Steve 0:09 The HR Happy Hour Network is proudly sponsored by Workhuman. The workplace is changing fast—and the leaders who understand what's coming will have the advantage. Workhuman's annual Trends Webinar returns January 29th with research-backed insights on the hottest trends shaping 2026. Discover how top organizations are navigating AI, psychological safety, performance, and equity to outperform their competition—plus exclusive findings from McKinsey's Women in the Workplace 2026 report. Featuring an expert panel from McKinsey and Workhuman, you'll get the intelligence you need to lead with confidence this year. Join the Trends Webinar live January 29th at noon Eastern, or catch the replay on demand. Register for free @Workhuman.com. Steve 0:51 Welcome to the At Work in America show. My name is Steve Boese. I'm with Trish Steed. Trish, good morning, good afternoon or good evening. I don't know what it is, where you are. How are you? Trish 1:03 It is still morning and Happy New Year. The new year means some new guests and new topics. Steve 1:11 Let's call the end of Happy New Year, though, right with that one please. Trish 1:16 Is that it? Really, it's been like a week. Honestly, I don't know. Steve 1:19 I don't care about that. Some people get offended with it, with the late Happy New Year. I don't. It doesn't bother me. Trish 1:25 If someone wishes it to me, well, I'm glad for it. So you can tell me, at the end of the year, Happy New Year, I'll be excited. I will. Steve 1:31 I'm excited for the show today. We're diving into a real hardcore HR topic, and people topic, and one we probably should talk about a little bit more, and that's retention, it's engagement, and it's how particularly small, mid sized businesses can better engage with their people and understand them better. Our guest today is Curtis Forbes. Curtis is the founder and CEO at MustardHub, and I want to learn about that name too, by the way, because that's a cool name. But Curtis, welcome to the show. How are you? Curtis Forbes 2:03 I'm great. Happy New Year. Happy New Year to all the people who receive that well! Steve 2:08 Well, yeah, I know I don't. I vow not to be as crabby and you know that person this year, so I'm excited. Trish 2:16 I'm gonna hold you to that! Curtis Forbes 2:18 To all those other people, I'll just say Happy Wednesday. Steve 2:21 Yeah, absolutely so Curtis, welcome. We mentioned you're the Founder and CEO of MustardHub. Let's start with learning a little bit more about you. And then MustardHub, of course, because you made a splash at HR tech this past fall. But some folks probably don't know who you are, and let's learn about that. Curtis Forbes 2:36 I'm happy to dial back all the way to the beginning. Like you said, I'm the founder, CEO of MustardHub. MustardHub is a workforce engagement infrastructure platform. We help companies reduce turnover, strength and culture, gain predictive insights into into employee well being. Little bit about my background. Goodness. I I actually started my my career, it's very, we'll say, non linear. Most, most people don't necessarily have, I guess, a linear career path. Music. My background is music. I spent about 15 years on the jazz circuit, playing music, teaching music, I started an education company 20 some odd years ago in music education, and I spent about 20 years scaling that across the country. And during that time, I built a roll up portfolio of other education businesses as well, and that got me dealing with and working with a lot of people, a lot of people in a lot of places, very distributed teams, Frontline-heavy, very Gosh, mixed worker classifications, full time, part time, contractors. So I got a really heavy dose of that right away. Curtis Forbes 4:07 And I'm sure your music training prepared you for that? Curtis Forbes 4:15 Well, you know, it's funny. So I've always, I've always taken, I guess, a very leadership approach. I mean, I was a band leader for a while. I did a lot of my own bookings for a long time. So I wouldn't necessarily say my education prepared me for dealing with people, but when you start to do that a lot and sort of managing what all that entails. You know, with a, with a, whether it's a big band or a small band, you get you get it, you get a taste of it right, at least a little bit. So the education didn't prepare me for it, but at least I got it sort of seeded the challenges that I was gonna start facing as my organization grew. Trish 5:00 Well, I think that's what was fascinating about your story, too. Is you were a person who was actually in need of something right with your people in all these different capacities, that they were working with you, a way to really address keeping them on board, right, keeping them with you. And I think that anybody listening to the show from small business all the way up to enterprise scale, we all have that problem. We all had that struggle, right? Wanting to be able to keep the best people on your team. So I know that was kind of the jumping off point for what you're currently doing. Maybe talk a little bit about that and how you went about just initially solving for some of those problems. Curtis Forbes 5:43 Well, you know, I think the first, the first, really, the first big challenge that I had is actually identifying that there was a problem. And I think that, you know, oftentimes, I think in a leadership position, we can, we can be blind to a lot of the things that might be going on within the organization, especially when you work with such distributed teams, right? Those hallway moments don't exist in a lot of times, you know? And it doesn't necessarily matter how big the organization is, but it might matter how the organization is structured, right? If you're smaller, if you're big, if you're remote, right? Or, depending on where those touch points are with with the staff that you work with, you, you might not necessarily know really what's going on. So the first big thing for me was actually identifying that there was a problem. You know? I didn't necessarily again, I jumped right into a leadership role. I created a company 20 some odd years ago. I was in my 20s. I kind of fell backwards into that without really knowing what I was looking forward to. I didn't have a lot of business training. In fact, the whole story of creating my company is time. Is another podcast I've actually lectured on that many times. But, and it was a little bit of a crazy situation, but so throughout the years, really kind of understanding what was going on within my organization, why turnover was was happening both voluntary and involuntary, right? Regrettable and not regrettable, because not all turnover is bad and not all turnover is preventable, and those are just two facts that we have to accept. But it was really around covid, you know, when we started to dig in heavily to see how we can change this trend. You know, through a lot of business development planning, strategic planning and resource planning, you kind of start to Well, we started to understand what these levers are that we could pull to help the organization grow in the various ways we wanted it to grow, right so people was obviously the big issue. We vetted a lot of really great, wonderful systems that exist in the marketplace. They didn't really fit the small business model. I grew the small business across the country, but yet each location really operated on its own P and L, right? So every one of them had, you know, and think about it, a lot of today's organizations work like that, right? Whether you're multi-location chain or a franchise or small business or what have you. That's not an uncommon business model that the options out there really didn't fit. So we we ended up building technology on top of proprietary tech that we had, all that we already had built. And it was pretty remarkable what it did for our organization right at jump. Trish 8:43 Well, I think, you know, even just exploring, you know, I met you in person, obviously before, but then also just on your website. I mean, I think what I view it as is a little bit of like operationalizing what HR normally would do, maybe in a larger, larger organization, and maybe still not getting right. So, for example, you know, being able to walk the halls and and see, are people having absenteeism? Are they, you know, are they slowly removing the things off their desk, right? So you can predict when someone's going to leave. So you're right without some of those physical visual cues of maybe, and you're right, leaders are so busy you don't always pick up on it. Even if you are in the office with someone, right, you don't know, and people are afraid to tell their leaders sometimes what's really going on. So yeah, I mean, as I was just kind of sifting through all of the abilities that you give these primarily small to mid sized businesses. I mean, these are things that, as an HR leader, I watched partners in professional services firms struggle with this. I've watched when I was working in healthcare with like, frontline, you know, everything from nurses to your food nutrition workers. You know, it's not sort of a single group that even struggles with this. So. For me, that's why it was so interesting for you to tackle it, because it had impact, right, regardless of industry or size. Curtis Forbes 10:10 When people talk about retention, I think it gets framed as this HR issue or labor market issue. But I think for operators, right, owners or operators that HR of one, as I like to refer to them as, like, it shows up in much more visceral way. I mean, it shows up as constantly, you know, backfilling roles, right? Managers are stretched in teams like, don't quite gel, because someone's always new right in I think that that eventually hits customers, right? I mean, what we consistently see, I think, is that people don't usually leave because of comp alone, right? They leave because of they feel invisible, they feel unsupported, they feel disconnected, right? People, what? I mean, what's the saying? Right? People don't leave companies that leave managers, right, that disconnect often builds quietly over time, right? The cost isn't just the recruiting fee or the onboarding fee, right? It's the momentum you lose. It's the trust that you lose. It's the sometimes it's the customers. And that was a big problem that we had, is that when we had teachers leave or musicians leave, we had customers go with them, and institutional knowledge, right? All those things that are a little bit more difficult to quantify, you know, also the load that you place on the people who do stay. So one person, yeah, I mean, one person leaving has, you know, can have a ripple, I think, across a team in ways that leaders don't anticipate until it's already happening, and then you're always playing catch up, right? And so to your point about whether you're big or you're small, I mean, different organizations are going to experience it differently, but the pattern is pretty still pretty consistent, right? When people feel unseen for long enough they they disengage before they exit. Steve 11:59 Yeah, there's so many difficult to quantify, as you said, Curtis costs associated with, you know, regrettable attrition or unwanted higher attrition. And it's not even I was even thinking about. It's kind of what's happened to a person for the weeks and months before they decide to separate, right? They're they're coming to work with a bad attitude, or they're coming to work very disengaged. They're not being that productive. Maybe they're sort of feeding that out into the into the environment, right? And other people are kind of taking that into right? And look, we all know it happens. We've all probably all had some jobs in our lives that you know we didn't love, and we were thinking about the door ourselves. But when it's happening more than you want, more than then, then you can really live with Yeah, the costs are astronomical, and many of them you can't really even you can't even quantify, but it's such an interesting point. And I guess the other thing I'll say, Curtis, I love your thought on it is, I know I've heard a lot of people talk about or frame this discussion this way, which is, retention, even engagement, is an outcome, right? It's just the it's just a result, right? It's, you know, so we shouldn't really talk about it all that much. We should talk about the things on the other side of the equal sign, right? Like, whether it's comp, work, life, balance, environment, you know, manager, employee, relationships, etc, etc. I'd love your thoughts on that. Like, should folks really think about, hey, let's talk about retention. Let's talk about engagement. Or should we just look at that as, okay, let's do all these programs and see what happens with our retention and engagement. Curtis Forbes 13:51 Oh, well, I mean, it is an outcome. It should also be a strategy, I think. I often don't see it treated as one. I think that there's a lot of things that go in well. I mean, we're dealing with humans, right? We're dealing with humans, and I think that oftentimes we forget that, right? So, yes, I mean, is it retention and turnover and things like that? certainly are on that, like you said, on that one side of the equal sign. And there's a lot of things that go into what makes something a good experience for somebody, or at least an experience that somebody wants to live with and live within. You know what's funny is that I think that most organizations already have all of the data they need. I just don't think that they think about it that way. The clock ins, the shift changes, response times, participation, missed handoffs, right? Right? You're talking about all the things on that side of the equal sign, right? These are treated as sort of operational noise. I think when you step back though those behaviors, they they tell a story, right? Someone who is always like reliable maybe starts going quiet, or somebody who's, you know, still performing, but maybe they stop participating, or another person starts actually picking up extra work without being asked, like, what does that mean, right? And I don't think that these things like, mean a lot in isolation, but when there's patterns that emerge, right, they're often early indicators of something deeper, the burnout, the disengagement, right? Or, like on my last example, I think maybe, like a readiness for growth, right? Or wanting, you know, more responsibility. I think those things are overlooked. And it's not that there isn't enough, you know, data. I think there's sort of a maybe, really a lack of interpretation of this data that they do have. Is that maybe a fair analysis? Steve 16:12 Yeah, I think it is. And to me, Curtis, thank you for that. I think that's the really, really interesting part of the story here, which is sifting through or helping organizations make sense of all that data, identifying what which of those data points are really predictive of some of these outcomes, and then helping the organization, helping managers and helping leaders with the appropriate, you know, interventions right to or at least awareness right to say, hey, so and so has clocked in seven minutes late on his last four shifts, and previously never was late, right? Whatever it is, right, that, to me, is really interesting part of this. Curtis Forbes 16:58 Yeah, so I think what you just said is a real there's something implicit in what you said. I think that's really, really critical for people to remember and understand, is that Predictive Analytics doesn't mean predicting the future. Like nobody has this crystal ball, and we have to remember that like there's that doesn't exist and and even no amount of AI can predict the future, right? When we talk about predictive analytics, that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about recognizing patterns earlier than humans typically do, right? So I mean, I'm trying to, I'm trying to oversimplify it, but, but purposefully so, because it's not a scary thing, right? Especially when managers are too busy, right? Or and they're overseeing a lot of people right there, they already have this enormous mental load that they have to deal with on a regular basis, right? And we don't have the water cooler moments to check in and be like, how are you doing? So you know, there's, there's ways to help sort of facilitate this. So if somebody starts missing shifts, I mean, that was a really great example, right? Or they're late, you know, you're to your example, or they're disengaging from communication, or they're pulling back socially, that doesn't mean they're quitting tomorrow, right? It means they might need a check in, or it might need support or clarity, right? And on the flip side, like somebody, I think, who consistently hits goals or takes initiative or supports others like they might not be a retention risk at all, but they are a growth opportunity, right? And how often are we looking at those kind of signals to tell us that, right? Do we have to wait for a position to open up and then have to go look for people who are, you know, consistently over performing, right? Maybe that's not the best strategy right here. So the goal isn't necessarily automation, for like, automation sake. It's, you know, giving leaders a nudge at the right moment so they can respond like humans, not like spreadsheets, right? And where we were right, because teams were more distributed, right? We had, we had less informal visibility, you know, than than we used to. And I think that the hallway, since those hallway conversations were gone, right? There's a reason. There's a reason they call it quiet quitting, right? Trish 19:31 Well, I think too. I mean, gosh, so many things are like spinning in my mind, of just times where having no technology to help recognize the patterns. You rely on the people, and then if the people aren't recognizing them, it's often too late. So it's fascinating to me to think about like, what would my work experiences have been like as an HR leader, helping my businesses, because I've worked for really small companies and I've worked for really large ones, and I think the problem is much the same. Because you're right. People are people. We start seeing people behave in a certain way. I'll give you an example. I'll try to, like, anonymize it. But and Steve, you've heard this one before, but when I was working in professional services, I went out on maternity leave, and I was out for six months almost, and I had various people because I was on bed rest in the hospital. Various people came to the hospital to resign because they didn't want to do it to their partner. And so it was really eye opening as a younger woman at the time worker, you know that I thought, why are they not telling their leaders? So the leaders had no idea these things were going on when I came back, in fact, one was being let go. They waited for me to return to do it. The leader did, and he was going through a really horrible divorce, but hadn't told anyone. So his performance had changed. And so when I guess my point with all of this is with something like MustardHub, where you are not just noticing patterns, you're contributing to positive pattern making, right? You're maybe seeing a little bit of something and then having that check in. You're not waiting until the person you're walking them out the door and going, Oh, well, yeah, why are you a poor performer, right? And they're like, Oh, I've got these other things going on in my life. So for me personally, I would see using MustardHub is that continuous like reinforcement that people matter. Their individual experiences are not just within the walls of the work that they're doing. Curtis Forbes 21:44 It's about building habits. You know? It's about building it's about building habits. You know, I think that, look, companies have values and just like human beings have muscles, right? It's but Right. Unless you're constantly exercising them, they will atrophy. And in an organization, it's going to work the same way, right? If you're not constantly reinforcing that culture, if you're not designing it intentionally, it will get designed for you, whether you like it or not, right? And so I think that part of what we try to do is build a system. Is build infrastructure that helps, helps companies build these habits right, helps them build that, that muscle right, where they can constantly reinforce their values. And you know, every company is different. All the practices you know that they that they may wish to implement, you know, and use to reinforce those values, are going to be different. So the use cases are, are going to be, excuse me, are going to be unique. And I think that part of you know our the thoughtful design, I think that we put into it is to allow that, you know, configurable customizability, so that we can address all of these use cases, because they're going to be different and right? And the smaller the organization, sometimes, you know, the more unique the use case might be, the bigger the organization, right? There's a lot of standard practices, I think, and best practices that get implemented, right? But so yet And yet, I think, another reason why a lot of the products that were in the marketplace simply didn't work for what we needed at the time, because the use case, it didn't support the business model, it didn't support the use case on how we really wanted to implement it. You know, what we find is that this is a structural limit of a lot of HR and HR adjacent software out there, and vertical SaaS, for that matter, is the ability to touch that people and engagement side right for platforms that are typically very transactional, right, they don't have the ability to sort of influence these behavioral outcomes under their own brand, right, which I think is can be an operational limit, but also, in some cases, a financial liability for them, right? And so part of the reason why we built this, this the infrastructure, the way that we did, is so that brands can now own that can embed it in their transactional HR systems, and now own this employee engagement life cycle, so that they can deliver that experience to their to their business customers who need it, who don't get that from you know, and Think about a lot of these small businesses who have a very, you know, kind of fragmented ecosystem of tools that they use without really able to address this one, I guess, big elephant in the room. Trish 24:54 So I guess this goes back to, like your background in in teaching, right, and educating people, I think that's what I'm hearing. Is like you're saying, you know, maybe I'm a small business owner, and maybe some of the employees are my family, right? So there's a whole nother layer of complexity there. Or maybe, you know, people wear multiple hats, and they're responsible for things far beyond maybe the scope of what they've been prepared for. I mean, you yourself saying, Yeah, my 20s, I was I founded a company, and I started learning on the job. I think that describes probably a majority of small businesses, right? We all jump in. Steve and I are no different, right? You jump in to start a business because there's a need, but then there's all these other things you really don't even have time to think about so, what are you hearing from some of your your small business owners, for example, like, how are they reacting to being able to have sort of, like, this enterprise level experience, but in a smaller company? Are they stepping into it aggressively? Are they a little hesitant? Like, what? What's the sort of vibe that you're getting right now? Curtis Forbes 26:02 Lot of it depends on the owner and operator. So there are, you know, you, you, you just in those few words, described the spectrum, right? Well, I mean, quite a few are not super tech savvy. You know, picture the the person who bakes cupcakes who felt like they could do it better than you know, the company they worked for and decided to open up their own shop, right? Tech isn't their background, people, isn't their background. Cupcakes are their background, right? And they realize their background. Trish 26:36 I want that to be my background! Curtis Forbes 26:36 Yeah, right, exactly. They they realize, though, that that they need to get a handle on working with people, and they need to do it quickly, right? And then there's the very entrepreneurial, you know, tech savvy. I mean, you have the entire the whole other side of that, of that spectrum, who are constantly looking for new tools to to make their business better. So I see both, both, but I will say, I mean, both have the same questions, right? I want to know who's a flight risk and when. What's it going to cost if I lose them, what's going to cost me to keep them? Is there a value comparison? How do I make that best decision? Right? Is there an intervention window, and what does that even look like? Right? How can I give this person something without breaking the bank that's going to make them feel good about being here and not want to leave and not want to take 50 cents more, $1 more, $5 more to go down the street, right? Because we're building something really special and really unique here, right? And so the questions are the same, the open mindedness might be, there might be a wide scope of that. So I think that, I think that there tends to be a little bit of of a learning curve right for the folks who are less familiar with technology. I think becoming a mature user on the platform might take a little bit longer. That's generally what I'm seeing. But I I think that the the benefits become clear pretty quickly. One thing to like be clear about. I mean, I don't think technology fixes culture. No, it never has, right? I think that. I think that what it can do, it can make culture visible, right? It can we talk about reinforcing habits. I think it helps managers notice what they'd otherwise miss. So like when we talk about the folks who are quick to adopt it and use it and see that value, versus those that don't, I mean, I think that that's the trajectories when they start to notice those things that they were missing before the visibility into their culture. I think recognition still has to be genuine, like the conversations still have to happen. Trust has to be built. You know, every interaction at a time, so to speak. And I think the healthiest teams use the technology as their support system, right? Not, not to substitute for it. But, I mean, the feedback has been fantastic. We've had companies who have cut two to three, you know, their turnover by two to 3x 180 days. And that's about average what we're seeing, which is pretty remarkable, right? Especially when you know, we talk about a lot of frontline industries, industries that have distributed teams that are they're primarily deskless workers. When you think about these types of verticals, you're looking at companies that experience turnover that it's over 100% annually. When you see that kind of change, I mean, all of the sudden it becomes a strategy, right? Because it's putting dollars back in your pocket and not a little bit of dollars, that's a lot of bit of dollars. Curtis Forbes 26:38 No, I'm glad we're talking about the dollars part now. So I one of the questions that I would have then, if I'm say, a small, even maybe a little bit approaching mid sized company, if I want to start and work with you now, I know you have a tiered sort of system of how that works. Can you maybe talk a little bit about that so people can understand maybe how easy it is to get started with you all. Curtis Forbes 30:37 So we do have a freemium model. We encourage an organization, sign up for free, add your entire census of members for free. All of the core engagement features are free to use, right? The organizations still have to purchase points. Work like, you know, the conversion is very much like credit card points. You buy 100 points for $1 there's no minimums, there's no per user minimums, there's no per user per month fees, right? We want 100% of the dollars to go straight to your people, and that's the point, right, especially with small businesses, right? Not to burden them with, you know, platform fees and per user per month fees and per user minimums and three year contracts and four to eight week lead times. I mean, this is what you see. And look, I'm not disparaging any of the software that's out there. It's it's wonderful. It's exceptional. It's designed for enterprise, right? And all the business models are for all the entrants in our market are that they're just, they're trying to sell to small businesses by competing on price, but it's the infrastructure of that and the mechanics of the model that don't work for small businesses, not necessarily the price, right? So that's why we've done what we've done. 100% of spend can go directly to your people, and you know, they can managers can use it for top down recognition, for peer to peer recognition. They rack up points via variety of different behavioral incentives that work on the platform and sort of gamified mechanics, right? And they can redeem those in the marketplace for, you know, countless benefits that are meaningful to them. That's part of the beauty of that. Companies can upgrade their subscription tier for a bunch of different things. We have one level that can include a lot of like more customization options, network level structuring. This is how MustardHub scales across large organizations, right? They may want siloed accounts, you know, throughout their organization or franchise systems. Private equity can link accounts through a network system and provide parent level visibility without interrupting those organizational boundaries. And then they can upgrade again for our predictive insights and integrations and or 280 software systems as well. So that tends to drive a lot of the value being able to see those things. Trish 33:08 Well, I like start out. There's no reason not to start out, right. Like, if it's free, give it a shot, right? It sounds like you are there to grow as they grow. That's right, and help them give I still go back to that, giving them insights on things that even even a seasoned HR professional, if you had one, might not think, are correlated, right? So a lot of things you talked about at the beginning were things that and Steve some that you mentioned. I mean, these are things that, as seasoned business leaders, we might not put those dots together, but seen more holistically with you all, it's, it's going to make a big difference in how they manage. Curtis Forbes 33:47 The goal is to make it kind of like a flywheel, right? Obviously, a manager and account owner will have to set it up, but then that, it kind of runs on its own. Once it's activated, it runs. You're building those habits just kind of like we talked about, right? So there's not necessarily this sort of, it doesn't require this overly managed initiative. Yeah, right. And you know, for owner operators of small businesses and medium sized businesses, we're already burdened with too much to do. Trish 34:18 I think I need MustardHub. I need some recognition. Steve 34:20 I'll tell you what, for sure. I mean, that's, that's the most compelling argument as well, right? We've been in small businesses for a long time, and yeah, and we're pretty tech savvy too. And I was wrestling with technology, two different technologies yesterday to do stuff that we have to do in our small organization. So to think, oh, let's get another piece of technology that I've got to struggle with. It's, it's very daunting, for sure. And we're in the tech business sort of right, like, and so, yeah, that cupcake shop owner, yeah, I feel their pain for sure. I don't know how you would approach things like very complex technologies. You just wouldn't, you wouldn't have the bandwidth. Trish 34:59 Well, and Steve, I think, too, like, even just using us as an example, I mean, with just a couple employees and the two of us, it's like, if Steve, like, not too long ago, Steve sent me a message, like, recognizing something I had worked on, like it meant the world to me that he took time to do that. And sometimes we get busy, we don't think of those things. It really does matter, right? So having a mechanism to make that easier, because I'm not doing that enough, right? So I know other business owners aren't doing it enough either, and it's not because it's not true. It's not because these people who work for you aren't doing a great job. My gosh, you're just buried under all the administration that it takes to run a company. Yeah, right. So, yeah, it's definitely valuable, definitely worth it. We'll have to look into it for ourselves. Curtis Forbes 35:52 I love it look. I mean, if there's one takeaway, engagement doesn't it doesn't disappear overnight, but neither does burnout, right? Both of them leave signals, right? There's a trail there organizations that do well, the ones that notice earlier and respond with humanity, right, not policy, right? Steve 36:16 Curtis, this has been a really fun conversation. I'm glad we were able to spend a little time together today. I did not get a chance to ask you where the mustard comes from. Are you just a that's you just a fan of the condiment, fascinated with other condiments, or tell us about that? Curtis Forbes 36:35 So you know, I, as you know, right, part of the origin story came from the organization that I was working with, where we had such a diverse group of worker classifications, many, many of which were also independent contractors, part time workers. And you know the idea here, and I'll add, you know, as independent contractors, right? There's this inherent misalignment with the organization, right? Just simply based on that worker classification, not able to take advantage of different benefit structures and things like that, which is hard, which is really hard, and and it even makes it more difficult to to get groups like that to really, I think, feel and internalize that company culture, right when there is that inherent misalignment and disconnection. Um, mustard seed is one of the smallest seeds that exists in nature, grows into one of the biggest plants. It's this idea that no matter how small or disconnected you feel right, you can still grow into something, right? You can there's still, there is still that opportunity to grow and to be connected to the larger the bigger picture, the bigger mission, the bigger vision, right? That bigger organization. That's kind of, I know that some people have alluded to, I think that there is, like, some religious connotation. It didn't necessarily come from that, okay, but you know more from this, I think, very organic sense, right? That in nature, no matter how small you feel, right, you can still be part of something bigger and be connected to it. And it's a hub for those, for everyone, right, regardless of whether you're C suite, the janitor, or just a two hour a month contractor, yeah, right. This is why we don't have per user per month fees, right? Add your whole census, because everybody's part of it. Trish 38:30 Yeah, I love that. That makes total sense. Steve 38:35 Great stuff. Curtis, thank you for sharing that and Curtis, where can we direct folks to learn more about MustardHub and maybe connect with you and the team there. Curtis Forbes 38:43 Sure, MustardHub.com and go on the web. They can find us there at MustardHub.com, and they can, excuse me, they can reach us at info@MustardHub.com is a great way to reach out to the organization. My personal email, Curtis@MustardHub.com, I do invite folks to reach out. You know, we're still, no matter how big we get, I'm still in the founder mode, and I love to hear from people who are existing or potential customers for what they need, want, feel. So I love feedback. Steve 39:11 Awesome. Curtis, thank you so much. Trish 39:14 Can I add really quickly, because you didn't mention that you have the behind the build and from the front lines video series that you do, which is fantastic. So as a former HR leader, I was always looking for sort of free ways to train my team. So whether you're a small business owner or someone who has a team of any size, really, I would steer them to those too. Curtis Forbes 39:38 So I'll quickly touch on those MustardHub behind the build really gets implicit perspectives on people management through the lens of the work of those who are building and backing really the infrastructure behind better workplaces, right? Think about the different platforms: brokers, consultants, platforms, investors, right? Everybody really who's building back in the infrastructure behind better workplaces and getting their like I said, that implicit perspective on people management through the lens of their work from the front lines is a really great series for the actual practitioners, the boots on the ground, those folks who are actually doing it, who are in the weeds and want to talk about those stories. And it's pretty incredible to get those two different perspectives right on on people management, on the things that work, what good leadership looks like? What good leadership doesn't look like? Sometimes the best, the best advice, comes from the stories about what didn't work, right? So definitely, definitely check those out if you get an opportunity. Trish 40:48 Yeah, I've, I've watched several of each and I've learned something new from each one. So even if you just listen and you walk away with one new thing you can do to me, that's a win. So yeah, thanks for coming on the show. Curtis Forbes 41:01 I appreciate it. Thank you guys so much for having me here. Steve 41:04 Thank you Curtis as well. MustardHub.com as Curtis said, Trish is super fun. Thank you for organizing this. You connected with Curtis back at HR Tech and made this happen. Thank you reminder. Go to hrhappyhour.net for all the network show archives. Subscribe, tell a friend all that. Thank you so much. And Trish, for you, for our guest, Curtis Forbes, I'm Steve Boese. We will see you next time. Bye for now. Transcribed by https://otter.ai