Matt Vance (Co-host): What is Mobrium? What are Crista and I up to when we’re not hosting this fun podcast? Here, our raw, unedited story of founding a tech company as husband and wife with five kids, ages eight and younger.

Crista Vance (Co-host): Hey there, I’m Crista Vance, entrepreneur and operations leader.

Matt Vance (Co-host): And I’m Matt Vance, award-winning author and social innovation researcher. We’re your hosts of the Culture Profit podcast, your place for purposeful company culture strategy. Learn from HR pros, executives, and thought leaders how to prioritize profits by prioritizing people. This episode is sponsored by Mobrium, the best friend of forward-thinking HR leaders, helping you strengthen your employer reputation as a reflection of your real culture. Learn more at mobrium.com.

Crista Vance (Co-host): As most of you know, the majority of our episodes are interview style with prestigious guests, typically people leaders, founders, and HR professionals. Back on episode 11, we did a special edition without a guest, just me and Matt, to better introduce ourselves as the hosts. I wish it had been episode 10, but because now we’re doing 20… Go ahead, Matt.

Matt Vance (Co-host): So today we want to do something similar to that, you know, the get-to-know-the-hosts episode from number 11. Some of you may know, in addition to being hosts of the Culture Profit, we’re also married. Surprise! Yeah, it’s me and Crista, husband and wife team, doing everything together in this podcast. But we’re also co-founders of a company called Mobrium. If you’re watching on YouTube, you can see we’ve got the Mobrium shirts on, which is fun. So although the backstory goes further than just the last 18 months since we started this company, we wanted to tell a little bit about what we’re up to with Mobrium and give you the full backstory of how we got to where we’re at right now.

Crista Vance (Co-host): Yeah, so the idea is that every 10 episodes or so, we are going to do an episode together and just kind of give you some progress on how things are going. It’s kind of an exciting thing, starting a company, and a lot has happened since our last episode. I had our fifth kid. His name is Zach. He’s a cute little baby. He does have some problems, like a cleft lip and palate, and he has a deletion of chromosome 1. So it’s been a challenge for sure, but he is such a sweetheart, and he’s been such a joy to have in our family. Also, since then, we’ve definitely learned a lot about how to be a nurse in some situations. I mean, everybody who’s listening who’s a parent, you know there’s a lot that comes with that territory. Baby Zach was in the NICU for 12 days, and when he came home, he was still connected to oxygen, he had a feeding tube, he had a monitor that was connected to him 24/7 that would tell us his oxygen levels. And so it was definitely a different situation. Like, you go from just being a normal, you know, mom or dad, and then you have to shove a feeding tube down your baby’s nose so that you can feed them. It’s quite the experience. So starting our company was a very calculated risk. We planned for this for a long time. Of course, we planned to have a bigger family, five kids, but we didn’t plan on Zach having all these additional needs. So navigating that since his birth has been a learning experience, to say the least. We’ve seen a lot of miracles, a lot of blessings, so much kindness from our family and friends and everyone around us, and that’s definitely been a real part of our experience in our lives right now.

Matt Vance (Co-host): So yeah, thanks for sharing that, Crista.

Crista Vance (Co-host): Yeah. So we want to just get right into it and tell you guys a little bit about the company that we’re starting. It’s kind of become a passion for Matt, and it’s become a passion of mine, and he really is so knowledgeable in this area, and it’s just led to this really cool idea. So Matt, tell us what Mobrium is.

Matt Vance (Co-host): So Mobrium strengthens your employer reputation as a reflection of your real culture on sites like Glassdoor, Indeed, Comparably, and InHerSight. The majority of companies that are on these platforms, they don’t proactively ask for feedback. They’re not asking for reviews, and so ratings actually tend to skew lower than they would be, because you have something — and I talk about this in my book, The Review Cycle — the law of self-selecting extremes. So when you don’t ask for feedback, you get the polarized extremes. The people that had a way positive or way negative experience are willing to go out of their way to write that review. But as you proactively ask for feedback, you lower the barrier to participate, make it easier, more people share, and you unlock this silent majority of people who are sharing feedback. And from every company I’ve ever worked with on the consulting side, and now on the client side with Mobrium, ratings start going up pretty much immediately. I’ve never seen a company that either stays flat or goes down as a result of proactively asking for reviews. So that’s a big part of what we do. But if you think about this, just like nobody wants to buy a three-star product on Amazon, or you probably don’t want to go to a three-star restaurant, you’re probably not going to apply for a job at a three-star company. And so we’re the first company that is dedicated to helping employers have a more true representation of their culture with ratings and reviews.

I guess one other thing I would mention is this program, like the service that Mobrium offers — you know, you’re not going to go invest in something unless there’s a measurable impact. So we are able to track the impact that our service has as a result of strengthening employer reputation. It increases applicants. We’ve seen application rates go from 20 per job to literally over 100. We see turnover decrease, and simultaneously it’s increasing productivity and engagement of employees, because they have the chance to be directly involved in culture change by asking and sharing their feedback. And then the less obvious thing that happens is strengthening your employer ratings on sites like Glassdoor and Indeed has an indirect positive influence on sales. It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in. Think about this: you can then pitch to a potential client or prospect or customer or consumer how awesome your culture is and how much your employees love working for you. It’s not really a foreign concept, right, to say, “Hey, we’re a best place to work, so you should buy from us.” But it’s one thing to say that with just, you know, a one-off award, but when you’ve got consistently positive ratings and reviews across many different employer review sites, it’s undeniable. So there’s that social proof.

Crista Vance (Co-host): And in all of our episodes, we’ve really focused on company culture, and we obviously feel very strongly about that — that companies should strive to have a good culture that makes employees feel engaged and excited to work there. But what’s the good thing about having that from an ROI perspective if no one knows about how awesome your company is? And a lot of times, like Matt was saying, if you don’t ask for reviews proactively, you tend to get those who are only unhappy with your company, even if you have a great culture. And so really what Mobrium is doing is making sure that, you know, hopefully you are a good company, and then from there letting other people know about that. And your reputation says a lot about you.

Matt Vance (Co-host): I love that. And Crista, you’re right on. Your reputation is where people are shaping their behaviors, just like — well, I guess let me back up for a sec. I talk to HR leaders all the time. We’re interacting with different HR executives, and sometimes I’ll have people say, “Well, we have a great eNPS” — that’s employee net promoter score — “we know that our employees love working here, so it doesn’t matter what our ratings are on Glassdoor, Indeed, and these other sites.” But to that I would say, well, how’s everyone shaping their opinions? They don’t have access to see your eNPS score, but everyone, the public, has access to see your ratings and reviews. I am a big proponent of always prioritizing ratings and reviews above any type of internal metric, because it’s those publicly displayed scores that actively shape perceptions. And perception is reality. That term is coined by Lee Atwater. You should go look him up. It’s a little tangent, but he’s definitely someone that I’ve admired for a long time.

So I’ll just briefly tell you, here’s the four things that Mobrium does. We help automate your review requests. So instead of you as an HR leader sending requests to employees asking for a review, and there being a potential conflict of interest because it’s HR asking someone internally — that employee may be concerned, like, “Are they targeting me? Am I at risk for discrimination or retaliation? I don’t know if they’ve asked other people. They say they did, but did they really? They’re going to know that I wrote that review the next day.” So now that employee doesn’t trust that request for a review, and they’re not participating. But when we, as that trusted third party, do that on your behalf with co-branded content, so there’s trust in place, we’ve seen that participation goes up, trust goes up, and you get a higher volume of reviews to help strengthen your ratings on a quicker timeline. So that’s the first piece: we’re collecting your reviews, automating that to save you a lot of time and increase that trust.

The next thing is we want to simplify management of all of your reviews. So we consolidate all of your review content from all these different top employer sites into a single inbox, so you can see what’s coming in in chronological order — reviews, benefit reviews, interview reviews, Q&As. You’re not going to miss anything because it’s all there. Then we also have some reporting and marketing capabilities to help you learn from the trends across all the sites, instead of just siloed data from one of these platforms. We’re helping you see all of it holistically. And marketing — we want you to find some aggregated stats, like total number of five stars across all sites, or average CEO score across the internet, that sort of thing, instead of just a siloed data set on one platform.

Some of the common, I guess, concerns that we get from companies is, “Well, we’re a small team, we have, you know, not a ton of budget, so we’re just going to try to manage this on our own, and we’ll just focus on Glassdoor, for example, because it’s the biggest.” Well, you could inadvertently create a problem that’s even bigger than doing nothing. What happens is you start asking for reviews on Glassdoor, you get some great progress there, but then you’ve ignored these other sites, and you’ve created reputation disparity, where you have great ratings over here, low ratings over here, and someone looks at that side by side and goes, “Huh, why are they so great over here? Is this fake, manipulated, or too good to be true? This must be the uncensored, unbiased opinion of the employees on these other sites.” And it reinforces trust in the bad ratings and completely erodes trust in the good ratings. So just like you diversify your investments in a financial portfolio to provide stability, you want to diversify your reputation. So our system helps — we automate review requests consistently across the top sites, so they’re all getting fed with reviews on an ongoing basis, and you’re not even doing any of that. It’s all automated.

Another thing is, when you’re asking for reviews on your own, if you’re doing, say, a twice-a-year request to a large amount of employees to write a review, that creates some unnatural review patterns, where you’ve got not much happening on your Glassdoor, and then boom, a huge amount of reviews come in, and then it dies back down to nothing. Well, that can be triggered as unnatural review patterns in Glassdoor’s algorithms. What we’re doing is smoothing that out and asking for reviews on a continuous basis, taking your entire workforce and splitting it up into small chunks, sending those requests, so there’s always reviews coming in. We’ve done a calculation: if you’re a 500-employee company, you can expect to send about 2,000 emails, 170 hours. It’s very time-consuming, on payroll and on your schedule. So we automate that, saving you all that time and money.

So I guess, Crista, question for you: where should companies start if they’re like, “Man, this is overwhelming. I’ve never even considered employer reputation. I don’t even know my scores, if our profiles are claimed. Like, where do I start?”

Crista Vance (Co-host): Yeah, I think with everything, it’s research, right? And so what we’ve discovered that’s been really helpful for our clients is to start off with a reputation audit — just looking at what they have out there already, and what has not been claimed, and what people are already saying about you, and just gathering all that data. And then we have great tips and advice for what to do with that from there.

Matt Vance (Co-host): Yeah, so we’ll do that for you. All you have to do is go to mobrium.com and schedule a time to meet with us right from the homepage, and you’ll get that report completely for free. Even if you’re not going to use our service, that’s still going to be a super valuable report for you and your team.

Crista Vance (Co-host): Yeah, yeah. That’s really the best place to get started on your employer reputation. So, and now we want to head into a little bit about our story leading up to all of this. So Matt, where did it all start?

Matt Vance (Co-host): So where did Mobrium start? I guess we officially started about 17 months ago, but the story started way back in 2014. I was a senior, you were a junior at USU, and I was applying for jobs. I applied for over 50 different jobs, wasn’t getting anything, no offers — much like today’s marketplace. But I was super frustrated. I mean, I was a student athlete, I ran track at USU, I did two internships, I had great grades, I worked hard, so I kind of thought someone would want to hire me, but I was getting nothing. But then finally, after almost a full year of searching, through my whole senior year and then a little bit after graduation, I was offered a job at a startup called Malouf. They’re now Malouf Companies. They make mattresses, pillows, bed sheets, furniture, all sorts of different products. And at the time there were about 30, 35 employees, and they offered me a very out-of-the-box job. They said, “We want you to manage reviews. Amazon reviews. We need more reviews. We need to respond to reviews.” At the time you could respond publicly to Amazon reviews — you can’t do that anymore — but that was it. That was my job description. And I thought, well, this is either my last resort or my destiny, so I’m just going to take it. Crista was expecting our first child, so there was a lot of pressure for me, and so I just leaned into it, and I found a passion for feedback. Customer feedback is where I started, and I managed tons of different reviews. Within a few years everything had grown, and I was managing over 1,500 product listings across 50 different e-commerce sites with a team of several people, and learned a ton about optimizing customer reviews.

Crista Vance (Co-host): Yeah, meanwhile I was working at Utah State, and I was planning to be a stay-at-home mom with our daughter that was going to be born. And the work that I was doing was project-based, and the project was ending that year, and it happened that I was the last woman standing — no men standing either. And what happened is my supervisor came over to me and she just said, “Do you have any interest in staying on with a different project?” And I was like, “Well, I was planning to stay at home with my daughter and care for her.” And she said, “Well, you can just bring her to work with you.” And I was like, “Wow, okay, yeah, let’s do this.” And four kids later — so I literally took my kids to work with me. I was in charge of our in-person training that we did. We usually had 30 professionals come on site to Utah State, and me and my little kids would greet them, and sometimes they would come sit by us at lunch. I was the one who brought all the food and provided all their materials, and it was just a crazy experience, but so awesome to be able to bring my kids with me. And yeah, four kids later, even through COVID and everything, it just started becoming a lot for me to balance the work that I was doing and four children. And because Matt was then working at a company called ICON, we felt like it was a good time for me to quit my job. And that kind of set us up nicely for the next phase after that, to start on Mobrium.

Matt Vance (Co-host): But kind of backtracking to one thing. So in 2017, I’d now been working at Malouf for three years, Crista was still working at USU. I had kind of gotten stuck with my progress managing reviews. There were some pretty big policy changes on Amazon that changed the way we operated, and I just was stuck. I was like, what do I do? How are we going to overcome these different things? And it was 2016, October 3rd — that date is burned in my memory — that’s when Amazon officially banned soliciting reviews, like free reviews: give away a product, ask for a review. That was no longer allowed. So we had to figure out different ways to get more reviews, especially for new launches. And that takes us to a conversation.

Crista Vance (Co-host): Yeah, we were just doing our typical drive after visiting our families, and Matt was really frustrated. He didn’t know what to do. I mean, he went back to the research, tried to see if he could find anything to tell him how to move forward with this new change with Amazon. And he also has a very entrepreneurial spirit and is always thinking of business ideas, and the two just kind of lined up in my mind. And I was like, “You should be the one providing the information to everybody else, because I bet there are other people looking for research on this.” And I knew how knowledgeable he was in this space after developing this for Malouf. And so I was like, “You should write a book, and see what you can find to put in there, and use the knowledge you’ve already gained.”

Matt Vance (Co-host): Yeah, so that started as kind of this small project of, I’m just going to write what I learn about managing reviews, getting more reviews, responding to reviews, different strategies. And I was thinking I could do this project in about a year. Well, it took four and a half years. It was way more involved — or maybe I made it more involved. That’s probably what you would say.

Crista Vance (Co-host): Yeah, Matt never does anything halfway. It was very thorough. And I had a big role in it as well, doing the citations — which I will say wasn’t my favorite thing in college, but he didn’t like it at all, and I was willing to do it. So I did the citations for the book and did a majority of the editing as well. So there was a lot of input on my side, but it’s definitely Matt’s book. It’s his brainchild. And what happened is it kind of transitioned him in his role at Malouf, and maybe you can share a little bit more about that.

Matt Vance (Co-host): Yeah, so at Malouf, I had proposed in 2016 that the leadership team would let me open a company profile on Glassdoor and Comparably and a couple of the others. I said, “Well, me and my team are best equipped to handle employee reviews, because we’re also managing the customer reviews, and we have a dialed-in approach for that.” And so I got the green light to do that. Fast forward to 2018: our strategies for optimizing customer reviews spilled over to the employee review space, and Malouf ranked number eight on Glassdoor’s list, out of over 1.1 million employers in the category that year — that’s how big the category was. So top 10 in the nation, best place to work. Becoming a best place to work with ratings and reviews is very similar to getting that number one category bestseller tag on Amazon or Wayfair or other sites like that. It’s very similar, right? So we saw applications jump up, we saw engagement go up, we saw productivity and excitement and energy just boost. And over the next two years, we won seven more national best place to work awards — some on Comparably, some on InHerSight. We got the Inc. magazine Best Place to Work award, all from managing employee feedback. So I had very much proven, at least to myself, that I had become good at one thing: managing feedback, both on the customer and the employee side.

So I realized that if I was going to make my book the highest quality it could be, I needed to go to another organization, a large organization, where I could validate the principles that I had been developing, so it wouldn’t just be this one-hit-wonder story of, “Well, did you really do that, or was it just because you were at this company?” So I started proactively networking and ended up getting recruited to ICON, the parent company of NordicTrack and ProForm. And they had me essentially do the exact same thing. They started me in the marketing department. Within a little less than a year, I had established a team that was managing hundreds of product listings across all the different major e-commerce sites, and brand profiles on ConsumerAffairs, BBB, and there’s some negative ones like PissedConsumer, and a whole bunch of others. We got all of that cleaned up, duplicate profiles cleaned up, and we’d increased the average star rating by 1.27 stars across dozens of key review platforms. And then ICON put me in a VP role over culture in the HR department to essentially do the same thing on the employee side. In that capacity, we were able to win some best place to work awards on Comparably and InHerSight. We launched an engagement survey. And then that led us to — now we’re in 2022, the book finally getting finished. It was released August 1st — or excuse me, July 1st of 2022. And that was kind of the catalyst for leaving and really starting our own company. I could sense that there was some momentum from the book coming out that we didn’t want to die, so it could carry us into the next thing. So how was that for you, Crista, when I was like, “Hey, I think I should quit now, and we should just build our own company around the principles of the book”?

Crista Vance (Co-host): Yeah, I mean, I think I was scared a little bit, for sure. I mean, I’ve always wanted to support Matt with whatever ideas he’s had, but I think he tends to be more of the dreamer, and I’m more of the realistic, boring person or something.

Matt Vance (Co-host): No way, you’re not boring.

Crista Vance (Co-host): But yeah, we had four kids at that time, and so it was definitely scary. But whatever Matt sets his mind to, I know it can succeed. And so I also had a lot of trust and faith in whatever he wanted to pursue, which at the time we really did not know where we were going with it. But we took that leap, and we ended up being — well, he ended up being a contractor for a company called Reviews.ai.

Matt Vance (Co-host): And that was a huge piece to this story. One of my good friends, Julius Kuschke, he’s a co-founder at Reviews.ai — which, if you haven’t heard of this company and you’re in the CPG space, you are missing out. You need to go check out Reviews.ai immediately. It’s a review intelligence platform where you can collect review data across pretty much every major e-commerce site out there. I’d been a customer of Reviews.ai, formerly known as ReviewMonitoring.com, all the way back since 2015 when I was at Malouf, and using that platform was key for a lot of the discoveries that I had while researching and writing my book. And then we also used it at ICON in the marketing department to help better improve the way we managed product reviews there as well. So Julius, he actually wrote the foreword for my book, which is pretty cool. If you get a copy of that on Amazon, you can read what he said. But he had the idea of, “Hey, why don’t you just work with me and kind of bridge the gap here? We’d love your help on some things, as a user of the platform and as an expert in the review space, and that can give you some time to navigate some of the specifics.” So it was honestly an opportunity of a lifetime, to be able to step away from a 9-to-5 and have a contract role that was able to cover our needs and also be relevant, and have a mentor and a friend to talk through some different things with.

So in those first few months after leaving ICON, we had a lot to figure out. But I at least knew one thing, which was the hole in the market that we were targeting. As I researched — when I was writing my book, I indexed over 1,000 content pieces from over 50 different review management companies, and through that process I realized there were some sub-areas, some sub-industries, within the review management or reputation space: companies that helped with product reviews and syndication; local retail companies that helped you increase your reputation on sites like Google and Tripadvisor and Facebook. But I found a glaring hole. There was not a single review management provider that helped with employer reputation, with those employee review sites like Glassdoor, Indeed, and the rest. And because my passion literally intersects with reputation and company culture, I just felt like this was where we were destined to go — to apply the methodology of The Review Cycle to helping employers streamline and strengthen their employer reputation. So that’s what we knew, but we didn’t have a lot. We didn’t have the website, we didn’t have a company name. There were so many details. So how did we get our company name? Crista, tell us that one.

Crista Vance (Co-host): Well, we did a lot of brainstorming, but we really wanted a fanciful name — so a combination of a couple different words that creates a new word. And so we came up with Mobrium, because I was like, well, what is this company going to do for other companies? And the main couple words that came to mind were momentum and equilibrium. Because what every company needs is some momentum, some reviews to get them to a better place, and then you hit that prime star rating and cadence of feedback to reach an equilibrium. Because a lot of people think, well, you want to always improve — and that is so true — but in the review world, you can’t get above five stars, and you actually don’t even want to get to five stars. And so that’s where we came up with Mobrium, because it’s “Mo” for momentum and “brium” is equilibrium. And we stick to that. Those two words really do exemplify what we’re trying to do.

Matt Vance (Co-host): So, and honestly, after so many different names, it was Crista’s idea that was the winner. Just like the book was her idea — all the good ideas come from her, and then I get to work on it. Well, we work on a lot of things together. We do separate our work: Crista does a lot of the operations and finance, and I do the sales, marketing, and kind of the methodology stuff. So lots of different things. Another question for you, Crista — and I know we’re kind of getting close to the end here — but what has it been like founding a tech company while being a mom of five kids?

Crista Vance (Co-host): It’s been exciting and crazy, for sure. Yeah, being a mom is my number one priority, just like it was when I was working for Utah State. I wanted to focus on being a mom, and that’s honestly the best job that I could have. But I love being able to have kind of a creative outlet and also be able to keep some of my skills sharp and help my husband with what he’s excited about. And so it’s been really exciting to see the progress of the company. And there’s been moments of a lot of anxiety, and moments of just some stress and uncertainty, and there’s been a lot of really cool breakthrough moments, and just seeing so much potential for this company.

Matt Vance (Co-host): So that’s awesome. And I would say you’ve been doing an amazing job balancing everything. It’s a lot of different responsibilities. And I would echo what Crista said, that it’s been this incredible learning experience up to this point. Very exciting, some amazing breakthroughs, but man, there’s been some hard things as well. Like, our first customer signed up within, I think, one month of us getting the actual platform and website turned on, and then it was months before anyone else signed up, before we got that second customer. And holy cow, that was really hard. I was feeling the pressure, like, man, can we do this? Am I failing my family? Was this just all for nothing? We’ve spared no amount of effort, energy, or passion to get this thing off the ground. But then when I got customer two, then it was three and four, pretty much right off the bat, in a batch. And we’ve got lots in the pipeline. We’re figuring out how to effectively market and continue to get new contacts. So it’s starting to get really exciting, which is fun.

Crista Vance (Co-host): Yeah, and I would say that’s been the focus — not looking too far down the road. Like, we want to have goals, but just taking it a day at a time has been the reason we’ve been able to come this far, and focusing on staying balanced with our mental health, and taking care of our kids, and making sure that role always comes first, and then our relationship — keeping that strong while working together. You know, I’m sure some of you have heard that having a husband and wife work together can be rough, but it’s actually been a really cool experience. And that’s not to say we’ve never had any disagreements about anything, but it’s been a good experience working together, and to see what two people who care about each other — we both want each other to succeed, but we both have different perspectives, and bringing both of those to the table really creates some cool things.

Matt Vance (Co-host): So, and we’re also really grateful for all of our advisers. We’ve got an incredible, amazing group of individuals who’ve been willing to be official advisers for our board, and some team members who are just putting out some incredible work helping us with the podcast, with marketing projects, with content, and it’s been so fun. I do have to say there’s been a lot of unexpected things — different things that I would never, in my wildest dreams, have imagined I would experience or do. And one of them, I would say, was cutting Crista’s hair.

Crista Vance (Co-host): Yep. I was desperate for a haircut, and when you’re kind of scrimping and saving and putting everything into the business, yeah, you do some desperate things.

Matt Vance (Co-host): But for me, I literally cut a woman’s hair. I cut hair. I mean, I’m sure we could have managed to afford a $15 haircut. She insisted, though.

Crista Vance (Co-host): And I was very hesitant. I was like, let’s save that money. And it was late in the evening, too, and I really wanted a haircut, and so he did it. He did a good job. So for all you CEOs out there—

Matt Vance (Co-host): Exactly. Yeah, all you CEOs out there who are saying, “Hey, we need to save a little money” — she’s practicing what she preaches there. Like, I even pulled two different teeth from one of our kids, who — she got those shark teeth behind, and so the teeth were loose, but not maybe as loose as you might want to pull them.

Crista Vance (Co-host): Yeah, kind of crazy.

Matt Vance (Co-host): Avoid some big dentist bills. You know, health insurance as a self-employed person is tricky.

Crista Vance (Co-host): So, and of course we would have taken her to the dentist if it really needed it, but we were fortunate that — she didn’t want to go to the dentist. She didn’t want to go, and it worked out. She’s pretty anxious.

Matt Vance (Co-host): So I do have to say, though, now that we have customers using the platform, and we start seeing those review requests going out and reviews getting posted and ratings going up — I believe in this process so much, and I’ve believed it for so many years. I’ve helped companies achieve these results more on a manual basis, but now to see that we have a software platform that’s automating a lot of those key pieces, and that it’s actually working — like, our very first client has already seen a 0.8-star increase on their rating on Indeed. We had another one that signed up, and within the first two weeks — they were a large enough company that with the volume of reviews coming in, they got a 0.1-star increase in the first two weeks, which was pretty cool to see. We’re helping companies hit that eligibility for best place to work awards on Glassdoor, Comparably, InHerSight — dozens of awards split across these different platforms. It’s super exciting, super rewarding, and man, it’s such an honor and privilege to have this opportunity to try to build something. And it’s starting to take, and we’re getting that momentum, that traction, and we are very excited to meet our next clients and do everything in our power to help you succeed and be your partners with all things expert knowledge with ratings and reviews, and spilling over to company culture as well. It’s a lot of fun.

Crista Vance (Co-host): I thought you were going to say you’re so excited to hit our equilibrium, ’cause you said—

Matt Vance (Co-host): Our equilibrium! We’re getting that momentum, we’re building our momentum to get to our equilibrium. Mobrium!

Crista Vance (Co-host): It is fun. Our kids sometimes like to cheer “Mobrium,” which is kind of fun. And we got them all matching Mobrium shirts, so we went and got ice cream one night, and it was a Mobrium ice cream night, which was pretty fun. So it’s been cool to have the family — all of our kids — see what we’re doing and be involved in little ways.

Matt Vance (Co-host): Like, our oldest daughter came and she put the inserts in each copy of The Review Cycle for me, and just, you know, small things like that.

Crista Vance (Co-host): She’s like a little saleswoman to her friends at school. She tells them about Mobrium and tells them to tell their parents. So we’re training them right.

Matt Vance (Co-host): So if anyone at her elementary school happens to work in HR, yeah, let us know. But thanks for listening, guys. We appreciate you being here with us on the journey. We’ve got exciting things coming up, both for the podcast — some really incredible people that are going to be joining us in some of the next episodes — and some really fun things on the Mobrium side as well. We’ve got some conferences we’re going to, platform enhancements. We’re going to be launching what’s called the Mobrium Academy. It’s a four-part training series where you can actually earn a certificate — a professional certificate for employer reputation, which is a very specific component of HR and employer branding. So if you’re not following us on LinkedIn, go check out Mobrium, and you can stay up to date with what we’re doing there. So yep, stay tuned, and thanks so much for your guys’ support.

Crista Vance (Co-host): Thanks, everyone. We’ll see you next time.

Matt Vance (Co-host): Thanks for tuning in to the Culture Profit podcast and for being a part of our journey to prove that putting people first is best for business. Today’s episode was sponsored by Mobrium. Want to get more employee reviews and streamline your employer reputation? Visit mobrium.com. Now go find one way to prioritize your people, and watch your profits grow.