Kingmaker: The TRUE Power Role in RevOps

0:00 (logo whooshing) Vish, thank you so much for being here. I think this is a really interesting topic where often the role of RevOps is not in the spotlight. The role of RevOps is usually in the background, and I think you had a really good metaphor for this that I think is an important mindset for people in a RevOps leadership role to have is how can you become the king maker and not necessarily the king? So anyone who's a "Game of Thrones" fan, I think "Hand of the King" really tends to be what that RevOps role is, regardless of who you're reporting to. It could be a CRO, CFO, CEO in some cases, but your job is really to become that king maker,

0:51 not necessarily be in the spotlight, but influence that way. I'm curious, how did you come to resonate with this metaphor, and how has your story followed that trajectory? - Yeah, it was definitely, I think it's a great point to kind of tie into the "Game of Thrones" analogy. I think it's, you're somebody who sees the entire big picture, but you don't actually say what to do. And to that point, my entire lifestyle, I think I've built around working with various companies. I ran my own startup when I was 15, so I've been through the process. I've done different strategies, different segments in a company,

1:26 but I've never owned necessarily any department myself. I've been a CT, I've been in operations, been in finance, been in sales, but I've never actually made the decisions that actually drive future success. I'm just a person that helps you drive success for themselves. So it's more like, I wouldn't say it's a supporting role, but I'd say it's definitely the hand that makes everything move forward. And to that point, the king maker, it's not the king, but you're a person who makes the king. - Yeah, and I think sometimes people might struggle with that a little bit, like wanting to be in the limelight a little bit, wanting their ideas to be heard,

2:02 rather than passing those ideas on and influencing other people to make certain decisions. I think a lot of people struggle with, hey, am I successful or am I doing a good job if I'm kind of behind the scenes? I think that's a great point and with RevOps, the mentality I'd say is you can't be somebody who always looks for gratitude or achievement. It's somebody who's more like, you know your work makes a difference and you have to keep moving forward a bit. And personally myself and RevOps, I don't look for gratification or exemplification. For me, if I get the job done, if I increase revenue, I think I've done a good job. I'd rather save the praise

2:44 for when we actually get the job done at the end of the year, we can all cheer and succeed and say we increased revenue X percent versus a weekly standard that says, wish did this, wish did that last week and this week. I'd rather just keep going through what we have and building new projects, new timelines and basically how can we improve the business, not just internally, but also externally? - No, absolutely. And I think it takes a great deal of humility to be able to operate that way and see your success in others, not necessarily in yourself. - Not just humility, I think it's also patience. I think you can't always run too fast on RevOps.

3:22 And that's one, I think everybody's fatal flaw is you run too fast, you don't know when to stop. You just keep going forward. You don't know when to like actually reflect, look back and see what changes that I make. What do I do next? It's a lot of self guessing or self doubt, but with that coming in, that's how you look at it from a bigger picture. You think outside the box. You think what could happen, not what will happen. And your goal basically is to predict what those next steps would be to help amplify and increase the message going forward. - No, 100%, 100%. I think a big part of this to be able to operate in this way is building the trust.

4:06 So how can you build that level of trust with your CRO, with your CFO, whoever you're reporting to? How are ways you've done that in the past or what advice might you give to somebody in a RevOps role to start building trust with their executive partner? - I will say this in one of two ways. You don't want to think you're too smart than the person you're reporting to, but you want to think you're smarter than them. 'Cause the goal is you need to know the business better than they do so that when they talk about something, you know it and you go on the same page and not catching up with them. I think it's just trying to know a business in and out

4:43 and not just your department or your vision or what you're focusing on, but knowing whatever your team is currently doing, whether that be engineering, whether that be something in marketing, it's your role to reach out and proactively understand more than waiting for them to come and reach out to you. And I think that's the key goal in RevOps is you have to be somebody who has an inkling for new knowledge, information, just somebody who wants to go and poke around the bush, ask questions that people would normally never think about and have never heard of in like the past couple of years and you bring it up and they're like,

5:14 nobody's ever asked us, why now? And that's the question I always bring up is why not? 'Cause it's something that we could do. It's something we'd improve. Why is this just from left sitting and not been taken care of? So you come in from the bigger picture, you see from the outside realm of what are we doing that we can replicate in that team or that overall division that we can help them improve. So it's to anybody starting at RevOps is ask questions. If you're not somebody who's gonna be willing to learn or willing to actually understand, it's a very hard game to kind of catch up and get to a point where a CRO or CEO will actually trust you.

5:50 'Cause for them, they look at you for guidance and they look at you to understand that you know what's happening in the industry or in a business and that you can give them proper guidance and proper measurements on what needs to happen, whether that be through data, for people, for just analytics, there's different categories of what I kind of look at, but overall it's just know your business. - When I was in RevOps roles, so before starting LeanScale, I ran RevOps for three VC back companies. Always found myself in that role, Kingmaker role. And I think one of the advantages you have that is a little underrated is often when you're

6:27 in that role, you're a bit unassuming and you may be able to get access to information that otherwise wouldn't float up to your chief revenue officer. When somebody's having a meeting with the CRO, they may be a little bit nervous to share their true feelings about something. They may not want to look bad in front of that person. When you're having a conversation with somebody as the head of RevOps, I always felt like people were just an open book. They were willing to tell me anything, share how they were feeling. Maybe it has to do with some of the personalities that the role attracts as well, or maybe you're a bit disarming.

7:03 But I do think also just the role that you do have, they trust that you're gonna hear it in a way that doesn't put them in danger and you'll filter what you need to filter for whoever needs to hear it in the executive level. And you have to have that trust with the people so you can build that trust with the leadership too. - I will be honest, it took me a lot of long nights, a lot of long days, and a couple of years to get to the point where what data I looked at, I could understand and see what's relevant versus what's not relevant. 'Cause from the perspective of a RevOps person, if you see something burning on fire,

7:41 your goal is 911, what's your emergency? This thing's falling to the ground. But to a CRO or CFO, for them it's more, what's the bigger picture? What's causing this to happen? And what can we do to remediate this? Not what's the problem, but what's the solution gonna look like? - Right, and you have the luxury of time to be sitting there listening to people's problems all the time and then sifting through saying, okay, this is relevant, this isn't relevant. I know who this, I'll take the 10% that's relevant here, put it in this broader story so I can package it up for my CRO to help make a really good decision.

8:15 - Definitely, I think it's just, with that analogy, it's also understanding what is crucial to what they understand and with that is personality. Once people get to know you, once you get to be more disarming or just overall approachable, you're no longer the scary person who's doing all the reports and actually gonna make my business look bad. It's more, hey, I wanna help you move forward, what can we do to get it? I think that's what Revoloft says is that somebody has to be open with willingness and no prejudice or no judgment at all. It could be broken, but I'm happy to fix something that's broken. I don't care how you got there.

8:53 What I care about is how we're gonna fix it. And that's why I tell people is you can have a broken process, that's human nature, we're not perfect. But the goal is what can we do to kind of improve this so that next going forward, it's a scalable solution? - No, that's right, that's right. And how, you know, when you're going about your day as a RevOps leader, how much time do you allocate? You mentioned you kind of need to be sniffing around for some potential problems. And I would spend a lot of time, one, just going through data. I had like a lot of dashboards I, you know, I called it my morning coffee dashboard.

9:31 I just wake up and let's just go see what's going on. Is there anything messed up in Salesforce? Anything broken? Are we building pipeline the way I would expect to? Which reps are doing well or not doing well? I just was curious. I don't know, as much as, say a lot of people are curious about their favorite sports team. Just go in and be like, how's everything going? And then I would spend a lot of time having one-on-ones with people. Just going around, setting up meetings, hearing how they're doing, hearing what's working, what's not working. And I mean, between going through data and setting one-on-ones, that was probably half of my time.

10:09 I don't know if that was too much or too little. What's your take on how much time ahead of RevOps should be spending doing that type of just like walkabout work? - I want to say not 40 hours a week, but it's close to 40 hours a week 'cause that's just how RevOps is. But I think with that being said, it's not an expectation, but it's just naturally people who do RevOps tend to like to work outside of normal offering hours. And there's a key part to that. Nobody can disturb you. I'm a very nocturnal person. I worked very late at night. Like I could do meetings up till five, sure. But like start getting my work done around 10 p.m. So from 10 till midnight,

10:47 I'll just have like a two-hour, power-hour session. Nobody's working. I have all my data and everything settled. I can build reporting, build structure. So for the next morning, people are already awake. I schedule some like 40 different messages so that here's everything that goes wrong. Let's go through it. And it definitely is to your point, like you schedule one-on-ones, you look through dashboards. Sometimes you get dashboard fatigue. You're just like, I have so many dashboards, I don't want to look at them anymore. And it's tricky to kind of undermine that, but I think the goal is what data actually matters.

11:22 And I think that's the hardest part in RevOps is understanding what's relevant versus what's not relevant. You can have multiple dashboards, multiple visualizations, but if it doesn't make sense, there's no point in you visualizing it. - No, that makes a lot of sense. I think there's so much data in RevOps. So it's tough to know what's relevant, what's not relevant, but that's part of the art of the job. One thing that you mentioned, I've said this a lot when you said you have your evening time period. I've always said, I've given this advice, hey, it's not for everyone, but if you're interested in really pushing your career far and you're feeling ambitious

11:59 and there's more you want to achieve, you have to make a choice. Are you a night owl working person or a very early morning working person? Because the best work doesn't happen in the middle of the day. When you're continually interrupted by Slack, email, meetings, context switching, you're not gonna do work that tends to move the needle if you expect to be able to do it then. So you have to pick, are you gonna wake up at five or are you gonna start working at 10 and then be committed to doing that on a regular basis and then you'll start to see these big rocks really, really move in your career. - I think, as you kind of mentioned to the point,

12:38 if you want to get into RevOps, you can't be somebody who stuck to a nine to five mentality that doesn't work in RevOps. It's something that's always changing, it's always fluctuating, something can always happen. I'm not trying to say we're on call, but it's definitely something where you need to be cognizant of what's happening and when things do arise, that's kind of where you can shine. You take the lead forward, you build those projects and you kind of drive what the momentum will be. Whether they be adding an extra hours or just doing ad hoc tasks outside of working hours. That's kind of how it is, but the more we can prepare and we can learn,

13:15 the more we can inform what it wants in our meetings. - Well, in a lot of ways, I do think you are on call. Like during the business hours, anything can happen. And so a lot of that time you might not be incredibly busy. You may have some, like a firefighter at a station, but you need to be at the station. And then you can't be preoccupied with something else. So that's why I agree, it's not nine to five. It doesn't mean it has to be necessarily that much more stressful than another job, but it's like, hey, I'm kind of on the call, like on standby, floating throughout the day, having my meetings, looking at data. There's a fire, I'm fighting that.

13:51 But then like my deep work time, I kind of have to do outside of that time. - For the benefit of your deep work time, it's by yourself. You don't need people talking to you, there's no distractions. I could be lying in bed, I could be outside on a park, lying down on a bench, reading something and just enjoying natural sunlight while I'm working on something and nobody's disturbing me. It's peaceful. It's something that I can do wherever I want. And that's the benefit of that beyond the nine to five, it's you set up whatever you want to do it. You're not restricted to where you have to be or what you need to talk to or what time zones.

14:25 It's totally up to you. And that's the benefit. - Yeah, and for people who enjoy the flexibility, I do think it's a big win being in the job. Something that was really interesting, I was reading a report that the highest rehire rate of any job in tech is ahead of RevOps. And I thought that was really interesting. Like the most likely to get rehired role as somebody who's been ahead of RevOps role. And as we know in tech, tenure is not very long. I mean, often a couple years, probably four years max is a really good run with any given company.

15:06 And you kind of have to move around depending on how the market's going. But I'm curious, I know you followed a few executives before but why do you think that is? And how does that play out in your career? - I'll kind of break it into two parts. I think part one on the tenure piece. Since we see the big picture, it's like we're the genie. We can go to our shining lamp and just basically ask it a wish and it'll tell us what we want to know. But to that point, we may know too much. And that's kind of where you see something could be failing or something could have issues. You see at first and you could be the one who's voicing your concerns,

15:44 but if it's not being actioned, there's only so much you could do individually. To that point of a king maker, you're not the king. You don't make the decisions. You're just somebody who informs them what to do. In the end, it's up to them if they want to succeed or if they want to go backwards. So it's definitely to that point where you kind of look at it that ways. And tenure, when you're starting off early, when you're trying to build out your positions, and as you kind of mentioned, you can be in multiple wrap ups positions, as you said, and freed up from VC back companies and now you lead lean scale. It's not something that's permanent.

16:16 It's something that you scale and grow out of. You build something. You're basically the next CEO or the next CEO of a company. That's kind of how you see a wrap ups as. And to that point, like I have my personal experience. I've switched jobs, I'd say about every two years right now is my tenure. But with that, it's been with progressively higher increments of exposure, experience, type of work. It's changed drastically. - Have you been following certain people along your career? Are you being like brought in by the same people? Is that how you're finding your new opportunities? - I've had some luck with similar people,

16:54 some opportunities, but I'd say for most it's been in one or two specific industries is what I've been looking at. I think that's a better way to look at it than looking at from individuals who focus in following the same type of person. Whereas if you work in the same industry, they know each other. Industry professionals talk, executives always communicating to one another, and it's a better referral than you following somebody as like, I'll follow you, but my goal isn't to be with you. My goal is to replace you. - I think that's a good thing. When does it make sense for the king maker to become the king? - Not too soon, not too late.

17:36 It's very difficult, it's hard to put a timeframe, but I'd say within your early to mid-starting of your career, so generally five plus years is kind of when you want to start looking into what's your next steps, what's your end vision. It's always where you ask the question, where am I gonna be in the next 10 years? And RevOps, if you say that, they will say you could be in 10 different companies in the next 10 years 'cause things will always change. It's never constant, it's never fixed, you can't predict what the future will look like, but you can shape the future to what it wants to be. And I think that's the benefit of you being in RevOps

18:09 is you can kind of define what your exit strategy will be. Just like a startup, you look at it from inception, growth, and what the exit is gonna look like, you look at the same position in RevOps, you start it off, you build process. What's your exit strategy beyond that? - Are there any skills that you think you need to have if you're going from, hey, I'm kind of the unassuming, approachable person in RevOps, I have all the data, I have access to data other people don't have, so I'm kind of able to come up with really good decisions. Migrating from that role into a CRO role, a CEO role, what skill sets do you think you need to change or adapt

18:50 to make that jump versus what you've learned in those particular roles? - I think one of the biggest things when you go into many of the C-suite positions, it's people skills, being approachable, being somebody who's a trusted manager who has a lot of knowledge. You come with somebody who has pedigree that I can look up to you, and no matter what, you know the big picture, you understand each one of these tools that we're using. What if you've never used any of these, or if you've never heard of them, you will take that time and effort to go and understand these tools, such that when we do go and implement this, you know exactly what we're doing.

19:28 I think that's the biggest things in any C-suite position is they may not actually be in the day-to-day operations, but when they hear something, they'll take their time to go and understand what it does and what it makes, such that when it does come up again, they already know what the next answer is gonna look like. It's be proactive and reactive, it's showing you how RevOps works is you want to learn it before somebody else mentions it again. - Yeah, and I think it's tough. I mean, I'll share just some of my background and story, like my role is so much different now than when I was a head of RevOps. I still think I have a lot of the tendencies.

20:05 I like to just spend some time absorbing data, spend some time talking to the team, how things are going. I think the big difference for me has been you need to own the vision and you need to make decisions. And sometimes you don't have enough data, but you have to make a decision anyway, and you have to live with it. And then you have to be able to communicate a vision and why you made a decision really, really well, where you may not have to do that in RevOps role. Like you bring all the right data to say this is what, I think you should make this call, but then you have to make the call and then communicate it and hold teams accountable to it.

20:44 I think that's been kind of the biggest thing for me, communicating the vision, owning it, and then being very decisive. I think to that point, but not the guinea pigs, we're not the ones who get shot down. When something goes wrong, we don't play in RevOps. - Right. (laughs) - I know you kind of have it as like-- - That's where the CRO will take over and we just kind of put it on them and we say, they're all leaders, we report to them, but there's a humility in that. They take responsibility for whatever does go wrong. They understand and they adapt. They don't say, let's fail here. Let's cry some tears and out and forget about this. Let's think fast.

21:22 We fell down, how do we get back up? What's the next steps? And I think that's what a good leader makes is, how can you move that forward? And what change do you make? Such are you, A, learn from your past mistakes, but B, what can you do to kind of help improve the team's morale, but also, what's the next learning gonna be? - I love that. And I know the average length of a CRO is 18 months. - Yep. - That's the average. So a lot of them are getting axed in nine months, 12 months, whatever that is. And yeah, if something goes wrong, it's their fault. Even if you gave them bad data, sorry. I don't, you still had to make the decision.

22:00 So they kind of, they get the heat first. - They get the heat first, but I think it's, if you know your business in and out, that tenure doesn't make much of a difference 'cause 18 months to one person could just be this Europe, but they could level up to a CEO. - Yep. - There is that potential growth. If you do well, it's a coin toss. You do amazing, you get the next step up, you don't do so well, you go on to your next venture. - That's right, that's right. I think you've had a really interesting career, and I don't even know if we'd call it a career from the very start. Starting a company at 15, that's really, really unique.

22:37 I'd love to just know, what was that arc? And how did, 15 is so young. Were there things you were interested in when you were like a child that kind of led to you doing something like that? And then how did you end up in the roles that you're in today? - I think, definitely starting off my first child when I was 15, parents didn't approve. I think nobody actually was approving of that. They just said, focus on school, try to graduate, get into university. I think that was a key mentality, but for my co-founder and I, I think we just wanted to see that. We saw a gap in our system. We found a niche, a market that could actually be approachable and targetable.

23:13 We said, let's go forward with this. Let's take it on, build the entire structure out then. To that point, we've basically built a K-pop empire about a decade ago, basically focusing on English media. A decade K-pop, nowadays it's the most biggest thing in North America, but back then it was all in Korean. There was nothing in English. People had to go to Google translate. People had to actually ask their Korean friends. It was a whole mess of an entire spaghetti strap. But to kind of go to that point and take it back and say, let's have journalists in Korea, people in Asia, who write these articles for us, it's published,

23:48 build out an empire and we did that successfully. That was something that nobody would have ever thought of when we were 15. - What gave you the inspiration and how did it end up? Did you end up selling the company? Did you end up closing it down? How did that go? - So it was more my co-founder. I think he was very into K-pop at the time. I was just more very into the technical side of things. And he said, hey, I see this thing. Let's take it on, try it out for like six months, summer break, nothing to lose. Let's see what happens. And took it on, went for the summer. I think we peaked at having a million page views at one point and we just said,

24:25 holy exclamation point, we have something here. - Yep, I'm sure. - And we just said, let's move forward with it. Trying to convince our parents that what you want to spend like after school hours, take our weekends, just focus it all into this company was definitely a bigger task. And I think it did help me build a good work culture at a very young age and understand what needs to happen, how to communicate, how to reach out 'cause we had to sell ourselves. And being a 16 year old, going up to like VCs and saying, I have the startup idea. And they say, come back to us when you have a bit more numbers.

25:02 And we said, how's this 25 million views in a year sound? And that's when they started realizing you have something, what are you still doing? So that was a bigger point. And I think to that aspect, it definitely was something that wasn't monetizable too easily 'cause it's definitely news media isn't the most easiest to capitalize on. So it did unfortunately shut down and that's kind of where it is right now. It didn't exit, but it did give us good learning. And I think both my co-founder and I, we take that. We're both working in consulting and operations science positions. And it's something that we still look back

25:40 and say, I'm glad we did that 10 years ago. - Oh, of course. I'm sure what you learned doing that was much better than your history class or whatever you're gonna be learning in high school during the time. - Yeah, definitely. And I think it's also something that's a good talking point when you graduate going to university and just say, I did the startup when I was 15 and they ask how and why. It's always the first questions I always get asked and just explain that to people. And knowing that if you think of something and you want to do it, just do it. I think you will always be the one who will self doubt yourself.

26:16 You'll always be the one who tells you it's not right or it can't be done. It's on you to take that and say, here's my problem. Here's what I propose a solution. Here's how I'm gonna do it. I think that's just a mentality you to have is just see something and go forward and try to find a way to fix it. - Dan, I think you don't have to have the full vision mapped out. You just have to have the next couple of steps. - Even just having an idea of what you want to achieve is better than having nothing at all. And to that point in RevOps, if somebody does come and ask you for this answer, I never say, I don't know. I always tell them, I'll get back to you.

26:56 Do you have any resources that you would recommend to start digging into this or what should I look for? It's never saying, I don't know or I don't care. It's more, let me look into it. Let me research some more. Let me find out more information about this. And that's the goal is you want to be the person who's approachable and you don't want to be somebody who's just, I don't care attitude. - Yeah, I think it takes a little bit of humility and resilience to do both of those. - But yeah, I think if anybody's thinking about starting their own thing or taking a step in entrepreneurship, they should absolutely just try.

27:34 Worst case scenario, you're gonna learn a lot. Maybe don't re-mortgage your house or something like that and you don't have to go too crazy, but go try and do something on the side, whatever is good for your risk tolerance, but you're gonna learn a ton 'cause you have to do everything at the beginning. You have to do some accounting, you have to do some financial modeling, you have to be able to pitch and sell an idea, you have to recruit people. So at that beginning stage, you literally have to do every single job. And if you close it up, you'll walk away just a better person for it. - A hundred percent.

28:07 - Well, this just has been really, really interesting. I love the metaphor, I love the analogy of saying, hey, in RevOps, you may not be the king, but you play a very important role of the kingmaker. And a couple insights, knowing just by the nature of your role and likely the type of people who are in the role, you're gonna have access to information that leadership simply doesn't have access to. You will have some flexibility and time to go gather that information. So that way you can help put together a thesis and make a decision. And you're just in the place to build that trusting relationship with a CRO, a CEO, CFO.

28:48 And I think those who can play that role really well will just find themselves continue to be rehired and finding new opportunities, especially in tech. - Like you mentioned, sounds like a two year shot clock is a decent time, but for those who do that job well, there's always gonna be opportunities. - And to that point, obviously, when I first got approached from you to kind of look into this podcast and where I am now, I actually switched jobs. So it's a very fun time. - That's perfect. When did you start the new role? - Started my new role, I think April 5th. So that's kind of why it looks a bit less than a month. - Wow, yeah. Things move fast.

29:30 Things move fast in tech. - I feel like I've been here six months already. Like looking at all the things I do and all the projects I'm starting off of, it's a whole different realm. When you work in RevOps, it feels like time goes by so fast, but it's only been like less than two weeks. - Yeah, a lot of the work we do is so compressed. And usually you're not coming in when everything's great. So you come in to set the foundation or fix a mess that's built up over time. So that first bit of time when you hop in is normally pretty busy. - And to that point, I think where I am right now, I'm just basically helping scale out a solution,

30:06 scale out a problem that they've identified as something that they need to re-approach. And I am basically brought in to kind of help provide support, but also structure to what the next step would look like. And that's the fun part in anything in RevOps then. To kind of get to this role, it didn't, I will preface, it isn't easy to apply for RevOps specific or anything that is operationally excellent shops. It's not the easiest market to find a job in. It's not something that is openly advertised. 'Cause A, they don't want to air out their laundry and say something is broken in our company. We need someone to come in and fix it.

30:43 That's not how it works generally. - That's a good point. It's like you normally don't have companies that are advertising, we need a new CEO. - That would be definitely a cause for concern if somebody did advertise that. - It's not a good look. They're normally done quietly behind the scenes. - But I think with that being said, it's definitely something where people speak more than what's on paper. You can have an amazing resume, you can have an amazing cover letter, you can have references that go beyond the end of the world, but it's how you approach yourself and how you present yourself. And that's the key thing with anything that you do work in

31:18 in RevOps specific is you have to be somebody who is approachable and dependable and just have a sense of demeanor where it's like, I felt like I've known you for so long, you've been like high school friends, but you just started last week. - Yeah, well, you're gonna be asked to influence a lot of people, influence a lot of process. So building those skills of being disarming is super important. - Yeah. - You're probably just born with it, but. - You can also, it's a learning skill. It's not something you just, I think it's just how you approach people and just having a different perspective on what things happen is something you just build and learn.

31:57 It's not something naturally you're born with, it's something you pick up and adapt over time. - Is there something throughout your story where you feel you had an experience that really helped you build those skills? - I think one of my prior positions working in operations, I think kind of helped set that structure. It was titled operations, but basically it was do everything except firing employees. So I did HR, did accounting, did payroll, did day-to-day operations, did sales, did marketing, but I just didn't do determination part of HR. - That sounds great. - That sounds great. I get to do all the fun parts. - Yeah, all the fun, none of the chores.

32:40 - Exactly, but I think that's, it's a good setting stone to kind of learn every department and every skill. I think that's kind of what threw me into the realm of RevOps and understood that there's something more than just doing every job in a company, you can actually help influence what the decisions will be going forward. There's actually a position that exists that actually helps solve these issues for these types of companies that have these growing pains that they realize there's something that they can't solve internally, and they need a department or an individual who can kind of overlook and oversee what's happening, what do we need to change?

33:15 - Yeah, I think having the exposure and building the empathy for each of those departments, which you did starting your own company. I think you can empathize with people who have to do sales, who have to do the marketing. It's like, you've done some of that before. I definitely had an eclectic professional background where I did some sales, I did some CS, I did some marketing. I worked at a hospital doing strategic planning, which was just a lot of financial and market analysis. And then on some of the soft skills side, I'm the oldest of five. So I have four younger sisters. And I think being in that environment growing up

33:53 as a kid definitely left an impression. I was more like middle management in the house, less like a sibling. So I was like a junior parent. - The overseer, parents go out, you take care of the house, it's, I'm the manager, roll call. - Roll call, yeah, making sure they're doing everything they need to be doing and making sure we're all following what we need to do. But that, I think just like growing up like that kind of was practice for these type of roles. Like, okay, how can I help a CRO parents? And then build trust with the kids, everybody else. So I think all those experience shape you and prepare you for the type of jobs you end up having.

34:35 And we take a lot of that for granted. Like, oh, I didn't realize that experience actually gave me certain skills. It didn't seem important at the time, but it actually left a big impact. - It's, I think, definitely similar to me. Not as many sisters, I'm the only son of my family, so definitely a lot of different story. But it came with, my parents only worked in some form of strategic operations or some kind of sales specific roles in large IT consulting companies. So having the exposure kind of showed me the picture of what goes on behind the scenes. I would always be looking over my dad's shoulder reading his emails or just asking him,

35:13 what's going on in this contract or this project? And he'd always wonder, why is a 10 year old kid asking me these questions? - Well, now it makes sense how you had the skills to start a company when you were 15. Before I was like, how'd you learn how to do that? But. - Yeah, but I think it's just, I never lost a curiosity, I'd always ask questions. I think that's just something that's stuck with me since I've been born is just, never stop learning. I think that's something my parents have even to this day. You might be busy, you might be focusing on one thing or the other, but try to learn up on something new. There's always something changing.

35:47 There's always something you can adapt to, whether it be a technical skill or a soft skill or something you just learn how to play a new sport or a new instrument that's, you're always learning something new. - Yeah, and I think sometimes we think, oh, I'm not learning something that's totally relevant to what I'm doing. You don't even know if it's relevant. You might learn lessons in this thing that are transferable in ways that you can't even really comprehend. So I agree, just always learning, doing new things, picking up new stuff, and just experiencing life in these unique ways. You find a way to integrate it with your professional life too.

36:22 - It'll find its way somewhere. - Yeah. - I mean, I personally outside of work, I am an avid traveler. I think I've traveled a bit too much for my age, which people sometimes are shocked when I tell them how much. I think I did like a flight every week in 2024. - That sounds like a lot. - That sounds like a lot, but it comes with a lot of planning and a lot of structure, which is what I took from Robops to kind of help build my overall traveling empire, I'd say. And it's a soft skill you learn and you just take it and adapt it. But with that being said, it's having an earning to learn something new, explore something new, whether it not be in tech skills,

37:01 whether it be something in soft skills, or if somebody says something in Salesforce and you've never heard of what Salesforce is, just taking that approach to go and learn what it is. It is a mammoth. I will preface for everybody who wants to get into Salesforce. Do not be alarmed if it's scary. It is scary, but it's a good skill to learn. - Yeah, and it'll be, you can use it in so many ways. No, I think it's important to keep learning, keep experiencing, and then find ways to relate it to what you're doing day to day. But Vicious has been really, really good. I appreciate you going through everything. Really, really sage advice for anybody who's in RevOps

37:39 and wanting to push their career forward. Or maybe they're not quite in that head of RevOps role yet. And I think it's just a really good approach. So I appreciate you sharing that. I appreciate you sharing your story. I'm really looking forward to hearing how this new role goes. And I also think you're gonna have to post your travel itinerary for our audience too. So I don't know if you have a following or a newsletter, but if you don't, it's probably something you should start. - I think I definitely will. So I knew that at this point, I think I've given my friends too much free travel advice. So I could monetize this.

38:08 - There's got to be a way to monetize it. Next business idea coming up. Well, thank you so much. I appreciate everything you shared. And as things continue to progress, we hope to have you back. - I appreciate it. Thank you so much, Anthony.