From a podcast interview featuring Ryan Hogan, Founder and CEO of Talent Harbor
In this episode of CEO Growth Talks, host Pete Hayes talks with Ryan Hogan, Founder and CEO of Talent Harbor, a recruiting firm built to make expert hiring accessible to small and mid-sized businesses. A serial entrepreneur and Navy Reserve commanding officer, Ryan has built, scaled, and sold companies, and recovered from a bankruptcy along the way.
Looking back on Run For Your Lives, a zombie-themed obstacle race that reached $5 million in 18 months before ending in bankruptcy, and Hunt A Killer, which grew from zero to $55 million in four years, Ryan explains why fractional executives became one of his biggest levers for growth. He walks through how his teams kept outgrowing their talent every few months, and why Talent Harbor brought in Chief Outsiders to connect tactics that were already working with an overarching strategy.
For CEOs under pressure to scale faster than their teams can keep up, the conversation offers a candid look at how to bring in the right expertise at each stage of growth.
You can hire a fractional executive who has lived it, been there, done that, and they can come in and work magic.”
Ryan Hogan, Founder and CEO, Talent Harbor
Follow Ryan Hogan on LinkedIn
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[Episode Transcript]
[00:00:00] Man, that intro's so good we had to play it twice.
[00:00:25] Ryan Hogan: But I'm like looking at your intro. That's like, that's an awesome intro, and now I feel nothing but shame.
[00:00:31] Pete Hayes: Yeah. Well, that's why we had to play it again for you, Ryan. Hey, everybody. Welcome to this edition of CEO Growth Talks. I'm your host, Pete Hayes, from Chief Outsiders, and it's my pleasure to welcome our super special guest, Ryan Hogan, who's the founder and CEO not only of Talent Harbor, but of other interesting businesses.
[00:00:50] Pete Hayes: And I just can't wait to dig into this because of your business development strategy, your passion for, gosh, entrepreneurialism and, doing things that haven't been done before and doing them in different ways, and your staying power. Powering through some tough times that we were just talking to before we got on the broadcast.
[00:01:10] Ryan Hogan: Yeah,
[00:01:10] Pete Hayes: yeah. You're welcome, Ryan. Thanks.
[00:01:12] Ryan Hogan: Thanks for having... This is gonna be a lot of fun. And then you said 20 minutes, so I, like you're gonna have to cut me off at certain points 'cause I,
[00:01:18] Pete Hayes: I go a little- We may just go long. Yeah. That's okay 'cause Ryan hosts his own... What's the name of your own podcast that-
[00:01:25] Ryan Hogan: So we've got, we've got three now.
[00:01:27] Ryan Hogan: We've got Confessions- Yeah ... of an Implementer, which by the way- That's
[00:01:30] Pete Hayes: the one I'm thinking of ...
[00:01:31] Ryan Hogan: Heard Here First. We just got the license. We haven't told anybody yet, but I'll tell you here. It's gonna be called Confessions of an EOS Implementer for the first time in two years. That's coming out in a couple weeks, but we've got that.
[00:01:43] Ryan Hogan: Confessions of a Vistage Chair, and then we've got a new one launching in about three weeks called, Confessions of a Rainmaker, with a whole bunch of guests from Chief Outsiders, so we're excited.
[00:01:53] Pete Hayes: Ooh, that's so cool. And what will... and we're gonna drill on the other two, but that one's brand new and we were just...
[00:02:00] Pete Hayes: I just found out about this. Confessions of a Rainmaker, and what kind of folks are you featuring from Chief Outsiders?
[00:02:05] Ryan Hogan: chief sales officers, chief revenue officers, chief marketing officers. It's really about like what are, what... The market is evolving so fast over the last like 15 to 20 years and it's so hard to keep up with like what are the tactics, what are the strategies.
[00:02:20] Ryan Hogan: And so we're bringing in people that are like living this day in and day out to come in and really give kind of expert guidance.
[00:02:27] Pete Hayes: That's nice. Do you actually get confessions in these programs? Do you, people actually, "Hey, I've never shared this with anyone before, Ryan." Are you gonna get a confession from me today, Ryan?
[00:02:37] Pete Hayes: I really wanna go there. I don't know how it's gonna go.
[00:02:39] Ryan Hogan: I'm gonna try. I, that- ... that was actually the whole point, I'm gonna flip the script. You would be surprised. So, the, my first company was called Run For Your Lives, and, like, this whole thing of, like, sexy names to, like, drive interest, and that was kind of the original thing with Confessions is, like, it's a little edgy, it's a little, like, it drives curiosity.
[00:02:57] Ryan Hogan: You would be surprised how many people come on and, like, share things that they've never shared before. So it's been a lot of fun over the last couple years.
[00:03:05] Pete Hayes: Okay, let's, since we're on that, let, let's back up a little bit. We'll get to Talent Harbor, which by the way, is the least edgy of your names.
[00:03:13] Pete Hayes: Right. That's, you kind of, you kind of left me on that one. I wanna hear the alternative names that you decided not to use, but let's back up, 'cause I know you're a Navy vet. What, you had 15 years or something in the Navy?
[00:03:25] Ryan Hogan: 25 now. Yep.
[00:03:27] Pete Hayes: Whoa. Oh, 'cause you're doing, you're still doing some, things. Yeah.
[00:03:30] Ryan Hogan: Yeah, I did 15-
[00:03:31] Pete Hayes: What are you still doing?
[00:03:33] Ryan Hogan: so I am in the Navy Reserves. I'm the commanding officer of a unit out of Spokane, Washington. It's a security platoon, but, you nailed the 15. So I was 15 years active duty, and then I've been in the Reserves for the last 10.
[00:03:44] Pete Hayes: Okay. And so when you left full-time, in the service, you've developed several businesses.
[00:03:52] Pete Hayes: They didn't all succeed, but then you also had a big winner. So take us through that pretty quickly.
[00:03:58] Ryan Hogan: Yeah, so I think the... What's interesting is all my companies that have actually achieved scale. So I've got, like, a million ideas. Out of those ideas, like, maybe 100 see the light of day. Out of those 100, maybe 20 become companies.
[00:04:09] Ryan Hogan: And out of those 20, I think I've only had three or four that have scaled. And scale is relative, 'cause, like, that doesn't mean that they necessarily end right. But first company, active duty launched, it was called Run For Your Lives. It wasn't the first company, it was the first company that achieved, some semblance of traction.
[00:04:26] Ryan Hogan: And if you think back to the Tough Mudder days, 2012, Tough Mudder, Warrior Dash, Spartan Race, so this was a five-kilometer race, except people were chased by zombies. And so, everybody put on a flag football belt, and it had three flags. That flag represented, or those flags represented health, and they ran through a five-kilometer outdoor obstacle course race that was themed like a post-apocalyptic universe or world, and there was 250 zombies chasing our participants.
[00:04:54] Ryan Hogan: - It was incredible. It scaled very fast. It was my first experience with a company that actually took off. That was like zero to five million over about, 18 months.
[00:05:06] Pete Hayes: Oh, that's impressive.
[00:05:07] Ryan Hogan: It,
[00:05:08] Pete Hayes: it was- So let's pause there for just a second. Was this your first experience at recruiting and recruiting zombies?
[00:05:13] Pete Hayes: I mean, how do you recruit zombies?
[00:05:15] Ryan Hogan: so funny story with recruiting zombies, and I said this out loud. I was, going to the University of Maryland at the time, going through a commissioning program with the Navy, and, Kevin Plank, the founder and CEO of Under Armour, he had this competition called the Cupid's Cup.
[00:05:29] Ryan Hogan: And so we went there and we pitched our business in front of a live audience. It was great. We won the competition. And he... One of the things that I said during the competition, which like made its round on YouTube and we got poo-poohed on quite a bit, is that our zombies actually paid us, meaning the people that were like kind of, quote unquote, "working the event," they were paying.
[00:05:49] Ryan Hogan: And we sold out all of our zombie events or all of the zombie spaces, because 250 people in a course at any given time, we had three different shifts, and so that was 750. But they called us out to come and dress like a zombie- ... and chase people. Yeah, crazy. Crazy. It was wild.
[00:06:11] Pete Hayes: Okay. So you got that one.
[00:06:14] Pete Hayes: Just, and would you call that to scale? I... $5 million business, 18 months sounds like a pretty big success.
[00:06:21] Ryan Hogan: Yeah, right to scale and right to bankruptcy. I mean, it was... it was a journey.
[00:06:27] Pete Hayes: It was an apocalyptic event. Okay.
[00:06:29] Ryan Hogan: It... Yeah. Yeah, the old saying of like zombies, this one died, and it died in a catastrophic way.
[00:06:36] Ryan Hogan: like incredible pain, heartache. There was... You know, I think when people see bankruptcy, my thing was like people were texting me and they were like, "Hey, so sorry, so blah." When you go through bankruptcy, what people don't see is it's really about the 12 months leading up to that.
[00:06:54] Ryan Hogan: When bankruptcy occurs or the papers are filed, like everything goes silent. But the months leading up to that, your phone is ringing off the hook with people you owe money to. It's... It is the most unpleasant experience I've ever had in my life. And then it ended, and that was that.
[00:07:12] Pete Hayes: I wanna come back to bankruptcy warning signs in just a second. Yeah. But let, let's go to your big one. Your, Hunt A Killer?
[00:07:20] Ryan Hogan: Yeah. So it took a few years off. So I went bankrupt. Derek went bankrupt. I don't know if he wants me to share that, but, like, we both went bankrupt.
[00:07:28] Pete Hayes: The other guy that almost named, not to be named.
[00:07:31] Pete Hayes: Okay.
[00:07:31] Ryan Hogan: The, yeah, the other guy that told me to shave my mustache, and here we are two weeks later. But... And then the comp- obviously the company bankrupt. But we had personally guaranteed everything on the company, all the vendor contracts, everything else. We didn't know what PGs were at that time. And so took about two or three years off.
[00:07:48] Ryan Hogan: I had commissions, transferred out to San Diego, California, was driving ships for a while. I was dabbling in different things, and then nothing was really working. I had this guy come to me that I met on Reddit of all things, and that's a whole nother story for another day. But he was like, "Why are you, why are you getting into business services and software and all that?
[00:08:07] Ryan Hogan: Like, your background is in entertainment and experiential and things like that. Like, why don't you try it again?" So who'd I call? I called Derek, and I was like, "Hey, you know, we dusted ourselves off. It's been a few years. We should run it back." And so we did, and we looked at the same sort of methodology with Run For Your Lives, which was, you know, this was the day of, The Walking Dead.
[00:08:32] Ryan Hogan: And so we were catching, like, this trend. We were catching all of these different components, and so we used the same sort of methodology is when you think back to 2016-ish, true crime was exploding. Now, 20/20 and 60 Minutes and all these, like, you know, true crime, murder mystery shows have been around for quite a bit.
[00:08:52] Ryan Hogan: But at the end of the day, like, all of the podcasts were just creating this massive movement in this true crime, - Mm ... this true crime space. And so that's what we did, is we went back to the original campground, and we transformed the 200 acre campground into a living crime scene. The problem that we had, it was called Hunt A Killer, it still is, but the problem that we had during that point is that with a zombie event we could put 20,000 people through in any given weekend.
[00:09:19] Ryan Hogan: With Hunt A Killer you can't have thousands of people standing around a fake crime scene and trying to interrogate suspects. And so we found product market fit, which in my humble opinion is the hardest thing to do in entrepreneurship, but we didn't have the right business model. And so we looked for different business models out there.
[00:09:35] Ryan Hogan: Subscription box, again, Loot Crate, Birchbox, this was 2016. Like, these companies were exploding. And, so we backed into a subscription box, and we said, "We're gonna deliver this murder mystery experience directly to doorsteps episodically each month." And so we would deliver clues, items, correspondence- Yeah
[00:09:53] Ryan Hogan: police reports, case files, and, Hunt A Killer took off. Hunt A Killer, zero to 55 million in-
[00:10:00] Pete Hayes: That's specific, yeah. So wow. Wow. You took advantage of the tr... Well, you had a passion- Yeah ... but then you also found the market fit.
[00:10:07] Ryan Hogan: That's it.
[00:10:08] Pete Hayes: That's it. And then you found a way to package it which was not which was gonna scale, basically.
[00:10:15] Pete Hayes: Yeah.
[00:10:15] Ryan Hogan: Yep. That's right.
[00:10:17] Pete Hayes: And it was a pretty successful exit. I think that's public. Can you share your-
[00:10:21] Ryan Hogan: it's not public. I could talk about the numbers kind of leading up to it. I think of all things I'm still under an NDA at this point. But we- Okay ... we eventually sold. So we grew and scaled zero to 55 million in four years.
[00:10:33] Ryan Hogan: and then we got into retail, Target, Walmart, Barnes & Nobles. That was kind of the game changer for us, once we shifted from direct to consumer into retail distribution. And then we sold to a company today known as Relatable, back then known as What Do You Meme. Okay. And they've been doing amazing things with the brand.
[00:10:52] Ryan Hogan: So brand's still growing strong and sitting on Target shelves.
[00:10:56] Pete Hayes: So you used the term game changer, and I don't think you actually know that you said that so
[00:11:03] Ryan Hogan: perfectly. That's it. That was it. Game changer. Man of accident on the words, yeah.
[00:11:11] Pete Hayes: So now, I mean, how do you get from that into the talent business?
[00:11:15] Pete Hayes: It doesn't seem like a, an obvious transition.
[00:11:19] Ryan Hogan: Yeah, so my Vistage chair at the time, Tom Leonard, going through this, going through the sale process. Of all things, I was activated in the Navy at the time. That's a whole nother story for beers one day. But going through that process while I was at the Naval War College, and then just trying to kind of figure out, like, what's next.
[00:11:38] Ryan Hogan: So Tom called me up, and he was like, "Hey, kid, you're not gonna be able to sit still, and you suck at golf. And so go pick your favorite line item and go do that for a while. Go help other companies do some of the things that, like, you needed help doing." Mm. And for me it was people, the investment, development, coaching, mentoring.
[00:11:58] Ryan Hogan: But we had this one line item for recruiting, and we spent, like, a million bucks on recruiting. I was like, what a... I, sorry for all the recruiters out there, but, like, a sleazy, nasty, I don't know, just like used car... And sorry for the used car salesmen. Used car sales, like, type industry. And the reason for this is that there's been this business model that's, like, contingent 30%.
[00:12:21] Ryan Hogan: It's been around for since World War II. And the whole concept of this is as people were coming back from the wars and there was people, like super connectors that could connect them into companies, they would just look for their, like, tip, their 30%. And so this business model that someone just pulled out of thin air became, like, industry standard and never evolved.
[00:12:41] Ryan Hogan: And so there's been zero trust and transparency in the... So anyhow, I looked at this as a massive industry and also a massive opportunity where you could come in with... and build, like, on trust and transparency and all these other things. And so that's what I did. I called Ilana Burr. Ilana was the best recruiter that we ever used at, Hunter Killer.
[00:13:02] Ryan Hogan: And I said, "I'm gonna launch a recruiting firm. I'm not a recruiter. I don't know what I'm doing, but I bet you I could do sales and marketing." And, she said, "Say no more," and she quit, left. And, here we are two years later growing like weed.
[00:13:17] Pete Hayes: There you go. Wow. Mm. Congratulations.
[00:13:20] Ryan Hogan: Thanks. So that,
[00:13:20] Pete Hayes: it's a little mysterious.
[00:13:21] Pete Hayes: You are a sales and marketing guy, even though, you just kind of tossed in the War College, in there- Yeah ... just as one of your, one of your things, as a Navy vet. But you pulled in Chief Outsiders, which for a successful entrepreneur who knows how to grow businesses, knows how to do things, knows how to get the right people in the right seats and so forth, and so why did you reach out to Chief Outsiders?
[00:13:50] Pete Hayes: It seems like an interesting, tactic.
[00:13:53] Ryan Hogan: Yeah. I think, - At this point, at this point, like people are starting to understand this whole notion of fractionals. Fractionals has been around for, God knows. It's mostly played in the private equity space. And like fractional, it, it's just over the last like 10, 15 years started to get exposure, kind of outside of those universes.
[00:14:14] Ryan Hogan: One of the biggest levers that we had at Hunt A Killer was fractional executives. And so as we were growing, as we were scaling... You know, when you think about a company that's growing from like zero to 10 million, there's a couple inflection points. There's gonna be a couple of like bumps in there.
[00:14:31] Ryan Hogan: When you think of zero to 50 million, like you are going through massive inflection points, and you're doing it on like every three months, every six months, where like you're quickly outgrowing your talent. And so the solution that we needed at Hunt A Killer was like we needed to be able to easily kind of plug and play some incredible people that had the experience, and then understand like what we needed next.
[00:14:53] Ryan Hogan: Was it somebody in full-time or did we need someone to drive strategy, and then kind of build a team around that strategy? And so what fractional did for me at Hunt A Killer, like we had the former chief accounting officer from T-Mobile. We had the former, chief technology officer from McAfee.
[00:15:11] Ryan Hogan: Like we had legit executives, and we weren't paying a million bucks a year for it. And so Alana and I, we were, probably about a year and a half, two years into this journey, and
Our tactics were working. So we had the podcast. We, we've got all these different things that we do, and they're all working.
[00:15:29] Ryan Hogan: The problem that we're having is like the fundamentals, the overarching strategy of how do you bring together all of these components and do so in a way which like maximizes the return on both that time and that money, that wasn't in place.
[00:15:49] Ryan Hogan: And so there, I, like I look at fractional executives as like a cheat code.
[00:15:49] Ryan Hogan: And so there, I, like I look at fractional executives as like a cheat code.
[00:15:49] Ryan Hogan: You know, instead of like going out and building a team and training someone how to do all this stuff and bring it together, you can hire a fractional executive who has lived it, been there, done that, and they can come in and work magic. And so we knew we needed some help. And the one thing that I've learned is like typically there's ecosystems.
[00:16:08] Ryan Hogan: Like when we went out and we hired a fractional, CFO at my last company, like it was a fractional CFO shop. And it's like when there is, when there is an organization that exists and their sole existence is for that thing, like generally they're pretty good at it. And so we vetted a couple shops.
[00:16:27] Ryan Hogan: Chief Outsiders was the number one. The level of talent, the quality, and the humans that you guys have is second to none. And so, yeah, we went down that path and here we are.
[00:16:41] Pete Hayes: So that's encouraging to hear. I mean, the notion of a firm is different than a single person, although sometimes you can find the unicorn that is exactly the right person.
[00:16:52] Pete Hayes: But there is more value to a firm, is what you're saying, and it seems like you've experienced that. And not just fractional chief marketing or sales, but in CFO in your prior experience, so.
[00:17:03] Ryan Hogan: Yeah, and if I can touch on that just a little bit, which is, like, maybe you can find kind of the single shingle or something like that.
[00:17:10] Ryan Hogan: Maybe they're already in your network, maybe they just retired. Like, it... There's a possibility that exists.
[00:17:10] Ryan Hogan: The one thing that Chief Outsiders brought us was not just, like, an incredible human, but the teamwork that happens inside of the enterprise. And so, like, for us, when our strategy came together, it didn't come together, just from Bill.
[00:17:30] Ryan Hogan: Which Bill, in his own capacity, is an incredible human, but he sits among his peers and stress tests the ideas that he puts together, that we put together, and you get these other angles. And you're talking, you know, you've got five people sitting around. That's over a century of experience that's now sitting in that room.
[00:17:51] Ryan Hogan: Did I say that right? Century, is that 100? I think so.
[00:17:54] Pete Hayes: It is. You're good. Yeah.
[00:17:55] Ryan Hogan: Okay, good. I was hoping it wasn't 1,000 years. But at the end of the day, like, the level of exposure you're getting to that is incredible.
[00:18:06] Pete Hayes: Yeah. We now call that a growth impact council, which is way too many words.
[00:18:11] Pete Hayes: But what happens internally, they, we call it a peer review. So Bill reaches out to his peers and- And the crazy thing about it, I mean, it delivers value to our clients, but it makes it so much more enjoyable for Bill and his peers to be able to work together and collaborate and learn new things and, bring it to our clients.
[00:18:30] Pete Hayes: So anyway, thank you for, thank you for sharing that time. Yeah.
[00:18:33] Ryan Hogan: Yeah.
[00:18:34] Pete Hayes: So is that the result of that flexibility or, continuing to see all? 'Cause, you know, we perhaps two-thirds of the time we're helping companies get through a growth challenge, right? They've stalled. Yeah.
[00:18:51] Pete Hayes: but in your case, I think we're trying to put the wheel, help put the wheels on, keep the wheels on, go fast, go, get to that next level. Is that fair?
[00:19:01] Ryan Hogan: Yeah. That's fair. And like for us, what's been really interesting, and it depends upon like stage and size and things like that.
[00:19:09] Ryan Hogan: Like for us, what we realized is that we've been growing so fast, we never stopped to like do the foundational work. It... My humble opinion is that some of the, some of the most like fundamental and critical work that you can do is talking to your clients. And most of the time when you're servicing clients, you're talking to them all the time, but you're not really asking the questions that you need to be able to translate that into how do we position the company?
[00:19:34] Ryan Hogan: What are our true differentiators? How do we build this sales script? Not that it has to be a script, but it could be just some bullets, but like what are the bullets that go on that page? And like there's very specific interviews, questions that you need to ask to extract that type of information.
[00:19:50] Ryan Hogan: And we don't, we didn't have time. And so like what we needed was like the foundational work put into place. And so like, you know, for us, at least in the early days, it's more of like project basis. So it's like, hey, we need some of this fundamentals, we need this, we need to be able to understand kind of our...
[00:20:07] Ryan Hogan: In EOS® world, we call this the 3 Uniques™. Right. We need to understand our three uniques so we can take that and translate it into copy for the website. And so for us it was like plug and play project base. And then it's like in and out, and then it's like there's another project just over the horizon, plug and play.
[00:20:25] Ryan Hogan: And then eventually it gets to a place of where it's a little bit probably more of a commitment. It's like nine to 12 months. It's not necessarily project, but it's more like, hey, let's like start doing the things and putting the people in place. - Yeah. And then, I don't wanna say there's never a time for a (full-time) CMO, but I think most smaller organizations...
Like, when you're sub... We were 50 million at Hunt Killer and we had two fractional executives on the team. Yeah. Like, I don't think that there's this need or there's 40 hours of work for, non-founding teammates in, you know, small to medium-sized businesses. So, yeah.
[00:21:05] Pete Hayes: Yeah. That's our business model, and that's why we exist too.
[00:21:09] Pete Hayes: Yeah. So, you know, we've just... I don't know if you recognize it, but we have, for the, Guinness Book of World Records in 2026, we've actually been speaking almost 20 minutes, and we haven't said AI. Right. So, I mean, I think maybe this goes down in some kind of history book, but, I'm gonna ask you, in your world, I mean, you're all about people, but how do you use AI in your world?
[00:21:34] Ryan Hogan: Yeah. For us, like, we're using AI to automate the tasks that should be automated anyhow. You know, I think, you know, back in the day when we saw innovation in, like, factories and things like that, it's about, like, automating a lot of these processes, but not, like, not necessarily, like, replacing humans.
[00:21:51] Ryan Hogan: Like, replacing faults, replacing, good decision-making. And so, you know, our approach, and some would argue that it's slow, but our approach is, like, the dynamics and everything is changing so fast. Number one, we believe that all of our software’s, if we've picked the right software, that they will figure out how to implement the right AI technology, the right innovation solutions into their product.
[00:22:16] Ryan Hogan: And so we're sticking with the products that the HubSpots of the world. Yeah. And they seem to be doing pretty good keeping up with where technology's going. And then we give everybody just the baseline knowledge. So everybody inside of our organization has a Claude license, and they're trained at a kind of a 101 basis.
[00:22:35] Ryan Hogan: So some people are, like, building their own things and doing incredible. Some people are just using it as a chatbot, but they've got the license to do it, and we give them the training.
[00:22:45] Pete Hayes: Nice.
[00:22:45] Ryan Hogan: And until things settle down a little bit, like we're not, we're not building $2,500 a month agents and thinking- Right
[00:22:52] Ryan Hogan: that technology or, electrical costs aren't gonna go up and companies aren't gonna charge you more.
[00:22:58] Pete Hayes: Yeah. Excellent. Excellent. Yeah, you probably know, or maybe you've heard from Bill, that we bought a little AI company a couple of years ago. Have you heard this?
[00:23:08] Ryan Hogan: No.
[00:23:09] Pete Hayes: We have our own development team, that we're taking our Growth Gears operating system, and now that's in software.
[00:23:15] Pete Hayes: And AI accelerates Everything. And so- That's
[00:23:20] Ryan Hogan: awesome ...
[00:23:21] Pete Hayes: it's a, it's a, it's an investment, but it's very specific to growth and accelerating sales and marketing things, so.
[00:23:29] Ryan Hogan: Yep.
[00:23:30] Pete Hayes: That, that's cool. So where does Talent Harbor go from here?
[00:23:34] Ryan Hogan: To the moon. You know, I think we have this conversation all the time internally of like, "Where do we...
[00:23:43] Ryan Hogan: Who do we wanna be? Who do we wanna serve? Where do we wanna go?" And, you know, what's interesting is Ilana and I have a shared passion for helping out the small-, medium-sized businesses. And so this has nothing to do with money. We wanted to- Let me just pause a
[00:23:56] Pete Hayes: second and just- Yeah
[00:23:57] Pete Hayes: point out you have a really interesting development strategy in, working with EOS implementers, and I know you're an EOS company as well, and Vistage Chairs, and I know you're, been a Vistage member for a long time. So there's a lot of evidence that you really believe that and that you mean it, and that's where you're focused.
[00:24:18] Ryan Hogan: Yep. And it, like, I don't... If we wanted to make a whole bunch of money, what we would do is we would turn this into something called RPO, recruiting process outsourcing, and we would start going after the Fortune 100 companies. What's interesting is, like- Recruiting, good recruiting, and I know this because I live this, recruiting at like, Indeed or ZipRecruiter versus bringing a recruiter with a true competency in-house, it's night and day the type of talent you'll get.
[00:24:45] Ryan Hogan: The problem is that most small and medium sized businesses can't afford it. Traditional recruiting is inaccessible. To ask a 10 to $15 million company to cut a 40 to $60,000 check every time they're gonna hire another human, that's crazy. And so what we've done is we've made expert recruiting, a competency, accessible to small, medium sized organizations, and we give them a competitive advantage by doing so.
[00:25:10] Ryan Hogan: And so I think for us, like, you know, what's next for TalentHarbor, where we're going, like we're gonna keep growing, we're gonna keep doing amazing things, but we're gonna keep doing it in the market that like inspires us, lights us up, and gets us out of bed each morning.
[00:25:26] Pete Hayes: Yeah. Well, good for you.
[00:25:28] Ryan Hogan: Yeah. Thanks, Pete.
[00:25:28] Pete Hayes: I love your story, Ryan. We definitely gonna have to have that beer.
[00:25:33] Ryan Hogan: Yeah. For sure. There's
[00:25:34] Pete Hayes: other things we're gonna have to spend some time chatting about. But congratulations on your continued success, that you have a vision that is getting you out of bed every morning. You're working with great people.
[00:25:47] Pete Hayes: you know when to bring in the right talent yourself, and we appreciate, the chance to have... had the chance to work with you and your team. And, I just wanna thank you for building the businesses you've built and serving our country, and, showing us what it means to live a meaningful life and serve companies and people, and, just thank you.
[00:26:08] Ryan Hogan: Awesome. Thanks so much, Pete. This was a lot of fun. This was good, so appreciate it.
[00:26:12] Pete Hayes: Okay. Well, thanks for everybody for joining us on this edition of CEO Growth Talks, and we'll see you next time. Bye-bye.