Episode 96: Chris Lauzon

Introducing Chris Lauzon

Chris is a former WordPress guy who helped people build websites. Chris is now a consultant helping various startups and nonprofits ramp up sales and support teams.

Show Notes

Twitter | @Squirex2

Instagram | @squirex2

Episode Transcript

Tara: This is Hallway Chats, where we meet people who use WordPress.

Liam: We ask questions, and our guests share their stories, ideas, and perspectives.

Tara: And now the conversation begins. This is episode 96.

Liam: Welcome to Hallway Chats. I’m Liam Dempsey.

Tara: And I’m Tara Claeys. Today we’re joined by Chris Lauzon, a farmer WordPress guy who helped people build websites. Chris is now a consultant helping various startups and nonprofits ramp up sales and support teams. Welcome, Chris. It’s great to have you here today.

Chris: Hey, there. Great to be here.

Liam: Hey, Chris. Thanks for joining us. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself more than what Tara shared?

Chris: Yeah. I’m a huge nerd just generally. I love helping people a whole lot. Tech support has been my passion since about 2001. I’ve done internet tech support, hardware support, but my real passion is for SAS and working in SAS businesses. Since then, I’ve grown up, gotten older, gotten wiser. I’m working with a lot of different technologies now. I have a lot of great coworkers I’m working with. I’ve made a lot of good friends in tech community that serves as a great black book for me whenever I need help in the wider support community.

Liam: That’s really cool. I want to jump right in and ask you about the work you’re doing now as a consultant. Tara shared that you’re helping startups and nonprofits wrap up sales and support teams. Are you doing that then from a tech standpoint? Are you doing it from more of an HR standpoint? Is it a collective of both? What does your services look like? What do your services look like?

Chris: Well, I don’t know how many people have ever worked for early stage startups, but you could sit down with somebody and go, “Hey, I need you to do just tech support. I need you to take a little bit of product, take a look at our support tickets and our ecosystem, and then give us recommendations for how to build teams and what you do and all that kind of stuff.” But what actually happens is that you jump in, and stuff happens because early-stage startups especially can be very chaotic. A person will end up, if they’re doing things correctly, at least or painting in there correctly, they will be wearing multiple hats. So for me, I have sales experience, support experience, marketing experience, HR experience, product management experience and technically QA experience, just because throughout the years I’ve had to wear so many different hats at once. It’s just the nature of the beast. Every day there’s something different, new week comes new challenges, and that’s just how it goes. It’s a roller coaster that sometimes…Well, most of the time it’s fun.

Tara: It sounds like you have so many things to choose from. What’s your favorite?

Chris: I don’t have a favorite. I like to kind of go all over the place – and it’s part of why I love working with smaller companies. I generally prefer just smaller teams in general because I’m able to jump all over the place. With a bigger company, it feels like a lot of roles starts to part in and you start to have almost kind of mini walled gardens within your company where you have the sales department, they do the sales stuff, and the support department, they do the support stuff.