CFO Hiring Secrets: What Ira Birns Looks for in Every Candidate.

Doing great. Great to be here, Oz. Thanks for having me. It's a little bit chilly out here in South Florida. This is one of the colder days so far of our winter. I feel bad saying that because our friends in New York, it's like 22 degrees, but you know, how you dealing with the cold? All good?

Oh, that's Florida for real cold. So, and we are going to get to those Yankees. I want to talk to you about that a little bit towards the end. Let's start here though. I moved to South Florida in 2005. A company that was rocketing up at the time was World Fuel. Growing, growing, growing, big organization. I'm interested. Can you tell us a little bit about the organization World Fuel and now World Kinect and why you decided to join the company?

So, it's funny to start. You said you came in 2005 and it was growing like crazy, which is true. I showed up in 2007 and I think I found a way to reverse that trend. Maybe we'll talk more about that later. I lived in New York my whole life. I was actually in the technology industry for almost 20 years. And I was a New York snob, right? I knew a lot of people that would find a job out of New York, decide to move away, and I would just tell them they were losers, right? You know, how could you leave New York? And whenever I would get a call, I would just be somewhat obnoxious. I remember getting a call about the opportunity in Minneapolis and St. Louis and Kansas City. And then one day I was heading down to South Florida for the holidays to visit my folks who used to spend their winters down here. And I got a call from Spencer Stuart, one of the big recruiting firms, saying, 'We know you always blow us off, but what about Miami?' And I said, 'Well, you know, I'm going there tomorrow.' So I actually had my interviews like Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve or New Year's Day at the Biltmore in Coral Gables knowing nothing about World Fuel, that's what it was called at the time, or the fuel industry. And somehow got the job, which moved me down here. I was intrigued by the interesting similarities between my role in my previous life and the role that I've had for the last couple decades, in terms of similar challenges despite different commodities, different industries. I came from the largest middleman, lack of a sexier term, in the technology business and went to the largest middleman in the energy business, right? So that middleman role has a lot of similarities. And it's worked fairly well. But that rocket ship has slowed down a little. The world has changed. There was a time I used to be able to brag at a bar that we had a higher 10-year average return on our stock than Apple did. We'd be in the top 10 and we'd be ahead of Apple. We used to use that slide in all of our marketing materials. And we've done fairly well, but that pace was impossible to continue as we got larger and larger. Probably an excuse more than anything. But we're still holding our own, doing pretty well.

Yeah, you know, well, when I came down in 2007, Miami, South Florida, was not what it is today. So, it's easier, right? More people are doing it now, especially post-COVID for lots of reasons. Maybe we'll get into that later. Back then, I probably had the guts to make the move more because I had a second home to me, right? My aunt, my father's sister, lived here for many years. I came down probably every year of my life from the age of 12. So 30 some odd years before I got the job, I had already been down here. So I knew the streets, I knew the restaurants. But it had just come off the back of two of the ugliest hurricane seasons in the Miami area. Obviously, they've now moved west over the last several years. And when I came down for interviews, every house had a blue tarp on it. Bickell, where I lived for many years, had like two restaurants, you know, Capital Grille and Rosé Kano. I mean, there was nothing else there. So I was comforted by the move more because of the family piece of the puzzle at the time than the glamour of Miami, if you will. A lot of the people that I wound up working with were like me. They had just moved here maybe before I did, right? So I wound up working for a New Yorker from Brooklyn, and another guy who spent many years in New York that was originally from Texas. So, I would say it was pretty easy. I do remember I still drive by this gigantic warehouse building somewhere between my office and the airport. And I slow down when I pass it by because I remember driving to work on my first day and pulling off the road and shaking saying, 'What have I done?' because I had a good job and I liked it. I'm like, what's going to happen when I walk into this building? So I try to delay my first day walking into the new life by 5 minutes by pulling my car off on the side of the road, right? So I still think about it every time I pass that building. But it quickly became very similar, similar people again, a lot of people from the Northeast. And adapting to living here was actually kind of easy, right? Because I don't like cold weather. I moved here kind of sort of tail end of the winter, where it was beautiful here in March and it was snowing in New York. So I commuted for quite a while, kept my home in New York and then after a while kind of got tired of doing that and didn't feel the need to keep going back. So I finally kind of grew up and gave up on splitting my time. So it was a pretty easy transition adjustment for me. Then of course over the last 15, 17, 18 years it's become an even cooler place to live, right? So many things to do, so much going on. The airport's gotten a lot better. I travel a lot. It's easy to get anywhere. Food is equal to, I like food and wine, equal to New York if not better to some extent. And a lot of interesting, I lived on Long Island. I didn't live in Manhattan. So everyone was either Jewish or Italian, right? And everyone was from Long Island. Maybe if you were lucky they were from Queens, right? You know here you're working with people from all over the world. It's one of the most international cities we have in the country just in terms of Europeans, Latin, South Americans, etc. So, it's been, my kids at the time were younger. They felt the same thing. They came and went, my older son was going to high school, my younger son was going to middle school. We moved and they were just used to the Long Island crowd, right? And now they had classmates from everywhere speaking different languages. And so, I think it was a great experience for them ultimately. And they had an enjoyable young adult life here as well.

I only allow you to say that outside of hurricane zone time because anytime it comes up I am knocking on wood every time because it's just a matter of when.

No, I wanted to be in sales. I think I may have told you the story when I first met you. I was going to college. My parents helped fund college even though I started working, speaking about sales. I had a job when I was 12. I think I lied about my age to get a job because I was selling beer and cigarettes and things like that in the store. But there was no way my mother was going to let me go to college and not major in something that would be rewarding. And I wasn't going to be a doctor. I thought about the law profession for a while. So, I settled on accounting, but even through school, I honestly hated it. And every job that I had during school was sales-related. One of my favorite little stories is during a Christmas break, I worked at the Chanel counter in Macy's, which was a cool experience because they do more sales in that two-week period than they do the entire year. So it was just a crazy experience. People coming in and spending a lot of money on perfume and stuff. When I graduated college, the first jobs I was looking for were sales-related. And I don't know if this is a completely true story, because it's so many years ago, but I think it's reasonably true that my mother found out I went on an interview, I don't know if it was Xerox or Ricoh, one of the copier companies to be in sales, and she told them not to hire me. So I wound up again succumbing to my mom. We may talk about her again later too. And entered the accounting profession. I got a job as an auditor. The only reason I took that job was because my mother forced me to go down that path and it was cool because it involved a tremendous amount of travel. So I said if I'm going to get into that profession, at least I could hit the road and see the country on someone else's dime. So, I got a job as an auditor for an interesting conglomerate. Did a lot of travel. Earned my CPA that way. So I am a CPA. It's not the thing I'm most proud of based on the story that I just told you. But I've always been a closet sales guy. When I go into meetings with the sales guys, I want to do their job. They don't want to do my job. I want to do their job. I had a business. I'm going backwards. When I was in high school, I started Ira's Coins. This is before the internet. So it's not like I had a website. So you would type up your price list and send it out in the mail and had a post office box at the local post office and I had my business card. I sold t-shirts in my high school and I would sell coins to people, rare coins. I still have a lot of them that sit in a box that I don't know what I'll ever do with. So that's always been my kind of closet profession thinking I'm going to start my own website and make a lot of money on it. Maybe I'll do that in my 70s. But that first job kind of led me into the corporate world. I very quickly, I try to tell the story without going on too long. I was an auditor for a while and then one of the audits that I did a few times was the Treasury Group, right? For those that aren't familiar, that's the group that manages the company's banking relationships and cash flows in and out the door and insurance and things like that. And it was a fun audit because the guys that ran that group were so bad that as an auditor, if you go and everything's perfect, it looks like you're not doing any work, right? And they were so bad that I was able to write this scathing report every time of all the things that were at risk and wrong. And then I'd go back and do it again and they didn't fix anything that they were supposed to fix based on the last report. And one day my boss called me in on a Saturday. So I lived on Long Island. I took the train to New York City where this company was, and he said, 'I'm relieving you of your duties.' I thought I was getting fired. And he said, 'I'm not firing you, but as of Monday, you're in the Treasury Department because you're the only one that understands how to fix that thing, and those guys aren't responding to anything that you've recommended.' I was maybe 25 at the time, and this was a public New York Stock Exchange company. Within 6 months the two guys that ran that group were gone. Some interesting stories there too. And I took over and I was 25 years old and I was an officer of the company and managing all the banking relationships and all that. And that got me into a long career of that type of work, treasury related activity. From there I moved on to a company called Arrow Electronics that used to be based on Long Island. It's now based in Denver. That's now an $8 billion market cap company. I started there as treasurer at a very young age as well, 27 maybe. And took on a lot of responsibility over 17 years including M&A which is now still my favorite thing, right? That company grew by acquisition and I led a lot of the acquisition activity for many, many years. Investor relations, you name it. And it got to the point where I wanted to be a CFO and my buddy that I worked with for 15 years was blocking me. He always told me he was going to retire, but he just retired recently, so good thing I didn't wait for him. And so I started looking around, which dovetails with the earliest story about not wanting to go to St. Louis or Minneapolis until this opportunity showed up. And I wanted it really bad, but then when I got the job, the reason I pulled over on the side of the road was I didn't really think I was qualified. I felt that I bullshitted my way through the interview process. And I knew how to be a CFO and I realized pulling in that first day that I've never done this before, you know? What am I going to do? When they ask me something and I don't have the answer, right? And somehow magically that never was a problem. And I've told other people this as my career's gone on that have made that leap including a guy that worked for me that moved on a couple years ago. You know, David Heck, and he was afraid the same way. And I said, 'You're going to figure it out. Trust me.' And he's doing a great job. I think the idea of impostor syndrome is a bit of a fallacy because by definition, anytime you take on a bigger role or you go into a new company, you are never 100% prepared or 100% ready for everything that's going to come up. It comes down to your adaptability, your learning agility, your desire to keep growing and things like that. So even if you know that rationally, your mind doesn't necessarily tell you that, you still have the impostor syndrome in your heart if you will until you show up and realize even when I took that job many moons ago in the technology business I felt the same way. I almost threw up on the way to work on the first day. Right? So I'm sure a lot of people go through that unnecessarily, but it's just a rite of passage to some extent.

Yeah, I was a paper boy at 11 or 12 years old, too. Now, people today, they hear a paper boy and they're like, 'What are you talking? What's a newspaper first off?' But, yeah, it sounds like that's one of the first entrepreneurial journeys you can take. You got your own little route and you're throwing newspapers at people's houses and you get paid. And Steve Jobs I think was too. There's a ton of really successful people that started their career in that space. I had between the ages of 12 and college graduation day, I must have had 15 different jobs completely different. I worked in a gas station. I worked in a department store in the camera department in a store called Abraham and Strauss that doesn't exist anymore. I did a little bit of everything because I figured this is the time I could try stuff and if it doesn't work out, it doesn't work out. I worked at a shaved ice place, a bagel place, Ross Dress for Less, a hat store. I was a referee for the YMCA. I was hustling like you were and I was selling candy bars and blow pops at school. So yeah. The other thing about the paper boy experience which is interesting, glass half empty, glass half full maybe. Amazingly after all these years, which is probably like 50 years, I still remember the cheap person that didn't tip me, I remember their apartment number and their name. Little do people know by not being generous, the long-term impact of their perception of you. I used to see this lady in the supermarket and I always hated her. It was 90 cents back then to get a 7-day subscription to the Long Island Press and she would give me a dollar and put out her hand for the 10 cents back. At the same time, I grew up in a town where the New York Rangers and the New York Jets all lived because the Rangers training facility was in this town back then. And the Jets used to practice at Hofstra, which was only 15, 20 minutes away, which where I went to college. Those guys, 90 cents, some of them would get the paper, $5. Back then $5 was like $500 today. Might change your money. So I still remember. It's amazing the things that you remember on the generous side.

Alignment you're saying? Well, because we assume we have it as leaders, right? Yeah. Probably, how do you boil a really long answer into a short one? Look, at the end of the day, every company has goals and objectives or they should. Every company needs to find their own rhythm in working towards achieving those goals and objectives. And as a public company, what's the number one goal? Driving shareholder value. I mean, you want to keep your people happy, but you're here to keep your investors happy as well, right? Everyone inherently in my mind, and I've seen it for many, many years, probably has either a slightly or dramatically different view on how to get from point A to point B. In some companies, it's maybe not the right words, free range, right? So, it's chaos because everyone wants to get to the same place. They want to get there in a different way. They prioritize differently and then nothing gets done. It's probably one of the most common problems in corporate America. That's where the alignment piece comes in, right? Because in order to effectively achieve those goals, which we don't always get to ourselves, everyone has to be locked in on priorities. So being aligned, you have to attach the word alignment to priorities to make it maybe more meaningful. Being aligned around what priorities, and we use the term rank stacking, all sorts of crazy terms, but what are the first three things that we all agree we have to get done before we go to number four? Because there's always someone in the room that maybe that's their sweet spot. They want to focus on number four but it doesn't make sense to do that first, right? So it isn't easy because everyone leaves a room. And if you don't communicate, that's the other key word, right? If you don't communicate often and well enough, chaos comes back, right? So I work with my team really carefully. We have goals. We know what we want to achieve. Everyone contributes a different piece to that puzzle to get there, whether it's cash flow, whether it's driving improved operating margins, whether it's driving growth, whether it's M&A opportunities and things like that. But they all have to fit together well and everyone has to be aligned around, 'Yeah, we all agree that those are the things that we're focusing on.' No pocket vetos. I hate that term. And it's not always that easy to get there, right? You have to have the right people. You have to communicate with them the right way. You got to keep them motivated. And you have to have goals and objectives that they believe in. Because if you want to get everyone aligned around a stupid goal or an impossible goal, yeah, it's going to make alignment a lot more difficult, right? So that's probably an art more than a science. But it's critically important because I've seen it go wrong over and over and over again in my career where folks just don't see the solutions the same way and they're working hard, they're doing what they think is right, but then you have all these different silos doing things to get somewhere and they're not connected. And therefore you wind up not getting there, right? And that's a common problem.

The first thing I did, so we all lived through COVID, so I don't have to explain it to anybody, right? We all dealt with it in our own ways, is well, I felt lonely and I figured a lot of people also felt maybe a little scared and lonely. And I was trying to think of ways to connect. So, the first thing I did being old-fashioned is I asked my assistant to print out a list of everyone's all thousand emails, names and emails. And every morning when I'd wake up, my goal was to send 15 to 20 emails out personally, right? And I would just use a highlighter and mark those people off the list. I don't think I ever got through the entire thousand to be honest. And I would say, 'Hey, just checking.' I think the subject line was 'checking in', right? 'How you doing? What's going on? Love to chat. Appreciate you. Hope everything's well, work, family, etc.' Half the people thought it was spam and didn't respond because they think, 'What are the odds that Ira sent me a personal note? He's never talked to me before. I'm in Norway. I barely speak English, right?' But once people realized what I was doing and they realized it was really me, I started getting lengthy responses. Like some of them were maybe too lengthy. I heard the whole story about their entire family and who moved here. But I also solicited requests for, you know, 'You have any great ideas? Are there things that we're asking you to do that don't make sense to you?' and things like that. So, that's where it started and I think people appreciated that. Then I decided to be like you and I started my own in-house podcast, if you will. Every Wednesday morning at 9:30, any one of those people was able to dial in and it was just a way to connect and I would give an update of what's going on. Some of my team members would update folks in terms of what was going on in those areas. We'd celebrate birthdays. And then I figured maybe people are going to start getting bored listening to Ira every week, every single Wednesday of the year. So I started like you bringing on guests. And I guess during COVID maybe people had some extra time. So I had the CFO of Bank of America, the CFO of Marriott, the CEO of Raymond James, the CFO of PayPal who's now the CFO of Walmart. Great guy. And you know, list goes on. So I kind of made it a little more interesting that way. CFO of the NFL who I worked with in that first audit job. And as we came back to life and COVID kind of started drifting away, I've never given that up. So, I still do it and I try not to miss it. And somewhere between 400 and 550 of those people dial in every week. I'm sure there are some people, I probably know a few that have never dialed in, which pisses me off, but 400 to 550 people dial in every week. If I'm on the road, I'll do it from a hotel room. I've done it from an airport lounge. Once in a while, it's inevitable that I have to cancel it. And I do a separate one each quarter after our earnings call as a public company to kind of give them the internal take on the previous quarter that we just announced. And that became so popular that our general counsel and chief information officer came to me and said, 'Can my guys dial in?' So now I have, and HR wanted to dial in. So now there's like 1500 people that dial in for those calls. So it's a great way to keep in touch with people all over the world. Sometimes, yesterday, so today's Thursday, I had my guy in Oslo, Norway talking about what he has going on, including his ski trip over Christmas, but also work-related activity. We have a guy that when the war broke out in Ukraine that worked in my organization, a young nice guy living in Moscow who's now scared shitless of what to do with himself. So, we were talking to him when the war was just breaking out. 'What are you going to do?' We moved him to Dubai and thank God, he's doing well and never had to sign up for the military or anything like that. So we've had all sorts of opportunities. And then I motivated the team to make recommendations on where we could make contributions and then we would choose one every month and then the person who recommended the contribution would get on the call and talk about what it means to them, in many cases it was personal, and we would make a contribution in their honor. So we still do that. So it's been a cool experience. And one of my IT guys wrote to me a few weeks ago and said, 'I think you should turn this into a podcast and open it up to the public.' I go, 'I don't know if I'm ready for that.' But maybe.

Well, you know, I could work with you. Maybe there's a partnership opportunity. Maybe I shouldn't tell you this, but I don't know if you watch CNBC. There's a guy named Dan Niles that's on almost every day. He's the guy that's kind of predicted major market moves in the past. He's now kind of predicting some softness this year. He said his number one investment idea this year is cash. He's going to be on one of my upcoming internal calls as well.

People don't realize, you nailed it, how, everyone wants to get a bonus. Everyone wants to get a merit, cost of living increase, right? Everyone wants a nice salary. People underestimate how meaningful that could be to the average employee that just comes in, does their job every day, probably thinks that no one even knows what their name is or what they look like, and then all of a sudden, whether it's the CEO or the CFO or someone else, sends them a personal note and thanks them. People do not realize how ridiculously meaningful that is to almost everybody. I sent out, you know, I always like to write as

Well, as talk, right? So, I always take the time like for New Year's, I sent the whole global team a New Year's note and my assistant said, 'I'll send it out.' She said, 'I'll send it out from my email address so you don't get inundated with out of office automated emails.' Right? I said, 'No, no, I want it from my address because I want people to have the opportunity to respond.' So, I did get 600 out of office emails all in one minute. Took me 15 minutes to delete those, but dozens of people wrote back and that's what I was hoping for to hear from some people that I don't talk to every day. So that stuff's really important and I try to stress that as much.

Sure. Someone came up with an idea about a year ago, with the knowledge that the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II was coming up this year into next year. And they had this idea of having a series of concerts to commemorate the end of World War II. The reason this person who's the guy that runs that organization took me to lunch. They said, 'Well, there's one that we think you're going to be exceptionally interested in which is going to feature a piece called From the Diary of Anne Frank. And we're going to do that piece for one of the concerts that's going to commemorate the end of the Holocaust.' The reason he knew that would be meaningful to me is because my mother survived Auschwitz. She was a member of a family of seven. Five of them perished. My mom passed away exactly 6 years ago last weekend. Her one brother that survived with her is actually 95 and still alive and living in Canada. So, I immediately said, 'I don't know what you're asking me, but the answer is yes.' So I agreed to chair this concert. At the time that I agreed to it, I didn't know exactly when it was going to be and I didn't know that much about it. I just knew it was going to feature this piece and it was going to commemorate the Holocaust, right? And I was obviously doing it for my mom. So I went on a letter-writing campaign to everybody I know that I do business with or that has any money and said, of course giving you when you get the chair role, you're expected to raise a boatload of money. They drafted something for me. It was more like, 'The symphony is a great place, which it is, and we do all these things for the community.' I said, 'No, I threw that out. I said the only way because it's hard to get money out of the corporate world today. I'm making this personal. This is about my mom.' And I went on a limb to say this concert is going to be in honor of my mom, more formally than maybe they had anticipated. It worked, right? Because a lot of people said, 'It's really tough to go to my committee to get cash.' But when I told them the story of you and your mom, money was pouring in. As the thing got closer, it turned out that this was now going to become the opening night concert of the season in October. And the piece was going to be narrated because this piece when it was first done was actually narrated at Carnegie Hall. I think it was Carnegie Hall by Katherine Hepburn. She collaborated in creating this piece many years ago and it won a Grammy award at one point. So all of a sudden at the 11th hour they say, 'We got some interesting news for you. This piece is going to be narrated by Daisy Ridley, who is in Star Wars, is a famous actress from the UK.' Still don't know how they pulled that off. And then they started preparing all the marketing materials and stuff and I go, 'Where's my mother?' Right? Because this is why I'm doing it. Push came to shove. They went above and beyond. So when the concert started that night, there was a pre-recorded video image of me on the big screen talking about my mother. And then the Playbills had an insert. If anyone wants to go on the New World Symphony, I think it's nws.edu website, the link is still there with a whole story that they beautifully prepared by a professional writer about my mother's story. And it was just an amazing, amazing night. And then there was a dinner afterwards. And I got to sit with Daisy Ridley, the actress, and her husband Tom, who's also an actor. They were both in the remake of Murder on the Orient Express a few years ago. And I said to her, 'You did a great job.' Something like that. And she's like, 'I know, Ira, I listened to every word you said. It was amazing.' It was the coolest thing to hear this from her. And then the whole dinner she was just asking me questions about my mom. It was just an amazing, absolutely amazing experience. And the next day I went back because they did the concert one more time and brought my daughter who wasn't there for the first night so she could experience it. So it was an unbelievable way to honor my mom. Now she's all over the internet where probably her name, if you Googled her, nothing would have come up before except maybe her obituary. A lot of people came up to me that night and said, 'What a story,' and 'I had a grandmother' or 'I had this or that,' and asked me a bunch of questions. Some woman gave me a book about her family's life. So part of my life when I'm not working has always been about honoring my mom because of the unique background. And I always tell people that my life's a miracle. I could go on forever about her because her survival was miraculous. She had way too many near-death experiences. If anyone goes on my Instagram page, most of my more permanent posts are pictures of my mother on the anniversary of her death or her birthday. That's about all you're going to see there. So that was absolutely phenomenal and that's guided me to dovetail the other things we talked about. That's certainly impacted me professionally in many ways.

It's the resilience thing and not giving up and not worrying about screwing something up knowing it could be a whole lot worse. It's not like reading it in a history book. You know, mom went through something a whole lot worse. So if you make a bad decision one day and take a chance, it doesn't go well, that's a whole lot better than watching your whole family get killed. So how that really transcends day-to-day, I'm not completely sure, but it certainly has an impact on the way you live your life, the way you think, the way you treat others. If you look at what's going on in the world today, there's so many horrible things going on. People have different views on a lot of this stuff, but for me, it's even more difficult because my mom lived through it, and it's kind of happening again in many ways manifesting itself in different parts of the world. So she's been this guiding light and she lived till almost 95 so I got to spend an exceptional amount of time with her. There's something about mom every day whether I'm at work or home over the weekend. So thanks for bringing that up.

Yeah, one thing I could say I could answer that many different ways, but one thing that impacted me a bit was being handed this easy to read book a few years ago called The Ideal Team Player by a guy named Patrick Lencioni, great author. His storyline told in a very simple way using a very simple company, it was like a plumbing business. Talks about your best employees being humble, hungry, and smart. Humble and hungry are self-explanatory. Smart may not be what you would immediately assume when you just hear the word because it's more about street smarts and having influential skills and knowing how to handle yourself, emotional intelligence and things like that, asking good questions, being a good listener. When you read that book, what's funny, maybe funny isn't the right word, is it kind of tells you to suggest that you do this, you immediately start going through your staff and people that you've interviewed and you start classifying them. And what the book says is very few people nail all three. You should hope that everyone you have working for you is nailing at least two out of the three. And if they're only at one, there's one or two solutions. Do you believe that you could actually improve where they're weak or they should be counseled out of the organization? I've handed that book to every one of my hiring managers and made them read it. And we've kind of used that as a guiding principle when we're interviewing people. Now, interviews aren't that easy because you only get like a 45-minute snapshot. I've used some creative ways of figuring. So there's no perfect recommendation on how to nail an interview as the interviewer. But you certainly could be with those guiding principles. I'm always asking questions or just having a conversation with someone to get a feel for how I feel that they may fit into those categories. And that's worked pretty well. I may also, one of the funny stories I like telling is I may before I make my final decision, take someone to do something as simple as taking someone out to lunch. My funny story that I told a few times is about to hire this guy and embarrassingly I did hire this guy even after telling the story and he didn't work out. I asked the waitress in the restaurant for an iced tea and she said they didn't have any. She turns to the candidate and said, 'What would you like to drink?' And he asked for an iced tea. So, I immediately said to myself, 'This guy wasn't paying attention, right? And is he going to be paying attention and will he have attention to detail at his job?' That wound up being the thing that he was weakest at. I should have, it would have been a weird thing to go to HR and say, 'I decided not to hire this guy because he didn't hear that I ordered an iced tea.' So sometimes it's little things. I've made decisions at the last second to pull an offer just based on in some cases the way the candidate was negotiating their package. So it's more of an art than a science but I do look for humble, right? Having people with massive egos just doesn't work. When you get back to your question earlier about alignment, those are the people that generally are hard to get aligned.

I mean, I have so many. I enjoy asking questions about people and their life outside of work. That one always is interesting. Gives me a feel for what the person's really like as opposed to coming in prepared with all the canned answers to the paper boy experience. I like asking people where they start out. What was your first job? Did you work in high school or college? What was that experience like? This sounds weird, Oz, but my favorite question is asking the candidate what questions they have for me. And when they say they don't have one, I bet that's a red flag. More than 50% of the candidates say, 'No, I think you covered everything.' And that's so lame if you think about it. Let me tell you why it's lame. If you're inquisitive and you're curious, it's impossible for somebody to be comprehensive because the more they say, the more things that should pop up in your head as potential questions or things that you want to better understand. And so, I think people get nervous or they're not prepared. But if you're actively listening, that should lead to more questions. Then there's the overuse of that and some people come too prepared and then they have like 50 questions. That's not good either. They have to have and then some of them, they're just asking questions for the sake of asking. So that part of the interview is also telling. So I'm like three-quarters of the way through the interview I get to that and I'm either on the fence or I'm not. If I'm on the fence, that often throws me the wrong way if that just falls flat. I've had some situations where the questions people ask me were the reason that I ended up hiring. I liked them and then they asked some really insightful questions that you could tell were not prepared or boilerplate coming in that they were really thinking about the opportunity in the right way. And again, I love people that are self-aware. So that's one thing if you ask too many questions or no questions that you might lack that skill, but I love people that are curious. And it's okay if they're asking what's in it for them because I also look at the interview as much as I'm interviewing you, you're interviewing me and this needs to make sense for you otherwise this isn't going to work out. So I think that's really good for a more senior person. I often use this one and say, 'Okay, I hired you. A year has gone by. Tell me what happened, what you did, what worked out well, what didn't work out well.' That's a tough one to answer, but someone really solid that's got a strategic mindset. So I won't ask that to an accounts payable clerk. But if it's a more senior manager level position, it's kind of cool because some people say, 'What are you going to do in your first 30 days?' So I throw the whole year at them and say, 'What was the outcome after the first year and how'd you get there?'

To that point, what I still haven't perfected is there are way too many times and I don't have enough time but I try to get at least if it's a mid-level manager up, get on the interview slate for even 15 minutes because what happens way too often is the hiring manager is like, 'My god, this position's been open for three months. I'm struggling. This person came in. They have two arms and two legs, a little bit of hair, and they're breathing. I'm going to hire them.' And then I see them for 15 minutes and I said, 'This is the person you want to hire.' And I nix it. And people hate that. And that's why they try to avoid me even getting on the slate. I understand where they're coming from. I said, 'But you have to once you hire this, you're going to invest a lot of time.' And I know it sucks for the position to be open, but then you're going to be doing it all over again in six months. It's such a short-term mindset because it's like, and I get it, like you said, 'I got to get this headcount filled or maybe it goes away or I'm stretching my team out or I'm stretching myself out.' And you're right, it's a common bias that comes up, but you have to avoid it because the problem is when you hire somebody and you bring them in, it becomes a one-year problem, two-year problem, three-year problem rather than another month of the position being open. So, I think you're spot on. I won't elaborate on this one too much, but I could give you the high level. To take that to the nth degree, I'm actually on the board of another public company, we haven't talked about that, who without getting too granular and going through a CEO transition, right? And I got to meet a couple of the candidates and I was on the interview panel. The line of question even at that level at the board level was which one you interviewed both and my answer was neither. That wasn't one of the choices I was given, but that was the answer I provided. And what I can tell you is that wound up being the case. It wound up being neither. And we kept going. So which one is a false choice? I love that you said that. So whether it's sport level or junior, we probably don't do enough training in that regard. You mentioned alignment by the way, the other thing that happens, my mind keeps spinning as you ask these questions. I remember one guy who I really liked so I was on the interview panel a lot. I really liked the guy. The guy wound up turning down the offer. So I followed up with him. What did the guy say to me? He said, and this was one of the reasons I liked this guy because he was inquisitive and he asked the right questions, said, 'Well, I interviewed with four different people and I asked them what my priorities would be in the first three or six months. And he said, 'Ira, I got four completely different answers. So, how can I take this job? Because you guys aren't aligned. You're all over the place.' As soon as you started talking alignment, I thought of that.

Well, a lot of what we talked about, it takes too long. So I'm always hungry. I say, 'Okay, I know we need this position.' and I go to HR and then four weeks later I show up and they said, 'We're still, we don't want to throw weak candidates in front of you, so we're doing our work.' I said, 'That's BS.' So speed, especially when it's a key position, is speed and focus is something that is really important to me that we still don't excel at. And the other thing is, you'll take the time to write a job spec, which is a science to do well. And then candidates will show up that don't even meet the spec. It's like, 'Okay, well, why do you even bring that?' 'Well, but they have this instead.' I go, 'Well, that's...' I had a CEO that I worked for many years ago, and he had this stupid line, which was actually wound up being somewhat profound. It was 'A must is a must is a must.' So he goes, 'When you prepare that job spec, you have some things that are nice to have, but it's going to have some things that are musts. And I don't care if the person's God, if they don't have one of those musts that you decided was something you must have, they're out. They're absolute deal breakers.' You have to know what the deal breakers are. The must have versus the want to have, right? But very few people follow that religiously because again, the natural tendency is I need to hire someone. Well, they got two out of three, so you're not going to come up with 50 musts, by the way. I know they don't have the third one, but I'm going to give them a chance. Well, then you screwed up from the get-go. So it's things like that. It is not easy. You need, you're on the outside looking in. HR is a way more critical organization than most people realize because those guys could make a huge difference if they do all this stuff. The very thing we have to understand is the people that we bring into our organization, how we retain them and how we develop them is a bottom line impact. And that's why I talk with a lot of CFOs and CEOs about understanding what the cost of a role being extended a long time, making the wrong hire, attrition, retraining. We're only starting to get our hands around that. And it's something that's really important. I will tell you this, if you go another four weeks and have any of those unqualified candidates, you give me a ring over here at MSH we'll move a little bit faster for you.

Wow. Sure. Don't trust everybody. Trust yourself more. Believe in yourself. Again, those stories I told you of freaking out first day of work. Have more confidence in yourself. There was a great line. I think I wrote it down in preparing for this, but I don't know what I did with it. Maybe I won't say you have lack of attention to detail. I'm not going to say that about you because I know that's not the case. I had another quote that I thought I may use, but it's not the right one for this discussion. I think it's just, that's probably the biggest thing by far is trusting yourself, believing in yourself. I used to use the line, I've stopped using it a bit, that the reason I've been so successful is because I never had enough confidence in myself and I felt that I had to prove myself every day. I guess that's still kind of true, but I've kind of twisted that around more recently. I don't use that line anymore.

It is, but it doesn't necessarily have to be overdosed with 'I don't think I could.' I'm hungry to do it, but I don't believe I could do it. You want to be hungry to do it and believe you could do it and be confident that you're going to get there and not being worried about making the mistake goes back to my mom's story of things could be a lot worse. So making mistakes, and that's one of my common interview questions too, where you rarely get a cool answer which is tell me about a failure and how you dealt with it. Too many people say, 'Well, I've never failed.' Like, f you. We've all failed. And then you haven't done enough. You haven't put yourself out there. I failed yesterday. So self-belief is key, but thinking you've arrived or thinking you're an expert and you've got it all figured out is also very deadly.

Ron Blomberg.

He was a Jewish guy from Georgia who could only hit righties, but every time he was up, he hit a home run. And I got to meet him a couple times when I was a kid. And so the days I was going to games all the time, he wasn't around that long. But he was here. And one day I brought a sign saying I loved him to a double header. And the next day in Newsday, the headline story of the Yankee win said 'Yankees split the double header, but Blomberg happy.' And he referred in his quote to my sign. So from that day, he became my favorite player. And during COVID, my friend whose son had his wedding that I referred to earlier, all this stuff's connected. Said, 'Hey, I know you love this guy Blomberg when you were a kid. My friend does a podcast for sports and he's going to be his guest, so you may want to dial in during COVID.' So, I dialed in and in the chat function, they asked if anyone had any questions. I said, 'Tell this guy that I'm the guy that was the kid that held up the sign in the big double header that he had where he hit like four home runs.' And he wound up engaging with me on the podcast. This was just a couple years ago. That's amazing. And I now have an autographed bat and he's in the Hall of Fame because he's the first designated hitter to ever get a base hit. And the interesting story there is in the first year of the designated hitter, someone else was supposed to be coming to bat before him in another game, but I think it was a rain delay, right? So, he wound up being the first designated hitter to ever bat and he actually got a hit. So, he's in the Hall of Fame for that. Aside from that, there are so many that are close. I would say Paul O'Neill was probably another.

Well, those were before my time, right? So, I'm thinking of, obviously Mariano Rivera, legend. What's your favorite championship? Which one stands out the most to you?

The one that I missed when Wade Boggs was riding around on a horse because my cousin, who I'm going to see this weekend, was getting married in Montreal. So, I had a miss. So, that was when the Yankees beat the Braves and it was two games to two? I'm trying to remember. And I knew I was going to miss the game that they had a chance to win the World Series in New York. So, I actually flew, pissed off my wife a little bit, flew to Atlanta to go to the game before the weekend when the wedding was going to be in Canada. And that's the game. It was an amazing game. So, that put the Yankees up three games to two. Paul O'Neill was in right field and the Yankees were winning one-nothing. And in the ninth inning, I think there were one or two guys on for the Braves. Bottom of the ninth, I was sitting out in right field. Some guy hits a long drive. And I have the picture on my wall. I'm looking at it right now. If I turn my camera around, Paul O'Neill reaches out. I couldn't see from my seat for a moment that he actually caught the ball. If he missed it, they lost the game. And he caught it. Game over. Yankees up three games to two and they went to New York and won the famous game six with Wade Boggs. Which I had a hard time watching because I was in Montreal and every TV screen in bars near where the wedding venue was was showing hockey preseason games. Worth it. That was the inverse of the Good Will Hunting story. Carl did Fisk. So, and then I got to go the first year in the new Yankee Stadium when they beat the Phillies. That was pretty cool. That was Hideki Matsui's like seven RBI game. Last game he ever played for the Yankees. I remember what George Steinbrenner called him, too. Now I got to... Okay, so who's the more annoying little brother, Mets or Red Sox?

Well, the worst day in my life literally aside from my parents dying was when the Yankees blew their three-nothing lead in the World Series to the Red Sox. I know. I'll never ever forget that. As a matter of fact, if I turn my screen to the side, those are my two Yankee stadium chairs. That's gonna lead to my last question because here's the thing. I am a big baseball buff. I never got to go to Yankee Stadium. I never got to go to Monument Valley. I did go to this monstrosity of a corporate stadium here. What's your feelings on the new Yankee Stadium versus the old Yankee Stadium?

Look, the old Yankee Stadium had this charm. I had a lot of amazing moments. Some of the best Yankee teams that I experienced ever played there. And not that long after the new Yankee Stadium, I moved to Florida, right? So I had limited experience in the new stadium. That first year was great, right? But most of my memories are old stadium. So, it was really sad for me when they tore that down. The new stadium's cool. It's probably one of the cooler baseball stadiums out there with a lot of history, but I've never had an attachment to it because shortly after it was built, I was out of there. I don't go back that much anymore. I used to have like partial year season tickets in the old stadium. I went there when I was a kid. Some amazing, Cal Ripken last game in New York. A lot of cool moments in the old stadium. But maybe I got to go back there now this season.

Thanks for having me. All right, take care. Talk to you. See you. All right. Bye-bye.