Not to paint everything with a broad brush, but I think where we differentiate ourselves is we choose to take the high road as an employer and we choose to work with high road clients who have nice work environments, who pay fairly, who treat people fairly, who have good supervisors and good personnel to interact with. And then we always try to do the right thing in terms of our employees. And one of the most concrete examples I can give is I find myself lobbying almost every day in some situation or another for worker pay. Every year over 800 tech and staffing leaders gather in Dallas for the SIA Gig E Conference. We sat down with seven of them. Here are their stories. I'm here today with Jason Radisson, the CEO and founder of Shift One. The thing Jason that had me reach out to you was sort of the story you have on LinkedIn, which if you look at your sort of your history, like your job history, the mission of improving economic opportunities for others. Talk to me a little bit about that write up you have on LinkedIn and your upbringing. And we'll get to talking about Shift One and the Gig Economy. But I think that's a very important thing to ground in. So just tell me a little bit about you. Yeah, 100%. So as you alluded to, I grew up, I was a child of a single mom, I was a 16-year-old single mom. The topic of work and self-empowerment, self-realization was super close to me the whole time growing up because my mom and I, we both, we kind of bootstrapped ourselves. My earliest childhood memories are going through GED and community college and kind of the things that my mom was doing. And then teacher college and I used to get passed around between the professors. I used to go to classes or whatever if my mom didn't have childcare at that moment. And then she was working jobs after school, between classes, those kinds of things. So we had this experience of work throughout. And I worked in every kind of school. So for me, it was always sort of this very full schedule because I was trying to earn some money and go to school. And every chance I got really at higher education was I saw it as really my own empowerment in a way to try to get myself to a better standard of living and kind of out of poverty in the way that I had grown up. Let's talk about just the gig economy in general before we get into shift one. You have a deep background in growing and scaling businesses. When you think of the on-demand space, do you think there's a sector or industry that it's not going to touch? It's a great question. And I think almost any job can be broken into smaller jobs that can be done on demand. I think it has to be balanced with the skills that a person's developing as they might be working different gigs and on-demand things. So I think it depends. But I think fundamentally gig work can touch almost every part of the economy. Now, you started your journey at McKinsey. You were a consultant. You got into software. I was just, I'm going off. Yeah, totally. I was publicly able to find. Totally. You got into software and then you got the gig bug. So tell me about that journey a little bit. Everybody ends up in sort of this space where technology and work sort of mush. Tell me a little bit about your journey and how you got here. 100%. So when I was a consultant, I worked in labor topics kind of not surprisingly. If there was tech, it was more approaches and capabilities and in particular applied math. So a lot of my consulting work was how do you merge two companies' workforces together? How do you redesign processes in big workforces to make them more efficient? I was a consultant in a phase in the economy where people had to drive efficiency. It wasn't the best economy. You mean like the one right now? Yeah, you know, not too that. Do I feel like it was so long ago? Yeah, yeah, yeah. No. It was the last recession. Exactly, exactly, exactly. So in those periods, it's a classic consulting thing. Consultants make money in a great economy and they make money in a terrible economy, just doing the opposite kinds of things. And so that was my consulting experience was that it was process improvement, OPEX reduction, a classic things that McKinsey is known for in the down market. A lot of in Latin America, I really like traveling and I enjoyed that part. I enjoyed the international dynamic and dealing with clients in different cultures and these workforce problems. In Latin America had all kinds of challenges, not that we didn't have them in the US, but everything was even bigger and more exacerbated. So that was my experience that then as I got deeper into sort of technology and there were new technologies coming out, I found it so fascinating that you could deploy software in so many other ways. And that's really where I started to learn automation skills. So I worked on some e-commerce platforms, you know, developing different algorithms and different approaches that were all automating, essentially automating people's e-commerce processes. And then I think it came full circle when ridesharing was really kind of the first big application that was out there that truly went global. It truly touched a lot of blue collar processes and a lot of very fundamental sort of frontline work, not the whole economy, but at least, you know, sort of the passenger and delivery parts of the economy. And for me, it all came full circle and was all in your mobile. And so, you know, that was a dove in and really I haven't looked back. I've really been working in that same space. That's kind of how it works for most of the people who start to see the opportunity. Yeah. And it's because it's got work. Yeah. It's got technology. It's got a lot of things that are very interesting and complex, but are somewhat solvable, as you've seen with Uber. Yeah. When you first went to Uber in 99 Taxi in Brazil, you show up there day one, plug in and like, what surprised you about just this new, you know, you press a button and you get an outcome sort of world? Yeah, yeah. I think what the technology does, you know, or did in a very unique way was it created automation sort of from a fresh sheet of paper. A hiring challenge in Uber would be, gosh, we're launching a city next week. We're onboarding 5,000 drivers this week. And you just, you had software and industrial approaches that the world kind of hadn't used before in the same way. I can't imagine any company, you know, prior to Uber, maybe some others, that you'd be able to onboard that many people to do anything. Yeah. And I'm imagining most of those processes. I just onboarded to Instacart because a good friend of mine works at Instacart and I was trying out their onboarding process for him. Seamless and never talked to a human and I was ready to go to Instacart, except for I couldn't find a job because they were all booked. But that's 100%. 100%. Yeah. So if you look at the onboarding capabilities, if you look at scheduling and the idea that you can dynamically schedule tens of thousands of people in real time, just fantastic automated approaches, highly scalable approaches and things broke, but the tech was just there. And so I think it was sort of a time to really see, call it something, a lot of it, we were sort of building on top of what e-commerce had done, you know, it's a similar, similar, not similar thing in terms of like running a website and running a supply chain of items into that website and matching buyers and sellers and whatnot, you know, e-bays and Amazon's of the world. But this was this real time thing that could take you out to eat or get you to the airport or whatever at the push of a button. And that was really fantastic. When I went to 99, it was just a fantastic time and opportunity in the world because, you know, what we had kind of figured out is not all cities were made the same. In Uber, I was responsible for Nevada and launching, running Las Vegas and, you know, some of the smaller cities, it's a fantastic experience. I saw that you were doing Vegas, right? Yeah. I'm sure there's some story. There's a Vegas story. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And some things that'll stay in Vegas. But, you know, in Brazil, we figured out that not all cities were put together the same way. And some of the best cities in the world for the gig economy were Latin American cities. And they weren't even the largest, you know, kind of capital cities or biggest markets. They were more of the secondary cities. I think a similar thing happened with Didi in China. There were a lot of Chinese cities, sort of secondary cities, you know, and there, as in Latin America, we're talking two to five million people, two to seven million people, you know. But those cities were structured in such a good way. There was a super ready supply of gig workers, and there was a rising middle upper middle class that had money, but not time. And it just, the market really came together in those cities. So, Brazilian cities, secondary cities, Belo Horizonte, Porto Legre, cities like that, Salvador, they were profitable. And if you look at what had been happening in sort of the gig economy, almost nothing was profitable. So, they were these really bright spots. And plus, you had the kind of social impact that you had because, you know, these were cities that, you know, had just slums and favelas and dramatic parts of the country that just didn't have any economic opportunity. You bring up a good point, because when people talk about the gig economy, there's a belief that there's kind of two sides of the coin. Some people believe that it provides economic opportunity to anyone who's willing to work. Yeah, the platforms have some challenges. But if anybody's willing to do whatever the work is, there's opportunity. And others say that it takes advantage of workers. How do you balance the two? You know, and this will transition right into shift one. Yeah, right. I think it's an important question to think about. How do you frame that in your own mind based on your experience? Great question. And I think part of it is, we've been talking about, or we've been conditioned, I think, particularly in the U.S., to think about, there's been like a dual track. On the one hand, we're hearing about workers where corners have been cut, and we're seeing regulatory disputes around those cut corners and whatever. And then on the other hand, we're hearing about gig workers who want maximal flexibility. I think what people really want is to maximize their opportunity and their economic advancement. And it doesn't have to be at odds with what the company needs. In the U.S., we haven't really put that together in a win-win situation. It's been better for the companies, for the gig companies than it has been for the gig workers. And a lot of that in the stuff that I read and people I talk to is around healthcare benefit. And we have a very unique messed up system here in the United States where your healthcare side to your work, which makes gig work just fundamentally harder to sustain because you have to work about healthcare. 100%. Well, we do, in the U.S., we do have this zero hours employment model. When we were starting out with shift one, we decided not to cut that corner. We decided to put our workforce on as W2 workers. We still have flexibility in terms of hours. We do. We have an hourly, I said, zero hour model in the U.S. And yet we're able to pay payroll taxes, we subsidize or pay for health insurance. They have, our workers have access to health insurance, have access to other benefits. So it felt like it was a corner too far. I think, as I said, I think that gig platforms have, obviously when you're growing really fast and you've got other things, I think you get to a certain point where you just can no longer make that case, where that workforce is your workforce. And I think- No longer a nameless technology platform. Yeah, exactly. And now we look at where we are in the economy where there's less and less talent available and people are having to dig deeper and deeper. And really, it's kind of on all of us, employers, platform operators, to treat people the right way so that they want to be participating and want to grow with our platform and want to be with us long term. Now, I love talking to founders because, working at McKinsey, working for Uber, I'm sure it's very different than starting a company. Tell me a little bit just quickly about when did you decide to take the jump and say, I'm going to be a founder? And then you did something that I see some founders do and I've always wanted to ask somebody, why stealth mode? So just those two things. Sure, sure. So for me, I had the idea and I had the vision that the manufacturing logistics market in the US was this monstrous place that, if we just brought technology and a different approach to it, we could create better living standards. We could create better employment opportunities. We could create a better supply of labor for the US. That's where we started. As we started working with different clients, we got into Latin America and we started to expand beyond that. But that was fundamentally, I started the company to help improve people's lives. And I wanted to go at a very professional career path, one that had a lot of rungs on the ladder, one that people could elevate themselves up into a full on middle class existence, going through a couple of different career steps and training along the way. And when you look at the world, that's generally not the entry level delivery. There are a few different roles in classic gig marketplaces where we think about things where it's more casual. A lot of those roles don't have the career rungs. So I wanted to really write what I had seen as a lot of the shortcomings. That was the founding moment and my inspiration for starting the company. And why stealth mode? It sounds like a game. I talked to founders and it's like, oh, you're in stealth mode. Right. Well, stealth mode allows you to work with a group of your buddies on a side project while you're figuring it out. And it may be that in our particular case, we were bootstrapping. So we were only investing back into the company. We weren't taking paychecks. So it really had to be on the down low while we were putting that project together. And then once we felt like, okay, we see where we have product market fit, right? We have our clients lined up. We have a path to fundraising. We know we have a company here. Okay, let's all go. We'll come out with the company, with the brand. We'll start to commercialize. And we'll all go full time. And we did that in 2020, right before the pandemic. It's a great time. January 2020. Now, let's talk about shift one. I think you spoke a bit about why the blue collar market. Yeah. What's been the biggest challenge as you approach, you've got this talent, you've created some technology. What's the biggest challenge when you approach your customers to try to deploy that challenge? Yeah, I think I give you two answers because we're attacking it two different ways. One of the ways that we help our clients is we've become a supplier of semi-skilled, skilled labor when they can't find people. So give me a scenario where shift one shines. Yeah. A manufacturing plant that's, its workforce is down 20%. And they're underproducing in units and pounds or whatever their output is. They've got lines down or short shifts because of it. And so we'll get engaged and we'll start supplying workers. So we'll onboard the workers, we'll handle as much of that kind of worker startup process and putting in great new teams to help fill out their workforce. So that's the kind of outsourcing BPO model. And we do that. It's 80% of our business. And our business is now transforming because as the economy evolves, what we're seeing is talent is thinner and thinner. I'm living in the state of Minnesota, which has the lowest unemployment in the country. It's just over 1%. There just aren't, there aren't workers hanging around waiting for jobs. And so you're essentially, you're poaching workers, you're finding workers who just happen to be in that five seconds of transition. A lot of the technology comes into play, hiring automation, you want to have it be frictionless and fast and get them transitioned and on our platform and outworking. But more and more, we're putting our technology into our clients and our clients are using our technology, using our gig tools with their own workforces. And then they have the flexibility to also work with external workers. So either our workers or... Is that the onboarding and just making it seamless from, hey, I'm interested, I'm on the floor. Yeah. And we have attendance and productivity tools as well. So the client can kind of holistically manage their blue collar workers, whether they're workers or whether there are workers or whether they're working with three different staffing agencies in addition. When you look at the future of Shift 1, there's this really interesting thing around the valuations of software versus the valuations of marketplaces. When you think of the future of Shift 1, is the software you're creating the future of Shift 1? Like, is it going to shift more into software and the marketplace is, hey, I need to have control of this automation to make the software better? Or is it really just a managed marketplace? I think it's 80% software, 20% labor. I think that's where the world is going. I think we're in a period, we've been in this period where we've had a shortage of labor and particularly manufacturing logistics, particularly in the entry level positions, not to mention health care and other frontline workers. That's amazing how many nursing marketplaces were born in 2020. Absolutely. I'm going to apply to technology because we're trying to save lives. There's a pandemic and everybody pivoted to, hey, and I've got a nursing startup. Exactly. A lot of those are the same catalysts. I think where we're headed as a company as we evolve is to be the automation platform to support our clients and all their high-volume workforce needs. Whether it's managing high volumes of workers, whether it's hiring high volumes of workers, whether it's managing different staffing vendors, and our automation will be a key part of that. That's where the company is going and for select clients. I think particularly we get into these situations where a client is really up against the wall. I really need 100 people next week. Can you guys do anything? We jump in and we help them. I think more and more the software is going to be our main business. Let me understand this. I own a manufacturing plant. I'm surrounded by people, an ecosystem of staffing companies that say, I can help. Where are they falling down in your technology approach or gig model? How does that work? Where is it? Because I think it speaks to this idea of, hey, there's a challenge with the traditional staffing. That technology in a new way of thinking can help solve. 100%. How has Shift 1 able to get the workers? The staffing industry that's been working with this company for 25 years is not able to get the workers. The backdrop is we're in a market where there just isn't talent available. It's definitely a seller's market, not a buyer's market. If you look at staffing traditionally, there's relatively low barriers to entry. You can start a staffing agency with a payroll provider, with a workman's comp provider, and maybe with a recruiter and a small office to work out of. I think what in the traditional approach, the branch has a network of workers that they work with. I think what happened in the pandemic is just those workers, we were either staying home, those workers decided to retire, a number of things happened. The experience we had in engaging with our clients as a new company is the clients would say, I have six different staffing providers, and they're all bringing me only a handful of people a week. I'm 200 people behind, and I'm getting six people a week from three different staffing. I've got you. And people are turning out. I'm just never going to get ahead. I'm never going to catch up. I think there's a lot of validity to the approach of, gosh, I would always empower a small business that and the entrepreneurial spirit of starting up a small staffing firm. I think where it gets really challenging, where some of the gig market tools come into effect is it's everything from online marketing and SEO and what it takes to be able to acquire an inordinate amount of candidates regardless of the market conditions. We have a lot of proprietary tech and techniques around that. And so generally, we might go into a market and we might be pulling 10, 20,000 applicants a week from that market and then automatically processing them down. So we're able to show up with a couple hundred applicants a week that are already entirely processed versus if I'm a two-person staffing agency or a small branch, I might have a little bit of software and a little bit of automation in some of that. But for the most part, I'm trying to manually process out of my database and out of my social media posts and things. I'm not able to get industrial scale. It's really interesting. And I hadn't thought about the gig economy being born or the layers of things on top of e-commerce. You figured out physical supply and payment and some of those things. Then you put on to it onboarding and some of it. I had never thought of that. I want to cover one last thing because I know you got to run. You say that shift one is bringing an ethical approach to blue collar work. And having read your statement and even talking to you today, what does that mean? When you say it's now ethical and it wasn't ethical, what's not ethical about it today? And how is shift one going to help with that? 100%. So I wouldn't say not to paint everything with a broad brush, but I think where we differentiate ourselves is we choose to take the high road as an employer and we choose to work with high road clients who have nice work environments, who pay fairly, who treat people fairly, who have good supervisors and good personnel to interact with. And then we always try to do the right thing in terms of our employees. And one of the most concrete examples I can give is I find myself lobbying almost every day in some situation or another for worker pay. There are things we can do internally in terms of benefits and support we can give for workers. One of the hardest things to navigate when you're doing outsourcing is what's the fair price for labor in that market for that job. And that's a place where we're able to step in and we sort of, as a platform, you've kind of got to make it right for everybody. You don't last long if you're only benefiting one participant. And so for us, that means trying to find a really good compromise on wages and working conditions and schedules and things like that. I think that's the thing that people don't understand in the gig economy. Workers have choice, especially now. But you're not going to get, if you're not a good person to work with or work for, even in a freelancer or an independent work situation, people are going to come work for you're not going to get the best. And that's only accelerated or made very apparent in gig platforms. Because I know if you're a bad Uber, if I'm a bad Uber rider, I don't get picked up as fast as if you're a great, there's something in the algorithm sitting with some friends and we were comparing our Uber scores and we're also comparing our Uber experiences. And it was really interesting how everyone around the lower your score was as a rider, the more you were likely to say that, hey, it takes a little longer for me to get my ride. Absolutely. Absolutely. So Jason, I want to thank you a ton for stopping by. It was a great conversation. I wish you the best and I'll continue to follow the great work you're doing at Shift 1. Thanks so much, Paul.
