A lifecycle by any other name | Lindsey Hulet

[Lindsey] (0:00 - 0:29)

We have a backlog, we have a benefits backlog, things that people keep requesting. So I have to learn a lot of the same techniques to how do I respond to employees requesting quote-unquote features that we just don't have yet because we don't have the, you know, administrative capacity or the financial capacity. And I've had de-escalation talks, lots of de-escalations, right, when people are upset or there's conflict with misunderstandings.

So all these skills are so transferable.

[Dillon] (0:38 - 0:58)

What's up, lifers, and welcome to The Daily Standup with Lifetime Value, where we're giving you fresh new customer success ideas every single day. I got my man Rob with us. Rob, do you want to say hi?

Ahoy, mateys. Ahoy, mateys. How did I know?

How did I know? And we have J.P. with us. J.P., can you say hi, please?

[JP] (0:59 - 1:00)

Hey, give me a call sometime, will ya?

[Dillon] (1:02 - 1:09)

What did I tell you? This guy's feeling himself today. And we have Lindsey with us.

Lindsey, can you say hi, please?

[Lindsey] (1:09 - 1:11)

Good old-fashioned hello, everyone.

[Dillon] (1:11 - 1:20)

Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate it.

And I am your host. My name is Dillon Young. Lindsey, thank you so much for being here.

Can you please introduce yourself?

[Lindsey] (1:20 - 1:32)

Yeah. My name is Lindsey Hulet. I am the VP of Operations and People at a tech startup called Builder Prime, and we do home improvement business management software.

Happy to be here.

[Dillon] (1:32 - 1:52)

Lindsey, you're famous. I don't know if you know this. You've been talked about on this show, never by name.

So I'm actually just making an assumption here. But maybe Rob will validate me later on in the show. Lindsey, you know what we do here?

We ask every single guest one simple question, and that is, what is on your mind when it comes to customer success? So can you please tell us what that is for you?

[Lindsey] (1:53 - 2:22)

Yeah. What's on my mind is how similar the people function is to customer success. In fact, at one of my previous positions, my department was called People Success.

And the alignment is uncanny, right? You just have a different set of customers, but everything you're trying to accomplish is virtually the same. So I've worked a lot with Rob, and we talk about this all the time.

It's incredible how similar they are, which is good news for Rob, because it makes me love customer success just naturally.

[Dillon] (2:23 - 3:21)

Good news for us in general, since we run a customer success podcast. I find this happens a lot when I explain to people. I'll say I'm account management, oftentimes, to people who I'm just meeting because it's easier to explain.

But if I think they know a little bit of ball, I'll say customer success, and I'll explain like, oh, we're trying to make people successful, and then try to blah, blah, blah. And I remember one of the first times I explained this to my wife. She's like, oh, you're a business relationship manager.

And where she works, those are just the sort of people, they are connective tissue between IT and a particular department that helps them utilize one piece of software to the best of their ability. But it's usually like an ERP, like this massive piece of software. And so I find that people create these connections, or they realize these connections better than we do ourselves.

So anyway, I would love for you to give like some examples of how these connections take place before I let the guys jump in here.

[Lindsey] (3:21 - 4:55)

Yeah, well, when you think about the customer lifecycle, there's something very similar called the employee lifecycle. And you're thinking about a lot of the same issues. How do I ensure that the customer, in this case, the internal customer, the candidate has a really good experience from the moment they encounter our company throughout the first experiences, the first discussions, which is typically an interview process.

But not just that, once they've like, quote unquote, closed, right, they've accepted an offer, you're now in a very interesting phase of the employee lifecycle where you have the chance to make an impact from day one. So how do you create incredible onboarding experiences? How do you facilitate learning?

How do you make sure that you're capturing and building on that honeymoon phase? Because it does run out, right? I typically have employees reach out to me.

Sometimes they're honest about it too. They'll say, I'm at six months and the shine is gone, right? I know where all the problems are.

I can see the challenges clearly. But then how do you turn those challenges into additional opportunities for your candidates? So and then, you know, even on the way out, how you treat people on the way out, it's very not common to terminate a customer.

It does happen. But whether you're terminated as an employee or you're leaving voluntarily, which is typically the case, you still have an opportunity on the way out. And so being in the people function, people success function, it's wrapping around that entire lifecycle and building touch points that matter into it.

[Dillon] (4:55 - 5:06)

I dig it. I have a lot more to say, but I'm going to let Rob jump in here. Since you are a friend of Rob's, you said that Rob loves you.

Rob, why don't you tell us a little bit more about how you think about this?

[Rob] (5:07 - 6:36)

First, I'll explain why you're famous, Lindsey. It's only because I've referenced this impressive people ops leader who leads the go-to-market function at one of my clients. And that's you.

And I've been, it's unusual to see and it works in all the best ways. And so I think Terry probably shared with you that the, Terry's someone else on Lindsey's team, by the way, shared with you the podcast recording where I was just talking about how cool it works at Builder Prime. And the example that you mentioned, Lindsey, too, I was thinking about the customer exit interview playbook that we recently put in place, where I pulled that from the idea of, first time I quit a job, I went through an exit interview process.

And I said to myself, well, I guess you could do the same thing with your customers, right? And I think you're right. The whole journey does parallel.

When you look at the customer journey from, there's an analog for the employee journey at every stage. For the sales process, there's recruiting. For the onboarding process, there's employee onboarding.

For the customer success and engagement process, there's employee success and engagement or people success, as you called it. For NPS scoring for customers, there's employee NPS internally. And then I think the most important thing is like, when basically expansion, right?

You think about your customer's growth, you should be thinking about your employee's growth. Your employees should be working on a success plan. And if they're not, well, why do you treat your customers with this level of service of success plans that you don't treat your own internal people?

Because every time somebody shows up to work, they are doing a renewal, right? It's like a daily renewal.

[Lindsey] (6:36 - 6:37)

Yeah.

[Rob] (6:37 - 6:38)

And so we should stay on top of that.

[Dillon] (6:39 - 6:42)

To that point, actually, Lindsey, how big is Builder Prime?

[Lindsey] (6:42 - 6:48)

How many employees? 45, 45 team members and about 515 customers.

[Dillon] (6:49 - 7:14)

Wow, that's fantastic. So I will just say bitterly, I have never had this sort of experience with a company that small. It is very turn and burn.

And I'm certainly not endorsing that. I think this whole attitude and strategy is obviously much healthier and more cost effective. I'm a little bit jealous that I've never had this sort of experience.

I think it's aspirational.

[Lindsey] (7:14 - 8:35)

I don't know what to say. You never had somebody like me running the people function at the company or... I mean, there's a reason I love what I do and I'm so passionate about it.

And it became even more clear working closer with the customer success function. I feel the way about employees, the way that our director of CS feels about our customers and all the good things for them. So to your point earlier, Rob, about engagement, we send out engagement surveys and have to really listen carefully to the feedback, look at the data and then build a roadmap.

We have a backlog. We have a benefits backlog. Things that people keep requesting.

So I have to learn a lot of the same techniques to how do I respond to employees requesting quote unquote features that we just don't have yet because we don't have the administrative capacity or the financial capacity. And I've had de-escalation talks, lots of de-escalations, right? When people are upset or there's conflict or there's misunderstandings.

So all these skills are so transferable and CS team members have to be real true generalists. You can definitely specialize in CS the way you can in people ops. But I think at the heart of it, a lot of CS people are generalists just the way that HR practitioners are.

[Dillon] (8:36 - 8:47)

J.P., I want you to take us out of here and I keep coming back to this word experience. And I wonder if you're thinking about the same thing. I wanna give you a chance to either share your thoughts or ask any questions you might have for Lindsey.

-: 10:49

Oh, this is great. I think the work that you're doing is great. The whole six month honeymoon, like, yeah, I'm sort of thinking about like multiple of my own journeys in CS.

And I think that it's great that there's a company that sort of like has this function, right? When you're thinking about retention because it is really costly to hire someone. And this is actually the second time now I'd never heard turn and burn or churn and burn.

I'd never heard this. And I remember like hearing that and that was like a dagger in my heart that that was a term, that that's a thing, because I think about so many people that go through a lot trying to interview and to work a place. And there's all sorts of reasons why someone may leave a job.

But I think it's really fascinating yet to apply the sort of the people success lens, thinking about it in terms of very similar to what we do in customer success. So yeah, even this like the idea of like expansion like Rob mentioned, or like having a success plan. I think that that's such a great, like it's a great humanistic approach, but it's also just very like, it just makes a lot of sense.

Unless you've literally built turnover, unless you're planning on that, unless that's part of your success plan, right? Like as a company, I think that being able to like empower individuals to really like grow where they are is great. And I also wanna applaud, I think that the interview experience is also really important.

I think you can learn a lot about how a company will treat you from the interview process. And so, yeah, definitely something to think about. But I guess if I had like maybe one question to sort of end with, what would you estimate like, Dillon had alluded to, never seen a small companies, like what is your idea of like this people success function like elsewhere?

Like your colleagues out there, what do you sort of see out in the field?

[Lindsey] (: 10:49

Yeah, I have a lot of opinions about this, but the short answer is, I think in general startups bring on that function, the people function way, way too late. I've come in at three different companies that around the 70, 80 mark, I think it's too late.

[JP] (: 11:05

I think the sweet spot- 70, 80, what?

[Lindsey] (: 11:08

Sorry, team members, 70 to 80 team members.

[JP] (: 11:10

Okay, got you.

[Lindsey] (: 11:11

Yeah, I think the sweet spot is 30 to 50. It's where you have enough ability to shape structure and expectations and culture and really set a solid foundation to build upon.

[Dillon] (: 11:24

And that is where I was gonna go with it is, Lindsey, you should absolutely come back, especially because you have more thoughts on this. And that is a fantastic sort of like statistic or like nugget you gave us at the end there of like what your opinion of when you can have the most impact. And it feels so long-term and sort of like second order thinking around, I remember a boss or a CEO who told me before, if my employees are happy, then my customers will be happy.

And so he was so hardcore about fostering a healthy culture, but I think that's really hard in startup world. Like you said, whether it's cost or it's time or it's just values, they just haven't built that muscle yet. So I would love for you to come back and talk more about that, but we are at time.

So until that time, you've got to say goodbye.

[Lindsey] (: 12:13

Yeah, thanks so much. It's been great to chat with you.

[VO] (: 12:44

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