Brock Weeks (Savi CEO) on AI-Powered Retail Insights, Scaling Sales & Saying ‘No’ to Shiny Objects | Growth Elevated

Introduction to the Podcast (00:00:02)
Julian Castelli welcomes listeners to the Growth Elevated Leadership Podcast.

Overview of Growth Elevated (00:00:27)
Julian discusses the purpose of Growth Elevated and its community of tech leaders.

Introduction of Brock Weeks (00:01:13)
Julian introduces Brock Weeks, CEO of Savi, highlighting his background and experience.

Savi’s Target Market (00:02:30)
Brock explains Savi’s focus on distributed enterprises, particularly in retail and restaurants.

Understanding Operational Metrics (00:02:44)
Brock discusses how Savi helps businesses monitor operations using video and AI.

Inspiration Behind Savi (00:03:02)
Brock shares his background in security and the initial idea for Savi.

Challenges in Monitoring Compliance (00:04:34)
Brock describes the traditional methods of compliance monitoring before Savi’s technology.

Value of Alarm Systems (00:05:07)
Brock explains why retailers were excited about basic alarm system functionalities.

Limitations of Existing Systems (00:05:55)
Brock highlights how existing technologies were underutilized and served as insurance.

Evolution of Technology (00:06:30)
Brock discusses the technological advancements necessary for Savi’s vision.

Initial Hypotheses for Savi (00:07:43)
Brock outlines his initial ideas on how to monitor store profitability.

Addressing Internal Theft (00:08:07)
Brock talks about the estimated losses due to internal theft in restaurants.

Customer Experience Monitoring (00:08:45)
Brock emphasizes the importance of tracking customer experiences in retail.

Real-Life Example of Service Issues (00:09:00)
Brock shares a personal experience highlighting service delays at a restaurant.

Root Cause Analysis (00:10:07)
Brock explains how video can help identify the root causes of service issues.

Data-Driven Decision Making (00:11:13)
Brock discusses the shift from anecdotal to data-driven decision-making.

Impact of Video Technology (00:12:39)
Brock elaborates on how video technology can enhance operational insights.

Starting Savi (00:13:30)
Brock shares how he began the business while consulting for a security company.

Early Investor Validation (00:14:56)
Brock discusses the importance of having knowledgeable investors for validation.

Business Launch Timeline (00:15:12)
Brock details the official launch of Savi in 2018 and its early development.

Challenges During COVID-19 (00:15:38)
Brock reflects on the difficulties faced by Savi during the pandemic.

Current Business Metrics (00:15:58)
Brock shares Savi’s growth, including customer numbers and future outlook.

Savi’s Growth and Employee Count (00:16:13)
Brock discusses Savi’s growth, approaching 50 employees and expanding to 10,000 sites.

ROI and Operational Efficiency (00:16:51)
Explains how Savi’s technology improves ROI by reducing operational issues and enhancing customer experience.

Impact on Customer Experience (00:17:14)
Brock highlights the technology’s role in improving service times and customer satisfaction.

Infrastructure Cost Savings (00:17:57)
Discusses significant savings on site builds by leveraging existing technology rather than custom hardware.

Improving Quality of Life for Employees (00:18:20)
Brock emphasizes enhancing managers’ quality of life through better data access and decision-making.

Milestones and Team Growth (00:19:36)
Brock reflects on the challenges and milestones in building Savi, focusing on team resilience.

Leadership Impact on Employees (00:20:30)
Highlights the satisfaction of seeing team members grow and succeed within the company.

Lessons Learned in Leadership (00:21:17)
Brock shares insights on leadership and the importance of focusing on people’s growth.

Focus and Essentialism (00:21:57)
Discusses the importance of staying focused and not overextending the company’s resources.

Market Focus and Challenges (00:22:37)
Brock explains the difficulties of spreading too thin across different market verticals.

Deciding on Target Markets (00:23:36)
Brock shares the decision to focus on restaurants to achieve better market penetration.

Measuring Success Beyond Revenue (00:24:10)
Discusses the importance of measuring qualitative impacts alongside cash flow and revenue.

Scaling Sales Effectively (00:27:47)
Brock talks about the right timing for scaling sales and avoiding premature headcount increases.

Data-Driven Decision Making (00:29:32)
Emphasizes the need for timely data to guide decisions on scaling and resource allocation.

Avoiding Overextension (00:30:44)
Brock warns against overextending the team and the importance of refining processes before scaling.

Book Recommendations for Leaders (00:32:14)
Brock shares useful books, including “Essentialism” and “High Output Management,” for leadership growth.

Closing Remarks and Future Outlook (00:32:46)
Julian expresses excitement for Savi’s future and thanks Brock for sharing his story.

Collaboration Among Founders (00:33:07)
Brock appreciates the value of founders sharing experiences to learn from each other’s mistakes.

Value of the Podcast (00:33:26)
Julian acknowledges the importance of the podcast in facilitating knowledge sharing among entrepreneurs.

Farewell (00:33:32)
Brock and Julian exchange goodbyes, concluding the conversation.

Podcast Outro (00:33:39)
The host thanks listeners and encourages them to subscribe and seek additional leadership resources.

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 Good morning. This is Julian Castelli. I’m the host of the Growth Elevated Leadership podcast, where each week I speak with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders in the tech industry. Past guests have included CEOs and CXOs of great companies like Work Front, CHG, Healthcare Pathology Watch and Moment, canopy, the San Francisco Funders, and many more. This episode is brought to you by Growth Elevated Growth. Elevate 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 help all of us become better leaders. We do this through educational programs like this podcast as well as our blog, and of course, our annual Ski and Tech Summit, where we bring tech leaders to beautiful Park City, Utah to enjoy camaraderie and collaboration in the mountains of Utah.

Speaker 2 00:01:13 So if you like skiing, if you like networking, if you like all things tech and growth, check out Growth Elevated and we’d love to see you at some of our events. And please subscribe to this podcast where you get your podcasts. Today I’m super excited to welcome my friend and colleague Brock Weeks. Brock is the CEO and co-founder of the retail video platform savi, which is a super exciting growth tech company here in Utah. Before savi, he was the VP of sales, or SVP of Sales at Orca Health, and Brock has held many strategies and sales positions at Vivint. Brock has consulted on sales and leadership for several fortune 500 companies. He holds a Bachelor of Science and Professional Sales from Weber State University, and he serves on numerous boards and and charitable organizations. Most importantly to Brock, though, is his role as a husband to his wife Kelsey, and a father to his three children. Brock, welcome to the podcast today.

Speaker 3 00:02:03 Yeah, thanks for having me, Julian. Excited to spend some time with you.

Speaker 2 00:02:06 Yeah, I’m excited to share the story of savi. I’ve been so impressed with what you’ve built and the journey you’ve been on. And you know, you’re a you’re a sales professional. You have a deep background, both educationally and some of the best sales companies in the world. So we’re going to learn a lot from you in that regard today. But before we do that, why don’t you tell us a little bit about savi. What does your company do? Who are the customers and how do you help them?

Speaker 3 00:02:30 Yeah, we serve what we call distributed enterprise. So it’s restaurants and retailers that are operating tens, hundreds or thousands of locations distributed across the geographic area. It’s all the brands we all visit. You know, think the Burger King’s, the Marco’s pizzas, you know.

Speaker 2 00:02:44 The fast food chains, the retail chains?

Speaker 3 00:02:46 Yep. Correct. T-Mobile, Verizon Wireless, things like that. And what we do is help these teams understand what’s actually going on in their sites and driving the results that are achieving through using video and AI.

Speaker 3 00:02:58 And we can dive more into that.

Speaker 2 00:03:00 But yeah. So so how does how does that work.

Speaker 3 00:03:02 Yeah. So it’s kind of like we started the company because I spent a lot of time in the security space, as we talked about back at Vivint, when you watched the residential security systems transition to smart home systems and start to leverage this, other technologies like IoT devices, cloud computing, etc., which is back when the kind of the original idea from savi came and this that we were meeting with all of these retailers that had 1000 plus locations and they would get all excited about a potential of an alarm system, telling them the when the system was armed and disarmed, which I found fascinating. I’m like, you guys are doing hundreds of millions in revenue, all of these locations. You’ve got all of these different systems in your store, and you’re excited about when a system will tell you when it was armed and disarmed.

Speaker 2 00:03:45 Yeah. What was the value for that for them?

Speaker 3 00:03:46 Yeah. They broke down.

Speaker 3 00:03:47 They’re like, look, we have point of sale systems that feed sales reports. We get labor counts Ounce ours from our stores. Clock in, clock out. So we get inventory counts, cash deposits. And then reviews were kind of starting to come online at that time. They said there’s often variances among those reports at the location. And then across all of the locations in the same geographic area, there’s massive variance on key things like labor as a percentage of sales, customer review, quart, all of those things, average ticket values.

Speaker 2 00:04:19 The operational metrics of the business.

Speaker 3 00:04:21 Correct. They broke down. They’re like, look, we get these signals coming out of the store of what the result is. We have no idea why we’re getting the result, though, because we’re not there and we don’t know why anyone does up their tie and they’re in.

Speaker 2 00:04:34 Yeah. What was the best practice of monitoring a compliance before savi.

Speaker 3 00:04:38 Yeah. Correct. Like literally it was like, okay, we’re going to drive around and be in the stores and spend time trying to figure out.

Speaker 3 00:04:43 And then you’re making anecdotal decisions based upon emotion.

Speaker 2 00:04:46 And we know that the regional manager is coming. So everyone be on time where your wear your best uniform, get it cleaned.

Speaker 3 00:04:53 Follow the scripts. Do what we’re supposed to do. Exactly what you know.

Speaker 2 00:04:57 But. But that’s what it’s been forever. Right. If you if you’re a regional manager, you might manage 50 or 100 of these stores, right? And you basically manage by traveling around. Isn’t that the, the the current state of play.

Speaker 3 00:05:07 That it was the current state of play? Yes, 100%. but back to like why they excited about the arm disarm. They’re like, well, we would at least know the store opened on time and closed on time because it shows when someone came in.

Speaker 2 00:05:19 Because that’s the first thing they do.

Speaker 3 00:05:21 Correct.

Speaker 2 00:05:22 So that was the that was the breadcrumb for you. He’s like, they don’t even know if people are showing up at the store.

Speaker 3 00:05:28 Yeah. They don’t know if the store is open on time and close on time.

Speaker 3 00:05:30 This happens actually a lot. As consumers, we go to places and we’re like, this is supposed to stay open till nine, it’s 830 and it’s closed or someone’s not there. So that’s when we realized, look, they’ve paid for all this infrastructure to be put in these organizations, but most of them are being used as point solutions like security cameras. They had these installed, but they were only being used as an expensive insurance policy and the data was trapped.

Speaker 2 00:05:55 For for a negative occurrence. So there there were no negative occurrence happens. And you can kind of go figure it out. Right. But like like like an incident like an injury or or a crime or something. Right. So so that’s a lot of, lot of lot of dollars and a lot of technology stored up. You have to have it. But it’s there. But like they this was someone trying to get more value about operational metrics. You saw this, you were at Vivint and you were selling the security systems. Right? So but but you saw the need for more more value at that time.

Speaker 2 00:06:24 Could the computers and the AI deliver what you had envisioned, or was this just an idea for you?

Speaker 3 00:06:30 It was just an idea. The technology wasn’t there yet, and the whole premise was that videos, the largest unstructured data set out there. If you can do what you’ve done with other data sets, which is move it to the cloud so it’s easy to access it, integrate it to other key business systems, and then use AI and other algorithms to analyze it. If you could do those three things, you would have to do it in the cloud. But you needed enough bandwidth to be able to get the data offsite. You needed cloud computing to be affordable enough. You need a GPU processing to be affordable. You needed all of this different technology to converge at once to be able to do this, and for multiple reasons, it didn’t make sense for Vivint to pursue it. They were a residential focused company, did not want to go after the commercial side, and the technology just wasn’t quite there yet.

Speaker 3 00:07:15 But as we saw things progress, I started consulting for a commercial security company in 2016. That’s when we started to look and say, hey, technology’s starting to trend in the right direction we could unlock.

Speaker 2 00:07:28 And you had this original idea of the alarm being turned off and on as a proxy for activity. And what were your other ideas when you thought like, hey, gosh, if you actually had the video, what else could you monitor? Like what were your 2 or 3 initial hypotheses, and did they end up being the ones that were important?

Speaker 3 00:07:43 Yeah, it was really around what affects the A profitability of the stores because you can build tech for the sake of tech. But what actually is it doing for the market that you’re serving? And our hypothesis was one you would be able to proactively cut into loss, specifically internal theft. In restaurants, for example, it’s estimated around 4% of gross sales goes to loss. Wow. Okay, $1 billion.

Speaker 2 00:08:07 And you’re filming everything, but it’s not being used.

Speaker 3 00:08:10 Correct. It’s there. It’s just really hard to go get in. What we mean by unstructured is the only thing.

Speaker 2 00:08:14 You’re not going to have a security guard watch every store. That’s not the answer.

Speaker 3 00:08:18 And you could only you could only structure video by time. And it was just constantly being added to at a high velocity. Right. You just get more and more data. And so if we could structure that and allow it to be searched by business systems and proactively flag things, you could start to cut into that loss. The second piece was, if I became accurate enough, you could start to track humans and how they move through experiences, whether that’s you waiting in line at a.

Speaker 2 00:08:45 So now you’re talking to customer service and quality of service.

Speaker 3 00:08:48 Yeah. If you’re waiting in line at a drive thru to get a burger or get a drink or a shake and whatnot, how long does it actually take you to go through that experience? Because we’ve all had that experience. It was while we were building savi.

Speaker 3 00:09:00 I had three young kids one night. Right. You were working really long hours, got home. My wife was sick. I took the kids to go get some dinner. I went to a pizza place that was a fast casual pizza. There was only five people in front of me in line. I stood in line for 25 minutes and everyone was frustrated. As all get out. I looked around, they had cameras, they had all this stuff.

Speaker 2 00:09:22 Oh, were you mentally saying, I wonder if we could monitor this? We couldn’t put in the hypothesis, you know, real time.

Speaker 3 00:09:26 Correct. Because I was like, you know what? Everyone in line was pissed. A couple people left, right? Those of us that stayed, it didn’t matter how good the food was.

Speaker 2 00:09:34 I have not that point. The experience is ruined, right?

Speaker 3 00:09:36 Correct. Yeah. I have not been back and most of those people hadn’t. But here’s the problem is if if I left a review, I would have said, hey, the food was good, the service was terrible, and I waited forever.

Speaker 3 00:09:47 But there left to say, well, was it understaffed? Was it a staffing problem? Was it a training problem? Was it part of our process? Like it’s really difficult for them to be able to actually do anything about that to systematically impact change. It just becomes crisis management. They probably would have sent me a coupon to come back and visit their store.

Speaker 2 00:10:07 Yeah, sorry about the experience, but but yeah, it’s basically just a it’s a signal that the customer was unhappy but they don’t know why. But with the video how would you solve the problem immediately.

Speaker 3 00:10:18 Correct. Get to the root cause of it. So if you could structure this data and let’s use video to track the customer how long it takes them to move through that experience. Well, what should our baseline be right. It’s just data practices. What’s the baseline of where we should be then? How long is it taking guests to do that? And what is the perfect ratio for our organization? If you have all these data points, you then can say, well, my labor hour is x my baseline to.

Speaker 3 00:10:44 Wait is Y. What is that optimal ratio so that we can properly staff to support all of the different customer experiences that we want to support and provide. And you can start to make trade offs and decisions based upon data and know when I make this change. This is how it correlates down the line. And if all you had was back office systems, you couldn’t make decisions based upon data. You were in crisis management and you were operating off of anecdotal emotion.

Speaker 2 00:11:13 Yeah, the anecdotal stories. But whereas if you have the video, you can actually see maybe the store is supposed to have ten employees there, or maybe there’s only six, right?

Speaker 3 00:11:21 And rather than having to have a human go look at it, if I become our thesis was if it became as powerful as it should, in my opinion, it’s not going to completely eliminate people. What it should do is make your team more able to focus on what they do well, and not mundane brain suck tasks, right? Think about all the little mundane things, right?

Speaker 2 00:11:42 The pyramid of suck.

Speaker 2 00:11:43 Right. And that’s right. I’m hearing that more and more often now as a as a rubric of if you can automate the, the bottom part of the pyramid of sucks that that that improves lives improves improves quality of work.

Speaker 3 00:11:55 Everything correct. So just surface the information that they should know about. But now instead of that district manager or regional manager going on site and being like, okay, what’s going on in this store? The data should just tell them you’ve got a staffing problem and you’ve got an issue going on here. You need to take this action now, go coach the team and have impact versus spending your time trying to figure out what you should even be coaching the team on.

Speaker 2 00:12:19 Got it. So your insight just if I could summarize, was you had you had a great history with one of the leaders in security cameras and security services, and you’re saying we can actually take that same equipment and the new technology of cloud and AI, and now actually turn that to operating and monitoring operating metrics in real time, everywhere, all the time.

Speaker 2 00:12:39 Think about the value that creates for that regional manager, who must have 100 stores managing by driving around and doing inspections, they actually can see aberrations from from the norm or from best practices. And then you can actually go to the video and see what why, why it’s happening. Right.

Speaker 3 00:12:53 Make decisions based upon data. And if you need insight to understand more, go right to that point in time, right to that moment, to understand the full context of what was going on. Because why I waited so long in line. They had enough employees. Two were in the back talking, one was out wiping windows and one was working his butt off trying to get us all through the line. It was just it was literally just a training problem. That’s all it was. But you need to be able to surface that for that brand so that they can actually make changes when needed.

Speaker 2 00:13:22 Okay. So you have the background at Vivint. You’ve been doing consulting. You kind of validated it through your own experience.

Speaker 2 00:13:28 And how did you get the business started?

Speaker 3 00:13:30 Yeah. So I was consulting for that security company and said, hey, this idea is still here. There’s some infrastructure we’re going to need. So partnered with some of their knowledge on the commercial security, integration and cameras and how we needed to be able to integrate all of these different hardware manufacturers to be able to get this data to the cloud, partnered with them, and was fortunate to get three really great, early angel investors that had expertise in the business. One was very, very experienced in video. They invented and held the patent on variable bitrate streaming. Really, really deep expertise there that I’m a non-technical founder. I’m not the engineering side of things. So I needed to say, hey, I’ve got this idea. Is it feasible to actually do this in an economical, affordable way and meet these price points and to have him be able to say, you know what, you’re kind of early, but like the pendulum is starting to shift. And here in a couple of years everything’s going to line up.

Speaker 2 00:14:24 So he validated that the technology was going to meet your thesis.

Speaker 3 00:14:26 Correct.

Speaker 2 00:14:27 Very cool.

Speaker 3 00:14:27 Former former restaurant operator, president of Burger King and some other brands. Brands would be able to say this is a huge problem. And if we had this data, it is so valuable to our organizations that it will actually drive profitability to the bottom line. It’s a key metric we’re flying blind with right now. If you can do these 3 or 4 things.

Speaker 2 00:14:46 Well that’s awesome. So one of your early investors was not only a tech expert on the video, but also a customer, validating the use case and the value creation.

Speaker 3 00:14:56 Yeah, you learn really quickly. The ideas can be great, but like, if you are the one driving everything, it’s not going to go very well. You got to go find smart people that know far more than you in these areas. And so we were fortunate to find those really smart people to help us understand that.

Speaker 2 00:15:10 All right. So when did you start the business.

Speaker 3 00:15:12 So as it exists today? 2018 is when we said, hey, security company, we’re going all in on this. Do you guys want to like, get rid of that part of the business that you were doing? You’re in a security integration, and we’re going to raise some money and go develop this text. Did that in 2018. Started writing the first code January of 2018. Released the platform kind of in its early stages. And, the first part of 2020 companies Okay. I would hit fantastic time right?

Speaker 2 00:15:37 Right into Covid.

Speaker 3 00:15:38 Yeah, great time to sell to restaurants and retailers when their doors are.

Speaker 2 00:15:42 And they’re all closed. And yeah, I’m sure that must have been a real kick in the groin, right?

Speaker 3 00:15:47 Yeah. It was some, some fun times, but, Yeah. Fortunate now to be able to serve thousands and thousands and thousands of sites throughout North America and adding thousands a year.

Speaker 2 00:15:58 Give us the give us the benchmarks we started in 2018. You drove into Covid, you got out of there.

Speaker 2 00:16:03 But now here we are in 20, 25, seven years later, you know, how large is the business? How many employees do you have? What’s your rough revenue size? And and how many, how many, how many customers are you serving?

Speaker 3 00:16:13 Yeah, we’re circa 50 employees. Fortunate to. This year we will pass the. We’re between the 5 to 10 million, I guess an RR, I’ll say. And we’ll we’ll be passing into that next phase here here shortly and fortunate to we’ll probably pass as well between, you know, probably around 10,000 sites by the end of this year.

Speaker 2 00:16:31 10,000 sites will be using your technology.

Speaker 3 00:16:33 Yeah.

Speaker 2 00:16:34 That’s amazing.

Speaker 3 00:16:35 Technology.

Speaker 2 00:16:35 And what kind of ROI? Again, going back. I remember when you first told me about this business. I just pictured that poor, poor regional manager, you know, managing the whole central region or something and has, you know, how many hundreds of stores. Have you validated that impact? What kind of ROI is that person seeing?

Speaker 3 00:16:51 Yeah, there’s a couple different ways that the business gets the ROI.

Speaker 3 00:16:55 The tangible measurable is definitely in reducing those lost driving behaviors, improper discounting, voids, refunds, some of those nefarious activities that unfortunately just happen.

Speaker 2 00:17:06 Yeah, it’s an operational business, right. These are these are very operational people intensive businesses, right? They’re they’re great businesses, but they’re they’re intense operationally.

Speaker 3 00:17:14 Yep. So you’re able to instantly cut into that and reducing those things with some of the automation and oversight that is allowed to happen there. But the real value, in my opinion, is actually in driving the customer experience and being able to make that where brands are able to cut time off their service times, which means more customers through and a quicker.

Speaker 2 00:17:34 Less frustrated dad’s get trying to get pizza.

Speaker 3 00:17:36 Yep. so and saving costs on new site builds as construction and things have become really, really expensive. You’re able to leverage a tech you’re already putting in. Like there’s one brand we’re working with right now. We’re in the process of cutting out about $15,000 in infrastructure cost per site by being able to just leverage this technology.

Speaker 3 00:17:57 They were.

Speaker 2 00:17:57 So not only operationally, there’s a tech benefit, a tech hardware benefit, maybe.

Speaker 3 00:18:02 Correct, because we’re basically saying you’ve paid for this infrastructure already. It can be used for all of these other purposes in the business. And you can start eliminating this custom hardware you’ve been putting in to do these things, like drive through used to be tracked with magnets in the ground.

Speaker 2 00:18:16 It’s about right. Yeah. That’s accurate. You gotta you gotta tear up the concrete. Put those.

Speaker 3 00:18:20 In. Yeah. Correct. So you no longer have to do that like you’ve put in the camera. So not only are you saving on infrastructure cost and driving efficiency there, but the other intangible or intangible thing that you can’t really measure, but in my opinion, is the biggest value we’re bringing to these organizations is improving the quality of life of their people. Those managers and area managers are able to actually get these questions answered quicker, have more impact with their team members spending time coaching off of data versus just flying blind.

Speaker 3 00:18:52 Right.

Speaker 2 00:18:52 Totally. Yeah. Like get to the root cause of the problem. That’s that’s super exciting.

Speaker 3 00:18:57 Most important asset that any company has is its people. And so if you can improve their quality of life, make their job easier and provide more insight to allow them to take action and have impact. Like really, really, really intangible, but probably the highest impact thing you can do.

Speaker 2 00:19:10 Well that’s fantastic. So you know, hey, this is a classic entrepreneurial story. You’re between series A and series B, and I know that you’ve got super exciting growth growth ahead of you. And that’s that’s awesome. Congratulations on getting to this point. Let’s talk about some of the things that you’re most proud of in this journey. What is the you’ve done so much to get here. You’ve gone through so many ups and downs. What are the what’s what? What are some of the milestones you want to celebrate?

Speaker 3 00:19:36 Yeah. as you know, building any company, there’s a lot of twists and turns along the way and challenges.

Speaker 3 00:19:42 I think one of the things is we’ve we’ve been able to find fantastic, great people to join us on this journey that are very resilient and adaptable. And we’ll just go through whatever is thrown at them and solve problems. But it’s been able to see the growth in the people. And like we had one individual who now is leading our networking implementation, who came to us before with zero background in doing this. He had actually worked in correctional facilities prior, and to be able to see the career growth and progression and knowledge.

Speaker 2 00:20:10 They’re building a career and they’re a leader now. And that was all developed at savi.

Speaker 3 00:20:14 Yeah, he’s on a complete different trajectory. And there’s a number of those. So I would say for me personally, honestly, that’s probably one of the most highest satisfaction things of running the business and starting it and looking at it over time.

Speaker 2 00:20:25 Absolutely. That’s one of the one of the gifts and benefits of leadership when you can actually have an impact in people’s lives, right?

Speaker 3 00:20:30 Yeah.

Speaker 3 00:20:31 Like, our first guiding principle is savi as we believe people matter. And that can mean a lot of different things. But at the end of the day, it’s like what’s right for the person. For some people like being at savi for their entire career though I hope we can provide them. That opportunity may not actually be the best thing for them long term, but did we help change the trajectory. Did we help them be able to have more opportunity, improve themselves? All of that. And if we’re doing that, I feel like we’re going to be successful because smart people are going to join us. They’re going to continue to grow, they’re going to innovate, and they’re going to be able to help us support our customers, provide them new innovative products, and build a great business.

Speaker 2 00:21:07 Well that’s fantastic. So you mentioned there were ups and downs. What do you know now that you didn’t know going into it that make you a better leader? If you’re doing this again, that you can share with our audience?

Speaker 3 00:21:17 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 3 00:21:17 We don’t have enough time to go into all.

Speaker 2 00:21:20 I’ll pick 1 or 2 ideas.

Speaker 3 00:21:22 Yeah. I really think the the first would just be to, really make sure that you stay focused. With what I mean by that, there’s a great book, Essentialism by Greg kun, that was, harboring on here at savi and just continuing to enforce to our team and the basic premises. If you say yes to something, you have said no to something else, we all have a finite, limited time of resources and time that we can put towards things. And because of the technology that we’re playing in, like it’s applicable to tons of industries, not just restaurants and retailers and convenience stores, it can be used in pharmacies and in banks. And there’s all of these different verticals that could use our technology, right. There’s also a lot you can do with video, right? You could track a I can be used to track a number of things. The reality is, is when you’re a small company, you can only do a few things very, very well to succeed.

Speaker 3 00:22:21 And most startups.

Speaker 2 00:22:23 It is such a great. That is such a great lesson. You have to pick it, pick a niche and really nail it to get repeatability. Now, did you guys did you guys wander? Did you get you get tempted? What were the shiny objects that you you you you may have strayed off path or were tempted to stray off path for.

Speaker 3 00:22:37 Yeah. Going too broad in our market. Right. You can’t spin up even though the tech was the exact same, spinning up a go to market motion in a couple different verticals with limited resources is really, really hard to do. And you can’t do it effectively. What you end up doing is spreading yourself thin from a market so you don’t get deep penetration, but it has ripple effects throughout the whole organization. The asks are going to be different from what a convenience store operator needs versus a restaurant, which is, we say our tech is the same and it is the way it’s packaged, the way the AI is used.

Speaker 3 00:23:10 It’s just enough different. You start to strain your implementation processes. You start to strain your product development resources. Everything becomes spread thin and.

Speaker 2 00:23:20 And you don’t get the network effects X, right? Whereas if your knee you’re going to have you’re going to have referrals, you’re going to have word of mouth, you’re going to have industry recognition and brand. So you’ve decided on the restaurant. Let me ask you, have you decided on restaurants as you’re correct. We know.

Speaker 3 00:23:36 You’re nailing. Yep. Correct. And said, look, we’re based.

Speaker 2 00:23:39 On the the the the dad pizza story. Let’s just let’s let’s solve that first.

Speaker 3 00:23:43 Correct. Let’s go back to that. Let’s solve that problem. And then we will move into these other verticals. And we’re entering that stage where we just are now going to go into a couple the other verticals.

Speaker 2 00:23:54 What are some examples, Brock, that like just validate this, this, this lesson because it’s so important. I’ve heard it so many times now that you’ve you’ve stuck with it.

Speaker 2 00:24:02 You’re seeing the benefits because of ABC, like because you’ve decided to focus on restaurants. Give us some examples that validate that focused niche approach.

Speaker 3 00:24:10 Yeah. I’ll talk about some of the ripple effects that are not measured. Right. Because you’re measuring your cash. You’re measuring all of these things. I think looking at the entire organization, we made the decision at savi. We operate in the OKR framework that we want to build a durable company. We’re not chasing shiny objects like the companies that I admire that have legs in runway. They weren’t built overnight as much as we all want.

Speaker 2 00:24:34 Yeah, the story makes it feel like it, but yeah. Yeah. Overnight success after 20 years, right.

Speaker 3 00:24:39 You look here in Utah, the companies at least, that I really, really admire, most of them have taken quite a bit of time to get to where they are. And they’ve built phenomenal, great companies.

Speaker 2 00:24:50 But they just come on our awareness in the last like stages where they’re a rocket ship and you think, wow, that just happened.

Speaker 3 00:24:56 Yeah. I mean.

Speaker 2 00:24:57 The truth is the truth is always more messy behind the scenes.

Speaker 3 00:24:59 Correct. From Qualtrics to Pluralsight to ancestry, Ancestry.com to LGT to the Vivint. Like all of these companies. Like, there’s a lot more that went into it and over time that have built durable, lasting companies that aren’t reliant on, you know, vaporware of financial markets.

Speaker 2 00:25:16 To be right.

Speaker 3 00:25:17 Right. Like, they have a durable business. So anyways, with that back to the focus that it’s LED is we looked at like our go to market strategies, an example of focusing on something we were spending a lot of time and effort to get the bottom part of the market. These are contracts that were between 15 to $25,000. That’s right. That’s great revenue. It’s a great business. And we had repeatable motion there. But when we actually looked at our total pipe, we also from the mid-market to enterprise, it was a third of the headcount in that obviously in the enterprise to mid-market. But the actual upside to both revenue was about X, what the small SMB side was creating, but it was the amount of customer success, headcount and support, headcount and time that these smaller customers were taking where it was spreading us so thin because we were trying to attack all ends of the market.

Speaker 3 00:26:15 Yes, we finally had to say, hey, look, we are spread too thin. Focus in. We’re going to go dominate this part of the market.

Speaker 2 00:26:23 And you chose enterprise?

Speaker 3 00:26:24 Yep. Mid-Market to enterprise. Up the top end of the market because of our business is nuanced. You have to support both with franchisees and brands.

Speaker 2 00:26:33 But not but not the small smaller ones.

Speaker 3 00:26:34 Not correct. And so you had to say no to these smaller deals.

Speaker 2 00:26:38 Your essentialism book. You you can’t do everything.

Speaker 3 00:26:41 Correct. But when you say.

Speaker 2 00:26:42 One thing, well.

Speaker 3 00:26:44 It’s so liberating, right? I look at some part, we’ve had some partnership opportunities that are like, man, this could create great long term revenue for savi. And it’s like, we’re not ready to support it right now though. And if we put our effort in there, they’re going to ask for this from our product team. They’re going to ask from this from our marketing team. We’re going to ask all of these things. The reality is we can’t do that right now.

Speaker 3 00:27:06 We have to choose between these. So what’s the best? Because they’re all good options. We’re not going to die for lack of good options. We’re going to die from spreading ourselves, then picking too many good options instead of that best or great option.

Speaker 2 00:27:20 That’s such a great story. So focus. You know, focus on on a niche. Own it. Do it really, really well. And and that’s, that that’s how you can be successful. That’s awesome.

Speaker 3 00:27:31 And the result of that, Jillian, is important is like our RR per employee is going to double, right? Right. As our revenues go, all of those things that actually lead to a durable company. Like they’re all actually trending in the right direction because of that focus.

Speaker 2 00:27:47 Now that’s fantastic. Hey, I want to get to another point that you brought up. When we were chatting earlier, you said that one of the key lessons was when to scale sales and when to just really load up and get get nail it before you scale it.

Speaker 2 00:27:59 and with your background in professional sales and working with so many great institutions on the sales front, walk us through what you learned there. What was that experience like?

Speaker 3 00:28:07 Yeah.

Speaker 4 00:28:08 I think like any company.

Speaker 3 00:28:09 You start to get, good traction and good revenue. And there’s this thought that you have to in order to like scale as a company, you need to add headcount, and you’ve got to transition from founder led cells to like repeatable processes. And yes, that is true. The problem is, is I think most people jump from A to G instead of doing e c d e f g.

Speaker 2 00:28:30 What does that look like? You know you’ve jumped too far. When. What’s a good example?

Speaker 3 00:28:35 Yeah, a great example here from savi is when all of a sudden you have all of this headcount that at the end of the day, when you’re actually measuring the end result of the entire process, yes, it falls within certain cake ratio, but it’s like, what is it actually doing to our organization? And is that the best result that we could be getting, or could we actually do the exact same end result over here with half the headcount and half the processes and spending differently? We all just want to add headcount.

Speaker 3 00:29:09 It’s this like metric. As humans, we want to be like, yeah.

Speaker 2 00:29:12 It’s like inertia or gravity, right? You just kind of. Yeah. We’re on a scale of the organization because you want to grow the business, right? Correct. And it’s a natural feeling. You’re getting pressure from your investors grow the business. Yeah. But so what would you say? What questions would you ask yourself as a founder? When you’re feeling that urge, you’re going to feel that urge. You ask yourself what to kind of check that that instinct.

Speaker 3 00:29:32 Yeah. So for us it’s just going back to having access to good data, timely data and looking at it and saying, okay, if everything went perfect in that effort, whatever it is, if it’s an SDR channel, however you’re doing it, what does that actually do? Back to those core metrics. One of those core metrics for savi right now is RR per per full time employee. Because if you look at it at CAK like yeah it’s falling within a 1 to 3, 1 to 4.

Speaker 3 00:29:57 It’s healthy. It’s good. Just keep adding to it. And it’s like no what’s the quality of that customer. Right. What’s the long term value of the customer. What’s the support needed. All of these other metrics across the organization. And if you’re measuring the right things, it makes it really, really clear that, hey, that effort is actually not worth it yet for us because of what it’s going to take for the rest of the business. And you can only do one thing, so maybe that is the best channel. If you looked at your, you know, SMB, mid-market enterprise, for some businesses maybe that’s the best route to go. But headcount brings complexity. Yeah, to an organization. And so you should stretch and strain your team in my opinion, especially on the go to market, to the point where it is just absolutely bursting at the seams.

Speaker 2 00:30:44 That’s a better problem to have than knowing you’re overextended on the hiring front, right?

Speaker 3 00:30:48 Yep. And you can like you can dive in as a leader and coach and understand because there is some ambiguity in sales.

Speaker 3 00:30:55 You’ve got to go like, well, why isn’t this rep converting? Is our messaging off? Is there messaging? There’s all of these nuanced things. Is the product not delivering in the right way? And when you’re trying to do that across 10 to 15 people, it’s really, really hard. Yeah. Doing that with 3 to 5. You can do it really, really well and really refine that process and get the of the flywheel going there and then add more. I think we all just fall out. I just company after company after company. That’s like, yeah, we scaled up and you see it, you scale.

Speaker 2 00:31:24 Scale up and then you got you, you hit, you hit some sort of roadblock and you get to scale down and then you’re on that sawtooth path.

Speaker 3 00:31:30 And if you were tracking everything right after a quarter, you know, really if something’s working or not. Yeah. Like there. Yes. Our cell cycle is longer than 90 days. But the early indications if you go to like Andy Grove’s book.

Speaker 3 00:31:43 Right. If you look at the egg factory, there are early indications that tell you the eggs bad. Yeah. Or the eggs. Good. But people are willing to pay five x for the toast and the coffee or vice versa.

Speaker 2 00:31:55 Yeah. So it’s okay. Yeah. Well that’s great. Well, well Brock, I think that’s great. I’m super excited about savi and and you’re, you’re I’m grateful that you’re sharing some of your leadership lessons with us. Thank you for that. You referenced essentialism Centralism as a as a great book. Any other books that, that you know, you find useful for our audience might like?

Speaker 4 00:32:14 Yeah.

Speaker 3 00:32:14 I mentioned Andy Grove’s high output management is another really great. Just.

Speaker 2 00:32:18 Yeah. You referenced the egg factory, right? Like, let’s let’s figure out how to how to optimize serving breakfast. Right.

Speaker 3 00:32:23 Yep. I’ve been dove back into that one recently and I’ve been loving it. Radical candor. is another great one. We try to practice that here at savi.

Speaker 3 00:32:32 I think a lot of organizations struggle, to do that. And, yeah, as far as business, those are kind of three right now that I’d recommend. There’s so many good ones out there. You know, the Simon Sinek has a bunch of great books, Jim Collins, all of those.

Speaker 2 00:32:46 Yeah, I love it. It’s great to see, see, validate when you see something in practice. And then you actually say, okay, I’m not the only one who’s had this challenge. And, you know, these authors do a great job of creating the frameworks and things to recognize them. So. Well, glad glad to hear that. That’s been helpful. Thank you for sharing your story. I wish you guys the best. I’m so excited to see the next couple of chapters of savi. And, thank you so much for joining us this morning.

Speaker 3 00:33:07 Yeah, no thanks for having me on, Julian. And love what you guys are doing at Growth Elevated. Right. There’s so much that can be learned as founders get together and share information with each other’s stories.

Speaker 3 00:33:15 Because the reality is, is we’re all kind of making the same mistakes. We’re all doing the right, same things. Right? Or it might be vice versa. If you share that information, what you’re doing right, it’s probably what I’m doing wrong. So love what you guys are doing.

Speaker 2 00:33:26 Know that’s the whole value. And thank you for sharing your time generously with us so we can do exactly that with this podcast.

Speaker 3 00:33:31 Absolutely.

Speaker 2 00:33:32 Thanks. Thank you Brock. We’ll see you soon.

Speaker 3 00:33:34 Yep. Take care.

Speaker 2 00:33:35 Bye.

Speaker 1 00:33:39 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. Com. We’ll be back next week with more insight from another great tech leader. Thank you.