(139) Sales, Life, and Career Lessons from Owner.com CRO Kyle Norton - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bHtUnxW6lo

Transcript: (00:00) there's like an intangible trust that we're building with the market that that can't be replicated. You know, the founders are doing a bunch of other stuff other than being psychos in their company and and like I think if you want to build a an exceptional generational company, you have to have that. (00:18) The sero goes like, "Oh, the number's too high. It's not fair." It's like, dude, fair is not a thing here. It's like the numbers too high which means for the business we are going to make suboptimal short-term decisions. (00:37) We are going to sacrifice building enterprise value and therefore here's the alternative path that I think we should consider. All right, I'm here with Kyle Norton uh the CRO at owner.com. Owner.com is a software platform used by over 10,000 restaurants to help them grow sales. Is a it's a suit of different products I would say. (00:57) There's a website builder, marketing automation, online ordering, loyalty program, a bunch of things that restaurants need to grow. Started in 2018 by CEO Adam Gil. They recently raised $120 million series C. Uh Kyle is also the co-host of the revenue leadership podcast by pavilion and before joining owner.com in 2022. He was director of revenue at Shopify and co-owner of open m mixed martial arts uh in MMA Academy in Toronto which you don't do anymore. (01:26) So first before we before I have that first question, anything to kind of correct amend in that intro? No, I think you got it. I mean uh owner really was started in 2020. Uh it was like a very different product before then. Co basically wiped it out. So Adam rebuilt the business from scratch essentially. (01:49) I think from 2018 to 2020 he got it over a million ARR that went to complete zero. And so he rebuilt the business from scratch in uh starting in March 2020. relaunched it like later in the year and then uh within a year had uh over a million in ARR again and with a completely different customer base and completely different product. (02:16) So uh yeah, I really talked about the company being like started in 2020. Okay. Yeah, makes sense. I went off of what was on his LinkedIn profile, but yeah. Yeah, but that is that's the full story. So we've been owner owner since then basically. (02:36) Now, I do have a couple questions about Adam, but do you still practice MMA, BJJ, any of that stuff? No. No. I had two knee surgeries, almost had to have a back surgery, and and uh that was it for me. I I had to I had to hang it up. I missed the sport a lot. I I I credit a lot of my career success to lessons I learned in martial arts. the acceptance of failure and pain as a part of the learning process and just understanding how to practice and how to get good at something with like very disciplined uh focused practice uh is is something I still apply to my sales teams to this day. (03:15) Like a lot of our a lot of our sales training is built around the principles of practice in sport. um which which I really learned from my mixed martial arts career. So yeah, I bring those lessons with me although I I do miss I do miss I was going to ask about that because uh I I people say this thing that like it teaches you grit and those things and I always wonder where I'm like does it really teach you grit or is it similar to sales maybe where maybe it doesn't necessarily teach you grit but it just attracts people who naturally have grit and those are the people who just stick around. There's definitely selection bias. Yeah, (03:52) there's certainly selection bias. And I think um there are people who start the sport, are interested in it, and ultimately give up because it is a really difficult one to learn. Like, you know, you could learn how to play volleyball and you can be bad at it and lose, but there's no like physical cost. (04:16) But with jiu-jitsu or boxing or or wrestling, there's a physical cost to not being good at that at that thing. Like you're just losing and you're you're getting physically beaten up and you were on the receiving end of somebody else physically dominating you, which which has like a very different psychological impact than like losing at a volleyball game or a soccer match. (04:37) Yeah. And so, um, yeah, people do definitely churn out of the sport who who don't have enough of, uh, grit, but I certainly think if you've got enough to stick with it and if you're at a gym, like the the type of gym we were trying to build was one that was more welcoming to beginners and it was less of sort of like a shark tank meathead type of thing. (05:02) We were in downtown Toronto like we attracted dentists and lawyers and tech people. Um because once you can get people over the hump, you know, the sport gives you so much. It's like a fascinating physical chess game and there's just like so many incredible lessons. And so I I had nowhere near the the resilience or grit before doing martial arts that I did after. And and after now you sort of feel like you can do anything. (05:30) Like you know, you you go in as a white belt just getting the crap kicked out of you and then that's where I'm at right now. Yeah. There you go. And then you emerge like three or five or seven years later and and you know you can physically overwhelm somebody that's 50 pounds bigger than you that is like much more athletic and just this the the uh sense of confidence and accomplishment is is like very significant. (06:01) So, you know, like a lot of my confidence in life to, you know, think I can I can do whatever I put my mind to and achieve whatever I want. I do attribute to martial arts. I would tell like anybody if you're body can handle it, like do jiu-jitsu. It it's especially founders. I think it's like it's such an incredible sport for founders because it's there's so much depth to the chess game of uh jiu-jitsu. (06:28) And you know, like I am such a big believer to this day in physical fitness as a part of being like a corporate athlete and performing well as an executive. A couple days ago, I hit my like thousandth day in a row of working out and I like, you know, I got a cold plunge in my house. I was Yeah. consecutive. Wow. Okay. (06:46) Some of them are like just yoga days and like mobility stuff, so I'm not like crushing myself every day. But, you know, like I was in the cold plunge today at 5:50, whatever, and and I rode my bike into work. And I just like it. It's a lot of the reason why I think I can sustain the tempo I operate at. Like, I've been operating at a very high RPM for a very long time. (07:09) And I've very rarely felt like I was like burning out. The only time I felt like I was burning out was actually when my when I was like um off of my health path after my second knee surgery. Wasn't going to go back to the sport. It was traveling a lot for work, like going out and like eating and drinking a lot. That was the only time I really felt like I was on the verge of burnout. (07:28) Uh, but you know, like I've got two young kids and we're in the like crazy startup mode and and I feel like I could do this forever because but I I attribute that to, you know, like I sleep eight hours a night every single night and I try to dial in my sleep hygiene and I work out every day and and I think like that that's a really important message for anybody who's in the startup game because you need to be able to sustain sustain this for like years and years and years to get to where you want to go. Now, talking about sustaining things, I mean, your your CEO, Adam, seems (08:02) special. I listen to his podcast on Jack Alman's podcast, one of one. So, I was going to ask you, what do you think are are some things that you learned from Adam that he does that other high-erforming founders and CEOs don't do? So, there's a lot there. I think the first thing that came to mind I'll share a few things but the first thing that came to mind is like I've always been the hardworking guy it wherever I've been like I I've I have been known as that and then I got to owner and I'm in a different life stage like I had two young kids but like Adam crushes me on (08:39) work work ethic and it was like actually a weird thing for me to deal with um from like a self-esteem and an image perspective because like that's what I've that's like what I've been known as. And I was like, "Oh my god, like my boss is outworking me like severely. I like it's just not it's not possible. (09:02) Like I you know, unless I want to be a delinquent father, I cannot actually put in the the hours that he does anymore." And and that tempo I think is so critical, especially in today's world. like we're we're now well like starting to get away from the Zerp era, but I still have friends that work at some of these companies that like try to do the work life balance thing and uh you know the founders are doing a bunch of other stuff other than being psychos in their company and and like I think if you want to build a an exceptional generational company, you have to have that. And I've (09:34) now been around a bunch of founders that are, you know, that have built or are building like multi-billion dollar outcomes. And the tempo and intensity that Adam brings from the very top is really important. And he doesn't he's pretty subtle about it. (09:52) He doesn't rub this in anybody's face, but you can just like see it. it sort of leaps off the page when you know like he we have an idea on a Thursday and then on like Sunday night he'll send you like a 17page document that's like extremely thoughtful and well well researched and and you're like oh like this is like two weeks of my work that he he like did in in like you know four days that's just his Chad GBT pro plan but this is even before Chad GBT this this was one of the things that struck me and why I left my role at Shopify, which I did not want to I did not want (10:28) to leave that job. I love Shopify. I still love that that company and uh was in an awesome spot career-wise. I just had my second kid. Like, I did not want to go back to startup land. But I spent a bunch of time with Adam because I invested in the company through GTM fund and then I was doing some advisory work with Adam and I was just like oh if I don't do this I might just regret this for my entire life after this. I'm just going to see like some crazy update on LinkedIn every year and know that I that (10:58) like that's the the great company that I missed because they don't come along very often. So, back to your question, like lessons from Adam. I think like intensity is is one of them. Um, and I've always known that, but like just seeing it at another level and seeing it exude seeing him exude it and have it go through the entire organization I think is is number one. (11:23) I've been close to some of his like founder mode decisions, which and we don't say founder mode. I think it's a little cliched and like misconstrued in in many ways, but um getting to see the founder mode discussion online and and like talking to friends about it, but then like seeing like a version of it with Adam has been interesting because I think where it comes from is he is arguably closer to the customer than anybody. He like lives and breathes the customer. (11:53) He started this business for his mom basically because he his his mom started a dog grooming business. it was going out was going under. It was going to cost them like everything they had. And so he rebuilt their digital presence and saved this business. And it's like his mom had a new lease on life. (12:10) And so like he feels very connected to the mission and he still is very connected to customers. He like texts and is on calls with customers all the time. And so he has a a very an extremely intuitive understanding of who the customer is. And so when we're making decisions, some things like don't really make a ton of business sense in the short term and but because he knows the customer and he's thinking very long term like we don't really he said to me before he's like look like if if somebody buys this business for like two three or four billion dollars he's like I will have wasted the last like eight years of my (12:46) life. and he like really means that. That's not like founder spin or some like jargon. Like from deep inside his body, he believes that. And so when you have a very long-term orientation and a very like deep uh deeply rooted connection to the customer, I think you can make these decisions that like sometimes seem contrarian or like not the right things. Like a good example of this is our investment in organic brand. (13:15) So, we started to plow money into organic brand when we were like less than 10 million in ARR. And I can't remember the numbers, but like we spent probably like a million dollars on organic brand when we were like a 10 million ARR company. And if anybody's tried to do organic, it has a very long payoff time horizon. (13:39) And so, we were putting a bunch of money into this into YouTube and Instagram and it's difficult to track. and even the stuff that we could track, it was just like a trickle of of leads. Um, but you know, he knew where our customers live. Our customers don't live on LinkedIn. They don't live like they they live on on YouTube (14:01) and Facebook. YouTube. And uh, you know, this is how Horoszi got really big like the the gym owner customer is a lot like the restaurant owner customer in some ways like very bluecollar independent SMB. Um, and so we've built up over time with a lot of his personal hours. Like he spent he used to spend like 10 hours every Saturday just recording YouTube and and Facebook or Instagram stuff. (14:25) Um, like every week like clockwork. And so it was the money in his personal investment and on something that made no sense in the short term was like arguably way too early for us, you know, in the company journey to make that that scale of brand. (14:44) But now we have more YouTube and Instagram followers than I think anybody in restaurant tech, like even more than companies like Toast. And you know, uh, he's gotten stopped on the street by restaurant owners being like, "Oh, you're like Adam Gild. I love your YouTube." And now because it because organic is this compounding asset and it's very difficult to build. So there's a significant moat like nobody else can go like oh I want to have a big organic brand too now. (15:08) Like okay good I'll see you in three years. Yes. Um and he just like had high conviction and at the time I'm like wow like that's like a that's a big investment of of time and money and I never secondguessed it at the time. I've had a lot of trust in him since the beginning, but I it did like raise my eyebrows. (15:30) I'm like, is this the right time? But like, you know, sure, like this is a thing he believes in, so I'm going to like I'm just going to support it. And sure enough, it's like paid off tremendously. And there's now that we can do the the sophistication of testing and we can understand like the halo effect around our paid ads and all this other stuff like now that we can now that we have the data um architecture to understand what organic is doing like yeah it's this tremendous asset that we've got and it's this this there's like an (16:00) intangible trust that we're building with the market that can't be replicated. And so, uh, this is an extremely long answer to your question, but no, I love it though. Yeah, the founder intuition is real. I think I think especially the first point on like his work ethic. (16:19) I've I've seen some I don't know, some VC posted that and their advice was basically to start early in your career to spend time with bar raisers, I think he called it. And the idea is essentially like people who who set a completely higher bar that you never thought actually existed, right? And there's so many examples of that. (16:37) the kid who was always best in math in in high school and then you go to college and you're like, "Holy shit." Like there's a lot of people who are even way better than me in math. And I think that kind of you think you're operating at the max and then you see someone else topping that and you realize actually I can do more. I I had a follow-up on that. (16:55) Given that you do have two children, what is your personal framework on deciding how to balance it? Because obviously you can always work more. You can also always spend an extra hour with your kids. So like what's your personal tradeoff framework? Yeah, it's really tough. Uh uh to be very honest I think like anybody who says like oftentimes you'll hear parents say like oh you know like you just get better at prioritization. You just like learn what's important. You focus on that. (17:27) I I think like people at big companies say that where you can work 40 hours a week and that's all good. For me, it just means sort of cutting out everything else. Like my the only things in my life that I really spend time on are my family, work, and my health. And like I I don't get to see my friends a ton. (17:50) Like that's definitely like a sacrifice I'm making for this opportunity that I think I have in front of me to build a generational company. Um, and you just have to be like understanding of that. And I do my best to to carve out that time. So, usually like I'm I'm like laptop closed with the kids by 5:30 p.m. And like I'm dedicated to them until they're they're asleep at like 8:30. (18:15) And then I basically work until I go to bed and which is usually by like 10:00. And uh then I'm up and you know I work out, get to work like by 7:30 or maybe 8:00 and I'm just like ripping as hard as I can. And you just you have to delete the other stuff. And so you know like when I see my friends it's like for a bike ride or a run or a workout or like I'm trying to find or I see my friends that have kids I get to see a lot because I can make those two things happen at the same time. (18:48) But yeah, like I I there's a bunch of people that I haven't seen in in a while because they don't have kids and they don't like do the health stuff. And so there's just like not a lot of overlapping opportunity to make space for it. And and maybe I will grow to regret that at some point in my life. I don't know. (19:13) But like that's the that's the trade-off I've made is not really like I'm I want to spend all that time with my kids and like the weekends are pretty sacred. Like I wake up with the with them in the morning and make breakfast and we hang out and I let my life I let my wife sleep in and then you know I try to do like special stuff with them as much as I can. So like I went out my daughter and I like went rock climbing and then went got a Manny Petty like and that's awesome. Yeah. Like you know you just got to create space for it. (19:41) This is getting very personal so you don't have to answer it but uh also with uh you know your wife do you guys have sacred rules of like one date night a week like religiously or because it also you know there's stuff that builds up that you need to talk through but when life's so busy you might just never get to actually sit down for two hours and just talk about what's going on in everyone's life. (20:05) Um do you have any non-negotiables there? So, this is something I should I should create more space for, for sure. When you have two young kids, it's really hard to like make space for your personal relationship. So, and like we just moved from Toronto to uh San Francisco and we've had a bunch of family stuff happen this summer. (20:30) So, like it is at its like most minimum right now. And uh we we have previously gotten into like a good cadence of like definitely not a date night a week, maybe like a date night uh a month is like a more reasonable cadence in carving out that time. Uh but it is very difficult. (20:54) I think like this is a I think the advice I would give folks here is just like understand that there's seasons in life and you just have to embrace that season and understand that things are going to eb and flow and like when you've got kids under under five and 10 years old like that season of your life is all about them and and you just like want to embrace that time as much as you possibly can because you know like they get to become six 8 10 years old and they start having interests of their own and you know they go they they have playdates when you're not there which which is like a a very different thing or they don't want you (21:29) around all the time and and then all you know my wife and I have more time for each other but yeah like while we're here and our kids want us around all the time and we can we can do that we're just sort of embracing it and and like like there's nothing in this world that I love more than my like it's it's uh it is just like a so such a profoundly meaningful and fulfilling thing that like I can just sort of fill every hour with them and and be pretty happy about it. Love it. Well, I think it's also good to hear that it is difficult, you know, (22:04) because sometimes people want to frame it that you can kind of have it all and have the perfect balance and crush on all fronts. Now you are, you know, let let me say one more thing about kids because I I think like you just made made like a very like subtle but important comment. (22:23) So before I had kids, what I would always hear from parents and they're like like oh yeah like you know my kids never get in in the way of work or like the line that they you know I always hear it's like you just get better at prioritizing. You just find a way to get more done. (22:41) And so I had this in the back of my head and but I you know for one reason or another I was like I just like I wanted to get myself to a certain career stage before I had kids. Um so that you know if if kids did affect my ability to do my job like I I was at a place where I'd achieved some checkpoint and I like I reference like I I relate it to like video games. (23:04) It's like once you get to a certain point of a video game, you've got a checkpoint and even if you die, you go back to that that checkpoint. Careers are a lot like that as well. Like once you're at a certain career point, hey, like you're a like certified um uh competent and functional VP of sales or like a a functional CRO for like a $20 million AR company. (23:29) Now, you can you can go get those jobs fairly consistently. And you everybody has to determine what that career level is is for them, but you know, like I I was a VP of sales for three years. I took a company from like 0 to 25. I'm like, okay, like I I feel like I have enough on my resume now. And that's when I made the move to Shopify. (23:48) It was pretty intentional to be at a big company to have kids. I felt like I had hit that baseline. And what I came to understand is like all those parents telling me it's like, oh, like your kids don't get in your way of work, like you know, you can do it all anyways. Like that was Like no, like I I went from working 70 80 hours a week and just like being all consumed to to like I just I today could not work 80 hours a week if I without being a delinquent parent. And that's I'm just like not willing to do that now. (24:20) And so I share this lesson with people who are thinking about having kids because it's like it might seem harsh or um like overly corporate and callous, but it is the reality that like when you choose to have kids, you will you will just have less hours to to work and that will potentially make you not as good at your job. (24:43) and uh or maybe you just like were really bad at prioritizing before or you didn't work that much and so you had the hours to to swap out. But I think for like people who are high performers, especially if this if your audience is like founders and early stage founders that are super dialed in and and putting in a bunch of effort like I think having an honest conversation of what like what what the impact of kids are is is important. (25:10) Like I started a company and my wife and I we have a two-year-old at home and I'm only now able to start like working out again since a couple months. Um because between the little baby and running my own company, it just felt like I probably could have if I would have prioritized it, but I don't know. (25:26) It was one of those things that I left on the Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like you would have had to sacrifice that time out of work. Yeah. Like there's always life is trade-offs. Yeah. Now, you you you host the the the revenue leadership podcast and you you had the ability to besides obviously being one yourself to interview some of the best revenue leaders and CRO's um yourself. (25:51) I was curious I always find the question of like what's the difference between a great and an average revenue leader boring? What what are some of the themes that you notice that are the difference between an all-time great revenue leader and some of the really good ones? Like where does that last one or two or 3% get squeezed? Yeah, it's a really good question. (26:15) Um, so I think being able to think holistically about the business is a big differentiator especially when you talk to founders. So, as part of my intake uh mechanism for the podcast and and I stole this directly from Harry Stepping, so shout out to Harry, where part of the intake is like, give me the three people in business who you are closest with, who you've spent the most time working with, and like is it okay if I reach out to them? And so, I get those names in the email and then I send them like a standard email. I'm like, "Hey, like (26:50) tell me about Finn. What are his superpowers? like are there any awesome stories that I just like have to ask him about? And one of the things that founders say about their about their CRO like the really top flight ones that have taken companies to like multi-billion dollar valuations is they were able to think beyond sales and because most people in a CRO seat come from a sales background. (27:19) There's smattering of of marketing and CS people but very much the exception not the rule. Um, and it's really difficult in sales to move away from that lens on everything. And so, uh, the great ones are able to plug themselves into product to be able to make, uh, into to help the product team get closer to the customer and make better decisions and be a really helpful partner and not do what a lot of VPs of sales and CRO's do, which is, you know, like just ask the product team for the last thing that a really big customer asks them for. (27:52) So like engaging the right way or being a really great collaborative partner for customer success and trading off the sales number for the retention number because that might be the the the decision that is most accretive for the business even though it it like can break our brains a little bit to to ever sacrifice um new ARR. (28:19) Um, and so I think like the and and you know the other piece of it is they can they can create positive friction but in a way that pulls everybody up. Like we use the word bar raiser a lot here which which you used before. And so the the elite CRO are are the best bar raisers um versus the ones you know like from some of the advisory stuff I do or from like founder friends. (28:47) The frustration I hear is like yeah you know the my CRO is really good he's delivering the number was just such a pain in the ass and um you know like he like I'm always having to patch things up between him and the CPO or like the CS team is always frustrated by by by their team and so that is like a bit that's more of like a zero sum attitude um versus uh like the the attitude of of how do you make everybody body better in the entire organization and how do you be that bar raiser? I think that's one of the biggest things that separates like the the good because everybody wants everybody's happy to have a serial that delivers the number versus like the (29:25) elite people who never get layered never get replaced can go from can go from like very early stage to to very very late stage like the Chris Degman's the wrong Brisco like the the those types of people who have been through that full journey that's one of the things that you that you see in like just if you listen to them carefully that you Is that also a company culture thing? Because I could imagine that there's some companies where if the CRO comes and says, "Hey, we're lacking on the product side and we need to redo our (29:57) product roadmap or hey, we actually need to uh you know like lower our uh our revenue goals so that we can redefine our ICP and and fix some churn." That that's maybe not always super welcome. Okay. So, this is a like I'm going to get on a slightly different rant here. Yes. But this is this is such a good this is a good point. (30:20) So yeah, there there is a bit of that in some cultures and a bunch of not very successful revenue leaders will basically chalk up all of their failings to well this the CEO the founder was a dummy and the uh VCs were all big bad meanies and they wanted us to like spend too much money and and they basically like cast blame everywhere everywhere else. (30:45) And you know, as a young VP of sales, one of the things I was really frustrated with was like it didn't feel like anybody was listening to me. And you know, we never we didn't really have product market fit and we were we were like trying to aggressively scale anyways even though the market was like really telling us that that we didn't have the right to do that. (31:08) And you know, that company has since gone on and needed to pivot multiple times and hasn't grown very fast. And so like in hindsight I was right in that view, but I I blamed a lot externally at the time. And now in retrospect, I'm like, well, if you put 2025 Kyle in that seat, I probably could have handled it completely differently. I could have helped I could have helped bring people along and explain it in different in like very different language and uh being a a very different partner on that journey. (31:47) Um, and so I think uh I think there's a lot of blame to go to go around because I know that if you would if you had put me in that position or if you put like Ron Gabrisco, he's the CRO of data bricks from zero to like you know how six billionaire r uh if you put him in that seat like that's not happening like that's going to be a completely different conversation. (32:07) So CRO's and and heads of sales like need to take way more accountability for this. And instead of like complaining about the founder and the board, it's like learn how to manage your board. Like learn how to influence your not even influence your founder, learn how to collaborate with your founder in a different way. (32:29) Because oftentimes what you see is like, oh the the the CRO goes like, oh the number's too high. It's not fair. It's like, dude, fair is not a thing here. It's like the numbers too high which means for the business we are going to make suboptimal short-term decisions. (32:49) We are going to sacrifice building enterprise value and therefore here's the alternative path that I think we should consider. Like that's a very different conversation and and so like your question is like is it about company culture? Yes, it is about company culture but like you are the CRO as you are part of the company culture arguably. No one outside of the CEO is more influential on the on the culture of a company than than the revenue leader because your team is going to be the biggest like I I manage the biggest team in the company of the functional leaders. (33:18) This has sort of been true like in all it's true in most companies unless you're super enterprise and you're more engineers than you are sales reps. And so like you just have to take accountability and ownership for it and stop making excuses. And I think once we get to that place, you'll be better off. (33:40) Just like read the book, The Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holiday to reset how you think about challenges. It's like, okay, like the CEO is like, you know, wants to do this thing that doesn't make sense and I don't think okay like good like now it's your job to help collaborate and solve that problem and try to see it from their perspective. (34:00) like put your put yourself in the shoes of the founder who is under tremendous pressure and scrutiny from the board and has to worry about raising the next round and has has to think about all these things that you don't and then try to get to the what you think is the the right answer. Yeah. So again sounds also kind of like extreme ownership by Joo. Now, um I was curious. (34:24) I I mean there's there is uh there's people on LinkedIn who are way more active than you, but but you are active here now. You post every now and then. You you you are hosting the the the the podcast with Pavilion. You're also doing things like this. And I was just curious like what's your what's your motivation? What's your reasoning? Obviously, my audience will will never buy owner.com. None of my listeners are restaurants owners. (34:44) uh most of the people who listen to the revenue leadership podcast are not you know restaurant owners I assume so yeah what's your kind of reasoning for being active building somewhat of a brand for yourself so originally uh it was all about talent attraction it was about it was about attracting sales reps um and so I I the content I used to write was very reporiented over time and so now I've got like a modest following like it's just under 40,000 I think. (35:20) Um but I've I have tilted my where I spend more and more time towards um leadership topics like we don't really have a problem with talent attraction because the interesting thing is like once you have a brand everything is easier. So, like one of the things we want to do is get more engaged with universities because we're trying to hire a lot of folks like straight out of college into these sales roles and just train them from scratch. (35:47) And I can email the the program leader of any sales program or business program of any school in Canada or like we're hiring in Toronto, so the GTA and they're like so pumped to have me come in because oh, I'm like hosting this podcast. I worked for this cool company. I got this big following and so um it was all about challenge traction at the beginning and then I started to build a bit of a following. (36:11) I was like oh like all of these other things are easier and and I started to to think about this because of Naval and Seth Goden you know talking about the importance of having audience and brand and and reputation just like has all of these other compounding uh benefits. (36:34) Um, and so, you know, a lot now a lot of how I think about myself is like I'm I'm like a important um voice to the market, not just in sales hiring, but to to the entire talent market. And so, there's probably not a lot of like IC engineers listening to this podcast, but there'll be, you know, founders who want to reach out and talk or VCs or whoever it is. (37:00) And these are people that uh we want to know the name of owner.com because people might refer folks to us or and even just like feeling like a bigger company than we are has this like really weird halo effect. You know, even when we were like 10, 15 millionaire R, we would go to these revenue these restaurant tech shows, people like, "You guys are everywhere. (37:24) like you're killing it d and you know we were growing at a good rate but like we're not growing at cursor rates or or anything like that but it felt like we were a way bigger deal than we were because like I generated I don't know like a few million impressions on LinkedIn uh in 2024 2023 or whatever it was and so from so that has an effect on people wanting to partner with us hiring fundraising like every like everything just just is like a little bit better and you know I get a bunch of really great uh advisory or or angel uh flow and I like you know source deals for GTM fund and stage two which I'm an LP in um or just friends (38:07) like I got a bunch of friends in venture that that I'll send folks to and there's just this compounding effect where you know I just sourced a deal for like a really well-known VC with a big platform form and like there's no there's no reciprocal. I don't get like any comp on that, but it's just like a good thing to do. (38:29) That's like a great relationship and it's a great relationship. It builds builds um network equity over time and I just like to do it too. Like I love early stage. I love I love all of this stuff. And so where I can be helpful, I like to be helpful. (38:49) I mean, I'm assuming also for hosting your podcast, it's also kind of a learning and development tool for you. That's the only reason I started it. Yeah. Like nobody could watch that podcast and I would still do it. Yeah. Because and and that was the original reason I I started it is I listen to a lot of podcasts. Like my Spotify wrapped in 2023 was like 54,000 minutes of podcast. What's your number one? 20 VC or Yeah, 20VC was up there. (39:14) I love Jack Aldman's podcast now. That's what I was listening to on my bike ride in uh Uncapped. He's a board member, so I'm not being a total suckup. It is actually It is. It is great. I was listening to the 10% Happier podcast by Dan Harris. (39:33) I've got a very eclectic taste, so like The Knowledge Project is one of my like tippy top most most favorites. I I listen to some like what would be the most surprising one that like would totally not at all fit what I don't know people would expect you to listen to? Lenny's podcast is is a podcast for product people and that that would have been in my top three 100% every year the last three years. (39:56) I think like my podcast is a shameless ripoff on on Lenny's podcast. It is Lenny's podcast for revenue people. I've emailed him and told him this. I have like so much respect for for him as as just like a a person. BG2 is is awesome with Gersonner and Brad Gurley. Um or Bill Gurley. Yeah, Knowledge Project. Yeah, Topline, The Pavilion Guys. I love Dwar is another one that I listen to a lot. (40:20) Finding Mastery is another one that like I I drill episodes on. So like it's it's sort of like a a variety. And and so do you relisten to your own episodes? No, I can't do it. Chris Walker told me he does this with every single episode he does, I was like, I could not continue living. I know. If if if I was more serious about it, serious. (40:44) Yeah. If I was more serious about like I really want to optimize every little thing and I'm like trying to build a huge audience, I would do it. But at the end of the day, it's a very niche podcast and I'm doing it for like sort of selfish reasons in some ways. Um, like I listen to a lot of the sales. You notice I didn't really say any sales podcasts in there. (41:05) 20 sales um in the 20BC feed is probably the best one out there. There's not a lot of great ones. And and what I find, you know, like Harry's audience is founders. That's who he's trying to speak to. And so he's asking like founder oriented questions. And so I listen to that pod. (41:22) And I'm like, it's good and he is the best guests of anybody, but like I I wanted to hear different things or like they they would go down a certain certain uh avenue and like oh like pull pull on that like go super like get super deep there but like that's not really the point of of 20 sales. (41:41) And so for me I just wanted a revenue podcast that would go really deep on like way fewer things. This is what Lenny does and why I think his podcast is so great. Yeah. And so now, you know, like because I have this platform and when I reach out to people, everybody says yes. And like again, like you don't really know what your brand is going to be valuable for, but you know, it will be valuable for a bunch of things. So, so that's why I started it. (42:04) So now I can reach out and talk to anybody I want. Like all the best CRO in the world, it's it's really great. They're very difficult to pin down and like schedule, but uh I get 90 minutes a week with You're not super easy. Yeah. Yeah. My apologies for that. Um and I get 90 minutes a week with somebody that I have like tremendous respect for and I get to ask them whatever questions I feel like and and uh so I learn I learn a ton. (42:30) Yeah. You you previously said this thing about kind of AI companies. I did have this question and it's kind of a mean question, but do you ever have I don't know regret or FOMO? I mean owner.com is crushing. You just raised your series C. You guys are growing very fast and you're not lovable. (42:48) You're not adding 100 million in 8 months. Do you sometimes have this tingly finger of like wanting to join one of those AI hyperscalers? I don't because I love our mission and you know like I come from a family of small business people like like multiple generations of entrepreneurs and small business people. I owned that mixed martial arts academy. (43:15) I like felt all of the pains we saw for our restaurant owner customers. I felt myself like building all of the tech for that business. And I feel like yeah, maybe from a net worth perspective, I don't even know if like I could go walk in and get that job. That would be arrogant for me to say, but you know, I don't even know if I could I the the net worth impact, you know, I I think we're going to build like a monster company here. (43:42) And I do think like that will be worth a lot of net worth for me. And I look at the difference between what I expect that to be at owner and what that could be at some AI scaler. A lot more volatility like we are growing more consistently. (44:01) There's a lot less risk in this business on that path to 10 billion plus than there is on all these AI things changing like overnight and you know open AI killing like you know hundreds of startups with some new release. So there is a riskreward thing, but but like that that potential net worth return isn't really worth it for me to like go work on a mission I don't really care that much about. (44:24) Yeah, like you're reinventing the future and you know like you're inventing the way that engineers work. Like it's really cool and I follow it closely and I and I think they're doing amazing work. But you know I get to help small business people that are like literally the fabric of our communities. (44:42) Like if you took all of the little local mom and pop restaurants and you in your neighborhood and you replaced it with Chipotle's, Applebee's, McDonald's, Starbucks, like just just do that thought experiment. What? Like what happens to your neighborhood? Yeah, that sucks. I don't want to live there. like it and uh they are under tremendous existential pressure from all of the big multinational uh restaurant chains and you know the comp the companies that are putting tremendous pressure on on them from from all around and if I can help give them the tools and help like a salt of the earth person you know like not (45:16) just survive as a business but like keep their livelihood. It's pretty meaningful work and it's easy to get up in the morning and like I really felt this at Shopify in a in a profound way. Um, so I don't really get the FOMO. Yeah. (45:37) I don't know if you heard of the brand, but Lab Coffee is currently spreading like wildfire here in uh Berlin and it's it's kind of like the new generation of uh Starbucks and uh I think it's started by some uh MBA type people and I I somehow like have zero desire to uh to check them out. They also have this like blue branding which just looks so unczy. I don't know. I'm hating on them for no reason. Um, question. You guys do SMB sales. (46:05) Can you give me like one or two very specific ways you guys are using AI like tactically in your day-to-day that's actually affecting your reps and and and productivity and output? Yeah, we have seven plus production use cases that I would say are producing a lot of value. Um we were really early like we were doing waterfall enrichment before it was a thing like before clay burst on the scene like we were we actually built our own waterfall enrichment with with AI scrapers and tooling like the that's our VP of bisops uh Jonathan Shankman who built it all from scratch and is like a mad scientist. So like I would say start (46:48) with the data foundations, first party and third party data. You know the third party stuff is understand your market in great detail. Figure out the accounts you should go after. Enrich them with the information you need to have relevant outreach. (47:05) Then find all the people you need to talk to and then enrich those with relevant relevant stuff and then get their get super accurate contact data. We use a company called datal lane for that now um which does a lot of what we previously had built in house. So that's the third-party uh data start there. Don't worry about AI outreach. Don't worry about like anything fancy. Just like get your data foundations there. (47:25) And then the first party stuff is do you understand everything that's happening in your in your customer journey and is that well instrumented and that's momentum for us. I was like one of their first three or five customers. We were the first customer on their conversation intelligence platform. (47:46) We ripped out Gong in favor of it because now I know everything that's happening across the entire customer journey and I can turn all of that unstructured data into structured data in Salesforce or Snowflake Fields. And so, um, once you have those two things, now all of the like cool AI use cases that you layer on top will actually work because AI is a pattern recognition machine, but if you give it crappy data and bad patterns, it's going to give you like bad outputs. And so Momentum is like it automates all the CRM filling out for the sales reps. (48:17) It saves them a bunch of time and it gives me like 10 times more data than I could possibly ask a rep to to write to fill in proactively uh or like on their own. Then we've got Avara, which is our AI sales simulator for for sales rep practice. Massively impactful. The reps who spend time in there get better at a way faster rate. That's a great tool. (48:42) We've got one mind which which is like one of the last use cases we've put in place which is the sort of AI BDR thing. It's we don't have it as an AI BDR. We have an AI version of Atom that is like an education uh superhuman. So you can go to our website. So this is another AI use case. You can enter in your restaurant's website and then we do this um AI website graater. (49:04) We pull in everything we could possibly know about somebody's digital presence and we do this big huge analysis and but it's a lot of information and and uh restaurant owners aren't always like super tech-savvy. So AI Adam is there to explain everything in like plain terms. You can ask him anything you want. (49:22) Adam wrote this book about restaurant marketing. You can talk to him about the book. You can literally ask anything about restaurant marketing, your specific report, how you should improve your specific business and he can he can answer. So that's only been in market for a month or two. Uh but like really promising results. (49:42) Pavlov, we're doing a bunch of like post sales, postale journey or like onboarding and postale journey uh incentive uh management and and uh AI uh customer journeys. Do do you know the the keeper test um for like employees like essentially if they would tell you they they would want to leave you would try everything that you could to keep them. Are any of those workflows that would pass the keeper test at this point? Yeah, basically all of them. (50:07) Wow. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I I didn't mention the ones that failed. Okay. So, but we've only had we've only had like one or two not like really not work. Um and I think part of the reason that we've picked well is like because of the amount of time I've spent doing angel and advisory and the venture thing like we we I can't take all the credit. (50:31) A lot of it's luck, but like if you learn how venture capitalists invest, then you can be much better at picking the right like seed and series A stage uh technologies to use because you're really just trying to pick the winner. There's going to be a bunch of companies in a category and whose tech is better today is largely irrelevant. (50:54) For me, it's like do you have the do you have a more aligned worldview of how I see this this uh category playing out and do I think you you as founders uh have the ability to win that category. So that was that was momentum that was data lane. Maybe I can squeeze one last question and uh I saw that Jason Lmin is an investor. I'm a big fan of his. (51:16) Do you interact with him or have you interacted with him in any way? Yeah. Yeah, he's on the on our board. So we spend what what's maybe one one lesson, one thing, one insight that you took away from from interacting with Jason, man, so many. So I had him on my podcast and I asked him about board management and he like let it rip. (51:39) He was so open and transparent and was like incredibly valuable on it. It's still one of my favorite episodes. So like one of the things he said on the episode was he's like run towards bad news. He's like, "When bad things are happening, let your board know right away. Don't sugarcoat it. Don't like try to, you know, skate around it. (51:59) Like, tell them tell them what's not working." And and uh that will build so much more trust and credibility. Like he really he's really big on trust. That's number one. Number two is like, you know, his his uh I think like his online persona can come across as like a little bit grumpy and like pessimistic, but it actually comes from a place of like such uh kindness and and the lesson there is like clarity is kindness. (52:30) And so he endeavors to always be the board member that will like tell you the thing that you need to hear that maybe some board members don't want to say because you know founder NPS is how you're going to how you're going to get referred to your next deal. And so if you're just like a really friendly board member and you're always like if you always have the founders back they're like oh I love this board member and you're going to refer that board member to your friends who are raising money. (52:54) But Jason, and he said this publicly, so I'm like not not like speaking out of turn, but I think his belief is the kind thing to do is tell the founder what they actually need to hear, even though they might not totally want to hear it. You know, it's like, hey, like you're that executive is like not good enough. (53:13) It's like that's an uncomfortable thing and maybe maybe that's going to like hurt your founder NPS, but um they need to hear it and that's a super valuable lesson and I try to take that into how I manage my team. I love it. interact. I love it. He gives me very old school like integrity over everything vibes. Kyle, he's the man. I will say Lmin is the man. So, if you're a founder, you want to raise money like he he is invaluable to have on your cap table. (53:36) Love it. Kyle, thank you so much for taking the time. If people want to check you out, I'll link up both your LinkedIn, your podcast, and then owner.com in the show notes. And uh yeah, thank you for coming on. Appreciate the invite. This was fun.