← Built Online
Built Online
Navigating the Startup Maze: Lessons in Entrepreneurship with Michael Sacca | Ep.101
00:49:17
Loading summary
Transcript127 lines
- [00:00]
Michael Sacca
When we give someone ownership, we have to give them also the ability to affect that. And that means the space and the resources to focus solely on that problem.
- [00:11]
Cody McGuffey
Because of my poor leadership or your poor leadership, or, you know, if we do something, it's our customers that pay the price because they get a bad experience, a bad onboarding experience. It's not a smooth product for them that we've been promising to them. And so that's why it's important to get this stuff right.
- [00:24]
Michael Sacca
Develop your org to solve the problems of your business. That's the key. It really doesn't matter what Silicon Valley says is the right org structure. It depends who you have on your team, what strengths do you have and what information do you want them to be getting on a daily basis?
- [00:39]
Cody McGuffey
Welcome to Built online. I'm Cody McGuffey and this podcast is all about one thing. Building the business of your dreams. Selling art, teaching classes, starting a blog, launching a brand. Whatever your passion is, we show you how to turn it into real income. I created Everbee to help anyone with a dream start and scale business. Ever be, ever be ever be Ever.
- [01:03]
Michael Sacca
Be Ever be ever be.
- [01:05]
Cody McGuffey
We now serve over 800,000 creators all across the globe. On this show, we bring on real entrepreneurs who've done it. They share their secrets, they share their failures. The exact steps that you can take to get started. What if you can get one golden nugget? How of today's episode. And it's the breakthrough that takes you from just dreaming to actually living a life on your terms. At Everbee, we believe that every human is a creator, and every creator should own a business. Saka. What's up, man?
- [01:32]
Michael Sacca
How's it going? Excited to be here. Excited for the conversation today.
- [01:36]
Cody McGuffey
Same man. I'm very happy that you're here. Super inspired by you and your history and your. And your background. And I. I'm excited to just share your, I guess, hopefully jump. Jump into your brain, kind of pull that out for all the people listening to this today. But selfishly, I just want to learn a lot from you.
- [01:55]
Michael Sacca
Cool, cool.
- [01:56]
Cody McGuffey
Awesome, man. Do you mind sharing a little bit about who you are? And I'll kind of fill in the gaps too, of what I'm understanding, but yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [02:03]
Michael Sacca
Michael Sacca. I'm the CEO currently at LeadPages. LeadPages is a lead generation landing page builder. And I started a While ago, probably 20, 25 years ago now, and when I decided I wanted to move into tech, my roommate was actually an engineer and he was working for this company and honestly, he was kind of lazy. He would go into work around noon, he'd come home around 4. But they couldn't fire him because he built some tech that they didn't know how it worked. And so they had to keep him employed. And he took full advantage of it. And he was making like three times the money. I was waiting tables out of college, and he was making a lot more than I was and doing a whole lot less. So I was intrigued because that felt like, okay, there's some value here. He's done something that they can't even get rid of him for, despite the fact that they probably should. There's gotta be something here that's better than waiting tables. When I was out in LA at.
- [03:10]
Cody McGuffey
The time, how many. How many years ago, I started thinking, this is 20.
- [03:13]
Michael Sacca
This is about 25, 25 years ago.
- [03:18]
Cody McGuffey
Okay, yeah, 2000.
- [03:19]
Michael Sacca
So early 2000s is what we're kind of looking at. And so I started asking him, hey, how can I help you? Right? So, like, he was really good at the back end. I started learning about the front end. At the time, it was HTML and css. And slowly I built up enough confidence that I could start to take on clients. And that was really the beginning of my career, was working with and kind of hustling for clients on the front end side, so building websites, building landing pages, working on marketing funnels for them. And I worked alongside him for about two years as kind of a side gig until I had enough to go out on my own. Then I finally quit the restaurant, went full time as an agency, and I did that for two or three years. And I actually. I was getting kind of burnt out because I was like, this is a lot of work. I was always trying to find the next client while doing the work for the current client. In retrospect, it was actually really, really amazing learnings. But I was like, I really just. I'd like to get a job. And I actually tried to get a job at several agencies. We had moved to Las Vegas at the time, and I tried to get a job at several agencies, and no one would hire me because I didn't have the schooling, I didn't kind of have the formal background. And so I had to continue with the. With the agency until we built it up to work with, like, Scholastic ge. So it ended up being amazing. But it took about five years or so to get to the point where we were making real money and we had recognizable clients. And through that, I had really just been doing sales. It was just like Once it gets to that point, I had people doing a lot of the work and I was focused on sales. And so when I. When I decided I want to try something new, I've done this for a while now, officially and unofficially. Let me. Let me go see what the market looks like. Because I never worked for a company at this point, and I was like seven years into my career and. But naturally, I was actually more of a salesperson than I was an engineer. And so I took a job in partnerships at Crew. And Crew was the parent company of Unsplash. And that's really how I got into what I would say the tech industry outside of the agency world was running partnerships and sales for Crew. And I ended up moving up to be the president of crew. We split the companies. Crew was a freelance market, a freelance platform for. For to find small projects. And then we had Unsplash, which of course is the behemoth that it is today. They saw the potential in it. And I sold Crew over to Dribble. At Dribble. I was there for seven years. The chief product officer in the. In the last couple years. And then I left to do a startup in the education space and then moved into the CEO role at LeadPages. But the journey has not been linear. And I think that's the important part is I always thought I'd graduate college, I'd get a job, and you kind of work your way up. It was actually much more of a maze to try to figure out and really learn the skills needed to work at the executive level than I imagined it would be 25 years ago.
- [07:06]
Cody McGuffey
That's really awesome. Saka. Yeah, thanks for sharing that too, because it's, It's. It's interesting to hear your journey because similar to me, you were a server. Sounds like you were a server, right? At a restaurant.
- [07:16]
Michael Sacca
Yeah. Yeah.
- [07:17]
Cody McGuffey
What restaurant was it? What type of restaurant? Describe this to me.
- [07:19]
Michael Sacca
It was. The last one was Cafe Crepe, which was on the promenade in Las Vegas, in Los Angeles, in Santa Monica.
- [07:27]
Cody McGuffey
Like, probably higher. Not higher end necessarily like fine dining, but also like up. Up there. Sounds like it was.
- [07:32]
Michael Sacca
It was a nice place. It was busy. It was a tourist restaurant. So, like, we were running.
- [07:37]
Cody McGuffey
Yeah.
- [07:38]
Michael Sacca
And. But it was. It was nice. And I worked at some sushi restaurants. Like, you know, you kind of work up your. Your way in that. I started as a buser and, and so cool. I was really not a very good server.
- [07:50]
Cody McGuffey
No. To be honest, I feel like such. I love, I love talking about this because you learn so Much as a server. I was a server at Nola's, and if anyone been. Been into the Bay Area, Palo Alto. Nola's is a very popular. Very popular amongst that. Like, in Palo Alto, essentially. Downtown Palo Alto.
- [08:10]
Michael Sacca
Yep.
- [08:10]
Cody McGuffey
Anyway, I worked there while I was in college, and I look back at that experience, and I think that it shaped me in so many ways. Like the customer experience, like greeting a table, making sure that, like, you just obsess over their experience. Like your customers. Customers experience while you're there. And then you're, like, running around too, so there's urgency. Right. But then you have to, like, prioritize also which tables you need to, like, pay attention to. If you're too busy and you're like. And then you forget somebody's order to put it, put their order in. Then you're like, oh, wow, now I have to. Now I have to deliver some, like, bad news somehow in a way that.
- [08:44]
Michael Sacca
Yeah.
- [08:45]
Cody McGuffey
You know, it's like I learned so much being a server so quickly.
- [08:49]
Michael Sacca
Yeah. Yeah. And every day is new. Like, you never know what's coming at you. It really is amazing experience. And I think we lose a lot if we skip that. That humbling point in life because you never really win as a server. Even nights where you make good money, but there's no perfect night. There's always a mistake. Something always goes wrong. And you're right. You have to learn how to build rapport quickly, which is essential for anything that you do in your career.
- [09:18]
Cody McGuffey
It totally is. I remember walking out. I saw this vivid memory of walking out in the middle of the night, probably like 12am when the restaurant kind of fully finished. And I walk around, count my. Count your tips. Right. And you're just like, if I make a hundred bucks tonight, I'm good. Like, I'm gonna be really like, this is awesome. You know, you should walk away with a hundred bucks. And. So funny looking back at that time, but I'm so proud of that time. And it. It totally has shaped me. And it sounds like it's totally shaped you. And when you said you, like, you went into sales and marketing, I'm like, kind of. Or that's. That was your bread and butter. I'm like, of course you did. The rapport.
- [09:48]
Michael Sacca
Yeah.
- [09:49]
Cody McGuffey
The relating to people, it was all shaped by those experiences early on.
- [09:54]
Michael Sacca
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.
- [09:57]
Cody McGuffey
Really cool. And then so looking back at that time, so you. You do this, and then you go into basically entrepreneur in a way. You kind of went entrepreneurial route from that, working with your. With your roommate. And then you kind of, you did this for some years and then you moved into almost like the entrepreneur route, it seems like to me. Is that how you describe it or how would you describe kind of your character? I guess you say, would it be entrepreneur?
- [10:22]
Michael Sacca
That's a great way to describe when you're at a startup. You're just trying to figure out the problem. And we had two problems and that was really where I had the opportunity to expand my role was I was doing a lot of the customer relations, trying to figure out what was the product we needed to build for agencies so that we could scale. And at the same time we had this photo site. You know, you could download all sorts of high quality free photos. That was, that was ballooning, right. It was just taking off. And so we actually had two problems to solve internally, which took a lot of the executive team's focus over to this, this photo site because that's where the, the investors, rightfully so, saw the huge opportunity. And I had the ability to step up into a role that was overseeing the entire freelance platform in just a couple of years because I was trying to solve that problem from the beginning. I always try to work ahead of the role. Right. My role was partnerships, but then I was dipping into product as dipping into marketing, dipping into sales, obviously. And that's where they say, okay, well we can, we can give him the opportunity to step up and oversee the whole platform because we trust that we've seen him work in different ways in different kind of departments and then we can go focus on this really big thing that, that's probably going to be the bread and butter of what we're going to do. But it gave me an incredible opportunity to be that entrepreneur with a lot of leeway to figure out the problem.
- [12:05]
Cody McGuffey
How big was crew? That was crew. That was a crew, Right. How big was crew at that time? Give us an idea of people size or what it is.
- [12:13]
Michael Sacca
Yeah, crew was. We were about 20 people on crew. The unsplash team was about the same size then. We actually had a cafe, restaurant and co working space that we had started and that was another 25, 30 employees. So we were, we were probably around 70 or 80 at the height of when I was there. But we were split up into three very, very different problems. So it was almost like three startups within one.
- [12:47]
Cody McGuffey
Can you share a little bit about that? For the person who. There's, there's a lot of us as, as, as entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs, founders, we, we get stuck in this, this shiny thing syndrome where you start Three businesses at one time or four businesses at one time? And can you maybe talk about that at probably scale? Because now you're at 20 people. 20 people. 20 people in three different things. And you're seeing it not necessarily from the founder of this company. It doesn't sound like.
- [13:17]
Michael Sacca
But you're.
- [13:18]
Cody McGuffey
You're kind of seeing it from. As an employee of this company.
- [13:21]
Michael Sacca
Yeah, yeah.
- [13:23]
Cody McGuffey
What were the challenges there? And what would you advise somebody to do?
- [13:27]
Michael Sacca
The focus is the key, right? It was, it was hard and it was. I could tell it was. And I want to speak for him, but it was hard on the founding team. Mikel was brilliant and was able to bring these three very different and big ideas to life. But as you scale, you can only. You can't scale yourself. And when you've got kind of a rocket ship like Unsplash, where, you know it's a household name, that's where your focus has to go. And that worked out really well, was in the beginning, you could kind of keep the balls going with all three businesses. The tough part was when you, when you looked at to scale, especially with investors, they wanted focus, right. They wanted to really, what's the winner? Let's just work out that winner. We don't need reps on all of the businesses. We just want you building muscle on the winner. And so eventually, as the businesses scaled, that was the solution. We sold off crew, we sold off the, the cafe, and the team focused on unsplash.
- [14:37]
Cody McGuffey
Okay.
- [14:38]
Michael Sacca
While we were building it, we had people working across the aisle, right? We had people one day, they're. They're kind of working on Unsplash, that then they're doing a little bit on crew. But the context, you start to lose it as, as you get farther and farther away from the origin and you're not just solving the block and tackle problems of getting something online, getting something set up, but you're starting to solve more niche problems. And that context was hard to. To keep going. So if you need to be in the weeds, I think there's a point where you need operators to come in. So if you're the type of person who's really good at, at starting something, getting it up, getting the initial marketing, getting the attention, just know that you probably can't be the 100% owner if the thing grows. But the, the, the, the nice part about it was like for Mikhail, he had three basically irons in the fire, right? So he just needed one of these businesses to pop off and he was going to do really well. Uh, and and luckily he kind of had three that. That worked, but he put in operators at the right time and. And he became more of a. A board member for. For each of them, except for Unsplash, with which he went on and led. And that, I think, worked well. But not everyone releases the reins fast enough. And I think that's when you get in trouble and each business starts to suffer because you're not giving it the time and attention that it needs, but you're also not allowing anyone else to. And so if you're able to figure out that transition point, it can help you as an entrepreneur to get more at bats in the beginning, as long as you're okay releasing it. I think Ruben Gomez, who's a, like a prolific bootstrapped founder, he has. Of course, I'm going to blank on it now, but he just stepped down as CEO of. Of his company. It's a kind of a docusign company, and he just stepped down as CEO and let his COO step into that role. Most likely he's going to go build something again from the start. That's what he enjoys. But that's the key point. And I think oftentimes we wait too long for that where we actually hurt ourselves.
- [17:03]
Cody McGuffey
I think it's a skill. I think it's a skill you probably learn over time. And you kind of burn. You burn yourself a couple times and you kind of figure out, oh, wow, there I'm. I need someone thinking about this a hundred percent of the time, whereas I'm only thinking about it 10% of the time. And that's a problem.
- [17:18]
Michael Sacca
Right.
- [17:18]
Cody McGuffey
And yeah, I think that's really cool. And it kind of like leads into. I was. I was curious going into this conversation, because LeadPages owns a couple companies, right? Or at least I didn't acquire one. It was a Drip years ago.
- [17:31]
Michael Sacca
We. So, yeah, that's an interesting story. I was not there for that.
- [17:35]
Cody McGuffey
Okay, that was years ago. Yeah, I remember. This was like 10 years ago.
- [17:37]
Michael Sacca
Years ago. Yeah, we acquired Drip and then Drip became kind of a rocket ship in itself, and a lot of the team ended up going with Drip and then leadpages. That's when Red Brick came in and acquired leadpages.
- [17:55]
Cody McGuffey
Oh, okay. Oh, yeah. That was fairly recent, actually. A couple years ago. Right?
- [18:00]
Michael Sacca
That was four years ago now. Yeah.
- [18:02]
Cody McGuffey
Okay, got it. Does Red Brick still own. So it still owns leadpages technically, Yep. And leadpages. Does it own Drip technically or no?
- [18:12]
Michael Sacca
No. So Drip broke off and they went on their journey kind of. Yeah, they were kind of acquired by LeadPages and then I, I believe they ended up raising around for themselves.
- [18:27]
Cody McGuffey
Oh, I know that.
- [18:28]
Michael Sacca
Spinning leadpages back out. And then. And then, yeah, Red Brick came in and acquired about four years ago and then I joined about a year ago.
- [18:38]
Cody McGuffey
Cool. The reason why I knew about Drip was because I think I was a customer of Drip at the time.
- [18:44]
Michael Sacca
Yeah.
- [18:44]
Cody McGuffey
And anyway. And I really love the product and Rob is the founder of Drip, I think.
- [18:50]
Michael Sacca
Yes.
- [18:51]
Cody McGuffey
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right. Okay, cool. Very good, man. What do you think is like the biggest mistake that you see entrepreneurs make while they're building at someone else's company? When I say at someone else's company, like you're an employee, you've been successful climbing the ladder, I would say, and not like a normal corporate ladder of a big huge company. Like these are like startup ish companies that you're making huge impact to. You're helping them spin out, you know, products that are rocket ships, essentially. What do you think is the biggest mistake a lot of folks make when they approach. I don't know when they're in this situation.
- [19:37]
Michael Sacca
I think as an entrepreneur, sometimes you don't focus on the customer enough because you've got customers there. Right. A lot of, like at Dribble, we built different product lines. At Crew, we had, you know, a very distinct product line from, from Unsplash. But oftentimes you take some of that traffic for granted and you end up building for too long. And because you've got this product in mind, you've got resources to build the product. You've got kind of an engineering team, which you don't always have when you're starting off. If you're, you're solo or you're small founding team, you've got maybe one or two engineers that are building. Right. So you don't have the luxury of a team and some resources to see your full vision. I think I've made that mistake over and over of building for too long and waiting to validate the idea to where you're burning resources against an idea that is unvalidated. And you think, well, I've got traffic, I've got people waiting for this. And you never go and talk to them and you don't actually see is this what you need? And that's where I think sales. Sometimes we avoid sales. And doing that early and often I think is key. You got to get close to those customers. You have to understand what their day to day looks like. And it's easy to do when you've got a little bit of cushion internally and a brilliant idea. And so it's not always the right idea or there may be tweaks that need to be made. And I found that oftentimes we forget to go through the process of iteration as fast when there's not quite as much pressure on us. So we have to apply that pressure ourselves. But when it's your business, when it's your paycheck or your kind of livelihood, we tend to do that work faster.
- [21:44]
Cody McGuffey
What do you mean by that? So as if it, if it was your business, like for example, I Gigantic la Gigantic, it was your business, you're saying. So you tend to just prioritize that. But you're saying as an employee you have to.
- [21:54]
Michael Sacca
Right. Like the food on the table is so much closer. Right. So you're going to go out, you're going to figure out the problem because you need to. And you know that you need to because if you get it wrong, if you spend the resources, you know you're not getting that cash back. Right. And oftentimes that might be money that you've saved, that you've earned or that you've directly raised and you're accountable for. And so you're going to do, I think naturally that validation work. Not everyone does. People make this mistake as entrepreneurs as well. But I think the hunger is there, which sometimes on internal teams it's not. And so I think we have to remind ourselves to get into the weeds and, and validate our ideas faster just as fast as we would if it was our own cash.
- [22:41]
Cody McGuffey
I have a question as a leader myself ever be, is we have about 42 full time employees. Um, so we're kind of growing as we speak to.
- [22:50]
Michael Sacca
Yeah.
- [22:50]
Cody McGuffey
Um, so it's. I'm very curious about how what you just mentioned. Internal teams don't necessarily have that hunger like inherent in them because they, they're going to eat no matter what for the most part. But you seem like you're rare. Obviously you're rare because you've climbed the ranks and built out and done so many different things. And now you've been a leader as CEO of led product teams, VP level to CEO level. You obviously rare in that way that where you don't have a problem like having that hunger, somehow you just pulled out. Even if it's not necessarily you as the founder. Like you still almost operate as the founder, which, which is why you're in the position that you're in. How do you get that out of your team? Or maybe how do you do that yourself? And also too is how do you get that out of the people on your internal team?
- [23:41]
Michael Sacca
Yeah, that's a great question. And I think as leaders we have to bring that urgency and we have to bring it in a way that the team is going to receive. And so I think when I was starting out, I just, I'm from New York and so I have a very direct and maybe intense style. At times I've had to kind of dial that back and figure out what is going to resonate with the team to bring urgency without declining more out. And so that was one of the skills that I had to work on for myself was I always had the urgency because coming starting out as an agency where you know, you, you eat what you kill every day you're trying to find a new contract, even when you have one that never really left. So I just, I always have that tally that I want to bring value. Even if I'm an internal employee, I want to make sure that I'm carrying my weight, that I'm bringing value to the table, that I'm doing work before I'm asked to do it. But sometimes that came with an intensity that wasn't well received. And so I had to learn how to show up in a way that people received. And it's different for every single company. But as a leader, our job is to bring the urgency and the intensity. And I, I've developed a system that we use internally that actually puts a lot of that accountability on individuals.
- [25:21]
Cody McGuffey
And so tell me more, I'm curious, what is that system?
- [25:24]
Michael Sacca
Yeah, we lean heavily on personal accountability because at the end of the day people don't want to be accountable to me solely. Right. They don't want to do work because I said it, that's the deadline.
- [25:38]
Cody McGuffey
Of course not.
- [25:38]
Michael Sacca
But they're a lot more motivated to do work if they've promised that that's the deadline or, or if they're going to let down their peers. No one wants to let down their peers, no one wants to let down themselves. And then you're aggravated if your boss sets your deadline. So we develop a system where we do planning for a project and we set milestones with dates and a deadline and we have, it's a, it's a no fault policy to move that deadline because we obviously no one knows everything, but when you're moving it, you're moving it with your peers. And so you, you come to the stand up or the check in and you say, I'm going to Be late. No one really likes doing that in the first year. You do that once, you do it twice, and then suddenly the work starts to get done on time. So we figure out how do I adjust the project to deliver what the important part is on time so I don't have to keep saying I'm behind. And that accountability alone, the pure accountability, the self accountability, I have found, increases pace. So when I came into leadpages, we increased engineering velocity by 30% within the first couple months just by switching to a system where we were accountable to ourselves, not to me. So I wasn't setting the deadline that no one everyone says is impossible or they don't want to hit it. They've set the deadline for themselves and then they're accountable for themselves to do it. And I found that that system, that kind of psychological twist on deadlines makes a huge difference because people don't want to let down their peers, they don't want to let down their teammates. And so that's the system that we use across the company now in order to drive better productivity.
- [27:26]
Cody McGuffey
I love it. I could totally see that we've leaned heavily into OKRs.
- [27:33]
Michael Sacca
Yeah.
- [27:33]
Cody McGuffey
And kind of sim similar thing. Instead of us setting the okrs like me setting the okrs specifically for every single person, it's like no, no, we set the high level company okrs and then it flows down to the specific product or different teams and then they set their okrs and key results and all this stuff and it, yeah. Since we made that transition, which is, which is an evolution I would say it's not a once and done but it has made a major difference for morale and also just productivity which is really nice. Um, I have a question for you at I guess leadpages because that's where you're currently at and that's what you've been up for the past year. What is the team organizational structure look like? One, I'm curious. Two other people are operating teams listening to this. You guys are about 60. 60 people, is that correct? I just looked at Google. Yeah, Cool. So big. I mean big. Not huge huge huge, but plenty big. That's 60 people. 60 lives is a tremendous amount of people. You're the CEO, how does it work below you?
- [28:34]
Michael Sacca
Yeah, it's, I guess I don't think it'll be a shocking structure. We have a product team, we have an engineering team. I, when I came in I changed the focus of the organization from a marketing organization to a product led organization. And really what that, that means is our, our product is leading our growth. And so when we're investing so much in building, we have to make sure that that is a priority and that they have the agency to make those decisions. We've got a Rev Ops team which kind of sits in between product and, and marketing and then we've got a marketing team that really focuses on top level traffic. And each team has their own focus areas. So marketing owns traffic and acquisition and Rev Ops owns conversion and revenue and product owns retention. And so we set that up so that there's clear ownership across the the organization. When I got there I would ask questions like well, who owns onboarding? And there's like five people that own onboarding which means that no one owns onboarding. And so when we give very clear ownership we were able to give to your, to your point about OKRs, we were able to give clear goals that related to where we're trying to get to. So we knew that if onboarding productivity or performance can increase to X percentage that that would help everything that flows behind it. Right. And if we can increase traffic and acquisition and give someone the focus that you own, who's showing up, what customers we're acquiring, what is our targeting and what volume can you get them here at that that was more effective than just hoping and praying the right people show up and we're just going to talk about things. It allowed us to be a lot more strategic in our approach and then it allowed me as a, as a leader to be able to work with each department had to improve a very specific point. Not just all which is kind of where we are was, you know, marketing was kind of bleeding into product. Product was, was bleeding into marketing. And at the end of the day no one owned anything and so no one actually felt the satisfaction when the numbers went up. Well, was it because of them? Was it because of this? And now we know when we, we see onboarding improvement we know the rev Ops team is doing their job and we can give them the, the props for that.
- [31:12]
Cody McGuffey
That's really, really cool and I appreciate you being so transparent about that because this is something that every company goes through is like we always are trying to re engineer the org charts who owns what, who owns this, who owns that? Because of all the reasons and you being ahead of most probably everybody listening to this. This is going to unlock so many things for so many people. It's like, oh yeah, maybe that's not my worry yet, but that's definitely going to have to happen. You know, at this stage.
- [31:40]
Michael Sacca
I've been.
- [31:41]
Cody McGuffey
Taking what do you mean by rigid? What do you mean by that?
- [31:44]
Michael Sacca
That that's like a rule that you kind of have to be inflexible with. It's really easy to say you own it, but I also want you to do xyz. And I think that's where as leaders we, we go wrong. When we, when we give someone ownership, we have to give them also the ability to affect that. And that means the space and the resources to focus solely on that problem. And so if we say, well, you own onboarding, but I also want you to do these 10 other things, oftentimes we're not going to get the performance out of onboarding that we want. And the excuse is always going to be, well, I was doing this, this that you asked me to. So as leaders, we really have to bring that focus for our people. And sometimes that means not doing some of the shiny things that we want to do because we've already assigned those resources to a problem.
- [32:36]
Cody McGuffey
I love this conversation. I don't know how many other people will love this because it's so nerdy and in the weeds about like structure and stuff, but it's just so fun because it's something that everybody is always dealing with specifically. I think we're approaching more of these conversations. I want to make sure I'm taking notes here. Next to me, you said product marketing, rev ops, engineering. And you probably have HR finance probably report into you directly too, right?
- [33:02]
Michael Sacca
Yeah, we have, we have HR and finance teams and a customer support team.
- [33:07]
Cody McGuffey
Customer support team. And do they roll into you or the CEO or do you have a CEO?
- [33:12]
Michael Sacca
I don't have a CEO. They roll into. Into me. And in the past, I've also had customer support roll into product. And I think it's really natural for them to roll into a rev ops or marketing team as well. It really just depends on for the company and what problems you're trying to solve. So right now it works well. As we scale, I'll probably roll customer support into either product or rev ops, depending on what structure we take. And there's so much good information that comes out of the customer support team. And when they roll into product, you see those problems get solved faster. And when they roll into revops, you see the sales and the kind of marketing insights come out. And so it really depends on what information you want your department leads to have. And that I think we should be more open to odd reporting structures because you're really trying to, like you said, develop your org to solve the problems of your business. That's the key, it really doesn't matter what Silicon Valley says is the right org structure. It depends who you have on your team, what strengths do you have and what information do you want them to be getting on a daily basis. The, the benefits of that reporting structure is that information is going to flow up. So where do you want that information to go?
- [34:36]
Cody McGuffey
I love this. So you have six people reporting directly to you. That's kind of like, that's, that's Saka's team. Six people. And you probably have an executive assistant or something like that that helps with some beautiful. So seven people. Okay, cool. A very similar structure to, to myself. The only difference, the big difference is Rev Ops. We don't have Rev Ops.
- [34:57]
Michael Sacca
Okay.
- [34:58]
Cody McGuffey
And so when you were talking about, you know, marketing. Marketing and growth, like what do they, what do they own? Well, yeah, they own traffic and acquisition, but. Oh, by the. But they also own like the conversion and also the retention and it starts to get really muddy and the problem is the customers actually feel the pain long term. Oh yeah, because they're, they're the ones that, because of my poor leadership or your poor leadership or, you know, if we do something, it's our customers that pay the price. And because they get a bad experience, a bad onboarding experience, it's not a smooth product for them that we've been promising to them. And so that's why it's important to get this stuff right. And I appreciate you sharing that. Rev Ops, they own conversion and onboarding, you said. Is that correct?
- [35:43]
Michael Sacca
So we actually have a, we have our PM lives on the RevOps team, but we also have a growth PM, a growth product manager, which means that the Rev Ops team has direct access to engineering resources and an engineering roadmap. And that's a bit unconventional. Usually you'd have everything under product. But again, when we look at how do we find rigidity in our ownership structure, we needed to give them the resources to be successful. And so if they're going to own acquisition, we needed the roles on their team that can affect and drive acquisition. So we've got kind of product marketing manager and a growth product manager on that team along with the data team and they own the CRM. And so that gives them access to everything that they need to be successful in that world.
- [36:36]
Cody McGuffey
Yeah, because you have the bureaucracy if you don't have them to be able to just work across teams and then there's going to be always.
- [36:41]
Michael Sacca
People will always be the last. Yeah, certainly. And so we tried to, to solve that through, through A bit of an unconventional org. If you look up different org charts you probably won't find that. But for us that was a problem that we needed to solve and so we, we wanted to, to bring the dedication and focus and ownership to it so that there really was no issues of who owns it and do you have what you need to to be successful.
- [37:12]
Cody McGuffey
And you said the product team, they own retention as well. And my question for you is, isn't onboarding so important for retention as well? I mean it's activation, I guess you could say, which is a part of retention. Very important part of it. So how do you, why did you have product only on retention?
- [37:31]
Michael Sacca
Simply so that we could have a team focused on acquisition and retention really is a huge problem in and of itself. Right? It's, it's the quality of the product, it's the features that we have. It's. And yeah, it relates all the way back to marketing of did we acquire the right customer? So there is collaboration along the way and communication that needs to happen of do we have the right customer and then are we building for the right customer? But retention really is oftentimes about product quality. Like do are we actually solving the customer problem? And I think that is a big enough problem for a team to own that and it can take many, many shapes. And one of the failure points is we've acquired the wrong customer and they're not successful. Well that's across team conversation that needs to happen and, or we've, we've onboarded improperly and they don't really understand another cross team conversation. But the retention problem is, is it can take so many different solutions and even philosophies of how to approach it that having a team just own that. Assuming that okay, we've acquired the right customer, we've onboarded them properly, now can we keep them around for a couple years? That's the problem that they're trying to solve and that's when you put support underneath product. Is sports is part of that solution as well, right? Is, is the customer happy? Are we answering their questions? What don't they know how to do? What do they want to do that they can't do? Those all become incredible product features.
- [39:11]
Cody McGuffey
I love that. So products. So head up, I guess is it safe to say that titles, you can call them PPs or whatever you want to call them, but the point is it's head of product underneath you, head of marketing, head of our bops, head of engineering, head of HR and head of customer. Customer support. Yeah, those are all the people. Okay, beautiful. And then product is something that actually I want to go back to RevOps. So when you hired it sounds like you built that Rev Ops team. You put that in place or was that already in place when you joined?
- [39:40]
Michael Sacca
We had someone internally who was on the marketing team who was really starting to stretch and we, we actually broke out the Rev Ops team from their role because they were doing some of that revenue operations work already. They were also doing a lot of other stuff. And so this was our way of promoting them and really giving them their own space to operate.
- [40:04]
Cody McGuffey
So now if this person has a vision, probably they're crafting a vision of how they're going to increase conversions, onboarding. And so this head of RevOps now has a product marketing manager underneath them. Yeah, A data. A data team. So they. And then a growth PM underneath them.
- [40:22]
Michael Sacca
Yeah.
- [40:24]
Cody McGuffey
Did I miss anybody else in there?
- [40:26]
Michael Sacca
There's a revenue operations manager who's running.
- [40:28]
Cody McGuffey
Our CRM and mostly that's about attribution and making sure that all the data is flowing properly and measuring properly.
- [40:34]
Michael Sacca
Yep.
- [40:35]
Cody McGuffey
Very cool.
- [40:36]
Michael Sacca
Yeah. And targeting. Are we, are we, do we know the quality of the leads coming in? Do we know how should we modify the product based on who they are? Should the onboarding change? Because they're a mid market customer or an entrepreneur, they might need very different things from us. And so are we able to identify them and then modify the experience based on who they are? So those are the kind of problems that they're looking at because we're really wide. I mean anyone needs a landing page. And so we work across, you know, 25 different industries. And so the problems that we're solving depending on who that person is, can be very, very different from customer to customer. And so we're trying to figure out, all right, if we personalize this a little bit more, will we get better results? So those are the kind of things that, that the Rev Ops man or the Rev Ops operations manager is working on.
- [41:39]
Cody McGuffey
I think it's a good transition time to go to our rapid fire. You ready?
- [41:43]
Michael Sacca
Sure. Yeah. Yeah.
- [41:44]
Cody McGuffey
What's your favorite business book?
- [41:49]
Michael Sacca
My favorite business book historically has been not a business book. There's two actually. There's Shanzai by Bong Chul Han. He's a philosopher from, from Germany and he, he writes about the difference in value between the, the east and the West. And one of the, the big differences that he points out, it just kind of makes you think about what is value and, and what is what can be sold and how do we derive value within our communities, and so in the west, we derive value from the origin. So if you look at art, the Picasso is worth the most money because it was the first, it's the original. And if you copy Picasso, it's not worth anything, right? If I make a duplicate, I can sell it as maybe a poster on Amazon. In the east, historically, artists make themselves by making copies. Kind of like doing a cover song, right? And if that copy can be. Can fool enough art dealers into thinking that it's legit, then it has the same value as the original one because the craft is the same, right? The work and the care that went into creating the original is the same as creating the copy. And so there was a. There was a famous incident where they were. There were these statues of ancient warriors, and they're all kind of copied from each other. And they were being sold in Europe at full price as if they were the historic statue of the warrior, but they were duplicates, and people were buying them. And there was a misunderstanding of the value because in Europe, they were looking for the original. This was made hundreds or thousands of years ago, and there was a huge misunderstanding of why that doesn't carry the same value. And it just makes you think about what is. Like, we make up this value in our lives and we assign a value to things, but even in the planet, we don't all agree with what actually creates value. So it was a very. It's a very interesting book that makes you realize we're not actually all a monolith. And even as humans, we're not all the same. And take those considerations in.
- [44:15]
Cody McGuffey
It's really interesting. I like to read that. What is the. What is the title again?
- [44:19]
Michael Sacca
Shanzai.
- [44:20]
Cody McGuffey
Shanza. How do you spell that? Shan. S H A N. I don't want.
- [44:24]
Michael Sacca
To get it wrong. It's S H A N Z H A I.
- [44:35]
Cody McGuffey
Perfect.
- [44:36]
Michael Sacca
And it actually, it's. It's discussing some of the. The fake goods culture in China where they're making replica iPhones, they're making replica electronics. Is it called entire.
- [44:51]
Cody McGuffey
Is it the deconstruction in Chinese? Is that what this is? The book?
- [44:54]
Michael Sacca
Yes.
- [44:55]
Cody McGuffey
Okay. Beautiful.
- [44:56]
Michael Sacca
Yeah.
- [44:56]
Cody McGuffey
Cool.
- [44:57]
Michael Sacca
So there's a whole culture of duplicating and reselling that's based in electronics. And obviously Apple, Microsoft, they get very frustrated because they're copying their products and then they're making these really interesting additions to it, but they're unofficial. And in China, they're very popular. And people kind of get into this. This culture of innovation where in the west, we're trying to shut it down. We only want the Apple idea and the Apple produced phone. And we're kind of, we, we do kind of limit ourselves to, to possibilities. So we basically have three companies selling us the phone and the, the innovation, the ideas that are coming from those companies is, is often quite stifled compared to what we're seeing in China.
- [45:51]
Cody McGuffey
It's this idea of like intellectual property. Right. And like when we have like these patents and stuff, is it actually good for the world or is it just good for the creator of that thing? And some. It's debatable. It depends on which way you want to look at it because the patent kind of does. When someone creates a patent that they're kind of shutting off another iteration of that thing for somebody else. And I noticed. Yeah, so it's. But then again, if you're the creator of that patent and you actually spend your time, how do you get paid and how do you protect yourself there too? And that's, that's.
- [46:23]
Michael Sacca
So there really is no right answer, you know, and, and I think those, those are fascinating problems to spend time with because they're really, either way you go, someone loses, but somebody wins. And so there, there really is no correct answer. And we too see two societies valuing things very, very differently. And as we globalize, those ideas are going to have to converge more and more. And it's probably at that cross section that there's some very interesting opportunities that will emerge.
- [46:57]
Cody McGuffey
Who would you define or how would you define a creator? Like who is a creator to you?
- [47:05]
Michael Sacca
I think everybody has the potential to be a creator. I think oftentimes we limit ourselves too much. Like you're a founder, you're a CEO and you're also a creator, a podcast host. Right. I think historically we have, we've been told that you have to get in a lane and focus on that, that lane. I think what we're seeing now more and more as things take less time to do that people are multi dimensional and multifaceted. And I think everyone has the opportunity to have a voice, to build something, to create something, even if it's not their full time job. And we see like, you know, nurses who are also now influencers. And I think it's a beautiful thing to better express the human spirit and the human kind of existence where we're not just boxed into being one thing as we have historically, just to make money. And I think everyone has that potential within them. Also the definition you used to, you know, a creator might have been building a business today it's, you know, literally jumping on Instagram for 15 seconds and providing some entertainment for people and that can be a business. And so I think the barrier is certainly lower but I think within everyone we have the ability to create and we should express that.
- [48:34]
Cody McGuffey
Saka, thank you so much for coming on, man. Where can people find you, learn more about you, follow your journey and also leadpages and things like this. What would you recommend somebody does?
- [48:43]
Michael Sacca
Yeah, I mean LeadPages is LeadPages.com and we've got some really, really big updates coming actually in the next couple months and so definitely keep your eye there. You can find me on LinkedIn. It's probably the best place these days to, to connect and send me an invite and I'll be sure to add you. If you got any questions, hit me up there.
- [49:08]
Cody McGuffey
Saka, thank you, ma' am. Talk to you soon.
- [49:11]
Michael Sacca
Thank you. Take care.