< Intro >
- Hello and welcome to Count Me In.
The podcast that explores the world of business
from a management accountant's perspective.
This is Adam Larson, and today my co-host Neha,
is talking to a woman
who describes herself as an accidental CEO.
Jennifer Smith is the founder and CEO of Scribe.
A software company that helps businesses
capture and scale the expertise of their top performers,
to drive new levels of productivity.
From fighting collaboration overload, to leveraging RPA,
to attracting the right talent,
Jennifer discusses how her obsession with efficiency
has fueled her unique and unplanned leadership journey.
Let's start the conversation.
< Music >
- Welcome to Count Me In, Jennifer,
it's such a pleasure to have you on the show.
- Thanks so much, I'm excited to be here.
- Awesome, so first things first,
you call yourself an accidental CEO.
Tell me more about that and what brought you to this point in life?
- Because if you were to ask me 15, 20 years ago,
gosh, maybe even five, seven years ago,
"Would you ever be CEO?
Would you ever start your own company?"
I probably would've laughed at you and said, "No."
It's not something I've ever thought about.
I don't know anyone who does that,
that's not in the cards for me.
I started my career as a management consultant.
So I was at McKinsey for seven years.
I worked mostly with financial institutions
in the Oregon operations practice.
Which functionally meant I would spend nine to five
sitting next to agents, in operations centers,
looking over their shoulder and watching what they did.
And if you ever do that work, you learn the name of the game is
you figure out who the best person is, and you sit next to them
and you say, "Well, what are you doing differently than everyone else?"
And you find that they've found better ways of working.
They would say, "Oh, I was trained to do all of these things,
but here's how I do this better."
And they would show me, they're all tabbing,
they're doing really fast things on their computer.
They became whizzes at finding these shortcuts
and these very complicated pieces of software they were using.
And, as a consultant, I would dutifully write that up
and sell that back to my client.
But I always thought like, "Gosh, if we had a way
to just capture what these people knew how to do.
They could have had really big impact on that op center.
They could have helped their colleagues all be better."
And I said, "Well, it's an obvious problem,
someone will solve that someday, surely."
And then, you fast-forward 10 years later
and then I'm working in venture capital,
and investing in enterprise software companies.
And I spent a lot of my time talking
to buyers of enterprise software, again, folks in financial services.
Just trying to understand like, "What are your open problems?
What are your challenges?
What are you trying to solve?"
And this idea kept coming back.
People saying like, "Oh, gosh, well, I or my people
are spending a lot of time doing similar tasks over and over again.
And actually they do it differently,
it's definitely different between people, everyone finds their own way."
Sometimes it's not even consistent within the same person.
They do something once a quarter,
they don't quite remember it, they try to do the process,
especially, if they've a very complicated software.
I'm like, "Wouldn't it be really nice
if there were a way to just know
what was the best of what everyone knew how to do?"
And I don't really have a way of doing that today.
My only option is to tell someone,
"Just take time away from doing your actual work and please
generate a document that shows what you know how to do."
That's not a very popular request.
And, so, I looked at it and said, "Gosh, technology
has gotten so much better.
It's so many years later
and we're still facing the exact same problems."
And I shifted from like, "Someone should do something about this."
To, "Well, I don't think anyone is doing anything about this
and they should, so I guess I'll do something about this."
And, so, I very much did not intend to start a company.
I cared a lot about solving a particular problem.
I'm obsessed with efficiency.
And I just saw a massive inefficiency in how millions,
hundreds of millions of people around the world
are spending their nine to five,
trying to navigate these complicated pieces of software
and trying to do it quickly,
because everyone's got a million things going on
and everyone's just doing their best.
But most people are doing it sub optimally
and it's taking them more time, and they're spending a lot of time
even just trying to figure out what to do,
that's not a good feeling.
And, so, I said, "Well, gosh, if I could solve that for people,
why would I do something else?
This feels like what I should be doing."
And, so, I started my company, Scribe, three and a half years ago now.
- Wow, that's really insightful and thank you for connecting it
to common business problems that we are all facing every day.
So this reminds me of a conversation
I was having with my daughter, she's 10 years old.
And I was telling her about coming on this interview
and meeting you, the CEO of the company.
And she was very curious, of course, about the company and your work.
I was, of course, able to help her understand
what the word Scribe means.
But how would you explain to a fifth grader, in simplest terms,
what you and your team does?
- Yes, we actually design our software,
so a fifth grader could use it.
It's designed for people across digital literacy.
So you could actually tell her to just try it out,
if she's at all curious, and she should be able to do it.
So, Scribe, very simply, we're a desktop application
or a browser extension, your choice.
And we will watch you do work and auto-generate step-by-step,
written guides with screenshots showing how to do that process.
So let's say, for example, you have a client
who is constantly asking you, let's pick something very simple,
"How do I log into my QuickBooks Portal?"
I don't know, that's probably a question you've gotten before.
So all you would do is you would click the Record button
and you would log into the QuickBooks Portal,
and you would click Start Record.
And, boom, Scribe would auto-generate step-by-step
written guide on how to log into a QuickBooks Portal.
Again, very simple example, but it would say,
step one, navigate to www.quickbooks.com.
Step two, click on the Login icon, instead, it's got a little screenshot
and it shows along, and so on and so forth.
And there's a bunch of ways, obviously,
you can edit, and customize, and all those sorts of things.
But the idea is anything you would need
to explain to someone how to do.
Whether that's a client who's constantly asking you a question,
or a colleague that you're onboarding,
or a virtual assistant who's doing some tasks for you.
It's a very easy way to capture what you know how to do,
automatically, and share that with other people.
Without having to take any time away
to actually write that down or show them what to do.
My whole philosophy is you've already done the hard part.
You know how to do something valuable.
Let's make it automatic for you
to be able to scale that knowledge
and to show someone else how to do that.
I'll often talk about it as documentation, as digital exhaust.
Just that byproduct, you're going along and doing your work
and you're creating this exhaustive documentation,
that you can now use in a variety of different contexts.
- Wow, fantastic, and thank you for making it easier for people,
who are new to this concept, to understand.
You bring up automation,
so let's take it up a notch, from the fifth graders level,
and talk about the three-letter buzzword,
RPA, Robotic Processing Automation,
which is getting a lot of spotlight these days.
But then, sadly, it remains just a buzzword
for many people in small and medium organizations.
How can RPA, or automation like this,
help finance and accounting people in these small companies?
- Yes, RPA is an area I've spent a lot of time in.
I would take it up from RPA to automation.
There's a lot of excitement around RPA.
RPA, in particular, means I will replicate
what a human does using software.
So it's almost like a layer on top of your existing systems,
and you build these very manual flows
that will click through software as if a human were clicking.
I've talked to a lot of Fortune 500 companies
that have implemented RPA.
They do these big RPA programs.
They set up these centers of excellence
and they do very good work.
I'll tell you, most of them, over beers,
will tell me, "I'm not quite satisfied.
These things work, but they work 70% of the time."
And then you've got these edge cases, something's a little bit different,
the software UI changes there.
There's a lot of difficulty and nuances
when you're talking about RPA.
Automation, more broadly, it's just this concept
of how do I use software to do tasks
that I otherwise would have to be doing?
And that I get very excited about, especially,
if you're in a small business because time is money.
You have limited resources, limited number of people,
we see this with our customers.
We're across hundreds of thousands of organizations
in over a hundred countries, pretty widespread everywhere
from a solo person, all the way up to folks in Fortune 50 banks.
And we often see it's the small business owners
who are the ones who are most passionate about,
"How do I save time?"
Because it's limited number of resources, time is money.
"I could be spending this time servicing a client.
Instead, I'm going through and generating reports
and doing these kinds of tasks that I could automate."
And, so, what I would think about is anytime
you are doing something that feels repetitive.
That feels like, "Gosh, I do this over and over again
or I do some variation over and over again."
Think about, "How can I automate this?"
And your mind might, immediately,
go to a very complicated automation systems.
And that is great, if you are at that level of complexity,
most people are not.
And, so, I would think even at the levels of templates.
Here is a really mild automation,
are you sending a very similar email every month
to clients notifying them of something?
Or when you're generating a report
and you're sending it out.
Depending on your email client,
you can create automatic templates.
You hit a couple of hotkeys and, boom,
it automatically pastes into your email.
And then you can change the person's name
and personalize customers, whatever you need to do.
But where are the moments like that
where it feels like it's simple and it is, but it adds up over time.
And, so, I would start thinking about automation
from anytime you feel like you're doing something,
you say like, "Gosh, this really doesn't
feel like a use of my specific talents."
Find software to do it,
because I bet there is software out there to do that.
Whether it's really simple macros,
all the way to custom solutions
that will help you, automatically, flag uncategorized expenses
and send it to a client or something like that.
- Those are some really good examples, Jennifer.
And talking about repetitive tasks
and tasks that people don't like doing, knowledge management
and process documentation always-
- What, not everyone's favorite?
- Definitely not everyone's favorite,
but these are still very important tasks.
Not just from compliance perspective,
but they're becoming more and more important
because people are now working asynchronously in remote teams.
So what have you seen are the most common
knowledge management mistakes that people make?
- Not doing it, is the short answer.
So most people I talk to have some basic knowledge management
We have some wiki, we have made some attempt,
we've done something.
And then I say, "Well, how's that going for you?"
And I have yet to hear, "Great."
For most people, they're like, "Oh, it works for this and works for that."
And, I mean, there's many challenges with it,
but one of the big ones is just the amount of time
it takes to create documentation.
You have finite, you've got eight hours in a day that you're working
or whatever your workday is.
And you've probably got 10 hours' worth of work
to do in those eight hours.
And, so, you're making ruthless prioritization decisions all day long.
And when you say, "Oh, could I send this one more thing to a client,
or complete this one more task
versus sit here and write out what I know how to do?"
Which task are people going to pick?
They're going to pick the direct output at all times,
it's more urgent for sure.
And maybe even, arguably, more important depending on the task.
And, so, this is where we thought a lot about with Scribe.
We said, "Well, gosh, a big problem
is the world is vastly under-documented."
I know that's not a sexy and exciting thing to say, but it is true.
And it manifests in that it creates a lot of problems for companies.
It makes it much harder to onboard new people.
It means that your people who are there,
even if they've been there for five, 10 years,
you yourself are spending time doing these repetitive tasks.
And maybe you're not even doing them correctly.
McKinsey did a study, of course, I was at McKinsey
I have to mention McKinsey.
I was not part of the study though.
McKinsey did a study where they estimated that
the average knowledge worker,
spends one day a week trying to find info on how to do their job
or explaining to someone else how to do their job.
That's a day a week of just like, "Hey, how do I generate this report?"
"Hey, how do I act?
How do I file my return?"
"Hey, can you show me where do I go to the IRS Support?"
"Hey, how do I get this in?"
And there are these small micro-moments
throughout the day, and it feels like not that big of a deal,
but you add all of that up and that's a day a week.
And, so, 20% of your time you're spending doing all of these things.
And, so, now in the context of that documentation,
what if I said documentation could give you that 20% time back?
Say, well, oh, no, that gets exciting to me.
And with Scribe, we think about, "Well, how do we make
that documentation automatic for you?"
So you're not sitting there saying, "Hey, I have to decide,
or do I do this task, or create documentation?"
And we say, "What if we can make that an and?"
What if while you're doing the task,
you just hit that Record button
and you automatically create documentation."
Now you've found a way to scale what you know how to do.
You've made your knowledge almost like software or media,
which are really scalable elements, versus one-on-one answers.
"Oh, I'm writing out an answer to an email."
Or someone pings me and says, "Hey, can you give me
a quick call and show me how to do this?"
I mean, how many of those have we got?
- Oh, God, I've sent many of those.
- Yes, I definitely have, too, we all have been on both sides,
and it's not fun being on either side.
I'm talking about it from the perspective of the person
answering repetitive questions,
but being the person asking them isn't really fun either.
Because you've already probably gone in
and tried to do it yourself and hit a couple of roadblocks.
Maybe you said a few swear words to yourself
and then you said, "Oh, this is not working."
And then you go, "Oh, God, who can answer this question for me?
Okay, how do I get in touch with them?"
You're going through this whole process.
And, so, what if you just had all of that info,
automatically, available to those people?
So when they were going to do that process, it was just there for them.
They didn't even have to spend those cycles going
and finding someone else.
And, so, if you can find a way to do it in-and
and our software is one way to do this.
Where you're just, automatically, creating this process documentation,
now you just have way more documented.
So to your question, "What are people doing wrong?"
Now you have way more documented,
and now you can do a lot more with that.
You can avoid questions, in the first place.
You can make it so that now when a colleague goes to do something,
rather than them saying, "Oh, I don't know,
I only do this once a quarter, I forget how to do this."
Or "I have never done this before."
And instead of them having a mild panic moment
trying to figure it out, they can just go find Scribe
or the documentation that you've created,
and they'll have their answer.
And that's, let me tell you, a really delightful experience,
when you say like, "Oh, gosh, I had a question
and, boom, it was immediately answered.
I didn't even have to go through this whole process."
- Wow, and that's definitely a blessing for people
who are working in another time zone,
where they don't have the luxury of same time.
- Yes, and that's even worse,
because then you've got a question, and now you're gated.
- Mm-hmm.
- People you need aren't available then,
and you're probably sitting there trying to figure it out yourself.
And you're puddling through
and, especially, when we're using complex software.
It's not always completely obvious how to do something,
especially, if it's a complicated process.
And, so, you're sitting there muddling through and trying to figure it out.
And those are both real-time costs,
and I would argue, emotional costs too.
We assume that's the cost of doing business, of doing work,
that you're going to spend time trying to figure things out.
But next time you're a little confused,
check yourself emotionally.
And what you'll see is you're frustrated,
you're extending energy just kind of trying
and you're like, "Ugh, I just need to get this thing done.
I need to move on, I got my 10 other tasks."
- And talking about frustration, I also remember you mentioning
something called collaboration overload.
- Yes. - Help us understand
what you mean by that and how can listeners in accounting and finance,
but also leadership positions can avoid this overload.
- Yes, so I think it got a lot worse during the pandemic,
and it's really been driven by something that is a good thing,
which is the fact that we now have
all of this collaboration software.
We have all this software that makes it really easy for us
to communicate with each other.
Whether that's Zoom or Slack, someone is, literally, just a keystroke
and hitting enter, away from being able to connect with them.
And I'm the CEO of a software productivity company.
And, so, it's counterintuitive that I would say this,
but these things almost have been too much.
It is too easy now for me to get in touch with people.
And, so, what you end up with,
and we saw this, in particular, at the height of the pandemic,
is you spend so much of your time collaborating with other people.
Whether it's being in meetings,
answering Slacks, answering emails, whatever you're using.
Different pings, phone calls, text messages, WhatsApp,
so many ways for people to get in touch
with you and ask you their questions.
And, so, what you often end up with
is you spend a lot of your day collaborating with other people.
And at the end of the day, you can come home
and your spouse can say, "Hey, honey, how was your day?"
And you can say, "Oh, my gosh, it was so busy."
But here's my question or challenge to you,
did you actually get work done?
Did you actually do the core output of what your job is?
Or did you spend a lot of your time in what feels very busy,
but just communicating and collaborating with other people?
And, so, I like to think a lot about how do you make
that collaboration much more productive
and have it be much more about
the core things that are output related.
And, so, obviously, Scribe is part of that story.
Like, "Hey" instead of someone...
we're trying to avoid those pings.
So instead of someone hopping on a Zoom with you,
or give me a phone call to try to show someone
how to do something in a one-to-one way,
just shoot them a Scribe.
The average Scribe takes 56 seconds to create,
and two seconds to copy and send to someone.
And, so, find those moments.
How many of those can you just bat away
with something that's more, to your point, automatic.
You feel like minor automations
but they actually add up to real amounts of time.
There are psychological studies
that will say, "For every ping that you get,
every interruption in your day."
You hear that sound of the Slack message go ding
or whatever it is that you're using.
"You lose anywhere between five to 20 minutes of actual work."
Because of the context switching that's required for your brain
to get back into that same deep flow, generative state
if you were doing something important and hard.
And, so, these things feel really innocuous at the time.
"Oh, Joe is just asking me another question, that's great,
I really like Joe, no big deal."
But when Joe and Joe's friends ask you 10 times a day,
you just lost anywhere between 50 and 200 minutes of time,
and time is the thing that we all have as their most limited resource.
And, so, can you find ways to reduce those
so they don't come in the first place,
and when they do manage them more appropriately.
So, to your question, for leaders,
for example, maybe setting the expectation that
when you were doing deep work,
you are not available on Slack for a couple of hours.
My team, well, when someone's head is down on work,
they put a little emoji, we use Slack,
whatever it is you use, but we use Slack,
and we put a little emoji of someone wearing headphones.
It's to indicate like, "I am doing work right now,
please don't Slack me unless it's urgent."
- Okay. - And then you come back on
and you can batch these things together.
- I like that, and I like how you contrasted
collaborating with a self-study kind of format.
Where you get the answers without having to ask for them.
And also how it connects to setting the expectations
and boundaries around your work and your time,
which is really precious, of course.
So I would like to pivot from here to your own journey.
And I was reading through it and you've been quite vocal
about how your startup journey went hand-in-hand
with your motherhood journey.
And we, absolutely, we can spend
an entire episode just talking about that.
But let's talk about your role as the CEO in Scribe,
and what strategies do you use,
in your company, to promote inclusion in the workplace?
- Yes, we think a lot about talent
and our talent value proposition.
And any time you're leading teams,
you got to think about like, "Why are these people here?"
Well, you think about your value props to your customers all the time,
you got to do the same thing for your people and your team.
And, so, that starts with thinking about recruiting.
Who am I bringing in the door?
And, so, we think a lot about...
We've sort of had a mantra with Scribe,
I tell everyone in our first conversations,
when they're debating joining Scribe,
"I want, at the end of your time at Scribe, for you to say
that this was the most rewarding experience of your career.
What would that look like?"
Hopefully, it's long time.
"At the end of that time, well, what would that look like?
What would you say at the end of that time to be,
'Hey, that was the most rewarding experience for me.'"
Put another way; "What does success look like for you?"
And then I'm trying to map up is that the journey
that we're on with Scribe?
And do I think we have the opportunity to provide that to someone?
And if we don't, then I say, "Great, that's a really great goal
that you have for yourself.
Let me make introductions to three other people
who might be able to help you.
Don't come do that here at Scribe, we're not set up for that."
So there's a whole kind of, upfront,
are we in alignment with our goals and what success looks like?
And then when someone's in the door,
it's continuing to check in with them because things change.
Company changes, people's goals change,
and it's still saying like, "Are we still in alignment?
Are we still on track?
Are we giving you the opportunities that you want?
Are you learning how to do things?"
And we say we want to find people who are great at their craft
and want to become excellent at it at Scribe.
And to us, that's creating an environment
that is really respectful, that is very transparent,
but where people still challenge each other.
And, so, we really hire for a growth mindset.
Where people say, "I want to constantly keep getting better
and I want to do that here."
And, so, what you'll find is that our team
is incredibly supportive of each other.
We do, at our team, all hands, we'll do shout-outs and gratitude's
for the last five minutes, and it's just people spreading love.
Like, "I want to give a shout-out to Thomas
who answered this question for me so quickly, and he did it... "
And then Thomas, "Oh, but you were really great at that."
Everyone is very quick to give thanks to everyone,
but they'll also push each other.
"Hey, we did really great last month,
but let's do even better this month.
What would it look like if we doubled that?
What would it look like if we shipped this thing even faster?"
And, thankfully, this culture becomes self-reinforcing.
When you bring in people
who want to work in this kind of environment,
and then you give them this kind of environment,
then that grows over time.
And, so, that means you're able to attract people
from a variety of different backgrounds.
And they're all united in this idea
of just wanting to get great at what they're doing
and do it in this kind of environment and this kind of culture.
And, again, we design our recruiting process
so that it becomes very clear to people,
during recruiting, what our culture and our feeling is.
So I'll often when I'm having a last conversation
with the candidate, right before we're about to make an offer,
and I say like, "Do you have any other questions?"
Usually the answer is no, they're like, "I've met people on your team.
I have such a great sense for what people are like at Scribe.
This feels like my tribe of people, this is really what I want."
Or they've self-selected out of the process.
And, so, I think really leading with what is your culture
and what does it mean to be here?
It gives people a sense and they can self-select in or out,
and we don't think about diversity
in terms of we have to have a set number
of targets or anything like that.
We actually don't even really track it
other than I looked at it the other day
and we are 70, 75% women
are underrepresented minorities.
And that's because we've thought a lot about
how do we create an environment
where people can just show up
and do work they feel really proud of.
That's our uniting goal together,
and that means you get all different kinds of people.
But everyone wants to do great work
and they're really excited to do it
with this other group of people.
- Awesome, and that's a great way
to look at diversity and inclusion in any organization.
I also love the questions that you're asking
and being open to the answers that you get.
Not all of them are going to be what you expect,
but it's good to hear those things.
I hope the leaders who are listening to this are taking notes.
- Those are the best questions to ask.
Where you don't know the answer
and you want to go into it not being tied to a particular outcome.
Because really what you're trying to do is find the best answer
for both people, and when it works then it really works.
When someone says like, "Oh, I really want to do this."
And you say like, "We can support you in doing that here."
That's magic on both sides.
And if someone comes describing and they're like
"I want to become the best computer vision engineer in the world."
Then I say, "Great, you should go to Google.
They have snapped up almost all of the world's
great computer vision engineers, go apprentice with those people.
That is the best place for you."
That means I lose a potential engineer, sure,
but now I've freed up a spot for an engineer
who really wants to be here
and who wants to do the things that we're working on,
and that's a win-win on both sides.
- Right, and talking about young engineers
or young people who are entering the workforce.
What advice would you give to younger professionals,
not just in finance accounting,
but overall people who are listening to this podcast.
On how they should be navigating their lives
and careers as they move forward?
- I had a professor in business school who said something
I thought pretty profound, at the time,
and I didn't think much of it.
And now I look back on it and realize just how wise it was.
He said, "Find the thing that you are always
apologizing for about yourself and find a way to get paid for it."
So, for me, I'm obsessed with efficiency,
and I was constantly told, in work environments,
that I was too fearless.
I would just go off, I'd see a problem
and I'd just go off and try to solve it.
And they'd be like, "No, that's not how things work here,
you're 24-years-old."
And they're like, "No back-off, there's a process, follow the hierarchy, et cetera."
And I learned over time to do that.
And that was fine and good, but now that I reflect back,
I feel like I left a lot on the table
in trying to conform to those environments.
And instead saying, "Well, gosh, I have this passion around
the kinds of problems I'm solving and ways of working.
What if I could just find a different environment
that actually fits those things
rather than trying to tell me to change and conform."
And sometimes that's right and feedback is good.
But if you're hearing it time and time again
and you say like, "Oh, gosh, this is a spike I have,
and maybe it's a liability in this context,
but it could actually be really great in another context."
And, so, rather, I think, we often try to smooth out our spikes
and become more polished stones.
And I actually think the most successful people I know
are really freaking, spiky corals.
They're really good at some things
and not so good at other things, and that's fine,
Great, find a way to spend most of your time doing those things
that you're really great at
and the stuff that you're not good at
automate away, delegate away.
Get into a different job
where you've got more support around those areas.
Whatever it is, just lean into the things that you're good at,
and try to spend as much of your time
doing those things that you're really good at.
And that's an efficiency story, that's an effectiveness story,
and that's, frankly, a happiness story,
and I think that's the most important part of it.
Chances are if you're good at something, you enjoy doing it
- True, and another thing that I think our listeners
can take away from this is being fearless.
Whether it's about solving problems when you're not supposed to,
or taking that accidental CEO position that lands in your lap.
- If someone tells you you're fearless
and they mean it as not a compliment,
as something to work on, note it in your head
and say like, "This is very kind of this person
to be giving me this feedback.
Feedback is a gift; I'm going to ignore that."
Or "I'm going to, maybe, in this environment
understand the way to operate,
but I'm going to secretly cultivate that about myself
because that can be your superpower."
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with the latest perspectives of thought leaders
from the accounting and finance profession.
If you like what you heard and you'd like to be counted in
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visit IMA's website at www.imanet.org.