Business RadioX ®

BRX Stories – Yum! Brands

by

BRXmic99
BRX Pro Tips
BRX Stories - Yum! Brands
Loading
/

BRX-Banner

BRX Stories – Yum! Brands

Stone Payton: And we are back with Business RadioX Pro Tips. Stone Payton and Lee Kantor here with you. Lee, let’s share our experience with TrainingPros and Yum! Brands.

Lee Kantor: All right. TrainingPros was a client of ours that we had for a very long time, and then their business was that they work with companies and provide temporary trainers to come in and do training for the organization. And they were having a difficult time kind of getting in front of the people that matter most to them, so we created a show called Learning Insights that helped them meet and serve kind of the learning professionals in enterprise level organizations.

Lee Kantor: So, we were doing the show for quite some time and, in fact, they’re the ones who coined the phrase relationship building moments, because they saw so much value in terms of all of the opportunities that their salespeople had in building deeper and deeper relationships with people throughout our entire process. And that’s really kind of where that phrase was coined, where, you know, we have relationship building moment, and inviting the guest, and having a pre-call with the guest, with having the guest on the show, following up with the person after the fact. So, every interaction is really multiple relationship building moments.

Lee Kantor: So, we were doing the show for quite some time, and their big trade show came up. What was that? SHRM? Which one was it? Stone, do you remember?

Stone Payton: I want to say ASTD. I think it’s called ATD now. But I think it was ASTD, all the training firms, consulting firms get together.

Lee Kantor: That’s a big big event. That’s a huge event.

Stone Payton: Oh, yeah.

Lee Kantor: And so, they said, “Hey, can we bring the show on the road and have you appear in our trade show booth?” And we, of course, said yes. So, we were basically 80 percent of their booth. They didn’t get a bigger booth the first year. They just put us, you know, smack dab in the middle of their booth, and we had our microphones and headphones and mixer all front and center, and people were coming and being interviewed live in their booth. And it was super cool because their salespeople were able to invite people that would be difficult for them to really interact with into the booth. The people had to wait their turn while we got set up, so their salesperson got to spend a lot of time with people that were very important to them.

Lee Kantor: And do you remember the Yum! Brand person, Stone?

Stone Payton: Oh, yeah. This guy, he was on the front cover of Chief Learning Officer magazine. He was the grand poobah, vice-president of global learning, and he had a particular interest in multi-generational learning. And he had written at least one, maybe two or three articles on that topic. So, our counsel to our people was when you reach out, find out what they’re excited about, make this conversation on the show, make it about what they want to talk about. So, they reached out to the guy and asked him if he would come on and share his insight and perspective on multi-generational learning, so that’s how they landed the interview.

Lee Kantor: Yeah. And one of the interesting things was, when we do these interviews, a lot of times people just show up. Like, he just showed up there. It wasn’t prescheduled. And I grabbed their badge to see who they are because I have to introduce them. His badge was backwards and then I’m like, “Oh, I’m sorry, I can’t read your badge.” And he’s like, “Oh, I turn my badge backwards when I walk through these conferences. I usually don’t go into the area where all the booths are, because when they see that I’m with Yum! Brands, I get bombarded with people. And so, I slipped my badge backwards so that no one knows who I am because, you know, I wouldn’t be able to go two feet without somebody coming up to me. So, that’s why I flipped it backwards.”

Lee Kantor: So, I had never seen or heard that strategy before, but I would imagine that somebody who’s with a super large company, and that he is a sought after contact, he would do something like that. But for our client, he was voluntarily coming in here happy to spend 10, 15, 30 minutes with our client, hanging out in the booth, getting his picture taken, getting interviewed, and helping our clients build a deeper and deeper relationship with this kind of high value target.

Stone Payton: Well, the lesson that really stands out for me from all of that, and that was a great deal of fun, and it really ingrained our value to the client, I mean, so we did that kind of work with them for years, really, until the guy sold the company. But the thing that stands out the most for me, Lee, is we didn’t just say yes. They were sitting in the studio right after one of their shows, and they said, “Is there any way we could take this on the road and maybe go to this conference?” And there was like, beep, beep, you and I looked at each other, we both said, “Yeah, of course.” And we didn’t have the first clue.

Stone Payton: So, we saw an opportunity. We recognized and listened to the client’s need. We said yes, and then we went home and figured out how to execute. Remember that?

Lee Kantor: Yeah. That’s a good lesson for entrepreneurs out there.

Angie Bretag with Motive

by

Motive-logo
Nashville Business Radio
Angie Bretag with Motive
Loading
/

Angie-BretagAngie Bretag serves as director of Motive’s Emerging Sales division, helping to connect emerging and mid-market brands with Motive’s industry leading platform and AI-powered solutions.

She has been with Motive since 2020 and is based in Nashville, TN.

Prior to joining Motive Angie served in senior sales positions with Glassdoor and Careerbuilder. The transportation industry is in Angie’s blood; growing up her family ran a truck stop off I88 in Illinois.

Outside of work, Angie can be found cheering on her kids at their various sporting events, as well as her beloved Iowa Hawkeyes.

Follow Motive on LinkedIn, Facebook, X and Instagram.

Transcript-iconThis transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix.

 

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Nashville, Tennessee. It’s time for Nashville Business Radio. Now, here’s your host.

Stone Payton: Welcome to another exciting and informative edition of Nashville Business Radio. Stone Payton here with you this afternoon. This is going to be a good one. Please join me in welcoming to the broadcast with Motive Angie Bretag. How are you?

Angie Bretag: Doing good. Thanks for having me.

Stone Payton: Well, it is a delight to have you on the broadcast. I got a ton of questions. Angie, I’m sure we won’t get to them all, but I think a good place to start would be if you could share with me in our listeners mission. Purpose? What? What are you and your team really out there trying to do for folks?

Angie Bretag: Motive, we exist to solve the problems and help companies that are in the physical economy. So what that means is we build tools to make companies safer, more productive and more profitable. And I feel like if I was explaining this to my mom and I said physical economy, she would probably ask a question. So I’ll explain that. I think when we say physical economy, what we mean is we are partnering with the companies that build and power our homes. They support our infrastructure, they manage our waste, they grow, deliver our food. It’s like any any company that’s out there moving, delivering, producing a product like Motiv is designed and is built to really support them. You know, that’s what we do.

Stone Payton: What is the backstory? How in the world did you find yourself in this line of work doing this kind of service for folks?

Angie Bretag: Motiv found our way here. Um, over a decade ago. We got into this wild world of transportation initially just to digitize paper logs. And so the transportation industry was still doing everything on paper. And so we saw an opportunity to create a tool to be able to digitize those logs. And that’s how we got started. And, you know, the rest is history. You know, we’ve we’ve definitely expanded into different industries and different products, um, all with one idea in mind. And it’s just really to make the roads that we drive on safer and the companies that we serve more productive and more profitable.

Stone Payton: So have certain industries, sectors sort of gravitated to your work? Are there some that you really align with? Really?

Angie Bretag: Well, yeah. We, uh, we serve tons of different industries. Uh, you know, when we first got started, like I said, we were primarily in the trucking and transportation industry. Uh, but now over half of our business consists of companies that are outside of that industry. So construction, oil and gas, home services, landscaping, you know, anything that is, you know, delivering, producing like driving the physical economy. We can partner with.

Stone Payton: So what drew you to Nashville?

Angie Bretag: Motive. You know, motive saw the opportunity to, you know, create a, you know, an office, a culture and build out our sales team in Nashville. And so, you know, in 2018, we made a huge investment in the Nashville market and built out some incredible office space right up the street from the Ryman. We’re on fourth and church. And yeah, we we’ve got two floors and a building, the L and C building. And, you know, we saw it as a great opportunity to be able to be in the heartland of America that not only will help us serve our customers, but also attract a lot of awesome talent to come work at motive as well.

Stone Payton: So now that you’ve been at this a while and you clearly have, what are you finding the most rewarding? What’s the most fun about it these days for you?

Angie Bretag: Oh, um, yeah, I, I think, you know for me, but I think if you ask anybody at motive, you know, we really are drinking the Kool-Aid in terms of knowing when we sell our product, we make the road safer and we save lives. And so, you know, it’s exciting to sell a product that we know makes a difference and is meaningful. And so I love that. Um, but also the motive team is incredible. And we’ve got a lot of really motivated and excited folks that, you know, work on the sales team, but also an engineering customer support. And I think honestly, all the way up, our executive team, you know, people just really care and really believe that what we do matters and what we sell makes a huge difference in the industry, in the communities that our customers provide services in.

Stone Payton: Okay, so let’s dive into the work a little bit and whatever is is most practical for you. Maybe walk us through a use case. But I’m interested to know like what? What happens throughout the I don’t know, the engagement, the work with a client. Walk us through what that looks like, if you would.

Angie Bretag: Yeah. So a good example would be we are reaching out to these companies that are, you know, in their in various industries, but we’re trying to get in touch with whoever’s managing safety or spend or, you know, any like anything that would kind of fall into the bucket of profitability, productivity or even safety. And so, you know, depending on kind of where we, you know, start the conversation or, you know, how we kind of get a seat at the table, you know, we’ll kind of take it from there.

Stone Payton: Like, what is the customer pain point like and what’s the what’s the relief. Say a little bit more about the specific service and and what they’re getting from you guys.

Angie Bretag: Yeah I think when we speak safety, we’re talking about, um, one of our kind of key products that’s changing the way that we do safety is dash cameras. You know, we give companies visibility into what’s happening behind the wheels. They’re behind the wheel. And then also, you helping use our AI technology to identify unsafe driving behaviors and help coach drivers to make them safer at what they do. So Dash cameras is a great example of how we’re able to make some real, tangible impact on the roads.

Stone Payton: So I wasn’t anticipating that. I say more about how you’re utilizing AI to to bring this to bear.

Angie Bretag: I mean, what company isn’t talking isn’t slang in AI these days, right? You know, I think everybody really says that. But at the end of the day, you know, we are using AI computer vision to help companies be able to understand what’s happening behind the wheel. So, you know, our AI models are helping companies understand things like drowsiness, people not wearing their seatbelt, cell phone usage, um, unsafe lane changes. And so our technology can see both in the cab what’s happening in there, but then also what’s happening on the roads around them to provide coaching. But also, you know, alert drivers when necessary to put the phone down and to get their eyes back on the road.

Stone Payton: What a marvelous application for AI. So you can your sensors your technology can pick up that these things are happening. And then you’re also able to to provide some support system and some some ideas to help them mitigate it or prevent it in the future, it sounds like.

Angie Bretag: Exactly. Um, you know, and when I talked about, you know, we we really believe that we make the road safer. You know, we hear that from customers all the time, that they have it in their own vehicles. And they themselves are better drivers because, you know, they have the motive technology in their cabs. Um, but yeah, I mean, we were able to detect it and kind of curb it on the spot, but then also go back and help drivers, you know, replay, you know, pull the tape and, you know, see what’s happening. And it allows them to provide coaching to their drivers and help. You know, make some real, meaningful changes.

Stone Payton: So I’m interested to know how the whole sales and marketing thing works in your industry. And then I guess, in particular, I’m interested to know when you first started bringing this to the market, I mean, did people jump all over it or was there a little. Did they bristle with it a little bit at first?

Angie Bretag: Yeah. When I think for cameras specifically, um, kind of the safety, the safety product, I think, you know, the drivers that are good at what they do are really proud of, you know, their safety scores and being able to, you know, really prove that what they do behind the wheel is safe and great. And I think, you know, some of the other drivers maybe aren’t as excited initially, but they definitely get on board. And I think it’s because this isn’t, you know, this isn’t a punish, but it’s to coach and to curb and to improve. And so, yeah, I mean, I think if anyone you know, is used to doing, um, you know, used to doing what they do without it and then they, you know, have something in there that’s kind of reminding them that, yeah, it could, it could be a little bit like it’s not even I wouldn’t say startling, but it could definitely be a change. So I don’t think they’re necessarily enthusiastic enthusiastic about it initially, but they really see the benefit. Um, and it helps their drivers and themselves get home safe at night. And at the end of the day, at the end of the day, that’s what matters most.

Stone Payton: Uh, earlier in the conversation, did you say 2018 is when you began to make an investment in the in the Nashville area?

Angie Bretag: Yes, sir. 2018. So, um, a couple years before, um, Nashville, I think, really took off. And everybody, you know, everybody decided to pack up and move here.

Stone Payton: And the team’s growing continues to grow. What are some some near mid-term plans in that regard. You just you’re going to keep going down that path.

Angie Bretag: Yeah. Nashville is such an awesome market for us. Um, we primarily in the Nashville office. We have a lot of sales folks. Um, and then the majority of our business development team is also here, too. So that’s usually, you know, more, you know, junior a little bit earlier on in their sales career, folks that, um, are, you know, just starting off. And so we see a lot of value in, um, you know, recruiting in this market and, you know, getting people that ended up here after college or, you know, moving to Nashville. Um, and our, you know, jumping on the bandwagon.

Stone Payton: So recruiting and development, uh, I’ll confess, and my listeners know that I’ve had my struggles with that over the, over the years, but I’d love for you to speak to your experience in, in recruitment development retention. I don’t know culture, any counsel you have in that regard and maybe share some of your experience over the years. I know it would be helpful to me and probably for our listeners.

Angie Bretag: Yeah, I my background before motive was, um, in the recruiting technology space. So I worked for many years at Glassdoor. And so I, you know, I think something I’ll always say when you’re looking to recruit and, um, you know, build a culture and, you know, really expand your talent is listen to what people are telling you that work there. You know, look at you know, look at your look at the reviews and kind of read it and, um, address it. So yeah, I think, you know, that’s always a little piece of advice. I always say, you know, pay attention to what’s being said out there. You know, there’s usually a little bit of merit. Um, but when it comes to recruiting, I think, you know, we luckily have an amazing brand, both in our industry but also in just the technology world in general. Like people, you know, come to motive. They’re excited to be a part of, um, you know, to be a part of the team. But, you know, some of the things that we’re really looking for. And I’ll speak to the sales side. Um, you know, as someone that does a lot of recruiting here in this market, uh, for salespeople is, you know, we’re looking for the ideal team player.

Angie Bretag: That’s like a recruiting methodology. You know, we’ve read a long time ago, but the idea is, you know, we’re looking for three things in our candidates. We’re looking for folks that are humble. You know, they don’t have a huge ego. They really want to, like, learn and grow. And they know that they don’t know things. And so they’re hungry to develop. Um, so humble, hungry. You know, they want to work really hard and they’re willing to, you know, put the work in to get the results that’s necessary. So humble, humble, hungry. And then the last one is just smart. Like they’re firing on all cylinders. Um, they’re able to, you know, understand complex ideas and be able to break into new industries and be curious and so humble hungry and smart is really what we look for on the sales side to identify talent. And then I think, where do we find it? We look across all industries. You know, you don’t have to come from one of our competitors necessarily to really be able to connect with the transportation and kind of physical economy industries that we serve.

Stone Payton: I think you make an excellent point, because I do think, you know, if you’re coming into a software firm and you’re coming from a surfboard manufacturer, you’ve got some perspective, some insight, some objective lens on some things that could really bring tremendous value to the software firm. Right.

Angie Bretag: Oh, yeah. Um, it’s always fun when we, you know, we bring someone in from a completely different industry and they kind of look at what we do, and they’re like, why don’t you why don’t you do it this way? And they think about the problem or the opportunity just slightly different. And it really changes the way that we operate So yeah. Absolutely. People diversity of thought and backgrounds makes a huge difference when you’re building out a team.

Stone Payton: Well, and that’s another interesting topic that you’re bringing up. I’ll call it innovation or creativity, because I think most of us who lead organizations large and small want to have an innovative creative culture. And at the same time, it’s not like you can jump on every cool idea that gets mentioned. Do you guys have any kind of like, rigor, disciplined, structured process for having that feedback loop and a way for people to contribute ideas and then treat it with some due diligence and, and then also so that the person that submits an idea and you don’t adopt it, they don’t feel beat up. Have you lived through any of that?

Angie Bretag: Oh, yeah. We always say like, you know like you’re like, you’re going to do something wrong. You know, the sooner that you can, you know, mess something up, the sooner you can figure out how to do it the right way. And so I think that’s one thing that we do really well, is create the space for people to learn and to grow. And, you know, we don’t expect perfection. We expect effort and we expect results. Um, and, you know, we we aren’t we aren’t perfect. We have really good, awesome ideas to go out and engage with prospects. And then we have kind of crappy ones, too. You know, it takes a couple of crappy ones to find the really good ones too. And if you don’t make people feel safe enough to come with all their ideas, then you’ll miss out on the really good ones.

Stone Payton: So I’m almost certain the answer to this is yes, but I’m going to ask anyway and maybe you can expand on it if that is the case. But I’m interested to know, have you had the benefit of one or more mentors along the way to help you navigate the terrain, like from transitioning from recruiting to this arena? And then as you continue to grow and things change, have you have you had a mentor or two?

Angie Bretag: Oh, yeah. I’ve had a ton of mentors. Um, you know, people I still keep in touch with from, you know, other organizations that I was lucky enough to work at and then internally at motive. Um, there are just so many people that are invested in want to support. Support you. You know, I feel like I, you know, have had the opportunity to work for some really great leaders. Um, and specifically at motive, you know, I shout out Ben Nott-bower. Um, you know, I have like a full, like a folder on my computer that’s just like my one liners of, you know, little tidbits or things that I’ve learned from him, from him throughout the years, um, that now, you know, I’m passing on to the managers that report to me and, you know, they’re passing on to their ease.

Stone Payton: So I don’t know when or where you would find the time, but, uh, interests, passions, hobbies, pursuits outside the scope of your of your work. My listeners know that I like to hunt fish and travel. Anything you have a tendency to nerd out about that’s not transportation and AI?

Angie Bretag: Oh yeah, I’ve got I’ve got toddlers and so, um, yeah, I mean, we they keep us busy, you know, we’re toting them to baseball right now and dance and gymnastics. Um, but yeah, we I mean, I think our toddlers keep us really busy. And then, you know, I am a huge football person. I grew up with brothers that played collegiate football. My, you know, every man in my family is a football coach. They all coach for the high school team back home. So yeah, I feel like, you know, we are officially, um, you know, in football season. And so that is something that I nerd out on, you know, I will nerd out on for the next six months.

Stone Payton: So we touched on sales and marketing a little earlier in the conversation, but I understand that you guys are going to be at an upcoming conference. Is that accurate?

Angie Bretag: Absolutely, yes. We’re going to be at MCE here in a few weeks in October. We’re really, really excited about it.

Stone Payton: And if you would share with us what MCE is and kind of your your strategy, like what will you try to accomplish? I mean, do you have you probably do have some sort of strategy or set of objectives that things that you want to get accomplished while you’re there? Yeah.

Angie Bretag: Yeah, absolutely. We are lucky enough to be one of the premier safety performance partners. Um, you know, it’s a really important industry event for us. You know, it brings together a bunch of different trucking industry leaders, CEOs, executives, um, and they all kind of nerd out over new things that are happening in the industry. And we are so excited to, you know, sponsor that and be a part of the conversation and just have the opportunity to really sit with, you know, folks that are already partnered with motive, but also that are curious about what we do and how we help companies like theirs. So yeah, I mean, I think best case scenario, we have some awesome conversations and learn things we don’t even know yet about our industry and identify, you know, problems that we can continue to solve for, you know, the companies that we serve. Yeah, we’re really excited about it.

Stone Payton: And where is it going to be.

Angie Bretag: Here in Nashville?

Stone Payton: Oh, right in Nashville. That’s fantastic. Well, I’ll tell you, my experience has been, as you might imagine, we do a lot of conference and trade show work where we are doing live radio, either on behalf of the conference organizers or an individual vendor. Exhibitor will hire us to do radio in their booth. And I have observed that particularly those firms that really do approach it with some real intent and objectives. I mean, you can get so much accomplished in terms of genuine relationship building in the space of a 2 or 3 days that that, you know, has an impact for for months and years, can’t you?

Angie Bretag: Oh, yeah. And especially this industry like we you know they are you know they’re they love the idea of getting to meet with people face to face and building those relationships. And, you know, the value and problems that we solve are so real. Um, and, you know, I think having the opportunity to really connect with them and, you know, spend some time with them in person makes a huge difference in, um, you know, being able to build opportunities across the spectrum.

Stone Payton: Well, I would say good luck at the conference, but I don’t think you need it. It sounds to me like you’re approaching it with the right mindset and a plan, and I am interested to to hear how it goes. So maybe you’ll swing back around and and tell me about the the experience before we wrap, I would love to leave our listeners with, I don’t know, a couple of lessons learned, maybe some pro tips. And it doesn’t have to be confined to the transportation industry, although that might be a perfectly appropriate point of focus for this. But just, you know, just running a business and scaling a business and recruiting, let’s leave them with a couple of quick pro tips or lessons learned, if we could.

Angie Bretag: Yeah. Um, yeah, I think a couple a couple pro tips or just things I’ve learned throughout the years that I think has that matter are, um, you know, the first one is it’s really it’s at the end of the day, it’s more important to be interested than interesting. You know, I think focus more on your customers and, you know, be obsessed with ways that you can serve them, um, and design your product and your company around being able to really solve their problems and, um, be more focused on them than focused on yourself. So I think you know, it’s more important to be interested than interesting. Um, I think that applies to any industry, transportation or not. Um, you know, that’s going to, at the end of the day, make you stand out and make your make your company successful. Um, and then I guess on a personal one, you know, I think one way I pursue life and business and, you know, you can start to see people that kind of view it in a similar way to, you know, there’s going to be a bunch of stuff that you have to do. You know, you have to, you know, in the sales space, you have to make cold calls, you have to, you know, send emails and kind of do some stuff that maybe isn’t as fun as, um, you know, getting to like, sell.

Angie Bretag: But, you know, those are the things you have to do. And I think the people that view it, the task view, the tasks that feel less exciting or less fun is kind of get to’s. Um, as you know, I get to make calls like, I get to go out and talk about motive. I get to, um, you know, I get to do these things because I have an awesome job. Those are the people that are long term, really successful. And, you know, that’s in business, but that’s in life too. You know, the people that, um, you know, I get with, especially with my toddler, you know, I get to read the 10th book tonight before bedtime versus I have to, I think, you know, viewing life and the the get twos versus the half twos really will change your perspective and how you approach work in life. And I, I think that’s been some of the best advice that, you know, I’ve received over the years.

Stone Payton: Well, I am so glad that I asked. I think both points are marvelous. Counsel. I am probably going to borrow slash steal. Interested? Over. Interesting. I’ll try to remember to credit you at least the first few times I say it.

Speaker4: Deal?

Angie Bretag: Deal. Well, thank you so much. This was exciting. I hope, I hope we shared some stuff with the listeners that they get some value from.

Stone Payton: Oh, without a doubt. All right. What’s the best way for our listeners to learn more about motive, tap into your work. Uh, you know, maybe learn about, you know, the where you’re headed. Maybe someone’s interested in a career with motive. Let’s leave them with some coordinates. You know, a website or whatever you feel like is appropriate.

Angie Bretag: Yeah. I mean, if you’re in the Nashville area looking for a sales gig, absolutely. Check out our careers page at Go motive.com. We’re on all the socials. Um, you know, if you want to learn a little bit more about life at motive, um, you can see some of our cheesy, cheesy posts about what it’s like to actually work here and learn a little bit more about the culture. Uh, we’re on LinkedIn. You know, those are great places to go. Check us out and then, you know, if you are going to be at MCE, um, in October and you know, you’re going to be lucky enough to be a part of that, stop by, talk to our team. You know, we’re really excited to talk about some of our new product releases and spend some time with the folks in the industry. So if you’re at MCE, check us out at our booth. Um, we cannot wait to meet with you. So yeah.

Stone Payton: Angie, it has been an absolute delight having you on the show. Thank you for your insight, your perspective, your enthusiasm. And I gotta say, your your wisdom. You, you and your team really are doing important work and we sure appreciate you.

Angie Bretag: Oh, thank you so much. We we love what we do. And, you know, we feel lucky enough to be able to work for an awesome company that makes a difference.

Stone Payton: I believe it. All right, until next time. This is Stone Payton for our guest today, Angie Bretag with motive and everyone here at the Business RadioX family saying we’ll see you again on Nashville Business Radio.

 

BRX Pro Tip: Tell More Stories

by

BRXmic99
BRX Pro Tips
BRX Pro Tip: Tell More Stories
Loading
/

BRX-Banner

BRX Pro Tip: Tell More Stories

Stone Payton : Welcome back to Business RadioX Pro Tips. Lee Kantor, Stone Payton here with you. Lee, today’s topic, storytelling.

Lee Kantor: Yeah, I think it’s so important in today’s world that you have to tell more stories. A lot of folks, especially in the professional service business, love data and they like to show numbers and statistical evidence that this is better than that and it’s obvious because the numbers show it. That’s all good and fine, but stories are the things that people remember, so it’s important to invest the time in getting to know how your service is truly impacting your clients, and then tell those stories to more people more often.

Lee Kantor: You know, sure, you can have the data, you can have the stats. All that stuff is great on a PowerPoint. But when you’re talking to somebody, it’s so important to be able to have an anecdote where you’re kind of focusing on one person and you’re sharing a challenge that they had and how you were able to help them overcome that and get to a new level.

Lee Kantor: Those little anecdotes, those stories are what people are going to remember. That’s how they’re going to refer you to somebody else. That’s how they’re going to decide to buy what you’re selling when you can kind of illustrate how somebody’s business or life changed because you helped them.

Stone Payton : So focus on the motions, not just the facts and figures. People remember stories. They forget numbers. It’s so important to be able to have these at the ready so that no matter what the situation is, whatever the problem the person has, the prospect has, or the challenge that they have that you have an anecdote at the ready that kind of illustrates how you were able to help somebody solve a problem and deliver a solution that helped get them to a new level.

Lee Kantor: So work on those stories. I would go through all your databases. I would have the whole team kind of in on this, where you just brainstorm a bunch of stories for a bunch of different occasions to help kind of lock in the emotion about why you’re the best fit for this prospective client.

Ramping up to attend the WBEC-West 21st Annual Procurement and Awards Conference with Sheila Cavalier

by

WIM-Freaky-Cookie-Feature
Women in Motion
Ramping up to attend the WBEC-West 21st Annual Procurement and Awards Conference with Sheila Cavalier
Loading
/

In this episode of Women in Motion, host Lee Kantor welcomes Sheila Cavalier, owner of The Freaky Cookie, a corporate gifting company specializing in unique cookie flavors. Sheila discusses her business’s evolution from direct-to-consumer sales to corporate gifting, emphasizing adaptability to market demands. She highlights the importance of networking and community support, sharing her positive experiences with the WBEC-West community. Sheila offers practical advice for first-time business conference attendees, focusing on relationship building, active listening, and follow-up.

Sheila-CavalierSheila Cavalier is CEO and Founder of Freaky Cookie.

Sheila set out to create something fun, something unique for the corporate gifting world that would communicate to customers and employees just how much they mattered. The result: Freaky Cookie, based on a family recipe dating back 90+ years!

A Los Angeles native, Sheila come from a long line of bakers, writers, and a father who worked in the aerospace industry in the 1960s. This legacy of creativity, innovation, engineering, and a quest for out-of-the-box fun led to the creation of The Freaky Cookie, also known as “The Cookie Disruptor!” The-Freaky-Cookie-logo

For a time, Sheila worked as a Multi-state Auditor, giving her the unique ability to parlay her talent for managing details with her creative vision. “It’s one thing to have a dream. It’s another thing to execute the plan that makes that dream a reality.”

Sheila enjoys running, music that soothes her soul, and spending quality time with family.

Connect with Sheila on LinkedIn.

Music Provided by M PATH MUSIC

Transcript-iconThis transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix

 

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX Studios, it’s time for Women In Motion. Brought to you by WBEC-West. Join forces. Succeed together. Now, here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: Today on Women In Motion, we have Sheila Cavalier with The Freaky Cookie. Welcome.

Sheila Cavalier: Thank you.

Lee Kantor: I’m so excited to learn about your business. Tell us about The Freaky Cookie.

Sheila Cavalier: All right. So, yes, we are Freaky Cookie. We are a corporate gifting marketing cookie company located in Rancho Cucamonga, about 50 miles east of L.A. And what we do, we specialize in unique, cool cookies. So, we have taken a 90-year family recipe, and we have put a spin on it and created these real cool cookie flavors. So, we’ll have cookies like Fruity Freaky Loop, we have Oreo Boo. We just do a large mass amount of different type of cookies, and we have a rotation where we put them in and we rotate every quarter. We do marketing. Many of our clients will use them for marketing events, employee incentive events, and gifting, of course. So, that pretty much summarizes what we do.

Sheila Cavalier: Oh. Also, we have a in-house graphing department where you can have your labels, your own logos and themes placed on the cookie box, which is a big incentive for, you know, our clients because they like to market their events and their company.

Lee Kantor: Was the cookie company always geared towards corporate like this, or did it start out as, “Hey, I make a really good cookie”?

Sheila Cavalier: Hey, how did you know that? Yeah. Pretty much that’s how we started out. We thought we were going to really see that D2C space grow. So, we kind of market it and we had everything. Our motto was set towards the D2C, but where our facility is located, we’re like in an industrial park where our kitchen is an industrial area. So, you don’t have much foot traffic. It’s no need for individuals to come into that area, you know, unless they’re conducting business. And what we got to see over time was cookies were stacking up. You know, no one wanted to buy two and three cookies. They weren’t stopping in to The Freaky Cookie for that.

Sheila Cavalier: But what we were seeing was a lot of calls coming in from clients or potential customers that were in the area to visit other customers, their clients, and they wanted cookies to take to their clients to show their appreciation. So, we kept our eyes on the pulse of the market and we’re like, “Hey, what’s going on?” You know, we were just getting these calls coming in, give us four dozen, give us ten dozen. And we kept seeing that over and over, and we’re like, wait a second here, as far as consumer, they’re buying one or two, and some days no cookies. So, we’re like, “Okay. We need to rethink this model,” and that’s how we were able to kind of pivot and take that look into the corporate space, and, of course, do our research and all and build in that space.

Lee Kantor: Well, I think that’s an important lesson for entrepreneurs. I mean, sometimes some entrepreneurs fall so much in love with their product and they kind of go down with the ship if it’s not going their way, where you are able to say our product is the same product, and if a company wants to buy 100 of them, let’s sell them 100, instead of wait for 100 people to come in and buy one cookie each.

Sheila Cavalier: Right. Absolutely, Lee, that’s true and that’s what we really focused on. Like I said, it took us some time, though, for us to really understand that it wasn’t geared towards the direct to consumer space because we knew very little about the corporate space even though we are in this industrial area, and within a 20 mile radius, it’s nothing but a lot of industrial buildings, and you got the airport, you got big Fortune 500 companies. But when we caught on, we started, like I said, connecting, reaching out, and we said, “Hey, let’s reach out.” We reached out to some consultants and they were able to help us, and we were able to align with what the demand was going on. And it’s been a nice journey. And, of course, COVID didn’t really help much, but, yeah, we were able to build, recover from that, and move forward, so we are — here.

Lee Kantor: Why was it important for you to become part of the WBEC-West community?

Sheila Cavalier: Oh, my God. You know what? One thing I can say, I come out of a corporate background. I was in corporate for many of years. And not having that entrepreneurial network immediately around me, like I tell everyone, I could pick up a phone if I needed a corporate job, that was not an issue. I had plenty of network of individuals in that space. However, when it came time for entrepreneurship, I knew really no one to turn to. Of course, you have your chamber, and I thank God for that, and those that were in the chamber. But I saw an opportunity bigger, and I just didn’t know how to touch in. I didn’t have anyone to reach out to.

Sheila Cavalier: And, of course, thank God for the internet, you start doing this research and looking for other women businesses, picking up nuggets along the way, and I happen to come across WBENC National, and I’m like, “What is this?” And over a period of time because it was just so much information there and opportunity, and I didn’t understand it, it was just like a puzzle with several pieces and trying to figure out how these pieces all were interrelated.

Sheila Cavalier: So, I took my time and researched. It took me about a couple of years because I was really trying to understand how this organization could help catapult my business to a new level. And seeing the supplier diversity program, I’m like, “What the heck? What is this?” But as time went on and I reached out to them, and they were so helpful, and then connected me back to WBENC-West, that was the beauty of it, because you have national and they’re headquartered on the East Coast, but they were able to connect me back to WBEC-West. And, oh, my God, the team was amazing, so supportive. I would call in, I can’t tell you how many times Maria and the group, they were always there to answer and inspire me, and just give me information as I need it.

Sheila Cavalier: So, that was my connection and I saw opportunity. You know, of course, it took a while, but then as I started connecting and getting to know individuals in the organization, I was like, “Oh, my God. This is opportunity. This is what I was looking for.” Now, it’s like, how do I build it? How do I connect and how do I develop relationships? So, I tell Jaymee, and Dr. Pamela, Maria, the team, had it not been for WBENC, WBEC-West, I don’t know how I would have grown this company. It would have taken much, much longer. Because of the connections that we have made and the help and support from corporate members, it has been amazing for us, so it has definitely catapulted our business into a new level.

Lee Kantor: Now, one of the benefits of being part of the WBEC-West community is you get access to events, like the upcoming 21st Annual Procurement Conference at the Westin Lake Las Vegas Resort and Spa in Henderson, Nevada this September 17th and 19th. Have you gone to these conferences before?

Sheila Cavalier: Yes, I have. I attended last year’s conference and it was amazing. And, of course, I’m registered for the upcoming conference and is so excited. Oh, my. The conference, you know, because we’re in a smaller group setting, my first conference was nationals. And just with a large conference and becoming a new member, it was overwhelming but I really enjoyed it. Having to have this opportunity to be connected in a smaller atmosphere and with business women, the team was amazing. It was like you were just in an environment where you can just learn. You had insights from individuals. You’re connecting with corporate members. You’re connecting with certified sisters. It was amazing. And just being in conversation and learning so much in this smaller setting was phenomenal.

Sheila Cavalier: I can’t tell you, I get excited when I think about it because I feel a lot of my information, a lot of relationships, the networking aspect of it is really strong at these smaller conferences. It’s that small setting, like a classroom, you’re going to be more connected and have more time to just get to know one another and share insights. And that’s what we do there.

Sheila Cavalier: And last year was phenomenal. I just can’t believe the connections I made and relationships. That’s what it’s about. We always hear that, we’re building relationships, we’re building relationships. Let me say it personally, I didn’t understand the depth of the relationship until I was at WBEC-West, because there, you’ve known individuals, you may have seen them at events, you had time to talk a few minutes or whatever the case may be. But over time, having those three days is just like an opportunity that only happens it seems like once in a lifetime. But we’re really fortunate to have this happen every year. So, to me, I call it my relationship building blocks. It just helps to really build, gain insights, and further grow the company.

Lee Kantor: Now, any advice for someone maybe this is their first time going to an event like this, how do you kind of get the most out of the experience and not feel overwhelmed? Like, do you have a strategy or some tips you can share about kind of attacking this? Because I would imagine you do some homework before the thing begins in order to maximize your time there.

Sheila Cavalier: Yes. Oh, absolutely. I’m doing my homework to see how my business model, my product can align with the different corporate members that are there, the companies that are there. Looking at their background, looking at the services they offer, their departments, who can use cookies, or where’s an opportunity for gifting within the departments. And, also, seeing who else is going to be there for us, other WBEC sisters. So, you’re looking to see and you may have already come in contact with others. You know them and you may have had some advice given from them or you guys have had relationships, like a couple of the companies I have worked with, and to see how we can further develop our relationship and see how one another is doing.

Sheila Cavalier: So, yeah, I do quite a bit of research before going in and developing the strategy. One thing I say, if this is your first conference, you want to understand what is your goal. You know, why am I going to this conference? Am I going just to sell my product? Am I going to see how my product fit in? I always say, for me, personally, I’m not there to sell my product. I’m there to build relationships. And I say that in the sense of I want to get to know individuals and what their gaps are. Just talking with them, what is the gap as far as what they’re doing and how they’re building their company.

Sheila Cavalier: So, with me, personally, I’m looking at relationships because everyone can use some gifts, everyone uses gifts, but not everyone wants cookie gifts, or maybe they don’t know they want a cookie gift. So, my thing is just wanting to understand or wanting to get to know my fellow WBEs in a deeper relationship per se.

Sheila Cavalier: And then, again, they always have insights they’re sharing with me, as I may not have known something that could further benefit my business. So, I’m going with an open mind, but I’m also going understanding that this is opportunity to gather information. I always like to think of it as my think tank, my information tank. It’s just a wealth of information around me and how am I going to pull from that information, what is going on in these different companies in the future that maybe we can collaborate together, we can do a partnership, or just the fact of I didn’t even may have known they existed or that they were a member, so just to build.

Sheila Cavalier: I’m one of those that’s looking to build, build relationships because I feel that is where it happens. And relationships takes time to build, so this is a perfect setting, opportunity to build relationships, and get to know one another on a personal level or business-personal level. So, that’s my advice, get to know who is there.

Sheila Cavalier: Participate in the events. One thing about me, I love being around people. But on the flip side of that, it’s a little intimidating at times. But if I just get in there and start being a part of the activities and having fun, before you know it, you’re like, “Oh, my God. I know this person. I know that one. I connected with them.” You just get to know people. So, you really want to take advantage of the activities and stay connected throughout the conference. That’s the important part. And I think that goes a long way for anyone going, whether we’ve been there years or this is the first time, stay connected and just be open to learning and being involved.

Lee Kantor: Now, one of the events that occur are those matchmaking events. Can you talk about some strategies on how to make the most of those kind of interactions?

Sheila Cavalier: Yes, matchmaking. With the matchmaking, I know that the individual there – let me start there – is going to be taking the information back to the different departments or to the lead director of supplier diversity. So, my objective is to give them some insights about my company and how I feel they can connect, how I feel I could be a benefit and fill a gap in that particular company.

Sheila Cavalier: The key thing to me is having information where I can follow up and understanding that it may take time, it’s going to take time. But if this is my first connection with them, at least I’m dropping nuggets and they get to know who The Freaky Cookie is, what we offer, and how we can be of service. And then, from there, I feel it’s my responsibility to follow up in the sense of maybe I’ll see them at another event, or maybe they said I’ll reach out to you in a few weeks, so I’m going to give them a little longer than that. And if I have an email, I’m going to follow up. But I really believe patience is the virtue of these events and these matchmaking sessions.

Sheila Cavalier: With the matchmaking, I’m going in with a list of questions that I may have. But then, again, because of the information they’re giving me, my direction may change. So, I’m not so much stuck on what is on my sheet and the strategy, or what I’m really trying to communicate as much as I am listening. To me, it’s really important for me to be listening at the information they’re providing, because they’re the ones, they’re the experts of that or know more about the company than I do. So, that is very important to me.

Sheila Cavalier: Matchmaking is an opportunity I feel to build. Maybe this particular time, I may not hear back from them in a while from this event, from this conference, but, hey, I may see them at national, I’m going to see them again maybe next year at WBEC-West, or at one of their personal events. So, I’m always thinking this is just a start spot to move forward and to continue to connect and to touch base. That’s the way I see it.

Lee Kantor: Are you bringing any of your cookies?

Sheila Cavalier: Of course not. That wouldn’t make sense. Heck, yeah, I am. I hope you’re there, Lee, so you can try them. We’re actually getting ready for the fall, and I’m bringing some of our fall flavors. So, yeah, I got a few things up my sleeve. Yeah, I do.

Sheila Cavalier: You know what I wanted to say, too? I wanted to also give some advice or just share my insights on the roundtable experience as well. I know you mentioned matchmaking. Can I –

Lee Kantor: Sure. Absolutely. Please.

Sheila Cavalier: Okay. With matchmaking, you’re going around and, of course, we’re talking in these group settings for so many minutes, and we’re sharing our company experiences. But what I found was key for me at this matchmaking is that, that corporate member is listening to your information. They’re listening to your challenges. They’re listening to your services. They’re listening at what you have to offer.

Sheila Cavalier: And the reason I say that, I had an experience last year at the Chase table. Lisa Stevens, she’s one of the directors of WBEC-West. She’s on the board. And we were chatting, I was sharing with Lisa my challenges growing the company, and trying to put together the strategy for timelines and marketing, and on and so forth. And Lisa was listening to me, and she says, “You know what? I’m in L.A. area. I’m going to reach out to you and I have a few options that we can possibly take. But be patient, I’m going to reach out to you and we’re going to determine how to move forward.”

Sheila Cavalier: And sure enough, I heard from Lisa in two weeks, and I was amazed because I knew she had so many individuals that she needed to reach out to. From that point, Lisa and I worked together for a full year, and she was able to guide me through different challenges and give me advice. And she’s been a jewel for me in this last year. So, you know, I didn’t even see that in the meetings, the roundtable meetings, but that happened out of that. And I was so moved by that because I still have a relationship with Lisa. I can follow up with her at any time. And I’m looking forward to seeing her here and attending her workshop at the WBEC-West conference next month.

Sheila Cavalier: So, I mean, these roundtable meetings, they’re just as valuable as the matchmaking. Take advantage of any opportunity that come your way and just be ready to go in and get the best out of it.

Lee Kantor: Yeah. And that’s another great example of, like you were saying earlier, just being open and not making selling the thing you’re trying to do, and making just relationships and meeting people and learning. When that’s the metric that matters, you’re going to have a more productive conference.

Sheila Cavalier: Absolutely, Lee, that’s the key right there. Because you’re open and, like I said, you’re just absorbing. You’re like that sponge, you’re just taking information in. And it is going to be a lot of information. I mean, if this is your first time, be patient. It’s going to be a lot of information. It may feel overwhelming. Go home, sort through it all, take your time, and just digest because it is so much value at this conference, and you want to just be in a position where you can receive and build. That’s the key.

Sheila Cavalier: And for me, personally, when I got to that point, it’s just like the doors start opening in the sense of opportunities. And just even beyond WBEC-West, just looking at my other business relationships that I have already formed with my clients, it’s just so much different information that you can pull and take to different parts of your business and can help you grow.

Lee Kantor: So, if somebody wants to learn more about The Freaky Cookie, is there a website or a way to connect with you through that?

Sheila Cavalier: Oh, absolutely. First of all, we do have a website, it is thefreakycookie.com. And you can also reach out to me personally at hey, H-E-Y, @thefreakycookie.com. We’re gearing up for the holidays. We’re going to have some really cool gifting offerings this year. And we’re excited and definitely could be a help to fill those gifting needs.

Sheila Cavalier: I mean, everyone is looking for a great gift, and The Freaky Cookie, we do it right. We’re giving you something that you’re not going to find out in the marketplace. So, yeah, you taste the cookies, I invite anyone on the podcast to stop at the table, I’m going to have a pop up table there so I’m looking forward to meeting everyone. I’m excited. I’m super excited.

Lee Kantor: So, you’re going to be at the event September 17th through 19th at the Westin Lake Las Vegas Resort and Spa in Henderson, Nevada. You’ll be there with a table, and they can taste the cookies there, or maybe run into you in one of the roundtables or one of the events.

Sheila Cavalier: Absolutely. I hope all of that happens. Yes, absolutely. Definitely will be there. Looking forward to it. Cannot wait.

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

Sheila Cavalier: Thank you, Lee. I appreciate the opportunity to be a part of the podcast today. It’s great. I love sharing the story.

Lee Kantor: All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you next time on Women In Motion.

 

Fintech South 2024: Luis Andino with Ditch

by

FS-Ditch-Feature
Atlanta Business Radio
Fintech South 2024: Luis Andino with Ditch
Loading
/

Fintech South 2024, hosted by the Technology Association of Georgia (TAG), took place on Aug. 27-28 at the Woodruff Arts Center and Atlanta Symphony Hall. This year’s theme was “Fintech Lives Here!”

Luis Andino, Founder and CEO of Ditch, is a 2x founder, computational mathematician and former data scientist at a multi-billion-dollar fintech lender.

Our mission is to empower individuals and families to achieve financial freedom through personalized financial education and debt management tools.

 

Transcript-iconThis transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix.

 

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studio in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Atlanta Business Radio, brought to you by Kennesaw State University’s Executive MBA program, the accelerated degree program for working professionals looking to advance their career and enhance their leadership skills. And now, here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: Lee Kantor here, broadcasting live from Fintech South 2024 at the Woodruff Arts Center. So excited to be talking to my next guest, Luis Andino with Ditch. Welcome.

Luis Andino: Thank you so much for having me.

Lee Kantor: So before we get too far into things, tell us about Ditch.

Luis Andino: Of course. Well, Ditch is a personal finance app that uses AI to help people manage and repay their debt in a more efficient way.

Lee Kantor: So how does it work?

Luis Andino: It’s simple. So we take roundups of your purchases and then we send those automatically towards your debt. So think of walking into a coffee shop and buying a coffee for $3.40. We take that 60 cent roundup and then send it automatically towards your student loans, mortgages, credit cards, which means that you’ll get to pay off your debt faster. And the faster you pay off your debt, the less you’ll spend on interest. And that’s how we help our users save money.

Lee Kantor: So how much does that for an average person come up to every month? Because $0.60 at a time, it seems like, you know, my mortgage. It’s going to take a minute. Of course.

Luis Andino: Well, we’ve gotten clever about how we go about it. And one of the things that we do is that we allow users to add multipliers to their roundups. So we have the average multiplier on the platform is 2.7, which means that that 50 cent roundup is going to end up being over a dollar. And those add up to be about $150 on average for our existing users. But you could also take Instead of just a roundup, you could also decide to use a percentage of that transaction and then limit the transaction range. So if I go and, you know, spend $150 and I’m allocating 10% of all my transaction spend towards my mortgage or my debt, then that $150 transaction would end up resulting in a in a $15 payoff. And those rack up much, much, much faster. But our average user today is able to send about $150 towards their debt every single month.

Lee Kantor: And then how much time does that save them in and how quickly they can pay off their debt?

Luis Andino: It depends on the it depends on the type of loan. So mortgages, it’s going to be much more time for credit cards. It’s going to be a little less time. It depends on the balance of the credit card. But generally users expect to save around 30 or 40% of the total time it takes them to pay off their debt with these payoffs now.

Lee Kantor: So how does the app work for me as an individual. Do I pay for the app? And then you’re doing this, or I’m paying a transaction fee every time. You know, we do this dosey doe with the roundup.

Luis Andino: That’s exactly it. So we take a small percentage of every time that we make a payment towards your debt. And the reason that it’s still very profitable for you as a consumer is because you’re saving much more on interest. And in fact, you’re saving five in cases, five times more on interest than what we’re charging you to make that transaction. So the product is free to use. There are some premium features, but the product in itself and what I’ve described as free to use, and then we take a small percentage of those transactions. And that’s how we make money.

Lee Kantor: Now, how cumbersome is it to make the connection between the app and all of the things that debt like to get permission them in, like, because this sounds like a fintech challenge.

Luis Andino: It is. And, you know, that’s one of the things that we have solved. Um, and our average user, it takes our average user about four minutes to link all their accounts and set everything up from the moment that they open the app for the first time, to the moment that the payoffs start accruing, it takes on average about four minutes.

Lee Kantor: So it’s a matter of the permissioning my the place I owe the money to to say, hey, I’m going to make extra payments at random times. Or is that or do you do it all at one time, once a month? Like how do the is it happening in real time as I’m making the payment, it’s going in sending a dollar to my credit card.

Luis Andino: It’s not because of course transaction fees would make that impossible. If I’m sending $0.30 at a time and I’m paying a couple cents per transaction. So what we do is we aggregate and we allow the user to choose the pace, but it defaults to $25 right now. So every $25 we’re going to be making a payment from your checking account directly to your debt. Be that a student loan, your credit card, your mortgage, etc..

Lee Kantor: So you’re putting it in an envelope.

Luis Andino: Effectively. You can think about it that way. Yes.

Lee Kantor: So, um, what was the genesis of the idea? How did the kind of the concept come about?

Luis Andino: Well, first of all, I have a background in consumer lending. So I worked in consumer lending, and I just worked with enough people that were managing debt to realize that, frankly, that kind of sucks. And most people have it right. And so unless.

Lee Kantor: You’re the what is it, the rich, rich dad, poor dad. I think he likes debt.

Luis Andino: Exactly. Well, debt can be used very properly. And that’s one of the things that we want to also do is within the app, we also have some financial education courses that the user can take. And the idea is that eventually we’ll take user’s debt from being a burden to being a tool that they can leverage to live a more prosperous life. But doing that takes a lot, right? And so we’ve decided that we wanted to focus on the specific segment of debt, because most personal finance apps have overlooked that segment. They’re focusing on the folks that are high net worth individuals that have assets that they can generate revenue. They have a high Fico score so they can be sold a new credit card, whereas Dick works with the people that anecdotally have been overlooked, which is the people that manage and repay debt and that are struggling with debt.

Lee Kantor: So is there a story behind the name?

Luis Andino: Well, it’s it’s very simple and it’s kind of cheesy too. But what we what we do is we want to help our users Ditch their debt. And so for that reason, we’ve chosen that name. Um, and it’s it’s worked. It’s stuck. Our users like it. It’s catchy, it’s short, and it’s made sense thus far.

Lee Kantor: So at what stage are you as a startup?

Luis Andino: I would say that we’re in the seed stage. We’re still finding, uh, our groove and finding our what they call in the startup world product market fit. Uh, but we believe that we’re well on our way to do so. We’ve have we’re serving thousands of users that are using our platform every day. Uh, and we’ve been growing dramatically over the past four months.

Lee Kantor: So what was it like when you just put it out to the world and were like, oh, I hope somebody kind of bites on this thing.

Luis Andino: It was extremely. Yeah, it was extremely underwhelming. You know, you you spend months and months building a product and you have this expectation that as soon as you turn things on, people are just going to show up. In fact, we’ve we were scared initially of whether system could handle the load that we were expecting. And then you turn the thing on and then all of a sudden it’s your aunt, your mom, your cousin, your girlfriend, and a few buddies of yours that have downloaded your app. Okay, we.

Lee Kantor: Got the low hanging fruit out of the way. Now what?

Luis Andino: Now what? That’s exactly the question. And the. Now what is that? Then you have to build, which I think is one of the biggest challenges with startups, is you have to build mechanisms to get the attention of a lot of people, whether that’s through the product messaging and making sure that that’s simple enough for someone to understand, whether that’s advertising on social media, whether that’s building partnerships with companies that already have your target audience. And that’s really one of the hardest parts about building a company, is finding enough people to care about what you’re building, and making sure that you continue innovating on the product to make sure that people still continue to care.

Lee Kantor: So who are the right kind of partners for you?

Luis Andino: We partner with fintechs, consumer lenders, banks, community banks, credit unions, all the folks that are actively, uh, having customers that owe them money. And the use case is that we partner with these types of institutions to help them service those delinquent loans. So if you’re a consumer lender, a bank, a credit union, and you have $100 million in outstanding debt and a portion of that is past due or people are missing payments, the use case there would be that you would send them an email and say, hey, we are making this tool available for you. And then that user would get the tool for free. And then the payoffs that we generate are those round ups will automatically go towards servicing that lender’s debt. And in that equation everyone wins. We gain a customer, the bank gets their money back and the lender and the customer gets a tool that helps them manage their debt in a more efficient way to make that process more seamless.

Lee Kantor: And are you white labeling it for them or is it still under the Ditch name?

Luis Andino: Well, for now, we’re trying to preserve our brand because we believe that the engagement is going to be higher. So if your lender is reaching out to you and saying, hey, we have this tool that we want you to use, you’re going to be like, man, I owe you money. I’m not going to pick up that phone call. I’m not going to open that email. But if it’s coming from a third party and it’s a tool that’s built specifically to help you agnostic of the lender, then we are confident that the engagement is going to be much higher coming from us than it would be if it was a white label solution that we’re making available to the lender. But that’s not out of the question for our future. I think that initially we’ve seen enough traction Attraction to want to bring our brand to life as opposed to just the technology.

Lee Kantor: Now, what was it like going through the innovation challenge?

Luis Andino: It was great. The preparation was very formative. It was the first time that I’ve been in front of an audience of that size, which initially was nerve wracking, but I was pleasantly surprised to feel that comfortable in front of that many people. And it just is another example of pushing the boundary further and further beyond of what we’re capable of as entrepreneurs.

Lee Kantor: So would you learn any new kind of thoughts or anything that somebody brought up that you hadn’t thought of yet, or any connections maybe, that are going to help you get to a new level for sure.

Luis Andino: Connections, definitely. I mean, we’ve had tons of people reach out to us. We had hundreds of people download the app right on the spot because we put up a QR code. But I guess like the the undertone of this is, is to just, uh, be prepared. And it’s not as intimidating as you’d expect, even if you’re in front of hundreds of people or thousands of people, if you know what you’re building and you deeply, deeply care about what you’re doing, the the passion is going to come through, and that’s going to be what resonates with your audience. And it’s not only enjoyable, but very productive at the end of the day, for an entrepreneur to build the habit of speaking to large amounts of people and feeling super comfortable doing it.

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

Luis Andino: Well, we’re always looking to build partnerships with, like I said, consumer lenders, credit unions, banks. We also have a partnership channel with large employers. So we partner with companies to allow to offer Ditch as a financial wellness benefit for their workforce. So in the same way that companies pay for health insurance for their employees, physical wellness or gym memberships, we also believe that there’s a huge impact that debt and money make on an employee’s productivity, their retention, their mood. And we believe that serving up these financial wellness tools for as a as a perk for the employee is super productive as well. So we also partner with large employers and POS.

Lee Kantor: So if somebody wanted to learn more, have more substantive conversation with your team, get the app. Is there a website?

Luis Andino: Of course. Our website is.io/contact. That’s the best way to get Ahold of us again. That’s ditc h.io/contact.

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

Luis Andino: Thank you so much.

Lee Kantor: All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you in a few. At Fintech South 2024.

 

Fintech South 2024: Aly Merritt with Atlanta Tech Village

by

FS-Atlanta-Tech-Village-Feature
Atlanta Business Radio
Fintech South 2024: Aly Merritt with Atlanta Tech Village
Loading
/

Fintech South 2024, hosted by the Technology Association of Georgia (TAG), took place on Aug. 27-28 at the Woodruff Arts Center and Atlanta Symphony Hall. This year’s theme was “Fintech Lives Here!”

Aly-MerrittAly Merritt is a former copy editor with a residual addiction to journalism, and is currently the Managing Director of Atlanta Tech Village. She was previously the Head of Community at SalesLoft, an Atlanta-based sales engagement software company, and in past Lofter lives, she’s also been a part of customer experience, support and product management, as well as Chief of Staff.

She has spent the last decade of her career working with the Atlanta startup community to advance both local startups and Atlanta itself on the national stage, with a special focus on diversity, equity and inclusion, and contributes to their growth and culture by connecting startup hubs, VCs and organizations across the city. She also works daily to build a network of strong women in business and tech in Atlanta and across the country.

She previously organized and emceed the ATL Startup Village, a bi-monthly meetup to generate publicity, visibility and potential investment for startups in Atlanta, hosted at Atlanta Tech Village. She sporadically spends time writing about tech and the startup community on her blog, AlyintheATL.com.

Aly lives in Atlanta with her husband, Alex (who is an attorney and therefore very challenging to argue with), and their toddler son (who primarily argues over which is the “right” blue sippy cup). She still is unable to reconcile herself to the Oxford comma.

Connect with Aly on LinkedIn and follow her on Twitter.

Transcript-iconThis transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix.

 

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studio in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Atlanta Business Radio, brought to you by Kennesaw State University’s Executive MBA program, the accelerated degree program for working professionals looking to advance their career and enhance their leadership skills. And now, here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: Lee Kantor here, broadcasting live from Fintech South 2024 at the Woodruff Arts Center. So excited to be talking to my next guest, Aly Merritt, with Atlanta Tech Village, and announcing a new development and expansion in south downtown. Welcome.

Aly Merritt: Thank you so much for having me today.

Lee Kantor: Well, for the two people who aren’t familiar with Atlanta Tech Village, why don’t you share a little bit about kind of mission purpose there? And then we’ll get into the expansion.

Aly Merritt: Absolutely. Atlanta Tech Village is the fourth largest tech hub in the US. We focus on supporting specificAly proprietary tech entrepreneurs. We have about 1300 of them in our building, give or take, and they make up about 250 to 350 companies. Our goal is to provide faster access to talent, capital and ideas.

Lee Kantor: So how has the tech community within Tech Village grown like maybe since its inception? Like, how many do you remember? How many businesses were there when you launched?

Aly Merritt: Oh, that’s such a fun story. We are a little over a decade old now. When Dave Cummings bought the building and started gutting it, he literAly had people come in and start building their own Ikea desks, floor by floor. It’s kind of a badge of pride, if you can say, I was there when I built my own Ikea desk. It wasn’t fancy. It grew very, very rapidly. There was actuAly a story in Hippotamus today that had a picture of when they hit their first 1000 members and had a lot of the original ATV team. And in 2019, we were completely full right before the pandemic, and even during the pandemic, we only dropped down to about 60% occupancy, even when we as a building were closed, because people reAly wanted to be a part of the community, even when they physicAly couldn’t be in the space.

Lee Kantor: And that’s the beauty of it. The community is not just the space.

Aly Merritt: That’s right. I like to say what I, I don’t sell office space. What I sell is community. I could sell office space. We have beautiful offices, but that’s just a piece of it. What we reAly do is focus on those serendipitous interactions between the entrepreneurs, the investors, the ecosystem folks, everybody in the ecosystem, which is why we’re here at Fintech South today.

Lee Kantor: Now, let’s talk a little bit about the expansion. And if you don’t mind, just share a little bit about the history that happened before you all invested in developing that south downtown area.

Aly Merritt: Yeah, it’s a funny story because it’s a very short history. We are doing real estate at startup speed. Absolutely. So David Cummings in October of last year. So less than a year ago got word that a large portfolio downtown which had been run by a German developer called Newport, was going up for sale. Bankruptcy. Style on the courthouse steps. Because apparently that’s still how we do things. As you stand on the courthouse steps and announce it to the world. And it was a large, contiguous chunk of downtown. And David thought.

Lee Kantor: And it’s a historic chunk.

Aly Merritt: Historic.

Lee Kantor: It’s not just a chunk of town. Yeah, it’s kind of the heart of of the, the world for a lot of people in a, in a certain part of history.

Aly Merritt: It is it was the original business and innovation district in downtown. And that was one of the reasons that it made such a big impact on David is he looked at it and thought, this is a part of history that reAly needs to be revitalized. We don’t want it to get sold into different people who maybe don’t have a big vision. This is an opportunity. And apparently we didn’t have enough to do so. We bought 15 acres, 53 buildings, the largest collection of historic assets ever sold in Atlanta.

Lee Kantor: And then the what’s kind of the vision to kind of reboot that, that part of town.

Aly Merritt: It’s a big vision and it changes literAly every day, as you do in startup world. Lots of pivoting, lots of testing and iterating and getting an MVP into the market and then saying, well, that didn’t work. Let’s figure out what we can do with that. Some days I come in and say, what is that? I thought that was a bagel shop. And they say things like, yesterday it was a bagel shop. Today it is a hairdresser. And I’m like, okay, um, so a little bit different than our focus in Buckhead is we’re moving not just into supporting our proprietary tech entrepreneurs, but also into supporting neighborhood businesses and helping Atlanta innovators and entrepreneurs grow from the ground up, regardless of the specific field that they’re in.

Lee Kantor: So it’s not just tech, which is a slight pivot. This could be a mom and pop. It could be a hairdresser, it could be a hairdresser. That’s fine.

Aly Merritt: Absolutely, because there’s so much space down there. In order to revitalize a neighborhood, you can’t just have proprietary tech startups, right? We want coffee shops. Yeah, you need coffee shops You need delis. You need pharmacies. You need. Grocers you need all the things that would allow people to move down there and live, work, play in a noncommercial real estate sort of way.

Lee Kantor: So it’s neighborhood as a service you’re selling.

Aly Merritt: It is neighborhood as a service in a lot of ways. Now it will have an additional fully resourced office similar to ATV Buckhead when we open in early 2025 at Atlanta Tech Village, Sylvan, it’s the former Sylvan Hotel, and that will house another minimum 200 entrepreneurs. We have about 36 offices there and that will focus on proprietary tech, but we are also building out space for our neighborhood entrepreneurs and businesses as well. And we currently have a co-working space open at Atlanta Tech Village Masons, the former Masons furniture store, and we have about 40 Masons only members there, in addition to a large amount of our Atlanta Tech Village Buckhead folks who are working down there too.

Lee Kantor: Now, is there any partnership with Georgia State since they’re down there as well? What a.

Aly Merritt: Great question. So they back up to our space, and we are working very hard on figuring out how we can better support them as they grow, as well as their graduate students who live down there. They have a huge pedestrian population and that’s very important to us too. They also back up to Underground Atlanta, who we work very closely with. And then on the other side, you have Centennial Yards and the new entertainment district there, as well as the CNN, formerly the CNN center, and that district that’s getting built out. And this is all a very symbiotic relationship. Any density that any of us can bring in or benefit across the board, even though we all have slightly different focuses and slightly different niche areas of interest.

Lee Kantor: So what do you need more of right now and how can we help you?

Aly Merritt: Thank you for asking that. We do a lot of public community tours because John Birdsong, the other partner in this in this development downtown, calls it transference of belief one tour at a time. You just don’t get it until you go. So I highly encourage folks to follow us on social media, see all the historic finds we’re finding in the building. You get heads up on everything that’s going on with the new buildings, all of the different designs and renderings, but you also get to come down and get a feel for the space. So that’s what we need. We need people to come down, come out, engage in the community. It’s not scary. We’ve got lots of parking. Of those 15 acres, we bought six surface parking lots.

Lee Kantor: There’s no shortage of.

Aly Merritt: Parking lot right now. Please come down and south. Downtown and Atlanta Tech Village are also doing a lot of lot parties. So you can find those on our social media. They’re open to the public. They’re kid friendly. We are celebrating not only the games that are going on in the Mercedes-Benz, which is walking distance away, but also we’re doing things like the party with the pass, with the Atlanta History Center coming down the line soon.

Lee Kantor: Now, as part of the kind of revitalization are you trying to keep kind of some of the architecture and the history from that standpoint, or is it something that, you know, because sometimes in Atlanta, they like to tear things down and put shiny things in its place.

Aly Merritt: Sometimes, frequently. I would say that’s often a challenge with Atlanta is that there’s a lot of history that’s no longer there. We are working our way through every single building, and we’ve acquired a few more since we bought the original portfolio. We are working with historical preservationists. We’re working on historic tax credits. We actuAly had our interns over the summer go into different buildings with a little cart, and they would pick up different pieces, whether they were beautiful lights or a typewriter or an old phone, all sorts of different fun things. And we’re putting them in a museum to showcase the spaces, even if a building isn’t structurAly sound. We’re working very hard to keep maybe a facade here and there. I saw a rendering this morning of a building that has trees growing in it, and the rendering turns it into a park with just a framework of the beautiful building.

Lee Kantor: That’s the the startup mentality. That’s an opportunity.

Aly Merritt: It’s an opportunity. We don’t say no. We say yes and yes.

Lee Kantor: And that’s right. Well, if somebody wants to connect and learn more, what again is the coordinates website and maybe social?

Aly Merritt: Absolutely. South downtown ATL is the Instagram for the entire portfolio. Atl Tech Village is specificAly for Atlanta Tech Village. So you can follow along on ATV, Sylvan and all the other fun things coming down the line. And we partner on a lot of those pieces, so either one will get you where you need to go.

Lee Kantor: All right, well, thank you so much for sharing your story. You’re doing such important work and we appreciate you. Thank you so.

Aly Merritt: Much for having me today. Oh, actuAly, I apologize. What I missed something. I do want to point out that even though we are revitalizing downtown, there is a lot already going on down there. So we are leaning into our neighbors tied to kitchen, Spiller Park, Wild Leap Brewery, Cat Eye Gallery shortly the Origin Hotel is going in, so there’s a lot of other folks doing great work that have been there for a long time and that are coming in new as well.

Lee Kantor: Right. So this is you don’t have to wait and go. There’s stuff to do now. Yeah, exactly. Early and often. Well, thank you again, Ali, for sharing your story.

Aly Merritt: Thank you for having me.

Lee Kantor: All right. This is Lee Kantor back in a few. At Fintech South 2024.

 

Fintech South 2024: Les Adkins with Yonga Tech

by

FS-Yonga-Tech-Feature
Atlanta Business Radio
Fintech South 2024: Les Adkins with Yonga Tech
Loading
/

Fintech South 2024, hosted by the Technology Association of Georgia (TAG), took place on Aug. 27-28 at the Woodruff Arts Center and Atlanta Symphony Hall. This year’s theme was “Fintech Lives Here!”

Les-AdkinsLes Adkins is the CEO and Founder of Yonga Tech and he was the Co-Founder and President of A Pocket. As President of APocket, Les drove the company’s strategy around currency and media. He has spent his career working with fortune 100 & 200 companies to develop digital strategies to make and keep their businesses relevant.

Les has an MBA in global communication and has spent the last decade working with some of the most progressive companies in the USA to bridge the gap between old and new.

Transcript-iconThis transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix.

 

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studio in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Atlanta Business Radio, brought to you by Kennesaw State University’s Executive MBA program, the accelerated degree program for working professionals looking to advance their career and enhance their leadership skills. And now here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: Lee Kantor here, broadcasting live from Fintech South 2024 at the Woodruff Arts Center. So excited to be talking to our next guest, Les Adkins with Yonga Tech. Welcome.

Les Adkins: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

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

Les Adkins: So the easiest way to tell you is one line we are doing crypto to fiat at point of sale. So crypto currency at point of sale so people can use their crypto. Finally. By having a debit card or credit card like they like, they use a debit card or credit card.

Lee Kantor: So now educate the audience. When it comes to crypto as crypto a currency, is it, is it? Kind of a commodity like what is?

Les Adkins: So right now crypto is a commodity. But it was meant to. Be a currency.

Lee Kantor: Right. So it makes it a little tricky. It does. Like I can’t bring my gold bar to. Buy a pizza.

Les Adkins: Exactly. So there’s $222 billion worth of crypto in the United States, and there’s 45 million. Account holders of that crypto. Right. And all they’re trying to do is spend it and save it and grow it and all that stuff, but they’re looking for ways to spend it. Well, what we’ve done, there have been ways out there that that have tried to do this. They’ve gotten in trouble. The banking regulations have stopped them. And so what allows us to do it is we are not a crypto company. We don’t touch crypto. It’s a self-custody wallet. You load your crypto and then you spend it as currency. We call it fiat, but it’s currency. So USD currency, yen, Euro, any currency you can spend your crypto in.

Lee Kantor: So any place that accepts crypto, I can use your.

Les Adkins: No, that’s the beauty of it. That’s any place that accepts cash.

Lee Kantor: Cash? I can go to 7-Eleven. You can do.

Les Adkins: 7-eleven. You can buy your gas. You can do a vending machine. You can do it online.

Lee Kantor: So how much is it going to take out if I go and buy a, you know, a snicker bar with my card from you?

Les Adkins: So how much is. So let’s say a snicker bar is let’s make it easy. Let’s say a snicker bar is a dollar, right? Okay. It’s probably more closer to $5, but let’s say it’s a dollar.

Lee Kantor: That’s why this is not going to be dated. So in the future you’ll be right.

Les Adkins: It’d be $100. So. Okay. So let’s say it’s a dollar. Yeah. So we allow you right now to load 5,000 USD crypto at the time you load it on. That’s the deal with regulations and all this wonderful, great stuff.

Lee Kantor: So a 12th of a Bitcoin about as of today probably.

Les Adkins: Yes, exactly. So then you take it to the merchant right. They take out a dollar’s worth of crypto. At that time. The merchant gets a dollar right. We freeze the transaction. So there’s lower volatility. And that’s all proprietary and patent pending and all the stuff that we do behind it. So but so it’s a dollar worth of crypto. You spend the dollar the merchant gets the dollar. They don’t care that you use crypto. They don’t even necessarily know that you use crypto.

Lee Kantor: That’s not relevant to them.

Les Adkins: No because we’re putting we’re point of sale agnostic. Right.

Lee Kantor: Because they are just getting their money. And it’s like it’s.

Les Adkins: Like pulling out a dollar in your. Think of it this way. This is the best way to describe it in your wallet. You’re saying let’s use the same. You said snicker bar right? Right. So same snicker bar. You go to the store, you have a dollar in your wallet. You pull it out of your wallet, you hand the merchant cash. Right. Right. Same concept, except we’re just doing it with crypto.

Lee Kantor: Right. And you’re doing it on a card. And then I can just dump my crypto there and use it as if it’s cash. As if it’s used up my $5,000. Exactly.

Les Adkins: And then you can load it again, or you can use it to save your crypto, but that’s a whole other conversation.

Lee Kantor: So how is how has the adoption been with this.

Les Adkins: So we are in alpha. We’re in alpha.

Lee Kantor: Alpha.

Les Adkins: We’re so we’re in alpha. We’re we’re at the early stages. But we have uh, we are partnering with Musk miners that they are a crypto mining company and they’ve got around 100,000 clients. We’re also working with some influencers in crypto. If you’ve ever seen the documentary God Bless Bitcoin, I work with some of those individuals and we actually have people that are using crypto now that call us on a regular basis and say, hey, is your card out yet? I want to use my crypto. So great example of that. Remember recently when crypto kind of went down for a day? Yeah, we had about 20 to 40 people call us and say, hey, is that card ready yet? Because we want to use it because we want to take the loss. So we have a lot of buzz around us. A lot of momentum. We have a very high level executive advisory board, and we’re in a funding round that we should be able to be closing in the next six weeks or so.

Lee Kantor: Is the card right now is there a card?

Les Adkins: We do have a card. It’s an alpha. It’s by invite only right now. But we actually have a card. It works with an app and a card. We actually have a card that’s an alpha and we’re pushing to beta. My developer and I keep having this conversation, so I want it to go in October. But he promised me by January.

Lee Kantor: So we’re negotiating. We’re negotiating. You’re negotiating.

Les Adkins: So he’s the guy. He’s the guy that makes everything work, so I can’t really push him too hard. So.

Lee Kantor: So, um, what’s the funny story on the name?

Les Adkins: So we were looking for a name, so we started out with a. We were eventually going to do a digital gift card app called Gift Guru. And we have a whole gift card thing that we do as well.

Lee Kantor: But crypto gift cards or it’ll eventually be crypto.

Les Adkins: Yeah, it’ll be.

Lee Kantor: Everything’s gonna be crypto.

Les Adkins: Well, it’ll be crypto cash. So we’re all crypto cash. So everything. Everything relates to USD currency, euros, yens. But. So we were looking for. We work with kangaroos. If you see our logos, there’s kangaroos on them. So my wife is into astrology. Not astrology but stars and constellations. So we were looking for constellations and we found a constellation in Australia that the kangaroo that they call Yanga. And that’s the name of the company, Yanga Tek.

Lee Kantor: So Australia has different constellations.

Les Adkins: Same constellations, different.

Lee Kantor: Names, different names.

Les Adkins: All I know is they said it’s found in Australia. So if you look up in the sky, you can see I.

Lee Kantor: Thought they were Greek constellations.

Les Adkins: You can Google.

Lee Kantor: It. Okay, I’ll take your word for it. So what do you need more for at this time? Is it investors or what are you looking for?

Les Adkins: Actually we’re looking.

Lee Kantor: We’re.

Les Adkins: Looking for investors. We’re looking for people that can help us go to market. We are looking for individuals that are interested in spending their crypto. So we’ll actually be like I said, we have an investor. We’re a current $5 million round of funding that, like I said, should close within the next six weeks.

Lee Kantor: And if somebody wants to connect, learn more. Website, all that good stuff.

Les Adkins: They just need to go to yoga tech.com or go to my LinkedIn, which is Leslie Adkins.

Lee Kantor: Adkins and yonga is y o n g a t e c h.com.

Les Adkins: Correct. There is a yonga tech. Yoga tech. So don’t do that one.

Lee Kantor: It’s that one.

Les Adkins: Yonga tech H.

Lee Kantor: Tech. Well les thank you so much for sharing your story, doing important work and we appreciate you.

Les Adkins: Thank you. Thank you for having me. I appreciate you guys having me here.

Lee Kantor: All right. This Lee Kantor back in a few. At Fintech South 2024.

Fintech South 2024: Nate Kaemingk with Better Forecasting

by

Atlanta Business Radio
Atlanta Business Radio
Fintech South 2024: Nate Kaemingk with Better Forecasting
Loading
/

Fintech South 2024, hosted by the Technology Association of Georgia (TAG), took place on Aug. 27-28 at the Woodruff Arts Center and Atlanta Symphony Hall. This year’s theme was “Fintech Lives Here!”

Nate-KaemingkNate Kaemingk, Founder & CEO, Better Forecasting.

Better Forecasting isn’t just another AI tool—it’s the product of two decades of hands-on experience, finally finding its ultimate expression.

Connect with Nate on LinkedIn.

Transcript-iconThis transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix.

 

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studio in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Atlanta Business Radio, brought to you by Kennesaw State University’s Executive MBA program, the accelerated degree program for working professionals looking to advance their career and enhance their leadership skills. And now, here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: Lee Kantor here, broadcasting live from Fintech South 2024 at the Woodruff Arts Center. So excited to be talking to my guest today. Right now we have Nate Kaemingk with Better Forecasting. Welcome.

Nate Kaemingk: Hey, thanks for having me.

Lee Kantor: Well, I’m excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us a little bit about Better Forecasting.

Nate Kaemingk: Yeah. So we have written a forecasting AI specifically for mid-market finance teams. So that’s going to be companies anywhere from 10 million up to $1 billion a year in revenue, and it’s written specifically to help with annual forecasting process. To make it a lot easier. I can go into customers and you tell me how much to.

Lee Kantor: Well, I just I’m just trying to get an idea for our listeners to understand what it is you’re doing and how you’re serving folks. Yeah, yeah. Go as deep as you’d like. All right.

Nate Kaemingk: Sounds good. Well, so the three, the most common reason we get phone calls or people are trying to improve their business is because they’re tired of what we call the annual guest process. And that’s where you take last year’s numbers. You kind of try to guess what’s going to happen next year. You know, we’ve all been through that process. Every corporation I’ve worked for has done that process, and it works on until it doesn’t. And so but.

Lee Kantor: Does it really.

Nate Kaemingk: Work? No it doesn’t. That’s actually the reason.

Lee Kantor: What’s the accuracy percentage of people’s forecasting I’m.

Nate Kaemingk: I’m impressed when people can get within 10% of what they said they were going to be able to do. Like if you got.

Lee Kantor: 10%, you’re high fiving.

Nate Kaemingk: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And that and then I’ve had, um, a recent company I can think of that called us. They said, you know, hey, for the last three years we have been off by 35%.

Lee Kantor: Just a third. That’s all.

Nate Kaemingk: Yeah, just a third. I mean, how do you run your business on that, like. And so so that’s one of the main problems. The next one is the classic, you know, hey, we’re running out of cash, but we’re profitable. What’s going on. Right. And so we will try to work with people on terms and what they can change. And then the third one is just of course, you know, the executive is about to make some major strategic decisions and he just wants to have some support like, okay, what are some unintended consequences that I can’t see yet. So we will help build models and our AI will build models for that. Um, companies solve that today. I mean, anybody in a corporation in finance will know this, but the companies typically will solve that today by hiring a person that does what’s called financial planning and analysis. And they’ll show up at the executive session with their 57 tab Excel spreadsheet. And they will try to answer any of the questions that are thrown their way during that session. Now, now, what you have to keep in mind is the meeting isn’t the problem. It’s how long it took to build that 57 tab Excel spreadsheet, and the fact that it won’t answer half the questions that are thrown at them that day anyways. And so what we’ve done is we’ve shortchanged that process. When I was at a previous role about a decade ago, it took us three man years, nine calendar months to show up at that meeting. And we still didn’t get it all right. We still had to go back and keep fixing it. And so what our tool does now is it takes that entire months long process and turns it into something that takes hours instead of months. And then there’s the annual rolling forecast. There’s actually a company I can think of. I can’t name names, but I can, um, there are $3 billion a year company.

Lee Kantor: What’s a rhyme.

Nate Kaemingk: With, uh, uh, they’re in agriculture, that’s all, as far as I can go, because they’re big enough, but, um, so. And they don’t they only do their forecast twice a year because it takes too long to do the update. So they just don’t even get any value out of it.

Lee Kantor: Why bother even doing so?

Nate Kaemingk: Why bother? Because it’s going to be by the time we get the updated forecast. Right. Exactly. And so what we that process is typically best case two days and worst case six weeks like we talked about. That takes minutes in our AI to do that update every single month.

Lee Kantor: Now in your AI, are you taking kind of industry information or are you taking just the specifics of this individual company? How do you go about building the forecasting model?

Nate Kaemingk: Fantastic question. So so we will start with the company’s financials. And that’ll be your balance sheet your profit and loss. You know GAAP standard accounting. So I love accountants.

Lee Kantor: You’re getting as much accounting data as you can as it just do you want like kind of historic. You want the whole shebang or. Yeah. Yeah. As much as they’ll give you, you’ll take.

Nate Kaemingk: Monthly financial statements back as far as you’ll give them to me. And but the full you know, here’s, here’s what the balance sheet close was as of the end of January 2024. I need the whole piano, the whole balance sheet. And with that, and we do that for every single month back in history with that.

Lee Kantor: And then you layer in, you know, kind of the industry standards and benchmarks from other, you know, from all the players. So you’re not just seeing theirs.

Nate Kaemingk: Well, so we actually I’ll kind of walk through that process. It’s actually a three step process. So the first thing we do is we take their historical data and we establish trends. And the reason that works is there’s a little bit of a psychological reason for that. If you don’t if you don’t recognize that 95% of the thoughts you had today, you had yesterday, sure. How to tie your shoe, how to drive your car, how to, you know, so we’re creatures of habit. And it’s actually our brains are designed to to not use high brain power. Right. They want to think about you know, that makes sense for.

Lee Kantor: They need to pay attention to danger. They don’t have to worry about how to tie their shoes. They already know how to tie their shoes. Exactly.

Nate Kaemingk: And so, so because we our brains are biochemically wired to create habits, that happens in our work. It happens in our business, it happens in the stuff that I buy on the way If I’m driving to work one day, I’m going to pretty much stop at the same gas station every time. Maybe I would change if there was a better price somewhere, but I’m pretty much going to stop at the same gas station or the same grocery store. I’ll buy the same flowers from my wife. You know, that’s all habit stuff. So we, as forecasters, will take advantage of the fact that human beings are creatures of habit. So when we’re doing a historical trends based forecast, we’re actually establishing a foundational baseline. Like this is what’s normal, right. And the only time and now there will be slight changes. You know, people change a couple of habits a year. There’s even entire industries written around how to help you change your habits in a healthy way. So we will capture those changes. That’s why we have to do the rolling forecast. We every single month, we’re going to expect to have 3 to 5% change in what happened from the previous year and capture that and keep moving it forward. The second bucket is the sales funnel. And so that’s the you know how many people hit our website. It’s all internal data. You notice I’m not saying anything about external data quite yet.

Lee Kantor: So so far it’s all internal.

Nate Kaemingk: Yep. And so the second thing would be, you know, how many conversations did you have? Did your sales team go to conferences? Did they fill in their CRM, their HubSpot, their Salesforce, or whatever you’re using? That is really good at giving us what is about to.

Lee Kantor: Change, right? What’s going to happen tomorrow?

Nate Kaemingk: What’s the. Yeah. So from the trend you can establish not just the most likely, but you can establish a high range of probability and a low range of probability. And then you use the sales funnel data to show well which direction are we heading. Are we on the high end? Are we on the low end. Right. And then once that’s all established, then we go to the outside market factors. We start looking at we actually pull in weather data. We pull in. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has a lot of, you know, you know, in the construction industry labor cost is a massive problem right now. Right.

Lee Kantor: And so supply chain issues, anything that’s happening, maybe there’s a pandemic, you know.

Nate Kaemingk: Something like that happens.

Lee Kantor: Anything can happen.

Nate Kaemingk: Or, you know, a ship could crash in the canal. Right now.

Lee Kantor: It’s blocked for a.

Nate Kaemingk: Year, right? Absolutely. And so so then we start trying to because because the most impactful thing to a business is what it does itself. We always want to look at the market. The only time the outside market really matters for a business is when they get large enough that it really matters. So we’re talking 10 to 30% of total market share before the outside factor is absolutely. You know, it’s like there’s nothing they can do internally to change what the outside market will do to them. That’s not always true. So once we do that, what we’re looking for is okay, what can’t be explained by the sales funnel, what can’t be explained by history. And if there’s any noise left over, then we go look for, well, there was a pandemic or a ship crashed or, you know, any of these events. We can.

Lee Kantor: Think of these.

Nate Kaemingk: Outliers. Yeah, exactly.

Lee Kantor: So then, um, so how did this idea come about? What was the genesis of the. Hey, I can come up with a better mousetrap for this.

Nate Kaemingk: Yeah, well, I just I came at this weird. I mean, I actually started out as a mechanical engineer, and I learned a whole bunch of math and statistics. We had an engineering problem I had to solve, and it was $10,000 per data point, and it was a couple of days of work to get a single data point. Now, this was when $10,000 was worth something, right? Um, and and so because of that, I learned a very specific subset of niche math known as inferential statistics for small data sets. And and it sounds horrible. And that’s I think it’s fantastic. But that’s my problem, not yours. So, um, because of that, when I went and did my MBA, all the bankers had me do their homework, as I like to say it or otherwise. They said, hey, we’ve never seen anyone do this before. Let’s have you start. So I kind of figured out I had something unique. Then I had a chance to go apply it at corporate. I worked for a fortune 500 company and got to do forecasting for them, and I had a lot of people come back to me like, you’re you’re approaching this in such a new way that handles risk factors. We’ve never seen anyone figure out how to handle before. And it was because of that background. Eventually, um left that fortune 500 company and I started doing this. I was I started doing this as a freelancer, and eventually it turned into my company because people liked it and they kept wanting to pay me for it.

Lee Kantor: And and you’re getting a better result than being off by a third?

Nate Kaemingk: Absolutely. Yes. If I, if I what’s amazing is how many people keep their jobs when they’re off by that far. And they, you know, either.

Lee Kantor: The weathermen keep their jobs or they’re like barely 5050.

Nate Kaemingk: I had a it’s funny when I say I do forecasting, I have to figure out how to tell people I’m not a weatherman.

Lee Kantor: Well, Connie, you.

Nate Kaemingk: Are.

Lee Kantor: A different kind of way.

Nate Kaemingk: I can tell you what weather will do to your business, but I can’t forecast what the weather is, so. Yeah.

Lee Kantor: So now you were part of the Fintech South Innovation challenge? Yeah, I.

Nate Kaemingk: Was, I was.

Lee Kantor: How was that experience for you? Oh, it was fantastic.

Nate Kaemingk: So they did a really good job. They they had a list of a whole bunch of companies that applied out of that list. They picked ten and had, you know, industry experts come in and talk to us about various topics, pitching investors if you’re interested in and that kind of thing. And then I got selected for the top three, which was amazing. And because I was in the top three, I got to pitch on the main stage here at fintech. So and the best I didn’t win good agriculture. One shout out to them. They did a fantastic job.

Lee Kantor: How are they at forecasting?

Nate Kaemingk: I actually don’t know. That’s a good question. Um, we’ll have to ask. Uh, so, so but what has been amazing about it is the number of companies that have been like, oh, I have that problem. You know, I actually had a I met somebody in the lobby and they pulled me aside and they were like, Nate, I know, I know the guy’s name that you’re talking about. You’re talking about this guy that stuck with the 57 tab Excel spreadsheet and got, heaven forbid, he gets hit by a bus because we’re we’re we’re screwed if that happens. And so we’re, we’re trying to de-risk that critical process and make it seamless.

Lee Kantor: So now is there a niche for your product.

Nate Kaemingk: Um, so so they’re.

Lee Kantor: Still learning that.

Nate Kaemingk: We’re still learning it. So the industries we’ve had we’ve had success in about five industries so far. But that’s mainly because we haven’t found any industry we haven’t been successful in. But, you know, we’ve had the most experience in construction and then in services. I like the non-sexy, repeatable businesses that like their great customers for what we’re doing because they’re growing year over year and they’re there anyway. So construction services, consumer product groups, some healthcare and then manufacturing are the ones that we’ve done the most work with.

Lee Kantor: Now, you said you’re you do better than the 35% person. What what is your kind of range of accuracy in your forecasting. Good.

Nate Kaemingk: Good question. So we’re still getting the 90 to 95% on average. But one of the unique things that we’re doing is we can tell you which month we’re going to be accurate and which one we’re not going to be accurate. And that’s very different. The industry standard benchmark is forecast accuracy. And I’m doing air quotes. I know you can’t see me do that on the radio. But that’s an average error for the entire year. Well if you’re 95% 5% correct for 12 months. That means one out of those 12 months, you’ll be off by 15 to 20%, and you still get to say you’re 95% correct. The difference in ours is we can actually tell you which month we’re not going to be correct. We can tell you that in August we’re going to be plus or -2%, and in December we’re going to be plus or -20. And as much as a forecaster wants to say I’m always correct as a business manager, it’s actually more important that you understand when there’s uncertainty in the forecast and what.

Lee Kantor: The limitations are. Exactly.

Nate Kaemingk: And so for the businesses that that that is a specific business that I’m thinking of that had plus or -1 or 2% in August, their staffing plan, their go to market plan, their what we’re going to do. We just nailed it. Like, okay, we know where it’s going to happen. We’re going to go do it. Just just get the work done. But for the December plan, when it came to September, we looked at December and we said, hey, we’re pretty sure we’re going to be on the low end of this, but we’re going to write a scalable execution plan, because as we get into the month, we know that we’re going to start to recognize, like so. So you staff your business differently. If you know that there’s uncertainty, you staff your you change. The way you’re operating plan going into it is. And it was actually very beneficial for them for us to even though we couldn’t nail it exactly, we could at least tell them the range of possibilities. And because of that, they wrote a business plan and were very successful in that month, no matter where it landed in the forecast. Right. Because they were prepared?

Lee Kantor: Yes. Now, if somebody wants to learn more, have a more substantive conversation with you or somebody on the team, what is the website?

Nate Kaemingk: Yeah. Well, besides just sending me a check, um, just so our website is, is better forecasting.com. So come and come and check us out. Yeah. Better forecasting.com.

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

Nate Kaemingk: Thank you for having me I’m excited to be here. Thank you. All right.

Lee Kantor: This is Lee Kantor. Uh, we’ll be back in a few. At Fintech South 2024.

 

Fintech South 2024: Lisa Arthur with Sensedia

by

FS-Sensedia-Feature
Atlanta Business Radio
Fintech South 2024: Lisa Arthur with Sensedia
Loading
/

Fintech South 2024, hosted by the Technology Association of Georgia (TAG), took place on Aug. 27-28 at the Woodruff Arts Center and Atlanta Symphony Hall. This year’s theme was “Fintech Lives Here!”

Lisa-Arthur-Fintech-South-2024Lisa Arthur, US Director and Global Chief Marketing Officer for API Leader, Sensedia, is a seasoned business executive and global marketer with Fortune 50 to start-up expertise.

She serves as an industry resource on Embedded Business, Open Finance, API and Integration Strategies, Marketing, Marketing Technology, Data-driven Marketing and Customer Experience.

She’s a speaker and author of Big Data Marketing: How to Engage Customers to Drive More Value Wiley; 2013 and a module instructor and partner with the Long Beach Accelerator.

Connect with Lisa on LinkedIn.

Transcript-iconThis transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix.

 

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studio in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Atlanta Business Radio, brought to you by Kennesaw State University’s Executive MBA program, the accelerated degree program for working professionals looking to advance their career and enhance their leadership skills. And now, here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: Lee Kantor here, broadcasting live from Fintech South 2024 at the Woodruff Arts Center. So excited to be talking to my next guest, Lisa Arthur with Sensedia. Welcome.

Lisa Arthur: Thanks. Great to be here.

Lee Kantor: Well, for folks who aren’t familiar, can you share a little bit about Sensedia? How are you serving folks?

Lisa Arthur: We are a global leader in API management and integration. What does that mean? We’re basically like the Lego blocks that help connect fintechs to banks. Banks to fintechs and keep it secure and efficient.

Lee Kantor: Now, why was it important for you guys to be at Fintech South?

Lisa Arthur: This is our third year at Fintech South, and we’re also members of Tag, the sponsoring organization of Fintech South. And in our three years here, we just really appreciate the people we’ve met. We meet them from all over the globe. We just met someone from Argentina. So for our global brand, it’s great because while it’s rich in fintech Atlanta talent, it’s also drawing a broader audience. And then additionally just the chance to keep up with what’s going on in the world of fintech.

Lee Kantor: So what is going on? What have you learned?

Lisa Arthur: Well, we’re learning that some of the problems that we’ve seen with our fintech prospects and customers are pretty universal, and that’s both good validation for how we’re helping them. But also I think shows there’s a lot of room for fintechs to kind of address these problems, to innovate better at scale.

Lee Kantor: So where is the opportunity when it comes to innovation on APIs?

Lisa Arthur: Well, the innovation is to one deliver on an embedded finance strategy. And while many aspire for that, some of the challenges that are holding them back make it where it’s more one off, it’s more tactical versus a scalable embedded strategy. And that slows the company down. It impacts the consumer experience, the developer experience. And then additionally, we’ve got this pending CFPB regulation, section 1033, which will a new rule be published we anticipate in October where there’s both a double edged sword for fintechs. There’s an opportunity because the CFPB is requiring data sharing. Consumers data is their data and they’re able to access it. But it’s also a slippery slope because some fintechs will be included in that. Depending upon what they do with the banks, and others may be exempt and may miss the opportunity to really drive a financial grade experience. So those are the two innovations we’re seeing a lot of now.

Lee Kantor: Where are the like, how do you help your clients when it comes to. I mean, it’s a balancing act in terms of they want to go to market with all this innovation and new technology. Then you have the regulatory that is usually not at the bleeding edge of things, right? They’re usually kind of coming from behind. How do you kind of help them balance all of this in order to be innovative, but still withstand the scrutiny of regulation?

Lisa Arthur: Yeah, that’s a great question. Um, well, I think let’s start with what’s some of the route blockers that fintechs are having at innovating. And one of the biggest ones we’ve heard and I’ve seen it validated here at Fintech South is bootstrapped resources, right? Many of these fintechs are pouring a lot into their products, a lot into their customer experience, and they don’t have enough bodies to do the innovation to scale. The second is on this compliance piece. What is their strategy? How does the innovation they’re doing link into compliance instead of fearing it? You know, how can this actually drive even more innovation. And the last thing is around the technical complexities. So if I’ve got fewer resources and I’m worried about this compliance, but I’ve got this technical spaghetti that I’m dealing with and everything’s a one off, then I’m not able to innovate at the pace that maybe my competitors are.

Lee Kantor: Right. And and I would think that a lot of these startups, especially when they’re bootstrapping, they don’t even know what they don’t know when it comes to a lot of this regulation and compliance. Right. They’re there, just like going boldly forward with some brilliant idea. And they don’t even know what kind of dominoes they’re knocking over as they proceed.

Lisa Arthur: You’re absolutely right. And you know, our team and I have talked to a lot of fintechs both here, but, you know, across the US and we often get asked, I don’t think I need to worry about this or what should I do. So I think we’ve got to be more forward thinking on the compliance side. One of the things that we’re coaching our customers on is that to go beyond compliance, there can be value, right? The value to the fintech can be an embedded ecosystem, faster onboarding, better customer experience, scale at a better cost. This starts to then supply resources, right? Because, oh, I’m not spending as much on this. I can I can add resources or I can partner for resources. So I think there’s a lot of, um, behavior changing. If you will, of not guessing and not waiting but taking a forward lean into it and saying, I’m going to go beyond compliance. I’m going to give that financial grade connectivity to my ecosystem, but I’m also going to use it to fuel a better path to innovation.

Lee Kantor: Now, is this where an organization like yours can really help while bringing something like that to the table and giving them just things that they probably hadn’t thought of, and give them a structure and a platform in order to execute.

Lisa Arthur: We absolutely can. We are very adaptable and agile, depending upon the fintech we’re working with, and we’re laser focused in the US on fintechs, regional banks and credit unions. So we’re not going after the whole world. It’s that ecosystem because that’s where the connectivity lives. So we bring and we just actually launched at the show, uh, a solution for fintechs called the Fintech API accelerator platform. So you mentioned a platform that’s part of it, but you’ve already you’ve already hinted at the fact that fintechs need more than just the platform. They need the thought leadership, the advisory services. They may need help getting that first API published, or embracing the authorization and consent flows of open banking, right, which can help them attract more interest in banks because they’ve already solved the compliance issues. So what we’ve done is we’ve brought our platform, an AI copilot, which will help on design and implementation services, a developer portal, all the things they need for the price less than a new car or, I’m sorry, a new truck. And why have we done that? Because we know they’re strapped. We know they’re strapped on resources and on budget. And we want to grow with these fintechs, not kill them from the beginning.

Lee Kantor: So if somebody wanted to learn more, have a more substantive conversation with you or somebody on the team, what’s the website? What’s the best way to connect?

Lisa Arthur: Excellent. Well, please go to sensedia and I’ll spell that’s e n s e d I a.com, hit a contact us button and that form will come into the US team and we will respond within 24 hours. The other thing, and I know this is radio and I may be crazy for doing this, but I believe that people like to do business with people. So you can also hit me up on LinkedIn. I’m at Lisa Burris, Arthur on LinkedIn, you’ll find me and just send me a private message. We’d love to help you. And more importantly, it’s not about the product. It’s about how we help you scale and deliver on an embedded finance strategy.

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

Lisa Arthur: Thanks for having me on and thanks for everyone for listening.

Lee Kantor: All right. This is Lee Kantor back in a few at Fintech South 2020 for.

 

Our Mission

We help local business leaders get the word out about the important work they’re doing to serve their market, their community, and their profession.

We support and celebrate business by sharing positive business stories that traditional media ignores. Some media leans left. Some media leans right. We lean business.

Sponsor a Show

Build Relationships and Grow Your Business. Click here for more details.

Partner With Us

Discover More Here

Terms and Conditions
Privacy Policy

Connect with us

Want to keep up with the latest in pro-business news across the network? Follow us on social media for the latest stories!

Business RadioX® Headquarters
1000 Abernathy Rd. NE
Building 400, Suite L-10
Sandy Springs, GA 30328