Steve Benson: CEO & Founder of Badger Maps | The Business Blast Podcast #483

Welcome to the Business Blast Podcast. I'm your host, Tyler Wagner. This episode is brought to you by WagsMedia. WagsMedia provides you with everything you need to generate more customers and grow your brand. Head on over to wagsmedia.com, W-A-G-S-M-E-D-I-A dot com, to enter a contest where you can win a free, done-for-you custom website valued at $2,500 for a limited time only. Now let's jump into the episode. All right everyone, welcome back to another episode of the Business Blast Podcast. I'm your host Tyler Wagner. Today I have Steve Benson with us. He is the CEO and founder of Badger Maps. A route planner app that helps field salespeople visualize their sales data, optimize daily routes and schedules, and work more efficiently. So welcome to the show, man.

Hey, Tyler, thanks for having me on. I'm really excited to be here.

Of course, man, we're excited to have you here. We'll dive into the first one. The first question I have for you, Steve, is what is the best story from your life that has an underlying valuable message?

Well, story from my life. Well, you know, honestly, I'd say the story of founding and running Badger Maps for the last, you know, 7 years is probably the best story I've got, honestly. And the lessons and the underlying messages from that are, one, life is about, and certainly running a business is about, the people that make it up, right? And treat people the way you would want to be treated, and things generally tend to work out and do right by people. And, and it comes full circle. I think that's one of the key lessons I've learned. We, we treat the people that work for us and our customers very well. And it's really, it's come back to be, to work out really well for the company and, and really all the people that work for it. Like, that's, that's been a key, key takeaway. And it's one of those things, you know, it's the golden rule for a reason. But, you know, I feel like a lot of times people forget about that and focus on other things, you know, how to, how to push profitability 5 more points or how to squeeze costs 10 more points or, you know, I think it's very easy to take your eye off the ball of how important your relationship with your customers and with your employees and the people that work at a company are. And you can— it's very easy to cut corners and do wrong by one of those groups. But if you, if you do it the hard way and do right by both of those groups, it will really pay off.

I agree, man. And what is the most valuable piece of information that we should know that is within your expertise or industry?

Well, well, like you said, you know, I, I run a company that helps field salespeople. And that's— but my background's in field sales, and that's kind of my area of expertise is sales. And I guess a lot of lessons from sales apply to life in general. But I think the key, a key lesson that I would— that I think is one of the most important things people don't think about enough, whether in sales or in life, is, is be prepared and be appropriately prepared. So In sales, I guess I'll talk about what it means in sales and then we can apply those lessons to the regular life. But in sales, I think it means doing research before you have a sales call, being prepared by doing a preparation call with the person you're gonna be selling to, and knowing and understanding who's gonna be in the room when you're doing a sales call. So when I say do research, I mean, understand what the prospect does, research their industry, their company, their website, you know, know what's going on in the news with them over the last year, and really do try to understand the context for the conversation that's gonna occur. And it goes without saying to try to, you know, look people up who you know are gonna be in the room, you know, know what you have in common with them, have things to talk about, check out their LinkedIn profiles, know who you're gonna be talking to. And you have to make sure to do this appropriately. You have to schedule time before the actual sales call, before the actual presentation to do this. Another piece of being prepared, I think, is to do a pre-sales call call with the key people or person that is kind of sponsoring you. So Usually, you know, a sales call involves more than one person. The person that's the sponsor, you know, internally for the company you're selling to of your solution is bringing together a group of people and they want it to go well. They're kind of in bed with you already, right? They look like an idiot if it doesn't go well. People like their boss are there. So if the call is just one person, you know, you don't have to, you know, peel this out like this, but often, you know, if you're leading groups of people or you're selling to groups of people, it's good to kind of get the key person and grab them and say, you know, via email or phone call, whatever, hey, would you, do you have time to do a 5-minute prep call before the call with the group just to make everything goes, make sure everything goes smoothly, right? Then when you're prepping with them, be like, hey, just so I can make sure I focus on what's really important to you here, what's the main goal you're looking to achieve? What are you hoping to see? And once they answer, you can get a background on where they're at today and what they're really trying to do here and know where to focus. And this gets everybody on the same page, right? You wanna learn what, you wanna learn that you want, you wanna learn what they're wanting to look for and get out of this presentation or sales call, what their pains are, what's their budget, you know, is this part of a bigger project? What does the decision process look like? And you can really collect all that information up front. I guess, and the final part of doing research is knowing who's gonna be there, you know, who's your champion in the room? What can you give them to help you convince the other stakeholders to do something? Who's against you? Figure that out. You know, there's always someone who's not on your side, figure that out. And develop an understanding on how you can overcome that. Figure out who's really making the call, who's the ultimate decision maker, who's in the room, or maybe they're not even in the room. So those are kind of, I think the, you know, I guess that's the lesson is be prepared and do your homework beforehand, do research, prepare with the right people and understand who the right people are in the room and who's in play. So that's kind of my, My expertise area.

Yeah, man. And so it kind of— I guess it could lead into the next question is like, what is your like best piece of business advice? And we can kind of stick to like sales. Let's say like if you were like somebody just starting out, let's say like they're fresh out of college or maybe they drop out of college and they're just about to start their own business. Because if you start your own business, you definitely need some sales. Yeah, salesmanship. Or they're working for a company doing sales. Like, what would you say? Like, what would be your first thing you would say to them?

Well, I guess the first thing I would say is play to your strengths. You know, a lot of people look to shore up their weaknesses and kind of focus on what they're not as good at, or they focus on what they think they should be doing, but play to your strengths. Like, I'm the founder and CEO of this company, right? But I— and it's a technology company, but I don't code myself. And when I started the company, I didn't try to learn to code so I could help out the people that were building the thing. I stuck to what I was good at, the sales and the marketing and the leadership and the, you know, the human resources, the development of the company. And I let the people that were actually good in the areas I wasn't good run and manage and own the pieces and really take charge on those things. You know, if you're new in your career and you're just starting out, I think if you want to have a successful and fulfilling career, you need to choose a company and a role in that company or industry based on the activities that you'll be doing in a job. Probably right out of college, you're not starting a business. You're probably taking a job and learning an industry. To start a business, you really have to understand something. Now, if you really already understand an area, like maybe you've been, you know, working at a pool cleaning business all through college and high school. And so now you really know a lot about that industry and you can start your own pool cleaning business. But, you know, it's difficult in, you know, if you're— if you just graduated college with a, you know, poli sci degree to turn around and start a software company because you don't know how to make software, you know how to sell software, you know how to market software, you don't understand the customers that you're going to be selling the software to. So I think what you want— often you want to be taking a job at a company. And so when you think about what job are you going to be taking, I think the first thing is that you want to make sure you're going to enjoy the activities that that job does. So a lot of people think about a job based on what do I— what's a cool job or what's a prestigious job or what's my mom going to be proud of? I mean, so many people end up as lawyers, but they've never thought about what does a lawyer do all day? Well, they read and they write difficult things, complex things, and then they kind of negotiate with people to get to a position often in written form. If you don't like reading and writing complex things and working alone most of the time, I mean, you're in an office at a desk at a computer for 60 hours a week or whatever, maybe more, as a young lawyer. If that's not an activity that you enjoy, law school is a bad decision, even though it's a prestigious job, you think it makes a lot of money, your mom's proud of you for becoming a lawyer. You really want to focus on the activity that makes up the job and make sure you enjoy that activity and make sure you're good at that activity. 'Cause maybe you're not great at reading and writing complex things. Well, then being a lawyer is going to be tough because there are people that are going to be great at that. So if you can find the, you know, the— if you imagine a Venn diagram with 3 overlapping circles, one circle being, do I enjoy this? One circle being, am I good at it? And one circle being, is this a job that, you know, I can apply for? You want to be in the middle of that Venn diagram. And if you're good at it and you like it, but there's no jobs, I mean, that's kind of how I feel about snowboarding, right? Like, I like snowboarding. I'm good at snowboarding, but there's no jobs in snowboarding. I mean, there's a handful of them, but you'd have to be a lot better than me. But, or if you don't enjoy it, but maybe you're good at it and it's a job. I mean, how many accountants or lawyers are good at being an accountant or a lawyer? And there are jobs of being an accountant or a lawyer. But they're not gonna like the activities that make up that job, that's probably, you don't wanna be on, you don't wanna be just where those two circles overlap. So that's kinda how I think about starting out a career. And people with the most fulfilling careers are able to find the nexus of those three circles.

Yeah, I couldn't agree more, man. I started out majoring in accounting due to it being the highest paid salary out of school or something. I read it somewhere. And then that was, I started out, but I absolutely hated it. I couldn't even get past my first accounting class.

Yeah.

And, um, and then I—

that's a great example, man.

Yeah, yeah. And then like, and then I let go. I actually ended up dropping out of school and then starting a business that I still run today. And I have another one that, that I— and I love doing what I do in both of them. So even though like initially when I started them, maybe I wasn't making as much as I maybe would have made like starting at an accounting firm or something, I don't really know, but down the road it definitely made me a lot more because I actually was able to progress and keep doing it because I actually enjoyed it. Whereas I know if I did accounting for like more than a year, I don't even know, I would just be so sad.

Well, yeah, and you know, those big account— the big accounting firms have huge turnover, right? I mean, most people that go there, and you know, I don't know the stats exactly, but I would imagine most people that go there are not there out of college or out of business school or something, are not there 3 years later. I bet that's a— that's less often than not, that's— that they, they kind of shake off or what they wash out of it for sure.

So I feel like you maybe you kind of maybe answered it within that answer. But the next question I have for you is, if you could give your younger self one piece of advice, what would that be?

Well, yeah, I guess, you know, making sure you're in the nexus of those circles is definitely a key piece of advice. Yeah. One, I You know, a lot of younger people work for me and I'm, you know, working at Badger Maps is the first job they have out of school. And so I try to interact with and do stuff with the people that started the company. And I, so like I teach class twice a week to all the new hires and all the interns. And not just about the company, but about, you know, things in life that I think are important that I wish I would've known. And so I'll try to give them as much, much knowledge as I can. And we kind of, we do that with new hires and interns. And then every 3 months, I kind of repeat the, repeat the same classes because it's a new class of people coming in. But it's a good way for me to get to know them and kind of give them some advice. So I guess point being, I give a lot of advice to young people. And I guess one of my favorites is You're early out of college, and I guess this is more for the people that are interning with me than people that are already working for me. But if you're working, when you're coming out of school or you're early in your career, if you're working for larger companies, they tend to be able to give you a very specific entry-level job. You know, you're changing these 4 rows in the TPS report and running a report on it and, you know, emailing that to someone or your, you know, it's, they, they tend to have you very, your role tends to be very specific just because they're a big complex organization and that you get a tiny cog to be a part of in a giant machine. And so it's very hard to see what's going on in the entire machine and the entire business and hard to get a zoomed out view of it. Small companies, you can often get exposed to a lot more and really see all the parts moving and see why they're important and see how they work together. You can see engineering and, you know, the product and the sales and the marketing and the operations and the HR, just because, you know, everyone's in one floor of a building or something, right? So it's not, it's not, oh, we're spread out across the world. And, you know, a company that has 20 people, bottom line, a company that has 20 people in it, you really get to see all the guts of the thing and understand what's going on relatively quickly. So if you work at a small company, you can get more in-depth, better knowledge, and your career, I think, accelerates faster, you gain titles faster, which then often, for some odd reason, seem to trend, seem to move laterally into larger companies, and you keep the title and kind of, it's a, even if you are going to a larger company, if you've worked at a smaller one for a few years, you end up moving faster. The, I guess, one exception to that rule is consulting. If you're going to be involved in large companies, doing so as a consultant is a really good way to do it, just because then you're, you're you kind of are able to get a higher level zoomed out perspective on the company and see and get to work with, you know, work with people higher up in the organization and see, get more experience in big companies. And that's why I think a lot of people that end up doing really well in big companies started their career as consultants and kind of soaking up knowledge as a consultant, you know, and kind of getting to see several big companies from a zoomed out level. But in general, I think you're gonna, You learn the most at a small company and you get the most responsibility and that will progress your career faster than anything else.

Absolutely, man. And my next one, maybe kind of going down a little different path is, in your opinion, what is the key to happiness?

A really big boat, probably is the— No, I think it's the opposite, actually. I think autonomy is one of the keys to happiness. So, being able to control your own destiny and not have someone breathe down your neck and be able to do something that you're spending your time and activity and energy on things that are fun for you and you're good at and you're kind of in control of what's going on. I think that's some of the drivers of happiness. And honestly, a lot of jobs you don't get, they're not set up to make you happy. They're set up to, you know, they've figured out how to squeeze an extra 15 points of profit out by, you know, squeezing this cost, you know, really cranking things up on the revenue side here, tweaking this, tweaking that. And your happiness was not necessarily optimized for the business's profitability was. So, there can be a conflict between having a good career and happiness because that's not what they're optimizing for, you know, the people that are kind of controlling the levers. But, if you have autonomy and you get to work on things that, you know, kind of going back to that doing things that you're good at and that you enjoy, I think that's really what drives happiness at least for me.

And what is the best book that you've read and what was the number one thing you learned from that?

This is tough. I, I really like Influence by Cialdini. I think that's required reading. Smart People Should Build Things by Andrew Yang is really good. I think it's inspirational. The premise of the book is that instead of going on the traditional path that most successful students take, like management consulting and finance and big companies and being a doctor or a lawyer, you know, top students should join, should start or join small businesses. And, you know, I don't, I don't think it necessarily works great for coming right out of college to start a business. In most cases, you haven't— you don't have the blocking and tackling. You should join a small business and learn how it's done for at least a couple of years and then develop expertise in something and learn how to have, have a small company and how to run one and then do it yourself. But, um, which is kind of— that's one of his premises. You could— you should start or join a small business. I would, I would lean toward the join, not the start. But, um, but I, I, I, I, I, I really do believe that, that you learn the fastest, develop the most if you, if you join businesses that have, you know, less than 20, 50 people at them. So, and I've taken that advice and hired a lot of young people right out of college into Badger over the years, and I've been able to watch them develop so much faster than like I did or other people on more traditional paths. You know, I went to business school at Stanford, so I've seen a lot of people with great career paths and career tracks, but, you know, joining a small business when it's early and it's doing well and you can kind of grow with the company and take on more responsibility, you just get experiences that are way broader than you are being a small cog in a big wheel. And, you know, and like you said, a traditional path does tend to make more money in the first few years of school. Like, if you had taken that accounting job, you would have made more money. But, you know, the investment in learning and leadership and development at this point in your career, in my opinion, ends up being worth far more over time, both financially and and just in terms of doing something that you enjoy.

Yes, I could not agree more. And the next one's another kind of tough one, maybe, is what is your favorite quote and why?

I've got a lot of— I do like quotes. I guess one that jumps off the page for me, I'm going to butcher it, but the difference between successful people and unsuccessful people is Usually not a lack of strength, not a lack of knowledge, but it's a lack of will. And that's a Vince Lombardi quote. You know, I really like this quote because I think to be successful, which, you know, success, career success, I think is important to me. It's important to a lot of people. I think you need to have You need to have grit. And people, you know, less often fail in business because they weren't smart enough. You know, it's not about grades or being able to crunch math numbers in your head, right? But it's really much more often from they fail from not trying hard enough and not giving it their all. And you want to be able to look back and say, I gave it my all and this was the best I could have done. And I really achieved my my personal best here. And, you know, there's, there's a million little challenges to being successful every day. There's sacrifices and things are hard and you just have to pound your way through them to be successful.

Yes, man. Dude, thank you so much for coming on. This was a very valuable episode. The last question that I do have for you before we let you go is where is the best place for people to find you online?

Um, yeah, I, you know, you can look me up, Steve Benson, and type Badger Maps on LinkedIn, you'll find me. The, my, my YouTube channel for Badgers got some really cool— if you're into sales training videos, I do sales training videos, and they're all just posted on YouTube for people. So that's just, you know, search Badger Maps YouTube, you'll find, and then look up training videos. You know, it's one of the playlists. I have a podcast where I talk to sales leaders. That's a good way to get in touch with me or to see what I'm doing. And I've got an Instagram @stevebensonSF. And the best place to learn about Badger or see that is badgerwrapping.com, the website. And feel free, you know, mention the Business Blast podcast here. And if you are looking at Badger, mention that to my salespeople, and they'll give you a free 2-month of the product just for— as a thank you for listening to me here.

Awesome, dude. That's a great deal. I appreciate that. Thanks again for coming on, man.

Sure. It's been really fun. Thanks for having me. The podcast you just heard was published with Anchor. Got something you want to say to the creator of this show? Send them a voice message using the Anchor app, free for iOS and Android.