The Achieve Podcast - Nate Brown (CX Accelerator)

Welcome to the Achieve Podcast, the show where we highlight the leaders, creators, and entrepreneurs who are building meaningful businesses and shaping their industries. My name is Jesse Warner. I'll be your host today, and we're excited to have Nate Brown, co-founder of CX Accelerator, on the call with us today. Nate, it's a pleasure to have you on the call.

What's going on, Jesse? Love the show. Thank you for having me. Can't wait to talk about this.

Wonderful. So our audience can get to know you a little bit better. Give us the quick backstory of your business. What do you do? How did it all get started?

Yeah, so Nate, Nate from Nashville here. I live in Murfreesboro, uh, really into pickleball and disc golf and customer experience. You know, that's been the trademark of my career from the beginning. I started selling postage meters on the streets of Jacksonville, Florida. Wasn't very good at that, but I did love the customer service element. And so the first real job I had out of college was supporting adult learning software, and I just absolutely loved it. But at some point, kind of got stuck in that ticket taker mode doing legacy customer service work. And I'm asking myself this question: there's got to be a bigger picture of how we can think about our customers more strategically. And the word I was looking for those 20 years ago was customer experience. And And when I found it, it was, woof, it was both feet in, Jesse. But what I didn't have at the time was a good community around me to help me learn and to grow in this relatively new function. And so that's where we started CX Accelerator, which was a nonprofit that is completely about helping CX professionals to develop on every stage of their career journey. So it's been a remarkable ride, but that is the moment we got started with some dear friends who are also looking for that sense of community and that ability to develop. It's kind of a strange job in the sense of oftentimes the people that would be mentors for you inside of the organization aren't going to really know the scientific elements around what a customer experience initiative really looks like. So it's one of those things where you got to look outside the walls of your office and find community beyond, and it's definitely there now, which is fun to see.

Nate, tell, tell me about how your business has changed and it's grown. How many people did you start with? Where are you at today? What does that community look like? Give me— give us a little color on that.

Yeah. So we started with just a handful of folks, you know, just, just friends that I trusted. And we invited a bunch of contact center professionals in the beginning that were part of my network. And so there was a couple hundred of us that got groovin'. And for those that are community science people, you know, it's good to start with a group that, you know, really well. You can kind of set the culture, set the tone. Then you start to invite people in that maybe you don't know as well, but they're going to take a cue from the environment that's already there. And that's exactly what happened with CX Accelerator. And we started to invite all these great people in internationally and pretty quickly, you know, grew to— now we have over 5,000 members that are experiencing value from that community. We've got the— it's a Slack-based environment where we are primarily. But we also have in-person gatherings going on throughout the country as well.

Wonderful. Let's talk about the business side of your nonprofit. Sure.

Yeah.

I mean, nonprofits, obviously the economics work a little differently than traditional businesses. Do you have donors? Who— where's the money coming from to fund this and what are you doing to grow that? You know, looking at sales and marketing and Tell us what's working, what's not. Give us a little bit of insight into that.

Yeah, I mean, a nonprofit runs a lot like a traditional startup would, except we have a little bit more accountability in terms of how money is utilized. You know, I, I have a nonprofit board, which is a wonderful group of people— Matt Lyles, Juanita Coley, Jeannie Walters, Jim Rich, and Justin Robbins— and they are locked into this mission of helping to develop CX professionals, and they are stewards of the finances that come in to ensure that that money that I'm using as the executive director co-founder is going towards that mission. And that's exactly what happens. You know, we are taking donations from organizations who care about the growth of CX professionals. You know, their mission is dependent on our mission in terms of these CX professionals being highly capable to influence change inside of their organizations. So we've got a number of great donors. I mean, think about people that are in the customer experience space. You know, you've, you got voice of customer platforms, you've got conversational AI platforms, you've got CRMs, you've got UCaaS, CCaaS. There's, there's thousands of organizations in that customer experience space who care about the development of CX professionals. And many of those have, have helped us to, to be able to grow those folks.

Hey, there's a lot of buzz around AI and automation.

Yeah.

Tell us how your organization's using AI today.

Yeah, we— I mean, Slack makes it easy, right? I mean, so many great AI features in there to improve community engagement, to welcome people in, to do all kinds of wonderful functions that are there. We certainly have some AI enablement on the project management side and some other things that help us just to operate and function well as a you know, there's not a lot of people getting paid in a volunteer-based startup. So you got to scale up well and have your volunteers be very effective and have me be very effective in terms of scaling my own efficiency and capabilities up. So personally using AI from a standpoint of just extending my own capabilities and accelerating my work. But, you know, I'm going to twist this a little bit, Jesse, if that's okay. I mean, the customer service space that a lot of us work in has been under considerable attack from the AI capabilities that are out there in a sense, because so many executives are seeing AI as an opportunity to cut heads. And one of the number one and first places they look to do that is in the customer service department. So our community has really morphed to one of education and enablement for these folks to be able to embrace this new era of their customer service career to, to be able to do more with more and to not be at risk of, of being in that ticket taker box that I talked about at the beginning of the episode there, where all you're doing is just reactively taking tickets. You know, that, that can be handled now by these remarkable tools that are out there and available, these tremendously efficient self-service capabilities that are now accessible to, to the common brand. So we have to evolve that work of customer service. So our AI conversations, Jesse, have really been about, hey, how can we use AI intelligently as customer service professionals, but really equip the people doing this work to have a long and lasting and rewarding career?

And so what I hear is a lot of it's about educating the community of the CX community around How do you use AI to your advantage instead of letting it take your job, right?

That's right. Yeah.

And if you think about— step up into that role, that leadership role around it. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, there's this opportunity to be so proactive in terms of how we think about engagement with our customers. I mean, it's not just about waiting for them to contact us anymore. It's about proactively identifying where they might be running into a friction point and then proactively assisting them. It's thinking about the fact that so many people don't even go to the brand to resolve an issue anymore. They're using these AI amalgamated search engines that are bringing all this information together from Reddit, from YouTube, from these third-party communities, and they're surfacing really good data and information. But we can have our customer service professionals be present in those third-party environments to be providing guidance and ensuring that the information that's coming across is accurate as we can continue to evolve our products and services. So it's a very different way of thinking about the work than just hanging back and waiting for the phone to ring. You know, those days are over.

As you tried to scale the company, the community, what are some of those constraints that you keep running into? What, what's preventing you or those roadblocks that you keep running into?

That's an easy answer. It's volunteer management. It's hard. It's hard. So, I mean, I've, I'm the executive director and I'm, I'm the only one and I, I don't, I don't even get a paycheck, but, uh, it's really hard to keep the volunteers who keep, who make the community function to keep them engaged and following through on their critical activities. Uh, you know, because volunteer management is like that, you know, that's going to be the case in. Churches, professional associations, nonprofits of all kinds that leverage volunteer management. You've got somebody that has bandwidth for a period of time and then they kind of fizzle out and morph away. So it's having people ready in those instances to come and keep momentum and keep traction going. But even more than that, it's giving these volunteers a meaningful sense of community, of identity, making sure that they understand how grateful that we are to them for the time and the energy that they're spending towards that. So you've got to have good structures in place and there needs to be a good cadence there where we're engaging these volunteers and making sure that people know how much they're appreciated and how much the work they're doing is making an impact.

Any other constraints that you feel as you're trying to grow it?

I mean, there was a time where donorship was a problem. And I was really wrestling Jesse with that idea of, of how do we need to morph this nonprofit to where we can accomplish the things that we want to accomplish. And everybody's telling me, you need to, you need to have a paid model for your members. But I wasn't willing to do it because at the very beginning when we started this whole thing in 2018, I made a promise that this would always be free. Free to the CX practitioners that are trying to grow in their career. I don't want finances to be a hurdle for them. And I don't ever want anybody to think that the reason we're doing all this is to somehow make this into a revenue-generating engine, because it's not. That's not the goal. That's not the purpose of what we're doing this for. But goodness gracious, were we limited in our ability, because it was all just coming out of my own pocket. For the first many, many, many years. So finally I worked up the courage and got the, the practical backing in terms of, you know, just administratively as a nonprofit, got us to the point where we could in an above reproach way accept corporate donation and be able to give real benefits associated with those donations back to these, these generous donors. It took me time. To get to the point where I was courageous enough to ask for those donations, and I had the right framework in place to, to follow through with that.

Looking at the next stage of growth, yeah, what are you most excited about?

Yeah, I mean, there's just so much going on in, in the customer experience and community spaces right now. I mean, people have been kind of moving towards this insular thinking, to use that Edelman Trust Barometer word. And, and we get to help break people out of that, you know, in a really cool and exciting way. Uh, it's, it's that idea of, of trusting our leaders and trusting brands to do what's right as we invest time and energy and resources into them. With the work of customer experience, you know, I like to define it as making people's lives better and easier. But in order to do that, we have to know what success looks like for them so that we can proactively guide them there, that we can reduce friction in that journey and be an effective guide. So it requires a lot of perception, it requires a lot of insight, it requires a lot of design skill to build a good community or to build a good customer experience and ultimately break people out of their insular thinking to where we can collaborate and co-create and really design something better that's going to help make the promise come to life, the mission that we have as an organization, the mission we have as a community, you know, bringing these things to life. It requires people who are not afraid to offer their ideas. Vanya got me on this book, Big Magic. It's this idea of like these beautiful idea tendrils that are just out in the universe and like, but they're not full, they're not fully formed. and we have to bring them together. You know, people with that circle of psychological safety that are willing to share, willing to put themselves out there, willing to collaborate even with people who don't necessarily think and act just like them. So the space is moving in a direction where we get to really help to break that insular thinking and generate this type of innovation. But it's going to be really hard, Jesse. It's going to be really tough to break out of some of the bad habits that we have formed in the CX space over these past couple of decades. But people are seeing the truth of this, seeing that the old way of doing it is not going to work. And we've got to adopt some of these new ways of thinking and collaborating. And these new tools are going to help us to do that. So it's an exciting time to be a CX professional.

Yeah, really, like we were saying, you know, I do think— and part of this, I think was driven by the pandemic, right? I was saying, oh yeah, you know, I— we all come into our own houses and kind of block the community around us a little bit. And then it's better now, but there's still a lot of that, right? It still feels like I'm gonna solve the problems myself, I'm gonna go to the AI for solutions.

Yeah.

Instead of really leveraging the community of people that are around us, right?

Yeah.

So I really love what you're doing there and trying to bring that community together a little bit more. And the in-person events, I think, is a key part of that. So, you know, I really like what you're doing. I'm glad you're excited about that because I agree with you. I think there is a, a need for that, right? Some of that inside-out thinking where you really do need some of that outside perspective to, yeah, to get it right.

You're so right in, in terms of a lot of this was accelerated by the pandemic. In terms of we went from what they called a crisis of grievance. So like that idea of I'm really frustrated because I don't understand why you think and act the way you act. So then it went to an even more dangerous place of I'm just not even going to acknowledge you exist. I'm just going to be here in my little safe bubble with people that think and act like me. That's not how society That's not how businesses operate well.

Let's talk about your journey a little bit, Nate. Uh, you know, let's go back to 2018 to now, some of the wins and the mistakes that you've had along the way. What are some of the lessons that stand out to you?

You know, uh, so, so many, so many interesting things. I mean, I, I definitely realized that I needed to anchor myself in terms of my knowledge as a community builder, because there's a real community hygiene, there's a real science to building a community. So I, I invested in that education early and acknowledged that I had a gap there. I think that's something that's kind of hard to do for a lot of these startup founders because they have to be all things to all people so often, and they don't have time to fill in the gaps that that they know they have. And that was a moment for me where it's like, this is growing faster than I am able to learn and grow with it. And I need to do something to fill in that gap and just, you know, be very humble and transparent with the people I was serving alongside in that. So they were very patient and graceful in that moment. And I feel like I was able to catch up and kind of become the leader that CX Accelerator needed to get into this next era in which we are experiencing. So, you know, that was important. I think even bigger than that, I mean, you, you cannot do this stuff alone. I mean, you've got to get people around you that you can trust and that you, that are, that care as much as you do about it, or else you're just going to get burned out. Like, you cannot carry the torch alone for very long. You got to have somebody that can relight your torch on a fairly regular basis, and it just, it just keeps the engine ignited when you've got people around you that, that really care and that you can really trust to, to move forward in their own energy and with their own words and their own ideas and their own perspectives that aren't yours, which is equally as important. Um, so, you know, that was certainly something early on that led to a lot of our success was giving it away. And I, I think that's hard for a lot of startup founders too. Like, if you want to grow 10x, then you gotta give out 10x. Like, you gotta, you gotta let at least 10 people be the X for you in terms of that, that exponential factor of growth. You know, as, as wonderful as AI is, to scale up your, your capability, there still is nothing as good as having a trusted person alongside you to do the work and, and just keep your fire lit. See, another, another lesson here. Those are, those are my current favorite two, Jesse.

Okay. All right, the last question for you: what advice would would you give to other leaders or entrepreneurs who are on a similar journey as you?

This is where my Simon Sinek comes out.

So I'm a fan of Simon.

Yeah, I'm kind of a utopian thinker. And I just feel like in order for an organization, which, which in my mind is a community, It's a community of people that have a like-minded objective to do something differently in the world that only you can do as well as you can do it. And if the conviction level is really high and you're bringing the right people in that belong to you to accomplish that mission, you're going to do phenomenal things. But the more that your true core purpose is to make money, the more that it's just not going to actually happen that way. And there are shortcuts, and there are ways to manipulate, and there, there are things you can do in the short term to hit a revenue target. But if you're doing that at the expense of the long-term growth and fostering of your true purpose and mission, you're just not going to be long-term successful. You know, in my opinion, from what I have seen. So it is equally as important as being a good steward of the finances and being able to make your shareholders happy and your investors happy. Obviously that's important, and obviously the business has to make money, but you just— you gotta keep that conviction alive, and you've got to bring people in that are there for the purpose and then level them up and skill them up with, with the things that they need in order to do the job, but they're intrinsically motivated to serve the mission. That, that to me is going to be the thing that makes you different. The thing that's gonna beat all the startup stats of all the startups that flame out, you know, like the 80% of startups that never make it to their third year. I think it's cuz they focus so hard on making money so quickly and they forget about their true brand core. So just keep that, and keep that at the heart of everybody that you bring into the organization.

Well, Nate, thank you for sharing your story, your insights with us today. Really appreciate your time. If you want to learn, for those listening, if you want to learn more about CX Accelerator and what Nate and his nonprofit are doing, you can visit their website cxaccelerator.com. And that'll wrap up today's episode of the Achieve Podcast. A big thank you to our sponsor Achieve Fractional, which provides fractional executives for growing businesses. And if you enjoyed today's conversation, follow the show, share with others. And again, thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next episode of the Achieve Podcast.