Orlando:
Welcome to Invested with Purpose Making the most out of our time, talent, and treasure. My name is Orlando

Cara:
And I’m Cara. And today we have an incredible guest with us, Mr. Andrew Crapuchettes. He is the CEO of the number one American Pro Freedom Job Board and we are just so happy to have you with us today. Welcome, Andrew.

Andrew:
Thank you so much for having me. It’s nice to see you and it’s nice to talk to you.

Orlando:
Absolutely. And before we get into anything, Andrew, I recently saw the video that you had on the Cross Politic podcast. I am subscribed to their podcast. I’m an avid watcher and listener, so encouraged by the work of those guys and your work of course, and just the work that’s happening in Moscow, Idaho with Canon and Doug Wilson, all those guys. So thank you for that and was definitely encouraged by it.

Andrew:
That’s good. No, Gabe Wrench has actually been a long time friend used to work for me. Oh wow. He was one of my sales reps in a previous business and the Cross Politics Studio is in one of the buildings that I own. As we talk about money, the point of money is to be able to do stuff and if you can own a building, I was able to give them rent free for a couple of years just to kind of get their feet under ’em. And obviously they’re succeeding now, but the point of having money is to be able to bless other people. Amen. Absolutely. I’ve been blessed to be able to bless them. Yes,

Cara:
Absolutely. Well, Andrew, over 4,000 employers and over 2 million job seekers in a short two year period in the short time span during the Covid epidemic. Tell us how you got here. Tell us a little bit about your backstory, what brought you to Red Balloon and the creation of this incredibly successful endeavor?

Andrew:
Yeah, thank you. So it actually really started back in 2020. Well, I should probably go back further than that. I moved to Moscow, Idaho from the San Francisco Bay area around 1999. So I’ve been up here about half my life at this point, more than half my life. And I had done the.com thing, I came up to Moscow, I saw there were no good jobs and so I started quite a few businesses here in town. I started everything from a 3D printing business to an economics firm, a student software business. And I’ve had six successful exits through the years, which was fantastic and was able to build a lot of jobs because jobs have always been very important to me because if you meet someone new, you ask them what do you do? And you’re asking ’em what their job is, but it betrays that there’s more to a job that just a nine to five hobby.

It’s a defining feature, it’s a vocation. And so I always wanted to create jobs for people. One of my businesses I started, our goal was 50 employees earning over $50,000 a year in our little town, 50 and 50 because we thought that would actually move the needle for our community. Well, 2020 came around and one of the businesses that I had started, I was the CEO of it was a $50 million tech business. We were growing, we were profitable, and I was striving to build a Christian culture in the way that I was leading that business. It was not that everyone had to be a Christian to work there, but I was going to be a Christian CEO in the way that I ran it. 2020 came around and the world lost their mind and so did my board. They decided that I needed to start forcing things on my employees that I was uncomfortable with or saying things on social media that I was very uncomfortable with.

They went so far as to say, look, you’re welcome to be a Christian on the weekends, but you’re not allowed to be a Christian CEO. I’m like, well, you can’t separate that from who I am faith out in every area of my life. And so I’m just not the right fit for this organization. So I ended up leaving the company and I love that job. I love the people, love the work. I kind of went through this period where I was like, well, maybe I’m going to take a year off. I’m going to spend a little time playing golf, hanging out with my kids, doing some of my real estate projects. And a friend kind of challenged me. They said, look, you were just given a choice between your job and your values and you had the financial wherewithal to easily choose your values, which lost you your job.

But not everybody has the kind of resources to be able to pull that off. And for a lot of Christians and conservatives, if you’re given the choice of, if you’re told, Hey, I’m going to cancel you from Facebook or I’m going to cancel you from some other social media platform, you’re going to kind of shrug it off. But if you’re canceled from your ability to feed your kids and pay your mortgage, you’re going to be at least tempted to compromise on something you hold dearly. So that was a long answer to a short question. So I started a job board to help those people out Red balloon work because we want to get back to work because work was in the Garden of Eden before the fall. Absolutely. We think it is a good and redeeming thing to do. So red balloon work, and as you mentioned, the success has been amazing and I think that’s because Americans still want freedom.
They still see it as a very valuable thing. And this is the only business I’ve ever run where I get unsolicited thank you notes from perfect strangers saying things as broad ranging as you have saved my marriage to, you’ve changed the trajectory of my family. I was going to church again because of the job that I’m in. Because when you swim in really painful woke waters for eight to 10 hours a day, it’s going to affect your whole worldview. And so these are people who have found freedom at work and then they find freedom in other areas of their life. And so I just love being part of that story.

Cara:
Awesome. So now don’t fear, I grabbed this from your LinkedIn.

Andrew:
Alright.

Cara:
Okay. So this was a post that you had made and I was just so incredibly impressed with it. “So today is Life day. Two years ago RO went down and many tens of thousands of lives have been saved. As a consequence, this is worth celebrating. Red Balloon is giving the day off to all of our employees so that they can celebrate. Next. We are co-sponsoring a block party in front of our office from three 30 to five 30 today to celebrate. If you’re anywhere near Moscow, Idaho, you are welcome to come to the block party” that is so praiseworthy and you are such a light in business. So I just want to thank you for doing that and by holding that torch and carrying it forward and giving an example to other Christian employers. So I just really wanted to ask you, how does your faith play in a role in leadership by setting an example, you really are setting an example.

Andrew:
Yeah, absolutely. And I think more Christians need to get into business. They need to get into leading business, they need to into managing employees. I’ve told many people over the years that when you’re a boss, when you’re a manager, you have the ability to speak into someone’s life in a way that someone might not even be able to who’s a pastor. And I’ll give you an example of this. I had an employee once who just had an anger problem and they were yelling at other people at work and I’m like, okay, so I have zero tolerance for that kind of thing. You need to deal with this all the way down. The principle that I learned through that is sin doesn’t usually nicely confined in one area of your life. So if you’re angry at work, you’re probably angry at home and if you’re lazy at work, you’re probably lazy at home and in other areas of your life.

And so I had the opportunity to talk to this guy and say, you need to deal with this or else I’m not going to keep giving you a paycheck. You’re going to lose your job. And when you have this kind of one-to-one correlation of you kind of need to do what I say or you don’t get a paycheck anymore, people listen. So lo and behold, I found out later that a number of people had talked to this gentleman and said, you need to deal with your anger problem. But he didn’t have to listen to them in the same way as he did have to listen to me. Look, I wasn’t telling him something that was outside of the work life. It was clear that this was affecting his ability to do his job, but it had huge impacts on every other area of his life.

And I happen to know from other sources, it really helped his marriage and everything else. And so that was a long answer again to a short question, but as a Christian leader, you can live out your values at work and actually be a huge blessing to the people who work for you. Absolutely. You don’t have to jam your worldview down everyone else’s throat, but when you live it out, when you live the love of Christ in the way that you manage people, it will have a profound impact on the everlasting souls that work for you. And so I think more Christians need to be ambitious for their businesses, be ambitious for what God has put in front of ’em because time is short. A hundred years from now we’re all going to be dead. And what impact are you going to make on people? You want to have good kids that are going to take your legacy forward, but you also have an opportunity to speak into people’s lives through business. Not all of us are called to be a pastor or a missionary. And so you need to be distinctly Christian in the way that you run your business. And when you do that, the blessings are profound. They’re profound for your family, they’re profound for your business, and they’re profound for your customers and for your employees.

Orlando:
Absolutely. And to switch gears just a little bit onto the specifics of Red Balloon and what makes that different and how you’re able to be mindful of those things that certain types of discrimination isn’t happening, could you speak a little bit to that and what separates it from, I don’t know, an indeed or something of that nature?

Andrew:
Yeah, absolutely. So there’s really two areas that you can think of. Red Balloon, we do it yourself job board where you can go and post jobs for as little as $75 a month. You can as a job seeker, everything’s free for job seekers. So if you’re looking for a job, you can fill out your profile, you can download the employee bill of rights and responsibilities, that’s a free resource. There’s a lot of videos on how to interview, how to do a resume. So we’re going to give you all those resources from free and it is going to come from a Christian worldview even though we’re not going to say that this is how a Christian should fill out a resume. It is so part of the way that we think about work and people that I think it’s going to be a real blessing to you and you need to understand people like Indeed who’s the big job board out there, but ZipRecruiter and others, they are not happy with Christians in the workplace.

And I’ll give you a couple examples of this indeed.com canceled answers and Genesis because they said you are an organization that is spreading misinformation, is not doing good things for culture. And so they would not allow them to post jobs on their platform. And so answers and Genesis has a thousand employees. They’re a big organization and they were put in a position where they couldn’t hire and if Red Balloon hadn’t been around, they would’ve been in real trouble on that front. Another example is, and I heard this from a large construction company down in Texas, they described their business as Freedom Loving and God-fearing Freedom Loving and God-Fearing seems really straightforward. And both ZipRecruiter and Indeed told them that that was a violation of their community standards and they would not be allowed to post jobs on their site unless they removed that from their description.
And unfortunately, there’s probably a lot of other employers that are like, okay, well I’ll pull that down so I can continue to interact in this marketplace. And so what we’re going to do is we’re not going to curb stomp your faith or your freedom in the same way that some of those other people do. So that’s kind of on the do it yourself side. You can go and post jobs we have resume database. We really would love to be a blessing to you. The other thing that we’ve started to do is we had organizations like National Religious Broadcasters who came to us and said, look, we need a new CFO and if we get a CFO in our organization, that’s not a culture fit, that’s not a faith fit, that’s not going to be the type of person that’s going to build organization, but someone who we’re going to have to walk on eggshells around because we don’t know if they’re a good culture fit, that’s going to hurt a lot.

But they also went to some recruiters to try and find a new CFO and they were quoted between 60 and $70,000 to hire a new CFO for their organization. They came to Red Balloon and this is what we’ve now done for hundreds of organizations and we ran the entire hiring process. We helped them define the position, we did a compensation review so they knew what the market was paying for that position. And then we went out and actually did recruiting because people who applied to a job aren’t necessarily the people who often they’re really good folks, but sometimes the person that you actually want in your organization is not applying to jobs happily employed. So going out and actually doing active recruiting of people who are already employed is sometimes a really good strategy. So we did this for NRB and again hundreds of other organizations.
We recruited people, we interviewed people, we made sure they were a culture fit, and then we brought the best candidates to NRB and didn’t waste their time with candidates that weren’t a good fit. Red Balloon does this for only $4,500 for a position and then $2,000 per hire. And so for $6,500 instead of $70,000, NRB was able to find a values aligned awesome CFO and talked to Troy over at NRB. He was kind of over the moon because if you know NRB, their mission is to keep the airways free so the gospel can spread and he’s like, you just kept $60,000 in our bottom line so we can spread the gospel and brought us the right person for our organization. That’s been really fun to be kind of part of that hiring story. So again, for Red Balloon, we can do it yourself post your own jobs or if you want us to take over that hiring process, we do it for a very affordable price and we’ve done it for everything from secretaries to CFOs and actually we placed a CEO at a company pretty recently and just placed an awesome person for job creator network and many, many other organizations.
So if you’re afraid of the legal potholes that are involved in the hiring process, we can just take that on for you.

Cara:
Wow, absolutely. Labor related lawsuits are a huge concern and for a company like ours, Timothy Plan, and I’ve talked to you a little bit about us and what we do our company, but we screen funds, we screen companies actually for our funds, and so why wouldn’t we want to screen our employees in a very detailed, in depth manner. So absolutely, I do believe that we will be speaking with you guys in the future. Right.

Orlando:
Yeah, and it’s encouraging and as you mentioned, there’s believers and Christians becoming entrepreneurs owning, using their wealth to honor God and having the ability to do things that make those changes, but it’s so unfortunate that it’s just the truth of the fact that neutrality is a myth in a lot of different areas. With indeed, as you mentioned, it’s not just about, okay, we don’t want to lean to one side or the other. The fact is they are antigo in what they want to communicate, and it is a very sobering reminder to be honest as you hear that, I had no clue that was happening. So to follow up on that, what about those who are on the website looking for positions? Are there resumes affected if they went to Bible college or if they have explicitly Christian things within their work history, does it have any effect there?

Andrew:
Yeah. Well, let me ask and I’ll ask it, and this may be a rhetorical question. Those who are listening and watching who believes that Facebook and Google use their algorithm to push their worldview, right? Oh yeah, absolutely. Of course

You think that HR companies that are very hard left-leaning are doing the exact same thing, whether it’s through their a TS software, whether it’s through their job board 100%, they do not want these type of people. And so we actually did a survey of all of a hundred thousand job seekers on the Red Balloon platform and we asked them, have you received discrimination in the workplace based on your faith, based on just who you are as a person? 63% of those people that we surveyed said that they believe that if their employer found out they were Republican, conservative or Christian, that it would maybe cost them their job, but it would absolutely have significant ramifications on their ability. Well, think about that when you start to hide your light under a bushel back to Matthew, when you start to do that, how do you think that affects every other aspect of your life?
75% of those, actually 76% of those people said they would be willing to take a pay cut if it meant working for a business that allowed them to live their values out loud. And so I think that’s kind of the moment we’re in America right now where you’ve got a lot of employers, a lot of job seekers who are trying to find each other, and if you can find a job where it is, allows you to be free and allows you to just be a Christian in the way that you act, you don’t again have to jam your worldview down someone else’s throat. You just need to be able to live that out loud. It has a huge impact on your ability to live. And yes, those platforms, I’ll call ’em woke HR tech platforms out there, they absolutely are using their algorithm to remove you from the front of the line when it comes to the hiring process.

Cara:
So I’m sorry, did you Go ahead. Actually, I wanted to ask a question about projections and what you see the future looking like. We’re in a very uncertain time now. Of course, you have droves many, many people leaving these blue states for red states. And then of course we have the debate that just happened where it’s quite obvious that we’re in a pickle as a country and things are uncertain, the economy is uncertain. We have businesses where you’re having a hard time finding a viable candidate to employ. We know that the Gen Zs aren’t reliable. We know that they’re a little socially inept. What are you hearing? You have your ear to the ground. What are you hearing out there with business owners and their fears from here until November, which can’t seem to come soon enough?

Andrew:
Well, unfortunately, it’s a great question because whether we do it through a survey, but I also talk to dozens of employers every single week and everybody’s in hunker down mode right now. They’re in a wait and see pattern. So something like 70% of other employers that we’re working with say they’re not hiring for growth, they are hiring for replacement. So if they lose someone, they’re going to try and hold, they’re going to replace, but they’re not. And they’re not trying to get rid of their staff, they’re trying to hold onto their good people. They’re trying to replace people who leave, but honestly, they’re just in a kind of hunker down, wait and see mode. And I think the whole country’s there right now. And a lot of these small businesses are, they’re just trying to wait November. They don’t know what’s going to happen. They don’t know what the fed’s going to do with the interest rates.

These interest rates are very hard on small businesses. They have a line of credit that interest is eating them alive right now. So between the interest rates and inflation, and we’ll just call it the Biden economy, it’s really hard on all businesses today. And so the vast majority of ’em are just in a hunker down and wait and see mode, which is not ideal because we know that any business is either growing or shrinking. Just the hold pattern doesn’t usually work that long. And so that’s my big concern. We did ask our businesses, if Biden gets elected for another four years, how will that affect your business? 45% of ’em said that they would shut their doors if that happened again. Oh my goodness. They feel the regulations, the taxes, the inflation, the interest rates, and they don’t think they can do it anymore. They’re just kind of hold on for November, which is not ideal, but unfortunately that’s the reality right now. Do

Cara:
You see DEI continuing to be pushed or do you see some businesses seeing the negative impact of that and maybe backing off?

Andrew:
Yeah, great question. And yes, I do see that the pendulum is swinging back. People saw the impacts of that. And for those who don’t know, DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion, those words in and of themselves are great words. Absolutely. In fact, we believe in the trinity, that’s unity and diversity. These words are not bad words, but they’ve been weaponized to pit people against each other. And it’s a very Marxist worldview where everybody has to hate people from a different category. If you have a different skin color or a different, you were born with a different sexuality, then you’re supposed to hate everybody else. And that’s not what we’re called to do as Christians. We’re supposed to value people based on the quality of their character, not the color of their skin. And DEI pushes against that very hard. In fact, one in four hiring managers in America have said, do not hire white males.

If you hire white males, it might cost you your job one in four hiring managers. Well, unfortunately, what does that do? Well, if you’re African-American and you get a raise or you get a promotion, everyone’s going to assume that you got that because of DEI, not because of the merit and the quality and the value that you bring that organization. So honestly, it pits everybody against everybody else, and it put us all in a position where we’re looking sideways at people rather than trusting that you’re the right person for the job regardless of what your background is, who your parents are, if you brought the value to the organization, you should get rewarded for that. And when we get back to that, I think America’s going to be in a lot better place

Orlando:
And that’s excellent. You mentioned discrimination based upon someone being white or black, straight male or whatever the case may be, but discrimination is what hiring managers and different people who are looking, they’re discriminating. That’s right. So let’s talk a little bit about that and I guess the differences and the nuance within discriminating because obviously we’re supposed to be discriminating based upon skillset, so we want the best person for the job, but are there instances where it’s appropriate? It’s kind of rhetorical, I’m sure you know the answer, but whether it’s appropriate to discriminate based upon gender or things like that.

Andrew:
And the answer is no, it’s not right. Want to do the best person for the job needs to get the job, and that’s the meritocracy. It’s if merit, we want to hire people based on merit. We want to promote people based on merit, and we should not care whether all of God’s children are valued and they should be valued based on the value they can bring in their organization. Now, I will give you some examples. Obviously, if you have a job where you need to be lifting 200 pounds, well, testosterone helps a lot when you’re lifting 200 pounds. And so you probably should be hiring a dude for that if you have someone, if you have an interior decorating job, there are some great guys who are interior decorating, but if there are more women doing that, it’s not that you’re discriminating based on gender, you’re not discriminating based on race, you’re discriminating based on who’s the best person for the job.

And God built us all different, and that’s okay. And you want to hire the right person for the job. And if you discriminate based on skin color or sexual orientation or any of those things, not only is that illegal, but it’s wrong because we have built our company in such a way that we want to hire the best person for the job no matter what. And if you do that as a business, and all the great economists, if you read Thomas Sowell, if you read Milton Friedman, they talk about the market will work these things out. If you’re a wise business and you need to understand supply and demand, and as Thomas Sowell points out, if women are earning less for the same value, then you should hire exclusively women because then you’re going to get amazing value for less dollars. Just that’s how the market works. But the reality is businesses are in a position where they can actually do very, very well if they treat people fairly because that’s not happening today. And so if you as a Christian business, live your values out loud and treat people fairly, people are going to come to you. As I said, 76% of our job seekers would take a pay cut to come work at a business who treated them based on the value they bring, not who their parents are or any of those other factors.

Orlando:
I have one quick follow up before you ask a question, Kara, different sectors within the marketplace, do you find that there are more who I guess utilize the DEI or more that are more conservative generally speaking? What are some of your insight onto that?

Andrew:
Yeah, unfortunately, the tech industry is pretty dominant trying to adopt whatever is the latest political cultural fad. So you’re definitely going to get more DEI in that space, whereas you get more blue collar jobs, whether it’s construction or manufacturing, those people just care about can you do the job right, don’t

Cara:
Want your house falling apart. Yeah,

Andrew:
I don’t want my house to fall over or I don’t want. And so I think that’s what we’re seeing right now. I hope this trend is changing though, because I know when I step on an airplane, I don’t care how diverse the pilot is, I want the pilot to be able to fly the plane safely. That’s more important to me. So I do think that the trend is swinging, and I think as conservatives and as Christians, we need to not go back to sleep because this is the problem that always happens where the liberals turn it up to 11 and then we fight back and they turn it back to eight and we all go back to sleep, and then they turn it up to 13. So what we need to do is continue to push back and say, God is still in heaven, and we care what the Bible says. We care what the Constitution says, and we’re not going to go back to sleep. We’re going to keep pushing for our country to be in a far better spot. And I think that’s still possible.

Cara:
So I wanted to bring it back to Gen Z. I have two teenagers that are Gen Z, and I like to think that they’re the exception to the rule because they’re being raised in a godly household. And Gen Z of course is not the demographic that’s listening to this podcast, but we may have some. So what is some advice you have for any of the Gen Z out there that are going into the workforce right now? And we know that employers are just not quick to hire them, and the reasons are pretty obvious, but what is some advice that you would have for them?

Andrew:
And I have five kids. My oldest is 20, my youngest is 12. So I’ve got kind of all the categories. The reality is that if you show up work hard and are cheerful, you are going to be significantly differentiated. So I’d actually say this is an opportunity to really succeed in a way that it would’ve been hard if all the Gen Zs were hardworking kids. And unfortunately, I think a lot of what’s happened is this Gen Z crowd has been raised on social media. They’ve gone to a public school system and then a university system that is telling them that they’re a snowflake, that they’re special, that they deserve everything, and then they get out in the workforce. And lo and behold,

Orlando:
The world doesn’t revolve around nobody.

Andrew:
And I think that’s what’s happening, which is sad. We’ve set them up poorly. Now, I will say as an employer who has a lot of Gen Z people here at Red Balloon, if you get the right Gen Z people, they are the best employees because they understand technology. They’re willing to innovate, they’re willing to be creative. And so all you employers out there, don’t just be afraid of the category in general in the same way that you don’t want to discriminate based on skin color or any of these other things. You want to get the best person for the job. So I would say give a Gen Z person a chance. If you get the right ones, like Kara’s kids, you’re going to get an incredible employee that’s going to move your business forward in a way you can’t even imagine.

Cara:
Awesome. Thank you so much.

Orlando:
So as far as the future of Red Balloon and any other work that you have, where do you see things going in five years? Is it working to grow this as big as it can? Other endeavors? What are you working on?

Andrew:
Yeah, so we want to redeem the world of work. That is really the stated goal of Red Balloon. Amen. We believe that work is a good thing for people. It’s an opportunity to bless others at scale. So we want to redeem it. And so the way that we see that working is if indeed.com can be a $3 billion business, why can’t we be a 3 billion business where
Christians need to be more ambitious? If Microsoft can get huge, why can’t we? But we need to do it in such a way that we don’t lose who we are and what we’re trying to accomplish. So in the immediate future, right now, we have the job postings and we have a resume database, and it’s the largest resume database of pro-freedom job seekers really on the planet. And then we do the recruiting services. And that has been a huge blessing, and we’re, again, filling positions from cybersecurity specialists to executive assistants. And so that’s been a huge blessing to be able to help employers that way at a cost-effective manner. What’s coming down the pipe is, as I mentioned before, woke, HR tech companies use their software to push their worldview. And so Red Balloon a TS will be coming out in the next couple of months.

And an A TS is an applicant tracking system. It’s an ability for you to be able to manage the hiring process with Culture First in motives and focus. It will also allow you to build a talent network. And as I talking to our good friends over at Answers and Genesis, when Ken Ham goes out and speaks at a conference, 50 people say, Hey, I’d love to come work for you. And he’s like, well, send an email to HR and I hope that we’ll find a match for you. But instead, red Balloon a TS will build a talent network, which will allow you to manage a whole bench of people. All those people will be able to get in there. We can tag them, we can make them searchable and sortable so that when you need a hire in the future, you already have a whole group of people, thousands of people who have said, I want to work for you someday. And it just really takes a lot of the anxiety out of the hiring process for our employers. So hold on. Later this year we’re going to see Red Balloon a TS hit the market. That’s

Cara:
Exciting.

Orlando:
And as far as practical application for those who are out there looking for work, any insight for them? Any red flags as they’re applying for something, a position?

Cara:
Ooh, that’s a good question.

Orlando:
What’s an individual to look for?

Andrew:
Yeah, when you’re looking for a new job, obviously you should go to Red balloon.org.

Orlando:
That’s right. That’s where to start.