Speaker 1 00:00:02  Welcome to the Growth Elevated Leadership podcast with Julian Castelli. Each week, we talk with senior tech leaders to explore stories and insights about the challenges involved with growing technology companies. We hope that these stories can help you become a better leader and help you navigate your own growth journey.

Speaker 2 00:00:27  Hello, this is Julian Castelli. I'm the host of the Growth Elevated Leadership podcast, where each week we talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders in the tech industry. Past guests have included CEOs and CXOs of great companies like Work Front, CHG, Healthcare Systems in Moment, Vox, Pop me, the San Francisco, 40 Niners, and many more. this episode is brought to you by Growth Elevated. Growth elevated is a community of tech founders, CEOs, and CXOs who are committed to working together to share best practices and learnings in an effort to make us all better leaders. We do that through educational programs like this podcast. We also have an annual summit each year in beautiful Park City, Utah. So for those of you who like to ski and like to talk talk shop with other tech leaders, check it out at Growth elevated.com.

Speaker 2 00:01:18  today I'm super excited to welcome Blake Harbor to talk with us today about scaling sales. I can tell you that almost every business we talk to, scaling sales is a critical issue. Blake is a veteran sales executive, and he's been with some of the big success stories here in Utah, including Hirevue and Lucid. And after that, he went to Work Stream, where he oversaw an incredible growth turnaround that we're going to talk about today. And, today he's working to help other companies scale their their growth journey. So we're going to learn a lot, with Blake. Blake, welcome to the show. Yeah.

Speaker 3 00:01:51  Thanks, Julian. honored to be here.

Speaker 2 00:01:53  We're excited to talk to you today. Yeah.

Speaker 3 00:01:56  Appreciate it.

Speaker 2 00:01:57  So, like, you've done a lot of things. you know, we were talking just early in the intro about about some of the, this successful SaaS companies in Utah, But, but Workstream is one where you had just an incredible story of both downs and ups, right?

Speaker 3 00:02:12  Yeah, it was quite the journey.

Speaker 2 00:02:14  Yeah. Well, let's talk a little bit about that. tell us before we get started, what does work Stream do? Who do they serve?

Speaker 3 00:02:21  Yeah. So work Stream is, started as an applicant tracking system serving primarily the hourly workforce. So there's, in that HR air tech space, there's a huge gap between operators or employers and then the workforce and how they communicate. And so Workstream set out to solve that and bridge that gap, by providing a texting platform for companies to engage with employees or candidates in real time. So an applicant might go to an indeed or all these job boards and apply for a job, and they can get a text in real time to go ahead and schedule interview and then post interview, go through onboarding process and all the other steps that would go in. So this is.

Speaker 2 00:03:07  The desk list worker, right? That's right. A lot of tech has been developed for the desktop and to automate the work. But but there's all these industries where people aren't at a desk.

Speaker 2 00:03:16  That's right. Right. And so we're focusing on that niche And the the key communication breakthrough is texting. Right.

Speaker 3 00:03:22  That's exactly right.

Speaker 2 00:03:23  Okay. Where's Workstream based.

Speaker 3 00:03:25  Yeah. So we're based out of Palo Alto. I met them actually through Peterson Ventures that introduced me to the CEO. And, were some early investors there. And, they were looking to build a sales team here in Utah. The CEO had been in Utah many times, loved the culture, understood that there's a good sales engine culture here. Yeah, we've.

Speaker 2 00:03:49  Got that reputation, you know, and you're an expert, you know, why should people come look to look to create sales teams in Utah? Give us give us a little pitch for Utah sales.

Speaker 3 00:03:59  I'm a huge advocate for a specifically SMB mid-market. We have a ton of experience. And I think the there's a handful of things culturally that lend that self to it. You know, the there's the Mormon church here where people go out and serve, Mormon missions for two years.

Speaker 3 00:04:14  They knocked doors at 19 years old. You learn this, a level of grittiness doing that that, you know, most kids never have it 35 years old and, you know, they come back from that. There's a culture.

Speaker 2 00:04:27  In different languages that they learn incredible, incredible training. expertise that they have to train these missionaries in different languages, send them across the world and then have them, you know, advocate and promote religion. So, yeah, that's that's got to be an incredible training for sales.

Speaker 3 00:04:45  That's right, that's right. I think even, you know, they come back from their mission. There's this element of culturally where people get married, they get and they have kids young. I mean, I'm one of I got four kids. I, you know, 34 years old and my my oldest is ten, my youngest is five. Like, we've been through all that well doing all this with SAS companies. And you go through that process, it's like I've got a mortgage, I've got a big family.

Speaker 3 00:05:08  Now I got to figure out how to pay the bills. And there you go. Typically the best option is how can I make the most money, the fastest to sell. And yeah, you know, you get this level of greediness that you might not get elsewhere.

Speaker 2 00:05:19  All right. So we got a Silicon Valley company, you know, looking to grow a Salesforce. They're looking for Utah. They find you as an experienced Utah, sales executive. You've been with some some great, Utah companies, as we mentioned earlier, Hirevue. and what was the other one?

Speaker 3 00:05:36  Lucid.

Speaker 2 00:05:37  Lucid. That's right. So you had a great experience. And what was their sales force like at that point?

Speaker 3 00:05:43  so the sales team consisted of myself, the CEO and, one rep that was based in Palo Alto. Okay.

Speaker 2 00:05:50  So this is early, like seed stage or a stage. Where are you?

Speaker 3 00:05:53  Yeah, they were just finishing up the series,

Speaker 2 00:05:55  Okay, so you're starting from scratch.

Speaker 3 00:05:58  Start from scratch. So when I joined, we were, on paper, about 800 K of revenue and pretty much all founder led sales and the typical founder led sales network friends, friends and family.

Speaker 3 00:06:12  Things like that had like translated to a sell a core sales team yet and I joined in February of 2020 and the world shut down 30 days later and we, we churned half the business that.

Speaker 2 00:06:28  Was that was Covid when the lockdown happened. Right?

Speaker 3 00:06:30  That's right.

Speaker 2 00:06:31  What a great what a great time to start a new company.

Speaker 3 00:06:33  Exactly. I was I was questioning all my decisions in life. Right.

Speaker 2 00:06:38  We all can remember where we were, but, you know, a new venture, early stage. And that must have been pretty frightening.

Speaker 3 00:06:44  It was. I mean, we were very small, I think less than ten and, 15, ten employees. and, you know, now we're at 400 K of revenue and I, you know, bless my wife's heart, 400.

Speaker 2 00:06:54  You're cut in half. 800, 400. Okay.

Speaker 3 00:06:57  Yeah. Lost half the business. And I remember telling my wife, I better keep feelers out just in case, because I don't know where this is going to go.

Speaker 3 00:07:05  It might be back on the street sooner or so. and, you know, obviously there's so much learning that goes into that experience of like, okay, where do we go from here? We've we've reset. and at that point we were selling to probably 7 or 8 verticals. Right. Anyone who's hiring hourly worker, if you think about that for a minute. So, so many industries and they make up a majority of the US economy. And, we were trying to sell all of them. I remember the first deal I ever did. It was $600. monster win. I think it took me three weeks to get done. and it was it was painful. It was a trucking company, and the guy was pinching pennies. You could. You could barely make it work.

Speaker 2 00:07:48  But again, the point was they're just workers. So these are truck drivers. They're not going to be at a at a at a desk. What were the what were the 7 or 8 verticals you were thinking about as you were, you know, early stage trying to figure out your go to market.

Speaker 3 00:08:00  Yeah. So trucking third party logistics was in there. just in sort of warehousing. we were we're thinking a lot about the healthcare, which there's probably seven sub verticals of health care. a lot of hospice, in-home care, assisted living communities. restaurant vertical, where we ultimately ended up, we were selling to a lot of restaurants, franchised, non franchised, quick serve. thinking about, like, fast casual segments.

Speaker 2 00:08:30  Okay, so all the all the places where there's less workers. And how did it go originally? Yeah, the founders had sold the friend and family. Your your first sell was to to a trucking company.

Speaker 3 00:08:39  Yeah. Yeah. That's right. They were a last mile, logistics company. you know, the first couple of months was just figuring out what the hell we were even doing, right? Like, where? What do we have left of the base revenue? What are those customers consist of? Why did they stay with us during through Covid thus far? And I'd hired one rep.

Speaker 3 00:09:00  that I actually had hired previously at lucid, and he'd gone into other companies and I brought him over and just really great or really young, scrappy, willing to build from the ground up. We worked out of our office, Utah office, which was my camping trailer next to the house. Every day, out of the.

Speaker 2 00:09:15  Trailer.

Speaker 3 00:09:16  Out of the trailer. That was get.

Speaker 2 00:09:17  Get all the image, get the imagery of Covid cut in half in the trailer.

Speaker 3 00:09:22  We literally I mean, it was 100 hundred degrees outside and no air conditioning was brutal out there. But he was a trooper and we made it work. But, it was really looking at those core existing customers that stayed with us, through March, April, May, June and starting to flesh out and have those conversations go back to them. Hey, why are you still with us? Like, yeah, we have nothing left to give you. What why why are you here? Tell us. Talk to us about like why you continue to use workstream and what's working and what's not.

Speaker 3 00:09:52  And we started to us a couple of things where some of the better customers that just passionately loved us and said like this is critical, business critical. We can't do anything else without this. we're within a handful of buckets of verticals, one being restaurants, the other was assisted living communities. and then the third one was actually like a logistics or a company. And, we started to really narrow in the scope there on who we were thinking about targeting and going outbound into, essentially. And we were looking for, obviously just look alikes who, who looks just like these customers. And why did they buy the way they did and how did they buy which there's unique buying patterns in each of them. And how do we kind of like reverse engineer how they bought them in the first place, how they use it, and how do we start to identify more people like them?

Speaker 2 00:10:48  That's awesome. So, you know, what I hear you saying is, and this is a great, great strategy, it sounds simple, but talk to your best customers as to why why they are sticking with you, why your product is helping, and then, you know, use that information to figure out what your choices are for vertical focus.

Speaker 2 00:11:06  Yeah. That's right. How did you how did you land on restaurants? What was it about the restaurants? You said, this is why we should go here.

Speaker 3 00:11:12  So, Mark Newman, CEO of Hirevue, a great friend of mine is incredible. Lovely guy. I remember something he's always told me and I'll never forget is you just need ten people that absolutely love your product and if you could lean on them, you can figure out what's next. And I've never forgotten that after 12 years of working with Mark. is I started to think about that specifically and what I continue to find over and over again where these restaurant operators that would get on these calls, number one, they would even take the call. They would be passionate about showing up to the call with myself, the CEO, and say, hey, we love Workstream we here's product feedback. We need your help. Even during Covid and during this time, you understand restaurants were firing everyone. They couldn't do it. And you know, so the need for to hire more people or use an applicant tracking system just wasn't nearly as dire.

Speaker 3 00:12:05  And what we also started to notice is they would refer us so naturally to other restaurant operators. And as we start to get those referral businesses, all of a sudden our cell cycle went from 45 to 60 days, down to about two weeks or less on some of these referral business. And we thought, okay, we have a ton of momentum here. And as we start to map out the Tam and Sam and think about where do we where do we start to point our efforts, well, I how I can there's a lot of there's not a ton of friction in the restaurant space where I could figure out how to go find who that owns these restaurants, and then they have four other friends that they're networking with on a regular basis that also need the same help to solve the same problem. They're not necessarily competing against each other. Yeah. And so and.

Speaker 2 00:12:52  Then you get a lot of turnover in restaurants. People go and bring you bring you with them. Right.

Speaker 3 00:12:56  That's exactly right. Yeah.

Speaker 3 00:12:58  And and what we so really over the course of six months in the back half of 2020, we started just narrow in and say, okay, let's just, let's say restaurants. And we even got a little bit more narrow there and so well, actually quick serve restaurants, which is, you know, McDonald's, Jimmy John's five guys, all those which then we found out happened to be they're all franchised. They're all owned by a local operator that might own actually ten Jimmy John's. But the best part about it is they also own five five guys, right? And now all of a sudden what happens is you have this network effect of operators that are plugged into multiple brands at a single time that all know each other. And, and there's almost this kind of big dog in each brand that owns the most stores or is the most successful in the franchises, right? That's right. And the you know, franchisors we love you know we love John. We love this person. He's got 100 stores.

Speaker 3 00:13:57  He's killing it like everyone wants to be like them. And so we thought, wow, if we could figure out how to get John on board and John becomes one of our ten, that just loves it. So we would go find those guys and we would damn near give Workstream to them for free, because all we cared about is them using us, becoming a champion and talking about it.

Speaker 2 00:14:14  We're like a brand ambassador for you.

Speaker 3 00:14:16  That's exactly right.

Speaker 2 00:14:17  That's exactly right. But you had to really understand. So you had to. You know, I want to talk about going from seven potential verticals to one. That's that's frightening for founders. Totally. Right. And and, but if you didn't do that, you couldn't go deep enough to understand the dynamics of those franchise or franchisee relationships and come to this strategy. So, you know, did you did it take some resistance? Was there some courage required to kind of say, look, we're going to really go after this one vertical?

Speaker 3 00:14:43  Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 3 00:14:43  I mean, that was an entire company shift that wasn't just necessarily go to market. Right. Like we had to get to the point where the entire company aligned on this strategy of going after one vertical and products building for the vertical specifically. And they're only having conversations with restaurant operators to continue to build for them. marketing is only talking to restaurants. How do we build more collateral and so on and so forth. And so that took a lot of effort. And, you know, a lot of kudos to to Desmond, my CEO that did such a great job of helping champion those efforts to help us identify it and then say, okay, how do we lead the entire organization towards this and then get buy in to have some degree of confidence that there's enough we could do here and And I the bet that Workstream is continue to play out to on these at this time is that there's the that whole market is really just underserved in all his solutions, right? It's really fragmented market. And they're going to continue to build on, you know, the the applicant tracking system, as was the the, the landing, opportunity to break into all these.

Speaker 3 00:15:53  And now they're they've built onboarding and employee engagement and payroll and all these additional products that continue to expand. And as restaurants consolidate tech and spend allows them to consolidate under the same. Fantastic.

Speaker 2 00:16:06  All right. So you you've you've shifted your your branding towards restaurants. You've made the big shift. How did it go. Like you get some of those big dogs and is that the driver. Tell me how that this this strategy played out.

Speaker 3 00:16:19  We we had one one of the big dogs in a Jamba Juice. That was our kind of a beachhead, I would say the early indicator of of why we were gaining traction. Jamba juice, those are first like main customer. And he was referring to us other Jump juice franchisees, which allowed us to start to recognize where the opportunity lies within the franchise kind of hierarchy, I would say. And as we went into the second half of, of 2020 was when we started to recognize this and preparing for 2021. you know, we've gone from, basically 400 K to just north of a million at the end of the year, which is pretty successful in itself, having turned half the business in March.

Speaker 3 00:16:59  And we thought, okay, this is our we're gonna make a big bet. We see the great rehiring as an opportunity to kind of ride this wave of what restaurants are going to go through next year, and we didn't know if it during Covid coming out. It was it could be one, 2 or 3 years out. But how can we help champion within this space? a technology that allows people to go out and hire again because they're going to have to over the next two years and going into January of 2021, that was the big bet we made as the whole company shifted to the strategy all in on restaurants, we became the vertical ized solution and we took it one month at a time. You know, we go, I think it was 6 million that year, for the entire year, basically from from 1 to 6, which I thought was just absolutely crazy. And in the first half of the year, we we've crossed 6 million.

Speaker 2 00:17:53  Oh my gosh. So 500%, 600% growth in six months.

Speaker 2 00:17:58  Yep. Wow. So, so now you got a whole new set of challenges, right? You you're winning the pie eating contest. You get some more pie. So, so so how do you scale at that level? How many people are you hiring at this point?

Speaker 3 00:18:09  Yeah. So we hired over 60, over 60 sales reps just in Utah here alone, that year. And, to your point, that was a whole new set of challenges, which was then my a lot of thought about, like, how do we how do we scale, how do we go higher that many reps have 5 or 6 reps a month every single month.

Speaker 2 00:18:29  And what gave you I mean, you're clearly at 6 million. You're feeling you know, let's let's give us the color and the feel because so many people talk about finding product market fit. Yeah. And you were right there from not having it to having it. What are the you know, in addition to hey, we're at 6 million. What are the signs and signals that like we absolutely have to scale like, yeah.

Speaker 2 00:18:50  What did you start seeing that they said the convince you had product market fit.

Speaker 3 00:18:54  I get this question off is just like what does product market fit feel like? I work with so many early stage founders at this point, and the best definition I have is when the market starts to pull you. And that's what we saw over and over and over again. The further we went into some of these brands, the further we developed some of these relationships with some of these key franchisees, the faster that the referrals would come in from that brand. And we could directly correlate some of these referrals to to the exact person we had originally reached out to her and engaged with. And all of a sudden, we have, you know, you have people reaching out directly to my reps that, you know, had owned a brand. I have reps that were just the Burger King guy, and that rep got all the Burger King leads because he knows that brand inside out. He knows every single owner in there, and they are coming through, flying him to their own conferences.

Speaker 3 00:19:45  They're asking him to come speak at conference. Oh my goodness. 23 year old sales rep speaking at these franchise conferences, teaching them how to hire people. You never hired someone pretty good.

Speaker 2 00:19:54  Sign lying or sales rep to come talk.

Speaker 3 00:19:57  Yeah. So, the market was very much a good.

Speaker 2 00:20:00  Example of pulling you, right?

Speaker 3 00:20:01  That's right, that's right. Physically pulling us out to to to be at those events. and of course, like deals were coming from it. Right. Our sales cycle got faster and faster and faster. And you know, we were having so many one two call closes over the course of the seven days on these franchisees, we could land and expand, within these brands very quickly.

Speaker 2 00:20:24  That's that's awesome. Okay, so back to the hiring you. You've got the signals of product market fit. You know how you know you're working with a company that helps hire non desk workers, but it's not necessarily your vertical. How do you find 660 people.

Speaker 3 00:20:38  Yeah. I've been really fortunate to build a handful of teams here in Utah.

Speaker 3 00:20:42  I've hired over 200 sales reps. just in Utah alone. and I have found there's a couple of things that I think have really stood out in my experience of recruiting. I mean, I would argue I'm probably a better recruiter maybe than SLC or even because I've had to be my entire career. But, well, yeah.

Speaker 2 00:21:00  A successful says leader. Recruiters recruiting on the job.

Speaker 3 00:21:04  Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. So, I, I network a lot. I mean, I could, I know a lot about all the companies in Utah and what they're doing, where they're at, what they're going through. And that's simply just by. I spend a small fortune on just going to lunch with reps. I invite them to lunch. They're willing to come to me. I've built just spent over a decade building a little bit of following on LinkedIn, which has helped, I think, tremendously. for me to be able to reach out to people and go to lunch and learn what they're doing, and by doing that, it allows me to understand what podium is doing, what they're going through right now.

Speaker 3 00:21:41  And to understand, I use podium as one example. There's 15 of them that, you know, I continually to pull from. but I can understand, who's top performers in those organizations just by going to lunch, networking, having Having those conversations allowed me to get pretty targeted on my outreach for recruiting efforts. and in addition to that, it's no different than the way we went and approached franchisees was, you know, we have five schools in the Valley here that I have deep relationships with that I've recruited from for many, many years and plugged into their sales program. I speak at their sales events. I've been really fortunate to work with the directors of those programs pretty closely. And, having recruited from them for a long time, I can recruit some of the top talent that comes out of these schools. And when you recruit a, you know, ex athlete out of any program, there's a lot of eyes on them. And people look at where they're going and they recruit like minded people. And I've, I've worked with some of the top athletes that come out of all these schools just by nature, if they want to get into tech sales.

Speaker 3 00:22:46  And it's an opportunity for them, and they have deep networks of other people just like them that also want to come work and be in tech sales.

Speaker 2 00:22:55  That's awesome. So so how did it end up? What was the the next couple of years like?

Speaker 3 00:23:01  Yeah. So that year alone, we we went we grew from basically one to over 10 million in revenue. scaled the sales team, I think. I can't exactly remember where we ended the sales team. We're probably 60 or 70 reps at that point.

Speaker 2 00:23:19  so from from founder sales to 60 plus and one, one year.

Speaker 3 00:23:22  Yeah. Year and a half years.

Speaker 2 00:23:24  Okay.

Speaker 3 00:23:25  Yeah. and then we spent really the next six months continuing to grow. We we, basically grew to just south of 20 million. when I, I left there in, September of 2022, it was.

Speaker 2 00:23:43  That's amazing. What a what an incredible story. And, the company to go public, raise money. What was the company?

Speaker 3 00:23:50  Yeah. So that we ended up raising a $100 million series B? you know, this was during the good old days of fundraising, which is very different.

Speaker 3 00:23:59  But, you know, we, it was really, really fortunate time, you know, raised $100 million. The, the K through boys from Founders Fund to join our board. Jay Simons, the president of Atlassian, to join our board, really fortunate to work with a lot of.

Speaker 2 00:24:13  Great, real, a real success success story.

Speaker 3 00:24:16  Yeah, incredible. Incredible team. And they you know, they continue to now they're continuing to build additional products for that market.

Speaker 2 00:24:22  Awesome. Well, that's a great, great story from like Inside the Crucible and getting the product market fit. That's awesome. So and so you've done this at a number of different tech companies and you've got a great expertise. And now you're bringing that expertise to to help others learn from it. Tell us a little bit about Blake Harbor Consulting.

Speaker 3 00:24:40  Yeah. So I stepped away. I've got, like I said, four young kids. I stepped away from that in September of 20, 22. And, you know, I'd spent over a decade just, in a grind and, and had it emotionally been there for my family and a.

Speaker 2 00:24:57  60 can't be easy.

Speaker 3 00:24:59  It's a lot. So, I thought, okay, I'll take a six month break. And I, during that time, I mean, I'm antsy, got a lot of energy. So I ended up meeting a ton of founders during what was supposed to be my time off. just two introductions, and I recognize this enormous gap in this transition from founder led to building a repeatable sales motion and founders trying to figure that out. A lot of technical founders that have never hired a salesperson in their life, how are they going to do this? And so, I thought, man, I could I thought I'd go back full time, but, decided to actually step back and say, you know, I can I can help multiple companies solve this over and over again. And it's it's where my passion lies, is helping founders find repeatability at the early stage and have confidence in hiring and building a sales team and reducing the risk of those hires. Most founders are stuck with the idea that they either hire an SDR and they're all of a sudden SDR manager, or they hire the VP of sales for 400 K a year, which is a huge bet and extremely risky.

Speaker 3 00:25:58  And most sales leaders have never seen that stage before. so I know help founders, build repeatability at that stage, help build the playbook, to reduce the risk of of those type of hires when they're asking those questions.

Speaker 2 00:26:11  cool. How how long do you typically work with a team? What's your engagements typically look like?

Speaker 3 00:26:17  Yeah, it it really depends. I'm really flexible actually on my engagement timelines because, you know, I've had engagements where we get in there and realize that that's, you know, they're a long ways from, Prague market fit and they actually need to go do something else, to where I've worked with companies for over 18 months at this point and, continue to work with them on, you know, a couple of them have hired VP of sales, and I help them go out and source that talent. We've found product market fit and started to scale and hired a few reps and then go hire a VP, SLS sales and continue to work and advise with those companies as well. So they're pretty flexible.

Speaker 3 00:26:54  But I'd say, you know, within the first six months you have a pretty good idea of what and if something's working and either where we should double down or continue to like, point our efforts or where we might need to pivot.

Speaker 2 00:27:08  Got it. And are you working primarily with B2B or B2C C type of companies?

Speaker 3 00:27:14  Primarily B to B. Yeah. Okay. Yep.

Speaker 2 00:27:17  And more SMB or enterprise.

Speaker 3 00:27:19  SMB and lower Mid-Market. I don't do much enterprise. I have great partners and referrals that I can send your way that are great options for that. But I am a SMB mid-market guy and that's your specialty.

Speaker 2 00:27:32  Just just as our story explained, knowing your niche and going deep in it is there's riches in niches, right?

Speaker 3 00:27:39  That's right, that's right.

Speaker 2 00:27:41  Well, where can people find you?

Speaker 3 00:27:43  Yeah, I can always find me on LinkedIn. I can't accept any more connection requests. I guess they cap that. but you can shoot me a note on LinkedIn. I'll always do my best to reply.

Speaker 3 00:27:53  you can always email me. My email is just me at Black harbor.com blackbird.com. that's usually the fastest way to find me or my cell phone's, I think, public on LinkedIn. So you can text me anytime. I always text back.

Speaker 2 00:28:08  Well, fantastic. Blake, that's a great story. And I'm sure there's a lot of people out there. Would love to learn from you. So thanks for sharing that with us this morning. And, good luck with with the business.

Speaker 3 00:28:17  Thanks, Julian. It's great to meet you and, great to chat through it all.

Speaker 2 00:28:20  Awesome. Thanks a lot.

Speaker 1 00:28:25  Thank you for listening to the Growth Elevated Leadership podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, would you please follow us and subscribe on your favorite podcast player and we'd be grateful if you recommend it to a friend. If you'd like more resources on how to become a better leader in business, we invite you to visit us at Growth elevated.com. We'll be back next week with more insight from another great tech leader. Thank you.