Brandon Rodman

▶0:00IntroWelcome to the Built by People podcast,

▶0:02Hostwhere we share the stories and insights

▶0:03Introof the world's top HR leaders. Join us as we dive deep into the minds of HR executives, uncovering their strategies, challenges, and triumphs in shaping today's workforce.

▶0:38HostI'm excited to welcome Brandon to the Built by People podcast. Brandon, thank you so much for joining us. For those who don't know Previ yet, what is Previ and what is the big news you want to share with us today?

▶0:48GuestYeah, so Previ, it's simple. It's an employee benefit. But when we say that to people, people are like, yeah, there's a lot of benefits. So what really is it? So Previ, it's an AI-powered employee benefit, and we are bringing employee pricing on premium brands to employees everywhere. We have things like cell phone service through the major carriers that on average are saving employees $1,200 a year on just their cell phone bill. We have home and auto insurance that is saving employees on average over $1,000 a year. And then launching today is something we call the Drop. Where every single month we partner with a different brand and have a curated selection of their products that we make available to the Previi members that they can buy at employee pricing.

▶1:40HostBrandon, let's rewind to the spark that started Previi. What personal or professional moment hit you hard enough to say, I've got to build this, and how does that why still fuel you today?

▶1:51GuestYeah, so Previi is my third company that I've started. My first company was a call center for dental offices. The second company was an expansion of that idea where we built communication software for dental offices and then expanded into other markets. And that company ended up being very successful, went public back in 2021. And then Previ was the next company that I started. A lot of the thinking behind starting Previ was what did I love about running and building my previous company, Weave? I spent over a decade running that company, and what I really loved were the employees. You can't build a company without a team of people that believe, and I kept thinking of how can I give back to the employees everywhere? Not just the employees that believe in the idea for Weave, the last company, but employees that are helping build entrepreneurs' dreams everywhere. And it really came back to the purpose that people are working, and that's to earn a paycheck. And so at the time, back in 2021, 2022, inflation was going crazy.. And so it just kept coming back that we should try to help employees save more of their paycheck. The way my last company, when I left there, it didn't end how I had thought it would end, which was the greatest blessing, uh, that it took me a little while to realize. So I wanted to start another company. I had the motivation, I had the energy, the drive., and I wanted to start something that could be much bigger and much more impactful, ultimately trying to help employees everywhere.

▶3:47HostBrandon, you've said in the past that employees are the heroes building companies. Was there an aha moment early on, like a conversation or a realization that made you see how broken traditional benefits were for them?

▶4:00GuestI wouldn't say benefits are broken. I would just say that Benefits were never an exciting space. Benefits have always been crucial to helping employees, not only by providing them a paycheck and paying them well, but there's so many other expenses in life like health insurance, retirement, things like that that have been focused on a ton. But every single year when it came time for renew your health insurance, it was never an exciting time. It was like, I got to go through this stuff. And just working with employees, I felt like they deserve something that is truly exciting, something that they can look forward to on a regular basis. So that was a really big part of Previ. I wanted something that I personally got

▶4:51Hostexcited about. Brandon, Previ has been making waves with companies like Traeger, PepsiCo, and Hanesbrands. What's the latest exciting update at Previ that's got you pumped up right now? And how does AI fit into that mix?

▶5:05GuestYeah, so the complete overhaul of Previ, we started Previ not with the plan to just do wireless plans indefinitely. We knew we needed to start somewhere and build up a base of members and a base of companies that we had partnered with. And using wireless service as the starting point for all of that ended up working out really well. We finally got to a point that we were big enough that launching the Drop, where we partner with a bunch of these different premium brands and we curate a selection of their products and we make those products available to our members at employee prices. That's the thing that's super exciting. These are sexy products, things everybody wants, but they are now at employee pricing, something that was not attainable before. But because of the scale that we're at and the channel of distribution that we're building, this direct-to-employee channel, it's now something that's available. And I really hope that employees love it and they look forward to it every single month when we launch a new brand.

▶6:14HostBrandon, I know Previ's saving employees serious cash, like $1,200 a year on cell phone service alone. Can you walk us through a real employee's before and after paycheck story to show what that looks like?

▶6:26GuestYeah. So Imagine an employee who may, maybe they're, they make $60,000 a year, so they may, they make good money, but every dollar counts. Statistically, that's probably still higher than what the average salary is in the US. This person isn't living a lavish lifestyle. Every dollar is critical to them, especially if they have a family, they have a mortgage, all of this stuff. And so every dollar that they can save either helps them afford more in life, helps them maybe afford a vacation, maybe helps them save for the future. And so our view was to look at every single thing that people are spending money on and how can we help them save money on those things. So the place that we started with was cell phone service. Everybody has a cell phone bill. And so we work together with the carriers to figure out a way to bring that employee price to them on their cell phone service. And as you mentioned, it's saving people over $1,200 a year. Home and auto insurance, another thing. If you own a home, you have to have home insurance. If you drive a vehicle, you have to have auto insurance. And there, there's ways to save money on that. And some of those tools that we're using are saving people on average $1,000 a year. So now somebody that's making $60,000 a year just got 5% back, between $2,000 and $3,000, 5% of their comp back on their paycheck that they can choose how to use that. And we're just getting started. Some of those people are going to use those savings to buy stuff from The Drop, but they're going to be able to buy it at prices that are reserved only for members. And employees of companies we partnered with. It's amazing to see the benefit that we're able to provide to all these employees.

▶8:27HostPrevi's shaking up the benefits game. How do you see it challenging the old school benefits world, and what big gap are you determined to close?

▶8:35GuestSo I don't think we're shaking things up from a standpoint of anybody's doing anything wrong. I just don't think there's been a big new earth-shattering benefit that's launched in a long time. And when we look at something as important as the 401(k), helps people save for retirement, absolutely critical. I love when companies contribute to it and really support their employees in it, but that helps in the future. There's nothing that's really helping today, and that's where Previ wants to come in. We want to come in and help employees today save more of their hard-earned paycheck that they can then choose how to use those savings. I don't look at it that we're trying to disrupt anybody. I look at it as there's an opportunity that no one's really gone after the way that we want to, and we want to join and have Previ be as big of a benefit as health insurance is, as a 401(k) is.

▶9:39HostBrandon, fast forward 5 years. Where's Previ headed? What's one dream partnership or wild idea that you're chasing to make that future happen?

▶9:49GuestIf we really can develop this into being what we believe is the biggest advancement in the benefits space since the 401(k), Previ's going to be a massive company that can really help in so many ways. Our negotiating leverage will increase, our scale will increase. We'll work with more brands. We'll have more ways of helping employees save money with the advancement of AI, helping really break down the way people are spending their money, helping them understand where they can save. The opportunities are really endless, but if I could write the story today of how I would like to see this go, I would love to see Previ at some point being a public company and being at that kind of scale. Working with Fortune 500 companies, working with the largest companies in the world while also working with small and medium businesses. We really don't have a direction where we're only trying to benefit enterprise employees. We look at every employee out there is absolutely critical. They're the heroes of the economy, whether they're helping build a big massive company or they're working at a local Dental office. All of these people are vital to the economy, and if we can help them in some small way, that's what's gonna be super meaningful to me.

▶11:10HostTell us about some of the reactions you've seen from companies like Qualtrics, Extra Space Storage, and Pluralsight when you've introduced Previ.

▶11:19GuestThe reactions are awesome. Early on, we had people that would make comments of, This feels like magic. How are you making money? You must be selling my data. It felt like we were creating money out of nowhere for them because the deals we have with the wireless carriers, you're getting the exact same quality you get anywhere else. You just work through a different channel in order to get it. And so people were really blown away as a benefit that an employer can offer. There aren't benefits out there, or there's very few of them that are completely free to an employer that can be launched in minutes and that the employees will ultimately just love. It's been awesome just seeing the responses from people, from individual employees as they've gone through the process, then to hear from HR leaders as they have also launched the program and them getting the feedback from their employees of how much they love it.

▶12:21HostBrandon, Previ's taken some bold swings. What's the riskiest move you've made so far and how did it play out? Good, bad, or total game changer?

▶12:30GuestThat's an interesting question. Early on when Previ was just an idea, I was starting to socialize the idea with some people, and one of the comments that came back was that the business model was completely flawed. That I was assuming that brands would lower their prices for us. Obviously very rational thinking there. And when I heard that, I was like, well, I know it actually can work that way when you work in scale. There's a lot of industries that work differently where they have a wholesale price and they have their MSRP and there's Marketing expenses, sales expenses that go into that. There's support costs. There's all these other kinds of costs that there's a way to work backwards from that and absorb some of their costs, streamline them on our side to bring that price down and to work together with the brands. It has not been easy to figure this out. It has been extremely difficult. And there's a reason why no one's done what we're doing especially at the, with the vision and the scale that we're trying to take this. It's been very risky. We've raised a bunch of money from investors. I've personally put in a ton of money. We've had a lot of investors tell us no. We've had investors share concerns that they don't know if this can actually be a big company. We kind of just keep defying the odds and keep chasing the dream that we really believe we can build a meaningful business helping employees everywhere save more of their paycheck.

▶14:10HostAll right, Brandon, last one. If someone's listening and wants to bring Previ to their team tomorrow, what's the one stat or story you tell them to seal the deal with their boss?

▶14:20GuestPrevi is the easiest win an HR leader is going to get all year. Literally, we charge nothing to a company. A company has to partner with us, though, in order to be able to extend Previ to their employees. Their employees cannot get access to Previ without us partnering with them. But the partnership does not cost anything. There's nothing for the company to manage, and they can launch the benefit to their employees in minutes. We've pre-templated everything for them. We basically made it the easy button, and the employees will absolutely love it. It's an easy way to put in the hands of every employee for the option to give themselves a raise. There's not many opportunities like that. We wanted to set this up in a way that every company could launch Previ. They don't need to go to their board of directors. They don't need to review their annual budget. They don't need to make cuts in order to figure out how to afford Previ. We wanted to take all of that decision-making off the table and make it literally the easiest thing that they could do.

▶15:33HostBrandon, thank you so much for joining us on the Built by People podcast. It was a pleasure to have you involved.

▶15:37GuestThanks, Dave. Appreciate it.