I think that's going to happen soon.
He is he is on point, man.
I've been so happy to work with him.
It's been I've been looking for him for a very long time.
Is he part of your team?
He's the CEO of Media Productions now.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, so he's he's actually been groomed
to be CEO of the company and he's he's flying forward.
Like, OK, cool.
This is this is looking good.
So it's been a huge breath of fresh air.
More than that, it seems like a magic carpet.
So there's that.
It's very yeah.
All right, Dave, I saw like, I don't know, 39 experiences
on your LinkedIn.
You have a lot of depth of companies
that you worked with favorite three
or favorite three from the past.
Favorite three companies, man.
Good question.
I would say within my fractional CRO experience,
there's been a few companies that I've just just really
kind of fallen in love with.
One of them is a group called Image Seller.
They're.
And selling.
Yes, image.
Yeah, I'm counting.
I'm just counting.
Oh, OK, OK.
Got it.
I'll give you the three.
Image Seller, a group called Glacier Clinics.
And then most recently, I've loved
the group over at Castle Rock Microwave.
Nice.
Castle Rock or Microwave?
Yes, yep.
OK, and favorite three outside of the CRO spectrum then.
Maybe going way back.
Yeah, you know, early in my career,
I started with Whirlpool fresh out of undergrad.
And I had just some amazing experiences.
I was part of one of their leadership development
rotation rotational programs.
So I got to work in different areas of the company.
They did a lot of just growth and development
there that I took forward with me.
So that was a favorite.
And I would say I spent a few years in the beverage alcohol
space, actually, post-grad school,
and worked for a distributorship.
And yeah, exactly, a brewery.
And hard to scale a kind of a living there,
but it was a ton of fun.
You got a third?
A third would probably be.
Thank you for being here today.
I'm really happy that you're here.
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.
Hey, what's up?
And welcome into Vision Pros Live.
I'm your host, Jackson Calame, founder and CEO
of First Class Business.
I'm trying not to be insecure about losing my voice right
now.
My voice is gone.
My heart is not.
It is here and present with you.
My brain is not.
Well, some people would debate that.
But I got Dave Vanderjat here.
Vanderjat, and he is a CRO expert.
And he works with complicated companies, medical device
companies, companies in supply chain.
He obviously also can work with the simpler solutions that
are out there as well.
But I really like diving in with people
who have that kind of depth and understanding,
because there's usually just a whole lot more
that you can learn from somebody who
has those types of experiences.
So we had an excellent pre-show.
He got to meet Chris Chambers on Chris Chambers' first day
as well.
And they had a great banter together.
I was like, great.
This is going to be fun.
We'll get Dave on the power take as well.
So we have a lot to dive into.
But oh, yeah, being a podcaster and having a bronchitis
and whatever else I got, that's just
not a good combination.
So anyway, moving into what we can do to help you guys
in the meantime.
Now, besides Dave coming on board,
we always want to mention these types of sponsors and tools,
these opportunities up here.
ColdClick, that's what we use for our LinkedIn automation.
And one of the reasons why I keep ColdClick up there
constantly is because so many entrepreneurs, so many business
owners, so many salespeople.
By the way, if you're a salesperson
and you actually are doing well, you're
making more than $10,000 a month,
here's my greatest trick and secret to you.
Stop being an employee mindset.
Get your own LinkedIn automation.
Don't go beg your boss for it.
I almost did that when I first started with automation.
And it wasn't even automation.
I hired a VA.
And I was going to go to my boss and ask for $3.33 an hour
to hire somebody.
I felt so bitten.
And I was like, you know what?
I can just do this myself.
I felt like such a big man for going and hiring somebody
for less than $4 an hour to fill my appointments up
by contacting people on LinkedIn.
And it was one of my first big entrepreneur steps, so to speak.
So if you're just starting out and you're like, man,
I don't know if I'm good out for this stuff.
Just know that a lot of us had to take very small steps
initially in order to get rolling with the systems
and tools that we have.
The nice thing about ColdClick is
it automates the whole process.
And then you don't also have to worry about somebody
hijacking your account, which I've
seen happen with people.
If your LinkedIn account gets hijacked,
here's my advice for you.
Who cares?
Just start over.
It's just an account.
Whatever followership you had probably
wasn't driving that much revenue to begin with anyway.
Just start over.
Always keep yourself running.
Pick yourself up.
Bounce back.
There's good songs about that, right?
Simply fast websites.
If you are starting from scratch,
I just wish I had found this when I was starting from scratch.
We've never used it.
Never heard of somebody using it.
Shane became a friend of mine.
I thought it was cool, these offering websites,
starting at $179.
I spent so much time and money on my first website iterations
for like the 10 different websites
that we launched at different companies
as the years have gone by.
Now, I learned a lot of lessons along the way doing that.
I learned a lot of great things about building.
But the most important lesson I learned was busy is broke.
If you're busy building your website,
you're not busy talking to your prospects
and moving into productive, profitable relationships.
So one of the best things you can do
is get a raw and maybe even unfinished website.
I don't think Shane would leave it like that.
I think he would very much polish it for you,
help you have a professional front.
But just know it's not going to be exactly what you want.
That doesn't matter in the beginning.
You need the proof of concept because you're
going to go talk to the market.
And if you're a great leader, you're going to listen.
And what that market is going to ask you to do
is make pivots and adjustments and changes
so that you can serve your ideal clients as well as possible,
which means you'll then have to go back and update
your website anyway.
So it's better not to overthink that.
Get moving and launch.
Do your research and development.
Or as one of my friends, Howie, likes to say,
R&D, your ripoff and duplicate by watching and seeing
what your competitors are doing out there.
And go provide massive value to those that you want to serve.
Lastly, I'm going to take advantage of this right now,
the water project.
The water project is I'm just never going
to not talk about this, guys.
We have people, millions of people
in the world who do not have access to clean drinking water.
Today, I feel a strong empathy for those
who are in a sick condition like myself
and don't have access to that.
I imagine some of them have to go walk for a couple
of miles to go get their own water.
What a miserable, difficult experience that would be.
And it's one that we can do something about.
Whether we give $5, $50,000 to this project
or we just share this with others,
you never know who you might touch
and who might be able to provide water to these communities.
You're making a generational impact in the process.
I absolutely love what they do.
I love that they show you exactly where the money goes
as well and the impact that you get to have on the communities.
That's pretty outstanding.
So without further ado, I'm going
to bring Dave Vanderjat on board.
We're going to be talking about his LinkedIn a little bit,
his background, and where he comes from.
I was called out the other day, and I'm fine by it.
Somebody called me out and said, Jackson,
you could tell that you hadn't read
through this person's LinkedIn profile
before you brought them up.
And I thanked the guy for his feedback, and I kept going.
No, I definitely had read through it.
The difference between reading through somebody's profile,
though, and recognizing in a modern world
who's a pretender versus who's a contender is very difficult.
And there's so much information available online now
about people that it's important that we take a deeper dive in.
I like to see how do people's eyes and smiles or reactions
or stories kind of add up from their own perspective,
not just what I read in their absolute best publication
or in how they represent themselves online.
So with that, I'm going to bring Dave on.
And Dave, I'm so excited to have you on the show.
Thanks for being here, man.
Absolutely.
Glad to be here.
Thanks for having me.
Yes, sir.
So for the sake of defining further for the audience,
who should be listening?
Obviously, the people who are looking to grow their revenues
are going to benefit from this reverse engineering
conversation.
The people who are probably looking to cut costs,
we talked about some of the disease that
exists within entrepreneurship.
But before we even go into that, I'm
going to pull your LinkedIn one more time.
And I'd love for you to just talk to us about some
of that background and depth that you have.
Is that OK?
Yeah, absolutely.
Where would you like me to start?
Well, I would like to get your LinkedIn profile pulled up.
There we go.
Sorry about that.
All right.
Fractional Chief Revenue Officer, you're
helping people scale with revenue audits, gap analysis,
go to market strategy, implementation, marketing,
sales, and customer success leadership.
So you can start with those concepts.
Or as I scroll past these experiences,
feel free to just say, hey, Jackson, stop on that one.
Yeah, absolutely.
So my background, a little bit going back
to the very beginning.
So you'll probably have to keep scrolling a bit
and maybe click there.
Post undergrad, I started my career with Whirlpool.
So Fortune 150 company, 100-year-old manufacturing
group.
And I was fortunate because I had several.
They put me in a rotational development program
where I moved around to different parts of the company.
And so I spent time in our operations group
within our aftermarket sales and parts and accessories process.
In other words, all the parts and things like consumables
that you would need with your refrigeration products
as an example.
And then I moved into product development and marketing
and then spent some time in the customer success and service
side of things.
So I like to say that I got to see
most aspects of the value chain of a $22, $23 billion
company at the time.
One of the great things, though, that I took forward and I found
later was ingrained in my DNA is I
spent a lot of time going through black belt, lean
process improvement, six sigma type work.
And what I found is I had a little bit of a career shift
later where I decided nothing wrong with going to the legacy
company that's been around for a while.
But for me personally, I felt a little bit like a cog in a wheel
and didn't see that I was having a lot of impact.
And impact for me especially early in my career
and even today was really important to me.
So I shifted gears.
I went to go work in more earlier stage companies.
And I started to take on a lot of sales roles.
And I had some amazing successful sales roles.
And then I had some very miserable,
you could even call them maybe failures,
or just was not able to crack the nut,
was not able to see success.
And because I always had a leg in marketing,
a leg in customer success, a leg in revenue operations,
it started to drive me to think of why was I successful here
and not successful there?
I mean, I'm the same person, hopefully getting a little bit
better as I go forward.
But I can't explain why one company was successful
and the other company I was not unable to find success.
And so what that drove me to do is
to start to do some of that reverse engineering.
I wanted to find out what was it about this company
and maybe the growth stage that they were at
and maybe perhaps the product they sold
or the market they served or how they served that market.
And I started to try to look at these different attributes.
And if you're familiar with running experiments,
specifically things that you'd find in like lean process
improvement, you start to put yourself
in a place where you can sort of, again, digest
and reverse engineer some of those processes
and try to figure out what was it that worked here
and what didn't work over here.
And so what that eventually ended up
culminating in for me was a couple of years ago,
I took on a fractional CRO role within a consulting group
and learned even more about just different frameworks
and go to market and what this means
and serving this audience, especially in companies
that are not necessarily pre-product market fit.
So the post-product market fit, but pre-scale.
And so which turned out to be the exact type of company
that I had been working in for about the last 12 to 14 years.
And so I started to kind of look at how can I go
into a company and have impact quickly
from a leadership standpoint, if I'm wearing the CRO hat
to figure out what that, we talked about it earlier,
that disease, that issue is, why isn't this company able
to see that success or that growth path,
that revenue that they're striving for, right?
And so that kind of brought me around to, all right,
I need to figure it, break this all down.
And that's a lot of the work that I do today,
especially in the early stages of when I began working
with a client is to just dig into their market,
their customers, their internal processes, their team,
do they have the right butts in the right seats,
and just really turn over every stone
and just understand, is this the team, the process,
the technology, the go-to-market plan
that's going to allow success?
And it's hard, candidly, it's just hard, period.
We've talked about that before, just being a CRO is tough,
being a fractional CRO, where you need to come in
and have impact extremely quickly is perhaps even harder.
And your success is largely gonna be dependent
on finding some quick wins while you also work
on the long-term strategic objectives
or maybe getting things correctly structured
so that this company has the ability to scale
and hopefully achieve their goals.
So that's a lot of the work that I do today.
I say a lot of times, for whatever reason,
I haven't worked with a lot of companies
that are maybe on that hockey stick growth
or have found that growth path.
They typically come to me because they've been
hitting their heads against a wall for so long
and just haven't been able to get the right people,
haven't been able to sustain revenue.
Maybe they have churn issues,
maybe they have process problems.
Perhaps they just can't bring in enough funnel
and build enough pipeline to close.
But ultimately, the symptoms are not always the root cause
of what's making that happen.
And so that's a lot of what I look at as my job,
is I need to uncover those things,
I need to root out what maybe some of those main issues are,
provide a path to address and fix those things,
and I build all of that into a go-to-market strategy.
And for my clients, if they decide they wanna work with me
going forward, then we would execute that, right?
And we would start to move extremely quickly.
And that's a little bit about the work that I do today.
Yeah, it's big.
I'll diagnose the challenge behind that or why, too.
You don't find a lot of companies on the hockey stick curve.
96% of businesses fail within 10 years.
Right, 4% survive.
4% aren't successful, 4% survive.
And so if you've got 99% of the market that's surviving,
no, none of them are on that rocket ship accelerator.
And so we do spend a lot of time,
especially in the Sierra space,
you spend a lot of time as a fireman,
or as a doctor, trying to help business owners
go through different forms of long-term therapies
to correct problems that have been growing
for multiple years.
So I'm always like, oh, let's just remove this
and everybody's happy.
Splinter and the lion and the mouse book, right?
Not always that simple.
Absolutely.
So what's your vision for those that you serve?
My vision is that they're set up from a go-to-market,
people, process, technology standpoint
across their marketing, sales, customer success,
and rev ops functions,
that they have, I'll call it their best chance.
I've enabled success and I've enabled scale.
I've sort of tied the, or connected the dots
between where they're at today and the struggles they have
and what the goals are of the founder team
and what they're looking to accomplish.
As you can imagine, a lot of times,
these are the five to 10 year plus,
overnight success stories
that haven't become a success story yet,
but the founding team's been grinding away.
For me personally too, just for a little extra color,
most of the clients or companies that I've worked with
are bootstrapped, they're not funded.
So they don't have a lot of cash just laying around
that they can throw at problems
and just see if they can figure it out or fix it.
Obviously I'm exaggerating a bit,
but there's just a, you know, cash is-
A lot of these C companies can throw money around.
You got beer pong as like a dedicated Thursday,
you know, culture activity.
You have money to throw around.
I'll throw right back at them.
Yep, yeah, most of my companies that I've worked in
and worked for have, yeah, they've been bootstrapped.
You know, cash is always tight.
For those reasons, I love what Sam Jacobs with Pavilion says
when he talks about the CRO
and their main responsibility is to be a steward of capital.
And I think that takes on even more importance
when you get into a place of being bootstrapped
and cash limited, because there's not a well, you know,
to go dip into, you know, what you have is what you have
and you need to be laser focused and extremely proficient
in figuring out where to allocate that capital.
And again, whether it's going into people, you know,
building out the team, whether it's going into, you know,
processes or sort of process improvement type projects,
or whether it's going into technology
that supports those things,
you need to have those things dialed in.
There's just not a lot of wiggle room for failure.
You know, one of the things that I like about you, Dave,
is that you're one, a lot of people are gonna tune out
of this conversation because you're talking
about the money and entrepreneurs, you know,
a lot of them want to do things because of the impact
and they've got their hands so far pressed
against their ears or hard pressed it.
They almost think that you're talking about the money
because that's all you care about.
To me, it's easy to see that you care about
beyond that money.
So, you know, I know people are like,
well, he's just bromancing Dave now, you know,
but no, it's, it matters.
And you mentioned the word, steward,
one that for years as an entrepreneur,
I kind of overlooked the responsibility of.
And I looked and said, I just, I want to make impact.
I said, I don't care about the money.
I care about helping others.
I didn't realize how loose lipped I was being
with my responsibilities.
I didn't realize that if I don't care about the money,
the money won't care about me.
And it was when I made that shift about three years ago,
that I also took a great financial shift for good.
When I started to say, you know what?
I do need to care about this resource.
And it's not because I care more about it
than those that I serve.
It's because I need to be responsible
because everybody's relying on me to be responsible.
And that's kind of what I see you emulating.
So what's your vision for you?
It's a great question.
Doing a lot of, I'll call it maybe turnaround type,
fractional CRO work, you know, candidly is,
it's exhilarating and it's also exhausting at the same time.
It's a lot of work.
It's going extremely hard, extremely fast.
And I've heard some people say in the space that,
most fractional CROs don't really stay in the space
for maybe over a half a decade or so,
give or take before they kind of like wanna move back.
That fractional existed for more than a decade.
I'm just curious.
You know, probably, I just don't think we called it that
until recently, you know?
Right, that's the buzzword.
Yeah, so for me, I'm passionate
about the fractional space today,
but I'm also open-minded to the fact that
there may be a company at some point
that really pulls on maybe my heartstrings sufficiently
where I decide to join them,
or perhaps there's other things going on
in my personal life that change
that would lead me down a path of wanting something
that's maybe more long-term and consistent.
So while I love doing the work today,
there's always the potential for something down the road
of being in a full-time role in that capacity.
But, yep, to me, I also just,
it's walk a mile, see a mile.
I left to go out on my own to be a fractional CRO
about a year ago this time.
I've had some great, some amazing clients and experiences,
and I would call them success
in terms of helping those companies set up for scale,
and some of them are seeing success.
But I don't know, I may have a different answer for you
in a year or two.
That's where I'm at today.
I'm loving what I'm doing right now.
Okay, you painted two different types of paradigms
of those analogies that I really loved.
One kind of like shut the door on what I was thinking,
but then I started imagining it.
So at first, one thing I'm grateful for about your vision,
Dave, is that you see that there's lots of possibilities
on the horizon, right?
That there's a lot, somebody might pull you
out of the fractional space.
You said pull your heartstrings.
I would add in there too, for at least for my sake,
I gotta speak for you,
but somebody might pull my revenue strings as well.
If they wanna buy us out
and they're aligned with what we do,
then Mark Cuban, bring it on, bro.
I always joke, if you weren't to pay me $10 million
to let go of what I'm doing,
then I would 100% accept that to go see what it's like
to work with Mark Cuban and be dedicated fully
to that process.
And at the same time, I would use that revenue
to bless the lives of all those I'm working with right now.
And have the impact.
Put some feed Sunday, seed funding
into some of my clients, right?
To help them move forward.
So there's these win-win opportunities
that sometimes we limit ourselves from seeing.
Now you also then said, walk a mile, see a mile.
And I was like, kind of.
You can see a mile that way.
Right?
And so I was like, then that's what I see you doing.
I see so many visionaries scared to look anywhere but here.
And I think that that's kind of a, it's kind of scary.
That's kind of a shame.
Because the best results, it doesn't hurt
to just take the blinders off for a minute,
look around yourself, and then get back into zero in
and locked in.
So I love your vision.
I appreciate that.
Absolutely. You want to talk about a little bit further
before you go into worst leadership
or do you want to move right into the worst leadership?
Yeah.
I mean, I'd be happy to talk about it a little bit more.
One of the kind of core principles
and when I'm doing a lot of expectation setting
with my clients, especially in the early stages,
I talk about the concept of iterative design.
And iterative design means to me,
I'll give you my take on it, which is 75 to 80% complete
is sufficiently complete.
Meaning there's a core value that Amazon has,
which is called have a bias for action.
And the underlying principle is that speed matters
in business.
And typically, even if you're bootstrapped,
even if maybe your competitive market is fairly low
or just you don't have anybody breathing down your neck,
speed still matters.
And so when I work with my clients,
we talk about, hey, if this is about 75 to 80% complete,
we're gonna ship it.
We're gonna execute, we're gonna prioritize speed,
we're going to have that bias for action,
we're going to move quickly,
and we're going to learn from those things.
So as, again, other principles of iterative design,
build, test, learn, optimize, right?
And the quicker you can speed up those feedback loops
and figure out what's happening.
And by the way, you also need to have,
and this is where rev ops comes into it
to be very, very important, is you need to have metrics
and you need to have leading and lagging indicators.
But if you can increase those feedback loops,
in other words, speed in which you're executing
and learning, and you know about based
on your leading indicators,
which of these things are truly moving the needle,
you can effectively start to outrun your competition
or outrun maybe other market forces
that are sort of tailing you, if you will.
So that's a lot of my mantra.
And taking that all the way back to,
what does it mean for my vision?
Where I'm at today is,
when I say walk a mile, see a mile, it's kind of like that.
I'm going forward, I'm hard charging down this path,
I believe in being focused.
But I also believe, like, hey,
I'm not saying that I'm 100% sort of baked
on this path either, but right now,
I wanna keep heading down here.
And once I get to maybe the next milestone,
who knows, maybe that's six months a year,
maybe 18 months from now,
it's good to sort of take a step back, recalibrate,
look around, what have I learned?
What did I like?
What didn't I like?
How can I be better?
How can I serve more, right?
Whether it's my clients, my customers, my personal life,
how can I improve on all these different angles?
So that's a little bit about what I mean.
Like put your head down, go,
but then you have those points in time
where you're kind of having that recalibration.
And again, we're diving deep in the philosophy,
the analogy, but that's my thing, man.
That's one of the reasons why I like
the saying you use of walk a mile.
You didn't say light speed a mile.
And I think light speed is a great place for it,
but you have to be willing to one,
hit every object in the path
if you haven't charted your course perfectly.
And two, accept the repercussions and the consequences
of having destroyed whatever that thing was
that got in your way.
Whereas if you are choosing to walk that mile,
you said charge forward.
If you're charging forward, but at a walk,
you have more balance and ability to,
again, make those adjustments,
not necessarily crush everything that gets in your way.
So food for thought.
It's your point when you get there, right?
Like pick your head up, right?
Mile is obviously figurative.
I don't know, mile might mean for you.
Get through the next month, get through the next quarter,
get through the next year, whatever that means, right?
But be focused.
There's a point which being too opportunistic
is obviously a distraction.
It doesn't allow you to stay in your core field
of competency.
But at that point, pick your head up and look around.
Like you said, look at different paths,
figure out what other options are there?
How could you do this better?
Is this working for you?
That's probably the core piece of it.
And that gets to me back into the concepts
of iterative design.
It's like, all right, I was pretty sure this was the case.
This was my plan.
I executed it.
Now I'm at this point.
I gotta reset quickly and understand,
look around, figure out was this the right thing?
How could I have done it better?
Where do we go from here?
What's next?
But my vision probably boils down to some element of
I love doing the CRO work.
I love kind of the reverse engineering,
helping companies, especially in my space,
somewhere between two to $20 million in revenue,
fix their processes so that they can scale
to whatever their growth objectives or goals are.
But to get there, you're not gonna have
all the answers up front.
That's just a fallacy.
But you do need to have a plan.
You need to execute it.
You need to make adjustments and then sort of recalibrate
that plan as you go forward.
Absolutely.
Well said.
So let's talk about that worst leadership experience ever.
What does that look like?
This could be your own.
This could be one you've seen in a leader personally.
This could be one you've seen on TV.
Man, good question.
Worst leadership experience ever.
I had one experience.
This kind of alludes back to what I mentioned earlier
about holding some sales leadership roles
where I had found a lot of success
and others where I would say were more failures,
just to be blunt and maybe broad.
But as I looked around in terms of some of the leadership
pieces of that, there was a couple things
that stuck out to me.
And a lot of it candidly came down to the founder,
in this case, like CEO of this group.
And really, I would say, in my opinion,
just not having a realistic grounded perspective
in terms of where the company truly is at today
from a growth or life stage perspective.
So said a little bit differently,
typical involvement of a company,
you go through some level of product market fit,
and then you go through typically what,
especially in SaaS, they call go to market fit,
which is where you're trying to figure out
those repeatable, predictable processes that allow scale.
And then once you get into scale mode,
obviously you're starting to go narrow and deep
in a lot of your functional areas,
and you're building out competency
and potentially layering in additional go to market
or business models, et cetera,
as you start to find that growth stride.
One of the biggest leadership,
and particularly this one that I was thinking about,
was really just not being real with where you're at.
So in this case, saying,
hey, we've achieved product market fit,
our product's great, we know that it has
the impact in the market with our customer base
that we say it will.
Now we just gotta figure out how to throw more leads
and build more pipeline, fill the funnel further.
The reality was that the product didn't work.
It didn't work as it said it was.
I saw this because I also was wearing a Sales
and a Customer Success sort of account management
hat at the time.
We weren't even able to use the product
the way that the product was marketed
and sort of the value that it was supposed
to bring to our clients.
We weren't even able to use it on their behalf in that way.
And so the diagnosis of the problem around,
well, we just need to throw a body at sales
and just fill the pipeline.
That's the solution for why we're not seeing growth
was absolutely the wrong diagnosis.
The reality was we haven't achieved product market fit.
We haven't really measured and truly understand
and really accomplished real impact
within our customer base today.
And for those reasons, the ability to fill more pipeline
just creates more chaos and confusion and inefficiencies
in terms of our success and our sales processes
rather than actually fixing the problem,
the revenue problem that we thought we had.
So to me, I think in a company in that space,
this particular one, the failure in leadership was like,
thou shalt not fake thyself out, I guess,
is what I would boil it down to.
You are not where you think you are yet.
And to the extent that you want to believe that
and force that into your reality,
I mean, do that at your own peril
because as long as you continue diagnosing
sort of the disease in your company incorrectly,
you will not see growth,
you will not see those issues resolve themselves
and simply throwing more bodies at a problem
without addressing the root cause
and being realistic with where you're at
is not going to bring you to where you think
you need to be today.
So I guess my message there for,
especially like the visionary founder
is it's great to be visionary.
It's great to be optimistic, future thinking,
tell that vision, but it's really important,
whether it's you or you have a counterpart
in your leadership team,
that's that operator mindset that's grounded.
You need to have that counterbalance
and you need to have that person that can keep you grounded
while you're also being the visionary.
And you need to be able to make sure you're executing
based on where you're at in your growth curve,
your growth plan.
Absolutely, well said.
And it's for he that has you, so I'm here.
Entrepreneurs, if you're the visionary,
you're likely not the person who's grounded.
Very important to get somebody who is by your side
that you're willing to listen to.
What's your best leadership experience look like Dave?
Best leadership experience.
For me, this would be,
so this is more reflective of probably my work style
in terms of how I would answer this.
One of the things as you've kind of picked up on here
when I talk about reverse engineering processes,
looking back, I'm not just looking externally,
I'm also looking internally at like, who am I?
What did I learn about myself?
How could I have been better?
What could I have learned?
What could I have done differently?
So when I think about best leadership experiences
that I've had, there were two in particular
that whether they were consciously or unconsciously competent,
they were able to figure out this is the type of,
this is how I need to work with Dave.
This is how I bring out his sort of zone of genius.
And so for me, what that always was, was give me the problem,
tell me the macro level issue,
give me as much detail as you know,
and then tell me, like set me down a path at least,
tell me where to get started
and be a resource if I need help,
but let me just go execute and I'll come back to you
as I have questions, as I need feedback,
as I need to course correct, right?
And as I need things.
So for me personally, the best,
the two best leadership experiences I've had were,
one was early in my career
and one I would say was maybe about six years ago.
And it was both working for individuals
that had that ability to say,
hey, I'm empowering you to go address
this large issue that we have.
Here's again, here's what I think about it.
Here's what I know about it.
Here's some additional detail.
Here's a list of people or sort of ways
to go address this issue and go attack it.
Now I will block, I'll block and clear the road for you,
I guess blocking and tackling,
but I will, but I'm not gonna get in your way.
I'm not going to micromanage you.
I'm not going to get in your business.
I'm not going to do a significant amount
of like questioning, like ad nauseam.
I'm empowering you to go address the situation.
To give a little bit more color,
that exact same leadership style applies
whether you're in sales or a revenue role
or you're in operations role,
because these two individuals,
for me that I'm thinking about here,
one was in a straight up operations,
sort of part of the company early in my career.
And the other one was more in a sales leadership role
where that particular company was in the red.
They were not profitable.
They were heading down a pretty, a bad path
in terms of their cash position
and what that was gonna mean for them.
So again, one issue was fix this operations issue.
The other one was basically fix this revenue problem
that I have, but here's what I can empower you with.
And then let me know how else I can support.
So, you know, my takeaway there maybe
there's no one leadership style that works for everybody,
but it is critical, especially with the importance
for this problem that you're trying to find somebody
to solve in your business, you know,
merits the investment into a person
to go attack this problem.
Make sure you know the person that you're working with.
Make sure you go deep into their style,
understand and be able to validate how to work with them
and how to bring the best out of them
and put them kind of in their zone of consciousness
or zone of genius or competence, I'm sorry.
And make sure you, you know, you equip them
and meet them where they're at.
And that's very difficult, but I think some
of the best leaders out there exemplify those things
really, really well.
And they get results through their people
because they recognize what each individual
on their team needs.
Well said, I've got, you sparked some memories
about leaders that I hadn't thought about in a while.
And a couple of principles.
If I, I wanna be careful with this
cause I need to ponder it a little bit,
but one of the concepts that come to mind is
I think my worst managers, my more difficult managers
were far more valuable to me than the mediocre managers
who didn't, who just kind of existed.
I think they had more of a positive impact on my life
than those who were just nice.
Then, oh, go ahead.
You wanna hit that?
I was just gonna say, I would agree.
I mean, I think, you know, the,
while I'd say maybe the results were more impactful
in sort of the positive situations,
what I learned and how I personally grew and developed
from that relationship with that leader
was significantly greater with the ones, to your point,
that were not positive, that were difficult,
that were hard, that, you know, we didn't see eye to eye.
Like it-
Here's the thing about that, dude.
Here's the big thing that just hit me with that.
So like my dad, for instance, super hard on everybody,
you know, very, very hard on us, but he cared.
I, looking back, these managers that were
kind of weak sauce managers, good people, nice people,
they didn't care at all.
They were there to clock in and clock out and leave,
you know, and so I think that's a big part of it is,
you know, is that person, do they really care about you
or do they just, are they just going through the motions,
you know, and existing there?
You know, nice, again, is it feels good,
but it doesn't always mean that that person
had your best interest at heart.
So at least he cared, you know, and tried.
And I've got many managers that were like that too.
Again, feel free to pick that up.
Yeah, I feel like, I would just say like,
I feel like you could sniff that out, you know,
especially if you've had a few reps under your belt
throughout your career, you can pretty quickly
get beyond the words that are said to sort of the meaning
and the motivations behind those words.
And, you know, that's tough,
because if you're interviewing for a job
or you're interviewing, you know, to bring somebody on
or you're looking to join a group, you know,
how deeply you can go in that process, you know,
may be limited, so, but eventually that stuff comes out,
you know, if the motivation's absolutely come out,
the reasons why they're there, what they truly care about,
and if they care about you, it always comes out.
I got to give credit where credit's due too,
since you sparked it and it's just so strong right now.
He's gonna be shocked that I say this,
and I've worked with a lot of excellent, excellent managers.
The best that I've worked with for me
was a man named Lamar Lamarrow.
And Lamar, I don't really talk anymore,
but he knew how to guide me and bridle my passion
and help me move forward.
And he had so much patience.
I was so difficult with the man.
And he was there to try to help utilize my resources
and make sure that I was successful in the process.
And just, I'm really like, whatever you said,
it was about you talking about the ones who empower you
and allow you to kind of grow and learn and let go,
you know, and at the same time,
you made space for those who have different
management styles, right?
They come in maybe a little bit,
and Lamar had to have a little bit different style with me
because I wouldn't have listened
had he not been willing to come at me when I needed it.
So I appreciate that, Dave.
This was your last lesson you could ever share
with the world.
What powerful lesson can other visionaries learn
from your experience?
Such a good question.
So what's going through my head today
in terms of how I personally develop
and where I need to focus
and where I need to shore up my weaknesses
or magnify my strengths definitely has changed.
So I'm gonna make a bit of a broad statement here,
which is that if you're smart, right?
Like you've got the intelligence piece of it down,
you're able to like learn quickly, you know,
about the how to, maybe even the why to.
I think at some point, and for me, I'm 38,
so this is starting to take on more and more meaning to me
than it ever did early in my career
where I more admired like intelligence
and can you get up and inspire and those things.
The emotional intelligence aspect of leadership to me
is it's everything.
It's the sweet sauce, if you will.
So the lesson here really is it's fine to learn
about things in the how and the why,
but eventually who you are and your ability
to win the game between your ears
in terms of managing your emotions as you lead people,
whether that's personally or professionally
is really the biggest game sort of to win.
And not that there's necessarily a win either,
but how you develop and mature in your emotional ability
to deal with problems and headaches and issues
and how you maybe compartmentalize
and how you sort of treat others, individuals,
through those hard times and those processes.
I think that's the kind of the stuff
that really leaves more of a legacy,
especially on an individual basis,
being able to lead with a high maybe emotional, is it EQ?
Those are the things that last lifetimes.
The dollars, they kind of come and go,
the strategies come and go, the people, not the people,
the accomplishments, the sort of superficial stuff
that gets for different reasons,
just gets a lot of the publicity.
Those things kind of come and go,
but the impact you have largely will be
how well you can lead and lead well
with a high degree of EQ, in my opinion.
Well said.
If the people are coming and going in your life,
then the EQ is probably where you can go spend some time
to also find some resolution around that.
Sometimes you can't always control it,
and it can take a significant amount of planning,
moving, and life shifting to gain a balance of friends
and support that does support you long-term.
But yeah, EQ has a lot to do with that.
So I'll take that, I appreciate that.
Diving into the subject, reverse engineering,
the revenue processes, and for the sake of uncovering growth,
let's try to hit that for five minutes.
What do we got?
Dave, what things, what actions could I take
as an entrepreneur today?
And let's go with the advanced version of this.
I'm not your entry-level person,
but they've been at this for 10 years.
What the heck do they need to be looking at?
Yeah, so there's a group out there
called Winning by Design.
You're probably familiar with them.
The CEO, Jaco van der Kooij, is an absolute stud,
in my opinion, in the go-to-market space.
They do a lot of primary and secondary research
on go-to-market motions,
but they don't just do them as singular frameworks.
They're actually updating go-to-market
as it relates to how macro and microeconomic forces
are shaping things going forward.
So to say, for example, the way they go to market,
go-to-market motions have changed
over the last maybe 18 to 24 months
with the rising cost of capital has changed
what companies can do profitably.
We also have inflation,
which obviously affects customer acquisition costs
within a company.
And so your ability to understand those changes
and what the impact is
to your particular go-to-market motion.
And by the way, I'm going to assume
that you have the right go-to-market strategy in place
that allows scale for you,
is actually incredibly important.
So going deeper on reverse engineering revenue processes,
and I'll overlay this a little bit
with some of their, what they call growth model matrix,
which is that as you emerge
from that opportunistic product market fit,
I'm just getting this company off the ground.
I'm trying, I'm doing whatever I can.
I kind of call it throw mud against the wall
to see what sticks.
And lo and behold, after so many years,
I now have a couple million dollars in revenue,
but that's not where I want to stop.
I have larger goals.
I need to now connect the dots between where I'm at today
and maybe a couple million dollars in revenue
in my longer term goals for the company.
And that's going to change for everybody.
That might be, if I could just get this thing
to 20 million bucks, that would be amazing.
If I could get this thing to X dollars per share,
in terms of equity value, that would be amazing.
If I could get it to 50 million, you know what?
I'm really not the 50 million plus guy.
So I think I'd probably exit at that point.
But understanding what your go-to-market motion
and how well it lines up
with your internal revenue functions today
is incredibly important.
Because especially if you're in a place
where you are bootstrapped or you just have
very limited cash and your burn rate is a very real
financial metric that you're looking at
probably on a weekly basis,
you can't operate in the red too long.
So one of the things that I see a lot of companies doing
especially again, emerging from product market fit,
that opportunistic kind of growth mindset,
we'll just grow that however we can get it,
is really starting to think in terms of scalable
and durable growth, meaning like cost-effective,
profitable growth.
And I think we're seeing even a bit of a shift
in funded companies from VCs
and where they're looking to add dollars
and the types of metrics and KPIs
that they're asking for today.
So one of the things, so what I do is,
so oftentimes I'll see companies that perhaps are
more of like a product-led growth company.
For example, maybe their annual contract value is,
let's say sub $10,000.
And they're doing maybe hundreds or maybe thousands
of deals per year.
They have a very high-qualified, expensive sales team
that they're sending out to go sign up these $10,000,
$12,000 deals every month.
The problem with that is that typically
if you have a tenured, i.e. expensive sales team
to go get those deals, you're basically leveraging
like aspects of a sales-led growth company
for a company that, from a go-to-market motion,
can only feasibly support customer acquisition costs
that are aligned with the product in your marketing,
things that are kind of scalable within those
to allow you to be profitable
on an individual customer basis.
So a lot of times what I see is we'll be like,
well, we're throwing, we have like a VP of sales,
but we're trying to get them to sell
like $5,000, $10,000 deals every month.
And it's like, the problem with that is the revenue
economics will never work.
Your customer acquisition costs related to probably
your customer lifetime value will never be in a position
where you can feasibly be profitable on a unit sort of basis
or on an individual customer basis.
So having that like kind of customer acquisition
to like lifetime value of a customer alignment
across your go-to-market motion is incredibly important.
And I feel like one of the things, again,
I love about Winning by Design is that they articulate
a lot of those things across like this continuum
of product-led growth all the way
to sales-led growth motions in the role of marketing, sales,
and customer success within each.
And it's basically built around fundamentals
of revenue economics.
You know, the basics here are you need to make more
on an individual customer than it costs for you
to acquire that customer.
And if you're too lopsided for too long,
bad things are gonna happen.
You know, you're gonna run out of cash,
you're gonna have to go raise more money,
you're gonna be insolvent, you know,
you're gonna have to lay people off,
you're gonna have to do a lot of not fun things.
So when it comes to reverse engineering revenue processes,
a lot of times I start off and I see people just trying
to be too many things to too many individuals.
They built their team around maybe what they did
in their last company or what's familiar to them.
And they're like, well, we need to do content marketing,
but we also need to build community,
but we also need to have highly specialized salespeople.
And you're so like, you're spreading yourself so thin
across so many different go-to-market activities
that many of which will not be cost-effective at all,
that you need to start to streamline those things.
To say it differently, like understand the lane you're in,
understand the game you're playing,
understand the revenue economics that dictate
whether you can survive in that space
and then go deeply into that space.
So ultimately for me, after we kind of dissect their team,
their processes, what's working for them today,
we look at their customers,
we go deep into internal and external data,
we ultimately come up with a go-to-market strategy
that oftentimes says, hey, let's shift out of this
trying to be too many things
and leverage too many different activities
across different marketing, excuse me, go-to-market motions,
and let's align them on a singular thing
because your data, by the way, supports
that this is where things become repeatable, predictable,
scalable and profitable,
and let's laser focus on these set of things.
So many times like the output of reverse engineering,
revenue processes building go-to-market
is basically saying no to so many,
like, hey, we're not gonna do
these set of activities anymore.
And that means we're going to just laser focus on these set
because we know what the output
is going to be on the other side.
I tremendously admire your confidence
as well as your ability to nurture people
through that experience.
It's two fantastic gifts that make me say,
hey, I hope Chris and Chris Chambers
and you catch up a lot more about the processes.
The, you know, the or in that equation
is you mentioned having that veteran sales rep,
the VP of sales, they can't be selling $5,000 packages.
So they have to be selling packages.
They have to be, know how to target
the right type of ideal clients
and be selling at that 20, 30, 50, 150,000 and beyond
in order to make that profitable.
And then of course, bolster the operations
behind all of that.
But I do agree with you.
There's a bit of a pipe dream there.
If you're not being a wise steward.
Let's find that.
So.
If you don't mind, the other thing I'd layer in
is there are a lot of other fractionals
and consultants out there
that a lot of times will come into a business.
Again, let's say sub $20 million
and talk about all these different ancillary markets.
Like you should be going and focusing
on this set of customers over here,
these different industries or these types of buyers.
You should be casting the net.
Like, why don't you go deep into channel,
even though you've been doing a direct
go to market strategy thus far, like layer into this.
And typically my approach
and what I find with most of my customers is like,
let's laser in on what you already have.
Like what's the core of your business?
Like, if we look at the bow tie funnel, right?
Let's look at the post purchase,
right hand side of the bow tie.
And let's really dig deeply into
what has gotten you to this point
and what's scalable to this point.
And while it's fine to be opportunistic,
most of those things are high risk, take a long time,
take much more money and resources
and people to do effectively.
And again, in my space,
I work with mostly bootstrap companies
where capital is always a concern and always thin.
Like you have to be able to find those quick wins
and start to build on those things
that produce profitability and cashflow
so that you can hopefully someday invest
in some more of the opportunistic things.
Every single, every client, every company I've ever worked
for, every client that I've ever had always has
a treasure chest within their existing customer base
that they just haven't figured out how to quite optimize,
how to get more of it, how to dig deeply,
find more people like that,
ask those, like nurture those customers
for additional referrals, right?
Obviously, you know, lower customer acquisition costs
for that kind of thing.
Like dig deeply into the core of what you have
because your cheapest growth
and probably your most sustainable and scalable growth
probably already exists in terms of the answers
within the data and your existing customers.
It's fine to be, obviously you're always gonna have
to have some level of focus on net new acquisition
and net new logos and such,
but usually you should be using what you already have
in terms of your core customer base to inform
how you should be going after your net new
and starting to go into all these different other
like channel and new industries and new customer types.
And we're gonna start with this person in this way.
Like those are usually the things
that are gonna spread you so thin
that eventually you've got some painful days ahead of you.
I see a lot of people throw their vision out the window
versus, you know, cleaning the existing glasses off,
so to speak, and moving forward.
So if you wanna connect with Dave,
absolutely connect with him on LinkedIn.
We'll also drop in the show notes on the landing page,
the different links that you can go to
to access his information.
Dave, thanks for being on Vision Pros, man.
Vision Pros, you have an excellent week.
And if you wanna apply to be on the show,
that's also available on the page.
We will see you on the next episode.
Take care, everybody.
Thanks, man. Thank you for being here today.
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as these episodes continue to move forward.
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And thank you for giving us your time and attention.