IAM1126- Founder Enables Companies to Manage Their Onboarding Process

Jeff Epstein is the founder of Onboard.io which is a SaaS made specifically for customer implementation to automate, optimize & create the perfect journey for every customer and enable companies to manage the perfect onboarding process.
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Jeff is a lifelong entrepreneur and a 2011 NYC TechStar graduate. He's been through the ups and downs of running, scaling, and selling a business and he's excited to share great value with your audience as well as his mission with Onboard.io.

• CEO Hack: Allowing myself to be efficient
• CEO Nugget: Your reputation and integrity take a lifetime to build and can be lost in a moment
• CEO Defined: (i) Setting the tone and the vision for an organization (ii) Supporting people

Website: https://onboard.io/

https://www.influencepodium.com/jeff-epstein

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Transcription

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00:24 – 00:51 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 I AM CEO podcast.

00:52 – 01:01 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 Jeff Epstein of Onboard.io. Jeff, It's great to have you on the show.

01:01 – 01:03 Jeff Epstein:

Yeah, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

01:03 – 01:33 Gresham Harkless:

Appreciate you for taking some time out. And before we jump into the interview, I want to read a little bit more about Jeff so you can hear about all the awesome things that he's doing. And Jeff is the founder of onboard.io, which is a SaaS made specifically for customer implementation to automate, optimize, and create the perfect journey for every customer and enable companies to manage the perfect onboarding process. Jeff is a lifelong entrepreneur and a 2011 NYC Techstar graduate. He's been through the ups and downs of running, scaling, and selling a business. And he's excited to share great value with our audience, as well as his mission with onboard.io. Jeff, great to have you on the show. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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01:41 – 01:43 Jeff Epstein:

Yeah. Let's do

01:43 – 01:50 Gresham Harkless: 

Awesome. Well, let's do it then. So to kick everything off. I wanted to rewind the clock a little bit and hear a little bit more about how you got started, what I call your CEO story.

01:52 – 02:23 Jeff Epstein:

So, my start in, you know, this is probably like lots of folks. So I started just by trying to create something to find something to do with my life. It's not a very sexy story. I had just graduated from law school and I was fortunate enough, that I had a side, sort of a side business and affiliate marketing and I was able to pay off my loan. So I didn't know I didn't want to practice law. Didn't know what I wanted to do with my life. I started basically what's now considered a startup, but at the time was just an internet business. And that was my first start. A couple of them failed, to be quite honest. I didn't do very well. And then the 1 that was fairly successful was the company called Ambassador, which was my last company.

That was the 1 where we raised a little bit of financing after I went through the Techstars process and learned about how to think about a company in terms of a scalable venture fundable way, which was very eye-opening to me. And now a lot of this information is on the internet and with podcasts and things like that. It's amazing. You can learn all these things. Back then there was very little available. And I guess fast-forward a few years after Ambassador, which we sold in 2018.

Now, which is the most fun for me with onboard, I get to start a company with my friends and we get to build something that is a problem that we faced quite often with my previous company, which was how do we get customers onboarded with the technology and by using technology made for customer success teams. And so that's what we do at Onboard. And it's fun because now it's sort of full-circle work. I'm doing something that I am passionate about and want to do. And it was, I think because I got to sort of learn so much as I went along previously as building a couple of different businesses.

03:47 – 04:09 Gresham Harkless:

Nice. Well, I appreciate you for mentioning that journey. I think so many times, as you said, sometimes the journey isn't as sexy as we would hope. But I think a lot of times just by taking action and learning like how you want to, I guess make a dent in the universe, but also make a dent within our organizations or companies and how we fulfill those gaps is sometimes not the sexiest route, but a lot of times it's just taking action that leads us that way.

04:10 – 04:43 Jeff Epstein:

Exactly. 1 of the things that you realize is that It's always challenging and there are new challenges every day. But what's amazing about a couple of things about sort of running your own company or being an entrepreneur is you get to set the tone. And that's not only for yourself but for the people around you. And so at the end of the day, you have no 1 to blame but yourself a lot of times, which is very hard. But the fun part is you have a lot of autonomy to do a lot of things and the direction and the focus and things that you want to do, which is unique. A lot of people don't understand that probably a lot of our peers, non-entrepreneur peers.

04:56 – 05:19 Gresham Harkless:

Yeah. And just like you said, I often say it's like you have a paintbrush in your back pocket and you get to paint with the canvas of what you want to see, how you want the business front culture, just so many different aspects. But at the same time, you also have that paintbrush in your hand if it doesn't go according to plan and you have, no 1 but to blame the person with the paintbrush was in some VNS.

So you're right about that. And so I know you used to talk a little bit about Onboard. oi, and I'm super excited to hear a lot more about it. So funny, because I had an internship during college where I was focused on onboarding and I had never heard about that. So for people who may not have heard about onboarding, could you tell us a little bit more about that and what you've been able to do with onboard.io?

05:38 – 06:07 Jeff Epstein:

Yeah, exactly. So the concept of onboarding is, if you think about the entire sales and really customer experience process, especially in software, and my background is in software as a service, so SAS. And what that means is your customers are renewing every month or every year. And so not only do you need to sell them and sort of close them 1 time, but you can also think about it like you're also always having to close them so they stay a customer with you.

And so when we were looking at the metrics and thinking about how to build the most efficient, best possible business previously, 1 of the things you want to do in SaaS is you want to have that customer retention be 100% or even maybe over 100% if they spend more money in the next subscription cycle, so to speak. And so 1 of the ways that we figured we could do that to increase retention was to create this amazing onboarding experience, meaning that the customer would utilize this technology very effectively and figure out how to get it all integrated correctly as soon as possible. And that sounds easy, right? And that sounds good. But as anyone in software here probably knows, or if you also are a purchaser of software, things are always more complicated than they seem.

And that's the same with the business, right? Especially when there's a lot of moving parts. And so the idea of OnBoard is to automate and organize the process of getting customers to use your product or service. So before they even actually use it, they have to get all the things working properly, set up correctly, and configured. And so OnBoard is a software tool to make that happen easily. And So that's how we started because again, it was a major pain point that we spent a lot of time thinking about.

07:20 – 07:33 Gresham Harkless: 

Absolutely. Appreciate that. And so I wanted to ask you now for what I call your secret sauce. This could be for yourself or the business or a combination of both. But what do you feel sets you apart and makes you unique?

07:34 – 08:10 Jeff Epstein:

I guess I'll start with myself, but I think it applies to businesses, right? Like ultimately, as an entrepreneur, you want to apply sort of your uniqueness or secret sauce to the organization and hopefully make, you know, sort of ingrain that culture. And for me, you know, the thing that I've found, and I think it applies to Onward specifically, but it's transparency, integrity, and being honest, which I think goes hand in hand with integrity.

So, what I found in 1 of the biggest learnings for me over the last 15 years of owning companies is oftentimes you don't, it shouldn't be like an adversarial situation with a customer. As you should, it should be like a partnership. You shouldn't feel like you're ripping them off and they shouldn't feel like they're ripping you off. Like you should get a fair price for what you're delivering and you should be delivering value, you know? And in those situations, you can become really good friends with the people that are customers of yours.

08:35 – 08:46 Gresham Harkless:

Awesome, awesome, awesome. 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 Apple book or a habit that you have, but what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?

08:46 – 09:21 Jeff Epstein:

1 of the hacks for me is thinking, and I think it comes down to really having great communication, but thinking about things in terms of frameworks. And so I know that's a little abstract, but trying to set yourself up in a way where you can manage as a CEO, as an entrepreneur, you're typically managing lots and lots of things, right? Like your life and your business, they're all colliding. Like there's never time for enough.

So I think like really allowing yourself to be efficient and to, I don't want to say don't, you need to think a lot, you need to spend a lot of time thinking, but you need to act, right? The difference between people that I think are successful and the people that are just sort of always dreaming is doing the work, right? And doing the things that need to be done.

09:35 – 09:46 Gresham Harkless:

So I want to ask you now for what I call a CEO nugget. So this could be a word of wisdom or a piece of advice. You might've already touched on this, but it might be something you would tell a client or if you happen to be a time machine, you might tell your younger business self.

09:47 – 10:23 Jeff Epstein:

I think the 1 thing that I would tell myself, and I think your reputation and integrity, they take a career or a lifetime to build, and they can be lost in a moment. I'd like to think that I've always sort of thought that, and I think that I've stayed true to that. But the people that I see that sort of have broken trust, or whether they were employees or other companies, or I just, you almost can't rebuild it. Like communities are close, tighten it, and word travels. And the best way to I think do well again, for yourself, for your business, for your life is to be transparent and be honest and create the best reputation that you can. That almost always works in the long run versus a lot of like little tricks and things like that. That's what sustains in business I think, and in life as well.

10:48 – 10:59 Gresham Harkless:

Yes, absolutely. And so I want to ask you now my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. We're hoping to have different quote-unquote CEOs on the show. So Jeff, what does being a CEO mean to you?

11:02 – 11:49 Jeff Epstein:

For me, I mean, I think, what a CEO means is really just setting the tone and I think leading and setting the vision for an organization or a business, and I think, again, helping set the initial value, the values in the mission. But ultimately, I think from a more practical speaking, I think what it means is supporting people, right? Like ultimately, yes, technically you can be the CEO of 1, a 1 personal company. And I joked in another podcast that it was the easiest job I ever got. If you just start, you're the CEO.

So in some ways, it's really easy. And anyone can do it. You can buy an LLC and you can be a CEO in a business car. But In terms of what I think being a good CEO means, I think it's like, to me, what I'm most proud of and how I measure other CEOs is how they build up the teams underneath them and how successful the people that work with them become and how much they sort of level up in their life. And so that's always been sort of for me, what mattered most, it wasn't sort of like the dollars of fundraising or the number of headcounts, so to speak, right?

Like I think for me it was, can we create an environment where people can learn and grow and become amazing people, right? And we used to say like, can we change the trajectory of their life, to make it infinitely better? And so that for me, I think is being a CEO and a leader, like those are the things that are incredibly valuable in terms of like measuring like success.

12:58 – 13:24 Gresham Harkless:

Yeah. And I love that. And I love how it ties back to the hack and the nugget that we were talking about too, because I think if you have those values, you have those things that you want to see, you begin to ask yourself that very powerful question is how are you changing the trajectory of people that are around you, the team members or whatever term it might be, FTEs or whatever that might be, how it manifests itself, but are you changing their lives?

And when you start to ask yourself, you start to see like this can be the impact that you have and you pour your heart and your soul into what it is that you do because it's made up of the people that have lives, that have families, that create that domino effect in everything that you do. So I think it becomes a lot more of a just kind of position and more of a, like a calling and a responsibility for lack of a better term.

13:44 – 14:15 Jeff Epstein:

Definitely. And it's 1 of the cool things that, like you said, if you're a CEO, you have this opportunity to do so much to get across any vectors of the business and of life, and you can help so many people, and you can build some amazing things, and again, hopefully, you can set yourself and your family up for success. So there are a lot of great opportunities that are super unique to being sort of a CEO or early-stage owner of a small business. Hopefully a big business.

14:15 – 14:33nGresham Harkless:

Absolutely. Small starts big, or big starts small. So you got to make sure that. So Jeff, 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 out all the awesome things you're working on.

14:35 – 15:10 Jeff Epstein:

Yeah, no, I mean, I appreciate it. I'm super passionate about entrepreneurship and helping folks and I'm happy to chat with anyone who reaches out, whether over email or online or phone or whatever, you can reach me on Twitter, it's Jeff underscore Epstein, LinkedIn also Jeff Epstein. And if you look for onboard, that'll be me. I know there are a few Jeff Epstein's not related to any of the bad ones or really, and anyone I know on, I don't know any other Jeff Epstein's I'm related to. So yeah feel free to reach out. Also emails, jeff@onboard.io. If you have any questions about onboard and how we can help software companies make their customers onboard their products faster.

15:22 – 15:47 Gresham Harkless:

Awesome, awesome, awesome. Well, thanks, Jeff. I truly appreciate that to make it even easier. So no confusion. We'll have the links and information as well in the show notes that everybody can click through, but truly appreciate all the wisdom and insight that you provided today. Of course, what you're building and helping to empower these organizations and employees and everything around what they're trying to do to make that impact and that ding in people's lives. So Thank you so much again, my friend, and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

15:48 – Outro