from the Philippines and there were a few instances where she had like looked me in the face and said something to me in Tagalog that it. It just didn't feel right, and I didn't understand it, so I had to go to one of the other, I went to our CTO and I was like, what does this mean? And he is like, she's being disrespectful to your face. And I'm like,

Darwin Shurig: I, I figured that's where you were going. It wasn't something that was nice if she's saying it right, right.

Sean Weisbrot: So different language. So I was like, okay, well we need to fire this person. Right. Clearly it's not gonna work. So. We fired her by this point. We had already started testing. We had started everything except it wasn't where

Darwin Shurig: it needed to be. What was the timeframe from the, what was the timeframe from the point you hired her until you finally made the decision to let her go? Probably three and a half to four months. I. Not as bad as I was thinking it might have been, but

Sean Weisbrot: well, so we fired her, still paying. And as soon as we fired her, we then told the testers and they were like, oh, that's a shame. One of them who wasn't her friend was like, oh, thank you. And the other one was like, ah, what a shame. Like I get it. No problem. And I was like, are you gonna be loyal to us? And she's like, yeah, of course we will. I go, I don't believe you. You're fired. I just, I'm sorry. Okay. How do I know you're not gonna just go and do the same thing as what she like, how do I know you're not gonna take advantage? Right? You're her friend. We hired you and she was your hiring manager and she was your manager. Like I just, there's something that doesn't sit right with me about keeping you. So it took us like another two months to find another guy to replace her. He is incredible. He is such a fantastic guy. Like as a human being and as an employee, like again, in the Philippines, you, you either get fantastic people or you get absolute duds, and this was a fantastic guy. Okay. Loved working with him. Um, we didn't have a budget to hire another tester, so I became the tester and I was doing manual testing, so sometimes I would talk to him as his CEO and sometimes I would talk to him as his tester, which was fun for him. Very stressful, very confusing. My CTL was not happy about it, and I was like, look, we need a tester. And I know the product better than anyone else. I know all of the feature specifications in my head, even though we have a product manager and the product manager is working with this other person, so I. So it was months of salary for these two people and then months of not having a tester or a QA manager and then hiring a new QA manager, which was more money for him to then fix her thing, which took six months for him to do and, and my time and energy having to test. So I can't put a number on it, but probably 60 to $80,000 at least.

Darwin Shurig: So, so, so you just proved several points that we've talked about before, because companies look at this all the time, every single day at comp. Well, we, this is what's in our budget. This is what we, we, you know, we believe we can spend, we can't afford this. No, actually, the fact of the matter is, is you can't afford not to spend it and do it right. Upfront because in our world, and it doesn't matter, we can talk about clinical trials. Uh, almost 20% of stage three clinical trials fail, and 70% of the failures come back to clinical efficacy, which all comes back to. Poor leadership, uh, the wrong talent, cutting corners, not interpreting FDA direction correctly mm-hmm. Or protocol design. Uh, five 10 K submissions, 70% of five 10 K submissions in in the medical device space. Are not approved the first time. 30% of 'em don't even make it to a real person. And if you look at the top seven reasons, again, it's all the wrong talent, the wrong leadership, you know, fraud using the product for the wrong, substantial equivalent for the pre, you know, for the predicate device. So you can go into all these different areas. So it's like, and then from a risk standpoint, uh, from a, uh, getting fined from a product not getting on the market recalls. It's insane how much money comes back. And then the last thing in this particular area that we're talking about, my guess is you as a C-Suite person, while you're getting to do the work, that you would've rather hired somebody to do while you're getting to report into somebody that maybe is making the situation that really should be reporting into you, but you're doing these dual roles. How's your stress level? How's your, you know, how's your health? And so, so oftentimes people cut corners relevant to talent management and what the cost is there, and they don't realize how much it's hurting them in the long run. And from a C-suite standpoint, I mean, executives work, you know, well over 60 hours on average, uh, over 70. Of the time. C-Suite, uh, personnel work on the weekends and 70% of them work on their vacations. They work 70% of the time when they're on vacation. Vacation, so we can go Right. Even if they get a vacation. So they're not really taking a vacation. Um, sleep is, you know. Barely over six hours a night. And then there's all this data in terms of health on, um, you know, 30% of C-suite executives reporting issues with fatigue and, and mental health. Mm-hmm. Um, Stanford, uh, school of Business did a, did a study. And it's like seven Fortune 500, uh, or, or Fortune two 50. Uh, CEOs or C uh, C-level executives die of unexpected heart attacks every single year. They're 35% more likely to have car cardiovascular issues. They're almost 20% more likely to have, um, high cholesterol, um, or high blood pressure. So, and here's the thing, when you hire wrong, because you do it transactionally. You don't put the time and the effort into it and you don't really understand or make, uh, make the effort to determine, make culture a priority, as well as that skillset and then things go wrong, which costs you money, hurts you in terms of opportunity costs because it takes you longer to get whatever it is you're trying to do to market. Does that improve the C-Suites health? Their anxiety and their ability to sleep.

Sean Weisbrot: Of course not. You know, I've recently interviewed several people about anxiety and panic attacks and, uh, yeah, it's not fun. I can definitely say most of my suffering started with my last startup, and even though the startup is gone, I still feel it.

Darwin Shurig: It's, what is it? Elon Musk said that being an entrepreneur is like chewing on glass and staring into the abyss, I think over the top, but it's. Um, you know, EE executive CEOs, people in the C-Suite have a life expectancy five years less than the rest of us. And, um, it's lonely. There's not, you know, typically, and there again, I mean, I'm kind of beating a dead horse, but hiring for culture and making sure you're hiring people that their personal why matches the mission statement and they believe in what you're doing that have high emotional intelligence that get along well with others. Then they're going to be more likely to, to pull together as a team, less wasted resources. And, um, you know, Chris Voss was the number one negotiator for the FBI wrote a book called Never Split the Difference. Um, you're shaking your head smile. So I'm, I'm you sure you're familiar with it, but talks about literally, uh, neurologically and scientifically, we're 30% more smarter. In terms of problem solving, when we have a positive attitude. And so when you think about as an executive, the stress, the anxiety, nobody's an executive who's like not, um, you know, not highly strong or, or an alpha, you know, thinks they're right, thinks they have the best idea. And so surrounding yourself with people that believe in what you're doing and have high emotional intelligence that you can, you can get support from. Um, and, and then making the process less transactional gives you the best opportunity to be successful, to be in the 30% of companies that succeed over 10 years than one of the many failures.

Sean Weisbrot: I'd have to say I've learned that I am often not the person with the best ideas. And that's fine because that's what you pay for, uh,

Darwin Shurig: right, and it's in the right culture. I mean, thank goodness I'm not the same person I was 20 years ago. And thank goodness I'm not the same person I was, you know, five years ago or two years ago. But the more, the more you understand what your strengths are and you're, you're acceptable of your weaknesses and you hire for people that fit the culture and then, uh, they balance you in terms of what you don't do as well. Um, another book I was thinking about when you were talking about earlier. Is, uh, about when you were talking about your dad, which at least your dad, you got great white teeth. I mean, your teeth look good, so, you know, he, he, he took care of you there, right? Um, but there's a book called From six to seven Figures, and in starting, you know, my company, I'd never owned a business before and I'd never really didn't know anything about recruiting other than the transactions of trying to hire people and then recruiters reaching out to me. But I really didn't understand the industry or a lot about it. So the first years just trying to figure things out, stay in business. Figure out what my value prop's gonna be, what differentiates, um, definitely those first two years and then the, you know, the first four years really getting good at, at, at blocking and tackling and what those things look like. But the book from six figures to seven, everything that, why you make it that first year and that first five years versus all the companies that don't make it if you want to scale or grow, those are the same things that will keep you from being able to do that successfully because. You can't do everything yourself. You can't just rely on yourself. You can't be the person that has all the best you know, ideas. You've gotta surround yourself with people that, um, compliment your strengths and help cover up your weaknesses. And so, again, coming back to what are those skill sets and do they match the culture so that you can trust them and that, uh, you're gonna be more likely to give up. Responsibilities that you used to do that you really shouldn't be doing any longer.

Sean Weisbrot: Yeah, I, I haven't read that book, but I work with people that are generally grossing six figures. So like, that's my audience, right? These are people that want to get into the seven figure range, and that's why I interview people, right? That are doing seven plus, because there's this inspirational slash educational opportunity for the audience to be like, oh, this is someone who's doing it bigger than me. They've already got a team, they've already figured some of that stuff out. What can I learn from them? And, um, the biggest, that's awesome. One of the, the biggest aspects of my program is you need a team. And the reason why you don't have a team is 'cause you don't understand how to build a team. You don't understand the psychology of, how do you find them? How do you attract them? How do you identify the right ones? How do you, you know. Hire the right ones. Of the ones that come to you, how do you create a pipeline for them? How do you give them the right kind of a contract? How do you onboard them and train them and instill your culture in them? There's so much that goes into it that people don't know. And so oftentimes they'll just stay at six figures because they're like, eh, it makes me more than I would if I had a job. So like, this is all that I need. It's like, yeah, but you're doing everything. Yes. So it's not sustainable

Darwin Shurig: generally, not it, it. I, I think it depends on, it certainly depends on what the industry is or what their service or skillset is. And there's entrepr, there's there, there are multiple business owners in the world recruiting that once they learn it and they get to a certain point, they choose to have, um, you know, uh, a lifestyle business because you can, you can run the business from anywhere, phone and internet. And they don't really wanna have employees. They stay two, three people and they can do. You know, anywhere from half a million to, you know, 1.2 million is, is probably a, a reasonable range for somebody that's really good. And that's been doing it for, let's say, you know, six to 10 years plus. Right. Um, a lot of, you know, 80% of people that go into the industry don't, don't make it a year. And then the statistics for recruitment firms that don't make it within a businesses is even. Seeing a higher failure rate. So it depends on what they're doing, but you're absolutely right. 'cause what happens if there's an economic downturn? What happens if you haven't updated your technology, your quality management system, you know, digital optimization. You and I were talking about that. Uh. Earlier before we, we went live, it is impacting AI and digital optimization for efficiencies is the number one thing, uh, uh, on CFOs, uh, in hospital systems on their mind. Because some of these hospitals have over 60 different systems that they're, they're utilizing. It's, it's not efficient. Um, it's being used in, uh, clinical trials, uh, digital twins. It's. Everywhere. Uh, master Control did a, uh, pretty extensive study and surveyed, uh, executives over manufacturing facilities, and 56% of them still had critical, uh, processes in manufacturing that were being done by pen and paper. And so 90 plus percent of 'em were saying within the next 24 months, we have to invest in digital optimization to increase efficiency. Lower risk, you know, our risk as well as get product out quicker. So, um, if you are a, a, a, a small business owner and you, what happens when technology changes? What happens if you have a health issue? There's, there's a lot of things obviously that can, can, can change. Look at the pandemic. Uh, how many businesses went out of, uh, how many. Companies went out of business 'cause of that. So I think you're absolutely spot on with that. I feel like we could talk

Sean Weisbrot: for a lot longer, but unfortunately our, our time is coming to a close. So let me ask you, what's the most important thing that you have learned so far in your life?

Darwin Shurig: Um, I would say the most important thing is really just understanding, understanding who you are, what's important to you, what your personal why is. Um. Because if you don't understand that, you're, you're less likely to know what your purpose is. And so understanding your, your purpose and that every, if you understand your, your, your purpose and where you get your value from, clearly, then I think you're better for other people, whether you're running a business and, and you have employees, whether you have partners in your personal relationships, um, because. Then you understand that you don't get your value and from, from other people in terms of, you know, becoming angry or being sad, or if you really understand that and you look at every single situation, is it happening to you or is it happening for you? And so I think understanding that you, you get an opportunity to look at things through a lens of. Every time something happens, if it involves adversity or struggle, it's an opportunity to learn and grow, um, almost like a test, or it's an opportunity to celebrate. Um, we learn more from our failures than we, we do our successes. Um, this has been a very, very difficult last year for, for us after a, you know, a huge year last year as we've, we've scaled three years in a row and then the economy went off, went off a cliff, well. The good news is the water lowered and we saw all these boulders and things that we weren't doing well. And so it gave us a great opportunity to grow and improve, uh, efficiencies. And some of the things that we're doing in the market that nobody else is doing came from those failures. And so I, I think, I mean, the most important thing for me is, is that understanding that you get to choose your attitude. You get to choose. Uh, what your values stand for and whatever else is happening around you. If you understand that, then you're more likely to give other people grace. You're more likely to learn from situations and be able to problem solve with people versus judge or, you know, not it's, it's okay not to be right. Uh, you're more likely to learn and where that can lead you. Um, so I think that's extremely important, you know, knowing your why and what's important to you and determine your, your values from that, because that will determine your actions and your, and your behaviors and whether or not you're growing or you're stagnant.