#134 - Sam Waicberg, CEO CareAR - On using technology to retain tribal knowledge and grow competitive edge in field services

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has power to make field engineers far more productive, and give the companies they work for new ways to retain and grow their competitive edge. My guest is Sam Waicberg, Co-founder and CEO CareAr.

Sam Waicberg is an entrepreneurial business leader passionate about building brands that scale. His expertise: driving and inspiring high-performing teams, game-changing solutions, positioning strategies, innovative partnerships, ecosystems, and communities that create network effects and growth.

Throughout his career, he’s held senior roles in sales at Oracle, Blue Martini, Aspect Software, Ascendent Systems, Envox, Fluency Voice Technology, Genband, and Vidyo.

He’s recognized for strategic out-of-the-box approaches for developing and executing corporate and go-to-market plans, thought leadership, and creating long-term meaningful relationships.

In December 2018, he co-founded CareAR, an Augmented Reality platform for smart services. Their mission: Making expertise accessible anywhere and instantly.

This triggered me, and hence I invited Sam to my podcast. We explore the challenges faced in the field services market and how technology can help transform productivity, quality of work, and overall profitability. Beyond that, we dig into a much larger problem that the services industry is facing as a whole: the rapidly decreasing workforce, and what challenges that gives entrepreneurs to retain tribal knowledge and their competitive edge.

Here are some of his quotes:

Innovation is something that constantly drives us. We think about the art of what's possible all the time. And we don't think too much about limitations and barriers.

We saw a gap in the market, and the other is something that evolved

The simplest issue was applying what we see in telehealth when we see a long-distance learning to field service, getting a remote expert to assist the field tech on site to do a visual consult to solve the problem while they're out there.

The big problem permeated as we started getting in there and talking to more C-level people.

70% of their organization's most valuable assets, employees, are leaving over the next 5 to 10 years. All the knowledge goes out the door with that.

So, the C-levels really are thinking, this is what keeps them up at night, about ‘What can I do to retain this tribal knowledge? What can I do to transfer this knowledge to other new individuals coming into the organizations in a way where I can accelerate the pace of that and retain my competitive edge?’

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. How you can drive transformative value by bridging the gap between consumer applications and the enterprise workflow
2. That instead of constantly worrying about the catching up you have to do, focus your roadmap on the question: “How do you want to be the favourite?”
3. That the opportunity to create unique value is often hidden in developing an eye for rapidly developing issues that can become a catalyst for transformation
4. How to take friction for adoption out by not only focusing on the user experience, but also on the business model