Ep.141-Beyond the Network Unveiling Expert Secrets! Pt. 3/3 with Elan Crane
Subscribe to the Next Level BizTech podcast, so you don’t miss an episode!
Amazon Music | Apple Podcasts | Listen on Spotify | Watch on YouTube
Welcome to the podcast that’s designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus and this is Next Level BizTech.
Everybody welcome back. Today we are wrapping up a series titled Beyond the Network Unveiling Expert Secrets. On with us today we have got Mr. Elan Crane, founder of Wheelhouse Virtual Solutions. Long time friend, Elan, welcome on man. Thank you, Josh. Good to be on. About time we get you on. Yeah.
Hey, so let’s hear you and I have known each other for a long time. But I want to give everybody a little bit of color here on your story. How you got into this field, windy path, not a windy path. What does it look like?
Well, Josh, I grew up in a middle class family and where we had green grass and my parents saved up, worked hard and bought their first home. Just kidding. Sorry, I had to do that. So I in all seriousness, I got in this business in the 90s, the late 90s. For the first time I had started making six figures in printing sales and made the leap to leave to do this kind of stuff. Everybody thought I was crazy, you know, took a big pay cut. But back then it was selling long distance. So you could save someone 30, 40 percent get paid every single month for Zidjal. I was like, that’s a win-win. I like that. So we did that a friend of mine and I did it out of his apartment. And then as we grew, I guess local got, you know, deregulated and then data came about and you had to learn all the new data and the data people didn’t understand the old telecom and the telecom people didn’t understand the data. Of course, I was in the mix of all of it. As we were growing, having to build out different departments.
I remember when we first got our first project manager, we were all excited. We had a big whiteboard. We got the electrical tape and made a bunch of lines and had FOC dates and customers on the left and all those types of milestones. And then we started using ACT and then Goldmine and then we built our own middleware. And so just going through that whole process of growing up to almost 150 employees, you just learn a lot, right? You get exposed to a lot of different moving parts.
And also at that time, I was involved, obviously, in the call center. Well, we were doing long distance. We had a lot of call centers. You know, they were billing 100, 200,000 a month sometimes in just long distance alone. And so we had a particular customer, a couple of stories. We had a particular customer who did TV and they were getting a bunch of busy signals. And at the time, we had recently had a relationship with a company called Buyers Online and MyACD. I don’t know if that rings a bell for you.
And so we met with them in 99 and we were talking to them. And the only just to picture this, they had 300 agents, they had a giant NEC and then they had a DS3 from ATT. Well, back then, most people, the only solution, I don’t care how big the bar was, the only solution was to add over a million dollars for the ports to the NEC and bring in more DS3s, hopefully through a different central office and have redundancy. That was going to take 120 days. The owner of this company was not having it. He needed to stop these business signals. So we said, “I tell you what, we’re going to come back in two days. We’re going to point your 800 numbers to this, you know, now it’s called the cloud.” But then it was just their servers in a data center.
And we watched and as the calls started coming in, it was 2200 calls per minute. And they just started stacking up in the queue and they were playing whole music. The next day we added some IVR, you know, press one for this, press two for that. And they still use the technology today. And that was for $2,500 to get an account started with Buyers Online and MyACD.
Now known as? Now known as. Nice. In contact.
It’s come a long way. But the point of that story is it’s the foundation in my mind that has set for where we are today. The second real quick story, I think that ties to that is we had a customer that had thousands of check cashing stations. This was like by 2004.
And they’d walk up to a check cashing. They’d put their check in and spit out the money, but they were getting a lot of busy signals because they had modems that had 800 numbers going to specific trunk groups. Well, if so many modems by coincidence hit the same trunk groups, they got busy signals. So we’re in this room where the fourth company they called in. I walk in, there’s like 20 people, all these experts, and they were like, OK, for $500,000 and in nine months, that’s what you have to give us a POC to prove that you can solve this problem. And I’m listening to them talk and I raise my hand. I was like, OK, you guys ready for a paradigm shift? Can I use the whiteboard? I walked up to the whiteboard and I said for $2,500, because that’s what it costs to start an account for $2,500 in three days, we’ll do your POC and we’ll prove it. And they’re like, what?
And so I said, we’re going to take all your we’re going to take your number. We’re going to the same number is going to be in all your modems or we can keep the ones you have, whatever. We’re going to point into the network and the network has the intelligence to know which trunk groups are open and they’ll send the calls and they and they stopped having business signals. So just being able to sit in a very complex situation with competition that charges huge capex, lots of expertise, lots of certifications. We were able to solve the problem like that and move on and did it for years. You know, lots of whiteboard sessions, lots of lots of solving problems. It’s been really fun.
Do you see that? I mean, to that to that point, though, you’re in that moment and you saw that paradigm shift early on when obviously others took it. You know, it took a number of years before others maybe saw that or were in a situation where that where that kind of happened.
I mean, does the marketing, does the marketing collateral follow that? Do you really know that this paradigm shift has happened or did you just being immersed in it that allowed you to go, this is this is something crazy. I got to get I got to get behind. I got to understand this. I got to I got a role in this because nobody around this understands me. And I feel like I’ve got this secret that I can just go crush things with.
Yeah, definitely. It was a really good secret for many years. As a matter of fact, I remember doing a magazine article in 2011 talking about cloud and talking about what it’s going to bring to the market. And at that time, they were still you know, most customers didn’t really understand what cloud was.
But what’s interesting about that is, you know, that as a service, you know, let the experts that focus on what they know do it. And you just plug in and take advantage so you can focus on your business. Same conversations we’re having today.
Yeah, I love it. All right. So tell us a little bit about who you are, who Wheelhouse Virtual Solutions is. How do you go to market? What do you do for anybody that’s listening?
OK, perfect. Well, I think to start off, it’d be good to kind of explain how Wheelhouse came about. So I left that other company I was talking about. It was on a three year non-compete. And when I got back in the business,
I figured technology had changed a bunch in three years. I went to the Agent Alliance conference in San Antonio. You were I think you were. I remember.
I remember.
And I went to that conference and saw 26 different providers and everything was, you know, as a service. And it included I.T. And I was like, what? Like when I left the industry, hosted PBX was how you had a phone system that wasn’t prim. When I got back in at that conference, there was this thing called UCAS. Didn’t have any idea what that meant. Took a few minutes to figure it out. But still, that’s the change. But that was really it. And so now I’ve got I.T. They were talking about security, all these things that I can offer as a service, which, of course, I really understood because of my experience in doing like this stuff I talked about was, hey, you don’t have to be an expert. Everything. Let’s let the experts do it and save you time so you can focus on your business. And so when that came all about, I remember leaving that conference. I was in my rental car and I was like, man, this is all in my wheelhouse. This is it because I love virtual solutions. I love I love being able to sell virtual solutions. And so that’s where wheelhouse virtual solutions came about. And then I go to market during the first six months of being back in the business, going through a lot of the trainings, tlairs, trainings, et cetera. I noticed a lot of agents were still so intimidated by anything. Cloud Contact Center security. They were just they were scared to make a mistake. And I thought, you know, instead of me spending a bunch of money going after customers, I’m going to find a handful of partners that have an established base of customers that maybe they don’t feel comfortable, maybe they don’t understand it or maybe they just don’t have time. And I’ll partner with them, go into their complex, big accounts and I’ll land and expand. And so that’s my go to market strategy. Probably 80 or 85 percent of my business is from partners, a handful of selected partners that we land and expand. It’s their customers. We just take the ball. We run with it. And they some stay on call, some sit back and, you know, collect the check. It’s whatever whatever works. But yeah, that’s our go to market.
So so you’ve seen you see that that role, your role transition over there over those years. I mean, how how do you think with that demand for all these advanced solutions? How has your role changed? Maybe the way that you approach deals, the way that you approach customers discoveries. How has that role changed over time?
Man, it’s a tough one because for me.
So for me, I take complex things and make them simple so I can understand them. Right. I’ve asked questions my whole life. I used to annoy all kinds of people for asking lots of questions.
So I think my role, though, is really the same.
I listen to what is going on with the client. I leverage what I already know. I leverage the resources I know to figure out where I’m trying to go. They help direct me in the right direction. And then I bring that conversation and start it and we get through discovery and stuff. So I think there’s just a lot more where I used to have to sell cloud. Now everybody wants cloud.
I think it’s just a lot more of the same, just in greater volume. And I think, you know, one analogy, you may know this analogy. I love this analogy where if you had a manufacturing company in the early nineteen hundreds,
you had to as the owner, you had to understand electricity. Like you had to hire engineers, you had to whether you steam, coal, water, wind, you kind of had to be an expert today. You just call the electric company and your grand opening, you flip the switch, everything turns up. That transformation is really what we’re doing in all the technology stacks. We’re saying, where are you spending time and energy and trying to hire expertise in areas that you really don’t even need? Just flip a switch and let’s move on.
I like it. All right. So take us back five, 10, 15 years, however long you want to go.
Lessons learned from a great mentor either or things maybe that you’ve learned the hard way. Either one.
Yeah, this one still hurts a little bit. I would say, you know, we spent two years. I got into, to Larry’s talked about IOT. This was probably around 2018 and I found a very big opportunity. They didn’t ask for it. They were just through talking to them. They wanted, they made fracking pumps in the oil business. And so we went to some providers that Larry’s recommended. We talked to them and the more we asked questions, the more we found out, well, they could do this, but they can’t really do this. And then, you know, some said they could do it all, but when you really pressed, they couldn’t. And lots and lots of work. We found five total companies to make the solution happen.
We even found a guy, one of the five companies was a guy retired from Schlumberger to make the data aggregator.
And I remember sitting at a baseball game with Patrick Oborn and I was like, Hey, Patrick, this deal I’m bringing is going to pay millions of dollars up front.
So how do we work this out? He goes, we don’t. You keep 100% of it. That’s how we work. We’re a MRC type company. That’s where we make our money. I said, well, there will be a nice MRC, but there’s a lot up front. And he’s like, good luck. So I thought that was pretty interesting. I was pretty excited. And so we had all the providers fly out. They were going to fly out and is with the executives of the company on March 18th, 2020. We were going to sign the deal. Proof of concept. Everything’s good to go. Well, that’s the same week the entire country got shut down, stay at home orders.
And as you know, the oil business took, you know, a kick to the face. After that, they lost 95% of their employees, practically went out of business.
And that was a hard lesson because we poured a lot of time and energy while you’re doing other deals as well. Right. But the good news is we learned a ton from it. And it taught me that if I can do it once, I can do it 10 more times. We just got to keep at it. So anytime if I lose a deal or if I struggle through a deal, I just remember that the next one’s right in front of you. You just got to keep going.
Right. And I think over time too, we’ve learned that the portfolio gets much more expansive. Right. I mean, you think about, you know, when, when, in UCAS early on, right? The idea of people, people paying for this thing monthly when they could just pay CapX and have it forever and let it age. That’s crazy talk, right? Which now the idea of buying it premise crazy talk. So it just takes time, expansive portfolio. And now people are obviously now they need help. Now they’re asking for more because now they’re understaffed. Right. And so now it’s, it’s flipped a little bit, which has just been wild to see. Yeah, I agree.
Anything that you do from a, the way that you do your discovery process as you’re going in, do you do any custom fitting on the discovery process? Is it about the business problems? How do you, how do you probe that to kind of get deeper insights into the customer’s needs when you’re going and try and sell in some of these things beyond the network, like we’re talking about today?
You know, I think, I think when it comes to discovery, I think where a lot of people miss the boat potentially is you have to build trust.
I mean, you literally have to build trust. I love going to, when I’m meeting a customer for the first time, I love going to lunch because we can just casually, you know, find some common ground, talk about things that affect their kids. You know, if they have teenagers or kids probably don’t dial 800 members, they probably, when they get a job will not take a big giant Dell laptop. They’ll want to use their own Mac, you know, just talk about things that are, have nothing to do with their job, but everything to do with their everyday life and, and build that trust because what you’re really hoping for them to do at the end of the day is for them to give you what their initiatives are, what their challenges are, where they’re trying to go in five years. And everyone wants to know that that’s trying to sell them. So they’re asked that question all the time. I mean, the cliche of, you know, what keeps you up at night. God, I would never ask that. But there are a lot of people that do and a lot of people go in and go, just tell me about your challenges. Well, I just met you. I don’t know you. I’m not going to give you all my challenges. So, so my point is saying that I think that’s to me, the first thing you do is build that trust, get them to a position where they’re on the whiteboard, where I’m drawn on the whiteboard. Once I hand them the marker and they start drawing, I’m like, we got them.
It’s over.
Because then they just open up and they can, they’ll share all kinds of stuff. I just have to take notes. And then of course, from my experience, I can see a lot of things, but I can also go to Telerus resources and go, Hey guys, here’s the notes. What do you think? And then I can go meet with the different providers and team up. So by the time they get on the call, it’s teed up to perfection. So awesome. Does that answer that question for you? It does.
Well, yeah. I mean, sometimes you, you know, I’m a big book guy in history. I love, I’ve loved learning for what, you know, other entrepreneurs, other historians, the Steve Jobs, the Edmund lands, you know, all of these guys have done. And sometimes you listen to it and you walk away. Sometimes you walk away with just brilliant nuggets that you’d never would have thought of ever. And then sometimes you walk away with going, my gosh, it was just back to the basics. He was just relentless on product development, or he didn’t take the idea that no, it doesn’t have to be in this box. Like we can build this, we can do this, we can do it fast. Let’s MVP it. Let’s get it out. Right. And so, I mean, you come up with this idea that yeah, just, just focus on, don’t, you know, focus on getting to know the person and it takes time for them to open up. Right. Um, cause these guys, to your point, they’re probably getting bombarded with people. And you think about, I’m going to, I’ll go on a, uh, I’ll go on a rant for a second. You think about all the people that slide into LinkedIn DMS and how bad some of those messages are. And if, if, if one person would try just a little bit harder to be a little bit more unique about maybe understanding someone’s industry or maybe understanding something that they struggle with, that would stand out and who’d have thought that’s what would make you stand out, but it really does.
It does because I mean, think about it. People go into these sales calls, I think for the first time. And I think they’re literally going, you know, I got to get them to give me something that’s a challenge so I can take this product that I’ve learned about and I can plug it in.
That’s just bad. It’s going to take time to earn their trust to truly open up.
So, All right. Um, advice here. Let’s go down the advice segment. What advice, maybe this is it, maybe, maybe, maybe build the trust is it. Maybe we, maybe we skip past this thought, but any other thoughts, um, partners, maybe that are looking to just go deeper, right? This theme is beyond the network. Um, maybe they want to go deeper security cloud, whatever. I mean, any, any ideas for partners that haven’t pushed past that, uh, and want to jump into those a little further, anything you’d suggest there.
You know, one of the things I would highly recommend, I’ve made this mistake myself multiple times, um,
is you have to, so like Telairs has engineers, right? They’re going to help you smart guys. Beautiful.
Telairs have providers have engineers and they can help you. But I’ve seen so many agents that will just, um,
get a customer to talk to a provider and think that the provider and all their expertise is going to get to make it happen. Well, that provider may be the wrong fit or an engineer might give a suggestion because you give them this much information. Well, if they knew the whole story, the engineer maybe would have never said that for an example. My point is this.
You as the agent, you have to do your own due diligence where you go to the resources of Telairs, you let them give you feedback. You understand what the customer needs. This is all behind the scenes without any pressure. Then you go to the providers, you find out who can do what, and then you find out things like we do that, but we’ve only done it twice and you go, okay, let me not talk to you. Let me talk to this one. We’ve done it 1200 times and we’re the best at it. And then you learn through that process because there’s two things that need to happen. One, you definitely don’t want the provider getting on the phone call after you have five pages of discovery going, so tell me about your business.
That’s one.
And two, by the time you tee the customer up with the provider, you should be really comfortable putting your name on it because you did the work ahead of time to make sure. You don’t have to be an engineer, you don’t have to be an expert at all the technology, but you have to have your own business questions and conversations to know that you are bringing the customer the right solution to consider.
It’s really an easy job. Like it.
I like it. All right, final couple thoughts here. So I feel like there’s got to be, maybe there’s another secret out there. So any final secrets that we haven’t talked about to really encourage partners to do more as it steps deeper into cloud, deeper into security. I think you’ve given some good stuff, right? You’ve given the trust. You’ve given the, you know, just build that, take it slow, build it. You’ve given this idea of let’s get as much information as we can so that we can all make an educated decision on next steps. But any final thoughts there, final secrets that we haven’t talked about, mistakes to avoid even?
Being an expert at business conversations.
Just know your technology, learn it, what you can, but just have normal conversations. Find out about business outcomes. Find out why that tech, how that technology, not what it does, but the outcomes from that technology, how it changed the, or the rubber hits the road for the client and master having business conversations. I think I see a lot of people that don’t do that. They talk about it. They act like they are, but they don’t really do that.
And is that, is that a, um, steering that track a little bit? Is it about business outcomes? Is it about uncovering problems and equating that? I mean, any, any more you would add to that?
It’s about having the confidence to know that whatever topic you’re talking about, whatever area you’re focused on, whether security, it can be security, it can be advanced, but the conversation is not that advanced as much as it is, you know, making sure that it’s risk mitigation, right? It’s where are the risks and just having those conversations. I think people need to be more confident and get better at having business conversations. That’s, that would be a, I like it. It’s good.
All right. Uh, final thought here. So miss Cleo, this let’s look out to the future here. Um, you know, we’re talking paradigm shifts. We’re in a paradigm shift right now. We’re at the age of, of large language models and everything that goes along with that. Um, over these next couple of years, I think it’s hard to look out past that over these next couple, any innovations you’re most looking forward to. Um, again, if we get together and do this in a couple of years, any advice that you anticipate giving of how our roles change in that it just bortac coming into the space, just what you’re excited about. Does our role change in how we talk about it?
I don’t know how much you’re going to like my answer because it doesn’t change. It’s the same thing. If you go back to the original concept, even if it’s the most complex AI, what are you doing? You’re going to take mundane tasks, wasted efficiency, um, bad money, you know, money spent in bad areas and you’re leveraging the technology to offset that. So you can do a lot more with less. It’s not that you’re trying to get rid of people, but you know, Josh, today I’ve been doing this like 25 years. I still have not met a company that has too many people and not enough work with so much money. They don’t know what to do with it. It’s usually the opposite, right? They’re overworked. They have so many parties. The CEO came in their office and said, Hey, I heard this advertisement on the radio. Why aren’t we doing that? And now suddenly the it guys, number one objective, it’s like, and they’re so overwhelmed already. So literally, uh, with is as crazy as AI gets robotics. I mean, even if I were to get the new, uh, Elan Musk robot, right? And he paid in my house. I’m still doing it because I don’t have to do those mundane tasks. So I’m excited about all the new stuff coming down the road. You know, the password list stuff. I love that. Um, some of the AI stuff, robotics, but it’s the same conversation. I think that’s the biggest takeaway. I hope people can get, um, if they are interested in learning from this is that, uh, don’t overcomplicate it.
Yeah. You know, uh, you remind me of one of the, uh, one of the quotes that I’ve loved recently that I’ve read. Um, it, it was in a different book, but the book referenced a quote by Jeff Bezos. And I think, you know, anybody wants to look at what Bezos did, what jobs did, all these people that were wildly successful and everybody wants the next trillion dollar company. So they look on these guys obviously for strategy. And so, uh, the question that he was asked was, um, you know, it was about, well, what do you think is going to change? Well, what do you think is going to come next? Well, what do you, what do you think we should focus on? He said, you know, that’s a good question. And I get asked that question a lot, um, because he’s got to think about where to, and where he had to invest Amazon dollars at. He said, but you know, the question that I would pose is that I would remind you that technology is always going to change. Things are always going to change. If you look at what we were doing with tech five years ago, 10 years ago, a hundred years ago, right? Fastly, vastly different. Even three years ago, what I would ask you and what I would, what I would implore everybody to kind of think about is what is not going to change. And that was kind of the thesis that he used of are people always going to want low prices? Are they always going to want fast shipping? Yeah. Okay. Well, cool. Let’s double down on Amazon prime and lower costs and, you know, optimize those things. I think, I think we have to look at the world a little bit that way as well of are people always going to want technology? Yes. Is it always going to be complicated? Probably. Is it going to get easier? Probably not. So our value in this just exponentially goes up as the technology gets harder, as people are forced to do more with, you know, different, less to your point, resources and not an infinite pile of cash. I just love our value in this equation. And it just, at the end of the day, we just have more stuff to sell, right? Yeah.
And there’s, yeah. And there’s so much market texture versus architecture out there that customers are confused, you know, and the smartest customer, if you get them behind closed doors and get them to speak honest, they know they don’t know most of what they think they act like they know. Right. Because there’s just too much.
Yeah.
Too much.
All right. That wraps us up. My friend, Elan. Come on, buddy. Appreciate you, man. You too. Take care. All right. Until next time, everybody. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engine Engineering at Telarus. Elan Crane, founder of Wheelhouse Virtual Solutions, beyond the network, unveiling expert secrets.