Speaker 1: SBI Perspectives, Driven by Insights, Delivered from Experience.

Speaker 2: Welcome to SBI-TV, Driven by Insights and Delivered from Experience. SBI helps innovative companies grow their revenue, margin, and enterprise value in ways never before possible. I'm Tony Erickson, your host and managing director at SBI. Today's guest is Nate Henderson, founder and CEO of Built Incorporated, creators of the innovative, interactive Built Instructions app that is revolutionizing the digital customer experience for products requiring assembly, installation, maintenance, setup, and repair. Nate and I are going to talk about how a CEO drives innovation and how Nate's innovation and commitment is building, driving adoption, and providing an exceptional digital customer experience for not just the brands on Built, but consumers like you and me. Nate, it's great to have you on the show. Thank you for joining us today.

Speaker 1: Thank you, Tony. Good to be here. Tell us about Built. So Built is essentially a mobile app that provides 3D-guided interactive instructions for any type of product, whether it's a dollhouse, a playset, a car engine, aircraft, you name it, anything that requires setup, assembly, installation, or maintenance, we're revolutionizing that customer experience with these 3D-guided interactive instructions.

Speaker 2: Okay. Okay. That's exciting. Some assembly required. Some assembly required. Okay. Good. Well, I could definitely see the benefit of that. So Nate, you have an interesting background in sales and product as a general manager. What innovations and growth opportunities did you see within Built that drove you to build a company and built as a company?

Speaker 1: Well, as often happens, it was actually a very simple need. A friend of mine came in after a very frustrating experience that he and his wife had had with a product that required assembly, and we just asked the question, why is it in today's very digital world we're still working with paper instructions? And we went out and realized that there really was not a good solution for especially consumer durable goods, and we just put our heads together and said, there's got to be a better way. And so we started going through that innovation and experimentation process until we created something that had really good market fit and then moved to commercialize it.

Speaker 2: Interesting. So, you know, it's apparent that Built is a game changer in terms of improving what's usually a terrible customer experience. So by making it interactive and empowering, you're connecting brands that you work with to their consumers and giving them an experience that they've never had before. So tell us about, as a CEO, the engagement metrics that you're measuring for the brands and then tracking that all the way through to their consumers. What are some of the metrics that you look at so that your clients are making the right decisions and informed in some of the strategies that they're executing with Built?

Speaker 1: Yeah, great question. So the first thing to understand in this is it's all about that customer experience. And what we're going to see, I believe, over the next 20 years is the big trend. The companies that are really going to win are those that have a more direct relationship with their customers in some way. So the foundational metric that we use is actually net promoter scores, because we look at success in the beginning and the very end as we're trying to create loyal customers, right? So we create promoters of our brand, but we do that first by creating promoters of the brands that we serve, whether it's Home Depot or Weber Grills, et cetera. The first question that we're asking is, when we revolutionize this part of the customer experience, are we creating promoters of their brand or detractors of their brand? And really, everything flows from that. How we organize as teams, everything is around that simple metric of creating loyal customers that are either promoters or if they're detractors or neutrals, then we triage that and figure out how do we turn them into promoters.

Speaker 2: So do you track then the shift of detractors to neutrals to promoters and baseline and show over time the impact that Bill's having on the brands you're representing?

Speaker 1: Absolutely. And this is a pretty revolutionary set of data for most customers, because most products are sold through large retailers and there's actually very little known about what happens to a product or customer sentiment once it arrives in someone's home or is on the actual environment where it's going to be used. And we're totally revolutionizing that. We're saying, let's first change the experience, flip it from being something that I think we would all agree tends to be very negative and turn it into one that is very positive. And what we have shown out of that is that when we do that, people come away as promoters at a staggering rate. So oftentimes we're increasing companies' net promoter scores by 20 or 30 percent just by changing this one moment in time within that customer experience.

Speaker 2: So a question that that raises is when I think about your example of Home Depot and Weber, and let's say I'm going to Home Depot to buy a Weber grill, who's Bill's client in that scenario?

Speaker 1: Well, yeah, another great question. So for us, our client at the end of the day is the brand, right? They're the ones that have innovated and they have created the actual product. The retailer can be a great influencer on it. And of course, if you buy something from Home Depot, they're part of the larger customer experience as well. But at the end of the day, we're focused on the brand because long term, when you think of a product, you tend to think first of the brand and then secondly, where you purchased it from, right? And so our paying customer is the brand. But I think so centric to understanding really what are the right metrics for your business is you have to move beyond what's the metric for that, the paying entity, and understand what does success look like for their end customer.

Speaker 2: So if I'm the brand, if I'm Weber in this case, and I'm able to show with fact-based evidence that I've got a better user experience, customer experience for my product, then Home Depot is going to want to give me more shelf space and going to want to take more inventory.

Speaker 1: Exactly. Because if you can make that experience that much better and create promoters, you have a long term impact on sales because you have loyal customers that are willing to come back for more. And any retail loves that. Any product or brand company loves it. But you're also lowering returns. You're lowering customer support costs. You're applicable. You're changing or improving the star ratings. And all of these things come together to have a pretty big top line and bottom line economic impact for the brand.

Speaker 2: Okay. Okay. That's exciting. That is exciting. So what accountability does the CEO have in overall customer experience?

Speaker 1: So it really starts with the CEO. At the end of the day, it really starts with the CEO. Let me explain what I mean. So oftentimes I see brands will look at the customer experience and say, hey, this is the trend that's coming in the future. How should we address it and attack it? And what I tell companies is what you want to do and you as a CEO need to start out with first is helping people understand why the customer experience is important. What are the economic impacts? And you need to instill that principle and that desire to create a great customer experience across the entire organization to oftentimes it's channeled at one specific part of the business. You know, we call it customer success and that's usually the wrong thing to do. So myself as CEO, my first job is to make sure that everybody within the company understands and willfully wants to create a great experience for our customers. Yeah. Okay. And by doing that, all these other efforts are really going to come to naught.

Speaker 2: Interesting. So would you categorize Built as a B2B or a B2C company?

Speaker 1: I would categorize us as a B2B company. But what makes us unique is we're willing to take that extra step and say, Weber, I'm willing to feel the pain that your end customer is feeling and I'm willing to fix it. Okay. You know, sometimes in our businesses we say, I'm going to create a solution for my end customer, but then I'm going to let them decide, you know, what to do with it after that. And sometimes that works, but more and more today, when you look at the great, great brands that are out there that are just overachieving everyone else in their industry, they're taking that extra step and saying, no, I'm going to start gathering data and information about my customer's customer and I'm going to help them solve that problem. And most importantly, I'm going to declare success only when I've enriched those people's lives.

Speaker 2: Okay. And that's the difference. So you're creating a lens to your customer's customer to ultimately help them drive revenue, margins, enterprise value, customer satisfaction, brand awareness, et cetera.

Speaker 1: Exactly. Because we have found in ours that actually the time people are most likely to speak about a brand by name is within three to 12 hours of finishing the installation, setup, or assembly. And so if we can change that moment, which we do with our built experience, and then measure it, we've set the brand off on a completely new trajectory. And this now allows them to be looking at follow-on sales, longer relationships, other things that they can provide to that customer because they came away from it as a promoter of the brand.

Speaker 2: Okay. Okay. Well, Nate, I really want to thank you for your time today. This has been an enlightening experience. What you guys are doing is fascinating. Myself, thinking about the number of times we've stayed up late assembling toys the day before Christmas, I can only imagine the game-changing that built is bringing to the industry. So thank you for the work you're doing and what your team is doing. And I'm thrilled to have you here on the show today. Thank you. Thank you. And to our audience, thank you for tuning in to SBI-TV, The Growth Advisory.

Speaker 1: To learn more, visit SBIGrowth.com.