Jonathon Fishman – CEO & Co-Founder, LeanLaw

Speaker 1 00:00:08  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 00:00:34  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, CHC, healthcare, Radical Systems in Moment Retail, me Not, the San Francisco 40 Niners, and many more. This episode is brought to you by growth. Elevated Growth. Elevated as 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 our annual Tech Summit, which happens to be at the base of beautiful Alta mountain in Utah this year.

Speaker 2 00:01:19  If you’d like to learn more, and if you enjoy skiing and networking with other tech leaders, come check us out at Growth elevated.com and subscribe to this podcast wherever you listen to podcasts. Today I’m super excited to introduce Jonathon Fishman. Jonathon is a three time founder and a leader in financial legal tech. He has brought fintech workflows into mid-sized law and professional service firms to streamline their financial operations. Now, he’s focused on the next wave of innovation, and that’s embedding banking and and financial management to help these industries. Jonathon is based in Boise, Idaho. He’s an avid skier and mountain biker, and he’s obsessed with finding used clothing on eBay. Welcome, Jonathon.

Speaker 3 00:02:05  Hey, Julian. Thanks for having me.

Speaker 2 00:02:07  It’s great to have you on today. Thanks for being with us.

Speaker 3 00:02:10  My pleasure.

Speaker 2 00:02:12  Okay, so tell us. Tell us a little bit about Lean Lore. this is this is a SaaS company for for law firms, correct?

Speaker 3 00:02:19  It is? Yeah. From the, you know, the outside looking in.

Speaker 3 00:02:22  We’re a timekeeping and billing company that helps law firms manage the full financial lifecycle of its clients from how they onboard track their time. produce the bill, collect the money and all the derivative reporting. And but really, what that is, is a it’s rapid that commodity of timekeeping and billing. Invoicing is wrapped around what we call a fintech workflow company. So what are really our DNA is to think about what we can automate, what we can integrate with and what the data opportunities. And we wrap that mindset around the key financial workflows of law firms and other upmarket professional services firms. So were that financial operating system that’s helping these law firms manage the full financial lifecycle of their clients.

Speaker 2 00:03:12  Awesome. Well, I know that law firms, that’s not their primary focus. So they definitely need a good set of tools to keep their business running. And I I’m sure you’re helping them, figure out exactly how to do that. how did where did this idea come from? Do you come from the legal industry?

Speaker 3 00:03:27  I don’t, the original founder is a gentleman named Gary Allen.

Speaker 3 00:03:30  He was a Stanford graduate, and practiced in a mid-sized law firm and had the classic founders story of seeing the pain of the industry. he was watching his own practice with the yoke of overhead and saw how boomers were aging out. And millennials and Gen X’s were coming into, positions of authority within law firms and saw that change had to happen, as you mentioned, you know. lawyers in particular are not known to be great, business operators. And so he saw, you know, the technology change happening, how folks wanted to behave differently and interact with tools differently. But he also saw a generational change happening. we were introduced via mutual mentor. I got very excited about his business, having my own entrepreneurial background. And, we became, you know, fast friends and started in law with a third person, a CTO, a gentleman named William Fantastic.

Speaker 2 00:04:28  And that was.

Speaker 3 00:04:28  When, that was 2015.

Speaker 2 00:04:31  Okay. So you’re you’re about 8 or 9 years into it at this point. So you started with with three of you.

Speaker 3 00:04:36  Yeah. And it’s an interesting story. I mean, for the first I would say five, six years until about 2021, 2020. We were fairly part time. And okay.

Speaker 2 00:04:48  So it’s an.

Speaker 3 00:04:48  Idea. Yeah. Gary was still practicing law and I had another company on inside and we had raised a little money, but we weren’t fully in the business. And in 2020, you had one of those cathartic moments where you’re like, are we in or we out? And I think that’s where the second generation of lien law happened. And I became the CEO in in the fall of 2021 and began to put it on its course of where it is today.

Speaker 2 00:05:12  So that’s an interesting, thing. A lot of people have ideas on the side, you know, particularly if you have an entrepreneurial background like yourself. But yeah. So you were kind of cultivating this or nursing it, but you weren’t you weren’t all in. What made you go all in?

Speaker 3 00:05:28  You know, we had put a lot of work into it, and there was a lot on the table.

Speaker 3 00:05:35  And, you know, even though we weren’t quote unquote all in, we were we were still very consumed in the business. But there becomes a moment where you get to this point, you’re saying, hey, we either have to be all in or not. And I think we had so much on the table that we weren’t willing to give it up. I think that was one motivation to the the bones of the business were there, you know, product market fit, revenue, high retention, interesting market and Tam unique product in the market. So all the the goods were there. But and this is this is the challenge I mean you know and this is what a lot of early stage companies deal with. we, you, we didn’t have everyone in the right, right. With people in the right seat. And one of the challenging things that we had to do is saying, you know, what was the leadership team looking like? How who’s going to lead the company and where are we going to move forward? And that was a that was a thoughtful but, challenging discussion, as it always is when people change roles.

Speaker 3 00:06:38  And that was part of the decision where I said candidly, you know, and this was also because of some pressure from outside sources and investors saying, hey, we need the right leader in the right seat for the organization. And I didn’t have to be me. I was in the company, but it it needed to be a person who was ready to lead. So when you talk about that, you know, making that decision, there was certainly a lot on the table to be optimistic about. But it was also a commitment about making sure we had the right leadership to take the company from where it was to where it needed to go.

Speaker 2 00:07:15  Was there a financing, deadline or event that kind of served as a catalyst to to make sure you had a full time leader and was it was what was where were you being in terms of taking out that money at this point? And how did that play a role in the evolution?

Speaker 3 00:07:33  in the early stage of our, our company, we did a lot of seed investing from local, you know, local, we call it the Treasure Valley here in Boise, which is Boise in the surrounding communities.

Speaker 3 00:07:43  And it’s not a hard community to get your hands around and and and as we as we got into 2020 from 2015 to 2020, the the community matured. And, you know, we had gotten to a point where we still needed some outside capital to be funded. Then there wasn’t a lot of optimism and energy to invest in. the way the leadership structure was set up. And so that was that was part of the catalyst. But it was also this was an interesting moment. I think it’s worthy to share with the team. At that same time, we adopted, the iOS management methodology.

Speaker 2 00:08:21  Oh, yeah, that’s a great one.

Speaker 3 00:08:23  And so this was a very important catalyst. So not only candidly, was I dissatisfied with how we were operating. I just happened to meet an EOS implementer, and he handed me a book. It wasn’t to meet him to do EOS. He was just someone I was meeting in the community. And he’s like, have you ever read track?

Speaker 2 00:08:39  Explain what EOS is for audience, please.

Speaker 3 00:08:41  Yeah. So I’m sorry. Thanks. EOS is called the Entrepreneur’s Operating System, and it was a book. It’s a methodology for managing companies based off of a book by Gina Wickman called called traction. And it’s spurned as almost cult like. You almost sounded evangelical when you’re talking about EOS, but it, it, it significantly transformed our company. But one of the key principles which helped in this conversation is they don’t like to use the word CEO or CEO. I mean, it still use it for outside. They use this idea of a visionary and an integrator, and the visionary typically sits in the CEO seat and they have a very strategic, very extroverted mindset, but they tend to be really bad at operations, and facilitation or that’s not their joy. I shouldn’t say bad. It’s not their joy and passion. Integrator is the opposite. They certainly can be strategic, but they’re really meant to be someone who is internal to the company operating and executing, kind of like a CEO might be. And so as we adopted that framework.

Speaker 3 00:09:43  We had kind of three forces going. One was, you know, we needed to still raise capital. And there was some, some not great enthusiasm towards the company to, we needed to make a decision to get in or out. And three, we are adopting this framework that’s saying, hey.

Speaker 2 00:10:01  Gave you it gave you the roles to to figure it for that. And you, you were the visionary. Is that right? Yeah.

Speaker 3 00:10:06  Yeah. So I was and I say that I don’t love the title because it sounds very grandiose, but. Yes. And, and and Gary Allen, our CEO at the time was the integrator, or took that role more. And what was interesting is and this is what I think is Julian is really hard, is that when companies are founded, someone just because of either money or stature or idea gets put into a role of authority, whether it’s CEO or some other thing, and the company will grow. And that can be some that can be such a challenging and potentially really disruptive.

Speaker 3 00:10:40  If not, you know, imploding. Transition as leaders change roles as companies grow. And that’s what was happening. We had to grow. We needed a different we needed to grow faster. We needed to be more strategic. And what was fabulous was us, gave us a vernacular and a framework because we said, hey, we’re interested in going into iOS and adopting this. That was a really important group acknowledgement between the three founders. And when we did, we had then a framework that wasn’t emotional and wasn’t, you know, personal to say, well, what do each role look like and what is the right person? And that’s where, you know, when Gary and I were having these conversations and he was amazing. I mean, he was very, he was very diplomatic and, you know, and very pragmatic as we approached it. But I said, Gary, you know, you’re not the visionary. That’s not who you are. And he said, yeah, I am, I’m not.

Speaker 3 00:11:38  And so that allowed us him a recognition to say, okay, that’s what this role is and what it needs to do. And maybe that’s not the best seat for me. And that allowed the company to begin to reshape its leadership team and move itself forward. So those three things were the driving factor in that moment of a company. And that’s when we really started to to grow. We’ve grown quite considerably since that moment.

Speaker 2 00:12:03  That’s excellent okay. So yeah, you have a founding group. You’re right. It’s very difficult to break that whatever hierarchy is created originally. But you found EOS that gave you a third party framework and then you you found your your roles that really felt like the best fits for each of your team members. Did you stay all three or was it just two of you going forward? No, all.

Speaker 3 00:12:24  Three in the company, but in different roles. Yeah. And I was.

Speaker 2 00:12:28  Like, okay.

Speaker 3 00:12:28  I really want to reinforce the importance of what us did. And I’m not suggesting everyone adopt iOS, but having Some disciplined management framework categorically changed how we operated, even before we had more maturity in our organizational execution.

Speaker 3 00:12:49  It allowed us to to go through a certain cadence yearly and quarterly and whatnot that AOS does and I, I, I if I say like key learnings, I know we’re gonna talk about it later, but that’s.

Speaker 2 00:13:01  One must hear.

Speaker 3 00:13:02  Them. That’s one of them that I wished I would have done sooner. in, you know. No, it’s too early. You know, as a three person company would be a little weird to do EOS, in its fully formed self. But as you start to get, you know, you start to get five, ten people in your company. Having that framework is so important because not only does it help you operate better when you may not have excellent operators in the company yet, because you’re still early stage and you’re still all quick starts. But when you bring people in, you immediately have a framework which they know how to operate in. They know what they’re supposed to do quarterly. They know what they call it, a VTL. They know what the Vto is the Vision Traction organizer.

Speaker 3 00:13:45  They know, you know, essentially where the organization is going. So it helps accelerate. It helps and accelerates folks onboarding in the organization. And it helps them, you know, be more productive sooner. so we’re I’m a big fan of us. And it’s sometimes hard, because it doesn’t fit perfectly with a software company. software as a service company, especially in engineering. but, you know, you work through it. You don’t have to be a purist.

Speaker 2 00:14:14  Yeah. That’s great. And did you guys hire a a iOS specialist to work with you?

Speaker 3 00:14:19  Yeah, they call them implementers and. Absolutely. And it’s and it it was a hard investment. I mean it’s you know, it’s it’s what every Friday should they these implementers make a lot of money on a given day. But in particular in the early stages. you know, a lot of people think, oh, we’ll just kind of do an iOS Lite and without an implementer. And, and it’s really powerful to go in a room and have a solid implementer as a third party, you know, objective person facilitating, all of the issue resolution.

Speaker 3 00:14:52  And, and that’s I think was also very helpful in us becoming a much better company. And we’ve committed to it. We have an implementer. We meet, we do three quarterly and then the annual two day session every year with, with our leadership team.

Speaker 2 00:15:06  So okay, so your, your iOS code and I helped you with your, your strategic planning every quarter and your yearly planning and keeping you on on track. So was that was that a major turning point in terms of your company being able to execute? Do you feel?

Speaker 3 00:15:20  Absolutely, 100%? I mean, it was.

Speaker 2 00:15:22  Give us some like before and after differences. What changed? And, what makes you say this is why it’s working.

Speaker 3 00:15:29  You know? Well, I’m going to say two things, that were really, I think, strong catalyst growth. And it all comes down to very basic principles. you know, making sure you have a clearly outlined and well-articulated plan. You know, what’s the yearly plan? What are the goals? strategic planning.

Speaker 3 00:15:51  And EOS helps you frame that in in what you’re doing. that breaks down into what they call quarterly and quarterly that have, you know, they call them rocks, but deliverables. So there was so what EOS did is it aligned everyone strategically on where we were going. And we on a very regimented cadence set. You know what our our rocks, what our, our work was to achieve those goals. that was number one. So the strategic alignment with the deliverables were all aligned. Number two, it created a dashboard of metrics. They call it a scorecard. That was brought clarity to the business and and to anyone listening to this. It’s it takes iterations and iterations and iterations to get the right scorecard. and we’re still iterating on our scorecard. some things never change, you know, but when you start to understand how you’re pushing the business, you start to you start to work with your scorecard. And and that helps you understand in a quick glance, you know, what are the most important metrics.

Speaker 3 00:16:56  But those metrics are shared by all. So that was the second thing that us did, is that it helped us understand the data and narrow it down to what’s most important, because it was tied directly to those objectives. Right. You could do a 1 to 1 with those those judges. and then the third, I think, and this has a bit of a longer tail, is it really does give you a framework to, ensure you have right person, right seat. They use, core values and they use something called the GWS. Get it once it capacity, does a person get it? Do they want it? Do they have the capacity? and that uniformed framework for for evaluating and managing talent was very helpful because it it’s always subjective, right? I mean, there’s data that says that it’s not but there’s still subjective components to it. But when we would interview someone, we’d make everyone. We make everyone who’s interviewing fill out the core values and rates them and core values. And then do they get it? Do they want it? Do they have the capacity? And so it normalized what we were taught, what we were grading on.

Speaker 2 00:18:12  It gave you some language. Common language. Yeah. Exactly.

Speaker 3 00:18:15  Yeah. And so when you know, incapacity is a very esoteric is not the right word, but the concept of capacity is very subjective. And so when we would interview, especially when I was interviewing with junior people in the company and we talk about capacity, I would always let everyone else go first, and then I say, well, here’s my concerns about capacity. And, you know, I remember this one time in particular that I had a different perspective because I just have a different visibility, a different scope of visibility. And it helped the other teammates understand why I wasn’t so positive on that candidate, and it helped them understand.

Speaker 2 00:18:55  That capabilities of.

Speaker 3 00:18:56  The capacity could be, you know, do they have the time and energy to do it? Capacity could be, do they have the do they have the ceiling to do it right? you know, can they because they can someone can come in and learn and. Okay, I think we can get to it.

Speaker 3 00:19:16  and, you know, when you tie that, do they get it? And do they want it? And do they have the capacity? Those three levers really help you frame it out. So capacity is sort of a subjective. Do they have the ability to get it done today and tomorrow? and that could be a myriad of different drivers. That helps you ask that question. And you know, it’s different for different roles and different jobs. So those are the three things that EOS did and that was that. and I think a second event happened, I can’t remember the exact date, but it was approximately around there. I, I, with two other people in the company, went into an accelerator and, and we had toyed with the idea of accelerator, but this was a special one. It’s called growth growth acts. And it’s, it’s one of the smartest venture capital firms I’ve ever met. Andrew Goldner and I’m facing the other gentleman’s name right now. Who had that firm? Andrew was my coach, and they, bring in early stage companies.

Speaker 3 00:20:19  We were a little later stage for most typically their idea form and they go through a, you know, three month accelerator and they’re maniacal about ICP. Understanding your ideal client profile. and the work that goes through that and, and then I because Andrew was my coach, I got all these sessions with him, and he’s the managing partner of this venture capital firm. And what they do is obviously use that as deal flow. Right? They do a three month incubator with the teams and they understand if it’s a good idea, if they’re coachable, do they want to work with them and then the back side, they can make investments, but they are are phenomenal operators and and educators. And so I came out of there with a vigor and spirit around really being honed in on our ICP, and creating a love language to your ICP. And we still.

Speaker 2 00:21:18  You mentioned that you said a love letter to your ICP. What does that mean? I haven’t heard that one before.

Speaker 3 00:21:22  Yeah, and it sounds a little corny, but what it means is that.

Speaker 3 00:21:26  And I’ll never forget it. The best example I can give you is as a trade show. We’re legal. So it was the Association of Legal Administrators, and this woman walked up to me at the booth and I started to talk to her. And as I was talking to her, you could feel everything that I was saying was, was representing and speaking to the pain that she feels every day in her job. And so as she talked and I talked about our solution, we were speaking the same language about how my work over the last eight years and understanding how we believe law firms should operate and the tools and workflows that they should use align perfectly with how she was operating her firm. But she locked this tool in law that would really overcome all of this pain. So the love letter was me expressing in our value prop and our our vision exactly how we resolved her pain. And, you know, she was perfectly in our ICP, so she was the right person in our ICP. And I was speaking in a fluid and very personal way because she could understand.

Speaker 3 00:22:38  Exactly. Yeah, I have that.

Speaker 2 00:22:40  You’re, you’re you’re hitting the bull’s eye.

Speaker 3 00:22:42  Right, right. And, and you know, of course, that’s in person. It’s at a trade show. It’s under the perfect scenario. But, you know, I think too many times, especially in early stage companies, was our mistake is that we weren’t maniacal about who our ICP was and narrowing and narrowing and narrowing to get to that point where we really had a high value conversation and could, you know, very clearly in there, easily sell what we do. You know, this idea of changing out your timekeeping and billing is not a simple decision, right? This is not selling an add on function tool that 1 or 2 people in the business use and you can, you know, zip it up and maybe sell it to some other folks, expanded into some other seats in the firm like, you know, Fathom Video or Loom or some of the tools that we use. This is their main instrument to track time and collect money on.

Speaker 3 00:23:34  So it’s a big decision to transfer. And so you really have to be very clear about who it is that buys your product and how you communicate your value and how you overcome that. So growth Acts got me really tuned in to, got me tuned in to ICP and ICP language and that love letter because they were just hammering, hammering, hammering on it. And even though we were, you know, years into operations and this is the lesson I learned, it’s never, never too late to rethink your ICP, right? It’s never too late to refine your, you know, what you communicate to your clients. It’s an ongoing process because there’s it’s always changing. The market’s changing. The customers are changing. Your company is changing. And and I think too many times companies get a bit stagnated into where they are and and aren’t thinking about how their consumers are changing. This last point on the growth acts. the other thing, and this was Andrew, he stuck into my head the importance of and, you know, of stage appropriate talent.

Speaker 3 00:24:46  And I didn’t I didn’t fully appreciate that at the moment, but how critical it is, especially in early stage companies, to have folks that have experience in stage appropriate. And the best example I can give you is we hired a senior level person in our company, and he had a great pedigree, and we used a recruiter and we felt really good about the hire. And boy, we we won. We got this, this person who’s got these great skills and he and he was highly effective and turned in less than a year. And when I went back and kind of thought about the mistake I made in that hire, he didn’t have stage appropriate experience and he couldn’t.

Speaker 2 00:25:25  Was he was he too senior or used to too big of a company? Was he was it too small of a company for him to bang on the ceiling or what was the issue?

Speaker 3 00:25:32  It was too. He was too senior. Yeah. And he he didn’t know how to operate in an early stage company. And, and even though he said all the right things in the interview about wanting to, you know, sell and and be in it, he was never really committed to it and didn’t know how to build the sales organization from that stage to where we need to go.

Speaker 3 00:25:49  And so it just became a key, learning that as I as I think about hiring, I, I’m really regimented about it. It’s it’s more important in senior roles or very specific roles. So I want to be clear. When you hire a junior customer support person, stage appropriate experiences and it’s critical. but when you used to have key roles, especially in leadership, hiring stage appropriate is like one of my number one mantras. And, you know, for example, we’re hiring a CEO right now, and I will not hire someone if they haven’t scaled from 2 to 10 in that period. It just won’t. I don’t I don’t I don’t care how good they might be or their pedigree because it’s just it’s just I don’t want to pay for someone to learn that that those skills and that experience, I don’t have the time and yeah. Budget.

Speaker 2 00:26:38  Well they’re unique right. And so that’s a that’s a critical critical stage. Well that’s that’s neat I, I hadn’t heard that that product market fit love letter.

Speaker 2 00:26:47  But you mentioned that earlier. So like when you when you when you kind of get that reaction from a client like the, the tears in the eyes, that’s when you know you’ve got product market fit, right? Yeah.

Speaker 3 00:26:56  I mean, and you know that you’re saying that your messaging is right. I mean, you know, I did a ton of selling early on. That’s what I did before I became the CEO. And when you had the right customer, it was such a fun experience.

Speaker 2 00:27:12  You’re truly helping them. You’re truly unlocking value.

Speaker 3 00:27:15  And that’s that’s the founder. You know, you created something from nothing. And to think that now you’ve got this solution that really impacts this business. And I mean, that’s just joy. That’s entrepreneurial joy. and when you don’t have it, you know, it’s really bad. It’s good for you. And if you can close them, you know, that there’s downstream, it could be rocky for the company and the and the, the client because maybe they weren’t the right fit.

Speaker 3 00:27:41  So when you get your love letter, man, it is it is joyous.

Speaker 2 00:27:46  And how long how long ago was that when you kind of felt that lock in and product market fit?

Speaker 3 00:27:50  That was 21. I think we did that. I mean, we had product market fit. from a product standpoint, I mean, we the thing that has kept Lee in law in business when, you know, candidly, maybe we shouldn’t have been in business because we weren’t operating as efficiently as we could, was our retention and our and our and the longevity of the product. I mean, it really does it. It works. Right? So there’s when you when you build a company and this is, you know, my own naivete because I hadn’t done a SAS company when I joined Lynn Law. Again. Sage appropriate skills. Right. I didn’t have the stage appropriate skills and industry appropriate skills when I joined Lynn Law. But when you when you build a product, there’s kind of two pieces to it, right? There’s the product market fit.

Speaker 3 00:28:39  Like we go out and we bring a solution to market and some people buy it and they don’t churn. Right. And there’s a whole product motion that you go about that. That’s one piece of the business that has to get right. But in a SaaS company, then there’s a second piece which is your marketing and revenue waterfall, you know, from first impression all the way down to close, when to onboarding to retention, customer success, retention through that whole customer journey. And those two pieces, you know aren’t always in harmony in SaaS companies, right? So we were really good in the early phase of building a product that had product market fit, and we had early success with clients and really strong retention numbers. And so it said, hey, there’s something there. But what we stunk at, to be brutally honest, was our our go to market, right?

Speaker 2 00:29:28  You go to market and your messaging and things.

Speaker 3 00:29:30  It was beyond that. It’s not just I mean it’s really I mean it’s, it’s it’s from the full customer journey.

Speaker 3 00:29:38  Right? And it’s, you know, from lead to, from impression to lead to Mql to SQL to closed when to the onboarding to, you know, the handoff to customer success and long term retention and that whole journey we when we founded, you know, there was me who was kind of a sales guy and an entrepreneur guy. There was Gary, who was the subject matter expert, who was a lawyer. And then we had a CTO, and we never committed early on to bringing in someone who said, you own that waterfall. We brought in some pieces to it, but never someone who owned the revenue. We had a sales and marketing people, and that was one of the key learnings. And so from a SaaS company, and I would imagine any company I think we get. It’s important to get product market fit. But you can have an underperforming company with an amazing product market fit that doesn’t have a strong go to market. And those two things happen.

Speaker 2 00:30:37  Across that whole customer journey, as you point out.

Speaker 3 00:30:39  Right.

Speaker 2 00:30:39  And and making sure that they’re all mutually complementary and build on each other. Right?

Speaker 3 00:30:45  Yeah. And so I think when you talk about why I feel so good about our company right now, is that, you know, we have an awesome product and I can, you know, I, I get to see we we get to see daily people using it through our data metrics. But you know what we’ve gotten much better at in the last, I’d say two years. And and particularly because we’ve found the right person, right seat to lead the revenue team was understanding this customer journey. And you know, there’s there’s layers to it. And and when you think about that revenue side, they’re one layer is first and foremost the data. And and we stunk at the data for many, many years. We didn’t understand our data on the go to market. And that’s critical right. You just it’s understanding your waterfall and and having someone who sits on top, who owns that data and can do actionable behaviors based on that data, I don’t mean, hey, we’re going to dial up and spend more money on ad spend.

Speaker 3 00:31:48  I’m talking about really understanding, okay, in this specific area of the funnel, like we had a problem with funnel. We would get lots of top on top of funnel impressions. And we had a we have an incredible close right down funnel once we get that client. But mid funnel was tough for us.

Speaker 2 00:32:06  Like who was that person who owns the data. Is that a rev ops leader or is that your sales leader.

Speaker 3 00:32:11  Yeah it’s a gentleman in our company named Matt Noble who is a rev ops leader.

Speaker 2 00:32:16  Okay. So when did you add rev ups? Because I think that, you know, you’re talking about the the challenge of the full customer journey, connecting everything, getting kind of forensic about why things are getting stuck in stage. Yet small companies often feel like they can’t afford rev ups. When did you hire rev ups and what’s the impact of that hire you think.

Speaker 3 00:32:35  Okay, so I’m going to answer I’m going to answer the question. Then I’m going to give you a little backstory, because I think it’s important we officially hired the right leader in 23 post right as we fund it.

Speaker 3 00:32:47  and it was right after we let go ahead of marketing and ahead of sales. Okay. So we, in our naivete, approach the business from a marketing function and a sales function.

Speaker 2 00:32:59  Yeah, that wouldn’t be integrated.

Speaker 3 00:33:01  And that’s our expense. That was my experience, our own experience. And when we finally understood it was a rev ops function, that’s when we started to really move. And it wasn’t it doesn’t happen overnight. I mean, it’s taken, you know.

Speaker 2 00:33:15  It’s a lot of work. There’s a lot of details and 18 months.

Speaker 3 00:33:18  To get the.

Speaker 2 00:33:19  CRM hygiene the challenge right.

Speaker 3 00:33:21  The the messaging and the people all aligned. Right. but they, you know, we, we, you know, we underspent on rev ops and spent overspent on marketing. Yeah. And, and I think that’s what gets a lot of early stage companies confused is it’s the whole customer journey. And that team has to be integrated and one person has to run it. In my mind, you have someone has to own it.

Speaker 3 00:33:52  And, you know, that’s if I talk about like, hey, what would have moved the company faster and what we should have invested in earlier was a strong read of ops leader. Way earlier in the business.

Speaker 2 00:34:05  Really, to just understand the data and create transparency into the whole customer journey. Yeah, that’s a great takeaway.

Speaker 3 00:34:12  Yeah. And you know, I talk about the two sides. We had product market fit. We have it right. That’s that was clear. But we didn’t have the investment in the rev ops side and have the right leader in that seat to help elevate everyone around us. And we needed someone who was stage appropriate. So we hired this gentleman Matt and Matt, you know, did rev ops at T sheets, which was a company here in Boise that sold to to he was customer Saffron Rev Ops, but he was a company that sold to Intuit for, you know, 2 or $300 million. He then was at a company called Center Base. I’m that center base, ConvertKit, which is, I think called Kit now, which is a SaaS tool into the, blogging world, and he had incredible growth there.

Speaker 3 00:35:00  And so he had the exact state.

Speaker 2 00:35:03  Of the right experience. Yeah that’s great.

Speaker 3 00:35:05  Yeah. Stage appropriate experience. Which I want your audience to hear that. Yeah. Appropriate experience.

Speaker 2 00:35:12  Well that’s awesome. That’s that’s a great story. Jonathon thank you so much for sharing that. looking forward to to having you with us a growth elevator this year and, and, seeing you all having some good chairlift discussions. you know, you had a lot of great talk. a lot of great takeaways here. if if what what would you recommend in terms of books or podcasts or blogs that people want to learn more about what you’ve been sharing?

Speaker 3 00:35:38  Well,

Speaker 4 00:35:41  You know.

Speaker 3 00:35:42  I want to there’s there’s lots of books. So, you there’s the, the the one book that really has influenced me heavily. from the very first minute I read it and saw solve the Golden Triangle, which was the Golden Circle, which was Simon Sinek. Start with why. And I just so routinely go back to that, over and over and over in my team, and I literally send it to them and say, okay, tell me why not the how and the what? Yeah.

Speaker 3 00:36:13  but you know what? I do what I pay attention to on a day in, day out basis. I mean, we didn’t talk much about fintech workflow and embedded banking, in this conversation, but, you know, I’m heavily looking at, fintech and, and bank tech newsletters as one, I’m going to probably mispronounce his name, but Linus, Linus, his newsletter is helping me understand what is happening in the fintech. Fintech. For us, being a fintech workflow company, that’s really critical. And then from a company and product perspective, I, I’m pretty vigilant about listening to Lenny’s podcast. he’s, he’s a product leader and talks a lot about product, but I think listening to some of the challenges that are articulated and solutions and thought leaders that are on his podcast, he’s talking to some of the most influential people in the industry. So those are the things that I pay attention to in terms of education.

Speaker 2 00:37:09  That’s great. Thank you so much for those. Yeah. All right. Jonathon.

Speaker 2 00:37:12  Well, thanks. Thanks a lot for your time this morning. And we’ll see you on the slopes in a in a month or two.

Speaker 3 00:37:17  All right. Thanks, Julian. Appreciate it.

Speaker 2 00:37:19  Take care.

Speaker 1 00:37:25  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.