UNLOCK BUSINESS POTENTIAL BY ORCHESTRATING SUCCESS THROUGH PERFORMANCE MASTERY

Thank you so much for having me. As you said my name is Anthony Piccolo. I’m the CEO of Performance Scoring and excited to be here.

Thanks for having us and look forward to our conversation.

Sure. It started when I didn’t set out to be an entrepreneur, but at 12 years old I started law and service which is a normal thing here.

I’m in Texas, in the south of the United States. And single mother that kind of, that whole story and needed to do something to help earn and earn my way. I fell in love with the idea of kind of meeting people where they are and helping them whatever their challenges may be.

I went to school University for International Politics and Diplomacy. My, heart has always been around people and just understanding. Why they do what they do. We all live our lives differently. There are a lot of right ways to do it and a lot of wrong ways, but they’re all different.

Throughout my younger years, I was always hustling whether that was, my lawn service or having a small digital marketing agency I was a chief marketing officer for an oil and gas firm. And, after I left there, I bought a small online retailer and.

And I was doing a lot of consulting work  along the way. And one of my clients came to me and said, hey, we’ve got this challenge we’re all over this, all over the US we need to find a way to, QNA, QA, and QC, our texts that this was in the oil and gas business and preventative maintenance.

And they needed to find a way to get that information back to headquarters, back to the people who own the yard. To the actual completion company. So, think of Halliburton Baker Hughes or Schlumberger. And, one of the things back then we would do is we would help organizations find technology off the shelf and help them use that or modify it.

And a little bit, the one rule we always had was never to build it. And of course, we broke our rule and we said, hey, we’ll, we’ll take a stab at this. And as we got rolling through it, I’m like, wait, I think they’re onto something. If this could be dynamic, this is an idea that can work for anybody.

It’s a way for people to engage their people at the moment, provide that feedback, and create those moments of self-evidence. That’s when people buy in and learn when they see it  with their own eyes. You know what, if I do this, then I’ll get that. Oh, I’m going to do that. But unless that person sees that has that self-evident moment, then really change doesn’t exist.

So that was the start. That idea was the start of performance scoring back in 2018. We started as a feedback platform as a way to receive and provide feedback up and down. And laterally across organizations, not just internally, but externally, and it quickly led to some further employee engagement pieces.

So, performance reviews you can’t review performance. Unless you talk about how people perform like their actual performance metrics. It’s really hard to talk about performance metrics unless you understand how people get things done. So now you’re into kind of some project management.

All along the way, we’re building this tool. And we had somewhat of an epiphany moment. We found out that our tools were being well, somewhat like this. We’re in a, we’re on a video conference and people just like they’ll pull up their CRM in the middle of the video conference to go over their numbers or Salesforce. So, we looked at the market and we saw a huge gap.

There are other tools out there ninety.io is a, is one that’s used a lot in the EOS world. And so, we saw this gap and one of the challenges that organizations have is that they’ve got all these tools siloed, and you’ve got all of these different decision makers that are over these individual silos, and they get in the room and they talk about something.

They’re the chief of their little cheat, their little fiefdom, and then they have to get together and agree to an objective. Or agree to a historical narrative like Harshit. How did we get into this room? Did you do this? Did I do this? Did Frank do this? And so, what we wanted to do is through our meeting management platform coalesce all these tools, not just ours.

And look, ours are great. Don’t get me wrong, but we’re not trying to be Walmart, we don’t do everything. And so we wanted to build a platform around the tools that exist in, inside of our ecosystem, but embed or leverage those other tools, right? We’re not competing with Microsoft SharePoint.

We’re not competing with HubSpot or Salesforce, but what we can do is integrate them well in context around the whole employee experience. So, when we get together in a meeting, we’re working from the same deck, the same playbook. So, we’re able to get to the idea. We can get to the discussion and the action items with intent and clarity, right?

So, when we move, we’re moving with conviction together. And so that’s probably a little bit longer of an answer than you were expecting. But my journey from 12 to 42 revolves around meeting people at the moment and trying to find the best path for collective success.

And so, performance scoring is the vehicle for that right now.

Absolutely. Performance scoring is an, as a company itself and a platform, that platform has been white labeled in the middle and into a few different industries under different brands.

So, for performance scoring specifically, our target is the private industry. We work with enterprise-level organizations, and Fortune 100-level organizations down to groups of two people. I think we were talking earlier and this idea that the one commonality that regardless of what you do professionally, the one commonality that we all have is we meet with people.

Yeah. We, so if you are a solo entrepreneur or solopreneur, whatever the new word is. You still meet with your prospects, your customers, your vendors, and your partners. And so being able to coalesce all of these different tools that we rely on to execute our business we can do that all-in, in the same space, providing accountability.

Target, like I said, from if you meet. You’re a target. Now in terms of industries, healthcare, and education, products, Loops Fire, is one that I can name here in this webinar that, doesn’t legally affect anything, but Loops Fire focuses on K through 12.

So, we’re in school districts all over the country providing this resource for teachers and administrators and staff and students. So, students can provide exit tickets and feedback to their teachers on their way out the door and say that they understood the lesson or that the bathroom needs service, right?

This tool can be used in a lot of different ways. Parent feedback there’s just behavior. Our tools we’ve had, we had a district last year that purchased our tool just for. their transportation division. The bus drivers could provide better feedback on the student interaction on their bus.

They would go back to their parents. Yeah, it just depends on the industry and our platform works in 143 languages in real time. So, we have, for example, in the EPC world, we’re working with organizations right now that they have architects in India, they’re producing in Korea, they’re engineering in Houston, right?

And so, they’re having these multidisciplinary meetings with people who don’t share their first language. And I’m sure you’re familiar. It’s hard when you’re sitting there with someone else and they’re speaking quickly. And you’re trying to follow along. And so, we all nod our heads.

Yes, we got it. But and I’m looking at your screen that you’re sharing, you’re probably sharing, a document or an agenda or a PowerPoint or the spreadsheet or whatever it is, but you’re also sharing it in that language that maybe isn’t your first language. So our tool just translates that in real-time, the questions, the discussion topics, the ideation, being able to see that.

Hear that, in person and then being able to see it in your language helps productivity and our real whole goal in this is, and I bet you’re familiar with this. You probably do a lot of meetings and I know you do cause we’re in one right now but how many meetings do you have that you set once?

And it turns out that the meeting that you thought you were only setting one time was just a pre-meeting. For the meeting that you need to have. And then you need to have that third meeting that post-meeting that recap. Our platform removes at least one of those meetings if not two.

So, we’re saving time. We’re saving money and we’re helping provide that clarity, consistency, and action. The actionable part that we desire to meet. Though, we would not meet it would be an email if I didn’t need to discuss it with you.

Absolutely. I would say that one of our core differentiators in our value offering is that, um, we’re not just another tool.

We’re a tool that coalesces all of your other tools together and informs, all of the stakeholders in the same way, creating a shared objective narrative. And so, if you look at our competition in the meeting space, look, anybody can scrap a timer on a meeting and send out an agenda and say, you’re over time.

Now there are all kinds of great AI tools. I don’t know if you’re using one now they can, that can track our meeting that we’re in right now, but what doesn’t exist in the marketplace today is a way to context this meeting, the action items from this meeting. Into our pulling from an employee or a vendor, right or pull that SharePoint, whatever document PowerPoint, whatever it may be right into this meeting and then for us to create tasks and discussion topics around it.

They are always tracked with that thing because a lot of organizations think we’re a Microsoft organization. We’re using teams and we’re using planners. And when we talk about meeting management, a lot of people will just throw out. I use Zoom like that’s a meeting management platform.

It’s a video conferencing platform and we’re agnostic to that. Look, you can. We’re on Zoom right now. And I’m running our meeting management platform here on the side. And this idea that we’re back to just because you’re a team’s organization or Microsoft or you’re a Google suite or how many times just because you’re internally that way, but you’re meeting with a customer and they want to meet on their platform, right?

And so now you’ve lost all that stuff. So, what we’re trying to do is again, we’re trying to coalesce. All these different things together create a shared stitched narrative so that we can all buy in and create action. There’s nothing worse than the false agreement. And that’s one of the things that our application protects organizations against is false agreement because now Instead of showing up to get the reporting details to the inside of a meeting, right?

I’ve got my silo. You’ve got your silo of information. We’re going to get together and then we’re going to fight over whose information is better. Not fight, but we’re going to discuss that, right? Our platform allows that to happen before this engagement ever takes place. So, when we walk into that meeting, we’re all fully prepared for a good meeting.

If you’re going to spend 30 minutes in a meeting with somebody, you should spend five minutes or less discussing numbers and reporting, because that’s something that everybody should be able to do. They should, one should, if they’re in that meeting, they should have access to it before they ever showed up.

And two, the whole purpose of the meeting is so we can ideate together. We can solve problems or solve issues. So, our platform makes that process. Like I said, much clearer, much more concise, it’s efficient and it provides actionable insights and steps that we can track.

And that’s another thing. It looks, like everybody’s got their project management tool, their performance that they’re using a pay. Most people use a payroll tool like Paycom or Workday or one of these others and they all have their employee reviews and all these like little bolt-on things.

Again, if your little bolt-on, which by itself is already insufficient, is bolted onto another silo that’s not connected to any of the other things that matter, then how do you have confidence in the decisions that you’re making? And That’s what we’re trying to empower organizations with is like a clear and Contexed confidence in the action that they’re taking and so we talk about our value proposition It comes down to we’re coalescing all this information together to save you time and create clear concise actionable insights and steps into the future.

Management experts exactly. This is what’s interesting. So, when I was saying a minute ago that our application works, real-time translation, 143 languages. The one thing that I didn’t forget to mention here, is that this is important. I said that our technology is white labeled in different spaces, right around different.

So, there is a whole movement in the United States around a concept called the EOS, the entrepreneurial operating system. And so, it uses very unique jargon, right? Management experts are very unique jargon. The timelines, are how you think about tasks or to-dos or projects, right? There’s just a different philosophy behind it.

So, what our technology allows organizations to do from a very high level is Change the jargon within the platform to match their management philosophy. So that way we can use the right terms. And, one of the neat things about that is it allows us to stay away from trademark infringement where we’re not, an EOS company, but we support a lot of organizations that are, that want to have their meetings in that EOS format, it’s their choice if they want to call a project, a rock or a pebble or.

Whatever they can name it within the application. So, anything that has that that, that word project would be a pebble or whatever it may be, in your jargon. So, it’s a way to come around that and then I want to take it one step further. And I know one of the things that our meeting management platform has done is we’ve again, coalesced around meetings.

And some of the parts of that, whether it’s employee engagement or performance, can take a backseat because everybody has those things. A core value of performance scoring is we’re trying to help organizations align their people. And we want people aligned with organizations.

You can, money is a great driver of interest. It’s a horrible keeper of people because guess what’s always changing money, your experience your value to the workplace. But what, especially when you’re talking about Gen Z and millennials, you’re, these are purpose-driven. They believe themselves to be purpose-driven.

And so, one of the ways that performance scoring is helping organizations align their people is we’re trying to create value alignment. So, when an organization is set up there. Performance scoring account or with one of our white label partners there, they’re deciding what their organizational values are.

So, when they’re coaching their people, they’re reviewing their people, right? They’re checking in with their people. All of those values are front and center throughout the whole process. When you look at when we review people, our philosophy is this. Some people call this head, heart, and briefcase.

There are a lot of really pretty ways to say this, but yeah. There are core competency skills and behaviors that need to be exhibited in a role to exercise it well outside of the paper or certifications you need to legally do the job, right? So, I need certain skills and behaviors. This is where we’re trying to stand apart.

It’s not just skills and behaviors and then those core competencies, the requirements, it’s the value alignment, right? I want people like that. That shares how not just our values, but how we prioritize those. And if those are shared, truly shared, then that has a value, a personal value. That’s I don’t want to say greater than money, but it gets right up there in terms of quality of life and how people perceive their place in an organization.

So that’s a core piece of how we’re trying to think about this. It’s not just jargon around it. How, what do you call projects or, what are your metrics around performance or how do you look at those? What, how do you value that? It’s actually, what do you value? You value generosity.

Do you value excellence, right? What does excellence mean to you as an organization? What does humility look like? And it’s so interesting when we look. In a snapshot, we have organizations not just here in the US But in education. We have clients that are a part of the UK, So in looking at how that what their values are and the differences. It’s amazing. And even intra and industry we got kicked off in the very beginning in commercial services. So, think of plumbing, and HVAC builders, right? And even looking inside a commercial service, if you were to look, they’re doing, we’ve got one HVAC company A and HVAC company B, both in the same geographical area have completely different value sets.

They pay people the same amount of money. They do the same kind of job. But how do they, how do people choose between A and B? It comes down to some of that value alignment stuff. Of course, all things else being equal, that’s the difference. And so that’s where we try to help create a focus for our partners.

So that’s a great question. We work with one of our clients and provide national security services to the United States. So, you can imagine even though that you sit in the AWS cloud your database is RDS and create, you get it.

It got all the stuff, you’re shocked. You got all the things, it’s still, it’s, there’s still in security around others, security. And so, we’ve worked whether it’s in government licensing it as infrastructure as a service. So, our platform can sit as a licensed product inside of their environment. That’s one of the ways that we’ve addressed some of those strategic issues. And then also being able to, because every part of our platform is, it was developed in-house, right? We’re not using third-party tools, which restricts a lot of. Unnecessary access. Having everything encrypted at rest in transit leveraging, this is where Amazon shines in a lot of them.

A lot of their offering. And so, we take security seriously. And we work with our customers to provide it. And this is, one thing else I’d like to share. So, when I was talking about how we coalesced all this information, there was a conversation early on. It’s We learned this with some of the performance management pieces.

So, we would have a company early on before we offered performance management. And they would say, hey, we’re using XYZ. And we’re like, okay, no, that’s great. We can integrate with them., we still use Zapier, but there were other tools we could use, we would use our own, REST API, connect to theirs, and go through the whole motions.

Once you start walking down that road, and you probably know this as well as anybody, once you start integrating, you start walking halfway down the road. And then, and so then you’re already halfway down the road. You’re like, all right, do we stop here? Do we keep going? So, on some of those things we kept going, but this is where security, we want to talk real specifically around security.

So, when we talk about inside of a meeting, being able to share, whether it’s a third-party application like HubSpot, you can embed HubSpot in our application. So, all of the security that’s around HubSpot and whatever security parameters you put in there reflect or are reflected directly in our meeting.

Same with our document management. We’re not a document storage organization. And you, especially at the enterprise level, it blows my mind. We’ve got some of the, we’ve got some pretty substantial partners that are enterprise level and it blows my mind. They might be using SharePoint for 90 percent of everything, but.

Then there’s the random drop box. There’s the random drive, right? Or gosh, what’s the other one? But anyway, so there’s all these other tools. So, what our platform is allowing organized organizations to do, and this is a real selling.Point for us is that look, we’re not trying to help you rewrite your security policy.

You’ve already done it. You’ve already mastered it with SharePoint. So, what we’re going to do is you’re going to embed SharePoint in here. And guess what? If that person who’s in that meeting has access to that Tool, whatever it is, then it’ll show up. So, for example, I’m in my meeting now.

I don’t have any embeds in this, but let’s just say I’d have HubSpot in here and you’re logged in as a guest. When you go to the agenda item HubSpot, if you’re already logged into HubSpot, it shows your HubSpot. And when it’s in, when I’m in mine, it shows mine. But like most meetings, you’ve got somebody sharing their screen when they’re talking about that specific stuff.

So, what it’s allowing us to do is sidestep some of these really hard security conversations while also ensuring that. Their security requirements are met because guess what? They’ve already had to meet them in that place that they’re embedding into our application.

Absolutely. It broke up for a second, but how was our onboarding? Is that what you said? Yeah,

Absolutely. So, in the very beginning, it was very personal. We would, we would do this by phone. We’d set it up on the back end and provide access. And of course, as long as things have grown and moved on now, that process can be done completely offhand. Customers can come to the website.

They can sign up for a trial. They can build their organization immediately within 15 minutes. Or less really depending on how many people they want reporting to them and all putting their values in and some of that stuff they can get started immediately. And actually, they have their first three meetings for everyone already set so they have, an implement like an onboarding and implementation and the support meeting, which allows them to walk through the process just by logging in.

The how to use the platform and look, depending on the size and scope of the organization or partner that we’re working with, that gets deep quick, right? Maybe they’ve got certain workflows, they want some customization around and we’ll work through that, but one of the neat things about our platform is that this is really what meetings did for us.

We do employee engagement, reviews, check-ins, real-time coaching, and pulse surveys. And then we can also do performance management in a just blows your mind. You’re like, oh, my God, I can’t do all these things. We only want one thing what meetings helped us do was now they could just turn on the platform right out of the gate.

And just by starting their first meeting, they can once they, they’ll see, oh, wait, what’s this? I can embed it. Oh, I can embed. Wait on, there’s a scorecard here, but there’s nothing in it. Oh, add objective. And then, they just start walking through it because the truth is, and we learned this a long time ago, and I’d be real interested to know your experience as well as, people say they want really good training, but.

What they mean is they want no training. And if it, if they do, they want it on their time.

That’s that is so true. So anyway, providing just the ability for people to have that menu of service and then being able to just walk right in the restaurant, and they already feel, and that’s what meetings have allowed us to do. Yeah, it’s really simple. You just go to the website. You put in the coupon code, on your credit card, which they don’t, it doesn’t charge you for a month. And of course, you’ll be checked in immediately, after you get set up, somebody will call you or send an email and go through the whole motions.

And like I said, it’s once you get into your dashboard, we tried to make it feel. It’s anything else. If you can use HubSpot, if you can turn on Facebook, if you can, if you’ve ever logged in, we all, of course, everything’s single sign-on. So, if you’re a Microsoft organization, you just hit log in, or if you’re Google login, if you’ve got a LinkedIn, you can log right in.

So, it just depends on what you’re, like the, in terms of the training, what’s the size and scope. If you’re a party of two, it’s really fast. If you’re a party of 2000, it’s still quick, but We can work through, some of that custom integration and solutions as we go. And I’ll take you a step further.

We have learned this in education, right? In some of these school districts, the 50,000-student school district has about 25, 000 staff. So how do you train 25, 000 people to ultimately allow them to score or provide feedback on another 50, 000? You better have a really good plan to do it.

And part of it is making it so a lot of organizations, they’ll start with us and they’ll be like, hey, you know what? I’m going to just, we’re going to, we’re going to run with meetings. Maybe they were with ninety.io, and they didn’t like that. They couldn’t track some of the performance metrics, and that’s why they’re moving over.

They might start in meetings, and then they learn quickly. Hold on. I can check in with one of my employees here, and I’m an early adopter. Maybe you just have, we call them Franks in our company. Maybe you just have that one Frank that wants to start the check-in process.

Frank is going to be the little center of the web. That tells everyone else how to do, check-ins. And that’s really how our application grows organically within our partner organizations.

So, I bet we’re probably a lot like a lot of organizations where we started, integrating by  need, right? Hey, we have ADP, we want to integrate our payroll into this and we want to be willing to, our old performance reviews are in ADP and we want to pull them in so we can start working through that. There are some great tools that like Zapier have allowed us to integrate with so many more tools.

So, building those, allows our clients to build those triggers and those actions within our application. Has provided that resource and that ability, that functionality that our customers need. So, I can’t say enough about our gratefulness for Zapier for existing. Because frankly, we’ve integrated with some very niche things that maybe one person uses one, one trigger, and one action for and Zapier has allowed us to answer that bell with confidence.

Absolutely. So, in terms of our, client acquisition like probably a lot of other Sass products. It’s fairly multifaceted. We’ve relied thankfully on a lot of word of mouth because our platform is inside of meetings, our clients are having meetings with their partners, their vendors, and their customers.

They’re acting as salespeople for us all along the way. And we’ve got a great referral program. So, one of your clients or partners decides that they want to, they want a little more in-depth and they want more access to your platform. It ends up creating a profit center for our clients.

So that’s been very helpful to us. Now in terms of some of the more, I will call it colder Legion yeah, we use whether it’s trade associations. So, we’re big into executive coaching. That’s a great space for us. Leveraging some of those trade associations, actually an education.

It’s a critical piece of what we do for our loop’s firebrand, which I think you can see loops. Oh, yeah, I got the background on. Their loose fires are educational products, just like performance morning. But again, for K through 12. So, trade association trade associations were really important.

We do use some legion services as well. And we started trying to test the waters in that. And that’s been as recent as the over the last year. And there’s, I’m sure you’re familiar, way more familiar than I am, but there’s a lot of different ways to skin the cat our phrase for that.

But, yeah. So yeah, Legion, trade associations, word of mouth. We SEO as much organically as we can get, especially in the performance management space. You can spend a hundred dollars on a click for performance management. It’s we try to stay away from doing a lot of that.

And then really webinars and podcasts and speaking engagements. That provides a great space for us because the truth is well, especially around meeting management to meeting management is like talking about CRM in 2004.

And now everybody’s got a CRM. So that’s how people like I said when I’m talking to, somebody who’s not either not looking for a way to, make their meetings better or has never heard about it. Most people would think, oh yeah, I have meeting management.

I use Zoom. I think Zoom is a great video conferencing platform. It has some great AI and transcription tools, but it’s not a meeting management platform. So really there’s some of that kind of goes with the territory education.

and Back to that thought too. Again, the heart of performance scoring is to create moments of self-evidence for our users. So, they don’t just understand and they don’t just see the information, but they believe it and they take it to heart. That’s how, our philosophy is when we’re talking to prospects, one, we want to have the engagement to help create moments of self-evidence.

Everybody wants to make their meetings more efficient. Everybody agrees there should be an agenda, right? But everybody also agrees that we should all eat healthy while we’re in the drive-thru to go to McDonald’s or something. Education is a critical part of this. The good news is this is a big blue ocean.

While it’s a space that’s growing infinitely. It’s still a blue ocean in terms of opportunity for growth and efficiency. Yeah,

So, I, this is always like one of those I love listening to Elon Musk answer this kind of questions because you’re always if you’re not growing, you’re dying a thing. Like I said, we started with feedback and got into employee engagement, performance, man.

All right. So, meeting management. And so really what one of the things that we’ve seen yeah. A big one of the things that we’ve been developing is we have so many, I would say performance scoring specifically about 40 percent of our clients are in the commercial services space again, that plumbing HVAC uh, building services and so forth.

A lot of them use field service management platforms. And again, it’s another silo. It’s one of the, it’s probably, they would argue maybe the most critical place of health, whether that’s, the ticket assigning, getting their techs on site, going all the way through the invoicing process.

Some of them do that. Some of them do it poorly. Some of them integrate well. But one of the, one of the spaces that we’re moving into some of the field service management pieces, because if you think about it, we’ve got everything else other than that, and we’ve always thought about all of these modules as like building blocks that can be repurposed, right?

The doors are here for this block, but if I turn it here, it’s still the same building. It just has a different way to enter and exit. And anything that we can do like that, and I’ll tell you something that we’re releasing next week. So, I don’t mind getting making this public now, but, in our meeting management platform right now, you can vote up and down conversation topics. So, our platform is used, can be used in, is used in podcasts and webinars. I’m sorry, webinars specifically. And so, it allows the people in the meeting to up and upvote and downvote the question topics or IDS if you’re EOS or those QNA topics.

Oh, absolutely of course. Yeah, unfortunately, yes. And we’ve got a great little tool called detour button in our meeting. So how many meetings do you have when somebody like gets off topic and allows somebody to hit the detour button on them and, so, tries to keep the conversation?

So anyway, what’s releasing here in the next couple of weeks? And is an actual emotion and voting system to be used in board meetings. And this is important for education, the school board meetings. So, when they’re going to vote. Moving things to motion. What makes this special is again, you’re able to embed all of these other tools that are outside of the application while leveraging all the things that are.

And then you’re bringing these topics up for actual motion and vote. So, our meeting platform can be used for tracking. Voting is like real voting. So, we’re excited about that. That’s

I fail fast technology. If you’re going to fail fast, it’s an iteration.

One word that I want people to say is honorable.

Yes, I am.

My last Google search. Oh, you know what it was right before this meeting we were having a conversation on MP4 or WebM and I was like, okay, what’s the size difference on WebM versus MP4?

Literally,

What never gosh. I don’t know if you could tell in this meeting, but I usually always have a smile on my face. So, I’m the, I laugh at everything. I’m the worst guy to ever invite to a funeral unless you want somebody to tell jokes the whole time.

The thing that never fails to make me laugh is probably my kids. I don’t know. I, that’s just something top of mind. I laugh at everything. Unfortunately, it’s a nervous response. Like I said, don’t invite me to your funeral. Or don’t have your family invite me anyway.

All right, Harshit. I appreciate your time. Thanks, guys.