Setting the Stage for Growth with New Breed's CEO | S02 E02

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 revenue management firm for the world's fastest growing B2B companies. We're also an elite HubSpot Solutions partner that follows 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 of how people add value to their 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 the CEO of New Breed, Patrick Bidiscomb, join the podcast. This is the second time you've joined, so welcome back to the show.

Hey, Guido, thanks for having me. Cool.

So I've been looking forward to talking to you for a while now because we've had some pretty exciting announcements so far this year. I want to try to go in order as best I can, but feel free to interrupt me and talk about other stuff as you want to. The first thing I want to go over though, is the fact that we're going to be moving to a new office this summer. Talk to me a little bit about how that decision came about.

Yeah, really excited about the move for our new office location. So it's been about a year and a half in the works, almost two years, which is crazy to think about, and we're not moving until July. So how it came in the works, we came across a new company that just kind of got started. It was still in the ideation phase and it was this company called Hula, which was founded by a guy named Russ Scully. And Russ really shared a common vision for culture, the tech environment, and wanting to really foster a great tech center of excellence inside the Burlington community. Burlington's got a lot of great cool companies, but no one's actually ever been able to kind of put a community around it. So I got in to talking with him and Dana, who heads up our facilities team around kind of what the future of like office environment should look like. And we got really excited and realized we were super aligned. And he at this point still hadn't bought a building yet, so. So and had a building that was in mind. Turned out this building that he had mined. Not only did we have a shared vision of what culture and campus and environment and community should look like, but also just Happened to be one of the nicest pieces of real estate that someone could secure in the Burlington area right down on the waterfront. So between those two things, we knew it was the right decision to move New Breed there after a long consideration. Love where we've been. Can't say enough great about our current office space, but really wanting to be part of a bigger ecosystem, bigger community and build that out and also support that growth in the greater Burlington area.

It's really exciting to be moving there in the next couple of months. We're recording this in the beginning of March and we're supposed to move in around July or so.

July 1st. We're going to.

I stopped by to the new office this weekend for the first time. Actually. I hadn't really taken a look around until then. And if you've never been to the Burlington area, the lake is right there on the waterfront in Burlington. And then on the other side, you see the mountains on the New York side. And it's just such a picturesque scene that's right there that our office and the windows there are looking out on. But with that being said, can you just talk a little bit about the importance of investing in the employees that we have here and kind of part of the calculus on that side in terms of moving into the new office?

Yeah, I mean, I think our. If you really like think why for us, why we invested in that space as much as the. All the perks and great amenities, it's really a one. I think if you can create an environment, an actual physical environment that your employees are happy in, that they're going to produce better work, better outcomes for your clients, just be all but better individuals in the community if you can foster that environment for them. I think there's lots of different ways to foster that environment, but also facilities do come into that. So we took that into consideration, saying, okay, great. This a needs to. We think a lot about raising the mean of the team. Like we took that same calculus like is this going to raise the level of the company? Is this going to make a better work environment for our employees than our current spot? And we have a great spot. So that was actually been challenging over the last few years when we knew we were eventually going to outgrow our space was what's going to actually be able to accomplish that? Right. We didn't want to move to a location that didn't raise the mean of the team. So we really thought about that component. I think this actually hits it on all levels. So that's really exciting for Us from the way it's laid out to the type of investment that we're putting into the space to make it very conducive for work life and then also just to be able to be able to be connected to not only the tech community, but also to the outdoors, which is something important to the employee base here at New Breed.

Yeah, everyone here, especially over the past couple of months, it's been wintertime, has been talking about going out skiing and everything like that, going hiking. And the new space is right on the bike path, straight on the waterfront. We get access to the surf club. There's a lot of exciting things we'll be able to do that's right there on campus at the new location. It sounds really cool. I can't wait to see the fully built version. The other nice thing that it's kind of played into is last year we won an award for the first time for one of the best places to work in Vermont. We found out that we're included on the list again for this year. Don't know what our place is going to be quite yet, but this just is a huge component that's added into that whole mix of just building a community of both, not just for New Breed, but for Vermont as a whole. You touched on this a little bit earlier, but can you just talk a little bit more to why it's important to grow New Breed and our business in the state of Vermont?

Yeah, I mean, it comes a little bit down. I think there's lots of reasons for it. One's personal. Just myself, Dana and Taylor, three folks that have owned New Breed for the last five years. It was always a mission of ours to. We're all, I'm from Vermont. They both moved to Vermont, but always just said, you know, hey, like, the mentality around here is like, you got to go to New York or Boston or San Francisco to make it. We wanted to challenge that thesis and really put out the mission that if we retain great talent in the state of Vermont, we can build great companies and people can have a really great career here and not have to sacrifice by moving just because they wanted to be able to make their. Their career somewhere else. So it's a personal mission for ours and something we've been super passionate about since actually when I graduated college. It was always something I was really focused on was how to. How to make sure that we retain really great talent in a great state and really build out this tech culture. And I think this is really going to help us take it to the Next level.

Yeah. What are you most excited about? A new space.

Most excited about the new space. God, that's. You know what, I've been coming to the same office for 12 years, so I think I'm just excited for some change and I'd probably say the biggest excitement for me is going to be watching all the new breeders come in and get to really like not only have a great place to work, but I really excited that their family like how the campus is structured because it's in more of a campus instead of just an office. Is that not only are they going to have access to a lot of these amenities, but also that their families and significant others are going to be able to be intertwined more into our environment because of the campus and the amenities that the campus has. Yeah.

That's awesome. It really seems like it's going to be an exciting time in July when everyone's moving in, can't wait to take pictures, can't wait to get acclimated to the new space, get a bit of a new morning routine down, but we'll see how it goes. And I can't wait to get started there. So I want to shift gears a little bit now. So next topic I wanted to get into was our partnership with HubSpot. So we've obviously been invested in HubSpot for a long time. We've been a partner of theirs for years now. But they recently came out with a new solution partner tier and rebranded the whole agency partner program to be the solution partner program. But one component of that was adding the Elite tier on top of that. So we found out about that towards the end of last year that that was going to be coming and we put a lot of time and energy into reaching that tier. Can you just talk a little bit about the importance of our HubSpot partnership and being included in that inaugural class and why we wanted to reach towards that?

Yeah, you know, for us I think it's great being a part of a greater ecosystem within the HubSpot ecosystem. To me, Elite was more a validation of the mentality we've always taken with HubSpot, which is it's a partnership and that it's a partnership that's a two way street. The biggest component that really excited me about wasn't the awards or the accolade, but more that how they structured it is becoming elite was really gonna allow it to be formalized that it was a two way partnership and that they'd be looking for a lot more feedback from their Elite partners on ways the partnership can improve and just have a more consistent open dialogue on it. I have to say HubSpot's always been great about feedback. Their CEO, Brian Halligan has the saying and has for a couple years now, that feedback is the breakfast of champions. And I do feel that they do truly embody that. That said, this just made it that HubSpot's grown quite a bit and that this opened up communication channels that I just don't think were there.

Is there anything new already that you've felt with the announcement of the new tier and the differences in communication and just working with HubSpot since that's happened?

Yeah, I think the biggest thing for me that I've noticed and it's still early, so I think it's an indicator, but maybe not truly exactly how it's going to shake out, but I have have noticed that before New Breed had a really great open dialogue at the executive level and director level. But I think this really helped it facilitate conversations at a individual contributor level. So I have seen hubspotters that are now consistently across the organization understand, hey, New Breed's an elite partner or other elite partners, right? Hey, this is someone we can trust to have a conversation with and open up that dialogue a lot easier. So that's. It's pretty early to say, but I would say going into this year, we've already kind of felt that change of conversation.

That's awesome. And as part of our push to reach the elite tier, when it was announced at the beginning of this year, we also were just making a lot of strides to being one of the best partners. We always have strived to be the best. And we ended up being named the top partner in North America in 2019. What was that like to find out that we were the top partner in North America last year?

Yeah, again, I think for us it's just that it's cool and exciting. And what felt the best to me is that it's a recognition for all the employees at New Breed that work super hard towards that goal. But it again comes down to just waking up every day and just being a great partner and really having that two way street and seeing that as New Breeds grow and seeing that mentality shift not just for myself, but across the individuals that work directly with HubSpot. So I think if we just keep doing what we're doing, we're going to continue to, you know, hold, hold these levels with inside the HubSpot ecosystem just because we've really ingrained their organization into our company and Vice versa.

So what's it been like, looking back, thinking, from when we first partnered with HubSpot to where things have grown now and the changes that have occurred within the relationship and just how much that partnership has grown over time?

Yeah, I mean, I think one of the biggest things that's changed is, I mean, just now it's really. It really is on a global scale. If I look where customer base comes from, where our shared customer base comes from. Right. It's where it used to be, so North America focused, but now it's really. It is a global partnership that we have with them from folks that we interact with all the way from Singapore to Sydney to Portsmouth, New Hampshire to Boston. You know, we're consistently working with them at a global level. So I think that's probably the biggest thing that's really changed from early on, where it was very North America centric.

Yeah. So Obviously we've been HubSpot partners for a while, but just yesterday, as the time of this recording at least, we made an announcement of a new partnership that we just started. So we've partnered with a company called sasworks. There's a lot that's been happening behind the scenes for what, a year now or so?

Yeah, a little about almost a year and a half.

So how did that conversation get started and how did it come to fruition over the past couple of months?

Yeah. So Jim o' Neill used to be the chief people officer and chief information officer at HubSpot. Him and I knew of each other and were in a handful of meetings throughout the years. He was the fifth employee at HubSpot. So over the last decade, him and I have interact with, but not as directly, but more just at an executive level. And I always had just really mutual respect for him. He actually had an award at HubSpot named the Jim O' Neill Award, which was around just having been a great culture fit for their organization and someone that just showed exemplary excellence. So I had this mutual respect for Jim. He had reached out to me right after he had left HubSpot and said, I'm thinking about doing this new thing. You want to get on a call? Turned out it's kind of a little bit. We've had a lot of funny little connections throughout this whole journey of the SaaSworks partnerships. But I happen to be where our leadership off site was, which was in Woodstock, Vermont. And I explained that to Jim because the cell phone quality is part of why we picked it, is that there's pretty much no cell service. And I just said, hey, If I lose you, I'll call you back from the landline. I'm in Woodstock, Vermont. Turned out that Jim also had just purchased some land in this building, a house out in Woodstock, Vermont. So we had this common connection right off the gate that got us talking and overall just had a really strong connection with Jim. I knew what he was able to do at HubSpot. I knew if he was going to do something, he was going to be all in. Then as we further got into conversations about the actual product that they're building, it really was the third pillar of what our core vision has always been, which has been around being able to bring marketing, sales and customer success services to the marketplace and be able to really help a company manage their whole revenue. So when I heard that he was doing this, my eyes just lit up. I explained our vision. He explained exactly where they see the roadmap for the product going. There was too much alignment not to do work together. I think the biggest evaluation after that point we both did is said. And I think this is a good thing to think about. Anytime you do a partnership is great because I think a lot of companies, when they think about mergers and acquisitions, they think about partnerships, they think about all the business components, but they don't think about culture. And if that's going to be an important factor, if you're really going to deeply integrate with an organization, are you going to build a similar type of culture? Are those two parties going to be able to really interact well? Are the employees going to have shared common values? And we were confident after doing a lot of due diligence on both sides of the table, that we are really culturally aligned. And I think that's one thing you'll notice, Whether it's Hula, HubSpot, Saasworks, we're kind of fanatical about making sure not only we're going to do great business together, but we're going to have a great culture and be able to really have that shared alignment around that with.

Our partners, at least as far as the saasworks side of things is concerned. Having someone like Jim, who is the chief people officer at HubSpot, to do that cultural evaluation was great to have, but he obviously wasn't the only person involved from that side. Can you talk about who else was involved in that process of working together and getting the partnership put together?

Yeah. So after starting out conversations with Jim, his co founder, Vipulshaw, got involved in the conversation as well as the rest of the New Breed leadership team. So Taylor and Dana and Dana really spearheaded it from the New Breed side. And Dan is kind of the keeper of culture at New Breed, if anyone knows her. So it was about a year and a half, just under of conversations, before we really nailed down the partnership framework, what it was going to look like, how we wanted to do business together. But really the majority of time, we actually just wanted to spend some time getting to know each other, getting to know each organization. They did some trips up to to Newbreed. We went down to Boston and went and met with some of their first employees and really made sure that we had this shared vision and shared culture. And the rest is just really now figuring out how to scale it.

It's been really incredible for me being able to work with and talk to Jim and Vibpel in the limited amount of time I've had already. They both bring such a wealth of experience and knowledge to the table. And again, even though I've only had a handful of meetings with them and a handful of interactions, they've all been so helpful for me. And I can't wait for the rest of the employees at New Breed to get some exposure there as well. Is there anything else that you can speak to in terms of the structure between the relationship between New Breed and sasworks and how we anticipate that looking moving forward?

Yeah. One of the things we thought about was in order for partnerships to be really successful, and this is something we learned from HubSpot. Right. Is you need to deeply integrate the two organizations. Right. And so we said, great, how can we structure this so that all parties involved, it's kind of mutually always set up to win. So what we came up with a scenario is that Jim and Vipul actually joined a newly established board of directors at New Breed, where they're going to be offering advisory advice on our growth as well. As I joined the board on sasworks, so we are commonly held. We're both at each other's helms, if you will. And that way, each step of the way we're reinforcing the partnership really needs to be mutual.

It's really awesome to see how well integrated we already have been. Looking forward to having them come up to our office at some point soon, and hopefully we'll be able to step down there as well. Last thing I wanted to ask about related to the partnership with SaaSworks is, and I know there's a lot happening behind the scenes, so we might not necessarily be able to talk about everything here, but is there anything else that you can share in terms of what our clients and the industry as a whole can expect over the next couple of months and years.

Yeah, I would say I think I can share more short term and I think we're still working out exactly the long term and timing on the roadmap. But the big thing that I think where especially for clients of new breeds today and ones in the future is this really allows us to bring a true customer success platform that's geared towards small, small and mid market companies. Right. So you've got the game sites of the world that have been focused on enterprise. There really hasn't been a great solution in the customer success space to really enable the client customer success customer success managers to be able to, especially at subscription based companies or in SaaS companies to be able to really handle the amount of customers they have in volume. So it's really an enterprise solution that's geared for the SMB and mid market, that's easy to use, really low friction on the adoption side and then allow Newbreed to continue to not only help them on customer acquisition, but also help them on our clients on retention and expansion as well. So we're really excited that it's kind of the third leg to the the tripod and be really able to help our clients in each of those key areas that really help, which are really the three main functions of revenue.

It's definitely an exciting opportunity ahead of us here. I'm looking forward to seeing what comes out of it over the next couple of months. But just to go back and recap real quick, so we talked about Hula. We got a new place that we're moving to pretty soon. Talked about the elite tier, top partner in sasworks. Are there any other announcements that we can look forward to this year? Is there anything else that you're looking forward to in 2020?

Guido wants the podcast to find out first. Let's see. I think we might need to do an episode here in a couple months, Guido, and we can announce a couple more things. But yeah, 2019 was a great year for new breed. 2020 is going to be another breakout year. Really excited. Not only now are the things that we're accomplishing these big milestones at a company level, but also a lot of individual awards people are receiving. So I'm excited that I can share more in a couple of months. So I think I just signed myself up for podcast on Guido's editorial calendar year shortly.

I'm going to add it to your calendar pretty soon. Make sure I have space blocked off. Your calendar is always really busy but this was a lot of fun. Is there anything else that you want to share with the audience about the accomplishments that we have so far this year before we close out for the day?

I would just say we're going to I have to thank all of our customers and partners for trusting in us over these years. So we couldn't have all of these great accolades and this had a breakout year in 2019 without both our great clients as well as our great partners. And really looking forward to be able to take all those that growth and accomplishments and be able to reinvest back in new breed to have another breakout year in 2020 and bring more exciting offerings to the market.

I'm certainly looking forward to it. Patrick, thank you so much for joining today. For everyone listening, our podcast is produced by myself and Evan Hodick, who provides music and editing for the show. We have a lot more great episodes on the way, so make sure you subscribe to the podcast so that you can get notified when our next episode comes out. In the meantime, check out newbreedmarketing.com for other great resources. Thank you everyone for listening and we'll see you next time.