Special: Interview with Bruce Heavin, co-founder, lynda.com

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Dave Crenshaw: Hello, Invaluable Personal Coaching members. This is Dave Crenshaw. Welcome to another edition of Invaluable Audio Coach. In thisedition, I bring in an expert—someonewho I believe is going to open your mind, expand your vision on how you can be more valuable in the workplace.

I’m really honored frankly by the guest we have today. Bruce Heavin is the cofounder and Chief Innovation Officer of lynda.comoverseeing its visual branding and style. An acclaimed illustrator and designer, Bruce helped broaden the company scope to include photography and graphic design.A graduate of Art Center College of Design, he has created graphics for national magazines and major media companies.

Bruce, thank you so much for taking a few moments to speak with us.

Bruce Heavin: Thanks for having me, Dave.

Dave Crenshaw: And I always like to ask because I interview people all around the world—whereare you located right now?

Bruce Heavin: I’m in a small town called Carpinteria, California. We’re just south of Santa Barbara.

Dave Crenshaw: That is one of my favorite places in the world, such a beautiful little town there where you guys have your offices.

Bruce Heavin: I’m actually looking out across the ocean at the islands right now as I talk to you.

Dave Crenshaw: Oh man, what a beautiful view that is!

Well, okay. So let’s dive into this. We’re going really to be talking about some of your experiences and some of the process that you go through asChief Innovation Officer. I know that what you talk about revolves around failure, passion, luck and experiences. Why are those four things very important?

Bruce Heavin: Well, those four things are important to me. I don’t have an MBA. I don’t have a business degree. I’ve built a pretty impressive business with my wife, but a lot of the drivers that came out of here came out of passion.

A lot of the impetus for starting this business came out of passion of my wife and I and her desire to teach. I opened it with my passions, as well. So when she wanted to teach, it was the impetus for starting a business because we moved to a town where there are no schools. It really came out of need and passion.

Dave Crenshaw: Talk to me a little bit about failure because I think people largely want to avoid failure, right? They think that’s something that we should stay away from. We don’t like it. Yet, you believe that’s a big part of your success ultimately, right?

Bruce Heavin: I think it’s a part of how we are able to do a lot of things. Failure is the foundation we build our successes upon. It’s our learning. It’s how we go about it.

Walt Disney was a huge failure at first. Einstein didn’t get it right. There are so many examples in business where people just don’t go out and get the answer on the first knock when they first try.

My example I like to talk about is riding a bike. When you learn to ride a bike, you want to ride a bike like the big kids, the big two wheel bike. You’re on a tricycle and you move to a bike with training wheels. You eventually take them off. Then you’re wobbly, and you fall over and you fall over. You don’t like falling over, but you keep doing it. You’re not really conscious of other people looking at you or laughing at you. As a kid, you just want to do it.

So you keep at it. You have this tenacity and eventually you’re able to make a straight line. Eventually, you’re able to make those curves and you’re thinking hard about not falling. You’re thinking hard about how to break. As you build these abilities, as you build your muscle memory, as you do this again and again, you start thinking “I just want to visit my friend around the corner”. So now you are thinking about navigating.

Then when you and your friend get together, you are like “Hey, we want to go out and go to the donuts or the candy stores.” So now you are thinking more high level on navigation and you’re not thinking about braking, pedaling, falling or turning. You are thinking about where you’re going. As you learn all the parts and pieces and you learn them though failure, eventually you are able to put together all these pieces and achieve higher level objectives.

Dave Crenshaw: Can you, Bruce, personally point to a failure in your mind that was a turning point in your career and in your life?

Bruce Heavin: I have a lot of failures to look at, a lot of things I tried. As a painter, I have a very silly failure and I didn’t understand black point. I was using one black and I’m like “Well, I wonder if Mars black is darker than carbon black?” There’s almost no difference between the two. My problem is I didn’t make one black darker than the other. I didn’t adjust my values properly and my images.

That’s one example and it’s just a learning example. I have businesses I started. I thought I could be a salesman and sell knives when I got to college. I learned very quickly: I’m not good at being a salesman.

So sometimes, it’s all about understanding your weaknesses and your deficiencies. I’m probably not the best person socially. So, how do I address that? How do I work that? And how do I make that into strength? How do I work with people that could help me or how do I work with people that could advise me?

Dave Crenshaw: I love what you brought up there. It’s something that I teach in one of my courses with lynda.comregarding focusing on your Most Valuable Activities. Like you said, you tried your hand at sales and you realize, “Wait a minute, this is not one of my Most Valuable Activities.”

And so you’ve learned to focus on the things that are your strengths, but also you’ve learned how to be more focused by delegating to other people.

Talk to me a little bit about that process of how difficult was it for you to begin once you realized “Wow, I need to delegate to other people. I need, not just build this company by myself, but to have other people involved.” Was that a difficult process for you or did you find that easy to do?

Bruce Heavin: I found that incredibly difficult. I’m a person who makes things. If we didn’t have anything on photography, I just step in there and I made the photography courses or I made the courses on design. I would go in and just do it myself. I used to do all the artwork courses.

And a lot of the jobs, all these things today I no longer do. I hand it off to other people to do and it was really hard even programming of what the courses and who to hire, when I let those go.

It’s essential for growth that I am not the person blocking the progress of the company. So we went from me and Lynda, now we’re close to five hundred employees. And if I were doing all these things, I don’t think I’d be able to breathe. I don’t think we’d be able to grow.

It’s a hard thing because you can only control the quality and you can only get things right if you do it all yourself. If you’re an artist, you know people aren’t going to replace you as an artist, but you’re going to have to trust they’re going to have to do something you believe is representative of your company and your brand.

Dave Crenshaw: Yeah, you mention the word “Trust”. One of the things that I really like about lynda.comand the experience that I’ve had with the business is you have a great culture there. And one of the things I teach is that a business is a reflection of its leadership.

So I would have to say that culture is a big result of you and, of course, Lynda and your perspective. Can you talk a little bit about what you did to create such a positive culture there at lynda.com?

Bruce Heavin: I thinkthere are a lot of things coming to it. I mean, Lynda herself is a major part of it. She has a personality and we both kind of came at it with the attitude of generosity where we kind of gave more than we got. We treat our employees really well, but I want and I expect my employees to treat our customers and our members really well. We kind of hope that our actions transcend downwards through our staff, to our customersand to our members.

If we can’t be good now when things are good, we’re not going to be good when things are bad.

Dave Crenshaw: Can you expand on that a little bit? What do you mean by that?

Bruce Heavin: Well, think about it. We’re doing well as a company and we’re treating our employees well. If we can’t do that now when things are good, maybe we have to trim things down in the future, but we treat our employees really well. We pay for their meals. We pay for their healthcare, their siblings’, their families’, their medical, their dental, their optics.

We try to get them the best of everything we can. We try to make the workplace a wonderful place to work and as ourselves work here all the time. We live most of our lives here at the office. So we try to make this an environment that we want to live in, as well.

Dave Crenshaw: So most of our audience is people who are running or managing within a small business and perhaps they look at the success that you guys have had, and say “How could we do that?”

I’m sure you have many conversations with managers and leaders there at lynda.com. What would you say to someone to help them create that culture of generosity that you mentioned?

Let’s pretend that you’re in the room talking one on one to one of these managers, what would you say to them?

Bruce Heavin: I think the culture of generosity is one thing and that reflects inward on your employees and hopefully on morale, and hopefully in trust of them with you to feeling secure and working in a good place.

But I think there’s a second level that deals with brand. And that really is external on many occasions.

Brand is about creating creative experiences. So I’m talking about creating great experiences for the employee. But I also think about creating great experiences for the customer.

When I think of brand, I think the logo is the last thing I think of. The company color is the last thing I think of.

Dave Crenshaw: What’s the first thing that you think of?

Bruce Heavin: Experience!It’s all about the entire experience. I look at how the experience all comes together as a whole.

Probably some of the better brand experiences I think are probably that of Disney or an Apple.

Disney has this experience where you might have gone as a child, but you had a great time or at least your memories were really good of being there. And when you have a child a decade or two later, you want to bring that experience to your kids. The experience causes a repeat of that experience.

Apple does it in a matter where you might hear of an Apple product through a friend. You might see it online and have a good experience at the website. You walk into the store and it was clean. The people there are helpful or at least we hope and everything is laid out beautifully. When you touch the hardware, the hardware is nice and beautifully presented. The software operates effortlessly and it’s simple. When you buy it, the packaging is great. When you use it, you find it as a good experience.

Even when things go wrong, when you have to go to customer support, you still have a good experience even though things are bad. And all these experiences translate to the brand which ultimately is represented by that logo.

Dave Crenshaw: And with five hundred employees, what’s your philosophy on how you get that many people involved in creating that experience and building that brand?

Bruce Heavin: I think I would talk to them on a larger scale. I’d really say “Look, the brand isn’t about the marketing department slapping the logo on or how it looks in the web design. It’s the customer service department and how they work with employees.”

I talk to them specifically. It’s about the sales team and how they approach the sales process to make sure that is a good experience. It’s really talking to each of the teams, even to the finance, marketing, to products, to the educational content. It’s really looking at every little angle and every little touch-point we have with the customer and really articulating what it means to make that a good experience.

It’s really about how do you take all these disparate touch-points to the customer and form together to make one really good experience. So people hopefully will have a good experience.

Dave Crenshaw: So if I were to sum up what you’re saying, really it is teaching, educating, converting the people to this mindset of that experience.

Bruce Heavin: Yes, very much so.

Dave Crenshaw: That’s great!

Well Bruce, I know you are a very busy man. So I’m not going to take more of your time. But what would we tell people would be a next great action for them to take from listening to this? Should they be involved in lynda.com? What would you recommend to them?

Bruce Heavin: What would I recommend them?

Well of course I would like to tell you that you should be involved inlynda.com, but that’s very self-serving. But I do think we do offer some really good, amazing training on lynda.com in a variety of ways. I did a talk that slightly relates to this online that is called The Thinkable Presentation. That’s at lynda.com, you could find it there.

I think a lot of this is really about finding these experiences and finding these truths as you go out there. I don’t think they’re all in one place. There are so many places to find all these things. We capture a lot of these at lynda.com but we don’t have everything.

Dave Crenshaw: Great and also if they want to connect with you, your Twitter account is@bruceheavin, correct?

Bruce Heavin: Right and there is a little bit of a story about starting lynda.com on lynda.com in our About section. There are some videos of Lynda and myself talking about setting up lynda.comup as a business.

Dave Crenshaw: Well that’s great. And I notice also you’ve got what’s look like a blog as well?www.bruceheavin.wordpress.com?

Bruce Heavin: Yeah, it’s kind of garden of neglect at the moment. I haven’t touched itlast year.

Dave Crenshaw: Okay, so we shouldn’t send them to that site.

Bruce Heavin: But there are also some fun things there. I think there’s a discussion there about the creation of lynda.com logo and how Lynda didn’t like it. She thought I turned her into the See’s Candy lady.

(Both laugh)

Dave Crenshaw: Alright. So, thank you again Bruce and thank you everyone for listening. Now go be invaluable.

 

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