Here we speak with Brendan Noud, co-founder and CEO of LearnUpon, a pioneering learning management system (LMS) company that has revolutionized the way companies deliver training to their employees, partners and customers.
After recognizing a gap in the market for customer-focused LMS solutions, Brendan and his co-founder Des Anderson built LearnUpon from the ground up with a commitment to innovation and customer support. From the beginning of offering 24/7 support to 12-hour shifts to becoming an industry leader with over 1,500 customers, Brendan shares the insights and values that have driven LearnUpon’s success.
Having previously worked for companies offering learning management systems and services, Brendan Noud saw a gap in the market for something bigger and better. Brendan was fed up with the lack of innovation and customer-centric values in the Learning Management System (LMS) space and decided to start his own company. That was the birth of LearnUpon.
Together with his co-founder Des Anderson, they developed LearnUpon to support the learning needs of companies. From the start, Brendan and Des placed a strong emphasis on customer service, ensuring customers could get the support they needed. Before their first hire in 2013, Brendan and Des rotated 12-hour shifts to provide 24/7 support to their customers. Today they have a global company with over 1,500 customers.
LearnUpon’s mission is to partner with companies that believe that providing great learning content is essential to achieving great results. They focus on helping organizations deliver effective learning that bridges the gap between employee, partner and customer training and business objectives.
With Brendan’s leadership of LearnUpon, the company has achieved widespread recognition and received multiple industry awards. His leadership has led to significant growth, with LearnUpon now serving customers across multiple industries and establishing itself as a market leader in the LMS landscape.
What is the main problem you solve for your customers?
At LearnUpon, we help companies deliver engaging LearnUpon experiences to their employees, partners and customers in a centralized solution. Our goal is to ensure that the learning they deliver impacts what matters most, such as performance, retention and growth.
What motivated you to start your company – did you want to change the status quo or was it a gap in the market that you could fill?
My co-founder Des and I have both been in the learning industry for over 20 years. We have interacted with so many people and companies who were not satisfied with their learning solution. They were outdated, bloated, and lacked focus on what mattered most: the user experience.
We decided to invest in developing a solution that we believe meets the needs of real businesses. Our focus is on making the learning experience as engaging and simple as possible and the administration experience as automated and efficient as possible.
What are your brand values?
LearnUpon has many brand values, but the most important one is “putting the customer first.” Nothing is decided, built or achieved without asking the question: Are our customers the focus? We are a customer-oriented company. We build for your needs. Our roadmap, our community, our conference — it’s all about the customer experience and putting them first.
Is team culture an integral part of your company?
From day one, we had a clear vision for LearnUpon’s culture. It has evolved significantly since then. Today, our cultural code defines the shared beliefs, values and practices that are important to us. We encourage all employees to celebrate when these values are followed and feel comfortable highlighting instances when they are not being followed.
These can be divided into several categories: putting customers at the center of everything we do; Lead with curiosity, ask questions and learn from mistakes; lead by example in a constructive and caring manner; and providing quality that we believe is best achieved through diverse voices and experiences.
Most importantly, we hire great people and trust them to do great work. We seek to build a team that is adaptable, resilient, collaborative, compassionate, motivated, humble and fun. Culture is the most important component of running a successful company.
What are you doing to show your team that you value them?
We offer many perks to show our appreciation for our team, but it’s the daily actions that truly shape our company culture. We trust our team members and encourage them to take risks and try new ideas.
Furthermore, we believe in complete transparency. Every month we host a company-wide meeting where we openly share news, celebrate our successes and learn from our challenges.
It is this trust and openness that our employees value most.
Do you believe you are speaking directly and clearly to your consumers when it comes to your messaging?
Transparency is very important at LearnUpon, especially towards our customers. If a prospect speaks to us and we feel like we are not the right solution for them, we remain transparent. And we will point them to another solution that we think is right. We also encourage everyone on our team, from sales to product to customer success, to be honest and open with our customers. This is how we build authentic relationships, and you can see that in our reviews and customer retention rates.
How often do you evaluate the data you collect and address your KPIs, and why?
Every decision we make is data-driven, be it qualitative or quantitative. We constantly monitor customer statistics such as satisfaction, NPS, customer loyalty and product adoption. We also give our customers the opportunity to talk to us, whether in person with our customer experience teams, within our customer community or at our conference. We want to know how we can continually improve to meet their needs.
This is also a high priority for the satisfaction of our employees. We conduct two surveys every year. A survey at the end of the year to assess team mood and a pulse survey at the middle of the year. It is important that we know how our employees feel and whether we are living up to our company culture.
Does technology play a much larger role in your company’s day-to-day operations?
It’s huge. As a technology company, we want to be at the cutting edge and use the best technology both internally and make it available to our customers. We have robust processes in place within the company for deploying the latest technology and also have a strong roadmap for our customers around AI. We also place a great focus on automation. The time of our customers and our team is valuable. That’s why we want to offer solutions that help you achieve more in less time.
What is your attitude towards your competitors?
The learning technology space is full of competitors. It’s a busy place with an estimated more than 1,000 learning solutions on the market. At LearnUpon, we don’t see having a competitive market as a bad thing. For us it means an opportunity. This means there is a growing market and demand for corporate learning.
Do you have any advice for someone starting out in business?
Consider your company’s values from the start. When Des and I first started LearnUpon, we wanted businesses to have the best support in the industry. However, since there were only two of us, this meant we had to split the 12-hour shifts in order to provide 24/7 support.
The pursuit of the best customer care has never waned. Instead, the company has grown with LearnUpon’s extensive customer experience team and continues to provide 24/7 support.
Being the key decision maker in the company can be lonely and stressful. What do you do to relax, recharge, and sharpen your focus?
I feel incredibly lucky to have Des, the co-founder of LearnUpon, by my side. I have known Des for over 20 years; We both emerged in the industry together and I can always rely on him to be a sounding board for ideas and ensure we make the right decision for our team, our customers and LearnUpon as a whole. Plus, it’s always a great change to play sports with my kids!
Do you believe in the 12 week working method or do you use much longer planning strategies?
We have a long-term vision, but to get there we work quarterly. At the beginning of each quarter, we set team- and company-wide OKRs that we all work towards. Every month the entire company is informed about the progress. It keeps everyone engaged and focused on an overall goal.
What three things do you hope to implement in the next 12 months?
At the beginning of each year we evaluate and revise our corporate goals, our product vision and our positioning in the market. We want to be sure about these things. Team growth is also a focus. We are opening new offices, expanding our teams and want to continue to attract the best talent to our company.
