The Startup CPG Podcast

02:58 Jessi - Hi, Jess, welcome to the show today. How are you?

03:01 Jess - Good. Thanks for having me.

03:03 Jessi - Oh, I am so excited to have you here. I would love if you could start us off by telling us just a little bit about yourself and your background as we dive in.

03:12 Jess - Yeah. So my name is Jess Cervellon. I am a customer experience and marketing professional that has been in the CX space for about 15 plus years at this point. My background has been primarily in SaaS and then In most recent years have moved to CPG Ecom. I, by day, I am the VP of Customer Experience at Feastables. And before nine and after five, I am also a co-host of Oopsy podcast, as well as a fractional CXO leader.

03:48 Jessi - Awesome. Amazing. Yeah, I've been following you for I think a little over a year. And I love your content. I've listened to your show, which we'll make sure to have links to at the end and everything so people can listen to your show because it's awesome. But and yeah, Feastables is so interesting. We being with Mr. Beast. CPG brand. I wonder if you can tell us a little bit like how did you start working with Feastables?

04:12 Jess - Okay, it is actually a really funny story. So and it's whatever, audience, here we go. Okay, we're gonna talk about it. So I, like I said, I've been in like the CX space and like some sort of capacity, whether that's like support, customer success, retention marketing, like just in this space for quite some time. But primarily, I've worked in SaaS, right? And so I worked in SaaS and like, uh, and Feastables is actually my fifth startup. I've worked at several different startups. I am a startup junkie. I'm going to be real with you. I love a psychopath moment. And so anyway, so, you know, I'm kind of like floating through the space. I'm like working in these SaaS, um, couple of SaaS companies, kind of like I was at a company that wasn't doing too well. And so I was exploring other options and I actually got a job offer. to be the head of customer success and operations for like a health tech company. And you know, just gearing up going down the same path. And I ended up getting reached out to on LinkedIn. But what's really funny though, is like I got reached out to on LinkedIn by a recruiter and they were like, Hey, do you want to come and like be the customer experience leader for this brand called Feastables by Mr. Beast? And you know, listen, I'm I'm older, like I'm 38, right? Mr. Beast is not in my realm of things. It's in my baby cousin's realm of things. And I just remember being like, what's Feastables? Who's Mr. Beast? And so I do some deep diving and I realized like, oh man, this is like really dope. Like this is a great opportunity. I secretly had been wanting to like make it into like the e-com, like CPG space. Like I will get into this, but I'm a brand experience junkie. Like I love a good like packaging moment and like just good brand experience. Right. So like I've always been a fan of just e-com. But I've never had an opportunity to work into it. So I was like, hey, okay, like I took the interviews, did the things, went in through like the pathways, and I got the job. And it's all literally because of like cold outreach on LinkedIn. And had I never… And the other thing is, had I never even moved to Chicago, because I live in Chicago on a whim. Okay, like I literally moved here on a whim. But had I never moved to Chicago, I would have never been in this like opportunity. to get it. And it's been, honestly, the dopest thing ever. Because one, I get to work in eCommerce every day, but I get to nerd out about brand experience every single day. And I get to also apply so much of what I've learned in the SaaS world into this world and creating not just customer experiences. thinking like, oh, customer support. Right. Right. I get to create like digital experiences based off all of the like knowledge that I've like received previously.

06:57 Jessi - Yeah. Oh, that's so interesting. So as you kind of like dug into like CPG compared to like software and as you were like learning about Mr. B since like you might not have like been target audience. And so you're like, you know, going down, like learning how to represent the brand essentially. A, I'm kind of wondering what that looked like to kind of really understand the essence of the brand for you to then start building the consumer experience. And then also in there, what did you start to notice of like, oh, this CPG, like, this is different about CPG with these physical products, or I'm curious what you started to notice as as differences from the software world.

07:35 Jess - Yeah. I mean, I think that's like a two or three-parter question, but I definitely can nerd out about this. So I mean, listen, and I think these principles apply to anybody. It's not just Feastables or Mr. Beast, right? I think that this applies to anybody who's going out and starting a brand or thinking about starting a brand. There's a level of understanding consumer insights and consumer market research, right? And so, you know, how I deep dive into it, of course, like I can go and like read about Mr. B's go and read like all the comments and like the YouTube channels or the YouTube videos. And like I've done those things and I did those things because I really what I wanted to do was like understand the audience, but also understand how to speak to that audience and develop a particular brand voice for that audience. Right. And I knew nothing. I knew nothing walking into it. But what I did know was how to research an audience and how to research the consumer to understand like how to speak to them. Right. So that's like that was the first feat. It was going and like doing my research like deep diving into the world of YouTube, his videos, articles, everything, and really just reading the comments within the community. And then on the other side of it too, I come from SaaS, right? Ecom is not wasn't my first nature. But what I do know is I know brand experience. I know how awesome it feels when you get a product and you have like this really awesome like unpackaging moment or you have this really awesome like moment within that brand to like go and build loyalty. Like I know that because I'm a consumer. So I like doubled down on like researching my favorite products and like what they were doing and like how they did it and like really just like going into research mode as well as like the D2C community. is probably the most welcoming community that I could ever imagine. It's a lot different than SaaS. I'll be real with you. Like, I really think that, like, people are here to help. I mean, this is a little bit of a shout out moment, but, you know, I reached out to, like, my network of people and I was like, hey, do you know this person? Do you know this person? I'm like this brand. And I got linked up with Eli Wise, who is now senior director of customer experience at Jones Road Beauty. But previously he worked at Olipop and I was a huge fan of Olipop. Right. And, you know, Eli like really took me under his wing. We would nerd out about customer experience and like I would tell him things and he would tell me things and like really learned about consumer experience in like e-comm, working with him as like a mentor mentee type of situation, but also like Just research. Like, I mean, listen, it's like it's kind of like when you go to read a book, right? Like I could go and like read the book and I can go like listen to the podcast. But you've got to do your research, got to go out and research your consumer and understand how to speak to them, what it is that they like, what it is that they don't like. And the last point that I want to make is testing things. Not everything that you do on that V1 is going to make it to your V5. And what I mean by V1 to V5 is like version one, version five. Right. So I think It's being humble to know that like you might not know everything, but it's also exercising testing.

10:49 Jessi - Oh, yeah, for sure. Most of the brands and most of our audience does not have the same kind of following as like Mr. Beast. Obviously, most people don't have that same kind of following. So building out consumer experience for someone with that kind of following and the following the Feastables as well. I'm curious what your thoughts are on consumer experience for really small growing brands. And I feel like sometimes there's some intimidation around even just seeing the letter CX, maybe it feels like a big brand thing. And I'm wondering what your thoughts are on how small brands can really leverage consumer experience, and then we'll dig into some specifics from chatbots and SMS and everything from there. But I just kind of overall philosophy question.

11:29 Jess - Listen, at the core of everything that I do, I was a customer success manager. I worked in a world where it was about building relationships with my customer. It wasn't just always seeing like them one time. It was like, how do we can keep them to come back? How do we make sure that they have like a really good experience and like understanding this product? understanding the support that we're going to give them, how do you utilize it, adopt it, all these things, right? So I apply those same principles to e-com, right? Like if I'm coming out and I have a brand and I have like a product, I've researched my audience, I understand like how to speak to my audience, but I want that audience to continuously come back to me. At the core of it all, you have to build a relationship with them. So it's thinking about it in like a customer success fashion of building relationship with your customer. More tactically is what is the experience of unpackaging their shipment? What is the experience of like of the packaging on your product? Like, are you being informative to your customer on how to use it, on what the nutrition facts are? Are you making it like how to reach out to you if like there's something that they need, right? Like, is there a QR experience to like lead them into another digital experience? I don't know, right? And then you would like trail into that on like, what is the site experience? Like, if I want somebody to buy my product, Like taking the same principles, like how you're friends with somebody and how you build relationships with them. How would you build your site experience around building a relationship with your friends? What would you tell your friends about that product? Like how would you want to convince them to purchase your product? So again, like site experience, relationship building, being informative. thinking about all of the touch points that your customer has to go through on your site experience and making those like frictionless and seamless. And then, you know, after post-purchase, like, OK, this person has purchased this product. What happens now? Like, OK, great. Like, so glad that you purchased this product, but like never see you again. Relationships don't work that way. You're starting a one to one relationship. Like, how do you follow up with that person? How do you give that person information about not just your product, about when their order is going to arrive to you. How do you nurture that relationship? What type of lifecycle campaigns are you doing? What type of retention campaigns are you doing to nurture that relationship? So I know this is very broad, but this is how I think about it. I think about every single one of my touch points with that customer as a relationship building moment, as an opportunity to build brand loyalty. Listen, you're going to get some people who aren't going to like your product, and that's OK. But you know what you can do is like people who might not like your product, give them an opportunity to tell you why they don't like your product. Like listen to your product reviews, right? Like if somebody who might not want to come back, maybe they're a one time purchaser and they didn't really like the product. You can still have a relationship building moment by getting their their feedback and even responding back to them and be like, hey, I'm sorry you didn't enjoy the product. Share it with your friend. Check back next time for the next variant. You know, like every opportunity is an opportunity to build a relationship with your customer.

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16:24 Jess - So, you know, the whole reason I built the chatbot is because like I didn't know what I didn't know about the audience. I'll be real with you, right? And I walked into the digital experience of the Feastable site as like, okay, well, if I think like a product manager for a SaaS company, right? And if somebody needs information about the product, but they don't want to reach out to a support agent, right? Or they can't pick up the phone and call, how can I give them that information, but make it interactive? actually shout out to Intercom because all of my chatbot theories are based off of like what that product is. Intercom is more of like a SaaS tool than it is e-comm. So I walked into like the feasible situation with like, okay, I want to like be able to talk to my customer and I want to be able to like interact with them. But I know that like I can't handle thousands upon thousands of tickets. So How do I interact with my customer while also deflecting conversations? That was the core of why I built out the chatbot the way it is. This chatbot isn't just like, okay, you're going to self-service and get product information. It's also an ability to gain information about what Mr. Beast is doing, what's his latest video. It's also an opportunity to go down what Jesse was saying, a randomness path, which is exchanging jokes with that customer, exchanging memes and having a fun moment that you're building that brand experience with them. And what I found was that people loved it. People loved interacting with this bot on the site. The other thing that I found about it is that I put this bot on like our PDP pages. And if somebody was like sitting there for, you know, however much time, like 30 seconds, 45 seconds, whatever it is, it would pop up and start a conversation with them. It was like a conversation starter. So then I also noticed that this like bot was like kind of a like tiny salesperson on my website while you're sleeping. And that's why I built it for Feastables. And then I found out that it just got so much interaction. And then now what I'm doing is I take that theory for somebody who's a smaller brand. If you have a really small customer support team… And it goes back to also what I was saying is create a frictionless and seamless customer experience for your customers. So it's like, if I'm on your website and I have a bunch of questions, but like, I don't know, maybe I don't want to go to the help center. Maybe I just want to write an email or chat in. What you can do is you create like an informative, like easy chat bot that gives like the top answers to like the most commonly asked questions. You can like also develop out the chat bot to like do tracking and managing that order. And so like those are very like self-service and self-deflecting pathways. But then on the other end of it, you can build out like flows where you can maybe like give information about your products or develop out your own randomness pathways to build brand loyalty. There's some tools out there that are really good with this. Customer with a K has a chatbot ability within their CRM tool. Zendesk does. Gorgias does. All of these customer support tools are pretty much coming around like having chatbots. And if you think about the chatbot not as just like, OK, it's a live chat feature and you think about the chatbot as like a self-servicing feature, you're going to speak to that customer experience and you're going to like drive interactions with it to then educate your customer.

19:46 Jessi - It continues to evolve all the time more options, but I've used Gorgias in particular to help build out some like chat pathways. And it's a great way to just make your like FAQ page more interactable or like you can start with something really small and basic or like you said, some of them are. They're integrated, like where it will look up the person's order number and, you know, tell them where their shipment is or something like that. Are there other like small ways for brands to test a chatbot to see whether they want to build it out and continue to spend time on a path? Or if they do set up a test, like how long do you gain data before you're like, that pathway people don't seem to be enjoying? Like, how are you kind of testing and evaluating what you create?

20:29 Jess - Yeah, I mean, granted, it all depends on what tool you're utilizing. I'll be honest with you, I've utilized so many of them. I've utilized Intercom, Zendesk, Customer, Gorgeous, Gladly, even HubSpot, all of these tools, right? They all have their own ability to build this. And I think Think of you just like break it off like, okay, this doesn't have to be like Feastables chatbot, but this could be like a really good V1. And you think about it in the sense of like, what questions have I been getting asked in my customer support tickets that I can like answer very easily in a self-service fashion? That's like the first and foremost thing that I would do with it. And then just like anything, you have to make new iterations, you have to test, you have to reiterate. And what I usually do for testing is every week I will go into our bot and like any tool that I'm using, I will go in and like look at what are the questions that are most commonly being sent to like an email support ticket, whatever it is, or a live person. And how can I make a new iteration of that? If you don't have like every week to do it, I think if you do it every 30 to 60 days, that would be good. It doesn't have to be the most complex thing. Like most of these tools will have information on whether a pathway was successful or not successful. Just by diving into that data, like you can make improvements with it.

21:46 Jessi - Yeah, that's really awesome. I'm also curious about SMS and text messaging as a strategy, both for people to interact with and then also for, you know, sending them information. Like, how are you thinking about SMS right now? I'm curious what you're learning as that area shifts and evolves.

22:06 Jess - Yeah, I love SMS. SMS is one of my favorite channels. It's one of my favorite channels to consult clients on, especially. I literally get so excited when I have a client. They're like, Oh, well, we switched from this to this tool. And I'm like, Oh my god, what are you doing for your tactics? How are you thinking about it? Are you segmenting your audience? Like, I love it. And the reason I love it so much is because the difference between email versus SMS is that you have this phone in your hand and you have this opportunity to have a two-way conversation with your customer and make them feel like a part of that brand. No matter what tool you're using, if you're using Sendlane, you're using Klaviyo, Postscript, Attentive. If you're building out your SMS marketing campaigns as not just like, I'm marketing to the customer, but I'm also like, developing a two-way conversation, I'm telling you that people will respond back. Even if they respond back in like emojis, people love to interact. I see it all the time. One of my favorite things to do in just like a simple marketing campaign, instead of just being like, here's a BOGO deal, buy one, get one free, you know, till Tuesday, right? And an image, like creating a campaign that asks your customer a question and maybe developing pathways that are short answers back to them, right? Like it doesn't have to be like super complex where like you're Feastables and you're making all these crazy games and giveaways. You can just make it two way conversation where you're asking them a question, you get an answer back, and then then maybe you give them a discount. But it's like kind of making your customer work for it in a way, in a really fun way.

23:47 Jessi - Yeah, I think it's so interesting that people want to interact like they're kind of waiting for you to prompt them and say something that resonates with them and they're ready to interact with you. Yeah, I know.

23:56 Jess - I think it's really interesting. I don't have like a statistic behind it just because like I've seen it across multiple brands and I think it would be really hard for me to like drive down the statistic. But I can tell you that I see more interaction with responses on SMS than I do on email. And one of the things that I've done on Feastables is I've actually built out like that chatbot to the SMS channel too. So it's like if you send the marketing campaign and somebody responds back and is like, hey, they're going to be able to talk to the chatbot and like still go down those same like types of pathways that are on the website. I've built out joke pathways where they can get a joke, right? You can create that two-way conversation. And I know that's really complex, but I think for a smaller brand who's thinking about it, there's definitely ways that you can build out flows within your marketing tool. I've seen it a lot, like whether you're, you know, on the big guys like Braze and Twilio or you're on Klaviyo or PostScript or Tentive, like any of these, right? There's ways that you can build out like short and simple flows to create that two-way conversation.

25:04 Jessi - Yeah. And I think it can be intimidating to get started in this area, but basically a lot of these tools like kind of walk you through the creation, you can set it up and then you can evaluate it, like you said, every 30 or 60 days. And you're basically replicating employees that you wouldn't have the resources to hire. Like Feastables could probably have a thousand people, customer service team, and there wouldn't be enough time in the day to answer all of the phone calls and inquiries about Mr. Beast. But if you build a chatbot that can essentially act and do all those interactions. So on a smaller scale for a brand, you take the time to do this setup. And then it's like having more employees and little mini salespersons, like you said. So it's so interesting.

25:42 Jess - I mean, here's a statistic for you. And granted, this is like Feastables. But the whole reason I built the SMS chatbot is because I was seeing on the web, I was seeing anywhere from 80% to 90% deflection rates. Because like I told you, most of these people just really wanted to interact. So it wasn't like, oh, I like seriously needed help. It was like, I just want to interact and like go and like joke and like go down these pathways. When I first launched the CX program at Feastables, we actually had 30 plus agents. So we had 30 plus agents and then we had two agents internally. And the 30 plus agents were a part of an outsourcing team. And like for better or worse, I think that Having your customer experience team very close to your heart and close to your brand and being internal pays off in dividends. We can get into that a little bit later. But that's my philosophy. And that's how I build my teams. And so anyway, so I had a 30 plus agents. And I was seeing that the quality of work is a little bit different than the agents internally. So on the web, I was able to deflect 80 to 90% of tickets. Great. Perfect. Love it. Boom, boom, boom. But then I also noticed because we have this direct call out of text us, we text back to 69420, which is our shortcode, we were getting thousands upon thousands of tickets. And they were just general conversation tickets. They were literally just conversation tickets to have a back and forth and, and like, I actually would have needed to like employ more agents on the outsourcing team. So I looked at that problem and I was like, well, if I have the web bot, how do I take my web bot to the SMS channel? And so my partner, the, the chatbot company, they're called Certainly. So they were able to help me build an SMS bot. I'm telling you, as soon as I turned it on, like, okay, so here's this, here's the statistic. We were seeing anywhere from like 15,000 to 30,000 tickets every two weeks in the SMS channel because we have this direct call out to like text us, right? I mean, thousands upon thousands upon thousands. And that's why it was like such a like a big problem. And as soon as I turned on the SMS bot, I immediately got that 80 to 90 percent deflection. And again, why I'm bullish on creating a seamless experience, creating an informative customer experience, even when you're sleeping, is because I double down in like the chatbot and I double down in like the help center and all these other like aspects to like be proactive. I no longer outsource my team and I have five individuals across the U.S. as well as one individual in Portugal who helps out on my team. But it's all internal. Everybody works for Feastables. And I've been able to keep my team really small because I'm also thinking about the agent experience and not just the customer experience.

28:33 Jessi - Yeah. Oh, I love that. I see this question a lot in our Startup CPG Slack community and on LinkedIn, people deciding whether to outsource like, you know, customer service, customer help. And, you know, we've talked about some ways that we can create resources, but I'm curious for you to expand on your philosophy on that. Cause I think our listeners would find it really valuable.

28:53 Jess - Yeah, I think whether you're Feastables, whether you're a brand just starting out, you as a founder, right? Like I'm a founder, I'm a starting employee. I care so much about this brand. I care so much about this brand and I care so much about like the experience that my customers have with this brand because I want them to come back. Right. And I strongly believe that putting customer experience and emphasis on customer experience at the beginning stages of your brand will pay off in dividends. And what I mean by that even more granularly is that if you invest in whether it's one CX agent to like build out your team or not even just build out your team, build out your program, or if it's two people and they sit within your brand and they're in the trenches with you developing your brand, your experience is going to be the dopest experience. And that's my strong belief about it. I mean, I know I'll get slack about it. I just do not prefer to outsource to third parties because I want people to be very invested in my brand. I want people to constantly strategically thinking about how we have to develop the brand voice. how we have to develop process and procedures that are better for the customer. And, you know, I really advise on like consulting pathways as well as just, you know, general advisement to a brand starting out of like ways to deflect as much as possible and be able to keep your internal team small, but be able to like answer tickets and like do what you need to do in the customer experience. And so again, I know I'm saying a lot of words, but again, I am a strong believer of investing in your customer experience program at the beginning stages of launching your brand will pay off in dividends. And what that means is not outsourcing it.

30:41 Jessi - That's, that's very helpful. And I mean, I agree with you. And I think there's a lot of great case studies and examples where that has, I think of like native deodorant, where his first multiple hires were all customer experience, which is really interesting. And it's just, it seems if you outsource your interaction with your customer, like your customers are the life of your business and you're not going to be able to iterate and test and continue to learn from them in the way that you invested as a founder or founding team member are going to be invested. So it makes a lot of sense.

31:10 Jess - Yeah, truthfully, this is why it was the fourth hire at Feastables, because we said customer experience is really important for this brand. And so like developing the go to market strategy for the CX program was very important at the beginning stages and not just outsourcing it. Right. And I know a lot of people are going to tell me, oh, the third party can be an extension of your brand. Yes, I absolutely believe that there are partners out there that could be really dope. Right. But my thing is, is that I think if you're investing in the experience that your customers are having in that beginning stage, you're setting the tone for the company to scale with customer experience at the forefront. And I don't mean just like customer experience. Like I know everybody like chops up customer experience, just customer support. I'm talking literally about the experience of your customer throughout your brand being a core function as well as a core principle of your brand for you to future grow and care about the experience. So like even putting this into practice, like because I was a fourth hire, because like we built the department as its own, like it doesn't sit under marketing. It's like literally its own department. Every person that has come into the company now understands the philosophies of CX. Now they put the customer at the forefront of everything that they're doing, whether in their supply chain, whether they're in R&D, whether they're in marketing, you know, tech. Everybody thinks about the customer's experience because we set up that pillar at the initial stages.

32:39 Jessi - Mm hmm. Yeah, that leads into, I think, places where then because you've built such a strong relationship with your customer, things like launching at retail, like I think about like Feastables launching in Walmart, and basically, you're able to call on your community to say, hey, we're doing this launch or even being able to I think of brands like we had on the show, like Oathouse or Midday Squares that have relied on their community to solve merchandising issues or things like that. And, you know, that's beyond customer support. Like you said, that's because you have a real relationship with your, your community members, and they feel ownership of the brand. So I'm curious, like with, with like the retail launch, like with feastables and Walmart, like, how did you think about building that experience for the community? What did that look like?

33:22 Jess - In addition to like the support function, we also have community as part of like CX as well. So it's like we have this really strong like discord network as well as like just social channels. Granted, we have like a platform to like to be able to like activate. But if we just go back to the principles of community building as a as a whole, you know, yes, it's a place for like to build those relationships and to like, you know, build that community. But when we launched into retail, yes, there was excitement about it. But we were able to like pull upon the community to tell us about broken bar situations and like activate that community and being able to like help us before we had a merchandising team in place, you know, from like the feasible side of it. It's really interesting because These people just really want a piece of the Jimmy pie in a way. They just really want to feel like they're a part of a Jimmy brand and a part of Feastibles and they're really helping Jimmy out. And so I think that's like, granted, yes, I think that's a beautiful thing with Feastibles. But when I look at it, smaller companies, right? And a lot of smaller companies focus on acquiring, of course. You focus on acquiring, but like if you also focus on like other channels where your customers like you're you can communicate with your customers and like build like relationships outside of just like an email chain or an SMS chain or even like a social chain. Like how do you like how do you kind of give back to your customer so that they want to be loyal to your brand for future drives?

34:52 Jessi - Are there other like big learnings or stories that come to mind? One that I'm curious to ask you about, first of all, is because you posted on LinkedIn recently was about your personal phone number getting leaked as part of Feastables. So I'd love for you to tell us about that. And then any other stories that come to mind is just like big learnings or meaningful moments.

35:09 Jess - OK, listen, my fam, you are starting a company for the love of God on your Shopify site. Do not put your personal phone number. The biggest thing I have learned is whatever you're doing and setting up your company, you get a business phone number. I've made that mistake. Maybe people are going to be like, yeah, Jess, duh. I did not know that. And being scrappy employee form, we were just like, yeah, here's my personal address. Here's my phone number. Since then, two years later, I have been blowing up. Most recently, I think this is like four weeks ago now, somehow my phone number got leaked on the internet to a Mr. Beast fan who, to be honest with you, I like run the social sentiment analysis and I literally cannot figure out where it's at. So I think somewhere along the way, somebody posted my number and said, this number belongs to Jimmy Donaldson. I, on average, let's check my phone right now. Oh, yeah. In this one hour conversation, I have gotten six phone calls that all say spam risk and my voicemail inbox is full and people just like call me back and like I refuse to change my number. Listen, I know that I'm an idiot for that, but I refuse to change my number. So point is, biggest lesson, get a business phone number. OK, that's great advice. The second lesson, and probably the biggest lesson, and something that I talk to a lot of people about all the time, when you are a small brand, you're a small brand, you're very being scrappy, and you're very much like everybody's doing everything all at once. When I first started, I was doing CX, I was doing community, I was doing digital experience, I was strategizing and executing, I was doing marketing campaigns, everything, which I love, and that's beautiful, and it's amazing, and I'm a psychopath, and I do those things. But what's an interesting thing with startups is that everybody, like when you're starting with a really small team, everybody has to do everything. But then as you scale, you kind of like, you kind of forget to kind of take care of your people in a way. And like, as you scale, you've got to bring in more and more people, right? And more and more people become very specialized. So then like your role becomes very specialized. Maybe you're not doing all the things anymore. Which is fine, but what I've noticed is that there are some people out there, especially junior employees, who get a little bit scared of that as you scale and they start losing the tasks that they were previously doing. And it kind of creates this bit of not fear, but just like, oh, like, yeah, maybe like FOMO in a way of like, I'm missing out on this. Like, I'm not going to get to do this anymore. Oh, I'm not going to challenge anymore. And then on the other end of it, too, is like as like you people become more and more specialized in roles. What I noticed is that sometimes people get very not only scared of that, but then they're like, this is my task and it's only my task and I don't want to delegate it. But they're not like allowing opportunity to grow within themselves. So my point is of all of this is like as your startup and you have to bring in more more people or more specialized people, I think as a founder, as a leader, it's really important to have a discussion with your employees to create kind of an environment of like we're in this together, we're doing this together. But as we grow, you might have built this Lego tower, but you might have to pass off that Lego tower to somebody else to go build a better Lego tower. And so then that allows opportunity for you to take on more Legos to build a new Lego tower. And I see this a lot. I actually see this not like I'm not really speaking from just feasible as I'm speaking from like a startup experience. Like I see this like fear of like as we scale, like I'm going to lose out on these things or I'm going to lose these challenges and I'm not going to be challenged anymore. But like create opportunities for people to like have more challenges and like really take care of the people that like helps you get from zero to 10.

38:58 Jessi - Yeah, that's a really great point. And it kind of ties into what you said earlier about how you not only think about taking care of customers, but you think about taking care of the agents that are on the team. And it's about investing in the people that have been been with you since the beginning and taking care of them.

39:13 Jess - I think the other thing is I build teams to like be very small, but the reason I build teams that way is because I also really want to give my junior employees an opportunity to like upskill themselves, right? Like being in a startup and being in the trenches together is such a good opportunity to like learn valuable career and life lessons. And so me as a leader, I'm not like, oh, my God, I got to go build the chatbot and I got to go do these things and like execute all these things. Now, like my role is like definitely shifted where it's like more strategy. And I'm not saying I'm like up in the tower doing like strategy and I'm only just like dictating stuff. I'm allowing for opportunities for like my junior employees to learn the things that I've maybe have learned, I've maybe mastered so they can go and master those skills and then take those skills into like whether it's the next job, whether it's the next position within the company. But like I build the teams to be kind of like this well-oiled machine as well as like building them to uplevel themselves.

40:13 Jessi - Yeah, yeah. Is there anything else you wanted to share that we didn't already cover that you really wanted to make sure that people went home with in this conversation before we go into how to connect with you specifically?

40:23 Jess - Man, I think I've talked about a lot of things. I apologize in advance to a lot of people that I've rambled a lot on this episode, but I appreciate you for listening.

40:32 Jessi - This is great. I loved the breadth of what we covered and I think you've got a lot of practical tips in here. And so what are the ways that people can connect with you? I'm going to link in the show notes, your personal website, your new newsletter that you're launching, which is awesome. The link to your podcast. Yeah. How else do you work with folks?

40:50 Jess - What's the best way to reach out? Best way to reach out is on my website, JessCervellon.com, as well as LinkedIn. I'm really active there. And additionally, I am starting a newsletter that will be launching in September. It's called Sunday Postcards Notes from an Impact Leader. Every week, I'm going to be diving into your inbox and inspiring you for the week ahead. It's a newsletter about like elevating your leadership game, empowering your team so that they can go and like orchestrate these amazing customer experiences. I'm a straight shooter, so it's going to be unfiltered advice and insights and really just trying to set the stage for something, something new, something fresh and something that everybody can learn from. So head over to my website, JessCervellon.com and you can sign up for the newsletter or you can reach out to me and give me a holler.

41:42 Jessi - Awesome. And you're a mentor as well on one of the platforms. I can't remember which platform, but I can link it.

41:48 Jess - Yeah, I'm also on MentorPass as well. So plenty of link opportunities to chat. Honestly, one of my favorite things is to nerd out about startups and especially these days, e-com.

42:02 Jessi - Yeah, I love it. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Jess. I'm so excited to subscribe to your newsletter in September. And thanks so much for just coming on the show and sharing your wisdom with us and being willing to share with our community. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you for listening in today. I'm so honored you joined me for this conversation, and I love hearing from you all with feedback, suggestions, or if you just want to say hi, at podcast at startupcpg.com, or you can find me on LinkedIn. If you liked this episode, we'd love for you to share it with a friend or colleague, subscribe so you don't miss future episodes, and maybe even leave us a five star review on Apple Podcasts. If you aren't yet in our Slack community of founders and experts, we'd love to see you there. You can get the free invite at startupcpg.com and find all our other awesome resources there, like webinars, databases, the blog, the magazine, and virtual and in-person events. And if you found yourself rocking out to our intro and outro music, which I do every single time, make sure to check out the Super Fantastics on Spotify. It's the band of our Startup CPG founder, Daniel Scharff. I'm Jessi Freitag, your host and producer, and on behalf of the whole team at Startup CPG, thank you for being here and see you next week.