The Achieve Podcast - Anthony Enrico (LeanScale)

Welcome to another episode of the Achieve Podcast, the show where we highlight leaders, creators, and entrepreneurs, those who are building meaningful businesses, shaping their industries, and having an impact. I'm Taylor Baker Baker, your host, and excited today to be joined by Anthony Enrico, the CEO and founder of LeanScale, and you can find them at leanscale.team. So Anthony, thank you again for joining us today. First off, And secondly, give us the backstory for those getting to know you. What, who, what brought you into this niche you guys are in? Who are you currently serving?

Yeah, happy to share. So at LeanScale, we serve B2B SaaS and AI companies. We come in typically around Series A, and then we hang with them till pre-IPO. So we have a few companies that we're working with that are marching towards that right now. We do all go-to-market operations. Sales ops, marketing ops, customer ops, partner ops. And we do everything from managing the strategy, laying out the processes of GTM infrastructure, and the big hairy part is managing all of the go-to-market systems. So think Salesforce, HubSpot, Clay, and now the biggest system we're managing as of late is Claude. So everything that impacts your go-to-market architecture infrastructure, we manage for fast-growing VC-backed companies.

Gotcha. And how big is the team and organization right now?

Team, we're just around 25 full-time right now. And we've been around since 2021, kind of technically, fully live in June of '22.

That's awesome. And for you looking back, what would you say have been some of the biggest turning points that have molded the way you think about running the organization?

One would be just getting started, kicking off the origin of LeanScale. When, when I started, I already had two kids. So I needed to do something that was also bringing in revenue right away. I knew I wanted to, to start my own thing, but it needed to be revenue generating out the gate. So I think for a services company, that's relatively doable, uh, especially if you have expertise in a, in a specific niche or field. And I think that part was easier than I thought.

It—

thought maybe it'd be harder, and that was one of the biggest things that I learned.

Gotcha. Okay, now this next question is kind of a two-part question. When it comes to your outreach, your messaging, your marketing systems, What have you found that's been working well to keep and attract customers or clients?

I mean, as the go-to-market operations company, we're using all kinds of tools. Uh, my favorite tool is Ample Market. Ample Market does the sequencing, but it also has the database and it also connects really well with LinkedIn. I don't think there's a better LinkedIn automation platform than Ample Market. Um, of course we use Clay as well as we're doing enrichment and looking for certain signals. And those are, those are the two main ones. And outside of that, um, Claude, so using them to do deep research on potential customers, building assets that act as really strong lead magnets. Um, and then also facilitating that mid-funnel process, building SOWs, we're using we're using Claude to pretty much automate and run that whole part of our business.

That makes sense. Now, next part of the question is, where do you still see opportunity or money on the table?

Yeah, it's always more. I think for us, there's opportunity to add more services, do more for our customers. We already have a good relationship with quite a few fast-growing companies. So if we can find ways to do more, so there's an opportunity. Um, I think it's very important for a company like us to have strong opinions in, in our space and create meaningful, helpful content that the market can engage with. So I think there's opportunities for us to do a much better job of that. And I think that would in turn attract more customers to us.

That makes sense. And who is your ideal customer?

So B2B, SaaS, or AI, kind of a blend now. It's tough to say which is which. We're usually working with the chief revenue officer, sometimes the chief marketing officer, and within the persona of the chief revenue officer, usually a CRO that has done this before. So it's not their first rodeo. They've built and scaled startups before. They know the operational walls they're about to run into, and they know they need a team that can get it done quickly.

That makes a lot of sense. Now, you mentioned AI and, and some of the play in cloud. Where have you guys found ways to utilize AI internally, and where do you still see more opportunity with that?

Yeah, so every single person at LeanScale is cloud certified. They're Claude Code power users and it's embedded in our workflow every day. So it's almost as, it feels almost as silly as asking like how your team would be using Google inside. So everything they do is touching Claude in some way. Some practical cases, we have a lot of project management work with the service that we offer. So taking transcripts, using that into running it through our agents to create tasks in our PM system, scope out projects, reference our playbook so we know we're following the level of quality across all the projects that we offer and deliver. That's a big one on the delivery side. Uh, we're using it to analyze our own business, query data, run data, make sense of everything we're looking at. And then in our prospecting and outbound, we're using it to create, you very, very tailored unique assets for almost mockups of how we could lay the GTM infrastructure for a potential company. And those have been really, really successful in helping convert new customers come in.

That makes sense. And I'm curious, 'cause there's a lot of questions, I've done quite a few interviews now where people are like, all right, which AI tool and it changes, it seems like every month, I'm one step ahead. What made you guys double down on Claude and are you still opening and exploring other ones?

I think Claude's winning the, the business use cases right now. So there's some, there's some creative use cases where you might want to use other platforms, but for most of the type of work we do, which ends up being producing written or presentations or moving data around. Claude outperforms on all of those. Um, so they just seem to be further ahead right now, but who knows what happens next week.

So true, because yeah, I mean, I think I started with ChatGPT and then I'm using Claude more and more, like, and so it's interesting to see this, but they just seem to get further and further ahead. So it is interesting you've adapted them, you saw it in advance, which is awesome, and you get everybody, hey, we're doubling down on this one. And you picked the right one, which is good. That's smart. Good intuition. So, Anthony, if you had to pick one constraint to focus on and solve over the next 90 days that would change the trajectory of the business, what would it be?

Yeah, this one's always a moving target. So yeah, for us, it always moves between either building top of funnel, getting our talent funnel. So we're AI native and empowered, but we still need people to deliver the service. So that tends to be a constraint. And then efficiency bottleneck, how quickly can we get projects done? How efficiently can we get things done? I think as of recent, we've done an excellent job in this bucket. So our efficiency has significantly increased, especially with adoption of cloud, building our own agents, building our own apps to facilitate what we're doing. We just went through a good round of talent acquisition. So we brought on some really strong operators to, to manage the accounts that we've closed. So the next 90 days is probably going to be top of funnel for us where we'll focus and then we'll go through this flywheel again.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. That's another really good system. Wet wild machine. Now, when you look at your own journey, the wins, the mistakes, what lessons stand out to you and which ones do you feel like took longer to learn than they should have?

Yeah, uh, there, there's so many. There's a long list. Um, lesson one, and I've learned so much with so many mistakes. Um, lesson one, if anybody's listening to this and thinking about starting a company, especially in the services base, just do it earlier. Um, it's, it's probably easier than you think. So I would just do that as a level of encouragement. That was the biggest thing. I was like, oh, okay, this big scary thing, we start it and then, um, all of a sudden you just have a new job and things are running and working. So I'd say don't be afraid to just jump in and do it. Um, a couple other things, I think try not to get too fancy with pricing and packaging. Uh, there's models that work. I tried to do that, try to be innovative in that area of our business. And there's just certain pricing and packaging models that will work for your service and just copy it and innovate later if you have to. Um, on the talent side, it's, I feel like people talk about this, hey, the difference between an A player and a B player. I don't know if people really understand the magnitude of difference. Between having an A player in seat and having a B player in seat. When you have an A player in your organization, they'll add 20, 40, 50% of quality improvement to the rest of the people around them as well. And when you have a B player, even if they just need a little bit of handholding, it starts to take away from everybody else. So I think the importance of having a plus, plus talent and paying for it. It'll feel like you can't afford it, but you actually can't afford to have B players on your team. That's the biggest thing I've learned over the almost 5 years of running LeanScale.

Wow, the B player tax that comes.

And it's massive.

How do you discover that upfront? Or do you have like an incubation process where they're on probation for 60 days?

So we do, we do, we have a 90-day probation period. So we're going to be evaluating, but you want to catch it before you even make the hire. Biggest thing, slow down the hiring process. Take some time. Get multiple people involved. So we tend to have 6 or so people involved before we make a final decision on anyone. Check references thoroughly. Because you'll pick up things that even if I know sometimes references are baked, but you'll still pick up on tonality of the person delivering the message and you'll see if there are any red flags and then have some type of test. So we have a presentation that you deliver as your final interview and everybody's done it. I don't care if you're on the leadership team here at LeanScale, you're entry-level analyst, Um, everybody's gone through this and really what you're assessing is how much do they care about their work?

Ooh, I like that.

It's less about, is it technically sound? It's more how much effort did they put into this? Cuz that's how much effort they're gonna put into your company once they start.

That's a beautiful clarifier right there. Wow, how much do they care about their work?

Like, that is a gold nugget. Anyway, and A players care. A players cannot help themselves. They, they would be embarrassed to do B-level work. Like, they couldn't do it if they tried. So if you see subpar work in some type of test, then you're gonna know, okay, you're a B player.

So how do you differentiate that? Because there's a distinction between that versus like the perfectionist mentality. It's never good enough. And it's like, okay, sometimes it's good enough. Deploy it. Like, you're not gonna get— like, how do you define that fine line? Does that make sense? Like the straight-A student who can't handle real life where things don't always run perfectly smooth.

It's always easier to hold people back and pull people back than to have to push people forward. So if you had to pick between the two, Yes, I would rather manage a perfectionist every day.

Yes. Yeah, I love that, that B-player tax, because the net effect on the team, like what you're saying, plus 20, 40% or neutral or negative, even 10%. Wow. Pay for that talent. Wow. So when you— last question— when you think about the next stages of the business, what are you most excited about?

For us, I'm most excited about helping our customers with Clock. So it is, it has fundamentally changed how we operate at LeanScale, how we go to market at LeanScale. And I know all of the companies that we work with are going to benefit more and more, and they're just releasing new things every single day. So, you know, RevOps, go-to-market ops tended to be framed around like Salesforce, HubSpot, Clay was kind of the new thing. I think the real value is going to come when we're implementing agents, we're helping people design their repos, we're implementing workflows that work and matter, and we're training people on the mindset of how to leverage AI. So I'm really, really excited about that. I think that there's a huge opportunity. We're right at the beginning and we have so much room to grow. With this tailwind behind us. Um, and it gets me excited because all the people here at LeanScale will have so many opportunities, and everybody here in our company is just learning things that you can't learn sitting in one company at a time. They're seeing it across 4 to 6 accounts at any given day.

Yeah, and I love that distinction you mentioned, like, learning how to think about AI and how to utilize it. And so what would you say to businesses? Because everybody's not— a lot of businesses are slow. They're like, ah, I don't know. I know I need to get into it, but there's so much unknown. Like, would you say to those businesses to kind of get them over that hump and say, adopt it, use it?

Yeah, I would say don't be intimidated by it. It's not that big of a deal. If you don't know what to do, you can always ask Claude what to do. So just start doing it. Just start getting it into the hands of your team. And don't worry about anything being too fancy. Just start baking it into everybody's workflow. Very similar, it'd be silly to be like, oh, how should my team be using Google? I don't know. When you give it to people, they'll figure it out. So I think you'll be surprised with what people will create and do when you give them the tools and train them on the basics. I do think there's a, a a level of enablement that you need on the basics of, you know, what does a context window look like? How do you create a workflow that creates specialized agents in a manner that can actually get your overall job done the way you want it done? How do you organize a repo? How do you feed it context? So those, those things I think will give people the basics and then they're going to build some beautiful stuff.

Yes, yes. I would say the analogy has come to my mind with this topic that's come up is the, the flip phone smartphone dilemma, where it's like smartphones have a similar format regardless which brand you get. Once you start using it and you learn the basics, how to move your apps around, what an app is, and also you're like, okay, and you start customizing your phone to your need, your life, your needs, and people who are switching, like you said, they need that basic understanding, that good training. And do you guys provide all that? Is there a schooling program that you recommend? Because I've had people ask me like, hey, where can I go learn about this? And there's so many places they can. Is there one you prefer, or do you just do internally?

Yeah, so for us, um, we started with the Cloud certification, so our team has gone through that. Then we do a lot of internal enablement. We have a few people that are just deep on Reddit and X and know everything that's going on with AI every day. They're training our team how to use everything, training me how to, how to do everything. So I think it's a mix. There's some external, but things are changing so much. So I would, if you can go to the source, go to Anthropic, go to OpenAI, go to Gemini, whatever model you're using, they should have some good enablement. And then you're going to have to enable on your own context. So you'll have to invest some of your own as well.

Yeah. Yes. I love that. Any final words for our listeners or those on a similar journey?

Just stay in there. If you're running a business, I know there's ups and downs. You know, I think the people that do well are the ones that endure and sustain and survive. So just keep going and keep innovating, keep iterating, keep doing what you need to do. And if you haven't and you're thinking about it, give it a shot. Take a leap of faith. If it doesn't work, you can always go back to one of your jobs. No problem.

I love that. Take that leap of faith. Thank you, Anthony, so much for coming on and sharing the insight and overcoming some of those fears people have with AI, like the modern shift that's happening. So for those who want to learn more, then go to leanscale.team, then go to LinkedIn, anywhere else you to send them.

That's perfect. Hit the website, or you can find me at LinkedIn, Anthony Enrico, uh, throw LeanScale at the end, you'll find me right away.

Awesome. And so yeah, reach out. And thank you to today's sponsors, Achieve Fractional, which provides fractional executive leadership for growing businesses. And if you enjoyed the episode, share it with a friend, with a colleague. If you're not sure how to start the journey, reach out to Anthony and the team, and they can help your team, train them, get them going. And get your business going where it needs to be in the forefront of this AI movement instead of trailing behind. So reach out, and we'll see you on the next episode of the Achieve Podcast.