How Purpose and Persistence Built Dylan Bassett's Consulting Firm

Why do so many consultants struggle to land their first few clients even when they are good at what they do? Well, in this episode, you are going to hear from Dylan Bassett, a consultant who left the corporate world in his mid-20s and built a values-driven consulting firm from scratch in just a few years. What makes Dylan’s story different is how he did it, because he had no audience, no big network, and no inbound machine. Instead, he did something that scares so many people. He picked up the phone.

We are going to dive into, and you are going to discover, how Dylan used cold calling to land his first few clients, what changed after the first small win that led to a surge in growth, and how narrowing your focus, even when it feels risky, is often the move that unlocks real traction. We also get into how he built a niche in the nonprofit space from zero credibility and why persistence, not tactics, is what actually gets you to momentum.

If you have ever felt stuck trying to figure out marketing, this episode will simplify what actually works. Enjoy.

In this episode you will learn:

• Dylan’s transition from corporate IT consulting at RSM to purpose-driven work.

• How Dylan used structured cold calling out of desperation to land his first clients.

• The shift from “anyone’s freelancer” to a laser-focused niche in the nonprofit sector.

• Dealing with content creation expectations and why outbound outreach beats waiting for inbound.

• Why persistence and building a statistically valid sample size are critical for sales strategies.

• Moving from a scarcity mindset to the “good with you, fine without you” sales energy.

• The decision-making process behind hiring full-time employees over contractors to build a lasting agency.

Welcome to the Consulting Success podcast. I’m your host Michael Zipursky, and in this podcast, we’re going to dive deep into the world of elite consultants where you’re going to learn the strategies, tactics and mindset to grow a highly profitable and successful consulting business.

Before we dive into today’s episode. Are you ready to grow and take your consulting business to the next level? Many of the clients that we work with started as podcast listeners just like you, and a consistent theme they have shared with us is that they wished they had reached out sooner about our Clarity Coaching Program rather than waiting for that perfect time. If you’re interested in learning more about how we help consultants just like you, we’re offering a free, no pressure growth session call. On this call, we’re going to dive deep into your goals, challenges and situation and outline a plan that is tailor made just for you. We will also help you identify where you may be making costly and time consuming mistakes to ensure you’re benefiting from the proven methods and strategies to grow your consulting business.

So don’t wait years to find clarity. If you’re committed and serious about reaching a new level of success in your consulting business, go ahead and schedule your free growth session. Get in touch today. Just visit Consulting Success – Grow to book your free call today.

Dylan Bassett is the Founder of Dept. 1 Solutions, a Minneapolis-based consultancy helping nonprofits leverage technology for social good. With a background in corporate consulting at RSM and a BS focussing on Management Information Systems and Entrepreneurship from the University of Minnesota, Dylan bridges the gap between complex systems and mission-driven work. He specializes in CRM strategy, data cleanliness, and workflow optimization for organizations that prioritize values. A purpose-driven entrepreneur and avid outdoorsman, Dylan believes technology should be a seamless tool for impact and advocacy.

Connect with Dylan Bassett

Discover more about Dept. 1 Solutions
Hey Dylan, welcome.

Hey Michael, thanks for having me.

Yeah, it is great to have you here. So let’s dive right in. You worked at U.S. Bank, then at RSM. Why did you leave the corporate world to start your own consulting business almost four years ago now?

It kind of stretches back all the way to when I was young. I always knew that I had some sort of entrepreneurial spirit. It was building stuff, the lemonade stands. I had a vegetable garden in my parents’ front yard when I was younger. One summer, I think I was like five or six, I was like, “I want to make $500 this summer.” So I always just knew I kind of wanted to hustle a little bit. I just didn’t really have a good channel to put it into.

So I went through the corporate world as really a systems guy, project manager, a systems admin, implementer, those types of things. Around the COVID pandemic and shortly after, everyone kind of has this moment of awakening that they want their work to be a little bit more purposeful and their life to be a little bit more fulfilling. I was no different and always had a calling, an idea that I wanted my work to be more purpose-driven, more values-driven.

Coming out of the pandemic and working from home and joining the corporate world to completely remote, I graduated undergrad in 2020, it was just not a great time to be in the corporate space. A couple traditional consulting practice staffing models and the way that I wanted to use my time and the way that I wanted to feel about my work, I just knew that it was time to do something different and kind of had a hunch that I could probably find my own clients and manage the relationships. So I just took the leap.

Yeah, it is funny when you said when you were young, and I know that you started this consulting business when you were in your mid-20s. You’re still very young, but I think about myself and I started my first consulting business really just the transition between high school and college. So I didn’t know very much. I think probably some people listening to this are thinking, “Well, both you guys started very young. I’m probably maybe later in life.”

And so for you, I know you said you always had this entrepreneurial kind of spirit. You wanted to get going on that. Did you not see a path in the corporate world? Being in your mid-20s, you certainly could have gone on and developed for many more years the opportunity to make more money or to grow or to find ways to make an impact inside of an organization is often there. What specifically, was there one event or just something that hit you one day to make you like, “This is enough and I now need to make that shift?”

I appreciate you asking this because I was thinking about it and I didn’t really get to the crux of it, but I would say I’m definitely a values-driven worker and a purpose-driven person. I care about things and I want the work that I do to drive a greater good. I think that’s been true about me even until I realized it tacitly or had the words to describe it as a motivator for me.

But in terms of a specific instance, without getting into all the gory details of it, I was working at a big consulting practice and you mentioned RSM, so I should say that I think RSM is a great practice. I had great mentorship, great leadership there, and it was a really good way to start my career. But at the time there, what I realized is that I was being evaluated from a performance perspective on, simply put, the number of billable hours that I was logging on a monthly or a weekly basis. I had no leverage over my own billable hours. I was just taking assignments from the directors who were selling work.

It got to a point, especially around COVID, I mean there’s obviously so many different external factors that are influencing the economy where the work that I got into was intended to be CIO advisory, technology systems implementations. Because of everything that was going on outside, we had to start flexing our staffing model such that I was getting onto projects that I had no interest in, were not in my wheelhouse, and just were not strategically beneficial to where I wanted to point my career. After trying to get a promotion and saying that “No, you couldn’t because you don’t have enough billable hours,” and I’m like, “Well, you guys just aren’t selling enough. How is this my problem as an associate?” I kind of just realized that it is not a game that I wanted to play and I would rather take the risk of trying to do it myself. At least that way, I could be the captain of my own ship and control my own destiny.

I think that’s – I’m glad that you’re sharing this because for those who are listening who manage teams or even a team, whether it’s five people or 50 people, this is likely what your team members are thinking about right now. And very often when you’re working on growing your business as a leader, you’re very focused on the metrics, on achieving the KPIs, the OKRs, the performance side of things, but very often inside of every employee or team member that you have, there’s something more meaningful for that person or to that person than just billable hours or hard metrics. So I think that’s important to keep in mind.

[07:28] – Building a Nonprofit Consulting Niche From Zero

I want to stay with this for a moment in terms of you feeling very clear from, it sounds like a pretty young age, that you wanted to make an impact. You wanted to focus on value-driven work. I know you ended up in the nonprofit space and I want to talk about that in a moment, but I’m wondering where did that come from? Because when I go back to when I was in my early 20s, I wasn’t thinking that way. I definitely wanted to create value, but my focus was much more on the financials in terms of like, “I want to make a lot more money so that I can achieve freedom. I want to be able to take people that I care about out for a meal and not have to think about money at all or create memories and travel.” And so my motivation was different than yours. Where does that come from? Is this something that you have from a young age? Is it your family? Is it your upbringing? Just give me a sense of the impact piece. Where does that originate from?

I don’t really know. I have maybe two anecdotes. My mom actually shared this story with me recently. And she reminded me that when I was in grade school, we went to – back then, protest wasn’t such a charged word, or a demonstration wasn’t such a charged word, but it was back when this was early 2000s and there was some stuff happening in Minnesota around teachers’ compensation or something like this. And so we went to the state capitol and we were picketing for the teachers. And she told me, she’s like, “You had a great time.” And I was maybe six or seven or something like that. I don’t really have a great memory of that.

Otherwise, honestly, I think the thing that flipped the switch for me was environmentalism. I love the outdoors. I love being outside. I love hiking. Snowboarding is like my favorite thing in the world to do, cycling. I love being in the water, all these things. And so I think when the climate crisis kind of started getting a lot more attention in the early 2010s, I realized that that was something I really cared about. It just kind of opened this world to me of caring about those types of issues. And then that coupled with the COVID awakening of like, “Is this what I want the rest of my career to look like?” At the same time, I’m 24, so there is a little bit of idealism and shortsightedness in there and naïveté, but it kind of forced this realization that I want my work to feel aligned with me as a person.

Now I say this often, both to my clients, to my team, and my friends, when I share with them about work: there is no friction or tension between who I am on client calls and who I am with my friends. My partner actually said to me the other day, she’s like, “It’s honestly interesting overhearing you on calls because it just sounds like when you and I talk on the phone.” There is no difference there. There is a little bit of that customer service voice, and that feels really good because it just feels like the work flows from me rather than having to be some intentional conflict inside of me.

Right.

So I should mention, you may be the youngest guest we’ve had on the podcast. I’m not sure about that.

It is an honor.

Well, you are 28 today. I shouldn’t make you older than you are. You’ve done a great job of getting your business to where it is over the last four years. And I say that from the vantage point of looking at many thousands of consulting business owners over the years. And so that’s really why when the team said, “Hey, here’s a guy named Dylan that wants to come on the podcast,” and I looked at what you submitted, I thought there is going to be some takeaways and lessons and an interesting perspective that I think regardless of where somebody is in their consulting journey, they can benefit from that.

So let’s go deeper because, again, you came from U.S. Bank, RSM. From what I can see on the outside, there is no clear focus on nonprofits. You wanted to go in the direction like you were being pulled to values-driven work, the whole idea of nonprofits impact. Was that just a very clear area that you wanted to specialize in and focus on? Did you know that from the get-go, or did you start the consulting business four years ago thinking, “I’m just going to provide expertise and help in anywhere where I have experience?” What was that decision path like for you?

You got it pretty close. So when I made the leap, I’m like, “I’m going to be a freelancer,” right? I should say, when I made the leap, I always knew that I wanted to be an agency owner rather than a lifestyle freelancer. That was- I knew that from day one, and I knew that I wanted to have employees and pay them well and treat them fairly and maybe have an office space one day. Those were all things that were part of the vision.

I started as kind of anybody’s freelancer. And so my website really was just a skills inventory, right? And so I got lucky with some family and friend connections that hooked me up with some subcontracting work, still in the same vein of systems implementation and that type of work, because that’s what I was good at. And found myself doing work for healthcare consultancies, patient experience stuff. A couple past clients from RSM hit me up when they found that I was working independently. I had never volunteered. I had no connections in the nonprofit space, but kind of came away from that call and was like, “I’m going to redo the whole website. I’m going to focus all of my efforts on this one sector, on that one niche. And get really specific about the problems that I solve for those organizations.” And I knew there was a lot of need for the type of work that I do.

And just spent really two years doing it the hard way – going to networking events, not knowing anyone, being the least informed guy in the room about the sector that I wanted to work in, building the connections, building trust from zero. It’s now four years in, just starting to pay off in terms of I have some recognition; people in my city know me. I can show up to events and I have friends that aren’t clients and some of them are practitioners and some of them are orbital and all that sort of stuff. But I’m in the space that I want to be in now.

[14:49] – Why Networking Beats Waiting for Inbound Leads

Would you say it took four years to get to that point where you feel like now you’ve really landed in the right place in terms of recognizing that and seeing the results? Or do you start to feel that, “No, I’m definitely in the right place, the momentum’s there, I’m reaching that tipping point”? Did that come earlier or is it just more recent for you?

I would say from that moment of realization, it was about 18 months. And I think I probably did it the long way. I thought that I could just convert people off the internet because they would land on my website. And I definitely did not do enough proactive outreach and network building early. And so that would definitely be, and I share this a lot: go beat pavement, get in the community, find the groups where people that you want to work with hang out, whether in person or virtually, and go be there. I just kind of thought, “Build it and they will come.” And that is not really the way that it works when you’re doing a startup consulting practice.

But I would say, yeah, it was probably about a year and a half. And then I kind of really felt like, “Oh, I got a referral; oh, someone resigned.” All that sort of thing started happening. And then shortly after that, it was like, “Oh my gosh, I don’t even know how I’m going to manage the work that I have.” And that’s when I start hiring and adding staff.

[16:24] – How Cold Calling Won the First Consulting Clients

Is there something that you feel that you did, so let’s say over the first 18 to 24 months, that you feel played the biggest role in you getting to that point where it’s like, “Wow, I have now more work than I have capacity in terms of the pipeline?”

Cold calling.

Okay. Let’s talk about that in a moment because I do have a note about that, something that most people dread to even hear those words and you kind of have a smile on your face when you say them. So we need to explore that more. But before we do, I know I saw you posted some short videos on LinkedIn. Have those been working for you? What’s been your experience with that?

Yeah. So this kind of hearkens back to what I was just mentioning: “All right, if I start a website and start posting videos, I’ll go viral and I’ll get a bunch of inbound leads and it’ll be awesome.” Yeah, that’s what I thought. That didn’t happen. And content creation is a grind. And unless you have good systems in place to script, film, produce content, it is really hard to do ad hoc in a way that is scripted and really intentional, at least when you’re starting.

And so again, I thought that would be like an inbound lead capture thing. It wasn’t. Maybe it worked a little bit, but now I have kind of circled back to it with more intentionality and it’s just more natural because, when I did it in my first phase, I was trying to appear as credible and build credibility just through academic research. And now, two years down the road from that, I’ve got a whole body of work and a whole lot of evidence where I don’t need to go and really script something. I can just kind of speak on the things that I want to speak about.

And so I also hired a video editor that can make videos better than me and do it a lot quicker. So I just need to have the idea and film the content, which also I’m kind of blessed, I guess, that I am not shy about being in front of a camera or projecting into a front-facing video. It’s just not something that I get embarrassed about. But the videos, part of what I wanted to do that for was just that it’s not really something that I saw being done. And so I thought, “This is a gap in terms of the way that nonprofit work tends to get communicated,” and tried to fill that. And it is definitely still a work in progress. I would say the more recent ones, since I added some systems around it and some intentionality and some higher quality video production – shout out to my video editor, he did a great job – there’s been more traction around those and definitely helps with visibility, particularly on LinkedIn.

Yeah. My suggestion is just find, choose one path. The sooner you start, the sooner you’re going to start seeing results from it. Okay. So let’s talk about cold calling.

Now you have a podcast!

Well, yeah. I mean, now fast forward many years, it is very comfortable. But it wasn’t always, and I’m just sharing this because I think there’s probably people out there who may not feel as comfortable creating content or putting themselves out there. But for me, the realization was that at some point I’m going to get in front of a client. And they’re going to see my face anyway. So what’s the point of holding back on that? And the reality is the more that people see you, hear you, are kind of surrounded by your knowledge and expertise, and as long as you’re providing something that is valuable or interesting, they are going to feel closer to you. That’s going to make this whole sales process easier. So I just, for anyone out there who might feel a little bit hesitant to put themselves out there.

This also like dovetails perfectly into just being comfortable in potentially embarrassing situations.

Well, you know, it is interesting. So I did many, many, many, many years ago – and we are going back 30 plus years ago – I did a lot of, well, I did some cold calling. When I just was looking for jobs. I remember I needed to make money to travel, to go overseas, and I would take, like, open up – in your day, they probably didn’t have phone books anymore, but these big fat, whatever they were, four or five-inch phone books, and I’d open it up and I would just call any number: landscaping, whatever. “Are you hiring? Are you hiring?” You know, all that kind of stuff. But okay, let’s talk about you. So how have you used cold calling? Tell me about when you start using it, also tell me, let’s just go over what the results have been. Because that’s important. And then let’s talk about what you’ve actually done to achieve those results with cold calling.

Yeah, cut me off if I linger on this for a second, but I started cold calling out of sheer desperation. So I mentioned I didn’t do enough of getting out and really building organic awareness. It kind of came to a head actually like two years ago, right before I found that momentum and that traction in my pipeline. I just kind of woke up one day and it was like, “Oh my gosh, I don’t really know what I’m waiting for. There is maybe one project out there, but certainly not enough.”

And so, this is after I had tried a social media inbound strategy. This is after I had just kind of sat and waited around for people to find the website. And I was like, “I have to take control of this somehow.” And so I grabbed a list of 2,000 nonprofits in Minnesota. Minnesota has one of the most vibrant nonprofit communities in the United States and my statewide association in Minnesota is the largest in the country. They had a list of all their members. I downloaded it, got a free instance of HubSpot, imported everything into HubSpot, and just started. And then I had a random name generator on Excel and just started manually enriching all of those organization names that I had pulled.

When you say enriching, for those that don’t understand what that means to enrich data, just explain that briefly.

The way that I’m doing it compared to the tools that are available now is definitely like discovering fire level of advancement. But I had my Excel sheet, it pulled a random name from the list. I went to their website, I found their executive director. I just did some quick reading on their mission. I incorporated that into my opener script, gave them a call, nobody answered, queued them up for three days down the road and tried to-

How many calls were you making per day at that time?

Yeah, it’s a good question. Because of all of that manual enrichment, I was, on a good day, I was probably doing like 15 or so.

And sorry, I’m going to jump in just to hit some points here. So 15 calls per day on a good day. How many of those 15 would actually answer the phone?

I don’t have good metrics on this because it was kind of just easier not to look and just keep going. But it was-

Just what do you think?

Yeah, it was, if I had two or three conversations in a day, that was solid.

And then the thing that most people dread is not actually necessarily making the calls, but what to do if somebody actually answers the phone. So when you got people, what did you say to them? How did you get in front of them? Looking back now, the way that you did it then in the early days, was it salesy? Was it promotional? Give us the message at a high level – what did it look like and sound like?

So, there are two things here of what I did and what I would do now. What I did was very salesy and very promotional: “Hey, I have a thing, you should buy it.” And the difficulty with that in the consulting space is it’s hard to sell a thing because the nature of consulting is very unique on a project-by-project basis. And I had no validation of a concrete problem that I knew for certain that they had, because I’m meeting these contacts for the first time over the phone.

So it was very scripted. It was like, “Hi, I noticed that you guys do this type of work. I’m a nonprofit consultant,” and my body of work that I had as credibility or evidence or similar projects that we’ve done for your neighbor, I didn’t really have that yet. And so it was slow going and it took me hundreds of calls. I think on a calendar basis, it took me about two months, if not longer, to go from being able to meet someone on the phone to get them on a virtual call, to do a proposal, to actually close one. But after I closed one, after like three months, I closed like 10 in the next month or two. And that was really kind of the blossom moment of, “Okay, one, I can convert someone off of the phone. And two, the validation of how I wanted to position my practice and the need of the sector, the niche that I wanted to serve,” that was like, “All right, we’re on the right track.”

[27:16] – The First Small Win That Sparked Rapid Growth

Dylan, what changed between the first deal that you won- so something must have clicked in order to make it work unless you just pushed it through – but I’m wondering, again, looking back in hindsight, what do you think are the nuances of what allowed you to win that first deal? And then also the change or the shift that led to the next 10 in a pretty short period of time.

The first one was honestly just persistence and timing. I called them on a day that they needed something and we closed that one in like a week or two. So it was just, “I can do a thing. You happen to have that need right now. Let’s do it.”

This is like a small, you know, $2,000 or $3,000 deal type of thing or-?

Yeah. It was an $1,800 deal and it felt like I had just won the lottery. But from there, even just getting one, two things changed in that I had the confidence that, one, I knew the work that I was doing was relevant, and two, I knew that this can work. Sol I had just enough evidence to say that my work is valid and the way that I’m approaching this can work. Those two things allowed me to be less salesy and less promotional. And this is true, of course, even now.

When you do something like that out of desperation, like, “I need a sale,” it makes it harder. When you have the “good with you, fine without you” energy, it actually comes a lot easier. And so now I don’t have to chase those as much and I haven’t done cold calling, just because delivery work and growing the team has taken up a lot of my time. Now I look at cold calling very fondly as something that, when I get the capacity, I know that it’s a viable sales strategy, especially now because I’ve got so many reps of discovery calls and consults and proposals and all this other work that I’ve done where I could cold call someone and just say, “Hey, this is the work that we do. We did a similar project for an organization that does similar type of work to you. Let me know if you want me to send over a case study.” Fine, right?

[29:55] – Why Narrow Niches Win More Consulting Deals

And so the shift that you made, just to be very specific, you’re getting into the details. What are the – at the height of cold calling when you were feeling it was really working well for you – what did the script look like? What was the overarching message that you would deliver to somebody on a call?

I would say the – to make it applicable to anyone listening – it is having an extremely specific problem that you solve. When I started early, it was not that much different than “I’m anyone’s freelancer.” It’s like, “I’m anyone’s freelancer for nonprofits.” And so once I started getting really specific about, “We help optimize workflows in your CRM, have better data cleanliness, make sure that your systems work for you,” then it was like, “Oh, actually we’ve kind of been looking at our CRM and people don’t really like it. Can we talk more?” Early on it was like, “I’m a nonprofit systems consultant,” and they’re like, “What does that mean? I don’t know. Now I have to go and think of what problem I want you to solve.” And so then it’s just matchmaking of, “This is the problem I solve. Do you have it?” And they say ‘No’ and it’s like, “Okay, well call me when you do.”

So you’re bringing up two things that I want to highlight here because these are challenges that all consultants face at some point along their journey. The first is the counterintuitive part: your mind tells you go broad because that’s saying that you can do more, means you’re not going to miss opportunities or you’re going to be able to capture more. But as you just highlighted, and we see this so often with clients that we work with, that you’re making them do the work. They have to try and figure out what you actually do. What does this actually mean? Whereas if you take the other approach and say, “No, I’m going to be very, very focused,” it makes it easier for you to explain what you do, but it also makes it easier for the buyer to really understand. And therefore, if they have that need, they’re going to resonate with that message.

The second thing that you mentioned earlier, and this is a really big one, is that you started doing cold calling. And it didn’t work for you right away; it took, sounds like two months at least. So hundreds of calls, or at least 100 or more, I guess. No, potentially hundreds of calls actually, before you won the first deal. Now this doesn’t have to be cold calling; for any consulting business owner out there, choose whatever you’ve been working on from a marketing perspective and ask yourself, how much have you actually tried to make it work? Because what most people do is if they’re- let’s just use the cold calling as a use case, they would try it for maybe a month. They would maybe make five attempts a day or 10 times a day. They’d stop, they wouldn’t put in hundreds and hundreds of calls because they would already tell themselves this is not going to work and they would give up.

And so the fact that you didn’t give up says a lot about who you are, and that’s going to obviously carry through everything that you do and lead to creating more and more success. But I just wish that more people would not give up so easily and they wouldn’t be so scared to put in the kind of work that you did. Because sometimes it’s so simple. You find a list of people who might have a problem that you can solve, you get in front of them consistently, and you don’t give up when it doesn’t work right away. And generally when you do that over and over again, things do start to click in place. And at a minimum, what you do is you learn a lot from the feedback that you’re getting from the people that you do speak with who are not interested. Because the more people that are saying, “I’m not interested,” that moves you towards a messaging to find the messaging that gets you in front of people that say, “Oh yeah, I am interested in that.”

I totally agree. I appreciate the words around just the work ethic and the discipline so much. So on my whiteboard back here, I have a quote from Jamie Brindle and he says, “Discipline isn’t willpower; it’s removing the choice to not do the thing.” I kind of made that choice when I threw myself in the deep end and said, “I’m going to quit my job and I’m just going to start this and it has to work.”

There is some tension that you create for yourself and a bit of a scarcity mindset and a desperation mindset when that happens. But in those months when I was doing that and I needed it to work, I knew that there is no alternative here. If it is not this, it is something else. I’m going to find the pot of gold at the end of this rainbow. I have to keep going because I was so committed. I don’t want to have to go back and find a job or start applying or admit defeat. I’m going to keep going and I think I’m stronger than this. But yeah, I could talk for hours about my philosophy towards discipline and doing hard things. But no, it’s a big thing of keep at it. You needed enough of a sample size to say concretely that something doesn’t work. And oftentimes we as humans are not patient enough to create a big enough sample size to concretely say that this won’t work.

[35:59] – When to Hire Employees Instead of Contractors

You recently brought on a full-time employee. You’re now a team of four. Prior to that, you had a contractor. You now also hired another contractor. So it’s you, a full-time employee, and two contractors currently. Why did you decide to bring on a full-time person and just not have another contractor? What was the impetus for that decision?

Super glad you asked. I think this kind of goes back to some of the stuff that we talked about early in terms of- I always knew that it was the direction I wanted to take the practice of having true staff. I’ve also, at this point, I had done enough fractional subcontractor work where we have a team of subcontractors and it works, but those teams tend not to be built to last because there is sort of an inherent expiration date on a contractor role. And purely demand as well; I knew that I had the demand that I could fill at least one FTE with a hire.

And then the last thing was I knew that the type of person I wanted to hire was probably going to skew younger, closer to having completed an undergraduate education or in that age demographic. Of course, I didn’t hire specifically for that, but an associate consulting role, that’s typically, that the type of profile who ends up filling those. And I knew that if I was a 24-year-old, 25-year-old, and was trying to pitch a job to my parents, and I was like, “No, it’s just a contractor role,” they would be like, “Well, that’s not secure enough.” I kind of got that same advice anyway and disregarded it and went my own way anyway. But I knew that I wanted to make it easier from the perspective of the candidate to pitch to the people in their life that they would probably be getting advice from. And so I was just like, “It’s kind of where I want to go anyway, and it’ll probably make it easier for someone to commit to this if I’m able to commit to them.” And it’s worked out like a dream, better than I could have hoped over the past couple months that they’ve been on the team.

Well, that’s great, Dylan. Thanks for coming on. I’m looking at time here. I want to be respectful of what we have on the calendar, but this is great. I appreciate your perspectives and you sharing some of your journey and excited to see what comes next for you.

Absolutely. I really appreciate the opportunity to come on and speak.

Important Links:

Dylan Bassett
Dept. 1 Solutions Website
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