The Frontlines with Hisham Khaki

Somebody asked me what's going to be different about Season 3 ? And I said absolutely nothing . We're doing the same thing we've always done , and trying to shine a light on people building good businesses , and doing it in a way that is ancient , almost as a simplistic way of saying it , but bootstrapping is not a new phenomenon .

It's the way everything used to be started before fundraising and venture capital and private equity . Before any of those things were things . Bootstrapping was a thing , and so I am always excited to get to share another story , and this week we have my friend , hisham Khaki , who is the founder and CEO of ShiftSwap in Atlanta .

Hisham , good morning , how are you today ?

What was it and what was the impetus for starting it in the first place ?

So I began my career working for a large 3PL and actually started in engineering 3PL and I actually started in engineering and one of the big things we were doing was rolling out lean within our distribution centers . I don't know , did you ever have experience with lean in warehousing ?

Oh okay , and I'm a process engineer at heart and did some industrial engineering too , so I think we're cut from the same cloth . Did some industrial engineering too .

And Kaizen events just to summarize real quick you get employees that are actually working on the direct processes , so floor associates . You take them away from the operation anywhere from one full day all the way to a week , and they're actually working on continuous improvement . So they're not doing any of their day-to-day jobs .

They're literally in a conference room out on the floor crunching numbers with other engineers and other continuous improvement people and they're the ones figuring out how to make their processes better , which obviously makes sense .

And when we'd finish up a Kaizen event , we'd have this kind of ceremony where we would give the associates that participated these certificates . And they were so nice . There are these framed certificates . They were signed by executive leadership and we'd hand them out one by one .

And I'll never forget I was doing a Kaizen event in McDonough , georgia , actually and I'll never forget the employee's name . His name was Dennis Gilpin , and when we handed him his certificate , I looked over after he grabbed it and he literally had a tear , like I'm not , it wasn't not being like figurative , he literally had a tear dropping down .

And I went up to him and I was like Dennis , are you all right ? And he just looked at me and he was a bit choked up and he said , man , I've been working in warehousing for 25 years and my wife is going to be so proud of me when I go home with this certificate .

And man , like , at that moment it just clicked , like it did something to me where it was like okay , this is my purpose . My purpose is to find ways to help improve the lives of the hourly workforce . And you know , with the 3PL , I eventually went into operations , because operations you can impact more people's lives .

And then eventually , at some point , I found I could impact even more people's lives . And then eventually , at some point , I found I could impact even more people's lives by starting up Happy Gig , which , in essence , that company was one of the pioneers of gig labor within the warehousing industry .

So the premise is you've got great warehouse workers that are already working , that may be looking for extra hours , and you've got employers who need flex labor to help deal with variability , and there was really nothing out there back at that time that made that connection so founded Happy Gig . It had a tremendous amount of success with that . We began in .

2018 is when we began recognizing revenue and then , of course , through COVID and all that , we saw a lot of success and then eventually that kind of morphed into ShiftSwap , which I know we'll get into a little bit more , but that's kind of the story of Happy Gig and how that started .

There's not a lot of podcasts being done inside of a warehouse and that workforce is generally not getting a lot of recognition . And yet they are the ones that do the work and without them , anything that's on the store shelf at Target or that shows up to your front doorstep would not be there .

And I think there is a lack of awareness , maybe more than a lack of appreciation . I think if folks had a chance to spend time in more warehouses and see what it actually takes to do that kind of work I work in furniture , so you know I get to see folks lifting sofas 20 feet up in the air on a cherry picker , and it's a different stress .

You know there's a physical component to it that most people assume is all automated . Nowadays they get an idea of a conveyor type system in an Amazon facility and they think that that's what warehousing is . It's not .

That's some of it , of course , but for the most part it is hardworking men and women getting up at really early hours 4 am , you know , 3.30 am to get to a shift in the dark and working a very demanding job for long hours on their feet all day long .

And so when I come across someone like you that has that same not just awareness but a deep appreciation for the people that do the work man , like right off the bat , it reminds me of why we hit it off when we first met . So I love the heart that you bring to it , and that is the heart of Lean .

Also is it's about the people , and those folks generally . Again , don't get asked , hey , what can we do to make your work easier , more efficient or safer ?

I did that for a little less than two years before I went to the 3pl world and during my interview , um , I was walking through the warehouse and it's really the first real warehouse I've been in and I'm interviewing for a logistics engineer job where my job , my , my role was to make things more efficient .

And the VP of ops , one of my mentors , he's walking around with me , interviewing me , and my eyes are huge because I'm seeing all these people on these clamp trucks and they're driving backwards and they're moving , like you know , at a very high speed , they're honking , I mean it's , it's crazy in the warehouse .

And he looks at me , the VP of ops , uh , and he , his name was Ralph Price and he goes yeah , sham , and he had a really raspy voice , shammy . Tons of opportunity over here , right , you can probably see it everywhere .

And in the back of my mind I'm like , oh my God , like where's the opportunity ? These people are all working . I came from an environment where , unless the factory was in shutdown , meltdown mode , you know , operators would have their feet kicked up , just waiting for something wrong to happen .

It could be the identical product , racking , equipment and everything , but you just add different people and it becomes a different organism altogether and it evolves and changes over time and that you can't understand it unless you experience it . And observing will get you some insight . Participating will get you more .

Doing the work will get you the most , and that means being there for the 6 am stand-up meeting , not just flying in in the afternoon , and after all , the work is mostly done and everybody's on their way out .

And again , not a lot of folks have that level of appreciation for it , and so maybe part of this episode really is going to just be about highlighting the people , because I know that's a big reason why you do what you do now is it's obviously you're in a company to make a profit , but you're also adding elements to that of I want to do it in a way

that's going to have an impact and be good for others . So you , beforehand , I asked you a handful of questions and you shared with me some of your values that you run your business by and we'll at some point we'll get into what Shift Swap does too , but this is such fertile ground .

The two that really stood out to me right off the bat were simplicity and effectiveness , and I'm curious how you landed on those as two of the values that guide your decision making that guide your decision making .

people overcomplicate processes and I still don't understand why a lot of the times , and I just see it . Once you start seeing it , you can't stop seeing it in so many things .

So I've always been kind of obsessed with what's the simplest way to accomplish the goal at hand , and whether that goal is creating a software that's actually effective or creating a process that is efficient . If you have kind of that goal of simplicity , a lot of , and it takes a lot of work .

By the way , like that , when you say , create something simple , it takes a lot of work to get there , but once you do , the impact usually is very clear and it's tangible , so that I don't know . That's always just been something that's been near and dear to my heart .

You know that you're a bit of a troublemaker . Were you always looking for a creative solution to a problem that maybe didn't fit within the academic world , or has that always been a part of your DNA ?

How can I simplify this to where I understand it and then I can communicate it to other people and my mind will just break down complexity and figure it out the simplest way possible . And maybe I didn't really understand that . That's how I operated until my professional career , but looking back as a child , I think that's what it was .

I almost had a fear of looking dumb , so it made me really peel the layers back in whatever I was trying to understand or look at and then be able to explain it in a very simple way .

You rise to the executive level of a very large and successful organization and gained a lot of experience , I'm sure on the people side as well leadership , strategy , management .

And then one day you decide , okay , I'm going to go out on my own and give up the golden handcuffs , the seeming security and structure of a large organization , and try to build something from scratch .

So you must have had aside from wanting to have an impact , you must have had a very high level of conviction that there was a need and that you were the right person to solve it . There was a need and that you were the right person to solve it .

Then , as happy , gig started to morph into shift swap , you know and some learning happened in between there that caused you to choose a slightly different direction . Can you help me understand what that learning process was of ?

Okay , we're going to go this direction slightly different now and I see a new opportunity that I have equal conviction in , yeah , and maybe you can explain what shift swap is too . We're 20 minutes in and I haven't even asked you that . My bad .

But you know how it morphed from HappyGig Flex and HappyGig Flex is still around , by the way but how that really morphed more into ShiftSwap is . Iteration is the key to any startup , any business . I believe the key is always iteration . Things change so quickly , needs change very quickly . You've got to be able

to iterate in a very smooth , controlled way . Um , in a very smooth , controlled way . So what we started finding was that a lot of like after COVID .

After COVID , after things started stabilizing a little bit , a lot of our customers started saying this is great , we love being able to tap into your workforce , but honestly , we need something for our own workforce .

We're struggling with retaining our workforce and we're starting to believe that the key really is to figure out how to retain them , and we're hearing from them that they need a little bit more flexibility . So I started listening to that and hearing more and more customers say that .

And then what happened was one of my largest customers came to me and said hey , we love Happy Gig , but we have a corporate initiative . This is a billion-dollar company .

We have a corporate initiative to create flexibility within our workforce and we want to explore the opportunity of you actually building it , your team building it for us , because everyone loves the user experience of of happy gig . So we said yes to that and we built it .

And , uh , we built like an MVP rather quickly within a couple of months , started rolling it out to pilot sites , started taking feedback and then we just started seeing it work . Site after site was loving it . They were immediately seeing improvements in their metrics and then it just started taking off from there .

And my North Star has always been how can I impact the most lives ? So whenever I'm thinking about where to pivot to next whether it was engineering into operations , operations to Happy Gig , happy Gig to ChefSwap it's always how can I impact more people's lives ?

And I quickly realized ChefSwap can , has the potential to impact the lives of many more people than Happy Gig Flex , and that's why it's become our number one focus right now .

Typically what would happen is I'd wait until Monday morning and I'd call out sick , like that's . That's the way it works , especially in warehousing , and I'll take you know the hits I'll take from an HR perspective . I'll get you know another point and I get one step closer to being terminated .

But it's the way I get a little bit of flexibility for myself and what ends up happening is I'll eventually get terminated . That's what happens in warehousing .

With shift swap , I would actually be able to post that portion of my shift and then someone else from another shift if I have a multi-shift operation can grab that shift and cover it for me and that feature you've seen a tremendous amount of reduction in turnover . The second big value is all of your dynamic shifts .

So any kind of overtime , any kind of voluntary time off , time off If you have part-time workers . Traditionally the way we do in warehousing is an ops manager or a supervisor walks the floor , collects volunteers , or they'll put a break room sign up sheet or they'll just call mandatory overtime or mandatory cut to hours , and none of that is good .

That creates problems , lots of problems With ShiftSwap . All that becomes automated . I'm an operations manager , I need six people to stay a couple hours longer , I post that I need six people and it all happens in a seamless way where everyone gets the notification , they can grab the shift . It goes back to leadership for approval . Good to go .

And the third big value is just messaging . Messaging so a way to keep in communication with your workforce , whether it's departments , skill sets , individuals , the entire team , you know , just a simple way to communicate with your workforce what's interesting is the difference between white collar work and blue collar work in the white collar world generally speaking .

And you hit the nail on the head as soon as an hourly associate gets on the point radar hey , you were 20 minutes late or something happened . The relationship changes to one . It almost feels punitive . Where they just had something in life happen , it wasn't . I live in Minnesota . We have blizzards , you know .

Some people can have a snowblower , some people don't . That might mean you're shoveling for an extra hour and of course you'll make acts of God type exceptions for attendance issues .

But that kind of impact is felt much more severely by hourly workers and they generally unless it's a unionized workforce they don't have as much of a voice typically to stay off of that radar or build processes and policies that are more accommodating .

So if your goal is so , this is me riffing and just learning as we're talking here , because this is helpful for me . I still run a facility today and this is good reminders for me . If your goal , oh , go ahead .

Right , like most , you know , most companies allow a lot of flexibility for the white collar workforce and still zero for the hourly workforce . I remember being in operations where there were train tracks , you know , right next to the facility , and if you got caught behind a train and you were 10 minutes late , you still got . The points Didn't matter .

So imagine like you're going into your job , nate , and you have to worry about not getting stuck behind a train to potentially lose your job . Like how are you able to focus on anything else other than that ?

But in the moment nobody knew , everybody was afraid and a bunch of folks generally were like I'm not going into the office , I'm staying home , I don't have a choice , you can't do warehousing remotely , and so there was a big disparity in how risk was absorbed in the population .

And again , I'm going specifically to that period where none of us knew what was happening .

And I recall being in a facility at the end of the day and we had bleach and all of these cleaning supplies and we had not full gear on but we were like disinfecting the soda pop machine and wiping down sinks and all the pack stations and the mouses at the ship station and we didn't know if we were gonna , you know , get really , really sick and have to

go to the hospital . Meanwhile a whole other group of people was just tucked away safely at home . And it really does highlight the differences of why one rule can't apply effectively to everybody , and then how you do need to adapt to , in this case , who your customers are and who the people are that you're trying to impact their lives .

How do you measure how much impact you're having ?

So , you know , if you pitch something to a traditional warehousing company and it's just pitched as hey , this is going to make your employees' lives better , their first question is going to be well , what's ? You know , is this going to cost me more ? You know , is it going to inflate the cost per unit ? What's going to happen ?

So when you find something that really helps employees and , at the same time , helps the company's bottom line , that's when you've really got something . And the way , the way we measure our impact for employers is simple it's reduction in turnover , reduction in absenteeism and reduction in cost per unit .

So those three things are used from the employer's perspective to justify it . And then the associate's perspective . I mean , of course , for me it's number of users . Our goal in the next few years is to literally impact the lives of a million hourly associates . That's where we want to get to .

So that's , that's our high level number metric of how many lives we're impacting . But then from there , you just see how many , how many hours people are able to take off without getting pointed , how many times people are able to give up a portion of their shift to take care of something at home .

How many times am I able to grab overtime or a little bit of extra money to support my family ? So there's many , many different things .

A million people in one place at one time . There are a handful of concerts . I think Garth Brooks in New York in the 90s . They said that he had a million people at his concert , or something like that . And so we like those really big numbers , but even smaller numbers .

If you make a post on LinkedIn , for example , and it gets 500 impressions , somebody would be like , oh , it's only 500 . It's not that big of a deal . You know how many people 500 people is . It would fill up your local high school gym that you go to a basketball game . Every single seat would be completely full , packed to the gills . And that's 500 people .

And it's hard to imagine large numbers . So when you say something like hey , if you've got 1000 users , or you've got five or 10,000 users and you putivities or something , and every single one of them was a user of yours , do you ever just imagine ? Because it's just a number on a screen sometimes , but it's not , that's an actual person .

And I again , I don't know if that's true , but uh , it was . You know , it was giving all the numbers . It said something like if you took every player since 1887 or whenever major league baseball started , it would account . It would be like , you know , 40,000 people that wouldn't even fit in one stadium . That's generally packed .

So , yeah , whenever I think about any numbers and you know impressions or users , you always start thinking of , like , you know , I'm , I'm in this room right now and it feels packed and there's only 300 people in here . So imagine what 3 000 people in here feel like .

That's going to take a thousand , while having this really ambitious goal way off in the future , that's going to take a thousand small decisions over and over and over . How do you stay motivated in the long-term nature of what it is that you're building ?

But then if you don't , if you're a founder or you're leading a big business and you're not able to break that down into realistic short-term goals , then you're you're never . I mean you're just going to burn yourself out and feel like you're never doing enough . So you've got to set realistic goals , whether they're , you know , monthly or quarterly .

You know you at least need quarterly . I think that's the minimum . Um , you've got to have quarterly goals that are that you can truly believe in right , that you can actually see it and you can create a plan to get there . You know , if I said , hey , we're going to get to a million users by the end of this year , that's there's .

No , I don't believe that . I don't believe it yet , but I do believe we can get to our current goal that we're aimed at at , and just that belief will get me there and then that'll unlock more belief and I think that's that's kind of like the process . You've got to truly believe it .

You get there and you have to understand that once you get somewhere , it'll unlock further beliefs .

So it's just really exciting to see something that works and is truly having an impact . With Happy Gig Flex , that was tough , that was trying to implement a different thought process for a lot of employers out there and what we'd see a lot is that we were losing almost as many clients as we were gaining every year , and it's demoralizing .

It wasn't for lack of performance on our end , it was just companies were using us as a band-aid because they had a shortage of labor and once they were able to get staffed up , you know they would stop using us . So whenever year you're looking back , you're like oh , you know , we got 25 new customers this past year but we lost 20 demoralizing , right .

But having a platform that really is sticky and is constantly improving value , learning curve , change curve is low . I think that's what I'm most excited about .

And then you have somebody who's on your platform and that low level friction is all gone and they're spending their time on more strategy or more kaizen events or people development , etc .

So I I don't I'm not surprised at all to hear you say you have zero percent attrition , because the , the people that are stuck in the old way can't imagine that there's a solution for the new way . And then , once they get there that they are probably saying to themselves man , why didn't we do this years ago ?

I didn't know that there could be a solution to this . And , going back to this idea of simplicity and lean , you have redesigned an entire process and removed all the waste from it . That waste used to be walking and talking and documentation on attendance , and now it is streamlined , it's efficient .

Do you find joy in that Of knowing you've applied all of your engineering thinking and your care for people into something that , if it's going , really really well , nobody even notices .

I had a customer tell me , um , this is probably about a year ago , and this was a three PL customer , and they were telling me that they were on a phone call with their customer , which their customer huge , you know , fortune , probably 100 company and this Fortune 100 company is on a call with all of their three PLs managing all their distribution centers across

the country and they were having some sort of an emergency . And they were having some sort of an emergency and they're telling all their three pls hey , you know , you've , you have got to get so-and-so product out the door , you know , by tomorrow evening or whatever it was . And we strongly recommend you get an extra 20 people to work overtime .

I'm making up numbers , but it's something like that . You know , you get an extra number of people , um , to work overtime . I'm making up numbers , but it was something like that . You know , you get an extra number of people to work in order to make this happen .

And our customer , of course , the general manager , right away he gets on shift swap and he posts the shifts and within minutes , if they're all filled , and he speaks up . Right , I can't remember what happened , but on this call with this huge company , it gets out that , hey , we've already filled all the shifts .

And they were like , what , how did you do that ? Did you already send your supervisors to walk the floor ? You already put a break room sign up sheet ? What did you do ? And he's like , oh , we've got the system that does it automatically . And he's like , oh , we've got the system that does it automatically .

And it was like , when I heard that story , it's just like the values of mine you were talking about earlier . That makes me so happy .

efficient at physical work . Yeah , it is simple stuff , but you hit the nail on the head so well that we overcomplicate it . That is our nature is to overcomplicate it , and so this struggle towards a simpler solution that is both cost effective and good for the bottom line and good for the people , no wonder you're having fun .

No wonder you're having fun , no wonder you're having success . Um , I can keep talking to you about this for hours . Now I just want to do my own . Let's .

Let's blueprint out some workflows , and I need to get back in and redo some racking in a facility now , because that's I love that part of fulfillment myself , and so it's always good to be able to talk shop with somebody who is clearly a pro at it and has that same level of love for the subject matter .

So I love it and I love how I get to watch these incredible computer science engineers develop this stuff and be experts in their subject matter . Yeah , yeah , they love seeing how many people they're impacting . It's fun all around .

I can't wait to see what the next stretch of the road looks like for you . I have no doubt you're going to continue to grow and be successful . We have to stay in touch . I want to hear an update from you in a year on the latest goings on with ShiftSwap and in the meantime , just know that we're all rooting for you , thank you , Nate .

Just , I mean , you do so much from you know , even last time we were talking , you noticed that the furniture in my office came from your facility , right .

So you make all that happen and you do this really , really cool thing where you're getting the stories of founders out there for other people to hear , because it's daunting , like being a founder , especially bootstrap , I mean , everything is challenging , right , even if you raise a bunch of money , that has its own problems , but you focused on bootstrappers .

Uh , it's really cool that you're getting people's story out there and I applaud you for doing it .

And , of course , thank you to all the founders who trust us to share their stories .