322 - The Bold Leap: Transitioning from Corporate Stability to Entrepreneurial Success with LearnUpon's Brendan Noud

Welcome to Listening with Leaders. I'm Doug Noll, lawyer turned peacemaker. I teach executive leaders how to listen to emotions rather than words so that they can become the leaders everyone wants to follow. And I teach those same leaders how to be authentically present, available, and connected to their families despite being insanely busy. I have learned that we are 98% emotional and only 2% rational. Learning how to listen to emotions is, in my experience, the foundational skill of life. Stick around to the end of the show and I'll reveal how you can be on our next guest in 15 to 20 minutes. So let's get started. Brandon Nguyen, welcome to Listening with Leaders. You're the CEO and founder of a company called Learned Upon, which is a LMS, learning management system, that allows your clients to set up training for their employees and workforce. I think that's what you do. Welcome to the show.

Thanks, Doug, and thanks for having me on your show. Looking forward to the conversation.

Absolutely. Well, before we— let's just start off with a really basic question. Tell us a little bit about your backstory. I know you're Irish, educated at University College Dublin. Tell us a little bit about how you got to where you are today.

Yeah. So yeah, I'm Irish, born and raised in a place called Kildare, just outside Dublin. And I, as noted, I did business in University College Dublin. And from there I started my career with KPMG Consulting. I wasn't 100% sure what I wanted to do, but I liked the idea of being a consultant, even though I wasn't sure what it was. But I spent 5 years there, joined as a graduate, and I think got a really strong base. Education into the world of business. I got to work with some amazing clients. And from there, after 5 years, I moved in to join a company called WBT Systems, which was one of the first learning management system platforms globally, founded in 1995. I joined them about 10 years later in 2004 as a project manager/account manager and ended up working, learning the e-learning space, learning about the different learning management systems out there, the good, the bad, the ugly. Had a great time, got to work with some amazing clients with WBT, the likes of the World Bank, Valero Energy, got to travel all over the world. So really loved my time there. I spent 8 years there. The last 4 years I started to move into sales. I used to help the sales team out a lot. And at some point my boss said, would you like to do sales full-time? And I said, yeah, I'll give it a go. So spent 4 years, the last 4 years there in sales, which really led to the idea of might be an opportunity for myself and Des, who also worked with WBT. He was on the technical side. He was a solution architect. So the two of us were chatting about the opportunity to maybe build our own platform focused on a different sector of the market, looking at smaller companies that couldn't afford a large solution like WBT. And yeah, that was the kind of the driver, I suppose. When you're at the front end of sales, you really get to understand what people are looking for. And yeah, in 2012, 13 years ago now, myself and Des left to start LearnUpon. And we've been on a journey for the last 13 years building, scaling the company. And it's been great fun.

Wow. So a lot of people wonder where you get the courage to leave a safe, secure corporate job and jump into entrepreneurship. Yeah, totally jumping into the unknown. Tell us about that.

Yeah, it's, I think a bit of naivety goes a long way and that you don't know what you're getting yourself into. Maybe to go back a little bit, when my, my parents had their own restaurant business, uh, when I was growing up. So myself and my siblings, um, from a very young age, maybe 6, 7, we were brought into the family business to help out clearing tables, washing dishes, serving customers. And then as we progressed, doing payroll and tax returns and all of those kinds of things. So I think that for all 3 of us in the family, that idea, that entrepreneurial spirit, I think was probably ingrained in us at a young age. So I knew I always, at some point, I wanted to have a go at starting my own business. It just wasn't, I had a few different ideas along the way from once I came out of college. But I suppose LearnUpon was probably the first time when I said, okay, let's do something. And I think having a great co-founder and someone in the boat with me in terms of Dez, I think was a big help. And yeah, I think at the time we definitely had a strong vision for where we could have an impact and what we could build. But I don't think we fully knew what we were getting ourselves into. Even the security of a well-paid job to not having a salary for a couple of years is definitely brings some stress along the way, but also I think from the day I started, and I say it to new people when they join the LearnUpon team, like I feel I've never— it's not a real job when it's your company. You obviously think about it pretty much 24/7 and you get to shape it and you get to work with amazing people. And while there's plenty of ups and downs along the way, overall, it's— I could never imagine doing nothing else now at this stage.

Yeah, that's what I understand. So what— you've been doing this now for 13 years. Obviously successful. What is it that gets you up in the morning and gets you excited to go to work?

Yeah, it's a good question. I, I think there's a couple of things. I get to work with great people, and I get to learn from great people. As we've grown the business, I think at the start I, I would consider myself reasonably good at most things, but certainly not an expert in things like sales or product or marketing or anything like that. And so to be in a position now— we, we're close to 300 people, we've been able to hire amazing talent around the world— and I get to just, in some ways, hopefully provide some direction in what we want to achieve, but just get to work and learn from amazing people. Last week we had our sales kickoff event in Salt Lake City. We had 100 people there from around the company, from Dublin, from Australia, from Greece, from all over, from the UK, obviously from the States. And the energy in the room, I was just like, I felt like this is the best job in the world, really, to be in that position. And I think the other thing is that the constant opportunity to learn new things. When you start a company, you don't start one because you want to be the CEO. I like that it's not about the title. You're passionate about something and you have a vision about what you want to build. As we've scaled, I've realized I actually have to have a job and I need to be the CEO. And so you're learning at each stage. Yeah, you're constantly challenging yourself, making mistakes, learning from them. And hopefully, yeah, so I get the opportunity to do that every year. And we always say we feel like we're only getting started. We've reached good scale, but the opportunity for the company and what the impact we want to have in the years ahead is that there's so much still to do. So that's exciting.

That's really exciting. I can tell you're really passionate and excited about not only what you've accomplished, but what you're in the future. Tell us a little bit about the company, Lernepunkt. What exactly does it do and who are your typical clients?

Yeah, so we're a learning platform, so we're focused on the delivery of online training predominantly, but we also allow our customers to manage live learning events and virtual events. So our customers would typically use our platform to deliver training to their employees for internal employee training or to train external audiences like their customers or partners. Or we also work with a lot of membership organizations, associations, professional bodies, sporting organizations who use our platform to deliver training to their members, like CPD training, for for example, or to train coaches and volunteers in the case of sporting organizations. So we've, we've over 1,500 customers now globally. Most of them are in North America, just over 1,000. So that's always been our main market. And we get to work with amazing organizations like USA Football, technology companies like BambooHR and Personio, and then large corporates, Visa or Chick-fil-A, Vanguard, and many others. Our platform basically allows our customers to deliver the right training to the right people at the right time. So we're all about removing the friction, making it really easy for learners to consume training as and when they need it. And our platform basically manages all the logic in the background and all the tracking and reporting.

So do you got— I get that it's content management, but you, it's the client who has to produce the content and they deliver the content to you and then you upload it into the platform and get it organized.

Yeah, they actually upload it themselves into our platform. So if it's, they are, and we also integrate with other content libraries. So LinkedIn Learning and some others where they have subscriptions, we can integrate with those, but yeah, we're mainly around the business logic behind who needs to do what training, when they need to do it by, sending the reminders, awarding the certificates, doing all the reporting. So all of that backend management is what our platform does. The content comes in all shapes and sizes, and a lot of our customers build it themselves, particularly if you're doing, if you're a technology company doing training on how to use your platform. So your customer academy, for example, you're going to build that training yourself. We give you some tools. Authoring tools to help do it that are AI-driven as well to make that really efficient.

I was going to ask you, AI, of course, has exploded in our lives, right? We all use it every day. How is AI affecting your business today? And where do you see in the future with AI?

Yeah, it's absolutely exploded in the last 18-24 months. For us, we're thinking about it like right across the platform, how we can bring in AI in the right way to have an impact for our customers. So we're very conscious about it. We don't want to just add AI for for the sake of it or because it's a buzzword in certain areas, but actually how can we have an impact on the administrators that use our platform, so put time back in their day. So things like we have an AI assessment engine that will generate exam questions based on content that you feed into it, so it saves a lot of time manually creating, typing out those questions and all the answer options. From the learner side, we have an AI coach or assistant, a reflection coach that basically challenges a learner of what they learned from a course, how they're going to apply apply it in their job. And again, it adds a lot of value and helps with deep learning and reflective learning. Right across the platform, we're now looking at how we can assign training and build learning journeys, personalized learning journeys, leveraging AI as well. So it's really exciting. For us, a big focus is making sure we're using AI responsibly and that we're very conscious of our customers' data and how we use AI in the right way to add value.

Interesting. Brendan, what do you think it is about you as an individual that you bring to the table that's made everything so successful?

It's a tough question.

I know nobody likes to talk about themselves, but that's the point of this show is to find out what makes Brendan tick.

Yeah, I think, I suppose I found I, I can relate with most areas of the business and with people across the business. I've done most jobs at some point. So I think I connect well with people when new people join the business or people who've been with us for 9, 10 10 years, I think I've built very strong relationships. So I'm good from that side. And probably the other area is that mix of product technology and sales. I think so. I'm, I'm far from a superstar in, in both, but I'm, I'm pretty good, I think, in both sides, and I can bring that together. And I think Des is quite similar, um, for a techie, um, and a coder. He's actually very business-focused and sales-focused as well. So we complement each other, I think, from that perspective. Yeah, I think I would say the other thing is probably fairly measured across the business. We've very successful, but we don't lose the run of ourselves and think we're—

You're not too full of yourself, right?

Yeah, exactly. And likewise, when things don't go to plan, I don't— I think we don't overreact. To be quite measured when things go wrong and just figure out, okay, how can we learn and go again?

So I agree with all of that. So I'm looking at you and I see somebody who grew up in a restaurant, which you can't get any more entrepreneurial than that, learned how to run a business as a child, then went to college, learned the academic side of business, then jumped into consulting and learned business from the outsider looking in, then went to work for a company, work your way up through the ranks, learning how it works from the inside. And now you're at a place where you've got this massive skill set that you probably don't even know where that you have and have been able to apply it for the last 13 years into the successful company called Learn Upon. Does that sound about right?

Yeah, it sounds a good summary. All right. Yeah, definitely. I've always been very keen to keep learning and I get bored quickly. I don't have the opportunity to get bored in Lernepark. There's so much to do. Things are moving fast. And I think that's, that's part of why I love what I do so much, because I know I'm going to be challenged to keep developing myself. And I think I have good mentors outside the business as well that are are patient and give me guidance and advice when I need it.

So LearnedUpon is an international company. I think I saw on the website you've got 5, did I read that correct? 5 locations around the world?

Yeah, headquartered here in Dublin. So we've about 130 or 140 people here. We've US offices in Philadelphia and Salt Lake City across North America. We have about 70 people at this stage, maybe 80. And then we have our development product and development offices mainly in Belgrade in Serbia. We've also some of that in Dublin. That's where Des, my co-founder, he's Irish, but his wife is Serbian. So that's how we ended up there. So we've an amazing team out in Belgrade, probably 50 or 60 folks out there. And we have a small team, but a growing team in Sydney, Australia. So we've about 9 or 10 down there. So we're a true 24/7 business. We offer a follow-the-sun approach to our customers with our technical support and customer support teams, which is something I think really stands out and our customers really appreciate.

As a CEO, how do you keep track of this far-flung empire you're building?

That's a good question. I suppose I have a great team and yeah, like we've, I think we've put a good structure in place. I think if you hire great people, they help maintain the culture, which is a big thing. We focused a lot right from the start and learned upon building a really strong culture in the business. And I think if you have that, it makes it easy as a CEO to know actually the team in many ways, they know what the right thing to do is. Part of our culture code is to act like an owner. And everybody in LearnedUpon is a part owner of the business through our employee share option scheme. So that was something that was important for myself and Des, that we wanted everyone in the business to be owners of the business, part owners of the business. And as a result, we can't be everywhere all the time. But if you, if everyone acts like an owner, I think they'll make the right decisions and do the right thing for our customers.

So it sounds like you've done a pretty good job of delegating downstream. And really try to minimize the micromanaging.

Do my best. It's hard. There's definitely where I see certain things and if I have an opinion on something, I won't be shy jumping in. But yeah, no, for the most part, I think like it's best. We've hired people that are much better than me and Des in certain areas. So I think it's, if you hire people, get out of their way, let them do great work, give them the tools to flourish and help the business grow.

So I want to pivot to a minute. This show is called Listening with Leaders. I was really interested when I started this about learning about how leaders listen. And now I'm actually working on my fifth book about leadership empathy. And let's just talk about that for a second. First of all, you are a good listener. How do you learn how to listen?

I do a few things, I suppose. I think starting my career with KPMG Consulting, I think as a consultant, it's ingrained in you to ask open-ended questions and to listen to the answers. It was one of the first things meetings as a graduate consultant, that's what you had to do. You had to take notes and often you're out with a more senior partner or senior consultant and your job was to be in those meetings and take notes. And the only way you can take good notes is if you listen. So I think it started there. And again, I mentioned from my own perspective, always wanting to learn and being very curious. And again, I go back to our culture code in LearnUpon. One of the core pillars is to lead with curiosity. And as a right across, certainly for myself, and I think across the business, we really encourage that to lead with curiosity, whether that's talking to our customers or talking to each other and to always seek additional context, assume positive intent. So those things are very much part of, I think, who myself and Des are and how we operate as a company. So yeah, I think there's definitely times again where when you, you get, you hear questions or things, there's a tendency to want to jump in with the answer. And I've tried to coach myself and work on that and to turn it back and encourage people to think through problems themselves.

I think that's the highest kind of leadership is that when you're acting as a coach, not as a commander, and helping people solve, help people figure out how to solve their own problems. So they grow, which means ultimately more is taken off your plate and you can expand into other areas. I've been thinking a lot about the concept of empathy, the ability to listen to and respond to the emotions of your team and also your clients. Do you give much thought about that, about the emotional side of leadership?

Yeah, absolutely. I think we see it. You always have this trade-off, I think, between people, if I think across the business, they're coming at things from their own career perspective and what they want to their angle, whether it's their team's priorities, and that might differ sometimes from the overall company priorities. There's definitely that aspect. So I try to understand where people are coming from. The same with our customers. When a platform like ours, it's a SaaS solution used by over 1,500 customers, right? A lot of our customers will want cert— different things from the platform. And so to be able to listen to them and understand, even though instinctively it mightn't be The obvious thing from my perspective, trying to understand their perspective is really important if we want to build a platform that helps our customers be successful. So it's yeah, it's definitely having that empathy, I think is really important to put yourself in someone else's shoes and understand the angle that they might be thinking about something rather than instinctively, I always know what my top priorities are. So it's sometimes you have to adapt those.

Right. I'm wondering how you inculcate those ideas into your organization.

Yeah, so for those, we've done a lot of work, I think, particularly in the last 12 to 18 months to try and get a lot of alignment across the company, right from leadership level across all the teams. As you scale quite quickly, again, it's very easy to have that alignment when you have a 10 or 20 person company. When you hit 100, 200, 300 people, suddenly it gets very— and a global organization like LearnAmI, we've got people in over 20 countries, right? That alignment, if you don't work hard on it, it's not going to happen just by itself. We've done a lot of work on that, on where we want to focus as a business, where, who we want to serve and help be successful. And I think over the last 9 or 12 months, right across the business, we've put a lot of effort into that. Right across the business. And we could see that last week at our sales kickoff. Actually, I think the feedback from everyone was the alignment between marketing, product, sales, and leadership was very clear. And that didn't happen by magic. A lot of work went into that. And I think we can see the benefit of that hard work now, I think.

So describe for me what was involved in getting that kind of alignment, because you're right, it's critical, but it's also very difficult. Difficult and very unusual to get totally good alignment in all the different parts of a company, especially one that's growing as fast as you are. How, how, what was the process you used?

Yeah, so we, we worked through a framework where first, where we actually looked at where we're successful today in terms of our customer base, most successful, because it's difficult. We have a broad customer base and we spent a lot of time understanding what our customers were looking to achieve, who they were looking to train. Where LearnUpon could add the most value. And I think getting that alignment initially on actually, I suppose a lot of companies can use our platform, but knowing where we can have the most impact and understanding the value that we bring. So we worked with across our product marketing team, our sales team, our CX team. Yeah, we brought a lot of teams together to do that analysis and to work together. And then you had to work through looking at the competitive the competitive market as well and the overall industry trends, like things like AI and what's happening there. But having everyone working together as a leadership team on that and bringing in experts across the business to add value, whether it's someone out of product or marketing or wherever it might be to help with that. And we, at different milestones, we communicated across the business where we are, were, and the progress we were making. We documented all that and locked it down and we made sure there was alignment right down to almost word level at certain things to make sure we all agreed when we said something, we understood what it meant.

Wow.

So that took, that process took about 9 months. And but then when it came to prepping for our new year ahead and for sales kickoff, actually what we wanted to communicate and the strategy we wanted to communicate to the team, it was actually relatively easy to get to because we put in all that hard work across the last like 9 to 12 months.

Wow, excellent. We're coming to the end of our time here. One more question, you know what it is, you watched some of my podcasts. So Brendan, what is it, what's one thing about you that we would never know about unless you revealed it to us?

Yeah, it's, uh, so I thought, I've thought about this. I'm going to go back to what I mentioned at start. So I started, uh, working in my mom's restaurant when I was I was 6 or 7, but my first job there was she had an ice cream parlour and I used to run the ice cream parlour and I perfected my skills at making a whole wide range of ice creams from Knickerbocker Glories to Banana Boats, Pear Williams, many others, and 99s. Yeah, that's, and as you know me now, people in Lernapark will know this because it's common knowledge now that I love my ice creams. And so that was, and it, but it was great as my early job. My, my mom used to pay me by commission. So if I hit certain sales during the day, I got to pick an ice cream for myself in the evening.

There you go.

The more sales, the nicer the ice cream. So I think that the sales skills were ingrained in me at a very young age.

That's fantastic. Brendan, I've really enjoyed our conversation today. Thank you so much for taking time out of your busy day to be with us.

Thanks, Doug. Lovely to talk to you, and thanks for having me on the show.

Absolutely. Doug Noll here. Thank you so much. For listening to Listening with Leaders. If you are a successful executive leader who would like to be on this program, please visit podcast.dougnull.com/podcast. If you got something out of this interview, would you please share this episode on social media? Just do a quick screenshot with your phone and text it to a friend or post it on the socials. If you know someone that you think that would be a great guest, tag them on the social media to let them know about the show and include the hashtag #ListeningWithLeaders. I love seeing your posts and guest suggestions. We are regularly putting out new episodes and content. To make sure you don't miss any episodes, go ahead and subscribe. Your thumbs up, ratings, and reviews go a long way to help promote the show and mean a lot to me and my team. Want to know more? Go to my website, DougNoll.com, or follow me on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. That's @DouglasEnoll. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next show.