CyberCoders

As a guy who grew up with a lisp until age 13, choosing to name my business Sherwood Staffing is a true redemption story. Really though, I named it after my grandfather Sherwood Feinberg. He was a world renowned surgeon and Chief of Staff at the famed Cedars-Sinai hospital in Los Angeles. Valedictorian both at his high school and at USC Medical School. He was also an Army surgeon and an amateur boxer. A true American badass. He developed Parkinson’s in his late 40’s. I only knew him as being wheelchair bound and unable to speak, and he passed away before my tenth birthday. If there is anyone I could choose to spend an hour with and have a conversation, it would be him. As I operate my business, I think about the man he was. I value morality over income. I try to uplift the people I interact with on a daily basis. I want to always make him and the rest of my family proud.

A few quick observations after 3 months in business at Sherwood Staffing Partners . Running your own recruiting business – at least in the beginning - is 2x the work for 3x the reward. The job itself is the same, but the tools are different. The names are different. The clients are different. That familiar UI you’ve operated out of for years, the one you navigate seamlessly and with pure muscle memory? Different. Soon enough, you’ll find that as a professional you are forced to become different too. Different for the better. Constantly evolving and refining your game and, if you are anything like me, more motivated than ever to do just that. Every candidate and client interaction now holds so much more weight than before. Every new client, new signed agreement, and new interview scheduled brings that dopamine hit that you first experienced when you were brand new to the industry. The excitement of opportunity. We just wrapped up placement #4 and crossed $115K in revenue with multiple upcoming final interviews. I have just about too many open roles to work and will definitely be putting in some hours on Saturday to keep up. The financial benefits speak for themselves, but from my perspective the biggest upside of becoming a business owner isn’t financial. It’s who you are forced to become in the process, and the feeling of ownership and pride which you won’t know you were missing until you make the jump.

I took Motion (Creative Analytics) ’s Creative Strategy Bootcamp because I wanted to make sure I was keeping up with all the latest and greatest AI tools. I have 12+ years of experience in Digital Marketing & Communications, but the playbook is literally being rewritten overnight. I’m on Week 6, and this week was one of my favorite sessions. It was on how to run a Creative Sprint, and it’s the first time the process has been broken down for me in terms of a day-to-day workflow. Every week has been amazing, but this week we focused on iteration, and it really resonated with me because I love the idea of kaizen, continuous improvement. I talked about it in a recent video: https://lnkd.in/gJgnzE2R So far I’ve had the opportunity to learn from Jade Heritage from Calm, Daniel Rivera from Harry’s, Will Sartorius from SelfMade, Sarah Levinger from Tether Insights, as well as Dara Denney and Evan Lee from Motion. And there’s still two more weeks to go! Why I love Motion: Content and competitive analysis that used to take me HOURS to do manually now takes seconds. It’s amazing! It’s critical that Marketers are paying attention and re-skilling right now. You need to know how to incorporate new platforms and tools into your MarTech stack, and as much as I’m leaning into new AI capabilities, I’m also practicing discernment because at the end of the day, it’s important to hold personal and professional boundaries on what AI can do and what needs to remain uniquely and irreplaceably human. We are pressure-testing those boundaries now. AI is such a powerful tool to enhance human capabilities, but there’s a limit. In a Thursday session, we learned about UGC and Matteo Friend who is also a UGC Creator shared that from an ethical standpoint, he believes that UGC must remain UGC and not AI. Innovative and ethical companies like Motion are doing it right. They are setting high standards for companies in the Advertising space, and I’m so glad to be an early adopter, so Motion thank you for offering this FREE Creative Strategy Bootcamp. Joining it has been one of the best investments that I’ve made in myself and my professional development! If you're interested in joining the Bootcamp, join the waitlist here: https://lnkd.in/gQ3wBnVD #marketing #creativestrategy #motion #AI #analyticssoftware

Three placements in the past month at Sherwood Staffing Partners and continuing to establish new partnerships with companies in construction, engineering, public accounting, and tech. After trying a bunch of tools with mixed results, our stack is looking like: - LinkedIn Recruiter Pro (still the GOAT as much as you hate to admit it) - ZoomInfo - Instantly for lead gen - ContactOut for recruitment emailing - The good ol' cell phone - 3+ cups of coffee every day (rookie numbers, I know) If you are a skilled, consistent top performer in a business with low overhead, there has never been a better time to bet on yourself.