The following interview is a conversation we had with Sammy Singh, CEO and Co-Founder of WurkNow, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $15 Million Raised to Power the Future of Staffing.
Sammy Singh
Great to see you, Brett.
Brett
Super, super excited for this. So let’s jump right in to kick things off. Can we start with a quick summary of who you are and just a bit more about your background?
Sammy Singh
I’m an entrepreneur at heart, living out here in Southern California. This is my second software company. I’ve been in the staffing industry for about 30 years, and I’ve got two kids. One is a college sophomore and the other one high school sophomore, and my wife’s a CPA, and we live out here in Corona, California.
Brett
And when you were 20 years old, did you dream of staffing or when you were 15 or twelve years old, was staffing on your mind or where did that passion for staffing come from?
Sammy Singh
Never, none of that. As an immigrant, of course, I’m a little bit of anomaly in the sense that I’m a Sikh Indian Punjabi who grew up in Brunei, which is on the island of Borneo, and I went to St. Andrews High School, and then I got educated on my bachelor’s india, then moved to the US. Back in 1990 when I was 21 years old. So I speak three different languages. I understand I’m at home equally india as well as in Southeast Asia as well as in the US. Because I’ve spent most of my life here. I’m 55 now, so having come out as an entrepreneur mindset. So I worked for retail, then I got into staffing as a salesperson in 1995. That’s when I learned what it was like in the staffing industry, especially in the light industrial world. So it’s kind of that evolution of moving from retail into being a salesperson and then eventually running a firm and then getting into technology.
Sammy Singh
That’s been the evolution for the entire process.
Brett
And I see you’ve been angel investor for about ten years as well. Are those typically staffing related companies that you’re backing or what’s the focus there?
Sammy Singh
Not at all. It’s actually been everything kind of under the sun that made sense. So after we sold, my brother and I, who’s my Co-Founder even till today, after we sold our last company, we had a pretty significant non compete. And we decided that while instead of sitting at home, because initially you sit at home going, yes, things are great and in about a month you get bored out of your mind, nobody emails you anymore and you’re like you’re miserable. So we said let’s get back in, let’s go out and see what’s out there, what we can invest in. So we probably made approximately through equity and money about maybe eight investments completely. Each one was different. We could advise them, help them with their tech and just kind of be there with them. So that really were different investments that we made. And out of that I believe three of them, maybe four have know evened out at the end of the day, the rest of them kind of fizzled out.
Brett
And that sounds pretty on par, right? With what you expect with angel investing.
Sammy Singh
Absolutely. You’ve got a us is built America. I always call it the biggest enterprise in the world. It is the best and the only place in the world to do business. And if you’re not an entrepreneur and you’re not willing to risk the wealth comes to those not only in knowledge but also in fortune, comes to those who actually venture out and actually create businesses. And part of that is risk. And if you believe in your own business, you got to be able to believe in others as well and be able to risk some piece of that with them as well.
Brett
I love that. And a few other questions we like to ask with the goal of really just understanding what makes you tick as a Founder first one, what Founder and CEO do you admire the most and what do you admire about them?
Sammy Singh
This answer would have been so different maybe ten years ago and then five years ago and today at my age with having done really met a lot of people, I’m really disenchanted with each individual that I want to idolize. I have really realized that some of the best nuggets of business come from just run of the mill business people. I’ll give you a simple example being of the Indian community. We have folks that are majority of them are doctors. A ton of them use really own convenience stores. When I’m saying convenience stores, I’m talking 5000. And then you’ve got another group that are tech entrepreneurs. Each one of them is successful in their own field. Money, if I had to say, can be made in any business. So I’ve really learned from all the way from my dad with the attitude to everybody that I meet and I try to absorb something from them.
Sammy Singh
So I’ve always found that if you find good nuggets in business and you want to admire someone, you really don’t have to go yes, you should read all the books, you should listen to everyone. But there’s no one because they were all imperfect in their own way and that’s why they are perfect. Each one of us have so many gaps in our mindset, maybe in our philosophy could be in the way we run our businesses, there’s nothing right or nothing wrong. Everybody’s right in their own place, and luck plays a big role in it. So if you take all of those I love the fact that I can just talk to an entrepreneur. That, to me, makes the difference, and I take something from everyone.
Brett
Do you have a superpower? If you encounter a young entrepreneur and they walk away from the meeting, would they say, wow, Sammy’s just got XYZ skill, or this XYZ thing about like, do you think you have a superpower?
Sammy Singh
One power I do have is the ability to convince and sell, which from sales has become now convincing based on logical facts and not being full of myself. That is, I believe, being humble. Not that I’m anybody that shouldn’t I’m no superstar in any shape or form, but just being humble and being able to respect people, that is something that I believe is my super strength, is I really do come from angle of kindness and listening and really being genuine about what I do. That’s what I’ve always heard the feedback from. Sometimes my superior, somebody that I might have spoken to or met, that I’m happy go lucky guy that they meet and something good comes from me. It’s maybe the energy I radiate.
Brett
What about books? Are there any specific books that have had a major impact on you and how we like to frame this is we call it a Quake book. So a Quake book is a book that rocks you to your core and really influences the way that you think about the world and how you approach life. Do you have any Quake books that come to mind?
Sammy Singh
Quick ones. You have to go with Sapiens being one of them. I really think that book left a huge mark on me. Simply by having read it rephrases the entire how we exist as human beings or where we are. Rich dad, poor dad, of course, as quirky as may sound, but that was one of the first ones you read and really puts things in perspective for you. And then I’ve got no less than 2030 books going on at all times. Millionaire Fast Lane was another one I just read by MJ. DeMarco. It was just amazing that if today’s kids and anybody who’s a young person takes that mindset, I wish I would have learned those things when I was young. And Ryan holiday is another one. Ego is your enemy. These are just each one of them left a very significant mark on me where I really felt that they connected.
Sammy Singh
Know something you can take away with.
Brett
Yeah. Ryan Holiday is one of my all time favorites. That’s where I got the idea for Quake books from. And sitting here on my desk, I have my daily Stoic journal behind me. I have every book that he’s written. He’s just such an outstanding author, and I really like his approach to Stoicism and how he’s made it much more approachable. I don’t know if you’ve gotten into Stoicism a lot, but when I tried to before, it was like very dry. Like reading meditations is very dry and hard to understand, but Ryan Holiday has found a way to make it very easy to understand.
Sammy Singh
Absolutely. It’s practical, it’s edible, as they say. And we used to have the book, actually, I used to leave it up in the front desk of the office and when everybody used to be here before COVID and we just open up one page daily because it has that and we would just take a picture and just post it onto our channel. For everybody in the company, life is too short and every day we’re absolutely blessed and lucky to do what we do. And Stoicism really brings it home.
Brett
Yeah, 100% agree. Let’s switch gears here and let’s dive a bit deeper into the company. So I mentioned you’re a digital staffing platform. I’m sure there’s much more to it than that. So if you want to go ahead and maybe just give us the overview of what the platform does and what your software does, I think that would be a great starting point.
Sammy Singh
So, as I mentioned, I’ve been in light industrial staffing for nearly 30 years now and there are certain problems that exist within light industrial space. And this starts with the worker. These are hourly workers. A lot of times they’re minimum wage. And what has occurred over these years, as I’ve seen this factory mentality that most of these individuals don’t even sometimes have a resume. I mean, here’s someone who’s walking into a staffing agency to go get a job and there could be 40 staffing agencies within a five mile radius. Some places here in Southern California, which is the mecca of warehousing, there could be 30, 40 staffing agencies and ten of them or 20 of them are serving the same customer. Here’s a person goes agency to agency finding a job, then probably being sent to the same position and making probably at the minimum wage level.
Sammy Singh
So we wanted to make sure, firstly, how do we address give more power, maybe a little bit more of a resume, something about the experience that really creates this individual and give them a fighting chance to do something better. So that was one component of the software and the other side was the client, which is the staffing agency. Basically enrolls someone, puts them through their process, matches them to a job and then this individual goes to that job. That was also partly broken because it has just become a factory. Today is I’m a staffing agency. It doesn’t matter how many people coming in, I’m going to churn as many of them and get them out to a client who is unaware of who’s showing up at their doorstep. What kind of experience do they have? Are they the right fit these things are they going to be productive where they are?
Sammy Singh
So we really wanted to take these two parties into account, which is the temp and the client or the customer, where they show up and make sure there was a software that matched everything. And the staffing agency sat in the middle to facilitate both these parties. And then the biggest thing that existed was compliance. If you’re in California, Bret, so am I. We know it. It’s got some of the most stringent labor laws that exist out there. So we wanted to make sure that the employer and the employee was protected as well. So we’ve really created think of it as a staffing platform that staffing agencies use to recruit, match and place individuals and also follow compliance, track time and labor clock in and out. And we also provide a software as a VMs for large companies that use many different staffing agencies to organize job orders to make sure that the right individuals are showing up to their doorstep and they are trained.
Sammy Singh
So we’re not an agency, we’re just the software that makes all of this happen at a very large enterprise scale.
Brett
And what’s the status quo for these agencies? If they aren’t using a solution like WurkNow or specifically using WurkNow, what else would they be using? Is there an existing legacy player that controls the market or is it like spreadsheets and know?
Sammy Singh
There’s some great competitors in our space, there’s some very good ATS. So our typically agency is going to use about five to eight different technologies to run their business. That’s how it works. We tried to make it end to end, kind of like the way HubSpot works. We evolved from one module, then said, oh, you need something else. And we kept adding to it, which was a good and a bad strategy because it took us a long time to develop it. There’s enough competitors in the space. Some of them are very strong in the front office, some are strong in the back office and lots of new tools to onboard people due to COVID. That COVID accelerated our whole industry. But we are one of the unique companies because we come from staffing, we come from this world. We understand the pain. So having unless you haven’t lived that staffing agency world, it’s very hard to solve the problems.
Sammy Singh
So that’s what everything we’ve done is very innovative, very simple, very effective so that one platform can do all of this for you. We call APIs with others, which is okay, but at least someone doesn’t have to suddenly go to a separate texting system or go to a different onboarding system. Then they’re doing something else, somewhere else. It was a complete muck as an industry. And we are one of the few that have really narrowed it down to one single platform that goes end to end.
Brett
This show is brought to you by Front Lines Media, a podcast production studio that helps B2B founders launch, manage, and grow their own podcast. Now, if you’re a Founder, you may be thinking, I don’t have time to host a podcast. I’ve got a company to build. Well, that’s exactly what we built our service to do. You show up and host and we handle literally everything else. To set up a call to discuss launching your own podcast, visit frontlines.io podcast. Now, back today’s episode. When you were deciding the modules to build first, what was that process like and how’d you determine what you would prioritize over others?
Sammy Singh
You know, great question. Honestly, I have to be very handed about it was one of the toughest things, and I think we screwed up on many by going very broad. Yet we did it to solve customers problems. For example, if someone’s matching an individual, they’re like, oh, how do I track the time? We’re like, oh God, we’re brand new, let’s solve that problem. Okay, I need an app to do this. Oh, we’ll go and build it. That was the bad part initially because like I said, we burnt a lot of time and money into it. But today we are thankful for it because went through the grind. We created something that is much broader and actually accommodates all of a customer’s needs. And today we are better off for it. But would I approach it the same way again? Maybe not, but again, no circumstances are the same.
Sammy Singh
Again, everybody makes decisions based on the best information that they have at that point.
Brett
And on the compliance side, does compliance change then as you go state to state? Is it completely different every time you move to a different state?
Sammy Singh
Brett, it’s so critical. We are solution providers, so we actually, for right now, we’re about to have a collaboration with a local labor law firm which will every month basically we’ll do webinars. We’re going to make sure that all of our clients and prospective clients and anybody is aware of law changes, wage and know compliance, anything else that’s changing in our regulatory environment, especially in California, that we are staying ahead of it with our clients and solutioning it for them. Imagine I’m a warehouse operator. I’ve got ten warehouses in five different I’ve got clients who are in five states with 16 to 20 warehouses. How are you going to keep up with all the wage hour compliances that exist? Because a lot of times you just want the right people at the right time with the right cost. That is the goal we’re trying to achieve for our clients.
Sammy Singh
That’s when we step in to say, let us give you an additional service, that is, we will keep up with as many laws and guidelines as possible. We’ll guide you to it, but don’t hold us accountable for it still, go check with your attorneys. But that’s the solutioning. Our clients are looking for because they a lot of times don’t have the resources they need to run their business versus be worried about every wage and hour law that’s changing in the 50 different states.
Brett
Can you give us an idea of the traction, adoption and growth that you’re seeing today?
Sammy Singh
We are pretty much at track of doubling our business from last year 70% to 80% growth every month versus last year. I just typically tracked last year, and the goal next year is to double ourselves again. So we’ve been fortunate that we just, for example, just got a client in that’s one of the largest three pls in the world. But again, it’ll be a six to eight month process to get them on board and get everything squared, and then we start scaling up. So these are all problem solving for a client and then solutioning and customizing the product according to them and then delivering what is necessary. So we have a simple goal. Let’s just keep doubling ourselves every year. Go slow to go fast.
Brett
What do you attribute to that success? I think every Founder listening in would say, yeah, Sammy, that sounds great. I want to double every year as well. What have you gotten right? How have you managed to achieve that.
Sammy Singh
And pull that off, being so small? Double is easy today. Three years later, it may not be. Maybe 20% is going to be right. My last company that was acquired by this gentleman, his goal was, I only want 10% growth every year. This is the profit I want and that’s all I care for. As long as you achieve 10% every year. Because his company was well over 20 some years old and that was fantastic. He always stayed in business. The growth comes from honestly listening to your customer, helping them guide and be successful. Going back to the Ryan holiday, if you recall, know ego is your enemy. Work as hard as possible to make who you’re serving as successful as possible, and it’ll come back to you in leaps and bounds. So even if a client or prospect calls us and says, we have this problem, we go out of our way to help them and assist them and even guide them to our competitors if needed.
Sammy Singh
If we don’t fit that model, that, to me, is old school customer service. Surrounding ourselves with an amazing team today. You can call us, somebody will pick up the phone, they’ll talk to you. Each and every person of my team are good, decent individuals who will talk. They are there for customer centric service. They’re there to serve our clients. And that’s the part it’s very easy to put yourself behind a wall for support, for implementation. Our folks are physically still showing up at clients, making sure success is occurring and then following up accordingly. So we’ve still taken an old school mentality while we use all the tools to make sure it’s efficient. Hopefully that made sense.
Brett
Bert that does make sense. And what about the role of blockchain? I was reading that on the LinkedIn page. There was a lot of references to blockchain educating the market about blockchain. Can you talk us through how blockchain influences or the role blockchain plays in the solution?
Sammy Singh
Absolutely. Blockchain is something again, caveat on this is no client of ours today is using it. We built it about, I’d say pre COVID. The simple reasoning behind it was were so ahead of the curve before blockchain even was adopted by this industry. Simple methodology behind it. My Co-Founder, TJ. He’s the one who came up with it, is in today’s regulatory environment, if I have a time card that comes in, if I make any changes to that time card, if someone didn’t take a lunch or a break and I owe them 1 hour extra as a premium pay, I’m recording all of that as an employer. And most of the time you’ll get class action lawsuits that will come in and say, listen, these are 3000 employees this employer has. And you, Mr employer, did not give me know waiver or compliance or didn’t pay them the premium that was deserved.
Sammy Singh
Now you’re stuck having to prove that you did not maliciously or on purpose shortchange any employee. And again, databases can be manipulated. We felt that if we recorded every single audit and every change to a particular time card or any action on the blockchain that was immutable data, that you could just give a database over to the council as well as defend your case saying we took all the actions necessary so that it really protected you. And in the long run, it was the most reliable source to move forward. So that’s where we wanted to bring in. And we still have it’s there. But we’ve just being a small team. We are growing, we just haven’t had the chance to be able to put that out in a live environment and see where it goes. But that was the mindset behind using blockchain in a practical and a common sense way.
Brett
What about your conversations with investors? So what I hear a lot from investors is they look for enterprise SaaS opportunities and things like that and they tend to kind of pursue the more maybe sexier industries like cybersecurity or ecommerce, things like that. For you. In the early days, was it hard finding investors that wanted to back a digital staffing technology company?
Sammy Singh
Yes, definitely. It’s never easy. Even Brett. I just finished up a bridge round and it was not easy. Environment. What it was two years ago today is 100 times changed, it was 100 times more difficult. But where we got lucky is one of our first customers was one of our first investors as well. We got lucky with our investors as well. This was a niche group. One of my co-founders was very well versed with a lot of private individuals, private wealthy individuals with different mindsets and appetite to be able to invest in us. So we don’t have any institutional money. Everything we have raised has come from friends, people we have done business with in the past. But the largest chunk came from our own clients who looked at our software and said gosh, if you’re solving this for me, I know others can use this.
Sammy Singh
I would like to make a large investment in your firm so we can really back you up and make you successful.
Brett
And if you were just starting the company again today from scratch, what would be the number one piece of advice you’d give to yourself?
Sammy Singh
Go slow. I would take a route of slowly taking one small module, raise very little money and really go through a little bit of a longer phase of making sure the product’s never done that. We know anybody who’s in the SaaS business understands that but really taking additional time. I think for us it got a little bit more difficult because COVID hit literally at the time we had just raised, it was so difficult to implement with clients and it was near impossible to get someone on the phone, let alone on a meeting. So that really hindered and every company that came out of COVID hats off to them, most of us survived and came out of it and are going to thrive because we saw the toughest way to sell, the toughest way to implement, the toughest way to communicate with our clients and prospects.
Sammy Singh
So I would say go slow, take the time to build out one component of it and go through the MVP a little bit longer. Plan things in a quarterly basis, don’t even do it monthly because a quarter goes by sooner than what you think. And what you think will take you five years will take you three what you think will take you one month is going to take you three to five months. So if you go with the mindset, let’s plan on a quarterly basis, see what we can do. It’ll take the stress off because your mental state really takes a toll on this.
Brett
And based on your journey so far, what would you say is the number one most important skill for a B2B Founder to have grit and persistence.
Sammy Singh
Cannot beat it enough times.
Brett
Persistence and final question, let’s zoom out three to five years from today into the future. What does work now look like?
Sammy Singh
Work now is going to be the authority of hourly labor. Whereas majority of the three pls and staffing agencies all have built such a huge ecosystem that without work now it would be secondary to do business in this industry because we have a fair, equitable and amazing user base system that really flags not only the client but as well as the temporary worker. Both of them are put on a pedestal and they both trust each other to be part of this ecosystem because they know that the underlying technology is there to help them all to do better and to not only save costs, but also to earn more revenue.
Brett
Amazing. I love that vision. All right, Sammy, we are up on time, so we’re going to have to wrap here before we do. If any Founder listening wants to follow along with your journey as you build and execute on this vision, where should they go?
Sammy Singh
They should just go to WurkNow.com. It’s wurknow.com. We have an amazing team and that’s what counts.
Brett
Sammy, thank you so much for taking the time to chat. I’ve really enjoyed our conversation and I know the audience is going to as well. So thanks so much for taking the time, really appreciate it.
Sammy Singh
Bret, thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it.
Brett
Keep in touch. This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Front Lines Media, silicon Valley’s leading podcast production studio. If you’re a B2B Founder looking for help launching growing your own podcast, visit frontlines.io podcast and for the latest episode, search for Category Visionaries on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening and we’ll catch you on the next episode.