Always Hire The Best People

Always Hire The Best People

Tim Fitzpatrick
Welcome to the Rialto Marketing podcast. Today's episode is a revenue acceleration series interview where we talk to seven figure B2B professional service firm owners that are actively trying to grow their business and get to the next level. We talk about the good, the bad and the ugly so that you can learn from their experience. Hi, I am Tim Fitzpatrick with Rialto Marketing, where we believe you must remove your revenue roadblocks to accelerate growth and marketing should not be difficult. Thank you so much for taking the time to tune in. I am super excited to have Bryon Beilman with me from iuvo Technologies. Bryon, welcome and thanks so much for being here.

Bryon Beilman
No pleasure to be here. I've been looking forward to this. Looking forward to this.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Me too. You guys have a lot of experience. I think a lot of great things to share that people can learn from. Before we dig into that, I want to ask you a few rapid fire questions to just kick things off. Are you ready to jump in with both feet?

Bryon Beilman
Let's go. Let's go.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Okay. So very quickly, what do you do and how long have you been doing it?

Bryon Beilman
I'm the CEO and co founder of iuvo, and we're an IT consulting and managed services company based in Boston. I've been in the industry for over 30 years and iuvo is a 16 year old company.

Tim Fitzpatrick
You're doing something right, man. Sixteen years.

Bryon Beilman
I made it past the infant mortality phase, at least.

Tim Fitzpatrick
What's the most important lesson you've learned in those 16 years?

Bryon Beilman
It always goes down to hiring the best people. And I think a lot of people say that, but you also have to build a recruiting and a hiring process around that. So I think tried and true, it's like having great people hire people that are better than you.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. It's so interesting how... I totally agree with you. You've got to have a system. Honestly, it is not that difficult to stand out from a hiring standpoint because so many people just do it the same as everybody else. Having a system that you can work makes a huge difference. I also think a lot of people neglect the marketing side of it. And marketing is super important when it comes to recruiting people. Not just how you market your business, but how you market to the team members that you intend to attract.

Bryon Beilman
I would tend to agree. I think marketing is a sales, it's culture is a hiring. You have to market your culture, otherwise, they don't know what they're getting into. And if you're honest about your culture and you can market it and then people come there, it's a big win.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Well, come on. In reality, what are people doing when they see a job posting? They're going to your website, right?

Bryon Beilman
They're going to social, they're going to everything they can learn about you, find out.

Tim Fitzpatrick
And if they're not impressed with what you're doing, how you're portrayed, you've lost the battle before it's even started. Sixteen years, you've seen some ups, you've seen some downs. Is there any mantra or some motivational thing that you say to yourself, share with your team to push through those times where you're running into challenges or roadblocks?

Bryon Beilman
Yeah, I think probably the biggest thing I could think of on that is really to believe in yourself. I think if you... Maybe as an entrepreneur, you're going to see things you've never seen before. Your team may see things you've never ve never seen before. And so I believe in myself. I know my co founder, Jeff, believes in himself. And then we reinforce to our team, like, we hired you for a reason because you're better than us and we think things are going to be fine. We just got to go forth. I think when times get tough, I think one of the biggest challenges there... I mean, yes for the mantra, which is believing yourself, but I think if you can focus on the thing ahead of you, I think people lose focus sometimes because they go like, Well, this is easy and this is the best thing. So you're like, People don't go towards focus on the right thing, and I think it'd be fine. But I think it's really just believing that you're going to figure it out.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. Well, even the best of us get imposter syndrome or have a monkey on our back at some point in the journey. So if we can just, Hey, believe in yourself, and I have what it takes to figure this out.

Bryon Beilman
Yeah. They both can live simultaneously. You can have imposter syndrome and say, Well, I believe what we're doing. I believe everything you've done. But yeah, half the time I'm like, I don't know if I deserve to be here. I keep waiting.

Hire the Best People

Tim Fitzpatrick
One of the things that we talked about in the pre interview, Bryon, was one of the biggest drivers of your growth. You touched on this a little bit where you just have a huge focus on hiring the best people, and you tend to lean towards very senior level people. Obviously, that is an expensive investment. The best people, senior people are not cheap. Why did you choose to do that? And how has it helped grow the business?

Bryon Beilman
Yeah, it does relate to what I said earlier about good people hiring you. But I think if you listen to some of the business leaders, and this wasn't a new media, this is looking back a little bit like Jim Collins was the business leader. He's like, Hire the right people and get those right people on the bus. Or Steve Jobs talked about hiring A players and they'll run circle around B and C. We found those to be very true. When we started the company 16 years ago, it's probably a little bit of impatience, a little bit of need. When we first started, the primary customers we had were semiconductor companies. They produce semiconductors and they had very complex needs with their software and their whole IT stuff. Very complex. An average person or a person without very high level of skills is beyond them. So we had to hire very senior people just to get that, to serve those customers. And then as you start growing, you say, Well, you touched on it, good people are expensive. So we tried a few times to hire less skilled people, and we failed. Our customers noticed that as well. So when you say, Well, we have a high value, you're trying to create a value of a brand and you say, We're the best. And then they say, Well, what about this person over here that's not so good? But regardless of this, not always skill level, it's typically a growth mindset. We found some really people who don't have a lot of experience, but they learn at an incredible pace. And so I think that translates to more senior people. But I'd say that because you can... Even the most senior people can learn from a less skilled member who has a very strong skill in X, Y, Z. So collectively, if you're collaborating well and you're working together well, I think that has given us the most success at our customers. And that right there for growth, as you said, is the less churn you have, you build on your customers and you don't have to replace them. So it helps focus on new versus trying to retain the old because you have good quality people. That is the thing that really has helped.

Tim Fitzpatrick
It's expensive to turn because it's really expensive to find new business at times. So you're far better off doing what you can to keep the clients that you have than looking for new business. It's also interesting, too. This was a trial and error thing. It's not like you went into this going, This is our strategy and we have to execute on it. It was a demand thing. It's like, Hey, the clients that we're working with, we have to have senior level people. Then there was some trial and error where you're like, Do we really need these people? Let's test this. You tried it and it didn't work, so you went back. I think in business, whether it's operations or finance or sales or marketing, there's always trial and error. We're testing things. As we test things, as long as we measure what we're doing, we've got the data that we need to go, Did that work or did it not? I love this story because I think a lot of people think, Man, I've got to have it all figured out. And man, we don't have it figured out. We're doing the best with what we have, and we're just constantly iterating and that also ties back to that growth mindset where you're just constantly looking for ways that you can get better and better and better.

Bryon Beilman
Yeah. It's also, I think, what I found, too, is the senior people... IT can be very complex. And if you ever... It in some ways is like a good writer. You read somebody who really writes well and they do elegant things in very few words. It can be very complex. And those experienced people, they've seen it, they've done it. And they probably wrote a book on it themselves. And they go, Well, instead of going A, B, C, D, E, F, you're just going right to A to F. And you solved it in a very simple and elegant way. When your customers feel that and they go, Wow, this is a difference because you try to differentiate yourself a little bit, but you can't do that unless you actually work on the differentiators.

Creating a Differentiator is a Real Challenge

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. Well, so that's a perfect segue into the next thing I want to ask you about because we also talked about that where you had shared with me, Gosh, early on, our differentiators just weren't unique. And if they're not unique, they're not differentiators. This is a common problem. I see it all the time in the IT MSP space, but it is the same across the board. Differentiating is a real challenge for people. And one of the things you said was, hey, we worked with our customers and within our company with our team to find them. I'd love for you to just share some of the steps that you guys took to do that.

Bryon Beilman
I think you touched a little bit on that as part of working with your customers. The first part of it was a sudden realization where you go to a sales call and you say, Hey, I just want you to know that we have the best people, the best process, the best technology. And they said, Well, the other five people I talked to said the same exact thing. And you're like, Oh, okay. Yeah, but we really mean it. That's not going to work, right? So when we went down, we started to find, What data do we have to prove? A, what data do we have to prove that we think we're unique in certain areas? And then what do our customers think? So for an example, we thought our customers liked us because we were so senior. And he asked him questions. I find out, No, we love your response time. We love the fact you get to us right away. And so it's like, Oh, really? So do we have any data that shows how fast we get back to our customers? And so we found, Oh, well, for the last 16 years, for example, we respond within 16 minutes to any issue. Well, over that long period of time, it's pretty good. So we say, Okay, I think that's differentiator, we can prove it. We have data to show it. So if response time is important to somebody, then they go, Oh, that's legit. But I think you try to... You put together a theory that these are differentiators, and you test it. Is this true? And is this really unique? And how is it? So people say, Oh, we have really great customer service. And you say, Well, okay, so how do you measure that? Well, we went and did the NPS, the net promoter score, and let's start us asking them that question. Turns out we Excel at that, right? So we're two and a half times higher than our competitors, the industry average. So okay, then we started developing over time. And then we said, Well, then you have to test those. You think those are your differentiators, and you have a call of your customer or prospect, and you find out whether they think it's valuable. Then someone go, Well, what is NPS? You're like, Okay, well, maybe it's good, but maybe they don't quite understand that. How do you drill down and make it very simple language that people can, A, you can validate and B, that it is truly differentiator.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. There's a couple of things I want to pull out here, Brian, because you guys did a tell me one of things right in this process, I think, because it is so hard for us as business owners to think objectively about our business. We're too close to the fire, right? And so I always go back to client interviews. I talk to your ideal clients, hear it in their own words. You think, hey, they care about senior level people, but then you hear from them, no, man, your response time is amazing. Okay. And you hear it back in their words, what's important to them? Well, what's important to your ideal clients is going to be most likely important to your ideal prospects as well. You guys got that information, created that. Your team members, frontline people, especially frontline salespeople, frontline customer service people, they're talking to prospects and clients every day and hearing it from them as well. And so team members have all kinds of valuable information. One of the things you touched on, too, was, hey, we were going out with these three differentiators and they're the same as everybody else. And the other thing I want to highlight here is people think that their differentiators have to be completely unique from everybody else. And they really don't. As long as your three differentiators are not exactly the same as everybody else, you've got some differentiators, right? The problem is when they're all three are the exact same, then you have an issue. But the other thing, too, and this is really tough in the MSP space because I've seen MSPs come up with guarantees. Guarantees is another great way, potentially, to come up with a really strong differentiator. But I see people come up with guarantees that people don't care about. You see in the MSP space, we guarantee you'll be happy or we'll let you out of the contract. Well, the reality is when somebody spent a month or two switching all of their IT over, unless it is just debilitating to their business, they're not going to do that again, right?

Bryon Beilman
Yeah.

Tim Fitzpatrick
So that guaranteed is a meaning thing. But now you have data, hey, we respond in an average of 16 minutes. If you really want to take it to the next level, and this scares a lot of people, you could say, Hey, we guarantee that we're going to respond in 20 minutes or less. Nobody does that. Now you have to back it up with something and tell them, Hey, what are you going to do for that? But that's a huge differentiator that most people will never do because, one, they're scared of it. Two, they don't have the data. You have the data. I love that. Thank you for sharing that because, man, creating your differentiator is... Once you nail down your differentiators, did you notice a fairly immediate business, immediate change in your conversions when you were going into sales?

Bryon Beilman
Gosh, I guess I don't have that data ahead of me, but I hadn't thought of it, looking at that point in time. It hasn't been an overnight. It's been a lot of work over a long period of time. You change this, you change that. Okay, how do you make these things pretty? Or how do you make the language, everything? But I know going into, at least in the calls, there's never any... I don't get that question, everyone else says that, right? Right. So they're like, Oh, I see where you're different. And so then you have to tease out, are these differentiators important to you? It could be in some cases that we want you to have it experienced in our industry. And then it's like, Oh. That is often the thing, especially if you're a regulated environment. Do you understand baking regulations or FDA? Those are more, I guess, focusing on verticals. But if you have A and B and one can meet your needs. I think it's been a gradual. I will say that I feel very strong about our marketing program on that. I think that... It was work in the marketing area around that, that really is allowing us to have probably a smaller sales team than we probably should for our success.

Marketing Takes Time

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. You have a Marketing Manager, full-time Marketing Manager. You have a chief revenue officer that are driving your marketing efforts. And you've been doing that for a while. One of the things you said to me was marketing gets a bad rap. Can you unpack that a little bit?

Bryon Beilman
Yeah. So I'm trying to remember the context. I don't know if you recall it.

Tim Fitzpatrick
I think when you said it, you were thinking about... It was in the context of ROI and how a lot of people expect fairly immediate results with marketing, if I remember correctly.

Bryon Beilman
Yeah, right. So I remember that now. I think for us, it's like we've committed to marketing. And when I talk to other CEOs and peers, and they're not seeing results from marketing, and say, Oh, what's going on? And they get skeptical because I think they try something, and they get mediocre results, and they write it off. See, I told you marketing wasn't an art. And to us, marketing is a bunch of things. I have a really close peer that I talked to. It's like his little CEO forum. And he's a very sales oriented organization. We're more marketing focused, how we approach the market, getting business. And for us, we're building it. Not marketing, it's part of our brand, our value. It's taken us five years to get really good SEO. It wasn't like... People are visiting our websites. Do we have any business from it? No, why not? Then, Oh, do we have this call to actions? And whatever. So you start drilling down and it takes a while, and you have to be able to try, measure and adjust. I think you reference to even a business, you run across something, why isn't it working? And many people give up and they just say, Well, marketing is not a science. And they're like, Well, it is. And there's some creativity to it, but you got to make a flywheel. And I thought that's how I think we look at it. But I think that's why marketing... Maybe I said marketing is a bad rep. I think it's because they didn't give up.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Well, you touched on it. You've been doing SEO for five years. Most people would have given up already. I had a conversation with somebody yesterday who was like, Man, marketing just doesn't work for us. We've had six different marketing companies. None of them have done anything. And whenever I hear that, I've always got to unpack it a little bit more. It's like, Well, what exactly happened? What were you doing? How long did you do it? I just had an interview with somebody the other day, and they were investing in cold outreach. And he was like, Man, we invested in this for a year and nothing was happening, and so we stopped. And then it was like four months later, I think they closed two or three clients that came from those efforts. And so he was like, It just didn't have enough time to see those results. But once we closed those two or three clients, the ROI was fantastic on what we were doing. So there's so many people that are just... There's the old story, and I can't remember where it came from, about the guy digging for gold. And he's digging for gold, digging for gold. He's like, This isn't working. He sells the land. And then the next guy digs 6 inches and hits gold. So many of us with marketing just stop. Short of or long before we've given it enough time to actually work. I love the fact that you said, Look, we're committed to it. Even if it's not working, we're still going to do these things. The framework that always stuck with me with marketing was you test, you measure, you learn. So you're out there testing, you're measuring it so that you can determine what's working and what's not. You learn from that, and then you just wash, rinse, repeat. It is a cycle that you never stop. So you've been doing it long enough, you fed the flywheel, and now the flywheel and now the flywheel is moving, it's got momentum. Now you just need to keep feeding. It's much easier to feed a flywheel that has momentum than to start from the scratch again.

Bryon Beilman
Well, you talked about the person you talked about with a cold outreach. When he said that, I thought maybe it was me I talked to because we had tried that for a year. We had very little success with that. But it doesn't mean I'm not going to do it. I realize what went wrong with it. Sometimes you talk to companies and they go, We have a process. It was too generic of a process in that case. Now, knowing what I know, I may do it again, but revisit in a different way. But it doesn't mean it's not going to work. It just means the way we did it didn't work.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. Well, especially with cold outreach and marketing in general, the industry does a very bad job of setting expectations because there's so many people out there going, Oh, yeah, we'll generate leads for you tomorrow, or We'll get you on page one of Google in 30 days. I mean, it's garbage. You can't control that. And especially with cold outreach, it's a process. Unless you really have things already dialed in, there's going to be some learning. Frankly, once it starts working, it doesn't always work forever. Things start, if the market starts to shift and you're like, Gosh, what we were doing isn't working anymore and we need to continue to iterate and tweak this process. So it's never a set it and forget it activity as much as we would love it to be but it's not.

Bryon Beilman
Yeah. During COVID is a perfect example. We were going to trade shows, right? And all of a sudden that whole thing died up for a couple of years. But all this investment in a booth and all this stuff, and we just attended our first trade show. Well, maybe our second, but it was actually... That channel right now is a little back in action where for a while you had to pivot and go, What are we going to do without that?

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. So, Bryon, you touched on cold outreach. Any other marketing initiatives that come to mind that you guys tried that just didn't work and that were learning lessons for you? Anything else come to mind?

Bryon Beilman
Yeah. I guess I would say we had a disjointed technology stack, if you will. I remember when I first started the company and I go, Okay, we got a website. We have everything going on here. And it was just a website. And it was about things we'd want to hear about ourselves and more of a vanity website. And it wasn't aimed at the customer. You're like, So what does somebody else... What do they care that you are good people or whatever? So then started, Okay, I got to do some blogs because I got to generate more SEO. But things weren't really working. We did some of the free email programs, Mailchimp or whatever, and it was really disjointed. Then we tried a marketing platform that was aimed at our industry, MSPs, to help generate inbound. It was very frustrating because like you mentioned, people's like, you can get leads really quickly. And so I invested in this platform. It was very frustrating. It was very low performing. And so that was a failure. But like I said, I still believe in the concept. So we ended up moving over to HubSpot, which put all of this together. We have our website, our marketing CRM sales, and it has a very big impact on our business. And for small businesses, they might say, Wow, that's really expensive. But what I've learned is that you get what you pay for in some of these things, and you invest in good people. Just like you invest in good people, maybe good marketing consultants, good marketing companies, good marketing products. I'm not going to go and buy the biggest platform that the enterprise people use. But it was definitely, we stumbled along the way. And it relates to maybe the earlier thing, like just believe in yourself, like, we believe in what we're doing. We're just not quite doing it right. So we had to tweak. So all of the things that we had, I mentioned performance. I have to tell you this because maybe other people have experiences, but the very first platform we tried, and I'll spare them the name for embarrassment, but we would send an email out and they had a graphic embedded in it. And in email, graphics aren't necessarily... They don't show up until you maybe click on them and they click on it. And literally, it took 45 seconds for the graphic to appear and download.

Tim Fitzpatrick
To load?

Bryon Beilman
Yeah. So I had to complain about that. No, that's the way it works. I'm like, No, you've already lost them. By that time, they're deleting it. They don't even want to see that graphic.

Tim Fitzpatrick
No, they're gone.

Bryon Beilman
Yeah. So that was just one example. And I just couldn't... I spent more time as my IT nerd going, Wait a second, you could do this better. Finally, that's not what I want to focus on. I want to focus on getting our message out.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. Well, a couple of things I'll share here. One of my mentors said always buy the best tool for the job. Sometimes as business owners, I think we're like, Oh, gosh, I think I can save some money there. But the best tools are going to make things far more efficient, which you guys now have found a tool that works for you. It's like, Hey, HubSpot is a great platform. It works for some. It doesn't work great for others. Because look, we're all different. I always tend to think that... This is not just with marketing because this is just tools in general. I think the best tool is the one that you're going to be able to understand and actually use. Because where the wheels come up is it's like, Oh, this is a great tool, and you start to use it and you're like, This is the most confusing thing ever. I'm never going to figure this out. And people just give up and because of that, they don't maximize it. There's a lot of tools that have great flashy features and benefits. I find half the time, most people don't use a lot of that stuff. As long as you can understand it and it's going to meet your needs, then cool, use it.

Bryon Beilman
Well, in that same vein, because we're trying to get net, there's basically a blue ocean of people who could become customers of ours. We recommend HubSpot to some of our clients because we like it. But it turns out that if you're a pharmaceutical company and you know the 50 or the 30 people that are going to buy your drug and these whatever, you got to focus on the 30 people. You don't need to start marketing to everybody in the world. You want to get your message out. You want to do other things. So some of those tools may not have value because your business is a little bit different. Not everybody has to. Hubspot works for us. But I know there's a lot of other programs out there. But yeah, it has to work for you and you have to believe that you have to be happy with the results.

Conclusion

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, absolutely. So, Brian, looking back at your iuvo tech experience, what are the top 2-3 things that stand out for you?

Bryon Beilman
Well, I think I'm going to repeat what I said a little bit earlier, the higher, great people period. And what stands out, too, is that when you hire great people, then you empower them. You say, You know what? Do what you're going to do. Let me help you break down barriers. But you'll find that they do things better, faster, stronger than you could. And you don't have to micromanage them and say, Here's our goal. Hire you. Empower you. Go do it. And it's been amazing. And it translates to life, too. I have children. I say, Spend your time with people that are great people. Spend your time and have great friends because you're the average of those five people you spend time with. It applies to business. You're all, hopefully, they're going to raise your average and you'll raise their average and everyone's going. So that's, I think the first thing. The second thing I would think about is related to that is build a great culture. I think the culture is your superpower. And so I think the brand and the culture, your brand is a mirror of your culture. So when people say, if you put out brand, here's who we are. And then people don't experience what you put out there, it's going to be a problem. But if you say, here's who we are, and you advertise as your brand and your culture, then everything's consistent. You don't have to worry about that. And I think it really... That I think is probably one of our main super powers. I have one more that I thought of here is that I'm an entrepreneur. It's not for everybody, but before this, I joined us, I was in startups, venture capital startups. What I found was whether you succeed or you fail in your startup or your business, you're learning. And what you learn is probably 3 X because you're just wearing so many hats. You got to be passionate about it. But I learned so much in the three failed startups, VC funded startups I worked at and made amazing connections with really smart people. I would recommend, don't be afraid to try that, because I think I wouldn't be where I am in running a company if I hadn't had those experiences.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. That leads into my next question, which is, knowing what you know, is there anything you do differently?

Bryon Beilman
Let's see. I guess it relates to a little bit what you do, but I think we're technical people. We built technical company. Eventually, we got around to realizing we got to have a mature sales and marketing function. Word of mouth is great, but if I think I would have focused on a real sales and marketing approach, I just didn't know. It seemed expensive at the time. And looking back, I think we would have been more successful. I'm not saying we're not successful, but I think we would have had. Even greater success if we would have put that mindset forward.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Before I got into marketing, I didn't really think about this all that much. And now that I've been in it, I'm certainly biased, but I always felt like whatever business you're in, that's what you're in. That's in second place. You are a sales and a marketing company first and foremost. Because if you don't have that, you're the best kept secret in the world. It doesn't matter how great you are because you don't have any business. I realized that sales and marketing are not all of our skill sets. So we either need to level up those skill sets or hire people that can do that function for us very well. Because without it, it's never going to work.

Bryon Beilman
One of our biggest competitors, or they're bigger than us, and we started about the same time, they're much bigger than us. But I think they went with that approach early on. My partner, he has an MBA, so I thought, Neither of us really thought through this. We were stuck in the nerd weeds.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Bryon, this has been great, man. I really appreciate you taking the time. You shared a lot of good. Stuff with us today. Where can people learn more about you?

Bryon Beilman
Well, if you want to interact with me directly, LinkedIn, my Bbileman on my. Linkedin, look for Bryon Beilman. My staff and my staff, we do a lot of blogs on our website. So we really try to share information. It goes to SEO, but in the end, we're trying to provide real value. Those are the... If you want to be passive and read blogs or you want to reach out LinkedIn, I'm happy to share, talk about anything related to this.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Cool. I love it. So go check out iuvotech.com or check out Bryon on LinkedIn. Look, I'm just going to tell you that I can't imagine there being another Bryonn Beilman that spells the name Bryon, BRYON.

Bryon Beilman
That's correct.

Tim Fitzpatrick
I'm sure that they can also search for you under Bryon and then Beilman is BEILMAN. But we'll make sure that both those links are in the show notes. So if you want to connect with Bryon, please do so. I have enjoyed connecting with you now twice. Thank you so much for taking the time, Bryon. I really appreciate it. Those of you that are watching, listening, I appreciate you as well. We've been talking a lot about growth, how to accelerate growth today. If you want to know which of the nine revenue roadblocks are slowing down your growth, you can do that over revenueroadblockscorecard.com. You can also always connect with us over at our website, which is rialtomarketing.com. Be happy to chat with you. Don't be shy, reach out. Bryon, thank you so much.