February 6, 2026 – Success Mentality Vlada Galan and Virtual Receptionists Nathan Strum

0:04 Intro 1 : Broadcasting from am and FM stations around the country. Welcome to the Small Business Administration award winning school for startups radio where we talk all things small business and entrepreneurship. Now here is your host, the guy that believes anyone can be a successful entrepreneur, because entrepreneurship is not about creativity, risk or passion. Jim Beach,

0:26 Jim Beach : hello everyone. Welcome to another exciting edition of School for startups radio. I hope you’re having a great day out there riding the roller coaster life of being an entrepreneur and making a lot of money, or you’re just about to get off the sofa and go out there and start your business. And I hope that this show will give you the motivation to do that and teach you some of the tips, tricks and techniques you need to be successful. Today is my father’s 90th birthday. Love you, dad. Wish you were here on Earth still. And say hello to mom in heaven. We got a great show for you today. First up, we have Vlada Galan. She is going to talk about mental success and how so important that those two are tied together. If she negotiates with Prime Ministers and stuff, she’s going to blow you away. And then Nathan Strum is with us. He has built an incredibly impressive Virtual Receptionist business called Abby that you will want to hire for your small business. I’m going to it’s a great interview and cool company. Here we go. Great show. Boy. I’m excited to introduce my next guest. She has international negotiation chops. Works with prime ministers around the world to help them become better managers, crisis and political geo strategist. So very excited to welcome Vlada Galan to the show. She is the founder of I lost it. Your bio is so long that I had I lost Oracle advisory group, which is a global consulting firm headquartered in several different countries, and she has been on all of the big TV shows, CNN, the fox, the Newsmax, all of that. In 2023 she was awarded a medal by the Ukrainian government for her leadership efforts there. And she has a new book out that we’re going to talk about as well. Am a lot of Welcome to the show. How are you doing?

2:27 Vlada Galan : Thank you so much for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.

2:30 Jim Beach : Quite an impressive bio. Where are you calling in from today?

2:36 Vlada Galan : I’m calling in today from Atlanta, Georgia. You’re here with me.

2:39 Jim Beach : Okay, yes, all right, let’s get started. You. We were talking before we came on the air that you went to Georgia State to get your undergrad, and you mentioned something that I’ve talked about on the show 1000 times, student debt. Talk to us about your student debt situation, because I want to emphasize this. I love it.

3:02 Vlada Galan : In the United States, I think we have a culture where loans are completely acceptable, and it doesn’t matter if you have the money or not. You’re made to believe that you can take out, you know, 1000s and 1000s dollars of student loans and pay it back later. I this is a form of just personal bondage that you put on yourself because at the end of the day, you’re graduating 10 steps behind. I made the decision to work all through college. I also, because I went to school in the state of Georgia for my undergrad, had the Hope Scholarship, which covered part of my tuition, I made a decision to work full time. This was making the hard decision up front. I could have made the easy decision and taken student loans and coasted through school even without having a job, and I chose not to do that. The results of that is I could build wealth much quicker after I graduated, because I could go immediately into my career field. I had no debt to pay and and was able to immediately start accumulating wealth, putting money aside, and in managing money in a completely different manner. And I think that this is something that so many students think is really acceptable and as a solution, and I don’t think it should be looked at as a solution unless it’s absolutely necessary, and even then, you should take the least amount of loans possible and work as much as you can, because what you’re doing is you’re putting yourself at a disadvantage when you graduate. And I was just recently talking to a very good friend of mine, and he said to me, I just paid off my student loans. We should go celebrate, and I laughed, because I haven’t thought about debt or student loans ever, and it has been years and years and years. It’s been, I don’t know, 14 years since, you know, he finished school and he just paid off his student loans. That’s been a burden he’s carried for 14 years. And I certainly think the student. Students today take this easy option out, and I think we have to learn to take the hard decisions up front. It really does shape us and helps us build wealth over time faster.

5:10 Jim Beach : Well, I love that both of my college graduated children also graduated with no debt, and worked and got scholarships. And I I think that it is a better path, and I don’t want to be bad or to slam Georgia State, but I think you’re better off going to a state school that’s not as good than going to a private or an expensive school that will give you debt. I’d rather go to Georgia state than Harvard if it’s a debt situation. So anyway, let’s move on and get to the important stuff. How in the world do you end up talking with prime ministers and presidents?

5:48 Vlada Galan : Well, I started my career right here in my home state of Georgia, and I started working on congressional campaigns and governors races and senatorial campaigns. And eventually I took that work experience internationally. I started my first company over 12 years ago, not knowing even how to file for a tax ID number. I started with nothing, and I learned and worked my way through. And it was a learn as you go. Type of experience. I was offered an international election over 10 years ago, and I took that opportunity, and it was an incredible opportunity. And ever since then, I’ve worked on national elections all over the world, across five continents, dozens of countries, many presidents and prime ministers, either or candidates running for office in opposition. And it’s been, you know, an unbelievable experience to be able in certain regions of the world to bring real change. And you don’t, you don’t think that you can be the person that can bring change and work to do that, but you absolutely can. And it goes to show that one person can make a difference. And I think many people listening don’t believe that they have what it takes to make any sort of difference in any space. And that is just not true. You can really, as one person, make a difference.

7:11 Jim Beach : Very interesting. Who did you start working for in Georgia, with the Kemp campaign, or the other

7:18 Vlada Galan : I worked, I worked on Governor deal’s campaign. We ran the RNC victory tour for Governor Deal. Kemp was actually the Secretary of State at the time, and he was one of the most active people at that point on the victory tour. I do know Brian Kemp. He’s He’s a wonderful governor, and at that time was a wonderful Secretary of State. I’ve worked with other candidates in various congressional districts, and have also worked with the Purdue campaign. I worked with Jack Kingston when he was running for Senate. So worked on multiple campaigns here in Georgia.

7:53 Jim Beach : Why are you doing that? Are you just interested in politics, or is this part of your overall strategy to build your career. How does this fit into your plans?

8:06 Vlada Galan : I was always fascinated by politics, and when I was at Georgia State, I had an incredible class from a woman who was part of, you know, one of the coups that took place in Venezuela. She was actually working with the State Department. State Department, and she was there in Venezuela when it took place. And I was fascinated by her work experience and and was just utterly fascinated that that could be a field to even pursue. I loved, lived and breathed politics, and that is why I chose to become a political consultant. I realized that you can really make a change by, you know, guiding strategy, guiding messaging, and guiding things that are very important. And you know, in certain in the United States, you know, when you consult, sure you can make a difference. You can bring a new senator to the fold. But how much of a difference do you make on a nationwide level? Working internationally, if you look at, you know, continents like the African continent, you have the ability to shape policy that can feed millions of people. And I’ve worked in countries that have become self sufficient in wheat, for example, that makes a lasting impact on a population over time and and that becomes quite fulfilling and purpose driven work.

9:27 Jim Beach : All right, very fascinating. Let’s talk about the book a little bit success mentality, lessons from a geopolitical strategist. I love the title and beautiful cover. Tell us about the book. Why does my mindset matter whether I’m going to be successful or not?

9:48 Vlada Galan : It took me quite a while, after having very successful campaign cycles in Georgia, to figure out what I wanted to do next, and I didn’t truly believe that I could break through and be a success. Successful as as people you that you see on television, or as people other consultants that you see around you. And I realized that one day, sitting laying on a friend’s couch in Washington DC, going from job interview to job interview, that I didn’t understand why I couldn’t have it, and I started to change my mindset, and that changed everything for me. I became I was a millionaire by the time I was 30 and and without knowing how I would get there, I began to believe that it was possible and take the steps to slowly achieve it, figuring out one step at a time. I wrote success mentality for others that find themselves in that position. I wish I had a step by step guide on how to put my life together at that point, I had no idea I had to figure it out on my own, and I wrote a book and a guide so that others don’t have to if they really want to get there. There is a blueprint, and I’ve that’s why I wrote the book. I share many lessons from my own life. I share how I got there, how I changed my thinking, how I found the why in my life, of why I do what I do, and why I work so hard and what I’m willing to do, and and I wrote a book on it, and the book shares lessons from all walks of my life, and also gathers on my personal experience. We’ve all been in situations where uncomfortable, and we’ve all faced imposter syndrome. We’ve all had to overcome things that were not necessarily comfortable to us, and I discuss how I got through it. I talk about a three step approach for overcoming imposter syndrome. I talk about how to tackle and find your why, and many other things in the book, because I wish I had it at that age, and I didn’t, and that’s why I wrote the book.

11:52 Jim Beach : So how do you get over imposter syndrome? That’s an interesting one. Three steps. I’m on step point one so far. What’s your three step plan there?

12:03 Vlada Galan : Oh, first of all, it’s very important in the moment to accept your feelings. I think many of us in that moment don’t feel like we’re worthy, don’t feel like we belong in the room. It happened to me when I walked in to a country club in Georgia for a fundraising event, I thought, what is, you know, a poor Ukrainian immigrant doing you know, in the midst of Georgia high society, I didn’t feel adequate or worthy to be there. And in order to move past it in the moment, you have to accept that those feelings, you know may feel valid to you in the moment, you can accept them, but you have to take the next step, which is, you know, action, and act to push through those feelings. And so one of the things that I always like to tell myself is I like to go through the justifications of why I’ve accepted what I felt, but why that isn’t necessarily true. And so I I go through kind of a process where I go through my experience, what I’ve done to get to the point and to be in the room that I’m standing in, this is, let’s say, the evidence and foundation to put your imposter syndrome to rest. And then you act and you push through it. So no matter if you don’t want to walk into the room, you walk into the room and you make yourself do something very uncomfortable. Oftentimes, it’s introducing yourself to someone or or standing up and taking a speaking opportunity in a meeting, or, you know, submitting, perhaps a proposal that you otherwise wouldn’t have submitted, or, in many cases, applying for a job that you may not feel comfortable or adequate to apply for. It’s pushing through and taking that action at the end. And so this is, this is very, very important in pushing through imposter syndrome. And I’ve, I’ve done it and applied it in my own life, and it’s always served me well, and I know others can stand to benefit from that. I talk about in a lot more detail, of course, in the book,

14:00 Jim Beach : in the book, you talk about the fact that, or maybe not, a fact that everything we need is already within us. I don’t know about that. I’m missing 12 different things. I was told,

14:12 Vlada Galan : No, it’s It’s absolutely true. In fact, that’s the first chapter of the book, and I start with that chapter on a journey flying from Eastern Europe to the United States at the age of just seven years old, not speaking the language, not believing how it will survive in a brand new world and and we don’t. We believe that oftentimes we carry what people like to label as negative qualities, or we don’t have what it takes. And from a very young age, my mother used to always tell me, what you need is inside of you, and I learned that that is true with time, even the negative qualities, even learning how to channel if you have an aggressive nature, overly ambitious nature, those things, especially in women, are labeled as negative. However, they’re not if you learn how to channel them properly and manage them and use them in the right. Settings. It’s actually very useful in things like negotiations, for example, or standing your ground, or going for that promotion that you may not feel comfortable. Going for, it takes that extra, let’s say, air of confidence, sometimes an error. You know, this aggressive nature can be put to use. And so it’s, it’s about people disregard their negative qualities without understanding how to channel them properly. And this is something I talk at great length about, because it’s not only our positive qualities those are easy to highlight and use. It’s knowing how to use the other side and negative characteristic traits that might be perceived as negative and learning how to channel them for you, we always have what it takes to push through something to accomplish something. So that doesn’t mean you’re born with every single skill set for every single job, but it means you have the basic qualities to push through many situations and to move through many different rooms and sit at many different tables of power. We just have to channel it and understand that it’s there and understand how to use it. And I think many people have this desire to look for something outside of themselves, and that’s a mistake. You first need to understand what you’re working with internally and go from there.

16:16 Jim Beach : How do we handle a crisis? Our five person business just really screwed up something. No one died, Vlada, but came close. You know, what do we do? What do

16:30 Vlada Galan : we do? The Wonder number one thing I can tell you, with handling crisis, with President Prime Ministers all over the world, is the number one thing that crisis does is it muffles the identity, and all of a sudden you may be a calm, headed, rational expert or leader at something, and what crisis does is the chaos you know, blinds you and you know, and blinds your vision you know, muffles your hearing and you start to act irrationally. The number one thing in a crisis is not to panic. There certainly is a pathway through and you can’t think of that if you’re operating in chaos. And so oftentimes, you know, what I tell clients is stop and assess the situation. That’s the first thing you have to do without panic, without rush. And I think everybody’s desire is to just actively respond. And oftentimes, that’s a mistake. Sometimes in a crisis you don’t actively respond. First, important to assess the situation. Second of all, it’s important to make a plan, and not people rush to a quick response. That’s a mistake. You first have to make a plan, and then I like to, you know, use what I call issuing a whole sequence, or a whole pattern, where you manage to fend off some portion of that crisis. If it’s, you know, a crisis in public relations, that’s a hold statement, you know, something like, you know, we’re assessing the situation at this time, and you know, we’ll be issuing a statement at a later time. If it’s a personal crisis, you know, it’s putting the first steps in place that you need to move through it, oftentimes getting legal advice or, you know, or advice otherwise, very, very important to move rationally slowly. And I think people do the opposite in crisis. They forget their identity. They rush to move quickly because it feels chaotic, and they feel the need to respond immediately. And sometimes the best thing to do is actually wait, not respond and assess. And so I think that’s, you know, very important to take into account. And I think oftentimes, when you do that, you react completely different than you would otherwise. You make a lot of mistakes responding quickly and impatiently in a crisis, because you’re consumed by the chaos.

18:38 Jim Beach : And how do I prepare for it? What do I do to get ready? Say, I know I’m going to have a crisis one day. Can I do anything now to get ready for it? Well, you

18:46 Vlada Galan : know, in a business setting, you certainly, you certainly have to have a list of stakeholders. These would be the first people you would contact if you had a reputational crisis or something like that. In a business, you would have a monitoring system in place. That way, if anything takes place, you’re the first one that’s notified about it immediately. You’re not finding out from reading a news headline. This happened to one of my clients. They woke up one morning and had over 160 news articles written about them overnight, and they were one of the last ones to find out. And that’s very unfortunate. And so to avoid situations like that, you have a monitoring service in place for a business. You have a spokesperson in place who’s ready to, you know, address issue, the hold statements, and you know, address a crisis at any point, and that person is well briefed, and, you know, well trained. But more than anything, you know, to prepare for, you know, any potential crisis, you do a risk assessment and a risk analysis. What parts of your business, or let’s say, if it’s a personal setting, your personal life, do you see that could have issues that arise, and what can you do to ensure that it doesn’t reach the boiling point where that happens? And so, you know, I have a client that’s. That has a product out on the market, and the product has been, you know, correlated to deaths. And that’s really unfortunate. Those deaths are not directly caused by the product, but because few deaths have happened when the product was used, they are being directly correlated. And those are things in a risk assessment that the client could have seen off well in advance and prepared for those things by issuing certain studies and certain statements you know, previous in the news about the safety, you know, of the product. They did not do that, and now they’re fighting to save their reputation. On the other side, all of those things can be prevented by doing proper risk analysis, and you can apply that to every facet of your life, whether it’s a business, whether it’s something personal. You can apply that to every facet of your life. I think a lot of people find themselves in personal financial crisis. Very often. Those things can be avoided if you anticipate the fact that there could be a problem there and start to make a plan for it in advance. And so there’s nothing that cannot be 100% anticipated or at least mitigated to some degree in advance.

21:06 Jim Beach : All right, I love it. Great advice. Go back in time and tell us about building your business. Oracle, how did you get your first client? Talk to us about building a business and give us the birthing story.

21:21 Vlada Galan : Well, I started, I started my first company in 2013 right here in Georgia. And then I went on and off to work for various companies. I worked for some of the top public affairs companies in Washington, DC, like mercury public affairs were actually the current president’s chief of staff comes out of and and I realized that there is nothing like building your own company and your brand and working for yourself and working for someone else. At least that was the case in my experience, I found a team much more rewarding. And so I went back after having incredible work experience for some of the top firms to building Oracle advisory group, which I started as an international entity. There’s offices in Dubai, there’s offices in Atlanta, there’s offices in Africa and and to do what’s not easy and one of the most important things you can invest in, even if you’re a small business just starting, is talent. Is not hiring the cheapest labor, but hiring even if you have one employee, it’s hiring somebody who really is talented and very intelligent and very experienced. That’s very, very important. It’s better than hiring three or five, you know, average employees just to do mundane tasks, those people take you really far and help you exponentially grow the business. And everything that I’ve ever done has been built on talent and and the company has expanded for that reason, is bringing on talented individuals that help expand the scope and the breadth of what you’re able to do and and the kind of services you’re able to provide. And you know, the second really important thing is staying innovative and staying ahead of the curve in the political space. Everybody understands modern day survey research, let’s say in polling, everybody looks at poll numbers when they come out. But do we understand the digital landscape and what goes on to a deep extent online? We all know famous names like Cambridge Analytica, for example, and we, you know, we had to look at staying ahead of the curve and bringing innovative solutions at the cutting edge of the political landscape to be able to bring technologies that could help predict elections, and technologies that focused on online indicators and started using AI, and these aren’t things that were done in politics 1015, years ago. And so, you know, one of the things for building a company is just also staying innovative and staying, you know, at the edge, you know, of the industry, and that’s very, very important, and and we really do do that, and that’s that can be used, that template can be used to build any company is bringing solid talent, staying ahead of the curve. It’s very, very important.

24:15 Jim Beach : Yes, it is very, very true. All right, most important question, what’s going to happen in the midterms, and who do you like in 28

24:27 Vlada Galan : Well, you know when, when you’re looking at midterm elections, generally, you know, after, you know, President takes power, midterms usually go to the opposing party. That’s just historically the way it goes. The only time I think that changed was during President Bush, because we were in the middle of a war, and so that’s the only time that I think we saw deviation for that. So I think that, you know, you’re going to see the house probably going to the Democrats and 2028 on the Republican side. I would certainly love to see more. Marco Rubio run, I think he has proven that he can fill the big shoes of a Secretary of State and handle US foreign policy. And we’ve had many amazing US presidents that have done well domestically, but have just suffered both on the Democrat and the Republican side on foreign policy. And I think Ruby has shown that, you know, he can, he can fill those shoes. I’d love to see him on, you know, the Republican ticket on the Democratic side. You definitely see Gavin Newsom ramping up and in hopes of that nomination. But I think you might have someone a lot more extreme on the far progressive left, like in Alexandria, Ocasio Cortez, she seems to be quite favorable. And the Democratic Party has continued to pull further and further left. And so you might see a surprise individual like that on the ticket. So that’s what you know. Those two tickets can look like. Of course, JD Vance has a serious interest in running. I think everybody knows that that’s the obvious option on the Republican side, but I would personally love to see Marco Rubio make a run

26:07 Jim Beach : for it. All right, fascinating, great stuff. A lot of you are very impressive, and congratulations on all of the success. I’m sitting here mad at the American education system that we’re not producing as much leadership as some of the other places around the world. How do we find out more about you? Get in touch. Get a copy of the book. Hire you for a crisis all that, please.

26:33 Vlada Galan : Well, you can find copies of the book at Target, Amazon, Barnes and Nobles. You can also go to www success. Dash mentality.com, to find more out about the book, and you can simply just Google my name, and there are plenty of links that lead you to the many different initiatives that I am involved in. Fantastic.

26:58 Jim Beach : Thank you so much for being with us. Great stuff, and we’d love

27:00 Jim Beach : to have you back. Thanks a lot. Thank you so much pleasure to be with you, and we will be right back.

27:20 Intro 2 : Oh my gosh, I love the opportunity to do this. Thank you, Jim,

27:23 Intro 2 : wow, that’s, that’s, that’s a great one. You know, that is a phenomenal question. That’s a great question. And, and I don’t have a great answer, that’s

27:31 Intro 2 : a great question. Oh, that is such a loaded question. And that’s actually a really good question.

27:36 Jim Beach : School for startups radio, we are back and again. Thank you so very much for being with us. Very excited to introduce another great entrepreneur who could actually help you in your business. Please welcome Nathan strum to the show. He is the CEO of Abby Connect. It is about a 20 year old business focusing on customer interactions and having great customer interactions. He is now using AI powered tools to combine human services with the AI to give you the absolute best type of receptionist that you could get. Nathan, very impressive. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?

28:19 Nathan Strum : Thanks, Jim. I appreciate you inviting me to the show. I’ll tell you, when you said 20 years, I pictured my gray hair on my on my head, so thank you for that.

28:29 Jim Beach : Well, that’s a sign of accomplishment. You’ve made it for 20 years. That’s we deserve. That’s the wrong button. There we go. Business in year two. Fantastic. Yes, it is. What’s Abby? Is that one of your girl’s names, your wife’s name, where’d the name Abby come from? Oh, boy,

28:56 Nathan Strum : Abby came from my father, who is the generation that used the phone book, if you remember the Yellow Pages starting with an A really gave you that leg up. And so Abby was born from from that old thinking.

29:14 Jim Beach : We should have gone ahead and doubled down and call it a, a, b, b, y. That’s right. That’s right. Tell us about the company. What services do you offer? Virtual Assistant for the telephone? Is my understanding? Absolutely.

29:32 Nathan Strum : Yeah. We’ve been branded with this term virtual, and I’ve disliked it ever since. We’re real humans. We’re all working the same office. We’re not remote, and you got a great group of people on answering phones, just like good old humans do. But you know, in this AI age, we’ve expanded our offering, and we’re now in the AI receptionist business, and we are offering a. Hybrid solution, where people benefit from the human connection over the phone, but the AI automation that allows you to save money.

30:10 Jim Beach : All right, an interesting combination where, how much human do I get and how much ai do I get through walk me through a call?

30:17 Nathan Strum : Sure. Well, it really depends on your business, and every business is unique. And the thing that I’m really loving about AI and the transition that this society is about to really go through is it allows more personalization, more customization, because it’s so easy to manipulate software and so easy to set up systems that are designed for the business. So we have some clients who want all human service. We have some clients that want AI at night. We have some clients that like AI to answer first insurance for the human if, if it’s a certain type of call. And then we have some clients that like us to do scheduling through AI and new client calls and whatnot with humans.

31:07 Jim Beach : All right, yes. Why do people not want humans? Is it totally a cost situation, or are there any other advantages to

31:16 Jim Beach : not having the AI just other than the cost,

31:21 Nathan Strum : a great question, cost and capability. So for our history, we’ve had a lot of clients coming to us asking for us to do scheduling for them. So think of your dental office you call in and schedule a cleaning, or a salon where you’re scheduling a manicure and a pedicure. Some of these scheduling platforms are too complicated for a service like ours, where, you know, we have lots of receptions to train, and your scheduling platform is changing, and there’s many variables, so we’ve had to turn that business down for many years, and now we’re able to train the AI to take those calls, and so that’s an increased capacity that we’re able to take on.

32:02 Jim Beach : I love it. I love it. Let’s go back in time. Nathan, tell us the birthing story. How’d you get the idea? What’d you do first? Where’d you get the money? How’d you get your first customer? Tell us some history.

32:15 Nathan Strum : Yeah, I’d love to Well, I was sitting on the beach in Fort Lauderdale going to school, and my family

32:22 Jim Beach : already blew my mind on the beach going to school. Got to do that or explain that.

32:29 Nathan Strum : Well, that’s that’s my talking point, but really it was sitting on the beach. So just came out of college, and my my parents called me up and said, Hey, listen, we’ve got this new business. We’re starting in Las Vegas, and we’d love you to be part of it, you know, as a as a family business. You know, throughout our whole lives, I’ve been involved with multiple of their companies, so it was a natural progression for for us as a family, and we started an Executive Suite business. So think of your Regis office where you have full service office suites. We still have that business till today, but as part of an executive suite, we answer phones for the clients in the building. And you know, like most businesses, we found something that we were

33:19 Nathan Strum : really, really good at. Clients loved us.

33:22 Nathan Strum : They love how we answer the phones. They love our personality. They love, you know, how friendly we sound and how we connect with callers. And so that was the starting point, and the birth of Abby connect, offering this great service to clients outside of our building in Las Vegas.

33:43 Jim Beach : Okay, keep going.

33:45 Nathan Strum : So we started Abby connect, and at first we, you know, there’s, there’s been some lessons along the way. You know, as any business that’s been around for 20 years will tell you, and there’s been many ceilings that we’ve had to hit and remake ourselves. You know, in the beginning, we were focused on cost cutting, and it never we never was able we’re able to hire enough staff to really provide the type of service that we wanted to provide. We felt rushed. We felt like we weren’t able to connect with callers like we had, you know, as a family, and so we had to raise our prices to keep up with the service we wanted to provide. And that was a little risky for us, because back then, call centers were in, answering services were all about cost cutting and shaving off every penny. So taking a service like that and increasing the cost and putting ourselves in a different category was a little scary, but that was a very big milestone for us, and allowed us to grow basically to what we are today.

34:57 Jim Beach : You know, how do we sell? This as a competitive advantage. Nathan, so if I have two banks to choose from, and one bank has humans on the telephone, I’m going to go with that bank, right? Because I hate talking to AI. I hate it. How do you sell that? Is it? The competitive advantage for your customers. I mean, they should be using that. Are they?

35:25 Nathan Strum : Well, Jim, I would ask if you’ve talked to our AI, because I don’t think you would hate them. But be that as it may, a lot of people do hate AI, and that’s why we never recommend that you outsource your entire business, and especially your phone line to AI, and you always have a human fallback, and that’s what our service provides. So in that bank scenario, you’re getting the best of both worlds. You’re solving the problem for people that hate AI, you’re providing them a human but you’re also helping your bank save money by having some of the routine calls go through AI and some customers, really frankly, like the AI answering more, because they can get more done quickly. We did a study. We looked at 500,000 calls. Some of the calls were human answered. Some of them were AI answered. And what we found from that study was that the calls on the AI side are shorter, but there’s more words, so they’re more efficient calls, you get more done more quickly, right?

36:34 Jim Beach : That’s the 95% right, where I just want to check my balance and move some money around or something like that. But you know, the time that we need humans, you know, where there’s actually a complex situation? I love the fact that you can fall back to a human. So that’s a great compromise, I think. Do your customers come in and argue price anymore?

36:59 Nathan Strum : Well, as a small business owner, we all love the word free, so we’re all going to try to get as close to free as possible. I don’t know if argue is the right word, but we definitely love saving money.

37:15 Jim Beach : Of the clients are that is that their number one price or shopping concern, their number one criteria for decision making,

37:25 Nathan Strum : we find that the number one decision is about outcomes. What outcomes are you trying to drive over your phones, and is your is your service ie Abby, going to be able to meet those outcomes at a fair and reasonable price, and we believe that we are best positioned to do that with our hybrid solution.

37:48 Jim Beach : All right, what was it like working with your parents? And how long did that continue? And what’s the situation now? What happened if someone disagreed with dad?

38:00 Nathan Strum : Oh, boy. Well, I don’t know if I can use these words. These words on your show, but it was challenging. Let’s put it that way, any family business will know that and arguments and disagreements happen with Dad daily. And you know that actually was the beginning of Dad’s retirement, was that we just didn’t want to work together anymore. We love each other outside of the company, and felt like the stress internally was was too much. But my mother still works in the business, and she’s great, and everybody loves her, and couldn’t imagine the company

38:43 Jim Beach : without her. What role does she play? Is she the chief cheerleader? Or that’s a great

38:51 Nathan Strum : that’s a great term for her. But she is the Director of Culture, and does do a lot of culture activities. She prepares birthday, you know, celebrations. She’s working with the HR department to ensure that everybody has a great morale and is happy. So she does a lot of those activities,

39:20 Jim Beach : All right, sounds like fun. Keeps her young as well, I’m sure. So it’s a great thing. Oh, yeah, were you able to bootstrap the business with just internal family money?

39:32 Nathan Strum : We were We were sent now, I do own 100% billionaire.

39:41 Nathan Strum : Well, I don’t know if we call that a billionaire, but we do call it hard sweat equity.

39:53 Jim Beach : Yes. Well, very impressive. I mean, y’all did that right? Do you have any idea how much you spent 20 years ago? To get the business up and running.

40:04 Nathan Strum : Well, at that point, my father and mother were the sole owners of the company, and I wasn’t involved in that part, but, gosh, I would say close to a million dollars.

40:15 Jim Beach : Wow, that’s a lot. Where’d that go to? Building Technology.

40:19 Nathan Strum : Building Technology. Investing in the real estate was a big piece of it.

40:25 Jim Beach : What do you mean? Just the real estate for a call center,

40:29 Unknown Speaker : the real estate for the executive suite,

40:32 Speaker 5 : the first part of the business, okay, how big a call center do you operate now?

40:39 Nathan Strum : Well, we, we’re, are in a 20,000 square foot building in Las Vegas where all of our receptionists and 90% of our company work. We’ve got a couple of remote people, and then we’ve just announced, just yesterday, and you will be the first show to have the announcement by me personally that we opened a office in San

41:03 Nathan Strum : Francisco. Why

41:08 Nathan Strum : San Francisco is the AI hub. San Francisco has the AI talent, and we want to position ourselves in this new AI world. And what better place to do it than San Francisco? We are a firm believer in in office work. I love collaborating with people. I don’t think that you can do that in a remote environment. And so we wanted to go straight to where the talent was

41:39 Jim Beach : all right when

41:41 Jim Beach : you know, AI became so trendy a couple of years ago, and everyone started investing in it and using it, you could go and buy a lot of AI products off the shelf, or you could develop your own what route did you take? How did you develop the AI technology piece of this? Sure.

42:00 Nathan Strum : Well, there’s several layers of AI technology, as you know, you know, there’s the fundamental underlying technology that the big companies like open AI and Google and anthropic developed, as well of as well as some of the technology that we use in our voice that was developed by some of the bigger companies. So some of that, it doesn’t make sense to recreate your own, but there is some AI technology that is recreated. We’ve We’ve learned a lot in the two year journey that it’s been to get here. In the beginning, we did a lot of what we made a mistake with a lot of B to B SAS companies where we just kind of injected AI at certain points of the product and and thought that that was going to make us an, you know, total different company, and AI led company that’s far from the truth. Those are, you know, there’s, there’s not a lot of value there sometimes. So we developed this AI product from the ground up. Wow.

43:07 Jim Beach : Very impressive. And did you have to go out and hire a specialist for that, obviously, to fill up the San Francisco office and pay them an ungodly wage?

43:17 Nathan Strum : Well, it costs a lot of money to live in San Francisco, I’ll tell you that, and they demand the salaries there, so you’ve got that one right. But yes, we are staffing the office there and looking for more engineers as we speak.

43:35 Jim Beach : And what is the response been to the work in the office, mandate, I 100% agree with you, Nathan, I have watched people work at home, and they get a lot of laundry done, you know, and it bothers me watching them do the laundry, you know, even though they’re on a it just I don’t believe in it. I just don’t inherently believe in it, because I know what I do when I have that freedom, I get my work done, but I screw around a lot more than I should have. How do people take the fact that they have to come to work? And yeah, because a lot because of businesses that are designed to be remote, this is one.

44:18 Nathan Strum : Well, Jim, people love to come to work because they love pizza.

44:21 Jim Beach : Well, that’s foosball, and foosball,

44:26 Nathan Strum : I’ll tell you what, we’ve been very lucky, and I’ll tell you why our main competitors decided to disband their offices and all work remotely, right? And guess what? Their customers are calling us in droves because their service is not the same. You cannot provide that same customer service over the phone. You cannot have that same culture which promotes the good customer service when you all work remotely. And people are feeling that, and so our employees. Olis see that transition. They see that clients are favoring our model over theirs, and so they know that they’re working for a company that’s, you know, going to be around for the next 20 and 100 years.

45:15 Jim Beach : That’s a good point. I like that. And do you do anything special to encourage or to reward them for coming to the office. Obviously you mentioned free pizza. Do you have special benefits like that, or cool things in the office to make it neat?

45:33 Nathan Strum : We do. We do. You know, we don’t try to go too gimmicky on the foosball games, but we do have a lot of in office, you know, activities, if you will, and culture events and and try to make it a very light and fun environment. And we realized very, very quickly that that was culture was going to be most important in our company, and that was how we were going to provide the great customer service over the phone. It’s not magic. It’s not a very hard formula to to, you know, provide that great customer service. You just have to have a happy place to work.

46:13 Jim Beach : How many operators do you have now?

46:16 Nathan Strum : Oh, we’ve got around 50 or 60 now.

46:20 Jim Beach : And do they do one account only or multiple accounts?

46:25 Nathan Strum : They do multiple accounts. They have software that helps them do that. We have built some really neat AI tools for them specifically that helps them do their job and helps so that every single time they answer that phone, they sound like they work for the business they’re answering. It’s a hard job, though, Jim, I’ll tell you that I’ve done it and it is hard.

46:49 Jim Beach : Yes, I used to do it myself. I spent years answering the telephone to grow a business, but it was a good way to connect with the customers and that brings an interesting question. Nathan, I was the CEO, the owner, the boss, so when you got me on the phone, you know, I could answer any question, and had authority, how do we pass that on to someone who’s never experienced the product, for example, or, you know, is it actually part of the business? How do you make them seem like they are and give them all that knowledge? Is it just that special software?

47:30 Nathan Strum : Well, the software is part of it, yes, but also the experience. So, for example, we specialize in certain industries. We’ve been answering for law firms, you know, solo practitioner attorneys, for 20 years now. We practice. We pass along all that knowledge during training with the receptionist. Our receptionist don’t take a call for a full month from starting. We spent a lot of time training them

48:03 Jim Beach : a month. That’s pretty impressive. I think we did a day of training well, and it’s expensive, yes. And then what about monitoring them? And this call may be recorded for your safety.

48:20 Nathan Strum : Well, I don’t know if safety is involved, but yes, we do monitor calls, and we do provide a lot of feedback. And what we realized early on is people crave feedback. They want to know what they’re doing wrong so they can make those corrections. They want to know what they’re doing, right? So they can feel good about their job. And they also want to know the stats of what they’ve done for that day. It makes them feel accomplished.

48:49 Jim Beach : All right. So do you have live monitoring where someone’s actually listening to the calls as they happen, or do you listen to recordings?

48:58 Nathan Strum : We listen to recordings. We do have live monitoring with new hires, but the majority of the oversight is through listening to calls. After the fact, we are developing an AI function that will listen to 100% of calls, which is just unheard of, and one of the reasons why I love AI but we’ll provide feedback on every single call. Wow.

49:28 Jim Beach : I’m sitting here thinking about, Do I want feedback on every single call? I guess I do. Yeah,

49:36 Nathan Strum : that’s, that’s a good question, but I’ll tell you what, if you don’t, you’re in the wrong line of business, right?

49:41 Jim Beach : Yeah, you know, I’ve been using AI for my writing right now. I’m trying to get some books done that have been on the desk for years, and it gives you a grade or each paragraph, each chapter, whatever you want, and I have gotten addicted now. Nathan to taking a chapter and forcing it to get a 97 or an A plus on chat GPT, you know, and so I spend a lot of time on each chapter, just reworking it and reworking it. And the AI has been so interesting to the things that suggest and the conversations that we can have. It’s amazing what it will think of and prompt me to think of and it even came up and said, I don’t like the title of your book. You should change the title, which blew me away. And then we argued about it for a while, and then it made some suggestions, and I ended up going with what the AI suggested, unbelievably for me, I thought so. It is unbelievable. The way it can improve any situation. I think it’s making me a better writer by having constant monitoring of my writing, and it gives me the feedback, and it’s in a private thing, so I don’t feel bad if I get a B or C,

51:03 Nathan Strum : I love everything you just said, and I would encourage your listeners to rewind that and listen to it again. I cannot commend you enough for the way that you’re using AI and writing was one of the first industries that everybody was scared was going to wipe out, and that people were going to use AI to completely write books and completely write articles, but look at how you’re using it. You’re the Creator, you’re the strategist, you’re the one that’s doing the writing, but AI is assisting you, and it’s making you a better writer.

51:40 Jim Beach : It is, it is, it’s, I’ve gamified it. It’s become a game for me. And my kids will walk by and go, where will what percent are you at now, dad, you know, my family knows that I’m now game obsessed with this writing, so I guess it’s better than being addicted to social media or something like that. I think so. I think so. So what’s your goal? Nathan, how do you have goals when it’s already so accomplished?

52:12 Nathan Strum : Well, right now, what we’re working on is trying to understand what this new workforce in the age of AI is going to look like, and how do we fit into that as humans? Because we’re, we’re, we’re a believer and not firing humans. You know, we’re a believer in supporting humans. And so I also believe that AI can change the way that we work together and can change the way that companies work. So we’re taking old, antiquated systems, for example, the human system of product development and feedback from customers and how that feedback gets implemented into the roadmap, and we’ve thrown out the whole software development process and rebuilt it from the ground up so that customer feedback almost goes directly to the software. It’s, it’s, it’s going to be game changing. We’re working on that right now. So that’s, that’s where our focus is,

53:16 Jim Beach : very, very impressive. I am impressed. You’ve done it exactly right. How do we find out more? Hire you get in touch all that stuff, please.

53:25 Nathan Strum : Yeah, please come to abby.com a B, B y.com. A B, B y.com, we offer a free trial, and we would love to have you try our services. Fantastic.

53:37 Jim Beach : Thank you so much for being with us. Nathan, absolutely. A pluses, and we’d

53:41 Nathan Strum : love to have you back. Thanks, John, thank you.

53:45 Jim Beach : We are out of time for today, but you know what we do? That’s right, we come back tomorrow. Be safe, take care, and go make a million dollars. Bye. Now you.