E50: The Secret to Succeeding in PE Owned Software Companies

I think it's, we all do this. I mean, whatever is your job, you have a family, you have a salary, and you have a list of bills to pay, right? And you do for your own personal business, right? Or personal life. And would you buy the new car? Would you buy the boat? Or can you afford to get a sheep? Well, yes, you can. But then I cannot pay the meal to my family. And you kind of balance it. You want to send the kids to private school? Yes, no, maybe. Some, some people are making sacrifice to make that happen. And that happens in the business. That happens in the business too, right? It's not infinite money you have. You need to have an educated bet. It's not gambling. The great thing is that in a private equity-run company, this is something that is very distributed, right? And this gives all of us the opportunity to be, let me say, the CEO of your own business, right? You have, you have your budget, you have your target, you have expenditure and revenues, right? Mm-hmm.

Welcome to the High Performance Sales Leader Podcast. And today, my guest is Mauri Garavello, who's the SVP at Qlik. But he is a world citizen. He has lived in more places than I can mention quickly. So I'm going to ask him that question. But he's also worked for some incredible companies, starting out from IBM, through WebSense, Forcepoint, Dynatrace, and now currently at Qlik. So, Moritz, thank you so much for joining me today.

Thank you, Perry, for having me, and thank you for what you do. I mean, I know there are a lot of people out there eagerly looking for your podcast. So thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. I am always fascinated by people who change lanes and succeed. So whether it is in changing and living in different Countries and locations, whether it's in different job functions, and you've done some significant or different types of companies. So it's the triple jump. So tell me, you started, you know, you started out in a techie role. You're, you know, you're now in SVP. Give me a little glimpse of how that journey evolved.

Yeah, no, you're right. Little I did know when I was young where this would have taken. Sometimes the turn is because the company needs, the business needs, sometimes because you like, sometimes it's because you take a gamble. There are times where you do because the family needs these or the family likes that, right? So no, it's been a nice journey across the globe, across the industry. Started as a techie, an engineer, doing night shifts and installing the— what was back then the outsourcing, like the server for internet was 2000-ish and where we were all in the bubble. And then, I don't know. I mean, I didn't plan it. It happened. The business needed it. So, slowly, little by little, moved into sales and started loving it. And when you are in sales, then little by little, you move to management and you start getting a sense of everything coming together, right? That's probably the story.

That's brilliant. And you talked about Need, opportunity, family, you know, it's very agile, right? Tell me about the different locations you've lived in. And I guess some of those moves, what took you there? Because I've heard Rio de Janeiro to Singapore to US, you know, you've done it all. Yeah.

No, no, more than happy. More than happy. Maybe I remember I was a single young guy in Italy getting the call from my boss on a Sunday afternoon. Saying, hey, do you have your passport ready? And that was how I ended up spending an extended time in Istanbul, in Turkey. It was fun. You have no commitment to the family. You just pack a— I packed very light. It was winter in Milan. I thought, hey, Turkey must be super warm. I packed light and I landed in Istanbul under the snow. That was fun. I didn't expect that, right?

Mm-hmm.

But it's, again, that one was, uh, the first one was not planned. You are in the right spot the business has a need and you are the only one that picks up that call on Sunday, right? That's probably the right definition. But then you start loving it and you start building your career around being available for those opportunities when they come. And so it develops, it develops and started traveling and moving. I was, again, I was young, but then I got no longer young, right? And then you start getting married and now moving when you're married is a different ball game. It's not just pack your luggage, it's talk to your wife and does it make sense? She had a pretty successful business, a pretty successful career.

Right.

And we were all excited, right? But I remember that day I told her, hey, we got an offer to move and the posting is in Asia. We can pick wherever we want. And she was excited. We were excited. We started planning and then It's like 2, 3 weeks into, and her boss comes to her and says, hey, Alessia, when are you going to resign? When is your last day? And she kind of got, oh mama, I need to resign. I built a career and now to follow my husband, I need to give it away. It was hard for her, absolutely. And I'm blessed that we took the decision together and she was very supportive. And so sometimes, well, most of the time, it's not just your own decision, right? It's everyone together.

Very true.

The family, the business, Yeah.

And so you've now worked for a couple of companies with private equity, and private equity companies are running a majority of companies now. And I hear the word PE, and it means different things to different people, from people who are like, oh, I don't want to work for PE, to I met people who specialize in PE because they thrive in that environment. And what I'm hoping to ask you a couple of questions today is to really unpack is it, what does it take? Now, I can already listen to you tell me about adaptability and change just through your own personal decisions, which I can already tell you would be successful in this environment, but tell me, what do you think it takes to succeed in a PE company?

Yeah, I'll get to that, uh, to that question, but first I don't want to discount the fact that At first it's shocking, right? I remember I was in a public trading company, early stage of my career, making some money. You have these stocks that you vest every month and you can sell on the market. That's exciting. And then it comes the call from your boss and, hey, PE has acquired the company. They're taking us private. And you say, okay, I lost my stocks, right? And then they call and they say, your boss is no longer here. And then the boss of the boss is no longer here. This was shocking at first, and it changes your way of operating probably overnight, right? Now, as usual, when in times of change, you just navigate the change. You need to be flexible. And then actually, and it was 20, 25 years ago, so probably was early stages of these firms entering in the software or in the IT business. But then it turned out to be probably one of the best opportunities for my career and my colleagues as well, because Private equity, that they operate very differently, no doubt, is no longer sell anything at any cost, just sell, get me more revenue. It becomes more, you're part of the company. You need to grow the company. There's no more silos in the company. It's not that you run sales and Priya runs the marketing side, or someone else runs the R&D. We all run the company and you need to coordinate. You have your own target, but you have a bigger mission that is Making the company efficient, right? I tell to some of our colleagues here in Coleco, we are owned by one of the best private companies, I would say. I've worked with them about 3 times now, so there must be something good in what they do. But I tell them it's probably like an accelerated master in business admin. There are people that they go through university, then they take some role, and then they take a year off and they take an MBA. It's the same when you are in private equity, right? Because you need to get to understand the balance sheet. And I would say probably most of my colleagues now, they master balance sheet better than any other person out there on the market, because that's what makes a private equity-owned company working efficiently, right? So it's a great opportunity. You still have to run as fast as you run in a public company. But yes, you also have, you don't have these, you have the target, it's 90 days target. You are in sales, you have a number, you go through what it takes, the passion. But then you also have a longer mission that is, hey, we have to plan for an exit, 3, 4, 5 years. The company to exit has to be bigger, more efficient, lean. And so you also work for that longer-term mission. Don't discount that going public is exciting. I had the great opportunity to do this a couple of times, once from a private equity standpoint. We popped the champagne and it was fun, right? It was fun to be a public company again. You feel proud because you took the company through the journey to be ready to be publicly traded again, right? I would not say it's the 2 different jobs or 2 different situations. But, but yes, there is a great opportunity in private equity for especially younger managers or people that are agile, people that want to learn a lot, right?

Yeah. You know, in my own career journey, I was the head of sales for one of the FedEx businesses, and they were looking at a managing director, which is my boss. I was reporting to a managing director, and they were looking at internal applications and external applications. When I put my hand up for the role— this is 15 years back— they said that you've got all the revenue skills, your results are fantastic, but you don't have experience running a balance sheet. Actually, the company paid for me to go to the Australian Institute of Management and do a 3-month financial management course so that not only did I understand a balance sheet, I actually understood that there was more than the top line. There was a bottom line that you need to manage, right? And that was transformational in that process. So there are so many other elements that you need to be aware of. So tell me, in your case, how do you deal with the pull and push of delivering a top line number, but also managing with the Cost pressures that you've got to manage. What are some of the, some advice that you would have for somebody who's caught in that tension? How do you manage it?

Yeah, I think it's, we all do this. I mean, whatever is your job, you have a family, you have a salary, and you have a list of bills to pay, right? And that's, and you do for your own personal, personal business, right? Or personal life. And would you buy the new car? Would you buy the boat? Or can you afford to get a sheep? Well, yes you can, but then I cannot pay the meal to my family. And you kind of balance that. You want to send the kids to private school? Yes, no, maybe. Some people are making sacrifice to make that happen. And that happens in the business. That happens in the business too, right? It's not infinite money you have. Yes, sometimes you can take a bet, but the business or the family budget is not really loving the bet, right? You need to have an educated bet. It's not gambling. You have to have your data right, and then you say, I put the dollars there. The same is running the business, right? Do you open— we live in APAC, right? We have a multitude of countries. Do you open the business in Laos? Well, there is certainly money to be made in Laos. Is it the right time to stretch and to go there, or would you double down in another country where you already have established business? And those are decisions that we all take. The great thing is that Probably in a private equity-run company, this is something that is very distributed, right? We take those decisions here in APAC. We discuss, obviously, we have a CFO, we have a CRO, we discuss with them, but we come up with this proposal. And this gives all of us the opportunity to be, let me say, the CEO of your own business, right? You have your budget, you have your target, you have expenditure and revenues, right?

I can completely see how that has enabled you to have visibility on where you're going, but also have to deal with the challenges of— and I love the example of running a family budget, right? Because absolutely, if you say yes to one thing, you have to say no to something else. You cannot say yes to everything. So now let me ask you, there are some difficult decisions around people and situations that you have, I'm sure you've had to make. How do you make those difficult decisions and manage? Because people can say, oh, PE, it's very cutthroat, very cut and dry. And, but you're continuing to work in PE, right? So how do you make a choice between the difficult financial decision and the people impact? What advice would you give me?

Yeah. I mean, obviously it's very easy to be in front of an Excel and see what makes sense and what doesn't make sense. In reality, then it always comes the moment that I think you're talking with people, right? The night before is hard, right? The night before, even because of performance or different market position, sometimes you have to take a difficult decision and communicate these to a 3D living Human being, right? That's the night before. Most of the time you don't sleep or you think or sleep uncomfortably. What drives me to do that following morning? There's a couple of drives. One is the decision makes sense and there is a bigger group of people that gets impacted if you don't take that decision, right? That's problem number one. It's not one-to-one, it's one-to-many, right? The second one is that most of the time, especially when you refer to Part of the business that are no longer functional to the mission or performance issue and so on. You also talk to someone that is in a comfortable position because, hey, I have a job, I have a salary, but he's not in a great spot. I have a job that is no longer relevant for the business. I have a job where I'm not performing and I'm not sleeping well because every day I think that there is travel. So I'm not saying You're giving the opportunity to those people to find maybe a better sweet spot, but that's their reality. I remember my first situation discussing about a performance issue and eventually an exit with this colleague of mine. I studied, I went through all the videos, what you should say, what you shouldn't say. We went through the night of no sleeping, the morning with HR, we were in front of this person, we separated. And, and he was much older than me. So there is even this implication where you feel like I trained you up in there. And we are still in touch. He, after that, obviously he had a couple of months of difficulties, but then he found a job much more rewarding for him. He ended up running the country he was in, very successful. Nowadays we are friends. He told me that was, was a shocking moment, but was also a great opportunity for him to look at his career, find what he wanted, and eventually being much more successful rather than performing 80% and struggling. He went up for a series of promotions, right? So it's not all the cases the same, but it's really, we are all people that we get easily comfortable in where we are, even when it's not working. But when the situation forces us to do something else, we may find a better, sweeter spot for all, right? Then when it comes to PE, obviously we need to run a company that is lean, it's very efficient and so on. We go back to the budget that we discussed before, right? It's not that PE necessarily has a number of heads. Most of the time the PE out there, they start with 100 people, then they go down to 90 to finance a way to go to 110, right? There is this repositioning most of the time. time of the business where it makes more sense for the future. And that's the reality, right? And there are a lot of movements internally that can help as well.

Yeah. The biggest thing that I'm taking away from what you've said to me today, and I've seen in being a recruiter that's working with over 100 companies and 300 leaders, but I see people coming, going, changes on a daily basis, right? I think the most important thing is what I'd heard a couple of years back. And this was a leader who said, go and ask your manager that if you were going to cut one-third of the team, would I be in the cut that would go? Or would I be in the top third that you would keep at any cost? Right?

Yep.

And listen to that information. And then either increase your contribution, or find a new job. And I really thought about it because at the end, it's about mutual value. What you do has to be valuable to the company, too valuable to the company to not lose. And either you relocate to a more strategic area, or you are among the top third of the performers, or you find something else where you can be a top third. Because it's very hard to be in a non-priority business unit or in a role or a territory where you're not succeeding. So that's the biggest takeaway that I've— and from what you've said today, Maury, it really is around ensuring that there is a connection between fiscal prudence and running a successful business unit because it impacts others. There are still people who it impacts here, but also being careful around the human impact. So. Yeah. Thank you so much.

And it's very personal, right? I think no one wants to work in a business that is dying. No one wants to work without being successful. And it was last week, I was chatting with a friend of mine, a former colleague, and he was asking exactly this, right? I'm here, my boss resigned, the company is kind of signaling that the business may not be strategic anymore for the future of the organization. What should I do? It's his own decision. He can even decide to sit there and rest in peace, but eventually he knows that it is a conscious decision and he will not be able to blame for the results he will get. So I wish him good, but that's something that we all face.

Yeah. Well, Maury, this has been a very insightful conversation, and this is what I love about the fact that you've shared openly. People don't get access to this conversation to understand that, and I Appreciate you and your journey has been incredible. So thank you for sharing this with me.

Thank you for having me. And, and again, thank you for what you do. It's, it helps many people out there. Thank you.