2 Bob London - Peter Baumann Interview: Why did you decide ActiveNav needed a north star?

I was fortunate a while back to get a call from ActiveNav about the company's desire to create a strategic narrative for the company. Some people refer to it as vision and mission. Some people call it a North Star, uh, but the strategic narrative as I defined it, and I think you guys too, is a little bit more of a narrative, a longer form narrative that talks someone through, whether it's a new employee, a current employee, or investor, or, or, you know, vendor partner. That helps them understand the company's role in the, in the bigger context. So I was thrilled to get that call, but what I really want— curious about is if I, if I tip the dominoes backwards that ended up with me getting that call, what's the origin story? Where did that come from? Why was it a business thing? Was it a fluffy marketing thing? Where does the need for a strategic narrative come from?

Again, I love the question because you don't often have time to stop and think about these things. There wasn't like one thing, one person saying to us, hey, Peter, you really need a new north star. In a way, it was a groundswell. It was a groundswell of lots of things that—

Like pitchforks and torches? What am I thinking here?

The market changed a lot. The market had, with the advent of all these privacy requirements and regulations, in the space of 3 years, the whole market changed. And you had a coalescing of all the different factions within the buy-in market. Either talking to each other or having their drivers start to overlap. And it happened pretty quickly. It happened largely in the lead-up to GDPR and as a result of a number of large breaches. It kind of complicated our marketplace. It's quite a fragmented market, but it complicates the marketplace. And inevitably what happens is when you get a buzz, you get a lot of new entrants. So we also suddenly had a lot of new competitors who personally I don't think really understand the market, but they were very well funded trying to address privacy without really understanding the privacy about all kinds of other things. And so there's confusion. There's confusion with customers, confusion with the analysts, the commentators, confusion with partners, everybody piling in, existing incumbents like ourselves who had a certain slice of the market and plenty of others that had other slices of the market and all with a little bit of overlap. It was difficult to cut through that noise, if you like, Bob. And when I say cut through the noise, both cut through the noise to our customers so they knew what it was we were trying to do for them, and then internally so that we all had the same, you know, parade. We're all pushing and driving on the same parade and we're not going off in different parades. But it was certainly the moment it all reached an apex, we had to come together and we had to establish a new, in our language, new North Star. That we could all pull against and we could also help our customers to determine what it was we were trying to do for them over a long period of time.

Am I correct? This was not, hey, our customers need more detail on what we do. It was something bigger than that.

Far bigger than that. It was a reason to believe. It was bigger than the reason to get out of bed on the Monday. It was the reason to go on the journey for a few years. Okay. And, uh, and it's quite exciting. It, you know, it's proved very valuable, very exciting for us, but it was very necessary. And in a way, it's only having gone through the whole process we can now look back and say, wow, how, how were we doing it without that? You know, often when you set a business up or you get involved in a new product or a new market, you put a lot of energy in and you, you have the time to do some of this thinking. And yeah, maybe, maybe because of past experience, you say, that's what we're going to do, we're going to create new plastic bottles and they're going to be more recyclable, cheaper, etc., or shippable or something. And then 5 years later, the market's all changed and you don't always have that chance to stop and reset. And effectively, that's where we've been. A lot of our previous North Stars had been overtaken by events in the marketplace. And so this was an opportunity for us to reset and give ourselves a 5-year, minimum 5-year timeline.

Got it. So what you said is, and the way you said it was interesting to me because I think I have this, this phrase that I've used in the past called customer rediscovery. And people say, well, I know what customer discovery is. It's the thing that when you're a startup, everyone knows you're supposed to talk to 100 customers or prospects and find out what they really need, and then make sure that, you know, that you validate what you're doing. But then there is no equivalent level of effort to that 5 years later. It's just always sort of iterating on what we've done before. So I appreciate that you guys recognize that. I think that a lot of companies don't force themselves to take a step back, even if it's for a week or two to do the work.

Well, Bob, Bob, if I can, just to that point, if it does happen once you're up and running, it's because there's an event. There's something that's triggered the need to do a reset or a refocus. And arguably now, just in this conversation, looking back, there were events that triggered us to action it, if you like. Some of those were new products and moving to cloud, massive shift in approach strategy. Some of it was what was going on in the market. If you're going into a funding round, you're going to have to get these things squared away and straightened out, and you're going to have to give your potential investors confidence this is what you're trying to do and this is why you're doing it and this is the magnet that's pulling you there. And so I think even in normal times, if you like, events come along that either force you to do these things or make it really clear that you'd be wise to take a pause and do it. And so inevitably there are a bunch of things that coalesced for us that also triggered us to get on with it and do it.