Parallels in Misalignment in Business and Education with Bob McDowell

Hi, I'm Warren Zenna, founder and CEO of the CRO Collective, and welcome to the CRO Spotlight Podcast. This show is focused exclusively on the success of Chief Revenue Officers. Each week we have an open, frank and freeform conversation with top experts in the revenue space about the CRO role and its critical impact on B2B businesses. This podcast is the place to be for CROs, sales and marketing leaders who aspire to become CROs and founders who are looking to appoint a CRO or want to support their CRO to succeed. Thanks for listening. Now let's go mix it up. Welcome to this episode of the CRO Spotlight Podcast. This is Warren Zenna. I'm me, founder and CEO of the CRO Collective, and kind of interesting guest today. Got this guest came to me through another guest, which is Terry McDowell, Terry Long, whom, you know, she's super. And she said, you know, you should talk to my brother. My brother Bob works in the educational sector. And what's fascinating is Bob solves the same problem you solve, but within the education sector, basically building, you know, organized or organizational alignment in the education system, which I thought was fascinating. So Bob and I had a conversation. I thought, this is. This is good. This would be a nice, really interesting way to show parallels. So I'm, you know, pretty passionate about education and improving education. I talk about this a lot. I put three kids through public schools and learned a lot from that process. So whenever I hear anybody that's trying to help fix the education system, to me, they're heroes. So with that, I welcome Bob McDowell. Bob is the senior Vice President, Leadership Organizational Health at ciso. That's C E, S O. And Bob is a educational, Has a doctorate in education and he was a former superintendent, and he's here today to talk to us about building aligned education systems. Hi, Bob.

Welcome. Hi. Thank you, Warren. Glad to be here and appreciate you having me. Great.

So when we talked initially, you explained to me what it is that you're up to and why it is that you felt what you're doing is consistent with. In, I guess, sort of like philosophically with what I'm doing.

Sure.

So I'd love to, if you could explain a bit more about what you're up to, what you're currently working on, and how your particular area of work right now aligns with what we're doing here at the CRO collective related to B2B businesses, etc.

Yeah, I think it has a couple different tangential points of connection. Right now I'm working for a company called the center for Effective School Operations. And essentially what I do there is act as a liaison between the CEOs of school districts, the superintendents, the CFOs of school districts, the directors, executive directors, and help establish how we might be able to create more effective and efficient operation for school district. We expand that into colleges, into nonprofits, into cities. So where that links into. I think what you've got going with the CRO Collective is a lot of the work that I do centers around revenue generation on the one hand, so for us as a private business, how do we generate revenue in this weird space with public schools that have a fixed income per se, and do it in a manner where they're getting the value add of it, not costing them more money to operate. So an efficiency piece. And at the same time, again, back to how do we generate revenue on the private side. So there's a unique connection there, I think, with this idea of Chief Revenue Officer in what I do, which is helping our teams at CISO understand how, how it is they work with, how it is they engage with and how it is they establish relationships with these people in those organizations to help on our side of the fence, promote our business and on the public sector side of the fence, see a giant value add for our existence.

Yeah, okay, it makes sense. So I'd like to dig into this a bit because I'm just interested generally in just how you got into this. Like, what is it that got you into the idea and what, what are the problems? There's two parts to this question. One is, how did you get into this particular area in education? And two is, you know, like, I guess I'm asking this question this way. So if you don't mind, just contextualize my next part of the question, which is the reason why I started the CRO Collective, is because I saw a call like a congenital issue going on in businesses, which is revenue misalignment, which is this fractionalization of functions that create a disparate approach to solving complex problems. It's somewhat organizational, it's operational, it's cultural. I mean, there's a whole slew of different ways, but, you know, it's pervasive. It's across every industry in B2B, and it's unaddressed. And that the, in my case, in my case, the lens that made the most sense to solve it was through this role of the Chief Revenue officer, whom I has a unique skill set to orchestrate the coordination of these disparate functions. So within that sort of Context. What did you recognize and why, why did you start this venture that what you trying to solve? And what would you also describe as the sort of, you know, similarly, let's say congenital issue that you're seeing in the education space?

Yeah, I, I don't know that it's, it's much different, quite frankly. I think we, the educational space just gets a lot more press for it being dysfunctional.

I'm sorry, what?

I, I think the education space gets a lot more press.

Oh, that's for sure.

Yes.

For the, for the dysfunction.

Right.

Well, you understand why. I mean, you're dealing with kids and you know, it's a big topic and. Yeah, it's a political football as well.

Sure, absolutely, absolutely. But and if we peel back all of that, what I discovered was not much different than what you just shared. So if we look at that public space, I started out teaching and then decided that I, you know, I had that typical trajectory of I can do more. So I'm going to go into administration to get there. I went through the technology space in school systems and got into school administration and then got into district administration. And what I started to find was a large chasm between what leaders were doing and how people were responding to what they were doing as an organizational set. So there were, there were opportunities to do things much more efficiently, much more effectively and get better outcomes in that case for kids.

Right.

Because it's a school system. And at the same time I ventured into higher district administration, so assistant superintendent and Superintendent of schools most recently. And what I discovered along the way happened around 2017 where I had the opportunity to go out to Stanford's design school and spend a week out there truly starting to understand human centered design and design thinking concepts as they relate to agile and the like. And what I brought back then was this idea that if we started focusing on the user experience inside of the system itself, we would start to see organizations that function which with a much higher degree of organizational health. So that concept right along the way then led me out of the superintendency and into the private sector in this consulting firm where now that actually that's my title now is Senior Vice President of Leadership and Organizational health. And that's really the entry point that I get into with folks on the public sector is with regard to how well is your organization functioning from the operations side and how well are we doing with the folks in that organization so that the organization can function to its highest heights. Level.

Yeah. Okay, that's great. So it sounds like you Obviously, you know, you come from an education system education background and you also have other competencies related to analytics, etc. And you brought some of those thinkings towards solutions of how to fix organizational issues that you see pervasive across the education system. So that's awesome. So here's my question because it's fascinating. There's a lot of really bizarre other parallels to this too. So, you know, one of the things that I talk about in my particular area is what are the factors that are creating this problem? So there's internal and external issues, right? So you've got old legacy systems. The way companies are structured, it's incredible how little thought has gone into just looking at operational structure of businesses, how every startup in the B2B space just automatically just starts to populate the company the same way. There's very little thought goes into just kicking the tires on why it is that we do it this way or whether it's needed anymore. Maybe it's antiquated. There have been in the past, in recent past, some attempts to try new models like flattening hierarchies and getting rid of leaders and just creating these flat organizations. I think that there's issues there. I applaud the effort, but I think that human beings need hierarchies. I think we're just built that way. We're social creatures and we need to follow and lead. It's hard to get a bunch of people to not do that. And then there's also information, educational barriers, which is just as we've evolved and new technologies and new learnings come into play. I don't see a lot of companies adopting new ideas as readily, as easily as they can. It takes them a long time for new ideas to become like that across the board. You probably see some examples, I can give you anecdotal stories of, look at this, one company did this great thing. But it's not across the board. It's still, everyone's doing things the same way. And the area where I say that happens mostly is in the C suite. And then there's external forces, which in your case is fascinating because in, in the case of the business, it's the investment community that really is the biggest, like external force. I mean, the market. One would say, sure. I mean, I mean, obviously, right, there's the economic conditions of the marketplace are the biggest factor. But that's related because most companies I deal with ultimately get funding. Now there are some organically grown companies, but most of them get funding. And once you get funding, you Bring in the funding community, which is usually either, you know, private equity or VC groups who bring an inordinate amount of pressure on companies to do things a very specific way. Because if those institutions have their own ways, they want to run their business.

Okay.

In your case, I would imagine that's the government.

Right.

The governmental component of it, which is the education boards and, and even the unions. I can imagine what factors those must play and not being able to get anything done. I'd love to hear about that. And then there's the internal, which is the teachers themselves and the principals and how they structure schools and how they teach and the teaching modalities and things like that. And the testing community.

Right.

So how can you get things done? Like, I'm curious, like, how do you, how do you implement change in an environment that is so fraught with this sort of foundational, you know, systemic infrastructure that's almost immovable? And matter of fact, even asking some of these things to be moved is almost like sacrilegious in some respects. It's considered to be like you're some heretic or something like that. I'm just curious how you manage those really seemingly difficult factors.

Yeah, I, and I, I would agree with you that conceptually it's the same. Right. We just. In an educational setting, you've got school boards. They're really the driving force behind what you do and you don't do as it relates to the superintendent and what you, what you go about there. The rest of it is internally is, I think, a lot the same. It's a human factor. And it's all of that stuff that you mentioned around humans willingness to change, humans wanting to change systems that have been in place for years and years and years, no matter what. So you have this, the same things hitting up against you in order to make that change. What I have found that is what I call the difference between having an organization that moves as a barge versus being able to move like a tugboat and really swiftly make some incremental changes. Working towards a direction really has to do with the ability for you to eliminate the siloing that happens. And so in a school system, that C suite is made up of your superintendent and your director of curriculum and your director of Finance, your director of hr. All the same typical things that we have. Even now that I'm on this side of the. The of half of our organization is truly a startup. The other half has been around since 2014, same type of setup. It doesn't matter what I don't believe the organization, if, if it's siloed movement isn't going to happen in the, in the way that it should is the first piece. Secondly, it, it goes back to those, in those core principles of visioning and communication. For what's the purpose of that organization? Whether it's a B2B startup, whether it's a school, whether it's a school district, who has the vision, who's supporting that vision and who's aligning the folks to that vision, not just in concept, but actually in the day to day work, the operations. And what does that look like, sound like and feel like for those people? The more you can align all of that together and keep folks in a position where they are wanting to do more for that organization, for that mission, then things start to change. But as long as we allow for the organization to continue to live in the old ways that it's done things, then there is no progress, right? There isn't anything. And nothing like a one off flat hierarchy is going to fix it. Nothing like a singular process or policy change is going to fix it. It needs to be system wide. It needs to happen with some cascading flow to it. I oftentimes use an analogy with the district leaders that I work with now and how to move things in, helping them understand that they need to have a balance all the time between what they're facilitating with people or working with people, what they're logistically laying out for people and how they're communicating. And there needs to be this balance between those three. And if there's not, we get stuck. And I find that now, even as I'm on this side and we are, you know, selling to a school organization, how clearly are we laying out our value add? How clearly are we communicating before, during and after selling? How well are we facilitating the micro relationships and the macro relationships with that organization? And that's what helps us now move along in the same manner as it did when I was sitting in the superintendent's chair. You know, the thing that I found in the chair and the thing that I now work with superintendents on is helping them understand that you cannot get by with not doing the face to face work with people to get things to move where you need them to go. Because there's so much that gets lost in translation. Particularly now with even the newer generations coming up through the ranks that are so used to their phones and being in on that phone thing. There's a power to being face to face that just is different for them. And I think all of that works together to get an organization to move. The. The last piece I would add in there is this idea of constantly developing the next group of leaders in that organization. There. There is no second to very intentionally and very purposefully helping people understand what it means to lead and to organize and to manage. And the similarities, the differences between that and how do we really come from that leader's user experience to help them get better at moving what we need them to move and who we need them to move.

Okay, that makes sense. So here's my question. In my world, we're going to continue this parallel because there's clearly a lot of them. I've identified a champion, which is the chief Revenue Officer. Right. I recognized, at least in terms of the. It was more of a reverse engineering thing. Ultimately, organizations need someone who's in authority, who has the competency and the vision and a process and a methodology to, you know, shepherd this through or else it can't happen. For the very reason that you and I are discussing that if it's done in a collective way, you end up having too many chiefs and you end up in the same problem. You need to have. Need to put somebody in charge of it who has the authority, the autonomy, the resources and the Runway to implement the. This alignment strategy. Who is the CRO in your world?

My experience. And what kicked this off?

Who should it be? Like, who, who, who do you. In your vision, if you were to go to the school organizations and, you know, make declaration, who is it that you think should be that person?

Yeah, I think it's currently the person who gets titled either your assistant superintendent of operations or your chief of staff. So school, School systems run those. That. That's just the title. I don't know what the title should necessarily be.

Yeah, yeah, I get that. I'm, I'm. Look, you're. You're answering the question. So. So I'm saying it's some sort of. It's an operational person whom has been already given operational control or authority, let's say, but maybe needs to be empowered or trained to do things in a way that maybe they're not right now.

Yeah. I think they're the right and left hand of that CEO. Right.

Yep.

They understand the vision, they understand the direction, they understand the scope. But they also have a skill set that is able to bring the team together and run the team and vision externally to make those connections. That was my experience. That was the aha. Moment for me was when I was sitting in that assistant superintendent's chair and I had a superintendent that saw that and allowed me to play that role. Basically work everything, operations, everything. Connecting the, the finance department with the HR department, making sure that nobody's ratcheting too far in front of somebody else and everything's moving in the same fashion at the same speed so that we don't get in front of one another, so that we don't crisscross, double checking, communications, all that kind of stuff. That's, that's the person on the educational side.

Yep.

It's a lot like the CRO position that you talk about.

Okay, so now another factor here that's fascinating about this is I guess just a couple of bullet point questions I have. Just. I understand. So ciso, that's C E S O, right?

Correct.

That's the company you work for.

That's correct.

You're a pro, you're a profit for profit organization.

We are.

Okay, so the money you get comes from either private schools or from the, the public sector, which is, I guess is like government money, right?

Correct.

Okay, so those are two completely different ICPs. I mean, that's got to be right there a crazy thing. We'll talk about that in a second. The other thing is, is about that, is that when I'm talking to my clients, right, Businesses, they're all profit, right? That's it. They're trying to make money. They, they want to grow their businesses and you know, expand their multiples and their market, market caps etc and get more funds and then also get their, their user base up and stuff. It's all profit. Everything's economically driven in my world. Okay. Now there are some times that I have companies that have dual things going on, right? I mean they're all businesses at the bottom line. So the bottom line and the economics drive everything because that's really what they wake up every morning thinking about. They're looking at, at numbers basically. But then you got some companies that are also mission driven, right? They're not only they making money, but they're solving some really important problem. You know, I've had some companies I work with that are for profit companies, but they're solving, let's say water solubility or you know, you know, carbon footprint stuff for, you know, maybe they're figuring out some new pharmaceutical thing or healthcare related thing. So there's an adjacency, which there's also a mission associated with it. So we want to make money, but we're also, you know, saving the world. And sometimes they have to kind of balance between those two things that's that's an interesting problem to have when you're a for profit company. When you have a mission, which one comes first? Right? But for the most part, in my, in my world, it's money. I would imagine in your case, it's more about students and educating people. Right. And the next generation of, you know, kids in the world and how they're going to be, you know, prepared for their futures, which is a pretty big mission. It's almost completely mission driven. You know, people that go into the education sector are very driven by that commitment to young people and providing them with what they need to be competent citizens. And those environments tend to be emotional. They're very passionate. They're driven by a lot of, you know, people whom are attached to that mission and have a personal alignment with that mission. And that creates a different type of culture because, you know, people have their own opinions about that mission and there can be some zealotry involved and a lot of hyperbole involved and all these sorts of things, things that go on. Which is why the education system is such a passionate topic for people. Because, you know, the, what's at stake is my kids. Right. That adds a wrinkle to this whole thing that's got to be fascinating for you in terms of trying to affect change in an environment where people have a much more passionate connection to this than just whether or not they're going to get their, you know, market share or they're going to get their, their mark, you know, that, that my, my share, my shareholders are going to, are going to, are going to get valued, which, which, you know, is pretty black and white. What, how do you manage that situation? That's got to be a very, very difficult environment to gain alignment because everyone's got their own personal stake in missions like that.

Yeah, it took me a long time to, to figure out how to navigate that.

How do you.

Well, I, I think the, the way that it, for me, the way that it is, and I think this, you know, will set some educators off. As you said, it comes from an emotional, emotional stance. But, you know, the mission of a school district, private, public, doesn't matter. Right. Charter doesn't matter is, is to get kids to have an experience that people have decided on is important that that's the outcome. Whether you're using traditional, you know, methods, whether you're using new methods, whatever you're doing. That's the, that's the educational side of it that really needs to be the focus of teachers 100% of the time, support staff. 100% of the time. And I would argue your principles half the time. So there's part one, how you start navigating it, what ends up happening. And the other part of why I think we struggle in education is we forget that it is also a business. Right? It's a business. We, we don't bring any more money in than taxes and grants and whatever. So it's capped and we can't necessarily make more. But at the same time we only have a certain amount. And so you have to do more with less. So you've got to operate it from that perspective. And so what I had to do was say, look, I need to rely on my instructional staff to carry out that mission and be mission focused, mission driven on kids. But a larger and larger percentage of my role has to be on the fiduciary part of this and understanding how do I navigate the complexities of a fixed budget and make things happen more and more and more in a world where your, your income may not come up, but your expenses continually increase and your, you're functioning In a business that's 75 to 85% human capital, that's your cost. So for me, long, long winded answer is I had to start thinking more like on the business side of things, how do I, how can I, what can we do? How do we create more efficiencies? How do we do things with different types of monies? How do we get creative in how we are bringing resources into a school district to support that mission that everybody's working on? And then how do we create a sense of urgency inside of the district to ensure that we are operating as efficiently as we possibly can up to the point where we don't impact the effectiveness of that instructional side. That's, that's the constant lens to be pushing it through.

On the educational side, that makes sense. I get it. I don't know, it's interesting you use the word business. I mean, sure, I mean there's obviously always a financial component. Like you said, there's budgets that need to be managed, costs, but only in the private sector is there a profit. So just, you know, I had a client for many years that was a private school, a private school in New York City, one of the top private schools. The superintendent or the, whatever you call it, there's like the person who runs the school or owned the school was my client. Think it was doing this like 45, 50 years crazy thing, like really had this, this incredible amount of, aware of knowledge about running these private schools. I Learned a lot. Right. I learned that that balance between making sure you're creating the right environment for students to learn in, but also make sure at the end of the year that you make money is a very strange, you know, two, two, two sort of masters to serve at the same time. It would seem to make sense. And it did make sense in this case that, you know, this particular client was clearly more biased on a day to day basis to make sure that the students came first. Right. And profit came second, but not too much. I mean, the guy had to make money, you know, and it's a school, after all, it was a business. So, you know, watching that dance was fascinating because most people that run businesses don't have that same issue. You know, they're. It's pretty much just about profitability and that's the bottom line. So I asked that I stick with this only because I guess it's more like how you define business. I mean, to me a business is defined by the fact that it's profitable component to it. Right? That's what a business is. You're growing a business to make more money. In your case, I'd say I don't know how much, what the balance or percentages are between the private sector and the public sector and your client base, but let's just say it's 50. 50. That means half of your client base is not going to make any money. They just have to manage the money that they have. And there's an efficiency or financial management component to it which is different than a profit motive that drives different behaviors. Right. But at the same time too, both have the problem of identifying what the real outcome is that the students leave the door smarter and that there's ways in which the school provided an environment where they can, you know, put people forth out of the school that have skills and knowledge and competencies that are improved as a result. And that gets into things like testing and gets into things like, you know, diagnostics and also teacher evaluations and you know, all the things. Again, the parallels that we have in the business world is how effective are my managers, how well do they train people, how well do they develop the people that they have? You know, if the accountabilities in a business are very well defined, I mean, if I'm a manager of people and their job is to sell and they consistently don't sell well. Well, you look at that manager and you ask is that manager providing the right training or support of their sales staff? Maybe they're not a good manager because the Teachers, in this case. Right. They're not providing the right delivery to the students or these people are not the providing the right value proposition to their customers. Teachers, because they have a union. Right. In the public sector, tend to be, in my view anyway, protected. Right. From that sort of scrutiny. And that's gotta be a big barrier for you in terms of being able to manage outcomes. I'm just curious what you're. I don't want to get into a political conversation because it can move in that direction, but it's a factor. And I'm just curious to know how you manage that in the areas where you're trying to implement change.

Yeah, well, first, I don't know that it's much different than union workers in, In a motor plant. Right, that. Right. So we have. On both sides. I, I think it does certainly a fair point.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think it does go back to when you peel back layers to leadership. Right. I think, I think that a lot of. When we see successful schools, private or public, what we tend to find is very skilled principals at the building level. They're able to navigate what we were just talking about very well, that balance between instructional need and the financial part of it. And where they come into play for those teachers is being very clear on what the expectation and the vision is and the goals are that don't just include a accountability measure of a test score that happens one day a year. Rather, what does in this case.

Right.

You. So you mentioned sales. So you dig into a sales manager and they've got a team of salespeople and they've got three that are hitting the mark and two that aren't. And we dig in to understand why is that happening? What is, what's. What's that about? We do the same thing in the classroom. You go to, you go to classroom to classroom and you. Let's take an entire. Let's take a high school and we've got six science teachers, and I walk into all six classrooms, and in three of those classrooms, it's really clear to me that those teachers understand one, their content and two, the kids that they're working with, and three, how to deliver and, and work with the content. And those kids together, two of the classes, very obvious. Well, I dig into why. And what I, what I maybe find is, you know, the. There's two teachers that aren't spending enough time and understanding the content they're supposed to be delivering. It could be that. It could be on your sales team. It could be that you've got two salespeople that just are not engaging with the amount of content they need in order to relate to their potential customers to the depth that they need to. So it's the same type of thing. The only real way that the union comes into play in that is there's a specific process that has to be followed in order to remediate support and potentially release. That's really the biggest difference.

Right.

The protection there is. Follow the process if someone's not doing their job and it's just going to take longer in the public sector than it does in the private sector. Because that's what it is, that's the protection is to ensure that people have a fair due process if things aren't going the way that they, that someone.

Wants them to go. Got it. So just, you know, I want to switch gears a bit before we, you know, kind of wind down the conversation around ciso's methodologies. And I guess one thing is. So let's just say that your ideal customer profile is a superintendent, I'm assuming, of a school system. Right. Who's recognized some issues they're having and they recognize that you're. How do you, how do you get on their radar? Like, how do you, how do they know about you and what, the way that you engage them and what's the process? And if you don't mind, what's the commercial model? How does that work?

Yeah, we, we. A lot of it is word of mouth and doing good work. But the, the other, there's a strand of it where me coming out of the superintendency there, it, it's no different than in, than in your line of work where it becomes a smaller and smaller world. Right. You know, people you work with, people you, you, you trade people. You know, a good fit for your company wasn't a good fit for my company. And we talk. So there's a piece of it where it's, it's. I know superintendents, I know that the other, the other piece of it is school districts, word of mouth to one another. And you know, we do very, we do a little bit of RFP work, but not a lot of RFP work that from some of our bigger clients. But we have a real niche I think is what's happening is we will do anything on the operational side. So we've got divisions in transportation, in human resources, finance, technology, in leadership, organizational health, communications. So anything that's on the operational side of the house for a school district or an organization, we are able to come in with people who have held Those positions mostly in the public school sector to either short term, long term, or come up alongside a group. So I have, I have clients right now. I had one that reached out this morning and said, hey, I've got an HR person that just up and quit. Is that something that you, I don't want to rehire it because the superintendent knows that you're paying salary and benefits and a lot of times we can do things more efficiently. So, you know, can you, what would it take for you to have somebody come in and do X, Y and Z for us? Right. And so as word get out, gets out that we do a good job of that, then, you know, at their next superintendent meeting, they're talking and hearing, well, I've got this issue. And so a lot of it is that the, the other piece that's really growing quickly is we are growing into assessment tools for organizational health. So what does it, what does your organization look like in terms of how you're set up for your hierarchy in terms of efficiency, effectiveness, operations, form flow, all that we're developing in each one of those, those divisions assessment tools that have now become, are starting to take off because they're, they're, we're finding they're successful for solutions for companies. And so a lot of it's word of mouth.

Got it. And you, you charging, what, like, like a retainer you charge or like how does it work in your business model?

Yeah, so yes, and there's some, some are set up as a retainer, some are set up just hourly, some are set up project based. So. And others are set up as a, as a contract. So a lot of our, our transportation work is set up as contracts. So districts, districts, companies or organizations will hire us out for, for, you know, a three year transportation contract or hire us out for a year of human resources support, things like that.

Are you a national organization? You work in any school district?

Yeah, we work with anyone we have at any given time. We're working with about 100 school districts. We've got 400 clients right now. We're in the United states, we're in 26 states and in, we've been in a couple provinces in Canada. So yeah, it's, it's taking off. We've, we've grown 100 and I want to say 110 clients in the last year. And so just trying to help, help with that side of it.

Got it. Fascinating. Well, look, I mean I, I obviously when our initial conversation, I, I agreed that there's certainly a lot of parallels here. You Know, I mean, we're, we're both fixing the same problem, but inside of different sectors. How do people get a hold of you? And I mean, I don't know how many people in my audience are involved in the school system. This was more of a, I think, an interesting theoretical, you know, conversation just kind of show an interesting parallel between how organizational misalignment is pervasive across any organization. And, and there was a lot of interesting parallels between the educational system and B2B companies and how, you know, this is like a disease that affects any, any organization, not just businesses.

Yeah.

But you know, what might be some interesting things that, like, for example, if there's people listening to this that are involved in their school system or they want to learn a little bit more about ciso, what's the, what's the right way for them to do that?

Yeah, so we have a website. It's theciso.com and C E, S O.

Right.

Yep. Where you can type in ciso.com and it'll pop up there.

Got it.

And that's, that's the easiest way to see what we, to see what we do. And I would agree. The, you know, a lot of people, even on the private side, either are sitting on a school board somewhere or are sitting on a board of directors for their charter school or their private school. And we do a lot of work with them. So I guess maybe that's the pitch to the people in your world is we know that there's a. There's an overlap.

There are. I mean, I have a lot of friends who are around school boards and I was involved in some myself. My daughter was on a volleyball team and a lot of the parents on that team were members of their school boards and stuff. And they have a lot of influence and things, so I get that. Thank you for listening to the CRO Spotlight podcast. The Croat Collective's mission is to help CROs succeed and help founders and CEOs build CRO Ready organizations. You can find out more information about our services@thecrocollective.com that's thecrocollective.com and we look forward to having you join us next time.