From Teen Mother to Tech CEO: Tana Greene’s Revolutionary Approach to Workforce Flexibility

Anthony Codispoti : 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 Tana Greene, CEO of My Work Choice. They provide fully managed staffing solutions for manufacturing and distribution, ensuring companies get dependable workers while securing 100% shift coverage. Under Tana’s leadership, My Work Choice was recognized as one of the most innovative companies to watch in 2024. And Tana herself was inducted into the Carolina Entrepreneur Hall of Fame in 2022.

She was also named among the 100 women to know in America for 2024 and honored by the smart business dealmakers Hall of Fame. With over 37 years of experience in staffing, Tana is known for transforming a national firm into an organization that champions flexibility and personal growth. She authored Creating a World of Difference where she shares her insights on leadership and resilience.

Tana overcame notable challenges early in life and turned them into stepping stones for success, earning her a reputation as a leader who supports others in reaching their potential. Now before we get into all that good stuff, today’s episode is brought to you by My Company, AdBag 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. One recent client was able to add over $900 per employee per year in extra cash flow by implementing one of our innovative programs. Results vary for each company and some organizations may not be eligible.

To find out if your company qualifies, contact us today at adbackbenefits.com. All right, back to our guest today, the CEO of My Work Choice, Tana Greene. I appreciate you making the time to share your story today.

Tana Greene : I am thrilled to be here.

Anthony Codispoti : So Tana, your journey begins with overcoming very significant personal adversity at a very young age. Can you share that story with us and how it led you into the staffing industry?

Tana Greene : Absolutely, absolutely. So for me, I was that perfect teenager going into high school. I was on a roll. I was the chaplain of my school when that was an elected position.

I was the president of the principal’s committee. And I’m starting ninth grade. Well, what does every girl want starting high school?

To validate themselves, they think they need the boyfriend. Well, I got Mr. Wright, actually was a senior. He was the top of his class. He was a surfer boy. Everybody wanted to date him and he picked me. So here I am halfway through my ninth grade and I have the boyfriend of the century.

Fast forward to summer of that year. And just so you know, I grew up in a very leave it to be household. My parents were older when they had me. They had adopted my brother and were told they couldn’t have children and voila, I appeared in their life. And so it was just a very magical time. I mean, everything was perfect in our lives. And I started dating the boy.

And next thing I know, it’s the summer between my ninth and 10th grade and I got pregnant. This was 1974. So it was before abortion. It was before anybody even used the word in the south. We didn’t even use the word pregnant. In fact, we never said that word in front of my grandmother. So it was very proper, very Christian, very proper.

Anthony Codispoti : So when I conservative environments, exactly the picture to understand. Okay, exactly.

Tana Greene : And so here I am 15 years old. It’s in my summer. My parents sat down. Luckily, my parents were incredible. We sat down with them and said, this is our situation. I remember going to my mother and saying, I heard my dad was at work. And I remember saying to her, I started crying and I said, you’re not going to love me anymore.

And she goes, what? And I said, I think I might be pregnant. And she looked at me and she said, Oh, I think you are too. And she hugs me and says, I was so afraid I was going to be too old to be a grandmother. I get tears in my eyes thinking about it to this day. I wish she was still alive, because I would ask her, what were you really thinking?

Anthony Codispoti : But that response in the moment was just pure gold.

Tana Greene : It’s exactly what you needed to hear. Unconditional love. It was unconditional love. It was a situation that she knew I was in and why make it worse. So she embraced me and said, when your father gets home, let’s have a discussion with him.

Why don’t you have Larry come over and let’s have a discussion. So we go into the living room with my parents that evening. And they said, what do you want to do? And we said, we want to be married. So two weeks later, I’m walking down the aisle wearing a white dress. The women at the church came together and through the reception. This is how life was back then.

Everybody bought a potluck. There was no alcohol. There was no music. There was nothing that you know up today in weddings.

But there was the white dress and it was down the aisle. My parents had a second home that they rented out and they asked the renters to move out and they furnished it for us. We moved into the home to live happily ever after, right? So you think the story is going to go right? I should have seen the signs when dating, but I didn’t because I thought he loved me so much that he did not want me to be around certain people, that he didn’t want me riding the bus.

He would pick me up and take me to school. What I didn’t realize is that was control. What I didn’t realize is what that would turn into later. And it became abuse physically. But they came, you know, it’s now I speak out a lot about domestic violence.

I’m doing a national project, which we’ll talk about later. But it’s the kind of thing where you think somebody’s just caring for you. You don’t realize what’s happening. And then when you find yourself in those cycles of abuse where you get hit and then he cries and says, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to do that. You think it’s your fault.

You think you can make it better and you think, oh, he’s sorry, he’s going to and then it continues to happen over and over. Well, I’d never witnessed this. I’ve never been around it in my life. I’ve never seen anything like it. I didn’t tell anyone because I kept thinking I had to fix it. And this is what women do. We’re going to fix things.

Anthony Codispoti : And especially back then from what you’re saying, you were all alone. Like this wasn’t happening to other school.

Tana Greene : I’m not in school. I’m at home all day. He takes the phone with him to work when you had the rotary dial phones. Oh, my goodness. Because I wasn’t allowed to speak to anybody when he wasn’t there. So I’m living through this. And I don’t know what to do. I’ve been cut off from all my friends and family. My parents weren’t even allowed to be there unless he was home. So he wanted to make sure I wasn’t telling anybody this was happening. So it was about a year and a half into it. My parents had offered to babysit and we were going out one night for to be with friends. Well, I’m 17. What does every girl want to do? Be with the girlfriends, right? I spend all day getting ready.

And it’s funny. It’s back then you didn’t have you didn’t have hairdryers and except these big things that go on your head and you didn’t have curling irons. So you either iron your hair or you put it up on top of your head with these big, huge Mickey Mouse rollers so that you had this straight hair for the night.

I remember doing that all day long getting ready. And he was late getting home from work. And by the time he came in the door, he’d been drinking.

And I was crying and saying, I wanted to go out. So he says, fine, get in the car. So we get in the car and we argue going to my parents house.

He takes the carrier out with the eight month old sets it on the ground, proceeds to beat the crap out of me and drive off. I have to go to my parents door. I ring the doorbell. My dad, mom come to the door. My dad takes one look at me.

I have blood coming down my face. He goes gets his keys and goes and looks for him. My mother takes me in. Luckily, she was very smart and that she called a friend who was at the YWCA because there was nothing called domestic violence. There was no hotline.

There was nothing to turn to. My dad luckily did not find him that night because God only knows what he would have done to him. But the counselor that they connected me with, I began to have daily conversations with him starting on that Monday.

And by Friday, and I wish I knew his name, I wish I could reach out to him. I don’t remember. But he said, there’s nothing wrong with you on the fifth day. He said, this is the situation you’re in. And he named it for me. And he explained the cycles of violence and he explained what was happening. And he said, you have a choice to make. You can be a victim or you can be a survivor.

Clear as day. You need to make that decision. I suggest you go home and write some goals and decide what you want to be and where you want to be in life. And I wrote four goals on a piece of paper. One, I wanted to graduate high school because I remember I quit after the ninth grade. I wanted a cap and gown. I did not want a GED. The second thing I wanted was own my own home by the time I was 25. Oh boy. I wanted to marry a knight in shining armor somewhere in this game plan. And I wanted to own my own business by the time I was 30. So I didn’t even know what targeted goals were, right?

Measurable targeted goals. I didn’t know what they were, but I wrote them on a piece of paper. I graduated high school. I get finished my three years in two by going to night school and summer school. I bought my first home at 22. I married my knight in shining armor at 26 and we just celebrated 40 years last weekend. Yay. And opened the doors of this business at 29.

Oh my goodness. So that was the beginning of understanding when you really want something if you have clear cut goals and you don’t deviate from those. It doesn’t mean the path is easy, but it means you can achieve them. And that was the beginning of my journey forward out of the mess I was in.

Anthony Codispoti : So it sounds like this gentleman from the YWCA will call him Honest Bob. Honest Bob. Yes. Honest Bob. These very simple words that he put in front of you, like it triggered something in your brain. You go and you write down these goals that I have to say as you were running through them, Tana, I’m like, those are pretty audacious goals given what your current situation is. But you hit all of them out of the park. You got there faster than what the goal that you had set was. And I’m kind of curious to understand this because some people, they achieve a lot. Some people struggle to get there.

Everybody struggles at some point in their lives, multiple points in their lives. Where do you think this came from? Like, is this like, did you inherit this quality from your parents? Were they like this? Do you think that the trauma that you went through somehow set you up or prepared you for this? Like, I don’t know. Do you have any sense of where this comes from?

Tana Greene : Anthony, I’ve asked that question so many times. I’ve had it asked of me so many times and I’ve thought about it very deeply and I will say my parents did not. My mother was very timid, very shy, stay-home mother. Only got involved in church things was not forthfall. My dad was in the military. He retired in the military when I was six because he was older and went to work for the New York Times.

And then later in life he part-time sold real estate but neither one of them were or drivers. But what they did instill in my what my father did instill in me is that you really have to follow your gut and your instincts. And I think sometimes the trauma that I went through may have given me that and plus the fact that I achieved, I was achieving these goals. I was seeing them come to fruition may have catapulted me into that but even to this day, I mean at my age now, I still don’t settle for much. So I don’t know whether it was learned or it was in me somewhere. I don’t really know.

Anthony Codispoti : I mean it sounds when you were telling the very beginning of the story, you know starting your freshman year in high school, it sounds like you were kind of an overachiever from the beginning, right?

You voted the chaplain, the I don’t know the president’s council or the principal’s council or you know there was a lot of things that you know were kind of lining up for you. Yes. Yeah okay.

Tana Greene : Yeah so and I was always that way so yeah that was probably part of it and then this probably catapulted it even further. But there are times still to this day, fear can get in the way and if you let fear overcome your goals, you will never achieve them.

Anthony Codispoti : Let’s do a little sidebar on this because I hear that from a lot of folks. You know I it’s a pleasure to interview many people and a little bit more privately usually off air, I hear about the fear that you know they overcame or have to continue overcoming and so you know even today as the CEO of this you know huge staffing company and you’ve had lots of companies and exits and successes along the way, you still deal with fear on absolutely a periodic regular basis whatever it is.

Yes. How does that show up for you and then what do you do to move through it? Because I think for a lot of people when they hit that fear they’re like oh this is God or the universe telling me that this is too hard that I shouldn’t do this. What’s your approach?

Tana Greene : I think for me when I feel that it’s deep in your gut, it feels sick, it feels not right, you’re not doing your normal routines, you’re not interacting with your friends and family. There’s a lot of telltale signs of when fear and a lot of times it’s not real blatant, it’s happening behind the scenes in the background and you get this feeling and what I’ve realized is the number one thing is I don’t have a plan B. I’ve lost control of the situation and I don’t have that I don’t feel I have control or I’m not finding a way to take control. So I think whenever that happens I have to stop and go what is the worst that can happen and then how am I going to drive myself out of this? Or what has to take place to get to plan B and whenever I can get clarity on plan B, fear is gone. Now I’m off and running again but it’s real easy to get mired in that fear and I’m not saying I do it instantly. I’m a hard slow learner and sometimes it takes a two by four and I’ve been hit by that two by four more times than I can count but ultimately at some point I’ll go wait a minute what is going on here and why do I feel like this and what’s it going to take to get out of this and it can be everything from somebody moving. Moving is a very traumatic thing divorce death all of these things can be can bring that fear in but if you can stop and recognize this is where I am I don’t feel like I have a way. Fear only comes when you don’t feel like you have a way out. Interesting. So once I figure the way out fear is gone not saying it’s always the right path and it might change 15 times.

Anthony Codispoti : But here’s what I heard you say it’s kind of like a multi-step process just a few steps though what is the worst that can happen and this step helps you I’m going to guess actually let me hear it from your words what does this step help you with?

Tana Greene : That helps me realize I’m not going to I’m the elephant is not going to eat me that it’s not as bad as my internal is telling it’s not the end of the world. It’s like I went through 9-11 and let me tell you living in a huge home 9-11 hits half my business is gone I’m exiting a franchise I don’t know what’s happening there I don’t know how I’m going to meet payroll I don’t know how I’m going to get computer systems to work all of this is happening in a six-month period of 9-11 and trust me I didn’t see the end of that. I thought shut the business down go to work for somebody else and I went no that is not my path that is not what I’m supposed to be doing I’m affecting lives and what I do and I’ve got to figure a way out of it and so sold the house I mean part of the plan was sell the house and get the equity you know put it back into the business so there’s been many a major cases to where you could have just walked away and said oh god doesn’t mean for me to be doing this right now you know my gut is not right doesn’t feel right just give up and go find an easy path no and every time I’ve grown because of that I read Happiness Now which was written by a Harvard professor and the one quote that stood out to me more than anything is happiness comes from fulfilling potential potential comes with a little bit of pain and growth so I always remember that and I always go this is just one more step that’s taking me to that next level and it’s 66 years old I’m still taking those next steps

Anthony Codispoti : that’s great I’m glad we did a sidebar specifically on that you know that why it’s so important to explore that like what’s the worst that can happen because you take it from you know negative starts start thoughts start spiraling out of control you really catastrophizing this and it’s like okay let’s let’s just walk through it what’s the worst that can happen like I’m not gonna die the elephant’s not gonna eat me right there’s a path forward and so once you’ve kind of set that part aside probably helps to calm your central nervous system to some degree yes and then you can focus on the next question which is what is plan B and once I’ve got an idea let’s get moving forward and and once you get moving forward you feel like at least to some degree probably not a lot early on but to some degree you feel like you’re taking back control like things are back in your hands yeah

Tana Greene : there it is losing control is fear yeah it’s as simple as that

Anthony Codispoti : so connect some of the dots for us how you got from you know bloody face on your your parents steps and you know writing down this list of goals to actually achieving those goals in a relatively short time period

Tana Greene : right right well again I wasn’t involved in high school when I went back I was just there to get my diploma yeah so I actually work every afternoon I would leave school go to work and I would do night school and I would do weekends thank god I have my parents support and I was living with my parents at the end of high school I wanted so badly to go to art school and become an art teacher that’s what I thought I wanted to be so um but I couldn’t afford four years of college and my mother said to me well you can be a nurse um you can be a secretary so I thought well I’m not going to be a nurse I’ll pass out I just see a needle so that’s not going to work so well I guess I could be a secretary so I went to a nine-month business school where I learned to do shorthand typing basic accounting and graduated in nine months with a secretarial certificate and at that time I went to work for Econolodge as the founder’s secretary so I was an executive secretary at age 19 and I was

Anthony Codispoti : probably a pretty good role for you to land huh

Tana Greene : it was great yeah it was great and then the school that I and I’m making eighty two hundred dollars a year and now I’ve moved out on my own my son and I had her own place and I ended up um going back to work for the school that I went to so the director kept up with me through these years and now I’m 21 all those years two years and she said I think you really well in admissions at the school because you can talk from a place of purpose to what the education did for you in helping you get a real job and I said oh I’d love to do that and she said it’s all commission and I went I can’t do that and she said I’ll tell you what I’ll give you a thousand dollars a month draw against commission because that’s how much I believe in you and in 90 days if it’s not working out I’ll help you get another secretarial job I said yeah what if I got to lose well in six months I made 35 thousand dollars took my son to Disney World and bought my house

Anthony Codispoti : wow so you look pretty good at this

Tana Greene : I was very good because that was from a place of purpose and I think that’s where I started realizing if I’m in purpose I didn’t know what it meant but if I was doing something that was from my heart it would truly play out in a successful way and so that’s kind of how I ended up in this business because it was to help people get jobs

Anthony Codispoti : and so uh it’s amazing and so how did you get from there to starting your own business

Tana Greene : so we ended up my husband and I got married and we moved to California how’d you know let’s do that for us went to work for um National Education Corporations their largest school as the admissions director and we were living out living the life of Southern California and it was wonderful and um then one day I said I don’t want to do this anymore I want to help people get jobs the part of that I loved about working for the school I enjoyed the enrollment part but the best part was when the people got the job so it was like how can I do that so I went to work for a head hunter in Newport Beach, California that did mainly mergers of attorney firms and large executive um partnerships in insurance and he wanted to start a temporary health division so he hired me to start it 90 days into it I came home and I said to my husband this is our business this is what I want to do and my husband was a nuclear physicist at San Onofre and he says to me I can see this working so we thought well we don’t know anything about the business so we’ll buy a franchise so that’s how we started in 1987 we bought remedy staffing first franchise they ever sold and they said you can have it anywhere but California and Arizona and so we like well let’s go back home okay home was Virginia so we moved back to Virginia and started this May 9th 1988 oh you remember the date

Anthony Codispoti : the exact date I remember the date it’s coming up just off to the races right off to the races well yep and after about two and a half years of being in the Virginia Beach Norfolk area

Tana Greene : we had an opportunity to buy a franchise in Charlotte that was not doing well so we bought that we had the two going and then someone came along and bought the Virginia office didn’t know who it was a broker approached us ended up being my first boss ever at the college small world bought my business so moved to Charlotte started growing that and at the end of the contract because we were the first franchise we didn’t have a non-compete so we and this is kind of a whole story into the purpose thing is through this time I’m going I’m not in purpose anymore because we were making money and I had this crazy idea in my head I guess through church that money was evil and making money wasn’t purpose and I had to do a calling so I had to sell this business to go find my calling I was really mixed up in this whole you can’t have both you it doesn’t flow so at the time that we were thought we were going to exit they’d gone public remedy had gone public they brought in a new CEO and we thought they were going to use the formula and buy us well 9-11 hit half our business is gone the franchise agreement is up in April of the following year of 2002 we had to make a hard decision talk about fear at that point it’s like okay are we going to take this on our own and we sat down and said we want to be a hundred million dollar company we want to be a nationwide company we know how to do that we just knew the goals we wanted we started with the goals and then we started biting off the pieces to get there

Anthony Codispoti : tana you’ve got a history of setting up pretty audacious goals for yourself there’s a pattern here please go ahead

Tana Greene : yeah so so we we started on that journey again we had to sell our house to get there that was tough decision but it would it fit into the plan of what we ultimately wanted and sometimes there’s sacrifice to be made to get to the next goal so that’s what we did and it was the best move we ever did we also went out and hired someone a couple years later that had taken two companies public that knew how to do this and brought him on it’s been 17 years now brought him on to help us grow this he’s the president of our company now and continues to lead the company let it through this transition

Anthony Codispoti : i’m curious to hear how you eventually resolved this conflict of purpose making money making money’s bad i i need to do something that makes less money so it’s more purpose how did you how’d you come to

Tana Greene : it was interesting at the time that we’re going through this we’ve hired a consulting company that came in and tried to help us with these goals i’ve had many a coach throughout the years i highly recommend a coach i highly recommend consultants that can help you drive your business because it makes you think out of the box and i remember this consultant said well why can’t you be in purpose why why do you what is it about that and so you know i told him the whole story and he said but you’re helping people get jobs have you forgotten the reason you went into this and at that point it all clicked and and i went okay at the same time that was happening anthony a friend of mine’s daughter who was a senior in high school called me and said would you come talk to our class we’re talking about healthy relationships would you come talk to my class about your story i had never told my story to anyone now remember i’m on the board at the chamber of commerce um a

Anthony Codispoti : prominent how did she know to ask you to come tell your story

Tana Greene : because her mother was my best friend and knew my story okay gotcha so she knew she didn’t know a lot about it but she knew i’d gotten married at 15 had a child and it wasn’t a healthy relationship so i i said yes and then i panicked and i went what are you doing yeah you’re about to tell the world you know even though it was high school it was like you’re about to tell everybody the story and i remember thinking to myself i don’t know anything about domestic violence except for what i live through so i called the local hotline and i said can you send somebody to help me with this and this woman said absolutely so she comes with me we do the whole thing where i tell my story she backs up with statistics and what happens and about the shelter and how it works and everything else and then next thing i know she said would you go to lunch sure i did not know she was the ceo of the largest domestic violence and rape center crisis center here in charlotte she said would you sit on our board this was 2008 and i said i would love to consider that she said well we’re about to go through a campaign to raise funds i’m thinking this was 0809 well we remember how bad the economy was during then but we needed it so bad in charlotte we had a um a 3,300 square foot facility for all of these women coming in we were putting them in hotels and everything else to keep them safe and we really needed this so i agreed to do it and i ended up on the funding board and we raised 10 million dollars we were only one year late in building that facility which had a hundred beds in it versus 30 beds so we were able to do it and and it was from a standpoint of passion but as i’m going through all of this and i’m working with my coach i said why do i get something out of this and maybe i don’t get something out of other things and she she says well what would you be doing if you were totally retired let’s start there i said well i’ve always wanted to paint i’d probably take an art class so i started oil painting and i didn’t buy canvases this large i bought this is one of my pieces behind me this is huge i bought these huge canvases didn’t even fit my sgp of a little type a right but what came out of all of that between speaking engagements and doing i became the spokesperson during that entire campaign on the news everything that we needed to do i’m taking the art classes and i’m building the business and i realized that winning a 10 million dollar account was great and it gave you a big high but it didn’t didn’t last creating art once you put the glaze on it i donated a lot of pieces i gave them to family members it was done but giving back in this community of these women gave me the ultimate joy of doing that so i kind of was able to break them that it all gave me joy but the lasting part was serving others that

Anthony Codispoti : was the biggest piece and so as you think about where you are today um where are you able to get that sense of purpose from your money-making job as well like if you’ve been able to reframe it as i am helping a lot of people get to work

Tana Greene : yeah and you know what it came from helping people get a job to now we’re empowering a working workforce and when i say that there’s never been flexibility given to an hourly worker if you think about the manufacturing role it was created back in ford when he was building the cars in detroit and he was like i got to fill every minute of every day how am i going to do that well i’m going to create eight-hour shifts they’re going to run three times a day and we’re going to have mandatory overtime well that worked when they were only men in the workforce now you have women in the workforce you have men that share duties with the household and you still expect people to commit to 40 hours a week mandatory overtime and three strikes you’re out it doesn’t work the job the alternative is creating an environment to where they can have flex time.

They can be off if they need to go to the dentist and not get dinged for it. And that is when we created my work choice seven years ago. It was realizing the turnover was 433% in a manufacturing environment, 30% absenteeism a day, and these companies were pumping in six, seven staffing companies to try to fill the void.

And these are people coming in with no training. It was a constant chaos. It was just chaos. Then they went hire a vendor management company to come and manage the chaos.

And it was like, okay, wait a minute. What is the answer to this? And it was absenteeism is causing all the turnover. So how do we deal with that? And then you’ve got manufacturing who says, we can’t get women in the workforce. They’re proud if they’ve got 40% of their workforce women. Okay, we’ve got 56% of our workforce are women.

Anthony Codispoti : And you’re serving the manufacturing industry.

Tana Greene : It’s all the manufacturing distribution. Because they have that we build a bench of workers for a client. It’s still your 40 hour a week workers. 70% of the people are completing their 40 hours like clock work. But you have a 30% of the people that are working 22 hours a week. Well, how that works is the guy here says, Hey, it’s midnight and I’m running 104 fever. Typically, he just doesn’t show up. There’s an 800 number.

Nobody calls it with the gamification of the app. He pushes the button and says, I’m not going to be at work today. That goes out to the community that says they want that first shift. It dings them on their phone and they go, Yeah, I’ll take that shift. 99.9% of the time when somebody drops a shift within six hours, it’s picked up.

Anthony Codispoti : Okay, let’s explore this a little bit. So you talk about the gamification on the app. You got the 800 number. You know, somebody can call real easily. Just get my heads up. Hey, I don’t feel well. I got something going. Whatever.

I’m not coming in today. And most people aren’t doing that. And what is it that is getting people to do that with your app? Right? They get points for it.

Tana Greene : They get points for it.

Anthony Codispoti : And they can use those points for what?

Tana Greene : For more days off for we have every client is different. We build an entire program within their comfort level because some clients are still very strict on this. They haven’t they haven’t quite given up complete flexibility, but they let them have a little bit like they’ll give them two days a month that they might play with. Some of them give them four.

Remember, you don’t pay somebody in an hourly if they’re not there. So why penalize them if they need to be all? You know why? Because they’ve never figured out how to build a bench of people that can fill in.

Anthony Codispoti : So they think if they hit people with this penalty that that’ll somehow incentivize them to Yeah, to show it.

Tana Greene : It’s really going to help you when your car breaks down or it’s really going to help you when your daughter sick or you know,

Anthony Codispoti : no, no, because you’ve built such a bench of talent, a big workforce bench. When somebody raises their hand and says, I’m not coming, you’ve got a whole bunch of people who are like, I’m available. I’d like to earn a little extra money today. Yeah.

Tana Greene : And it could be anywhere from one and a half times the number of people they need to two times. Good example is we had a plant where we have 1200 workers a day. That’s the average. We might have 2400 people that are pre trained production ready.

Anthony Codispoti : Oh, so you’ve got it that you’ve also got these folks trained. It’s not like they’re showing up and they’re spending the first couple of hours learning how to run the machine or whatever they’re doing.

Tana Greene : There is something out there called a marketplace. And you hear a lot about these where, Oh, come to the marketplace and you can find an employee. Well, manufacturing can’t just take anybody and put them in the seat.

They have to have a trained individual to do that. And what we found is that GE, GE is a perfect example because they’ve spoken out in Bloomberg for us and they speak engagements all the time on how this works at GE. You’ve got a workforce. They gave us 290 people that had been terminated for absenteeism. And they said, see if they want to come back

Anthony Codispoti : under your umbrella under the 240 of those came back under the premise that I can work when I want to work. I can pick up whatever shifts I want to pick up.

And if I’m not going to be there, I let them know I’m not going to be there. We also break out the shifts into two blocks. So if it’s a 10 hour work day, you could pick up a five hour shift. If it’s eight hours, you’ll pick up four.

Anthony Codispoti : And so the folks who are most comfortable in this sort of a flex environment in terms of the workers, the employees, they’re what? They’re parents, they’ve got or they’re taking care of somebody or like they don’t know they don’t have a set schedule where it’s like, I know I can work Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Like sometimes I can work on a Monday. Sometimes I can’t. Right.

Tana Greene : And so they can pick their shifts every week. They can get a static shift if they want the 40 hours a week and they can commit to it and then just hit the button when they’re not going to be there or they can be one of the flex workers. So we have a lot of moms that, you know, hey, my kids are in school now and I’ve got this flexibility. I may only do a four hour shift, but I may pick up five of those in a week and I’m, they’re more steady and they don’t turn over because they have the flexibility to continue to live their life and you’ve got retirees or one of our bigger ones too because they’re like, Hey, it’s raining.

I can’t go play golf today. I could go earn $17 an hour in an air conditioned environment packing a box. You know, it’s not hard labor. It’s in a clean environment. It’s easy.

It’s, it’s not like loading trucks. It’s a simple job to do and we get students, a lot of college students love this because, Oh my gosh, it’s midterms. I can’t even think of taking a shift. Well, when you work part time somewhere, I don’t care where it is.

They expect you to be there part time every week. Well, I can’t always do that because of my flex or I’m taking care of an aging parent. I can’t do that, but you think about the gig work that’s out there today. You can go drive an Uber. You can go do Door Dash.

People want the autonomy to do that work, but they don’t necessarily want to drive around with somebody in their car or drive stuff in their car to somebody. Now I can go to the same place. I’m familiar with it. They know my name. They know my work and I’m valued there and it’s not guesswork and I can get as many hours or I want or as few as I want. And last week alone in 22 states, over 10,000 employees, we had a 98% show rate on every shift. Wow. That’s how it works.

Anthony Codispoti : So the first question, it’s a multi-part here. First question, Tana, are a lot of other employment agencies doing this?

Tana Greene : Nobody’s doing it that I know of. Why? Because they’re afraid of change and they’re afraid the client’s not going to accept it. And I will say it’s been a battle to get a client to really let this go because we’ve always lived in this point system of fear.

We’ve never empowered the worker before to let them deal with it themselves. And it’s amazing what comes out of giving that empowerment. But now it’s morphed into a SaaS product because the client said, I want my permanent people to be on it because this is brilliant. They can choose to be out and they can hit the button.

So now we’re starting to build programs for the GEs of the world to let their permanent people actually be able to play on the app as well. Now they can’t see other shifts of other companies or anything like that, but they can use it to be out. And let’s say I took off today because I needed to be at my daughter’s school, but I’d like to pick up those hours this weekend. Now I can go pick up a shift and keep my 40 hours whole. Before all I could do was take that day off and probably get penalties for it.

Anthony Codispoti : So not only can you offer the staffing solution through this app for your clients, but you can also, like you said, now it’s a SaaS, it’s a subscription service where they can do this with their own internal full-time folks.

Tana Greene : Yes, yes, exactly. And it really is just all about changing the job and the perspective of the job. So before it was mandated 40 plus hours a week, now it’s you choose when you want to work. Well, when we run ads in cities, we are always number one or two response on any ads on Indeed. We beat out Amazon in all these big cities. We may be paying two to three dollars less, but we get more recruits because of the flexibility.

Anthony Codispoti : And so that is obviously communicated in that job post. Yes. And people are looking for that. Yes. That word flexibility. That means everything to them.

Tana Greene : We’ll get two to one to anybody running a full-time job. And I remember the CFO of GE saying, I don’t get it. We run an ad, we get three people. You run an ad, you get a hundred people. He goes, we have benefits. The benefit is flexibility. You’re overlooking the biggest benefit to the worker today.

Anthony Codispoti : So you mentioned that there’s been some resistance from folks because this is something new. It’s a new way of thinking, a new approach. How do you continue to grow this and gain more adoption?

Tana Greene : You do it slowly with the client. You’ll start off with one division and you’ll show them the data of how it works. And next thing you know, you’re in their second plant and their third plant and you’re taken over as an exclusive provider, which doesn’t happen today. Most staffing companies are sharing the business because they can’t get enough from one. Once you prove you’ve gotten in the door and done that, they take you with open arms. We don’t even have a sales department. We have grown mainly through referrals, believe it or not.

Anthony Codispoti : Say that again, Tanya. The size of your company, zero sales.

Tana Greene : And I think you just told us last week you had 10,000? Yes. What was the number? 10,000. 10,000 shifts. And you don’t have a sales… There’s nobody doing sales. My president does the sales because they come in asking for a demo.

Wow. It’s word of mouth and it’s growing through like Stanley Black and Deckers are a perfect example. We had two of their locations in the country. Now we have exclusive the entire country.

Anthony Codispoti : So is it a big lift for you to go into a new geography? Because now you’ve got to build up that pull of talent there in that particular city?

Tana Greene : I can build talent two weeks. I put these ads and I get bombarded and our app is all self-sufficient. So they come on, they do everything in the app. We have AI on the back end. All the chat is done. We have grown our business 10-fold and not increased our staffing level through AI.

Anthony Codispoti : That’s amazing.

Tana Greene : We don’t have one branch office, not one branch office. It’s all done from one call center. How are you using AI? Mainly through the chat. It’s all through the process of the application, everything. And we use it to judge how many people we need at a specific site based on turnover, based on need.

We can kind of put that in play to give us an output. If the normal is 400, I may need 650. But if they have big fluctuating schedules, I kind of need to know what that level is to staff to. Those are the two areas that mostly we’re using AI that saved us the most money and time. Fascinating.

Anthony Codispoti : And it sounds to me like given that this model, that this approach is still relatively new, that you’re probably just rolling up your sleeves and thinking about how do we get this idea to as many people as possible? But are there, how many steps down the road are you thinking? Where do you see this going? Because I know you’ve got the entrepreneur’s brain and it doesn’t turn off. And this is just a seedling of what I think is probably to come.

Tana Greene : Yeah. I really believe now that this is bigger than us, that it needs to be in the hands of the world, not just our small company. And I think it’s going to end up partnering, I can see us partnering with a large strategic that has branch offices and has big contracts, and just laying it over what they’re currently doing. To take an average of the show up rate in the staffing right now for Light Industrial is 49% to fill every show. It’s a mindset because typically you’re giving a requisition for 100 people, right?

And you have 70 show up, that’s a 70% show rate. But what happens day two on that shift? So it’s, it’s hours filled that we’re judging now instead of a requisition filled. So in the staffing industry, they’re filling 49% average hours worked. We fill 98%. That’s absurd. Yeah, I know. And plus we have no branch offices.

Anthony Codispoti : And so to partner with a large strategic is, I sense that’s probably more than just, you know, here’s the app, because there’s a lot of process that goes to it, right? Like, it’s the hiring, it’s the, it’s the advertising for the positions, right? Right. So what do you, what does that look like?

Tana Greene : I don’t know if you’ve done any of them yet. It’s no, we’re talking with some now. That’s what that’s, I think we’ll be the next step. We could grow it organically, but it’s going to take a lot longer to grow it organically than it would delay it over something move fast, especially in international.

Anthony Codispoti : Yeah. Super interesting. Tana, I would love to hear about your book, creating a world of difference. Tell me what was the inspiration there? What’s it about?

Tana Greene : The inspiration there was really about working out a purpose, which we talked about. But it was really taking our core values. And what does that look like in creating a world of difference within your company?

How do you do that? I mean, we all know what mission vision values are, right? I’ve had mission vision values for 38 years, but it wasn’t till about 15 years ago that I really stopped and said, what is my values? What is my values? Because it has to come from the top down.

And how does that play in the business? So I sat down with, again, a coach and started whiteboarding. What is important to me?

And where do I see and where did these stories come from? So we started with, see the awesomeness in others. That was that was our number one. That came from really the way my mother reacted to me when I told her I was pregnant. It was that feeling of somebody embracing you, not judging you. And that seeing the awesomeness in everybody, people react differently when they feel that. When they don’t feel they’re being judged. And so taking that into the business was really important, especially people coming in that don’t have jobs and they’re looking for jobs.

Imagine how low they feel. Seeing the awesomeness in them and building them up was was our number one. Number two was dare to be different. Well, I definitely have dared to be different in my life. There’s a pattern of that.

Yeah. But it kind of goes back in my book. I wrote a whole chapter on my fifth grade, because I was sent to an all black school. It was integration.

It was 1971. It’s segregation, excuse me. Sending us across town to an all black school. I can remember my parents and all the neighbors in our living room going, we’re never going to let our kids do this. This is not going to happen.

We’re going to stand up for it. I remember touring the local Christian private school because my parents were going to put me in that. Next thing I know, the fall rolled around and got on the little yellow bus and went to the all black school across town.

And there was a principal there, Mr. Bravel. And I write about him in my book because he must have seen something in me then. And he asked me if I would do announcements. So what he saw was, I guess, a leader within the group. And he said, I’m going to put you up here.

Well, talk about being different and being put out there. And it’s funny, I sent him a copy of the book. When I, I never told him, never called him, just wrote about him and sent it. And I got a phone call one day, I’m sitting in my desk and my assistant says, there’s a Mr. Bravel on the phone for you. And I said, you are kidding me.

So I answered the phone and he goes, could you do me a favor? Could you send me a picture of you from school? I need to make sure I’m putting two and two together. I think I know who you are, but I’m not sure. I sent him that picture and he called me and he said, I knew it was you. I just knew that was who it was. And he said he carried that book everywhere he went and shared it with everybody he has since passed, but he was honored as the last alive principle that went through all of that segregation in 1971. So very specially, he was in his 90s at that point.

So that dare to be different. And say it mean it do it was the third one. And that was all about my father taught me that he was a mentor to me. Even when I went to buy my house, he said to me, I said, what do you think dad? And he said, what does your gut tell you?

And he was all about, but if you start it, you’re finished it. And that is one of the core values that we have carried through. If you say it, you better mean it and you better do it because that’s what people value. And that’s when people trust you.

And then the last one is easy. It’s never settle. I obviously didn’t settle for much and I still don’t.

So that was big. But really, it’s really all about how do you find that within yourself? You have stories. What are they and how do they drive your life? How do they drive your parenting? And there are certain ones in there that are very deep rooted because of what you’ve been through that become your values. It’s easy to just pick words out of a dictionary. And then for me, it’s really about as far as the mission, it’s empowering the working world. It’s a purpose.

Anthony Codispoti : And where can people find this book? On Amazon. Creating a world of difference. We’ll include a link to it on Amazon. Show notes for folks. Great. What advice would you have for others looking to achieve their own level of success?

Tana Greene : Well, it depends on what you deem as success. Number one, what’s important to you. Really identifying what is that. And it may not, my path of success may not be your path of success. But I think just really being able to be honest with yourself and what’s, you know, just saying I want money is not driving where you truly need to be. It is what do you want? What do you want others to say about you? What do you want to, what did your epitaph say? What is it that you want to leave? What do you want people saying about you when they come to the church that day and you’re gone? What is that? And how do you want people to left feeling? What’s the feeling you want to give people? All of that ties into your path.

Anthony Codispoti : How do you connect that then to making money? Like, well, I want to help people. I want, you know, we all have sort of these, most of us have sort of these more noble ambitions. But at the end of the day, a lot of people listening, hey, I’ve still got bills to pay. Oh, absolutely. Tana, how do I kind of get these two to marry together?

Tana Greene : Right. Well, I think it’s, and I think you can answer this easily is why do you do what you do? It’s the why. You do it because you want to inspire people. I mean, it’s, you have to understand the why. If you don’t connect the why dots and the why can be as simple as I sweep up at Disney. And why? Because it creates an environment for happiness for people that come here. It’s a simple why. Answer the why and everything else becomes purpose.

Anthony Codispoti : Simon Sinek had a great Ted talk on that. It’s become famous. If people haven’t seen it, it’s worth googling. Yes. Any particular daily habits, practices, rituals, Tana, that get you started, keep you on track, keep you centered?

Tana Greene : It’s important to me to find quiet time. I am an extrovert, but I do need my quiet time. And I do that. I get up early every morning. And I am on my back porch. I don’t care what the temperature is. I don’t care what the weather is.

I’m out there. I have a heat lamp. And I have fans when it’s hot. But that’s my time to reflect on what I’m thankful for every day. I try to find three things from the day before that I’m thankful and grateful for. And then I really think about what do I want this day to bring to me before I begin my day. And it’s a simple ritual. It doesn’t need to take more than 15, 20 minutes. It’s my way to meditate. I can’t meditate. I’ve tried. My brain just won’t stay that quiet.

Anthony Codispoti : You found a modified version that works for Tana Green.

Tana Greene : Right. But that is the, and when I don’t do that, my whole day’s off.

Anthony Codispoti : Tell me about imposter syndrome. Oh my gosh. There’s no way that this affects you, right? All the successes that you’ve had along the way, all the hurdles that you’ve overcome. Surely you are very confident in yourself all the time. Absolutely not.

Tana Greene : Absolutely not. I would say I had some imposter syndrome coming into this podcast. You know, it’s like, well, people really believe your story. Are they really, do they really want to hear what you have to say?

Really? I think that imposter syndrome lives within us all the time. Sometimes worse than others. But I think pushing beyond that has given me the strength to go to the next level. It’s kind of, when I look back to the fulfill your potential, it’s pushing yourself out there.

And the more you do that, the more comfortable you feel. But that imposter syndrome still to this day, albeit some function, and I’ll feel like I’ve got to be quiet. I was sitting in boardrooms years ago and I wouldn’t say anything because my mother said to me, you’re bossy. And she said, you need to be quiet. In other words, women need to be seen, not heard. And I took that into business meetings and boy, I wouldn’t say anything.

I would wait for the right moment. I never interrupted. And to this day, I have to remind myself that I have something valuable to say. I still live in that world of imposter syndrome. I don’t think it ever leaves you. I think if it does, you’re a narcissist.

Anthony Codispoti : That’s a good perspective. And I appreciate you being open and honest about that. Because I think everybody suffers from this. Everybody I’ve ever gotten to open up about it. But they think that they’re alone.

They think it’s just me that feels inadequate. And I had a guest a while back that framed imposter syndrome as his greatest superpower. And I was like, oh, I love that. Rather than it being this thing that I’m trying to run away from and revalidate myself, he’s like, no, it’s my greatest superpower because it’s what makes me get up out of bed every day. And go after it and re-prove myself. He’s like, so I don’t try to get rid of it. I don’t try to get away from it. That’s the thing that feels me and pushes me forward. Yes. Yes. Yeah.

Tana Greene : Still a feel good when you feel it.

Anthony Codispoti : It does not. I don’t think there’s any way around that. But maybe if we can look at it as the fire under our rear ends that gets us moving, then it’d be like, that’s just, that’s God. That’s mother nature. That’s my biology telling me it’s time to get moving. Right?

Tana Greene : That’s right. And one thing we didn’t discuss yet that I wanted to bring up is on my goal sheet two years ago, I had, I wanted to do something national with domestic violence, not just local. And I had just put this on my goal board. It was like December. And in February, I got an email.

And usually these emails I get, you know, they go into trash, junk, junk, junk. But for some reason I read this one. And it was, we had done some research and found an article that you had done in ink magazine talking about your domestic violence situation. And we’re working on a museum project in San Francisco called the Courage Museum. It’s going to be located next to the Presidio. It’s going to be housed there, but there’ll be a traveling component and an education component to people who’ve overcome things. And we found your story and would like to know if you want to participate.

Well, I answered the call. Little did I know it was going to be as big of a project as it is. It opens in 2026. It’s called the Courage Museum. And it’s 15 stories.

I’m one of 15. And it’s going to be like a hologram. I flew out to California and filmed for three days with a documentary company that is, that is, you see all their documentaries on Netflix. They’re big ones, right? And they said to me, they wanted an environment that represented me. And we tried and tried and tried to find something. And I said, it’s my business.

That’s what represents me. They go, fine, we’re going to ship your office out. They literally came in and created up my artwork, created up all my stuff, shipped it out there, recreated my office. And we did this entire filming.

Anthony Codispoti : And somehow that was more efficient than then coming to you where it was already set up?

Tana Greene : Well, because they’re crews. If you saw their crews, it was big crew.

Anthony Codispoti : Okay. So a lot of people that they’d have to travel and put up in hotels. And okay.

Tana Greene : So now I actually, this will travel. It will go from city to city. And it will have the educational component. And you can even interact with me with an iPad, ask me questions. And with AI, I go right to that point and answer your questions. It’s going to be fascinating.

Anthony Codispoti : So that’s coming out. So this isn’t in a fixed location. It’s a traveling exhibit.

Tana Greene : It has both. The fixed locations at the Presidio, which is right next to the Golden Gate Bridge. And then there will be a travel component that goes city to city. And there’s an educational component that’s going to roll out to all of the high schools and colleges. Wow. And it’s, it’s from everything from hate crimes to domestic violence to what happens on the reservations to women, all of the subjects.

And it’s not just women. It’s anytime you’ve had to overcome something dramatic in life, they’ve covered that subject. And it’s just, I got to go out for a storytelling, they call it a storytelling event where they bring in a lot of the donors. And I got to hear some of the other stories that the survival of a girl in high school during one of the shootings. She was the only one left alive in her classroom down in Florida. And she played dead underneath another body on top of her and just hearing her story and how she’s taking it to where she’s taking it in life.

And it’s just overcoming. And they had a girl, she was 28. And he, at the time I was 64, they put us on stage together and they showed snippets. We hadn’t seen our story yet. She showed some of her story and some of mine, they were identical, identical. And it was, this doesn’t change just because times have changed.

Domestic violence has not changed. And so they’re doing great work just to, for me, it was naming it. Once that doctor named it for me, I could get out of it. So it’s like, if I could have heard that earlier on, maybe I wouldn’t have married it.

Maybe I wouldn’t have even dated him more than a few times. But it’s naming things like this to be aware. So I’m just, I’m just very proud. It’s called the courage museum. The courage.

Anthony Codispoti : And can people see it now or it’s not coming out until next year, 2026?

Tana Greene : It’s not coming out until next year. There are the education.

Anthony Codispoti : You saw a preview of it, but it’s not available for public view yet.

Tana Greene : Not yet. So that’s exciting.

Anthony Codispoti : Well, if it’s all right, maybe we’ll have you back when that comes out and you’ll have some snippets that we can share and we can, we can sort of talk about the impact that it’s having because that sounds fascinating.

Tana Greene : That would be great. Tanner, what’s one thing you wish more people knew about your industry? I really wish they knew how important the people were that they hire. They think of it as a commodity. I wish it wasn’t such a commodity because it is people driven and I can’t understand why it becomes just a commodity.

I can order 50 today and then when they get here, I can say, yeah, I only need 25 of you going home. I mean, it’s like the human part of it is, is gone. I think that is the part that bothers me the most about our industry because these are people and they’re working and they want to be valued too. That’s the one thing and then just the accepting change and understanding that our world, we’re not going to put that genie back in the box with technology.

This is going to continue to drive the gig economy jobs are going to continue to drive change, technology drives change, accept it, find a way to work with it rather than fight it and let’s make our world better.

Anthony Codispoti : I love that. One more question for you, Tana, but before I ask it, I want to do two things. First of all, I’m going to invite all the listeners to hit the follow button on their favorite podcast app. That way you continue to get more great interviews like we’ve had today with Tana Green, the CEO of my work choice. Tana, I also want to let people know the best way and you choose from the following to get in touch with you directly to follow your story or to follow my work choices story.

Tana Greene : Right. LinkedIn is the best way to do it. I’m on LinkedIn. My work choice is on LinkedIn. They’ll continue to post those stories and feel free if you want to get in touch with me directly. My email address is TanaG at myworkchoice.com.

Anthony Codispoti : Okay, you sure you want to put that out there?

Tana Greene : Yep, I’ll put that out there. I hope I get a bunch to answer because I would love to help anybody.

Anthony Codispoti : That’s amazing. Last question for you. Let’s say you and I reconnect in a year and you are celebrating something. What is it? Probably grandkids. I have two now and they’re quite my life. What are their ages?

Tana Greene : One is almost 15. Oh goodness. Yep, because remember I got married really early. You started young. And then 20 years later, I have my daughter and her daughter is now six months old.

Anthony Codispoti : Oh, wow. So fingers crossed that there’s more on the way. Is that what we’re saying?

Tana Greene : We’re hoping not with the one with the 15 year old. He just turned 50. I think he’s finished.

Anthony Codispoti : Well, Tana, this has been a lot of fun. I want to be the first one to thank you for sharing both your time and your story with us today. I really appreciate it.

Tana Greene : Thank you. I’ve really enjoyed my time. Thank you again. Look forward to coming back.

Anthony Codispoti : All right. Okay. Book it. That’s a wrap on another episode of the Inspired Stories Podcast, folks. Thanks for learning with us today.