Eric Taussig, Founder, CEO, Prialto
Eric Taussig is the Founder of Prialto, a virtual assistance company that leverages the human cloud from their overseas offshore service centers to help amplify people by reinventing the executive assistant role enabled by technology and a global workforce.
AUTOMATED EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:01] You're listening to Scaling Up Services where we speak with entrepreneurs authors business experts and thought leaders to give you the knowledge and insights you need to scale your service based business faster and easier. And now here is your host Business Coach Bruce Eckfeldt.
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[00:00:57] Welcome everyone. This is Scaling Up Services, I’m Bruce Eckfeldt. I'm your host and our guest today is Eric Taussig and he is founder and CEO of Prialto. They are an executive assistant service. We're gonna find out about how he's developed, grown that company across three different continents. We're gonna talk to Matt about his entrepreneurial experience, his journey about scaling a service based business. Talk a little bit about the service itself and how leaders and service based companies can leverage these kind of services to best leverage their time, their capabilities, so they can focus on the growth and the strategy and actually scaling the business. So with that. Eric, welcome to the program.
[00:01:32] Yeah. Thanks. Great to be here.
[00:01:33] Yeah, I appreciate the time. Sue, let's learn a little bit about you first. Understand kind of your background. How did you get into being a founder? What was that like? And then we'll talk a little bit about the business and your experience scaling your business.
[00:01:45] Okay. So my background should have always been an entrepreneur. Always have been on the inside. That kind of was always I'd had to build the resume.
[00:01:53] A first sale, professional services, banking in New York and Hong Kong before and after business school came back to the West Coast, San Francisco, where I grew up in 2004 and had the chance to get involved, a couple of technology companies and then the opportunity to start my own thing now. And I had an idea. My wife, then fiancee said, do it now. We're not going to get any easier. Exactly.
[00:02:22] And actually, the idea for Prialto kind of came from some work she was doing, helping a Nasdaq listed company manage their offshore team in the Philippines.
[00:02:32] And I kind of got to know her team and thought, hey, so a lot of companies that don't know how to develop this could utilize it. And that would bring together a lot of my passions around the problems and opportunities of doing business cross-border.
[00:02:46] Of course, culturally connecting people, helping Google, but a lot of my different interests together.
[00:02:51] And so that's you know, I'm curious what you know, having been involved in various early stage companies directly and indirectly and then starting your own. What was the difference when when it was your own company? How did things change? Were you any surprises, any observations about actually being the founder vs. working for a founder or being involved in a company that was, you know, early stage? Yeah.
[00:03:12] I mean, you know, you're clearly you're really putting yourself out there. You know, you can't kind of toe dip.
[00:03:18] You have to jump in with with with your full self and you need to recruit and develop a team that's going to do that with you.
[00:03:29] And so your attached to the entity in a way, you're just not if you're kind of hired into electric company.
[00:03:38] And how did you go from kind of this initial idea? So you had some insight around where the needs were, where the problems were for some of these companies that are that are working with these these search teams. How did you go from kind of inside to actually, you know, I guess getting your company up and running? What was the first kind of stages like? Where did you find your initial clients? What came first, the clients or the team? Tell us about that process.
[00:04:02] Well, it was very iterative.
[00:04:03] I did have a team first before clients and built a little bit of infrastructure and some connectivity that was a little bit harder to build back then.
[00:04:13] So this was just as smartphones were starting to get traction and not everybody had realized that communication costs were going to, you know, effectively zero, meaning you can connect to people to work together.
[00:04:27] Anyway, the world for for really nothing but the hard part is building the context. So that I guess that was the insight is that I believed and continue to believe that, well, mechanically, it's easy for any two individuals that want to work together around the world to to connect culturally. It's really difficult. And I don't think they don't.
[00:04:48] It's quite cultural. It's just context. The more distant the geography, the harder it is to the more distant. In terms of, you know, physically, the harder it is to develop that context in which two people can work effectively together. And so that's that's the problem we're always, always working to mitigate.
[00:05:07] Donna, and do you find I mean, given when you launched and kind of the state of technology at the time, do you find that was it was good? Like, do you have an advantage because you were early to market there or was it problematic because as the technology shifted. Competitors could come in quickly. Not have to deal with some of the early stuff. You did give me a sense of how timing played a part or how you kind of view the timing of starting the business relative to technology situation.
[00:05:31] Yeah, no great kitchen.
[00:05:32] I think the timing was really good actually, because it allowed us to learn a lot before people became so accustomed to working remotely as they are today. But even today, well, you know, huge numbers of people are working out of their homes the way that they were back then in that. And the numbers of those people continues to grow. It's still not super intuitive to people that they can just effectively work with somebody far outside of their community. So the market is just expanding. And as we get better, we can take advantage of that expansion. So that's been really good to us.
[00:06:04] And how we strategically how have you kind of positioned or what's been the evolutionary process for figuring out exactly what you're kind of services, what palms you're solving, who you're solving for? Talk to us about kind of positioning your customer in the niche that you've effectively calmed down.
[00:06:20] Yeah. So today we have two very different niches. One is what I built the business on. It bootstrapped, which is kind of your solo producer is two very small businesses. So people that have often have somebody that's left a large professional services firm, maybe taking a couple of clients with them, cut out their own shingle. And they're used to having at the firm that they've come from, they're used to having the kind of support services that we offer.
[00:06:45] And I know that world well and enjoy talking with those people and helping to solve their problems. And we're really good at it.
[00:06:53] The other half of the business and probably more than half today and growing is similar types of people, but who are who are still in those larger professional services environments.
[00:07:03] So like insurance companies, we've got a couple of Nasdaq listed companies that have a complex enterprise sale and, you know, expensive salespeople that the company doesn't want to have kind of poking data, you know, sticking data into who they want, the visibility, they want the helpfulness of a CRM, but they don't want their executives sitting there totally figuring out that you can actually get off. So we're good at doing that on their behalf and then everybody's happy.
[00:07:30] Yeah. So you kind of better free them up or take take away the tasks that are taking up time for them that are kind of low level so they can focus on the higher level. Higher level work.
[00:07:38] Yeah, I mean this. So, you know, anyone in a large firm that's in a business development or sales will I mean, their real magic is, you know, originating that relationship and managing that relationship through a transaction. It's not kind of being a data entry clerk.
[00:07:50] And yet there is you know, there's some important work around that data entry and it needs to be done thoughtfully and strategically. And what we can do that for them. And and the way a lot of companies try to solve this problem is just, you know, yelling at folks and saying, hey, get get your information in there.
[00:08:07] And if you don't get it and you're not going to do up with that, they're giving them something that's very cost effective.
[00:08:15] And. And it's it supports them. It's like we're gonna give you a personalized Peralta's support team and he's happy.
[00:08:23] Yeah. How many of those are. Well, I can see the service is very, very similar to the type of client, the sales process. The value proposition who you're actually selling to seems a little bit different. What do you need to do differently when you are approaching these two different markets? And then how do you kind of I guess operationally then how are is two different teams to the same teams from us both. How do you how do you kind of make it work from a market strategy point of view and then an operation point of view?
[00:08:48] Yeah. So so so today both niches are very important to us. The those those smaller businesses are shorter sales cycle.
[00:08:58] Often it you know, somebody comes to us with a lot of pent up demand. And so they are ready to get started right away. But then, you know, the other side of that is their business can change very quickly on them and have them flow.
[00:09:09] And so, you know, we had we just naturally expect a higher attrition rate. That enterprise sale is what you and pilots saw. And, you know, four or five, six, seven, eight executives and then, you know, often supporting 10 to 20 executives across the firm. That's a considerably longer sales cycle. It's it's a very well, both sales are very consultative, but that. But when we are working to support a larger enterprise, we're looking at it in the context of, you know, their entire business. So it's just there's a lot of stakeholders in our conversations.
[00:09:43] I can imagine how I guess operationally how have you. Is this the same team or do you have two different teams? Do you have different people that can do either? You know, either.
[00:09:52] Well, it's it's different salespeople, but the service platform is the same. It's just simply that when we're supporting the larger firms, we can just bring we can apply more resources from the same service platform. But it's it's just that the knowledge sharing that happens on the service team is more robust. And so we there's just a lot more we can bring to to the firm that we're supporting.
[00:10:16] Yeah, makes sense. And historically, you started with the solo. Or working with the independent consultant kind of Purnima. When did you realize that you could provide this other service? How did that process work strategically? How did you make that decision? How did you start it? What were some of the challenges?
[00:10:32] Yeah, well, an enterprise larger enterprise sale is, you know, like you said, it's very different than than selling to an individual decision. Just the decision when there's more than one decision maker, it's just gets more complex. The sale is more complex is the opportunity. You know, we were in the San Francisco Bay area when I started the company. So there's just so many companies you can go and talk to. And so you just, you know, go. You talk and listen and you think how what people need and want and you get a sale, you do a study.
[00:11:00] So it's just a lot of a lot of grit when anything else. Yeah. I think, you know, for the entrepreneurs out there. Yeah. I said those are the two niches today. We did do a very big pivot early on so that I think it'd be good for entrepreneurs know about it. So we started the company just before the big financial crisis. And at that time, things were really frothy. And so we imagined starting a really kind of low price point service to kick start the business. And the thinking was, hey, you know, a few hundred dollars a month if you do, you know, a couple of neat things for a high velocity executive. They're just never going to cancel. When the financial crisis hit and you know what, the stock market went, you know, shrunk by 50 percent or whatever it was, that sort of mass wealth market grew up, just blew up, disappeared for for a fair amount of time. And so that probably was a blessing in disguise because it forced us to develop the service that we knew we always were going to develop more quickly, which was, you know, really deep, a much deeper offering. And as we raised as we deepen the offering and raise the price, attrition went down dramatically.
[00:12:17] Oh, interesting. So your ability to to hold on to customers increased as you DepEd did you as we raise the price is the price.
[00:12:25] And we do so deep in the service. What were you. I mean, I think the price raising helped us.
[00:12:31] I mean, it helped us qualify out people that didn't need the service. But it also meant that we could support fewer people more carefully. And when you when you deepen the service, what what was deepening in the service like we're providing now or at that point that you weren't providing before, what we were able to really understand somebodies business and their clients and how they liked to be represented and and really be much more of a strategic partner to the professionals that we were supporting.
[00:13:01] So they get you can actually sort of key into their operations and speak on their behalf or represent them more or more accurately to do more due to work on it. And where are you finding your talent or what's in in terms of the service professionals that you're on your side? Where are they located? What's that process been like in terms of finding them growing outside of the business?
[00:13:21] Yeah. So our frontline workers work in our service centers in Manila and Guatemala City. And that's important. Most of the competitors in our space are marketplaces or out-of-home model. And we are very committed to the concept of professionalising or re professionalising administrative services and reinventing administrative services. You know, Islay technology enabled world. And there's a ton of knowledge sharing that happens in those service centers. You know, physically they look a little bit like a call center, but the behavior is much more like a professional services office that people are walking around. They're solving problems with each other. They're sharing knowledge all on behalf that companies that we support. So that's our frontline workers and their direct managers. And then onshore in our Portland, Oregon headquarters. We have sales marketing, but most importantly are are engagement managers who are kind of process architects. So they're the ones that are understanding the workflow of our we call our customers members, our members. And the accounts that they sit in and helping we do the heavy lifting of creating the context and training the online support and support person on on those processes.
[00:14:44] So those those folks can can really sit down with the business and understand exactly how the workflow, you know, takes place and what the rules are with what the needs are. And then they can kind of map that and then train your administrative staff to actually execute against them.
[00:14:59] Yeah, with the goal of fostering one to one relationship as that service gets up and running, the relationship between the productivity assistant, the P.A. and worker and in our service center and and the member in North America, the executive. But having that bridge has been there's a ton of value there.
[00:15:19] I'm sure. You notice in terms of your your best customers, what are they? What are they like or what? What are characteristics or qualities that you've you've come to learn around, you know, your best or your ideal, your core customer? How can you how do you identify them? What what makes them different from other customers?
[00:15:36] Yeah. So the baseline is they need to be what I would call process respectful. What I mean by that is, you know, I'm a little I founded the company to support people like myself. So I'm a pretty strategic. I'm running around doing lots of different kinds of things. And I'm not necessarily the most process oriented person. But I respect process. And so I built a company of really process oriented people. And so you need to. You need to want to be supported by that. Now, I used to think that if somebody was really process oriented, that they wouldn't get as much value from it as it turns out that those people also get a ton of value. And they they just love what we do because we get how they're organized and they like the they like that were taking a process they already have and further optimizing it and continually innovating on it.
[00:16:22] And on the flip side, in terms of your employees. What have you noticed that makes makes a great employee? What have you done in terms of recruiting and interviewing? How do you identify and attract the right talent? That's going to be successful in this model.
[00:16:36] Yeah, great question. So it's kind of all the cliches. We want somebody that really wants to learn. It has a great attitude. And we've been burned over and over by somebody that's just great and a few things on day one, but doesn't have a good attitude. So so we definitely manage to our core values, what we call our Coyle's, which is commitment, ownership, integrity and learning and service. And we're relentless about that. So we were uncompromising. So if, you know, somebody might come in with great mechanical skills and impress everybody in the beginning that they're they don't have the commitment or the ownership with integrity, and then we definitely will manage quality. On the flip side, we've seen again and again somebody that's got the right humility and wants to learn and and yeah, maybe they are slower to start, but they they get it and they're with us a long time in terms of training people up.
[00:17:30] I mean, you know, we always you know, we talk about hiring for culture and then training for skills. But training can be difficult or, you know, it's costly. It takes time and money investment. How have you, I guess. What have you found in terms of what you can train for, what you can't train for? What's the process like? What have you learned around being able to kind of train people up that that have the right cultural fit but don't necessarily have the skills? How do you go about doing that?
[00:17:54] So we do like we do it best to turn at it. But it's worth it because because we've got great customers. And if if we can train somebody up, it can take a while. And yet they are like that on that training will be really high. So a bunch of upfront training. And then again, because they're in our centers. There is a ton of learning that happens through it, almost through osmosis. So it's very much a professional services model where they're being kind of mentored by by people who have been here with us a long time.
[00:18:22] There are some interesting things. I mean, we have customers come to us or potential prospects come to us and say, you know, just the person going to have an accent.
[00:18:30] And we're like, yeah, I'm going to have an accent. Just like if you walk around San Francisco or New York, you know, half the people you work with have an accent.
[00:18:39] And people really when people are asking about an accent, most often they are consciously or unconsciously drawing upon the experience they've had. Calling a customer support for their their bank or the computer company.
[00:18:54] And getting a person offshore who doesn't listen to their questions. And it's not the accent that they dislike. It's the poor listening skills. And so it's it's when you ask the question and the response is a non-sequitur, that's what's painful when you're talking to somebody off shore. And so we actually filter much more for listening skills and again, a desire to learn and desire to listen and curiosity than we do for accent. And that's been important. That's been the lead. We've got people with pretty strong accents that are kind of great attention to detail, solve problems and are terrific and support. And we have people maybe because they went to high school here or junior high or something. They have perfect American accents, but dropping balls all the time.
[00:19:41] Yeah, it's interesting. When I think it happens in so many levels in businesses, you go over optimizer, you over select for certain criteria and in that time, money resources kick out candidates in terms of process. You know, when you're when you really what you need to do is look at it's efficiency. I think, yes, they need to be understandable. But it is not that they don't that they need no accident. It's that I just I need to be able to communicate effectively, you know, up to a point or up to a certain level. And then after that, you know, more more capability is not it's not worth the additional cost and complexity in terms of finding folks. And then it allows me to find other folks. So you can, you know. Find talent is probably talent out there that kind of fits this, you know, this sliver of needs that you can leverage, whereas other people are gonna be, you know, letting someone go in or not not hiring them because of accidents when in fact they can actually be really good employees.
[00:20:33] Yeah. Very much.
[00:20:34] And that's our value in the labor market. So, I mean, you know, we're operating in places where it's kind of the other half of our business.
[00:20:40] Got to constituency's in there. Honestly equal, which is, you know, we got our customers and we've got we've got the people that deliver the service and we have to make those people really do have to be equal. And so we can have a social mission as well. And it's you know, we go into these markets where a lot of bright young people are answering angry telephone calls all day for they're for a bank or a computer company. And you know that that's every call they pick up as a person. That's very transactional and very unforgiving. And it's generally focused on, you know, one or two very specific skills. Like they're like they're not usually problem solving. So it's usually is just that voice. And we take people out of those environments and we give them a direct relationship with three or four North American executives where they're learning real skills. They're really getting insights in to, you know, international business and picking up real skills and solving problems. And they've got a lot of autonomy. That's not for everyone. So there's a lot of self-selecting that happens. But the people who want that environment, they have a great experience. And we see people we see the learning curve. I mean, we see people develop incredibly quickly.
[00:21:49] You know, when I think you point out, you know, a concept or an idea that I think is really important for service based businesses, and I don't think people think about this enough or think about it this way enough, which is every service based business is really a double sided market. Right. You're trying to find customers and clients, but you're also have to find talent. And, you know, you have to have a strategy. You have to have an offering to the talent side to attract them, to retain them just as much as you need strategy on the client side. I mean, tell me more. You mentioned this. This you know, you've got a social mission or, you know, you you're looking at more than just, you know, kind of creating a job. What do you do or against what are some of the things you do when you come in to a market like this or a community like this to be attractive, to be different, to be know, compelling proposition for for these folks. And you mentioned some of the you know, the work that they do is more engaging, more, you know, is less mundane. What are what are some of the other things that you do to make it attractive for the talent side?
[00:22:42] Well, I think it's where we spend the majority of our gray matter. So we're always investing and thinking about, you know, what's what's going to be compelling work advice for how can we have a great place for them to grow. And so, you know, we're using a lot of the kind of happiness at work and positive psychology models that are being applied in North America.
[00:23:03] So we're big fans of that, you know, kind of the Daniel Pink model of, you know, autonomy, mastery and purpose, but also sensitive to the fact that you're coming there in environments that are you know, this is not kind of Wall Street or Silicon Valley. I mean. And so you can't just kind of retro fit those models on to our work environment without some thoughtfulness.
[00:23:26] You know, now and tell me about, you know, companies that have, you know, are looking for these kind of services of, you know, whether whether it's the solar producer, independent consultant side or your organization that can see the ability to kind of leverage their highly paid experts by surrounding themselves with a team like this. What are some of the things you need to think about? Decision points, things you need to do to before you hire somebody while you hire them, the things that will make it more successful, more get better results. What are some pieces of advice that you give folks that are thinking about hiring, you know, a company like yours or against services like yours?
[00:23:59] Yeah. Yeah, great question.
[00:24:01] So I think I think it's all the same calculus on whether, you know, you outsource or hire somebody when you're when a professional is working to get leverage, there's kind of, you know, how do they get started? Because, my gosh, I'm moving so quickly. I don't even have time to think about what I would delegate. So it's just getting started. It's gosh, even if I, you know, took the time to scope out and document what I will delegate like training the person, it's gonna be so difficult. You know, it's hard enough to manage the person at the desk next to me, let alone out of my office or offshore.
[00:24:34] And gosh, my gosh, if I do that, you know, I take the time to document so I can get started. I hire and train somebody. And then if they're good, my gosh, they're going to go back to school or, you know, if it's off shore, they can go down the street and work for somebody else. And I'm going to be back to square one. And so we're set up to yeah, we've been doing this a long time. At this point.
[00:24:54] We have, you know, hundreds of thousands of hours of support, experience. And so we can kind of help somebody quickly deduce what they can delegate. We can do a lot of the training on their behalf and then we're going to help maintain continuity. So we don't just train one individual support person. We train a team. We document everything. And so, you know, whether it's us or somebody else, I would be looking for somebody or. Whether it's a firm or an individual who understands all that, so you'll get especially at kind of the administrative layer that we operate. You'll get a ton of individuals that you can contract with to a marketplace or firms that are just kind of putting a body in a sea. We'll tell you, hey, you know, they'll kind of say they can do anything you ask.
[00:25:39] So I'd just be really wary of somebody that says yes to everything. And make sure they're asking good questions and that they're being honest about what is easier and harder to delegate. How long things take to get started and what's going to be required of you as a customer to be successful.
[00:25:56] Now, not make sense. This isn't great, Erica. People on to find out more about you, about the work that you do, about the services that you offer. What's the best place to get that information?
[00:26:04] Yeah. So our Web site is full of information. Prialto, P R I A L T O . our blog. We take it really seriously. We're not it's not just clickbait. We live and breathe this stuff and it's a great resource.
[00:26:19] I'll make sure that the link is in the show notes so people can click through and and get that information. Thanks for taking the time today. I think this is a really it's a it's interesting topic. I think it's, you know, obviously huge in terms of business these days. Kind of find leverage, use resources like this. I like the approach you're taking and really kind of looking at it as a professional services model. So, you know, this is going to be really helpful to the audience. I appreciate you taking the time today..
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