Keith Cline, VentureFizz
Dave, thanks so much for joining us.
David Keil, Lakeside
It's great to be here once again. Thank you.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
Yeah, we've got some catching up to do, because we talked about a year ago, and you're three months into the CEO job at Lakeside. And this is a category called Digital employee experience management. So let's talk about that. Like, what does that mean? And what does Lakeside do
David Keil, Lakeside
So think about Lakeside is a company that would ultimately allow your employees to not throw their computer out the window when it's not working. So we help large complex IT environments, get visibility and crush their entire digital estate, and allow them to do more with less. And we do this with a very comprehensive platform called ces track, which is the leading IT data intelligence platform in this category as validated by Gartner, Forrester and other leading research firms.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
Well, let's talk about some of the like examples of like, customers use cases, like when I think about how work continues to evolve, and how employees are engaging with their employer, it's been a, it's been a moving target, you know, it was a remote for the pandemic, now, companies are still trying to figure out hybrid in person, you know, so it's, it's evolving a lot.
David Keil, Lakeside
You know, we think about this constantly, what was interesting is our Head of Customer Success, Guy lever spent a bunch of time early on last year, getting feedback from customers. And what they said was, both Lakeside, and some of the other players in the space, do a lot of amazing things, but that they needed a little more help driving to a clear ROI and proving out the business case with more clarity and more methodology. So we deployed something that's fairly unique in the industry called the philosophy blueprint, you can actually read about it on our website. And it really makes it much easier and clearer. And essentially, productize is the business case is around eight key areas that are most common that our customers face. So I'll speak about a couple of those, the primary one that we see, increasingly first is to improve visibility, get focused on what the CPU disk memory impacts are to a user experience score that we come up with, identify users that are impacted devices that are impacted in a challenging way, and provide that visibility to an IT organization and the service desk to remediate these issues much quicker, or in some cases, actually understand the issues and resolve the issues before they become apparent to the end user. So this visibility use case is incredibly critical and provides a very significant ROI. And then there are some areas that are a little bit more straightforward, perhaps, how about hardware optimization and software license optimization? You know, how do you really have visibility across your physical estate, and understand what hardware needs to be right size, what hardware needs to be improved, and perhaps what hardware is still able to be sustained and not replaced so that you can really bring data to this part of the equation and make sure that the decisions and companies are making around their hardware usage are data-driven and very efficient. Similarly, from a software license standpoint, we look at the packages across the entire state. And we are able to drive significant cost reduction because we're giving information through this visibility to not pay for licenses that are not being used, or are not being licensed in the most appropriate way. So these are a couple of the key use cases. There's several more that I'd love to go into if we had more time for sure.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
So what's the current state of the state at the company at Lakeside? So like, number of employees, your investors, whatever you can share?
David Keil, Lakeside
Yeah, we're about 250 employees today. We have amazing investors with insight partners. They're one of the largest investors software investors in the world. I've actually worked with the team at Insight Partners now over the last eight years, this is the third business I've I've run under their leadership, and they are big believers and invest for growth, and to really work intensely with executive teams to scale in a very smart way. So we've had gone through a significant transformation at Lakeside over the past 15 months, we've upgraded our capabilities across many of the functions we've also centered on a customer first approach throughout the organization. And what that really does is not only relies on our customer success team to ensure that our customers are happy but ensure that every function in the company praises the price already on our customer usage, our customer happiness and our customer success as their number one goal. So we've changed compensation systems to support this, we've really re engineered our product roadmap to drive this effort. And this customer first approach is said, huge positive impact on our overall retention over the last eight to 12 months.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
So what's it like working at Lakeside? What's the what's the culture? Like, if someone joins the team?
David Keil, Lakeside
Yeah, thank you. We did a lot of people recently of our tutor and 50 employees over 100, believe it or not, have joined us in the past 12 months. So that creates a very exciting, very fast moving very dynamic culture. We have three hubs, if you will, across US and Europe, Michigan has been our engineering hub for many years. And that's where our founder and the founding engineering team are still based. So the Michigan culture is one that really prides itself on very incredible understanding of domain expertise of the employer, employee experience space that they've been focused on for 1520 years now. Our Boston office is the major office for our sales, marketing and GNA functions. And that's a that's generally an area that we've got some of the, the employees that have been here, you know, for two to five years, have a very high energy culture and really complements the experience team in Michigan quite well. And we have obviously lots of opportunities for the two teams to work closely together and visit each other's offices, etc. And then in Europe, we have a really fast growing hub in London. I was just there recently, and we continue to invest heavily in Europe. And I want to point out, we're not only strong and present in the Northern Europe region, with our London hub, our Scandinavian focus, but we recently added on a very experienced team in the dark region, in Zurich in Germany, which we expect to be a significant growth path for us into the end of the year and specially into next year.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
Now, top tier talent, regardless of market conditions, they always have options. So why should Lakeside be on the radar for potential employees?
David Keil, Lakeside
We think about that all the time, and it is always critical to both hire and retain these top employees. What I think people will find it at Lakeside is an ability to be with a company that is big enough to really matter where a business that is one of the top two or three in our category. According to Gartner, According to Forrester, we are very committed to becoming the number one player in our space. Yet it's small enough that everybody can make a huge difference and really has an impact in a very, very material way. So if if employees are excited to be on the front line to be working closely with the executive team and to really be very customer focused and customer facing in an exciting fast moving environment, this would be the right opportunity and culture for them.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
Well, if you are incent exploring opportunities at Lakeside, you needed to go to their company page on VentureFizz, which has all their job listings, go to venturefizz.com/lakeside and you'll see all their listings there. Dave, thanks so much for taking the time to walk us through all the details on the company.
David Keil, Lakeside
Thanks for having me again, and look forward to a great year ahead.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
