Building a Seven-Figure Franchise for Six Figures: Cary Daniel’s Nextaff Opportunity

Anthony Codispoti (00:01)
Welcome to another edition of the inspired stories podcast where leaders share their experiences so we can learn from their successes and be inspired by how they’ve overcome adversity. My name is Anthony Codispoti and today’s guest is Cary Daniel, co-founder and CEO of Nextstaff. They are a staffing franchise that focuses on matching talented individuals with organizations in the commercial, healthcare and technology sectors.

Through its unique X-factor recruitment process, Nextstaff aims to deliver top quality service and help businesses reduce turnover by placing the right people in the right roles. Kerry has worked in the staffing industry for many years, playing leadership roles in multiple companies before co-founding Nextstaff. He is passionate about business ownership and sees staffing franchises as a way for entrepreneurs to thrive in their local markets.

NextHalf and Carey have earned several honors, including recognition as an Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Regional Finalist, placements on the Inc 500 listings, Entrepreneur Franchise 500, and a spot in the Franchise Times Top 500. Carey’s dedication to franchise ownership and client success has helped NextHalf grow across the country. Now, before we get into all that good stuff, today’s episode is brought to you by my company, Ad Back Benefits Agency.

where we offer very specific and unique employee benefits that are both great for your team and fiscally optimized for your bottom line. Imagine being able to give even your temporary employees free access to doctors, therapists, and prescription medications. And here’s the fun part. The program actually puts more money into your employees’ pockets and the companies too. One recent client was able to increase net profits by $900 per employee per year.

Results vary for each company and some organizations may not be eligible. To find out if your company qualifies, contact us today at addbackbenefits.com. All right, back to our guest today, co-founder and CEO of Nextstaff, Cary Daniel. Thanks for making the time to share your story today.

Cary Daniel (02:06)
Thanks, Anthony. Appreciate it.

Anthony Codispoti (02:08)
So Kerry, you’ve been in the staffing industry for decades. How did you first get your start?

Cary Daniel (02:14)
It’s kind of an odd story in the fact that I was coerced into the industry by my current co-founder. There was a company in Kansas City that was hiring. They were on a rapid growth plan and he said, you got to come check these guys out. I went in and interviewed and said, no, that’s not for me because I wanted to get in sales and all they had was, you know, kind of the recruiter position open. And he came back and said, you don’t understand how fast they’re growing. So, you know, you should give it a shot.

And so I went in second interview and back then they did a Gallup ⁓ personality profile test. And I actually failed that test, but they called me and said, you failed the test for a recruiter, but we’re going to encourage them to give you the management test. And so they gave me the management test. passed. And that’s how I got into the staffing industry. So a couple of times where I didn’t want to get in, they didn’t want me in, but it happened to work out.

Anthony Codispoti (03:14)
So that’s interesting. So the person who recruited you in obviously was a friend, somebody you’d known for a while.

Cary Daniel (03:18)
I had known him for a couple of years. He and I had worked together before.

Anthony Codispoti (03:23)
And so something about your personality made you not a good fit for a recruiter, but what made them think that you might be a good fit for management.

Cary Daniel (03:32)
You know, having been in this industry now for two and a half decades, I can see where, you on the recruiting side, you’re typically, you have more of the empathetic personality trait, much more of a softer personality where mine was more of a hard-driven A, go, go, go, much more tailored to sales. And evidently, based on the Gallup poll, more tailored to management. So I guess lucky for me, when Gallup did that, they had a

some kind of way to compare it and said, hey, he doesn’t really fit the profile for the recruiter that you’re looking for, but we think he’d make a good manager. So ⁓ at that time, that company was a big believer in that. was kind of a, if this test says you’re good, we’ll hire you. If it says you’re not, we’re not going to hire you. That was kind of their thing. They were big believers in it. So evidently, it all worked out long term.

Anthony Codispoti (04:09)
Okay.

that was it. That was the yardstick,

What’s

your perspective on that kind of assessment? How much faith do you put in those today?

Cary Daniel (04:34)
You know, it’s a tool and you know, I think as we get into this conversation, we’ll dig down into kind of the X factor and where that tool lives, but it’s one of many things, no different than people talking about AI today and recruiting. It’s a tool. It’s not going to be the end all be all. And I don’t think just like a personality profile test shouldn’t be the one and only factor, AI is not going to be the one and only factor either.

Anthony Codispoti (05:01)
So I want to spend the bulk of our time talking about what you’re doing at Nextstaff, but let’s lay a little bit more groundwork first, because you were in the staffing industry for a bit before you started Nextstaff. What was the most formidable stop and role for you prior to Nextstaff? What did you learn? What did you take away from that?

Cary Daniel (05:21)
⁓ You know, the first company I was with, were publicly traded, just went public. And so it was a great time to be involved in a company like that because of the rapid growth and the injection of capital and everything. But there was a lot of change that happened at the levels above me. And I thought, you know, I kind of saw my path and then I saw my path kind of either get backed up or disappear.

And it just so happened I was recruited away from that company to another staffing company. I literally, think it was the Monday I started, they announced that they had just sold to another company, a publicly traded company going through a roll up. And within six months of me being there, there were only three people ahead of me, the vice president of sales, the CEO, and the CEO. And within three, six months of working there, all three of those people were gone. And now I was reporting to people in Salt Lake City, whom I

never met and I thought, you I’m not, I’m not going to let somebody else control my future and control my destiny. I’m, I’m doing all the work anyway. I’ve sold, I’ve seen the recruiting side of it. I’ve opened offices for other people. I’m going to do it for myself. And so that was, that’s what launched it.

Anthony Codispoti (06:36)
And where was your business partner at the time? Had he followed you or was he still at the original company?

Cary Daniel (06:42)
He had gone, he was doing sales for another organization. Yeah, he had left the publicly traded company. He went one way, I went the other, but I stayed in staffing and I called him up and I said, because we’d been talking about it, I thought, you know, maybe this is something we should do. And we joked that one of the, I guess it was good at the time, maybe bad for them. I said, one of the biggest mistakes that the publicly traded company ever made with us was that they would share their monthly P &Ls at the office level with us.

Anthony Codispoti (06:45)
Okay.

Cary Daniel (07:11)
And we’d see what we were making versus what that office was making. And we thought, it’d be nice to be on the bottom line side of this business.

Anthony Codispoti (07:19)
⁓ And what skills did your partner have that you’re like, got to do this with him?

Cary Daniel (07:26)
Operations. All the operations, the recruiting side, the operational side, that was not my forte. It’s never been my forte. ⁓ Mine’s always been on the… Business side? Absolutely.

Anthony Codispoti (07:38)
development, sales, growth.

And what’s his name? What’s your partner’s name? Let’s James. Okay. ⁓ and so you and James decide, okay, Hey, we’re going to go out and start our own thing. Did you both quit your jobs to go do that? Or did you stay at your jobs and kind of do it on the side until you got things built up?

Cary Daniel (07:58)
I came home, my wife was six, I think it was six months pregnant. And I said, Hey, I quit my job and I’m starting a business. James stayed at his company, I think for about a month, just so we could get the ball rolling. pretty, mean, within 30 days, we were both feet first and didn’t know what we didn’t know. Mindsight looking back on it, we were like, in no way should we’ve ever done that because it was so stupid.

Anthony Codispoti (08:26)
And I’ve got to ask, did it really go down that way? You hadn’t had a discussion with your wife. You just quit your job one day, and you came home and said, have new plan.

Cary Daniel (08:36)
We had been talking about it. And I said, you know, we’d like to do this. And this is what we’re thinking about doing. But one of the key hires that we had in mind to come aboard with us, it was kind of the impetus because he called and said, hey, I just got let go of my job and I’m available. If you guys are ready to roll, I’m ready to roll. And we thought, OK, we don’t want to miss out.

on this hire because this is the guy we were like, if we do this, we got to bring this guy in. He’s an absolute stud when it comes to sales in the business. And that was the impetus. were like, he’s available. We’ve been talking about it. Let’s go. And yeah, again, in hindsight, you don’t know what you don’t know at the time. But yeah.

Anthony Codispoti (09:27)
What was the biggest thing looking back that you didn’t know you didn’t know?

Cary Daniel (09:31)
Well, when you’re running a branch, the essence of our business is very simple. You find companies that need people. You find people looking for work. You match them up, repeat the process. We did that for years. What we never had to deal with was all the stuff that goes on in the back, the payroll and the taxes and the work comp and the insurance and the software and the vendor negotiations. so we just thought, let’s go get clients.

We already have some that we know about. We know how to recruit people. We can do that. We can match them up. And then it’s like, hey, we need to see a copy of your work comp insurance. And hey, what’s your general liability policy look like? hey, how are you funding your payroll? All clueless. And this is 98. This isn’t like I just go ask Chet GPT to figure this out or Google, It’s like, I remember calling, I think it was American Family. I called my American Family.

homeowner’s guy and said, Hey, I need to get some work off insurance. And he was like, we don’t do that here. And so I call this guy gets my information. He’s like, okay, well, yeah, we can buy coverage. I need you to bring, you know, $25,000 deposit down. I’m like, wait a minute. I thought this was gonna be like $200 a month. Like homeowners. I’m sure these people are like, Oh my God, I can’t believe underwriting these people.

Anthony Codispoti (10:52)
What a rookie. ⁓ So how did you get that first client?

Cary Daniel (10:53)
Huh? Terrible.

It was somebody that we had worked with before. was another client that, so the gentleman that we hired, he’d been in the industry with us four years prior and stayed in staffing. And so it was somebody that we knew and had a good relationship with, told him, hey, we’re starting our own. We’d love to have you as a client. And he’s like, let’s go. Right away. Yeah, right away.

Anthony Codispoti (11:21)
way.

That personal relationship, he remembered the service, he knew who you guys were personally, and that felt good to him. So that that $25,000 that you needed to come up with, were you guys just dipping into your own pockets? Did you have to, you know, go ask friends and family for some money to get started?

Cary Daniel (11:39)
We were fortunate at the time that we had ⁓ two friends of ours, both were in the accounting world working for, back then I think it was the big six, today it’s probably the big four, but ⁓ they had been talking about ⁓ funding us and maybe doing some kind of investment. And so those conversations had been going on for a little while. And so when we called them and said, hey, we’re ready to go, we’re ready to launch, they had already had some kind of idea of what the expectations were.

But again, it’s one of those where you don’t know what you don’t know. And we certainly didn’t budget a $25,000 work comp deposit in month one pro-pharma. But to their credit, they came through.

Anthony Codispoti (12:23)
stuck by you around helped you out. And so at what point, like, all right, this is really working. We got something here.

Cary Daniel (12:32)
At what point did that occur?

Probably, you know, we were probably three months in and we had kind of stalled out at a certain level. And there was another woman that had worked for me at both prior companies. And I’d been trying to recruit her away. We finally got her to come over. And I’ll never forget her going down our, you know, this is back in the old days where you’d have stuff written on a whiteboard and we had all our orders written up there.

And I’ll never forget her first day coming in and we’re sitting down. It’s me, James, our salesman, this other lady that we hired. And she just went through and she’s like, OK, tell me about these jobs. Well, this this one. She’s like, no, no. And she just went through and crossed them almost all off. Why these purple squirrels? need a underwater welder for six dollars an hour. I need a forklift driver with 10 years experience for seven dollars. She’s like, no, no. And so.

You know, we sat there and thought, man, if we could just fill these 50 orders that we have, and she kind of brought that to a halt and said, you don’t have 50 orders, you have three. I’ll those today. Go get me 50 real orders. We doubled in probably 30 days, doubled inside 30 days.

Anthony Codispoti (13:52)
Holy cow. So she was getting rid of these jobs that were just gonna be impossible for you to fill.

Cary Daniel (13:57)
We call them purple squirrels.

Anthony Codispoti (13:59)
And why purple squirrel? Because they don’t exist?

Cary Daniel (14:02)
Yep. There’s probably one out there. you know, it’s like a white buffalo. There’s probably one out there somewhere, but you’re spending the rest of your life looking for it.

Anthony Codispoti (14:11)
Yeah. And so what else did she do that kind of helped put you guys on the right track other than saying no to all the purple squirrels?

Cary Daniel (14:19)
Well, none of the purple squirrels, but also guiding the sales effort to what could be filled. So in staffing, it’s one of the struggles that people run into in this business is everybody out there either uses or could use staffing. Every business out there has some kind of hiring need at some point. And so as a salesperson,

It’s almost overwhelming because you could walk down the street, walk into a warehouse, and they need guys putting a widget in a box. You go next door to a manufacturing plant, and they need somebody to operate a piece of machinery. And you go over here to an insurance customer service, and they need 20 people answering. You could spend your time just bouncing around the city, and your recruiter is trying to gain some momentum and trying to gain some focus because if

If let’s say housekeepers, for example, that was a big one that we did in the very beginning. Once you are recruiting housekeepers for, let’s say Marriott, if Marriott says, okay, we’re good now, well, the other 10 housekeepers that you had recruited, now we could send those to Hyatt or we could send those to fill in the blank. And housekeepers tend to know housekeepers and general managers of hotels tend to know other general managers and franchise owners of hotels know and own other.

hotel franchises. And so you can build very rapidly if you become a niche player instead of bouncing all over the city, trying to fill anything and everything that somebody gives you an opportunity for.

Anthony Codispoti (15:54)
So what were the niches that you were focusing on back in late 90s and early 2000s and how has that evolved into today?

Cary Daniel (16:02)
So back then it was housekeeping and pretty much warehouse type work. know, guys driving a forklift, picking, packing, assembly, that sort of work.

Anthony Codispoti (16:16)
And where are you guys today?

Cary Daniel (16:17)
Compared to today, we don’t do as much housekeeping. ⁓ It’s just not a business that we tend to focus on. But we have really three verticals. Commercial, which is a massive vertical in staffing. So that covers everything from light industrial warehouse through clerical and professional. We do quite a bit of commercial work. We also do health care. And then we just

started rolling into technology.

Anthony Codispoti (16:49)
And so the healthcare roles that you’re filling are these nurses and doctors or what are we talking about?

Cary Daniel (16:55)
predominantly nurses, RNs, LPNs, LVNs, and then you could get into like the CNA level.

Anthony Codispoti (17:05)
Okay. And how about technology? you placing coders, programmers, developers?

Cary Daniel (17:10)
Could

be anything cyber.

Anthony Codispoti (17:14)
And so as I think about those three different industries, it seems to me that obviously the needs are different. But tell me if I’m sort of thinking about this in the right way, like in the commercial vertical, they may need somebody, I don’t know, this week, but maybe not next week. Whereas maybe the technology clients that you have, they’re like, hey, we’ve got a six month project that we need somebody here for. Is that like the other industries maybe are a little bit more short term techs, a little bit more of a longer term placement.

Cary Daniel (17:44)
Close to that, yes. So in commercial, you tend to have two type of users. One is for their flex staff. So for example, right now it’s October and we have some of the companies that are really busy during the Christmas season, Kirkland’s for example, let’s say, really ramping up to service that. And so they will use us to flex up. And then as soon as the season’s over, they flex down. That’s one user.

The other user is somebody that is looking for full-time employees, but just wants to outsource the recruiting, the screening, the hiring. They get to try them for 90 days through us, and they’re kind of the offshoot of their HR department. The majority of temporary workers that we have are looking for full-time work on the commercial side. A lot of the companies are looking to hire full-time people. So, you know, in the industry, that’s a little bit of a misnomer in that.

It’s all temporary work. That’s usually not the case. Most of the time, the majority of people would go full time if the company offered it and they were a good match. And then in technology, most of that is going to be longer term contract work. We’re doing an SAP implementation. It’s a two year implementation. We only need these people for 12 months. And then in health care, it’s a little bit of both. Health care is a lot of filling and shift work because there’s such a shortage.

And then there’s also contract work where they need somebody for maybe a 12-week assignment. So it can be kind of a mixture as well.

Anthony Codispoti (19:21)
At what point in the company’s trajectory did you guys make the decision to focus on a franchise model for growth?

Cary Daniel (19:30)
We sold, so we were rapidly growing. So in December of 98, we started and by probably early 2002, we had opened up 10 locations in four different cities.

Anthony Codispoti (19:44)
All franchises are corporate.

Cary Daniel (19:48)
And we, it’s ironic, we got a call from a business broker asking if we were interested in buying a location in Wichita, Kansas or something. And we looked at it and decided that it wasn’t.

Anthony Codispoti (20:00)
I’m sorry, Kerry, where was your headquarters at the time? Okay, go ahead.

Cary Daniel (20:02)
Kansas City.

Yep, headquartered in Kansas City. And we said, no, it’s not a good fit for us. And he flipped the script on us and said, well, have you guys ever thought about selling your locations? Well, no, I mean, we’ve only been in business really three years. We’re just now taken off. And he said, I get a lot of interest from people to buy staffing companies. And we’re like, well, I mean, what kind of interest? And so the recommendation was, go get a valuation.

And so we talked to our two investors and we all decided we had a number in mind. If it came back at this number, we would try to sell it. If not, we’d keep building. And the valuation came in 20 % higher than our PEG number. Listed it and it was sold within 90 days. Wow. So we sold the Kansas City units to one gentleman. ⁓ We cut off St. Louis and Springfield to two other gentlemen. And then we had the Denver location we sold to somebody else.

But those

Anthony Codispoti (21:01)
outright sales. This was not the franchise model yet. Okay, go ahead.

Cary Daniel (21:04)
Yes,

done. And so now here we are sitting there, you know, I’m 30, I think it was 31, maybe enough money to do something with but certainly nothing nowhere near retirement. And really, my entire career to speak of was staffing. And so we were like, you know, maybe we should franchise the concept that would allow us to do something outside of our non compete in Kansas City.

And so we went to the buyer and we said, Hey, we’re thinking about franchising this. Do you have any objection if we franchise the concept, sold staffing as long as we don’t do in Kansas City? And he’s like, problem. And so that’s what started it is we thought, you know, when we started this in 98, we were so naive. We had the staffing experience, but we still had no idea how to run a staffing business. There’s other franchises out there, but you know, maybe we could build one that kind of would help guys like us. And so we spent.

most of 2003, taking everything that we knew and putting it into a replicatable, duplicatable system, getting compliant with the Federal Trade Commission to sell franchises and all the good stuff that goes along with that. And in 2004, rolled out the Next Staff franchise concept.

Anthony Codispoti (22:22)
And did you still have your own location at that point or had you sold everything? You had sold everything. Yep. And so did you now open up a corporate location as you were sort of starting the, this new model and the, going after the franchising or it was like, Nope, we’re just going to sell franchises.

Cary Daniel (22:26)
We had sold everything.

The idea was just to sell franchises. But we had a little bit of an ace in the hole in that the Denver location that we sold, we sold to the branch manager at the time with owner financing. With the idea that, once we franchise this concept, what we’d like to do is roll you in as franchise number one. And we’ll do all the back office finance, the payroll, we’ll do all that other stuff.

And he was like, that sounds good to me. So nobody wants to be a first franchisee. So that’s a little scary. So we were lucky that we could roll in with somebody that knew us, trusted us, rolled out. He was our first franchise. So now in talking to somebody else, you could at least say, yeah, we have one other franchise on our. Give him a call. And he had known us for years. So it helped having that early validation right out of the chute.

Anthony Codispoti (23:39)
So how did you get the second one?

Cary Daniel (23:40)
The second one, I believe, was from Houston, ⁓ a gentleman that was in staffing with his, I think his ex-father-in-law, who became his ex-father-in-law. And he wanted to do something on his own, but same thing. Didn’t know the back office, needed dad help. ⁓

signed him up and started rolling. yeah, ⁓ it’s kind of scary because you don’t know, OK, we know what we’re doing. We think we know what we’re doing. And we think we have a good concept. Will anybody else believe in that or buy into that? So we were lucky that in a relative short time, we had a couple of wins under our belt that we could build upon.

Anthony Codispoti (24:24)
What was the biggest growth lever that you were able to pull that really helped to accelerate the sales of these franchise units?

Cary Daniel (24:33)
You know, the story’s a little different one. So let me back up and I’ll try and compress 20 years into two minutes. ⁓ So we started selling franchises. I think we got to maybe eight and then 2009 hit. Big downturn in the economy. Staffing industry is usually a leading indicator. So we’re six months ahead of any recession, six months ahead of any upturn. And so the staffing industry was taking a notice dive. ⁓

the talks of Obamacare and healthcare and all this other stuff started coming out. And we thought, you know what might be a good pivot here? What if we found a payroll company and a PEO company and our existing franchise owners could start selling that as well? And so we found a company in Kansas City that did those things, worked to deal with them and closed on that deal January 1st, 2010. And so we were able to…

now start offering not only temporary business, but the PEO and the payroll solutions in a time when people were trying to figure out how to get under 50 full-time employees, et cetera. And so in a time when the staffing industry was taking a nosedive, our growth went through the roof for the next five years. And so we were able to take that company up north of $100 million by 2015 and then had a very similar experience that we did in

2002 where somebody reached out and said, hey, we’re doing a PEO roll up. Would you be interested in selling the PEO? And we took advantage of that, sold it. It’s now rolled up and part of Paychex.

Anthony Codispoti (26:11)
Okay. Fascinating arc.

Cary Daniel (26:13)
Yeah, so that was 2015 into 2016. And then in 2017, we had not sold franchises for almost 10 years.

Anthony Codispoti (26:24)
focused solely on growing the PEO payroll side of the business.

Cary Daniel (26:27)
Yeah, it was like a tiger by the tail trying to trying to manage that. And once we got rid of that, it was like, OK, well, let’s get back to the franchising business. so 2017 really kind of that’s where the X Factor came up and all that kind of switch from the payroll into staffing. so 2018, we relaunched the next F franchise model. And then most of what you see today is

over the last seven years. We still have a few legacy offices that are around, but most of who we are today is the result of last seven years, really.

Anthony Codispoti (27:04)
And so how many locations do you have today?

Cary Daniel (27:07)
⁓ We have 25 locations with six in development.

Anthony Codispoti (27:10)
Okay. ⁓ Tell us about the franchise opportunity.

Cary Daniel (27:18)
So in staffing, like we mentioned, it’s a relatively easy concept. Easy concept, but not easy to perform.

Anthony Codispoti (27:28)
Easy

to describe, hard to execute.

Cary Daniel (27:30)
Yes, and the execution really is about ⁓ just following through on your daily activity commitments. So for us, the franchise opportunity is finding somebody that, you know, there’s a lot of people that they don’t have that restaurant experience or retail experience where you traditionally you think of a franchise as restaurant or retail. The B2B side, there’s

far fewer of those, and even far fewer, think, that I would consider kind of really professional type atmosphere ⁓ businesses versus janitorial or window cleaning or something like that. So for us, it’s finding that individual that probably has a sales background, has that entrepreneurial desire, but knows what he doesn’t know and says, I would like to do something professional.

I really like helping people. And in this business, it’s kind of a win-win-win, right? You’re helping the client find the people. You’re helping the people look for work. And you get paid to do it. So it’s a win-win-win across the board. And for us, I have seen after being in the International Franchise Association, after just doing my own research out of curiosity, there’s probably 4,000 different franchise opportunities out there. It’s very tough to find a franchise opportunity.

that for the entry level that we have, which is $120,000 to $150,000, to have the kind of return on equity anywhere, I’ve not found another opportunity where you can see

Anthony Codispoti (29:14)
Does

that include even comparing you to other staffing franchise opportunities?

Cary Daniel (29:18)
The other ones are similar. Most of them are more expensive on the upfront because the minimum requirements are higher in terms of full-time employees, et cetera. But I’d say the staffing franchise opportunity in general, it’s hard to find an opportunity where you could invest low six figures and very quickly could be making that annually. And within a matter of years, you could have a business worth seven figures.

It’s just hard to find. A lot of these other opportunities I see outside of staffing, you’re talking about mid six figures and you’re hoping that you could make six figures a year.

Anthony Codispoti (30:00)
And why do you think the math is so different? Is it because, hey, in staffing, you need an office, but you don’t need expensive kitchen equipment. Basically you need phones and computers, right? The overhead isn’t pretty intense.

Cary Daniel (30:12)
That’s it. I mean, there’s no FF &E. It’s really people. that depends on what you want to do. Do you want to start Lean and Mean or do you want to grow something big and massive and quick? But it’s really your staff. I rent, I’ve had people do $15 million a year out of a thousand square foot office. So, and that could be really basic, basic office stuff. So yeah, handful of computers, a couple of phones, a little bit of a budget for marketing.

and your staff and you’re off and running.

Anthony Codispoti (30:46)
Okay, so tell us about X Factor. What is it? How does it set you guys apart?

Cary Daniel (30:51)
So after we sold the PEO and the payroll company, that had been our USP for years. Hey, we could do temp to payroll, temp to PEO. We can cover everything in between. Once we of chopped off two legs of that stool, we kind of had to look at ourselves and say, OK, how can we be different than everybody else out there? And it was interesting because at the time, there was a survey that got put out by

one of the industry associations. And this industry association is a little unique in that it has as members not only staffing companies, but buyers of staffing services. So you really get two different angles of people in the same world. And the survey was to the staffing buyers, when you’re thinking about choosing a staffing agency, what are your top three things you look at? And in that survey,

lumped all together was what the majority of staffing companies sell. Price, workforce strategy, risk diversification, speed, all this other stuff. But on their little chart, way up the outlier was worker quality. Far and away, the number one thing the buyers wanted. That was not surprising to us because we hear that all the time. That was not surprising. What was surprising was then they went through their staffing agency

database websites and look to see who even talks about staff or work or quality. 18%. So 80 % of the buyers really only care about quality. 80 % of the staffing companies are selling everything else. So that was our first aha moment. my school, I went to school psychology major for industrial organizational psych. So this was right in my wheelhouse. I researched every white paper case study.

anything that had ever been published on determining quality of hire. What’s out there? What can be proven? Because what was interesting is even of the 18 % of staffing companies that did talk about quality, when we would do our own searches, best quality staffing, whatever, well, you’d start to read their stuff and it was very subjective stuff. Anything, we get the best quality people because our people are better. Okay, well, what does that mean?

Where’s the quantitative data backing up what you’re talking about? So we looked at everything, put it on a correlation chart, and found out that the majority of HR departments and the majority of staffing companies are using the tools that are the least predictive measures of quality, which is the resume, which indicates your job experience, infers your page.

And then most people do an unstructured interview versus a structured interview.

Anthony Codispoti (33:49)
What’s the difference?

Cary Daniel (33:51)
So an unstructured interview is, let’s say I’m talking to three candidates. And the interview sounds something like this. So Anthony, tell me about the experience you had at your last company. And then interview B is, hey, I see you played football at K-State. How was that? What did you learn?

Anthony Codispoti (34:08)
You’re

asking different questions of everybody.

Cary Daniel (34:11)
The structured interview is, Anthony, tell me about the biggest obstacle you ever had to overcome. Mike, tell me about the biggest obstacle you ever had to overcome. Sarah, tell me about the biggest. So you’re asking three different people the same questions so that you can get some kind of baseline on, you know what, when I asked that question, know what, Anthony, he really did well on that one compared to everybody else instead of this. It’s twice as predictive, just that one thing. So in between.

Anthony Codispoti (34:38)
Okay.

Cary Daniel (34:40)
what most people are doing, and the most effective tool, which is a work sample test, you have all kinds of things in between. You have reference checks, personality profiles, behavior, integrity tests. have attempt to hire, staff and company. I don’t know if I want to use a staff and company. Why should I use you? By trying somebody for 90 days, you’re twice as likely to get a quality hire out of the process, statistically proven. Not my opinion, not me making it up, not me saying because my people are better.

It’s a statistic that, think about it, you try anything for 90 days, you’re going to get a pretty good idea of whether you like it or not, all the way up to ⁓ cognitive tests and work sample tests. So what we did is we packaged that up into what we call the X Factor process. And it’s really a customized blend based on your company of those key ⁓ components. It’s not the same for everybody. And sometimes it’s only a few of those components. Sometimes it’s

a little bit longer. But back to your original question on those profiles, we lean on them as a tool, not only for our offices and doing some of their work for staffing clients, but when we look to get franchise owners, it just gives us an indication of their tendencies. And then you can structure your interviews around those concerns. So when it says that, ⁓ hey, Anthony’s a bit of a maverick,

he’s not going to be really good at following direction or following rules. In a franchise system, that’s something we want to vet out quickly. And so we’ll talk about it during those calls.

Anthony Codispoti (36:23)
Do you have a favorite personality assessment?

Cary Daniel (36:26)
⁓ We use the predictive index. That’s the one we use.

Anthony Codispoti (36:30)
franchisee candidates as well as employees. You mentioned one of the ways to judge people or assess people and their skills is a work sample. How often is that actually a possibility?

Cary Daniel (36:34)
Yes.

⁓ It depends on the job, obviously. But one of the greatest examples we have was ⁓ there was a, ⁓ it’s kind of a weird thing. They did the testing for circuit boards. And the piece that tests, I don’t even have something here. If you can imagine the end of a pin, that little piece right there, that’s about the size of the probe they were assembling.

microscopic, little tiny, tiny things. And they were under a big magnifying glass all day, putting together these little tiny probes that would test circuit boards. Massive turnovers, you can understand, doing that eight hours a day. That’s all they did. Take a tube with a spring, with a thing, stick it in, dupe, repeat that a million times. Huge turnover. I’m like, have you guys ever thought about giving them a work sample test before you hire them just to see if they even want to do this?

Never thought about it. I said, give me a couple of your boards. We’ll start doing it. Massive reduction in turnover. Because you’d have people sit there for five minutes and go, no, no, no possible way. Why’d you rather know that than their first lunch break and they never come back? And you’d have other people say, so I can listen to my headphones. This is all I have to do all day long. Yeah. Love it. And so you weed out the people that were not going to be a good fit very, very quickly. So work sample tests like that.

You get a lot of stuff like 10 key type tests that if they’re going to be on 10 key all day, fine, let’s make sure they’re proficient in that. Stupid. You’d be surprised. You go talk to a company they want people working in their shipping department. So what’s been the problem? People can’t read a ruler. OK, well, do you give them a ruler test before they start? No, never thought about that.

Why don’t we give them a basic ruler test first before you get them in the shipping department? can’t read a tape measure. You’d be surprised at the simplest little things. ⁓

Anthony Codispoti (38:52)
Because those are things that you feel comfortable doing in an interview. When I’ve hired folks in the past, my favorite ⁓ approach is because the interview is fine, we can talk, but I actually want to see the quality of your work. Now, in the kinds of roles that I’m hiring for, I’m giving folks a paid task. Here’s the project, go away and do it. It may take you five or 20 hours. Whatever it is, I’m going to pay you for it.

You know, at the sort of the scale that you guys are operating. And for some of these roles, that’s not really necessary. Like it’s something super basic, like, okay, here’s a roller or ruler, like show me four inches, right? Or here’s a circuit board. Can you do this for a couple of minutes? Right? Like some of this is just real low hanging fruit, super easy stuff.

Cary Daniel (39:34)
Yeah, it can be very low hanging. Another one we had was somebody that wanted appointment centers and obviously very high turnover position. And so part of the interview process in which we worked with the company and we actually paid them to do, we had three people come in our office for one hour. We gave them a list of hundred companies with a script and we wanted to see how well they’d perform. And it was funny because I said, okay, these three people,

They’re off. Who would you pick? would you pick? Who would you pick based on the interviews? And it was like one, two, three. And the best performing person was not number one on anybody’s.

Anthony Codispoti (40:16)
All right. ⁓

Cary Daniel (40:18)
And she was an absolute superstar. Worked, I think, I lost track of her probably two, three years at this spot and just killed it. But would have never been their original hire.

Anthony Codispoti (40:31)
So we’re talking about some of the tools that you use, right? The personality assessments, the X factor that you guys have constructed. And you mentioned at the beginning of the interview that AI is a tool. How are you guys using that tool yourselves today?

Cary Daniel (40:44)
So with us, AI in the forefront on the recruiting side, it can do a lot of the tedious work. So for example, we have offices, we probably get 500 applications a week. That’s a tremendous amount of work to try and get a hold of these people, schedule interviews, do the initial upfront, what are you looking for? What job do you apply for? So AI can handle that very efficiently. So that’s one area. The second area.

is through texting workflows that start to become intelligent based on how you’re answering. So that way, if let’s say Kirkland’s calls and says, hey, I’m going to need 200 people in the next two weeks. In the old day, we were dialing the phone 1,000 times to find 200 people. Now I can send a message, say, here’s what we’re looking for. Here’s the shifts we’re looking for.

Et cetera, et cetera, send that out, it’ll go out to 10,000 people and they can select what that works for. So that’s on the recruiting side. Eventually I see that working its way into some of the more complex onboarding like for nursing. To onboard a nurse or even a CNA, mean, the laundry list of stuff they have to provide to become,

Anthony Codispoti (42:04)
certifications

and whatnot.

Cary Daniel (42:06)
They have to have their, OK, I need a copy of your CPR qualification. I need a copy of all your tests and this and that. I mean, it’s just a laundry list. There’s a lot of human follow-up that goes into that where AI could take that over and not disrupt the relationship you’re trying to build, instead trying to make it more efficient. We still use the recruiter to build a relationship and to manage that. But that’s where.

I think AI will play a big role is the upfront heavy lifting of just narrowing down who’s going where and who wants what. And then the, you’re interested. Now here’s the 14 things I need from you in the next two weeks. Let’s have AI follow up on that and make sure it gets all checked off. So we’re using that. And then on the sales side, very interesting. was just testing it today. On the sales side, we are

I’m working on a AI sales coach. And I have this thing set up right now. It’s unbelievable. I call it up and it’s like, hi, I’m Steven, your AI sales coach. I’m here to help you, blah, blah, blah, blah. Talk to me like you would anybody else. You could stop me at any time. You can start over any time. You can ask me how you’re doing. You can get feedback. Go ahead with your opening script whenever you’re ready. And they start, they rattle it off, and then he starts hitting them with objections based on how difficult.

They said they wanted him to be. And I’ve given him, I’ve given the AI agent, top 10 objections and he’ll coach them through it, walk them through it. And ⁓ it’s amazing. It baffles me when I…

Anthony Codispoti (43:52)
And this most of the tools that you’re using, I’m guessing are probably ⁓ off the shelf tools, maybe that some customization for you, but you’re probably not building your own custom things.

Cary Daniel (44:03)
It’s usually starting with a template and then customizing that template from there.

Anthony Codispoti (44:09)
I was at an event a couple of months ago where I met a founder of a company that’s working on an AI sales agent tool, similar to what you described, but taking it a step further so that if one of your representatives is on a call, this agent is listening in and providing coaching as they’re going like, here comes in the customer objection. And it’s like, okay, let me get you prepped for that. Like here’s some bullet points of things that you can say. Wild stuff.

Cary Daniel (44:39)
Yep, I’ve seen one similar to that as well.

Anthony Codispoti (44:42)
Is

it ready? Is it baked now?

Cary Daniel (44:44)
I think there’s one out there that’s ready. Back in the day, would sit there as a sales rep, you’d have all your objections laying out in case, but you were on the phone also. So while you’re on the phone, you could sit there and fumble around looking for, okay, where’s that objection of I’m happy with my current. Oh, okay, here it is. Now, a lot of this is on Zoom. But yeah, I’ve seen some of those that I have not demoed those. But if it’s anything like the one we’re using, I don’t see why it couldn’t.

listen in and while you’re on your Zoom call, be over here giving you the thing. We also use AI for that initial ⁓ franchise inquiries. So we get tremendous amount of inquiries. A lot of people are just doing their research. So we have an AI agent that takes that initial phone call and we’ve given them all the answers to all the stuff you upload at once. You never have to train it again. And you could sit there and have a 20 minute conversation.

Anthony Codispoti (45:40)
Is it feel, I mean, obviously, you you’re tech talking to an AI, but does it feel pretty real?

Cary Daniel (45:45)
It’s spooky, spooky. Every once in a while you can tell, wait a minute, something’s weird. But now the key to this is, and we’ve told this to our offices as well, is if you’re gonna use these tools, you don’t try and hide the fact. So even on our ⁓ franchise AI agent, it says, you know, hi, I’m Michael. I’m the franchise AI assistant here to help you with some of your initial questions. Feel free to ask me anything, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, and it goes through a whole list.

They know, but we’ve had some follow up calls with people that were like, oh yeah, I spoke to Steve, you know, I spoke to Michael man. Yeah, he’s really good. And there’s like, well, he was AI, you know, he’s AI. They had no idea. Wow. mean, the tonality, the pace, the pausing, the arms. It’s weird. It’s really weird.

Anthony Codispoti (46:34)
That’s wild. Now, I think you said you’re in 25 markets. Correct. OK. And so ⁓ obviously there are a lot of markets still open for you guys in terms of franchise opportunity. Are there any states that for whatever reason are off limits?

Cary Daniel (46:50)
There are, in the franchise world, we’re regulated by the Federal Trade Commission. And there are certain states that you have to be registered in order to offer franchise sales. And so for us, there’s a few weird ones that were like Hawaii. I’m not going to mess with that. ⁓ New York. New York’s just tough on franchise law. It’s tough on employment law. We’ll get there eventually. But we have so much other territory to mess around with.

Washington states and other ones just difficult to deal with, so we just don’t bother.

Anthony Codispoti (47:22)
people are interested, where can they go to find out more information?

Cary Daniel (47:26)
So for the franchise opportunity, we have a site. It’s nextaf.com. And that gives you all your information about franchising. And then the talent side and the client side is nextaf.com.

We separated those out because when we had them both at the same, we would get an enormous amount of franchise inquiries of people looking for jobs. ⁓ They’d sit there and they’d read our stuff and they’d go to contact us and didn’t realize that one was for franchising, one was for talent. So we just thought we’ll make it easier and separate those two.

Anthony Codispoti (47:52)
because I.

And we’ll make sure we include links to those in the show notes and we’ll actually give folks those addresses again towards the end of the interview. But you said something else I wanted to come back to. You mentioned that staffing is a leading indicator of what’s going on in the economy. So here we are recording this in October of 2025. What are you seeing?

Cary Daniel (48:25)
Up until recently, this is the first time in history that staffing has not cooperated with the overall economy. It’s been a strange ⁓ turn and it’s got most of the industry people baffled because you could track it through history. As soon as staffing went down, the economy went down six months later. As soon as we went up, economy went up six months later and it just followed.

The staffing industry up until about a month, I know we were in October, about two months ago, had about 34 months of straight decline year over year. Wow. Very bizarre, very unusual. And during the election, we thought, OK, this happens sometimes, Uncertainty at the election. Just think about it from a hiring manager’s perspective. I don’t know who’s going to go in office. If it goes one way.

maybe I’m not going to do this. If goes another, I’m going to hire some people. So let’s wait to see what the election happens. So we thought as soon as the election’s over, okay, we’ll finally get out of this broken cycle. Well, the election happened. But then we start talking about tariffs and all this. And then it just very confusing hiring manager. The market doesn’t like uncertainty. Hiring managers don’t like uncertainty. Entrepreneurs don’t like uncertainty. And I just feel like over the last two, three years, we’ve been living in this perpetual

uncertainty of what is going to happen. And it felt like we were just stuck. We would get signed agreements of people saying, we know we’re going to need people eventually, but we just don’t know when. And about August, we started to see an uptick. And we’re starting to continue to see that right now. So if we’ve broken out of this abnormal cycle, that would tell me that the rest of the economy would be picking up.

toward the end of Q4. ⁓

Anthony Codispoti (50:23)
So this is what you guys are seeing at Next Staff. Do you have connection with many of your peers in the industry to see if it’s a similar trend?

Cary Daniel (50:30)
Exactly, same trend. was on a call two weeks ago. I think we had nine other CEOs all over the country, all different verticals, and across the board, they all said the same thing. About August, we finally started to see some uptick.

Anthony Codispoti (50:50)
Sorry, all different verticals, but they’re in the staffing industry. They just serve different verticals. Yes. Interesting. Let’s take a little bit of a left turn here. I want to hear about a big serious challenge that you’ve overcome in your life, Kerry. How’d you get through it and what did you learn?

Cary Daniel (50:58)
Yeah, we’ll see.

Probably, I’ve got a handful that come to mind, but there’s one that…

stands out more than the rest for obvious reasons. ⁓

In I lost my 17-year-old son.

a car accident. has any parent has ever, if any parents ever been through that, they obviously know it, but it’s every parent’s worst nightmare. ⁓ But that was something that

took a while to figure out, know, one, how are you going to deal with it? And what do you do? Where do you go from there? ⁓ But it was and still is, I mean, you know, the biggest obstacle I’ve ever had to overcome. And I think you can you can choose to be a victim in life in any circumstance.

or you can try and find the positive out of it. And I think what helped me kind of move through that was being grateful for the time that we did have instead of mad about.

future of what we were not going to have. And if you can take that day by day and shift your focus to the gratitude, being grateful for what you did have, being grateful for the people that you met, being grateful for the relationships you have now because of what occurred, ⁓ you know, it helps you process that. helps you

deal with it. And I don’t know that you could ever say you could get over it. ⁓ But it certainly helps you get on and it helps you get through it. So, yeah.

Anthony Codispoti (53:42)
I mean, what you’re saying on the surface sounds like helpful advice. See if you can find a way to be grateful for the time that you had together. See if you can find a way to be grateful for the relationships and the experiences that you’re having now and are available to you going forward. It’s one of those things that feels like is so hard to get from here to there.

in an experience like that. Any sense of how you’ve managed to at least somewhat cross that bridge?

Cary Daniel (54:22)
really good question because you’re right. ⁓

I see people, when something like that goes on in your life, it’s like anything else. You kind of look for support of people that have gone through it and there’s plenty of groups out there on Facebook. It’s fortunately not a common thing where you’ve got this big group of friends that have all been through it. ⁓ But I do notice that

you know, sitting in on some of these face groups.

folks that the majority of them don’t heal and they don’t tend to cross that bridge, they don’t tend to get there. And it is that they are so focused on the loss. And how do you get them to transfer from the loss to the gratitude? That’s a great question. ⁓

I don’t think I’ve sat down to try to dissect it to figure out was there something that I did? there certain books that I read? Was there a certain thing with faith or spirit? Was there something I could pinpoint and say, if you just do this, all will be better? I think it was the fact that maybe leading up to that point, I was kind of on my own spiritual

quest and learning everything I could about just life and universe and spirituality and had my mind open to so many different things, researching every different religion, just trying to find common denominators and make sense of it all. then when this occurred, maybe something in that, you know, having a little bit of a background in that helped me.

piece it together, maybe a little quicker than somebody else.

Anthony Codispoti (56:32)
You were already doing this exploration prior to the passing of your son. So maybe there was some foundation there that had you more open to the idea of gratitude.

Cary Daniel (56:44)
Yeah, well, and if you get to the point where, you know, now we can get really deep into this stuff, but if you get to the point where your belief is more of…

one of that we don’t really leave this plane. just in a different.

format, right? It’s no different than ice changing to water changing to gas. If you have that kind of theory that, well, maybe we were one thing before, and then we came here to this, and then we returned to what we were prior.

You know, we really didn’t go anywhere. It’s just the form has changed. And if you can wrap your arm around that the presence and that energy is still there.

That I think can make a big difference in your life. And if you’re open to it, and it’s no different than anything else in your life, if you do any research on kind of the way the mind works and the reticular activating system and what you look for is what you will experience in life, if in your mind what you had is gone permanently, you’ll never be looking for

proof of it or the existence of it because in your mind it’s gone, it’s not there. But if you start with the premise that, we were some form of energy before we came, we kind of condensed into this energy form now, now we return to that energy form. So the energy is still there somewhere. Maybe I can’t see it, but could I sense it? Could I feel it? Maybe. And if you’re open to the possibility, you would be surprised

at the number of things that occur in your life and the number of synchronicities that nobody in the world can explain to you because it defies logic, it defies reality, it defies anything you could possibly wrap your arms around other than what else could you attribute it to?

Anthony Codispoti (59:11)
Is there a specific example of the synchronicities that you’re talking about you care to share?

Cary Daniel (59:17)
And I started writing them in a journal because they would occur so often. And then I stopped writing them down because they occurred so I thought, why am I writing all these down? This is just the way it is. This isn’t unusual anymore. ⁓

I might have to come back to that one. I’m trying to think of something that…

I’m trying to think of something that would really blow your mind. I’ll have come back to that note.

Anthony Codispoti (59:51)
Okay, is gratitude a daily habit or practice for you? Is it something you roll out of bed and you’ve got a ⁓ practice to help ingrain that into yourself?

Cary Daniel (1:00:05)
I’d say yes, it’s one of our core beliefs. It’s our first core belief for company. Yes, absolutely the first core belief. Because if you are not grateful for what you have now, you’re not going to be happy at your next level or wherever. So I would say I’m better at it in the evening than I am in the morning. In the morning, it’s supposed to be my, what are your three gratitudes?

Anthony Codispoti (1:00:09)
The Company

Cary Daniel (1:00:34)
that’s supposed to be on my morning routine.

Anthony Codispoti (1:00:36)
And the cup he just held up for the camera for listeners. says, don’t worry, be grateful. And then it’s got a three line items that you’re supposed to fill in.

Cary Daniel (1:00:45)
So I used to be much better at it in the morning. In the morning, it was. It was a three, every morning, three gratitudes. I’m much better at the evening right before I go to bed. That’s what I try and do. But I did a thing for a long time. And this is like right after my son landed and passed away. ⁓ Somebody had mentioned to me about doing gratitudes and trying not to repeat. Well, you write them down. And pretty soon, if you’re doing a day of the journal, you’re sitting here. It’s really easy, right? Family, health.

my children, you know, and then you go on and a couple of weeks later, you’re like, family, I said family, have I said my business? I don’t know if I’ve said my business. And it occurred to me one day when I was in Excel and I was typing something in Excel in a long sheet that if I had typed it before, it would start to fill out the thing. And I thought, you know I’m to do. And so I created, it’s just this simple, an Excel spreadsheet and it’s got one, two, three. And I type in the first cell, my first gratitude, second cell, third cell.

And now I’m in literally I’m online, you know, hundreds, hundreds, hundreds deep. You cannot believe how hard it gets to where, you know, you’ve you’ve listed thousands of gratitudes and now you’re having to get really creative about what you’re grateful for. Because as soon as you type in, no family business, no. ⁓

Anthony Codispoti (1:02:01)
And probably more granular too, I would imagine. Not just business, but I’m grateful for this particular coworker maybe.

Cary Daniel (1:02:07)
Exactly. It’s like long tail keywords in Google. You go from business, weather, family health to the people that work in my business and sunny weather and experiences with my family. And when your mind starts working that way, I I’ve read so many books on this about rewiring your brain and you can experience some very tremendous

impacts in your life in that one shift. That one shift.

Anthony Codispoti (1:02:44)
Do you have, you’ve read so much, but do you have a specific book recommendation, whether it’s on sort of the idea of rewiring your brain or the idea of, because I liked what you were describing, sort of the, we were a form of energy before, we sort of get condensed into this physical form now, and then we kind of go back to the physical form, because it sounds like that was incredibly helpful for you in the healing process.

Either one of those things or maybe something we didn’t even touch on, a book that you might recommend to our listeners.

Cary Daniel (1:03:17)
you know, if…

The struggle that I’ve seen, the struggle with kind of deep personal work on a book is that if you’re not ready for it, you won’t hear it. And so I tell people this all the time. say, I’ll tell you what has worked for me. It may not resonate with you whatsoever. And I know that to be true because the one I’m going to tell you about, The Seed of the Soul,

Gary Zucoff.

Somebody was talking about it one day and I’m like, you know what? That sounds pretty interesting. I’m going to check that out. Went, I bought it, reading through it. as I started reading through it, I’m like, wait a minute, this guy, I go to my bookshelf. I had had it for years. I’d started reading it years ago and I threw it on a shelf. And ⁓ I started reading that book and there was a chapter in their own illusion. I bet I read that chapter 200

Anthony Codispoti (1:04:08)
Ha ha.

Cary Daniel (1:04:23)
because I got to it and I’m like, wow, something here is hitting me, but I can’t, it’s like when you’re trying to remember somebody’s name and you’re like, it’s right there. ⁓ Reading that chapter, I’m like, ooh, this is something’s tapping me. What is it? What is it? And I couldn’t figure out what it was. I couldn’t figure out what it was. And so I finished reading the book and I kept coming back to that chapter over and over because it was nagging me. It was like me forgetting a name.

And I kept reading it and one day it hit me and I was like, holy shit, I got it. And transformational, absolutely transformational. And it’s basically about making conscious decisions versus unconscious decisions. So Gary Zukof, Sita Sol, absolutely unbelievable. The Untethered Soul, Michael Singer is a great one. ⁓ There’s so many that are out there. You kind of have to find…

somebody that resonates with you on where you’re at in your journey. And I’ve had some books that meant a lot to me early on and I read them now and then I’ve had some that Deepak Chopra. Deepak Chopra, I probably read 10 of his books when I was in my 20s. No clue. I read them because I had heard about him and

You know, I started reading this stuff and I get done with the book. I’m like, I have no idea what that guy’s talking about.

Anthony Codispoti (1:05:53)
It’s just bouncing off, yeah.

Cary Daniel (1:05:56)
He was in Kansas City a couple of years ago. went to hear him speak and I mean, I can hear him now. I couldn’t hear him before. There’s a lot of people like that. Eckhart Tolle is like that. You can listen to Eckhart Tolle and go, what is he talking about? Or you can listen to Eckhart Tolle and go, wow, unbelievable. it’s just kind of what you’re, where you are in your journey. And, you know, for some people,

Anthony Codispoti (1:06:20)
where you are.

Cary Daniel (1:06:25)
those will really hit home for you and other people you’re gonna go, that was worthless. Put it on a shelf and come back to it.

Anthony Codispoti (1:06:33)
Kerry, before I move into my last question, did one of those synchronicities pop into your head?

Cary Daniel (1:06:39)
⁓

Anthony Codispoti (1:06:42)
putting you on the spot.

Cary Daniel (1:06:44)
Yeah. Yeah. I wish I would have thought about that because that’s okay. I would have gone and I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you a story, not necessarily synchronous. I’ll tell you a story.

One morning, was probably two months after my son passed away, I was laying in bed and at my old house, we had ⁓ kind of a block window, you know, it lets the light in but you can’t see through it, kind of facing the east. And so in the mornings when the sun come up, man, some days you’d be lying in bed and man, that sun would hit you in the face and so you’d almost be squinting your eyes.

And I remember one morning laying there and I was like, man, the sun’s coming up. And so kind of was closing my eyes a little tighter. And I was kind of in that state where you’re not dreaming, but you’re not awake. I was trying to stay asleep, but the sun was hitting me in the eyes. And ⁓ my mind just started wandering. And I had this conversation.

Anthony Codispoti (1:07:39)
in between.

Cary Daniel (1:07:56)
with my son. And it went back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and just about all kinds of different things and topics and all this stuff. And I’m laying there. And then when it was done, I was like, wow, that was awesome.

And I opened my eyes and it was like four o’clock in the morning.

One the sunlight, can’t explain it to you. And for anybody that’s ever had a dream, you know how you wake up, you have your dream. And then you got some clear visions of it at first. then throughout the day, then you can’t even remember what you dreamed about. I went in the next room and I wrote page after page. I wrote every question and every answer of that conversation, like it was being dictated to me. No loss of recollection. No, what did he say? It was like it was being

It was unbelievable. Can’t explain it to you.

Anthony Codispoti (1:08:57)
That’s beautiful. Thank you for sharing that. So before I ask my last question, Kerry, a few housekeeping items. When I give people your website addresses again, nexttaff.com, N-E-X-T-A-F-F.com, ⁓ if you’re interested in finding a job or interested in hiring Nexttaff for employment services. And nexttaff-franchise.com, if you’re interested in the franchise opportunity.

And then as a reminder, if you want to get more people access to benefits that won’t hurt them financially and carries a financial upside for your company, reach out to addbackbenefits.com. And finally, if you take just a moment to leave us a comment or review on your favorite podcast app, you’ll hold a special place in my heart forever. So last question for you, Kerry, what do do for fun outside of work?

Cary Daniel (1:09:45)
You know, I tell people this all the time when they say, well, you know, you’re, you know, mid fifties now you’re thinking about retiring. And I tell people, I like to golf. I don’t love to golf. I like to hunt. I don’t love to hunt every day. I like to fish. I don’t love fish. There’s a lot of things I like to do, but I mean, being a business owner, being involved in activities every single day that move the needle and get people fired up.

That’s what I enjoy doing. So I don’t know that I would ever retire, but I do a lot of other things out there. I do competitive barbecues, fish, hunt, all that other good stuff. But you want to get me going in a conversation, then you get somebody sitting there and says they’re thinking about opening a business or they’re thinking about doing this and.

Hey, I’m thinking about marketing or something like that. I mean, I could sit there, these conversations, you you want to talk spirituality, you want to talk this, I could do that for hours and hours and time flies. you know, that’s when you know that you’re in your flow when there’s no sense of time. It’s easy, it’s effortless. And I could do that all day.

Anthony Codispoti (1:11:06)
Kerry Daniel from Next Staff, want to be the first to thank you for sharing both your time and your story with us today. I really appreciate it.

Cary Daniel (1:11:13)
Yep. Thank you, Anthony. I appreciate it.

Anthony Codispoti (1:11:15)
Folks, that’s a wrap on another episode of the Inspired Stories podcast. Thanks for learning with us today.