Being comfortable with uncertainty, narrowing your customer focus, and having empathy for your customer with Jeremy Ruch (Founder and CEO at Bandalier)

Callan Harrington 00:01
You're listening to That Worked, a show that breaks down the careers of top founders and executives and pulls out those key items that led to their success. I'm your host, Callan Harrington, founder of Flashgrowth, and I couldn't be more excited that you're here. Today's guest, we have Jeremy Ruch. Jeremy is the CEO and founder of Bandalier. Jeremy, welcome to the show.

Jeremy Ruch 00:28
Great to be here. Thanks so much for having me.

Callan Harrington 00:31
Why don't you walk us through, in your own words, what Bandalier is doing?

Jeremy Ruch 00:35
So in a nutshell, what Bandalier does is we provide fast-growing companies with US-based inside sales, customer experience, and operations teams on demand. So companies that are looking to scale these types of teams quickly use us, first of all, to what we say, ramp up faster, right? They call us because they're looking for 20 people, 30 people, 50 people next week, and we help them do that. And then the second piece is they use us to de-risk their hiring process. Because one of the unique value propositions of our service offering is that companies can actually hire our folks directly if there's a good mutual fit. And so they work with us to sort of gain exposure to lots of different customer-facing team members and then can bring them in-house if there winds up being a good mutual fit.

Callan Harrington 01:20
I'm excited to dive into that. I'll put that on pause here for a little bit, but I'm excited to dive into it because it's a significant challenge, right? Unless you have a ton of experience on staff, hiring a lot of especially more entry-level salespeople is a big challenge. Because I think more than any position, and you guys are doing more in sales, but on the sales side in particular, it's hard to decipher who's a good candidate and who's not, because they're all going to sound good just by nature, in the training that they've had coming right out of college. Every single one's going to sound good, so I'm excited to dive into that. But before we get there, where did this all start out? Where did your career start out, just in general?

Jeremy Ruch 02:10
Well, my career started in about as wildly different a place as you can imagine. So I actually started my career— I got a public policy degree, and when I graduated, I actually started my career in finance working for a sovereign wealth fund out in Singapore. So just a completely different world. Grew up my whole life, you know, in New York City, and was 22 years old, looking for something different, and so wound up doing that for a year. And sort of a year doing that, I think, I mean, I learned a boatload in that year. But one of the things I learned is that I really wanted to be involved in something smaller, to be involved in something entrepreneurial, right? Because that was a massive, you know, 1200-person firm, and I was looking for something more startup-oriented. And so when I came back to the States, wound up joining a Fintech startup called Bond Street, and I was the second hire there. So literally, we were in the CEO's apartment lobby before, you know, we barely had a website. I think we just had a landing page, and my job was to go out and find business. So that was a pretty broad task as the second hire. What we did at Bond Street was we were part of what's called the second wave of FinTech lenders to small businesses. So what we did is really, we provided term loans to small businesses all over the US in a much easier process than they were used to from traditional banks. And we were able to do that because we had an online application, sort of a much more seamless process. But of course, in order for that model to work, you needed small businesses as customers and needed to get the word out to them. So literally, my first few weeks at that job were spent knocking on doors, literally going storefront to storefront in New York City, just talking to anybody I could, making cold calls, sending cold emails, just trying to find small businesses to become our initial customers for this term loan product, and ultimately wound up building out sort of an inside sales Customer Experience team. And that was really my first exposure to what an absolute freaking nightmare and what a significant pain point it is to build these teams for fast-growing tech companies, particularly tech companies based in places like New York City, San Francisco, where the labor market is just super competitive and expensive. And so I had that experience, and it was really that pain point that I experienced managing that team that wound up driving me to start my own thing, and specifically to start Bandalier.

Callan Harrington 04:12
So I'm gonna back up here a little bit. On another show you were on, you said that year in Singapore was the most interesting year of your life. Why was that?

Jeremy Ruch 04:20
I think there are a few different reasons. One is just, I think being in a completely foreign environment for somebody who grew up in what I think would generously be described as a bubble here in Manhattan, here in New York City, and just being thrust into a completely different environment. So, you know, I was one of 10 associates in this program for GIC, for the sovereign wealth fund. I was the only American. I was the only non-Malaysian, non-Singaporean in the program. And so gaining experience and exposure to something that was new to me, which was finance, in just a completely new environment, I think, was a really, really powerful thing. And the other thing I think that wound up probably having a bigger influence on me later on, was seeing what I would call sort of almost the top of the pyramid. So there is, through sovereign wealth funds, pension funds, these massive, just massive amounts of wealth being deployed. And I think that's been the cause of a lot of what we have seen on the ground here in the US, in the venture community. A lot of that capital, while it's being deployed by primarily, obviously, by VCs, those VCs are getting their money, often, ultimately, from these sources of wealth, both here in the US and overseas. And so kind of starting there and understanding how the view of the world looks like from there, and then, you know, transitioning into almost completely the opposite environment, which was a literally two- or three-person startup in New York City, just starting out. I think that transition was just fascinating. But I think the reason I describe it as the most interesting year of my life was just living in a completely different environment and sort of being forced to figure things out in that environment. Everything from how do you live in a foreign country? How do you make friends in a completely foreign environment? How do you navigate an institution that's completely new to you in a different environment? So I think there were some really powerful lessons for somebody right out of school.

Callan Harrington 06:00
How did you meet people? Actually, I'm kind of curious what prompted that in general, like, why Singapore? You're in New York City. You have your pick of the litter when it comes to finance companies to be able to work with, and you went to Duke. So it's not like, you know, you had a good school. I'm sure you had connections in New York City. Why Singapore?

Jeremy Ruch 06:20
So I wish I could tell you it was part of this very structured plan that I developed from the time I was, you know, 10 years old, I knew I would, you know, move to Singapore at 22. Of course, that's not how it panned out. I was a public policy major at Duke. If you'd asked me when I was starting college, in the middle of college, I probably would have told you that I was looking for a career either in government or in consulting, but certainly not in finance. The opportunity with GIC came as an internship opportunity, actually in New York City, and it came through, I think, some listserv that I was part of through public policy. And I think because of my public policy bent, I was really fascinated by this concept of a sovereign wealth fund, right? Like, huh, a country investing effectively for future generations, right? Like, what a fascinating concept, especially coming from the US, where, of course, you know, paying trillions of dollars in debt. This is really interesting to think about a country that is not only not passively in debt, but is actually investing for future generations and being thoughtful about that process. And of course, I later came to learn that, you know, obviously, we have states with— we don't have sovereign, we call them sovereign wealth funds, but we obviously have states that invest. And then I learned more about that ecosystem, but wound up taking that internship out of New York mostly out of curiosity. And I absolutely loved it. I just found the process of evaluating companies, whether they were publicly traded, privately traded, that summer, I was doing publicly traded companies, really interesting. It’s almost like a sort of a puzzle of like uncovering how this company works. How does it make money, and what do we think will happen to it in the future? To be a really interesting intellectual exercise. And so, you know, at the end of that summer, they said, "Hey, we have entry-level positions, but they're all in Singapore, so if you want to work for us, you have to move out there." And honestly, the thought that occurred to me is, when the hell else am I going to have an opportunity in life to just, you know, explore something this completely different? And so, you know, much to the chagrin of my parents, wound up as they didn’t hesitate to remind me to the place on earth. It’s probably furthest away, maybe, besides Australia, Singapore is about as far away as it gets.

Callan Harrington 08:22
They're the two worst time zones that you just mentioned.

Jeremy Ruch 08:24
Yeah, overlapping is pretty brutal from a time zone standpoint. But yeah, just a fascinating experience overall.

Callan Harrington 08:30
Very cool. So you came back, and you got involved with a pure startup. So you went from this very, very large company, sovereign wealth fund, right, that had many, many people working for it, and then you went to a pure startup. What was that transition like?

Jeremy Ruch 08:42
So funny, because I remember telling people at the time there was almost so much you had to unlearn from one experience into the other. And there was so much of value, I think. And it's important to emphasize this, particularly for an institution that was doing what GIC does, which is investing money. You know, the primary value, they have a list of prime values, P-R-I-M-E, the first of those as P, and it stands for prudence. And so now you're joining a seed stage startup in New York City, right? And I don't want to say prudence is the last on the list of values, but that's not exactly, you know— first and foremost, what we're focused on, right? We're focused on, move fast and break things. Figure out how to make something work extremely quickly, figure out how to get comfortable with very, very fast growth when we're building the plane as we're flying it. And so a lot of the things I had gotten used to, which is spending days and days and days on PowerPoint decks that maybe someone would view, maybe somebody wouldn't, very extensive financial modeling of every different scenario. And it was funny, because I remember I got to a point where I was actually applying these techniques in my personal life. As I was making personal decisions, I would start modeling them out. If it is a 25% probability of this happening versus a 30%, I remember thinking about where I was going to move, after Singapore, which city to go to, and modeling out all these different things. And I can't remember who I sent this to, but they were like, "What is wrong with you? Why are you thinking this way?" So, you know, a lot of it, I think, was very helpful grounding. But also, you know, it had to be at least modified to be applicable in the setting of a seed stage job, where obviously we had to be quite a bit less risk averse, and we had to move quite a bit faster. But obviously, it also felt super freeing to be in an environment where I'd gone from making decks and models for somebody else to make decisions on. Now it was actually, "No, you're going to be the one making the decisions every day, and you're going to have to own the results of those decisions."

Callan Harrington 10:18
Do you remember the most impactful change where that happened? Meaning you went in here, you had to throw prudence to the wind, and you had to move quickly. Do you remember what that situation was?

Jeremy Ruch 10:27
Honestly, I think it was in that initial outreach to small business owners and realizing that all the things that I had learned about developing very, very detailed plans with very detailed modeling about how everything would go weren't going to fly in a world where I was going door to door, the freaking Lower East Side, logging into small businesses. I had no clue what was going to happen, right? And we got to a point where all sorts of things go wrong at an early stage startup. We were, at one point, trying to figure out an outreach strategy, and one of the things that worked really well for us early on was personalized email. This was 2014, I guess, before the days when Salesloft, and Outreach, and all these tools had made it much easier to do this. Back then, this was still a novel concept, doing personalized email to different business owners. It worked super well for us. And so, of course, being a VC-backed company, the next move was to go scale it. And so we wound up sending 5000, 10,000 emails in a matter of weeks, and realizing very quickly why that wasn't a good idea and what some of the brand ramifications were. So just getting comfortable with that level of uncertainty, that level of risk. But I think being in sales, especially, getting comfortable with the fact that things aren't always going to go the way you plan, or they're not even always going to go the way your worst-case scenario was forecast. They're just going to go totally different than anything you would have expected. A lot of that was in those early conversations with small business owners and just realizing, "Wow, this is a totally different world with lots of uncertainty." And there's something obviously scary about that, coming from such a structured, rigid environment. But there's also something pretty exciting about it.

Callan Harrington 12:00
Yeah, especially as the first sales rep. This is something I get asked all the time. When you're hiring those first salespeople, what are you looking for? And a lot of people think, you know, go out, get somebody that's got a ton of industry knowledge, or get somebody that was the rock star at your biggest competitor as that first sales rep, right? Because I always recommend founder-led growth, right? Founder, get out there, make sure that you can get some of these sales in, and you've got a repeatable motion, and then go hire a couple of sales reps. And when you think of those first couple of sales reps, it is so much more about everything that you're saying. How adaptable are they? How good are they at bringing that feedback to the product team? Can they navigate in a very uncertain situation? Not only can they do that, are they excited about it, right? I think whenever some of the best new sales reps that I've had— or just opening a new market, or a new product, or something like that, they love the challenge of figuring it out, and are not afraid to fall right on their face, because you're going to fall right on your face. It just is what it is. So I love that on what you mentioned, and I'm sure, and you know, and we'll get to this, but you have to deal with this all the time at Bandalier, is my guess.

Jeremy Ruch 12:58
Yeah, totally. And I think one of the pieces I drew a lot of inspiration from was actually talking to small business owners who were our customers, right? And understanding the levels of risk that people have to— basically have to deal with, and the level of uncertainty in the lives of the literally millions of people who start small businesses in the US, right? And these are folks who don't always have a safety net behind them, and don't always have the luxury of knowing what their next step will be if things don't work out with their business. And I've, you know, spoke to people who, you know, were sleeping on their factory floors, not Elon Musk style, not knowing they had a bed at home, literally sleeping on factory floors, because that's where they had to sleep. And I think understanding and gaining an appreciation for that, yeah, like I mentioned, I think there's a lot of inspiration and strength to be drawn from those stories.

Callan Harrington 13:44
How did that change how you went about your job?

Jeremy Ruch 13:47
Well, one of the things it did was, I think, it gave me a respect for their time and for what they were building, right? So I think one mistake we saw a lot of lenders making in the space— you're in a weird position as a lender, right? Particularly on the sales team for a lender, because you're often in the position of actually rejecting people for the product that you're providing, which is obviously a strange position to be in as a sales team. And the way a lot of companies approach that problem is just to filter people out as aggressively and as quickly as possible, right? And to be kind of brutal in the way they do it, right? You're not a fit, sorry. Next, right? And you know, they all had their different ways of doing it, but what we would hear about from customers who'd been through experiences like that is just this feeling of being disrespected. And that, I think, and I only now fully understand this as a small business owner myself, the feeling of disrespect is really— sort of contrary to that, the feeling of respect is really an important currency for small business owners, just respect for what you've built, respect for your time. And so we really tried to, as we started to build out a team, really tried to build that into our training. We tried to build it into the ethos of what we did overall at Bandalier. Like one of our core values is, "All entrepreneurs, we should really respect the time that our clients are putting in, even if they don't actually wind up being immediate clients." We should focus on building the long-term relationship with them. Because anybody's a potential client, anybody's a potential referral business, but on some level, more importantly, they are taking time out of their day to speak with us. They've been through a lot. In most cases, their time is a really valuable commodity, and we should have respect for that as a brand. I think just respect for what they have built, irrespective of whether or not they're a good fit for us at that particular point in time, was a really important— I know it can sound trite, but I really do think it had an important bearing on kind of how we conducted ourselves.

Callan Harrington 15:00
I totally agree, and I saw that quite a bit in companies that I've sold with that also sold to certain small businesses. And certain companies would have an elitist attitude about it. It's like, you know, we went out, we raised millions of dollars. We've got the best product in the world. We've got the smartest people in the world. Nobody cares, right?

Jeremy Ruch 15:12
Totally.

Callan Harrington 15:13
And I've worked with those companies that were like that, and those companies that did not have that attitude, but did all the same things as the people that did have that attitude. And from a sales perspective, that carries, right? People hear about that, and like you said, I think one of the things that— it's what goes unsaid in the call, meaning, what experience did you drive, right? Where, if they talk to somebody else and they said, "Hey, have you heard about Company X?" "I've heard about Company X, honestly, I don't care for them." Or that's the difference between somebody else saying, "It's like, you know what it was? Wasn't a good fit. But given where your business is, you may want to check them out. Honestly, if I could, I would have loved to go with them. It just didn't make sense for us on this." That's a totally different conversation and creates a totally different network effect. So I love that.

Jeremy Ruch 15:53
100%, and I think this is an underappreciated element also, of just sales teams more broadly, as frontline representatives for your brand. And one of the dangers in managing strictly through numbers, right? Because if you focus your salespeople strictly on meeting a certain number, the thing that goes unspoken there is you're incentivizing them to treat anybody who isn't contributing to that number as worthless, right? That's not an argument against commissions. I think it's important for folks to have goals for sure, but important to keep that sense of balance in mind. If you're making a cold call, if you're talking to a lead that's unqualified, you are the frontline representative of that brand, and while that person may not be an immediate customer for you, they have a network too, and by the way, they may ultimately, one day become a good fit for your product, and the experience they have is really, really important.

Callan Harrington 16:35
At Bond Street, you were the first person, and you’re going door to door in New York, and you figured this out, and then you also recruited the first team. Is that correct?

Jeremy Ruch 16:44
Yes. So we sort of built out a machine largely built off of, like I mentioned, cold email initially. We actually wound up deploying quite a few folks out in the Philippines and in India that were doing some of the basic mechanics, you know, building the lead lists, actually sending out the emails, and a team of freelancers all across the US. And one of the things we found was that there was a really strong infrastructure overseas for deploying these teams, you know, really reputable vendors who could help us build teams, five, ten, whatever it was, very quickly. We actually started looking for similar infrastructure here in the US, basically to be our frontline representatives of the brand, who would actually speak with small business owners and do some of that initial qualification work. And just found that the infrastructure for those vendors or sort of the landscape wasn't quite as strong. There weren't a ton of great options available. And this felt odd, particularly given the societal issue that I saw of there being a boatload of these companies on the coasts, so New York City, San Francisco, venture-backed companies often hiring people in these markets, which are obviously some of the most expensive markets in the world to do business in, with a ton of competition for talent, when there are tens of millions of people in small towns throughout the US for whom an opportunity with a fast-growing tech company doesn’t come around every day, isn’t necessarily available, and who would be great fits, in many cases, for these customer-facing roles. And so it felt like there was an opportunity there to sort of act as the connector between the two. And that’s really what sort of got me thinking initially about the model for Bandalier.

Callan Harrington 18:00
So you experienced the problem firsthand. You were clearly growing really fast at this company. What made you leave? Why was this problem so strong that you left a good position in order to take it on?

Jeremy Ruch 18:12
Yeah, the way I thought about it is that I don’t think I would have left for just an idea that I thought was compelling from a business standpoint. Hey, like, because there are lots of those. And of course, like being in the startup space, you always have this idea of, like, oh, what would happen if somebody built a direct-to-consumer business for this thing? Or what would happen if someone built a software idea for this particular application that is frustrating to us? And those things come around all the time, obviously. What was unique to me about this idea was that it combined that— because I felt there was a real need, I was experiencing it as a real need, so I sort of knew there would be a customer base for it— with something I just cared about on a broader level and like, on a societal level, like a problem that I felt it was really important to solve, which was this growing gap that I saw between where talent was and where it was situated and where these companies were actually hiring. And it felt like there was an opportunity to really solve— I don’t know if I’m arrogant enough to think we’re solving it, but at least to make a dent in this pretty significant societal issue, while also creating a business that I thought would have customers and could make money. And so it was a combination of those two things, really, that prompted me to actually start it.

Callan Harrington 19:25
So you officially went, you started Bandalier. What were those early days like?

Jeremy Ruch 19:30
Sort of similar, actually, to the early days of Bond Street, of kind of, you know, doing a little bit of everything, running around a little bit like a chicken with its head cut off. So first of all, I had to find a city in which we would launch Bandalier, which I think is actually how you and I met initially, because I was looking at cities all over the place. Spent some time in Columbus, Ohio, spent some time in Buffalo, New York. Wound up selecting Binghamton, New York, as kind of our launching pad. And in the early days, you know, it was me doing the sales for our clients, right? So I wanted to make sure that I was having the experience of what it would be like to be an employee, a team member of Bandalier. So initially, my pitch to prospective clients was, "You’re going to get me, Jeremy, as a fractional sales rep, and I’m going to see how this process works. I’m going to see what it’s like to sell as an outsourced inside sales rep." And so that’s what I did for the first few months. And our first client, you know, had me as the fractional sales rep. My wife, you know, what that client did was actually an interesting business model. What they did at the time, and they’ve changed a little bit since then, is they placed printers in coffee shops for people to be able to print their documents. And so I was going coffee shop to coffee shop in New York City, trying to place these printers there. My wife was telling everybody, "Jeremy quit his job. He’s become a printer salesman. He’s going door to door doing that." But it was super valuable. A lot of the lessons from that initial experience working with a client, understanding what it was like to formulate a pitch for a new product, helped inform some of the structure that we put in place for future clients. And as we’ve scaled, what are the processes we need to put in place to get somebody up to speed on a new product as quickly as possible? You know, what is the infrastructure we need to put in place for, like, client success, client delivery, for how we communicate what we’re doing to clients, and all those sorts of things. So doing all that, while also making our first few hires in Binghamton to sort of lay the groundwork for the business, when I would not be the one doing all the sales for our clients myself was pretty important.

Callan Harrington 21:25
I didn’t realize you were still going door to door on behalf of the client. I thought this was inside— I mean, I know where it is today, but the fact that you were doing that as the founder, and that's what I think is probably the most impressive, is that you came from a spot, you moved your way up. You were in a good position, left, and not only did you start this, you could have hired somebody, I bet you could have hired somebody to do that, to do that for you, but you didn’t. And you were going door to door.

Jeremy Ruch 21:50
To be fair, before I wind up on one of these fact-checking sites, when I say door to door, I was sending emails and securing meetings. So it was inside sales, but then I was going in and meeting with, you know, the owners of these coffee shops. So it was not like, in that sense, like the early days of Bond Street, where I was actually just cold walking into places, but yeah, it was a lot of just time on the streets walking in and out of coffee shops.

Callan Harrington 22:15
Oh, so you guys were actually doing full cycle. It wasn’t just appointment setting?

Jeremy Ruch 22:20
Yeah. So what we were doing at that point was doing some of the initial outreach to coffee shops, coffee shop owners. This is very particular first client, you know, future clients. Most of what we were doing was setting up appointments for AEs, kind of more traditional SDR type stuff. And since then, we’ve branched out actually into customer experience. So pure customer service, upsell, cross-sell type stuff and operations. But in those early days, yeah, it was teeing up contracts basically. And these were situations where those folks weren’t being charged because they made their money off the actual people actually printing. So it was just basically trying to get somebody to agree to have a printer placed in their coffee shop.

Callan Harrington 23:00
Gotcha. And so you're doing this. When did the transition happen, where you started to bring on those first couple of people to do this for you?

Jeremy Ruch 23:10
I mean, it was really within a few months. So we initially hired a handful of interns, actually, so part-time team members from the university. And one of the reasons we situated ourselves in Binghamton was that there was this combination both of the university in that area. So it’s a really, really strong State University, SUNY Binghamton, which is based there, but also, you know, a community around it, which, you know we and we drew on both. So we hired folks that were full-time, either recent grads or just folks from that local community, often coming out of retail or hospitality roles. And then we also hired part-time team members, most of whom were college students. We experimented with both. So we hired our first few interns, really right away, to begin taking over some of that sales work, and within a few months, they were doing most of it. One of our early, really one of my first hires, was a guy by the name of Matt Scanlon, who wound up leading that office and ultimately overseeing all of operations for us. And he wound up building a lot of what we now refer to as Bandalier University, sort of the training infrastructure, and then really the entirety of, sort of our operational platform for performing this work on behalf of clients. And so ultimately, you know, we had a team of people doing this for that client and for several others that we onboarded that fall.

Callan Harrington 24:25
So you guys grew really fast. And throughout that growth, what were some of the biggest challenges that you were going up against?

Jeremy Ruch 24:32
I think probably the single biggest challenge was the diversity of client needs, right? And the recognition that, because in those early days, and speaking with a lot of folks who’ve started businesses like this, I think we all travel a similar path. I was just laughing with somebody that I wish we could write a book about it, so that other people didn’t have to keep learning the same lesson that all of us already learned. But on some level, you kind of have to live it to understand it, which is that, in those early days, you get so excited about a new client, you just want to grow the business. You don’t want sales coming in the door. You want money coming to the bank account. You want to feel like you have a real business. What happens as a result of that is you're not disqualifying a hell of a lot of deals in those early days. You’re taking on anything because you want to have a business. And as a result of that, what most folks in this situation wind up with, as it turns out, is 10 or 15 or 20 clients who are all completely different from one another. All have totally different needs. They’re all trying to use you in completely different ways. And so on some level, the biggest challenge is trying to maintain a semblance of business sanity and predictability while having 20 clients who are all totally different from each other, with totally different needs. And that creates all sorts of friction, right? Because it means each of your team members is doing something a little bit different, and, you know, is having their own different experience. And you’ve got to kind of try to create some stability, some consistency for them, while clients are asking them to do all sorts of different things that aren’t necessarily exactly what we initially expected to be doing. And also, and I think this is key for folks who are starting businesses, keeping your eye out, because it turns out some of those use cases that you’re seeing may not have been your initial business plan, but may actually be huge markets for you. And so paying attention, spending a lot of time with clients in those early days, understanding, is this a use case that aligns with our mission, actually, and is it something that we can fulfill? And I think a lot of the learnings from those early days have helped inform the direction that we end up taking, for sure.

Callan Harrington 26:25
You hit on a couple points I think are super important. One, knowing who your ideal customer profile is, and really zooming in, you know, asking those questions, doing the customer interviews for those customers that are— You know, there’s revenue. There’s revenue, there are all sorts of questions asked, you know, what’s the revenue? What type of business, what stage of the company? And then there are those questions that don’t often get asked, you know, are they sending referrals? Are they really happy? Are they low maintenance to work with? Are they fun to work with? And zooming in and dialing in on those, it makes your go-to-market 100 times easier, because now you’ve got this social proof with people, you’ve got raving fans that you can build that momentum off of. And then the second piece is listening to the feedback, because there might be adjacent opportunities to be able to go into. But I get it, and I did the same thing to the T. I brought in clients where I genuinely thought I could help them, and in some cases, did, but it was pushing the ball uphill, all the way. And so I totally get that. And I tell people all the time, find your ICP early, make some assumptions. Test it. It’s just going to make getting sales so much easier. And you brought up a really good point. If every client’s different, it’s hard to build processes that’ll work across all of them, so it’s hard to scale. On the flip side of this, so those are some of the challenges. What about some of those items as you’ve built Bandalier, where those are big catalysts to your growth?

Jeremy Ruch 28:00
I think that probably two things I would stress. The first thing that I think we emphasized from our early days, and I think part of this was informed by some of our early team members, but also some of that experience speaking with a whole bunch of small businesses and kind of having the luxury, the privilege, really, to see which ones seem to take off and do really well and which ones struggled, was having a really firm sense from our early days of what our culture was going to be, and focusing on our team member experience from our earliest days, right? So very early on, we had this exercise where we sat down, determined what we were going to center our culture around, and we came up with this concept of Kaizen, this idea of continuous improvement, which has really informed just about every direction that we’ve taken, and really is sort of the central piece undergirding our culture. I was literally just right before this on a session with three new team members who started. We do this with every single person who starts still today, taking them through, "Hey, here’s what our core value is as a company. Here’s why we selected it, here’s how it applies to you, and here’s how to put it in its practice here at Bandalier." And the reason I think that’s been so important is that for us, customers are obviously key, and creating a great experience for them is obviously central to everything we do. But we recognize that in order to do that, we’re a services business, we need to have team members coming in, having a consistent experience, all bought into what our culture is, and helping us advance that culture. And so creating that strong, central sense of identity, I think, was important in our early days. It's even more important now that we’re remote because I think, you know, if you’re not seeing people in person, in some ways, it can be hard to reinforce some of those unspoken cultural norms. So we need to do a better job kind of laying it out explicitly for folks and explaining how it informs everything we do. So that’s piece number one. And then piece number two is really listening to customers, spending lots of time with them. Some of the best advice I’ve gotten, and I think it’s so true, is that like the one-time investment you can make as a founder, that is almost never a mistake, is time spent with customers. I’d extend that just time spent with team members, just having one-on-ones, with people understanding, "Hey, what’s going on your day? Tell me a little bit about any feedback you have for the customers," doing that across a wide range of functions, especially as you grow.

Callan Harrington 30:20
That makes total sense. What’s the next stage of Bandalier?

Jeremy Ruch 30:25
I think the next stage for us is really expanding, first of all, the range of functions that we work in. We’ve always said this, that our model, we think, can be applied to a wide range of functions within, especially within tech companies, this concept of connecting talent with fast-growing companies, and this vision, really, for somebody being able to walk into our virtual office anywhere in the country with a set of skills, set of personality traits, and us being able to assess through an interview process, "Hey, here’s the role based on lots and lots of data from thousands, literally, of previous interviews, thousands of previous training sessions. Here’s our best-informed take on which role you’re going to be the best fit for." Then we’ve got Bandalier University with— it started out as just inside sales, 101, now we’ve got customer management, sort of client success, 101, got a leadership training course. We can take you through a pretty rigorous training curriculum and then deploy you for a company in need of those skills, with the idea that if there’s a good mutual fit, you can actually potentially work for that company long term or move into a leadership role with us. I think expanding the number of functions we’re able to do that across as one natural next stage, and then just getting more and more rigorous in our analysis of the data because, you know, we’ve now been doing this for five years, and some of the stuff we’ve been able to uncover is pretty cool. And we’re getting more and more sophisticated in our ability to understand kind of which questions are predictive in our interview process, what we’re learning in our training process about top performers versus folks who don’t wind up succeeding in these roles, and how we can tweak things to make sure that we’re putting the right people in the right places. So I think it’s kind of horizontal and vertical, right? It is broadening the number of roles we’re able to do this across, and then getting even better at our ability to execute in the roles that we’re already in.

Callan Harrington 32:10
That’s very cool, and it makes sense to use that data when you’ve got the numbers that you guys have. Use that data to better predict fit. I think that makes total sense to me. And I think one of the unique things that you guys do is— so just for our listeners, one of the things that Bandalier does is, not only do they perform this service on behalf of a company, but they will actually place them at the companies themselves. So these are people that are already familiar with the company and put a whole team in infrastructure right there ready to go, which I think is great. And just correct me if I said anything wrong there?

Jeremy Ruch 32:45
No, that’s 100% right. One way we often encourage people to look at it is it’s a little bit like an insurance agency, almost on both sides, right? So for talent, these are folks often starting their careers, or certainly at the start of their career in this particular function, they have the opportunity to get to know a company before going and working there full time, and we have the ability to give them exposure to lots of different potential opportunities. And for companies, you know, hiring decisions are really important, and making them on the basis of a pretty limited set of data, especially if you’re an early-stage company that hasn’t necessarily hired a ton for this role before, doesn’t always make sense, right? So the ability to actually get to know somebody, to sort of try before you buy within these roles, I think, is really powerful, and I think that’s a big part of the reason a lot of our clients work with us.

Callan Harrington 33:30
Makes complete sense. So Jeremy, before we jump, if you can have a conversation with your younger self, and I’ll leave that age undefined, what advice would you give them?

Jeremy Ruch 33:42
Yeah, I was thinking about this because, you know, someone tipped me off that you might be asking this question. It certainly does depend on the age, right? Because the advice I would give my three-year-old self or four-year-old self might be different. I think it would probably be to be less afraid. And, you know, I think particularly at the early stages of your career, everything is so new that everything seems like a massive disaster or a massive win, right? Massive opportunity. When it happens, you think that everything that is happening to you is probably the first time this has ever happened in the universe, and you’re just so overwhelmed by everything that happens. And I think one of the behaviors that can drive is a certain, I don’t know if it’s a risk aversion, but certainly caution, right? Of, "Don’t screw things up." You know, early stage of your career really want to make sure you’re off on a good footing. And I think, like, if I look back to the early stages of my career, especially, like, the most valuable learnings wasn’t whether a particular boss liked me or didn’t like me, or a particular assignment went well or didn’t, or did I get a promotion, or did I not get a promotion, and was it the right promotion or the wrong promotion? It was really like just the range of experiences, and you never really know how a particular experience might inform something you do later on in your career. And so what I encourage myself to have done earlier on in my career is just try to get as broad a set of experience as possible and not worry so much about where I am on the ladder relative to other people, and you know how fast I’m moving and are not moving and that kind of thing. Worry more about just having as broad a set of experiences as possible.

Callan Harrington 35:20
I think that’s excellent advice. And you do, you pick up things along the way, and you may not realize that till years later, the importance that it has, so I love that answer. Jeremy, thank you for coming on the show, man. This was a lot of fun.

Jeremy Ruch 35:33
Thank you. It was great chatting with you. And yeah, anytime. This was great.

Callan Harrington 35:37
Absolutely.