Joe Walsh
Thryv
Joe Walsh, Chairman and CEO of Thryv, has spent over four decades scaling companies through acquisitions, market launches, and now AI transformation. From turning Yellowbook’s revenue into a $2B business to taking Cambium Learning Group from $0.70 to $14.50 per share, Walsh has built a repeatable playbook for finding hidden talent inside struggling organizations and restructuring executive teams without destroying culture. At Thryv, he’s applying that same logic to the AI era, building an AI-native platform for small businesses while keeping legacy employees invested in the future.
When Walsh arrived at Cambium Learning Group as board adviser, the private equity firm that owned it expected him to clean house. The stock had crashed from eight dollars to seventy cents. The leadership team was in their mid-60s and doubling down on what had always worked. Instead of replacing them with external hires, Walsh made a different call. He became executive chairman and elevated someone already inside the company into the CEO role.
The difference between this move and a typical turnaround is precision. Walsh studied the organization, found someone with the right foundation and hunger, cleared obstacles for them, and stepped in to manage the board, debt, and Wall Street relationships. That CEO transformed Cambium from paper textbooks to an AI-enabled digital platform operating in 46 countries. The stock went from seventy cents to fourteen dollars and fifty cents. The existing employee became the lever. External hire would have meant onboarding someone into a crisis.
The current team, the next level down, can do it. They just need guidance.
Joe Walsh, Thryv
During the Yellowbook era, Walsh completed 77 acquisitions in two decades. He launched into 250 new markets. That cadence taught him to look for what he calls a “honeypot of talent” inside acquired businesses. When Thryv acquired Keep, the founding team had been there a long time and was actually ready to move on. But the upper-middle layer was different.
Walsh doesn’t strip-mine acquisitions for technology and then toss the people. He integrates the company fast and watches which mid-level managers step up. Those people already understand the local market, the customer base, and the product. They’ve been doing the work. They know the gaps. They just needed a bigger company, clearer strategy, and resources to step into larger roles. At Thryv, many of Keep’s upper-middle managers are now playing key roles in the broader organization.
We got a honeypot of talent there.
Joe Walsh, Thryv
The trap during transformation is ending up with all legacy people who resist change, or flooding the organization with so many new hires that culture becomes a Tower of Babel. Walsh manages this by being deliberate about the mix.
Thryv has people who’ve been there for years, who are genuinely excited about the future and willing to learn. It also hires from outside to bring fresh ideas and patterns from comparable companies. The two groups work closely together, sharing best practices. Walsh and his leadership team constantly ask themselves: Is it time to seed a little new thinking into that area? Should we inject more fresh perspectives, or are we ahead of where we should be?
The mechanism that makes this work is self-selection. Thryv is an old company with a generous pension and severance plan. People who don’t want to adapt can pull the rip cord and leave with real money. That sounds harsh, but it’s honest. The people who stay are the ones who actually want to be part of the future.
People tend to self-select pretty quickly. They either want to grow or they don’t.
Joe Walsh, Thryv
Walsh sits in his office on some afternoons and does five twenty-five minute Zoom calls with customers in a row. Four customers in one afternoon, zero travel, deep listening. This isn’t a survey. He’s asking them what they need, what they’re struggling with, what the market is telling them. He also spends time with the sales force, getting a layer of meta-consumption about what’s really happening in the field.
The small business owners Thryv serves don’t have the budget to hire armies of marketing consultants. They can’t spend millions on tokens. They’re running funeral homes, plumbing companies, catering halls. They’re trying to figure out how to compete with e-commerce and national rollups. They need a product that works for them, not a product that forces them to become AI engineers. That’s why Thryv spent two and a half years building a new platform from scratch that was AI-native but opinionated. Since launch five weeks before this conversation, Thryv sold over a thousand licenses.
Walsh spent years with teams in India and the Philippines. They did good work. But they were arms-length contractors. When Thryv acquired a company with a small back office team in the Dominican Republic, Walsh decided to actually visit them instead of shutting the operation down.
He found people who spoke good English, were culturally willing to meet the company halfway, and wanted to build real careers. They weren’t transaction-focused. They were committed. Thryv went from 88 people in the Dominican Republic to 788 over time. The team now does software development, accounting, and every function you’d expect from a major company. They’re employees who wear Thryv shirts, share the company strategy, and have the lowest turnover rates in the organization. If Thryv hired this talent in New York or San Francisco, the salary would be astronomical and people would leave constantly for other opportunities. In the Dominican Republic, Thryv is the best job in the country. People don’t leave. When you’re looking to hire in Latin America, this dynamic changes everything about retention and culture.
That 88 people has turned into 788 because they impressed us with what they’ve been able to do.
Joe Walsh, Thryv
Transformation requires repetition. Leadership is repetition. But repetition alone doesn’t unlock behavior change. Thryv uses a President’s Achievement Award given quarterly to employees who are genuinely adapting AI to improve the business. The rewards are significant cash. The recognition is public. During a monthly all-hands webcast, the company puts these people on screen, tells their story on video, shows their photo, and lights them up.
What happens next is peer learning. Sandy Johnson figured out how to save labor and get 300% better results with the same staffing. Now other people in other departments start asking themselves: How can I do that in my area? The company isn’t demanding AI adoption. It’s rewarding the people who are finding clever ways to use it and making it visible to everyone else. That’s how you move a legacy business without ultimatums.
Core values work the same way. Walsh’s mouse pad has one value on it: “Invest in our people.” Another is “Act like you own the place.” A third is “Done three.” These aren’t nice-to-haves. They’re how you actually operate. When you nominate someone for the President’s Achievement Award, you explain how they lived out one of these values. That’s the reinforcement loop.
Walsh joined Yellowbook as a small mom-and-pop business in a single market with a single local formula. He decided to study the founders. He didn’t just work for them. He studied them. He interviewed them. He wrote down what made the business successful. He created a model, a set of core values and principles based on what they’d built. Then he took that model and scaled it using mergers and acquisitions and geographic launches.
Over two decades at Yellowbook, Walsh scaled U.S. revenue from thirty-eight million to two billion. He launched into 250 new markets. He completed 77 acquisitions. He grew the employee base from less than 200 to more than 8,000. The company went from a single market on Long Island, New York to covering the entire United States all the way to Hawaii. The mechanism wasn’t magic. It was clarity plus repetition plus people who wanted to win. He gave them a crystal clear target that mattered, that would genuinely help people, and then made sure the team shared in the value they created.
As an investor at Walsh Partners, Walsh looks at moats. But moats are in flux. AI is crashing through old assumptions. Something that was laborious to build might now be quick. In that environment, you want people who are adaptable. You want founders and leaders who read the market well and adjust. You want a company with a real moat, people you can trust, and genuine passion for the problem they’re solving. You don’t need a perfect founding team with a technical co-founder and a salesperson. You need people who stay close to customers and adapt.
If you’re close to your customer and you’re adapting and adaptable, you’re probably going to be fine.
Joe Walsh, Thryv
The team that we have now in the company is made up of a couple different groups. One is new people that we've hired in from the outside to bring new ideas to say this is how we did it over at this comparable company. And then our existing or legacy team, the people who want to be a part of the future. We don't want it to just be legacy people where we just this is the way we always do it. We're going to keep doing it that way. And we don't want it to be flooded with so many new people that it's a tower of babel. There's no culture. Maintaining a company culture while you're transforming is challenging. We, for example, have a president's achievement award to recognize the people who are really adapting AI to help our business. We recognize those people with significant financial rewards and we give them a lot of recognition.
Is there an ultimatum you give the team? Hey, use AI or you're out. How do you lead that change for folks to really get bought in and on board? Well, look, when you're transforming a legacy business,
this is who we hire. I'm Luis Set, your host, and today's guest is Joe Walsh. Joe is the chairman and CEO of Thrive, a top 100 global workplace to work for, lifelong entrepreneur, and an investor. Joe, it's an honor to have you here.
Luis, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me.
My pleasure. I saw you posted today on LinkedIn that a lot of times leaders have to make hard decisions and Uber CEO is going through it now whether it's restructuring reallocating talent and resources to different areas. I want to dive right into that because so many people are going through this right now and it's on everybody's mind with AI and with job like you've done this throughout your 20 plus years you know building companies. What would you do differently now this this time around uh knowing what you know?
Well, I mean you're you're right. I mean the AI is certainly causing everybody is sort of react and business models are going in and out of favor very quickly and uh paradigms are shifting quickly and uh you know the employment scene is changing also and you know for us it's it's really about the people we serve. You know, we we work really hard for local independent business owners, small businesses, and you know, we're there for them and trying to help them figure out how to navigate all this change. And actually, the rapid change increases the need for us because frankly all the acronyms and all the stuff, you know, if you're a plumber or you're running a funeral home or you know, you got a catering hall, trying to keep up with all this stuff is really difficult. And we have, you know, a couple thousand experts that do this every day and know it inside and out. And we help navigate all of that for our local independent business owners. So for us, it's really about caring forward solving their problems. How are you guiding them through this transformation? Are you enabling them? I saw that Thrive went AI first, right, a few months ago, but there's the segment of business that you serve is they're not going to be a Silicon Valley startup going and spending millions of dollars in tokens. How how are you helping them navigate this change?
We had a product was called Marketing Center that we wrote sort of on the on the old paradigm and it had some kind of AI around the edges as AI evolved, but and it was a strong seller for us. that was doing really well. But we took the time over the last two two and a half years to really build from the studs up a new platform that replaced marketing center that was sort of AI native if you will and uh it's been out about 5 weeks now and sold over a thousand of them. It's moving fast. uh you know the I think the market is wanting to be on the latest sort of AI enabled capabilities and so the other tool that we had was very good but this is just sort of next level and I think for a lot of independent business owners trying to go to just the spot and take AI raw and figure out how to work with it in their business is harder than if you have a platform with a company that's purpose-built. you have the ability to access all the power of AI in a in a kind of a environment where it's set up to do to solve your problem to do what you need it to do.
Love it. And you're also an investor, right? So at Wash Partners, when you're investing in companies, what are you looking for in the team?
Oh boy. Um, that's a giant question. You know, I I think as investors, we always look for a moat. You always look for why is this business going to stay successful over time? Does it have a moat around it? And those modes are coming and going and very fluid at the moment. Uh because AI is just crashing through old assumptions and old paradigms and something that might have been quite laborious to create you might be able to create really quickly. Now I think people that are adaptable I know I know whole whole companies that have pivoted their entire business model you know based on what's going on. Um and to some degree we have as well. We were previously doing more of an all-in-one business management solution and we wrote our new growth platform as I mentioned you know sort of uh AI native and we really feel like we we want to address a more narrow patch within the the needs of a small business than we were before because AI is just coming for so many different areas
and you want somebody who's passionate but in terms of like a a company you're not looking for somebody who has a technical co-founder and has a uh you know a founder who can do sales. You're not looking at it like that. You're looking more of okay, does this have a a moat? Can I trust the people that are running it? And uh are they passionate about what they're doing?
Yeah, I think those are those that's pretty well said. Those are those are some key things. Look, if you're close to your customer and you're adapting and adaptable, you're probably going to be fine.
I love it. I love that you started with that and saying, you know, you're you're building for the customer, you're serving them, and you're going back to that. So, as as CEO, how often are you going and talking to customers?
Oh, every week. Um, you know, I I set up occasional ride days where I go out in the field with our with our sales reps. But more important than that, or easier to do or more consistent that I do is I I actually set up backtoback Zoom calls. you know, like I I'll have like a 3 or 3:30 or 4:00 or 4:30 at a 5 and just, you know, spend 20 25 minutes with four different customers in an afternoon just going through them. I also spent a lot of time talking to our salesforce about what they're experiencing. So, it's sort of a meta a meta consumption of of of what's going on. Um, but yeah, you you've got to stay close to customers. And so, for us, it's you know, what do they need? one of their other options Frank quite frankly you know the competitively the offerings are changing and now with social media it's so easy to get a a message out there even if you are a very small or even not that successful of a business you can get your word out there so there's it feels as though there's you know scores of people offering them all kinds of you know versions like you're in some kind of you know uh marketplace or bizaar with these people barking out there hey come to Hey, I I can do this. And it's often difficult for the small business to sift through what's real and what isn't. You know, in the old paradigm, a successful business would have a big building. A lot of times they don't have a building anymore. A successful business would have big ads in the newspaper or full page ad in the yellow pages or something that you could kind of touch or see. Now, a website's a website. You can spin up a website in a couple of minutes. So, I think sifting through who is real and who's sort of a facade that's been made up is very difficult for a local business. And we've been in business since 1886. Grover Cleveland was the president when when our company was started. The United States had 38 states. So, we've been around a long time.
It doesn't hurt to also be in the NASDAQ. Uh, THRY.
Yeah. being a publicly listed company helps differentiate you a little bit from the guy that works out of the trunk of his car, you know, uh who's got a great website and a great uh social media, you know, influencer pitch.
So before you were doing Yellowbook, is that so nearly 25 years at Yellowbook, tell me more about that experience and then what like what you've been able to apply from Yellowbook now at Thrive. Well, I joined a a small mom and pop business that had been around for a while, but was really just in in a single market with a single single local formula. And I've spent my life studying success. Studied the biographies of great men and women, companies, countries, sports teams, anything that achieves success and just sort of chronicled what makes success. And one of the common denominators that you always see in in highly successful people is at some point they studied at the feet of the master. They went and they, you know, carry the paints and mix them and clean the brushes for the great artist or or whatever. At some point they were influenced by somebody who who was very accomplished in that area. And so I I went to this company and realized that these older gentlemen that had built this business um had sort of forgotten more about their business than I knew at that point. And I really went to work studying what what made that company successful. And I think they just did it over time. I don't think they really realized it. Well, I chronicled it. I wrote it down. And I created a model, a set of core values and principles by interviewing them and working closely with them. And I took that basic idea that made this single market local kind of $20 million business successful and figured out how to then use my kind of uh mergers and acquisition skills and all that and scale it. So we went out and we launched into more than 250 new markets. We gradually moved across the country and we made 77 acquisitions over a period of a little over two decades. And so the combination of the acquisitions where we would either buy a platform or a tuckin and then the new launches allowed us to achieve manifest destiny where we went from a single little market in Long Island, New York. We rolled across the entire United States all the way to Hawaii. And uh we went from this very small kind of less than 200 employee business to more than 8,000 employees covering the entire United States. And um you know we we learned a lot along the way for sure. So the the companies that you're investing in now are they all in in similar spaces or you diversifying in different areas um from technology to
for me after Yellow Book I uh one of the private equity firms that had made a lot of money during the Yellowbook run also owned a publicly held education company called Cambium Learning Group. And Cambium was struggling with the transition from printed textbooks and materials to digital. They they really they had a a leadership team that was in their mid60s and they they they really felt if they just doubled down and tried to do what they had been doing in the past harder and executed a little better. More like the old days, you know, it would really work. And they just really didn't read the market very well. Didn't understand what was happening. And so their stock had gone from about eight or nine dollars a share down to 70 cents a share. and the private equity firm uh that owned a good chunk of the company asked me to come in as a board adviser to try to help solve the problem. So I took over as uh executive chairman, let the senior management team go and elevated a bunch of uh the current employees into the key executive roles. And we together pivoted the company from the paper textbooks and materials to a online monthly recurring license that was roughly $2 to $3 per child uh in the classrooms. And we managed to blow this thing to 46 countries around the world. you know, basically just using the same learning materials, the same pedagogical excellence that they'd had on paper, we kind of converted it to a we would consume it digitally and we made it much more interactive, much more would collect data to help you understand where the child was struggling and so on. And so over that six and a half years, we started at 70 cents a share. And a big private equity firm called Veraritoss came along and took the company private for $14.50. 50 cents a share. So,
wow.
You're pretty you're pretty good at math, I'm guessing, Louise. Uh investors made a lot of money on that. And maybe more importantly, tens of millions of children can read today because of the stuff that we were doing and best of fractions and some of the other basic things. So, it was really an inspiring thing to be a part of.
That is that is incredible. So, you reminded me of uh you know, if if you help somebody get what they want, you can get what you want. and you helping 10 million kids to read that is transformational.
That is one of our at thrive one of our core values. It's gently borrowed from Zig Ziggler, but if you can help people get what they want, you can get what you want.
You know, we we really believe that, you know, money money you making money is a byproduct of helping people. And if you genuinely help people, you know, you're unlocking value of which you can you can get a little bit of. And I think so many people try to figure, well, how can we make money and they lose sight of, you know, it really is about uh a sustained assistance for the people that you're trying to serve. So, we made a big difference for kids and because of that, you know, uh sales just skyrocketed.
That's amazing. I I want to dig deeper there. You you said something that, you know, chairman CEOs are going to have to to go through. it's what they're hired to do but may be doing for the first time which is restructuring that executive group. So is that is that a formula that the private equity group gives you and says all right Joe go and follow this or are you interviewing these executives seeing who's missiondriven? How do you how do you cap those first three months? No, in this case, the private equity leader, uh, Jeff Stevenson from Verona Stellar Stevenson had worked closely with me during the yellowbook run and he approached me and said, "Look, I've got this education company with this problem, you know, will you go run it?" And I said, "What what do I know about an education company?" I mean, he said, "Look, you know people, you know sales, you understand kind of how markets work. Go have a look." And so I I came back to Jeff and I said, "Um, the the current leadership team isn't going to be able to get this done." And he said, "I know that. I've already figured that out. We want you to do it." And and I said, "Well, I I I think the current team, the next level down, can do it. They just need a little bit of guidance." So I took the company over as executive chairman. Um, and I elevated someone who was already working there into the CEO role and I helped kind of manage, we was a public company, so I helped manage Wall Street and the debt and the board and stuff for him and sort of cleared the obstacles out of the way so that he could do what he knew needed to be done with that company. And he did a marvelous job. I think I helped a little bit with some of the key people choices and you know some of the challenges that we bumped into along the way but um it was a it was a really successful six and a half year adventure.
So you mentioned that it was 77 acquisitions and uh or around two decades and you're also now acquiring companies not not at that scale obviously but
not at that pace. Um yeah, the software business is a little different. In the directory business, you know, we were buying customer bases and geography and and we were, you know, rolling them onto our platform. So, it was a really natural rollup type scenario. We've done some of that, you know, at Thrive, but when you talk about software, there's much more integration challenges and so on. So, uh you don't typically see as many rollups like that. Beyond the integration challenges, how do you handle the people challenges? We had a guest Doug uh CEO of EPS software and he mentioned during his acquisitions he'll bring on somebody from their exec team to sit on you know the exec team and they don't they don't necessarily remove the the folks from the acquired company. um they they picked the best controller out of the two and the best legal out of. So, how how have you gone about integrating the the the new company into yours?
Very similar, you know, just just trying to weigh up what talent was available. There were certain when we acquired Keep, there were certain strengths uh that we were looking to gain and you know, we quickly incorporated those into the broader company. We did we we never ran it as a separate business. between we brought it in and sort of integrated it uh very very quickly into our company and uh while the the product is still out there um you know the the business is completely merged and integrated together now and and that happened fairly quickly.
I said that's super fast.
Yeah, there's some there's some redundant senior senior leadership but their their founding team had been there a long time and they were actually looking to move on and do other things to be honest. Um, so that was a fairly easy thing to do and then many of their kind of, you know, upper middle level people are are playing key roles now within Thrive. So we really feel like we got kind of a honeypot of talent there. So very excited about how that how that went.
It sounds like that's one of your superpowers is finding talent that has a lot of potential to to lead. How do you how do you find that? It's a repetitive thing I've seen in the come up here.
Well, that's nice of you to say. I think I think I'm pretty good at understanding markets and where they're moving and spending time with customers and salespeople and figuring out, you know, uh, what's next for that market and giving them a crisp strategy that they can sort of get their heads around, understand, and then people get excited about that strategy and begin to pursue it because everybody wants to win at the game of business. Business is a game, let's be honest. And it's got a scoreboard, you know, it's money and profits and all those things. And there's wonderful rewards if you win at the game of business. And so, I think what I've been able to do throughout my career is rig the game to win. basically figure out how to give a crystal clear target that we could all go chase that mattered that was important that would genuinely help people would unlock value and then make sure that our team had the chance to share in the value that we created and sometimes it's been quicker and sometimes it's been longer sometimes it's been harder or easier the one we're doing now it's been hard it's taken a while and AI is sort of um if our transformation was a hundred yard football field we came you 90 yards down the field and then we slam slammed into AI. It was like a steel curtain defense to keep us out of the end zone. And we've had to pivot. It slowed down the win, if you will. But I think the win ultimately is going to be even bigger because we now have such a strong uh AI uh native platform that we've built. But the last couple years have been challenging, you know, managing through that.
What What are some ways like is there an ultimatum you give the team? Hey, use AI or you're out or what? H how do you lead that change for for folks to really get bought in and on board?
Well, look, I mean, I think when you're when you're transforming a legacy business, the big advantage is you have people who are very invested. They've been there a while. They plan to be there. They want to be there, and they're they're willing to work very hard to try to sort of keep up with the changes that are going on. There are always some people who maybe are later in their career or a little more closed-minded who say look I don't want to do this new thing and they they tend to self- select pretty quickly and in our situation because the company was so old it used to be a part of the phone company at one time there was a very lucrative uh pension plan and and and severance plans and so on so people that didn't want to play could sort of pull the rip cord and get a bunch of money and leave and and so it worked out pretty well that that people self- selected. But the team that we have now in the company is made up of of a couple different groups. One is new people that we've hired in from the outside to bring new ideas to say this is how we did it over at this comparable company and then our existing or legacy team the people who want to be a part of the future who are at a you know at the stage of their career where they really want to grow and they're sharing best practices and ideas and we've got these really engaged employees and it's a it's a perfect cocktail and we're always tinkering with it trying to get the blend right. We don't want it to just be legacy people where we just this is the way we always do it. We're going to keep doing it that way. And we don't want it to be flooded with so many new people that it's a tower of babel. There's no culture. Maintaining a company culture while you're transforming is challenging. It
it sounds like you have a a good group, two groups that want to win at the game of business. They
they're just one group. They all work closely together, but we have and we talk about it all the time. Is it time to
to seed a little bit of new thinking into that area? Should we, you know, and so we've we've been very deliberate, very thoughtful about how much uh new thinking to inject. And um you know, I I think we've done a pretty good job of it to be honest with you, but in any given time, we may be a little behind or ahead of where we should be.
Yeah. Well, we've seen I mean we're a small company and if nobody's leading the charge on on the change and doesn't even it doesn't happen even in a a small company. So, uh you know with a with a bigger and legacy business I I imagine there's got to be a lot of reinforcement. And I I've read that leadership is repetition, right? For my four-year-old and for our business, it's uh repetition, repetition, repetition. I I also think Luis there there's some things that you can do in a larger organization. We we for example have a a president's achievement award to recognize uh I think it's quarterly the people who you know are are really adapting AI to help our business. So, and as we see somebody doing something that's really clever, that's maybe labor saving for us or or or helping us do something, you know, 300% better with the same staffing, um, we recognize those people with significant financial rewards and we we give them a lot of recognition. We have a a monthly webcast where we trot them out and kind of tell their story and video, put their name up in lights. Uh so that sort of recognition I think is important too to encourage people and also to show oh well you know Sandy Johnson's doing it and I can do it you know in my little area and so people are looking for ways that they can really innovate and they realize the company encourages that acknowledges and recognizes that.
I love that this is all virtually.
Yes. Well I mean we've got a a global company with a couple thousand employees. So you know in order to be together we use this new technology you know you know the various tools zoom whatever and we do a um at least a monthly uh conversation where we share some updates on what's going on in the business maybe drill in on one particular area and we always close out the webcast with it with recognition people that are accelerating our transformation get recognized typically around how they're living out one of our core values. news and um we have the person nominating them on screen on video, you know, nominating them, explaining what it is they did. That was great. And then we you see a photograph and or a live video of the person sort of receiving it. And it all happens in a pretty slick video way, but it helps reinforce the culture that we're trying to build around the world.
I love it. And you you mentioned core values a couple times here. It sounds like it's not just something that's written in your handbook or your wall. It you actually hire
So my mouse pad I'm working with, you know, has right on it, you know, the core value of invest in our people. We believe that you should be, you know, every year having a plan to invest in your people, helping them grow and develop in their own skills so they can be more valuable to our customers. You know, act like you own the place. You know, that's one of our core values. We want people to come to work every day, interact with customers every day, like they own the whole company. So, you know, they some of these things might sound piffy to you, but they're important to us.
Not at all. I mean, they're they're going to attract people who are going to be in your tribe. You want it to sound piffy to some people, right? Then like, oh, no, I don't want that. I don't want to own the place. Uh, so everybody who does join wants to own the place.
Well, look, we've all dealt with people in companies who just pass you off, pass you around. But when you when you encounter the owner, when you encounter somebody that takes an ownership mindset, you're like, "Oh, thank you. I finally got somebody who cares, who follows all the way through and solves my problem or helps me get the information that I need." And I'm very proud of the fact that, you know, we have a couple thousand of those people in our company. We call it done three. You know, you're done three. You you you not just you receive the problem or the task, but you follow it all the way through till it's done, done, and done. there's nothing else to do. It's finished. And um that sort of ownership approach uh is part of why we get such exceptional grades for customer service.
Wow. Done three. I might have to borrow that one. So you you have folks all over the world, um you know, developers in the Dominican Republic, you know, team in the US. So what have you seen in hiring internationally that you know, has it sped things up? Has it slowed things down? Has it enabled you to find talent you couldn't otherwise find in the US? What has that enabled for y'all?
Well, we look, we we've acquired a number of very successful companies and they had within them employees that possessed a real commitment to their company that knew their local markets, knew their customers very well. And so we were able to leverage that strength and they were able to keep us from making stupid mistakes and say, "Well, here in New Zealand, you can't do it that way. This is how you have to do it." So they were able to translate our plan and vision and sort of customize it for that local market. And then we're growing. So we've been hiring new talent in there and people are attracted by a big strong brand and uh a clear product vision that want to be a part of that. So I think that's been really important. um you know in the
in the Dominican Republic that's sort of a nearshore back office operation for us and it's been incredible. You know back in the old days I had teams in India or the Philippines and they did a good job but they were you know typically sort of arms length contractors. These folks are our employees. They they wear thrive shirts and you know they they're they're full-time you know brother weirdos. You know they're right in there with us. They share the the gatewing nation strategy and uh they the best job in Dominican Republic period. So, you know, people are lined up wanting to be a part of our company.
Yeah, they're an hour from me. Uh I'm in northwest Puerto Rico, so that is that is very close. I could get there get there swimming if I if I trained enough. Really incredible. Um what what you've built there. You talk about nearshore but it was trendy India, Pakistan, it's all like that's where you get the real costsaving from but for you it doesn't like the cost savings is not the number one thing it's having somebody that's actually part of your team on your time zone being directly integrated rather than working in a big building where you don't know how they're they're they're being treated. I think that's the benefit that you're seeing here by by hiring versus going going uh over to the Atlantic.
Yeah. Yeah, I mean we've done it both ways and we're just really pleased with they're just it's a wonderful group of people that we've got and I think we bought something that that had a small team like 88 people down there and we went down and we met with them and we were just really impressed and that 88 people has turned into 788 over time because they just impressed us with what they've been able to do. And we do all kinds of functions there. We do software development there now. We we do accounting. We do all kinds of things. And there's very skilled, you know, college educated, really sharp people that uh like living in San Domingo or in the Dominican Republic and want you want to stay there but want to pursue a high-end career and you know Thrive as I said is the best job full stop in the country. We we and people are lined up to get in. you know, if we were competing for that same level of talent in New York City or San Francisco, I mean, you can't even imagine what we would have to pay. And then they turn over all the time because they'd have all these other opportunities. When you're the best job, they're already at the top of the food chain. They're not leaving. And so, we've had very committed, low turnover people.
I didn't think about it from from that perspective where you could really, you can go and become the the best employer uh in that region by providing these opportunities. Uh, that is incredible. I'm so I I think you also wanted an excuse to go down there more often. Uh, not not a bad place to be. I haven't I haven't been yet. I got to go. Um, so what what advice would you give to a CEO thinking about this for the first time? They've only hired in the US. They're looking to hire internationally, globally for the first time. What advice do you have for them to still keep that culture and those values while getting that that talent outside of maybe, you know, their core group of of friends and team that that they've known or went to school with.
As I said, we we we got lucky. We we made an acquisition. Uh it was an American company that had this small kind of back office function. And I think my team initially was like, "Well, obviously we're going to shut that down." I said, "What's obvious about that? Let's go see what we got." And so we went down and we spent time with them. And we just found these really caring, wonderful people. And they spoke, you know, very good English, which is important. And they wanted and were willing culturally to, you know, sort of, you know, meet us. like you know small things like in the Dominican Republic most people use four names and that's hard for Americans to figure out when you've got four names most of which they're not that familiar with and so you know we've asked them gently to just kind of Americanize pick two pick two names um you know like I'm Joe Walsh you know I'm not Joseph Anthony blah blah blah Walsh you know and So, it's a little thing and culturally there's a little sensitivity, but people get it. You know, I'm trying to be successful in another place. I need to, you know, win in Rome. I need to be a Roman a little bit. And so, they've been doing that. So, we've made all kinds of small, you know, compromises with them and they with us to really make it work. And, um, gosh, some of our best employees are now in that geo.
That's incredible. I uh I love that you said no, like there's nothing obvious about this. we we have to go and see and what what it turned into. Uh wow. I I love that story so much.
Right. And and so what happens is for for an American who's in Toledo, Ohio who's just trying to get some help with his website, when the person comes on and they have multiple names they never heard of before and they can't pronounce it just it just erects a little bit of a barrier. We have some incredible talent there. We're so so blessed to have them and they've been wonderful of trying to uh you know to work with us and and and meet our market head on.
Love it. Are you looking to expand in other countries outside of the DR as well or are you focus on expanding there
in terms of outsourcing or nearshoring? No. DR is our spot and we're building there. But um you know we're we're certainly moving our software more and more around the world. We we're creating partnerships in in markets that we don't have a physical footprint, looking to kind of build and grow in those areas. And look, you know, we're we're helping hundreds of thousands of small businesses scale and grow and be really precise about what marketing they're doing, what's working, what's not working. There's a famous quote, you may not be familiar with it, from an industrialist here in the US years ago, John Waker. He said, 'I know that half of all my advertising is wasted. I just don't know which half. Um, and our new AI platform solves that full stop. They they are able to tell where am I getting my leads from, what's working, what's not working. And that's the dream of every scaling entrepreneur. They're perfectly willing to put a lot of money behind marketing and sales. They just are afraid of wasting some. And so if they have a tool that will let let them make adjustments and kind of stay on top of what's working, it's the holy grail. It's like kind of what they're looking for. And so, you know, we're out there helping these scaling independent businesses uh drive leads in and and know what's working. And that's a big opportunity and it always will be. AI, AI, it doesn't matter. There's always going to be businesses trying to grow. It it sounds like uh with Thrive it's done done. You you you get you get it all done.
The done three.
Well, Lisa, I really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you for uh including me today.
Likewise, Joe. Likewise. Where can folks go and find you and and learn more about Thrive?
Well, uh thrive.com is our website address. You know, I'm I'm Joe. Walsh at thrive.com. And uh you know, it's u it's a pretty simple thing we're doing. just driving efficient growth for local independent businesses and I find as a career the people that we've managed to bring into our company it's great work you know you know working with small businesses are the backbone of the countries that they're in and you know helping these people uh compete with global e-commerce and you know national rollups and stuff like that is a really noble cause that people get excited about and can stay excited about over time. So yeah,
phenomenal. This is who we hire. Thanks for being on, Joe.
Thank you.
