Guest: Jody Greenstone-Miller, CEO and Founder of Business Talent Group
Air Date: March 25, 2019
Chad
Hi everyone. My name is Chad Nitschke, cofounder and CEO of Bunker, and also host of this podcast, Ready. Set. Work. Ready. Set. Work. is a podcast series focused on the future of work, specifically highlighting all different perspectives from the gig economy, to on demand platforms and more. Join us each episode to hear from thought leaders paving the way toward the future of work.
Chad
Hey everyone. Today I’m here with Jody Miller, Cofounder and CEO of Business Talent Group. Jody, welcome to the podcast.
Jody
Thanks Chad. Happy to be here.
Chad
Yeah, it’s our pleasure. So do you want to start off by just telling us a little bit about Business Talent Group and just ultimately what sets it apart from other talent marketplaces?
Jody
Yeah, so BTG is a global talent marketplace that has been designed from the very beginning for the very high end of the independent talent market. People who have been trained at consulting firms, worked for big, exciting companies, people who are subject matter experts or project managers – so the high end of the independent on-demand economy. And we focused most of our attention from the beginning on serving the fortune 1000 globally, and created a world that we think is appropriate for the caliber of talent we deal with and the caliber of clients we deal with.
Chad
Yeah, that’s great. And then I’m really curious, what inspired you to start the company?
Jody
You know, you always create the company you wished existed in the world. And you know, I kind of came at this from both the talent perspective as well as the client perspective, as I had run an interactive television company that was a joint venture with Disney, and at the time for Telcos, I’d been a venture capitalist at Maveron, Howard Schultz’s son Dan Levitan’s firm up in Seattle, and I noticed that, you know, several times a year as an executive, I just needed something that just didn’t exist. You know, I needed a few people to come in and help me get some work done. I needed people who knew something about a new market I was interested in. It wasn’t permanent hire and it wasn’t you know, the nature that I wanted to bring in a major consulting firm. And there was no easy way to find people, you know, you’d kind of call around and you’d say, ‘you know anybody?’ And before you knew it, you know, you were six degrees of separation and you had no idea, you know, who these people were, if they were any good. And so from the client side, I’ve kind of always known there was something else I wanted as a manager.Â
And then what I experienced on the talent side was two things: when I left Americast, which was the digital television joint venture that I was running, a lot of people called me to consult with them because I knew a lot about interactive TV, and you know, I wasn’t a consultant and I didn’t want to be a consultant and yet I knew a lot of valuable information. And so one of the clients who called was the corporation of public broadcasting and they wanted me to help them on a number of projects related to the media and things I had some experience in and I said, you know what, I’m going to find you a former consultant. I’m going to have them do the work plan and the PowerPoints and put it all together, but when they really need to know about interactive TV, I will give them that information. I will provide, you know, the additional contacts. And before I knew it, in that year I was the largest outside contractor at the corporation of public broadcasting doing, you know, a series of projects with independent professionals that combined former consultants with industry experts. And at the end of one of the last projects – which was actually to help create a strategy for a public television children’s media – you know, the president of PBS at the time said to me, ‘you know, Jody, what you’re doing is really interesting. We work with all the consulting firms and this is actually better. It’s unique. We couldn’t get this kind of, you know, team, and it’s about a third of the cost.’ And, you know, I was doing this while I was at Maveron, you know, kind of out of my back pocket.Â
And those are three of the four things you look for, you know, as a venture capitalist, right? The fourth of course is scalability and scalability was always the big question. How would you scale a market like this? Particularly when we started, you know, when the marketplace concept was still pretty new. You know, Elance was around but it was not dealing with the kind of talent I wanted to deal with. And so basically I decided, you know, I felt there was demand from my days as an executive. I knew that people who worked in this way loved it. You know, the people I was finding and hiring, you know, really were happy to do this kind of work. And I had a kind of a feeling, if nothing else, that more and more people would like to be independent if they could get reliable project flow. And so I decided BTG was going to try to create the infrastructure to make this market efficient and reliable for both clients and talent.
Chad
Yeah, that’s great. I mean, it’s kind of the classic startup story, right, where you started out solving a problem for yourself and then as you got further into it, you thought, hey, other people have this problem too and, you know, there’s probably a way to, you know, ultimately do this at scale across a bigger subsection. And then so you have a really, really interesting background and so I’m eager as we kind of go through here to dive into that more. But before we shift gears into that, you’ve also, with BTG, had kind of a distinct pleasure I think of being a really early mover in this space. And so I’m curious when you pictured, you know, if you can kind of rewind the clock back to 2007 when BTG was getting started and you had in your mind kind of the future of work and then you fast forward to today – do you think it’s kind of what you were imagining or is there anything that you’ve been kind of really surprised with, by the way that work has evolved?
Jody
Yes. I have been really surprised – and maybe it was my naïveté – how challenging it is to bring something that seems very intuitive and obvious into the corporate structure. And you know, I think the naive belief that obviously since, you know, I needed this kind of talent and I knew that, you know, other people would need it, that that was all that mattered, was inaccurate. Because when you choose to serve major global companies, the two ways you can do it is, one, you can do what we did for many years, which is be what I would call ‘quasi-rogue spend.’ We were not 100 percent rogue spend because I’m a lawyer by training and we always had, you know, proper MSAs and contracts. But essentially we were working with executives who had the power to do something outside of a traditional procurement process.
And so that’s how we built the business. A few years ago, I think we saw – and there are a lot of reasons for that, which we could go into – you know, when we first started, we went to HR and we said, boy, wouldn’t you like to be, you know, even more relevant to your executives by offering them this new thing. And none of them – it just didn’t compute, you know, at all. It wasn’t one of their – they sort of didn’t see the connection between what we were doing and kind of their mandate of, you know, talent acquisition, which is traditionally a permanent placement model or staff aug, which is, you know, what the staffing firms do at, you know, a different level than we operate. And so we just didn’t fit. And so we built the business sort of outside of that. But about two years ago, we started to notice probably as you all did, that organizations were becoming interested at a different level in what was going on in the independent talent market.
And that was a good thing, but it was also a hard thing because as they became interested, they still didn’t really understand how to get their arms around it and how to bring this capability into the organization. And so what BTG has had to do is develop the skill of helping these organizations actually bring us into their world. So I kind of call it the Jerry Maguire thing. You know, we have to help them help us, right? Help them, help us, help them, right. And so I think that to me is the biggest surprise is how hard it is and how long it takes to institutionalize this in a way that makes it what I think it needs to be, which is kind of a ubiquitous part of the way people think about getting work done.
Chad
Yup that’s really interesting. And I kind of feel like you and other early movers kind of paved the way for building the market. But as you said, I think any time there’s a new market that’s kind of being created, there’s a fundamental challenge around product marketing. And you know, if you’re, let’s say for example, building a new application tracking system you probably don’t need a lot of product marketing, right? People know what an application tracking system does. You need to market your value prop and why you’re better. But I think if I heard you right, like in being an early mover, you really had to kind of blaze the trail for product marketing and what is an on demand talent platform?
Jody
You know, it’s the classic thing that, you know, are you a vitamin or an Aspirin, right? You know, we think we’re a little of both, but we’re probably more of a vitamin. And you know, when you’re an Asprin, when someone’s got a problem today and you’re going to solve that, you know, you’re an ATS system, you’re gonna help them track all these people, right? What we’re saying is this is a whole new thing that can help you in all these different ways, and in fact the value prop is pretty broad and therefore it makes it even harder. And this has been a challenge from day one. I mean, on the one hand, we’re a fantastic way to reduce consulting spend ’cause there’s a whole chunk of work that we think the independent market is not just less expensive but better for a variety of reasons. So the value prop to procurement who’s overseeing professional services spend is really a cost savings because the quality difference is harder to convey to the procurement team, right? On the HR side, there’s a totally different value prop. It’s agility. It’s, you know, it’s just time. You can get talent in in 24 hours. It is access to talent that you can’t get otherwise. You know, you’re sitting in the middle of the country and you want cutting edge blockchain talent or digital talent, more than likely you’re going to have to access them through something like BTG because the odds of hiring them full time and making them, you know, move there is low. So I think, you know, the value prop of agility, access to hard to find talent and time is a very different value prop than just we’re going to save you money on consulting. And yet both are true. And when it really is integrated properly, what we see some clients doing – you know, early adopters from our point of view – is it actually can change the calculus of how you think about structuring your team. You know, what kind of talent do you need to have permanently available full time, and what kind of talent are you now comfortable that you can access when you need it in the market. And that’s kind of, you know, another generation I think from where we are today.
Chad
Yup. Yeah, definitely. And talking about your background, so you mentioned, you know, you’ve been exposed to kind of a wide variety of industries, you know, government and media and investing and since you have that unique perspective, I’m curious, are there any industries in particular that you think really stand out as benefiting from using independent talent?
Jody
So look, Hollywood is a great example. I mean, if you think about it, Hollywood is one group of independent people coming together after another. Particularly, you know, the movie business. And you know, I think what happens – and there’s some good work being done on this around the concept of flash teams – you know, the more you can structure your work into definable roles, which is what Hollywood has done, right? You have a sound person, you have an editor, you know, there are really defined roles that you need when you make a movie. And then you can, you know, qualify the quality of people in those roles. And in Hollywood’s case, you have representatives, you know, agents who are kind of negotiating all of this. That really works. So the more you can imagine, you know, a world and I think you’re seeing some of this in technology, if you look at where, you know, independent outsourced talent I think has exploded first, a lot of it’s in the technology space because you can say, ‘I have a very specific need for a Java programmer’ or someone, you know, to come in and do the UI/UX, and you’re seeing worlds where it’s very defined. The less defined the roles and the less defined from a kind of a repeat basis, the bigger the challenge of using this model. And so, you know, we’ve seen a lot of success, for example, in the life sciences world, and one of the things we’ve seen there is that life sciences really, one way to think about that industry is a series of projects around particular drugs, right? We develop the drug, we get it through the regulatory process, we launch the drug, we commercialize the drug. Each phase of this has a pretty defined series of skills that are needed. And so I think as I look at it, the fact that that’s an industry that took to this model very naturally and quickly, isn’t a surprise. And so the more companies start to think about how to projectize work, which is something, you know, I’ve personally been talking about for over 10 years, I think the sooner the application of independent talent becomes not just desirable but kind of essential.
Chad
Yup. No, that’s great. And the Hollywood analog is really interesting and you’re much deeper in kind of a talent space than I am, but just even in the past three years when I’ve started to learn about, it is interesting how Hollywood has really leveraged that model. And I was at an event and somebody from Sony was there and they were kind of laying out all of the things that they have done to leverage kind of that IC model and whether it’s even like spinning up a new entity just for a project and then winding that entity down when it’s finished. And like, it was really, really interesting to – you just don’t hear kind of how the sausage is made, you know, you watch the movies, but until you actually hear somebody describe it, you’re like, Oh wow, okay. And there’s, there’s definitely a lot that we can learn from that. I think,
Jody
Well, the original name of BTG was United Talent Group and it was based on United artists in which, I don’t know if you know the history of it, but in the old days the studios, you know, the big studio moguls had contracts with all of the stars and they were very restricted. Like Warner brothers or MGM would, you know, say Charlie Chaplin, you know, you can only star in movies that Warner brothers produces. They were very restrictive contracts. And in fact, they would make deals with each other sometimes. Like, okay, you could have this star if you’d give me this star. And the big stars – a group of big stars – led, I believe, by Charlie Chaplin if memory serves me correctly, decided this is stupid, we’re the ones on the screen. And they broke away and created United artists, which were essentially the biggest stars in Hollywood at the time. I think Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford may have been part of it too, and basically said, we’re not going to work for one studio anymore. We’re going to be free agents and you’re gonna work with us independently. And so that was our original name as kind of our homage to them. And then because – I think a combination, because we were based in LA when we started, we started getting, you know, like glossy pictures of stars because people assumed you were just a Hollywood talent agency. And so we decided we had to change our name and make it a little clearer, you know, what we were doing. But yeah, the Hollywood example is real.Â
And the other thing to think about that some economists have pointed out to me is that in every industry where the best talent become free agents, if you will, whether it’s Hollywood or whether it’s sports, what ends up happening is the most talented people actually have more leverage and earn more. It’s something you’re starting to see in technology, and I think you will start to see it in the broader talent world that BTG is, you know, is pioneering as well. So, you know, just the notion that if you are a blockchain expert as an independent person, you’re going to be worth more, and people will kind of go to the highest bidder, is an interesting concept that I think most people don’t think about when they think about talent and business.
Chad
Yup. No, I definitely agree. It’s going to be really interesting to see that kind of unfold and evolve. And then, so you were also a venture capitalist for eight years and I’m just curious to hear your perspective on how you liked that. And like, you’ve obviously now raised, you know, venture capital for your own business. I’ve raised venture capital for Bunker and I’m just curious, like, how did you like that?
Jody
So I thought – I think being a venture capitalist is really interesting and stimulating because you spend your days, you know, talking to exciting, excited entrepreneurs about their ideas. And I didn’t – I enjoyed it, although I actually joined Maveron like, I want to say, a month or two before the crash. And so I’ve lived through both the end of the heady days and the crash, and then coming out of it as well. And you know, that the crash was not fun. You know, a lot of companies just literally couldn’t make it because they didn’t have enough capital to get through it. And that was hard. But, you know, I’ve learned a lot. I couldn’t, I actually don’t think I could have started BTG if I hadn’t spent the time at Maveron, because I learned both, kind of, what it looked like to create a company from scratch, I learned how hard it was, I had a lot of respect for the effort involved, and I learned a lot about financing companies. And I think all of that has been really valuable as I built BTG. So it was a good experience.Â
I think at the end of the day I missed being responsible and able to drive the operations of a business because you don’t do that, and you shouldn’t do that as a VC. So I was ready to get back into the fray and really take an idea and develop it and drive it. But I think, you know, being a venture capitalist is a really lucky thing to be.
Chad
Yup. A lot of coffee meetings. And then so you’re on the board of a company called Imbellus, which is disrupting the way that we think about assessment in some really cool ways. And would you mind just telling the listeners a little bit about what they’re doing?
Jody
Yeah, so, you know, when I was at Maveron, I did a lot of work in the education space. You know, ultimately I got involved with a company, that was a leader in online education. So I’ve always had a real interest in kind of education, obviously talent, and assessment, which is part of, you know, what BTG does, right? Part of what we do is collect data that allows us to assess whether a particular talent is a good fit for a project. So I was introduced to an entrepreneur named Rebecca Kantar, who has been a serial entrepreneur even though she’s still in her 20s. And you know, she had a really big idea, which is that the way we assess talent is out of sync with what we need to be successful in the world. And in particular, I think, you know, she looked at things like the SAT and thought that instead of testing specific knowledge, we need to be much more focused on assessing kind of human potential. And she took that idea and created what I would call a gamification assessment product, and it’s a beautiful product. McKinsey was actually the first user of the product for their own recruiting and assessing process. And, you know, I think it’s really exciting. You know, it’s a big idea. She’s a terrific entrepreneur and I think it’s trying to do something that we need to do in world. So I’m, I’m excited to be part of that.
Chad
Yeah, that’s great. And then there was an article that you wrote that I just read recently. It was Syncing our Life Plans with our Lifespans, and I found the article to be really interesting and I was wondering if you just kind of expand a bit on that concept and topic in general.
Jody
Yeah. So I’ve had a kind of lifelong interest in the way we work, the cycles of how we work, and why it’s so rigid. Not a surprise that I would start BTG because that’s, in some ways, a somewhat responsive answer to that. And one of the things that I think is challenging – but I think it’s changing – is that there are again, pretty rigid ways in which people look at career progression and they don’t necessarily match up with someone’s life progression. And therefore to me, we’re leaving a lot of talent on the sidelines and also making things harder than we should for individuals. And so, you know what I mean by that is, if you take the typical way in which most big organizations think about a trajectory – and you know, some of this is reenforced by the way people look at permanent hires – if you aren’t progressing immediately and quickly through the ranks, you’re often not deemed to be top talent. I mean, some good examples are, you know, when I’ve been in meetings where people are assessing talent and they’d put them in A, B, and C, I’ve seen so many examples where someone is A quality, everybody agrees, but because they may be working differently, like maybe they’re working from home two days a week or maybe they are working only 80%, that alone would put them in the B bucket, which means they wouldn’t be at the top of the list to be promoted or be successors. And so there’s just, there’s no real – today in my view, still – institutional way to acknowledge a different pace and different choices apart from someone’s quality. And so the idea that you know, people are living a long time now and have a lot of energy, but, you know, if you look at a lot of the consulting firms and law firms, there’s mandatory retirement sometimes as early as 60. So you know, on one hand your organizations are forcing people out at a certain age, and on the other hand, they’re forcing them to work in a certain way at an earlier point in their career, that may not be ideal because let’s face it, there’s pieces of people’s lives that happen in their thirties or forties that take time, because they should, if they want to take time. You know, they develop their relationship with their partner, they may decide to have a family, they may have issues with their parents, they may want to run marathons. You know, there’s other things in life. And the rigidity of the way we think about career progression is totally out of sync with how people want to spend their time. And you know, the way I ended that piece is, you know, I look at someone like me, my daughter’s in college, you know, I’ve got nothing to do but work now. This is probably the most productive time of my life, and I don’t think I’m unique in that regard. So I think there’s a real opportunity to, again, think of the life cycle of work and be much more flexible around how we view talent throughout the whole span of a person’s life. And again, I think companies that get that and figure that out will have a huge advantage. But again, I don’t really see that happening. So again, you know, back to what’s happening in the world and is it different than I thought, it’s just taking a really long time to change, in a true institutional way, the way people think about work and the flexibility with which we are comfortable dealing with people’s differences in different points in their career.
Chad
Yup. Yeah, it definitely seems like, I mean, freelancing helps enable that. Right?
Jody
I mean honestly, Chad, you know, back when we started thinking about this, it was exactly – that was part of what I was thinking, which is, and by the way it’s happened. I’ve seen this happen, where companies – a lot of times companies came to us in the early days out of desperation. So there was one big media company that really needed – I think it was gamers – some cutting edge skill, and they literally couldn’t hire these people because the really good people were all trying to do their own startups. And the last thing they wanted to do was come in to some big media company. And they literally couldn’t find the talent. So we said to them, why don’t you hire this group of people three days a week? They’ll give you three days a week because they need money to support their other projects. So they had no choice. They hired a couple people three days a week. And what they learned was they actually got what they needed three days a week. Now would they remember that and be open to other things? I don’t know. But that was the idea that, you know, companies would actually learn that they could get, you know, work done in different ways and then be more open to changing their own models.
Chad
Yeah, definitely. And one thing that you touched on in that article too was this expectation to be successful at you know, just a younger age nowadays it seems like. And actually think it’s kind of funny, I mean there’s plenty of like jokes about the, the Forbes 30 under 30 lists, you know, like we’re gonna run out of the under 30 year olds pretty soon I think, because they’re filling up the lists, but I don’t know. Can you, can you unpack that a little bit for the listeners?
Jody
I think a lot about this and I think it’s fascinating that we are willing to suspend – we meaning general conventional wisdom – we’re willing to suspend judgment and assume that a 20 year old with a big idea is able to execute that idea and yet look at a 50 plus year old and assume that they can’t possibly, you know, be given a CEO job because they’ve never done it before. Like, that seems like two opposing facts that make no sense to me. And I think a lot about it, and I guess it’s a little bit like a politician with a record. You know, if you’re running for office and you’ve never been in politics, well you don’t have the 50 votes that are troubling. Somebody who’s never been in an office is a fresh, clean slate, and so you can kind of draw what you want on it. And so if you’re talking about very young entrepreneur with big ideas who’s going to be charismatic, have a lot of energy, you know, you can kind of suspend your belief or your knowledge set and think, wow, you know, there are some amazing people who can do that – maybe this is the one. And that’s exciting, and you know, if you’re right, it can be very rewarding. And by the way, you know, from a entrepreneur’s standpoint, because work is so rigid and not necessarily fun all the time, if I can get it over with in my twenties you know, that’s great. So what that does is it creates this enormous draw from the talent side to go and be an entrepreneur, see if you can win the lottery ticket. And that creates a lot of excitement on the kind of media and VC side. It’s kind of a reinforcing virtuous cycle on the young side. And on the more mature side, I think, you know, A) it’s got this kind of notion that if you’re X years old and you haven’t, you know, hit it out of the park or you took time off or you when a different path, that you couldn’t possibly step up and run a new business. I think that is just kind of old think – not meaning that as a pun. And I think it’s a big mistake and if you really look at a lot of companies that are being started now, they’re actually being started by entrepreneurs in their 50s. You know, even – I’m looking at [inaudible] you know, she’s about to go public, started the company in her late fifties. I think this will change, but I think it just has to do with a lot of the kind of hype and media on the young side and not enough of the reality of what’s happening on people at the other end of their career. It really makes no sense that you would be more excited about someone who’s done almost nothing then you would about someone who’s probably had a lot of life experience.
Chad
Yeah. And it kind of gets to that bias issue, right, of whether it’s age or ethnicity or gender. Yeah. Just the more that we can get rid of that, the better off we’re all going to be.Â
Chad
Thanks for listening. Everyone. Tune in next week to part two where we’ll talk more about how the on demand economy came to be and what the future of work might look like.
If your interested in learning more visit https://www.buildbunker.com/ or contact us at support@buildbunker.com
Want to go a step further? Please email scott@buildbunker.com or set up a call using  https://calendly.com/bunker-sales/usage-intro!
IFA 2019: A First-Timer's Perspective on the Franchise Industry’s Largest Conference
