Cotter Cunningham – CEO of ExpertVoice

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  Hi, this is Julian Castelli. I’m the host of the Growth Elevated Leadership podcast, where each week I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders in the tech industry. Past guests have included CEOs and CXOs of great companies like Work Front, Healthcare, Radical Systems, in Moment, Vox, Pop me, the San Francisco 40 Niners, and many more. This podcast is brought to you by Growth Elevated at Growth Elevated where 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. we also have a blog, and we have an annual tech summit in the mountains of beautiful Park City, Utah.

Speaker 2 00:01:12  So if you want to learn about leadership and if you like skiing, check out Growth elevated.com and our annual Tech Summit. We’d love to see you there. Today I am super excited to welcome Cotter Cunningham to the podcast. Cotter is the CEO of Expert Voice. Expert voice help some of the world’s best brands build deeper relationships with their most influential, influential advocates in retail stores, professional settings, and online. All of this is done to improve the strength and reach of of trusted recommendations that help customers buy more confidently prior to Expert Voice. Cotter was the CEO of retail May not. Retail may not is a leading savings destination that enables brands to engage active shoppers and influence purchasing decisions. Cotter founded Retail Minot in 2009, and served as CEO through 2018 and chairman through 2020. As CEO, Qatar grew revenues from zero to almost $300 million and grew the business to to 650 employees, all while remaining profitable. He also raised over $250 million from a number of different investors, including Austin Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, GV, IVP, and J.P. Morgan.

Speaker 2 00:02:29  Qatar is now a venture partner at Next Coast Ventures, and that’s where I had the good fortune to get to know him. He’s also a husband and a father of three kids and lives in beautiful Austin, Texas. Please welcome Connor Cunningham. Yay!

Speaker 3 00:02:44  Thanks. Thanks for the intro. That was fun.

Speaker 2 00:02:48  Yeah, well, we’re looking forward to hearing a little bit about, about the journey and some of the stories. So, you know, congratulations on on on all all the success. before we start talking about your company in Utah, which I’m tempted to do, let’s let’s go back a little bit to, to retail. May not. That’s an interesting company, right? yeah. You know, I look at it and I’ve used it for some coupons, occasionally. And, and so I look at it as kind of an e-commerce type of site. But tell me a little bit about how you got started with retail. Me not what was the what was the original idea? And did you have to iterate a little bit to get to where it was?

Speaker 3 00:03:22  Yeah, it’s a it’s a crazy story.

Speaker 3 00:03:25  So I was an entrepreneur in residence at Austin Ventures and kind of looking for a business, and we stumbled. I played around with coupons before there used to be a company called Fat Wallet that, did like rewards and cash back. And there was a couple of kind of smaller coupon players, and I started investigating the space. And it sounds so obnoxious to say this, so forgive me, but everybody I met was like a single, a solo entrepreneur. Inevitably, their background wasn’t marketing or anything like that. It was kind of scrappy, entrepreneurial types. And I felt like and a lot of them were kind of approaching it sort of part time and things like that. And so my thesis was, what if you had one of these and you ran it like a business, as opposed to sort of like a hobby that funded your, your lifestyle. And, because some of them had pretty amazing lifestyles. And I remember we, we bought three small companies on one day, and we ran those for you with an acquisition.

Speaker 2 00:04:36  So you had to be found some small players and said, let’s, let’s build a base. That’s right. Was the general idea the digitization of coupons going from paper to online or not so much.

Speaker 3 00:04:46  Not so much. It was really more just that at the time Retail. The well, the second the big the big thing is, was the one I mentioned that these were sort of run on professional. They sort of underlying sort of theme, I think, is this idea that at the time, e-commerce represented maybe 10% of the typical wallet spend. And of course, you feel like over time it’s going to be 90. And so let’s ride that, that growth up. and it proved right. I mean, I don’t know the exact I haven’t checked the exact percentages lately, but it’s certainly a bigger share of wallet for the average consumer today than it was when I started, in 2009.

Speaker 2 00:05:27  So help, help describe the ecosystem, right? Because I know it as a place, as a consumer, as a shopper, I can get a discount.

Speaker 2 00:05:35  But but you’re how are you getting those discounts and bring them together? And how are they unique discounts that you have at retail maybe not versus others or your marketplace of discounts.

Speaker 3 00:05:44  Yeah. So you tell me now. It was really innovative. It was started by two gentlemen from Melbourne, Australia. Like I said, I bought it about a year after, we started with three other sites and it quickly became the star of our little portfolio. And so we wound up sort of closing or winding down or just de-emphasizing the original three brands and putting all of our eggs into retail may not and literally change the name of the company, confusingly.

Speaker 2 00:06:13  To I was going to ask you where that name came from. So that was the Australian company’s name.

Speaker 3 00:06:17  Yeah, I see Australian coming out. It’s kind of a weird story. The guy had started a site called Bug Me Not, which was a way where, at the a lot of the, news sites, this is 2009. It was a different world.

Speaker 2 00:06:32  Had, the early days of the of the domain names and, and the great, great real estate grab.

Speaker 2 00:06:38  Right?

Speaker 3 00:06:38  Yeah, 100%. And so a lot of the news sites had started, requiring you to register. And so the whole concept behind Bug Me Not was you would register with generic like username and password, and you would post it and so I could go into bug me Not and grab that username and password. And so I wouldn’t have to register, I could use yours or something jointly. It’s kind of a fun UGC approach a little in a way. That’s the way they approached coupons. It was genius at the time. The interesting thing about it. So the ecosystem works like this. They’re online retailers and consumers. And so they’re looking for traffic. And so they use coupons as a way to drive traffic from the, from consumers. And so the interesting part about coupons is you don’t get paid on the use of the coupon. You get paid just for the traffic. So in other words, your cookie on retail may not. And then we deliver you to, you know, Kohl’s or Macy’s or whatever.

Speaker 3 00:07:41  And so that winds up in a paid Transaction, regardless of if you use a coupon or anything like that. Yeah. It’s pretty.

Speaker 2 00:07:50  It’s a traffic. It’s paid for traffic. Okay. Yeah.

Speaker 3 00:07:53  And so the, you know, typically a typical commission, I think it’s been pushed down pretty hard. Now I’m not in the business anymore, but, at the time it was around 5%. So not huge money. But, you know, if you do enough of them, it adds up. and so.

Speaker 2 00:08:10  This part of what’s called affiliate marketing and affiliate traffic, okay, that’s the category. All right.

Speaker 3 00:08:15  Yeah. And there are a couple of fun things about that, not the least of which was every every retailer has an affiliate marketing team and say, right, you had a clear customer who needed you and got bonuses on, you know, whether or not you were able to drive traffic to them. So there was a a definite win there as opposed to a lot of businesses like the one I’m in now.

Speaker 3 00:08:35  We don’t have a clear customer always. And so it can be challenging sometimes to say, hey, you know, you need us. And the guys like our girl or woman is like, hey, Dua. So that’s a thing. So anyway, there’s a clear customer.

Speaker 2 00:08:48  There’s a clear is the person in the marketing department. He’s who’s got a budget for affiliate traffic. Their job is to drive traffic. And what would you provide them?

Speaker 3 00:08:56  Yeah. Traffic literally.

Speaker 2 00:08:58  You provide them a tool set to build these coupons or.

Speaker 3 00:09:01  Whether that’s the that’s the best part of affiliate. So it’s all pre done. They’re they’re these couple of sites. Rakuten has one. It used to be Commission Junction and Link share back in the day. And so the the all the plumbing has been put in place. So you can actually run a coupon site with a very minimal sales group. Now we wound up really ramping up our sales group because we found that the more interactions you had with these affiliate managers, the better coupons you would get, the more exclusives you would get, the access to more interesting deals and stuff you would get.

Speaker 3 00:09:35  But the fun thing about retail, me not and I don’t want to miss this point, is kind of what we were talking about before. It let consumers post UGC user generated content on this site. So if you are out and about.

Speaker 2 00:09:49  You early days that became really critical, right?

Speaker 3 00:09:51  Right. And you were.

Speaker 2 00:09:52  An avenue for that or you helped them give you know.

Speaker 3 00:09:54  Yeah.

Speaker 2 00:09:55  Facilitate.

Speaker 3 00:09:57  If you found a fun coupon for gap or whatever, you could post it on retail. May not. You got points. We didn’t actually pay you or anything but.

Speaker 2 00:10:06  Gamify it a bit.

Speaker 3 00:10:07  We gamified it a little bit. And then the other thing that I think really helped is when you would post the coupon, you, the consumer, you would write it in a way that used your voice. And so, it helped in SEO a ton because you would typically describe the coupon or whatever the benefits were in the, in the way that a consumer would think, not the way that a marketer would think.

Speaker 3 00:10:34  So the example I always use is like women’s pants. They don’t always call them pants in the ads that come slacks or something like bottoms, but you don’t call them that. I mean, no human in the bottoms, like maybe for babies. And so, you know, it would be $5 off women’s pants at Kohl’s and you’d post that. And so I think that really helped. anyway, we wound up buying that company, and then it was a rocket ship for the first 4 or 5 years. It was really incredible.

Speaker 2 00:11:05  And and so you bought those startup companies, you kind of narrowed it down to the retail may not business. Then you just really started building on that business model.

Speaker 3 00:11:13  Yeah, that’s exactly right. about two years in, we started expanding internationally. So I bought Keep On sites in the UK, company called Voucher Codes. We bought three sites in France and sort of pushed them together. We did some work in Germany, which was hard, and we never really mastered Germany for better or worse.

Speaker 3 00:11:34  We did some stuff in Australia. So yeah, we definitely sort of expanded that way and then we started playing around with obviously the things that were to come. So, cashback being a big one, browser extensions being huge.

Speaker 2 00:11:52  So you really became, you know, kind of the cutting edge of, of online traffic and generation and affiliate marketing and understanding all those things.

Speaker 3 00:12:00  Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, one of the leaders, there were certainly people in it with us.

Speaker 2 00:12:07  And so what were the stages like? You obviously you went all the way, you went public hundreds of millions of dollars. But what were the the high level stages if you had to break the journey down, start up phase, maybe growth stage and then public stage.

Speaker 3 00:12:21  Yeah. So we started with no employees, you know, just me in a tiny little office in the basement of Austin Ventures, and, Austin Ventures gave me $30 million, about 28 to buy the. That’s a.

Speaker 2 00:12:35  Good start.

Speaker 3 00:12:36  Good start.

Speaker 3 00:12:37  And if you start with 30 million in your pocket, you’re not doing anything wrong. to buy the three original sites. So they were all growing nicely and had pretty good revenues and pretty good growth. Our revenues are about 10 million to 12 million, kind of in that range. So you can.

Speaker 2 00:12:54  You you bought consolidated those. So you started at zero. Then you then you got a big big step change to ten. That’s right. What was the the next goal when you started ten. You’re trying to get there.

Speaker 3 00:13:05  My whole goal was to get to 100 million. Okay. I’ve been at Bankrate, a company in South Florida, before that, and we had worked. I’d had three different CEOs, and we had been gone from about 50 million to about 80 million during that time. I was there ten years, I think roughly. And, we never could get to a hundred million. And it always was. This kind of.

Speaker 2 00:13:28  You came in with that bogey. Very well. Well, well, well entrenched in your mind.

Speaker 3 00:13:32  No. Yeah. I mean, you know, the I can’t even describe it. It seemed almost unobtainable. And, the joke is that he told me not. I think we got there in about a year.

Speaker 2 00:13:44  One year.

Speaker 3 00:13:45  The second year. Second year. First year after we bought it. Yeah, it was doing about 30 million the day we bought it. And I think within a year we were doing almost a hundred. Yeah.

Speaker 2 00:13:57  Wow. Yeah. Okay. So that, that, that, that journey that you set yourself up for, for, you know, this might take three, five, ten years, one year to 100 million okay. So that so you, you you clearly know you’ve got a rocket ship at that point. You you hit you hit the wave right at the right time.

Speaker 3 00:14:12  Yeah.

Speaker 2 00:14:12  And so you have some massive scaling challenges that I suspect, right?

Speaker 3 00:14:17  Yeah, 100%. I mean, my favorite story about that is we needed some real estate. We were just bursting at the seams.

Speaker 3 00:14:23  We were over this coffee shop on South Congress and, you know, I mean, people were having to have meetings in the stairwell kind of thing. And so we wound up moving, a couple blocks north to, sort of downtown Austin. And I remember the only space I could get at the time was a floor like, for what Austin Real Estate has, is there’s a lot of empty space now, I think. But there wasn’t at the time. And so you had to take the whole floor and I didn’t need the whole floor. We had like 70 employees and I you know, I thought I remember telling our CEO, we will never use this whole floor. And I think we wound up taking 5 or 6 floors in the building by the end of the thing. But.

Speaker 2 00:15:08  And how long did it take you to occupy that first floor?

Speaker 3 00:15:11  Yeah, not very long. I mean, about a year. Yeah. So, we worked with some great people to help us with real estate, which I think is one of the hardest challenges, you know, to try and have enough space where you have enough space for people, but also you’re not sitting around looking at the space going, why do I have all this space? Right.

Speaker 3 00:15:31  because it’s not cheap. Right. And so we got lucky that, there’s a group here called HPI that was just fantastic in helping us kind of measure all that.

Speaker 2 00:15:42  Terrific. Okay, so you shoot up to 100 million. Now you’re at a incredible triple digit growth pace. how long did it take you to go public? When did you go public?

Speaker 3 00:15:52  Well, we went public four years after we started. So pretty. What was your.

Speaker 2 00:15:56  Revenue level at that point? Do you remember?

Speaker 3 00:15:59  About 180, I think I you’re you’re you’re testing my memory. but yeah.

Speaker 2 00:16:04  Okay. So within four years, four years to go, to go from 0 to 180 and going public, that that is the, the theoretical Super Bowl. I guess if you’re playing in the startup world, you know, what was that like? Tell me about.

Speaker 3 00:16:18  That. Yeah, it was crazy. I mean, it’s everything you’ve heard. I mean, my favorite story about going public was we, we had two great investment banks, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.

Speaker 3 00:16:32  And they were lovely and super smart. And we got lucky. And you know, they did a great job for us. But we were at fidelity and the salesperson for one of them was talking to the sale, the potential buyer at fidelity. Right. And they had been the Patriots game or something together. We’re going to go or something like that. And like I was just kind of sitting there drinking my coffee, listening to them talk. And it dawned on me, I’m the product here. Yeah, they’re selling you. They’re selling me. And it was a weird feeling because, you know, these guys are going to see each other a thousand more times in their careers or whatever. I’m there a day, you know? I mean, maybe you might be the.

Speaker 2 00:17:17  Flavor of the day and and you know, how how much are they going to emphasize you versus what’s coming tomorrow. Right.

Speaker 3 00:17:23  And, you know, and we got amazing advice and I wouldn’t change anything we did for the world.

Speaker 3 00:17:28  But you definitely realize you’re the commodity.

Speaker 2 00:17:33  Yeah, well, you went public on which exchange?

Speaker 3 00:17:39  Nasdaq.

Speaker 2 00:17:39  Yeah. So, you know, I mean, the reality is, though, but you’re you’re joining one of the world’s largest marketplaces and you’re, you’re a new you’re a new product on the shelf. Right? That’s exactly what it is.

Speaker 3 00:17:49  No, no, it was just kind of a crazy thing. Yeah. No, the going public. The other fun thing we did, I thought this was cool. So if you go public on the New York Stock Exchange, you get the famous balcony shot, right? Right. And the balcony holds 14 people. And I felt like, you know, at the time we were kind of 400 people, I think maybe 500. And to me, you know, I wanted them all on the balcony. Right. And so that seemed ridiculous. And so we talked to Nasdaq and they let us open the stock exchange in Austin at Austin City Limits, where they shoot the, the music.

Speaker 2 00:18:27  Oh, fantastic TV show.

Speaker 3 00:18:28  Yeah. And so we had a big party and, rang the bell.

Speaker 2 00:18:33  For some sort of. How do you do that?

Speaker 3 00:18:34  Yeah, we had a big stage and they, you know, and I’m sure it wasn’t connected or anything, but I got to slam the thing and, you know, the sirens went off. We had a band. It was, oh, that’s awesome.

Speaker 2 00:18:45  So you made it. You made it very inclusive. So your whole team can be part of that. No big screens and it’s been amazing. Bring your.

Speaker 3 00:18:51  Family out. I mean, you know, the whole thing, right. So it.

Speaker 2 00:18:54  Was that’s.

Speaker 3 00:18:55  Fantastic. Amazing day. And I think, you know, so often I mean I had the VCs come I mean you know, why not I mean it’s yeah. Yeah. How many times are you going to go public in your career. You know. So.

Speaker 2 00:19:06  Oh that’s that’s a great story. I’m glad to hear that.

Speaker 2 00:19:08  Well, you know this, you know, I read on your LinkedIn, you know, that you had an incredibly, high approval rating on some of those sites, like Glassdoor. People really liked working at your company, and you were incredibly well liked as a top rated CEO. Was was that something you focused on? Like how did you how did you in this growth? You you know, you’re obviously adding people trying to figure it, fill out flaws and all that. But how do you make it a good place to work and make sure that the culture was good, you know, during that rocket ship ride?

Speaker 3 00:19:39  I think it’s hard. I mean, like Austin then and now is really competitive. And so it’s not enough just to say we’re going to pay competitive salaries. I mean, Apple, Facebook, Google or all here they were coming at that time. And as well there’s a bunch of local great companies indeed started and is headquartered here. Dell, of course, the granddaddy of Austin tech is here.

Speaker 3 00:20:06  All amazing companies and great places to work. And so, you know, that’s your competition. When you’re thinking about like a product manager or a full stack engineer or front end person or something like that. All those people could go any of those places. And, you know, So it’s not enough just to say, well, we’re going to pay a competitive salary. You have to, I think, build a culture that people go, I want to be part of that. And so we did a couple things. We stole something from Amazon. One of the one of the things I’m most proud of is we stole a thing from Amazon called the bar raiser. And so it was a part of the, it was the it was supposedly the last part of your interview process, and we picked, I don’t know, I think 10 or 12 people from the company that we felt like represented kind of the best of us and from a cultural standpoint. And they would interview the every candidate, not just exclusively for culture fit.

Speaker 3 00:21:05  And they had a black ball. And so they could say, this guy, he’s not like us, you know, he’s not he’s not going to make it. He’s to cut the road. He didn’t talk about a team. He talks about himself, whatever. And, you know, I did.

Speaker 2 00:21:19  The final interview round. You You brought in your yeah, your best culture folks. And then they had to pass the culture bar.

Speaker 3 00:21:26  That’s exactly right. And I liked it. I thought it worked pretty well. And that was.

Speaker 2 00:21:31  Across the board every everyone that was hired. Well, that’s that’s not a small commitment.

Speaker 3 00:21:36  No. Yeah. And and inevitably and you can see this coming a hundred miles away. You know, there’s somebody you really want to hire that the person black balls, you know, and then you’re like, oh gosh, you know. And so, you know, you would talk to the person. Why why did we throw the black ball on on Sally. She seemed amazing to me when I interviewed her, you know, that kind of thing.

Speaker 3 00:21:56  But, you know, I mean, you’d work through it or you wouldn’t, but we you honored the process. Yeah.

Speaker 2 00:22:01  You have to honor to to to build.

Speaker 3 00:22:03  Otherwise it’s meaningless.

Speaker 2 00:22:05  I know it means a ton coming in, though. When you see that in an interview process, you. Everyone talks about culture. But that’s something probably that really speaks pretty loudly in the in the interviewing process.

Speaker 3 00:22:16  No. And it’s funny, I, I think culture has is something that we talk about now that for the longest, I mean, I’m older, I’m 62, the, the longest in my career culture wasn’t talked about. I mean, at least not any of the companies I was at. You know, it was just they it was a job. And so I think I think it’s definitely for the better. And I think it’s definitely something we try to focus on. You know, since I’ve been a CEO.

Speaker 2 00:22:46  So and that’s a really good example. You know there’s always the values on the wall and people kind of roll their eyes because sometimes they’re not consistently applied.

Speaker 2 00:22:54  But like the example that you just shared where you take the effort of using your the critical time of some of your best people to be part of that interview process and to give them the chance to blackball people and have to live with that, that that’s putting your money where your mouth is. I think that should probably speak volumes.

Speaker 3 00:23:10  No. And you? Yeah. I couldn’t agree more. And, you know, you talk about values. I remember I was at a big retailer who I won’t name because I don’t embarrass anybody. And they had a really well written set of values that were on the wall of the lobby. Right? We were waiting on the person to come pick us up, and I commented to our contact, I’m like, I love your values. And he was like, what are you talking about? And I pointed to the wall and he’s like, oh, I’ve never read those, you know? And so wow, what a it was so obvious that it was just some marketing hoo ha.

Speaker 3 00:23:45  And he’d never bought, you know, and he’s like, no, I don’t know anybody that’s ever read that and say, oh.

Speaker 2 00:23:49  My goodness.

Speaker 3 00:23:50  When we were going to do values, he told me not. And at my new company, we actually I don’t I thought it would be more powerful if instead of me coming up with what I think, we built a team of employees and had them say, here’s what’s important to us. And so I did that every time. Me not. And I did it again here.

Speaker 2 00:24:12  I love that. Well, I’d love to follow up and learn about that technique. But, so obviously this is this is a great story. It sounds like a ton of fun, but I’m sure there’s some things that, you know, looking back that you, with the viewpoint you have now and the perspective you have now that you might have done differently, what kind of lessons might you pull out to someone else who’s maybe, you know, we’re all aspiring to that kind of rocket ship, but whether they’re at the same slope or not, what are some of the lessons you can share? and things you might do differently if you did it again?

Speaker 3 00:24:42  Yeah.

Speaker 3 00:24:43  I think, you know, we probably over hired. We didn’t probably we definitely over hired. we struggled to find the right metric for sort of how to think about how many employees we needed to run the business. And I used to have this joke that, everybody needs a buddy. There are no one person departments. And so, you know, it’s a classic example that, you know, you think I remember I hired someone to run a strategy. Great guy, super smart. And I look up a year later and he’s got six people that were working for him, and that’s not his fault. He felt like we needed him. But to me, it was an example of, you know, building out a team that maybe we didn’t need. maybe we did.

Speaker 2 00:25:29  How would you handle that now if you were in that situation?

Speaker 3 00:25:31  Yeah, I we work hard to just. I just don’t hire. Right. We, we really have clamped down on I mean, we hire very it’s a much more first of all, we’ve I’ve always worked hard to hire in the interview process, but I’m pull I’ve pulled that back now into this sort of let’s talk about why you need someone.

Speaker 3 00:25:55  Right. And so if someone leaves, we don’t just automatically rehire for them. You know, we kind of take a step back and say, well, is there something we could do this job? Should we automate it? Should we outsource it? Should we move it offshore? What, you know, is there some other way to do this job that’s cheaper and more efficient. and I think that is a lesson that came with time, frankly. And it’s easy to get caught up in the kind of start up business of how many employees you have. How much money have you raised?

Speaker 2 00:26:26  Yeah. The vanity. Right?

Speaker 3 00:26:28  Yeah. Who do you raise?

Speaker 2 00:26:30  The process that you just described is what would get you to profitability and capital efficiency for sure.

Speaker 3 00:26:35  That’s right. And the joke is to me now it was crazy profitable. And so we probably weren’t as well. Not probably we weren’t as aggressive managing costs as you might be in a company that loses money.

Speaker 2 00:26:52  Yeah. Well, most people will listen to this podcast, are probably venture funded and they’re probably, you know, along the journey where they may still be losing money and getting to profitability while maintaining growth is really the name of the game.

Speaker 2 00:27:04  So, you know what you just said there in terms of really with every hire. Do you need that hire? Does it. You know, I love the idea of just replacing someone who’s there because that can sometimes be automatic. Yeah, right. But but you just walked through some really good criteria. You know, you need that person. Do you need that person full time? Do you need that person now? You know, do you need that person domestically. Right. You said about offshoring and then can you automate it? I think, you know, those are those are some great questions to ask, in terms of driving, you know, continue your growth, but but reducing your cost base as you go along so you get better, better profitable or more and more efficient.

Speaker 3 00:27:41  The other thing that happens, and you know this rarely, you almost never have someone immediately on deck, right? So if you quit tomorrow and I’ve got somebody that can start the next day, right? I mean, that just doesn’t happen.

Speaker 3 00:27:54  It doesn’t.

Speaker 2 00:27:54  Happen. Right. So your caps.

Speaker 3 00:27:56  Right. So in that sort of interim process where the person is left or leaving, but we haven’t brought in the replacement, I think it’s important to kind of talk to the team. Are we really stressed right now. Are we kind of doing okay. So yeah we we didn’t have good discipline on letting people go. We were very disciplined on hiring. But we definitely had people kind of bump along that, that maybe we should have been more aggressive about. So.

Speaker 2 00:28:28  Okay. Well that’s.

Speaker 3 00:28:29  Great.

Speaker 2 00:28:30  So tell me a little bit more about what you’re doing now at Expert Voice.

Speaker 3 00:28:34  Sure. Expert voice is a is kind of a quirky company. So you mentioned it in the in the opening we run pro programs for brands. And so the classic example. But it’s one of those companies you kind of have to explain for people to go, oh, okay. The example I always use is if you’re a ski instructor, you know, ski brands want you to wear their jacket, when you’re out and about, you know, the resort will give you a jacket, but but, I mean, you know, when you’re out and about or skiing on your own, you know, Helly Hansen wants you to wear their jacket.

Speaker 3 00:29:06  K2 wants you to wear their skis. I always tell the story. I skied for years in Taos. We grew up skiing there, and I had the same ski instructor for six years, and it was this guy in Jim and Jim skied on Rossignol. And man, I can assure you, when it was time for me to buy my first pair of skis, I was buying Rossignol. Or, you know, regardless, I remember that too.

Speaker 2 00:29:27  That was my first big, big, you know, new set of skis when I was aware enough of brands to make a make a choice.

Speaker 3 00:29:35  So brands need help managing those programs to make sure the ski instructors are qualified, to make sure that they are ski instructors, that kind of thing. And so we do that for them, and we manage that in an e-commerce sort of environment. So if you’re a ski instructor, you can come to expert voice and you have a ton of brands that want you to represent their stuff and they’re willing to sell you their stuff at a lower price to get you to, to be in.

Speaker 3 00:30:03  And that’s true if you’re a fireman or a doctor or nurse or, you know, golf pro, I mean, the list goes on.

Speaker 2 00:30:12  That sounds like a kind of a fun, fun area. You’re in. You’re you’re you’re in those aspirational recreational expert areas, right?

Speaker 3 00:30:19  Yeah. It’s funny. I haven’t always been as outdoorsy is I is I am forced to be now. So, we need to get you.

Speaker 2 00:30:33  Up here to Park City for our, growth elevated conference and do some skiing at Alta with us this year.

Speaker 3 00:30:40  I’m sure it’s fun.

Speaker 2 00:30:42  So tell me about, you in our, pre-game, we were you were talking about the challenge of being fully remote. You know, you’re you’re you’re in Austin. the company’s in Salt Lake. You’re back and forth, but, sometimes, you know, the people aren’t in the office in Salt Lake. how are you? How are you navigating that? What are your thoughts on on, you know, pros and cons?

Speaker 5 00:31:01  Yeah.

Speaker 3 00:31:02  We are fully remote.

Speaker 3 00:31:05  the company was headquartered in Salt Lake, and before the pandemic, I think there were two people out of the 150 or so that work there that weren’t in Salt Lake, and one of them commuted in every week. And then when the pandemic hit, people just scattered. And they moved to Seattle. They moved to Denver. they moved out from, you know, you know, Utah better than I, but out into the the backwoods of Utah, it’s beautiful. Why not? And so, When the pandemic ended, it would be almost impossible to bring the company back together. Coincidentally, that’s when I, we bought the company. I had a private equity firm in Austin called tritium. bought the company about almost exactly two years ago. And so there was no. You couldn’t put the genie back in the bottle, right? I mean, people were home and we just had to learn to live with it. But as you know, sort of the history of my own experience is very much kind of butts in seats mentality.

Speaker 3 00:32:13  and this is required us to as managers. You can’t be that way, right? I mean, we were joking before, before the call, I literally, you know, if you hadn’t had a shower, if you’re walking your dog, while we talk on the phone, I don’t know, you know, I mean, I guess I could hear the traffic or something, but we need to. It’s forces his managers to focus more on outcomes and not on sort of time and seat. And I think that’s pretty healthy. there are some jobs where that’s super easy. Sales is always the classic example of, you know, did you hit your quota? Yes. Then I kind of don’t care if you’ve played golf, you know, Friday afternoon or Four or something. I don’t know, maybe I do. but, old habits are hard to break. But, you know, for something that’s trickier, you know, programming, you know, we’ve used everybody’s tried a million things in programming to measure efficiency, but it’s it’s still challenging.

Speaker 3 00:33:17  And so, and operations and things like that can be more challenging to, to measure. But we’re working through it and it’s been a fun experience. People are great. the company is really, lovely. And, yeah, it’s going well.

Speaker 2 00:33:34  Well, I’m excited about, learning more and and and seeing you here when you’re in Utah. It’s great. Great. to have you, part of the Utah ecosystem, you know, speaking of that, the Utah ecosystem is is growing. But you you played a huge role in the Austin, tech scene, both, you know, in the venture capital space as well as, you know, obviously with retail may not, talk to me a little bit about what’s happening in Austin and, what are you most proud of there?

Speaker 3 00:34:00  Yeah. You know, it’s funny, the way I think about it is when I first moved to Austin, our biggest challenge when recruiting people, if someone was out of state was the trailing spouse. Problem is, how does your husband or wife that works find a job, especially if they were in tech when you’re at retail may not.

Speaker 3 00:34:26  And we really struggled with that at first. There was kind of Dell and indeed and that was it. And yeah. But now, you know you kind of never hear that anymore. There’s so much going on here. You know, as I mentioned before, you know, Apple, Google, Facebook, TikTok, all have pretty enormous offices here. Apple, especially the top.

Speaker 2 00:34:50  Tech markets for employment in the country.

Speaker 3 00:34:52  Yeah. And you know, so if you’re intact and you’re a trailing spouse, you can get a job if you want one. more than likely. And so that’s, to me, so exciting. I love to see that growth. there’s a good startup scene here. it used to be that there was just Austin Ventures. It was kind of the only venture firm in town, or certainly the dominant player. Maybe a better way to say it. And now there’s a lot of really well established. there’s still probably not enough seed capital here, but man, if you’re raising an A, you can definitely find people to talk to here.

Speaker 3 00:35:29  It’s still hard to raise money. Of course, raising money is hard. But, and I think that’s sometimes lost on entrepreneurs. I do a Q&A for a local newsletter. And, the most popular question by far is, you know, how do I raise money? Why am I having trouble? And, you know, not every idea can be funded and not every idea is a venture idea, so it’s still hard.

Speaker 2 00:35:57  Yeah, well, you know, I’ve enjoyed getting to know you through our work together at West Coast Ventures, and it’s a lot of fun to see all the exciting companies that, are being incubated and growing in Austin and across the country together. But that’s that’s been a real treat for me, and I’ve enjoyed it. So, that was a great story. Thank you for taking the time with us. You know, for the people that, are aspiring to to have the kind of success that you did, any any recommendations you have books or podcasts, do you think that, you know, that you read that you like, that they might, put on their list as they’re just doing their, continual, education?

Speaker 3 00:36:32  Sure.

Speaker 3 00:36:33  I would say two things. the thing I think that’s helped me as much as anything in my career is while I started in finance, I then shifted to marketing. And I think having a broader background has really served me well. I got lucky. There’s a branch of marketing. Direct marketing at the time required, pretty heavy analytical skills. And so, yeah, the finance background did. Yeah. So finance background was actually a benefit, not a negative. But, you know, that ability to sort of see across the platform has been invaluable. I can’t say it enough. And anytime someone comes to me, I’m like, get as much experience in as many different jobs you can in terms of podcasts or, books. my favorite business book is Shoe Dog. I think you’ve read it. it’s I love it. It’s truly amazing the grit that guy has. The founder of Nike is just Phil Knight. It’s just insane. I mean, his story after story where you just in the book where you’re just like, what this guy did to put Nike on the map is absolutely the classic example of what it takes to build a business.

Speaker 3 00:37:48  And I wish I could say I work half as hard as he did. It’s truly amazing.

Speaker 2 00:37:54  Yeah, that’s an awesome story. And you’re going to enjoy that movie. Er, it’s just a chapter in that book. But that, that’s a that’s a fun one about the Michael Jordan version, about it, chapter of that story. Well, Cotter, thank you so much for your time this morning. I think this was a great story, and I, I can’t wait to, continue to to work with you to, to help entrepreneurs in the way we are. And good luck. in all your, your ventures. Thanks so much.

Speaker 1 00:38:22  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.

Speaker 1 00:38:43  Thank you.