In this episode of The Great CEO Podcast, host Pam Singleton interviews Greg Coticchia, CEO of Sophion, a company that provides innovation and new‑product‑development software. Greg explains that Sophion addresses a fragmented $3 billion total addressable market, competing against DIY spreadsheet‑based solutions by offering out‑of‑the‑box decision‑support tools for executives and product managers. He describes the company’s multi‑year transition from a traditional perpetual‑license model to a highly recurring SaaS business, emphasizing the challenges of moving large, security‑sensitive enterprises (e.g., Honeywell, 3M, BASF) to subscription pricing. Sophion now targets organizations with $250 million+ revenue, serving both global brands and mid‑size firms, and focuses on personas ranging from C‑level executives to individual product managers. Greg shares his personal work habits—60+ hours a week, heavy emphasis on people and communication across Teams, Zoom, email, and phone—and identifies the biggest growth constraint as market awareness of the innovation problem, noting that a large portion of corporate R&D spend is wasted. He discusses delegating the Chief Product Officer role to a stronger leader, reflecting on ego and the benefits of hiring talent. Greg’s leadership style is described as energetic and purpose‑driven, motivating teams by highlighting the tangible impact of bringing products to market. Finally, he reveals his passion for music, playing woodwinds and piano, which he pursues alongside family life.
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Hi, my name is Pam Singleton. Welcome to another great CEO podcast. I'm here with another great CEO, Greg Coticchia of Sophion. Welcome, Greg, and thank you very much for being here.
Thank you, Pam. Thanks for having me here today.
Very good. In a few sentences, tell us what Sophion does.
Sophion is all about innovation, and we help companies take their ideas and successfully commercialize them. So anything that has to do with innovation or new product development is what Sophion is all about.
Terrific. Well, I don't remember seeing lots and lots of competition on the product development innovation side. Is it a big market?
Well, we estimated the total addressable marketplace for innovation and new product development to be actually about $3 billion, which is really amazing. What's interesting about that though is it's a highly fragmented marketplace, and while there are as a result, a lot of players in it, people tend to solve it in a lot of different ways. And one of the traditional ways is just trying to apply project management tools and methodologies and frameworks to solve product-level and innovation value propositions that companies are trying to solve and mitigate the risk associated with them.
But they're very different, very different approaches. Lots of competition out there, highly fragmented market. How do you— and I imagine you compete with the do-it-yourself market as well.
Wow. Thanks for mentioning that because the do-it-yourself marketplace tends to be the number one competitor, Pam. People still try to cobble together their own spreadsheets and their own databases and their SharePoint and in the software world, the Jira and Confluence tools and put that all together and try to make do. The, uh, uh, and, and it's, it can be, uh, very challenging. Um, our value proposition though goes right to the heart of out-of-the-box making that process very easy, giving them, as particularly the executives that are using this system, uh, the decision support and insights about their data to make better decisions.
Well, that's tremendous. That's a tremendous help for the, the companies out there that need to bring products to market, and every company needs to bring new products and services to market at some point in its life. So what percentage of your revenue will recur?
Well, we are a highly recurring revenue business. We're, as you would imagine in a software business, we value ARR, and so annual recurring revenue is really important. We've transitioned over the last several years though, being a 20-year-old business, from primarily a perpetual traditional enterprise software company, and we've gone through that, that change where now the majority of our revenue is in terms of recurring revenue. Very difficult change for software companies. We reflect though the marketplace that we've been in where companies, particularly the large companies that we serve, the Honeywells and 3Ms and BASFs and others, you know, tend to protect their intellectual property and the information that's contained in there. And so Having highly secure, scalable, high-performance environments around those, which we provide for those companies, they tend to be one of the last bastions of change from perpetual to a SaaS-type environment.
Oh, congrats to you. Kudos to you for making the change. That's a very difficult one. It sounds like you serve the big companies as well as the smaller companies.
Well, we have traditionally served some of the world's largest brands, and, uh, you know, we have been in chemicals and, uh, consumer packaged goods and, and verticals that we've done extremely well in. And we've brought that out over the years to a more horizontal— at the same time, uh, what we've brought into the marketplace over the last several years is not just for the largest organizations, but we're serving that small to medium-sized business as well. Um, we, we tend to look at it as jobs to be done and what the personas that we're serving. So we're not serving just the executive doer anymore or the director or VP, but the individual doer as well. So we look at it as serving the person who manages the idea and ideation process, the person who is the individual product manager who may be owning that product idea and set of features. And those systems need to work together whether they're in small organizations and small departments of large companies or actual small businesses. We tend to focus in our target marketplace. We used to focus much more on just billion-dollar and above, but as innovation and automation of innovation processes, we now are targeting at $250 million and above organizations.
I can assure you that every organization needs this one way or another. All right, let's focus on you for a bit as CEO. How many hours a week do you work and where do you spend your time?
Well, I, I definitely spend probably, you know, 60+ hours a week in this job. I spend my time like probably like a lot of other CEOs. You know, most of it is on people issue and communication issues. Right. And it's so important, particularly in a world— I started this job when COVID started. And matter of fact, for the first year and a year and a half, I had not met anybody that I work with in the organization face to face. Wow. And so that was a really, really challenging time, I'm sure, for those I was leading, but for myself as well, to establish the cadence, to make the changes, to get the alignment when they wanted. So, you know, most of my work, I try to, particularly in an age where communication is is done in so many different ways. So whether a person likes to do it via, uh, via Teams or Zoom or WebEx, or they want to do a texting or email or phone— God forbid a phone, you know, do they actually want to have a phone call with somebody? Um, whatever way they want to communicate, I try to make sure that I'm communicating in a style that reaches that audience so that we can move the company in the right direction.
Very good. I, I forgot to ask you, um, what, what are the biggest constraints to growth in the business?
Well, you know, the biggest constraints to growth are really for us to be able to get the awareness of the company itself for the problem set. So many default businesses, you know, there is estimated that there's well over $3 trillion spent on innovation or R&D offices throughout in companies of all sizes. Yet half of that is considered wasted. 94% of other CEOs are disappointed in their innovation efforts. Yet at the same time, you know, recognition that there are ways to mitigate risk and get speed and time to marketplace is something that has been in a lot of ways ignored. Sophian, is well known, of course, by some of the brands I mentioned, I mean, companies that are synonymous with innovation. But making sure that we can get that type of recognition in a broader audience is one of our largest gating factors. So it's great to be able to be talking to you and let people know the Sophion story here.
Absolutely. So as any business grows, as leaders, we have to shed certain responsibilities to develop our people and to free ourselves up so we can focus on higher-level work and bring them along. So name one responsibility, just one, that you delegated in the last 6 months.
Well, I am a product guy and I have spent my entire career in love with products. And, you know, when I started this job, I realized that in order to do a really good job for Sophion, that I had to actually give up that role of being the chief product officer. And I was very fortunate to find somebody who was much better than I'll ever be at leading product and doing product strategy so that I could focus on other areas of the business. And it's just a pleasure because, you know, watching somebody else do the job that you love, you know, if you can remove yourself and your ego and everything else about it, you can learn a lot.
You can learn a lot. Good for you. Good for you.
So it's not always easy though.
Oh, it's hard. It's hard on the ego, undoubtedly. But, but then you get a gold star for hiring someone who's presumably as good, if not better, than, than you are at doing something key, something that's close, near and dear to your heart. So what, what one or two things describe you as a leader?
Well, I think people say to me all the time, how do you get all that energy? And so I don't think of myself as a particularly energetic person, but other people certainly see me that way. So I'll have to give it up to those who see me as a highly energetic person. And, you know, I think that energy actually creates enthusiasm and motivation for others. So I think when you see your leader excited and ready to jump in and make things happen, I think for those that tune into that vibe, they too say, wow, Wow, you know, this is fun here. And it's all part, I think, of being a part of a company that you have a sense of purpose. I mean, I walk up and down a grocery aisle and I look at just in our consumer packaged goods, I look at products that I know we had impact on helping bring to marketplace. And you say to yourself, wow, those aluminum cans, that candy bar, that next generator, we were a part of helping that company make that decision to bring that product to life. And for me, that's pretty exciting work.
That is exciting work. Well, what do you do for fun besides work and besides being on the Great CEO Podcast? What do you do for fun?
You know, I love music. And so I start my day probably watching music videos, listening to music. I play music. I'm not very good at it. I was— I wanted to be a musician when I was younger. And so I play woodwinds, I play clarinet, I play saxophone. Later in life, I inherited a piano from a family member, and since nobody else wanted to play it, I actually took lessons. So I dabble in playing piano. And so that's, that's, that's probably my, my number one thing that I love besides my family, my wife, and everything else is music.
Music. Fair enough. Well, Greg, this was awesome. Thank you. Great interview. Thanks for joining us, and we wish you great, great luck and continued success going forward. Thank you.
