Help Executives Increase 10X Efficiency

Welcome to The Spend Advantage™ Podcast by Varisource, the savings for your business.   Get access to discounts, rebates, benchmark and renewal savings for 100+ spend categories automatically for your company

We interview amazing people, companies, and solutions, that will help you 10X your bottom line savings and top line growth for your business --- https://www.varisource.com 

Transcript

 spend advantage is the competitive advantage for your spend across 100 plus vendor categories. This podcast is all about interviewing amazing people, company, and solutions that will help you tend your top line growth as well as bottom line savings for your business. Hello everyone! This is Victor with versus. Welcome to another episode of the Spend Advantage podcast. Today we have very excited to have one of our new partners, Execify Uh, Matt Odin, who's a CEO and co-founder, will be with us on the show today. Um, they are essentially the first AI executive operations platform helping executives be more efficient and thrive. Welcome to the show, Matt. Thanks, Victor. Great to be on today. Yeah, we, uh, we're really excited about this conversation because, you know, for us, we're always looking for partners that can help companies or even executives, um, you know, be, uh, do things easier, better, faster. And, uh, you created something super unique. Haven't seen, you know, anybody approaches. So a lot of, you know, great questions coming up. But if you don't mind, maybe for an audience, uh, why don't you give us kind of a bit of that founder's story background? How did you stumble into this executive, uh, operations thing? Sure thing, Victor. And we're so excited about our partnership with various sources. Well, we think we've got a lot of potential clients and prospects in common with the areas of industry that you work with, and I'm excited to to do some rollout soon. So with that, I'll tell you a little bit about how exactly I came to be. I spent years in high pressure environments in corporate, in early stage startups, through IPOs and public companies working in technology, and I saw a huge gap emerge through experience. And that that was around something we all do a lot of the time, which is scheduling. Scheduling was the starting point, and we're going to talk much, much beyond that today. But when you're traveling for business, when you're getting on zoom calls and need to be on with seven people, when you're tracking projects, when you have executive teams out there, they are executing on some sort of either tight or loose operational strategy. So the way that the executive team moves, how they're prepped for meetings, how their time is spent, how communications are sent out automated and manually across their teams, their direct reports as well as their peers and even up to the board level. How all that flows is really the function of executive operations. But when we started the company, we didn't have this term. We didn't we didn't start there. We started with the classic pain. And the pain was concentrated primarily in executive assistants, who are running the busy calendars and logistics for these executive teams. And through my experience, having had EA's, worked with EA's and really Victor during the most difficult part of my career. Middle management. Serving as my own. E managing teams. Planning. Off sites. International travel. My schedule was heavy. I used a lot of different apps across a lot of different internal teams and client teams, and really saw that there was a disconnect in the operational layer and in working with executive assistants, of whom we've interviewed over 500 and worked through demos and pilot programs with, we've identified key workflows that keep the executive teams operating at peak capacity. So the pain really came one day when I was standing over my kitchen sink. I was stress eating cheese and crackers. I was unemployed. I had served in numerous vice president general manager capacities. I was between startups trying to figure out what next. And through this, working with top tier recruiting agencies and a lot of business professionals in my network, trying to figure out, okay, where, where do I where does Matt Oden fit? I ended up on an email chain this 200th, the 1,000th in my career that had gone on and on, trying to locate a time for a group of people to meet. Right. We had about 3 or 4 of us. We needed to get on a call, discuss a particular business, and finding time was proving very clunky. We were 1015 emails deep and I said to myself, standing there, why hasn't anybody built a platform for executive assistants? And that was the genesis of executive. Since then, executive has evolved way beyond scheduling. We were born in an era where I was out, so we dove right in and platformed around it from step one, and we've built a set of AI tools, scheduling tools, analytics and reporting tools across the operational layer that helps to automate, um, AI actions and AI jobs, as we call them. And so on our platform, you can access your entire office suite across a network of your team and collaborate and run different AI queries and prompts and operational or again, workflows simply on demand on a schedule. Or you can run them when they're triggered by certain events, like an incoming email. And so the journey started. We got to this level of offering this in market, which has been just incredible, to to work with large companies and small companies to really mature the offering. And it really came from the pain point of the executive assistant, who was struggling to work across all these tool sets and keep everything organized for a very busy group of people. Being the executive layer within their organizations? Yeah, I think all the executives, I mean, you know, personally in my career, you know, being in executive roles, um, where a lot of times, you know, you're serving as your own, uh, you know, like, like you mentioned and, um, you know, obviously, whether it's in a smaller company, you have to do everything or a larger company where you have an E. So we could talk for hours. But I think a lot of the the story you gave a lot of the executives in, in the community probably is nodding their head saying, yeah, like, you know, either on my own E or I have an E. And, and so this kind of goes into a couple interesting questions I'm going to get into today. You mentioned the terminology executive operations. So obviously, you know, people know about FinOps. They know about DevOps. They know about all these different departments of operations. And nobody has really talked about or even maybe this term, uh, you know, exec op, right. So kind of walk us through how that came about and what has that become? Uh, you know, since you kind of been building off of that brand. Yeah, great. Great question. Because it is a new category that we're pioneering from a SaaS perspective. The term I can't claim that we created the term executive operations, but if you go into the circles of executive assistants, administrative professionals, executive support, executive operations is a term that comes up. And in terms of orchestrating that, right as a chief of staff, is it maybe a leader on an E team? You need to implement an operational profile. And so as we were building the platform this term kind of got on my radar and it just seemed to encapsulate what we were building and what we were doing, which is really platforming a part of the enterprise that's never been platformed before. And when you think about it, you think, okay, well, what what is this doing? Well, it's making executive teams more efficient at the end of the day. And that's in many cases the economic engine of the business. And so that's what we seek to do by empowering the teams that support the executive function within the organization. Yeah. And, um, you know, the the the question coming up next, uh, I'm really interesting interested to hear your thoughts because when you look at salespeople, they got CRMs, right. You got to give your your team the right tools for them to be as efficient, effective and powerful as possible. Makes sense. Right. You got to give it the right tools and everybody. So obviously you decided to, uh, work with, you know, executive assistants. And I think, uh, across the business world would love to, since you've interviewed so many. Would love to hear from you. Uh, what are some of their typical challenges that people may not be familiar with? Right. Because maybe they're thinking, hey, why don't you use calendly? Why don't you just use, uh, you know, the Microsoft Google Calendar tools and, uh, they just think, you know, that they're just going to take care of everything, but you're not giving them the right. Yeah. So can you kind of talk through, um, you know, what problems executive assistants are typically facing today and what are some current tech tech stack that you see all the time that they're using? And, um, yeah. Interesting topic. Yeah, absolutely. So great. Great topic. You know, kind of parlaying off the previous response about what is executive operations platform in the business. It's really about creating a tech stack like you mentioned for an area of the business that's critically important. And it's never really been platformed before. So what happens is if you are an executive or an executive assistant entering an organization, you're typically given a set of tools. And then within that tool set, expected to build some sort of operational workflows that constitute some sort of a loose or formal operations program. Now that could be down to things like policies on travel, right? And very practical things and rules that need to be followed within the organization. But what happens in the real world is, well, you get either Google Workspace or Microsoft 365. So you have Gmail and Outlook, you get Slack or Teams, and that becomes your threaded messaging, you know, internal and as well as some client facing or external market facing. Dialogues. You have zoom, or you're using teams or meats, or you have a video conferencing solution. You may have pockets of scheduler tools being used, such as Calendly, which is strong when it comes to, you know, hey, take a look at my calendar and pick a time use case that everybody's copied and it's now built into Google and Outlook. You may have a tool like that, but it's not really sufficient. You can't always offer up your your full calendar to external folks, and coordinating calendars, both internally and externally can prove very, very difficult when you get into a group situation. And that's where these point solutions, whether it's Hubspot's calendaring tool, Google's any of these, maybe some more advanced ones that line up a couple sales people like a chili Piper, you know, sales focused scheduling tools, those are a little bit more mature into use cases. But for the everyday group cases, there were clear gaps on the point solutions when it came to scheduling and Microsoft and Google. They're not building their office suites for this. They're not thinking, you know. What's an executive assistant do when they wake up in the morning? What what is their life? What's their persona? What are the click patterns? What is the most time consuming thing that they do? Which, by the way, the most time consuming and biggest pain point in the market is scheduling group meetings and rescheduling. And you look at the platforms versus the point solution around some of these basic tools, and they have a limited set of calendar views. You can only show a couple of time zones. Like the tools just fall flat when it comes to these power users working on behalf of, you know, powerful executives or savvy business people that need to move very quickly. So when you look at an executive operations platform, we have a lot of indirect competition, right? We go head to head over on the scheduling. When it comes to summarization technology around emails and stuff, then we're fringing on competing with Gemini and Copilot. But what these tools haven't done is really a gigantic AI, and that's what we've specialized in. So in addition to offering more traditional software. Like scheduling, where we've inserted AI much like other applications do, or legacy built on AI solutions where we've inserted like, hey, translate this meeting invite into these four languages, you know, all prompt driven, really practical places where we inject it. We have over the top created two products. One's called AI assist, which is a chat interface like a GPT, where you can talk to all your emails and all of your calendar. And not only can you understand what's coming up on your calendar, you can save these AI prompts and say, hey, email me every Sunday night like all my external meetings this week in a table view like this. Because I just want to see it and scan it because looking at my calendar is inefficient. That's one UI we're going to give you other UIs and prompt driven workflows, but beyond that, where we go way ahead of what Gemini and Copilot are doing is actually controlling the whole office suite. It's like check availability for Victor and I. Let's say Victor, I had access to your calendar for next Tuesday. Find us a half hour slot, list out the times. Okay, great. Pick that for 30 time and add a zoom to it all from prompt or voice. And so controlling the toolset through prompt invoice is kind of the next frontier. And then being able to save those jobs and run them on a recurring basis to automate them and to be in a position on a platform like ours where you're working across several zoom accounts, several slack accounts, several calendars, and several email inboxes at the same time, with a power tool set like this just completely changes what the tooling could look like in this function. So going from a place where, hey, take all these tools and figure it out and create operations, and we haven't even gotten into analytics and things like that yet. You know, make a program, write some policies, figure out how you're going to run the the operational and logistics part of the executive lifestyle, email triage, all these use cases. It's never really existed. You've had to cobble together your basic office platform, and then a handful of point solutions and your travel booking system, which is usually going to be concur. Or Navon being kind of the rising up comer in that space. Yeah. Every time, every time we talk, I, I always I can think of some, some additional people that, you know, definitely can help with these type of things because they're just juggling so much. Right? I mean, outside of even executives, you think about legal, right? Like legal teams, they're doing so much and they're everybody's looking for them like they are the everybody wants to need to work with the legal from sales operations to, you know, and um, so yeah, some some additional questions coming up on that. But, you know, one thing about spin advantage or even their stories where we really try to help companies figure out, um, you know, not just how to save time and money through their, the vendors that they purchase. But what does the ROI really help you understand? These are investments. These are really, if you come down to it, investment money that you make to try to bring an ROI for whatever it is you're looking for, right? That's why you buy these solutions. So I think I want to spend a couple minutes at least on this specific question, because I think it's so important. So we talked about helping executive assistants. But in theory, helping executive assistants really means helping your executives. And if the executives can x their productivity time. I mean, that has tremendous impact on the success of the entire business, right? So I'm not trying to oversell it. But, you know, to me, I think, um, can you kind of go into maybe even a few examples of how by having a executive operations program. Right. Uh, executives can be more efficient, but how does that then translate into potential revenue or, uh, growth for the company? Yeah, great. Great point. It's all going to boil down to time savings. And when you get time savings you can do two things. One is you can use it as you as you wish, or you can do more and create more value for the business. So assuming people are doing this within the confines of a workday, then they're going to have more time to add value to the business. And when you look at a platform like ours that facilitates really with the AI tooling infinity workflows, you start to find using our tools that you can make drastic reductions in the amount of time that it takes to do traditional things. Like, for example, we worked with a large multinational Victor, and they have about 17 executive assistants globally. They cover and partially cover a group of more than 30 to 40 execs in that organization. And they're doing a lot of scheduling. It's medium to heavy travel for a lot of those executives, and we actually track down their slack threads with them. And we looked at their slack threads and we looked at them basically go through the workflow in their browser Chrome environment, and we were able to take a scheduling use case that took 4 or 5 people commenting back, several lists being typed out, and count the number of tabs. We went from having to enter four distinct tabs to get this scheduled to one. We went from going from an entire slack thread to zero slack thread, and a couple of comments on specific times based around how our application works. We reduce the typing and the total click flow by 93% to get a meeting scheduled for a group of people, and we're able to repeat this reliably. Now, I'm not going to say it works in every single use case of every scheduling scenario within an organization, but for core ones of getting groups together virtually on site or digitally, it cuts down keystrokes and workflow. So now you've given your executive assistant theoretically back, right, 90% of their time, maybe even more because it was just more intuitive and centralized in a single place for them, and was right adjacent to other tool sets. You look at that and you've immediately saved time, which then allows the executive assistant to better support the executive. Beyond travel and kind of basic mechanics. A lot of ease are being asked to move up strategically in the organization to basically look ahead of all that minutia and click pattern and say, okay, what's coming, what's what's coming for the exec. So imagine needing to prep for a meeting. And, you know, Victor, I'm sure the first time you and I met were both pulling up an email and clicking on a LinkedIn profile and trying to remember who each other are so that we can have a productive conversation. And there's a cost to that. There's a cost in the quality of the interaction we had, the level of preparedness we had. So imagine in a platform that you could say, hey, generate background on this meeting and it would pull up and summarize our email threads. It would pull up and timestamp all the times we'd met previously. Um, go pull LinkedIn, get profile information, and imagine being able to do that across your meetings all year long. The amount of time that you get back and the quality of your interaction can be much higher. And so that's a very everyday example of how we deliver value to the end user, the executive. And then along the way, while we are having emails automatically triage. Right. Because our AI agents can go in and look for patterns in your email, and you can basically summarize some rules how you want it to operate. So you can do spam and inbox triage and clearance. You start to give these chunks of time back to people, chunks of time in three minutes, in 25 minute chunks. And overall that creates value. And as we do that, we measure in the platform. Hey, how many scheduling invites were sent? How many internal and external people did you meet with last month, last quarter? Last year? Who haven't you followed up with recently? Like you can imagine a better organized system to operate from? And that's really the vision in what we're working to deliver on for organizations. Yeah, I love that. So maybe that kind of gave me a follow up thought, which is, you know, right now a lot of the EA's because of the lack of technology or just, you know, minutia like you talked about, they're only able to support 3 or 4 executives. Right? And what that means is only maybe the sea level executives get a E, but then everybody else can't. Or, you know, they're not going to hire another one. Um, but I think with your technology and you talk about how that enables the E to maybe support more team members, more executives, um, you know, in the VP or SVP levels where they can also get assistance because again, imagine when you have the VP and SVP trying to do that themselves and serve as their own E their time is taken to go do administrative things where they're not out there selling, they're not out there providing more value to to the business. So all of that kind of works together. So what is your thought about enabling the E to be able to maybe support more actually people with the same amount of time? Yeah, great. Great question Victor. It touches on some pretty big themes right around AI in the workforce. So I think if we start at that level, you look at the problem like we hear a couple of different canned reactions per se out in the market. One being once, you know, every couple of weeks I'll get a response back on some prospecting or marketing activities or reach outs that I'm doing, or an EA will say, no thanks. Good luck. You know, taking my job with AI. And there can be a strong reaction there. And we publish and we publicly speak about how we don't believe that's the case at all, because AI's simply not there. It's not going to have that human touch. It's never going to be able to service that person in the way that a human does in any foreseeable future. That's that's my company's opinion on how how we look at the market. It's just so far off. However, you're going to need to use AI, and everyone's going to be expected to do a little bit more now. And I think most of us have experienced that. How quickly we can move through some projects when we employ the right AI tool now, it can be a threat then on the executive side or the operational side or the HR side, some people will jump and say, well, are we can we have less? Right? It becomes like, can we let people go, which is indirectly AI taking people's jobs also. Yes, you can, you can. You could totally make your business more efficient, not only in areas that we work in, but in areas that many, many companies work in. And you can eliminate a lot of jobs through different projects and technology implementation. Nobody is really immune to that. But to be competitive, you have to think about growing your company, not reducing your company and constraining people. The value comes when you empower that the executive that much more, and the more personnel that's deployed efficiently to do that, the better. So I think what will happen is that personnel levels will stay the same in many organizations. They are increasing their executive ops profile because they realize it's a core function of the everyday pulse and heartbeat of the whole entire business, keeping those communication lines and workflows highly, highly fluid. But as the as the technology rolls out, what will happen is you can help to provide some some additional services to like mid-level execs, for example, would be a primary beneficiary in the trenches, everyday management, frontline teams that they're looking after, they're having to get into the administrative work. And these aren't cheap people right. In the organization. This is this is well-paid management roles that are doing a lot of their own administrative work. And so if you have a platform that's modular, then on our platform, for example, you can provide like email triage only as a service to another exec. You could provide scheduling for another exec or a group of execs. And there could be a protocol about how they request that, how that's deployed. And there's a program in place that's repeatable, scalable, and predictable on what the outcome is going to be. And so I see it lasts about reduction and more about staying competitive in modern markets with the same or more numbers of humans and actually pulling ahead by running your business more efficiently. Yeah. I feel like, um, as we kind of close out on the on the conversation here, I got one last question for you, but I just feel like, um, and maybe that feeds into my last question because, you know, we talk a lot about executive operations and EA's, and this is a perfect fit for it. But can you talk about maybe some examples or use cases where you've seen other departments or, uh, you know, management who are on a lot of calls will get maybe IT management, maybe marketing, maybe, um, you know, HR and they all deal with a lot of vendors and a lot of, uh, you know, scheduling and things like that. So can you talk about what other use cases or other departments have you seen that's been successful in leveraging, uh, something like this. Yeah. The one that really stands out that we've got pull into in the market several times is recruiting teams. Recruiting teams have really high scheduling needs. And the recruiting platforms, um, aren't always using the most advanced, um, scheduling capabilities on their platforms or haven't built them. Um, or you're using a third party like Calendly, which it requires a lot of manual intervention. And watching it in order to successfully get a few people into a room, which has to happen a lot during the recruiting process. Right? With committee meetings and, and review cycles and, uh, multi-person meeting scenarios that companies want to set up in order to evaluate candidates. So that's a great example of a function that that hits on, you know, one product feature area within our application and is immediately, you know, one of those clients is actually already starting to use the AI stuff to do some prep around candidates and communications, which has been really interesting. Um, another area is sales. A lot of people in sales are, um, logistics heavy, travel heavy. And the theme, like, you know, we talked about I know Victor, you and I both experienced this in our careers is that that self-support function. And so not everybody gets an E right? In fact, most people don't. And so what do you what do you do. Because you still have to do administrative tasks. And so in many cases we're finding kind of prosumers coming onto our free tier, the application, trying it out, getting different AI jobs set up that help to just kind of deal with a few use cases and repeatable things that they're managing out in the field regularly. And so we find these adjacent audiences. But really our our core work with, with enterprises is going in and establishing this executive operations function, platforming it and working to measure towards success criteria so that we do deliver on the ROI. Yeah. No, this has been a great conversation. We're super excited. Again, we love partnering with, um, you know, innovative companies that are looking to, you know, be pioneers of industries and categories and change the world. Uh, and, uh, we're here to support you. Um, so we always ask our, uh, guests one last question, which is you you've seen a lot. You've done a lot, you know, in your careers, if you had to give one personal and or business advice that has nothing to do with, you know, kind of the exact operations, something that you maybe live by or kind of you, um, really believe in. What do you think that would be? Yeah. Travel. Make sure you travel okay. It teaches you a lot about the world and people, and I just couldn't advocate enough. It's one of the one of the characteristics we look for when hiring. Have people traveled? Do they have exposure? Where have they pushed themselves to and how did they do it? You know, was it a Carnival Cruise lines or did they throw a backpack on and and find their way around Asia for six months? And I think, you know, the more that people can get out, the more they can connect with people that aren't like them. And I just say that's that's the one thing it's I've just enjoyed so much about life and would encourage everybody to just, you know, close up this podcast and book a trip right now. Yeah. So where was the most interesting place that you've, uh, you traveled to, do you think? Oh, Victor. Come on, that's hard. It's interesting. Oh, my gosh, there's interesting things everywhere we go. Um, the most interesting place that I've traveled to where you have a favorite, I guess, um, probably. Probably the pyramids of Giza. I mean, it's a kind of a, you know, a a checkbox bucket list for a lot of people. It's the pyramids. And I was lucky enough to go there. But it's just being in a place like that that's so ancient and not really understanding what it is, is just profound and like just sticks with you. And people are still talking about this stuff. You know, it's in the news this week, the pyramids. So yeah, it's a that was an interesting place and really profound when you when you look at the, the pyramids, the ocean, the nature, you kind of see how small we are, you know, compared to, uh, Mother Nature. But, um, but no, thank you so much for the partnership and, uh, being on the podcast. Yeah. Thank you. Victor. We, as you know, are super excited about our partnership with Varisource. I mean, it's been great so far. And, um, look forward to being on more calls with you and your team and, and helping to get some of the companies you work with and that we work with set up with an executive operations platform. So thank you. That was an amazing episode of the Spend Advantage podcast, where we show you how we can help you, your bottom line savings and top line growth for your business. Hope you enjoy the conversation, and if you want to get the best deals from the guest today, make sure to send us a message at Sales@varisource.com