Shannon Swift is the CEO and Founder of Swift HR Solutions, a consulting firm that provides strategic HR and talent solutions to early-stage and growth-stage companies with a focus on startup and emerging sectors. For over 20 years, Swift HR Solutions has partnered with hundreds of clients, including Zillow, thriving as a primarily referral-based business with minimal marketing. Passionate about building strong foundations for startups, Shannon excels in fast-paced environments and brings a unique perspective shaped by her early years growing up in national parks.
Here’s a Glimpse of What You’ll Hear:
- [2:17] Shannon shares how she built a thriving 100% referral-based business from the ground up
- [3:23] How creating strong HR foundations helped startups accelerate their growth
- [6:05] Why Shannon believes every entrepreneur should embrace a “Plan B” mindset
- [13:07] Shannon’s top strategies for generating consistent referrals without advertising
- [16:20] How genuine service and volunteerism opened unexpected business doors
- [18:03] The role technology plays in streamlining HR operations and onboarding clients
- [20:12] How Shannon evolved Swift into three thriving business divisions
- [34:37] Shannon introduces Swift Starter HR, a resource empowering startups with expert HR support
In this episode…
Some businesses thrive without spending a dime on advertising or marketing. They attract every client through word of mouth, with reputation alone driving steady growth and opportunity. What does it take to build a self-sustaining referral engine that delivers year after year?
Shannon Swift shares the secrets behind her firm’s 100% referral-based business model, tackling the challenges of sustainable growth without conventional marketing. Drawing on her early HR experiences with startups and high-growth companies, Shannon reveals how she deliberately cultivated authentic relationships, focused on service, and consistently prioritized helping others, whether through volunteering, board leadership, or simply being generous with advice.
Tune in to this episode of the Smart Business Revolution Podcast as John Corcoran interviews Shannon Swift, Founder and CEO of Swift HR Solutions, about building a thriving, 100% referral-based business in the HR consulting space. Shannon shares how her early years in national parks inspired a spirit of service, what it takes to earn lasting trust in business relationships, and how technology and remote work have reshaped her industry.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Special Mention(s):
Quotable Moments:
- “You never know when somebody is going to pop up in your world down the line — just be nice to everybody, help everybody, always be respectful to people.”
- “I never hesitate to be very open and transparent, and have those conversations — just seeking to serve without expectations of anything in return.”
- “Being able to come in at that earliest stage when there’s nothing broken and just make sure it stays that way is really one of the biggest reasons we exist.”
- “Our model is always very seasoned HR folks; so the overhead is low, and we look and feel like part of the client’s team.”
- “It comes down to just managing expectations and prioritizing, making every client feel like we’re only working with them is kind of a little bit of a game we play.”
Action Steps:
- Nurture genuine relationships across your network: Build authentic connections by consistently engaging and offering value without expectation to create lasting opportunities and word-of-mouth referrals.
- Volunteer and serve in your professional community: Expand your network and credibility by contributing to boards or associations, demonstrating expertise, and fostering organic referral opportunities.
- Always seek to create win-win connections: Proactively connect people and share opportunities to build goodwill, strengthen your reputation, and encourage reciprocal referrals.
- Know your strengths and clarify your niche: Focus on areas where you excel and accept aligned opportunities to position yourself as the go-to expert others confidently refer to.
- Be open and generous with advice and support: Freely share insights and help others, even competitors, to build trust, enhance your reputation, and attract referrals through goodwill and collaboration.
Sponsor: Rise25
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Episode Transcript
John Corcoran: 00:00
Okay. Today we’re talking about how to build a 100% referral based business. How you can do that for your business. My guest today is Shannon Swift. I’ll tell you more about her in a second, so stay tuned.
Intro: 00:13
Welcome to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast, where we feature top entrepreneurs, business leaders, and thought leaders and ask them how they built key relationships to get where they are today. Now let’s get started with the show.
John Corcoran: 00:30
All right. Welcome, everyone. John Corcoran here I am, the host of the show every week. If you’ve listened before, you know that I talk to smart CEOs, founders and entrepreneurs from all kinds of companies. And if you check out the archives, we’ve got Netflix, Grubhub, Redfin, lots of great episodes for you.
And of course, this episode brought to you by our company, Rise25, where we help businesses to give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. How do we do that? We do that by helping you to run your podcast and content marketing with the easy button for any company to launch and run a podcast. We do three things: strategy, accountability, and full execution. So if you want to learn more about it, you can contact our team, go to our website. The email address is support@rise25.com and the website is rise25.com. All right Shannon, I’m so excited to have you here today. I know we’ve been working on getting this set up for quite some time.
You are the CEO and founder of Swift HR Solutions. It’s a consulting firm that provides strategic HR and talent solutions to early stage and growth stage companies, especially in technology and life sciences sectors, with over 25 years of experience in leadership and executive roles. And we’ll talk about some of the companies you’ve worked with, including Zillow and Tableau, some really iconic companies that have come in through your company. And also, as I teased in the beginning, we’re going to talk about how to run a business that thrives based on referrals. And that’s where you get all of your business, which is a big, big topic.
People love to know how to get more referrals. But first, Shannon, let’s start with young Shannon growing up in national parks. That sounds amazing to me. I go through national parks like Yosemite or Glacier Park or something like that, and you see, like people living there and you’re like, wait, people get to live here. This looks amazing.
And your father was, I guess, a ranger, a government employee, and you’re growing up in national parks. Tell me what that was like.
Shannon Swift: 02:16
Well, it was amazing. And so I was born at the Grand Canyon. And so that started my career with the Park Service. We moved to Clear Lake Ranger Station when I was one and a half. My dad was there through my high school years, and so I had a million tourists coming through my front yard every year from all over the world.
So we would track license plates in the campground, and we had every state, every province, and we’d meet people from all over the world. And probably the biggest frustration was that I was not allowed to set up a lemonade stand. I had all these people right there in front of my front door to my house and, and my father was a rule-abiding government official and would not allow me to to set up a money making scheme which was a heartbreak for me.
John Corcoran: 03:02
Those poor thirsty tourists who could have used a glass of fresh lemonade. So depriving them. Jeez, that must have been so frustrating. That’s great. Well, let’s talk a bit about how you got into the world of HR.
So first of all, how’d you get interested in this as a topic, as a field, as a profession?
Shannon Swift: 03:23
Yeah. So I went to the University of Washington and studied psychology, and then I got hooked into some business classes and started just just really devouring those. And so when I graduated, it was a psychology and business. And, and I got into my first role with a national home infusion therapy company that was based out of Orange County and took over. They were decentralizing all of the human resources and the payroll for across their 70 branches nationally.
So I got to train with this amazing HR group, and I was like, oh, this is what I want to do. This. This is. This is me. And they said to me at that point, well, the branch will never be big enough to support a full time role.
So if you want to do that, you’ll have to move down to California. I was in Washington, and so so I said, you know, that’s not happening. And then the national company was bought by Baxter, and they started kind of rolling out all of the, the, the kind of merging all of the branches. And in the 11th hour, I was waiting to be let go. And I was acquired by Children’s Hospital in Seattle.
They had a for profit arm that most people don’t know about. So we were a wholly owned, for profit subsidiary of the non-profit hospital. And so it was just the most amazing career jump for me, because all of a sudden we had nothing and we got to build everything, this business from the ground up. I got to lay the initial HR foundation and, and I learned from, from this amazing group. So so that kind of started my whole, my whole journey with, with startups in particular, being able to be one of the first.
I was employee number eight, and we grew to 110, and I was one of five people leading the company when I left eight years later. And so it was just this really phenomenal opportunity that kind of set the stage, I think, for my passion around that early stage growth. My husband’s company had 35 people and used to call me all the time for HR questions. And, and so I just I realized that there was a need for that earliest stage expertise. And so that really kind of set the stage for, for for my, my, my HR journey.
John Corcoran: 05:26
And you had the vision or the idea to start your company. I don’t know how far in advance it was, but you, you were planning towards it for a while by the time you started it. And you also had been working with a lot of different companies by the time you started your company. So wasn’t wasn’t something you started straight out of, out of school. So talk a little bit about what inspired that.
Like why? Because it’s tough to go from a probably well compensated executive position, you know, working for different companies. You’re in the Seattle area. There’s lots of startups that you could work for. You know what?
What inspired you to go down the path of entrepreneurship?
Shannon Swift: 06:05
Well, I think that first experience that I had out of college kind of made me realize I needed a plan B. So, you know, I thought, like, my dad, I was just going to have this job forever. And and so when, you know, eight months in, all of a sudden I was told, you know, you’re not going to have a role. I was like, okay, what’s my plan B? And my plan B at that point was, hey, you know, it seems like, you know, my husband’s at this company that calls me for help.
There must be other small companies I could get. You know, I had a cell phone and a pager, and I thought I could just, you know, be a multiple company HR person. At that point, I was on the board of the HR association here and and at a board meeting, I was talking with a friend who had just joined a firm, and I said, well, what do you do? And she said, oh, we work with small companies that don’t have an HR department. And I was like.
That was what I was going to do. I ended up going on board and selling outsourced HR services for them. So I saw. Saw the need the company would get six clients a year. And when I left two years later, we had six companies every month that were coming in.
So I built a referral network, just started with cold calling and really building relationships. And then I was recruited to start the Seattle office for a professional employer organization called Trinet. In its early days, and so had the first successful branch office here. And so I saw what I liked about both of those models, and definitely what I and my clients didn’t like about them. And so so I ended up going back in-house with a startup that had 12 employees.
Software company, we grew to 150. I realized then that when a company gets to 150, I develop an eye twitch, like literally an eye twitch. And so I was like, okay, I know, I know my lane.
John Corcoran: 07:43
This is not.
Shannon Swift: 07:43
Me. So I’m like 2 to 150 employees. That’s my lane. And so. So I was able to then go on to a publicly traded pharmaceutical company that had 60 people, no HR foundation at all.
And so that was kind of the launch for my starting Swift HR solutions was realizing that even a publicly traded company has not done a good job of laying a solid HR foundation, and I’d had the opportunity to do that multiple times. And so it’s really my passion is laying that earliest foundation that allows a company to scale without being distracted by HR. So the it was definitely scary jumping in, but I had my first client six weeks before we started.
John Corcoran: 08:27
Yeah. I want to ask you about that. How did that happen?
Shannon Swift: 08:30
That was just amazing. So I was down to my last three months’ notice at my last company that I was in-house at, which, by the way, was too long to give notice. But I was.
John Corcoran: 08:38
A long time overly generous.
Shannon Swift: 08:41
Setting myself up for success. And so. So I got a call six weeks. I was going to take a month off then and then start my company. And so six weeks before I was going to start my last two weeks in house, I got a call from an entrepreneur, and he was with a venture firm here as an entrepreneur in residence.