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Building the Future has quickly become one of the fastest rising nationally syndicated programs. With a focus on interviewing startups, entrepreneurs, investors, CEOs, and more, the show showcases individuals who are realizing their dreams and helping to make our world a better place through technology and innovation.
Welcome to building the future hosted by Kevin Horick. With millions of listeners a month, building the future has quickly become one of the fastest rising programs with a focus on interviewing startups, entrepreneurs, investors, CEOs, and more. The radio and TV show airs in 15 markets across the globe, including Silicon Valley. For full showtimes, past episodes, or to sponsor the show, please visit buildingthefutureshow.com.
Speaker 2:Welcome back to the show. Today, have Stacy Yudin. She's the CEO of NEP Services. Stacy, welcome to the show.
Speaker 3:Thank you. Good morning.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I'm excited to have you on the show. I think what you guys are doing is really innovative and cool. But maybe before we get into all that, let's get to know you a little bit better and start off with where you grew up.
Speaker 3:Sure. I'm a California girl, born and raised, Huntington Beach. Yes. I live I live in Laguna Beach now, so I'm very, very lucky we have great weather. I went to UCLA, so any Bruin fans out there.
Speaker 2:Very cool. What did you take, at UCLA and why?
Speaker 3:Oh, wow. Well, life takes a variety of turns, but I was a history major, and I was, you know, first gonna go to medical school and did all my sciences, but decided that life as an entrepreneur was much more exciting and and innovating and invigorating, I should say, than than following a career in medicine.
Speaker 2:Okay. So how did you or what made you figure that out? Was there, like, a defining moment, or how did that come to be?
Speaker 3:You know, you know, I'm a big proponent of doing, you know, summer classes and and traveling and getting outside of your city. And and I spent a lot of time working with international nonprofits. I worked with US campaign for Burma and for UNICEF. And along those journeys, I was able to experience working outside of the scope of my community. And I realized that there was I I was geared towards a life in business, and I love solving big problems, and big challenges were exciting, not intimidating.
Speaker 3:And so being an entrepreneur and, you know, really, really innovating, you know, difficult problems was more attractive to me than maybe spending time one on one with patients. I thought I could make a bigger impact, working on the business side than I could, you know, one on one.
Speaker 2:Got it. Okay. So walk us through your career up until coming to NEP, and then let's talk about your career and because you've had a number of positions there, and now you're CEO.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So my I first started off working with, like I said, international nonprofit. I was working for the David Geffen School of Medicine
Speaker 2:Oh, cool.
Speaker 3:In the program in global health, working on international research projects. We were basically creating these research sites and using it as an opportunity to train medical students, doctors, and residents about, that particular research grant in that particular country.
Speaker 2:Cool.
Speaker 3:So it was an opportunity for me to really get on the ground and say, okay. Well, how do we start this clinic? How do we start this education program? You know, setting up everything from where people are gonna stay to the actual facility and and payroll and, equipment. And so it was just kinda like starting a small business in different country with a variety of regulations and stop gaps and hurdles and challenges at the local level as well as well as at, the institutional level.
Speaker 3:So that was, you know, that my first real opportunity to solve some big challenges, and and we ended up building seven different international research facilities and sites and seven different training programs around the world. And we're we're very, very proud of what we've done and been able to train local doctors and have local experts also provide training to US Physicians. And so it was a really, great experience as far as starting something from zero. I mean, from concept, you know, a whiteboard and some paper and pens to, you know, a full blown training facility.
Speaker 2:Very cool. So how did you find out about NEP and and kinda get involved with them? And then let's talk about kind of your rise there, and then let's dive into what, you guys do.
Speaker 3:NEP Services was providing fundraising services through direct mail for, first responder organizations, on the West Coast, and I happened to meet the founder. And I we were I was taking a look at his business as a consultant, and we had a lot of conversations about how could we do more for these nonprofits. Right? We were handling a lot of the transactions in the marketing side, but the the idea and the big vision was what if we build platforms that would help the nonprofit be more efficient? You help them communicate and market better to their donors, include the donors in the conversation of how they're driving impact for that community.
Speaker 3:And so the you know, again, back to the whiteboard, back to the pen and paper, what was that big vision, and then then the hard work started where we had to put that into action. So that that was the beginning of our dream, when we first started building NEP services technology platforms, and that was about a decade ago.
Speaker 2:Okay. So walk us through that journey and what is it today and kind of let's dive into the services and offerings of the software.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So NEP Services now provides advanced fundraising and communication platforms for nonprofits, labor organizations, five zero one c threes that help them transform their marketing and internal operations.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 3:So one of one of the areas of impact I always talk to nonprofit leaders about is that you have to run your nonprofit like it's a business. So you need to think about your internal operations, how you can streamline and make those effective, as well as your fundraising strategy. Right. Nonprofits a lot of time focus on, we've gotta raise money. We've gotta raise money.
Speaker 3:That's our bread and butter, and that is 100% of your budget is how much you can raise from your support from your supporters and donors.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 3:But the other side of that is how do you be really strategic with the vendors and partners that you choose, and then how do you operate your actual nonprofit operations? And you should you should approach it like a business. So choosing best in class solutions for accounting, choosing best in class solutions for your website, and all the other administrative tools that you need, not just the most cost efficient solution. Something that it can really future proof, set you up for success in your nonprofit.
Speaker 2:No. That makes sense. Well and you want the because you have to when you put yourself out there to your, like, to your users as a nonprofit, like, if they have a terrible experience, they're not gonna wanna use your platform or your website or whatever. Correct?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, it's just like a business with a customer. You know, you wanna make sure that you're presenting yourself in the best light. You're communicating effectively with that, you know, customer or donor. Either they're effectively the same thing, you're selling, the impact that you're making as a nonprofit.
Speaker 3:So you wanna make sure that you're engaging your audience just like you would for any business. And so the tools that you're using need to be at that same caliber as if you're a Fortune 500 company. So one of my biggest challenges as at that time was a consultant and director of business development any at NEP was, how do you design products that are as good as best in class products for Fortune 500 companies, but at a a budget level for a nonprofit that's just getting going?
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 3:So how do you how do you make that affordable? How do you fit that market, for nonprofits that don't have as much discretionary spend as Fortune five hundred companies? So that was one of our biggest challenges when we're designing and investing into these products is making sure that they're they could be priced in this marketplace appropriately. That that's a whole another show probably on pricing strategy.
Speaker 2:Well, can you maybe dive a little bit deeper into that? Because I like you said, obviously, that I think is a challenge. Even I think as a lot of start ups, just getting early customers sometimes just pricing can be a challenge. Right? So how have you kind of solved that?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So I think one of one of the areas where NEP really, really did well and we really did well early on was not overbuilding our product.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 3:So as an entrepreneur, you know, we all have ideas, and it it's really easy to have great ideas. And I hate to say that, but what's difficult is implementing a great product using your ideas. And so it's really about paring down what you're gonna build into your MVP. You should be building the least amount of your ideas as possible, holding yourself back from jumping off the cliff no matter how exciting that might seem, building at least at least amount of features as possible, and then iterating off of actual customer feedback. And and I've I've read that that is not a new recommendation.
Speaker 3:I didn't come up with that recommendation, but it's really, really hard to follow because there's a lot of excitement, and you get a lot of traction initially with your platform. But what happens is that you're unable to iterate any one feature well enough to be successful long term. So I I I now tell everyone, you know, all my entrepreneur friends and young business owners that really wanna dive in a % into their product is that hold yourself back, build as build it build it as small as you can so that you can focus on iterating piece by piece. What that does later is it also allows you to have a less expensive product because you've invested less upfront. So you're gonna be able to enter the market and keep your price points as low as possible so that you can get either early adopters or at least have a little bit of a a wider margin when it comes to your pricing strategy down the road.
Speaker 2:I % agree with you. But how have you kinda managed, or what's your advice for that? Because, obviously, you have a a road map. You have feature requests from clients. You might have, like, a big customer that's maybe willing to pay you to develop some features, or you might have a customer saying, we'll sign up if you add these three to five things or whatever the number is.
Speaker 2:So, like, how have you managed that? Because that's really challenging.
Speaker 3:That is probably the most challenging part of this. And I can admit to everyone on the air who's listening to this that I didn't I didn't make the right decision a lot of the times because you do get pulled in with these what you've you've you see then as your key customer, as your ideal customer. They pull you in with the idea that, oh, we're gonna refer everyone and Yeah. Yeah. We're gonna use this platform.
Speaker 3:They kind of sell you in a way.
Speaker 2:Interesting. Yeah.
Speaker 3:You you get you get wrapped in with the idea of, you know, this is someone who's gonna elevate my platform to the next level. I'm gonna be able to demonstrate their use cases and their success. And so I would just you know, I I had a lot of business mentors at this point in my career as well, and they cautioned me on the same thing that I would say is that you really, really need to hold hold your platform close and not get not get sold on on your customer user base and be really, really strategic with what you build out, not overbuild. Because I did overbuild on my first platform. My first version of my of NEP Connect are membership communication and engagement software for unions and nonprofits.
Speaker 3:It we we were very successful. We scaled in eighteen months to, over almost three quarters of a million users, which is a huge success, very successful. But we we overbuilt some features, and we were at these scale walls that we've now had to to basically refactor. And so I looked back at a few key customers, and I spent too much time focusing on a couple key customers who kinda promised me the world. And I didn't spend enough time looking at the entire platform analytics and your your your your 80% of your users.
Speaker 3:What are they doing on the platform? Where are they spending their time? What features are they using the most? What are what are the innovations, and what are the use cases that I need to be developing for 80% of my customer base? Not not the 20% that maybe is screaming the loudest or selling me on what they're gonna do for the platform.
Speaker 3:So it's a hard absolutely a very, very hard line to walk.
Speaker 2:No. I I hundred percent agree. So I wanna dive a little bit deeper into what exactly do people get with the platform, and is there add ons? Like, how does it kinda work when you're onboarding a new user or or, I guess, like, union or whoever?
Speaker 3:Yes. Again, another another great example of a a challenge we learned building a platform for unions and nonprofits is that the use cases are varied, very varied. You know, this is not just one type of customer who's going out and buying a car and wants this type of experience during the sale process. When you're working with labor organizations, unions, first responder organization, nonprofits, they all have a very, very diverse set of needs. So our our latest version of Connect Plus, our membership database engagement and member experience platform is a brand new kind of entry point into the marketplace of how do we create early adopters for nonprofits?
Speaker 3:How do we how do we give the donor experience the feeling that they're they're working alongside the nonprofit every day? How do we help unions engage their membership? And so we do that through an all in one software that allows the union or nonprofit to deploy communications. So emails, text message, encrypted documents, and a membership space in the cloud where they can have two way conversations with their donors or with their members all in one ecosystem. And so it's kinda like the metaverse wrapped into a website where that donor can get engaged with that nonprofit as much or as little as they want to.
Speaker 3:Same with unions and their members. A union member needs to pay their dues. They wanna communicate with their nonprofit or their their organization. They need to look at their benefits. They can do all of that inside of this virtual union space that we call Connect Plus.
Speaker 3:And so it's really been able to connect the union to their members or the nonprofit to their donors.
Speaker 2:Okay. And so what because you have a bunch of, like, like, they can have a website. They can have a few other things. Like, let's dive a little bit deeper into some of the other features that once they get the kind of core that they can kind of expand on.
Speaker 3:Oh, yeah. Once they build out this virtual office and this virtual space that allows them to run the nonprofit, communicate with their members, keep their membership data, they can expand and really start to deliver strategic marketing. So, you know, they can attach their web site. They can add on virtual voting. They can do surveying to the community.
Speaker 3:We have a platform called Help A Hero, which allows our nonprofits to raise funds securely through a a crowdfunding web site, that data of those donors is automatically embedded into their web platform with us. And so one of the areas where we stand out is that I've taken the time to integrate each one of these separate tools into Connect Plus that their entire operation is streamlined. And we have that interoperability, which allows the the leaders to do things a lot easier than they're used to. They don't have to spend their time behind a desk. You know?
Speaker 3:The data from their membership and from their donors are all integrated into one platform, which is a a big lift when you're talking about managing a nonprofit or managing a labor union.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well and the other thing too is not having to, like, have this tool for one thing, this tool for another thing, this tool, like and then trying to integrate and get all the data from all those is a nightmare.
Speaker 3:Right? It's one of the biggest, yeah, it's absolutely one of the biggest challenges I think for anyone who's running a business, nonprofit or other. I've got a texting tool over here. I've got an email, Mailchimp, Constant Contact over here. I've got a website with Wix.
Speaker 3:A lot of amazing, incredible tools out there, but there's really not a platform right now that can pull in all of that and integrate it into a virtual space. And so that was the big elephant in the room that we were trying to solve in a way that was cost effective and efficient for nonprofits and labor unions. We're gonna give you the best in class tools. We're gonna allow you to integrate with any third party tool that you'd like all on one streamlined platforms. So that that is a it's a big problem to solve, and that's what we've been solving and iterating on at NEP for now a decade.
Speaker 2:Wow. No. That's awesome. So I wanna dive a little bit deeper into, like, what's the cost, or does it kinda range, or how do you charge for this?
Speaker 3:Again, in a pricing strategy, when you first start out, you know, you have a goal in mind, what you think the market will bear, what what will nonprofits, what can nonprofits afford, What's appropriate? You know, one of our goals at NEP is we're working with nonprofits. We wanna make sure that the maximum number of dollars raised goes back to the cause. So how do we be efficient with building a very cost effective platform? So we're proud that our our latest iteration and version, we have communication platforms and websites that start at $99 a month for nonprofits that are just starting out and labor unions that are small all the way to enterprise level support, you know, for organizations that are state level and international.
Speaker 3:So we've been able to build a very flexible platform that allows and and encourages even the smallest nonprofit to get the best tools in the industry, and we're very proud of that. We want you to be excited to launch your nonprofit and make an impact in your community. And I wanna make sure that I can give you the best tools to do that that are affordable and cost effective as you grow.
Speaker 2:No. That that makes a lot of sense. So, obviously, some of these, well, nonprofits or or especially maybe on the union side, the sales cycle can be either probably pretty quick or maybe, like, you know, a year, two years, somewhere in there. What's your advice or how have you landed some of these bigger accounts? Because I'm sure they were challenging.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, of course, everyone wants that sweet spot with your that customer. Right? The customer that can go on your website, make a decision, download the product, and train themselves. But in the reality of business, that's very unlikely.
Speaker 3:Ask any director of customer success or any team of customer success individuals. They're gonna tell you a completely different story. So, you know, you obviously, we wanna make our mark with enterprise level clients. That that gives us a breadth and depth to our platform. It gives us that street credibility.
Speaker 3:And now, you know, having you know, this is our third iteration of the platform. We've had enterprise customers for, you know, over five years. And so that sales process and cycle takes time. So what we've done is we've really pushed our platform to allow organizations, especially enterprise, to jump on a freemium model to test drive the platform early. And then we build a scope for those larger enterprise clients, and we really start looking at how their data of their union members or nonprofit or their donors are constructed.
Speaker 3:So we've hired on not only data hygiene experts, people that are database engineers so that they can help manage the data and organize the data before we launch an enterprise customer's platform. So that that is a huge challenge when you're dealing with these large customers, but we built on teams of people with that expertise because the customer is not the expert in that. We need to provide that expertise, and that does shorten your delivery cycle. But it it's it's still a challenge. But what I always tell our groups is bad data in, bad results.
Speaker 3:And so it's better that we spend time in the in the enterprise build process to clean their data up first. And so we yeah. NEP also does that for our customers.
Speaker 2:No. That that makes a lot of sense. So it sounds like are you building custom, like, features sometimes for certain clients, or are you just kinda cleaning the data to get it into your platform, a bit of both? How does that kinda work?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Unfortunately and unfortunately, you know, we're doing both. We're we're we're Kinda have to. Yeah. You kinda have to in this world.
Speaker 3:I mean, 80% of our customers use our platforms as they are. Yeah. But we're constantly watching, you know, what are the user behaviors? What are the top features being requested? What are the top tickets?
Speaker 3:One of the things I always say is that we need to stare ugly in the face. What part of our platform is not being used? What part of our platform needs to be enhanced? And so we're Yeah.
Speaker 2:That's interesting.
Speaker 3:Focusing we're focusing being on being very client centric, very client focused. What is the feedback customers are giving us? What do they not like? It's it's much more difficult, and some people can take it personally, but you've gotta stare ugly in the face and focus on fixing those problems early, talking to customers, getting their real on the ground feedback. So I remind our customer success team and our directors across the company consistently to listen to customers.
Speaker 3:Let's read these tickets. Let's talk about them. Let's have conversations on what's working well and what's not working well. We can't avoid that. We should be fixing those problems early and including our customers in that conversation.
Speaker 3:So I spent a lot of time at meetings on the ground, having great conversations with customers and asking the hard questions. What don't you like? What's really not effective on the platform? And that's given us really great feedback over the last decade, and I think that's what's led to our success today is our customers' feedback, is our customers' commentary.
Speaker 2:No. I think that's actually really good advice. I'm curious though, how do you manage, like, getting actual good feedback? Because sometimes it's like, yeah, I like it. You're like, that's not helpful.
Speaker 2:Like, I wanna know, like, what you hate or what you don't like or because you're gonna you and the team are gonna have to come up with probably the solution a lot of the time because they're not software people. But, like, how do you kinda manage that? Because that's hard.
Speaker 3:Yeah. You're you're gonna have those customers that just want to, you know, complain. But I think it's all about building relationships with your customer base. So, you know, our customer success team, although we have all of the great software strategies of a ticket system and and automated bug reporting and all of that, you still need to have a conversation with your customers. You still need to build a relationship with your customers, and then that's how you build that dialogue chain.
Speaker 3:You know, sometime people have a hard time telling you what's not working. They
Speaker 2:Yeah. They
Speaker 3:you know, some some customers don't have a problem telling you what's not working. And so it's about identifying those strong customer relationships, working those up the chain. And then I I spend a lot of time going to meet them in person. I've never I've never spared any expense saying, hey. You know, let's sit down in a room.
Speaker 3:Let me let me, you know, order in lunch, and let's sit in a boardroom. And I really, really wanna dig into you. When you show them that type of respect Yeah. They're gonna really give you some great feedback. And so our active users that are very highly engaged in the platform, we know that those are the areas and those are the individuals that we can have these really robust conversations.
Speaker 3:And you're right. We come up with the software solutions, but truly the best ideas come from the marketplace.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:So the more you listen to your your key customers, the ones that are really using the platform, I think the stronger your iteration and your solution set will be for that customer and for your customers. It's when you try to to design things in a black room with only software people is when you waste a lot of time and a lot of money.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, and a lot of times the people actually doing the design and development aren't the customer. They're not the actual user of the platform. And arguably, I always say, like, some somebody or maybe all the team might even hate the software because they're not the target user. But if the target user loves it or they want the button orange instead of purple, for example, it's like, well, we're gonna make the button orange because, like, that's what our users want.
Speaker 2:Right? And I think founders kinda can forget that in my experience sometimes. It's like, well, are you the user? Well, maybe you might hate it. But if your users love it, well, what are you gonna do here?
Speaker 2:You probably wanna go with the user, not you.
Speaker 3:No. You told you hit the nail right on the head and and that's what I mean by you can't design or iterate in a black room in your conference room by yourself with just your developers because if your developers had their way, your platform would be 100% different than what the consumer, what the marketplace, what your what your users actually need. And so you have to take your ego out of the development process. You as a founder, you are you are an empty vessel, and you really should be echoing now, again, you should lead, but you should also listen closely to what your customers are saying. You should look at the data of how your customer base is using the platform because I agree with you.
Speaker 3:There have been plenty of times where I'm in a I'm in a room, and I'm saying there's no way we're gonna design it like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:But I'm wrong. I I really have to be looking listening and looking at what the customers need. What are their needs? Right? And when you listen to the marketplace, you take your ego out of the build process.
Speaker 3:It it totally changes your approach to building a platform and to solving the problem because ultimately, it's your users. It's your customer's problem you're trying to solve, not your own. You gotta take yourself out of that. Yeah. And that's hard to do.
Speaker 2:That's really hard. Yeah. No. I I think that's actually really good advice. I'm curious though, and I think because your user base and you I'm guessing here is probably somebody that's very technical all the way down to, like, not technical at all.
Speaker 2:And designing and building for that range of people is really challenging in itself.
Speaker 3:Yes. I I mean, every every SaaS platform has a variety of challenges, but our user base, you know, are they tend to be older. Okay. You know, they're not they're not out there in the metaverse. You know, they're not spinning up, you know, YouTube videos and dance marathons.
Speaker 3:We're we're talking about a user base that is a little bit less familiar with online applications. So, yes, we've had to really think very, very, very long and hard about how to make it really easy. So one of the rules that I say is nothing should be more than three steps. Even if you're gonna run a very complicated membership report and you have 10,000 members in your union
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:How do we how do we make the filtering and the membership reporting process so easy that my grandmother can use it. Yep. And so it's taking very complicated processes traditionally and breaking them down into very clear steps and then trying to automate this as much as possible. So one of the areas I'm most proud about NEP Connect and our Connect Plus membership platform is that it's a database that really anyone can use. And you can drag and drop.
Speaker 3:You can change the display of how your member's data is being shown. So and you don't need a database engineer to do that. You can drag and drop it on your screen as a user. Anyone can do that. And when you get to reporting on the data, which is the most important part as a as a organization, you can customize, a report in the click of a button, click of a button three times.
Speaker 3:One a, b, and c, and you can pull out a very complicate what should be a very complicated membership report, but it's gonna it's gonna export in a filtered way very, very easy for that user. And when I show customers how to do that, I've never seen so much excitement over a database. And and that makes us very happy. How do we take something super challenging and make it very, very easy for a set of users that don't have as much computer skills as maybe some of us.
Speaker 2:Which is actually really hard to do. Like, make something complicated simple in an application.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And and and this hasn't happened overnight. You know, this is ten years of iteration.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:But going back to having relationships with your customers from day one, being able to ask the hard questions and say, yeah. That that sucks. It doesn't work very well. What do you think? How what are your opinion?
Speaker 3:How should it work? Listening and having conversations with your customers, being customer centric. That's how we were able to make something that was really, really difficult into something now that is fairly simple for the average user. It was it's not a process that happens overnight. It's a lot of iteration, a lot of conversations, a lot of difficult conversations also.
Speaker 2:No. I that's really good advice. So how does AI apply to NEP? Are you working on it? The are you currently using it?
Speaker 2:Walk us through that.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I I'm I'm someone who loves the next best thing as maybe a lot of your listeners can agree with. You know, I'm always keeping my eyes and ears open as to what's happening in the marketplace. We've been following AI and dabbling in it for years. And I think now it's such an exciting opportunity for any type of platform like mine because there's so many tools that we can now integrate, and I don't have to build them.
Speaker 3:You know? I just I don't need to be the master of all, and I don't want to be. By the way, no one should want to be the master of all. So there's a lot of a lot of innovations that are happening in real time. And so, yeah, we're we're embedding and incorporating AI features into our platform now both on the user communication side.
Speaker 3:Right? So how to just make communicating easier, that's just a win for our customer base. I wanna write this email. I wanna send this text message. You know, write this for me.
Speaker 3:That gives our customers something immediately that they can use. But also on the more complicated, so cleaning data, the data hygiene process. When you're importing 25,000 member records into a member management software, that data needs to be in a better place. You know, those email addresses need to be validated. Lots of data hygiene that needs to happen.
Speaker 3:And so we're working on some more complicated solutions to how do we make the data hygiene process cleaner and easier? How do we make it easier and more efficient, by the way, for our customers and NEP's customer success team to help customers upload their data and get started quickly? So that that launch point, I think, with the help of AI is gonna go from, you know, six months, like you asked me earlier, to hopefully six weeks. And so that's some of our target goals using AI. And it's very exciting time.
Speaker 3:I'm one of those people that wants to embrace every AI tool in the market, and it's my team that holds me back.
Speaker 2:No. Makes sense. So I wanna well, I've been thinking about this since I asked it a while ago. Like, so you work with maybe some of your larger clients and maybe some of the custom stuff to add in new features. When you roll those features out, are you rolling those out to all your clients and maybe they don't use them, or are you just rolling them out to a specific client or a handful of clients?
Speaker 2:Like, how do you manage those, like, custom feature requests?
Speaker 3:Well, one of the ways that we manage is we take a deep breath and know that everyone will always want everything.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And so I think the first part about those custom feature requests is the ability to say no, and that was very hard for me and our team to do being so customer centric. Yep. It's the, you know, the devil and the angel on your shoulder. You want to be customer centric and listen to your customers, but you also need to say no. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Because that's not the long term vision of the company and the platform. And so you have to ask yourself questions like, will this benefit, you know, 80% of my customers, or will this benefit my enterprise level customers, you know, in the next five years, in the next two years? Does this really build upon our product road map? Does this enhance our product road map, or does this change the nature of my platform entirely? And so when you lean into, does it change the nature of my platform?
Speaker 3:You've gotta say no. But if it doesn't do that and it enhances your road map and it's gonna really bring value back to your entire to most of your customers, I should say 80% is the target that I I look to, then we really start to get into, well, how do we map that out? What does that look like? And so what I'm really proud about, our new Connect Plus association management solution is that we can both deploy these enterprise level changes to one installation, or we can make them available across the entire platform. And so when we did our our rebuild just recently, that was one of the big corporate challenges we wanted to solve.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 3:It's how do we find that balance? How do we deploy these customizations that are really needed for enterprise level customers? But also, and in some cases, make those available across a platform. So we've been able to do that. And, again, that's time and time and ingenuity on what's gonna work well for NEP NEP's platform, and they connect post platform over the next five years.
Speaker 3:How do we build scale?
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 3:So that was a big challenge for our developers.
Speaker 2:No. No. It makes a lot of sense. I I'm curious though, how do you manage the maintenance of those features that are maybe only rolled out to a few enterprise customers? Because, like, that's where you can really get kinda lost in the weeds.
Speaker 2:Right? Or, like, those features just stop working because, like, it's you have a lot going on. Right?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Maintenance is it's really not the build as you accurately noted. It's the long term technical debt and maintenance of those custom features. So we've been able to do it in a way we compartmentalize a lot of our maintenance packaging, both on the feature set, but also on the platform. And so our team spends a lot of time thinking about how do we how do we make sure that everything is maintained both for security and usability and feature updates and all of that across the platform.
Speaker 3:So it's truly all built for global use, but it's only deployed in local installations. So that when we do massive, updates and and maintenance issues, we address that feature by feature. So, yes, that's probably the number one consideration when building custom features is what is the long term maintenance requirement, and burden for you as a business.
Speaker 2:Yeah. No. I think that's really good advice. So you and the team were recently nominated or, well, won the Fast Company, like, one of the most innovative companies in North America. How did that come to be and kind of like, that's congrats on that.
Speaker 2:That's huge.
Speaker 3:Thank you. Yeah. The the innovation award was by Fast Company was a surprise to us. We got number eight in all of North America, which
Speaker 2:Which is huge.
Speaker 3:To be to yeah. It's huge.
Speaker 2:To be on the list. Make the list. Never mind the top 10.
Speaker 3:Exactly. To be on the same list with Amazon and and Treger and all these incredible companies leading the way for decades and decades, it was it's quite an honor. And I think, you know, from a software perspective and from a client perspective, we're in a marketplace that people traditionally don't look at.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And so we've been really committed to our industry and to our marketplace, and where we've taken a lot of steps to elevate nonprofits and labor unions to have the same best in class tools as everyone else has. And so it was really nice to be recognized by Fast Company and other publications as well as, you know, nonprofits are a billion dollar industry. If we wanna look at it from a free market perspective, The US is one of the most generous countries in the world. Our citizens raise, they are really active in their communities. A lot of great people doing a lot of great work, making a huge impact for those that are less fortunate, whether it's on the health care side and innovations with grants and research projects all the way to your local community foundation, Ron McDonald, the local boys and girls club.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 3:There's a lot of business in the world of nonprofit. So it was great that despite nonprofit or labor union marketplace, they're getting the same recognition, you know, as as Fortune 500 corporations on the stock exchange. They do a lot of great impacts in The US, so it was great to be featured as a private company serving that that those institutions.
Speaker 2:Yeah. No. That's that's really awesome. So I'm curious. Is there anything else that you wanna mention related to the platform or other advice that you'd maybe wanna pass on to others whether they're in the space or just, you know, doing a startup and being an entrepreneur?
Speaker 2:Because you guys have been around a very long time and, you know, you've had a bunch of success.
Speaker 3:Well, I think first and foremost, you know, we're we're incredibly honored to be recognized by Fast Company. You know, we're innovating with purpose at the core of it. Every every single person that works on our team, we're all really committed to helping our clients. So there's a lot of passion, that's that drives our product development, our maintenance, you know, customer success. We help others make a difference in their community.
Speaker 3:So our platforms, whether it's help a hero crowdfunding, communitypetition.com, which helps you deploy a free online petitions to get, you know, your message out, Connect Plus membership management solution that helps manage a database and have best in class communication software all in one space, and the native mobile app that goes along with that, all of these products. We're just very passionate about delivering innovative, best in class software to nonprofits and labor unions. So that's been the driving force behind everything that we do. I'm very lucky. I get to wake up every day and know that my work helps a lot of people, and it helps a lot of people make a bigger impact.
Speaker 3:So I I love what we do. I love working in the nonprofit space. I love working with first responder organizations, having their back on a daily basis. You know? There are people that risk their lives every day to keep our community safe.
Speaker 3:They run into burning buildings.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:So making sure that they're supported, their labor unions are supported, their foundations are supported, that we have their backs. And our whole team is very passionate about giving back, and I'm I'm very fortunate to have a wonderful set of colleagues but each one of them in their own way is passionate about giving back in some way. And that's why they work here. They get to work in tech plus, you know, make their community stronger.
Speaker 2:No. I I no. I think that that's really great. I'm curious, though, is the team kind of spread out across North America, the world? How does that kinda work?
Speaker 2:Or do you have an office or a bit of both?
Speaker 3:Yeah. We we have three corporate headquarters.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 3:One in DC, One in Austin, and then our our head original headquarters, our OG headquarters in Newport Beach, California. But we were we were doing remote work before it was a cool thing, before COVID.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 3:So we've we've built a team of engineers, of developers, customer support people, accounting across the country. So I think we have customers and customers and employees in 34 states
Speaker 2:That's cool.
Speaker 3:Which is exciting. And they all bring a different a different vibe and a different culture piece to our internal culture, so we love that. So we've been doing remote work for years.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's that's great. So how will we close the show with mentioning where people can get more information about yourself, NEP, and any other links you wanna mention?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Well, if you need any type of technology for labor unions, nonprofits, if you'd like to raise money, manage your membership, you can go to our website, nepservices.com. You can send us a message. You can reach out to us on LinkedIn. Again, that's NEP Services, or, you know, hit me up on LinkedIn as well, and we'd be happy to work with your organization and make them stronger and help you innovate.
Speaker 2:Perfect, Stacy. Well, I really appreciate you taking the time out of your day to be on the show, and I look forward to keeping in touch with you. And have a good rest of your day.
Speaker 3:Thank you so much, Kevin. Have a great day, and and thanks so much.
Speaker 2:Thank you. K. Bye.
Speaker 1:Thanks for listening. Please visit our website at buildingthefutureshow.com to join the free community, sign up for our newsletter, or to sponsor the show. The music is done by Electric Mantra. You can check him out at electricmantra.com and keep building the future.