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Always Be Testing
#104 Rewriting the B2B Playbook: Bryn Jones on Scaling Through Partnerships
00:34:18
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Foreign.
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Welcome to another episode of the Always Be Testing podcast. I'm your host, Ty degrange, and I am really, really excited to talk to Bryn Jones today. Bryn, how you doing, man?
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Good, Ty, good. Thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it.
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B
You bet. Something we've been working on for a moment here. For those of you who don't know, Bryn Jones is the co founder and CEO of Partner Stack, a leading B2B SaaS partner marketing platform. A lot of good learnings and experiences to share with you all today. You guys have some really fun things you've shared over the last few months and years now, building Partner Stack. One of them is your pancake. Were you the first pancake at PartnerStack? Tell me a little bit more about that.
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A
Yeah, the pancake that's come up, it's really become a part of us. I'll be totally transparent. We call ourselves pancakes. Every employee that joins Partner Stack is a pancake and we stack up together and become this stack of pancakes. There's a lot of reasons for why that's the case. I wish I could say I was the first pancake. I actually fought the pancake moniker for a while in those early days, but I realized that it was something that was just super fun for the team to get behind and. And if we really had an opportunity to lean into it, could help define the whole culture. And so transparently, I fought in the various, like, for like a week in the earliest of days. So I wouldn't say that I was the first one. And even amongst the co founders, I won't give myself credit for being the absolute founder of Partner Stack. It actually came from my other co founder, Luke, when we previously started another company together. So it's a lot of fun and I think I wish I could have gone back and given myself some advice just to take myself a little less seriously back then and just have fun with whatever you're going and doing.
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B
That's awesome. That's awesome. I definitely can appreciate that. We've got some cowboy code stuff going on over here at Round Barn Labs, so maybe cowboys and pancakes go together. Who knows?
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I'm there for it. Maplestur brings everything together, so that's what we sign up.
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I love it. I get a sense and I think it's definitely accurate from our observations and collaboration and work that your team, Partner Stack, is kind of paving a new ground and rewriting the playbook in a lot of ways, in my opinion, around what's possible in B2B SaaS in partner marketing. How does it feel to kind of create a step change for a B2B SaaS industry? 1 I often say is the fastest growing in partner marketing and affiliate marketing in my view.
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Yeah, it's been an interesting journey. PartnerStack were founded back in 2015 and we went through Y Combinator back then. I went out and talked to investors and quite literally was laughed out of the room. The idea of like why would you ever invest in partnerships? Why not put all of that money towards direct sales teams? Like that's the thing that made most sense. And so over this 10 year window we've seen like step change changes. And what's funny is really our mission along the way has not really changed. And so it's just been meeting companies at the right time. The driver for all of this has been the B2B growth. Right. The entire market has continued to grow and it's not slowing down in any way, shape or form. Not only is it growing in total number of B2B companies there, but it's growing in maturity as well. We're seeing a rise of many public B2B companies that are looking to grow in more efficient ways and then down to efficiency. Market for a period of time said growth at all cost was critical and now it's well, sustainable growth and efficiency, it really matters. It's the thing that's going to let you not only improve the underlying unit economics of your business, but ultimately get in front of the right customer at the right time, many of whom aren't early adopters of technology. And so you need to go through third party channels in order to reach them. And that just provides a better experience. So it's been quite the journey. We've seen several stages where things have really picked up, especially in 2020 with the pandemic and then I would say in the last 18 months post ZIRP period and the wave of AI, people really understand that partnerships isn't just the channel, it's not just this indirect sales motion. It's core and critical to every go to market leader or at least the ones who are most successful. At least we're seeing buy into that. That thesis.
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B
Yeah, I love that. And I think tapping into those that are doing it the right way and being successful is obviously a part of it. I think what you said that was really fascinating to me just there was sustainable, efficient lever long term. And I think there's nothing more that could describe partner marketing more effectively than that. And I think that's the magic of kind of pairing partner marketing. The Channel market fit, the channel business fit and the long term, sustainable, efficient nature of it. It's really counter to that growth at all cost concept that we were all living in for a period of time.
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Exactly. Yeah. No, totally. It's great to see when companies and market strategies like Meet the Moment really shows like that's where the biggest opportunity kind of plays out.
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B
Yeah, absolutely. You talked a little bit about Y Combinator. You've obviously had some great startup wins and experiences and learnings. How did that inform how you thought about building PartnerStack's platform the right way?
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The biggest lesson that we had along the way, you know, partner stack. It was really our second company. Our first company we built and we like to say it was like Slack for nonprofits, which is to say it was like Slack except worse in every way. In that experience where we learned the power of this referral motion, we built a refer a friend program. It showed the majority of our business. And so what we learned along the way was we were not channel experts, we were not partnership experts, we weren't even B2B go to market experts. So that the best way for us to build the best version of our product was to stay super close to our customers was to go in and talk to go to market leaders, partnership leaders, marketing leaders, go to talk to partners themselves. At one point I think we called for the first 12 months every single partner and every single partner manager that signed up to our platform. And not only was it the founders that did it, but like the whole team leaned into that motion and we were able to get that immediate feedback. We still have that type of motion today where we're deeply engaged with our customers because constantly have to be improving our platform and deeply engaged with our customers, the B2B partner managers and go to market leaders as well as partners. Our product teams work hand in hand with them along with our success and even sales team. And so the way we have been able to build what we've been is just listening. That's the biggest thing.
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B
I love that so much that's come up so much on this podcast. It's come up so much in growth experts and really smart people that have achieved literally the top of the top when it comes to growth marketing leadership. Leadership in general. Look at Bezos and Amazon. That was what so much glossier is one of my favorite consumer examples. So many in B2B and technology. Having talked to hundreds of software businesses. What what was maybe the more surprising insight obviously kind of in the DNA of always be testing what were Some of those conversations that kind of shaped how you thought about things or what you wanted to create or things that maybe surprised you a bit.
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Yeah. There's two things that really stood out to us in those very earliest days. And though some of them have improved, we still see kind of things that pop up that are. That look very similar to it. The first was many of the partnership leaders we would go out and speak with. They had built incredibly successful programs. They had built it on next to nothing. They had, like, hacked and stitched these things together that were driving 10, 20, 30% growth for their businesses. But they weren't getting credit from the top down. So they weren't getting the resources, they weren't getting that seat at the table. And when we unpacked that, we learned to realize that partnerships has a tendency to speak their own language. And it's important that partnerstack enable our customers to not just speak the language of partnerships and partners, but to actually elevate that language to speak the language of revenue leaders. And that's where we really saw the opportunity, and that's what we've seen behavior. The most successful partner programs don't speak about it in terms of partnerships. They do speak about it in terms of the impact on pipeline, the impact on revenue, the impact on retention. And there's a direct line that's tied there. Let's face it, no matter what, go to market motion and you go. And there's nuances to everything. Ultimately, you have to be able to level up and layer up so you can get more resources. So that's the biggest one. The second thing that we saw is people that thought that partnerships was more of an art, not a science. And then I'll give you an example of what I mean by that. People who thought the best return on their investment was spending money to go and talk to all of their partners in the first 50 days of their job. We tracked this very, very closely. The majority of those people, quite frankly, they just didn't have a job six months later. And it's because in partnerships, this is a channel that could take a long time to turn online. And so prioritizing stuff that drives prioritizing initiatives and investments that drive revenue in a very short period of time. In the early days, critical, you have to show that a return can come. And return shouldn't be measured on number of partnership touch points or pieces of engagement. Return needs to be pipelining, influence, pipeline. It could be top of funnel. Maybe it's not even converted yet. But people that prioritize effectively action and tying that action back to revenue, incredibly successful. And those who don't see that light, the sad reality is they're often not on a job shortly thereafter.
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Yeah, we've seen that firsthand, been there in a number of ways. Where that setting of expectations internally is just so critical. And then also being able to get some eek out some base hits, to use a sports analogy, get some wins on the board, even if those are not mind blowing. There's that balance of like expectation setting, forecasting, putting points on the board in some capacity on some clip and then you're going to get some big wins along the way as well which are needed. But I think that's a really important reminder as well as the alignment on the verbiage and the language you're speaking, you have to be speaking the same language, going after similar objectives, incentives aligned, which is just spot on stuff. I love that.
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And to the end of always be testing, you can't over optimize a program. You just need to get it out. And once you have it out in market, then you hear from your partners and your customers and then you optimize. So the idea of running these tests just so critical and, and that's often why we see the people who are most successful in partnerships, they actually come from a marketing background. Because in marketing dirty secret is yeah, they get a lot of budget, a lot of that budget doesn't work. But what you're looking to do is to shut down the channels that stop working and to double down on the channels that are working. And so I think that anybody working in channel and partnerships would benefit from embracing that marketing mindset. Because if you're willing to test, willing to experiment, like really the sky's the limit.
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B
Yeah, absolutely. And I love that. Not only do we talk about it, it's in the namesake of the pod, but so many of the guests have talked a lot about across the board, especially in partner marketing, the importance of having testing, budget, running regular tests, which I really appreciate you calling out obviously. The other piece I really loved that you shared there was around kind of the concept we talk about internally a lot is not letting like perfect be the enemy of good. Which I think is easy to get caught up in sometimes.
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Yeah, no, it's absolutely the case.
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You've seen partner marketing and partnerships evolve quite a bit over the years. You're a big part of that ecosystem and shift in mindset. We're obviously seeing SaaS and B2B. Partner marketing itself essentially explode in a good way. Where do you see partnerships evolving over the next five years for SaaS companies?
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I think that partnerships is gonna look a lot more like marketing than the channel kind of to draw a difference there. We're seeing this rise in the way that people buy software has changed so much. And when they show up to your website ready to make a purchase, the majority of the decisions already made because of the reference ability and the research that folks go on and do from the onset. And so the evolution in the way people buy software is totally changed in the last 18 months. It's accelerated because before you go through Google, you go in and search, you'd go through peer groups, all that stuff still exists. But the LLMs have really fundamentally changed the way even more changed the way that people are buying software. And LLMs are serving as a first point, not a last point in the software purchasing decision. And generally speaking, purchasing software, at least in the B2B sides, fairly complex decision, there's many stakeholders, there's a profound effect on a business as well as significant investment often required. So it's not as simple as buying a pair of shoes or a hat. And so I suspect that partnerships is going to be a huge influencer on like the rankings of these LLMs. And then you're going to be able to track not Only how the LLMs rank the product, but you actually can influence that based on user generated content that has high engagement. Like that's what we're seeing today. We're seeing this rise of aeo, geo, whatever you want to go in and call it. At the end of the day, if your users and your partner and ecosystem is talking about your product in a specific way and there's high engagement, the LLMs are training off of the user generated content. You will rank differently. And the result of that is I think that a lot more paid media spend will be reallocated to partnerships. And the way we make that happen is not only of course do you need the tools and technology, but you need the community of partners and you need to be able to build that business case at a revenue level, not at a partnership level. That partnerships really wire that paid media span. And so I think the partnerships is going to look a lot more like a marketing function and therefore have tighter alignment with, with, with, with a CRO than it being kind of put on an island. And for those of everybody who sees that like lean into this moment, I love that.
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B
Yeah, not, not being on the island, not being siloed, obviously such a great growth principle, such an important marketing and business Principle that we've seen and lived through in house as an early days now as an, as an agency that works closely with brands hand in hand. I couldn't agree more on that point. Yeah, I think the concept of there was this flood of interest in partner marketing, affiliate marketing, influencer marketing. You and I have talked a lot about trusted third parties and how there's a bit of a trust gap that that fulfills and that's a bridge for and that works for. And I think that wave of the reviews and the content and that third party review kind of ecosystem that exploded now it's almost and I think it's just being compounded by the AI opportunity. You have this new opportunity where we've seen technical, detailed evidence that not investing in partners in this ecosystem is absolutely insane and it's basically become essential. I think my sentiment is like there was a perception and maybe a tinge of reality where it was like, well this is a nice to have bolt on for some brands. And I think now with AI in the current state, it's absolutely essential. On top of the other reasons you've.
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Talked about, we certainly see that, I mean we can see companies as a result of AI lose 40, 50% of their market cap public companies because they're not going to be appearing in the right set of search results in this new world, in the new world. And so there's tangible impact to business and to shareholders. And I think that when partnership leaders see that biggest picture, they will understand that opportunity. Because if you have the best product and no one knows about it and you can't get it to market, you'll never realize that full opportunity and the mission and the vision of your business. And so we have a responsibility to influence and impact everybody in a company as well as our end customer.
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Yeah, no, I love that. I think the other piece, it makes for a great environment for partner marketing. And what we're seeing and what we're part of is this global opportunity, this ability to enlist an army of partners who can essentially service so many different functions. Multi channel quality, content, authenticity. The list is long, right. And valuable. I think in a world where you're seeing more distribution, more technology, more remote, a real hunger for efficiency and a pretty aggressive push for scalability, sustainability and efficiency. It just lends itself to the partner marketing ecosystem for SaaS and for why we're seeing such positivity and growth and need requirement for it right now. I'm sure you all are witnessing that firsthand.
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Yeah, it's pretty amazing. And it doesn't only impact the end customer, it doesn't only impact the growth of the business was also incredibly powerful is that it impacts the partners in such a positive way. Right. Whether they're agency partners, resell partners, content partners, community partners, B2B influencers. There is generational wealth that is being created in the space and it's extending your team so you can better service the customers. And so you go to these user conferences and so many of the user conferences could be a B2B influencer. It could be an agency, could be like a content partner. And you talk to them and you realize people are paying their mortgage, sending their kids to school, retiring off of off the opportunity that's been made there. And they're better servicing the end customer, the end customer staying around for the lifetime value is greater. The CAC is lower. Integrations, they've gone undone. Like the unlocks are incredibly powerful. And so it's not just one plus one equals two, it really does equal five, ten, whatever you want to kind of the calculus you want to go and put behind it. But again, we have to be able to tell that story internally and that story actually has to be backed up with data and it's really exciting.
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Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I love that there's. There's a thoughtfulness around the pro partner element to the ecosystem, to the platform. And if you're integrating via server to server, if you're thinking about CRM connection, if you're able to pay out in perpetuity or thinking long term, which aligns with the brand's incentives in many, many cases, it's going to be so rewarding and so valuable and lucrative for partners, as we've talked about, or the currency of the ecosystem are in many ways an R and D machine of the ecosystem. Just super exciting to see that wealth creation and sort of democratization of digital marketing in a lot of ways. It's been around for a long time, but I think this is a really exciting development for B2B SaaS. Partners that are doing the right thing by these brands. They're getting really well rewarded for it.
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Yeah. One of the founding principles that we started PartnerStack on was the idea that yes, our customers are B2B companies, they're marketing leaders, go to market leaders at these B2B companies. But what does it look like for us to build the world's best partner experience? And initially we viewed like, what is the world's best partner experience? While it's centralizing all these B2B opportunities, it's standardizing the way that partners have the ability to work with go to market leaders. And over the last 24, 36 months we've really unlocked that and it turns out it's true. Right. Like if you required your partners to log into a whole bunch of different portals. If you're working with partners that want to move into B2B you should be able to reward them on an ongoing basis and you should be able to the technology provider like PartnerStack, you should be able to train the customers on the need for those types of things. Not everyone will buy into it and sometimes the unit economics of their business don't make sense. But the combination of the technology, the training and enablement and the aligning around incentives through the platform, we're really proud of the experience we've been able to deliver on the partner side. And now we have partners telling many of our customers like we won't work with you if you're not on partner stack because it is that trusted layer for us. I don't want to log into another portal. This is the best standard way. There's a million things we can go on and do better. There's always that and we're leaning into those things big. But yeah, that's really been the founding principle for us is like how do we build the world's best partner experience? Because we build the world's best partner experience, everything can be unlocked.
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B
Yeah, I love that. It's that customer centric mindset of how do you create something special for for the end user. We talked a lot about brought some great points up there like thinking long term payouts in perpetuity in some cases server to server tracking. It's nice to see a movement. I think that's starting to pop up across the industry in consumer and in B2B around elevating the importance of that tracking accuracy. I'm serving on the PMA Measurements Council. I've had some really good, interesting conversations and I think there's a hunger to kind of cross that line across that barrier to be like we're better than this, we need to be able to track more accurately. In a post privacy concern world, pixel inaccuracy world. You talked a lot about some of the things but what are some of the other things that you're thinking about to kind of cater and serve that B2B SaaS brand community? What are the things that are popping up for you and you're hearing from brands that you're like wow, they're really craving this. We're building this for them or things that you're excited about in that world.
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A
Yeah. So there's really two buckets there. Of course there's automation and automation's unlocked with AI. Right. What are the agents going to do to improve really much of the admin tasks required for partnership and go to market leaders? And I'm going to take the opposing view on this one as of course we're going to do innovative things. But the truth is like everyone's going to or they won't exist as a company. Like everyone is going to automate as much of the job as we possibly can. It's just are you automating the right and most valuable parts of the job? And we'll do everything from analytics to enablement. But specifically at partner stack, what's unique is we think it's absolutely critical to automate as much of the recruitment as possible. Not all of it, but automating as much of the recruitment as possible. We also believe ultimately people like to work with people still. Who knows what's going to happen in five and ten years from now. We might be in a whole whole new set of systems. We can't automate the relationship. We can help with much of the sourcing. And so we want people to still manage those relationships, bring people on, onboard them in the right, in the right way. But we want to with data be able to identify here are the best partners to reach the customers at this point in that sales funnel. Here's how they complement to these other partners that maybe help on the top end of the funnel. And here's a series of partners that can help with renewals. The ability to point out with data versus just like the guest, stuff that happens we think will be absolutely critical along with all the other automation that will happen. And then the other area that we think that I mentioned before that is going to be absolutely critical in partnerships is the trend of what happens not when Google's gone but when the paid model has transitioned to support the LLM. And we believe that the advertising model at Google and they'll come up with a new version of course is going to move from the search engine into the LLM. And we believe that partnership is the partner stack and partnerships is the glue that will make that transition seamless and that's the opportunity that not only are we pointing people towards, we're having C suite of public companies show up on our doorstep saying how can I spend this much more with you? And that's an incredibly exciting time. Partnerships we've seen waves of excitement. But this one looks like the biggest wave yet and we want to be there to support our customers through that transition. Because though there's opportunity, there's always beer as well.
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B
Yeah, no, I, I totally like that and appreciate that Bryn's dropped some amazing knowledge and insights in terms of like what you all are building for whom and where it's all going, which is just beyond appreciating. And so much, so much alignment and excitement about being here for this moment, getting to know you a little bit more. What are some softwares that you just can't live without or you're. You're an user of or a fan of other than Partner Stack?
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Partner Stack? I mean honestly just my calendar. I have a two year old daughter at this point and so so much of it is just scheduling in and around her. That's. That's really anything that improves my, my scheduling between my, my wife and I, that's where I, that's where I'm thinking about. Along with her daycare app. I never understood how many times I'd be logging into a daycare app during the day. But the total transparency is, is that I've also enjoyed some productivity tools like Gamma. That's really helped with some presentations, really made me rethink what's possible there Inside of our business. We've just implemented attention.com, which has been an incredibly powerful tool to watch and see. Not only the way that I've engaged with the platform, but the way the other pancakes have been engaging with it and what's it done for a business. But yeah, those are both sides of what's there. If anybody has any recommendations on tools and technology, it'll help manage with scheduling in a two year old like I am.
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B
We have a mix of tech and old school with our family and kid wrangling and management. And yeah, I might, I might have to trade some notes with you on that. The last one you mentioned on the was it is that a CRM tool or am I missing something?
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Yeah, attention.com kind of sits on top of CRM, but it also listens to all the calls and so it really helps with the analysis on the revops side of what's actually happening. So for example, if you wanted to be like hey, how many calls did our sales reps do this week? It will give you a breakdown per sales rep. Hey, in the calls that our success team had with our customers, how many times did XYZ pop up? And it'll give you a detailed breakdown and not that it's perfect. Nothing is but the improved efficiency on this. These are questions that so often you sit in meetings or have meetings about. Now you can go directly to the source and get a pretty good view of where things are going.
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B
Yeah, I love that. I've looked at some similar and I'll have to revisit that one. But some good suggestions for sure. On the consumer end of the spectrum, anything that you've bought recently or something that you swear by that you want to share.
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A
I don't know the brand, but I bought this meat thermometer and I spent more than I would normally spend on something like this. And I got to get the brand and send you what the brand is after the fact. It is the absolute best consumer thing that I've purchased in the last 18 months. Wow. Really, really love it. And as is my family to make sure that things are coming out cooked the right way.
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B
I love that. Now, well, now I have to ask, what's your. Do you have like a go to dish or something that you're proud of in terms of what you made?
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A
It depends on the year, time of the year, and I certainly like to go and experiment like right across what's there. But the staple would just be ribs, which are. It's hard to go wrong with them. And just fun because I associate that type of thing with friends, family, neighbors coming over and having a good time. And that would be a staple throughout seasons.
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B
That's amazing. It's such a go to. Yeah. Next time you're down here in Austin, we'll have to definitely partake.
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A
Absolutely. I would love to.
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B
Some good options. Some good options. What's a random fact that most people don't know about you?
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A
I think everybody at this point knows that I was a competitive swimmer, swim on the national team for a bit. Thought I was going to spend my career in sport. But a really random fact is that I'm super into gardening and this is something that I've got into over the last three years. And I'll often take on a Friday afternoon a phone call or two while I'm doing it. And I find like, it creates a lot of focus and it's fun to grow things, right?
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B
Yeah. Like businesses and partnerships and all that.
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A
Exactly.
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B
Yeah. That's really cool. Do you have anything you're growing currently or anything that you've done in the past that you're a big fan of?
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A
Yeah. So we moved into our place and the former owners, they had this sedum garden is the type of plant that grows in any really condition. And I don't know what this, the former people who lived in this place did, but it was all dead. And so for the last three years, we brought this back to life. And every year it's one of these plants that come back year over year over year it gets bigger and thicker. And so the reason why I like that is just watching my daughter plan it has been a lot of fun. And so that bringing that back to life and all the weeding and everything that that's gone along with it, it's been. It's been a blast. Things that if you told me four years ago I would be into, like, never would have believed you. But you see progress on something and you just want to keep. You want to keep going.
- [32:29]
B
Yep. No, that's amazing. I could not agree more. I feel like the times I'm like observing wildlife and bird watching and do like that kind of thing, it's like you're really doing this. Like 10 years ago, you'd be laughing at yourself 100%.
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A
But it is the best.
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B
Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. This weekend, I think, in fact we were. The kids were just like running feral in the backyard and having a blast. And they have a little area we call the garden, which is basically like a sandbox at best for my daughter and my little boy. So they love it and it sounds like you guys do as well.
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A
Yeah, it's the best.
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B
Amazing. Bryn, it's been awesome. You absolutely crushed and gave us some good insights that are very much appreciated. For those that want to connect with you, learn more, what's the best way for them to do that?
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A
Yeah, I mean, add me on LinkedIn, there's not a lot of Bryn Jones out there. I think I'm Bryn dash Jones on LinkedIn. But the absolute best way is just to reach out to me through email. Brynartnerstack.com See everything that comes in. Would love to connect, would love to talk about the things that are working, the things that aren't working. Some questions in and around there. I often say the conversation with me is the fastest way to save a whole pile of money. We're not going to just go in and sell partner stack to you. We genuinely want to walk you through best practices. So anybody interested, feel free to reach out and. Yeah. And Ty, thank you so much for having me on here. Really, really enjoyed the conversation.
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B
Awesome. Bryn, I always appreciate you. And it's B R Y N for those of you.
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A
Yeah, Bryn.
- [34:02]
B
Reaching out. Bryn, you're the man. Always enjoy and great episode. We'll talk to you soon. Bye, everybody.
- [34:08]
A
Cheers.