Latest / Entrepreneur Odyssey / The Surprising Truth About Building Trust When Your Brand Is Unknown
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- Tejneet Selhi: Hello, Zach. Nice to have you with us. everyone to the Entrepreneur Odyssey podcast. And today we've got the wonderful Zach Beagle, who is the founder of Copac. ⁓ Lovely have you with us, Zach. Zach: thank you so much. Thanks for having me on. Tejneet Selhi: Absolutely, I'm excited about our conversation today and I'm excited for our viewers to hear more about Copac and a bit more about you as an individual and your background and why you started the business. Zach: Absolutely. I'm happy to jump right in if you're ready. Tejneet Selhi: Perfect, absolutely. Zach: So hi everyone, my name is Zach Beagle. I'm born and raised in the Philadelphia area. my career in management consulting, so really helping organizations in the Fortune 50. I did a ton of people process technology transformations. How do you get it in that order? The people aligned to the process, aligned with the technology to really drive huge transformations. From I took that expertise and worked with several early stage startups. from employee experience companies to SaaS companies. then really after my last exit, kind of took a step back and wanted to reflect, what do I like doing? What am I good at? What's my passion? And what I really came to a conclusion of was, I like to drive outcomes that matter. I'm pretty industry agnostic and very flexible, very tool and technology agnostic as well. But I like to help people and help organizations ultimately achieve their goals. After doing a good amount of research, noticed about 90 % of organizations fail to achieve their strategic goals. That is a massive miss and a massive opportunity to help improve. And that's ultimately why I founded Copact. And Copact is, as we coin, an outcome partner. So our mission is to turn organizations' top priorities into measurable wins across growth, profitability, and retention. Think of us as a wave partner. to help organizations ultimately achieve what they've struggled to achieve in the past. Tejneet Selhi: Amazing, that sounds great. And I love that for our listeners as well and our viewers because it's about thinking about what your passion is and then aligning that to ⁓ the of business needs. And in this case, having an outcome driven approach, I think is fantastic. Zach: One of my favorite things that I always tell, I'm a mentor at Penn State and Northwestern and a couple other places is people are always like, well, how do I figure out what I'm good at? I say, it's always about experimentation. And I'd say, I always recommend changing good at to a different definition. It's not what you are of or what your capabilities are. It's what you like doing. It's the combination of what you're good at and what gives you energy. If at the end of a task, like I could be the greatest. Excel modeler, coder in the world. But if I'm drained after doing that activity, I'm not good at it. It's not my passion. It's not what I'm meant to do. I really, ⁓ a couple exits and a couple things, really wanted to take a step back and say, what do I do that really gives me energy and excites me day in and day out? ⁓ thankfully was able to come up with the idea of Copact and we're 15 months old. So it's been a great journey so far. Tejneet Selhi: 15 months, so you're still relatively new. However, you've done extremely well. our viewers, we had a chat before the podcast today, and Zach has done great so far. You've already got around 50 clients, I believe. Zach: 50 clients, have 75 partners, B2B product and service providers, and over 100 individual impact advisors or builders. So we built an ecosystem approach. So it's all about getting the word out there, educating people on our process and methodology, adding value at no cost. Tejneet Selhi: Amazing. Amazing at no cost. us a little bit more about that, about that side of things. ⁓ Zach: Absolutely. So the way it works for us is we are tied to organizations incentives. So from a client standpoint, we do the diagnostic, we do the matchmaking, we help run the engagements at no cost. The client never pays us. We never get paid anything. We only get a 10 % revenue share on the backend from our partners. So if we bring in a marketing and branding agency and we redo a website and go to market messaging, we get 10 % of the revenue share if it's successful. If it's not successful, all of our fees go back to the client. If we're not able to drive results, we earn absolutely nothing for the work that we do. Tejneet Selhi: but that's great model, definitely, and a very inviting model. And I like the fact that you've got this ecosystem of partners as well. ⁓ did you build that up? Because I know that that in itself can be a bit of a challenge. Zach: Yeah, actually the first month before we officially launched, my goal was to get 25 partners. So I had to spend six weeks recruiting and finding the right partners that I think could ultimately help. The key thing that I found was finding people that generally aligned with driving outcomes for their clients. Like their ultimate goal wasn't, hey, like I do a service and I get paid no matter what. If that's your methodology and your thought process. outcome driven marketplace like us wasn't a good fit. So I started joining groups that were very outcome driven, outcome focused, started following people and connecting with people that had similar mindsets. ⁓ then naturally found partners that believed in this approach and believed that differentiation wasn't gonna be the best product or service or the best marketing. It's going to be in the results you can actually move the needle for for your clients. started slow, took a while to kind of get our footing and eventually ⁓ kind snowballed just because people that we found had other people in their network that were good fits and then it all kind of grows and combines. So it's taken a while. ⁓ It's 15 months to get to 75 partners, but we feel like we have really good coverage and really good partners that believe in it. And hopefully now it's an education process to get other partners that are a good fit and well known in the Tejneet Selhi: Yeah, absolutely, that's great. Let's talk a little bit about industry trends and some of the industry trends that you're seeing and navigating through at the moment. Zach: Yeah, so we support a ton of different industries and I'd say there's a lot of cross industry trends that are most intriguing to us in terms of we support life sciences, pharmaceuticals, aerospace and defense, consumer products. cross industry trends are very AI focused. It's very much the hot buzz topic and item out there. I think a couple of things that I'm seeing ⁓ are very interesting ⁓ one, definitely the more senior executives and groups that we're connecting with either have an all in approach or, hey, I'm not touching that with a 10 foot pole. They're very interesting adoption strategies in AI and people are either viewing it as the cure for all or, hey, this is something that we're not gonna adopt. The biggest thing that I think needs to be clarified for people is AI is a tool. When the internet came out, .com is a tool, AI is a tool, we go all the way back to the assembly line. These are tools, these are products, these are capabilities that people have. They do not replace people. They are meant to augment and enhance individuals, and ultimately they do not fix things that are broken. They can help you build and create momentum and drive things and systematize things. But ultimately you have to fix the core problem to then allow AI to enable a solution. the classic capabilities of process design, consulting, deep research, all of these things might be enabled and be more efficient with AI, but you still need these core capabilities. You need to be asking the right questions. You need to be driving the right things. And I think organizations right now are ⁓ taking two approaches which I think both aren't the right balance either I'm going to go AI on everything and everything should be done AI if it can be and or I'm not touching AI I'm not interested in changing the ways I've run this business. The right approach is in our opinion is experimentation. Find places where you can try it see if it works see if it's driving the ultimate results that you want and then rinse and repeat. No business should be 100 % AI driven and no business should be 0 % AI driven right now. You need to find that happy medium for what your business is and what your goals and overall where your vision wants to go. Tejneet Selhi: Yeah, great. That's great advice to any budding entrepreneurs out there. And let's talk a little bit about, because obviously you are an outcome driven business. So tell us a little bit about your approach when you are talking to prospects or potential clients. Tell us your method for sort of... getting out from the client what their outcomes are, like what their end goal is, let's say, so you can provide them with the right tools and ⁓ Zach: Absolutely. So every engagement, whether you're coming on as a client or partner with us, starts with a diagnostic. We believe in this approach. We believe in conducting deep research. We believe in doing competitive analysis. And we believe in understanding and communicating with our clients and partners to understand what their goals are. It's very much very similar to ⁓ current state assessment and a management consulting approach or really any strategic engagement. We're almost a mirror. We want to mirror and guide you and understand what is going on in your business, and then ultimately paint the picture of how do we get to the future. So every engagement we do starts with our AI GPT enabled diagnostic tool. It does deep research on the company, the competitive landscape, the overall market. It evaluates the current state maturity of the organization. What are the gaps? Where are the opportunities to improve across growth, profitability, and retention? It then guides the executive or the leader to paint the picture of what's your vision? Where do you want to get to? What does good look like? What does great look like? Where are the roadblocks? Where are the opportunities to improve? And then ultimately at the end of the diagnostic, it showcases three initiatives that are actually going to move the needle and are tied directly to the outcomes that the client or partner said are most important. So it's a 45 minute exercise that we do that really truncates what's typically a multi-week assessment for organizations or, you know, in the SMB in the early stage space, you don't get access to this. You don't have the ability to use these type of consulting guidance and approach. So what we really try and do is we're not, what I tell everyone is we're not saying we can run your business better than you can. Our goal is that we can be an enabler to help you run the business the best way possible. So we are that outside perspective, that tool, that enabler to help you achieve the goals that you know are critical for your business to be a success. Tejneet Selhi: that thoughts. fascinating and I think that is, in a way, it's quite a simple approach but such an impactful approach. It's understanding where your prospective clients are today, they're some of their roadblocks as you mentioned and then where they want to be, right? And then, I think that's absolutely great advice. And then, so ⁓ you AI being ⁓ an trend that runs across every industries. What would you say is a trend or a challenge, let's say, that you're facing within COPEC at the moment? Zach: Yeah, I think thing that we're challenged with that I think everyone's challenged with is it's noisy out there. There are tons of messages, automation, a new guru or expert in every single space you can imagine. And people don't know where to go and trust. They don't know what information is real. They don't know what reach out is genuine. ⁓ our biggest struggle and really the first six months of us going live was education. How do we educate? How do we showcase value without having to hop on a call with us? How do we build through value first and then showcase how we can help in the future? That's our biggest challenge is educating people, getting people out of their current mindset and their current approach and showcasing another path. We do not believe we are right for everyone. If you are happy with where you're at as a business, you are growing at the pace you want. You have the right profitability, you're retaining customers, and you're not looking to shake it up and transform and go beyond where you're at today, we're not a good fit. you have goals that you are not able to achieve by yourselves, if you have ambitions of where you're trying to get the business to, we are a great partner for you. And that education of this is a tried, true, and tested approach that turns that 90 % failure rate we talked about earlier to a 90 % plus success rate, that's what we can bring to the table and what we commit to as an organization. And so our biggest issue or our biggest opportunity to improve is education. There's lots of elements and pieces of our process. What we need to get better at and me in particular is how do I communicate the value? What's the pain they're feeling today and what's the ultimate end outcomes that we can drive for them? without getting bogged down in all of the details where people get confused and then they don't want to work with somebody that confuses them. Tejneet Selhi: Yeah, I want to pick up on something you mentioned just then was how do we educate without having calls? I guess question I have for you at the moment, and I understand that you want to get better at that portion, but how are you doing it today? What's working well today? Zach: Yeah, I think the things that are working best for Copact, and not to say we've cracked the model, podcasts. We run our own podcasts. We join lots of podcasts. Getting our messaging, our approach, our methodology and thought process out there, super critical. Eminence. I've been a huge content syndication person since very early stages at my time at Strive. Content. Build things out there. Don't block. Again, a lot of people do. Hey, give me your email and I'll give you access to this. share content, good content, good information, good tools and capabilities that people can leverage at no cost is really great. And then the final piece that we're doing is we've built a referral flywheel engine. We are constantly bringing on new clients and partners, new advisors, and we're putting them in one community where they can add value to each other, connect with each other and leverage it how they see fit. So we're really doing the Grassroot networking, the eminence approach, as well as the partnership approach. And we do believe in all three of those strategies because people have auto dialers, people send thousands, sometimes millions of emails out. That's not breaking through the noise. You need to find ways where you get somebody to say, ⁓ that's interesting. That's an interesting thought. You're worth a 15 minute discovery call to learn more. That's really the goal. And then from there, they run in your sales process and your overall approach, but it's tough. mean, none. It's a difficult time right now to be breaking through that noise in the noisiest time in human history. Tejneet Selhi: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. But I really like what you said a little bit earlier. It's about getting content out there and building trust with your with your prospects, right? Because if you're suggesting things that they can leverage, you know, you're building that that trust and that relationship before you need to have a call with them, right? Before you dig deeper. So so that's Zach: I think it's valuable content. Like a lot of people are like, yeah, I post once a week. Well, okay. I mean, you could post once a week or five times a week. Are people resonating with it? Is it a cohesive story of what you're trying to help people with and bring to the market? If every post is not connected in any way or there's no overall strategy or theme or the content you're producing is not connected under an umbrella, people get lost and then they unfollow you. So it really has to be Tejneet Selhi: That's right. Yeah. Zach: a strategic approach to adding value to and adding value to individuals. And the companies that do that the best and the fastest are the ones that are going to be the most successful. Tejneet Selhi: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely is. And like you say, it's about having that uniqueness to stand out from a very crowded inbox, right? Or, you know, so I think definitely key as well. Like I say, you've already done so well in 15 months, but what your vision for Copact in the next sort of six to 12 months? Zach: Yeah, so we've actually made a couple hires, which is really exciting. So we've brought on a new director of business operations. We've brought on a couple of sales consultants and some back office help and support. And really we're gearing up to do 150 outcome driven collaborations by the end of the year. So actual active projects where 40 % of that revenue is tied. to the client internal metric across growth, profitability, and retention. We did 25, all of them really late Q3, early Q4 in 2025. So we're looking to ⁓ 6X kind what we did last year. And it's reliant on the strategies we're talking about of grassroots networking. Eminence podcast value added tools no cost and then really building out that network and ecosystem that refers business in That's very much our focus as a bootstrapped organization do not want to spend crazy amount of money on ads and ⁓ and things like that we have to be very strategic and I almost like the challenge because it then forces us to be very deliberate and very value added rather than just spraying information out there. We need to spend the time and do it correctly. And we're on pace thus far, it's a big challenge this year for us to get to 150. And we'll where we go from there. Tejneet Selhi: Yeah, absolutely. And obviously you mentioned noise and the fact that there's so many people out there in this space trying to do ⁓ exactly the same, ⁓ what would you say is your biggest hurdle aside from that? Zach: Aside from the noise. Aside from the noise, I'll bucket that in with education, besides noise and education, I think the next biggest thing is trust. We're an unknown brand. We're a new brand, a new methodology, a new approach. And we work with several enterprise clients. We work with small startups or well-funded startups as well. And when you don't have decades-long history and you're not funded by, or you're not even looking for funding at all, but you're not funded by a reputable VC, angel investors, et cetera. It's how do you build that trust? And so we've really leaned into kind of my experience, my expertise, the people I'm bringing on, bringing on really good people with good backgrounds and pedigree ensure that people know the people that they're working with and make up for the brand that doesn't have as much trust yet and really showcase forward. And I think that's why It's actually interesting. Like you said earlier, like it's a really easy model to join and it is an easy model to join. There's no cost. It's very easy to jump in, but that almost also creates alternative push against it of, ⁓ it was ⁓ why is it free? And why would I do it? And like, why are you in like the discount marketplace? So we battle that a lot of the trust and the no cost piece of. Tejneet Selhi: Yeah. Zach: Well, you get paid what you're worth. And if you're not worth anything, that's why you're no cost. While we've just engineered it in a different way for us to create value and earn value. So it's an interesting place of, no, we're not the discount marketplace. No, we're not. We have the most premier partners that we can get. It's really focused on changing that perception, building that brand up, and educating. It always goes back to education and people's trust. Tejneet Selhi: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. I want to ask you one more question if I may. So... For you as a now, you've been the industry for many years, although is still relatively new, ⁓ what's one bit of advice you would give to somebody that's kind of just starting out, just sort of debating whether to take the plunge into founding ⁓ a new business? Zach: Yeah, I think if I could go back in time and give myself any advice, I think doing it in parallel with another job, another income, think going 100 % in all once and bootstrapping is very difficult. That is an extremely tight crunch on you financially, mentally, emotionally, versus if you're a little more diversified, especially in the early stages. Like even if you want to move faster, you're not the key cog to move it. Like you're waiting on people, you're waiting on people to work with you. You're waiting on people to go through the education process. And so I think attacking it in a bit more of a structured approach with like time allocated for it rather than going a hundred percent in, I think would be my best piece of advice from, you know, the first year plus of I wanted to move faster. I had the bandwidth to move faster and support more, but building the demand takes a little bit longer and there's no shortcuts to that. So I think starting small, experimenting, and then as demand justifies it, allocating your time, allocating more resources is really the best way to do it because... you can spend on this day and ⁓ hours and hours and workshops and do all of these different things. Until you go out to market, you really don't know if you have anything. So go to market fast, go to market small, efficiently, effectively, and then let the demand dictate your next actions versus building and power points that are gonna be wrong. Tejneet Selhi: That's great advice, I think, because... Yeah, it's a case of you start a new business, you want it to do well, and you just want, got the time, right? ⁓ you're putting 100 % in, but it's, like say, until you have clients, you're actually limited to how much you can actually do, ⁓ right? from sort of the lead generation and things like that. But ⁓ yeah, I that's great advice. And ⁓ I'm ⁓ Zach: And your incentives, only thing I'd add there too is your incentives are wrong that I didn't realize of you're chasing revenue and you're chasing short term things rather than is this really aligned to the big pictures is really aligned to the vision of why you built the company. So there's so many reasons to start small, pace it, get to market quickly, trial and experiment before taking the full plunge next time I do a company, I will take that advice and definitely do that. Tejneet Selhi: Yeah. You know, I did say that I was gonna ask you the last question. I've got one more actually. It just leads into what you just said there. Did you build quite a comprehensive business plan? Because you mentioned about making sure that what you're doing is aligning to your vision. And I think this is an important piece for new... entrepreneurs sort of coming into the space. Did you build a comprehensive business plan and how did you find that that, you know, did you find that that helped really align your vision? Zach: phase. Yes, we did build a comprehensive business plan. I actually formed a board and the initial partners that were coming on before it had the comprehensive plan and was very helpful. I think that's bare minimum to get started. What I would say is as in all best laid plans are they fail they fail quite often, especially, and it depends on what type of business you're founding. But if you're founding a net new business and a net new model, ⁓ Tejneet Selhi: Yeah. Zach: There's no around or strategizing around getting out into the market and experiencing it. You do customer interviews or potential customer interviews. You do your research and... Tejneet Selhi: Yeah. Zach: we know so much more 15 months later than we could have ever learned if we just stayed in a box and just continued to brainstorm and plan. the planning is critical. We did that for about a quarter before we launched and the prep work. And was helpful and it's required, I think, ⁓ to anything decently well. It doesn't change needing to get out to market as quickly as possible and getting the feedback, getting real clients until somebody is actually paying you and you're actually creating value. It doesn't matter. It's all theoretical. Tejneet Selhi: Yeah, yeah, that's absolutely fair, right? Best laid plans, I think you've got to have, got to have agility in world, especially in the world that we're living in, ⁓ with with everything else, ⁓ you've to be able to be agile in your thinking. But having that basic plan, think is definitely important. Zach: Yeah, I mean, how can you get anyone to follow you if you don't have at least a path where you're trying to take them our direction? I just think sometimes people stay in planning mode. I was in a Philly entrepreneur group and there were a couple of people that were like, hey, I don't need a plan. I'm just going to jump in and do it. And there were a couple of people that needed to plan. I know some people that are still in planning mode 15 months later from when I met them and the idea is not viable anymore because other things have come out and things have changed and it's like, well, you had a good idea. You should have went into market and kind of seen where it taken you. there's that balance of planning well as just going out into the market and executing. And there's no perfect advice. You'll know when you feel decently ready and then you'll know based on the feedback kind of where to take it. Tejneet Selhi: Yeah, it's like testing the waters, right? You've got this great... ⁓ idea but actually if no one's resonating with it then you know or maybe you need to tweak aspects of it before it you know is is the right plan so yeah ⁓ great advice that I think it's been such a pleasure having you on this podcast I think it's been ⁓ really for our edge sorry excuse me ⁓ tripping my words there educational for our viewers and really well done on ⁓ you've done with COPAQ thus far and I'm excited to follow the journey and see you get to that 150 mark by the end of this year. Zach: Well, thank you so much for having me on. It was such a pleasure and always happy to support fellow entrepreneurs and anyone out there that believes in driving outcome-driven and really helping change way business has been done, ⁓ very and efficiently approach overall. Tejneet Selhi: always happy to Amazing. that's a perfect way to end. Outcome driven ⁓ to business. Fantastic. Well, Zach, have a wonderful rest of your day. Thank you so much. And hopefully we can have you back on the podcast again, maybe towards the end of the year, just to see how you're getting on. Zach: I'd love to join again. Thanks so much for having me. Tejneet Selhi: Amazing, thank you.