Archive for category: Alex Kraft

The Art of Company Building

Guest writer Alex Kraft takes us through his experiences as both an employee and an entrepreneur to highlight the art of company building.

I recognize I’m not the first to have this thought, but I’ll share my education and experience in company building. Prior to Heave, I worked for an established company. I was also younger in my career, so I was learning in every possible aspect. There’s plenty of material available that talks about the art of company building and everyone regurgitates the same axioms around “you need to hire the best people.” 

In fact, every company tells the world they have the best people. Yet we all know this isn’t true. One of the cooler aspects of my entrepreneurial journey is the access I’ve had to top tier advisors/investors and people who’ve worked for some of the top companies in the world. 

They’ve opened my eyes to what company building really means. I’ve always been more focused on the day-to-day culture in an organization. Setting up collaboration, accountability, and honest feedback loops. But I never knew how significant the pre-hiring process and an employees’ first day were to success. 

Company building starts with recruiting. Recruiting isn’t just targeting candidates and having conversations. Recruiting starts with defining what your company is looking for in general and by role. For example, we’ve defined what we look for in a software engineer, in a territory manager, in customer success, and what we screen for in marketing. Define what background you’d like to see for the role that is a predictor for success. Put on paper what traits and behaviors match your company’s culture for each job role. For example, we screen for five different areas. There’s a company document that has questions to ask a software engineer candidate to screen for grit or ‘no drama’ (Grit and ‘No drama’ are two of our five areas—we DO NOT want people that bring drama!). Same for a territory manager. It’s amazing to see how when you spend the time to document these things, the hiring experience is significantly smoother and cohesive. Everything starts to make sense. 

Next, it’s important to set a process. How many total interviews? Who performs the interviews? Are different people involved and at what stage? What do candidates have to prove to move forward in each? Do you have a grading system? I’ve learned how much this matters. Having a process helps greatly to stack rank candidates. With these things in place, you come to learn that hiring decisions aren’t made subjectively as much and everyone involved is much more aligned. This is the way you can lessen the chances of making a mistake and increasing your odds of success. 

Congratulations, you’ve run the process and the candidate you wanted accepted the job. 

The next phase of company building is just as important. The overused term is ‘onboarding.’ Here’s the concept: a new hire’s first day(s) are critical. We bring everyone into our corporate location for a 3+ day class (depending on role). We share our company founding story and our journey. We outline our mission, vision, and our goals. They get the opportunity to meet their teammates and understand how all the pieces fit together. Everyone is aligned on where we’re going and how we’re going to get there as a team. You want the new additions to leave thinking joining the company was the best decision they ever made. First impressions are everything and taking the time and spending the money to do ‘onboarding’ right pays dividends down the road. 

I see the effect it has and how motivated and engaged our team members are when they get settled back where they work every day. People appreciate the thought and the time you put into them before pushing them out in the wild, so to speak. 

Hiring is difficult. You’ll never bat 100%. But in my earlier days, I worked for a company that was solely dependent on who walked in the door to apply for a job. And I wondered how we couldn’t attract top talent. How you set everything up from recruiting to a new hire’s first week sets the tone for a memorable experience. And here’s the best part: those employees turn out to become your best recruiters for the future. 

Great people want to work with other great people, for great companies.

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The Importance of Mindset

Guest writer Alex Kraft addresses the challenges of starting a company in “The Importance of Mindset.”

As we hit year 3 of Heave, I wanted to share my biggest challenge starting a company because it’s not what I thought it would be back in July 2020. In the early days, I thought the biggest challenge starting a company was building a product. Finding talent to build technology, supervising the build, and getting the product to market was all brand new to me. This certainly wasn’t easy (and the continual product improvements we’ve made since), but I’ve learned that managing my mindset is the hardest part.

Starting a company is an exciting time. You’re full of passion, belief, and energy. You go into it understanding the odds are against you and that you’re fighting every day to gain relevance. But you believe that at some point (soon) others are going to see what you see:  your product is ten times better. than what’s out there or that others are going to recognize the great idea and want to partner with you.  What I wasn’t prepared for and has proved the biggest impediment is the avalanche of “No’s.”  No’s come from everywhere. Potential customers tell you ‘No,’ investors dismiss the idea within 5 minutes, even those who you were sure would help you, say NO. Plenty of people laugh and ignore you. This is where the reality check happens. This is why entrepreneurship is so hard. How do you stay motivated and keep pushing forward when the world says NO? Small wins help but most of us are wired to focus on the negatives. For the past 30 months, I’ve been engaged in a battle with my mind. 

I found two things helpful over the past 3 years. First, I tried to read as much content as possible on other companies’ origin stories. We tend to view successful companies today through the lens that they’re an overnight success story. Nothing could be further from the truth. Every company faces crucial life or death challenges along their journey, many times in the early days. It’s these decisions that make or break the company. Things that seem common sense today aren’t so obvious early on. It’s also reassuring that talented people behind iconic companies didn’t have all the answers from the jump. They learned over time and listened to the market. This research helped our team determine ‘pivots’ along the way and necessary tweaks to keep us breathing. Time is a precious asset for a start-up. 

The opposite can also provide context:  researching companies that failed. Finding out where they made critical missteps can help someone anticipate issues within your own business. I’ve learned one of the most critical CEO functions is to determine what’s around the corner and to have a plan. Unforeseen circumstances can create panic, which is the worst thing to happen to a company. Employees look to leadership in challenging times for the confidence that the team is prepared and will have the answers for whatever comes their way.

Perspective is important, but the battle comes when human nature kicks in. We all want to be liked. We seek consensus and to be part of a group. I was listening recently to a podcast with famed investor Mike Maples Jr. and Daniel Ek (Spotify founder) when it clicked for me. They were discussing how breakthroughs happen. Mike Maples Jr. mentioned that breakthroughs only come from a contrarian perspective. The people who aren’t afraid to say, “nope, the current way isn’t the right way. Here’s a new way….”  The lightbulb went on for me. 

To accomplish something great or to achieve a breakthrough, one must be comfortable as the outsider. These individuals don’t expect others to agree with their viewpoint or embrace their idea. This is what I didn’t understand or appreciate. The breakthrough builders focus on making an impact—rejection comes with the territory. They put the customer at the center of everything and work towards solving a problem. The customer’s opinion is the only one that matters. If you deliver an A+ in customer experience and deliver results, everything else takes care of itself.

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Unbiased Customer Feedback

Today, guest writer Alex Kraft explores customer comments in this blog post on the importance of unbiased customer feedback.

Customer surveys are all the rage these days.  I wouldn’t be surprised if the kid’s lemonade stands down the street started texting a survey after each purchase made.  I had a recent positive experience that caught my attention though and is the purpose of this blog.  It isn’t necessarily about the frequency of surveys, its more about the employees’ communication to customers.  It seems like in almost every instance, the consumer is told what scores are acceptable.  It usually happens like this: “just to give you a head’s up, you’ll be getting a survey and it’s really important for us here.  Anything less than 5’s across the board hurts us”.  Of course, I don’t want this person negatively impacted by my answers.  I understand that many companies use surveys as an incentive compensation opportunity, but doesn’t this practice contradict the entire purpose of surveying for customer feedback?  Customer feedback is critical to understanding performance, market perception, and expectations.  But this approach detailed above has become all too common and misses the mark.  To me, identifying areas to improve is the most important part of customer feedback.  

So, if customer surveys are largely pencil whipped, how can an equipment dealer get real critiques?  What many do is go on a customer tour of their 10-20 largest accounts.  I understand how important it is to stay close with your largest accounts, I’m not suggesting otherwise.  But this won’t get you any closer to areas that you can improve.  These customers get the best of everything from your dealership:  best pricing, most attention, and best access to your senior level teams.  When one of those 10 accounts has an issue, the fire alarm sounds and everyone within the dealership comes to the rescue. Funny enough, you don’t need to ask as almost everyone in the dealership knows exactly what these customers’ experiences are with your company! 

I learned this lesson when I worked for a dealer and again once I started Heave.  In my dealership days, I remember meeting a large account that rarely gave us business.  We’d get the occasional rental and quote every purchase, but when it was time for them to sign the contract, the other dealer walked out with the signature.  We had one of our top salesmen on the account and he was a true professional, calling on them weekly.  I don’t remember what prompted us to ask the question, but I do remember the meeting when we just flat out asked, “what are we NOT doing that _______ dealer is doing?”  The customer described their experience with one of our competitor’s service departments as the deciding factor.  He mentioned that our competitor serviced their machines on the weekends and off-hours.  When they showed up for work on Monday, their fleet was ready to go with invoice in hand and that is why they continued to buy from our competitor.  He said, “no one else in the market has ever come close to this experience, and when we need service from the others it always interrupts our operation.”  This was a great eye opener for me as a leader.  I learned that day where the bar was for us if we wanted to earn, not only this customer’s business, but most likely many of the other top accounts in the area.  This is not something I would have “learned” from reading customer surveys. 

I visited many customers when launching Heave.  We had a vision for what the platform could look like and how we could serve customers.  There were two customer visits that stood out, as both customers told me that Heave ‘wasn’t for them’.  If I was ten years younger, I probably would have gone into a pitch trying to convince them that they should use our marketplace.  But the purpose of the visit wasn’t a sales call, it was an information gathering meeting.  For me, this was an incredible learning experience to understand from their perspective why Heave didn’t provide value.  These two meetings were pivotal in helping us shape our product and strategy. Without this feedback, we would’ve continued to struggle defining who Heave is built for and probably wasted a ton of time pursuing the wrong customers.   I can’t thank those two individuals enough for the respect they paid me by being honest and unbiased.  

Every dealership knows a group of customers who don’t really buy from them but that they know well.  These are the customers who can be incredibly helpful if they’ll give you the time and be honest.  One great quote I’ve learned years ago from an executive was, “customers vote with their wallet”.  Maybe there’s a group of customers that have quietly shifted their buying behavior towards a competitor the past few years.  We’ve all run through the list of customers parts sales- are there customers that buy parts from your dealership but don’t have corresponding service revenue?  My point is that these are the perfect interview candidates.  When you start losing business, the typical knee jerk reaction is always, ‘they must be solely buying on price’.  Rarely is that the case.  But it makes us feel better because our inner dialogue tells us that there was nothing we could do. Our job as leaders is to put the effort in and dig deeper to find out where we are falling short. The other thing worth mentioning is that it’s ok if you can’t put an immediate fix in to some of the issues that arise.  For the example I gave above about servicing equipment on weekends and off-hours: our dealership didn’t have the manpower or expertise at the time to shift in this fashion.  The point is that it’s much better to know where the bar is set than to make internal excuses or to simply not know what is driving market decisions.  This feedback helps shape long term goals within the dealership. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised what people will tell you if you approach it in the right way and create an environment where customers feel that they can be open and that you’re asking for the right reasons.  

And a quick reminder:  when Ron sends out a survey asking whose content on his site you’d prefer to read more of, please don’t forget to rate mine near the top.  “All 5s’” for this guy…

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Positioning: Who Are You For?

Guest blogger Alex Kraft discusses positioning in today’s blog, with the important question of who you are positioning yourself for? Who is your message meant to target? Are you a partner to your customers?

When you work for an established company, there are certain things that get taken for granted. Customers in the market know your brand and they’ve experienced your products. Opinions are formed based on experience. For young companies, the art of positioning becomes incredibly important.

Wikipedia defines ‘positioning’ as ‘the place that a brand occupies in the minds of the customers and how it is distinguished from the products of the competitors”. How do potential customers perceive your product when they haven’t experienced it and it’s not established? What I’ve learned over the past 18 months is: words matter. It’s remarkable how certain words trigger different responses and can create opportunities or worse, close doors in your face.

One of the major challenges with positioning is that everyone seems to use the same words, regardless of whether they are accurate or not. As I’ve written before on this site, Heave in its simplest form allows dealers/sales reps to quote contractors equipment (for rent or sale) easily on their mobile device. I’m very proud of what we’ve built so far and couldn’t wait to tell the industry….so terms like ‘platform’, ‘marketplace’, ‘e-commerce’, found their way into our positioning. The problem is that every tech company says that they are a platform/marketplace/e-commerce solution. The result is that you get drowned out amongst the crowd and no one remembers anything. Even worse, a customer will just assume your product is the same as one that they’ve maybe had a poor experience with, because of that similar description (without even trying it!).

For equipment dealers, it’s similar. Pick a dealer, any dealer. Don’t tell me who they are, let me guess: do they have the ’best’ or ‘quality equipment’, with ‘THE BEST SERVICE’? Are they ‘customer first’?

Are they a ‘partner’? I remember when I started as a Volvo salesman and attended a factory training session. Naturally I wanted to learn the areas where we had a competitive advantage, something tangible. One thing that I left armed with was Volvo’s superior fuel economy compared to the competition. Unfortunately for me, I was flipping through a Construction Equipment Guide the next week and I see ads for Case promising the ‘best fuel economy in the industry’, same as CAT, Deere, and Komatsu. Now Volvo is just another brand promising the same thing as everyone else. I had to go back to telling customers we just had the ‘best service’….

With Heave, we created something new and started with a blank slate. I became frustrated early on as we met people in the industry. ‘Why don’t they get it?’, I would ask one of my partners. It seemed so simple to me, but I lived it every waking moment. The more I read and researched other companies, the more I came to understand how important positioning is, and how it can set companies apart. I didn’t realize the skill involved in articulating an idea concisely with an economy of words. Once I had an appreciation for the nuance involved, we began tweaking our positioning. As we met with clients you could tell that it was resonating more, and we were getting closer. The final ‘aha’ moment for me was something that I believe every dealer/OEM can also learn from.

Positioning goes together with identifying a target market. A mistake that I know well is not recognizing your ideal customer. In the early days of Heave, I was afraid that if there were 100 potential customers, we needed to appeal to all 100. We couldn’t afford to have a smaller potential pool of customers I thought. Thankfully, I came across a sales trainer named Josh Braun. Josh’s content opened my eyes to how successful salespeople don’t try to sell or pitch to everyone; they focus their efforts on those who fit the solution. It finally clicked for me. Heave is not for the 15-20- year veteran salesperson who has the same 15 accounts for the past 10 years. Heave is for the younger, inexperienced, hungry sales reps who are new(er) to a territory and building their book of business. Have you ever noticed that those who say that “it’s a relationship business” are the ones who’ve had the relationships for 20 years? That saying is code for “this is MY customer, go find someone else!”  This exercise was incredibly liberating for our team because it brought clarity to our mission and removed a ton of pressure. Now we weren’t wasting time talking to those who weren’t a good fit for our product. Do I believe that Heave could help that 15-year veteran salesperson? Of course, but why push a boulder uphill? Go talk to the 50,000 equipment salespeople in the US who are tired of cold calling offices and jobsites, that keep showing up and never get past the gatekeeper. Their manager offers solace by telling them, “Don’t worry, it’s just part of it.  It took me 24 months to get my first crack at quoting Contracting. Now they buy 5 machines per year from us.” That is our ideal user and our positioning followed. Now we were speaking directly to them.

While equipment dealers aren’t starting with a blank slate, there is opportunity to stand out since everyone has been using the same terms since the 1960s. Don’t make the mistake of just copying the competition. You don’t have the same resources as the competition, and you don’t get credit for the ideas if you just are copying what someone else does. Who are the customers that your competition doesn’t serve? Maybe this fresh positioning could be tied to embracing the technology driven changes occurring in the industry? Maybe your positioning can be focused more on certain products or customer segments? On second thought, consistency is your friend, and you can’t go wrong with ‘We take customers to lunch, sign paper contracts, and we stock a lot of parts.”

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