Join host James Mackey and his guest Chris Fezza, CEO & Co-Founder at Admin Within as they discuss the fractional consulting models and how companies of all sizes can benefit. Explore hiring strategies, network power, and how companies should think about building an internal rev ops team.
Gain lessons on aligning technology with business needs and driving process improvements.
0:35 Cris Fezza's background
3:52 Fractional consulting for startups and scale-ups.
8:56 Retention and flexibility in talent acquisition
21:02 Leveraging networks
31:39 Building internal rev ops teams
Thank you to our sponsor, SecureVision, for making this show possible!
Our host James Mackey
Follow us:
https://www.linkedin.com/company/82436841/
#1 Rated Embedded Recruitment Firm on G2!
https://www.g2.com/products/securevision/reviews
Thanks for listening!
Join host James Mackey and his guest Chris Fezza, CEO & Co-Founder at Admin Within as they discuss the fractional consulting models and how companies of all sizes can benefit. Explore hiring strategies, network power, and how companies should think about building an internal rev ops team.
Gain lessons on aligning technology with business needs and driving process improvements.
0:35 Cris Fezza's background
3:52 Fractional consulting for startups and scale-ups.
8:56 Retention and flexibility in talent acquisition
21:02 Leveraging networks
31:39 Building internal rev ops teams
Thank you to our sponsor, SecureVision, for making this show possible!
Our host James Mackey
Follow us:
https://www.linkedin.com/company/82436841/
#1 Rated Embedded Recruitment Firm on G2!
https://www.g2.com/products/securevision/reviews
Thanks for listening!
Hello, welcome to the Breakthrough Hiring Show. I'm your host, James Mackey. Today, we are joined by Chris Fezza. Chris, thank you for joining us today.
Speaker 2:Hey James, thank you for having me on, very excited to chat.
Speaker 1:Very excited. Let's start with your background. Could you tell us about yourself?
Speaker 2:Sure, yeah, absolutely. So I have been working in tech and in sales and revenue operations pretty much my entire career. So from late late 2010, I was started at Living Social, which is a very was a very hot growing startup in DC. I eventually got acquired by its competitor, groupon, a couple years later and I was there as a company went from about 300 employees to, I think, just over 4,000 at one point, and that was all in the matter of two, three years. So it was really quite a ride. So a little bit of e-commerce experience there Went on to a software company that was also based in DC called Metalogix Software.
Speaker 2:It was about 200 people and then went to a larger, more established software company called TravelClick, which was about 1,200 people. So saw companies that were at different growth stages from startup to scale up to more established everything from 30 million AR up to 400 or 500 million and very intentionally wanted to try to get the different levels of experience at those companies. What does it mean to be an operator and supporting a revenue and go to market team that could be 20 people or could be 200 or 300 people.
Speaker 1:Nice for sure, and so right now it's also about your company a little bit yeah.
Speaker 2:So right now I am CEO of Admin Within. Admin Within is a company that is co-founded by myself and Ty. Francis and Ty and I actually worked together at Living Social, originally in sales ops. We took somewhat parallel paths in our careers and then came back together to start doing what we do in a consulting fashion, and we really saw that there was a need for companies that wanted to establish a go to market teams and they wanted to have a strong kind of operational rigor in doing that early, setting the right foundation for scale. And so there was a talent gap in the market. To be honest, there were not enough qualified sales ops and rev ops people and more and more companies demanding that skill set.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, originally we thought that we would be starting the company as largely a training company.
Speaker 2:So how do you take people that have what I call relevant experience?
Speaker 2:Maybe they were a BDR, that was very process driven.
Speaker 2:Maybe they were a financial analyst or something like that how do you train them in the things that they need to know to be good sales ops person, and train them in some Salesforce and systems administration stuff as well too, and so they could grow into that role and we thought that helping companies develop employees into that function was going to be easier than finding qualified people because there just weren't enough. So that's actually how we started as a training company and actually next door was one of our very early clients and we did a training program for them, for some of their employees, and ultimately the business model kind of very quickly in the first year shifted from that to a more of a done for you consulting, as some of the clients that we had, as well as some of the companies we're talking to. They just presented with really immediate needs and they said this idea of growing the talent is a good one, but it takes time and we need things done like right now, because we've got goals and we were trying to scale aggressively.
Speaker 2:So they were looking for us to do the work for them, and that's, I think, a little bit more of a traditional consulting model.
Speaker 1:Right, right, and I think, too, it's like this. So, guys, everyone, what we're going to do today is we're really going to be diving into fractional consulting models, particularly for startup and growth stage. We will talk about some use cases for enterprise as well. Both Chris and I own consulting businesses. I do recruiting solutions, chris doing Revop solutions. On my end, we do full blown RPO, meaning we might have 10, 20 recruiters assigned to a large business to run essentially a certain amount of hires per year for a certain department, right, the company might say we need 500 engineers, right, something like that.
Speaker 1:But Chris and I also, we work with a lot of early stage companies, and so a lot of these early stage companies don't necessarily need these massive teams of consultants to come in. And so what we're seeing an emergence of in the startup and growth stage market is a lot more fractional services. So it's in our case, for instance, it's like fractional and even more so on demand, so it's a little bit more flexible and nimble that meets the needs of startup and scale up customers, particularly with the volatility that we see in the tech industry Right, everything that's going on this year, for instance. So I think what we really want to do is dive into fractional solutions how scale ups are leveraging these solutions. Startup scale ups and larger category leading companies are leveraging these solutions. I think we're going to talk a little bit about our founding, founding story, and we both have a lot of experience speaking to customers right, and speaking in terms of what their problems are and how we can go about solving those problems. And I think it would be helpful to provide context on how we essentially landed on these business models, because it really comes from, okay, there's a need in the market, right. We're growing as a result of that, and so we can explain essentially the value propositions, the setbacks and why companies are considering this.
Speaker 1:Just because, again, from an executive perspective for you, tuning in this is becoming a lot more common. It has a lot to do with the market volatility, as Chris says. It has a lot to do with plugging somebody in quickly that can get the job done, and there's a lot of other essentially value propositions as well. So, chris, you said that the business model shifted to go from worth of training shop into a hands on consulting, do it yourself type of operation. I think I understand that and then the assumption I'm going to make that I would like for you to test to validate, depending on whether or not you agree, is.
Speaker 1:I think one of the reasons is that early stage companies scale up to companies really you're not going to have the infrastructure for in-house training, right, they can hire you or they can work with you to help train, but the reality is that if they're investing in training individuals that ultimately might leave in a year or two, they may not really have the budget or infrastructure, even when they're working with a partner to put up like that, essentially like flywheel of hey, we're going to provide all of these training resources and we're going to have this really well defined career path progression for you and all these opportunities to continue to move up to retain the folks right, like some of the best training programs that I know, it's okay, they're going to hire a developer at a very low cost and they have a great training program and once the developer reaches a certain competency, they're going to increase their compensation to retain them for another year or two.
Speaker 1:But the reality is that a lot of startups and scale ups may not feel like they're in the position to do that and unless they have a really experienced maybe like VP of people talent that can do that at an earlier stage, and so a lot of the times it's easier to just plug somebody in that already knows what they're doing. Is that basically why it's hard for companies to train their own people, or what are you saying?
Speaker 2:Yes, there were a couple of things that I think made it difficult. One is just the lead time the lead time to competency, right. So when you're training someone you're essentially investing in their future and investing in the future benefits to company. It's an upfront cost and it's an upfront time investment that you hope will pay off over time as they pick up the skills necessary to really contribute at a higher level. But that does take time and I think with any job position certainly in REVOP's roles like experience is the most valuable thing, certifications, other things like they hold value, but the time that you've actually been in seat doing the job is the most value and we can try to accelerate that through training and through guidance and through having access to a community of folks who can help answer questions and that sort of thing. That can definitely accelerate it. But the reality is true startups they're trying to be in hyper growth, like they don't necessarily have that time to wait, or they might wanna do that, but they also might need some true experts to tackle things for them immediately. Immediate priorities They've got monthly priorities, quarterly priorities. They're not necessarily thinking about the one year, two year out or able to focus only on that long time horizon.
Speaker 2:And the second thing which I think you mentioned is retention. Like, how do companies truly retain talent? Yes, obviously, if they're creating a good environment where they're training and working on employee development, that obviously can help. But there is that reasonably sized upfront investments, and in this case we were talking about really having people that were new to a job function. So they're new to REVOP's. They've never done it before, like hopefully they'll like it. If they don't like it, they're gonna wanna move on too, and so you've got some variability there and just like, how long will people stick around?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think so. I think too, like just in this market, having flexibility on a P&L to help with surges and projects, and I think a lot of the times, like, we'll see customers that come in for an initial project but then they end up leveraging us on an ongoing basis, and particularly for some of the on-demand services, they might start PALLS, which is also a value proposition that some of these fractional services can provide. But yeah, I think it's when we particularly start to get into growth stage organizations, we'll usually see some kind of split where, depending on the market conditions, they might have, let's say, 70% of their staff in-house. That's what we were saying, more so last year, where they would have 70% of the recruiters in-house and about 30% augmented out to companies like mine, for instance. But that was really more so in the healthy growth market.
Speaker 1:Now what's really interesting is we're getting master service agreements in place that actually don't have an initial scope. It outlines pricing in terms, but it's more from the perspective of hey, we had to cut the majority of our in-house recruiters. If we get roles opened up, we are not ready to deliver on this, so we're gonna go ahead and get this master service agreement in place so that we can quickly get an SOW followed up statement of work in place quickly to move next month, cause we think it might be in the next month or two. So we're also seeing that kind of value proposition where basically companies hardly have anyone in-house for an arcade-style acquisition.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean it makes perfect sense. I think like I was meeting with the CFO of one of our clients last week and he mentioned that essentially they have as their scale-up company, right, so they do have a team internally that they're working with, but as they are trying to do more and more things, improve their operational excellence in their lead to cash systems that they're using, they do have some gaps just in terms of the types of roles and experience that they need. And so he was saying, okay, there is a place where companies like yours and mine can step in fractionally and it's oh, if you need a developer with this type of skill set, you may not need them full-time, you might be able to get away with 20 hours a week and that's gonna solve your needs for the next six to 12 months. So, yeah, keep that off the P&L or take it out of your headcount overhead, put it in as a consulting cost. You can turn it on and off like a faucet. You're paying for really only what you need and you can get more kind of prescriptive with exactly what you need, and so that's really a way that we work with a lot of our more scale-up customers. It's not that they don't have a RevOps team at all, that they usually have great folks internally, but we can help supplement those folks in terms of expertise and capacity when they need it for specific priorities, and that's, I think, a company is able to justify that cost relative to those specific priorities more easily.
Speaker 1:Yeah, for sure. So I wanna make sure that to our audience like, we don't come across as biased as well. There are certain situations of which this may not be the best solution, or there's something where there needs to be a consideration. So there's the right checks and balances in place. So I can start.
Speaker 1:I think typically it's ideal to have, when you reach a certain stage of scale whether it's like around 50 to 100 employees in my case right, this might be different for RevOps, but where you need some kind of in-house leader to guide strategy for the department and make sure that basically, structured hiring right, a structured process to deliver on outcomes that are aligned with Northstar Metrics, is living in-house.
Speaker 1:Like when we're working with customers that are sub 50 employees, maybe seed series A organizations, a lot of the times we own actually implementing hiring best practices, the checks and balances to make sure they get the best folks in. However, we start to really push. Hey, you need a VP or a director at a minimum to come in and have internal oversight of what you're doing, so that we're more so able to just plug in like we can make suggestions. But at some point you want to start to move the leadership motion in-house so we can build out a manager or whoever else that we need to if we need to provide some oversight and we have senior level people on our end that can help with that. But I do think internal leadership gets becomes pretty important for us around the 50 employee milestone. Is that similar to what you see or like? What are your thoughts on that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, for it's a similar theme for us. I think the size is more dependent on the size of their go to market teams, usually sales marketing, like CS, maybe when those start getting above 25 people. But I would also kind of peg it up. It's going to be like a kind of a series B, it's when they're not no longer a startup, they're now into scale up mode. If they're trying to now take what they've got foundationally and continue to scale it. At that point, for that scaling I think it's certainly justifiable to bring in like a director level person to be that strategic person. And they're working hand in hand with the other business leaders. They're going to be there every day, day in, day out, focused on helping the company meet their objectives and helping to find what the strategy is. That's more, I think, where it's relevant and you can utilize that level of a person effectively and, at least for in Rebops, you can justify the high salary with all in comp at 200K plus potentially.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think I mean like a great VP of talent acquisition or people, in my case, right or a great executive, right, they're the ones that are going to be sitting in on leadership meetings, right, and maybe even presenting to a board. They're going to understand, they're going to have a deeper understanding of, they should have a deeper understanding of what are the top metrics that the company needs to provide and they should have an understanding about why, if the hiring plan is really aligned with that, like a great executive is going to understand, they're going to get. If, okay, x department has to hire these folks, is that really how clear is the causal relationship between hiring that person and achieving the company's goals and really partnering with other leaders within the organization to make sure that there is a very structured process to go through prior to a role being opened? So, as an external provider for us, we're not going through the motion of saying, okay, you say that you need to hire, like, go into a VPN engineering, all right, I understand, you need to hire these folks. Here's a 10 step process that we need to go through before a role is open to determine if this is actually the proper amount of headcount that you need to figure out how much capacity that your team has, how much additional capacity your team needs, why that additional capacity is needed. What projects are these folks going to be working on is their way to prioritize. So we're not working on all these projects and that we're just focusing on a smaller group of projects that are really going to drive the company forward.
Speaker 1:Right, all of the financial approvals, the executive approvals, the 3060 90 day plans all of those things should be done before a role is opened up and as us, as a provider, like we can say, hey, you should do these things, but it's not really our full time internal responsibility to be a executive within the company and make sure that strategy is fine tuned. And so, again, very early stage, it's usually owned by the CEO and so maybe there isn't as much as a need for that. But when you start to enter that scale up phase, you need somebody like laser focused on that, because otherwise the CEO is going to be bombarded from leaders saying, hey, I need X amount of people, and the CEO is not necessarily going to have the time to really dial into exactly why those folks are needed and if things are running as efficiently as they need to make sure that they're not actually over hiring, for that department Is a good example on our side right.
Speaker 2:I mean for sure, as the early stage CEO myself, I think having someone to kind of pressure, test and vet the hiring plans. In addition to the process, it's super important being able to create the structure, to say what is the need and why are we justifying this hire, and also think about it realistically in terms of what level you're going to hire, at, how long it's going to take to actually find someone and bring them on. When are they going to start to provide that benefit to the company after being on board? Yeah, I think it's super important. I'm curious, james, are you, is your team also working? Do you generally work and support like one department at a time or is it across departments where you might be balancing hiring process and priorities that are different leaders?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so we're typically working on a range of roles like between engineering to revenue, to GNA, and we sometimes we plug in specialists, typically for later stage scale ups, but for early stage companies we usually plug in a strong generalist that probably has experience with engineering and sales. It's we really go with the segmentation of the internal team. So if a company is a category leader and they have 10 engineering recruiters, then they're going to want specialists. If they're under 50 employees, they're going to want somebody who can fill essentially all of the roles. So it varies a little bit and I think the way to structure that is, again, if it's early stage, get a really strong generalist.
Speaker 1:Things are going to change right. This quarter it might be oh, we need engineers. Two quarters from now it's hey, we need to pivot and focus on sales, and so, opposed to getting in a resource that you have to pull out a couple months later, it's better to just get somebody who's done it all at an early stage. In my opinion and that's like true for an in-house hire too you can say, hey, we're primarily it's going to be a lot of technical hiring, so we want somebody who's experience is bent in that direction. But to me it's and honestly I don't.
Speaker 1:I'm not a huge believer that somebody even needs to exactly be a specialist in a role on the recruiting side. I'm more of just get a really high quality recruiter or recruiting leader and if they did primarily sales, like they'll figure out, like it just doesn't take too long to figure out how to hire great engineers, I mean, a great senior recruiter or recruiting leader could figure out the nuance for the roles like within a month. So they're not able to. It's not the right person, regardless of their background. So to me it's more so. What's the skill set? The one caveat to that is if somebody was doing like high volume hiring or like blue color hiring and then they're coming into an environment where it's senior level engineers or sales hires, that's the totally different motion and I don't think that. I think that really doesn't translate quite as well. But when it comes to a specialization like tech versus revenue or whatnot, I think it matters a lot less. I think having a startup scale up experience is a lot more important than why is.
Speaker 2:Yeah, makes sense, makes sense.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think too, just like getting. One of the things we wanted to talk about is just the evolution as leaders and growing companies, and I would love to just hear some stories from you as you've gone about growing your company, maybe more so light bulb moments as an executive, challenges that you face as an executive, how you've overcome those challenges. Does anything come top of mind? It could be more on like psychology side. It could be more on like process side or uncovering high leverage whens Like, where does your head initially go to on this topic?
Speaker 2:A few areas. I think that I doubt anyone will think this is a new revelation or be surprised by this, but I think the earlier you are, the more important it is to hire really good people who have the experience, you trust and they can take ownership of whatever they're doing themselves. I think that, like you, just don't have the capacity when you're very early to have oversight on everything. You have to really trust the team to be able to execute well in their work and to be the types of folks that will take initiative and do more than their ass, because you're not sitting there giving someone tasks and projects to do all the time. They have to be proactive and I think that's having those type of people in is really helpful. I mean early on, I would say hiring people to eat referrals, I mean, it seems. I just think it gives you a better chance of success when you don't necessarily have time to figure things out. You've got people that you already have some level of comfort with. Or, in the case of referrals, there's like a trust established somewhat of a known entity, and this is a good example too of, I think, where we leverage fractional folks and I think, where other companies could as well too early stage.
Speaker 2:Some types of services are very common fractional, such as like a lawyer counsel. A lot of times folks will just work through a law firm before having in-house. That's normal. But we use it for, like fractional HR executive, fractional finance executive, even some fractional like very senior engineering roles for us where we need a developer who's done a ton of different integration stuff and knows it inside and out, and like we might only need them for five or 10 hours a week but they can be so effective during that time that they can allow us to take that project on that has that component to it and be really confident in our delivering against that. So I think it's having different fractional folks to lean on, especially early on, it helps you to operate at a really high professional level and without anywhere near the cost of what it would take to bring on those people and usually less than the cost of hiring a lower level kind of person or less experienced person in that role.
Speaker 1:Right and I think, like one of the, when it comes to hiring people, the most important to me is supporting across the board at early stage, but leadership right. So what are the points that you mentioned? To me that really resonated was hiring people that you know at an early stage, and I think that's actually most important at leadership level. And the board, the advisory board, the venture capital firm, whoever is advising should some of those folks should have a very strong network of people that they can introduce you to, because I hesitate if a VC recommends an executive search firm. I'm just not a big believer in working with executive search firms.
Speaker 1:I think that, to the extent possible, almost at every stage at scale, it makes sense to try to hire through your network. If none of the advisors or board members have the connections, find an advisor that does right, or that's through the company, finding a way to compensate that person, or, as an executive, you individually having an advisor that you can pull in and incentivize some way. On the side, you have to surround yourself with people that have the connection. So in my case, I have some advisors that are more like technical operations, helping me avoid holes that I could fall in. But then I also have a couple of advisors that are on my board because of the relationships that they have.
Speaker 1:I need a strategic partnership with one company, or I need to pull in another board member, or I need an intro to a potential customer. There are some folks that are just incredibly well connected and I think that it's a lot more valuable to invest in that type of advisor than it is to invest potentially like an executive search firm or something like that. Particularly if you're a CEO and you have the ability to grant RSUs, it doesn't have to be a whole lot. People actually will become a strategic advisor for a very reasonable cost when it comes to RSUs A lot less than you may even think and you're able to essentially leverage their network. So it'll probably end up costing you less than an executive search firm and you're going to have a much higher hit rate and the quality of people that you hire. I find that to be such a critical strategy that I think is underutilized.
Speaker 2:It's really good and interesting point and honestly, I think I'm thinking back at the different companies that I've worked at, as well as some of our clients, and I know they are getting that from their board, from their investors, from their advisors. You can see it happening and, common example, I worked with the CEO previously who, I think, three companies in a row was placed by the investor because there was a confidence in that. He knew the business model, the area that they're operating in the industry and that sort of thing, and obviously was a known entity to them in terms of being able to positively perform. Sometimes there's folks who are specialists in turnarounds or something like that, and I think they, knowing who those people are and what they're good at, I think is a big value that some of those advisors can bring we. Actually this is something that I probably should look to leverage ourselves, because we don't do this today and probably really should. But I do think that the point about getting those referrals that way, I think it just cuts your cycles down massively because you know that when you are introduced to those types of people and you're talking to them, you're, of course, going to check their qualifications, you're going to check their fit for your company and what you're trying to do. But you're not starting with this big top of the funnel and then trying to get it down to your candidates. It's like they're already starting at a level where you're doing those qualifications checking and I think it really accelerates your yeah, you're hiring plans.
Speaker 2:Some of the folks that are leaders on our team today are, like I said, people that I knew before I had met or gotten introduced through people. Previously they were, they were RevOps folks. So maybe directors and VPs not necessarily executives, but really really strong operators and super glad to like have been able to bring them in early. The network effect actually just one. One kind of last thing on that is that's one thing that I think I didn't have as much awareness of or understood its importance like early on in my career Like I think that I was lucky to work at good companies and work with like great people and build just good connections through through being co workers but like that kind of helped catapults the company when we launched, because I had a number of CFO CEOs, vp of sales that were at companies where they had some gaps or they had some needs and maybe their their director of sales ops had left the company a month before they need to start annual planning for the next year, right.
Speaker 2:So they were like, hey, we've done this before with you, can you help us do it again? And there were several engagements that kind of started that way that have turned into a multi year relationships with new customers. So yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think the power of the network is critical, and the more that I think about it and I actually hadn't thought about this before but I feel like the strategic advisor strategy when it comes to introductions, could also work for individual contributor hiring. So one thing that I would like if you're a scale up and you have to hire a ton of engineers, why not look at ahead of technical recruiting that was out of scale up organization or growth stage? Right, let's say, a series series, series D that moved to a startup? Right, if you could find that profile, they might only be hiring a handful of engineers, but they have this network of hundreds of engineers that they've interviewed and worked within the past. So why not make that person a strategic advisor, give them like shares of rsu's they're getting a little bit of upside their freaking pumped and so grateful to have the strategic advisor role the first one of their life and basically the structure of the relationship is introduce us to engineers.
Speaker 1:I think that that strategy could even work. And I mean again, then you're like circumventing, like paying a lot of fees. I feel like I'm selling against myself right now. Think about that. I just feel like that would just be like a really good strategy. I thought about it in the past for leadership, strategic introductions, but I'm also thinking like this could definitely work at an IC level. You would have to figure out the exact right profile to recruit for a strategic advisor role. But that could definitely work, like in any specialization where it's hard to find enough good people. Find an advisor who has a large network of them that doesn't need to tap into it for their own company because they have a limited amount of space on their team and just boom Like you can get a referral bonus. And that way you don't even have to give them rsu's, give them the title, give them a certain amount per hire. That's even better.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that's. We had a little bit of the as living social kind of got got so big and then people went on to other companies and different things that you had a little bit of a living social mafia type effect, where I think this was happening not through the structured advisors, but the guy that ran the Salesforce team at Living Social. He's introduced to me and we've hired or worked with like multiple people that were on his team at that point and gone on to do other things in between, and now they're, and now they're working with us.
Speaker 2:So yeah yeah, it definitely works like, especially said like that operating at scale size where they know enough people and they've got enough network.
Speaker 1:Yeah, if I was like this way internal leader of tonic position I have to hire a hundred engineers. Let me find five heads of technical engineering that are no longer at their employer and reach out to all of them saying, hey, will you be an advisor? I want to. I want you to introduce me to the top 10 engineers that you worked with at these companies. I think, yeah, I think it's interesting like network effect and like what you said is like the more traditional way where it's like you worked with folks in the past and they make introductions. But I feel like there's a way to even scale that strategy, to like this like almost advisor referral model, which is really interesting.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think if you're going to, if you're going to rely on it and you need it to be operating consistently, like you said, scale it, then you probably want to have a more structure.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think both ways right. Like ideally, it's like introductions from somebody you know and trust, like I think what you're saying is ideal, right, you worked with people at this highly successful scale up organization and you can pull people along with you, like that's, that's the best way to do it usually. Yeah, yeah. So let's talk about RevOps. I want to talk a little bit more about your specialization.
Speaker 1:I think a lot of people the two departments that I see people struggle with the most building from the ground up our partnership teams and RevOps because I feel like they're the way partnerships are run, the way that RevOps is run is they're very recent in a sense, they're changing rapidly and there's a lot of, I feel like, blind site, blind spots for executives when it comes to building. So I think, like what I'd love to get a sense for, how do companies do this? What are and what are mistakes that they should be looking for? I mean, I feel like there could be a lot of costly mistakes to building an internal RevOps team. So let's put on the hat of building an internal team. How should companies be thinking about building this from the ground up?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think what makes it hard is that there's not a lot of traditional development paths for RevOps. It's relatively newer. I think there's a lot of people that are self taught in it and that can be totally fine. Like I'm self taught somewhat, but the reality is that I had the ability to like work with on great teams and with leaders that had more experience than me, so I learned from other people, but I learned on the job. I guess I do think that it's what a company needs to look for. Is they need to look for the? It's the right person for where they are now and where they see the company going in the next one to two years. I don't think they should be realistic about that, because most people are not going to stay in a job in the tech industry more than two years, and so that's the time horizon that I would use, and you don't want to get someone who's used to operating at a much larger company level. They will not necessarily be able to help you bridge that gap. I think having someone who's been there before is definitely helpful, and I would say also, the company needs to think about what. What is their focus? It are their issues that they need help because RevOps runs the gamut from strategic analytical process. Technology covers a few different areas depending on the company that you're at, but at an early stage company, they're going to be looking for someone who can maybe do all of those things, which is really hard to find.
Speaker 2:I would try to figure out like where? Who are they working with? Are they supporting a VP of sales, vp of marketing, a CRO? What? What's their kind of reporting structure? And where did those people have a lot of strengths? Let's say that their VP of sales is. He's got the strategy part really down, but he needs someone to help him drive process standardization and make sure that all the technology is going to work. I think then you're looking for someone who's strong in those areas. Other companies like the, for example, if you're working under the sales leader and they're really good at the sales process and running deals with the team and coaching the team on how to be successful, they might not be a planner, they might not be doing any analysis, so you need someone then who's going to be like a little bit more an analyst background there. So I think it's yeah, it's important to see what are the, the main strengths you need to have, and that's this is where you can also can potentially leverage a fractional agency to plug in the gap there.
Speaker 2:You asked about any like mistakes or that things like that mistakes people commonly make. Don't have your Rev Ops person just be like an order taker or someone who's just doing like ad hoc work all the time. If you're, if they're sitting in there just saying I've got a load lead list in the system and, oh, I've got to automate our lead routing and that type of thing, they'll be stuck in the weeds doing all of those things and they will not necessarily be like head up thinking about what's the company trying to achieve overall and what are the big things we can do to help drive towards those objectives, and so I think that's a gap that I very commonly see is that people will just get down in the weeds and technology and not really be aligned towards what's truly driving the company. I think it's tough.
Speaker 2:I mean, in the past 10 years, the amount of sales, marketing, cs technologies that companies use is just like I'm through the roof. There's so much tech now and it can be helpful, but it can also bog you down. I think that's something that companies are trying to come to terms with. How do we manage this stuff? Many cases it's just falling on Rebops, but not necessarily in a good way. So, yeah, I do like, when you look at bigger companies that are in the scale up phase companies like Cloudflare and Datadog and other companies that are really operating at scale they are separating out their strategy teams from their business systems team. They start to treat the systems like it is more of an engineering type function, product and engineering and I think that's right at that scale, at early stage, you can't really reasonably do that, but I think you need to do that as you go. Bigger. And complexity, because it's different skill sets and both need areas of focus.
Speaker 1:Right? I think so. When I leverage a fractional Rebops service around time of COVID a recovering coming out of COVID we had some good wins setting up Salesforce, but I think what was very important for us as an earlier stage company at the time was I needed a service. What I learned is that when I was going to leverage a fractional service and I think this goes beyond Rebops as well but I needed somebody with experience, strategic experience to help with oversight on how to help translate my business needs into how to implement the technology and build it the right way, because the folks we were working on they were great tactical implementers but they didn't have the strategic understanding of how to build the right way and how to really understand how to work with me to make sure that we were aligned on the most impactful projects and the most impactful way to deliver and really also helping from a budget perspective.
Speaker 1:How do we really laser into what needs to be done so we're not overbuilding or building in the wrong direction, or starting a project that we thought was going to call X amount but it ends up costing 5, 10, x that because we didn't go through the proper evaluation of the in-product built. And so what I learned from that is I would want a senior kind of strategic oversight person managing the project in addition to the more so tactical and I think again, this is that sub 50 employee range where it might be less important as a company scales. But first it's like when we're working with SMBs as recruiting solutions we have a fractional like VP that's actually working alongside the recruiter to make sure that things are done properly. So that was also a lesson learned for me. Just getting into what you were saying about being aligned on business goals, right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's, it's super important. I mean it's for I think it's one to make sure that what is being suggested done for the work actually is good, solid, high level work being delivered, and because you've got someone who's been there before and seen it done. So I think it's that level of experience that you want to have someone kind of leading the engagement, and then also it's for the alignment of strategy overall. So yeah, that's, and that is part of our operating model. So we do have like a rev ops architect, which is more like a director level person, and they're supported by more executional type folks analyst, administrators as well too, and like you need both, because if you don't have the strategy, you're going in, you're setting things up that you may not need to or they may not be the things that are going to drive the most benefit. So focusing on process first and things that are going to drive improvements, I think is the way to think about it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think so. I think so for a lot of companies at least, as they're growing. Look, this is Chris. This has been a lot of fun. We're coming up right to the minute before our time ends today, so very engaging conversation. I appreciate you talking with us about a topic that we really haven't dived into quite as much on the show. So, chris, thank you for joining us today.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thanks, james, appreciate you having me on.
Speaker 1:For sure and for everybody tuning in. Thank you so much for joining us and we'll see you next time. Take care.