Jesse Hopps -founder @ demandmetric.com

Welcome to another Founder Wisdom Podcast. We have Jesse Hobbs with us. Jesse is a founder and CEO at Demand Metric and also Commercial Excellence Consortium. He's helping commercial excellence leaders minimize resistance to change, accelerate transformation, and make real impact. Canadian originally living in Medellín, Colombia. So Jesse, welcome to Pods. Tell us a bit more about yourself and what you're up to. Yeah.

Hey Charles, thanks for having me on. Yes, I've been a bootstrapped entrepreneur for about 20 years now and most recently working with large enterprises to help them with doing large-scale mindset and behavioral change.

How did you get into that? Because I saw some of your experiences, right? Started infotech. In 2000, which is a long time ago. You majored in philosophy, which is also interesting background. It's pretty wild. And then started your own company in 2006, 20 years ago. So tell us about your background.

Yeah, real quick. I mean, I grew up in a family that didn't have a lot of money, so a lot of scarcity. My goal when I was about 15 was get into the best business school in Canada. It's called the Ivey School of Business. Very competitive. Didn't get in. you know, they had a pre-acceptance program from high school, and then if you didn't get in there, you had to do 2 years of undergrad. And if your marks were good enough in undergrad, then you might get in at your 3rd year for their HBA program. Went into university first year, I just took like general arts and things, didn't really know, I just wanted to get into school. But my parents went bankrupt in my first year. So they had cosigned for a bank loan. And after my first semester, they basically went bankrupt, they couldn't re-cosign for the loan. So I was like a year into school, I had about $15,000 worth of debt and just needed to figure something out. So that's when I joined InfoTech. It had been founded by a guy who taught at the business school, went through it, and ran the business like a textbook business. From there, I thought I was a shoo-in to get into the school. Sure enough, I was partying a lot in my early days, and I was working full-time, going to school part-time, trying to have a social life. And lo and behold, didn't get into the business school. And so I ended up just finishing a— it was a 3-year philosophy degree. It took me 5 years to get it done because I had to work my way kind of through it. But it started me on my path. You know, a lot of my good friends were going into investment banking and consulting, and I just wanted to be a McKinsey consultant. That was my goal. I just thought, you know, if I could learn how to be a consultant, I'd have this— I don't know, this identity I could step into. And I remember formative memory. CEO of InfoTech told me, "You know what, kid? You're a good kid. You're good in sales, but you're not McKinsey material." And that that sort of started off my path into entrepreneurism and really where I've kind of come to today. So that was my my early days.

Yeah, thank God you weren't McKinsey material because I don't know, like McKinsey level is pretty high, but it's not like excellence like you. get as a founder, right? It's like not an obsessive desire to carve—

Yeah.

A third into a gold or a diamond piece, right? Like, foundership is like this obsession, and every day you get better at your stuff, and yeah, lo and behold, if you're like 3, 4, 5 years in the game, like, McKinsey consultants sound like fucking idiots, right? Like, it's kids advising businesses on like fantasy business plans from case studies that don't make sense in reality, most of them. But what I like though is like McKinsey kids that go and found their own company later on. Like that shows that they're applying their philosophy and they're just tired of just advising and consulting people and businesses that don't act on what they actually have to say.

I've met several ex-BCG, Bain, McKinsey guys, and the ones that go into industry or that start a business because they get tired of the, I call it the theater, right? We build the plan, we sell it internally, we roll things out, but then the results don't come. The reckoning happens. And by the time everyone's measuring all this return on all these investments, all the guys that bought the consulting, delivered the— they're gone. They've already moved on to their next corporate gig, right? And you're left with all these people in the company that have been there maybe 20 years. They gotta pick up the pieces and go forward, right? I really respect the guys that go out and sign up for a real number. Yeah.

What I like about their model, these firms, is that they do accounting of their clients, which is like boring, and then they upsell their consulting, right? Which is pretty genius business model. It had me think like, oh, can I find these accounting firms myself, reach out to them so that they can sell my cold outreach/lead gen service? Are you doing some of that yourself, some partnerships?

Yeah, I mean, I've got a sort of unique model. My market's so difficult to reach. You know, we're talking about global heads of corporate functions at Fortune 500. So, you know, these guys are, I would say, like next to impossible to engage. You know, it doesn't matter how much you spend, getting them to respond and act is just extremely difficult. So the only thing that I found to work over the past 5 years of experimenting, trying everything from cold outreach to webinars, events, I mean, all the tactics you could think of, I started an experiment. This is what got the consortium launched. And basically it was a LinkedIn connection request. And in the connection request, I said, hey, I'd like to invite you to join this Commercial Excellence Consortium. It's a private invite-only community. Just for other global heads of strategy, transformation, commercial excellence in big companies. And then I was crystal clear. And I think this is what made it work. I said, there's no sponsors, there's no sales guys, there's no consultants, only peer-to-peer experience sharing. We'd be honored to have you in the group. And, you know, at the beginning when we had nobody in there, people would ask, you know, well, who's joined, right? But then when I had like Pfizer, Mitsubishi, Honeywell, like super senior guys, Then the snowball started rolling down the hill. It was sort of this kind of cool kids group of really senior people, and we stuck to our promise of no pitches, right? Like no one in there that's trying to sell you anything. And that providing of community and a different experience they can't get with the Gartner groups or other executive forums. I mean, there's always a pitch, there's always a sponsor, there's always somebody in there trying to work the room. And so by maintaining that and preserving it and really holding us to a high standard that way, that's really what made this thing work. So it wasn't even about us doing anything. Like, we had to offer no content. The value in and of itself was this user-generated experience where they joined because they couldn't get that elsewhere.

Yeah, masterminds are hard though. Like, I've tried them as well and they take a very long time to crack. Like, what would make Way more sense for you is like podcasts, right? Like do a podcast invite and then your second invite could be the the mastermind because these guys want the stage, right? They want to be asked awful questions. Not even their wives know what they do, right? Like and from a business perspective, like just sit down with them and ask them questions.

That's I agree, but I I agree and I disagree. I mean, I've tried podcasting as an angle. Like trust me, I've tried. All the tactics. Here's my experience of podcasting with this group of people, okay? The ones who are like, yep, I'd love to go on the podcast, okay, this is my honest experience, typically are asking a whole bunch of taker-type questions. I noticed you're into giving, contribution, reciprocity, okay? Here's what I found. The guys are like, yep, love the podcast. What's your distribution? You know, it's all the questions about what's in it for them. And it's not about contributing back to the industry, okay, or learning. And so I've been able to get people to join, right? I was able to get several people that were like, yeah, I'll do it if your audience is big enough. But I found they were not the kind of people that I actually wanted to work with in the long run. You know, like my clients are all people that I could see hiring and partnering with to go deliver really high-end service for us because they've got experience implementing a model or whatever and a proof case behind them. So when I built the consortium with this model of, it wasn't even masterminds, this is free, right? It's a monthly roundtable limited to like 20 guests, right? So we get all these guys to join the consortium. I think we got about 350 now. We send out an invite and we'll do it like a really obscure topic, like structured autonomy or a paradox. Like how do you show the impact of your work when you can't take credit for growth or EBITDA that's increasing? Because the businesses that you're serving need to take that credit. So we'll throw out a paradox like that. We'll get a group together. Now, once we're within that frame of that group of people that legitimately wanna share what's working, what's not, then I ask those guys. So I'm using podcasts more as an engagement mechanism to go deeper with them. Maybe I hear them say something brilliant. This just happened last week. Guy said some really brilliant stuff, was an ex-McKinsey guy actually, but he's joined as a COO of a pro services company. Brilliant, brilliant point on the, roundtable, and I said, Jeff, you know, would you mind hopping on a podcast? I want to double-click on that and go deep because I think the rest of the people in the consortium would love to hear more about that. He agreed. We recorded a pod just like this, and now, you know, because he's a contributor, I'm happy to share that with my group, right, and get him out there. What I don't want are guys that look at this consortium and this channel as, oh, maybe I can start building my personal brand within this community, and then when I leave my business, I'll take my package when I get restructured out, or I'm already planning to exit. I'll have all these warm relationships and already positioned as this big expert in this group. So I got to be really careful of sharks circling in the water because of this asset that I've built. And so, you know, podcasting, I think there is a lot to it. I just got to be really careful about how I deploy the strategy.

Yeah, no, it's a good point. I think most humans take before they, they give though. Like, that's 99% of humans, right? So that's right. Goal is like show some understanding and empathy and like reverse it slowly but surely, right? So I think that's a mastery, but I love, yeah, this can work both ways, right? So from podcast to mastermind, from mastermind to podcast. And yeah, I found that for the views, there's very few that care for the views, just like having their corporate arm accept that they're—

Well, that's the other problem with podcasts is there's a lot of that. you know, nervousness about, hey, I can do this, but it has to be my personal opinion. I can't tie this to any opinions about our organization. That's definitely been a—

Yeah, pre-send the questions, right? Like, make it a bit more scripted. But I think that's— you gotta accept that this comes— that's the luggage that comes with your ICP, right? Like, Fortune 500, that's the game you signed up for. Like, authenticity in Fortune 500 and real shit, right? Like, not really. Like, it's gonna be 9 to 5 type of stuff and just like corporate fucking kind of safer, right? Yeah, yeah, the safe route for sure, which is not my route at all. It's a route I'm exploring with time because I love the high ticket of it, right? Like, uh, I gotta make some sacrifices, plus I think I can learn. Uh, why did you choose that route? Was it because of high ticket and just like your time?

You know, um, It's kind of a long story, but like the short version of it is I had worked in Demandmetric building like the world's largest subscription of playbooks, tools, templates, stuff, kind of like a do-it-yourself consulting library. So when I didn't become a business school graduate or a McKinsey guy, I went to go productize the whole industry and just say, look, you guys are smart, you can use this stuff, but I didn't just make stuff. I built things based on what customers and members were asking for. So they'd say, hey, you know, I got a meeting coming up and we need to determine if we're ready for a CRM. Do you have any tools or anything like that? I'd be like, ah, no, but let me go make something. So I do research, build a readiness assessment, post it on the site, right? Did that like 1,000 times. So it was kind of like Lean Startup and building for jobs to be done. Well, with that subscription-based model for like 15 years, we went an inch deep and a mile wide. We had like 7,000 customers, but we didn't really go in and make massive impact in any large organizations. And I had sort of 2 formative experiences. One was a big fail and one was a big success. And so by, you know, both paid me really well, but one felt a lot better along the way. And so when I learned what I didn't know on doing it the way that I thought that you're supposed to do it, you know, give people interactive experiences, give them the tools and playbooks, get them showing you that they can understand, that they can do the analysis, that they can develop a plan. I thought that was enough. And the reality was it wasn't enough. They didn't change their behavior, didn't stick. I'd call them 3 weeks later, hey, how's it going with your plan, your market strategy you built? They'll be like, we haven't really looked at it since the workshop. I'm like, well, what am I flying around the world for? Like, this is a waste of my time. My wife bottom-lined me one day. She said, hey, you gonna make the girls breakfast on a Saturday morning? When I came home after being out all week. It's like, yeah, you know, I'll be right in. Just catching up on some email. She's like, I didn't sign up for this. I left Colombia. We're in Canada. It's freezing cold. I'm raising the kids by myself. Like, are you gonna just keep like leaving all the time and then working all weekend? So when she said that to me, I really started thinking about like, what is this worth? You know what I mean? Like, yeah, they're paying us, but like, is this really helping the people I'm trying to help? And I don't like working for money. I like working for impact. And so when I realized I had to come clean with myself that just because you got paid to go do some great workshop that everyone said, you know, scored really well, was really, you know, good experience, if it didn't move the needle, it wasn't worth putting in the effort. And so that was the kind of the negative experience, right? And I thought, you know, I'm at the top of the game, Fortune 500 kind of client, really important, you know, doing this work. But when my wife kind of called me on it, I started thinking a lot differently and I got another opportunity. A guy that left that company actually, when the CEO got replaced, got hired at another organization And he said, look, I need some help with an upskilling academy, like a plan for how to deliver training and enablement. I said, look, man, I could use the cash, but like, I really don't want to do this again. Like, we just tried that for 3 years. It didn't work. It didn't stick. What do you think about doing something different? And he said, okay, let's figure it out. And so, we went down this journey. We've been doing it for 2 years now. Major, major breakthroughs, you know, intrinsic motivation built in the people. measurably improved adaptive capacity, resilience, and grit, which I know you're a big fan of all this resilience and pain, embracing difficulty. We brought the science of that into this large enterprise and measurably moved people up the spectrum there at scale. And when I saw that there was a way for this guy to get promoted, have his mandate expanded, even in an organization that's really struggling with all kinds of market issues, competitive issues, social issues. I thought that this has to be shared with the world. And so it was more figure out how to fail, figure out a way to get it to work. And then we built the consortium to share that story, really. So it was sort of like fail, succeed, find a way to share. Then I would podcast and interview him actually on these roundtables and get additional people involved in the discussions. And now it's sort of evolving into, okay, How do we make this a repeatable method? How do we get other practitioners out there doing it? And so that was really kind of the genesis of it. It wasn't really like we had a strategy, you know, of how to market this thing. It was like, how do we, you know, get it to actually work? And then how do we share that with other people?

And what kind of specific case study can you tell us about? Because if I think of corporations and employees, right, like most of them are just there for the check, 9 to 5, right? Like it's very low motivation. I don't think that these corporations will scale in the future because it's going to get so competitive with AI agents.

I agree.

And then measuring impact. And I mean, most of these guys don't give a fuck. Like even if like you bring a consultant and have workshops, right? I'm just like, dude, I'm watching some guy tell me something to do without having to do anything and I'm still getting paid, right? So—

Here's the thing, right? And that was the design constraint. When we started on this the second time around, clients said, look, whatever we build, it has to be constrained around intrinsic motivation. If we're unable to achieve and ignite and sustain intrinsic motivation, nothing's gonna stick. So that was the first thing. So I got deep on the science, like what is required, psychological needs for intrinsic motivation. Well, it turns out the entire, like, go get a consulting strategy plan, Hire the big systems integrator firms, Deloitte, Accenture, whatever, buy Salesforce or whatever other enterprise software you want, do training and rollouts, manage these big initiatives, and then put the KPIs and governance in place to force people essentially to adopt these changes. That in and of itself is what kills intrinsic motivation. It's not that people don't wanna come to work. It's that the way that they're managed destroys their motivation at like the core. So if you look into, it's called self-determination theory. Right? There's like 40 years of research on this. 3 needs, right, for intrinsic motivation. The first is autonomy. People need to feel like they're involved in the design or the diagnosis, even before the design of a solution, the diagnosis of the problem. Large enterprises generally strip that entirely from frontline, middle management, even senior leadership in many cases, when they go buy McKinsey to do a top-down plan, right? Second piece is relatedness, right? So the relatedness is, does this actually matter for my day-to-day job? And in most cases, I mean, I've been involved in all kinds of these big enterprise rollouts. I look at the design of the system or the new process and I look at the sales guy and I'm like, guys, why do you think this is gonna be good for them? This is a terrible idea. If I'm a sales guy looking at this, I don't wanna fill out 87 fields to fill out my opportunity information so I can feed this back for reporting, forecasting, product management, market research. It's just crazy, right? So if you look at like, is this actually helpful? Is this related to helping me do my job? Usually the answer to that question is no. A good example that's been blowing up right now is AI-assisted next best step or next best action, okay? So AI will look at like your meeting notes and all that's going on and it'll tell you, you know, here's what you ought to do next. But like every single time a sales guy looks at that, they're like, well, you know, maybe there's some truth to this, but like it doesn't know the whole picture. Yeah, in a perfect world, maybe, but that's not the next step I'm gonna take, right? And so if it's not actually related and helpful, the more they push this on people, the more they're just like, no, they're dumb ideas. I'm not gonna use this. And the third piece is competence. If people don't feel like they're being stretched, but not broken, but they can actually master a new set of skills, usually that involves getting coaching from someone who's actually got the skill, they often will lose motivation. They're like, yeah, this is too hard, or this is too easy, right? And so Getting the right level of confidence and growth going for people is what's required. And so I don't think that people show up looking just to catch a check. I think that's a really pessimistic view of like where people come at the 9 to 5. I think it's that they've been systematically beaten down over time by these big enterprises and how they're chained to their desks, right? And what's expected of them and how little is being asked of them of what the real problems are and what they need to be successful, and then having dysfunctions and barriers actually taken out of their way. When you remove a lot of those systemic barriers, people come to work with like piss and vinegar again. So like, I don't believe it's just like a lost cause and that we can't get people intrinsically motivated. I think that the way that work is experienced and designed needs to move from managing change and pushing for adoption of stuff that some other group of people thought was good for you, needs to be stopped. And people need to be leading through adaptation, where you create the conditions for that adaptation to occur naturally. You invest in and you build up the adaptive capacity and the resilience of the human beings inside the organization. This can be done. The problem is most of the guys that do strategy work, training work, systems work, they don't have a psychology background or an org dev background. So they don't realize that they're crushing motivation. And that adaptive capacity, there's actually a science to it. And it's not a personality trait, right? You're a naturally highly adaptive, resilient guy, but you develop that through formative experiences over time. That can be also used if we can give people real adversity and coach them through it. We can— we've seen a measurable bump, 20% on the bell curve of the adaptive capacity and resilience of the individuals, right? At scale, very, very quickly, within 90 days. They choose one project that they're passionate about, one problem they want to sign up to solve, or at least make progress on. As they run into roadblocks, challenges, issues, adversity in the project, we coach them and we build up— it's called their adversity quotient. Okay, so you've heard of your IQ, maybe an EQ. Neither of them predict much in life. AQ, on the other hand, has 40 years and 5 million people studied that demonstrates successful outcomes, whether it's spinal surgery or Entrepreneurship, you know, they use this as a filter to see who gets into MIT's entrepreneurship program because it predicts and influences who's gonna be successful with their company. The problem is all these MBAs and finance and engineering types that, you know, get sold McKinsey and Bain work, they don't know that they can actually make their people better at dealing with challenges and issues. And so when you change your assumptions about who you're dealing with, and what can be done by investing in them, that's when you can get breakthrough growth and, uh, and really turn things around. Yeah.

And as a guy that's solo with so many people in one organization and you come in, you come in as an outsider, how do you maximize your impact if let alone changing one human is rocket science?

No, it's, it's, uh, well, I look at the job, it's kind of like personal training 1,000 people that don't want to get in shape. They don't care about getting in shape. That's the job. Okay? If I was to give you like a piece of paper and I was to— this is really crude, okay? But like I had a list on this side and a list on this side. It was fat and fit. And let's just say my job was come into my company because we believe if people were fit, they would be mentally and physically healthier and they would perform better. That's our assumption, right? Your job is to get them all to be fit, whether they wanna be or not. Well, that's kind of the same thing as when you say to 500 sales guys, you're medium performing, mediocre performance, or high performance. We need to get you into the high performance category, even if you're happy, complacent, you know, don't want to change how you do things or whatever else. I mean, if I was to say, you know, do you think I can get everyone at sub-15% body fat in a year? You would say you're crazy. There's absolutely no possible way, baby. And you know what? There are technologies out there. The key is, are we using science to solve the problem and based on real evidence? So at the end of the day, I believe that one leader can absolutely make that type of impact, but they've got to lead. They can't manage it. They can't force it. They've got to create a groundswell of intrinsic motivation. They got to invest in improving the adaptive capacity of the individuals at scale very quickly. And they got to throw those people that they're expecting to perform better into the grinder with real adversity and let those people choose what are the problems that need to be solved and then support them through actually developing solutions to their own problems. Only if you do that can you get muscle building when it comes to higher performance and adaptive capacity.

So, how does that materialize in the case of I hire you for a contract? Like, you have workshops. Are they physical, these workshops?

No, we do. We've got a kind of methodology, but basically, We structure ours like an academy or an accelerator, okay, and so if it's an academy, it's on the context of we're going to do some learning here, we're going to upskill and build our capabilities. Generally speaking, we do— it's called align, inspire, reflect, apply, scale. In the align phase, we make sure that we're working on the right capabilities, so we might say, hey, there's, you know, 40 things that McKinsey said you got to get better at in order to achieve the strategy. We're going to get the general managers that need to support the work, to vote on, not 40, the top 4 for their business. Okay? So we narrow things down. We know in advance what they're going to support based on, hey, if we could wave a wand and just get better at these things, you know, I'll support the work. So that's the alignment phase. In the inspire phase, we measure their adversity quotient. We bring in Dr. Paul Stoltz, the world's leading expert on this. He's a master coach of the entire US Olympic team to talk to them about harnessing adversity as a fuel source instead of looking at it as a threat. and a reason why we're not gonna perform. So we inspire them with Paul, their own understanding of how they interpret and respond to challenges. And then we share like kind of podcast-style interviews of status quo versus what some best-in-class companies are doing related to those capabilities to plant some seeds. We call it guided discovery. In the reflect phase, we bring people together physically, right, into a 2-day workshop. There we ask them about, we don't give 'em training. We ask them what are their real challenges? What are their— what's getting in the way? What have they tried before? What do they think they need? in order to solve for getting better at these capabilities? And at that point, we get a million reasons why it's gonna fail and why they can't do it, but we also get them to surface their real needs and blockers. Then we ask them to say, okay, pick something you're intrinsically motivated to work on, find a team of 3 to 5 people that you wanna partner with on this inside the organization, could be across business units, regions, whatever, it doesn't matter. They become the consultants, okay? We give 'em a big project charter template, we say, go fill out this charter, Tell us where you're at today. Where do you want to be in 90 days? We stick them with a coach who's been trained on this adversity quotient and grit. We let them run their own projects. We coach them through them. At the end, they present a report after the 90 days to a senior operating committee, including a board member, to say, here was the problem we saw. Here's what we did about it with our own motivation, our own reasons. Here's the progress we made. Here's what we need now. Here's what we need you to understand about what we're up against trying to grow this company. Then they get lots of visibility. The board members remove systemic blockers in the company where they can, and then the cycle continues. If there's something really, really great out of these projects, usually there's about 8 or 10 per cohort of 30 or 40 people. If there's a best practice that's been established, that starts scaling naturally across the organization because they have evidence, and it was developed by the people doing the work, not by outsiders, not by consultants. We just facilitate the process.

I like that process. Yeah, makes sense. Accountability, right? Like in system and sort of gamifying it and making sure that all the cogs flow into one another. Jesse, where can people find out more about you, dude?

Yeah, LinkedIn's the best way to find me. Just Jesse Hopps on LinkedIn. I think I'm the only one out there. And if you want to learn about the consortium, get involved, you know, talk with some of the world's leading companies and executives about these challenges, commercialexcellenceconsortium.com.

It was Jesse and Charles for another Founder Wisdom podcast.