In this episode, the host interviews Harry Joiner, a top executive recruiter in marketing and e-commerce. Harry shares his selective approach to working with clients, emphasizing the need for clear business strategies, strong financials, and a commitment to e-commerce. He compares recruiting top talent to casting star actors, noting that A-level candidates seek companies with compelling stories and solid economics. The discussion highlights the importance of business leaders knowing their numbers, defining their vision, and welcoming candidates who ask tough questions to build high-performing teams. The episode concludes with actionable advice for attracting and retaining top talent.
Chapters:
Introduction to Harry Joiner and His Credentials (00:00:00)
Host introduces Harry Joiner, his background, and notable companies he’s worked with.
How Harry Selects Clients (00:01:04)
Harry explains his criteria for choosing which companies to work with, comparing it to Hollywood actors picking scripts.
Evaluating Client Business Fundamentals (00:02:20)
Discussion on analyzing a client’s business economics, strategy, and suitability for top-tier candidates.
Attracting Top Talent: The Hollywood Analogy (00:03:41)
Harry compares recruiting top talent to attracting star athletes or actors, emphasizing the need for a strong business foundation.
The Importance of Smart, Challenging Candidates (00:05:28)
Harry shares his preference for candidates who ask tough questions and challenge him, indicating high-caliber talent.
Recognizing Top Candidates by Their Questions (00:06:25)
Harry describes how the best candidates demonstrate their value by probing deeply into business metrics and strategy.
Hiring Lessons from Personal Experience (00:08:41)
The host reflects on his own hiring experiences, noting that the best hires are those who challenge leadership and require preparation.
Three Actionable Takeaways for Business Leaders (00:10:33)
The host summarizes three key action items: define your exit strategy, know your numbers, and cast a clear vision for recruits.
Harry’s Process and Final Advice (00:12:50)
Harry emphasizes having a simple, practical process for business planning and offers to share it with listeners.
Episode Wrap-Up and Thanks (00:15:35)
The host thanks Harry for his insights and closes the episode.
Links and Mentions:
Tools, Websites, and Links
LinkedIn
Books and Articles
Success
Wall Street Journal
Businessweek
USA Today
Internet Retailing
Videos
Shark Tank
Entourage
Transcript:
Josh 00:00:00 Today I’m super excited to introduce you to Harry Joiner. Harry is described by Search Engine Watch as a dominant recruiter in client side multichannel, the in multi-channel e-commerce space. He is an executive recruiter for marketing and eCommerce. He has been interviewed by success magazine and he has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, marketing, Sherpas, Great Minds in Marketing series, Businessweek, USA, TODAY.com, Internet Retailer, and many more. He has closed dozens of manager, director, VP and C-level ecommerce searches for some of the following companies. A&E television. Adidas American signature brands. Ashford. Com. Backcountry. Com. Boot barn. Com Columbia Sportswear. And many, many more. So welcome to the podcast, Harry.
Harry 00:00:48 Thank you so much. Great to be here, Harry.
Josh 00:00:50 I think what’s interesting there, you mentioned, you know, you have a small firm, right? You’re well experienced. Your results speak for themselves. If people go check out your LinkedIn profile, there’s raving reviews of people that have worked with Harry.
Josh 00:01:04 so, Harry 150, you know, companies are going to apply to kind of hire your services. What are you looking for is you kind of determine what are the 50 you’re going to work work with. What’s the difference between those that you say no to versus the ones that you say yes to and why?
Harry 00:01:22 Sure. It’s a great question. well, so when people pitch us on a deal, so they pitch me into Alan and it’s a little bit like if you’ve ever seen a concept pitched on Shark Tank, it’s a little bit like that. Alan and I are very particular about the deals that we take, and I think I learned this watching entourage back in the, you know, 2000, 2008 through 12 or something that in Hollywood, the richest actors aren’t the richest actors because they’re the best actors. They’re the richest actors because they get the best scripts. It’s a lot like that as an e-commerce recruiter. So we like searches that can be closed on the back of a single story, right? So the brand, the you know, the client, they know what their business is about and who their business is for and what their unique selling proposition is.
Harry 00:02:20 So why should anyone do business with them versus any option available to them? including doing nothing. we look for the underlying economics of the client’s business. So do we understand how they make money? Do they understand how they make money? Do they understand how they’re going to make money in the future? We tend to take a good hard look, at things like size and scope of a 12 month file. We’ll look at things like average order value. We’ll look at things like recurring revenue and order frequency. We’ll look at, what it takes to actually bring that concept toe to life. You know, the purpose and values and viewpoint of the brand, and we’ll look at a variety of different factors to try and determine whether our audience, which is the top 3% of people in the e-commerce industry. I mean, 97% of the candidates that watch this podcast aren’t going to they’re not we wouldn’t represent them on a deal anyway because we’re out there looking for load bearing walls. I mean, this sounds super salesy, but the fact of the matter is, when people come to me and Alan, they expect us to be in the organizational transformation business, right? You come to us looking for a Steph Curry, a Michael Jordan, a Tom Brady.
Harry 00:03:41 That’s that. And it is like being an agent in Hollywood and the best candidates in the industry, the people who are capable of plugging and playing and being a load bearing wall in our client’s business, they want to make sure that they can do reputation enhancing work. That’s really what it boils down to. And that means that in terms of the search, the client has the budget, the authority, the need, the timeline and the hiring process to knock good candidates in versus knock them out. And, the business has favorable underlying economics that the client has clarity and ability and resolve, you know, commitment towards e-com. And those are the things, honestly, that you need for an a player to do reputation enhancing work in your business.
Josh 00:04:30 Yeah, I love the, the strategy that or the analogy that you made there with, you know, hiring like the Michael Jordan’s or Steph Curry’s right. If you think about that. You know, as a business owner. Right. If you want to attract a Michael Jordan or a Steph Curry.
Josh 00:04:46 Right. If you’re an NBA owner, you’ve got to have a good team. Right. And you’ve got to have a good vision and say, hey, here’s the teammates that you’d be working alongside. Here’s here’s where we can go if we bring you on to the team, that’s going to attract those a level, you know, talent and players to your team. Whereas if you’re kind of confused, you don’t have good economics behind your business. You don’t know your numbers. You might be a little wishy washy with your strategy, right. Or your vision for the business. You’re not going to get that A level talent to come join your team, because I think it’s it’s definitely like a recruiting process. Like you have to sell somebody to your business at the end of the day.
Harry 00:05:28 I like people who, are smart. I mean, you can tell when somebody’s smart. I like to be intimidated, frankly. When I first started recruiting, I looked like, you know, I’ve been a recruiter for 18 years.
Harry 00:05:42 I’m in my late 50s. I’ve been around forever. when I first started recruiting 18 years ago, I had a real problem with, like, panic, you know, and, like, fear of the phone for the first, probably a year and a half that I did it. And, you know, before I would call a VP of e-commerce because there wasn’t a big list of people with e-commerce. my palms would sweat and that would just be like, oh my God, you know? And they would frickin sweat. It was annoying as hell.
Josh 00:06:08 Yeah.
Harry 00:06:09 And over time, what I learned was the people who were in the top 3% of the industry are the people typically, who make my palms sweat. And over time, I began to link a lot of pleasure to the fact that I was getting sweaty palms.
Josh 00:06:24 Interesting.
Harry 00:06:25 And that now I’m like, that’s the canary in the coal mine. If I’m on the phone with the candidate and they start asking me a bunch of questions about, okay, so you say your company is if you say your client has a $50 million business, what percentage of that is B2B versus B2C? Okay, so $25 million DTC business okay.
Harry 00:06:46 Let’s talk about that. What percentage of that is third party markets versus DTC where they have a website and shopping cart, etc.. Right now? What percentage of that is mobile versus desktop And what percentage of that is, you know, where’s that traffic coming from? Is it, you know, direct organic, paid referral, you know, social. Like and then I realize like, oh, shit, they’ve got more questions than I got answers. And my palms start to sweat. Yeah. I’m a very insecure person. Very insecure. And over time, I’ve learned that actually, my insecurities are a feature. They’re not a bug. I love my insecurities. That’s where the money is. And so if you’re on the phone with a candidate who they know their numbers, they ask great questions about your business. Right. Who’s on the team? What agencies are you using? What’s your cost per week? What’s your cost per sale? What are you doing to drive traffic and improve an average order value? Improve the conversion rate.
Harry 00:07:44 What platform do you want? What are you doing? Right? You should do more. Leave him alone. Maybe you should stop doing. What’s your competitor doing that you should copy. What is nobody doing? Somebody should do. And all of a sudden, if you’re an entrepreneur and you’re just like, I don’t know, perfect. That’s what you want. You want that candidate who’s got more questions than you got answers? Yeah. Footnote for the basic stuff that you’re actually hiring for. They have to be able to give you ear. Right. Example. Action result. So let’s say you need somebody who has amazing Amazon three peat chops today. Okay. So make sure they have the three peat chops today for planning and forecasting for you know Amazon advertising or whatever it is. Make sure you get what you came for. But the stuff that’s going to get you here is just being able to think aggressively about the underlying economics of the business. Does that make sense?
Josh 00:08:39 Yeah. No. Makes a lot of sense.
Josh 00:08:41 And, you know, even as I look back on the team members that we have hired, and we recently hired a VP of operations for our business. And to be honest, as I go back, I don’t think I’ve ever, like, come to this realization until I spoke with you about this and you kind of shared those insights where honestly, the the candidates that have been the best that we have ended up hiring are honestly the ones that I was kind of most nervous for going into their interviews where I was like, I need to come prepared because I know they’re going to ask difficult questions. They’re going like, I almost feel like I’m going to need to sell them on my own business and establish the fact that, like, we have our crap together and we need to bring them onto our team, like, I still need to be knowledgeable enough. Like, for example, with our VP of operations, I spent probably a good half a day gathering all of like our financial data gathering and looking at what’s our average order value, what you know, what percentage of sales are coming from different channels.
Josh 00:09:45 you know, how many products did we launch this year? How many products are we planning to launch next year? So, like, just lots of numbers, right? What are our margins? What’s our gross profit? All of it. Right. Because I knew that was going to be a question asked there. And sure enough, on those. During that conversation, you know, he was fairly impressed. He was like, are you came very prepared with like your numbers, you know, your stuff. And it went both ways, right. Like, I was impressed with the questions he was asking because that’s the type of person that I need on my team that’s going to push me to ask the difficult questions. But then number two, he then was like, wow, this, this business knows where they’re going. They know their numbers. They’re not just kind of throwing things around and hoping things stick. They have a clear vision and action plan of how to get there. They just need that extra talent to take them to the next level.
Josh 00:10:33 I love to leave the audience with three actionable takeaways from each episode. Here are the three takeaways that I noted. Harry, let me know if you think I’m missing something here. I would say action item number one is to. If we go back to the beginning of the podcast, is the comment you made about your father. Your business strategy should be your exit strategy. I think that’s where it that’s where it all begins. And you listed five different ways that you’re essentially going to, you know, exit your business, whether you do it by choice or it just happens as a natural consequence of your inaction, so to speak. Right. that’s got to be that’s got to be action item number one. You’ve got to get very clear with like, what is that exit strategy look like for you? And even if you’re the type of person that’s like, I want to hold this in my family for eternity. Okay, well, if that’s your approach, then start formulating what that’s going to look like.
Josh 00:11:28 action. Step number two is you have to start understanding your business and the financials. we talked about this and you shared so many examples of you’ve got to know your average order value. You’ve got to know your repeat purchase rate. You’ve got to know how many units you’re selling, like how many are repeat purchases versus new purchases versus old customers buying old products and old customers buying new products, right? You’ve got to know the intimate details of your numbers, because if you don’t, you’re going to have a problem. When we get to step number three here and step number three in action, item number three I would say is you’ve got to cast a vision of what your exit is going to be. Where are you going in the future. What is your 5 to 7 year plan look like. And how are the people that you are trying to recruit or bring on to your team, especially a players? How is what you’re trying to employ them to do going to be reputation enhancing for them? And you’ve got to get very clear with that.
Josh 00:12:37 And so I think for business leaders and CEOs, if you genuinely want to take your business to the next level, you’ve got to get really good at all three of those action items that we shared today. What do you think, Harry? Anything else you would add?
Harry 00:12:50 I think that’s right. For anybody who made it this far in the podcast, I would say thank you. I, you know, have a process for all of this, right? If anybody wants to call and just chat about any of this. It’s so I really I want to stress I didn’t go to Harvard. I never worked for McKinsey. I didn’t go to work. It’s none of what I do. It’s. It’s all designed to be. It’s very back of the envelope stuff. And so in this example, I mean this examples, I made it up. I mean, this could have been any client, you know, that I’ve worked with. I hear all the time, well, we want to be 17 million, and we’re looking to grow to 32 million in the next five years.
Harry 00:13:34 I mean, and where does that number come from? Well, an entrepreneur just thinks, well, I hope to be twice as big. That’s where the number comes from. They just pull it out of the air and I don’t fight them on that. I just say, okay, hypothetically, let’s say you doubled the size of your business. What percentage of that would be DTC? What percentage of that would be Amazon? What percentage of that would be target? Walmart? eBay? Overstock? What percentage of that would be domestic versus international? What percentage of that you know. And what percentage of that would be one p versus £0.03 versus blended 1P3P. Right. And they might go I don’t know. And that’s okay too I’m not condemning that because you don’t have to be Carnac on Johnny Carson to know the answer to that. You’d have to be, you know, clairvoyant to understand that what I really want is for the person to just broadly, vaguely know we’re going west and we think we’re going to Seattle, but we may change our mind when we get to Tulsa and start heading down to San Diego.
Harry 00:14:38 But we don’t know. Well, you know, we’ll figure it out when we get to Tulsa. That’s good enough. If I work for McKinsey that you paid me a ton of money for that. And so none of that is really hard. But like as you start to grow your business this time next year. When you think about all of this again, you would know. Okay, so Tulsa is in another 24 months. I’m going to have to make the decision. So as I look at my business from last year, what did we do right. What did we do wrong. What should we copy. What is nobody doing? How did we do all the old opening? We never knew. It’s just high level crap. Did any. Trust me. I mean, if I can do it, you can do it. You just. It’s just off the top of your head. You can do it with a six pack of beer and a legal pad and a football game in front of you.
Harry 00:15:29 It’s not designed to be hard. I have a process for it. If somebody wants to call me and learn more about the process, they’re welcome.
Josh 00:15:35 I love that, Harry. You’ve shared so much value. Well, Harry, thank you so much for your time today. You’ve dropped a lot of knowledge bombs with us all. I know I’m, you’ve taken away a lot of action items for my own team from this podcast. So thank you so much for your time. And, we’ll look forward to connecting with you again in the future.
