B2B Training Solutions leveraging Generative AI in the Healthcare Industry with Avi Singer

AS HEARD ON: The B2B Growth Blueprint

Presented by Modern Revenue Strategies, listen in as showdme CEO & Founder Avi Singer, and the host of The B2B Growth Blueprint podcast Mark Osborne discuss leveraging AI technology in healthcare.

Mark Osborne:

Welcome to the B2B Growth Blueprint podcast where we talk with entrepreneurs, founders, and leaders at B2B services, tech and SaaS companies to learn the systems and processes they’ve used to create success for their business. We’ll also learn from marketing and sales experts to provide insights to help you grow your business. I’m your host, Mark Osborne, and the podcast is brought to you by Modern Revenue Strategies and their 10 XROI B2B growth guarantee. Schedule a free diagnostic call to learn the fastest path to double your B2B revenues in just 90 days. Hello and welcome to another episode of the B2B Growth Blueprint podcast. I’m your host Mark Osborne, and today I’m excited to welcome our guest. I’m going to read his bio here so I get it right. Avi Singer is the founder and CEO of showed me. They’re an online compliance training company focused on healthcare. So over the past three years, showed me has helped train over a hundred thousand different caregivers, 150,000 different employees across more than 800 organizations, and they’ve grown to become one of the largest providers of home care training in the state of New York. Prior to showed me, Avi was vice president of People at Undertone, which was named one of the best places to work five years in a row by Crane’s Magazine. He’s also held human resources learning and organizational development positions at places like Indeed, as well as double click Google and even the Blue Man Group in Las Vegas. So Ari, thanks so much for coming. Welcome,

Avi Singer:

Mark. Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate you inviting me on the show.

Mark Osborne:

Absolutely. So that’s a really large number of volume of trainings that you’ve executed. Surely you haven’t done all those by yourself. Tell us a little bit about what you do there at Showed Me.

Avi Singer:

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So I started out my career in human resources and specifically in learning and development and love that space, love onboarding new hires, getting them up to speed, training them, seeing their careers grow. When I realized I was kind of done with being within hr, within the tech space, I went out and started my own learning management platform called Showed Me. Initially we were focused on peer-to-peer learning, but this opportunity sort of dropped into our laps where we discovered that within the post-acute healthcare space there were some real challenges and real struggles getting employees properly trained. And I started looking at that industry and again, as a tech founder, there’s some things that you’re looking for that just, it checked all the boxes, annual recurring revenue, basic things like that, high level dissatisfaction with most of the software in the post-acute space that people were looking for good software.

And then there’s real training need People in the compliance space have to be trained. It has to happen every year and has to get done and they needed help. And we pivoted in 2017, we pivoted into online training for post-acute for healthcare. Currently work with lots of different verticals like home care, home health, skilled nursing, a BA, lots of different markets and the organization has grown with that. So we’ve grown from initially being a tech company, building this amazing platform and this great service provider to now also including things like content development, course development. We’ve got extensive course library that covers all the needs and things like that. So it’s not really thought of as an exciting space when you think about HIPAA and OSHA and things like that, but we think it is, we love it. The organization’s now over 40 employees, completely remote across the United States and even overseas. And we’re excited. We’re excited about what we get to do every single day. We’re excited about the success and the help that we provide with our clients and we’re excited. They give us great feedback about how it’s working for them.

Mark Osborne:

That’s awesome. That’s great. So I think maybe it’s in the Lean startup or one of the books around agile development, they talk about that most successful companies have had to pivot at least once in order to really find that niche. And it’s interesting to think about you had a business that was going in a direction, you were able to sort of perceive changes in the marketplace and recognize an opportunity and then pivot. And so I’ve oftentimes seen companies kind of struggle with letting go of what they were doing and then fully embracing the new opportunity that they’ve identified. Talk to us a little bit about how you kind of did that, and especially from the standpoint of like I’m sure it changed the ideal customer and the persona of that. And so then obviously the way that you position yourself and the differentiators that you bring to market, talking about that, how did you successfully make that transition without having leftover artifacts that were more a function of how the company used to be or what used to be your function versus the new? Talk to us about that.

Avi Singer:

Yeah, it certainly isn’t easy. I think any CEO or even any founder will tell you it’s your baby. So trying to turn your baby that’s maybe a righty into a lefty or something like that. It’s not easy. It’s not easy to let go of again, your dreams and your aspirations and pick up something else. I think one thing that does make it a little bit easier is understanding that if you really want to build a real business and a real company, I think you have to really think about is what I’m building nice to have or is it a need to have? The ideal place you want to be is in the need to have space. And I think what we realized was as much as we can try to convince yourself that the platform we had built was neat to have, it really wasn’t.

It was nice to have and when given the opportunity to be in compliance and even though again, compliance is not nearly as cool and exciting as some of the other things we’re doing, but if going back to what I was saying before, but if you really want to be here for the long run and you want lots of clients and lots of customers and lots of growth, you need to do it. So that made it easier for me. It made it easier for me to make the transition and even talk to our company people who had invested hours and hours and years of their lives in building a platform to pivot and switch by saying, Hey, do we want to be the company we dreamed about being or do you want to be a really successful company? And if we want to be a real successful company and feel good about ourselves and have happy customers and recurring clients and things like that, we need to pivot into this need to have space.

And the opportunity is there. And I will say that there was overwhelming support internally. People were willing, and to your point about what happens to the platform and all these cool things you built, they were willing to do that. I was so appreciative and still am appreciative that they were willing to take pieces they had built that were amazing and cool and all these things and say, you know what? I’m willing to put that in the background. I’m willing to move that away because I need to build something quizzes, which is something, need the compliance space as opposed to something cool around video chat and things like that that we had built before. So not easy, but again, I think if your reasons are good and can articulate it well to your employees and get their support, you can make it happen.

Mark Osborne:

That’s such a great point about moving from a nice to have versus a need to have. I was reading some statistic the other day that for B2B services and even sort of technology underpinned services, your biggest competitor is nothing because something like 70% of the time when they say no to you, it’s not because they chose a competitor. It’s because they either did a satisficing solution internally, they kind of figured out what they could do themselves or they did nothing and sort of resolved to the status quo. So really creating a solution that lives where they’ve got a burning platform they have to jump off of is really sort of key to success. So good on you for recognizing that. And I also think it’s a great comment about your dreams have to evolve. It’s funny, this microphone is sort of a vestige of my past life.

I was a musician and oftentimes people that I’ll meet will be like, you ever miss it? Or you feel like you gave up your dream? I’m like, no. My dreams evolved as I grew up. I found I was just as excited about marketing bands as I was playing in ’em. And then turned out I was really the marketing that was the pull the whole time. So it’s kind of interesting how those evolved thinking about companies and obviously you had a lot of forethought and self-awareness to recognize that you needed to make this switch. And you and I were talking a little bit before about the importance of really having disciplined planning and forecasting. One of the things that a statistic we say a lot is Harvard Business Review says that a company with the marketing plan has four times the success of one without all other things being equal. Just taking the time to write it down can literally quadruple your success rate. You were talking a little bit about the importance of focusing on the unit economics. Talk to us a little bit about that and how you thought about that through the lens of your business.

Avi Singer:

I grew up in the tech space and I think people always got excited about money that’s being raised, and that was for many years a proxy of success. Oh, they’re a successful company, they raised a hundred million dollars, there’s $500 million. And I was very fortunate to have mentors who guided me a little bit differently and they said, build a fundamentally sound business and don’t focus on raising money. And just as an aside, I think one of the nice things about not getting sort of caught up in raising money as a founder, you get to spend time on your business as opposed to being a fundraiser, which many tech founders end up being and I get to focus on my business, but that’s because I was again mentored and coached to think about, hey, build a fundamentally sound business. Understand what are people willing to pay for your product?

What’s the market opportunity for your product and therefore what can you afford to build and expand and think about where you’re going to go with this based on that. So be realistic about how much money can we earn year one, year two, year three, and then build your business that way. And I think what that saves you from is sort of sometimes perceived success. So I spent $10, I earned one, and I think that’s successful. I earned one. And that’s what a lot of founders unfortunately go through. And then all of a sudden one day that money dries up and we can’t run this business anymore. We built a business that costs $10 to run and now we’re getting zero or something like that. So I think number one, it’s easier to see what’s real and what’s true in terms of success. It’s easier to see and is this really fundamentally sound business that can grow and can we build off of it?

It makes you also a little bit hungrier knowing that kind of old school, you can only eat what you hunt and kill. So it makes a little bit hungrier in that sense and you don’t get this sort of false, again, this sort of false confidence that I don’t have to necessarily hunt that much because I’ve got this money in the bank. I’ve got money we’ve raised. And again, aside from the mentoring and coaching, I think I’m fortunate that I’ve always had employees that kind of thought that way as well. So I never felt pressure from my employees, when are we raising money and what kind of round can we raise and what’s the valuation of the business or things like that. I think they’ve always looked at it as, Hey, we’re building a good business. We’ve got great recurring customers, great logo retention rates and things like that. And that’s really the kind of business that we want to be part of.

Mark Osborne:

And you look especially prescient, it’s now May of 2024, we had what, 20 years of essentially free money in the marketplace. So many people built their businesses based on the premise that, well, there’ll always be extra money that I can bring in. I don’t have to necessarily be profitable for any foreseeable horizon. Whereas today that just doesn’t work. And so the fact that you sort of built your business with that certainly is much better aligned to the dynamics in the marketplace today. When we were chatting earlier, you made such an interesting comment that I have to sort of share with the audience, which is about when people are buying a house or even let’s say they’re looking to get a loan to invest in expanding their house, they don’t get that loan to expand their house and then sell back the one room that they added on back to the bank, which is fundamentally what you’re doing when you’re giving up equity in your business. And I thought that was such an interesting analogy and sort of a visual that people actually thought about. Yeah, I would never do that. Why would you do that with your business?

Avi Singer:

Yeah, it’s a hard mind shift. Again, people getting it, like you said, 20 years and then lots of fundraising and all these unicorns and all that. And people always figure that’s a proxy. A proxy for success is your A round and your B round and your C round and all that. But yeah, I mean again, I fortunate had those mentors and who would tell me, but to you, to your point, right, you’re selling a piece of your business in order to get that and to the analogy you just mentioned before, yeah, it’s like you’re paying your mortgage by selling off pieces of your upstairs and your bedrooms and attic and things like that in order to meet your mortgage, maybe think about it a little bit differently, maybe think, hey, maybe this isn’t quite the right thing for me if I need to do that because inevitably will happen is you’ll get to that point where you can’t raise anymore or now we’re seeing down rounds and things like that and it really disrupts your business and it makes it unpleasant for employees and you have layoffs and all those kinds of things. And again, I would love to be able to hopefully avoid those things forever just by being a little bit more disciplined about, again, what kind of money we’re making and what money we’re spending and how do we do that in a way that’s controlled but still grow, right? I mean that bottom line is they still want to grow, so you don’t want to get stagnant over there, but there are other ways of doing it for sure.

Mark Osborne:

Yeah. Well, and so that brings us to a really interesting point around when you are bootstrapping, and I’ve worked with plenty of clients and companies that we’re in that sort of position. They create some tension from the things that you want to do. If you don’t have that VC fund of the open checkbook, you can kind of do everything at once. You kind of need a way to prioritize. And oftentimes we see the friction between, well, marketing wants to do this and they think it’s going to generate all these leads, but sales really wants to do this. They think it’s going to generate more revenue. And where do they find that alignment? What have you seen be some successful strategies for creating alignment and diffusing the tension that exists when companies are sort of bootstrapping and having to focus on profitability?

Avi Singer:

Yeah, it’s a great question. I think you mentioned before that companies with the marketing plan are four times successful as the ones without, I’d probably extend that to other parts of the business as well. Product plan, tech plan in our world of building out courses and content, of course development plan. And it’s another filter that you need to put all these plans through and say, okay, but what are we going to get out that when you’ve got that money in the bank and you’re like, eh, it’s just a risk we’re taking. Let’s see what happens. Hopefully it’ll work out. You have that capacity when you don’t have it. You really have to ask yourself, if I develop this course, what’s my ROI on that course going to be, right? So yeah, it’s a nice course to develop and it seems like a nice idea, maybe we should have it, maybe we shouldn’t.

Should we go to this conference? And not just, it has a big name, but literally what’s the ROI on that conference? What’s the ROI on building things? We’re getting customer requests. And what’s interesting about that is when you’re sort of in that world of really thinking things through about what’s the return on investment? Is this a good idea? Should we pursue it? You can even discuss that with your clients. They’ll come to you and they’ll say, Hey, you guys should do X, Y, Z. But if they’re mature and you’re mature and you sort of express that to them, you can sit down and say, Hey, it really is a good idea. However, we just don’t think there’s going to be an opportunity for us to make money off of it. So again, kind of like we were talking before, it falls in the nice to have category versus need to have category.

Same thing with a course. They might say, it would be great for you to have this course in your library. We think it would be great. And we could say it is a good course to have. We just don’t think there’s a market demand for it. And again, when they’re seeing that you’re consistent on that and you’re not just trying to push them off or avoid it, but you’re consistent in terms of your mindset and how you think about things, they’ll take it that way. And we see the same thing with employees and employees realize that, again, you’re not trying to be cheap. You’re not trying to not spend money, but you treat every dollar with value. They start getting creative. I mentioned to you as we were talking before, we’ve had employees come to us and say, Hey, I took a look at our AWS costs and they seem to be going through the roof.

Do you mind if I take a look at it and see if I could bring them down? Our company use a lot of text messaging to communicate with our users and employees will take a look at that and say, Hey, I see our SMS costs are going up. Maybe I could take a look at that and see if there’s something creative we can do to lower our costs in different places. So they start getting and seeing that the challenge as well, like, Hey, how can I be creative? How can I think more about unit economics and costs and things like that so that I can continue on this path that we’ve set forth here? How can we build a good, fundamentally sound profitable business? So yeah,

Mark Osborne:

That net present value calculation that we all learned in school, it’s funny, it’s applicable so many places and it’s such a valuable tool to think about, if I could spend this dollar today, I got five places I could spend it, what’s the payback schedule? What’s the possible return? What’s the likelihood of success? We actually do that in marketing and sales. Oftentimes, you are sort of making a bet in marketing because you’re going to make an investment today and hope that it pays off. But oftentimes we’ll see people kind of just say, well, here’s what the upend potential could be. I’m like, well, what’s the likelihood? What’s the probability of that upend potential versus maybe we have a narrower band of probability of what’s most likely to happen. It’s also funny too though, and a lot of people talk about this from, there’s a great book called Thinking in Bets.

I don’t know if you’ve read it, but it’s a good read I’d recommend. But they talk about oftentimes companies fail to do the thing that they should do because of a really deep downside potential, but the probability of its minuscule. And so they’ll never take a risk on something that could have. And in fact, the probability of at least a good outcome is quite high and a great outcome is actually reasonably high, but a very small chance of devastating risk, and they’ll never take those risks, which what you did with pivoting obviously represented a lot of risks, but a lot more upside potential.

Avi Singer:

Yeah, I agree with both of those. I think you have to, again, if you’re in technology and you want to stay ahead of the curve, you’re definitely going to have to take some risks. Again, everyone’s talking about AI right now, and it was was really great. I was at a conference a while back and they had different case studies get up, and one of the best case studies was a company who had pursued AI and it didn’t work. And they said, but we tried it. And I thought that was so refreshingly honest and sort of like they said, Hey, we thought it would do something. We thought it would be helpful. We thought we could implement it. We did it for six months, we rolled it out, customers didn’t see the value in it, and that’s it. So yeah, I think if you can be honest, then I agree with you, you can make those bets and try not to get stuck there and pile on and invest more and put more button money behind it, but just be honest.

So you can do that. And again, it’s the same discipline in terms of thinking about, okay, we know we’re going to do well here, so let’s do that. So we’ve had situations where at times we’ve thought about what are other areas of compliance outside of healthcare that we should maybe look at and address? Should we get into the construction industry? Should we get into, and there were times where we kind of dipped our toe and say, Hey, we could do this. We could do this really well. And then we have to ask ourselves, but can we focus on it? Can we put enough attention on it? If we’re focused on healthcare, can we also be focused on construction or something else? Sorry, excuse me. And again, you just have to have those honest moments and say, if our goal is that whatever we’re doing, we’re doing it a hundred percent. We’re doing it in a way where we feel like we’re going to really achieve something unique here. Let’s continue focus on that. Let’s not get distracted by some of these other things. So again, I’m fortunate we’ve got employees at our organization who are not afraid to give feedback or give their thoughts and ideas. We’re a pretty flat organization, and I can always run these things by others and say, Hey, we have this opportunity. What do you think? Should we go after it? Should we not? And that’s always refreshing to have.

Mark Osborne:

That’s a good discipline. Have a common conversation with folks about strategy is what you choose not to do as much as what you choose to do. And very often, especially when companies are early stage, they’re like, well, we want to serve everyone. We want the largest possible total addressable market when in fact you can’t do that well. And so it’s by picking a specific industry as you’ve focused on healthcare, that you really start to carve out your own niche and become differentiated in a way that no one else can if they aren’t really focused on that individual industry.

Avi Singer:

Absolutely.

Mark Osborne:

That’s really interesting. So tell us, what’s something that you’re excited about that’s on the horizon for showed me

Avi Singer:

Things that I’m excited about specifically? That’s a good question. I think, again, we are in the compliance space, which is sort of again, the sort of boring stuff. However, again, AI is there. I’ll give you some examples of, and we’re excited about AI and some of the things they’ll do, and hopefully none of our competitors are going to watch this podcast. I think everyone else should watch this podcast. So we have a massive audience, but none of our direct competitors should watch this. So I’ll give you an example of just, so, again, Neil, I’ve gone to certain conferences and I think that message I mentioned before is you have to be thinking about ai and it may not be something you need to do and pursue, but you have to be thinking about it because the worst case scenario with someone else in your industry is thinking about it, is fly right by you.

They have been one area. We’ve seen some great success there and we’re very excited about this is around the ability to produce really interesting content. So we think about the old school creating a course. Let’s say you have to take an anti-harassment course or some kind of corporate compliance course. The federal government requires that the state requires it. You go read the regulation, someone puts together a PowerPoint to do some voiceover, and that’s the course. I think what’s happening now in the AI space is number one, and that’s expensive also. It takes time. You’ve got to write a script and you’ve got to, however you’re putting it together, whether it’s actors or whatever, it’s, it’s a timely, costly thing. With ai now, there’s so many things you can do. Number one, you can have AI actually review regulatory requirements for you and come back and say, Hey, this is what we believe their training requirements are to cover this topic.

So just interesting. That alone just seems like really fascinating for us. We can get AI to produce scripts at a cost and pace that may be at 20% of the cost before AI is now getting into film creation and movie creation and beyond even animation, voiceover translation work, we’re seeing translation work and things like that. We’ve seen the cost of producing really good strong content go from sometimes eight to $10,000 a course down to two, $3,000 a course. And that’s just the first thing we look at, save us money. And the next thing we kind look at is what if there was a world where people didn’t find content to be boring? You didn’t get this email from HR saying, sit through this anti harassment training or sit through this corporate compliance training. What would that look like? And what we think about now is what if on its own the content could actually address you specifically?

So what if based on the basic information they have about you, we could address you by name. We could talk to you based on your gender identity. We could talk about you based on the state that you live in or the kind of work that you do, or other things we know about you. So now it seems like, wow, someone’s actually talking to me versus me sitting through this sort of random course that’s just like your generic course across the board. There’s really some interesting ways of being able to customize content and we’re hoping to do that. So really hoping to shift from boring content that’s just off the shelf generic to where it really feels like, Hey, this was created for me based on my role, my position, my place, my experience, some of my own other personal characteristics. And I think that’s one.

And then the other area that we think is going to be incredible is, again, we’re in healthcare and right now we’re happy we do this. We have provide our clients with a great service, check the box, make sure that you’re doing all the things you’re supposed to be doing. But we think we have an opportunity to improve care. If we can start to extract information from systems that will tell us what are some of the biggest issues happening in this facility? Oh, there are four cases of sepsis, which is an infection type of issue. And therefore we can start to, in real time, deliver training to start addressing some of those issues. We’re having some issues in food service, and again, I don’t know your audience is going to be particularly interested in those things, but these are things that are interesting for us when you think about leveraging some of the new tools out there to not only customize content and make it intriguing and interesting for audiences out there, but also to be able to adjust in time training, right?

Hit people at that most important point of care so that yes, they’re checking their box, they’re making sure the state says we’re happy with the training that you’re doing. We’re also making sure that that training that they’re doing is not only going to check the box with the state, but it’s also going to help them improve care with their clients. So again, we think there’s lots of exciting opportunities, particularly in the healthcare space to address a lot of those things. And I think in other industries as well, when it comes to compliance rather than, again, generic compliance, I think we can read systems, look at systems, get data from systems that will tell us, Hey, don’t just do the generic training. There’s something specific you want to be addressing. If your people are sitting at a computer anyway, going through training, there’s some specific things you want to be addressing. So those are the things that we’re looking at right now that we think are interesting in the compliance and training space and really focused on it.

Mark Osborne:

That’s very interesting. The generative AI stuff, really good applications like that, like data that’s applicable and relevant to the business and using that to shape and inform what’s happening, those are going to be the real transformative stories. Well, it saved me time writing a brief, that’s not that exciting. But instead, the idea of it digested a hundred pages of legal documentation in five minutes, that’s where you really start to see some really interesting innovation taking place

Avi Singer:

And also read the regulation and try to make it creative. So again, that’s the kind of prompting as you learn about prompting, prompting you can do is like, don’t just read this back to me. How is this going to be engaging material, even though it comes across as sort of standard boring material?

Mark Osborne:

Yeah. So for our listeners that maybe they’re in healthcare, maybe they need the type of services you provide, if they were in a room with you and three other people, what’s different about shog me? Why would they work with you?

Avi Singer:

Yeah, that’s a great question. I think the reason we got into this space was the message we were getting from people who were already in healthcare and the providers that they were working with at the time was, Hey, they’re giving us technology. They’re giving us a content library, but it’s all on us and we have way too many things to do. We have too much work already on our plate. Human resources is busy with staffing and retention. Compliance is busy with dealing with state regulations and requirements. We don’t have time to do this. And I said, what is this something that we potentially could take on for our clients? Imagine if not only we had the platform and the content library, but imagine we could do this for them. Or we can go to them and say, Hey, instead of us giving you this platform and giving this content library, you give us your employees, and we will make sure that everyone takes all the required training they need to an annual basis.

And that’s really what we articulate whenever we’re talking to prospects or clients and customers and say, how are you different than your competitors? And I say, what did our competitors offer you? And they say, well, they offered us technology and they offered us a library. I said, well, that’s not what I’m offering you. I’m offering you compliant employees and I’ll take care of all that for you. And we’ve been able to do that at scale, and that’s, I think, the unique nature of our business. People will come to the state, but I own 50 facilities across six states. Can you do that? And I said, yeah, we can do that. Or I have 10,000 employees in three states. Are you able to get to all of them? I’m like, yeah, yeah. We’ve figured out how to scale that. So that’s our big differentiator. Again, I think many of our competitors will have decent technology or they have good content libraries, but I think in today’s day and age, especially in the post-acute healthcare space that we’re in, people are looking for that extra hand extra help, and we’ve been able to help them really manage all compliance requirements and stay within the regulatory requirements that they have without a lot of work on their part.

Mark Osborne:

That’s great. Avi, this has been such a great conversation. We could chat all day, but I’m sure you got to get on and build some more courses and help some more people get compliant. For folks that want to get in touch with you, how do they get in touch?

Avi Singer:

Yeah, the easiest way are on our website, www doho. That’s SHO wd do me. That’s the easiest way to get in touch with us. I mean, they can always reach out to me personally. I respond to everybody. I love talking to clients prospects. Mine is easy. avi@show.me, SHO wd.me. And yeah, any questions they have, like I said, we’re always interested in the conversation and opening people’s eyes up to just a different way of handling these things.

Mark Osborne:

Awesome. Thanks again, Avi, really appreciate you joining us today.

Avi Singer:

Thanks so much for having me, mark. It’s been great. Alright,

Mark Osborne:

Bye-Bye. Thank you for joining this episode of the B2B Growth Blueprint podcast. We hope you’ve gained insights to grow your business. If you enjoyed this discussion, please rate, comment like on your favorite platform and share to others who’ll find it useful. Do you know a CEO founder or leader at an early stage B2B services, tech or SaaS company who would like to be a guest and share their story? Send us a note. Let’s schedule a conversation.