See show notes for this episode: S 02 | Ep 40 Managing Your Last 10%: How to Spot and Fix Your Leadership Blind Spots.
Alex: I am excited to welcome Nathan Christensenen, co founder and CEO of Mineral HR and compliance platform for small and mid sized businesses that supported over a million of small businesses. I personally got to know Nathan because we're serving some of the same customers and have nothing but admiration for what he has done. He has now exited this business and is on boards of other private equity and venture backed companies. Welcome to the pod.
Nathan Christensen: Thank you Alex. It's great to be with you.
Alex: Well, let's start in the journey of this company and then we'll move on into, you know, what, what you're advising now in the, in a slightly different age of AI. But you know, a lot of my growing up happened in the HR tech world with success factors and one way or another I found my way back with folks doing benefits like employee benefit brokers and advisors. we love them. They create a lot of very important content that helps small, and medium sized businesses serve their employees well. And you were serving the same, the same customer types and you know, I'd love to hear about that, that journey and what you learned from there about what made them successful and then what made you successful. Wisdom.
Nathan Christensen: Sure, sure. well, you know I think our story was the typical story of a lot of startups which is a lot of failures and a lot of mistakes along the way. And we didn't start out partnering with insurance brokers and payroll companies. We actually started out trying to sell our product, which was an HR compliance platform directly to small businesses. And this was, you know, in the, this was about 15 years ago. the SaaS product ecosystem was still very early. small businesses in many ways didn't understand the compliance challenges that they had and certainly didn't want to spend money on them. I didn't really trust online expertise. There are all kinds of hurdles that we had to get over. but we built the product because we knew that there was a gap between what small businesses needed to do from a compliance standpoint and the resources that they had to be able to do it. Most of them were sweeping issues under the rug and they were getting caught later, by inadvertent mistakes they were making or they were paying a lot for attorneys to help them address the issues. So we built the product and I went out basically door to door, trying to sell to small businesses and everyone sort of agreed that yeah, this is a pain point. We don't like compliance, it keeps us up at night. We realize we're probably making mistakes but we just aren't sure that this is a product that we can invest in. And after a lengthy period of time of just very, very painstaking customer acquisition, we sort of went back to the drawing board and said okay, if, if we know that small businesses have this pain point, but we also know that the small businesses aren't ready to invest directly in it, how else can we reach them? And we literally opened up the phone book which existed still at that time and, and started thinking about okay, who serves small businesses? And not only who serves small businesses, but who is a trusted advisor to small businesses.
Nathan Christensen: And that led us to insurance brokers and payroll companies. And so we started reaching out to them, getting to know them and found that our product is actually a great fit with their value proposition to the small businesses. And so we embedded mineral compliance inside of the offering from insurance brokers and payroll companies and peos and, and then we were off to the races. And we ended up as you said, over 10 years building a customer community, over a million million million customers through those partners that we, we established.
Alex: Well I think one thing that I found is when when we meet some of these, these brokers, they generally have like a couple systems on there that they talk about. One is some benefit administration, solution for kind of compliance around benefits. And then the other one is Mineral, you know, and you've kind of joined forces was another firm Think Think hr. So like some
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Alex: people heard of these and had a great you know, exit ultimately but the they immediately, the recognition is is there and you know that's not necessarily the easiest group of people to sell to. Like my, my perception is that you know they, they are like have a broad offering, lots of complexity, trust in relationship business, not necessarily like differentiating themselves through technology innovation, probably on average older personnel and team member. So they're not kind of you know, waking up in the morning and wondering what they can do as open claw today. You know as an ex. Example the way like a typical startup founder might be. And, and at the same time they have you know, these like you said, each for example benefits advisor could have you know, 20, 30, 100 depending on the size of businesses they serve, relationships with other businesses. So it sounds like that channel was essential but it's not an easy channel to, you know, as we were chatting, you know, over the last, you know, year or so. It's not an easy channel to penetrate. What was, what made it work for you and, you know, how come you persisted?
Nathan Christensen: Yeah, you know, it's not an easy channel to penetrate, but it's also not an easy channel to, to work within. Insurance brokers are managing a tremendous amount of stresses and pressures from all kinds of stakeholders. They've got, you know, the carriers they work with on one side, they've got their clients on the other side. and, the clients are constantly asking for more. the carriers are constantly putting, you know, pressure on the insurance brokers and they have to navigate all of this. And so it, you know, it is a channel that I think is under a lot of pressure. what made it successful for us is that insurance brokers, as you said, it's a relationship business. And although a lot of the insurance products that, that folks are offering are similar, you've got, you know, the major carriers in the market. What, what really distinguishes insurance brokers is the relationships that they build with their customers and the role that they play as a mentor, a, coach, an advisor to that business. And that was a perfect fit with our, our business because, as I mentioned, you know, small businesses, they knew they were sort of losing sleep over their compliance issues, but they really didn't know specifics about what those were or what to do about it. And insurance brokers, this is, this is what they are really good at.
Alex: Existential dread, but no ability to act on it in any way, like realistically. Right, right.
Nathan Christensen: And so you have these insurance brokers that are the trusted advisors for their clients. And they are, they're really skilled at spotting gaps for their clients and figuring out how to help fill them. And they knew that the compliance issues were out there. They wanted to make sure their customers are really successful over the long, long term and weren't dragged down by lawsuits or audits or other issues. And, so they were perfect partners with us where we provided a platform and the insurance brokers recognized the value of that and could communicate that to their clients. and, you know, it worked very well. It also helped that that our platform had a lot of, connectivity to the benefits programs that the insurance brokers were selling and their clients were putting in place. So if you're going to be offering benefits, you want to know what are the best practices. You want to know what are my responsibilities. You want to be able to administer, your employer Responsibilities effectively. so it also worked that there was, there was a good adjacency between benefits products and HR compliance.
Alex: And so it started like it sounds like you had an initial wedge. And I think to grow the business, you've, you know, once you got in, you started introducing a broader and broader offering. So tell us about how that and that like it. It, it makes perfect sense.
Nathan Christensen: Right?
Alex: It's so hard to get in market. And once you get in, you, you probably have yourself now earned the trust of these benefit advisors and so you could probably serve more and more of their needs. how did you think about that expansion?
Nathan Christensen: Yeah, that's exactly right. We, you, we started working with some of the smallest, most localized insurance brokers in the country. Folks that as you said, had a roster of, great clients, local clients, they were really focused with them. And so we started working with those partners initially because we knew that they were very intimate with their customers and they could help us learn about the needs of the small businesses and how to articulate the value of our product to them. And once we started building, you know, once we started to understand the insurance broker mindset and, and the role they played through these small localized insurance brokers, then we started approaching the larger brokers,
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Nathan Christensen: the regional and then the national brokers, about partnerships. And we could point to the success that we had had with the smaller brokers and show that the model worked and we could use the learnings from, you know, those partnerships to create a playbook for the larger ones. But it's, it is a, it's a trust and relationship business like so many businesses. And so, you know, we had to establish really good relationships and a good track record and a lot of integrity with, you know, the, the brokers we were working with. And then, you know, brokers help each other. They, they tell each other, hey, I'm working with this company. You should too. And before you know it, you become kind of the, the industry standard and that's a good place to be.
Alex: Well, and yeah, I think the, you guys had a legendary success story. I think the private equity firm that backed you is very positive about, what happened at the outcome. And they brought you on, as an advisor as well.
Nathan Christensen: yeah, that's right. It's a great partnership.
Alex: How, now that you're advising other CEOs and you know, you co founded, another company, will come back to that later. How do you look at your leadership journey back then and you know, what do you see what worked and what you would want to keep on doing, or where would you try something different?
Nathan Christensen: Yeah, the. The biggest, the biggest leadership lesson that I learned along the way, which I, as I now partner with other CEOs, I try to help them learn faster than I learned, is that the role of the CEO is not sort of the chief doer or the chief know it all. The role of the CEO is more like, you know, the orchestra conductor that is making sure that everybody understands what. What's the musical piece that we're playing? What does beautiful music sound like and look like? is bringing in different parts of the team or different parts of the orchestra when it's time for them to show up a little bit bigger, move a little faster, but is actually relatively silent. You know, you don't see conductors, although they can be very emphatic in their gestures, they're not actually making the noise. They're letting their team make the music. And for the first, I would say, five years of building Mineral, I thought that I needed to be, making the decisions, all the decisions. I thought, you know, my instinct needed to be the best instinct. I thought that I needed to be doing, a lot of the work myself. And I, was running myself ragged. But more importantly, I was capitating the team. I was constraining the team. The team in the company could never get better than I was because I was.
Alex: Because you were leading from the front. You're kind of the.
Nathan Christensen: I was leading on the front.
Alex: Those best intentions. You're kind of like resetting.
Nathan Christensen: right. And all roads led through me.
Alex: Yeah.
Nathan Christensen: And, then, I had a mentor at the time, Will Moore, who observed this one day and sort of woke me up to the fact that, that's not actually the role of the CEO, at least not a CEO who wants to scale. And he gave me a quote, I think it was by Eleanor, Roosevelt, that, how's it go? Good leaders create. Good leaders, create confidence in the leader. But great leaders create confidence in the people. Meaning, like, a good leader makes everybody feel like, okay, great, I'm a good leader. You should follow me. But a great leader, right, really empowers people to feel empowered and confident in themselves and in each other. And that, really changed the way that I led. And I realized that, as I mentioned before, my role was to create the conditions for success, to make sure we had the right people playing the right instruments at the right time, and that everybody knew what music we were supposed to be playing. And then just to let Them do their thing. And I realized that the more I spoke, the worse we did, the less I spoke, the better we did. The longer my emails were, the worse, the shorter, the better. And it really changed my leadership style. And, I see a lot of CEOs today, particularly in this moment where it's, you know, I would say, relatively challenging and sort of anxiety inducing time with AI and you know, turbulence and geopolitics, all kinds of things. I see a lot of CEOs running to put out fires and sort of doing the same thing that I did of, sort of capitating their company. And so one thing I really worked on myself on and now work with others on is how to let go of that and, think about how do you create the conditions for success rather than be the one who is, you know, kind of the sole party driving success.
Alex: It's funny, you reminded me of this, alleged story about, I think a mother of Winston Churchill who said one day she spoke to two, British Prime Ministers, One was
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Alex: Gladstone and the other was Disraeli. And he said, after I spoke with Gladstone, I thought he was the cleverest man in all of Britain. And then she spoke to Disraeli and said, after I spoke to Disraeli, I, I thought I was the cleverest woman in all of Britain. And I think that I like that. It's sort of what you've said is really a bit like that, right? Like you, you speak to somebody and it's kind of are they inspiring you or are they telling you, no, no, you're wrong. This is how, this is the right way or, you know, like the, there's, there's some balance of, direction right, in your vision and you still need to impart that, but the cleverer you are at eliciting that, so it comes like it's somebody else's idea. The Tao Te Ching style. Like when the great leader leads, nobody knows they're leading. it's sort of what I'm hearing, is the big takeaway for you and your leadership process, right?
Nathan Christensen: And the people who build companies, they run to ownership. We love ownership, right? We love to take monkeys off of other people's backs, put them on our own back and charge forward. And so for me anyway, it was a big adjustment to think, that that wasn't my job anymore. my job was.
Alex: Maybe it was your job earlier. It was your job maybe, like when you were starting out in your career, right? But then, yes, yeah, no, I
Nathan Christensen: think there's a time and place for it. But then as a, as an organization begins to scale, it goes from a strength of the organization to a liability.
Alex: Well, one of the things I really admire about Mineral HR and what you guys have done is that you've effectively turned, these benefit advisors and payroll vendors into your ecosystem, almost an extended part of your team. And when we chatted, you were really thoughtful about some of the things that you were doing in terms of making their lives easier, reducing friction for them. You just shared your story about really getting intimate with them, because they were intimate with their customers. But tell us a little bit more about that because I think increasingly we live in the world where if everybody can do something, something or other was AI. Trust and relationships are important. And one of the reasons we love similar customers that relate to and want to be kind of listed along Mineral, Mineral at some point. and the list is that we want to work through trusted partners because I think there's nothing that we could run all sorts of marketing and spend all sorts of money on that. And even, you know, yes, we can build amazing products, but to get it to market, it still will. The trust will matter more in the AI era, and the human relationships will only matter, in some markets because everything else could be commoditized. So in that universe, everybody, I think needs to be, amazing at working through whoever those trusted partners are. You were, you were an example of that success story. We'd love to hear some of the stories of what you were doing, what you've done. What are you advising others now to do in, you know, from those lessons.
Nathan Christensen: So a couple thoughts, Alex. there are, Thematically I think there are two key ingredients or two, two key things to be thinking about for folks that want to build really good partnerships in business and potentially build a go to market engine, that works through partners. the first is what you described. Trust. When we at Mineral signed a, ah, partnership agreement with an insurance broker, a Payroll company, a P.E.O. company. to us that was a sacred bond because they are handing over their clients to us. And we don't want to do anything to jeopardize that relationship. In fact, we want to make that partner look so good to their clients by delivering great products and services to their clients. And we took that very seriously. We talked about it as trust and as kind of a sacred promise. we felt very honored that our partners would send their customers to us. And we, felt a lot of Responsibility. Deliver on that. So that. That's the first thing. And so let's, let's.
Alex: Let's pause on this because I felt when you use the word sacred, I felt. I felt it. It's a strong word, and it's not a word that is commonly used in business, and I love it. And I think this resonates with our philosophy. I don't think we've used that word the same way. But tell us more. And how do you convey that? Obviously, it's through behaviors,
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Alex: but also, do you have to pick the right team members who really also believe in that? Is it some values testing that you're doing? How do you deliver on set? Secret. Right? Like that's a big delivery. outside of spiritual. Spiritual world.
Nathan Christensen: Yeah. Yeah. The first thing is when. When we were, talking to a new potential partner, we would say it explicitly that, we take very seriously the trust that our partners put in us and that we will deliver on that and that they have our. Our commitment and our promise that we will do that. And then, of course, you know, that's talk. You need to. You need to actually deliver on it. And you can hire. You can hire great account managers or customer support people. I mean, you, you can do that. But I think that the more effective thing is to actually make it cultural within your business. and that starts with, what are your core values? And do your core values communicate that sort of intent? And we had a core value, that was, we are in this together. And very specifically, it meant that we believe that we have this sacred bond with our partners, and we are in this together and delivering an exceptional experience to their customers. And we never want to think about ourselves in a silo. We always want to think about the, you know, I would say the consequences, of whatever we decide to do in terms of its impact on our partners. And so we, that was one of our four core values. and, you know, they didn't just live on a, T shirt or on the wall. We talked about these core values. We gave awards for these core values. And so we really, made it a living and breathing part of our DNA as a company. And what that means is then, yeah, you could hire the best account manager in the world, and they're going to deliver a great experience to the customer. But you can't always find the best account manager in the world. You can't always afford the best account manager in the world. But if you make it cultural, you can hire people that maybe don't have that kind of experience or track record yet and bringing them into your organization. And very quickly they will be performing like, you know, an, a performer. so, you know, that's. And then of course we would be measuring the results of our, of our actions. So we'd be looking at client satisfaction, we'd be looking at customer NPS scores, we'd be looking at anecdotally the you know, sort of the testimonials that they would give, both good and bad. And we had a, we had a saying in our company that we needed to have stakeholder balance within our business. We needed to have happy customers, which created happy employees, which created happy shareholders. And every, town hall. We started with our customer metrics to reinforce this idea that we have to deliver for our partners in making sure that their, their clients are, you know, having a good experience.
Alex: Well, thank you so much for double clicking on that. I think that's a, that's a beautiful framework. and you know, combining the metrics around that the, and the value sounds like, ah, the right balance. And it feels also when we spoke, you know, in the past and today, I just always feel that this is authentic to you as a leader as well. Like you're someone that I, I would place a trust in and that I, I do wonder how much of that must come also from somebody who's a missionary, who really genuinely does care about the customers and partners versus like, you know, historically there's this sort of notion between missionary and mercenary companies. Right. And like, there's a lot of people that are opportunistic. Right? Hey, we could make a lot of money in AI now. It's the thing, what should I be building in AI right now? And there's that mindset. It's a little bit more transactional and not as long term. And then I think what you're describing that just says, hey, we're building for the long haul. We care about secondary, and tertiary outcomes or whatever we're doing, and the returns speak for themselves. It sounds like you had a lot of word of mouth and just at some point as we're discussing the market tipped right. And you became the de facto trusted partner. so tell me a little bit about your own, you know, and we'll come back to more ideas on partnerships. But like, you know, if you were to, to speak about yourself a little bit in your, your personal leadership style, what's your take on how, how that reflected in the building that type of business that you built?
Nathan Christensen: well, I think that businesses are often take on the personality of the senior leaders in the company and specifically founder, CEO. And that's for better and that's for worse. in some ways, but you have to be cognizant of that. And
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Nathan Christensen: you know, one of the. I like to say that, for our Strengths. The first 90% of our strengths are really what make us and the organizations that we're part of successful. The last 10% are where we might have blind spots or liabilities. so I tend to be a, you know, a relatively analytical, thoughtful person. And you know, the first 90% of that is great because, you know, generally that translates into good decision making. It translates into a lot of alignment within the team. but the last 10% being that it can become overly analytical and you can get slowed down by wanting to really understand every aspect or understand how it's going to affect every person or every stakeholder, every customer. And what I needed to do very intentionally was go out and find folks to put on my leadership team who would offset that, you know, that attribute of mine and would be more action oriented. And so I tried to surround myself with people who, yes, they wanted to make thoughtful decisions, but also they felt, you know, that sense of urgency and then, you know, we could meet in the middle where I would really want to make, you know, very strategic and thoughtful plans and decisions. And they understood the urgency of then translating that into action. And you know, it was never quite perfect. But that combination worked well for us in, you know, is a way that we had to evolve the company over time, you know, from sort of my personality to I think a, maybe a better mix.
Alex: Nathan, when I was introducing you, I didn't, I didn't do proper justice. You were one of the few legal eagles who has a JD and then went on to be an entrepreneur and a CEO generally. That works maybe in some industries, but it's not the most common path precisely because of what you described. It sort of there's, you know, real focus on, you know, risk down, downsizing, the risk, thinking through everything, not rushing details. Right, details. and I, I see this like one of m. My, my partners in building relate to is is a jd and we're just very wired differently. And at first it was annoying a little bit and we, I could see that it clashed. And then as, as you grow, you just realize, wow, this is beautiful. Like we could compliment each other and, and, and you just need to work, work around these capabilities and you're serving A compliance heavy. Right. sector just like us. So I think this is actually essential to find a way to balance vitality with this prudence that you were describing.
Nathan Christensen: That's a very good way to put it. Yes. And, as a lawyer, I am afflicted with, being overly analytical sometimes.
Alex: We get good answers from you. So let's, let's come back to the. So this is sort of one direction that we dove in and how to be great partners, or build. Build partners as your,
Nathan Christensen: There's a second one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I, I like to talk about fuel and friction. And that's. That's not necessarily a framework that, I created. I don't know. I heard it, I'm sure somewhere along the way. But, my version of fuel and friction is that, there are two ways to change behavior. One way, and you can think about this in terms of parenting, or you can think about this in terms of business or, you know, politics or anything. One way to change behavior is to, throw more fuel, on the fire. And in a business sense, you can think about that as, more aggressive, louder marketing. You can think about that as incentives. You know, we're going to give you six months free if you sign up tomorrow. You can think about it as, you know, all kinds of things that you're just kind of amping up the, the pressure to act. Okay, that's. That's one way to change behavior. And it can be very effective. and I would say, like, for, for a while, that is the. That is the mode that we understood at Mineral. Let's get bigger incentives. Let's have a louder, bigger message, all of that. And that will translate into partners coming on board and then their, their clients coming on board. but along the way, I discovered, an. Actually a more effective way to change behavior. Fuel is always needed. But then there's, removing friction. And, I'll tell you a story that has nothing to do with business, but illustrates the power of removing friction very well. for a period of time, the. The US Military had a really big challenge, recruiting people. And when they looked at the recruiting pipeline, they found that actually they were doing very well at the, at the top of the funnel. They were getting a lot of people raising their hand saying, yeah, I want to be part of this. but then along the way, the recruits fell off and the number of, people who enlisted were below targets. And so they tried to
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Nathan Christensen: add more fuel. Right? They added more incentives to sign up Maybe it was signing bonuses, I don't know all the mechanics that they tried. And it had some impact, but not a lot of impact. And then they dug deeper and they found where they really lost the most number of recruits was at a very specific and very sensitive moment. It was the moment where the recruit needed to tell their parents that they were going to enlist in the military and that the recruits felt very nervous about how to have this conversation, in, in a productive way with their parents. Because obviously serving in the military is a sacrifice. And, And so what did the military do? the military trained people to be facilitators of conversations between parents and children about this issue. And so if a recruit was headed towards a conversation with the parent and expressing concern, the military could offer somebody who could facilitate that conversation in a really healthy way and remove that friction from the recruit's mind of, oh, you know, I'm not going to invest because. Or, I'm not going to enlist because I'm worried about this conversation. Okay, let's take that friction out.
Alex: Enlisting officer would go and join the recruit and the parents or. Right.
Nathan Christensen: Or, you know, yeah, it could be tips, it could be participating, it could be virtual. but that they, they, they found the friction and they removed it. Well, and, so I don't want to compare business to military. These are very. Two very different things. But that same principle of identifying, really understanding sort of the mindset of the people at play and where the friction points are and figuring out creative ways to remove it. I mean, you can also, like, I don't know when, when's the last time you bought a refrigerator or maybe a mattress?
Alex: so I'll think mattress probably a couple of years ago, IKEA type of thing, which is a good example. Probably a friction. It's a little bit of friction, in terms of you can never leave ikea,
Nathan Christensen: right. Ikea very, strategically create friction. Well, the mattress industry, realized that, one of the big reasons why people didn't really replace their mattresses is because it was such a hassle to figure out what to do with your old mattress. So then they started the program of, we will take your old mattress away. Same with refrigerator, things like that. so these friction points are really important. And what. And you, you, you kind of, alluded to this earlier, but what we found in building partner programs is once we established trust, that was, that was great. We had the sacred bond, right, with our partners. but then to really get the flywheel going, we had to deeply understand the experience of our partners and look for any source of friction between our business model or our team and their business model or their team or their processes, their workflow, technology, and find those points of friction and remove them. So whether that was technology integrations, workflow integrations, just ways of communicating with them, invoicing, you know, pricing structures, all of that we had to really dial in so that there was no friction. And that ended up being actually more effective than like all the promotional campaigns that we were doing.
Alex: And, you still needed to get to them.
Nathan Christensen: Them at first for sure.
Alex: It doesn't remove the need to get to market.
Nathan Christensen: Right.
Alex: But then once you get there, they're more successful. And then this is one of those industries where word of mouth matters tremendously, as you pointed out. Right. And, and people talk to each other. They're not always competing, but at the same time, there's a commodityization pressure. So you want to pay attention to what the competitors are doing. So there, so there's this weird thing that if you do well, eventually that word will spread. Is that, a good way of thinking about this?
Nathan Christensen: Yeah. The first year I went to the industry, conferences, I was always very dejected. Nobody would really talk to me. I was sort of this outsider, this unknown, untrusted entity. The second year I showed up, you all thought, oh, okay, well, this, this person's invested in our ecosystem here. We'll learn a little more. And I got a few people to bite and, you know, partner. Then the third year I showed up, now they're referring other people and, you know, it just became, you know, kind of an exponential curve. But, but just like you're saying, you know, you, you have to, you have to build towards that. It doesn't happen overnight, so you really needed to.
Alex: It. It's a cumulative investment is kind of what I'm hearing. That you, you. Right to you. You. You don't, you don't. You shouldn't expect immediate results, but over time, the returns start, you know, picking up because the, the trust and you know, this is, let's say, not like the industry that everybody jumps up to try new things, but eventually there is a pressure to stick to the standard. So if you become that standard.
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Alex: Right. Yeah, it's worth, it's worth the wait.
Nathan Christensen: Insurance brokers, like a lot of people, they, they see a lot of, vendors come in and out. Right. Every year there's, there's some new shiny object, and, then it might be gone the next year. And to your Point, you know, it also might be very, opportunistic. They're sort of coming in, seeing what they can grab and then taking off. And you know, in our experience, what really made the difference was showing our commitment over a period of time. So we weren't sort of that shiny object that came in one year and then disappeared. but we were there year after year. We were, we were adding what we hoped was thought leadership and new insight, to the industry and you know, not just trying to kind of milk it for sales.
Alex: And Mason, kind of help, help me understand because you know, the, the product, the underlying product that you, you sold, you could have gone, you know, now that it's matured, you could have gone back to going direct or you could have taken like the LMS that you've built to do compliance. Right. You could have taken that somewhere else. what, what kept you focused is it just that you thought, hey, we can't get distracted, you know, because I'm sure you felt the pressure to find, you know, fast growth pockets. Right. And there are probably years that are always not as fast. And so the shiny object for you must have been there as well. Guide me a little bit on how, how you thought about it. What would you do differently? What would you say worked really well, as you kind of analyzed, because a lot of CEOs probably wearing was equity investors in the back are feeling different pressure points. Right. Go expand. Try something that's AI is changing everything. And so you need to quit what you're doing and try these 10 other things and come back when they're going to be hypergrowth. Otherwise you're wasting, wasting our resources. Right. So there's that talk and then there's you kind of sticking to, to a market for many years.
Nathan Christensen: Yeah, I think that this is really important and you know, it's something that overall I think we did quite well. But not always. There are certainly moments where we, we fell short and I made mistakes. But focus is super, super important. That doesn't mean that you keep trying something that's not working and it doesn't mean that you don't experiment with ways of doing things differently. But ah, I would much rather try to do a few things and do them really well than do a lot of things and you know, hope, you know, kind of throw things, at the wall and see what sticks. And we tried that, we, we tried, you know, lots of different experiments and just found that when we, when we sort of stuck to our, stuck to our guns, experimented a little bit, but in very targeted ways. We made a lot more progress. But you know, on the partner, on the go to market front, when we built this partner centric go to market model, our partner DNA became our DNA and so we became a partner centric company. And you want to, you want to understand and respect the DNA of your business and leverage the strengths that it gives you. And if at some point you need to change your DNA or expand your DNA, that that's fine. But I realized that what we knew how to do better than anybody else was partner with you know, these other service providers to deliver our product through and with them. And now as the, as companies scale they can do more, right? There are more resources and and your company builds this kind of muscle to execute so that you can go off and try new things. But we tried to be very intentional about when to pick those moments where we felt like okay great, the core DNA of our business is running really well. Let's go out and try something new and different. Generally that was along the product side rather than the go to market side. but for us focus was definitely a core part of our success.
Alex: Well, what a beautiful insight Nathan. as we're wrapping up I'd like to know two things. How can people find you and follow you and learn more from you? And two, anything that some of your latest projects, you've co founded an AI coaching business. Tell us more so that we could keep getting some Nathan nuggets after the show.
Nathan Christensen: well people can find me on LinkedIn. I haven't been as active there as I used to be but I'm planning to come back on some thought, thought leadership pieces in the near future. I'm also on X, although there too once I stepped out of the CEO role I sort of took a breath and I haven't been posting as much. But I'm there if anybody wants to reach out, has questions, wants to talk about these ideas further, would love to do it. And yeah I serve on as you said, board for private equity backed businesses
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Nathan Christensen: now. But I also launched a new startup in Portland with some other co founders. it's called Huckleberry and it's based on a problem that I observed and that my co founders observed. being in the HR tech world for a long time and hearing the stories of the executives in those businesses and particularly the HR leaders, I saw a lot of concern about things around employee turnover Geez, we have a turnover problem or internal professional development of geez. Our employees are not growing at the pace we need to be able to promote them and fill the gaps as our company grows. Or, even attendance and absenteeism of employees not being as engaged or, showing up the way that they need to do. I hear kind of all of these problems bubbling within businesses, and what I came to believe is, although there are a lot of different causes for those issues, there is one cause that I think threads through all of them, and that is that in most organizations, there's a coaching gap. There are employees who are well intentioned and want to work hard. but growth requires mentorship and coaching and learning and training. And in a lot of businesses, there are at the time and resources to do that. Maybe some of the executives have an executive coach. That's great. But for a lot of the other employees, they're sort of left to their own devices. And, so we launched Huckleberry as an AI native company to provide an executive coach for everybody. And, that's what we're doing.
Alex: So if you want to get a little bit of brain dump from Nathan through Huckleberry.
Nathan Christensen: That's right.
Alex: You know where to continue this conversation. Nathan, thank you so much for joining us. it's been a lot of fun to connect and share your nuggets with the world.
Nathan Christensen: Oh, it's a pleasure, Alex. Great to see you.
Alex: All right.