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Excellent Executive Coaching: Growing Your Business and Enhancing Your Craft.
EEC 404: Emotional Intelligence in High-Pressure Leadership, with Jim Delaney
00:19:54
Jim Delaney is the Co-Founder and CEO of Traction AI, a go-to-market partner for founders navigating the early stages of growth. What lessons from military leadership carry over into building a high-performing startup team? Why do so many founders...
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Foreign.
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Is a company that helps entrepreneurs and startups. It's led by Jim Delaney, who has extensive experience leading in the military, venture capital and in private equity. He has led and sold companies and has extensive experience experience in scaling data so he can bring his valuable experience and knowledge in helping your business be successful. So let's listen to Jim Delaney. Welcome to the excellent executive coaching podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Katrina Burus and today we have Jim Delaney. Welcome, Jim.
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Thank you so much for having me.
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Yeah, I'm delighted to have you. You have an incredible background. You're a former US Navy officer and a National Security Agency. You had a team and then you went into venture capital, private equity firms as a CEO. Anyway, you have a lot to bring to this podcast. So my first question to you is, what lessons did you learn from the military as being a leader in the military and how can it carry over in a high performing startup team?
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Well, thank you for the question. I'm very proud of the time I was able to serve, in my particular case, the U.S. navy. So I was a Naval Academy graduate who then served about nine years as a naval officer. And there's a lot of emphasis in the military on leadership. And it's a particular kind of leadership. We refer to it as servant leadership. And that is that it's the role of the leader to serve those who support him or her. And you've simply got to make sure that they've got the resources they need to be successful and that you're looking after their safety, that they can trust, that you're going to act in their best interest. And so the whole mindset coming out of the military, or I should say inculcated while you're in the military is this focus on others, the team that supports you in the pursuit of the mission you're trying to tackle.
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So a lot of people have the perception that the military is very authoritarian. How do you address that perception?
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Well, I think it certainly is hierarchical. And it's hierarchical insofar as when you're in battle situations, you need somebody to actually make a decision. It's not time for consensus building and other things. So there has to be this ability to be able to make the call, make the command decision and then have the team carry it out. But you still could have mutiny in the ranks unless you've developed the trust and established the care with them so that they know that you are somebody worthy of leading them, particularly in these life and death situations. And so it is hierarchical. It is an industry that's based on command decision making. But you have to earn that right. And you earn that by demonstrating to your troops that they can trust you at your word. They trust that you're acting in their best interest and that you care about them as a human. Once again, all in pursuit of the mission.
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Yes. And of course that's good leadership. Now how do you relate that to a high performing startup team? I perceive a startup team not being very rule oriented or, you know, that are constantly trying new things that are a bit out of the box. So what's your perception?
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Well, you're certainly right. Military organizations by definition have to be highly structured organizations. And I think most venture startups, and I've been a part of a few of them, they are absent a lot of structure. You're trying to figure it out, but that's a little different than the leadership. I think that where the parallels are for me is that if you have an idea, and so I'm a founder of a company right now and I was launching the idea and I have to be able to effectively convince other people that where I want to take the business in the context of our vision and our mission is worthy. And you'll find that in the military you can't motivate your sailors or your airmen or your soldiers by money. They are there out of duty on our country. And at the end of the day, you've got to be able to lead them and appeal to them based on that human connection. And then I trust in the care that I mentioned earlier. The same is true with early stage startups. As you're bringing a team together and say, hey, there's this new AI company I want to launch. You actually have to be able to command their attention. They have to trust that you're worthy of their followership and that you're going to be able to take it forward. Once again, very different than the structuring of the business. But in terms of the leadership, that trust, that care, that conviction, that charisma, it still needs to be present.
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So you just mentioned the vision is very important to engage them in the project or the new company. But then you say that many founders struggle with a go to market execution and how do you fix that? So what's more important, the vision or the execution or where's the balance of the two?
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You know what? You're really onto something powerful because to me it's not binary, it's not mutually exhaustive. Years ago actually near neck of the Woods, I had the pleasure of working closely with Marc Benioff over at Salesforce and I was able to work closely with him for about a three year period. And I have never seen a leader who's been able to keep one foot in the tactical execution of his business, right. Staying on top of the details around the operations and the operational execution and one foot in sort of the strategy, the vision of where the market will be going. And so it's not an either or in my opinion. You do have to exactly as you described, find the balance between the two. And you're right, if we were to shift in terms of the execution around go to market and commercializing a product or a good or a service, there's a number of things that we can call out in terms of the tactics, but it doesn't undermine the importance of finding the balance between that strategy and that vision. Right. The choices that you make, where you're going to take the business and the day to day operational plan.
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So it's a two different mindsets. Let's say somebody has a difficulty in the execution, the go to market execution, how would you fix it?
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Well, it's interesting, right, about 80% of startups fail, they have this great idea, they have this concept, they have this good, this product and they test it amongst a handful of people and they think they're onto something. They think they've got the next unicorn, they've got this next great big company. But the challenge is, is that when you go from sort of founder led sales to actually being able to recruit people in, to be able to scale your business, what you must have are simple, standard, consistent go to market motions that at the end are repeatable and they're profitable. And so the enablement piece of this in terms of ensuring that you keep everything C spot run simple so that you can recruit people in, so they can do it the same way each and every time, like that is what unlocks scale. That is where you can remove some of the friction that comes from as you start to recruit other people into the team, then not doing things exactly in the same regimented, rigorous way that allows for that scale and allows for that level of efficiency and profitability.
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So tell me, what does revops actually mean for the early stage of a company?
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Well, you and I chatted briefly about this before. There's been a huge movement over the last three to five years because what companies are finding is that they must find a more efficient way to go to market, they must find a better integrated way to go to market. And so Revops is revenue operations and effectively what you're trying to do is build an architecture, build a go to market plan that unites all the functional areas that touch revenue, that touch a customer. And so that's marketing, that's sales, and that's customer success. And to ensure that from a systems perspective, right, so we're talking about applications like HubSpot or Salesforce. From a process perspective you're bringing together. On the marketing side, it might be lead scoring, lead attribution, lead nurturing, but making sure that you've got good seamless handoffs to the sales team, right? So where your marketing qualified lead seamlessly goes over as a sales qualified lead that's meaningful and valuable. So it's streamlining and improving the integration of the business processes between marketing and sales and customer success. And then finally the measurement, making sure that the teams marketing, sales, customer success have a common set of metrics, a common set of SLAs and key performance indicators that they're all driving to that you hold everybody accountable for. So you don't have the infighting between sales blaming marketing, or marketing blaming sales or otherwise. So it's about systems, it's about process, it's about measurement, and it's about bringing those teams together, united as one.
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What was your biggest challenge to get people aligned with the systems and processes?
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I like the question because it's easy to put together a checklist in terms of how to integrate systems and it's easy to have the list of the processes that you can bring best demonstrated practices to in the set of metrics. But you're actually onto it because at the end of the day, you can only be successful through people and your team. And so this team behavior and this behavioral shift is probably one of your critical success factors in making this happen. The way I've tried to tackle it and had some success is by bringing everyone in and helping them understand the why. So it's not just what we're going to be doing, guys, in terms of the integration of the systems and the process and the measurement. And we're all going to have these common set of goals and everyone's going to be held accountable. But here's why we're doing it. Because I find that when people can understand the thinking behind it, they're much more willing, if they commit, they're much more willing to jump in and then to kind of think like a leader and to execute with what we used to call in the military commander's intent. And so that team behavioral dynamic is probably one of the most important things that you can have first in terms of getting adoption, but then ongoing compliance in terms of the continued execution around the business model.
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And how do you make sure that this alignment continues over time? Because initially they have a different mindset and a different objective. I love the idea of having common metrics. How do you make sure that this stays in communication? Do you have regular meetings?
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Yeah, I think it's a couple of things. One, I often would run my meetings right out of the applications themselves. So I referenced HubSpot as an application. We've used that consistently. We literally could bring the teams into a common meeting and from that application kind of show the progression between what is a marketing qualified lead to a sales qualified lead to an opportunity to a customer to. So they could actually see the full funnel, they could see the full relationship where you go from suspect to prospect to customer to evangelist. So that's one thing using the tools and the technology to help reinforce, but I think the second thing is, is just the communication and being consistent that they're going to be held accountable for acting like a team. And that could be a monthly check in with a town hall. When we were smaller, smaller startups, we would have feelings. Fridays, we used to call them, where we bring all the teams together and talk about the week's learnings, the week's successes and some of the exciting things that were on the horizon. So I think communication, the collaboration, the coordination, that's the secret to making sure that the ongoing compliance is there a lot of Cs.
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Yes, I see, I see. So how you align product, marketing and sales, what do you do to make sure you don't over hire or burn too much cash?
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Oh boy. Because it's always feast or famine coming out of COVID There was a lot of money in the venture capital market and about two years later that money dried up. And a lot of these startups, particularly a number of the startups I was working with, they had taken on too much cash, they had overinflated valuations and suddenly they had to tighten their financial belts. And so how do you do it? Well, there's certain rules of thumb, of course. So because I've worked predominantly with SaaS businesses, we have a rule of thumb, it's called a quick ratio. So if a salesperson gets paid, I don't know, call it $100,000 base, $100,000 on target earnings, they make $200,000 all in. If they can't at least produce a quota of twice that 2x that, well, you shouldn't keep hiring Salespeople. So there's some rules of thumb with respect to this. The second thing is, and there's a fantastic book by Bruce Cleveland called Traversing the Traction Gap. And I'd highly recommend it for any startup, any founders, any entrepreneurs out there. Bruce Cleveland, Traversing the Traction Gap. He talks about this concept of thinking about how you stage the growth of a business. And this is at the heart of it. There's a time and place where you've got to ensure you've got product market fit. He actually calls it market product fit before it makes sense to start hiring marketing and salespeople. Too often people will say, hey, I've had some early success. I really like what we could be possibly doing here. And they haven't figured out a way from an enablement perspective to teach and to scale or to create that repeatable sales motion I talked about earlier. They haven't done the work or they're not locked and loaded in terms of the exact problem they're trying to solve, the pain points they solve with the problem, the benefits that are accrued in the context of their value proposition. And without that level of definition around those things, it's way too early to be going into your go to market and thinking about scaling your sales and marketing teams.
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Very good point. I'm sure they'll save a lot of people.
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I see it a lot.
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Yeah. So what advice would you give to a young leader that is just recently stepping into a CEO position for the first time?
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Well, there's certain things for sure that are obvious and then I would probably tailor my answer more specifically to are they early stage? Are they with. Because I've worked with Dun and Bradstreet and JPMorgan Chase, so well established companies. There might be a different, I don't want to say different set of rules. There isn't. But let me answer your question. I think the most important thing is to recognize what you know and what you don't know and that your success is going to be wholly tethered to the team that you build around you. It's often not your vision, it's often not your strategy. It's your ability to successfully lead your team toward the accomplishment of your mission. And you have to be very self aware, know what you know, know what you don't know and make sure you're filling in those blind spots. I think too often, especially when you're first put into that seat and I know it was true for me, I felt the pressure to perform. I felt the pressure to have the Big idea. And I was completely wrong. Those big ideas will come from the collaboration and the coordination and the consensus of the leaders that you put around you and their ability to lead their teams. So I think it's being focused on servant leadership, building those teams, entrusting those teams, relying on those teams, and then make sure it's never about who's right, it's about getting to what's right.
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So a lot of young leaders are not as aware as you are, Jim, who has had a lot of experience. So they don't know what they don't know. So how would you address that?
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Well, I think what they have to do is they have to be taught to be mindful that they're going to go into situations where they're not going to have all the answers. That takes me right back to my military days. Right. Like you get into a, they call it a situational awareness. And there were the knowns and then there were the unknowns, and then there were the unknown unknowns. But the point is that young leaders, it's okay that they don't have all the answers, but they have to know that in any environment they go into that they're not going to have all the answers. And they've got to be willing to be self aware and to understand that as learning leaders they have to evolve and they should be really focused on, okay, where am I going to get exposed and then who can I bring around me to help solve that problem?
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Yes, very good point. So what's your next project, Jim?
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Well, I'm super excited about the venture I'm currently on. I founded a company a few years ago called Traction AI and when people ask me what I do is I like to tell them that we work with entrepreneurs to help their dreams come true. So, you know, I'm a little bit older, a little bit more advanced in my age. And so you go from the stage of learning to earning to returning. So I think of myself in the return stage and I just get such a kick out of working with these young aspiring entrepreneurs. You know, some are just clear they're going to do great things and some struggle and you can create and provide value to all of them. And so living vicariously through them, realizing their entrepreneurial dreams is a big thrill of mine. And we recently hired my son. He was a basketball player at American University. He was an entrepreneur major and we recently hired him. So I think the dynamic of being a dad and having your son on your team, within your company is fun. We're going to be flying to Bentonville, Arkansas next week. I'm going to be giving a talk, the Pen Fed Foundation. It's an incubator for military entrepreneurs. And so he'll be making that trip and he's part of that. And he just kind of. He loves being around other entrepreneurs. He loves seeing the dynamic, he loves seeing the dialogue. And I hope he likes seeing his old man mix it up in there.
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Yes, yes. That's going to be a whole different relationship. But I imagine it gives a lot more meaning to even what you do to have your son there.
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Well, it forces me to raise my game. I don't want to. As a baseball player, we talk about, like, making the shots. I don't want to show up in a game situation and, and missed the shot in front of my son.
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So tell us, Jim, how can people get a hold of you?
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Well, they certainly can reach out to me via LinkedIn. It's Jim Delaney. I'm the CEO of Traction AI or check us out on our website. You can get us@trctionai.com and I certainly can make the information available to you if there's places for you to post information like that.
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Wonderful. Thank you so very much for sharing your experience and knowledge.
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Well, thank you for having me. It's been a real pleasure. It's also been a pleasure getting to know you.
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Thank you.
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Thank you for listening to the Excellent Executive Coaching Podcast. You can subscribe to all Future podcasts@excellentexecutivecoaching.com join us each Wednesday to learn more about the latest trends in leadership techniques and bring your coaching to the next level. To learn more about Dr. Burris CEO mastermind, use the contact form form@excellentexecutivecoaching.com.