Welcome to New VP of Product, Josh Kahle!

Hey everyone, it's Mike Andes here, founder and CEO of Copilot CRM. Today I have a really special announcement. Super excited about, and that is that we have brought on Josh Kahl, who is with me today for our VP of product here at Copilot CRM. And so I wanted to kind of ask him a few questions. That way all of you as our members and users or even the public, can get to know him and kind of his background and what he brings to to the team in a very unique way, and his background in both technology and home services. So, Josh, I'll kind of give you the floor right off the bat. Maybe give us a little bit of background on you personally, where you live, family, hobbies, just kind of the general run.

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you, Mike. So my name is Josh Kahl. As mentioned, I live in Madison, Wisconsin. I've been here for about seven years. I lived in Chicago for a number of years before that we settled in Madison where we have family. In Chicago, I ran a multimedia agency that built custom web apps and software, mainly like in the recruitment space, as well as ran a recording studio that did some music for film and tv. The software development side of the business was eventually acquired by careerbuilder.com and I joined their team for a couple of years, just kind of working to integrate the software into their stack. I then got recruited to ActiveCampaign, which is like an all in one kind of CRM EMS marketing platform. And I worked mainly on the top of the funnel. So think like landing page builders, form builders. But my last role, actually there was a group PM where I got to kind of work across the entire business on some really high impact releases and just major initiatives that impact like the majority of customers. I have two kids. Henry is 8, Hazel is 5. My wife a new dog. A new dog, a new dog. Another kid I know, and my wife's a hairstylist. We own a salon here in town. Yeah, we just got this new golden retriever puppy this weekend or on Friday named Isabella. We call her Izzy for short, which is super exciting. My kids are like over the moon, but exhausting, you know, as it goes with puppies. But as for hobbies, we're a hockey family. My son plays hockey. I grew up playing hockey, so I'm a coach for his team. I love golfing when I can. Mike actually found a picture of my golf swing and giving me some tips, but I'll golf, golf very often. We do a lot of hiking and camping. We also have an RV travel trailer that we kind of drag around the country with the kids, which is super fun. Also a big music family, so I actually studied music in college. Have always been kind of a music head, and my wife is as well. We spend a lot of time traveling to concerts and festivals, so. Yeah.

Do you sing? Do you sing?

Unfortunately not. I always. I studied classical guitar performance, of all things, in college, but I never had a voice. My dad can sing like a canary. He's incredible. But I never got that voice, unfortunately.

Wow. Well, the internal team at the office is basically a band of guitarists, so you'll definitely want to check that out. But in terms of your background, I know with the home service side specifically, obviously Copilot, that's our focus, the green industry. And so many home services and entrepreneurs behind that. Kind of give me your background with home services specifically. I know you've been involved as an owner in the past. Kind of walk me through that.

Yeah. So in college, I ran a painting contracting business with my brother. He had started out as like a college pro painting franchise. Like, right when I was at the end of my high school. When we went off to college, we kind of started our own Kale Brothers Painting. We grew the business to multiple crews. It kind of helped pay my way through college. I just learned a ton about what it takes to be a solid service business and what it takes to just grow and sustain a healthy business. Actually, I mentioned this to you, Mike. One of our employees at the time has continued the business. Eventually he rebranded, but is still in business today and thriving. Based out of Utah, like, nearly 25 years later, which is cool. Beyond painting, my wife and I also, you know, bought a building here in town. We've renovated it. We opened a hair salon. So while it's not home service, it's also a service business. And we've just learned so much about the value of just providing excellent service to customers and how, like, valuable, clear and consistent professional communication is and how to really build a loyal clientele.

Very cool. And so from that experience of the home service side, also just service in general, in terms of the salon, what is sort of the connection that you think software plays from a entrepreneur that's relatively new or even an experienced larger company? What does software solve for these small business owners and these service providers specifically?

I think the most important aspect is that it provides the ability for a business to solve scale. A model that ActiveCampaign has that I think is really on point is that their software powers small teams with big businesses. Again, I think that's like A really interesting paradigm. I think CRM marketing tools like Copilot can really help these smaller, maybe less sophisticated teams just come across as more professional and seasoned, which really helps level the playing field. Mike, as you know, many home serve service businesses are one, two or a few person shops. And the ability for software that can make that business compete with the bigger shops with bigger marketing budgets and level of playing field is really profound. I also think it can help tighten the ship. You know, it's very easy when you know a new or early growing business just to kind of run and figure things out as you go, which is important. But record keeping and kind of keeping track of customer data that is so critical for your business becomes an afterthought. So. So with a system like Copilot, it removes that hurdle and then that hurdle only compounds as the business grows and becomes more sophisticated. So I think software like Copilot is absolutely critical to any business of any size.

Cool. And I know the past about four years you've been working at ActiveCampaign and they are a much larger company than Copilot is. Currently. They serve hundreds of Thousands, literally over 100,000 customers and a similar demographic, small business owners, solopreneurs, et cetera. Their business, last I saw publicly kind of mentioned was over $200 million in annual recurring revenue, much larger, hundreds of people on the team, et cetera. What do you think you learned there that will be really valuable not only to our team internally at Copilot, but also our members and our users going forward?

Yeah. So my Last role at ActiveCampaign was a group product manager. So. So again, I kind of worked across the business on larger releases that impact the entire business and a majority of customers. But I think is most important or transferable is just being battle tested. We're going to be making massive changes to Copilot in the coming months and years. And just having gone through similar things at a bigger scale helps me understand what to expect and ways we can kind of mitigate issues and just reduce risk. I also learned really the core and important pieces in high functioning, high velocity product and engineering teams, like what it really means to work effectively between product engineering, design to discover the important problems we need to solve for customers and just the steps we need to take to build and deliver those to our customers while the business is in flight. We often say kind of in the SaaS world that we're building the plane as we fly. Right. Our customers rely on software to be operative at all times. In order to do that really Thoughtful things during their day. We have to be really thoughtful about what we build, how we build it, how we deploy it, and how we support it. I also learned a ton about just the value of spending considerable time with our customers and also honed a lot of skills around learning customers businesses intimately and how our software is being currently used. What are some of the gaps in functionality, what's confusing or frustrating user experience, what kind of workarounds they've implemented to kind of unlock their business, and then really how critical again a CRM and EMS marketing tool is to all of their business operations for customers. Again, our customers rely on the software for the majority of their critical business functions and daily operations. So the bar there is extremely high. It has to work 99.9x percent of the time. So yeah, my time at AC was really transformative for me as a business person, but also generally as a product leader. And I'm thankful that I'll be being brought into copilot as well.

From kind of like the product perspective. For someone that doesn't kind of understand the traditional SaaS setup when it comes to technology, what is product exactly? And then specifically your role, VP of product, what does that sort of entail? Just for the average person that might not know product versus engineering and all these other terms?

Yeah, product kind of sits at the center between design and engineering. And our job is to help enable the engineering and design teams, again to kind of design and then build and deliver the solutions. So I really think of this kind of like two pieces, like there's discovery that's like, what are we going to build and why? And then the delivery piece and product really kind of sits at the intersection of all of those and really closely ties to business leadership and executives on how are we driving business revenue, meeting our business objectives? I think as far as the role of a vp, I think the most important pieces are really building a team and then creating a vision for the future of that team. So a VP role is often much more in the strategy domain than the tactical. That said, what I love about copilot, one of the things I was so attracted to is that we're small enough where I can do a little of both. Right. I can still dig in with the engineering and design teams, get my hands dirty. I can also zoom out a bit and really focus more on strategy and business growth. And we're already starting to work on the future of Copilot and how we'll scale this business 10x and beyond. My role is really to kind of build and Support the teams that take it to that level. Cool.

And so the first half of 2024, what some people may not know is you helped us a little bit from a advising perspective, kind of navigate and get out of what we call bug hell. The first half of 2024 and we've obviously had massive challenges and disappointment to our users around our aspect of our transition to scaling just mass amounts of growth that we had last winter. And so what would you say to the users that may have been disappointed? Maybe they tried Copilot. We did have a lot of bugs there. We're still coming out of that process. What would you say to them in terms of your perspective on how we can improve the stability, reduce the bug count in Copilot and just make it a much more dependable product now with your leadership?

Totally. Yeah. First and foremost, I empathize with how painful issues can be in software. Having worked in IT for almost 20 years, run my own businesses that had software issues. I acknowledge that when things don't work as expected, it's incredibly, incredibly frustrating. I will however, say from my experience doing this again for that length of time, bugs, defects, issues with software are very common. Even in my most recent role just at ActiveCampaign, working again their 200 plus million dollar business, 100,000 customers globally, incidents and bugs were common. I think the businesses and software teams that get really good at this, they work hard to of course minimize and then just provide a foundation of stability, but also get really, really good at response. I think the most important thing there is just clear communication around issues, a fast response time, of course, and just dedication to quality from the team. That's one of the things we're really actually starting to work on quite a bit is just a culture of quality. There's nothing that is more important. Part of complexity in software is that there's multiple environments, there's legacy code, there's deployment processes across time zone, there's patches and fixes that introduce regressions or new bugs. It's crazy complex and difficult. One of the engineering leaders here actually at Copilot recently commented that software like Copilot is like having a baby. It's fragile, it's very needy, and it requires a really passionate focus on the health of the baby. And again, we're already starting to put considerable work to ensure that baby is well taken care of and just set up for future success. So I would encourage everyone, you know, current and loyal customers to stay with us. You know, we're making enormous strides towards stability and platform. But in this business, it's always kind of like two steps forward, one step back. It's just kind of the nature of the game. There's no such thing as like perfectly linear growth. So that focus on quality and stability is something I'd ask our customer, current, current customers, excuse me, to understand and get behind. But again, I realize there's been real considerate impact on our customers operations as we kind of work through some of these early challenges. So, you know. Yeah. Again, I'd ask you continue to have faith in Copilot as many of you have in Mike Andes. Mike is incredibly high standards for Augusta Lawn Care, and those high standards are actively being implemented in copilot. I kind of just think of myself as the conduit just to ensure those standards are really lived up to. I would also encourage customers to reach out to me directly. So I'll provide my email address. Mike, in the thread. I'd love to hear from you. I'd love to hear about issues you're facing, how we can immediately help, but also what like tools and features and functions we can add to the platform that really will help you unlock growth.

Cool. And speaking of some of those challenges, like, as we look forward.

Knowing that very well that in any business that's growing, there are challenges and there are struggles. And as there's so many things that we want to be able to provide in terms of features, what do you see as some of the almost expected challenges that Copilot will face as we go from serving a thousand or so businesses in the home service industry to tens of thousands? As you've seen similar kind of trajectory with ActiveCampaign, what are some of those things that you'll be keeping a pulse on? As we grow the team, we scale up users, what can we do to make sure that this process is as smooth as possible?

Yeah. And to be redundant here, building the foundation for scale is absolutely paramount. There's a ton of work going on just to build the technical foundation that we can rely on and our customers can trust. There's a lot of work to do in that regard, but we're really making tremendous progress. It might not seem like on the surface, but I just want to provide assurance that we're investing a ton of resources into shoring up our foundation. I think another challenge beyond that is how we help our customers distill the data and information, the platform to help them understand what they need to do next to grow their business. I think AI will be a big part of the equation and we can implement it Thoughtfully in a platform in ways that help our customers save time and money and, and just to help them understand, engage their customer base just to kind of further extend their reach. I think another is how we ensure Mike's knowledge to help customers business grow is thoughtfully implemented in the platform. Right. We have a big competitive advantage at Copilot and that we have Mike who's one of the top voices in the space. So how do we add his knowledge and passion into the platform? Another super critical piece I think maybe secondary or second most important after stability is the UX user experience the platform. One of Copilot's competitive advantages currently is it has a ton of valuable functions. The flip side to that is that it can make the UI seem cluttered and confusing. So we really have a lot of work to do around improving the UX so that the software is intuitive and we're already starting to invest quite a bit improving UX for all customers. We're going to be hiring a senior UX leader here soon which will help us really take these efforts to the next level.

Cool. Kind of zooming out a little bit more. You're obviously making a massive transition personally, professionally, away from a much more stable company, realistically speaking, to a startup like Copilot. Not necessarily asking why, but also wondering what is the opportunity that you see with Copilot, not just personally, but even just what problems are we trying to solve and what are you most interested in solving for these home service business owners that you've been of one of in the past and obviously have rubbed shoulders with a lot of them as well.

Absolutely. And again, I think it's being able to make data driven decisions, you know, providing more guidance to our customers on what to do next and why and how they can unlock kind of the tools to help them build million dollar businesses. I think that opportunity is extremely exciting for me and profound for many, many business owners. I think again, having Mike as a core function of the platform gives us a unique advantage and integrating his knowledge mixed with the data in the platform to help our users to get the outcomes they desire. In short, make more money with less effort is really, really intriguing to me and I can taste it. I think we will get there pretty quickly. I think there's also a lot of space opportunity for AI again providing guidance around optimized routing, about the optimal time to send marketing or reminder messages around benchmarks for performance across the industry to suggest this is exactly what you should do next. Whether it's raising prices or offering new services or better incentivizing your staff and how to do that. AI is really becoming a tool quickly that all businesses can harness to further extend their reach. And so we will be implementing that in a way that truly becomes a Copilot, quote unquote, in the key areas of their business to drive revenue and results. Again, I want to be clear though, just to be very, very clear, we have some work to do to get to that and that'll take us into 2025 around stability. You know, Copilot is such a critical aspect of your business, you have to be able to rely on it. So we're really doubling down on the infrastructure for reliability but also scalability so we can have those foundation to innovate. Mike, we've talked about this a number of times, but there's kind of an arc that I'm envisioning for how this kind of plays out. And so it's the first phase, really stable foundation, read scale. The next phase that we're going to be going into in 2025 is being incrementally better than the competitors and kind of all the key critical flows and email and SMS and text and then ultimately being fundamentally different, innovating in ways that make us a leader in the space that can ultimately help our customers again grow their business. I'm also just really excited to start spending time with Copilot customers. Discovery is really one of the most critical aspects of product management. Actually spending time with customers learning how they're using this software, the challenges they face their business, and how we can help them solve those problems is super rewarding. It's a win win, you know, for both for us and for customers. So again, I'll provide my email address and thread. Would love to hear from anyone who's willing to talk about their business. You may have already seen, but we're doing some user experience, surveying and testing, so you'll see much more of that in the future.

Cool. Well, I wanted to say on my part, I know perhaps previous colleagues of yours will see this and obviously future colleagues and members of Copilot's team. But I just want to say on behalf of the team here and all the users and members, thank you for joining. I'm very well aware of the risks associated with joining a smaller company like ours that have much more problems and issues that are more glaringly obvious than a company like ActiveCampaign. And you know, your impact has already been felt over the past several months of working with us, you know, very, very part time. So I'm really looking forward to the difference you can make for the team, for our members, for the industry as you join us full time and really ultimately kind of plug the holes of my experience. I do not have these type of skills and I think that has been the glaringly obvious pain point for our members over the past six to 12 months as we've scaled up the technology company that I am inept to be able to lead from a technical perspective. And so I really, really do appreciate you joining, putting your shoulder to the wheel and kind of getting behind the vision of what we're trying to do and I really look forward to working with you.

Same. Just wanted to say thank you Mike for putting your faith in me. We have a lot of work to do but I'm really incredibly optimistic about the future and just honored to be a part of this incredible organization you have built. So thank you.

Fantastic. Thank you everyone for joining and we will see you next week.