Ken Gavranovic Podcast Transcript
Ken Gavranovic joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, home of the Digital Executive podcast.
Welcome to the Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Ken Gavranovic. Ken Gavranovic is a seasoned technology executive, global keynote speaker and member of the Thinkers 50 and the Forbes Council, renowned for helping brick and mortar businesses leverage AI and advanced technologies for immediate impactful results.
With over three decades of experience, Ken has collaborated with top venture firms guiding over 18 successful exits, 35 mergers and acquisitions, and one IPO. Ken’s expertise spans iconic brands like Disney World and 7- 11 where he implemented technology solutions that improved customer engagement and operational efficiency as CEO of Product Genius, Ken pioneers AI power tools that turn real-time data into meaningful customer interactions, empowering customer facing businesses to achieve measurable improvements in service and efficiency.
His career highlights include founding Interland now web.com, where he grew the company from zero to 200 million in revenue in just three years before leading it through a successful IPO. Ken also held executive roles at New Relic and Cox Automotive, where he spearheaded digital transformation initiatives that enhanced customer engagement and operational performance.
Known for identifying and capitalizing on transformative trends. Ken offers invaluable insights for business leaders navigating today’s fast-paced, tech-driven landscape.
Well, good afternoon, Ken. Welcome to the show.
Ken Gavranovic: Brian, thanks so much for having me.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely, my friend. I appreciate it. Jumping on a podcast today. You’re hailing out of the Atlanta, Georgia, Alpharetta area, I guess, and I’m in Kansas City, so we’re just an hour apart. But I do appreciate you getting on a podcast with me today.
So Ken, jumping into your first question, you’ve helped over 18 companies exit successfully and led one to IPO. What are the core patterns or indicators you look for when evaluating a business readiness for that kind of growth?
Ken Gavranovic: Good question, Brian. I say I think there’s probably two parts. The first part is where you are.
You’re where you’re on the cycle, so you’re from, you think about it, you want to have the trend be your friend. You want to have the right people and then the capital to execute. I think that’s kind of the first part, and I look at that trend and quality of leadership team. The other part, I think that’s an interesting thing.
A lot of times people go about life and they’re like, how do I get to my goals? What I’ve seen very consistently with people, including myself, are able to kind of build that startup to IPO or have those big exits. It starts off with a really crisp vision, and this is where it gets a little bit different than most people do.
Most people go from vision to how, what I’ve seen is when people go from vision to y. And it’s a must. Like that vision of where they want to go, they know why they want to go there and it’s a must, not a should. Then the how’s come automagically and you’ll keep pivoting and pivoting and pivoting till you get to the right exit.
And I think that’s probably the key thing. And I remember one time I was sitting with a guy named Bill Gurley who funded Uber’s Benchmark Capital, very, very well, well known vc. And I was talking to him about Zillow, which at that point wasn’t public and you know, really was kind of non-existent. I said, you know, just outta curiosity, why’d you guys invest in Zillow?
How’s it going? And he said, well, it was great ’cause we can get the entire Expedia team. So when you have a team that’s aligned to that vision, that why it’s a must, they’ll figure out the how. And that’s where I’ve seen that big success.
Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. Thank you, and I appreciate you breaking that down.
For our audience and myself today, obviously trend, be your friend. I like that. Hire the right people and obviously leveraging that capital, but how do you get to your goals? Was the thing that really stood out for me is having that really crisp vision and having that why it’s a must. Obviously, if it’s not that, then you’re not gonna get there.
Totally get that. But hiring that right team is so, so important, and we all know this, whether you’re in business as an entrepreneur or you’re working at the corporate job, we’ve seen it time and time again. So thank you. Ken. At Product Genius, you’re using AI to turn realtime data into customer interactions.
Can you share an example of how this technology has transformed a client’s business, operations, or service delivery?
Ken Gavranovic: Yeah, I will. And lemme just give you a little context on how I think about ai. And kind of what’s coming, if you think about in modern businesses and I’ll, I’ll talk about some retail and customer interactions you specifically asked about.
There’s lots of interactions. We’ve all been in business meetings where there’s this report that has a bunch of KPIs. None of them are actionable and just kind of a waste of everybody’s time. What I believe with AI is AI’s gonna allow us to capture various aspects of our business that. Before either we couldn’t capture or was not actionable and AI could build, do that pattern matching to give us those true insights.
So now to answer your question with real-time data into customer interactions, one of the things that we’re doing with Product Genius is really thinking about how do we take AI and bring that to SMBs. Enterprise, larger companies, they’re already embracing it. They’re well in their way. Many times you’re getting AI from SaaS.
But if you think about a typical business that we go into, we walk into the business, we have a good or bad experience. There’s reasons why we found that business located it. We have an experience. We leave. And we kind of vote with what we tell our friends, or we never come back unless we’re really, really upset with that business.
And maybe we give them a a zero Google review or we give ’em a five star. And that’s kind of on the outlier. And so what we’ve seen there, a lot of those interactions aren’t simply tracked with product Genius. We’ve installed QR codes, for example, in retail establishments that allow customers to instantly give feedback to ask questions so they can, or even if they’re on the website, so they can go and say, Hey, what’s the special, what’s, you know, I had a great experience with someone. Basically capture a lot of those interactions that otherwise would never be captured in any way. And what’s interesting as we’ve installed this in restaurants we’re seeing, and the way the system works is it sends a weekly report to the business owner. It says, Hey, it looks like you have a staffing issue on Wednesdays from three to five.
It looks like the bar’s staffed light from eight to 10, or maybe someone’s not cleaning, or maybe you’ve got a really great hire, or maybe you’ve got a really bad hire. Instead of learning that. You know, typically a business owner will learn that through kind of the word of mouth grapevine. What we’re seeing is instead of learning it in 3, 4, 5, or maybe even two months, weeks, they get to see it instantly.
And so we’re seeing them see really the ability to quickly understand what’s working, not working in their customers, and pivot in real time.
Brian Thomas: That’s amazing and I’m glad we’re starting to leverage the technology. Like QR codes, you talked about it. We all know about reports to nauseam and they’re wrong and all wants to read ’em.
But with these different interaction points, AI obviously can capture the right ones and can do much, much more, much faster. Again, back to the QR code, providing that real time customer feedback will help the business owners obviously improve that business, so I appreciate that. Ken, as someone who’s seen multiple waves of digital transformation, how do you evaluate which tech trends are truly transformative versus just hype?
Ken Gavranovic: I would say probably there’s two ways to measure it. One is the, if you think about what’s the potential value of this transformation? So that’s kind of on the potential. And the other one is just look at the market trends. What’s the adoption rate? If you want to go way back in the day when I was in my twenties, I had this crazy little thought that every, every business was gonna run their business on the internet.
Started a business, took it from zero to 200 million, took it public. And because it was clear to me that the internet, I. Was gonna totally change the way we attract customers, the way we inform customers. And I already saw the traction that was going, like the first month in business, we did $40,000. So I think when you see that there’s clear traction.
That makes a lot of sense. If you think about digital transformation, which I’ve done a couple years ago, big enterprises, it just made sense from an efficiency perspective when you looked about kind of the future state versus current state. You could see, you know, with dollars and cents, the efficiency you’re gonna drive in that organization.
And then I’ll take it back to ai. I think AI is really interesting. If you look at it, this is the fastest growing adoption of a technology trend in the history of man. I think AI is gonna be more transformative to every single aspect, both good and bad ways across the board. You know, again, I think it’s what’s the adoption rate and what’s the potential of perceived value, I think are the two things that I look at from a trend perspective.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. I appreciate that, and I like how you’ve got lots of experience here, but leaning into the trends that are certainly going to be transformative or are changing things currently, you highlight a, a important one I think, is that ai, which I would agree with, is the fastest adoption of technology that we’ve seen in the history of the world.
So really appreciate your insights. Lots of them that we could talk for hours on it, I’m sure. Ken, the last question of the day, many companies struggle to make AI actionable. What advice would you give leaders looking to implement AI in a way that generates real measurable ROI?
Ken Gavranovic: Brian, Great, and I work with a lot of private equity companies that are really moving fast to AI apply their businesses.
I’ll give you some specific hints and then I’ll give you just a structure that works at businesses if you really want to totally embrace AI without hiring consultants. Then get somebody in your organization who really loves ai, understands ai, have a leadership meeting. Bring that person in and explain to the rest of the team the power of ai, the power of it, being able to pattern match the power of it.
Be able to take all of the different aspects of data, and then challenge your leadership team to go off into the various aspects of their business and come back with real actionable areas to implement AI and then actually test it. Show the results. You’re gonna have some wins, you may have some misses.
But that continuous improvement, we’ve kind of, kind of an AI working group. That’s what I’ve seen just move really, really well with private equity funded companies, whether it be 10 million or 200 million or 300 million. And what they’re seeing initially is, is from a benefit. The easiest, of course, is if you’ve got developers, if you implement AI correctly for every three developers, you actually get another developer free.
The velocity, we’re seeing 30 to 40% code output quality. Good. You also see that in qa. There’s some things you can do in there, so in your engineering team, that’s a real easy fit from your sales team. There’s a lot of opportunities in there. It’s really, you know, thinking about how we’re creating, you know, new proposals and so.
Contracts, we’ve seen a lot of benefits in there. So I think contracts, sales, contracts, those are huge areas. And then beyond that, certainly customer service is a key area. Anything that’s repeatable where somebody has to do step A, B, C, D, E, F, G, that’s where AI can come in and really revolutionize it. So again, it’s that cross-functional team at the leadership and then go through and focus on specific areas and then you’ll start to see tremendous benefits and your team will just start to see the wins and that will amplify the wins.
Brian Thomas: Amazing. I appreciate that. And certainly we should lean into that. Really the leadership of the company, right? That cross-functional team, they can go out and look at their different business lines and see where there are some use cases where we could apply ai, but I like how you highlighted that. If you find somebody in your org that’s in the technology space, knows ai, maybe loves AI, and leans into that a little bit.
Can certainly help the leadership team with some of those use cases. Also, you mentioned, uh, leveraging AI and the sales team and then have customer service, which is huge today. Of course, uh, conversational AI is becoming so good. It’s actually replacing people on the phones, which I’ve seen in action and it’s amazing.
So Ken, I appreciate all your insights today and it was such a pleasure having you on, and I look forward to talking to you real soon.
Ken Gavranovic: Thanks for having me, Brian. Have a wonderful day.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Ken Gavranovic Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s Podcast Page.
