[Emerging Tech] Simplifying Operations in Wealth Tech With Max Klein
- Quik! News Team
- 12 minutes ago
- 24 min read
Max Klein is the Co-Founder and CEO of LEA, a company that automates client data workflows for wealth management firms using AI and APIs. He previously spent seven years at Amazon working on products like Alexa, Kindle, and Prime. Earlier in his career, Max lived in China for eight years, working in international business and public policy. He is also fluent in Mandarin and has founded prior ventures in education and global placement.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
[2:27] Max Klein discusses how LEA helps wealth management firms manage client data
[3:57] Inspiration behind starting LEA after a personal financial planning experience
[6:33] Lessons from building APIs and personalization at Amazon Alexa
[9:00] Strategies for supporting operations teams across wealth management firms
[10:04] Role of AI in processing unstructured client documents and data
[12:20] Max explains how LEA integrates directly into document vaults like Box and SharePoint
[19:43] Shift toward fewer screens and embedded AI tools in enterprise software
[22:31] Why larger firms are centralizing operations inside Salesforce
[26:36] Leadership lessons from Amazon
In this episode…
Wealth management firms often struggle to efficiently organize and manage client data. From PDFs and statements to client conversations, data arrives in countless formats, making it both time-consuming and error-prone to manage. If advisors are overwhelmed with manual data handling, how can they scale their businesses while still delivering exceptional client experiences?
Max Klein, an expert in AI workflow automation with years of experience at Amazon, sheds light on how firms can overcome this challenge. He emphasizes the importance of automating data recognition and classification, turning unstructured documents into usable information that drives business processes. Max highlights the role of embedding AI into existing platforms rather than creating new systems, meeting firms where they already work. He also shares lessons from his career, including Amazon’s customer-centric approach and the value of written communication and active listening.
In this episode of The Customer Wins, Richard Walker interviews Max Klein, Co-Founder and CEO of LEA, about leveraging AI to solve data challenges in wealth management. Max explains how firms can eliminate repetitive manual work with smarter automation. He also discusses embedding technology into existing platforms, centralizing operations in systems like Salesforce, and the importance of customer listening and feedback loops.
Resources Mentioned in this episode
Quotable Moments:
“We help wealth management firms get the client data they need into the places they need.”
“Information comes through conversations, documentation, statements, PDFs — it’s flying at a firm in all formats.”
“The third piece is generating novel, reliable, interesting, actionable insights about clients based on data.”
“There is still a shocking amount of valuable time spent by talented people doing menial work.”
“Screens are not going away, but there will be less of them, which is great.”
Action Steps:
Automate document recognition and classification: Replacing manual sorting with AI reduces errors, saves time, and ensures accurate client information.
Integrate solutions into existing platforms: Embedding tools within Box, SharePoint, or Salesforce minimizes disruption and increases adoption across teams.
Focus on the data layer first: Strong data architecture creates a foundation for reliable client experiences and scalable workflows.
Shorten the feedback loop with customers: Direct interactions reveal how tools are used and enable faster, more effective improvements.
Prioritize value-driven problem solving over flashy features: Concentrating on critical workflows delivers measurable impact and long-term solution stickiness.
Sponsor for this episode...
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Episode Transcript:
Intro: 00:02
Welcome to The Customer Wins podcast, where business leaders discuss their secrets and techniques for helping their customers succeed and, in turn, grow their business.
Richard Walker: 00:16
Hi, I'm Rich Walker, the host of The Customer Wins, where I talk to business leaders about how they help their customers win and how their focus on customer experience leads to growth. Today is a special episode of my series on emerging tech and solutions, and today's guest is Max Klein, co-founder and CEO of LEA. If you want to hear more episodes about emerging companies and fast growth, check out Rabih Ramadi with Avantos and Peter Dun with Feathery, and Brandon Castaneda with EZ Bombs, who has the fastest-growing food product on TikTok? And today's episode is brought to you by Quik!, the leader in enterprise forms processing. When your business relies upon processing forms, Don't waste your team's valuable time manually reviewing the forms.
Instead, get Quik! using Quik!. You'll be able to generate completed forms and get back clean, context-rich data that reduces manual reviews to only one out of 1000 submissions. Visit quickforms.com to get started. All right, I'm really excited to talk with Max today. I met him a year ago.
He's the co-founder and CEO of LEA, the AI workflow automation platform for wealth management. Prior to founding Leia, he spent seven years as a product manager at Amazon, building APIs and data infrastructure for the tools you guys all use: Kindle, Alexa, and Amazon Prime. Max spent the first part of his career working in international trade policy and corporate strategy in Beijing, China, and holds a degree in China and Asia Pacific Studies from Cornell University. Max, welcome to The Customer Wins.
Max Klein: 01:51
Thank you very much, Rich. I am super excited to be here and also excited to see you again after what feels like a very long time.
Richard Walker: 02:01
Yeah, I know, man, I've been watching this and seeing your growth, so I'm excited to hear more about it. And for my audience, if you haven't heard my podcast before, I love to talk to business leaders about what they're doing to help their customers win, how they build and deliver a great customer experience, and the challenges to growing their own company. And with this emerging tech series, we're going to hear how it's going to evolve and change potentially. So, Max, let's understand your business a little bit better. How does your company help people?
Max Klein: 02:27
I have to say, the premise of your podcast is very Amazonian, starting with the customer and working backwards. You have torn a page out of the Bezos playbook there. Oh.
Richard Walker: 02:38
It's one of the most inspiring companies in the world to me, to be honest.
Max Klein: 02:42
Yes it is. It is quite a place. We could talk about that for many hours. So, back to your question. How is it that we help people?
We help wealth management firms get the client data they need into the places they need it to run their business. Simply put, client Data Orchestration Wrangling organization has been a long standing challenge in this industry, and with every single new trend that comes with technology, whether it's, you know, bigger enterprise platforms that sort of become your line in the sand of, hey, this is what we're going to use to run our business or AI or new new investor trends. There's always evolution here, but this client data problem is still really sticky. So that's why we're focused on solving it.
Richard Walker: 03:39
So I have several.
Richard Walker: 03:40
Questions about this. I mean, first of all, because this is a fairly new company, you guys are well funded. You've got a lot of of growth in front of you, but you're also doing great things at the moment. What inspired this idea? I mean, coming out of Amazon, why'd you say, I've got to be in wealth and I've got to do this.
Max Klein: 03:57
It came from a personal experience of getting a financial plan, and the piece of it that really struck me was twofold. Number one, there is a tremendous amount of work that goes into collecting and analyzing the inputs that go into a financial plan. And to me, it seemed like the service provider, in this case, a financial advisor who worked at an RIA, was really being put through the wringer to do something that was so core to their value proposition for their customers. So it just seemed hard and arduous and perhaps that there could be a better way. But we all go through life and observe things that seem imperfect or broken.
I ride the subway in New York City every day, and I don't start a transportation company. The thing that really struck me was once this process was complete and this financial plan got delivered, I saw the tremendous impact that it had on my family. And that's what drew me in and got me asking questions as a product builder, as a founder, why doesn't this positive impact happen to more people more often? And what's standing in the way of the service providers, in this case, financial advisors and operational staff at Rias, from doing the great work that they do more and more efficiently. And the more I started looking into the problem, it became really clear that at its core, like many things, it is a data organization issue.
Richard Walker: 05:48
And you speak my language. I mean, we're an API first company, and my actual background is system architecture, reporting systems, data warehousing, data systems. I mean, really, I think of my own company as a data company first as well. And your background building APIs to make systems talk to each other. You brought in a unique perspective because I think a lot of people look at it purely from the front end, the user experience only.
But the data layer is really what matters.
Richard Walker: 06:18
So both both.
Max Klein: 06:19
Matter, but they but the data layer really matters.
Richard Walker: 06:24
I shouldn't say it's.
Richard Walker: 06:25
It's that's what matters. It matters so much because it's the foundation. It is the architecture for which you build the rest of everything that you're going to do.
Max Klein: 06:33
And and let me let me jump in and give you one concrete example from my past life. Working as a product manager in Alexa, we were on a platform team that was building in personalization and voice recognition. So when you talk to Alexa, it can distinguish between Rich's voice and Max's voice and then personalize the experience based on that. Let's say you like punk and I like classical music, and I say, hey, Alexa, play me music. It knows it's me.
It'll play classical music. And everybody knows the music use case. It's concrete, it's easy to understand, it provides immediate value. But how about the complexity that goes into understanding? Is this rich or max talking?
Richard Walker: 07:23
Yeah.
Max Klein: 07:25
That is a deep well of research of edge cases. Even science that goes into that. And the there's, there's the kind of sort of foundational piece of doing the voice recognition. And then there's the package up that data point and pass it to someone who's creating some sort of beautiful, magical experience that the customer is going to be able to touch and feel and being able to consume that data point in an efficient and straightforward and reliable manner. And that's really what takes it from cool to useful.
Richard Walker: 08:04
Yeah. So, you.
Richard Walker: 08:05
Know, I'm jealous in a way, because you got to work with AI-driven products back there at Amazon. I'm assuming you had this AI experience with Alexa. Is that fair?
Max Klein: 08:15
That's fair. And that was in 2018 and into 2019.
Richard Walker: 08:21
Yeah. My my view has been I mean, my company is almost 24 years old. So my view was solve this problem from a workflow standpoint. I had no concept of AI. And we have been evolving and I'm learning AI as we go for years now to to be able to put it into our product and reinvent what we do.
But you had the opportunity to start from the ground up in this manner. So I'm kind of curious. First of all, let me ask a clarifying question about your product. Are you focused on the front office of the advisor, the middle office? The back office?
Where does your product really sit? And then I want to understand how did AI play a role in your ability to do what you're doing?
Max Klein: 09:00
Yeah. Our focus is on becoming the central operations team's best friend. So be it an onboarding team, a financial planning team, sometimes a compliance team, sometimes an integrations team. And when I say integrations, I mean integrating a new firm or sets of books of business onto a new platform. And that's really our focus.
Because a lot of the firms that we work with are starting to figure out how to specialize and allocate certain work efficiently across the organization so that the clients end up with the best possible experience versus each human wearing each and every hat on a daily basis.
Richard Walker: 09:44
Yeah.
Richard Walker: 09:45
So then how how is your thinking about applying to this problem? I mean, you could say data. Data is a bunch of transformations. It's sharing its communication layers. Where does AI fit into this from your standpoint, and how does it make it better and more unique than just, oh, I'll just call every API in the world and connect them all together or something?
Max Klein: 10:04
Yeah. I mean, if we could call every API in the world, then a lot of the problem that we're solving wouldn't exist because the data would already be packaged up in a structured manner, and all you'd be doing is figuring out how do we combine this in the most productive way, so that we can run our business and serve our clients more efficiently? But that is not the case. Information comes through conversations. Information comes through.
Documentation comes through statements. It comes through PDFs. And so it's flying at a firm in all these different formats. And the way that AI factors into that is number one. How do we take a piece of unstructured data in a document and decipher it and just decide, what is this document?
Is it a 1040? Is it Aunt Sally's trust? Is it a pay stub from last month? What is this? And then the next layer is how do we go and find the critical bits of information that we're actually going to use to power our business processes?
And then the third level, which is really more of the holy grail of AI because the first two are very difficult and a lot around data integrity and process automation. And then the third piece is generating novel, reliable, interesting, actionable insights about clients based on all the data that we have. And each of these lanes is still in the early innings of really getting figured out on an industry wide scale. So that's why it's so thrilling to be in the trenches solving these types of problems.
Richard Walker: 12:01
Yeah. So in terms of an actual user experience with your product, I mean, I'm starting to think like, okay, so there's all these note takers. There's other document, you know, revision or reviewing systems out there. Yeah. What is an experience like using your product. Where does it sit and who's who's doing what with it. Yeah.
Max Klein: 12:20
So LEA deploys to start as an app extension inside of your document vault. So think box ignite SharePoint the places where client information is ending up as a starting point okay. And then we have a feature called Centralia, where an operations associate or an advisor can right click on a batch of files or one individual file, send them to us. We do our magic. We send those files back suddenly.
You know what everything is. You know what's there and what's missing. Everything has a nice name, and in other specific cases, you're getting data out of those documents that you need to power downstream processes, like generating an investment proposal. You need holdings data out of a pile of statements that a prospect has shared or a fee schedule audit. You need a fee data that you can compare against your billing actuals, so that you know and have visibility into what's actually happening within the four walls of your firm.
So it's really that sort of organize and orchestrate type of flow that we are focused on.
Richard Walker: 13:45
So does that mean somebody can just give you a stack of quote-unquote unknown documents from a system standpoint like they're not named? Well, they're just like, oh, statement one, statement two or worse, document one, document two, and your system figures it out and says, oh, this is a statement. This was a pay stub. This was a driver's license. Is that part of what it's doing is making sense of it all?
Max Klein: 14:06
That is exactly right. And there is still a shocking amount of valuable time spent by talented people doing menial work that is necessary.
Richard Walker: 14:21
But.
Max Klein: 14:21
Is not. It's powering the processes that make the firm go round. So it is absolutely essential work. Yeah, but it's repetitive and it's error-prone because if you're looking at a stack of 25 documents Making a small error in terms of how you name something or where you put it is a totally conceivable thing to happen. And you might not even know the consequences of that immediately.
It might happen when somebody is trying to figure out, hey, when's the last time we talked about taxes with this client? Do we have their information in the right place? And everything has a random alphanumeric name and you just don't know the answer. So now you have to double back. So it's the kind of problem that compounds over time.
And is also the kind of problem that sort of invisible when it first happens. So it's it's sort of the the worst type of problem in a way.
Richard Walker: 15:23
Yeah. Yeah. I think we all kind of forget you buy this imaging document management system and you either have to go through the indexing process, which is manual largely, or you have to find the right place to put it, which will then index it, which is manual. Annual, or you have to name it really, really well and have a file structure. I don't use box, we use Dropbox, but we have to have very smart file structures in order to classify documents and how we're going to structure it and order it.
Max Klein: 15:50
Of course.
Richard Walker: 15:51
That's a lot of work, and man, does it get messy fast. Somebody decides, oh, I'm going to create a file here or a folder here, versus in the right place, or they fail to take a document from, I don't know, we get something signed and DocuSign and somebody fails to take it and put it in the right folder. So if you're solving that kind of work, man, I want to hire you because that's.
Max Klein: 16:10
Just.
Richard Walker: 16:11
It's just drudgery.
Max Klein: 16:12
There's and there's the doing things around, pointing AI in the direction of a specific problem, and actually solving that problem well requires some love and passion. Yeah. And if you want to develop that love and passion to solve that problem. You can, but we all have a limited amount of time in our week for solving problems all the way to 100% or even. Sort of enabling continuous improvement around a particular problem.
And so that's where thinking about build versus partner versus buy really comes into the picture, because there are certain problems that you know are important. And if you ask yourself, am I going to do this myself? The answer is more often than not, no.
Richard Walker: 17:17
Yeah. You know what the best example of this in my life is? All the photos on my iPhone they're not organized. I and I won't go through the process of organizing them all. And I just want to plug in an AI that will say, oh, here is this son, I have three boys.
Here's all the photos for this kid by month, by year, etc. categorize it by event types. Identify people. Scenes like, oh, these are the memories from this trip that we took that is so hard for me to find right now. I'm not willing to do the work.
Max Klein: 17:47
And imagine if somebody was asking you for that information constantly. That's the situation that our customers are in.
Richard Walker: 17:55
Yeah, man. That's challenging. So you called this an extension. Does that mean people are just literally buying a plugin or that's how we kind of platform user interface or.
Max Klein: 18:07
We do, but that's the way we get started and we want to meet. This is a trope in enterprise software and AI, but meeting customers where they already are is super valuable and also really important. The last thing wealth management firms need is yet another system and yet another screen. So we've taken that to heart. And we begin our deployment and value generation as a simple app extension inside of the app stores that each of these document management systems provide.
Richard Walker: 18:49
So I'm going to introduce a concept that a friend of mine told me about early this year. He declared SaaS software as a service is dead because of AI. And he said he backed off and he said it's got stage four cancer, like it's terminal and it's in a really tough position. And his premise was this anybody can use AI to rebuild their SaaS product. And I don't mean yours, I just mean in general.
You don't need another dashboard from somebody. You need functionality; you want the end result. And so he kind of put out there and said, if you're not pricing yourself based on the actual value delivered, the result that somebody is looking for, you're not really well aligned with how they're going to buy your product going forward, especially as years go on. And AI gets smarter and smarter. How do you feel about that?
Where do you see yourselves in the spectrum of SaaS? And I mean, because you're at an earlier stage, you get to craft this.
Max Klein: 19:43
Yeah. That's right. Screens are not going away, but there will be less of them. And for enterprise users, that is a great thing because just like the client data orchestration problem has been around for a long time in this industry, so has the swivel chair effect. I think part of the reason that a lot of AI note takers have really taken off is that they're an extension inside of zoom.
So I'm using Zoom. This is a way I can make Zoom work better for me. And by the way, my CRM now works better too, because the note taker is automatically creating tasks that I would have otherwise had to create. So that I feel, is a really new. Oh I'm sorry.
The lights went off. Let me turn the lights on, rich.
Richard Walker: 20:34
You're not moving enough in your office there. The timer said. Hey.
Max Klein: 20:39
There we go. Hopefully we'll we'll last a little bit longer this time. So. So this whole trend of fewer screens is really magical and interesting and has a ton of value for the end users versus more screens, more vendors, more switching back and forth between different things to get jobs done. And so I think that whole trend of being embedded, partnering, and collaborating and making sure that data gets into the right place.
That's a super important thing. And for process automation, AI is an incredible tool to actually get us to a place where we're seeing a measurable, positive impact on the way that business is done on a daily basis. I also think that even aside from AI, companies are just getting smarter about wanting to have fewer systems. They don't want to have three different tools that do three different things, but also have 2 or 3 overlapping capabilities to the other one. It just doesn't make sense from a forget the money, just from a complexity and management perspective.
It's difficult. Yeah. And so one trend we've seen is that, especially the slightly larger wealth management firms, 510 billion and above that we've been working with extensively are starting to centralize a lot of their business inside of Salesforce. And say what you will about Salesforce a as a product. It does require a lot of tender loving care to bend it to your will and make it work the way you want it to.
Richard Walker: 22:30
But sure.
Max Klein: 22:31
It is an extensible and if you build the right workflows and feed it the right data, it can do a lot for your business. And so. What we're seeing is these firms are starting to centralize a lot of their business operations inside of a platform like Salesforce. And that means that the better Salesforce works, the more efficiently their business is going to operate. So if you're working backwards from what is this customer need?
This customer needs better data in Salesforce. And how can a company like ours, who understands the different use cases across the client lifecycle and also the business lifecycle, do what we do in the context of that broader business goal? And I think that's a little bit of the art of the way that like AI and software is being built and deployed right now for enterprises.
Richard Walker: 23:32
Yeah. You know, part of the way I look at that question myself is, are you trying to be a set of functionality, or are you trying to be the actual platform? And I view it similarly to what you said. The customers have made their choice on platform. I don't want to build the whole platform and do all the things that they need done in a platform technology.
Instead, I know my special talent is identifying automation, identifying point solutions that solve specific problems. And you could argue forms is much bigger than just a point solution because of the data flow and the processes and the transactions that are going on. But we're still hyper-focused on how do we provide the API interface to create the data model for forms to deliver the form experience inside the platform you already have? Why should I tell you you have to leave your platform to come to my platform. Reform.
So I like how you're thinking about this too, because honestly, it's a really big hill to climb to build a platform. But to go in and provide immediate value by plugging into what they're already doing, take advantage of the human behavior that's already happening and not retrain everybody on everything. That's super powerful. And to me, I don't know how you feel, but to me that becomes the plumbing of their system and therefore they're not likely to remove you after they've implemented it.
Stickiness is really important here.
Max Klein: 24:55
Yeah. And sticky. Exactly. And the the the the motion and the conversation around solving specific data related issues without whizzbang screens. It's it's a surgical process.
And. That would, you know, if you rewind five years ago Infrastructure, people's or workflows. People's eyes just glaze over. But now that larger enterprises are becoming more. Self-assured about the platform decisions that they've made, they are not shy about asking the point of pointed questions about how their solution work with my platform?
And if it doesn't tick the box or satisfy the requirements of both, the way that things work today and the way that things are going to operate down the road, it's going to be harder to get your foot in the door, and b it's going to be harder to stay there. But the opposite is also true. And so that is a big opportunity for solving problems. But doing it in a way that fits with the architecture and the vision of the way that an enterprise software stack is being built.
Richard Walker: 26:22
Yeah. All right. So you mentioned Amazon and the customer focus that they have the customer-centric universe they live in. What are some other things you took from Amazon into your current company.
Max Klein: 26:36
The written word. Amazon takes uses the written word to express new ideas and to make business proposals come up with product ideas, validate feedback. And so I, I take that sort of rigor to the way that we do business as well. To be honest, one of the trickiest parts of transitioning from being a product manager at a big tech company to being a founder was the transition to using Dex all the time? It took me.
It took me a little while, but I think in the background I'm always starting with pros, whether it's written or in my head and then using that to kind of create the simple visual representation of those ideas. So the written word is definitely is definitely one. And then the other one is just listening. If you're going to be customer-centric, you have to let people talk and you have to ask simple, probing questions and not be afraid to hear the answer that you don't necessarily want to hear. And so that type of communication and openness and curiosity is, I think, one of the most important parts about building a product, starting a company and successfully serving customer needs in a meaningful way.
Richard Walker: 28:08
Yeah. And so I did an episode, I don't know, a month and a half ago, which was the four core concepts that I've learned from my guests on this show that are required to become the best customer experience that you can think about. And you're mentioning some of this because I think one of those key concepts is you have to sit on the same side of the table as your customer. You have to be on their team, in other words. And what does that mean?
You're really listening to them. You're not trying to sell them. You're not trying to solve their problem until you've understood what the problem is and how they're approaching it. But it's really hard for companies to do that. And as you're growing, how are you going to make sure your team members still embody this?
Max Klein: 28:49
Yeah, that's a that's an ongoing, ongoing question. I love this term. Forward-deployed engineer has become really trendy in in the tech world. I think it started at Palantir.
Richard Walker: 29:05
I heard this term.
Max Klein: 29:06
Yeah, it's it's it's the idea that you have an engineer working on a problem and they're almost seconded to the customer to be a part of their team for some period of time and then do work in that context, come back, do more work, and you end up in a good spot because there's almost this like extra connective tissue. And I think that is a really cool and interesting idea. If you have a small and mighty dev team, you don't necessarily want everybody at a different customers office every single day of the week. But the idea that everyone in the organization is interacting directly with the IT department, with the CTO, with everyday users, and shrinking the feedback loop is just essential. And with, I think with the new sort of software deployment model with AI, where you build something that is hyper-focused on solving a specific problem, you better solve that problem well.
Yeah. And in a way that actually fits with the requirements of your everyday users. So this whole concept of forward deployed engineer I think is interesting. And I'm I'm going to continue to explore it and really figure out what it means to a company like ours.
Richard Walker: 30:38
So do you think that actually means I would go offer to my customers in an implementation that I'll give them one of my engineers for five hours a week or something as part of that.
Max Klein: 30:46
Not even just during implementation. It could be anytime. So and again, we all have limited resources, so we can't just be shipping engineers to every single company's office every single day. But imagine what you can learn with two working days spent alongside your customers. There's there's a lot of knowledge to be gained, and it's really that second level of knowledge of how are people actually clicking around?
And where does that data that we spent so much time compiling, extracting, normalizing, calculating and staging ending up? And how is it being used 2 or 3 steps down the line. And you could ask that question seven times in a zoom call. And never, never get a clear answer.
Richard Walker: 31:38
No, I know, I know, we love to get demos of our customer systems so that we can see what they're currently doing. And I don't think they've used our product.
Max Klein: 31:47
And I don't think the thinking behind a forward-deployed engineer is new. You always, you know, everybody's always wanted to get to know their their customers and their users better. Yeah. But this is just taking it a half a step further.
Richard Walker: 32:00
Well, so this is an interesting thing because I think with the power of AI and software development, if you can get a developer who understands the business problem better and then use AI alongside their their workday, I think you can give them bigger projects to accomplish. Not just that single tasks might also be a way to think about this. Go back to these customers and say, hey, could we actually put somebody on your team for a period of time or participate in some of your discussions and understand it better? I'm going to test this out. Man, thanks for being on the show.
I've already got so much from it.
Max Klein: 32:33
Just trying to just trying to help. Yeah, you can you can Google forward-deployed engineer. I'm sure you're going to find a lot of hits for job descriptions.
Richard Walker: 32:43
Yeah. Most definitely. Max, we're running out of time. So I have to get to my last question. But before I do that, what is the best way for people to find and connect with you and your team?
Max Klein: 32:54
Yes. The best way to find us outside of following, adding me on LinkedIn and following our page is to go to get bio and hit the demo button and schedule time with us. That is the most straightforward way to make time and have a conversation.
Richard Walker: 33:15
Cool. Awesome. All right, so I get to ask one of my favorite questions. Who has had the biggest impact on your leadership style and how you approach your role today?
Max Klein: 33:25
I thought back to my second ever boss when I was 24 years old, a woman named Melissa Gillies. She's from Australia. At the time I was living in Beijing, working at a media and TV startup. We were developing television shows and creating branded content. Before that was as much of a thing as it is today.
And Melissa did two things. Number one, she bridged between a pretty wacky management team and the people in the business that were actually trying to get work done, and she did that with aplomb. So that was something that I really came to appreciate in the long run. And Second, she took an intense amount of rigor to anything that we were sharing with customers. And that was, you know, reporting or proposals, not just being prepared for meetings.
Everybody knows that, but really adding a level of thought and polish to anything that we ship, not just the product itself, but our communication. And so that was, you know, that's something that I've come back to over time, especially now that we're I'm in this seat in a position interacting with customers every single day and always thinking about how do we communicate clearly, how do we communicate with empathy and trying to see things from both their perspective and ours at the same time. So thank you, Melissa, for that long-term lesson.
Richard Walker: 35:06
No, that's awesome. Because, I mean, communication is the heart and soul of who we are as humans. And you're talking about core skill sets here and how we communicate with our with our team as leaders, as managers, as also with our customers. So I appreciate that story. All right.
I want to give a big thank you to Max Klein, co-founder and CEO of LEA, for being on this episode of The Customer Wins. Go check out Max's website at getlea.io That's LEA, by the way. Getlea.io, and don't forget to check out Quik! at quickforms.com, where we make processing forms easier. I hope you enjoyed this discussion.
We'll click the like button, share this with someone and subscribe to our channels for future episodes of The Customer Wins. Max, thanks so much for joining me today.
Max Klein: 35:48
Thank you so much, Rich. I really appreciate the time.
Outro: 35:52
Thanks for listening to The Customer Wins podcast. We'll see you again next time, and be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes.
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