Crain’s Chicago Business Profiles NogginLabs
8 October 2007
Recently Crain’s Chicago Business interviewed Brian and Traci Knudson, CEO and CFO of one of Chicago’s most innovative and award winning companies, on their philosophy towards their clients.
MR. KNUDSON: We create programs with simulated conversations, with actors recording the parts of the customers. If the employee says the wrong thing to a customer in the online course, the customer will start getting mad at them, and the employee will have to dig himself or herself out of a hole, just like what would happen on the job. We started out creating programs for Allstate, then Dell, and now we have lots of clue chip clients, inlcuding McDonald’s, Abbott labs and AOL.
MS. KNUDSON: Every year we look for new clients, because what if a client were to go away? Perhaps they’d be acquired by someone and stop building e-learning for a year, and that would put a hole in our business. We have 35 employees to protect.
I don’t think that looking for new customers means we lose focus on the ones we’ve got. We’ve given more-defined roles to our staff members and identified key phases when Brian and I will check in. That ensures that Brian and I still have focus on every project but are not involved in all the details. Working with new clients also keeps our employees from burning out. They enjoy writing about how to make french fries for McDonald’s…because you’re training 2.1 million people a year. But if that’s all you ever did, you might tire of it.
MR. KNUDSON: Another reason we’re constantly pushing the evnvelope on who we work for and what we do is to keep it interesting. Every time we invent something new for clients, it causes us to get more clients.
MS. KNUDSON: Last year, revenues were $2.4 million, and this year our sales will be about $4 million, so we’re definitely growing. We have 25 active clients now, and we’d like to add three to five clients a year for the next 10 years or so. We don’t have any plans to stop growing, but when we reach 100 clients, we’ll re-evaluate.
