ļ»æKyle Mlakar Full Interview Transcript
Introduction and Welcome
AJ: Welcome to this episode of the Thriving Through podcast. My guest today is Kyle Mlakar. Kyle, welcome to the podcast.
Kyle: AJ, thank you so much for the warm welcome. Excited to be here today.
The Path to Self-Employed Consulting
AJ: We'll start right out with, I have a couple questions I like to ask all my podcast guests. And the first one is, what was your path to becoming a self-employed consultant?
Kyle: That's a long answer, probably to a great first question to get us started. I think it was the culmination of a lot of different chapters of a career that, like if you think of a career as a book, a lot of different chapters, probably a few different anthologies in there. So it's really been this evolution around various roles that I've had at different companies and ultimately led me to focus on, what do I enjoy doing the most? How can I do more of it and get paid to do that? Which is kind of a central piece to that. So that was kind of the overarching path, how I got there today.
AJ: And what was the answer to? What do I most enjoy doing?
Kyle: I really enjoy helping people get to where they want to ultimately go, or maybe even further beyond what they thought was possible. Just by giving them a little nudge, a little coaching, mentoring, but also strategic plans on how to actually block and tackle whatever it is they're trying to do. And that's what we do at HireCos, the fractional chief of staff consulting company.
Understanding the Chief of Staff Role
AJ: You know, I've always wondered, I mean, I've heard of the term chief of staff when it came to, like, you know, the White House and politics, right? What is a chief of staff in a corporate setting? What do they do?
Kyle: We've all watched The West Wing, that's how we kind of think of a chief of staff, right, blocking and tackling all over the various things that are happening behind that big building. What I have found it to be in a corporate or company setting is someone who fills a role that lives within the ether of an organization. What I mean by that is it's a role in a position that is able to be amongst the C-suite executives, understand what everyone is trying to accomplish from their own perspectives, and what that group is also ultimately trying to do in leading their organization. Take those thoughts and concepts, distill it all the way down vertically throughout the organization down to the newest employee, who just was onboarded within days, weeks, months, whatever it may have been, and be able to communicate what it is that that plan or those items are to each layer of an organization. At the same time, they're able to then cross all various departments laterally within an organization. So we can speak specifically to accounting and finance, operations, sales, marketing, however an organization may be constructed. You're able to then bridge the gaps between each one of those and help everyone move forward with clear focus and understanding around what is the purpose and the intent of what they're trying to do each and every single day and then how that builds into the bigger picture. I know that's kind of very maybe grandiose, let's take it from 30,000 feet and through our conversation we can distill it down further, but ultimately that is what a chief of staff is able to do. It's being the synergist of an organization.
The Difficult Decision to Leave Corporate Leadership
AJ: I like that, the synergist. I want to go back a little bit to something we talked about when we met earlier. You told me that you had a career goal of becoming a CEO. Then it didn't work out. Walk us through that decision. That's the kind of difficult position to want to leave. Walk us through the decision to leave and how you process that professionally and emotionally.
Kyle: That's a phenomenal question. I'm actually excited to answer this. Yes, so at my last company, I started as a solopreneur, a chief of staff. I was then appointed as president. At that point, you understand what a change you signed up for. And thankfully we were a company that had incredible growth, amazing run of success, hitting the 5000 Inc in 2022. At number 268. Then we actually hit number 694 in 2023 and I believe in 2024 we got up to about the 230s. So all of that momentum that we had gained was wonderful. What I then learned later on is, if your customers have cash flow, you have cash flow problems. So, which is another thing, when I made the choice to leave, I wanted the work that we had accomplished during that era to stand on its own merit. I didn't want anything to diminish what we had accomplished there either, as a leadership group, but more importantly, as an overall organization, we had built. We doubled the size of the company. I had offshore teams in different countries. We had done a lot of things together and a comprehensive change like that can have impact in all facets of an organization. Most importantly, it's people. And I just didn't want that to be at all vanished or negatively impacted. And so, I made the choice to say, hey look, let's let what we stand for stand for itself and I'll exit at this stage, which isn't easy from the process, but the difficult part took a while. I would probably tell you it took almost a year to really understand what that event was like and to kind of learn from it to come out on the other side of the tunnel. But more succinctly, I took two months off to be with my family, dove into a bunch of projects, and then I launched HireCos. It's time to get back to work, we'll figure it out, and that's kind of how I pushed through.
Finding the Right Business Partner
AJ: You found a business partner. And you said that finding a business partner was a windfall. So tell us, take us through the story of deciding you wanted a business partner and finding sort of the right one.
Kyle: Sure. So I knew early on if you're gonna be a solopreneur, and you want to build and grow your brand, at some point, you're not able to do it all. You can't provide service and deliverables to clients, meanwhile work on your business, also balance your own life, whatever those things may be. So understanding where you wanted to take the business from the beginning, I think helps set the tone of hey, we need to know that we need to get to these things one way or the other. And one of them was to bring on somebody else so that I didn't feel like I couldn't go after new business. What ends up happening or what ended up happening to me, is in the first six months of HireCos, hey, it's great. We got two clients. We're working and we're running full steam ahead. Everything's great. Okay. Hey, one engagement ends. Well. You know what I learned was I just never had the time or I didn't make the time one way or the other to continue to focus on messaging around business development and moving the needle, make the problem of having a pipeline a real problem and it'll work out, you know, there's ways to then message. Hey look, I can't necessarily start tomorrow. But if you give me 30 days, we'll be ready to go, you know, at the start of next month, type of thing. I didn't know how to balance that because you're trying to launch a website and a brand and you're trying to get insurance and all the other things that you're trying to figure out. So, I was a part of a fractional Slack channel community. And I was invited in by a former colleague of mine and somebody tied up an introduction and said, hey, I really think what you're doing is kind of cool. And I'm a chief of staff of X number of years. And I'd like to help and I went, jump on board. Let's go. Come on. And so, she's been tremendous. She's in Dallas, Texas. Her name is Stephanie Denton and she's our head of operations and customer success.
AJ: So and it is a formal partnership?
Kyle: Yes. Yes, she is a formal partnership into the company. She handles some of our client work and is truly a voice of steadiness when it comes to some of the things that I'm also trying to do as a visionary, as a founder. You want to build and grow this, and it's a lot easier to do it with someone alongside you than it is always to do it alone.
The Partner Vetting Process
AJ: I've had some podcast guests that have had negative experiences with partners, you know, because it is kind of like a marriage. So how did you sort of vet Stephanie and get to know each other? So that you knew that it was going to be a good partnership. So that you knew it was going to work.
Kyle: A little bit of luck. I'll say there's a little bit of luck, maybe a lot of luck, depending on the person that you speak to. I think I was on the lucky side. It started first with I wanted to understand. Okay, so from your perspective, is Stephanie looking at HireCos, what do you see that is attractive to you? What are we putting out there that makes sense, that is defining our purpose, our intent of what we are trying to accomplish as a company? Not just for ourselves, but of course, for our clients and maybe other partners and things of that sort, you know, our approach publicly, our profile. What is that telling you? And if she can communicate back something very similar with alignment of what it is that I am looking for, or what I am trying to say, then all of a sudden we've got a pretty clear understanding around what it is that we're trying to accomplish together. So that was really number one. I wanted to understand her perspective of what HireCos was trying to do and be. Number two is, given your experience, what do you think the role of Chief of Staff is? So to your first question, what's your definition of the Chief of Staff? And hers was very similar. And then third was, okay, where can we take this? I mean, what are the ideas if you were to come into an organization and help build it? Where do your ideas go? What have you thought of that maybe I haven't thought of, maybe I have, maybe I hadn't, but where would you want to take this? What are the things that you would want to get into? And if there's alignment there or, oh, I hadn't thought about that, then now we've got even more tangible aspects to work with together so that we can create together and we can use HireCos as a channel to do that. So if she wants to get into, she's an EOS implementer, if she wants to do more of that type of work, okay, let's make that a part of our capabilities and services at additional levels and let's go after that. That is not, I'm not certified as that right now. So how do we increase or ingrain what her vision might be into the broader scope? And that's something that those three levels is really what helps cement very quickly a great partnership and relationship between us.
AJ: I love that and I want to play that back to make sure that I got the three. So the first one is you had her give sort of her outside perspective of what her perception was of the company, the mission, where you're going, how you're coming across. So that you know sort of her interpretation of you, then what was the second one?
Kyle: We defined exactly what her definition of the role of a chief of staff was, right, and what it can provide to a company. And then number three was, well, what would you want to do with it? Given the opportunity, given that this were to move forward with the partnership, what would you like to see happen? And that was really the three aspects that we focused our early conversations on.
Business Progress and Reality Check
AJ: And that framework worked because you've got how far so good. How long have you had the partnership?
Kyle: I think unofficially, officially, we started talking in March of this year and we launched HireCos in October of '23, so we're just coming up on our one-year anniversary.
AJ: Oh, congratulations. So, where is the business? Where you expected it to be about 10 months in?
Kyle: You know, I remember talking about this kind of in our first conversations. The answer is yes. I think it is probably where I saw it would be in one year. And I think I was pretty intentional around what can we get done in the first year, and then, what do we need to make sure that we're starting to work on now in year two. The work needs to actually start right now to propel us forward. So my focus now is in preparing for year two, which obviously starts coming up here. But, you know, you can think about it in October, you can think about it in January, whatever. To answer your question, yes, the business is where it's at. We have learned a lot, and I think that's kind of the most important caveat to your first year is just to try to be aware of learning as much as you possibly can.
Biggest Mistakes and Key Lessons
AJ: Looking back, what's the biggest mistake that you've made in this first year?
Kyle: I would say there's two pieces to it. Number one was the sentiment I mentioned a few moments ago around being reluctant to create a business development outreach sales pipeline. To take for granted the fact that you have two clients already and you've got work to do because at any one, you know, based off of contract, those things can come to an end. So that was really number one. I wish I would have started that earlier. Number two is actually a point that again came up in one of your earlier podcast sessions or episodes around putting money aside. Taking, I believe someone mentioned, 20% of, say, a monthly retainer or whatever your invoice revenue is for that month and setting that aside. That could offset tax payments, that could offset ebbs and flows within, you know, a normal business cycle. That would have been my other wish I had done or thought of during the past 10 months.
Business Development Challenges and Solutions
AJ: Let's talk about business development, otherwise known as sales and marketing client acquisition. You said business development is your number one priority, but it's also your biggest challenge. What specifically makes it so difficult?
Kyle: First is, how as a solopreneur or founder-led sales team, am I able to reach as many people effectively as a part of my audience as I can? And, so you want to get very, very wide, but you need to start at a very small point. You need massive outreach and results from very little. So how do you get as much juice from the squeeze? So you've got to look at some technology and how you can create leads and then get them into a process of outreach to push them through your pipeline, your sales pipeline, however you define it from stages and so on and so forth. So that's one, the other's bandwidth. How do you balance all, where do you find the time? And so, I've been locked in over the past six weeks at looking at how the pieces of creating this sales biz dev engine. What are the components going to be? And how are they going to fit together so that I can sit here from this desk, so to speak, and push that as hard as I possibly can with the respectable and appropriate amount of effort, given all the other things that being a solopreneur entrepreneur with a partner creates.
AJ: And tell me a little bit more about that. I mean, in the six-week period, what are you looking at? Give me some more examples, some specifics.
Kyle: Well, there's two key platforms that I've been looking at and testing. The first is a lead generation platform called KnowledgeNet.ai, and I was introduced to them through some networking opportunities with individuals who are hyper-focused on sales and biz dev. And so that's a really interesting platform, and I'm excited to kick the tires on it because it creates a very interesting and nuanced way of getting after your primary contacts based off of whatever your ideal customer profile is. But how you get into that nuanced niche of getting that connection made through, obviously, social media platforms, LinkedIn primarily, things of that nature. But how is that data then scraped, organized, and primed to then get into a sales pipeline or CRM type platform? So, that's number one. Number two is a new founder-led CRM platform that's coming onto the scene right now called Revo, R-E-E-V-O. Really interesting platform. It has AI components that are coming in. So your meeting note taker is there taking your notes, being your second in command, so to speak, but then transforming those notes into actionable email templates that you can send out immediately. The recordings that come in set next steps not just for your client or whomever you're engaged with on a conversation but also for yourself because much of the time the most important thing is that you hold yourself accountable to the next deliverable and don't fall out of what. Hey, do I owe this person one or this or that, you know, we're in this tech boom where everything is a tool and a helpful is it actually helping you or not, this is something that I've really leaned into. And so far, I see it actually removing some of the things that I have originally had in our quote-unquote tech stack to help me drive the business, and it's going to eventually take some of those things out and replace. So those are the two main components that I've looked at. How do I get leads created, organized, and primed, and then what is the content or how am I going to deliver or execute the outreach to those contacts? And I would, I guess a third piece quickly is then content messaging marketing. How do we create the messages that need to go to those leads? That's the third piece that we're all working on.
AJ: Okay, so Revo sounds really interesting. Do you think it is something that would be appropriate for self-employed consultants?
Kyle: 100%. Absolutely. And if anybody would like to speak more about it or my experience, feel free to reach out anytime.
AJ: Cool. I think I'm gonna look at it because it sounds like, I mean, right now, Calendly just added note-taking, which I like, but then I have to download those notes into either my Google Drive or into my CRM. It's not an automated process, and that's the kind of manual work that we, as CEOs of our businesses, shouldn't be doing. So this sounds like it's taking, you know, something that technically I could have a VA do, but I like to do it immediately. I am fascinated. Thank you for the suggestion of that. I'm going to go explore it as well.
Kyle: I think it's interesting to watch tech platforms and companies today solve a unique problem and kind of build back or add on the capabilities of something like a Calendly or an AI note-taker like Motion, etc., because those things are built. So, you know conceptually how to do it yourself, but what they're not doing is kind of the hardest thing. If you can solve the hardest problem and then add on all these ancillary pieces in and of itself, well, then you have a really full-service offering. So I find companies that are doing that in the tech space very interesting.
Mindset and Mental Challenges
AJ: I want to switch gears and talk a little bit about sort of mindset and mental things. You mentioned that you're extremely hard on yourself. As a fellow extremely hard on yourself person, I can totally relate. How has that trait both helped and hurt you as a consultant?
Kyle: It has helped me because I believe that I have a different level of mental endurance that I haven't necessarily seen. I just try to optimize as much as I possibly can as a quote-unquote part of my secret sauce to people. So I'm hard on myself in terms of setting reasonable, respectful, and accountable deadlines. One of our values here at HireCos is relish accountability. I absolutely love it because that means that someone's bought into you, and they know, like, and trust you, and so deliver for them. From that aspect, I think that our clients to date have felt that they believe they will always have me alongside them for the ride, and that's the truth. Where it has hurt me is where it has pinned me up against two points, and I don't choose to make a decision. Or if I see something like back, just to use a thread that we've talked about through the podcast, Biz Dev, if I know that's not necessarily a problem, I can sometimes focus, well, God, I'm too hard on myself for having let that go for too long. I didn't get started. Just get started, stop worrying about the fact that you didn't do it, and start doing it now. Let's not worry about it anymore. I've switched my mindset over the past two months to focus on that versus in the spring. I was probably like, oh my God, what am I gonna do? So, it's been a little bit of that Catch-22.
AJ: It sounds like before there was some regret. Like, why did I do this? I should have done this, you know, that voice in your head that says you should have or you shouldn't have done something that can be very loud. You've sort of said, okay, I'm not going to do the shoulds and shouldn'ts. I'm gonna focus right here and see what I can get started rather than looking back. You know, the past is the past.
Kyle: Yes, give yourself some grace. I mean, you're gonna think of everything. When you're going into business for yourself, you're gonna do the very best that you possibly can if you're committed to that vision that you have and that passion for what it is that you want to do. But you're not going to get it all, and it's gonna be okay. Just when it comes back around and you get the next opportunity to lean into it, that's when you need to recognize to make sure you lean into it because if you let it go again, then that's another missed opportunity. So just capitalize on the next time.
AJ: Jump on it. I have one of my business coaches is action creates clarity.
Kyle: Yes, absolutely.
AJ: It's a good one for me. I'm a recovering perfectionist, so my kind of default setting, if I'm not careful, would be to continue to work on it, you know? It's not perfect. I can't put it out. Problem is, if I don't put it out, I don't get any feedback on it. So I don't know if it's any good or not. So I live by action creates clarity. It's good enough, get it out, get some feedback.
Kyle: We're very similar in this perfectionist type of issue that we're trying to solve for.
AJ: I love what BrenƩ Brown described herself. She said I'm a recovering perfectionist and an aspiring good enoughist.
Kyle: I like that. I'm gonna steal that one. I like that one very much.
The Revenue Roller Coaster Reality
AJ: I have another question and then we're going to go into some of the wrap-up questions. When I introduced myself to you on our initial call, I talked about helping self-employed consultants with the revenue roller coaster. And you nodded, you kind of resonated with that revenue roller coaster concept. Just describe what it feels like when you're living it.
Kyle: There are moments of pure ecstasy and accomplishment and joy, and success. And then, there are the 3 a.m. wake-ups with, you know, the night sweats, so to speak, you know, like, oh my God, what am I doing? And you know, why did I do this? Like, oh goodness, what have I done to myself and to the rest of my family? So it's all those things in between. What's been interesting actually, is that some of the clients that we have, you know, they're entrepreneurs and some of them are young, some of them are 10 years younger than I am. And so they've actually, you know, in our partnership and our collaboration, as part of our kind of leadership syncs that I set up on a weekly basis, we've actually turned that dialogue into a help me help you situation. Hey, what are some of the problems that you're having? And so it's helped a little bit. You just get, you don't get numb to it. You just get a little bit more used to it. I'm grateful that I think given my past work history, and I'm talking more about the length of time that I've had a career and in the various companies that I've worked in and just different types of things that I've tried to be aware of and observe, it gave me a little bit more of an understanding of what could be. And then when you're in the moment and you live each one of those experiences, those sleepless nights or what have you, they get a little bit easier because you stay on task, you know how to work through it. You've been here before, it too shall pass. There's a great thing on Instagram that I see all the time. It's a bunch of actors sitting around. Tom Hanks is there too, a couple of others, and he sits there and he says, the one lesson I wish that I had learned: This too shall pass. This too shall pass. This too shall pass. And so I definitely find those moments again possibly in the middle of the night when I say to myself, this too shall pass.
Building Mental Endurance
AJ: You mentioned mental endurance a minute ago, and it sounds like you're working on your mental endurance. What are you doing? What have you done and what are you doing to build that mental muscle?
Kyle: First, it's to recognize how was I able to build it up and that is not necessarily who or what I do anymore. So for a period of time in my career, I was working full-time running a sales team at a freight brokerage in Chicago, 60 hours a week or so. And then I was going to culinary school 20 hours a week, which then extended through other opportunities to make it easily a 100-hour week very, very quickly. I did that for a year. And in that period of time, I think that's where I built this mental endurance trait that I call it. Working in a restaurant and having 300 covers a night versus running your own company as a solopreneur are very different opportunities and environments. And so, now it is around my mental endurance is around making sure that I have enough left at the end of the day to go home. I'm lucky enough that I do have an office outside of my home, which I need a dedicated workspace. But when I make the seven-minute drive home, that I've got enough in the tank to be present for my two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, my wife, our dog, etc. And so, how do you just block and tackle throughout the day? Take the periods of time that you are highly acute and most into your work, use that to the best of your ability, and then give yourself a chance to step away. Listen to a podcast, you know, watch something on YouTube. I don't know. I'm a big visionary visual guy, so I like to watch kind of motivational things there, but it's understanding what it really means in terms of your balance now, knowing that you can do quite a lot in a very long period of time.
Vision for the Future
AJ: Where do you see your business in three to five years?
Kyle: Where I see the business, and I hope and I'm working towards the business being, is where we are entrenched in multiple industries. I'm very fervent on the fact that I am working hard with Stephanie's help to build an industry-agnostic Chief of Staff consulting company. The majority of my background has been in logistics and transportation, and I'm going to use that to my advantage to get the door open and be able to help our blueprint get implanted in as many different organizations as possible. But the reason why I love bringing Stephanie on was that her background has been in completely different industries. So let's open those floodgates up and get there. I would like to have multiple teams of fractional Chiefs of Staff throughout the country. I am located in Cleveland, Ohio, and I have worked 100% remote for the last five years, and it's completely doable. So we'll see where that goes, but I'd love to see some leveling vertically and horizontally within the organization so that we can serve more clients, more customers, and solve more problems.
AJ: What do you think are the biggest challenges you're going to face in achieving your vision?
Kyle: Continuing to get our name out there recognized, I think it's always around maintaining profitable focus on financials, making sure we're making the right decisions. We're not allowing things to be in our recruiting process and our onboarding process for too long. If it needs to be jettisoned, we're jettisoning it, and that workflow optimization often comes into contracts and talent deployment. You deal with strategic planning, working better with various platforms. So just a little optimization, talent deployment, and focus on strategic agility and profitability. I think that'll be a very interesting exercise for us to dive into over the next 12 months. Our goal is to just continue to drive bandwidth, systems, and processes. Let's not rest on our laurels. We learned very early on in year one that we take the opportunity as we wrap up for the clients for granted. Let's continue to push the needle a little bit further. From there, it'll be making sure that we have systems, processes, and workflows in ourselves.
Key Advice and Resources
AJ: I'm looking at it right now. It's called 'The Boutique' by Greg Alexander. It is a book specifically written about boutique consulting firms, and it was given to me by a networking contact here when I pitched the idea, and he sent it to me. So that would be one book that has been extremely valuable in this business. And for those who are listening, I will put the link to that book in the show notes so you can find it there. What's one piece of advice you wish someone had given you when you started consulting?
Kyle: For 20% of your monthly payments, just because you want to, you know, you believe into it so much. You invest everything that you have into it emotionally, you know, and intellectually, but there is a financial component. You're trying to build the company. So how much can I invest of our own assets into the business to make it worthwhile? And you don't want to create too much strain for yourself because although it is a factor of stress that is completely solvable. Financial stress. There's nothing like it, not to say that's where we are completely, but I wish that I had had that nuance and I think we would have made different decisions around certain pieces of tech or we would have structured agreements in details in different ways. If I had made that kind of a pillar of how we are going to operate the company in an early stage.
Connection Information
AJ: Wise advice. Okay. Last and most important question. How can listeners connect with you if they want to learn more about your work?
Kyle: That's a great question and thank you very much for giving us the opportunity to do so. You can find us at www.hirecos.com. I am relatively active on LinkedIn. So you can find me either on our company LinkedIn page, or my personal page for Kyle Mlakar and that's spelled M-L-A-K-A-R, which is always a fun Slovenian name to bring about. That's the best way to get a hold of me and quickly, my email is just [email protected].
AJ: Wonderful. And I will again put all of those into the show notes as well, so Kyle it has been a delight to have you as a guest today. Thank you so much and that is a wrap on this episode of the Thriving Through podcast and for all of you keep thriving through.
