The following interview is a conversation we had with Jared Pope, CEO and Co-Founder of WorkShield, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $12 Million Raised to Eliminate Workplace Misconduct

Jared Pope
Thanks for having me. Appreciate it. 

Brett
Not a problem. I’d love to begin with learning a little bit more about your background. 

Jared Pope
Yeah. You know, it’s kind of interesting. I often tell people I’m a recovering lawyer, as I often like to say, and actually grew up in a very small town with a twin brother who is six four and I’m on a good day. 510 so a little of the honors. What’s. And Danny DeVito, if you’ve seen twins before but grew up with modest means, worked hard, went ran track and field at TCU and cross country and went to law school at SMU. And from there really just kind of hit the ground running. Met my wife at SMU at law school who’s also my Co-Founder as well. But really got into benefits and Erisa and employment law HR issues and quickly realized that I’m probably my best manager myself. 

Jared Pope
So I don’t like to like any other entrepreneur you don’t want to report to somebody else per se but really just kind of focused on how do I make my own dream successful and dabbled in a few things. Failed successfully like anybody else, but then really hit the ground running with those lessons learned when we started worksheet six years ago come February 18. 

Brett
What’s the deal with lawyers stopping being lawyers? I feel like I have talked to a lot of founders in the last couple of months where that’s their story as well. What’s the deal there? What’s going on? 

Jared Pope
I think law school is great because it changes the way you think about things. It definitely changes your mindset. But at the same time, there’s so many different levels of law, whether it’s litigation or corporate or criminal. But at the same time, I didn’t like billing the hours in working or billing 2000 hours. Which means you’re going to have to work 2500 hours, which is nearly 200 plus hours a month, just to bill sometimes. And so I really decided, you know what, hitting the clock every year at zero, and you got to start over and you do all of it for maybe a $20,000 bonus, but yet you’ve made the firm over $1.4 million. It just didn’t seem like it was a fair shake. And so I just said, you know what? I’m tired of being a lawyer. 

Jared Pope
I’m going to go do my own thing. And I think for every person that says they’re a recovering lawyer or just got out of the practice of law, I think the ideology of being a lawyer is great. But sometimes we get into the practice of law and realize it’s really messed up. 

Brett
What is the mindset of a lawyer? Cause I’ve heard that from other folks as well, and that they say, honestly, word for word, exactly what you just said, that they walk away with a way of thinking. What is that way of thinking? 

Jared Pope
It’s curious. We’re all big fans if you watch the show. Ted Lasso of be curious. And I think that mindset of curiosity is a good one for both business, for analytics, for data. We’re trying to figure things out. And I think that’s the one thing about law school, is you go through three years of intense training through different subject matters, to be curious, to ask the questions, to dig deeper, to find the thought patterns or the recognition aspects of the answer and how you get to answer. And I think that’s the whole process, is where you’re able to go into a situation objectively, but also with a curious mind to figure out which questions need to be asked and how do you get to the point that you’re trying to get to? And I think that’s the mindset that really sets up. 

Jared Pope
Anybody that goes to law school to have an advantage, maybe over other people, is to have that curiosity. 

Brett
What’s it like having a Co-Founder, who also happens to be a spouse? 

Jared Pope
You know, it’s interesting. I love it. It’s a lot of fun. It doesn’t mean it’s easy, for sure. But when I started the company, my wife Jennifer was probably also my best critic as well, and my hardest critic. And so I’ve started some other companies before that flopped, somewhat successful, and she’s never been really excited about them. And then when we started worksheet and I had the idea, she kind of had this look in her eyes like, okay, I could get behind this. This is really cool. And we started it together. And it takes a lot to where we really try to, when we get home at night with our kids, we have a 15 and a 13 year old, Harmon and Madeline. We really try to shut it off, and that can be hard. 

Jared Pope
But at the same time, we also hold each other accountable for certain things. But it’s also having that outlet to talk to where maybe you can’t talk to your other team members about things that are going on to where when the kids are in bed or the early morning coffee at 05:00 a.m. We can talk about business decisions or business strategies and what’s going on for the day and really have that partner because it is hard and someone’s there with you and they’re not going to leave. So it’s fun, it’s exciting, it’s frustrating all at the same time. It can be a beautiful thing. But one of the things we’ve really focused on is no matter what, we’re husband and wife, we’re best friends and we’re business partners. Third. And I think we take it in that order as well. 

Brett
Take us back to 2018 and the founding of the company. What were those first three to six. 

Jared Pope
Months like, probably like any other company. And it really gets down to, ill go back a little further. It started really around November of 2017, and that was right around the Me Too movement and really asked the question of how do we solve this problem of harassment, discrimination, workplace misconduct, and really diving into what is the existing system? Is it broken? Can it be fixed? And if it can be fixed, can it be scalable? And is this something that could help companies out not only from being sued all the time, but also the individuals that these things are happening to, can they actually have a voice to be heard? And so when we started out, it was really working till 02:00 a.m.. Nonstop. 

Jared Pope
While also, I had a law firm at the time with attorneys, and so making sure we can pay our bills, but in the sides and late at night, putting things together, funding the company, having the expenses. And I remember one of the first real moments that we had early on. We realized, you know what, learning from the successes and failures of some of the other companies that I started before, I realized, hey, we need to get our name out there. And we did this process of interviewing some PR firms and getting some marketing people involved. And when it came down to it was a pretty easy decision. But the monthly fee was more than our mortgage payment. And so we really just had to kind of say hey, is this worth it? 

Jared Pope
And Jen and I looked at each other and we said, hey, I think this is worth it. We could do it. It’s going to get our name out there. It’s going to get the people to know that we’re serious and who we are. And that was kind of the first moment within those first four to six months of, okay, the company’s founded, it started. Everything’s legit. Let’s go where were like, all right, we’re in and we’re not turning around. 

Brett
Were there any low points in those early days or just throughout the company’s history where things got closed, things got tense? Any moments like that? 

Jared Pope
Not so much in the early days, but what did happen? It was tense in the sense of we felt like we had this secret, right? We had this really neat kind of trap, this mouse trap, and no one else was doing what we’re doing. And were almost like, okay, we want to get our name out there, but we don’t want too many people to know what we’re doing. And were very fortunate because were very smart with the money that Jen and I put in to fund the company and to bring people on and to make those smart decisions. And so were never necessarily worried about paying employees, paying team members. It was always more about how do we make sure the message is correct? How do we make sure that people truly understand what we do? 

Jared Pope
And there was a moment, not necessarily early on, but down the road, where we made some bad hires, and it’s not because the people were bad, it’s just, you know, it didn’t work out. And when we first started raising some capital and we raised some individuals and brought on some individuals that were probably a little too expensive, we learned from those missteps, as you would say, and so learning from them, I remember at one point we knew what we had to do. And you make these friendships with these individuals, and it can get tense because sometimes you have to let them go because the rocket’s taken off and you’re being held back from a string or anchor. And sometimes you got to cut the anchor to make sure the company goes forward. 

Jared Pope
And those are some of the decisions that I think would be more tense in the early stages where the company just grew and we outgrew the individuals that were there at the time. 

Brett
You mentioned there investing in a pr firm early on, was that successful for you? Did that really help propel the brand. 

Jared Pope
And launch the brand out into the world? It was. It was successful, and we still use them today and they’ve been with us for a long time. And in our view it’s been successful from the standpoint of they got who we are, they got our message, they got our branding and defining success through that way. Absolutely. I think it’s also been successful because it’s easy to call upon them and they know the history to where when you bring on a new, whether it’s a marketing firm or somebody else, you almost have to reeducate. And so it’s been successful in that way because there’s not a lot of things we have to tell them that they don’t already know. 

Brett
When it comes to the brand and the general marketing philosophy. How would you describe your marketing philosophy? 

Jared Pope
Its a little bit about education but we took approach early on with okay lets get some PR, lets make sure our names out there but can we do it without paid advertising? And thats what we did. Our approach was if were going to start paid advertising you have to be committed to continually doing paid advertising. And that was an approach that we just said hey you know what, we’re going to make a strategic bet that we’re not going to do that. And let’s focus on some organic where through our LinkedIn post, let’s do some blogs, obviously some SEO stuff, but really no paid advertising. 

Jared Pope
And I think it’s worked out well for us to where given where we are as a company we have over 160,000 employee lives on our platform covering employers from 10, 15, 20,000 plus all the way down to ten and 20 lives. And we’ve been really successful as a company today. To where all without paid advertising. And which I get excited about it given our recent fundraise is that we now have growth capital to where okay let’s be diligent, let’s be smart. Do we start doing some paid advertising? But let’s make sure if we do it’s the right paid advertising. 

Brett
Who’s a typical customer for you or what is that ICP? 

Jared Pope
Our ICP is really designated between any company that has employees from on the low side 100 to 200 lives to on the high side about five to 6000 employee lives. And now we obviously have bookends of those. You know we have a 10,000 live company called Mattress firm that you’re probably familiar with. Omni Hotels is a client of ours as well who have more employees than that. But I’d say our bread and butter is really that client. That employer that’s got between 102 hundred employees all the way up to say 5000 and we often find with them, it’s they want to make sure their culture is great, they want to make sure these issues are addressed, that we respond to, that we cover. 

Jared Pope
And there’s a lot less red tape that you have to go through, especially when you get above the 5000 type groups. 

Brett
Just to highlight some of the numbers that I see on the website. So you have 150,000 plus employees protected, you’re serving 300 clients and then 41 million in savings. Where does that savings come from? How do you quantify that savings? 

Jared Pope
Yeah, great question. So generally speaking, when an employer has an internal incident, and so just to kind of set the bar worksheet not only does the intake with our platform call center, but instead of putting the onus of these HR misconduct issues back on the employer to go investigate, we actually do the complete investigation from start to finish. And we do all of that on average less than a week. And so to give you some data, on average, the national average is about 30 plus days. So we’re 70, 80% faster than the national average, which is why we’ve been so successful. 

Jared Pope
And so when you think about the savings for our companies, the hard data shows that for an employer to investigate their own issue, when you add up the HRS time, the legal time, the potential turnover cost or productivity cost, the average cost is roughly around $20 to $21,000 per incident and lost productivity, lost time, turnover, hard cost. If you bring in an attorney to help with that investigation, and so if you have a thousand life group and you have ten issues, it’s going to cost you roughly $210,000 for those ten issues and internal costs. Well, with worksheet on a thousand like group, you’re going to pay $40,000 to cover all of it and handle all of it. Manage the drama, handle the drama, investigate the drama and then make sure that drama is has a clear path to resolution. 

Jared Pope
So what we’re allowing our clients to have is more time on their plate to do more productive things that take their own business forward. And so that’s some hard dollars. And it’s pretty interesting because when you look at the PNC side or property and casualty insurance side, with employer practices, liabilities insurance or Epli insurance, for the smaller companies, the average deductible is about $15 to $20,000 because they know that’s what it’s going to cost you to do your own investigation. 

Brett
This show is brought to you by Front Lines Media 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. Wow. So it’s not just a software platform, then. It’s a service that’s built on top of your software and on top of your technology. Is that right? 

Jared Pope
Yeah, that’s right. We have a very hard line about any company that’s trying to solve workplace drama, toxicity, HR misconduct, through chatbots, through technology alone, is losing a very critical point that when these issues come up, voices want to be heard, and there’s got to be another human voice on the other side of that line. And the way I equate it to is, imagine you and your spouse buying a house, but only doing it over text. It’s probably going to lead to a divorce, more likely. And so this human voice and this human component of it reminds me, when I was in law school, there was a torts professor named Professor Schumann at law at SMU, and he talked about, at one point, what he called the role of apology. 

Jared Pope
And stay with me on the train here, because I’ll bring it around full circle. But the role of apology was this idea that they did this study to where they went out and surveyed all of these plaintiffs that won these multimillion dollar settlements in these court cases. And one of the questions they would go ask them is say, hey, okay, great. You just won $15 million. Is this what you wanted? And more than 99% of all of the plaintiffs said no. All I really wanted was an apology, but they just weren’t willing to give it. 

Jared Pope
So when you bring that around to what we do at the end of the day is what we find is when someone’s been potentially harassed or discriminated against or there’s some misconduct that happens in the workforce, at the end of the day, the employee that it happens to, they just want to know that their voice is heard and that the company is actually going to take it seriously. And so when we started with our brand of worksheet be heard, we really mean it. Where the employee could be heard. The employer is obviously heard through the investigation and making sure that things are done, but it’s really that psychological safety. What an employee, when they know that their employer has worksheet, their voice is going to be truly heard. And so that’s really what we’re about. 

Jared Pope
And why in our minds that you can never take away that human component related to HR misconduct. Yes, you can have technology. Yes, you can make it faster to do these. And you can also capture data. And that’s also what our platform is about as well, is that with every issue that comes in, theres 75 pieces of data that we have, and we can actually take that data and apply it to our companies and our clients and say, hey, youre having XYZ issues on the east coast versus west coast. And, hey, youre having more issues when theres male on male departments and female on female departments than you do with combined departments, which is actually a true client of ours. 

Jared Pope
That any department that has 100% male or 100% female has way more issues than when there’s departments that just have female and male together, which is what most people would say is counterintuitive. 

Brett
You mentioned data there. 

Jared Pope
Have you analyzed the data to see. 

Brett
How this problem of workplace misconduct has changed over the last five or six years? Or really, I guess just since 2018, when you were starting from an outside view, when did the me too movement really begin? I would guess that’s probably 2017. A lot’s happened. Has the problem been gotten any better? Like, are you seeing progress, or is the problem still just as bad as the day you start? 

Jared Pope
Well, I think the problem has actually increased for those companies that turn a blind eye or want to check the box for anonymous hotline. And that’s it. Right? And the industry and the economic times in which we’re in, especially since 2017, when it started, 2018, when we started, is people have gotten more boisterous with what they want to talk about. At the same time, they’re also still fearful of raising their voice inside an employer because of that fear of retaliation, the fear of ridicule, the fear of, am I going to lose my job? And you could see waves of it when it was an employee market where they could go anywhere because the jobs, there were way more jobs and employees, they could just, if they didn’t like a toxic culture, they’ll just go to another workplace. 

Jared Pope
But now you look at today where maybe the jobs aren’t as much, especially in the technology space, and people are kind of hunkering down, where do I go? How do I succeed? And then you have the work from home, plus also the remote work, plus going back to the office or hybrid models. You have this really interesting intersection of there’s a lot of things happening, not only in the atmosphere in which we live, but also in the workplace in which we work. And so when you have all that together, people still make mistakes. They still think there’s a power play, a pay disparity. They make stupid decisions. And so at the end of the day, I think the harassment and discrimination, although there’s been a light that’s been shining upon it, people are still doing it. 

Jared Pope
The problem is people don’t feel safe actually raising their voice inside a company because the existing system that we’re correcting is you go call the hotline and it goes straight back to the person. Generally, that is probably doing the harassing or discrimination to where it’s not a third party like us that’s actually making sure it gets looked into. And so one of the interesting stories is we started in 2018, everybody has their COVID story. And we wondered at the time, okay, are we going to see more incidents during COVID or less because of the work from home? And we actually saw more. 

Jared Pope
And the interesting part about that is, if you think about with kids and technology, there’s a lot of bullying that goes on with technology, on social media, texting other people, and that transferred over to the workplace with adults, right, not kids, but with adults. So when they’re on a Zoom call and they turn off the cameras, or they may say things that they probably wouldn’t say if they were in person across the table from all of a sudden, this idea that, oh, I can’t see you can’t see me. We’re going to turn off our cameras. I’m just going to tell you the way it is, not realizing that it’s coming across a different way. People got really bold in their actions. And when that happened, we saw a lot more incidents. 

Jared Pope
And then, as you can imagine, when people went back to the office, it’s the same thing. They forgot how to act. And so, as I often say, when you got to rely on human behavior, and human behavior always makes mistakes, I think we’re in a good business. 

Brett
How do you think about your market category? Is it HR, incident management, workplace misconduct? Like, what’s the market category? And then what’s that line item? 

Jared Pope
Typically, you know, we kind of think of it from a GRC standpoint. Governance, risk compliance. We’re a little hybrid because we fit within HR, because generally HR is the one that’s doing it. We also fit within compliance and legal and governance on that side, because it’s the attorneys, it’s the general counsels that have to make sure it’s the risk is mitigated but then you also have this insurance play as well to where EPLI and PNC premiums are going through the roof by double digits every quarter. And so companies are like, why am I paying so much premium when employers are getting sued left and right one of their managers discriminated against somebody, but yet they didn’t know about it. 

Jared Pope
So they’re paying out 15, $20 million to these individuals when, if you ask the executives, they want to solve it, they just didn’t know about it. Right. And so the way we look at our space and our industry is really that GRC component with the blend of HR and a little bit of insurance as well. 

Brett
What do you think has been the most important decision you’ve made to date since launching the company? 

Jared Pope
I go back to that tension moment we talked before, and it’s, we’ve gotten really good at making decisions quick, especially when we realize someone’s not working. And I think the faster you can learn that, the better the company will be. Because too many times, startups, companies, they hang on to people because they’re trying to make it work. They’re hoping it works and praying it works. And at the end of the day, you know in your heart, like, hey, it’s just not working. And yes, you can try to find some different fits for people, but we’ve gotten really good at our hiring, our decision making, but also. So that’s number one. 

Jared Pope
Number two, I think what’s also been really good for us is when we commit to our strategy, we commit to it, and we make sure our company values and mission and vision is where we’re headed. But it’s communicated to our team members, and I’m sure you know this, but when we hire anybody today, and we’ve grown, by the way, by 100% since September. So it’s been pretty fun. Yeah, it’s always fun. But one of our core attributes to making sure that people are the right fit is they have to meet three criteria. And it comes from the ideal team player, which I’m sure you read, and it’s, they got to be hungry, humble, and smart. And we’ve had people that were two out of the three, and they didn’t work. 

Jared Pope
We’ve had people that were one out of three, but we thought they were awesome. And, oh, it’s okay. Guess what? It didn’t work. And for the most part, everyone we’ve hired, they’ve all been three out of three. And it’s amazing. The culture is fantastic. Now, does that mean you’re always going to find the right person? No, not necessarily. But it sets you up for success a lot better than anything else. 

Brett
Let’s imagine that I come to you and I say, Jared, I am a Founder. I want to build HR technology based on everything that you’ve learned so far throughout your journey. What would be the number one piece of advice that you’d give me? 

Jared Pope
The number one piece of advice that I think is beneficial to anybody that wants to get into HR technology and they want to build their own platform is make sure it’s your own. And whenever you bring on your clients and your customers, continually ask them, how do we improve? Be curious, what can we do better? What do you like about the technology? What do you don’t like? What would you like to see within the technology that solves a pain point? And I think that’s one area that we’ve done really well, is that we continually communicate with our clients and ask them, hey, how can we better? What do you like? What do you not like? Is there something that annoys you? That is on our platform that you wish did X versus Y? 

Jared Pope
Is there something that maybe within your day to day you’re trying to find certain data? How do we make that data more accessible or easier? How do we make sure when you add team members or you add different HRDs across the United States, how you can assign them to a different region easier? And its those curiosity questions that I think not only at the beginning, if you’re going to build your own platform, that as the clients come on, you have to make sure that you maintain contact with them throughout the whole process. And now, does that mean every quarter or every month? No, I think it depends on size. But is it twice a year? Probably at least to where? Hey, let’s do a checkup. How we doing? How are you all doing? What can we do to be a better partner? 

Jared Pope
And I think when you do that, you earn the grace of your clients and there’s going to be times that you will have to cash in the grace that you’ve earned, because maybe there is a mistake, maybe something happened, but it’s that grace that you earn that really solidifies the partnerships that you have with your clients and that you’re not going to necessarily worry about, hey, they’re going to leave. 

Brett
Final question for you before we wrap up here. Let’s zoom out three to five years into the future. What’s the big picture of vision that you’re building? 

Jared Pope
So it’s fun. We want to be the preeminent platform that employers can go to not only make sure their HR drama misconduct issues are handled, but they can handle all their other issues as well, their ethics, their fraud, the whistleblower. But in addition to that, and we’re rolling this out, we want to be the premier player that can put a guarantee behind our platform, meaning if you get sued and you have worksheet, we’ll cover your deductible on your eco live policy. That’s how strongly we believe in our process and our platform. And four years from now, we want to be that company. 

Jared Pope
That where we’re headed, we’re going to have a million plus lives on our platform and we’re going to have the data that is going to allow companies to really figure out what their next step is when it comes to culture improvement, when it comes to their own team members, what they need to execute on. And thats really fun. Where were headed? 

Brett
Amazing. I love the vision and ive really loved this conversation and you’ve definitely turned me into a fan and ill be rooting for you as you execute on this vision. Before we wrap up, if theres any founders that are listening in and want to follow on with your journey, where should they go? 

Jared Pope
Ww dot worksheel.com or you can hit us on LinkedIn as well. Or feel free to look us online. I think our emails are on there. I know my information is out there on LinkedIn. Shoot us a note. We’ll be happy to have a conversation, see where we can help. 

Brett
Amazing. Jared, thanks so much for taking the time. 

Jared Pope
Thank you. Appreciate it. 

Brett
All right. That was awesome. Really enjoyed that conversation. 

Jared Pope
Thanks, Brett. I really appreciate it. It was a lot of fun. 

Brett
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 and growing your own podcast, visit frontlines.io podcast. And for the latest episode, search for category visioners on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening and we’ll catch you on the next episode.