EMPLOYEE SPOTLIGHT: Andrew Alix

John McMillan: Alright, John McMillan here with another employee spotlight hangout. Today, I have one of our San Diego employees, Andrew. How’s it going, Andrew?

Andrew Alix: It’s going very well. Thank you very much for having me John.

John: So we are still coming up with a name for Andrew’s position, but he is basically the direct trainer and I don’t know, supervisor, manager of the client managers, whose name might change as well. So, it’s kind of a position and you been doing it what, two, three weeks, like pretty much full-time at this point?

Andrew: Probably two, three weeks, in some capacity, at least six probably. But yeah, transitioning out of the sales consultant role into this particular role to try and work with the client managers and try to help them out with basically every facet of their job.

John: Cool. So it’s just kind of another support that we’re putting in there for that role, which I think will help kind of bring these guys to the next level. So Andrew, why did you join Vyral Marketing in the first place?

Andrew: That’s a good question. OK, well, I’ll start from the top there. Scott Sillari who is our VP of business devolvement, is my cousin. For those of you who know him, we look very similar, we kind of talk very similar. I think yesterday we were actually finishing each other’s sentences in a very bizarre way. So he and I used to live together in Washington D.C. He left D.C. to come out here, and found Frank, and ended up at Vyral and has been working here for a couple of years, doing very well, helping the company grow. He told me about the opportunity to come out here and work with him in his sales department and new business department, so I kind of took a leap of faith to trust my cousin and come out here and join Vyral, like I said in the sales and consulting role, onboarding new clients. So I had done that with them for about 5, 6 months, and then a few months ago worked with Frank to kind of realize the fact that we definitely need somebody in this position that I’m currently occupying, which is how I”m in the position that I’m now now. But basically came from D.C. because Scott recruited me.

John: Cool. OK, so I’m going to ask for a couple different first impressions here. So you first impression of you know, Vyral, meeting Frank and all the people in San Diego, and then, you were recently in Omaha a few weeks back, so your first impression of coming into this environment.

Andrew: So my first impression with meeting Frank and the San Diego crew was actually when I was still working at my old job back in D.C. I had been putting on a conference in Austin, Texas and Frank and Scott flew me in from the end of that conference to come check out Vyral in San Diego. I would say probably the thing that jumped out most was Frank trying to basically sell me on San Diego, which involved taking us out to lunch and then promptly jumping in the ocean immediately after eating lunch like a maniac, telling Scott to hold his shirt and shoes, and then he ran into the ocean. That was probably my first impression. But it was good, it was solid. It was very different than what I’m used to, or what I had been used to before in my professional career, which was a lot of ‘show up, work your cubicle, do your job, go home, leave everything’ 9-5 type of thing. The reason why I was interested in doing this job was because of the impression that they gave me, which was that this is a place where you’re going to be able to build something and you’re going to have opportunities available to you. We’re going to listen to what your ideas are and you’re going to be able to make them grow. And that was basically my first impression of San Diego. The reason why we came out to Omaha was because it was like our initial idea for ‘hey, some of us should go to Omaha to do a training.’ Because initially, this was basically about doing a sales training for the coaches to see if they could sell additional services, but then it basically turned into a different type of training, which was basically client relationships. So Scott and I flew out to Omaha....and what was my first impression with the Omaha office? Well, younger. A little bit younger than what I am used to, but it’s a good thing, because there was a lot of excitement and energy. And I was very nervous; I had never trained people before, but basically we came up with a curriculum to try and work with everybody, try and pass as much information as we knew was correct. While we were doing it, I felt kind of like ‘oh God, I hope they’re taking this on,’ but they were, and they were hungry and enthusiastic in a way that I was not prepared for, and I was surprised - pleasantly surprised with the enthusiasm that I found in Omaha.

John: Cool, that’s awesome. Alright, so, where do you think you’re headed with your career at Vyral?

Andrew: Well, that’s a really great question. I mean, I sit next to Frank, which means there’s constantly new ideas being dripped on me every single day. I would say for the foreseeable future, I would like to continue working with the client managers, that position, because of the feedback they’ve given me, they seem to enjoy working with me and I certainly enjoy working with them, trying to work with them on sort of their leadership training, client management strategies, and things of that nature. So I’d like to continue doing that. But ultimately the San Diego office is the business development office, so you know, as much as I enjoy the training, some sort of way of building that into new business would be somewhere where I’d like to go, particularly in trying to help us get into new industries.

John: Cool. Alright, great, so what have you learned since working at Vyral? And I’m sure you’ve had a lot of the breakthroughs in your mindset, like working directly with Frank.

Andrew: What have I learned since working at Vyral? Well that’s a good question. I think I’ve learned a lot. I wasn’t in marketing when I took this job. I was an event planner. Before that, I was in higher education lobbying in D.C., so I did a lot of jobs where I spoke and dealt with people and had client relationships experience, so that always existed, but I hadn’t done marketing before. I had a vague idea, and so what I’ve learned so far is the necessity but also relative simplicity of what is required of people to market their business and get there and see results. We talk about it all the time when we’re trying to bring on a new client, which is nothing we do here is rocket science, but what we do we do very effectively, and systematized in a way that brings great value to people who work with us. So anyway, I guess the answer to the questions is I’ve learned a lot about marketing, I’ve learned a lot of about entrepreneurship, which again is something I had no experience with coming from D.C. I mean, in D.C. I was working with major organizations and institutions that have been around for some hundreds of years. So working for a company that is what, 6, 7 years old at this point that primarily deals with people who are their own personal entrepreneurs is a completely separate skill set and a completely separate mindset than what I was used to.

John: Cool. Alright, so you kind of touched on a lot of these, but what are the big differences here with Vyral as opposed to your last employers?

Andrew: So, I used to work for a professional association of marriage and family therapists, and I was their in-house event planner. It sounds extremely specific, and it was extremely specific, not that there’s anything wrong with it, I actually very much enjoyed working for them. It was a great organization with great people there. But what is very clear when you come from an organization like that or an environment like that is you are constrained by the limitations of the position, the limitations of the organization and their flexibility to allow you to take on more work and more responsibility. So, at that organization, I did my job, I think I did it pretty well, and I always liked to think I could bring something to the table with new ideas; I was still relatively a new person there, relative to everyone else at the company, but their flexibility and their ability to take in new ideas and run with them was very limited. Before that I worked for a higher education institution and they were even more constrained. And so the difference in the environment was here - and this is what I recognized when I met Frank and Scott and everything in California - was the ability to have the flexibility, was ‘hey we want you to come here and do this job but if you have a different idea, we’ll run with it. Show us that it works and you can own a whole new division here.’ You know, I was watching Leah and Lindsey create the advertising program, which was they took the initiative to study and learn how to do it and do it really well, and now they own that entire division within the company, which was not something I had seen before. You hear about it, but I was first exposed to it here. Anyway, that’s the major difference.

John: Cool, OK. So, what can we be doing better as a company?

Andrew: What can we be doing better as a company? Well, I think a major - and I may have blinders on just because of where I am just saturated with this - but where we can do better is with the exact reason why we kind of created my position, which is to train and bring people up to speed, particularly new hires. That process hasn’t really been created yet and we’re working with some really great people to try and develop some training material so that as we continue to expand, or if someone leaves us and we have turnover from within, we need to make sure that we can bring someone on quickly and efficiently and train them appropriately. Right now it’s not quite there, but again that’s one of the responsibilities that I have here. It is a cop-out to say that one of the things we need to make better is the work that I need to do? I feel like that’s a cop-out but I’m going to take it.

John: Well, I get it a lot - training. That’s one of the things that I hear a lot on these. Alright, let’s talk about the people at Vyral. What do you like about working with them?

Andrew: Well, what I would say what I like about working with people here at Vyral is, it goes back a little bit to what I touched on when I went out to Omaha, which was they’re young, they’re enthusiastic, the people that I’m talking to mostly, the client managers, are very excited about their position. They’re excited about the opportunity they have there, they’re excited about the fact that they manage clients and they have all these opportunities for growing their team and learning. They impress me more and more because I get to have one-on-one meetings with all the client managers every single week. They continue to impress me in a way that I’m not expecting, and they often take my feedback with less of a cynical point of view that I feel like I might if I was in their position, if someone was Skyping me ideas about how I should do my job better. They sincerely seem to take that criticism and those ideas that I have, and implement them, and are enthusiastic to get back on the phone with me. I don’t know if I was their age a few years ago and I was in that position if I would be as gracious.

John: OK. Any memorable moments that you’ve had while working at Vyral?

Andrew: Lots already, I can say that. Definitely coming to Omaha is a major one. Being introduced who I had only seen through a computer screen was great. Meeting you, meeting the team in person was huge. Memorable moments, I’d say Omaha is definitely number 1, and then I would say when we went down to Florida a few months back to go to Tony Robbins was pretty amazing. We went with a few client managers, a couple people from San Diego, Frank, and that was an experience I wasn’t expecting, but it was very very good, and it was actually my first chance to meet some of the Omaha people outside video conference, so that was really excellent. I’m really excited because we actually have five people from Omaha joining us in Las Vegas in a couple weeks for a mortgage event. I’m not going to be there for the full event, but for the three days that I am there, I anticipate that being a really good one, because I’m excited for those people to meet some of our clients and potential clients in person.

John: Cool. Alright, so, honest to God, I ask people who are thinking about working here ‘hey did you watch those employee spotlights?’ and they do, so what do you tell those guys that are thinking about working at Vyral?

Andrew: People that are thinking about working for Vyral?

John: Yeah, what do you tell them about this job?

Andrew: That’s a good question, because I did tell someone, because I did hire my replacement here. So, I guess I’ll have to say what I told her, which is that it is a different work environment if you’re used to something very run of the mill, 9 to 5, that kind of thing, like a very traditional model. If you’re used to that, this is going to be a shift and a change in probably a good way for you. It’s going to challenge you to take on more responsibility and hold you to the things you take on to make sure you are being successful with them. So, I would say it’s challenging, it’s different, it’s exciting. So if someone was, let’s say someone who was looking to become a new client manager or someone who is looking to become a graphic designer or whatever in Omaha, what I would tell them is as somebody who has spent about a decade in a very traditional office environment of corporate structures and needing approval for implementing your ideas and kind of holding onto that idea that if I just do a good job, all of my work will be rewarded eventually - coming from that world, this is something that’s far more exciting that holds far more promise, and I feel like I’m in much more control of where my career is going right now than if I went a more traditional career route. So that’s something that I think not everybody understands, and I try and impart that wisdom into the people. I mean, I keep saying ‘if I was their age’ but they’re only like 5 or 6 years younger than me, but still, those 5 or 6 years are huge, like I made some pretty big career decisions when I was 22, 23, 24 that weren’t necessarily the best ideas, but yeah anyway, that would be my message to that person that was thinking about it.

John: OK. So who should not work at Vyral? You know, what are personality traits that of those people?

Andrew: Oh boy. Who should not work at Vyral? I would say somebody who is just looking for a paycheck, who doesn’t want to expand their role in whatever they get hired for. So, I mean, honestly you can get hired for any one of the positions here. Let's say you get hired as a project manager, and if your expectation and what you want out of that job is to show up, do the work, and collect your paycheck, and go home, and just do that without any expectation of personal growth, personal development, if you don’t want to attend conferences, if you don’t want to learn about the businesses we work with, if you don’t want to learn about what makes an entrepreneur successful and how to relate to them, if you don’t want to get on the phone with our clients and act as a consultant and talk with them about their product and their business and how to make them do better business - if you don’t want any of those things, you could do the work that we offer anywhere else, OK, but, the opportunities that we have here are for people who are curious and want to grow themselves professionally, and want to invest in themselves through their work so they become more valuable here or in their future career.

John: Cool. Well that was great. Thanks Andrew.

Andrew: No problem, thank you John.