The Foundational Operations Gap with Evan Kubitschek

Hi, I'm Michael Hartman. I'm Naomi Liu.

And I'm Mike Rizzo.

And this is OpsCast, a podcast for marketing ops pros and rev ops pros created by the MoPros, the number one community for marketing operations professionals.

Tune into each episode as we chat with real professionals to help elevate you and your marketing operations career.

Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of OpsCast brought to you by marketingops.com and powered by all the MoPros out there. I'm your host, Michael Hartman. Today I'm digging into a topic that many teams feel but few name, what our guest calls the foundational operations gap. Our guest is Evan. Evan, I knew I should have asked you this. Am I going to butcher it?

Kubacek.

Kubacek. Okay. I knew it was one or the other. I would have gotten it wrong. Founder of Grow Rogue. He works with early-stage companies to help them build the right marketing operations infrastructure before things start to break. We'll discuss how infrastructure issues often get overlooked. what the warning signs look like and how to avoid or recover from an operations house of cards. So, Elvin, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me. Look forward to it.

Yeah, well, let's just dive right in. So, let's start with that concept of what you call the foundational operations gap. What is that? What do you mean by it? How did you come to define it?

So, I've been in marketing operations for 15 years now, which is a terrifying thing to say. And I prefer to work with early-stage companies primarily because I have the opportunity to address this gap. And what I think of the foundational operations gap is the foundational layer of operational frameworks, scaffolding, architecture, however you want to describe it, that I would say probably 90% of companies skip out on. And so it is critical that you address it early on because I think that at a certain scale, it could be Series B, it could be 50 employees. The inertia of chasing revenue becomes so great that it's very hard to return to these foundations and justify the investment in fixing them. And so I consider it a foundational layer. Like if we're talking about specifics, I would probably say database health, and that could be defined broadly as having a minimum viable record. What is your definition of what a record should look like?

Right.

Segmentation, speed to lead, data dictionary, and an understanding of how your tech interacts with each other, your stack interacts with each other. What the order of operations should be, kind of that foundational documentation that I think doesn't really come naturally to a lot of companies. And there's that inflection point that I talked about that many people skip, and I think to their detriment, because I've certainly walked into W-2 roles for myself where none of that exists. And things break constantly because no one knew they could break, or they're not interested in investing in that because they just want to push out more campaigns built on broken architecture.

So, one quick question and maybe a deeper follow-up. So, it seems like, I was initially going to say, this sounds like what people would call tech debt, which by the way, I used that term with my wife the other day and she was like, what is that? Like, I can't explain it, but is it like, it seems like it's more than just tech debt.

I would define it as more than just tech debt. I think that tech debt is certainly involved and it's an important piece of that puzzle, but I think often if you go back to sort of the first principles of what business problem are we solving, with this tech investment, or what is our point of view on what a record or a prospect should look like? How do we define that? Let's put that to paper and have that documented for the entire team, the entire company to orient toward. I think there's a lot more around process and people and not just platforms. I would almost rank platform last amongst those 3 in terms of how I would address these things. Because I think—

Yeah.

Wrangling the people together to define your goals, creating process out of those goals, and then finally mapping that to where you want to invest your dollars in terms of platform, in terms of stack. I would rank that third out of those 3.

Okay. Makes sense. Okay. Yeah. So like one of the things I see often, maybe on the process side, when I've got, especially at large organizations, which I tend to see what I think are sort of overburdened approval processes, right? Number of levels, time, and then people wonder why we can't get stuff out the door. It's because we've got just too many steps and too many hands in the middle of it with too many people who can veto something and so on, right? It's like, is that an example of the kind of thing you look for?

It is. I think that you're describing a level that might be beyond where I prefer to work, just because I think that's what you're describing is when that inertia has become too great, right? Where you can't maybe return to address the process. You're too caught up in sort of the tactical swamp, the tactical hell of pushing out as much throughput through that process as possible. And that's the The goal that the campaign ops team might be measured on. But what I would look for there is understanding the underlying system. Do we have actual ticketing systems defined? Do we have definitions of what the requirements are for someone to make it onto the calendar? Do we have definitions of how competing priorities work and how these things take precedence? What are the KPIs we're measured against? Can we justify these SLAs in terms of an actual calendar that makes sense for throughput for the MOPS team? Are those things defined in a way that maybe if you're under growth marketing, you're under a CRO, depending on who you fall under, but do they understand that? Are they aware of that? And are they supportive of you having boundaries and pushing back on these things? That is the type of work, sort of that foundational layer that I think isn't always in place because many times I'll hear a phrase I hate, which is move fast and break things.

Right.

Yes, there's a space for that, but if all you do is break things over and over and over and never return to fix them, of course things are going to become tougher over time.

Yeah. So is it, you use a term or you had a phrase that you used with me when we talked before, you're not scaling marketing, you're automating chaos. Is it like, is that kind of what you meant by that? Is that what you just described there or did you mean something else?

I think that's accurate. I like to use an example of if you think about your kitchen, right? And let's say in this scenario, your kitchen is a disaster. You got dirty dishes everywhere. There's food and ingredients all over the floor. You have no meal planning. And I say, well, why don't we just buy a faster oven? That doesn't make any sense.

Right.

Right. There's lots of analogies that you could use in that scenario, but often people say, well, let's just buy this bandaid. And usually comes in the form of a platform, a tech investment. That's what they want. Someone is sold on it. But when you ask about, well, how does that play in our current stack? What problem does that solve? Could this be addressed with better process and keeping the same investments that we have? Those types of questions I think are skipped. So it's sacrificing that hard upfront work on the altar of speed and efficiency. And if you don't address those upfront questions, I think you will get caught in this gap and I see it quite often.

Okay.

Yeah.

I mean, what you remind me of is early in my career, I did work in consulting in a totally different space where we did a lot of work with like helping companies choose and implement financial and accounting systems, right? And one of the things we always coached our clients on when they were evaluating vendors was they're going to pitch you on all the bells and whistles that they could do, right? Amazing reporting, yada, yada. But we were like, we always had to remind them, like, if you can't do AP, AR, GL work every day and count on it to be right, then the reporting doesn't matter. Right.

I think the— I've joked about this before, but I wish there was a way that we could put sales under some type of cross-examination where they are bound to tell the truth about their platform in a sales conversation? Because certainly early in my career, I have fallen victim to the siren song of a sales engineer or sales telling me that this platform is a panacea, will solve all of our ills. And as I've gotten more mature in my marketing operations career, you know, I want a POC, I want to see your documentation, I want to understand Do you have robust integrations or is it just like a Tray.io or Zapier wrapper? The sort of the things you learn to ask about the platform that they're not always willing to answer on the sales call. Those types of questions I think are just so important and it's getting harder and harder, I think, for those things to be asked. I look at—

Well, I think it matters that you ask the right questions. I think about, I was looking at visualization tool for some reporting that I wanted it to integrate with Marketo and it did. So I was like, okay, but I never really looked under the hood that much. I was moving too fast. It was relatively low cost. Well, it did integrate, but it integrated with stuff that like was not useful at all, right? I couldn't do anything with it like we wanted to. And so We ended up like spending a lot of time trying to make it work. And like finally I just tossed it because it was like, shame on me, right? I didn't do that real level of due diligence that I should have.

And I do think in today's market and how tough it is to justify software purchases, asking for a POC is not out of the realm of possibility. Like, give me a couple months with the platform, we'll pay for it. But we need to understand exactly how it works and find the bugs. You know, I've seen demo accounts without the full functionality, these types of things. But to your point, they may tell you that it integrates and yes, it might integrate, but then you might find that that key data point or that key field you're looking to measure against doesn't or isn't available in some fashion. And then the whole use case falls apart.

Yeah, no, it's funny you bring that up. I had forgotten I've talked about this before a lot. Like, I wish these software vendors would do something more because like a 7-day trial, 30-day trial usually is not enough time, right, to truly evaluate it because it's hard to allocate the time from your team, right? And I've said like, be willing to offer a— it doesn't even have to be cheap, right? But like a reasonable cost, short-term license. of what you would actually be thinking about getting so you could really truly evaluate it. I think that like they're, so they're not totally giving up. I get that that's a challenge from a revenue predictability standpoint and everything else for them, but it's like, I think it would be a better, I think it would be an option that more people would take advantage of than they probably think. And maybe I'm wrong.

I would, I think I would agree with you on that. I think that you would find more people willing to jump onto that offer rather than having to go all in on something that potentially might, they might stake their position at the company on, especially with some of these platforms being 6 figures plus.

Right.

If you're not absolutely sure that it's the right investment, I'll give you an example. A client just secured 2 POCs in a row with a chat vendor that went really well, and we made the full investment for that client that was multiple 6 figures. And to their credit, they were willing to extend that. There were conversations about what level of investment it would take for both of those POCs, but they gave it. And in the end, they secured that revenue. And I think that flexibility was what won them that contract. And I wish more vendors would be willing to explore that.

Yeah, I love that. Well, so let's get back to this foundational operations gap. So you talked about you work mostly with early-stage companies. So what are some of the reasons that these companies get into that situation and how do you spot it?

So I think that The warning signs that I typically see with clients are it usually comes with their first round of funding or outside investment. And that typically means there's new speed pressure being put on them from their first board members or an expectation of some type of return with angel investors. But there is now outside pressure to grow at a certain rate. And I do think that especially if it's VC money, you're starting to see a little bit of an adverse relationship between how growth marketing brand building works and the expectations around growth. And so that's where I usually initially see people sacrificing the foundational work for speed and growth at all costs. I think that initially you're going to see a lot of manual workarounds starting to happen at that stage, a lot of tribal knowledge in terms of the team. It's usually a very small team. It might be an individual or maybe one consultant who's doing the work, but they don't want to pay for someone to be documenting what's happening or creating a data dictionary. So if that person departs, they're in a lot of trouble, right? There's no one to understand exactly how the systems fit together.

Single point of failure.

Single point of failure. Attribution questions can take days because no one's defined the channels and the offers that matter to the company. They're using something out of the box or they're just glomming reports together. They're not creating a single source of truth across the company. And so those are some of the typical things I see at, as warning signs is when you start to get this outside pressure, but also you're ignoring some of that foundational work sacrificed on the altar of speed or on the altar of growth. And it's very common, I think, with sort of a seed or Series A, that's when I start to see that inflection point. And if you go beyond that, it just accelerates.

Right. That's interesting that the external pressures are a driver behind it. So when you talked before, you talked about process and people is more important to you than tech, but it feels like some of this manifests itself with problems in the technology or being able to use the technology. What are you seeing in terms of priorities or Like processes that tend to, I know you talked about moving faster because of the outside pressure, but what are like, do you have any, can you go down a little deeper on that? On what, like what are some examples of where that happens?

Yeah. So as an example, it's very common for me to see with clients that that need for speed means there has never been any definitional work around campaign operations or some type of ticketing or project management system. Very often there is nothing but a Google Sheet and requests coming in via Slack. Things are not threaded in a way where multiple people can reference them. It's kind of a game of tag of how things should be triaged. That's very often a failure point and it doesn't have to be expensive. A very simple form, something cheap like an Asana, a ClickUp, any number of project management tools. Just the minimum viable system will get you quite far. But that is certainly one that I see not having a data dictionary. So to the point of having that process around how are fields being populated, I think there are lots of smaller tools. You think about Clay, Waterfall Enrichment, all of these smaller investments that can inform your core systems. But very often they are not being documented in a way that lets you understand what is overriding your core fields. Where's the source of truth coming from? What is the direction of the data? What's the cadence of things being pushed into those systems? I'll give you an example with a client. We did a lot of work over one month, and then I found out that there was a shadow system. That no one told me about, wherein SAP was overriding the account data every 24 hours and finance had full control of SAP and we had never touched it. So of course, all of the infrastructure work that we were doing was useless until we addressed that root cause. And no one had thought to go back and think about how that was completely muddying the waters in their CRM. And that's the type of thing that I think gets missed. It's not understanding how your systems communicate with each other, not defining what the way they should perform and your expectation of how they should perform, and then defining the business problem that they solve. What are they actually being implemented for and what does success look like for that? If those definitions change constantly, you're never going to be able to measure success in a meaningful way.

Yeah, I like the term you used before, and I've heard it before, but it's been a while, the minimal viable record, right? I think that's a concept that a lot of people probably listening or watching have never heard of. And if they haven't, they should really start thinking about like that, because I think that addresses one of the common complaints from sales teams, right? You gave us crap data. Crap leads, whatever. So it's interesting that that is not as common, including places I've been, to have something like that or definition of that. Do you also include definitions of, like on reporting, you mentioned attribution, but like other reporting where you have common definitions of how you define the metrics, how you calculated that kind of stuff?

Oh yes. I could rant about this for hours. I have been in so many situations where a report is built by another team and there's ARR as a field, ARR V2, ARR latest, and the report is built with a field that's been deprecated or is no longer in use. And all of a sudden it's a 5-alarm fire because their projections for their team's growth or pipeline has cratered. Them not knowing that they are using a field that no one uses anymore. But the problem is no one has centrally defined what the measures of success are and what the definitions are and which fields are the ones that should be used. So ideally everyone would be operating from the same core set of reports and dashboards, and that's the source of truth for everyone, and that's locked down. But if you want to let people freelance, at minimum you have to have the definitions of what parameters, what reports they can build against, and what fields are actually in use. If you don't have that, you're asking for people sniping at each other, having different definitions of success, disagreements at A leadership level, a board level, that gets really messy really fast. And that's another very common issue is you don't have the standard definitions of how you measure things.

Yeah, it's, but I think people get caught up a little bit in like, this is the right way to do it. And they kind of, you know, dig their heels in a little bit sometimes. And I think you gotta let go of that, right? Because to me, like, There's a few things where I would probably argue pretty strongly for this is the way we should calculate this particular metric. But in general, I almost don't care as long as we all agree what it is and it's a reasonable one because I'm more interested in us being able to agree on it and be able to trust it that we're all talking about it the same way in what it's like. Because there's downsides to every one of these and upsides to them. So Like, I don't know.

Yeah. In, in my early career, I would fall on my sword and argue so hard for things that I felt passionately were the correct way to do things. And as I've suffered the slings and arrows of many, many years having those battles, I'm right there with you. It's so long as we are agreed upon the direction and we're going in the same direction.

Yeah.

I'm okay with that. If we can agree that we want to revisit those metrics or the direction on some type of cadence so we can make sure we're course correcting, we're good. As long as we have a standard definition together, that I will take as a win any day of the week.

Couldn't agree more. All right, so we talk about a number of things about how, well, yeah, what it looks like when you get to this situation with the gap. What are some of the things that tell you you're kind of approaching that tipping point where you're going to be going into that systems are tangled or whatever it might be? Like, how do you identify that if you're sitting in a chair right now listening to this before they want to have to hire you, Evan?

So I think The tipping points or the warning signs that I look for are if I go into your system and I can't understand within a couple of hours how things fit together, if there's not an architect's vision or an overall vision of how data prospects, customers should flow through. Your system, I think that's a big warning sign. So that typically would look like completely disorganized programs and workflows, no naming conventions, no conception of centralized lead processing, lead scoring, generalized nurture tracks. Some of these sort of core functions of a Marketo, of a HubSpot. If they're not in place and they're not organized in a way that is easy to consume, I think that's an early warning sign. What that typically means to me is that you're spot-fixing requests rather than pushing back on those requests if they don't make sense in the broader context of your instance. And that's not an attack on anyone, right?

No.

Junior employees, it's very hard to push back against a CRO, a CEO for what they want. But as you mature, you need to have a vision or a roadmap of how things should work and a point of view and fight for that point of view or push back against some requests. Another area that I look for is looking at the database, right? So I'll give you an example. We had a client recently that had 700,000 records in their database. Of which only 150,000 had been touched in the last 3 years. And so they are paying for 550,000 records annually that are getting absolutely no touches from marketing, no marketing comms of any kind, even translating that to the sales side, they're not being touched. And so I want to understand.

I can't tell you how much like that makes me hurt. Like physically.

When I pointed that out to the poor stakeholder, she was so upset and I wanted to let her down gently, but it was, the reality was painful that you had paid a lot of money over the years to not touch any of these folks. But I want to understand, how are you using the database available to you? Do you have a plan to touch all of them? Are they, Categorized or segmented in a way that supports your sales function? Do you have concrete definitions of their lifecycle? So the expected buying cycle that they would go through, are they, are you respecting their subscription preferences? That same client, as an example, you would find prospects that had received 3 wake-the-dead emails during that time. And then the fact that they had selected, no, I am not interested, was ignored and they were kept in the database. So it was good intentions, but the final step that should have happened never did. And that's the type of thing that I'm going to hunt for is, are you using the tool? for its core functionality? That's the first thing I'm going to evaluate. Do you have a base level of organization and a vision for how it should be used? And very quickly, I think you can suss out whether or not that's happening in an instance. It doesn't take long.

Let me ask you, so I had a scenario where I inherited a Marketo implementation that was doing things in a non- I call it non-standard way, right? So there's a lot of sort of, I forget what Marketo calls it. They're essentially, they have a capability that's built for like nurture streams, right? I can't remember exactly what it's called. But the implementation I inherited basically didn't use that at all. It had some highly customized stuff to the point where if we wanted to change out a single email in a thread, right, we were worried about it breaking things downstream. Um, yeah. So, I mean, is that the kind of thing too where you're like, I get it. Like sometimes you get, if you get sophisticated enough, you can go sort of beyond the, the most common ways in which to use these platforms. And I don't have any, any problem with that. But like, I, what, what bothered me is that it was so complicated and convoluted and interrelated that it was really like, we really were struggling with, we knew we needed to update content, but we were so worried about breaking something that we didn't. And we, so eventually, I mean, it was all built based on the vision of an agency that I also exited fairly quickly after I got there. But we basically had to basically undo everything they did and took advantage of the built-in functionality instead, right? So I guess Where I'm going is, I don't mind complexity if it truly adds value, but if it restricts what you're able to do, then I think it's a warning sign too. Is that the kind of thing you're talking about when you're using the systems as expected or?

Absolutely. My point of view is that you earn the right to add complexity to a system, and the way you earn that right is by nailing the basics that everyone can agree upon. And so the situation that you were in, I see very often, and unfortunately it's past that inflection point where any fix you might try and implement is like doing surgery on a patient that's awake. There are so many processes that are live and running that it becomes exponentially harder.

Yeah.

To address those while keeping the lights on, while keeping campaigns running. And you can get caught in analysis paralysis just trying to figure out if I pull this thread, does the whole Gordian knot untangle? And, you know, I've got egg on my face.

Yeah.

And so I do think that in every instance that I step into, and that's why I prefer to work to your point with those early stage orgs is because that operational debt, tech debt, process debt, people debt generally hasn't built up enough where it's too painful to fix. But addressing that and using, I typically describe it as 80% best practice, 20% your practice, right? It's not always going to map 100% of what Marketo suggests you do, HubSpot suggests you do. But start with 80% and then you earn the right to do that last 20%. That can be very difficult and take the most time, but you adjust it to your business. But start with what everyone else is doing, what is best practice. And then as you conquer that, you nail that, you earn the right to get to the more complex bespoke things you want to do specific to your business.

Yeah, I like that idea that you have to earn the right to do heavy customization.

Yeah, I think that, you know, there's a misconception also that simple means easy, and that is not the case. It's simple laying these things out for a client, but that does not make it easy, right? The upfront work of Defining what a record should look like in your database, defining segmentation, what is the customer journey for your nurture workflows? All of those things are much harder than the technical build of them in a Marketo, in a HubSpot. And so that people and process side is, to my mind, the much harder piece to get right than the platform itself, typically.

We're on the same page. Okay, let's switch gears a little bit. So for those folks who are listening or watching, um, who are in the seat going like, yes, we have this operational gap. I want to go fix it, but, uh, and I've talked to my boss or my boss's boss or whoever, and they're, they don't get it. They don't understand. Like, how do you go about the process of, call it pitching, selling, convincing the organization that It's time you need to address it.

So I think every org is different, but typically the lens that I will take with clients, if I'm working with a mid-market company or a company that's a little more mature, I look at 3 lenses that I typically see leadership caring about. That's growth, efficiency, and risk management. And so I think those lenses give you a rubric to work through to justify this type of thing. So very often, I think especially with MOPS, we're nerds, we're geeks, we love tools.

Yeah.

And you can get lost in talking about the technical capabilities or what a platform can do without tying it back to brass tacks. What does it get leadership? Why should they care? And so I think that, you know, some examples of like a growth connection. So a database cleanup enables segmented campaigns that on average perform 3 to 5 times better than mass email. Right? So if you are not doing any type of segmentation, you can tie it to, we're going to do the same level of effort as today, but you're going to get 3 to 5 times more effective results.

Yep.

Or efficiency. Eliminating manual process frees up team capacity of the equivalent of 1 to 2 full-time employees.

Right?

If you're talking about campaign operations or instituting SLAs, you measure those, you can start to justify because you know how much time it's taking, how much more efficiency you can wring out of the same systems with a robust process or risk management. What would happen tomorrow if the person who built that beautiful mind nurture system you laid out Departed. I'm guessing there wasn't documentation. The agency was probably long gone, and you've got 2 weeks to try and write documentation from scratch if they give notice. So all of those things, I think, as examples, you can tie them to the things that leadership care about. You're still doing the same work you'd like to do. It's just a tweaking of the messaging, of the positioning, and how you present it. So there is an element of learning how to speak leader, how to speak executive. And you just have to learn how to tweak what you're talking about a little bit for it to resonate with them. And that's something that I think is the difference between an individual contributor, kind of the manager, senior manager. You want to make that leap to director and above, you have to learn how to position it to those leaders. Yeah.

Just, so I'm just curious because I, recent conversations with other guests, one who was a CMO basically said the efficiency one is one that he didn't even really care about, right? That tying it to growth and I, what I would say is profitable growth these days, right? Like there was a time not that long ago when it was just growth. But to me, it feels like it's the environment shifted to where profitable growth matters. But like, have you, just curious, do you see the same thing that if you can tie stuff to growth, it tends to be better received and you get more movement? Or have you seen kind of just as much success with the other types of storytelling, if you will?

I think for my corner of the market, growth of those 3 resonates the most, but efficiency, I would push back and say that is a very close second. And the reason for that is for a lot of the clients that I work with, they tend to be early-stage VC-backed companies. And so yes, they want growth, but to your point, they want sustainable growth and they don't want to light cash on fire to get it. So efficiency to my mind is a very close second. If I can justify time savings, employee time savings, make the employees more efficient, make marketing more efficient without having to invest additional dollars just through better process and better definitional System architecture, that is a very compelling messaging in my message in my mind. And that's certainly something that I found to be successful in some of the orgs that I've worked with. But yes, I think growth overall is still the name of the game. It's just, I think sort of the, the ZIRP era growth at all costs has, that's gone away a little bit.

Yeah. Well, and I think if you touched on this, but it feels like that middle one, if it was efficiency and effectiveness, right, which are sort of two sides of the coin, like, because I think effectiveness is another one, but it also depends on metrics that you are focused on. It feels like that's, that's another piece of this puzzle. Okay. So I think we're going to have to kind of wrap things up here. And it's so as we wrap up, so if you were going into a client and you were talking to the MOPS leader or the CMO, whatever, I don't know who you end up typically talking to, like what advice would you give the MOPS folks listening to like how, yeah, I mean, you touched on this a little bit. trying to tell a more compelling story about how to talk about the value of what they're doing, especially if they're pitching for these ideas that, I mean, one of the things I think people struggle with, with these sort of fixing the gaps is they're not always as obvious in terms of the output, right? There's downstream benefits.

Yeah.

So cleaning up your data, it makes your segmentation better, faster, cleaner, right? More effective. But You don't see the results immediately. So how do you, how would you coach someone to talk about that?

So I think the first thing you have to do is establish some level of communication cadence so that people know what you're doing. And I think that is a challenge for a lot of people in MOPS is that you tend to be more of the Wizard of Oz type role. You want to be behind the curtain, you want to make things run, But if no one knows you're there, they're not going to realize the work that you're doing is making everything run on time. You know, in our last conversation, we talked about this, like no one cares that the trains run on time. They care when the train is late or the train breaks down. But unless you make the work visible that goes into making everything run on time, people won't care. So for me, what does that look like? For my immediate leader, that's managing up a weekly email of what I accomplished and why it matters and what I'm doing in the coming week. It might be every 2 weeks, team Slack, post something to the marketing team about what you did and why it makes their lives easier. Tie it to their goals. Do the same thing with sales. I think you will find that people are a lot more willing to invest in your efforts when they know How it affects their bottom line, how it affects their goals. And then the other piece is I want to get in front of many, as many complementary stakeholders as possible, right? Take RevOps out to lunch, take sales out to lunch, take product out to lunch, take marketing out to lunch, understand what they care about, document that so that you can talk about it in a way In their language, right? A lingua franca across. Okay. Well, I know product cares about this. Sales cares about this. I am sitting at the center of this web and I can think about what is something I can work on that helps me, but also touches on product, touches on sales. You're going to get buy-in on that effort because it's touching multiple areas at the same time. The more you know, about the connective tissue across orgs that kind of plug into what MOPS is doing, the easier it is to message your impact and the easier it is to show that as you are pitching things and creating your roadmap.

I like that. I would, I would add finance to that list.

Yeah.

And then the other thing, just to kind of, what I heard is ask, don't assume what those people like, what they care about, what they, how they think about stuff. I think that's, that's a good, Bit of advice, right? And just be humble and just like, I want to learn what matters. And I think that that would go a long way towards helping that. Evan, it feels like we barely scratched the surface on this one. I know we probably could have gone a lot longer. So thank you for, thank you for the time, for the insights. This has been a lot of fun. If folks want to connect with you or learn more about what you're doing, what's the best way for them to do that?

I got 2 ways for you. So you can find me on LinkedIn, Evan Kubicek. I post quite often, lots of memes, lots of videos, but the foundational operations gap is the space that I like to play in. And you can also find my little corner of the internet at growrogue.com. If you're interested in addressing the foundational operations gap at your own place, reach out. I would love to chat with you.

Perfect. Well, again, thank you, Evan. Thanks always to our listeners and supporters. We appreciate all that. Uh, if you have an idea for a topic or a guest, or you want to be a guest, feel free to reach out to Naomi, Mike, or me, and we'd be happy to get the ball rolling on that. Until next time, bye everybody.