142: What's Changed? With The JB Sales Executive Team

Good afternoon, everybody. This is John Barrows with Make It Happen Mondays, and we have a very special Make It Happen Monday today. We're trying to be as relevant as possible. Instead of doing our typical guests, and we rolled them out on a weekly basis and finding other thought leaders in the space, decided to have a little conversation with my team right now, specifically my executive team. So I'd like everybody to say hello, or Megan and Chris, could you say hello to everybody, please? Hello, everybody. Hey, everyone. So for those of you out there who haven't been who don't know us all that well, Megan is our COO here at J Barrow Sales. And Megan's been one that has been with me since the start.

She's the one that makes all this stuff go. She has a Megan, you got to talk a little bit about your background. So people have some perspective of where you're going to be coming from with this conversation. Yeah, no problem. Background in accounting, finance, and on the legal side as well. And you've been through, you've been through, walk through some of the like, because your experience is pretty ridiculous as far as, you know, companies getting acquired, companies getting, you know, like all you've been through like, what, five or six startups that have all gotten acquired in some way, shape or form? Yeah. So definitely have always been in the high tech space in Boston. So lucky for me, I've seen a bunch of stuff worked for companies at pretty much all sizes.

So startup all the way to the days of being acquired by several companies by IBM. So that has obviously given me perspective on how companies operate in all kinds of times, the best of times and the worst of times. And so luckily, we've seen mostly the best of times here, as the growth of the company with John has been, gosh, now for seven or eight years. So, but we're facing challenging times. And so it's been helpful to be able to pull from, I guess, knowledge about how different size companies operate from the financial side of the house in trying times. I think that's probably the most critical thing to our conversation today. Yeah, absolutely. And Chris, for those who don't know, Chris, not only is he our CRO here at JBSales, but I've also known Chris since what, we were what, five or six or something like that?

Five. Yeah, five years old. Back when you had a flowing mane of hair. Easy. I did, by the way, I did. I texted Kim and I was like, hey, I'm on with John right now. Shoot me some of the pictures that I know from our high school yearbook. Thanks. We'll get those out. So Chris knows where all the bodies are buried. But Chris, he's actually the one got me into entrepreneurship. You know, I graduated college, I worked for Black and Decker and Xerox. And then I worked for Black and Decker and then Xerox. And I was kind of on the corporate, like, I guess this is what you're supposed to do. And all of a sudden, I reconnected with my friend Chris here and found out he had started a company, which I thought was hysterical, because Chris didn't exactly do well in high school.

It was kind of a fuck up. But, but I had started a company. And I was like, Oh, what's this all about? But you started it in when when did you actually found Thrive? 99. 99, which was in the shit, right? I mean, so we're gonna go talk about like starting companies and what companies go through. I mean, you decided to start a company in one of the worst I mean, before this mess, one of the worst economies out there, right? Yeah. Yeah. So within that, one, trying to think back of how we actually convinced you to leave a paying job to come on sales for us. I don't think you know this, by the way. So I remember I had a commission check waiting for I was making 30 G's a year. Okay, my base salary was 30 G's at Xerox.

I had a commission check waiting for me for $25,000. If all I did was wait until January 1, all I had to do was stay at Xerox until January 1. All right. And I would have gotten that commission check. But Nate was like, No, we need you to start in December because we need you to start selling immediately. And I'm like, dude, I just give me like a couple weeks, I'll make 25 G's and then I won't have to sweat it, right? And he's like, Nope, Nope, if you don't accept it, you want and I'm like, I decided to give up that little that that was a massive chunk, because I saw a huge opportunity to really make a difference and really be part of something. Well, first of all, I appreciate the lead in of knowing that I'm a fuck up.

But but to John's point, just to give context, and to Megan's point about having the benefit of being in multiple organizations and multiple roles, and doing it long enough to actually go through bad times and downturns, I did start my first company in 1999, full of energy, vigor, vigor and ignorance, went into it and immediately got punched, smacked, you know, right in the face. But I will tell you, we learned and we learned quickly. I think the difference then till now is 20, 25 years, and didn't have a lot of risk back then. So things obviously decision trees are a lot different. Since then, I've predominantly run and created professional services organization. As much as we've had some really great success, I'm also an expert in blowing shit up.

So within that, not only have I been through four or five pretty big events globally. I've also been, you know, through some some rough, some rough times of just building businesses. And so none of this uncomfortableness is new to me, I will say that there's always curveballs and the need for audibles. But within that, I share, you know, with Megan about I am thankful, and a lot of my ability right now, I really does come from real experience. This does feel a little bit different. But within that, I have seen that we've been able to leverage these collective experiences to, you know, make the decisions we've been making day to day here. So I was excited for this conversation. Yeah, and that's kind of what I wanted.

I want to take a different approach to this, right? Because usually we really have, you know, real conversations on the podcast and, you know, about, you know, techniques or strategies or whatever. But, you know, right now is such a different time compared to anything we've seen. You know, I mean, yes, you know, 2000 was rough. Yes, 2007 was rough. I mean, Megan, you know, she knows, like, you know, Basho fired us all in 2007. I mean, that's and that's so again, another shit. And I was like, Oh, and at the end of the day, I remember everybody freaked out. And I kind of looked at it. And I was like, Wait a minute, there's an opportunity here. Right. And I made more money that year than I had made in the previous five.

Right. So I think there is opportunity with where we sit. But what I wanted to shed some light on is where I'm seeing a lot of stuff on LinkedIn and about companies laying off and people stressed out and all this other stuff. But what I'm not seeing is the details of what's happening behind the scenes in some of these companies and how decisions have been shifted and how people are now looking at stuff from a from a buyer standpoint. Right. So so what I'd love to walk through you, the audience here is kind of the the pro the progression of when we started to see like we started to get some new. OK, yep, this virus, it's in China. And all right. And then, OK, wait a minute. We're starting to see the impact here.

This looks a little bit more seriously. And then when we had to really start to say, OK, and then what did we do? So I thought that would be a good conversation to have with the audience just to give some perspective on what's happening with small businesses right now. All right. They're cool with you guys. Yeah, I think it would really help for context, John. I think we I think even as we were talking before about the calendar of when we the early indications here, this is even almost like pre news. But maybe just if you want to just give a quick snapshot of how we were doing, like what was the state of things going into this? Because I think that in our revenue mix is really important because, holy, I look back right now where we were not even 20 days ago and how much the business has changed.

Oh, I mean, it's changed. I mean, so and I got no problem to open up the I really, you know, this is to I thought you were going to wear a kimono so you could open it up and I was frightened. That would be a little weird. But but no, nobody wants to see that. But I think the you know, like we you know, we had a stretch goal of what four million this year. Right. That's what we were going for four million. All right. You know, I think, Megan, what did we do last year? Like two point seven, something like that? Two point eight. Right. So we did just under three last year. We're like, fuck it. I hired up right at the end of last year. We hired up. We hired James and we brought on new, you know, Meg customer success.

And we were we were like going to get after it because I had a decision at the end of last year to say, do we want to just kind of be, you know, a lifestyle company and just kind of do our thing here or is there an opportunity to get after it? Right. And we said, fuck it. Let's get after this. So, you know, then I think when did we start hearing? When did we start really? Do you guys remember when like Corona hit? Like like when we started hearing the news about China and stuff like that? It was like late January, early February. Right. And it was kind of one of those things we were like, all right. And I remember I was one of those that was like, whatever, people are making a fucking big deal out of this.

It's just the flu. Shut the fuck up. You know, that type of thing. And then all of a sudden I was like, I remember waking up one day and the death toll in Italy had bounced by 30 percent like overnight. And I was like, oh, fuck. And but then we had had and oddly enough, like we do we have some APAC stuff. Right. But we had a bunch of shit scheduled in APAC for March. Right. And and then we started seeing the spread. Right. And it was like, all right. Now, February is like, OK, what's this all about? And then I remember because the dates I'm looking at here, I remember the week of March 9th was was crystal clear to me because early February. Right. That's when people started looking at conferences and started shutting those things down.

I think Facebook was the first big one. Chris, was Facebook the first big one to shut down their user conference? It was the first one that went out where it was like of size. Yeah. Yeah. And then we had and we had Rev 2020 that we were going to on the 9th and the 10th in San Francisco. So we were all planning on going to that. Right. And I remember all of us were kind of like, when is that going to like, is that going to cancel? And Megan, like what do you remember like like when you started paying attention to this? Well, I remember going I went to Brooklyn for the weekend in late February. And I remember distinctly being there, being like, I don't understand why people are making a big deal about having to go to the grocery store and stock up on goods because we can't leave our houses for two weeks.

Like not making a joke of it, but just it wasn't reality at that point. Like we didn't know how serious it was going to be. And I mean, literally that Sunday night that I got back and probably that Monday, so whatever that was, the, you know, March 2nd or 3rd, like the week before Rev, I was like, oh God, this is real. And that's when I remember, I think on our Monday morning meeting, I was like, hey, do we have any insight as to what's going on with the Rev 2020 conference? Because I think we need to start seriously considering whether we're going to be able to go. And from my perspective, I'm always looking like, when do we have to cancel so that we aren't faced with hotel charges, airline fees, all of that kind of stuff or cost outlay.

Definitely. And Chris, you were talking to these partners, like when, when were you hearing like real serious conversations about stuff? I'd probably say a good week before Rev was ready to go. I remember that was the point at which I, that decisions were starting to be made and from the standpoint of not just what are we doing for our onsite training, but the, the, the bigger conferences, which again, for all size companies, specifically a small organization like us to come out of pocket for a sponsorship. And, you know, basically we were bringing the team out there that, that was opportunity. One, there's cost is the opportunity cost of going. And so the pressure there was, we need to make this.

This was a big deal for us. We needed to make this event yield for us. We need to make it. And so we had, we had so much planning going into it. And obviously a lot of pressure was on the marketing and my side of the house here. I remember starting to get a little bit kind of like, well, first of all, how's that going to affect attendance? How's it going to affect the mindset going into it? But then more importantly, like at what point are decisions going to be made and you know, how to, how are we supposed to react? So I remember that was the first week for us where as collectively us three, we started having conversations about this, not in the context of, um, what, you know, thinking about what could happen, but starting to say, should we be making this actionable?

I think at that point we were going and it was Morgan who had scheduled for kind of a, we were joking saying he's going on this. We're going to say goodbye to Morgan and put him on the, you know, the, the seven seas tour here. And I remember saying like, um, okay, well that, that sounds as though that might get taken out. Should we be proactive? And that's when this started becoming a weekly agenda thing for us for the first one or two weeks. And then it just ramped from there. And one thing, uh, from an audience standpoint to understand is, uh, our business, uh, from a standpoint of sales training, um, um, Megan, what is the split of on-prem delivered training? 70, 30, right? 70, 30 range. Yeah.

Oh yeah. The, we're rated heavily from a revenue perspective on, on site. Right. And so, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. From that standpoint, it's important to understand at that point, most of our revenues is based on us traveling the world, delivering training, um, by luck, foresight, or us just, you know, changing our revenue mix. We've already been investing in delivering content and training virtually. We've been working on that for a better part of six months. And so we had a little bit of a running start, but by no means was it going to, you know, at a steady state with that revenue even come close to covering overhead. So that's where, when this really started to become real and John, you can talk about what the, that trigger point of us starting to make decisions was.

That was the hard part, which was, okay, that's fine. Let's make this gut decision, not gut, but let's use our gut to make this hard decision to say, at what point are we going to start actually proactively canceling things so that we get that time back? Cause the opportunity costs, I'd love for you to talk about that night where Morgan was flying around, you were flying around, shit was falling apart. That's that next morning. I remember waking up and saying, uh, we're in the, we're in a different business today, guys. So, you know, John, talk a little bit about that. I mean, that was a, that, that 24 hours was nuts. No, I mean that, that's really where it hit home for me. I mean, I remember rev 2020 was either canceled or whatever, like a week or two before.

Right. And so we had like the ninth and the 10th. And, and I remember maybe the last week in February, that's when the shoe dropped and it was like, okay, rev 2020 has been canceled. So, okay. We had like a week or two to, to digest that. But then I would, that was supposed to be San Francisco. I was supposed, so I was supposed to leave Sunday night, be in San Francisco for rev 2020 on Monday and Tuesday. And then I had a training for survey monkey on Wednesday. Right. So, okay. That got the rev 20. That makes sense. Cause that was a huge conference, right? Well, big conference, right? Where a lot of people were going to be in one place. Okay. That makes sense to cancel something like that based on what's going on customers though, 20, 30 people in a room, not that big of a deal.

Right. So, uh, for the, so instead of being in San Francisco on Monday and Tuesday, I was in Boston. So I was getting on a, but then all of a sudden on Monday of that week, I get survey monkey saying we, you know, work from home locked in. Sorry, we have to cancel that. So I had to scramble to say, okay, well, why don't we just do it remotely? Thankfully we did. And then I was like, all right, well, Monday, Wednesday, uh, Wednesday night, I'm getting on a plane because my Thursday, Friday was in Chicago and I was still, and I still a client. I had pinged him earlier that week saying, Hey, are we still good? Are you sure about this? And he was like, yep, absolutely. And no joke on, on Wednesday, I go to Logan.

I sit down at Davio's. I, you know, I'm looking around. I'm, I'm, I'm wiping everything down at that point. Right. Um, and I'm, and I'm, but it seems normal that the airport's still pretty full. Right. And all of a sudden, uh, I get on, I remember I get on the plane. I was actually one of the freaks. Like, I think people were looking at me a little weird because I was wiping down everything. I was wiping down the seat, the headrest, you know, all of it. And nobody else was doing that. And I'm like, Hey, you're, I don't know, whatever. I just don't want to take any chances here. The planes are gross anyway. So then I'm on the plane. I see the last person get on the plane and I get this text from an unknown number.

And it was, and it, and it read, are you, are you still in Boston? And I immediately was like, fuck. And so I hit the guy back as fast as possible. I go, who is this? Cause I didn't know, you know, I didn't, I wanted to confirm. And he was like, it's VRAM. I go, are you canceling the session? He goes, yes, sorry. And I remember without even blinking, I got up from my chair, I ran to the front of the airplane and I was like, get me off this plane, get me off this plane. And she was like, I'm sorry. You know, we're closing the doors and you know, we can't, I go get me off this fucking plane. And they were like, sir, we can't. And I'm like, all right, fine. Corona, Corona, Corona. I'm like, I got Corona and fuck it.

You know, like you want me on this plane? Right. And they were like, what the hell? And they let me off. And cause I'm sitting there, I'm like opportunity cost Chris. Like we had just found like Morgan was in Chicago for two days for the sales assembly conference and it got canceled. And so that was two days of, of time that he lost to, to really start hammering down on what the priorities were at this point. Right. And so I think that's where we called an all hands that Friday morning to say, okay, this shit is real. What do we do? And, and I think that's, is that where I asked you, Megan, like how do companies make decisions in this environment? Yep. And my response was pretty much depending on the size of your organization, finance just stops spending.

You stop paying bills effectively and you not necessarily the, for the, for forever, obviously, but you definitely put a hold on, let's not push cash out the door until we understand sort of what this looks like. Give the finance team a chance to do some modeling around what does it look like. Um, and certainly internally a finance organization is going to be looking at saying, um, whatever, you know, budgets you previously had, we're going to put them on hold at the moment. Let's not sign any new contracts committing any more dollars until we really have an idea of what's going on. And that's twofold. One is our customers going to be able to pay the bills that you've already sent out. What obligations do we have as an organization in a finance team, um, to pay out based on what we've already committed to.

And three, what does our own sales channel look like? How impacted is the revenue number going to be for our own team? Because, you know, uh, if that immediately comes to a screeching halt, then you have no money coming in from your normal sales process and receivables. And therefore that is going to cause a chain reaction for a bunch of different decisions that have to be made. So the easiest thing from a finance perspective is to kind of just stop, you know, uh, the first, you know, working in all size companies, the first thing is to the accounts payable team, don't cut any checks this week. Okay. Payroll goes out as normal, but let's not cut any checks. Let's really look at what our cashflow looks like and what it needs to look like over the next 30 to 60 days is pretty much how most the gut reaction for most organizations will be.

And so what was, what, what did you do coming out of that meeting as the COO, CFO for, for JV sales, right? Like what were the, what were some of the immediate things that you did coming out of that? What, whoa, fuck, like we got to do something here. What was that look like? So luckily for us, we don't have a lot of, um, sort of spending that goes all over the place. We have very sort of targeted things that we spend money on. Some are recurring, some are not. Um, the first thing that I did was I immediately pulled up our forecast that we had just sort of talked about, I think maybe like a week prior and I said, okay, what? And I immediately went to expenses and said, what are our must haves to run this business as we know it right now?

And what are our nice to have? So those budgets for Chris to spend money on fun technology? Yep. That I told Chris, no spending money on that stuff right now. Um, John, don't go signing contracts for other fun, new, um, you know, computers and devices. Um, so really it was understanding where are the buckets that we always have for that unknown? Like at the beginning of the year, we know we have stretch goals. We know we're going to need to invest money in order to meet those goals usually. Um, so where were those buckets of money and what amount was there? And if I removed all of those buckets of money, knowing that we probably weren't going to be able to use them, what did that do two hours?

So changing nothing on the revenue side, because again, by this, at this point, nothing had really been canceled yet. We were just sort of being like, okay. Um, you know, survey Mikey, we still delivered the, the Thursday, Friday session. We knew it wasn't being canceled, just rescheduled. So it was a matter of what is immediately going to happen. If all of our sessions over the next month get canceled and little did we know that that month would turn into much longer, but that's really the first parts that I started with was to say, if I take out all of our nice to haves and just focus on what we have to have to run the business, what does that do from our cashflow perspective to understand, um, then what we needed to do from a decision point on the revenue side.

And, and so then from a revenue mix standpoint, Chris, right? I mean, it kind of as a CRO and being responsible for every, you know, the, the, the specifically the sponsorships and anything online that we do, you know, I remember that, I don't know if it was that meeting. Cause I, I do still think we were holding on a little bit of hope that, that it was, there was going to be some onsite stuff, but I think very soon thereafter, I think it was even, we started to go into almost, I don't know when we went to weekly or daily scrums, Chris, I know your team is doing all that, but I do, I do remember a point where I said, we just have to assume that we, we have no onsite sessions for, for, uh, Q2 and Q3.

And I said, Megan, could you do that modeling? So therefore with no onsite sessions for Q2 and Q3, our, we took our projections from 4 million to 2.6, right? We literally slashed our projection to 2.6 and we realized we had to make some real hard, fast decisions to, to, to shift what we were focusing on. Chris, cause Chris, you had public workshops, you had all these different things. So you want to talk about kind of like your mentality going through our product mix suite and our ICP. Cause you talk a lot about how our, our ICP, our ICP has changed. Our ACV has changed, right? So where were you in that mindset of like when we pulled those shit trigger? I do remember the three of us having, uh, conversations to, you know, kind of our triage moment was, uh, an easy conversation, which was it's now is not the time for story time.

Now is the time for real things. So what, first of all, going to Megan and saying, um, for a, a period of time that we can actually see. So shortening event, you know, uh, horizon of what can we actually see? What can we feel? What do we know about? And I think we shortened that up to like three months. And I know we ran them for the rest of the year, but we really did shorten them up for three months. And from there it was line by line. And I remember going through and dreading it. Cause I was like, Oh shit, Megan's going to make, find out how much money I'm spending here. Um, but I remember going through line by line and making sure not passing judgment, but making sure that those were real, um, real projected first on the expense side and understanding the difference there between, you know, fixed and variable having to do with the work that we were doing above the line.

I remember working with you, John, to go through and say, we need to make sure that this time around the next few pipeline reviews, that this is not the opportunity for story time. This is the absolute conversations who's in play thinking about this was a huge piece, which was thinking about not our customer, but the customer's customer, what industry do they serve? What's the sensitivity of that? Because we know that's coming. And so therefore one is making sure that we knew, um, within that short period of time, what were absolute revenue coming in. And for the most part, that got wiped because that was on site, but taking that off, just, it's not there. We do have because of revenue mix of 30% of, um, uh, either delivered virtually or online.

Um, we were able to look at that and say, okay, what's hard lock? Like what will not go away? Not what's pipeline, but what is committed and went through. And that, that helped us to establish a pretty big Delta, a big Delta. Um, from there, we took a step back and you know, what changed on my side, um, was we need to move quickly to evaluate and take a snapshot of our services, look at them as products and say, which, which of these products have a standing chance. And we really went from probably 10 to 15 SKUs of services we sell. And we very quickly paired this down to five and that was taking the online, uh, the, um, the on-premise training. And can we quickly move that over and restructure it, which we have been doing remote training for a few years.

We don't do it as often as the on-premise, but really just making sure how can we make that a best, a great product and documenting it and very quickly going to the marketing team and saying, build us a wrapper around these, these products. Um, from a standpoint of the, from marketing events and, um, content. So obviously a part of our number is the, our sponsor partner number. Um, we're a very structured organization. If you know about us, we have, we have a lot going on and we're actually a really well oiled machine. It's fucking chaos on the inside, but it looks like we know what we're doing on the outside and it yields results. Um, the problem there was I had a content map out until November.

We're talking about guests, subject, you know, medium, all drawn out, ready to go. The problem was, is that the content had no relevance to what was going on and would actually feel like I'm looking at it going, we had a great one lined up. I think the first weekend that was going to be the relationship between an SDR and AE. Beautiful concept. Great conversation be had. Nobody gives a fuck right now. Right. And so I looked at it and I looked, cause I also have to work with my sponsors and I have a responsibility to them and said, um, this is going to come across totally insensitive. Like, and we're not helping people right now. And I literally had to, if I could pick up all the whole marketing content plan and I literally threw it out and had a blank page and we had to start from scratch and go through.

And so to do that, what we needed to do was to define what we considered to be a North star. So instead of jumping in and doing work, we did some planning that said, one, what are the products that we have that we can go to market with? Right. And make sure that we know that everybody in the organization from a communication standpoint knew these are the products you can sell. Here's what they include. Here are the price points and assign some roles and responsibilities of how we were going to push those out very quickly. In many cases, as you know, John, this was going back to existing customers to say, we need to move. Are you interested in moving over to these new products on the other side of it?

They're knowing that there is a huge revenue gap. Um, we had to, uh, you know, come up with some new products. And so, uh, we had been doing these workshops, you know, we were on this world tour for the last year. So doing these workshops, anywhere from 50 to 125 people, um, uh, on site going through the standard, filling the funnel content, really great feedback, a lot of value, and immediately said, I need to find a way to test to see, um, is this of something that we can do at scale, but do it, uh, virtually. And so within four days, we created a product for the first time ever. You've never done open enrollment for a course. It's always been, um, you either have to buy it online or train, um, uh, companies.

And I remember you and I having some hard conversations. What about cannibalization? What does that do to, you know, our big companies who pay way more per seat to train? And we said at the risk of cannibalization, this is a situation of, I don't care about the future value of cash. I care about the value of cash right now. And we need to go find a way to first provide value so we can charge for it. And you gave me the creative Liberty to, to go out there and to drive. So within four days, we stood up a virtual, um, a program. We pushed hard to just get that out to the marketplace and we were able to get 450 people, um, which I'm really proud about. The feedback was amazing. You brought your a game, uh, so many wonderful things, you know, afterwards happened.

We created a lot of good relationships that very quick test. So first of all, that was a risk that I could have fallen flat on my face. It could have came across to our paying customers as though, you know, cannibalization. And there's, you know, like, why are we charging what we charge on that other side? Um, but we realized that, uh, that one, the medium works to no matter what's going on out there, people are still driven to, you know, up their skill, more importantly, up their skill and understand what's changed now. So we've now made a series of the live cast and that's actually backfilled, um, the, those, uh, workshops from a standpoint of content, um, got the team together and we just pulled, we pulled everybody we knew.

We pulled our, our, our, our, our customers and enablement sales leaders, individual reps and said, what are you thinking about right now? Like what, what is important? And from that standpoint, we just developed a very quick list of four to five themes. And from there, just went back and said for each theme, who do we know in this space that has a ton to offer and went out and picked up the phone and just built out a quick content calendar. Granted, we're not building a six month content calendar. Again, event horizon. We're only focusing on, you know, 30 days at a time of go through. So from that standpoint, when, you know, like what's changed on our side, I mean, everything's changed. I mean, I feel as though once, and I, I, one of the things that I want people to understand that I feel as though worked in our favor here was our ability as a team to just make fast decisions to that decision to just say, proactively go and cancel.

We canceled our on-prem booked revenue because we couldn't control it. And I think we really just learned, let's make decisions about the things that we control versus, you know, going out there and hoping, but being at the mercy of, you know, other circumstances. And so I'm really thankful for that, that week where we're making decisions. Um, and then the next piece was in, I know I'm going long here, but the other piece was, I think the other thing that we did that was great was we moved away from like a weekly meeting to daily short scrums. There's so many things we should be working on. Our backlog was a mile and a half long, but we only focused every day on the things that affected us getting to cash and things that we could actually get accomplished that day because the next day things would change.

So we would just reset and work through it. So I understand where a smaller bow were easier to turn, um, for all the things that we've done right so far, I think it's been the fast decisions and I think it's the communication on a shorter timeline. I agree. And that, and that was going to flip that to Megan too. Like Megan, as a finance with, with your background here, how have your decisions, decision-making criteria changed? Like from, from when we were doing fine and it was like, okay, cool. Yeah, we should maybe do that. I mean, you've always, uh, you know, held, held us together for what we're spending and making sure that we're actually making money. But how have your decisions, uh, changed or how you make decisions change over the past month?

It's been, um, for me at the moment, it's really about not trying to forecast the future of stuff that we don't know. So much like Chris just said, we have, there's so much of this that's out of our control. And my dad always used to say to me, you need to let go of the things that you can't control because you can't control them. So it really was, it became less about what is the end number look like and very much about what do we need to get through X amount of X period of time. So early on in the process, it was, what do we need to do today, tomorrow, whatever, to figure out what we're going to do. And now I feel like, um, you know, from my perspective, I'm starting to now look into the several months out, what does it look like?

Um, because for me, it's like, okay, base, the decisions we need need to carry us through until we can likely see that there, we are going to have more information. So through all of the things that we're hearing about what's going on, do we think that we'll have better visibility in 60 days? I think we will. Um, what that visibility is going to look like. I don't know, but I have to plan for at least 90 to 120 days out at this point, because at 60 days, um, that's not going to give us a lot of runway to make additional changes. So, and when you say that, when you say plan for 90 to 120 days, you're, you're meaning planning for us to be in the shit for 90 to a hundred days, right? Not like what our goal is for 120 days from now.

Right. Yeah. It's a matter of what are we, what decisions do, what do we have? What information do we have today that is going to help me make sure that the decisions we are making today are going to carry us through for X period of time. And the best, and I said this to John last night, when I talked to him, the best thing, the best view that I can see right now is it's got to be everything for spending. At least everything has got to be on a 30 to 60 day window. I can only say what is going to work for 30 to 60 days. And that's pretty much based on our cashflow in our, you know, it may be unique to other people where our, one of our busy periods of the year is January with kickoff sessions that, um, you know, John and Morgan do.

So luckily for us, there's a bunch of stuff that was billed in December and in January that is going to help from a cashflow perspective, um, that isn't sort of, you know, geared on, you know, our recurring revenue or delivery that we have each month is consistent. I mean, um, you know, usually January, February are busy for us and then March and April are slower. And then it starts to pick up again before summertime. So some of all of that was coming into play for me, but also, um, you know, what decisions do we need to make on the expense side in order to make sure that we are okay with a plan that we have for 60 days for 90 days, for 120 days. So that's kind of where my, I'm everything that I'm looking at is what is my 30 day view, 60 day view, 90 day view, 120 day view.

And it, it really depends on what line item I'm looking at to figure out how my decision criteria changes, um, personnel related people who are critical to our business. I'm making decisions for as far out as I possibly can, because they're critical to our business. Um, renewals of things that are coming up, um, probably going to be like, it just depends. It's really going to say, what would happen if we didn't have this? Is it going to impact our revenue? If we didn't do this, is it going to allow us to do something else that we need to do in order to sort of drive revenue through an uncertain time using other technologies we need to buy? Those are the things that I'm trying to look at now to say, what is the future impact that it will have?

And I think that leads to an opportunity from a sales standpoint, right? Because like, I think a lot of people are wondering like, Oh, people aren't making decisions or whatever. No, they are. They're just making different decisions and they're making more thoughtful decisions. Right. Cause Chris, I mean, you know, I put this post out there and this is just where I believe I fundamentally believe this is accurate, you know, and it's, it seems to be playing out, which is companies are in three buckets, right? One is the lockdown fuck off. We don't even talk to me right now because we are in such like travel industry right now. Like it is just don't even bother. Right. Then there's the other bucket of, well, the other extreme, which is they're getting after it.

You know what I mean? Like they are, they are in a windfall right now, like toilet paper making companies, you know what I mean? Like, like, like they're, they're fucking making it rain. Right. Or zoom. You know what I mean? Like zoom right now, I got to imagine if I'm the VP of sales at zoom right now and somebody, some, somebody calls me to help me be more efficient with my sales process or something like that, or say I'm dumb, dude, fuck off. I am in order take mode right now. Get out of my way. Like there's no skills involved in selling this shit. We're trying to get our stuff out there to as many people as possible to help people and you know, make it rain. Right. But then there's that bucket right in the middle, which is, I think the vast majority of companies that are just kind of like us where it's like, all right, you know what I mean?

Like how are we going to get our way through this and we're locking a lot of things down? We see opportunity and it's not that we're not making decisions, but there's a couple of things that I flipped over to you, Chris, to say there's some excess that I know that we have that we have just not tackled because Chris is, you know, when you said we got a laundry list of shit to do, you know, and I'm not going to call out this vendor because I don't want to call him out on this podcast, but we use one vendor that we drop 30 to $40,000 a year with to do something I think is very basic. And I've always had a little bit of a bug up my ass about this vendor because first of all, I didn't like their fucking conference, but because they didn't feed me, which if anybody knows what that is, they'll know who this fuck I'm talking about.

Anyways. But, but, you know, we're spending a bunch of money with them. And I always kind of been like, eh, you know, but okay, but times are good. You know what I mean? So fuck it. No problem. Cause the cost of transition nightmare. Okay. Whatever. Now I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no. Go look at some options for that. Right. Chris. And I think you with the, with kind of the plethora of vendors, you deal with all our vendors right now. Right. So how are you looking at things from, from where you are, even though we're bananas crazy, trying to figure out how we can drive revenue. We're also looking at the internal systems. Right. And then I want to translate that to how that, that message comes to me and then how I deliver that message to Megan and then she, what she dictates we do.

Yeah, absolutely. And the entire time I was going through this process, I was thinking the same thing where don't tell me there's not selling opportunities. There's a few ways. So the first thing I did was after we had, um, we made sure we had crystal clear understanding of from a, both a financial and a target standpoint of what we needed to do. Um, and we did, we called our shots and said, here's how we keep the lights on. Here's what the business looks like. I went back and said, okay, well, first of all, two things need to happen. First of all, I'm responsible for cost cutting and making sure that essential spending. So anything that comes up in that period of time is up for evaluation. And so this was a perfect time for us to take a look at things that we had not evaluated and say, um, you know, is now the time to make switching costs or to not renew.

So from that standpoint, there was a few days there where if you got ahold of me, this is being opportunistic and think about that opportunistic. If you hit me on one of these days, I would have heard you out. And this was across the entire sales stack because I was looking for, I, I, I understood the challenges I had. I was one doing cost cutting, but two, I was changing our business of what we were doing. I was certainly open this entire. So as much as we are sitting here in the period where we're trying to affect and, you know, really, it sounds like we're cutting costs. It was just that we were trying to change the business to support this new revenue, revenue mix that we had. So at the same time, there's opportunity for a vendor to come in and displace or offer other options for what we were doing.

There was another opportunity that said, wait, anyone can look at, first of all, you can find me, you can find my phone number, right? Two is you can think about, well, obviously they have to, the logical thing for a sales training organization to do is move to virtual delivery. If you're in that space and you have a solution, you should have reached out to me. And I'm, you know, like that was the part that I was sitting there going, no one, like, am I not that cool? Like where the fuck are people selling me stuff? Like they just weren't. And that, that blew my mind. I think it's because people are one, there's the empathy, sympathy, like how to go at people, that type of thing. But I was in buying mode.

I still am in buying mode. Like there are things that I might even put out there and say, someone helped me solve this problem. Um, you know, you and I saying we have to be the best in this industry at learning how to live cast so that when you're sitting there and you have some time and you want to communicate that you can do it and do it well, there's opportunity there. Like the opportunity for me to move this whole stack. I spent, I mean, how many, I mean, we were just, you know, burning midnight oil, trying to figure out how do you do e-comm with zoom and patching all this shit together. Thank you, Zapier. Like, um, but there's, those are solutions that if you got me on the right day, like I'm moving fast, I will invest for speed.

You know what I'm saying? And that to me was what I came back to you. And I was just, I think we were pretty clear and we're like, wait a minute, people have to hear this. Like it's not about me just putting, we're not just putting hold because we are a business that is moving forward. And from a sentiment standpoint, look at any of our channels and you can realize we're not sleeping on this shit. So if you saw that, you could see that we're in this mode, you know, that we're adapting, you should be reaching out. And I do think that translates to there are sales opportunities. Yeah. And I think that's the, the, the saving grace or kind of the silver lining to a certain degree with, from a sales standpoint is everybody's talking about what's happening right now, right?

That you can't deny it. Your CEO has to, if you're in this situation, you know, if you're in this world right now, your CEO has had to put out some type of statement about what's happening with their business and how they're reacting to COVID-19, their website, their tweets, their whoever. So to your point, Chris, it's actually kind of, it's a lot easier to do quote unquote research right now because there's a lot of like people are telling everything what's going on right now. So whether you know it about that specific company or not, or you know what about the role within that company or what's happening in that industry, you should be able to make some pretty logical connections that they're in this space.

Let me now go and, and look, if I can't help them, then don't fucking call. But if you can offer it in a, in an empathetic way, but deep on personalization, right? And that's why I, you know, I, I probably the post that took off the most was please stop the templated bullshit cadences. I got to be honest. I've always hated them. I've always hated templated emails from sales reps that have sent it out in cadence format, right? Because I've always felt like that's marketing's job, but I get it. I understand the game here. We play in the world. Sales reps have to be efficient. Okay. I get it. Um, so I've adapted our model to, to address that, right? Cause it used to be the why you, why you now email, do all your research, spend 20 minutes doing, you know, and then before you send out an email, but reps are being asked to make 50, a hundred dials a fucking day.

So, you know, I'm, I'm pretty much crossing off 75% of the audience. If I say, Oh, only do quality. So I've kind of adapted to that as a, as, as the content is concerned. But now I think now it's like a great, it's almost like a good stop. Let's stop with the bullshit. You know what I mean? Let's stop with the cadence stuff and actually pay the fuck attention to what's happening with these business. Cause there's real opera, there's real pain, but there's also real opportunity. And that's what I think we're, we're still trying to figure out where those are for us, but it's, I think everybody's seeing those pieces that they're trying to put together there. I want to just, one of the points that we have internally, and we've actually gotten pretty fired up because people misunderstood when we say it, even internally, I think a couple, you know, like I remember a conversation with James and Morgan of them saying, but I thought we're not saying that cadence, we're saying automated steps exactly within cadences.

We're saying going through the motions is enforcing the medium and the timing of things, the, the, how you're doing it. Cadences are great. There's nothing wrong with cadence. It's the automated steps. Cause we all know everybody here has gotten a prospecting email that obviously came and there's, I'm not looking for someone to give me a, uh, uh, like an email hug and see how I'm doing. But if you, if you're just sending stuff in with the standard stuff right now, that's the old, like I was already desensitized at the beginning. Now I just think you're an asshole. Totally. I mean, I've been preaching death of the average sales rep. I mean, you guys have seen the presentation for years. I, for what, six, seven years now, Megan, I've been preaching death of the average sales rep.

And my, my original hypothesis around that was the, the advent of technology and how technology was evolving and going to be slowly replacing, right. Sales reps who are literally going through the motions. And that's why I said, put death. That's why I said death of the average sales rep, not death of the sales rep. Sales reps are always going to be needed, but the average ones, the ones who are going through the motions. And I thought it was going to be a gradual thing over the next 10 years. This is a forcing function that those average sales reps who have been going through the motions and have not been paying attention or perfecting their craft or learning how to do sales the right way, they're going to get smoked right now.

They're going to get smoked. And they probably already have been smoked right now. So those who've come out of this, like my hope, and I've didn't, and I'd like to kind of end on this note for all three of us is, you know, the silver lining that I think we have here with, with this whole mess outside of people dying, which I, you know, can't wrap my head around is that I'm hoping that this brings us all back to center a little bit and gets us to focus on what's important. Right. And to realize what relationships are important in your life. Like, I mean, it's easy to figure out who, what relationships matter for you right now, because they're the people you've been talking to off of Facebook.

You know what I mean? Like your family, those ones that you remember, fuck, I haven't talked to that person in however many years. Yeah. I probably liked a comment or something out there's on Facebook, but I haven't actually talked to that person. I'm going to reach out to them, you know, and, and from a sales standpoint, you know, Morgan and I were having this conversation telling him like 27 year old kid, I go, dude, your generation grew up in the point and click. Anything's at your disposal for any reason. You want a song, Spotify it out. You don't have to wait in line at, you know, you know, fucking tower records and, you know, pray to God that it doesn't get sold out by the, you know what I mean?

Like, like you, if you wanted a movie, it was right there for you. If you wanted food, you Uber eats, it delivers to you. If you wanted to send out a billion emails to, to hit your number, you can do it in a click. So that his, that generation is grown up with that shallow view for the most part on how to really do genuine shit. And I think this is my, my hope is, is that this is kind of one of those, okay, I got to stop now and really fucking think this through, right? From a quality standpoint, learning and perfecting your craft, learning how to really genuinely give a shit about people and make a difference. That's my hope is that when we come out of this, people will realize that, that we can get back to basics and go a little bit more quality.

And I just want to kind of Megan, get your final thoughts on kind of where you see things right now. And, and, you know, what's your hope out of all this mess? Yeah. I mean, right now I think that, um, it's just a matter of timing for now. I mean, again, I'll go back to the, we have to just rely on the, you have to make the best decisions that you can with the information you have in the moment. Um, what if scenarios kind of, we've never seen this before. We've, we've been through tough times, um, you know, as a country, um, we've, we've dealt with it, but, um, and I think it applies to like business stuff and in your personal life too, right. Um, you know, people who are going through the process of buying and selling houses, needing to, you know, buy a new car, like dealing with, you know, having your children home, you know, what does all of that mean?

And, um, really understanding what your, your role is, um, you know, as a, as a human in this society of being able to say everything I should be doing at this point should be something that's meaningful because, um, like what, if you're not doing it meaningful, then what is really literally, what is the point of doing it? Um, and I think that translates back to why are you sending an email if you literally don't have a value proposition to provide to somebody and just really understanding, and this is true across, again, across the board, who your audience is, like really think about when, before you send an email, like what's changed? Well, everything. Well, that's what, like, I mean, you could look on LinkedIn that, that kid hit me.

It was like, hey, John, just what's changing your price. I'm like, what's changed? Every fucking thing, every fucking minute of every fucking day, you dipshit. And I got pretty pissed off at the kid because we'll talk about lack of tonality, right? You know, I mean, understanding kind of where things are right now. So I told you, yeah, I mean, Jesus. So have some empathy, right? But, but start giving a shit. So Chris. Yeah, I, I think there's two things that I'm learning. Uh, the mistakes on my side, um, I think Megan started to toe into a little bit was we're all sitting at home. Um, usually our mornings are, um, me talking with Megan and then the kids coming in or hearing a big noise and a kid falling down or, um, and I think, and even today, like when we had that conversation, I think I failed because I, my whole thing was, and I'm just sharing, cause it's been like weighing on me pretty heavy.

Um, this is scary shit. And my job at home, in my opinion right now is this isn't business building. This is keeping the lights on and then keeping income coming in, uh, for the family. And I took that as I'm going to work so fucking hard. I'm going to work every night. I'm going to bash through every door. And then all of a sudden I lifted my head up and realized I hadn't seen my kid here. I am in my house with my family. I've alienated my poor wife. I've pissed. My kids are just like what's going on. And at the one time I should be balancing that time. I'm like pushing so freaking hard on this side that first of all, I was starting to feel tired. I was being grumpy. I'm sure it was being a dick that one, I think balance because your home right now is more than ever.

And I have a lot like, um, giving people that, you know, Oh, I hear the kids go take care of it. Like that's fine. Like you'll probably see a kid popping up behind me at any point. I got kind of slapped in the face last night, you know, just almost literally, but from that standpoint of just that balance. But here's, here's where I come from. And I've been thinking about this. First thing is at a business level, the top level, like we are, or even at department level, make sure that you agree that you understand what your North star is. And that's either financial, some type of metric. You have to understand what you're supposed to be doing right now. And it's okay to throw away the playbook, like literally, but you have to have something for 30 days and that's going to enable you to the next step, which is defend your time.

Your time right now is so important. And the best way to say no. And I've had to learn to do this is if you have a North star, all you have to do is to relate what you're being asked to do or what you do on a daily basis and say, this is not affecting me getting to the North star. I shouldn't do it. I have partner projects all over the place. Um, I feel poorly about saying, I can't do this right now. Things have changed, but instead of just going back and saying, no, you're not a priority. I can say, we've determined that this is our North star to get through this right now. This project together really isn't going to help me do that. So I'd like to have your permission to push this off until we get through this so I can focus and help the business move forward.

That was really empowering. The next piece is the part that is focusing on what you control. It's not, it's a wasted emotion to sit there and focus on hope and, or, or maybes only work on the things that you can control. And the number one thing is know what mode you're in. It's okay to be in retract mode. Some businesses, it makes sense to retract some, some from a department level. You don't have a choice, but know what mode you're in so that you can always look back and say, okay, wait a minute. We are, we are in go mode. So that's making my decision piece. And the last piece has to do with internal resources, use and play to strengths right now. Don't assign people to do work just because they're in a pod and their pod is to do that thing.

When you look at the North star, figure out the work that needs to be done. And then from there, really just take a look at the resources that you have ready to go and move them around and put them in the area that's driving towards that North star. And sometimes that might mean pulling a good salesperson off to work on the marketing side. Or in this case with Megan, me, Megan, pulling Megan out from the operations and helping her help me. Like that's really made a big difference on our side. But you know, other than that, um, I just think the communication and I really do credit John and Megan of beer really being amazing leaders on this, of forcing hard conversations, saying things that are not pleasant to hear to the team, but knowing that we're doing it in their best interest, telling them that it's going to be okay.

I got your back that, yeah, that's great, but that's not going to help them make life decisions. And it's not going to help to motivate them for what needs to get done. I want to give a lot. I do give a lot of credit to all of the teams and the executive teams that made decisions to like not have those conferences. I sat there thinking about, um, you know, Kyle and Sydney over at sales loft in the war room, making that decision and been like, wow, like this is real. And I, I, and, uh, same thing with Jeff at sales assembly, man, like what a hard, so I'm, I'm really thankful to have like, that's how you lead. Like you have to make hard decisions. Um, this is one where I'm not, you know, at the, at the end of the day, this is, this is John, John runs the show and you know, and as much as we are, you know, partners in this, I know what weighs on you, man.

Like this is shitty times, but this is where things are in and it does fall on you. And I think you've done a great job and thank you for that. Uh, thanks man. And, and, you know, to reiterate that for people listening, I mean, Megan, what did I, what did I tell you? Our, our North star was remember to keep everybody. It was to keep our team complete and whole. And that's like, cause I'm sitting there cause it went from revenue targets of 4 million to 2.6. We can still do that to revenue split. All right, we're going to do this. And then as things moved, it was like, no, no, no. Okay. Number one goal here is put it together, a financial model and a plan that makes sure that we can hold everybody here for minimum 60 days.

Then we'll look at it again, you know, at the end of next month. And, and every decision now, now that we're making aligns with what Chris now said, which is now it's not, this is your responsibility. This is so-and-so's responsibility. This is so-and-so's responsibility. This is, hey, it's all of our responsibility now to keep us all employed. And if you're going to be selfish in a point like this, then you're probably going to be the first one that isn't going to be employed. So, so if we can keep that, I mean, and I think that, you know, hopefully the, the, the audience got some value out of just this conversation alone, um, about where decisions and how decisions are made, but also, you know, how, how teams should work together, uh, to, to figure this out.

I mean, I feel extraordinarily blessed to have people, uh, who are really not only competent, but give a fuck, right. You guys and everybody else on the team, because that makes a huge difference. And I think one of the things I really learned early, and Chris, this was a learning lesson from Thrive, you know, when you start a business, you don't want to start a business with people who can do what you do. Right. I, because, you know, I remember at Thrive, like you, Nate and Chris had such distinct, uh, skill sets. And I remember ever since then I've been searching for that for myself and I've, and I failed at it. And the reason is, is because, you know, I remember after, um, after Thrive, it was, you know, it was Staples and when I, well, when Staples bought us and I remember I was there with a bunch of other sales guys, sales guys.

And you know what I mean? So I was VPs. I was now working with VPs of sales and salespeople. And I'm like, I don't know. Cause I'm inherently looking at them and they're looking at me like, I can do your job better than you. I know you're just thinking that. Right. And then, and then after that it was Basho and everybody was sales. And then Eric and I didn't get along out of it because when we split off and did our thing, because again, it was one of those, I can do your fucking job. And so I have an opinion about your job, which is going to get in my way because I don't think you're doing it the right way sometimes. But then when you find like Megan, like I have fucking no clue. I mean, I know finances.

I can read a spreadsheet, but holy shit, do I rely on everything that you do to help us make decisions? Cause I'm not, that's not my skillset. And Chris building all the shit that you're building and making and taking those 8 billion parts and moving them down to five pieces that actually work together. That's just not a skillset I have. And if we look down the thread, we're building this team with people who compliment each other, not conflict with each other. And I think that's a huge takeaway for me. And that's why my number one goal is to keep this fucking team together. And I hope people, you know, as you build your businesses, as you're out there doing your own thing, you take that and you, you know, into heart that you build it with good, competent people, but all who compliment each other, not who do the same fucking thing.

Cause otherwise you start pissing on each other and it doesn't work out, but this works out with that guiding star. So I appreciate you guys. Thanks man. Cool. Well, everybody, uh, like I always say at the end of all the podcasts here, uh, go out and make somebody smile today, no matter how shitty your day, um, is, if you can make somebody smile today, uh, you had a pretty damn good day. So it's, so if we can all do that, uh, hopefully we'll all get through this together. All right. All right, everybody have a great week. Make it happen.