Grant Stanis - CEO @ TeamSupport

Welcome to another CEOism podcast. We have Grant Stanis with us today. He's the CEO of Team Support. He's helping B2B SaaS companies make support a strategic growth channel down in Austin. Grant previously was board of advisors at BambooMeta, CEO at Enmark Systems, been CEO for, I believe, a private equity fund, right? And that is intriguing to me. I've been dabbling a lot in that space as of late. So Grant, welcome to the pod. Tell us a bit more about yourself and what you're up to.

Thanks, Charles. I appreciate it. I, uh, you know, it's been fun, uh, the last several years doing a bunch of different, uh, things in and around the space. Um, you know, never actually run a private equity fund actually, but always done consult— started my career doing consulting work for them, especially around buying and selling and trying to find some value, uh, as you go along the way for them. And Um, hit an inflection point in my career at one point where I said, hey, I'm giving a lot of advice to these guys, how about I start running some companies for them? And so spent the last— better part of the last 10 years kind of walking into companies at various different points in their stages. Um, sometimes it's a company that's got a great product but a terrible expense structure. Sometimes it's a company that's got a founder-led lifestyle business that you're trying to reinvigorate and grow. And Sometimes it's a total disaster that you just got to figure out exactly what you got and figure out what you can make from it. But, um, seen a lot of people make a lot of mistakes, certainly made them myself, and learned, learned a lot along the way.

Right. Let's start with your background, right? You started at PwC, and I also read in politics, right? Like policy analyst in Texas Senate. Um, and yeah, you spent, yeah, probably what, like 15 years With like quote unquote conventional jobs, CFO and so forth. When did you officially scale to CEO role? And do most CFOs or consultant types make good CEOs?

That's a good question. You know, I, so kind of going back to the beginning, I started my first career, as you mentioned, in politics and I loved it. It was great. You got to feel the work of what you're doing every single day. And the fast pace and the rush of it was awesome. And then I got some advice that if I wanted to make money and not go to jail, that I needed to get the hell out of politics. So I did quickly from there. But, you know, I think it came down to 2 things, right? The first thing was, is I think that consulting was a phenomenal setup. It led me to context shift in a day-to-day life, if that makes sense, because You go from one project and one call to the next, and especially doing the M&A consulting I was doing, I have like eight deals running at once, and you had to quickly go and flip and pivot between whether it was a tax issue to on one project to a financial issue on a second one. And that actually really benefited me, I think, as well as the synthesis and breaking things down into small bite-size aspects. What I think that the consulting held me back. Was when you're in consulting, you work with a certain type of people. They focus and they talk and they breathe and everyone is the same. Outside of the consulting world, everybody is very different. They have different motivations. And the very first time that I left consulting in one of my first roles, I tripped up tremendously because I didn't adapt in the right way, if that makes sense. As in, I thought everybody was in, by being the smartest guy in the room, that I would instantaneously get the respect and the credit. And it almost made me have less respect, if that makes sense. And so made a lot of mistakes in that first role, but learned a tremendous amount.

Yeah, that's a crazy good insight, right? So how did you adapt it specifically? How did you learn, I guess, EQ and to work in team? Because in my opinion, still pays a lot to be the smartest guy in the room. And to me, that doesn't mean to be an arse, right? And just like put everyone down, but means to do more reps, right? And there's still very few humans at the end of the day that are willing to do more research and know your shit more than everyone else in the room. It also means competition, right? Competition in a corporate setting, I don't like it because it's politics, right? To get up. But if I get competitive as a founder, right? Like it's almost unlimited upside, right? And investors will have me on their radar more. I'll be better to my clients and there's generally greater ROIs. Can you—

Charles, I think that you hit one of the biggest things, which is the competition, right? In consulting firms, it's incredibly competitive. You're, uh, you got this like fence around your clients and your jobs, and you're like, as much as you might be part of a partnership, you're still also responsible for your revenue goals, and, and you got to make sure you get it. But what you said, I think, about competition is really great, which is you shift that competitive dynamic. And don't get me wrong, I'm one of the most competitive people you ever meet. But when I went into corporate, I had some of that competition with my peers, and that was totally wrong. What was wrong, or what was right, was the competition towards my rivals, right? And like, when I walked into one of my companies that I worked on, or that I worked with, um, they had no competitor that was their number one competition. There was nobody that they sat there and said, oh, I'm gonna go smash these guys in the mouth, right? And you didn't have that rallying cry from everybody that said, I gotta go do this. And that's like where you talk about utilizing your EQ and finding the different ways of what you're doing. Like, that's incredibly important. And I do think that that EQ piece is challenging still, right? Like, I find myself, especially as a CEO, you're typically out in front of your organizations, right? Like, you're thinking, 3, 5 years ahead, and you've got to be able to bring your company along with you. And you cannot— and again, this is part of like where I learned my mistakes— is I always thought, well, if I am speaking about it, you're going to totally get what I'm saying right away. And the reality is you have to say it 3, 4, 7 times in order for somebody to be like, oh, I think I get that, and oh, I'm ready to come along. And but it's also about giving them that information. This is where I think that the IQ comes in, which is you've got to explain it to them in different ways because people hear different things. It's no differently than with your spouse or your partner, right? Like, you might say something, they're like, no, no, I didn't say that. And you're like, well, you did, but they're just coming at it from a different angle. And so bringing people along, making them be a part of that conversation, man, I made that mistake big time where it was like, this is the idea, let's go. And sometimes it's about having a little bit of that debate But then being at the end and being like, okay guys, like disagree in here, but like let's commit when we go outside and let's go drive to this better argument. And so I think those are some really big mistakes that I made early on that have helped me as I've progressed with those.

Yeah, I'm definitely guilty of that as well. So I don't deal with like normal humans in my team nowadays. I have a weird funnel to recruit people. My partners, I only do partners, by the way. I don't do like classic 9 to 5 roles. I just outsource to agents. AI agents at this stage, but I do recruit like 1 percenters, super high performers. And most of them are ex-clients because they know my system. I only work with founders and CEOs. So my business partners nowadays, folks that own equity in my business, they're founders and CEOs and they run their own shit, right? So it's not my stuff when I bring them in is not like the full thing. So I think I fixed that, but I'm still impatient with people I onboard as clients, right? Like I have them in front of me. Ultimately I sell like go-to-market as a service with a very contrarian approach combining cold email and podcasts. And when people don't get it, I'm like, what part you don't get? But most of these people have never managed 1,000 salespeople like I did. They didn't start like 10 fucking agencies to find out like what lead gen method worked best, right? And that's the part I guess I need to be more patient and more empathetic. And I really liked the part you said to explain to them in various shades and colors, right? Some of them will digest a video better. Some of them it's share screen call. Some of them it's a webinar. Some of them it's an email with like point forms, right? So gotta be patient, but sometimes I'm like, man, what part don't they get? You know, there's that frustration, right?

Well, you know, it's, I, I say it a lot, which is you got to meet your clients where they're at, right? And it's kind of like right now in the AI adoption phase. I think you, especially if you're like a, like a software company like us, we've got to meet our clients where we're at. We still have clients and we've got a super agentic, um, AI-forward product, but we got clients who don't know, don't understand AI, and we're constantly having to teach them. Then we've got some of our customer base who are on the forward side of it and they're like, hey, you're Your your multi-layer agentic layer isn't enough, right? Like I want A, B, and C incremental on top of it. And I'm like, man, like can I just have everybody in the middle? Like I can run a super profitable company in the middle, but but you don't get what you want, right? And I think that's the the beauty is you have to to extend it. And it's it's it's frustrating. There's no question about it because you have the same with you know your employees, your team members, right? Like I've got team members who. Have built like AI loop coding, right? Like a bug comes in, it's gonna create an AI loop of like fixing it. He's got his agents that will QA it, that will write the PRQs, that do the coding. And he's gotten to the point where he's letting some of them fly, right? Like he usually is the second reviewer, right? But like he's even developing an agent that's saying, here's what I'm looking at and here's what I'm doing. And then I've got others who are very much like, no, I'm still gonna send this email myself. Right. Or I'm still going to talk about this. And, and you, or a developer who's like, I refuse to use AI. And now it's like, it's hard because everyone's got a point, but you also need them to move forward. And if they're not moving forward, you know, it's a little bit easier when it's an employee versus your customer or your customers, it's harder to kick them in the rear to get them going. You know what I'm saying?

Yeah. But in your case, you know, I would guess it's only like 1% of your clients that want like the full technical AI stack and API and Craziness, right? And usually these people are not the best clients to have, right? Like they're good, they're good on their own and they don't want to spend, right? And they're probably still small-ish. Most of your most profitable clients are like corporations that don't have a clue about AI, right? And they need hand-holding and they need like the stuff we just talked about, like explaining various shades and colors, right? Um, I think that's most of where your, your revenue comes from, right?

It is. And, you know, you need— it's great to have both because on the one side it does push your product to be better, right?

Yeah.

And it pushes you to be more competitive in the environment, right? Um, but sometimes it also pushes you down a rat hole that you don't want to be in. And that's where, like, again, a lesson learned is the hyperfocus of what you do You do sometimes have to say no. And I think that the power of saying no inside an organization can really move forward more than saying yes to everything sometimes, right? And so evaluating that, like, hey, yeah, like, this is going to impact, like, to your point, you know, that, that 50% of our customer where we make our profit, like, that's really important because that's going to be the people that stay the longest. It's going to be the people that pay the most and require the less support.

Right, right, right. And you just put it in the product roadmap, I guess. And then how do you calculate that roadmap, right? Like what can be delivered the soonest, as simplest as possible, so lower cost with the greatest upside? Is that what you determine?

That's exactly what we do, right? So we, you know, we run our company in 6-week cycles and every 6 weeks we bring together, you know, a group of the senior leaders as well as like the client-facing folks and we literally will tackle basket and say, you know, each one says, is this for retention? Is it for new logo, right? Um, or is it a client request? And, you know, sometimes the client requests, if they're willing to put money behind it, you know, you might be able to jump the line. Um, usually those ones work when it's got sort of a greater good. But we absolutely look at it and say, hey, like, how many of our clients are actually going to use this, right? And the more it is that's out there, can we charge incremental revenue for it? And the more we'll drive the outcomes for it. And, you know, it's a balance, right? Um, ironically, we've actually built ourselves an agent that takes all the feedback from our customers, like historically, so we can sit there and generate and say, how many times has a customer brought this up in a conversation with us, and categorize and tag it from that perspective. We actually productize it into our product, which is pretty cool. And so everything's got like a priority score based upon a matrix that we established ourselves, which is pretty slick.

I love it. Tell us the story of you being brought in. Uh, what was the state of the company? Who's the PE that, uh, have you in their Navy sales team? And yeah, what was the thesis of deploying you in that company precisely?

Yeah, so, you know, I came to Team Support just about 2, a little over 2 years ago, right? And Team Support's a great company. We started in 2008, had some founders. Um, our founder actually exited, uh, prior, and there was a a team that was before me when I got put in. You know, the situation candidly was the company was behind in the AI fight, right? In the support world, if you're not sort of forward-leaning in AI, you're really getting passed. And part of it is because everybody wants to provide support. Like, think about like every time that you— the upside of running a support company is people constantly wanna put in new software to get their costs of support down and make their customers happier, right? airline and how every time that you call, it's a different experience, right? And that was really good. What was interesting though is the company had got almost to be too corporate-like. And so we had a process for a process, and perhaps it was during a board meeting where somebody asked a question, so we started tracking a metric that nobody cared about, right? And what happened is process got in the way of innovation in a time in which we needed incredible innovation, right? And so We had to strip all that out, get back to sort of our startup crazy days, and it would literally be like, does this feel right or not? Here's a simple analysis we want to do. Let's do this analysis in 15-20 minutes, even with imperfect data, before we sit there and try to spend 3 weeks analyzing something, because that 3 weeks we're gonna get lapped, right? And we had a lot of ground to make up. And so we had some unhappy customers, we had some unhappy employees, candidly, too, right? Like everybody was unhappy investors. And we've made a tremendous amount of strides, right? Like our retention rates have increased 15% from when we walked in. And part of that is just because like we're delivering the product that they finally want and we're delivering new product. And part of that was we made a really tough call, but we made it quickly, which was AI is gonna lap us if we try to do it within our own sort of You— the UI in which we've got. So we created a new UI that, you know, a bunch of our customers are using today that love. But had we not made that decision, we'd still be struggling tremendously to try to get things off the ground, and we'd still be chasing our tail. And so again, speed is the matter of the game, not necessarily the world's greatest format or presentation, but speed is kind of what you got to have, I think, in this market today.

So you were parachuted there in 2024, right? And today 2 years later. So what did the first days look like? And is it like hyper-stressful type of things in which you're, it's like chaos at first, you build a plan, you're not sure if that plan will work out. Is it a patience thing as well in which you need to religiously execute the plan you've built, right? And how do you know that you're starting to win, granted that running any companies, let alone is like, Rocket science.

I, I think the trait that kind of doing what I do matters the most is resilience. And part of that is the ability for you to make a quick decision and either unwind that decision or double down into that decision, right? And half of them are going to not work out. Like I tell my teams all the time, like, I want you to make mistakes. I want you to make good mistakes, but I want you to make mistakes because if you're not making mistakes, then you're not trying to advance something. And to go to the other piece of that, I will tell you it's super stressful in the beginning. It's a lot less stressful kind of in the middle, and then it's extraordinarily stressful at the end. And what I mean by that is in the beginning, you're sitting there and you're trying to figure out exactly what your plan is. And you've gotta, again, I once had a mentor, not a mentor, a board member of mine tell it to me great, which is ruthless prioritization. There's the urgent and the important. And so When you come in, there are the urgent things that you gotta knock off the board, but you've got to build this important platform, right? And so it might be, hey, we've gotta fix some cost structures. It might be we've gotta get on our product. It might be like any, depending upon the situation, it could be several of those, but you can't boil the ocean, right? In our scenario, it was get in front of our customers, figure out what they need, and then let's go execute that plan, right? And so that first amount was how can we talk to as many customers as we can? How can we get feedback, all of these different pieces? So we did all of that, right? We replaced a few folks here and there. We moved people into different roles from our existing talents that were maybe not in the right roles. And then that middle part was actually, I would argue, the easiest. And what I mean by that is you had a very clear vision of I need to do X, Y, and Z. In our case, it was like 3 pieces around our platform. One was AI, one was reporting, right? And another one was scalability and reliability. 'Cause we had some issues around that and we fixed all of those, right? And we did it in the exact opposite order, which was reliability, AI, and then reporting, right? So we move forward, you start to see, you know that you're creating the progress, right? Because you're starting to see the metrics improve, whether it's the retention, whether it's your new logo bookings, whether it's employee morale, right? Like we put metrics next to each one of these things that we're going to go achieve. Then you get to the point where it's now the extreme pressure. And that's the moment that we're in because there is no excuses in the boardroom around like, hey, we've gotta go fix this thing that I inherited. I'm 2 years in, there's nothing that I inherited at this point in time. It is let's go, let's fix this, and you own 100% of the outcome. And that is like the pressure cooker. It's like if you're ever working for a VC, a founder, like a PE CEO, it doesn't matter, you own a business, you get it, which is, You are responsible for that outcome. And that's fun because you're making these decisions, but it is different when, you know, when you walk in, it's kind of like, well, there's a lot of stuff that's broken, like how worse can I do, right? Now you've got a little bit more pressure around like, hey, you fixed it, like don't break it, right? It's just a little different of a mindset, right? But you cannot—

Right.

What you can't do though is you can't take your foot off the risk.

Right?

Because if you get complacent around like, hey, we've got this thing in the right spot, man, like, it's gonna— the world— what's the old Ferris Bueller saying? Life comes at you fast, right? It is so true when you're a CEO. And if you sit back for one hot second and have that whiskey, like, you're gonna get passed.

Yeah, you gotta get addicted to growth and victories, right? And like you said, stoic in the face of failures and stuff that is not picking up. When you were dropped in, what tough decisions would you have to make? Like personally, if you would ask me that, and I'm getting to M&A and all of that, but potentially PE, I love doing these things, but I would feel most humans are just cruising around talking about taking their whiskeys, right? Like 90% are fucking taking their whiskeys. And I would just like let go a bunch of them, obviously not to like Elon style to break like everything around it, right? But I would cut the fat. Fat for sure. I guess like that's the most obvious thing you do when you come in. Like what kind of hard decisions did you do when you were brought in?

Yeah, so there are, you know, certain positions in which performance is really easy to grade, right? Sales reps performance, CSMs retention, right? What you gotta be somewhat careful on is sometimes the sales rep's performance though is a broader upchain aspect, right? Like as in, Do they even have leads to close? Right? So there you go.

There you go.

They probably don't. They didn't necessarily, right? So like going and cutting your one sales guy may or may not be, or two or three, or your entire sales team is probably not super important if your marketing team or your outbound team can't get you the leads that you need, right? And so you gotta be smart with what you do, but you gotta make the decisions fast. Sometimes too, when you like, I love to go talk to everybody and I talk to everybody like, A, 'cause I want to get to know them, But B, because I want to know what they're passionate about and what they're good at, if that makes sense.

What they're driven at.

What are their incentives?

It's all about the incentives. Exactly.

Like, we, we had some people in the absolute wrong roles, right? And, and some of it was because— I don't question what happened previously. I'm sure there was a reason why they put them in the role that put them in, but they could thrive somewhere else. Like, I always tell a story of I took a professional services leader and put them in FP&A, and now that guy's A two-time CFO who's got three, two, two, one or two X's behind him, right? Like super, super great guy. You would never have expected a guy with an engineering degree to be great at finance and math, right? Now granted, he's got that engineering pain in the ass to him, but like he's still a great guy, if that makes sense, right? But like that's the type of stuff that you got to do. You've got to be creative because when your back is up against the wall, you don't have that VC money that's like, yeah, let me just throw a couple Benjamins at the problem and make it all work out. Like you've got to be thrifty and scrappy. And you've got to bring that back in, which goes to like the second thing, which is get your complainers out. I can't tell you how many times I walk into organizations and they're culture killers and they're sitting there. It's like, I actually love the person who asks the questions that's like, or pushes back. It's like, hey, why are you like, give me that debate. Like, let's talk about this.

But like the person who's like, you know, that are always poopy pants mentality and bringing everyone down.

And it's like, well, don't tell me that I can't. How could I be?

What— from what facts do you base that assumption on, you know? Yeah, first principles, or is it, uh, your, your traumas and your, your baggage, right?

This is true, right? And, and sometimes, you know, I, I've parted ways with folks and it isn't because they're not super talented, it's that they— it's time for them to be successful in another organization, right? Maybe they've been through A bunch of shock.

They need to be dropped in cold waters, you know, and just like, yeah, yeah, they're just not been the right role or maybe the right org, you know, and maybe they still have it in them, but they've gone into the habits of not being an added value, right?

Yeah, like, I, we've, you know, we've parted ways with some individuals who ended up going on and being super successful at somewhere else. And I think part of it is just you get run down sometimes when you're at a company too long. Maybe you had that bad manager or two and you're just like, I'm gonna get another bad manager. And hey, that's okay. But like, I encourage anyone, if you ever feel that way at a company, go somewhere else.

Yeah, get the fuck out.

It's like, it's gonna be so much better for you. Life sucks, you know?

You spend like 60% of your life working for something you don't even have fun. And I understand it's very uncomfortable to go get another job. And I mean, I'm Mr. Founder and preaching for everyone to launch their own companies, right? But yeah, it's definitely time. You're 2 years in your role right now. You're in the hard part technically, the hyper stressful part technically, right? Because you've been there long enough to prove your KPIs, prove that you're an added value. What's on your radar for this year?

Yeah, so, you know, we are absolutely spinning into everything as it relates to the AI space, right? I think as it relates to customer service, it's gonna be there. We're really thinking about changing the way that front-end service customer module looks. And I'll give you an example. We have a product that was a chatbot, right? When you go up to the website, pops up. Our whole aspect is that's gonna be actually the future of service support in a different way, and we're repositioning it from the standpoint of you're in an application, you do not wanna go to another website, you want to get the experience and the service right in that application. And so we're putting a lot of aspects into tracking it, understanding it. The other thing is around like what we call states, right? Which is, are your customers improving or are they declining? You know, health scores are a little bit of a thing of the past, largely because everyone will tell you, you can thumb them, you can do all these different pieces. But are you creating the sentiment to say the velocity is going up or the velocity is going down? Because 2 people with a score of 70 can have totally different stories. You know, one is going from 50 to 70, the other one's going from 90 to 70, and you gotta get in front of it. And candidly, like, leaders also don't want people thumbing the scores, right? Like, you get the CSM who's like, I'm a hero. I absolutely like saved all my accounts. You're like, well, were they all really at risk or were they all super happy, right? And I think that's the beauty of AI is you're cutting through the BS a lot faster. And like we're just trying to create programs that can bring that intelligence to sort of your post-sale operations and really unifying customer success and customer support.

I love that, dude. Where can people find out more about you and the company?

Yeah, come check us out at www.teamsupport.com. Feel free to find me on LinkedIn, Grant Sanis. I'll respond to everybody and anyone that reaches out. We'd love to tell you more about what we're doing.

This is Grant and Charles for another