CEO Spotlight Series: Exclusive Interview With BizLibrary CEO Dean Pichee

View all C-Suite Confidential—Professional Learning Market Insights

Dean, thanks so much for sitting down with us today. We are excited to hear the BizLibrary story. Let's start with past and present BizLibrary. You started the business 27 years ago, and the offering has evolved quite a bit since its early days. What are some of the core tenets that have served the business well throughout its history?

Thanks for having me. It’s been quite a journey, and, while we’ve grown and evolved quite a bit, we think our best days are still ahead of us! Today, we believe that we’ve built a truly differentiated platform, providing a one-stop-shop learning solution that can grow and scale with customers of all shapes and sizes. I’m going to talk more about our capabilities later, but let’s first start with how we got here.

For the first 15 years (I founded the company in 1996), we were just a small learning content aggregator that provided organizations, typically 50 to 500 employees, with affordable access to high-quality learning resources. Early on, these were video-based (VHS and DVD) training programs. Then, in the early 2000s, following advances in technology, we pivoted to streaming our learning content online. The shift to digital delivery prompted a need for a Learning Management System (LMS) that could help our clients deliver and manage their employee training. We explored potential LMS partners but ultimately decided to build our own, home-grown technology solution, a decision and a mentality that have served us quite well.

In 2010, our growth trajectory changed materially. Around that time, YouTube was growing in popularity, and we recognized that short, video-based content was a very popular and effective learning format. We saw a large market start to open up and made three strategic shifts to capitalize on this trend: (a) We brought in a group of new leaders, including my son, Andrew Pichee, and Erin Pinkowski, who currently serves as our Chief Product Officer; (b) we started producing our own content (up until that point, we were solely a third-party aggregator); and (c) we instilled a customer-first mentality, a mindset that has allowed us to foster long-term partnerships with our clients and to build solutions to meet their evolving needs as they grow.

From 2011 to 2018, we experienced rapid growth, with employee count growing from ~25 to ~90 at the time of Primus’ investment (November 2018). Since then, we’ve successfully transitioned from a content provider to a complete learning platform, built to provide a simple yet holistic solution for a vast range of customers. Some of our completed initiatives include major investments in our LMS, which we view as a best-in-class solution, and the BizSkills offering, an innovative and highly configurable skilling solution, which I will discuss in detail shortly.

Circling back to your question, the following attributes have supported our success over the past 30 years:

1. Technology Forward: We embrace technology and, with a home-grown approach, have successfully navigated multiple seismic shifts in the learning content universe. Today, all capabilities—from content to pathways to customized learning, sit on our proprietary platform—providing a simple and centralized solution for customers.
2. Easy Button Mentality: For reasons I’ll dig into shortly, learning is very complicated, and every customer has its own, distinct set of needs and objectives. We pride ourselves in serving as a one-stop shop for all types of customers, providing them with the right mix of learning solutions (both skilling and compliance) today and opportunities to enhance and expand their learning programs over time, with everything seamlessly managed and delivered on one platform.
3. Long-Term Customer Success: Our customers are partners. We strive to ensure our partners accomplish their near-term learning goals and, as our relationships evolve, to help our customers frame and achieve longer-term targets. We endeavor to grow with our partners and have built a platform that enables this collective growth, at scale.  

Thanks, Dean. And a great segue into our next question: Can you talk a little bit about your ideal customer profile? What matters most to this type of customer? How does BizLibrary help address these challenges?

Absolutely. Today, we focus on partnering with small, medium, and large enterprises looking to enhance their L&D programs. Our clients are looking for a partner that has the right mix of content to meet their specific compliance and skilling needs and the administration capabilities to ensure the program is effective. Over the past 27 years, we have observed these challenges and, over time, strived to create a holistic, cloud-based solution that helps our clients deliver world-class learning programs. What does this look like? Here are a few platform highlights:

• A robust and highly relevant content library, comprised of skills and regulatory-driven content.
• Pre-configured and personalized learning pathways, pre-mapped to thousands of specific job roles and skills. This feature helps administrators identify and implement the right personalized skills program for each employee in a matter of days.
• An easy-to-use but powerful proprietary LMS.
• Tools that enable content curation and customization, including live learning, allowing customers to deploy their own content on our platform.
• Curation and support experts that assist L&D departments throughout their partnership with BizLibrary.

While not all customers leverage every capability, this depth helps reinforce our one-stop-shop mentality. We are uniquely providing highly tailored solutions at tremendous scale, which, we think, sets us far apart from our peers.  

Thanks, Dean. One brief follow-up to this question: How should we think about potential alternatives for customers in your target market?

Great question and a key point to consider, especially since I’ve hit on the scale point a couple times.

A potential customer can absolutely create a similar ecosystem on their own, but it would take significant time and investment. To play out the example, creating our offering with a group of vendors would involve selecting an LMS, a compliance training partner, then likely a mix of skills training providers that collectively meet the range of skills a company is seeking to develop, which could range into the hundreds. While I don’t doubt the collective content mix is out there, it would take years to build a modular, cohesive approach, and all the disparate skills players will likely not sit on one LMS. It’s possible, but not efficient, especially for the typical organization.

In contrast to the above, our typical implementation period is 45 days or less, all managed in one central location. Should the administrator elect to adjust skills packages and pathways, or weave in their own content, we can typically deploy in a matter of days. This nimbleness and efficiency are hugely important to our customers’ L&D departments and reinforce our ability to grow with customers, given how easy it is to expand a customer’s learning program.  

Let’s dig further into skills training. Given the enduring labor shortage and skills gap in the U.S., skills development continues to grow in prioritization and enjoys a massive market opportunity. Can you discuss BizLibrary’s investment in skills training?

Yes, absolutely. As an enterprise leader, you face a simple skills challenge: Should I fill every position with the right people with the right skills, or can I find good people and help them develop skills required for their respective roles? I would argue that it's better to hire good people and help them develop job-critical skills, as skills needed are going to evolve over time and, long-term, you’ll end up having a more talented organization. However, for enterprises, this is easier said than done. Skills training is very complicated; it’s a moving target and hard to mobilize the right mix of training programs to meet the dynamic skills needs across an organization. For example, today, our clients are focused on digital literacy, cybersecurity, and artificial intelligence, to name a few. These skills were lower priority five years ago, and our clients will almost certainly have a new wave of priority skills five years from today.

Our BizSkills offering has helped BizLibrary simplify and champion skills training for organizations of all sizes. We have the depth of content needed to meet a vast range of skills, powerful learning pathways to drive actual skill attainment, and the configurability to adjust skills programs as a customer’s needs change. This combination of depth and scale is a huge differentiator for us and has really helped deepen our client partnerships.

Here is an example. We currently have a client with ~400 employees, and they've identified 200 unique job titles within the organization. If you're the L&D manager, how are you going to identify the skills required for those 200 job titles and the content mix needed to develop those skills? It’s a daunting task for a small L&D team and a great case study for BizLibrary. Our solution has pre-mapped, off-the-shelf learning pathways to the skills of thousands of job roles, which allowed us to deploy a personalized, enterprise-grade learning solution seamlessly for all 200 roles. In this case, we took a very complex learning environment and provided a streamlined, personalized upskilling solution within 60 days. This timeline would not have been achievable without our resources and experience. And we’re well positioned to support this customer as their needs evolve. This is a nice example of our Easy Button Mentality, and, in this case, we’re the Easy Button for Upskilling and Reskilling.  

One brief follow-up here: Can you expand on learning pathways and how these serve as a differentiator for BizLibrary?

Sure. In order to create effective learning pathways that line up well and drive skills attainment, you need a large library of content, which we have. We offer ~12,000 learning resources for a customer to choose from in a wide variety of topical areas. However, no employee needs to consume 12,000 pieces of learning content to be productive and develop a skill; in fact, a role needs only a small subset of the 12,000 (~20 lessons over the course of a year), and plan administrators often don’t have the expertise or bandwidth to select from our library of content and build bespoke playlists on their own.

This is where our learning pathways come in. Learning pathways are pre-configured content playlists, mapped to specific skills, which deploy content over a set period; the administrator only needs to identify the roles they’d like to target, and we take care of the rest. Think of pathways as shortcuts through our extensive library, providing learners with content that’s personalized for them and relevant to their job role. These pathways sit in our BizSkills offering and offer pre-mapped training for thousands of job roles. In addition, BizSkills also offers tools such as skills assessments, customization and curation capabilities (which include editing or building a playlist from scratch), and job role matching, which helps employees see skills required for other roles in the organization.  

How do your customers think about ROI and measuring success? Given the typical profile of your customers, are you helping them define and frame program success?

Our clients think about ROI in a variety of different ways, as they come in with a variety of different objectives. Here are a couple different examples of how we frame and help measure ROI for customers.

Sometimes, there is a clear and direct result from our training. A client recently indicated that we saved them an $80,000 liability because of a single course we provided to their frontline employees. A broader ROI metric contemplates clients aiming to develop a leadership bench with our skills-based products, as our customers intend to develop people not only for the job they have today, but also for the job they’ll grow into. In this case, ROI is about successfully promoting from within versus experimenting and hiring outside of the firm. Another common metric is employee turnover, in general, which is a huge ROI indicator for many of our customers. Many are struggling to find talent and skills they need externally, so the ability to reduce turnover and promote from within drives material, and identifiable, ROI.

To the second part of your question, we absolutely help evolve a customer’s thinking with regards to program success. Many of our customers are initially using a “smile sheet,” which simply asks did people enjoy the learning? And this is all they’ve ever measured. In this case, we try to help them evolve, potentially guiding them to tangible business results—items such as employee turnover, internal promotions, bench size, fewer accidents, and improved sales efficiency, among others.

One additional point: We not only help clients think about how to measure program ROI but also how our program can drive further ROI, such as increasing a skills package for a new team or adding leadership training to a high-turnover part of the business. Helping customers frame the ROI equation certainly helps us deepen customer relationships and grow with our partners. Smarter every day is one of our core values—our employees strive to grow every day, and we hope our offering drives a similar result with our customers.  

Last question. It’s been quite a journey over the past 30 years—what are some of the areas you’re most excited about, looking five years out?

Excellent question. We're really excited about the future and the next phase of growth. Here are a few major themes that get me excited, looking out the next five years.

Traction With Larger Organizations: Before Primus, we largely focused on smaller organizations. However, our investments in platform, capabilities, and content have really unlocked the mid-market and enterprise customer universe. In fact, we feel our value proposition resonates particularly well with this universe of customers, who often have bigger (and more complex) learning aspirations and, with those, more challenges we can help them solve. Specifically, we’ve found that customers in the enterprise tend to appreciate live learning. Our combination of skills depth plus our platform’s virtual classroom capabilities helps these customers cultivate holistic blended learning programs and really expand on our platform, paving the way for long-term customer growth. We’re encouraged by the scale-up success we’re already seeing from larger customers.

Investment in Skills Development: We believe our BizSkills offering delivers a highly differentiated solution in the market and has unlocked material TAM opportunity within our target customer universe. Plain and simple – the skills gap endures across industries and organizational sizes. BizSkills helps customers directly address their unique skills challenges and applies a long-term, ROI-driven approach to employee development. We’re poised to benefit from material greenspace on the skills side, and we believe we’re meeting customers with the most comprehensive and scaled solution in the market.

Continued Adoption of Enterprise Learning: We’ve played in this market for almost 30 years and experienced really strong growth for over the past 10. Up until recently, there had always been a feature or initiative or investment that kept us a tiny step away from reaching our full potential. Today, I’m so proud of the platform we’ve built and firmly believe that we’re just hitting full stride, with a best-in-class, all-in-one solution in a market with a ton of whitespace. We continue to see customer sophistication, with regards to learning objectives, evolve at a rapid rate, and our platform welcomes this evolution. We are poised to continue to benefit from adoption across the segment and augment momentum, with customer upsell driving increased lifetime values, given our more holistic, stickier solution.