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Partner with Associations
Capitalize on the Law of Contrast
Be Willing to Test Counter Intuitive Tactics
Real Relationships
Share Your Expertise Freely
How to Create an Engaged Community
Mark Buffington with BIP Capital
Mark Buffington is co-founder and CEO of BIP Capital, which is recognized as one of the most active and successful venture investors in the Southeast. Additionally, he has co-founded three successful companies over the course of his career.
Since founding BIP Capital in 2006, Buffington has led investment rounds in more than 25 companies in a number of market verticals, including healthcare IT, Digital Media, Ed Tech, Enterprise Software, and FinTech. Notable exits include Vendormate, Ingenious Med, and Shareholder InSite
Buffington serves on the board of directors for several companies, including AchieveIt, ConnexPay, Trella Health, mLevel, PlayOn! Sports, Nview, and UserIQ. He also serves on several nonprofit boards, including KIPP Metro Atlanta Schools, the Georgia Tech College of Computing, and the Board of Trustees for the Alexander-Tharpe Fund (Georgia Tech AthleticEndowment).
He graduated from the Georgia Institute of Technology and has an MBA from the A.B. Freeman School of Business at Tulane University.
Follow BIP Capital on LinkedIn and Twitter.
What You’ll Learn in This Episode
- Why it was important for BIP Capital to create a Return to Office plan for its own portfolio companies and the business community at large
- Highlights of some of the most important elements of this plan
- Advice to companies for navigating COVID-19 from a management perspective
- The results of a recent public survey BIP Capital conducted on how companies and their teams were returning to office
- Advice to companies that are struggling on business growth
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BRX Pro Tip: Customer Service – Do Not Automate
BRX Pro Tip: Customer Service – Do Not Automate
Stone Payton: [00:00:00] Welcome back to BRX Pro Tips. Stone Payton and Lee Kantor here with you. Lee, let’s continue our conversation on customer service. There are just some things you can’t really automate, right? And maybe this is one of them.
Lee Kantor: [00:00:16] Yeah. You know I’m a big fan about automating as many things as possible in order to scale the business, but customer service is a difficult thing to automate, and it might be impossible in terms of kind of really serving the clients that we have because, again, our business is we don’t have hundreds or thousands of clients. We’re not this mass company. We’re dealing with a handful of people. So, it’s better, I think, to lean into the customer service as a way to differentiate and provide more value to the clients because in our business, I mean, every client’s important and it’s worth the time invested in personalizing the experience, so that you can keep that client for a long time.
Lee Kantor: [00:00:58] So, I’m a big believer in over-promising and over-delivering. I think that we should give them an offer that is so overwhelming that that’s almost impossible to say no. And then, I believe that we have to over-deliver the service. And when you do that kind of regularly, you’re going to get the clients you need, and you’re going to keep them for a long time. But in order to overshoot and exceed their expectations, you better be charging enough, so that you can afford to do that in the manner that’s going to kind of deliver and over-deliver on the promise that you’re making.
