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What it takes to go from scale-up Sales Leader to Founder CEO
61 Plays10 months ago
Tom Lavery is Co-founder CEO of Jiminny, a software platform which helps commercial teams maximize their revenue through conversation intelligence. Jiminny enables its customers to record, transcribe and analyze conversations in real-time, giving customer insights and full visibility into performance. Jiminny empowers teams to coach and develop their people at scale.
In this episode of the First-time Founders Podcast, Tom describes how he seized an early-career opportunity with Reward Gateway, scaled that business in various sales leadership roles (through a number of successful Private Equity transactions) and eventually co-founded Jiminny, with Reward Gateway as a cornerstone customer!
Interested viewers can reach Tom via https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomlavery7/ or tom@jiminny.com and Rob (https://www.linkedin.com/in/robertliddiard/) at Rob@mission-group.co.uk (or to book some free time with Rob, visit https://www.eosworldwide.com/rob-liddiard). Alternatively, if you’d prefer Rob to send you a free copy of Traction (the book by Gino Wickman which explains The Entrepreneurial Operating System) just complete the form here: https://www.eosworldwide.com/traction-giveaway?implementer_email=rob.liddiard@eosworldwide.com
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Transcript
Introduction to First Time Founders
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the First Time Founders podcast, the show where we talk about how to start a business from nothing and grow into something meaningful. I'm Rob Lydiard. I was the co-founding CEO of a software business called Yapster that was acquired in December 2022. I'm now a professional implementer of the entrepreneurial operating system
00:00:17
Speaker
which means I help entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial leadership teams get more of what they want from their business, aligning around a vision, figuring out what they need to do to get there, executing with more discipline and accountability, and improving team health, because we can be a little bit chaotic sometimes in startup land. That's my day job, but in my spare time, I love speaking to entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial people about the first time founder journey and what those of us have done it, learned on the way.
Tom Lavery's Journey to CEO of Jiminy
00:00:42
Speaker
Today, I'm speaking to Tom Lavery,
00:00:44
Speaker
Tom's the founding CEO of Jiminy, a conversational intelligence platform for the sales.
00:00:49
Speaker
Well, it started as a conversational intelligence platform for sales, but actually the way Tom would describe it now is it's about conversational intelligence for your business driven by customer insights. Tom's a great guy. He enjoyed success before founding Jiminy as a sales leader at Reward Gateway, which is a sort of darling of the mid-market software sector in the UK. He's been through a number of private equity buyouts, and Tom saw, I think, two of those transactions.
00:01:16
Speaker
So Jiminy was not his first rodeo as a tech executive, but certainly his first rodeo as a founder owner.
00:01:24
Speaker
So in this episode, we talk about what it was like transitioning from a successful executive reward gateway into building Jiminy, what is learned along the way, and what is observed about great customer-oriented organizations, both from his work running Jiminy internally and from what he sees externally serving a great number of tech companies at different sizes, but also including a decent number of small founder-led software companies, which is overwhelmingly the people that listen to this podcast.
00:01:50
Speaker
So I hope you get great value from it. Without further ado, my conversation with Tom Lavery.
Lessons from Starting a Business
00:01:59
Speaker
Tom, welcome to the First Time Founders podcast. Thank you for doing this, mate. Pleasure. Good to be here, Rob. Excited to chat. Tom, before we dive in, would you mind giving folks the whistle-stop tour of how you became the CEO of Jiminy? Oh, yeah, absolutely. I'll do a whistle-stop quick one.
00:02:20
Speaker
Originally, sales was my background, sales person, sales manager, but quite a young age. And then I became sales leader at a tech company called Royal Gateway. I was there for nearly eight or nine years as a successful UK business has a few exits under its belt. And I probably learned so much in that time there that gave me the ability to even think about starting my own business. And then since then,
00:02:50
Speaker
2016 had the idea, 2017 live with a product I've been running, Jiminy and we're a conversation intelligence platform, helping companies analyze their data and kind of improve performance. But yeah, so it's kind of 20 years in a very quick recap.
00:03:08
Speaker
Yeah. So you've folks that are operating, a lot of people that listen to this are running sort of small, medium sized tech businesses. So many will likely know, know Jiminy, so it's obviously achieved a decent degree of success. If you had to go back and start again, what would you say are the things that you would do the same versus different? Let's have it out as well. Most tech companies are small. Everyone has this perception like
00:03:38
Speaker
even when you could get like past the 1% or 10 million or, you know, and then you might have, you know, on that on that journey to IPOing or being part of a bigger company, they still might only have 200, 300, 400 employees, which in grand scheme of things compared to some companies isn't massive. That's true. Yeah, but what would I do differently? And I don't have many regrets, because I think they all kind of lean into being part of the
00:04:06
Speaker
story, right? Your own story, you know, you wouldn't be doing what you did today if it wasn't for your previous business. But I think, I think in the beginning, I was trying to run too quick, you know, not, not, not worrying about just swimming in my own lane, obsessed to, like, you're always obsessed with the market, how you should innovate, we should be doing that as a healthy obsession to have. But I think just, oh, how can I be
00:04:34
Speaker
the number one, how can we be biggest? And I think that creates the wrong behavior. And we were talking about it before we came online, like, you know, probably having a more infinite mindset about how long your journey is going to take, how long your business will be around with or without you and kind of thinking like that. No one talks about these things. So it's like getting married or having kids or buying a house.
00:04:58
Speaker
It's no good fucking telling anyone. Just go fucking do it and then you can work it out. But yeah, it's a bit like that. That's so true. Did you, because you came out of a wall gateway having sort of seen pretty significant, pretty significant growth. Did you come straight into Jiminy almost expecting to pick up where you left off at RG? Was it? Yeah, I mean, I thought we would do everything faster than we have done. I'll be honest, like,
00:05:25
Speaker
But even now, if I sort of anyone, hold on, I think that'll take us two months, I'd say double it. It doesn't matter what it is. Funding, building something, hiring someone, you know, just everything takes twice as long as you think. But no, I think I, I think I had to learn a different way to do it. Because even though there's, sales is always hard, business is always hard. But I think just building a brand and building a company
00:05:56
Speaker
I thought I could probably do it in half the time it actually takes just to get known, just to get repeat business, just to get trust, you know, all of that. So yeah, just like running my own race and just being more concerned about where we end up rather than, you know, trying to be the number
The Birth of Jiminy
00:06:14
Speaker
one. And the idea for Jiminy came because you wanted to drink your own champagne, right? It was born out of a frustration or an opportunity that you observed running sales organizations for Royal Gateway, is that fair?
00:06:25
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. It was built for Royal Gateway. They were one of our first customers. They still are a customer today. And I feel like we had three different chapters at Royal Gateway, where we blew up the UK. Then I ran sales across the group. Then I lived in the US for five years, set up the US office. And it was when we were in the US, I just saw video being the dominant way that people sold.
00:06:55
Speaker
But like even listening to a call when we had what was called an inside sales team back then, which is a dead thing now because everyone does inside sales. Um, but you know, just, uh, you'll remember like, Oh, you'll have a Webex, a desk phone, salesforce pad and a pen you have into log into some like a, like a HP laptop, just to listen to a call and go down a spreadsheet. It's like, Oh my God, this is too hard. There's no reason like no one does it. So there was a lot to do with how could like, we,
00:07:24
Speaker
automate the CRM process, make it more like a self-driving car, which we're still on a mission to do, because salespeople don't love doing admin, and they shouldn't, they should be doing other things. And at the same time, one of my co-founders, my wife, Shelly, is very passionate, like coach, and it was just impossible for her to coach, and she kind of asked me to find a way to fix that for her. So it's a combination of the two things, really, that came together.
00:07:54
Speaker
And it wasn't that kind of idea originally, like we had a big pivot. We started, we built our own telephony to start. Really? Yeah, it's a bad idea to build a video conference when Zoom blows up. That was a good idea. Yeah,
Building the Technical Team
00:08:08
Speaker
yeah. So that was the first sort of couple of years. And then we moved to like an integration model. So originally, yeah, like the core platform stayed the same. People loved that experience, but it just, the capabilities of what we could do, media servers, you know,
00:08:24
Speaker
quality of audio, so we weren't able to compete. So we had to kind of shift gears. Did you know who was going to build the platform to begin with from your kind of reward gateway experience? How did you go about assembling the technical team? Because that's quite a big technical vision, isn't it, to kick off? So two things. I have a technical co-founder, James, who's our CTO today. And he's very talented back end developer.
00:08:53
Speaker
I pulled in another front-end developer who worked for me at Royal Gateway, a guy called Armet. And then James, actually, we have a massive office, massive office, like a big team in Bulgaria, like product engineering support, and even some of our CS team are there now. And we were kind of, we went over there going, oh, James, just live there for a little bit, and then you can come home. And like, sort of seven years later, he's got like, he had a Bulgarian fiance anyway, but he's like,
00:09:21
Speaker
over there now and we've got like 35 people and you know it is but yeah we just hired a couple of contractors and then yeah which and one of those contractors a guy called Bez is still
00:09:33
Speaker
one of our employees today. That's amazing. I always think with sales oriented founders, it's so interesting this this idea that it's sort of easier to describe something than to build it. My, my favorite thing I used to say to customers actually, when they were quite sort of visionary sales oriented customers, and they would, it was a bit defensive, but whatever, that's part of the purpose of this podcast, some of the catharsis. I'd say to them, look, if I gave you a shed full of sheet metal and some tools, you couldn't build a bicycle, let alone an aeroplane.
00:10:03
Speaker
while you're describing, I know that texts become familiar, but because it's so familiar, we've sort of forgotten how unbelievably difficult it is to build some things. And I found that you definitely still sit on the customer side, but of course you sit on the founder side as well. Did you have
00:10:21
Speaker
Like how close were you, forget the pivot, like after you've done the pivot, how close were you to like the product sort of feeling the way it looks in your mind once you were putting it in the hands of customers or did you have a period of feeling embarrassed of it?
Product Development and Market Fit
00:10:34
Speaker
It's a really good point. There's lots of different questions in there, but I'll try and answer one at a time. When you look at the building a website, for example, and how long that takes, it's just a bloody website.
00:10:51
Speaker
Yeah, and if it takes people three, six months using it, then you think about a product with everything else that goes with it and to get it right, and infrastructure. This is a whole other level. I think it was a friend of mine who was building a marketplace for his recruitment consultancy companies. Tom, I just had a total appreciation now for how hard it must have been to build Jiminy, because he's just trying to build a website, and it's like full of teeth. But no, in answer to your question,
00:11:18
Speaker
I am, still am, Nancy, very passionate. Me and James were basically ran product for the first sort of four years. We didn't even have a product lead or whatever. We just always felt that, because we were bootstrapped and then kept small amount of seed funding, that as soon as we weren't close to it, it wasn't necessarily going to go into the right direction until you've got product market fear and all those other things that you need.
00:11:47
Speaker
grown to scale. So we got a product leader for the first time, sort of 2022, and I've got a great head of product, Gallia. But I work really closely with her, but operationally and tactically, they try not to get involved too much because I start annoying people. But generally in terms of like, the look, feel, working with designers, the roadmap,
00:12:10
Speaker
So I'm involved quite heavily still. So you didn't over-delegate early on, because it's a mistake that I think quite a lot of us make. I certainly do that. And did you do a lot of the sales yourself as well to begin with? So as well as running products? Yeah, so literally me and James run product, and then I sold everything for... When did Becky join? He's a mutual acquaintance of ours. Yeah, Becky Butler. I'm going to say in COVID. But we had like a couple of
00:12:40
Speaker
salespeople that came in and out, but like to have a proper salesperson like closing most of deals is my support, I'd say 2020. So the first two and a half, three years. Did you do that to protect capital or because you just intuitively knew that you needed to stay close to the action, both go to market. I think when you realize there's not enough friction in the sales process, we talked about a pivot and other things like that, but when you really feel it can be sold without you,
00:13:09
Speaker
That's when you probably got product market fit, right? You don't need the founder telling the vision and the story. Even though you want the team to do that in different ways and buying into the future, you can't have that to scale. It has to change. So there's like an inflection point there. Can you remember the sort of what changed in the pitch where it did started to just fly and you felt comfortable that others could deliver it? Or was the pitch stayed fairly consistent?
00:13:41
Speaker
No, I think it's just generally like a maturity in the product. You have enough trust in the market, enough referrals, the product does enough. Like, you know what it's like, there's like gaps. And when you've got your early adopters like Crockett's across in the chasm, there's people that will accept those gaps. But the majority of people who buy your product will churn, they won't accept those gaps, right? So how do you get the
00:14:12
Speaker
majority rather than the early adopters. So I think you need to be touching on getting past the early adopters as being your buyer, which means they generally need more to feel safe. It's like, I still see it now sometimes, it's like, oh, am I going to get fired if this f's up and buying the wrong software or whatever. So I think there's people underestimate, like, oh, is it just a safe bet?
00:14:41
Speaker
you know, like, that's that goes through people's minds, the unspoken things that don't get said in a pitch. You know, yeah, it's such a, it's such a mature approach, I have to say on my
00:14:55
Speaker
My first time, I knew we needed capital to build a decent messaging system. I didn't deliberately over promise to investors, but it turns out I did over promise to investors. And then I don't know whether I lacked the courage or the experience or both, but I then didn't particularly reset those expectations. So I just hired salespeople probably prematurely to try and kind of lean into fulfilling those
00:15:24
Speaker
those commitments I felt like I'd made. It's impressive you didn't do that. It's the difference though between like sometimes you just have to have the blind optimism and low end to like drink your own Kool-Aid all the time because going back to one of your other points is like, you know, you constantly, I don't know, it's like a child or a kid, right? Like in terms of how much you would
00:15:52
Speaker
care about the product and the looks and feels. But there's always something wrong with it. And you know it better than anyone else. You know, no, it's even multi billion dollar products. That's the that's the case for right? Yeah, it's like, oh, I'm sure everyone thinks I would like it if I was two inches taller. And my bike, my biceps are bigger or you know, I you know, I didn't have a beer belly or, you know, but it's the same. It's like, oh, there's always something in your, your product that you're going to be
00:16:19
Speaker
But I think one of the biggest things, I probably learned this at World Gateway, is you're always going to have a list of 10 or 20 things you've got to do every week. And the art is picking the two or three that are going to be either most on fire or most effective, and when to be ostrich and put your head in the sand about it, and then when to come back up and deal with it. And that is hard to do.
Managing ADHD as a Founder
00:16:44
Speaker
And you can do that just being
00:16:48
Speaker
as an AE, as a VP, as a CEO, as a founder. It's just an art to try and learn how to do that. People often say I'll get overwhelmed or the feeling of being overwhelmed. You just have to live with that.
00:17:07
Speaker
But you know, does it come naturally to you like managing stress? Like, how would you say sort of you cope with kind of pressure and that sort of thing and uncertainty? You know, I think I've been on a journey, like back half of my career, I think, like, probably self diagnosis, but like, definitely got some form of ADHD.
00:17:32
Speaker
So apparently, again, I only learned to say that when you have ADHD, you constantly or very most of the time live in the front part of your brain, which is basically a constant state of anxiety. So I don't know what it's like to be out of anxiety. But if that makes sense, it's kind of like weird. If I'm sitting in a meeting, my feet and my hands will be moving under the table. It wouldn't be obvious, but I can't sit still. But then you struggle to relax, but then you just can be hyper focused and do more. So actually,
00:18:02
Speaker
No, I don't feel stressed and I don't feel anxious, but then apparently I'm always in that state. That's so interesting. Yeah. So it's a bit weird, like, but again, as you have a coach, as you maybe have a bit of therapy, you do these things as you learn your self-awareness becomes better. Also as well, apparently the average age for a man to mature is 43. I fill out this out because Shelley googled it because he's wondering when I'm going to mature.
00:18:31
Speaker
Yeah. So I think, I don't know if I bring the average up or down, but I'm 40 this year. So I've got three years to go. That's amazing. I'm 40. Well, I'm going to send this snippet to my wife. Yeah. You got two years left. Yeah. That would explain. Yeah. I wonder if, I wonder if I'll be able to grow a beard by then as well. Yeah. I'm definitely, if I go again with the tech business, of course, I'm going to, I'm going to get you need a few gray hairs. You need a few gray hairs to do it.
00:19:02
Speaker
I've seen it more now, actually I was talking to a customer when I was in Sweden recently at an event and a lot more investors, whether it's VC or PE are not just picking people from McKinsey or they've been working at Silicon Valley Bank or whatever and get them in and they actually prefer them to go out and be an operator first and then become an investor after.
Advice for Aspiring Founders
00:19:27
Speaker
Whereas it's always been the other way around, but you just have a bunch of accountants
00:19:30
Speaker
different shapes and forms who've never actually done the job. But my biggest, if you have that passion and creativity that you want to do your own thing, or you have an idea from those ideas, I think most of our customers that are tech companies, when I actually speak to them, they're just solving problems that they had themselves always. And so to go out and work somewhere for five, 10 years to just gain the experience
00:20:00
Speaker
And to have the idea of what you want to do, whether it's in tech or not, I think it's almost like a degree that you need to go get.
00:20:09
Speaker
Yes, it's so true. I mean, I've shared on this this podcast before the next chapter of my career from an operating perspective, as I plan on pursuing acquisition entrepreneurship, like sort of micro private equity. Yeah, again, we talked before we started recording the part of my passion is is being around and helping founders in the kind of the sticky middle in that kind of 500k to sub 5 million recurring revenue, maybe even sub 3 million. And I just can't I can't imagine
00:20:38
Speaker
going from zero to one again, I have just zero desire to go through product market fit and all of that stuff. Go on. I just remember all this time, like, I'll tell Shelly the number.
Challenges in Early-stage Funding
00:20:50
Speaker
She wasn't always working in the business every single point, because we had kids and other things. She's like, we're not one million yet. Seems ages, it's only about 750. But yeah, getting the first 100 customers, first million, first
00:21:06
Speaker
customers. That's so hard. Yeah, and I understand as well. I thought about it a lot. You know, even a lot of investors now, and even our current investors, which are amazing, the guys at Kennet, they generally have a model, 3 million and up, you know, bootstrap founder, whatever. So like, it's really no one wants to know you. No one wants to give a shit. Like, basically, I walked away, I came out, you know, being a two private equity management buyouts, you know, been on the board for five years, and
00:21:35
Speaker
Boo fucking hoot, no one gave two hoots. No EBITDA, no profit, just an idea. Like, no one wanted to know. Like, you know, and, you know, credit, I mean, I've taken it to loan now and the family officer put some money in, like, you know, you have to have someone who, who believes you. And that's hard, that getting that, you know, initial traction and belief is a difficult thing, you know.
00:22:01
Speaker
Well, Glenn Elliott was the founder of Raw Gateway, right? Yeah. I don't know Glenn, but I remember seeing him talk and there were a few entrepreneurs like him that built businesses around that era where I think it was profitable fairly early, wasn't it? Although they took growth capital, it wasn't capital particularly required to grow the business, right? It was private equity built for a profitable business. It's a rare
00:22:31
Speaker
breed, I'm not sure you could quite do it now. Like, we tech like if you asked the first private equity, I don't even think they'd say they invested in a tech company, they'd say it's a HR business, you know, so then people's expectations on salaries and SaaS wasn't a thing as labeled in the SaaS ecosystem in London.
Insights from Reward Gateway
00:22:53
Speaker
So like we paid a bit less gave benefits went for younger people on the way up. So but yeah, like, there was
00:23:01
Speaker
the EBITDA margins were insane. They were all gateway and that helps a lot, right? Because you have a bit more to play with. I learned the sign. I actually don't know if you know this, but so Yapster partnered with Revolt Gateway. You could access Revolt Gateway in the end through my messaging platform.
00:23:18
Speaker
We did some really interesting work for Next and a few others. She's not there anymore, but Megan Wiseman ran customer success there for a while. I learned tons being at Reward Gateway just later in the journey. It was just interesting watching a
00:23:38
Speaker
just a profitable, functional company that still had seemed to have a good culture and a good relationship with the customers. But it was just so different to the cohort founders I'd knocked around with where we'd all raised money and we're almost being encouraged to just keep kind of burning it and achieve the next funding round as opposed to, you know, be self-sustaining. I know the world has changed since, but it was really eye-opening. But then if you, Glenn,
00:24:05
Speaker
Glenn was genius at some stuff. He was, and I got to like work side by side with him intensely for about five years of it. And then, you know, bigger jobs, different things, went to US, you know, you know, but the core of it kind of together every day, but then you got to remember like Glenn was like a developer, then he had multiple businesses, he ran a design agency, which is like hard because there's loads of them, he's slogging out for a pitch without reoccurring revenue.
00:24:35
Speaker
So it wasn't his first rodeo. No. So by the time he'd done More Gateway, like he knew so much, you know, again. And then he had two great people next to him. Helen was a COO and done multiple businesses at the first phase of More Gateway. And then Charlie, he was like a mature CFO wanting to do his kind of last payday and be the PwC viewers. So like, but they cared and were super passionate. But like, there was a lot of experience. I didn't know that.
00:25:04
Speaker
And then Chris, I'm a co-founder who I'm still really close with today, but he was the cashback concept, the original idea. Like he was in his bedroom, like built some site in India, making underground a year with like lying my pocket and Glenn found him and then said, oh, let's do this and kind of plugged it together. So there's a lot that goes on before you see Royal gateway and you go, oh, great company, but there's so many different backstories to make a good company. And then I think when I came in to run sales,
00:25:33
Speaker
They were worried because they'd had like two sales leaders. It wasn't working. They weren't selling. Yeah. And then they came in and we kind of took it off together. But yeah, started to fly. But again, the right thing. Product has to be right. Market has to be right. Timing, you know, people. It got difficult.
00:25:54
Speaker
And so for those that are, you know, it's it's worth the products working there there and then just sort of wearing your Jiminy hat a little bit. I know you're not here to sell Jiminy, but I do think it's genuinely interesting. How good would you say most small founder led businesses are at coaching their customer facing folks?
Coaching and AI in Customer Management
00:26:13
Speaker
There's not something I really ever thought about as I didn't think about it as much as I should have now looking back. Yeah, like it's getting easier now like because we create
00:26:23
Speaker
right, use AI to give you like, mitigate risk and do stuff. So it's come on a long way. What do you mean by that? So like, we'll take, we'll take the transcript, then we'll use a different form of AI to summarise it, create action items. So you're doing that for the team, right? So they got to know what they got to do. Then we'll use a feature called Ask Jiminy to like, tell you the risk, tell you the engagement, write you the follow up email, and we're starting to get on the deal level. So a lot of it is like, starting to
00:26:54
Speaker
push, whether it's self coaching or manually coaching can be done, parts of it can be done through AI, right? And you can do that. But I still think not enough CEOs listen to calls. They're not close enough. This is our most successful customers and the ones that stay the longest don't see it as a sales tool, they see it as a business tool. Yes. Yeah. And that's, you know, entry point with sales and revenue teams, still the long game with Jiminy, like
00:27:23
Speaker
we're already doing it now is like, how do we if we've got product feedback and marketing feedback, how do we push it to marketer and confluence, right? Like, and I feel that every every it's everyone's job in the business to help sales become better. So the whole piece, originally, like I saw it as we grew or gateway, you know, I left at 260 employees. And there's parts of me where I felt like sometimes we behave like we had 2000. You know, there's probably that I was
00:27:53
Speaker
It was past the stage where I was even too scrappy, too creative, whatever you want to call it. But I think, you know, anyone understanding the context of what's going on with a customer, like if you hire a great marketing leader and they're not listening to calls and then rewriting the narrative of how you value prop within the first 20, 30 days, like are they really going to get your startup flying?
00:28:21
Speaker
And then they probably need to listen to the calls to do that because it's even harder to go meet people now, right? That's another whole challenge of actually getting any face time with people.
00:28:30
Speaker
Totally. What's your kind of go-to tech stack then? If I'm running a kind of 500 to somewhere between 500 and a million quid subscription software business, I've maybe got, let's say I've got HubSpot, what would you like around?
Tech Stack Recommendations
00:28:47
Speaker
Because I think there are a lot of families that don't consider themselves systems people. They dream one day of having
00:28:53
Speaker
sales operations, right, and internal tech. And then consequently, kind of don't spend enough time thinking about this stack and how it informs their workflow. Like, what would you recommend? I think not just Jiminy, but like, you talk about conversation intelligence category, it's probably come like number three or number four, most important thing. Once people have it, they can't live without it in some way, shape or form. Well, yes, I'd be the customer leaves, it's unfortunate, they'll either downgrade or upgrade.
00:29:22
Speaker
They don't stop having it at all. But I think, look, you need a database, you need a CRM, you need data, you need to do some sort of call. But then pretty much after that, you start having something to record and make phone calls, and then you need to analyze it. So I'd say number three or four in terms of importance. But to educated, like I said we were talking about before online, we will have customers, founders on HubSpot, two or three users,
00:29:52
Speaker
to hundreds of people on Salesforce, but they're some of the customers with the best retention that lasts a long list that kind of grow with you and you kind of grow into their tech stack and you know, everything else. So is this a standard setup would be something like HubSpot, Meets, Zoom? Yeah, like those things. Is that fairly straightforward to stitch that together if I'm a low tech founder? Yeah, like I think if you say,
00:30:23
Speaker
that most people could start with a free version of Slack, free version of HubSpot, just pay for Google workspace. And then eventually when you've started to get a few sales or whatever, you might look at something like Jiminy and then you can automate more to HubSpot. Depending on whether you need a dialer or whatever on top of that, depending on your BDR, SDR, but you can get really far with that in my view.
00:30:49
Speaker
Then all the other things become important. As you get bigger, you need to be led by the data and make better informed decisions. Probably one of the things I learned is that you spend the first part pretty much running the business on gut instinct and flying from sea of your pants and decision to decision to having a much bigger team of people and having to then make different decisions.
00:31:17
Speaker
not just what Tom thinks or what we said last week in a meeting is actually what does the data say and then what's the right thing to do. It's different.
00:31:30
Speaker
I'm now a devout believer in that.
Data-driven Decision Making
00:31:33
Speaker
I just use like a simplified, that's how I got into the entrepreneurial operating system, right? Because someone gave me a book and I was in a mess and it all seemed simple. And then I had to ask myself why I was not doing any of this basic management stuff. But that kind of weekly scorecard of looking at indicators of
00:31:49
Speaker
the leading metrics that are going to drive me to where I wanted to get to, I found way late in my journey. I know we're coming up on the time we got allocated, but what would you say is the thing that's most important to you now as a CEO, as a manager leader of your business that didn't come naturally at the beginning, but you're a most devout follower of now. Is it something like looking at data or would you say there are other areas as well where that didn't come naturally? I think it's the best to deploy me
00:32:19
Speaker
where, where the stuff does come naturally. Thank you. Uh, like some people say, Oh, you know, like I might get on the four or four or fifth sales call with the guys and people like surprised almost like I'm there. Not always. Cause I think a lot of CEOs have got rolled their sleeves up in the tech downturn. So it doesn't matter how big they are. You'll see the 60, 70% of the time CEO's job is to engage with customers. It's just in different ways. Like when you're very small, you might be closing the order.
00:32:46
Speaker
when you might be going, I spend as much time down on renewals as I do on kind of sales calls. But for me, generally, I start to ask questions. That's the bit that keeps me sane. Because that's the bit I can do like sleepwalking. And I love that bit. And every time I speak to customers on the sales call, it gives you ideas or inspiration or something you didn't think about. So you stay close. You don't have to do it. I probably average it over a week.
00:33:16
Speaker
probably a customer call and a sales call a day. But that's not hard really in like 10 hour day when you're a founder or whatever.
Embracing Personal Strengths and Enjoyment
00:33:25
Speaker
But that's probably what I average. So you still focus more on your strengths. Yeah, and I think as you build a team around you, you want, I mean, we were talking earlier about Saster and like, you do have to hire people that are better at you. Like, Gali in my head of product is way more detailed orientated, really thinks through
00:33:46
Speaker
the end result of the UX and the UI and the detail like, it's just not me. And then if you look at other things over time where we've got a new marketing leader and Shelley running CS, they're just things that wouldn't be the best for me to do right now. But you just need to build the right team around you over time so you can spend time
00:34:16
Speaker
I think as a founder, you have to do everything that ages. You know that. You just have to do most things. And it's a scary thing. It's like, oh, well, if I don't do it, it's not even going to get done when you're that small. But then it gets to a point where you kind of have to make that change and let other people do it and just support them. Not help, because help, I think, is sometimes the wrong word, because people feel like, oh, I need help. But just support them to do their best work. A lot of my job, I think, is making sure that
00:34:45
Speaker
I can support the team to do their best, their best work. As I said earlier, right, when it's when it's just when it's just you or just you and a couple of folks, then it's really about making sure that the bullets you do have you fire in the right place, presumably. Yeah. And I think they those days are great. And you let every one looks back like someone might have like a job and they like they're moaning about something or whatever. Then they look back with various tinted glasses on every part of your life or career. But
00:35:15
Speaker
You know, those bits are kind of great when you've got like four, five, 10 of you, you're trying to like disrupt and innovate and do something different and you can make change happen really quickly. You know, that's great part of the journey, but you haven't got all the customer and the people stuff to deal with as you get bigger. So then it changes, right? But yeah, every stage is,
00:35:44
Speaker
Has its own challenges. I feel that I've tried to just embrace The journey because you know the end like we talked about earlier the end result you know, it's not it's not about IPO in or getting the exit because no one everyone just gets on with a day double won't give a shit you just be sitting there with either some money in your bank account or no business like but it's always like what you what you did along the journey and
00:36:11
Speaker
and how it made you feel, whether it takes 15 years, 10 years, eight years, I think you've got to be prepared to just make sure you're enjoying the actual part of it, like the day-to-day part of it, you know. Well said, Tom. Thank you so much for doing this. It's been brilliant. I've loved talking to you. And are you happy for me to put your LinkedIn, at least, in the show notes so people can look up and follow your journey if they've enjoyed this? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. They can go to, like, Jiminy's felt a bit differently, so it's J-I-M-I-N-M-Y.
00:36:40
Speaker
go to our website and chat to anyone and if they want to just hit me up on LinkedIn because they just want to talk to me about something else and not Jiminy, I'm pretty good at getting back to people's. Superstar, thank you my friend. Alright, cheers Rob, pleasure.