#StartupsEverywhere Profile: Ben Brooks, Founder & CEO, PILOT
This profile is part of #StartupsEverywhere, an ongoing series highlighting startup leaders in ecosystems across the country. This interview has been edited for length, content, and clarity.
Quality Career Development for Enhanced Productivity and Employee Retention
PILOT’s virtual HR platform is designed to help organizations boost employee engagement, build better workplace relationships, and create a business culture that empowers employees. Founder & CEO Ben Brooks spoke with us about his company, his experience with startup incubators, and how he believes privacy legislation can impact the startup ecosystem.
Tell us about your background. What led you to creating PILOT?
I come from a diverse work background. I have been in the rental car space, retail banking, the defense industry, management consulting, the insurance business, HR, and then ultimately, I became an entrepreneur and a founder. I started with one-on-one professional development coaching for executives and entrepreneurs, but I quickly realized that I could only impact as many people as could fit on my calendar. From there, I started thinking about how I could scale the life-changing outcomes created by one-on-one coaching. At that time, I was also noticing that many of my clients came from majority demographics and were already relatively successful. That spurred the idea behind PILOT—providing people with 80 percent of the efficacy of top tier one-to-one coaching, which can be $1,000/ hour, for about five percent of the cost. PILOT works to scale and democratize the empowerment of people by giving them agency over their careers.
What is the work you all are doing at PILOT?
PILOT helps employers address employee retention, engagement, and teaches them how to cultivate diverse pipelines of talent internally. Oftentimes, in engagement surveys and exit interviews, employees say they want more feedback. They want to have a career plan. They want to be growing. They want better relationships with their managers. PILOT helps organizations address some of those needs and pain points. We achieve this through a six-month employee development program that creates cohorts of employees. It’s also 100 percent virtual and flexible so it's more inclusive. The cohort interacts asynchronously through Slack and Teams, supporting each other and creating a community. During the program, employees reflect on powerful coaching questions from the comfort of their phone. For example, the PILOT product may ask, “Do you know your manager's career goals?” or “What are your unmet needs?” or “How can you form closer relationships with your colleagues?” Then, we come together and coach managers to be more like coaches, and the managers give feedback. We also do group coaching and fireside chats with executives who share insights about how to get ahead professionally as well as decoding the unwritten rules of success. Finally, we provide all the change management, and measurements to make everything work. It's HR, employees, managers, and executives all coming together for six months, focused on giving people the tools to feel powerful at work (which is our mission!).
What was your experience with accelerators like StartOut’s Growth Lab?
We participated in the accelerators from both StartOut and the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce (NGLCC), and each were great experiences. At Startout, I was part of a six-month growth lab focused on LGBTQ founders. Ten of us went through that program together. Being an entrepreneur is a pretty lonely experience so it was great to have a sense of community. The other participating founders came from my demographic so we were able to talk about our shared experiences being LGBTQ in the startup space. StartOut’s mission is to empower people of diverse backgrounds and ultimately help make a more level playing field in society through economic empowerment. Participating in the StartOut Growth Lab felt like we were part of something bigger and connected us with some fantastic advisors, vendors, and fellow founders.
Tell us about your experience raising capital for PILOT.
I founded PILOT on my life savings, and we focused on growing the company through what is often called “bootstrapping.” Some startups rely on fundraising from venture capital (VC), but it is not accessible for many people. The percentage of VC funding that goes to Latinx, Black, Indigenous, LGBTQ, and women-owned startups is abysmal, and despite recent efforts to make it more equitable, have in fact declined in recent years.. The VC-backed startup ecosystem doesn't open up connections, education opportunities, and other resources to traditionally and historically underrepresented groups as we don’t fit the “pattern recognition” of most VC’s.
I had to face a large learning curve working with traditional banks to scale my startup, for example. Despite previously being a management consultant, holding a SVP role at a Fortune 500 company, and having served on a board, there are still so many things I don’t know. For startup founders who are less experienced, I imagine it's even more difficult for them to work with banks. The information needed for businesses to succeed is just not out there or it’s incredibly difficult to find and understand. When I needed to get a Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan, I didn’t know I needed to have a lending relationship with the bank. Even though I qualified for a loan, I didn't have that relationship for one of my businesses, and it hindered us. I ended up opening lines of credit that I don't even need just to create a bank relationship. The Small Business Administration (SBA) Loan program has amazing potential, but right now it's only living up to a fraction of its ability. PPP and the Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) program were critical streams of capital for a lot of entrepreneurs, but those only existed because we had a horrible disaster and a heroic stimulus package from Congress. Typically, SBA loans are only given to businesses that are already making a profit or meet particular requirements, so how can businesses get started? If our government and our elected representatives believe that fostering economic development through entrepreneurship is important, they should focus on capital access in order to help founders get their businesses off the ground. And the diversity and inclusion angle needs to be taken into consideration when solving this problem, so people of all backgrounds are able to start and run successful businesses.
What challenges have you faced while hiring talent?
Employee benefits are an issue for small startups like ours. Affordable Care Act exchanges products often are quite restrictive and it's very expensive. On top of that, Obamacare does not allow for out-of-network benefits, so we use a Professional Employer Organization (PEO). But even PEOs require a certain minimum headcount, so I couldn't even join one of those until we had a couple of employees, which are hard to recruit if you're not already offering benefits. Without portable benefits or having a Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (COBRA) extension, people are inhibited from taking the leap to start something new or to join a company.
Labor laws are also extremely complex and hard to work through as an employer. For example, parental leave and disability leave. I want to offer those kinds of benefits to my employees if they choose to start or grow a family. We still haven't been able to do that even after I spent six months benchmarking and trying to cobble policies together to make it happen. In cases like that, the overcomplexity of the laws makes doing the right thing very hard. Every state and even different cities within the same state can have different labor laws and those laws change all the time. Keeping up with those changes can be a difficult thing on the compliance side. And because of the complexity of immigration law, I can’t consider hiring non U.S. citizens. It’s extremely expensive and time consuming to get immigrant workers their H1-Bs or another type of visa, thus that talent pool is limited to large established businesses with deep pockets and sophisticated legal teams. If policymakers could work to simplify labor and immigration laws, that would be a huge help to the startup world.
What challenges—or issues—have you faced with protecting customers’ sensitive data? Have you ever opted out of working in certain states because of their privacy laws?
We have a customer in New York City that has employees based out of France. To work with that customer and their situation, we have to consider EU privacy laws. We care a great deal about privacy and we want to be compliant, but it can be very expensive and complex. Right now, we're spending $6,000-7,000 a month on IT security consulting and $20,000 a year on a platform to help with compliance. Various states also have their own privacy laws. Harmonizing those laws nationally would make it much easier for business owners like me and those we work with. Generally, there’s not a lot of help or support from any government or nonprofit organizations around privacy or IT security. There’s also very little guidance on how to set things up initially and how to have good security and privacy without the costly certifications. These are all issues that have hindered our business. Privacy law is built around sophisticated multinational large businesses, so as a startup we have to learn how to work within a system that isn’t made for us. We take our customer’s data privacy very seriously and have strong internal controls, but aligning those to the web of regulations is where the rub is.
Are there any other issues that you think should receive more attention from policymakers?
The tax code is very complex. To take advantage of methods of reducing those tax bills—like R&D tax credits—you often have to rely upon vendors, meaning it costs money to access the programs the government designed to benefit your business. Similar issues exist for SBA programs where you often need capital and a middleman like lawyers, CFO’s, and bankers to navigate the system successfully.
Having a solid network is crucial to starting a business, which can make it difficult for people of more marginalized backgrounds. I can’t imagine being an immigrant or first generation college grad, and potentially lacking a supportive network to help guide me through this jungle. The less connected founders are to resources and opportunities and the less knowledgeable they are of regulations and laws, the more difficult it is for them to be successful. This ties back to education. It’s important that founders learn the fundamentals. If it doesn’t exist already, I support the idea of a founders business degree, allowing founders to attend community college part time and learn some of the basics of starting a business. A lot of fundamental business skills, like HR, risk management, and basic accounting, are not taught in public schools. Other organizations charge a lot of money to learn those skills, often at too basic of a level or too conceptual. There needs to be an affordable and accessible core curriculum for entrepreneurship that can be distributed to the community college infrastructure.
What are your goals for PILOT moving forward?
I hope to build an enduring company, that is second to none in our category, and that helps employees be the best version of themselves. And it's really important to me that fulfilling our mission of “everyone feeling powerful at work” starts with our PILOT crew members. Because when people feel powerful at work, they are also show up powerfully in their families and their communities and with their own well-being. That's really the big vision that gets me up and inspires me to work hard everyday!
All of the information in this profile was accurate at the date and time of publication.
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