Ep. 212: Jennifer Smith – Obsessing over efficiency with the CEO of Scribe

Connect with Jennifer: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenniferreneesmith/
Learn more about Scribe: https://scribehow.com/

Full Episode Transcript:

  < Intro >

Adam:            Hello and welcome to Count Me In. The podcast that explores the world of business from a management accountant's perspective. This is Adam Larson, and today my co-host Neha, is talking to a woman who describes herself as an accidental CEO. Jennifer Smith is the founder and CEO of Scribe. 

A software company that helps businesses capture and scale the expertise of their top performers, to drive new levels of productivity. From fighting collaboration overload to leveraging RPA, to attracting the right talent, Jennifer discusses how her obsession with efficiency has fueled her unique and unplanned leadership journey. Let's start the conversation.

 < Music >

Neha:              Welcome to Count Me In, Jennifer, it's such a pleasure to have you on the show.

Jennifer:         Thanks so much, I'm excited to be here.

Neha:              Awesome. So first things first, you call yourself an accidental CEO. Tell me more about that and what brought you to this point in life?

Jennifer:         Because if you were to ask me 15, 20 years ago, gosh, maybe even five, seven years ago, "Would you ever be CEO? Would you ever start your own company?"

I probably would've laughed at you and said, "No." It's not something I've ever thought about. I don't know anyone who does that, that's not in the cards for me. I started my career as a management consultant. 

So I was at McKinsey for seven years. I worked mostly with financial institutions in the Oregon operations practice. Which functionally meant I would spend nine to five sitting next to agents, in operations centers, looking over their shoulder and watching what they did. 

And if you ever do that work, you learn the name of the game is you figure out who the best person is. And you sit next to them and you say, "Well, what are you doing differently than everyone else?"

And you find that they've found better ways of working. They would say, "Oh, I was trained to do all of these things, but here's how I do this better." And they would show me, they're all tabbing, they're doing really fast things on their computer. They became whizzes at finding these shortcuts and these very complicated pieces of software they were using. 

And, as a consultant, I would dutifully write that up and sell that back to my client. But I always thought like, "Gosh, if we had a way to just capture what these people knew how to do. They could have had really big impact on that op center. They could have helped their colleagues all be better." And I said, "Well, it's an obvious problem, someone will solve that someday, surely." 

And then, you fast-forward 10 years later and then I'm working in venture capital, and investing in enterprise software companies. And I spent a lot of my time talking to buyers of enterprise software, again, folks in financial services. Just trying to understand like, "What are your open problems? What are your challenges? What are you trying to solve?"

And this idea kept coming back. People saying like, "Oh, gosh, well, I or my people are spending a lot of time doing similar tasks over and over again. And actually they do it differently, it's definitely different between people, everyone finds their own way." Sometimes it's not even consistent within the same person. They do something once a quarter, they don't quite remember it, they try to do the process, especially, if they've a very complicated software. 

I'm like, "Wouldn't it be really nice if there were a way to just know what was the best of what everyone knew how to do?" And I don't really have a way of doing that today. My only option is to tell someone, "Just take time away from doing your actual work and please generate a document that shows what you know how to do." That's not a very popular request. 

And, so, I looked at it and said, "Gosh, technology has gotten so much better. It's so many years later and we're still facing the exact same problems." And I shifted from like, "Someone should do something about this." To, "Well, I don't think anyone is doing anything about this and they should, so I guess I'll do something about this."

And, so, I very much did not intend to start a company. I cared a lot about solving a particular problem. I'm obsessed with efficiency. And I just saw a massive inefficiency in how millions, hundreds of millions of people around the world are spending their nine to five, trying to navigate these complicated pieces of software and trying to do it quickly, because everyone's got a million things going on and everyone's just doing their best.

But most people are doing it sub-optimally and it's taking them more time, and they're spending a lot of time even just trying to figure out what to do, that's not a good feeling. And, so, I said, "Well, gosh, if I could solve that for people, why would I do something else? This feels like what I should be doing." And, so, I started my company, Scribe, three and a half years ago now.

Neha:              Wow, that's really insightful and thank you for connecting it to common business problems that we are all facing every day. So this reminds me of a conversation I was having with my daughter, she's 10 years old. And I was telling her about coming on this interview and meeting you, the CEO of the company. 

And she was very curious, of course, about the company and your work. I was, of course, able to help her understand what the word Scribe means. But how would you explain to a fifth grader, in simplest terms, what you and your team does?

Jennifer:         Yes, we actually design our software, so a fifth grader could use it, it's designed for people across digital literacy. So you could actually tell her to just try it out if she's at all curious, and she should be able to do it. 

So, Scribe, very simply, we're a desktop application or a browser extension, your choice. And we will watch you do work and auto-generate step-by-step, written guides with screenshots showing how to do that process. 

So let's say, for example, you have a client who is constantly asking you, let's pick something very simple, "How do I log into my QuickBooks Portal?" I don’t know, that's probably a question you've gotten before. So all you would do is you would click the Record button and you would log into the QuickBooks portal, and you would click Start Record. And, boom, Scribe would auto-generate step-by-step written guide on how to log into a QuickBooks Portal.

Again, very simple example, but it would say, "Step one, navigate to www.quickbooks.com.

Step two, click on the Login icon, instead, it's got a...