Matt Horine’s Reindustrialization Mission: Building On-Demand Labor for American Manufacturing

Anthony Codispoti (00:00)
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 Matt Horine. He is the head of Reindustrialization and Growth Innovation at Variable. They are a software development company founded in 2015

Variable provides an on-demand labor marketplace and workforce management platform, helping manufacturing and distribution businesses handle fluctuating demand with more efficiency. During his time at Casper Technologies, Matt spearheaded daily operations, leading to successful mergers and integration with commercial partners. He also held key positions at IntelliCentrics, focusing on strategic growth there as well. At Variable,

He has played a critical role in managing enterprise level engagement and developing market strategies, resulting in meaningful cost savings and team expansion. He draws on years of expertise to foster a culture of innovation and continuous growth. His passion for operational excellence and innovation makes him a standout leader in his field. Before we get into all that good stuff today, our episode is brought to you by my company.

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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, the head of reindustrialization of variable, Matt Horine. Thanks for making the time to share your story today.

Matt (02:06)
Yeah, thank you, Anthony. Thanks for having me on.

Anthony Codispoti (02:08)
I want to make sure I got the pronunciation of your last name correct.

Matt (02:11)
That’s okay. It’s actually Horine, but I’ve gotten it several different ways, so ⁓ that’s just fine.

Anthony Codispoti (02:18)
H-O-R-I-N-E for those folks I know that already want to go and look him up on LinkedIn. Matt Horine. Glad we got it cleaned up. Okay, so tell us about the services you offer at Variable, the non-staffing staffing firm.

Matt (02:32)
That’s a really good way to put it. So, you long story short, this is my second stint back at Variable. I started with the company about eight years ago in 2017. It was there from then until 2021. And I’m back because Variable is very different than what you would consider a traditional staffing company or other marketplace company. We are very focused on

a specific vertical, which is the umbrella term American manufacturing, but that covers warehouse, logistics, distribution operations. And so we are an operations platform built for operations professionals. And that is really what makes us different. We are not an HR tool. We are not something that is used for a full time employee development candidate pipeline or for basically matching head count. ⁓

there’s room for all that in operations. There’s room for all of that in business. But what we see is the idea of this flexible on-demand operator base, which is what we call our workers, that are able to be called in in real time to address your demand cycles, volatility, the macro environment, whatever affects those in the supply chain and in manufacturing. So if you’re looking at your business and saying we have a static head count of a hundred people all the time,

You’re fighting everything from attrition to your full-time workforce, to just finding people, which I’m looking forward to talking about later about there being a labor shortage. Our philosophy is there isn’t, it’s much more about access and being able to bring people in in a merit-based system. And what I mean by that is the operators, the workers are rated by the business and the business is rated by the operators. And so what that does is in a meritocracy drives performance.

It drives operational KPIs. can address specific segments of your business through labor, which is what we believe the fundamental constraint is in any business. It’s how do we use our labor capacity to take on more orders, grow our business, or just be a better operational unit. And so that’s a very high level how we differentiate from a temp staffing firm.

Anthony Codispoti (04:44)
So good time to kind of talk about the play on words and terms of the way your name is spelled variable is very able. V E R Y a B L E. ⁓ so I think tell me if I’m getting this right, but variable variable workforce, right? You can kind of flux in and out depending on what needs that you have. And then I don’t know your platform makes it.

very able bodied people accessible to your clients who need them.

Matt (05:14)
Yeah, it’s spot on. So it’s a play on words a little bit, but also the idea that labor traditionally has been viewed as a fixed cost structure. And so this variation in demand or variation in how you see and provide access to your workforce is the play there. And it’s something that ⁓ makes a lot of sense over time if you’ve seen it in practice.

Anthony Codispoti (05:37)
So conceptually, I understand why from your client side, having access to a variable workforce would be helpful, right? Heading into Q4, you know, lot of three PLs, a lot of warehouses, they have extra needs because of everything that’s going on with Christmas. Leading into Q4 and probably part of Q4, manufacturers have that same sort of increase in need to be able to fill some of those orders that are coming in.

But on the employee side of things, why would an employee want this sort of flex model in their lives as opposed to, no, I’m looking for a steady 40 hour a week job that I can stay at for years.

Matt (06:21)
That is a great question and it all ties back to the labor access model that we see this through that lens. And what I mean by that is that there is a big change in the demographics and structure of the workforce, meaning that, especially in manufacturing, the average age of the American worker has risen over the past few years and people see that backfill need. ⁓

as something that is business continuity, right? You look at it at the ownership level, but at the employee level, how do people go to work every day? Well, over the past few years, there’s been this element of a gig economy mindset where people want to have a voice and be able to choose what they want to do on a daily basis. And that provides a few different benefits. So one, it’s more choice and it’s the freedom to move about. Our CEO and founder, Mike Kinder, has a great line about 1099 contractors.

being kind of the original state of man. Like you’re working for yourself. You’re doing things and building an income and building and providing. And so with that and the idea of that, you get exposure to multiple businesses. It’s not the same thing every day, which in manufacturing, that’s been the historical model where somebody, you know, like my grandfather worked at ⁓ a BF Goodrich tire plant in Miami, Oklahoma for

35 years and loved it and that was great. But there was also some structural things around that, some societal structure around that, that’s changed rapidly over the era of globalization. That’s not how it is anymore. And so people want choice. They may be looking for it in a flexible capacity because they’re a student or they’re a single parent and they need a different shift structure. Or they are somebody who is maybe semi-retired, but they still want to be involved in the workforce and be productive.

So those operator personas and those profiles are very different. And we have people who use the platform for their full-time earnings. They do just variable. That’s what they do. And they bid and go places every day, somewhere different. And we have some people who augment and kind of build their own schedule across different apps or maybe their own full-time employment in the manufacturing space. And they’re picking up extra hours to earn extra income. So that’s the key to it where there has been this buzz around a labor shortage.

We think it has much more to do with access and being able to say, can I do that, get more people into the operation when I need them and how can it benefit my business? So it’s a win-win in that regard. And that operator profile is something that we’re seeing take place more more common as, as you know, we started in 2016, 17, and it’s becoming much more of a mainstay in the, in the workforce environment.

Anthony Codispoti (09:08)
⁓ What do you mean by the societal structure being different now versus when your grandfather worked for the tire manufacturer?

Matt (09:18)
It’s a really interesting structure that we see a lot of remnants of in the hiring process, where people say, we want people here, we want them to join our family, which is great. That’s a great company cultural attitude and aspect to have, or we want people here for the long haul. Over the past five years, in the pandemic timeframe, you’ve saw how volatile the supply chain could be.

All of sudden that becomes a business decision versus what you would like it to be, which is a family decision if it’s your business and you view it that way. ⁓ Overall, over the past maybe 30 to 40 years, if you look back at manufacturing before and some of the other structural changes that have taken place, manufacturing jobs historically came with a pension structure where they came with ⁓ a series of benefits and types of things that help people

build what we consider the wealthiest time frame in our country, which is where you could support a family on a single income. You could send kids to college. You could buy the car, buy the washing machine, be a consumer that was both mindful and in a way that was ⁓ structurally sound, financially sound. And so now wages have stagnated in manufacturing. Off the top of my head, those numbers, they haven’t really risen in comparison to other

assets or other economic indicators like asset bubbles or like real estate or those types of things. They haven’t, they’ve been fairly stagnant for the past couple of decades. And so people are finding ways to supplement and use their skill sets and still have that drive. People want to work and there’s a lot of dignity in that. And so people are finding ways to get more benefit out of access to different types of work without that

old school structure where people have traditionally said, hey, we can be at this one place for the long haul because the world is moving fast and things change very rapidly. So I allude to that because it’s so important because I think the lens of a lot of companies when they, they want to hire, they do want to just hire and not have it be a recurring problem, but it’s, it’s not playing out that way. You’ll see a manufacturing site or a three peel. Like you talked about that seasonal work.

They’re doing this because they’re flexing up in real time with their demand. They’ve got to have the labor to address the business need. But once the demand, the down cycle hits, they need the agility on the business side and the worker needs follow on opportunities. They can’t hang their hat on saying, I went to work for a three PL in this warehouse. And, you know, just because we got to the four Q rush, it’s not as stable beyond that because businesses have a real need to, to address their operational throughput and they have a real need to address the bottom line and having too many people.

at least a bad situation. So that’s where we see the match and where people now have follow-on opportunity and more access to do other things.

Anthony Codispoti (12:17)
So functionally, the way this works from an employee perspective is they go into the app and they will see different opportunities that are available to them. And they’ll say, hey, I would like to work at that place tomorrow and sign themselves up. And then they just show up for work the next day and they get paid how often and from who and what did I miss in this whole process.

Matt (12:43)
you’re pretty much spot on. There’s a couple of technical details and I’ll kind of work that process out. what they do, if they work through the variable app, again, they’re contractors, so they sign up, there’s an onboarding process. So they go through a background check, they go through other onboarding features, basically set up their banking, do a couple of other things to where we facilitate that match in the marketplace. And then what they do from there is they bid on opportunities that fit

their skill set that fit their geographic area. So you’re not going to bid on something that’s 50 miles away. You know, that’s something that we’ve seen pretty common in Metro areas. And they’re going to bid on places that have good ratings. So if your business does well and treats operators well and is a great place to be, they’ll see that they’ll say, Hey, this business is a five star business or a four and a half. Cause you, you know, my Uber ratings, not, you know, perfect five star. So we get, we get the feedback game and what the business sees

When these bids come in is a roster of names and real people that have a rating, that have a digital resume of where they’ve worked through the variable app. So if they’ve worked at 500 different ops across 10 different businesses, they can see how many ops they worked. They can see their skill sets, that their skill sets are valid. If somebody says they’re a forklift operator and they have 100 forklift ops on their profile, it’s pretty certain.

that the market has provided that feedback in a way that is validating from another business. So it gives it that assurity. So that is the nature of how an operator would go about bidding. And what over time happens is we all have preferences. And so businesses build what we call your labor pool, which is a group of operators who are familiar with their business. And that business has said, hey, we’d like to call this specific person back on demand when we have it.

the real time draw, which lowers kind of the onboarding time and cycle. They’re building the arc before the flood is how we phrase it. So they’re able to draw on a group of people that are familiar with their business and constantly refresh that pool by bringing in new people through the app to basically rate them and say, hey, we want to add them to our roster. I’ve often compared it to like a farm team in baseball. Like if we had to call up somebody to the majors,

We know what team they’re playing for. We kind of know their general stats. We know, you know, they’re, they’re good at their position, bring them in and address the demand. And so that operator, what they’re doing from their, their vantage point is they’re raising their hand. They’re saying, I want to work at that time for that pay in that role. And that is, ⁓ that goes far beyond somebody who is just going to onboard.

and see how they like it. And then the company has sunk in a month of onboarding costs and training and it didn’t work out. And for Variable, if it doesn’t work out, just end the op. And the operator will probably feel the same way, quite frankly. You get a lot of honesty for an open marketplace where people say, hey, this isn’t for me. Or the business can say that with a little bit less structure around, ⁓ I’m going to hurt my attrition numbers or I’m going to hurt my hiring perspective. So that’s the difference.

Anthony Codispoti (15:57)
And so then is there a scenario in which your client, the company, the employer, like, you know, to use the farm team analogy, they’re like, we really like these three people out of the 40 that worked here. We want to hire them full time here, Matt, let us pay you a fee because we’re going to bring them in as a W two.

Matt (16:21)
Yeah, it’s a question we get all the time. And our answer on that is good luck. If you want to get married, that’s fine. We’re not a recruiting firm. We’ll never send you a fee. And we’ve had people do that ⁓ often. People say, I’m going to hire them. And then they’re back on the platform. Both sides are back on the platform within about 60 days. Because what the operator has lost is the flexibility. They got married. And they have to be there for a standard shift.

There’s no flexibility in the schedule. You know, all of a sudden, if they can’t work a day, now they’re taking vacation time. All of that kind of buy-in goes out the window once you’re an employee. Now it has worked, I’m sure in certain cases. For the business, what that does is if you’ve brought in, you’ve changed the arrangement with somebody you’ve grown familiar with and liked, you’ve changed the arrangement on them. And so now you’re getting a different type of performance where it’s back into that traditional employee category.

That can be good or bad, but for us, say the real benefit is the flexibility that both sides get where, you know, if you bring that person in 40 hours static across the entire week, there may not be any need to address some type of productivity. It may be a down week and they’re sweeping the floor or doing like, you know, kind of second tier stuff instead of being really on the floor and, you know, addressing a demand cycle. So it changes the dynamic a lot. And, you know, we’re not.

hesitant to it. Our advice is don’t do that. You can put them in your labor pool and they know that you’ve gotten positive validation and they can be called back on demand. But once you change the arrangement, it’s back to the traditional employment structure.

Anthony Codispoti (18:02)
Now, I’ve had the good fortune to interview lots of different employers and things have gotten better in the last probably year or two, but I still hear from a lot of folks that labor is really tight. They use the term labor shortage and you’ve got a different view on that, which you touched on earlier. Can you explain in more detail?

Matt (18:24)
Yeah. So there’s a couple of layers to that. know, one is that the manufacturing sector has been in a re what I would call a recession for the past couple of years. there’s been a lot of tap dancing around that on the national level around. don’t want to call it a recession. You know, we don’t want to spook investors or wall street, or we don’t want to call things like they are. But if you’ve been on the shop floor, you know, things have been very different and the demand cycles are, ⁓

Not what they normally are. You know, you’ll see some businesses that have a traditional seasonal rush. It’s not there, but then something happens, you know, a couple of months outside of that. And all of a sudden they spike in demand for, ⁓ you know, so that’s, that’s one layer of it. And the second piece of it is the labor shortage. There’s a lot of talk about talent and what people want people to do for them. And that is squarely putting something, you know,

in a neat little box that says, this is how it’s always been. And the world is a lot more dynamic than that. know, HR professionals, even operations professionals know that their business is not what it was five years ago. It’s not what it certainly not what it was 10 years ago. And it certainly won’t be that way next year or over the next five. So the flexibility is really where we talk to a lot of our business partners and say, you’ve got to have some agility.

in the operation. can’t just look at, need a head count of 100 and I have to hire to 100 and maybe have a reserve of 10 people I could hire at some point. It’s much more fluid than that. People are facing real life challenges. They get the opportunity to move on to a different position. And in the hourly world, a couple of dollars here or there is something that’s a mover. And you see it a lot in geographic areas. have one.

one business in Texas, won’t say who, but there were five kind of manufacturing plants in the same neighborhood. And they were essentially, you know, trading workers almost in a price war, like the hourly work dollar amount kind of went up, you know, incrementally 50 cents at a time. And you’d see the shift. And our perspective on that was like, you guys need to make it flexible, you know, post for when you have actual productivity, address your demand. And, you know, you can pay them that. And then when there’s not any work, they’re getting it somewhere else in a totally different, you know, vertical.

So we, again, I can’t emphasize it enough. It’s about access to the system. And for too long, people have been kind of boxed out by that 40 hour work week where they’re punching their time card. It’s way more dynamic than that. And so it’s a lot of fun. One other thing that I should add here, it’s a huge opportunity to upskill, huge opportunity. people, one, when we talk about worker shortage, it may have to do a lot with labor utilization. If you’re bringing a welder in,

People will tell me all the time they can’t find welders or they can’t find CNC machinists. They’ve got some on staff, but they need more. How much time under the hood is that welder actually doing his job? I’ve been into a lot of shops where they’re not, they’re loading, they’re prepping, they may be sweeping the floor, they may be helping load a truck. That’s a welder, that’s a high skilled person who has been kind of farmed out to take care of things around. They want to stay busy and productive, but if you bring in flexible labor to essentially address those things that are…

sitting around the welder, you have increased that welders uptime and you’ve kind of addressed, you know, other things that are going on. Second, that, that group of people who’ve come in to do that are now getting exposure to different parts of the operation. And we’ve seen people move up from, you know, what would be like a $12 an hour warehouse helper into a little bit more specific machine, like a pipe grooving machine. And you’ve moved up not only in wage rate for that, that operator, but in skill rate. And they can take that person on a journey through the business.

to learn their business better and to get the skills that they’re looking for.

Anthony Codispoti (22:18)
You’ve got a bit of an unusual job title, Matt. ⁓ Head of reindustrialization. I don’t know that I’ve seen that before. What does it mean?

Matt (22:28)
Yeah, that’s a really good question. I’ll get some inbound spam emails that say, Matt, we’re talking to heads of reindustrialization. You might want to do a little research. I’m the only one. If there’s another one out there, please reach out to me. This is my call for it. But it’s a very specific title for our organization because we believe in American manufacturing. We believe in this larger reshoring and reindustrialization moment that’s going on in the country.

And we have been saying it for a long time. You this goes back, you know, eight years ago where we believe that the United States should be building our industrial base from the position of it’s a national security issue and something that starts on the shop floor. So the capabilities that we see in manufacturing, this is, you know, goes a lot of the reindustrialization talk that we see is specific to the defense sector or

⁓ you know, something bigger, like advanced manufacturing, it’s the shop floor, its suppliers, it’s people who are trying to make and build here for a long time. Labor arbitrage, you know, cause that to be offshored. You could find cheaper labor. could find cheaper. Material. We think that that can be done here because the, era of globalization has shifted.

back to where, we’re paying a lot of money to basically have something shipped over here. We’re paying very low wages, but we’re paying a lot of money to move it and put it at risk in jeopardy. We saw it during the pandemic, especially. All of a sudden, things like toilet paper, it’s like, where do we get our toilet paper from? Or where do we get our Tylenol from? Or where do we get a lot of these things that we use in everyday life? And so reindustrialization to us is talking about the supply chain and compressing that.

and bringing it back to America, which is who we serve as the American manufacturer and the operational people out there who make it happen every day. And so that’s our overall goal is to see a stronger manufacturing sector. And so taking the buzzword out of it, I used to joke about reindustrialization was kind of like the dark alleys of X. People were talking about this in the back. ⁓ It’s come to the forefront. But specifically what it means for Veryable is how do we bring our supply chain back and how do we get the labor ⁓

question solved, because it’s not, you if it’s your labor problem, or if you’re having an issue, it’s either labor or it’s a supplier. And if you go down that chain, that almost decision tree like structure, if it’s your supplier, it’s probably your supplier’s labor problem. They’re not able to flex and take on more orders or have capacity to do anything different than what they’re already doing. So that’s overall what we would probably describe it as.

Anthony Codispoti (25:05)
So obviously, you guys would benefit from bringing more manufacturing back to the states. ⁓ And you are in the process of supporting that as well by making that difficult to find and fluctuating labor needs fit with your clients. Is there a deeper role for you guys to play? ⁓ Are you? Is there something, I don’t know, from a political or a legal or a

know, tariff perspective that you guys get involved with.

Matt (25:37)
Yeah, I think there’s there’s a lot of that. I think it’s a one You see a lot of people in the market now talking about this reindustrialization

movement and effort. And where we see ourselves is addressing the fundamental root cause of what may have caused more globalization or what’s the challenge in bringing it back. We believe that answer is labor access. So back to what we were talking about earlier, most people are looking at this from the standpoint of I buy my materials from overseas.

Or I don’t know where to look for my materials within, you know, a domestic market. And so we have a lot of people as a marketplace who are participating on a daily basis by posting ops for labor, where we say, how do we help these customers talk to each other? How do we get people, you know, one of the big challenges we’ve heard, it’s kind of anecdotal, but a recurring theme that I’ve seen is I try to call a US based supplier and I can’t get somebody to answer the phone.

or it’s kind of structured in a way that there is a built-in process of ordering something. I hear a lot about it in the metal space, that there’s like a service center you have to buy from, you can’t go buy straight from the mill. So we look at this from the perspective of how do we reduce bureaucracy? How do we make things flatter in an organization? That’s why we talk to the operations groups in these companies, because the ops guys know.

HR is great. They are looking to fill headcount, but the operations guys say, I don’t need 20 guys standing around or I need 20 more people in this operation over the next 72 hours because we had this order fluctuation. And so being faster, that’s, think what reindustrialization has to be about, taking down the red tape, the bureaucracy around how we hire people, where we buy from, some of the regulatory ⁓ requirements that are placed on businesses.

You want to keep it safe and keep everything on the up and up. But being able to move fast means that you can’t have those constraints around you. And we view labor as that fundamental path.

Anthony Codispoti (27:56)
So you think that is one of the core bottlenecks that up until now has been preventing, to some degree anyways, more manufacturing taking place here in the States.

Matt (28:08)
For sure. think it’s a recurring theme because it is true in a lot of ways. I think that ⁓ there’s ⁓ a skills gap. is ⁓ the people gap that people talk about. It’s real, but it’s addressable. And that’s the difference that we see. one, a lot of businesses talk about investing in

training and those types of things. They go to the Chamber of Commerce or they go to some type of local authority and say, we need people that can do XYZ. That in this day and age means there’s got to be skin in the game. And so for our model, it makes a lot of sense that if you’re bringing people in on an on-demand basis and you’re upskilling and you’re assessing and you’re rating, you’re building that meritocracy, there is a lot more buy-in from the worker side, the operator side in our case.

And there’s more buy-in from the business saying, I want to keep that person here and they’re getting paid, you on a, had this question earlier, they do get paid daily, which is part of that faster theme that we were talking about. ⁓ So you’re doing it at a pace that doesn’t say, I have a gap, but I’m trying to do it the old way. I’m trying to do it where I bring somebody out of a, you know, technical school, or I bring somebody straight into the shop floor. And I can expect that they’re going to stay here for a decade or longer.

If you break down those walls and say they’re just going to want to be here because this is going to be so great and awesome and they’re earning and they’re upskilling and they’re increasing their value, that’s how you build the structure for what we think is like the model for the 21st century. It’s very different than what it was even 10, 20 years ago. So all those things do exist, but they exist in a way that they are addressable and fixable.

Anthony Codispoti (30:00)
So even if we’re talking about somebody who’s making $18 an hour here in the States, there are Asian markets where $18 would actually represent a really nice daily wage. And so I see how variable is solving a component of this. But where else do you think help is needed to bring more manufacturing back here?

Matt (30:26)
It’s a really good point because a lot of what this theme centers on is globalization. And there’s a lot of different ways to slice that up, but you hit on the most important one, which is labor arbitrage and moving production and manufacturing to low cost countries from the wage rate perspective. What happens there, if you take a look at China over the past 20 to 30 years, their wage rates have risen.

to point where a lot of things are moving to Vietnam, Thailand, other places in Southeast Asia, where it was like it was in China 20 years ago. And the ultimate problem with that is that, one, in China’s case particularly, ⁓ you are building the economy and infrastructure around what we can perceive as a geopolitical foe. I don’t want to point fingers or do anything like that, but what I…

What I mean by that is that they have a goal for the 21st century to be a superpower, which they are there or they’re near there. And we helped build that by outsourcing our own industrial capacity. And what’s happening now through tariffs, which are just levers to pull, to basically flatten ⁓ in a reciprocal way, trade back and forth, ⁓ you’re seeing people move out of China.

to go to third party countries and they still may be running things through China, but it’s going to other countries and coming back to the United States. So they’re chasing the wage rate, which is great. I’m all for ⁓ developing countries and countries that are in that position, raise the standard of living in their own countries, but there’s also this element that you will continuously chase that over a period of time. That’s a never ending cycle. Eventually, if you get to 20 years from now and you look at these third party countries that are

taking on a lot of the work because China’s wage rates have risen or whatever the reason, they will be in that same position 20 years from now. And so you’ll be chasing the next low cost center until eventually you’ve kind of hollowed out. It starts here. We’ve seen a hollowing out of the manufacturing sector. It will happen in China. It’s just a matter of time and cycles, and then it will happen in the next place. And so what you do by that is you look at

our industrial base and you say, how do we do this in a way that increases productivity of the worker? It maintains a standard wage rate and it helps the business in a way that they can take on more business and have some type of continuity where they’re highly productive and where they’re paying a good wage to workers in the manufacturing space. that’s a good example of that is textiles. Textiles over the past 30 years have

become what I would consider in the US 10 times more productive than they would have on machines from the 80s or 90s. And that means, you for every 10 workers, maybe there’s one or two workers, but those one or two workers are maintaining the wage rate of, you know, $25 an hour or whatever the current number is. And so you build that out by building more of that. And so there’s more of it, which increases, you know, I don’t hate to point to GDP, but you rebuild the textile industry.

It’s not as many jobs as it was before because there’s not a hundred workers sitting on the floor at the sewing machines. There are five to ten highly productive, highly skilled workers who are making a good wage and turning out product that is of the highest quality. And so that is kind of how you rebuild the structure going forward. It’s never going back to the way that it was. It was changed to China for that reason, because the wage rate was low and you could have thousand workers on the factory floor. And that was a lift for them.

But without the transfer of that and what that, I think one other important thing here is to say, 10 years ago, the learn to code mentality was very common. People were saying that. And now we’re looking at an environment where American software engineers are having trouble coming out of college, finding a job because of AI. So you kind of say this thing of the past, it’s not going to be that way anymore. You have to learn to do this.

And the time cycle is getting shorter. That was 10 years ago. And we’re now in a position where AI is doing, you know, X, Y, Z, and we have software engineers that are having trouble finding work. So you have to build these things to last and you have to build them in a way that increases the productivity of American businesses and pays for the worker.

Anthony Codispoti (34:58)
Okay, let’s stick a pin in that. We may come back to that topic, but I want to better understand how it is you guys approach your own growth. I’m assuming with your model, you know, it’s sort of a chicken egg. Like you want to go, you know, from Houston to, I’ll make it up, Austin. We want to be in the Austin market now. And maybe you guys are already there, but you you need obviously a client base there, right? You need one or more.

manufacturing, 3PL, warehouse companies. And then very quickly, you need to find the labor to help support them. So talk to me about how you approach that process of identifying new markets and how you go in.

Matt (35:44)
It’s a very interesting dynamic because it’s a dual-sided marketplace. The fundamentals of supply and demand apply here, like in most places in life. If I were to go into a market, one, we view a geographic market as something that has to be supported by a team. It’s supported by people who are helping operationally coach businesses on the way to do this. This is not a

B2B SaaS concept. It’s not something that you’re going to a call center as a business and hope to get an answer on how you work your operational platform through variable. You have to have people who know the market. A good example of that is Detroit, famous for being automotive. Houston, famous for oil and gas. You look at those kinds of sectors, the fundamentals of manufacturing still apply. And what I mean by that is

that type of work, you you have to build layers to it where the operator, the worker has choices where they can bid on work and the businesses have to have peers in the market that are also participating in it in order to build it up. So if I’m a business and I’m posting and I’m getting all new operators all the time, I’m the initial assessment every time on that person. It doesn’t work that way. So the parody of it is if I’m

working in a more mature market and I can look at an operator profile and say, this person has worked 20 ops at three different kinds of businesses. That is the validation that kind of builds the marketplace. And so, you know, our growth has been fueled by we’re US based. We’re in our marketplaces. In some cases we could support remotely. You know, those are all, you know, in today’s world it’s almost required, but in the sense that

We are going to teach the business how to leverage this as an operational tool versus just a product where it’s not like an Uber launch. You know, it’s not something that if you remember back, I think Uber is everywhere now, but you know, a decade ago, Uber was launching in Dallas where they were launching in, you know, Phoenix or whatever the city. They were doing that and they were supporting all of it from probably their San Francisco headquarters from a bigger capacity, but they had to have just drivers and supply in the market.

businesses are local, ⁓ their problems, their challenges are local, and their success is local. So that’s something that we believe is fundamental about American manufacturing. And so building that supply demand parity is critical for our business model.

Anthony Codispoti (38:30)
And so how many markets are you in now?

Matt (38:32)
We’re in about 30 across the US. So primarily in Texas, the Southeast, the Midwest, and a little bit in the Northeast. ⁓ A lot of that has to do with the demand of those areas with manufacturing. It also has to do with the regulatory environment. Is this something that we think from a regulatory environment and from the perception of the business’s regulatory mindset, can they do it?

And those places have, you know, just like in manufacturing, they’ve led on that. So it’s something that we see as very different in every region of the country. ⁓ Like I was mentioning earlier, you you look at the Midwest, which is the heartland of American manufacturing. They do a lot more automotive than they do in, you know, say Texas. There’s a couple of plants here in Texas, you know, not to cast them aside, but.

So those are the places where we see the demand for this type of American manufacturing and this type of model.

Anthony Codispoti (39:33)
Are you in Columbus, Ohio, my home? Okay, so when you first came here, I’m gonna guess the first thing you have to do, you gotta find the clients, right? Do you need one client? Do you need two or three? Is it important to you that you have multiple stakeholders?

Matt (39:34)
We are in Columbus, Ohio.

It’s,

it is. And so what, you know, ends up being the, the smoothest path to what I would call like a market launch is usually driven by some type of demand. And we have a lot of business users that have locations across the country. So if you look at a distribution network or a, you know, a three PL or, you know, any type of ⁓ major supplier, they have locations and they say what’s good in, you know, in Dallas or Atlanta is good for Columbus, Ohio.

when we have a plant there or we have a facility there. And so we have built so much depth and traction with a lot of our business users in other parts of the country that they ask about the next region of the country. And once you get a couple of those, and of course that’s all new, know, kind of blue ocean. If you go to a new market, there’s infinite amount of potential new entrants. You can start out with businesses who know your model and you’re standing up a market and you’re building that supply demand.

⁓ balance. And so that’s been generally our path and how our customers, we follow the customer and we follow the business demand for it and that has worked out very well.

Anthony Codispoti (40:58)
And then in terms of finding the workers, I don’t know, you’re running like Facebook and Tik Tok ads to try to recruit people.

Matt (41:05)
I don’t know about TikTok. ⁓ And that might just be a thing for me. I’m not on TikTok. We could be. what this started out as very early days was almost like traditional recruiting, saying, hey, we’ve got this platform. This is how it works. Would you be interested in making a living this way? And people signed up for the app to try it. And then they got exposure to businesses. And then it becomes much more organic. I can think of one really great example. There is a

a company in Wilmer, Texas, which is just south of Dallas. It’s building, you drive through Texas now and you see a lot of industrial space going up. But what ended up happening as that business was building their labor pool was you would see some same last names popping up in the labor pool or from our side, which is hidden some same addresses. Maybe it was the same apartment complex, the same street, same geography.

And so the word of mouth is really what started to, ⁓ to carry it. And in a way that’s become much more organic and that’s, you know, kind of a testament to the success of the model, which is, Hey, we don’t have to go direct recruit. Like that’s not something that most people in marketplaces do. ⁓ it is very early, you know, maybe eight years ago, there was some element of that, but also we partner with a lot of different industry groups, a lot of different companies have also found this as a way to.

build their own pool. So they take our platform and they say, hey, we don’t, we’re not hiring full time, but we, we want to put this person on a roster and use them when we need them. That’s a way to, to bridge the gap and address that productivity that we were talking about earlier. So it’s, it’s very ⁓ fluid on the, on the operator side. We’ve seen people come in, you know, kind of exit for a little while. Maybe they went back to full-time employment ⁓ or, but they’ll come back. And so it’s, it’s very dynamic.

Anthony Codispoti (42:57)
What are the regulatory hurdles that might keep you out of certain markets?

Matt (43:02)
There’s two ways to answer that. One, I think from the business perspective, it’s something different. So we do see a lot of businesses say, is this for us? Is this something that we could do? ⁓ The answer is yes. And it just kind of requires a different mindset. From the regulatory side, just like a lot of other ⁓ companies have maybe found some challenges in over-regulated environments. And I say that, I love those places.

I’ve been there, traveled to some of those places, but if you look at California, Illinois, maybe New York, maybe some others, you’ve seen it in the news with things like Uber or with Lyft. They see this as kind of like a displacement of a traditional structure. And they say, is it 1099 work? The answer is yes, because you’re not posting a job and having somebody come work under your direction. You’re posting for a specific scope of work.

that has a start and an end timeframe, almost like you’re calling in a plumber or an electrician. They’re not your employee. They’re somebody that you’re hiring or you’re not hiring, but they’re somebody you’re calling in or bringing in to do a specific job under a specific scope for a specific amount of time, which is very different than an employment relationship. So there’s been some of those challenges just because people aren’t familiar with how to do this, but we’ve overcome that in most instances.

Anthony Codispoti (44:25)
Okay, so I understand what you’re talking about. Yep, like Uber and Lyft, lots of discussion, disagreements over whether folks should be considered full time workers, if they should be a W-2, which opens up a whole can of worms in terms of, you know, benefits and other things. ⁓ And so the states that you would stay away from for the moment anyways, are the states that, you know, kind of have legislation that’s not so friendly to this discussion. So given that most of your

operators are 1099. They’re getting paid directly from your client.

Matt (45:02)
So the way that that works is that our model, because they get paid daily, so if they work today, they’re going to get paid tomorrow. That’s bank processing time. ⁓ And that, course, can be adjusted by the business up or down if they worked more or less. And so we pay. We facilitate that payment. And the business pays variable. that’s a lot of the administrative burden.

Anthony Codispoti (45:31)
I was going to say administratively, would be a nightmare if each of your individual clients had to be responsible for that.

Matt (45:32)
Yeah. ⁓

Right,

right. And so that’s the power of the model is that, hey, you have the ownership of adjusting any time or adjusting, you know, if they’re doing piecework, you know, adjusting that actual pay rate to let us know what to pay them within a 24 hour window. And so that’s the ownership component of this is if I’m an operations manager and say I wanted to pay somebody more, which is often what is the case.

I need to adjust that up so that my worker, my operator gets paid and then variable facilitates that payment and the businesses pay very.

Anthony Codispoti (46:16)
Matt, on this show, we always like to ask our guests about a particular challenge ⁓ that they’ve overcome in their lives. And for most folks, it’s a specific event. I think for you, it’s something that’s more ongoing that you are addressing on a regular basis. Can you walk us through what that is and how you approach managing that?

Matt (46:38)
Yeah, it’s something that I think about probably every day in a lot of different ways, and I think a lot of people do too. ⁓ It’s the idea, I think that there’s a buzzword around it called imposter syndrome. And people don’t think they should be where they’re at or they know what they’re doing, right? And the more I’ve gone on in my career, whether it was my time in the military or early on in my career as an ops manager or somebody,

There were many times where you say, I don’t know what I’m doing. But if you are confident in yourself and understand that people make mistakes and that nobody’s perfect, that is where you learn. And so I’ve been very fortunate. When I came into Variable, I was very fortunate because two people who founded that company saw something in me. And Mike Kinder, who’s my boss and our CEO, and Noah Labhard, who’s our CTO, they

we’re the ones taking the risk and saying, we’re going to build this. Do you want to be on board? And that is the moment where you say, Hey, these guys are taking the risk and they’re building something. And I want to be a part of that because you learn something. ⁓ I go back to my time in the army. was an infantry guy, you know, historically, you know, I wasn’t an athlete and somebody who was, you know, like in tip top shape. ⁓ but I was in the infantry and that was something that I wanted to do. And

I did pretty well. I spent four years doing that. I wasn’t the top super soldier or anything like that, but I had the opportunity to lead a team, ⁓ to serve, to be with people who were better than me and I learned a lot from. And so you take that, all those experiences into play and you say, how do I use that experience to build onto the next one with the fundamental truths that I learned? And some of those fundamental truths include if I work hard,

if you’re honest, and if you are looking to do the best for the people around you, most of those things work out, you know, pretty well with business performance, or they work out really well in your daily and personal life. So, you know, I’ve been at startups, I’ve been at places where is this thing going to work? I’ve been at a business where maybe you take something on and it wasn’t what it was written out to be.

I’ve been in a particular situation where the financials of the business were not what they were reported to be. And so that requires you to take integrity and operate and try to win and then find ways to build continuity for people because they’re counting on you. And so you will come across that in every facet of life. But I think particularly what I think of is those moments of self-doubt are probably a time for reflection and saying, hey, the sum total of my experiences tell me and my gut instinct is this.

Let’s do this and be, um, you know, um, be very firm in your belief. And I joke often about, you know, there’s a meme that’s on accident. It’s called the concluter and it’s, it’s like, uh, you know, strong beliefs loosely held, you know, I believe strongly in this, but I’m very open to, you know, learning something or doing something a different way. And as you get older, you know, finding that different way, sometimes you lean back on your, your experience a little bit more and say, no, that’s not how it was, but you have to be open about that. And that’s.

Anthony Codispoti (49:46)
Yeah.

Matt (49:58)
I think what adds up to the sum total of your experiences.

Anthony Codispoti (50:01)
You know, the idea of imposter syndrome has been talked about many times on this show. ⁓ And it’s always interesting to me. It surprised me initially at first some of the people who brought it up very successful leading large companies ⁓ come across as you know, very bright and very confident much as you do today. And they were, you know, out of their minds nervous just about doing the interview today. Like, you know, why does anybody want to listen to what I have to say to Michael? You kidding? Like, you know, look, look at everything that you’ve done and

Matt (50:25)
Right.

Anthony Codispoti (50:31)
And so I think it’s helpful for other folks out there to hear that, you know, you’re not the only ones that are doubting yourselves, right? Even people with the, you know, the top of the heap, ⁓ it happens to them on a regular basis. I had, one guest in particular who actually told me that imposter syndrome is what he considers to be his superpower.

And that’s a separate question I like to ask. What do you think your superpower is? And I’m like, no, no, no, we haven’t gotten to that. Like you’re sort of mixing these up. And he’s like, no, no, no, let me explain myself. He says that feeling that I get every day when I wake up, like, I don’t know what I’m doing. Like all these people looking to me, like, I have no idea. I’m making it up as I go along. But that…

For him is the thing that lights a fire under his rear end every day to get up and to figure it out and to perform and not to hit the cruise control button. I see you nodding your head. Does this make some sense to you?

Matt (51:29)
It makes a lot of sense. There’s, you know, one other thing that I believe is is a fundamental truth and it ties directly to what you’re saying is there’s nobody coming to save you. You know, you have to have this this element of self-reliance that you have to be competent enough and that’s how you beat imposter syndrome. But you have to do it in a way that you recognize others are trying to help you. There’s nobody who can really solve all of your problems for you except you and being very open minded about the resolution in which

those problems are solved. ⁓ So that’s, you know, I kind of, you know, sync up a lot with that guest and say, yeah, lights a fire under me and business and in life to say, you know, I don’t know what I’m doing, but I have to figure it out. And there’s no really way out, but through. And that is, I think what, you know, if I could say anything and my advice is what it is, but it’s, you have to do things that make you uncomfortable. And you have to do things that

are not easy every day. If life was easy, that would be great. I mean, you didn’t have to make tough decisions, but that’s not how people build new things. It’s not how we progress. And I think there are people who’ve been through a lot more challenges than I have. I’ve been very fortunate. Like I mentioned earlier, my career has been very fortunate and I’m very fortunate to be at Variable because it’s a product that not only I believe in, it’s an idea that people should have the flexibility.

and the ability to have more say in their own lives. And so that’s a lot of it, right? Is, hey, you know, I wanna have that say in my own life. I don’t want events to direct me. I wanna probably be in a position to control a little bit of my environment, but you have to be comfortable with when that doesn’t happen. And so, yeah, it makes a lot of sense what you mentioned about your other guest.

Anthony Codispoti (53:14)
Matt, you host your own podcast, right? What’s the name of that?

Matt (53:18)
I do. It’s called US manufacturing today. It’s sponsored by variable, ⁓ where I work in my day job, re-industrializing. So ⁓ this is our first year of the show, but it’s ideally something where our customers or people who have worked with us or close to us as part of that overall manufacturing network can come on and talk through things that they’re seeing, macro trends, and maybe something really insightful about their business that could help a manufacturer out there try to find their way.

Anthony Codispoti (53:48)
I’m curious if this holds true for you. ⁓ I’ve done a good fortune to have done hundreds of podcast interviews now on this side of the mic. And I’ve been asked many times to be on the other side of the mic. And most of the time I say no. The handful of times that I’ve said yes, I felt very uncomfortable with it. I’m very uncomfortable on the other side of the mic. And I think it’s a lot of that imposter syndrome. what, why do people want to hear what I have to say? Like I’m.

pretty good at asking questions and helping people tell their stories. I don’t know, is my story really that interesting? What was it like for you sitting on the other side of the mic today?

Matt (54:26)
That’s a really funny question because, ⁓ one, you ask great questions. So two, ⁓ that’s something that…

I am very comfortable bringing people on to our show and letting them talk about their business and what they like to do. And you nailed it. You get a little bit of that imposter syndrome. It’s like, why would anybody want to hear what I have to say? I’m hosting the show and I want to ask good questions. And that’s another funny thing is like, I need to ask more questions. I think about that all the time. yeah, exactly. You can do it real time.

Anthony Codispoti (55:01)
See, here you are doubting yourself again. But in like

a good way, like in a constructive way, like you could beat yourself over that, beat yourself up over that, or you’ve just identified like, I think I could probably ask more questions in my interview.

Matt (55:16)
I could ask more

questions. Yeah. So it’s a great opportunity to one, think through a lot of what you’re saying because you do get in a pattern of saying, hey, this is how the show will go. It’s about that control thing, right? You’re trying to beat the imposter syndrome or something with a level of control. I’m going to ask the questions. I’m going to do X, Y, Z or put out this point of view. And when you’re talking, we’ve had a great conversation.

A lot of things come out that maybe are a little bit more freeform and they were top of mind and that’s the good stuff that comes out. And I always tell people, I don’t know about you, but I always wish I’d left the record button on a little longer than I did because sometimes people let it all out after the end. Hopefully I left it all on the field today, but it’s a good thing to change up every once in a while.

Anthony Codispoti (56:03)
What’s something fun you like to do outside of work?

Matt (56:06)
Well, right now I am a dad. I’ve got a three year old. And so a lot of my fun time is ⁓ whatever he thinks is fun. So I love being a dad. He’s three and he’s awesome. It’s a really kind of reflective thing of life. You get to a place where you can kind of remember when your dad was that age. It’s like, wait a minute, life happens pretty fast. So that’s what I’m doing right now. Outside of that, know,

lot of family stuff and kind of just taking it easy on the weekends when we’re not busy during the week.

Anthony Codispoti (56:41)
All right, so here’s another question I’d love to ask. What is your superpower?

Matt (56:46)
You know, I don’t know if I would call it a superpower, but I think it is something that has shown up in my career where it’s kind of like a, how can I do things for people ⁓ that either I wish had been done for me or I know were done for me and it meant a lot. you know, in my career, I don’t think empathy is the right word, but I think it’s something more along the lines of taking a, like a.

big personal interest in anybody that I’m working with and seeing how ⁓ I can kind of bring them into the fold. we didn’t really get into this my time at another company. We had a pretty big mandate of bringing people on board quickly. They had been historically understaffed and underserved. And we grew the team by 15 people just by bringing in different experiences and trying to patch that together. So pretty loose answer, but that’s.

What I try to do is listen and I did a lot of talking today, but hopefully I can listen as well.

Anthony Codispoti (57:46)
Matt, I’ve just got one more question for you today. But before I ask it, I want to do three administrative things real quick here for the audience. ⁓ Anybody who wants to get in touch with variable ops, you can find them on the web variable ops.com. And remember that it’s spelled very able ops.com. Also, you can find the company on LinkedIn search for the same word, very able variable. And you can find Matt Harine H O R I N E. I get it right that time.

Matt (58:15)
You mailed

it, yeah, that’s it.

Anthony Codispoti (58:16)
Okay,

Matt Harine, Variable Ops, find him on LinkedIn. Also, as a reminder, if you want to get more employees access to benefits that won’t hurt them financially and carries a financial upside for the company, reach out to us at addbackbenefits.com. And finally, if you’ll take just a second to leave us a review or a comment on your favorite podcast app, you will hold a special place in my heart forever. Thank you. ⁓ Last question for you, Matt. A year from now, you and I reconnect and you are celebrating something big. What’s that big?

thing you hope to be celebrating one year from today.

Matt (58:50)
That is a really good question. I’ll go the professional route on it. I would like to see a lot more businesses and a lot more people involved in American manufacturing. you know, it’s kind of seeing the tide of that follow the buzz. And, you know, right now it’s very easy to talk a lot about all this, but as manufacturers know, it’s probably more of the doing that really catches up to people. So I would like to see that in a year from now. I would like to see people, you know,

really adopt this concept and bring a lot more success to their business and opportunities to the American worker.

Anthony Codispoti (59:28)
Matt Horan from Variable, I want to be the first to thank you for sharing both your time and your story with us today. I really appreciate it.

Matt (59:34)
Great, thanks for having me on and really enjoyed it.

Anthony Codispoti (59:37)
Folks, that’s a wrap on another episode of the inspired stories podcast. Thanks for learning with us today.