Talk Tech with Rob Scott Featuring Stephen Spiegel

From ice cream to SaaS! 

In our latest Talk Tech with Rob Scott, CrewHu CEO Stephen Spiegel shares how celebrating small wins builds culture, boosts retention, and drives MSP growth. 

Learn how CrewHu’s gamified KPIs and Monjur’s legal protection empower MSPs to scale with confidence

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Welcome to Top Tech with Rob Scott.

SPEAKER_01 0:07

Steven, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_02 0:09

Hey, thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_01 0:11

Uh, for those of you that those in the audience that don't know you, tell us a little bit more about yourself, your membrane, where you're from.

SPEAKER_02 0:19

Okay. I I'm I'm from New York. Um, live in Boca Ricon, Florida. Um, they say that's the sixth borough of the city. So uh still feel at home. Uh and uh I'm a I own the software company in the in the channel. Um and uh I had a weird journey getting here. If you want to hear about that, we can we could you go into it? I do, but first tell us a little bit more about your software business. Okay, so we have a we have a SAS platform. Um uh it was built uh to help companies uh engage their employees and and deliver amazing customer service. Um now we focus on on the MSP customer. So we help MSPs engage their team to deliver badass customer exterior 100% of the time.

SPEAKER_01 1:08

That's awesome. So tell us a little bit more about the product itself and how it helps your customers achieve those goals.

SPEAKER_02 1:18

Yeah, so uh yeah, I built this originally for for my Colt Stone franchise franchises. We uh we have a group in in Florida, and uh went when I got into it, uh we would do a really great. We were we were winning winning the market, we were growing by leaps and bounds. Um, you know, we would open up a couple of stores a year, and suddenly uh we started to uh lose employees. Customer service went down, and finally same source sales started to decline. I knew I needed to do something about it. Uh I noticed that our voice of the customer, we were getting one negative review per store per month, over a thousand transactions. 96 by the way, that's not enough to get a good beat on the customer service. So, you know, we created a solution to um get more feedback. So after every transaction, five minutes later, we would ask them one simple question, you know, how was it? And we didn't stop there because we wanted to recognize the people for delivering good service. What ended up happening is the one piece of feedback drew to 100, 96 of which were positive. So we had 96 chances to say thank you. Uh, 96 chances to appreciate uh the team. Turnover basically went away. Customer service went up again, and we became one of the largest uh grossing franchise brooms in the country for Cold Stone Creamery. And we have the look back since. Now, luckily, some MSPs started to use us. I had no idea what an MSP was. So I naturally called one. And we're friends, we're friends today, uh, one of the OGs, and he told me all about the the business. He introduced me to Gary Pika. You might know Gary Pika, he's sort of a celebrity in these in these parts. He'll be on the show right after you. Oh, fantastic. So I asked Gary, well, Gary, listen, I think we have something here. I think we could deliver a lot of value to your MSP clients. Um, yeah, and he told me you could sponsor an event. Shispass was coming up. It was the inaugural event. I had no money at the time. We were burning a lot of money. Um, I said, listen, let me tomorrow talk to them for half an hour. I know that they're gonna they're gonna do something. If if we have something, I'll sign. But I have the money right now because I'll tell you what, on one condition, that you take care of the the bar tab. I had no idea how much you guys like to drink. I mean, it was uh uh it's a big bill. It's a big bill. Well, we signed up a couple of dozen um MSPs and we haven't looked back since. So since 2016, we've been serving the MSP community, uh helping them deliver uh amazing customer service so they could stand out from their competitive market and grow their grow their MSP and be successful.

SPEAKER_01 4:09

Um so from ice cream cones to managed services. Uh that's an amazing journey. Uh tell us what is it that's different about being the founder of a SaaS company and the channel versus running one of the most successful cold stone franchises in the in the brand chain?

SPEAKER_02 4:35

Uh well, I mean, one thing is you know, it's not seven days a week. Uh yeah, we're always opened in in the in the ice cream stores. Um but you know, for me as an entrepreneur, um, I like to create, I like to solve problems, um, create things from scratch. That's what that's what I'm really, really good at. When you operate franchises, you're you're you're operating someone else's brad. Um Love It. We did really well, but I felt something was missing for me. You know, my journey was something uh different. I needed something a little bit more. So working in SAS allowed me to understand what the problems were in my target market, you know, create that solution just for my target market and really build build a brand. And we're doing okay. If you ask uh uh an NSK to come to these events, they they probably have further crew to or they might even be a customer.

SPEAKER_01 5:30

That's really amazing. And what you've done to date is just uh very impressive. And and imagine a solution that will allow you to get real-time customer feedback and use it as the basis for a reward and recognition program for your employees that increases customer success, increases feedback, and gives you so many opportunities to recognize your employees. And for those of you who are like me, Gen X and older, uh recognition systems have become, in my opinion, even more important as you start looking at employing Gen Z, millennials, and others. All employees like to be recognized for their contributions, but recognition programs, in my opinion, have become more and more important in the modern age. Uh, what types of MSPs or customers do you find benefit the most from Kruku? Yeah, okay.

SPEAKER_02 6:36

And I mean, that's a really good question. So what when I first we started to sell uh to the MSP market, um, it was if you're an MSP and you have a PSA, uh, you're in our market. Um yeah, we've we've got a little bit more sophisticated. We we understand that um you need to be an MSP, right? You need to have a PSA. Um have at least you know four or five employees. Um and we we range from five to you know 12 customers, MSTs with over a thousand uh employees. So so that's not as much as the target market, uh the size. It's are you an MSP that really believes you know, culture, company culture, and the team is your superpower. Now, if you believe that, you know, you are a fit for us, right? Got that's what we believe. That's our mission. Our mission is to engage uh the employees that work for MSKs, motivate them, make them make them happy because we know if they're happy, you know, you're gonna have a more successful and and profitable uh MSP. Um MS keys look look the same. They all look the same. Tech stacks the same. Maybe you get something new to the tech stack and you have a differentiator for a month or two or three, and then the market catch up catches up with you. The only thing that differentiates you from the market better than anything else is your company culture and your channel. And if you have an engaged team, you will stand out in this market um and you'll grow and be successful.

SPEAKER_01 8:18

That's great advice. You know, one of the things that Cruhu does is it brings gamification into performance management, allows you to make games out of your KPIs so that the things that are important to the owners become communicated and gamified with your employees. Tell us more about how Cruhu executes that with your platform. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 8:43

I was I was watching Peyton Manning on on stage. Um I'm a big I'm a big football fan, and uh uh I'm big into discipline and and effort. One of our core values, it's work your ass off. Not because you're checked to a desk. I think you'll like that, but you're this is a place for you, but it's because you're passionate about um you know what you do, right? And so you need to know your goals, but you also need to get your whole team to know the goals. Because if you expect your team to do things and they're not doing it, and you come to find that they don't know what their goals are, they don't know what their KPIs are, how are they gonna do their job? So the first thing you need to do is to show them what their goals are. The best way to do that, yeah, is to have leaderboards on your top five KPIs, have the contests on your top five KPIs, have triggers that reward your team uh for your top five KPIs, and and you're gonna find magically that your KPI success is gonna improve and increase, and your performance is gonna increase, and your profitability is going to improve because just like in ice cream, just like in restaurants, the biggest expat line is your lake. And if they're not doing what they're supposed to do, you're not gonna be profitable. If they're doing exactly what they're supposed to do, you're gonna be very profitable.

SPEAKER_01 10:11

How does the um deployment or customization of the games that fit a particular client situation? How do you go about mapping the games to whatever it is that the particular customer wants to measure or focus on?

SPEAKER_02 10:32

We we focus on uh the KPIs that uh we hear in the market are are the most important. So we hear that uh time entry for each app, really important. Can't get my guys put put in the time entry. Utilization app, really important. Response time, resolution time, number of tickets closed. If you notice, all of these things uh are what we call leading indicators. If you do all of these things right, your service is going to be better. It's not just about the CSAT score, it's about a lot of other metrics that turns into that trailing uh indicator of a of a high of a high CSAT and high customer retention rate and high employee retention rate, because frankly, your employees want to work for a winning team. And if you're not giving your employees the tools to manage their customers, they're gonna find a job somewhere else. Or at least that would be the best thing. The worst thing is they stay with you and they disengage just a little bit. You might not even see it, and then all of a sudden you have an average MSD just like anybody else. And and of course you're you're you're not differentiating, you're disappearing.

SPEAKER_01 11:40

It makes sense. And, you know, as a SaaS founder myself, retention, customer retention is such a huge thing. Like SaaS Academy would calculate growth ceiling, right? Yeah. And so I'm interested to understand how Kruhu helps MSPs retain customers.

SPEAKER_02 12:03

Yeah. Well, typically a customer would come to us. One of the one of the pains they would come to us with is, yeah, you know, we kind of think we know what what what's going on. Um they may even have a CSAP provider, and they may have a number of smiley faces or frowny cases, but they don't have anything else. They don't have any actionable feedback uh to improve. And they're not focusing on the positive, right? That's one thing a lot of companies forget about. More often than not, of all the tickets that get close with a with a technician, the majority are possible. And you need to take advantage of that. You need to take advantage of that and say thank you to to the guys in the front line. And it's exactly the same as the ice cream store. I could build as many ice cream stores as I want, I could invest millions of dollars into it, but if the people who are scooping the ice cream are not delivering the service, the company's gonna fail. The company's not gonna be as profitable, the company's not gonna grow. Now, if the guys in the front line are being recognized and appreciated for this, we call the small wins. If they're recognized for the small wins on a daily basis, you create this culture of customer service. And all of a sudden, you're gonna be at Cassina event in Las Vegas, like we are now, and your team's gonna be back in the office in the pit, and they are going to be working their asses off and doing all the right things. And that's Matt.

SPEAKER_01 13:30

That's awesome, Stephen. Thank you so much for that, and I really appreciate it. Um, as you know, uh, I think very highly of you, and I appreciate you taking the time on short notice. Uh, before we wrap up, and and yeah, big draw look at the camera and let the audience know anything else that you think is important for them to know about crew who maybe how to get in touch with you, maybe a special promo or something if you like. Yeah, but just uh whatever it is that you want to communicate about crew who and so how they can get in touch with you, how they could get started. You could just you know look into the camera and tell the audience that's interested in learning more about crew who how can they connect with you and your sales team. You got it.

SPEAKER_02 14:15

Yeah, so you could you could connect with us by going to crew C R W H U dot com through a website, sign up for a demo. Um you use the word manjor, yeah, we'll give you free onboard. Uh we have White Glove onboard you for the system. Now, um you may want to use Krumu, you may already use Krumu, um, you may not be ready uh to use Kruhu. And that's and that's fine. Um if you're gonna get anything out of the few minutes I I spend with uh Robert here today, with you here today, get this. Um if you're going to do anything from this information, celebrate the small wings with your team on a daily basis, and figure out all the ways that you can recognize the guys uh for for doing the great things that they do every day, because that's what gets missed. Right? They start working really hard because they want to, but then now they feel invisible. They don't kill C. So what do they do ultimately? They could get they get tired, they get burnt out, and they disengage just a little bit, and all of a sudden, again, you have an average MSD. Focus on celebrating the small wins on a daily basis with your team.

SPEAKER_01 15:31

There you have it, Stevens. Focus on selling, uh celebrating the small wins with your team, and you can be like Steven and go from ice cream to customer success. Yeah, hey, if you have a team behind you, you can go to anything. That's awesome. Thank you so much, buddy. I appreciate you.

SPEAKER_00 15:52

You've been listening to Talk Tech with Rob Scott, brought to you by Monger. Monger is the first mover in providing contracts as a service solution specifically designed for IT-managed service providers. Their task-enabled legal solutions based on industry-leading templates often customized for each client and periodically updated to ensure that MSPs always have the latest protections and are legally compliant. For more information, visit liveer.com.jr.com.