You Can Be Aligned At the Head or the Heart, but the Best Alignment is at the Wallet

Have you ever felt stuck and scared to take the next step because you're overthinking everything? Or maybe you're just juggling too many ideas and don't know which one to focus on. It's tough, right? And honestly, I'm in that position even right now. Even if your business starts to grow, moving too fast or not having the right team in place can cause problem. Welcome back to Mastering Tech Growth, where we interview industry leaders to bring you actionable insights and inspiring stories. I'm your host, Mike, and today we are talking with David Boyce. David is not just a successful leader, he's a lifelong entrepreneur who co-founded every business he's built from the ground up. What's even more amazing is that David has never worked a 9-to-5 job. From his very first company at age 22, creating businesses worth hundreds of millions of dollars today, David has charted his own path and turned bold ideas into lasting success. In this episode, David will share how he built and scaled his businesses, avoided common mistakes, and became the kind of leader who inspires teams and drives Real Growth. Welcome to the show, David. Thank you for joining us today.

Thank you so much, Mike. I really appreciate you having me.

Thank you for joining us today. Once, one more time, it's been a couple of minutes. So David, we have this question, which is, I wanna, I call it in the spirit of the show. And it goes like this. When I say mastering tech growth, what comes to mind?

You know, just that. I mean, it's growing a business and getting momentum in a business and having meaningful growth. It's hard. It's one of the hardest things companies do because it's not just about the product that you build. It's how you've packaged it, how you've priced it. It's, it's how differentiated it is in the market. And also to the apparatuses that you have set up. People just aren't going to buy your product. I mean, you have to have— in my case, we have to have very seasoned sales folks because the amount of money that our product costs on a monthly basis requires meetings, you know, requires discussions, requires conversation. So everybody out there on the phone probably has different levels of services. Some might be sold just on your website, you know, click a button, do a free trial, and you're off to the races. But, but at least products like ours, which are roughly $8,000 per month to buy our top software package, that's going to require a conversation. So I think growth is one of the most difficult things for a business to get going. The good news is once you have the momentum, once you figure it out, oftentimes you can, you can go for a long time and grow a business for like we have 3 or 4 years in a row. I think we've been probably 35% plus growth. So and we're a, you know, a couple hundred million dollar company.

Okay.

It's hard to do, but once you get it, I think you're, you know, you could keep it.

All right. So it's hard to get it moving to the right direction, which is the trajectory of growth, but once you get that momentum, it actually becomes easier. That's what we're saying.

I think so. It's just because it's so hard to do. You know, if you're growing your business, that's not by accident. You've done something right in order to get the momentum that you have in your business. So For us, my experience is once you have the momentum, you have to work really, you have to work hard to keep it. But the most difficult thing to do is get up.

It's get up.

Is get to the point where you're growing. And that's, I think that's the, because there's so many factors. It's not just your product, it's not just the price. It's not, there's a lot of things that have to go right. And some of that too is competitive. How competitive you are in the market. So you might have the best product and the best this and the best this, but your pricing is just not there because your business hasn't scaled enough to get some of the operational leverage that you need to keep your prices in line with where the market is. So there's a lot of things that go into growing a business. I think that's why from an investor perspective, it's probably the most valuable thing that a business can do to create value for itself is to grow. Because growth, if you think about it, it's the one thing that says, well, the market is buying this product or this service. At a rapid rate, something must be right.

Okay, right.

It's the one thing that— in fact, there's a whole category of private equity firms called growth investors. That's all they do is invest in companies that know how to grow. So it's, it's a very valuable, um, skill. And, um, but, but a lot of things have to go right.

Okay, so we do have a follow-up on this one, David. Then the You're absolutely right. You're 100% right. There's so many things which goes into growth, and there's so many levers you need to pull to actually make that happen. So the follow-up to this opening question with our show is, if you to choose one from all these factors which influences growth, what would that be?

Well, I'm a product— everyone would have something different to say here because they could find what's in their heart. And what they really believe in. I would say for me, what's driven our growth the most probably has been the product and the quality of the product and the results that we're able to get because I'm able to get people now who can tell the story of the product, right? So some people will focus on, I'm gonna get the best salespeople or I'm gonna get the whatever it might be. For us, We have done a lot of work on creating a technology solution for automotive dealerships. That's, that's what I do. And that solution has a promise, which is that you will sell and service more cars because it's an all-in-one solution. So for us, the solution was the biggest investment. The solution itself had to solve a problem in our industry, which it has, but it had to solve it in a material way and it had to solve it in a way that we could prove that it was a better mousetrap, whatever. I think at the end of the day, without that product and the passion that people have around it, I don't think that we would have enjoyed the success that we did. So we had to, we had to wait until our product was worthy before we really, really took it out to market. And I think that while we, well, we did fine over the years because this has been a long journey. As you mentioned earlier. As we did, you know, we've done fine over the years, but our real growth, a lot of our real growth has come since 2020. And that's because our product is, it was in a much more mature state. So I would say growth, but we also have some other, we have incredible sales team, we have incredible marketing, we have a wonderful client list who serves as references to our customers. But I think at the end of the day, it's gotta be the solution.

Okay, so first, this— so what we're saying effectively, David, is that just make sure you're solving a problem before you start looking at anything else. Like, that's the choice we're making. We're saying understand the problem the market has, understand how you're going to solve this, make it in a product or a service, and then push it out. So the very first step, the one factor we're choosing, is just making sure that we actually have a problem to solve.

Yeah, I mean, not everybody out that's listening, uh, to us today has the same type products, but if you have a product that is in fact different, yes. You know, if you're just doing— if you're a fast follower and you're just doing the same thing as somebody else has done, as soon as you get to that point, actually those people would answer the question very differently. They probably have some marketing or some sales or some tactics that they're using, but for most of the companies out there, they probably have a product a service, a solution that's differentiated amongst their competitors. And so, yeah, in that case, I think it— in my opinion, that ultimately the companies that have the best quality products that are the most differentiated are going to win over time. Over time.

Mm-hmm. Okay. I love that, David. It's such a no-brainer, you know, at the same time. But you see people tripping on this. People come up with various ideas of what they want to build and why they want to build it, but ultimately you just take back to this first principle thinking and you simply ask, am I solving someone's problem over here? Is the problem space big enough so people are willing to buy? Is it big enough to actually be able to find clients and customers? Such a simple thing. David, can you share what life was before you started your first venture at 22? Age of, you know, because that seems like for me that's, um, that's a very courageous thing, right? So I started Entrepreneurship Journey way later. Uh, I, I feel like I needed to learn from others how to do business, how to do sales, you know, how to do marketing, how to think about the product, how to look in general, how, you know, how to launch and scale the business. So I went into you know, enterprise jobs, startup jobs, learn the skills before I was comfortable enough to onboard the risks which come with launching business. You just went straight after it, like you never worked a 9-to-5, you just went like, 22, I'm gonna co-found business. Like, what was in your head then?

Well, I actually didn't work a 9-to-5 job, I worked a 9-to-9 job just for about 6 months of my life. Yeah, maybe that was part of it, right?

Yeah.

Um, I, I, I was one of those people that in, in that kind of accidentally got in the car business. Uh, I didn't get some jobs I thought I would get out of college, and I needed to make money, and I went into the car business. I'll just keep it simple since it was a long time ago. But right when I got into the industry, I loved it. I love the people, I love the atmosphere. It was fun. It just felt like a good place for me. But as I looked around, you know, you pay attention when you're younger sometimes. I saw a lot of the people that were in there that were older, that, you know, they were 40 and they looked 60. The retail business is really hard. You have to work a lot of hours every weekend. And I thought, well, if I stayed in this business, the ultimate dream for me would be to own dealerships. That was the ultimate position. You just, all you had to do is look upstairs and see the biggest office in the building. So that was aspirational for me. But I was also coming into the industry at a time where there was no real technology, Mike. So this is back in the late '80s, think of like '88, '89, '90. And I was— had just come out of school where PCs were just entering into the world of consumers, right? And, and so I, I really just had kind of a basic idea which is I could automate some of the functions in the dealership through personal computers and it would be better than the alternative. It was a simple concept. And so myself and my father actually on my first business talked about it and I think the— and we did it. And so that started when I was 22. But I also spent time working in the industry because that's how I made money. So I would think about it as work. I would work nights and weekends at car dealerships to make money. They'd pay me money because I was really good at what I did. But I also would work during the day to build the technology and go sell it to dealers. And so the way I sold it was I would literally say, I will come use the technology in your dealership. I'll show you physically how much better this is than what you currently do. Uh, it was hard to say no to that. Because I said, I won't charge you anything. I'll just come on a Saturday and I'll show you how it works. And then if you like it, you can keep it. So it was a buy and try, or try and buy. But to answer your question of what life was like before that, life for me was my father was in the military. And so I lived all over the world. I went to 13 schools in 12 years. So I lived everywhere. And I think when you do that, you really become used to change at a rapid rate. I mean, imagine moving every single year of your life.

That's tough.

And I went to 3 different high schools, so I had to find out what was going to work for me. And sports, fortunately, was one of those things. And I tried to develop a nice sense of humor and I had to work my way through becoming the new kid every time I was in school. But then I went to college at a place called Washington State. Which I loved. I was able to stay there for 4 years, 4+ years, met a lot of dear friends. And so, as I came out of college, I think I had probably more confidence than I really deserved. You know what I mean? And I think that also too, I moved from the West Coast back to Washington, DC, where my father happened to be stationed at the time, was in at the Pentagon. Pentagon. And during the entire time I was in college, they were over in Europe. So it was a very interesting childhood. And where we moved every year, and then as soon as we got settled, I got settled, my parents moved to Europe for his— because he was a successful officer in the military.

Mm-hmm.

So I think there was this sense that I moved all the way back across the country. And then I ended up in the car business. So I thought to myself, what do I have to lose? You know, what is it that's going to go bad for me? I fortunately, I didn't have any loans. I had a little tiny Honda Civic. I had, you know, my folks, I was living with my folks at the time because I just had gotten out of school. And so I think sometimes in life, you know, It's hard. I don't know when you started your first business, but you might have been married, you might have had kids, maybe not, but you had probably more responsibilities than I did. So I'd love to take credit that I saw this vision, I saw this dream, I went forward, I jumped over the cliff, all of which is true, but I also didn't feel like I had a lot to lose. And remember, the thing about the car business is the worst case scenario for me is I probably would have done fairly well just staying in the retail car business. Um, and so I, I felt like I didn't want to do that, but it was always an option as a backup. So I, uh, I think that in some ways I probably got lucky. In other ways, I think that the timing was incredible because technology was just entering kind of the It was just kind of commercially available. I was able to take advantage of all of that at about the same time. And I was pretty fearless, I will say, even back then and probably still today, I was not afraid of a risk. And as my life has gone, I've realized that that's just part of my personality profile, but also one that I think a lot of entrepreneurs at some point, that's why I respect entrepreneurs so much and enjoy them is because at some point, you are taking a risk that most people don't understand. And sometimes that risk is illogical. In my case, it was— appeared illogical, but I had not a lot to lose.

So I love how you put it. There's so much to unpack here. And thanks for that story, David. I feel like you're not giving yourself credit enough. You know, yes, you were 22, lots of confidence, Still, there's so plenty confident 22-year-olds which don't just, you know, build stuff and hustle and work and then go in and try to sell it. I think there's still innately something which, you know, made you successful as you are today. When you were doing, and it was Automarkt, right? Like when you were 22, the business you created was called Automarkt. So that's the software piece which you effectively hustled into reality by still doing the retail work. And you went into auto dealerships and you went like, let me show you what this can do. So effectively you pitched and you sailed by yourself. Were you thinking about any sort of like growth and exit strategies at that point in time? Or were you just taking step by step and you were thinking like, okay, what's the next thing? I just build it, I know it works. You know, the next one I need to go show to someone. You know, after that one, okay, well they liked it, now I need to try to sell this. After that one, okay, I made the sale. Maybe I now need to make 10 sales. Like, how did you take all of it up to the point where you actually sold Automarkt?

Well, Automarkt ended up being very successful and I did end up selling it when I was, I think, in the year 2000, 2001, something like that. And this was 1988. So we went from 1988, me selling it door to door myself, you know, to a company that had, I don't know, 300 or 400 employees. And one, one of the things that happened along the way was this great thing called the internet. So the product that we had, Automarkt, just stood for automated marketing. That's all it stood for. So everyone thinks it was an automotive thing because I thought maybe we could do stuff outside the automotive business too, but You know, it morphed over time. So my first goal was very simple, Mike. I just wanted to be able to not have to work in a dealership and be able to pay myself enough money just to pay my bills. And I didn't have a lot of bills. That was the other thing. I kept my cost of living extremely low. And so, you know, I was the guy that had like 7 roommates and you know what I mean? I really, really kept my costs low, so the bar wasn't high. So I worked for a number of years getting money from car dealerships to help them with various things. But then I would, you know, sell my software. So that was my first goal. Nothing to do with growth, nothing to do with exit, no fancy plan, just, just chopping wood one foot in front of the other. And I knew that I had to get to around 20 or 30 dealerships that were paying me on a monthly basis in order to not have to work at nights and weekends on that, because I like, I like to work. I work a lot of hours. I still do. That's just built into the who I am. So that was my first thing. Then I think that I started thinking about growing the business but not exiting the business. I wasn't, I wasn't thinking about the exit. At that time, there probably was no exit strategy for a company that size. There just wasn't. But as we started growing this technology, what's happened to me over the years and happened big time in our first businesses, one thing led to another, led to another, and each of those things made us bigger. So the first thing that we were doing, which was kind of automating like F&I offices and aftermarket offices, with this one piece of software. Then I had a client ask us to build— they're not as popular as they were today, they're not as popular as they were then— but he asked us to build kiosks, touchscreens. So these touchscreen kiosks would sit in the showroom and think of them as customer information centers. So we took a lot of what we were doing and we built out these kiosks. In order to do that, we had to learn a lot about inventory and sharing and networking and so on and so forth. And we had some success with that because it was very popular with customers. Then this thing called the internet came along, I'd say commercially in '98, something like that, maybe '97, '98. Hmm. Everything we did, we just put on the internet and we were able to create dealers— some of the first internet sites in the country for automobile dealerships. So what we did was we morphed, right? We kept thinking and we kept staying curious about what could we do next? What do our clients need? What problems are we solving? And the biggest problem that a client needed was a good internet site. If you think about it, even back in '97 and '98, when people didn't expect much from internet sites, But just the fact that you can even list all the inventory that was available and update that on a daily basis and share inventory amongst multiple locations, it— because some of our dealers are very, very big. They have 8 or 9 or 10 or 20 locations. And so they didn't— believe it or not, they had no way of sharing their information with inventory with consumers. They had them on some back office systems, but customers would have no idea all the cars that they owned at different locations. So You know, the internet exploded. I mean, we were able to substantially grow our business in a very short period of time. And that's what I mean. It took us, it felt like 10 years to get to a point where 4 years later the company was at 300 or 400 employees.

So when you started thinking about an exit, did that change how you approach the business in a sense of like, okay, I'm thinking about this right now. I know I want to exit in a couple of years, so I'm going to be start looking differently of what, how we do things and why we do things, you know. Okay, so what was that like, uh, strategically speaking, when you started thinking about exit? What were some actionable steps? People thinking, let's say, potentially right now they want to exit, like, what would be your advice to them?

Well, the actual steps that we had to take were ones that we learned, 'cause we were getting approached by companies to either invest or buy our company. And they were asking questions and we paid attention to the questions they were asking. So they were asking us things like, "What's your EBITDA?" And I think I remember the first time I'd say, "I think I understand EBITDA pretty well." And so I think for the most part for us, We were very fortunate that our business checked off naturally a lot of the box that investors like. We had a very high retention rate. Our clients loved our product. We had a management team that had stayed in place for a number of years. We had a, our costs were reasonable at that time. You know, we were founder, owned and founder-driven and founder-led, but we also had a very great management team behind us as well. All this took 15 years to develop. So a lot of the check marks were there. I think the thing that we weren't as prepared for was how profitability was really gonna drive the ultimate value of the company. Because we were entrepreneurs, so we were taking distributions and we were growing so fast. As long as we had plenty of money in the bank, as long as we had, you know, we were growing, we were happy with that. We were more focused on growth. But I've learned since that, you know, margins and EBITDA as a percentage, the rule of 50, all these things, or the rule of 40, All these things are really important to investors. And so now obviously we look at those things much earlier in the business, but that first business, I didn't pay attention to those things really up until the very end. They just, we just happened to have a business that checked off most of the boxes, but I did get a wake-up call on profitability. Fortunately, of all the things to fix in a business the fastest, usually If everything else is going well, profitability you can fix internally.

How do you approach right now, Dave? So when you build new businesses and, you know, maybe say Team Velocity being the newest one, do you start with all these things in mind? Like, is there an exit in your mind when you start new ventures or you just go like, okay, well, Here's a problem I know Mark has, fundamentally speaking, you know, I know we can solve this. I can see the scale. I can see, you know, all these numbers coming together. So I'll go ahead and do that. Or you start with the idea of, okay, 5 years in, we're going to sell this. We're going to make this acquisition target.

I know everyone's different. I am very much against pre-planned exit strategies because I think you run your business differently. If you're just planning on it. Now, I'm not saying at some point, but 5 years to exit a business, you better have an— if you want to exit for a lot, you better have an idea that's just incredible that nobody else ever thought of before kind of thing. I think that businesses evolve over time. Nothing good is really— nothing all that good is really all that easy. And so take a look at the most valuable businesses in the world. They weren't done in 5 years. I get you. I think that what you have to do is put principles in place early on that are healthy for your business so that it would be valuable to investors. Remember, a lot of people will take investors along the way, right? They'll bring a minority investor in or somebody just, a client loves their product and they wanna get invested. I've never really done that, but it's, It's not uncommon. And so I just think you have to put principles in place for your business that make it valuable. And then you'll know when you get to a certain spot. I've always known when it's right. And most of the time there's a reason. And sometimes the reason is, you know, you have a partner in the business who's not as active in it anymore as they once were because they moved on to something else or, an event has happened in someone's life where they wanna maybe diversify their portfolio or whatever it happens to be. You have to set your business up so that it would be valuable to other people. And there's like, I don't know, Mike, maybe 5 or 6, 7 things that you have to do in order to have a business that's highly valuable. Some of them you would imagine make total sense. I get you, you know. And, and, you know, what's your— what's your growth? What's your growth? What's your margin? What's your retention? Is huge. What product? How many blue-chip clients do you have? What's your total addressable market? You know, you start answering those questions. What's your rule of 40? You know, how fast are you growing? What's your profit margin? Add those two together, what's that look like? So we understand what, what investors find attractive and what they're willing to pay the most for. And I think if you can, you just try to, you know, put those principles in place early because they're, um, but they're also the, the same factors that you would want in your own business. So the exit strategy is funny to me because people will talk about, well, in order to exit, I have to do A, B, C, D, E, F, and G. And I'm like, those are the same things that you would do if you wanted to keep the business.

Yeah.

If you're gonna create value for yourself, you have to create it for someone else. So the, the whole concept of the exit strategy, I, I would say this, the one thing about an exit strategy that I probably haven't done a good job with over time for your listeners is, is some people are good at timing the market. So they're just smart about it. You know, there are times where two companies can be worth 30% more depending upon the timing, right? So the timing we're moving into right now appears to be a time where businesses are gonna become more valuable. Same business, more valuable. Why? Because we're probably gonna get into an environment where regulations are going to be limited, at least in the United States. We're gonna get into an environment where it looks like capital's gonna become cheaper as the interest rates, the pressure to, drop interest rates if it gets up there. There may be a lower tax environment for both corporations as well. So when labor gets cheaper, I mean, pardon me, when capital gets cheaper and regulations reduce, that's usually an environment for businesses to thrive in. So, and therefore the valuations go higher. That part, I haven't always been great at timing because administrations will change and move around. But if you stick with the basics, you'll be fine.

Yeah, I do agree, David. And I was digging into that question because I wanted to understand how you approached all the ventures you did, which was, I think it's like 5+ where you co-founded and either merged in or exited. Are you thinking about exit when you start them, or is it something which just happens because of a healthy business? And I think it's very great advice If people listening and thinking about exit, you actually talk with the investors and potential buyers and see what they care about, what questions would they ask, and see if you tick those boxes as you have mentioned. My own advice is as well to just not really— if you're thinking about an exit, you're going to be thinking about scalability and exit strategies. That can lead to neglecting the core business values and customer relationships as well because you're just going to be looking at that target. And you're going to be like, how can I go to that target as fast as I can? And you're going to be dropping balls along the way, which might be highly influential to the general success of the business. Okay, so that's great. Let's talk about customers. You mentioned one thing, David, which, um, I took a note, um, that someone suggested or asked for you to build the kiosks. So you were like, okay, cool, you know, we're going ahead and do that. So which leads to this question is like, when you build your businesses and all of them, you are, you know, which you already build and exited, what is your general approach to listening to what the customer wants and customer needs? Are you just taking that at like face value, or is there a framework or a way you looking at this and going like, I don't know if that's a good idea. I feel like we probably know more than what you're saying, and it's like, what's your approach in understanding what you actually build next?

Well, I think that what we've done, and I would recommend this to all companies, in my opinion, this is one of those universal truths that has always worked well for me. If you listen to every individual customer about what they want, you're going to chase a lot of things that, that one customer wants, but nobody else does.

Mm-hmm.

So what I recommend doing is setting up a customer advisory board. And what I do is I have about 12 or 15 clients, and they rotate out every year. We manage that board and we have meetings regularly with that board. Uh, we also do a trip a year with that board, and we get some of the most respected, uh, retail dealerships in the country. We do some big ones, publicly traded. We do some small ones. We do some imports, we do exports. We want to have a variety, that's the most important, of people on the board. And we meet with them quarterly and we share with them the ideas that we're working on that we've come up with. And we share with them ideas that we have vetted from our current customers. And we run it by them and say, hey, you know, thinking about putting resources into doing this, this one dealership has this problem. Problem and asked us to solve it this way. What do you think? Do you have the same issues? Do you have the same problems? Um, how big of a problem is it? What are the competitors that you're using to solve that problem today? And so on and so forth.

Okay.

Customer advisory boards are incredible. Oftentimes your best clients will do it for free. We don't pay them to be on the board. We, we do treat them to a nice trip, uh, once a year just as a gesture of our appreciation. But it's not extravagant. And I think it's one of the best things that we've ever done because it allows us to not jump around with every single, you know, suggestion. But on the other hand, we do take that to a broader board and we vet it quarterly. And I would tell you that I'd say about 50% of our development are ideas that we have, and 50% of our development is probably ideas that come from a customer. And I think that's a nice balance, um, because, um, you can't come up with every idea in your business. And you are solving— see, for us, we have a very specific industry that we're trying to solve problems for. So when you deal with the best of the best in the industry, they'll tell you Yes, that's a real problem. That, that, that's something we would love for you to solve. Uh, and then we also get a chance to talk about not just solving the problem, but is that something we can monetize? You know, is there, is there, is that an enhancement that we can maybe pay for? Uh, some of our best enhancements have come that, that, that we charge for have come from basic problems that theaters have that I thought were already solved, but apparently they weren't.

Okay, I love that, by the way, the customer advisory board, so highly overlooked and underrated. It's a great way to have a constant focus on where do you want to go. It is a B2B relationship though, so if we, let's say we are business to customer, would you still build, because business to customers just has a lower price range, right? If you're thinking about business to business, you're going to be building your advisory board, most likely going to have some flagship clients in that advisory board, maybe CEOs, business owners, or business relationship people or whatnot, which can give you that guidance on what you want to build, if it's a good idea, everything we just discussed. Great. But if you're B2C, you know, you likely have like a subscription module where everyone's pretty much the same, right? Because it's just like lifetime value potentially higher to some but everyone's paying the same monthly, maybe someone is paying a little bit higher. But how would you approach like a B2C when it comes to custom advisory boards?

Well, when we build products sometimes and the end product is a customer, we will do focus groups. Focus groups are inexpensive. It's the same thing. You just do focus groups and ask people what they think. About this. And if the focus group is a group of users in this case, or a group of just people that you think would be, you know, good at providing advice— I've done focus groups for my clients, I don't know, many, many times. It's the same concept. It's having it prepared, asking all the questions. What do you think about this? What do you like about this? You know, do you like the way the software works this way or this way? A or B or whatever it might be. So I still think getting feedback from your ultimate customer is the ideal way to develop solutions. Again, we're primarily focused on technology here.

Yeah, I love that. Focus groups for both of them, David, like the customer advisory board and focus groups. Like, what's your selection criteria? Let's say Who would you take into advisory board and why?

Well, we have thousands of customers. So you want to find people that, A, most importantly want to do it, they're engaged clients. So oftentimes your most engaged clients are the best for the customer advisory board. They're the one, or maybe if it's a B2C, you're the user who uses your software or whatever your solution the most. Because they, they, they like your product and they— people want to make things better. So actually, first is, are they an engaged client that really knows our product well so that their advice is something that we can count on? Uh, two is they have to be willing to meet and attend the meeting. Sometimes people just don't have time and they say they want to do it, but they, they don't ever show up. We try to vet that out with them in advance. In our case, we try to keep it simple. It's about an hour and a half meeting once per quarter. And then we do one meeting per year offsite. I'd say those two things are important. The third is their, really their level of knowledge, because some people that are your clients, you know, they have a lot of knowledge about the day-to-day operations of their business, but others ride high. And so if you bring people to customer advisory boards that just only ride high, they're only up in the clouds, they have the man, everybody else does the job, they sometimes don't have the same level of input. And those will be my 3 or 4 pieces of criteria that we have. We also try to find clients that are, of different sizes and scale. So if you have all— what people tend to do on the customer advisory board is they bring in all their big clients.

Yep.

And all— but most of their clients are small. So we try to balance it between small clients. So in our case, in the, in the automotive business, you would say, so I have a public, I have a small private, I have a Ford dealer, I have a Honda dealer, I have dealers with groups, I have dealers with points. So You try to balance it out a little bit and that's just worked out really, really well for us.

I love that, that's excellent. Just the diversity of views, 'cause the smaller one might, not might, they will have different problems than the enterprises will. It's just a different scale of operation, so clearly you will have different challenges. Do we pay them? Do we wanna find people to our advisory board which just wants to be there because they, they feel the connection with the product or service we're giving, so they want to influence where it's actually going, or do we want to actually pay them and, you know, put them in a position where they feel obliged to give the best advice they can?

Everyone probably has a different point of view on that. Our point of view, in a focus group, you might have to do that, right? But in a B2B relationship, we have not paid our advisory board. We think it's important not to pay them.

Um, why is it important not to pay them, David?

We, we think that it's, it's a more— the relationship, they're going to genuinely give us their advice, uh, about how they feel. They're not being paid, so they don't have, you know, let me come up with something, let me, let me make something up that I, I— because I have to have value, so I want to provide this. And we also—

what—

how we pay them is we reward them. We take them on a trip. It's It's the same thing. I could take the money. Well, we take them on a very nice trip per year. I think last year we went to Napa Valley. Nice. And for wine tasting and all that stuff. And the board is about less than 20. So it's a reasonable thing. So that's how we do it. Our message to our clients is, thank you. We really appreciate it. We want to take you somewhere and your wife. We always allow them to bring their wife or their partner, brother or sister, whoever they want, a guest on the trip with them, and they really appreciate that. So that's what's worked well for us. I'm not saying that paying is a bad idea, it just isn't something we've done.

It's a relationship, right? We want to build a relationship. It's not— we don't want to have a transaction where we pay them, get advice. We want to build a long-lasting relationship. That's what we're saying, right?

That's what it is for us. Our customer advisory board also, we also get a lot of advice from them that's not on product. So I'll, we will ask them questions about how we support you. We talked to them during COVID about how you should be handling certain situations. We talked to them about 'You have some big contracts that are coming up, and how important is it that we're able to do some other things for you that we're not doing today?' And, and so on and so forth. So we don't just talk about products. Product probably is the main part of the advisory board. We expand those topics to other areas.

Okay. Did you ever got In a situation where, and this is coming from my personal context, where I would talk with the, with the clients and, you know, they, they will share the problems and, and share the vision where product should be going and how you can help them. And I would just think like, that's just not visionary enough. Maybe it's just me having my, you know, head in the clouds, but I always like see much bigger things than what the client's asking for. And always, you know, I'm like I don't think that's like big enough. Like, I'm not sure if I want to build this. Does that ever happen to you?

Yeah.

Okay.

I think most of the visionary ideas we come up with, because the clients don't always know what's possible, they're not in the technology business.

Yeah.

They're the, they're the user. Our job is to come up with the really big visionary ideas, right, that are going to be, uh, the mo— probably what we're most known for. But I think where a customer advisory board can help you with is what you were asking me earlier about, which is enhancements. You know, I have an idea to do this, an idea to do that. Next you know, you have 60 ideas. Which one should you do? Should you do any of them? And I would say most of the ideas that we receive from clients are not visionary. And because I think if they were visionary, they probably would be in a different business.

Yeah, that's true.

I think that our job is to create the vision for what we want to be, knowing the industry as well as we do. But we do get a lot of very sound ideas on enhancing our product and which ones are worthy and which ones are not. And that's a big part of our business.

Yeah, I love that. So $200 million, David, You don't get that just by pure hustle, right? You don't get that just purely by hard work. You have to have a system effectively which scales, right? So you come up with something, you get the problem solved, you create a product. To scale it, you have to have frameworks of how you do things. You hire people to run your frameworks and all of these, let's call them business systems. How do you approach that? Like, how do you approach operational business processes and look at them and go like, I'm going to create 1, 2, 3, I'm going to automate this, I'm going to put a software in that, I'm going to hire a person to that. How you look at all of these challenges?

Well, the way I look at it is, is that think of it as dials, right? You've got all these dials and you're constantly trying to turn them and work with them together. Some are operations. Some are customer support, some are sales, growth, and so on and so forth. So the best thing that I found is over time, every entrepreneur is different. Every entrepreneur has areas that they're very strong in. So an area that I'm, for example, pretty strong in is in product development and selling it. I just have a natural ability to create products. I always have. I love it. I spent a lot of time on it. Think about it. And it's— so I work, we have a phenomenal team, but I get to spend a lot of my personal time on that because it's an area that I, I like. But in order for a business to be successful, you have to work on lots of high payoff items, not just the ones that you happen to be good at. I'm also selling, so it's more natural for me to to do those things and work on that. But what's not as natural is, for example, the financial statements or onboarding our clients or retaining our clients and some of the other areas of our business that are, I would just say, highly operational. So you bring in people that have the skill sets that you don't have, but you have the vision, you have the, the metrics that you think that particular area of the business needs to achieve. And you work with them on developing out all of those items. And that's why I think it takes some time to get it right. So the way I've approached it is I'm gonna have a very complementary style of management where I'm gonna complement myself with other people who are really good at what I'm not good at or what I don't like to do. And that's how I built out the management team. A lot of entrepreneurs make the mistake of putting a bunch of people around them that are like them, right? Because that's their natural habitat. They're like, yeah, you know, you get a bunch of— yeah, next, you know, a bunch of people that all agree with the CEO, uh, are all running the place but are missing— you're missing from the people on the team the vital you know, talent that is required to help a business across all dials be successful. So I, I've just kind of approached it to me in a compartmentalized manner. And if you looked at our organizational chart functionally, you know, there's a person— there's probably 6 or 7 major functions in the company, and I just have a person who runs each of those 6 or 7 functions. And we have in this company that I have now that we're talking about, you know, we've got probably 550 full-time employees and another 125 full-time equivalents around the world. So, you know, you're not gonna run a business like that by yourself. You have to have talented people who are really just as talented as you are, just maybe not in the same area.

Mm-hmm.

That's all I know.

I love that. That's excellent. And you so rightfully called out people hiring, uh, similar people to themselves. It's just a tendency because that's how you build rapport. So what, when you come into these interviews and, and, and you see someone who you're just getting along very quickly, it's so likely that that person is similar to you, which means you're probably gonna hire the same skill set. You're just gonna multiply yourself, but Who's going to be looking at your blinders? You know, you don't know what you don't know. You, you, everybody has blinders and just being self-reflective and going like, I'm, I don't like that work, or I have no idea how to do that work well. And then hiring people in that space is how you build a good executive team. So such a, such an important advice we're giving right now. So There's a Lean thinking which advocates to less systemized approach, but actually more people-oriented approach, right? So what's your take, David? Like, do you like systems, or do you like to give flexibility to systems and say, I actually love people to take more ownership than having automation and systemized approach to work?

It's such a good question. We were having a big meeting about this yesterday, and I think it's a tightrope that everybody is trying to walk right now because there's so much technology and automation that you could put into a business. And we were talking about this for hours yesterday, management, and I think you have to find the balance. The automation and systems obviously are wonderful because you get consistent outcomes.

Yep.

But in the least, in the business that we're in, there's, there's a human element to it where I'm like, a human could actually answer that question faster. We could put it through a system and a tree and it goes here and it goes there. Just listen to a question or something our client needs. And as you get bigger, uh, you have to have systems further. By the way, systems are critical. The question is, is how, um, constrained will those systems be? How will you let humans get involved with those systems and say, you know what, I can answer this question in 30 seconds, let me handle that, the client would be happier? Um, and so we're, we're constantly working on that. I'd say for us that probably is, is much more in the area of support, how we support our clients, because there's a lot of technology today that people get frustrated with. You know, go to this assistant, type in this question, and if it doesn't give you all the right answers, uh, you become very frustrated very quick. But yet it's available 24/7, which humans are not. So yeah, how, how do we insert humans into the systems to make sure that the clients are getting a, you know, what they want, which is the best support possible. I think it's a really good question that you're asking. I tend to lean towards systems because they're scalable and they make sense and they're monitorable and we can, you know, we can see what's going to— we can test it. But people still are at the heart of a lot of our relationships. And so we're trying to combine those two together right now to develop what I hope is the perfect outcome for our clients, which is human touch right when you need it and quick automated tech answers when you don't.

Yep.

It's, um, I'd probably be working on this for the next 10 years, you know?

Yeah, it's not, It's a subtle dance and finding the right variables and right inputs to actually make it valuable to the customer, which is the main success or the main outcome you're looking for, it's not that easy. We actually had another episode with Alex, CEO of a call center, where effectively the software they have is to make sure that you're giving the best customer experience possible. And we talked about the fact that AI is reaching the point where, in his view, people will demand a systemized, you know, bot approach because the data is getting accessible to AI and it's, you know, the capturing level of the data is so robust as well that AI will be able to shuffle through your data and understand the problem and give you solution much faster than the human will. And his take is that, you know, it's like another 5 years or so and people will not want to have people customer support. They will want to have an automated AI bot level of support because it will be faster and it will be a lot more on point. So it's very interesting to, you know, to see where the world will go with that.

I think it depends on your products as well and your service. That's probably also a pretty It will, yeah.

It's definitely not applicable to all the services and products, 100%. So we talked a little bit about the executive team which you build. You mentioned you have, you know, likely about 6 business functions and you have the best people to run these functions. And then, you know, there's a business hierarchy which goes to sort of employees and whatnot. So ultimately the whole picture, the whole business as a CEO, you need to develop or become, or maybe you are by default, a very good leader of people. So what's your philosophy when it comes to leadership?

Well, I think that everyone has their own ways of doing leadership. I think sometimes leadership people— I think this is where people tend to do what comes natural to them, uh, right? Because some people are centralized, you know, where they they ride high and they hold everybody accountable. And some people are very centralized and they want to run things through them. I have tried to find a balance in leadership of those two styles. It's probably been the most difficult thing for me to work on, which is I tend to be very centralized. I like to know what's going on in the business, particularly in what I consider the main areas of the business.

Mm-hmm.

But you have to let people do their jobs. You have to hold them accountable. So one of the things that I've done is set up some small committees that I run in that are important parts of the business, and we have metrics on those, on those things. So some of them obviously would be easy, like finance, right? Meeting every other week, we call it the weekly, every other week financial meeting. We have a very clear set of metrics that I want the company to hit and we report on those metrics and what we're doing in order to, you know, achieve them. And so that's most, many companies do that. But I also then will do other meetings, you know, like for example, one that's a little more centralized, but it works for me is We have a meeting called the Red Dealer Council, and the Red Dealer Council, all of our clients are marked green, red, or yellow. And if you're red or yellow, but red, we get all the leaders together and we let you come and explain why the client's unhappy. They're unhappy because we made a mistake, uh, we didn't launch the client well. That's— you would think, wow, why is the CEO involved in, in a meeting like that? Because I want our people to see that if I don't care as the most, then I— then how can I expect you to care about our clients?

Yeah.

And what CEOs love to do is they love to live in the land of happy, you know, like, I want to hear about all my happy customers, I want to hear about the top salespeople, I want to hear about all of our achievements. I try to have meetings where I get realistic points of view on the things that are not going well. And, uh, because I get plenty of on what's going well. What's not going well? What can we do better? So I have these metrics per department and we talk about them and we look at them sometimes on a monthly basis, depending upon the department, sometimes on a quarterly basis, but no further than quarterly do we meet. So that's been my way of being decentralized in the fact that I'm not running that particular area, that meeting, someone else is running it, but I'm attending it and I'm listening in on it and I'm asking lots of questions about what we're doing to get better or what's our initiative to mitigate some problems we've had or whatever it might be. And I think that for me has worked pretty well. I don't know if that answered your question about what my leadership style is, but It's, it's, it's for me, I'm constantly trying to balance between, uh, because I only have so many time hours in the day and my job is to make sure I'm working on things that are high payoff.

Yeah.

What is the highest payoff items? I'd say if I had a leadership style, that would be it. Um, I focus on things that are high payoff to the organization. Most people like low payoff items. I have a checklist. I come in, I check it off every day. I go on. I have dinner, I'm done. But high payoff items, they're hard, they take a long time, they're generally expensive. Yeah. And, and they're mission critical to the organization.

Yeah. High impact areas. Yeah. I tend to concentrate on this as well. I love bigger problems and bigger challenges. And as you rightfully put it, it takes more time, takes more energy, but they're usually a lot more impactful in the sense of direction of the business and success of the business. So I want to ask this question, uh, because I got, I got called a problem spotter once, and I really took that deeply, and I sort of nicknamed myself a problem spotter. But I got this nickname or this label because I was asking these questions, which I think that's what you were saying, David, as well. It's like when I go in, in the meeting, I care about where the risk is and what the problems are, because I feel like if you manage your downside, the only left outcome is positive, right? So I don't tend to look at the upside, what's going on well, what are all the success metrics, which in some way it brushes off the good results the team is achieving, because every single time if I'm on a call, I'm like, 'Okay, where's the problem? You know, what was the risk? What's not going well?' And that gave me that problem spotter label. You don't get feedback like that if you're always, you know, just looking at the risks and problems.

Well, you know what you can do is— it might help you— is what helped me is do a meeting once a month with your company. We call it town hall. So Town Hall is our positive meeting. All we do is cover off on all the wonderful things, anniversaries of people who've worked here. We praise our top salespeople, our top onboarding people, our top retention people, our development team for launching a product. And it's just incredibly positive meeting. And we do it once a month. And so that's the place where I get to become very positive. No problems. We're all talking about the victories that we've had, and it's wonderful. We also have a— I don't know if you use channels like, or communication systems like Slack. Yeah, anything. Do you use Slack? Yep, we use Slack. I'm prolific on Slack for congratulating people, right? Hey, great job on this. Love to— I don't— I think one of the things that is important is when you're going to be— be positive publicly, right? Public means on Slack or on town hall. But privately, when I'm in a meeting that's specific to something that we're working on, if I'm going to discuss problems, it's going to be in that environment. Right, where we're really discussing a problem. I'm not just being negative for the sake of being negative. I'm in it with you. I wanna, I wanna, I do believe this is a problem or a downside, as you would say, or a risk that you have that we should really focus on. And as the CEO of the company, I'm here with you to discuss it. I'm not, I think it's a real problem. We have to get better. Let's talk about how we can get better. And I think that you need outlets for someone like yourself or like myself who tends to look at something and go, wait a minute, that doesn't look right. You need outlets that are like, hey, Mike is— he gets it. He also sees the positive. He also sees the hard work that people are putting in, the achievements that we're making, the victories we're having. And I do that on Slack, and I do that in town hall. And that gives me enough of a— And again, I genuinely feel proud about what the team is accomplishing. But if you sit around all day long thinking about the accomplishments on a day-to-day basis, I think you're right. I think there's a risk that you miss something that could be vital to your business. I love that. And then that causes its own set of problems. Try to find yourself some positive ways. Business is so much like relationships, right? I don't know what everyone's relationships are, but you can't have a relationship with somebody and it's just negative.

Yeah, it becomes toxic.

The date night, the positives, the trips, the anniversary, celebrating victory, celebrating milestones in your life, celebrating holidays together in a very positive way. But you also have to deal with the challenges that you might have in a relationship, and those have to be done more in private, you know. And so that's kind of the way I look at it.

I love that, David. That's great advice. That's great advice. What do you do— well, actually, what is your advice to entrepreneurs which are really struggling to let go of the day-to-day operations? And this is coming from the context which I felt myself when I was a co-founder with the founder. You know, he was a CEO, very hardworking, visionary person, but it was so difficult for him to let go of day-to-day operations when the business started scaling, and he just wanted to be everywhere. He wanted to know everything, and if something was not to his standards, of quality, he would just basically go like, let me do that for you. And it absolutely like stretched him thin and overworked and overburdened and it caused a lot more problems eventually, right? It's like, what's your advice for entrepreneurs who just cannot let go?

You know, it's hard because entrepreneurs started, generally start something very small, very manageable. And they're successful because they don't let go, right? And then as you grow, that style just doesn't work for people. And so, you know, I think what you have to do is you just have to, no matter what, set up systems in place. I told you mine. Mine is to have these, a lot of macro meetings, where I'm not, you know, I'm listening, I'm hearing what's going on, I'm setting the tone, setting the vision for the company, setting the metrics for the company. I think it's also very important to set compensation plans. So for example, your CEO, if people, if he said it, if you compensate people in order to do the things that this particular CEO, say yours, wanted to have done, and those compensation plans were aligned with his objectives, they're more likely to get done. So I'm a big fan of compensation because I set the compensation models up for the company because I want to be aligned with the company's objectives, which are often my objectives, because I'm setting the objectives for the organization. So if everyone's compensation is aligned, I'm less likely to have to get involved because their own compensation is going to be motivation enough for most people in business to hit their objective. So that's something that you can do, is you can try to set— because he, he doesn't want to necessarily have to get involved and solve the problem. He's just, uh, can't figure out another way of doing it. And so you just do what you did when you were small. I, I've, I've tried to put in macro systems that are going to, and I find compensation to be one of the more effective ones, which is I want these things to happen and I'm willing to pay you to make them happen. There's a reward and a consequence for them not happening, and that mostly revolves around your pay. The second thing it motivates around is your— is the promotional— who's getting promoted and who's not. So what I try to make it very clear is the people who I have to get too involved with their department, too involved with them because they're not meeting objectives. Generally, they're not going to be the people that I'm— I'm not going to put them in charge of more stuff when they're not doing the stuff that they currently, you know, should be doing as well as we think they should do it. So, you know, when people start to see the people who move up the ladder are are being promoted based upon performance, not based upon relationships, but performance, that creates an atmosphere in your organization that we're performance-driven, not relationship-driven, because that's the danger, but performance-driven. And I'd say these are kind of the, the types of things that I've learned over the years that have worked well for us. But I haven't gone to lots of courses and lots of classes on this. I've probably learned the hard way because like you're, this sounds like the CEO you're at, I tend to be, I have to protect myself from getting too centralized and too deep in something when it's really other people's jobs to do that. So I had to work on, work on that myself.

I do believe it's, um, it's a second nature to the founders to care too deeply because ultimately the business is there. They found that it's their baby, you know, they have a vision for that baby, they want to take it somewhere. And if someone doesn't do the justice with their function towards, you know, the business vision, you just tend to go there and go like 'Let me just do that.' It's, yeah, it's a hard one, isn't it? And that's why I wanted really to ask that one. I struggle with that myself, to be honest. I think everyone really struggles, but the answer I had is just hire people you can trust. That's it. Just don't hire just a person, just hire a person you can trust, and then it's going to be much easier to let go because you're going to be trusting the person. So that potentially one advice. A follow-up question, David, which I wanted to ask: in your point of view, should all the founders become CEOs of the business eventually?

Not necessarily. In our case, we have 3 founding partners and they felt like I would be the best candidate for the CEO, which is usually how it goes with, with us. The other two partners, I think, bring such tremendous value to the organization strategically, but I don't think would have lined up character with their— they would not— they don't line up as well as a CEO on a day-to-day basis, because CEO day-to-day is very— it's very time-consuming. You've got a lot of people, you're dealing with a lot of problems, and some days it doesn't feel strategic at all. Sometimes it feels like a hit. And at least in my case, my two partners are absolutely brilliant. They're very strategic. They bring lots of things to the table, to the organization that I don't bring, but I'm not sure every founder is set up to be a CEO. In fact, I'm sure they're not. And, but in my particular case, I have always, I think as long as I can remember at least, with all the businesses, I think I end up either, I either start out as the CEO or I end up as a CEO. But that's probably 'cause I also like it. You know, I enjoy the responsibility and I enjoy the camaraderie of working with the team and accomplishing things. So I think that CEO is a personality-driven type role. That's what everybody's cut out to do.

Yeah.

I think the worst thing that a founder can do sometimes is to think that they, because they came up with the idea or maybe they had the capital and the idea that they would be the best person to run their own business day to day.

Yeah.

And I think it's a mistake that founders can make sometimes.

That's such a strong shout, David. I learned that the hard way. And, you know, the same CEO I was talking about who, who couldn't let go of the things, he had the vision of, of being CEO, but we had people on the board saying, you're not. And people left from the board, and effectively his, his pure focus of becoming CEO just destroyed the business. It just went nowhere. And, uh, and that's actually the context behind the question. I, I do believe as well that not all the founders need to be CEOs or should become CEOs or should even target, you know, or have a goal to become CEOs. It's really, you know, asking yourself a question or retrospectively looking and going like, what's my value add to this business? Like, what do I bring to the table? If you bring the CEO capabilities, great. But if you don't, don't think you should be CEO because you're a founder. Just Find a good CEO, the business will do better. Just continue doing your value-add. Such a, such a strong shout. Thank you for that, David. So, um, we're doing this live and I want to just take a peek if we have questions from audience. Okay, so I want to bring this up on the screen, David, and should be seeing this. So it goes like this: I am very interested in what is your mantra or code to life?

Oh, that's a big question. I'll give you one that I think about often in both my personal life as well as in my career. And it goes like this: Change, whether good or bad, is always going to be resisted with equal intensity So we're going to go through changes in life. We're going to go through them personally. We're going to go through them physically. We're going to go through them in business. We're going to go through them in relationships. And it's difficult to— I've learned that no matter what, it's resisted. It's resisted by my children. It's resisted by business partners. It's resisted by people who work for our organization, even when it's obviously good change. I know it sounds crazy. I'm like, wait a minute, if you change something for the better, shouldn't everyone recognize that?

No, no, they don't.

They recognize— so change, whether good or bad, is resisted with equal intensity. And I've just learned in life that I have this very high propensity for change, probably because of the way I was raised. But I'm— and I'm so used to it and I'm so comfortable with it that I get incredibly frustrated when other people don't get it and see it. And so I've had— for my life, I've had to realize that I have to— there's going to be resistance. I just have to fight through the resistance and over time, usually. And that's kind of how I've lived my life because there's been so much change involved in it between all the businesses, all the places I lived, that it's just— that's it, I guess. I mean, there's probably a few more that come to mind, but that's one that just instantly came to mind. I hope that helps.

It's a great one. So what we're saying effectively, the bigger the change, the more impactful the change. The more resistance you will get. And it doesn't matter what the change is. In the context of business, we are effectively talking about change management, and you're going to bring some change. And a good ex— a good, good example I have is when two businesses merge. So someone buys someone, or you're getting bought by someone. So that by default is going to be a big change, right? And that change is for better. You know, the two businesses coming together is going to become one bigger business. You're likely going to take a lot more market share. You're going to go from top 7 to top 1, whatever you're doing, that's a good change. But pretty much everybody in the business outside of management team will be looking at that change and going like, oh my God, like, I don't like it. That's, that's my experience. So saying that resistance just, it's gonna be there. How do you overcome it, David? It's like, is that just for you, like, I've been doing this for like, you know, one on like 6, so I'm just like, I'm just gonna go with that, like, or do you have a a way of how you approach change management?

You know, I think first of all, recognizing that you're going to have it is the most important thing I've had to come up with, which is the resistance to change is just, it's, it's, it's, it's as humans, it's just built into us. And some people have a higher propensity for it than others. So that's the first thing is just recognizing like, look, you're, you're, when you go into it. So now when I, when I go into I go into something and say, hey, look, we're gonna make a change in the way we do things next year. I mean, little, like, I'll just give you an example of something that we did. We put in enterprise level of software and Salesforce. You've heard of Salesforce? Yep. We put that in a couple of years ago and you would've acted as if we were putting in the, there was a lot of resistance to it. It took me years to get the entire organization fully running it because everyone had their little favorite pieces of software that they were using.

Yep.

The amount— we didn't have a single source of truth for many things. We had managers who preferred different pieces of software in that arena, and I won't give you all the details, but you know what I mean. Yep. Salesforce is, at our size, was a fundamental change on how we were going to operate the business. And it literally took me years. Some managers I had to, we even had to basically part ways with because they were so convinced that the way they did that Salesforce couldn't do this, they couldn't do that, they couldn't do this. They couldn't accept the fact that this was a good positive change for the organization, that we needed to move to an enterprise level of software to manage our business relationships. And that Salesforce was the decision that the business decided and they were gonna have to get on board with that. And I could give you 100 other examples, but yeah. So we had some of it was you just have to fight and grind your way through it. You just have to say this, you have to be persistent. One of my favorite, I read a lot of different books, but you know, it's, I will persist until I succeed. If you've ever read the book, you'll know what I mean. But I will persist until I succeed. And you just have to, to, um, stay convicted with what you're doing, knowing it's the right decision. Because if you don't— see, that's one of those things where if you don't, you're going to get a very different outcome, right? So I could have said, listen, take your time with Salesforce, maybe it's not for everybody, we're evaluating it. I could have crossed my arms. Let's see, let's do a trial, right? See, that's— you can't do that because your people are watching you and they're saying, well, he doesn't really believe in the change.

Yep.

He's just introducing it and he's going to see what happens. You have to be an agent of change in your business and whatever that might be. I've got one coming up next year. I know it's going to be a big one where I want to change the pricing of our products around a little bit so that we can have a higher gross margin than we currently have. And I believe we've earned that in the market. And I'm going to get massive resistance from parts of our organization. Why? Because the price has always been— that's the price, that's the way we do it, it works, why mess with it? And it's something that I've done a lot of research on, a lot of thinking on. And we're gonna do it. So we're just, but it's gonna be resisted. I already know, I've planned for it. So a lot of times when I go into a project like that, now I'll tell everybody, let me explain to you what's gonna happen. Half of you are, I mean, I just tell them that you're gonna resist it, you're not gonna wanna do it, it's gonna, and the other half are gonna jump on board and the half that jump on board with it first are gonna be more successful. And so, We're gonna do it, here's how we're gonna do it, we're gonna take our time, we're not gonna just do it overnight. And that's the other thing, change is important, but you can't just introduce it constantly to your organization because they can't deal with it as much. So, you know, I guess the way I deal with it is through persistence.

Okay, I love that. Did we just spoil what's coming next year to your employees, David, if they're watching live? Be ready for the price change, it's coming.

I've already, I've already started implementing and talking about it with the right people because, um, you know, when you get to our size, you know, a small difference in pricing makes a huge impact to make a big difference in margin. So, uh, we'll, uh, they know it's coming. And they know that I know it's gonna be resisted by certain people in the organization. But if you're listening out there, it's coming January 2025. We'll make it work. I've got a lot of tricks 'cause I've been around the block.

Yep.

To implement change. A lot of times my go-to is around compensation. So I'll implement a change and then I'll reward, make it a reward. If you implement this change effectively, here's how it's gonna affect your compensation. If you don't, it's gonna negatively impact your compensation. I have found that that alignment, you know, a mentor of mine said, you can be aligned at the head and you can be aligned at the heart, but the best alignment is at the wallet. And I've always remembered that in business that, you know, you wanna be aligned ideally at the wallet with your people, right? So when you do well, they do well. When you don't do as well, they don't do as well.

I love that, David. I'm gonna put this as a title of this video when it goes live.

I like that. I love that.

Well, you can't be aligning your head, you can't be aligning your heart, but the best alignment is at the wallet. It's gonna be a title of your video.

When you put it live, I'll give credit to the person who said it to me.

Okay, so if people want to learn more about you, David, and about business you do and your products, where they can find you?

I think that for this particular company, the easiest way to go is to go to the main website, which is Team Velocity, TeamVelocityMarketing.com. So TeamVelocityMarketing.com is a beautiful website. There's a short video on the product if you're really interested and to see what our products are. Just click on it. It's less than 5 minutes, but it completely understands our entire product, our entire product differentiation, how it works, and why I think we've been pretty successful. So I'd say teamvelocitymarketing.com.

Excellent. Well, thank you for your time, David, today. And for people listening, if, if you really care about exploring David and his product and Team Velocity, just check the show notes. The link will be in the show notes. If you find value in the show, as always, come find us online. Just Google our name, Mastering Tech Growth. We would love some comments. You can leave comments for David or any other of our episodes. And as always, until the next time, stay safe and see you online.