IAM502- Founder Helps HR Professionals Find and Buy The Right Software

Phil Strazzulla is the founder of SelectSoftware Reviews, a website dedicated to helping HR professionals find and buy the right software for their business.

Phil started his career working in venture capital at Bessemer Venture Partners before getting his MBA at Harvard Business School.

• CEO Hack: Cultivating a healthy life
• CEO Nugget: Understanding your own bias and that of thought of leaders
• CEO Defined: Privilege to be grateful for each day

Website: https://www.selectsoftwarereviews.com/

http://philstrazzulla.com/

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Transcription:

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Intro 0:02

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview?

If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of.

This is the I AM CEO Podcast.

Gresham Harkless 0:29

Hello, this is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast and I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Phil Strazzulla of SelectSoftware Reviews.

Phil, it's awesome to have you on the show.

Phil Strazzulla 0:39

Thanks for having me. Gresh.

Gresham Harkless 0:40

No problem. It's super excited to have you on. What I wanted to do is just read a little bit more about Phil so you can hear about all the awesome things that he's doing.

Phil is the founder of SelectSoftware Reviews, a website dedicated to helping HR professionals find and buy the right software for their business. Phil started his career working in venture capital at Bessemer Venture Partners before getting his MBA at Harvard Business School.

Phil, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO Community?

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Phil Strazzulla 1:05

Let's do it.

Gresham Harkless 1:05

Let's make it happen. I wanted to kick everything off and hear a little bit more about your background, what I call your CEO story, and what led you to get started with your business.

Phil Strazzulla 1:13

Yeah, sure. I guess my sort of professional story started when I was a lot younger probably the 12 or 13 years old, when I first started getting interested in all this stuff. I grew up sort of in the '90s boom in the stock market and .com, everybody was kind of talking about it. I was like, oh, there's this like, easy way to make money. That's exciting. It's better than mowing lawns and all the other stuff I was doing. My brother and I convinced my mom to take us to Fidelity and we opened up brokerage accounts and still have that account live and actively kind of started trading stocks was smart enough or lucky enough to get out before it all collapsed was *Ben like a Buffett disciple.

Of course, he was very aligned with Alan Greenspan's comments about irrational exuberance. I did that whole thing while investing the doing that since I was a kid. Then when I was in college, I interned at a two-person startup and I just loved the impact that I could have this sort of ability to think creatively and solve problems in different ways. I was doing a lot of like cold calling, and sales and realized, like, oh, I can 10x my efforts by doing some marketing, and I can get free marketing if I do it in the right way.. From that experience, I was like, I would love to start a company one day, took a couple of jobs after college to help me build that skill set, most notably working at Bessemer, doing early-stage investing, going to business school, and then finally have the guts to start my own thing, taught myself how to program kind of thought that was like a necessary skill set for starting a technology business and started working on different projects.

One thing led to another I started this business called Next Wave Hire, which is recruiting software for SMBs, specifically, seven or eight months ago hired a guy to run that business as sort of like a general manager, and had a lot of free time want to start another business have the startup bug like most people probably listening, I love to learn, I love to teach. The gap and market I saw is that there are just a million b2b software vendors, especially in the HR space, and it's hard to pick which one to go forward with. I wanted to kind of shed some light on, unbiased reviews in that ecosystem helped HR teams buy the right software to be successful, as individuals as well as from a business perspective.

Gresham Harkless 3:46

Nice. So that's super exciting to hear like you said, he kind of had that entrepreneurial DNA in your veins, and he pursued it in a lot of different ways and in great to help get you in the most entrepreneurial form. If you don't know how to do something, sometimes you just self-learn and teach yourself how to do it as you were able to do with coding. A lot of times you have to do that, to make sure that you can be successful, or at the very least knowledgeable about certain aspects of your business.

Phil Strazzulla 4:12

Yeah, I think that's right. Like, that's, to me, the most valuable skill set is to learn. To learn SEO, and like go deep on that to learn how to code, to learn, how to do sales when you need to do that. The amazing thing is there are so many great resources out there to learn how to do this stuff. If you don't know, you don't have to go to graduate school, you don't have to have a fancy advisor, as you can just start pretty basic like googling stuff and take an online course and like, kind of use the resources that are out there for you.

Gresham Harkless 4:46

Yeah, absolutely, and especially in this day and age, there are so many resources that are available to us just set at a click of a button and for you to be able to research and learn how to do anything but there's just so much available to us and I know you read it something that is a resource that we can also Google as well and find out more. Could you tell us a little bit more through SelectSoftware Reviews? Tell us what we would find there and how it help out us as business owners.

Phil Strazzulla 5:11

Yeah. So basically, what we're doing is we're pretty analogous to like Word or not WordPress, or a wire cutter, or NerdWallet. Except for this HR tech vertical. If you're looking at a new Payroll Solution, we'll tell you, who are the top 10 payroll vendors out of the three or 400 that exist out there? What is the sort of keys to selecting the right one? What do you think about budgeting, ROI, and implementation pitfalls, like basically everything you need to know in very digestible, very actionable content so that you can make the right decision?

Because I think for a lot of these things, if you make the wrong decision, it can be very, very costly like a lot of software is expensive. It also just takes a long time to implement. We're trying to aggregate all the advice that you would need, if you have like a friend who was just like an expert in buying XYZ type of software, what would they tell you so that you can do the right thing, you can get your promotion, you can help your business accelerate. We're doing that for all the different categories within HR technology, with the aspiration of one day, doing it for other b2b software categories as well.

Gresham Harkless 6:23

Nice. Yeah, that makes so much sense. I think that be able to kind of aggregate and consolidate and provide all the information that's available to us because there's so much again, that's available to us if we just Google. But have that in those different formats that you talked about, and be able to kind of filter through and read and get it in digestible form, instead of having to like to go through different reviews and different pages of Google, it gets you all that into a one-stop shop. It kind of sounds like

Phil Strazzulla 6:50

Yeah, exactly. I think the key is, in-depth, unbiased research. I think most of the content on the internet has some sort of bias to it. There are a lot of review websites out there that have user reviews. Most of that is paid for Play content, even a business as reputable as Gartner is almost entirely paid to play. My philosophy on this stuff is like, Look, I'm not trying to build like a multibillion-dollar company. The market is so huge that if I act morally, it might be slightly detrimental to my economic outcome, but I can feel good about that. Potentially, it's good over time, because having high-quality content means that you're going to rank higher and Google people are going to talk about you at conferences, and they're going to send it to their friends. That, of course, is going to help your business.

In the short term, there are companies every week that email us that say, Hey, how can we get on your website? How much does it cost, and the majority of those companies are terrible, they just have awful solutions. I say, hey, it's not a good fit for XYZ reasons. Of course, I'm losing 1000s of dollars a month, which at the earlier stages of business is like a lot of money. I can sort of like stick to my Northstar, which helps me I think, in the long term build a more valuable product for the users and therefore myself as well.

Gresham Harkless 8:17

Yeah, that makes so much sense. It's kind of like the answer. If they don't have really good products and they want to get on your platform, the real answer is actually to go and work and get a better product and that'll help you to be able to get on the platform.

Phil Strazzulla 8:31

Yeah, that's that would be good advice. I don't I try not to be Yeah, confrontational. Especially over email, like, a lot can be lost in conversating in translation. I don't want to make anybody outright angry at me. It'd be like, here are the objective criteria. Sorry, this rubric says you can't be on there. I love for you to be on there. That's kind of the way I handle it. I think you're right, the real advice would be and that's probably another business right like consulting, like, here's why you don't have one of the products that I feel comfortable putting on the website, here's how you can make it better. Go execute on that and let's revisit this in six or nine months.

Gresham Harkless 9:16

Yeah, that makes so much sense. The reason I just pointed that out is because it's the it's the it's philosophy that you have for your business, it sounds like you're making sure that you're putting out quality content, you're making sure that you're being unbiased. Those kinds of quality principles, not taking shortcuts and just advertising or doing things to be found, but you're putting out high quality and understanding that, that's going to be the thing that's going to keep you long term to be relevant. I definitely appreciate that and I wanted to ask you, and this could be for you personally, or for your business, I want to ask you for what I call your secret sauce. This is what you feel kind of sets you apart and makes you unique. I don't know if you already touched on that or if you can expand on that a little bit more.

Phil Strazzulla 9:55

Yeah, I think from the business perspective, it's just like keeping that Northstar of doing Right by the people who read the content. Having that as like the true purpose, like impacts the design of the website, the content, like business model, everything, I think in the right ways, and having a business, having a Northstar, like making money, means that you're going to be 80% similar, but that 20% is probably going to be a very big difference. I think the secret sauce is just like, constantly trying to get better. That's like how do I try to do that it's journaling, it's reading, it's meditating, it's paying attention to how I'm spending my time, what I'm putting into my body, what I'm doing with my body.

I think all of those things sort of make the person better, which allows you to take advantage of the opportunities that come your way, and also allow you to jump over those hurdles that are just inherent in entrepreneurship. No matter who you are, no matter what you're doing, if you're running Facebook, or you're running a one-person startup, like, you're just going to have like all these like really, really challenging things that happen to you. They're not as challenging as living in a place where you don't have potable water. I think they're, they're still like very challenging mentally. If you're doing the right things, if you're, if you're trying to get better every day, like, you're going to be able to take advantage and jump over those hurdles. That's when I think about like, the thing that drives me to hopefully find continued success. I think that sort of attitude is sort of my secret sauce, as you put it,

Gresham Harkless 11:46

I appreciate that. I wanted to switch gears. I know you gave us a CEO hack already. I don't know if there's anything else that you feel like it's like an app or book, or a habit that makes you more effective and efficient. In addition to the snowball effect,

Phil Strazzulla 11:58

I think one of the most important things is to cultivate a healthy life and realize that the time that you are spending, exercising, eating right, meditating, and spending time with friends, is not wasted. I think many times I wake up and I'm like, Alright, let's start doing emails. Your brain is gone, your ability to think creatively is gone, you've already looked at your phone, and you're already thinking about the nine things you got to do before breakfast. You're probably execution focus. Like, that's how you have gotten to where you are but you have to realize that like your execution, the focus is a strength and a weakness. You need to take a step back and say, spending 10 minutes meditating at the beginning of the day will make me more effective.

Gresham Harkless 12:48

You're right. I know you already also gave us some of what I call CEO nuggets. So this is like a word of wisdom or a piece of advice. It could be specifically related to HR and HR professionals, but what's something that would be like a word of wisdom or piece of advice you would give?

Phil Strazzulla 13:03

Probably, I've mentioned this a couple of times throughout the interview already, but I like this idea of bias and understanding your personal bias, the things that you like to do or don't like to do, or the mental models that you've adopted due to your experience, and how that's influencing your decision making. I think most importantly, understanding the bias of thought leaders, right, and that could be like a mentor, or it could be somebody that you get coffee with, and you're like, Oh, my God, I get to sit down with this person who did this amazing thing, and they're gonna give me advice.

They're almost certainly going to give you advice with almost no context and it's going to be highly colored by the things that they've done, or haven't done, or the thing that happened to them this morning, or whatever. It's so hard to parse through all of these things. Again, this is why it's sort of like having a clear mind and being able to think, when you're brushing your teeth, or whatever, is so important.

Gresham Harkless 14:04

Yeah, absolutely. Now I wanted to ask you my absolute favourite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. We're hoping to have different quote and quote CEOs on the show.

So Phil, what does a CEO mean to you?

Phil Strazzulla 14:15

Being a CEO, to me is sort of like a privilege that you should be grateful for each day.

Gresham Harkless 14:25

I appreciate that and I appreciate your time, even more, Phil. What I wanted to do is pass you to the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional you want to let our readers and listeners know and then of course, how best they can get a hold of you and find out about all the awesome things you guys have on your platform.

Phil Strazzulla 14:40

Yeah, sure. I guess as we head into the winter in Boston, I'm always reminded of like, there are always these stretches of tough times. I feel like they always happen in the winter for some reason here probably because of the lack of sun and I think it's just nice to like be able to connect with the folks in your community, or online communities to understand that things are going through are like, quite common, like, it's not a function of like you as a bad leader, are you making bad decisions or whatever, like, you're probably doing a pretty good job.

Whatever challenges you're working through, just like know that there are a lot of other people out there who have kind of gone through similar things. You'll probably get through it as long as you're gritty and smart and sort of level-headed enough. In terms of where people can find me, I think LinkedIn is probably the best filter, you can check out SelectSoftware Reviews. I also have a personal blog that I post every once in a while at philstrazzulla.com and yeah, we'd love to connect with people.

Gresham Harkless 15:47

Awesome. We'll have those links in the show notes so that everybody can follow up with you and check out the blog and of course, go to SelectSoftware Reviews as well, too. Just as you said I think sometimes in entrepreneurship and business, it can seem extremely lonely, and a lot of times when we're going through hard times we feel like we're by ourselves.

As you said, by making time to talk with people and talk about sometimes the difficulties, trials, and tribulations we go through, we realize that we're not the only ones and we can also get support community and help. I appreciate you reminding us of that and of course for all the awesome things you're doing. Thank you so much and I hope you have a phenomenal day.

Outro 16:22

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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