How to be a Hired Gun CEO - Interview with Greg Coticchia

What does a career in entrepreneurship look like?

Messy.

There we go. It is, we should know that even the intro is gonna be surprising today when you work with rock stars, right? I have Greg Coticchia here. I will say entrepreneur emeritus.

Just because you have the right investors and a lot of money and the right team in a hot marketplace, whatever, it is not a guarantee for success. I go back and often tell people, look, in an early stage business, only two things count, someone to build it, someone to sell it. That's it. You know, all the other— I'm not saying the other things aren't important, but if you don't get those two things right, you're not going to get anything right, right? Founders that stay on too long can harm the company. Bringing in the wrong professional management that alienates the, uh, the original founders, or they feel that there's a tussle for control, can really screw up a company. So it is a gentle dance that has to be done.

I'm really, really psyched to do this interview. Greg, thanks so much for being here.

Thank you for inviting me, John. Good to see you and look forward to having a great conversation and hopefully helping our listeners gain some valuable information. Excellent.

And if you're a CEO founder, this is going to be one you don't want to miss because Greg's background is vast, an entire career being a startup entrepreneur, a founder, a hired gun CEO, all of these things. And at the same time, teaching business and entrepreneurship at University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University, and others as well. So, this is a really just awesome opportunity to hear what a lifetime of entrepreneurship looks like, what a lifetime of just, you know, training, inspiring, mentoring entrepreneurs and CEOs. So, Greg, really, really glad you're here.

Glad to be here.

So, why don't you share a bit about your journey? I mean, walk us through because it is, there are so many parts to it. I think everyone would love to hear it.

Well, thank you. And it is a long journey and with lots of ups and downs. You know, I started, I grew up in a family of engineers, my dad, my brother, my uncle, everybody was an engineer. So of course, when I wanted to be a musician, John, they said, yeah, you'll make a great engineer. And I went into engineering school and I got my engineering degree. I can still see myself on the roof of my fraternity house in my senior year, with some of my buddies in engineering school, looking at them saying, what am I gonna do with this engineering degree? I don't wanna be an engineer. So I didn't change my mind after 4 years. So I went into sales and my mother cried for about 6 months, but she got over it eventually, you know. I loved sales and I worked for a company that today is under the banner of Eaton Corporation, but at the time was Cutler Hammer. We sold process control and automation, all kinds of factory automation stuff. But what was great about that is it really set me on my journey. It set me on my journey because I learned a lot about problem solving in a technical sales environment. And so that was just, it was like getting another master's degree, you know, it was just fabulous. And, and I really enjoyed that. I spent many years in my early in my career in that. And but I finally found myself one day talking to the engineers themselves too much. And I thought, and I did some introspection and I said, you know, if you want to spend your time not selling but talking about what features should be in the product, what do you think that's called? In those days, we didn't have this thing called the internet. So I had to actually, you know, go to a library and figure that out. And it was like, oh, those are product managers. Oh, okay. So, you know, that's the people that decide what goes in the product and build the roadmap. So I went to night school, got my MBA because that was what people did in those days if they wanted to be a product manager. And that led me to my first startup because no one would hire a guy that was an engineer that sold with an MBA to be a product manager. They wanted them all to come out of, you know, services or be a systems engineer or an engineer themselves that had worked in developing their products. So I got my first big break being in a startup. And, you know, in those days, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, you know, if you were an entrepreneur or in a startup, that meant you were unemployable. You couldn't find a job. It wasn't the cherished, beloved thing we talk about today with, you know, Steve Jobs and Elon Musk and, oh my God, these are our legendary heroes and everything. So, and I joined a robotics and machine vision startup that was doing all kinds of stuff in AI. Imagine that in the 1980s doing AI. But that was first of many. And You know, in the first half of my career, to kind of shorten this story and the question that you asked, I spent my time as a product manager, marketing, sales, business development, partnerships and alliances, all kinds of areas. I was in a couple of early-stage businesses that we grew to public and exited for over $1 billion, one in systems and network management software, the other in cybersecurity. And then I was also in what I like to label as some wonderful learning experiences, otherwise known as failures. Failures. And I had some singles and some doubles and some triples in between there. And it was another foundation for my career. Subsequently, after that chapter of my life, in the next 20 years of work, it was all as a CEO. And so, all early-stage businesses raised about $73 million in venture capital, did some of them that were bootstrapped. All kinds of crazy businesses from embedded systems to electronic billing for law firms to governance, risk, and compliance startups, all kinds of things, and a few more cybersecurity ones. I came in as the founder. I was the hired gun CEO. Some of these were private, some of them were even public companies. So I've done it now 6 times, and I think that's enough. And I've lived to tell the tale so far, knock on wood here, you know. But that's the journey. It's a long journey. And as I said, it's messy.

Yeah. Well, you know, I love that you brought up failure and just the role of failure in learning, but in also finding the right space for a startup. Any specific failure stories that come to mind where you think, wow, I learned a lot from that one and maybe some key takeaways from that?

Yeah, and I am a big proponent, as we'll hopefully talk about in some of the things I've learned that are keys, but there was one company I was with called Nat Systems, and Nat Systems taught me a lot. It was an enormous failure, and it was in the days where people were building, if you remember, two-tier applications and client-server development. We were a three-tier or n-tier application, and then this thing called the internet came along and just blew up up the model, which was a lesson all itself of how your business can be disrupted by external factors. But this team, just to give you an idea, you know, we had a stellar rockstar team. There was not a loser on a team. It was the dream team, you know, that created this. It had actually started in Paris and moved over to the States. We had money from Kleiner Perkins. Our law firm was Wilson Sassini. You know, we had, you know, people who had done it 2 or 3 times. We got all, you know, the guy who, one of the investors was the original investor in Oracle. How could this go wrong? This couldn't go wrong. It was in a hot marketplace. Everything was great about it. And it blew up. Okay, so let's talk about why it blew up. One was that little thing called the internet, right? It came along. The other thing was I learned tragically for the first time how important due diligence was before investment. And the due diligence didn't uncover that, When the product was built, it was an application development tool environment. It was highly, highly, highly custom for each instance of every customer. And so it was very difficult to make it repeatable and scalable. So by adding salespeople to it and getting new customers, it actually exacerbated the technology stack problem that they had. And, you know, people didn't want to slow down, speed up, right? So we hit a lot of walls faster. And it goes, the third point I would say is, just because you have the right investors and a lot of money and the right team in a hot marketplace, whatever, it is not a guarantee for success. These people that think, you know, I got all the right elements, so, you know, this is a slam dunk. None of them are slam dunk. There's all kinds of risks. There's all kinds of problems. And, you know, it blew up and that's just the way it goes.

Yeah. Well, and so often it can just be mistaken, this idea that entrepreneurship or running a startup is like, you know, like laying pipe. There's just a step-by-step process. And if you run the process, everything's gonna work out. There's still so many factors where risks come into play. It is a risk-related type of a play. And even in the due diligence process, you know, it's like all of those that are experts at the finances, the numbers can miss things. I recently interviewed on this channel with Chad Zordyk from Armanino. Expert in mergers and acquisitions and in financial due diligence for M&A. And he talked a lot about how the numbers tell you part of the story, but you got to get in and learn about the people. You got to understand the process. You got to understand the business that they're in and even just the way it all came to be. Because missing some of those key things about even how it's architected or how it's positioned, that can later be the Achilles heel.

Yeah. Yeah. And so, you know, the success that it had culturally in Paris, you know, a developer could go on the metro and go down to, you know, the big insurance company or the big finance company or the big bank, and they could go solve a problem, add a feature, delight the customer, come back, not include that back in the core code. And they knew where that branch was and they thought they were doing something good for the customer. But that process and the geography and how they built the early success of the product that validated the need, when you translate that and try to go to the States and blow that up, it actually worked against it, right? So things that you thought were good didn't work, right? Or weren't recognized. So yeah, there's a thousand ways to screw these up.

Yeah. And you've tried many of them, right? I have.

I have. Don't try this at home.

Great. Well, one thing I find fascinating about your background is that you have equal parts, maybe not equal, but you have strong experience in product management and also in sales. In fact, I once heard someone say, you know, if you're working for a company You wanna get yourself as close to the customer or the product as possible because that makes you indispensable. Everybody else can be dispensable. But I think, and when I think about startup entrepreneurship, the critical role that those two things play in getting something started, you have to really understand the product and you build the product and you engineer and create the product. But if you do that independent from customers and that engagement with customers, particularly those that are thinking about buying, because that's actually the ones that are most important early on. So you really have the, what I'll call the customer development process overlaps these two areas so much. So that's just where I think your background, you bring those two things together. Just talk a little bit about the overlap and the congruence between sales and product management, how that relates to customer development and really how that's fueled your career.

I, first of all, it's a great question. Thank you for observing that. And a lot of people pick it up. Yes, I go back and often tell people, look, in an early stage business, only two things count: someone to build it, someone to sell it. That's it. You know, all the other— I'm not saying the other things aren't important, but if you don't get those two things right, you're not going to get anything right. Right. And so, you know, I really treasure my sales experience from learning, you know, sales methodologies to being a salesperson to being a sales manager. And quite frankly, as we all know, when you're the CEO of a startup business, what are you really doing? You're really the, you're the salesperson. You're selling equity in the company and investment. You're selling the brand. You're selling those first customers. You know, you're, that's what your job is. You're a salesperson, right? I think the blessing that I was able to move from sales into product management, and I do, I have a lot of laments about modern product management. One is that it's become this Jira ticket monkey service of just looking at priorities on a roadmap and serving them up to developers, and it's, they really have lost the business element of it. And so much of that business element is Understanding the customer and the sales process, because so many things you put in the product, you have to say, well, you know, what's in it not only for the customer, but what's in it for the salesperson to sell it to the customer, right? How does it differentiate the product? How does it offer things? So I think understanding how salespeople think, how they work, what they have to do, what their job is. And because I, and also having, by the way, the credibility because I was a salesperson it gave me such, you know, I could go into a company and I could connect with the salespeople because I carried a bag, but I also could connect with the developers because I was an engineer. Yeah. And so, you know, you— I was able to understand both sides of that world and bridge that world and talk to them the way they like to be heard. I think that this— I think it's a huge part of being successful in a startup as well.

Yeah. So let's talk a little bit about the startup CEO because, you know, I think, and what I would say here is that maybe just let's start with like the move to professional management that so often happens in a startup. And so maybe distinguish a little bit between startups that continue to be run by founder CEOs versus those that, you know, bring in the hired guns, so to speak.

Yeah, it's typical because, you know, so often professional money when they're raising will, exit out and kind of push out the founders, you know, push them into a CTO role, you know, an evangelist role or something along those lines. And we see this over and over again. And even the, you know, the classic stories of some of our most successful startup businesses, we see the founders often, you know, shuttle side. There are a few people and you got to keep this in mind. What got you there is not necessarily going to get you there. Right. And so It doesn't mean that you're not, you know, it takes different capabilities at different stages of the business. I mean, I would say to myself, I mean, I'm a perfectly fine and fit under $100 million CEO. I'm probably not the guy that's going to go from $100 million to a billion. That's not my skill set. That's not what I'm good at, right? And I think in those earlier stages, you've got to remember that You know, many times it's the founder's idea. They live the problem. They, you know, they saw, but they're not necessarily equipped to run and operate the business. So a hired gun comes in to help establish that and get that cadence because they've seen success. They know what to put in, processes to put in place, etc. And some founders can do that. Some founders can go for longer periods of time with the company. Founders that stay on too long can harm the company. You know, bringing in the wrong professional management that alienates the original founders or they feel that there's a tussle for control can really screw up a company. So it is a gentle dance that has to be done. Many times very successful entrepreneurs are brought in as a hired gun and the system rejects them, right? Because they don't want to make the changes. They think they want that, but they don't. The other side is, you know, sometimes the founder just holds on for dear life and, you know, I'm going to learn, I'm going to do it. And they end up strangling the business that they were trying to build because they didn't want to accept that it wasn't in their best interest, is not the company's best interest, right? Yeah. So I've been on both sides of it and it is, it's a game of trust and selection. It comes down to people, though, you know, and you have to have those intellectually honest discussions and go with it.

Yeah. Well, I mean, I think of a couple of examples there, maybe like Uber, a good example, you know, documentary about like the battle over Uber or Super Pumped, the series, you know, I mean, you know, ultimately, you know, Travis maybe overstayed his best timing. Bill Gurley, of course, the big battle to kind of try to remove him and bring in, you know, hire to help. But, you know, I think of other examples like Chewy.com where, you know, Ryan Cohen and Blake, you know, recognized early Hey, we're going to get this really awesome idea off the ground, but we aren't the ones to carry it forward. And they brought in people like Stuart Horowitz and others to really be that professional management so they could exit the company and let it grow into something even much bigger than they were really ready to produce. So tell us a little bit. You've been both, I know from our conversations. So tell us a story about what it was like being the startup founder versus what was like being the hired gun.

Well, you know, I think the startup founder is exhilarating. You know, I, you know, I think of one of my time at eBillingHub with two other, the original developer and kind of the subject matter expert in legal software and legal eBilling. And I came in as the founder for the sales and marketing go-to-market, even though I was titled as the CEO. Right. And it was great because it was bootstrapped and You know, you really are there, you know, everything from figuring out the pricing to the feature set to the, you know, what, you know, what trade show activities we're on to how are we going to set up what systems, decisions on everything, you know, you're— everything is at zero, right? So you are really, you know, trying to figure out like every day is packed, you know, 12, 14-hour days trying to do these heavy lifts and, and also Well, you know, do we have enough money to make payroll? Right? So that, I mean, that is, that's the kind of stress not everybody wants in their life, to be honest with you. I find it absolutely exhilarating. I was going to say it can be exciting, but yeah, it's very nerve-wracking.

Well, I think about like the book Peter Thiel wrote called Zero to One.

Yes.

What a challenge it is to start something that doesn't exist yet, to go from scratch, do something transformational. You know, that next phase, that 1 to N, like every derivative company that's ever been, you know, it's like somebody can figure out a way to do it faster or cheaper or easier or more flexible or whatever. But that really, that starting from scratch and just the very fundamentals of who is even our customer and what are we doing for them that they can't get somewhere else and why would they buy from us and, you know, what is the offer? You know, those can be such challenging things that It's like hard rock mining. So what's the other side?

Tell me about the other side. The hard gun is also very interesting. One of my early CEO stints was at a company called Logic Library in the application development tool space as well. By the way, because of my experience at the earlier company I talked about, Nat Systems, when I got offered the job as CEO at Logic Library, I told one of the VCs, I said, you know, I promised myself I'd never work in this business again. And I did it again. It was still hard. It was still hard. There were 3 founders, and I came in because the VCs came in and they wrestled control. And there was a financial operational founder, there was a technical development founder, and there was a sales and marketing founder. The person who had the most difficulty was the sales and marketing founder because she had been the CEO, and she really struggled because she She's still in her mind, even though she sold the majority of interest through the fundraise, in which she also paid herself a commission, which is, you know, I don't know if it was strange. Let's put it that way. It was noticeable. She struggled with the changes because she kept on saying, well, this is my company. And it's like, no, you're, you know, it's just a job now, right? Because you're working for the man. You're working for the VCs own this company now. And they're appointing me to come in to take this to the next level. And she struggled really with trying to find a place for herself. The financial person, you know, stayed as the CFO. The development person stayed as the developer, and they were able to stay in their seats throughout the ride and through the exit. I think they had difficulties. CFO in particular still had difficulties because, you know, they, At times, he would be outside that same box like the, like the other founder, where it's like, you know, this is what, you know, this is mine and I have founder shares and all those things. So you wrestle with those because it takes a big ego to start a company. You know, it takes a lot of confidence to start a company. And now there's this guy coming in and he's going to be telling you what you need to do. And some of those things don't fit your mindset about your values, why you started this business. And it's like, oh, you should do these things. And it's like, why? I don't need to do those things. So there is, it's very difficult to change. You always have that set of founders who are the resistance, right? And they're gonna throw monkey wrenches. They shake their head and they go and do exactly what they were doing all along. They're just in the ride. And some of them just want to wait you out too. Some of them think, okay, you know, new guy, let's see how long he lasts, you know? Maybe he'll be here a couple of years and then we'll come back to us. They'll see the error of their ways. So you really have to spend time with the culture, the value set, understanding the decisions. You have to spend more time persuading people internally why. Yeah. You know, so as much as you might want to lean in and just say, this is what we're doing and how we're doing it, unless you want to shoot all those people, which is dangerous in itself as well. Right? Because then you have another set of problems. You have to choose which poison you want to go down in order to lead this company.

Yeah. Well, and talk a bit about culture because I really feel like that's probably at the root of that is the culture you inherit as a hired gun CEO and a startup, but then also the culture you create. So, what are some things you've learned along the way with that?

Very difficult. You know, my last gig was at a publicly held enterprise software company and, you know, it was the founders who had run it. They took it public too soon. You know, it was way too small in modern terms to be a publicly held software company. They kind of knew that, but they just left it that way. And I think some of that was just ego, right? They just liked that. But they were very set in 1997 and how things were sold and everything and the transformation to a modern B2B SaaS technology, pricing, development style. You know, how you go to market. I mean, I remember we were selling it as SaaS, we priced it as SaaS, the contract still said maintenance and all the other stuff. Everything about the company oozed of legacy, you know, of its 2001, right? And making those changes was very difficult. I'll share a story with you that the way that they had driven revenue and the heroes in the company were the services people. And I'm like, the services people, help me understand this. Well, they weren't doing like training and just implementation. They were actually similar to the Nat System story because they were of that era, right? They were out there slinging JavaScript in the field and being heroes. And when you looked at the financials, it had not your normal 20% or less services revenue. It had 35 to 40% services revenue. And they, they would, what they would do is they called it straw, wood, brick. You're gonna laugh for those who know anything about software development. The straw was the, the field SE would go out there and they would show what could be done with the product in a demo, like a normal demo. That wasn't in the product, it was just what could be done. Customer would love that. Oh, it's exactly what I'm looking for. Well, of course you built it just for them. They'd buy it and then they'd hand that demo that was the wood to the services guys and they'd have an SOW to actually build that. None of this was in the product, by the way. And then they would give that and they would give it to development and say, oh, you need to put this in the product now. And it would be a straw wood brick. And it was like, that is not how you build software.

And yet, I remember that era, that really was a lot of how it was. The priority was on customization and then And then, you know, you'd have a product manager trying to figure out how do we get this, you know, thrown together custom code into the actual product.

Yeah. And so, I mean, and so let's go talk about that instantiation into culture because that was the question you asked. Culturally, the heroes were the people who showed up at these big companies and they slung that code and they solved that problem. They'd come back. And by the way, they generated revenue. Well, wasn't that a good thing? Well, no, when you're looking for ARR and repeatable scalable SaaS revenue, that's the value. That services revenue wasn't valued, right? And so all of a sudden you're telling this person who was the hero of the company, we don't really need that work anymore, we don't need as much of it, or what you were doing was not really a good thing. Well, that's a hell of a thing to tell people, right? That's a hell of a transition. So culturally, the value system, what was valued, how it was valued, was not what is valued today. And taking people through that as the hired gun CEO, very, very challenging because you can't just say it once, right? You can't say, hey, this is why, and here it is, and let's go do it now. You know, that's just not how it's going to happen. So you have to bring people along and it's a long process.

Yeah, the change management can be so challenging.

Very.

So, you know, as you brought this up, it made me think this, I'd like to dive in a little bit deeper, you know, maybe talk about, you know, 'cause yeah, you really lived through that transition from when software was kind of a big product you sold and then you charged some maintenance or maybe you did some customizations and then the move to SaaS, you know, the move to cloud, it's really the transformation of the industry, of the business transformation of, things have been done the same way for a really long time. And now there's a radically new approach, but it means you have to just unseat everything. And wow, what a metaphor for so many different industries and area of life right now and everything. So I would love to just maybe hear a story or two about, you know, what the challenges were. You know, we just talked about culture, but what were the challenges just even like in the market or like getting to this, you know, how do we break through from this old mindset?

It's, it's huge. I mean, I think people originally when they looked at SaaS, they said, oh yeah, we can just host this thing on a server in the cloud and it's the same product and we'll just change the pricing so that you have an annual subscription versus a payment and maintenance and that's it, right? Isn't that all? Isn't that all there is? You know, it's like, no. And I remember even sitting down with people and they'd say, well, you know, we have a single tenant instance of our, of our thing and we don't think that's bad because none of our customers are asking for multi-tenants. And I'm like, yeah, none of them will. It's your problem. It's a manufacturing problem. It's an operational cost. You need to fix it, right? No one's asking you for it, but that's how you build software today because that's your cost of goods sold, buddy. So, you know, it is. And you're seeing the same dynamics, by the way, generationally from the buyers today. Buyers have had an online consumer experience. I wrote an article recently on LinkedIn that, you know, the majority of buyers are not grumpy old men like me that are, you know, boomers, right? They're 43-year-olds, right? And younger. And those people do not want to have, you know, two folks show up on the, you know, after they filled out some form, you know, on Zoom or Teams or at their office to go through a PowerPoint presentation and do a demo. Those days are way, way, way, way over, right? And there's still some people operating in that sales-led motion, right? People want to see the product, experience the product, evaluate 2 or 3 of them, look at online sources, not just Gartner Group and Forrester and people like that. And, you know, they're going to go to Quora and Reddit and all these other places. And maybe at the very end, after they decided on one of those products, then maybe they'll contact the vendor. So 70-80% of the sales cycle's over, it's a digital experience, it's totally interactive, it's much more product-led, and that is another aspect. Forget about how we're developing the software and where it's hosted and about all the other things and everything, and the, and the whole go-to-market thing, that whole front-end experience has radically changed, right? And for people that are my age that experienced a whole different way of success in that marketplace, throw out your experience because it's useless. A lot of the things you learned that work are, you know, they're obsolete. Yeah. And that's a tough pill to swallow, right? Again, it goes almost back to what we talked about, the founder and the hired gun, is the things that got you here are not going to get you there. You have to go back and have a beginner's mind again. You know, you might have had great success in some business, but a lot of the lessons you learn may not be representative of how people make things and sell things today. So you have to go back and reabsorb and relearn.

Yeah, that's such a powerful one. It is such a great example of, you know, we just see so many industries now being radically changed and it's almost like the structures, systems, as well as the mindset of a lot of the key players are so focused on how it's always been done. It's almost like that, how do we tweak this? How do we do it better? It's like, well, things are changing, so we need to do it faster, a little bit more efficiently. Are we— and in a lot of ways, it's like, well, you know, you're, you're operating on a model that isn't even necessary anymore. And so much more—

I still hear people, John, to this day, uh, talking about, well, this is different, it's a physical product, it's not a digital product. And it's is there any product in the world today that doesn't have a software or digital aspect? Maybe not even— first of all, many of them embedded in the product itself, but at a minimum, they have some type of e-commerce motion in its go-to-marketplace, even if it is a pure physical product that impacts that product and how it goes to marketplace and is a part of the requirement. And this, this idea that, you know, that there that, oh, they're built differently. What, there's no requirements? There's not a roadmap? There's not a strategy? You don't have to build the right thing? You don't need a value proposition? You don't need a differentiated feature set? You have to deliver things on time? Okay, yeah, there's inventory on one versus the other, there's a supply chain maybe one, but you know, there's supply chains now in software too. You embed all these third-party products into your product, you've got to have dependencies, all kinds of things that work. So It's just nonsensical, but people are stuck in their ways. They just don't think, they're not thinking through what is happening or what has happened in the world.

Yeah. So let's talk about go-to-market. Go-to-market strategy and planning can be one of the toughest challenges for startups. So let's talk a little bit about that. I know you have a strong background in go-to-market planning and even now working on some things. So I know you have a lot of great stories there. What do startup founders need to be thinking about in terms of go-to-market?

Well, you know, we talked about risk earlier in this conversation, and go-to-market is another area that you have to get right, and it's full of risk. And the risk that you, you have here is not only not executing correctly the go-to-market place, but the associated money that you're spending, right? And the problem is you can spend a lot of money, as we all know, the, uh, the old people forgot the name John Wanamaker. You probably, because you know that name, but he was a very famous retailer from the previous century. But John Wanamaker used to say, had a famous saying that was, half the money I spend on marketing is wasted. I just don't know which half. And so no truer words were ever spoken. And marketing and sales in general is a great place to just flush money down the toilet. And so you have to be very disciplined. And one of the things I learned very early on, and it goes way back to one of my first CEO jobs at Logic Library, is we did an analysis very quickly of all the different things we tried in terms of our go-to-market for lead generation. And because everybody said, oh, we should do this show, or we should send out this mailing, or we should do, have this on a landing where we should do this webinar. And all of a sudden you had like 50 things we were doing to generate leads. And I'm looking at that thinking, wow, what are the 3 things that generate 80% of the leads? And actually we got it down to 3 and it was, you know, some kind of infographic and some kind of webinar and a handful of trade shows. And we cut our spending way down, did those things and lost nothing in terms of of our go-to-market, right? And so, you know, just figuring out your spend, your prioritization, your spend, getting the metrics right, because people also think they can't measure sales other than the revenue. That's wrong. Every step of the sales process can be measured. You can ask questions. So if you're not a salesperson, learn that it's as much a discipline. It's not all just art and presentation skills. You know, there's, there's, there's a, There's lots of methodologies that you can measure where you are in your pipeline at any time, and you can hold people accountable. And you get the— you really want to understand the metrics of how big your pipeline is. Are you getting the right type? Are you progressing your deals in the right stages, et cetera? So get those metrics around it. The other thing is marketing. Yes. John Wanamaker didn't know what those metrics were. We live in a digital world. Everything could be measured. You know, get your systems in place, buy something cheap and cheerful, get a freebie startup version or, you know, at 90% off of HubSpot and use it and measure all the things you're doing in your marketing motion. Make sure those things are aligned. The hardest part, particularly on the go-to-market place, is your— is, is, is if you're in a business that is not purely a digital sale and you need salespeople, is all salespeople are great at selling themselves. So you've got to do a good job of hiring the right salespeople that are going to match your business. And by the way, I don't always look for domain expertise. You know, oh, well, we need a salesperson that understands healthcare because we're a healthcare offering. I say, no, you're hiring them for their sales expertise. If they're not smart enough to learn your business and some of the lingo in the first 90 days, you hired somebody that's just not capable, right? But you're hiring them for their sales expertise. Same thing on marketing. You're hiring for their marketing expertise. You know, if you can find somebody that also came from your market, just remember some of their bad habits and assumptions about your market come with them too. So they may not be as creative or do some breakthrough things that aren't found in your business. And I found some of those when you're in an early stage get you heard above the noise. So don't over-index on domain expertise. It's not always the best thing and it doesn't always get you the benefits you think it's going to get. Get you. A lot of bad habits, a lot of assumptions come with those people. So structure, structure, structure, discipline, discipline, discipline, a lot of risk. Watch your spend, watch your hiring, focus on it. Work that ICP, that ideal customer profile. Who is really the economic, you know, particularly in B2B, it's the last thing I'll say on go-to-market. Most of them are not transactional sales, right? B2B is a complex sale. You have your user buyer, you have your influencer, and those people typically want to see your product all day long. I love to call them see-mores because they want to always see more. And, you know, and, and, and above that is your economic buyer and your decision maker. If you don't have something that gets you or those people won't take you to those people, you're going to lose. You're going to be frustrated. You go out of business. You may have the best product in the world that adds all kinds of value. So make sure you've identified all the players. Understand and listen to what each one of them needs. Make sure there's something in there for everybody, right? There's a reason that that economic buyer wants this product as much as the user buyer ends up using it and stays in engagement with it. So think through that whole— it is a really big, hairy, ugly problem set in the go-to-market space. Yeah.

So, John, So much to unpack.

Oh, we could just do a whole series right there on go-to-market. A lot of head trash, a lot of head trash.

Absolutely. One of the hardest jobs for startup founders is the job of CEO. And Greg, I think about your experience being a startup founder, being a founder to CEO, being a hired gun CEO for startups, and now a coach to CEOs of startups. What are 5 secrets you have for startup founders who are also playing the role of CEO?

Yeah, I— thank you, that's a great question. So first of all, I like to really start with understand your value proposition clearly, right? Understand— a startup has to understand the value it's delivering relative to those different ideal customer profiles, right? And to the market itself. And you have to go back and this goes back to understanding selling and selling methodologies, right? Is what is the pain that you're solving? Why did they hire your product to do that job? What's the job to be done? And what value are you unlocking for them, right? If you don't have that clear understanding of what it is and why it's different, for their different jobs that they're trying to solve, you will never ever be successful. So number 1, understand your value proposition clearly. 2, prioritize, unlike what I'm doing on this call, listening over talking. Use your ears and your mouth in the proportion God gave them to you, right? So you wanna make sure that you are always listening. People give you all kinds of clues. There's all kinds of unstated and stated things. Collect, collect, listen, listen, look for patterns over and over again. Third thing, just like a great product manager, focus on saying no. There's lots of shiny objects and founders in particular love to chase opportunities. And particularly when you're frustrated and you don't think you can say, oh, grab that straw, grab this thing, let's try this, right? And you can thrash and waste a lot of time and effort. Say no. Bad news early is good news. Get rid of the distractions. Align with your core mission. Align with the value proposition. Fourth thing, iterate, iterate, iterate, validate, validate, validate. Everything that you think is an opinion. It's an assumption. It's just a hypothesis. Listen to yourself and test your hypothesis so that you're not just saying, well, Well, you know, we're going to do this. Well, why are you going to do this? Well, we think this, or I know this. Okay, have you tested that? Test it. You know, it's cheaper to test it than to actually build it, launch it, and you spend money and time. You know, this is, this is not where you want to go. Iterate and validate. Last thing, leadership team. And why I gave you an example on this call of a great leadership team that failed, you know, none of these are guarantees. Make sure you have the right butts in the right seats. And make sure that they're A-players. If you have, if you ask yourself the question, would you hire the people that are working for you again? And if the answer is no, why are they still there? You know, your leadership team, go through them on a scale of 1 to 10, where 10 is a world-class person in this role. If you have people that are 7s or below, get rid of them. Right. They're not going to help you. So that's really, really important advice to remember. So those are the 5 things I would tell anybody and I often coach about.

Awesome. Yeah. So 5 secrets for startup founders that are playing the role of CEO. And let's talk about your book. So it's Start Your Startup Right. Why don't you tell us just briefly about that?

I just love the name. It is, you know, it is not actually a startup manual. You won't find things in there about raising money and valuations and all the other things. It really is about some of the things we've talked about here and some of those secrets we talked about where, you know, what do you have to do in your go-to-market? What do you have to do in your selling? How do you build a great product? So it's much more of these types of elements of starting your startup right, other than talking about, do I have the right investors and the right cap table and all, you know, and, uh, and those types of elements. So, you know, identifying your market, getting your value proposition right, putting in your right go-to-market and your right salespeople, the right marketing things to remember. And there really are hints and tips from, you know, my 40-plus years of working and doing 14 different startups and, you know, teaching and coaching and being advisor and being on boards, etc. So what I've tried to do is look at myself and say, what's my value proposition that I can give to other people? What are the patterns? What are the things I see over and over again? And some of them are not the typical things that you often hear. So, they're going to challenge some assumptions that people have.

Yeah. Well, and I know from our discussions, coaching a founder CEO or CEO of a startup, very, very different than other executive coaching or life coaching. What is, you know, if someone hires you, if a founder hires you, what's their, what can they expect? What kind of experience are they going to have?

Well, you know, first of all, you're, you're part therapist, part consultant, and part coach. But like a great coach on the coaching side is, I'm trying to get the best out of you for the position you play. I happen to understand that position. I don't want to prescribe to you what I would do or necessarily always my opinion. I'm trying to use what skills you have, both behavioral, intellectual, all those things, elements, and trying to make sure you can play that position for the job you're in and get the absolute best as you play each and every day. So that's part of the, part of the role. The other part of the role is being coached not only for the CEO, but for the company and making sure that they have the right team in place with the right goals and right objectives. You know, some people think that, you know, even in a small company, you don't have to be structured and organized. And, you know, getting a regular cadence, a regular rhythm, making sure that you have clear goals, not only for the year, but each quarter, and that you're talking about those and you have a scorecard each and every week that you're saying, are we winning the game? Are we losing the game? So helping them put those types of practices in place, and then learning from those so we can adjust. That's another valuable part of the coaching exercise.

That's excellent. Yeah. And of course, your book available from all the usual outlets and all the outlets.

Great.

And we'll, we'll put the, the links down there. If someone wanted to get ahold of you, Greg, either to be a CEO coach or just to engage in some way, what are some of the best ways to reach you?

The easiest way, I'm gonna give you my email, is Greg Coticchia, G-R-E-G-C-O-T-T, two Ts I put in there to keep all the spammers away, but I'm inviting you in now. GregCoticchia@gmail.com, you can reach me there. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn, and you can connect there, and we can exchange messages there, and love to get an appointment with you. I have my Calendly set up there, so Make an appointment. Love to talk with you.

Awesome. And before we wrap, I always love to ask this one question and love to hear your thoughts on it. What is your favorite founder film?

Oh, you know, there's so many good ones, John, but my one that I've come back to, and maybe it's because I saw it early in my life and I think it's from late '80s, is Tucker. And the story of Preston Tucker and the Tucker automobile. Is just, I mean, it has so many elements of what we've just discussed. It has the, you know, the hired gun professional coming in and, you know, taking the company out. And it has that whole sense of how we build something and getting that teamwork and having, and having people that are not necessarily professional car builders, you know, build the car. That's why they tried so many different things. And just the stress of, you know, trying to get through the regulation and worrying about the money and the family issues and all the things. It has so many beautiful elements of it. And you know, and at the end of it, he succeeded, but he failed. You know, it was a Pyrrhic victory, right? But it still is a beautiful story of learning so much from failure that I think every entrepreneur can take something away from and realize that Preston Tucker made a dent in the universe. He made a difference in a, in a business. And he actually was a visionary of things that we see today.

Yeah, that's amazing. Love it. That's a great one of my favorites as well. Just see so much of that, the ideation, you see the iteration, you see the failures and learning from failures. You see the, you know, what it takes to get that, you know, kind of escape velocity when you're trying to disrupt deeply rooted institutions and patterns and those kinds of things.

So it's such a beautiful story and it's very well told. And there's several books out about Preston Tucker as well that go into much more detail that I would really, if you love the movie, go read them. They're fabulous.

That's excellent. Well, Greg, thanks so much for sharing just a blink at your career. And I mean, truly, you're like the original entreprofessor, really. You know, you—

Yeah, we, you know, I'm the OG, you know, entrepreneur professor and serial entrepreneur combined. So I've had the good blessing of having people like you in my life and many other people. I owe everything to the people that I've been blessed to work with and know. And that's really another important part of all the advice that we should end this with, which is don't ever forget the people who got you there and the people in, in your personal and professional life, because they're— they are the people that make everything work.

That's amazing. That's awesome. Greg, thanks so much for being here. This has been an awesome discussion and awesome interview. I love it.

Yeah, I had a lot of fun. Thank you for inviting me.

Excellent. Keep going.