Today's Guest

Hiring employees is a key piece of running any business and an important responsibility for you as the owner or manager. As the employer, it’s critical to ensure you’re getting who and what you think you’re getting. Travis Reiter is the President and Co-Owner of Perfect Fit Background Checks. Travis’s business provides accurate and reliable background screening services tailored to the small and medium-sized business owner’s unique needs. Perfect Fit makes background checks fast, easy, and affordable even for small businesses – and Travis explains how working with Perfect Fit will help you avoid potentially big problems down the road.

Resources Shared

• Fast and Affordable Background Checks, Employment Screening
• Travis Reiter | LinkedIn
• Thryv
  

Episode Transcript

(Please excuse grammatical errors due to transcription)

Gordon Henry:

Hey, this is Gordon Henry at Winning on Main Street, and very often here at Winning on Main Street, we like to focus on ways to grow and generate revenue for your business, but sometimes you have to look at the downside of running a small business. This week we have an expert on how to protect your small business through background checks for your small business, making sure you hire the right people, and just as importantly, avoid the wrong ones. We're speaking with Travis Reiter. Welcome Travis.

Travis Reiter:

Hey Gordon, thanks for inviting me to the show.

Gordon Henry:

Good to have you Travis. A quick background on Travis. He is the co-owner and operator of Perfect Fit Background Checks, an employment screening company out of Boston, Texas. Travis and his partner and fiance, Rachel Sperling purchased the business in early 2021, acquiring a software platform and brand that was launched more than 15 years ago and has kept many of the support staff, they've been with the platform for more than a decade, many of them. He's lived in Austin for nearly 20 years. Prior to buying Perfect Fit, he worked in sales and account management at a variety of tech companies, ranging from Fortune 500 to startups, now he's focused on providing a better option for small businesses when it comes to pre-employment screening and background checks.

Which listeners could add to this episode? Hiring is a key piece of running any business. It's important to do the background check to make sure you're getting what you think you're getting in terms of your new employee and their qualifications and background. Perfect fit background checks is suited for the SMB, the small business and just may save you a lot of pain later, so check it out. Travis, welcome to the show. Before we get into the whole background check industry and what you do there, I'd love to learn just a little bit about your background, so why don't you tell us sort of how you got into this? What was your first job and where did you go from there?

Travis Reiter:

Yeah, so my career spans a lot of different types of jobs through high school and college, I worked at my uncle's auto body shop fixing cars, and then post-college, I graduated with an economics degree. If anyone out there has an economics degree, you're probably not using it directly as an economist. I really leaned into the sales world that is so vibrant here in Austin. We have a lot of software and tech companies here, but not before taking a detour into insurance. Through the sales experience, I worked at large companies, small startups, the whole gamut there, but the entrepreneurship interest has been there for a long time. I did some freelance web design throughout college and even after college on the side, in addition to my day job, and it was something that kind of scratched the itch a little bit, but wasn't a full-fledged business. Now, I'm very excited to be in it doing it full time.

Gordon Henry:

You mentioned your uncle's autobody shop. Was entrepreneurship kind of in your family? Was that something you were raised with, and always had at the back of your head?

Travis Reiter:

Yeah, working with him, that was over the course of seven summers through high school and college. In an autobody shop, I think there are probably 10 or 12 of us in total, so whenever you're in a small organization too... there's something maybe you don't appreciate until you work in a small business where everything that you do matters, it's easy to kind of realize, or not realize, when you're working with a large company, not seeing the direct impact of what your work is doing. That was something that was really neat. You feel the responsibility and sometimes the pressure that comes with it, but oftentimes whenever there's pressure, then there's also the associated fulfillment and kind of pride that comes with it whenever you achieve whatever your objective is with that. That was certainly the first place.

With the freelance web design that I was doing, that was another one where the output was very tangible. That's not the case for background checks, we don't see a lot of tangible output beyond just the customer relationships that we have, being a little bit different, it's still kind of the same excitement whenever you talk to someone and they're like, we're just so excited that we found you. We're happy to have someone that we can just call and talk to. Having someone that's happy with what you're doing for them, I think that's what a lot of us do it for, right?

Gordon Henry:

Was there an event or some specific thing that made you say, I'm going to ditch the regular day job and basically build, well, buy my own company? What triggered that?

Travis Reiter:

Yeah, this has been the plan for a long time, but it wasn't necessarily set to be something that I did at a specific date. I just knew that I want to be prepared for it whenever the right time came. My fiance and I had been planning to live abroad actually at some point, it was a bucket list item for her. She eventually won me over to the idea, and so once Covid hit, we started planning for that and planning to make that move as soon as Covid would allow us to. That was a very natural time for us.

We lived in Portugal for 2022 and we knew that that would be tough trying to maintain our day jobs and living six hours ahead, so we were like, okay, this is a natural time, so we started not only planning to move abroad for a year, but also planning to buy a business. That's when the shopping process started. That's when we found this opportunity. One of the key things we were looking for was a business that we could operate online, and fortunately the right one came along at the right time, and here we are two and a half years later.

Gordon Henry:

A lot of people who listen to the show are thinking about buying businesses. How specifically... Did you go to BizBuySell? Was it one of those clearing house websites that you went to? How did you find out about this particular business that you ended up purchasing?

Travis Reiter:

It actually was BizBuySell, and I feel like a lot of us maybe start out there browsing the listings. My younger brother was a huge help to us actually in the purchasing process. He has experience in investment banking and then private equity, and he was also shopping for a small business at the same time. We were talking to each other, and I think maybe he was sharing more advice with me than I was sharing with him, but he had recommended a book called Buy then Build that really focuses on the idea that you can mitigate a lot of risk by buying a business as opposed to building it from scratch.

The other thing, the other big takeaway for me was, don't limit yourself to a hobby or an industry that you're familiar with, necessarily, but to understand your skillset and then look for an opportunity that needs what your skillset is. That really changed my perspective on it, and then before I ended up really working with any business brokers, the right one came along. My brother was the one that actually found it on BizBuySell, sent in my direction, and it worked out.

Gordon Henry:

Fantastic, so many people hear these messages often at a college graduation where they say, follow your passion, pursue your passion. I guess we'd all be rock stars and center fielders if that's what we did, but often you've got to sort of pursue what you're good at or what you think you can actually execute on and make a living. It's not always just about... Or maybe that becomes your passion because you're good at it and you can make a living and maybe build it, and that's exciting to you. It's not always the thing you wanted to do first in life as a teenager.

Travis Reiter:

Right. I mean, there's certainly people out there that do find that, and I'm sure that's incredible, but for most of us, that's not the case.

Gordon Henry:

Right, exactly. Why don't we get into the Perfect Fit Background Check business? I guess before we get into that, I know you gave me some information to share. For those who are listening, part of this conversation may sound like legal advice, but it's important for you to note that this isn't intended to be used as legal advice, and a business should always consult with your attorney to establish what's right for their business. That's an important thing just to keep in mind as we talk through this background check issue. Travis, first, let's just set the stage. What exactly is a background check?

Travis Reiter:

Yeah, background check can encompass a lot of things. I think for most people, the first thing that comes to mind is a criminal background check, and that's true, that is included in the vast majority of orders that customers place with us, but it also includes some other things. Most businesses will have a variety of needs, maybe for different types of positions that they hire for, and then also by industry, there'll be different needs, but you could be talking criminal background checks, you could be talking driver history, drug screening, physical exams, and then verification services as well. Verifying is the education and the employment history that they have on their resume, is that true and accurate?

Technically, that is physically what it is, but I also make it a point to communicate to our clients what they are not. I think it's just as important to understand that they're a risk mitigation tool and they're not some kind of moral litmus test to say, hey, this is a good person or a bad person, and they're a bad person so they shouldn't work with us. It's a tool that should be used responsibly to kind of understand, are there risks that we should consider based on what this person is going to be responsible for in our business, and then using that information as appropriate in the hiring decision.

Gordon Henry:

Yeah. You and I were talking just a bit before the show and I was saying, yeah, I've made a few bad hires in my career, and usually when the person didn't work out, it was because it wasn't a cultural fit, it was someone who came in. I remember one guy and he would take a couple of hours off in the middle of the day and the rest of the company was working hard, working hard, and this guy was on the basketball court and people were like, what's the deal, we can't get him in a meeting when we need him? That kind of thing. It just didn't feel like a fit, but it wasn't necessarily somebody who had done something wrong in their life where you could find it on a piece of paper, where they had cheated or lied or hurt somebody or done something like that. How does that stuff show up? I mean, in your background check assessment, can you pick out somebody who might not be a fit for the company?

Travis Reiter:

Yeah, there's ways that that could come to light through the process. Part of that, again, will depend on what you decide to include in your search package. Some things are pretty black and white, like checking for a criminal record. However, if you decide to include an employment verification, then when we place that phone call, part of the questions that we ask may be like, are they eligible for rehire? Professional reference checks are another place where we have a conversation with someone that knows the person, and so we may learn a little bit more about that, understand what some of their strengths are, weaknesses are. Some of that can come to light. It's not always guaranteed. Some people are maybe a little guarded about what they're willing to divulge, so it's certainly not a cure all, but it can help sometimes.

Gordon Henry:

Okay. How does it work, just practically breaking it down? If I have a company and I want to do a background check with you, what do I need to do?

Travis Reiter:

The process is, an employer just trying to acquire the information is very simple. Our most popular order method is, I believe, offered by the vast majority of vendors nowadays. We call it the invitation method, and essentially all you have to do as an employer is decide which background check package is appropriate for this role, and once you've selected that, then just provide the name and the email address for the person and that's it. The rest of it, we'll provide updates along the way by email. What will happen is, we'll send the email invitation to the candidate and they'll just click a link and we'll walk them through the whole process. Essentially, that's just collecting the appropriate information that we need from them to perform the searches that we need, and then also providing the appropriate paperwork. There are certain authorization and disclosure forms that have to be presented, and some of them have to be signed, and so we'll take care of that. The actual process and the action that has to be taken by the employer is very simple in terms of actually executing a check.

Gordon Henry:

What does this cost, to run a background check through Perfect Fit?

Travis Reiter:

Yeah, again, it will depend on what's in the package. Our most popular package that really just focuses on criminal searches is $24, which we're very proud to offer that. One of the things that made us interested in moving into such a mature industry... Background checks have been around for decades, they're not necessarily revolutionizing anything or redefining anything. A lot of the terminology and communication that I was used to in the startup industry, and my fiance Rachel, she worked at Meta prior to this, and so very different environments from a mature industry like background checks, but something that was very interesting to us whenever we were investigating it was the pricing is just very opaque.

The largest vendor in the space, I believe is Checkr, and they actually are transparent with their prices. I think they're the only major vendor that is. Most of the others, you have to talk to a sales rep, they want to get you on the phone, they want to give you a price, and then you kind of play the whole pricing game and you think you're getting a discount but at the end of the day, you're still not entirely sure if the price you got is competitive or not competitive.

When we were doing our research and kind of seeing, okay, what are the prices that are out there? In addition to the transparency thing, it was also very common for small businesses to pay drastically different prices than large businesses. If there are any HR folks listening to this, that work at a large corporation, $24 probably doesn't sound that impressive, but if you're a small business, you're probably paying 50, 60, 70 bucks sometimes for a basic criminal check like that. That was something that was very attractive to us was there seemed like there was a very clear opportunity to just work with small businesses. You don't want to try and boil the ocean with any business, it's important to find your niche and zero in on that. We saw a very clear opportunity there. Just go talk to small business owners that Googled it, signed up with someone, they're like, 60 bucks sounds reasonable, they move on to the next thing because they've got 10,000 things on their to-do list. Anyway, a very long and winding answer to how much is a basic check run.

Gordon Henry:

Do most small businesses find you just by googling you, or is there some other way you get found?

Travis Reiter:

Yeah, most people don't really shop for this very often. I think for a lot of people it's a line item expense. When you're hiring someone, there are a lot of moving parts, there are a lot of things that have to happen and it can be an emotional process. You're trying to evaluate candidates, trying to figure out who's going to be a good fit for you, and I think for a lot of people, this is just a checkbox, like, okay, we've done all the hard part, the interview, we found this person, we just got to check this box to make sure we can move on.

Some people do find us. A lot of times those are new businesses that are doing it for the first time, and then once they've signed up with someone, they don't often go back to it. For us, it's a lot of times us bringing up the conversation with them. It's something that, because it's kind of a routine expense for a lot of people, we find a lot of success just getting out and shaking hands, meeting people in person. We do the online thing and reach out to people online, but in-person has been the most successful for us.

Gordon Henry:

Got it. How often when you're running these background checks, do you find a problem with a candidate? I'm just curious. Is there a way to say 10% or 5%? How many of the candidates show up as red flags?

Travis Reiter:

Yeah, I believe that across the US it's a surprising number of people that actually have some kind of criminal record. I want to say it's like one third. I could be off on that, but it was a shocking number. Part of it will depend on what industry you're in, maybe the candidates that you're getting have skewed one way or the other, but it's not terribly uncommon. Coming back to what I mentioned a few minutes ago, this isn't supposed to be a test, discernment if someone's a good person or a bad person, it's just understanding, are you putting someone in a position that may create a higher risk for a potential incident? There's a lot of nuance to that as well. That's a big topic right now, and what is often called the fair chance hiring movement. A lot of times that includes what is called Ban the Box legislation.

It's something that I think whether it's conscious or unconscious, whenever a hiring manager does see that someone has a criminal record, it kind of taints your perspective immediately. We can all do better to try and consciously not do that, but there's evidence that it still has an impact. A lot of these Ban the Box laws that you see, which are pretty common, but it's a patchwork across the US right now, a lot of states have it, A lot of municipalities have it. There are slight variations in the actual legislation in different locations, but essentially they all come back to the idea that you shouldn't ask about a criminal history until after you've had the interview and evaluated their qualification for the job, and then once you've extended an offer or a conditional offer, then run the check and then consider what is on the background check in the context of relevance. How old were they whenever it happened? Did they serve their sentence? How much time has passed? And really taking a nuanced consideration of what's on there.

Gordon Henry:

Yeah. I mean, you hear so much today about how to avoid discrimination in the hiring process. Is this considered an allowable factor to consider though? Once you've done your interview, if someone shows up as having a criminal record, are you allowed, in theory, to consider that as a reason to take or not take the person?

Travis Reiter:

Yeah, absolutely. That's actually a great question, and it's a common misconception that people have is that, okay, well, we can no longer run background checks, or, oh, we're going to be forced to hire someone, and that's just not true. The whole purpose is, give someone a fair shake at a job, take the time to consider their qualification before you just automatically disqualify them. That's not to say that you should hire everyone that's qualified, you're doing background checks for a reason. You're not doing any favors to anyone by putting someone in a bad position.

If you have someone that has a tendency to speed and you're trying to hire someone that's going to be a driver for your car, people can change their behavior, but in general, people tend to have behavioral patterns, and if you're going to have them driving every day, are you doing them any kind of favor by putting them in a position where they may be creating risk, whether it's just getting a speeding ticket or maybe being a dangerous driver on the road and putting other drivers at risk? You're not doing your brand a favor, yourself a favor, the actual employee a favor, you're really just trying to use this information and put people in a position that is best for everyone.

Gordon Henry:

For a small local business, a lot of our listeners tend to be small local service businesses. Is it actually necessary to write a background check? I'm wondering if you're in a smaller market, and maybe you've been around for a while, very often you'd think the person who's applying for a job is somebody who lives locally, you may know them, you may know their family, maybe you went to high school with them. Do most of the smaller local businesses run background checks? Is this more like a big company thing to do? I was just curious, is there a breakdown?

Travis Reiter:

Yeah, a lot of small businesses do start hiring people that they know, and that's very common. In those situations, you may feel like you know that person very well. In the case of family, oftentimes you do, in the case of friends, maybe you don't know everything, but you know a lot, so a lot of this is a judgment call like, what are the risks of the role? If you're hiring someone remotely because they're going to make sales calls for you from their house, there's not necessarily a whole lot of risk in that, right? But if you've got someone that you're going to hire to go knock on doors and do door-to-door sales for you, where they're going on potential customers properties to their homes, then that's a higher risk and something that is worth considering. While you think that you may know someone, I think that if it is a higher risk position, it may be worth going ahead and just doing that.

I like to encourage people to think about background checks as similar to insurance. Well, I was going to say it's a lot cheaper than having an incident, but right now insurance is getting pretty expensive and that market is kind of wild, so maybe that's not a good analogy anymore. But if you're going to just spend $24, and if at any point it prevents one bad hire, it's going to be worth it because just the time and the expense that goes into having to replace someone, not to mention just whatever kind of headache comes from an incident that may occur, there's kind of that selfish reason, but also just beyond that, in the US, we have a responsibility to hire responsibly.

This is something that we learned last year when we were living in Europe, that there's a little bit different perspective over there, but here in the US, negligent hiring claims are not terribly uncommon. Let's say, you hire your friend that you've known for 10 years and something happens and then it turns out, well, they did have a criminal history of this, you can be held liable for not having been responsible and done a background check to see, okay, well they have multiple instances of doing X, Y, Z, you should have been able to foresee this. There's kind of a legal liability that you're trying to avoid here too.

Gordon Henry:

Yeah, if something happens where that employee does something bad to another employee or to a customer, then you could be, I guess, sued by the customer or the other employee that you failed to spot this in the employee you hired?

Travis Reiter:

Right.

Gordon Henry:

Yeah, that's an excellent point. Yeah. A lot to worry about as a business owner hiring people. Good reason to use Perfect Fit. We got to take a quick break, Travis. We'll be right back and we're going to hear more about Perfect Fit Background Checks, and what's next for Travis Reiter. Don't go away.

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Gordon Henry:

We're back with Travis Reiter from Perfect Fit Background Check. Travis, you've been doing this now for a couple of years with your fiance, Rachel, how's the business itself going? Has it achieved your expectations about growth trajectory, everybody who buys a business has a plan? How is it going, and is it fitting the plan?

Travis Reiter:

I think that's one of those things where it's like an immutable law of physics that no matter how much you plan, it's never going to go as planned. The one that always comes to mind is that when you're buying a business, they always say, okay, do everything you can, research all you can to plan for all of your expenses, everything you're going to need, and it's going to be double that. I was like, okay, all right, well I'm going to account for that. We're just going to double our expectations, and then inevitably, it still just ends up being double that, so maybe I shouldn't have doubled it in the first place, maybe I'd be in for half the cost. I don't know. It's been a ride, and I think that most small business owners could relate because it's one of those things where no matter how much you plan, stuff is going to happen.

It's important to plan to guide your activities, but it's more important to be flexible with your planning and be able to pivot whenever stuff happens. I would say that we're not where I thought we were going to be two and a half years ago, but we've been able to be dynamic and change whenever circumstances changed. We are really starting to see, especially this year, a lot of the momentum that we've been working on building for the last few years. I think part of the challenge is, when we bought the business, we started with a new brand. The name Perfect Fit Background Checks is only two and a half years old. Our platform and our team are very experienced, and that's rock solid, but no one knew our name, and so just launching a name from scratch, there's a ton of challenge in that.

I think that now we're starting to see people recognize the name a little bit more. We're starting to get more reviews where people start to trust us a little bit more. Google has seen that we've been around for a few years, so we're starting to rank better. All the little things that you do from marketing and branding and all that, it's just slowly starting to catch up. Things are absolutely booming right now. Everyone would love to see today's success yesterday or a month ago or a year ago, but we're in an awesome spot right now. It's been great.

Gordon Henry:

Good to hear. Did you make a conscious decision not to take the company's brand that you bought, or how did that work?

Travis Reiter:

Yes, and it wasn't really an option for us, but that didn't deter us from pursuing the opportunity. It just ended up being a little bit bigger of a challenge than we expected, I think.

Gordon Henry:

Got it. Okay. What's next for Travis and Perfect Fit?

Travis Reiter:

We're on an awesome trajectory right now, and I think that if we just keep moving in the direction that we're moving, then we will be a happy camper. I think that business owners in general are a very motivated group, and just as humans, I think that it's tough to ever be satisfied, so our goals right now are going to be different from our goals in a couple of years, but ultimately I'm seeking what a lot of business owners are looking for, financial flexibility and freedom, being one of them. Part of that just comes with continued growth, and then also just the experience and the fun of owning a business. I absolutely love having to do 20,000 different things, having to understand a little bit about accounting, a little bit about marketing and all that stuff. That's stuff that excites me and I love it.

For me, I would love for this business to just thrive over the next 10, 15 years. It's hard to predict anything that far out these days, especially just with all this exponential technology like AI. Who knows where we'll be in 10, 15 years, much less, five years? But yeah, my goal would be to grow it. We'd love to hire on, grow the team a little bit. We'd love to have 15 people, 20 people. I think that there's a lot of excitement and fulfillment that comes from working with a team of people, and that's something that I would love to see.

Gordon Henry:

Yeah, sounds good. Well, we wish you all the best of luck, and it sounds like you're doing all the right things, so I'm sure it will be a good future for the company and for you.

Travis Reiter:

Yeah, thank you. Thank you.

Gordon Henry:

Just to the last question, for people who do need a background check for their employees, should they just go to perfectfit.com? Where do they find you?

Travis Reiter:

Our website is perfectfitbackgroundchecks.com. Of course, we would love to work with anyone that's looking for a vendor. Like I mentioned, we work best with small and into the medium-sized business category, up into a thousand employees, I think that most of your listeners are going to fall into that category, but if not through us, I would encourage people to find a local vendor or a mom-and-pop shop, it's something that they can oftentimes give you a more competitive rate than if you just Google it, and you get the small business service experience as well. It's one of those. Not every service is ideal for working with small business. Sometimes big businesses are a good way to go, but this is one where it makes sense.

Gordon Henry:

Okay. Well, you heard it, perfectfitbackgroundchecks.com, it's Travis Reiter. Thanks for coming on the show, Travis, great to have you here.

Travis Reiter:

Yeah, thanks Gordon.

Gordon Henry:

I want to thank our producer, Tim Alleman and coordinators Diette Barnett and Daniel Huddleston. If you enjoyed this podcast, please tell your colleagues, friends and family to subscribe, and please leave us a five star review, we'd really appreciate it, it helps us in the rankings. Small business runs better on Thryv, get a free demo thrive.com/pod or download our new free product command center @thrive.com. Until next time, make it a great week.

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