Season 1, Episode #51: Scaling Your Customer-Centric Culture As Your Business Evolves With “Fro”

Meet the man known as Fro, CEO of Beam Benefits.

In 2012, Fro and his co-founders of Beam, a digital employee benefits company, developed and built the first-ever connected toothbrush. In a time when connective devices came to the forefront (think IoT products: Nest, FitBit), Beam quickly came to a fork in the road: take the path of least resistance and narrow their ambition, or lean into the storm and wildy expand their ambition. We’re sure that you can guess which path they chose.

Fro shares how Beam Benefits evolved into a mainstream player in the insurance industry, where their competition has big budgets and, in some cases, over 100 years of experience. So, how does Beam compete? Their customer-centric culture.

With such rapid growth, Fro generously shares his experience scaling the culture at Beam and how they’ve attracted the right people to “work on the work.” It’s an intentional blend of industry insiders and outsiders followed by a simple 3-step process: Listen, prioritize, and then vet. It’s a continuous cycle that’s applied to their internal and external customers and is now spearheaded by their Customer (Broker) Advisory Board.

One thing is clear in this episode: Fro and Beam REALLY know their customers.

Watch the episode here:

Listen to the Podcast here:

About “Fro”

Alex Frommeyer is the co-founder and CEO of Beam, a digitally-enabled employee benefits company that provides the industry’s most innovative dental insurance product. Beam Benefits is a digitally-native employee benefits company that offers dental, vision, life, disability, and supplemental health coverage for employers of all sizes. The company simplifies and modernizes the $100+ billion ancillary benefits industry through its intuitive online platform, self-service tools, AI-powered underwriting, and thoughtful coverage for improved overall wellness. Its Beam Perks™ program offers incentives to members and rewards them for healthy behaviors. Beam has raised over $160 million in funding and is available in 44 states across the U.S. Learn more at beambenefits.com.

Scaling Your Customer-Centric Culture As Your Business Evolves With “Fro”

How An Outsider Can Beat The Competition

I am looking forward to this episode because we’ve got Fro. His name is Alex Frommeyer. He goes by Fro, and you’ll understand why. One of his co-founders is also named Alex. Why am I so excited about this show? As you learn what Fro has to say, you’re going to know that he pays attention to listening. He listens to everyone. He listens to the customers, three different stakeholder groups that are key to his business succeeding, and his employees. It’s fascinating how he brings all of this together as an outsider and is revolutionizing multiple industries, in a sense. I’m excited to get into this episode.

What I love about Fro is he is a left brain-right brain guy trained as an engineer but so creative as an entrepreneur. He is not afraid, as he says, to lean into the storm and not take the path of least resistance to make some incredible changes in an industry that has not historically seen a ton of innovation. There is lots to read. I can’t wait to dive into this interview.

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Alex, it’s so great to have you here. We have been looking forward to this conversation and cannot wait to know more about you, Beam, and all the things you guys are up to. It’s such a great innovative company. There is so much to share with our readers. Welcome to the show.

It’s great to be with you, and I’m excited. Thanks for having me.

Why don’t you kick it off by giving us a little bit of background? Help our readers get to know who Alex Frommeyer is, how you got to this point in your career and what led you to Beam.

A couple of the answers are intertwined with one another because I’ve never really had a career. I started Beam with my two co-founders after meeting them in engineering school in Kentucky. We were living in Louisville, Kentucky at the time. We started a company together when we were undergrads, and then we started Beam right after we graduated.

My resume is very simple. I’ve been with the same two friends of mine and my co-founders, Alex and Dan, for my entire career. All we’ve done is build products and companies together. The past several years have been building Beam. All three of us grew up in Kentucky and, through various paths, found ourselves very interested in both engineering as a discipline and wanting to build technology products with our life’s work. We’re very fortunate that that’s what we get to do every day.

Tell us about Beam and how that got started.

Beam was started in 2012. What’s so interesting about how we’ve evolved as a business is where we started. My co-founders and I were not only engineers but hardware engineers – electrical and mechanical engineering. The first version of Beam was building the world’s first connected toothbrush. We built that product because we saw an opportunity merging at the time, a couple of mega trends that were playing out in the early part of the last decade.

Customer-Centric Culture: We saw that a customer was totally unserved or underserved by the accessibility and affordability of dental coverage. We wanted to help solve that.

One of them was the internet of things. The falling cost of sensors and the rapid rise of mobile phones, smartphones, and compute power meant that for the first time, it was possible to build and scale simple consumer devices in particular to hundreds of thousands, millions, or hundreds of millions of users. Some examples of products being built in that era still endure now. Companies like Fitbit were launched in that period and Nest Thermostat is another good example.

Beam was getting started, and we were looking at business ideas right around that same timeframe. We had the skillset to be able to build the hardware and the connectivity components of a product. We also had a bunch of family members in dentistry. My sister was in dental school at the time. She now runs her dental clinic with her husband, who she met in dental school. One of my co-founders’ moms is a dental hygienist and has been her whole career. He grew up every summer hanging out in the practice that his mom worked at.

We knew a little about the industry and were interested in healthcare more broadly. We saw there was a customer who was being unserved or underserved by the accessibility and affordability of dental coverage in particular. We wanted to help solve that not by building an insurance company, which is what we decided to do later. At first, we had much simpler ambitions which were, “I bet the insurance companies would like to know who is taking great care of their teeth every day and who isn’t. I bet more people could get cost-effective coverage if they could prove that they were exercising good preventative care habits.”

Connecting the toothbrush and being able to allow, for the first time, a data stream to create that telemetry, we thought was a super interesting idea on its face and an opportunity for applications to be built on top of that, whether they were more like gamification-style features or, what we ended up doing next, which is expanding it into its bespoke insurance product.

Take us through the journey of your founding. You’ve talked through a piece here, but where did you see that opportunity to transform? You talked about the mega trends coming together, but why a toothbrush? There’s got to be something deeper there.

The genesis of the opportunity was around taking a problem set of how the dental field worked, the status quo, in circa 2010, which is that you’ve got this huge market. Dentistry is a multi-hundred-billion-dollar market in the US, so even larger globally. There’s a joke in the dental field that dentistry is ten years behind healthcare, and healthcare is ten years behind everything else.

It was a great example of when you’re talking about places where innovation isn’t happening or happening at a high velocity. It’s a highly-fragmented market. Most dentists own their own practice, and they own one practice. Because of that, if you have something innovative in the dental industry, you have to sell it door-to-door from dentists to dentists to get meaningful market penetration.

Since they’re small business owners, dentists have to choose what innovative products and services they want for their practice because they can’t say yes to everything. They don’t have a corporate P&L with which to fund lots of those opportunities. The nature of that dynamic has kept the industry feeling very mom and pop, disparate, and fragmented for a long time.

We saw the opportunity to take some of what was happening in technology at the time, like the smartphone revolution, sensor revolution, and the internet of things trend, to bring something to the market that dentists and dental insurance could take advantage of with neither party having to do anything. We didn’t have to sell anything to the dentist directly.

Dentistry is ten years behind healthcare, and healthcare is ten years behind everything else.CLICK TO TWEET

We would build an ecosystem of data usage and engagement that could help take the fragmented dental industry that didn’t have a lot of software and customer experience day-to-day and turn it into a more connected, inclusive, and robust industry. It could yield everything from a better way for parents to help their kids build and maintain good preventative care habits to helping dentists better alert their patients toward opportunities for them to have better long-term dental health or cost savings when it comes time to get those teeth covered.

That way, when you needed work done, you could afford it and know a dentist that could do that work and do it for a good price. That fabric stitching work that has to happen in dentistry is what we saw at first at 10,000 feet back then to say, “There’s something there.” We think that a hardware device and the tech-enabled services we can build around it could help pull the whole thing together and take it to the next level.

You mentioned that you weren’t setting out to become an insurance company. Walk us through the multiple pivots along the way and where you are now.

Beam has had multiple pretty big moments and then many small moments where we could have taken a path of less resistance and kept our ambition as a company relatively narrow. Instead we’ve taken the exact opposite path – let’s lean into the storm and wildly expand our ambition. We think a bigger company, a bigger opportunity, and more solutions, more problems can be solved for that customer, awaits us on the other side.

It started with the core DNA of my co-founders and I. Not only is our education background in engineering, but we all are complimentary and strong first principles thinkers. Anytime we confront a problem, we want to work backward from, “Let’s take this problem or issue we see all the way down to the studs and build it back up to what we think it should be, not what the status quo says it is now.”

That’s how we arrived at building our own insurance company. We had built all this connective tissue in the Beam brush, the connected toothbrush, in a successful ecosystem with leveraging that hardware. In order to get meaningful adoption and connective tissue built into the insurance world, we couldn’t. We tried and were unsuccessful in getting that product line adopted by the insurers.

Their tech stacks and budgets couldn’t handle something like the hardware, the ecosystem, the data stream, and how to incorporate it into how they do engineering and IT work inside these mature but relatively analog businesses that we now compete against – the large insurance businesses.

We had to find a different way. The different way could have been changing our business model and Beam. What we were at the time was hardware or internet of things experts. Instead, with zero days and zero seconds worth of insurance know-how, we said, “We’ll start an insurance company because the best way to solve the problem for this customer and get them what they need, which is affordable access to dental care and coverage, is to deliver it to them and build the entire experience end-to-end. We’ll not wait for Delta Dental to do this using our hardware. We’re going to have to build it ourselves. If we’re ever going to see this vision become a reality, we need to take the bull by the horns and build it ourselves.”

This was 2014 and marked the first big expansion of our ambition at Beam, which is going from a company with a point solution to a business that wanted to solve a variety of different problems for that same customer. It then expanded again at Beam through our success in scaling that dental insurance product to 43 states around the US, thousands and thousands of brokers who help us distribute our product, and tens of thousands of small and medium-sized businesses who have purchased Beam’s dental insurance product for their employees as an employee benefit. We’ve now seen an even bigger problem to solve again.

Customer-Centric Culture: Most dentists own just one practice. Because of that, if you have something innovative in the dental industry, you have to sell it door to door from dentists to dentists to get meaningful market penetration.

We’re iteratively expanding our ambition as a business by becoming not Beam Dental anymore but Beam Benefits. Beam Benefits is a digital employee benefits platform where many products can go through the same innovation cycle that we did in dental, which is rapid digitization of the tech stack and an up-leveling of the entire customer experience, which speaks to the simple, easy, and modern employee benefits experience of the future that doesn’t yet exist today.

We wandered our way into building that exact thing for dental insurance and have seen that every one of our customers is like, “Thanks, but can you please now do this for all of the employee benefits products I buy. What you’ve done in dental is amazing, but it’s only solving 1 of my 10 problems. Can we get to work on the other ones?”

We could’ve said, “No, we’re going to stay laser-focused on dental because that’s our DNA as a founding team and the story of the business up to this point.” Instead, we’re leaning in and saying, “The customer has told us. They are voting with their interest and will soon vote with their dollars, which is they want us to solve more problems for them.” They think Beam is the right company to bring that solution to them. It’s now our opportunity to take advantage of, and that’s exactly what we’re going to do.

I love all that, especially leaning into the storm and listening to your customers. We have the good fortune of working with Beam on your Customer Advisory Board. Can you talk to us a little about how much you depend on really knowing your customers to help drive some of these strategic decisions you’ve been making?

We have a very complex business model with multiple stakeholders. It’s very obvious at first glance to talk about the idea or the essence of listening to a customer. To execute it, though, for many businesses is difficult. Some because of the effort and cost of listening to customers. Some because of disparate geographies that they operate in or disparate product lines that that company maintains.

For us, our complexity has a multi-stakeholder environment. The direct buyer of our insurance products is a small or medium-sized business, usually an HR administrator or maybe even the owner of that business if it’s a very small business. We don’t talk directly to that customer. We talk to them through their employee benefits broker. We have to convince the employee benefits broker to introduce us to that business. That’s two stakeholders, broker, and client, as we refer to them internally.

The ultimate user of our product is neither of those two entities. It’s our member, either the employee or the dependent of the business, has now offered one of Beam’s insurance solutions to that end member. I’ve got a member who needs to find a dentist in the network, schedule an appointment, get work done, file a claim, and then get the claim approved. They’re going to use the toothbrush every day and use that data to create a rewards ecosystem. As they brush their teeth, they can redeem points on our platform for gift cards and prizes. None of those activities speak to anything the client or the broker cares about.

This introduces the complexity of our business which is who do we pay attention to? To what degree do we pay attention to these various stakeholders who have overlapping concerns but not perfectly overlapping concerns? We have to prioritize certain stakeholders and certain initiatives over others. We have to create harmony between those entities so that Beam’s aggregate ability to solve problems being articulated by any one of those three stakeholders is allowing the business to progress, continue to grow, and for us to continue to identify and solve ever more important and relevant problems for those stakeholders.

We knew we needed help along the way because we were almost doing too much listening. Some companies probably don’t listen to their customers or not enough. We were on the other end of the spectrum, which is we are hearing too many ideas and opportunities because we’ve got all these stakeholders, and they all need different things at different times.

A small business owner has to pick and choose what innovative products and services they want for their practice because they can’t say yes to everything.CLICK TO TWEET

What we’ve gotten a lot better as a at business doing, with your help, is setting up a formal way to address what we decided internally as our key stakeholder for the next few years of our business, which is our broker, and allowing and facilitating a forum upon which we can better absorb, vet, and prioritize. This healthy feedback loop is how that stakeholder is going to work sustainably and scalably with Beam.

It feels so much less chaotic than earlier versions of our business, where every idea was a good idea. It was coming in from all the stakeholders all the time with no internal ability to organize, thus creating technical listening but a whole lot of inability to act nearly quickly enough to address all the different things we were hearing at the time.

With all of that going on, those three different stakeholders, and all this listening happening, you guys are outsiders. Let’s set the ball field the way it is here. How do you have the confidence to take on those industry giants? You’re taking on some massive competitors and outperforming them. From an outsider’s perspective, you would think, “There’s no way we can compete with their budgets or what they’re doing.” How do you have the confidence to take on that challenge?

We can’t compete with the reputations of the companies we compete against. Many of them have been in insurance for 100 to 150 years. We can’t compete with their budgets either. We compete on culture. From my perspective or at least in this context, what culture means is how we approach our work and attract the right people to work on that work.

We’ve developed a system, somewhat unintentionally, of building teams that carefully blend insiders and outsiders to tackle a problem or a team or a functional area. I say it was a little bit unintentional because my co-founders and I were all outsiders. We started an insurance company with zero expertise, experience, or knowledge about it. We knew we needed help with somebody who had been inside the walls of a real live insurance company before.

Some of our early teammates and employees were insiders. This incredible dynamic developed early on at Beam as we started to grow. It worked. There were these strangely complementary pieces that we, originally, were self-conscious about because, up to that point, my co-founders and I were hardware engineers. When the business needed actuarial models built, we felt useless. How could we contribute at all to such a project?

The strangest thing that began happening early on is that our ability to poke at conventional thinking, assumptions, status quo-style approaches to many of these elements of the insurance experience ended up being valuable. Not to drag those topics all the way toward, “Let’s rebuild it all from scratch and forget anything you’ve ever learned from an incumbent carrier.”

We always ended up somewhere in the middle. We’re going to take the status quo and give it a facelift. The facelift was the outsiders poking and prodding on, “What? Why?” “Why do you go through this workflow? Why does it have to go to this stakeholder before this stakeholder? Why can’t it go to them at the same time? Can we deliver this thing faster? Can we do this thing differently?”

We ended up looking at the map in a very first principles way. We’re moving the pieces around in a way we thought would take the best of both worlds. The insiders that had the know-how and experience to know some of the pitfalls of previous innovation attempts that hadn’t worked out for good reasons and outsiders that were constantly challenging the status quo a first principles and healthy way. It worked.

Customer-Centric Culture: Beam Benefits is a digital employee benefits platform where many products can go through the same innovation cycle that we did in dental, which is rapid digitization of the tech stack and an up-leveling of the entire customer experience.

Now, at Beam, when we interview candidates, and build leadership teams, in particular, and build a new functional area in the business, we still think about how to construct a team with a blend of insiders and outsiders. That way, in every little nook and cranny of the business, there’s a group of people challenging and bringing new perspective to a problem, as well as insiders that bring with them deep domain experience that can and often is also valuable to make sure we never stray too far from what our stakeholders expect in any given part of the experience.

That fundamental approach has helped us gain conviction that we may not be perfect anytime we launch a new product, add to our experience, or release a new feature. We are going to take a listen first, act second approach, leveraging stakeholder feedback and a mix of insiders and outsiders evaluating that feedback and coming up with something that’s uniquely Beam relative to everyone else in our industry.

You talked about competing on culture, and anybody who follows Beam or Beam employees on LinkedIn knows that you have a phenomenal culture internally. Can you talk to us a little bit about how you intentionally built the culture and how you maintain that as you grow?

Maintaining is the key. Scaling culture is a fascinating and incredibly complex experience. This is the first company I’ve built and am scaling. I’m learning my way through the maintenance of culture and the refinements of culture over time. Let’s start with building it in the first place. That insider-outsider status has a second great effect other than building these interesting teams with the diversity of perspectives and ways of thinking. We found it also tends to attract the “right people” to our business.

The outsiders that want to work at Beam are folks that certainly have options and experience in other industries but, for some reason, are attracted to working in the insurance industry. I find this strange personally, but then again, I’m an example of it myself. Nobody sat around their kitchen table as a kid, and when their mom or dad asked them what they wanted to be when they grew up, they said, “I want to be in the insurance industry. I would love to be a broker.” That conversation has never happened.

Beam has almost 400 employees now. A lot of folks have selected into working at an insurance business, and for many of them, for the first time in their life or career. Those people tend to be attracted to the types of problems we get to solve in the insurance world. That tends to attract analytical-minded, technically-minded people, and folks that enjoy going into these unsexy, forgotten, and unloved industries and figuring out how to make them more interesting and work better than they do now. That attracts a type of person that resonates with us.

The insiders have their version of this. The type of insider that comes to Beam is likely a contrarian, disruptor, and relatively noisy at whatever traditional insurance company they were working at previously. They were probably a person that hated the bureaucracy, the red tape, and the lack of innovation inside whatever that business was, and didn’t know that there was an outlet for their innovation interest and desire to do something more dynamic by leveraging their knowledge.

Beam then comes along. They see us and go, we hear this all the time in interviews, “Until I saw Beam, I didn’t know I could work for a company where I could use my domain expertise and be able to do it and apply it in a more impactful way than I’m ever going to be able to in this 20,000-person business that’s been around for 150 years.”

Beam ends up attracting this interesting mix of people that either fundamentally operate as an insider or outsider, but it ends up working great for us. We described that with a set of core values we call GRITT. It stands for Growth, Resilience, Initiative, Tenacity, and Team-First. We think, in particular, those core values get to the heart of what makes a Beamer unique.

Scaling (our) culture is an incredibly complex experience.CLICK TO TWEET

Even in particular, when you look into growth, as an example. From our perspective, growth could mean many things, but we describe it as a process of giving and getting feedback. We’ve built a lot of mechanisms in our business to help people grow by being unafraid to highlight, critique, coaching opportunities, and ways to help point at a thing and say, “This was awesome. Here’s how you can take it to the next level.” That’s going to describe a lot of our manager-employee dynamics and relationships. It’s also for the employees of the business, all of our Beamers, to be able to critique the business as well, which is, “I like our approach to transparency as a business, but I would love to see us do this instead. I would love for us to add this to it.”

When it comes to maintaining and scaling culture, we are not just listeners to our external customers, the stakeholders we talked about. We are also listening to our internal customers, who are our employees. I am constantly changing and tweaking our culture, both literal policies and such, but also how we articulate the culture. We’re refining it all the time because I’m actively soliciting feedback in meetings and all hands. Sometimes it’s anonymous or sitting down with Beamers who are thinking deeply about a particular subject.

I am turning what I hear into new ways of thinking and operating that are making us stronger and better over time instead of doing what most companies do, which is become hardened and codified into a previously successful culture that doesn’t end up being malleable enough to accommodate rapid growth. Since Beam’s going through rapid growth, we think we need an uncompromising culture on certain pillars, but very malleable ultimately on how we get there to accommodate the fact that the business is adding 100-plus new people every single year.

It’s so dynamic how you’ve described your perspective as an outsider, how you combine that with insiders, and how you maintain the culture. As you look forward to the next few years here, we’re going to face some challenging times. What do you see for the industry? How does Beam fit into that?

We are excited because we think our expansion into Beam Benefits from Beam Dental is perfectly-timed with another macro effect, which is one of the things that helped start Beam in the first place. It was observing what’s happening in the environment more broadly. In this case, it’s this recognition that employee benefits have never mattered more than they do now.

It may matter in new ways as well. For the past few years, COVID and back-to-work/Great Resignation issues that have been front and center for every employer, no matter how big or where they’re located, dominated every HR department. COVID, office shutdowns, going remote and then coming back online, but in what way? Hybrid, back to the office, fully remote, and the HR policies attached to those dynamics plus the Great Resignation, the tight labor market, and how do we attract, retain, and satisfy our teams, the talent we need to win as a business, whatever it is that we do as a business? How do we do all that in this environment where we’re like living in a totally different world every six months?

One of those answers is an employee benefits program that works for and scales with your team from an attraction and retention perspective. One of the issues laid bare amongst the employee benefits ecosystem as constructed is that if you don’t have a fundamentally digitally native way you provide the benefits experience to your employees, it can’t scale to distributed teams, remote work, more offices, or people that are spreading out physically. We’ve seen a lot of manual HR processes fall apart in benefits specifically, but also in general, as people have physically moved.

A classic example is that if everybody used to be in the office, you could do your open enrollment each year by handing out sheets of paper that people fill out, collecting them a week later, and then plugging them into a system. Those days are over. For most businesses, you’ll never be able to get 100% of your employees to fill out a physical sheet of paper onsite. It’s clear the industry wanted to move in these more digitally native ways before COVID, but it’s gone from a nice to have to a need to have and it’s done that really quickly.

Beam is incredibly well-positioned as the only digitally native business in the employee benefits space. Now that we’re adding new products as part of our Beam Benefits platform, instead of being previously very focused on dental, it’s allowing us to address other topic areas that we know the small and medium-sized businesses that we work with need. Vision, insurance, life, disability, supplemental health, and more on the way. That’s going to help provide a more holistic experience in that attraction and retention equation.

Customer-Centric Culture: We need an uncompromising culture on certain pillars but ultimately very malleable on how we get there to accommodate the fact that the business is adding a hundred plus new people every year.

I often internally liken this to how it’s not just having the products, but who provides them and the experience matters. Think about the past several years, how any small or medium-sized business would communicate to their workforce that they are a hip and modern employer. Install Slack. It’s easy. One way you can signal your team that you are hip to the trend is by not having any old corporate communication tool. Get Slack because Slack is the best performer in that segment from a product quality perspective, but its brand also speaks to the workforce.

That Slack equivalent doesn’t yet exist in employee benefits. There is no way for an employer to communicate to their team, “Not only do we have good benefits here, but I can prove it to you by the brand name I’m about to say next.” We think that is an incredible opportunity to synchronize and improve the relationship between employees and employers by inserting ourselves in the middle and saying, “This employer does care about you. We know that because they’ve selected us to do your benefits program and ensure it’s excellent.”

The wheels are spinning. I love the way you think and how you’re stirring the pot every time you see a chance to. We love that conversation. Tony, do you have any other questions before we wrap?

No. We’ve covered a lot of ground. This has been awesome, Fro. Thank you.

This is amazing. We are fortunate to have a front-row seat to a lot of the cool things you’re doing and appreciate the opportunity to work with you. We’ll be beside you, watching the ride and everything cool that’s happening for you. Before we let you go, we want to ask you if there is any non-profit or charitable organization you’d want to shout out to. We like to give our guests a chance to shine the light on a good organization. Is there anybody you want to give a shout-out to?

I’ll do two quick ones, and thanks for the opportunity because they’re both near and dear to my wife and me. I’m based in Columbus, Ohio. I sit on the Greater Columbus Arts Council board, a grant-making organization. We provide operating support to big institutions like the ballet, the opera, and the symphony and direct grants to local artists.

If you’re a painter, sculptor, musician, or performance artist in the Greater Columbus area, you can apply for and get grants directly from the GCAC, which is super fun to do because you are putting money in the hands of artists to make a more vibrant arts community. It’s done in a way that is a very pro artist, which I appreciate. The GCAC has played a huge role in COVID, helping support and sustain artists’ livelihoods when it’s volatile.

Speaking of the ballet, my wife is on the board of the BalletMet in Columbus. She’s a former professional ballet dancer. For her, this is a dream come true to go from being a dancer in a company to being on the board of a company. It is fun to watch that community we’re close with thriving during volatile times and for her to see a whole new side of the business or the institution that comprises a ballet.

Thank you so much for sharing that. Thank you so much for your time, Fro. We have been looking so forward to this conversation. We appreciate your insights and getting a peek into Beam and how you and your co-founders think about how you’re building and innovating the company. Thank you so much for generously sharing your time and talents with us.

Maintaining culture is the key.CLICK TO TWEET

Thanks for having me. I appreciate all you are doing to help us build Beam. We need the help.

Talk to you soon, Fro. Thank you.

Thanks.

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That episode is awesome, Betsy. I love the last piece we’re talking about with the culture and how they build this culture in this organization. There’s this dynamic nature of outsiders versus insiders, listening to both sides and extracting from that is what makes a difference. It’s going back to those first principles and saying, “How do we give this a facelift? How do we make this something better for the customers?” To be honest with you, every company has got to look at doing that because the world is changing fast. We’ve got to take outsiders and take insiders. We’ve got to find out what’s the better way.

I love what he said about not necessarily blowing something up but taking the status quo and giving it a facelift. In tech, you hear so many companies say they’re going to blow up this industry and the status quo. I love his approach. “We don’t have to blow it up. Let’s take what’s good and improve upon it.” I thought that was some good insight.

Our whole conversation was about the types of people that a company like Beam attracts and building that culture. I follow the company and a lot of the employees on LinkedIn. He and his co-founders have created an incredible culture within the organization. They’re up to 400 employees, and that’s not an easy task, but it’s been a model that we’re watching as we grow in scale and want to maintain a great culture. I couldn’t be more appreciative of his being generous with his input.

I’m glad we had this episode, and I look forward to having him back in the near future.

It’s going to be fun watching them succeed. Thank you, everyone, for being here. We appreciate our loyal readers. If you haven’t yet hit the subscribe button, please do. We’ll see you next time.