Sorry, you'll have to be patient with me.
Your audio quality is not coming through well,
but your value does come across well.
So it sometimes may seem like we're interrupting each other
or we're overlapping each other,
but I think there's just some weird internet demon
that does not want us to talk well.
So just letting you know that in case
it helps us with our banter a little bit.
Not a problem.
Awesome, man.
Well, Chris, I'm happy to have you on the show
and what are you most excited about sharing today?
You know, just trying to help people in the B2B space,
grow their accounts and grow their margins
because I do believe margin is the root
of success for small businesses.
Absolutely, what's your one secret weapon
for how to do that?
Relationships.
Oh, it was concise too.
Yeah, for sure.
It's all about relationships and business,
you know, taking the time and the effort
and investing it back into the existing organization.
All right, welcome in to Vision Pros Live.
With Jackson Calame, I'm your show host.
We'll be doing interviews for visionary entrepreneurs
and guest leaders who are building
fantastic visions out there.
And pros, welcome to another episode of Vision Pros Live.
I'm your host, Jackson Calame, founder and CEO
of First Class Business.
And I'm excited to have Chris Klaus on the show today.
I'll go into his intro in just a minute
without skipping the fact that we got some awesome sponsors
to be talking about.
So we got ColdClick.
This is a system that we use for our LinkedIn automation.
It helps protect us as we implement automation
to attract great people to work with us and talk to us.
Now, when I say attract, I am actually talking about
utilizing very warm messages to make sure
that you're not just shoving your offers
down people's throat.
And that's my tip and trick to you
is just be a normal human being.
When you reach out to people,
let people study your profile.
If your profile shows that you're an expert,
they may want to talk to you
if you show up as a genuine human being.
But the process of automation also makes sure
that we're able to distribute our message
to more and more people and attract said great leaders.
So the tool is never the problem.
The tool is a resource.
And how we choose to utilize the resource
is either a problem or a blessing.
Water can drown people,
but water can also provide tremendous blessings to people.
And that actually makes me need to stop for a moment.
I actually would like to give a brief moment of silence.
I don't know if you are paying attention to the news
and what's going on, but Israel is now in a war
with Hamas and Palestine is also affected by it.
I don't want to take sides
in really any relationships in life.
We are all brothers and sisters on this planet,
and not all of us know that,
but I just want to make sure that if you haven't heard
the news, it's something that you should really be looking
at and paying attention to.
And there's more unfortunate news
that we are also probably not aware of.
And that's that Afghanistan was hit by an earthquake.
And according to initial reports,
2000 people died in said earthquake.
Another report said 800, whether it was one person or 800,
the loss is obviously devastating
for those closest and affected by it.
So if you would, I won't be silent during this actually,
I'll use the time productively,
but maybe just have your thoughts and prayers with people,
but also consider if you know a link
of how people can help effectively, please share it
in the comments.
If you are in a position to help out,
then go look for the links
and how can you help those circumstances.
But the world's been going through a lot of darkness
in a lot of different ways for thousands of years.
Let's not sugarcoat it.
We don't necessarily live in an exceptional time.
And at the same time we do.
And so with that said,
we're going to enjoy this episode of Vision Pros.
We're going to compartmentalize this experience,
find our abilities to help in that cause outside
of sharing the awareness on the microphone,
but also we're going to dive in to the blessing
that we have of being able to host Chris
and learn from his experience as a tech wizard.
He's like Bill Nye, the science guy, but better looking.
And he helps with business,
not just basic facts about physics and chemistry.
So that'll be fun.
Anyway, I'm going to dive into TapMental now a little bit.
There's Chris, there's our Bill Nye.
So the tapmental.io is a client of ours.
And I've been super impressed with David Goodall
and the types of results that he's able to get for clients
who are looking for operational help.
Him and Chris probably have a very harmonic overlap
in the way that they both do things.
What I love about David is his ability to get
into the emotional healing within the founders
of said ventures and help them recognize
that overcoming their trauma,
overcoming their experiences at a deeper level
will root out the core problems
that are ultimately holding back their ability to scale,
which then affects his ability to put workflow processes
and systems in place that make the most sense
for said companies.
So feel free to check out ColdClick and TapMental.
And last but not least, the Water Project.
I'm a huge fan of the Water Project.
And no matter what else is going on in the world,
it breaks my heart.
There are people that do not have access
to clean drinking water.
And every day we've got an opportunity to step up
and help out with this by giving a dollar
or again, raising awareness for people who are less aware
of the realities that some people face out there.
And I feel fortunate enough that I need to spread the word
about that as well and help people understand
that you have an opportunity not only to give back,
but to also see how your dollar goes
towards helping the community you chose to support.
And I think that's really cool.
I don't know too many organizations
that were doing that as soon as the Water Project
started doing it.
And it just gives us that transparency.
You know, I was like, okay, my support is going
to a community that's actually in need.
And I get to see the outcome of said experience.
So anyway, let's get Chris on the show now.
And Chris, Klaus, I'm excited to talk to you.
All things tech, all things business,
whatever we can cram into the next 30, 45 minutes,
we will absolutely do just that.
So Chris, Klaus, thank you for joining me
on Vision Pros Live.
Let me pull you up.
There we go.
Now you're on.
I'm excited to be here, Jackson.
Absolutely.
So we're going to be showing some of your websites
as we talk.
You have quite a few ventures that you're involved in.
Kilo feet, you've got SAS Rock,
you've got the Realty Tech,
where you're teaching about AI and how to utilize that.
You know, I guess with all of that under your belt,
knowing that we're talking to visionary entrepreneurs,
people who can also envision themselves as market leaders,
who should be listening today?
Why should they listen to you?
And what are they going to get out of today's show?
All right.
I think the thing we're going to talk about the most
is probably account expansion.
So I would say that people who would benefit the most
are B2B executives, salespeople, and or owners.
They should listen because I've helped expand accounts
at the last several companies that I've worked at,
as well as for my consultants, my clients.
And they're going to learn some techniques
that will help them do that.
And when I say expand accounts,
I mean, take an account from 30,000 to 200,000,
take an account from 400,000 to 3 million.
You know, these kinds of processes take work.
But I think most small business owners
spend far too much time trying to acquire new leads
instead of investing in the accounts that they already have.
Well said.
That will be fun to unpack.
And I think you just nailed the second piece pretty well,
which is what is your vision for those that you serve?
You hit some of the tangible outcomes of that,
which is awesome.
What do you hope that leads to for your clients?
Margin.
So I really do believe that if you invest right
and you can grow accounts,
you have a long-term scalable and sustainable business.
So you can have margin and you can be protected
from the ups and the downs and the cycles that exist
because you're not a transactional company at that point.
You're a relationship company and your clients,
your partners will stay with you through thick and thin
if you do the same for them.
Let me have some limiting belief fun
and twist your words a little bit.
So you make people rich and greedy, right, with margins.
No, but go ahead.
Help somebody understand that heard that,
what it is you mean again.
I don't believe without margin,
you can actually invest in your clients
and your relationships.
If you operate at a single digit margin,
you can't go above and beyond.
You can only provide the service you already provide.
But if you start to increase or less, yeah.
But if you increase your margins,
you actually allow yourself the opportunity
when you see an opportunity to invest in that account
and to help the client even more.
So margin begets quality.
I'm a big, big believer in that.
And I think you can always be the Walmarts of the world
chasing the single digit margins,
or you can be the Apple of the world
and be chasing double digit or triple digit,
well, double digit margins.
But because that double, that high,
the 20 to 30 to 50% margins,
those allow you to invest in your product,
to invest in yourself, to invest in your clients.
And ultimately the combination of those investments
is what allows you to have a better product
and a better customer experience.
It's funny, man.
I'm gonna dive a little deeper.
I love that you use the generalized view of Apple
and Walmart to depict this,
because it's an easy concept for people to understand
since you buy $1 items at Walmart
versus buying, I don't know, $4,000 earbuds at Apple.
So I get that.
And for those of you who are listening in,
Chris knows this as much as I do.
And I appreciate, again, the oversimplification
can be helpful to draw a correlation.
But I also want everybody to catch the nuance
that he and I know that, well, wait a second.
Apple, I'm also an, I'm an Apple customer.
I have iTunes, right?
I don't pay a dime for iTunes, right?
So I've got my free Walmart style product through them
and they use that to get me into their bucket
so they can continue to sell me things
if I ever decide to go that route.
And in the case of Android, same thing,
Android, Apple, I don't care, I don't wanna fight.
But the same thing, I get into their free stuff
and then I end up with their higher ticket items.
Walmart's the same way.
That's why Walmart is worldwide, right?
You go and you buy the milk at a loss,
but those plastic cups you're buying
or those t-shirts on the rack that you're buying,
the markup, the margin is phenomenal for that entity as well,
which is why they're able to scale.
And the key is finding somebody like Chris
who helps you figure out how the heck do you do that
for your brand, not getting distracted by the other brand?
So what's your vision, Chris, for yourself in all of this?
There's a Japanese word I'm probably gonna butcher it
called ikikage, I believe, which is that intersection
of your purpose, your vision, how you make money,
what you're good at, and all of those different things.
I truly love enabling individuals ikikage.
That is cool that they have words to define things like that,
like holistic ideas, rather than having to use
a long phrase like us.
That's why they sound so wise all the time.
So, all right, let's dive in a little bit
to that margin aspect, man, teach me, teach away.
So how do you go from 30,000 to 200,000?
What does that look like?
Well, so it starts with like a process,
and there are four different ways
that you can make additional money.
You can upsell, you can go through
the traditional land and expand,
you can start to offer tailored solutions
when you have deep relationships with your clients,
or you can offer new offerings based upon listening
and hearing your clients.
And one of the reasons that some of these processes
require an investment is because you do have to spend time
listening to your customers.
And by the way, this is good product management,
which is my background, this is good sales,
and this is good everything.
Listening to your customers is critically important.
But it starts with really a process.
I'm sure you've heard of quarterly business reviews,
Jackson, right?
Lots of big companies do them.
But I think a lot of companies do them wrong.
And what they do at a quarterly basis
should actually be done on a monthly basis
when they primarily speak with just the champion
of the account.
The champion, and you should be talking a lot,
and you should be dealing with each other all the time.
When you say the champion of the account,
are you referring to the account executive
who manages that account,
or are you referring to the account themself?
The account themselves, the champion of the account, right?
Instead of doing that on a quarterly basis,
that should be done on a monthly basis at a minimum.
And then on the quarterly basis,
the change is that you need to make sure
that you're dealing with either other departments
at the same level of that champion or the champion's boss.
Because the quarterly business review
should be about making the champion look good for using you.
Okay, yeah, sorry.
Let me just make sure I understood that.
So the champion, you're referring to the account executive
who manages it.
I'm referring to the champion within the organization
that's using your software, product or service.
Oh, so the champion is the client.
The champion is always the client.
Who's championing you inside of the organization?
And that's very rarely the CEO.
Which means there's always another person higher
or lateral that you can be expanding
your opportunity inside of.
And so one of the ways to do that
is let's say you have an account
with let's say North America,
and you wanna pick up the South American side of a business.
When you do a quarterly business review,
it's an opportunity to have
the North American business account manager
potentially add in the South American business account
or his boss, the global leader,
and bring them in and say,
these are the things we promised,
these are the things we delivered.
Our champion, you wanna make your champion look good.
This is what the champion asked for.
This is how we did it.
This is how we improved.
Here's the opportunities for improvement we see here.
Is there anything we can do for you?
And you've already had these dialogues with the champion.
So you know what they need.
What you don't know is what their boss wants
or what their counterparts want.
But having that conversation in front of those people
is an amazing opportunity to make your champion look good.
Hopefully you're helping him get a raise or a bonus.
But it's also exposing you in a way
that you could never get to those other people
inside that company because your champion is the one
that's helped guide and build and add
the additional contacts and the additional leverage
inside the organization.
I'm a big believer in the concept, Chris, huge.
One reason why is I'm usually,
I was usually the champion within organizations
that did the dirty work behind the scenes
to get the systems to work and function.
And there's nothing more frustrating
than when you're dealing with a service provider
that doesn't value your input.
And you're trying to implement that software
for the success of both the entity you represent
and the software provider that you chose
or that you decided to work with.
So the client success manager role,
some people would call it the CSM.
I've seen that starting to take off
a little bit more and more in the market.
I think it's one of the best,
one of the most important roles that companies can carve out.
Go ahead.
You got a hundred percent.
No, I agree completely.
And customer success managers are critically important.
But one of the things I'm part of the process
is understanding that your customer success team,
your customer support team, your training department,
and your sales team as four different organizations
within side your organization can develop silos so fast.
And so part of that process is every week,
sure, you'll probably have a sales meeting
where you view all your main accounts,
but every month inside your organization,
maybe a week before your monthly champion call,
so you can be prepared for it,
you have a account review with all your key accounts.
I don't care what the,
whatever the threshold is for your organization,
maybe it's a hundred thousand a year
and you only have to look at your top 20 accounts,
but every single account gets its own dedicated meeting.
And inside of that, the support department has to come
with all the issues and an account issue analysis.
The customer success department has to come in
with the customer successes findings.
Sales does the same, support does the same,
all the departments come together
and make a true understanding product as well.
They build a true understanding of that customer's ethos
and that customer, what the customer needs
inside the organization cross-departmentally.
You enable your sales manager, your account manager,
your CSM, who's ever in charge of this process,
to then have an effective call with the champion
inside of the organization.
And they get to say things like,
hey, we did this customer support analysis
and this is what we found.
And because of that, well, I talked to the product guy
because he was in my meeting, I talked to the product guy
and we're going to make this tweak
because we think it's going to improve the product for you.
And now you've just escalated the idea
of customer success, support, product development and sales
and you've looped it all together
through that one throat to choke of the account manager.
And you've said all of my whole department,
my whole company thinks you're important
and we bubble it up and we review it all the time.
And I'm having this conversation with our monthly basis,
not a quarterly.
And on the quarterly, what I'm going to ask you to do is
I'm going to help you try to look good.
So we're going to review and make sure
that we can spin this in the best possible way
because it's important that we both have success.
And now how can I help you share that
across your organization?
Massive, massive value add when you can do that.
But that's where I said, you have to have margin.
Otherwise, you've got hours of time
for a customer support person to do the analysis per account,
hours of time for support.
It's not a chicken and an egg.
It's a chicken egg concept.
You have to invest in your brand to win.
You have to be willing to do what you need to.
And sometimes we hold ourselves back because we say,
well, I can't quantify the value of that.
I can't quantify, there's no metrics to back.
That's a lie.
That's not true.
However, in the effective executive,
Dr. Peter Drucker talks about how you measure
an executive based on quarterly performances.
Meaning you got to give them at least four months
to be able to begin to see what the types of results
they might drive are.
And a lot of times the beginning driver is uncomfortable.
And so the results are actually going to be
kind of funky looking in the first four months.
Usually by month eight though,
you have a pretty great idea of something like this
is winning really well.
And I would equate this to any sports person out there,
or if you're not, consider looking up the man Dremond Green
from the Golden State Warriors.
And here's why.
Dremond's job is not to make the most amount of points.
It's not to block the most amount of shots.
It's not to give any tangible KPI or metric
to justify him being on the team.
Yes, he does do those things and have some highlight games,
but that's not why they love Dremond.
Dremond's job is to be mean and it is to be in the way.
He's just supposed to get in the way and affect people
and their mindset and he's motivates the team too.
Don't get me wrong, he's a great basketball player,
but the stats don't necessarily show it.
Now your customer success manager,
their job is not to be mean.
It's to be the exact opposite of that.
It's to be kind.
It's to listen to people.
And I'm just incredibly bought into your concept, Chris,
if you can't tell.
I'm like, this is huge.
And I don't see this happen enough
because entrepreneurs and HR departments
are scared to bring people in that don't fit
within the metrics within one silo department.
Amen.
And actually I love the fact that you brought up
the HR departments.
So one of my biggest issue,
and I saw this great tweet a few weeks ago
about the death of SaaS, which is greatly exaggerated.
Of course it is.
But I really loved what he was saying
and that is people don't buy technology,
but we sell technology
and that's not what we should be selling.
We should be selling the three legs of the stool,
which is we have the people, we have the process,
and we have the technology to make you successful.
And it's the combination of those three.
Here's our point.
Can I give one more base on that?
Go ahead, go ahead.
I got to do the plug, brother.
I got to.
And that's why I named this Vision Pros, right?
Because it's the vision that attracts those elements
to be there in the first place.
But that's the problem is companies assume
they understand all,
they just want to sell their product or service or SaaS,
right?
And nobody cares about that stuff.
Not unless you have that people, that culture,
that vision to support it.
Go ahead.
Yeah, I like that.
So you could even say that the vision is really the chair
and the legs, right?
The stool, the portion of that.
Because you have to have a process.
You have to, and it's got to be onboarding,
it's got to be management,
it's got to be account management.
You have to have a process.
You have to have the right people in place
to make that process work.
And then you have to have the technology.
If you're just selling technology,
you are selling a commodity that is replaceable.
And that is one of my big, big true beliefs
that if you're just selling the technology,
you're selling a commodity.
And I'm not in the commodity sales game.
I'm in the relationship game.
I'm in the building long-term value
and unlocking long-term value.
And that can only be done by doing this.
So one of my clients that I was just working with,
we were working on engagement and, you know,
I think they had a client somewhere
in the 30,000 a year range.
And I talked about how to walk through this process.
And we built plans around how to do some of the things
that we just talked about.
And over the course of six months,
I'm pretty sure they signed the contract
before our engagement ended,
with greater than like an 8X size increase.
But the thing is, to your point, Jackson,
which I think is great,
you said it can take about eight months.
It took probably the full six months, right,
for them to start to see a change in the client
and then to start the contract negotiation
and get that all taken care of.
But the reality is, at a level of an investment you make,
they actually had to bear the cost
because there wasn't margin in the account to do that.
And they were willing to take that risk
because guess what?
Just hearing about it,
Jackson, you can see Jackson's enthusiasm, right?
It's like, this just makes sense.
And if you're not doing this
and you don't have the margin to do this,
try it and see if you can figure out,
because those things always happen.
You always can.
You cannot make your excuses,
the reason why you don't do the right thing.
Agreed.
But I think the point is,
you have to hear from your customer real words,
real listening, and you have to provide the value
for them to learn about the upsell chances, right?
Or to learn about the expansionary chances,
or to build something tailored and custom to them.
And I think a lot of times people hear like,
hey, they wanna have super high margins
because SaaS is great, which guess what?
Service companies have been the bread and butter
of America for a long time.
SaaS has been around for what, 30 years?
So it's, service is not a bad or dirty word,
but you can lump it into a recurring contract
and extract some of that value from a multiple perspective,
if that's what you're worried about,
by saying, hey, we're gonna sell you the software,
it's 10 grand a year, but in that 10 grand,
I'm making up the numbers because it doesn't matter,
you're gonna get a hundred hours of customization,
or training, or support, or whatever thing.
You can just make it part of the software bundle
that they have some labor that's associated with it.
So that way you're developing and providing the solution,
and you're not worried about margin counting necessarily.
I mean, I will say, if a company attempts
to go this route half-heartedly, they're gonna burn.
It's not gonna work.
You have to be willing to actually listen
and implement this with, it's a fall of faith
that you take when you do this,
you can't do it half-heartedly, it will not work.
And here, I'm gonna give a couple of examples.
Is that cool with you?
Yeah, I'd love to agree and disagree with you in a second.
Sweet, I'm down with that, always.
So two of the companies that I see implementing
this style of training and growth are Trainual,
T-R-A-I-N-U-A-L.com, they do a phenomenal job
of building out a support process that is wicked cool,
and a vision for what it is that they're doing.
And you can just tell they have that success manager
built into the process by the way
they onboard the new clients.
One company that I see stepping up in this regard
and kind of making new moves is Canva.
Canva's got commercials coming out like crazy
on YouTube and on TV, and you can just see, again,
the dedication to focus in their culture.
But you can also visually watch the expansion
of these brands over time because of what's happening.
Now, I saw another company that was failing miserably
to implement a client success, and they needed one.
They did not have one, they had these silo problems,
and the company was named Traffic and Funnels.
And Traffic and Funnels was run by some very, very smart,
very good leaders in the world.
I tend to think they are.
And at the same time, the customer service was abysmal.
It was awful.
And they brought in somebody who I feel like did
the best job they could as a client success manager,
given that the existing culture did not respect
the reality of a client success manager.
And that was Tyler Chambliss.
She did a phenomenal job of coming in
and trying to right the ship, but she did it alone.
And it became more and more obvious.
And I was just a client of theirs, right?
So I wasn't a consultant with them
and I worked behind the scenes, but you can see certain things
unfold, especially as an entrepreneur.
Like, you just have the ability to know, oh, red flags here
and there and there.
But I watched her try so hard to go all in as the client success
manager, and I could see that the feedback we were giving,
the community was giving, it was all on a Facebook group
where you could see what was happening.
It was pretty obvious that she had almost no support
in the process of delivering.
Granted, she did certainly make waves
that provided an improvement to what they did.
But I have to digress on that.
I don't feel like they adopted fully or came even close.
And I would say the proof is that they no longer exist.
The brand got shut down.
It's gone.
So those are the three different elements.
I just want if you're going to do this,
don't go in as the doubting Thomas.
I don't think you're going to win
if you go in with extreme doubts.
You're going to self-sabotage the experience,
in my opinion.
But Chris, hit it.
What do you feel is wrong about that,
and what can you add to it?
I was going to say, I agree and disagree.
You can't do it half-heartedly.
However, you can organizationally
do it half-heartedly.
And what I mean by that is you don't have to deploy it
to all your accounts.
In fact, there should be a gating mechanism
that says only accounts that meet this threshold
should get this.
But when you first start, you can literally
pick a single account and say, I can make the investment
for a single account because this is my most important
account already, and I want them to be happy.
So that is the half-hearted.
You can't do it in a single account half-hearted,
but you can do one account instead of 50 accounts.
That's semantics.
Because I think you're going wholeheartedly
for that one account.
But you're not investing in the scale of the experience yet,
which I love.
That's a great point that sometimes we
try to eat the whole elephant at once.
You got to eat one elephant one bite at a time.
Yeah, one bite at a time.
I like that.
You got to eat it one bite at a time.
I couldn't agree more.
And I really, in fact, that's one of the things
that I would suggest frequently is starting with one
to three accounts that are the most important to a small
company and a gating.
A lot of companies that are going
to be north of 10 million, they're
going to have parts of these processes in place.
But it's those companies that are not 1 to 10 million range
that haven't really figured out the scaling that
benefit the most from putting this stuff together.
I heard it called the seven-figure desert,
and it made me chuckle.
In a room alone, I was like, oh my gosh,
that is so incredibly accurate.
So Chris, let's dive in to the next principle.
In fact, I'll show this on my screen.
We'll skip a couple questions.
We might come back to them.
But the next question is, what can other visionaries learn
from your experience and trying to implement
this within your brands?
Your brands are a bit smaller than the, I think,
the 10,000.
I don't think you have 10,000 clients at Kilofeet,
but I might be wrong.
No, I'm on the real small side now,
since I'm now a solopreneur consultant.
But what can other visionaries learn from the experience?
So cliche, but it's like, if you really, truly build
relationships with people, you will truly have a better
business.
If you truly care about people, you will truly
have a better business.
For our largest clients, we had a monthly review
with the champion, but we were on site typically
at least once a quarter with them,
or they were at our office once a quarter.
And we were having working sessions with them
very frequently, where we're diving in deep,
and we're listening, and we're trying to understand them.
It's just caring about people is good business.
And that's probably the most powerful lesson
that I could say is caring is good business.
Yeah, I think that's, you can call it cliche.
I think it's fundamental.
And as a Spurs fan watching boring Tim Duncan my whole life,
who's the big fundamental, that's what we love.
That's what I'm all about.
So somebody doesn't get that, I'm sorry for you.
Moving on to a darker subject, what is your worst business
experience ever?
Well, after my first company scaled and we did exit,
I joined a B2C company my first time.
So one, not a big B2C fan, at least now.
But two, we went through the Apple advertising fiasco
and the privacy settings and all of that,
and our cost acquisition like 10x in 30 days,
which fundamentally broke the unit economics because we
weren't a funded organization.
I've always worked at bootstrapped organizations.
I've always worked for smaller companies.
And so it burned a little bit of our cash
and was not a fun experience going through something
like that where an outside market issue can really
affect you in a fundamental way in a very short period of time.
Absolutely.
That's one of the interesting things about COVID
is that it, in some respects, created a bit of unity
and humility for everybody to understand that.
There are external factors that can crush your hopes
and dreams if you haven't factored in all
the potential risks that exist in the world, which
is impossible.
I think it's fairly impossible to factor in every risk.
But all the more reason to make sure your building would
sound cliches, or I mean fundamentals.
So what's your best experience in business?
You know, taking the first company I worked at,
you know, I started there, there was like 18 people.
When I left, I don't know, maybe there was 80 or 100 people.
And they were purchased by a PE firm.
And the PE firm had started buying three or four
other companies and merging them altogether.
But going through the process of taking a relatively small
company that was older in terms of the way it functioned
and helping transition them to SAS,
and really build a long-term sustainable, scalable,
recurring revenue-based business model.
Which by the way, besides margin,
recurring revenue is everything.
So that was the best experience for me.
But it was over a long 13, 14 year period.
But the fundamentals of recurring revenue
has stuck with me as well.
Yeah, good for you.
I think that's also extremely helpful.
I can relate to your background on that.
It's fun to see whether I work with them or not,
whether they hate me or not.
I have some of those in the past too.
What's fun to see is most of the businesses that I've worked
with are still operating to this day.
And they are doing better than during the time
where we work together.
And I got to be part of that scale process
and that foundational process.
So it is.
It's exciting.
And it's like, how do you not want more of that?
So I got the startup addict thing in me as well.
Well, I love relationships, as you can clearly
tell from all my conversations.
And I worked there for 13 years.
So most of the people were there before I
started dating my wife.
Most of them were there helping me plan the proposal.
They all came to my wedding.
They were there when I had my daughter.
So it's always building the relationships
is not just with your clients, but it's also
with your coworkers.
Which I think that was a huge part of the reason why
that it was such a good experience for me.
And one of the sad things to happen out of COVID
is the loss of some of that deeper relationship function
inside of the work environment.
Absolutely.
There is a contrast.
I had to learn that over time.
So I wasn't gifted with that mindset.
And I didn't do what I needed to do
to earn that mindset in my earlier years
of running companies.
I don't want to say it was transactional,
but I just wasn't quite aware of all the things
that one should do to respect, foster, cultivate, build
your relationships with people.
So given that you've been working on that for so long,
what are some of the key aspects of building
a strong relationship, a healthy relationship with your peers
and your clients?
I'm going to go back to fundamentals.
The number one fundamental that I believe everything
is based off of is setting accurate expectations
and then communicating against those expectations.
We said we were going to do x.
We did y.
Here's how we went above and beyond.
Or unfortunately, here's how we missed.
And this is how we're going to remediate it.
So just having good quality conversations,
just having good quality communications,
but they're all predicated upon a basic fundamental of what
is the expectation of our relationship.
And obviously, we're talking primarily now
on the client relationship.
But it's also true of personal relationships and even
business relationships with coworkers.
What is my expectation of you?
Or what is your expectation of me?
And how we need to communicate when we go above or beyond
or when we go under.
And we need to figure out ways of fixing that.
It's just basics.
But the basics of that communication
will take you so, so far.
Yes.
And I want to work with you on this live,
because I've got a different paradigm.
Go ahead.
And my paradigm is less common in the world.
So it makes for an interesting reality.
I cannot agree with you more about the setting
accurate expectations part as something that truly helps
most relationships in this world.
And I, on the flip side, I believe expectations are of ice.
I believe expectations.
I love what Shakespeare said.
Expectations are the root of all heartache.
And I've felt that very, very deeply.
So I believe in aspirations.
And I believe we should definitely aspire
to get things done.
And we should make space at the same time for the fact
that life doesn't usually go perfectly.
And so there's a lot of mercy baked into my belief set
and a lot of forgiveness baked into it.
I also see a lot of people torture themselves
in life over trying to achieve expectations for somebody else
in order to kind of people please them.
And there's this middle ground that exists in all this.
And there's a lot of ideas.
But I would rather work with somebody
who abides by great principles myself
and not even worry.
I don't worry about the expectation.
I worry about the aspiration of what we're headed towards.
And as long as they're showing up and providing
the fundamentals of success, then aspiration to me
is just a healthier way of quantifying an expectation.
But I'm not going to be mad at you at the end
because I know that as long as you did your part,
we're good to go.
But that doesn't work in a world where expectations
dominate business.
It doesn't always work that well.
So I would love your thoughts on that.
Well, one, my gut reaction is I love it.
And I would have loved to have been a situation where clients
were that flexible and generous.
But I think the reality is, especially
if you start targeting Fortune 500 or larger enterprises,
enterprise software has a lot of value.
But it comes with expectations.
Delivery by this time period and this time period or this.
And there's quarterly results that they care about.
And there's just some realities of business
where expectations become important.
However, I think part of that relationship structure
that we're talking about is the flexibility of communicating.
And it's not that it is transactional in nature.
But if you go above and beyond a bunch of times
and then you miss a couple of times,
your relationship has built up enough to survive that.
And by the way, communicating early and often
is the most important thing.
If you know you're not going to deliver by Friday,
tell them on Monday, don't wait until Friday to not deliver it.
And so part of that is setting expectations
and communicating around that.
I think it's a reality business.
Probably internally, if you have the luxury or the grace
to be able to do it internally to your coworkers,
absolutely aspirations.
If you're talking about family and friends, aspirations,
I would say 100%.
I don't know if I could get it.
It would certainly be harder to sell a system around aspirations
and sort of guarantee success.
Expectations become a reality for a lot of companies.
Right.
Yeah, I look at guaranteed success,
and I look at COVID or the Titanic and think, yeah,
look at how far that got you.
So it's but I'm with you on it.
And it's funny because you taught me something super valuable.
And that's that you have to know your audience, right?
And the different factors of the audience.
And you might have certain relationship rules
and boundaries with different entities in your life
than with others.
If you want to be an expansive influence, for instance,
then you've got to be willing to tolerate things that may not
be part of your core.
Tolerate conversations that may not be conversations
you want to have.
And so I'm grateful because I can
see that for the scale of first class business, for instance,
for a scaled market and a message where
we don't get to educate people right away on aspirations,
it's important for that product or service
to meet the demand of expectations.
But those people can be nurtured through a process
of inspiration that creates a conditioning
for them to start moving towards a lifestyle aspirations.
And I do think there are clients,
there are companies out there, great companies, Fortune 500.
I would say MindBody is a great example of a scaled out company
that from what I've seen, does a pretty great job of gearing
towards aspirations versus expectations.
And Jake Larson at VideoPower, I was grateful for him as a leader.
That guy did such an excellent job
of helping everybody understand aspirations.
But it's a little bit more rare.
You have to be more patient.
I would agree.
But I think to pick on two companies we talked about
earlier, Walmart and Apple, they're
polar opposite companies.
But neither they're both massively expectation
and deadline and high quality outcomes based.
I don't think you would ever get either of those
to be aspirational in nature.
That would be like, don't challenge somebody
who's a contrarian to go after that.
But yeah, that would be a very big uphill battle.
All right, Jackson, I want to see on your next episode
how you've changed Apple.
Right.
I'd have to use Apple first.
But I don't like crappy software, so I don't use it.
Oh.
I'm hanging up now.
You're hanging up on me.
All right.
Chris, this was awesome.
And Vision Pros, if you have any questions for either one of us
about product scale, if you want to know more
about Chris's companies, we'll have those links
in the show notes.
Cynthia's done a great job of sharing those as well
in the comments.
So we thank her for her support on this episode.
And Chris, what's the best way for people to reach out
and get in touch with you?
On kilofeet.com, I do have a thing
where people can sign up and just start a chat.
And we can talk to each other and see if we can help each other.
Awesome.
Absolutely.
Well, Chris, you've been an excellent guest.
I appreciate you being on the show.
And Vision Pros, thank you so much for being here today.
We will see you on the next episode.
Take care, everybody.
Thank you for being here today.
I'm really happy that you tuned in to Vision Pros Live.
I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions
as these episodes continue to move forward.
This is going to get more and more fun.
We'll have more and more engagement as well.
We'll invite people to participate in the show.
And thank you for giving us your time and attention.
Have an excellent time.