The Secret Sauce to Sales in 2024 w/ Alex Levin | Ep. 127

In this episode, David and Gary speak to Alex Levin, the CEO and Co-Founder of Regal.io, the #1 cloud contact center for customer engagement.

Links:
regal.io
LinkedIn Regal.io
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David Baxter has been designing, building, and advising startups and businesses for over ten years. His passion, knowledge, and brutal honesty have helped dozens of companies get their start.


In Biz/Dev, David and award-winning Creative Director Gary Voigt talk about current events and how they affect the world of startups, entrepreneurship, software development, and culture.


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___________________________________

Submit Your Questions to:

hello@thebigpixel.net

OR comment on our YouTube videos! - Big Pixel, LLC - YouTube

Our Hosts

David Baxter - CEO of Big Pixel

Gary Voigt - Creative Director at Big Pixel

The Podcast

David Baxter has been designing, building, and advising startups and businesses for over ten years. His passion, knowledge, and brutal honesty have helped dozens of companies get their start.

In Biz/Dev, David and award-winning Creative Director Gary Voigt talk about current events and how they affect the world of startups, entrepreneurship, software development, and culture.

Contact Us

hello@thebigpixel.net

919-275-0646

www.thebigpixel.net

FB | IG | LI | TW | TT : @bigpixelNC

Big Pixel

1772 Heritage Center Dr

Suite 201

Wake Forest, NC 27587

Music by: BLXRR

Transcript

[00:00:00] 

David: It's just interesting how, even our team, we're trying to automate as much as we can. Obviously a human gets involved as our sales cycle, but most people want to automate as much as possible. So it's refreshing to hear you might be better if you mix the two



David: Hi everyone. Welcome to the biz dev podcast, the podcast about developing your business. I'm David Baxter and I am joined per usual by the beanie baby, Gary Voigt.

More importantly, we are joined by Alex Levin. How are you, man? You are the CEO and co founder of Regal. io. How's it

Alex: Thanks for having me.

David: Yeah, man. Glad you could join us.

So tell me, A little bit. We're going to jump right in here. Tell me a little bit about Regal.

Alex: Sure. So really the story starts, before real starts in the last company by co found I were at we were hired company that owns Angie's list and home advisor and handy all the big home services brands. And, we were trying to help move home services from like the old [00:01:00] school in person thing to booking online.

And we noticed this pretty fascinating thing that, you know, even though lots of people started the booking process online rates to actually conversion rates to finishing it online were quite low compared to traditional like engaging with human being. And we tried all kinds of fancy technology things to fix the problem.

So we thought we were fancy technology people. Couldn't move the needle. And eventually we realized if we had a conversation with a customer, God forbid, like all of a sudden, like we built trust. We built a relationship and the customers, got the fence insulation of the home remodel or whatever it was.

We go, Oh, that's weird. Like we've been taught don't talk to your customers on the internet. Like, why is it good to talk to your customers? And we ended up talking with more and more friends in what I call high consideration industries. Healthcare banking and lending and insurance education, where, customers were pushing to have them move online, but they found when the similar us when it was digital only online for a school, for instance, they really had trouble [00:02:00] getting the students to sign up.

But if they added in human touch points, Came right back up. So it was how do you marry digital with a personal touch at internet scale in these industries, which is very different than retail because retail, you didn't need to talk to your customers and our first, as we grew these teams, our first effort was we went to our existing contact center software providers.

So the time nice and Genesis, we said, Hey guys this is exciting. We're going to talk more with our customers. We want you to build software, help us figure out who to talk to when and why. And they basically said, go away pound sand. They wanted nothing to do with it. They said, we built customer service software.

Our job is to deflect customer interactions. Reduce the average handle time, make them all the same. Bye bye. That was interesting for us. And so Rebecca and I, my co founder and I. And then I said maybe there's a business here, let's actually build a system from the ground up that allows you to know what the customer is doing on the website, know the customer's information and personalize, the messaging, how do you reach out to them on what channel, what do you say to maximize that relationship with [00:03:00] the customer?

It's often proactive, right? We're not just waiting for the customer to come in. It's, Hey, I see that they're having trouble signing up for that student loan. How do I have a conversation with them? And in what channel and what do I say? And we actually found that a lot of the trip was bringing a lot of things that existed in marketing technology into the contact center.

So we've brought a lot of concepts from marketing into contact center, like AB testing and, event driven or triggered SMS and calls a, variant how do you do it? If you think of Goosebumps Choose Your Own Adventure, if certain things happen, then do other things.

It is variant pathing that is now part of that experience, and we've seen massive success, across these industries with these brands that are interested in continuing to engage customers. So this point, Regal has a couple hundred customers, we are VC backed we've raised money and I think really having a lot of impact.

So we reported end of last year, we've driven 3 billion in revenue for our customers at this point.

David: So sales is when you're talking about newer custom companies, [00:04:00] sales is like this black magic that must happen. Otherwise you, your company dies, but most people don't go into starting their company or running their, your first company with any knowledge of how to do it. And I think it's really interesting that you're talking, because Most of the people want to automate it because they don't have the manpower to do, full phone calls and all of that kind of stuff, like you're saying.

So it's interesting to hear that you're getting back to the basics that, people matter in this and people, especially, we would be our software, we built custom software, so we would definitely fall into the high consideration thing. They consider it a lot.

Alex: Yeah, it's interesting. We actually stay away today from B2B just because, it's so considered and like you buy expensive, inexpensive salespeople. We focus on what we consider very transactional sales. So think of again, healthcare financial services, education, you 000 product or service, which, probably sells in the, under [00:05:00] a few days.

A few calls and it's usually contact centers that are selling it. So it's a very different motion. I think like generally there's a trend where, yeah, even what is traditionally been outside sales has moved inside and what is inside sales has moved to more automation. So like eventually maybe everybody will use our software, but today, yeah, I think you still pay expensive salespeople to go and sell expensive software.

David: Oh, sure. For sure. 

It's just interesting how, even our team, we're trying to automate as much as we can. Obviously a human gets involved as our sales cycle, but most people want to automate as much as possible. So it's refreshing to hear you might be better if you mix the two.

Which seems to be your approach. Yeah.

Alex: Yeah. It's, the way I sometimes describe it as my wife. Grew up in a small town in Colorado and one of her friends like is an insurance agent And people used to walk in and she knew their kids and their pets and everything about them And she did very well because she everything like was personalized right?

She like really [00:06:00] treated those people Well now a lot of her business comes in like ding on her computer and there's a phone number that shows up She has no idea who they are or what's going on or whatever And she has a hard time even getting him on the phone let alone than convincing him to buy life insurance You So what's happened is as things have moved online, it's depersonalized.

A lot of that experience and a lot of the software that's been built has only made that problem worse by basically treating everybody the same. So we're just saying is. Even if you move online, like you got to figure out how to not lose that personal touch. You got to figure out how to still make that person feel like they're special.

Feel like you care about talking to them. Not like they're the 50th call you've had this hour where you're going to say exactly the same thing. We've all felt it. Like the brands that actually do this well are the ones that you're going to stick by. The brands that treat you like, any, you're anybody else.

It's really hard to feel any kind of engagement with them.

David: I mean, engagement and authenticity, I think in the world of automation. Is becoming less and [00:07:00] less common, it's funny though. I, when you're talking, I'm, I have an 18 year old son and a almost 16 year old daughter and getting them to answer the phone or to call someone takes an act of God. I will.

This is true. My daughter, she's very lovely. She And 15 year old jobs are very hard to come by. There's not very many companies that hire 15 year olds because there's all these labor laws and all this stuff that go away at 16. So I was like, ah, screw it. I'm just going to hire 16 year olds. There are a few companies that do it and anytime she could apply online, she would, but if it required a phone call done, never would lift up the phone because that was totally scary to her.

And I'm curious, Are you, since you're now bringing the phone call back are younger people. And I'm thinking, gen Z kind of they're in their mid twenties. Are they answering the phone? Cause my kids certainly

Alex: yeah. So I often get the question like, Hey is this just for like people over the age of [00:08:00] 70? Is that who's this demographic is for, but no, we see. So what's really fascinating is. If you look at the different channels that companies are using to try to engage customers, so let's say it's a, a job site and person doesn't apply to the job and they send 'em an email, 3% click on the email, they send 'em a text, 10% click on the text.

Traditional calls, it's about 5 to 10% answer rate in the us just a random number that's calling you for something like that. Our on Regal, our average answer rate is about 30%. So we're doing something different, even among those populations.

David: Like, why would, I don't know your number, right? You call me, you're a number. I don't know what you're going straight to voicemail. How do you

Alex: yeah, we have a few tricks. So one is, we are actually hooked into the systems and know exactly when customers are falling off and can make sure that the timing is right of these things. So you want the timing, right? A lot of this stuff is happening on people's customers, mobile devices.

So while they're on the mobile device, they're falling off. You can engage them too. [00:09:00] We have a deal with the cell carriers that allow us to brand calls. So we can say this is on the phone call. It says this is so far. Who it is. It's not a random number. Three we're multi channel. We can text before we call or text after we call, or, do WhatsApp for crying out loud if you need what, WhatsApp is not relevant in the U S but in other countries it's relevant.

So what it means is that we can make sure we're engaging the right people in that right moment. Yeah. If you're trying to just, brute force, call somebody three times a day for 10 days. They're probably going to ignore you, in that moment, you're having trouble, trying to get your student loan refinance.

And so if I calls you're going to say, thank goodness. And pick up because you want their help.

David: That is so interesting. So they're on the website, you've got it timed and then you're going to call them as. them. Now, is it you guys who are calling them or is it the customer people of SoFi? It's

Alex: Oh, so if I, we provide the software, so we're not providing the staffing I'd say, five years from now, 70, 80 percent of those interactions will be [00:10:00] handled by virtual agents, conversation AI. So in that case, like it is, it will be us. Regal handling the interaction. And when it escalates or when there's an issue that can't be handled, then it will be passed back to agents.

So I think there's gonna be, massive transformation of how these things are handled. Definitely some of those contact center jobs will go away and they'll come back in other forms where they're managing AI and they're handling escalations and they're setting up these journeys. There'll be big shifts.

Gary: That was actually going to be my next question about the conversational AI and the, chatbots or whatever, as they're getting more sophisticated to use those, but then it made me think about, it seems like. What you're doing is finding that balance between being sold to, or just providing information.

A lot of people don't want to be sold to in person, but they can go to the website and see everything you're offering, but then they don't want the cold, empty, I don't know if I'm making the right decision. So then you have that personal touch of reaching out to them and holding their hand through it.

So that's like the balance that seems to be working. And as soon as maybe that goes away and becomes more [00:11:00] AI, is it going to be. Is that going to be another cold feeling for the customer where

Alex: Yeah, I'll give you like a funny, so use like a, an old school, a hundred years ago, like restaurant as an example, like you walk in and like the maitre d knows you and takes you to your favorite table and make sure that you have the wine that you like, and, already orders the food you want without you even like saying anything.

It's still pretty special. Like you go to an Applebee's and somebody like tries to oversell you on the like new special of the night. Like you feel like an ass because you're not having that much fun. Both are persons, humans that are actually doing it in one case, like it worked really well in one case it didn't.

So it's not the humanness of it that makes it good or bad. It's how well it's done, how personalized it is, whether they pay attention to you and what you actually want. So one thing technology is much better at humans then is actually paying attention and knowing that the last time you're here, you ordered this thing and didn't like it.

And, two times ago, like you came with two kids, you probably have kids and, this isn't your wife who's with you. This is like your [00:12:00] sister. So don't pretend it's your wife. So technology is incredible at doing that. So if we can leverage technology to bring back that experience that happened, whatever, a hundred years ago at a restaurant, like everyone's going to love it.

So your point on what if it's AI, not AI? There's going to be very odd interactions in this. So today. If, Mark Zuckerberg has AI so AI is for very rich people who can deal with it. Soon AI will be for everybody. When AI becomes for everybody, is it going to be cool again to have a human in your home and rich people are going to want the, Mark Zuckerberg is going to have the human, not the AI.

Whatever scarce is the thing that like humans want. So it's not because something is better or worse in an absolute sense.

David: I had this, I don't even know what you call it. Thought. We'll just call it a thought. So we have been, we as in humans, let's just talk humans in general. We have got, or Americans, let me specifically say Americans. We have gotten really tired of calling a company and it's a person overseas.

that we can't understand and doesn't give us great customer service. [00:13:00] But people are saying, I don't want to use an AI or talk to a computer because that seems weird. But I think we're in this perfect thing that if you had an AI that could perfectly understand you and answer and give you better service than you've used to, I think you're going to adopt that in a heartbeat,

Alex: that's going to be the next thing. Yeah, it's going to be, how quickly can, that person engage with you and if they do it better than what the default, is, then you're going to use it, and even I'll give you an otter idea. So right now, most support is done by the company.

As in the company picks responsibility for the support. But in that case, they only, even if they have AI, they're only going to know first party data. Meaning the interactions you have with that brand. If people come out with a support agent that is my, Alex's support agent, it could know all of my first party data with every brand that I'm interacting with.

So I may in the end not even want to interact with the virtual agent of a brand. I may want my virtual agent to be handling it. That has all the integrations to their systems because it knows more about me and my preferences. Maybe you would argue that like you could give [00:14:00] that first party data to some other company But I probably don't want to give it to every brand out there So there's going to be these interesting new models that come up

David: I wonder. So let's back up. Web 2. 0. That was the advent of social media and Facebook and all of those. And it was the first time that we were communicating with each other, using software, that was web 2. 0 and web 3. 0 for those who cares is crypto. Ignore that.

Alex: Yeah, that's going to be like a footnote in history. Like the web, what else in history did we say? Oh, we, the database switched from the MySQL to this other thing. We're going to talk about it as a new transition. Like it didn't have an impact on the consumer. So I don't know why it was ever called a 3.

David: Yeah, we're going to go to web four over at the end of this. We had the idea there was early on in the day that we were gonna own our own data and we were going to say, Facebook, you can have this data and LinkedIn.

You can have that data, but it was my data and I got to choose it. That all went out the window, right? We own none of our own data. It's all owned by all the platforms and where the government talks [00:15:00] about a data privacy and all that never happened. We have another chance. I think right now, based on what you're talking about, cause you're not the, a lot of our guests in the last few weeks have talked about our own personal AI.

This is my AI that knows me and is, I'm going to use that AI. That, and I'm to talk to other AI's and so they can have these really quick computer conversations of, like reserving of thing. He likes the aisle seat. He likes water to drink, blah, blah, blah. We just do this quick computer.

Alex: Yeah.

David: Do you think, and I'm way outside of your realm of expertise here, but do you think we will actually get to own our own AI here, or do you think it's going to be yet another Google AI and they own everything again,

Alex: Yeah. I think it'll be to your point, another opportunity to have this fight. A long time ago, I worked in this industry around how to keep people's data safe. Broadly in the United States, what we found is that people cared about features more about data than data privacy. So in a world where you care about features over data privacy, you make [00:16:00] that trade all day long and great, whatever.

In other countries, it's not the same, right? So in Europe, people tend to be willing to give up features in exchange for data privacy. And so they make that trade off. So we found it's largely a cultural thing. It's a cultural shift, a cultural decision rather than, an individual one. So yes, in the United States there are some people that care about that, but it's by far the minority.

So I don't see anything changing in the short term in the United States. But in other countries, yeah, I think you'll see people make decisions where like it's, they own the data of the AI and they'll insist that the big technology companies develop it in that way.

David: man you're. Taking the wind out of my sails. Cause I was really hoping, but you're a hundred percent, right?

Alex: I get it. It's about, changing attitudes in the United States. The United States, just people don't care. Like they are used to ignoring phone calls. They're used to their data being leaked. They're used to having to deal with whatever spam email that comes in your email. a physical mailbox and they're [00:17:00] okay with it.

And that's the trade off that you're making, the second that somebody really cared about not having that all the whole system could change. It's not that hard technologically it's more attitudinally do you want the system to change? Keep fighting the fight can, convincing people one mind at a time and you'll get there.

David: Perfect example. I was reading the verge today, tech website I love. And they were, they had an article today talking about Apple is talking to Google and open AI to power their phones AI stuff. And which was very interesting because it means they're not nearly as far along as they hope to be.

But anyways, what would the comment section, there was this one guy who said, Man, if they do this, if they let Google in, I'm going to sell my iPhone, which would be in America, someone who cared about the privacy. That dude was like booed out of the chat. It was unbelievable. Like it was vicious. This guy was like, okay, man, go take your iPhone, go buy whatever you want.

And he was like, ridiculed out. And I was like, that is the perfect example of [00:18:00] American. Convenience wins all day, every day in America. Yeah.

Alex: a choice. Let's not pretend that we're not making that choice. Americans like to then go, at the bar go, Oh yeah, my data got stolen and complain about it, but it was a choice 

David: You, you made the choices that make this so easy. What's really interesting. So it's your company is like in the bridge, right? Your company is only a few years old and you're bringing back human interaction, but you're right on the edge where the human interaction is going to completely change and go away.

So it's just a really interesting. Time for you guys.

Alex: yeah. I think particularly we think about like where the advantage is going to come, as things get more automated and one of the advantages is like, who has the data, there's content about these conversations. Open AI, trying to get everybody's like texts from New York Times and Reddit and whoever, because they need that to make their actual chatbot better, their, chat GPT better, in our world, like we're lucky we work [00:19:00] with customers who have these conversations.

And so we can use that data to train new models, and so the more we can know about what's happening, the better we can make those agents. We're one of the few companies that has a lot of that data, in these sort of outbound conversations. And so the question becomes, what other advantages are there, that allow us to build a sustainable business?

Because if there, if we don't have an advantage over somebody else, then all that's going to happen is, there'll be, very commoditized bots that anybody can use for a dollar a year and anybody can set it up and you won't need us. So I think if there's not.

Differentiation these bots, like it's, that's it's existential for us and a lot of other companies, I suspect that what's going to happen is there is real differentiation based off of the use cases and the workflows you build and the data that it's trained on. And with that, it will allow us to continue to differentiate within AI in the same way we've differentiated in other software.

David: If you had pinned me down five years ago and asked me how this AI [00:20:00] thing was going to play out, I would have assumed incorrectly, but I would have assumed the little micro bots. Would have been made first, here's a bought an AI bot. That's about history or it's about whatever, right? A very narrow focus.

This one knows about customer service. This one knows about Coca Cola, whatever, but it's very narrow. And it never would have occurred to me that the big, I know everything bot would have won. Cause I think in

Alex: I don't know. To be fair though like it's going more the direction of what you're suggesting, right? Because the less, the smaller the LLMs, the less they're trained on, the faster they are. And so the more effective they are, because they're cheaper to run, they respond to the customer more quickly, everything works better.

When you do want a bot that knows everything and like it's expensive, it's slow, it's not as interesting to use. Part of what's amazing about the human condition, if you want to call it that, is that we are so good at, across such a huge variety, getting to a quick answer, quick, [00:21:00] maybe an incorrect answer, but a quick answer, whereas for computers, that's a much harder task.

David: I wonder if there is so Chachapiti and all that they have there, you can use their bots for all sorts of things and you can use their personalities. And I mean that by you tell them how, what they're good at

Alex: Yeah. How sarcastic should you be? Like, Yeah.

David: and how narrowed down this conversation would be, but they're still.

The whole bot behind there, right? Like you could put in walls to say, we're going to talk about superheroes and anything outside of superheroes. We don't want to talk about, you can do that, but it's still the whole bot. So it's still slow. Like you're talking about, there are

Alex: necessarily. They, they have all kinds of ways of only training on certain materials where if you ask it about something else, it wouldn't know the answer. Now, the problem is it might try to make up the answer because it doesn't know that it doesn't know, but humans do that too.

And so it's about then understanding how do you create QA and limits. So same with like customer support agents, right? So if you have a lot of customer support agents, you may say, Hey, when certain questions are [00:22:00] asked, I don't want it to go to these agents because they weren't trained on that. Same thing is going to happen to the AI.

Like when certain kinds of questions come in, don't send it to the virtual agent because it wasn't trained on that topic and it couldn't possibly give a good answer.

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Alex: Some one of the more interesting pieces of technology, I think that will start becoming popular is the reuse of QA technology in an AI world. We have QA technology today. It's used to QA what human beings do, whether it be in engineering or it be in Customer service or sales, like we have, and some of it's automated, even some of the technology, it's only going to become more [00:23:00] important when there's AI, because AI is not perfect in the same way humans make mistakes, the AI makes mistakes, or it does it in a way that we don't think is the optimal way.

And so I think, people who are building QA tools are very quickly going to try to figure out how to shift that into a world where they're QAing virtual agents instead of humans.

Gary: I have a question, but it's going to go back to your company, Regal. io. You started it in 2020 and you said you had a partner. Are you guys a small team and a remote team or what does the company

Alex: So we're New York based, so we grew up in New York, both of us. We love New York, didn't want to go to San Francisco. That's the other big tech hub. We always wanted an office in person. I always say as an entrepreneur, you have a choice, either you want to go remote. It might be easier to hire, but then it's harder to manage or do in person, which means you have a smaller pool to hire from.

But it's much easier to manage. And we made the latter choice. We have, over a hundred people now and, I think it's, it gets fun as the team gets bigger and bigger because, all the things that you did really well at 30 people, now you have [00:24:00] to do well at a hundred or 300 people.

And it's much harder as you get bigger to do the same things. 

David: That's really interesting because I have always heard from business owners that I know that, you start out with tiny and it becomes very close. And then when you get about 30, that's about the max at the quote closeness, right? Where, everybody and all that.

And then it changed your company changes to, to accommodate that. And then about a hundred. It changes again because it's another abstract and a lot of people who run businesses. They don't like that. They don't want to go north of a hundred

Alex: Yeah, it depends what you want. Like the last company we were at, we joined probably, I don't know, 30, 40 people or something, and at the end we were almost 10, 000. We've seen like the scale, so it's all relative, like saying you don't want to go above a hundred is like quaint, if you're going to build a very big business, you may have to go above a hundred now.

If you talk to my co founder, she would say, Hey, Alex, his dream is to have a company of one person and a billion dollars in revenue. That would be [00:25:00] great when it's smaller, there's, less communication tax, there's, less, constant change in the team. There are advantages to being smaller if you can do it.

So I'm not saying we shouldn't try to be smaller, but I'm saying the reality is that often as you're growing, humans are naturally gifted at some things that you can't automate. At least in the beginning. Yeah.

David: How have you dealt with, cause the reason I'm zeroing in on this is you were excited that you were getting bigger and bigger in the challenges that it brought, which is so different than what most people I know. How did you Tackle those changes to keep that culture and keep those systems running.

When you started crossing 30 plus 40 plus 50 plus.

Alex: Yeah, look it's the never ending battle is too strong word. The never ending sort of issue within startups is as you grow, like you're constantly challenged with Hey, how do I add process in to make this better and, you add the process in too early, you slow everything [00:26:00] down.

Because now you've put too much process. Now you added too late. Things went off the rails and you probably slowed yourself down. So knowing at what point to add in different sorts of processes as you scale is one of the. Whatever hidden secrets of all this stuff and there's not a perfect answer ever But certainly like you can do it better and worse.

And at what point do you have hiring plans? What point do you have? I'm just thinking about people what points you have training plans What point do you have annual bonus plan? You know You can choose to do it at the beginning when you probably didn't need it or you can wait until you're a thousand people Which boy you're probably too late.

So And every part of the business, like there is that trade off or that, that you're constantly thinking through about when you want to add the process to make sure that you're helping the business scale to why it's interesting. I'd say we take the approach that your goal as a manager should be to make it so that you're redundant, which is a very different approach than a lot of companies of yesteryear, the old days, like you go to a company, whoever the most people work for them is the most important.

And [00:27:00] like they tried to make themselves completely in, an extra, like completely needed for that business in order for them to never get ripped out. Actually, like what we've tried to explain to people is if you put yourself in a position and you make it so that you're so necessary I can never promote you.

Wait, what? You can't, but I do everything. How can you not promote me? I'm the one who does everything. And you go it's because you do everything that I can't promote you. So in the other hand, if you looked at it and said, now that I've done it all myself, I want to make it so that either through process hiring or technology, I remove myself from all that.

Then I go, wow, look, Sally, look at all the great stuff you've done. I can now give you the next challenge, a bigger challenge. And so we actually challenge people to figure out how to get themselves out of it, ultimately, so that they can then go on and take bigger challenges. And those are the sorts of people we're trying to hire.

Sometimes, yes, you can automate things or use technology, you don't need people, but you still need the people who can figure out how to turn what was a manual, non processed thing into something that can be more automated through, whether it's humans, [00:28:00] processor technology.

David: How it's very interesting. And I'm curious, how did you learn this? Did you have a mentor? Did you hire just a Ninja who just knew, did you learn this the hard way? Cause it's not like one of the things that people say CEOs, they get paid a lot and they're not really worth that. And I'm like, Okay, we can argue about pay and all that in a different conversation, but the number of people who know how to run a thousand plus person company is very small because that is a skill set that so few people ever get a chance to do, right?

It's just, there's not a lot of people you can ask. So how did you learn this stuff? Did

Alex: Yeah, look, my co founder and I have worked in a number of technology companies and definitely, you watch your bosses and your mentors and you see what they do well. You see what they do less well, and you make up your own mind about how you we're lucky from that regard.

It's not our first time around the block going, Oh my God, like, how do you do that? Like we've seen it three or four times. It doesn't mean that it was done right or wrong in the past, but it definitely is helpful as you go [00:29:00] through it. I think also we like to take a pretty first principles approach to things.

We spent a lot of time together talking through like some of these more challenging situations to figure out what is the way that we think is our way of doing it. Now, that doesn't mean it's right for every companies, every other companies may want to do it a different way, but for our company, like we'll come to what we think is the right way of doing it.

And as long as it's true to our values, to the way we like to do things, then it's fine. It continues to work. If you try to do something that's not true to your values, it's yeah. People feel that pretty quickly and it doesn't work. So I think between experience and, first principle thinking, you get pretty far.

The last piece though is you have to remember the best entrepreneurs are the ones actually that fail the most. And it's like a weird way of putting it, but it's very true. Like the ones who are terrible entrepreneurs are the ones who, Oh, I can't, I don't want to try something new. It's such an, I don't know what if it doesn't work.

And, they spend years agonizing over it. And maybe five years from now, they make a decision at which point. The business has passed [00:30:00] them by and the decision they make is wrong anyway, and the business goes under. The best entrepreneurs are the ones that go it's okay if I fail, let's, you have this idea, I'm going to try it tomorrow.

And they try and they see what the reaction is and they measure it and they decide whether to continue or not. Oh, here's another way of doing it. Try it again. It might work. It might fail, but they're constantly failing small till they figure out the right way. Do we always have the right answer? By no means, but we have a pretty good idea of how to try new things and how to make sure we're quickly getting feedback to see if we can go forward or whether we have to do something differently.

David: love it.

Gary: Well, you seem to have the momentum to prove that what you're doing works well for your company and for the people that work for you. So to wrap this into one final question, what would your top three pieces of advice be for any new entrepreneur, new business or startup? You

Alex: So definitely, one would be at the beginning of your career don't feel like you're in a rush. Like I always felt like I had to be in a rush. I had to be in a rush. If I didn't do it time was going to go by. You don't need to be in a rush, like much more important to go find businesses that are very [00:31:00] high growth managers that are very good And it doesn't matter what the role is go work for them.

Like you'll learn so much so Going somewhere where it's going through all those different stages of growth, even going somewhere where they don't do it right. We'll teach you a lot before you go and try to do it on your own. Because it's, I see people coming straight out of school, trying to be entrepreneurs.

Sure. Some make it through. I'm not saying you can't, but it's quite hard if you've never seen it, you don't have any reference points. Go work for somebody else. I all the time say that my, my parents spent less on my education than my old bosses. I made so many mistakes. Like literally there were times where like I blow a million dollars on a mistake.

So I cost my old bosses a lot of money, but better to learn on their dime than on mine. So I made those mistakes on there.

Gary: hear that

Alex: to think that I gave them enough back and value that it was okay, don't make those mistakes on your own dime. So that's one. I'd say two is if you're going to really be an entrepreneur, you have to find a partner.

I don't know how I could never have done this alone. It's not possible. Like you have to go find people. If [00:32:00] nothing else, that's going to, they're going to be a sounding board and a shrink and all rolled into one, even if they're not doing valuable things for the business, they're doing valuable things for you.

And so you need that person where no matter what, like they're the one you're going to talk to, where they're never going to leave the business and you're always going to be in it together. You're not going to find that person on Reddit. I don't know why I'm picking on Reddit these days, but you're not going to find that person on Reddit.

Like you're going to hopefully work with that person. You're going to, go to events with them. You're going to know their family. You're going to sit down and have a real conversation about your hopes and your dreams and find out whether you're compatible to start a business together. The number one reason for business failure is, founders breaking up.

Number two, I think is running out of money. So don't do that either. But, make sure you find that person. It will completely change the experience. Don't try to do it alone. Three people max as founder, more than that, forget about it. Do not do it. It's like herding cats, like figure out who's really going to be doing it and who's not.

I'd say, after that, I'd say one of the better, things that like we've learned to do, is to come at [00:33:00] things from a very data oriented perspective. And, again, maybe it's just how we were taught and like the educational system we went to, but. I can't stand when I go to companies and they're still people making emotional decisions or decisions based on committees and consensus and whatever, or just on opinion, even worse, like it's terrible, so the example I sometimes give is imagine you have two groups of engineers trying to decide on the database they should use for some project at some companies. That is a religious debate. And it's a, or it's a debate that could take six months, which is now basically blocking the project instead at a data oriented company at a company that uses data to make decisions easier.

You can say, okay, what is the database for? Oh, it's to run this SQL query. Like I need to run it fast. I take the SQL query, run it in both databases, see which one's faster. It's not a debate anymore. I just saved us six months of back and forth and pain and agony. Figuring out how to use data to make your lives easier.

Is so [00:34:00] important and I'm not saying opinion is worthless or experience is worthless If you don't have data and use opinion or experience as a starting point for what you're going to do. That's fine That's a great starting point Don't make the mistake of believing that because you believe something Or because you've done in the past that should be the ending point You can't possibly know that because it worked at the last company.

It's got to work at this company Just make it the starting point and then iterate until you figure out what's right for your new situation your new company

Gary: Yeah, that's a good one. And I do the fact that you said have a partner or someone that you can talk to as a sounding board or whatever, to some of that you can trust. And when you mentioned don't have more than three founders,

Alex: business, by far, if you can be 50 50 and everything, that's the best. But I have friends where it's 90 10, one owns 90 percent of the business, one owns 10. And the one that owns 10 isn't even really that operational in the business. You know what it works because they trust each other and they have each other's back and they work together well.

So they don't have to be the one who's contributing the same. You don't have to have equal ownership in the business to be a co founder.

David: Would think I would even challenge that [00:35:00] to more having two 50 fifties that doesn't work because no one's. In charge generally, I have a friend of mine who's him and his brother are owners and it's 50 50 and it's just conflict because like I'm never going to work for you. You're never going to, and it's just, there's not, if it's 60 40 or even 51 49, someone's the boss rather

Alex: sure. That's why three founders can be good in our case of my founder. That's 50 50 on everything. And the reason it works is that we have different areas where we are a tiebreaker. So like she runs a product engineering org. I don't, she's the, in the end, the tiebreaker there, when they go to market org, I'm in the tiebreaker there, but it makes it so that neither of us need to be constantly deciding on like everything about the business.

So we can move much faster by having that. But yeah, in theory, if you say, Hey, like me, give one of the people, one more share than the other person. So it was always a tiebreaker. Fine. Go ahead.

Gary: well, Alex, if anybody wants to learn more about your business or yourself, how [00:36:00] can they reach out?

Alex: Sure. Go to regal. io or you can always email me at hello at regal. io. If you have a, a more considered business, that's like healthcare, insurance, lending, local services, education, or, you're, you have an outbound call center. We'd love to chat with you.

Gary: All right. And we will add those links to the show notes in the description for this, for everybody to grab.

David: well, Alex, this has been a blast. Thank you so much. This went all over the map and I love it.

Alex: You never talked about, the FAFSA. You forgot about your financial

David: We didn't even get there, but this was, I, you go where the conversation takes you and I nerd out about anything, including customer service, so this was awesome.

Alex: Cool. I appreciate the time, guys.

OUTRO: Hi, I'm Christy Pronto, Content Marketing Director here at BigPixel. Thank you for listening to this episode of the BizDev Podcast. We'd love to hear from you. Shoot us an email, hello at thebigpixel. net. The BizDev Podcast is produced and presented by BigPixel. See you next week. Until then, follow [00:37:00] us on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Threads, YouTube, and LinkedIn.