Driving Customer Focus - Bryan Murphy - Smartling - Episode #58

If you don't do that, someone else is. So it's too bad to sad that's the world we're going to be the most cost effective, the fastest, bestest translation solution provide in the world.

Welcome to Not Another CEO Podcast. I'm your host David Politis. Every week we talk to inspiring leaders and get the true stories, the ups and downs, the lessons learned and come away with actionable advice for our own journeys. Today's guest is a seasoned operator and entrepreneur who's been building and scaling technology businesses for over two decades. He's a three time CEO. He was co founder and CEO of WHI Solutions, the largest automotive e commerce platform in North America which was acquired by ebay. And in 2012 his next CEO role was at Breather, leading the company through a major transformation. He's now the CEO of Smartling, an AI powered translation and localization platform. Under his leadership, Smartling has become a product led, customer obsessed company that helps brands like Shopify, Canva and Door Dash scale across markets and languages faster and more cost effectively. He's also served on the boards of several high growth technology companies, bringing his operating experience to help other founders and and executive team scale. Please welcome CEO of SmartLink, Brian Murphy.

Hey David, great to be here.

I'm excited for this conversation. We'll jump right in with the first question. What is the one thing you've done, big or small at Smartling that's had the biggest impact and you do again if you're CEO of another company in.

The future, I think for sure it would be jumping on AI. Right, right out of the shoe. I remember we were, you know, I remember seeing the news about GPT getting released and waking up on a Saturday morning grabbing a cup of coffee, taking a look at it. And I think that within, by 10:00am that morning, the entire leadership team was slacking each other back and forth about, about this technology.

And so when I, so I think this is obviously a very timely conversation to be having. My experience, I've been working with a bunch of companies even though this is what everyone is talking about and everyone's talking about AI and going, I'm not actually seeing every company actually going all in on AI. And so my question to you is like from that moment to now, what were the steps to actually go all in on AI?

Yeah, I think that's right. I think so. And kind of looking back after doing this for 20, 20 years or so, you know, kind of you develop a little bit of pattern recognition and I was looking at what I was seeing and thinking about the business that we have, which is translation, right? So cloud native, very experienced team with neural machine translation and machine learning. All right, you know, former versions of what we call, what we call AI now, right. So we already had a pretty good foundation for understanding this technology and the potential of it. But it was definitely new and different and very new. Right? So I remember when we, when I first got started in the Internet, right? Nothing existed. You had to build everything. We were building our own servers, we were having to write. You could just like get a login for Shopify and get going, right? And this was clearly like this. We're like, okay, this is new. But it felt very impactful. You know, even look now, I mean, now we can look back and say, yeah, that, that was right. But felt very impactful at the time. We knew it was going to have a big impact. How would we take advantage of it? And that's always a hard part, right? You've got this very efficient machine that's running, right? So we are an engineering team, product or an engineering team that does 3,300 production releases a year. We're hyper efficient, right? These guys, this team really knows what they're doing to introduce in a big way, in an impactful way, a new technology that was going to impact everything that we did was going to be and was quite disruptive. And it was probably one of the hardest things I've ever had to do. It's one thing to say something, hey, let's use it. And I think this is why maybe you're seeing or not seeing the things that you haven't seen is because to introduce a new untested technology like this into a production environment is not an insignificant or a small task. So I had to figure out how to do that in a way that wouldn't blow up the machine, but would yield very fast, you know, have very fast impact. And it probably, in fairness, it probably took me six, seven, eight months to actually, to actually do that. Hmm.

I, I actually, I lit literally earlier today, got off with a, a founder that I'm working with and he's telling me like, I don't just want my leadership team. He, he said to me, I want like the company thinking about this and I want the company coming to me with ideas because I don't even know what to, to use this for. How did you communicate this kind of broader, you know. Cause I can imagine there's some questions, right? You're now, what are we going to do? Create another engineering team, a different Product embedded. Like how did you handle that?

Yeah, that was really the tough part. I sort of recognized that I had to create an R and D function that was separate from the engineering and product team. And as you can imagine, the engineering and product team was not happy with that. You know, they wanted to, you know, they wanted to be innovating and working with this new technology. But the reality of the matter was is that is, was that if I had done that, I think I would have distracted them from their core mission of roadbank. And so I had to create this what I call a three headed monster, which was R and D, product and engineering and create kind of a, and create a real clear flow there.

Right.

So how this was going to develop and then even within that had to create an operating plan that would allow us to produce innovation, you know, with AI in a timely way. Right, that worked. And that was, that's easier said than done. So I'll give you an example. What we did is we said, okay, we know that we're going to test and fail a lot in R and D. You know, we're going to, we're, we've got a hypothesis that we're going to develop. We think we can use AI to solve this particular problem. Okay, let's develop it, engineer, test it, iterate on it, test it, iterate on it. But we're going to time gate it, right? We're going to time gate and we're going to give it a confidence level. So let's say we're going to take 10 experiments, we're going to run all those and if they don't reach 80% confidence within a certain amount of time, it's out, like just scratch it, move on to the next thing. So it's really important to create like these time gated cycles so that you are in like kind of like this spin loop forever. Like hey, how's that thing going? Oh, we're, we're real close. We're just like a few days away. Well, no, so you gotta be disciplined from a, from a time gate perspective. In my perspective, in my perspective, the second thing that we had to do and this took a little bit of work was if you kind of zoom out for a moment, we have a, we have a very clear KPI driven North star for our product and engineering teams, for a tech team, which is we know what our customers, what we focus very much on what our customers expect in terms of outcomes. In our customer's case, it's quality, speed and cost are the three big things. That they care about when it comes to translation. So going back in that, you know, in that development cycle, every experiment that R and D was working on had to be anchored on at least one of those things. In other words, you had to have a hypothesis that if we run this experiment and it's successful, we will reduce turnaround time by X percent or improve quality by X percent and reduce cost. You see what I'm saying? But then that way we weren't like, like wandering off into the wilderness like developing all kinds of cool things. So we've been very, very focused, keeping a super tight focus on customer outcome driven innovation.

So it's basically you, you put like the guardrails like I imagine like when my kids go bowling and like the, the, you know, it's like you kind of put the, the guardrails to make sure that it's going in the right path. But they still have the flexibility to experiment, to try different things. Right. I mean that seems like what you're, you're saying.

Yeah, I'm like listen, we're not Xerox, you know, we're park. We're like, you know, we're not like, it'd be like where you guys can sit up and invent stuff for years and years. We are a production software company so that's hyper focused on customer outcomes. So those are the guardrails. And that has worked I think really, really well for us looking back over time. To be honest with you, I'm painting this picture like oh yeah, it was great, it's easy. Oh my God, we had fights. There was a lot of, a lot of passion around, around, around this topic.

So one of the things, you know, when we were meeting for the first time and you were, we were talking like I can tell you specifically and it sounds like now that's the company have this like customer obsession, customer focus and, and which I, which I love. You're also not the founder of Smartling. You, you joined as the CEO. How did you get up to speed on what the customers wanted? How did you become, you know, now it's like you, you understand that customer sounds like very well. Like how did you actually do that when you joined?

Sure. Two things. One is you know, if you look at my background, I spent a lot of time in venture funded companies as a, as a founder or a co founder.

Right.

So I still had very much that mentality around creating product market fit. You know, I'm a big believer in you know, innovators dilemma, obsessing over what problem or what job a customer is trying to do. So I always approach product from that perspective. You know, Jeff Bezos famously leads the empty chair in the room. We talk about that a lot. Point is, is that everything that we do is about helping our customers achieve their desired outcomes. So part, part and parcel of all that is just instilling that into the organization a and then understanding what it is. So how did I understand what those things work? Well, in fairness, for the past 20 years, every product or e commerce business that I've ever launched has been global, right. So I've been a customer of translation and localization for 20 years.

Right.

So I say listen, and when I walked in the door the first day, I said, I have no idea how you guys do what you do, but after 20 years of experience, I know exactly what I want as a customer. So that was like my first sort of lens.

Okay.

Then it became a very systematic effort around going out and talking with customers and understanding what problem are they trying to solve. And in fact, it was funny. I just literally got back, we just got done doing a, basically a three week tour around the world. I've met with hundreds of customers, go out to dinner, have drinks.

And.

The question, the way I always open up a conversation is what problem are you trying to solve? And that usually elicits a very, a very direct answer.

Right.

Everyone got like, everyone kind of has of the top of, oh, you know what, God, you know what I'm trying to solve right now. And you put that together over a couple hundred meetings like that, you start, and you document it and you start getting some pretty good pattern recognition around that. And that really helps inform us as a, as a company in terms of what products we're trying to solve for our customers.

How long do you think it took you from the point you joined to the point you understood the cut, like you really groked, you know, what the customer was.

Well, I've been doing it for three and a half years, so. Three and a half years. First, you know, I, I think it probably took, I think it six months. Six months. And I think to be comfortable, a year.

To be honest, I think one of the things you just said there, one of like my favorite moments, I talk about it a lot is at one point I met with a hundred customers in a hundred days, one on one. You know, it was during COVID over Zoom.

Yeah.

And I was the founder, I did know the customer, but I felt like I kind of gotten disconnected. Their lives changed a lot because of COVID their jobs like, and like you just said, like, the power of just having those, like, just ha. Literally just talk. Like there's no secret, like, having the conversation. I mean, for me, it was like within 10, I don't know, 15 of them, I knew what the next 85, we're going to say almost, you know, there starts to be those patterns where you're like, okay, there's, there's. Right.

I mean, and that's why, that's why we say, like, so if you look at our North Star, right, Our North Star is to help our customers grow faster.

Global.

Right, okay, period, paragraph. But what does that mean? That means nothing. Okay, great. That sounds great.

Problem.

What does that mean? We know that they, you know, after hundreds of, you know, or thousands, tens of thousands of sales meetings, you know, signing up customers, all that kind of stuff, they care about four things. Quality, cost, speed, ease of use.

Right?

Those are things now, now those are pillars that we, that we build our business on and our product roadmap on. And Those are also KPIs that we can measure, right? So quality, we can measure. Speed, we can measure. Cost, obviously, we can measure ease of use, we can even measure. And, and that's what we do. So, like, we're constantly working on creating technology that improves those outcomes for our customers. I would make one other point which I think is kind of interesting. Like, okay, so within a few months, like, I had a pretty good idea of what our customers want, but guess what? Our customers needs chill every year. So I just spent the last three weeks and the conversations that I had with those customers in the last three weeks, their problem set has changed from a year ago, right? I'll give you an example. So I said, what's the number one problem you're trying to solve? Oh, my God. Our CEO wants us, is demanding that we have an AI solution, right? So a year ago, that was not. That was not. They would have said, right? So, and we, you know, fortunately, this is one of the things I talk about because, like, like, we started building out this technology two and a half years ago, and I'm glad we really hustled when we did because now we have to beat our customers where they are. So, for example, some of them are really sophisticated. They want to use their own LLMs, they want to do their own prompt engineering, but they'd like to do it within the automation and the framework and the tool set of Spartan.

Right?

Great. Then we have other customers, like, holy smokes, I have no idea. Like, he wants us to, he or she wants us to use AI and we don't. I don't know how to do that. I'm like, right, we've got that solution. So we have to build this solution set that spans across that customer use case, which is like, we're super sophisticated, highly engineering oriented, can write prompts, can do all that too. Geez, just do it for me and everything. That was a lot of work to retool the platform to enable that type of outcome for our customers. And it's still very much ongoing, as you can imagine.

When you come back from a trip like this and you meet with all these customers and you gather all these insights, how, how do you package that? Like, do you package that up for the company, for the board, like, for the other customer? Like, how. What do you do with that information?

Yeah, Yes, I do. I do typically try and package it up and share it with, mostly with the, with the company in the organization, a little bit more verbatim with, with the board. But we try and document what we've heard, you know, and summarize all that and then share that with some of the leadership team and the management team. And then we've got an all hands tomorrow where I'll be talking about it, you know, directly with the team. Cool.

I have a very tactical question here because I have been through this myself in various iterations. Do you, do you, when you have these meetings, do you have a person, do you have like the account manager there with you? Like, do you have someone with you in those meetings or do you do them just yourself?

Yes and no. If it's a, if it's a formal meeting, well, I'll do it. I'll do it two ways. Sometimes I do. Yes. And that's like more of a formal meeting, like in a qbr. Like I'll drop in often on our, on our customers, QBRs, just to listen. I'm, you know, I always say just ignore me. They never do. But I say just ignore me. I just want to hear what's going on. Sometimes then I'll also just pick up the phone and say, hey, it's Brian. I just want to see how things are going, you know, and let them talk. So those are like the. Sometimes it's. So sometimes it's a whole team. The, the whole team. It's very structured and sometimes it's just like, hey, let's just talk. Dinners are that way. Often we do these road trips and I'll literally just sit down having a, a drink or sharing a meal and sound just like, hey, what's. What's going on? What's the, you know, what, what kinds of problems are you trying to solve? But I'm just listening.

Yeah, my, my biggest challenge that I ended up running into, and I think it probably for everyone, right, is when you're doing all of that, it's like, how do you actually capture if you don't have that person? You know, you go to the meal, the meals. Usually for me, I find that's when I get the most information. But then it's also like at a meal where I'm not going to be taking notes down, you know, while, while I'm eating with them. And then I'm like, oh my God, I got to remember, you know, I leave the meal and I start like writing everything.

Yeah, I wish, I wish I had a better solace for that too, because I'm not great in that. So I could literally now it's like 11:30.

Exactly.

Purple cocktails, you're like, they're like, oh my God. You're like at a different time zone. It's like, nope. What did she say to me? You know, if you're writing it down, but you got, you got to do.

It, you got to do it. You talked about the KPIs. I, I really like how you talked about these pillars and then being able to measure those pillars. When you arrived three and a half years ago, did you have the measure? I mean, it. Were the pillars there and if. Yes, were the measurements of those pillars there.

So I don't get myself in trouble. I'd say some of it was there, but it wasn't that rigor that I'm used to. One of the things that happened to me was I've got this interesting background. So like, I spent many years, you know, as a venture funded founder, you know, startup person. Right. So, you know, you're building, building, building, hyperscaling, all that kind of stuff.

Right.

And then I spent four years at eBay where they measure everything. And you're operating this colossus machine, you know, at scale, globally. And I learned a lot about operations there, like really operating at scale. And that was really where I learned how important it was and how to measure things that matter. And that was the big unlock for me. And so now what I've tried to do in my leadership is combine those two things where I'm creative enough or flexible enough to think and operate like a founder, but to create a framework for scaling around that and, and that to me has felt like a very powerful combination.

Do you, do you have a metric for each of these things, one. Or is it a. I mean, I'm sure there's a set, but is there like a metric that you say we're successful because this number has gone up, down, whatever? Yeah, I.

Yes, I think. I think it is a. What's interesting is that each one of our customers a little bit different. So if it's quality, cost, speed, they may care about one or one of those and not the other two or all three or vice versa. So it's kind of like about.

Depends on the. Depends on the.

Right, exactly. So we try and move all those together. Quality, they measure some more than others. Like, so quality is paramount for most of our customers. So we have multiple measurements for that. We have Terra Blue, Comet, mqm. This is a little bit nerdy translation stuff, but the answer is. Yeah. So actually what's interesting is to give you an example, we actually benchmark every month all of the major neural machine translation engines, all of the major LLMs, alongside our own products. Every month we reproduce that picture. Yeah, we're actually probably going to publish that because it's getting pretty interesting.

Wow. Wow, that's cool.

Yeah, so we pay very close attention to that, obviously, cost. We monitor on a. We're grinding that down. Like, to give you an example, like our customers, we've helped our customers reduce their translation costs by about 60% over the last 36 months. So we're constantly working every year bringing that cost down, making it faster, easier to automate, more automated, so that they can translate more for the same money. That's super important for our customers. When we do those things, we win.

It feels like that what you just said is the dilemma that a lot of people are in a variety of fields. I was talking to a lawyer the other day and they were saying now with all these AI tools coming into the law firm, they have this interesting, interesting challenge of they can do things for a lot cheaper.

Yes.

But if they do it for cheaper.

Yes.

They don't. You know, and like, there's this. And. And they're not. Well, some are embracing it. I shouldn't say none, but you have to. Don't. If you don't embrace it, you're going to end. I mean, it's kind of inevitable. Right. That you're going to end up getting someone else is going to embrace it.

That's right. This is. This is the innovators allow.

Right.

So. And that's how we came into this business. We were faster, cheaper, but not better.

Right.

So coming up from the bottom and Using AI, that was really the big unlock was we used AI to help us solve particular linguistic problems which, which allowed us to be faster, cheaper and as good as or better. And that's been the big unlock. So it is the dilemma, right? It is the innovator's dilemma. And I always think about, like, think about data services, right? Or cloud service, Data storage and cloud service, Google, Amazon. Actually Amazon probably understands this the best of anyone. I think if you look at their, whether it's AWS or even their, their E commerce business, they, Jeff Bezos NET crew, they know they gotta keep grinding every year to be that cost leader, providing better solutions. Netflix is a great example. Remember when they went from the artwork, he completely, he's like this. We have to completely pivot this business and go from whatever it was. 14 bucks. What was it? Like 14 bucks a movie?

The rental dude, I don't remember. It was something, some.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, 11 bucks or whatever. But it was this whole thing now like, look what you get for and music Spotify thing. Great example of gentleman's paradox. Music's probably maybe the best example, right? Where we went from, you know, 18 bucks an album to what do I pay for Spotify free. Point is, if you don't do that, someone else is. So it's too bad, too sad. That's the world. We're going to be the most cost effective, the fastest, bestest translation solution for our world. And we have to make it up with volume.

You feel like a go to market. Like if I were to put you, you're not an engineering CEO. You know, you're, you're not, you're, you're a go to market kind of CEO. How involved do you get? This is like a big conversation I've been having with CEOs recently is like, how deep do you go into the functional areas? Like especially the areas that you're better at and you know, kind of more naturally inclined to like, do you, do you go all the way down in the weeds of you know, the individual campaigns and the email copy? Like where, where do you, you know, stop? Let's say.

Yeah, I think that, I think that CEOs and like CMOs and, and lots of other. And CTOs. Like you kind of major and you minor in some things, right? You're, you have a superpower and there's other things you're not going to. I'm, I'm definitely a go to market product centric CEO. I'm not an engineering CEO. So when it comes to like marketing and sales I am also a big believer. Don't expect what you don't inspect. I actually enjoy getting into the weeds into marketing copy. In fact, literally I was laughing when you're talking about email copy. We do this weekly go to market meme where I bring all the functions together and I was literally going through emails that we're sending out looking at copy, looking at open interactions, click through rate. So but, but, but that's like, that's the, that's asymmetric. It feels like you're going down the weeds. But we're sending out like, I don't know, like a hundred thousand emails a month like that. To me it's probably worthwhile for, for me to understand what are we saying? And by the way, what's the, what's the response on that? You know, between this messaging and that understanding that is like, I think in my opinion like super important across the whole organization when it comes to things like that. I'm, that I'm not as good at let's say engineering. I rely on really talented team members and, and setting up KPIs.

Right.

So once again, so engineering velocity, like are we, you know, what's, what's our backlog?

Great.

Like what's happening there? You know, all those kind of things so I can understand them from a perspective of what are we producing, you know, from a, you know, against our, you know, product framework. KPIs, are we, are we meeting our customers needs?

It's interesting, you know, when I think, when, when I speak to early like first time founders, first time CEOs as their businesses grow, you know, they're told like get the people who know how to scale and get the, you know, hire the executive team. And I think over time they start to, and I put myself in this bucket over time you kind of get further and further away from the inspecting kind of at that level and you're like, well I hired that person. They get paid a lot. They've done this before. I've never done this before. So I'm going to, you know. And then as time goes on I think you actually realize that being in the weeds, especially when you have the experience or just the knowledge or just a different lens on the business and kind of that it's valuable. You know, there's the right way to, to kind of do that. But if you don't do that, it's, it's. No, unfortunately nobody will, will care as much as the CEO about all of those things.

We're really, really fortunate to have a super Fat, passionate, dedicated team here. But, like, what's. So the perch that we have as a CEO is different than anybody else in the company. Like, we. We have that latitude to run across the organization and dive down into each one of the respective parts of the organization. No one else can do that or does do that. So we have a unique vantage point that you want to. That is a superpower that you want to take advantage of. And I'm always surprised, like, I'll kind of run across the organization that I'll deep dive into something. Not because I'm like, think that there's something wrong there or, you know, for whatever reason, but I just want to understand, like, once again, I like to have, like, what problem are you trying to solve? What are you working on right now? What do you think about such and such? And you get very, very interesting insights into where you find information, like, how aligned is that part of the organization with the mission of the company and what we're trying to do. And you f. Sometimes you find these, like, kind of pockets that for whatever reason, typically it's a manager or it's a process where you're not communicating well enough. You find these pockets where they're like, they're behind, they're not hearing the mission, you know, they're not hearing up or there's something wrong here, or they're not getting it right, or you discover, like, whoa, here's an area where I'm, like, understaffed, where I've got a different. That's how you find these things.

I think it's, you know, I. I did an interview with Teen Zuo, who's the c. Founder and CEO of Zuora. And we had a very interesting conversation where I met him many years ago. We were sitting and he was asking all the CEOs of the table, like, how do you handle your calendar? And I was like, oh, I'm working, you know, 8am to 8pm back to back to back. And he's like, really? He's like, what does your calendar look like three weeks out? I'm like, it's booked. You know, and he said to me, he's like, dave, how do you even h. How do you respond to what's happening in the business if you're just booked, you know, all. And when you just said that kind of. You could see across the business and kind of dive in. Into the various things, I. I love that. That kind of visual. You need the time to do. You know, you need to be able to kind of give yourself that time. I told him I. In the interview, I told him after he said that to me, I tried so hard, and I did. I cleaned up my calendar. I cut back on these recurring meetings I did so that I had those pockets, you know, to. To. To. To jump into things.

Yeah, I think. I think you need to leave time to do that and to meet with people and also just time to think and react, you know, I mean, there's so often, like, what I find is when my schedule gets blocked back to back, and I don't have time to think. I don't. There's something wrong that then to me, I'm. I'm not operating the way. Something's not right.

Let me ask you about operating rhythm. You know, I think it's a. It's a topic I am very passionate about, and I think you are, too, based on the conversations we've had. Can you kind of walk me through how you think about operating rhythm and. And I. More tactical the better. Because I think this is, in my opinion, if I had to answer that first question, what's the one thing you would do? Like, big or small? For me, it's about the operating rhythm. For me, like, the operating rhythm is the foundation, you know, to. To everything. Um, can you maybe walk me through how you think about that?

Yeah, I. I think, to me, like, this is gonna sound weird, but good ideas are not that hard to come up with.

Right.

Like, everyone's got, like, there's always good ideas. In my mind, the difference between success and failure is around execution. Like, how well do you execute against that? So I've always. I've always felt that way, and I've learned the, you know, good ways and bad ways that that's really what it boils down to. So for me, I. I think that execution is, like, one of my superpowers. It's an area that I really focus on. And so over the past several years, I've developed this operating rhythm, which it really starts with what I call it. You know, obviously, we've got our. We set our strategic plan right for the year. That's budget plan, all that stuff. Review that get approved with the board and the leadership team. And then we break that down into its key components into what's called, you know, an operating plan.

Right?

So there's like, maybe four main pillars to the operating plan, and each pillar has, say, three key initiatives that. That rotate, right? They get closed off or they. Or they keep going or whatever. And that's the plan.

Right.

And what we do is every week, we Meet four days a week. We review that operating plan in various levels of detail. We might dive into one of the buckets on Mondays.

Four days a week.

Four days a week.

Leadership team.

Leadership team. And then on Wednesdays, it's what I call the management council, which is every single team lead in the company. So this is critical. And so what we do then is. So on this, it's just a Google sheet, right? I had no fancy asana or anything like that, but it's, it's a Google sheet with. Here are the, here are the four pillars, here's our KPIs, here are the key initiatives. Let's say there's, there's like a handful of key, maybe three key initiatives for each one of these buckets. An owner status, delivery day. And it's like a scrum. So we basically start off meeting, we go from the top to bottom. We say, who you know, you know, Jenny, you're the owner of this. What's the status? We're on track or we're off track. And you know, generally you want to be on track, right? Because now, especially on Wednesdays, which is our management council, which every single people leader in the business is attending, you don't want to be the person that doesn't know where their initiatives stand, you know what I mean? Or be behind.

And how often do you do all hand, do you, do you take those same initiatives at the all hands?

Yep, yep. Yeah. So we do an all hands once a month and we, we review. I don't go to, I don't go into that level of detail. And the all hands, we talk about the status of the, the, you know.

The big one, the big, big pillars.

Whether or not we're on track against those major KPIs.

And in terms of setting that plan, is that something that you do? Leadership, management council, like how broad of a group does that part.

And it is, it is really, it's really the management council plus the leadership team that puts that together. So we kind of do a bottoms up starting in, you know, October, right? We start thinking about what 20. Start thinking about what 26 should be. I mean it's always like Evergreen, but like in October we'll start saying, okay, based on what we know, where we are LTM last six months, then we forecast forward. Okay, this is what we should be able to do. We typically have some big discussion sessions. Like, we'll get together for like half a day and we'll talk about, you know, we'll say, you know, we'll say things like, okay, strategically, what do we need to be thinking about over the next 12, 24, 36 months?

Right?

What are the big rocks here that are going to change? Last year, we did something interesting. Like, we got together for half a day. We spent all day in the morning, we talked about, like, that sort of thing. The afternoon, I said, okay, and I give him notice. I said, I want you to come in, in the afternoon, and we're gonna have a kill Smartling discussion. In other words, I'm gonna give you. I'm gonna give you venture funding. You're gonna come up with an idea that's going to kill smartlink. What is it?

Right.

Wow. That's a good. That's a good. That's a good. That's a good exercise.

Yeah, it was interesting. So I was like, come up with ideas, like, red team, like, you're going to take us out. What would you do? Because, you know, you know everything about this industry and about our business. And so that was a really interesting discussion. And that gave. Then that kind of, like, led to a number of other discussions around what should we be doing?

How much battling is there on kind of, you know, how few or many there should be? Like, and. And how do you deal with that? Because that feels like the. At least for me, when I started this process, which probably wasn't. It was too late, but it was years into Better Cloud. The first year, I felt so good. We did the planning, we did what you just said, and then we finished here, and we did, like, half of the things that were on the list, you know, and everyone was like, dave, you didn't. We didn't do it. You know, and I was angry. They were angry at me. We didn't have enough resources. And then the next year, we're like, okay, let's. Let's cut it back a little bit. We cut it back. We did, like, 65%, but we still didn't. Like, how do you handle that focus? You know, like, how. How do you mitigate for that?

I think to me, like, I'm always thinking about cutting that list down. You know, people. People and myself are always wanting to add stuff to the list. I think that's one of the reasons why I do it. Because, listen, I know that there's like, any. At any one time, everyone's got, like, a hundred things to do, right? But I'm a big believer in, you know, parade out, right? 80, 20. So, like, what matters to me is not doing the hundred. It matters. Doing the 20 things that get you the 80 I actually probably spend more time trying to pare down that list than adding to it. Does that make sense?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And that.

That's probably the biggest struggle. So we spent a lot of time talking about that, like, okay, this is a good idea. The hardest thing is, like, when something's a good idea, this is a good idea. But, you know, is the other. You're me use this expression a lot. If you're on my team, is the juice worth the squeeze? Like, is he going to move the needle if we do this thing? Well, probably not. Okay, then let's not do it. Don't worry about it. Focus on. On these three things. You know, knock those down, we have some capacity, then we can come back to this other thing.

What is the. Actually, one last question on the operating rhythm is, who manages that for you? Like, do you manage that? Do you have an EA or chief of staff or operations cfo, like, or do you do that?

I get this question all the time. I do it because it feels like micromanaging, but it's not. It's really my. So we kind of talked about freeing up time, interestingly enough, or ironically enough, structuring it this way. Where I've got a team meeting with my LTD once a day, except for Fridays. And then I've got this management council, right, Where I've got every single team leader in the company going over the operating plan. Kind of frees me up from a bunch of bullshit, you know what I mean? Like, I know now, now all my LT and my, all my people, leaders know exactly where we are on the plant, what's ahead, what's behind, what needs to get worked on. And my expectation is that if we're, let's say, if we're behind on something, they're going to need that meeting and they're going to go figure out how to fix it, because next week they're coming back, they're going to sit down, we're going to have this conversation again. How are we doing on, you know, initiative, xyz? Are we back on track? You know what I mean?

I get it, I get it. You kind of remove the whole, like, hub and spoke. I mean, you kind of. By just having everyone together all the time.

Yeah.

You're really just having all those conversations. Do you have one on ones or not?

Not really. No. I don't. I don't like one on ones, to be honest with you. Which is contrary to a lot of folks, but I feel like they're sort of like, I would much rather Meet with a broader team and educate that team so they're all up to speed, listening to the conversation than have a one on one that I'm only impacting one person at that time. Do you know what I mean?

Yeah, yeah. I don't know if I don't know.

If it's a good idea or a bad idea, but it's just, you know, that just.

Well, the hub and spoke is the thing. Actually, the feedback I've gotten before as a leader is like you're having conversations one on one with all these people, but then. And they're having it with you.

Yeah.

But they don't know what the other ones are like.

That's the worst.

Yeah. And so that was a big change for me of like really leaning on the leadership meeting and then pushing one on ones to like a cadence that was further out to force conversations to have to happen in that room. But having the people lead, having the broader. How big is that broader management? About how many people is in that?

I think it's probably about 25, 30 people. Wow. Yeah. So listen, I get it. Like they're sitting there and many of them are, you know, doing slacks or emails or kind of sitting there, kind of like just listening. Get to the bucket that they're involved with and now everyone's paying attention.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I get it.

Yeah. But they're, they're hearing by assimilation. It's kind of like the same thing. We have this on Tuesdays. We do these go to market meetings. So I used to have like. And we still like, obviously we have sort of specific task driven marketing meetings and obviously sales meetings. But once a week we'd get together as a go to market team because I kept finding, I'm like, okay, I'm having this conversation with marketing and then I got to go have this conversation with sales. And it's like they're always like, you know, sales and marketing, they love to argue.

Right.

I said, no, no, let's just. No, no, let's sit in a room. This is the go to market plan.

Let's.

Let's hash it all out.

I really like that. I like that. Okay, so you've been, you've been a part SmartLink 3 1/2 years. Question I ask every guest, what is the biggest challenge you've faced since you joined Smartling?

I would say, yeah, our codes. I know one of the biggest decisions I'm always wrestling over. We. We used to have a big office in New York City and we are now we're down. We have an office in Dublin, Ireland. But we have 200 plus employees in 20 different countries. And I probably wrestle with it with us all the time is whether or not we should do some kind of, you know, back to, back to the office. And I just, I don't, I just don't see that happening. But it makes me feel weird as a CEO. Yeah. Not to spend time in an office.

Yeah. Do you get people together somehow?

Yes. So, so once a year we do, we do a four year trip to Puerto Rico and bring everyone in for that. We do training, get together. Then we try to get together. Obviously the board, the board and the leadership team gets together, you know, quite often and we try and do monthly meetings, try and do monthly get togethers in New York. And that sort of scratches the itch. So that's one of the things that drives me, that, that, that's something I think about a lot.

Yeah, I look, I think when you're at that scale and you've already have people all over, it becomes, I mean, I think it becomes kind of nearly impossible to, to bring everyone back into an office. For me, I, I, I miss being, you know, it's the thing I miss probably the most is like being around other people and I don't even know that it's for, I think for the CEOs, it's a big deal. I actually think the younger generation, I feel very old saying it, but like the people coming into the workforce today, they're going to miss not being in an office and they don't even know that they're going to.

You know, I worry about that all the time. It's like I feel like I got 99 problems to solve and maybe that's not what I should be solving.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. Where's Smartling 2028, it's three years from today. Where is smartling? What's, what's, what's happened?

Right.

So, so today the way once again, sort of when I think about content. So content growth is right, exponential. Like there's not less content, there's more content that needs to be multilingual. The world's becoming more, more global. Business is becoming more global. And I see us being the, the provider of that sort of like translation as a service.

Right.

So the same way we think about cloud storage or data storage, cloud services.

Right.

I want us to be thought of as being able to provide that service on demand for our customers for translation. And the more cost effective, automated, easier to use, we can make it. The, the more our customers are going to be able to unlock content that they've been rationing to translate. And that's really like, you know, that's really kind of like our ultimate goal. So I think by 2028, we're on our way. I'll give you, I'll give you an example. So like, when I got started in 2021, 70 plus percent of our content was. We'll call human translate.

Right.

That number is now flipped all the way. Let's call it 80%.

Right.

That number splits around to 20%. So. And the word count, it's not that we're doing less human translation, we're actually doing more, but we've just increased the amount of content that's being translated. Yeah, that's the remarkable thing. So that's what our customers want is they, they would like to. I don't. They would like to produce 10x more content for the same budget, basically.

Right.

So that's what we're helping with, like through automation, AI translation and AI or automated quality assurance. That's kind of like the key to making this thing really rock for our customers.

Awesome. I just want to transition a little bit to your background. Where are you from originally?

Detroit, Michigan.

Okay. Where did you always know you wanted to be a leader, founder, CEO? Was that something that you grew up kind of feeling? No.

Wow.

I, you know, it's really funny. I did, I always joke, I did start my first business when I was 12 years old. So I think I've, I think I've always wanted to be an entrepreneur. I think I do. I do know that for sure. But like, did you ever, you know, did I want to be like a CEO of a company? No, I wouldn't, I wouldn't say that was one of my aspirations.

What, what, what were, what was your first business?

It was a pie baking business. So.

Pie baking?

Yeah. Yeah. We grew up in this neighborhood that had apple trees and cherry trees. And so I love pie. And I'm like, hey, you know what, I'm gonna go pick this fruit, make these pies. And next thing you know, neighbor says, hey, after you pick it, will you make a pie for me? And I'm like, of course I will. So I did that and that turned into a whole business. But it's a really funny story because it told me about, you know, taught me a lot about product market fit and gross margin and outsourcing to my mom and my sister.

What, what, what was your first job when you came out of school?

I went to work. I was, I worked selling like health insurance, you know, to small businesses. And then I got a phone call from some folks that in the automotive industry that were looking for a, you know, a young salesman that could come in and help them grow their auto parts business. We're selling to the oem, so making cars and stuff. And very quickly it was really interesting. Like, I got in that job, I was, you know, I was 23 years old, and first thing I did is I looked at the RFP process. I'm like, this is ridiculous. We need a database for this. So I actually created a database so we could track them electronically, not with pieces of paper. And then I, within a year, I went to my, the owner of the company and said, hey, I've got an idea to start up a new business. And I thought we'd be partners on it. And like, you could imagine the look on this. I mean, this guy is a titan, a titan of industry. And he just had the most bemused look on his face and he's like, okay, Brian, why don't you tell me a little bit more about this business you want to start, right? So credit to him. I mean, he, I gave him my pitch and, and he, I said, I tell you what I thought we'd do is you. He said, well, how are we going to fund this? And he said, and I said, well, I figured you put the cash in and I would provide sweat equity. He said, brian, I don't, I don't do sweat equity. I said, I will match you dollar for dollar. How about that? So we, I'm like, oh my God. I didn't have any money. So I figured out a way to cobble together the cash. We did it. And he got me started in my first, you know, kind of like real business. And that was, wow, you know, 24, 25. And I had a little bets and wow.

And. And that was whi. That was the cubby.

No, that was actually way before that was Alpha. And it was the company low agency. We call it Alpha Sales.

Okay, okay.

It's like crazy little thing, but like, but that was such, you know, a life changing experience, like to think that, to think at 24 years old, like, it never occurred to me that I couldn't do that.

Right.

That we shouldn't do that. I think that's what the funny look on his face was like. I don't think he's probably never had anyone sit there and 24 years old and say, hey, let's start a business together.

Why do you think that you had that confidence to do this.

I don't know. That's like. I always think that I was joking about entrepreneurs. It's like, you have to be just dumb enough, which is crazy enough, right, to just like to do this, you know? And I've always. I guess I've always had that independent streak for sure. Hmm.

What did have you had? Kind of a mentor, coach, role model, like someone as you've kind of scaled these businesses, that has helped you do that?

Oh, yeah, I. That this is really key. And, and you. You gotta have. You gotta have a mentor, you gotta have a rabbi. You gotta have someone that's gonna help you take you under your wing for whatever reason, right? And I always think it's funny, but it's funny now as I'm older, right? I. I do. I try to do this all the time. I think it's human nature that, that you want to help grow people, because that was always, why would this person help me? But I was really fortunate. I had a couple in Detroit. The gentleman I just described to you was one of them. Another gentleman, later, entrepreneur, incredible entrepreneur, helped me. And then in my life, I was fortunate to have an uncle who was once again kind of like a titan of. Of technology, right? So CEO of Akamai, president of IBM, sat on the board of. Sits on the board of Cardinal Harley Davidson, you know, Oracle.

Right.

So this is. This is the guy who, like, really taught me what I needed to know to run a. Run a tech business.

Wow. And was that from, like, do you think that that was somewhere from a young age that you saw that and kind of. I just from my experience interviewing people, like, a lot of people say they needed to see one other person do something, you know, be an entrepreneur or do. Do something that made them know that it was possible, you know, like, even if that person wasn't family or, you know, I don't know. You know, it's interesting. I asked. I asked everyone this question, you know, and someone's like, oh, this person did this thing, or I got exposure to this, or I saw, you know, whatever. And that got me thinking, I can do this.

Yeah, that's a. That's a great point. I'm trying to think back. I think, you know, a lot of my, like, you know, even my father, who was a. Who was a surgeon, he had his own, like, you know, he had his own business, his own practice, right? But I used to help him out with that. We used to talk about it all the time. He wanted me to get medicine. I'm like, no. And not Cut out. But I saw that, we talked a lot about that and I was just surrounded by these people like, that ran businesses and Detroit is a super entrepreneurial town. It really, it was when I was growing up, like everyone had a tool and die shop, they had a plastic ejection molding company, they did something. So I was always surrounded. That's a great point. I was always surrounded by these, these people that were entrepreneurs. And so I think that that's why I always never occurred to me that I wouldn't be a runner entrepreneur, I suppose.

What, what is it that drives you? You know, like, what, what is the motive? What is the motivation? You've been successful, you've done this multiple times. You know, you like, but you're still grinding. You're, you know, on the road doing this. Like, what, what is it that, that drives you?

I can chip on my shoulder. I think that's a right wrong or different. That's a, that's a, that's, that's a driver. You know, I think you always feel like you're not doing good enough. You know, you always do better. And so I think that's, I don't think that's particularly healthy per se, but I think that's what loaded me to be. And, and I like to, I do like to solve problems. Like, I, I, I really do enjoy that exercise of seeing a problem and then, okay, how can I make that better? And that's, I think to me that's what. That intellectual curiosity is one of the things that drives me. I get a lot of satisfaction out of, you know, how can I make that, how can I fix that problem? How can make, make it better and then accomplishing that?

And, and I see from what I've seen, like, you, you've, you're a board member for a number of companies or have been. Are you, like, if someone reaches out to you, will you, like you said, you know, will you pay it forward and kind of have the conversations with founders, help them, like, how to, how do you do that? You know?

Yeah, yeah, generally. So I give myself room to sit on a couple boards at a time kind of thing, and I get as much as I give and those things. I, I just think it's fascinating to be in the room with another accomplished CEO and their investors and be on the other side of that table is super helpful for me.

Right.

Because like, it's one thing when you're a CEO, right? You're, you're, you've got, you're looking down, maybe you've Got your problems you're trying to solve.

Right.

Believe me, there's a whole nother team that's looking down at you, you know, sort of assessing and to sit on the other side of that table and understand, oh, okay, now, okay. It makes me a better CEO.

That's a good, I like, that's a good point.

You know, so, yeah, so that, that I, I, and then I try and help the CEOs with what are typically, I'm brought in, like, because I'm like the tech guy, whatever, and, and I get brought in a lot and maybe even more traditional sort of companies, like, where they need some support like that. And I enjoy that.

What? Last question. Knowing everything you know today, all the experience you've had, if you could go back to the beginning of your career before you started selling health insurance and you give yourself one piece of advice, what would it be?

It's the, it's the, it's, it's the advice that was given to me by, by men, my mentor, which is, number one, always hit your numbers, then raise your hand right to me. Then that's the advice that I, I pass on. And really what it is, is like, do your job. Like you're, you're, you're hired. Do your job, do it well, know what your numbers are, achieve those, and then raise your hand and, and try and do more. And that's how you move up through the organization or frankly, you know, if you want to be an entrepreneur, that's like, kind of like with. Those are the requirements.

It's great advice. I like that. I, People have said, raise your hand.

I.

Not in those words, but other words that mean the same thing. But actually, no one's added the part of hit your numbers. You know, do your job. And I think that is super important. You have people who are like, yeah.

Give me more, give me more.

You're like, well, you're not even doing your job, Tony.

Also, that's super annoying to me. When someone's not doing their job yet, they're saying, hey, what about this over here? Or do your job first and then let's talk.

I like that advice, Brian, if people want to get in touch with you, what's, what's the Best way? Is LinkedIn Email what?

LinkedIn is generally the best way. Happy to chat with people.

Great, Great. Brian, thank you for doing this with me. I really appreciate it. This has been amazing. There's a lot of good nuggets in here, a lot of good lessons. Tactical to strategic. The story, your story. It's amazing. So thank you for doing this.

Thanks. Thanks, David. It was a lot of fun. It was great talking with you.

Awesome. Awesome. Well, for anyone listening, I hope you enjoyed. I hope you found value in this. If you did, please share this out with your networks and we'll see you for the next episode of Not Another CEO Podcast. That's a wrap for this week's episode of Not Another CEO Podcast. Thanks for joining. For show notes and more, please Visit not another CEOPodcast.com we'll see you next week. Sam.