#TDSU Episode 203:

⏱️ Timestamps:

00:00:00 - Intro

00:02:16 - Entrepreneurship is a mindset

00:03:37 - Ownership and driving value

00:05:06 - Redefining what it means to be an entrepreneur

00:07:42 - The thrill (or fear) of unpredictability

00:07:56 - Customer success and personal ownership

00:10:14 - Delivering value and owning the outcome

00:11:14 - A final challenge

📺 Lifetime Value: Your Destination for GTM content

Website: https://www.lifetimevaluemedia.com

🤝 Connect with the hosts:

Dillon's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dillonryoung

JP's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeanpierrefrost/

Rob's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rob-zambito/

👋 Connect with Ilai Szpiezak:

Ilai's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ilaiszp/

[Ilai] (0:00 - 0:15)

Hopefully the best intra or entrepreneur doesn't really matter if it's inside a company in your own company. And that's, that's where the idea came from. I was speaking with my young brother and sister today.

They are 11 and 15, by the way. And I'm like, we need more entrepreneurs, you know, and you are the next.

[Dillon] (0:25 - 0:36)

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, JP with us. JP, do you want to say hi?

[JP] (0:36 - 0:37)

Hey, how are you?

[Dillon] (0:38 - 0:57)

And we've got Rob with us. Rob, can you say hi, please? How's it going?

And we have Ilai with us. Ilai, can you say hi, please? Hey, everybody.

How are you? Oh, my gosh. Too much energy.

I'm feeling down today, guys. I can't compete.

[JP] (0:57 - 0:58)

Ilai's here to pick you up.

[Dillon] (0:58 - 0:59)

Okay. All right.

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

I'll let him.

[Dillon] (1:00 - 1:09)

I'll let him. And I am your host. My name is Dillon Young.

Ilai, thank you so much for being here and bringing the heat. Can you introduce yourself, please?

[Ilai] (1:09 - 1:44)

Sure. I'll do my best. So maybe the heat comes because I'm from Argentina originally.

So I was born in Argentina. I'm in London, though, now, which is great and it's rainy. So I feel you completely today.

I'm 14 years here and I'm still complaining. So anyway, I'm originally from Argentina, been a founder most of my life before the pandemic. I wasn't in tech and I ended up being in tech because I ran out of work because I was an event manager and producer and the pandemic killed the industry.

And I moved into tech and now I'm a founder building a CX tool called Dolphin AI.

[Dillon] (1:44 - 1:49)

That's my focus. Event industry. I see it.

I see it in the way you carry yourself.

[Rob] (1:50 - 1:54)

All black, too. That's like on brand, right? He knows.

[Ilai] (1:55 - 1:57)

You too. You got the memo before.

[Dillon] (1:59 - 2:01)

Only one of us didn't.

[Ilai] (2:01 - 2:02)

Yes, exactly.

[Dillon] (2:04 - 2:16)

Ilai, you know what we do here? We ask one simple question of every single guest, and that is, what is on your mind when it comes to customer success or customer experience? Why don't you tell us what that is for you?

[Ilai] (2:16 - 2:30)

Yeah, connects to this, but actually is more about life and we should be doing more. We need more entrepreneurs. That is what is in my mind today.

And I know exactly why. But, you know, I think it's a really big topic. We need more entrepreneurs.

[Dillon] (2:31 - 2:38)

When you were in the event space, were you running your own business then too? Yes. Yeah.

It was my company. So you've always had this, this vibe.

[Ilai] (2:38 - 3:35)

Weird. This weirdness. Yeah.

This weirdness of being a founder. So tell us why. Why do you think that's key?

It's more about the mindset of being an entrepreneur rather than having to be an entrepreneur and building your own stuff. I believe that not everybody wants to be their own boss, but everybody is their own boss somehow because we are, whether working for someone or working for yourself, you're always working for someone else in the end and the customer. I generally and passionately believe about that.

Someone is paying the salary, whether it's your salary or someone else's salary, doesn't matter. It's about the customer. And that does connect a lot with customer success.

Because we are working or making someone else successful. And the biggest thing I believe about entrepreneurs is about building that mindset of getting it done. So getting that, you know, getting, getting that.

[Dillon] (3:35 - 3:36)

Okay.

[Ilai] (3:37 - 3:42)

Were you afraid to swear? JP got me, so it's okay.

[Dillon] (3:42 - 4:14)

I love this. I think it comes back to customer success, but it's not, it's just being aware of how to drive value, right? Like, I think that comes in in every single part of our life.

And we try to say that it's one job or another. And sometimes it's, well, everybody's in sales. Well, I would say everybody's driving value and you're doing it in every aspect of your life.

I love that idea. And I think the entrepreneur side of it, for me, I would say the way I interpret it is you're in control of that.

[Ilai] (4:14 - 4:59)

Yeah. You're never, you're never in control. I would say you're trying to be in control.

I think, and I think the best founders in the world put control in the most unexpected situations. Like you see that all the time, like Airbnb was going to die in the pandemic also, not just me in events. Airbnb almost dies, you know, in that, in that time, they, they actually a year and a half after.

So you actually see that the worst places in life make you hopefully the best intra or entrepreneur. It doesn't really matter if it's inside a company in your own company. And that's, that's where the idea came from.

I was speaking with my young brother and sister today. They are 11 and 15, by the way. And I'm like, we need more entrepreneurs, you know, and you are the next.

Go, go, go and sell.

[Dillon] (5:02 - 5:05)

Well, Rob, as a business owner, how do you feel about this?

[Rob] (5:06 - 6:19)

I feel great about this. I will say it's not for everyone, but, but I will say for those that it's for, there's different categories too of entrepreneurship. I made the mistake in my past.

I rewind to when I was like 22 or whatever, and I was graduating college. I had only one idea of what an entrepreneur was. I would look at venture-backed startups and I would say, well, that's an entrepreneur.

Right. And I came to realize that I started to even try to build my first business with that notion in mind. And next thing, you know, I was like waiting on this investor to come through.

I had a friend who was doing my marketing and branding work. I was waiting on him to come through. And it wasn't until I met my then to be business partner who said, kid, there is no investor.

That's you. There's no marketer. That's you.

This is on you. Like get the product to the market. Stop over-complicating things.

There's, you have your product, your customer has money. You just exchange those things and you get it to market. Boom.

You're an entrepreneur. And, and it wasn't until that moment that I realized there was this whole other different category of entrepreneur where, you know, the local guy who owns a diner or the local woman who owns a, you know, whatever hair salon, but we sound too gendered here. Sorry.

Do we ever edit that? The other way around, the other way around.

[Dillon] (6:20 - 6:26)

The salon, the woman owns the diner. Now you got women cooking. I think you're screwed, dude.

[Ilai] (6:27 - 6:29)

The business, the business, whatever.

[Rob] (6:31 - 7:40)

The local, you know, business owner down the street, the main street business owner, which actually makes up like a large portion of jobs in the world is just as much of an entrepreneur. And it's kind of cool. I've seen the perspective around entrepreneurship change as the venture economy has changed over the last couple of years.

There's a lot more startup founders who are recognizing that like doing the unsexy is becoming sexy again, where they'll, they're willing to like start as a services business and then eventually roll into a SaaS business, which is interesting. As opposed to like, that was sacrilege three years ago. It was like, no, you have to have a pure SaaS play.

And like I said, it's just not for everyone. There's pros and cons, right? Pros are like, if I look at my line of work, there's high variety, high autonomy.

It's very liberating, but like, it is terrifying at times to look at six months from now and say like, look, I don't know if my income is going to swing 50% in one direction or 50% in the other direction. Or maybe in a case like Ilai's, like, you know, that might be a 10 year time horizon that you're looking at where you're like, this could have a massive venture sized outcome, or this could have, this could be zero. It could be zero.

[Dillon] (7:41 - 7:42)

So it's good.

[Ilai] (7:42 - 7:45)

But that is exciting, at least for me, you know, in my point of view.

[Dillon] (7:45 - 7:55)

Yeah. Well, but I think that goes back to Rob's point of like, certain people find that exciting. Others find that cripplingly scary.

JP, go ahead.

[JP] (7:56 - 10:06)

Yeah. I'm going to focus more into where I think was at least part of what you were saying, Ilai, was around like, it's really about like ownership, right? Like I'm going to get away from like the owning of a business per se, but like we bring a value, right?

So in customer success, if you're understanding like what truly makes your customer successful, right? I think to understand what makes them successful, we have to understand the value that we are actually bringing to them, right? Like if we take the mindset that like, we just work for said company, like we are marionettes in a way, you know, we are sort of blind to really like the value that we're providing.

So if you were to sit down and somebody was to say, Hey, you know, you're the CEO of JP industries. Like, let me see your opinion now. Like what kind of, what kind of value are you providing?

And I think that in customer success, we hear about, you know, CSMs being tied to revenue and some people balk at this, some people accept this, but ultimately I think that it's just a motion of something like ownership. It's just like, you know, take ownership of understanding the value that you bring and maybe stop being so, we also talk about being proactive in customer success and not so reactive. And I think that taking ownership, being able to drive accounts is something that we should be doing really with our own careers.

So that no matter where we go, CS is always a little bit different or a lot different depending where you go. But I think if, if I understand, Hey, JP brings like this sort of set of values in the same way that a product may have a brand and it understands its value proposition. I think understanding my value proposition and what I have to offer and being able to articulate that is a form of entrepreneurship, right?

So that when I come and I come to work for a company, they know that there's like, wow, this guy can articulate it. He knows what value is going to provide and we feel good about our partnership. He's going to partner with us.

He's not just going to work for us. And I think that that's a difference in mindset.

[Dillon] (10:07 - 10:14)

Ilai, we have one minute left. What are your takeaways, your advice, whatever you, what do you want to leave the audience with?

[Ilai] (10:14 - 11:14)

Well, from this conversation, I think the biggest word that we mentioned, if we would take a word cloud is value. It's about delivering value for someone. So we need to understand the who is that one, especially in customer success, what is value for them?

What does success look like for that person? Like JP was talking before. And I think one thing that I want to go out with is not just value, but it's like that outcome and entrepreneurship or intrapreneurship or whatever we will call that person.

We are owners of the outcome that we deliver for someone that delivers value. It's I think kind of like the way I see this domain effect in the end. So hopefully that also delivers an internal value, higher expansion, we retain them, we mitigate churn, et cetera.

But it's about delivering that value and owning it. I completely agree. I love that.

And whether they are listeners that will be entrepreneurs or intrapreneurs, own it and go and take on the world.

[Dillon] (11:14 - 11:21)

Ilai, I love it. Come back and tell us about Dolphin AI next time. But for now, we have to say goodbye.

[Ilai] (11:21 - 11:23)

Thank you so much. Have a good one.

[VO] (11:29 - 11:59)

You've been listening to The Daily Standup by Lifetime Value. Please note that the views expressed in these conversations are attributed only to those individuals on this recording and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of their respective employers. For all inquiries, please reach out via email to Dillon at lifetimevaluemedia.com.

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