The Hidden Cost of How You Pay People | Nicole Armstrong

Pay isn't just a number on a paycheck. It's one of the clearest signals employees receive about how much their work is valued. Yet many organizations unknowingly rely on outdated compensation systems that create mistrust, increase turnover, and make hiring even more difficult.

In this episode of The Entrepreneur's Studio, Chris Allen sits down with Nicole Armstrong, Founder & CEO of Ellequate, to explore the hidden costs of outdated compensation systems and why the best companies are building transparent, data-driven pay strategies that strengthen culture and improve performance.

Whether you're a founder, CEO, HR leader, or people manager, this conversation offers actionable insights for creating compensation practices that strengthen culture, improve retention, and better align pay with organizational strategy.

In this episode, you'll learn:

•  Why market-based compensation alone often creates long-term pay inequities. 
•  How transparent and explainable pay systems improve trust, retention, and hiring. 
•  Practical steps leaders can take to build compensation strategies that reflect the true value of work. 

Resources & Links

Connect with Nicole Armstrong

•  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicole-armstrong/
•  Eloquate: https://eloquate.ai/
• https://www.ellequate.com/fair-pay-index

https://www.auris.io/

Follow The Entrepreneur’s Studio so you never miss an episode:

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/

Youtube: http://www.youtube.com

Instagram: http://www.instagram.com

The Entrepreneur’s Studio is sponsored by Auris, helping small and mid-sized businesses simplify payroll and HR with powerful tools and real human support. Learn more at https://www.auris.io 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:22

Pay is one of those indicators of what an employer values. It's probably one of the most concrete. And employees may not understand every internal system in the organization, but they're constantly thinking about is my pay indicative of the contribution I bring?

Chris Allen 0:40

My guest today built a company to solve one of the most charged and most avoided conversations in business, pay equity. But she didn't come at it with a megaphone. She came at it with data. Nicole Armstrong is the founder and CEO of Eloquate. It's a platform that gives companies the analytics to understand, measure, and actually fix workplace pay equity. In our conversation recorded live in Orlando, Florida, Nicole shares the strategy behind equity first leadership practices and how she built the analytics infrastructure to transform a broken system into a scalable solution. I'm Chris Allen, and this is the Entrepreneur Studio Podcast helping you run and grow a better business. Love it. Well, uh, before we get into the business strategy behind Eloquate, uh you got to tell us what did you see happening in workplaces that made you say, something has to change and it's gonna be me.

SPEAKER_01 1:52

Oh, well, this actually starts with a personal experience in the workplace. So I was actually in the market myself for a new role and had an interview with this large healthcare organization. And as part of the interview, they asked about salary history, right? And so when they made the offer, the offer was just a little bit above what I'd made in my previous role as an individual contributor. But this role would have been managing multiple departments in different states. And so I said to the recruiter, I was like, this doesn't feel quite right. And he was like, No, you're right, this isn't really representative of the role. You should ask for the value of this role. And I did, and they rescinded the offer. And they said, you know, the response was sort of, well, it's more than you made on your last position. So I think that was that aha moment where a lot of these outcomes that we see in the workplace have less to do with individual decisions and behaviors and more to do with the systems themselves. Yeah. So I thought, well, we need to find a way to solve this and really give employers the tools they need to make better choices.

Chris Allen 2:49

That's a really bad experience. I'm sorry you definitely went through that. Thank thankful in some ways, too, because of what you decided to boldly go build. But it, you know, I think one of the things that is important about this, this is like a systemic issue, right? Yeah. Uh and there's there's a lot of reasons, right? But like tell us a little bit about how the pay equity sort of structure and how the system is broken. Talk to us a little bit about what what you see at the at the core of this.

SPEAKER_01 3:14

Oh, I love this question. So I think there's a few things that we're really struggling with, and a lot of that has to do with the history of how we've built our pay systems, right? And a lot of organizations really rely heavily on market rate to figure out how do we price this role. So they're looking externally for that data. And there's nothing necessarily inherently wrong with that, but I would say that market data alone has a few foundational flaws, right? The first is it's backward facing, it's never gonna tell you what the market is really pricing right now, it's always gonna look in the rearview mirror. But the other thing is that it can't tell you how important a role is to you, right? So if you think about uh benchmarks, they tend to be generic. A program manager is a program manager, but in one organization, that might be a really critical role to the function of the organization. And in another, it might be more of a support role. So I love to use the example of like a data analyst, right? So if you have a company and your data analyst pulls data and pulls reports, it's relatively simple. Maybe it's not critically important to the strategy of the company, but if your company is a data company and that's the product you're putting out, then that data analyst becomes much more important. And markets not going to be able to tell you that, right? And then the final flaw, especially when it comes to pay equity, is that the market actually can carry historical bias forward. So a lot of folks don't know that research has shown that when women enter male-dominated fields, the pay drops for the same work that the men were doing before. And when men enter female dominated fields, guess what happens? Exactly, the pay goes up.

Chris Allen 4:51

Dang.

SPEAKER_01 4:51

Right? So the market has never actually priced the work, it's priced the humans that do the work. Wow. And so that's a reflection of our social value on the on the humans that are in those roles. So if we only rely on market, which most organizations do, then we're gonna keep carrying that inequity forward cycle after cycle, benchmark after benchmark, salary survey after salary survey. Wow.

Chris Allen 5:14

Well, this is uh I call it an in-traffic issue, right? There's traffic going both ways. This is this is something where uh you were just talking about the uh uh, I would say a gender biased uh type of uh systemic issue. But like what one of the the views, uh there's the employer view and there's the employee view, and you had this really horrible experience. You were transparent and you got dinged for it. That was that sucks. But let's talk about the employer that's uh had to maybe buy a company and they're inheriting the sins of another, right? Or uh they were a startup and they grew really fast, right? Like talk about this, these decisions that have made, and uh, you and I were talking behind this kind of like tech debt, right? It's a problem you sort of put off that you're like, hey, I don't have to deal with it right now. Talk to us about the a little bit about the employer view and how leaders can start to address this or even recognize that it's a problem.

SPEAKER_01 6:05

Yeah, I think for employers, part of it starts with just collecting the data. And a lot of employers don't actually have the data. We might have like outdated job descriptions from five years ago that don't really capture what a job does. We might have the pay bans, but we couldn't actually defend if we were asked to explain how that pay ban came to be. And the challenge for employers is that employees do talk, right? We know that 73% of candidates are looking for salary before they even apply to a role. So they're going to Glassdoor, they're going to salary.com to see what roles pay. So if you don't have a defensible structure underneath, not only are you gonna lose out on talent, but you're probably gonna lose the talent that you already have. You know, one of the key challenges, I think, especially when you acquire someone, um, or even as the market shifts relatively quickly, is you have wage compression, right? So you have folks in similar roles that are making very different amounts based on when they joined the organization. Well, that is gonna erode trust pretty quickly. And so it's not just the cost of turnover that's the problem, it's the cost of the disengagement that happens before they leave. And that can happen months before they leave, right? And that's very expensive too. So employers are often worried well, how much is it gonna cost me to actually take a deeper dive and look at this? But I would argue it's actually already costing you that amount. You just haven't looked at the data to understand what it is.

Chris Allen 7:25

Yeah. Would you consider this like a quiet crisis in many businesses?

SPEAKER_01 7:30

Oh, absolutely. And I actually think it's growing because as we think of the market shifts happening right now, we have younger generations of employees who have very different expectations. They're very open about asking for transparency, they want to know how decisions are made. So employers have to be ready to answer those questions. And at the same time, when we look at the skills that have been traditionally valued in the workplace, they tend to be more technical skills. Well, guess what? A lot of those technical skills are gonna be able to be automated. But those durable skills, those human-centered skills, they were never really included in the benchmarks. They were never priced because they tended to be in female-dominated jobs. And because of that, those durable skills, as we look at automation, those are gonna become more critical. Those are the skills that we can't automate. So as the workforce itself itself is shifting and as the value of skills are shifting, the structures that we have in place currently are not gonna be able to keep up. They're not gonna reflect the value of work for organizations in a meaningful way that really makes sure that that work is aligned with the strategy.

Chris Allen 8:32

Well, how do you enter the conversation? How does how does like with Eloquate, how do you sort of enter a conversation with an employer? That is, is it they have recognized this is an emergency or have they heard something that you know you're talking about? Like, how do you sort of enter that conversation?

SPEAKER_01 8:47

I love that question. I think a few different ways. Sometimes employers, they know something's inherently off, they can feel it. They intuitively know that the roles in their organization that really are critical to the success, the market rate doesn't quite fit. We do this, we try to solve for it in a lot of different ways. So some organizations will say, well, we'll put pay this role at 50% of the market, and we'll pay this role at 80% of the market, and we're gonna pay this role at 90%. And part of that is because they know there's a misfit between what the market says this role is worth and the value to the company. So sometimes they in their gut they know something's off. Yeah, yeah. Um, and then sometimes we just had a client recently who, you know, they were really struggling to hire for a role. They had the market rate, they were offering market rate, and they were not getting people applying for the job. And so they said, I just we need a gut check on this data because it doesn't feel like it's accurate. And so when we ran it through the process and we say, okay, let's look at what your organization's really trying to achieve. How does that role compare to others in the organization? What are the skills associated with the role? What's the value that role is bringing? When we did a deeper dive into that, we found that that role was actually undervalued for what it brought to the organization. And what was interesting is that the response from the CEO wasn't like, oh, we have to do a pay increase. It was relief. She was like, oh, this makes so much more sense now. So they adjusted that and they filled that role now with two people. So I think it depends on where the organization is. In some instances, they inherit problems and they're like, we know that something's off and we have to address it before it becomes even bigger. In other cases, it's sort of this unspoken, nagging issue that they can't quite put their finger on.

Chris Allen 10:26

Well, you you know, one of the things that I like that there was a pay adjustment, you know, that you were just talking about for an individual role. But what about if you're, you know, you you've got a hundred, hundred and fifty employees that they're it's all very different to the way that they're compensated. And if you were to do an adjustment to get everybody, you know, to an equitable place, that bill is really, really high. So talk about how businesses should be thinking about solving the problem over time, or is it like a right now gotta solve?

SPEAKER_01 10:58

It doesn't have to be a right now kind of solve. I think part of it is identifying top priority, right? So when we think about roles in organizations, we think about how critical is this role to the organizational priorities and how critical is it to the strategy of the company? And how likely is it to be underpriced relative to the value? So if you kind of go through that decision-making tree, you're gonna identify the roles in your company that are at most risk, right? That if they were to leave tomorrow, it would really deeply impact the way that your ability to provide services or deliver on your mission. So we always recommend starting smaller, focusing on the roles that are really critical to the organization first. The other thing that you can do is make it a phased process. You don't have to boil the ocean all at once. You can really say, okay, we're gonna start to make these adjustments, but we're gonna set a salary cap on how we make these adjustments. We're not going to allow an adjustment of more than three to five percent every year. And we're gonna, we know that it's gonna take us a few years to get there, but we'll get there, right? Um, the other thing I would say is what organizations may need to recognize is that your people are your number one line item, right? They're typically the biggest piece of your budget. So if there's a miscalibration of how you're valuing the work in the org, that's costing you. So the goal is to how do we recalibrate and really make sure that we're paying the roles to their value and to the skills they require versus what the market says. That's gonna save us money in the long run because we might also discover that there are roles that are overpaid for the value they bring. Yeah. And we can recalibrate that too.

Chris Allen 12:32

Well, we got to talk about that one. Uh so let's move to maybe the employee side for just a second. I like that you said people talk. You know, uh, and one of the things that I really enjoyed you elaborating on in our our first conversation was uh if people are talking, and let's say there are two roles that are doing the same work, but let's say they're customer facing and one of them is Spanish speaking and the other one is not, but they've talked and they're like, uh, I make more than you. Let's say the business did the right thing, right? And paid more for certain skills. I'd love for you to break down because that was just one thing was the multilingual thing as a as a skill, you know, as assessing the business. But talk to us a little about when they talk and there's this pay discrepancy and it's an artificial argument rather than often it is a very real, a very real thing that can happen.

SPEAKER_01 13:19

Well, the beauty around creating these underlying systems, right? So how we recommend organizations think about it is we're gonna evaluate two different formulas here. One is what is the role itself worth? And then the second formula is how do we want to reward additional attributes that the human in the role brings, right? So fair pay doesn't mean paying people exactly the same for the same job. There are other factors that can be included, but the goal is that those become consistent and explainable. So, for example, I love this example. Well, what if you have an employee that speaks another language, right? Do we want to reward for specialized skills? In many cases, yes, right? If if someone's calling in and you constantly go to that person for that skill set, you probably should reward them for that skill set. Or maybe someone has additional tenure or certifications that are really helpful for that particular role. It's okay to reward them for those things. The key is just to be consistent, to say if someone has a skill set and it's applied, we're gonna reward them in this way. So that way when an employee comes to their manager and says, Well, why is this person making more than me? It becomes really simple to say, this is the base rate for the salary, and these are all the additional attributes they bring, right? Would you like to start working on these things as well?

Chris Allen 14:30

Wow, I love that.

SPEAKER_01 14:31

And then there's clarity on how they can also grow within their role.

Chris Allen 14:34

I think that's great. Uh I I want to talk about Eloquate for just a second because I'm fascinated by the users that can actually use this, use the platform. So give us uh an employer view and then maybe an employee view that could potentially short circuit a pretty uncomfortable conversation, right? So if you think about it, they're the the person with the uh additional attributes, can they go into the system and see, oh, the explainable system is there and I can see why, uh how I can go make more or something like that. Help us to understand a little bit about the employer view in the system and what the employee can see.

SPEAKER_01 15:09

Yeah, so the way it works with our employers is when they first start, the first thing we do with them is help them get clear on their compensation philosophy. So, what is it they're trying to achieve? What is the mission of the organization? How do they want to position themselves in the market? How do total rewards fit in, right? All these really uh difficult questions that we want employers to be able to answer and get clarity on within the leadership team. Maybe my favorite one within that is helping them get clarity. If two different things diverge, say the market is vastly different than the value this role brings, what's the decision-making process there? We have to get clear on that first because that becomes the North Star. The next thing that the employer does is they really start to do a deep dive into their job descriptions. We're gonna look at language to make sure that there's nothing in there that's gonna deter certain candidates from applying. We're gonna make sure that it's comprehensive and make suggestions. So this is one area where AI is really great. We can look at those job descriptions and say, hey, are there skill sets missing that are typically associated with this type of role? And if so, we're gonna add them in so it becomes a really comprehensive data set of what this job does. Then we help them figure out, well, how do we value those skill sets, right? Not just how important is the skill to the job itself, but how critical is this skill to the strategic priorities of the company, which you've already defined in your comp philosophy, right? So that becomes the North Star. Then the beauty in that is we can start to look at roles that have a similar value based on the skills they bring and a similar value based on kind of the internal worth or the operational worth of that role as well. So from the employer side of things, it's a way to take all these pieces of data that have been siloed and see it all together in a system that makes sense. And then they can start to model different scenarios and say, hey, we really want to lean in more toward the skills-based value, or we want to make sure that we're paying a living wage based on our region. And it will show them kind of how that might adjust individual salaries and how that might adjust ranges. On the back end, they can also control, as you were mentioning, for those individual attributes, right? How do we create formulas to say, how do we want to think about tenure? How do we want to think about additional education or certifications? What if someone serves on committees and they use a lot of time? How do we want to consider those factors, right? So, what that does is it allows the employer to really get a better understanding of how do we compensate for these roles? What's the explainable and defensible system that we're building so that managers are better equipped? And maybe that's the missing piece too, is we have to take that information and be able to train managers on how to explain it in a way that's gonna resonate and build trust with employees. Yeah. So if an employee does ask the question, why am I making what I'm making? Then you've got that right there.

Chris Allen 17:46

Yeah, that's awesome. I think one of the best parts about what you're doing is you're making pay equity, you're addressing the issue, making it programmatic rather than maybe this opportunistic thing where, you know, there are certain leaders that are, I gotta pay these people this. And HR is like, come on, let's let's let's do this the right way. Let's let's make this more programmatic and and get sort of arrest this problem right as as we're trying to solve it. One of the things that I I would love, I I was I was so enthusiastic about our uh sort of pre-conversation. I just want to hear your jobs, workplace, AI point of view.

SPEAKER_01 18:21

Ooh. So I think that there's gonna be a lot of disruption that does happen. You know, we're hearing that AI is not gonna replace jobs, that it's gonna augment them. I think some jobs are probably going to be replaced in greater numbers. But I also think what's happening is that AI is going to reconfigure the value of work really quickly. And what's interesting is we're already starting to see that as people are trying to build out more skills-based assessments. They're measuring those technical skills, those AI skills, but we're still not measuring those durable skills. But that transition is happening, and those skills are equally important. So I think ultimately AI is not going to be able to replace the human in the work, right? We're always gonna need a human in the loop. It cannot replace human judgment. And so I think a lot of those durable skills are safe. What I would also say is AI can be a really incredibly powerful tool when it comes to HR, but we also have to be really careful because if the systems underneath the AI are sort of outdated, maybe make assumptions that aren't quite accurate, then AI can be a tool that actually scales that bias, right, rather than actually solves for it. So we have to really make sure that as we're making choices within our organization of what kind of tools we're gonna use, that we understand where is the data coming from? Are we confident that we've mitigated bias or that that update that data is objective before we ever use those tools to scale within the organization?

Chris Allen 19:46

That's uh I love that point of view. What do you think is uh a talk track for let's say someone in HR is very aware that this is an issue, but that it's not getting the attention that it really needs, right? And maybe they're recognizing very uh acute pain in the organization. What do you think is a a great way to arm this crew, you know, with the right talk tracks, playbook, talking points, data. What do you think is sort of the most influential approach or approaches that they could take?

SPEAKER_01 20:18

I think a few things. I think data driven is always great. So if we think about the cost of turnover, that's usually about 50 to 200% of somebody's salary, depending on what level of the organization they're in. But we also know that folks disengage about three to six months before they leave. And so that's a cost too. So that's a data point that can actually be calculated, right? So if you know certain roles have a higher turnover rate, to calculate the cost of recruiting and retraining those roles can be a number that you can put in front of leadership and say, hey, this is already costing us this amount, right? Don't we want to stop this? And not only that, but when you have turnover, it's not just the upfront cost, it's the loss of institutional knowledge, right? It's the effort that goes into bringing in a new employee, training them, onboarding them, right? All of that takes a lot of resources. So quantifying in that in a way that leadership can understand can be really helpful. Yeah. I also think that there is a compliance argument to be made, right? Pay transparency laws are expanding across the country. There's 17 states plus DC that already require pay ranges to be in job postings. And that can be really helpful. But transparency without a system underneath can actually just make that bias or those inconsistencies more visible. So if you're forced at some point to put those numbers out there and you're not prepared, then you're in a constant game of catch up, right? It's it's not a way, it's not where we want to be in terms of being proactive and getting ahead of the market. Um, so I think there's that compliance issue. And then finally, I think especially for teams with leadership that understands the value of the people that they have in the organization. I think there is an appeal to that to say, hey, we want to protect what you've built, right? And then the way that we do that is by ensuring that we are calibrating the worth of these roles to the strategy of the organization. And if we're misaligned, it's costing us an opportunity and it's also costing us in talent. And so we need to bring that into alignment so that we can achieve the mission that we've set out to achieve. So I think those are the three the three good talking points to start with. With.

Chris Allen 22:21

You know, uh one of the things that was I haven't experienced this all over my career, but when I the best HR people that I've worked with are the ones that can put together a business case.

SPEAKER_01 22:31

Absolutely.

Chris Allen 22:31

Here's the problem. Here's the likely cost that we're experiencing. Here's the cost to repair it, and here's the likely outcome. I was so impressed. There are a few just dramatically good HR executives that I work with that were like, here's the business case as to why we should do this. And I think that I I I love the way that you just framed up what the talking points are. I I think at the end of the day, having that framework is really, really huge. How do you arm HR leaders and executives with that type of business case information as they get into Eloquate?

SPEAKER_01 23:06

Oh, it's a good question. So I think part of it starts with a conversation. So as we get to know employers, we typically say, what are you really struggling with? Right. And oftentimes those will bubble up to the surface. Hey, we're we cannot keep talent, we cannot um recruit talent, people aren't applying, or engagement has gotten really low and we see the numbers and we don't know how to fix it. Right. So if we can start to create almost a diagnostic model for employers and for HR leaders to take back to leadership, that's where we typically start. So let's look at why you're having trouble recruiting. Let's dive a little bit deeper into that. What is the role specifically? Tell me how important that role is to the organization. How disruptive is turnover, right? Those are the stories that you can take back to leadership. Those are data points that you can share with leadership to let them know how much this is really important to the function of your job. So a lot of it starts with just diagnosing what's the actual problem because sometimes it's not obvious. You know, sometimes you might say, well, hey, we're having trouble recruiting, but it's not a recruitment issue at all. It's the fact that the systems underneath that you've built don't reflect the value of that role. So that goes back a few layers before you even put that job in the market. So let's go back there and figure out how to solve for that first. And if you can demonstrate to leadership that this isn't going to take a massive amount of time or resources, but it's going to make us more efficient. It's going to make us more effective. And you can lay out what that process looks like. People are more likely to say yes. Yeah. Right.

Chris Allen 24:31

Well, I like that we've talked about the framework and talk about the strategic approach to this. I I want to know like some practical things, you know, because uh let's say that there is a pay equity issue and there's been some sort of, hey, there's here's some budget that we can work in to try and address some uh of the issue. Talk to us about things like salary increases or salary decreases and retention. And what's the what are what are some of the tactical things that you've seen that work really well?

SPEAKER_01 25:04

Yeah, so I think for salary increases, really getting focused on where's the most risk in the organization, right? Um, and so part of that is identifying what roles are we seeing higher turnover, what roles are we seeing higher wage compression, and what roles maybe are critical to the strategy that we haven't really paid much attention to other than market salary. If you can identify some of those high-risk roles and work on those first, work backward, that's what we would typically recommend. And again, I think those salary increases, they don't have to be huge. I think part of it is employees want to understand how pay is determined. And so oftentimes, if you have a conversation and you explain, this is ultimately where we're gonna go with your salary, this is what we can do this year, and this is the plan, most employees are gonna understand that, right? It's not necessarily that they expect their salary to change overnight in one cycle, but they want to understand how did you get to the number where I'm at, right? I feel like pay is one of those indicators of what an employer values. It's probably one of the most concrete. And employees may not understand every internal system in the organization, but they're constantly thinking about is my pay indicative of the contribution I bring? Right? And so if you have reasoning behind that, the beauty in all of this is to start building the systems to support that. So the first thing I would recommend is doing an audit of your roles, right? Focus on those high-risk roles. What does that job require? What are the skills, competencies, uh, responsibilities that are really required to do that job well? How critical is this job to day-to-day function? What is the market rate of this job, right? And then compare that to the range that you currently have. And if there's a misalignment, what would it take to actually increase it and bring it up to what would be more representative of that work?

Chris Allen 26:51

Right. I like that you talked about uh what the company actually values. And I don't know if we're talking about core values. I think we're talking about like the underlying values, where it's this idea of there are some employers and some executives and leaders that are looking there, they actually want that point of leverage to not have like here's how pay actually works, because they see it as a point as a point of leverage, not necessarily uh, you know, something something that's to you know to their benefit, right? What have you seen? Have you seen sort of a change where it was a group that you've encountered that maybe did use it as a point of leverage, and how you were able to get them to sort of reconsider the way that they have those underlying values of work?

SPEAKER_01 27:33

Yeah, I think so. So when we say values, I think you're right. It's it's not necessarily um sort of maybe the mission and vision statement, although it could be that. Yeah. But oftentimes organization will tell that they value equity or they value fairness, right? But their underlying systems aren't producing those outcomes. And so that ends up feeling um very performative in many ways.

Chris Allen 27:57

And disingenuous.

SPEAKER_01 27:58

Very disingenuous and can be really harmful, not only to your employees, but even from the outside folks looking in, right? We can look at companies who made a lot of statements in support of fairness and equity and things like that that have then walked them back, or we find out later that they actually didn't follow through, or the systems that they've built didn't support that. So when we're thinking about are we creating systems that are in alignment with our values, it's what are we actually trying to achieve as a company? How do we value the people within the company and how is it translated into systems? And then how are we measuring whether those systems are effective, right? That's the key that makes sure that equity is embedded. I think sometimes we treat it as this program or this outside initiative, but it's really only effective when it's embedded in every single decision a leader's making, right? It's it's the everyday systems that we're really looking at. How do we embed this? And so I think part of it is identify those systems. What are the systems that are undermining our goals, right? And start there.

Chris Allen 28:58

I think that's awesome. Well, you know, for any leader in this room or those listening to the show who may have avoided this conversation, it happens because it's maybe felt too risky. What's the one thing that we can do this week to get honest about how our people are paid and what that says about our business?

SPEAKER_01 29:14

Oh, I love this. So we often have a very simple access that people can use, right? It's kind of a four-piece quadrant where you think how critical is a role to the organization? Maybe it's more supportive, or maybe it's critical to the function. And how likely is this role to be misaligned in the market, right? Where is that disconnect? So anything that's in that upper right quadrant where high value, high risk, we would recommend they start there. That's one thing that you could do literally when you get back from this conference. You could say, let's go through our roles and see which roles we think are most at risk of being misaligned. The next thing we do is like, let's look at our pay ranges. Do we have pay ranges and do we have a defensible uh explanation as to how we got there? And if not, then we might need to go back to the very beginning and say, what is our compensation philosophy? What are we building? What do we exist to achieve? And how should compensation support that? If you can't answer that question, what does compensation exist? How why does it exist? And how does it support your mission and your goals? Then you have an idea. You don't have a structure. So you need to go back and build that out and be able to answer those questions. And then you can look at every role within your company through that lens.

Chris Allen 30:23

That's awesome. Well, I have to say I'm super impressed with your expertise on this topic. And it was awesome just to sit down and have a conversation with you about something that's super critical to all of our businesses. So why don't we give Nicole a round of applause?

SPEAKER_01 30:37

Thank you so much.

Narrator 30:42

Thank you for listening to the Entrepreneurs Studio Podcast. Check the show notes for resources and links from today's episode and follow us on Instagram at the entrepreneurs.studio. See you next time.