Shane Smith 0:00 One of the earliest pieces of advice that I got was give away everything, a way to get an invested resource in your company without having to, you know, pay the multiple six figure salaries and carry the 40% burden on top of that, and to be able to get started, right. So you don't have to excuse my language, unscrew it up later. So you don't bring a knife to a gunfight. If you're sitting down and doing budget planning on stuff like that, oh, well, a loyal customer is much happier. Look at all these statistics. And the at the end of the day, it's like, show me the money. In reality, our customers are on their own journey. What does that mean? That means they may have taken to quote, to quote a cartoon from a lot of you, they may have taken a left and Alburquerque. Max Matson 1:00 Everybody, welcome back to future of product. today. My guest is Shane Smith. He's customer experience and success experts, founder of ever attics, Shane, thank you so much for joining me today. Would you mind introducing yourself real quick? Shane Smith 1:12 Oh, my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me too. So my name is Shane Smith I founded ever radix at the end of 2022, probably the, the less than ideal time to earn a consulting company focused on areas that you know a lot of the businesses of them cutting and you know, right or wrong, kind of within endeavor to pay it, pay it forward, I come from my background, a software engineering background, and, and then moved into support in 2000s. Adopt bomb days. And from there have kind of progressed and, and pretty much done almost every customer facing job and small and large software companies along the way, learned a lot of lessons, made a tremendous amount of mistakes and had awesome mentors along the way. So aside from the timing of ember 2022 founding founding ever radix kind of as a way to pay it forward, was something that I was better positioned in my life for the personal side and then went for it. It's been an interesting journey. I so appreciate you having me here. Thank you. Max Matson 2:26 Awesome. Oh, yeah, no, no, it's my pleasure. I was really grateful that you reached out I think, having somebody who speaks to customer experience and customer support is super crucial. Right? And you kind of point out that, you know, starting late 2022, we've really seen this kind of crunch on the department. Right? So I'd love to get into that. Shane Smith 2:46 Absolutely. Absolutely. Max Matson 2:49 Yeah. But just to start off, let's just real quick talk about the core mission of ever radix. Right? What exactly do you guys do? You mentor kind of paying it forward? But what does that look like in practice? Shane Smith 3:00 What does it look like in practice? So from an athletics perspective, there's some things I can't divulge. But let's go customer experience, customer experience includes the full customer journey as they experience it. Right, right. So one of my favorite examples is to think about somebody walking into a sandwich shop and buying a sandwich, eating it and then walking out the door, and then asking yourself, do they come back and why or why not? And if you think about that experience that started with Why did you walk in the door door in the first place, which is clearly marketing, right? Or some sort of awareness? Maybe dumb luck, but probably marketing. You had to buy your sandwich, you had to order it, you have to talk to somebody who's not sales. Right? Right. You've sat down or you sat down, got up, went to the soda fountain to fill up your soda, there is no napkins. That's grody. It's nasty and nobody wants to look at it. Who is that? And you know, the SAS analogy might be and some CSM have debated me on this one it might be CSM, right and then my gosh, you you got back to your table and your sub didn't have pickles on it, and nobody's there to be found. So So is that customer support? Maybe. And then you walk out and then when you walk out who are then so ever Rennicks is is a consulting firm that I started to really start to bridge and bring these silos of customer experience together. It's easy to say everybody owns a customer journey, right? In practice. Those are things that we hear in town hall, we leave town hall and we go back and still do the same things that we always did before. So we're trying to bring a holistic perspective. And when we are bringing a holistic perspective and looking at it, and each one of those interactions is is hugely important and impacts whether or not you're gonna go back to the store and buy the sandwich again. Max Matson 5:12 No, totally. So in that analogy, would you say that? You know, so I think the kind of traditional line of thinking is customers customer support is at the bottom of the funnel, right? It's, it's the last step, it's how we retain, right, but what you're kind of saying is no, actually customer support touches all of these different facets of the buying journey. Shane Smith 5:31 Yeah, if you look at if you look at a consider something called the peak end rule, the peak end rule is, is based in human psychology, when we go to sleep, what we retain, for the next day, and what our memories are kind of based on that very, very high level peak. So emotional highs and lows along an experience are remembered. And, and the end of an experience is remembered. Alright, so that's really important. And that creates something in a journey mapping or customer journey mapping that we often call moments of memory. And, and those are really important. So here, here's when it comes to support. Overwhelmingly, if you look at customer interactions, potential Pekin moments of memory, and the number of interactions support and service have with our customers. is greater than every other organization put together combined. So is support important. Max Matson 6:44 Yes. Yeah. Shane Smith 6:46 And it's, and it's, and it's obvious, so And to your point to around it's kind of seen as the bottom of the funnel? I think that's true. Although, although that's not to degrade the importance of providing that great experience, right along the way. Max Matson 7:06 Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I think it's something that I think we see a lot in SAS, right? Is this dedication to optimizing within a silo or optimizing within a department, right? So when we're selling something we're optimizing to make the sale when we're marketing, something we're optimizing to push people into later stages of engagement, right. But when you have kind of this overarching Customer Success focus, what you're always optimizing for, really, is that customer is going to come in who's going to retain who's going to potentially recommend you to other users? Shane Smith 7:41 Absolutely. I mean, absolutely, because of those moments and memory. And if I could throw this in there, too, I'm very passionate about it. One of the things that we have learned, I think, over the past decade or so, is understanding our customer journey is important. And I think anybody with a with a brain can can easily get to that point, understanding, you know, the different steps that a customer goes through. However, when it comes to us sitting in our ivory tower, on around a desk and a whiteboard, and defining the customer journey, that's fine, as long as it stops as a frame of reference. In reality, our customers are on their own journey. What does that mean? That means they may have taken to quote, to quote a cartoon from a lot of you, they may have taken a lesson Alburquerque and, and their customers, they're humans, and they have the volition to be able to do that. It's onus on us, especially in these times, to be able to be agile and adapt to those lesson Alburquerque, as the case may be, and, and I see at least a lot with a lot of the companies, I guess, that I've been talking with, in past experiences, there's often a gap in that kind of philosophical paradigm of who owns the customer journey. Max Matson 9:11 Right? Absolutely. I just kind of loops back to what you're saying at the beginning with with kind of this trend towards de emphasizing customer success. A lot of these companies. It seems counterintuitive, right? Because this is a time economically where so many SaaS companies, especially plg, SAS companies are actually the worst retention that they've ever experienced. Right? Why do you think that that kind of misguided direction and leadership is taking place? So what is it about customer success that's made it be de emphasized? Shane Smith 9:44 So it's really interesting, I think there there are two there are two major aspects going on, or at least a lot of the decisions that had to be made in the beginning of this year. And and I tiptoe carefully on that, because from my heart or I believe that, you know, most of the companies that had to make these decisions would have preferred to avoid them. Right. And one of the things I'm very passionate about is actually connecting the customer experience to Financials. Why? Because it's a very unsexy topic. However, it's who pays our paychecks at the end of the day, right? So so you don't bring a knife to a gunfight. If you're sitting down and doing budget planning on stuff like that, oh, well, loyal customers much happier. Look at all these statistics. And the at the end of the day, it's like, show me the money. Where does the money come in? So the first part of my answer in context of that is there, especially in the startup areas, venture capital, or private equity firms often own or control or majority, majority control, you know, a firm and its decision, right. And there there is a financial guidance that's often used. And it's called the rule 40. And what the rule of 40 states is over some period of time, I care about the growth of the company in terms of percentage. And then I'm going to add that to the percentage of cash flow. So breaking that down. Rule 40. How many more sales have I gotten? And then how much more money do I have? Right now, let's look at customer success, and support for that matter, especially on the second half of that cashflow, support, right or wrong, it just is the way the world works is a cost of goods sold. Right. Right? It's from a from a financial perspective, it's on the budget sheet. It's the same as a server sitting in the closet under the stairs. At the business, it just says Yeah. So ways to reduce that labor cost have influenced some pretty hard decisions, because I increase cash flow. Right? Right. Customer successes in slightly a different group Customer Success typically are the just for your listeners are typically the people that are building relationships, and going after the renewals. So you were a subscription customer this year, are you going to subscribe next year as well. But please don't kill me if you're in customers, because that's over simplification. And then they may or may sell you more products. But that also is is not very emphasized in that rule 40. So, companies came to a point in in the beginning of this year of 2023. And right or wrong, the people that are funding them said we have this metric, the standard metric called rule 40, do you want to continue to be funded? If so you need to increase your sales, and you need to cut your costs. Right? If that number, you add those two percentages together, which you're not allowed to do in statistics, by the way, but if you add those two statistics together, and it's a number equal to 40, will, or more will keep funding it. So what do you do in that situation? You have to cut, you have to cut? Max Matson 13:46 I see. And it feels like it's it's very much optimizing for the short term, right? Because like we said, then you're putting your sales in a in kind of a silo and saying just bring in people, we don't care if they retain B, you know, come with B, right. Yeah. So would you say that? And you mentioned kind of CX financial modeling, right? Yeah. Without going, you know, no. But is that kind of the antidote to this problem? In some ways? Shane Smith 14:15 It is, it is part of the anecdote. So the problem. So So in my experience, and I'm guilty of this as well. Being somebody that's focused on the customer and the customer experience and then thinking of myself and reflecting on myself as a customer. Innately, I understand the importance of that. Right. And I think if you're a human and you have a soul, you also understand that that's not how finances work. Right? So So very often we would go into our I would go into budget planning meetings and I would say all the things, you know, hey, well, you know, a loyal customer, happy customer buys more and all these things, and then ultimately comes down to So what, and there's a cornucopia of customer statistics on this, but that's math, right. And that's hard. So, so one of the things that we spent a lot of time on, was actually going out in a statistically accurate way. And building a financial CX model that has various inputs. So if you want to make a decision, let's just say if you want to make a decision, and you believe that may drop your customer satisfaction and support by 5%. You know, it's tough times out there. So maybe that's the right decision to make. Right? What does that actually affect when it comes to your gross revenue, or your expansion and your churn rate. And that's where myself and I see this so often, like the support leaders, faces gloss over, when we start talking about financial, it's just, it feels dirty to us to do it. So we didn't demystify that effectively from an in a statistically accurate way. So we can, we can say if we're going to cut to people, and that's going to increase our response time, and that historically has had a 3% You know, variation on our customer satisfaction. So what here, this is, this is this is the so what good or bad, you know, are different should I should I invest to extra headcount? Right? In the organization? What will that do? That's will raise x y&z hold me accountable to that, how will that help the finances, boom, there you go. And it has been, it has been riveting and eye opening to see that financial model come to come to kind of fruition. And I say that because I personally, having walked in the issues and then frustrated out of too many board meetings and budget planning sessions, it became very path or I became very impassioned to understand how finances work. And being a software engineer, this is the last thing I ever thought I would explore. And sitting down and working with the finance people and the CFOs. And really understanding the way that businesses looked at is really, really important. So that's a long answer. But that's kind of how I view the financial model and where it fits into the situation that we're all facing today. Max Matson 18:02 No, absolutely. I mean, I feel like it makes so much sense, right? So many departments are having to align to revenue at this point, right? Like, I mean, there's the more obvious ones with marketing. But when it comes to customer success, if you're seen as more of a line item on the cost front, there is I can't think of another way to really analyze what the impact of either trimming or adding to your efforts there is going to be. Without, you know, this level of line of sight. Shane Smith 18:32 We have to you can't bring a knife to a gunfight. You're going in, you're going into budget planning. And I say this a little bit flippantly. But but so please don't take it in a negative context. Yeah, of course. But we're in budget planning. And there's a reason that meeting starts with the word budget. It's about finances. Yeah. So wouldn't wouldn't you want to have budget kind of information, financial information going into there? Absolutely. The answer is absolutely, yes. Max Matson 19:09 100% Yeah. I would say every department should right. It's part of the reason why I was really fascinated with talking to you is I haven't heard other people you know, really express this when it comes to customer experience. And it seems to be like if anything, the one place where it makes the most sense, right. Shane Smith 19:26 Do you know I'll give you I'll give you a real example. If you don't mind. Yeah, he my my wife and I shop at Walmart neighborhood market for grocery shopping. And it was a few months ago we were driving back from Walmart, which is not renowned for their customer success or customer experience. Okay. What are they renowned on? Price, right? Yeah. Okay. And after we bought our groceries, we're driving back and I have This this reflective point where we're, I'm like, Oh my gosh, that's I am such a hypocrite. I'm on LinkedIn, I'm talking about the customer experience, how important it is, I have three or four other grocery stores, you know, the big names the Ralph's and the Albertsons and all that, but we go, we go to Walmart, why? And, and it really bothered me. And, and on the drive back, it occurred to me, and I was so relieved, that actually, it wasn't a hypocrite. The reason, the reason we are shopping at Walmart, is because the customer experience is the same as what it is at those other stores, you get to the line, there's only one cashier, I can get that at Albertsons, I can get that, you know, at Walmart, so why am I going to go pay more. And in the SAS industry, what I believe has happened is very similar to this where we have degraded the customer experience. have degraded the customer experience, right or wrong because they had to. And then what happens is you are in a you are now competing on price, you're in a price war, nobody wins that. Nobody wins that game. So seeing a lot of that, and the reason I guess I hedged a little bit on that is some of the prospects I have been talking to understand. And typically they're their larger firms, which I've also found very interesting over this year, understand how valuable that customer experience is, and where they're trying to attack. Their version of the rule 40 is scaling, white glove treatment versus cutting treatment, you know, on another super fascinating anyway, I love that story. Because it hit me and I thought for a long time I was incriminating myself. Max Matson 22:01 No, it's a great example. I, I think I've actually written a little bit about kind of my own come to Jesus moment with ad blocking as a as an advertiser. Right? Yeah, there's something fundamentally broken here, if I don't want to see the thing that I do, right. But all that being said, so you operate kind of in the realm of fractional leadership, right? Shane Smith 22:24 We have Yeah, so so ever, onyx has several different offerings. With, with the support aspect, having having been a leader of an organization, both in small and large companies, typically SAS software, there is a place that's very challenging for a small company, you know, let's call it you know, 50 people or less, when you come to this point in this realization, like, oh, shoot, I have to, I have to understand, and I have to build back in, you know, support and stuff like that. The reality is a, you know, a vice president or, or an SVP or even, you know, a director of support. They're expensive, we're expensive. And there was a reason that that we often try to recreate the wheel in startup companies, and it's usually money, fractional leadership. And this doesn't just apply to support, you see it in CES and sales and stuff like that is really a an, a way to get an invested resource in your company without having to, you know, pay the multiple six figure salaries and carry the 40% burden on top of that, and to be able to get started, right, so you don't have to, excuse my language, unscrew it up later. Right. And so fractional leadership is certainly something that we offer. Then on on top of that kind of our governing our governing services, we have something called a support readiness assessment. And the support readiness assessment will look at a support organization for a software company, it will assess it across the seven fundamentals of customer support across 56 different elements within there. So think of like a balanced scorecard, if you will. And then what I appreciate and a lot about the programming and where it has differed from some others that have done similar things in the past isn't an assessment. It's not an audit. Everybody's got their own place in the journey. So there there are, there are right things to do, and clearly wrong things to do. And then there's also right time to do them. Right, you can't boil the ocean. So our assessment comes in we, in a very short period of time, six weeks or less, which is almost unheard of, we not only provide, you know, 50 pages of documents and conversations, you know, with, with, with the, the employees and the staff and customers, we also propose a roadmap, like, imagine you're a support leader walking into a brand new company, and they want to hire you as the EVP of support those do exist, by the way. And they're gonna say, Well, what's your plan? Here's your plan. And here's what you do when So, you're going to get your short wins, you're going to get your long poles and you know, your midterm wins in there as well, and sequence and yet, the reason I go into that detail is because all of our other services really are framed within that framework itself. So So we also offer a one day session where, hey, I just have a problem that's around this virtual session, you know, let's just go and solve the problem, do some follow up and, and kind of like a touch and go, you know, if you're an aeroplane guy, touch and go, the the, and then because of this industry, or this year, rather, in the industry, there has been a lot of people that have been promoted very rapidly. And surprising what just in full transparency when I started ever radix. And I put coaching on there as a service and kind of built that out, because everybody else does it. So and that that has been something that has coming up over and over and over for me and I have a couple of coaching clients that I work with, and and a few more, but they all fit this scenario. And they're awesome. By the way, I can't even believe I get paid for it. Max Matson 27:14 That's awesome. No, that's awesome. Kind of. Yeah, paying it forward to the next generation of leaders in that space. Right. That's great. It's great. That's fantastic. Well, you know, you and I have talked off camera a little bit about your background, right. But I think we could go into a little bit more depth on that real quick, just because I think you have a really interesting kind of origin point into service industry. Sure. Shane Smith 27:36 Okay. cut me off if I go too long. So, my, my, I go, I'm a little bit old, I go back to Commodore VIC 20 days. For those that want to do that. We all have strengths and talents in the world. And my my personal God given talent was programming. I was first published using a Commodore VIC 20 And one of those magazines that you had to go type everything in and there was a checksum number in fifth grade. And, and over a year, and it was just the thing that came easy, I can pick up computer languages, you know, in a heartbeat, which is not a transferable to verbal languages, just or liberal art, FYI, I did pass a Spanish two in 10th grade in high school with a d minus. And a promised that I wouldn't take Spanish three based on class participation. And I've never worked harder in a class in my entire life on that class. So that that being said, I I mean, this was my kind of innate talent. So went to college, join the Air Force, I was did a variety of programming roles there. The one that really stuck with me was I would I targeted ICBM missiles, the Minutemen, the peacekeepers that the United States stuff. And that set a frame of reference on life or death. That was impactful to me, got out of the Air Force, and, and did some consulting gigs. There was a company that we all wanted to work for back then. And so this is around the dot bomb days. And for some reason, they they accepted me, however, I I had to do a support role. And I was a Java architect at the time, but I had to take a support role, though this company was the place and I moved my family across the country and to Boston at the time and join This company, and in fairness, I would have pushed a broom, I would have done the toilets, anything to work at this company up to and including support. So I took the support role was ostracized from my, my engineering community, how could you possibly do that? That's so beneath you. And I did this role for six months. And what I'll never forget and greatly appreciate it is there was an opportunity that came up to become a manager at this company. That's the dark side of the fork. Right. So as a software engineer, last thing we want to do is being management. He, however, the support role was so tremendously challenging and hard. I probably would have done the toilets, if they'd let me stay there, instead of that support role. Right? Once again, I got lucky. And they picked me, you know, for this manager role. And I remember a customer escalation that I had been dealing with as a support engineer on for the week leading up to the Friday, you know, before the weekend, and it was a harder, it was a really hard customer escalation. And you know, emotions were high and you just the textbook challenge, escalation. And then over the weekend, I became a manager. So on Monday, I had to go back into the same exact escalation with the same exact customer, except I had a manager title. And I didn't change that much over the weekend. Although the demeanor and disposition of the customer, to me, yeah, change a tremendous amount over the weekend. And that left me with with a perspective of, of like, holy cow whose job is harder. totally right. And, and before servant leadership was something you could go on LinkedIn and search for and see, I think I accidentally fell in to kind of a servant leadership mindset very early on, right. But I was also graced, I was talking with somebody the other day, throughout the next 20 years. I hit the Powerball jackpot, leadership lottery for mentors, I literally have had zero, bad bosses. Zero, every single person I had, I have had the privilege of working for has in some way shape or form. Most of the time, like, greatly enrich me, mentored me, took me under their wings. And that's that I appreciate, especially in hindsight, and when I say like the Pay It Forward moment, I know most people don't have that opportunity. A lot have the opposite. The that's, that's what I'm indebted to. I guess. Max Matson 33:14 That's a great way to look at it. Yeah, yeah, I think all of us are kind of standing on the back of the people who helped us to get to where we are right and and to learn what we needed to learn to get there. So, I love that you emphasize that you just to pivot slightly, because I love this term. You use the term right to renew. Right. So you say the importance of exceptional service is the right to renew. Right? Could you define that and and kind of explain your your philosophy on that? Shane Smith 33:45 Yeah, absolutely. So So renewals are typically typically handled in most SaaS companies, by a customer success manager or maybe an account manager. There may be there may there probably is a lot of different customer success or hopefully account management reach out along the way. Right, what? From those groups. However, there's also a, let's call it a one year annual contract, there's going to be a year's worth of interactions, to come in and, and have that conversation in an impactful and meaningful way. The right the right to renew is a responsibility of customer service and support, frankly, everybody else, although we talk with our customers more than everybody else put together so we have to own this. We we we have to make the platform acceptable for our AM's to count man jurors and our CSMs are customer success managers to begin that conversation they have to have the right to renew our customers if we deliver a crappy experience, yeah. Yes, 25% of customers will leave after one, right? So they aren't enabled and in a position to do that without firefighting and it's killing customer success in CSM right now the firefighting, it is so important for customer support and service to to provide that platform for the people that are effectively getting money for the company that equals into our paychecks to be able to have that conversation in a in an effective way. Max Matson 35:51 Totally, totally. So what would you say that it's kind of what would you say is leading to that? That firefighting tendency, right? Like, what why is it that Customer Success and Support Teams are always now prototyp FIDE by having to fight fires? Shane Smith 36:06 So the I have several opinions on this. Yeah. The one thing that has happened over the past 20 years is something with regards to voice of the customer, believe it or not, if you go back, when voice of the customer just started out, it was actually pinned to support support should do this, you're talking to the customers more than everybody else, you should do this. And they quickly realize that that the DNA of a support person very often was not congruent with that of a person that has to ask for money. I didn't want to say sales, right? Yeah. And in this kind of realization, we birthed the new organization of customer success. And this is very early 2000s, maybe late 90s, depending on, you know, where you want to stick the pin. And in my experience, as a customer support leader at the time, i Congratulations, take this, you go you go and do this. Yeah, they also had a revenue aspect to the role. So So very often they're not cost of goods sold. Customer Success. Okay, so that's good. Now, what has happened in there's varying opinions on this, in my opinion, though, is we have somewhat come full circle back to that early 2000s, late 90s mentality, and what we're asking a customer success manager to do is absolutely unreasonable, in my opinion, generally speaking, manage this book, manage this book you have, there are a lot of CSMs if they're listening, when I say 100, there'll be like, I wish I had 100 You know, it could be 800 different customers. Oh, and by the way, I want you to touch base with them. You know, once a quarter, we can argue about the effectiveness of that. And I want you to get the renewals by the way I also want you to upsell and support didn't pick up the phone or it didn't answer their email. So how do you fix this issue? Oh, and by the way, CSM, you need to be a technical expert to in order to do this, it is it is a very, very, very challenging space right now. And they have the pressure of revenue on top of them for for that so. The it's so it's so vitally important to take a step outside of ourselves, look at what others are being faced or are facing. And, and to address that accordingly and enable them customer success and sales, they pay, they pay the bills, they just do. So we should all be subservient. And the best partners that we can possibly be, it's on us, not them. Right? To be that best partner, enable them so we can continue to get our paycheck. That's the with them the what's in it for me, right. And, and the and the unsexy kind of answer to the question is, is it really is relationship I can build you a process that that forces you to have certain amount of meetings and do the all these other things, but if you're the support person, or the marketing person or the finance person it's on all of us to to be helping sales and to be helping customer success. It's on us right it's our the volition has to be here. I've never met a customer success manager that has or CS person where you're How can I help you do And from that period standpoint that has not answered that question. With a little bit of disbelief sometimes that, you know, what do you want? What do you want? And that I mean, that's the answer. It's it's really relationship. Max Matson 40:16 Yeah. Yeah, totally at this kind of decomposition of customers as people, right. More looking at them as numbers, I think it's always the root of a lot of these problems. Right? Yeah. It's so sure. You mentioned kind of this, this dichotomy between the two departments, right sales and customer success. You've, you've mentioned in your your LinkedIn profile, that you are sales averse, right? Oh, personally? Yes. Personally? How do you reconcile that as an entrepreneur? Right, because I know, founder sales is a major part of getting something like this off the ground? Oh, that's, Shane Smith 40:56 that is a fascinating question. And I'm really glad that I'm really glad that you asked it. So one. So one of the things that I did in the very beginning, it was kind of a self assessment on myself, and I realized, again, that my one of my weakest points was was selling I, as much as I like to financially model and show the number is selling, it has never ever been something that's natural. For me. That being said, just kicked off this firm, I need to go sell, right. So I went to the training, talk with a lot of people had a lot of mentorship. And one of the things I wished I had learned earlier in my journey, specifically about five months earlier. Was that wasn't authentic to me. And when I realized that, I, I also realized that I could sell if you will, by being authentic. And you know, a real a real example. Real example I'll leave you with is yesterday, somebody reached out to me, we we, over the weekend, weirdly. and schedule a call. This person is nowhere to be found. You know, I have Sales Navigator and all this. No idea who or where they are I know them now. Yeah. Although, out of the blue, and it was a person in customer experience, that similar scenario learning a lot, a lot of different things going on. And we had a half an hour call that went about and I don't know, an hour and a half. And it was a great call. Hey, hi. I highly enjoyed it at the end of the call with no pretense. Shame, what are the packages that you offer? I'd really like to work with you. Yeah, I didn't sell. I didn't sell you know, and and that. That has been my my typical kind of funnel inbound. And by being authentic and being able to jump on the phone, and like, I just want to help you. I just want to help you. Like there was a, there is a limit, right? And I think most people realize that, although approaching it from the heart and authentically is been the way that I guess you could say I sell Max Matson 43:49 Yeah, yeah. Right on. No, I think that's a great, that's a great lesson, right? Like, I hope that people listening who are also sales lovers. take that to heart because I do think that there's so much to be said for just showcasing your abilities through your words and actions, right, as opposed to writing a sales pitch. Shane Smith 44:07 It really is. And I realized that there are there are different sides to this. This thought one of the earliest pieces of advice that I got was give away everything. Give away everything I can come in with that support readiness assessment, I can tell you what's wrong and and or what maybe you should be doing and these other things. You can also go on Google for almost anything and find almost anything and an AI my Lord. You can do it. So so that information in of itself isn't particularly valuable. Having that information and saying oh crap, how do I do this? That's where the value is. Right? So I'm in the giveaway everything I can camp. And you know so far it's worked out Max Matson 45:00 Awesome. No, I love that. I love that. Oh, Shane, this has been an absolute pleasure. Is there anything you want to leave people with? Shane Smith 45:08 You know, the only thing I would say is or a couple things I would say is thank you. I appreciate everyone listening and thank you, Max as well. Oh, my pleasure. You know, if you're interested, I'm on LinkedIn. I post almost all the time, Shane Smith, or look up ever radix or website ever radix.com. So Max Matson 45:29 perfect. Perfect. Shane Smith 45:31 And don't be shy. I'm not going to sell you because I can't. Max Matson 45:33 Yeah, you've heard Awesome. Well, Shane, thank you again. This has been so much fun. Shane Smith 45:42 My absolute pleasure. Thank you so much. Thank you