eBay did it with Flea Markets, Netflix to Blockbuster, but can the old stodgy multi-trillion-dollar staffing industry be changed overnight? Brad Hill, President of Digital at SkillGigs is betting on it, but will he and SkillGigs have what it takes to get past the Firing Squad?
You've gotta listen to find out.
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Firing Squad Intro (0s):
Like Shark Tank? Then you'll love Firing Squad! CHAD SOWASH & JOEL CHEESEMAN are here to put the recruiting industry's bravest, ballsiest, and baddest startups through the gauntlet to see if they got what it takes to make it out alive? Dig a fox hole and duck for cover kids the Chad and Cheese Podcast is taking it to a whole other level.
Joel (23s):
Oh yeah. What's up everybody? It's your favorite guilty pleasure with another episode of Firing Squad. This is the Chad and Cheese podcast. I'm your co-host, Joel Cheeseman, joined as always, the Ren to my Stimpy, Chad Sowash. And today we welcome to the Firing Squads SkillGigs President of Digital Brad Hill. Brad, welcome to The Firing Squad.
Brad (48s):
Hey guys. Hey Joel. Hey Chad. Looking forward to it.
Joel (51s):
Oh, glad to have you here, Brad. Brad listened to his first episode this morning over his Wheaties, so we're not sure how this is gonna go for Brad, but Brad, for our listeners tell us a little bit about Brad, the person. What makes you tick?
Brad (1m 4s):
What makes me tick? So, let's see. I'll make it in some couple of bullets. I feel like, you know, from a professional perspective, I'm a recovering corporate executive, loving the world of startups today. Shade tree mechanic, struggling to do that, trying to improve my car karaoke capability and not doing a very good job of that. So, but you know, from a standpoint of what makes me tick and listen, I love the passionate about what we're doing in the industry. I love being able to construct and build things. I've always kind of thought that, you know, you've got a couple of options in a career, and the more that you can basically be able to drive and build something and change and disrupt, I enjoy that piece of it. I've got two wonderful boys.
Brad (1m 45s):
I've got a big spread on them, I got a 17 year old and a four year old.
Joel (1m 49s):
Oo! I feel you dog, I feel you.
Brad (1m 52s):
Just praying my 17 year old doesn't make me a grandfather while I'm still got a teenager in the house. So
Chad (1m 58s):
Good luck on that one.
Joel (1m 60s):
He will.
Brad (2m 1s):
Yeah, so I'm a Southerner, born and bred in the state of Mississippi, but I've been in Texas for 22 years. So that's a little bit about me.
Joel (2m 8s):
Who hails from Tupelo, Mississippi, your hometown?
Brad (2m 11s):
Other than me? It would be Elvis.
Joel (2m 13s):
Oh yes.
Brad (2m 16s):
He's got the claim to that small town in north Mississippi for sure.
Joel (2m 20s):
And your And your favorite Elvis song is?
Brad (2m 24s):
Oh gosh, actually that's a good one. Suspicious Minds.
Joel (2m 27s):
Oh, that's mine too. That's mine too. Chad?
Chad (2m 29s):
Jailhouse Rock Baby.
Joel (2m 30s):
That's, Oh, I like that one. I like that one too.
Chad (2m 33s):
Old school baby.
Joel (2m 34s):
Alright enough of the pleasantries, Chad, tell him what he is won today.
Chad (2m 38s):
All right, Brad, well welcome to Firing Squad at the sound of the bell.
sfx (2m 43s):
Ding, Ding, Ding.
Chad (2m 44s):
You're gonna have two minutes to pitch SkillGigs. At the end of two minutes, we're gonna hit you with about 20 minutes of Q and A. Be sure to be concise or you're gonna get those crickets, which means tighten up your game and move out swiftly. At the end of Q and A, you're gonna receive either big applause, it's raining skills. Hallelujah. Woo baby. A golf clap. Yeah, there's a slight chance of scattered Benjamin showers, but forecast is not so lucky. And last but not least, the firing squad.
Joel (3m 17s):
Oh!
Chad (3m 18s):
It's bone dry out there, baby. No cash showers happening on this one, but you need to get your ass back the drawing board. And better luck next time that's Firing Squad. Are you ready?
Brad (3m 29s):
Let's do it.
Joel (3m 30s):
Your two minutes starts right now.
sfx (3m 33s):
ding, ding, ding.
Brad (3m 34s):
So Skill Gigs an e-commerce style talent marketplace. So listen, our goal is to basically seamlessly connect healthcare professionals and IT professionals. We use AI to match those work opportunities. I think the most important thing is understand what we're here to disrupt. We're really driving to disrupt the third party agency business model. That business model ripe within inefficiencies and really designed to serve itself, I spent 25 years in that industry. Our main focus to be able to create transparency and empowerment between the buyers and the sellers. So if you think of a buyer as an employer, seller is talent. So we want to crazily create a connection between the two that removes a lot of those middle layers. So arguably what we're saying is like no more recruiters, we're not a job board and we're not a staffing company.
Brad (4m 17s):
If you think about, you know, we are, you know, kind of from a job board perspective, we are the eBay to the flea market or the iPod to the Walkman, when you think about that as a staffing organization. We want to basically converge the entire process of being able to connect with talent and basically empower that transparency between the two buyers and the sellers to connect. What does that mean? That means we're giving the talent an environment to have something that they've never had before, which is the freedom to be able to choose their pay rate, the freedom to be able to remarket themselves and no longer outsource their fate to a third party recruiter. From an employer perspective, bypassing that relationship with the third party agency allows you to have better cost controls, direct access to that talent and the ability to redeploy that talent.
Brad (5m 1s):
Now to a buyer and to an employer, from an e-commerce perspective, we offer a lot of discounts and incentives based on the hiring consumption that they would have over the period of time that you're using the platform. But again, I think our biggest component is really the inventory and the talent that we bring in the marketplace. We're now enabling them to have direct access to a corporate recruiter or an employer, not a third party agency. They are able to control their pay rate, they're able to control the ability to remarket themselves and through our 3D resume, which is a patented component of our platform, it gives them a brand, a brand that they can build on over time. And if you think about this from an e-commerce perspective, they have a product.
Brad (5m 42s):
Their product is their talent.
Joel (5m 43s):
All right, Brad, your two minutes is up. Thank you for your pitch. All right, let's talk about the name real quick. In scheduling this, I think Chad went with SkillsGigs, SkillsGigs, SkillGigs. It's a little confusing. Like talk about the genesis of the name skills gigs.com looks like no one's using it. Did you try to buy it? Like talk about the name?
Brad (6m 9s):
Yeah, so you know, we've been around about five years and one of the number one things that we wanted to promote in our marketplace was the skills of the talent, right? We're getting away from some of the abstract connection points and we're wanting to promote that person's talent through the skills that they have. So we really wanted to hone in on the term skill. Now in the last five years, you know, we've seen the growth in the expansion of the gig economy. I like to say being in the staffing industry for 25 years, it was the original gig economy. We just never claimed that terminology. The gig economy has kind of been associated to B2C as well as thinking about the 1099 worker today. But there is a huge population of workers out there that work contract to contract.
Brad (6m 51s):
And that scenario that we wanted to basically take advantage of, kind of pulling those two terms together to say we wanna promote skills at the main, most component part of your capability as a talent. And we want to basically take advantage of the gig economy kind of terminology that's become very pervasive today.
Joel (7m 9s):
A five year old company is owning the gig economy acronym there, Chad. That's good. That's good. So you've raised about 1.5 million according to CrunchBase. You took a seed round, not a lot of money. You guys are mostly bootstrap, like talk through that.
Brad (7m 25s):
Yeah, so we've been bootstrapped since we kicked off about five years ago. What makes us unique I think, and thinking about a startup is kind of where we're at today. So our run rate is a little over $80 million currently today. And we're a profitable organization. So if you think about a tech startup, which is really how we identify ourselves. We are a software as a service (SAAS) kind of platform. Having an organization that is profitable, that's generating that level of run rate in five years, that's over 400% growth. So we're in a unique position to where we've got this stability, the product market fit between the buyer and the seller environment with our customers that we're working with today, and the talent that's seeing this as an alternative that they've never had before to grow that part of our business.
Brad (8m 8s):
But we also are in the process of raising really our first, most significant round going into next year. So we're looking for a significant raise. And a lot of this is just to take advantage of basically what we believe is a disruptive event in the marketplace, which is basically being able to tell employers, don't call an agency, become your own agency. Give them a platform to build their contingent workforce directly and to be able to redeploy their internal resources and their own talent pool if necessary. So our system is complete end to end. Almost think about a convergence of a VMS system, an MSP system, as well as a job board all into one from the point of publishing a job in the marketplace, curation, hiring.
Brad (8m 51s):
And then basically what also makes us unique is we handle the EOR component. So we have the payrolling component at back end of the process.
Joel (8m 58s):
Sounds to me like he's ready to announce some sort of a series A round on the show Chad. I don't know if you're welcome to do so, Brad, if you'd like to.
Chad (9m 5s):
Said he has a run rate of 80 million. I don't know that he wants anybody else in his pie. That's what it sounds like. Okay. So Brad, how big is the staffing industry? Revenue wise?
Brad (9m 18s):
The well global tams about a half a billion, a half a trillion dollars, right? $500 billion.
Chad (9m 24s):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So big question for me. When you know that the staffing industry is antiquated and they need really a new age operating system, why go head-to-head and try to compete with them instead of just becoming their operating system? Because everything that you've said thus far really meets a head-to-head component as opposed to doing what Indeed did to the job board industry as they came in and they now own it. Why are you going down the go-to market that you are now versus being the operating system for the entire industry, which is a much larger chunk, even though 80 million's a lot, a much larger chunk?
Brad (10m 4s):
Yeah, that's a great question Chad. And we get that from time to time, right? I mean, we can think about our technology as just basically a platform to utilize for staffing companies to basically aggregate talent. I think the biggest driver for us and one of the unique components of our platform is the way you engage, right? We're envisioning a world to where employers and talent can connect seamlessly, but with the most important components that are to the talent, which is, here I have a job and this is what you're gonna pay. So one of the pieces that's kind of a twist in the way our put system works, kind of where this eBay component comes into play is the way you bid talent. So our customers own their bill rate. We don't tell 'em what they're gonna bill. They basically, ee use AI to curate and match that talent to their jobs.
Brad (10m 47s):
There's a skill density built into the job that they publish and a skill index that quantifies the skills of the talent. Once they bid that talent, the talent's gonna receive the job on their mobile device as well as their pay rate. So if you think about in the world of digital or in healthcare, when the demand is high and supply is low, you have to promote something that's gonna be the most important attribute to that talent. And that's one of those components which now the talent is able to accept, deny or they can actually rebid that. So we see this component that is bigger than just being able to provide the next generation AI platform to a staffing company to basically go out there and curate talent. And we also see a changing shift in the way corporate recruiting's starting to look.
Brad (11m 30s):
Corporate recruiting is starting to have to build elasticity in their workforce, not just through permanent hiring. They want more control of their contingent hiring capability. So we're basically allowing them to have their platform to build that contingent workforce, lower their total cost of acquisition. Cuz guys, let's be frank, I think I worked in that industry. I think maybe you guys worked in that industry. The third party staffing agents businesses does not care as much about the talent and the employer as they do the profitability that they hold between it. And so we're around to move that layer to allow those two components to connect, to pass along the value to the talent, which is most important is I own my fate, I own my pay rate and I own my ability to remarket myself.
Brad (12m 12s):
I'm no longer outsourcing it to a third party agency, to an employer. I'm no longer outsourcing that to a third party agency as well, which basically is meaning that I'm having to work at their pace, their urgency. So one of the things that really we believe is a changing in a shift is that, there's gonna be an award. And we've got customers today that look at it this way is that I'm building my own contingent workforce in North America and globally on my terms and I'm lowering my cost of acquisition. So we are really trying to kind of go in there and create a place for this business model that doesn't exist.
Chad (12m 46s):
Okay. But there still is a third party. I mean you get paid, right?
Brad (12m 50s):
We get paid. So the third party is the payrolling component. So our compensation, the way we make money is descriptively, you pay to access the platform, based on your hiring and consumption that you would have as a buyer or an employer. You have a discounting program that comes along with the consumption that you hire, right? So the more people you hire, we apply discounts to your finalized rate that you would use to negotiate with the talent. We handle the EOR. So once everything is done, everything's negotiated. We don't be in the way the talent's negotiating with the buyer, the buyer's negotiating with the talent, with our bidding functionality. Once they agree to work together, we step in and bring that contractor on board to SkillGigs as a SkillGigs contractor for the length of the assignment.
Chad (13m 34s):
Okay. Are you in the US? Are you actually working worldwide?
Brad (13m 40s):
Our marketplace today we have about 125,000 profiles in our marketplace today. A large portion of that's gonna be in North America, probably over 80%. We are starting to proliferate into Asia and to other parts of the country. Basically central South America and and eastern Europe. And one of the cool things about that is just when I add to that is like, you know, me coming from the IT staffing outsourcing world, if you wanted to access talent abroad, you had to predominantly either build brick and mortar there or go through an outsourcing relationship. We're now allowing companies to be able to staff augment out of India from North America. Covid changed everything guys, you know that, it went from an employer market to an employee market.
Brad (14m 23s):
It went from an experiment of working from home to the point to where India had to change the way their business model worked in that country to allow people to work from home. We're taking advantage of that, enabling people to hire talent in India to do staff augmentaion work here for contingent labor in North America.
Joel (14m 42s):
You've talked a lot about staffing firms. My initial thought in terms of your competition was, you know, Upwork, Fiverr, those guys. Where do you consider them in the competitive landscape?
Brad (14m 55s):
That's a great question. So I think competitively we're similar because we're a marketplace business. They're a marketplace. We're a marketplace. We don't see them as a direct competitor cuz they're focusing on micro projects and 1099 workers. I believe there's a gap in that they would struggle to bring to the enterprise cuz enterprises have more need to basically extend their staff through utilizing contingent labor that doesn't come with the risk of employee misclassification. We're watching legislation right now happen in real time in the world of the gig economy around employee misclassification. If you're a traditional enterprise and you need a contractor for six month time materials underneath your management, you cannot use a 1099 worker.
Brad (15m 35s):
You're gonna misclassify them immediately and create exposure for you. So we focus more on the component of the worker that is going to be looking for that contract position. It could be a contract to hire position as well that enables them to pick up that contract work, build that contingent workforce for an employer and do it directly.
Joel (15m 53s):
You really just sound like a staffing firm. Am I like, you might have some different tech and you throw out ai, but essentially you're calling on employers to fill spots. You have a database of 175,000 workers that you're placing in there, but then, you let go. Is that where you stop being a staffing firm? I guess? Are you a hybrid? Like where do you fit in the ecosystem?
Brad (16m 16s):
Yeah, so I think the closest thing that makes us look similar to a staffing company is that we handle the payroll and the EOR at the end of the negotiation process, which is basically what a staffing company does. What we don't have as recruiters. So think let's talk about how we build our marketplace. We use traditional B2C ad campaigns and marketing that basically bring talent into the marketplace and build a profile. We also have a three to one ratio of referrals. So for every one person that signs up, they bring three people with them into the marketplace. Talent is, it's free to be in our marketplace and to build their brand. From there what makes us also massively different is we don't handle any of the connection between the buyer and the seller.
Brad (16m 56s):
The technology's doing all of that for it. So if you think about, no, no different than the way Uber disrupted the ride sharing business or the way Airbnb disrupted the travel agents business and we took the middle layers out, we replaced it with technology, we put it in the hands of the users.
Joel (17m 12s):
Okay, talk to me about acquiring talent. Like for example, I went to Google and searched nursing jobs, I didn't see you guys there. Like what's the marketing strategy and are you doing the same with employers or are you calling them directly?
Brad (17m 26s):
Great question. So on the B2C side, we basically have three or four different means that way we go about doing, we of course we do Google SEO for travel nursing and et cetera, Instagram, Facebook, are the two other very large areas that we use for marketing as well. Again, we also promote a lot of referral business into the marketplace as well. We want, that network effect is really starting to take hold. We're bringing in between four and 6,000 new members every month into the marketplace. Off of those three areas that we have. We've experimented with some other, you know, more creative things, Joel, like sponsoring eSports events to kind of generate people that want to be in the marketplace as well. We're gonna be hosting hackathons as well to kind of promote opportunity for people that are IT professionals for that, for example, that would want to be in the marketplace.
Brad (18m 14s):
And we also have a proprietary team and a technology we call Skills Radar that we can do spot inventory management. So as an e-commerce business, we're in the supply chain business buyers and sellers. And so we have to constantly be able to manage inventory against the way our buyers are actually hiring that inventory. And so we can go into that and kind of spot manage inventory and target skills, whether it's an RN or whether it's a, you know, a MER developer, a full stack developer to make sure we're managing that. On the B2B side, it's been a little grassroots the last couple years. Part of our raise that we're looking to do next year is to basically really pump a lot of B2B marketing into the marketplace. Traditionally, like any other organization, we have a sales team that's focusing in on demoing the product and then obviously selling the subscription access to the technology through a user license model.
Chad (19m 2s):
You take a look at the technology, you don't have any recruiters. That's where most of the money's spent on the staffing side of the house, right? So when you take a look at that, obviously the margins are gonna be much, much larger, but you're probably not going at 15 to 20%. So where are you usually hitting? What's your main margin point that you're trying to target?
Brad (19m 21s):
Yeah, so main margin for we're trying to cart is somewhere between 20 and 25% on margin. Now, one of the things to think about having worked for two of the largest global staffing companies in the world, let's break this down even more. For every billion dollars they generate, it takes about six to 700 people to produce it. So we believe we can go generate that same amount of value with half as many people. Cuz you just made a comment, Chad, in the staffing industry, when you want to go bring customers and talent in, what do you do? You throw bodies at it, I'll go hire another salesperson to get a req, go hire another recruiter to find a resume. We don't have to basically make that same investment to generate the income that we're looking for in the marketplace.
Brad (20m 2s):
Also, uniquely it's descriptive, right? So we have descriptive revenue because to access the technology from a buyer perspective, you pay to access it and you basically will receive consumptive benefits and rebates, discounts on your hiring over time. You keep your discount by the way, as long as you're subscribing. Our discounts for our largest enterprise buyers are 15%, right? So if I'm a buyer, I'm a CIO, I'm an administrator, I'm like, you're gonna tell me I can lower my cost of acquisition over hiring, say my first 15 people, which the cost savings pays for our technology and I can keep that discount as long as I keep using the system along with our percentage rebates that we offer them every year.
Brad (20m 44s):
Another cool thing that we do is you can publish a permanent job in our marketplace. You can, if you choose to, we look at that as a, something similar to a restocking fee. We charge a low flat rate if you hire full time out of our marketplace. And that flow flat rate is not a percentage of the first year's salary. It allows me to basically use the B2C dollars I need to go replace that person that you just took outta the marketplace.
Chad (21m 11s):
So talk to me about partnerships. How are you, other than you know, Google, SEO, SEM, how are you driving candidates through partnerships? Not to mention how are you driving sales through partnerships?
Brad (21m 24s):
Yeah, so on the candidate side, we're exploring some new things currently as we speak with allowing companies that may be holding, let's say for example, there's companies that hold H1B visas for a lot of their employees. We're allowing them to be in the marketplace through a core to core relationship with us, to be able to help bring in a embedded talent in the marketplace that can be utilized through our buyers. So that's one area that we're exploring some partnerships that we can do to help drive basically the growth of the talent marketplace itself. On the outbound side, on the B2B side, we're really starting to explore what those new partnerships look at. We're talking to other companies that are in the industry and talent marketplace, businesses that are kind of peripheral to our skill set categories as partnerships.
Brad (22m 8s):
One of the other areas that we're really excited about is the systems integrating world for the digital side. Systems integrators are some of the biggest buyers of IT staffing. And so their relationship with us to be able to utilize our technology to directly source talent, not indirectly do it through a staffing agency, lowers their cost of acquisition that actually increases their margins. We also give them the ability to talent pool their head count in our marketplace to help reduce their overall cost of their bench that they're utilizing on a regular basis.
Joel (22m 37s):
What the hell is a 3D resume?
Brad (22m 40s):
Great question. So one of the things, Joel, that we want to do is that that 2D resume that could be five pages long that a recruiter or someone has to go through, wanted to eliminate that. So, we patented this technology, which allows someone to build a profile for free, and we basically take each one of their jobs that they've done and then we ask them to wait and build an index in an indicese against all the skills that they've used across all those jobs. We then create a three dimensional picture, a three-dimensional visual of that. So if you're a recruiter or a hiring manager, you're gonna see two big things. As soon as you look at their profile, you're gonna see basically a three dimensional view of all the skills and index that are most prevalent for that particular talent.
Brad (23m 23s):
And we're gonna break that down in an industry density. So what we're saying is you can review someone's capability with our 3D resume in less than 15 seconds versus getting a highlighter and a pin and looking at your job and going through and highlighting a bunch of texts. That enables us to also do another thing that's very important in algorithm, that index that they build on a thousand point basis is what we run the algorithms against, the skill density of the job that the employers publishing. That waiting system is what drives the curation, just like any other e-commerce business, the more you buy, we start to see elements that are creating the interview process and the hiring process, and we continue to build a proprietary algorithm for that particular buyer.
Brad (24m 8s):
And we also match bidirectionally, so the buyers get matched through the system based on their published jobs and then the talent get matched to jobs based on their skill sets being in the marketplace. The last thing I'll mention on the 3D resume is the product, eye site productization of it. If you're a talent, and let's say you're a technical talent, you might have been, you know, a project manager, an architect, a web developer, we allow them to create multiple products. We call it a skill listing. So you can create multiple products off your skills that you've collected over your career and use those promote in our marketplace. So you may have multiple profiles, you may say, I'm open to doing a project manager job, but I'll also take a scrum manager job position.
Brad (24m 49s):
I create two products, I put them into the marketplace and allow the buyers to be able to curate to them.
Joel (24m 57s):
In one of your promotional videos, you claim to be the world's biggest self sourcing talent marketplace. What does that mean, self sourcing talent marketplace?
Brad (25m 8s):
Great question. So we hear the term direct sourcing a lot, right? It's kind of becoming something more commonplace. We look, throughout the lens of more of an active sourcing to where we're truly empowering the buyer and the seller to basically self source together, to basically have direct access removing all those elements. And again, the biggest twist, the most unique component of our marketplace, which makes us different is the bidding functionality. So we watch competitors, all the time we're watching the way platforms are being developed, we're looking at the way talent markets are being developed. There is not another technology out there that provides full self-service bidirectionally that's allowing a bidding process to happen in order to create that connection.
Brad (25m 51s):
So we allow the buyers to control their hard dollar costs. We allow the talent to control their pay rate, once they basically agree on that, after that, it's an interview, are we a good match? We take all the pricing ambiguity out up front. That's what makes us unique, which makes us, even though our size today, we have not seen another competitor out there that's truly creating that level of self-service between a buyer and a seller.
Chad (26m 15s):
Talk to me about threats. Who are your threats that are out there? Other than the the old lumbering staffing organizations?
Brad (26m 24s):
Yeah, so we get investors ask us this question a lot, Chad, it's a good question. So you named one that kind of comes up a lot. What about the big five, right? I won't name 'em. We all know who they are. Are they not going to go build this or are they not a threat to this business model? And my answer is, having worked for two of 'em is that their ability to pivot against the Titanic that they've built is a challenge, at the end of the day. Can they buy their way into a marketplace like this or buy a system like this? And it also is gonna mean that I'm gonna have to basically say, no more recruiters, no more salespeople in my organization. So it's almost as if there's a Blockbuster/Netflix effect there, right? Those big guys are Blockbuster and then, and we're the Netflix and we all know the story.
Brad (27m 9s):
Blockbuster could have bought Netflix for $50 million and they said no, right? So those big agencies, they're gonna find ways to use technology to accentuate their business model. They're not gonna change it. So the other threats are gonna be, I think, you mentioned two other marketplaces out there that are predominantly 1099. When we start to see more legislation that's starting to come down for the gig economy, they're gonna have to pivot their business. Today they don't handle EOR, we handle EOR in house. They outsource that to another third party if you wanna do it. They bank their money off of micro transactions.
Brad (27m 51s):
Their average invoice per per buyer is about $5,000 a month. Ours is much larger than that. So our threat's gonna be the legislation coming down causing the larger marketplaces that are doing predominant 1099. Two of those big ones are public, they have a lot of funding to start pivoting towards how do we take our business to the enterprise in a way that's gonna allow us to operate probably much more similar to the way we operate today, which is reason why we're wanting to raise money so we can get out in front of this anticipated change probably happening in the next 24 to 36 months.
Chad (28m 26s):
Okay. So do me a favor and list out your total addressable market. What are the different industries that you're hitting? Industry tech, what are you covering right now?
Brad (28m 37s):
Yeah, so our categories are healthcare and digital today. So we have two direct marketplaces. I would say the total addressable marketplace. The size of that North America is about $180 billion total addressable market size. We're obviously trying to go after somewhere between, you know, three to 10% of that to basically kind of continue our growth. We are thinking about also other categories. So SkillGigs is going to be a multi-category marketplace, business model, healthcare, digital. We're looking at finance and accounting and we're looking at some other marketplaces as well as sales and marketing. This allows companies that are early adopters to this business model that are willing to empower their corporate recruiters to build their contingent workforce through our technology the ability to add more categories.
Brad (29m 26s):
Of course, IT and FNA are very close to each other. Healthcare, we're very focused on the clinician side, but there's also an IT component to the healthcare world too as well. So we see that kind of helping us provide us a diversity into it. There's a lot of companies out there that'll just be gonna kind of be one specific category. We see at least three categories over the next 36 months.
Joel (29m 51s):
Chad, this sounds really expensive! Brad, you mentioned subscription model, but let's dig into that. What can a company typically expect to pay for your service?
Brad (29m 60s):
Well that's a great question. So we have three plans that we look at and what we look at this from, there's three enterprise plans, what we call a recruit pro plan. Recruit pro plan is gonna be for a small/medium business, and it's our most affordable subscription that we have. It's two licenses, $12,000 a year. Okay? That comes with our standard fee structures, our standard, what we call bring your own contractor rebates, which is basically allow you to payroll through our technology as well as our standard fixed fees for permanent hiring. When you move up the scale, we have three enterprise plans based on hiring volumes. So whether this is hiring spend contingently or non contingently or actually count spend, we basically increase that.
Brad (30m 44s):
So it'll go all the way up to $120,000 a year. That's for our largest plan. So it's $10,000 a month, $120,000 a year, you get three discounts, five, 10, and 15%. You get a 1% rebate, you get a fixed monthly cost structure at $4,000 for every person you hire permanently. And the cool thing about this is because we already take 30 to 40 points of cost out before you hit a discount because we removed all those layers from the buying process, what we're seeing is it takes three hires in our marketplace to cover a hundred percent of the capital cost of that investment on the technology.
Joel (31m 25s):
And be on the lookout for a Groupon for the holiday season everybody. All right, Chad, you know what the bell means. Brad, I don't know if you know what it means, but it's time to face the firing squad, my friend. Are you ready?
Brad (31m 39s):
I'm ready, man. Let's go.
Joel (31m 40s):
Yeah, Chad, are you ready?
Chad (31m 41s):
Let me snuggle up to this microphone here real quick. Okay, so Brad, one, I think one of the most important things for any organization is experience and, you and Kashif have great experience, leadership in the space. Pretty awesome to see you guys come in and really shake things up. Timing, I think it's perfect timing. There's no question to be able to challenge the big names out there, you have to do it with a model that is entirely different. Like you said, you have to, you have to be the Netflix, you have to be mailing discs and then being online, the taxi to Uber, the flea market to eBay are all great examples.
Chad (32m 24s):
Margins? Being able to cut count, to be able to scale. This is something that Joel and I talk about every single week on the show, is how do we use tech to better scale, to be able to increase margins, efficiencies, and those types of things? Go to market, I think there's some opportunities there, but the biggest thing for me, is I believe that you have a proven model. You have revenues, you have a portfolio of clients. You could be the operating system for the staffing organization. And again, think Indeed what they were to job boards back 15 years ago.
Chad (33m 4s):
That's really my biggest dig on you guys is that I think that now that you have a proven model, you can take that and you can go and shoot for the stars. But to be quite frank, man, I love what you're doing. You're taking an old slow titanic industry and you're adding a speedboat into it. It's a big applause for me.
Brad (33m 25s):
Oh, thank you man.
Joel (33m 26s):
And that's, No, no, no. Brad, you don't talk yet. You don't talk yet. I know, I know. It's your thing, man. You like, to do the thing, but it's not your turn yet. Okay. All right. It's my turn now, Brad, there's a great line in the movie Jerry McGuire where Jerry is talking to Rod Tidwell. I'm assuming a lot of our listeners know this movie and they're walking out from a game and Rod asks Jerry, why he is not at home with his wife and Jerry answers and he says, Well, it's an answer. And Rod says basically, it's not sexy, but it's an answer. That's what I kept thinking through your whole pitch. Like, none of this is sexy unless profits are sexy.
Joel (34m 9s):
Like, I'll echo everything Chad said. You guys are a well manicured machine. You're gonna raise a Series A, you're profitable, you're gonna grow into new markets. Healthcare and tech are only gonna be, you know, tech maybe with layoffs is interesting. Nurses leaving healthcare is interesting, but you guys sound like you're diversifying into new markets. If I could create a new grade where the crickets are in with the applause, I would do that. But since I can't, this business is boring as it is for those that typically come on the firing squad is a big applause.
Chad (34m 48s):
I think. I think it's sexy, Brad. I think it's sexy. I'm a big fan of making money.
Joel (34m 53s):
It's not sexy, but it's an answer.
Brad (34m 55s):
I like to call it new hotness.
Joel (34m 57s):
Brad firing squad's over, man. You don't have to pitch anymore. It's over. It's over, it's over. Save your 3D resume, your ai, your self sourcing marketplace for another day.
Chad (35m 10s):
You can ditch all of that.
Joel (35m 11s):
Save it for another day. Chad, For us. It's another firing squad in the can!
Chad and Cheese (35m 15s):
We out. We out.
OUTRO (35m 15s):
This has been the Firing Squad. Be sure to subscribe to the Chad and Cheese Podcast so you don't miss an episode. And if you're a startup who wants to face the Firing Squad, contact the boys at chadcheese.com today. That's www.chadcheese.com.