Our guest today is a serial social entrepreneur who has been disrupting for over a decade. He is a mentor and an active angle investor.     Unmanageable debt is directly tied to mental health issues in America. Enter disruptor Jason Saltzman CEO & Co-Founder at Relief App, who is building a digital solution to overwhelming credit card debts. 

As someone who has experienced the effects of toxic debt firsthand, Jason is on a mission to make financial relief accessible to everyone. 

 Key Takeaways: 

• The main ingredient for disruption is caring about the people for whom you’re creating value. Money is a receipt of value.  

• Solutions relating to debts are simple, however, the problem is extremely complex.  

• Any debt has a stigma around it and it has systemic ramifications. Today, 1 in 3 Americans have an account that has fallen behind. 

• It affects marginalized communities of color because not only there has been a lack of financial education but also, some of the largest creditors in the world with the highest interest rate go after these communities.  

• The problem expanded because of the coronavirus, as the government started printing capital and giving it to people in need but as per the data as people had access to more capital, their savings shot up and that triggered the creditors to issue more credit.  

• The problem compounds when you leverage credit in a society which needs it, people start spending on things they don’t need via credit cards. 

• Last quarter, the national credit card debt recorded the highest number of credit card balances in the history of debt recording. 

• Jason predicts that we will be seeing a major increase in defaulters as the compounded debt completely outweighs monthly income.  

• The average credit card rate in America today is 29.73% 

• The name of game is to get very expensive credit in the hands of people that don’t understand how to use it. 

• Some of the highest individual balances are with people with advanced education e.g. Doctors, Lawyers etc. because even after the extra years of school not of the classes involve how to manage credit or books of accounts  

• Credit card companies will issue more credit once professionals start making $200,00 - $300,000+ a year  

• Because Jason worked in the credit card and debt space in earlier years, he started to get calls from friends and family to help with a walk through their credit-related problems. Jason says that” the solutions are there, they are so simple. They are just not being put in front of your face and many people hiding from this problem just don’t know”.    

• A study by Mckenzie revealed that only 2% of people will call their banks or credit lenders and manage a payment plan. The other 98% hide from these calls. 

• One of the biggest reasons for Jason in starting the Relief App is to normalize the credit debt problem and get individuals their dignity back 
• Depending on your current situation, Relief App will make all options available for every person using the app to speak to your creditor and work out a solution. 

Quote of the show: 

14:22 to 14:50 

“The system is gamified, every time you turn on the television, our whole country is set up to sell you something and you want a life that many people can’t afford and extending credit gives you that opportunity to get something that you cannot afford. Even look at those Visa and Master Card commercials of the lifestyle that they are selling people. It’s like oh s**t I want that! But I don’t have the money to pay for it! Now you do! With credit we are your best friend, but that comes with big shackles” 

  Links: 

• LinkedIn:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonsaltzman/ 
• Company Website: http://relief.app 
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/SaltzmanJason 

 Ways to Tune In: 

• Amazon Music - https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/eccda84d-4d5b-4c52-ba54-7fd8af3cbe87/disruption-interruption 
• Apple Podcast - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/disruption-interruption/id1581985755
• Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/6yGSwcSp8J354awJkCmJlD

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

While the client onboarding process is intended to establish customer relationships that are long-lasting and mutually beneficial, it is woefully lacking. 

Enter disruptor Srikrishnan Ganesan, Co-Founder & CEO at Rocketlane who is crafting a thoughtful experience by gaining a deep perspective and understanding of the client’s domain which resonates with their product and services. 

 Key Takeaways: 

• The main ingredient for disruption is developing a deep perspective and understanding of a domain which can then spark insight and can help create a thoughtful experience. 

• Since COVID, the demand for a customer-centric experience had escalated to a point that any small hitch is perceived as intolerable.  

• Businesses are built to be customers centric but at times when companies optimize processes, the client may face frustration, especially when things are happening remotely.  

• Status Quo of Client on boarding experience – it’s a hit or miss approach, processes are typically delayed. There is a lot of chaos and lack of communication, primarily as information is across different channels/places.  

• While all companies should acquire new customers and clients, retaining old clients is more profitable.  

• Rocketlane tries to address some key pain points like the status of the project & the sentiment of the customer, and consistency of delivery by following a series of steps with deep templating capabilities and streamlining the collaboration. 

• If a company has invested in a lot of project management apps, Rocketlane helps you import/migrate all your projects.  

• The biggest challenges today are – educating the market and the potential audience and the existence of the tool     

Quote of the show: 

8:38 to 9:13  

“From what we have seen, the biggest impact is when your customer success team comes in after you on boarding are they able to have an offensive strategy, focus on expansion from get go or are they going to be on a back foot when they come in and need to be defensive, focus on churn, focus on keeping the customer and that largely determined by how well on boarding goes. If you did a great job, they can focus on expansion but if you did a sloppy job they are forced to build credibility all over again with the customer” 

Links: 

• LinkedIn:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/srikrishnang/ 
• Company Website: https://www.rocketlane.com/ 
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/srikrishnang 

 Ways to Tune In: 

• Amazon Music - https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/eccda84d-4d5b-4c52-ba54-7fd8af3cbe87/disruption-interruption 
• Apple Podcast - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/disruption-interruption/id1581985755
• Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/6yGSwcSp8J354awJkCmJlD

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Our guest today helps the under-represented, under-estimated and underpaid talent land high paying jobs at the world’s best tech companies. He’s an ex-Google, ex-Facebook, ex-Sales Force and ex-American Express employee.  

Founder, CEO and Chief Accelerator of Kadima Careers, Alan Stein knows the inside out, the start to finish walkthrough of how to get hired with any of the giant multinational companies. He’s been there and seen what’s spoken and how to fix it.  

 Key Takeaways: 

• The main ingredient for disruption is questioning everything and how it can be done better. Things are done for irrational legacy reasons or miss-aligned incentives.  

• Status Quo of the hiring process or recruiting talent – hiring process is a huge field and there are millions of jobs out there. Tech giants like Amazon, PayPal, Netflix, Google, Adobe, Spotify, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple etc. (considering Fortune 500 companies) open up roles and streams of applicants come in. These companies are hiring machines and recruiting employees the same way each year, sorting out thru the huge amount of applications as they are attractive brands.  

• About a 1/3rd are hired via referrals at the top companies  

• Most of these companies are looking to hire black talent as they are the most underserved. A lot of companies have between 2% - 4% of black employee base and in the USA the number has risen to ~13%  

• There is a lot of social pressure to hire a diverse workforce like (including but not limited to) Native Americans, LGBTQ, Differently abled, Military vets, Latin ex, Women and Black 

• The Big Problem – Recruiters are focused on hiring with speed & volume and the hiring managers are focused on speed and quality, very few companies are measured on their candidate experience. During this process, if they get black talented women, awesome! But these companies will fill in a role based on the candidates they meet first from some top universities.  

• Alan’s main motivation to disrupt the hiring process was a combination of his recruiting/hiring manager role, which he took on as a passion to bring in a diverse workforce and expand the scope of his networking efforts. 

• Alan’s advice to candidates applying to these tech giants is to understand the process because the companies are not going to change their hiring processes. One of the things to consider is to submit your application in the first week or two – if not you’re probably amongst the thousands who stay in the queue. 

• Alan also advises to always check the careers/jobs page of the company you want to work with because, by the time a job listing comes on a third party job website, it’s about 4 weeks old with a pile of resumes rolling in on top of referrals.       

• Cover letters are a BIG waste of time, it’s more effective to invest time in building relationships and networking instead of writing a cover letter which will have little or no influence on the hiring process.       

Quote of the show: 

6:29 to 7:01 

“They are in some desire, a lot of these organizations say that they want to increase diversity and I do honestly believe most of the leader there actually do want to occur but what’s more important is the hire quickly, to fill these roles quickly. So if diversity can enhance the situation, GREAT! But it’s not going to slow down the machine of just gobbling up all this great talent that is interested in working for these top companies.” 

  Links: 

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alanjstein/ 
• Company Website: http://www.kadimacareers.com   

 Ways to Tune In: 

• Amazon Music - https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/eccda84d-4d5b-4c52-ba54-7fd8af3cbe87/disruption-interruption 
• Apple Podcast - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/disruption-interruption/id1581985755 

• Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/6yGSwcSp8J354awJkCmJlD 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Our guest today works with architects, engineers, farmers, and city planners to create buildings that come alive and are a source of food for people living in the area. But growing thousands of plants indoors with building restrictions and putting together all the stakeholders quickly complicates things. 

Enter disruptor Dawn Parks, CEO & Owner of The Alternate Edge Consulting, who is also a conductor of these big projects. She knows how and when to engage the different stakeholders to make food sustainability a reality.   

 Key Takeaways: 

• Nearly 19 million people in the US don’t live near a grocery store.   
• For funding, people rely on the government agencies, which are very limited in what they can provide in terms of funding.   
• The main ingredient for disruption is thinking outside the box and looking for technologies that could fit together which haven’t been thought about before.   
• The government agencies have to provide an ROI back to the government, prove the budget every year and not get cut off.    
• Status Quo of food sustainability remains its location/geographic specific. Because of the history of the low-income area, high crime rate or lower socio-economic area, a lot of retailers/grocery store owners don’t move in and/or take a risk doing so.    
• The problem also remains with getting food to the consumer’s location in the US. In other cases like sending food outside the country, the food has to go through aid agencies that get caught up in a political situation where the food never reaches the people it’s intended for.    
• Climate change also contributes to the problem and impacts the vegetation which has an impact on how the crops grow and what needs to be fed to the live stocks.    
• Technology along with data can help make better decisions for everyone to be more productive and profitable.   
• How’s the disruption happening now? Understanding the core problem, the local community and their needs and working towards what’s needed help to overcome the food deserts. 

Quote of the show: 

7:34 to 7:55 

“The grocery stores aren’t moving in and those that do move in are taking bigger risk. Because there isn’t a lot of retailers, might be higher crime rate, might be a socio economic area, so then if you have $40 and need to feed 5 people, it’s easier to go to McDonalds’ than go buy broccoli and lettuce. “  

Links: 

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dawnparks/ 
• Company Website:  https://edgesustainability.com/ 

 Ways to Tune In: 

• Amazon Music - https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/eccda84d-4d5b-4c52-ba54-7fd8af3cbe87/disruption-interruption 
• Apple Podcast - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/disruption-interruption/id1581985755 
• Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/6yGSwcSp8J354awJkCmJlD

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Our guest today, Jesse Woodbury is a disruptor in SaaS sales and a host of a successful podcast show SaaS Sales Players.  

High dollar SaaS sales tend to involve at least half a dozen stakeholders with crazy competition and them being educated about the industry. Enter Jesse Woodbury, he has created 2 frameworks that help providers close over 7 figures in ARR. 

  Key Takeaways:   

• The SaaS market currently growing by 18% each year and is expected to grow to 22% by end of 2022 and is being considered to transform the IT industry from a cost centre to a value centre.  

• SaaS adaption in the Health care industry is growing at the rate of 20% per year.    
• The main ingredient for disruption is being a thought leader while creating and putting out content regularly which roughly equates to making 100 cold calls or sending 100 emails a day.    
• Content can be repurposed and packaged up in a way that your buyers consider you a thought leader in their industry.     
• He also changes his mind-set and considered being a consultant or a partner instead of a salesperson as the main prospects are executive-level buyers like CEO, COO, CTO, CFO etc. which in turn increased the deal sizes and time.    
• Tips for frontline SaaS salesperson – read and compile relevant articles to your industry and take snippets that might be relevant to your buyers. Package and share them with your potential clients, even in the middle of buying/deal cycles. This helps you build credibility, and value and position yourself as a partner in their business. 

• Status Quo of SaaS Sales – One had to fix an appointment and sell the hardware or servers on company premises, usually a large multi-million dollar complex deal.    
• With a lot of market automation techniques and more than 20,000 SaaS companies trying to sell their services, there is a lot of noise. Executives aren’t sure which tool is valuable and supports their business.      
• Being in SaaS sales is an incredibly lucrative game if you play the game right. The best sellers have been figured from implementing content.   
• Being a sales rep in a high ticket SaaS company, the role is to create valuable content for buyers. It can be specific about which tackles/handle a problem.    
• With the current status quo, the average tenure for a Sales VP in SaaS companies is 18 months, and even shorter tenure with frontline reps, resulting in huge financial losses and potential revenue. 

• Even if you have a small subset of your reps posting relevant content to your buyers, word gets around that they are available to partner with your business and solve problems.    
• Jesse's advice to the sales rep is to “find the medium, platform or channel that works best for you, some people that are tweeting, for others it may be LinkedIn. As for me, I like recording podcasts. I know a lot of reps who have found success with video content.”   
• The status quo was to update your name and numbers in the sales force and inform your manager about the next steps to close the deal. Jesse suggests making the deal more conversational and collaborative, that’s how you know make your deals more predictable and have more span of control.       

Quote of the show: 

18:40 – 19:12   “Being in SaaS is an incredibly lucrative game if you play the game right, but if you’re not playing the game effectively. Sales is the highest and the lowest paying job in the planet. Sales is very much what you kill and if you can’t do that because you’re sticking to the status quo, then how you do continue hitting you’re numbers and continue on with the profession. So that’s been the challenge and that’s why the shift has to happen more broadly” 

  Links: 

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessewoodbury/ 
• Company Website: https://www.kustomer.com 

 Ways to Tune In: 

• Amazon Music - https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/eccda84d-4d5b-4c52-ba54-7fd8af3cbe87/disruption-interruption 
• Apple Podcast - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/disruption-interruption/id1581985755 
• Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/6yGSwcSp8J354awJkCmJlD 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Matthew Owen has been solving problems as a Fractional Chief Technology Officer for 25+ years and is a Digital transformation leader, specifically with disruptive innovation of facial recognition. He is also a Twitter enthusiast, using it to ensure success at large scale events to gain valuable real-time consumer service feedback on new technology being implemented while it’s being experienced by the consumers.   

Key Takeaways 

• The main ingredient for disruption is extreme customer focus, taking into account the customer experience and their journey.
• Twitter could be a major feedback tool, where customer voices their opinion and experience about your product & services.
• Facial recognition technology is controversial but when used correctly can be incredibly useful.
• Facial recognition technology can help solve certain types of problems.  Example: A Football stadium or a concert – 60 odd thousand people are trying to get in with an even smaller army of people helping them to get in, creating a bottleneck. Adding COVID to this mix makes it more challenging.  Implementing Facial Recognition based express access or iPass allows fans and staff workers touchless access. 
• Status Quo with Events and what consumers expect after COVID – Change is constant, with COVID regulations easing out consumers are confused with overlapping rules thrown by the authorities. Each event has its own set of rules & regulations, making it challenging for fans and employees alike. 
• User education plays a pivotal role in making this technology scalable. The problem with educating the masses is that they are desensitized to marketing emails and half a short attention span.
• A proper protocol is followed with multiple layers of screening and judgment to ensure peace of mind and public safety. 
• The challenge with this technology in the States is the regulatory environment. With privacy advocates for the consumers, the country is governed by laws making it difficult to navigate around them and still make sure the technology works for the consumers.
• The future of Facial recognition technology is going to be ubiquitous, inevitable and can be deployed at every location for the good of the customer.
• Part of the challenge is the myths surrounding the privacy and security of the technology – Consumers don’t really care as long as it’s convenient and saves them the Hassel. The real bottleneck it educating the end-users and making them aware of such technology. 
• The major challenge is budgeting – who pays for such a tech? Because it’s a cross-functional tech, getting all departments to agree to possess a greater challenge, which slows down the process.
• It’s all about the consumer experience. When it comes down to it, any technology which is developed whether B2B or B2C, ultimately affects the end consumer. In the case of Facial recognition, it affects directly.  

Quote of the show: 

6:43 “The technology can it used for good or evil, just like any other technology we’ve invited as mankind. It’s incredibly useful if used correctly, there are things you can only do using facial recognition, like scanning a crowd of 66,000 people and picking out 3 people that shouldn’t be there”  

Links: 

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mowenranger/ 
• Company Website: http://6bpartners.com 

 Ways to Tune In: 

• Amazon Music - https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/eccda84d-4d5b-4c52-ba54-7fd8af3cbe87/disruption-interruption 

• Apple Podcast - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/disruption-interruption/id1581985755 
• Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/6yGSwcSp8J354awJkCmJlD 

Links 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6923281101763268608 

YT snippet: https://youtube.com/shorts/ADMv9X0IysE?feature=share 

YT episode: https://youtu.be/5TadziWMP84 

Podbean: https://www.disruptioninterruption.com/?s=%23+029 

Amazon Music - https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/eccda84d-4d5b-4c52-ba54-7fd8af3cbe87/disruption-interruption 

Apple Podcast - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/disruption-interruption/id1581985755 

Google Play - https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cub21ueWNvbnRlbnQuY29tL2QvcGxheWxpc3QvODE5NjRmY2EtYTQ5OC00NTAyLThjZjktYWI3YzAwMmRiZTM2LzNiZTZiNzJhLWEzODItNDhhNS04MDc5LWFmYTAwMTI2M2FiNi9kZDYzMGE4Mi04ZGI4LTQyMGUtOGNmYi1hZmEwMDEyNjNhZDkvcG9kY2FzdC5yc3M= 

Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/6yGSwcSp8J354awJkCmJlD 

Stitcher - https://www.stitcher.com/show/disruption-interruption 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Dave Dein has been in logistics, trucking and now education for 30+ years. He has been in all positions in trucking, a driver, management and now is a CDL (Commercial Drivers License) instructor with Patterson High School, California

The trucking industry has been changing drastically over the years. Supply chain, logistics, technology, training but especially recruiting. Today, we have an enormous shortage of truck drivers.

Key takeaways 

Quote of the show:

4:22 “I have been in trucking since 1988, there is always been a demand for well-trained drivers. The problem is we have a driver’s shortage and an ageing workforce. 25% of our current drivers getting close to the age of retirement.”

Links:

 Ways to Tune In:

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.