Jim Sharpe: The Future of Interaction at Events & Leading a Breakthrough Pivot

This episode is sponsored by Contentfy, a premium video editing and content repurposing service for busy content creators, influencers, brands, podcasters, YouTubers, and marketers. Contentfy provides unlimited end-to-end editing and repurposing services to help you get your video and audio content edited and repurposed quickly, easily, and reliably. Join other busy content creators, founders, brands, and marketers who now spend even more time creating while they take care of the rest. You no longer need to worry about spending hours editing anymore. Just create content, build your audience, and grow your business. If you're a content creator looking to save time and money, or looking to outsource your content marketing team, get your first free video edited now at contentfy.co. If you'd like to sponsor the SaaS District podcast or recommend any guests that you think would be valuable to be on the show, visit horizoncapital.com/saas-podcast today. Thanks again, folks.

Thank you.

Hello, hello everyone. This is your host, Akeel Jabbar, and welcome back to another episode of SaaS District. In today's episode, we'll be talking about leading a breakthrough pivot and the future of interactions at events. Today we have our guest Jim Sharpe joining us. Jim is the CEO at Eventree, an event management technology that enables thousands of brands globally to transform the way they plan and execute their events and meetings for virtual, hybrid, and in-person event experiences. Throughout his career, Jim has held high— has led high-performing teams in private equity-backed tech-enabled businesses, investing in talent, service, and product, resulting in significant revenue growth. Prior to joining Eventree, Jim was the Managing Director and GM of Gerson Lerman Group. In his capacity, he led several hundred professionals and achieved significant expansion while growing revenues to over $200 million. So welcome, Jim. Super excited to have you on the SaaS District show today.

Great, Akeel. Thanks very much for having me on the show.

So we always like to start off, can you share obviously your personal background, past positions, and what drew you to join Eventree as CEO? think last year was January 2020?

That's right. So I've been at the company for about 14 months at this point, but throughout my career, I primarily have spent time in the tech-enabled services business. So as you mentioned, I did 2 different 6-year stints at a company called GLG, Gerson Lehrman Group, and we pioneered the expert network model, which started in the financial services space and then went to all different user types. And I was an early employee of that company, and again, worked there on 2 different occasions, um, and ran a $200 million business reporting into the CEO. Prior to, um, coming to Aventri, um, it is worth noting that in between stints at GLG, I actually did, um, build, uh, re-engineer, and sell a manufacturing business in rural Florida with a private equity firm. Uh, that is probably a, uh, for a different, uh, different conversation, but it's just worth, worth pointing out. But I came over to Eventry in January of 2020, obviously didn't know we were 6 weeks away from a pandemic beginning, which is the discussion, but I joined the company for a few reasons. The first was that it's an industry going through a tremendous amount of technological change. So events are a huge part of the marketing stack of any industry, and event planners were struggling with their own spreadsheets and individual solutions to run their events programs. So increasingly, they're moving to large software platforms like Eventbrite. So that's one thing I thought about the market. Also, within the market, there was a large competitor in the space, followed by a number of other competitors like Eventbrite. And I saw that as an opportunity to innovate and perhaps win some market share in that growing market. Obviously, Eventbrite has a spectacular team of people, so I observed that right from the get-go. a great product as well. So I thought it would be an outstanding team to lead. And perhaps most importantly is I had a trusted relationship with the private equity firm that brought me into the company. I think it's important to know your investors from the get-go, and we thought it would be a great opportunity to enter the market and see what we could do.

Cool. So this is just an assumption, but correct me if I'm wrong. So I would assume with COVID when you joined, couple months in, you know, virtual events became, you know, the new booming industry. And I think that's where probably most of your growth came in, and you had to make that pivot, which we'll, you know, you can talk about. Can you share a little bit of insights of what the growth in the space looked like? You know, do you have any trends, numbers, and what— how did that help, you know, Eventbrii kind of lead that acceleration?

Absolutely. And let me talk about Eventbrii just for a moment so that everybody understands, like, the company. You described a bunch of— much of it, but we We're a software and services business for enterprises that throw events and meetings. We have about 60,000 events a year that go through our platform, about 5 million registered attendees that go through our platform on an annual basis. Our customer base is 1,400 enterprises ranging from leading airlines, consumer companies, banks, universities, nonprofits. So 1,400 of those customers, and they leverage us, as you mentioned, to manage their live, virtual, and hybrid event capabilities alongside a large onsite services business that we have that goes to large trade shows. So that's the business, 250 employees, about $50 million top line. To answer your question, Akeel, so yeah, the virtual events business was something that frankly wasn't really on my roadmap when I took the job in January of 2020. We had plenty of work to do in live events. But I remember the first phone call pertaining to a trade show that where there was a debate over wearing masks at the trade show or not. A couple of weeks later, Mobile World Congress was canceled. I remember getting that phone call as well, which was an event that we were supposed to serve. And that just sparked a major period of uncertainty and then transition in the industry. If you look at the virtual event space now, It is a market that is expected to blossom to about $800 billion by 2030, so it's becoming a big market. And based on our research, about 89% of event planners believe that virtual event components will remain very important for the future. So it's a big part of the event stack going forward. And in terms of how it impacted Eventree, so we had to go into nights and weekends mode in Q2 and Q3 to develop our own virtual event technology, and we built one We got it into the market by the end of Q3, the first iteration of it, and then we've recently released our second iteration of the technology, which has outstanding features we'll probably talk about today. But in terms of what happened in Q4, so we saw 13,000 events take place on our platform. Keep in mind, all of these are virtual. So 13,000 events leveraging our platform, 1.4 million registrations going through our platform in Q4. What ended up in Q2 being a huge downdraft in terms of live event engagement, I can share the opposite stats with you on that, resulted in Q4 almost coming back to the same levels that you saw prior to the pandemic. It's just that everything was virtual. So it is just a, it's a big opportunity now for the events industry. We'll talk in a bit about the upcoming changes and how virtual and live will work together. But yes, it's a, virtual has certainly taken over for the time being and has provided event planners was a tremendous opportunity to keep their events programs going and even make the most of them.

Yeah, it seems like you made the right move. I mean, if you guys waited it out and, you know, thought it was going to be a short-term thing and, you know, continue to hope on those live events, I mean, you probably would have stayed, you know, you wouldn't be able to rebound as great as you guys did. Um, yeah, and then as kind of vaccines are rolling out and over these couple of, you know, these months and the rest of the year, um, do you expect this kind of format to continue, decrease, or what kind of behavior do you expect to see in the industry Where people will be leading events?

Yeah, so we are very hopeful right now that the live events business is turning a corner. We appeared live in Orlando in February with Informa, which is the world's largest trade show operator. We partnered with them to provide a safe, badge-free, touch-free way to attend an event, which is a very interesting thing we're excited about. Hopeful and seeing our customers start to return to live events. So we're hearing about the largest trade shows are back on the books for June and afterwards. People are starting to think about live events again, but I think the key to returning to live events is going to be safety, which is going to tie into the way that you can attend these events in a socially distanced manner. You can still exchange information with people without having to pass business cards. And so we're hard at work developing that technology with some of our partners, but what we expect for virtual going forward is that we do continue to expect virtual event formats, even in a safe, quote unquote, environment, to be a huge part of the stack. We think that 80% of the live event formats that were around prior to the pandemic will come back with a vengeance. We think that another 20% of those will probably swing over to virtual formats where people realize that the budget or other just benefits of being virtual makes sense. And then we expect a whole new world of virtual event formats that didn't exist before to pop up as people realize that you can get your teams together more frequently in a virtual environment. And then lastly, Akeel, is the growth of the hybrid market. So what we really think is going to happen is that you're going to see live events and virtual events come together and have live events going on that have a similar but different set of content and engagement going on virtually. And the best platforms, the all-in-one integrated platforms like Eventree, are going to have the ability for attendees, sponsors, and even event planners to move interchangeably between all those different formats. So we're investing heavily toward the hybrid event market. We are currently positioned as an all-in-one platform that allows everybody to move between those different formats. So it should be an exciting time.

Yeah, that's exciting to see. So would you say, would you say there's any certain locations where you're seeing most of these virtual events happening in 2021 or even live events? And then, so you mentioned some kind of future opportunities for improvements. Do you see that being the frontier of kind of innovation in this space being those hybrid events, or is there anything else that we can expect to see?

Yeah, so that's a great question on locations. So the places that you'd expect, Florida, Nevada, the type of economies that rely most on events and trade shows, and also happen to have good weather, which is probably why many of the trade shows go there, is those are opening up first. And those are the ones that have the space and the ability to do so safely, the largest budgets are there. So we're seeing it occur first in these warm weather locations that are traditionally big areas for trade shows. So that's the first place it's opening, but you are hearing far more rumblings actually in the last couple of weeks of people starting to open their live event programs back up. So we're excited for that. So that's fantastic. In terms of innovation within this arena, we see a few areas of innovation. The first is on the virtual front, which is that The problem with virtual events today, and I think we all agree when we attend them, is that they can be pretty flat. It's difficult to engage with the content. And what event planners are struggling with is how do we keep our attendees engaged? We may have 5 times as many people at the event, but how do we keep them interested in what's going on? And so what they're doing is they're adapting their formats to make them punchier, short-form, more engaging and interactive through gamification and other things with the attendees. So there's a big engagement piece there. Another piece is that of networking. I think you also agree that one of the best parts about events is the ability to serendipitously or directly engage with people and do business. And that's been lost for the most part with virtual events. And so our new platform that we released has a lot of the innovation that we're looking forward to in networking. You know, for example, Our platform has a recommendation engine, so when you sign up for an event, it asks you a couple of questions about your interests and then recommends a series of attendees that you should meet with, right? So it recommends who to engage with, which is great. So you could be walking around a virtual show floor, so to speak, and you know who's to your left and who's to your right that you should talk to. We also have other technologies such as video chat, breakout rooms, other things that allow groups of people, either one-on-one or in small gatherings to get together virtually. So that's a big area of innovation right now that everybody's focusing on. And then there's this whole element, Akeel, around ease of use, which is that coming out of this pandemic, we're gonna have probably reduced team sizes at a lot of these companies. So you're gonna have to do more with less.

Right.

And just because you have a complex event doesn't mean your software needs to be complex. And therefore what we're all working on is arranging technology that makes it easy to use. And that's a big rallying cry for my team right now is all around the ease of use of all the technology that we create. So we think those are areas of innovation. And the last one is that of monetization, which is how do you make money at these events if your goal is to make money?

Sure.

And there's a big movement toward creating exhibitor booths that allow exhibitors virtually to engage with attendees and then greater sponsorship opportunities. So I don't know if you've been to a virtual event where the happy hour is sponsored by somebody or you see banner ads at the virtual event, but that's part of a continued innovation going on to provide more sponsorship and ROI opportunities at these events.

So ease of use, monetization, and being able to kind of— another point of that is also kind of the safety part, right? When you're thinking about live events where you have handshakes, business cards being traded, and there's probably that little bit of hesitation from from people to come back. Is there any piece on that technology front that you guys are implementing to help people feel safe coming back and make sure they have that experience, get that engagement for both attendees and exhibitors?

Yes, great question. So on the technology side, I think one thing we all agree with is that the technology, the best technology is technology that you barely know is there. And this is something we've been focusing on as we think about the return to live events. I did mention the case study with Informa where we were at that pop-up magic show in February. With that technology, the first thing we were trying to solve for was seamless check-in at the event, so the ability to go to the event, you don't have to wait in line anymore. You showed a QR code that you had on your mobile device that we created that allowed you to enter the event, without having any issues, right? So that's, that's the first advantage that creates safety and social distancing. The other impact of that is it allows you session control, so you can control who's in the room, how many people are in the room, and make sure that everything's being kept in a safe manner. And that's another technology that we're developing. And then with that, the great benefit of this kind of badgeless check-in type technology is it allows you to exchange information with other attendees very seamlessly. So as opposed to a paper business card or other collateral, you can use your mobile device to scan with somebody else and immediately exchange valuable information about one another. So we think that these badges are easy to use. In our experience, they are preferred by most people on the show floor, and we think it represents a huge area of innovation for safety. One other thing to keep in mind about safety is that you also need a backup plan, and that's part of the virtual experience as well. Let's imagine for a minute that you're throwing an event in Orlando next month and then something happens related to health or otherwise, and you need to have a backup plan for all that work you put into your show. And therefore it's also important for people to have, if they're not doing a hybrid component, to have a plan about what they would do virtually in a pinch to make sure that event occurs. And I think that's another key consideration when it comes to safety.

Makes sense. So you've got the seamless kind of check-in, you've got the meetings or business cards going through the app, I guess now you just need those virtual handshakes and we're set, right?

Yeah, yeah. And then also you have AI, which is gonna be, you know, helping to manage some of the session control and then facial recognition. So we saw some big shows a year ago use facial recognition. Of course, there's security concerns there, so you need to make sure you have a secure platform, but we do expect that that will be an increasingly utilized way to welcome attendees at these events. So we're excited for all the technology innovation that's underway, and we have a couple of the largest partners in the world that we're working with directly on this. And so we have had a front row seat to much of the concerns that are underway with safety.

Super cool. I'm excited to see it as well, what kind of how it plays out. In terms of, you know, 'cause a lot of our listeners are SaaS founders or marketers, right? They're looking to maybe, or they're considering events, that was part of their marketing budget, going to events, maybe hosting an event. Would you say hosting a virtual or hybrid event is for every business? Because I know you work with a lot of enterprise clients, or how can you say a SaaS company start hosting a virtual event? Why should they consider organizing one?

Yes, so I do think it depends on what your goals are. I think we all agree that nothing beats the value of a face-to-face event, so we would say that the greatest way to get your constituents together is that way. But increasingly, we're gonna be leveraging virtual. I do think there are a number of reasons why your listeners would wanna consider getting an event or events on the calendar. I think the benefit of virtual is that you can reach a large part of your audience at once. You can do so on a budget that you couldn't before. And now with the capabilities that we've been describing, you can make it a far more enriching experience. So I think that the ability to monetize the event is important depending on what the goals of the organization are. We've talked about that. I think the way to make these events successful, if you're an organization, is first you need to have a platform that can handle what you're looking to do. So you need to have an understanding of how many people, how many event days, how many speakers, the type of interactivity you're going to have, and the features you need. So that's the first goal. The second is making sure you put together an agenda that makes sense for whatever your goals are. So you have to have the right interactivity of speakers, keynotes, gamification. You know, at our global kickoff, Akeel, a month ago, we had celebrity cameos. So every once in a while we would break in with a celebrity that was talking to us for a couple of minutes, and that was a great way to keep people engaged. Um, you have contests, you have polls, so you just need to have an interactive type of, um, way of connecting all of your attendees. And then, you know, the other part is the networking side too, which we described, is that when your attendees come to the show, they want to meet other people, and you need to make sure that you have networking tools that will benefit them overall. So we do recommend it, of course. We think that based on the fact that 1 out of every 5 marketing dollars goes toward events, which means it's a big business, it's, you know, it's a— some say it's a trillion-dollar market overall if you include all the different ways people are getting together, but We think it makes a lot of sense to engage in virtual and live event formats and just have it be a part of your marketing stack, especially given how noisy and crowded a lot of these marketing channels are these days. I mean, online marketing, pay-per-click, and all of that. For you to really engage leads that you want to engage with, we feel like the event is a great way to capture that.

Okay. So if I'm thinking of it from a marketer's perspective or founder, I've got a budget for leading events. And obviously at the end of the day, I'm gonna invest all this money into it. I have to think about ROI, just like you as a CEO, you think about all your investments. What, you know, tickets are being one way of kind of monetizing events, and you mentioned some other ways. Can you talk about what are some other ways to monetize or prove that ROI, or what are some clever ways that you've seen ROI has been proven at these virtual events so far?

Yes, so there's what's been done, there's sort of what's underway, and then there's a bit of a futuristic view of that as well. So you mentioned tickets, and obviously registrations is, the old way to make money. But envision a world now where you could have 5,000 people at your live event and 500,000 people at your virtual event. That creates whole new opportunities for revenue from attendees. So that's the first side, is just global reach. And we've seen benefits of getting more attendees to an event because it's virtual. So there's that. The second way to monetize is through sponsorships. So that, there are a few ways to do that. One is by setting up virtual booths. So You can have sponsors that are paying real money in a virtual format at the show, and attendees are finding ways to video chat and engage with content from that virtual sponsor the way that they would at a live trade show or event. That's one way. The other is just pure sponsorship opportunities to monetize is that you're now providing access to banners, sponsored activities, this poll is sponsored by so-and-so, surveys that are running throughout the show. These are all things you can monetize for the large part of the market that is sponsorship revenue. And then with that also, I think if you're engaging an all-in-one platform like an Eventree, you have access to very rich data that you can leverage in the future. So you know who went to that event, You know what they paid attention to, you know how much time they spent in that particular session. That data is stuff that you can leverage as a marketer in the future toward generating greater outcomes for your attendees. So we think that that's another, that's another big area of it. Now the last frontier is content libraries, and this is where we're starting to look to the future a bit. You know, we envision a world of Netflix-type engagement with the content of events. So what you have today is kind of static content libraries, which is a virtual event allows you to access the content of that event during the event. You go back to your hotel room, for example, you can log into an event that took place that day. Great. What we're also seeing now, and something that we have in place, is we have a sort of instant and rich content library that is accessible for years after the event takes place. So now you have all this content at the touch of a button, What we're also envisioning in the future is that we start to aggregate all that content, turn it into a marketplace, or at least an area where people can consume that content, and then that may bring all sorts of new monetization capabilities in the future if you think about just the value of all these video platforms. The great thing about events is that the attendees are focusing generally on a very specific set of topics that therefore will have a very specific and interested set of users in the future that would like to consume it. So we're thinking about how we create that last area of the monetization, which is making the most of the content going forward.

Super cool. I kind of want to shift gears and talking about kind of how you approach the business model and your framework of how you make product development decisions, because I think there's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of risk and a lot of uncertainty as we've seen in the last year. But you got your solution, you know, work with Many different kind of industries, different types of events, different size and stages of businesses, and different event job kind of roles, what I've seen. What's kind of your framework and how you make those decisions and roadmap with so many of these variables? Because I know you mentioned you had those front row seats with some of the big guys, and, you know, they're leading those conversations. Are you just focusing on the 80/20 of those few guys helping you make those decisions, or do you have some other way of looking at that and approaching it? This is more for CEOs and— and helping them as well?

Yeah, so it's one of the greatest challenges and then also most exciting opportunities is the product roadmap, especially in a fast and rapidly changing industry like we're in. The first thing we always do is we listen to the market. So this morning we had our Client Innovation Council, which is a quarterly event that we host with a number of our customers where we share advanced views into updates on our business and then get their feedback, right? So that is an important way to develop your product roadmap is to talk to your customers, and we're lucky to have 1,400 of the largest enterprises in the world. In fact, we signed our largest enterprise deal of all time just yesterday, which was fantastic. So there's that listening to the customer, and then you have to set up the right framework. And this is something that I overhauled when I got here, is that we built a committee structure that allowed us to stay formal but also stay agile, which meant that We drive content strategy with client influence, but the strategy itself is top-down, but the accountability for executing that is bottoms-up. What that means is that we have a 3-layered committee structure that is underway, that is always evaluating our product roadmap and pivoting and adjusting the swim lanes based on what we think needs priority. I'll tell you, it's changing every week right now because of all the innovation in our space, and I can talk about that in a minute. But the, the third layer of that committee structure, everybody is welcome to attend that, which means that you have somebody from sales or customer success listening in on the product roadmap that can express some concerns or support of what's going on. And that has really helped us in this world of innovation in virtual where, for example, our team is working 7 days a week right now to innovate around our next generation of features. You need to be agile. It's something very new for us, so I think now we have sort of week-to-week agility on our product roadmap. As we build things, we circle back and make sure it's the right stuff. Then you obviously have to align the rest of your team, your sales materials, your training, all this other stuff around the product roadmap as it's developing. It needs to be a very immersive process for the entire company, but you need to maintain that formality to make sure that you're sticking to it and that you're communicating well across the company. And I think that if there's one thing we've done well in our ability to roll out not one but two virtual technologies and also innovate our onsite safety technology, it's been the fact that we have a very tight product development effort underway now.

I love that idea of kind of building a committee to kind of, you know, run those ideas and have us kind of as mentors but also as a sound like a board, right? Can you speak a little bit more? How big is the size of this committee that you work with? How did you decide who would be the right fit there to be part of this?

Yes. So you have 3 layers of committee. The first one at the top is the strategic direction. So they take and recommend direction from the executive committee, which then allows them to chart out a hypothetical roadmap for the quarter. And that group of people is probably a half dozen that are setting that strategy. Then from there, you get into the next group, which is actually dividing up the responsibilities among various teams. So say we have X number of developers, so we can handle 6 different development streams at one time. They then allocate the resources across those development teams and then report that back to the executive team on the timing. The third area, which is more than a dozen attendees, and that's the one that tends to include more representatives from around The company, that one is the actual tactical execution. So where are we this week? Did we get it done? How is this feature working out? And that is one where a lot of the actual ingenuity occurs because we learn on the fly what the challenges are or where we can innovate. And so those committees are chatting with each other. The invitations are pretty much open access. The minutes of those meetings are posted publicly so that you can log in and see what was discussed at those meetings. Because I think that one challenge that many of your listeners probably experience is that there's always this finger-pointing between the go-to-market organization and the product or technology organization where, you know, one side says, uh, you know, we created something but you didn't sell it. The other side says you didn't listen to us when we told you what we needed to sell. So you have to have that interactivity, and that's one gap that I've really worked hard to bridge. And I'll tell you that a lot of our discussions, they're, they're real. I mean, people are very adamant about what we need, especially in this day and age of change, and it's led to a tremendous amount of Positive development, uh, at rapid speed.

Love it, love it. It makes sense. Um, so as a new CEO, you know, you started, uh, you know, January 2020, uh, you know, company kind of came to a halt a few months later. I believe you guys had to secure some kind of funding, you know, obviously your company's lifeblood, uh, events at a halt there. Um, and I believe you're also the co-founder and GP at Lux Capital, what I see on your profile. What are your recommendations for attracting and then also building that strong foundation and trust with those investors when you have all that risk at the same time hitting you at a big drop in revenue at that point?

Yes, it was a very interesting time. And I think I'll kind of— the end of the story is that we raised capital from our existing investors, a large amount of capital that would allow us to both shore up the business during uncertain times, but also innovate and build our virtual platforms. But how did we do that? I think a lot of that comes to what you said, which is around trust. And so when things started getting very uncertain in late Q1, early Q2, I did something pretty dramatic, which is that we moved from quarterly board meetings and monthly calls to weekly board meetings, which sounds pretty time-consuming. But what we did was we built a template that allowed us to communicate communicate with the board on a weekly basis the rapidly changing numbers and insights that we were seeing from the front lines. That kept us all in tune, which numbers that were moving millions of dollars on a weekly basis, moving around based on assumptions. We had 3 different recovery scenarios. You may laugh. The first recovery scenario was May 2020, which didn't happen. The third recovery scenario was spring 2021, which guess where we are today. Going to those weekly board meetings, I think, established a sense of trust because we had to make dramatic changes in a short period of time. We did have to reduce our team in Q2 based on what we were seeing from the market, so we made some very difficult decisions, but the fact that we faced reality quickly and early on not only gave us trust with our investors, but it gave us the breathing room to be able to execute and recover. So what that led to was an internal discussion of— we made the hard decisions to right-size the business. We then knew we wanted to lean forward on virtual, of course, conservatively. And that led us to raise a round of capital from our existing investors, which include a few private equity firms, and go forward. So I do think that the first part of Having trust with your investors is to find the right investors. I think you need to work with people you trust. I am very fortunate in actually my career, I've had quite a few trusted backers, but I've worked with private equity almost everywhere I've been. And here, the team at HGTC has been a great partner to me. So we're lucky there. And then give them the reasons to trust you, which is be willing to make the tough decisions, pivot quickly, face reality, as I said, and, you know, none of us expected what happened in Q2, but we came together as a team, uh, and made some tough decisions and we're better off for it, uh, in many ways.

Yeah, that makes sense. Uh, Jim, I want to kind of switch gears, move into the kind of rapid-fire questions. I mean, obviously these are just questions that are rapid, but you can answer them kind of as quickly or as slowly as possible. Um, look, looking back now, I think this is more, you know, if you were starting back your entrepreneurial journey or Or back when you were, say, 25 years old, what's one piece of advice you wish you had known and would tell yourself now based on your wisdom and experience?

Getting personal here. So there's a lot I would tell myself, and I have to remind myself that I'm not 25 anymore sometimes. But so, you know, if you think about from the business front, I'll say, you know, the advice I would give myself, you know, other than buying Amazon stock, you know, when I was 25 would be, I think that it's important to align yourself with those who you trust and those who are more talented than you are. I think that being challenged by very bright people helps you grow immediately. The other thing I've realized is that I think the most stressful situations in my career have been where I developed the most. Therefore, looking back and not shying away from, but embracing those moments is something that I would tell myself to do more. And then I think, you know, lastly, there's sort of this element of being patient. I think that I'm a person who moved around a little bit early in my career, and I think that what I didn't realize was that being positioned well and being skilled for an opportunity means the opportunity will generally find you, and sometimes you have to be a little bit patient in letting that unfold. So I think that's the professional advice. And then on the personal advice, you know, it does go by fast. You know, I'm not 25 anymore. I just tell myself to be present and take plenty of photos because it goes by.

That's very true. Sound advice. What are some of the biggest challenges you're currently facing in order to continue to grow Aventurine? What keeps you up at night now? Imagine it'd be a lot different last year, but in today's environment, what's keeping you up at night?

On the business front, the first thing that has caught me off guard a bit is just the rapid pace. of product innovation in our market. So when I took this job, I had a roadmap in my mind, and now with the Zoom effect and the billions of dollars going into this arena, the products are changing more quickly than ever before. So I'm always paranoid, very paranoid about thinking, what next? What next? So that's one thing, but I think the main thing that keeps me up at night is execution risk, which is saying that We have a very talented team at Aventry. We know what we need to do, but it's very important that we continue to collaborate and to drive positive change as quickly as we possibly can. And that's what keeps me up at night. And I actually think to myself every single day, what could I be doing tomorrow that's going to help to drive positive change at the company? And if there's some pocket or, or gap that's created at the company, maybe I can fill that gap to help us, to help us move forward.

Nice. Who or what would you say are 3 best resources? These can be books, people, mentors, or maybe people you follow who you'd say have been the most instrumental to your success over these last few years.

Well, yeah, I think if we want to talk professionally speaking, I think everybody is very lucky to have a mentor that helps them develop earlier in their career. I think there are many innovative CEOs out there who we all follow on Twitter, Elon Musk and others, and love to follow their innovation and their thought process. But if I just kind of really get down to it, there was a teammate when I was first at GLG who was actually my age and was my manager. And we were classmates at school as well previously. And what I learned from that mentor was that this person really helped me professionalize as an adult. at a young age because for some reason, he was just operating at a far more mature level than I was at that particular point in time. I think that really helped me come along and that mentorship helped propel me to some of the work ethic and capability I have today. As far as reading goes, I like to read biography. I read about everybody from Musk to Andrew Carnegie or whatever it might be, just talking through and learning from successful business people. There's a leadership book that I like, which is called How to Have a Good Day by Caroline Webb, and she's a former McKinsey partner who focuses on organizational design. It's just a good primer for anybody hopping into a new role, similar to the book, The First 100 Days, or The First 90 Days, I can't remember. I like her book, and I think it's very down-to-earth advice on how to run an organization well and develop positive relationships and teams. So that's something that I read and reread often. And then on the personal front, I mean, if we're getting down to it, there's a couple of books that have really influenced me in my life, and one of them is a book called The Untethered Soul. I don't know if you've read that book, but it's a book that helps you stay centered and process the information in your life in a way that allows you to Stay joyful and just keep in mind that at the end of the day, we're all floating through space on this massive planet in a vast universe, and we shouldn't take anything too seriously. That's some of the inspiration that I draw from.

Yeah, it's always good to have that reminder, right? We're just a speck of dust in this universe and The Untethered Soul, I'm going to have to get that book today. We'll add those books to the show notes for people to check out as well if you want to to download or get it from Amazon. Uh, Jim, what does success mean to you today, whether it's personally, financially, business, life? No, no right answer. Just how do you define it in your own mind?

Yeah. Um, great question. And, you know, I think for me, professionally speaking, as someone who moved around in different markets and industries, I think that what I realized that I strive for most is the ability to lead great teams to do great things. It doesn't matter the industry that we're in necessarily, but the ability to lead a great team of people to do outstanding things is what really inspires me. So I think that that's always what I'm looking for. Even in a manufacturing setting, where your team is very different than what you might find in a software setting, the ability to set a goal and to overcome odds and to win is something that makes me proud. And with that usually comes job creation, which is another thing that I'm very proud of in my particular career. So I love that type of growth that is team-driven growth, and that's success to me. On the personal front, I'm somebody who's very blessed, and I think that if you have your health and you have family and great family and friends you can trust, I think you can consider yourself pretty successful. But I think the key to that, of course, as I said before, is making sure that you enjoy it all and and stay focused and centered.

Love it, love it. This has been, this has been great. I appreciate you jumping on SaaS District show today. Uh, final question, where can our founders get in touch with you, uh, learn more about you or Eventree and possibly signing up for your platform?

Absolutely. So thank you for asking. Uh, Eventree, we are available at eventree.com, also on social media. Uh, we post a decent amount of content on the industry. Uh, for me personally, you're welcome to Email me, jim.sharp@eventbree.com, and be happy to engage with you and tell you more about what we're up to. So thank you, Akeel. Really appreciate being on the show today and appreciate all the thoughtful conversation.

No, thank you for being here. I appreciate it. Cheers.

Thank you.

Thank you all for watching this episode and joining SaaS District today. Don't forget to like, subscribe, and hit the bell for future episodes. Where we interview top leaders in the SaaS industry. If you're a SaaS company looking to grow and unlock the true value of your business, get in touch with us at Horizon Capital and myself or one of our consultants will provide a free assessment to help you get there and hit your goals. If you have any feedback or suggestions for this podcast, please comment down below and help us improve our content for you all. Thanks again and see you on the next one.

Bye.