The Value of Mentorship | CapIntel’s Co-Founder and CRO, Rob Crnkovic (Podcast 241)

I think when you're young, you just kind of think the world's ahead of you and you know better than everybody and you're about to just embark on this crazy, awesome career. I wish I would have sought out more mentorship like proactively and done it earlier and in a much more meaningful way just because of the impact it's made on me and my career.

Our guest today is Cap and Tell's co founder and CRO, Rob Sinkovic. Cap and tell is a B2B wealth management platform for financial advisors and asset managers that enables them to save time and easily articulate the value of investments to their customers. Rob joined Cap and tel with over 10 years of B2B sales leadership experience. As a former executive at Slack, Salesforce and Plaid, he led high performing teams focused on the financial services industry and has successfully applied his experience to build small but mighty sales teams that continue to scale quickly. Through his leadership, Cap and Tel has inked major deals with some of the biggest names in the wealth management industry including bmo, Global Asset Management, IG Wealth Management, Canada Life and Equitable Life. Rob, welcome to the Second In Command podcast.

Yeah, I'm really happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, I'm looking forward to, to learning a little bit about your journey and also to learning a little bit more about what Cap and Tel does. But why don't you start off and just kind of walk me through some of your leadership growth over the last few years. I'm particularly interested just to hear about what it was like working at Slack and also at Plaid.

I actually started my career. I was a business student and in Canada the tech scene really hadn't taken off. You know, this was 20 years rim. Actually research in Motion was really kind of the hot company and it was really starting to kick off the Waterloo sort of tech hub there. So natural place for a lot of business grads was to go into CPG. So I did that for almost 10 years and I had a lot of friends. Salesforce actually opened up their a North American office, so an office in Toronto that covered most of North America from like a commercial sales perspective. And I had a lot of friends that I'd went to school with that had went to Salesforce and had been there many years and were always telling me about like how great it was. And five, finally I decided to make the jump. So I moved over to Salesforce and at the time I moved from Stanley, Black and Decker, I was a general manager for their outdoor lawn and garden business and I moved over to Salesforce and I was actually given the Stanley Black and Decker account. And one of the coolest experiences was at Stanley Black and Decker Canada. I reported to the president and I couldn't dream of being in the same room as the CEO of Stanley Black and Decker Corporate and, and within like two months of me being at Salesforce I was in a room with the CEO of Stanley Black and Decker Corporate and talking about strategy and things. And that's what got me on, on software and software sales. Just to be in the room with incredible leaders like that and being amazing to make an impact on our business. It was like sales, tech sales all the way.

That's amazing. Okay, I've got a funny story and I don't know if this name, it's only gonna be a first name. 1994, I had a roommate in Toronto who was at Block and Decke. His name was Ron. Super fun guy that was in kind of. This would have been in the sales and marketing arena right around where you were there.

Black and Decker was a, a really interesting place because they subscribed pretty closely to the old Jack Welch. Like you know, 20% get promoted, 20% kind of exit the business. Y so there it was a really great place to advance your career quickly. But there was also a lot of turnover. So I, I learned a ton of in that business. But Ron wasn't there.

I wish I could remember his last name because he was a great guy too. Funny about the cpg. You're the second person in two days who's talked about their CPG experience and it doesn't come up very often because that was just kind of the space that I wanted to get into after university as well. What do you think you pulled from the CPG space? The consumer packaged goods that you still carry with you today?

The thing about CPG is tech sales and tech is a little interesting, especially on the go to market side because it's very much like pay for performance. And so you don't necessarily have to be super senior to potentially accomplish some of your financial goals and different things like that. Or even your goals of like, you know, being in the same room as the CEO of Stanley Black and Decker. Like you can do that even as an IC within tech sales. Whereas consumer packaged goods, it's, it's much more about kind of like moving up the chain of command and increasing your, your purview. And one of the biggest things that you aspire to do in CPG is own a P and L. And so I was fortunate enough to own A P and L relatively early in my career. So I was, you know, under 30 years old getting to dive into a P and L and make decisions around a P and L. And I think as you start to do enterprise sales, it's super key to understand the business and the decisions and the experiences these business owners are having. So I was really fortunate to kind of have first person experience about like, do you grow sales? Do you cut costs? You know, if you're bringing new costs in, how do you justify that? So a lot of the ROI and the, the kind of the decision making behind it, I had some purview into it and I thought that was really, really helpful because ultimately like what we're trying to do is enable these business owners to either save money, grow their business and it's really important to have that experience or have that background at least. I found it to be really valuable.

That was the key that I was hinging on as well. I was hoping you were going to go there. I wasn't really looking from it from a packaging or a branding perspective, which I think you also get, but it really is owning the P and L of a business or a business unit that I think most business people don't understand. And it's astounding to me that most employees don't understand the basic P and L of a company. They just don't get it. And I think that's something that all leaders need to get. When you were with Salesforce and getting into enterprise sales for the first time, were there any lessons that you picked up there that you still kind of carry with you today?

I had sort of like two versions of my career and they were all really successful. So I was fortunate that I was at Salesforce nine years. I was in a unique position that we had like club which were different levels of making your number. And I was fortunate enough to make club every year and made chairman's club. So I had, you know, nine years of over delivering on my quota both as a salesperson and as a sales leader. So, you know, my first years were, were as like a really successful IC and a gentleman named Keith Block came in from Oracle to be president of distribution to really make Salesforce an enterprise company. And one of the big focuses was let's focus on financial services and let's folk, let's talk the language of our customers. And I was fortunate enough to be given JP Morgan Chase as an account. And I remember kind of like doing everything you're supposed to do as a salesperson and had a deal all lined up, we committed it and the deal kind of fell apart at the last minute. And we're really fortunate. We're able to scramble and kind of make the number. But after that, I was given a mentor and it had kind of been like, like before the mentor was like, grit, personality, hard work. Hopefully there were some things I understood. But like, after the mentor, I learned that like, sales is a vocation and there's an actual process to it. And I just so much to some of the great leaders at Salesforce for really teaching people how to truly sell an enterprise deal. And like, it's a really complicated dance and I think there are, like, there's best practices, there's process, and it's definitely repeatable if you do it in the right way. So for me, that sort of changed my life and the trajectory of my career was to. To really learn true enterprise sales.

Okay, that's super interesting about. About the true enterprise sales and what it is. I'm going to ask you a couple more questions around that. My wife actually was. She led all the Salesforce engineering teams for Tick Monster. So she was on a different. Different side of a similar business. So did. But I guess you went to a couple Dream Forest events in San Francisco.

Yeah, a couple Dreamforce. And I remember like Ticketmaster and Live Nation and we. We had some awesome customer stories around those. So that's pretty cool.

Yeah. So that all the engineering for all of the venues for Ticketmaster, so for all the NFL sites and all the.

Oh, wow, cool.

Yeah. All the cool perks. You got to go to everything for free all over America. But then she was finally like, what the am I doing sitting leading engineering when she was trying to build something that was replacing something that she just spent two years trying to build with these engineering teams and they were already replacing it just as it launched. She's like, this doesn't make any sense anymore.

Yeah.

Exit stage.

Right.

So when you're doing the. The enterprise level sales and you're working with the C suite on these, what are some of the secrets that you can kind of pass on to others that will make it easier to do enterprise sales? Like, you know, you mentioned the vocation, which I think is just understanding it and treating it seriously and learning. But are there any couple of tricks or tips that you can give?

I think it depends on the size of your organization. Like, I can give some perspective maybe to start. Like, would it be helpful from like a startup perspective? Like from the cap and tell perspective?

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Let's. Why don't we even start? Tell us what cap and tell is and then let's give us a couple of examples of how you've done strategic sales or enterprise level sales for cap and tell.

Yeah, for sure.

Yeah, I'd love to.

So we've been around in market for three years. We're really fortunate to have had a lot of success already. We have 12,000 advisors and wholesalers on the platform already and we just recently raised our first funding round, a Series A led by Fintech Collective out of New York and Fengate Asset Management out of Canada. Ultimately, we're a client experience and an advisor experience tool. Our goal is really to deliver transparency into the process of working with an advisor and a client. So right now one of the main things that a client does is when they invest with an advisor, they're really investing in investments, they're moving their money over to put into investments. And right now there's a lot of goal based planning, which I think is the right thing to do. So when you work with an advisor you talk about like, you know, what are my risk parameters, when do I want to retire, you know, how am I going to make retirement happen? And so what our tool enables an advisor to do is really quickly compare investment that you currently have or different portfolios and then being able to put together a proposal that combines qualitative information and quantitative information to deliver like a really good view of what that plan looks like for the end client. And so, you know, we've seen a ton of value that we've driven both on the advisor side, like making them more efficient and contemplating them much more as a salesperson, making their job easier. But then on the client side, because we've been able to combine qualitative information with quantitative information like I don't know about you, but like if you see Sorrentino or R Squared or all these crazy charts on your investment stuff, it doesn't mean a lot to me. But if somebody says, hey, it's a, you know, crazy inflationary time and you need some yield because you're a balanced investor. And I'm going to show you a couple things that make a whole bunch of sense to you and resonate to you personally, that builds a whole bunch of trust and it makes people really understand what's going on so they can ask intelligent questions and build confidence with their advisor and really move some money over. So that's what cap and tel does. And we've been fortunate to focus on the enterprise and already had a lot of deals. So we have Three of the largest banks in Canada as customers, the largest insurance provider in Canada, one of the largest national wealth providers. And then we've recently moved into the US with a lot of success on some great brands in the US as well too.

What's the reason that these banks are working with you? Because I would have thought that they would have had stuff like this on their own already.

Yeah, I think they do. They definitely do. But I think there's a few things that are going on within the market that makes a lot of sense for us. And I think this is part of the selling process of a startup to a bank. I think one of the things you need to be able to do is really articulate vision of where the market's going and where that bank needs to be. But then you need to be relatively tactical and precise about the problems you can solve for them relative to their existing tech stack and what they've built and everything like that. So for us, the vision that we see, and it's shared very commonly across our customers, is that advisors are no longer exclusively stock pickers. They need to be relationship managers and they need to be able to really deliver a great customer experience. One of the things that we're seeing as a really consistent theme is, is that banks, where they traditionally would build everything, now are really viewing vendor technology as a great way to quickly establish client experience and really build a great stack for their advisors. And it's, by the way, it's super competitive to get advisors to work at one company or another. And the tech stack is a big differentiator. So that vision is kind of shared and that's going on. And then we're really fortunate to have an incredible CTO and co founder named Max. And then James is our CEO and founder. It's not just the go to market motion, it's also the product that needs to support it. So you need a scalable product, like something that's going to work for thousands and thousands of users. We also need something that's like componentized and integratable with API first technology. So like we know that a bank has legacy solutions here and legacy solutions here. How do we fit into them and solve the problem in a really meaningful way? And then we also need to basically have the whole company align to selling to the enterprise. Like product people need to be on the phone, Dev people need to be on the phone, Security people need to be on the phone. Like you can't say you're an enterprise company and then security not be enterprise grade, you know, What? I mean like so all assets of your company have to be on the same page that this is your ideal customer profile and what's it going to take to sell to them and then be fully committed? It's so much more of like a decision than a hope if you're going to sell to the enterprise.

Well, that's interesting. I like the fact that you were even talking about just the integration with some of their legacy systems. And I also think it's interesting that these big banks are finally deciding they don't need to build everything on their own. You know, 20 years ago they were always building everything completely on their own and then there were always other solutions that already existed. They could have just plugged in, but they somehow just seem to. Are they doing that across the board now? Do you find that the banks are trying to plug in software, best of breed software across the board?

Yeah, I feel like there's certain areas where it still is heavily homegrown and like, personally I think it makes sense in some of those areas there's certain things around scale or security where the banks really want to own that. But then there's areas around advisor experience, customer experience, client experience, onboarding, where, you know, the expectation is so incongruent with the current experience that the only way to kind of get to where it needs to be is through vendors and picking, to your point, like those best in breed solutions. And that's why I think it's really important as a startup to understand kind of where you fit in that whole ecosystem and really kind of align to what the vision of whatever that Persona that you're selling to is. If you understand that that Persona is undergoing like some massive, you know, transformation and undertaking. You know, you need to think about how you can benefit that or accelerate that transformation rather than why can't I get my two hours sort of thing versus maybe somebody where your tool can make the most material impact in the shortest amount of time. You know, then maybe it does make sense to really go full frontal on that engagement. I think being in tune with, with what their needs are is, is really, really important.

Is it different selling into the US financial services industry versus selling into the Canadian. I mean, I guess there's the obvious. Well, you're a Canadian company, but like once you're past that, is it different or is it the same?

I think it's different. I think it's much easier to sell to the US than it is to Canada. And I think a lot of people assume that to be the opposite. But the Amount of competition in the U.S. breeds a little bit more urgency. So in Canada, you know, there's five major incumbents and so they're exceptionally innovative and they do like really cutting edge stuff digitally, which I think is a real big benefit, you know, but they also have fortress balance sheets, right. And they, they, they mitigate risk and just naturally, you know, Canadians are a little bit more consensus driven. Has been kind of my experience. You're always selling to multiple stakeholders and being multi threaded is the key to any kind of enterprise deal. But in my experience, you know, if you need to talk to 20 people in the U.S. you need to talk to 45 people in Canada. So I think in the U.S. we found it to be a little bit quicker deal cycles.

Funny, I've heard that even about west coast Canada versus east coast Canada.

Oh really? No kidding?

Yeah, I've heard it's much easier to sell to the people on the east coast like a Toronto, New York, Boston, because they tend to move cost or more urgency to get shit done. And people on the west coast a little more laid back, a little chill. Friend of mine was the founders of a financial law firm in Toronto called Wildeboard Elise and they led the research in motion the rim offering, you know, 25 years ago. That's how they kind of cut their teeth in this space and use that as the entry point into a lot of US deals. Do you find that because you started in Canada, you got in with these, you know, some of the big five banks. Has that allowed you to get in the doors of the US now? Because everybody knows, you know, BMO and Bank of Nova Scotia and TD and Royal, like all those brands are really well known in the us has that opened doors for you?

Like surprisingly not. I think our funding has helped us the most. We found financial services companies to be super open to talking to fintech and a lot of them have kind of put together fintech teams and partnership teams and so as soon as we, we, we kind of got the funding and we were able to artic the problem we were solving. We've tried both paths, like hey, we do business with, with bmo, we'd love to do business with you. And I think that didn't get as, that never got us as much traction as hey, we're this exciting fintech that just raised some money and we've got a lot of customers and we're solving this problem that seemed to get us in a lot more doors which like intuitively I would have thought that the large Canadian institutions would have been Much better. Because traditionally within financial services it's really important to gain a brand, like in terms of customer brands. And the more you can get customer brands in different ideal customer profiles generally the easier it is to do that. But the Canadian brands haven't translated to the US the problem statement that we're solving has translated.

It's been like just the fact that you're legitimate, right? You're, we're a legitimate company. We've raised money from a couple of USB C in the fintech space. This is what we're doing, this is how we solve it. That's legitimized enough. They don't need to know that you've landed some part of a Canadian company.

Yeah, yeah, I think so. And like, it's almost been interesting when we kind of lead with the top three banks, some of the feedback is a little bit like, well, you're a Canadian company. Do you understand the U.S. problem? And the U.S. problem fundamentally is really, really similar. And we actually started with the US Problem as the thing that we were solving because we always aspired that like that was the TAM that we wanted to go after. But like Canada was in our back door and right, right beside us, like we live here. So we started, you know, talking to folks initially in Canada and took off really well. But from like a regulatory perspective, from a competitive environment and even from like a customer perspective, really, really similar problems. But often when we lead with like, hey, we're a Canadian company, you know, working with Canadian businesses, it's not as exciting potentially for us to get that first meeting than when we talk about us being, you know, fintech solving really meaty problems.

That's cool. Talk to me about the Series A. How much did you raise and what was it like when you, when you did that raise, what did it change and what were the lessons that you learned kind of doing the Series A to get to completion?

James, our CEO, is an ex investment banker and an accountant by trade. So he led that, but asked me to kind of, you know, ride shotgun a lot of those pitches. And through the whole process we raised $11 million US it was led by FTC Fintech Collective out of New York. And it was followed by Fengate Asset Management in Canada, one of the largest asset managers here. The process was really exciting. Like we met so many different VCs and I think what we learned is that at first we were really trying to tell an exciting story that we thought VCs would be interested in. And then really quickly what we realized is rather than trying to tell an exciting story that VCs would be interested in. Like, we have a really great business and we were fortunate enough that we didn't necessarily have to raise. We were in a bit of a unique position. So we thought why don't we just tell our story and what we want to do and naturally like that'll help us choose the VC that makes the most sense as well too. So like that was our method of interviewing VCs. It was like, we're not going to tell the story that we think people want to hear. We're going to tell the story that of, of where we want to grow and, and of who we are today and where we want to go. And if that resonates with people, like, let's get really deep and help them understand what they need to about us and, and let's try and understand what we need to about them. That sort of change in, in how we were thinking about it and how we were pitching helped us get really, really quickly down to the folks that made the most sense for us and who we made the most sense for, which was made it a really fun close.

Has it changed anything? Finish the close.

We finished it in May and then we announced it in June. Yeah, it's totally changed things. I think it's afforded us the opportunity even from a hiring perspective. So we were always aggressively hiring, but our candidate profile changed. We went from hiring like exceptionally talented, bright, gritty people with subject matter expertise that could bring like that have done it before and could come in and bring processes and could bring experience and maturity to the business. Like one of the challenges I still have is like, I'm so close to Max and James and we talk, you know, a couple times a day and sometimes you fall into that like pre raise mentality where it's like a gut feel and a lot of things are like notional and emotional. And I feel like this is happening and like we're talking like, oh, we should do like I'm feeling this, maybe we should do this post raise. We're really trying to be a mature, data driven business and so they're, they're great partners to be able to kind of remind me and say like, hey, maybe we should do the diligence. Let's talk to our people. Like we hired really smart people. So that, that's kind of the difference from pre raise to post raise is, is just the experience that we've brought in and the maturity that we're trying to drive in the business.

So it sounds like you're Going to be using most of the cash or some of the cash then for building out your next A level team. Right. For really scaling up the leadership in the next team. How many employees do you have now?

We're just under 60.

Okay, so not a huge company yet either. That's a nice size. Still to be able to focus with 60 employees is the focus then to start going after more on the sales and marketing side? Is it on the engineering side? What's the, what's the focus on people right now?

Yeah, so traditionally we've been heavier on the engineering side. So we've been really focused on like, you know what we mentioned earlier is you need to, you can't just say I'm going to sell to the enterprise. You have to have a product that can be sold to the enterprise. And so it takes a lot of work to build, you know, a configurable platform versus a customized platform. Like you see so many times that people say like can you do this? Or how do we make it our own? And then all of a sudden you land that client and the entire dev and engineering team just has to build new stuff to be able. It basically becomes a custom development operation for whatever your large customer is. So really fortunate that we've been focusing on building like an API first platform that it's componentized, that it's configurable, that it's scalable. So a big focus on that side we've been growing, I would say like our business group, you know, like finance, operations, human resources and then also a big focus on go to market. I think one of the areas, you know, frankly I underestimated, you can get to 3 or 4 million dollars in ARR by kind of nailing a couple big clients, right. And then sprinkling some other stuff in there. But to go from like 3 or 4 to 10 to 15, you really have to back it up with pipeline. Right? And you really have to back it up with like a go to market machine, a process. So we've really been heavily investing on that. I think one of the place we probably personally I didn't invest heavy enough was around the marketing engine and we were getting so many referrals and we were like our, our close rate is, is really, really high. And now what we're focusing on is just continuing to be able to grow our top of funnel with like the right customers. And we know that like we know who our buyer Persona is, but we also know who our next three Personas are that if we touch them and have them really interested in our business as well. Our close rate goes up. So like we've really starting to heavily invest driven kind of like marketing engine and we're already starting to see some really great impact from that.

And is it only on the financial services? Like are you in the insurance side of things as well? Like are you working with groups in the US called like Advisors Excel or are you only on the the like the stock side of things or investment?

So anybody that would sell investments. So, so right now we have the ability to compare any sort of investments. We're adding ESG and SMA into the platform this quarter, which is really exciting but mostly focused on the investment side side.

I spoke at an organization years ago called the Top of the Table Million Dollar Roundtable. I'm pretty sure they're all kind of in the investment or the, the life insurance side of the insurance side of the space, I think. But how do you, you kind of touched on this whole like if you land the clients and the engineering team just starts building up this custom software and I'd written down something around, is it hard to integrate? How do you resist the urge to say yes to all of those needs that those customers have versus trying to get them to use what, what you've already created? Because sometimes you're trying to get them to adopt a different style of running their business. In some ways I would think.

I think that was probably the hardest transition to CRO, to be honest with you, is that idea of like chasing a quota and a kegr versus like really chasing growth and trying to build for growth. Like if you fall in love with the deal and you're a rep, it may cost you your year. But if, if you're a CRO and you fall in love with the deal like all of a sudden you can have your leadership team now start to fall in love with that deal and it impacts, you know, the they're building and how they're executing. You can even have like to your point, your engineering team fall in love with the deal and start solutioning how we can build to satisfy all this stuff and the next thing you know, like your roadmaps off the rails and a whole bunch of things. So I think the one thing is, you know, if there's situations where the client's not a fit for us, we're fortunate enough that we can say no as well. Like I think the key to an enterprise deal is like a really good fit and there's no point in closing a map massive deal if it's going to railroad your company and cost you, you know, two or three times as much over the next six to 12 months sort of thing. So I think that's one is understanding if the deal really makes sense and if you fit the need and if, if your tool set does, I think the, the other thing too is out of the gate. Integration's always the question. And I think if you really know the use case and if you really know the value that you're trying to deliver, that's what helps keep the scope down or legitimize if the scope needs to be bigger.

Right.

So if you're solving a certain problem and a lot of people come out of the woodwork and say, I want it integrated into this, I want it integrated this, I want it integrated to this based on an mvp, like a minimum viable product that produces the most amount of value to you, Mr. Or Mrs. Customer. Like do those integrations really make sense? And when we go through that exercise and relate it back to the problem that, that the champion or the decision maker is usually trying to solve, a lot of times it' just comes down to one or two integrations to like the customer master or something significant, but something that is like reasonable for us and something that we've done before. And one of the things that we've done, I think has been really bright by our product and engineering team is anytime we do an integration, we build it as a toolkit. So it's always reusable and documented the next time. So, you know, the first time we do a Salesforce integration, a client basically paid us for that salesforce integration, but it was done using like an API toolkit that's repeatable that now we can hand to the house and say, hey, we can either be business architects or we can be fingers on keys. But like here's what all the information and it's really easy to do.

That's the only way that this truly scales. Right. How about yourself in terms of your growth? Where do you think you're growing? And I'm curious how the company had to evolve or change kind of. You started pre Covid about a year or so, pre Covid and then Covid kind of hit with a bit of a whiplash, I would imagine. How did you have to change? You know, are you a, are you a location based organization? Are you hybrid now? How any changes around that as well? So talk about your leadership growth and then also the company in terms of where you're located and how you're building out?

Yeah, it's been kind of Funny, because during COVID like, I think one of the most important things we can do is just hire awesome talent. Like, if we can build the right team, I think that goes a long way and that one of the most important things I can do personally, I feel, is, you know, bring in the right leaders and help enable them to bring the right team in. And when we're hiring, initially, all we hear, like, one of the first questions people would ask is, are you fully remote? And we'd say, oh, yeah, yeah, we're fully remote. Like, all good, no worries. And now, like, the question we get is, do you have an office? And it's. It's kind of like, do you have an office? Because I, like, I want somewhere to go. And then if. If we say we have an office, the next question is, but, like, I don't have to go, right? So, so, so, so it's a challenge, right? Because I don't blame. Folks want camaraderie, they want meeting. Like, they, like now. They. They miss people. They want to work with their teams. A lot gets done when you're together in the collaboration. Work from home is so convenient. Yeah, done. And you can work on your own schedule. And like, you know, we see a ton of productivity from people working from home. So we've been really thoughtful about how we can almost have a hybrid working environment. We've been really thoughtful about, like, trying to get the team together. For example, we just had the whole team out in Halifax. So all 60 people were out in Halifax for. For two days. And it was super focused around, like, culture and future. But it was like the first time most people had all ever seen each other because, you know, we've got some folks in Philly that we. We've built out a hub in Philly. We've got some folks in Halifax. I've got most of the go to market people here in Toronto. So it was really nice to get together. But we do have to be really thoughtful about giving people the opportunity to work from home, but also facilitating like collab and getting them out of the house and together as well too.

Yeah, it's a really interesting time on this as well. I just saw Elon just put a note out this morning that he's requiring all employees to show up at the Twitter head off or Twitter office is 40 hours a week now.

Oh, wow. Not insane.

He's like, we got to do and the world's getting real and we got to stay focused. I'm like, wow, that's hardcore. I think there is a bit of a blend with, you know, we need you to come in, we want you to be around. We have it available. But there's also that meritocracy of, like, and if you can work and get shit done and be remote, that's cool. I just met with a. A client of ours the other day, and I've done probably 50 calls with her over Zoom over the last few years. And I met her in person, and she's five foot zero and I'm six. I'm six foot four. And I looked at her, I'm like, you're so tiny. Because on Zoom, she's like large, man. She's big energy. And she's like, yeah. I meet her in person, like, you're this tiny little thing. She goes, I know. It's amazing. It's funny. Yeah, it's, it's. It's so different.

And I love seeing people's backgrounds. Like, that's part of the thing I like. And listen, I don't blame people for graying out their background or having the things there, but I love when I'm on a call with somebody kind of peeking what's behind them, because you get a real different insight into somebody sometimes when you see what's in their office and what's important to them and pictures that their kids drew and stuff like that. So some of those things I like on the Zoom because you get a different glimpse, but it's also really nice to be in person with people and have some of those hallway conversations and. And yeah, so we're, we're trying to balance both right now.

Are you going to open up a US Office at some point?

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I think we've just got so much momentum in the U.S. so we hired head of marketing is out of the U.S. she came from Backbase.

Super.

Incredible. Really excited about all the stuff Anna's doing. We just hired two strategic sales folks that came from E. Money and some other places in the wealth space down in Philly. And so we're, we're actively growing our U.S. headcount. And like, an official office down there is, is in the plans in the term, for sure.

It's awesome. All right, last couple questions. How about your personal growth in terms of leadership? How have you had to adapt as a leader?

Yeah, it's been kind of funny because I. I went from a little bit more of, like, thinking about things macro to jumping into a startup and almost having to be a little bit of ever. Like, I was marketer and customer success and a product manager when we had to figure like, do you know what I mean? It became, it became like in everything super tactical and now I'm going through the process of like kind of pulling myself out of that again. Because on the go to market side, you know, we've hired our head of customer experience, we've hired our head of marketing, we've got a director of sales, we've segmented it like we built out really great high functioning teams and now I'm just kind of bringing myself out of those day to day deals and, and you know, like still send a LinkedIn message to somebody sometimes and do some prospecting and it's like, is that the best use of a CRO's time? Probably not. So, so, so just kind of getting back to, to thinking about the business strategically and, and helping my team kind of run their teams and have some autonomy and really kind of get the engine going. So that, that's just been a really interesting experience from like getting back into it and then really thinking about building a real big a growth muscle that's repeatable.

Nice. Now will you need to do a Series B? Are you going to be able to scale from where you are? Is there any, any thoughts on that?

So I think I, I think the way we're thinking about it right now is we have no plans to do a Series B right now. We're really fortunate in that the timing of our raise and also, you know, one of the things that we've seen is the deals for us have slowed down a little bit, meaning that it takes a little bit longer. So deals maybe that we thought we were going to close in the second quarter, you know, closed a couple months into the third quarter. But we're really fortunate that like we're, we're still doing a lot of deals and doing some deals that we're really, really proud of. So we haven't, we haven't seen the, the volume of deals or the number of deals go down. So I think the way we're going to play it right now is just continue focusing on the US market growing there. I think we've been meeting some different strategics and, and different funds who are really excited about what we're doing that we think could be really, really cool partners, but no plans to actually do another roadshow at least for another 14 to 18 months.

All right, I want you to lean back, lean back a couple decades and go back to the 21 or 22 year old Rob and you're going to give yourself some advice. What advice would you give yourself back then that you know to be true today. But you wish you'd known when you were just starting on your career. Career.

I was really fortunate to fall into a couple mentors, both like in CPG and then salesforce. When you're young, you just kind of think the world's ahead of you, like and you know better than everybody and, and you're about to just embark on this crazy awesome career. I wish I would have sought out more mentorship like proactively and done it earlier and in a much more meaningful way just because of the impact it, it's made on me and my career. So that, that'd be my advice. Advice to anybody who's starting any sort of career is really just go out and, and try and find some mentorship and ask some questions and learn and, and even if it's not specific to your role, like even if you want to learn about the next role or whatever it is or, or just talk to people about how they run their business so you can have an understanding of P Ls or business decisions. I just think it's really impactful to have somebody helping you.

I, I, when, when I was the chief operating officer at 1-800-GOT junk. This is now going back about 18. I did have a formal mentor who was being groomed as the COO at Starbucks. And I think what you just mentioned, I'm going to do a loom video as soon as I get off with you and I'm going to send Greg Johnson a loom video and just say thank you for the. He just really put his time into me over the course of 18 months with, you know, monthly calls and every quarter in person stuff. And I think it's time to drop a loom video so maybe you can send one off to your mentor as well and say thanks.

Yeah, I think that's a fantastic idea because I think just a little bit of time, you know, can make such a massive impact on somebody in their career. Career. And I know it happened for me, so I think that's an amazing idea.

Let's, let's both take two minutes this morning, send a thank you off to our mentors. So Rob Cernkovic, the co founder and CRO for cap until, thanks so much for sharing with us on the Second Command podcast.

Yeah, thanks for having me. I had a lot of fun. There are certain people who are really good at the 0 to 50 million revenue range and then that's a very different company than 50 million to 100 million. I know there are plenty of people that are great startup people that are not great big company people that are great big company people that are not startup.