Interview with Mihir Shah, CEO of Drobo – Small Business Show 158

The Small business show, episode 158 for Wednesday, February 14, 2018. Greetings, folks, and welcome to the Small Business show here at BusinessShow Co the show by, for and about small business owners. Sponsors for this episode include Textexpander. We're@textexpander.com podcast. You get 20% off for your first year. And Jamf. We're at jamf J-A-M f.com SBS. You get your first three devices free for life. Here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton.

And here in Lafayette, California, I'm Shannon Jean. That's a mouthful, Dave.

Hey, you know, it's what I do. That's right.

That's right. You have a lot of experience.

I do, yeah. Arguably too much. That's right.

That's all right. It's good to have lots of experience.

Sure.

Yeah. At least a good thing. So, hey, we've got a great guest on the show today, and I want to jump right in because we have a lot of stuff to talk about. So we recently had Jari Bolander and Mehir Shah on the Small Business Show. We discussed Jerry's book.

Right.

The Entrepreneur Ethos, which is cool. I have a signed copy sitting next to my bed. It's awesome.

Same.

Yep. But when we were on the show, we realized as soon as we hung up with these two awesome guys, we said, man, we need to have my. Her back on the show. He's got a lot of good stuff to talk about. About. So, Mehir, welcome back to the Small Business Show. Thanks for joining us today.

Dave, Shannon, thanks for having me excited to share and impart whatever knowledge I have to you guys and your constituents and your listeners.

Yes, constituents. Yeah. I spent a lot of time on your LinkedIn profile this morning. So it's. I think it's definitely wisdom that you.

I don't know about that.

So, you know, my. Her. He's got an extensive background, you know, helping to manage, acquire, invest in and sell business businesses, both small and large. I know our listeners will learn a lot from you, so we're really happy to have you back. What I'd like to do is take you back to the beginning where a lot of folks are maybe right now and maybe not your first business venture, but what really got you jazzed up and started to spark to get you going in the business world, if you could talk a little bit about that.

Yeah. I'll tell you a couple things. Funny enough, my background, at least from an education standpoint, was in the life sciences. So my Father's a physician. And so growing up, the only thing I knew was, hey, gotta go be a doctor. And my junior year, I think, in college, it was, my dad set me up with an internship with a cancer specialist out of Southern California. And thinking, hey, this is great. I got an internship. Most med school students. Students get, you know, couldn't get this hookup, I'd say probably in the first 48 hours. I realized that that career was not for me. I, you know, was in front of a cadaver, like, looking at, you know, blood and guts, and I said, you know what, Dad? I appreciate what you guys do, and I appreciate what doctors do, but this career choice is absolutely not for me. And. And so then. Then kind of began, you know, the journey right over there.

Sure, sure. Well, that's good. You learned that early on.

I can see how it. Being presented with a cadaver would give you a very efficient way to evaluate your future. So very efficient.

I walked into that room and I smelled that smell, and I was like, I am done.

That's it?

Yeah, that's it.

But that's like, that's it.

No, I mean. I mean, funny enough. Funny enough, I took the MCATs, you know, got into med school, all those things, and I said, you know, what? Not going.

Yeah, but that's huge. Like, people go like you. You know, I meet people sometimes my age that, like. Yeah, you know, I realized I went into the wrong profession. It's like, well, you headed that right off at the pass. That's good.

And. And how was. I mean, you know, must have been tough maybe for your. Your folks or your dad as, you know, not kind of following those footsteps. They. They took it okay and supported you?

You know, actually, my dad was extremely supportive. And so, you know, my father's the only physician in business people. So it was, you know, very kind of, well, receptive. Get it? Understand. Mom was a little bit, you know, disappointed. I think I turned out okay.

I think so. Yeah. That's awesome. So, you know, as I mentioned, for much of your career, you've been involved in, you know, mergers, acquisitions, and, you know, we talk a lot. We've been talking about the last, I don't know, maybe five or six months about selling your business and different things that go on. We've had some guests come on that have sold their companies, you know, during your time of doing this and analyzing what stands out as. Or is there one thing that stands out as the most critical part of making an acquisition successful? Bringing together two companies.

Yeah, a couple things. So first and foremost, there's gotta be a product market fit for the company that you are acquiring, right? So did a ton of deals at IBM as well as Brocade and the ones that separated the ones that were successful and unsuccessful or whether or not there's actually a market for the product that you're building. And so the other interesting thing we did at IBM was we actually did a study of the 200 or so acquisitions that we had done over the previous 10 years that I was there and the ones that actually were most successful was, hey, we got a product, we're solving a problem and customers are actually paying for this product. The ones where we invested in or bought companies that were kind of science projects where we thought the technology was really cool and maybe it would help, turned out to be non starters and just did not get the traction even with a large company's sales force. So that's one thing. The second thing, culture. I mean, I can't stress enough about this, right? The company that you're acquiring has to have a similar cultural fit or you have to assess really quickly whether that team that's going to come on board can adapt to your culture because change is a little bit difficult. And if you get that whiff of hey, these guys are just going to continue to do what they're doing and not really going to be a part of this overall mission that we're trying to go accomplish, it's a pretty quick deal killer. The unfortunate part is you get this whole steamroll effect of when a deal happens and all the executives and all the deal sponsors within the large organization just want to go get it done. Always like to take a step back and say, hey, does this make sense from a cultural standpoint? Because if it doesn't, it's just going to be a disaster. You might have a trophy that you acquired a company, but at the end of the day there's going to be no revenue and no synergies associated with it. So those are kind of the two things that I am very, very keen on.

That's great, that's really helpful. So I have questions about both things on the product aspect of it. So you call them kind of science projects where you thought, hey, this is a good technology, it would be great. But if it didn't come to fruition, would your focus then be on how do we preserve this talent and this group that we bought that can help doing other things, or is there some effort spent at trying to turn around something maybe that didn't work out? Right?

Yeah, absolutely. Right. I mean, you've paid a handsome sum for an asset now and it's not working out. And hopefully the team that sponsored this deal at the larger company can figure out how you can incorporate technology pieces within that acquisition to make a complete solution to compete against your competitors, or take that team and rapidly develop an adjacent product that we can go sell through our channel. Even taking a role to take a step back on this, at the end of the day, this is really a sales game. It's taking this thing out to market, positioning it correctly and having your salesforce go put it in the hands of your customers.

I'm curious, from the standpoint of someone being acquired, what are some of the signs that your new, hopefully benevolent overlords and acquirers are, are perhaps feeling a little bit of the post purchase blues. Right? I mean, because I feel like, you know, if you've been, you know, your company's been acquired, you're, you're part of that team. You know, there's a long term involvement stretch for you. You kind of want to know, like, how are, you know, you want to know those signs before somebody comes to you and says this isn't working, you know, especially if there's maybe some upside to the deal for you if things work well. So are there any things that might be sort of metrics or warning signs for somebody to say, oh wait, maybe I can be the, I can take the lead here and step up and say, hey, is this working the right way? You know, what might some of those things be?

Yeah, so first and foremost, every time a large company, you know, and we'll just use public companies, right, as kind of the acquirer, you know, when they're putting together a business case to go and acquire a business, that business case incorporates incremental revenue, right? That, that, that that target will generate as a part of a larger organization. It'll, you know, it'll have a hiring plan as a part of it synergies, you know, in terms of, hey, you know what, maybe we don't need all the salespeople that are coming with this organization and we can, you know, use our existing salespeople and then there's metrics aligned to all those. And so they have these kind of broader integration teams at these larger companies that are monitoring the progress based on the initial business case that was presented. So the incentive is for the, for the sponsor who sponsored this deal within a large organization to make those metrics, to either make those metrics or figure out if they're not making them, how they can evolve that asset that they've acquired. So there are definite metrics in there. Right. So my thing, if it's a small company that again, doesn't really have a product, the metric is, hey, you told us that this product was ready to go. How come it's taken so long to get developed? So there's a product milestone kind of metric and then there's financial metrics. You scorecard these on a monthly basis to see where we are in terms of what we said we were going to go do.

Interesting, because that's a different mindset than a lot of small businesses, especially in startup realm, like you said, if they don't even have a product, yes, you have these milestones, but you, you also, you're just kind of doing everything and running as fast as you can toward the finish line. And now someone has defined when and where that finish line is. And so for someone coming in, wrapping your head around, well, there's a new way to do things now or a new way to look at things now that could be really helpful.

And a new accountability.

The new accountability. Right. It's not just. Especially if you were the CEO and if you were the CEO and the chief engineer on the project and all those other things. Yeah. Understanding what they need from you and what they don't need from you.

Yeah, yeah.

And what these large companies are great at is process. Right. Process is instrumental in making these large behemoths run. And coming from a smaller company, it's difficult to adhere to those because you're not used to that process. Right. You're calling the shots. You're like, hey, this is the one metric I care about. But in reality, these larger companies are looking at multiple different metrics. And if one of those red flags goes off, you better believe that the deal sponsor is getting a phone call saying, hey, we just spent $200 million on this asset. Why are we not generating what we said we were going to go generate?

Yeah. That's fascinating and I'm sure can be difficult. And I also think it comes part to my next question about culture, that process culture, and maybe a little more control, higher levels of accountability. And like you said earlier, change is difficult. Are there, you know, things that, or methods that you found to get people to embrace that change during those kinds of transition to help them, you know, succeed?

Yeah, I mean, I think at the end of the day, the, you know, and again, we're going to take the Acquirer and Target monikers over here. Whoever the sponsor at the Acquirer is, I Mean, he or she has to lay down the vision of what that business unit is going to go do and how this new asset is going to go help achieve ultimate goal. And so if you have that crystallized and you're able to communicate that to the new team, I think you get rid of a lot of these obstacles that typically happen. Where it tends to fall apart is where there's kind of miscommunication. And so you kind of go back into the deal process. This is why I think it's extremely important for both Target and Acquire to spend a lot of time together where it be with dinners, coffees, whatever it is, really, to get to know that person. Because the worst thing is, hey, I want to do a deal just to do a deal. I go buy a company and I don't know who these people are, and I don't know how they're going to go integrate. That's just a recipe for disaster.

That makes sense. Yeah. No, that's great. That's very cool.

Yeah. I'll just give you one example. I mean, at Brocade, we acquired a company. The company was a small company with very little revenue. We ended up paying, let's say, 18, $19 million for it. But even before we got to that point, I spent a ton of time with the founder just to make sure the way he operated, the way he treated his employees was very much aligned with what Brocade did. Because I kind of knew that if we didn't do that, it was just going to be a difficult challenge. Everything worked out. And it worked out so well that we were able to even get concessions out of him from pricing because I got him to a point to feel that, hey, look, being a part of this, you're going to be, you know, not only are you going to have greater responsibility within a larger organization, but you're going to be able to call the shots in the valley on your next endeavor, right?

Oh, yeah. Oh, there's a. You're right. It's a sales pitch. Yeah.

Total sales fit. Yeah, total sales.

But, but, but not. I mean, not BS like that's actually true. If, if this acquisition is a successful thing for Brocade, then that person could call the shots on their next deal for sure.

Yeah.

And, and so, and so what I go back to is instead of sitting across the table on someone on a, you know, negotiating with, bring them on your side and align those kind of common goals and objectives. You'll be, you know, your probability of success will be a lot higher. But again, that's just kind of my style. There are companies out there, their style is completely different. Right. We buy you. You're going to do what we're going to do, and that's how it is.

The best way to go.

We talk about that concept of sitting on the same side of the table in many different scenarios, all the way down to the lone wolf consultant that's out there helping somebody fix their printer. It's like you need to be on the same side of the table, otherwise you've just entered into an unprofitable, adversarial relationship. So.

Absolutely. And I always tell. I always tell people use the term we. You know, not. Not near use we. Right. It's just something.

Some.

Something little as that can make a huge difference.

It totally makes sense. Yeah, that's great. The power of we.

You know, Power of we. Oh, I like it.

All right.

Hey, Shannon. I wanted to sound like a book title. It does sound.

Yeah, that does sound. I was just thinking that I want.

To take about two and a half minutes here, Mihir and Shannon, and talk about our two sponsors. Shannon, you want to. The first one?

All right, you're up there.

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Micromanaging the right way.

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There you go. And our thanks to Smile and Textexpander for sponsoring this episode. Our second sponsor for this episode is jamf@jamf.com SBS where you can get your first three devices for free for life in Jamf's awesome mobile device management system, Jamf.

Now is that forever?

It is forever.

Wow.

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I think between my wife, my kids and my parents, I probably need this for my house.

I use it. Yeah, there have been times when I've used it for my house for sure.

Yeah. That's awesome.

All right, you want to take us on to the next one, man?

Yeah. Mehir, thanks for letting us pay the bills there. Appreciate it.

Sure.

So what I want to do now, let's condense your 20 plus years of business experience and jump ahead to how you arrived at Drobo. Can you give us a little bit of background of what for folks that don't know what Drobo does and then how you got involved with the company and ultimately became CEO? Sure.

So you know, Drobo manufactures and designs data storage appliances, primarily targeting small business as well as creative professionals. And, you know, our value proposition is really around storage. Easy for Everybody, right? We know people are starting to move to cloud and doing those types of things, but at the end of the day, this is a cost effective solution. Even more cost effective in the cloud for small business and creatives to house their data within their four walls and our network. Attached devices act kind of Azure private cloud, so you can access those devices from any of your mobile devices, laptops, PCs or a web browser.

Nice.

That's kind of Drobo, how I got involved. It's really interesting. So I was approached, I'd say about early 2015, where Drobo was being put on the block or to get sold. And a good friend of mine is a banker who was representing Drobo, and my former boss actually sat on the board of Drobo's parent company, which was Connected Data, and, you know, got approached saying, hey, here's an opportunity to, you know, get involved in a, in a company that's got a great brand. Thing is you got to go raise money to go buy it, right? And you got two weeks to go do it. And so, and so, you know, discussions progressed. This was in a kind of, I think it was around April timeframe, about mid April, ish, somewhere around there. So, you know, got on the phone, called several people that I knew. You know, I was willing to go and lead the organization, and we were able to close the financing in, you know, a few short weeks and bought the business. Right. So, you know, we partnered with a couple private equity firms to go do it. So, yeah, it was fast. You know, I literally. We closed the deal. I want to say 11:55pm on a Friday night where I was actually supposed to be at a, at a family wedding function and I had 40 texts from family members asking me where I am. Like, everything's getting started. Yeah, that's kind of how it is, right? You guys know how the small business world works, but it's all right. So, you know, kind of the lesson that I've learned from all this, like, you know, make sure you have a great network. Right. These opportunities come, you know, very, you know, far and few between and, you know, capitalize on them. You got to, you know, pull the umbilical cord, as I always say.

Yeah, that makes sense. We talk about a lot here too, you know, networking and making those connections. That's awesome.

What is that? Is that timing abnormal? Like the, you know, you've got two weeks if you want it. Like, go find money, let's go. It's going to happen. Now, is that, is that pretty common or. No, this one was a little out of the ordinary.

I honestly feel it's common for me.

Fair enough.

I've always been in situations where it's always, you know, you got two or three weeks to go get this done or else, you know, it's gonna blow up. I always make the comment, you know, you know, I don't know. Crap always blows up when. When I'm either out of the office or I need to get things done. It's kind of a good motivator, too, right? It's, you know, you work super, super hard to go get it done and that, you know, you get it across the finish line. There are times where, you know, in my previous career where, you know, I've been on the other side. You know, buying business for a large entity, that obviously takes a lot, a longer time because, you know, again, the acquirer has a balance sheet. You're kind of waiting to get the small company in a position where you can go in for the kill. You know, they're low on cash and those types of things. So those deals typically take three, four, five months to close.

Got it. Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. But like we say all the time here, time kills all deals. And so to be able to go to some equity or someone who's going to provide you with capital to do this and say, I've got this deal, if they get excited about it. Well, good news, because you got to sign the check next week. There's no time to think too much about this or to have something else distract you from this, like, we're just going to do it or not. And I need to know today because otherwise I got to call the next person on my list. So.

Yep. I mean, it's. And that's what it was. Right? I mean, have for it is dialing for dollars.

Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. Wow, that's. That's a great story. So when you came on board and now we get to the part of the show which I always, you know, I call the problem solving section. So managing crisis and things like, often when businesses are sold, there's problems that need to be solved. When you came aboard to Drobo, did you have to jump right into solving any critical problems right away? What went on there?

So, again, crisis. I think my brand is crisis. That's good.

That's a good brand to have.

There's crisis every day. Right. And we had crisis yesterday. Right. So I thing that a person like myself or someone who's looking to acquire a business, you really got to assess what are kind of the key components in the business, drivers of the business. And for a hardware company, the most important thing is supply. Right. If you don't have supply, you have zero revenue. And we had a situation where the contract manufacturer at that time, Drobo, had a large outstanding balance due to them. So the first thing that we had to do was hop on a flight to Asia and show these guys the business plan and what we're gonna go achieve. And we needed their partnership to go do it. So that was probably, I would say the biggest crisis is if we weren't gonna get that done, then we weren't gonna go do the deal. So we actually pre negotiated that before the deal actually closed. If we pay you X of what we owe you, will you continue to build products for us? And it was, fortunately it worked out really well.

That's great. Yeah, that sounds like a critical part of things to make sure you don't want to do the deal, walk in on Monday morning and then realize that.

Oh yeah, you don't have a business.

Yeah, right.

Yeah, right. And the other thing that we realized was the opex, what I called operational expenses for this business were completely bloated. Right. Very much driven by a classic Silicon Valley startup that's been funded a ton of money and they can go spend on whatever the heck they wanted to do. So we had to go line item by line item and took a long time to figure out where we can and get to an OPEX level. That got us to a point that was somewhat comfortable. And I always tell people the way to kind of do that is go find a public company in your industry, see what their revenues are and what their expense to revenue ratios are for each line item them and try to budget, plan your budget according to that. So for example, if I'm making $100, if I'm a big company and their revenue is $100 and they're spending $20 in sales and marketing, make sure your sales and marketing budget is 20% of your revenue. That's how you become really efficient.

Yeah, that's a great idea. What a great tip.

That's a great tip. Whether you're acquiring somebody or if you just have a business that you kind of want to wrangle under control. Just. That's. Wow. Yeah, I love it.

That's very cool, huh? Yeah, so that's good. What I like also is your comment, you know, my brand is crisis. I mean, you're right, we're always. I mean you can't run around like your hair's on fire. You just kind of have to embrace it and go, okay, here, line them up and let's knock them down. You know, and, and I think that's a really smart thing. That's cool. So let me ask another one. We always ask all our guests this, you know, staying on the topic of problem solving, we're big fans of mistakes on the small business. Since they tend to learn. We learn a lot from them, often on the hard way. But can you share with us a mistake that you made during your career? It doesn't have to be Drobo, but something that's really stuck with you as a major learning experience.

Yeah. And I'll kind of go back to Drobo. Like I said, I underestimated how difficult a hardware business is to run. So everybody goes in with these rosy projections, you know, into any endeavor, you know, we're going to be a company. But I think I kind of go back to, you know, understand what your business drivers are and, you know. Right. And I'd say the biggest mistake that I made was really underestimating how important that supply chain is. Because when you have, you know, 10 or 15,000 components that make up your product, any slippage in one piece of that, that supply chain can really impact your business. And I'll give you an example. Just yesterday we found out that the manufacturer of a small spring device doesn't want to bid on our business anymore for a reason. So that's going to delay our ability to get a product. It's a small spring, it's about a 2 centimeter size spring that goes into our product. Not even an electrical component component, just a spring.

Wow.

And so, so again, I kind of, you know, I kind of go back to know your business, know your business drivers, and you're gonna make mistakes, right? I make mistakes on a daily basis. Right. Personal, boy, you know, whatever it is. Right. Personal business mistake. It's just how quickly can you adapt to it and how, you know, can't only you. Your team as well. Right. You gotta have a good team who's able to navigate, you know, through this change and be able to take a deep breath and say, hey, you know what? We're gonna find a way. We're gonna find a away.

Yeah, no, that's great. So would you say that that's your biggest challenge at Drobo is managing that supply chain?

Supply chain. I mean, again, everything's a challenge here, right. You know, we're, you know, we're moving buildings, you know, we are, you know, we're ramping up a new contract manufacturer right now. You know, we have a couple of sales people just left for sure. We're kind of hiring new people. Again, like I said, my brand is crisis, right? That's how you get through it. You, you know, we had where we had a little bit of a cash crunch, right. And so how do we navigate, you know, do you stretch out vendors, do you get incremental capital, you know, those types of things. And you know, we're in the midst of doing a big capital raise right now. And so again, it's, it's like I said, I've probably had it in the last two years.

Yeah, that's great. It's problem solving though, right? Just.

And that's what it is, right?

Yeah.

And I think I said this on your show last time. Somebody in this world has encountered your problem. And that's why a network is extremely important. And you know, whether you go put it on LinkedIn or whether you go to any networking organization you belong to, hey, I've had this issue with my contract manufacturer. What do I do? Chances are I probability that someone else has encountered that. So use that to your advantage because you can't figure it out on your own, right? You're gonna, you're gonna shoot yourself in the head trying to be, hey, why is this happening to me? You know what, it's happened to several people, several thousands of people use, harness the, you know, harness the power of crowdsourcing knowledge to be able to get you to your answer a lot faster.

Yeah, that's a great tip, especially for entrepreneurs or small business owners that are often, you know, maybe this lone wolf mentality that, oh, look, I'm going to solve, I'm going to, you know, solve this problem and maybe not reach out to get help. So I think that's, that's real important. Important.

Yeah, I think you got to be self. Aware, right. First and foremost is, hey, I don't have the answers to everything. Right? And you being the CEO or the owner of your business, your team and your employees are constantly like, oh, this guy must know everything, or this gal must know everything. No, you know, it's we, what we try to do is we try to invest in people who do. And if we don't, we extend out to our network to say, hey, here's the issue that I'm having. And I'm telling you, every single time I've done that, I've gotten a solution.

Yeah, that's cool, that's brilliant. So I've loved having you on the show, some really just awesome tidbits of, you know, information that are some great tips for business owners of any size. So I want to wrap it up, I want to again bring you back to the beginning, kind of where we started. If you could go back to when you were just getting started on your, you know, awesome business career, is there a critical piece of advice that you would give yourself based on your knowledge and now?

Yeah, I mean, I continue learning. Right. At the end of the day this, this whole, you know, things that we do are a journey and you know, I have friends that have been in the same job in the same big company for 15, 20 years and, and, and that's fine. That's, that's what they enjoy and it's their means to an end to whatever other passion that they may have. But you know, I kind of chose this path and for those listeners that you have, they've probably chosen a similar path as, as myself and you guys and is always be excited that hey, something new. You wouldn't be doing this if you, you know, if you didn't want to learn and grow as a person. And so that's where kind of the growth mindset really comes into play. And I think people who embrace learning, who embrace change, you know, are going to be successful in small business.

Hear, hear. I agree. I think you agree too, Dave.

No, totally. It's like you have to. If you expect things to be the same tomorrow as they are today, you're wrong. And if you feel like things are the same today as they were yesterday, it's because you've become complacent. Like watch out for either one of those mindsets because you are definitely wrong and it means somebody else has momentum that you don't have.

Ah, that's true. Well, Mahir, we've loved having you on the show again. What's the best way for people to learn more about Drobo and your products?

Sure. So you know our website www.drobo.com has plethora of information on our products. We're Also on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, all the kind of social platforms. Go and follow us and you'll see kind of our story. I think it's really unique. I think it's going to be one of the true telling turnaround stories of the Valley.

That's awesome. Awesome. Thank you so much for spending your time with us today. I've learned a lot and I know all of our listeners will as well. I really appreciate it.

Very cool.

Thank you for having me. Yeah.

Thanks, Mihir. I appreciate you coming back and all of that. It's very, very cool stuff, man. Shannon, that about does it for me. You good?

I'm good, man.

All right.

Well, folks, we will see you next week. And keep living that charmed life.