Adam Radulovic 4:21
Sure, the high level we’re an outsourced IT department for small medium businesses. We tend to gravitate to the ones that are trying to change their business to accomplish something different or more. Typically, that’s growth but not exclusively. And we see technology that in the past has been an obstacle for businesses. In my dream my passion was to help other entrepreneurs remove those obstacles so they can achieve their goals.
And technology just happened to be an area of expertise in an area that I knew was lacking and causing people slowdown in business that’s what we focused on. A unique you already meant Shouldn’t we remove 80% of the problems from happening in the first place by a simple auditing approach, and a department that just focuses on looking for non conformities and fixing it?
Jeremy Weisz 5:10
I promise you in this, I’m going to make Adam tell some brief stories. So stay tuned to some crazy stories, because I’m sure he’s experienced, you know, a lot of things that we probably never thought are possible, and probably scare me a little bit, but that’s okay. You know, sometimes what happens, we take action. What’s interesting, Adam is, I feel like you really honed in on who an ideal customer or client is for you. And that’s what allowed you to continue to grow and scale, talk about that process, and who is an ideal customer and how you’ve honed in on that? Sure.
Adam Radulovic 5:51
Initially, it started more for what drove me and my passion, which after working with Fortune 500 companies, I knew that wasn’t it, I wanted to work with organizations where families are part of it, you build relationships, the more of a human experience instead of a transactional, bureaucratic paper pushing money making machine. So from early days, we gravitated to organizations that had less than 250 employees, typically even less than 150.
Because you have this bond, this tribal experience when you work with those organizations. Now, there really wasn’t rocket science, how we got to narrowing the scope of exactly what we’re looking for, except initially, we just helped everybody. And through time, we understood what we really want to look for in these types of organizations, because we have the biggest impact and we drive the most value with them. So it is like peeling, peeling an onion, finding, finding that and starting to just initially with the number of employees and the size of the organization.
Jeremy Weisz 6:59
So now who do you when you think of that, and I like how you kind of break that down, which is there’s a size when there’s like, who you have the biggest impact for, for and drive the most value for because we are talking to you. There’s specific industries and you know, 24/7, you know that you serve certain pain points. So talk about some of those things that you have found you serve best for
Adam Radulovic 7:28
sure. The core of it is an organization that depends on technology, that the employees there have to utilize technology in order for that business to operate. So that’s our first really key requirement, because our uniqueness and our values are really geared towards removing problems. If it can remove problems, some independence technology, that productivity goes directly back and makes that business just that much more efficient. So that’s the key one, the other ones are more secondary. So we have a couple of secondary ones, the 24/7, that you mentioned 24/7 365. From the earlier days that came from the investment banking world, I wanted to be able to offer that level of service.
So initially, we came out as 24/7 365, I had no idea how complicated that’s going to be ultimately to manage five live shifts, deliver that service and account for a PTO and sick days, etc, and still provide it. But that’s another secondary and our final secondary one is our security management. We went through a five year process to be certified by the International Standards Organization. It’s called ISO 27,001. And as far as we know, we’re the only one in the greater Chicagoland area that’s ISO 27,001 certified, which just means that we’re credible and audited in our ability to manage security on us and on behalf of our clients. Talk about customer support.
Jeremy Weisz 8:57
Right, you met you mentioned 24/7 shifts, how do you manage? And what do you think about customer support in the company because I know companies I go to on their website, I can’t even find an email address, right our phone number. So what do you think about customer support?
Adam Radulovic 9:19
Customer Support is the number one experience for all of our clients. Ultimately, clients might initially purchase service or sign up with an IT firm because of price or some mentioned features but the experience is predominantly based around how they’re being supported. And our philosophy is because we have the audit process that removes most of the problems that arise by the time you get to our service desk. We already felt like we failed somewhere to prevent that problem in the first place. So if you do come to us, we want that experience to be white glove. Perfect. As close To ideal as we can possibly get, because we already feel like we’ve missed the mark, preventing it.
So we have enough capacity in order to be able to handle the busy times, which you might be surprised by, but typically are Monday mornings, and immediately after a holiday. So we have to be able to handle after Thanksgiving after New Year’s when people come back sometimes have weeks of not working, all of a sudden they forgot their passwords, they don’t know how to use an application because they haven’t touched in two weeks, we have a massive influx of issues and be able to account for that and handle it. It takes a lot of planning. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle, a three dimensional jigsaw puzzle to get that to work.
Jeremy Weisz 10:47
We’ll talk about early on because one of the things I know you said, if you were to go back early on, you would have spent more time on processes. Yes. Talk about the processes that you think about and put in place with the customer support. And like the five, you know, you said that the five live shifts?
Adam Radulovic 11:10
Now, do you want to hear more about the processes we author on the behalf of our clients and supporting them or our internal processes around running? More internal service desk internal? Yeah, I’ll tell you the journey, the journey was a really painful journey. And I hope anyone that listens to this avoids this painful journey, the first part of the pain is you need to start from day one. When you’re the first person in the business, it’s gonna feel like a waste of time. And it’s gonna feel like you don’t need to document these procedures because they’re in your head, you know exactly how to do it. Well, the problem is, at some point, if you want to scale and add a second person, you’re gonna have to spend that time and teach them.
In the written procedure, we actually write it out as a lot more steps than you realize just as selectively doing on your own. So I’d say the first step is to document it from day one. So we went through and once we realized we needed to start documenting these procedures. We built up a wiki, if anyone’s familiar with that term, compelled the wiki Bala procedures and I wrote 70 or 80% of those procedures. Well, after a few 100 of those, you no longer as an individual had the time to go back and keep them updated. So what happened was initially, as I was the author and a couple of us were offering those procedures, it took off and XL meta started looking at those procedures.
And it really helped us move forward as a procedure and process driven company until we got to hundreds and those procedures became old. And when people looked at them, they said, Well, this procedure no longer matters. And from time to time having a procedure doesn’t matter when more than half of them are antiquated. People gave up, they gave up on going to the wiki and even looking at procedures, they just knew Oh, all procedures, I’m not going to look at that. So we had to tear it all down and start back up again. And we use a particular tool that makes it easier than a wiki. But our first step was training 100% of Exxon letters, to be able to themselves, author governance offer POS authored policies, procedures and processes.
Sure, there’s an approval process that’s built in. So it’s not that anyone writes it, and there is so amount of maximum production, but 100% of excellent writers. At that point, we were trained in writing procedures. And today 100% of external auditors write procedures. So when we launched it, we trained everybody. And then we just pull in policies, get people comfortable using the system and authoring policies, because everything starts with the policies. And then we push that down to develop our procedures. And the first place we looked was the wikis, we went to our Ahmet to at that point there were probably 1500 to 2000 Different wiki articles, and we just one by one would take and freshen up. So it’s relevant today and moving on
Jeremy Weisz 14:14
the use of certain software to move them on to a platform. Yeah, on the wiki.
Adam Radulovic 14:19
Yeah, we use a product called Sweet process. There’s other ones
Jeremy Weisz 14:23
we use. We process we love Yeah, yeah, I’ve had Owen on the podcast before. He’s awesome. I
Adam Radulovic 14:29
i agree this stuff is great. And so the process is just an amazing, easy to use platform. So you’re probably smiling as I’m going through the description. today. We have probably about 3000 pieces of government governance that are written but it sounds overwhelming. It’s not because it’s departmentalized. So every department has a very few procedures or policies to focus on and more procedures. And we’ve developed this quarterly process wherever you depart. Hartmann goes through and reviews as a team, all their policies, processes and procedures. And what’s happening now is that we’re more pruning what we put in place. And not many new procedures. Now, this has long been an answer to your question, but we’re not developing many procedures anymore. Very few. What we’re doing now is refining what we have in place.
Jeremy Weisz 15:21
Talk about the shifts, how do you coordinate it with different time zones, people where, you know, where are the people located for the shifts? And because I’m sure you spend a lot of time organizing that? Sure.
Adam Radulovic 15:38
When I initially thought 24/7, I thought of three shifts. What do you miss with three shifts ? What about vacations? What about weekends, and how many shifts are weekends, you have 48 hours in a weekend. So you have to have this floating shift as well, that covers little before little after weekends. So we have a floating shift from Thursday to Tuesday, as we can cover. And then we have extra letters that work on the weekends, multiple different shifts, regular business hours and how it flows. between shifts, there’s always an overlap.
There’s never hard cover, this shift ends at let’s say, five, another one starts at five, you have to have at least an hour to cut over between the two. So you can handoff between them. And it took a lot of trial and error to get to where we’re at today, we had a lot of issues and customer customers would have challenges. Those times that we couldn’t help.
But we had a loose start shifting the shifts in a way that PTO wouldn’t impact and surprise sick days wouldn’t impact it. So there’s no shift that we’re just accounting for one person. The next level is more complex. That’s the service desk. And that’s regular support. But what about escalations? What about management? So we had to start building these layers of escalations across shifts and supervision or management across shifts as well, to get to where we’re at today.
Jeremy Weisz 17:17
So to cover all this, what are you thinking of regions or countries because obviously, you could have us but you know, people, it’s harder if they’re working in the middle of the night.
Adam Radulovic 17:31
It’s really hard to find people that are willing to work 11pm And seven hands in the US that are qualified, very tough. So we have three different countries that we operate in today. Us as for the regular business hours, shifts predominantly. And then Serbian Philippines for the other shifts. And we’re trying to match that people, for the most part, are working in their daylight hours.
Jeremy Weisz 18:06
Do you still have family or friends? Do you have friends or family in Serbia?
Adam Radulovic 18:11
Yes, I still have family in Serbia. So you can’t tell but you might not be able to because English is my second language. And I still have family in Serbia who came to us in 1988. So
Jeremy Weisz 18:23
with sourcing talent from Serbia, is that people you knew or did you just have to go about like anyone else from scratch not knowing anyone?
Adam Radulovic 18:34
Unfortunately, ladder, I really had a go and look because I was gone for so long. None of the people that I was friends with really ended up in the technology field. And so I had to go look for someone else but I had an advantage in speaking the language. And I could ask around and people are more willing and probably trusting to work with somebody with a name that’s clearly Serbian. And that I think made it easier. Get everything started there. So,
Jeremy Weisz 19:01
um, your background? Were you born here, or when did your parents come over here? Sure.
Adam Radulovic 19:07
I was born in Ithaca, New York. My dad was a professor of thermodynamics. And then when I was a year and a half, I think my parents wanted both my brother and I to have a Serbian upbringing to experience what they experienced. And so we went back to then you have Slavia before the worst, went back to your Slavia and then returned to Provo, Utah in 88, and how long were you there and you can solve it? Ah, about nine, nine and a half years. What was it like there, the time really different than now?
That the community aspect was not something I’ve experienced in the US sense right? I think that communism or socialism, whatever was caused at that time, really did make everybody feel like they’re on the same level. And you could be friends with anybody. You know, you’d have the knock on the door and somebody wants to borrow an egg or some sugar. You knew everybody’s names. And it was very. So for me, it was very warm socially to be part of it. At that point it was a clean country. Capitalism didn’t enter, enter in Yeah, either. Was very government controlled. My fondest memories were from vacations. So you’re probably familiar with the European vacations of August. So we’d go the full month of August, on the Adriatic coast, and I’d spend a month on the beach.
Jeremy Weisz 20:50
It’s interesting, Adam, when, on the surface with your background, the dad’s a professor of thermodynamics, you studied Computer Engineering at Michigan. You know, I’m thinking oh, Professor, not necessarily an entrepreneur, right. But when you look at I know you’ve shared in the past things like you would charge people to take the garbage out, you had shaved ice business, you had multiple businesses throughout your life. Was that just inborn? Or was your parents kind of pushing you to explore delivering value in the way of entrepreneurship? My,
Adam Radulovic 21:34
my parents didn’t push me in anything in life, my parents just kind of loved me and set and helped me wherever I needed help. So it was all driven by me. And if I have to go back and think, think through, I believe it was just getting to America. You know, I went from a socialist communist country, whether you want to call it America, and all of a sudden, money was something that was important. And where I came from just wasn’t didn’t enter into conversations. What was important was science and engineering and community, those, that’s what people focused on. And I came here. And I was inundated with just commercials and lotteries.
And remember, I saw what it was so some lottery came in the mail, you want a million dollars, and I was so excited, I went to my parents, a sweepstakes or whatever, it was some some sweepstakes. Yeah. And I was so excited. Look, we won a million dollars. And somewhere around there, they think, in my head, that I want to run a business. I want this freedom of running my own business, and I want to be able to buy candy, like that’s where it started as a kid, I want to be environmental candy. And so I figured out how to make money just doing that. We were
Jeremy Weisz 23:02
before we hit the record talking about the red ocean. Yeah.Talk about the red ocean for a second.
Adam Radulovic 23:06
So the concept of the red ocean is any industry that’s just full of competition. And anything that phraseology comes from a red ocean, when sharks are just feeding on bodies. And the bodies in this instance, are just businesses that seem to offer the same exact services. Everybody else, there’s a lot of blood in the water, and you have to take clients from each other. There’s no no Greenfield, no, we’re new to go.
And then the opposite thing is the blue ocean. Were more of your challenges describing what you’re offering your value proposition because nobody’s looking for it. You have to go and evangelize the value that you’re providing. I think both have pros and cons. But we’re in an absolutely very mature red ocean right now.
Jeremy Weisz 24:03
So then how do you differentiate and get past that?
Adam Radulovic 24:08
It’s hard. It’s really hard. I’ll give you an example. So we absolutely have uniques in the market, and our core unique is this audit process, that we have a separate department that performs the audits and fixes non conformities and reduces 80% of the problems that happened with clients. Well, how do you convey that to a prospect? Well, you can do what I’m doing. It can verbally describe it. But what prevents your competitors from just saying the same thing? Nothing. So this is this journey that’s been happening over the last 14 years.
We were built this way from the get go from day one. We wanted this service to reduce problems to audit, to remove obstacles for the entrepreneurs and business owners and small business employees. That was a passion that we wanted to do. So we built that. And initially, it was proactive, it was proactive. And then competitors would say, Hey, we’re proactive, too. And we’re proactive because well, we have monitoring in place. That’s like saying a fire alarm is being practiced. No, it’s not being practiced. You’re just reacting faster. Nothing, you’re not stopping the fire. You’re just saying, Oh, look, there’s this fire over there. So we had to go through the education process saying, Well, you know, monitoring is not practice.
Jeremy Weisz 25:41
Are some of the misconceptions. So like, that monitoring is not proactive? What are some of the other misconceptions of statements? Sure.
Adam Radulovic 25:50
That is just setting technology up correctly, once. Even the right way is being practiced. All right, we came in, and we migrated you now to office 365. And we set all the security features correctly. Great, the minute you stop, and then at your complete, new technology can change and cause that previously correctly Setup System to no longer be correctly set up. So there’s this constant work of going back on technology and seeing how it is set up and making changes to prevent problems from happening. The second misconception is doing a hit initially is the monitoring, that monitoring and looking for problems after they happen is being proactive, absolutely necessary.
You want your technology provider to detect the problems before employees have to fully experience it. But that’s still not preventing you from experiencing that problem. And as quickly as you can resolve it, that negative experience is still pushed down for that organization. So those are, I think, probably the two key misconceptions that I see around being proactive in the misconceptions that IT providers themselves have around being proactive as they imagine, they can have their service desk, their firefighters be the ones that prevent problems to be the, you know, the prevent preventers, fire presenters. And that’s just not possible.
You can’t have someone that’s geared and focused on stopping fire fighting fires, be the one to also think about being proactive and stopping fires. I know you can do it, we’ve tried it, you just get geared one way or another. And then my story of how we discovered this, as we hired service desk, exon letters in the early days, we found the best way we could pay them really well. And we said alright, they’re not going to want to deal with all these annoying problems of just recurring over and over, they’re going to follow this process. And then I removed them from the app in the first place. And we made a really simple checklist of 99 items, hey, service desk, person, please just follow these 90 Step items per client.
And if we do this, our problems will drastically reduce. And time went by and our level of issues stayed about one issue every three or four weeks per employee. And finally, I sat down, I’m like, Hey, X on that or the service desk, I’m gonna not use the name. Why? Why do we still have these issues? Okay, I think we have the process to reduce them. And I’m seeing the same issue repeating, you got a bunch of sit down next to them. Okay. sat down next to him. All right, let’s get this list at step one. All right, I gotta do this to check the climate. Oh, hold on, and there’s a call.
Okay, John, let me help you with your laptop for one second. 50 minutes go by, okay, where were we again? The witch client. Okay, let me pull that back up. And this just happened on the third day. I’m like, Okay, I got it. I’m an idiot. You could have just told me, I get it. So I think that’s the misconception that IT providers have, that they can overload an existing role and ask them to do this practice task is just not possible. Yeah, I like how they handle that. I do too, it is very effective.
Jeremy Weisz 29:31
What are some of the biggest mistakes companies make? You’ve seen? I mean, we’ll talk about some breach stories, but what do you see? As you go through a lot of audit processes, what are were some of the big ones for people
Adam Radulovic 29:50
going through the selection process of picking a new IT provider. And we walk five to 10 companies. It’s not hard Do this once a week. I think the majority of people get it wrong. They don’t know what questions to ask about what attributes look like for an IT provider. And most importantly, they don’t know what end result they want with an IT provider. What do you want from it provider with the number one reason I hear is faster support. You don’t want faster support, you went there not to be the reason to get support in the first place. You want not to have problems, that’s the reason it’s the markets trained there, we get everybody because of the level of service, slow support, they do things wrong. The real underlying problem is the lack process.
And the lack of a way to remove problems from happening, the lack of audit makes me get these new providers and they get the same result. And they’re frustrated again. So I see sometimes people go through three, four providers in five years. And their challenges. We are more like our audit process, it costs, there’s more labor separate departments that go into the audit environment. But that’s what has the biggest bang for the buck. If they’re dependent on technology. If I can remove 80% of problems happening in that business, I know they’ll be able to accomplish more as a business, but they’re gonna have to marginally invest a little bit more for that to happen.
Jeremy Weisz 31:26
So they’re asking the question, how fast is your support? Yeah. So what questions should they be asking?
Adam Radulovic 31:34
How will our technology experience be different with you than what it is today with provider x? And then after the how is, well tell us why it’ll be different. And hopefully the answer for the WHY is a proof of some process and evidence of achieving that result.
Jeremy Weisz 32:07
It makes me think of those I don’t know if they’re still airing those commercials. And I’ve remember seeing the Maytag repair person commercials where they showed and basically relaxed and did nothing because the equipment was made. Well, that person doesn’t get called. Right, that’s kind of what I picture.
Adam Radulovic 32:26
But that is spot on. I wish I thought of it like that.
Jeremy Weisz 32:33
Yes Well, you said we need to do a spoof commercial with just egg shells. Except with, you know, mimicking the Maytag won. So talk about you know, now people make, you know, there’s mistakes that companies are making with their security, what are some of the stories, some of those breach stories, I know you You’ve spoken all over the place, and I’d love for you to share with you
Adam Radulovic 33:03
a share. I’ll share a Hi, my, my absolute my scariest one that I have. It was a large organization we got pulled into. I’m trying to remember. I think it was by a friend’s forensics company. They said, Hey, we have a client, their middle breach, their internal IT is understandably a little lost, right, because they’re, on one hand, feeling guilty because a breach happened. And then the hand that tried to deal with this scenario that has never dealt with before or not prepared.
So friends of the company asked us to come in and we came in. And we just started talking with the C suite understanding the pain they’re currently experiencing first. And they’re in the middle of doing this major transaction. And all they needed was access to some files. It’s been 10 business days where they hadn’t had access to these files for this. And then it was a significant transaction.
The biggest in history. Through a couple of questions, we identified that they had backups, not only just backups, they had off sites of those backups and they had really an industry leading platform for disaster recovery. And all we had to do was log in and within an hour just click a button it’s almost as easy as the red button, staple red button. It’s that easy. We hit that button and within an hour they’re able to access their files. So that part was my great cool wearable fix something and the C suite was impressed but we told them like NO YOU’RE it did a great job that put this in place. For some reason they forgot it was there. They just need to hit the button. As we hit the button a few weeks later, we’re still helping them, you know, recover. And a few weeks later
we started having the people that are part of this breach response team. They start receiving emails. And they started receiving emails from the assumed hackers, the threat actor. And what the emails had was their individual emails. So hey, Mister attorney, or Mr. Forensic expert, we know where you live, here’s a picture of your home. We know the car that you drive, here’s what it is. Get your client to pay or else.
Now, I don’t know why we didn’t receive emails like that. Maybe we got involved a little bit later than everybody else. But it clearly escalated the game to a level that we’ve never experienced before . I felt at risk. And from then on, I realized that even during these breaches, the only way we can communicate is through anonymous email services. That it can’t be known that we’re helping organizations. Excellent. That name can’t be out there, that we’re helping these organizations. That’s probably the scariest.
Jeremy Weisz 36:22
So how did you end up?
Adam Radulovic 36:24
How did they get resolved? It was a bluff. So the hackers were not paid. The systems were recovered from clicking that red button. And it ultimately will help them get organized. And there, they were fine, we left them. We have made a couple of changes. One, which I’m sure everyone’s tired of hearing. But the way that hackers got in was the lack of multifactor authentication, that email platform, set the other button we hit.
We asked the C suite to give us permission, we’re just going to enforce this multi factor and everybody right now, then just stopped the bleeding. And sure there’s some negative operational impact. At that point there. We’re past that being the big issue. So we hit the second button. And now that they had that whole fixed that was it, we hit two buttons.
Jeremy Weisz 37:25
I’d love for you to talk about tech stack for a second. What you like about the sweet process. What are some other software tools? Either you use internally, with the company or
Adam Radulovic 37:37
or externally? Sure. I mean, like the marketing tech stack? Yeah. Sure. Well, let’s start with a couple on the sales side that I think I’m most comfortable with speaking because we do a lot of research. Our CRM is antiquated but we’re in Salesforce, we selected Salesforce, and we’re using it from day one because of their integrations at that time, with almost every other system that could be integrated with serum. And it’s still true today. That salesforce.com is more integrated than any CRM platform out there. Think HubSpot is a really good second place.
And if we had to reselect a serum today, probably HubSpot. The second tool is for salespeople and customer service that allows us to dial through relatively quickly on either clients or prospects when we’re seeking some kind of information. That tool’s phone burner really makes it pretty easy to manage that process for small medium businesses. Prior to that. We had another provider inside sales.com that I think just swam up and said, you know, we only want larger organizations and started cutting out small medium businesses. So we’ve looked at every single offering on the market. There’s not that many at that time. There’s about 13 and we selected a phone burner.
Jeremy Weisz 39:04
It was RingCentral in the running.
Adam Radulovic 39:07
At that point, it was not able to do dynamic lists for dialing. I mean that killed out most competition, the ability to have these dynamic lists, which is really required if you have more than one person dialing so they don’t clobber each other and Dallas, same person twice in five minutes. Those are probably the key ones in the sales side. One that Trent kind of goes between sales and marketing Apollo. Pio, great for a database of contacts and emails of who to prospect to their competitors. zoominfo I just didn’t have a good experience working with their salespeople.
I felt like they were just in it for themselves and they know how to sell stuff and they really didn’t care about me which I just completely realized when the salesperson told me they weren’t willing to do something because they’d get a small commission check. Just changing the payment schedule. Okay, well, I got it. So we went to Paula. For retargeting, we use an ad roll. So retargeting is when someone either comes through your sales process or visits your website somewhere you’ve already engaged with them once.
Retargeting allows you to continue to engage with that prospect, and typically through ads or marketing or emails SEMrush to analyze the performance of search engine optimization, so to see when people search in Google, why they’re coming to you and how your competitors are doing. And even your clients we frequently use it with. Clients are just curious about their own SEO performance. And working with marketing agencies, we show them how to use sem rush so they’re equipped to be able to speak the same language and see the results themselves. I’m probably missing a couple of the fresh ones that come up, but those are good ones.
Jeremy Weisz 41:12
What are us Jews? Are internal communication with the team using Slack or anything like that or not.
Adam Radulovic 41:18
So if you go back to my introduction, the company and we co founders group of eight of us put together that organization Microsoft bought it’s part of Microsoft Teams. nothing bad to say Microsoft Teams except that user interface for group collaboration and group group communication, they just didn’t do a good job. very inefficient screen real estate. So we use Slack. And we have a significant number of bots integrations, some of their third parties, some that we had developed ourselves. So it serves as a hub and spoke communication platform for us. So everything goes into Slack from all the other systems and can come from slack outward. Or going to running a SAAS company
Jeremy Weisz 42:03
versus what you run now. Because it seems like I would think Oh, Adams gonna go off and start another SAS company and sell it. Instead, he wanted to make it hard on himself and get a lot of people.
Adam Radulovic 42:18
Yeah, my background was software development. Before I loved creating technology. I moved over to this role because I enjoy people more than technology. And Professional Services is a people business, whether it’s the Exxon matters, and just getting the joy of watching their careers grow. For clients, where you’re seeing their dreams start getting realized and their breath of fresh air when they don’t have to worry about technology anymore. I just like that. Really. belly to belly human experience.
Jeremy Weisz 42:55
I’m talking about the hiring process. You know, all this is a very people driven business. And like you mentioned, there’s five shifts. And that’s just one part. That’s only customer service. Not Not everyone else that you mentioned, the manager is an escalation team. So what is the you know, and they’re interacting in? When someone’s maybe mad? Right? I mean, you’re not getting calls like, Thanks, Adam, we appreciate you that you’re only getting calls. And most of the time, like something’s hitting the fan, we can’t find something now that’s even your fault. But um, how do you hire? What’s your process for hiring? Sure.
Adam Radulovic 43:33
So in the hiring process, our philosophy is that we’re trying to help, it’s a two way street. We’re trying to help select people to become excellent letters, and be able to predict that they’re gonna be successful and happy in that role. Our process is geared really towards that mutual bond being successful. So outside of the standard, you know, behavioral interviews and whatever interview questions we go through, we have some additional assessments that help us, we have a personality profiling, that tool that we use called culture index. It’s not a pass or fail type system, it just tells us that for this role, these are the type of personalities that are going to fit the best and have the highest chance of succeeding. So we look for that. That’s one of the things we look for.
And we also do cognitive tests that we know for certain roles, certain types of cognitive skills are necessary to succeed with and we use test gorillas for that. We use Wonderlic. Previously , someone moved inside sales.com And unfortunately, drastically changed their pricing and how they treated small medium businesses and we said, Okay, I see we’re not in your market anymore, we’ll find something else. So those are the two that we’re using, including our interviews. I think the unique part and the interviews that we have as a final step before any One joins XL net, there’s a team interview. And the purpose of this team interview is, let’s say you’re in the service desk 100%, the Service Desk gets invited to the team interview.
As well as the prospect, and both are told the same thing. We want to make sure that as a team, you enjoy being part of this team. And if you don’t feel like you would this your chance, like, you know, bow and say, you know, either I’m not interested in join axon that I see the team, I don’t think it worked well, or for everyone on the team that joins the interviewer to be able to say, you know, I don’t think that would work well, well, that person that’s complete ability to buy in and choose who’s part of your team, instead of that being chosen for you. Let’s say those are our magical pieces that help us thanks for sharing that.
Jeremy Weisz 45:55
You know, you mentioned Tesco, and you had Wonderlic, and they got purchased. And you know, it wasn’t the greatest, the greatest experience that also happened with another provider that you had. And so I want you to help a consulting company. And something similar happened in that scenario. Yeah.
Adam Radulovic 46:20
We’re in a red ocean thing I mentioned, we’re in the very mature red ocean. So what happens in the red ocean, all you can do is take clients from each other, and merge and acquire. So we had one of our competitors get acquired and actually have a number of our competitors get acquired by the same entity. And, we got a call or inbound marketing lead and started talking to this consulting company.
And they said, you know, Adam, the company, we were with previous acquisition, it was a great service. And I knew that company and I echo that like one of our competitors that I felt was the best in terms of service and culture and just love that organization. Said, we’re, we’re that organization that you knew Adam, IT service went from A to F. And it’s been that way for months. Now, that’s been longer than months, this has been a year and a half the same company has kind of experiencing this but said,
Okay, we went through the conversations, and I think we both recognize they were looking for exactly what we did, because we were so similar to who they were with previously that previous that position that they ended up becoming a partner of ours, and really returning back to what they had almost impossible scenario, they got back what they had previously. Now my hope. And if the entities that might hear this hear it, I love you, my hope is the service is even better than what they had previously. And certainly, we’re aspiring for that. But they’ve gotten back what they lost. And now they’re able to focus again on their business instead of being frustrated and having the C suite WORRY ABOUT IT issues. Adam,
Jeremy Weisz 48:10
First of all, I want to be the first one to thank you. Thanks for sharing your journey and your lessons. And I’ve taken several pages of notes here and in just sharing everything more or less than three pages. Um, let’s see one time is a page and a half. It’s four Yes, four page Don’t sorry, it’s five five pages. You won’t be able to see it on my iPad but it actually is five pages here. Um, but I want to encourage people to go to XL.net to learn more and check out what they’re working on and everything they do. And Adam just thank you for sharing.
Adam Radulovic 48:50
Thanks for having me, everyone. Take care.
