Ep. 4 Joseph Fung Founder & CEO of Uvaro

Show Notes

At Uvaro, we're on a mission to make career transformation and best-in-class training available to everyone!

Uvaro fills the overwhelming unfulfilled demand for sales talent at scale-up companies in North America's emerging technology hubs.
Our innovative sales training programs teach recruits everything they need to know to thrive in B2B sales roles at growing tech companies, from sales methodologies and tactics to using digital sales enablement tools, all underpinned by immersive real-world industry experiences. We believe in the success of our students, which is why payment for our program only begins once our students are employed.

https://uvaro.com

What is The Llearner.co Show?

Listen in as groundbreaking leaders discuss what they have learned. Discover the books, podcasts, presentations, courses, research, articles and lessons that shaped their journey. Hosted by: Kevin Horek, Gregg Oldring, & Jon Larson.

Intro/Outro: Welcome to the learner.co show hosted by Kevin horic and his fellow learner co-founders listen in is groundbreaking leaders discuss what they've learned, discover the books, podcasts, presentations, courses, research articles, and lessons that shaped their journey to listen to past episodes and find links to all sources of learning mentioned, visit learner.co that's learner with two L's dot co.

Kevin Horek: Welcome back to the learner.co show. Today we have Joseph Fung, he's the founder and CEO of Varo. They're actually doing some really innovative stuff around sales training, and he thought you guys,

Jon Larson: Yeah, it sounds like you've ours doing some really interesting things. It's, it's a education platform, which we're always interested in. It's specifically for sales training and it looks at, it seems to be mostly for tech sales as well, where they're also helping us as well with the matchmaking, which is really interesting where they're not just providing the education, but it looks like they're also introducing pro possible salespeople to organizations and training them.

Gregg Oldring: Yeah, I I'm fascinated about this because it's a topic near and dear to my heart. The, the idea of sales when I was going through business school and university, I took a long time to do it because it started a company. When I first started in business school, there were no sales courses at all in the school that I was in. And, and over the course of time, they would have this feedback thing at the end of the year. I would always say, we need to have sales courses. We needed to have sales courses cause I was in the program for that long. And then finally they did have it. It's a thing that has been, it was long ignored. I think within education, within business was teaching about sales and that kind of influence and so on. It's so essential to work whether you're actually the sales person or whether you're actually just pitching ideas internally.

Gregg Oldring: There's a pretty constant need to influence someone else to come to a decision. It's really valuable work and I think that's really cool and interesting. And also I I'm interested. I always love hearing for people who have experience overseas, what they kind of learn about there, about home when you go overseas. That's one of the things I was known as is people who have spent time overseas that was coming back kind of having some realizations about the place that they live. Curious about that too, just to kind of learning is going on there.

Kevin Horek: I think the interesting thing I choked with them last time I talked to him, it was like, this is the training that I need. Like, well, I've always kind of needed and still need, even though I'm not a sales guy. I think even just, it would be actually really fascinating and I would learn a ton and I think like you're always selling yourself or something, right. Even if you're not a sales person, but you're especially in startups and you're talking to people you're always kind of even just like soft selling, right. Or you're not even trying to get the person to buy something, but you're constantly talking to them about what you're trying to do and just articulating and communicating that better. I think selfishly, that one really helped me.

Jon Larson: Yeah. It'd be also interesting to see how during how their business has changed from say 2019, till now with everybody changing where they were working from. I'd be interested to hear how that affected their business.

Gregg Oldring: Yeah. That would be fascinating. I'm still curious if maybe it's all just Jedi mind tricks. I didn't actually, oh, here's another thing to consider too, is that another mind that has gone from being a computer or engineering kind of focus person to something other than that. I love to see where those parallels came or how that whole transition happened. I hope we get to ask about that too.

Kevin Horek: Cool. Well, I guess I'm going to show welcome back to the learner.co show today. We have Joseph Fung, he's the founder and CEO of Ivara Joseph. Welcome to the show.

Joseph Fung: Hey, thanks Kevin. Thanks for having me on. Yeah, I'm.

Kevin Horek: Excited to have you on, I think I was, I'm fascinated by what you guys are doing at U Varo, but maybe before we get into that, let's get to know you better and start off with where you grew up.

Joseph Fung: Oh, for sure. I grew up in the kind of Toronto and then north of Toronto area. Anyone that's in the area knows, my stomping grounds, like in York region, new market and all that kind of stuff, but very cool around Toronto has been the kind of anchor for my life.

Kevin Horek: Sure. You went to the university of Waterloo. What did you take and why.

Joseph Fung: Computer engineering and honestly, the why is probably the worst answer. Literally I picked the hardest programs to get into it is not the best way to choose your direction, but it's like the entry requirements are difficult. I'll show you.

Kevin Horek: Okay, interesting. You, were you doing any computer programming whatsoever before you actually took the program?

Joseph Fung: I was, but again, that was by accident. I, I was supposed to take, I was enrolled in a business program during high school and on day one, the people that were in the class and the way it ran, I realized, oh, this wasn't actually going to be as difficult or challenging as I really want. I left it switched and the only other class there was computer, so it's terrible, but I feel like I stumbled into a software career.

Kevin Horek: That's amazing. I'm curious then you get out of school, you go and teach English in China. I'm curious. What did you learn and get from actually teaching overseas that you were able to bring back to Canada and have used to this day?

Joseph Fung: Kevin you're uncovering all of my terrible academic past, which is funny considering I'm running a training institution now don't worry. It's good. Yeah. I actually, I took off to China after second year university because I, I was angry at the school and as all young angry people do it to do something new. I took off to China more as a kind of, almost like a flip of the middle finger to the university of Waterloo at the time. I'm glad I came back. I finished the degree. It's all good, but I loved it. It was such a great learning opportunity. I mean, learning the language is always good. Learning. Another culture is great, but it really helped me appreciate how different approaches to solve problems are. Okay. The Chinese education system was just so different than ours and getting a chance to see it firsthand and participate in engaging.

Joseph Fung: It really helped me realize how much I appreciate what we have here, but also just, wow. There are totally different ways to solve the same problem. And I'm really glad I learned it. It was really helpful for him a reference for all my future work.

Kevin Horek: Interesting. Okay. So walk us through your journey. Maybe some highlights along the way up until coming up with the idea and starting you borrow.

Joseph Fung: Sure. I mean the LinkedIn version, T TLDR for tech companies, founded some sold, some closed, it got better at that each time, the kind of steel cable that runs through all of those is my co-founders. Now we started our first company because we wanted to build a great place for people to work. I was on a co-op job and they had a new president coming in and I was like, great, we're going to meet a new president. You know, everybody else was scared. He was gonna close the plant that sucked. Yeah, built a bunch of software companies, but always wanted to help people have a great place to work. The real Genesis for you Varo really came from that desire. How do we build and how do we build great places to work and how do we give people the opportunity to find their best work?

Joseph Fung: And, and that's really why we start.

Kevin Horek: Interesting. How did you come up and figure out that was really important to accompany success as you were building these companies?

Joseph Fung: We started, when we founded the company, it was actually less about helping other companies. It was just about having a company. We could be proud of like, okay, yeah. I wanted to have a place where my friends and my family, the people I knew would be proud to work at. That led to a lot of, with my business. I started to realize it was a sustainable differentiator and that if we get help, others do the same thing that we'd help a ton of other companies too. Yeah, I think more realizing what we valued and cared about actually really applied to others too. We thought we could share that.

Kevin Horek: Interesting. Okay. Walk us through, what exactly is you Varo and what made you actually decide to build it?

Joseph Fung: Yeah, so Euro's a career success platform. Grow careers in tech. We do that primarily through the sales side of the organization. People will come to us, take our career training, get paired with the companies that we work with and then work with our coaching teams to grow their careers. What that looks like is somebody might come out of like hospitality or tourism. Maybe they were a bartender or a flight attendant, or, we're selling cell phones. They go through our classes, they land a job at a, a fast growing SAS company. They're earning more money and they get promoted faster as they continue to work with our services. Yeah, we care about helping people lead successful careers and that's who we work with.

Kevin Horek: Interesting. I don't know why it never dawned on me until probably my mid to late thirties that you're always kind of selling yourself, even just when you're out with like your friends or family, even if you're not selling like a physical product or service, you're always kind of selling. Do you agree with that? Or what are your thoughts around that?

Joseph Fung: Oh, a hundred percent. I mean, so when we think about the details and the core skills of sales, discovery questions, how do you uncover new information? How do you share and convince people with information you're sharing that applies everywhere? The problem is that everyone has this consumption and Kevin, maybe you've got, like, when you think about sales person, the idea that comes to mind, people think about like some kind of slimy jerk, that's going to shove something on me that I don't need. And that's what prevents people from. I think really looking critically at the skills we've got these stereotypes and that sucks. I like that we get to overcome it. Yeah, I don't know what comes to your mind when you think of how a sales professional,

Kevin Horek: It depends on vertical. Like if you would have said car salesman, it usually comes with a negative connotation. I think if it's somebody in software, if I'm targeted properly, it's actually worked on me before. I'm like, what, that's actually really good. That's going to save me X amount of time or whatever it is, then I'm more open to it. The like spammy things that you get on LinkedIn that say, whatever, and they have no idea about me or what I'm even doing, or they're trying to sell me something that's clearly has nothing to do with me. And they did no research. I think then it's kind of more like, you feel like a spammer it's negative, but I think that, I think it's depending on context for a long winded version to your question,

Joseph Fung: I think context is right, but I mean, you've got that ear of almost like a professional buyer. I mean, you're thinking about it critically one of our students. I think I characterize it in a way that I think a lot of people do. He came in, he's like, how do I get a title? That'll look better on my Tinder profile that won't scare people away that I know. I know. I mean, I don't know if we helped them get a better date or not, but just that idea of something that doesn't trigger a knee-jerk reaction, I think is a really compelling thing. Cause I think that's what people worry about when they think about sales and when we show them what it's like to be at a sales professional in a software company, it's this huge aha moment. Like what, I don't have to lie, I don't have to push a lousy product.

Joseph Fung: I just uncover problems and solve them like, wow, it's such an empowering thing for people.

Kevin Horek: Totally. Let's dive deeper is so how has you Varo different than the traditional kind of jammed it in your face until you buy this thing?

Joseph Fung: For sure, I mean, the reality is the most technology sales, most software sales are not that they really aren't. It's about finding someone that has a real problem that you actually solve. If you're chatting with someone and they don't have a problem, you got to end the conversation. If you can't solve it, you got to end the conversation. I don't think it's about you Varo. That's more about the tech industry. I think what's different about you Varo is that we help people practice how to do that. We don't just give them the job title and shove them in the deep end, which is how most tech companies hire. They hire 10 people in fire five and I don't think that's appropriate. The more we give people, a safe space to learn and experiment before they're put into the, that kind of, front of the line role.

Kevin Horek: Okay. What types of things do people actually learn to make them a successful software salesperson?

Joseph Fung: I mean a really big one. It sounds really soft and fluffy is how to empathize. Okay. Interesting. I'm sure you've been in a situation and I'm sure listeners have too, where a sales rep asks you a question about like, what do you need or what do you want or what are you experiencing? You give answer and they just jumped to the next thing and they haven't heard you. Yeah. They're just, they're just trying to move it forward and like yeah. Okay. Next thing, that is a really good example of a poor sales process and that doesn't work in tech sales. Helping people actually active listen, reflect back and then imagine, oh, if you're experiencing that pain, what's it like to give an example? We were on a sales call and one of the things we asked the customer we're talking to was, oh, well, if you miss that sales target, how's that going to feel to you in the business?

Joseph Fung: Her language was, oh yeah, my fingers on the chopping block, big, this very visible, visceral reaction. Like she felt like she was going to lose a digit. If she missed this target and taking the, to actually pause and internalize, oh, that's what she's feeling. How do I keep her from losing a finger? I'm not trying to sell a product. I'm trying to help keep her hand intact. That's that's a core skill. That's learnable. Many people don't exercise in the workplace.

Kevin Horek: Interesting. How does you Varo go and teach people kind of the new way to actually sell?

Joseph Fung: Yeah. It's and part of it is bringing in amazing instructors. We bring in amazing sales leaders, amazing professional instructors, people that are in the field succeeding and give real world examples to emulate. The part that's really critical is it, Y you can't do this just by watching videos. It's like, you can't learn to play the piano just by reading the notes. You'll have to actually practice. Yeah. We create a safe place to practice and to fail. We're on zoom calls, Hangouts all the time, letting people try pitches, cold calls, getting comfortable with those, because if you don't have a safe practice space, you never learned to actually do the motions. I'll just theory.

Kevin Horek: Okay. What types of stuff do you teach people then? There any resources that our listeners could maybe check out to like dive deeper?

Joseph Fung: Totally. At a high level, I mean our curriculum that for context, because people will hear this and it might be overwhelming. Our standard program is two hours a day, five days a week for 12 weeks. So there's a whole lot. Yeah. We've covered the full gamut from prospecting discovery, social selling, objection, handling demos, different sales methodologies. How do you do research and build an opinion on an industry? We cap it all off with this demo day competition so that people come in and they actually have to do a 15 minute sales pitch on a product they've never sold to a customer they've never met and they have to demo the product at the same time. It's a crucial, but they come out with these exceptional skills and it sounds overwhelming, but I mean, a, we've got a bunch of free resources, like on demand dot U o.com has got a bunch of free videos.

Joseph Fung: We push a bunch of it to YouTube, but if people want a, like a book or something, a great starting point is something like a triangle selling from the team at loop. Okay. Interesting, great little mini frameworks. You could bite off a chapter at a time and learn something really valuable. It's a nice way to kind of build some of those skills. It's one of the books we referenced in our course a lot. Happy to kind of tip the hat to that.

Kevin Horek: No, that's very cool. The other fascinating thing to me, when I learned about you, Varo is it's, there's no upfront costs. Do you want to talk about how you guys monetize and actually get paid for the training there you guys are offering?

Joseph Fung: Yeah, for sure. I mean, I'm a true, I've been true believer that getting paid for your product is a great way to prove that it's solving a problem. So yeah. People can enroll and they can pay right away. So that's totally option. Happy to take money, but fair enough. Yeah. Somebody wants to like the best a founder's job or a CEO's job. Like their primary job is to cash the check, bring the money in. I got to make sure I do that and kind of stamp that one. We created Guevara to build great places to work and make these jobs more accessible to people like there's huge segments of our economy or underemployed. We make it really hard for immigrants, for folks who are challenged by so many barriers. We wanted to make it as accessible as possible. We took our standard membership plan and we turned it into an employment linked vehicle.

Joseph Fung: If someone's enrolling, yeah, they can pay as a lump sum, which is like pay for the course. They can also pay on a 24 month payment plan, but the part that's really fun and two thirds of our customers take advantage of this. They can pay on an employment, linked a membership. Only once they land a job that crosses a localized income threshold only then would they pay for tuition. Even then it's tied to their base salary. For a sales rep, they get that predictability of the fees, but they don't actually have to start paying until they actually have gainful employment. For so many, that's such a big challenge. It makes this kind of program so much more accessible.

Kevin Horek: Yeah, totally well for anybody really. Right. No matter how well off you aren't right.

Joseph Fung: I mean, the reality is we do have a third of our members who come in and start paying right away because maybe they're in a position where it's not going to hit their bank account that badly, or they just know where they want to take their career. There's a lot of folks who come in and they're uncertain about where they want to go or they're currently unemployed or they're fractionally employed. For that situation, that's generally when folks are leaning into it. We have a lot of people who use our program to say, go from like an account executive into like sales engineering, or customer success or someone who's an SDR and wants to be an account executive. Yeah, we have a lot of folks who come in and want to level up their career, not just kind of newcomers to the industry. Sure.

Kevin Horek: I want to dive deeper into some of the stuff that you actually teach and then how you actually transition and help them get into.

Joseph Fung: Sales career. For sure. Picking about what we're teaching. Let me give you one that I think is going to be helpful. One of the things that, so for backstory, how we launched Vara, we actually started the company as a software company first, and we have a platform that sales teams use to run their sales playbooks. Okay. I start there because that's where we get a lot of data. Like we know what our sales reps using when they're actually on sales calls, what are they doing? One of the things they're often looking for is customer stories. Sure. That makes sense. You talk to a rep, you want to know who else has bought. Most companies do a terrible job at this. They build case studies and they're on the website. And the sales rep doesn't know them. One of the modules that we have is we dig into telling really effective and shareable customer stories.

Joseph Fung: So we highlight a couple of things. I mean, this stuff we covered in a couple of hours and I got to condense it, but things like considered the hero's journey. Who's the hero of the story. Many people tell a story about how they helped a customer making them the hero. That's terrible. You want the customer to feel like a hero. You're just that advisor. Who's helping them out. Like they're the Luke Skywalker. You're just Yoda helping them out. Interesting. We talk a lot about that hero framework. We talk a lot about how do you edit your story to be one or two sentences so that it's memorable and shareable so that you can spread it with others as a case study, you can't memorize a one or two sentence story. You can no, last one. This is the part that I think is the example of like, these are tactical tips that people don't think about is making your stories searchable a really good example.

Joseph Fung: You've probably seen this. Yeah. You've got a sales team customer on the phone and says, Hey, do you have a customer? Just like me? The rep is going, yeah, we have a lot of customers like you. In the back of their head, they're flipping through their stories. Everybody has that. They probably have like a Google doc or a notion board, or maybe they're using kite put in your stories, the words you're going to search for in a minute, a good example. One of the companies we worked with, they sold to a number of cannabis producers. Their story on cannabis and pharmaceuticals in it, and no one could ever find it. Cause in the moment the customer said, Hey, do you have any other weed companies that you worked with internally? They tweaked the story to highlight and talk about weed so that it was more searchable.

Joseph Fung: It sounds so silly, but you got to design these things so that a sales rep can use it. Not just so that a marketing team feels good about putting it on their website. I mean, that idea of really good customer stories is one example of the so many things we cover in our curriculum. Interesting.

Kevin Horek: How did you make the connection between customer story and kind of that hero's journey?

Joseph Fung: This is a good example of where the high level concepts, I wish it was our genius. It really is the myriad of sales trainers and consultants that we work with and best practices in the industry. I think where the real magic came from was more us identifying that customer stories specifically are actually the second most searched thing by sales when they're in the middle of sales calls. Interesting. Yeah. Most sales training programs, they gloss over customer stories. They say, Hey, I have good reference customers. Your marketing team can help you with that.

Kevin Horek: Okay. Why do you think the customer story has been kind of lost on traditional kind of sales teams.

Joseph Fung: The problem, and is it actually part of a much bigger problem? Most companies have not invested in any kind of structure training. Instead they lean on, organic and kind of storytelling in order to train. They say things like, Hey, Kevin, welcome to the team. We're going to sit you down beside Greg, do what Greg does. And okay. In that case, Greg just tells you what he's been doing. He doesn't actually know like objectively, what's the best thing to do. You go to these organizations and someone's working at Oracle or Salesforce and they're like, oh yeah, we've got all these data sheets, make sure you have a data sheet. The sales rep goes, oh, I guess when a customer asks for a story, I need to have a good case. Study on a data sheet is two pages. It's a PDF that I can send them.

Joseph Fung: They just assume that's what a best practices. No one actually looks at the data and trains their people on what's best. That's a perfect example. You could go to every marketing team and you could ask them, Hey, who has recently been asked for a new data sheet or a white paper? Everyone will raise their hand. If you go to the same sales teams and you say, Hey, how many of you closed a deal recently because of a kick ass white paper, data sheet.

Kevin Horek: Yeah.

Joseph Fung: Fair. It is it. I mean, I'm being glib and I'm being simple, but it actually really is that so many sales teams, their training distills down into someone's closing a lot of deals. They don't know exactly why. They just try and get everyone to copy them. Unfortunately, that's just not the best way to consistently periodically improve. We're lucky in that we've got a big pool of data and we've got a ton of reps that we can evaluate. That helps us improve that curriculum every single time we launch class.

Kevin Horek: Interesting. Too, like obviously my sales style would be different than Greg's or whoever else is right in your example, or potentially different,

Joseph Fung: That's it that's exactly it. And, and so sales teams then start trying to hire in the way they fit that. Like we see this every day I get a VP of sales who reaches out to me and says, Hey, I need to, I need a couple of eight years rest of yours. Can you help me out? Nine times out of 10, when we asked them about their hiring process, they say, oh yeah, I've got this great sales rep, Kevin on my team and trying to hire people that are just like Kevin. They give me a demographic description. Like they play competitive sports at school. They're a team player they're very extroverted. We know that they like people and we sell to the food services industry and they're a foodie. Okay. It's just, it's not an objective way to evaluate or find talent. And so we're just propagating it.

Joseph Fung: As an industry, we need to get better about hiring and training. Sure.

Kevin Horek: No, that makes sense. How do you pick people to actually take the course and then how do you help them actually get a job once they're.

Joseph Fung: The selections are really interesting one. So it's a big challenge. Last quarter, we received something like 17,000 applications. Yeah. It is the big problem for us. We use a lot of tools. We use some great tools like Pullum to help assess people's strengths and natural interests. We, we have some unique data that helps us identify success. A good example, people think extroversion or persuasion are actually really core skills. We actually found to my earlier point, empathy is a bigger indicator of sales performance. So we look for some of those. We have some automated testing and some hurdles, like if people aren't willing to put 20 minutes into an application, they're probably not going to spend the time for our 12 week course. Things like that. The characteristics we look for are things like resilience and grit, because you need those to succeed in sales. I mean, people who have struggled through this pandemic, in the hospitality and food services and tourism, I mean, they've overcome so much.

Joseph Fung: It's actually a lot of people who really fit that. Those are the things that we look for. It has a good second question. Again, that whole like secret sauce, the things that are different, a lot of people, when they think I want to find a job in tech, they think to the companies, they know, they say, Hey, I know zoom. I know LinkedIn. I know Xbox I'll apply there. That's a, a good way to send 50 resumes and be ignored. Sure. We spend a lot of time helping our members target the company stage and type and selling motion that works well to their interests. Like, what, if you like talking to a new person every single day and talking to a hundred different people, a small business or consumer products is going to fit better. If, if you like developing a really longterm, deep relationship, a mid-market or an enterprise deals going to be a better solution for you.

Joseph Fung: I don't get why companies get this wrong. They rarely so rarely hire for experience and knowledge about the buyer. We spend a lot of time people help match helping people match that a good way to think about it is like one of our grads. I love telling me this story because yeah, he's just, he's such a representative example, graduated college eight years in food services, bartender bar manager, restaurant manager gets laid off due to COVID ends up going through our program landing at a company who sells to restaurants and bars. It's scheduling to them now. Yeah. It's he crushes it. No reason he blows through and no surprise that he blows through quota outperforms. His peers came from LinkedIn, gets promoted, earns way more than he did before. It's about that alignment. We spend a lot of time helping people be really targeted in their outreach for where their career is going to take them.

Kevin Horek: Interesting. Has the pandemic really kind of helped and gotten a lot more people interested in becoming a sales person then have you found,

Joseph Fung: I don't know if it's made people want to do it more, but I think it's made more people realize it's possible and doable so that it doesn't seem as daunting.

Kevin Horek: Okay. Fair. Well, and I guess it's like, well, if you already have the skills, because you've worked in one of these industries that is very transferable and once you figure that out and you can potentially make a lot more money. You're like, well, why wouldn't I try it? Especially when you can go with you, don't pay until you find a job option. Right. It's kind of.

Joseph Fung: Brainer. And it's no brainer. I mean, everybody knows how to do things like use the zoom call now. Yeah. These things feel like the baseline requirements feel much more attainable to so many more people now.

Kevin Horek: Sure. Do you want to maybe give us some other customer success stories?

Joseph Fung: Absolutely. Always happy to, I, I, I mentioned Matt story because of that alignment between kind of his past work and his next work, the parts, I think that gets me most excited though. Are those kind of the stories of the challenges and adversity? Like one of our other members, he was in San Diego at the time working in the trucking industry, he was an immigrant. Because of visa changes like the political climate, COVID all of that. His visa was going to be canceled. He's gonna have to leave the country. Yeah. Like, wow. Talk about terrifying. It's like, you're doing this class, you're in different industry. You're going to get kicked out of the country. He ended up deciding to try and move to a Toronto. In the middle of the program moves to a different city. Wow. Lands this amazing role, selling AI powered market intelligence tools does something like 400% of quota and his first month, wow.

Joseph Fung: Double. They doubled it, the quote on them. He did 300% of the new quota. I mean, he's loving it. He got promoted. When you think about there's things like communication barriers, he was a newcomer to the country. So there's an accent, his local networks. He doesn't know anybody here because he just moved from his home country to the U S then to Canada, no local work experience like overcoming. Those is so rewarding because hopefully, yeah, every day we get comments from our members about how you Varo changed their life, saved their lives. Like one of our members wrote a blog post that we didn't ask her to do. A testimony is just wrote it. You Varo saved my life. What, I've done a few software companies, a few businesses that are B2B, and I've never felt so fulfilled working with these incredible people. I love the fact that we're a small part in their journey.

Kevin Horek: No, I think that's really great. How do you find the companies that are willing to work with your trainees and then potentially decide to hire them after?

Joseph Fung: Yeah, it's yeah. It's really interesting because when we first launched the company, we thought we'd have to do that. Find companies who are willing to take a risk. Okay. I think COVID accelerated a change that was already happening. More, more remote, selling, more remote staff. And it's quite the inverse. We have way more companies coming to us to hire our grads than we have. A nice I'd rather have that problem than the other, but we see it right now. Our grads are 50% more likely to exceed quota. And so they get hired. They, they crush quota. The company goes, how do we hire more people like you? They say, Hey, okay, there's this program you've aro. And then they start referring other members. So honestly we don't do any outreach. We don't do any kind of advertising. The employers are a hundred percent inbound, a lot of referral, a lot of search.

Joseph Fung: Yeah. And in really cool.

Kevin Horek: That's awesome. No, congrats on that because obviously if it's working then other software companies that, well, a lot of them know each other and they're like, Hey, we got this great sales person or people from this program, like have had her to, right.

Joseph Fung: Yeah. It that's exactly it. Because again, our customer, like our, the person that we're holding up as our north star is the individual sales rep. We want them to succeed. Sometimes that means making it easy for them to bring people into their company. We're always happy to make those introductions, but it also means that we're not stuck in a position of trying to like chase recruiting dollars for a company. Our job is to refer people who are a good fit where they'll be happy and successful because that's what our north star is. Yeah.

Kevin Horek: I guess. And then everybody wins. Now that makes a lot of sense. You've done a bunch of companies, you've in a bunch of different industries. You've gone through idea to acquisition. You've shut some companies down. Have you, what have you learned outside of your business life that you've been able to maybe apply back into your business life? If anything,

Joseph Fung: It's so funny because in many ways I think the things I've learned professionally have helped me in my personal life. Interesting. Okay. I don't want to belabor those, but it's, we see that all the time, like, communications, training and work really helped at home, on the flip side, I suppose I've like all the work around those love languages and relationships has helped me in work. I'm sure. I think the thing that probably sticks out to me the most about kind of personal learnings applying to work is the things that I learned around our son's birth. Our son he's 10 years old, but when he was born extremely early and he has a genetic condition that involves some delays in development. I don't say that because it's like, Hey, are you going to adversity tough challenges? Everyone's got a challenge, but before he was born and before went through that, I would have described myself as a very impatient person.

Joseph Fung: Okay. Yep. I expect people to kind of learn what I'm sharing or hear what I'm putting down or, get it right the first time. I would've just said, that's me, that's who I am. Realizing that how patient I was, my wife was and how naturally our patients came in that context, really helped me internalize things like your comment earlier context matters. It's like, oh, I guess that actually means I can be patient. I must be, I haven't built that skill or I'm choosing not to be. That's been really useful to kind of shine a good mirror on myself and not just accept that a, a failing or a bad behavior is me, but maybe something that I've picked up or acquired. I think that's helped me be a better manager and leader. So I'd point to that.

Kevin Horek: Interesting. So, but how did you be on the lookout or be aware for that and throughout your career where you're like, okay, I'm doing this one thing. It's probably not one of my better qualities I want to fix it. How do you actually commit to fixing it and keep it ongoing?

Joseph Fung: Oh man. What, if I had answer to that, I'd probably be in better shape.

Kevin Horek: There enough,

Joseph Fung: Your first one I think is a really cool and I've been very fortunate to have very honest mentors. Okay. Yeah. Like, I mean, once it would tell you those uncomfortable truths, like yeah. I think, I think about the first business that I ran and I remember one mentor giving me some really candid. I mean, I think about it now and I cringe listening to it. He's like, your clothes are too big to live his comedy. He's like Joseph, your suits, your jacket is just too big. You look like a kid because you're swimming in it. And it was a classic thing. It's like, I bought them, I'm kind off the rocket and we're went and got something that fit better and I felt better. And my conversations were better. I had more confidence. People listen to me better. I mean, silly little things. Similarly, when I was speaking, if I was nervous, I had the habit of touching my face, like, rubbing my chin or scratching the temple, but just feel a lot of contact and same thing that mentor was saying, Hey, when you're doing that, it conveys more nervous newness.

Joseph Fung: I mean, I was really young at the time. She was like, you're more likely to break out like stupid things like that. Interesting.

Kevin Horek: And.

Joseph Fung: Without that feedback, I don't think I ever would have learned how to look for challenges or gaps or flaws like that.

Kevin Horek: No, I think that's really good advice because you want somebody, or maybe many people ideally to give you that brutal honest feedback, and it's not coming from a place to be mean it's coming from a place to like make you better and only help you out. I think sometimes that gets lost sometimes on people in my experience. Anyway,

Joseph Fung: That's totally, that's absolutely it, we're always, so we want to give value and we want to help people improve. Very often we give feedback in the safe areas. Totally. We don't focus on the areas that are most impactful. That's where I think I valued the mentors that I had early in my career the most.

Kevin Horek: Do you have any advice for finding a really good mentor.

Joseph Fung: It's funny cause I've been asked that a couple of times, how do you find a good mentor? I really wish that I had a proven formula. I've been very lucky in that. The mentor I just mentioned was actually introduced to me by my mother. Cause I, I read a lot from her. I know she's a great sales professional, sorry, a great professional. She had somebody that she knew is that I could learn from. I mean, that was a great connection. Other mentors and coaches that I've had, I was introduced by investors. The interesting thing is the only common factor I could find the best mentors that I've had. I didn't go looking for. Somebody came to me and said, Hey, I've got this person that I think you could learn from. I'd like to introduce you.

Kevin Horek: Interesting. Okay. That's fascinating.

Joseph Fung: I, I think the, I mean, I'm lucky that I've got people who would suggest that to me, but what I've also seen is I've seen others who had those introductions offered or those recommendations offers and they didn't act on it or didn't take it. I think I was lucky that I did act and I've used that as a kind of a mantra for myself when someone's trying to make that kind of an introduction, something where they think I can learn from, I always run with it because I've always been positively surprised.

Kevin Horek: Interesting. There any books or podcasts or any other learnings that you've found very useful that you recommend to others throughout your career?

Joseph Fung: I mean, so many, if I was going to cherry pick a couple, two that are really top of mind for me right now, one of my favorite books and go to is it's a book called who, and it's a very simple framework for hiring and I always highlight it because most companies and founders and entrepreneurs don't get serious about their people practices on hiring early enough. So like really accessible, starting point. The other thing that's top of mind is I refer to this one a lot. Is leaders under fire. It's a, it's an allegory. It's talking about dealing with crisis management, like PR disasters and I mean, great framework, great lessons. The big takeaway for me as I was digging into it was how just simple, small amounts of preparation for areas that don't come up often can just save you so much heartache. I think that's really helped to me as a leader, mitigate disasters that would otherwise be surprises.

Joseph Fung: And that's been really helpful. Leaders under fire is one of my favorites.

Kevin Horek: Interesting. So what do you give us? Some maybe examples of areas that are maybe overlooked or people should put of effort in case something.

Joseph Fung: Happens? Yeah. The leaders under fire book is specifically around public relations. Okay. Something terrible, like you get sued or somebody, your employees to something terrible. That book covers there for me, where I've been really fortunate are things like my last company really early on, we said, Hey, let's make sure we keep all of our finances and all of our documents just organized so that if we ever want to go public or we want to do something like that, we're ready. Like let's just organize ourselves early on because it's easier to start early. Sure. When we got to sell the company and the acquisition happened, it was super fast, super clean and all the way through the process, continually the comments from the acquire were, wow, this is like the easiest, cleanest deal we've ever done. We had an amazing outcome because we didn't have any hair on the deal.

Joseph Fung: It wasn't awkward things like one of this was for me, one of the more painful ones, the first customer that we had to give a really large refund to earlier in my career. One of those mentors that I mentioned to earlier has adjusted ask yourself the tough questions first, when you're level headed. Yeah. I did, we spent some time just kind of thinking through and talking through, what would I do as a leader? If I found someone stealing from the company, or if I found we'd sold a product that didn't really solve the problem or, and we would talk to a bunch of them, the answer is really clear when you're level-headed and clear-eyed, but in the moment of crisis, you're all panicky and the lizard brain takes over. And, and you're saying, Hey, I got to make payroll, how do I manage this cash it's terrible situation.

Joseph Fung: We can zoom out and say, what, when I was even keeled, I said, I should just do the refund. It's suddenly made that decision. Much of your user and the stress lifts away, your people follow you better. The outcome for the customer is better. That like taking the time to think through, even in a small way, a very critical matter can save you a ton of heartache in a moment of crisis.

Kevin Horek: Not, I that's actually really good advice. I feel like so many companies, especially if you have other co-founders, it's hard to even bring up the conversation to say, what? We should have these hard conversations early on. Right.

Joseph Fung: It's it is, it's really hard. It's, I'm trying to think of the, he, the blunt easy way to put it is people often get it wrong, like what they think they're going to do. So, right. Like having both of your founders, ask those questions, think through it. If you have really clear answers and you get to that moment of crisis and in the moment it's not working people aren't following through on what they said, it actually makes it way easier to resolve the situation. Cause the disconnect just jumps out so clearly. Whereas without that, you get stuck in this terrible cycle of like you're interpreting situations differently. You care about what's fair. If how you've committed to behaving and then you get to the end game and things fall apart, the split like where the gap is just becomes so apparent.

Kevin Horek: No, I think that's actually really good advice. There anything else that you would maybe recommend to somebody that's either wanting to be a salesperson or be an entrepreneur? Because I think in a lot of cases, you're one in the same.

Joseph Fung: They're so similar. Actually I love the way you phrased it up because the advice I would give is they are, there's very similar skills, but you cannot miss the fundamental differences. The one example I'll point to is the role of being an entrepreneur means you can sell and have to sell differently. If I call somebody up on the phone and I say like, Hey Kevin, founder, I've got this cool product. I think it can help you out. Can I pick your brain for a couple of minutes? It's a way more positive conversation. If I call you up and say, Hey, Kevin, I'm a sales rep. I've got this product that I think you can help with. It just feels different. Yeah, similar skills, but the social dynamic, the social contract ends up being very different. You can transfer skills, but if you fill those two roles, you gotta be able to wear different hats.

Kevin Horek: No, I think that's actually really good advice, but we're kind of coming to the end of the show. How about we close with mentioning where people can get more information about yourself you've aro and any other links you want to mention? Totally.

Joseph Fung: Folks can hit us up at you. Varo U V a R o.com. If anyone wants to connect with me directly, I'm on most social media, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook at Joseph phone, all one word jam together.

Kevin Horek: Perfect Joseph, while I really appreciate you taking the time out of your day to be on the show. I look forward to keeping in touch with you and have a good rest of your day, man.

Joseph Fung: Hey, thanks Kevin chatting. Hey, thank you.

Kevin Horek: Okay, bye. Cool.

Gregg Oldring: A nice guy.

Kevin Horek: Super nice. And like how he talks is like.

Jon Larson: Perfect. It is, you should be on the way he should be regular on the radio or something. It's yeah,

Gregg Oldring: He's very precise in his speaking as well, which I am jealous of as we, as it gets closer. Well, as we've done even the preambles and stuff, I think to myself, wow, I'm really not very good at speaking. I only speak language and I'm not very good at it, but he's yeah. You could speakers when speech is wonderful.

Jon Larson: It's very good presenting. I imagine he is a great presenter and what? I think it also ties into what they're doing as well. Yeah. Cause I was watching some of their, his, their videos on their site and his presentation. It was, I, it was exactly like that. Like just the way he presented the way he worked your way through it's, I wonder how much it's based on the training they're doing.

Gregg Oldring: Yeah. I think it's so interesting. I loved how he's he starts off just doing something because it's hard, which obviously he has kind of a, and even just his approach to sales, he's got a, analytical kind of brain. You have that side of his brain is obviously well-developed. The fact that the story arc goes into being a more patient person and story is part of these things. These are the other side of the brain kinds of things really kick in for him and how that's really, I dunno, kind of shaped his own journey. I just thought that was all really fascinating and kind of encouraging.

Jon Larson: Yeah. I think I I'm struck by as his emotional intelligence and empathy, he talked about empathy and in the interview, I thought that was very insightful.

Kevin Horek: Yeah, no, I thought it was really interesting. It's always kind of fascinating how somebody like that's taking an industry that's been around forever and kind of coming at it with new tactics and a new angle and making it, I guess, kind of different than how it's traditionally done.

Jon Larson: And once again, stories are so important.

Kevin Horek: And it's interesting.

Gregg Oldring: Yeah. He didn't say Ziglar in the pregnant pause. I'm disappointed by that. That was one of my favorites.

Intro/Outro: Thank you for tuning in to the learner.co show. If you're looking to be a guest, try out our app or want to get in touch, please visit learner with two L's at www.llearner.co. The music for the show is by electric mantra. Thanks for listening and keep on learning.