Unreasonable Hospitality

Last year, we read Will Guidara’s Unreasonable Hospitality and talked about how we could apply it to MotherDuck. I had posted about how our nesters were great. I do think one of the pillars of MotherDuck’s success was our GTM team who showed unreasonable hospitality to our customers - Ryan with brilliant strategic thinking, beautiful branding, informative videos (awesome Dev Rel team), and fabulous events (kudos to Carly), Nouras who created a great ecosystem for our customers, Margaret (and her Hatchery team) who treated customers with such thoughtfulness, and Scott who showed caring concern that the customers were purchasing the software because they needed it. Unreasonable hospitality will set you above your competition.

During the past few months, I had a great experience with Sphere. Tax registrations are painful and time consuming for finance teams. MotherDuck didn’t hire a big finance team so it fell all on me. But Nick at Sphere came to my rescue and solved the problem for me. He also met with me and Regina to implement the software. His communication skills and hustle really made a difference in making sales tax less painful. There are many sales tax platforms out there but it’s good to work with one that takes things off of your plate.

Deel is another example of how excellent service can ease finance’s burden of international payroll. I have worked with Alex since he started Deel. He answers my slacks and emails quickly which is critical for payroll issues. Fortunately, he hired Luke has helped with my 911 calls. When you have a payroll issue, you want it answered ASAP.

One of my last software platforms to implement was Common Paper. Unfortunately, I left before I was finished but the Jake offered to meet with Tania and help her complete the implementation to get it into production.

During the past week, I had to start an accounting system from scratch and get out reports within a few days. Fortunately with the help of Chris and Leonard from Rillet, I was able to get it working quickly. They answered my slack messages quickly and helped me implement a ERP system quickly. I was able to pull financial reports out within 5 business days. Damn! Yes, it’s was amazing.

For my last shout out and to help the viewing algorithm, I wanted to give a shout out to the San Mateo EMTs who helped us recently. My husband was hit by a golf ball and was bleeding badly. Fortunately, my neighbors were around to call 911 and get help quickly. The EMTs were taking him to the ambulance to have him examined more and run tests. The dogs wouldn’t leave with our neighbors as they are so very loyal to us so the EMTS offered to drive them in the cart. They showed our family unreasonable hospitality by being helpful, gracious, and humorous (to calm me down). My husband is fine.