Navigating Growth in Sales | S01 E21

Hello everyone, and welcome to New Breed's Adding Value podcast. My name is Guido and I'm the manager of Acquisition and Strategy at New Breed. For those of you who don't know, New Breed is a customer acquisition agency focused on helping B2B companies grow and expand their business. And we do this by following the inbound methodology, which at its core is about adding value before extracting value. So the goal of this podcast is to bring you stories about people, add value to their customers, customers, their company, and the individuals around them. If you like what you hear, please subscribe, give us a five star rating and check out the rest of our content on newbreedmarketing.com today. I'm excited to have Heather Chevali join the podcast. We're talking today because this month marks one year since he joined New Breed and a lot has changed in that time. You started off as an inbound advisor and have recently moved into a role managing new revenue and partnerships for New Breed. So, Heather, I really appreciate you taking the time to join today and welcome to the podcast.

Thanks for having me. I was starting to feel left out because I hadn't been asked yet.

We have room for everyone to join eventually. As I mentioned, you joined the team about a year ago, and I'd argue that a lot has changed since then. When you first joined, I'd also say that you had a bit of a quiet start to your brain. Not in the sense that you weren't doing a good job or you weren't noticed, but that despite your experience, which you had plenty of experience when you came here a New Breed, you didn't come in trying to rock the boat, you kept your head down, you got work done, and you observed for a while before sharing your opinion. So was that like a calculated decision before you decided to join, or what made you decide to do that?

Well, that's a good question. So before I started at New Breed, I had met Patrick and Dana, who are two of the owners of New Breed, through a mutual friend, business acquaintance. And I was able to kind of have a unique intro to New Breed because I didn't go through the traditional interview process with them. You know, we had some dinners, we met up a few times, kind of talked about what the opportunity was. And what I realized was if I took this role, that I was stepping into a very tight knit small business that was really at an inflection point where they were going to start scaling. And I knew if I was going to be a part of that scaling, that I really needed to Come in and build trust with the key leadership and employees here at New Breed and making sure that I was building trust and coming in with a sense of wanting to learn from them and wanting to learn about the business and not coming in like just because I had experience that I knew everything. So it was a calculated decision that I made. I know that personality wise I can be a little bit of a lean forward type person and first impressions, that's not always the best. So I wanted to make sure that people felt that I was approachable and ready to learn from them.

It's interesting having gotten to know you over the past year. I wouldn't have guessed that that would have been the way that you started things off at New Breed. But I think it really played to your benefit. It really helped you build a lot of trust here, which is pretty cool. But we touched on your experience briefly. Do you want to just a little bit more about what experience you had prior to starting at Newbreed?

Yeah, sure. So my background for the last six or seven years is in software, which is one of the reasons why I was excited to come into New Breed to really help with not only expand the services part of the business, but expand on the software side and our relationship with HubSpot and potential other relationships with other software partners. My experience is with Cox Automotive. I work for Dealer.com if anyone doesn't know what Dealer.com is, they're the largest digital marketing company in the automotive space, owning about 70% of that market. And it was a similar company to this in the fact that we sold software and we built software in that company. We also sold marketing services. So this really played to my strength. I did that for a while and I moved to another company within the larger organization called Dealer Track where we sold dealer management systems and that was an accounting based software that really was the core to the dealership operation from the service department, the front end and the accounting department. So that was where I got my experience. Dealer.com is local to the community and we had went from when I started there to a 700, 700 person company, went through two acquisitions and were valued at $4 billion and now we were part of a 55,000 person organization and I just didn't feel like I had the opportunity to make the impact I wanted on the business and was looking for an opportunity to get involved with a smaller stage growth company.

So that's really interesting. What was that like going from this enterprise level company like you said, multi billion dollar valuation sounds like to a company of I think we're at around 60 employees now and a little bit less than that a year ago when you started. So was that a big shock when you first got here?

When I started, we were like 42 employees. So we've grown quite a bit. It was definitely different. A lot of the things that you don't think about in a big company or being in an office with 1200 people are like the everyday things like that there's enough batteries for your mouses and the pain points that New Breed has, which are good pain points. It's that we're growing so fast that we don't realize all of a sudden, hey, we need to buy more rechargeable batteries for our mouses. Or hey, we probably need another microwave because we have too many people trying to heat up their food. Which are good problems to have. But those aren't the type of problems I was used to doing, dealing with on a daily basis. So I think it was like the little day to day stuff that was the biggest change for me. And then the more exciting part that I was really, really re energized by when I first came in was that I came in every day, even as a new employee, and really felt that everything I did and everything I didn't do affected the company one way or the other. So my engagement, my level of effort, my ability to help solve problems really makes an impact on this business. And to me, that's why I get up every day, is because that's really exciting to me.

I don't know if I've actually talked to you.