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Susan Marchese With American Industrial Hygiene Association

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AIHASue MarcheseSusan “Sue” Marchese, CAE, MS, is AIHA’s Managing Director, Strategy and External Affairs. AIHA is the association for scientists and professionals committed to preserving occupational and environmental health and safety in the workplace and community.

During her tenure, Sue has helped rebrand AIHA, rolled out numerous public awareness campaigns, and increased membership from new audiences. Sue holds a Master of Science, Organizational Development degree from New School University. She is a Certified Association Executive (CAE).

Connect with Susan on LinkedIn.

What You’ll Learn In This Episode

  • Latest in MarTech in associations
  • Modern P.R. approaches in the association space
  • AIHA during the pandemic

This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Association Leadership Radio. Now here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: Lee Kantor here another episode of Association Leadership Radio and this is going to be a good one. Today on the show we have Sue Marchese with American Industrial Hygiene Association. Welcome, Sue.

Sue Marchese: Hi, Lee, great to be here.

Lee Kantor: I am so excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us about the AIHA. How are you serving folks?

Sue Marchese: Absolutely. So air is actually an association that has been around for almost 100 years. Industrial hygiene has a little bit of a misnomer. And so the way we like to explain it is that H.R. is the association for scientists and professionals who are committed to preserving and ensuring occupational and environmental health and safety or RFS in the workplace and the community. So some people have thought industrial hygiene means that that’s for people, for professionals who are cleaning buildings. But it’s really not. It’s about ensuring that there is reduction of risk mitigation of any kind of problems that could lead to further health issues. So they’re really scientists and really not people who are just cleaning buildings.

Lee Kantor: Now when when there is sometimes confusion when it comes to a brand like that, how has that evolved over time? Did it start out always being about scientists and just the name was kind of created confusion, or has it evolved over the years?

Sue Marchese: Yeah. So back in 1939 when it was founded, it was it was the Industrial Revolution, right? So there were just it made sense for the professionals who got into this space to be known as industrial hygienists, because it was typically in the manufacturing factory type of setting. But then it really expanded to military, laboratory, academia. It just really expanded outside of industry or industrial. So over the decades it sort of became this misnomer. And that’s why back in 2018, when the board of directors of our organization took a step back, they said, you know what, maybe it’s time we need to revisit this. So after market research with our own members and some outside allied professionals, we decided, you know, it’s time to really just be known as h h a for the legacy factor. But when we try to introduce our brand and the concept of this association and what our members do, we introduce it by explaining what occupational and environmental health and safety is. So we’ve had to kind of do what I call a brand evolution. We really didn’t rebrand arguably, but we just have begun to tell the story of not just what our members do, but the outcomes and how they can affect lives and communities. So it has been a bit challenging, but we did do this brand evolution back in 2018 through 2020. We launched and it was three pronged approach. So it was change the logo, sure, but it was also about educating the general public. So through earned media, public awareness campaigns. And then the third and final is outreach to universities, trade schools, etc. to try and raise the awareness factor of what is this particular organization, what is this particular profession. And that was the hallmark of this brand evolution. Air used to just represent the membership strictly, but the evolution turned into an opportunity for us to brand the profession of these professionals.

Lee Kantor: Now, were the members kind of saying, Hey, great, finally, that creates clarity. Now people understand the importance of my work, or was it something that they were like, Did you have a struggle from a membership standpoint, or was this something they were hungry for?

Sue Marchese: So I think that the answer is yes, we have a little bit of both. And ultimately, when we started our market research studies, when we were doing interviews and a full survey to the membership and focus groups, we did it very deliberately to make sure we had the data behind the fact that the majority of members were all for it. And we’re full steam ahead on doing this brand evolution. So by all means, we definitely weren’t just doing this in a small, isolated room in our offices, and we made sure that we talked and communicated with the members in advance. And really they they really were the ones who made us go in that direction with the one caveat, and that is don’t get rid of our legacy. So there that’s where air still remains. And I guess we were kind of thinking, well, you know, Geico did it right or IBM did it. Nobody knows what those stand for acronyms anymore. And HHR is the opportunity for us to then explain. So that’s our brand is really just age, but then it is about who our members are. So, so that said, we we try to ask them, talk with them, communicate with them. And we did not do it. As I as I mentioned from 2018 to 2020 took us two years, not because we were dragging our feet, but we were trying to be deliberate. All that to say in 2020 when we launched, there were laudatory remarks from many, many members, even outside allied professionals, saying this really helps.

Sue Marchese: This definitely is going to help raise the awareness of the profession and the membership. And then, of course, we definitely heard from people who were super vocal and were not happy thinking that we were turning our back on the history of the organization. But, you know, they were really few and far between. I think that we actually counted about three people who were super vocal about it out of our 8500 members across the country and Canada. So, you know, we we had to be super cautious in how we approach this. And yet I do recognize the fact that people are going to want to hold on to their history and the hard work that they did in their careers. Why turn their back on it? But rather, we looked at it as an opportunity to enhance the future of the profession. So, yep, we had yes, we had a couple of naysayers and a couple of people who were not happy, but we also addressed them one on one and had opportunities to have open town hall meetings to get out concerns or whatever it may be, even after we launched. So I think that all in all, we had a very successful brand refresh and this brand evolution has really served us well as an organization. In fact, as organizations have been suffering over the last couple of years during and post pandemic and Chase membership acquisition has grown and our retention has been phenomenal.

Lee Kantor: Yeah, those are all clues that maybe you’re on the right path.

Sue Marchese: I think so.

Lee Kantor: Now, as a member of Air, what is kind of what are they looking to get out of the membership? How do you help them take the profession in their own career to a new level?

Sue Marchese: So there is a particular function of an industrial hygienist or an occupational and environmental health specialist. Those people are not just making sure people are wearing steel toed boots in a dangerous construction setting or they’re not making sure that there is no injuries on the job. Those are not the only things that they do. They’re actually taking scientific experiments and sending them to laboratories and digging deep almost as if they were kind of, I guess you can say, forensic scientists in the workplace and making sure that there were things that are not harmful. They were also they are also instrumental in making sure that PPE, which is suddenly become a household word. Where in the past it had not been. But with the pandemic, something that professionals have done for years to ensure that there’s proper PPE usage in the workplace. That’s one of their functions. And now that is that has become a household word. Unfortunately, I guess on one hand, because of the pandemic. So the the function of the of the professionals also leads to the fact that they need additional education. They need to keep up their relevance in the field. They also have an opportunity to go after a certification called the c i h certified industrial hygienist or ci h. Designation. Because of that designation, a lot of our members do turn to J to seek out very reputable education, webinars, courses, various opportunities at our annual conference, which happens in May every year.

Sue Marchese: So that is a predominant reason a lot of people usually say that they’re involved with. I j that’s predominant. But the number one when we do our needs survey or our member needs survey, the number one reason that they want to be involved with h.r. And the benefit that they feel they can take away is association with our reputation. Being involved with h.r. Has an opportunity for them, i guess for networking, but also for the the strengths of our of our role with these professionals and in companies. So this is where we always hear that it’s about i’m joining h.r. Because i need to i want to not just for the education, but because i have to for my to uphold my reputation as a professional. The other benefits, of course, there are numerous ones. I can’t even go on. I’ll waste everyone’s time telling you about them. But I can tell you the last. The third benefit that we always hear is our wonderful publications. We have the Synergies magazine, which comes out 11 times a year, and then we also have our journal for occupational and Environmental Hygiene. So those are just the top three reasons and benefits that members enjoy.

Lee Kantor: Now, are there chapters locally around the country for people who want to get involved, or is this a national conference that everybody goes to? Like how does an individual kind of plug in?

Sue Marchese: Yeah. H.r. Has local sections, although they are not directly part of national. They are our affiliates and they are their own standalone entities, their own 500 1c3 but we as an association, foster them, work with them, encourage them. In fact, we even have a staff presence person on staff who make sure that the local sections are provided with graphic design needs or things to keep them rolling at a very easy pace rather than them having to start things from scratch. So even though a national doesn’t necessarily manage all of the local sections, they are tied to us. We also have our annual conference, and our annual conference brings together a lot of our volunteer groups. Aj is one of the one of the most unique organizations and that our members cover so many different industries. You know, like I mentioned earlier, maybe back in the thirties it was just really manufacturing, but now it has hit every single industry you could imagine. So our committees are as numerically large as the industries that our members touch. So we have committees such as excuse me, Respiratory Protection Committee, biological hazards, committee incidents, response committee. So there are just there for first responders or for indoor air quality and things of. That nature. So because of that, our committees, I believe we are up to over 70 committees and working groups at. Super active volunteers. That’s an opportunity for them to all meet at our annual conference next year in 2023 is going to actually be in Phenix. And they we change locations every year. And this is an opportunity for the committees to get together, but also for the members to take advantage of concentrated amount of time to get their contact hours. So the conference usually is about 18 to 19 contact hours for three days. So our membership really does kind of span the entire country, as I mentioned earlier, but also a lot of people from Canada.

Lee Kantor: Now, getting back to that brand evolution that you were talking about, how are you seeing kind of public relations and this level of communications? How have you seen it evolved since, you know, in your career in working with associations?

Sue Marchese: I, I have a sort of like I like to consider that there is such a thing as modern public relations. You know, there there is the typical earned media of public relations where you you draft press release and you pitch it to different media outlets. That’s definitely still alive and well. And we do it, you know, my my team and I, we do that. But I the modern portion of PR or public relations that I have really espoused over the years in my entire career has been public awareness. And to me, that is done in so many different ways, whether it’s taking advantage of social media. But one thing that we do at age is we do in our public relations department that I run is targeted outreach. So, for example, we have this public awareness campaign that I mentioned earlier about getting the word out about the value of this. And when we launched that a couple of years ago during the pandemic, we were able to reach out to different. Large industry professional associations and connect with them. Connect our members with them.

Sue Marchese: Excuse me. So, for example, chemical manufacturing is specifically chemical as opposed to product manufacturing. Chemical manufacturing has a lot of hazards, a lot of potential impacts. And we know and our members believe that it is not just about checking the box and making sure that they are following OSHA standards. It’s definitely important. Of course it’s paramount, but there’s more to it. It’s about going that extra yard and making this a core value in a company. So that’s what we did. We had brand ambassadors from our membership, write blog articles and be interviewed and different things like that with various chemical manufacturing, professional associations or even trade American Chemistry Council, for example. I had done some coverage of the imperative for H in the workplace. So those are just a couple of quick examples of how I think it’s modern PR because even though we were not necessarily getting coverage in the Wall Street Journal or something of national impact like that, we were actually doing very, very targeted media outreach to those those key audiences that we know our members can impact.

Lee Kantor: Yeah, I think that as the media consumer is becoming more and more fragmented, they’re looking for those niche publications and outlets to find the information that’s important to them. And to show up there is probably more efficient than to be in the Wall Street Journal that, you know, a lot of folks that it’s not as relevant to them or as impactful as it is to the way you’re doing it, that the folks that should hear it need to hear it, are going to hear it. If you work through the the media that these people are paying attention to every day.

Sue Marchese: Exactly. Yep. That’s the philosophy. That’s our strategy.

Lee Kantor: Now, are you seeing that as a trend or is that just kind of the evolution of media now that it’s so fragmented and that everything is kind of on demand when people are they’re trying to find the information when they need it in the places that they, you know, are used to looking rather than, you know, maybe 20 years ago when there were just kind of the go to media outlets that everybody paid attention to. It seems like everybody nowadays is on their own journey and that they have their own kind of media that they look at and that it’s hard to reach any large group of people with one message efficiently anymore.

Sue Marchese: Yeah, you’re absolutely right. It’s definitely a trend is definitely what I would call a modern PR professional. Should have that in in their quiver as a strategy. So it’s definitely a trend. And I like how you said it. You know, like everybody is really having the opportunity to choose their own news and their own outlets and things like that. And I think that that’s exactly what we as association, PR and communication professionals need to do, and that is to hone in on where we think. The right people are going to be reading and and then go where they live and go where they read and try to get in involved in their interests. And we at AIG are actually doing that through a bunch of other ways besides person power, where we pick up the phone or we contact associations and do some of the education like I was talking about earlier. But we’re also doing a lot of digital pure martech kind of, you know, types of efforts where we’re looking at geo targeting people, where for attracting them to become customers for our education, for our purchase of our books and other things like that. We are doing a lot of web advertising. In fact, just recently we took a we dipped our foot in the pool of hiring a digital audit to be accomplished because we wanted to make sure that we were actually doing things that were effective, that were actually going to be seen by the right people. So whether it’s for PR or for marketing, even, I make sure that we are trying to have some very targeted, very laser pointed types of efforts and campaigns, because after all, we are really tiny. Our organization is a total of 62 people. My team is a total of six, and yet we have some tremendous, tremendous energy and opportunities. But we also want to make sure that MarTech is working for us. The technology is smart and that our strategies are implemented properly.

Lee Kantor: Now, can you give some advice for the association leaders out there to in and around how to create that team that plays nice together? Because sometimes marketing, PR, advertising, there’s kind of a blurring of the lines of who does what and the impact that each are having. How do you kind of create a team that can work together well on that overarching mission?

Sue Marchese: Yeah, well, interesting story. When I got to Asia eight years ago, I was unfortunately met with that exact thing that you just described. There was a lot of kind of factions or, I don’t know, silos or whatever the thing may be, however you call it. I had to come in and see what I could do and try to see how we could all work together. The absolute first thing that I did was I sat down individually with each one of my team members and I talked with them about their personal brand. So I started one on one and helped them look inside themselves as to what how they wanted to be perceived as a professional. And I continue to work with each one of those people, whether they were here eight years ago or they’re new to our team a couple of months ago. I do the exact same exercise with everybody and I revisit it on a regular basis because that’s one way I can help coach my team into being the best professional that each one of them can be. So that is a mission of my own.

Sue Marchese: And as a whole, I have seen that work quite well. At our organization, we run our one. It’s really important for me to have a brand standard for our marketing communications and PR, and we as a department run the department with that brand standard first, first and foremost. And so if I had any advice to give to anybody, I would say look internally first and make sure that your team is where they want to be, because then as they are comfortable with themselves and they are more surefooted and know that they have someone who has their back, meaning that PR or that communications manager or director, they can then do their very best to work with others in in the department, in the entire association. So there’s a lot to be said about how you go about doing that and how much time you you spend doing that. But to me, it’s worth every minute of your of your time as a director or as a VP, because ultimately it really does come back and help.

Lee Kantor: Yeah, you have to listen. You have to allow people to be heard so you can all get on the same page of what we’re all trying to accomplish here.

Sue Marchese: Exactly. And and again, the brand standard, like I mentioned earlier, is something that we we try to revisit every couple of years because things may change. But ultimately, we’ve pretty much as a department, we have kept to our brand standard. And it’s it’s basically almost like running our internal Marcum and PR department, like an agency, you know, as if we were an internal agency for our different department teams, membership, professional communities, education, etc.. So yeah, that is definitely something. I think if Markham and PR could help become the hub of the wheel, that I think is very huge accomplishment for an association.

Lee Kantor: So what do you need more of? How can we help?

Sue Marchese: You have helped so far really phenomenally by allowing us to have this opportunity to to to speak on the radio show. What a tremendous way for us to get the word out about our profession and also for me to talk up my phenomenal colleagues who I work with and all of the phenomenal accomplishments, actually many award winning accomplishments as well. But one other thing that we can, if you all could do to help, and that is to get involved in A.S.A.P.. And I myself am a senior now, and it was something that took a long time. But I think that getting involved with CA with the association is something that’s important for association professionals, whether it’s just, I don’t know, you know, sitting on a committee or even just simply reviewing potential awards and being someone who gives back to the association. Because there’s so much, so much education, so much wonderful information that they provide for for those of us who are kids, who are certified association executives or even just in general for folks who are in the associate association space.

Lee Kantor: Well, so thank you so much for sharing your story today. If somebody wants to learn more about HHR or connect with you, what are the coordinates? What’s the best way to do that?

Sue Marchese: We have a website which is a IHH dot org. We also have 0ehs careers dot org. That’s for people who might be interested in getting involved in the particular profession. So please check it out. And they’re very consumer oriented and very useful tools for people.

Lee Kantor: Well, so thank you again for sharing your story. You’re doing important work and we appreciate you.

Sue Marchese: Thank you, Lee. Have a great.

Lee Kantor: One. All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on the Association Leadership Radio.

Steven Latour With Westfield Chamber of Commerce & Downtown Association

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Steven LatourSteven Latour, CEO at Westfield Chamber of Commerce & Downtown Association

A Brand Enthusiast and Advocate for High-Velocity Culture Change

Steve’s for-profit and non-profit expertise, coupled with a passion for branding and communications, have shaped his life mantra – to have a healthy disregard for the impossible.

Since arriving at the Westfield Chamber in September 2020, Steve has reinvigorated the organization by bringing significant companies on the board of directors, including Abbott Labs and SEP, a major tech company that relocated to Westfield. He negotiated a successful cooperative merger of operations with the Downtown Westfield Association and has seen revenue growth for the organization by $200K in just a year.

He is a proud alum of Central Michigan University and was the first family member to graduate from college. He most recently served as the CEO of Sigma Tau Gamma Fraternity, Foundation, and Housing Corporation.

During his tenure, Steve has visited more than 300+ college campuses, written two dozen leadership programs, led and organized conventions and leadership conferences for thousands, and facilitated retreats across the country for thousands of college men, women, professionals, and boards. He is passionate about education, youth development, and volunteerism and currently serves as the Westfield Youth Assistance Program president.

Steve comes from a large family, loves being an uncle and Godfather to five, and enjoys traveling with family and friends. He has learned that every experience and person he encounters brings him one step closer to achieving his big audacious life goals.

Connect with Steven on LinkedIn.

What You’ll Learn In This Episode

  • High-Velocity Culture Change
  • Keeping Score and Promoting the Vision
  • Free the People
  • Orient, Educate, and Train
  • Relevant, Replicable, Recognizable
  • Role of Chamber of Commerce in 2023

This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Association Leadership Radio. Now here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: Lee Kantor here another episode of Association Leadership Radio and this is going to be a good one. Today on the show we have Steven Latour with Westfield Chamber of Commerce and Downtown Association. Welcome.

Steven Latour: Thank you so much. I appreciate being here.

Lee Kantor: Well, I’m so excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us about your work at the chamber. How are you serving folks?

Steven Latour: Yeah, I’ve been in my current position for two years now, and we happen to be in a community that is growing leaps and bounds. So we’ve got new businesses here all of the time coming into Westfield. And so it’s a real opportunity to connect those businesses and the people working for them with city services, networking, connections, all the things that they need to be successful and what they’re trying to accomplish here in Westfield.

Lee Kantor: So what’s your backstory? How did you get involved in this line of work?

Steven Latour: My back story is that I was a former fraternity CEO, so I worked for a national college fraternity and we had chapters across the country, 80 different chapters across the country. And I loved it. Got to travel the country, been to over 300 colleges and universities. And I knew that I wanted to get into public service at some point. And so I had purchased a home here in Westfield, started to get involved in the community, and the chamber job opened up and I thought this may be the ticket to get involved in the community and may eventually lead to public office at some point.

Lee Kantor: Now, when you’re working at a chamber, can you talk about your vision of what that optimal chamber experience would be for a member?

Steven Latour: Yeah, I think some members kind of join and then think something magical happens and then suddenly they have new leads and people that are calling them and stopping by their office. Maybe if you’re a donut shop, you’ve got people stopping by, but for the most part it’s really a way to engage in the community. You know, I’ve got the benefit of knowing our entire city council and the mayor and several of our elected folks. But I also have the benefit of knowing almost all of the CEOs of our larger businesses here in town, all the way down to the restaurant chain managers and owners. So when you’ve got those connections, it’s really easy to begin to help people find out the folks they need to meet and connect with. Learn and grow. I think we after school or training, you want to stay sharp and stay on top of what’s going on. So the chamber offers those educational opportunities. It offers networking opportunities, social opportunities. It’s a real way to feel integrated into the community deeply.

Lee Kantor: And you brought up a great point. I think a lot of folks, when they see there’s a chamber or they decide to join the chamber, they might be looking at it as a transactional opportunity where I’m going to go in, I paid money, so therefore I’m going to get business when it’s really a connection and relationship opportunity where you can build deeper relationships. So you might do business down the road, but it isn’t really to go there and show up with a bunch of business cards and then leave with a bunch of money.

Steven Latour: Yeah, absolutely. If that were the case, we would be doing very well. But we’ve got a lot of in our chamber, we’ve got 500 businesses that are a part of that, which represents about 8000 individuals who work for those companies. And I always tell folks that it’s being engaged, it’s coming to things. And it’s true for most chambers around the country. Most of what they do is free. It’s the occasional luncheon and stuff that you’ve got to pay for. So if you’re not sure, go check it out, Attend some of the free things, meet some folks, and I think you’ll start to see the benefit of your own engagement, and that will prove that it’s worth investing in.

Lee Kantor: But is that some kind of part of the education you have to give in order to manage the expectations of a member that it isn’t something that you just pay dues and then money appears that this is something that you have to lean into and really invest your time into if you want to get the return you like.

Steven Latour: Yeah, I think that’s it exactly. I often use the analogy. My mom was a toy buyer for Kmart and they would come up with the best toys in the world, but until they were on the shelves, people weren’t able to buy them. So you’ve got to be the person on the shelf in front of folks so that they can see what it is you’re doing, who you are in the community, what it is you’re trying to sell them so that they can get involved and potentially buy your product. It’s not enough to just have an ad somewhere or to say that you’re a member. You’ve really got to engage and be on the shelf.

Lee Kantor: Now is part of your bio. You use the the phrase high velocity culture change brand enthusiast and advocate. Can you talk a little bit about what you mean by high velocity culture change?

Steven Latour: Yes. So there is this book by Price Pritchett and Ron Pound. And it’s it’s a simple quick read called High Velocity Culture Change. But I found this book about, I don’t know, 15 years ago, and I have used it time and time again. And it’s really proven to be a good resource for me, but also a source of inspiration. So in every case that I have come into in my career, I often find those organizations are a little stale. Maybe they’re looking for some change in direction. And so how do you make that happen in a way that is quick? Because sometimes it could take a very long time to turn turn the corner. So when you’re trying to find those quick wins, it’s important to have kind of this guide. And so, you know, some of the concepts from the book are really freeing your people to be themselves and to do their best selves, expecting some casualties from that. Meaning you may lose some board members, you may lose some staff members, but if there is a vision that people have bought into, then those losses may be a moment of sadness, but they’re not going to be an anchor that weighs you down and keeps you away from accomplishing your goal. I’m a big believer in achieving hard results in a hurry. So, you know, when you’re trying to make some change, you want to put some wins on the board because then people start to feel like, well, this is a winning team and I want to be a part of it. When I got to our chamber, there was two full time individuals on staff. We had about 420 members and we were up 225,000 chamber. Two years later, we’ve got four people, four full time people on our staff. We have I just presented a budget to the board last week for 580,000. That would not have been possible if I didn’t bring everyone along. I have a really strong communications plan and really promoted the vision of Westfield and how we were a part of that, both as the chamber and the Downtown association.

Lee Kantor: So how do you keep score? How do you define the metrics that matter?

Steven Latour: Yeah, for me, a big one of those. There’s this concept and it’s in the book as well called Seizing the Schools. You know, you want to be sort of the go to person or company or organization that people rely on for educational support, statistics, information. And so that’s really what I and our staff have started to do. We we look at all that data and information that’s in the community and then folks come to us for that source of information. So I think the engagement that we’ve seen increase the sponsorships that we’ve seen increase and participation just in person at events, the connections that people are making. And we’re also looking at when people are upgrading their membership, that tells me that they’re finding value in the relationship that they’re having with us.

Lee Kantor: And how do you kind of determine what is important to your members at any given time? Because things obviously, if you were pre-pandemic, things that were important are different today than they are post-pandemic?

Steven Latour: Yeah, certainly. I think it’s really taking a hard look at your community and trying to understand what direction is the community going in. We’re very fortunate that Westfield is a suburb outside of Indianapolis and we’re next to a suburb called Carmel. That’s done extraordinarily well. It’s been one of the top places to live in the United States several years in a row. Westfield’s recently started to get some of those accolades, and it’s because we’ve taken some of the best that we’ve seen in our region and we’ve put our own touch to it. And so I think we’re looking at a community that’s growing at a fast pace. We know that we have people moving into our community that are coming in from, frankly, all over the world. We just had to have it labs open, a new facility here, and a third of their staff don’t speak English as a first language. So how are we as the Chamber, encouraging our restaurants and other businesses to make sure that they have bilingual menus and all those things? That’s where I think that the community sees value in us having those conversations and bringing that to the forefront. So it’s understanding the community, it’s knowing the direction we’re going in and then trying to meet the moment.

Lee Kantor: So how do you work as a bridge between the different constituents in terms of, you know, universities and or large enterprises and the solopreneur? Like you have to you know, you’re serving all of those constituents. How are you able to kind of engage them in a way that creates connections and creates opportunities for each of them to play nice together?

Steven Latour: Yeah, it’s a great question. We’re fortunate that we have a very large community college based here in Hamilton County called the Ivy Tech. We have a great relationship with their staff and the Chancellor. We have a great relationship with a lot of entrepreneurial entrepreneurs who are looking at getting some of their business up and running and connecting them to well established businesses here in town that are looking for people to help manage communications, people to do it, people to do accounting. And so I think it’s having that mixture of in a base of membership. And when we have people that look at joining, we say, you know, yeah, we’ve got a couple of accountants, but I can tell you that we’re referring accountants all the time or we’re referring I.T. support all the time. So having those folks that we can connect to and meet with and share with. It’s all, I think, all about understanding where those companies are and having that. I’ll use an old term, but Rolodex available, although it’s all on the computer now of people to go to and connect with and refer to. So and we track kind of those referrals, but knowing that we have those abilities to make those connections quickly can often save some time and some money.

Lee Kantor: Now, any advice for a leader of a chamber that maybe, you know, you’re in a couple of years, but when you first started, can you share maybe the advice of what those first hundred days look like?

Steven Latour: Yeah. One of the things that I actually did when I worked for the fraternity and became the CEO was I visited every single chapter in a year. It took a year, but I got to all at that time 68 campuses and met with their students and I learned a ton and it positioned me to be able to make some very intentional changes going forward. And I did the same thing when I got to the chamber job. Within the first three months, I met with 100 of our members. And so it was a lot of coffees and a lot of sitting there and having great conversations. But what it did for me is give me insight into what are their company struggles, individual struggles, what is what is their relationship with the city and the city staff? What’s the relationship with the chamber? And then it’s allowed us to begin to make the modifications and changes that need to be made to meet folks kind of where they are, to support them and help them be the best organization or business that they want to be. And so that was a big piece of it. I think the other was understanding what is our direction, what is it that we want to be in the community because we can’t be all things to all people.

Steven Latour: I think we can name tons of companies who’ve tried to do that over the years and we’ve watched them fall. So what is it that we do really well? Let’s keep doing that and let’s do that even more on a broader scale. So I think the connecting part, the education part, there’s no one in the community that can educate like the chamber because we have the ability to bring people and resources together. We also have the ability to bring businesses together. Last year we launched a Hoosier Chocolate Fest and it was an opportunity to highlight chocolatiers and bakers who didn’t have an ability to organize all that on their own. So we brought everyone together and had a sell out event over the course of two days and had over 1200 people come through and and raised 40,000 doing it to support our chamber and two other chambers that we’re doing with us. So I think it’s those those initial meetings, it’s having an understanding of what the vision and purpose is going to be and then beginning to build the operation.

Lee Kantor: I think you brought up a great point in terms of investing the time to listen to the constituents before you make kind of massive change. So here first, learn first, and then based on that data, then you can make a better informed choice and kind of craft the vision that really works hand in glove with the expectations and the desires of your constituents.

Steven Latour: Yeah, 100% agree. I think you have to do that to be successful. We all have hunches, right? We kind of think we know what some things are are going to be or are not going to be. But I would tell you that I you know, 30, 40 people in there were things that I thought were issues that weren’t issues. And there were things that I didn’t even considered that were brought to my attention that seemed like easy wins for us. So definitely worth the time and energy. And I still do that. I probably meet with four or five different people every week outside of all the other structured meetings and things that I have just constantly listening now.

Lee Kantor: Have you do you have kind of a vision of the role of a chamber in today’s world that might be different than, you know, your father’s or grandfather’s chamber?

Steven Latour: Yeah, you know, this chamber is 40 years old and it was actually started as a local business association 20 years before that. So, you know, back in 1960 when they kind of got things going, the little town of Westfield was about 4600 people or so, maybe less than that. And the chamber then was really meant to be a social connector for the men and women who were involved in the business community and also do some things for the community. So they were the first ones to have the parade and the first ones to do some events around the 4th of July. I think there’s still a place for that in 2022. But what I have been really pushing among our membership is to say we are the best ambassadors for our community. There’s probably no one who will be better ambassadors than us, and we want to be successful and we want to win because if if we’re all doing well and the community is doing well and our schools are doing well, then the community as a whole is going to be the best of the best. So it’s not we’re not going to get anywhere by tearing each other down or complaining about streets or parking or anything like that.

Steven Latour: As businesses, what we need to do is come together. Think of ourselves as ambassadors. And then how do we work through? Negotiate and come together on finding solutions for problems in our community so that we can move forward. And so I think that’s one of the biggest shifts that I’ve seen. The other pieces, I think that we as a chamber need to have a hand in hand relationship with the development office within the community so that we can be at the table with them so that when businesses come in and go through all of that city process on what needs to happen to to build something or put something in. Then they look at us and say, well, what are the schools like and what will my employees do for fun in the evening? And what are the experiences that they’ll have? Because so much now is about the experience that people have. It’s not just what they do from a traditional 9 to 5. So I think we’re a good connector there. And the ability to help the city sell us on being a great place to live. But in the end, I really think our chambers in 2022 are the ambassadors for the cities they represent.

Lee Kantor: So what do you need more of? How can we help?

Steven Latour: Well, I think the biggest hurdle we’re now facing is that we’ve we’ve grown up in a world where you have a person from a company who is the, you know, the contact at the chamber office. And so there is, for example, a hospital when I got here that we had one contact name in our database at the time, and it’s a hospital that employs 1300 people. And so I sat down with their CEO and HR director and I said, I appreciate that we’ve got this person to go to. And they’re phenomenal. But you’ve got an entire company of people who we have an opportunity to connect them, to volunteer opportunities and mentorship opportunities and community events that not only that we’re hosting, but that service organizations are hosting, that the police are hosting, that the city’s hosting. Just recently we had a huge trick or treat night that was companies sponsoring that for the community. So we want to your individuals working for your companies to be the member of the chamber, and we want you as the company to be our partner. And so that’s one of the shifts that for us at Westfield we’re making. And I think it’s working so far, but we view the company as our partner because we wouldn’t be here without them. And we we view the individuals working for that company as the member. So I think really it’s those folks who are running companies, it’s giving your employees the opportunity to connect, to serve on boards, to volunteer, to engage, to go to events. And so that means sharing those emails and that contact information and then talking to your staff about why that information is important to share with the chamber so that they can really feel a connection to the community. And we know that if they feel connected, they’re going to be happier employees and they’re going to be in those positions for years to come.

Lee Kantor: Yeah, that reframing of what a member could be or should be in an organization, it shouldn’t be one person in a 1000 person company. That’s absurd because there are so many young people that are part of the organization that would benefit so much by leaning into their chamber by, like you said, volunteering and showing leadership skills and networking, and not only to help them within their organization, it’s going to help them within their career. I mean, when somebody else sees them as, hey, look at this young person, volunteered and took over this leadership position, look how well they did. Look at how proactive they were. They might be a good candidate for a leadership position in my organization. It’s a win win win all the way around. So I, I can’t I can’t emphasize enough, especially to young people to consider joining your chamber, because that’s where the rubber hits the road. You can demonstrate real leadership skills to a lot of people in an easy manner because those organizations are hungry for people to volunteer and show leadership skills.

Steven Latour: Absolutely. Absolutely.

Lee Kantor: So if somebody wants to connect with you, what is the coordinates? What’s the website?

Steven Latour: So our website is Westfield Chamber Indie dot com and I know that seems a little funny, but there’s a Westfield in New Jersey and a Westfield, Massachusetts, and sometimes people confuse the two. So we thought, we’ll go with Westfield Chamber Indeed.com. So that’s our website info at Westfield Chamber Intercoms or email address. But you can find us on all of the social media outlets and reach out, connect, happy to meet with folks, happy to share ideas with not only people in Indiana but across the country.

Lee Kantor: Well, Steve, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing such important work and we appreciate you.

Steven Latour: Thank you for the opportunity.

Lee Kantor: All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll show next time on the Association Leadership Radio.

Kelly Anne O’Neill With Dualboot Partners

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DualbootKelly Anne O'NeillKelly Anne O’Neill has a passion for connecting great people, helping entrepreneurs, and serving the local community.

With a diverse background in non-profits, healthcare, and tech startups, she is currently working with Dualboot Partners in Atlanta.

Previously, she spent the last 5 years building programs to serve entrepreneurs and bringing in strategic partners such as Invesco, Truist, and Coke at Atlanta Tech Village.

Connect with Kelly Anne on LinkedIn.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode

  • Why Kelly Anne loves mentoring
  • The most important advice she gives
  • The biggest mistakes Kelly Anne sees

This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: [00:00:04] Welcome back to the Startup Showdown podcast, where we discuss pitching, funding and scaling startups. Join us as we interview winners, mentors and judges of the monthly $120,000 pitch competition powered by Panoramic Ventures. We also discuss the latest updates in software Web three, health care, tech, fintech and more. Now sit tight as we interview this week’s guest and their journey through entrepreneurship.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:39] Lee Kantor here another episode of Startup Showdown podcast, and this is going to be a good one. But before we get started, it’s important to recognize our sponsor Panoramic Ventures. Without them, we couldn’t be sharing these important stories. Today on Startup Showdown, we have Kelly Ann O’Neill and she is with Dualboot Partners. Welcome, Kelly Anne.

Kelly Anne O’Neill: [00:00:59] Thanks. Excited to be here.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:01] Well, I’m excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us a little bit about Dualboot. How are you serving folks?

Kelly Anne O’Neill: [00:01:06] Yeah, so Dualboot is a software and business development company. We build software that also builds your bottom line. So it’s a more holistic approach to taking a product to market or building out a piece of your software projects. And we do that through incredible product directors on our team, a very well-equipped and experienced tech team as far as developers go. So yeah, it’s been a really fun eight months. I’m relatively new to Dualboot and open up the office here as we expand into Atlanta.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:39] Now Dualboot are you are your clients typically enterprise-level companies that are just need to update their software want to go in a new direction from a software standpoint, are you working with startups that don’t have maybe a technologist and need kind of that your expertise to help them launch a venture?

Kelly Anne O’Neill: [00:01:58] Yeah, it’s a great question. So we work with startups all the way up to Fortune 500. We just it looks different every engagement. So we do five things, we build MVP’s. And so that’s mostly probably what you’re thinking about with the startups. And we do that through design, through launch phase, we do DevOps and QA, we do something called replatforming where it’s taking a legacy product and modernizing your tech stack, bringing everything over and relaunching that we do rescue missions, which is kind of what it sounds like of Holy cow, it’s crashing and burning help. We also do stuff acceleration where we if you need to augment your team with key role partners, we step we step in and help you accelerate your growth. So those are kind of the five things that we do and that can serve, again, startups to Fortune 500. It will just look different with our engagements.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:53] So what’s your back story? How did you get into this line of work?

Kelly Anne O’Neill: [00:02:57] Great question. I have a super diverse background, professionally speaking. So graduated college, went into the nonprofit world for two years, which was super helpful in laying the foundation really of whatever I wanted to do and randomly hopped back into health care after the nonprofit world where it’s what I went to college for. It’s called a child life specialist, but it’s a role that helps children and families cope with hospitalization and really get to step in with the kid, make sure they’re understanding what’s going on, their diagnosis, their prognosis, whatever that looks like to help a family cope. So I was at Children’s Health Care of Atlanta in neurosurgery and worked in the E.R. for a little bit for three years. Then, as you can imagine, that’s a pretty hard, hard role to stay in. So did a really big pivot and came to tech startups. So worked at the Atlanta Tech Village with Karen Houghton and David Whitburn for five and a half years, fell in love with entrepreneurs and their vision and startups and the ecosystem, so ended up there as the director of Strategic Partnerships and programing. And then in October I joined Dual Boot Partners. So on the more of the software development piece of entrepreneurs and startups and all those things. So it’s been a really fun ride, wild ride really.

Lee Kantor: [00:04:25] Well, looking back, you know, it’s interesting when you’re going through a journey like yours, looking back, maybe you see some dots that were connected that obviously you didn’t do it on purpose. But having that background in health care and especially in the space you were in, your empathy gene must be off the charts. So that probably helps you in building community and really kind of understanding maybe some of the struggle that some of these folks are going through, because you probably have seen struggles a lot. You know, more life and death struggles in real life.

Kelly Anne O’Neill: [00:04:56] Yes, you nailed it. So in the a lot of people are like, wow, how did you make that jump? That feels super far off. And to your point, it really isn’t that far off. In the end, humans are humans and people are people. So what I learned at the bedside was super applicable to startups, super applicable to entrepreneurship in the way of I learned to prioritize really well. Sense of urgency is high, earning the right to be heard really quickly and also building rapport with people because in the end, humans are humans. And so it just looks like you enter in differently obviously between health. In technology, but all the same.

Lee Kantor: [00:05:42] And, you know, the stakes are not exactly the same, but maybe they feel the same to a startup founder. You know, that is true.

Kelly Anne O’Neill: [00:05:52] I think at times. Yeah, it’s like you truly ride life with people. And so, yeah, the end result might be different, but the feelings associated with what’s going on can be a roller coaster, like you mentioned.

Lee Kantor: [00:06:05] Now, you mentioned some in your background. You were involved in creating strategic partnerships and you were involved in that side of the business. Can you talk about maybe or maybe share some advice on how do you go about kind of creating these partnerships? How do you create those win wins? And how do you all get on the same page so that you’re you can build something bigger than each of the individual participants?

Kelly Anne O’Neill: [00:06:30] Yeah. Something I learned really quickly in Atlanta in particular in the ecosystem, is that everybody wants to help and be a part of exciting things. So on the outside you think of these big corporations feel very separate, but a lot of time there are people in those organizations that really want to help by paying it forward or help monetarily or help you build something to help entrepreneurs. Because really, when you’re when you’re building businesses within a city, you all went together. So bringing in the strategic partners, it really was taking time to listen to founders here and kind of sift through what was going on to see what they needed and then identifying who that key person was within a different corporation to tell the story of what’s happening at Atlantic Village or at EDC or wherever these entrepreneurs are, is telling the story, and then specifically the village, inviting them in to work with the entrepreneurs. And it looked different for every partner, but I think it brought a lot of life to like within the partnership of exciting, fun, supportive. It kind of hit all the things for the corporate sponsor and it really helped the entrepreneur.

Lee Kantor: [00:07:48] Now, when you’re kind of trying to explain that value proposition from the entrepreneur, it looks like, Oh, why would they pick me? Like, why would they work with me? I’m this little startup. And then from the Enterprise they’re like, Hey, we’re this huge thing. Why, you know, how are we going to help that individual person? Like, how do you kind of help them each connect the dots that they are each bringing value?

Kelly Anne O’Neill: [00:08:09] Sure. I think it is. Again, kind of going back to the whole premise that humans are humans and people are people and we all need each other. And it’s really sitting down and learning how we can all help each other and showing that, hey, just because this looks wildly different from the outside doesn’t mean on the inside that there’s not a super connection here, whether that be a mentorship as far as sitting with a founder and giving feedback or whether it’s like, Hey, we have the financial means to really help build something here for a founder to help them get to X, Y and Z to meet those goals. So it’s really doing a lot of listening and a lot of careful thought of how can I bring value to both sides and kind of educate both sides to see that we’re not that different and what we’re doing and we’re super helpful to each other now.

Lee Kantor: [00:09:07] How did you hear about Startup Showdown in Panoramic Ventures?

Kelly Anne O’Neill: [00:09:12] So Tami Queen I feel like she does a great job of sharing about what she’s doing and so anything she’s involved in and great people are involved in, you immediately want to get involved in as well. So seeing the social media posts and kind of watching from the outside, it was just something that drew me in immediately. And getting to be a mentor has been really fun, has been really fulfilling. And so kind of hearing the stories of other mentors and what the program has looked like, it was an exciting thing to join.

Lee Kantor: [00:09:46] Now is there a piece of advice that you share with founders kind of regularly? Is there something that you’re like, Hey, everybody should know this?

Kelly Anne O’Neill: [00:09:58] So I think if an early stage founder is like, Hey, what’s one piece of advice coming in you would think to share with me? And it kind of takes me back to my days at Atlantic Village and running the mentor and advisor program there. I would tell all early stage founders to get a mentor, one that you can trust and know that has your best interest in mind. Whether that be personally, professionally, whatever that looks like, someone that you know always has your best interest at heart. Entrepreneurship Startups. Building a company is a roller coaster and it’s equally important to find. That person who’s going to push you and help you work on your business plan as it is to find a person who can pause and say, Hey, you need to take a walk or take a break, take a vacation. Someone who can play both sides of the fence of taking care of you and your business.

Lee Kantor: [00:10:55] Now from let’s kind of dive in there a little bit. Now, from the mentoring standpoint, do you have any do’s and don’ts of how to be a good mentor?

Kelly Anne O’Neill: [00:11:06] I think something I always keep in mind is the respect for the founder and the thought that, hey, this person put a lot of time, emotion thought into what they’re building. And while I might have opinions, I always want to make sure they know that they are the founder and empower them. And people are going to make mistakes and understand that even if this founder makes a mistake or goes against what I’m saying or suggesting that that’s part of the that’s part of the roller coaster, and I’m not always going to be right. So I think it’s coming to the table with new ideas and maybe some wisdom or, hey, I’ve seen this done before. Here’s what I saw work and didn’t work. But also having the humility to know that you’re being invited into something which is an honor to be trusted. And so I think it’s a yeah, it’s a balance of knowing when to speak, when to listen, when to give advice, when to push, when to not. So just always keeping that in mind for the founder.

Lee Kantor: [00:12:10] Now, let’s get on the other side of the table. What some do’s and don’ts for being a good mentee.

Kelly Anne O’Neill: [00:12:17] I think one of the greatest things that I’ve seen in mentoring is a founder who can take feedback and is open to suggestions. It’s a. It’s easy to get super passionate about things and think that you’re correct and right all the time. And while it is your company, I also think it’s a really it’s a it’s a really special skill to be able to sit back and listen and absorb and. Process through feedback. So that’s something I always really admire about founders is when they are there being super vulnerable and sharing a bunch about their business and where they want to go and their dreams and aspirations and goals all to get all this feedback. And when a founder can sit and kind of process, I think that shows a ton of maturity.

Lee Kantor: [00:13:11] Yeah, coach ability is an important quality.

Kelly Anne O’Neill: [00:13:15] Yep.

Lee Kantor: [00:13:17] Now, is there any mistakes that you commonly see? Is there something that you’re like, Oh, here we go again? I’ve seen this movie before.

Kelly Anne O’Neill: [00:13:26] I think, and maybe it’s because I tend to be I don’t even know the word to describe excited or making. So I think it would be kind of jumping into something without putting thought behind it and kind of sitting and running by someone else. So we have blind spots in life, all of us do. And so I think sometimes as a solopreneur or a founder, that’s kind of like Steamboat Head, lets go. I’m running this by myself. It’s, it’s doing things without asking others or bringing someone into it to get feedback because we’re only able to see what we can see. So if you’re not involving your customers, if you’re not asking the right questions, if you’re not caring about the market you’re serving, I think that’s where I see the biggest issue is getting so far along and having so much pride in what you’re doing, all to realize that you never asked your customers or anyone else like, Hey, what’s your opinion on this? And kind of getting to a point where you’re not actually serving a customer in any way or have a product that aligns with the market you’re trying to enter.

Lee Kantor: [00:14:30] Now, do you mind sharing a story? Maybe it doesn’t have to be about you mentoring somebody, or maybe it’s just somebody you heard, like a mentoring kind of success story where somebody came in, maybe they were at a plateau or maybe they were struggling and they got a mentor. And it really did move the needle in their business and it did take them to a new level. You don’t have to name names, but just maybe the problem solution kind of thing.

Kelly Anne O’Neill: [00:14:54] Yeah, I think I’ve seen it over and over again at the Atlantic Village. If you think of all the graduates there and you hear their stories and listen, most of those graduates will tell you what made the difference was a mentor, whether it was a pivot that happened and someone to kind of call that out of, hey, I think we’re at a point where this isn’t making sense anymore to, hey, I’m a brand new founder and I really don’t know what I’m doing because who does? And this person really stepped in with me. So the stories I have of success through mentorship, I wish I had a whole I have for a long time, I kept quotes from people of what it meant to have a mentor. I think personally, where I’ve seen it really work too, with early stage founders is I mean, even through honestly, Startup Showdown, getting to work with these founders for the small opportunity we get like that 30 minutes to really get feedback and work with people. I’ve seen it really work in the Hey we’re getting we’re in the finals for this. We’re going to pitch and giving feedback on the pitch or giving feedback on the deck or encouraging them as a founder like Here’s who you are, you are equipped and you can do this. And seeing the confidence turn on that, even for this small amount of time, you get to see a founder win the whole thing or shift. And through the small changes you’ve been able to suggest, hey, now they have this funding and I think it can go from the small story of 30 minutes. So imagine what can happen with a year long relationship. There has been I’ve never I’m sure there are mentor stories obviously that are awesome, but I’ve never heard a founder say, Man, I really wish I never had a mentor.

Lee Kantor: [00:16:52] Right? No one ever says mentoring. That was a waste of my time. Like, you’re going to get something out of it no matter what I mean. And hearing somebody else kind of invest their time and wisdom into your situation, I mean, even if you disagree, it’s going to be a worthwhile endeavor.

Kelly Anne O’Neill: [00:17:10] Sure.

Lee Kantor: [00:17:11] Well, Kellyanne, thank you so much for sharing your story today. If somebody wants to connect with you or learn about dual boot, is there a website for that? And what’s the best way to get a hold of you?

Kelly Anne O’Neill: [00:17:23] Absolutely. Linkedin. I am active on LinkedIn. Dual boot partners websites. Dual boot partners dot com we are. Email me Kellyanne O’Neill at boot partners dot com so very open to being in touch with and we’ll respond on LinkedIn for sure.

Lee Kantor: [00:17:44] Good stuff. Well, thank you again for sharing your story. You’re doing important work and we appreciate you.

Kelly Anne O’Neill: [00:17:49] Absolutely. Thanks for having me on.

Lee Kantor: [00:17:51] All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on Startup Showdown.

Intro: [00:17:56] As always, thanks for joining us. And don’t forget to follow and subscribe to the Startup Showdown podcast. So you get the latest episode as it drops wherever you listen to podcasts to learn more and apply to our next startup Showdown Pitch Competition Visit Showdown Dot VC. That’s Showdown Dot VC. All right. That’s all for this week. Goodbye for now.

 

Gwenn McGuire With HBGM&Co.

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HBGMCo.Gwenn McguireGwenn McGuire is an introvert, thespian, causer of good trouble, wife, boy-mom, and advocate for midday naps. She attended the University of Central Florida as a theatre major, walked away from corporate America to eventually focus on fixing the broken system, is a board member for the YMCA Carl E Sanders facility in Atlanta, and has a deep background in scaling and growing startups.

Gwenn is the Co-founder and CEO of HBGM&Co., an Executive Search and Placement firm that meets companies at every stage of growth. Uniquely, HBGM&Co. develops and prioritizes the nontraditional female candidate and teaches organizations how to retain them.

Connect with Gwenn on LinkedIn.

What You’ll Learn In This Episode

  • About HBGM&Co.
  • Nontraditional hire
  • Unique service offerings
  • Ingredients to retaining a great hire

This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Atlanta Business Radio, brought to you by on pay. Atlanta’s new standard in payroll. Now, here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: Lee Kantor here another episode of Atlanta Business Radio. And this is going to be a good one. Today on the show, we have Gwen McGuire with HBGM&Co. Welcome, Gwen.

Gwenn Mcguire: Welcome Lee. Thanks for having me.

Lee Kantor: I am so excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us about your firm, how you serve in folks.

Gwenn Mcguire: Absolutely. We are an executive search and placement firm. We meet companies at every level of growth. And so we serve solopreneur to corporations. Uniquely. We develop and we place the nontraditional female hire, and we teach organizations how to retain them.

Lee Kantor: So what exactly is a nontraditional hire?

Gwenn Mcguire: Yeah. When Janey, my co founder, and I were in the early stages of constructing the framework of HPG, and we got super clear around the description of the woman that we wanted to uplift through the corporate ranks. And so the vision of our company is to diversify the C-suite and in understanding the face of C-suite, past and present, we realized that the nontraditional woman wasn’t a prominent figure on, let’s say, Fortune ranked list. And so those are women who identify as veterans, as differently able as bipoc, transgender or first and second generation. But the why is more important than the what, right? Like, why aren’t these women making the list in larger numbers and in corporate America? There is a favorite topic of conversation amongst leadership that the pipeline is broken, meaning that there are very few qualified candidates to fill the pipeline. And when the conversation is extremely overexaggerated and quite frankly, it’s a dangerous one as it disqualifies the nontraditional, nontraditional individuals, corporations are facing three things right now the mass retirement of baby boomers, the great resignation. And on top of that, 3.5 million women have left the workforce since the pandemic. And so the pipeline isn’t broken like the priority of companies are and have been heavily focused on the Ivy League outfit, the traditional hire. Right. And so disregarding the evolution of today’s talent and that evolution is indicative of talent that are looking for more creative ways to diversify their skill sets without the burden of college debt. And this proves that the way that we qualify talent has to evolve. The very definition of qualified needs to shift how we screen resumes needs to shift as well as how we interview.

Lee Kantor: Now, a lot of organizations, especially those Fortune 500 Fortune 1000, give lip service to the importance of this type of diversity and inclusion. Are you seeing kind of a disconnect between actual action and an actual kind of progress in this area rather than just a lot of talk around in and around this area?

Gwenn Mcguire: That’s my favorite topic to discuss, actually. Yeah, and it’s a hot topic as far as diversity in corporate America, especially since the pandemic. And like, what does that mean when we’re defining a truly diverse workforce?

Lee Kantor: Well, I find that an easy way to check is just go on their web page of leaders. If you just look at those little boxes, it tells you pretty clearly who the people are that are making the decisions. It may not be what their customers look like, but it tells you what their leadership looks like.

Gwenn Mcguire: Absolutely. But other things that we gauge as well are most certainly, you know, their leadership and how diverse their leadership is. But like also we gauge like what is their retention rate for marginalized individuals? What are the the ERGs that they have in place? And then most importantly, my favorite is following the money philanthropically. I want to understand what initiatives and initiatives and organizations do these companies fund consistently? Are they funding and supporting companies that are led by diverse founders? A truly diverse workforce is committed to diversity internally and externally.

Lee Kantor: Now. So what of what have you found? What are some of the kind of discoveries you found by checking into that and holding them accountable for those type of activities?

Gwenn Mcguire: Absolutely. So just a little background there. Post George Floyd, Corporate America was in the spotlight regarding rampant systemic racism and toxic practices within the workplace. Right. And I think this caught corporate America off guard as companies then went on to spend $200 billion plus promoting equity and racial diversity. And so this is an example of Americans holding the largest employers and defenders of these practices accountable. However, of these companies, less than 18% publicly committed to internal improvements and even less actually improved. And so what’s been apparent today on our end is that we were given lots of lip service in masterfully crafted statements of support on social media. I think where a lot of people, a lot of companies also get it wrong is that, you know, promoting that one bipoc employee to chief diversity officer, having them lead your first DEI initiative is blatant tokenism. And so that difference between diversity and tokenism, there’s a lack of understanding there. And in this specific example, like it’s lazy and it shows that you don’t understand what true diversity is in your workforce. You have to also have ERGs and support as well as a culture built around marginalized individuals within your company.

Lee Kantor: So how does your firm help? Like say you have that leader that says, You know what, I looked in the mirror and I think we can improve, I want to improve. And then I hear about HB GM And what are some of the conversations you’re having to help that leader improve their organization and maybe take their organization to a new level?

Gwenn Mcguire: Absolutely. This is my favorite topic also. Well, actually, generic co founder, she loves talking on this as well. Retention is is like her department. But before I go into that, I think it’s first important to understand that the retention clock doesn’t begin once the candidate is seated in the role. And so this is where we come in and helping companies to just basically understand what their culture and their systems, what they have in place, how it is either setting up their candidate for success or how it’s hindering them. And so it’s important to understand that retention starts with the company’s digital marketing. Candidates want to see themselves reflected on the social media platforms within the team section of your website and even the stock photos that you use. They want to see themselves in the audience and on the panels of your conferences. Candidates are researching potential employees more than ever before, and they want the slightest. And if they have the slightest feeling that they won’t have a sense of belonging and support, your company can quickly become obsolete in their in their minds. And so also, to be clear, like this advice is to give a company agency to switch up how they market and attract employees, completely bypassing the internal human to human work. That has to happen. Like you can’t bypass that process. And that’s where we come in. We teach retention strategies through the funnel of marketing to leadership promotion. And this takes dedication, it takes open minds and communication, and it also takes a human responsibility to better the environments of those that contribute to your bottom line.

Lee Kantor: So what’s some actionable advice you can give an organization, maybe some low hanging fruit that they could be doing today to really make a difference What’s what some of the baby steps they can be taking?

Gwenn Mcguire: Yeah, I think one is to actually talk with your employees. You know, there are leadership has become so comfortable with, you know, having they become so comfortable with. Kind of standing apart from their employees and not taking the time to actually have a conversation and understanding how their employees are feeling, how they can support them. You know, we haven’t we’re working within a firm pretty soon. And one of their major issues is that their bipoc talent don’t have the support like they’ve been asking for months. You know, I’m looking to to grow within this role. I want to understand the trajectory of this role. But not having that support has really disabled them and has kept them from moving up, you know, up the ranks. And so I think it starts with just that human to human connection. One not. Don’t send out a Google form, you know, to to survey your employees, like literally sit down and have a 1 to 1 conversation with them and show them that you care about their well-being.

Lee Kantor: That you can’t really emphasize enough those open lines of communication, the clarity and the messaging and and the being congruent between what you’re saying and what people are seeing with their eyes. Is that like, walk me through like when you start working with an organization, what are those first conversations look like where you can see, number one, if you’re the right fit and that you can help them achieve the outcomes that they desire.

Gwenn Mcguire: Yeah. So that that looks like we like to speak with leadership first and get their take on how they’re running their department, how they feel that they’re running their department, how they feel that their employees are doing. And then usually the next conversation happens with the employees themselves, and the feedback just doesn’t line up. You know, there is there is a blatant disconnect between what leadership thinks and feels is happening within their departments. And then there’s what the employees are actually feeling and thinking. And so we like to have those those those two different perspectives to then be able to share back anonymously, of course, but also. Providing an action plan of what we can do going forward to strategize and to help the company come out on top.

Lee Kantor: So what separates you from other kind of firms like yours?

Gwenn Mcguire: I’m sorry. Can you ask.

Lee Kantor: What separates you from other firms like yours? What makes your services unique?

Gwenn Mcguire: Yeah, absolutely. During the early stages of founding our company, we’ve taken the time to really poll companies at different stages within their businesses. And we learned that recruitment firms hold very little trust amongst businesses. Some feedback that we received were centered around firms under-delivering or overpromising or prioritizing culture or prioritizing role over culture. I think the feedback also that was just most interesting is, you know, post-pandemic. Many firms jumped on the diversity bandwagon post the pandemic without firm understanding around diversity and tokenism, which I spoke about earlier. Placing diverse hires in spaces that are unsafe or haven’t built culture and ergs to support them for the sake of placing that diverse hire. And so HPG and Co is really intentional about the impact that we make post the placement process, offering our support and building company culture systems and processes and changing leadership management are ways that we ensure retention for our candidates. And this is also how we’re instrumental in transforming corporate spaces for the betterment of future generations. So we work closely with companies to ensure that our candidates land in a safe space to lead.

Lee Kantor: So what is your ideal client look like? What is that? Or are they for Fortune 500? Fortune ten? Like, who are your ideal clients? Who are the ones you want to work with the most?

Gwenn Mcguire: Yeah. So we work with solopreneur hours to fortune companies. Our our services meet companies at every level of growth. And what this means is, for example, we find that our solopreneur that we service are most engaged in our contract service, which provides contract experts for short or long term needs, such as your virtual assistant or your virtual project manager. And then, like our small businesses to enterprise sized companies, they engage in our contract to hire service in our development program, and corporations are most interested in our direct hire service and our 1 to 1 retention strategies.

Lee Kantor: So what do you need more of? How can we help?

Gwenn Mcguire: Absolutely. We invite leadership to the table. We invite leadership to our table. We want to engage with more leaders around the topics that we’ve discussed today. We are deeply committed to transforming companies from the inside out with attraction, development and retention strategies that builds better corporate spaces.

Lee Kantor: Now, what about advice for that employee that’s out there that wants to be found, that wants to that feels they are ready for that next step? What things can they be doing to get on your radar so you find them and then they become a good match in some of the organizations you work with?

Gwenn Mcguire: Absolutely. Reach out to us directly. Like we love having those 1 to 1 conversations with potential women that we add to our roster. We create a very, very safe space for our candidates, even during our interview process. And yeah, we’d love to connect with you 1 to 1. You can find us on social media, HBM Co or take a moment and email us, inquire at HBM COCOM.

Lee Kantor: Is there anything they could be doing to make them a more attractive candidate?

Gwenn Mcguire: Oh, absolutely there is. I think there’s there’s so much in this space now. There’s so much that’s offered to candidates to be able to diversify their resumes and upskill, you know, their resumes as well, such as certifications. Yeah, things of that nature. And I think too, like we just recently had a conversation around patrons, parents, you know, that’s huge in the news right now. And we encourage employees to continue to have the conversation around pay transparency, but also take the conversation a step further. If you realize that upon having these conversations, you realize that one of your colleagues is being paid, let’s say, you know, 3000 more than you in salary, take the opportunity to really have the conversation with them and understand what certifications are, what type of what other attributes do they serve to their role that maybe you’re missing, that maybe you can join in on, so that when it’s time for that, that pay raise or whatever, you’re prepared and you have something to bring to the table to show how impactful you are for the company now and in the future. And so I say that to say, you know, have the conversations with your colleagues inside and outside of your workplace and just better understand how you can upskill.

Lee Kantor: Is there anything a candidate can be doing on LinkedIn that are there’s some things that are must haves that you’re not seeing and things they shouldn’t be doing that are red flags?

Gwenn Mcguire: Red flags. You know, I haven’t seen many red flags lately. It seems to me that candidates are especially more careful, even within their social media space, about what they post, especially when they are eagerly looking for placement, when they’re eagerly looking for that next job. And the job market is is interesting right now. And. Candidates are really clawing for like the next opportunity, I would say, especially for us within our firm, we. We really take the time to dissect a candidate’s resume? We take the time to basically piece together what their skill sets are and what their responsibilities have been within past roles. Because sometimes we find that, let’s say, for instance, a a candidate doesn’t necessarily have the title of executive assistant. However, within the different roles that she’s been employed in, she’s got all of of the expertise. She just lacks the actual title and the title in order to get her paid at market rate or more. And so that’s something that we do within our firm is really dissecting our candidates resumes to put them in in better positions.

Lee Kantor: Now, if somebody wants to learn more again, can you share the website or the socials? The best way to get a hold of you or somebody on your team?

Gwenn Mcguire: Absolutely. Our website is HPG, COCOM, and you’re able to, for our candidates, apply to our roster on the website and for our clients. If you want to hire an executive or inquire about our services, you can do that there as well. Also, our email address is inquire at HPG, BGM COCOM. My personal email address is Gwen g w e rn at code dot com.

Lee Kantor: Well, Gwen, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing such important work and we appreciate you.

Gwenn Mcguire: Thank you so much for having me. Thank you.

Lee Kantor: All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you next time on Atlanta Business Radio.

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Serge Kadjo With PERSA

by

PERSASerge-KadjoSerge Kadjo, Founder at PERSA.

Born and raised in Africa, Serge is tech-savvy with expertise in hardware development.

From renewable energy to IOT Devices, Serge has invented, founded, led and co-develop advanced technological devices like MOONA in Sleep Tech, Nanonap in Brain Enhancement and Presso in AI and Robotics.

Today Serge is making a pivot in the software industry with his first SaaS Startup in the live stream and web3.0

Connect with Serge Kadjo on LinkedIn and follow him on Twitter and Facebook.

What You’ll Learn In This Episode

  • Live engagement, the difference between the online and physical shopping experience
  • New trend in online shopping, Livestream, social shopping
  • Creator economy on Web 3.0
  • International Startup Ecosystem
  • Difference between a hardware and a software startup

This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: [00:00:05] We’ll come back to the Startup Showdown podcast, where we discuss pitching, funding and scaling startups. Join us as we interview winners, mentors and judges of the monthly 120,000 pitch competition powered by Panoramic Ventures. We also discuss the latest updates in software web3, health care, tech, fintech and more. Now sit tight as we interview this week’s guest and their journey through entrepreneurship.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:40] Lee Kantor here another episode of Startup Shutdown podcast, and this is going to be a good one. But before we get started, it’s important to recognize our sponsor Panoramic Ventures. Without them, we couldn’t be sharing these important stories. Today on Startup Showdown, we have Serge Kadjo with Persa. Welcome.

Serge Kadjo: [00:01:00] Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:02] Well, I’m excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us a little bit about Persa, how you serving folks?

Serge Kadjo: [00:01:07] So first item, it’s a engagement tools that we built for e-commerce website and project based websites. So yeah, we started back in France back in 28, 21 during the COVID, during COVID 19, we started the services in order to help like what stores do to sell online because due to COVID, the one that they were there was not able to sell a physical store. So we tried to recreate this experience of being in the physical store directly for them. So that’s where the idea came from, actually.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:40] Well, how do you see kind of ecommerce evolving as we enter kind of this Web 3.0? Can you first explain to the listeners who aren’t that familiar how creator economy is behaving on in the Web 3.0 environment and how your service can help them get to a new level?

Serge Kadjo: [00:01:57] Oh, that’s that’s actually the that’s definitely the new trend right now. So I would just start with some data in order to but what I want to say, you know, back in 2020, back in 2019, there was no not COVID yet. China made actually 1.2 billion in sales just in one day during Chinese New Year, just in one day. And then those sales have been made only through livestreaming. So China is actually leading the the influencer market with with people that actually doing the ecommerce stores or just buying things online through the mobile phone. And this trend is actually growing. So China started back in 2018, 2019. They made, as I said, 1.2 billion. 2021 was booming due to COVID everybody trends moved from source of from physical store to online store. And you can see it again. You can see that trend with with all of these with all of these countries. But selling online, it’s not that easy. So we saw when we saw that medical stores try to open the the online store with Shopify, WooCommerce, etc. but it’s boring. Like when you land on a website, you have text images, videos, but you don’t have the sense of being home. And how am I able to experience in terms of being engaged with sense of being, of feeling the presence of somebody that we can help you? So with with an influencer, you can actually see that trend because an influencer or even somebody online that that can be there to actually extend to you or even show how to use the device or even showcase how to how to behave or how to how to I don’t know how to style yourself so these things can actually help.

Serge Kadjo: [00:03:53] You can have had the store owner boost themselves. I can also I can help the the customers feel the trend. So that’s that’s how this this thing is kind of coming step by step and with the with the creator economy. We saw that right now, all of these new generation, the Gen Z, the Gen Y, it’s kind of being everybody wants to be a YouTuber who then. Good. So that was the last trend. Everybody wants to be a YouTuber now. Everybody wants to be an Instagram influencers. So we saw that thing coming. The last job. The last job was YouTuber. Now it’s Instagram influencer. And then again after Instagram influencer, we see TikTok influencer. So we saw that trend coming to the influencer market. So the goal is to try to merge the need of the businesses with the growing job that’s coming right now with the social network and TikTok, Instagram, those influencers and then merge those two things to create a better experience online for for, for, for, for customers. So that’s the idea behind it.

Lee Kantor: [00:05:00] Now at the heart of it is there’s an evolution happening in ecommerce and the way that people buy and sell things online, especially for younger folks and then especially internationally. And it’s not the way that things had been done. So you need a tool like yours to kind of be the bridge that helps people sell more effectively in today’s world. This is a leap that’s happening, this Web 3.0, right? This is a different paradigm when it comes to it may be the same activity, but it’s a different ecosystem.

Serge Kadjo: [00:05:32] Correct. You said it’s right. It’s it’s actually the same we the goal with web theory right now. To bring as much as possible person on on this and this new evolution. So it’s kind of difficult right now because it’s a it’s a new tech. There is some new world, some new way to to take it out, to consider it. And people are kind of one way. They know what it is and and they are not skeptical. And the other way they see that has a bubble. And I think that that will dissipate. What we saw with with Web two or with Internet at the beginning. So we see the same thing right now with Web three. So the idea with before to right now is to try to bring as much as as much as possible new person onward train how to do that is how has you said right now you need to make it as easy years as possible and we first we try to break that to break that that race. And we want to make it, as I said, as easy as possible for for customers, for creators, economies, and then finally for businesses. So we we are developing a tools that is first thing, first customer centric, which means that we will have no big words, no big difficult for no difficulties for people to understand how it works. And second thing, we make it also plug and play. So which means that businesses won’t have to set up the whole like secret key or just get to go get the crazy wallet or crazy I don’t know, architecture to set up the web tree. It will be just a simple link that that they can plug in, that they can add to the website that will do the whole trick for them. So that’s how we plan to do that.

Lee Kantor: [00:07:22] Well, what’s your back story? How did you get involved with this technology and this and founding this company? Can you tell us a little bit about your history?

Serge Kadjo: [00:07:31] Sure, sure. So I started like this startup journey back in 2015, and I started with the auto development. So I started doing in renewable energy. I moved from renewable energy to BCI and brain connectivity wise and then from brain connectivity device. I went to sleep tech and hence like brain activities. So that was back in 2019. I was in China etc. And then I sold the trend of of digital economy back in China. Everything is you can do literally everything with just your just your smartphone. You don’t need any paper, you don’t need any touch money. And I saw that trend with combined with the trend with with with the creative economy. And when I saw that trend out, I was like, huh, it might be good for me to to switch from my background to a software background. So I started digging into crypto and then I started working like with a fast payment system that was changed, but that was based on a blockchain architecture which was iota back then and untangle. And then I said that that was the thing with, with the whole blockchain architecture set up the whole fees list system with iota and tangle and then 2021 after COVID, I said, hey, why not merge all of this training that I got in China from digital payment from the crypto and then finally from the from the crypto market and the idea came from person.

Lee Kantor: [00:09:08] Now, can you share a little advice for folks that are getting into a new area like you are with Web three? Sometimes it’s hard to explain it because people can’t even imagine it. And it’s so new. People are kind of hesitant to get involved. But, you know, just like it was when Web two came on board, if you weren’t in it, it was hard to be good at it after a while. So you got to dabble in it a little unless you think it’s not going to do anything, which is, I think, doubtful at this point. But so how do you kind of make it comfortable for folks to take the leap and to kind of go with you on this journey to when you’re trying to have a startup, you know what I mean? Where it’s like you have this idea, you could see it clearly to you. It’s probably crystal clear. Right. And but for new people, this is a big leap. So how do you kind of go through explaining it and making it approachable for new investors or new customers?

Serge Kadjo: [00:10:05] So it depends depend on the person that I’m talking with. If I’m talking to an investor, of course I will show them the big market, live, the opportunities and where where we are going and the vision. Because most of the time when you when you when you want to start an idea or when you want to start a startup, investors are not investing in in this crazy like a market. They’re investing you because you are the startup at the beginning. So most of the time is what I would do. I would I would give my background. Forgive my ideas and then give the long term vision for investors. But for customers it’s the game is to try to explain it. As a kid, it’s like, imagine that you have a kid in front of you. The most important thing is to just to light the bulb inside of their head. That’s it. Don’t try to oversell it. Don’t try to build it to do it. Complicated. Just try to light up the bulb in the head in that case and follow it. Touch it. So take it as they get Web3 for me, the way that I explain web3 to to newbies or to people that don’t understand it, it’s like. Bogdan People don’t know Internet. Bogdan People don’t people don’t understand what is what was Internet, how it will go. But if you can just imagine that right now everybody is on Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter and and we cannot live without that if you are able to explain that idea. But in 1929, 19 or, I don’t know, 1999 or 2000 at that time, people will follow you and you will be able to light the bulb in the head. That’s it. So you so you need to think you need to find the same analogy for for free and give it and give that to new customers.

Lee Kantor: [00:11:58] Now, how did you hear about Startup Showdown in Panoramic?

Serge Kadjo: [00:12:03] Oh, when I arrived in Atlanta, I was looking for four for a nice place to work or not above working other to work for a nice community to dip my toes in the ground and see how it goes. So I landed in Atlanta Village. Then from Atlanta to village and the network of mentors, I heard about panoramic ventures and and the competition. I was like, okay, that’s that’s a that’s an interesting thing. That’s an interesting challenge. Let’s see let’s see how it goes and that that’s how we end up there.

Lee Kantor: [00:12:35] And then what did you find most beneficial going through the start of showdown process?

Serge Kadjo: [00:12:40] Oh, definitely. The the the whole mentoring process, the the idea of spending time with other folks, the fact that you you you have access to those videos, those trainings, the networking. The networking was really crucial for us because, as I said, I was a French company when we decided to move to the US when during networking and this competition and the part of and part of being members of this panoramic venture is actually boom, boom, our network. And they got like really, really good coverage.

Lee Kantor: [00:13:20] And that’s important at an early stage to be part of a really good and really strong ecosystem and community that can help lift everybody up.

Serge Kadjo: [00:13:29] Definitely. That’s a that’s one of the key. If you want to grow, if you want to grow fast and file and also go far away. So the community focus on that, focus on your customers and and finally, focus on your mentor. So that’s the three that’s the three things that I would say.

Lee Kantor: [00:13:47] Now for you personally in your journey and your career thus far, has there been any mentor or somebody that is an inspiration or somebody that’s kind of who you look up to in this?

Serge Kadjo: [00:14:00] So I would say that I have to, to, to, to, to person that that I follow most of the time or that the mentoring for first person is my mum. Of course she, she, she taught me everything that I know about business. So she started from scratch back in Africa and then she, she’d grown up step by step. So she’s my first like go to if I need advice in terms of businesses also in life. And then after her I do have other mentors in the US, in France, in Africa, in China. I have also my big community of of, of our entrepreneurs back attacks in Shenzhen actually said like number one actually how do entrepreneurs startup in the world so those big communities help me like go faster like challenged my ideas and then also gave me like a wide view of, of when I have an idea or want to have a challenge. So, yeah.

Lee Kantor: [00:15:00] So what’s next for pizza? What do you need? How can we help?

Serge Kadjo: [00:15:04] Oh, definitely. I think for person right now we are focusing on the this new platform that we call the challenge, which is the creator version of process. So process has two to vertical. We have high first, which is dedicated for businesses and then we have porcelain which is dedicated for for creator economy and web three. So we are we release our our testnet I think last week we released our testnet last week and we we are actually open. We let people at Cayman Islands create their own account connected with a social media network, bring their own token, and then have a relationship or relation and business with with, with businesses or relation in agreement with businesses, they can start selling, selling the token and then give access to their network and to their customers and followers. So we we are actually highly open. We want people to come try our business, see how it goes, give us feedback, and then start giving the tools in the web.

Lee Kantor: [00:16:12] Three and one one more time. If people want to connect with you or somebody on your team or experience person, what are the website coordinates for each of those?

Serge Kadjo: [00:16:22] Definitely. So we our our email and tag online. It’s hard for us to just go everywhere, whatever. It’s a Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, go everywhere. Just like higher higher person and our website is higher presseye.com. That’s it.

Lee Kantor: [00:16:39] And it’s very PRSA.

Serge Kadjo: [00:16:43] Correct? Yeah.

Lee Kantor: [00:16:45] Well, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing important work and we appreciate you.

Serge Kadjo: [00:16:50] Thank you so much for having me.

Lee Kantor: [00:16:52] All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you next time on Startup Showdown.

Intro: [00:16:57] As always, thanks for joining us. And don’t forget to follow and subscribe to the Startup Showdown podcast. So you get the latest episode as it drops wherever you listen to podcasts to learn more and apply to our next startup Showdown Pitch Competition Visit Showdown VC. That’s Showdown Dot VC. All right, that’s all for this week. Goodbye for now.

Paul Noble With Verusen

by

VerusenPaul NoblePaul Noble, Founder & CEO of Verusen.

His passion for entrepreneurship has always shaped my approach for go-to-market strategies and tools, which was the driving force to pursue his dream of launching his own organization to improve the availability of easy to use technology for optimizing the supply chain for materials management.

Connect with Paul on LinkedIn.

What You’ll Learn In This Episode

  • Things that are going for Verusen as they have made a home in Technology Square
  • The key challenges they are hearing from their customers in the supply chain today
  • Their view at Atlanta’s role as Supply Chain City and its impact on the rest of the world
  • Company’s expansion and look ahead at 2023

This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: [00:00:04] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Atlanta Business Radio, brought to you by on pay. Atlanta’s new standard in payroll. Now, here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:25] Lee Kantor here another episode of Atlanta Business Radio, and this is going to be a good one. But before we get started, it’s important to recognize our sponsor on pay. Without them, we couldn’t be sharing these important stories. Today on Atlanta Business Radio, we have Paul Noble with Verusen. Welcome, Paul.

Paul Noble: [00:00:42] Hey, Lee, Great to be back.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:44] Well, I am excited to get caught up. For those who don’t know, tell us a little bit about Verusen. How are you serving folks?

Paul Noble: [00:00:50] Yeah, So we work in the supply chain. We’re supply chain software company, and we focus on materials intelligence. So we help simplify all the complexities that are going on for mostly Fortune 1000 manufacturers and their suppliers so that they can trust that they have what they need, where they need it, when they need it for the perfect balance of capital and risk.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:14] Which sounds like an important job in today’s chaotic times. I guess the timing is perfect for you guys, right?

Paul Noble: [00:01:22] Yeah, it has. It has been over the last 24 to 36 months, quite a quite a roller coaster for our customers and partners and one that we’re excited that we were developing the solution prior to and have been able to do our part to help minimize the chaos as much as possible. And I think that as we continue to look ahead of what’s coming next, 12 to 24 months and beyond, there’s going to be a lot of a lot of new, new things that will be introduced as challenges and and ones that we’re excited to continue to develop and expand and grow to to help alleviate those pressures for the global supply chain.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:11] Now, for the folks who aren’t as kind of deep in the weeds as you guys are, can you share a little bit about when you talk about supply chain, can you just give us kind of a 101 explanation of what that means and and some of the complexity that you’re helping deal with?

Paul Noble: [00:02:30] Yeah. So we focus specifically in the materials space. So these are materials that organizations need to run their operations and make sure that manufacturing facilities and warehouses and things of that nature can function appropriately from an asset perspective as well as, as we’ve talked about before earlier this year, moving into. What does that mean for what do I need to build my product? So every organization is tasked with what do I need to actually build the product, where do I get it from and how do I get it there once I place an order? And so there’s a lot of variables on where you’re sourcing, how you’re sourcing, when you’re sourcing and what availability there is for those materials. What do I inventory? And there’s a lot of analysis and scenarios that need to be run there. And so it’s a challenge from organization to organization on how they wrap their arms around what what’s going on across a global supply chain that kind of goes from start to finish on getting making their products and then delivering to their customers.

Lee Kantor: [00:03:47] And then each organization has a different philosophy when it comes to how am I going to get the next step in this process? Like, am I going to have a warehouse filled with these and then I can use them when I need them? Or am I going to use kind of the transportation and logistics as my warehouse and I’ll just get it right when I need it? And do you help manage through all of that as well?

Paul Noble: [00:04:10] Yeah. Yeah. No, exactly. So there’s there’s always been this, this challenge of how do I keep as little as possible so I don’t have to buy extra warehouse space and inventory more than I need for a longer period of time than I need it or to alleviate risk. Do I boost inventories. And that that happened a lot during the pandemic because it’s been traditionally either or. What we’re trying to allow organizations to accomplish is overcome their system challenges, overcome their process challenges, and overcome the people challenges in and across in and across the organization to make sure that they can invest in what they need to fulfill production and orders and things of that nature and keep assets up and running without the uncertainty of overpaying for it and insurance policy or being left stocked out or with downtime, not producing product. So it’s a pretty challenging problem and one that by wrapping your arms around the data that’s flowing through all of these organizations and understanding it in a simpler and more scalable way, which is what we provide for our customers, helps dramatically be able to pull whatever lever you need at any given time without having to react and be a lot more predictive and proactive in that approach.

Lee Kantor: [00:05:51] And this is kind of a very fragile game of musical chairs, right? Like if if I guess wrong, I could be sitting in a warehouse full of last year’s fashion items that aren’t going to be sold, or if I play in the wrong way and the other direction, I might have all this demand that I can’t fulfill and then I’m out of business from that standpoint. So it’s it’s very fragile, the relationships, but they’re all playing together in order to be successful. And that’s why your technology is is trying to help them be as effective and efficient as possible. Right?

Paul Noble: [00:06:31] Yeah, exactly. I mean, it’s a it’s a it’s a delicate dance between what your what you’re able to control and what your suppliers control and what just the general supply of these materials, whether they’re widgets or raw materials or ingredients for something. One one little hiccup can can throw off an entire product. And I think we’ve seen that with automobiles and and other shortages for key elements that go into products. And so whatever you can do to to find where the bones are buried, so to speak, and be able to surface that intelligence out of the data so you can make more accurate decisions across procurement and operations and finance and reliability and all these folks that are working on different parts of the same problem, the better off you’ll be in terms of eliminating surprises.

Lee Kantor: [00:07:38] Now, is there an opportunity to leverage artificial intelligence in this space to really become more efficient?

Paul Noble: [00:07:47] Yeah, absolutely. That is that is how we do all of this, right? So as we’ve talked about previously and what. We don’t use A.I. or ML or any of the technology buzzwords, just just to say and we’re just to use them. I mean, they’re they enable our ability to and what you’re seeing a lot in supply chain is purpose built software products that can plug in and remove a lot of the uncertainty and heavy lifting of manual processes and start connecting and supporting people so that you can combine, combine the knowledge of the two. And so how we use it is being able to essentially use what they call natural language processing and be able to read things and tell. If I call this material, this my supplier calls it that, their supplier calls it this, but they’re really the same thing or interchangeable with one another because as a whole, people are still naming these things across systems like SAP, and it just gets. Untenable in terms of what data is flowing through, what system. So we essentially can understand that in its natural language and then drive outcomes. So these models work together so that we can drive the business outcomes that people care about and they don’t care that we use AI, but it’s important to how we deliver the business outcomes that matter.

Lee Kantor: [00:09:27] Well, I mean, communication’s difficult, you know, with people that speak the same language in the same office. Imagine how it is across cultures and countries and oceans to all get on the same page. When it comes to saying widget widget a means the same thing across all of those languages and cultures rather than I call it this, you call it that and then you think you have a lot and I don’t think you have any.

Paul Noble: [00:09:55] Right, exactly. No, we we we talk about that with our with our customers and partners that it’s everyone up into this. Up until recently, their solution is like, oh, we need to control the naming and put in rules of how we’re naming different things in an across a system and governance. And certainly that’s important. But we’ve we’ve seen over the past few decades and obviously highlighted over the last few years that that’s not a solution to the problem. It’s just it’s a bandaid, so to speak. So rather you wouldn’t necessarily tell everyone in your organization that you couldn’t say hello, you have to say hi or how whatever their language of greeting someone. So why would you do anything different and tell them you have to name this something in your system or you have to call it this or call it that. When someone’s inherently going to circumvent those rules and call it what they’d like and then make it challenging to understand what’s what, what’s where.

Lee Kantor: [00:11:00] Right. And you’re asking, that’s a big lift for everybody to get on one page rather than let’s just meet everybody where they are and let’s let the technology do the lifting.

Paul Noble: [00:11:12] Yeah, way too much change management in that scenario. And that’s what we’ve seen. And that’s why a big part of why we’re experiencing the problems that we are. It’s lack of trust, lack of uncertainty. And when we when we when it comes down to it, that’s what we provide for our customers and partners is trust that you’ll have what you need for the perfect balance of capital and risk. Now you can execute upon that intelligence.

Lee Kantor: [00:11:40] So that technology you feel is a large part. That’s what’s taking you to this new milestone over 2 billion in manage inventory.

Paul Noble: [00:11:49] Absolutely. Yeah. We keep adding to that and expanding this experience again to now outside of challenges. We are also seeing people shortages, labor shortages. And so what we’re working to do is expand on the experience for our customers where we can pass the baton to a partner to help them execute more effectively where they don’t have enough people to do it in a more traditional way with some of the things that we surface. And so by simplifying this and being able to drive value quickly and in a scalable way. We’ve continued to grow our presence in and across organizations and obviously new organizations and new partners that serve our customers in a different way adjacent. And so we’ve seen a lot of growth in terms of what we’re supporting and managing, and we’re going to continue to see that grow and double over the next year and beyond.

Lee Kantor: [00:12:57] Now, are you still seeing Atlanta playing a vital role as part of this supply chain city? I guess that initiative that we’ve been trying to brand ourselves as.

Paul Noble: [00:13:09] Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s we continue to see more and more organizations look to Atlanta for all of. All of the support from a technology and subject matter expert perspective. A great place to do business. And so we continue to see really great startups emerge in different, different parts of the supply chain, from logistics to. To procurement services and on down the line. And I think we’ve we’ve been meeting recently. I think a story you may have covered Georgia Tech was just granted with the largest grant as a part of the build back better program to invest in AI, in manufacturing projects and research, which I think is solely a testament of the great work that’s being done here in the metro Atlanta area.

Lee Kantor: [00:14:10] Now, how do you view Atlanta regarding this supply chain kind of center of influence that we’re becoming? What are some of the things you wish we had more of?

Paul Noble: [00:14:22] Yeah, well, certainly I know that there’s there is a lot of talent here. We would we would love to continue to see people relocate to the area and become part of the many businesses that use or provide services. I think there’s been a growing, growing opportunity and positive movement in capital that’s available for. Where we were a couple of years ago in terms of getting seed capital and and early stage capital for new technologies and people that want to start businesses that can help solve really big problems. I think those are a couple of things that come to mind right away.

Lee Kantor: [00:15:12] Now, when it comes to talent, is that something that you’re and everybody in this space is just really hungry for that There’s just not as many talented folks as you need right now.

Paul Noble: [00:15:27] Yeah, I think it’s one thing and one thing we look at is, I think, one. The positive of supply chain kind of being in the news is that it’s a more fun problem to work on for very talented engineers and data engineers and data scientists and a lot of folks that could do anything in any sector. Right. I think we’re seeing a lot more individuals say, well, this is this is. Time that I can invest and join a company that can really make a difference in the world. So I think that’s changed and that helps from a what remains a still a very competitive. Talent, environment, people, environment. Even with a lot of the news that you’ve seen in terms of companies downsizing, it’s still pretty competitive when you come down to some of those core technologist types of roles. And I think now it’s going to help the supply chain area to be able to. Recruit and attract that this is a fun. Problem that affects billions of people every day.

Lee Kantor: [00:16:51] But is it something that you’re seeing younger people at an earlier age consider? You know, supply chain logistics. This isn’t your grandfather’s supply chain and logistics. You know, this is a different world now. This isn’t, you know, warehouses. I mean, it has warehouses of forklifts, but those might be run by robots and there might not be a human in the building. So it’s not what it used to be. And maybe there’s kind of a perception that isn’t the reality for young people that are considering this.

Paul Noble: [00:17:21] Yeah, no, I think a great point. Things are shifting, jobs are shifting, but we see a lot more interest. We see a lot more programs that are growing in the supply chain management space as a. There’s a concentration and even majors. Right. And I think that I look back I was having a conversation with Tim Brown at Georgia Tech and I was like, I didn’t even know to go into supply chain when I was entering school and wish I could have. And I think it’s great that there’s a lot more visibility and opportunity for that to be an intentional pursuit for young adult entering undergraduate or graduate programs and entering the workforce, that that’s something they want to do. That can be a great career.

Lee Kantor: [00:18:23] Well, you recently secured your 25 million for a Series B. What is it that you need more of to kind of keep this expansion and growth going? Are you hiring right now? Is there something we could be doing to help you with How can we help you?

Paul Noble: [00:18:40] Yeah. So certainly always looking to connect with great customers and partners and it’s still a pretty uncertain and challenging environment. We’ve been able to continue to grow and serve, serve those customers with that. We are always looking for great people in it, across a lot of different functions, especially in the in the technology function here. And so if you’re interested in some of the things we’ve been talking about here today, whether you’re a practitioner, a technologist, or could potentially remove some angst and uncertainty from your day to day, we’d love to talk to you in any of those capacities. And should be should be a lot of fun moving ahead.

Lee Kantor: [00:19:30] So what’s the website? What’s the best way to get a hold of you or somebody on the team?

Paul Noble: [00:19:35] Yeah, we can. You could always reach out to via the website VeriSign dot com and we’re at VeriSign underscore I on most of the social channels. And then you can always reach out directly to me at all embarrassing dot com.

Lee Kantor: [00:19:53] And that’s VeriSign v e r u. S e cnn.com.

Paul Noble: [00:19:58] Correct.

Lee Kantor: [00:19:59] Well, Paul, thank you so much for sharing your story, doing such important work. And we appreciate you.

Paul Noble: [00:20:05] Thanks, Lee. Always great to be on and I appreciate your support.

Lee Kantor: [00:20:09] All right. This is Lee Kantor. See you all next time on Atlanta Business Radio.

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Steve Kahan With Insight Partners

by

Insight PartnersSteve Kahan-CopySteve Kahan, Marketing Expert at Insight Partners.

He has successfully helped grow seven startup companies from the early stage to going public or being sold, resulting in $5 billion in shareholder value. Steven is the author of Amazon’s best-seller, Be a Startup Superstar. Steven’s newest book is called High-Velocity Digital Marketing.

Connect with Steve on LinkedIn.

What You’ll Learn In This Episode

  • Anatomy of a $1 Billion Exit
  • The situation was on day 1 at Thycotic – where revenue was flat
  • The big bets the company made
  • The modern digital marketing strategies the company put in place – that any company can replicate
  • Easy-to-implement strategies for getting found online, providing the most critical information, and getting buyers to purchase—fast.

This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: [00:00:05] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for high velocity radio.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:15] Lee Kantor here, another episode of High Velocity Radio. And this is going to be a good one. Today on the show, we have Steve Kahan with INSIGHT Partners. Welcome, Steve.

Steve Kahan: [00:00:26] Thank you for having me, Lee.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:27] I am so excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us a little bit about Insight Partners. How are you serving folks?

Steve Kahan: [00:00:33] Yeah, So Insight Partners is one of the world’s largest venture capital companies. And I advise a number of portfolio companies on their digital marketing.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:45] And what’s your backstory? How did you get into this line of work?

Steve Kahan: [00:00:49] So I really am a 30 year veteran of startups in particular, focused in on marketing. And and really, if you if you look at my background, I’ve been blessed to have work with seven startups, all of which have successfully sold or have gone public, generating a little over 5 billion in shareholder value.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:14] So did you start out just within one startup and then that grew and then you got kind of the bug and you jump from, you know, one site exited, then you jump to another one.

Steve Kahan: [00:01:24] Yeah, that’s pretty much the story. But, you know, for me, I did not take the traditional path. And I remember when I was growing up, my father used to tell me so many times just, Hey, get your degree. Go to work for a large corporation. You work hard, they’ll take care of you and you’ll have a great career. And I remember about a year and a half in, and I was staring at this pile of claims that I was supposed to process that that day. And then looking at my bank account and wondering, how on earth will I ever get ahead? And the student loans would eat my paychecks before they ever even got a chance to hit my bank account. And so I asked an important question to myself at that point, which was, how could I earn a great living loving what I do? And so for me, I quickly realized I needed to kind of get out of working for a large corporation and get in to the startup world where there’d be very much like minded entrepreneurs. And and as you say, I got the bug and have never left.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:34] Now, when you’re working at a venture firm like you are, how do you kind of view the entrepreneur? How do you view that startup founder? Are you seeing them like, I know you’ve kind of gone through the path multiple times, but has that perception shifted when you’re looking at kind of the other side of the ledger?

Steve Kahan: [00:02:56] Yeah. So for me, it’s it’s a it’s a great question because although I now sort of work with the venture capital company, when you have 30 years of being in the trenches, of having to do the work that a lot of the entrepreneurs that I’m advising are doing, What they’re not getting, for example, is advice from a super smart, young sort of person who’s got a background in in banking or financials who who really has all the book smarts in the world but has never really done it right. And so for me, I have a great empathy with respect to what the entrepreneurs are going through. And what I try to do is, is try to utilize a lot of the experience that I have, in particular with what works and then focus in on providing advice that helps them to accelerate revenue at reasonable cost.

Lee Kantor: [00:04:01] Now, anyone, any entrepreneur that’s going the venture route, isn’t it the expectation when you go that route, it’s like a home run or a grand slam or an out, like you’re not interested in manufacturing runs and and being okay with singles as a result?

Steve Kahan: [00:04:22] Well, in terms of the investment philosophy, the organization is always looking for home runs, but they’re singles, there’s doubles and there’s triples. And I, for example, have have have hit the singles, doubles, triples and home runs as well. And so, you know, you always a every single deal that you invest in always looks like it’s going to be that home run, at least in Excel. Right. And then the real world sort of gets in the way, if you will. Right. And so so you you certainly are looking for those home runs and you try to counsel and provide great guidance. That would enable the entrepreneur to achieve that. But realistically, that’s not the case all the time, even though you’re shooting for it for sure.

Lee Kantor: [00:05:15] Now, with your lens as a marketer, do you see companies differently? Like are you able to advise folks maybe that have an idea that is are generating singles and you can, with your marketing skill, move them up to a double, triple home run?

Steve Kahan: [00:05:33] Yeah, 100%. I mean, what I find is that there was an interesting study that I recently read where 83% of the CEOs expect their marketing to drive most of their companies growth. And yet the Harvard Business Review said roughly 80% of CEOs are dissatisfied with their marketing results. And and so what you find is, is that there’s a lot of sales and marketing leaders who feel a little bit overwhelmed by revenue expectations they can’t meet. And part of at least the advice that I give is that the way people buy now has totally changed. Right. And so there’s a lot of organizations that interestingly hasn’t kept up with that. And a great example is if you think about it, just think about it in your own life, right? If you’re going to go buy a car, you probably are not looking forward to going to ten different dealerships and working with sales reps at those ten dealerships. Again, nothing, nothing against those those reps. But what you’re doing is you’re going to be searching online. You’re going to go do some Google searches. You’re going to understand the various options that you have. You might build your own car, you’re going to read reviews. You’ll probably even know what the pricing is and what it should be. Right. And that’s the way people are buying now. And so when you think of that, that a lot of organizations haven’t adopted an approach that enables them to grow revenue, given the fact that their buyers are now relying on digital content to make their purchase decisions.

Lee Kantor: [00:07:27] And that’s a major shift because historically the salesperson was kind of the gatekeeper of the information and now the consumer has the information at their fingertips and then the salesperson has to really just be the Sherpa that’s guiding them through the the buying decision that makes sense for them.

Steve Kahan: [00:07:49] That’s right. And what it means in in just very specific terms is that there’s a new level of information parity during the buying process that has totally changed how marketers have to interact with potential buyers to influence them towards their product and services. And so the bottom line is, is you’ve got to be great online, right? And if you want to consistently grow revenue, you have to be able to do it by delivering great content in an environment where people are going to scan quickly to quickly, then make a decision whether or not they’re going to read on. Right. And so you’ve got seconds, right? And so being great in that environment is is is not easy. But but but I’ve been able to do it. I’ve been able to crack that code. And and that’s a lot of the advice that I also try to provide the organizations that I work with.

Lee Kantor: [00:08:54] But isn’t it I mean, that tactic of being brief but high quality information, enticing, compelling that works, I would think, for the person maybe at the beginning of their journey. But when they’re ready to make that actual buying decision, don’t they want to go deep and really validate their instinct?

Steve Kahan: [00:09:16] Yes. And Right. And so so what that means in in practical terms is that you’ve got to be able to understand and deliver content across the full spectrum of the buyer’s journey. Right. So when they’re educating themselves at the top, when they’re considering different solutions, when they might actually go just refine their search forward and start to look at a specific solution or a specific couple of vendors to to evaluate all the way through the purchase. And you’ve got to be able to connect with them across all of those stages. And if you don’t have great content across the full spectrum of the buyer’s journey, that will zap the. Velocity out of any high velocity digital marketing strategy.

Lee Kantor: [00:10:10] Now, how important is it in this journey, like especially in startups where you don’t have buyers yet? Maybe you have an idea. How do you kind of get actionable information when you don’t have kind of a baked solution yet?

Steve Kahan: [00:10:27] Well, the way that I would advise people to to look at that is that they’ve got to really understand the status quo. Right? And so the status quo represents the current situation, how the buyer is serving their their needs now. And and this really matters in the scenario that you outlined, because you often don’t lose business to a competitor, you lose it to the status quo. Right. And so oftentimes you’ll hear someone say, gee, we’re just not interested or I’m not interested because what I’ve got is good enough, Right? And so so you’ve got to ask potential buyers about the status quo, have them to describe, for example, their current process for for what they’re doing today, what their operations are, how they and their team stay on top of the challenge, how they don’t get overwhelmed by it. What are some of the tools and products that they use today? What are they like about them? What don’t they like? Right. And so by understanding that status quo and communicating very specifically against it, it enables you to tackle that problem head on.

Lee Kantor: [00:11:52] Now, I think that you brought up a very important point here in terms of learning how to position your product or service, how to speak the language of your prospective customer. You have to really have conversations, human to human conversations, and understand the language they’re using, the search terms, they’re using the the outcomes they’re desiring. You have to really get to know them. And a lot of founders, at least the ones I’ve spoke to, they have an ego maybe, or a point of view that they understand and they really can develop personas, but they don’t really have the data to validate those personas that makes sense in their head. And then you can’t not have conversations with people who are buyers and or potential buyers. That’s where the rubber hits the road. That’s where you’re going to get that edge to create that high velocity result you’re talking about.

Steve Kahan: [00:12:57] Yeah, you’re absolutely right. I mean, what you’ve got to be able to do is you’ve got to understand the entire context of the buyer’s world and and you’ve got to regularly talk with customers and then beyond. Just that is that if you look at a lot of the organizations that actually do talk with customers is that they they ask them questions that just so happens to align with the solution that they sell. So they’re almost leading them towards the solution because that that’s what they want to hear. And so you’ve got to ask certain questions in which you don’t do that, and then you’ve got to pay very close attention to the specific language that those potential customers use. Because then in your content, in your ads, you want to reflect that language back at them. Because one of the major marketing fallacies is that like, gee, if we could just be super creative, that that’s going to really help us to to stand out and win. And the truth is, is that the buyers don’t care how clever your marketing department is. They want to work with people who understand and empathize with them, and speaking their language proves that you do exactly that.

Lee Kantor: [00:14:22] Yeah, I remember when I was in school, one of the lessons they taught I have a degree in advertising was it’s not creative unless it sells and a lot of marketers get hung up with the creative part and not the selling part.

Steve Kahan: [00:14:36] Yeah, absolutely right. And then when you’re asking those questions, then you’re starting to get a better sense of also what people are Googling for. Now, you can get a lot of the stats of what the what the search numbers are on specific terms, but really understanding that, I mean, you’ve got to be great on Google, right? And so that’s whenever someone’s going to buy something today there, they’re there oftentimes. Going to Google, Right. And and and being great on Google is a key in this environment in order to sustain growth.

Lee Kantor: [00:15:14] Now let’s share some advice, maybe for a couple of different people. Let’s start out with the the new startup founder. Maybe there that person that had a corporate job and is thinking, you know what, I’m going to take this plunge and I’m going to pursue startups as maybe a pivot in my career. Any advice for that person that’s going from a corporate background into the startup world? What are some do’s and don’ts for that individual?

Steve Kahan: [00:15:40] Yeah, so the way that first of all, I, I think of startups, right? So I never founded my own company. I always went to companies at least had some sort of revenue that were taxed to them. Right. And so what I look for and what I try to always find is that a lot of the entrepreneurs out there, they have good stories, right? But what you’re looking for is a situation in which there’s both a good story as well as a good chance for success. So what I look for first and foremost are quality people that share my values, right? And so if you can’t respect, trust and admire the people involved, move on and look for others, that that sort of rock your world have complementary skill sets. I look for a concept that fills a big market need in which that market need is a must solve problem. Right? And so it’s why I’ve sort of gravitated mostly towards cybersecurity. And I don’t worry if there is competition, I worry if there’s not competition. I look for a great product that I believe in, one in which that I would want to purchase or recommend myself. Right? And that I could go to work every day for with a passion for what that company creates and my role in creating it. And then I also look for that the startup is is funded well enough, right? You don’t want to choose a startup that doesn’t have a long enough runway to get off the ground, right? So you want to check to see that the company is properly funded and capitalize. You have the best chance for growth and stability. I found that if you look at those core attributes when you’re evaluating companies, odds are that you’ll be selecting a company that has the potential to win big.

Lee Kantor: [00:17:41] Now, I know a lot of your background and work is in the startup world. Does your in your latest book, High Velocity Digital Marketing, does any of that pertain to maybe that individual that’s in professional services that they’re that they themselves are marketers or they themselves are an accountant or a doctor? Do do those same strategies work in like kind of a B to B consultant world?

Steve Kahan: [00:18:09] Absolutely right. And so, you know, like if you look at even just understanding your ideal target buyer, right, in in great ways, I mean, when I started at the last company I was at where we went from 5 million to 145 million in five years and exited for 1.4 billion. When I joined on day one, I asked the founders and the management who the customer was, and they said it was it was cybersecurity company, right? And they said that our our, our, our customers are the chief information security officers. Right. And so they were like, Steve, you should know that this is we’re we’re cybersecurity company And I started to interview the the customers. And what I found was it wasn’t the the people responsible for i.t security at all. It was actually i.t admins. It was the techies in the trenches. Right. And so in many ways those are the folks who are never going to read an analyst report. They want stuff fast. Easy, right? They they aware in many hats. They’re going to read reviews. They’re going to hang out online in certain places where the the i.t. Security people who are creating policy or worried about regulatory compliance are are not right. And so when you think of companies of all sizes, no matter what your role, there are very fundamental things in this case. This established company didn’t even know who its ideal buyer was right and so that that lesson of of focusing on your ideal target buyer for example, is is something that a lot of people in organizations across different roles oftentimes take for granted. And as a result, when their marketing digitally their marketing in the wrong places and they wonder why they’re not getting the return that they expected.

Lee Kantor: [00:20:14] But in your example, not only were they looking in the wrong places, they were dismissing your question like they were. So they were so confident that they knew it didn’t even occur to them to look somewhere else.

Steve Kahan: [00:20:30] Yeah, absolutely. I mean, and then it plays out, right? And so, like, if you think about it, we wanted to launch a podcast. And so the last thing I wanted to do was to launch a podcast that, like, nobody’s listening to. So knowing that our target customer were these IT admins, I went to partner with an organization that was the leading provider of training to I.T admins and they did some podcast. I offered up a partnership with a cybersecurity podcast and because we tapped into that huge customer base that they had literally within weeks we had one of the largest cybersecurity podcasts around the globe. Right? But that all emanated from knowing who we were going after and then being, I guess, sort of entrepreneurial enough to say, Gee, who can we partner with where at very little cost, we could have a huge podcast and do it at Lightspeed.

Lee Kantor: [00:21:36] Yeah. So I mean, it’s a great lesson for people out there. And again, it’s you’ve got to get out of your office and talk to the real buyers, not just assume you know, because even if what you thought was true when you started may not be true today.

Steve Kahan: [00:21:53] Yeah, for sure. I mean, and those needs change, right? Markets evolve, competitors evolve. I remember we were taking a position around simplicity, ease of use, right? Because it aligned with what our buyers wanted and it really started to work. And so our £800 gorilla competitor that actually had a complex product started messaging all around simplicity. So I got online and I started Googling for their documentation, their products documentation, and ours was about 30 pages. And I found that their product documentation was over 1500 pages long, and I compared their documentation to the fifth largest novel ever written in human history and trained our sales and partners on that. And, and literally their attempt at matching our messaging ended and, and it never recovered for them.

Lee Kantor: [00:22:59] Good stuff. Well, for you, what? Could we be doing more for you? What do you need more of? How can we help you?

Steve Kahan: [00:23:07] Well, really, I’m more about helping others. Right. And so what would help me is, is that I just wrote a new book called High Velocity Digital Marketing. It’s really focused on the digital marketing strategies that we’re talking a little bit about here. And it’s very much a how to, by the way, where people could implement what they learn literally that same day. And so I guess if it provides value, what would help me is that I get gratification at at least at this point in my career is is just hearing back from others that they tried some things that that that worked or any feedback that they might have that that would be most helpful for me would be just helping others succeed.

Lee Kantor: [00:23:56] Now, in this book, it’s very tactical. And is is this something that you have to have a big budget in order to leverage digital marketing? Or are there ways, like you mentioned, partnering and doing things with others that may be you can do it in a more affordable rate?

Steve Kahan: [00:24:12] Yeah, I mean, that’s what it’s all about, right? I mean, I mean, another example is, is that which I, I go into detail, but like we talked just a little bit about being great on Google and you could pay super expensive SEO consultants or read 500 page books and your head will be spinning. Right? And so what we did is we identified our coveted keywords, right? These were the ones that people were searching on whenever we created content, whether it was web content or or other types of content, we would have our SEO expert meet with that content creator, make sure we were covering the appropriate keywords. They would meet again at the end of the project to make sure that they were incorporated, and then we would expose the content so that Google could scan it right? And just simply that process, as well as creating content that our partners love, which gave us a lot of backlinks, enable us to punch far above our weight. And so that just implementing a process like that and I go into other things as well, can really help any listener and their company to become great on Google.

Lee Kantor: [00:25:29] Well, if somebody wants to get a hold of the book or connect with you and your team, what is the way to do that?

Steve Kahan: [00:25:35] Well, my book, High Velocity Digital Marketing, is available wherever you would buy books online like Amazon and I could be connected with at Be a Startup Superstar.

Lee Kantor: [00:25:49] All right, Steve, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing such important work and we appreciate you.

Steve Kahan: [00:25:54] Well, thank you for having me. Lee. It is my pleasure.

Lee Kantor: [00:25:57] All right. This is Lee Kantor. Until next time on high velocity radio.

Simon Severino With Strategy Sprints GmbH

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Strategy SprintsSimon SeverinoSimon Severino helps business owners in SaaS and Services run their companies more effectively which results in sales that soar. Trusted by Google, Roche, Consilience Ventures, Amgen, and AbbVie.

He created the Strategy Sprints™ Method that doubles revenue in 90 days by getting owners out of the weeds. He is a TEDx speaker, Contributor to Forbes and Entrepreneur Magazine, and member of the SVBS Silicon Valley Blockchain Society.

Connect with Simon on LinkedIn and follow Strategy Sprints on Facebook and Twitter.

What You’ll Learn In This Episode

  • Shortening the path to ‘wow’.
  • “Strategy Sprints”
  • 3 CEO habits
  • Walkthrough process with new clients

This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: [00:00:04] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for high velocity radio.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:14] Lee Kantor here, another episode of High Velocity Radio. And this is going to be a good one. Today on the show, we have Simon Severino with Strategy Sprints. Welcome, Simon.

Simon Severino: [00:00:26] Hey, everybody. Happy to talk. High velocity and sprints goes well together.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:30] There you go. Well, before we get too far into things, tell us about strategy sprints. How are you serving folks?

Simon Severino: [00:00:37] We coach people to have better sales and marketing and to run their business in a way that is more conducive to a good life rather than just a great business. So basically we want to have them feel great now while they are scaling their business versus feel great. If insert your if here, if I sell, if this happens, if that happens because it never happens. But what really happens is right now the process of exploring, of building and of scaling, and we are the coaches who help do that with more fun, with more grace.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:17] Now, do you have a niche that you serve? I mean, being an entrepreneur or a small business person that covers a lot of ground, do you work in certain areas?

Simon Severino: [00:01:26] We work only with B2B businesses, mainly agencies, consultancies and B2B software.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:34] And then what’s your back story? How did you get involved in this line of work?

Simon Severino: [00:01:39] So I started 21 years ago in a global consultancy where I would do this work for the big brands across the globe. On Monday I was in New York. On Thursday I was in Paris and on on Saturday I was in Shanghai doing it for different teams. The question was always the same question How do we enter a market? How do we crush it in the market and how do we stay in the market? How do we stay competitive? How do we stay relevant? And those questions are still around here. If you run a business right now, whatever the business is, you are asking yourself, what’s the right thing to do For me to stay in the market, to crush it in the market, to stay relevant, to stay competitive? What do I need to change? What do I need to keep? Or just being doing more? What do I need to do less? These are the questions that we get asked every day.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:38] Now, when a client comes to you, are they typically experiencing a certain type of frustration or are they at a plateau or are they losing business or are they just kind of getting burnt out? What is kind of the reason that they reach out to you?

Simon Severino: [00:02:53] Typical reason is they feel like they have hit a plateau. If they just do more, it doesn’t bring more results. It would just burn them out. So their current situation is. Every project starts from scratch like every client. They cannot reuse current modules. They are restarting every client project from from scratch, which means there is a lot of manual activities. It’s a ton of input from their side and the business is dependent on them. So they feel like if they go for a four weeks vacation, they would have guilt feelings and sneak sneak away from the beach to have a phone call. That’s usually the situation when they come to us.

Lee Kantor: [00:03:45] Now, when they’re working with you, is there a typical process you go through for every client? Do you kind of walk through? They have to do some pre homework before they start working with you or do you just start listening to them and then just kind of coming up with a plan to help them solve whatever problem they have and help them reach whatever outcome they desire?

Simon Severino: [00:04:11] Yes, we just start listening. There is no pre work. The only pre requisite is that you want to scale the business because our goal will be to double revenue in 90 days. And so this will be the most intense project for your next 90 days. In the first month we will work on simplifying your offer, packaging the offer better, having it convert more. So it will be an offer as simple as VW revenue in 90 days. If you can say it that quickly, that simply then it’s highly referable. People can get out and refer to you, People can become your affiliate partners. And so the first part is to simplify it in a way that it actually gets across. The second part. Is to increase by 25% the sales time. So to shorten the time from awareness to closing by 25%. Many people take six months, eight months, ten months to close a deal, to close a new client. And so we will reduce that to 2 to 3 weeks using our templates and swipe copies. The second part is we will reduce the increase the conversion rate by 25%. Conversion rate is you are talking to ten people per week, you are closing five, then you have a 50% conversion rate. Now we will increase that rate because it’s usually below 50 and we want to have it around 50%. So we will increase that by 25%. And the third thing is increasing the price for the offer that you are currently selling by 25%, by de-risking the decision for the client and by improving the positioning and what it is compared to with compared to. And so when you increase those three things by 25%, which is what the strategy is Prince method is all about, then you have increased revenue by 99%.

Simon Severino: [00:06:24] Now you have almost doubled revenue and you have more cash flow, which means that the team is more relaxed and you are now more in grace and in in in a calm, productive state which will now be felt by your clients as being much more fun to work with. So you will lose less clients and they will refer much more to you. But this is what we do in the first month. Simplifying things, just finding what’s currently working for you, doing doing that more and doing less of everything else. So the team will have much less activities because they have now only one main offer and we are improving each part of that offer every week. And then the second part is increasing those three key strategies, 25% more conversion rate, 25% faster, saves time and 25% more dollars for the same offer, which increases cash flow. And then the third month is writing all that down in form of processes so that it’s less people dependent. Now it’s a machine that’s working. And when we write down the processes, which we call SOP, standard operating procedures, now you can hire people, you can change people, people can get six or go go on vacation. But the whole system is still resilient, is adaptive, is capable of having self correction and self-healing properties, which you want to have, especially in these times, in this very volatile times, you have a system that can cope, self-heal, self-correct, self decide, and now it’s less dependent on on people.

Lee Kantor: [00:08:26] Now is that your consultancy? So it’s a 90 day sprint. That’s what people are buying from you. Or is it something that okay, once we’ve tackled one line of business, now we do it again for a different one and we just keep it going from there? Or is that kind of the end of your time with them that all it takes is 90 days to kind of solve their problem and get them on the right track?

Simon Severino: [00:08:51] Yeah, most clients just book one sprint for 90 days and that optimizes one main offer for them and they don’t need more. Then they have a more simple business which is converting more. They have now more life. They have systems that work that’s fine for them and and some then pick a second sprint. So they say, All right, I have now one offer that’s working like a machine. Now, can I stack a second offer on top of that? And so of course, when you have optimized one, you could now start a second one. This is how you create multiple revenue streams stacked upon each other. And so, yes, some do a second sprint, but you actually don’t need many. It’s enough. If you do one, you have one systemized business and then you can enjoy your life because that business is enough to create, you know, to feed multiple families. And so for most people, that’s enough.

Lee Kantor: [00:09:56] Can you share a story? You don’t have to name in the name of the client, but just talk us through the challenge that they had and how you were able to inject your system into their world and get them to a new level.

Simon Severino: [00:10:08] Sure. So Sonny Abdul-Jabbar in Los Angeles, he’s printed and he’s a consultant. He runs an attack consultancy. So everything that you need, he is the guy that you would call if you are in Los Angeles and say, Sonny, I need developers. I have this tech problem. Can you solve this tech problem? And he’s the most networked guy and he would find it. Now, the problem was that he was offering many different things. Like most service businesses, they start offering they they get asked for multiple things and they say yes. And then quite quickly, you have 17 different offers in 17 different projects. So what happens is that your profitability goes down and you are working a lot for. Not much more net profit. So he felt that just doing more of that will not be conducive to growth. And so he sprinted. And his goal was to to simplify and to systemize the business. So all of those different things that he was offering, we asked him if you could only pick one Sunny, which is the most profitable of all these offers. He picked one. It was. Just consulting on blockchain related topics. So of all the possible technological challenges, he picked blockchain technology and then we said, Alright, who is of all your last 50 clients? Which one is the ideal client? And he picked one.

Simon Severino: [00:12:00] And then we designed the flow of his things to be around that main offer for exactly that kind of people that he wanted to serve. And we simplified everything else. He started a weekly lengthy newsletter, which was called The Three Things Blockchain You Need to Know this Week. Very simple, but very coherent. And so the whole brand was now very simple, very coherent, very easy to tell what they stand for. They are the blockchain guys. You have any technical blockchain question, Those are your people. And so sales went through the roof. He wrote us then a wonderful client testimonial, which is on our website, and it says, In this strategy, Sprint, my sales went through the roof. And it was just in the first month just simplifying and then in the second and third month systematizing and scaling. That was basically the work for him. And that’s a very typical sprint, a typical situation for agencies, consultancies that they. They’re doing too much and they’re offering too much.

Lee Kantor: [00:13:13] Now, it seems to me at the heart of this is being clear on your offer and what is going to be the offer that resonates with that ideal client as part of your system. Are you doing any interviewing of their ideal client to really understand what it is that they need and what it is they’re getting from this your client like? How important is that understanding of the real motivations of the of the client’s client in order to come up with that simplified offer that resonates.

Simon Severino: [00:13:52] Great question. Yes, it’s very important. And yes, there are also interviews. So we have 274 blueprints and templates ready for our clients. And some of them are interviews. We have even three types of interviews and we have the whole slab copy is exactly what they ask, how long the interview goes, how many people they need to interview, and there are many variations of doing it yourself. And then there are delegated versions where your team interviews them, and then there are even fully automated versions where just emails ask them these questions. And yes, these are three of our 274 blueprints. Plug and play ready are very important because you really need to use their words. So we then use the words that we collect in these interviews on the website, on the email subject line. So this is the masterclass of marketing when you use the exact words that your clients use. Because, you know, you can you can use your technical words, but that’s not how they think. You have to use the words that they use. That will increase your or your Google ranking, that will increase the resonance and the they will feel understood when you use their words, literally their words. Then they will say, Oh, yeah, that’s me. He gets me. Oh, yeah. Click.

Lee Kantor: [00:15:29] So is that a mistake you see firms making is they’re not really empathizing enough with their client. They’re kind of just talking in the language that they understand about their service and product and not through the lens of how the buyer buys, but rather how they’re selling.

Simon Severino: [00:15:52] Totally. Yes. And we are all doing this in different degrees. But if you go to your website right now, whoever you are listening to this, think of your current website. What are the first words? What are the first 10 seconds that I experience? Are you talking my language? Are you talking the language of the user who is there for the first time? Are you talking to them like you would talk to a stranger visiting your place for the first time? Or are you talking from your perspective? And so most of our websites, if we are honest, we are talking from our perspective, Hey, this is who we are. This is what we can do for you. We don’t start with, Hey, this is who you are. I see you. I know how it feels. I know that you have this problem, this problem, and that this feels hard. You know what? Those three people also have this problem. Look what we did with them. Can we do it with you? Find out. That would be a good flow for for a website. For example, if this happens in the first 10 seconds, that’s a good website and you can check our strategies please dot com. We always try to have that flow optimized and it’s converting quite well. But most, most websites are just talking features. They are talking from their perspective. We are engineers. We have built great features. Okay. But I don’t know how you’re talking to me or to something else. Is this built for small businesses or for big businesses? We are not connected yet, so I’m not interested in your features. Do you see me? That’s what I want to know in the beginning. And are you talking to me now?

Lee Kantor: [00:17:40] Especially for your professional services clients. Is it something that you need to have? Like you have a book. You have a lot of thought leadership on your website. Are those kind of must haves? In today’s day and age, when it comes to selling this type of knowledge? Or is that a nice to have?

Simon Severino: [00:18:02] That’s a good question. And it’s different for everybody listening right now. I don’t think anybody needs anything. I think you can run a great business without a website, actually. Probably the core component are an email list. Good operations, meaning that you actually deliver value around to vitals. You either help them decrease costs or you help them save time, or you help them increase sales. Time and money are two vital things. If you have some operations, some core core delivery, that really helps them with either time or money. I think that’s a must. And the second is that you really care about that, that you really want to go deeper, understand them, make them win, because they will feel it. These two, I think, are a must. And then that you really show up, that you really consistently show up for them, are there for them, and are interested in evolving and are interested in their feedback because you will implement that feedback. So this is the must. Something else is a nice to have.

Lee Kantor: [00:19:26] What? What do you need more? How can we help you? Do you need more entrepreneurs to go through the system? Do you need more business coaches to get certified in your system? What? What are the things we could be doing to help you?

Simon Severino: [00:19:42] I need as many people as possible to grab the book because they they can navigate the next months much better if they have our proven processes and they are in the book. The book is strategist Prince Dotcom and they can grab it on Amazon.

Lee Kantor: [00:20:01] So the book is the first step in kind of connecting with you and your team. If you go through the book, you learn, implement some of that stuff. It’ll improve your business and it might make you ready to invest in a more substantive relationship with your team and or maybe join and partner with you.

Simon Severino: [00:20:22] Yeah, most people cannot afford a 1 to 1 sprint coach, but the book is a great starting point and many checklists, many blueprints are in there and they can go very far just by implementing what’s what’s in the book. And it’s step by step. Every chapter is exactly very practical. So most people will get most value just by doing what’s in the book strategy sprints. And then some of them might say, All right, I came so far and I want to go even farther, and they will call us. They will then go to strategy sprints dot com and have a call with us.

Lee Kantor: [00:20:59] And are those 274 templates in the book or some of them?

Simon Severino: [00:21:04] Yes, like 35 of them are in there.

Lee Kantor: [00:21:07] Okay. So it gives you a good feel for your methodology.

Simon Severino: [00:21:11] Totally. Yes. And it can probably help them save a ton of time because they can now focus on what they are best at and and don’t have to think about the process of how to do marketing, how to do sales, how to do client onboarding, because that’s in the book and they just focus on what they are great at.

Lee Kantor: [00:21:34] Well, Simon, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing such important work and we appreciate you.

Simon Severino: [00:21:42] Thank you. Keep rolling, everybody.

Lee Kantor: [00:21:44] All right. And that’s strategy sprints with an ESPN.com. All right, This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on high velocity radio.

Kevin Song With withco

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withcoKevin SongKevin Song is withco’s Founder & CEO. Driven by the experience of his family’s Brooklyn grocery store being displaced, Kevin started withco to make it exciting to be a small business owner in America again.

He’s spent his career investing in, managing, and advising over 50 companies and has deployed over $1B of equity capital.

Kevin graduated from Cornell University with a degree in Economics and was a Forbes 30 under 30 recipient for Social Entrepreneurship.

Connect with Kevin on LinkedIn and follow withco on Facebook and Twitter.

What You’ll Learn In This Episode

  • Kevin’s story and how he came to found withco
  • How withco helps small business owners
  • The state of small business real estate
  • Broad economic trends that impact small businesses

This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: [00:00:04] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Atlanta Business Radio, brought to you by on Pay Atlanta’s new standard in payroll. Now, here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:24] Lee Kantor here another episode of Atlanta Business Radio. And this is going to be a good one. But before we get started, it’s important to recognize our sponsor on pay. Without them, we couldn’t be sharing these important stories. Today on the Atlanta Business Radio we have Kevin song with withco. Welcome, Kevin. I am doing well I am so excited to learn about your company. Tell us about withco how are you serving folks.

Kevin Song: [00:00:51] Yeah definitely so withco we are an acquisition firm that helps small business owners become commercial property owners all across the United States. We do that through our financial product called Lease to own. We think that mortgages are pretty unattainable for most small business owners. We think leases are not a good option, especially for the best best business owners. And so we’ve created this third option that really helps small business owners turn into really fantastic owners of properties and in that hopefully help them build generational wealth versus get to this place.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:30] Now, when you’re saying small business, how are you defining small? I mean, the government has one definition and a lot of small business owners have another.

Kevin Song: [00:01:39] Yeah, definitely. So I think from a very baseline perspective, we do use the Small Business Administration’s guidance on what defines a small business, but it comes in all shapes and sizes. And so we look at everything from doctors and dentists to people starting up retail concepts to people who are in the concrete polishing business. So of course your local restaurants and neighborhood services.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:06] So then the property you’re looking there, you’re talking about, it could be, like you said, kind of a mom and pop small salon that’s a standalone building to a larger office building.

Kevin Song: [00:02:20] Yeah, that’s right. It could be mom and Pops who want to buy a single location and have a very permanent relationship with that community. It could be an entrepreneur who is looking to scale a concept from one to many locations, and it could be anything sort of in between.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:40] So what’s your back story? How did you get involved in this line of work?

Kevin Song: [00:02:45] Yeah. So I started the company in 2019, actually. Quite a little bit of a personal story. My family had a grocery store in Brooklyn for about two decades. Mom and dad, good people ran that thing. Blood, sweat and tears. That a lot of good things for the community. I think that was just a part of running a good local business. And yeah, long story short, we got a phone call from a big developer who decided to raise our rents, and so we lost that business three weeks and we actually lost our home after a few months. And I was 11 when this was happening. And so really trying to understand why the heck this was happening in the first place. But the question that I asked then and still sits with me to this day and I sort of become the kernel to start with CO was why being really successful and creating a lot of value in that community actually ended up leading to our own demise. That question of why are there really good, fantastic entrepreneurs and families across America who effectively displaced themselves by being really successful? That became the real genesis to start the company.

Lee Kantor: [00:04:00] So ironically, the more value that your folks were providing the community, the more valuable that property became. And that ultimately led to them being kind of removed from their the neighborhood that they built and served.

Kevin Song: [00:04:16] Yeah, exactly. It’s it’s like the greatest irony of them all. It’s the fact that we built the system that, you know, kind of markets itself as rewarding hard work and success. But through that hard work and success, you actually end up destroying a lot of the value that you created. I don’t think that’s an America that we’re really proud of. And I think when something like displacement actually happens, it’s this sort of identity crisis that we face, that the reality of our situation actually is not congruent with the identity that we have. And so that instance not only happens on a small local corner in Brooklyn, but it’s happening more systemically across the country. And one of the reasons that we’re in Atlanta and we’re in Georgia in general is because we think this is going to be one of the next sort of epicenters where so many people are moving there, so much, so much is changing. And that’s in no small part because of the fantastic local entrepreneurship that exists and the great local businesses. And so we want to support as many fantastic entrepreneurs as we can to sort of ride the wave that they’ve actually created.

Lee Kantor: [00:05:38] Now, what percentage of small businesses own their own property? Is it just a super small number?

Kevin Song: [00:05:47] Yeah, literally. Raz 0%. It is one of these weird sort of instances where it’s mostly these sort of like mom and pop landlords that actually work and sell and invest into these properties. And I think in that it’s really, really easy to sort of understand why some of these bigger sort of issues exist in the first place. Know, we think the issue isn’t that like a local landlord is making a practical decision for their family on who to work with and why. It’s really that the system has been put in place where a small local business, you know, we use coffee shop, you know, doesn’t really stand a chance against like a Starbucks when, you know, you’re competing on price and kind of rents and all of that sort of stuff that actually are important decisions. And so, yeah, there’s there’s a lot of sort of systemic sort of thinking that we do because ultimately it drives to a conclusion and that again, like I don’t think any of us are really, really proud of.

Lee Kantor: [00:07:03] And it’s one of those things I don’t think people realize that a lot of larger franchises or businesses that have stores around there really real estate plays more than they are business plays, or that business is just a part of what the what the real business is.

Kevin Song: [00:07:24] Oh, yeah. I mean, we know some well known entrepreneurs who, you know, for example, in New York City have told us that they’ve made more money on selling or owning their real estate than they’ve had on selling millions of pastrami sandwiches, creating sort of a different method or way for small business owners who are truly putting their blood, sweat and tears into creating a great operation and letting them get on sort of this path to a different type of wealth creation is something that makes us proud to come to work every day. And I think we’ll hopefully be the foundation to to change a lot of the way that even America thinks about small business. We think it should be this career path that’s accessible and exciting and wealth creating and not perceived to be this thing that’s very risky or very passion driven exclusively. It should be a really good decision for your family. And we think real estate ownership is just just the start of that path for great business owners in America.

Lee Kantor: [00:08:39] It’s funny that you bring up the delis in New York. Most of the kind of name brand delis aren’t there anymore because of this.

Kevin Song: [00:08:48] Yeah, that’s right. But, you know, 305, this house is curated. Katz’s Deli is going strong. They’ve been there for over 100 years and I don’t think they’re going anywhere. And I think it’s in no small part because they own 250,000 ST.

Lee Kantor: [00:09:02] Right, they own the building, so therefore their future is kind of safe.

Kevin Song: [00:09:08] Yeah. And again, it’s this sort of like weird platform risk that exists that is like great irony that we’ve set up for ourselves where business owners work really hard to make their business and therefore their place extremely valuable. Yet aren’t the ones that actually get to cash out on that value. And it comes from the fact that mortgages and ownership are highly inaccessible for most business owners. You know, they cannot save a down payment because it’s an impossible amount of money. They also do not know how to buy commercial real estate and for good reason. It’s a very esoteric product. And, you know, unlike even buying a home, which has been very, very consumer ized and educated and government supported small businesses, no one knows really how to buy commercial real estate except for a handful of companies and people. And, you know, again, on the other side of the lease is just this product that is so counterproductive. You end up you know, if you do really well, you end up raising your own rents or having someone pay more for the space that you and the neighborhood that you’ve created, most likely a big business or you have a big developer or someone else who has a genuine higher use of that space come in. And so we’re sort of in the business of trying to serve small business owners to sort of have as many options as they can to to build wealth. And one of those main pathways and sort of the foundational layer we think for businesses that occupy space is just to make sure the relationship with that space is not only secure and that you have control over it, but that it’s something that is an extremely good return on your investment because you’re probably not only operating a great business, you’re probably spending a lot of money to make that space wonderful, and you’re also doing a lot of great things for that neighborhood.

Lee Kantor: [00:11:15] So how does it work? How do I know if my business is the right business to take advantage of this opportunity? How does the whole process work?

Kevin Song: [00:11:26] Yeah, sometimes we’ll find you, but we welcome people to come find us any day of the week you go to with Darko, you can learn a lot about how we work and what we’re doing. On that. You’ll sort of tell us what your situation is. Maybe you’re in an existing space that you love and it’s the one for you, and you want us to help you buy that specific building. Maybe you’re coming at the end of a lease term and you want to move and look for a space that’s bigger, smaller, exactly the same. Or maybe you want to grow. Maybe you have a few or one really successful location. Your landlord is never going to sell it to you, but you want to open up your second or seventh or 15th location of a business and we can help you with that too. Once you sort of come to with Echo and go through that onboarding process, you’ll get sort of white glove treatment from our team to really help you kind of understand near how to invest in real estate with your business. We want to make it as easy and informative and we want to create options for you as much as possible. And so by uploading your information and telling us what you’re looking for, giving us your lease and letting us really understand your purchasing power, we can be extremely consultative in trying to create as many options for you as we possibly can.

Lee Kantor: [00:12:58] So say hypothetically, I have a I’m a doctor, you know, it’s my own practice. I’ve been, you know, leasing in this space for a period of time. I make, you know, X number of dollars a year. You see how much I’m paying in rent? The lease is coming to an end. You know, my size is okay, maybe I could always go bigger. I come to your website, I fill out some forms, I have a conversation, and you are going to take that data and then say, Hey, you know what? Down the street, here’s a building that might be appropriate and you help me move or help me acquire it. How? How does it work?

Kevin Song: [00:13:41] Yeah, we’ll be we’ll be fully turnkey, fully consultative to you. So it could be a like this space that I’m in, my lease is expiring and, you know, my landlord has asked me, do I want to buy the building in which you like the building, in which case we will help you price that building, make an offer, run the entire due diligence process for you, and basically give you back the key. So you’re now on a lease to own agreement with us Every year that you pay rent, When you’re on your agreement, you get part of it back effectively in the form of a down payment credit. And over the course of our lease term, our goal is to build you up to a full down payment that you need to actually buy the property back from us. And we do. We run sort of every process of that journey. If you’re interested in moving or expanding, we’ll help you actually find those new locations. We work with great brokers across the country. We understand kind of the inventory, the real estate that’s out there that’s possible to purchase. And so whether you’re coming to us with a property in mind, it could be the one you’re in or the one down the street that you saw for sale sign on, or you need us to start from scratch and actually understand if the one you’re in is the right one for you and help you find new locations, that can be great options for your business.

Kevin Song: [00:15:13] We’ll take it all the way through from beginning to end. And the idea is to also not only run that process for you and make it something that you can you can rely on. We also want to build trust with you by actually educating you on why we’re making some of the decisions that we’re making, because we are, in effect, making them together. We don’t succeed unless you become our buyer. We want you to own the building. And so we’re buying lease to owning and then selling the building to you. And we both need to understand why this thing that can be the most transformative experience of your life can be the thing that sets your family up for generational wealth. Why, that’s a fantastic decision for both sides.

Lee Kantor: [00:16:04] So I’m not just trading one landlord for another. You’re help your partnering with me to help me at some point be the landlord for myself and own the space.

Kevin Song: [00:16:16] Yeah yeah exactly. You know, I think business owners already have an ownership mindset, right? Like, no one’s building a business, you know, for just a short period of time. At least the ones that we want to work with, they’re building a business because this is what they’re called to do or this is what they need to do or this is what really motivates them. And so we’re with them sort of every step of the way, and we want to make sure that they are, in effect, making a fantastic investment decision for themselves, where they’re making a fantastic return on their time by running a great business. And that might be, you know, creating great profits for them. We want to make sure that those profits stay within their their hands by making sure the real estate is secure. And also in that same breath, actually helping them capitalize on that work that they’re already doing in that space by educating them and doing the work for them to make them sort of evolve them from being just a small business owner into a community, into being both a small business owner and the literal community owner by owning a piece of property.

Lee Kantor: [00:17:37] Now, when you’re talking to a small business owners, is this kind of a mindset shift? Are you having to educate them on on the understanding that they are kind of vulnerable in the situation as a tenant rather than a, you know, the owner of the property?

Kevin Song: [00:17:53] Yeah, definitely. I mean, we want no one likes surprises in the world of real estate, right? It’s not like no one likes when the landlord and the tenant have the conversation six months before the lease six fires and the landlord says, Well, actually I’ve got a double year rent, you know, the neighbor, the neighborhood, and that business owner kind of go up in arms and say, you know, this is this is like an infringement on the community rights. And it should be like that should be the feeling, actually, because, you know, losing like a cornerstone of your neighborhood is like. I don’t know, like Coca Cola going out of business in America because they can’t resign their lease like that local corner store or that local cornerstone, like failing to exist in the local economy and local society is. Absolutely tragic thing. And so we are sort of in that business of trying to help these business owners really get on that path and in that education and understanding and really changing your mindset from being someone who operates a great local business on a daily, weekly, monthly business into someone who can really think about how to build something for the long run. Because odds are if you’re if you’re great, you’re already doing that. We’re just trying to walk you across that bridge of being a renter to an owner and enabling you to do that financially and with sort of the means and the education.

Lee Kantor: [00:19:39] Well, I just don’t think that most business owners understand how vulnerable they are. Like you’re mentioning some stories, you know, where they raise the rent double or triple. I mean, I’ve heard just recently a store here locally in Atlanta, they raised it four and one half times. And it can happen to anybody. And and you are vulnerable. And if you have an opportunity to take control of some of the this risk by investing in yourself and investing in your building specifically with the help of somebody who knows their way around, I think it’s definitely something you should be considering. I mean, I just don’t think that the typical business owner understands how vulnerable that that at the end of a lease, you’re your rent can go up at whatever number that the landlord wants it to.

Kevin Song: [00:20:30] No, that’s right. That’s right. I mean, I think one of the great philosophers said something like, you know, a healthy man, you know, thinks about a million things and a sick man thinks about one thing. I think real estate and the relationship with the space is very, very similar to kind of that sickness. Right? It’s like it is the thing that is so foundational. It is the thing that your entire business runs on top of. Yet, you know, I think it’s easy to sort of forget what that relationship actually means for the survival and the thriving of your business. And so one of the first things that we ask for from a business owner is the lease, because we once we see that lease, can actually tell you, well, hey, you have three years left on your lease, that’s great. Like you might have you might be on a great lease today, but actually, like there are a lot of cranes going up in Atlanta right now. And, you know, these big brands are actually coming in. And so even though you have the security of your lease today for the next three or so years and you did a really good job of figuring out how to get a lease that would protect you for for a period of time. But it is a slow moving car crash. We know what’s going to happen at the end of that at the end of that lease term, which is your landlord is going to be shopping around and asking, you know, my lease coffee shop is interesting, but Starbucks is willing to pay me three times as much because Atlanta became you know, this part of Atlanta became really cool.

Kevin Song: [00:22:11] And now Starbucks wants to capitalize on that or, hey, like this big developer is coming into town and they’re willing to pay me a lot of money to actually make this this face really meaningful financial sort of opportunity for me. And so, again, like, it’s really about preparation. Like we don’t want small business owners to be caught by surprise about what’s going to happen. And with that preparation, we can actually advise the business owner. All right. Hey, like your lease today, the current relationship that you have with your space is actually really good. You are sort of tracking where the market is. And so by the end of that lease term, unless you just genuinely want to own like you probably have a good option to sign another lease set of fair term. Or it could be that, hey, like we just want you to know the price of rents in this market for compared to where you are today is actually already doubled. And so there is going to be this car crash, really tough negotiation that’s going to happen. And we want to prepare you whether that means helping you think about other options that you could potentially move to, whether it means making an offer to your landlord today so that maybe you can you can take advantage of sort of having that relationship for the next three years. Some places already. And so, yeah, again, all of this is about making sure the small business owner has all of the options in front of them to have the best relationship with space, including one which is around permanent ownership and wealth creation through their business.

Lee Kantor: [00:23:52] And you’re open to talking to people with several years left on their lease. They don’t have to be ready to move, you know, in six months or 12 months. You all talk to anybody, right?

Kevin Song: [00:24:02] Yeah, we’ll talk to everyone. We want people to come through our doors. We want to be really helpful and supportive. We know like starting a small business and running one successfully doesn’t happen by accident. And so all of that work and, you know, blood, sweat and tears again, that you’ve you’ve you’ve you’ve done to create value. We want you to keep it. And ultimately we understand that you coming to our doors today may mean we’re not going to be able to have a meaningful conversation with you if you’re not ready for ownership or you have too much time left on your lease before you can make make a move. But ultimately, it is again about providing great options to business owners, which once we have that information, What is your current relationship or relationships with space through releases and where is the market? And also how is your business doing? We’ve we want situations where someone comes to us, give us gives us this information and tells us what they’re looking for and we tell them, hey, we’ve got nothing for you right now because your business isn’t ready. Once we have that information and we see that your business does become ready because your profit margins go up or you’re about a year left on your lease, we can start really creating great options for you. It’s just again, like business owners have no business in or no reason to have thought that this was something that was extremely possible for them. We want to enable and empower and educate them to prove to them that this is one of the best ways to actually run a business and to create security and control and wealth through having a fantastic local business.

Lee Kantor: [00:26:10] So if somebody wants to learn more, have more substantive conversation with somebody on your team, what’s the way to do that? What’s the website?

Kevin Song: [00:26:17] Yeah, with that super easy should be some great sort of easy options there to sort of go go through the journey. You could also contact partnerships with ICO directly if there’s something more urgent. But I would, I would recommend Watsco as a place to learn more and to start the journey.

Lee Kantor: [00:26:38] Well, Kevin, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing important work and we appreciate you.

Kevin Song: [00:26:43] Yeah, thanks so much. We really, really excited. Thanks.

Lee Kantor: [00:26:45] All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on Atlanta Business Radio.

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