ZenBusiness COO, Shanaz Hemmati, on automating G&A with AI, building a $1.7B company that thrives in both up and down times, being a technical COO, and growing HomeAway through M&A to IPO to more M&A with Expedia

00:15 - Michael Koenig (Host)
Hello and welcome to Between Two COOs, where phenomenal chief operating officers come to share their knowledge, advice and, at the very end, a crazy story. I'm your host, michael Koenig, and our guest today is Shanaaz Hamati, the COO of Zen Business, a platform that makes it wildly simple to launch, run and grow business, from registration to legal to finance, to go to market functions like marketing. Prior to Zen Business, shanaaz was an early employee at HomeAway, which she helped take public and pick up close to 25 acquisitions along the way. Eventually, homeaway was on the sell side and was acquired by Expedia Notably. Shanaaz is a bit of the rare type of COO with roots in engineering, infrastructure, data and other technical aspects. In fact, she started as CIO at Zen Business before moving into the COO role, which is definitely something we're going to discuss. Shanaaz, welcome. Thanks for being here. 

01:10 - Shanaz Hemmati (Guest)
Hello Michael, Thank you. Thanks for having me. 

01:13 - Michael Koenig (Host)
Absolutely. Let's talk about the legal structure of Zen Business itself. It's a public benefit corporation. Can you first explain to us what that is and secondly, why it's important to Zen Business? 

01:26 - Shanaz Hemmati (Guest)
Yes, public benefit corporation is a type of a corporation you can set up. Delaware, mainly, is a place where most companies are also setting up their domestic entity. Again, we are a corporation, but of type public benefit. The reason we did that is both all founders Ross and I especially are very passionate about what do we give back to? How do we give back? How do we support our community society? What do we want to do differently to have an impact in the world? That was when we decided to make our corporation a public benefit, so that it's part of our charter and it enforces and makes sure then, that we have that and we have to make sure we constantly have activities and programs around us being a public benefit corporation. 

02:25 - Michael Koenig (Host)
Having that in your DNA. How does that translate into those programs and activities? 

02:31 - Shanaz Hemmati (Guest)
Yes, as part of our planning every year, as we plan the following year, we have certain initiatives. That is right aligned with us being a public benefit corporation. Usually it's around multiple different areas. Which is the charitable donations and which organizations do we want to help and support our voluntary activities? As you know, we have employees in 30 different states, so it's pretty expanded and wide for us and we support that in a lot of locations. On top of that is at times we start like a new program. Just last year we started the grant program for our customers where every month from those that fill up an application, we go through them, filter them and we pick three or four, depending on how much we've allocated to that program in that year, and issue them a $5,000 grant to help them grow their business. 

03:38 - Michael Koenig (Host)
I love that Supporting the businesses, supporting your customers, helping them beyond just the services you provide. I really do love platforms that enable people to actually do what they are good at what their core reason for being in business is. The fact that Zen business takes out all of that back office, gna, everything around formation and ongoing compliance is absolutely brilliant and it just makes people more self-sufficient. Is that a fair characterization of the business? 

04:12 - Shanaz Hemmati (Guest)
It is. It is when I joined this adventure with the rest of the founders. The reason this was most interesting to me and treating as an opportunity was because I've always been very passionate about small businesses and people who have an idea and they want to go be their own boss and do something about it. To me, this was an opportunity to really enable them. Why building this platform? Why keeping it simple and easy for them and providing educational pieces? Again, putting all of that together is exactly what you said is a way in the platform to enable people who are just starting and really they can use all the help they can get. If it's this one person that's just starting, there is this one really thing that they are very good at and they want to go focus on and make that a business, versus all the back office stuff that they have to worry about. 

05:19 - Michael Koenig (Host)
It is quite a bit If you started a business and handled all of that back office on your own, just going about and registering that first LLC if you wanted to and then converting it to a C-Corp if you were going to raise funding even though really an LLC isn't. Anyways, I digress. Your areas of responsibility at Zen Business are actually quite similar to mine at Two Cows. While we both covered GNA functions, we're also responsible for technical functions like infrastructure engineering and data science. I imagine that's a result of your move from CIO to COO. What was behind that? 

06:01 - Shanaz Hemmati (Guest)
From early on. When you're just starting a company and there are a few founders, you're just trying to figure out what you want to be Like. First year for us was really all about a lot of research and testing and talking to people, talking to potential customers and then narrowing down. Unlike, we do want to be a platform that makes things easier for the customers. 

06:28
From the starting point, when Ross and I were talking about this, it was more about the technology aspect of things. It was more about the data pieces and all the solutions and tools that we needed in the company. Then, within the first year, once we really solidified our strategy, then it became this much bigger piece. That then, through our conversations and also through some of our learnings in that first year of maybe what's Ross is really good at versus what I am really good at, how do we want to divide up those responsibilities, especially as you're pretty small, just a few people they don't have all the resources you need. That means then you have to be pretty hands on, even as a CEO or CEO or CEO. Then again, what are you really good at and can be hands on and get it done or find the right people that can help you out. That is when their role kind of a changed to more of a broader one and being the CEO of the company. 

07:43 - Michael Koenig (Host)
In terms of startings and business. A lot of the time, starting companies will do that thing wizard behind the curtain, create the perception of automation while doing things manually, so that you're not overbuilding. You know exactly what you are going to build on the problems that you face. Was that an approach that you all took in the early days? 

08:11 - Shanaz Hemmati (Guest)
Yes, for sure. 

08:13
Ross and I, both coming from technology engineering backgrounds, one thing that we always talk about is in our past lives at other companies, we always built things that nobody wants. 

08:27
So, like from really early on here, we're like we want to make sure that we don't go off and spend time on building things that maybe is not what we end up providing to our customers or is not what our customers want. But at the same time, we are always about automation. Technologies are here to make it easier for us and to help us move faster, and for nobody wants to keep on doing a manual process or work if you can actually automate it. So that kind of a being you know always are, you know, gold. At the same time, we're like we want to make sure that we don't go off and build something that's also very complex before really testing it out with our customer base. So this is how and even today that's how we go about it. We always try to test things first. We try to make sure we do enough research, get feedback and, before you know, we expand on it. 

09:32 - Michael Koenig (Host)
So you just mentioned automation and we have entered at this point a whole new level of automation capabilities with generative AI. I want to start this with a little bit of a preamble to frame the discussion, so bear with me here as I think about this a lot. I want to draw a parallel to put this in context for folks. One of the ways we can think about the impact of generative AI is to essentially compare it to what early computing did for numbers and in that sense of increasing the speed, accuracy, scalability, complexity, accessibility. Generative AI has kind of done that for structured language. That could be both an asset and if you missed the vote maybe a threat to Zen business. How are you all thinking about that? Because, as you mentioned, automation came from the beginning of how you were thinking about this, but now the power and the capability and the promise is potentially far exceeds the original. 

10:46 - Shanaz Hemmati (Guest)
Yeah, it's a pretty interesting. It's just a pretty interesting era. We're entering, right, and I feel, like anybody that I talk to, they're just moving super fast, trying to figure out oh my God, this is great. What are you doing? What do I need to do? How do I need to use it? So we definitely are thinking about it. We're definitely doing some work, like, as I'm sure you already know everybody knows it kind of as a company and your data. 

11:19
We have to be very careful about our data, especially because we collect all the business data right. We have a lot of data about our customers. Our customers sign up for many different products and services and part of our platform, and the easiness of it is because we already have their entity data. It makes it really easy to go sign up for the next product that they need within our platform, versus if you're online and you're picking all of those products and services from different vendors or different platforms, then you have to keep on providing your paperwork and all the data. So that is the reason where we have to be very careful of how we leverage, you know, chat, GPT or the AI solutions, but we've already started playing around with it and doing research and definitely already thinking about the areas that it can be super helpful to us and help us move faster. 

12:21 - Michael Koenig (Host)
So that's from a product standpoint. What about just a general operations standpoint? Because I know, you know, I have so many conversations with COOs and we're all just kind of like, you know, first it was, well, what's our policy, right, and it's been kind of just like, well, we don't know what it should be. Just hey, everyone don't put anything confidential in there. 

12:42 - Shanaz Hemmati (Guest)
Exactly that's our point too. It's like, do not put anything confidential, but go play with it right. There definitely are so many areas that you know you can save a lot of time in just like typing up but kind of becoming good at how do you prompt right, chat, gpt, what do you ask? How do you ask your question? How do you ask for what you're looking for in order for it to be really super helpful and save your time in what you're trying to do? So it definitely requires kind of a sun playing around with it and getting used to it. 

13:17
And yeah, I mean we totally like I am encouraging everyone at this point in our company, regardless of whether it's like regarding our building, our products, or it's on the operations side. It's like use it and try it, be careful about the data, but then see this next task that you're gonna be working on. Is it like just try to ask good questions and see if you can leverage it in order to save your time, and there are times that you learn a lot by doing that as well. You're just like. You're like oh my God, like this is a great point. Like I should include this in my general email that I'm sending out to everyone, or oh, I should be thinking about that if I'm working around the strategy, around this area. So definitely, I think like, again, everybody's trying it, everybody's like trying to leverage it as much as possible. 

14:14
And, as we know, as a CEO, when somebody asks me what is your challenges, it's always been there is a lot that we wanna get done and we don't have enough capacity. Right, that's always a challenge and it's a good challenge, because then that means you're doing pretty good as a company, especially if you have a lot of stuff on your list that you wanna get done. So to me at this point, I think maybe what the AI solutions are providing is like oh, what are some of the leverages that I can get just from the AI where it will help me to expand my capacity? Maybe, put it in a different way, it's like expand my capacity, especially on the operations side. 

14:54 - Michael Koenig (Host)
Yeah, let's get into that On the operation side. Well, chat GPT, when you have something that is just such a blanket tool, it really requires people to be creative on those inputs that you mentioned, but asking every single person to be creative, that's like a lot. I'm not that creative, and I really just think about it as like oh, how did chat GPT change how I approach this today? In terms of operations, though, because that's what our folks are interested here how are you thinking about using whether it's chat GPT, whether it's another generative AI instance, to streamline operations? 

15:39 - Shanaz Hemmati (Guest)
Yeah, again we're kind of thinking true what are some of the ways and means that it could be, because you can also end up spending a lot of time and not really getting a lift from it, right? So to me at this point and working also very closely with our CTO is what are some areas that we can get a great lift from it? Like, for instance, customer support, right, the contact center, whether it's the chat, whether it's the call, whether it's emails, like I think that is a great area where we can see how we can get a lift. And then a lot of that would be based on then us creating those prompts of us creating using the AI's that are available and then using our data and then providing that back to our customers. So, again, it's like picking and choosing as we come across areas. It's like what area do we think that we can have an impact and increase our capacity and be very great at by using the AI solutions? So that's like this is like how we're thinking about it right now. 

16:51 - Michael Koenig (Host)
Hmm, that's a good frame. You mentioned your CTO. I understand that, and I had said this earlier on. You cover certain technical functions like engineering, excuse me, infrastructure, engineering, data science. Where do your areas of responsibility stop and where do those of your CTO pick up? 

17:19 - Shanaz Hemmati (Guest)
As far as, like our organizational structure right CTO reports to me, our customer success, you know, officer reports to me, also head of HR reports to me. So we all like work very closely together. We're very collaborative, but they basically are really senior leaders. They have full responsibility of their areas and I'm just here to enable them and help them in any which way that I can. 

17:50 - Michael Koenig (Host)
So CTO HR customer success reporting to you what falls into your CEO's bucket. 

18:02 - Shanaz Hemmati (Guest)
So so yeah, on top of that also legal and program management, procurement, our corporate citizenship efforts, which is along the PPC lines, all of that is reporting up to me and things that over time again, ross and I kind of over time make decisions or decided like what moves or what stays with me, what moves to him, and a lot of that had to do with the growth and the stage of the company, right, like early on, like, for example, I had finance reporting up to me up until last year when we hired our CFO, and at that point also for the stage of our company and how we're thinking of the next phases is okay. 

18:49
Now the CFO is reporting to Ross, so Ross mainly focuses. You know again, he has like C-level team members reporting to him, so they're pretty senior level, so it's the CFO, the chief marketing officer and chief product officer, but Ross mainly is been focusing around like the strategy, you know, business development, corporate development has been heavily involved in that and again, as far as me, you know I like how a colleague of mine called it chief other officer, right, so that means that things come up at times and there is really nobody else. You know at that point that that could take an on and maybe then decide what do we want to do with it. So in those cases, you know, sometimes like it just falls on me to go figure it out or take the ownership for a period of time and then decide if it needs to move to anyone or do we need to go find an owner for it. 

19:51 - Michael Koenig (Host)
A great way to go about figuring out your needs and the head count needs, and who you have to hire next. In a previous interview you mentioned that you're skillful at hiring great people. What's your trick? How do you approach it? 

20:07 - Shanaz Hemmati (Guest)
So, you know, hiring great people besides having a great network, you know, because, like you know, my career goes over 35 years, both Ross and I, so we both have like great network and great group of people that they've worked with in the past. But for me, michael, is is so much about how passionate you are and how much you love what you do. I think that is a super important element of not only you becoming successful as a person in whatever that you love doing, but also the company you become a part of is going to be successful because of your passion and love for what you do. So that is again a big factor for me. 

20:56
As I talk to people and you know, the attitude and personalities of how they approach things is also super important. And all of that if you get a big group of people that are all like, really passionate, you know they love working together, they love to work in a team environment is what's going to make a company successful. So this is like, and what's so important to me and we I would say we do a great job of that here at our company is creating a jerkless environment, if I may say that, and if you come across before that maybe they're not a fit, you know, for your environment, trying to take care of it. You know sooner than later, so it's that's how you know. When I talk to people, those are the things that I look in them, because I think if you really value what you do and have great standards for the product of your work or the result of your work, and then it that is a great team member. I would like to be a part of the team. 

22:04 - Michael Koenig (Host)
Those are fairly subjective qualities. How do you evaluating subjective qualities like that? How do you compare Apples to apples? 

22:14 - Shanaz Hemmati (Guest)
It's. It's not easy right, it just all comes true. You know, working with people for a while and kind of a see how they work, how they communicate, how they collaborate. You know what is the result of their work and how much do they care about what they do. 

22:32 - Michael Koenig (Host)
Let's talk about M&A. You were on the buy side at home, away 25 times, I believe. 

22:38 - Shanaz Hemmati (Guest)
Yeah, I think it was actually more than 25. I lost count at some point, oh. 

22:43 - Michael Koenig (Host)
My gosh, that's crazy, but I imagine that you all Became a finely tuned machine. I'm wondering First can you tell us about the strategy that drove so much activity? 

23:00 - Shanaz Hemmati (Guest)
Yeah, so with at home away, the strategy from day one was the home away actually formed by acquiring three existing VR vacation rental listing services. 

23:15
So that was from. That was the strategy of like how do we grow this company and how do we make it global, you know, as fast as possible, which, like within a few years, we were in so many different countries and that was it like, okay, where do we go find the best vacation rental listing services or companies in each like region or country and then try to acquire them? And I wasn't like when you say on the buy side, like I was and the the team and a group where we had to do a lot of the integrations because of all the systems that I had to manage at Home away. So it was. It was a great way of Really growing the company and expanding it over such a short period of time and it was also a great learning and experience for everyone that was in the company, that was involved in part of those like acquisitions and integrations and and expansion to a new, you know, region. 

24:18 - Michael Koenig (Host)
Tell us about the integration. What did you learn? 

24:22 - Shanaz Hemmati (Guest)
That every single integration was just a little different. You know I always say it's because at the time you know owning like all the data pieces and data structures for the company. You know, at some point I was like, oh my god, like designing data models and databases for such a long time. Before that I never knew you can model a listing service so differently from one Solution to the other. I'm like, really like you can model it so many different ways not, and not two of them were the same, like they're even similar. 

25:01
Every single one was so different. So at the really early on, as we were learning that, you know, just with the first few, it was important for us and this is how we went about it to kind of a build that integration layer in like a really standard way and have Templates so that you know, as we acquired new companies, that in order to be able to integrate their data like fast enough to already have our requirements on like the elements that we needed and then Quickly map out those elements in this like template level so that the the rest of it, you know the systems then on the home over side, that the corporate systems could quickly and easily Consume that data quickly and easily With any sort of integration or merging of completely different data structures, databases. 

25:58 - Michael Koenig (Host)
That is Super complex. I can't even imagine was it ever so complex that you just went. That data is not even worth it. Let's just toss it, start over. 

26:12 - Shanaz Hemmati (Guest)
Well, you know that was not like an option Never, because these were already like companies that were making money. So you couldn't just like do that, but we would talk about it, you know, like, oh my god, can we just like drop this and start over? 

26:28 - Michael Koenig (Host)
Yeah. 

26:29 - Shanaz Hemmati (Guest)
So, yeah, that was definitely never an option. So in, but in some cases you know it took longer, right, some of those integrations, depending also the size of the, the company we were acquiring, you know how much could be maybe mess up or not mess up in the integration. What was our level of risk that we were willing to take? You know, of course it was a little different and the time frame was different because we needed more checks and balances, again depending on the size of the company. 

27:03 - Michael Koenig (Host)
Getting back to your roots as an engineer. How has that shaped your approach to operations? And If there was something to pass on to other ops folks, what would that be? 

27:18 - Shanaz Hemmati (Guest)
Yeah, I think one thing that has helped me, you know, being an engineer, I think is that they being that detail oriented and kind of applying logic maybe or formula as to things you know, the if then else statements, you know, and I'm kind of remembering, okay, what are all the conditions in this case and how do I want to think about it. I think all of that is it's been helpful to me, you know, kind of taking on this bigger role on operations, but then at the same time, you know, sometimes with engineers you know, we are too much of oh, true or false, like that's it right, and kind of learning how to maybe expand on that a little bit. That is not always like black and white, there might be some grace in between, and what is that and what does that mean? So this is like how kind of over the years, you know, I think that I have learned to apply some of those concepts. 

28:27
And also, as an engineer, you know, we're always thinking about I just want to build this thing, I just want to build the next new thing and move on. You know, get over. So for me, especially in the role of operations, is thinking about the consumers, of what I'm putting in place right. That becomes a much bigger thing as you become like a CEO of the company or do operational work is if I'm an engineer and creating this or building this, you know thinking about the customer side of it and how the customer is going to consume it and whatever I'm building is super valuable to that customer. I think that becomes a really big part of it. 

29:14 - Michael Koenig (Host)
You all have grown quite quickly. Still a relatively young company I want to say seven years at this point. 

29:24 - Shanaz Hemmati (Guest)
Correct January coming January seven years. 

29:27 - Michael Koenig (Host)
And you all crossed the nine figure revenue mark, I believe pretty quickly. What did you all do? Right? 

29:35 - Shanaz Hemmati (Guest)
I think that you know, taking risks and testing stuff out and like not worrying about you know everything to be super perfect at all times has helped us. 

29:50
And also I think what has helped us tremendously is this continuous research and test and then see what happens and then move on and, you know, build it out or go to the next you know idea or the next solutions. So that is a piece where you know I think that has really helped us in moving. You know, as fast as that we've moved. And again, being very close to our customers has been super helpful, like from like really early on in the company. We started, you know, doing customer reviews. We also did the NPS, you know, score with. Both of those are done through like third parties and it was a tool for us to really learn really fast and everything that we do. And then where do we have to improve and make it better or change and what are the areas that we all do that and keep up with it Right. So I think that all of that and again start doing those things really early on has helped us be where we are now. 

31:03 - Michael Koenig (Host)
Yeah, and to give listeners a bit of context here, zen business has a 4.9 star rating out of five on trust pilot, and a lot of them, so when you're talking about being close to your customers, this is very significant. Now, how do you do that, though, if your clients are mainly SMB and I imagine that there's quite a bit of scale behind that to cross the nine figure revenue mark? How do you manage that sort of personalization, how do you manage staying close to customers when you have so many of them? 

31:42 - Shanaz Hemmati (Guest)
Yeah. So, yeah, it's great. We really are proud of our trust pilot score. As you said, it's not just a few hundred, it's thousands of reviews and that has, you know, changed over time a little bit. It has been down at some point and has gone up, but we pay very close attention to it because, again, for me, like, having happy customers is really important, like for any business. Like, if we don't have happy customers, we can survive and we can grow as a company. So you know how we've paying close attention to what happens with the customers and we're on the call with customers constantly. You know we have ways where we're capturing, you know, certain feedbacks from the customer and we're all like paying attention to that. You know, when it comes to reviews, when it comes to customers, you know, commenting on certain things, we make a personal contact with them so that we can learn more and we see where is it that we need to improve. 

32:39
And there has been times, actually, you know, through our growth process, because there are things that happen unexpectedly, like we've had cases where in just over a month, couple of months, our traffic grew tremendously, all of a sudden, you know, our number of customer acquisitions grew, but they didn't have enough staff to support that. 

33:02
So what did they have to do? Like jump in very quickly and hire people as fast as possible, but then they also have to go through training. So how can we speed up that process? How can we speed up the process of like hiring and adding capacity? Because our score was going down and we didn't want that, but we knew the main reason for that was the time to respond to the customers, right? So measuring all those KPIs constantly, like your time to response, the level of happiness from the customers, what are they saying, is what has helped us to have quick reactions into where there is a major issue, it's like how do we need to go fix that? And they also make that super important across the company. Right, we make sure that everybody at the company knows how important those KPIs are so that when something comes up that requires attention, that we're all paying attention to it. We're all in it together to make sure we fix it. 

34:09 - Michael Koenig (Host)
What sort of tools are you using for keeping track of KPIs and maintaining visibility? 

34:16 - Shanaz Hemmati (Guest)
We use Salesforce. That's our CRM. We have data team that gets data from basically all of our systems where we can have insights into our data. They're building structures constantly in like, okay, what is the next data set? We want to look at Our reporting tools like Tableau. We recently got subscription just like last year into Tableau and moving everything in there. 

34:48
And then the data analysts that we have that are also constantly digging into data based on what they're seeing and what's changing is also helping us to dig in further and also find out if there is no another data set or another piece of data that we need to break down further or start adding to our structure to be able to dig in easier. So for us it's just like constant improvement. Like Day 1, we had pretty small data set or solutions and we've been growing very massively in those areas of data. Data is super important. Data is power we say that all the time and data is what's going to enable us to build better and to be better. So it has been a pretty important piece of like what we wanted to invest in and we have made a lot of investments in that area in the last couple of years especially, and continue doing so. 

35:49 - Michael Koenig (Host)
Now Sun Business is in an interesting spot to track the macro economic environment. You have businesses starting up on your platform. Understandably, not all businesses survive, so you have some businesses winding down. It must be fascinating to track that. You started in 2017, economy is booming, then COVID happens, then there's an explosion of funding and then now there are these economic headwinds that we're all seeing. I mean, what does that look like? Is that something that you all kind of can point to and go? Oh yeah this is interesting. 

36:34 - Shanaz Hemmati (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, so you know, data is always interesting. 

36:39
You always learn something new. 

36:42
One thing that's been great about what we do as a company is, you know, if you talk about just the what happens in the market or economical factors, it's interesting. 

36:55
This was kind of very similar to when we were at Homeaway, was you know, when the economy is good, people who want to start their own businesses really want to just go do it because market is good, they can get their service up and running pretty quickly and start having customers very quickly. 

37:15
And also when the economy is bad is when some people start thinking about maybe it's time for them to start what they wanted to do for a long time and that is maybe an opportunity for them, whether they lose their job or whether they're just like thinking that they're tired of what they're doing and they want to go do what they wanted to do at all times. So that's related to economic factor and how market impacts what we do. And then on the data side, yeah, again, like all the data we capture about our businesses and that's that data grows right, we're still like yeah, we've been around for almost seven years, but I still consider us pretty young company, as you mentioned. So as we're acquiring more and more customers and as we're offering more and more products and services and expanding our platform and expanding on like integrations within our platform, then there is more data that we can dig into and learn more from, so again making a lot of progress in that area. 

38:23 - Michael Koenig (Host)
So from that description, essentially, when the economy's up, you get customers. When the economy's down, you get customers. Is it when the economy stagnates and doesn't go? 

38:36 - Shanaz Hemmati (Guest)
up or down, that we experience it down. 

38:39 - Michael Koenig (Host)
That's fascinating. 

38:40 - Shanaz Hemmati (Guest)
I love it. 

38:41 - Michael Koenig (Host)
And here I think that it was completely different. But, lo and behold, that's the power of data. Well, shana, as it's time for my absolute favorite question, which is as COOs, we've all had those moments that come up. It's completely crazy, completely off the wall, and we think like I never thought I'd see that. Do you have one you can share with us? 

39:10 - Shanaz Hemmati (Guest)
Yeah, it's interesting. When I heard the question, I'm like, wow, this is pretty interesting. And the first thing that came to my mind which, of course, I had to think about it, because I'm like is that really like a? Yeah, it is. It was something that I never thought that would happen and would work so well was when COVID happened. We were a pretty small company it was only like 30 of us at the time. So we quickly sent everybody home and said we want everybody to be safe, let's go work from home until further notice. Maybe two weeks later we'll come back. But then a few months later it's like oh wow, we don't know when we're going to go back. I don't know when this is going to end and I don't want to continue having these expenses at the time where we don't know what the market is going to be like or how we're going to be able to continue on as a company. So I'm like we're closing the office. Luckily we were able to get out of the list. We're going to end all of these expenses that we don't need to be on our financials and we'll decide later what we're going to do. 

40:26
So at that point, and then continuing into the next, following few months, I learned from everyone at the company that actually this working remotely is working well. Everybody's much happier working from home. They're saving a lot of time and money just so that they because they don't have to commute back to the office every day. And some people wanted to move closer to family. Some people couldn't afford buying a house here in Austin, so they wanted to move away so that they're able to buy a house, and all of that made everybody much happier. And then, as we were growing in a city, especially like Austin or any city, if you're growing as a company, then at some point it becomes hard to keep on wanting to find resources in the same location in the same city. And what dictates that all the time is the fact that you have an office and you want people to come to the office and people want to be in the same city as you are. 

41:26
So that is when I said you know what Things are working. Well, let's just expand on this and go find the resources we need in other cities and maybe other states. We started maybe with another one or two states and then we're like, wow, this is great. This is how we're able to find the resources we need as soon as we need them. So we kept on expanding on that and things are working pretty great. We now have employees in 30 different states in the United States and this is something that I would have never even think about that it would work so well for a company to just for everybody to be remote and not to meet on a regular basis, not to be in a person on a regular basis. So that was a big thing that I thought again. I never thought that this was ever going to happen. First of all, in my whole career I never thought such a thing would happen, and then but I'm glad how well we were able to support it and to make it work. 

42:34 - Michael Koenig (Host)
And I'm assuming that you use Zenn Business for all of those different state registrations to, of course. Well, shanaaz, thank you so much. Thanks for joining and sharing your knowledge and experience. Where can people go to keep up with you? 

42:53 - Shanaz Hemmati (Guest)
It was my pleasure, michael, thank you again for having me. I am on LinkedIn and I think that's the major place that I check regularly more regularly, of course, checkouts and business. I'm sure many people can leverage those services as they want, even for their site hustle. It doesn't have to be a full-time thing, it could be a site hustle. I am also like Instagram, facebook. Those are the ones that I don't regularly get on, maybe once every blue moon I just check things. So, but LinkedIn would be the best place if anybody likes to connect, and I always love to connect and expand the network and learn something new. 

43:34 - Michael Koenig (Host)
Yeah, absolutely Well. There you have it. Thanks for listening to Between Two COOs. I'm your host, Michael Koenig, and a very special thank you to our guest, Shanaaz Hamadi, for joining us. Tune in next time for our next COO chat on Between Two COOs and be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts so you never miss an episode. Just visit BetweenTwoCOscom for more and if you have a minute, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts so others can get great advice from phenomenal COOs. Thanks for listening and tune in next time. Until then, so long, how does it feel to just pause and vote?