Communication Tips from a Fortune 500 Leader | Peter Schmied, President Appspace (Podcast 384)

I think you build a world class company around communications. Everything is about how you communicate and interact with the team that you serve. And so when you can provide sort of a, we call it a frictionless or seamless experience, I think that's the key. If it's cumbersome and it's hard, it's not going to work. But sort of bridging the gap with the way that you communicate and the way that you provide opportunities for people to connect when they're around other team members, I think is the, is the critical component there.

Our guest today is AppSpace's president, Peter Schmied, and Pete is a dynamic business leader with over 20 years experience as an entrepreneur and executive in enterprise software, consulting services and cloud industries. Before joining AppSpace, he served as DMXC America's executive vice President and General Manager, helping customers across Canada and the U.S. and Latin America and the Caribbean enable digital transformation with Microsoft technologies. Before dxc, Pete was instrumental in founding Concerto Cloud Services, a tri bridge company which he served as president of operations, overseeing the company's technology, platform, service delivery and customer service functions. He's a great leader. He's running a team of 450 people that are based all over the world and he's a huge Tampa Bay Lightning fan. You'll love this episode. We'll see you on the inside. So, Pete, welcome to the Second In Command podcast.

Thank you. I'm happy to be here.

Yeah. Looking forward to learning from you today and to learning about your journey and also just understanding kind of some of your thoughts. We're going to dive in around some of the culture side. I know that's really important to you, but before we do, I think it's important to understand the business, the landscape that you're approaching this from. So why don't you tell us about App Space, what it is, your core, who your kind of core clients are, what the company does as a core, and then we'll go in from there.

App Space is an interesting company. It's, it's been around for 20 plus years. It's really transformed over the past, I'd say 10 years or so. We started primarily in the digital signage space, if you want to call it that. But with, with COVID and Post Covid, I think we really hit the market right where, you know, we're, I like to say we're in the workplace experience, employee experience space. And you know, that's kind of a buzzword, I guess it could mean a whole lot. But at the end of the day we As a company are truly trying to transform how companies can communicate and work with their team members to provide a consumer like experience, an amazing experience for them because there's a bit of an employee revolution happening. They're at the epicenter of everything that we're doing in the workforce and as companies. And so app space is building the connections and establishing the platform that helps facilitate that across communications, across the physical workplace and the digital workplace.

Okay, so who do you sell to and what the solution that it brings to people?

It depends on who the actual Persona of who we're selling to, whether it's hr, IT or facilities. But I would tell you that we tend to play in the Fortune 500 space. I think we have something like 170 of the Fortune 500 are customers of ours. I'm trying to think of the some company names I can reference that I'm allowed to. Mattress Firm, Costco, Glencore, Paramount, University of Northern Colorado. Those are just some that come to the top of mind that I know have done case studies with us. If we're selling into the HR space, it's really about what's the modern way of communicating to team members today, Especially in the, I'll call it post Covid world where you have some people who may be fully remote, some people who may be partially in the office hybrid type of role, or some people who are full time in the office. And if it's facilities and it happens to be a company that's interested in bolstering their return to office, how can we provide more of a destination that encourages team members to want to be back in the workplace? You know, recently I heard we did a customer advisory board meeting and I heard this really interesting statement that was made. A lot of companies nowadays are divesting their corporate real estate to invest. And so you're seeing the square footage shrink. But they're building these destinations for team members to return to the office. But once they're there, how do they make it high impactful work? How do they make sure that they're around people that they want to collaborate with on a regular basis? If they need to have a quiet area, how do they identify where quiet areas so they can go get thoughtful work done? So that would be the facility sort of Persona. And then on the IT side it's how do you bridge all this together in this consumer like single interface that just makes it really easy to interface with all the technology that we have?

What do you mean by companies are divesting themselves of their space but then investing in Space.

There's one customer, they had something like, I think it was 2 million square feet of corporate real estate pre Covid and they're shrinking down to a couple hundred thousand. This is for their, their headquarters. What they're realizing is they didn't need all of this space, but they're going to spend similar amount of money to create a really cool new modern feel in the workplace, that destination. So it's divest all of this space and invest in something that's more meaningful. One particular customer is trying to create the healthiest workplace in the world. So they're using sensor technology to measure occupancy, air quality, all these kind of unique things. And then they're sharing that information with their team members so they can make decisions about where they want to work or how they want to work. Maybe they don't want to be in a loud environment and they're measuring decibel levels, stuff like that.

Love that. So you guys as a company have some good insights as to why employees are coming back to the office. Can you give us a clue and do you think companies are really moving to get employees coming back some way, shape or form, or is the horse out of the stable and you know, we're not going back to an office at all or are we somewhere in between?

From my personal perspective, and I have, you know, the unique privilege of having a very diverse point of view given all of our customers personally, I don't think we're ever going to go full, full time back into the office. There are some companies that believe that's the case and, you know, I think you'll see that in the difference in their return to office strategy strategies. I'm seeing more success, we're seeing more success in those companies who are adopting hybrid model where you empower your team members with the power of choice and you provide them the facilities and the things that they want and need. You educate them on. When people they work with are going to be in the office, you kind of nudge them, hey, you know, Pete's going to be in the office today. You haven't been in the office in a while and you only live two miles. You may want to go in, maybe you can grab a lunch. His calendar is free. Those are the types of things that I think are going to really drive the modern era of how we work. And then, you know, it's not just about the physical workplace too. I think companies are struggling with how you communicate when you have people working in this hybrid model at home and geographically dispersed Locations around the world.

How is app space set up right now? How many employees do you have total? How many are in physical space and your head office is in Tampa, but how many have you got working out of the Tampa space?

We're about just shy of 500. I want to say we're about 450 employees worldwide and we are a global company. Some cases we work in time zones where it's a 12 to 15 hour time difference, at least for me here on the eastern side of the United States. Our Tampa office is our headquarters. That's primarily a lot of our executives. I think we've got somewhere around 25 people that I'd say are in the local area. But we're fully hybrid. Like we believe again in the power of choice. We don't want to force anyone back in the office, but we do want to provide the opportunity for people to come to the office if there's a good opportunity or means of providing a collaborative environment so they can work together in person. I think we all know in person is. Some people might debate this, but sometimes getting in front of people face to face is a good relief from doing virtual meetings and, you know, everything on camera. Plus it's just natural to the human experience. So we try to look for opportunities to bring people in when appropriate. But we fully adopt this hybrid model.

Love it. What do you think makes the culture work when you're hybrid or when you've got remote employees? I mean, culture 10, 15 years ago was all about the physical office space, the water cooler chat, the after after work activities or drinks, the going for lunch with people, the ability to kind of collaborate. How do you build a world class company culture in an era when people are not, you know, sharing a physical space together?

I think you build a world class company around communications. Everything is about how you communicate and interact with the, the team that you serve. And so when you can provide sort of a, we call it a frictionless or seamless experience, I think that's the key. If it's cumbersome and it's hard, it's not going to work. But sort of bridging the gap with the way that you communicate and the way that you provide opportunities for people to connect when they're around other team members, I think is the, is the critical component there.

What's that mean, that frictionless communication? How does that work?

I'll try to describe it, I guess. Maybe I won't do it justice. Maybe I will. I feel like the industry is moving into a modern era where I Might go and post something on an intranet site and HR or the people in Culture team may expect people to be kind of reading new policy changes or information about your 401k or, you know, all of those things that we've dealt with. People are busy, they're trying to balance the work life balance or the flexibility of that while being successful professionally and personally. If you can serve that information differently based upon somebody's preferences or usage patterns, then it becomes more impactful. A great example would be, let's say that you know who I am, Pete, and you know that I have a big upcoming town hall with our engineering team and there's some specific feedback that we receive from a survey because we survey our team members before we get into a lot of agenda and address big important, you know, company topics. Maybe there's a way to serve that up to me when it knows I'm commuting into the office or I'm commuting into a business meeting, a lunch meeting, or where I can play that on my CarPlay and it can just feed me the information. It might actually live in SharePoint or it might live in an intranet, some other intranet, but it knows I have availability. It knows I need this information because I have this upcoming town hall and it can present it to me based upon when I'm more available. So that's a seamless, frictionless thing because it's aware of my preference and it's aware of the way I like to work. And again, that's, you know, part of what our software and, you know, our platform helps do and it's all configurable and things like that. So anyhow, that, that's one way of a frictionless sort of communication experience.

I want to ask you about, about selling into kind of the Fortune 500. What's it like to sell into a Fortune 500? What. How do you successfully get in those doors? Because it's more of a strategic sale. You've got multiple decision makers. Often we hear that the bigger companies, you know, the people are going to say yes, yes, yes, but they have no. Either desire to really buy or they just drag you along instead of saying no. How do you successfully sell into that Fortune 500 group?

I would tell you that it almost always starts with something small, the traditional probably overused land and expand model, where if you think about how Appspace started, it started with something like signage and then really building the right model around the people that we interface with and truly building champions of appspace, earning their trust and then spending the time to educate them on the other things that we can do. That's typically how we sell, cross sell within the Fortune 500. So it starts small. It starts with some, you know, IT project and then we continue to expand because we're doing a great job. You know, I like to say that we're very customer centric. When you put that element into a product company, it very quickly helps you build the credibility that you need to sell in deeper and deeper and start to build relationships with the people of Culture team, the facilities team, those Personas that I mentioned earlier. That's the key there is, I think we start small, we go big, and it's all about building credibility and doing a really good job.

How about you mentioned earlier that you sell into hr, you sell into IT and you sell into facilities. What differentiates a sale into each of those? How do you sell differently to HR than you might to IT or facilities? How do you approach? Because they've got to be very different personality profiles as buyers. Have you noticed anything that makes a sale work with each of those groups?

Yeah, I think, you know, you can assume, you know, they all have different business objectives. Right. So understanding what business problems they're probably trying to to solve and most of the time it is how they communicate to their team member, team members of its hr. Everything that we do is really targeted around how we help solve those business challenges for them. It's solutioning almost in real time by you ask a lot of questions in the discovery process and then we start to share, you know, how we can help them from a more modern approach. I like to say there's the old way of doing things and then there's sort of this new modern way in the post Covid world. What I found is when you tell stories and you help educate the art of the possible, people get excited, but you have to spend the time, you have to really understand what business problem they're trying to solve first. It's sales 101, in my opinion, based on the Persona.

Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. All right. You joined the company right at the start of COVID and I've got to imagine that, that either the company was in a big transition or a big holy crap. What was that like kind of joining a company at that time and how did you have to adjust as a leader at that time?

There was a lot of uncertainty right, with COVID And so as I was looking to join AppSpace, I was actually kind of going through my own little evaluation process of why Do I want to do this? What's the opportunity? And the momentum in the marketplace hadn't really hit yet, but I saw the vision of where AppSpace was going and how we were trying to build products that are going to solve for this new modern workplace and a modern way of communicating. And, you know, it was a bit of a hedge on my part, hoping that that comes to fruition. That doesn't always happen, but I feel like AppSpace hit it right. We little bit lucky in the timing of things because we had products that we were already developing, you know, immediately kind of the latter part of COVID as we were exiting, we caught wildfire. The demand was there, the need was there. Every company in the world was talking about how we can continue to communicate better to our team members. We were having lots of discussion around return to office, and that was exciting to me. Those. Those are tough challenges to solve. Most importantly, being at the table, being a part of the conversation with, you know, the Fortune 500 and hearing how they're thinking about all this because no one had figured it out, and then taking that feedback, getting in the hands of our product team to start continuing to evolve our products and offerings, that really helped solve some of the challenges that we were hearing in the marketplace. So it was fun. It was. I didn't anticipate that, but it was a really fun challenge and it was a fun ride. It's still a fun ride.

What do you focus on day to day right now? And can you speak to the difference, or is there a difference in the title between president and COO title?

I guess there probably is in the traditional sense. I don't personally like titles. I think culturally, at least from my perspective, I like to use words like, we're here to serve the team, we're here to serve our customers. Titles are more hierarchical. To me, I would say the traditional sense of a COO is that could come across as a pure operator, but in the sense of what I'm doing in my role today, you know, we're still building, we're aggressively building, and we're operating. And so there's this constant, continuous improvement process that we're working through almost on a quarterly basis as the company grows and scales and the needs and demands of our customers and team members increase. So I'm a builder and an operator in the president role versus the traditional CEO role.

How do you decide what to focus on? I mean, a company of the size of 450 people, how do you decide as a company what to focus on? Which projects or which strategic initiatives to say yes to and which ones to maybe say not now or no.

That's a good question. I don't know if I've 100% solved it perfectly, but I think making sure that we're toeing the line of big picture. So kind of forest through the trees. And I think our product vision really helps ground us in what we're trying to accomplish. For those folks who are sports enthusiast, the old Wayne Gretzky, you know, we want to skate to where the hockey puck is going. And so I think we're constantly listening to our customers and our partners and our team members and we're anticipating where the market's going. And I think that that's how we stay focused on big picture. Because, you know, it's really easy to get bogged down with the, the day to day and not make the progress that you need to to continue pushing forward. I call it the doggy paddling effect. You can doggy paddle and tread water all day long, but now not really get to the shore. And getting to the shore is the objective because you can only tread water so long before you drown.

So what are the specific things that you do to make sure that you're working, you know, or as you said, you're skating to where the puck is going. What are the things that you focus on as a leader day to day?

It's listening. The best way I could describe it is I'll tell a little bit of a story here. I think in the traditional sense of a product company, the way I see it is there's a lot of companies out there that tend to be very product centric, very proud of their product, and they have their own ideas of how that should evolve. And that's the right thing to do some of the time. But when you think about, like how you continue to stay ahead, I mentioned earlier I have a little bit of a service background. Listening to the customer, really understanding and becoming very customer centric as well as product centric. I think that's what helps ground us on where we should be focused because there's so much you can learn if you're just listening. We spend a lot of time. I mentioned customer advisory board earlier. We have two big customer advisory board meetings annually. One for, I'd say our Americas customers and then one for our international customers. And there's a wealth of knowledge that really helps serve us from a North Star perspective. And then we overlay that on top of our product vision because we also have aspirations based on being experts in Certain areas. And that is really the trajectory of how we decide what we're going to work on and what we invest in all of that. So it's listening and it's not just to the customer, it's to our partners. We have a big channel we leverage as well as our team members that are on the ground talking with our customers and partner network.

I love this. I love the simplicity of it when it kind of get to be so complicated when it's 450 people too. How about the roles and responsibilities between you and the CEO? How did the two of you decide who is going to do what? How do you divide and conquer there?

I feel lucky. I have a little bit of an interesting, I guess, scenario. Our CEO Tony DiBenedetto and I, we've had the privilege of working together for over a decade in different companies. Tony's a very entrepreneurial individual. So am I. My career has been very entrepreneurial. Startup and then big company startup and then big company. And so Tony and I have developed this cadence and this trust amongst ourselves of how we work. We know where we have strengths, we know where each other's have weaknesses and we work together as a team. Obviously I take direction from him as the CEO and he's been a great mentor of ours, but it just happens naturally. I couldn't point at one particular thing right now. I would tell you like, you know, my focus probably is not as heavy on the sales and marketing side. Tony would be really heavy there while I'm focused more on, you know, our product teams, our engineering teams, our. Our customer success groups, things like that. Because that's, that's where I have a lot more expertise and experience.

Okay, makes sense. Who are your current direct reports? What titles? Report G. Now it would be our.

Our head of product, our head of customer success, our head of customer care or support, however you want to call that. Our professional services organization, reports as well as our pre sales and then our research and development organization, our engineering team as well.

Okay, so for each of those groups, you know, the heads of each of those functional areas are already pretty seasoned, solid leaders. You know, it's not like you're having to teach them how to lead people. So what are you working with them on? Are there any areas of their growth that you kind of see across an organization that you tend to work with people on or is it just more situational?

I would tell you so some of them are new to the organization. As we've gone through this transformation, we've brought in some additional talent folks that have a wealth of knowledge. Specifically, like in our product area, we just brought in a new leader in our product management function. And so I'm obviously working with that individual differently than what I'd be working with some of our other more seasoned leaders. I would say that I'm primarily in the how do I serve you? How do I help you? Very, very focused on making sure that we as a leadership team are clear on what our objectives and what our company strategy is. And again, all of that centers around our product vision. And product vision is not just our perspective, but also from our customers and listening to our customers. So that's really the role that I play. I'm there to help mentor break down barriers, whether it's we got to find funding to go attack a unique issue, things like that. Situationally.

What about when you're hiring a senior person and bringing somebody senior into an organization? You know, you've got all the people that are currently after that job. Let's say you have the head of sales to make up a title. You know, you've got your VP of sales that you're recruiting for, but you've got a bunch of people that work in sales that would love to be the VP of sales. How do you stick handle around that issue when you know you're bringing somebody in from the outside? What's the communication that you have to happen with the team? What's the first 90 days like? How do you kind of help that process so that, you know, they don't quit, they don't get frustrated, there's not a ton of ripple effects from the new hire.

Culturally, I think as a company, I think we're very advanced. And so I would say when we go through a scenario like that, the first thing we always do is when we are hiring, we open it up internally, right? We're very clear, hey, we have the senior role we're looking to fill. And if people internally want to apply, then they're welcome to apply. And we run them through the same sort of process that we'd run an outsider through. And I think what naturally happens, because we're very transparent and open and trusting of each other, I think candidates that may not be good candidates find out. Internal candidates, they find out that very quickly, just based on the questions that we're asking and the interview process as a whole, that they're maybe not as qualified as what we're looking for. So they naturally sort of remove themselves from the process. You know, hey, this might be a little bit over. Over my shoulders, a bit. And so I found that tends to be the case most of the time. Sometimes we hire internally. Like, sometimes we find a really good candidate, like based up our needs. And that's worked out really well as well. And I. We love to promote within. We're always looking for that opportunity. People want to continue to. To grow within the company that they work in, right?

Yeah. My approach is very similar when I. When I show the job posting to a job, most people bow out pretty quickly. But the one example, and I agree that, you know, occasionally you have some people internally that can rise. I had was hiring a head of marketing one time, and I had this candidate that worked for me in operations who wanted to be the head of marketing. I'm like, marketing, what do you know about marketing? He goes, yeah. Oh, you never saw my marketing resume. You saw my operations resume when you hired me? I'm like, what are you talking about? He pulls out another resume and shows me himself, the same guy, but he showed me his expertise as it related to marketing. I was like, holy. We ended up hiring him as our head of marketing. He was incredible. But it's amazing what you forget about people after you've done the job interview. You know, you forget their skill sets. So, yeah, sometimes you have to dig deep internally. How have you grown as a leader over the years and what are you working on currently to grow as a leader?

I'm always working on that servant leadership model. I really believe in that. I know it's a buzzword that a lot of people use, but I continue to work on that. It's how do I serve our people, our team members? I try not to use the word employees, by the way. I don't know if you've noticed that. So that's number one. I'm always trying to do that. I think I can always get better at that. Any of us can get better at that. We're all in leadership. That's number one. Number two, I'm working on staying curious. A lot of my success is not because I'm smarter than anybody or stuff like that. I just actually failed a lot. And so learning from failure, being curious when things work well and why they worked well and being curious when things haven't worked well. And you know what you can glean from that? I continue to do that every single day because I fail every single day. And if people don't admit that, then they're not being honest with themselves. So I'm constantly keeping that as a thing I'm working on. And then the other thing That I think some people may say is weird is I try to always put myself in uncomfortable situations because that to me is personal growth as well. I kind of have this unwritten rule I share this with. I have a 25 year old daughter and a 22 year old son and they're right in the kind of the prime of beginning their career. And I say, hey, if you ever hear that little voice on your shoulder just saying, oh, don't do that because you're uncomfortable, you should do it. And you know what? You might fail at it and it might be an epic, like embarrassment, but I guarantee you next time you'll be better at it. And so I, I'm always in tune with that and that still happens to me today with a lot of things. And so I'm, I'm working on that as well.

I love that. All right, I want you to lean back into the past and give the younger, you know, 21 year old Pete Smead some advice. What advice would you give the younger you, you know, to be true today, but you wish you'd known when you were a lot younger?

Wow, that's a great question. I would say I would just touch on what I just said. Number one, don't be afraid of failure. You got it. You got to fail to get better. Growth only happens when you do fail. So take on big things. Not everyone's willing to raise their hand. Be a habitual learner. Constantly be curious. Try to learn something new every single day. That would be the second part. Attitude, aptitude and knowledge. Constant chasing of knowledge are the two or three most important things. It never stops, in my opinion. Have empathy. Treat people the way that you'd want to be treated and be genuine and be transparent. And that'll get you really far. Because those are the, in my opinion, the keys to success. That's what I've just done really well, I think, and that's why I find myself in the role that I'm in today.

I love that. Pete Smead, President of Appspace. Thanks so much for sharing with us on the second fan podcast. Really appreciate the time today when you.

Were in a new market, when you've got a really interesting technology, when you've got such incredible customers right out of the gate, you can look out onto the field and say, gosh, there's so much I want to do here. And at a bigger company, you have the time, the resources, the people to kind of set all of those things in motion and watch all of them bear fruit.