Business Matters’ Secrets of Success: Brendan Noud

Here we speak with Brendan Noud, co-founder and CEO of LearnUpon, a pioneering Learning Management System (LMS) company that has revolutionized how businesses deliver training to their employees, partners, and customers.

Having identified a gap in the market for customer-centric LMS solutions, Brendan and his co-founder, Des Anderson, built LearnUpon from the ground up with a commitment to innovation and customer support. From the early days of offering 24/7 support through 12-hour shifts to becoming an industry leader with over 1,500 customers, Brendan shares the insights and values that have driven LearnUpon’s success.

Having previously worked for companies offering learning management systems and services, Brendan Noud spotted a gap in the market for something bigger and better. Fed up with the lack of innovation and customer-centric values within the Learning Management System (LMS) space, Brendan decided to start his own company, and that’s when LearnUpon was born.

Alongside his co-founder, Des Anderson, they developed LearnUpon to support the learning needs of businesses. From the beginning, Brendan and Des placed a big emphasis on customer service, ensuring customers were able to reach out and get the support they needed. Before their first hire in 2013, Brendan and Des took turns working 12-hour shifts to offer 24/7 support to their customers. Fast forward to today, and they have a global business with over 1,500 customers.

LearnUpon’s mission is to partner with businesses that believe delivering great learning is essential to achieving great results. They focus on helping organisations deliver effective learning that bridges the gap between employee, partner, and customer training and business goals.

With Brendan leading LearnUpon, the company has gained widespread recognition and earned multiple industry awards. His leadership has driven substantial growth, with LearnUpon now serving customers across diverse sectors and establishing itself as a leader in the LMS landscape.

What is the main problem you solve for your customers?

At LearnUpon, we help businesses deliver engaging LearnUpon experiences to their employees, partners, and customers, all within one centralised solution. We aim to ensure the learning they provide impacts what matters, like performance, retention, and growth.
What made you start your business—did you want to rock the status quo, or was it a gap in the marketplace that you could fill?
My co-founder, Des, and I have both worked in the learning industry for over 20 years. We interacted with so many people and businesses that weren’t happy with their learning solution. They were dated, bloated, and lacked a focus on what really mattered: the user’s experience.
We decided to invest in building a solution that we believe meets the needs of real companies out there, focussing on making the learner experience as engaging and simple as possible and the admin experience as automated and efficient as possible.
What are your brand values?

LearnUpon has many brand values, but the most important is to “put the customer at the heart of everything”. Nothing is decided, built, or achieved without asking the question: Is this putting our customers at the heart? We’re a customer-first company; we build for their needs. Our roadmap, our community, our conference—it’s all about the customer experience and putting them first.

Is team culture integral to your business?

From day one, we had a strong vision for LearnUpon’s company culture. It’s since developed significantly. Today, our culture code maps out the shared beliefs, values, and practices that are important to us. We encourage all employees to celebrate when these values are followed and feel comfortable highlighting instances when they’re not.

These fall into a few buckets: putting customers at the heart of what we do; leading with curiosity, asking questions, and learning from mistakes; leading by example in a constructive and caring way; and delivering quality, which we believe is best done through diverse voices and experiences.

Above all, we hire great people and trust them to do great work, trying to harness a team that is adaptable, resilient, collaborative, compassionate, driven, humble, and fun. Culture is the most important component of running a successful business.

What do you do to go the extra mile to show your team you appreciate them?

We offer plenty of perks to show our appreciation for our team, but it’s the daily actions that truly shape our company culture. We trust our team members and encourage them to take risks and explore new ideas.

Moreover, we believe in full transparency. Every month, we hold a company-wide meeting where we openly share updates, celebrate our successes and learn from our challenges.

It’s this trust and openness that our people value the most.

In terms of your messaging do you think you talk directly to your consumers in a clear fashion?

Transparency is big at LearnUpon, especially with our customers. If a prospect is talking to us and we feel like we won’t be the right solution for them, we’re transparent. And we will direct them to another solution we feel is right. We also encourage everyone on our team, from sales to product to customer success to be honest and open with our customers. We build authentic relationships because of that, and you can see that shine through in our reviews and retention rates.

How often do you assess the data you pull in and address your KPIs, and why?

Every decision we make is data-driven, be it qualitative or quantitative. We constantly monitor customer stats like happiness, NPS, retention, and product adoption. We also give our customers an opportunity to talk to us, be it 1-1 on calls with our Customer Experience teams, within our customer community, or at our conference. We want to know how we can constantly improve to meet their needs.
For our employees’ happiness, this is a big priority too. We run two surveys each year. A survey at the end of the year to assess team sentiment and a mid-year pulse survey. It’s critical that we know how our employees are feeling and if we are living up to our company culture.

Is tech playing a much larger part in the day-to-day running of your company?

It’s huge. As a tech company, we want to be on the cutting edge and use the best technology internally, as well as provide it for our customers. We have robust processes within the company for using the newest technology, and we also have a strong roadmap for our customers around AI. Additionally, we have a big focus on automation. Our customers and our team’s time is precious; therefore, we want to provide solutions that allow them to do more in less time.

What is your attitude towards your competitors?

The learning tech space is filled with competitors. It’s a busy space with an estimated 1,000+ learning solutions on the market today. At LearnUpon, we don’t look at it as a bad thing to have a competitive market. To us it means opportunity. It means there’s a growing market and a growing demand for corporate learning.

Do you have any advice for anyone starting out in business?

Have your company’s values in mind from the get-go. When Des and I first started LearnUpon, we wanted the businesses to have the best support in the industry. But with just the two of us, this meant splitting 12-hour shifts so that we could offer 24/7 support.

That drive for the best customer support has never waned. Instead, it’s grown with LearnUpon’s substantial customer experience team, still offering 24/7 support.

It can be a lonely and pressured place to be as the lead decision maker of the business. What do you do to relax, recharge, and hone your focus?

I consider myself incredibly lucky that I have Des, LearnUpon’s co-founder, by my side. I’ve known Des for 20+ years; we both came up together in the industry, and I can always rely on him to be a sounding board for ideas and ensure we’re making the right decision for our team, our customers, and LearnUpon as a whole. Plus, playing sports with my kids is always a great break!

Do you believe in the 12-week work method, or do you use much longer planning strategies?

We have a long-term vision but to get there, we work in quarters. At the start of each quarter, we set team- and company-wide OKRs that we all work towards. Each month, the whole company is updated on the progress. It keeps everyone dedicated and focused on an overall goal.

What three things do you hope to have in place within the next 12 months?

At the start of each year, we assess and revise our company goals, our product vision, and our positioning in the market. We want to be secure in those things. Team growth is also a key focus. We’re opening new offices and growing teams, and we’d like to continue to bring the best talent into our business.

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Business Matters’ Secrets of Success: Brendan Noud