Transcript: Behind the Curtain: Lukas Hermann's Dive into SaaS Success
This transcript was auto-generated from the recording and lightly edited for readability. Speaker attribution is best-effort. It serves as an archival copy in case the original source becomes unavailable.
Welcome to the Jackie Serviss Show. I’m Jackie Serviss, where we are talking all things people strategy, entrepreneurship, and how hiring the right humans will unlock the next phase of growth in your business. As a former corporate VP of HR, my life completely shifted when I learned I had a brain tumor. From this moment forward, I knew that there was more. I dove headfirst into healing, mindset work, and spirituality. And from this space, my entrepreneur journey was born. Now I am a people strategist and founder of Serve Recruitment Agency, a boutique recruitment firm that helps scaling companies hire aligned leaders for growth. In this podcast, I’m going to share about my business journey, entrepreneurship, leadership, and how hiring the right humans unlocks massive potential. Welcome to the show.
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Jackie: Welcome back to another episode of the Jackie Serviss Show. Thanks so much for joining again. I’m so excited to be able to have just open, real and honest conversations with tech founders and those that are changing the industry that they’re in. So Lukas, I’m so excited to have you on the show today. Welcome.
Lukas: Well, yeah. Hey, thanks for having me. It was awesome to get in the podcast.
Jackie: Yeah. So it’s gonna be fun to talk more about stagetimer.io and your journey. And we’re going to get there as a part of this conversation. But before we do, I always like to do a couple rapid fire questions. It just helps me get to know you a little bit better. And it also helps whoever’s listening in get to know you as well.
Lukas: Yeah. Awesome. Go ahead.
Jackie: Okay. Where were you born?
Lukas: I was born in South Germany, pretty close to the place I’m living right now. Stuttgart, maybe known for the Mercedes-Benz and the Porsche car manufacturing.
Jackie: Amazing. And you answered my next question, which is where’s home now? So relatively similar place.
Lukas: Yeah, exactly around this quarter.
Jackie: Amazing. Now you shared, though, before we pressed record that you’ve been doing a little nomading and traveling to different parts of the world as well. So where have you been traveling to as you’ve been building or thinking about the idea of Stagetimer?
Lukas: Yeah. In fact, me and my wife, we made a big plan last year to say that, you know, we went full time already. Let’s do the nomading, the traveling around in Asia thing. And we, in fact, got rid of our apartment, sold our furniture, went on the journey. But after like six months, we came to the point to say we really like having a base of operation, like just a home that we are permanently. And being married and maybe also being just over 30, it was more attractive to us to say, you know, it was nice. It was awesome. We enjoyed it working all over the place in Asia. Let’s get home. Let’s go home and find a new place.
Jackie: I know. I know that feeling deeply. There’s something so cool about being able to travel and go see the world and do it on your terms. And then there’s a time where you just feel like you’re complete. It’s like, all right, it’s time to plant fruits and come home. And that doesn’t mean you’re not still traveling or being able to go to where you want to go for certain periods of time. But I’m definitely love having a home base now too.
Lukas: Yeah, absolutely. And we don’t like — we really enjoyed it. We saw it like as a beta test to see which cities we like and which cities we may visit in the future. But yeah, eventually you’ve seen the world and understood cultures and saw things. And now you want to do other bigger plans in your life.
Jackie: I love that. Do you have a favorite city? Like, do you have a city you traveled to where if you weren’t living right now in Germany, you would think like, okay, we could actually see ourselves there too?
Lukas: Yeah, we totally loved in the south of Vietnam, Saigon, which is called Ho Chi Minh City. And unfortunately, at least at that time in Vietnam, you couldn’t stay longer than 30 days, couldn’t renew your visa — that just didn’t have a program like this. But we really enjoyed like the people I got in contact there with the indie hackers, as well as just like the environment and the food. Yeah, our favorite.
Jackie: Incredible. Okay, I have not been so I’ll add it to the list of places I need to get in the world. We’re finally at that stage, we have six year old twin girls where we’re starting to open them up to travel and thinking about travel. We’re doing a little bit of Europe this Christmas over to England and Sweden. And so we’re just getting to the stage where we feel like we can start packing our backpacks again and taking them with us on these adventures. So I think we’re a couple more years until we can do Vietnam just because the distance from Toronto, it’s a long flight. But Europe is definitely a place where we want to spend a lot more time.
Lukas: Yeah, we told ourselves, you know, let’s get a bit more wealthy and then we fly business next time.
Jackie: There we go. Yeah, being in economy while you’re going on, you know, 13, 14, 15 hour flights — there’s definitely a luxury being able to lie down and have space. Yeah, I love that. Okay, well, great. We know that you’re in Germany, you nomaded, we have an understanding that, you know, Saigon and Vietnam is a place that you loved. Going into whether it’s personal development, professional development, do you have a favorite book that is something that you recommend to everyone or something that really shaped or influenced your thinking?
Lukas: That’s really my wife’s question. She’s the reader. But you know what, I will share a book that brought me to entrepreneurship. It’s a very basic book. It’s called The E-Myth Revisited by David Gerber. It’s really, really basic. It just introduced you to the idea of like, what is it? How do you think of business? I like the turnkey idea. Like, you know, what is involved besides just the manual labor that you have to do? It opened my mind to business and entrepreneurship. And I mean, I guess most of your listeners are there already. So it’s kind of…
Jackie: It’s a good one to revisit though, because it’s something I read multiple years ago and then came up recently when I was doing some team development with the team using that language, right? Because when we think about entrepreneurship, there are times where we act like employees, right? We’re acting like the employee. We operate like the employee, especially when we’re getting started, right? Our hands are in the business. We’re doing the business. We’re in the weeds. And then to step into management roles versus entrepreneurship and how we define that. It’s really — it’s a book I think should be on everybody’s bookshelf, especially if they’re in entrepreneurship, just to understand those variances of the roles we play as founders when we’re building businesses.
Lukas: Exactly. And I also like the concept of even though you don’t have a team, maybe you’re just you and your friend, you still define roles like, I do this and you do this and I do this and you do this. So eventually further on, when you start to hire, when you grow, you know like what role to give up, what role to keep, and don’t have this mixture and chaos that maims you.
Jackie: Absolutely. Absolutely. All right. Last question before we dive into your story, which is — who in your life has been a mentor that has helped, let’s even say shaped the idea of stagetimer.io? Who’s helped you really think differently about building businesses?
Lukas: Yeah, I would love to say I have one, but I always had a difficulty that I either couldn’t find a good mentor or maybe just by my nature and like somebody who learns things, I learned things by myself. So either way, I never really found one. Maybe just because you’re in Germany it’s a bit harder to get. I don’t know anybody from my family or friends — just me, really having to learn these things by myself. That’s the way I prefer it. Yeah. Something along this line. And I don’t really have a mentor.
Jackie: That’s — I love it. Well, thank you for being honest. You know, I think so often everyone’s different. Everyone learns differently. Everyone experiences differently. And just hearing from your perspective that you haven’t had a mentor. And in fact, you know, getting your hands in and getting dirty and like understanding how to learn yourself has been your journey, which it’s interesting to think about that parallel around — you’re your own mentor. Right. You have the work ethic to go and do what you need to do to learn what you need to learn.
Lukas: I actually wanted to have one, but I just couldn’t. There was nobody I knew.
Jackie: So, well, have you ever heard of Dan Martell?
Lukas: No.
Jackie: Okay. I’ll offline — we’ll talk about Dan. I think you’d be a really interesting person for you to connect with, especially in the space you’re in. He’s got some really cool — he’s got a cool book out. And I’m in his elite coaching program right now. And so he’s a mentor of mine and I think you would really connect with him. Yeah. Sometimes it just takes one person to open up your eyes to who is out there in the world. It can be really cool to just have these connection calls and see how it can open things up.
Lukas: Yeah, it would be. That would be good, actually.
Jackie: Amazing. Beautiful. Well, let’s talk a little bit about your story because you’re a co-founder of a company called stagetimer.io, which I did a lot of deep diving on, and having run events myself and having been in large conference rooms and meetings my entire kind of pre-entrepreneur life in corporate America, I just think that the philosophy of what you’re trying to do with Stagetimer is so needed in this industry. And I’d love to get a little bit more of your story — of who you are as a background, but how did this idea come to be?
Lukas: So this idea came as a complete accident, right? I went into this mental space of being a contractor, doing websites, doing web development. I thought, I really want to have a product. I want to have something that scales, you know. Sure, in the beginning, you put a lot of work in, get a little money out. But the more work you put in, the more it compounds. So that was my idea. I wanted to have something like this. I was very interested in the SaaS world, you know, software as a service businesses.
So one day, I sit in a studio of a friend who is doing a video recording, right? He has two rooms, one where the person is kind of sitting or standing in front of a green screen, and the other room where he has his mixer and computer and recording and everything. And he, you know, runs in, starts everything — camera, whatever, everything he can do from his buttons, right? Except for one thing, that is start the countdown, where he gets up, runs into the room, presses on some kind of old laptop that sits on a chair, runs back out. And I’m thinking, you know, this is really necessary, that there should — it’s such an obvious solution to have an online solution that you can press start on one computer, and then it would count down on a screen somewhere inside a room. And I looked online and couldn’t find it.
And you know, in my mind, it’s like, obviously, there has to be the solution. It’s like, it’s such an obvious thing. It wasn’t there, at least I didn’t find it, except for some stuff you have to download and — not the easy online, I’ll open a website. So I built it in a weekend, because it’s rather easy to build such a thing, and put it on Reddit, and stumbled into this, almost I’d say, like need of people for such a tool that I hadn’t anticipated. I’m not even from the event industry. So that’s all completely new for me.
Jackie: Yeah, it’s — you know, I’ve been on stages in the last year where, you know, you have 20 minutes or 25 minutes or 30 minutes to give the presentation. And you practice at home, and you get the timer out, and you know your rhythm that you should be done within that timeframe. And then you get on stage, things happen, right? The nerves are high, you’re thinking about 100 other things, somebody asks a question from the audience, now you’re answering it, it takes you off cue of how you’re presenting. And very quickly, that 20 minutes or 25 minutes that you’ve rehearsed can be 40, 45, 50. And it completely takes the cadence of the event and makes it so that everyone’s running behind now.
And you know, when I was looking at Stagetimer, I just thought, gosh, some rooms I’ve had this in, and some rooms I haven’t, but it’s usually on a makeshift computer in the back of the room. And somebody holds up a hand and says five minutes and tells you how much more time it is. So to have a screen as a presenter in front of you that’s counting down your time just helps you manage your time as somebody who’s on stage actually giving a talk.
Lukas: Yeah. And if you look from the event organizer perspective, right, you’re telling this up front, there’s lights, there’s an audience, like there’s a hundred thousand like impressions on their mind. And then you stand there in the back with like this one paper that says, you know, come to an end, five minutes or whatever. And they never look at it, or even ignore it.
Jackie: I know, you have to dance in the back of the room to try to get any attention that’s on stage.
Lukas: Exactly. So I thought, you know, let’s build everything in. Let’s have this one screen. It shows the time, and you know, presenters can press a button and it flashes it, makes it so people look. It can flash. It goes over time. And you can even show like a message, right? It says something like, you know, hold the microphone closer to your mouth, please.
Jackie: That’s so helpful. Oh, that’s so helpful. I love this. So you are the developer of the duo, right, and you’re running this business. Correct me if I’m wrong — with your wife.
Lukas: Yes.
Jackie: What — so tell me a little bit more around the dynamics of being a partner, like actually building a business with your spouse, and how you’ve defined those roles on what you’re doing in the business and what she’s more gifted at in the business. How has that been as you’ve been building?
Lukas: Yeah, I was worried about it. So I started alone and I built it as a side project. But eventually I put like a payment thing and people started paying, and the monthly revenue starts growing. And at the same time, my wife is a teacher, but she’s kind of tired of her job. Doesn’t want to do it anymore. And I think, you know what, do you want to work with me? Like I’m doing this new thing. Do you want to kind of do this shift in your career almost? And I asked her because I knew that she loves books and she loves learning and she’s very good, just like me, to teach herself new things.
So I said, if you want to help me, I need somebody who does customer service and marketing because, you know, as a founder, you do — the meme is to do 50% development, 50% customer service, 50% marketing and all the other things. And your time is scarce. And I said, I will buy you like four books on each topic and you read them and then you do it, because I just don’t have the time. And she was up for the challenge, which — I was worried, like maybe she said, ah, no, I cannot do this, I’m not sure about it. But she was up for the challenge. And that was the moment I knew — I think it can work, you know. Even though we are married and live in the same house, I think having this clear separation of roles, she has her thing, I have my thing, and she’s excited to learn how to do it. I thought, yes, this would work.
Jackie: And how long ago was this that you guys started to partner where it went from maybe more like a side hobby or hustle to, oh, people are starting to pay, the monthly revenue is actually picking up, we have a business here? What point in time was that?
Lukas: Two years.
Jackie: Yeah. Incredible. Okay. I love that. What has been — so I work with my husband, although today I run my own business. He advises, he runs his own business, I advise, because we operate very differently. I’m much more of the, you know, people space, strategic side of things. I love diving into the marketing side, et cetera. He’s the ops finance perspective. So we just look at business very differently. I’m curious for you, just working with your spouse — how have you managed? There’s times in the day where it’s work time and there’s times in the day where you have to turn it off and be married and a couple. How have you managed that as a couple?
Lukas: Well, so obviously when you work together, like everything just gets mixed together. And you constantly talk about this or that. I would say one advantage is you really have something to talk about. And we always — we often observe this in couples that they kind of almost run out of topics to talk about. I don’t know, you know what I mean? And then if you have businesses, like there’s just always something that comes up and we have very engaged conversations around business and then it goes into other fields as well.
But a challenge is to have kind of clear meeting times, right? With a team, you have your standup, you have your town hall meeting. And with your spouse, it can be challenging because you’re together all the time. And sometimes you are kind of all the time together and you never communicate properly. You never sit down and just say, let’s go through these topics, right? Let’s make a strategic plan for the next few months. So what we do to solve this is that we go out to eat. And we say, this time is reserved for strategy — next three months. This time is reserved for a review of the last month. And we look at it. It does not always work perfectly, but it’s good enough, I would say.
Jackie: I love that. Yeah. We’ve definitely had to use the calendar to make sure that we have like clarity of when we’re spending time together, both professionally. And I would agree, you know, a lot of our conversations even on a date night, right? You get outside, you’re going for supper, you’re just enjoying life. We’ll talk about a hundred other things, but it’s really interesting how innately in those spaces, our creativity will turn on together and we’ll be back talking about business. And it wasn’t intentional. We weren’t going out to talk about business, but we’re just so excited about something that came through. And at our dinner we’re back to talking about that.
So I understand that deeply, but I do think to your point, having clarity on when you’re meeting and the topics to discuss when it is a business oriented conversation is so helpful. It really is.
Lukas: And I mean, one danger is, right — it’s your spouse. You cannot get rid of them. Like you cannot — if you have an argument, we’re not firing your spouse at this point.
Jackie: Yeah. You’re not firing your spouse. It’s not a thing. So, but on the other hand…
Lukas: Since you are married, you know each other already for — in our case, six years. So you know how the other person is thinking and ticking and working. And it’s easier to estimate what is a good fit, and it’s easier to kind of handle conflicts because you have so much practice already.
Jackie: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Well, I’m curious. So two years ago, you guys decided we’re going to go all in. This is a business we’re actually going to grow and scale. What have been some of the big wins for you as you’ve been building this business? Like what has gone really well? You know, is the industry hungry for this? Like, what have you noticed?
Lukas: So right at the beginning — I have to preface that with, for me, this whole product was always just like a test, an experiment. I thought this is a cool problem. It’s so easy to solve, right? Almost. And I said, this is so easy to solve. Let me use it as a test. I had it free. Like it was eight months just a free tool on the internet that you could use. And I thought, you know, if I really want to go into SaaS and this stuff, I need to try it out. I’ve never used a payment method. I’ve never done any of this. So I integrated a payment system into this free tool and created, to be fair, a very flimsy pro feature just as an excuse for people to pay. And in my mind, it was the experience of integrating the technical part.
And I didn’t even plan a big launch. All I did is just post it on Twitter. Hey, I integrated a payment method. Turns out the very evening I did that, the first person paid, which for me was the first — you know, the first internet money you make. Somebody’s willing to take a credit card out and put that number in and pay. The first internet money you make is always magic.
Jackie: It is. You actually — it’s the first time you see the payment come in on the processing side on your end, somebody actually paid for the product we put out. It is magic. It really is a magical moment.
Lukas: Completely. Somebody wants that. And then it really started for us to understand who actually wants that. Who are the people that want that? Because again, I’m not from the industry. So I thought, you know, people that have a studio, because my friend had that. But then more and more I got into this — no, there’s people that do live video editing, live video production, event organization. And how do you speak to them? Where do you find them? What do they do? When are they active? Where do they gather and congregate?
And really early on — and this was really awesome — we got this word of mouth boost. People started talking to each other. And like, every now and then there’s a YouTube video where they mentioned us. There’s a podcast where they mentioned us from these people in this industry, because turns out, if you’re in the live video production industry, you have lots of cameras and equipment and recording gear. And these people, they’re all hosting YouTube videos and their own live stream channels. So they constantly put out content, and really love to discover new tools and talk about it. So this was great in the beginning. It really gave us kind of this broad acceptance in our industry, just by these individuals that are excited about technology and equipment in their space talking about us.
Jackie: That’s incredible. Yeah, word of mouth is so powerful. It’s a big piece of how I built my business too — referrals and word of mouth were just so powerful when you have a warm lead that’s coming in and saying like, oh, I want that too, or how can I get access to that tool? That’s awesome. I love that they were sharing without even the need for you to say like, hey, our product works over here, take a look, from a marketing standpoint. Those are really powerful — to have testimonials and people sharing about your tool without prompting. So I love that.
I’m curious on the flip side, as you’ve been building this, what have been some of the roadblocks or hiccups or challenges you’ve faced along the road of building a profitable SaaS based business?
Lukas: So probably the most unpopular topic is taxes and regulations. Every person that does not come from an entrepreneur background has to learn it in their country. And yeah, I always assumed that in Germany it was particularly difficult, until I tweeted it out. And then people told me that it’s not much easier. Like, yes, America and UK, they have a bit of an easier system, but like Canada — you’re in Canada — and other countries, it’s equally complex to do anything regarding business. So that is a big roadblock right at the beginning, when you don’t have money, don’t have experience, don’t have anything. You get this kind of huge — how do I handle accounting and taxes? And that’s hard. But it’s manageable. And yeah, I don’t want to talk too much about it, it’s a bit of a boring topic.
And then the next is pricing. Pricing is so hard. Like what number do you put on your thing? If you sell, if you resell something, right — you buy shoes, resell shoes, it’s super easy. You buy the shoe for a hundred dollars and then you sell it for 120, so you have your margin. But try to do that with a digital product, because essentially a digital product costs nothing in the beginning, right? A bit of hosting here and there, but it’s just your time. How do you put a price on that? Is it eight bucks? Is it 20? Is it 40? Is it 50? Is it a hundred? You have no clue. And only as you get to know the market, you understand — okay, how big is the problem? How much are people willing to pay for it?
Are there other — we, as I said, in the beginning, I looked for the solution, nobody had it. So there was no comparison. But there are tools that are kind of in the same space. What do they charge? And you’re getting closer and closer to this answer of what can I charge? But then comes the problem of, like, what customer do I want? Do I want the business customer or the kind of end user, like a private person? It’s a completely different pricing, completely different customer service that you have to do at that point. Do they need an invoice? Do they not need invoices? And so on and so forth.
Jackie: I was just going to say — it’s entrepreneurship is so interesting because it’s the only place where you’re arbitrarily coming up with a price, right? And so I sell a service, right? Like, I don’t have a product. At the end of the day, the service is me, and I am coming into businesses and I’m helping them with people strategy, thinking about who they need to hire next, building out a roadmap for them, and then I go hire talent for them. And over the course of seven years, pricing has ebbed and flowed with what the market was looking at, but it was also a big piece of it — my own confidence. So I’m curious for you, like, was confidence a piece of, as you started to see how this tool was actually impacting people in the market and they were giving you feedback and that feedback loop cycle, were you then more confident to put the price tag you wanted to see on it? And has your pricing changed over time and iterated over time?
Lukas: Yeah. So we are more than double what I started with right now. And it’s — confidence is such a big part, just to understand, yeah, it is worth something, I can charge more. And another thing is that you have this problem — how do you separate a low price from a high price, right? There’s a company that needs a lot and there’s a company that needs very little. There’s a company that has one event. There’s another one, they make a team meeting every single week and need my tool. Should the one company pay more than the other? Yes, obviously. But how do you measure that? Where do you draw the line in the sand and say, well, here’s cheap and here’s expensive?
And we tried several methods. We said, we limited like how much you can — how many rooms you can create, how many timers you can create in one room, how many days you can show. Right now we are trying how many kind of users you can have in your team. And it’s all imperfect. It never properly works. You always have the big companies — the Googles and whatever — they come and use your tool and pay 10 bucks. And the small guy that does it for his church, you know, who just happens to need these five things that are in the more expensive plan. And then he calls you and says, oh, you think it’s so expensive, can we have it for a cheaper price? You never can do it right. It’s very, very hard.
Jackie: Yeah, it is. And I think to your point, you’re just constantly learning and you’re constantly building the confidence in your product and how it serves and who it’s for. And it’s just that constant loop, that feedback loop of — you know, you put something out there, people buy, they have an experience, they give you feedback, and then it’s iterative. And I always say that in business, like business is not linear, right? It’s not just one straight line that — oh, it just keeps going, it gets easier. To me, business and running your own business is the greatest personal development and professional development crash course, because you’re learning and growing as a human and a leader as much as you’re learning and growing a business at the same time. So it’s always — there’s always an Achilles heel of like, what does right even mean? Like who knows what the right answer is for everybody. And it’s just constantly iterating based on the feedback the market’s giving us.
Lukas: Absolutely. And then we get to the next step, right? I’m comparatively small in my company. It’s me and my wife and it covers our expenses, but we are getting to the point where we have enough customers and it’s growing and we need more architecture and more feature requests. And I’m thinking, who do I hire first? Where do I find them? Do I hire 100% or 50%, or a contractor? What is the step? How does it look? Do I micromanage them, or do I find somebody who I can say, you know, here’s a problem — go solve it. Like, I don’t have this experience. So this is the kind of step in the development that I need to take. I mean, you have this experience. How do you do it?
Jackie: I love this. Yeah. This is my jam. And especially when we’re at early stages like this, where you’re starting to think about team now. And as you scale, who we’re hiring is such a big question mark for all of us in all of our industries. And so I’ve worked primarily in the space of tech and I love working with startup and growth companies who are growing at a rapid rate because it’s fun to start to piece together — who do you need? And so here’s some perspective for you. It’s something I talk about really openly, which is we always have to have clarity first. And we want to think about boxes before people.
So often we get to this stage that you’re at, and you might have friends in the same industry who are giving you advice, like, hey, I hired this person first. No, I heard hired that person first. I hired an architect. No, I hired an operations person. I hired an executive assistant. I hired a marketing person. Like everyone’s hiring differently, because when you think about talent, it’s going to be custom to your business and custom to the growth plan that you’re on.
And so what I always do is — you have to go strategy first, because you have to have clarity of truly who you need. And then you roadmap that. It’s called like succession planning or people planning, where you roadmap who you need. Let’s just use your business as an example. Let’s say you’re thinking about hiring. What’s your timeframe that you’re thinking about? Like, would you want to see somebody in your business in the next three months, six months, year? What are you thinking?
Lukas: Yeah. So six months horizon.
Jackie: Six months. Okay. So we’re going to hire the first person in six months. And then based on your business — and I’ll walk you through how I get there strategically in a second — you might be thinking, okay, if we hire that person, it unlocks this in the business, and this is what it actually generates for us. The second person we need to hire is 12 months after that, and I think it needs to be this role. So you start to build a little bit of a roadmap or a plan succession-wise against who you need and when, because one of the biggest roadblocks of entrepreneurs is we are reactive or late to hiring. We don’t hire the person until we’re in pain. We wait until we get —
Lukas: Once — like, to get back to the email, right? You’re juggling all the balls. Once the balls fall, then you think, oh, who can pick up this ball?
Jackie: Yeah. Oh, maybe I should actually hire to get somebody to go grab that ball so that it doesn’t keep falling every day when I miss it on my to-do list that’s now grown, you know, because I’m everything in the business as a solopreneur or even having kind of one other partner.
So I always like to think about proactive hiring. So if we know who you need in six months, you can be hiring today. And what that means is, yeah, we can go traditional and you can post and you can do all the things online, but it’s also the one piece that we miss when we’re reactive — we forget that good people know good people. You have a whole network of people who you could say, hey, I’m hiring an architect in six months. If anybody comes to mind, let me know. You could tweet it out. Hey, I’m hiring an architect in six months. Who’s the top talent out there?
Lukas: Right. So instead of saying, oh, I need an architect yesterday or today, even better — you say like in six months, and then you have this time to get some pipeline and people start sending you referrals and people start sending people in. You might end up hiring that talent in four months because you find a better person than if you waited. But at the end of the day, you put yourself in a position of power versus a position of like, I need this today.
Jackie: And you almost — a lot of the times entrepreneurs will make quick decisions and they won’t be the most effective decisions. And then you get into the loop of, I hired fast and I hired wrong. And now — it won’t be your wife — now I have to fire them because it’s the wrong person and it costs me more time and energy. And now I have to go hire again because I’m even further behind. And it creates this — and I see it in entrepreneurs a lot. There’s an anxiety that comes with hiring then, because we never got ahead of it.
So that’s just some thinking for you. But how I do that — for me, it’s always, what’s the mission? What are we trying to create within your business? Then we get really clear on where are you at today? And that’s very specific to your business model, your revenue structures, how we’re bringing money in, just a really clean look at where you’re at today. And then the conversations you’re having with your wife over lunch — we get clear on, okay, well, what’s the growth plan? What’s happening in three months from now? What’s happening in six months from now? What’s happening in 12 months from now? Once we get clarity on where we want to go, that starts to identify — for me, I start to see puzzle pieces of who you might want to bring into the team from a skillset standpoint, from a leadership standpoint, to unlock that potential.
So I always say — where you are today versus where you want to go tomorrow, there’s a bridge in between. And one of those bridges is who you need to hire, because it’s going to help you scale faster if we can get it right.
Lukas: That’s really cool. So since we’re on the topic, one more question. What is your employee versus contractor?
Jackie: Mm-hmm. It depends. And this is where — I have hired fractional people, contractor people, part-time people, full-time people for all different companies, because it depends. And it depends on the specific needs that you have. It depends on the goals that you have. Like for instance, in your company, do you want to be an entrepreneur team that has 20 people physically or remotely working for you? Like, have you and your wife talked about what your goal is when you think about — is this a big team? Is this a boutique team? What do you guys think?
Lukas: For us, small team and remote.
Jackie: There we go.
Lukas: It’s obvious.
Jackie: So small team and remote — if that’s the energy that we’re trying to create, and we might step into hiring. I call it stepping into hiring. You don’t need to hire somebody full-time right now because you don’t even know how they work. You hired your wife because you knew her. You had six years of previous experience to say, I know her. I know her work ethic. I know how she’s going to show up. Sometimes it’s best to hire fractionally or as a contractor and step into hiring. And once they’ve proven themselves over six months, 12 months, then you say, hey, you’re doing awesome. You really fit with our culture. Do you want to flip to full-time or do you like being a contractor? And again, different places in the world will have different regulations around hiring versus contractors and how often we use them. But at the end of the day, it really comes back to what you’re trying to create in your business and build a custom people plan around that.
Lukas: But you see, this is the magic. You have done it a few times. When you say it, it sounds easy. It’s like, ah, so easy. And as an entrepreneur, you think about it as an unknown. This is unknown to me. It’s so complicated. Oh, there’s so many things to consider.
Jackie: And it feels scary, right? It feels scary when you’ve never done it before. If I came to you and I was like, hey, I need to develop this piece of my business that’s going to use your skill set as a developer to go build a digital product on my business — building a digital product to me feels overwhelming, right? So that’s where, for me, the more we can connect the dots to people who are experts in their space, the more we can really unlock the fear and be like, oh, it’s actually quite simple when we just lay it out with a really clean feedback loop.
Lukas: Yeah, I like this counter-example. Like when I started, I saw on Twitter other people that had their own kind of bootstrap businesses and they were posting, hey, I have $5,000, $6,000 of monthly recurring revenue now. And you see this and you think, yeah, this person’s alone. This person’s my age. They know about as much as I do. I can do this. I can get there. And this is the same with somebody who says, yeah, this is how hiring works, no problem. Yeah, I think I can do this.
Jackie: Yeah, it really breaks down the walls and creates more clarity, right? And we can be — as entrepreneurs, when we’re clear and there’s a roadmap, a lot of us have had to bootstrap and get our hands dirty and figure it out. So I’m always like, hey, if I have — this is where mentorship really comes in for me. Like if I have a mentor who’s done this before me and can give me some advice, I’m not worried about myself executing because I’m pretty good at getting in there and getting things done, or else I wouldn’t have a business. None of us would be making any money if we were afraid to do things and actually try something. But sometimes it’s like, I feel like I have 10 options and I don’t know what one to do first. That’s where I get stuck as a business owner. So yeah, that’s where mentorship has really helped me.
I don’t know if you still have time — I have a good example about that.
Lukas: Please do. I can do it quickly. So we came home from a trade show two weeks ago and I get an email from somebody who says, yeah, I’m an investor and I invest kind of my own money and I’m interested. I really like your product. Now, normally you kind of ignore cold emails, but this one was very personal and I felt like it’s real. So I had a meeting, a call with him, and he introduced his idea and said, you know, maybe it could be something. Maybe we can come together here. And I get out of this call and I think, I’ve never even thought of investment, right? I didn’t seek it. I have never thought of it. What is happening?
But because I have kind of this community now on Twitter and know people, I immediately contacted them and said, hey, you have been in investor meetings or you have taken money. Tell me what I should look for. Tell me the red flags. Tell me the green flags. Tell me how it feels like to sit on the table with other people that are rich and want to give you their money. And I had some talks in the next days and it just helped me to understand. So this is the dynamic. This is how it works. This is what the end goal is. This is what the parties have as interests, right? This is how they negotiate. This is how they try to get the upper hand. And it helps me just to go into this next meeting that we maybe have in a much more relaxed way because I know what’s going on.
Jackie: That’s right. I’ve not heard of people talking about it. And maybe you ask different questions now because somebody told you, here are the red flags — so ask the questions to see if any of these red flags come up. You put yourself in such a more powerful position when you ask or you seek some feedback so that you can learn from people who’ve done it before us.
Like at the end of the day, that’s all we’re doing, right? I feel like I had mentors that have done this before me and now I’m in a position, thankfully, where I can mentor some other people who are maybe building their businesses themselves as well. And I’m sure you’re a mentor and you probably don’t even realize it, because you and I met on Twitter. That’s where we met. So you have a good presence and people will ask you questions. You’ll reply to them, and using our own lived experience to help others is a piece of this, in my mind. And just keeping community and openness of sharing really top of mind has always been really important to me.
Lukas: Yeah, I love it. And this is precious to have such a community.
Jackie: Yeah, it is. It is. Well, Lukas, if somebody is interested in this — so again, stagetimer.io. Think about it like a countdown clock that can be programmed onto your computer, onto your stages. If you’re in the entertainment space, if you’re a live podcaster, if you do live recordings like YouTube channels, even if you’re in corporate meetings and you need a timer on for presentations or to keep everyone on track, this is a tool that I think is going to really continue to support so many industries that really need it. And especially the event space. How can people find out about you? How can people connect with you if they’re interested to learn more?
Lukas: Yeah. So you can check out the tool. What we haven’t mentioned — it’s a freemium. So there’s a free version you can just use. It’s called stagetimer.io. And if you want to kind of follow me, I’m really active on Twitter. I try to share things that happened to me, good and bad. Follow me at @_lhermann — my name, first name and then last name with an underscore in front, because many Germans have my name, unfortunately. Yeah, would be awesome.
Jackie: Beautiful. Well, we’ll make sure to make sure that the stagetimer.io website and your links are all live on our show notes. So if you want to connect with Lukas, you want to learn more about this product, please check out the show notes because it’ll be just an easy click for you to get access to all the things. Lukas, I’m so grateful for your time and your energy. Thank you for pouring into us and just sharing a bit more about your entrepreneurial journey with us.
Lukas: Thanks for having me.
Jackie: All right, guys, we’ll see you again on the Jackie Serviss Show.
Thank you for listening in to today’s show. If there was a key message that landed with you, please share or send us a direct message on Instagram at Jackie Serviss and let us know. We love hearing from you. Also, to continue to keep this podcast growing, it would mean the world if you could take a minute and like and rate the show or share it with a friend. Our team is forever grateful. Until next time, we’ll see you again on the Jackie Serviss Show.