Building Trust with Customers and Partners

You have said that to lead effectively, you have to win trust, not only with your customers, but also your partners. So, who are your partners? And how have they helped to advance your vision and goals for Bill.com?

Yeah, it’s winning trust, and it’s also keeping the trust. So, for me, I actually start with a very high level of trust, I think life is too short to have to wait to earn trust. So, I’m going to give you my trust and I might assess in any given moment that I should give you less trust. But I’m going to start with trust, because that makes life a lot easier. That’s just who I am. But partners, they have lots of people that are going to be challenging decisions and want to do different things. And so earning that trust every day is super important.

So, for us, the first partnership we did was with CPA.com, which is a division of the AICPA. Every CPA in the country is a member of their organization. And we did that because SMBs trust their accountants, and we wanted to make sure that that trust can be placed in us as well. And so that partnership has been super valuable. It’s now 13 years in the making, and something that we work on every day, how do we continue to support them and their constituents? So, I think that trust is super important. The same would be for our top three banks, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, and Wells Fargo. Like just having the opportunity to really engage with them and their customers, what is it that their customers need? The same is true for American Express. But by the way, we treat those big level names the same way we treat our smaller regional banks, whether it’s the First National Bank of Omaha, or First Republic, these are all things that we’ll work with.