John Grover is the Co-founder and Chief People Officer at Endsight, a 150-person outsourced IT company for small and medium-sized organizations. As the organization’s CPO, he recruits and retains the best talent in IT. His duties include talent acquisition, workforce development, performance management, career pathing, succession planning, marketing/branding, organizational design, retention strategy, benefits, payroll, and employee engagement. Aside from running Endsight, John is an active member of the San Francisco Entrepreneurs’ Organization.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- John Grover shares his background and his journey to California
- How did John venture into computers and the IT field?
- John’s sales approach
- The decision to shut down a successful business to start an innovative concept
- Why did John pivot into the CPO role?
- The shift from acquiring customers to winning over team members
- How did the pandemic affect Endsight?
In this episode…
Can you recall a job interview that made you reconsider whether the opportunity was worth continuing to pursue? Do you remember why your interview left you with reservations instead of anticipation?
Recruiting and hiring are not easy tasks, as business leader John Grover knows firsthand. To attract, hire, and retain the right talent, he believes companies must do away with efficient hiring. Instead, choose effectiveness over efficiency. If companies plan to retain top-tier talent for more than eight to 10 years, they need to spend ample time getting to know their future employees. How can hiring teams achieve such a goal?
Tune into this episode of the Rising Entrepreneurs Podcast, where host John Corcoran welcomes the Co-founder and Chief People Officer of Endsight, John Grover. Together, they discuss Grover’s venture into IT, his passion for effective hiring methods, winning over his team members, and more.
Resources mentioned in this episode
- John Grover on LinkedIn
- Endsight
- Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO)
- EO San Francisco
- Brené Brown on LinkedIn
- John Corcoran on LinkedIn
- Rise25
Sponsor for this episode…
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Co-founders Dr. Jeremy Weisz and John Corcoran credit podcasting as being the best thing they have ever done for their businesses. Podcasting connected them with the founders/CEOs of P90x, Atari, Einstein Bagels, Mattel, Rx Bars, YPO, EO, Lending Tree, Freshdesk, and many more.
The relationships you form through podcasting run deep. Jeremy and John became business partners through podcasting. They have even gone on family vacations and attended weddings of guests who have been on the podcast.
Podcast production has a lot of moving parts and is a big commitment on our end; we only want to work with people who are committed to their business and to cultivating amazing relationships.
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Rise25 Co-founders, Dr. Jeremy Weisz and John Corcoran, have been podcasting and advising about podcasting since 2008.
Episode Transcript
Intro 0:02
Welcome to the Rising Entrepreneurs Podcast where we feature top founders and entrepreneurs and their journeys. Now let’s get started with the show.
John Corcoran 0:13
Alright, welcome everyone. John Corcoran, here. I am the cohost of this show. And for those of you who are new to this program, go check out our archives because it got some great episodes, some great interviews with smart CEOs, founders and entrepreneurs of all kinds of companies, and I’m also the Co-founder of Rise25 where we help connect b2b business owners to their ideal prospects. And this episode here today, brought to you by EO San Francisco. EOSan Francisco is a chapter of the Global Entrepreneurs Organization known as EO. Just 16,000 members globally helps other entrepreneurs to connect and build relationships and build their business collectively. And so go check them out at EONetwork.org. And my guest here today is John Grover. He’s the Co-founder of Endsight, which he co-founded in 2004. So 150-person outsourced IT department for small and medium sized organizations. They have offices in Northern California, and also San Diego. And I’m excited to talk to him about his background with entrepreneurship. And John, excited to have you here. First of all, you grew up in Auburn, Alabama, your parents were college professors and didn’t go too far away for college. You ended up staying right there and author and I’m sure they made you a deal you couldn’t refuse. But um, tell me about? Were you the kind of kid who was like running around starting businesses doing lemonade stands out in your parents lawn? Or are you not that kind of kid?
John Grover 1:40
Well, funny story, I actually was not. And my parents are college professors think like, Peace Corps types. Yeah, it’s not that they say ugly things about business people, but it wasn’t the virtuous thing to be in the household would like be out there crushing it and and starting your own business and putting on a bunch of risk and stuff like that. It was more like let’s make a difference for the world and help the developing countries and all that sort of stuff. So no, it was a it was a different thing. And it didn’t really occur to me till Well, I got to California. So
John Corcoran 2:17
you game to California and Northern California in the late 90s. So we’re talking.com Boom, this is when San Francisco is going crazy. The first.com wave right when you show up in San Francisco.
John Grover 2:30
That’s right. I show up in that cool breeze hit me coming off the Bay. And that’s it. This is football weather all year round. I just got done finishing school and the muggy south and and well, I’ll say I think this is this didn’t work for me. And the sun was shining. And it was cool. And I was looking around and what I what I noticed, John was that the young people were running the show. Okay, and everybody was talking to was like, Hey, what’s your plan? What are you good analysts? This is what I’m doing to kind of like, you know, affect the future of the world? And what do you do? And how are you thinking about stuff? And what are you here for, you know, and, and I said, dang, I gotta get a plan. I thought I was just geologist really trying to stay off the street and keep my nose clean. You know what I’m saying? And I was gonna work here a little bit and go to medical school and or, you know, apply to physical therapy school. I didn’t have a big plan, but the luck factor cannot be overstated. Right? So you come out of school, in a time when the economy was heated.
John Corcoran 3:31
Definitely. I graduated actually. 98. So one year after you and you know, many of my friends, I went to college in California, many of my friends gravitated to the Bay Area, I ended up going kind of returned going over working in politics for a few years in Washington, DC, but wanting to get back to Northern California because I was so jealous of all this stuff is that’s where all the action was at that point in time.
John Grover 3:54
There was nobody saying young man Slow your roll, you gotta get experience and this lady, you need to tighten it up. And just like, there was none of that. It was like, No, get up in here. You could do this. Right? And I saw a bunch of knuckleheads doing pretty well and I thought, Well, why not? Me? Somebody gotta get out here and do something get after it and make the world better. Why not me? Right. So
John Corcoran 4:15
what was the first stop? I mean, so you’ve got your your bachelor’s degree in Exercise Science, what you studied from Auburn. So were you in technical kid? Like had you been dabbling in computers on the side or
John Grover 4:27
not at all? So I didn’t even know computers were a career or a day. I love physical fitness and human potential and maybe physical therapy or medical school. And so when I got out here, I was fortunate enough to get a job at an IT certification company and we were taking people and teaching them Microsoft stuff. Certification Training Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer and I’ve seen people change their lives go from working at pgde climb and telephone poles to making double what they were making, just by getting educated on some of these it principles. And I started really seeing how the tools of these businesses were affecting the productivity of everybody and everything. Right. So a law firm in the 90s was had each attorney had, I don’t know, several paralegals and helpers, and paper, and
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