363: How Eytan Bensoussan Built NorthOne for Small Business Banking

Harry Duran 00:00:00:

So, Eitan Bensason, CEO of North One and the host of this Week in Small Business, thank you so much for joining me on podcast Junkies.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:00:07:

Thanks for having me.

Harry Duran 00:00:08:

So let's get a location check. Where's home for you?

Eytan Bensoussan 00:00:11:

Toronto, Canada.

Harry Duran 00:00:13:

Yeah, yeah. How long you been there?

Eytan Bensoussan 00:00:15:

Born and raised in Montreal, so an even colder part of the country and then have been there for about five years now.

Harry Duran 00:00:22:

Okay, what's something most people you know don't realize or the hidden gems of Toronto?

Eytan Bensoussan 00:00:28:

It's actually an enormous metropolis. I think people don't actually realize that there's. It's bordering something like 10 million people when you take the surrounding regions. It's just enormous. And so that just leads you into a whole bunch of exciting and interesting things going on in many places at once. So you don't really have a shortage of like things to do or things to see, which I thought was, you know, just really fascinating.

Harry Duran 00:00:51:

So I took a look obviously at your background and I'm a current customer of North1 and I think that's how we connected. I'm a big fan of the site so we can talk a little bit about the found surrounding there. But I was interested that when I look back and you know, and I don't know if you've had a chance to look at your LinkedIn in a while, but you go all the way back as a intern at the Planet Finance. So I'm curious, like if you go back, if you think about yourself growing up, getting into school, were you always interested in finance?

Eytan Bensoussan 00:01:18:

No, actually it was finance was to be like totally honest finance, banking. I kind of deliberately avoided them for a long time. It was far more of the challenge of things that was like getting me into them and how much I could learn about them rather than the financial aspect. I think the I then was able to remove that like mental block I had on like thinking about banking and finance. And it actually was this kind of one plus one equals three. I was able to actually lean into it and say, okay, I can enter this space in a way that's comfortable for me. Whereas I think prior to that, you know, I've seen friends go into banking, people who are going. And I just, that was never the world that I wanted.

Harry Duran 00:01:58:

Sounds like there's a innate sense of curiosity about how things work. Is that accurate and is that something you can trace back to your childhood?

Eytan Bensoussan 00:02:06:

Yeah, I mean, I think it's a combination of so for sure curiosity, but it's also really, really attracted to what doesn't look possible like, how could I ever do this? And it's like a moth flying to the fire, right. There's like good versions of it, but then just very bad versions of it. But that's something that I consistently had tracking over the course of my life.

Harry Duran 00:02:26:

If I had a conversation with your parents about how you were as a child with some of that track as well.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:02:32:

Absolutely. I mean, I made it my life's mission from basically till I was like 6 years old to maybe 12 or 13 to become a baseball player.

Harry Duran 00:02:40:

Oh.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:02:41:

And I just, I knew the odds of it, but I was just obsessed with it. And so I would be like in the morning throwing, you know, tennis balls against the garage door, waking up the neighbor, just like trying to do drills, you know, at night I'd like try to like, you know, flex my muscles in my arm, thinking better way for me to throw, like everything I could do obsessively until I like really got the clear signal that was not going to happen. But yeah, that was tracking a lot.

Harry Duran 00:03:05:

What's your earliest memory of thoughts of or maybe experiencing anything that would, we could call entrepreneurial?

Eytan Bensoussan 00:03:11:

I think it just, it honestly emerged really naturally. I never even thought of it as entrepreneurialism or entrepreneurship. You know, as early as high school, some subjects came really easy to me. Like, really easy. Just get very gratefully right. Like things like math and science. And I could tell that they were like the opposite for other people. And so it just got me very quickly into tutoring. And so I started by just saying someone's going to pay me like 20 bucks an hour to tell them about the periodic cables or help them with like, you know, geometry. And so then I started going from there. And then I created group tutorials where I would get, you know, 15 people in a room, each one of them paying 100 bucks for a three hour crash course before exam period. And it was so like not effortless, but it was just such a non, like of course. Like I people value this when I find a way to make money. And then it kind of just grew. And at one point I had started a system where I would tell my students that anyone you refer me, I will give you 10% of what I make of them in perpetuity. And so here I was like a little spreadsheet. You know, I'm like in borderline like leaving high school and I'm bicycling around the city giving like little, here's $6 for, you know, last week's residuals, etc. But I remember making like three or $4,000 one month, just do the tutoring. Because it just grew so quickly. And again, I didn't even think of that as being a business until much later as I got into, like, college. I was like, oh, man, I was like, building something there.

Harry Duran 00:04:34:

It's easier to look back at these things because they say hindsight is 20 20, but when you look at those experiences, was there anyone in your life at that time that was inspiring you?

Eytan Bensoussan 00:04:44:

Yeah. 100. So I kind of had two sides of the coin, you know, on one hand, you know, both of my grandfathers were business owners. And so you always heard, like, the stories of their business owners, you know, and they were just small business owners. Nothing. You know, we're not talking conglomerates, you know, but you kind of had all this kind of percolating in the background. And my father is, in many ways, like the honey I shrunk, the kid's dad who's always tinkering with inventions, turning them into companies.

Harry Duran 00:05:10:

Okay.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:05:11:

And so you kind of had this medium where there was always this idea of, like, well, that sounds like it's never been invented before. Why don't you try to invent it? Also this idea of, you know, my Grandfather wake up 4:00 in the morning, start his day. So you kind of had both of those role models emerging at the same time, which kind of sparkled itself for me.

Harry Duran 00:05:28:

So there was some models to follow and some people that were inspiring you and behavior to mimic and also traits to mimic as well.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:05:36:

Totally. I mean, and by the way, it wasn't just the positive. Like, we saw the dark side of entrepreneurship.

Harry Duran 00:05:42:

Yeah.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:05:42:

You know, my dad is an engineer by training, and, you know, the idea of the business side of his businesses was, you know, this is the guy who solved quadratic equations in his sleep. But then when it comes to the ledger, like, you could see, like, he was really like, okay, I have to go back to basics. Like, how do I make sure that, you know, I count for every penny? I could see how tough it was in those places, which is, you know, some of the inspiration ultimately for North 1. But even just the idea that a business owner kind of has to do the hard things.

Harry Duran 00:06:09:

Yeah. I love to see how all these threads tie together. And something that I saw that you did early on also was you were a research intern for the Charlie Roche show.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:06:17:

Yeah.

Harry Duran 00:06:17:

You know, I can see now how the early days coming to fruition for you, this curiosity, this entrepreneurship, you know, this proclivity towards, you know, the subjects like math, but the broadcasting and Also, I think you had a web series as well at Globe and Mail. So there's something there brewing about whether something you've learned while working with Charlie Rochester. So I'm curious about how that was starting to sprout as well.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:06:41:

So, you know, as I got into college, I was just kind of honestly, information overload by subjects I had never even touched before. And I started falling in love with like things like philosophy and poli sci and being able to study business. And it was just like, how did I never know about these things that you could actually study? And so something like Charlie Rose. You know, I would watch Charlie Rose since I was a kid with my dad late at night. And then I realized, like, actually the things that I'm starting to pick up outside of science are the things that they're talking about. And so I just decided, you know what I want to try to figure out. How can I work there? Can I test out this hypothesis that maybe that's my career? And I applied, I think three times in a row that I got rejected, applied the first time I got rejected. And I asked him, like, can you help me understand why? Like, well, you're like a science student. You're studying like biochem and math. Like, doesn't make sense for a show which is on the humanities and on business. And so I said, what would I have to do? Like, show us that you're interested in media. So I went out over that next year and I went to join the local TV station at the university. I started getting involved in the debating team and I applied again. They said, look, you got that, but you're still, your coursework is so heavily focused in science. So I declared a poli sci minor and I did a minor in business. And finally, like, I think the third year there, they said, you know what, if you're willing to come down, we'll interview you. I just got on a Greyhound, did an overnight, went to the Y YMCA to shower and went right for the interview. And it worked out. So it was amazing. And it just, you know, it showed me that I didn't want to be in show business per se. But yeah, so many of the things that I was watching, the team behind the show, you know, like a small army of incredibly bright people trying to put together this like the 60 minute show that was emerging. I was like, that, that's so cool. That's like an army at work. And look what they produce.

Harry Duran 00:08:25:

What was the experience like getting to see Charlie Rose up close? Because, you know, for folks that are interested in like interview based show. And then, you know, they obviously there's people to model Terry Grosses of the world. And now we have, you know, newer people like the Tim Ferrisses and the Joe Rogans. But like, early on there wasn't a lot because you'd have to. You're limited about what you can see on tv. I grew up in an era. My parents would watch 60 Minutes. Right. So you'd get those and you'd have that experience. Barbara Walters maybe, you know, probably showed my age with that one. But did you learn anything that maybe in hindsight you're using now with the podcast?

Eytan Bensoussan 00:08:57:

Totally. Look, I think there are two of the things that come to mind. One was just an absolutely insane work ethic, just obsession level insanity was scrutinizing every single thing that happens in the show and how to improve it never went away. And the second one was an almost like Wikipedia level, like absorption of information, you know, so you'd have a guest coming. And it wasn't just like, who is this person? What can I talk to them about? Like, Larry King is the other version of that. Right. Larry King was like, I don't know who I'm interviewing. You know, let's see where this goes. But this was like, you know, looking through even like Library of Congress for like what is even just not the subject matter, what's the adjacent subject matters. And then hundreds of pages of research per guest, all being internalized. And that expresses itself through, you know, maybe a dozen or 15 questions over an hour. But because of that all that, you could actually get to a lot of depth on the, to the topic. And that level of obsession, I think so really stayed with me.

Harry Duran 00:09:54:

And then you also had spent some time later with. At the Globe and Mail.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:09:58:

Yeah.

Harry Duran 00:09:59:

Talk about that experience a little bit.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:10:01:

So this was, you know, I came back from that time and I found one of my professors in school management and I was talking to him about it and he said, you know what? I've been thinking about, you know, just taking a management specific approach to interviewing the leaders. So I just said, well, then I'll do it with you. By the way, I had never done production. I had only been doing, you know, how do we research people? How do we think about who we want on the show? But I just bought, I can't remember what the name of it was. Final Cut Pro, which was the backyard day, like this. There was like eight textbooks to figure out how to. And I just like, I bought it and I read the whole thing and I was like, all right, I'm ready to edit videos. And we just kind of just figured it out. But that way I was able to do both things. I was able to bother prepare questions, which is what I had already done. But also I was able to be the one stop shop where once he's finished with the taping, I take the whole thing, I'd edit it, I ship it off. And it was just, you know, I just said yes before I said no.

Harry Duran 00:10:57:

How did that experience color how you thought about preparing for these conversations?

Eytan Bensoussan 00:11:04:

Honestly, it allowed me to have think of a little bit of a laboratory. So in sometimes, you know, when we started the this Weekend Small Business podcast, so what if I take a totally unprepared attitude, right? Like, I want to see what that that's like. And so I tried it. I felt that what was really frustrating for me was that it was leaving me to surface level. You know, you're asking all the specifics. And then I went the other way, and I said, well, what if I were to research the heck out of someone? And I found that had its own things, you know, obviously the cost, but it allowed me to kind of almost have these different models and try to figure out what felt most natural. And I'll be candid, the one that one of the most important things I realized is that I didn't want to have discussions where I was just agreeing and nodding. I actually wanted to find points of disagreement. So I started creating this kind of engine in my mind where I was like, when I disagree, I actually, like, step it up. And so. And that actually became some of the most interesting moments of that when it's a healthy challenge in the discussion rather than tracking of it. And I mean, again, for me, the mandate of the podcast was not, can we explore the life of. Because there's a really. There's a different narrative approach you want to take for that. For me, it was, what are the greatest tools, trips, tricks that the best practitioners can teach the wider small business world? So I almost wanted to unpack and go, hang on, that doesn't make sense to me. How does that work? Why would you do this? Why don't you do that? And it's through a little bit of that, you know, full court press that you actually get these really amazing moments of clarity or insight through the interviewer. Like, oh, that's the reason why you're telling everybody they should kind of follow this methodology for managing their money, or, you know, how they hire this way or that way. And so let me get to the root cause.

Harry Duran 00:12:44:

Is that something. It sounds like it's something you had a curiosity about early on as you started to expand what you were studying. Right. Because you had, you know, it took you three rounds of applying to Charlie Rose and going back and forth and realizing how much you needed to diversify the breadth of what you were learning. You mentioned something specifically about this ability to disagree with someone and push on that subject. And I think it's something that's getting lost now. Nowadays. You know, people are so worried about saying the wrong thing and getting canceled.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:13:09:

Yeah.

Harry Duran 00:13:10:

You know, they don't want to have tough conversations. And I think what we've lost is the ability to have conversations with people who you may not necessarily agree with, but you can respect their opinions and you can have a healthy debate about it. Is this aspect of being able to maybe debate's not the right word, but just have a longer form conversation where you can find points where you might disagree, but at the end of the day, you at least understand where they're coming from.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:13:32:

I think that. I mean, two things. One, I think it's just so much more interesting that way. Right. It just. Who wants to be on a roller coaster where it's like a straight line to the other side? You like the loops, you like to have a little bit of the curveball. And if everybody, you know, the goal is not to create some sort of gotcha situation. Right. If everybody knows, hey, rules of the game, we're not going to agree on everything. And that's a feature of the discussion, by the way. I don't even think that's just a media thing. I think, you know, even internally at North 1 at the company always start, you know, some of our more important problem solving sessions. Look, we assume good intent. Nothing here is personal. It's not meant to be. So if you can interpret it that way, don't. That's. And then it's about like, you know, now you need to, like, rip this idea apart. And I'll typically, like, come with a strong point of view on something, but the whole point is that I actually want to be. I want my thinking to be reshaped. In fact, the most valuable thing for me is when I realize I'm wrong on something. Like when, you know, you're right. Like, great, that's where I was this morning. But if I can get a different perspective, man, it's so much more empowering.

Harry Duran 00:14:33:

Yeah. As you started realizing and playing in this world and looking at all the things that were of interest to you, you Then made The move to McKinsey, which is, obviously, it's got a rich history of, you know, developing folks for leadership positions. What made you lean towards that and realize that was going to be the next necessary step for you?

Eytan Bensoussan 00:14:53:

Yeah, well, I guess it comes back a little bit earlier than that. So after I finished studying science, I really didn't know, how do you get to where you want to go in life? Like, I knew I didn't want to be in a lab. It just wasn't going to be. I was talking about, this is going to date me. But I always talk about, how do you become Michael Jordan on the basketball court, not Michael Jordan on the baseball field, you know, and, like, I was like, that's not my basketball court. And so all these things. And I ended up going to do a law. And I can't totally understand why, how I got there, but I did. And I just remembered at, you know, the beginning of my first year of law school, I went from being doing really well in science in undergrad, and here I am with letters. I didn't know they went that low. Like, I'd never seen marks that terrible in my life. And I'm having this, like, what did I do to myself here? Like, this is clearly not a basketball court. This is worse. But I remember really wanting to leave and thinking, like, I must have made a mistake. And as I was getting ready to say, you know what? I'm just gonna stop this, I realized that I hate quitting more than I hate, you know, suffering.

Harry Duran 00:16:01:

And why is that?

Eytan Bensoussan 00:16:02:

I just was like, you know what? This is the system telling me I don't work. I'm going to, like, crush the system, like, manage myself through it so, like, I can walk away from it on my terms rather than simply having had the system give me low marks and tells me, hey, you're not good. No, no, I'm good. I'm going to now find a way to show this system I'm good. And then I'm going to take a hike if that's where I want to go. And so I actually decided to, like, double, triple down. And I finished law school really well, like I did, you know. And by the way, it doesn't come easy to me at all. I sacrificed a whole lot of social, you know, and extracurricular to just probably catch up to where the better students were. But I had to put in a lot of effort. But by having finished strong, I came to two realizations. One, you know, nothing necessarily has to block you. But two, I don't want to. I probably am not well suited for law. And I could see my classmates who would come alive when they were in, you know, the real legal zone. Yeah. In their zone. I'm like, you know, I appreciate it so deeply and I. And I value it, but I know that's not for me. And so in many ways, going off into McKinsey was such a great combination of saying, look, I need to weaponize all this knowledge I've learned to something productive for myself. I'm kind of in so many places. And so this was almost like. It's almost like taking applied human engineering. See, how do we solve the toughest problems? And there are no rules to the game. You kind of like use every. Every data point, every argument, every kind of lever you can to really come to the crux of how to solve a real human problem, which is, you know, businesses, organization. And that was a playground for me where I was just. It was exactly the right thing to kind of apply all of these. This horsepower I was building up over the years, but just didn't know how to, like, where was the outlet for it.

Harry Duran 00:17:43:

Yeah. What would you say in your time, there were some of the traits you acquired that you see now are helpful for you.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:17:49:

Yeah.

Harry Duran 00:17:50:

To get to where you are now.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:17:51:

You know, the first one was it is not a new trait, but rather it just put a label. It just work your face off. I always was a really hard worker, but here it was like taking that and saying, how do you 10, 20x that, like, do whatever it takes to solve the problem to help the cost of clients? Like, nothing gets in the way of that. Not time zones, not jet lag, not like, you know, it doesn't matter. And I love that idea of just like, you just leave everything on the field to get to the best answer for your client. And so when it comes to, you know, business, it was just like, if we do whatever, you know, in our particular situation, what does it take to make the customer happy? What does it take to get them what they need? We just. We figure it out. We should almost like think, what's the right answer? And how do we reverse engineer from that? Even if it's painful for us, even if it's that, but even more importantly, it allows you to, like, create this very clear environment in the company, saying, we need to get to the right answer on something, you know, worries, emotions, politics, Time aside, what is the right answer, you know, in first principles and how do we swarm to get it done and break our own rules? And, you know, not from a like break our mental models. I mean, you know, like, how do you like, oh, we've never done it. Oh, now let's do it this way. Let's try it and let's like, you know, I want to be careful because you never break bank rules. That's not the rule I meant, but I think that was one. I think the second one was rigor. Right. If the putting this microscopic squishy thinking. So it's like, okay, well we're all saying, hey, this should be, you know, about that bit. What does this mean? How do we actually be precise? How do we stress test? Like, okay, we have to go build this new feature for our customers. Well, what are all the assumptions we've made? Where's the greatest risk? The riskiest assumption that we actually don't have coverage on? We just kind of said, I hope this is true so that the whole thing follows. And so we have just not standing for this does not pass the sniff test of like being a rigorous methodical approach. And especially when I entered up entered, you know, the world of company building, people come from all walks of life. There's no sort of school of company building. Right. It's just. And so you would see that at least what I was really was helpful for me was I could really track my thinking. And it's like I had real conviction in the ideas that were coming up and they have staying power. And it was something that I saw like a lot of people had to acquire the hard way. They would kind of just, you know, make decisions, but didn't have that instinct, like, how do I stress test them? How do I de risk the decision before throwing resources at it? And that's been real valuable. And I think the last one, just to kind of cap it off, is this idea of, you know, just getting smart on a subject you're about to. You know, as an example, when Northone started, we couldn't afford stuff. I took a graphic Design class from 4 to 7am for months to learn how to create wireframes and how to design so I could kind of take this idea from my mind and put into something real. And then we got someone eventually who could turn that into a real product that, you know, people want to use. But every time it was like going so deep on a subject and then resurfacing and saying, okay, now that I kind of feel that I've got a real depth here, how do I attack the problem? And this need to just not stay surface level was. Is a big driver.

Harry Duran 00:20:59:

Yeah, it Sounds like being in that environment, McKinsey, it's almost like you were playing in the major leagues of like business thinking. I think of the Jim Rohn quote, you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with and like.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:21:08:

Right.

Harry Duran 00:21:09:

I imagine there was a lot of that. Like everyone's like moving aggressively and thinking and you know, you're looking left and right and everyone's just kind of like operating at that same level as well.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:21:19:

Yeah. And you know what I also learned there? And this was not intuitive. That doesn't have to. That can be also complemented with kindness.

Harry Duran 00:21:25:

Yeah.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:21:25:

You know, I met some of the smartest, like hardest charging people I've ever met in my life. And yet so many of them were so deep, were kind and warm and thoughtful and it was almost like, you know, in the movies you get or tv, like you get this like imagine where like the more successful the business person is, the more of a jerk they're going to be and they could care less. And I'm sure that's true. There's plenty of. But I actually found that there were people who married being deeply human and empathetic and kind with being incredibly hard charging and fast working and being able to realize that that zero sum is more of a mental model for movies because it's easy for us to kind of think of that stereotype. But the real elegance was when people just marry the both in real life.

Harry Duran 00:22:06:

I know from a business perspective it makes a lot of sense nowadays. Back then you think about the Rockefellers and Carnegie's, they're just like, go, go, go and lost. But is this always been something that's important for you? This idea of like having empathy, caring for your fellow human in the context of, you know, building and growing a business?

Eytan Bensoussan 00:22:23:

Yeah. I don't know that I have given it that name. You know, like, I just, I didn't like spending time around jerks. Right. We now label that as like saying, oh, you know, you're looking for X, Y and Z in the environment. Sure. But I mean ultimately, like I just wanted to spend time around people that I liked and that probably solved for some of those things. I think the, you know, this amazing. One of my best friends, she's a doctor now and she once taught me the difference between compassion and empathy. And that's when everything clicked for me. You know, in med school they talk to you about this idea of empathy, which is where you put yourself in the shoes of the person who will be feeling this and you let you feel like they will. And there's compassion, which is where you can kind of understand what the person will be feeling and have compassion for them, but it doesn't change what you've got to do. And so the way they work, they teach them that. The difference is this idea where, let's just say you have to tell someone that their child has passed, Right. If you try to have empathy, you put yourself in the shoe of that parent, you're frozen. How could anybody? Like, it just erects you. But when you have compassion, it's about being able to say, look, you know how they're going to feel, and it's going to be terrible. You do have to kind of walk them into the room, help them understand what's going on, talk to them about, like, next steps, because they're going to be, you know, in that state of total loss and those two. That was one of the biggest gifts that she gave me. When I understood that, it allowed me to kind of understand that, you know, especially at work, when it's live or die by your results. And so being able to have compassion for the people around you, but it doesn't change that. Like, we still got to get this done and come hell or high water. And so I, you know, you say, like, I understand how bad that's going to be, and I understand how painful this might be, especially when you're giving, you know, critical feedback. But it doesn't change the fact that the facts are the facts. They don't care about our feelings. So as humans, we can kind of appreciate that, and we won't argue with the facts, but we can then at least understand what this will do to other people emotionally.

Harry Duran 00:24:13:

Yeah, I love the distinction. Thanks for sharing that. So talk to me about the origin story of Northone.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:24:19:

So it kind of merges two parts of my life. You know, I grew up in a family of small business owners, and so I just saw. I mean, I hinted at it, but I saw how people who are really good at something, you know, my grandfather was an electrical contractor, right. So he had a small team and would go run the wiring through a whole bunch of malls and homes. He was really good at that. You could sleep easy knowing that the wiring in your house was done well. But was he, like, incredible at keeping his receipts, at knowing, you know, how the books were going to close by the end of the month? Not necessarily. Right. And so the superhuman level of attention he had to put that was incredibly draining. But it would become his weakest link if he didn't get it done. Well, same thing with my dad. And so I just grew up knowing that there was almost this like two sided beast. Entrepreneurship. You're killing it on the basketball court, doing the thing you're selling, but then you're going to play baseball where you have to deal with all these things. Sometimes it's for, it could be HR for people, it could be finance. There's a whole bunch of things which come with the package. And so that was just this one context. The second one was I spent, you know, in my time at McKinsey, we spent a lot of time working with a lot of these large companies and organizations who are just spending too much running their finance department. And they said, how do we actually, you know, we don't want to sacrifice the quality or the output, but it can't be that it costs us 50 million a year to run finance on a global level. And so having done many of those, I started realizing that these companies were able over time to save many dozens of millions of dollars each on this by doing a couple things. One, right, sizing their bank accounts. You know, a lot of them had just gotten bank accounts as time went on and you know, you'd have a company making billions of dollars that had hundreds of bank accounts which had hundreds of transaction limits and every overage is another two bucks. And so you don't realize this because you know, it's such a little corner of the business sometimes. But we realized that you could just, if you right size your bank account, there's so much savings to be had. That's kind of the first step for North 1, which is so many of the small businesses out there, they're just using bank accounts that are, you know, charging them fees that you know, they could avoid that are not getting them the best possible return on their money through interest, through cash back. And so when we started North Pole I said I want to make it this the place where any small business in America, this is the right size bank account for me. You know, there's no fees, free inbound wires, you know, apy, cash back, all the things that you want. Problem one, problem two that you know, I saw these big companies solving was they were starting to connect all the information across their various tools in a big enterprise context. That's like oh, the east coast accounting system and the west coast accounting system and how do we kind of. But in a small business you're thinking even like receivables, payables, your balances, these are things that typically live in silos until maybe the end of the month or quarter, when you're like, does it all net out the ability to start giving people an ability to connect the dots on the information on all the money coming in, coming out? What are some of the insights that emerge and how you can attract the biggest picture? And finally, how do you kind of where you can automate the processes? You know, in a large company setting, it means you have a team of 75 people doing manual entry, for example, and sure, it gets it done, but it can be wasteful. You know, if you could have a product that does that in the life of a small business owner, it's like post it notes. How many post it notes? Like, on the 15th of the month it says, I got to go check this. And how do we get those post it notes off their desks and just have it delivered? In the product experience, I'll give you, like, one little example to bring it to life. You know, in North 1, one of the things that is one of our most successful features is our envelope system where people can kind of take the balance and just carve it out into small allocations. It just helps them. You know, typically a balance is like a giant mountain of money. And I'm like, I don't know what part of this is about to get shipped off for tax and what part I have to reserve for rent. And so creating a budget inside of your bank account was one way to remove that kind of burden that was laying. You know, we have so many people that have just used that. You know, I used to intermittently try to update things in Excel or Google sheets, but I'm not good at doing it every day. And it was like a very. I'd have to like, do it late at night now. They're just like reallocating, just dragging in real time, like, how much money should go into which envelope. And it just gives you a little bit of that visibility into the business. And then we started, for example, building on that and sending people a daily or a weekly recap of their bank account saying, how do you do month over month? How'd you do week over week? And what are the biggest things that have shifted your balance? Just those things answered. What we have found are some of the five most common questions customers would ask themselves. When you ask them, like, what do you often. And we were able to give that back to them. So this is an example of how we tried to bring that mandate to life for small business. Can we. Because there's an army of companies trying to serve the largest companies in the world. And they're building customs. But very few people are building software bespoke for small businesses in a way that actually is not a stripped down version of what was an enterprise solution. And we're just going to like create the cheap version. How do you actually create for, you know, by intentionally the world class solution for a small business owner. That's your goal, not something else adjacent. You kind of slide down into that place and that's kind of where that comes together.

Harry Duran 00:29:22:

Yeah. And that idea of the envelopes is, was popularized with Michael McCallitz's profit first 100%.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:29:27:

So when I was in college, I read Profit first and created a very unsuccessful business with it. But the system stuck. Right. And I was like. And that's why when we launched the one thing that I was adamant, like we cannot launch without envelopes because I know people who use Profit first are going to want to use envelopes. And so we've got to kind of be able to offer this. And candle in retrospect, that was a good call because it's been one of the things which has helped our customers a lot and now we're actually investing heavily in how do we, what's envelopes V2, how do we bring these things? And it just, you talk to a lot of customers and you realize the ways, the creative ways people are using this in ways that I wouldn't even have imagined. And how can we kind of make that easier?

Harry Duran 00:30:08:

Yeah, that's one of the features that I looked for when I was looking for a bank and that's why popped up. Yeah. So how does one, you know, again, hindsight 20 20, how does one think about starting like big picture? Like starting an online bank is no easy feat. It's not something you can do. It's not like whipping up like a simple SaaS product or like a website. You know, there's a lot involved and so talk a little bit about what you maybe wish you knew when you first started that, you know, now what are we about eight years in?

Eytan Bensoussan 00:30:37:

I didn't know what it was going to be when I started. I started with knowing a problem that was like, this is so silly that no one has solved this. It was just simply the insanity that a small business has to go through just to manage their finances and to. It's just crazy. And so I started saying like, how do I explore that? I spoke to a hundred small business owners before I even started the company and just said like, what keeps you up at night? I had like an interview script that I would go through and it led me to a couple of real mental moments of mental clarity. Because when I started, so maybe it's going to be like a cool dashboard that I can build them or some sort of plugin. Because that was realistic for me. Right. That was like something you could chew on. But then when I came to it, the intellectually honest answer was that they were saying, look, I don't need another tool. Like the last thing I want to deal with is another thing I got to log into another tool. Like and. But every one of them was saying, but the pain starts with the money. It's do I have enough? You know, I'm like, why am I getting dinged for all these fees? I can't even like in an instruction manual to operate my bank account. And I need like, quick answer is there? I don't need like. And so to me, the intellectually honest answer was to say the bank account until recent days has been kind of like a power socket. Right. What do you expect out of your power socket? Just plug the thing in and it works. People often have like a bank somebody plug in and it works. But really that's actually the best place, if you think about it, where with all of your finance operations should be stemming from there.

Harry Duran 00:32:04:

Yeah.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:32:04:

And so it was about thinking what if your bank account and your banking platform, of course they would do the give you the best banking experience. But what if that was starting point for a whole bunch of other things that your business will need. For example, paying automatic bill payment, budgeting, you know, revenue analytics, all things that we've over time have built into Northone because it was the next step in how to help customers. And I'll just kind of go back for a sec. It never takes away to actually convince someone that you need you earn their business, you have to have the best product that they're looking for. So what I mean by that is on its merits, the bank account has to be the best possible bank account that it can be. It's not because I have an extra tool you weren't looking for necessarily that you're going to now choose me. You have to be able to win on the merits of being the best customer service you can get, of course, fastest money moving, biggest limits, et cetera, better fee structure. And then if I can then be in your consideration set of people worthy of your business. Let me tell you about all these other things you weren't necessarily looking about. But oh man, can they really lighten the load. And that's that two part process in which we Found that, you know, really resonates with business owners because very, you know, candidly, I can't think of a single business owner who's looking for some sort of a bill payment solution, says, you know what, I'm going to get a bank account to go get that. It's the wrong border. But we do see people who are like, I need a great bank account. And oh, that's really cool. They have all these things. How did they know? This is another part of the things that bug me at work. And that's kind of this important insight.

Harry Duran 00:33:35:

How have you grown as a leader? This was your first CEO experience, right?

Eytan Bensoussan 00:33:39:

Yeah, I mean, tremendously. But what it does is it just shines light on who you are. You know, I found that the more founding a company, hiring people, running it with a team, you can't reprogram yourself overnight. Like probably by the time you're 30, you're like 90% of who you're going to be. And you can kind of dial things up or down, but it just shines a light. And so that level of the thing that enabled it for me is just a self awareness. I'm really good at this, I'm not good at that. And it helped me just stop being fuzzy about it, saying, I could probably do this. Like, no, no, no, just declare bankruptcy on the things that you're bad at and just find someone better than you. So certainly, like, it helps you shine light. But I think the other one is just the power of resilience. Like it just every time that you feel like everything's about to end, you realize that there's just some way that you can figure it out. And the first time that happened, to be honest, I was like, it's really gonna end. Like, I was like, it's all over. And this is like early days. This is like really, really early. We weren't even live. I had other things that kind of torpedoes that came my way that was like, we're never gonna get to launch and we're never gonna get investors. And by the second, third or fourth time, I'm like, you know what? I don't know how I'm gonna solve this one, but I actually know what I'm gonna solve it. And to be able to have gone through enough of those like moments where you're just white and you're like in a cold sweat, but then live next day, it kind of gives you this armor to say, you can kind of throw a whole bunch of problems at me and yeah, I'm going to have that first minute where I feel like, you know, my heart's in my stomach, but after that, my mind starts going, and I'm like, all right, yeah, yeah, cool as a cucumber. How do we proceed? And that's, I think, the thing that I could have told you maybe intellectually years ago, that was true. But this is the one where I'm like, you are going to have to live this over and over and over again for you to actually realize at the end of it that, you know, resilience is maybe the most underrated skill that no one works on because so much of it just is when life happens to you.

Harry Duran 00:35:32:

Yeah.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:35:32:

But has that been valuable?

Harry Duran 00:35:34:

Yeah. And it's just kind of leading to or reflecting back on the earlier experiences you've had. You learned to build that resilience over the years and learn how not to give up in the face of adversity. And I think that's clearly shown, and it clearly helped you for these moments. What's a tough question you've had to ask yourself recently?

Eytan Bensoussan 00:35:53:

What? Not. That's. You're like, I'm walking in my mind. I'm like, well, there's like. It's got to be like, 50 of them.

Harry Duran 00:35:59:

Yeah.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:35:59:

But, you know, tough question is how. I mean, I'll give you three kinds of questions that came through recently. One is, who do I need to be in six months to, like, what's the company going to need of me?

Harry Duran 00:36:11:

I love that.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:36:12:

And sometimes it's not even six months. It's like, in the next month, does my calendar reflect what is important and am I spending time and et cetera? Like, that is a real. I have to regularly just take a step back and say, where do I need to be? Because, you know, typically when you run a company, you're actually able to go anywhere, Right. You can be in one moment, you're in sales, then you're in hr. And so at some point, they're all necessary. But then when you have this moment to say, well, where is the biggest bottleneck for the company? That's where I throw myself. And that's actually the question that has come back over and over. I call it my mit, which is my most important thing, I kind of say, this is clearly the most important bottleneck of the company right now, and I just completely throw myself in, and I blow up the calendar. And until we solve it, and then I move on to the next one, I think the other part is, conversely, you know, what's our. Are we solving? Are we helpful enough for our customers, like, where are we falling short? It's one thing to kind of get, oh, your MPS is doing great and customers are very satisfied, but there's just this constant little paranoia saying, yeah, but what about next month? Where are we kind of slipping now that we don't see and how do we get ahead of that? And I feel like, you know, that's a hard question because when you have things that are working, it just, it's such a good emotional feeling to say, I can breathe a bit, but actually my instinct has now become when things are working well, my paranoia grows and saying, well, where is the thing? Where's, like, under the water? Sure is the thing that's coming my way that I need to kind of prepare for.

Harry Duran 00:37:40:

That's very interesting. I love that. The mit. So obviously we'd be remiss if we didn't talk about the inspiration for the podcast, but I get a sense that it was bubbling based on everything we've talked about. So talk a little bit about why you felt like you needed one more thing on your plate.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:37:54:

Yeah, honestly, it came from our customers. I try to speak to maybe one or two customers a week, ideally more, but that's my minimum. And got a lot of questions from them, like, hey, do you know of any good resources on how to better manage my salon? Or, you know, my construction company is doing really well, but, like, I'm starting to get pulled at the edges. Like, I don't know how to, like, create more time for myself. And I was getting a lot of these, like, had nothing to do with what we did, as, you know, in banking, but rather were more about how do I run a better business. And so I just said, I wonder, you know, I would actually, by the way, I would Google things and I put like a little email package for them to get. And here are the top five resources I found. Here's why I like this one. I try to create like a little. A mini guide.

Harry Duran 00:38:36: Sure.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:38:37:

And I just had this thought. I say, well, what if instead of doing this one at a time, what if I could just go find some of the best practitioners in different industries and actually bring them, share that with all of our customers in those industries. So it was a lot less about what I had to say, for sure. And thought more about could I be a convening factor to bring some of the sharpest business owner operators to our customers and hopefully they could learn a little bit. And I remember, like, when we started that I wouldn't say, go listen to the podcast. I Would try to send email saying, here are the five timestamps that had really nuggets. If you're gonna just learn one thing, learn those. My goal wasn't to say, like, can you kind of get people's eyes for 35 minutes? But rather, can I have that conversation and bring a couple of nuggets that are then something I can take to the customers? And that's really kind of where it started.

Harry Duran 00:39:27:

What's that experience been like for you? And how have you grown as a host of the show?

Eytan Bensoussan 00:39:31:

Yeah, it's actually really tough to switch your brain. You know, sometimes it even catches up on me. Like, I'm just dealing with something really heavy in the morning on in the team or the company. And then all of a sudden I realize, like, oh, shoot, in 20 minutes, I have to, like, open my mind and, like, you know, bring this person in. And so that's actually one of the hardest thing, which is kind of just mental shift you gotta make before and after. And to be clear, like, the company doesn't miss a beat. Like, it just. It doesn't give me some sort of, oh, I couldn't get this done on time. You just got to do the overtime. So that's the first one. And the second one is, as a host, you just have this such a better radar for how do I make this an interesting conversation? You know, try. How do I avoid the monologue and really pull through? And sometimes you kind of go to a place that you weren't expecting and that's okay, too.

Harry Duran 00:40:18:

Yeah, I've found it's made me a better listener. It's made me more curious and be more interested in pulling threads when I hear them, and I think it's translated to the real world. Has any aspect of running the podcast helped you in your personal life or in the business as well?

Eytan Bensoussan 00:40:32:

On the personal side, it has given me much better questions to talk to people around me. I'm much better at asking questions, and I'm much better at listening to the answers and then making that as a stepping stone to the next really interesting thing. So my hope, you know, people will tell me whether I'm right or not. My hope is I become a more interesting person. And then the other part is that it's also given me a lot more patience on listening to the full answer to people, even at the company. Like, you know, avoid interrupting when it's not necessary. It's just a great, like a bit of a control system that I can implement.

Harry Duran 00:41:08: Yeah, that's awesome. So a couple of Questions as we wrap up. I appreciate your time. Really. This has been a really fascinating conversation. What is something you've changed your mind about recently?

Eytan Bensoussan 00:41:18:

I'd say the thing that I'll widen the definition of recently a little bit, but I think the thing that I found was the biggest mindset shift that I made was how to sell North One. Right. I used to really lead because that was the problem I grew up with is this productivity issue, right? Like, just. It weighs on you like this all the time, this idea of your finances in your business. And over the last year or so, I actually realized that it was actually selling the bank account on its merit as a means to being able to have the conversation about productivity. And when I made that switch, it just opened up so much for us with our customers, with the company. That was, I think, one of the most interesting insights that I think flipped my mind on how to even think about what, you know, how to articulate the value of North 1 to a small business owner.

Harry Duran 00:42:07:

What has you most excited? If you think about lookup, I know it's hard to project too far in the Future, but maybe 12 months from now we're having this conversation. What's on the roadmap that you're looking forward to building?

Eytan Bensoussan 00:42:16:

Well, look, I mean, that's what's actually so exciting. It's the roadmap. It's the stuff that, you know, we do a lot of listening. We really spend time trying to ask people, like, what can we do better? What's something that you're missing? Where are other money things happening in your life as a business that are not here? And what can we learn about that? And do you need those replaced or not? Like, a lot of humility on saying, like, don't break that. That's. That's working just fine right now. But as a result of that, the things that we then are planning on, it's just really exciting because you know that it's going to hit the string of someone that's told you, like, this is a thing I could really use that gets me excited. And I think the other one is that our as a company, I think the team is sharper now than it's ever been when we've put a lot of work into getting everybody closer and closer and closer to our customers. And so the, you know, no one works in a silo of an abstract small business owner. People can know and almost feel what those owners are looking for. And that gets me really excited because the best decisions, the best ideas, they definitely don't come from me. They come from people who are, like, in the trenches, working on stuff, and they're like, hey, what about? And all of a sudden that turns into something really novel.

Harry Duran 00:43:23:

Love that last question. What is the most misunderstood thing about you?

Eytan Bensoussan 00:43:28:

That I know all the answers. I come into every conversation with a point of view very, very quickly, and I'm pretty, you know, firm about it, but that's only because I'm almost dangling is there for meat, like, for someone to come and just start trashing it. My greatest hope is that people come and show me that I'm wrong. I think people sometimes think that the fact that I have a point of view means I think I'm right, but it's really not that.

Harry Duran 00:43:50:

Yeah. Well, Eitan, thanks again. This has been a fascinating conversation. I'm so glad we got connected. When I saw that you had a podcast and I was like a client of your service, I was like, you don't see very many CEOs who are hosting the show and who, as it's clear from this conversation, take as much of an interest in what their customers are thinking and how they want to support them. But it's clear now as we've sort of pulled the curtain back on your origin story and how all the pieces started to lead your influences from your family, the drive that you've had, this fire that it's been building up over the years, and how you've had this persistence and always making sure you can push through in the face of adversity. I think it's no surprise that we ended up where you're at now, and it speaks to, like, what you're building with Northone. So I really appreciate you taking the time to share this inspiring story with my listeners.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:44:39:

Well, thanks for your interest, Harry. I'm appreciative of the opportunity.

Harry Duran 00:44:42:

So Obviously, north it's NorthOne.com for folks to learn more about Northone. Anywhere else you want to send folks to get connected with you?

Eytan Bensoussan 00:44:48:

Northone.com first one. I mean, I'm on Twitter @A10sMB. You can find me there.

Harry Duran 00:44:54: O

kay. All right, well, make sure we have those links in the show notes as well. I really appreciate your time, Etan.

Eytan Bensoussan 00:44:57:

Thanks. My pleasure.