How to Bolt Sales onto PLG Without Cannibalizing It

0:00 You know, great story at PDQ. It's a great American story. You know, the founders who are

0:03 twin brothers, they graduate high school. They want to be Hollywood writers. They move to LA,

0:09 and it turns out they can't get jobs as Hollywood writers. Maybe no surprise.

0:13 My guest today is Dan Cook, president and CEO of PDQ, a device management company that two twin

0:20 brothers bootstrapped to 20 million in revenue and 15,000 customers before Dan ever walked in the door.

0:28 The journey clearly, whatever operations were for me was not working because the COO pulled me aside

0:33 and said, "Hey, Dan, would you want to try out sales here at Lucid?" Of course, my first question

0:37 was like, "Well, why me?" And the business at the time was about 30 plus people, and he said, "Well,

0:42 you like to talk." I've seen it go really well, and I've seen it go south to where you start to

0:50 really take away maybe the magic of what you have built. The road is littered with SaaS companies

0:55 that PLG'd in, added sales reps. The sales reps got paid commission, cannibalized. What was already

1:00 going to happen, all you did was add cost to your P&L. And then there's a few that don't know how

1:07 to value that early investment or don't know how to articulate that to their CEO or CFO of, "Hey,

1:14 this is necessary." If a wave is coming, how do you make sure you don't miss the wave? And how do you

1:20 make sure you don't have the wave crash down on you? You want to ride this wave. One area I want

1:24 to get into as well, I think a lot of the former moats that companies were built on are just

1:33 starting to really go away. And one that seems to be continuing to provide outsized returns are

1:40 companies that build a very, very strong audience. Dan, your first sales call at Lucid was with the

1:56 head of IT at Uber. And the guy essentially handed you a credit card and asked, "How much could I get

2:01 for 15 grand?" Take us into the room. What did that moment tell you about what you had actually

2:06 walked into? Yeah, sure. Well, first, thanks for having me. Really excited to be here. And congrats

2:11 just on building a great podcast and community. Honestly, it was one of those kind of fun and

2:16 career defining moments for me that I always look back on with fondness. So just to set the stage,

2:21 I had joined this business called Lucid Software. They make a product called Lucid Chart, great

2:27 business, a great product if you ever need to try it out. And turns out this business had built a

2:32 great product that hundreds, if not thousands, hundreds of thousands of users were signing up

2:36 for in a freemium style and then they could pull out their credit card and buy a single license

2:40 here or a small team account there. I had joined to do what--the title was Director of Operations.

2:47 And, you know, for those of you who know, you know that that title means really very little or no one

2:52 understands what a Director of Operations actually does. And about a month into the journey, clearly,

2:57 whatever operations were for me was not working because the COO pulled me aside and said, "Hey,

3:02 Dan, would you want to like try out sales here at Lucid?" And, of course, my first question was like,

3:07 "Well, why me?" And the business at the time was about 30 plus people of which everyone was an

3:12 engineer except for me. And he said, "Well, you like to talk." And so it was a very low bar for

3:17 qualifying to be a salesperson at Lucid at that time. But I was eager to give it a shot. So it

3:22 turns out you show up at this business with a great kind of freemium motion, users that are already

3:28 enjoying the product and that sets you up pretty nicely. You would then list the companies where

3:34 you were seeing some of this self-serve adoption from top to bottom and you would see some of the

3:38 great names where oftentimes hundreds and a few instances thousands of end users had found this

3:43 product without a salesperson ever knocking on the door. And so it turns out Uber is one of these

3:48 companies where there were hundreds of users of Lucidchart that already existed there all on

3:53 scattered subscriptions or oftentimes using the free product. Well, it turns out, you know, maybe

3:58 TMI but I had previously worked with someone who had gotten fired from a job but ended up as the

4:04 number 10 hire at Uber just to tell you how life's not fair. And so when I saw that Uber had a lot

4:10 of Lucidchart users and I reflected on this former colleague, I reached out to him, said, "Hey, who

4:14 should I talk to about this Lucidchart adoption at Uber?" He connects me with the head of IT.

4:19 My very first sales call because I like to talk, I get on the call and so said, "Hey, you know, you

4:24 got a couple hundred users of this product called Lucidchart. We see that sometimes people want to

4:28 put it all onto one subscription and manage it centrally. Would you be interested?" And he says,

4:34 "Yeah, how much can I get for 15K?" And of course, I wasn't expecting that response so I hit mute on

4:38 the phone. I pretend to calculate a number and I just make up, "Well, how about 300 licenses?"

4:44 And he says, "Yeah, here's my credit card. Gives me the credit card number. We close a 15K deal."

4:49 And I was in the room with another member of the team and as soon as we got off the call,

4:53 he stands up. He's fist-pumping, chest-pumping and I'm like, "Is this not normal?" He's like,

4:57 "No, man. That's like our third biggest customer." And so I walk out into the broader room where

5:02 there's a bunch of engineers who, you know, generally don't like to talk and they're giving

5:05 me like a nice golf-clap round of applause for closing this deal. And I guess I'm off to the

5:09 races at that point because, you know, you close your first deal for 15K which at the time was a

5:13 big deal for us and all of a sudden the bar is pretty high for me to keep the pace up. But it

5:19 did set a really nice stage for me and candidly a ton of learnings along the way about how you

5:24 can inherit something that's really great and then try to really elevate it via a sales-assisted

5:29 and sales-enhanced motion. And so I'm grateful that that first call close happened. That's such

5:36 an amazing story and I'm personally, I'm a huge fan of Lucidchart. I've used it at every company

5:42 I've ever been at. I use it still to this day. Lean Scale, building org charts, building flow

5:48 charts, all kinds of stuff. I feel like it's the best thing to organize my thoughts. It really is

5:52 a great product. Fantastic. You know, if you're in like a revenue ops role or any kind of leadership

5:56 role, just to get your thoughts on paper, document a process, think through things. It's a great

6:00 product for that type of thing. So hat tip to them. Totally is. Totally is. I'm curious though

6:07 how, I feel like I've seen this a few times, like great product, building a bunch of momentum

6:13 on the self-serve motion and then just hadn't done any sales-led growth at all. But I've seen it,

6:22 I've seen it go really well and I've seen it go south to where you start to really take away maybe

6:30 the magic of what you have built. Yep. When you're thinking about, okay, it's time to start layering

6:36 this on. What order of operations do you take and how do you make sure you don't ruin the good thing

6:42 you have while being additive with the sales motion? Yeah, it's a great question. And you know,

6:48 now that I've probably talked to, I don't know, tens, if not close to a hundred different PLG to

6:53 sales type leaders and companies, I think there are playbooks that have emerged here and maybe

6:58 a lot of the listeners have participated in some of that. To me, I think the first, like in most,

7:04 what I'll call right in front of your face risk in layering sales on is, is sales actually going

7:09 to be accretive to growth? Or when you add a sales professional, are they just going to cannibalize

7:14 the PLG motion? And you might not get any better, but you've just layered in cost and maybe some

7:18 sophistication. And so it seems as if every company I've talked with, and of course, in my journey at

7:24 Lucid and now at PDQ, you've had to ask this question, which is what, how comfortable are you

7:30 with introducing a sales rep into this process? And where do you draw the line so that you can

7:34 clearly define attribution that a sales professional or sales team is adding and driving growth to your

7:40 revenue, not just cannibalizing existing revenue? And a lot of companies do it quite differently. So

7:45 at Lucid, we determined that the self-serve product was quite successful. You could buy a

7:51 small team account with your credit card and no friction. And so why add friction? But what we

7:55 found was that just like this Uber example, there were businesses that wanted to manage software

8:00 centrally. They felt really compelled to, to make sure that they knew everything that was going on.

8:05 And I'm really grateful for this shadow IT movement because it's basically helped build my career.

8:09 And so what we determined was there was an actual SKU or paywall we would introduce

8:14 for an enterprise wide offering that only a sales professional could provide and you had to buy

8:20 through sales. You could self-serve into the small accounts, but you wouldn't get some of the

8:24 enterprise or administrative features that organizations oftentimes require. And that

8:30 line of that paywall, so to speak, created a real nice bifurcation because then you could clearly

8:35 show attribution where a sales rep was able to drive an upsell into this SKU versus maybe a

8:41 self-serve account that they could have just bought with their credit card online. What's

8:44 been interesting to me to see is not every company does it that way. There's actually quite a few,

8:48 there's a spectrum of models. So there are some PLG businesses that decide, you know what, we're

8:53 actually going to let the sales reps cannibalize or engage in every single self-serve PLG lead.

9:00 And they'll use quota as an offset to say, hey, we know you're going to get X percent of your quota

9:05 through what would have been self-serve. We need you to show that you can drive some percentage

9:10 increment on top of it. And the way you might do that is through larger deal sizes, maybe by

9:15 qualifying and trying to expand into other parts of the business, you can land a larger deal than

9:20 self-serve would. Or maybe you do it through a cross-sell motion. We have multiple products,

9:25 we want to, you know, take that lead and see if you can cross-sell. And if you can do that

9:29 effectively, it's worth giving up the freemium lead so that you can drive a larger, you know,

9:34 land footprint. And, you know, each company has to kind of make their own decisions. Interestingly,

9:38 at Lucid, we drew the skew on this enterprise IT admin product. At PDQ, we've actually opened it

9:46 up, the aperture, and let our sales reps engage in leads. And what we've seen there is we go for

9:51 larger deal sizes. And because of their discovery and the presence that they have in engaging with

9:56 prospects, the larger deal size makes up for, you know, the cannibalization of what maybe would have

10:02 self-served, if this makes sense. So every company has to kind of do it a little differently. But I

10:05 say that's like bucket one, is how do you really truly understand is sales accretive to your growth

10:11 and not just cannibalizing something that's already working? That does seem to be the part where

10:16 companies have the biggest challenge, where it's the messy middle. It's should sales come into

10:22 this opportunity? Should we just let them grow organically and keep stacking on licenses?

10:28 I think your point of bringing it back to the offer is really helpful. I'm curious. So at Lucid,

10:35 you have the carved out, here's the enterprise plan with like, oh, we need HIPAA compliance,

10:39 we need XYZ things, and, you know, probably things that you would only need if you're doing a bigger

10:45 deal. At PDQ, is it a product offering that made you say, hey, we're going to take a different

10:53 approach? If somebody's listening to this thinking, hey, should I carve out that enterprise plan

11:00 versus kind of keep the same plans regardless and then just let sales navigate where they need to,

11:06 what went into making that decision? Yeah. So I think there's a couple of kind of parts to the

11:10 framework. So, well, and we'll just call it like, what are the, what are some examples of the

11:15 decision nodes that might make you comfortable doing this? So we mentioned one, we'll call it the

11:18 SKU or the Paywall, clearly bifurcates where rep can engage versus where marketing or growth kind

11:25 of drives, you know, adoption. At PDQ, our thesis was actually, hey, we are generally dealing with

11:31 an end user IT professional that might be nested within a larger business with other similarly,

11:38 similar IT professionals. The title of these, of our customers is often the system administrator.

11:42 They're the people that like, when your computer's not working, you send them a note and say, hey,

11:46 man, my computer's not working and they generally tell you to, have you tried restarting your

11:49 computer again? That's our customer. So what we, what we, what our thesis was, was that we're

11:54 landing with that one IT professional who might manage a set of devices in their company.

11:58 If we let our sales team engage with that lead and do the right discovery, can we actually expand

12:03 the size of the land by getting the other sysadmins involved in the buying decision? And so therefore,

12:10 instead of doing the land a small deal and then hope to expand later, maybe we can actually pull

12:15 forward some of that in the initial land. So that was thesis one. And again, you have to test it. You

12:21 have to see if our sales reps do this the right way. Can we actually drive a larger deal size?

12:26 I think the second element was we actually had other products that we had acquired. You'd

12:31 mentioned in the intro and we had this additional thesis, which was, hey, they come in with one

12:36 product in mind. Can we do the right amount of discovery and introduce this portfolio of products?

12:42 And that might also be another way to enhance your deal sizes. And it turns out on the former

12:47 thesis, it became actually quite difficult. We were elongating our sales cycles and oftentimes

12:52 weren't getting the larger deal because it just was hard to do. But when we introduced the cross

12:57 sale motion of, Hey, what about product two and product three? We found that we got a larger

13:02 attach rate by having sales touch those leads and that more than paid for the increased cost of the

13:07 sales reps quota. You have to have a key thesis in mind of why the sales rep should engage with a

13:12 lead that was otherwise coming to you. I think you have to be very test driven and really try

13:17 to isolate the rep and see if they can perform an action that drives that growth in deal size or

13:23 across the skew or whatever the thing might be. And if you can see that you can prove it over a,

13:27 you know, period of time with one or two reps, then you can have confidence that maybe that's

13:30 the right step for you to take. And maybe the last thing I'll share is when I talked to a couple

13:35 different companies, there's a company called smart sheet. That's a great, another great business

13:39 that built on PLG and sales assist. And they actually did something really interesting,

13:43 took some sophistication, but they would create a, they called it a ghost book. So imagine you have

13:48 five reps to start or four reps or whatever. They would create a fifth kind of a book where they

13:53 would not let a rep touch it. And they wanted to just run an AB test to say, Hey, let's just,

13:57 let's AB test our reps against each other and see which reps are doing a good job at this thesis.

14:01 But let's also make sure we're testing it against like the status quo to make sure that it's actually

14:05 truly a creative to growth and not adding costs without benefit. And I thought that was another

14:10 interesting approach on how you might test your way into sales coverage on top of PLG. So

14:19 makes a ton of sense. And I think what I'm hearing, and let me know if I'm hearing it correctly,

14:24 it depends on the value proposition that the product may be offering to the customer.

14:29 The way I'm seeing it is Lucid, you may have value just for that one particular person who

14:36 wants to have a license and they don't necessarily need to have the entire company leveraging Lucid

14:40 to get the value out of it. Or maybe PDQ like, Hey, the real value comes when you're managing

14:46 all of the devices with the software. So we want to make sure you're actually getting the most out

14:51 of the product offering. Does it feel like individualistic versus like enterprise value

14:57 can maybe shift the spectrum? Yeah, that's another great kind of way to think about it. And in fact,

15:03 you know, you think about the contrast in these, these two businesses, which again, listeners

15:06 probably wouldn't know enough about, but like with Lucid chart, anyone can use it for any

15:10 use case at PDQ is a very specific persona. And so I think that also creates an interesting dynamic,

15:16 you know, how horizontal is your product versus how vertical are you? If you have like a key core

15:21 persona, that might actually have additional implications for how you approach this. Whereas

15:25 if you're this broad platform where every single person could use it at a low ACV, you might need

15:30 something more compelling to drive the right sales types conversations with a, with some sort of buyer

15:35 or persona at the business in order to really justify a sales approach. And, you know, I've

15:40 seen a few PLG based businesses where the product just might not be important enough candidly to

15:45 the enterprise where it's really hard to break into some centralized buyer and IT team or elsewhere.

15:51 But there's plenty of businesses who figured that out as well. And, you know, oftentimes it's a

15:55 paywall around some enterprise view and IT admin features. So, yeah, I mean, each business has to

16:00 kind of think about it a little differently. I would say my learnings are you got to test into it,

16:04 you got to be aligned with your marketing and product teams. You definitely got to be watching

16:08 for cannibalization and you can't get too confident that success is truly earned if you're just

16:13 cannibalizing something that would have happened. And, you know, I think the road is littered with

16:18 SaaS companies that PLG'd in, added sales reps, the sales reps got paid commission,

16:22 cannibalized what was already going to happen and all you did was add cost to your to your P&L.

16:26 So, it's a, it's a, it's a quite an interesting journey, but when you do it right,

16:30 it can really accelerate growth. And, you know, fortunately at Lucid and PDQ it's worked.

16:36 Once you feel like you have the right thesis and you've been testing it, it feels like, okay,

16:41 we have an understanding of where sales comes in versus what we let live in the PLG world.

16:48 I imagine the next challenge is how am I going to allocate capital across these two motions?

16:54 I know sometimes they serve each other, but PLG is typically much, much more marketing driven

17:00 versus layering in sales headcount and as a CRO leading revenue, how would you

17:08 recommend going through that decision of where to shift capital from your PLG motion to your

17:14 SLG motion? Yeah, great question. So, I think, you know, if you think about the order of operations,

17:22 there's generally, I think, a very positive benefit to nailing the PLG part first before

17:28 you add in the sales motion, right? And for obvious reasons. If you're having people adopt your product

17:33 without a sales team, it suggests that there's real value there. And, and so I think the order,

17:39 at least that we took it at Lucid and I think similarly here at PDQ was you'd start with what

17:43 I'll call traditional search. You try to drive an optimized SEO strategy and now increasingly an

17:50 AEO strategy. Make sure that people can find and discover your product when they search for

17:55 something in the category that you exist in. That's generally a function of, of course, you know,

17:59 adding the right content strategy and team and, and of course, someone who's expert in these,

18:05 in these ways of attracting customers to click on the link and to find your product.

18:10 The second one, once you've kind of nailed that, and that's usually just a headcount cost,

18:14 you're then going to think about how do we make sure that when they land on our webpage,

18:17 there's an optimized path to get into the product and to get the value as fast as possible.

18:21 And of course, different companies define this role differently. There are growth teams and other,

18:26 other approaches that you might take. But really what you're trying to do then is to just take the

18:31 most advantage of any single person that comes to your website and get them to try the product. And

18:36 again, we have a team that does that here. And again, that's headcount centric. You then,

18:40 if you want to start widening your funnel, you start paying for campaigns. And of course,

18:44 that's where I think you have to have a particularly quantitative

18:48 set of team members who can ensure that you're getting an appropriate cost per lead or,

18:53 or cost per demo or cost per trial. And I think if you, if you can feel comfortable about those

18:59 economics sand sales team, that, that's a really critical, what I'll call inflection point before

19:05 you decide to start layering on sales. You know, that's maybe just rocket science, but I think,

19:10 or not rocket science, it's, it's probably pretty basic, but we've just tried to make sure that we

19:13 understand our marketing fundamentals before we start layering in a sales team. I think once you,

19:18 once you start thinking about sales, and again, I'm trying to think if this is going to be that

19:21 novel to listeners, but maybe it's good just to revisit it. And here I am kind of thinking through

19:25 it out loud with you. You know, you, you, you add two reps or four reps, you, you, you always start

19:30 in multiples so you can kind of A/B test against each other. They have a base salary. They have a

19:35 variable compensation. You want to try and use over some period of time, call it three months or six

19:40 months to identify whether they're run rating in terms of ROI on their own compensation. And, you

19:46 know, we tried to target a 4x payback on the sales rep in, in their first year. And we felt like if you

19:52 had 4x payback plus a tuned marketing funnel with an understanding of costs that you could sit back,

20:00 stare at the spreadsheet, sit down with your finance partners, and feel really comfortable

20:04 about whether you were scaling efficiently and effectively and in a capital efficient way.

20:08 And so that's the approach we took. You know, you can get into the real weeds in terms of the math

20:14 on this and the right way to drive attribution and those types of things. But of course, took a real

20:19 partnership with both marketing, sales, and your finance team to make sure everyone's on the same

20:24 page about the right rate and pace to invest in sales team members. What we found was, and you'll

20:30 actually appreciate the story, we hired four reps. I had been selling. I, you know, closed the Uber

20:35 deal, of course, and was feeling pretty proud about myself. I had closed a few other deals. And so

20:40 when I was hiring the first set of four reps, I assumed that they would be able to do half the

20:44 production that I could do because, you know, how could they do as well as I do? And they were going

20:49 to be pretty efficient at it. And it turns out about three months in, we were watching their run rate

20:53 and they were 2x'ing my pay. So I was materially off in my forecast of what a sales rep could do

20:59 at Lucid. And so we quickly adjusted those quotas and also felt confident we could start adding

21:03 additional headcount. And I think just being deliberate, being thoughtful, having good partners

21:08 and making sure you're data driven, you can't let emotion get in the way. And I think that's

21:11 probably a great way to just approach that problem. I think that's one of the only times

21:17 I've heard someone be surprised that the new reps are outperforming what their expectations are.

21:23 Well, what can I say? I was pretty confident in myself.

21:26 No, I think that makes a ton of sense. I think just culturally, I think it's a big change

21:31 when the team is used to having, okay, we're pouring money into marketing and ads usually for

21:38 for PLG motions and all these other channels. And then it's like, oh, we have to start shifting and

21:44 taking some of that that maybe we can't do some of the things we did over here anymore. We got to

21:47 move it over there. So I think the way you framed it, hey, let's measure the unit economics of each

21:52 decision. And then as well, drive alignment between sales and marketing and product. It's

21:58 probably the only way to do it. Yeah. I mean, it takes some iterations. I think one of my learnings

22:03 was you have to obviously be meeting regularly and communicating regularly. You have to have really

22:09 good, I'll call them SLAs for lack of a better term between teams and departments to just make

22:12 sure that we agree on what is success and what are the outcomes we're looking for here. And we're

22:18 humans, emotion can get in, especially in scale of mode. Everyone's working hard. Everyone's got the

22:22 right motivation in mind. So you just always got to be aware of that. Because you mentioned there's

22:28 a lot of companies where this has gone off the rails. So you have a great PLG company, you layer

22:34 in SLG and it's just a complete miss on the investment. What are some of the big red flags

22:40 a CRO or CEO should be looking out for when they start running this new motion? Yeah. So maybe a

22:47 few things and maybe they might not all be red flags, but they might be things to avoid the red

22:52 flags. So maybe I'll kind of pivot your question a little bit. I think one of the things I found,

22:57 and I'm curious if the folks listed in have had similar experiences. It's like you think about the

23:02 diversity in GTM organizations and just in terms of how people think, their strengths and their

23:07 weaknesses. You're going to have like one set of sellers on one spectrum that are going to be a

23:12 little more what I'll call quant heavy and into the numbers and the metrics. And then you're going

23:17 to have the other side of the spectrum of the sellers who are amazing with prospects, amazing

23:22 with customers. They're really into the relationship, but maybe the numbers aren't as much of a

23:27 strength. And I think that that's an important dynamic to understand as you're reflecting on

23:32 yourself building one of these organizations. Where are your comparative advantages? Where

23:37 do you skew? And that way you can then hire people around you that can compliment you because I think

23:42 to be successful in this motion, you need people who are good at both of these things. And sure,

23:46 there's some people who are amazing with people and quants, a little harder to find. But I found

23:50 that very quickly identifying your own strength which takes some humility, your own weaknesses

23:55 especially, and then trying to compliment with hires that can surround you with additional skill

24:01 sets. So let me give you an example. I think one of the biggest challenges in the PLG motion is that

24:06 when you hire your first sales leader and if they're more on what I'll call sales relationship

24:11 side of things, they're going to feel really excited when they're closing deals. But they're

24:16 probably not going to fully appreciate, and this may be a stereotype, that there's this

24:19 cannibalization risk and that we have to be incredibly careful that we're not just consuming

24:24 revenue that was already happening. They'll spike the football on the deal, but it's like, "Well,

24:27 that deal might have happened." And before you know it, it happened without you. And before you

24:31 know it, you have misalignment culturally and you have the execs and folks in other rooms saying,

24:36 "Well, the sales team is not closing anything incremental." But the sales leaders over there

24:40 spiking the football with their team because they were able to close the deal. So what is my point?

24:45 I think a RevOps infrastructure early is actually incredibly helpful. And what is RevOps? We can all

24:51 define that differently. But to me, it's a reflection that there's someone or a team that

24:57 are slightly more quantitative in nature that can be a little bit of a, we'll call it the Switzerland

25:03 between your exec team and your sales leaders to really truly measure the efficacy of the effort

25:08 and ensure that the appropriate amount of support is being lent to make sure it's working appropriately.

25:13 And this, of course, is across a variety of things. So, for example, you got to be quantitative enough

25:18 to actually, you know, present outcomes. Are we closing deals? Are they truly incremental, etc.

25:24 But then you work your way into compensation plans. You work your way into systems. And we could have

25:28 a whole conversation about the landmines associated with your system strategy. And of course, you have

25:34 an enablement strategy that you also want to implement so that you can think about how you

25:37 might scale this effort if it's working rapidly. And so I found that maybe it's not a red flag,

25:44 unless you're not doing it this way, it might just be something you should think about. How do you

25:47 invest early and often in an appropriate, quantitatively driven Switzerland-like RevOps

25:53 function that can just make sure that the ship is headed in the right direction with the right

25:58 alignment? I think that's like a critical one to watch for. I really appreciate you bringing that up.

26:04 And I'm wondering if you have, I know it'll depend on different companies and what the

26:09 GTM setup is, but I think there's a lot of companies or a lot of leaders that recognize

26:16 that and they do make the investment early. And then there's a few that don't know how

26:23 to value that early investment or don't know how to articulate that to their CEO or CFO

26:29 of, "Hey, this is necessary." This might be a two-part question. One, when should you start

26:36 investing which resources? What do you need early stage, mid stage as you're scaling?

26:42 How do you think of building out that RevOps team? And then two, how do you justify the

26:49 amount of investment? Do you tie it to how many sellers? How much ARR? Why do you need a five

26:57 person team versus a one person team? So the magnitude of investment, where do you tend to

27:02 make that argument to senior executives? Yeah, so great question. Maybe I'll start with the

27:07 second one first. We actually did a little bit of our own informal study on this and we interviewed

27:12 a couple of companies that we admired to understand the RevOps investment relative to, we'll call it

27:17 generic sales investment early and then we'll call it later in the scale journey. And I can't remember

27:23 all the companies we interviewed and again, stages, how do you even measure stage? Probably based on

27:27 employee count. But what we found was some of the best in class companies that at least we admired

27:32 over invested early in RevOps to the magnitude of like a six to one seller to RevOps higher ratio.

27:39 And then as you watch the scale journey happen and once they were into the hundreds of sellers,

27:44 that ratio would be as, it would dramatically change to like 30 sellers to one RevOps person.

27:50 And the takeaway for us was, hey, we should invest early because the foundations for scale

27:55 are totally intertwined in your data, in your systems and in your process. And if you can feel

28:02 real confidence that you've made the appropriate investments, that everything is looking square

28:06 there, then your confidence in pouring gas on the fire and the return on that investment will

28:10 dramatically grow. And as a revenue leader, your ability to communicate to your broader leadership

28:16 team, the CEO, that what you're doing is working, the confidence levels just go through the roof.

28:21 And so we actually, we did something interesting here. And this is a hack that I found everywhere

28:26 I've worked. We'll specifically loose it in PDQ. It turns out there's a type of persona that's a

28:31 great person to be like a first hire here. They can be generalists enough to be dangerous and they

28:36 just grind. And the persona is basically, it was what I was when I graduated college. I went to and

28:41 did an investment banking job and you basically sit in a cubicle all day. You stare at Excel spreadsheets,

28:46 you work 100 hours a week and you just grind away and you make okay money, but not enough to really

28:51 justify that lifestyle. And every single one of those kids eventually wants to go off to business

28:57 school or be a CEO or whatever ambitious thing. You know, otherwise, why would you work 100 hours

29:01 a week doing Excel? And what we found, and it's kind of a money ball strategy is if you could find

29:06 someone like that two to three years, they've done their investment banking program, they're

29:10 looking for another role for a couple years prior to going to business school. It was a great hire

29:14 that was a low cost persona that you needed to pay them, but you didn't need to pay them nearly as

29:19 much as some five, 10, 20 year veteran. They came in and were happy to work 80 hours a week because

29:25 that's much better than 100. And they were quantitative enough to be dangerous to really

29:29 help you get comfortable with the numbers associated with your scaling efforts. Maybe

29:34 they weren't as systems centric and you need to augment there, but generally pretty smart,

29:40 pretty motivated. The other group to hire out of is these, you know, you do these two year

29:44 consulting programs out of Bain or BCG and McKinsey. And if you can convince somebody like that,

29:49 hey, finish your two years, come work for me for two years and then go off to B school.

29:54 It's a great money ball. There's real value in those types of folks and they will grind. So

29:58 that's a little hat tip I could come back to. But so you hire someone like that, they can

30:04 kind of be a generalist for you. They can hold down the fort on what we'll call forecasting

30:09 and sales rep performance and be a partner to whoever your sales leader is or your sales reps.

30:15 The next critical junk jump was into the systems piece. And I guess you want me to keep going.

30:21 Yeah, absolutely. I'm loving this. First of all, I've never, I'm recruiting these people all day.

30:26 And typically we're kind of looking for someone. Maybe they are already in the startup,

30:31 but you're right. That's what happens. Like, well, once they've built a career in it and they have a

30:35 couple, you know, good notches on their belt, then it is pretty cost prohibitive. And then it's like,

30:41 where do you find the pool of people who haven't already made it yet? I think it's brilliant. So

30:46 yeah, I would love your perspective on the systems side too. Yeah. So the systems one is like, uh,

30:52 you know, I'm sure everybody who's ever had to implement systems new or who's inherited bad

30:57 systems, um, you know, could pull their sleeve back and just show the scars, you know, um, you

31:02 know, what was interesting for me is because I hadn't really been a sales leader before I'd,

31:06 you know, sold money for a venture capital firm, but like I was not a, I didn't know what I didn't

31:11 know. And because I'd been in a cubicle for a couple of years, you know, building Excel sheets,

31:15 the first CRM we built at Lucid true story was a Google spreadsheet. And, you know, the thought was

31:20 like, let's actually figure out what information matters when we're engaging with the prospect.

31:25 And let's, it was really interesting to watch what, what information would one of our four

31:30 early sellers log? Clearly, if a sales rep is logging something on their own, it suggests that

31:35 there's meaning or value to the information. Otherwise the sales rep will never log anything.

31:38 I think we all know this 100%. What was, what was information that they were logging? That was

31:43 telling. And then what was information that I and others felt like we just had to have in order to

31:49 truly measure and vet the ROI of this effort. And so of course you come, we come with the things we

31:54 want those reps to log and then they have the things that they're logging organically. And what

31:59 do you know? You now have your V1 design for your CRM. And, and what I appreciated about that effort,

32:07 even if it wasn't, I didn't do it on purpose. I just didn't know any better is I think there's

32:10 actually real wisdom in it. If you understand your underlying process, and if you feel like you have

32:15 a process that's now repeatable one, and then two, if you actually know what information is important

32:20 to you as sales leader, as CRO, as CEO, and then as the reps, what do they need? You can basically

32:28 reduce your margin of error on CRM implementation dramatically. And I think the, again, the road is

32:34 littered with organizations who bring in the high priced ECRM consultant or who just do an out of the

32:39 box implementation or candidly who just hack their way along the, along the way. And you just end up

32:45 building the Frankenstein that then years later, the whole team is like, what have we, what have

32:51 we done? And, and unfortunately, you know, look, it wasn't perfect, but I think for us, we were able

32:57 to get that V1 out and it worked really well for us. And then of course you build and eventually

33:03 hire the right professionals who can help you manage that your process will change inevitably.

33:08 You'll get bloat in your opportunity object and all the different things you're doing on in your

33:12 CRM. You'll have to occasionally whittle that back. But we found that the early effort in maybe doing

33:18 the unscalable thing first was like critical and eventually allowed you to do the scalable thing

33:23 more effectively. I think there is a lot of wisdom baked in that I, I worked for a few tech companies.

33:29 One of them ended up getting acquired by Lexus Nexus fortune 1000 company, and they had a

33:37 multi-billion dollar revenue organization. The forecast was all of the EAs of the VPs of sales,

33:46 emailing a Excel spreadsheet to the top head of sales EA who compiled all of the forecasts.

33:54 And they did that every Friday afternoon. That was their process. And that wasn't that long ago.

33:59 That was in 2020. So I think the point is if you have a really good process and you nail that out,

34:06 nail that down first, that's perfect. Then you layer on the acceleration of having systems to

34:11 make it efficient, even better. A hundred percent. Yep. And you know, I look, I think AI will probably

34:16 help here a little bit. You know, I think you can, you can cover a multitude of CRM sins probably

34:21 with just a good, you know, Claude, you know, back and forth and asking for the right information

34:26 and data. But I think the, I think the underlying, the underlying principle for me is if you don't

34:31 have a sales process that you believe is good and repeatable, then beware of your systems

34:35 implementation because it will likely increase your, your, your risk significantly and the costs

34:42 associated with it. So I think it's a really good caution. I want to get into PDQ a little bit

34:51 because I think one, one part of this journey that always throws a whole bunch of wrenches in the

34:58 growth is layering in acquisitions. So you come in, there's a PLG motion. We're going to bolt on the

35:05 SLG motion, which is already difficult enough and plenty of things to work out. Then on top of that,

35:11 as you're growing, we're going to bolt on some acquisitions, do integrations and get new sales

35:15 teams working together. New PLG motions combined into one story that makes sense. Walk me through

35:22 it. How'd you do it? Oh man. Well, I'll pull up my other arm and show you the scars from, from that.

35:29 You know, I think we've learned a lot. So we've done four tucking acquisitions over the past four

35:34 years, you know, small to mid-sized companies between call it 10 and 60 team members, right?

35:40 So we're not, these aren't massive deals, but you know, anyone who's worked at businesses of that

35:45 size and scale knows that there's oftentimes a lot of homegrownness and you know, there's stuff that

35:50 works really well. And then there's a few things where you inherit and you're like, huh, why did,

35:53 you know, why did they do it that way? And of course they might say the same thing about PDQ.

35:57 So what I think the playbook that we've, we've generated is one where you start with,

36:03 when you're integrating two teams and companies and products together,

36:07 you start with like the easiest thing first and you work your way back. And you, you of course,

36:11 build a playbook that ensures that you have the right owners of each of these things. So let me

36:15 give you an example. We found that you could very quickly acquire a business, send an email out to

36:21 your customers and say, Hey, we've introduced this product to our new, to our family of products.

36:26 Are you interested in a demo? And believe it or not, just a nascent or very basic marketing

36:31 cross-sell campaign effort where you drive them to webinars or you just invite them to raise their

36:36 hand and experiment with the product has been an incredibly easy and valuable way to drive leads.

36:41 Now, of course, what happens is the lead gets registered and it's in their CRM or it's in our

36:45 CRM. And so you have to start kind of working your way back to understand and identify how do we then

36:51 build a unified process and eventually migrate systems so that this doesn't just become some

36:57 similarly Frankenstein backend. So our playbook consists of a cross-sell strategy. It starts

37:04 with marketing, a cross-sell strategy that then has the appropriate overlay rep that can speak,

37:10 you know, an expert speak to the product and ensure a positive experience from the prospect.

37:17 And then you eventually and inevitably migrate the CRM, which again requires a big systems lift.

37:24 And then lastly, on the product side, you introduce and eventually build common authentication to the

37:30 product and migrate them to a similar billing system. Whether you end up integrating the

37:36 products completely as a UI, UX or whether you have an app switcher or whether the apps continue

37:41 to be standalone, each product we've had a somewhat different strategy there. But said another way,

37:46 you kind of work your way back through this playbook of sorts and I think we've got to a

37:50 place where we're pretty good at it. You know, I think to summarize our playbook on acquisitions,

37:54 we've effectively early and often cross-sold the product immediately to try and again generate

38:01 interest using a marketing campaign that's generally pretty basic but, you know, a variety

38:06 of different touch points there, email, webinar, webcast, etc. We then use sales engineers to

38:14 help supplement or augment sellers who don't know the technicality of the new product that we've

38:18 acquired yet but can then just help generate, you know, the movement of the pipeline.

38:24 We do introduce an enablement effort so that our reps have to sign off on the acquired product

38:30 in order to start getting leads. We want our reps to really feel confident in the products they're

38:35 selling and so we force them through, you know, a recorded enablement and a manager signs off on it

38:40 and we just find that as a nice touch point. Technically, we use--we will integrate authentication

38:46 so you use the same username and password. We'll eventually integrate billing, same billing, same

38:52 quote and then in some instances, we've integrated the apps completely or use an app switch or let

38:57 the apps continue to exist standalone. So that's been our playbook. I think, you know, M&A can

39:02 definitely create some real complexity in all of this. We're not perfect at PDQ. There's still

39:07 some lingering systems that we're continuing to migrate but we built a nice playbook here and you

39:12 built some capabilities around it. You utilize the right systems resources and sometimes occasionally

39:17 contractors and other smart folks and that can be a real help as you move through kind of an M&A

39:22 strategy. Yeah, I think I've seen it--I've seen it done well and I've seen it done really poorly

39:29 and when it's done well, it's amazing. You get that synergy between the go-to-market teams,

39:34 the cross-selling activity starts happening, you're sharing opportunities and there's a lot

39:39 of momentum. Then I've seen it where how it's been years before you integrate the CRMs and they're

39:44 basically just running on their own and we're not getting any outsized value of this acquisition

39:49 that we made and if any or even worse some like toxicity between the teams and not giving them to

39:55 gel well. So I think it's just be very thoughtful when you're making an acquisition which sounds

40:02 like you've taken an extremely thoughtful approach in who you've targeted and who you brought in.

40:07 Yeah, look, 100% and, you know, I think I would say M&A as a growth lever, I could argue at times

40:15 it's you've got to be pre-dialed in to make it work. If you don't feel like you've got a really

40:19 good playbook or experience doing it or just incredible conviction and I heard somebody once

40:24 told me that if you're going to make acquisitions and you see hair during the diligence period,

40:30 expect a wig factory once you've closed the deal, you know, and it turns out that's been the case

40:35 for us a lot of times. You see something, we're like, "Oh, that doesn't seem right" or something

40:37 maybe and then once you acquire the business, you're like, "Wow, we just inherited an interesting

40:41 challenge," right? And, you know, it might not be the fault of the acquired business, they just did

40:45 things the way that they did them. And so I think if you're going to explore an M&A strategy from a

40:49 GTM perspective, you have to have real confidence that you can bring that product to your channel

40:55 successfully or they can bring your product to their channel or that they bring a new channel

41:01 that you can distribute your own products through. And I think if you can get conviction of those

41:05 things, then it probably increases the probability and similarly covers a multitude of integration

41:10 sins, you know, that can happen with an M&A deal. One area I want to get into as well, I think a lot

41:16 of the former moats that companies were built on are just starting to really go away. Sure.

41:25 And one that seems to be continuing to provide outsized returns are companies that build a very,

41:32 very strong audience. Early in PDQ's history, the founders did a really good job of that and

41:38 team that up. I would just love your take on what it's like being in a business that made that

41:45 investment early on and carried it through. And if you have any advice for other companies

41:50 interested in doing the same thing. You know, great story at PDQ. It's a great American story.

41:54 You know, the founders who are twin brothers, they graduate high school, they want to be Hollywood

41:58 writers, they moved to LA and turns out they can't get jobs as Hollywood writers, maybe no surprise.

42:05 And so to pay the bills, they end up becoming system administrators, IT professionals. And

42:10 that ends up being a very fortuitous decision because within a few years of that, they build

42:15 a little consulting firm and then a few later from that decide let's build software and that's where

42:19 PDQ originates. And to their credit, because they had been the customer, they nailed product market

42:25 fit with the original product, just nailed it. Understood. The need really had an ethos of giving

42:30 IT professionals a win. And I think they landed that. Second, they would admit that they didn't

42:36 know how to sell or market the product. And so they first, from a packaging standpoint, started

42:41 just giving the thing away for free and eventually figured out, hey, let's ask people to pay us with

42:45 a credit card. So they kind of fell into freemium meets PLG. And then last point, they thought,

42:52 well, why don't we channel our Hollywood writing ambitions? And they just started going on YouTube.

42:57 And they were so consistent and so religious about the consistency and the content that they

43:03 wanted to bring to give IT professionals a win. And this was 2010 when YouTube was still pretty

43:09 nascent. I mean, you know, that was the time when it was just, you know, what do you want to call it,

43:12 user-generated content of all shapes and sizes. And so they would go on every week and do a live

43:17 webcast. They would invite their customers to attend. They actually used some homegrown software

43:22 for some of that at first. But then we're also doing YouTube content. And to the credit of these

43:26 guys, they had the right kind of humor, the right authenticity. And over time, virality,

43:33 you know, maybe not capital V, but an IT world virality that led to other IT professionals

43:38 finding the content. And a few things that they did that I think were particularly smart. One,

43:41 they didn't keep their content contained or confined to our product. Like they tried to

43:46 broaden the conversation to a whole host of topics that sysadmins and IT professionals dealt with.

43:51 And again, maybe not totally rocket science, but I think it allowed them to capture a wider

43:57 set of viewers. And of course, that viewership just got nurtured over time. And eventually,

44:02 all of them end up trying the product at some point or another, right? Second,

44:06 the consistency was critical. And third, they actually would do live Q&A. So they actually

44:11 had like a live show. And I think that just built a community that then found its way into Reddit,

44:18 where people would speak very positively in terms of their sentiment. And, you know,

44:21 Reddit's not what I would call the friendliest place in the world at times. But people talk

44:25 very fondly of PDQ because I think these founders were really authentic. I think a couple takeaways

44:30 that I've had since. First of all, you know, anytime you inherit a business and are asked to

44:34 take over for founders, they've since retired. They moved to Puerto Rico. I think one of the

44:38 things I appreciated was, one, let's not screw this up. How do we continue to invest in appropriate

44:45 content that's regular, that's authentic, that is relevant to our customers? And, you know,

44:52 I've been having this thought lately without getting too philosophical with everyone here.

44:55 But, you know, you think about the world of AI. I mean, all of us are experiencing the AI slop,

45:00 you know, that's all around us. I am convinced, and I don't know if it's some evolutionary thing,

45:05 where we can see something and recognize that something's off. Like, it's not right. It's not

45:10 real. And it'll get better, surely. And maybe there's a time when our brains will get tricked.

45:16 And I'm sure we've all gotten tricked at one point by one of these videos even recently.

45:19 But what is my point? Like, I think that authentic content, authentic communication,

45:25 and authentic customer experiences and engagements are going to be the premium

45:29 that can oftentimes separate your brand. There might be some instances where an agent is going

45:36 to purchase from another agent and, you know, authenticity and personality, you know, won't matter

45:40 at all. But in so much as I think humans will still be involved in a lot of the experiences

45:44 associated with AI, I'm bullish that there's still a role for us, you know, in an agentic and AI world.

45:50 Like, I think the authenticity of the content you create, the experiences you create for your

45:54 customers and how you engage with them is going to be the differentiator. And I've even hypothesized

45:58 that there will be some company or companies out there who say that they're only human,

46:02 that they don't even use AI. And I bet all of us will decide at some point or another that we want

46:06 to buy from that brand because they're a human brand, right? And so I think it just goes to show

46:10 that there will be real premium to authentic, authentic to your brand, authentic to your team,

46:17 experiences that customers will want. And the founders were a really great example of that.

46:22 I've never heard it framed that way, but it makes me think people can even see through if it is a

46:26 real person, whether that person is being authentic or not. So to try to get a AI avatar

46:34 to exude the same authenticity, I think is going to be, to your point, unbelievably challenging,

46:40 potentially impossible. And also just the supply of real people doing real things,

46:47 that's inherently the value of it. And it's going to be really limited as we continue to create more

46:52 and more AI driven content. So I'm with you. I think there's going to be a huge opportunity

46:58 for it. And maybe there's a point in time you can do this. I'm curious on the transfer of content,

47:08 because a lot of times it's built around a personality. In this case, you had a very

47:11 unique situation. You had two people who want to be Hollywood writers. They kind of got to live out

47:15 their dream through their tech company. How do you transition that and keep the same feel of it?

47:26 Yeah. Well, so this has been really interesting. When I joined PDQ with 70 team members, and I

47:31 want to say 40 of them, had been system administrators, customers of PDQ, who'd been recruited

47:37 to work at the business. And to the founders, maybe credit, I can say maybe, they then infused

47:44 every function inside the business with system administrators. And I think all of our team

47:48 members would admit that there were times when that was really great, because there was real

47:52 customer empathy for what they were experiencing and doing. And so every function, product,

47:58 design, engineering, sales, there was system administrator DNA that could just really empathize

48:04 with the customer. But maybe you lacked at sometimes the benefits of specialization of

48:08 people who were just really good at sales or really good at marketing independent of system

48:12 administration. And I think we've tried to create the right fine balance mix of bringing in those

48:18 experts so that you kind of get the best in class of how to do a certain function. But then you got

48:23 a system administrator kind of tied or embedded in the team that can really help us understand the

48:28 customer problems. And maybe even have some empathy for like what our IT customers are going

48:33 through. I mean, they're grinding every day, oftentimes in a thankless job, right? So I think

48:37 that's one is how do you keep the right amount of what we'll call customer empathy, just throughout

48:43 your organization. To your point about like some of our content strategy, it turns out when you have

48:48 really dynamic and we'll call it charismatic founders who are now living in Puerto Rico,

48:53 and they're no longer on your webcast. I don't think I fully appreciated that I needed to be

48:58 running like a studio operation almost akin to like an increment, you know, where I had to have

49:02 like a weather person and the sports person and the anchors, right? And I think to our credit, and really

49:07 the team, we've been able to develop additional personalities, so to speak, right? And it is pretty

49:13 funny, like you need people who are really technical expertise to the point about authenticity.

49:18 One way you show authenticity is that you are a technical expert. And so we've had to make sure

49:22 we have people who really know their stuff. And then sometimes it's nice to just have some charisma,

49:26 someone who can be kind of the person who brings levity and enjoyment, and you know,

49:30 they have to know enough to be dangerous. But so said another way, anytime you deploy a strategy

49:34 where personalities are actually important to being authentic and authentic brand, you know,

49:39 just just be aware that you're also going to, you know, run into a situation where you're going to

49:43 have to have a pipeline, you're going to have to realize that some of these folks will, if they

49:47 ever leave, you know, you'll have you might have some challenges to replace them. And, you know,

49:50 we've had different moments where it's worked really well, and others where it has, it's been

49:54 a challenge. But, you know, kudos to the team, they continue to find great people to to be our voices

49:58 and our, our, you know, our presence, you know, on these on these forums. So

50:05 what's next for you and PDQ? What's on the horizon?

50:10 Yeah, well, like probably many of the folks listening, I assume there's going to be like a

50:14 spectrum of folks that are going through similar stuff. So you're either one, you've already joined

50:20 the what I'll call like AI native business. And so a lot of what you're trying to think about is

50:25 old paradigms to new, and how do you now scale a PLG company in an AI first or centric era?

50:33 That's an interesting set of problems. PDQ is not in that category. We were a SaaS business that's

50:38 now kind of going through that evolution of how do we continue to stay relevant, but also continue

50:44 to delight our customers and be prepared for a future AI or a gentic driven era. And I think that

50:50 that category, so that's where we are, there's probably another set of folks that are listening

50:54 who are looking for their next opportunity or might not even be in the software world.

50:58 I think for us at PDQ, we feel one really confident in the position of our products,

51:03 you know, it's hard to vibe code what we do. You can, we're putting software on the devices we

51:07 manage. There's a lot of trust that's embedded in that. And we're in that kind of cybersecurity

51:12 vulnerability management world that is actually quite, quite positive for us, given that AI is

51:19 showing really well at finding vulnerabilities and other issues, right? So we feel pretty well

51:23 positioned for that. That being said, a lot of what we're doing, we're revisiting and trying to

51:28 think through how can AI be appropriately introduced in an authentic to us way and in

51:34 an effective ROI driven way. You know, we talked about the ROI of PLG and sales assist and how do

51:40 you make sure you're, you've got the economics right. I mean, you talk to any business right

51:44 now and we're all trying to wrap our heads around token usage and what's the appropriate kind of

51:48 amount of spend on AI relative to the ROI and can you measure it? But how it looks for us though

51:55 is one, we've tried to enable every single team member here to have access to appropriate AI

52:01 tools. Two, where we've introduced some rigor associated with budgets. We just can't go spend

52:06 money like crazy. We kind of need some justification. I'd say three, in product, we're actively

52:11 evolving our products to include the appropriate automation that we think will delight the customer.

52:16 In our go to market, we're actively revisiting our entire customer acquisition strategy

52:21 and finding the appropriate and what I'll call mature enough AI driven approaches to the pipeline

52:28 and to the funnel. That's everything from experimenting with some outbound BDR concepts

52:34 with AI to building a RFP generator that scrapes the web using AI and identifies some opportunities

52:40 for our sales team to our sales enablement strategy and how we ensure that our sellers

52:46 have the right content and training and certification so they can feel confident

52:50 in the products that they're selling. So I would say AI is a key theme as it is for probably many

52:54 in terms of how we adopt, implement, and see real returns from that investment. We're still in the

52:59 wilderness there a little bit in terms of feeling totally confident in where we're headed, but I'd

53:05 say that's been a big theme. And then the second theme of course is always just how do you keep your

53:08 own saw sharp or your blade sharp, right? And I think each of us owes it to ourselves to make sure

53:15 we're spending the appropriate amount of time reflecting on how our own roles can evolve or

53:20 how we can adopt tools to help us be better at our jobs. And so that's been a big kind of

53:26 personal focus is just how do you make sure that we don't, if a wave is coming, how do you make

53:32 sure you don't miss the wave? And how do you make sure you don't have the wave crash down on you?

53:37 You want to ride this wave and I think it's an exciting time and hopefully everybody feels

53:42 motivated enough to have fun riding it. Yeah, and I think you mentioned something. I don't think

53:47 anybody's sitting in there feeling like they're fully confident and dialed in on exactly how to

53:51 take advantage of the wave. So I think most are feeling that way. If you are feeling that confident,

53:57 then you're probably going to have the wave crash down on you because you're probably missing

54:00 something. I mean, things are changing so fast, right? I mean, it's every day is something new.

54:04 And I think the key thing is how do you just appropriately set aside some time in a week

54:08 or in a month to try a new thing here and there. And it's hard when you're trying to build and

54:14 scale and there's any problem on any given day, but I think it's an exciting time.

54:19 Yeah, adaptability and agility are going to be super key here in the next. They always have been,

54:26 but in particular now. Dan, this has been incredible. Thank you for sharing everything

54:33 you have. Everything from your story of how you got into SaaS Lucid is such an amazing company to

54:39 begin that journey in. And I love the story of bolting on the SLG to the PLG motion and all the

54:44 wisdom that you shared in there. Also appreciate you diving deep on RevOps and helping people

54:49 understand how much investment they should be making at which time, knowing it might be a little

54:54 bit heavier at the beginning, but letting that investment scale out. And then everything you're

54:59 doing at PDQ from bolting on SLG, managing acquisitions, maintaining an audience after

55:06 the founders are living their best lives in Puerto Rico, as you put it, and really preparing for the

55:12 future. I think there's so much in here. So Dan, really appreciate you being on the podcast,

55:18 everything you shared. Can't wait to watch what you in PDQ do next. And thank you again.

55:25 Yeah, thanks for having me. I mean, congrats on all you've built at Lean Scale and I've enjoyed

55:29 a lot of the content you put out. And of course, if, you know, to anyone listening, if you're going

55:34 through any of this stuff or just want to compare notes, you know, happy to connect on LinkedIn.

55:39 But otherwise, yeah, I really appreciate the conversation. It's been a lot of fun.