"First up, don’t start a business with people you don’t enjoy working with."
Itzik Levy is the CEO and a co-founder of vcita, a platform that helps small business leaders in the service sector to manage their schedules, customer relationships and finances.
One of the Tel Aviv startup ecosystem’s success stories, vcita first launched some ten years ago. The company rapidly expanded to the US and began aggressively developing a full suite of business management tools, including solutions for capturing and nurturing leads, booking appointments, and billing customers – all integrated with a powerful CRM and self-service customer portal.
While directly serving the needs of small business entrepreneurs remains at the core of everything vcita does, today Levy and the rest of the company’s executive team are also developing partnerships that allow marketing agencies and other resellers to offer custom co-branded versions of vcita’s app to their clientele.
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Table of Contents
We are thrilled to have you join us today, welcome to ValiantCEO Magazine’s exclusive interview! Let’s start off with a little introduction. Tell our readers a bit about yourself and your company.
Itzik Levy: My name is Itzik Levy, and I am the co-founder and CEO of vcita. I currently live in Tel Aviv with my wife and two boys, and I’m a second-time entrepreneur.
Before starting vcita, my first company was in the cybersecurity realm. I come from the world of technology, having served eight years in the 8200 elite intelligence unit in the Israeli military, but building products and customer experiences is my passion.
vcita is an all-in-one business management solution for small businesses. Our platform offers small business owners all the tools they readily need to manage their time, money, clients and marketing, all in one place.
Looking back at the past two years, businesses and their founders have gone through a lot, to say the least. What new skills and tactics have you personally, and has vcita as an organization, adopted to help you survive and thrive?
Itzik Levy: We had to learn to keep the company’s spirits and effectiveness high, despite the new work-from-home model, which presented us with its own set of challenges. We looked at how we can keep our employees close, even though they weren’t physically working together.
I found myself, along with my operations team, looking into innovative ways to bond with our employees from afar and keep them motivated considering their own hardships throughout the period. In addition, we had to learn to maneuver our way through the uncertainty of the time.
Being that our clients are small businesses, we were unsure just how big the impact of the pandemic would be on them. We were unsure how our SMB community would get used to the new normal and how many of them would survive. We had to learn to support our SMB community through the uncertainty and offer them the tools they needed to succeed and make it through this hard time.
Finally, I had to quickly shift and adapt my leadership style to adhere to the new norms. I needed to show my involvement and understanding to employees’ working constraints as well as overcome senior management challenges, all while trying to find the best solutions to our problems as a company, with a product built for a community in distress.
Your platform has undergone considerable development since it launched as an appointment booking widget ten years ago. As you diversify in functionality, how do you make sure that you’re staying true to your core mission and value proposition?
Itzik Levy: vcita’s core mission has and always will be to support and serve entrepreneurs and small businesses in their digital transformation journey. That mission doesn’t change based on features we deploy.
In fact, our platforms’ functionality diversification stems from the core mission. We develop features and functionalities that further support our SMB community, decrease barriers and help them thrive, keeping our product true to our mission.
What are the biggest challenges that you’re currently facing, and how do you plan to overcome them?
Itzik Levy: One of our main challenges is that vcita’s platform works with multiple verticals across many different countries. In order to do that, we need to create a robust platform that serves all industries’ needs in parallel. A salon owner needs a different platform than a tutor, for example, and our solution needs to be able to speak both languages effectively.
With all this variety come endless needs and possibilities, which also makes it difficult for us to hone in and focus on one specific capability. We need to develop it all in a timely manner that will be relevant to our users.
We overcome these challenges by partnering with organizations that have the knowledge and the ability to focus on certain industries or geographies. By partnering with leaders in different markets, we can expand our understanding of the market’s needs and further expand our platform’s capabilities to encompass and create an answer for these needs.
When you first founded the company, vcita was based in Tel Aviv only, but you quickly opened a new headquarters in Seattle. Looking back at that move, how instrumental was it to your success in terms of international growth?
Itzik Levy: Our presence in Seattle, Washington, has been instrumental to our efforts to truly understand our main initial target market. When expanding in the US, we needed legs on the ground to make sure we spoke the language (not English, but the colloquialisms), understood how to behave and present ourselves, and could keep up with the competition.
In the future, we will continue to look to expand wherever our market is. The insights and experience that come from having people at the location where your customers are lends a great hand to improving how well we serve our markets.
Out of all of your proudest moments as an entrepreneur, is there a particular one that stands out the most?
Itzik Levy: Any time I am able to see evidence of a significant impact on people, be they our customers or our employees, I feel proud.
Whenever I read reviews by actual users that say that our software has changed their business and their lives for the better, it makes me feel like we have served yet another happy customer, and that’s what we’re here for.
The same goes for my employees. When we win awards like Dun & Bradstreet’s top 100 high-tech companies to work for, or receive rave reviews of how we run our business from our employees, I know that the work which my team and I are doing is making a difference.
You’ve done a lot of original research into the challenges that small businesses are facing today. What are some of the most interesting data points that you’ve discovered?
Itzik Levy: According to a large survey vcita conducted back in November 2021, small businesses have been facing three main challenges. Their main challenges were equal parts finding new clients, retaining and nurturing their existing clients, and managing their cash flow and payment collection.
In addition, 96% of respondents adopted digital tools in the previous year, showing how crucial digital transformation is to their survival.
However, they are spreading themselves thin, with 92.6% admitting to using anywhere between one and six different tools to run their business. Such a large spread presents evidence that a unified approach is necessary in order to support small business growth and digitalization.
How did your journey lead you to become a CEO?
Itzik Levy: I always wanted to be an entrepreneur and build something of my own. This played very well with my will to tackle a diverse set of problems. I would also like to think I excel in that.
Looking at vcita’s website, it’s clear that your network of partners and resellers is a key aspect of your business. What have you been doing as an executive leader to develop those channels, and where do you see them headed in the years ahead?
Itzik Levy: vcita’s partnership program prioritizes go-to-market above any other channel. In our efforts to change how small businesses operate, we realized we needed partners that will help spread the word with their own small business audience.
In order to nurture these relationships, we have been tackling them from all facets. We’ve ascertained these relationships by coming out with relevant, supportive content, contacting relevant potential partners, and building vcita as the best platform for partners to bring digital solutions to market. We believe partnerships are the best way for us to make an impact.
Over the coming years, we plan to drastically expand our partnerships and are aiming to team up with prominent organizations looking for digital transformation solutions for their small business clients to work with.
Do you have any advice for aspiring CEOs and future leaders? What advice would you give a CEO that is just starting on their journey?
Itzik Levy: First up, don’t start a business with people you don’t enjoy working with. This will be a lifestyle change, so you want to make sure you’re going at it with the right people.
Secondly, before you commit to a specific business idea, make sure you can answer the following questions. Is there a need in the market for your idea? What will be the business model? Does your idea match the strengths of your team? Is this the right timing for your idea? What can go wrong?
Finally, share your idea with as many people as you can – don’t keep it a secret. Most people won’t steal your idea, but instead they’ll offer you advice and other perspectives.
When you first became a CEO, in what ways was your role most different from what it is today? What has surprised you most as a leader over the past ten-plus years?
Itzik Levy: In the beginning, my role focused mostly on strategy: how to get the product up and running, go-to-market strategies, development strategies and so on.
As time has progressed, the focus has shifted to more of an execution approach. I am more focused today on execution than strategy, although the two often do go hand in hand.
Thank you for sharing some of your knowledge with our readers! They would also like to know, what is one skill that you’ve always wanted to acquire but never really could?
Itzik Levy: Even before I became a CEO, I have always been fascinated by learning new skills and trades. I regularly use YouTube videos and other resources to learn things I am not familiar with. At the moment, I am really into chess, as it challenges my mind and helps me see things from many different perspectives.
Jerome Knyszewski, VIP Contributor to ValiantCEO and the host of this interview would like to thank Itzik Levy for taking the time to do this interview and share his knowledge and experience with our readers.
If you would like to get in touch with Itzik Levy or his company, you can do it through his – Linkedin Page
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