Episode 3 - WeDisrupt Sales Podcast - We sit down with Greg McBeth who is a Founder and Revenue Advisor for GTM advisors.
- Greg provides a unique insight into the inner workings of scaling a startup from $0 to $10 million through his experience of scaling the likes of Node.io, BloomBoard, Inc., & Crunchbase
Episode 3 - WeDisrupt Sales Podcast - We sit down with Greg McBeth who is a Founder and Revenue Advisor for GTM advisors.
- Greg provides a unique insight into the inner workings of scaling a startup from $0 to $10 million through his experience of scaling the likes of Node.io, BloomBoard, Inc., & Crunchbase
Hello and welcome to a shop sales podcast. My name is Will Chivers. I'm driving my cars for sale calm. And we're here to interview some of the world's most influential sales leaders, revenue officers, executives on the planet. Williams Episode Three, we disrupt sales podcast, who do we have on the show today? What are we going to talk about? So today we have pregnant Brett. He's the founder and CEO of go to market advisors. And today we're going to be talking about experience scaling the likes of Bloomberg from a 50 K to 5 million in revenue company. Just under four years. We're going to be talking about everything from the importance of ICP, to building your comp plans in the early days to managing the expectations of your CEO to set yourself up for success. Can you enjoy this episode more? So I hope you enjoy it as much as we did. Brilliant. Let's get into the episode. Greg, great to have you on the show. It'd be great if you could kick off a little bit about yourself from what got you into sales up to my name is Greg Macbeth. And I started my career. Actually, isn't it education as an engineer, so I graduated from Stanford and oh four, I was a mechanical engineering major. And I thought for the longest time that I was going to go into engineering or some sort of scientific discipline, and I really learned this, my senior year of college was I could make more money playing online poker, than I could have been an engineering job that I was going to get out of school. That was a really cool experience. It taught me a lot about human psychology, how people make decisions, how they manage their emotions. It forced me to think in terms of optimization, which is something that I've carried over to my sales career, but looking at how you tweak small, different elements of your game, you know, when you play, who you play against how you play, what games and and ultimately, that drives significant impact in the outcomes. I could see how making lots of small tweaks ultimately lead to much better outcomes down the road. So after about a year of doing that, a little over a year, doing that full time started to get kind of boring. It wasn't particularly fulfilling. So I did try to apply ply my degree, and make my parents happy after spending a bunch of money to send me to school and do an actual engineering job. And it went about as I expected, it was not what I wanted to do long term and randomly had a conversation with a friend of mine. And she had just went through a sales training program at Cisco. And so I ended up applying, getting that program and went through the train program. It was fantastic. They did a really, really good job of taking someone with no knowledge of sales, and frankly, at the time, not even an interest in sales, and getting them excited about it into the into a point where they can be confident pitching a CXO of any fortune 500 company. So I spent a few years at Cisco and then went to a Cisco partner. And to Cisco partner, I was responsible for all the major Silicon Valley accounts, so Facebook, Google, Salesforce, etc. And that's when I really started to get interest an interest in joining startups. So I joined a startup called blueboard, which was focused on teacher training and teacher competency. But all four years they're running business development, which was, which was an awesome experience golf, golf to understand the ins and outs of the educational system, educational politics, which are complex, to say the least. And really just learned what it was like to work a startup. And I will say that I was, you know, whatever I thought it was going to be like I was vastly underprepared for the shift coming from a huge company. It's huge clients, tech clients to going to a 10 person startup and selling to educators and educator educational administrators. So you know that after that, I ended up switching over to crunchbase, where I ran sales and customer success for about a year. And then got really interested in a startup called node which was an AI company focused on at the time it was a little more sales and marketing oriented and eventually morphed into a platform where you could take AI technology and offer that as a service to clients it note and crunchbase as well, there was not much of an infrastructure in place. With respect to sales and revenue generation, so it was up to me to pull all that in place to hire the team six to scale the processes, and do a lot of yearly selling. So it was a nice way to sort of have to one keep your ear to the grindstone and understand what was going on in the market with your customers, and then also be able to take a step back and figure out now how do we take this to a place in which we can grow revenue from zero or the low six figures well into the millions. And so after a few years, node ended up parting ways and launched my own practice, which is where I'm helping startups do exactly what you described. So that zero $10 million journey, I helped them put the strategy, the positioning, the processes, and ultimately the team and the management infrastructure in place in order to do that, and I've been doing that for about the past eight months. Nice. So I really want to kick off with talking about our experience of blueboard coming into an company which has got an undefined strategy, which is still probably working areas product market fit just purely because of how big it is, what was that experience like? And what were the biggest learnings around? What you need to look at joining a company that size? Well, the first most important thing is really understanding the kind of broader ecosystem with which you work. And I think there's, it's very easy to make assumptions going in. And this is something I also advise a lot of my clients when they're hiring scaling teams, but there's a lot of assumptions that you kind of make going in about how you think things work. Right, so not to get political. But when you think about a lot of the some of the different wars that America has been a part of overseas, one of the big challenges is sort of the cultural barrier, right? We don't necessarily know how some of these other cultures operate. And that makes it a challenge to implement things that to us seems sort of second nature. And you very much have that same mentality, where if I go from, let's say, working within, you know, the top tech working with the top tech companies in the world to working in education, there are fundamentally different ways that education works that I have to understand first before anything that I see makes sense. And so that's actually the biggest Part I think that's where, frankly, was probably my my biggest mistake going into the education. Startup was not really getting stock of that and understanding and learning from people in that space. So I kind of took it for granted that we had all of the resources and an understanding of that on our team, and didn't really do as much additional work as I should have to get a better sense of why things are the way they were. Once you get that though, then it's a question of, alright, what are the things that what are the levers that I can move? Right? I can't, I'm not in the role. We're in what we're not impacting Paul's certainly not at that scale. So I can't change policy, but I have to operate within the policies that are already in place, and then be able to sort of maneuver around where there are areas that I can't necessarily push back on, but I need to understand where I can push right where I do have some leeway. And that part is a lot of, you know, one individual research, but to his understanding and talking to a lot of people that work there because people that work in that space, they get it, you know, yeah, I was always I was always amazed at how much You know, I kind of figured teachers would be somewhat divorced from a lot of the policy in many cases. But that wasn't the case, teachers and a lot of kids really, really understood why things the way they were. And they could also see the impact that certain policies would have downstream right with the students. And you can see often that there was this big disconnect between what the people thought policy was accomplishing and what the actual impact was on the students. And so getting a better sense of that would have really helped with respect to how we designed our product and how we went to market. Yeah. And I think now that there's been a shift to sales methodologies and being more advanced in terms of your culture, I think more probably a big thing that people do forget is the value of people that understand your space. And being a thought leader to your customers and taking your market in the right way. which is essentially, as a startup you're looking to do, you're not you're not coming to a space, which is defined yet you're looking to move the needle. So customers start thinking your way, right. So I think, yeah, that must be massive. I've got asked the question, right. So so going into a startup, typically, you know, you're dealing with It might be, say a technology individual who's who's a CEO. And he's now in some respects, got to give up control to help scale the business. So how about going into a startup? How do you deal with that personality? And what are some of the, I guess the principles that you put in place from from day one to C, D, you know, 1000? Yeah. So co founder is going to, they're building a company, they're building that company, because they have a thesis. And that thesis is going to, for them describe somewhat of how the world works. And they're going to understand the problem that they're solving the product they're building, in reflection with that thesis. So you have to sort of accept this person is going to kind of come in with a certain way of doing things that you need to you need to consider right just like you can't necessarily change policy, and certainly not overnight, you're not gonna be able to change someone's mindset or the way they're doing things, especially when it's worked for them to a point right. I think what you have to have to realize is that, you know, it's you're not necessarily fundamental shifting the way that the way that you're going to market, right? And so the problem you're solving, it's really more about how do you operationalize all of the things that are required in order to still solve that problem, but do it at scale. And a lot of what you have to realize in this, you know, this is true, whether you're talking to founder, CEO or a new executive or an investor, if I understand the decisions, and decisions are made emotionally, and when they're made emotionally, they're also held tightly. And so you have to kind of attack this on multiple fronts. And, you know, and so it's not just I can't just necessarily say, I'm going to go to the table with data and that's immediately going to change the results because oftentimes, you're not going to have data especially at the early stages and especially not with any sort of statistical reliability as to what you should do. Sometimes you will if you do very fast moving selling, ecommerce is a great example right, you can see the impact pretty quickly of changing web design button placement. Things like that. But in a lot of cases, especially if you're selling big b2b deals, you're not going to have that. And so you have to look at a lot of different ways to bring that pitch to the table as to why somebody should be running a business a certain way. And so in that case, I really like the one keep the CEO really engaged throughout the early stages of the process, if they're not so free, you know, if they're not on the calls, if they're not hearing the same things, especially when it's not them out doing the selling, that's really critical. So you have to see the impact that in the way that people talk to you when you're not a co founder, because you get a different level of engagement. When that is your title. It's just the reality of business. Secondarily, you need to bring in people who can really understand that market and kind of speak the language and that's why having a good network of advisors in the space or that run business before to throw that back because there's a sort of an immediate trust there of this person who's run a business before they know how this works. So what they're telling me is probably based on some really good experience. And then lastly, you do need to really have the your data buttoned up So, you know, you don't want to be in a place where you're two years down the road from when you initially took over in some sort of revenue generating capacity. And you can't say with any, any reliability, what the data is telling you about how the business is running. If you can't benchmark according to different companies in the same space in the same industry, that's going to create a lot of problems. And you need to be able to use data going forward to make that case, because you're not always good. You can't always just rely upon your sales pitch, you have to be able to point to something that's very tangible. Yeah. And I really focusing down on that zero to 10 million hour which you advise people on every day, when you look at kind of the biggest things that you try and help the CEOs and founders with, what would you say that the biggest areas are when it comes to their go to market and the sales and revenue side? Yeah, it depends on what stage you're at. And I would kind of broadly put the two stages within zero to 10 million, maybe three stages. So there's, there's like the zero to 100,000 or two thousand, then there's that to 2 million or so. And then there's the two to 10 million. And the zero hundred thousand is usually it's, you know, the CEO is doing the selling. They're acquiring customers, they're doing product tweaks, right, you're typically not involved that stage, you know, I say zero to 10 million is kind of a tagline. But I'm usually coming in when somebody already got a few hundred thousand revenue, because that means they at least figured something out, right? They're not just selling to their old boss or somebody that's going to buy because, you know, I'll try this out and see what's going on. So, you know, the most important thing, I think the first thing that I will always tell a CEO coming in, assuming they've got some successes, What's got you to this point is not going to get to that next point. And then what gets to that next point is not going to get you to the following point. And so you have to think a little bit differently about how you're ultimately going to market. So the idea that you can go in and continue to sell now if you're a CEO, what if you're a CEO say, a million dollar your product and there are others out there even early stages, you can go in and close two deals. You Question about that. But you're not going to scale well beyond that without some help. And most products aren't selling at that price point. And so in order to go past those that first those first five to 10 deals or so you have to start getting help. And the first thing that the CEO will realize, and this is actually one of the hardest things to for CEOs internalizes, what a salesperson is going to experience is not what you're going to experience. You cannot necessarily translate your success, your metrics, the feedback you get in getting the relationship you have with customers, to a salesperson that you're bringing in. Right. They're not they're not a founder, they're not a senior executive from the outside perspective. They don't necessarily certainly don't have the passion, right? This is your business, they're not going to come in with that same level of passion. All great salespeople can certainly, quote fake that. And they're not going to have the interworking and knowledge and ability to maneuver without any consequences, the salesperson, right, they have to operate within a framework, right? They can't say Oh, yeah, we're gonna just Oh, you don't like this feature. We're going to change this feature. Right? That's, that's a very powerful thing that you can say as an executive and the founder that you Can't say as a rep. So getting out of that mindset, frankly, is the first thing that I will always advise you as to do, don't expect what you did to translate linearly to what a rep is going to do. The second piece then is is making sure that they are staying close to the customer, the customer conversation level. So I, you know, it's easy in some cases, to say, Okay, I brought people in, I can now kind of take my hands off the gas, and let these people sell and it's gonna be fine. And that kind of goes along with number one, because you just assume that things will continue the way they will. Most CEOs still want to be fairly involved with those early stages, but I do occasionally see some that will kind of say, especially if they're more technical and don't really like the selling aspect where they'll kind of let the the reps go with it. But it's really important and I would say this, you know, even to fortune 500 companies you want to see do and customer calls on some frequency, right? It's not gonna be the same if you're the executive, you know, if you're not the CEO of Apple than if you're the CEO, a 10 person startup, but you should be engaged in some sort of customer dialogue at some scale. Because you have to be able to, you know, see through all the different levels of bureaucracy that ultimately sort of shift in class, like a game of telephone, right? You get different translations of the layer. And you're not hearing what the customer saying when you're four or five levels removed from that. So getting out of that mindset, frankly, is the most important thing as a starting point. Once you once I engage with the client, and then there's, there's, we can go into that that part now if you'd like to, but there's a lot more than once you start to get to that point where you're ready to scale. Okay, so focusing on that 100 250 grand mark in revenue, a VP of Sales has come in and they're looking to make a plan. Would you always suggest that they start with the things at the touch of addressable market, building the ICP, as the foundation for building a good plan for the next one, two and three years moving forward? Yeah, before we even go that route, we need to understand what problem we're solving for clients and how critical that problem is. So I mean, traditional product market fit but you don't necessarily have that even if the first 50 or hundred thousand revenue depending upon your product. I'd be one or two customers, which I would not necessarily say not necessarily say is validation of product market fit. So understanding what problem you're solving, right? Who has that problem? how critical that problem is, and then help a poorly, or well, current solutions on the market solve that problem are absolutely critical for validating your product is actually ready to go to market. If you don't have those things. If you can't validate those both through data and qualitative metrics, then you're probably not ready to scale sales. That's my personal opinion. Once you do that, though, right, then you can start looking at Alright, well then what do we need to do in order to make sure that we can tackle the market effectively and sizing the market is helpful from the perspective of you know, where should we go? how much or how much revenue you're likely to generate, how what sort of metrics we can reliably use as benchmarks or so for instance, in extreme example, if you have addressable market of 1000 companies, you better have a really, if you're, if you're a venture backed company, you better have a really, really killer product that you can sell for millions of dollars, because you're not going to get perfect market penetration. And therefore, if you have, if you want an outsize outcome, you're going to have to have a really, really high priced and high value product. So it's good for that type of purpose. But honestly, I don't, I don't necessarily like or think that building out an addressable market analysis outside of for the purposes of fundraising is that important early stage because you're almost never brushing up against the limits of that. What's more important is understanding based on the product, the problems that you solve, the scale and scope and value of those product problems, who you should be selling to and so building on ICP, you know, there's different terminology for that, but ideal customer profile in some senses is very valuable early because you do, you don't have the scale such that if you make some significant percentage misses, it doesn't impact your business. You, you have very limited resources, I really stayed up very efficient with where those resources go. And so being able to identify the profile of someone who's likely to be a fit for you, beyond just, oh, they're in this industry, right? Or they're this company size like that, yes, that is important, for sure. But it's really more about, you know, what can you reliably use as a data point to suggest that this is the type of person we should be selling to? And then once you do that, then it's okay. Now you understand everything about these people, once you've validated that, that's kind of that's typically, that's typically where I really start to get engaged. So there's kind of the early strategy piece, which is, you know, where again, where do we think the proximal solves a problem? Who's solving a problem for etc. Once you figure that out? Then it's okay. Now, how do we actually engage with this buyer, because it's not good enough just to necessarily throw out your perception of it. You need to be able to speak their language and that comes from experience with that industry and it comes with conversations with the people that are on the ground that are facing the problems come from people who have effectively sold in that space or marketing that space that really understand how to communicate with potential. Yeah. And I think probably the biggest challenge I see, particularly with tech startups that have an enterprise product is what is the process to constantly test product market fit. And I put a big emphasis, emphasis or constantly because things change so much. I mean, I've personally been in SAS businesses myself, where, two, three years back, everything seemed really easy. And you know, as the markets moved, and we maybe haven't pivoted in the right way, we haven't had the success that we do anymore, and it just creates a load of confusion for everyone. And so I think, from your experience, what I'd be really interested to understand is, have you seen the great examples of our companies have figured out a process to constantly test the market and see how they can respond. Yeah, so if, here's what I would say if you as your product becomes more complex, higher priced, more focused towards the enterprise sector. You need to do a lot more of the work up front, in order to make sure that things are moving smoothly if you're selling so if you're selling a widget that costs $50, you can afford to learn on the fly, because of velocity that should experience right you can, you have to make some very basic assumptions. So you're not selling the entire wrong market. But once you've got that, it's more important to be able to learn and adapt very quickly because the scale and speed allows you to do that and still operate an effective business. Right now, as you shift toward something, let's say you're selling for 100,000 or 250,000 or a million dollars, you got to be really sure early on that you're going in the right direction. And so what I suggest there is one still going through that exercise, right? So understanding the problems you solve and how urgent those problems are, that exercise has to be on really, really well. You have to be really confident you're doing that from the right perspective before you then start to move and try to sell. Second, once you actually have gone to market then it becomes a question of how are things progressing? And so it's not enough just to say you can't just rely on well are these deals great? Because if your deals are taking two or three years, that's what maybe that's probably a bit extreme example, but but you certainly see deals even that are at a startup six months. And that's still for a startup company where your funding may only last at 12 to 18 months, that's a really tough place to be in, right? You don't want to have to go through two sales cycles, realize we're not doing it correctly, all of a sudden, we're out of money. So you got to look at all the things that lead up to that. Right. Are you having effective conversations? Are people you know, clearly engaged? Are they are they moving things in the right direction? Are they engaging decision makers? It's kind of a, you know, sales methodology approach. And it really doesn't matter what methodology you use, necessarily, but it's are things moving forward in a clearly progressive way. And if they are, right, you can at least have some confidence you're doing you're doing things correctly. Now, you know, that's also where you get challenges with an early stage team where, you know, you might not have the right team members in place, right? Early sales hired especially are very, very challenging to get right. And that's why again, I suggest that the founder involved very early because if you do have Critical gaps specialising in the enterprise, one of the things I think often companies are selling the enterprise Don't think about are all of the sort of regulatory and or industry level requirements, some of which are incredibly nuanced. So you have to sort of make a bet and understand how much of an investment you're willing to make and how quickly you can adapt in order to take filk puzzles, where there might be things that are absolutely game killers for that particular audience. So you just want to exclude that for a second. So you can see for a lot of CEOs that those early hires are critical, right? Because that can ultimately make or break the business. So what advice do you give to see your eyes when you're when they're looking to make those early sales hires, you know, what, what sort of personality? Do they need to look for what sort of skill sets they need to look for? You know, you mentioned there sort of customer engagement and that's key. Now as technologies evolve, the way to sell has evolved. So what what sort of advice you give to CEOs when they're when they're looking to make those early highs? Yeah, so You know, I would say that of the things that you look for in a good sales hire 70 to 80% of those are going to be true no matter when you hire someone. So you want to hire someone who's who's intelligent. I mean, especially if you're doing enterprise sales, you have to be really thoughtful and strategic about how you're navigating organization. You can't just sort of throw something in the wall and see if it sticks and expect it to work at scale. You need to hire someone who works hard. I mean, there's no question there. You know, I guess I guess you could make an assumption there. Certainly, there are certainly places in large organizations where you don't have to work that hard, and still do pretty well. But all else being equal, of course, you want someone who's going to work harder and really be thoughtful about their work. You don't want someone who is generally fairly competitive. It's really helpful as a salesperson to be competitive, even if it's not interpersonally competitive and certainly don't want toxic competitiveness but you want someone who is absolutely motivated to perform, even if it's just competing against themselves right and wanting to do better quarter over quarter month over month. You know, the last thing you want someone who sort of a you know, an ethical good person and fit right like toxic people can crush an organization very, very quickly, right? You can have 20 great people and one absolutely terrible person that one terrible person can destroy the morale of the team. So it's really critical to get that get that early up front. The one, the one big change, right. And this harks back a little bit to what we're talking about with the challenges of shifting from big companies or small companies, you have to absolutely have someone who's okay with uncertainty, and ambiguity. And all of those other things we described are, in my experience are generally predictive of someone who is okay with ambiguity, but not always. You know, I certainly won't name names, but I do remember a hiring made a long time ago who is otherwise very smart, you know, great cultural fit, etc. But when it came to, you know, a problem that didn't have a clear roadmap or blueprint, I that person just could not function. And it really created a lot of issues because those things come up all the time, and he just didn't know how to handle those and deal with those. And so it's clearly not an early stage you have to have that mentality. A great way to sort of evaluate that as someone who's worked on early stage startup before, or if you're hiring something from big company, which I would generally recommend against doing for that first or second sales hire, unless they have early stage experience before or unless they have other areas in their life or past professional history where they've clearly had to work through complex ambiguous situations and they've come out with flying colors brilliant, I think this this next question before we go into the rapid fire round is purely for sales guys, because I think one of the hardest things for anyone to do a CEO a revenue officer anything in the early days is finding the right comp plan and finding out how to pay people fairly because no one's gonna blow their number when you're a 1 million our company. And I think it's about kind of getting a mix between making it fed, but also making the sales guys keep motivated. So what what's your usual tips to people trying to figure out comp plans in the early days especially in the more complex process? So I would ask the person, you know, look what you're doing interesting startup, I think about your own comp plan, right? If you're an early stage executive, why you're coming in, and you're probably not making as much cash as you are, if you are going into a big company, right, like generally early stage startup employee, like you're not getting paid that versus the same level of Google, no question. So you get compensated other ways, right? You compensated with equity. And that's obviously you have to compensate you for the risk that you're taking by joining that thing that's a lot less certain. And so you need to think about from the same perspective, a sales rep. Now, the challenge with that is that sales reps often are not getting a significant chunk of equity. It was early stages. And so what I would suggest to people is one, you know, I would offer especially the first few sales reps, treat them as maybe not founders per se, but members of that first kind of inner circle team, right? Not not necessarily gain as much equity as you would if you're an engineer because usually equity is more of a comp package, but you shouldn't have equity as part of this. Secondarily, I would look for ways to de risk what the sale People are doing. And there's several ways you can do that. So the first is by creating a comp plan that's not necessarily tied to downstream output. But the inputs that you want to drive and you think are important, right, as a sales leader or as an executive, you need to understand what behaviors are going to lead to the outcomes you want. And you need to be able to support your team towards driving towards the behaviors. So maybe it's not, you know, maybe your first three months, your comps not tied to revenue close, it's tied to, you know, how much how many companies you can get in your pipeline. Or if it's tied to, you know, completing all of your if you're doing outputs, you're doing outbound prospecting all of your outbound prospecting sequences within a certain time range. Or you know, or perhaps you have even certain projects you can tie to right we think you're gonna, if you're an early stage, you might have real think you have to do X, Y, and Z before you even have for a robust high functioning sales team. comp, that sales rep on completing those things with high quality and on time. Those are always your reasonable things you can do. You can also provide a ramp Or, you know, some sort of quota adjustments, depending upon what you see in the market. So I mean, perfect example we hear a lot about now is COVID in pre COVID, right, the metrics that you use pre COVID are simply not going to fly post COVID. And so you have to be able to make reasonable adjustments as necessary. And I wouldn't tell like the general ethos, when I would tell, executive or founder is, look, if there's any question for those first two reps for the first, you know, two sales cycles or so, just err on the side of giving them the benefit of doubt. Right? If you're not sure if something is maybe the rep or not like, give them the benefit of the doubt, make sure that they're taking care of comp wise because ultimately that stuff pays dividends down the road if you've hired the right people. That's one thing if you know if somebody was doing something that was totally unethical or was just absolutely clearly couldn't probably not fit and you need to make those changes quickly. But if you're not sure, right, getting the confidence you have the team's back early, and you're hiring those salespeople because you believe as a sales rep who let's say Getting paid $150,000 a year on TV, you're assuming they're gonna bring in four or 510 times that. So if you're making that you're making that as an investment, you need to think about the fact that it doesn't matter really the scope of things that I give them an extra $5,000 here $10,000 there even when they didn't quote unquote, earn it, I give you that level of confidence. If you've hired the right people and done the right things is absolutely gonna pay itself back many times over down the road. Right, that has been fantastic. Just before you go, I'd like to ask you a few quick questions. And the first one is around the daily routines. So when you're not in the casino, and you are in your nine to five, what's the daily routine? Do you have one? Yeah, well, not to see as much at all anymore, which has been kind of upsetting. But it certainly is getting more time at home. My routine so I'm very much into personal health and firmly believe that personal physical health leads to effective mental health. And I don't think I could do the work that I do without being in good physical shape. So I work out almost every morning probably six days a week on average. So I set aside time to do that, I set aside time to kind of relax through the day, start to have a cup of coffee and sit outside on our porch and just listen to the sounds of nature. And also to help my wife, who really likes to kind of have some time together before we start the day I as I've gotten older, right, I am not in the place where I'm not, I'm doing a lot fewer 3am casino sessions with before, but because I kind of realized what I need to do in order to take care of myself. So I really try to balance out my day to where I'm doing things that helped me physically and mentally, and also help you maintain and build relationships that matter to me while still getting work done. So I tend to work more and more focus periods and blocks. And I also try to balance doing stuff that I have to do and stuff that is going to help me be more effective in the future. So things like personal learning time, I'll set aside about an hour each day where I'll go through some sort of learning activity. And it could be just maybe working on writing. And I write sales articles. I write personal articles. It could be I think, courses. So I don't have a lot of, for instance, I advise clients primarily on sales and business development and in fundraising, but I also have a lot of clients who are looking for help with SEO and paid demand generation. And so I'm taking a course to help increase my proficiency there. So I can speak that language and be more effective. So it's kind of a combination of forward thinking and also present thinking that really drives my daily routine. Nice. And if you want to recommend one book, what would it be in my business book, I'd say never split the difference. It's a book by Chris Voss, who's a former FBI hostage negotiator. It's a great book. It's it's very helpful for selling but it's also really helpful for life. I mean, the type of techniques in terms of how you how you communicate, how people make decisions, emotionality, etc. How all that fits into play, right tells us some really poignant examples. And it's a fantastic book, highly recommended, is a personal book, I would say there's a book I read that called the righteous mind, which is a book about political attitudes and values, which is really interesting in today's modern time. But I think it's really helped sort of change the way that I view people and kind of give me a perspective that was, you know, less about kind of right and wrong and more about sort of different shades of grey and how people think and think in different ways that are not necessarily complimentary, but aren't necessarily indicative of sort of a certain for a moral compass. So I would highly recommend both to better understand your fellow person. Amazing, Greg, it has been unbelievable to speak with you. And we've learned so much. So for the hundreds of people that I'm sure be really interested to learn more. Do they have an opportunity to reach out to you and speak with you? And if so, where can they find you? Absolutely. So you can find me on LinkedIn, Greg mcbath. GTM is the name of my business. If you want to learn more about the company or you potentially want to see how this potentially help you can go to a GTM growth calm. And my email is Greg at GTM growth if you just prefer to email me directly. Brilliant. Great. Thank you so much, Tom. It's been a pleasure. Transcribed by https://otter.ai