IAM1121- Co-founder Disrupts the Outsourcing Space

Brianna is the cofounder of CrewBloom. They're disrupting the outsourcing space by connecting the top 2% of sales and support talent with roles at growing companies.

• CEO Hack: Recognising there's a lot of work to be done
• CEO Nugget: Chillout and don't become emotionally attached to processes
• CEO Defined: Cheerleader, emotional intelligence, and taking ownership of livelihoods

Website: https://crewbloom.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianna-carney-crewbloom/

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Transcription

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00:24 – Intro

Are you ready to hear business stories and learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and level up your business from awesome CEOs, entrepreneurs, and founders without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresh values your time and is ready to share with you the valuable info you're in search of. This is the IMCEO podcast.

00:52 – Gresham Harkless
Hello, Hello, Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast and I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Brianna Carney of Crew Bloom. Brianna,

01:00 – Brianna Carney
It's great to have you on the show. Oh, Thanks so much for having me. I'm excited.

01:03 – Gresham Harkless

Definitely super excited to have you on. And before we jump in, I want to read a little bit more about Brianna so you can hear about all the awesome things that she's doing. And Brianna is the co-founder of Crew Bloom. They're disrupting the outsourcing space by connecting the top 2% of sales and support talent with roles at growing companies. And it's so refreshing and exciting to kind of hear about all the awesome things that they're doing the saying goes in order to go farther, you have to have a team in order to do that. So I love that you all are helping to empower, you know, so many organizations and people to be able to do that. So Rihanna, are you ready to speak to the I AMCEO community?

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01:35 – Brianna Carney

I am, yep.

01:36 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome, well, let's do it then. So to kind of kick everything off, I wanted to rewind the clock a little bit. Here is a little bit more on how you got started, what I call your CEO story.

01:44 – Brianna Carney

Yeah, of course. So Kerbloom came to fruition pretty organically. I was at Amazon before launching Kerbloom and obviously Fortune 500 and large companies are dependent on global talent. So after leaving Amazon, I spent a year traveling throughout Asia, got to work, met my co-founder and just been setting up to do better business and raise the bar in terms of off-shoring talent ever since.

02:13 – Gresham Harkless
Yeah, absolutely. And I imagine that being able to find the right people and have that top-tier talent is so important for organizations and businesses.

02:22 – Brianna Carney

Of course, yeah. Just looking at the amount of really disruptive founders that weren't able to achieve profitability given the cost of talent, we really felt it was important to kind of raise the bar and empower companies to grow on scale.

02:37 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. So I wanted to drill down a little bit more in here a little bit more on how you're doing and how you're raising that bar and helping to be kind of matchmakers, so to speak, you know, for these organizations. And then, of course, the people that have that talent. Could you take us through a little bit more on what it's like to work with you?

02:51 – Brianna Carney

Yeah, of course. So typically we're working with small to mid-size SaaS companies. So the organizations have systems processes and structures in place. They have sales or success leadership and they're solely in need of the human capitalist scale. So we acquire client opportunities in 3 ways. So we have an outbound SDR team that reaches out based on a lead that should be from a sales ops team. The sales ops team goes out and sources leads for job posts from Craigslist and indeed the SDR will reach out and say, hey, I saw that you're hiring for a client success manager.

What would you think about hiring someone like me? I'm calling you from Malaysia and the cost of a grab to the airport is $6 versus where you're at in Boston at 60. They set an appointment and we have a senior BDR team that converts that. Also, we have an affiliate program, so our existing clients are able to refer business to us and have an incentive for doing so. And then they also obviously have a technical marketing team that drives organics through the website.

04:01 – Gresham Harkless

Nice, I definitely appreciate that. And so a lot of times people that have that need, they're reaching out to, you know, you and the team to understand like how they can fill those needs. But it sounds like as well too, you're also reaching out to them sometimes.

04:13 – Brianna Carney

Of course, So it's a combination. Yeah.

04:16 – Gresham Harkless

Okay. Perfect. Perfect. Perfect. And then as far as like what you feel kind of even sets you apart and makes you unique, what I like to call your secret sauce. What do you feel like is that for yourself personally or the crew bloom as a whole?

04:27 – Brianna Carney

Yeah, so I think our secret sauce is that you don't ever want to overlook the reality that the primary value proposition of offshoring is cost savings. That being said, however, we've all called a bank, an airline, gotten connected with someone outside the US and they just saw it, right? They couldn't speak English. They had no instinct. There's marginal talent all over the world, but there are also cream-of-the-crop top performers. My team speaks better English than I do, is highly instinctual, and just cream of the crop top performers. So we just have a radically high applicant rejection rate.

I think that's really what sets us apart. We just launched into beta last week a platform that automates the applicant scoring process. So taking a really holistic grab in a 90-minute window of what their specs and professional skillsets are, but also understanding their device requirements and typing abilities and internet speeds, those sorts of things. And we grab all that data and develop a candidate profile that we then there can share with our clients. It's essentially like Tinder for talent selection. I think that the high applicant rejection rate and being a tech-enabled company is really what sets us apart.

05:39 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, I appreciate you sharing that and being able to kind of, you know, aggregate all that data and information and be able to obviously, you know, manifest itself into that profile that people can kind of see, you know, what's a great fit at all. And it kind of sounds like, too, I know you touched a little bit upon a lot of times the organizations, the businesses, startups, potentially have this really phenomenal idea, but the gap isn't there as far as them being able to find the talent to be able to kind of implement that idea. So being able to kind of, of course, have those tools that you have, but also to be able to bridge that gap sounds like it's absolutely huge.

06:13 – Brianna Carney

Yeah, I mean, we feel really strongly about what we do. My co-founder is actually in the Philippines. She's Filipino. So that's kind of where we got our start. The majority of our resources are in the Philippines, but today we have folks logging in from 17 countries. Everybody works remotely. Kind of having a remote work model since inception has really paid off over the pandemic that we're all suffering from. So yeah, we feel pretty excited to be to do where we're at today. Obviously have a lot of growth and work to do, but I'm proud of my team.

06:43 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. It's always work to do and I appreciate you, you know, mentioning that as well too, because I imagine there's this quote by Wayne Gretzky where he says, I don't skate to where the puck is, I skate to where the puck is going to be. And I imagine with the pandemic, a lot of things have moved where there's outsourcing and obviously virtually. So getting that opportunity to be where that puck is, it's absolutely huge.

07:02 – Brianna Carney

Yeah, we just have to kind of always try to see what tomorrow and the next year are going to bring and be 5 years ahead of the competition.

07:11 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. That's the name of the game. So I wanted to switch gears a little bit, And I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an app, a book, or a habit that you have, but what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?

07:26 – Brianna Carney

So I guess recognizing that I definitely know that there's always a lot of work to be done. I think my hack and kind of one of the biggest blessings or competitive advantages that I had out of the gate was my co-founder relationship. So Kate is really the peanut butter to my jelly so to speak, and we're just really able to hone in and hold one another accountable for pursuing the best versions of ourselves. When we look at the impact our leadership team and contributors and supporters are having, I just would say my hack is just really knowing how to identify folks who are far more capable and brilliant than myself. I think we fostered a pretty good human-centric work culture which is really important.

I think that we do a number of things internally so I could just say that we do a lot of really fun things, given a remote work model, team happy hours, and dress-up Mondays. And we have team chill Saturdays. We have a huge crew gloom gives back initiatives every quarter. We reach out in the community to help folks less fortunate than ourselves. We have a team that has a monthly humble huddle so we talk about and get comfortable with ways in which we fell short and what we didn't deliver or perform on.

We have an Elon Musk huddle once a month where everybody brings forth an awesome idea and the winner gets a pizza party for their family and then we implement those ideas and really foster a disruptive work culture. But yeah, I mean, I think those are a few things that I do that really stand out on a personal level. I think my hack is being a Special Olympics coach. I love coaching Special Olympics and I run marathons. So just kind of getting out and breathing fresh air and moving my body is a personal hack.

09:11 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, I appreciate you sharing that. And of course, you know, I think so many times we forget about that personal aspect. So I love how you added that in. Cause I say, we skip over the human aspect of the business so many times, but hearing all those things that you do as a team, but also being able to kind of lean on, you know, your things that kind of light you up as well too, or how we ultimately like to reach that success and have the fuel to kind of keep going as well.

09:33 – Brianna Carney

Yeah, totally. 100%. Like I say to my team all the time, like this just doesn't matter. Like work is always second. What matters most is like the humans that you love and getting out in the world and feeling good vibrations. But if we can show up and not hate our jobs every day and really deliver and pursue the best professional versions of ourselves, we'll be better neighbors and friends and sons and daughters and mothers and fathers. So yeah, it's really important.

09:57 – Gresham Harkless

Absolutely. And that creates that domino effect because we end up being in a better, obviously, city or state or environment as a whole. And once you're able to do that on a smaller level and it starts to create that domino effect, then you get to have that ultimately better world.

10:11 – Brianna Carney

Yeah, yeah. I feel pretty lucky each day.

10:14 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely, you're creating that change. And so I wanted to ask you now for what I call a CEO nugget. So this could be a word of wisdom or a piece of advice. It might be something you would tell a client or if you were to hop into a time machine, you might tell your younger business self.

10:30 – Brianna Carney

So I think I would tell my younger business self to just chill out, to be honest. Just there's a lot that we bootstrapped. And so there were a lot of expensive mistakes, a lot of things that we had to work our way through, and kind of time and believing in yourself is really all that matters there, but you just kind of have to go through those challenges and believe that it's going to pay off in the long run. So, I mean, We over the past 2 years have been pretty fortunate. We were able to double the revenue last year. I was trying to do the same this year. But the first few years were rough. Like we had some bearish growth. We built a product in the wrong language. And I just wish I would have been able to maturely address that with a little bit of chiller energy.

11:19 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. And I appreciate you sharing that. And I think so many times when you are very mission-driven, you have something that you want to do and implement and make a ding in the universe, so to speak. Sometimes we can beat ourselves up a lot. And sometimes even, you know, those people that are around us because we want to see that come to fruition. And I think one of the things that I kind of said to myself over this pandemic, especially too, is giving yourself grace, you know, for whatever happens, continue to work hard and drill down, but don't beat yourself up because that's not going to help you get any closer to where you want to be sometimes.

11:51 – Brianna Carney

A couple of other things maybe I would have been a little bit more diligent, quite a bit more diligent with boundaries surrounding work-life balance. Like the amount of nights I just brought my laptop onto the couch and fell asleep on my laptop was probably not productive or healthy. So yeah, just really being structured and holding myself accountable that way. And then also just like all entrepreneurs, I guess, I think it's really important to not become emotionally attached to processes. In the for-profit space, our oxygen is revenue. And if a process isn't making money, you have to be able to test that and identify that early on and adjust.

12:32 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, I appreciate you sharing that so much and I say so many times we can get attached to the what instead of the how or the how instead of the why I should say. And I think when you have that mission of what you want to do So many times when we try out different processes or different things, we want to be able to kind of pivot and change and not get as attached to that because that can not allow us to get to where our goals are. But if we have that strong mission, as you kind of talked about, and we understand that human aspect that you talked about as well too, then you have that opportunity to set yourself up for success for the organization, but also ourselves individually.

13:07 – Brianna Carney

Yeah, cheers, well said.

13:09 – Gresham Harkless

Absolutely. Well, perfect. Why now? I wanted to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. And we're hoping to have different quote-unquote CEOs on the show. So Brianna, what does being a CEO mean to you?

13:21 – Brianna Carney

I don't really consider myself a CEO. Like, I don't know. I mean, it just sounds pretty formal to me. Like, I guess I do make quite a few decisions. I just think as like we're set like the role of a CEO or a founder or leader is just to be a true leader to leverage emotional intelligence and to understand your team and to execute your core values in the day-to-day practices, like the example. And so it's really important that you take ownership of the livelihood of not only your team but their loved ones. It's a heavy lift.

14:00 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. Especially that emotional intelligence part, But I love that cheerleading piece because I think so many times, you know, in much of the same way, you kind of have to be on a balance for lack of a better term, and be able to kind of course, you drive things forward, but at the same time, make sure that you're supporting and support can be so many different things. So trying to figure out how to understand what is going to support what or what decision to make or not to make is a lot. But I think if we understand that this is like our mission, this is what we're set here to do, then that puts everything right in alignment.

14:31 – Brianna Carney

Yeah, yeah, I understand.

14:33 – Gresham Harkless

Well said. Absolutely, well, Miranda, truly appreciate that definition and I appreciate your time even more. What I wanted to do is just pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know and, of course, how best they can get a hold of you and find about all the awesome things you and your team are working on.

14:49 – Brianna Carney

Yeah, well, I was just like shout out to the listeners. Just like tuning into podcasts and different opportunities for growth and progress such as your podcast is critical. So huge shout out. Again, I'm here to help in any way possible. You can find me on LinkedIn. My name again is Brianna Carney, B-R-I-A-N-N-A-C-A-R-N-Y. My email is Brianna at caroobloom.com. You can follow us on social media. Yeah, most importantly, just be well, and be good to yourself.

15:21 – Gresham Harkless

Absolutely. Well, Brianna, truly appreciate that we will have the links and information in the show notes as well, too. I love you know, everything you're building and helping to connect, you know, that top tier talent, you know, with the people that need it as well too. But I think even more like hearing about your culture and hearing how important it is to kind of build that and create that so that we don't forget why we're doing what we're doing is maybe just as important. So I appreciate you for reminding us of that and doing that as well.

15:46 – Gresham Harkless
And I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

15:49 – Outro