The CEO's perspective | Jordan Wallach | TDSU Ep. 44

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It's a little bit of being John Malkovich. We get inside the mind of somebody who's running things and it's interesting to hear no matter what direction that goes in. All right.

What's up, Lifers? And welcome to The Daily Standup with Lifetime Value, where we're giving you fresh new ideas about customer success every single day. I got my man Rob here. Rob, do you want to say hi? What's up, Lifers? And I got my man JP here.

JP, do you want to say hi? What's up? And we've got Jordan here. Jordan, do you want to say hi? What's going on? Awesome. Awesome.

And I am your host. My name is Dillon Young. Jordan, thank you so much for being here.

Would you introduce yourself, please? Love to. I'm Jordan Wallach. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Belfry.

We are a vertical SaaS platform built specifically for the security guard service industry. So in short, we help security guard service companies. They operate almost like staffing agencies.

We help them manage their workforce, prove out their value to their end customers who hire security services and essentially lead them to create safer environments for everyone involved. Right on. Well, thank you so much for being here, Jordan.

You know what we're asking on this show. So if you could, please tell us what's on your mind when it comes to customer success. Yeah, what's on my mind is we are about two years into our journey.

We're early, early stage, so to speak, or a seed stage startup. And I've been working with Rob actually on building out a customer success function from scratch. We've been moving quickly every six months.

It seems like a different company at Belfry. We didn't have a product two years ago, then we had an MVP, and then we had some customers. And now we have many customers, many happy customers.

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The challenge is continuing to scale that organization and ensure that our customers are happy and seeing value from what we've been building for them. Right on. And so what is that? How does customer success embody itself at Belfry today? And how do you think about it today and maybe tomorrow? Yeah.

So how it looks today is very different from what it looked like three months ago. Three months ago, it was maybe me and a couple others on my team running around without much structure, just ensuring that all of our customers were onboarded. Maybe they had their data uploaded into the platform and they started to use the platform, but maybe they didn't solidify the value that they were seeing from Belfry in a really clear way.

We were being really reactive and not proactive, especially in a startup environment. Our product is constantly evolving. We think we've progressed their workflows a lot from where they came from, but a lot of times it's what's the bug of the day or what's a feature request or what's an issue that's on their mind and we're scrambling trying to get them the right answer as opposed to maybe talking about business outcomes.

Where do they want to move their company towards? How can we support them in getting there? And so I think that's where also we're moving to in the short term is building out an organization of seven folks now from almost zero very recently who are manning each component of the customer lifecycle from onboarding to support to ongoing account management. Yeah, that's where we're at. Rob, you've got the answers to the test.

So maybe what I would love to hear from you is from your perspective, what has the evolution looked like at Belfry? Yeah, good question. Well, first of all, I got to give Jordan a lot of credit for managing such a rapidly scaling organization. I've worked with a ton of startups and this is probably top, certainly top three in growth pace that I've seen.

Like things have really ramped up quickly. And so with that growth, we've kind of had to, what we had to do in the early stages was figure out like what's the framework we're going to apply to this. And it's actually like sort of an intersection of two frameworks.

So we basically took like what is the customer lifecycle we want to build everything from onboarding to support, to account management, to renewals, to upsell to advocacy, most of those things we hadn't even been touching yet, because like customers weren't late stage enough to even turn into renewed customers or case study customers or whatever upsold customers, right. So that was one is like the customer lifecycle. And then to Jordan's point, the other sort of framework we had to establish was like, we've got all these initiatives, how do we bucket them? And so we basically said, okay, we have a lack of process, we have a lack of visibility into the customer experience, and that they're actually having a positive experience.

And also a lack of people, right? You can't start without people. So we were like, okay, let's do people ops, customer ops, rev ops is the three main buckets of work. And long story short, we put together like a full grid of here's the customer lifecycle across people ops across rev ops across customer ops.

Like what does that mean for us? What do we need to do over a structured schedule? And I will say that these things, you know, a plan is no good without good execution. So I've got to give Jordan a lot of credit for being able to lead the ship across what would otherwise be a very chaotic endeavor. What's up guys, it's Dillon here and you know why I'm here hat in hand.

I got a favor to ask of you. If you like what we're doing, give us a like on whatever platform that you find us on. If you want to know when we're dropping new stuff, give us a follow, give us a subscribe, and maybe best of all, you want to give us some feedback, drop a comment and let us know what you like, what you don't like, or how we can get better.

We want to make sure we're giving the best content we can to you and others within the community. Thanks so much, guys. I'll let you get back to the show.

JP, at the beginning of this, I saw you rubbing your hands together tantalizingly. So what were you thinking as Jordan was talking about their evolution? What was going through your head? Thank you so much, Dillon. You know, allow me to put my hands, those same rubbing hands into the dough of Belfry.

And what I'm feeling around in there, what I'm feeling in there is there's a whole lot of opportunity. If you're a CSM at Belfry right now, you got a whole lot of opportunity because you're probably in more of a generalization and a specialist role. And I bet it's probably chaotic AF for those on the ground, because it is for the people at the top too.

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They're trying to, you know, build the plane as they fly it, so to speak. So JP was in this position before. So I'm time traveling right now.

And that's why I got my hands in the dough, right? Hands are creeping me out, man. Still there. Still there.

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I'm not sure I understand the analogy. You're time traveling and you're making pizza? Yeah, yeah. You know what I mean? If we can have hopped up time machines, you know what I mean? I think this is more a Futurama reference.

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Yeah, there we go. So I just think that like, you know, for the CSMs that are out there, they're watching that are at the early stage startups. That would be my two cents is that like it may be chaotic.

There's a lot of opportunity in there to learn about sort of where you're really good, maybe where you're not as great. But I'd say in the end, don't take it personally as maybe you're not cut out for customer success. You may not be cut out for an early stage startup.

All right. That could be what it is. Or maybe you really like it.

But I would say dig in to the opportunity because there's a lot of opportunity there. So with the time we have left, this is actually an interesting pivot I wasn't anticipating. But Jordan, I'd love to hear from you as the leader of an organization and you're building this thing and it's you're building it while it's flying and it's flying really fast, according to Rob.

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And by all accounts, I've talked to you previously and it sounds like that too. But how do you communicate with your customer success professionals about your vision, where you want to go, as well as like, what is the most important thing to you and to your investors at this point in time? Because what JP said is you're working with probably some generalists, people who have done a little bit of this, a little bit of that, and they're doing that now. So how do you define priorities and communicate with your folks in that way? Yeah.

I think it's a constant challenge. But ultimately, it's finding like-minded professionals, folks that are excited by changing someone's workflow, by truly changing the way they do business, by changing the way that an employee is interacting with their supervisors, that the back office is managing their schedules and managing payroll. And if we start from that common shared goal of, we want to change how this industry operates, everything kind of flows from that.

So starting with that shared vision, we could say, all right, well, the way to break that down is, first, the sales team is going to go out and find these companies that are struggling with some pain in their business right now. They're going to hand us a company that's really excited about the opportunity here with Belfry and what we're going to provide them. How do we get those folks seeing the value from our platform in the shortest amount of time possible? And they've been through really lengthy onboarding processes in the past.

They've been burned by a lot of software providers in the past. How do we, in the first hour that we're actually interacting with them from the CS team, how do we change that mindset? Then the account management piece, how do we not only say, hey, any questions? What bugs are you seeing in the product? I want to check in with you to see how things are going on. How do we say- Our favorite phrase.

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Here's check-in. We before had hundreds of check-in calls with all these customers internally, and it's like, no, we need to actually be providing our customers a reason to jump on the phone with us. And that could be something like, hey, on average, Belfry customers who are successful are seeing X percentage of unbilled overtime, or they're spending X amount of hours in their back office doing this process.

Here's where you're at, and here are the tools that we can actually help provide you to get to a better outcome for your business. I don't know if that answers your question. I just went in a lot of different directions.

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It's a little bit of being John Malkovich. We get inside the mind of somebody who's running things, and it's interesting to hear no matter what direction that goes in. But that's our time, Jordan.

Thank you so much for bringing this to our attention and for sharing this perspective. It's much appreciated. We'd love to have you back maybe in another, I don't know, 90 days to hear how drastically things have changed and get an update on your CS org.

But Jordan, thanks again. Until next time, we've got to say goodbye for now. You've been listening to The Daily Standup by Lifetime Value.

Please note that the views expressed in these conversations are attributed only to those individuals on this recording and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of their respective employers. For all inquiries, please reach out via email to Dillon at lifetimevaluemedia.com. Find us on YouTube at Lifetime Value and find us on the socials at lifetimevaluemedia.com. Until next time.