#115 - Adam Jay - Founder and CEO of Adam Jay Consulting - Redefining Startup Success

Sales, marketing, RevOps, and customer success. It's sink or swim out there, and yesterday's strategies and tactics won't help you today. This is Revenue Today, and I'm your host, Jared Robin. Join me as we interview top revenue leaders in our community to learn what steps we could take right now to help you scale more effectively. Revenue Today is sponsored by Rev Genius and Rev Room, and we're on a mission to build trusted spaces for curious revenue professionals who are collaborating on the future of B2B GTM. Welcome back, friends. This is another episode of Revenue Today, and I'm joined by— with a very special guest, a guest that I've known for quite some time that, uh, I've become even closer with this year, and and and grateful, gratefully so. This is the founder and CEO of Adam J Consulting and host of the Revenue Reimagined podcast. He's a seven-time executive sales leader holding roles such as VP of Sales and CRO, and he's now working with founders as a fractional go-to-market leader to successfully transition from founder-led sales. Welcome, Adam. This is Adam J.

I don't know how I'm gonna live up to that. And you say it so calm and so methodical. And like, that was a really good intro. Like, I might steal that and put that on my show.

Take it. I was gobbling up rice before this, and I have one stuck in my tooth. So even with one hand tied behind the back, no.

I love it. I appreciate the warm intro. I was gonna ask what— who Adam J Consulting is, but I forgot that I named my company after myself. We could talk about why that's a good or bad decision. Um,

we'll talk about that in the second half. I want to jump right into it. Um, you have such amazing content all over LinkedIn, and, and you're focusing on helping found— you focus on a lot, but helping founders transition from— we'll talk about that too, uh, from founder-led to sales-led. But Yeah. Adam, debunk a myth about GTM or generating revenue today.

So there's 2, but they're going to tie together. The first one is hiring a VP of sales is not going to solve your problem. And that ties into hiring people, simply throwing people at the problem, hiring AEs, hiring BDRs, whatever it is, saying let's just go hire people and we're going to grow revenue.

Well, yeah, help me understand. What are people doing? What are they expecting? And how can we, how can we better position to solve it?

So a lot of the founders that I talk to, one of the first things they say is we've achieved, you know, X milestone, whether that's A million ARR, 500 ARR, you know, 7, it doesn't matter what the number is, but we've achieved X milestones. So now we're just gonna go out, we're gonna hire 4 account executives and a VP of sales, and we're gonna scale this thing, right? They're just gonna go bring in revenue. And when you start digging under the surface and pressure testing that, so let's pause before we make those job descriptions live. Let's pause for a minute and let's ask some questions. Do you know what your ICP is? Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. But do you know who your buyer persona is? Maybe. Let me ask you a question, Jared. Of the deals that you've sold to get to $1 million, do they all look the same? The answer is always no, by the way. Tell me a little bit more. Well, one was up here, one was down here, one was here, and we had a bunch of them that were like right here. Well, which ones do you want? Well, we want the big ones, of course. Those are the ones that are the easiest to maintain. Those are the ones that are in our ICP. We'll go back to your ICP because do you really know what your ICP is? And of all of those customers, who by the way all looked very different, was the sales process the same? Did they all close the same way? Did they all follow the same journey? Of course not. Guess what? You are not ready to hire a sales team, much less a VP of sales. You haven't built out Your sales process. You don't truly know if you have product market fit yet. What you have is heroics. What you have is friends and family, like, I mean, family is a stretch, but friendlies who have purchased your product. You have word of mouth from people within your network, but you haven't established product market fit and systemization to understand that what you're doing actually works. So what's going to happen is if you go hire a bunch of people, there is no process. There are no systems, there is no ICP, there is no buyer persona. Everyone is just going to go after everyone and it's going to be a shitshow of heroics. And ultimately what you're going to find is that you're not able to scale because there's only so many people that will buy that way. And you've now spent a bunch of money on these folks and not money or time where you should be figuring out the basics first. Congratulations, you've sold $1 million. That's phenomenal. And that should never be discounted. And I mean that sincerely, like, that's not an easy thing to do, but $1 million does not equate to product market fit.

But it equates to enough budget to hire somebody, right? And isn't that next person supposed to solve the challenge? Like, why, you know, devil's advocate, a founder that may not have extensive sales experience

Yeah.

Shouldn't they hire somebody that does and to help them walk through it?

So yes, you should hire someone that does to help you walk through it. It should not be a full-time $500,000 a year VP of sales. The other problem that you'll find is when you're typically hiring a VP of sales, and I was one for years, they're not builders per se. Some of them are, don't get me wrong, but they don't want to be in the weeds. And if you haven't built a startup from the ground up yet, if you haven't actually had to go out and find that ICP, determine the buyer persona, deal with pricing and packaging, if you haven't done all of that as a VP of sales, you're used to at least the basic foundation being set. I posted about this this morning and you come in and you have none of that, right? What you have is 8, 10, 15 deals that have closed, no real process to look back on. And you're going to be asked to build it from scratch. And you've never done that. And you're going to have this look like deer in the headlights, and you're not going to know what to do. So the smart thing to do, be it me or anyone else, is to bring someone in on a fractional basis for anywhere from 90 days to, you know, 180 days to work with you to build out that process, to validate your assumptions, to make sure that you're hiring the right people and make sure that that playbook is completely built. 80 to 90% before you go hiring and scaling rapidly. Sure, you could hire an AE or 2, but what you don't want to do is just go expand the team. I had a founder the other day who's like, oh, we're going to go hire 10. What the fuck? Sorry. What do you mean you're going to hire 10? They're like, well, we have 7 now. We're going to hire 3 more. And I said to him, I said, so 7, like, that's a lot. You're at $800K ARR. That's a lot of AEs, right? What do they get paid? $60 grand each. So let's do the math here. $60 grand each times 7, and you're at $800K ARR. Is that a wise use of 75% of your money? Let's ask question number 2.

They didn't have their first board meeting yet.

Um, there, there is no board meeting yet because they, they haven't raised funding, which is an even interesting part.

There we go.

But we dug deeper, Jared. And of those 7, how many, how many are hitting quota? 2. What is quota? X number of deals per month. How do you come up with that number? Well, because I think that's what they should be able to sell. I mean, you have 2 people who are doing that. You have 5 people who aren't. Maybe it is the right number. Maybe it isn't. But to go hire 3 more because 2 people are hitting quota is not the right answer.

Well, let's, let's, let's break this down a bit more. Like, what are some bullets that a founder should have in place before bringing on a seller, period? And then, um, the second part, like, some bullets before bringing on a sales leader, um, and bullets meaning processes and playbooks and stuff like that.

Ah, so it's not like a Glock 40, a Smith& Wesson .45. I do live in Florida. We don't, we don't need permits anymore to carry Whole separate conversation. So before you hire that first seller, at a bare minimum, you need to understand who you're selling to. What is that ICP? What is that ideal customer profile? Who do we want using this product? ICP is not to be confused with BP, which is buyer persona. Those are 2 very different things. And arguably, you need your buyer persona as well. So ICP, who is the company? What is the ideal company that we want? I want to sell to Rev Genius. I want to sell to Salesforce. Those are 2 very different companies, right?

Right. But shouldn't what we want and who we should sell for or to, can't those be 2 different, or shouldn't they be 2 different things? Because I might want to sell to the Yankees, but the product isn't ready yet.

Or So you shouldn't be selling to the Yankees right now, should you?

Right.

Here's the problem. Everyone wants to go upmarket. Enterprise whales, right? We all want the whale. When you are dealing with smaller, we'll call it mid-market to what I'll call mid-SMB, maybe even between mid-market and enterprise, that kind of mid-price segment, you can afford to mess up a little bit. There's multiple people that you need to get in front of. They're arguably easier to get in front of. And if you make a whoopsie, you could kind of walk it back. There is only one New York Yankees. And if you happen to get the chance to get in front of your buyer persona, we'll assume that is the CTO or COO at the New York Yankees. You get one at bat to stay with the baseball analogy. And if you fuck it up, they're not letting you come back in because you've done and messed it up. Where's your proof points? It's very hard to start an enterprise. You have no proof points. Can it be done? Yes. Is it my wheelhouse? Transparently, no. My wheelhouse is much more mid-enterprise and lower-level enterprise. I'm not selling to the New York Yankees. But what I can tell you is in orgs that I've worked with, you're right, who you want to sell to and who you should be selling to are very different. Having an MVP and validating that your product does what it's supposed to do with the buyers that you want to target is absolutely important. But you don't start at the very top without having started at the bottom and worked your way up and having a proof of concept. It just Doesn't work 9 times out of 10.

So you have an ICP, you have your personas. What else do we need for your first AE hire or your first sales hire? And should it be an AE or should it be an SDR?

Oh, that's a loaded question, Jared. That is highly variable depending on the business, depending on who you're selling to. I am a huge proponent of full-cycle AEs. I think SDRs make sense in large enterprise where you are trying to really penetrate deeply into an organization and there are layers upon layers upon layers that you have to get through. And the dollars make sense when you are a, you know, when you're selling to smaller companies, even mid-market. I had a client who their average ticket price was like $220 a month and they're like, oh, we're going to go hire BDRs. I'm like, the math doesn't make sense on this. Like, what do you mean? They're like, well, we need leads. Whole different conversation. We could talk about marketing and marketing and sales working together. Pricing and packaging, I think, can be flexible upfront. Like pricing is typically all over the place, you know, with a startup, it's not standardized. But you have to have that kind of brain dump from the founder to build out the sales process. What I find happens is a lot of AEs will get hired And it's, oh, go sell. You know, this is— I do a discovery, I do a demo, and then we close them. That is not the sales process. I promise you, there are so many conversations that the founder is having and so many things that the founder knows about the product, the process, the handoff to CS, onboarding, what it takes to get a customer onboarded, what it takes to get a customer to use the product. All of that information has to be documented and brain dumped and then put in a nice pretty form before you hire that first sales hire. I think, and I tell all my founders, it's not your job to make it pretty, right? Put it in Apple Notes, Google Notes, a Google Doc, a Notion. I don't care where the hell you put it. I'll figure that part out. But you got to document everything that you're doing and everything that you know. You can't just expect someone to come in who's not a founder and be able to sell your product like you do. You're on— I can't hear a word you're saying.

There's this intangible founder's passion and founder's past.

Cannot be replicated.

Like, like this person was C-level of SAP and, and I worked with them for 14 years,

but

I trust that person. You can't put that in a playbook.

I don't even think that matters though. I mean, I'm, I'm working with a founder now who Whose previous role was an account executive at a well-known software company that we all know. But they have this passion that they get on the phone, they get on the Zoom with you, to your point, and like, you would swear this person has been doing this for 100 years. They've been an AE for 3 years, but they have that passion. That will never be replicated by someone who's not a co-founder. And that's why founders are so good. at selling, but it's also why I think founders don't understand that everyone else isn't so good at selling.

And I do believe that's an intangible for first sellers as well, that, that, that some people have, like they need to believe. And the folks that are the best first sellers tend to have that. They might not always have the process, but they come in with a lot of passion.

So I'm— we'll get a little controversial here, right? Which I have no problem with that. But I think my belief, when you are selling, if you aren't— and there's people who will tell you otherwise— if you are not passionate about what you are selling, I think it radiates. I think people can tell. I think it appears as if you're going through the motions. I think you're not as vested in the product. And I think you will not do as well. The best sellers that I've seen genuinely believe in the product and the people that they are selling to. There is a reason that I never went to sell paperclips for Office Depot, because it would not excite me in the slightest. And I have a friend, I shit you not, who makes half a million dollars selling paperclips for Office Depot. I can't fathom doing that. And when you hire people who are just looking for a job, or my favorite line in interviews is, sales is sales. I could sell anything. It's always the same. Bullshit.

Oh, you can't. That's a, that's a nonstarter with that, that line.

It's, it's not true. And if you want to be really good at what you do, you have to be able to empathize with your buyer. And to be able to empathize with your buyer, you have to be passionate about the problems you're trying to solve.

Well, well said. It was funny working for a perceived commodity and having the other person FedEx and UPS come after me, I'd like laughed at them. I'm like, I can't. Like, you're the reason why I'm so good here.

And listen, there's gonna be roles and positions out there, FedEx, UPS, paperclips for Office Depot. Like, not every job is one where it's like, holy, like, I love what I'm doing and I love what I'm selling. I couldn't do it. I think those roles all have a place, but specifically when it comes to our world that I'll call B2B tech, I think it's very different than selling a commodity. And I remember I started my career in healthcare, in women's health, and I was in the final interview and they actually brought a product manager in to interview me. And he said, like, if you want to sell the coolest widget, you know, a laser or, you know, something that does spine stuff, like, this isn't the place for you. Like, that's not what we're doing. If you want to sell something that you could be proud of and make a difference every day and be like, wow, like, I'm helping to prevent cancer, then this is an opportunity. Was it less money? Yeah. Was it sexy? No. Not at all. But did I make a difference every day? Absolutely.

So I think the core difference is, if you're looking at something as a commodity, you can't sell it. But if you're looking at something as a value driver, even if it's a paperclip versus a paperclip, like my paperclips get there 3 days quicker, they last 14 times longer. And the Yankees sign 20x times the contracts and generate this much extra revenue than your POS paper. If you're looking at it like that, you can sell a paperclip.

Yes, that's very different though. There, there's a bunch of caveats you just put on that right now. We're talking about differences in product. This paperclip is manufactured better. It's manufactured out of a stronger metal value,

right?

It's also blue and it's blue and white.

Yeah.

Like, why, why wouldn't you want a blue and white paperclip?

You'd want red on it too, uh, first for Fourth of July. But yeah,

I mean, we, I, we could go red and white for the Red Sox, but I, I don't know if we want to have this conversation.

Yes, well said. Pardon me. But, um, okay, so we built, we built this, uh, playbook, we hired the first AEs. At what point do we bring on a senior leader?

When we—

what's needed? Like, what gaps need to be come across at that point? Because when it sounds like—

When we've demonstrated that we could do this in a repeatable fashion, and there is no magic number. It's not, Jared, it's when you have 20 customers. It's not when you have 10 customers. It's when you can say— I was gonna say Tom, Dick, and Harry. Bill, Bob, and Sam are all selling the same thing the same way. with the same messaging and seeing results now, and they're at capacity, they can't do anymore. Now we're at a time that we want to start looking at expanding the team. Now we're at a time that we want to bring in probably more AEs and someone to manage those AEs. I will tell you, and this is just my belief, 90% of companies, in my opinion, bring in a VP of sales way too early. I think you could do with a director level, sometimes even a manager level to coach the team, guide the team, motivate the team, pump them up, work on a little bit of the process with the founders, work on really hammering out that playbook with the founders. But bringing in a half a million dollar VP of sales, that's a big nut. And that's a lot to undertake because it's going to kill your burn rate unless you have the systems, the strategy in place to either really, really drive an increase in revenue. Or really, really drive an increase in efficiency.

What KPIs would you look at as that founder, like just monitoring the AEs?

What's a KPI? No, I'm kidding. So I think there's a lot of things you need to look at. And I think this is where a lot of founders go wrong is they're just thinking sales KPIs. And they don't realize that marketing, sales, success all have to work together. before you consider bringing in someone senior, and certainly as you look to grow your org. So it starts with how many leads are we getting and where are those leads coming from, um, and what are the best performing lead sources. Then you move into, of those leads, how many of them are turning into sales accepted, right? There's a big difference between a lead and a sales accepted lead. Of the sales accepted lead, How many of those are turning into opportunities? So now we've taken that whole top of the funnel and we're going to understand, are we targeting the right people at the right time with the right message? Fantastic. That's done. Now you're in the hands of an AE. Of those opportunities, how long are they taking to go from stage to stage? Do you have clearly defined stages with very clear entry and exit criteria? That's a big miss with a lot of companies is if I ask you what stage 3 is, it's going to be very different than what someone else tells me stage 3 is. So do you have that entry and exit criteria? What is your average selling price? Are we seeing consistency across the board? Are we seeing consistency in the amount of days to close? And ultimately, it's all of those critical conversion rates that we need to look at to make sure that deals are flowing through in a scalable And repeatable fashion. Then the one thing where I think people don't spend enough time, and this is hard in startups because you don't necessarily have a year, 2 years, 3 years, but what is that churn rate? So while you can't understand churn rate initially, listen, if you come at me 8 months after you've founded your startup and I ask you your churn rate and you have annual contracts, you're going to tell me, oh, our churn rate's great, no one's ever left. Okay, big deal. They haven't left yet. So what's the next question? How many daily active users do you have? How many monthly active users do you have? How long are they spending in your product? What's the value they get out of your product? You got to ask that to everyone. And as a new sales rep, sales leader, sales VP, you best be on the phone asking customers that as well.

So there's a lot to do as a founder, which is why fractional— And I've seen about— One of the reasons why fractional became popular. Is it popular? There's a few folks. Do you think, um— oh my gosh, I, I, I have a, a per— I don't know if it's provocative or not, you tell me. Did, did, did the need of early-stage companies for not hiring Fractional, uh, not hiring a full-time leader create the fractional market? Or did a lot of early-stage VPs becoming disenfranchised with early-stage life and being hired at the wrong time create that market?

I would argue, probably, in my opinion, in my opinion, more of the latter. I think Almost every great revenue leader that I know has worked for multiple startups with multiple founders who were very, very well-intentioned. And that's an important thing to note here. I don't think that 85% of founders are anything but well-intentioned. I don't think they wake up and are like, oh, how many people could I piss off? And what could I do wrong today? want to run through like a bull with a china shop. I think those who do run around like a bull in a china shop are doing it with pure intentions. But what happens is you don't know what you don't know. Nothing changes if nothing changes. And they're creating these environments where they're being told by their VCs to go out and hire someone to lead sales, to lead revenue, And they're not ready. And then they get in and I have personally had this happen to me. They don't know as a founder how to understand the numbers because they're not a revenue leader and they're giving you numbers that are inaccurate. And I'll give you a perfect example. I asked a founder in an interview, I'm like, oh, so how many customers do you have? And she's like, oh, we have 227. It was like 227, 229 customers. Wow, that's great. How much ARR do you have? Just under $2 million. Pretty awesome. I didn't know then to ask. I know now. How many of those customers are paying? So they were monthly. There was no contract. How many of those customers are paying customers? Well, that dwindled it down to 82. How much of— Yeah. Big number. How much of that revenue has been collected? Never think to ask that. They were counting monthly subscriptions that were going unpaid as revenue because the customer had not emailed and said, I want to cancel. So, they were recognizing revenue that— oh, that's the right answer. Big no-no.

That's the biggest one. I don't mind the 82 out of whatever, you could fix that, but not recognizing the money coming through.

Biggest no-no. But it wasn't ill-intentioned. And I realized after I left the org that it wasn't ill-intentioned. And I left pretty pissed off and pretty upset. Like, I felt like I was lied to and I was deceived. And, you know, I— the founder and I spoke, and I stayed on as an advisor for a long time afterwards. It's, it's what her— it's how her VCs told her to spin the story to get a sales leader in. Wow. So she was taking the advice of her venture capitalists, but had no understanding of how to really look at the numbers. So when something like that happens to a great VP of sales or a great CRO at early stage, Over and over and over again, we finally get to the point that it's, it's twofold. It's number one, I'm never going to do this again, where I'm going to put blind faith into someone. And then to me, my main guiding principle is I want to help as many founders as I can not make the mistakes that I've seen, because what those mistakes do is multifaceted. Number one, it kills your reputation in the community, both from a product standpoint and a personal standpoint. Number 2, your burn rate goes sky high. Number 3, your dilution goes sky high. And when you go to raise again, you're going to raise a shit round because your numbers suck. So if I can help founders not struggle with that by implementing the right processes, the right playbooks, the right systems, the right messaging upfront, then I feel like I've done something great.

Are you seeing, uh, VCs warm up to the idea of fractionals coming in?

I am. Um, so I'm working— Dale and I are working with a client now that is VC-backed Series B, $53 million XYZ company out of New York City that I can't disclose. Um, but part of the process was getting their VC's blessing. Um, so I think that VCs are, because they don't want That burn. They don't want to see it go wrong. And it's a lot easier to say, hey, you know, we're going to spend $15,000 to $20,000 a month for 6 months on the right person to get this done right before we hire someone full-time. Because the numbers work out to roughly the same other than the fact that, you know, a fractional person isn't fully loaded. So you're not paying benefits, insurance, you know, workers' comp and all that other stuff. But you're going to get that process Set up properly. The other part that I think is really appealing to the VCs specifically with our model is a couple of things. Number one, we don't want you to be a customer forever. I don't want to string you along for 9, 12, 18 months and have you— I want to work with you for arguably 6 months and then wind down over the next 3. And then I'm going to help you find a really great VP of sales. And AEs through our network. And P.S., you're not going to pay a recruiting fee. So when you have a founder that goes to the board and they're like, hey, I need $100,000 to pay 20% of XYZ's salary, that's a hard sell. But when that 20% gets you my services plus that same recruitment, now it becomes a much easier sale.

It's a super interesting space being built, right? Like with that. And I spoke to another person that places sales reps and then trains them, not quite building the full—

I love Hamish. We could talk about him directly. He's incredible, and his model is different.

He might come into my coworking space in due time. I was talking to him today, and that would be, uh—

But his model is different. So you brought it up, so I'll dig into it. He will recruit them, but it's kind of a fractional model.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah,

he's just doing it in a backwards way than we are. Not backwards wrong. He's just— he's doing the recruiting first, the training second. What I love about what he does is he has a vested interest, unlike most recruiters. And listen, I have recruiters that are friends. My kid's mom is a recruiter. Most recruiters don't have that vested interest beyond that initial 3-month period where they have to replace them. When you have someone who is saying, I'm going to recruit this person and I'm going to train them for you, They're not going to hire someone that's a shit show or a shit show to train because that's on them. I love this model.

And he's a good human being. He's a sweetheart. It opens up to a bigger thing because now you're seeing fractional BDRs, fractional everything. Like, is this just—

I don't believe in that.

I think that's just an excuse to underpay, right?

Yeah, I think it's an excuse to underpay. I think that you're not going to get the results you want when there's certain roles that I do believe need to be full-time in-house. I think that it's one thing to have someone working on your business, working on your strategy for several hours a week. It's another thing to have an outsider who is doing BDR work for you for an hour and BDR work for someone else for an hour. I think a lot's going to change in the BDR space. I think a lot's going to change in the sales space and networks are going to become much more prevalent and important. Sure. Important. Um, I'm not sold on the fractional BDR model.

It— yeah, I, I, I think I'm not either. Um, but it's, it's going to be interesting dynamics. Like, within the 6 months you work with somebody, like, what, what's a reasonable success metric to, uh, strive for?

You know, that's, um, that's a loaded question. Um, typically, I guess it depends

which— yeah, it does. They're, they're not—

9 times out of 10, they're tied to revenue, to be totally honest. They're tied to an increase in revenue, but that percentage is highly variable depending upon how engaged the founder or leadership team is with us, depending on how much of the process is built out when we start or not. To me, everything starts— we have a 127-question diagnostic that we run our clients through. Super simple. It's a rating scale and it lets us know where to focus. And then we have a playbook of over 65 different items that we want to complete throughout our engagement. And that's everything from, you know, we talked about ICP and buyer persona, we're going to build out your initial messaging, we're going to build out your nurture messaging, we're going to go through objections and rebuttals, we're going to work on building your job descriptions to make sure that you're getting the right talent. We're going to help you hire. There's so many things that go into what success looks like. At a high level, I would say it's 100% completion on that playbook being complete so that when we leave, everything is set up in a repeatable manner, that revenue is growing. The other success metric, Jared, and the only one that really counts to me— revenue up and to the right is important, but when we're done and I send you that link to leave a testimonial, will you— unbiasedly leave a 5-star review. If you won't, we have not done our job.

That's good for folks to understand, right, that are, that are looking to hire fractional or, or build out their team. I'm curious what keeps you up at night on behalf of your clients, because you're in a, you're in a unique position. It could be nothing, right?

No, it's, it's, it's not.

I, I see—

So I had this illusion when I went to work for myself that I was going to take Fridays off. That lasted about 3 weeks. I do try to do no meetings Fridays, but there's too much work to be done. What keeps me up at night? Multiple things. So we're working with typically early-stage startups, right? So if you have an AE, and part of what we've been brought in to do is help you scale and grow and train that AE, What if that AE quits? What if that AE sucks and that AE quits now? And I had this happen to a friend of mine. AE quit. Well, we don't need you anymore. What the— what do you mean you don't need me? You haven't built anything outright. We can't afford you because we have no business coming in, is what that comes down to. Making sure that our founders are not getting the pressure from the VCs to grow at all costs. And that, that doesn't come back on us, that we're not going to come in one morning and it's going to be great. Our VC has just said, you know, we need a 6x revenue, you know, in the next 3 months. And if you don't do that, you know, we're going to have to terminate your contract. That keeps me up at night and making sure that my clients are satisfied and feels that, you know, we are moving in the right direction and having progress. One of the things I think that Dale and I do that is unique that most people in our space don't do Everyone has a 30-day opt-out in our contracts. If you're unhappy for any reason, 30 days opt-out really forces us to stay on our game, right? We collect payment at the start of every month, but we don't get 6 months upfront. You like in like 30-day opt-out. So you have to be successful. And that means that we have to constantly be moving that needle up and to the right, whether that be in a revenue standpoint, whether that be in a playbook completion standpoint, whether that be in an understanding why people are buying our product standpoint. At the end of the day, we have to see progress. Because we can be fired at any point in time.

It's a good thing, though, with the 30-day opt-out, because if they're going to be a difficult client, you're weeding them out fast yourself, right?

I mean, so the clause used to read that they, they didn't have an opt-out other than for cause. We always had a 30-day opt-out. I, as the fractional leader, we always have the ability per the contract to say, listen, like, you're not doing what we asked, you're not involved, etc., etc. Like, this isn't a good look for us, this isn't working, whatever. Like, we're out. What we've done is trying to be more approachable to founders who are hesitant of working with fractional leaders because sadly the word consultant— and notice I haven't used it once, um, other than in my damn company name— um, the word consultant has a very dirty, dirty connotation with it. We're working with a client now who's like, I don't want a consultant talking with my customers. So we're trying to flip that and turn it that like we are an extension of your team, right? At the end of the day, I want everyone on your team and your customers to look at us as an extension of your team. And that's hard from a context switching standpoint, like going from a company who's in healthcare to B2B SaaS to packaging all in one day. Like that's 3 different personalities. I literally have a collared shirt that I keep in my, in my office for when I'm dealing with healthcare. Um, so that context switching is hard, but I think, you know, to allow people to build trust, to earn trust, um, we're asking people to spend a lot of money with us. Um, and with that, you know, has to come trust, and trust isn't given, trust is earned.

Agreed. Uh, now, in regards to the future, what excites you the most, whether Period. Take it any direction you want. I'm curious.

My child turning 18 in 6 years and me being able to travel the world is the first answer.

But you travel the world with him, or you try to?

No, he's gonna go to college, um, when he's 18. And we, we travel now, but when I say travel, Jared, I mean like we're moving out of the house and we're living 30 days in different countries. Um, like really travel the world. Um, what excites me professionally, I think that we're finally seeing a realization in how to grow and scale responsibly. I think that everything that's happened over the past year and a half has not been— yes, it's troubling. There's been a lot of layoffs, but I don't think it's like, oh my God, a catastrophe in that sense. I think we are rightsizing. We are getting to where we should have been and correcting the mistakes that we made. And it's horrible. It is sad. I know many people who've been laid off, but I think that what it's allowing for us to do is recognize how businesses should be grown the proper way, slowly, steadily, responsibly, without this growth at all costs mentality. So that excites me. And I'm going to go a little controversial here. What excites me also is the consolidation. I think that you're going to start to see all of these platforms that do the same thing get gobbled up by others. And you're going to have, you know, one or two clear winners. Think, you know, in no particular order, Gong, Clary, Outreach, Salesloft, Falcon. There's a bunch of these companies out there that arguably all do the same thing. You're going to start to see some consolidation. I think some are going to gobble up some of the others and you're going to get 1 or 2 clear winners and that's going to require people to get really good at what they're building. And I'm excited to see what gets built.

All right. So We've learned a lot about how you'd help transition from founder-led to sales-led, and then also like, you know, figuring out the whole future of Fractional and current state as well, and in the future in general and traveling. I'm curious to know more about you, Adam. Like, if you were to have a dinner party and you can invite one person, Alive, dead, or fictional? Who would it be?

Or fictional.

I have to add fictional because, uh, there's a, there's a lot of good folks.

You, you didn't prepare me for this one. Um, we're gonna get a little emotional here. If I, if I could invite one person, um, I'd invite my mom. My mom passed, um, 6 months ago. We hadn't spoken in the better part of 2 years because of some addiction issues on her side. I found out— doesn't matter how I found out, but I found out well, well, well after the fact. And hindsight being 20/20, while I couldn't have changed her addiction, there was so much that went unsaid. Right. An addict is an addict, right? You can't change them unless they want to change. But no one should ever leave this earth wondering if someone loved them or not. So having the chance to have that conversation, that's where I'd go.

That's—

weren't prepared for that one, were you? No,

that was deep. I was, I was thinking that you were gonna give like Ken and Barbie and Ken or something. That was, uh, no, that, that, that's more potent by far. And, um, you know, I'm, I'm exploring now myself, um, you know, being multisensory, meaning, you know, outside of look, feel, touch, hear, um, the connection with others. Yeah. You know, the, the true karma and, um, and, and the oneness. And, uh, it's, it's pretty humbling and incredible. All right, let's, let's tell me about what you love to do outside of work.

Oh, it's all my kid, man. Zachary. Um, Zachary is my world. He's 12 years old. He is an avid basketball player. He's on a couple travel teams, a rec team. So we spend a ton of time at basketball. We'll be there tonight, practice from 7 to 8 on a Tuesday. It's lots of fun. Notice I'm being facetious. My wife and I love to travel typically. So we do a week off, week off with Zachary with his mom when he's not home. One of those 2 weeks a month, we are usually somewhere. I'm actually gone for the majority of the rest of this month starting next week. All right. And all of September as well. So traveling's huge and I'm a huge foodie, man. Love to cook.

That's awesome. Now, one piece of advice that you'd give to your younger self and you could give it to Zachary, what would it be?

You have 2 ears and one mouth for a reason. You don't know everything. Shut up and listen.

How could people get in touch with you, Adam? This has been a great— this has been a great talk and so happy that we were able to see who Adam is outside of scaling.

I appreciate it, man. LinkedIn, it's Adam B as in boy, J-A-Y. And stay tuned for something super special. It's revenue-reimagined.com. That is where you could find all things.

I am bullish on what him and Dale are building with Revenue Reimagined and their fractional business that they have. It's spectacular. They're helping people that need to be helped do things that they wouldn't do without them. I appreciate it. Thank you all for, for listening. And thank you, Adam. Thank you for coming.

Thanks for having me, man. I appreciate it.

And for everybody listening, if you enjoyed this, share this, like it. Come back next week. We'll be here again. Thank you all. This is another episode of Revenue Today. Thank you, friends, for joining me. That was another great episode of Revenue Today. If you're looking to listen to more episodes or for the show notes, go to revgenius.com. For all my friends in the Rev Genius community, it was awesome to spend this time with you. Please DM me any feedback or ideas for future podcasts in our Slack channel or on LinkedIn. If you're not in Rev Genius, join us. It's revgenius.com. It's free and it's fast to join and really for all levels of revenue professionals. For senior leaders, we just launched a private community just for you called Rev Room. We know it gets lonely out there and we We've built a tight-knit group of senior leaders collaborating on the future of B2B go-to-market. Looking forward to seeing you all there.