Jess Singer: Think You Know Your Company?

JONATHAN FREED: Hello. You're listening to a TEN7 audiocast. We're here today to discuss discovering insights about the humans in your company. I'm Jonathan Freed, and I'm here with Ivan Stegic, founder and president of TEN7, and joining us today from Know Your Company in Chicago is our special guest, Jess Singer, Head of Business Development. Jess, please tell us about Know Your Company.

JESS SINGER: Oh, I would love to. So, Know Your Company is a software tool, and we exist to help business owners overcome growing pains. So you know well, because you use it. We specifically work with business owners and C-level executives who have really, anywhere between 5 employees and even up to more than 700 employees, and we are now across 25 different countries who are all hiring, growing, or experiencing change in their companies. So when you're going through this process, you probably can imagine, you felt it yourself, you're feeling less in touch, you might even start to wonder if people are curious about the company vision or maybe even what do they think about the benefits. KYC, Know Your Company, is just a super lightweight, zero-barrier to entry tool that is going to help business owners overcome all of these, sort of, common communication challenges that they experience as their business grows. And just personally I can attest, because I'm a former CEO myself, what an extremely valuable tool like Know Your Company really would have been for my own company when I neared the 30-employee mark all of those years ago.

JONATHAN: Ivan, why did you choose to subscribe to Know-Your-Company's services?

IVAN STEGIC: That's a good question. I've actually been looking at, keeping track of, knew about, Know Your Company for at least 2 years, and it's really been a challenge to find a good reason to use Know Your Company. I don't know if it was a challenge because I felt as though I knew all about our company, because we were all in the same place, and in the same office space. But, as a company, we needed to grow and to be able to justify using Know Your Company and very recently in March of this year, we became fully-distributed. and it felt like the right time to start using Know Your Company. I felt like we needed to be more in touch with each other, not being able to see everyone in the office every day of the week gives you some sort of pause as a business owner, and we've done a lot of work with our human resources company in getting to know our own mission and our own values and this felt like the right next step. And I haven't seen anyone do what Know Your Company does in such a frictionless format, being able to login and see what everybody's responses are, and the design of the content itself made a lot of sense for us. So that's kind of why we chose Know Your Company, and we're very happy users, and we're, I think, 2 months in. I think we were doing it for 2 days and we were very happy, well, I was at least.

JESS: I love it.

IVAN: Jess, what do you think the key advantages of using your services are for companies out there?

JESS: The first thing I would ask is...have you, Ivan, ever been the last to know something at your company? That's a pretty common thing, right?

IVAN: It is. *laughs*

JESS: It is. So, I think it's a painful realization when you realize you're the last person to know something, you just realize you're out of the loop. So, Know Your Company helps business owners uncover those types of blindspots, and we also help you learn how to ask for feedback, give feedback, receive feedback, how to act on the feedback, and Know Your Company solves this super real problem and we frame it in a way that is super actionable, it's visible, and it's in this very organized fashion on the back end. And then we also give you tools to help you with very real CEO struggles. So you're bringing your employees together, and sort of breaking down these silos and barriers. Bringing Know Your Company on is this great way of bringing this cohesiveness to your team.

IVAN: Where do you see yourselves in the next 3-5 years?

JESS: To create a world where as many workplace environments as we can help just have open, honest cultures.

JONATHAN: That brings us to the end of this audiocast, and I would like to thank Jess Singer and Ivan Stegic for sharing their insights. Please visit us at TEN7.com and keep an eye out on the TEN7 blog for future audiocasts. This is Jonathan Freed and thank you for listening.